Cooking as Fast as I Can (18 page)

I deserved exactly what I got. During our years together I
had
taken her for granted. I'd had my own flirtations and make-out sessions with other girls. At the Culinary I'd been with two sexy straight women, one a school executive. Both
had made it clear they were interested in experimenting and thought I would be a good gateway girl into the lesbian world. Once, when Hannah and I were in a rocky patch, I had a fling with a gorgeous blonde with a Hawaiian name. Maluhia was one of the most beautiful women I'd ever laid eyes on. We both felt the electricity the day we traded glances in the crowded halls of the Culinary. We had a few encounters, our passion torrid but short-lived. Eventually it became clear that she loved men more, and I knew I loved my relationship more.

One night soon after I arrived home from France, I cooked
kota kapama
for Hannah, the first time I'd made it since I'd been home. Our apartment was filled with the scent of garlic and cinnamon, smells I equated with comfort and love. Hannah came home from work, took one look at what was on the stove, and made a face. Only then did it occur to me that she had truly moved on.

My months in France, exhilarating as they'd been, had left me wrung out, flat broke, and in no mood to be spurned on a daily basis. A picture of us in a frame sat on the bedside table. The next day while she was at work I slipped the picture out of the frame, packed the suitcase and duffel bag it felt like I'd just unpacked, scratched a little note on the back of an envelope, and drove home to Mississippi.

I'd called my parents, told them I was headed down for a visit and some southern-style TLC. I pulled into the driveway and not one thing had changed on Swan Lake Drive. The huge pines in front of the house were still shedding needles. The pool table in the sunroom was covered with the same stacks of papers I'd glimpsed the last time I'd been home. I had been away long enough, and was still young enough, to
note that my parents had aged a bit in my absence. They were as sharp and warm as always, but their movements were a little stiffer, their hair a smidge grayer. Alma, who'd been old as long as I'd been alive, was in the kitchen making a cheesecake in anticipation of my homecoming.

I'd just missed my brother Mike, who against all odds had landed on his feet. After he was released from the county farm, the judge had advised him that since he owed so many people money it was probably best if he moseyed down the road to another state. For a while he laid low on Flag Island, the site of our happiest summers, living off the fish he caught and figuring out his next move. He disappeared for a while then showed up in Little Rock, where he worked for the owner of a gas station and then at a hauling business. Finally he started a wrecking business with some friends and snagged contracts with the fire and police department, hauling away cars that had been totaled in accidents. He'd had a short-lived marriage, but then met a stand-up citizen named Carrie, who by all reports was good for him.

I moved back into my old bedroom on Swan Lake Drive, my softball trophies from grammar school still lined up on the dresser. Four, five, six days passed with no call from Hannah. The days were mercifully mild after the brain-boiling heat of summer, which I was not unhappy to have missed. Driving past my old high school, I sometimes heard the marching band practicing. It was football season in the South. Fall was in the air.

I'm the first to admit that between graduating at the top of my class at the Culinary and not simply surviving but thriving in two French three-star kitchens, I'd become a little snooty. The first day I joined my mom in the kitchen I picked up one of her knives and touched my thumb to the blade.

“You need some new knives, Mom.”

“Says who?”

“Just about every great chef out there,” I said.

“Cathy, you know, just because you graduated from cooking school and spent a few months among the French, don't you come in here trying to tell me how to cook.”

She took the knife out of my hand and pointed it at me. She was joking, but she also meant it. She was opposed to me or anyone getting too comfortable up on her high horse. She believed that if you've done great things, that's for someone else to say.

Down the road the values my mom and dad instilled in me would surface in the way I treated my own brigades and eventual business partners. I would surround myself with people who were smart, creative, and productive, who would work hard and tell me the truth. I wouldn't hire people who told me what they thought I might like to hear.

After a week, Hannah phoned late one night. She said all the things that lure a person back into love. She missed me, hadn't realized how much she loved me until I was gone, couldn't bear the thought of life without me. She'd dumped the girl she'd been hooking up with. I spent a few more weeks at home, then returned to Rhinebeck, and we settled right in as if nothing had happened, both of our transgressions forgotten.

I'm a firm believer that things happen for a reason, and not a day after I'd returned to New York I received a call from Melissa Kelly, my old executive chef from the Beekman Arms.

“I heard you're back from France,” she began in the abrupt, get-right-to-it manner I associate with northerners. “I have this great situation up in Old Chatham. It's a five-hundred-acre sheep farm. The new owners came into a lot of money and want to open an inn and a restaurant. We'll have homegrown ingredients, make our own bread and cheese. You interested?”

“Sure am,” I said.

Melissa had also graduated at the top of her class at the Culinary in 1988, and since then had been all over the place, working with Larry Forgione at An American Place in New York, Reed Hearon at Restaurant Lulu in San Francisco, and queen Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. She worked as a private cook in the south of France for a while, and moved to Japan to open another An American Place there.
Food & Wine
had named her one of the best upcoming chefs of the nineties. I'd kept up with her exploits through her aunt, my friend Nancy, the one who invited me to Julia Child's house for lunch.

I guessed that Nancy had told Melissa a little about my exploits as well. In the mid-nineties, even if you were a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, it remained a big damn deal to get a
stage
in a French kitchen, especially if you were female.

