How to Cook a Moose (11 page)

Serve the haddock on top of the rice with the chard alongside. Serves 4.

The next Thursday at the soup kitchen, Monica asked me to make an applesauce to go alongside some pork chops for a later dinner. I
filled a small plastic crate with a variety of red and green apples from the big fridge in the pantry, washed them in the small sink, took off the little stickers, then set up a big cutting board with a wet cloth underneath to keep it from slipping. All through my shift, whenever I had a spare several minutes, I stood at my little workstation, happily and steadily reducing that big box of apples to a smallish dice. I prefer to leave the peels on for texture; that's how my mother always made applesauce. Cutting them small makes the applesauce smooth and palatable. I also like dicing; I'll take any excuse to do it.

By the time my shift was almost over, I had filled a deep steam-table pan. I added a big handful of brown sugar, three bay leaves, some minced fresh rosemary from the plant in Monica's office, a good pouring of cinnamon, and another of salt. After I mixed it all together, I poured two cups of water over the pan, covered it in parchment paper and then foil, and stuck it into a moderately hot oven to bake for the next hour or two.

I left not knowing how it turned out; it didn't matter. I was so soothed and refreshed by chopping all those apples over the past couple of hours, I came home energized, smiling, almost euphoric.

The next week, I walked into the soup kitchen to find that I was the only volunteer that day for lunch, and Monica was on vacation. Her substitute, Jordan, ran the teen center. He had two premade chowders heating in the oven when I arrived—one corn, the other, fish.

“How do you feel about making biscuits?” he asked when I came in.

“I feel fine about making biscuits,” I said, with private misgivings, which I kept to myself. I've known I was gluten-intolerant since I did an elimination diet in 2002 to determine why I felt so terrible all the time: depressed, bloated, foggy-brained, crabby. Since then, I've been rigorously gluten-free and no longer depressed or bloated. It's been worth it. But the machismo of the professional kitchen, even a merciful, charitable soup kitchen, does not allow for fear of wheat.
You have to cook what needs cooking. I resolved to keep my mouth closed while I made them, try not to breathe the flour dust, scrub my hands and sponge off my clothing afterwards, and hope for the best.

Jordan handed me a handwritten recipe he'd copied off the Internet for a large-enough quantity of biscuits for the day's lunch: 8 cups flour, 1/4 cup baking powder, 2 cups oil, 4 cups milk, but only 1 teaspoon salt. He went back into the office, where he was working on the teen center's weekly menu.

The oven was already hot, so I got out a big bowl and measured the flour from the huge sack in the pantry and carried the bowl quickly back out to the kitchen, leaving behind the inevitable puffs of flour dust in the air, trying not to breathe any of it. I rolled up my sleeves and averted my face as I stirred in the baking powder and a good shaking of salt, a lot more than the recipe called for, because one teaspoon of salt was not nearly enough for all that flour.

I considered the two cups of oil. If I used oil, I could stir the batter with a spoon and drop the biscuits onto the cookie sheet with a smaller spoon. I wouldn't have to touch the dough. I could get it done and into the oven quickly, and be safe from flour contamination.

But they wouldn't be biscuits. They might taste all right, but biscuits involve creating an alchemy of starch and fat that you can only get by rubbing them together by hand until they're blended.

The soup kitchen had no butter, only margarine. I took out a two-cup block, unwrapped it, and cut it into the flour mixture. Then, using my bare, clean hands, I rubbed and rubbed it into the flour. It took a while. Toxic, dangerous flour covered my arms up to my elbows, hung in puffs in the air in front of my face. I didn't stop until the magical alchemy happened and I had grainy, fatty, yellowed flour, ready for the milk.

I made an indentation in the flour, splashed in some milk, worked it into a paste, added more milk. I didn't measure the liquid—another
secret of real biscuits. The flour will tell you how much it wants. When I had a ball of clean, firm dough, not too sticky, not too dry, I got out a big board and set it by the bowl. I filled the measuring cup with more flour, not even bothering to be prissy about it anymore; I was too intent on my project to care by now.

I floured the board and turned the dough ball out onto it.

“Jordan,” I called, “is there a rolling pin in this kitchen?”

He emerged from the office. “You can just drop it onto the sheet with a spoon,” he said. “They come out fine.”

“I have to make them my grandmother's way,” I said with a self-mocking laugh.

Did my grandmother even make biscuits? I have no idea. I was referring to some mythical grandmother, an old-fashioned Midwestern farm wife who got up at dawn to feed her hardworking family breakfast with real American biscuits.

I patted and pushed the dough with the flats of my palms until I had an inch-thick layer, which worked fine in the absence of a rolling pin. Then I took a drinking glass and cut out the biscuits one by one. I took the leftover scraps, patted them into another layer, and cut them out. I did a third round, and then they were done.

I arranged them on the sled-sized cookie sheet and baked them. They came out puffy, golden, moist, and light. I wished I could eat one; I was sure they were delicious.

Later, during lunch service, a tall, elegant black woman with a strong Southern accent approached the window.

“I'll take another biscuit,” she said. “Girl, you made these?”

We smiled at each other.

“Yeah,” I said.

“These are real biscuits!” she said. “Like my grandmother used to make. I haven't tasted these since she was alive!”

I gave her two more, and afterwards, I was hardly able to contain my elation as I climbed the hill up the Prom toward home.

