Stuffed (16 page)

CHOPPED EGG

Thursday was Mattie’s night off and when we lived in New York, since my mother didn’t cook, we’d eat at my grandmother’s. Then we moved to the suburbs and that was too long a drive. So we’d take the car to Shantung in that precursor of the Banana-Sonoma mall, the local shopping center. Mom would order a Sidecar, an amber cocktail made with brandy, Triple Sec, and lemon juice, and we’d start with ribs.

But as my sister and I grew diet-conscious, Thursday night dinner shifted to North Shore Steak House on Northern Boulevard. Restaurant families tip everyone. They tip well. They know firsthand how hard the work is and how often customers under-tip. Even when the service is rotten, restaurant families overtip. In addition to the waiter, they tip the captain, the maître d’, and always the most neglected person—the one who, if he does the job right, is invisible, the one who works hardest for least—the astonished busboy who’d sometimes bow when Dad pressed two dollars in his hand.

There’s a heightened alertness, ions get cranked when restaurant people walk into a restaurant. Restaurant people instinctively recognize each other. At North Shore we’d get the best table (you can see everybody, everybody can see you, not near the kitchen, the entrance or the powder rooms) and the best waiter, Jim, who nodded his head when we ordered and said, “Very good, Mrs. Volk.” When we ate out with Dad, we’d tell him what we wanted and he would speak to the waiter: “My wife will have . . . My eldest daughter would like . . .” But when no man was present, we ordered individually. Mom had the pork chops with applesauce, my sister and I, the sliced steak. The house salad, iceberg tossed with Romaine, was sixties predictable. It was the dressing that set it apart. White, acidic, garlicky, and full of Dijon mustard, it didn’t slide off the leaves. It was clingy and piquant. Piquant is too rare a sensation in food. For echt piquancy, nothing can touch the Welsh rarebit sandwich at the counter of the Fountain Restaurant in Fortnum & Mason with its molten Day-Glo cheese. Listed on the menu under Toasted and Savory it is extreme piquancy, involving everything in the oral cavity in a head-on collision. The tongue curls. The palate throbs. The gums hum. You feel it in your teeth.

I was sixteen the day I came home from school and found Mom in the kitchen. She’d never made dinner except for Sunday bacon and eggs. But there she was lifting lids, sniffing, stirring. She’d tied one of Mattie’s white aprons over her Gino Paoli knit suit that would someday be mine.

“I’m making dinner!” she said. “Wash your hands! It’s almost six!”

No matter what was going on in our lives, we sat down to the table at six. Watches were synchronized. One minute late was not tolerated. You had to be in your seat with your napkin in your lap at six
exactly.
That was when the food was so hot it still sizzled. That was when it was timed to be served. No one could start eating until everyone was seated. If you weren’t at the table at six on the dot, people would have to wait for you. Keeping hungry people waiting for food was unforgivable. Treating Mattie’s labor with indifference was unforgivable too. No one should have to eat cold food just because
you
lost track of time playing strip poker in your boyfriend’s basement.

“What are you making?” I asked my mother.

“Veal Stroganoff,” she said.

At six we congregated in the breakfast room. Mom carried in the silver well and tree. The well and tree, a wedding present from Aunt Gertie, had three parts. The wells on the sides cradled side dishes—the vegetables and starches. The concave tree in the center was for the main course. Whenever my father sliced steak or roast beef and put it in the tree, the juices ran down the concave branches and puddled in the root ball. He would soak them up with bread, then feed some to my sister and me. It was hot, blood-soaked white bread, softer than cotton candy. When Dad carved, he stemmed drips off the carving board with white bread dams. Those we ate too.
Jus lie
was good for you. It “built you up.” My friend Steve’s mother used to juice raw steak for him. He started every day with a glass of blood.

Mom stood at my left with the well and tree. I tonged some beans on my plate, spooned a little rice, then covered it with the Stroganoff. It was a creamy café-au-lait color.

My sister helped herself, then filled Mom’s plate. When she returned from the kitchen, Mom brandished her napkin and we dug in. I stabbed a strip of the veal. I put it in my mouth. I looked sideways at my sister. She was looking at me. There was no way we could swallow it. Something was terribly wrong.

I pressed my napkin to my lips. The only taste in the world, besides medicine, the only
food
taste I couldn’t stand, that even the thought of made me gag, was licorice. Licorice meat?

“What are you
doing
?” Mom said.

“Taste it.”

