Garlic and Sapphires (37 page)

The lovable, capable Trish Hall, editor of the Living Section, designed the new Dining In/Dining Out section and then deserted us to become the editor of
Martha Stewart Living.
Eric Asimov was still writing the $25 or Under column, but after a brief stint editing an early incarnation of Sunday Styles, he'd been reassigned and was now downstairs in Metro. Molly O'Neill had moved on to start her own dot-com business and Marian Burros was spending most of her time working out of the Washington bureau, despite the fact that she and the bureau chief, Johnny Apple, didn't get along very well. Faced with all their empty desks, it was hard to sit at my own and feel jolly.

I tried to get to know the replacements, but the new editor of the Dining section, Rick Flaste, was nothing like Trish. He was a gruff man and the least politic person on earth. Tall, gangly, and strangely ascetic looking for someone who loves to eat, he displayed an utter contempt for fashion. He had the air of some biblical prophet intent on predicting doom. His clothes looked as if he slept in them, and his long face and large forehead were framed by lanky strands of hair. His ideas were smart and original, but he was either too busy or too brusque to bother with charm. Even when he asked nicely, it felt as if he was barking commands. The new young reporter, on the other hand, was just the opposite; Amanda Hesser was terrifyingly sweet. She was pale, pretty, and petite, but she seemed so frighteningly ambitious that we all kept our distance. Before long I stopped going into the office. I was supposed to be sitting at my computer, writing from home, but the truth is that I had disappeared into the kitchen.

 

 

 

 

 

E
very kitchen is filled with flames and shards, fire and glass, boiling liquids and sharp objects eager to attack you. Cooking is too dangerous to permit distraction. If you step into that arena without the proper respect, you will certainly get hurt.

“Blood!” screamed a sign over the stove in my first professional kitchen. Beneath, spelled out in large letters, were the appropriate steps to be taken in case of severed appendages, injured limbs, or major burns. Peril pounces on the careless cook, and for me this lurking menace is part of the attraction. I have found that meditation at the edge of the knife makes everything seem better.

But while cooking demands your entire attention, it also rewards you with endlessly sensual pleasures. The sound of water skittering across leaves of lettuce. The thump of the knife against watermelon, and the cool summer scent the fruit releases as it falls open to reveal its deep red heart. The seductive softness of chocolate beginning to melt from solid to liquid. The tug of sauce against the spoon when it thickens in the pan, and the lovely lightness of Parmesan drifting from the grater in gossamer flakes. Time slows down in the kitchen, offering up an entire universe of small satisfactions.

That fall, worried about Carol and wondering about my work, I spent weeks standing at the counter, chopping onions, peeling apples, and rolling dough. I made complicated soups and stews, and I began baking bread every day, as I had done when Michael and I first lived together.

In the end I came to realize that a restaurant critic's job is more about eating than writing, and every time I cancelled a reservation I grew more seriously behind. I was having a secret affair with cooking, and I knew it could not continue. But every morning, after walking Nicky to school, I'd go home and sit in the kitchen, sifting through my recipes. A jumble of handwritten pages, they were gathered into an ancient, torn manila folder filled with memories. Tomorrow, I'd think, tomorrow I'll go out to eat, tomorrow I'll go back to the restaurants. And then I'd turn over another page and a long-gone meal would come tumbling out, more evocative than any photograph could ever be.

Here was apricot upside-down cake, written in my mother-in-law's neat, careful script. Here was Aunt Birdie's potato salad, scratched in her feathery penmanship and signed with her funny little bird. My own recipes for six different pie crusts were carefully printed for the students at my cooking classes. Serafina's scrawled instructions for coconut cake were almost illegible, as if she had not quite wanted to part with the recipe. My mother's thick, bold writing danced exuberantly across a page torn from the
New York Times
in the mid-sixties. “Sounds like you!” she'd written across a recipe called “Minetry's Miracle.” I looked it over; it required a pound of butter, a dozen eggs, a pint of cream, and a cup of bourbon (not to mention chocolate, pecans, ladyfingers, and macaroons). Indeed.

Then a recipe written on blue-lined paper leapt into my hand. The writing was not familiar. “Aushak,” I whispered, and suddenly it came to me. An Afghan exchange student had given it to me when I was an undergraduate with a reputation as a cook. At the time these scallion dumplings had seemed too strange, too exotic, too time-consuming, and I had never attempted them. Now, studying the ingredients, I was curious. The dumplings sounded delicious. Yes, I thought, writing out a grocery list, this is my recipe for today.

I walked to the market, strolling past Citarella, where the man who decorates the windows with fish was contemplating his latest creation. He added a few oysters to the design, stood back to observe the effect, and waved at me. Next door at Fairway the bins were filled with six kinds of local apples, the last of the deep-blue prune plums, the first of the pumpkins. There was some sad-looking corn and some fine-looking tomatoes. I grabbed a basket and walked in. People were sliding through the sawdust, pushing, tugging, shoving past the raucous dairy counter and the shiny dried fruits, eager to get to the deli counter and jockey for position in the smoked salmon line.

I gathered mint, scallions, and fresh garlic into my cart and went off to find the wonton wrappers. As I passed the bread a baguette called to me, and as I reached for it a voice said, “Not that one.”

