Stir (5 page)

The next day, I asked how he was doing. He'd gone home.

L
ong before I loved Eli Schleifer, I loved the way he ate. He always seemed to eat so well, at least by college student standards. Those rehearsal snacks were only the beginning. Most of us made do with the complimentary slice of tomato they would add to your bagel at the campus café. Eli liked lox on his, so he got lox. And he bought grapes. Never mind their steep price per pound. Frozen, he'll tell you, they make the best dessert. (“Almost as good as
un
frozen grapes,” our friend Eitan likes to say.)

Eli wasn't buying steak dinners or fine wines. Just little luxuries here and there—fresh-squeezed orange juice, for example—that don't normally fit into a college budget. He paid most of his own way through college, so it's not as if he had tons of money lying around. Whatever he did have, he was happy to spend on food. Getting to eat what he wanted to eat was worth it.

“Why food?” I once asked him. “Why not buy, I don't know, nicer shoes?”

Eli shrugged. “I was hungry.”

Our sophomore year of college, a semester after he joined our choir, we took a social history class together. We sat directly across the seminar table from each other, closest to the instructor on either side, and at the break, together with most of our class, we would go to the student-run kosher deli across the hall. I'd never been a fan of deli sandwiches. Too salty, too flabby. The mustard was the best part. I'd usually get a knish, instead. (Though, admittedly, the mustard was the best part there, too.)

Eli did not approve. So one day, he ordered for me. Heat the corned beef, he told the student behind the counter, and stuff some coleslaw in there. Coleslaw. Right
on the sandwich
. Warmed through, the corned beef's fat didn't squeak or ball up on my tongue. The meat was juicy now, tender and soft. And the coleslaw. There was crunch! This was deli reborn.

A hot corned beef sandwich with coleslaw became my regular order, and when I asked Eli to eat his sandwich slowly, please, so that I wouldn't be the last one chewing and wiping my lips back in class, he laughed and said okay.

Meanwhile, Eli was expanding his own culinary frontiers. He'd grown up observing kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws. Some foods, like pork and shellfish, were entirely off-limits, and his family had separate sets of dishes for meat and dairy foods, which must be eaten apart. We did, too, growing up, though my mother did it mostly out of respect for her own parents, and because it was what she had always known. Eli's family went further. Even outside their home they ate only food that was certified kosher, cooked in kosher ovens in kosher pans, and served on kosher plates. Vacations meant lugging coolers filled with tuna sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs. They always stayed in rental apartments with kitchens, his mother unpacking her own pots, foil roasting tins, even a food processor, while they all settled in. When I met Eli, he'd never eaten so much as a dinner roll from a restaurant that wasn't kosher.

All of which is to explain the following scene. I was walking along Broadway one night, on my way back to the dorm, when I ran into Eli with a couple of crumpled napkins in his hand. He was flushed and grinning.

“I just ate my first nonkosher food,” he announced in a half whisper. He looked spooked.

“What was it?” I wanted to know, imagining a cheeseburger, or a hot dog from a stand.

“Pizza.”

“With pepperoni? Sausage?”

“Cheese.”

A slice of
cheese pizza
. This was the giant leap from the strictures of his youth.

Eli had never been what you might call “a believer.” But when you're a kid, what feels normal and right is whatever you know, so he'd always walked the walk, abstaining from electricity, writing, and driving on the Sabbath; blessing his food; wearing a yarmulke on his head and symbolic fringes under his shirt. This was his world. His family and friends did all these things, too. Stepping back was anything but natural. Each transgression had to be a conscious, deliberate act. He forced himself to turn on the lights and listen to music on Saturday afternoons. He ate more pizza. By the end of the year, he was leaving his yarmulke at home.

The complicating thing, here, is that even as Eli wanted out, there was much that he loved to keep him, especially around the table: the traditional songs after Friday night meals, playing board games with his brothers on long Saturday afternoons, unplugged from the world in accordance with the Sabbath laws. He loved decorating the sukkah, a backyard hut, for the harvest holiday of Sukkot every fall, rolling out the bamboo mat for the roof and covering it with leaves, hanging the foil peacock that hung over his father's chair and the illustrated mats for the walls. They ate seven nights of meals out there, the laughter and singing from neighbors' sukkot audible over their own.

