Eating for Beginners Read online

  After scrubbing down my station with soap and bleach, I drifted the two blocks to my apartment in a daze, too wiped out to bask in the glow of my first solo performance. I took a hot shower to wash off the stink of sweat and fish, then got into bed next to Noah and waited for the adrenaline to wear off, which took until around two A.M.

  Somewhere in my insomniac musings, I thought about the calculated risk David had taken by leaving me alone at the stove, and then about the many compromises and risks he and Laura had made and taken to open applewood, like working late into the night for months with two small children asleep in the back room, children they then had to cart home—and get up with the next morning. (I had cut a deal with Noah so that he got up with Jules on the mornings after my restaurant shifts since he went to bed earlier than I did, but no one was getting to bed early in the Shea household.)

  Working at applewood, I gradually discovered that the charmed vision the restaurant's customers had all had of Laura, David, and their children in applewood's early days was, like so many charmed visions, partly false. When the restaurant opened, Laura was just a few weeks away from giving birth to Tatum. She was enormous, and it seemed to Noah and me when we ate there that first week that starting a restaurant was terrifying and odds-defying enough without being eight and a half months pregnant on top of it.

  And then, the next time we ate there, Laura was no longer pregnant and instead had tied to her hip in a sling a plump, rosy, blond baby girl. By the time Tatum was a month old, she could frequently be found at the table near the fireplace wearing nothing but a cloth diaper, keeping warm with a group of delighted customers while Laura dashed off to take care of some task. Diners often requested a viewing, and when something went awry at a table, whether it was a service error or a long wait for the food, a surprise visit from Tatum could smooth over almost anything, almost instantly.

  Customers (and restaurant critics, who couldn't help penning what Laura referred to affectionately as "reviews of Tatum") adored Tatum, who seemed, quite literally, a bright shiny emblem of all that eating well could produce. From the diners' point of view (including mine), the scene was positively bucolic. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, her parents were close to losing their minds.

  "The thing that was pushing me to the brink was having to take the girls home at the end of the night every night," Laura told me. "It was so hard to have worked this really long day and then have to wheel the buggy in, push all the tables aside, get it set up with blankets, have the staff be quiet, lower the lights, run the girls through the greasy kitchen, get them wrapped up, back the buggy out, go home, and then once we got home open it up, unwrap them, run them up two flights of stairs. That was the worst. I couldn't keep doing it every night. They just keep getting heavier!"

  For the first three years of Sophie's life, back when the Sheas were living in Chicago, Laura had rarely left her child's side. After Tatum's arrival, she was surprised to find herself wishing she had someone to care for the children at home while she worked. "In Chicago, I would get so sad when I'd see kids at the park with their nannies," she said, laughing at her former self. "How sad that people choose to let their children be raised by nannies, and if everyone was just a great parent like me the world would be a much better place." Her voice took on a mock-snooty tone. "'At least I'm here to set an example and my child is perfect and your child is whining because you work!'"

  After the Sheas made the move to New York, Laura still refused to budge on her decision to stay home with her child. "David had a really hard time finding work and I still wasn't working," she remembered. "I was just being Sophie's mom. Self-righteous Sophie's mom." Eventually, after David's burger-joint job and their decision to open applewood, she changed her mind, and it was the start of a new life for them all.

  "We wanted to put in the work and the effort for ourselves, not punch the clock for somebody else," David told me. "How that was going to materialize or what form it was going to take was the question. In the debate or discussion trying to figure out what it was going to be, how it would work with having kids was a big part. One scenario we came up with in the middle of the night was, 'We'll never see the kids, the kids will hate the restaurant, we're going to have to force them to be there when they don't want to be, they're never going to get to do kid stuff, we're going to be stuck with this restaurant, stuck with kids that hate the restaurant.' And then obviously that didn't happen."

