The World in My Kitchen (5 page)

W
e settled into our small,
empty apartment. We were happy, but I realized very soon that I needed to work. Everyone around me, except Naima, was working. We also needed the money. In France, I would not have worked. At that time, young, upper-middle-class women stayed home, but here in New York, it wasn’t the same. Until you had children, you were expected to work. When I wrote home that I was looking for work, my mother thought it was odd and wrote, “Doesn’t Jimmy make enough money to support you?” I was upset by her comments and tried to explain to her that here in New York, there was something in the air that made you want to work and so I tried to find a job.

Every morning I scanned the newspapers for help wanted ads, but the ads were for specific professions or skills, like secretaries or clerks, and I did not know what I could do or what to look for. My degree in literature was really no help. I spoke English fairly well but could not spell or type. I had one letter of recommendation from an Italian businessman who headed an import/export company in Udine, Italy, where we had lived for a year. He had hired me hoping I would make a good secretary but fired me within a week telling me that I was totally inept. He wanted me to leave without any fuss, so he offered to give me a strong letter of recommendation. This was the extent of my working experience. I was getting quite desperate and was about to look for a job as a saleslady or babysitter, when my eye caught a small ad for someone who could write in French and in English. I quickly called and set up an appointment.

The office of Monsieur Ribaud was on Fifth Avenue near Forty-seventh Street in a building called The Fuller Building. Located at the end of a long corridor, his office was a tiny dark room with two desks, a typewriter, and a teletype machine. M. Ribaud was short, slightly bald, with his few black hairs held in place with some sort of grease. His shifty eyes were hidden behind thick-rimmed glasses, and he wore a shiny gray suit with a shirt whose collar needed ironing. He had a heavy Belgian accent, and I tried not to smile when he inquired about my French skills and my working credentials. With some hesitation, I handed him my Italian letter of recommendation. To my relief, he barely glanced at the letter and proceeded to explain that my job would be to read all of New York’s newspapers every day. On Fridays I was to write a piece in French, summing up the most interesting articles I had read, and then send it by teletype to his newspaper,
La Libre Belgique,
in Brussels. I would be required to be in the office from 9:00
A.M.
to 2:00
P.M.
every day and answer the phone, and for this, I would be paid $35 a week, twice a month. I immediately said yes, overjoyed to have a job. I was then handed a key, and I promised that I would be on time the next day. I called Jimmy and said excitedly, “I have a real job!”

The next morning Jimmy walked me to the subway, explaining what station to exit. I looked for my station, but I must have missed it because twenty minutes later, I found myself in Queens. I got out of the train and tried to ask how to go back to Manhattan. I did not understand what my would-be rescuers were saying to me: “You can take the IRT or the BMT to go back to Manhattan.”

What did these letters mean? I did not know what to do and ended on a bench, crying. I was lost, totally lost. As I sat on that bench, forlorn and thinking that I would be fired, an older man approached me and asked if I needed help. As I explained through my tears what had happened, he laughed and told me he would take me back to the Forty-second Street station. I learned in the subway that his name was Renaldo Butoni, he was an Italian journalist attached to the United Nations, and he lived in Queens. When he left me in front of The Fuller Building, he handed me his card and said he hoped we would see each other again, but not on a subway platform. Later, Renaldo and I would become quite good friends, and he would often help me in my work.

As I reached my office, I tried to imagine what excuse I could give M. Ribaud. To my astonishment the office was empty. On my desk were six newspapers,
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily News, The New York Post, The Sun,
and
The Herald Tribune
and instructions on how to teletype the article I would write on Friday morning. The note also said that he would come by on the fifteenth of the month to pay me. M. Ribaud kept his promise, only showing up twice a month, promptly at 9:00
A.M.
, staying just long enough to hand me my bimonthly check. I never found out if he or the paper liked my work or what he did the rest of the time. I was always alone in the office with my newspapers and a pair of scissors.

