Goldy's Kitchen Cookbook (2 page)

T
he author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the following people: Jim Davidson; Jeff, Rosa, Ryan, Nick, and Josh Davidson; J. Z. Davidson; Joey Davidson; Sandra Dijkstra, Elise Capron, Andrea Cavallaro, Thao Le, Elisabeth James, and the rest of the superb team at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency; Brian Murray, Michael Morrison, Liate Stehlik, Carolyn Marino, Kaitlyn Kennedy, Tavia Kowalchuk, Joseph Papa, and the entire brilliant team at Morrow; the St. Anne's-Belfield community in Charlottesville, Virginia, especially Kay Butterfield and Gunda Hiebert, with special remembrance of the passing of our beloved Pamela Malone and Emyl Jenkins; Professor Diana Kleiner of Yale University; Kathy Saideman; Carol Alexander, for testing the recipes and making many valuable suggestions; Jasmine Cresswell; Linda and David Ranz, M.D.; Shirley Carnahan, Ph.D.; Carole Kornreich, M.D.; Julie Kaewert; Dylan Burdick and Tiffany Green; Lyndsay White; Pamela Eaton; J.R. and John Suess; the Reverends Andi Suess Taylor, Jay Rock, David Evans, and John Hall, all of St. Boniface Episcopal Church in Sarasota, Florida;
Judith Rock, Nancy Evans, Betsie Danner, Carolyn Walker, and all the parishioners and staff at St. Boniface; Harriët van Elburg and Jason Heckman; the Reverend Nancy Malloy, Bill and Carole Hörger, and all the parishioners at St. Laurence Episcopal Church in Conifer, Colorado; my far-flung family: Adam Mott, Janie Mott Fritz, Lucy Mott Faison, Sally Mott Freeman, and William C. Mott, Jr., plus all their wonderful spouses and dear children, with remembrance again of the passing of our beloved Tom Fritz; John William Schenk and Karen Johnson Kennedy, who taught me how to cater; Marty O'Leary and the staff at Sur La Table in Sarasota, Florida, for numerous helpful suggestions; and thanks forever to Triena Harper and Sergeant Richard Millsapps, now retired from the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department, Golden, Colorado.

I
n the early 1980s, I started to write about a character named Goldy. She would be a caterer, I decided. At that time, I only knew three things about her: She loved to cook; she had a troubled eleven-year-old son; she was a survivor of domestic abuse. Her ex-husband, whom I named the Jerk, was a wealthy doctor who had repeatedly beaten her. But as I wrote more about Goldy, I realized that she had thrown him out. Her grit, hard work, and ability to find support from friends, church, and her mentor at a Denver restaurant enabled her to put her life back together. She did more than survive. She thrived. She took the lemon that life had given her and made not just lemonade but Lemon Chicken, Lemon Bars, Lemon Cookies, and Lemon Meringue Pie.

By 1987, I had finished writing what became
Catering to Nobody
. My critique group, to which I often brought cookies, told me I should put some recipes in the book. So I did. In 1988, the wonderful literary agent Sandra Dijkstra took me on. She sold the book to St. Martin's Press, which published it in 1990. Over the next twenty-plus years, Goldy, her family, and I have continued to grow, and it has been a fabulous journey.

Like Goldy, I enjoy working in the kitchen. This was not always so. The night before I married my husband, Jim (who is nothing like the Jerk; I say this only because people have repeatedly asked), I broke down.

“I can't marry you!” I cried, as we sat in the front seat of our Chevy Nova (which turned out to be a lemon of a different kind).

Jim asked, “We can't get married? Why not?”

“I can't cook!”

Jim said, “We'll be fine.”

And we were. I learned to have fun cooking. How I decided to write about Goldy is another, parallel story.

But let's start in the kitchen. I am the oldest of four children. Our mother disliked—
despised
would not be too strong a word—the necessity of preparing the family's evening meal. My guess is that this resentment coincided with a mishap with the pressure cooker.

I was nine. My mother had mastered making beef, potatoes, and carrots in her cooker, so that was what we ate almost every night. This would usually be accompanied by leaves of iceberg lettuce dabbed with mayonnaise from a jar. Based on our experiences at friends' houses, my siblings and I knew that some mothers liked to cook and did it well. But if we dared to complain, we would be sent to our rooms without dinner. So we learned to keep our mouths shut, as they say in the South,
right quick
.

Occasionally, my mother varied what she served, perhaps out of a sense of duty. She was from New England. On St. Patrick's Day, she made corned beef and cabbage. Even though we were Protestants, she always served fish sticks on Friday—just in case. We also had the occasional dinner of (canned) Boston baked beans and (canned) New England brown bread. On the weekends, my father worked off stress by making yeast breads, which he kneaded with great vigor. We kids dug into the corned beef and cabbage and pressure-cooked beef, potatoes, and carrots and slathered margarine—all we knew in those days—on Dad's bread, and things hummed along.

Then she accidentally blew the lid off the pressure cooker. I remember the
kerbang
. No one was hurt, thank God. But the kitchen ceiling bore a permanent imprint from the lid. The beef, potatoes, and carrots left stains that never came out. (Before they sold the house, my parents scrubbed the ceiling and painted over the stains.)

After the pressure cooker incident, my mother threw in the kitchen towel and pretty much handed the job off to me. She didn't mind shopping, so I would use the ingredients she bought: packages of chicken pieces, pounds of ground beef, those sticks of margarine, plus more heads of iceberg lettuce, boxes of Shake 'n Bake seasoning, Rice-A-Roni, Betty Crocker Noodles Romanoff, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, instant mashed potatoes, instant mushroom gravy, instant salad dressing mix.

