Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Read online

  “This is where you’re taking me?” I halted in the lobby, as we entered the hotel and I realized what restaurant was there. “I am so not adequately dressed for this place!”

  But he pushed me ahead and the beautiful young woman at the door, more expensively dressed than me, warmly said “good evening” and put me right into one of those chairs at one of those tables with the heavy silverware as if I were welcome. We ate pigeon and an ouef en cocotte and I got a slight chill—from the actual temperature, not the exalted level of cooking—the pigeon was unfortunately so rare that its juices hadn’t even begun to run—and when I asked if I could have my coat back from coat check, they brought over instead a wooden box of pashmina shawls in a dozen colors from which I could pick the one most matching my outfit. I never would have gone there on my own and at that time, with my $423.00 weekly paycheck, I never could have afforded it, but I am still, to this day, more impressed by the sandwiches.

  An affair is an exhausting proposition when you are in the restaurant business. The work hours are already rather long, and especially so in the beginning years if you are both the chef and the owner. To pull off an illicit affair within the hours of two a.m. and eight a.m. while living with your girlfriend is not an easy undertaking. At the affair end of things, you just cut to the chase. You are not spending your few hours together having long and deep meaningful conversations getting to know each other. You are not meeting each other’s friends and getting to understand the guy through the context of the company he keeps. You aren’t taking the time to discover if you even like each other. No. You are doing your thing in every corner and on every surface of that apartment and then eating sandwiches just before hailing that pre-dawn cab back downtown. But somehow, we continued, and our affair took on a little weight without, oddly, depth or dimension.

  In the summer we drank negronis. And as things progressed, haltingly, we drank them on a brief vacation in Italy, in the square at Campo di Fiori, at twilight, while my girlfriend stayed home in New York, pulling her bar shifts at Prune, returning to our empty apartment, and she and I prided ourselves on the independence we were able to celebrate in each other. We were not each other’s property, we delighted in agreeing. There was a great deal of darker hue going on there between us, however. And to be sure, real polyamory is a serious dedication practiced by total pros. We were pure amateur slop. Having an affair, no matter how enlightened and forward-thinking the feminist in you is, is still an act of hostility, usually retaliatory. And requires private real estate. I remember meeting a friend of Michele’s some years later, herself married, who said, with a puzzled look on her face, “But why would people who love each other hurt each other?” Possibly forty-five seconds of silence ensued before I erupted in the deepest belly laughter of my life, which lasted for four days.

  Suddenly, Michele came to me with green card issues. I was thoroughly unmoved. I couldn’t understand how he could have made it here for eighteen years without arranging his visa story properly. He showed me new statistics and articles from the New York Times describing how changed the immigration landscape had become and how difficult to navigate. I told him to muster five thousand dollars and pay someone in his lab to marry him, which he was adamantly opposed to. But unless you are a performance artist, nobody, not even an erstwhile lesbian enjoying her midnight liaison with an Italian, wants to get married for pragmatic reasons. And I was not feeling persuaded as yet by any of the other romantic reasons either. I knew every inhale and exhale of my girlfriend, I knew the long pause every morning between sock and shoe on her left foot and sock and shoe on her right foot, as she dressed and contemplated the day to come. I knew her fears and quiet joys and she knew mine.

  The Italian and I were still completely unknown to each other. But Michele had been kind to me and he desperately needed a kindness, as he explained to me that all eighteen years of his research on septic shock would now go down the drain as he returned to Italy. My girlfriend had frequently accused me of being unkind, and so in a perfect triangulation, I agreed to marry Michele. As if to prove my kindness. By the time Michele and I were getting married, I had known him for almost three years, but at the City Hall ceremony our friends were meeting one another for the first time, and we were meeting many of each other’s friends for the first time, and for years when acquaintances heard I’d gotten married, they’d asked, assuming it was the bartender, if we’d gone to Massachusetts where lesbian marriage is legal!