Eli wasn't about to let go of these things. He may not have wanted to feel bound by that world, but he wanted very much still to be in it. So, even as his own religious practice waned, he lived year after year with his Orthodox Jewish friends. This way, he was “grandfathered in,” he once told me, included despite whatever he now believed. He liked that.

When we weren't traveling on weekends with our choir, Eli would often host Friday night dinners. Most student-hosted dinners were potluck, like the one where we first met, with upwards of ten people crowded around too-small tables or sitting on made-up beds. Eli would cap his guest list at six and make all the food himself. Most of his recipes were Schleifer family classics: chicken coated in his mother's preferred brand of Russian dressing, tossed with bread crumbs in a Ziploc bag, transferred to a pan, and baked. This was “chicken in a bag,” something he'd made as a kid when his parents worked late. Also in this category: tuna casserole and baked ziti, which the Schleifers pronounce “zitty,” as though the pasta were seventeen and in need of a deep-cleansing face mask.

“Zitty, zee-tee, what did I know from Italian?” my mother-in-law explained. Sarah is the child of two Polish immigrants who spoke only Yiddish at home. Salt and pepper, she says, were the only “spices” she ever saw in her mother's kitchen. She learned to cook from cookbooks and found the baked ziti recipe when Eli and his three siblings were small. Z-i-t-i: She'd never seen this word before. But baked pasta bubbling with tomato sauce and cheese? As Sarah would say, what could be wrong with that?

Eli made new things, too. A salad of spinach, mushrooms, strawberries, and candied pecans. Chicken breasts stuffed with apricots and greens. He had a juicer and would shake up too-sweet cocktails of fresh apple juice and Midori that we all thought were terrific. He didn't do soups or hot beverages, period, which might have troubled me if I didn't find the particularity of it so endearing. This was a man who knew his own preferences and tastes and honored them. Politely refusing the soft-serve strawberry ice cream at the register because, if you recall, he ordered the strawberry hard-scoop, wasn't fussiness for its own sake, but deliberate living. I liked this guy more than I knew.

Don't tell my mother-in-law, or for that matter my husband, but for a long time I just didn't get baked ziti. It seemed like the no-man's-land of pasta dishes, lying somewhere between pasta with sauce and lasagna, and less delicious than both. This ziti changed my mind. It is its own terrific thing, saucy and full flavored with a bit of heat. (If you're not into spicy, reduce the crushed red pepper in the tomato sauce by half a teaspoon or so.) I like the crisp bread-crumb topping and the hint of nutmeg, which may sound like a strange addition, but you'll be glad it's there. Don't let the béchamel sauce intimidate you. Just be sure to warm the milk and add it slowly to the pot to keep the sauce from breaking.

Despite the name of this recipe, Eli and I have discovered that we like it best with rigatoni, another tubelike pasta that's larger than ziti and ridged along the surface. Oh, and use the best canned tomatoes you can find for this dish, which, of course, is a matter of taste. I like Muir Glen.

This recipe is adapted from one that chef Mario Batali shared with Dana Cowin for her book
Mastering My Mistakes in the Kitchen
. It's great at the center of a casual dinner party, with a big salad, a bowl of olives, and a couple bottles of wine.

For the tomato sauce:

4 tablespoons olive oil

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon crushed red pepper, plus more to taste

2 28-ounce cans whole peeled tomatoes

1 teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more to taste

For the béchamel:

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

2 cups whole milk, warmed (but not boiled)

½ teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more to taste

¼ teaspoon nutmeg, plus more to taste

For the rest of the dish:

1 pound dry ziti or rigatoni

8 ounces fresh mozzarella cheese, cut into ½-inch cubes

1 cup (50 grams) freshly grated Parmesan

1 cup (50 grams) panko bread crumbs

A pinch or two of nutmeg

½ teaspoon crushed red pepper (optional)

2 tablespoons olive oil

A handful of fresh basil leaves, sliced or torn into small pieces

Position a rack in the top third of the oven, and preheat to 375 degrees. Brush a 9-by-13-inch ceramic or glass baking dish with olive oil.

Make the tomato sauce:

Pour the 4 tablespoons olive oil into a 3- or 4-quart saucepan and warm over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Stir in the garlic and crushed red pepper and cook for a minute or so, until fragrant. Add the tomatoes, smooshing them up with your hands as you drop them into the pot. Dump in any juices left in the cans, stir in the salt, turn the heat up to high, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes, until the sauce thickens slightly. Taste, and add more salt and crushed red pepper, if you'd like. Remove the pot from the heat and set aside.

