Talking with My Mouth Full (11 page)

Jeffrey conducted a study to try to prove Wolke wrong, but it didn’t really work. I said, “I hate to tell you, but I’m siding with Wolke on this one.” I’m not sure he ever forgave me for that.

The worst piece we worked on, at least as far as my wardrobe was concerned, was one on goose. Roasting a goose is an arduous process, as they are sizable animals. I was charged with cooking goose in various ways for a month, using methods and recipes from Escoffier to Alice Waters. I would brine each with cloves and anise, mark its skin, and then roast it.

Geese are fatty animals. In the cooking process you render more than a quart container of fat per goose. Jeffrey had a poor ventilation system in the apartment, and for articles like this I was in his home kitchen every day. The smell of roast goose penetrated my skin and hair, the way food used to when I worked on the line. Every night when I got into bed with Jeremy, even after I’d taken a shower, he would complain, “You reek of goose.” And I did.

To this day, I’m sure I’m the only person ever to attend a
Vogue
meeting with Anna Wintour with goose fat running down my Old Navy T-shirt and onto my Levi’s. Luckily, she never actually looked at me.

Jeffrey’s aged-meat story was pretty stinky, too. Rotting meat? Not appetizing. Lobel’s, a family-owned shop known at the time to be the best butcher in New York, would send down custom-cut porterhouse steaks for us to try to age ourselves, never successfully. I learned the hard way about butchering and dry- versus wet-aging.

Aging meat properly intensifies the flavor and tenderizes the texture. But it’s not an easy process. Jeffrey left town during this experiment, which meant there were steaks rotting on the kitchen counter while I was working in the loft. He insisted I should endure the smell in the name of science.

When the flies began to circle, I tried to cover the meat with a China cap (a conical mesh sieve) so it would still have access to air. It didn’t work.

Jeffrey called to check in.

“There are maggots in the meat!” I reported.

“So what?” Jeffrey said with a laugh. He thought it was funny.

“Maggots, Jeffrey!” I said. “I’m throwing it away. This was not in my job description.”

“Don’t be a Jewish princess,” he said. “This is vital research!” (I was the first Jew who had worked for him, and because he was Jewish, too, he loved calling me a Jewish American princess.)

Despite his over-the-phone protests, once the maggots took over, I threw that fetid meat away.

It was during the dry-aging meat story that I first met Tom Colicchio. His restaurant Craft had recently opened just around the corner. He was dry-aging his meat for twenty-eight days or more, which was rare for a chef to do himself in-house. Lucky for us, he agreed to age a few special cuts to various stages and hold taste tests at the restaurant for the article. Most people only age meat up to twenty-one days, if they dry-age it at all, because of various FDA regulations and the cost and space needed to do so.

When you dry-age for that long, the meat loses water, so you lose product. For every ten-pound piece of meat, you lose a pound or so of weight. It’s an expensive process. This doesn’t happen when you wet-age meat, as the meat is sealed in an airtight bag or container; it retains the moisture but you definitely sacrifice flavor. Through the course of our research we discovered that twenty-eight days of dry-aging is optimal and delicious. The meat’s flavor is intensified and the texture is still silky smooth. But past that stage and it starts to taste “high,” slightly rotted and past its prime.

Dry-aged steak wasn’t our only indulgence. Jeffrey was proud of being an elitist. And working for him, you could not help but become somewhat of an elitist, too. At least it was hard not to get used to very expensive food.

One month, Jeffrey and I worked on a story about caviar. Until then, I had known little about caviar, except that it was expensive. I certainly had never had the chance to sit with twenty different brands of caviar and one big spoon! As Jeffrey and I worked on his caviar story, I learned about the politics of the Caspian Sea, about overfishing and why caviar was so expensive and desired. (Now you can get good American-raised caviar, but for centuries all good caviar was Russian or Iranian.)

Caviar is traditionally served as part of a service, with parsley, chopped egg, and shallots, on a toast point of some sort. But Jeffrey made me a purist. I came to understand that you don’t need or want anything to interfere with the flavor and texture of really good caviar. Why would you put all that stuff with it? The texture of caviar is the most sublime part. You want to feel every perfect round sphere, taste the saline and fat pop in your mouth.

