Talking with My Mouth Full (21 page)

We joke sometimes when we are eating a particularly delicious meal that he wishes he’d married the girl who just ate salad. He’ll say: “Just once can’t you be one of those girls who only eats a bite out of her food and lets her husband finish the rest?”

He insists we should not split food 50-50, but instead 60-40, because he is a big person and I am a medium-sized person. I suppose he’s right. But I’m hungry.

Given how my mother raised me, it should be no surprise that I married a man who is my gustatory equal. When I was about six, artist Judy Chicago’s famous exhibit
The Dinner Party
, an installation featuring a banquet table with settings designed to represent important women in history, was touring and my mother went to see it in Toronto. She was greatly moved.

Afterward, she came to pick me up from school. She was so inspired that she asked me a question she’d always said she wouldn’t ask her daughter: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I want to be a dental hygienist,” I said proudly.

“Why not a dentist?” she asked.

“
Mom
, men are dentists,” I explained to her as though she was being ridiculous. “Women are dental hygienists.”

Well, as you can imagine, she lost her mind. I got the lecture of my life. She made it clear to me that I could do anything I wanted to do, including become a dentist. And that my career options should never be limited by my gender. Whether or not that was or ever will be completely true remains to be seen, but it is an important dream to instill in young women.

My mother was fiercely independent, and she instilled in me that same drive. She wasn’t preachy, but she always insisted that women needed to make their own money, especially because her own mother was so dependent on her husband. If my mother hadn’t had children, maybe her career would have gone in a different direction. I don’t know what she sacrificed to have us. She worked my whole life, but she certainly made specific decisions that allowed her to work from home and raise her family.

I never did become a dentist, although I did go into a field that’s male-dominated. I credit my mother with giving me the courage to strive for both a career and a fulfilling personal life.

My parents have been married for more than forty-five years. So you can imagine how overjoyed they were when Jeremy eventually proposed.

One of Jeremy’s and my favorite neighborhood restaurants in August 2007 was, appropriately enough, called August and was located around the corner from our apartment. The chef at the time was a young guy named Tony Liu. In the tiny universe that is the culinary world, he’d worked for Daniel Boulud just before I was there, and then for Mario Batali at Babbo.

We ate dinner at August on occasion, but it was their weekend brunch that we especially loved. Jeremy and I would sit in the glassed-in courtyard and linger over coffee on lazy Saturdays, eating whatever creation Tony and his wood-fired oven would dream up for us. There was always some sort of baked eggs with chorizo, or basil and fresh tomato sauce, fluffy German pancakes with black currants, delicate gravlax with soft scrambled eggs and dill. Tony would make golden hash browns the size of hockey pucks that would sit up in the window of the kitchen, and it was all I could do not to grab them as I was walking to our table. Tony’s menu highlighted regional specialties from all over Europe, from house-made Irish corned beef to Spanish
calçots
(wild spring onions often blackened on an open fire and served with romesco sauce).

My favorite was his Welsh rarebit: hearty dark rye toast slathered with a sauce made from cheddar, strong mustard, and ale, served with a fried egg on top and a side of cornichons.

How could it not be? Mustard is my favorite condiment. Eggs are my favorite food. Cheese—obviously. Beer—adds bite. It’s in my personal Food Hall of Fame.

I’d been traveling through California for ten days—from LA to San Francisco, and for several days to Sonoma for an event with the
Top Chef
Season 2 winner, Ilan Hall—and returned home on a Friday night exhausted. We had dinner with Sonia, who still worked with me at
Food & Wine
, and drank a bottle or two of wine. I was so tired that I collapsed into bed without washing the makeup off my face.

I woke up the next morning and remember feeling so grateful that I had nothing to do for a whole weekend. In my half sleep, I rolled over to nuzzle under Jer’s arm and I hit something. I thought it was the phone or the TV remote, and I batted it away. Then I opened my eyes.

Jeremy was wide awake. His eyes were huge and alert. I looked down and saw that in the bed beside me was a small box. He started talking nervously. Words were falling out of his mouth. I barely even heard what he said. I opened the box and there was a ring. I was in such shock, I blurted, “No!” from surprise.

“No?” he said, startled.

“No! I mean, yes!” I said. “Yes! Yes!” I cried, still disoriented from sleep, and put the ring on my finger. It was so beautiful and feminine and perfect. I looked up at him, happy, and he started to laugh.

“What?”

“You might want to look at yourself.”

I went to the bathroom and saw black streaks of mascara running down my face; my hair was sticking up at all angles.

I cleaned myself up, went back to bed, and he said, “Don’t move. Just stay here.”

We lay in bed, beaming, for a little while and then the doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it,” I insisted, putting on my bathrobe.

When I opened the door, there was a man standing outside with a huge box. I took it from him and it almost knocked me down, it was so heavy.

Inside was a full breakfast delivery straight from Tony at August. Since they have a wood-burning stove, they cook everything in cast-iron skillets. They hadn’t transferred anything into to-go containers. Instead, they had just piled the skillets into this box and had it couriered over. There was my beloved Welsh rarebit, and so many other treats, enough food for at least three meals. We made it last the whole day, laid out like a picnic on our living room floor.

Twenty minutes later, the doorbell rang again. Two deliverymen arrived bearing vases full of flowers; huge peonies, dahlias, roses, and hydrangeas. They lasted for days.

