The School of Essential Ingredients (12 page)

“Wine?” asked Charlie, coming up behind him and handing him a glass. The wine was cold and clear and tasted like flowers and snow. “I love this patio. It’s why I rented the house, really.”

She returned to the kitchen and came back with a plate covered with slices of meat, thin as leaves.

“Prosciutto,” she explained to his questioning eyes. “With the melon. You’ll see.”

They sat at the tiny table, their toes touching as Charlie ladled a spoonful of dripping melon chunks onto his plate.

“Taste the melon first,” she suggested. “There’s a guy at the fruit stand who saves his best for me.” She laughed when she saw the expression on Tom’s face. “He is very, very old. And he loves his melons like children. You’re lucky—this is the time of year when they are at their best. And Angelo’s melons . . . well . . .”

Tom skewered a piece with his fork and put it in his mouth. The flavor opened like a flower across his tongue, soft and sweet. He started to talk, and then stopped, holding the taste inside as it dissolved into juice.

Charlie watched him. “Now we’ll try some prosciutto with it.” She took a piece of melon in her fingers, wrapped it with a translucent slice of pink meat, and motioned for him to open his mouth. The meat was a whisper of salt against the dense, sweet fruit. It felt like summer in a hot land, the smooth skin in the curve between Charlie’s strong thumb and index finger. The wine afterward was crisp, like coming up to the surface of water to breathe. They ate slowly, and yet more slowly, until the bowl was empty.

“Give me a minute,” Charlie said. She stood, resting her hand for a moment on Tom’s shoulder as she moved toward the kitchen. “I’ll be back.” Tom sat, listening to the sounds of Charlie moving about in the house—the clatter of a pot lid being set in the sink, a refrigerator being opened, shells rattling into a pan. Music drifted from the living room, a woman he had never heard before, in a language he didn’t know. Charlie hummed along with the music; through the open back door Tom could catch sight of a hand, the back of her heel, as she moved from sink to stove. He remembered, as if from a long way away, a time when the world was huge; now it seemed as if he could fit all the world into such a small space—a restaurant, a house, a table, the hem of Charlie’s skirt as it brushed against her ankle.

“Spaghetti del mare,”
she said, coming through the door, “from the sea.”

In the large, wide, blue bowl, swirls of thin noodles wove their way between dark black shells and bits of red tomato.

“Breathe first,” Charlie told him, “eyes closed.” The steam rose off the pasta like ocean turned into air.

“Clams, mussels,” Tom said, “garlic, of course, and tomatoes. Red pepper flakes. Butter, wine, oil.”

“One more,” she coaxed.

He leaned in—smelled hillsides in the sun, hot ground, stone walls. “Oregano,” he said, opening his eyes. Charlie smiled and handed him a forkful of pasta. After the sweetness of the melon, the flavor was full of red bursts and spikes of hot pepper shooting across his tongue; underneath, like a steadying hand, a salty cushion of clam, the soft velvet of oregano, and pasta warm as beach sand.

They ate. Bite after bite, plateful after plateful. They talked about childhoods—Charlie was from the West Coast, Tom from the East; Charlie had broken three bones in a bicycle fall, Tom his nose when his older brother was learning to pitch baseball. When the bowl was empty, they ran hunks of bread along the sauce at the bottom and brought them dripping to their mouths. The light through the leaves dimmed and disappeared, and they were left with the candle in the middle of the table, the light coming through the partially opened back door to the house.

“Dessert time,” Charlie declared, and went into the house, returning with a small plate of cinnamon-dusted cookies and two small cups of thick, dark coffee. They ate and drank, quieter now, watching the movements of each other’s hands, eyes.

“You know,” she commented, taking a last sip of coffee, “I’ve met a lot of guys who see sex like dessert—the prize you get after you eat all the vegetables that make the women happy.

“I guess I see it a little differently,” she continued reflectively. “I think sex should be like dinner. And this is how I like to eat.”

