Talking with My Mouth Full (10 page)

The next summer, by which point I had been working for Jeffrey for about four months, eight of us Canadians decided to rent a summer share house together in the Hamptons. We found a five-bedroom fixer-upper with a pool in Southampton on Craigslist and rented it every other weekend. The summer was great. We were in our early twenties and more or less single, not a care in the world.

Up to this point I had never seen Jeremy as anything but a friend. It was all perfectly platonic. But then one weekend toward the end of the summer, I came into the kitchen one morning and looked at him differently. Suddenly, I noticed how cute and sweet he was, how funny and easy to talk to, and I found myself attracted to him. We started flirting.

In early September, I ended up at his apartment very late one night. We sat talking until three in the morning.

Is he going to kiss me?
I kept wondering.

I thought there was something between us, but maybe I was reading it wrong. I got up to leave. I walked into the kitchen to put my water glass in the sink. I turned around in the dark and he was there.

We kissed briefly, and I left.

The next morning I woke up thinking:
What I have I done?
I wondered if I’d screwed up our friendship and if it would be awkward within our little group.

But I also liked him—a lot.

When I’d broken up with my Toronto boyfriend, I’d promised myself the next guy I dated would be a Man. When life got serious, none of the others could commit. I was only twenty-four, but still, I remember thinking:
The next guy I date is going to have direction. He’s going to know what he wants to do with his life. He will be a real live adult
.

Jeremy was not that guy. He was in grad school. He’d never had a long-term relationship before. He was a year
younger
than me. Plus, like I said, he thought I was a nerd.

For the first few weeks we dated, we did a lot of making out on the couch. Finally we had “the talk”—that “What is this?” conversation every man dreads and every woman wants to have immediately, or so they tell us in romantic comedies.

“What if I want to be with someone else?” he asked. “We’re not committed, right?”

I was surprisingly bothered by the notion of this. Still, we agreed that we weren’t fully together. We discussed how it would affect our group of friends if we broke up.

This went on for a few more months.

That winter, he went to Kenya with his family, and I remember missing him desperately. He called me when he stopped in Amsterdam on his way home. That’s when I realized: this was serious.

From the moment we met, he was so easy to get along with and made me feel so comfortable. All the men I’d been with before I’d gotten to know through the dating process. But Jeremy and I were already friends.

There was a lot of common ground. We were both Jewish Canadians with close-knit families. Both our mothers were the Woman in the Kitchen. They were both passionate and accomplished cooks. They both loved coming to New York to eat. They raised us in similar ways, with similar values. He also lived a block from where I was working, at Jeffrey’s, which was very convenient.

I’d left home, only to meet another Canadian.

Of course, my parents loved him. After all, how could they not love a man with such passion for old Jewish food? His favorites are kasha and knishes, the beiger the better. He also happens to love British food, which is, of course, also beige. Give him a pudding or a meat pie, and he’s happy. In London a few years back, he ate so many meat pies he got the sweats. He would eat bangers and mash every day if he could.

Still, my mother called him “cute but useless,” because he couldn’t help me procure a green card. “Couldn’t you at least find a
New York
Jew?” she asked. (Those visa issues would continue to haunt both of us for years.)

Meanwhile, the reality of my job with Jeffrey was both more and less glamorous than I imagined. Jeffrey walked around the apartment eating chocolate a lot of the day. I spent countless hours cleaning up wrappers and half-eaten chocolate bars, which he scattered everywhere (Valrhona 61% Le Noire Gastronomie was his preference).

But most days I would focus on learning everything there was to know about a specific food, like the story he once did on Medjool dates, for which I blended date shakes all day long. When we did an article on pizza, we tested pizza dough for months on end. We were tweaking the master recipe constantly. He got a Raytek laser thermometer that let him point at an oven from several feet away and read its internal temperature. He took me to every pizza place in the city. Most of the guys working the ovens were Mexican, not Italian. So it was up to me to translate our interviews about oven temperature and pizza-cooking methods. When he needed a reservation at El Bulli, my Spanish worked, too.