  I came to believe that the Sheas had survived those exhausting early years at applewood because they had decided to simply love the restaurant, the kids, the whole messy, impossible package, and to worry about the details as they cropped up. Even Tatum's birth was that kind of detail. When Laura went into labor one night around midnight, just after a dinner shift, her first thought was, "The minute I say something, they're going to make me go home, and I have stuff to do that nobody else, including David, knows how to do." Though she had planned to take a few weeks off, she ended up having Tatum early the next morning, a Friday, and going back to work on Saturday. "I remember watching her waddle down the street with Tatum in the sling on Saturday morning," David said, "and I knew it was fine." He added with a laugh, "And it ruined any hope of me ever complaining about anything again."

  Laura explained, "I took exactly the opposite attitude I had with Sophie. Get out there and do something! With Sophie I was all about nursing and slings and attachment parenting and I really believed in it. It's not that I stopped believing in those ideals, it's just that I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive. It was a learning process for me, becoming the person and mother I ended up being."

  Part of the reason the Sheas were able to pull off what they did—opening and running their own restaurant while raising two small children—was their staff, all of whom seemed to accept as a matter of course that there would be children around, especially Tatum when she was too young to have a bedtime in the back room like Sophie. From the dining room during dinner service, it was not uncommon to look through the glass-paned door into the kitchen and glimpse one of the servers or dishwashers carrying her around while Laura was otherwise occupied, as though it was the most natural thing in the world to have a newborn in a kitchen where open flames were going all the time and where the temperature often topped a hundred degrees.

  Family of all kinds was everywhere at applewood. One day when I was watching Frank take apart an enormous tilefish, dark gray with bright yellow spots, I asked him where he'd learned how to do it. He said he'd done some bass at his previous jobs, then gestured toward David, put down his knife, raised his hands to his heart and said, "He's my teacher," in a tone of voice I hope to inspire in someone someday. Frank's younger brother, Joseph, was the assistant dishwasher. He had started at the restaurant just days after I began working in the kitchen, and six months later he was learning how to do garde manger.

  Another crucial staff member was Pete, whose brother Johnny was the main dishwasher. Pete was in his late thirties, muscled and bald with a little mustache, and like Frank he had been at applewood since it opened. He had several ex-wives and a smattering of children in various places, and once said to me mournfully, "I think with this"—gesturing to his heart—"instead of this"—pointing to his head.

  Together, these people kept the restaurant running. As David mused, "When this place closes, it'll probably only be me, Laura, Frank, and Pete left standing." Pete worked the floor, delivering the bread and daily spreads that were served to every table after ordering, clearing plates, and running food from the kitchen. When things were slow, he was generally on hand to make coffee with a thick layer of sugar at the bottom for the kitchen staff—on some nights, the only thing that got me through—and to challenge us to feats of strength like trying to lift our own body weight on one arm by placing a hand flat on the stainless steel counter and pushing up (even in a kitchen like applewood's, you sometimes run out of things to pickle and cure in your downtime).

  Frank, in addition to his kitchen skills, had an en
viable inborn talent: he was an organizational genius. Every Thursday he would tackle the challenge of fitting an insane amount of produce, fish, and dairy into a walk-in that wasn't nearly big enough for it, while leaving room for the three or four whole animals that would be delivered later in the day and had to be hung in there until they could be butchered. Every Thursday I wondered how he could possibly do it, and every Thursday, within a few hours, he did it. He even managed to make the chaos in the walk-in functional; there always seemed to be a whole pig positioned perfectly as a handhold when you needed to balance on a box of wine bottles to reach something on a high shelf. After watching this for a few months, I mentioned to David that Frank could probably get rich quick if he opened a side business organizing people's closets, and that I would happily be his first customer. David laughed, but I could see that he didn't find the thought of losing Frank to his inner Martha Stewart entirely funny.

  "Frank is greatly determined and a tough guy," he said with affection. "One in a million." Then he went off to consult with him about what supplies needed to be ordered that week.

