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

  It’s hard to cook for kids, and when something doesn’t appeal to them, instead of saying a polite no thank you, they instead break into a giant yuk face and shriek “eewww” right in front of you, as if you had no feelings at all. There were moments that summer when I felt more distressed by a nine-year-old’s disgust with a fleck of basil in his tomato sauce than I had in the entire previous decade when ostensibly more serious failures had occurred. Somehow, a crack in my fully cultivated antipathy toward children and their insipid tenderness had formed, and without even the slightest understanding of why or how, I felt worse at the thought that I might be undernourishing the kids than I did when, for example, all the quenelled saffron-pistachio ice cream melted onto the gold-rimmed plates when the king of Thailand spontaneously rose from his seat at the luncheon honoring his presence and gave an unscheduled and wordy toast. Worse watching a homesick Birch boy walk away disappointed from the empty milk cow than watching that line of tuxedoed waiters standing there with plates in their hands, ice cream pooling, strictly forbidden to move.

  We cooked from scratch, and even though it was only baked chicken and buttered noodles and spaghetti and meatballs we made it all ourselves. I worried that I wouldn’t have enough peanut butter or breakfast cereal and that I was thirty miles from the nearest town with only a once-a-week appearance of that giant eighteen-wheeler that Sysco would send up from Boston on Wednesdays. Bearing everything I needed for the kitchen, except vegetables, that gleaming monster of a truck would slowly make its way down the winding and meandering gravel road, the driver in a blue uniform with a name patch sewed on his breast pocket and a blue Sysco trucker’s hat, taking his time. This would not be a good place for an eighteen-wheeler to get stuck in a ditch. The counselor girls in their pajama bottoms and the counselor guys in their Greenpeace T-shirts paused their hackey-sack games and made a human chain from the back of the truck to the kitchen where they good-naturedly hauled in the huge weekly order and stacked it.

  The produce came from a local organic operation out of Amherst. Their truck was a battered mustard yellow panel truck with a big butternut squash logo on the sides, and the drivers were all good-looking and polite and incredibly friendly guys in dungarees who had quite possibly just graduated, not in traditional cap and gown but in Birkenstocks with a bell-ringing ritual, from my alma mater, Hampshire College.

  Kids don’t eat vegetables but I bought them the best anyway. I had accepted the logistical fate of ordering meat and dairy and dry goods from Sysco when I understood that being on a hundred wooded acres out in the pine forests of western Massachusetts took me off the delivery routes of better purveyors. But I couldn’t bring myself to buy vegetables from them, too.

  Many of these kids had suspicious food allergies that I had to carefully work around. At the beginning of every session, I passed around a survey to all the bunks—Birch through Willow, boys and girls—and asked each child to alert us to any special dietary needs, any allergies or diabetes or issues around food. Every year for the four years that I was the chef at this camp, there would be one boy with a very serious peanut allergy, who really would swell up and die if I carelessly used the same spoon at the make-your-own-sundae bar for jimmies as I had used for peanuts, while every session I had no fewer than sixteen girls with “allergies” to dairy and wheat—cheese and bread basically—but also to garlic, eggplant, corn, and nuts. They had cleverly developed “allergies,” I believe, to the foods they had seen their own mothers fearing and loathing as diet fads passed through their homes. I could’ve strangled their mothers for saddling these girls with the idea that food is an enemy—some of them only eight years old and already weird about wanting a piece of bread—and I would’ve liked to bludgeon them, too, for forcing me to participate in their young daughters’ fucked-up relationship with food. I was obliged to attend to the allergies. For the first time in probably the entire decade that had passed since I had seen or spoken to my own mother, I thought warm and grateful thoughts about her. She instilled in us nothing but a total and unconditional pleasure in food and eating.

