Best Food Writing 2013 (60 page)

I was involved with a woman who had rescued a stray knife from a tag-sale FREE box because it needed a little love. My knives came from Bridge Kitchenware in the East Fifties, back in the day when the infamous owner, Fred Bridge, was considered the Soup Nazi of professional cookware. If you wanted to buy a bird's-beak paring knife from him and you weren't planning on using it to carve roses out of baby radishes like Jacques Pépin, he wouldn't sell it to you. My knife roll contained an eight-inch chef's knife, a six-inch carbon-steel Sabatier that rusted in mild springtime humidity, four paring knives, a Japanese cleaver, a nine-inch slicer, and a seven-inch filleting knife. And all of them were kept in pristine condition: the moment I saw a ding in one of them, I hurried it to a specialty sharpener on the
Lower East Side, like an hysterical mother who rushes her baby to the emergency room after a sniffle.

“Tell me what you need chopped,” Susan said, sipping on a steaming royal-blue mug of odorous Lapsang souchong, a tea so simultaneously sweet and pungent and smoky that it made the dog throw up.

I looked at her.

“Come on—I'm really
good
at chopping—I'm a designer, remember?”

I reached into the vegetable drawer in the fridge and extracted a large onion, two celery stalks, and two carrots.

“Can you chop me a mirepoix?”

I was so fucking haughty about it, and she didn't even bat an eyelash.

“No problem,” she said, putting her mug down. She took a scuffed plastic cutting board from behind the faucet and set it down on top of a lightly dampened paper towel, to keep it from moving around. I just stared at her, my arms folded.

“You gonna ask me what a mirepoix is?” I said.

“You gonna keep talking?” she replied, looking at me over her reading glasses.

And with that, she began to chop everything using that sad, tip-less tag-sale knife. When she was done, she dumped the carrots, celery, and onion into three Anne Hathaway's Cottage soup bowls, pushed them toward me, picked up the newspaper and her tea, went into the living room, and sat down on the couch. The vegetables were perfect eighth-inch cubes and lovely. I remembered the day we met, when she touched the tiny scar on my right hand.

Details.

Two hours later, while the
braciole
—paper-thin slices of Arnaud's prime beef rolled around black truffle–scented wild mushroom duxelles, parsley, and Pecorino di Pienza, and then browned in olive oil and butter—sat braising in red wine and San Marzano tomatoes in Susan's only high-sided sauté pan, Susan began to rummage around the fridge.

“I'm hungry,” she said, gazing into it like she was expecting a human voice to spring forth from its depths.

“I'll cook,” I announced, putting the newspaper down, certain that
she would somehow manage to change the oven temperature and turn the
braciole
into shoe leather.

“Sit,” she said, pointing at the oven. “You're making dinner, remember?”

“Okay. So, what will we have? Grilled cheese? God knows we have enough pecorino to feed a small village in Tuscany.”

I moved to the other side of the counter so I could keep an eye on things.

She pulled a small, dented Revere Ware saucepan out from the drawer under the oven, filled it with water and a few tablespoons of Heinz vinegar—the sort that my grandmother used to mix with water to clean the windows—and brought it to a simmer. She placed the smallest of the Griswold pans over a burner, heated it dry over medium heat, and set down four overlapping slices of Canadian bacon in it, like an edible Venn diagram.

“Stop!” I shouted, leaping up. “You're not using oil? You're going to destroy that pan!”

“You need to not talk so much,” she said without looking up, carefully breaking four eggs into four small ceramic pudding ramekins. She put four slices of plain white bread into the toaster, stirred the simmering water to create a vortex, and one by one, using a slotted spoon, gingerly lowered each egg into the water, simultaneously reaching over and pressing the lever down on the toaster. The Alessi timer—the one shaped like a lady in a dress, that she'd brought back from a work trip to Italy the year before along with holy water from Lourdes and a Pope John Paul bottle opener—was set to three minutes. When it pinged, so did the toaster.

Susan set down on two lovely, hand-painted Italian breakfast plates golden slices of toast topped with Canadian bacon and four magnificent, firm, buxom white orbs, the most perfect, perfectly poached eggs I had ever seen. I sliced gently into one, and its great gush of deep yellow yolk slowly flooded the plate and the meat and the bread. She pushed a small ceramic bowl of coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper in my direction. I took a pinch between my thumb and forefinger, rubbed them carefully together, and released a slow shower of tiny flakes over the eggs.

When people over the years have asked me, “When did you know you were falling in love with Susan,” the answer is an easy one: just
the simple, thoughtful action of having coarse salt in a small bowl instead of iodized dreck in a shaker was enough to make my heart careen from one side of my chest to the other. The tactile, ancient process of taking a pinch of salt from a tiny bowl between human fingertips, and rubbing it, sprinkling it, thoughtfully, on food, connects the diner with what is on the plate with a sense of immediacy. There is no need for a grain of rice to keep the salt dry in the humidity and the shaker clear.

Bowl of salt. Fingers. Food.

Susan began slicing up both pieces of her toast, bacon, and eggs into miniscule squares, like the mother of a small child would do for her baby who has just learned to use utensils, and I laughed out loud.

“What's wrong with it?” she asked. “It lets me read the paper and eat without having to use both hands.”

Details.

