Talking with My Mouth Full (7 page)

I quickly grew disgusted by the thought of eating chickens. Eating an egg or a chicken at the dining hall was out of the question; it made me gag.

Looking back, I’ve had my share of bird-related trauma. When I was in kindergarten, we incubated duck eggs and hatched ducklings. We built a big cardboard house for them. The class would care for the ducklings for a month or so, and then they would be sent to a farm.

Each weekend some child in the class got to take the ducklings home to look after until Monday. Finally, my weekend arrived. One of them was the runt of the litter and was always struggling to keep up with the others. On Saturday my family went out for lunch. When we got home, I ran over to the duckling box. The runt was dead. I was devastated. This was the first time I had seen death firsthand.

My mother explained that the duckling wasn’t strong enough, that it would have happened anywhere. She placed it in a blue jewelry box and we buried it in the backyard. We had a little ceremony. I was terrified of going to school on Monday morning. How was I going to explain to the teacher that the duckling had died under my care?

And then there was Digger, my pet baby budgie, who somehow escaped from his cage in my room while we were all downstairs eating dinner and mysteriously drowned in the toilet, just a month after we brought him home. Again, I was beside myself.

Come to think of it, there have been a lot of dead birds in my life. But then there’s Toby—the one I like the least, who is bound to outlive us all.

So it was only fitting that I developed a strange relationship with these chickens in the
lol.
A funny thing happened a few weeks into my stay on the kibbutz. As my disgust grew to hatred, I started to eat chickens and eggs again, this time out of spite—and with determination. As they bit and pecked each other and me in the
lol,
I would think, “You stupid chickens! I’m going to
eat
you later!”

They weren’t raising chickens as meat on our kibbutz, just for their eggs, but on occasion we had to kill one or two if they got sick or injured. So I learned to kill chickens. The veterinarian taught me how to do it painlessly. You grab the chicken by the neck, turn it upside down, stretch it out, and make one sharp snap. It’s over in an instant.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoyed it a little. I loathed those chickens. They were such
animals.

And as awful as it sounds now, I needed to vent. I felt some remorse, but not much, because it wasn’t for sport. The birds I was killing were sick or hurt, and it was my job to put them out of their misery.

After about four weeks of this brutish job, where I was the only woman, picking eggs alongside my ex-boyfriend, I’d had enough of the chickens and the heartache and requested to be transferred. I was sent to the fields. It was liberating work, in fresh air—a huge relief from the stench of the chicken coop.

The field was lined with alternating rows of lychee and avocado trees. It was wonderful being in the sunshine, but outrageously hot, well over a hundred degrees. Whenever the heat overwhelmed me, I would seek refuge under an avocado tree with a handful of sweet, ripe lychees.

And every single day for breakfast and dinner, I would eat the same salad. The Israeli kids taught me how to make this kibbutz staple. Dice a tomato and a whole cucumber. Mix them with cottage cheese, salt, and pepper. I also would mix in a little mustard, with a fried or hard-boiled egg.

In the last weeks of our stay, I was transferred to the kitchen, where I worked as a dishwasher. The dining hall served several hundred people three times daily, which made for a lot of pots and pans to be scrubbed by hand. I did so for eight hours a day. After a while, it became a habit and I could completely tune out my brain, listen to music, or have time to just think.

But my last job in the kibbutz kitchen was my very favorite of all, as the “egg girl,” on breakfast duty. I began at four in the morning to prep for breakfast at seven. I made giant batches of pancakes, just as I would make crêpes years later at Le Cirque, and giant batches of scrambled or fried eggs, moving them quickly, methodically over a vast flattop grill, fifty or more at a time. I was basically a short-order cook, invaluable training for what was to come. I could pour myself into it and get lost in the action, temporarily forgetting my teenage angst.

It brought back the same feeling of magic that my childhood egg creations had so many years before. Now I worship eggs. My favorite way to eat them is with what we as children called soldiers: a soft-boiled egg in a little cup, with strips of buttered toast on the side.