Meanwhile, make the béchamel:

Melt the butter in a 3- or 4-quart saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and stir for a couple of minutes, to form a pale brown paste. Very slowly pour in the warm milk while whisking continuously. Bring the sauce to a boil and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring the whole time, until it thickens. Remove the pot from the heat, stir in the salt and nutmeg, and taste. If you prefer more salt or nutmeg, stir it in, and set the sauce aside.

Make the pasta and assemble the dish:

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and toss in a few hefty pinches of salt. Add the pasta, and cook until it's 3 or 4 minutes short of done. (It will cook the rest of the way through in the oven.) Drain the pasta and transfer it to your largest bowl.

Add the tomato sauce, béchamel, mozzarella, and about three-quarters of the Parmesan to the ziti and mix well. Transfer the mixture to the prepared baking dish and scatter the rest of the Parmesan over top. In a small bowl, toss the bread crumbs with a nice pinch of nutmeg, plus another ½ teaspoon or so of crushed red pepper if you want some extra heat, mix with the 2 tablespoons olive oil, and sprinkle over the ziti.

Bake until the ziti is bubbling and the top is brown, about 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and let rest for 10 minutes, then scatter the sliced basil over the top and serve.

Serves 6 to 8.

W
hen I visit someplace new, my favorite thing to do is eat. And walk—preferably to a place where I can eat some more. Florence is for art, yes. The Uffizi. The Pitti Palace. The Galleria dell'Accademia. But I'd have waited in lines twice as long for the tiny strawberries that Eli and I found at the outdoor market there, for the way they dissolved in our mouths like sucking candies and turned our fingertips pink.

Food is more than what we put into our bodies when we are wherever we are. It's the feel of a place, something language can't get at, the memory of a place as it forms. Montreal is a loaf of bread sticky with dates, hazelnuts tucked into its crumb. It's the crackle of crust as we ripped into it with our hands. Jerusalem is the fruit stall at the end of the block, persimmons and pomegranates in heaps, pomelos the size of my head. Wherever I am, food is what makes me feel there.

Even when “there” is an ICU hospital bed in Burlington, Vermont. Never mind that it's the city where a surgeon unpacked my brain on an operating table. That I was doing very little eating and even less walking didn't matter, since I had a devoted squad of visitors committed to both of these things.

My family had more or less moved to Burlington during the early weeks of my illness, staying in hotels, inns, and, in my mother's case, a guest room at a nearby convent. ICU visiting hours are limited, on again, off again, throughout the day. I'd watch the clock and wait, imagining my people at restaurant tables, in line for coffee, choosing bananas from produce displays. When they'd finally file into my room, I'd make them tell me all about it.

Which is how, having only ever passed through the city in the back of an ambulance, I became deeply acquainted with where the people of Burlington go to eat. There's a café called Mirabelles, where my mother tried steel-cut oatmeal for the first, second, third, and fourth times, in rapid succession. She reported on each encounter, and though I knew firsthand the extra chew and heft of steel-cut oats, how they stand up to a long, slow simmer and transform into a creamy pudding, I looked forward to each retelling. My brother-in-law liked the vegan French toast at the Magnolia Bistro, and though my aggressively nonvegan husband must have gone there just to humor him, he liked it, too. There were the chocolate chip cookies baked at the inn where my stepmother, Amy, stayed for a few nights, and the health food store where my father would buy me flavored soda waters and line them up on the ledge by my window. People brought me menus from everywhere. I studied them. It felt good just knowing what was out there. And even better when I finally got to taste it.

Eli had driven his road bike up from Cambridge to ride between hospital visits. He was training for a century ride, one hundred miles through the five boroughs of New York City. The event was still a few weeks out, and we agreed that he should carry on with his training. I'd be postsurgery by the time the ride came around. I wanted him to do it.

So, while I lay in bed staring at the whiteboard where the nurses wrote the date each day, he rode. I liked to picture him flying down the country roads. The padded shorts that endowed his narrow frame with a butt, the yellow and black jersey zipped up to his chin, sunglasses wrapped around his head. He looked like a wasp with knees.