  There were a couple of girls at this camp, however, who were quite different. And many nights during dinner these sisters would come up to the huge open kitchen window—the pass-through—where we the kitchen crew served out platter after unbreakable melamine platter of pale, bland, innocuous, and inoffensive foods to the kids assigned as that night’s table waiters and then stood there waiting to refill their family-style platters with “seconds.” These girls would come up to the window and ask, politely, for “the balsamic vinegar, please.” Oh, little Emma! With her chubby cheeks and some braided thing around her wrist that she had made that afternoon in the crafts barn—I could’ve kissed her every evening for appreciating the food and even daring me to make it a little more “adult” at every meal. Those kinds of kids can be obnoxious, too, I admit, with their oversophisticated tastes, turning up their noses at good old fried chicken, claiming to prefer “a paillard, quickly sautéed,” and insisting on extra virgin olive oil. That kind of cultivated taste could be sort of unbearable in an eight year old, but not this girl. She was pleased to please me, almost aware of how charming she was, in her little way, asking for Parmesan cheese, or fresh black pepper. But most of the one hundred or so kids ate like pigs—and just as fast and just as loud, and made big gruesome messes of their meals by pouring milk into their food and stirring it around giggling uncontrollably while their counselor pretended to keep some order at the table.

  Three weeks into it, just when I thought I would die from tater tots and baked chicken, we had session change, and all the parents came up to camp for Parent’s Visiting Day. At last, I could really roll out a spread—a spicy, slimy, wiggly, bitter, green, and bony spread. I couldn’t spend any real money—it wasn’t in the budget—but I could cook anything I wanted. We were giddy, Shaun and I, to have our hands in stinky Vietnamese fish sauce for the vegetarian spring rolls, which we packed with cilantro and jicama and carrots and cucumbers. The four kitchen helpers were maybe not so enthused to be pulling the beards out of and scrubbing twenty pounds of mussels for the chilled mussels on the half shell with vinaigrette, but if working in a kitchen was something they all had wanted to “check out,” this was a perfect introduction. As best as we could, using the butter-yellow melamine plates, we artfully arranged soppressata, Alphonse olives, hard cheeses, and bread that had crust and body—that could actually hurt the roof of your mouth if you were unaccustomed. We fried fatty, bony duck wings and coated them in toasted sesame seeds. We untangled mounds of curly bitter endive and tamed it with pear and walnuts and vinegar with bacon fat.

  It was a perfect New England summer day, hot and breezy and a saturated blue sky made more beautiful by puffy white clouds. Parents in clogs and Tevas, having almost all arrived from Brooklyn in Volvo station wagons, were swarming the campus, moving from bunk to arts barn to theater to see all of the clever and crafty things their kids had been doing for the past three weeks. I was transferring a whole side of cold poached sea bass from a sheet pan onto a serving platter—the fish a little longer than our largest platter, unfortunately—and getting ready to dress it with some parsley oil, when I noticed one of these parents standing at the pass-through, watching me with amused curiosity.

  “Hello there,” I said.

  “Are you responsible for all this?” he asked, pointing back to the buffet.

  “Um, I guess so. Yes.”

  “I’m Emma’s dad. She’s been telling me about you all summer.”

  “Emma’s dad!” I cried, lighting up. “I love Emma!”

  I put down my spoon and went to the pass to shake hands.

  “I’m Gabrielle.”

  He said so many kind things about the food, and I felt so rewarded, but I noticed that he spoke about the food the way that only someone who works with food could. There is a way, a distinct way, that people who work in the industry speak to each other about food and you can tell, within minutes, that they ar
e part of your extended clan. It’s not like an obnoxious foodie talks about food, ostentatiously throwing around kitchen terms and names of ingredients they have researched at length. It’s not like an appreciative eater talks about food—awed and enamored and perfectly happy to speak of his enjoyment without having any idea of what he’s just eaten or how it was achieved. It’s the way only someone who works in the industry talks about food, by almost not talking about it, but just throwing out a few code words and signals—like a gang member flashing you his sign. Every single time that I sit at a restaurant’s bar, order the txacoli or grüner veltliner rather than the sauvignon blanc, ask for the razor clams and not the calamari, I am sniffed out immediately by the server as an industry peer. Having said nothing.

  “Who are you?” I finally asked, having picked up every single one of his gang signs.

  “I’m Mark. Mark Bittman.”

  The father of Emma turned out to be Mark Bittman, the cookbook writer and New York Times columnist. Of course she loved balsamic vinegar and Parmesan cheese and fresh ground black pepper.