Both my time in Israel and in Spain taught me a vital truth about young love: immersing yourself in a totally different world than your own is the perfect way to gain perspective on the troubles that plague you. When you travel, you don’t have the option of closing the door and weeping in your bedroom. You’re forced to push through it, to be in the moment and appreciate where you are. You’re not surrounded by the things that give you comfort. You don’t have your friends, your tub of ice cream, your favorite sweatshirt. Instead, you have new experiences; sweet, sour, salty, and serendipitous moments that become new memories, fresher and more powerful than those that came before.

Food is, naturally, an extension of this. Foreign flavors convey so many priceless lessons: discovery, elation, pleasure, nostalgia, comfort, and fear. The food of a new place teaches you so much about its culture. It offers a window into other people’s lives, history, and values. It allows you to see that the world is much bigger than you and your broken heart.

FIVE

Finding My Footing — and the Best Back Bacon

LUNCHTIME AT THE
Saint Lawrence Market. Hundreds of cheeses are stacked on top of one another—from France, Quebec, Vermont, and Ontario. At my dad’s favorite stall, there’s elk jerky, with a sign that reads,
IT’S NOT PRETTY . . . BUT IT’S GOOD.
Maple syrup. Giant ham hocks, slabs of back bacon (known outside Canada as Canadian bacon), and handmade sausages. Russian cabbage rolls. Greek stewed eggplant. Loaves of Italian breads. Wheatgrass. Beeswax candles and local honey. Belgian crêpes deftly poured by young women speaking Japanese. Steaming coffee. Tangy Canadian “triple crunch” mustard. Pickles and olives. Live lobsters. I eat a spicy, saucy Portuguese pulled-chicken sandwich on a roll. Or a huge container of spaghetti with hot peppers and vegetables. I walk the floor of the market, tasting everything, gobbling the noodles. Then I go back to work. By 3 p.m., loaded down with food, I am fast asleep at my desk.

During my last year of college at McGill, I started to take a more serious interest in eating. I starting writing restaurant reviews for the school paper and reading a lot of food magazines, for the first time feeling like they weren’t just for my mother.

Most of all I pored over the U.S.-published magazine
Food & Wine
, scouring the masthead to figure out who was who, trying to guess what each editor’s title actually meant, and dreaming about attending the annual
Food & Wine
Classic in Aspen: How awesome does
that
sound? My mother had offered to take me on a trip after graduation and it actually came down to Napa or the
Food & Wine
Classic. For whatever reason, we wound up in California—but the seed was planted to one day make it to Aspen.

Christmas vacation my senior year, a good friend of my parents gave us her New York apartment for a week. I’d been many times before, but this was the first time I was going as a “grown-up,” when I could go out alone with friends and navigate the city on my own. Still, my parents were with me, and I certainly let them take me out for nice meals. Our friend made us reservations at some of the city’s hottest restaurants. It was 1997.

Over the course of that week I had three meals I will always remember: The first was lunch at Balthazar. It had just opened and was at the height of its buzz, overflowing with energy. I was convinced everyone around me was a model, amazed at how the entire population of a restaurant could be that good-looking. I ate mussels and fries, a towering seafood platter, and profiteroles with chocolate sauce, poured tableside.

Another night we had dinner at Aquavit, which was also new. The young chef, Marcus Samuelsson, must have been only twenty-seven at the time. I sipped black-pepper aquavit and ate cured gravlax in the romantic room, all dressed up for the holidays.

Then we went to Vong, which had just earned three stars from the
New York Times.
Hailed as groundbreaking, this was Jean-Georges’s initial venture into Asian territory. It was the first high-end restaurant of its kind to demonstrate such an amazingly original mix of Thai and French flavors, and epitomized the 1990s New York dining scene.

It was dark, and the luxurious banquettes were more like private booths, covered in rich quilted fabric. The service was uncannily attentive. They served us a “white plate” with a selection of signature appetizers on it containing several ingredients I didn’t know: daikon, galangal, nam prik. There were fried duck spring rolls and delicate Vietnamese summer rolls. I returned from New York for my last semester of school inspired and determined to go back again soon.

Back in Toronto, living at home, I was feeling confused. Although I had learned a lot at McGill, academia didn’t prepare me for anything specific. It prepared me in some ways for the adult world: I grew as a person. I learned how to write, how to do research, and how to question. But I did not graduate with a set purpose.