  The negroni is a short and perfect aperitivo made of equal parts bitter Campari, sweet vermouth, and floral gin over a couple of ice cubes with a small slice of fresh orange dropped in it to release its oils. That perfectly Italian presence, which sparks your appetite and brightens your mood, holds in balance the sweet and the bitter, which I can’t help but think of metaphorically, as the relationship with the non-threatening Italian continued even after the girlfriend, whom I had come to think of as the great love of my life, finally left, giving me and our many shared years the double bird, that very same double bird I had taught her to use as a parking and driving tactic when she first arrived in New York. She and I have never spoken since.

  IT WASN’T CLEAR TO ME that I was really getting married when I got married. I am not sure what I was thinking—not because my thoughts were vague but rather because my thoughts were contradictory. I approached the wedding—and talked it up—like a piece of fun and spontaneous downtown performance art. Yet I rolled the idea of it around in my mind much more than I should have, and with greater investment than someone as ostensibly nonchalant as I was. Nonetheless, in the interest of time, I put my thoughts aside and I treated it as one of those catered weddings of which I’d done a hundred. And I invited my sister by saying, “On the outside chance that this turns out to be my actual wedding, I’d like you to be there.” I didn’t even mention it to my father, and obviously, not my mother either. To my best friend, an adamant opponent of marriage on political grounds, but a devotee of downtown performance art, I said, brightly, “Bring a camera and take lots of pictures. We’re going to need plenty of documentation later!”

  In just a few days, I planned a small reception, hired town cars with chauffeurs, stumbled upon a perfect dress at a vintage store, and pulled the whole wedding together for about a thousand dollars. It remains one of the best weddings I have ever been to.

  When the day arrived, in the afternoon, all the girls who work at Prune came over and crammed into my apartment for a twenty-minute glass of Billecarte Salmon rosé champagne and to admire me in my dress and hair and makeup. I had to get to City Hall before the last “ceremony” at three-thirty and the girls had to get back to work, so we didn’t have much time to drag anything down. They looked exactly like themselves in their aprons and chef jackets, checked pants and clogs, and it felt so much better than if they had been awkwardly stuffed into matching colored bridesmaid’s dresses with their flabby pale underarms and “we in the restaurant business eat too many cake and steak scraps to be wearing this dress” kind of tummies. I was working a French twist and a stiletto heel a mile high. I really love an urban wedding. Urban weddings are classy.

  And so I arrived with my sister and my best friend, Heidi, in her four-button, narrow-leg Helmut Lang suit at City Hall, and we got in line to go through the metal detectors. If you want to feel like the most glamorous woman in the world on your wedding day, just be the only one dressed in a good heel and a vintage couture dress at City Hall at two-thirty in the afternoon, surrounded by people going about their municipal business of renewing their driver’s license or appearing for jury duty or verifying their city marshal bond.

  There were a few people ahead of us at the chapel, which was just a tight, ugly room upstairs with a dirty carpet, and cigarette burns on a few of the fiberglass chairs where we sat to await our turn. The small group that we had assembled were all impeccably dressed, with the Italians really understanding how to work a good suit and a good cashmere sweater and an expensive colorful silk tie. Mich
ele was so nervous he had cut himself shaving and so appeared at his own wedding with a Band-Aid on his neck under his ear. In truth, Michele was not marrying ironically. For him this was not a piece of performance art whatsoever. He claimed to love me and to want this marriage. Inasmuch as he was able to know himself at the time and to have insights about his own desires, I trust he was getting married for love. I am sure there are many women who would find it wonderful to hear the man they’ve just started sleeping with start to make suggestions about living together, and who would thrill to receive a Tiffanny box after a few brief months into their affair. But I was annoyed by it and felt erased and unseen by it. “Jesus, slow down,” I warned. “You don’t even fucking know me.” I had flatly refused to even introduce him to people we ran into over the first few years, and I never once entertained his preposterous idea of living together. But he wouldn’t for an instant even entertain the idea of marrying someone in his lab just for a green card. He showed up to City Hall at three o’clock in the afternoon to really marry me. At the ceremony, my lesbian friends wore suits, too, which covered up their tattoos, mostly. I’ve never seen a more disparate group of people in a room for the same occasion before in my life—an Italian Upper East Side doctor eleven years my senior and all of his cohort, and a downtown, pierced and tattooed, recently defrocked lesbian dishwasher and her motly crew—all convened in chapel C on the eighth floor.