Looking up, I found a man with a boyish face staring at me. His warm brown eyes and mischievous grin seemed surprised to find themselves attached to such an oversized and awkward body. With one hand the man dangled a baguette before me; with the other he stopped my reaching arm. “Take this,” he said. “It's baked later and delivered earlier.”

“Hi Ed,” I said.

I barely knew Ed Levine, but he had a reputation as the ultimate connoisseur of New York food. For years well-intentioned friends had been telling me that I should cultivate his friendship. Nobody, they assured me, knew more about the city's edible landscape. There was apparently not a pizzeria in the city that Ed hadn't sampled. If I wanted to meet the jerk chicken king of Brooklyn or the tofu man of Flushing, Ed could introduce me, and he was one of the few people who knew where to find the last women in the city still stretching strudel dough by hand. The best fried chicken in Harlem? Ed could lead me to it. SoHo's finest sandwiches? Ed was on to that as well. But although we had been introduced any number of times, neither of us had pursued the acquaintance.

“Have you tried the donuts they've been getting from Georgie's?” Ed asked now, drawing me over to the bakery counter. “Well, you should.”

Ed was full of opinions: I should be buying this olive oil instead of that, my coffee should come from next door, and he did not approve my choice of smoked salmon. But his enthusiasm was so infectious that I couldn't be annoyed. When he said that my Afghan dumplings would surely be better with yogurt from the Middle Eastern store in Bay Ridge, I suspected he was right.

“I could take you there,” he offered. He stopped himself, eyes gleaming. “In fact, why don't you let me take you on a food tour of Brooklyn?” He ran his fingers through his short red-blond hair and added, “You'll meet some amazing people. Bakers and butchers are undervalued in our culture, and they're so happy when you recognize what they do. We'll have a great time. Please come.”

How could I possibly refuse?

 

 

 

 

 

Y
ou were right,” I said a few days later as I climbed into his car. “Those dumplings were great, but they would be better with homemade yogurt.”

“The Middle Eastern place is going to be one of our last stops,” he said. “I want to take you to Carroll Gardens first. But we're going to make an unscheduled stop before we go to Brooklyn. I want you to meet Jim Leahy at the Sullivan Street Bakery. Okay?” Ed was looking straight at me as he talked. “He's an amazing guy,” he continued, still looking my way. “When Jim talks about bread it's like he's speaking in tongues. Besides, we might as well pick up a little snack to tide us over.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking that if I didn't argue he might look back at the road.

But Ed, it soon became clear, was a trusting driver who relied on his car to take care of itself when he was otherwise occupied. For long stretches he looked at me, at the itinerary, at the passing scenery. “I haven't seen that bakery before!” he'd cry, swerving across three lanes to get a closer look, convinced that any cars foolish enough to be in our path would move before we reached them.

I was relieved when we got to Sullivan Street and Ed maneuvered the car into a conveniently vacant loading zone and turned off the engine.

It was warm inside the bakery, and hushed. Flour swirled through the air, so much like snow that when a woman came to throw her arms around Ed the two looked exactly like figures in one of those little pa perweights you shake. “Ed!” she said. “Jim's going to be so disappointed that he missed you!” The air smelled of yeast and heat, and if you listened carefully you could hear, above the whirr of the ovens, the faint burble of rising dough.

Great mounds of crusty loaves surrounded us like soft mountains, and Ed stroked one fondly, saying, “Jim is obsessed with getting the right textures.” As he moved through this soft white world, flour settled on his jacket and frosted his hair. He stretched a hand to a long swath of
pizza bianca
stretching across the counter like a languid cat and broke off a corner. “Have some,” he said, handing me a piece. The flatbread was crisp and slightly oily, dotted with rosemary, and so delicious that each bite enticed you into another.

“This is perfect!” said Ed, sounding surprised. He took another bite and shook his head. “When Jim first made pizzas they were cardboardy. Then they got soggy. But now he's really nailed it. What happened?”

The woman pointed an affectionately accusing finger at Ed. “This guy,” she said, “can really drive you crazy. He won't accept just any old thing. He keeps nagging at you, nagging at you, nagging at you until you make it better.” She smiled at Ed and added, “Your complaints were heard.”

Ed nodded his head. “I wish everyone was so obedient.” As far as I could tell, there was not a whiff of irony in the statement. “Tell Jim I approve.”

We left and went from one small shop to another, gathering food as we traveled. By the time we walked back to the car we were laden with warm little pear tarts, turnovers, jars of jam, loaves of bread, goat cheese, and zucchini wrapped in flaky dough.

“You see why I love these people?” Ed asked. He looked longingly at the shops we were passing, loath to leave any off the tour. Suddenly he ducked; ahead of us a large man loomed in a doorway and he was pointing a finger at Ed. “You!” he commanded, coming towards us. “You! Come in here right now!”

Ed speeded up. “Sorry,” he whispered out of the side of his mouth, almost running now, “but we have to get away.” To the man he said, “Tomorrow, I'll come back tomorrow.” And then, in another whisper, “Keep moving. If we stop and go into the store he'll start feeding us and he won't stop. He'll never let us go; we'll be here all day.”