It occurred to us that now we had to actually get married. We had a lot of anxiety about the wedding, partially because both of our mothers had strong feelings about the subject. Jeremy’s mother hated the cookie-cutter traditions of a formal wedding. She also hated how much they cost and thought it was frivolous to spend huge amounts of money to get married. My mother, too, would go on and on about how huge weddings were unnecessary. She often said she wished we would just elope.

For the most part, we agreed. We didn’t want a gratuitously over-the-top affair. It was overwhelming to conceive of dealing with the seemingly endless details a wedding required, the politics, the invitations, the family drama. We wanted none of it. Just a small, personal ceremony. But we also realized we really wanted to celebrate with all the people we loved. In the end, our wedding was a celebration, a great party that we made our own, but it did take some doing.

First, there was the matter of the dress. Throughout the years Jeremy and I were living together, Aunt Linda was impatient. She wanted a wedding! From the moment I was born, she was looking forward to shopping for my wedding dress. When the time finally came, she was over the moon, and my mother was happy to hand over the job.

By contrast, my mother never cared much for fashion or frills. I actually didn’t care for them either until I moved to New York and discovered that the city was basically a glorified shopping mall.

So, this was Linda’s moment. She said to my mother, “Renée, don’t say a thing. This is my job.” They came to New York together, with my mother-in-law in tow, to pick out the dress with me.

I wanted the simplest design, nothing strappy or poufy. We had decided to get married the following August, in New York. It was going to be excruciatingly hot. I tried on maybe fifty dresses. The one I picked—we found it at Carolina Herrera—was the only one that came remotely close to what I had envisioned. It had a delicate grosgrain ribbon at the plunging neckline and the bodice was made from flowing layers of silk in a summery Swiss dot pattern, but otherwise, it was the simplest possible dress. Most importantly, it got Linda’s approval.

The wedding itself, for all our internal stress leading up to it, was informal and comfortable. We held the ceremony and reception at The Foundry, a restored metal foundry in Long Island City, Queens, right across the Queensboro Bridge from Manhattan. It had a lush back garden and views of the New York City skyline.

We had a traditional Jewish ceremony, more or less, but many other aspects of the typical American wedding didn’t feel quite right for us. We didn’t have bridesmaids and groomsmen, although my nieces and nephew did the most incredible job as our flower girls and ring bearer. Never, I’m convinced, has a ring been carried so well. We didn’t have a first dance. Ironically, considering my job, we didn’t even have a cake!

Jeremy and me with my parents, on our wedding day

(
Photo courtesy of Tara Donne
)

It will come as no surprise that food was the most important detail. For our rehearsal dinner, we served barbecue from Daisy May’s, a take-out spot in Hell’s Kitchen. The owner is an alumnus of Daniel. It’s my father’s absolute favorite, and ours, too. The meal was casual, a buffet of sticky ribs, Texas-style brisket, fresh corn smothered in sharp cheddar, mashed sweet potatoes and collard greens, beer-can chicken, and smoky beans.

For the wedding reception itself, Jeremy and I spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted to serve. There’s a lot of bad wedding food out there. We wanted it to be personal and unconventional. Most of all, we wanted it to be good. We felt it fitting to take advantage of the abundance of local summer ingredients, so the food could speak for itself. Of course, the best person for this job was Daniel Boulud.

Jeremy, Daniel, his catering manager, and I sat down to craft the menu in the bar at his flagship restaurant. Jeremy and I already had in our heads an idea of what we wanted. But I knew you could not tell Daniel what to do. The truth is: he will figure out how to do what you think you want better than you could ever imagine yourself.

It is true that if given the opportunity, Daniel would put foie gras and caviar on everything. He has a penchant for rich French ingredients, but he is a genius, and I was ready to suspend any doubts.

This took some explaining to Jeremy. He was worried about all the ingredients Daniel was suggesting. He was concerned it would be too fussy for some of our guests and argued that several of our family members and friends weren’t as ambitious in the culinary department as we were.

“Figs with fish?” Jeremy balked at this incongruous-sounding suggestion from Daniel. “Our friends will freak out!”

“The man is a master,” I explained. “We need to trust him.”

Jeremy relented, and we wisely gave ourselves over to Daniel’s vision.

The menu was the most colorful and plentiful I’d ever seen. I’m biased, of course, but I think it was objectively spectacular. It achieved all we had hoped for, indulged our beloved guests, and celebrated our appreciation for the summer bounty.

We seated everyone at long communal tables in the garden courtyard. We designed the meal to be eaten family style, with people sharing and tasting food off one another’s plate.

The four-course meal began with three chilled soups, alternating on the table so everyone could sample to the left and right: minted pea velouté with rosemary cream, corn puree with sautéed zucchini, and tomato gazpacho with basil oil and cucumber.

This was followed by a feast of seven fresh summer salads: sucrine lettuce with shaved crudités and lemon olive dressing; traditional ratatouille with grated Parmesan; artichokes
barigoule
with basil; Satur Farm red, golden, and candy baby beets; Hawaiian hearts of palm with avocado; heirloom tomatoes with
pistou
; creamy ricotta with garlic crostini. The salads were paraded out on large platters and placed in the center of each group of six.