Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (21 page)

MOLLY AND I HAD LOTS OF PLANS
, some sillier than others. One was to eventually relocate to Marathon, a little town in West Texas, and open a pseudo greasy spoon that would serve wonderful food. No white linen, no stemware, maybe not even matching plates and flatware. Just tables filled with pecancrusted catfish, smothered chicken in onion gravy, perfectly roasted chickens, fresh-picked vegetables, and cloud-soft biscuits doused with butter churned from the milk of local cows.

We would come up with menu ideas. My daughter, Hannah the Chef, would execute them, and I would greet guests pleasantly or otherwise stay out of the way. One sure offering would be coq au vin.

Close by our dream café Molly and I would pool our resources—hers substantial, mine meager—and plant a double-wide (hers) and a yurt (mine) on a patch of West Texas real estate in Marathon, where she did in fact buy a double lot. When her health took its final turn south, she ended up selling it to political strategist Harold Cook, a friend who, like a handful of other Austin renegades, was doing his part to Democratize that arid neck of the woods, as in “Let's turn Brewster County blue.” In the best Molly tradition, it was the kind of sale ranchers probably did a century ago with a smile and a handshake. Like a lot of other friendships, this one evolved from a meal a long time ago.

Cook was working at the time for Representative Debra Danburg, arguably the most liberal snuff-dipping Democrat in the Texas Legislature at the time. Molly, who was writing for the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
, stopped by the office to chase down some story or another. She and Harold struck up a conversation.
One thing led to another and the two began to hang out, a coalition built on mutual political interests—solidifed, naturally enough, at a political event.

But let him tell it: “Debra had been scheduled to participate in roasting Glen Maxey [the first openly gay member of the Texas Legislature] at a fund-raising dinner for the Lesbian Gay Rights Lobby at Scholz Garten, but she had to cancel at the last minute, so I filled in. Molly was emcee for the event, and she introduced me as a legislative aide for Debra Danburg, which, she said, was “just like being Murphy Brown's secretary.” (This popular and sometimes controversial 1990s sitcom was set in a newsroom where investigative reporter Murphy Brown was plagued by a string of hilariously inept secretaries, often portrayed by high-profile celebrities.)

“I started my speech by reading a mock letter from Danburg, which she'd supposedly written and which started out, ‘Dear Glen, I hate it that I couldn't be with you and LGRL tonight. I would have been there if I could, but I got another offer that sounded like more fun, so fuck you.' Molly decided that anybody who would say the f-word in public was A-OK in her book, so we stayed late, got drunk, and after that I was a regular.”

The friendship grew. Cook even made chili in Molly's kitchen, having learned to cook out of desperation and self-defense while a student at the University of Houston. Too broke to eat out and too proud to scrounge meals at his parents' house, he taught himself, delving into the kitchen bible of the '50s and '60s—the red plaid
Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book
. He particularly remembers an evening when he made chili for her.

“She kept standing over my shoulder and tasting stuff, suggesting more of this or more of that. I told her I don't like backseat drivers and to leave me the hell alone and let me cook my chili.”

Over the years the two spent time together in Marathon. She enjoyed piddling around, clearing cactus and moving rocks from point A to point B to make parking space. He became a piddling-around pal, primarily helping with the heavy lifting. Molly told Cook about wanting to build a writer's shack on the property, but acknowledged that because of her illness, the six-hour drive from Austin was just too much and she wouldn't use the house as much as she would have liked.

She decided instead to pool resources with her brother, Andy, for a place in the Hill Country village of London, only three hours away. They planned to
have a few chickens, maybe a cow or two, and a vineyard, the results of which would be an insouciant Chardonnay bottled under the label “Château Bubba.”

Molly offered to sell her piece of Marathon property to Cook because she felt he understood the spirit of the place and would care for it as she would have wanted. It would have been just like Molly to give it to him had Jan Demetri, her accountant, not intervened. Instead she sold it for the same sum she had paid for it several years before. Who knows how much it's worth now. But, once again, that was Molly.

Cook ponied up the cash, but they didn't even do a formal sale for at least another year or so—it was essentially a handshake deal in the best Texas tradition. There's an excellent chance that neither of them bothered with details long enough to find a notary public. Instead Molly insisted on a formal ceremony transferring “moral and spiritual responsibility for her property.” This not-so-solemn rite was performed up the road, at the home of Ty and Kate Fain. It was originally scheduled to take place at the actual property, but the peripatetic West Texas weather refused to cooperate. Instead, at a New Year's Eve gathering Harold placed his left hand on a
Texas State Directory
and pledged to take care of the place and continue the frivolity and ridiculousness Molly had initiated.

As it's turned out, he has indeed built the writer's shack that Molly envisioned. The porch is almost as big as the cabin—to accommodate a crowd of friends sitting around talking politics, laughing and telling lies, just as Molly would have wanted.

19

MOLLY LOVED BREAKFAST
. It was serious business, even if eaten at noon. As long as some egg incarnation was involved, it was breakfast. Breakfast for me usually arrived around noon-thirty and consisted of maybe a fried egg on spaghetti or a fried egg on a bowl of chili or a fried egg on whatever was left over from the preceding night—beef stew, baked chicken, lamb chops, or oh, Lord—pork chops.

For most of us scrambled eggs are scrambled eggs are scrambled eggs: fry the bacon, take it out, plop the eggs in, stir to the desired doneness, and flop the mass onto a plate.

