Insatiable (5 page)

My Ex-Sister-in-Law’s Orange Pour Cake

I
baked this moist tea cake for Christmas gifts in the sixties. I placed each cake on a vintage carved breadboard that cost five dollars back then and wrapped it in cellophane. Imagine having the time for such domestic arts. I am deeply envious.

Cake:

2 cups flour, plus 2 tbsp.

1/2 cup butter, softened

2 eggs

2/3 cup sugar

1 tsp. baking soda

2 tbsp. grated orange zest

1/2 cup chopped nuts (walnuts or pecans)

3/4 cup sour cream

Topping:

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup orange juice

1 tbsp. grated orange rind

Preheat oven to 375° F.

Cream 2 tablespoons of the flour into softened butter in a large bowl. Beat eggs in small bowl. Add sugar and combine with flour and butter mixture.

Sift remaining flour with baking soda and add slowly into the egg-butter-sugar mix until combined. Add grated orange rind, nuts, and sour cream. Pour or spoon into greased metal loaf pan.

Bake 30 minutes.

For the topping, combine sugar, orange juice, and 1 tbsp. grated orange rind.

Remove cake from the oven when done and pour topping on cake while cake is still hot.

6

I
NNOCENTS
A
BROAD

I
N BLUE TROUT AND BLACK TRUFFLES, JOSEPH WECHSBERG, MY MODEL OF A
peregrinating epicure, had written, “All epicurian roads lead to Vienne.” Not Vienna, but Vienne, a small outpost dating back to Roman times, south of Lyon. Don’s best friend, Jules, was just back from army service in France with the newly converted’s galloping obsession for gastronomic adventure. He could see we were smitten with food. He was properly impressed by my adaptation of Café Chauveron’s mussels in Chardonnay cream, glazed under the broiler. “Not exactly the same,” we all agreed. “But really close.” Don poured a $1.89 bottle of Chablis. We told Jules our plans for a belated honeymoon in Italy. Jules urged us to make time to discover France. We revised our itinerary. Of course we would go to Vienne. Not sensibly by train from Paris, as more seasoned gourmands would have, but naïvely, determinedly, from Rome—by two trains, an autobus, and a taxi, about the most obtuse detour one might contrive.

Never having known the glories of La Pyramide—famously “Chez Point,” when the legendary Fernand Point was alive—I can only detail the glories committed in his memory as they fertilized our budding gluttonous sensibilities. La Pyramide was dramatically spruced up years later. But back in 1962, it was still the same modest
maison
Point had ruled, with Madame Point sitting on a tall chair at the entrance, checking out arrivals, and, I felt, writing us off as innocents abroad. Well, we had our doubts about La Pyramide, too. The tacky little dining room with its funereal gladioli seemed ominously bourgeois, without promise. Maybe we had found our obsession too late.

But then came a molded pyramid of sweet butter to marvel at, huge, enough to butter toast for a family of four for a week, and a rich, gamy terrine framed in the tenderest pastry crust. A fresh knife and fork heralded a round of truffle-studded foie gras set into a square of brioche—exactly the yellow cakelike texture of the richest challah. I had never tasted fresh foie gras before—so pink and delicate and buttery. It filled my mouth with silk and demanded attention. I knew at once this could become an addiction. Then a ritual change of silver and the waiter arrived with a small pastry boat filled with a ratatouille of autumn vegetables, each distinctly itself yet happily married. By then, we were getting a little tipsy and congratulating ourselves for our brilliance in being alive and at the kitchen’s mercy.

The
truite saumonée
was stuffed with a poem of mushrooms and vegetables and was painted with a potion blending butter, cream, and port. We drank a wine we’d never heard of called Condrieu, icy golden
vin du pays
in an unlabeled bottle. It cost one dollar and was so fragile that it could not be exported, we were told (though now it is widely exported and you can’t get half a thimbleful for one dollar). With the crusty mustard-slicked and crumbed duck and its accompanying sauceboat of béarnaise, we shared a half bottle of heady and imperious Hermitage. The miraculous duck . . . how did they do it?

The elderly maître d’, Vincent, invited me to the kitchen to see the cooking of the duck.

“Us?” asked Don, who did not speak French.

“Non, moi,”
I said, rising dizzily. In the soot-blackened alcove, a Boy Scout troop of teenage cooks paused to stare, one of them tossing coals from a wheelbarrow into the oven where the bird had been grilled. I muttered what compliments I could muster in French, given my inebriated state.