At that fateful meeting with my family friend who helped me realize that “Eat. Write. Travel. Cook.” was actually a viable career plan, she also gave me more concrete advice, suggesting I try writing for lifestyle magazines. That made sense, but I had no idea how to go about getting such a job.

By coincidence, at a bridal shower the very next week my mother was seated next to a young woman who worked on the publishing side of
Toronto Life
, the city’s award-winning monthly magazine. She told her about me. The woman called my mother a few days later to say I should apply for an editorial internship.

I landed the position and soon realized writing about food was a job people actually had. It wasn’t just a pipe dream.

I edited and conducted research for the magazine’s listing pages, including theater, art, and restaurants. I spent a lot of time learning about copyediting and immersed myself in fact-checking. It’s sort of like being a private investigator, doing reverse research. When an article includes an address, say, 431 Smith Street, in a big brownstone on the north side of the street, it was my job to make sure that was the right address, that it was indeed a brownstone, that it was big, and in fact on the north side of the street. I loved the process, even though some of it was tedious. I liked re-interviewing subjects, finding flaws, and fixing them. It felt rewarding to improve the story or to debate the nuances of the way a sentence read.

Once while spending time in the magazine’s archives I found a food article that my mother had written some twenty years earlier. I was officially becoming my mother!

The food editor and the magazine’s restaurant critic became my idols. I was like a lost puppy following them around as much as they would let me, picking their brains and hoping they would eventually offer me their scraps. Finally, the magazine let me write. The first thing I published was a sidebar called “Rex Appeal,” about a new exhibit of dinosaurs at the Royal Ontario Museum. Eventually the food editor allowed me to do “$25 and Under” restaurant reviews and a feature reviewing the city’s best movie theaters, which meant I saw a movie every day for two weeks. Not exactly Pulitzer-worthy, but it was a start.

Not only was I learning about magazines; I was also learning about the Toronto I’d grown up in but never had a chance to explore as an adult. I loved Toronto, but I didn’t really come to know its ethnic communities and all it had to offer until I started working. It was invigorating and inspiring.

Even lunch when I was at
Toronto Life
was a thrill for me. The offices were right on Front Street, almost at the lakeshore, just two blocks from Toronto’s Saint Lawrence Market. It’s a covered market open every day, all year round.

I interned at
Toronto Life
for four months and then freelanced for them for another six, even after I got my next job, at the
National Post
. How I landed that one was total serendipity.

At summer camp, when I was thirteen, I idolized my beautiful camp counselor, Rachel. She was only four years older than me, but when you’re thirteen, that’s a huge difference—especially where your boobs are concerned. We stayed friends through the years and I always looked up to her.

Flash-forward to the summer of 1998. Shortly after moving home, I met my next boyfriend (this one not a musician, thankfully), and about three months into dating we decided to take a weekend trip to New York. Rachel, who had graduated a few years before, had moved to New York and gotten a job at
Marie Claire
. We had lunch and, again, she enthralled me. She had this wonderful magazine-world life in New York City.

Just a few months later media magnate Conrad Black announced he would launch a new national paper in Canada, aptly named the
National Post.
He poured boatloads of money into it. It was the biggest newspaper launch the country had seen in decades. And it had a glossy, full-color Saturday magazine, with entertainment, fashion, food, and arts coverage.

Black hired the smartest minds in politics, culture, sports, and art from around the country and around the world. Rachel was hired as an editor and moved back to Toronto to work there. She was on staff with her friend from
Marie Claire
, Colleen Curtis (who has come back to my life many times since, in ways I could never have anticipated), and Kate Fillion, a legendary Canadian author and journalist. Rachel tracked me down to tell me they were hiring and I jumped at the chance to work with her. At first I was hired as the Saturday magazine’s editorial intern.

Again, I felt drawn to the editor of the food pages. I wrote as much as I could for the section and as much about food as they would allow. The first food-related story I published with them was a sidebar about McDonald’s specials all over the world, like the lamb burger in India or the New Zealand “kiwi burger,” with an egg on top. Hey, it was a byline, right?

