Eating for Beginners Read online

  All of it had come from nearby farms, most of them in upstate New York, in the Delaware River valley and Columbia County. There was nothing in there I wouldn't have gobbled up in a heartbeat, though possibly this ecstatic feeling was as much the result of the forty-degree temperature of the walk-in as it was a reaction to the fruits and vegetables.

  Outside the restaurant, it was eighty-five degrees and ninety percent humidity. In the kitchen, which I once heard David describe as "one of those kitchens that's really hot in the summer and really cold in the winter," it was unquantifiably worse. The kind of worse that produces steady rivulets of sweat running down your chest under the two layers of your shirt and chef's jacket that don't let up for the entire duration of a ten-hour dinner shift.

  ***

  But the heat was nothing compared to what was happening at home. During the month of June, Jules cried at dinner every single night, or at least this was the only thing I could bring myself to write down about the month other than that he was living almost exclusively on yogurt and bananas, with some nuts and crackers thrown in. I, who had shunned books about pregnancy, childbirth, decorating your nursery, and most other baby-related topics (except for that one about sleep, for obvious reasons), had finally given in and begun reading about how to get a child to eat. I hoped to discover a magic solution that I could implement in some specified number of easy steps. Being in the restaurant kitchen, with its utterly logical—if occasionally dangerous—processes of slicing, dicing, blanching, and pureeing, had made me even more aware of how much I loved having a plan. There were no recipes at applewood, but there were universally applicable methods for getting things done. You prepped, cooked, plated, and sent out to the dining room, and before long the plate came back empty and you knew someone on the other side of the swinging door was happy.

  All of which was much more satisfying than reading books about stubborn toddlers and their wretched eating habits, let alone actually coping with one of these children. In the books I found sentences like this one, which confirmed yet again that Jules was not even an ordinary picky eater: "When the toddler goes through the long warm-up of twenty meals to learn to eat a vegetable, you won't worry if you understand that this is all part of the learning process." Well, the book was right, I wouldn't have worried at all about that. But with Jules the widely touted theory that children need ten, fifteen, even twenty exposures to a new food before they'll eat it did not apply. Not one little bit. There was no getting him to try anything no matter how many times we exposed him to it. If we suggested he taste it, he ignored us. If we said nothing, trying to "be appropriately unconcerned" as one expert suggested, he ignored the food. As his vocabulary expanded, he began to look at things on his plate and say, for example, "No chicken. No pasta. No fish." He knew what everything was, and he knew he didn't want it.

  At last I turned once again to M. F. K. Fisher. I needed a book about the human relationship to food rather than one about how to induce your offspring to eat—emotion rather than psychology—and Fisher's work fit the bill perfectly. "When a man is small, he loves and hates food with a ferocity which soon dims...," she wrote in Serve It Forth (1937). "His throat will close, and spots of nausea and rage swim in his vision." It occurred to me as I took this in that perhaps, through some feat of reincarnation, Fisher had met my son. "It is hard, later, to remember why, but at the time there is no pose in his disgust. He cannot eat; he says, 'To hell with it!'"

  Now this was what I was looking for, because all around me, parents were telling stories about their children eating exotic food. Children who loved sushi (Jules wouldn't even try rice) or eggplant, or something else improbable and charming. One night Sophie and Tatum came into the restaurant with their babysitter and word came back to the kitchen that Sophie wanted duck. A few minutes after the plate went out, it was returned with an apology—she had meant to ask for duck confit.

  Several days later, utterly despairing, I flung myself down on a chair near Laura while she got changed for dinner service and asked her how on earth she had produced two children who ate duck confit.

  This was the moment when I realized that if David was an overt softie, Laura was a secret one. Beneath all her wisecracking—and not even very far beneath it—was something entirely different. I would never have guessed it, but later on, during a slow period in the kitchen when David and I were talking about our children, he told me that Laura refused to talk to Sophie and Tatum on the phone when they were apart because she couldn't bear to hear them upset. I also discovered that she was the engineer of all sorts of romantic escapades on behalf of customers, like incorporating marriage proposals into the dessert menu and offering glasses of champagne when these proposals were accepted. (Reverting to her tougher persona, she would come back to the kitchen and side with the groom if she felt the bride-to-be had not answered as effusively as she should have.)