On the first day, I started to read
The New York Times.
I had problems with the political articles, since I wasn’t familiar with the workings of political parties or the government, so I turned to the local news, which was also quite a mystery to me. Robert Wagner Jr. was then mayor of New York. There were articles about corruption, others about a mysterious Boss named Carmen DeSapio.
Who is this “Boss?”
I wondered. Since I had to wait until the evening to ask Jimmy, I went on to read the next story. This was an article about a controversy on Robert Moses’s plans to build more public housing downtown. I doubted that Brussels would be interested, so I turned to the entertainment pages and read about Carnegie Hall and Mayor Wagner’s hope to rescue it from demolition. Musicians and composers all over the country and abroad were gathering forces to protest its imminent destruction. This article was cut and stacked away. I read about Mayor Wagner’s decision to create a free Shakespeare theater in Central Park. Again this article was cut and put away. On Friday, I would write an article incorporating all the tidbits I had read. By 12:30
P.M.
, it was time for lunch, and I went to explore Fifth Avenue.

Forty-second Street was lined with cafeterias and coffee houses.
Which one to choose?
They all seemed the same to me. I read their menus and wondered what could I eat.
What is a Triple Decker?
Finally, I chose a restaurant that did not look too intimidating and sat down at a small table. I ordered a hamburger but could not remember how to say rare, and I was presented with a gray, overcooked hamburger, topped with a slice of orange cheese and sweet pickles; it looked and tasted like rubber. I discovered that beyond American coffee, which I disliked, and Coca-Cola, which I found sickeningly sweet, I could not order a glass of wine nor could I ask for a beer. Unable to eat, I paid and left the place, promising myself that from then on to bring my own lunch to work.

Back at the office, I switched newspapers and turned to
The Wall Street Journal.
Scanning the front page, it was there that I caught a glimpse of American life outside of New York. For instance, there was a column about a New England woman who had started a business raising Newfoundland dogs and knitting jackets with their hair. The article was fascinating because it was bizarre and also because the woman was so successful. I cut out the article and added it to my pile. For the next few weeks when I came into the office in the morning, I first turned to
The Wall Street Journal
for its stories on small businesses. They were always fascinating vignettes and, to me, so American. I could combine them with other articles to send to Brussels on Fridays. No one ever complained in Brussels that what I wrote was often strange or far-fetched. Once in a while, I would insert important political news stories. National elections were to take place the following November, so I looked for some extraordinary events such as the controversy around Adlai Stevenson’s shoes. Stevenson was the Democratic candidate for president, and the sole of one of his shoes had a hole. The embarrassing photograph was shown on the front page of
The New York Times.
Later, I found out that it may have been planted by Stevenson’s people.

I enjoyed my work immensely because every day I learned something not only about New York but also about the rest of the country. Slowly, I began to understand American politics and the workings of New York City.

New York life fascinated me, especially Greenwich Village. Very often after work, I would take the subway and get off at the Eighth Street station and walk through the neighborhood. It was late June, and along the narrow curving streets, the lovely town houses had geraniums in window boxes and flowers everywhere. I spent my afternoons looking at the small funky boutiques, sitting in coffee houses, or spending hours at the Sheridan Square bookstore. On weekends, Jimmy and I would go listen to jazz or attend an avant-garde play. We often went to the first in-the-round theater in New York, the Circle in the Square Theater. I can still remember how enthralled I was to see Jason Robards in
The Iceman Cometh
or Truman Capote’s
The Grass Harp.
The crowd was young like us, and after the play or the concert, we would walk to Tenth Street to the Ninth Circle for a drink or dinner or stop on Cornelia Street for a cappuccino at Caffe Cino. It seemed to me that people all around me were adventurous, that they were open to new ideas and very involved. I felt that there was hope and excitement in the air and found the city vibrant and alive. For me, the Village was a bit like the Left Bank in Paris; it felt like home.

Every morning, I looked forward to going to work. I was no longer afraid of getting lost in the subway. The only problem I had to solve was my lunch. Every day after work, I went shopping for food in our neighborhood. I found supermarket displays baffling, the food was always wrapped in plastic. For example, if I wanted to buy beef or lamb, the cuts of meat were different from the French ones, and it took many tries before I knew which one to buy. Bread was also a problem until I found a delicatessen store that sold rye bread, which was far tastier than the sliced white bread from the supermarket. I also discovered that New Yorkers liked smoked salmon and that it was as good as what I used to buy in charcuteries in Paris. I also loved Virginia ham, which is very different from the French boiled ham that I loved, slightly too sweet for my taste; but I learned that with it I still could make a very good sandwich.