What you put it on matters, too. You don’t want a dry, hard cracker, because it will overwhelm the texture of the fish eggs and ruin the experience. That’s why blinis are their most popular accompaniment. They’re soft and pillowy.

Best is to indulge in it simply with a mother of pearl spoon (metal reacts with caviar and turns it bitter). At the end of the article, Jeffrey gave me dozens of jars of caviar to take home, as he had eaten his fill and needed a break.

I didn’t. Jeremy and I gorged ourselves every night for a week. I never burned out on caviar, like I did with goose. But for reasons more complex than extended research for a
Vogue
article, I did completely go off black beans.

Twice when I was in college, I had black bean soup and got sick. Once on a date I ordered it and thought I liked it, but the next day I was rolling around in bed, ill. Maybe it was food poisoning, but at the time all I could think was that black beans just did not agree with me. I felt achy and feverish. A year or two later, I had black bean soup at another restaurant. The next day, again, I was nauseous.

Then just over ten years ago, on Labor Day weekend, Jeremy and I were on our way home from the Hamptons and stopped to grab some food. We ended up at a Cuban restaurant downtown. I had a grilled chicken sandwich with black beans. The next day I woke up incredibly sick. I lived on saltines for what seemed like forever. The first day that I felt like myself was Tuesday, a full week later.

My father called around eight in the morning from South Africa, where he had been visiting family. He had some time to kill at the airport before his flight took off. We chatted away, and I lost track of time. Finally, I looked at the clock. “Dad! I’m late for work! Sorry, I have to go.” We said good-bye, and I jumped in the shower and flew out of the house. It was around eight forty-five, and I knew I would be a few minutes late.

I started running north on Seventh Avenue, and at some point I noticed that everyone was milling around in the streets, looking confused and staring south. I hadn’t put my glasses on yet and was more or less blind without them. I asked a stranger, “What’s going on?” He pointed south with a blank look on his face. A plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers.

What a crazy accident,
I thought.
I have to get to work
.

I ran east on Eleventh Street to Sixth Avenue and suddenly heard screaming. A second plane had hit the second tower. A woman standing next to me on the street started to vomit.

I continued running. I barged into Jeffrey’s, four minutes late. I was hoping that he would still be asleep when I got there, as was often the case, but that morning he was not there. He had left the TV on, showing the news.

I picked up the phone and called my mother. Two minutes later I wouldn’t have gotten through, because the phone lines in New York City were overloaded and about to go down, but she picked right up.

“Mom!” I said. “Something is happening. Planes just hit the World Trade Center.”

“What’s the weather like?” she asked, instinctively.

“What do you mean?” I replied, thinking she wasn’t taking this seriously. “It’s a beautiful, clear day.”

“Terrorism,” she responded immediately. “It’s a terrorist attack.”

That was the first time such a thing even occurred to me. As it turned out, Jeffrey had gone to the corner to watch the events of the morning unfold.

I don’t eat black beans anymore. I know it’s not rational, but I associate black beans with getting sick, and then with September 11, the day New York City fell apart.

We had been testing coq au vin for Jeffrey’s November 2001 column. Coq au vin, I discovered at the start of our research, was first created to make the best use of old roosters. Wine is used in the marinade, as well as the cooking process, to tenderize and then braise the tough bird so it is edible.

We needed a lot of roosters, and I set up a good system for managing them. I found a chicken purveyor in Brooklyn who could deliver a steady stream of freshly slaughtered roosters to Jeffrey’s apartment. There are several stages to making coq au vin. I had roosters coming in every day, and I would prepare them to marinate overnight in wine, vegetables, and herbs, and make stock from any unused parts. (We only braised and ate the dark meat, as the breast would dry out, which Jeffrey did not find suitable.)

Meanwhile, I would braise a second batch and finish the sauce, vegetables, and noodles to serve with it, for a third. The birds were in constant rotation as we tweaked and worked out the perfect recipe. We were well into this process on September 11.

