Season to Taste (2 page)

But I knew why I was there: to learn. I learned to listen to the sound of meat in the pan, to smell the endnote of the nuts toasting in the oven. I learned to judge by color and texture, to leave the safety of published recipes and instead operate with the senses alone. Maws could be tough, but he never failed to inspire. With his pleasure, the kitchen blazed—the fresh rolls perfuming the hallway with fresh butter and yeast. I tackled herbs and garlic, lamb’s tongue and rich logs of
pâté de campagne
. I peeled beets and shallots, chopped onions and churned bundles of arugula around the barrel-sized spinner again and again until they were clean and dry. I was learning the basics one by one. That was the only way to become a chef.

Before service began one night, I stood at the sink in the kitchen while the rest of the staff prepped at their stations for dinner. I had just finished filling the bottles of oil and replenishing the chef’s supply of butter when Maws arrived to take his spot. He looked over at me and smiled. His grin was broad, almost manic when paired with his chef’s knife in hand. The first orders of the night were just about to come, and he stood poised. Ready to cook. Excited to feed a crowd. “This is what I live for, Molly,” he said. “This is life.”

During those long sweaty nights, the act of eating had never been so satisfying. My appetite roared in the face of so much physical work. It was a hunger I never experienced in the deskbound days of school. I plunged my fork into the massive frittatas, bright with green basil and red peppers in the sunny crust of eggs, which Maws cooked for the meals shared by staff before the work night began. During service, the sous-chefs would hand me samples of butterscotch ice cream or sour milk panna cotta, whispers of sugar and cold that I ate between the clouds of steam released from the sanitizer with every load of dishes. I took small bites of crisp-roasted quail and creamy Macomber turnip puree, of a buttery rabbit sausage and the marrow scraped gently from inside the bone. I inspected the sear of hanger steak’s flesh, exhaled the minted song of a sorbet.

Once, a young female sous-chef who wore her wispy blond hair tied back with a bandanna turned to me with a piece of toast. I felt tired and frustrated in front of the sanitizer after spraying myself in the face with the dishwater for the eighth time that night. “Molly,” she called with a smile. “Would you like a snack?” She handed me a thick hunk of bread that had been slathered with foie gras: salmon pink and flecked with fleur de sel, a rainbow of ground pepper. I took a bite. It was smooth and fat against the flaky crust. It tasted of the earth, an intoxicating flavor that screamed decadence and delight, one that immediately took me back to a happy afternoon in Paris, when I first tried the goose liver pâté with my college roommate Becca.

One afternoon Maws arrived at the restaurant for prep wearing denim shorts and a ratty blue T-shirt. He looked alien without the usual baggy whites. Together, hunched over the table in the back, he taught me to clean the case of Georgian shrimp that had just arrived. We peeled the shells off their slick gray bodies, slit open their backs, and removed their delicate digestive tracts. We kept them in a metal bowl resting in a box of ice, which soon smelled of seawater and fish.

“Seafood,” he told me, “is ideally kept at a temperature just a bit over freezing. The refrigerator is still a little too warm. Even those few degrees affect the taste.” I hung on to his words. I nodded.

He worked deftly, his fingers moving far quicker than I could coax mine.

“Do you read about food?” he asked me after a moment’s silence.

“Yes. Of course.”

He had never asked me a personal question before. I was surprised.

“What?”

For a moment every single name vanished from my mind. I tried to picture my bookcase. I began to rattle off a list of journalists, writers of essays and warm coffee-table books.

Maws looked at me. His raised his brow.

“Get your head out of the clouds, Molly,” he said. “Read about
real
food. Leave the romance for later.”

I bought myself a copy of Harold McGee’s
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
the next morning before I drove to work, ready to read about the chemistry of sauces, the evolution of bread, and the effects of temperature change while cooking fresh meat.

“That’s more like it,” Maws said with a pat on the shoulder as I reported my purchase back, heaving a stack of plates to the sink.

My nights in the kitchen flew by. For nine weeks, the unending parade of filthy pots and pans was sustained by quiet lessons with the chef and a sincere hope for the future. I breathed in the potent scents of sorrel and garlic, mandarin and curry, tongue and jowl and thigh. I closed my eyes. I concentrated.

