Insatiable (21 page)

27

D
ROWNING
M
Y
S
ORROWS IN
C
HILLED
B
URGUNDY

I
MOURNED MY MARRIAGE IN THE SUNLIT GARDEN AT EUGÉNIE. EVEN THE
bees ignored me. I brooded about my fate between ham baked in meadow grass and other delights
.
Was I too old to fall in love that way again? Reading Updike novels at the pool didn’t help. Adultery didn’t seem any more elegant in New England than on West End Avenue. Even now, in my advanced wisdom, it doesn’t strike me as so naïve that I thought considerate adultery could help us stay together. So many of our friends seemed to get away with it.

Now on the train to Roanne, I imagined Don in the Dominican Republic, not speaking Spanish. I wondered how he would get along. Meaning, of course, without me. I’d always led the way overseas with my brave bits of French and Italian. And where was I going on my own? I hadn’t been single for more than ten years. I hadn’t been great at it then, though I suppose a conservative bystander might think I hadn’t been all that great at being married, either. But I’d been wonderful at being married. I still believe that. I thought Don was brilliant at it, too. Indeed, life with Don had often felt like playing house, carefree and precious, exactly what I treasured. I berated myself for not doing more to save us. But what could I have done? Plastic surgery? Fat lips and thin hips. It would never have been enough. Even after he packed his bags and left forever, he was writing me sobbing notes of undying love and regret. (Am I nuts? I kept them. I have the craziest beside me as I write this, but I’ll spare you.) Yet a moment later, he was talking about twenty-two-year-old skin. The shallow bastard. Mildred was right; I had to leave him. Now I felt less crazy and very alone. Don had promised to call from the island to let me know when it was official. I wondered if he would take Her along for a romantic Caribbean weekend. Could he be that cool? That uncaring?

There was an attractive man sitting across from me. He was wearing a wedding band. I think it’s nice when they advertise. And anyway, it would make no sense for me to fall in love in France, I thought. I offered him one of the chocolates Bocuse had insisted I take with me.

In Roanne, Pierre and his vivacious Olympe greeted me like family. It was a much-needed distraction. There was no way they could guess how much I wanted to curl up and be comforted. They had heard about Michel’s
cuisine diététique
and were curious but dubious. “A great chef cooking
cuisine diététique
is good for the
presse,
” Olympe said. “Good
publicité,
good for the business of the spa.” And
certainment,
I did look thin, observed Pierre.

Jean Troisgros was quiet. His wife, Marie, had committed suicide some months earlier, but I didn’t know any details. Unlike Olympe, always bubbling and seemingly happy at the reception desk, Marie, as I remembered, stood in shadow, usually silent and indifferent, or maybe just shy. I wandered out to the kitchen to watch Jean salting a piece of beef, testing the heat of a skillet, snapping commands to a cook. I’d never really looked at him as a man before. I’d seen him as one half of the fun-loving
frères
Troisgros, teasing and grinning, and not all that serious in the dining room, waiting for a moan, a sigh, a cry of approval for a new dish. I’d been here with Don and then with Murray and later on the Moët & Chandon junket with Yanou. But now with an empty chair opposite me and a husband signing off on our marriage in the Caribbean, I saw Jean. I saw that in spite of his graying beard, he was younger than I’d first thought, and handsome. Did I imagine he was flirting with me? He seemed to hover by the table, filling my wineglass from the pewter
pichet,
turning a plate the waiter had set down off center. His eyes sparkled. The beard was sexy.

There was a phone call for me at the desk.

“The lawyer fucked up,” said Don. “By the time I found him, we got to the court late. The judge decided he couldn’t sign the papers till tomorrow.”

“Oh, poor baby,” I said. “What will you do?” Here I was, comforting my husband because he couldn’t divorce me fast enough.

He was alone. He would get a room. He missed me. He was sorry we had stopped working. It was all his fault. He started to cry.

“It’s my fault, too,” I said my eyes filling up. “So tomorrow, then,” I said. “I’m not sure where I’ll be. Maybe en route to Paris. You don’t need to call again. I’ll just know it’s done tomorrow.”

“I’m so sorry, pumpkin.”

I hung up. It was too late to “pumpkin” me now.

