Delicious! (15 page)

“How many people?”

“Nine.” He looked down at Amy. “Do I have that right? What do you think we should we get?”

“The usual,” she said, making me long to tell her she would find nothing usual at Fontanari’s. I bit my tongue. “Some Brie, maybe, and some Swiss. Nothing too strong. A little salami—but not the kind with garlic.”

“We have no garlic-free salami,” I replied. As if such a thing even exists.

She glanced up at Mr. Complainer. “Boyd can’t stand garlic, you know that.”

Mr. Complainer looked pained.

“Bologna?” she suggested, pointing at the mortadella.

“We’ll take half a pound.” He gave me one of his nicest smiles, saying, “And maybe you could give Amy a taste of the fontina? That should be safe.”

I handed a slice of our blandest cheese across the counter, and the blonde nibbled at a corner. “Oh,” she purred, “that’s so good.”

I bet she was a cheerleader in high school.

“I told you that man was single,” Rosalie whispered fiercely in my ear. “You should have listened to me.” Her unspoken words—and now it’s too late—lingered in the air.

“Some prosciutto?” Mr. Complainer was unaware of the drama taking place behind the counter. “Would you let her taste it?”

I took down the San Daniele, sheared off a paper-thin slice, and handed it across the counter. Amy gave it a dubious sniff. “It smells funny,” she said. “What is it?”

“Italian ham,” said Mr. Complainer. “Taste it.”

She examined the meat as if it might be dangerous, carefully removed the strip of fat, and took the tiniest possible bite. “I prefer good old American ham,” she pronounced.

He looked mortified, but he obediently followed her directions; the guests at this party would not be disturbed by unfamiliar flavors. “We do have to get some mozzarella,” he said. “Betty loves it.”

“You sure?” Amy sounded doubtful.

He was.

“Do you want the cow’s milk mozzarella or the buffalo milk?” It was mean of me. I couldn’t help myself.

Amy reacted exactly as I’d hoped. “Buffalo milk? Are you serious? Cheese made from buffalo milk?”

Mr. Complainer looked down at her, and I thought he seemed slightly impatient. “Real mozzarella, the kind in that caprese salad you’re so fond of, is made from water-buffalo milk.”

She shuddered visibly. “
Water
buffalo? Guess I won’t be eating that again.”

Across the room, Sal raised his eyebrows; Mr. Complainer had gone down a notch in his estimation. Rosalie was even more distressed. When they’d gone, she let out a little wail. “Did you hear what she said about the prosciutto?”

“I told you he wasn’t interested in me.” I gave her my best told-you-so look, but I did think it was strange. What was a guy who took cooking classes in Italy doing with a woman like her? She wasn’t
that
pretty.

ON MONDAY I ARRIVED
at the mansion in a better mood than usual and scrambled up the stairs, ignoring the dark hallway, trying to ignore the stench. Was it possible it had gotten even worse? I fled to my cubbyhole, determined to get my work out of the way as quickly as I could. I had decided to look for more letters from Lulu.

My first caller had attempted caramelizing sugar for the first time, with disastrous results. “Caramel always hisses, bubbles, and seizes before it settles down,” I told her.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” she said irritably.

The second caller had tried to make a complicated rabbit-liver terrine into a vegetarian dish, and the third had sliced off the tip of her index finger on a mandoline. It went on like that, one time-consuming disaster after another, and it was hours before I could move on to recipe requests.

There were two for the Coffee Crunch Cake they used to make at Blum’s in San Francisco, a recipe so popular I kept it on my desktop. Someone else wanted a fresh coconut cake she remembered from the fifties, and that was easy too. I forwarded the request for a reproduction
of the 1965 Christmas cover to rights and permissions in the main office. But Julie Marr, in Rio Vista, California, had me stumped.

“My dad’s ninetieth birthday is coming up,” she wrote, “and he keeps talking about these great cookies he ate in the war. I wanted to surprise him with Anzac biscuits, but there are so many different recipes I don’t know which to trust. Help!”

Anzac biscuits?

Google offered some assistance, informing me that the name was an acronym for “Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,” but after that the online history grew cloudy. One source traced them back to the Scottish Highlands, another to the aborigines. I wondered if the library could help. I’d look up the biscuits, and then I’d look for Lulu.

As I climbed the stairs to the third floor, the stench grew steadily worse; this couldn’t be normal. I’d have to call someone over at the main office. It had gotten so bad that I ran up the last few steps to the fourth floor and sprinted toward the library, yearning for the cool apple scent. The room seemed to reach out and pull me in, and the soft chairs invited me to sit. As I moved deeper into the room, the quiet grew more profound. It was so peaceful that I could feel my heartbeat slow, as if I were breathing with the room, honoring its age.