  At the end of every summer, I was asked to prepare a lavish and special dinner for the staff. The tradition was to have lobster, that creature that most signals luxury and splurge. After the last weeping deeply tanned kid had pulled out of camp, with his Popsicle-stick cabin and tie-dyed T-shirts in the trunk of his parents’ car, waving out the dusty back window to all of his beloved counselors the entire length of the gravel road until he was out of sight, we were all left alone on the beautiful campus. We had to clean up and close down. Between this very minute and sundown the next night, the canoes needed to be hung in the shed and all the life vests washed and sun dried and then wrapped in heavy black garbage bags. The glue and glitter and pipe cleaners in the art barn had to be neatly arranged in their tight-lidded two-pound coffee cans. The mattresses and springed cots needed to be stacked in the barn attic. And when that was done, everyone could come down to the fire pit for an outdoor feast in appreciation of their hard work dispensed all summer long.

  Each year, I butterflied and grilled whole Maine lobsters over real wood charcoals and basted them with smoked paprika butter. I grilled leeks and red onion, and corn on the cob in the husk after soaking it in one of the horse’s water tubs filled from the garden hose. We had sliced tomatoes and cherries and watermelon. And in this instance, with the kids gone, we drank a lot of cold beer.

  In Northampton, a twenty-five-minute drive south on a quiet set of roads, there was a good seafood guy. I got my lobsters from him every year. It was a fun excursion and a total change of pace and scenery to head into town with its foreign film houses and organic coffee roasters and summer session Smith College girls riding their bicycles around. I resurrected a routine I had established when I was in college nearby and working at Jake’s, of stopping at Steve’s ice cream for a scoop of malted date and a scoop of sweet cream ice cream—two flavors like your birthday and Christmas morning rolled together—and then proceeding on to the seafood wholesaler to pick up my thirty clawed beasts, neatly packed and sound asleep in chilled Styrofoam “coffins,” as they’re called. I’d return to camp in the late afternoon, put the Styrofoam boxes of live two-pound lobsters right into the walk-in, then grill them the following evening down at the fire pit.

  My last year as camp cook, I decided to skip my normal routine and instead of going into town myself, I passed the errand off to the whole gang of counselors who were taking the van into town to bum around and do laundry and drink beer. I was really looking forward to a quiet vacated campus. The impending return to my cramped New York City apartment and that grisly catering workload was weighing on me differently than years past and I wanted to stay on campus as many of these last hours as I could. I asked Laurel, one of the long-haired, pajama-pants hippy girls who was assigned to drive the van, if she could go to the wholesaler and pick up my lobsters, which I’d already ordered.

  “Sure, man,” she said, ignoring my gender. “But, like, we’re probably gonna get back kinda late, y’know?” She giggled.

  I understood this to mean that they were going to hit a bar for a while before returning to camp.

  “No problem,” I said. “Just throw the boxes into the walk-in when you get back if I’m not still up. That’s all you have to do.”

  “Okay. Cool,” she agreed. And soon, the campus was nearly empty. Even Shaun, a teetotaler, had joined the group just to get away from the insect-ridden wilderness that he’d been enduring for six weeks.

  I spent the whole day in silence cleaning and wrapping up the kitchen. Debbie and the kitchen crew had done a major job in washing all of the plates and cups and cutlery and putting it all away in the attic. And they’d taken a vanload of surplus dry goods over to the school, where it would be put to good use in the coming weeks. I was left to clean the stoves and scour the walk-in and unplug the phone and de-lime the dishwasher. Tasks I love, as they keep your hands occupied and your mind free to wander.

