Best Food Writing 2013 (59 page)

 

 

I
N
S
USAN'S
K
ITCHEN

By Elissa Altman

From
Poor Man's Feast

Falling in love is a complicated dance. In her tender, funny memoir,
Poor Man's Feast,
Beard-award-winning food writer, editor, and blogger Elissa Altman (
PoorMansFeast.com
) describes how she learned the dance with her new partner Susan–a dance that always seemed to come back to food.

I
n the way that some people believe you can always tell the nationality of a tourist by looking at their shoes or their underwear, I've always thought you could do the same by digging around in someone's kitchen. You can tell who they are, existentially speaking, just by opening cabinet doors, poking around their refrigerator, and pulling open a few utensil drawers.

I tested this theory years ago, long after my parents' divorce, on a visit to my mother's house: she was in the bedroom, on the phone, and I was alone in her kitchen, just looking around at her slightly peeling 1980s silver-and-white wallpaper, opening the odd food cabinet to see what, if anything, she was eating—six small cans of tuna packed in water, a one-thousand-packet box of Sweet ‘n' Low—when I opened her lower cabinet doors. There was an electric knife in one of those cracked black cardboard boxes with red felt lining. I opened the box, and there was the white-and-gold plastic electric knife handle—still lightly coated with the gunk of an ancient holiday rib roast—but no actual knife. There was the fondue pot top to my mother's brown-and-white Dansk fondue set, and a box of fondue
forks containing just one, lone, slightly bent one, but the base—the contraption on which the fondue pot sits—was missing.

“Your
father
must have taken them,” she said, ruefully, when I asked. But it didn't make any sense: Why would my father want the bottom of the fondue set but not the top? Why would he take the knife part of the electric knife, but not the handle?

“Just for spite,” she added, with an angry gimlet eye.

“Come on, Mom,” I said. “You're being silly.”

“Then they just disappeared. Who knows what happens to these things?”

In my mother's world, inanimate objects are always developing minds of their own. When they get good and tired of being neglected and ignored, they simply say
goodbye, good riddance
and off they go, stomping away in the middle of the night like a knife and fork dancing across the screen of a 1950s drive-in movie: a single fondue fork and the top part of the electric carving knife, marching out the door in a conga line. She had even managed to lose an entire set of flatware that I once bought for her when she somehow, inexplicably, was running low. If you aren't a party-thrower, and you don't have dinner guests over on a regular basis, how do you lose flatware? But for my mother, it makes sense: she doesn't cook—she is fearful of food and every morsel that passes her lips sends her careening backward in time to the days before she lost all the weight and became a television singer, back to when she was a fat child—so the idea of caring for, of coddling cookware like it was a baby or a prized pair of Chanel pumps was utterly, ridiculously crazy.

But crazy is relative. And so on the other hand, I was equally insane about what lived in my kitchen, and I doted on its contents the way you would a small, brokenhearted child: In my house, no knife ever sat in the sink. No pot filled with baked-on mess ever traveled through my tiny, eighteen-inch-wide dishwasher. No cast-iron pan ever saw a rinse of soapy water or a damp sponge, or even soap.

“This is
disgusting,”
my best friend Abigail once said when she came over for brunch, picking up the Lodge cast-iron pan I'd bought specifically for making a honey-glazed, blue-corn corn bread I'd once eaten at an uptown, neo-Southern restaurant. She ran her finger along its surface and made a face.

“It's just age,” I said. “And the fact that you're never supposed to wash it.”

“And I just ate something cooked in this thing? How the hell are you supposed to clean it?”

“With salt,” I answered.

“Salt? Just
salt?”
She was aghast.

“Yes,” I said. “It's the way it's been done for centuries. The coarser the better. Like maybe, a nice flakey Maldon sea salt from England.”

“So you scrub your pans with imported English sea salt. Tell me that's not completely nuts.”

“It's not,” I told her, waving a copy of Edna Lewis's
The Taste of Country Cooking
in her face. If it was good enough for Edna, it was good enough for me.

“Honey,” Abigail snorted, “you may have noticed: you're not exactly a six-foot-tall black woman who likes to do things the way her great-grandma did back when she was a slave. Go out and buy yourself some dish soap.”

In truth, the idea of using salt to scrub a pan thickly caked with baked-on food was something that I had always found secretly terrifying, especially after my first bout of food poisoning ended with a doctor friend coming to my house to hook me up to an IV for a few hours while we watched daytime television together in between my unhooking myself and racing for the bathroom. Scrubbing cast iron with salt was one of those mildly upsetting, romantic constructs, like threading adorable, tiny birds on a skewer and roasting them whole in a wood fire, like Richard Olney used to do in his tiny, sweet, sundrenched house in Provence. It was like a ride through culinary fantasy land until you stopped and thought about it for a minute.

When I better-examined Auntie Et's nested set of jet-black, clean-as-a-whistle Griswold pans sitting on the counter, I couldn't imagine for the life of me how they'd gotten that way, or if they were just so old that the stuck-on food had disintegrated and fallen off over the years, like the now-empty can of rubbed sage from 1953 that Susan's mother still kept in her spice rack over her sink, having evaporated into light-green dust sometime during the Tet Offensive.

“Et must use a
lot
of salt on these babies,” I said to Susan later that day, holding one of the smaller pans up to the light and running my finger along its surface.