On one of his rides, Eli passed a sign for pick-your-own berries. When he got back to town, he announced to my family that he was going to get some for me, and would anyone like to join him? And so it was that Eli, my in-laws, and my divorced parents squeezed into a single car, bumped down a dirt road, and rolled to a stop alongside a mosquito-infested orchard.

It had rained recently, and my mother was concerned about the mud. My mother-in-law was concerned about the thorns. They were all concerned about the mosquitoes. But these people would gladly have shot the moon out of the sky for me that day. As it turned out, they did something even better: venturing into the raspberry patch, slapping at their arms and the backs of their necks, braving mud and thorns, and each other, to drop a paper sack of raspberries into my lap. From where I sat in my hospital bed, it may as well have been the moon.

I tipped the berries into my hand. Carefully. They were so soft. I studied their plump drupelets neatly stacked, their hollows pursed like lips into supple
O
s. Against the faded pastel of my hospital gown, the plastic, the metal, the white all around, they stood out, blood red. I ate them quickly, one by one, and let their juices dry on my hands.

I was feeling much better by then. Strange, seeing as how it had been only two weeks since the rupture. It was as though someone had pried the pain off me and simply discarded it. It was no longer mine, just a hunk of scrap metal somewhere on the bottom of the sea. My body poured back into the spaces where that pain had been. I felt full and new. Cozy, even, beneath my hospital gown and IV tubes.

There was this business of the approaching brain surgery, but in my newfound condition of painlessness, the idea was bearable. The surgery felt now like a mere formality to lock in the health that my body had already recovered. I was in no less danger. Despite my feeling so well, it was only a flimsy clot plugging the ruptured vessel that was keeping me alive. I had been told, no joke, not to sneeze.

Somehow, though, I didn't think about any of that when a nurse asked if I wanted to try standing up, maybe take a loop around the floor. I had no idea why this was even allowed, but yes, yes! I wanted to! The nurse removed my catheter and helped me to the side of the bed. The floor was perfectly flat, but when my feet touched the ground for the first time in two weeks, I felt as though I were standing on an incline. I grabbed the walker in front of me and, with a nurse on my left, Eli on my right, and someone rolling my IV behind me, I began to shuffle along.

I looked down and saw my pink traction-pad socks pulled halfway up my shins. I thought of the race in New York six weeks earlier: the opening loop around Central Park, the way we all spilled out onto Seventh Avenue and ran through an empty Times Square, the lights and billboards in full effect. I picked up speed in the final stretch down the West Side Highway. As I passed the last of the live bands, Eli and our friend Megan rode by on bikes, waving and cheering me on. It was magic.

That I'd done all that now felt like a joke. Wait, no,
this
was the joke. I laughed out loud and kept moving. My dad was there when we rounded the nurses' station. He had an odd expression on his face, as though he didn't know whether to feel relieved or heartbroken. I smiled. “I'm walking,” I said, in a voice taut with childish pride. I turned away, ashamed.

After the loop came the best possible thing: a shower, an actual shower, in the nurses' changing room. My nurse wheeled me to the stall, helped me onto the shower seat, washed my hair, and then
closed the curtain
, leaving me alone with that glorious stream of hot water. It flowed onto my face and down my back. When I closed my eyes, it felt almost like real life. Back in my room, I got to sit up in a chair and comb through my hair, and put on my favorite green T-shirt instead of a gown. That's how my mom, dad, and Eli found me, clean, upright, feeling civilized, when they arrived for visiting hours with a very special package.

It was salmon, pan roasted and perfectly seasoned, from a glowy little restaurant in town called L ' Amante. Eli and my dad had eaten it there the night before, and the next day they went back, determined to bring me some of my own. The chef didn't do take-out, but with the help of a sympathetic bartender, they prevailed. They'd had to “play the brain surgery card,” my dad told me, and I laughed.
Brain surgery.
Even surrounded by beeping monitors and a tangle of tubes, it didn't seem possible that those words could apply to me. I dug into the plate on my lap.

The salt hit me first. For two weeks, I'd eaten nothing at all, and then only the blandest of hospital food. Lukewarm tea, flabby noodles, broccoli steamed to mush. Now, suddenly, salt! I ate and my family beamed, visibly comforted by the sight of me with this thing from the outside world. That salmon didn't belong there, and neither did I. As long as I was eating, it seemed possible that this had all been a terrible mistake.