Beaten, Seared, and Sauced (4 page)

If you believe, as I once did—as I was taught—that everything will come to a sudden end, what point is there in being ambitious? This was not the message, I think, my parents wanted to send. But I was not ambitious. Life pulled me with it; I did not steer.

I left New Hampshire for college in Boston, and I was stunned by the divergence. In that space between everything I’d known growing up and what was inflicting itself on me now, my mind went dark and it filled with snakes. There was rain in everything, and everything was cold. I had never imagined that even the bricks of a building’s wall could be hostile. I barely graduated.

I went to New York, looking for the rest of my life. The city was immense and dizzying and hypnotic. The rest of my life seemed mostly to be two steps ahead of me. I couldn’t catch it. I just let the wind push me.

Each night, I made a ritual of cooking dinner for myself. I hated going out. My mother had a quick and easy dish I used to love: chicken breasts breaded, sautéed, served with a wine and mushroom sauce, rice, and broccoli. I made it several times a week, because it tasted like I was home. But it never tasted that way enough; maybe it was not
enough wine, too much wine, the wrong bread crumbs, or maybe too much lemon in the sauce.

If you walk on almost any block in New York City, you can catch your own reflection in the window of a restaurant. They’re innumerable and most aren’t very good. But I suspected that in some of them, there were geniuses in the kitchen who could take the same ingredients I used and work miracles with them, who could make perfectly every time the dishes that haunted my palate. It never occurred to me that they had
learned
how to do it, or that I could learn, or that they could create dishes I’d never had before that might haunt me in the same way.

If I had a date, if I was making friends, if I was seeing old friends, I cooked for them. I never felt fluent in the real language we speak to each other in, the one by which we assemble ourselves in the company of, for the benefit of, other people. I spoke my mind and myself with food. I didn’t do that with any of my jobs.

For a while I was a foot messenger. I was a receptionist. I was a proofreader. I became a host at a restaurant.

I was a nanny. I had a five-year-old kid in my charge. His mother was suffering from cancer. I picked him up from school, helped with homework, cooked him dinner, took him to movies. I talked to him when he was so terrified he didn’t know how to live. His mother got well, he got older, and I moved on.

I wrote music and book reviews for papers like the
Boston Phoenix
and
New York Newsday
. I wrangled some assignments from the
New York Times
. I wrote the first, and it was published. I wrote the second. The editor would go through everything I did, word by word, changing most of them as we went. Every time, my piece would be gutted. For a writer, this was the best place you could ever be. I was among people whose words changed the world. But it was too much. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t belong there. I never would. I folded; I didn’t finish the remaining pieces. The deadline came and went. After a while, the editor stopped asking for the stories. I never quite finished feeling ashamed at the failure.

I did layout at magazines. I took reservations at a jazz club. I cleaned apartments. I wasted a decade.

The world didn’t end, but depression had eaten away my twenties. Just before I was thirty, I fell into a job at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, as a staff writer. I took writing seriously, and I took this job seriously; I’d lost a lot of time to the black dogs in my head and I wanted to grow up and function well, like others did, and I wanted to live well.

While I was at Martha I first heard about the Culinary Institute and began to really understand the concept of cooking school. Most of the kitchen staff there, and a significant number of the people writing about food, had gotten a culinary education. I shared an office with another writer, Laura Wallis, who would become a close friend, and we began spending some time looking at the websites of cooking schools—the CIA, various schools in and around Manhattan—just idly daydreaming.
If we ever get rich
, we said,
we’ll go to cooking school
.

I was not Martha Stewart material. People liked me, editors liked me, but I wasn’t one of them. Everyone was promoted ahead. I survived three rounds of layoffs. I still never moved. I was writing all over the company: the website, the merchandise catalog, the magazines, the newspaper column. I never moved. After a couple of years, I gave up. I didn’t quit, I just stopped caring. I came to work in T-shirts and work boots. I never shaved. I lasted for a long while more. Finally, I was laid off when I refused to add a full-time job’s worth of computer coding to my writing assignments.