Not so with Ivins.

One Sunday morning I awoke to earsplitting kitchen clatter. Curiosity prompted a stumble into the kitchen to identify the source of the noise.

When I arrived in the doorway, Mol was removing butter and cream from the fridge, followed by a quick detour to the little patch of chives she grew by the fishpond in her atrium. After chopping chives, she grated a little pile of Asiago cheese.

She had already brought six large eggs to room temperature. She then cracked them one by one, first into a small Pyrex bowl (lest one bad egg spoil the batch), then into a larger stainless-steel bowl.

Initially I thought this activity might be a prelude to crepes, but I didn't see flour. Rather than interrupt, I stood, puzzled. Counter space was filled with spoons, whisks, measuring cups, and bowls. This production, I soon learned, was the prelude to
ouefs brouille
—the French version of scrambled eggs.

In the context of Molly's everlovin' francophilia, the bustling started to make sense. One of the many things in which we concurred completely was the importance of taking all meals seriously.

When my daughter was in high school, she loved inviting friends over because she and I prepared cooked-from-scratch meals. We were living in the little town of Summit, New Jersey, where the parents of most of her classmates spent more for dinner than I made in a month. Her buddies couldn't believe it. I cooked every day for just the two of us. It was insane, but it was also my therapy. I often wonder if—or at least how much—our cooking together influenced her decision to become a chef. She had already decided to become a ballerina after seeing the Dance Theatre of Harlem perform. Little did I suspect at the time that she would actually eventually train at the DTH school, perform with the junior company, and go on to dance professionally with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She also became a chef in Cape May, New Jersey; Dallas, Texas; and Aspen, Colorado—where, after twelve years in a hot kitchen, she quit to become a bartender.

I think about that progression often, remembering typical weekdays that began before seven: make breakfast, go to work, get off at five, pick her up for the forty-minute drive to ballet class, return home, cook dinner, pick her up from ballet, eat, check her homework, and collapse into bed. As long as things went well at work, I could cook a daily meal. When things went wrong, I prepared several meals at a time to ameliorate borderline homicidal rage.

Hannah always knew whether I'd had a good or bad day by how vehemently I sliced and diced, each knife cut assigned to the head or throat of the offending supervisor. Once, after completing her homework, Hannah emerged from her room to find a different entrée on each of three of the four burners: chili, Puttanesca sauce, and chicken smothered in a three-onion gravy, one of those knuckle-sucking Southern recipes I learned from my father. I had half of a white onion, part of a red onion, and several green onions in the refrigerator. I chopped the hell out of all three. Hannah stood a safe distance away and weighed the wisdom of speaking.

“That bad?” she asked.

“That bad.”

“Okay.”

“I'll call you when dinner's ready.”

“Okay.”

I grew up in a household where we sat down to dinner together six days a week. My mother shopped almost daily for fresh vegetables. My father, one of seventeen children raised on a farm, bought our meat from a butcher. He brought it home midday if he came home for lunch. Otherwise my mother shopped at the family-owned grocery store near us. The butcher had a few false starts when he thought he could palm crap off on her, but then he saw the error of his ways and began selling a much-improved quality of beef, pork, and lamb.

So in the 1960s, when I lived in England, the daily shopping routine wasn't alien to me. I shopped every day because my husband, Eric, and I didn't have a refrigerator. Stopping at the greengrocer after popping in at the butcher's for chicken or chops was part of the routine. Molly didn't like for food to languish in the refrigerator either. She too had shopped daily when she lived in France, soaking up the language and loving the culinary wonderfulness that surrounded her. It never let her go.

As for the morning of Much Kitchen Noise: Molly's clatter, chive snipping, and cheese grating were deliberative, contemplative processes, clearly weighted toward the meticulous end of the cooking spectrum, unlike the Sweets version of scrambled eggs at the opposite end.

In the Sweets family version, scrambled eggs were prepared using the greasy bacon grease technique. It featured a mess of chopped green onions dosed with several hearty shakes of black pepper. Unscrambled eggs were unceremoniously dumped onto the wilted onions afloat in bacon grease in a very hot cast-iron skillet. The whole shebang went from skillet to plate in five minutes max. In the summer, sliced garden tomatoes and whole wheat toast were accompaniments, occasionally preceded by a wedge of fresh watermelon, cantaloupe, or honeydew.

And then there was Molly's interpretation:
oeufs brouille
.

So now six eggs are in the bowl on a big, heavy chopping board. The chives are in a little pile on one side of the bowl, and the grated cheese is on the other. Out comes a stockpot.

A stockpot? For six scrambled eggs?

To neutralize my by-now-palpable curiosity, Mol hands off a fresh loaf of brioche. Sometimes in the kitchen Molly was a woman of very few words. “Four slices,” she says.

I obey.

On this particular Sunday she is unusually short on conversation and just points to the knife stand. Knives have been recently sharpened—glory
hallelujah—and I set to work. Meanwhile Molly's
oeufs
preparation is coming up on the thirty-minute mark as imported unsalted butter sizzles in the stainless-steel bowl that she placed over the stockpot, which now contains boiling water—a double boiler on steroids, only instead of a narrow-sided saucepan on top, the bowl allows the eggs to be easily whisked and fluffed into creamy, buttery goodness.