  But none of this was known to me that day I begged her for her secret, and I expected that my misery might inspire one of her snappy, funny remarks. Instead, I got nothing but sympathy. "For the first four years, Sophie ate anything," Laura recalled. "People said it was because David and I are chefs. I started to think maybe there was something to that, maybe the way we feel about food had an effect."

  I was about to protest that Noah and I feel great about food, too—we love food! Then she continued. "But then at four, one by one, there were fewer and fewer foods she would eat. Now it's chicken."

  The idea of a Shea child refusing to eat chicken cheered me right up. It also reminded me of something else I had read in a book about feeding children. "Parents of finicky preschoolers almost always tell me the same story," the author had written. "'She ate well when she was just starting out on solid foods, but then when she was a toddler she would only eat certain foods. Now she won't even eat what she did when she was a toddler.'" Then the author had delivered a damning judgment: "In that phrase describing the toddler, 'she would only eat certain foods,' the parent is telling me that she was catered to."

  Upon reading this, I had questioned whether Noah and I had been indulging Jules's fondness for yogurt and bananas just because we wanted him to eat something, as of course we did. It's very hard to ponder sending your one-year-old to bed hungry. But knowing Laura, I seriously doubted that she had catered to Sophie, so maybe we were in the clear. I was about to ask what she thought about this when she shrugged and said, "They're people, and sometimes it's a political protest and sometimes they really don't like it."

  I expect to see Jules on some kind of picket line by the time he's five.

  ***

  "When people enter the kitchen," the novelist Laurie Colwin wrote in her wonderful book of food essays Home Cooking, "they often drag their childhood in with them." I had thought I was coming to the kitchen to escape the one aspect of Jules's childhood that was driving me absolutely crazy. Instead, I stumbled across my own early years and found a small, unexpected salvation there.

  One of the most cherished activities of my youth was making forays with my father to the Cellar at Macy's, a gourmet mecca of a kind that is now commonplace in cities like New York but was still exotic back then, especially to a young child. There, we would buy two things I loved dearly: freshly baked "salt sticks," stubby, narrow rolls covered with rock salt and caraway seeds; and candied orange peel. Both these treats evoked for my father memories of his own childhood in Czechoslovakia, and we would often talk about his favorite sweets and cakes that couldn't be bought in America. As we stood on one of Macy's rattling old wooden escalators one afternoon, a dreamy look came across his face as he described a striped coconut confection. I must have been about six years old, and it was the first time I really understood that he had had a life before my mother, my sister, and me, in a place very far away that he had not been back to for many years. On the bus ride home, while I tried to imagine him as a little boy in middle-European short pants and knee socks, we demolished our spoils, arriving at our apartment far too stuffed for lunch. />
  I hadn't thought about those trips to the Cellar for a very long time until one day in the kitchen at applewood. I had just finished peeling an enormous metal sheet tray of roasted cipollini onions, which were mixed into many of the vegetables for extra flavor before plating a dish to be served, and was looking to take a little break before moving on to a similarly huge tray of roasted beets. I stepped over to the grill, where Sarah was scribbling ideas for the evening's meat dishes on a paper towel. Sweetbreads with turnips, apple-ginger compote, and brown butter; crispy pork belly with grilled potatoes and scallion purée; roasted rabbit with fingerling potatoes, rapini, and basil pesto; grilled goat with cannellini beans and squash; duck breast with red cabbage and candied orange peel.

  The last item on Sarah's list caught my eye. Candied orange peel. If she had written it on the paper towel, that must mean she knew how to make it. And if Sarah knew how to make candied orange peel, chances were there was some in the vicinity. Then I saw it—a full plastic quart container sitting on her stainless steel counter. It was as though I'd stumbled right back into the Cellar at Macy's, only this time I wasn't separated from the bounty by a glass case. I dipped a spoon in to swipe a few pieces. Savoring the citrusy sweetness, I asked Sarah how she made it, thinking that if I gained the power to produce my own candied orange peel I would have penetrated one of the great secrets of, if not the universe, at least my universe.

