Eating for Beginners Read online

  Except, of course, for David's. Restaurants, even small ones like applewood, are complicated organisms. They require constant smart management of a variety of things, which need totally different kinds of attention: food products, bookkeeping, service, and chefs. Every aspect has to be in perfect balance for a meal to go smoothly. For Laura and David, being not only business partners but also married and the parents of two young children complicated matters even more. "Some of the really bad moments for me and Laura are when it's just too much togetherness," David confessed to me once. Their relationship was on display in front of everyone in the restaurant all the time. If Laura was up in the office during prep hours, it was not uncommon to hear her yell "Dave!" in a voice loud enough to echo through the kitchen. This usually resulted in him stopping for a moment, perhaps pulling a face for the rest of us, and yelling back, "In a minute!" He never went to see what she wanted before he finished whatever he was doing, but he always went. If he and Laura were having a disagreement about something unsolvable, he just came back to the kitchen and started cooking again. Even the best-run place has moments of getting through the evening dinner service on sheer guts, and I saw David and Laura bury their argument and do just that more than once.

  ***

  But I learned all of that later. On my first afternoon at the restaurant, I was far too scared of the food itself to think about where it came from, let alone about the intricacies of David and Laura's marriage. At the garde manger station I faced, in addition to the ingredients for the starters listed on that day's menu, a huge box of morels: damp, dark brown forest mushrooms with narrow stems and honeycombed tops covered with little ridges and pits. The first of the season—it was early May—they had just arrived from Virginia. They would end up in a special appetizer, a "verbal" that wasn't on the written menu, along with veal sweetbreads. David grabbed a few out of the box, split them a bit between finger and thumb, then turned to me and said, in a voice as normal as if he was asking me how I wanted my coffee, "They're filled with worm eggs that are undetectable to the human eye."

  The cardboard morel box, which was stained and damp and half-crushed and smelled vaguely like the New Hampshire woods where I hunted for salamanders after summer rainstorms as a child, was sparsely filled at best; this was what eighty dollars worth of fancy mushrooms looked like. And I was supposed to prep them, cut away parts of each one, with some kind of judgment I did not possess. The confidence David either had or was faking in me was unnerving—though I soon learned that one of his great gifts as an employer is divining almost immediately how to use what he has, people and ingredients alike, and then getting the absolute most out of them.

  My task was to quarter the morels, except for the ones about the width of my thumb, which I was supposed to leave whole other than trimming a bit of the stem off the bottom. As I took each light, spongy mushroom out of the box, I devised a method of standing them up like little wizened soldiers in a row across my cutting board and stepping back a few paces every now and then to size them up. No doubt I looked as foolish as I felt, but everyone had the grace to go about their business, pretending there was no awkward elephant in a borrowed chef's jacket in the room.

  And what a room it was. From the moment I stepped through the glass-paned green door into applewood's kitchen, I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole. Even though it was quite big for a restaurant kitchen (as I learned after arriving and exclaiming "It's so small!" like a true neophyte), it wasn't actually all that big. And it was incredibly full. Below my counter were many jugs holding vinegars (champagne, red wine, white wine, balsamic, sherry, Banyuls), oils, honey, maple syrup, and anything else even remotely saucy. Above it were several dozen quart-sized plastic containers filled with dried fruits, spices, and various nuts. To the left of the counter was wire shelving stretching up toward the high ceiling and stacked perilously with plates, random kitchen utensils, and empty plastic quart containers.

  (It would be hard to overemphasize the role of plastic quart containers in the applewood kitchen. Not only was everything from duck innards to blanched peas kept in them, but they served as drinking glasses, too. After a few months of working there, I was constantly reaching for a nonexistent one at home and wondering how I had ever cooked—or quenched my thirst—without them. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I kept trying to work out a way to communicate to the world the profound efficiency of drinking one's morning coffee out of a quart container instead of a ridiculously inadequate mug.)

  The door from the dining room swung toward me. "Order in!" called one of the servers. He stuck the top layer of his order ticket into the stainless steel rail above garde manger. It was a table for two (a "two top"), and they wanted a cheese plate and the pea shoot salad to start. Because the pea shoot salad had sauteed crawfish in it, the fish station was in charge of that. That left me with the cheese plate, which I thought I could handle, albeit rather slowly, as it was taking me forever to get the plastic wrap off one of the cheeses.

  "You can just cut right through the plastic," David, who was at the fish station, said, swooping over to save me. "Just like this. And then—" he whisked away the piece of wrapping he had sliced off with the neat section of cheese. As he went back to his crawfish, I wondered why it had never occurred to me that I could cut through plastic wrap.

  I had many moments like this as I learned about kitchen work. On the day I began by trimming morels, Liza set up my cutting board by soaking paper towels and laying them on the counter, then pressing the board down on top of them. When I looked at her quizzically, she demonstrated the no-slip properties of wet paper towel against stainless steel. Who knew? Several months later, while David was showing me how to make a pork terrine, I discovered that you can bake Saran wrap, and my life has never really been the same since. In the less useful category, I became so accustomed to wiping my hands on my apron or the front of my chef's jacket that I nearly destroyed several sweaters by doing the same thing at home. In a triumph of the banal over the sublime, it was this, rather than my newfound ability to purchase produce with abandon and make a meal from it, that came to mind whenever people asked me whether cooking in a restaurant had changed the way I cooked at home.