When Jeffrey wanted to translate a chocolate recipe by Pierre Hermé or a vegetable terrine from L’Arpège in Paris, my Canadian French education also came in handy.

The first article of Jeffrey’s I worked on was about the coveted (and overfished) bluefin tuna, the history and lore of
tunny
, as it’s known in Latin. The next was on U.S. cheese pasteurization laws. I learned about FDA food policy and food-borne illnesses like listeriosis. Pasteurization, heating milk to over 161 degrees, or aging it for more than sixty days, takes away some of the authentic and unique flavor of the cheese, but it also kills any possibility for food-borne illness, which is why the FDA insists all cheese in the United States is either pasteurized or aged.

We discovered that serious illness from raw-milk cheese is actually extremely rare in the United States. Most food-borne illness, like listeriosis, in this country comes from meat, especially deli meat and hot dogs. Listeriosis can be fatal. It attacks those with compromised immune systems, children, pregnant women, and the elderly.

We also learned in the course of our research that we Americans are probably too reliant on those “best by” dates. Packaged food has an expiration date stamped on it, and people think it’s like a clock: if it says February 17, then at midnight on that very day it instantly goes from good to bad. But experienced cooks know that judging by smell, taste, and sight is more important. I deplore neuroticism in the kitchen; as Jeffrey often preached, people have so many irrational phobias of food because they just do not understand the science behind it. With Jeffrey, fear of eating is not an option.

About a year into the job, Jeffrey traveled to Thailand for an article. When he returned, he brought me back a selection of insects from the night market in Bangkok and made me try them in front of him. One was an assortment of fried larvae. They were white, each about the size of an Advil, fried in peanut oil with salt. I’ll try anything once. They tasted like popcorn—crunchy, salty, and greasy. Not bad.

The larvae were not my first foray into the world of edible insects. When I was nineteen, I spent the summer in Australia with my roommate, Cami. On a small island off the northeast coast, I ate ants that the Aborigines revere. The last section of this kind of ant is bright green and contains vitamin C. That’s how the Aborigines avoided scurvy. Our guide encouraged us to eat some of those ants, and we did. No one got scurvy.

After Jeffrey’s Thailand trip, he made me search for weeks for the perfect mortar and pestle for his homemade Thai curry blends. I had to go to Chinatown about sixteen times. He sent me to Mexican restaurants, too. Nowhere in New York did the right one exist.

When Jeffrey returned from Palermo, in Sicily, he re-created a velvety pasta dish made with sea urchins that melted and became the sauce, served with chili flakes. It tasted like the sea—so good, in fact, that he decided to go diving for his own sea urchins off the coast of California.

Surprisingly, what you’re actually eating is the reproductive organ of the sea urchin. It’s orange and looks a bit like a tiny tongue. It’s best not to think of this, especially because it can be so delicious. At Nobu just weeks earlier, Jeffrey had introduced me to another amazing sea urchin dish, wrapped in shiso leaf, battered in tempura, and deep-fried.

For all I was learning, I was constantly on edge. Jeffrey believed in negative reinforcement. It’s so counterintuitive to the way most of us want to treat our children, our students. My generation has been taught that you reward good behavior—you make it hard to do the wrong thing and easy to do the right thing. Jeffrey believed you make a point of letting people know only when they do something wrong. That way, the reasoning goes, the mistake will be branded into their brain and they will not do it again. It’s like Pavlov’s dog, or mouse-zapping experiments. I hate to admit it, but it was effective.

Jeffrey’s motto was “Precision in word and thought.” Not that he was precise himself, which is the irony of it all. His house was a mess. He always had food on his shirt. Some days he subsisted on caffeine-free Diet Coke and dark chocolate. And yet he was constantly correcting others, especially their speech.

You could never say, “No problem.”

“Of course it’s no problem,” he would say. “You work for me.”

Instead I had to say, “You’re welcome.”

“Frankly” was poor grammar. You had to say, “to be frank.”

When I wasn’t being scolded, I was shopping and cooking. Jeffrey’s favorite lunch was to buy little chickens, poussin, from the Union Square green market and spit-roast them in one of his Roto-Broils. He liked Bread Alone’s levant bread with it. I would go to the market at least twice a week for these and whatever else was on our grocery list. And I would treat myself to chocolate milk from Ronnybrook Farms.