She took a bite.

“My God!” she said.

In the kitchen, she reread the recipe. She checked the spices and sniffed the sour cream. “I don’t know what it could be, girls,” she said. Then she examined the bottle of white wine she’d grabbed to stew the meat in.

RICARD ANISETTE, the label read.

We headed for North Shore. Over steak and pork chops, we laughed about Mom’s
Veau Ricard.
She didn’t cook dinner again for thirty years.

Now I love her cooking. Like all things Mom decides to do (taking up tennis in her forties, then whipping me, going for a master’s degree at sixty-four), she does it with style and commitment. She researches. My favorite dishes are Aunt Renee Birns’s Chicken Curry and Mrs. Brill’s Cabbage Soup. No one can make a burger as crusty on the outside and rosy on the inside as she can. My mother is a world-class
searer.
She seals the juices in a fragile carapace of carbon. She can
hear
when the pan is ready. Her chopped egg is her brother’s favorite food in the world.

“Darling,” he says, thrilled, “you made this for
me
?”

She mounds it in the caviar server, then circles it with Ritz crackers. “All for you, Bob.”

He eats it up, piling the crackers high. Years later, when he’d lost his sense of taste, he’d eat it anyway, loving it from memory. “Audrey darling, this is terrific,” he’d say.

Mom’s trick with chopped egg is chopping the mayonnaise and salt into the eggs
while they’re still warm
using a double-bladed mezzaluna
in a wooden cutting bowl.
She doesn’t overchop, so the whites are still squeaky. Don’t bother making Mom’s chopped egg if you’re going to practically purée it or chop it in a Pyrex bowl. It won’t taste the same. Do microscopic bits of wood get into the egg? Does ancient mayonnaise leech out from the wood?

Whenever we went to Long Beach, she’d make chopped egg sandwiches and wrap them in waxed paper. The eggy mayo would soak into the warming Wonder Bread and turn it yellow. But the real taste of Long Beach was a hot dog at the Roadside Rest. Or a sloppy, flappy burger piled high with mayonnaisey slaw and a slab of tomato at the Texas Ranger. I’ve tried to duplicate the taste of a Rangeburger, but you need a greasy griddle and it’s hard to find meat that cheap.

I started going to Long Beach the July I was born. My parents would rent a house, and my grandparents would rent one next door. Then my great-grandparents would move in with them. In summer we duplicated our four-generation Manhattan Diaspora by the Atlantic. I would sleep under mosquito netting and watch the light stream through the swirling dots of dust. I would pour orange juice into my milk and cereal and pretend it was a Creamsicle.

In Long Beach what we ate still came from the store. Not that we ate the prepared food, good as it was. Restaurant families rarely do. They have their own tastes. Homemade recipes are too labor-intensive for a popular restaurant. No good chef has the time to cook everything
à la minute.

Morgen’s kind of kitchen has vanished. Santos, the head chef, could make anything. The trend in fusion cooking today combines two cuisines. Santos kept his cultures pure. He cooked what was called a continental menu. Each foreign dish was made strictly the way it was made in its country of origin. The inventiveness came from the inventory, the repertoire, how many main courses you could make and what would accompany them. There were the usual Diamond Jim Brady prime ribs, steaks, chops, and seafood. Customers counted on standbys. But Morgen’s was also the United Nations of food. The dinner menu from Wednesday, June 3, 1981, lists eighteen foreign specialties of the day plus the usual thirty-six entrées. Vichyssoise was on tap. Polynesian Chicken with Javanese Coconut. Duckling Montmorency, Swedish Salmon in Aspic with Mustard Sauce, Steak à la Deutsch, Veal Piccata, Shish Kebab à la Turque, Calves Liver Veneziana with Noodles Sienna, Curried Scallops with Rajah Rice, Fillet of Sole au Fruits de Mer, a giant, unfinishable slab of mittel-European meat called Gedampte Rinderbrust, and my all-time favorite menu listing, unleashing the virtuosity of his menu muse, Dad’s take on chicken soup: Essence of Young Fowl with Matzo Dumpling.

We love
savoureux—
food with plenty of taste. We appreciate subtlety, but we like to spring a food’s energy. The difference between salt added before cooking, during cooking, and after cooking is oceanic. The difference between
salts.
We tune food. Just because something’s good, doesn’t mean more of it is better. All cooking is a pas de deux between complements and contrasts. How do you wring the most out of a radish? How do you fry an egg so the border is crackling brown lace? What does sugar do for tomatoes? How much vinegar do you add to the honey so it tastes more like honey than honey without vinegar?

