Tender at the Bone (34 page)

THE SWALLOW’S PORK
AND TOMATILLO STEW

¼ cup vegetable oil

8 large cloves garlic, peeled

2 pounds lean pork, cut in cubes

Salt

Pepper

1 bottle dark beer

12 ounces orange juice

1 pound tomatillos, quartered

1 pound Roma tomatoes, peeled and chopped

2 large onions, coarsely chopped

1 bunch cilantro, chopped

2 jalapeño peppers, chopped

1 14-ounce can black beans

Juice of 1 lime

1 cup sour cream

Heat oil in large casserole. Add garlic cloves. Add pork, in batches so as not to crowd, and brown on all sides. Remove pork as the pieces get brown and add salt and pepper
.

Meanwhile, put beer and orange juice in another pot. Add tomatillos and tomatoes, bring to a boil, lower heat, and cook about 20 minutes, or until tomatillos are soft. Set aside
.

When all pork is browned, pour off all but about a tablespoon of the oil in the pan. Add coarsely chopped onions and cook about 8 minutes, or until soft. Stir, scraping up bits of meat. Add chopped cilantro and pepper and salt to taste
.

Put pork back into pan. Add tomatillo mixture and chopped jalapeños. Bring to a boil, lower heat, cover partially and cook about 2 hours
.

Taste for seasoning. Add black beans and cook 10 minutes more.

Stir lime juice into sour cream
.

Serve chili with rice, with sour cream—lime juice mixture on the side as a topping
.

Serves 6
.

At The Swallow every worker was a manager and every manager had an opinion. The restaurant was collectively owned and the group was incapable of agreeing on anything. And now they were arguing about me.

“She sounds like a prima donna,” said a tall woman with short blonde hair. “Why would we ask her to join the collective?” She gave me a hostile look, smoothed her long denim skirt, and sat down again.

“Look who’s talking,” said an intensely thin man, jumping out of his chair with such force his wild blond curls quivered madly. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and said with great passion, “You’re so rich you never even cash your paycheck.”

“Well,” said Helen, “at least
I
don’t make sixteen gallons of Indonesian fishball soup that smells so disgusting we almost lose our lease!”

Another woman leaped to her feet. Small and stocky, she spoke with a decided French accent. “You don’t make anything at all,” she said with a snort. “At least Peter tries. You just stand at the front counter playing the grande dame!”

“Who mopped the floor last night?” Helen demanded, eyes blazing.

“Look,” said a barrel-chested man with thick black hair. He was tall, with a smashed nose that made him look more like a boxer than a chef. “You guys want to fight about the Wednesday night shift, that’s groovy. But do it on your own time. I have to read my poetry at Cody’s in less than an hour.” He plunged back into his seat. The two women also sat down.

Then a plump, pretty woman in a low-cut print dress pushed back her chair and pointed an accusing finger at me. She had
reddish brown hair and wore a surprising amount of makeup. “Helen’s right,” she said. “We don’t need any more like her. Take yesterday.” She folded her hands prissily in front of her and made her voice high and affected. “Judith took three hours to make the quiche, because it simply had to be perfect. Antoinette was creating a roast beet and orange salad, and Bob suddenly decided to make a new pot of soup. Me and Linda couldn’t get any of them to help out during the lunch rush. Even worse, Rudy was working the cash register and you know he can’t add.” Chrissy burst into tears. “I’m so tired of all your PhDs and MDs and BSs. Can’t we please, please take some ordinary people into this collective?”

“Look what you’ve done!” said Helen, walking around the table to hug Chrissy. She glared at me over her shoulder. “Oh, why don’t you go work at Chez Panisse?”

After Helen’s little speech it didn’t look as if the membership would even offer me a trial period. The members were put off because I was from New York (too aggressive), and married (highly suspect in Berkeley). Having a master’s degree made it worse; there were plenty of nonpracticing doctors and lawyers in the group, but they were not considered the best workers.

As Helen and Chrissy talked on about how much they didn’t want me I looked around the room and wondered how I had become the enemy. I wanted desperately to join this strange group. Suddenly I had an idea. “I’ll work for a month, and if you don’t want me in the collective you won’t have to pay me for my time,” I said. “You have nothing to lose.”

“No way,” said Chrissy, “she must be rich. Who else would work for free? We don’t need any more rich people.”