Back at the table, there was a challenging confrontation with creamy Saint Marcellin cheese and something goaty in a leaf, then ice cream and the house’s mythic eight-layered Gâteau Marjolaine. Just at the point I knew another bite was impossible, a platter of the pastry chef’s frivolities appeared—diminutive cream puffs, itsy napoleons, mini-tartlets. Between groans of pain and ecstasy, we devoured them one by one. Everyone was giggling—Vincent, the waiters, a few lingering clients. Flushed faces all around us were giggling. Somehow we got the check and somehow we paid, dispensing francs equal to the twenty-seven-dollar tab and a tip or two. Someone aimed us out the door and in the direction of La Résidence—two triumphant pilgrims, leaning into each other for support . . . totally, blissfully, wondrously sauced.

Raw Tomato Sauce for Pasta

D
on and I loved a pasta with an uncooked tomato sauce that we ate at a shack on the beach in Ischia during our belated honeymoon. I gave the idea to Craig once. He said it was awful, but I noticed he ran a very similar recipe some months later. Only the best summer tomatoes will do.

4 large beefsteak tomatoes

4 very large cloves of garlic

6 large basil leaves

1 tsp. salt

6 grindings of black pepper

2/3 cup fruity extra virgin olive oil

1 lb. bucatini or perciatelli

Core and chop tomatoes coarsely, between 1/4 and 1/2 inch. (I never bother to peel them, but you can.) Put the tomato and all its juices into a large bowl. Peel garlic and smash with a chef’s knife if you want to remove it before serving, or mince two of the cloves if you want to leave it in for a more intense garlic taste. Add garlic to tomatoes.

Cut 3 of the basil leaves into fine ribbons and add to tomatoes. Add salt and pepper. Stir in olive oil. Cover and let sit at room temperature for 8 to 10 hours, stirring occasionally.

Cook pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water for 10 to 12 minutes. Drain in a colander, reserving a third of a cup of pasta cooking water in the pot. Return pasta to pot and toss with reserved liquid. Ladle into soup bowls. Remove smashed garlic from tomatoes and ladle over pasta. Sliver remaining basil and scatter on top. Some will want a flurry of fresh grated Parmesan; purists will not.

Serves 4 as a main course, 6 as a first course.

7

C
OMFORT
M
E WITH
C
HOCOLATE
M
OUSSE

W
HAT MIGHT HISTORY HAVE BEEN IF EVE HAD TAKEN THAT APPLE AND
baked it into a
tarte tatin
and shared it with the snake? For Don and me, having tasted the fruit of the foie gras, there was no turning back.

Back home, the pursuit of cuisinary perfection became all-consuming. We worked, yes. You need money to dine well. And Don was ambitious, a committed newspaperman. For me, journalism was just a hobby, providing running-around money till I sold that novel. But novels take forever. By then, I was in weekend-warrior attack mode on the three hundred pages of a novel not even I quite understood. Meanwhile, to cook a great meal was instant gratification.

I cooked following the catechism of Craig Claiborne. I whisked yolks into zabaglione in my copper bowl and whipped the cream over icy water, per the counsel of Julia Child. I conquered my fear of dough with six lessons from the English cooking teacher Dione Lucas in a studio above her shop, Once Upon an Egg, later O’Neal’s. I mastered boning a duck without breaking its skin, stuffing it with assorted ground meats, and baking it in a pastry blanket. Helping Dione stretch my twelve inches of strudel dough till it overhung a six-foot table and you could see through it was thrilling. That she sent her nylon stockings to the laundry and they came back ironed was impressive, too. I never did either at home.

Our friends were possessed early foodies, too. When I recognized the dark-haired woman buying a boodle of serious cheeses at Fauchon in Paris as a woman I’d met at a Burgundy Society Tastevin dinner in New York, and then ran into her twice again in the next four days—at the legendary shop selling copper pots and pans in Les Halles and at dinner on the Côte d’Azur—we both took it as a message from the fates. Naomi
*
and I are still soul mates, now forty years later. It was she who persuaded an uncle in the cheese business to create American crème fraîche with instructions she brought home from France. For neophytes with only a vague notion of what crème fraîche might be and what it was doing in the supermarket dairy case, there was a little folder of Naomi’s recipes glued to the container top. The only drawback for me was my insider knowledge, aware from the beginning that the divine ooze was 87 percent butterfat. Even before cholesterol entered the axis of evil, that struck me as dangerous.