Finding good vegetables and salads was also a problem. String beans seemed overgrown to me, nothing like the French haricots verts I was used to, and I hated iceburg lettuce. At first we went out to dinner, but very soon this became too expensive, so I started to cook. One night we decided to invite over for dinner Jimmy’s old friend, Gabriel Sedlis, an architect from Europe who had come to the United States after the war. He had been Jimmy’s classmate at Harvard. I still can remember the first dinner I prepared because I had to comb the neighborhood to find what I wanted. I made a cucumber salad with plain yogurt, garlic, and mint. Fresh mint was not easily available then in local supermarkets. I finally found a small store run by an Italian woman, who had fresh herbs growing on her windowsill. She agreed to let me have some. I also bought some chuck steak to make my own hamburgers and served them with a green peppercorn sauce; I made a puree with canned artichoke hearts using my new blender, a present from my mother-in-law. The puree was good though if too thin and slightly watery, since I had overdone the blending. But no one complained. For dessert, I made my first apple mousse, which was a great success, because I had just discovered how wonderful Macintosh apples were.

My reputation as a good but somewhat bizarre cook began with this dinner. As time went by, I became more adventurous and went beyond my westside neighborhood to shop.

One day, Jimmy announced that he had invited another old friend from Harvard for lunch the following Saturday. “Don’t make anything too French or too strange,” he said. “I haven’t seen him in several years, and I don’t really know what he is like.”
Not too French?
I decided to make an omelet, a salad, and a cake for dessert. I had been attracted by boxes of luscious cake mixes and learned that you could make a cake by just adding water and baking it in the oven. And so I started with the cake. When the cake came out of the oven, it looked nothing like the picture on the box. I had not understood the directions and had ended up baking the chocolate glaze and using the cake mix as the glaze. That cake ended up in the garbage can. As I prepared the omelet, I remembered Jimmy’s request. I decided, that to make it not too French, I would add some ketchup, which would give it an authentic American touch. The friend was charming, but the lunch was an unforgettable disaster. When I brought the “American” omelet to the table, Jimmy looked astonished as he stared at the disgusting grayish-orange mass. Not knowing what to do, I immediately started to talk about my total lack of cooking experience, hoping that Jimmy’s friend would forgive the horrible meal. The friend smiled as he played with his food. Jimmy looked grim, and as I was getting more and more nervous, I endlessly chattered away. As he was about to leave, he looked at me and said that he hoped I would enjoy discovering New York’s restaurants. We never saw that friend again, and Jimmy made me promise to never attempt to make what I thought were American dishes.

During the week, we ate simply, shopping only at our local supermarket, but on weekends, we explored downtown and the Lower East Side. Our first stop was often the Essex Street market. The market was alive and bustling with people. The meat stands were run by Italian butchers. There I was able to find fresh chickens, rabbits, lamb, and cuts of beef or veal I could recognize. The vegetable stands offered at least three types of salads green, and I could satisfy my desires for a tender lettuce (which I learned very quickly was called Boston lettuce, reaffirming my strong belief that Boston knew good food) or escarole. There were bright red tomatoes, fresh string beans (maybe not as thin as the French ones but still quite good), large Italian eggplants, bitter sorrel, and broccoli. I often bought broccoli in attempts to prepare this uninspiring vegetable in a more imaginative way. With the broccoli, I made soufflé, tried it in a soup with turnips, or served it steamed and drizzled with olive oil bought in Little Italy. It took me much longer to be adventurous enough to buy fish because I could not recognize any except gray sole. I also explored Jewish stores on Houston Street. There I found fresh bread, fresh or baked farmer’s cheese, heavy cream, and dried fruit. What I liked best was the butter. On the counter was a hill of bright yellow butter just like in France. The butter was sweet and creamy, so much better than the package variety sold in my supermarket. The saleslady would cut the butter with a wire to exactly the amount I needed. Then Jimmy and I would stop at Gus’s pickle store on Essex Street and Grand Street and buy a quart of sour cucumber pickles. They were so crunchy and so garlicky that I could not resist the temptation and ate most of them on the way home. Nearby was a store that sold bagels and bialys. Jimmy had introduced me to my first bialy. I loved the hot, fresh, chewy bread with its chopped onion center. I would buy dozens and have them slathered with butter for breakfast.