  "It's so easy," she said, characteristically encouraging me as she caramelized shallots for a chanterelle mushroom ragout with polenta. (The grill station also made the nightly vegetarian entrée, an extra task that nearly pushed me over the edge every time I worked it.) I watched intently as she pantomimed julienning orange peel. "Then you toss it in a pot of water, boil it, change the water, boil it and change the water three more times, add the sugar the last time and then let it reduce until all the liquid is gone," she said. "Voilà!" Okay, how hard could it be, I thought, heading back to my beets. I craved that orange peel, and since Sarah needed hers for the duck I didn't think she was going to let me make off with the whole quart.

  At that time I was especially prone to the kind of longing triggered by the candied orange peel, because my father, he of the giggling on escalators and the unfettered joy in eating candy before lunch, had died when Jules was four months old. It had been left to me to pass on to my son all of the details that made him whole, eccentric snacking habits included.

  It had not occurred to me that I would find anything at applewood to remind me of my father (another reason, perhaps, for my flight from my regular life into the restaurant's kitchen). Despite his love of good food, he was a man blissfully free of the ability to cook much of anything beyond a very festive cheese fondue. But of course there's a good deal more to food than cooking, as I had discovered on that escalator.

  And so it was with more than just normal apprehension that I bought half a dozen oranges (yes, they were completely out of season) and carried them home one evening to attempt Sarah's recipe. As I stood over my stove watching the matchsticks of peel churning around in the boiling water, I thought of my father and all the times we'd eaten it together, often to the point of gleeful illness, in cities and towns around the world. My heart pounded at the idea of being able to re-create, in some small way, the food that strung those many memories together. When the final pan of water had evaporated, leaving just the peel, now coated in sugar, I put a piece on my tongue and tasted those long-ago afternoons.

  Jules, who had learned to walk by this time, was using his new talent to get as close to the hot stove as possible. In spite of his eating habits, he was usually good for something sweet, so I gave him a piece to try.

  "Like it!" he exclaimed in a surprised voice, chewing and raising his bright blue eyes up to mine. "More!"

  And suddenly my father was there, if only for an instant, visible in the look of sheer delight on Jules's face. A few lines of a poem by Wyatt Prunty that I'd loved for many years, since long before I had any acquaintance with any of its subject matter, rushed into my mind. He was talking about the arrival of his own son, but he could have been standing in my dining room watching Jules munch orange peel when he wrote:

  ...your birth was my close land

  Turned green, the stone rolled back for leaving,

  My father dead and you returned.

  My own father, I saw all at once, was not lost to Jules after all, and not quite as lost to me as I had thought.

  Candied Orange Peel

  6 oranges

  1 cup sugar

  1. Remove the peel from the oranges by cutting off each end, then cutting from top to bottom of the orange, following the shape of the fruit, so the peel comes off in big sections. Do not cut off the white pith, just the peel.

  2. Julienne the peel into thin strips.

  3. Place the peel in cold water in a pot and bring to a boil to remove bitterness. Repeat 3 times, changing the water each time.

  4. Place drained peel in a pot with cold water and sugar, bring to a boil, and reduce it until all the liquid is gone.

  5. Feed to your toddler against the bad advice of everyone who says it will ruin his teeth. Do not feel guilty.

  Serves about 24 as garnish, or 1 as a source of immense happiness.

  Jicama Slaw

  10–12 cipollini onions

  fresh-squeezed juice of 4–5 oranges, adjusted for taste

  fresh-squeezed juice of 4 limes

  fresh-squeezed juice of 4 lemons

  1 large or 2 small jicama roots (about 2 pounds)

  zest of 1 large lemon

  zest of 2–3 limes

  ⅓ cup olive oil

  salt

  3 jalapeños, seeds removed

  1. Peel the cipollinis and use a mandoline to slice them very thinly. Set the slices to marinate in a bowl of mixed citrus juices, amounting to about one-third of the total juice, made up of 2 parts orange juice to 1% parts lime juice to 1 part lemon juice.