My impulse that day was to be with my family. But Jeffrey’s reaction, I assume because he was afraid and anxious, was: “We’re not going anywhere.” The world was crumbling around us, and we were stuck in his apartment, cooking roosters.

Jeremy was still in graduate school at NYU at the time, and asleep at his apartment a block away when I got to work. I spent what felt like hours trying to call before I was finally able to wake him up. We met on the corner for five minutes. I could not leave for much longer. I could not check on my friends. Jeffrey didn’t want to be alone. And he had a stoicism about him: “We will stay here and cook these fucking roosters!”

Finally, at around seven that evening I declared, “I’m going home.” I went to Jeremy’s house and gave my own apartment to Brandon, the close friend who had introduced us, and his family, who had been evacuated from their Tribeca home. I couldn’t leave the country, because my visa was about to expire. Jeremy had a car and was going to drive up to Montreal to be with his family, as it was just before the Jewish high holidays. On the way, he dropped me off at my cousin’s in Katonah, New York. I needed desperately to get out of the city for a while, to try and make sense of what I had witnessed.

I came back a few days later and continued cooking those roosters. We cooked them right through the search and recovery. We poured ourselves into the project, partially to distract ourselves from the terrifying reality that was unfolding around us. Old roosters are tough. You need to do a lot of work, marinating and braising them to make them tender, but once you do they are delicious.

We hadn’t thought about what to do with the copious amounts of coq au vin and separately roasted breasts that were left over when we were done. Even with our commendable appetites, and the help of a friend or two who would come by for a snack, we could barely make a dent.

Fortunately, around that time, the chefs from Balthazar organized a truck that picked up food from local restaurants to bring to the recovery workers at Ground Zero. And so, at the end of each day, I would lug over our vats of coq au vin for delivery. Suddenly all the work we put into cooking those roosters felt worthwhile again. The smell of the red wine and the taste of the meat and vegetables nestled in their cooking liquid are burned into my memory of that period, too, only in this instance, as a source of comfort and solidarity.

Going to work for Jeffrey was a substantial trade up from the kitchen. It kept my hands dirty and immersed, it allowed me to stretch my mental skills as well as my knife skills. But shortly after the coq au vin experience, I realized it was time for me to move on.

Jeffrey resisted my efforts to leave him, as he does with all his assistants, but ultimately relented and even gave me a good reference. Over the two years of our work together he had exposed me to so much great food and to the most talented people who make it. For this I am forever in his debt.

When I was working for Jeffrey, people were outrageously generous to me. They took pity on all the girls who worked for him. They knew it was a trying and intense position, and most of all isolating, as it was just the two of us alone in his home for hours every day, much of which he spent writing. They also knew that if we had worked for Jeffrey and survived, we had to have half a brain in our heads. The roster of chefs and top food authorities he worked with and in turn introduced me to was staggering—from acclaimed French chef Paul Bocuse to culinary scientist and author Harold McGee and beyond.

I didn’t lack for interviews once I started looking for a new job. But the publishing industry was unsettled after 9/11, and the economy was rocky, to say the least.

I made it through three rounds of interviews at
Martha Stewart Living
. I even cooked for the senior food editors in their test kitchen for a day, but I didn’t get the job. I was offered a position editing the
Eat Out
guides for
Time Out New York
, but they couldn’t help with my much-needed work visa, and besides the pay was miserable, even by magazine publishing standards. I met with then-editor-in-chief of
Bon Appétit
, Barbara Fairchild, whom I’d worked with a few times on projects for Jeffrey and who had once mentioned in passing, “Call if you ever need anything.”

I took her up on it. I took everyone up on it! We went out for drinks and she read all my clips, but
Bon Appétit
had no jobs either, especially not for a kid from Canada without a green card. I interviewed with Joe Bastianich, a famed restaurateur and Mario Batali’s business partner, who offered me a job as his assistant and PR manager, but he was hesitant to deal with my visa issues as well. Who could blame him?

The red tape involved with getting a work visa in the United States when the country felt so vulnerable, even for Canadians, was more than a little intimidating to people at the time, and not worth most companies’ efforts, especially for a junior position.