Another story I wrote was about the air service industry, and how much pilots, air traffic controllers, TSA agents, and flight attendants were paid. It showed that you needed very little education to get many of those jobs. Because of it, I got my first piece of hate mail. “How dare you belittle what we do?” They were appalled. “Who is this Gail Simmons?”

I took the letter to my editor. “Do we print a retraction?” I had fact-checked it, but I was still horrified I had upset someone.

“Frame it,” he laughed. “It’s great! You caused a stir. You provoked an emotion in someone. They read what you wrote and felt forced to respond. You made them think! That’s journalism.”

I take that advice to heart every day. In my life now I get angry emails and posts on blogs all the time. People go on for pages if they don’t like what I said about someone or a decision I made, a dress I wore, a meal I praised. I’ve read I have abnormally pointy ears, that I’m a witch, mean, racist, a stuck-up food snob, and countless other charming sentiments.

Whenever I read negative responses, I repeat this same mantra to myself: I still win, even if you don’t like what I did. You’re still watching the show. You’re still reading the magazine. You allowed yourself to be provoked and took time to act because of it. That’s what I call an attentive audience. It’s the ultimate reward: to know that people are listening. It then becomes a dialogue, which is the reason we do it in the first place.

Back then in Canada most of the major food media still came out of the United States. There is still no major food publication in the country, because Canadians read
Food & Wine
and
Bon Appétit
. When I was trying to figure out how to create a career for myself, all the big food jobs in Canada were taken by people in their forties and fifties, who weren’t going anywhere, because those jobs were cushy and rare.

After about six months at the
National Post
I was at a loss for what to do next. But I knew I still had so much to learn. So I went to the food editor, wide-eyed and hungry (literally), looking for guidance.

“If you want to write about food, you need to learn about food,” he said. “You need to know your beat. If you want to write about politics, you go to Washington. If you want to write about war, you go to the front lines. If you want to write about food, you need to speak the language. You need a point of view, a way to differentiate yourself. Forget about writing for a while. Go learn how to cook and how to eat.”

He was right. I researched culinary schools and a plan began to take shape. First I looked at the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York, but their programs all lead to associate or bachelor’s degrees. I knew that I didn’t want to be a chef in a kitchen, and I had just gotten out of school, so I didn’t want to go into a two-year program. That narrowed it down to two major schools in New York: the French Culinary Institute and the Peter Kump New York Cooking School. (Peter Kump was a major culinary figure in New York in the 1970s and 1980s; he was a close friend of James Beard and cofounder, in 1985, of the James Beard Foundation, along with Julia Child.)

A friend of a friend in Toronto had just come back from completing the professional program at Peter Kump’s and gave it a rave review. So it was decided. I applied and was accepted for spring admission.

Here was the chance I had been waiting for, the opportunity to realize my dream of living in New York. Sure, there was a good culinary school in Toronto, and several around Canada. But New York was my first and only choice, for the same reasons that it’s everyone else’s—I wanted to experience the energy, to be at the center of an industry I sensed was far more dynamic than what was available to me at home.

Despite the exciting prospects, I still had guilt about leaving. I was in a relationship of about a year and worried I was not giving it the chance it deserved. But my boyfriend loved New York, too. He was in the advertising industry and threatened to eventually move to New York as well. Then there was my brother Alan, who was still struggling. During the year I’d been home, I had been able to spend so much more time with him and, perhaps, helped ease the stress and worry my parents were carrying. But both my parents had left their childhood homes to pursue their own lives and careers, so they were very supportive of my aspirations. I rationalized that I would just go for the duration of the program—maybe a month or two more if I could get an internship or temporary job to solidify my experience.

New York, I knew, would give me that leg up I needed over my Canadian competition in the industry. Even a year in New York, with a prestigious cooking school degree under my belt and a few months of work at a high-profile publication, would make me a big fish in Toronto’s small food-media pond. Like Rachel before me, I could come back and have my pick of opportunities. Or better, perhaps I would gain the respect and knowledge I needed to start something fresh and new, something Toronto had never seen before.

I packed up my room in my parents’ basement. Two months from the moment the idea was planted, I was gone.