The waiter explained he had taken away the braided-fish dish in my absence so it wouldn’t get cold. Jean came out of the kitchen with a
cassolette
of scallops.
“Très simple,”
he said, “raw, the way you like it.” He was teasing. I always asked for my scallops and fish
“pas trop cuit”
—not too cooked.

“Can you sit a minute?” I asked in French. “Talk to me.” I was not sure we had anything but food to talk about.

“Sorry,” he said. “I excuse myself. I must go back to the kitchen.”

“After the service, then,” I said in French. “Come to my room.”

I thought he seemed shocked. He did not answer. I felt stupid. Then the waiter came to fill my glass again. Jean took the moment to disappear. I tasted the scallops, but the sauce seemed sickeningly rich.

It was Pierre who came to see if I was pleased with the lamb. And Pierre who supervised my choice of cheese, adding a wonderfully smelly epoisse steeped in marc and a chèvre wrapped in cinders—new, “from the neighborhood goat lady,” he said. I watched Jean chatting with a couple across the room, stroking his beard, standing on one foot, with the other tucked behind it, as if exhausted.

I needed something citric and pungent. I waved the pastry cart away and asked for sorbets—plum, pear, tangerine,
pamplemousse
(that marvelous word for grapefruit)—and then managed to put away two thousand calories in cookies, mini-tartlets, and chocolates.

I felt a little queasy as I went up to my room.

I bathed, perfumed, rouged, and powdered . . . slipped into a pale blue nightgown that held everything that counted in the right place and skimmed the rest discreetly. Just in case. The knock at the door woke me. I let him into the room. His hunting dog bounded ahead of him. We kissed . . . and his hands tried to brush the gown off my shoulders. I undid his belt, unzipped his trousers. I slid into bed as he sat to remove his shoes and then turned to me.

At this very moment, the judge is signing the papers, I thought. Don is feeling lost and sad. People are talking to him in Spanish. I’m divorced. He will marry Her and she won’t let him see me. I don’t want to think about it now.

I reached for Jean, touched his beard, put my fingers into his thick hair. He rolled on top of me and made love to me. The dog rested his muzzle on the edge of the bed and watched.

28

O
F
J
AMES
B
EARD AND
E
NCOUNTERS WITH
G
ODDESSES

I
WAS NEVER IN THE INNERMOST CIRCLE OF JAMES BEARD CONFIDANTS,
protégés, and sycophants. What with deadlines, the strains of wounded domesticity and later divorce, rebirth, and a devotion to disco dancing, I didn’t have the free time to hang out in his charming Village pad. I adored him mostly from afar. Now I can see that I was also intimidated. He was the founder of our church, the all-knowing wizard. I was grateful that he was very generous in his comments about me for publication. I knew he had a rapier wit and could be bitchy in private. I felt he could see right through me, and I worried that he saw an imposter.

Picasso had to learn to draw before he did those Cubist tricks. And here I was, scolding a two-star Michelin chef because his vanilla cream was too strongly scented with rose petals and chiding André Soltner at Lutèce for a vapid
crème renversée au caramel.
Yet in my brief years as an amateur cook, I had never tackled sweetbreads or cleaned a squid and had failed utterly in my one attempt at trying to duplicate Le Pavillon’s
quenelles de brochet.
The stink of abused fish had lingered in our kitchen for two days.

To feel on firm ground when critiquing Chinese restaurants, I had taken a series of Chinese cooking classes. I’d studied with the dowager queen of the wok, Grace Chu, then with sometime actress Lilah Kan and, later, Virginia Lee, coauthor with Craig of
The Chinese Cookbook.
Mrs. Lee had us endlessly marinating chicken and meat in cornstarch and egg white for her velvety stir-fries, so there were always bowls of abandoned yolks. One day, she tossed three dozen yolks into a puddle of oil in a hot wok and scrambled them for the class. It was the essence of egg . . . eggs on speed. Richer than foie gras. Nobody died that night—as far as I know.