I arrived home in the early hours of the morning reeking of chicken stock and duck fat, my clothes stained with grease and crusted in melted chocolate. My body always hurt. It was an arthritic pain—especially my hands, from holding and washing so many heavy dishes, and my back, from lugging large vats of stock from the kitchen to the fridge and back again.

I loved it.

I had entered into a world that challenged me, that frustrated and delighted me, one where I could grow. I felt, for the first time, like I could see my future, like I
knew
.

WHEN I WAS SMALL,
my mother baked strawberry-rhubarb pies. She used a recipe that once belonged to her own mother, handwritten on an index card stained with spice and time. I would sit on the kitchen counter and watch.

She would move quickly through the kitchen, gathering bowls and ingredients. A thin woman with her straight blond hair cut short, she chopped rhubarb, sliced strawberries, and rolled the flour-dusted dough with harried precision. I usually disliked my mother’s speed, like when she took me to the mall and I had to bob and weave through the crowds in order not to be left behind. But I didn’t mind it in the kitchen. Perched at the counter I wasn’t underfoot. And I loved the cold, smooth feel of dough. I loved the salt-scented undertones of butter.

Stalks of rhubarb were handpicked on summer afternoons from our haphazard suburban garden out back. They were light pink and speckled in green and lay waiting on the kitchen counter like a stack of alien antennae. Even when chopped and tossed in a bowl with strawberries and sugar, the filling didn’t lose the harsh sour tang, which puckered my mouth when I plucked little mouthfuls and ate it raw.

I would watch my mother load bright scoops into a dough-laden pan, sealing the top crust to the bottom with a quick pinch of the fingers around the edge. I kept my eyes on the extra scraps of dough, making sure my mother kept a little pile off to the side. She always did. It was the most important part.

“Baby pies,” my mom would say.

“Baby pies,” I would repeat.

The fondest memories my mother had of her own family involved cooking. My grandfather Walter was happiest in the kitchen. He made
frikadeller,
a traditional meatball dish from his native Denmark. He made thick rice porridge and rich curries, quick pickles and magnificent roast beefs. Around Christmastime, he let my mother roll and bake the long rectangles of shortbread dough that they had brushed in egg whites and sprinkled with almonds.

My grandmother Marian baked loaves of bread, which transformed the house with their yeasty aroma when my mother and her sister, Ellen, walked home from school. From a recipe in her well-worn copy of the
Joy of Cooking,
she made tapioca puddings—“fish eyes in glue,” she would say—and gingerbread, warm hunks of which were eaten with a scoop of fresh whipped cream. And there were the pies: sweet-scented strawberry-rhubarb in summer, cinnamon-spiked custard in winter.

Marian wasn’t a warm woman. She lived behind what my mother felt was a thick veil of gauze. She was unable to express the emotions that her children needed, especially after Walter died, when my mother was a teenager. But no matter what kind of pie she baked, my grandmother never failed to gather the extra scraps of dough. She would throw them into small glass custard cups, hugging thick lumps of butter, cinnamon, and sugar.

“Baby pies,” she would say to Ellen and my mother, who sat on the counter watching.

When the tiny pies emerged from the oven, bubbling and bronze, the girls would carefully inspect each one, deciding which was the biggest, jockeying for the best spot to put fork to flaky crust first. In their home in Westfield, New Jersey, my mother often felt abandoned and alone. But in those kitchen counter moments, filled with the scent of caramel and spice, she felt like she was noticed, even loved. She felt warm.

It was hard for me to imagine my grandmother baking pies. It was hard to imagine her as anything but old and a little bit scary. Marian was in the final, debilitating stages of Alzheimer’s by the time I reached elementary school. She lived far away in a nursing home in Hawaii, close to Ellen and her family on the island of Oahu. I visited her there one summer as a shy, frizzy-haired third grader. I walked in to her room with my two cousins, my little brother, Ben, and my mother.

My grandmother was balanced, birdlike, on her hospital bed. She looked small and confused. I watched the speckled light hitting the floor, listened to the whispering footsteps in the hall and the chatter of nurses coming in and out of the room. It was vacation; my skin was slick with sunscreen. I had recently discovered the joys of coconut milk, the terror of jellyfish, and flowers so lusciously scented it was almost too much to wear them in a lei around my neck. I couldn’t really understand why we were there in a room that smelled of baby powder and lemon juice, salt and old age.