  But I was happy in the applewood kitchen from the start, squashed in amid the chefs and the shelving and countertops under a ceiling hung with ladles and spoons and strainers and dominated by a huge stainless steel air duct that ran almost the length of the room. The floor was red linoleum, the walls tiled white about three-quarters of the way up, the light fluorescent. The overall effect was overwhelming, but I had left the familiar world behind and I liked having done so. It would be several weeks before I could remember where to find a vegetable peeler or which lowboy refrigerator had the sugar in it. I rarely ventured to the back of the room, which was more or less the domain of the pastry chef, August, though he shared the space with Johnny, who washed pots and pans in a huge double sink at an amazing clip every day starting at three o'clock. Something entirely other was going on back there in pastry, something that involved precise measurements and what looked to be a few actual recipes, two things I had not seen (and never would see) in the part of the kitchen that produced the savory food.

  Just beyond the pastry chef's ice cream machine was the door to the office, which was in a loft above the room where Sophie and Tatum had slept every night for the restaurant's first two years. Still painted with scenes of sheep having a tea party, the girls' old haunt was now filled with extra wineglasses and their old futon bed. I tried sometimes to imagine what it would be like to have Jules asleep back there during a long shift, but really, once the controlled frenzy of the dinner service began, it was hard to even remember sometimes that he existed.

  Each week the hours flew by while I chopped, diced, and blended. On Thursday the produce arrived in the morning and the meat was delivered in the afternoon—whole goats, pigs, and lambs, and often an enormous hind of veal weighing in the vicinity of a hundred pounds. The animals were stashed in
the walk-in to be butchered later, or, if there was not enough meat for dinner service, butchered right then.

  When everything was ready, the kitchen door, which remained open in the afternoon, was closed, the lights were dimmed in the dining room, and the candles on the tables and around the room were lit. Depending on how busy the restaurant was, the hours that followed took one of several forms. On a really busy night at applewood, which seats forty-five people at a time (plus six at the bar and another six on the patio in good weather), they'll do a hundred or a hundred and twenty meals ("covers"). Sixty dinners on a weeknight is a decent take, but often they're spread out over the evening in agonizing fashion, four at six o'clock, then nothing until seven-thirty, then a rush at nine and one last gruesome walk-in table at ten-fifteen—"sixty the hard way," in David's parlance. Those were the nights when the chefs did "projects" to keep busy between orders. Sausage got made, rinds and vegetables got pickled, fish got cured.

  Those were also the nights when I had time to exercise my artistic sensibilities, time to linger over every plate at garde manger, dressing, garnishing, and organizing each salad and arranging each cheese plate. I didn't know how to make myself useful with brines and meat grinders like the rest of the kitchen staff, but for me every plate was a "project" in itself. It was a little like practicing feng shui on a tiny scale—perhaps the garde manger book was finally having an effect on me—and I was getting into the aesthetics of "presenting foods to look their best." Lettuce leaves went into the bowl with the spine down, ruffled edges turned up so they were open to diners. Cheese wedges, placed next to the accompanying stack of garlic crostini, always had the uncovered end pointing toward the edge of the plate, an invitation to cut in. When it came to the arrangement of the wedges and crostini, though, there was room for individuality. No two of us did it quite the same way—in the fluidity of such a small kitchen, even though everyone had an official station, no one was above stepping over and helping out if needed—and David, as much as his standards were impeccable and his sense of hospitality enormous, liked it that way.

  Once when David was training a new chef, I asked what he planned to tell him. "Cook for yourself," he answered. "Whatever anybody has to say shouldn't impact you all that much. If you're trying, if you care, that's enough." He paused, then added, "I'm going to say, 'Just pretend you're at home cooking for you and your wife.'" Then he tied on his apron and headed for the grill.

  And though of course this was not the whole story and the new chef didn't last the week because, however he cooked for his wife, it was not the way he needed to cook at applewood, I knew David's sentiment was genuine. After all, there are ideals and reality in everything.

  2. We Eat What We Are

  MY FIRST WORD, uttered sometime in the winter of 1971–72, was "cookie." Naturally, I leapt at the chance to spend half my week in a kitchen where a steady supply of baked goods was handed around at all hours. It will not, perhaps, surprise you to learn that my nickname as a young child was "Miss Carbohydrate," nor that my belly was extraordinarily large (though, thankfully, it disappeared right around the age when having a midsection shaped like a bowling ball is no longer considered adorable). My sister, who was four and a half when I was born and a keen observer of the world, called me Mush. Now that she's a mother (of two children who, annoyingly, will eat anything she puts in front of them), I have been promoted to Auntie Mush.