That night, at home in my own new kitchen, inspired by the idea of cooking with soul, I roasted a chicken. I stuck a cut-up lemon and a handful of pitted olives into its cavity, squeezed lemon juice over its peppered skin, and put two big pats of butter on top. I surrounded it with whole peeled shallots and halved peeled carrots and parsnips set into a coating of olive oil, covered the pan with foil, roasted it at 500 degrees for twenty minutes, then uncovered it and turned the oven down to 350.

I made a broth with the pile of parsnip and carrot peelings and tops, the shallot peels and ends, the gizzards from inside the chicken, pepper, and salt, simmering it until it was sweet and earthy. I strained the broth and whisked polenta into it and let it cook until it thickened, then stirred in a lot of minced fresh basil and Parmesan cheese.

When the chicken was moist inside and crackling outside, and the root vegetables were soft and had begun to caramelize in the chicken fat, and the polenta was cheesy and savory and redolent of basil, Brendan and I ate.

Afterwards, I poured the chicken fat that was left in the pan into a coffee cup and put it in the fridge. The next night, I fried wedges of red cabbage in it until they were soft and browned and velvety, just like my mythical grandmother would have done.

One of the last Thursday mornings I worked at Florence House, I walked into the kitchen to find Monica almost in tears, in a state of awe. There were ten or eleven boxes on the floor by the steam table full of the most beautiful produce I'd ever seen—lettuce, radishes, kale, chard, spring onions, garlic, broccoli, cauliflower, garlic scapes—glistening
and alive and gorgeous and colorful. Florence House had just been awarded a grant worth $100 a week, which paid for a full membership in a farm-collective share. The collective is local, in Portland and right outside the city. And they train immigrant women to farm.

For several minutes, Monica and my fellow volunteer, Alison, and I stood there beaming at each other and at the vegetables before we got down to work. First, we had to use up all the vegetables that were already there to make room for this incredible new stuff. I augmented a steam-table pan of leftover fried rice with a medley of sautéed chopped carrots, onions, celery, and peppers, stuck it into the oven to heat, then made two big stir-fries, one vegetarian, one with many pounds of donated Whole Foods organic chicken.

When it was noon and time for lunch, Alison held down the serving while I did dishes and prepped radish greens. (For some reason, maybe because I'd never thought about it, I hadn't known that radish greens were edible. I tasted some as I worked. They're mildly peppery, a little like arugula.)

Meanwhile, Monica was breaking down the shipment of farm-collective vegetables. Then, using a fish tub full of vegetable scraps, she made a stock for a spring onion and potato soup. It always struck me, cooking with her, that she seemed never to waste anything: not food, not energy, not words. With Yankee (as I was coming to identify it) thrift and know-how, she used every scrap of donated goods and leftovers, moved around the kitchen purposefully and economically, and spoke thoughtfully, concisely. I found her quality of direction so easy to be around; I trusted her on an animal level.

I felt this way a lot with people I was meeting here—our contractors and neighbors, waiters and checkout people, the native Maine writers we'd become friends with. Whether it was cooking, writing, or building houses, there was a common thread of self-taught, organic integrity, a refreshing lack of didactic cant and cerebral showiness, a
seat-of-the-pants ability to do what needed doing in the most direct, practical, commonsensical way that wasted the least amount of resources, whether it was installing ceiling tiles, making vegetable stock, or writing a sentence.

Since moving here, I'd found something else, something I'd always lacked: a strong sense of community, from which everything else flowed. It felt good to be in this kitchen with Monica and the other volunteers, to feed these homeless women nourishing, well-cooked food, and to work physically hard. I spent my days in a chair at a desk. At the end of a three-hour shift of nonstop dishwashing, pot-scrubbing, chopping, serving, and cleaning, I felt tired and relaxed, as if my brain had had a real break. Volunteering is profoundly and essentially different from working for pay.

I looked into the faces of the women as they took their plates of food, or as they returned their used plates to the dish window. I didn't know exactly what it was I was receiving from them. They always thanked me. I always thanked them back.

One of them, a tall, thin, quiet blonde woman I guessed was maybe a few years older than I was, stood near me as I wiped the tables after lunch.

“I'm moving today,” she said, unable to contain her excitement. “I got an apartment. I've been homeless for seven months. I'm getting my own place. The landlord's an angel; she didn't ask for a deposit, a credit check, nothing. I can use the yard to plant a garden, she said.”

I stopped wiping to listen to her. “That's fantastic,” I said. “I'm so happy for you.”

She and I exchanged a brief look, smiling, but there was something else, too: We were two middle-aged, white American women, on either side of an economic divide.

She said with measured insistence but no self-pity, “I owned my own house for years, you know? I raised eleven kids in it, I lived there
forever. Then my husband—not their father, my second husband . . . because of him, I lost the house. He ruined me. I couldn't believe it. Then he took off. Suddenly I was alone and homeless.”

“Oh my God,” I said. I didn't ask why one of her eleven kids hadn't taken her in; it was none of my business.

“It can happen to anyone,” she said. “I didn't understand that before, and now I do. You, me, anyone.”

We exchanged another look. I recognized a warning in her expression, as if she saw something about me that needed addressing. Maybe she glimpsed the wayward, hungry, lonely street dog I had been for so many years and could very well be again someday. She had once had a home with people she loved, as I had now, and she had lost it all, as I could. Nothing was ever certain; I got her message loud and clear, right in my gut.