Hannah and I drove to Old Chatham, an hour and a half north up the Hudson River Valley. The farm sat amid rolling hills and was picture-postcard beautiful, with well-kept outbuildings painted traditional barn red with white trim, surrounded by green fields in which a few flocks of sheep in their woolly coats ambled and dozed. Melissa was just as I'd remembered her from the Beekman Arms: pretty, dark-haired, and pale-eyed. She had the thin, strong limbs I associated with farm women or avid hikers. She rubbed her hands as she showed us around, told us how the owners, Tom and Nancy Clark, were going to grow the flock (eventually they would have around two thousand head) and how we were going to have fresh sheep milk to make cheese, ice cream, and crème brûlée. She was already imagining the flavors she would offer, classic vanilla and chocolate, and also rum raisin.

The farm-to-table movement was in its infancy then. Not
everyone who peeled a carrot or washed a lettuce leaf believed that the flavor of a dish depended on where a vegetable was grown and when it was picked. But Melissa had been mentored by Larry Forgione, who along with Alice Waters was leading the farm-to-table parade, and she was well acquainted with what grew in the Hudson Valley from her time at the Beekman Arms.

Twenty years ago it was relatively insane to open a restaurant on a farm in a tiny historic hamlet, located in the middle of a tangle of sleepy country roads, close to absolutely nothing. This wasn't France, where cuisine was the national religion, height of culture, and favorite sport all rolled into one. People who could afford it thought nothing of traveling hundreds of miles to dine at Georges Blanc, including rich Parisians who flew in for the evening in a private helicopter, landing on the helipad installed on the roof especially for such patrons.

We opened the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company Inn together, and from the first we were packed every night. People would come from Albany and Sarasota Springs, even making the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Manhattan.
Esquire
magazine dubbed it one of the top ten restaurants in the country.

One of the main farm-to-table tenets was to follow the ingredients. Freshness and availability determined the menu, not the other way around. For this reason, the menu changed daily. At many restaurants, you show up in your whites at 7:00 a.m., half asleep and clutching a cup of coffee, and shuffle through prep for the institutional chicken dish, pasta dish, and whatever red meat had been on the menu for years. Not the case at the Sheepherding Co. For a long time, it was as if every day was my first day on the job.

Lamb was on the menu a lot, obviously: rack of lamb served on a bed of broccoli rabe and garlic mashed potatoes;
char-grilled lamb served with beet greens and huckleberries, with a side of sweet potato chips; lamb shanks, leg of lamb, and lamb shoulder chop.

Melissa was Italian on her mother's side, and we shared a similar grounding in Mediterranean cuisine. We served sheep's cheese in grape leaves with thyme, rosemary, savory, lavender, and cracked black pepper, marinated overnight in olive oil, then grilled and served with flatbread. Eggplant caponata, with capers and anchovies, finished with a thick sweet-and-sour sauce of brown sugar, vinegar, and tomato puree. A simple, delicious panna cotta, and of course sheep's milk ice cream, which was sweet and rich and had a slight tang I can still taste.

That daily menu change kept me on my toes, expanded what I'd mistakenly thought of as my already extensive repertoire. I incorporated quinoa and farro into my kitchen vocabulary. I learned a few dozen ways to use fresh figs, Meyer lemons, and the new heirloom tomatoes that were just coming on the scene. I could make a hundred sauces in my sleep.

The Sheepherding Co. started showing up on best-of lists and in feature spreads in newspapers, and was winning awards. Every week, it seemed, a van arrived from Manhattan, and out poured photographers and writers, there to cover Melissa and her amazing, unexpected success. I may have been racing around making sure service happened that night, but I saw what was going on. I saw what she'd earned, and I wanted a chance to do that for myself.

The inn and restaurant were housed in an eighteenth-century Georgian colonial manor, and the kitchen was as tiny as any you'd find in Manhattan. For a solid year Melissa and I worked shoulder to shoulder, like two oxen yoked together, plowing the fields. After I started feeling the stirrings of ambition,
however, things changed. Melissa, like any good executive chef, commanded her kitchen like an army general.
Sous
means under in French, and they don't call it sous chef for nothing. I was eager to be the one creating the menu and plate design, evolving the concept of the restaurant, and in general not having to take orders from anyone else. I wanted to be the one who came up with an idea for a new dish at midnight, called for a quick meeting of my staff, and saw customers order and enjoy it the next night. I wanted to be in charge. And I'm not afraid to admit it: I wanted the fame. I wanted to be a star.

Hannah and I, and our two Greyhound rescue dogs, barely survived the historic blizzard of 1996, months after we arrived in Old Chatham. We'd never witnessed such a thing, fifty-mile-an-hour wind gusts, barns and grocery store roofs collapsing under the weight of many feet of snow, people stranded in buses for hours and days, the government shuttered for a week. A year later, on the first day the temperature dipped below zero, we looked at each other over our morning coffee and agreed: this is completely insane. We could see our breath in the bathroom of our little rental house, and the dogs shivered in their sleep, even on top of the heat vent. Every day I looked forward to the infernal heat of the kitchen, something that as a Mississippi girl born and raised I could tolerate with relative ease.