  ***

  The Monday before Thanksgiving, I went to applewood to help with the catering for people who had ordered free-range turkeys from Vermont and sides to go with them. (David drew the line at actually cooking the turkeys, though no doubt he would have had plenty of takers for that service, too.) In a single afternoon, when the restaurant was closed, Greg, Sarah, David, and I made sweet potato purée for fifty-two; herbed new potatoes for thirty-two; a mix of roasted carrots, rutabaga, parsnips, and potatoes for ninety-six; butternut squash soup for ninety-two; cranberry chutney for eighty-four; pecan stuffing for ninety-six; and turkey gravy for eighty-four. Some of the portion numbers, typed up on a sheet that had been stuck into the ticket rail at garde manger, were imprecise, but it was not a time of year for stiffing anyone. "Basically, every quart container should serve about three people," David had written at the bottom of the portion list. "Overestimate. Give more when in doubt and all will be well."

  The catering work got me in the mood for cooking our own Thanksgiving dinner, which would include a Vermont turkey given to us by David and Laura as thanks for my help with the catering. On Thanksgiving Day, as Noah and I prepared dinner for my family and part of his, Jules played at our feet in the kitchen, making us pretend coffee and eagerly waiting for his cousins to arrive. We made the Brussels sprouts from a doctored recipe a dear friend had clipped from the New York Times years ago. (It contains my favorite penciled-in note ever: "I usually add a stick of butter here.") We cooked the sweet potatoes with maple syrup and chipotle peppers, to remind Noah of where he came from. And even though by this time I knew many ways to prepare stuffing, I made it with chestnuts, exactly the way my mother, who would be with us that day, had made it since she met my father. We brined and cooked the turkey as David had suggested ("More salt than you would ever think") because he was a chef, but also because, by now, he was our friend.

  When we sat down to the meal, my mind traveled two blocks down the street to applewood, where the Sheas and everyone on the restaurant staff who wasn't going somewhere else were celebrating. I was facing our dining room windows, and out in the park the tree branches were completely bare and stark black against the fading light, glittering with raindrops from a cold afternoon shower. As I looked around the table at our families—at my nephews who ate anything, at Noah's nieces who were old enough that no one minded what they ate anymore, at Jules who was stuffing himself with bread (hallelujah!) and nothing else—I thought of James Merrill's wonderful lines about loving people in spite of their flaws (or their eating habits). In the final section of his poem "Variations: The Air Is Sweetest That a Thistle Guards" (1951), Merrill wrote:

  ...not love, great pearl That swells around a small unlovely need;

  Nor love whose fingers tie the bows of birth

  Upon the sorry present. Love merely as the best

  There is, and one would make the best of that

  By saying how it grows and in what climates,

  By trying to tell the crystals from the branch,

  Stretching that wand then toward the sparkling wave.

  To say at the end, however we find it, good,

  Bad, or indifferent, it helps us, and the air

  Is sweetest there. The air is very sweet.

  I passed the bread basket to Jules and the potatoes to my mother. Give more when in doubt and all will be well.

  Brined Turkey

  7 quarts water, plus more if needed

  1½ cups salt (though this is imprecise)

  about 2 tablespoons juniper berries

  about 2 tablespoons whole black peppercorns

  3 bay leaves

  maybe 3 or 4 onions, coarsely chopped

  ditto on the carrots, also coarsely chopped

  any other herb or flavoring that sounds good (thyme, rosemary, garlic, etc.)

  1 18–20-pound turkey

  1. In a large pot, bring 1 quart of the water, along with the salt, juniper berries, peppercorns, bay leaves, onions, carrots, and whatever else you decide to add, to a boil. Then turn off the heat.

  2. While the above mixture is cooling, place the turkey in a large plastic bag (a garbage bag will do, though actual brining bags are now available).

  3. Pour the remaining 6 quarts of water into the bag. They should almost cover the turkey.

  4. Now add the spice and water mixture from the pot. If the turkey is not completely covered, add more water until it is.