  There is, of course, nothing like having a child of your own to make your family suddenly recall all the quirks and characteristics of your childhood. And so, soon after I had Jules—whose first word, you may also not be surprised to learn, was "no!" followed almost immediately by "this!" so that he could tell us about all the food items that utterly repulsed him and then about the very few that didn't—there were many reminiscences about what a ham I had been, and how I had my first haircut at six months, and also, yes, what a dreadfully picky eater I was.

  Among other things, I refused to eat sauce of any kind until I was into the double digits. I even hated stopping at McDonald's on family trips because in those days they served nothing but burgers and it was impossible to get one without mustard and ketchup already on it (I guess I was ahead of Eric Schlosser in judging fast food, though for all the wrong reasons). I can remember pouting in the backseat of the car as everyone else munched away, pretending to be interested in the scenery along the New York State Thruway or the New Jersey Turnpike as I plotted world domination and the plain hamburgers that would be served across the globe once I was in charge.

  Given all of this, my time at applewood was tinged with the reckless abandon of a woman running from her past, which had, as the past always does, returned to haunt me in the eating habits of my son. I couldn't help feeling it was at least partially my fault that, unintentionally, Jules was foiling one of my most basic instincts. Every time he refused his dinner (or his breakfast or his lunch), I thought of M. F. K. Fisher, who wrote that "one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world." The stories I had down, but I wanted the stew, too. So, unable to please my son, I settled for feeding strangers at the restaurant.

  The first physical manifestation of this zeal appeared on my hands: by midsummer I had almost no fingernails left, and I had discovered that it's possible to do a great many things without them. If you're an amateur chef, it's also probably wise to buy stock in a bandage company. Adhesive can cover a multitude of sins, including the absence of a sizeable chunk of thumbnail and the thumb that was once beneath it, an injury caused by repeated idiotic use of a mandoline. Or, as someone muttered when Liza was putting it together for me to use on the last day I had a thumbnail for many months, "the most dangerous tool in the kitchen."

  It was also, according to Liza, a tool that "makes everything so easy!" (Oh, to have a dollar for every time I proved her wrong on that count.) Liza, who had never bothered to go to cooking school, was a born chef. As children, she and her brother had run a little café at home, cooking for their parents on anniversaries and birthdays. "I always made up my own recipes," she mused, mincing chives. "I've always been somebody who goes to the grocery store, sees what's there, and makes something up as I'm shopping. I read cookbooks and take them in, and then I make other things."

  I listened to Liza with great interest and a bit of envy, as this was, in fact, exactly the kind of person I'd always wanted to be.

  Little by little, Liza and David were trying to point me in that direction, and like her boss, Liza displayed a charmingly misplaced level of confidence in me—laughable knives notwithstanding. One day in June she asked me to make a jicama slaw. This required first peeling the fibrous, papery skin off of the jicama root, which was the shape of a slightly squashed sphere, to uncover the crisp white flesh with a consistency similar to a raw potato. Then you used the mandoline to slice the jicama, then you julienned it and added it to citrus-marinated cipollini onions (also sliced on the mandoline) and minced jalapeño. It seemed like an awful lot of slicing, but Liza demonstrated enthusiastically, knocking out a series of perfect jicama slices, her arm moving back and forth in a steady rhythm. Buoyed by her positive attitude, I plunged in with gusto.

  Roughly five seconds later I had, instead of neat slices, jicama gone haywire. There were little chunks and pieces all over my cutting board, not a perfect slice to be found anywhere. I kept trying, and was rewarded about two minutes later when I grated right through my plastic glove and into the thumbnail of my right hand, which was clutching the jicama in a claw-like fashion. Soon after that, because there was nothing else left to mangle, I sliced into the skin of my thumb, which began to bleed a little bit inside my replacement glove, now also cut open. I bandaged it up and persisted without stopping to ask anyone what I was doing wrong—I was worried about losing face, and I'm nothing if not hardheaded; like mother, like son. Over and over, j
ust when I thought I'd cut as deeply into my flesh as was possible, I managed to slice off just one more millimeter (and through one more glove), leaving my thumb a tingling, smarting mess, though at least these later slices were too superficial to bleed. I continued until I had sliced enough jicama to ensure that everyone who ordered the diver scallops it was to be served with could have a portion. Then I put my first imperfect jicama hunks and lumps into a bowl from which everyone in the kitchen could help themselves while they worked.

  Still, I was relaxed in spite of the pain (I'll say just one more thing: jalapeño juice in fresh open wounds). It was the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, as I merrily went about the destruction of my thumb. The walk-in refrigerator downstairs was so crammed with produce that no one could actually walk in. The huge number of boxes and crates taking up most of the floor space had forced me to balance on one foot when I put away duck breasts earlier that day. There were carrots as fat as my wrist, fava beans in their long, dingy pale green pods, the last of the English peas, four kinds of lettuce (one fantastically named Red Cross), arugula, sunchokes, hot banana peppers, bok choy, spinach, basil, morels, and fresh chives capped with purple flowers, which gave off a delicious oniony smell and became garnish for a soup that night.