When I tried to sign up for Beard’s advanced cooking class in 1974, I was flatly rejected. “No one can take the advanced class till they’ve done the introductory,” his assistant told me. There was no argument, no string to pull. How embarrassing. The restaurant critic was required to join the novices in his teaching kitchen, struggling with the bizarre burnerless glass stovetop that we all hated. (But Corning was a client, after all, so that’s what we cooked on.) Jim would perch on a tall stool in one of his red or black cotton tunics, tree trunk-like legs splayed for balance as he took our measure, pairing us off—two by two—with an assignment for the evening to put together the various courses of what would be dinner.

One day, he decided we should test whether freezing meat sabotaged the flavor or texture, research for a magazine article he was writing. We would roast and pan-sauté a series of matching beef cuts, half of them fresh, half of them thawed from the freezer. What a shock: Contrary to the epicurean’s innate disdain for the freezer (good only for ice cubes, homemade bread crumbs, and to store bones for making stock), we discovered no difference at all.

The class was all about pleasure and fun, a mad dance dodging one another’s knives in the crowded kitchen, vying for an approving grin or wink. Every once in awhile, Jim would put his gigantic hand on top of yours to correct a knife chop or a whisking movement.

Tasting, endless tasting. Beard was a legend for his extraordinary taste memory, the ability to retain and recapture a dish’s distinct tangle of scents, flavors, and textures, not unlike a great musician or composer’s perfect pitch. And he could convey a sense of the joy of a new discovery with the details of the stories he told. My favorite image from class is that of Jim standing at the kitchen counter in the old house on Patchin Place, carving a slab of seared brisket, slipping a chunk of fat into his mouth, and laughing. “I’m a fat boy myself.”

Garlic was our mantra. I remember one class that called for garlic in every dish except dessert. If an innocent dared to ask, “How much garlic, Mr. Beard?” he’d boom out the answer: “Half an acre.” One evening, I was in the duo charged with rolling a boned leg of lamb studded with garlic into a sling made out of a clean dish towel. It was to be suspended from the handles of a large oval enameled iron cocotte, then steamed over garlicky broth till the thermometer registered rare. After a suitable rest, the roast was unwrapped and sliced. Beard wanted it served with a fast-cooked garlicky tomato sauce and gremolata, the classic garnish of osso buco—grated lemon peel, minced parsley, and finely chopped garlic . . . raw garlic. The turnips Anna, a variation on the French classic potatoes Anna, slathered with butter—crisped and baked in a flat metal pan—were aggressively dotted with minced garlic, too. I forget what got tossed with garlic for a first course. I tried to scrub away the garlicky stickum on my fingers with lemon juice. A faint earthy scent lingered.

I would not have imagined that boiled anything could have been as lush and flavorful as that lamb. I stole the gremolata mix and used it that next summer as a feisty staccato on cubed swordfish that I crumbed and then seared in a black iron skillet. Even though I could measure how much butter it took to melt the turnips into sweet submission, turnips Anna still seemed less fattening than scalloped potatoes, and even now they pop up at my holiday dinners.

Andrew, the boyfriend left over from the magical summer in the house on the bay in the Springs (I continued to share him with his fiancée, his children, his work, and his guilt months later), came by to pick me up after class. Later that night, we were locked in the addictive embraces that drew us to bed long after we both should have known he would marry the all-forgiving “other woman.”

“What have you been eating?” he cried from somewhere near my knee. “It’s like garlic is coming out of your skin.” I found my inner arm not far from my nose and sniffed.

“Oh my God, I think you’re right.”

Andrew was not a lover of garlic. But he was a lover of women. That carried him through what must have been quite a challenge.

I regret I was not around for the early rumbles of revolution in California cookery. In the seventies and early eighties, I was always looking east, flying off for a quick fix in France as often as I could get Clay Felker to foot the bill. Fortunately, Clay understood my mouth needed this constant rehabilitating ecstasy. Although I admired their work from afar, I didn’t come to know Alice Waters or Marion Cunningham, Jeremiah Tower, Jonathan Waxman, and Wolfgang Puck till much later. And I never shared an oyster or a confessional cup of tea with the mythic M. F. K. Fisher. Perhaps if I’d spent more time on the West Coast, I might have earned a share of that intimacy and jumped on the grow-your-own-vegetables team earlier. It took a while before I noticed that a fresh bean was superior to a French bean. And it took even longer before a fresh bean was a local bean.