  And yet our candid black and whites in our wedding album look so genuinely happy and festive and relaxed because we were, in fact, just that—happy and festive and relaxed, unburdened by any sense of a “real” or a “deep and somber purpose.”

  When we emerged, married, we exited from the building under the huge vaulted arches of the southside doors and there, on the cobblestone, with pigeons all around us and my sister throwing rice—all of it captured in black-and-white photos—it looked an awful lot like an actual, consummated marriage.

  I had arranged for a small fleet of black Lincoln Town Cars to wait for us outside City Hall and take us across town to a tiny and excellent wine bar in the West Village. Heidi held the car doors open and helped guests into the cars, shut the doors carefully, and then patted each car on the roof when it was ready to take off, and then the next one would pull up in the queue and she would install a few more of our party, and tap the roof of the car signaling the driver, until she had us all successfully whisked away like visiting foreign dignitaries in sleek black Town Cars that crept through the tiny streets of the deep West Village and spit us out on Carmine at Bedford. We spent the waning afternoon hours having chilled Lambrusco and soppressatta tramezzini, all twenty of us packed into that tiny space where Jason, the owner, let us bring in, instead of wedding cake, a large platter of burratta—the soft, custardy fresh cow’s milk cheese from Puglia, which Michele had introduced me to—and thirty silver soupspoons, and for our wedding cake moment, amply photographed, we exchanged big killer spoonfuls of soft, creamy burratta.

  Starting with our very first morning of a seven-day honeymoon in Paris, Michele changed his hard-driving campaign of “get-the-girl” to “get-away-from-the-girl.” I’ve never seen anyone so abruptly debilitated by the prospect of his own marriage—and the emotional intimacy of it—as he became. We found the neighborhood where we’d arranged to stay, and as we were rolling our luggage along the cobblestones to the little apartment we’d rented, he was half a block ahead of me, where he stayed the rest of the trip. While I strolled the boulevards, looking in all the shop windows, gawking at the precision of the pastries and the gelatines and even the string to tie the little boxes, Michele bolted ahead, looking for a signal on his cell phone, leaving a perpetual half block between us the full seven days of our “honeymoon.”

  At our meals he overate so nervously and so terribly that each night after dinner, back in our apartment, he moaned on the couch with severe indigestion and I pretended to read in the empty bed, wondering what was exactly going on. I ended up eating our last dinner in Paris alone, after a day neither of us will ever forget, roaming around Père Lachaise cemetery together but apart, where I only sometimes caught a glimpse of his back as he scuttled along a path in urgent search of a particular mausoleum. For the INS wedding album we knew we had to assemble, we stood with our heads leaned in together and held the camera at arm’s length, catching a shot of us in front of the Centre Pompidou, the Galleries Lafayette, and en fin, in front of la Tour Eiffel. As we boarded the plane home, Michele walked down the aisle holding his three newspapers in three different languages, rather conspicuously I felt, and we flew that long transatlantic flight as we would a dozen times hence—almost without speaking. For someone who had almost cruelly emphasized the green card nature of the wedding, even I was curious about how devastated I felt.

  13

  SO I CAME TO POSSESS, OF ALL THINGS, A HUSBAND. THIS DIDN’T make sense for the longest time, to anyone, myself included, but that was also before I had met his Italian mother. Eighty-year-old Alda Fuortes de Nitto cooks eggplant that satisfies like meat, grows her own olives, peels apricots from her own trees, and sun dries tomatoes to make her own tomato paste. I adore her and our summer visits to her home in Puglia, at the tip of the Italian boot heel.

  She drives like a bank robber and calms my babies as only a mother of six can. Every exhale is accompanied by staccato grunts that make it sound as if she is perpetually enjoying a private joke, and hip surgery has not stopped her from cooking delicious meals for the entire family.