When we were done—it was early in the afternoon on a frigid Sunday—Susan got up and put the tiny cast-iron Griswold in the sink, filled it with soapy water, and let it rest.

“Salt,” she said, “is for eating. Not for scrubbing.”

The
braciole,
which filled the house with the earthy essence of tomato and truffle and wild mushrooms, cooked in a very slow oven for the rest of the day, and when it was time for me to leave for the city, was not quite finished. I left it to Susan's hands, to slice into perfect roulades, which I was sure she could do expertly, since her mirepoix was so goddamned precise.

“Promise me you'll toss the sauce with the fresh tagliatelle I brought,” I said, as we drove to the train station in Hartford.

“I promise,” she agreed, glancing over at me.

“And that you'll let the meat rest for ten minutes before slicing it exactly an inch thick.”

“Oh for god's
sake,
I
promise
already.”

But it wouldn't matter: without my being there, I was sure that the first meal I'd ever made for Susan was going to be an abject failure, and I wasn't even going to be around to ask forgiveness. Or to make excuses.

“How was it?” I asked that night when I called to say I was home. It was after nine.

“Good,” Susan said, “but maybe a little tough. So I chopped up the meat and stuffing and tossed it all together with the pasta. And it was so much better.”

Poached Eggs with Canadian Bacon on Toast

           
In every new relationship, one dish emerges that becomes synonymous with love, safety, and goodness. Silly me, I thought it would be my
braciole,
but no; it was Susan's miraculously cooked, splendidly perfect poached eggs. Soft, runny—but not too runny—they scream comfort and howl happiness. And today, years later, when I'm either feeling frisky or like I want to crawl under a blanket and suck my thumb, it's Susan's poached eggs that I crave. Forget the fancy poaching devices and tools that I used to sell at Dean & DeLuca: all you'll need is a wooden spoon, a small saucepan, and a timer. Note to self: the fresher the eggs, the less the whites will hold together, so if your friendly neighborhood urban chicken-farming hipster rushes over with a few newly laid ones for you, give them a few days before you make this.

Serves 2

           
2 not-so-fresh eggs

           
1 tablespoon distilled white vinegar

           
2 slices Canadian bacon

           
2 slices bread of your choice (white is best, raisin is not)

           
Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper

           
1. Carefully crack each egg into a small ramekin and set aside. In a small saucepan filled three-quarters of the way with water, add the white vinegar and bring it to a simmer over medium heat. While it's simmering, place the Canadian bacon slices in a medium, dry cast-iron pan over medium-low heat; cook on one side for 4 minutes and flip.

           
2. When the water comes to a rolling simmer, gingerly slide the eggs into the pan, and with the dowel end of a wooden spoon, flip the white over onto the yolk two or three times. Slap a cover onto the pan, remove it from the heat, and set your timer for exactly 3 minutes.

           
3. Meanwhile, cook the bacon on the other side for 2 minutes, and simultaneously toast your bread. When the bread is done, the bacon will be done. As soon as the timer goes off, and using a slotted spoon, carefully remove each egg to a ramekin.

           
4. Top each piece of toast with a slice of bacon, and top each with a poached egg. Serve with a bowl of coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper.

 

 

W
HAT I
K
NOW

By Diane Goodman

From
Eating Well

In Diane Goodman's aptly-titled short story collections–
The Genius of Hunger, The Plated Heart,
and
Party Girls
–her characters' lives revolve around food, nurturing, and desire. Her day job as a Miami-area caterer provides rich material–and sometimes it also leads her to make surprising friends.

I
met Edith two years ago when her daughter Ruthie hired me to cook her 30th birthday dinner. Ruthie had said, “Don't be offended if my mother doesn't seem appreciative. She's a little . . . gruff. And she doesn't like people cooking in her house.”
Now you tell me?

When I rang the doorbell, Edith called out, “Who's there?” It was 3:00 and Ruthie wouldn't arrive until 5:00 but I thought her mother would be expecting me. I said “the caterer?” as if I didn't know who I was.

I had imagined a big, intimidating woman, but what I saw was the reason I was there: Edith was ill. She was not old, maybe in her late 50s, but she was tiny and bent, thin and bird-boned. Her fingers on both hands were gnarled nearly into fists. She didn't invite me in.

“I hope you brought your own pans because you're not using mine,” she said. “And what are you making anyway?” I stood on the porch and told her the whole menu, including her own Braised Chicken; Ruthie had given me her mother's recipe.

“That's Ruth's favorite dish. I invented it. You don't know how to make that,” she snarled.

I had all the ingredients it required. I knew how to braise. But
I said, “I'm really sorry, Mrs. Kassenbaum. I know this is intrusive, but . . .”

“You don't know anything,” she said.

I knew one thing: I was in for a long night.

Edith stepped aside and then hobbled behind me as I made my way to her kitchen. Her breath was short, but I could hear her swearing under it. She sat down at her table, glowering while I unpacked the ingredients.

Edith said. “Are those leeks? Did you take the sand out?”

I had. Of course I had. I almost said as much.

“Don't you know anything? You have to rinse the sand out of leeks,” she said again, but this time in a quieter voice. I thought maybe her fury had exhausted her but when I turned to answer, she was crying. She was so hunched over her face was practically on her knees. I walked toward her and when she didn't react, I knelt down and put my hand on her back.