“Chocolate milk?” Jeffrey would ask. “What’s the occasion?”

“You don’t need an occasion for chocolate milk!” I would insist.

He found my love of chocolate milk absurd, even though he would drink caffeine-free Diet Coke all day, alternating with espressos from his bright green Francis Francis machine.

He always corrected people on the subject of New York’s “N. Moore Street.” He swears it’s not North Moore. It’s Nathaniel Moore, named after a revolutionary war hero. Recently, I corrected a girlfriend of mine who called it North Moore, and she sent me the link to an article about how the street used to be Nathaniel Moore and is now North Moore. But I take no pleasure in correcting Jeffrey. I have an allegiance to him. I always want to believe everything he says.

Often we would work on articles around the clock, and it would get him very stressed, as he was constantly scrambling to make his deadlines. We had our first and only true argument while working on an espresso article for
Vogue.
We had called in seventeen espresso machines from around the world, of various sizes and prices. I had to assemble them all and figure out which made the best espresso and why (always why). I had to test for various attributes, including power, water pressure, and packing of the grounds (tamping). (For the record, the key is in the pressure of the water moving through the coffee grounds. The more pressure shooting through the ground beans, the better the espresso. That’s why most cheap espresso machines don’t make great espresso; they aren’t powerful enough to create the necessary pressure.)

Jeffrey insisted on keeping me there testing espresso nonstop for days on end. He made me cancel my travel plans for Labor Day weekend. And after all of it, Jeffrey decided that it was basically impossible to make a good espresso unless you had a $10,000 professional upright Italian espresso maker with a brass eagle on top.

Jeffrey never makes anything easy, but he always leads you to the answer somehow. He always wants you to succeed, as long as he can first watch you stumble your way through it. Sometimes I felt like he knew the answers but had me do the research anyway, just so I would learn. A valuable lesson indeed.

When I was first working for Jeffrey, he had a local television show with Ed Levine called
New York Eats
. Ed is a fellow food writer who has also published a number of bestselling cookbooks and founded the blog Serious Eats, among other things. If Jeffrey was Charlie in
Charlie’s Angels
, Ed was Bosley. Besides Jeffrey’s wife, Caron, Ed was the only person who really understood Jeffrey and who was helpful and empathetic to his exasperated assistants.

Their show was innovative for its time; exploring three pieces of culinary news each episode, including a New York restaurant review, a guest chef cooking demonstration, and a product taste test. I spent countless hours hanging out with the two of them, calling in products or chefs for the show, and doing various bits of research. I particularly loved when once in a while Jeffrey would let me tag along for their restaurant reviews. They once took me for handmade soba noodles at the legendary and deeply missed Honmura An, where I learned that you were actually supposed to slurp, because it showed you were enjoying your meal. We ate hand-pulled soba in broth, made by a man sitting in a small glass room in the back, tempura, tea, sake, and Japanese pickles. The flavor of the soba was nutty. The noodles were soft but didn’t fall apart when I chewed them. The dashi (seaweed) broth was mildly salty and fragrant.

Ed was always the perfect foil, as I knew Jeffrey would scrutinize anything I said. Having Ed there allowed me to relax and not feel like I was under a microscope. I always knew Ed would come to my defense or defuse any tension.

Jeffrey also did an article about salt. We all need a certain amount of sodium to survive, and we need the iodine that’s often added to it. His question was: “Does each kind of salt have a specific taste, or does all salt taste the same?” A chemistry professor and
Washington Post
columnist named Dr. Robert L. Wolke, who wrote
What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained
, believed that salt is salt.

Minerals, he said, that are added to salt may change the flavor, but whether it’s coarse, fine, or sea salt, it all tastes the same no matter the shape or place of origin. All salt has the same saltiness. The only difference you taste is determined by the size of the grain and therefore the rate at which it melts on your tongue. A teaspoon of fine salt is saltier than a teaspoon of coarse salt, because there’s less air in it, more grains.