The card catalogs, three huge old wooden files, stood near the fantastic desk. The first one wheezed as I pulled on the top handle, emitting a little puff of dust. Somewhere in the back of my mind was a dim memory of the card catalog at the Santa Barbara Public Library, the drawers filled with prim index cards of neatly typed Dewey decimal numbers. This was different; I looked down, startled, at a sea of colored ink. Flipping to “Anzac,” I pulled up the first card and found myself staring down at angular writing scrawled with a red pen. “The first recipe for Anzac biscuits appeared in the
War Chest Cookery Book
(Sydney, 1917). That recipe, however, is for an entirely different biscuit than the one we know today. The first recipe for what we now consider an Anzac biscuit was the ‘Anzac Crispie,’ in the 9th edition of
St. Andrew’s Cookery Book
(Dunedin, 1921).”

The card behind it had obviously been written by someone else. The black ballpoint writing was clear and rounded, each “t” neatly crossed, each dot centered just above the “i.” “Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance commemorating the battle of Gallipoli. Anzac biscuits contain rolled oats, flour, desiccated coconut, sugar, butter, golden syrup, baking soda, and boiling water.”

There was a third card, the elegant calligraphic script written in turquoise ink of such startling brightness that it seemed like a shout from the past. “Anzac biscuits are chameleons, coming in all shapes and sizes. There are no standard recipes, but during World War II, readers submitted dozens of variations. You’ll find them in the letter files for 1943. And the excellent Australian
Commonsense Cookery Book
is always reliable.”

What army of eccentric librarians had created these color-coded cards? I began to pull open drawers, looking for other colors and different handwriting, trying to determine how many there had been. But I found no green, no purple, no yellow. These strange cards came in only red, black, and blue. Who were these library ladies? When had they created this strange catalog?

The library shelves contained only books or magazines, so the recipes mentioned on the turquoise card must be among the letters in the secret room. I walked to the back of the library and slid the bookcase aside, half expecting to find the funny little doorway gone. But it was still there, and I squeezed through the narrow opening, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness before reaching for the light switch.

The letters were arranged chronologically by year; 1943 took up an entire shelf, which was so high up I had to stand on tiptoe to read the labels. There were hundreds of folders, but I could see nothing labeled either “Anzac” or “Biscuit.” Where were those reader recipes? I reached for the first folder on the shelf, which was strangely labeled “Aardvarks of America.” Aardvarks? Are there aardvarks in America? I opened the file and removed the first letter.

The next letter was also a response to the contest. This hopeful cook had submitted a recipe for a carrot roll with toasted oatmeal and cold mashed potatoes. The third submission was for sardine fritters … and so on. There were no aardvarks in the folder, just recipes for extremely peculiar wartime dishes. Perplexed, I put the folder back and reached for the next one.

This one was slimmer, but its name was as incomprehensible as the first. “Abracadabra” was typed neatly on its little plastic tab, and when I opened it I found that the letters were entries in another contest. The magazine had requested that readers submit their “magical substitutions” for ingredients that had become difficult to obtain. My favorite was from a woman suggesting twenty ways to serve sweet potatoes in place of pie.

Pulling down the next folder, and the next, I began trying to decipher the labels. “Big Cheese” contained letters to the editor in chief, and “Bitter” held nothing but complaints. Whoever had created these files had a wicked sense of humor, but she had organized them according to some mysterious system known only to herself. I felt she was daring me to figure it out.

I looked up at the shelves, studying the labels. The letters from the prewar years were sparse, taking up only a few slim shelves, and there were no files after 1972. But between 1942 and 1946 there were dozens of shelves, containing what must have been tens of thousands of letters.
I would never have time to read them all. I pulled down the “Aardvarks of America” file, riffling through the letters again, thinking that if I could figure out what aardvarks had to do with the contest, I might understand the system.

But what was an aardvark, anyway? I wasn’t sure. I went out to the giant dictionary and learned that aardvarks are prehistoric creatures that live on termites and ought to be extinct. “In African folklore,” the dictionary said, “the aardvark is admired because of its diligent quest for food.” The contest in the “Aardvarks” folder had also been characterized by a diligent quest for food; was there something there?

I went back to the card file and studied the Anzac cards. Was Gallipoli a clue? Then my eye caught the name of the Australian cookbook:
The Commonsense Cookery Book
. This seemed promising, and I went back to the secret room and flipped through the “C” folders. “Cackle.” “Char.” “Colossus.” “Comfort.” And there it was: “Commonsense.” I was so startled by the discovery that I dropped the file as I pulled it from the shelf, and it spilled its letters at my feet.

As I bent to scoop them up, my eye caught a sheaf of translucent papers in the middle of the pile, held together with a rusting paper clip. Turning the top one over, I saw that it was densely covered in a careful schoolgirl script. The Anzac biscuits went straight out of my head.

Hope can’t hurt. I turned the phrase over and over in my mind, wondering at what age optimism ends. Lulu’s mother was right: Her daughter was a master of magical thinking. And not just because she had convinced herself—against all odds—that her father was still alive. She’d also turned a famous stranger into a magical friend. I tried to picture James Beard’s enormous bulk, sitting at a desk, writing the letters. I so wished I could see what he had written back.