“Karen?” my grandmother said in a soft voice. She was staring straight at me. Suddenly, I was terrified.

“No, Grandma . . .” I said. “I’m Molly.”

There was a pause.

My mother cleared her throat. “Hi, Mom,” she said. “I’m Karen. I’m your daughter.”

My grandmother said nothing. She looked lost.

I had been warned that this would be a tough visit. “Alzheimer’s is a disease that erases memory,” my father had told me before we left. “It has erased almost everything for your grandmother, except for the distant past. It’s almost impossible for her to understand today.”

It was hard to imagine. The present was everything: the way my new plastic sandals clipped on the tiled floor, the way the ocean glowed blue outside, the way my mother smelled faintly of Tiffany’s
Eau de Parfum
. How could my grandmother think I was her daughter? I was Molly; my mom was Karen. And this strange, fragile woman on the bed? I only knew that her name was Marian, and visiting her in this home near the ocean made my lips taste vaguely of salt.

But the delicate cursive writing on the recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie belonged to her, my mother insisted. “She invented the baby pie,” she said.

The custard cups my mother used for her own tiny pies were small and made of white-ribbed porcelain. She too filled them with small, misshapen rolls of dough, topped with plops of butter. They came out of the oven lumpy and bubbling, the dough bronzed in some spots and blackened in others, all piping the unmistakable scent of baked sugar. Just like our mother and her sister had, my brother and I would examine each, trying to decide which was the biggest and the best. The strawberry-rhubarb pies—sweet with a hint of sour, oozing pink inside a golden crust—were for everyone. The baby pies, however, were just for us.

On these days, the whole kitchen filled with the aroma of fruit and butter, pulling my father into the kitchen. The yelling matches between my parents that drove me to my room—and my brother to howl in response—seemed to melt away in those moments over the kitchen counter. Even Ben, whose diet consisted mainly of vanilla yogurt, loved the sound of his fork cracking crust.

YEARS LATER,
when I was twenty, I spent three months in Katima Mulilo, a small town on the very northern edge of Namibia. An unlikely village carved from the Kalahari Desert, Katima Mulilo sat in a swirling mass of dust and heat hours away from the closest city in the country, an endpoint to the Caprivi Strip, the section of land jutting straight into the center of Africa. Dull brown sand covered every inch of the ground; gnarled shrubs emerged from the earth; small block houses interspersed with reed huts and charred communal fire-pits clustered along grainy roads. The world smelled of sweat and smoke. Even the sky felt brown.

I had come to Namibia with a small group of college students as part of a volunteer teaching organization. After a quick orientation, we had each been sent to our individual posts. I arrived in Katima Mulilo with three others to teach English and AIDS awareness in the small, impoverished community. I spent my days in the classroom and my evenings attempting to connect with my “host mother” Mbula, a schoolteacher only a few years older than me. I shared her government-subsidized home with her and her husband, Bonnie, and their small daughter, Mary.

Mbula, who had luminous black skin and a wardrobe of bright green and yellow wraparound skirts, worried that I would never find a husband unless I could cook, clean, and sew like a true Namibian woman. “I have a boyfriend,” I said in protest. It was true: his name was Alex. I had first noticed him—his hair, actually, which was a carrot red—in my high school English class. We were soon inseparable, a quiet relationship of skateboards and football games, pizza dinners and my first nights not spent alone in bed. We broke up for our freshman year of college, when I went south to Providence and he north to Burlington, Vermont, but were back together then, long distance only improving the butterscotch scent of his skin. “I love him,” I told Mbula.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“Home.”

She shook her head.

“You need to learn to cook.” She gestured toward the kitchen, her throne. There, she lorded over pots and pans, providing for her family every meal of the day.

That summer she taught me to wield a needle and thread, and she laughed at the inept way I handled the bar of soap as I washed my clothes in their laundry bucket. She showed me how to make
n’shima,
or the gruel-like maize meal that we boiled in large stock-bottom pots and then rolled into potato-shaped patties using a special wooden spoon, which we ate for every lunch and dinner along with fried greens and the occasional gristle of meat. The scent of her kitchen was jarring—the corn oil and mutton grease, the goat and kale, the unfamiliar porridge aromas of maize.