“Are you kidding?” she barked. “Her secret is
far
more subversive.”

“What is it?” I whispered, leaning in close.

“Soap and water. And a good, long soak in the sink,” Susan said, matter of factly. “Salt is just so—I don't know—
twee.”

Earlier that morning, when the alarm went off at eight, I threw the covers back and raced down the stairs with MacGillicuddy following me, sounding like a stampeding herd of cattle in the otherwise still house.

“What are you doing?” Susan groaned from upstairs.

“I'm making dinner,” I yelled back.

“Now?”

“Yes—
now.
It'll go in at eleven and be ready at three, you can take me to the station at 4:30, and I'll be back on the train home to New York by six. So,
now—”

At eight on this mid-December Sunday morning, with my still-new love interest drowsing away upstairs, her slobbering dog following me around the kitchen hoping I'd drop something, and the
braciole
that Arnaud had cut for me on Friday, it was now or never. I wasn't going to freeze meat as gorgeous as this, so I got up to make supper, roughly an hour after the white, wintry sun had come up.

Susan's refrigerator, a mammoth black side-by-side Kenmore, so immense that the moving men had to slide it through the living room and over the counter on blankets—like an obese Pasha perched on a flying carpet—had a reputation for swallowing up anything you happened to be looking for at the very moment you needed it. I opened it, and cheese—soft, hard, harder, some white, some yellow, some blue—fell out at my feet, draped in varying degrees in plastic wrap. A small, blue-striped yellow ware bowl from the 1930s containing beige, cardboard-colored ground turkey and covered with foil sat precariously close to the edge of one of the sliding glass shelves. I searched and looked, lifting up packages of deli meat and containers of yogurt like a child does on a scavenger hunt. But no
braciole.

“Where's the meat?” I yelled up the stairs.

“What?” Susan was still half asleep.

“The beef—
THE BEEF, DAMMIT
—from Arnaud,” I shouted, anxiously, like I was having a dinner party in a few hours to which Russian royalty might be in attendance.

“It's there,” Susan pleaded. I heard her get up, her feet hitting the floor above me. “I didn't touch it!”

“I don't see it!”

“Look behind the shaker,” she shouted.

I stomped back to the fridge, removed the cocktail shaker still half-filled with the watered-down remnants of the bourbon Manhattan that we'd sucked down before running to Et's house for the chicken slop, and there, nestled between a loaf of Pepperidge Farm white bread and a Tupperware container of leftover macaroni and cheese, was my outrageously expensive beef.

I rummaged around the kitchen cabinets for a small platter and came up with one—part of a whole set of blue-and-white Anne Hathaway's Cottage service for twelve—that would allow the two pieces of
braciole
to come to room temperature comfortably and slowly without daring to touch each other, which, if they did, would result in unacceptable, uneven, oxidized spotting. I covered them with foil and set them aside, out of reach of the dog, and went back to the fridge to search for the handful of wild mushrooms—golden chanterelles, hen of the woods, and brown spongy morels—that I'd dropped fifteen bucks for at Dean & DeLuca. By the time Susan trudged down the stairs, I was sitting at the counter, gingerly rubbing and patting the dirt off of them with the dry piece of raw white silk that I'd neatly folded up, wrapped in a white handkerchief, and tucked into my coat pocket before leaving my apartment on Friday. Soft, delicate, and with the tiniest amount of nap, raw silk is the perfect tool for cleaning mushrooms without bruising them.

“Good morning, honey,” Susan said, giving me a sleepy peck on the cheek.

“Good morning,” I said, with an edge, looking at her out of the corner of my eye.

“Can I ask what is it that you're doing?” She filled up the tea kettle at the sink, and glared at my little patch of silk.

“What does it
look
like I'm doing?”

“Dusting? Drying the tears of a weeping morel that misses its mother?”

“Very funny,” I replied, putting the last of the mushrooms on Susan's small tag-sale wooden chopping board that was in the shape of an apple. “I need a knife—do you have anything sharper than this?”

I held up a five-inch chef's knife with a plastic handle that I'd found in a drawer near the sink; a full quarter-inch of its tip was missing, sheared clean off, like it had been circumcised.

“They're all in here,” she said, opening up a narrow drawer near the stove. I poked around and pulled out a paring knife that had a thin crack in its plastic handle. There was a long, heavy chef's knife, and both of them had seen better days and were about as sharp as limp celery.

“Do I need to bring my knife roll up next week?” I asked.

“What wrong with
these?”
she said, holding up the paring knife.

“What year are they from?”

“My mother gave them to me. Or they might have belonged to one of the aunts; I can't remember.”

I snorted. I prized my knives, which I never, ever let rest in the sink, or ever see the rough vulgarity of a dishwasher.

Susan shook her head, exasperated.

“I don't understand what the difference is—if it's a good knife, it's a good knife.”

“But don't you think you should take better care of them? I mean, look at this one.” I held it up, and nodded at the missing tip. Susan swooned, and took it out of my hands.

“I love that knife. I think I found it at a tag sale, at the bottom of a box. I felt badly for it—it just needed a little love.”

“You sound like Linus at the end of
A Charlie Brown Christmas,
when he gets down on his knees and wraps the tree in his blanket.”