The first time I saw my girlfriend, Nelly was giving a reading at a bookstore in Brooklyn. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person; she is petite—just five feet—with a great smile and, I had to admit, a beautiful figure. I was knocked out by what she read. I bought her story collection,
See Through
, and read it twice. I eventually gave her some of my writing and we became really close friends. She was an avid cook, too, and had been a professional baker when she lived in San Francisco. She was warm and gracious and I found her sense of very dark humor hilarious. We both knew entire sections of Denis Johnson’s
Jesus’ Son
by heart, loved a lot of the same movies, and
recommended bands to each other. We stayed friends that way for a couple of years. Our friendship went on for a long while until something changed between us, and I wound up seducing her with food.

At one point, I had a sideline freelance job rating restaurants for
New York
magazine’s website. I was given a budget of $75, enough to take one other person with me for two, maybe three, entrées and a couple of desserts. There was not usually enough left over for wine.

I had invited Nelly once before to join me on a review; it was a really mediocre restaurant still inexplicably thriving in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. The meal was terrible, but we had a nice time.

Two weeks later, I had another assignment already past deadline. I asked Nelly and she agreed to go. The day before, I decided to lie. I thought my own cooking, instead of someone else’s, might impress her. I e-mailed saying that the gig had been canceled. But would she like to come to my place for homemade ravioli? She said she would and that she’d gladly take the role of sous-chef. I never got around to shouting orders or making her scrub pans. Actually, I did most of the work and just plied her with wine. Whether it was the vintage, the pasta, the very rich, pork-laden sauce—I don’t know. But we were a couple from then on.

I got a job as an adjunct professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, teaching creative writing and literature, but it didn’t pay enough to live on. I was dependent on Nelly, who didn’t seem to mind while I was attempting to find my feet. I got another adjunct gig at the now-defunct Interboro Institute in Manhattan, teaching college kids from dire backgrounds the rudiments of composition. Almost every woman in my classes was a mother, or soon to be one, and many of the men had served time. One of my students, busted for crack, asked me if I could get him his homework while he was in Rikers Island. Another teacher told me that in any given class, someone had a gun in his or her backpack. When I’d stand up in the front of the room, lecturing, I could never put that out of my mind. This job didn’t pay enough to live on either. Nelly paid a lot of our bills.

“I’m just waiting for you to figure out what you’re going to do so we can get on with the rest of our lives together,” she said. We had no idea what to do next because I had no plans, no options. Money was getting scarce. It got frustrating for Nelly, and sometimes she’d just say, “My life is on hold.”

We threw dinner parties all the time, though, because we liked the company and I liked the cooking, plus it was cheaper than going out. We’d get ten or twelve people in her dining room around the table, eating my food, getting drunk on wine and whiskey. I’d have Bob Dylan or dub reggae on the stereo. I was ambitious in my expectations of how the food would turn out, that it might be so good it could create a memory in someone else’s head that was indelible, forging a bond between us. We could, both of us, all of us, return again and again to the moment when we ate this meal together.

With expectations like that, how could I not fail? I made homemade pasta and a sauce made of artichoke hearts to go with it, and the dish was bland and underseasoned and dry—the sort of thing you eat because you have to, just to be polite. It looked impressive, but the talk just fell off the cliff when people began to eat. There were the cursory compliments, and the topic of conversation changed quickly. Dylan sang and the candles flickered and our shadows were large on the wall. I played with the food on my plate and said maybe six words the rest of the night.

Cookbooks, I decided, made false promises. Beyond and behind the vagaries of instructions like “sauté the squid until tender” lay a body of knowledge that made those instructions workable. I could understand it in musical terms: Any guitarist could hit an E-chord, but it took skills to make an E-chord thunder and shimmer like John Lee Hooker. Neil Young could play a single note for a full minute and make it an arresting solo. Its hypnoticism lay in the nuance.

On an afternoon when the snow fell too hard to go out, I rooted around on the Internet until I arrived on a page selling the Culinary Institute of America’s textbook,
The Professional Chef
. It was more than twelve hundred pages, and covered—so it promised—every culinary
fundamental. I made a resolution. I would order the book. I would study it and cook from it. I would work my way through it as much as was practical. I would acquire the skills, through sheer repetition and perseverance.