  Her food is so simple and prepared with such dispatch that it is almost unnecessary to speak of recipes, and wrangling one from her is more of a poetic than a didactic encounter.

  How many potatoes? “To the eye,” she says. How long should I cook the onions? “Until you put a dent in them,” is her answer. What is the melted butter for? “Per la faccia,” she says, for the face.

  The first meal of Alda’s I recall was a lunch of simply vegetables, well boiled. The table was set with a cloth, a water and a wine glass, five pieces of good silver per setting. And a cruet of her own golden, buttery olive oil in the center—all this for a spare lunch of zucchini, green beans, and chicory. Left out on her Salentino pottery, covered with netting to keep the flies away until we arrived after a long, intensely hot eight-hour motorcycle ride from Rome. We sat in the cool, dark dining room—eating the most delicious, unapologetic, undressed meal of a lifetime—the harsh glare of the white-hot afternoon shuttered out.

  Alda cooks mostly vegetarian in the summer as the meat is of notoriously poor quality in the south. She uses only the limited variety of ingredients that are available, but they are like none you could get here, no matter where you shop.

  Many are her own. Pine nuts in the shell that fall out of the tree in the courtyard of her youngest son’s summer house—so piney they taste almost mentholated; her own oranges, their juice squeezed over ice crushed in a dish towel with a mallet for a midday snack for the kids; figs that are juicy and cool when picked at ten a.m., warm and jammy at four p.m. Burratta and buffalo mozzarella and giuncata—the fresh cow’s milk cheese that sits in giuncata (rush) baskets that impart its flavor and its name—were brought to the house by the local woman who makes them—still warm!—the first time I tried them.

  The eggs yolks are as orange as persimmons—making it clear why the Italian word for egg yolk is rosso di uovo, “the red of the egg.” The zucchini is less porous, less watery, and has smaller seeds than ours. The beans are darker, chewier, and more slender and taste like pure chlorophyll. The eggplant, from vines surrounded by rocky terrain of wild oregano, fennel gone to seed, and sweet garlic, is more flavorful than the eggplant from your local organic farm, grown among clover and corn.

  “Poor people’s meat,” she says of the eggplant. The way she makes it though, using more than a dozen eggs, two whole balls of buffalo mozzarella, and easily a liter of extra virgin olive oil makes me wonder what kind of poor people we are talking about. The kind who own their own olive orchards and in
dustrious chickens, I guess.

  To start, she slices the eggplant in her hands without using a cutting board or a table. She holds the vegetable in one hand and slices toward her body with the other—using her one dull knife that she’s been using forever, never sharpening it. She salts and drains the eggplant, but then never rinses it. She first flours and bread crumbs each eggplant slice and then dips it in egg before sliding it into hot olive oil to fry. The chef in me longs to sharpen her knife, buy her a new one, use a cutting board to get uniform, perfect eggplant slices and to dip the slices in egg before the bread crumbs. But the daughter-in-law in me follows Alda, who has been making it this way for fifty or more years.

  Her pizza rustica comes from a recipe of her own mother-in-law: a thin, enclosed pie of mozzarella with a puff-pastry-like dough. It’s equally simple and uses that very Italian way of measuring for a dough—you go by the quantity of eggs you are starting with to determine how much flour is used. She only ever measures anything for my benefit, so I can write it down and make a recipe, but I’m glad every time to see her dump the car keys and daily mail that sit in the pan of the old balance scale and weigh out flour—from her own wheat!—throwing little brass weights into the other pan.

  When she pulls her old sawed-off broom handle out of the kitchen drawer to roll out the dough I sigh happily to be so far away, literally and conceptually, from my stainless steel restaurant kitchen where the freezers all freeze to precise Deparment of Health standards, and there’s a knife for turning, for boning, for filleting; there’s a wet stone, and a dry stone and the need for improvisation arises rarely. I sip my negroni and contemplate my new, unexpected circumstances.

  She and I do not speak the same language, and because of that our relationship really thrives. Even my twenty words of Italian—all of them in the present tense—don’t work with her because she speaks formally and sometimes in a Leccese dialect.