As the avant-garde of the gluttony to come, we did dinner parties, my foodie friends and I, wowing one another with whole ducks boned and stuffed, and pistachio-studded pork terrines, devoting long hours to reproducing all the moussemerizing, béarnaising, and vinaigretting we picked up in many rounds of cooking classes and gourmand travel.

We cheerfully commited to shopping that took days and military discipline to organize. Since Don worked mostly nights at the
Post,
he was free to chauffeur me around town in our little red Volkswagen to gather the best ingredients. There was no Fairway then, and Eli was probably still teething on a bagel from the family grocery, Zabar’s, which had not yet gone global. We had to cross town to Cheese of All Nations, hit the Village for bread at Zito’s on Bleecker Street, double-park outside the Nevada Meat Market for quality veal or lamb, and stop at Esposito’s on Ninth Avenue to buy the best ground pork for the pistachio-studded terrine. Don got a shop foreman at the
Post
to cut a lead weight that fit precisely inside my terrine mold to compress my classic pâtés. He immediately had a vision of my dropping the weight on my foot and made me promise never to weight my terrine unless he was home. Great editors are like that—always anticipating the worst.

I bought my battery of knives from the notoriously terrible-tempered Fred Bridge, famous for snarling at innocents who dared ask uninformed questions in his mythic kitchen-supply bazaar. I tamed his savage bark by buying
oeuf en gelée
molds, and expensive truffle cutters (as yet unused), as well as springform pans, charlotte molds, and tart pans with removable bottoms (which I did use). I baked an exquisite, terrifyingly complex
poire bourdaloue
from Time-Life’s
Classic French Cookbook.
It knocked everyone out, and then I quite sensibly decided I never had to do that again.

The oenophilic competition of our men grew heated even as our cellars and wine closets were required to grow cool. Don’s boyhood friend, Jules the ophthalmologist (who had directed us to La Pyramide), put down seven hundred bottles of the ’61 vintage in a humidity-controlled storeroom. Once Jules explained what that meant, Don and I, cellarless but determined to hold our own, found cases of France’s most celebrated Bordeaux at Macy’s wine shop and brought home Château Margaux, Lafite, and Mouton Rothschild at $225 a case. That was a wanton extravagance then, but they were the only names we knew.

The two of us tried to recapture the rapture of France in Manhattan at restaurants like the Veau d’Or and Café Chauveron. We psyched ourselves to feel comfortable in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons and braved the Coach House, where the proprietor, Leon Lianides, could look right through you if he was in one of his moods, which he clearly never was when favorites like Craig Claiborne and James Beard were lapping up the tripe in avgolemono soup, followed by the fabulous lamb steak with its kidney still attached. Even the great French chef Jean Troisgros was dazzled, we were told, by Maryland lump crabmeat rolled inside Hormel prosciutto, thick Madeira-haunted black bean soup, native sirloin paved in pepper, Comice pears with American cheese, and pecan pie. Troisgros left carrying two iron baking molds and the recipe for the Coach House’s grainy little logs of corn bread.

We went to El Parador because Craig wrote that he loved the margaritas and guacamole. And in between these exercises in excess, we ate simply and cheaply at Oscar’s King of the Sea, at King Wu in Chinatown, where Don’s friends had thrown his bachelor party, and at our favorite Shanghai local on Broadway at 103rd Street, where we inevitably had the pressed duck—a lushly crusted dish I haven’t seen anywhere for decades. We haunted movie revival houses, hating the dip in the middle of the Thalia but driven there by our hunger for movies. But mostly, I cooked. I crisped soft-shell crabs and deglazed the pan with a splash of white wine or shook bay scallops in a bag of bread crumbs and then sautéed them in butter. Sour cream made anything taste better. I invented fabulous frittatas, those layered Italian omelettes, using a week’s worth of leftovers from the fridge. And I indulged Don with bananas flambé and crème caramel. We were trim and young. No one had ever heard of cholesterol. Detroit was rocked by riots, in which forty-three died. Away on our honeymoon, we missed the October demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the Pentagon. Home again, we were the Bonnie and Clyde of West End Avenue, with our gourmand swagger. We were so in love.