“The meat is done,” Lillian pronounced, taking the spoon from Tom’s idle hand and running it in a wide circle around the pan, pulling the sausage into the center, where it steamed and simmered.

“Now we’re ready for the next step—but first a trick. A meat sauce loves red wine. But if we put in the red wine now, the meat will taste acidic, so we’re going to add some milk.” Lillian poured what seemed like a huge amount of white liquid into the mixture. “I know it seems odd, but trust me.”

Tom looked down into the pan. It did look strange, the white at first swirling around the meat, pulling away from the oil like a finicky child who doesn’t want to get her hands dirty. But as he watched, Tom saw the milk begin to enter the meat, change its color to an almost ashy gray, softening its edges.

“We’ll let that simmer until the milk is absorbed,” Lillian commented. “I know,” she acknowledged, “it all takes so much time. While you’re waiting, you could answer three e-mails. You could call a friend, start the laundry. But tonight there is no time, so we don’t need to worry about wasting it. You can just sit and let your thoughts unwind. And you’ll be glad you did, because time will change the taste into something smooth—the difference between polyester and velvet.”

Tom had STAYED at the restaurant only through the summer, making money to help pay for law school. He wanted Charlie to quit, too, and go back to school, but she wouldn’t. The restaurant owner had had a change of philosophy, perhaps prompted by the meals Charlie kept leaving on his desk, and had offered her Tom’s position when he found out Tom was going back to school in the fall.

“But do you want to work here all your life?” Tom asked her when she told him the news.

She looked at him, disappointed. “I want to cook,” she said, “and this is the only restaurant in town, unless you count the fish-and-chips joint.”

“What about your literature degree?” he persisted, caught up in the energy of his first week back at classes. “Don’t you want to do something that lasts?”

She stared at him and shook her head. “Poetry isn’t any different than food, Tom. We humans want to make things, and those things sink into us, whether we know it or not. Maybe your mind won’t remember what I cooked last week, but your body will.

“And I have come to believe,” she added, smiling wickedly, “that our bodies are far more intelligent than our brains.”

There had never been a way to counter Charlie, perhaps because she didn’t care if he agreed with her or not. She loved him, she knew that, and knew that he loved her.

“Why me?” he asked her, looking up at her face through the cascade of her hair falling about them.

“You’re the oregano,” she said simply.

“We can add the wine now,” Lillian prompted. The milk was gone, soaked into the meat. “Tom, will you get a bottle of red from the cook’s shelf?” She turned to the class. “Now it might not seem to matter what wine goes in the sauce—it’s going to simmer so long, anyway. But you’ll notice the difference if you take care with the ingredients. We don’t want to skimp on our wine, even if it’s in a sauce, and we want a wine that can hold its own with the meat—something heavy and full and mellow.”

Tom brought over a bottle and handed it to Lillian with questioning eyes. She pulled open the cork and breathed in, smiled.

“That’ll do just fine,” she said.

Charlie called them “mamma wines,” after the matrons they met in Italy on their honeymoon—a grand, two-week tour, celebrating his new job in a big-city law firm and the chance for Charlie to cook in a restaurant with a capital R. Their plan had been to start in Rome, and then move on to Florence, Lake Como, Venice. But Charlie reached their
agriturismo
forty-five minutes outside Rome and stopped.

“Taste this,” she said during dinner at the long wooden table. “We aren’t leaving until I know how to make this pasta.”

Linguini led to ravioli followed by cannelloni, caponata. The town was small and unattractive, something Tom had believed was impossible in Italy. Its best function seemed to be as an overnight stop for slow tourists on their way between Rome and Florence. The buildings were post-World War II, concrete and stucco, not an arch, a fresco, a little-known Caravaggio to be found. When Tom tried to tell Charlie this, she just smiled and told him to go find a little hill town where he could taste wine, or something.