“I’m not rich,” I insisted. “I live very cheaply. Last year I got by on less than fifteen hundred dollars. There are eight people in my house and we grow most of our own food.”

“You live in a commune?” said Chrissy. “That’s different.”

“A commune?” said Michael. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I have to be at Cody’s in twenty minutes. Can we vote?”

I loved working in the restaurant with a fierceness that surprised me. There was no hierarchy: everybody did everything, from cooking the food to mopping the floor, and there was no job I didn’t like, from lifting fifty-pound sacks of flour off the delivery truck to burning my hands on hot plates as I snatched them from the dishwasher. I loved the quiet of the clean kitchen early in the morning and the noisy intensity of the lunch rush. But what I liked best was the way working in the restaurant used every fiber of my being. When I was in the restaurant I felt grounded, fully there. While my muscles ached from the hard physical labor my mind strained to anticipate problems. When my shift was over I was often so tired I could not walk the six blocks home. The first day I had to call Doug and ask him to pick me up. “I hope I get in,” I said fervently as he drove me home.

I began studying the other members, trying to figure out how to persuade them to vote for me. Chrissy and Linda were the easiest; they were the backbone of the restaurant, young working-class women who did their job and wanted you to do yours. They flirted with the college boys, giving them free slices of our rich quiche. They made them egg salad-and-walnut sandwiches so stuffed with filling the guys couldn’t get their mouths around them, and slipped them extra brownies. If it was a night shift they turned the radio up loud while they cleaned. All I had to do was offer to stay late so they could go dancing. “Cool,” they said, and started to be nice to me.

Peter and Michael were easy too: they wanted help making soup. There was a lot of competition over the soup pot, and regular customers
always asked who had made it before ordering. Michael’s soups were straightforward versions of the recipes we had on file, sturdy vegetable or navy bean, things he could do with a minimum of fuss. I gave him a little spice advice and his soups improved dramatically. He was touchingly pleased. Peter, on the other hand, could not resist attempting exotic concoctions. “I could have told you that Indonesian fishball was going to be a disaster,” I said. “From now on, let’s talk it through before you start.”

The cooks, however, were clearly going to be a problem. Antoinette, who was French and talented, thought my cooking was far too pedestrian to improve the restaurant. She never considered cost, bringing bones from her own butcher to make stock for onion soup and insisting we bake all our own bread even though it cost more. She once used gallons of cream to make a shrimp bisque so extraordinary that for years afterward people would ask hopefully, “Shrimp bisque?”

Judith, the professor’s wife, was not impressed with me either. She was The Swallow’s secret weapon, a woman who went to Europe every summer to take cooking lessons with famous chefs. She returned with dried mullet roe from Sardinia and saffron from Spain. The summer she spent in Italy she brought back real balsamic vinegar from Modena and The Swallow’s famous salads became even more famous. Toward the end of my trial month I walked into the kitchen just as Judith was tasting the pork and tomatillo chili. “You used canned beans!” she said, making a sour face. “What can you expect of someone who lives in a commune?”

Bob, the other maestro, considered me insufficiently temperamental to be a great cook. He was extremely talented but he cooked only out of despair and disappointment; every time he broke up with his girlfriend he drowned his sorrows in the creation of a masterpiece. Fortunately the relationship was stormy, but even on a calm day he was capable of something as spectacular as the peanut-butter stuffed chilies he invented for a catering job. When
I told him I thought they were fabulous he waved a dismissive hand and said, “You’re just trying to get me to vote for you.”

They sent me out of the room while they voted. I waited ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty. How long could a simple vote take? After half an hour I couldn’t stand it anymore and I went back. Nobody even looked up: they were arguing over a recipe request from a magazine.

“It’s an elitist publication!” shouted Michael. “We can’t send them a recipe.”

“We should be flattered we’ve been asked,” Antoinette said.

“It will be good publicity,” Judith agreed.

Had I been accepted into the collective? Nobody said anything, so I just sat down.

“Publicity is not the point,” said Peter. “Do we really want to support the mainstream press?”

“Yes,” said Judith. “We could use more customers.”

“Come on!” said Linda. “We can barely manage to run the restaurant now.”

“Yeah,” Chrissy added ominously, “and who’s going to type it? It better not be someone on my shift!”