It was Jim Beard—congenitally bicoastal and beloved on both—who introduced me to the goddesses. I first tasted Alice’s food at dinner with Jim and my friend Harley Baldwin in the café above Chez Panisse. I had arrived in San Francisco fresh from worshiping the exquisite finesse and refined complexity of Frédy Girardet in Crissier, outside Lausanne, and Michel Guérard in his remote fiefdom in southwestern France. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting much.

“Shall we just cook for you?” Alice asked, relaxed and confident, bubbling with affection for Jim. (Jim brought out a lot of bubbling in his female acolytes and protégés.)

I remember thinking, Okay, show me. And to my astonishment, she did. There was something radically daring in the simplicity of every perfect vegetable, the pristine leaves of baby greens that had not yet hit kitchens in New York, the clarity of an oddly shaped tomato. Until that moment,
heirloom
meant a hideous vase you dare not send to the thrift shop because it had been your grandmother’s. If there were zealots reviving forgotten species of tomato or twenty strains of heirloom potatoes on the East Coast, I was not yet aware of it.

“I have only three scallops left,” Alice said. “They’re very special.”

We each had a scallop still in its shell—unheard of back east at that moment—slicked with a bit of butter, a drop of lemon, a turn of the pepper mill. It was like eating something just born, hatched a moment before in the sea just for us.

Alas, I definitely came too late to my first audience with the aging and ailing M. F. K. Fisher. One afternoon in the mid-1970s, I walked into the dining room at the Stanford Court in San Francisco and spied James Beard, a huge smiling Buddha in a blue denim mandarin jacket, impossible to miss. I ran over to give him a hug. He was lunching with an elderly woman draped in brown, her face rather dour and unexpressive. I looked at her and nodded.

“You don’t know my friend Mary Frances?” He seemed surprised. “Mary Frances Fisher.”

It took a few seconds before it sank in and I realized this swollen, clearly unwell creature was the famed, beloved, unsurpassed writer of food and love, the sexy siren (as food historian Betty Fussell describes her) . . . M. F. K. Fisher.

“This is Gael Greene,” Jim said. “She is the very enthusiastic restaurant critic of
New York
magazine.” (Jim had a way of saying something positive about me that could also be negative when you thought about it later.)

That day at the Stanford Court, I imagined I could see M.F.K.’s young beauty from her portrait on so many book jackets, although it was almost lost in the doughy puff of her medication-distorted face.

“I’m having trouble with my
New York
magazine subscription,” she said.

I bit my tongue and smiled. “Well, if you send me the sticker from your last magazine, I’ll get that fixed for you the minute I get back to New York.”

It was in Jim’s beginner class that I met Jane Freiman, a fine-arts major then in publishing, who would leverage these classes, a passion for food, and sheer chutzpah to become a cookery teacher and cookbook writer when she found herself unemployed in Chicago due to marriage.

Together, Jane and I were formidable. How else to explain where I found the chutzpah to invite James Beard for dinner? The two of us fussed and debated the menu, elaborating and revising, testing and refining. Jim seemed comfortable enough sipping champagne on the cushioned window seat in the back room of my apartment. I’d set up the foldaway aluminum table and draped it in dark blue corduroy cloth to the floor—regal backdrop for service plates and candlesticks from my collection of pewter. We brewed pumpkin soup so I could use my antique pewter tureen and ladle. It took two tries, but I mastered lush ricotta and spinach gnocchi from Naomi Barry’s Tuscan cookbook. The leg of lamb that followed—generously pierced with slivered garlic cloves—was exquisitely rare, perfect with a ’66 Mouton Rothschild from the cellar riches Don had generously left behind in Woodstock.

The climax was my version of Paula Peck’s deeply dark chocolate velvet under drifts of sour cream folded into whipped cream for an approximation of crème fraîche, and meltingly buttery Viennese cookies. Jane’s lush bittersweet chocolate truffles arrived with coffee and cognac.

Jim sipped and looked thoughtful. I guess we all felt some comment was called for.

“This is the richest dinner I’ve ever eaten,” Jim said. All I heard was the superlative. And I glowed with pride. Next day, I chewed over the ambiguity of his statement. I finally decided not to brood about it.