  I watched the horse ladies back up their trailer to the paddock and load the horses into it and then drive away, slowly making their way up the long drive. Suzette, the maintenance gal who walked around all summer with her toolbelt on, nailed closed the barn shutters and padlocked every outbuilding on camp, finally hanging all the keys in their labeled spots in the office, and went home. I left myself a couple of cutting boards and the few things I would need to produce the meal the following afternoon, but since I would be grilling almost all of the food down at the fire pit, I had the rest of the kitchen pretty nicely put down. I emptied all the salt shakers and the soap dispensers and scrubbed out the milk cow with bleach. At dusk, a bluer and earlier setting dusk, I noticed, this late in August than it had been in June when we arrived, I made a small meal out of a few leftovers in the fridge and headed for the screen door to sit on the back stoop. Something made me stop short, and hang in mid-stride. At first I smelled an incredibly pungent kind of ammonia as I froze my hand on the door just about to push it open. I could hear someone breathing, heavily and irregularly. I stood dead still. And then a full-grown black bear ambled by, not ten feet away, with nothing but screen door between him and me and my bowl of dinner. He continued on his way down past the barn and across the field and disappeared into the woods, just as it was getting too dark to easily make out his shape in the distance. I opened the door, sat down on the stoop and ate my dinner.

  The kids were not back from town, so I turned out the light and went up to my cottage, loudly clapping my hands the whole way in the dark to scare off any other thing that might appear. At around midnight I heard the van creeping down the long road to camp, its headlights and taillights the only illuminated things in an otherwise pitch-black night. Silence everywhere except for their drunken laughter and the car radio blowing out the windows. I heard them park and kill the ignition. And then I heard the slam of the screen door to the kitchen, as it echoed up the hill to my cottage. Feeling secure that they had just deposited the lobsters in the walk-in, I turned out my light and went to sleep.

  I was always the first one up at camp. I had to get to the kitchen by six to make sure waffles were made and coffee brewed and the canoe trips packed out with their crates of food. The director rang the camp bell at seven-thirty, and each morning there was a camp-wide assembly outside the dining hall, before they would all pile in for breakfast. I did this every morning. First one in, to be quite ready.

  So even on the last day, with the kids gone, and nothing but our end-of-year counselor appreciation dinner to pull off, by habit I still was up and heading down through the wet grass in my tall rubber boots at around six the following morning. I pulled open the screen door, ducked under the pass-through to enter the kitchen, and nearly crushed a lobster lying right there at my feet. I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing. What was a dead lobster doing on the floor at the entrance to the kitchen? Had it fallen, unnoticed, out of one of the coffins when the kids were putting them away last night? How drunk could they have been n
ot to notice?

  I followed my eyes across the kitchen floor and I’m not sure if I moaned out loud or physically gasped out loud. In the middle of the kitchen floor I saw another lobster. Dead. And just next to it, another. And then, a couple of feet behind him, two more. I was losing my breath. I looked up and there, clinging onto the edge of the three-bin pot sink, but having expired mid-journey, another lobster. With a clenching knot in my stomach and welling up with tears, I cautiously made my way to the sink, and there found the rest of the thirty lobsters, drowned in cool tap water. The ones on the floor had crawled up on the backs of the others, scrambling for freedom, for oxygen, and had clawed their way out of the sink and onto the floor, before dying midway across the wooden planks.

  I was sick. And I could barely breathe. And even when I pushed myself outside into the fresh air and the rising sunshine and the wet dew, I couldn’t feel cleansed or well or recovered from the stupid death I had just picked my way through. I felt as if I had been poisoned. They were just lobsters but it takes a lobster more than fifteen years to grow to three pounds. Grown men die harvesting them. The boat moves along as the lobstermen stand in back hauling up the pots and dumping the lobsters on deck. You can get your leg caught in a line and go overboard. It happens. And forty-five pounds of massacre of anything is hard to stomach, giant stupid seabugs even. Lobsters live in deep cold ocean water. Ocean water, as most of us know, is salty, and not the stuff that runs out of the tap of a camp kitchen sink.

  But how could this have happened? Shaun would have surely known exactly what to do with the lobsters. I had given Hippy Chick clear instructions. I went back into the kitchen and started to collect them all and place them back into the Styrofoam containers they had arrived in, which were sitting open on the counter. I scanned my memory for the events of the night before. Hadn’t I heard the screen door slam? Didn’t that mean they had entered the kitchen? But I had clicked off my light and gone to sleep before I heard the screen door slam again, signaling that they had left the kitchen. I drained the water from the sink and put the rest of the lobsters into the coffins, the irony of the word we use to describe these rectangular containers for keeping fish fresh not lost on me. And Shaun appeared but I couldn’t even talk. He was also stunned.