  5. Close the bag tightly and leave the turkey to brine for about 24 hours. You can leave it out—no need to clear off that shelf in the fridge that you really need for all the side dish ingredients. We do and haven't killed anyone yet.

  6. The next day, remove the turkey, dry it, and roast as usual.

  Serves 10.

  Jean's Brussels Sprouts

  (adapted first by Jean and then by me from the New York Times Magazine)

  5 pints Brussels sprouts

  ½ pound bacon, diced

  ½ cup pine nuts

  3 shallots (instead of scallions, as per Jean), minced fine

  1 stick butter

  freshly ground black pepper

  1. Cut off tough stalk and outer leaves of sprouts. Place them in a food processor to shred coarsely. [Or, if you're like me, just chop them up with a big knife because you never bought a food processor. They end up shredded either way.]

  2. Fry the bacon in a large skillet until it is crisp. Remove and drain on paper towels. Add the shallots and pine nuts to the fat remaining in the pan and stir over medium heat until lightly browned, about 2–3 minutes.

  3. Add the shredded sprouts. Cook, stirring, over medium heat until they are cooked through but still crisp. Here Jean says, "I add about a stick of butter while they cook, stirring it in approximately a tablespoon at a time, since the bacon fat isn't nearly enough to keep the shredded sprouts [5 pints, after all] from getting dry."

  4. Then she says, having gleefully abandoned the recipe altogether by this point, "Keep stirring and shoveling the sprouts around so the bottom layer doesn't burn. It takes longer than six to eight minutes [what the recipe says]—more like ten to fifteen—to cook through."

  5. Crumble in the bacon, add the pepper to taste, stir, and serve.

  Serves however many people are willing to eat Brussels sprouts—probably about 8, but you may have leftovers.

  11. Away in a Manger

  AT SOME POINT, along with the reasonable beliefs that children need to sleep and breathe, the idea that "little children love to dip things" seems to have become a fundamental plank of parenting. In the months when Jules ate the least, people were constantly telling me that they had gotten their little Janie or Jack to eat something by offering a sauce for dunking. Why I bought into this concept given my own sorry history with sauce as a child, I do not know. Nevertheless, we started putting ketchup, the most-mentioned dipping sauce, on Jules's plate with some regularity. Appar
ently there were parents nationwide whose kids would eat almost anything as long as they could dip it in ketchup first.

  For us, unsurprisingly, ketchup did not have the desired effect. Jules would say "Dip dip!" over and over while miming dipping a piece of food into his ketchup without ever actually touching the ketchup, then put the food down, unbitten or even licked. Meanwhile, ketchup itself became his favorite meal. He asked for it constantly and ate it straight with a spoon or a fork. When it was gone, he ignored our pleas to move on to the next food on the plate and excused himself from the table with a polite "Down, peese?" (He had learned how to undo the buckles on his booster seat months before.) Had there been a redeeming aspect to this development—had he, say, branched out to foods with tomato sauce on them, like pizza or pasta—we might have accepted his ketchup craze more graciously.

  But there was not. Jules was about to turn two and hadn't expanded his palate in months, with the critical exception of bagels with cream cheese (a true blessing since in New York City you can get one anywhere) plus crackers, bread, and cookies of any kind (meet Young Mr. Carbohydrate, son of Miss Carbohydrate). He had had a three-day love affair with shredded salami—the first meat that had entered his system since the baby food days—but then wouldn't touch it, or any other meat, again. Instead, there were dinners of ketchup and milk and maybe a few carrots, followed by yogurt at bedtime to keep him from waking up hungry at five A.M.

  It was December, and it was time for me to flee again, this time to a farm near Andover, Vermont. In my three days there, none of this would be my problem. If someone woke me up in the wee hours crying for food, it would be a cow. Or a goat. Or a lamb. I was going to the source of what we referred to at the restaurant as "the animals."