“I’ve got what I need,” she would say, and then add with a grin, “at least for the morning.” And she would head to the kitchen, where she would be greeted with choruses of
“La bella americana si è finalmente alzata dal letto”
—The beautiful American has finally gotten up out of bed—provoking roomfuls of knowing laughter.

Tom learned to be back for lunch at the long table under the trees outside, and after lunch, when the farmhouse would settle into a profound quiet and Charlie would roll luxuriantly into his arms, her hair an ever-shifting maze of smells—fennel, nutmeg, sea salt. Hours later she would leave him and return to the women, only to start the whole process over again at dinner.

“You could have a worse honeymoon,” she chided him, with a wink. “I could be pillaging some old museum for poems . . .”

He didn’t care, he realized. Didn’t care when reservations, so carefully made six months before, slipped by, and with them views of a terra-cotta-colored duomo, a Grand Canal, a foam-kissed cappuccino at a lakeside café. Every lunch, every dinner, he returned to a woman who seemed to draw into her body the very essence of the food she was learning to make, becoming deeper and more complicated and exciting.

After two weeks, they left and returned to Rome. Charlie spent the plane flight home scribbling designs, notes for ravioli recipes, on scraps of paper. “What would you think if I tried bourbon in the filling?” she would ask him. “Italy meets the Deep South.”

Back at home she found a job at a restaurant, and within weeks her new dishes were finding their way onto the menu. Some evenings Tom went to the restaurant at the end of his work day and ate with her on the back steps; some nights they both knew in advance he would simply go home. He would open the door of their house to the smell of sauce on the back burner. By the pan, there was always a note.

Hey, Darling,

I’m working late, so you’ll have to use those beautiful hands of yours in a useful occupation for once. Cook the pasta. Don’t ask what’s in the sauce. We’ll see if it had the particular effect I wanted later.

I love you,

Charlie

“You could sit here all evening and watch the meat absorb the wine,” Lillian commented. “It’s amazing what you’ll end up thinking about. Plate tectonics. A child in your lap. Crocuses.

“For now, however, we’ll add the tomatoes and move on to the pasta. Now, we want some tomatoes for texture. You could use a can of crushed tomatoes, but crushed tomatoes are made from the bits, the parts nobody is going to see anyway. If you want to make sure you have the best, then you buy them whole and crush them yourself. Again, more time.” Lillian opened a can of whole tomatoes and pulled out a Cuisinart from the shelves under the counter. She ladled tomatoes from the can; the machine whirred, and then stopped. Lillian tipped its contents into the pan.

“Finally, a bit of tomato sauce to thicken things up.” Lillian opened a can of tomato sauce and poured some in. “There. That can take care of itself for a while,” she said, turning down the heat under the pan.

“Now, on to the pasta.” Lillian pulled out a large container of flour and plunked it onto the countertop.

“You could use dry—it would work just fine. But we have time tonight. So, go ahead and put some of that in a mound,” she directed Tom. “Then make a hollow in the middle. Use your hands.”

Tom reached into the wide mouth of the glass jar and felt the flour between his fingers, soft as feathers. He cupped his palm and pulled up a handful, then another and another, creating a small mountain on the wooden countertop. He made an indentation in the center, running the base of his thumb along the edges to smooth them out, feeling the flour shift beneath his fingertips; it reminded him of playing at the beach, hours with the sun on his back and acres of building materials at his disposal.

“Good.” Lillian went to the refrigerator and returned with a small bowl of eggs. She cracked one into the hollow. “We add the eggs one at a time until it seems as if there is enough,” she said. “Tom, you can stir with a fork—you’ll want to make sure there are no lumps.”

It Was Tom who had found the lump, nestled like a marble at the base of Charlie’s breast. His breathing, which had been racing to keep up with his excitement, suddenly stopped. It was like waking to a gun in his face; the world held, mid-fall.

“Hey, bud, where did you go?” Charlie had asked him teasingly.