  2. Peel the jicama root and slice it about 18 inch thick on the mandoline.

  3. Cut the jicama slices into matchsticks.

  4. In a large bowl, mix the jicama with the lemon and lime zest, then add the remaining juices in the same ratio used for marinating the cipollinis.

  5. Add olive oil and salt to taste.

  6. Slice the jalapeños about ⅛ inch thick on the mandoline, then mince them and add to the mixture.

  7. Add the marinated cipollinis and, if necessary, some of the liquid they were in.

  Serves 4 as a starter or a side.

  3. What Is Cheese?

  BY THE TIME I had been at applewood for a few months, I had settled into the weekly schedule. The restaurant served dinner Tuesdays through Saturdays, brunch on Sundays, and was closed Mondays. Tuesday morning was when the kitchen came back to life, when the chefs went down to the walk-in and pondered its contents most intently because they knew they wouldn't get anything new to play with until Thursday. There was a pleasant rhythm to this cycle—the depleting of resources in the early part of the week followed by the bounty of Thursday morning deliveries and the excitement of a new set of vegetables and meats to experiment with. (David once told me that he actually dreamed about recipes.) This regularity was punctuated now and then by the cheese deliveries.

  Unlike everything else, cheese arrived at random and, to my surprise, usually by UPS. I discovered this one day while I was working at garde manger, slicing beets and making vinaigrettes. An ordinary brown box appeared on the stainless steel counter and I looked up just in time to see the UPS guy disappearing through the swinging door. The box could have contained almost anything—books, shoes, DVDs, toothbrushes—but instead, the first slice of the knife into the packing tape released the unmistakably pungent odor of cheese. Inside was an ashy gray wheel, which I took down to the walk-in, my mind spinning.

  You can mail cheese, I thought. Wait until I tell my friends about this.

  It had never occurred to me that sitting in the very same UPS truck as
all those Amazon packages and shipments of diapers was something so delectable. Who had packed the box and where? I associated UPS with offices and Xerox machines, not fields and farms.

  A lot of the cheese brought by UPS came from a small dairy farm in the middle of Connecticut called Cato Corner. It was only about a hundred and twenty miles away, and I thought it would be an ideal place to start learning more about who, and what, was behind applewood's food.

  ***

  On a sunny Wednesday in June, I got in my car and drove north. A small herd of caramel-colored Jersey cows munching grass behind a wooden fence was the first sign that I'd reached my destination. The cows were an anomaly amid the modest, essentially suburban houses set close to the winding road. They appeared all of a sudden, the long red barn behind them set off by tiers of rolling green pasture that seemed to rise up to the clouds.

  When I stepped out of the car onto a dirt and gravel driveway, a rush of wind in the surrounding trees filled my ears. It was an unblemished summer day, one of the kind the poet Philip Larkin described as "emblems of perfect happiness," made all the more perfect by the fact that I seemed to have stepped into a page from Jules's Old MacDonald book. I could hear cows lowing and dogs barking as I walked toward a small gray shed next to the barn. The strong but not unpleasant scent of manure and hay and farm animals filled the air. A black and white rooster scrabbled past, and I watched it hurry to an aging white farmhouse surrounded by trees.

  Entering the shed, I found two women dressed in tall white galoshes, big white plastic aprons, and shower caps that looked to be made of cheesecloth—a very Willy Wonka effect. Cheryl was the first to introduce herself. A former chef who had tired of the taxing hours of restaurant work, she now made cheese at the farm full time. Helping her that day was Dianna, who was an accountant in Manhattan three days a week and spent one day every week making cheese as an antidote to the commuting and the rat race. For now, one day was all the time she could spare, but she was hoping to get out of accounting and onto the farm full time. As the women wrapped pieces of cheese in wax paper (no doubt they had packed at least some of those UPS boxes), Cheryl told me they sold about five hundred pounds of cheese per weekend at the New York City Greenmarkets. Recently, local people had started to buy their cheese, too. When I asked why, she gestured to a poster taped to the door. On it were a photo of a farm stand and the words "Homeland security. Buy local. It matters." "People want to know where their food is from after the whole spinach scare," she explained.