Nelly said, “This looks amazing.” We were seated together at her dining room table, just the two of us, her arm around my shoulders, poring over the textbook. Here were the instructions for making stock and dozens of different sauces. Here were the methods for making vegetable cuts, for proper sautéing and braising. It looked like the template of a complete education. But … most of the recipes ran heavy on the butter, oil, and cream. Most of them involved meat. Nelly’s favorite dinners were vegetable-centric, and she informed me she simply couldn’t eat this stuff day after day, nor could I afford to cook it day after day. I did what I could. I made stock—chicken and veal. I tried a few of the salads and vinaigrettes; I made a Spanish dish of shrimp and chicken with chocolate, bread crumbs, and Pernod. I was clumsy and I took a long time. The results were trembly, and perhaps not worth the effort.

Nelly had to give up her place, and she moved into my apartment, which was too small for two people. We tripped over each other, and no matter where we were in its three rooms, we were never more than ten feet apart. Our things were piled up from floor to ceiling. We argued often. We broke up twice, but we loved each other and despite the tensions, we’d reunite within a few hours. It turned into a long winter.

Should we marry? Should we look for another apartment? Should Nelly try for a teaching job far away? Should we move upstate? And the biggest question of all now that Nelly was on the cusp of forty, and me not far behind: Should we have a kid? We jostled and stumbled around these questions that we couldn’t answer. What could I say? What sort of answer could I give? I was poor, I had nothing dependable with which to fund a future. I cared immeasurably for Nelly; I cared about learning to cook; I cared about my writing; I was beginning to care very much about scotch and bourbon.

I signed up for a couple of cooking classes around the city: a knife skills class at the Institute of Culinary Education and a sauce-making class at the New School. Each one lasted for just a few hours, and both were great. But they didn’t even begin to approach being comprehensive. Still, I left the knife class knowing how to hold a knife properly and how to dice an onion, and the sauce class with a basic understanding of how to make a pan sauce.

I went to the Strand, the used and discount bookstore on Broadway, and bought more cookbooks: Thomas Keller’s
The French Laundry Cookbook
and
Bouchon
, Marcus Samuelsson’s
Aquavit, Larousse Gastronomique, The Union Square Cafe Cookbook
. I studied the recipes, trying to distill things down to their basics and essentials; beneath all the opulence of a French Laundry dish, what was Thomas Keller really doing? Braising? Okay, then what was he telling me about braising? Nelly gave me a present of
The Babbo Cookbook
by Mario Batali. For my parents’ sixtieth birthdays, I made the braised short ribs from
Babbo
and they still reminisce about it years later. Anytime I did well at the stove, it stoked the enthusiasm up a few degrees. Anytime I didn’t, it felt like a crisis, like the weather of my twenties was coming back.

Through a friend of a friend, I went to a restaurant in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn and met with the owner, Paris Smeraldo. The restaurant, a bistro-type place that had gotten a nice write-up in the
New York Times
, was called Northeast Kingdom. Paris offered to let me do a
stage
—an unpaid stint working in the kitchen to learn—and I took him up on it. The chef was a twenty-six-year-old from London, Andy Gilbert, blond, reed thin, and well over six feet tall, and on my first day, no one had told him I’d be coming. After an awkward explanation, he led me back to the kitchen, gave me a knife, a cutting board, and an apron, and had me slice mushrooms. Then onions. Then carrots. The menu’s big sellers were macaroni and cheese, a Berkshire pork chop with an herbed cream sauce, and chicken pot pies. Most of it was assembled ahead of dinner service and fired on order. “This is rustic food,” Andy said. “You don’t need to try and be exact—a rough chop is fine.” The kitchen was a tiny box and had three worktables, a convection
oven, and two convection burners. Felipe, the sous-chef, was the only other employee in there. Several days a week, after I finished work at Interboro, I’d arrive at 2:00 in the afternoon to turn big vegetables into little vegetables for several hours. I’d watch the first hour of dinner service. When things got busy, I was in the way and I’d get sent out. After a week or so, I was making the oven fries, and, on Saturdays, when I’d get there at 10:00, I’d spend my first hour making crepes.