My mother was home for dinner, but four lunches a week she was on the floor, working the line. She and Dad were a team. Mom, the elegant beauty in the fabulous Donald Brooks, Geoffrey Beene, or Bill Blass for Maurice Rentner. Dad, Clyde Beatty in the center ring. They orchestrated fifty tables, the bar, 194 customers, 16 waiters, 16 busboys, 1 captain, 1 manager, the hatcheck girl, and Miss Car-lotta, the riveled attendant in the ladies’ room. At lunch, when the place was rocking, they used a code of hand signals to signify “Get a busboy to clear the deuce at six!”, “Table twelve needs a check!” Or Mom would raise three fingers above the crowd, and Dad would raise three back if he had a “three” and she’d release the next clot of customers from behind a red velvet rope.

No matter how long the line was, Mom would say, “Only five minutes!” when customers asked about the wait. And because she was so glamorous, so charming, people rarely grouched when it stretched to thirty. Turnover was key. If lunch went from 11:30 to 3:00, you could turn a table three, sometimes four times. Saturdays, after he’d closed the books, Dad would say, “Audrey Elaine, we did our best lunch ever Thursday!” My sister and I would grin. Another Morgen’s record broken.

This is how they met: “I was sixteen, visiting my friend Edna in the building,” Mom says. “And she read a letter she’d received from a boy who was going to the University of West Virginia. It wasn’t a romantic letter, but it was such a no-nonsense and poetic letter, and I hadn’t realized that boys could write interesting letters. I just felt they wrote about themselves playing football or jumping or something, and this was really an
interesting
letter. And I knew enough to know that this was somebody who could make life very, very important. So I said to Edna, ‘Boy, I’d love to meet him.’ And she said, ‘His family has just moved into the building. He’s away at school, but his sister, who is our age, is in the building, and you’ll meet her,’ and shortly thereafter I did. And I didn’t know how to get an introduction to her brother, so I suggested to her that
my
brother would be in for spring vacation from Lafayette and I’d like him to meet her, and she said, ‘Oh, I have a brother at the University of West Virginia, but he isn’t coming in till June.’ And I said ‘Well, I’ll have my brother call you when he comes in for spring break.’ And my brother did and they dated when he was in town and she was available.

“In June of that year on the house phone, her brother called and he said, ‘Are you free tonight? I’d like to take you out.’ It was a Wednesday night June fifteenth, and he came down to the apartment, and my bedroom door could be a little ajar so I could peek at the front door. And our housekeeper, Alma, answered the door, and I saw this
wonderful-
looking young man standing there, and I was all atremble. I couldn’t believe that this was going to be this blind date. He wasn’t called Cecil then. His name was Stuff Volk. Everybody called him Stuff. His sister Helen was Big Stuff. His sister Harriet was Little Stuff. I called him Stuff until we married. I didn’t think it was seemly to call a husband Stuff.

“That night, as I was buttoning my dress—it was a beige dress with a lotta lotta buttons down the front, and my hands were trembling so I couldn’t button them—that night I said to myself, What are you so nervous about, Audrey? You’d think you were meeting your future husband. And then I came out, and we went on our first date, and he took me down to a pizza parlor in the Village. I had never had pizza. And he ordered one with anchovies on it, and I thought, Now I will surely die, because I had never eaten an anchovy and I had no intentions of doing so. But my next thought was, if I don’t eat this, this very sophisticated young man who’s in college is never going to take me out again. So I managed to bite and swallow without much chewing. And I think we took the Number 5 Fifth Avenue bus home, which stopped at Riverside Drive, so that we could walk to 845 West End Avenue, to our apartments. The next day I thought he wasn’t very interested in me, because I hadn’t heard from him by one o’clock in the afternoon. So I took out my two-wheeler, and I told the doorman to ring the new people’s apartment and ask Harriet Volk to look out the window. But as I’d hoped, he came to the window, and he put his head out six stories up and said, ‘Hi! What are you doing tonight?’ while I was riding my bike. And I said, ‘Nothing,’ so we saw each other again that evening, and we saw each other every evening until June twenty-third, and that night we went to Glen Island Casino. We doubled with his sister and my brother, and I think Glenn Miller was playing there. We danced, and he gave me his class ring, and I was so thrilled, and that was the beginning.”