So in fact I had done plenty of “cooking” before Jim and I were due to get married. But I knew it wasn't
real
cooking. The mothers of my friends and my siblings' friends when we were growing up outside Washington, D.C., were great cooks, and they made everything from lasagna to tzimmes with what looked like ease and dedication. When I would plead to have my friends over for a meal, my mother would bake a ham. I made Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to go with it, plus iceberg lettuce mixed with mayonnaise.

During those early years, I also was fortunate enough to witness a real cook in her element. When my siblings and I were young, our parents would go on vacations without us, which was common among middle-class households in the fifties and sixties. An older woman would stay with us. I'm sure she's passed away, but still: Let's call her Mrs. Jones.

Mrs. Jones made everything from scratch. As long as I was willing to listen sympathetically to her laments about her son, Jeremiah, I could watch. Mrs. Jones would make luscious chicken pot pies. She cut real butter—never margarine—into flour, sprinkled on iced spring water, and rolled out pie crust while telling me how Jeremiah had been acting up. Mrs. Jones made spice cookies, chocolate cookies, and sugar cookies while bemoaning the fact that Jeremiah was in jail. Mrs. Jones's real specialty was candy. The problem with Jeremiah, she said as she rolled chocolate into luscious globes, was that he had a chemical imbalance. I listened and
nodded, all while recognizing that Mrs. Jones, like the mothers of our friends, was the genuine article in the kitchen.

I had just turned twenty, and Jim had just turned twenty-two, when we were about to get married and I was sobbing and saying that there would not,
could not,
in fact, be a wedding the next day, because I couldn't cook. I knew the “Mrs. Jones standard” would be the one by which I would be assessed. Those were the days when women, and only women, were judged—usually harshly—based on their ability to cook. My mother had escaped this judgment, but I knew “the truth,” and that was that we had Instant Everything.

When our parents had cocktail parties, they served frozen egg rolls that my sisters and I heated up. For their rare dinner parties, my father would place a raw egg beside his place and expertly whisk it into a dressing for Caesar salad, which would be served with ham and baked potatoes. Other times, when they needed to entertain guests for a meal, they took them to a restaurant.

So before the pressure cooker exploded, I had enjoyed the beef, potatoes, and carrots, the occasional New England dish, the ham, and fish sticks. Then I'd had my adventures with Shake 'n Bake and other time-and-effort-saving dishes. When I was twelve, though, I quite unexpectedly received a profound lesson in differing regional cuisines.

That year, I received a scholarship that enabled me to attend a girls' boarding school, St. Anne's, in Charlottesville, Virginia. (It is now a coed school called St. Anne's-Belfield, known by the acronym STAB. When I purchased a pair of sweatpants with
STAB
embroidered on them, our youngest son thought I'd bought them at a crime writers' convention.)

At St. Anne's, I was blessed to have outstanding teachers, one of whom, Emyl Jenkins, told me I should be a writer, a compliment that I held in my back pocket for eighteen years, while going to college, working at other jobs, and raising a family.

In the food department, Charlottesville might as well have been a continent away from Washington. At St. Anne's, we had real Southern cooking: grits and sausage; biscuits and gravy; perfect fried chicken; black-eyed peas and stewed tomatoes. According
to my sisters (they were too young to cook, and my brother was only a year old), our mother resignedly took over making the Shake 'n Bake chicken and Rice-A-Roni. One hundred ten miles away, I thought I'd died and gone to Food Heaven.

Eight years later, when Jim and I were, despite my pre-wedding meltdown, married, we were both full-time scholarship students, this time at Stanford. Jim was a Navy ensign and ensconced in a graduate engineering program. I was finishing my undergraduate degree and had a limited budget to prepare meals. At first, I served Jim Instant Everything. Surprised, he lavished compliments on me.

While relying on Instant Everything—which was expensive but not time-consuming—I read Peg Bracken's hilarious, wonderful
I Hate to Cook Book.
It seemed even I could follow her simple instructions. I learned the Art of the Casserole, which usually involved canned creamed soups mixed with a variety of other ingredients.

We hummed along until the day I splurged and bought a steak. Since I only knew the Art of the Casserole, I put that sorry piece of beef in the oven at 350˚F for an hour.

Jim ate every bite.

I did not immediately set my sights on becoming a writer. I studied hard, protested the war in Vietnam, and developed affection for the subject of art history. (Most of the professional foodies I've met majored in art history—an interesting coincidence. And art historians themselves are usually wonderful cooks.) While in school, my desire to become a better cook deepened, owing to two sources.

When we were newlyweds, Jim and I lived in a tiny apartment in Menlo Park, right near the offices of
Sunset
magazine. I bought their cookbooks at the Moffatt Naval Air Station commissary. When I had the time, I worked my way through some of them. Encountering a problem, I would call the
Sunset
test kitchens. The people who talked to me were unfailingly helpful and encouraging. But I remained timid, and when I was tired, would opt for tuna casserole.

The other, and longest-lasting, reason I came to love cooking was an epiphany that took place during a particularly exhausting exam period that year. Unable to face the prospect of opening yet another can of tuna, I turned on the television and saw
Julia Child on PBS. I shook my head as she gave straightforward, simple instructions on making a roux that didn't taste of flour. That night, I made my first béchamel sauce. She was right. The food was luscious, and I felt energized, not drained.

I bought
The French Chef Cookbook,
based on the TV show, and soon I was stuffing mushrooms, poaching chicken, and whipping up
bavarois à l'orange
. Julia Child's assertion was a revelation:
I can teach you to prepare French food
. Many women of my generation followed her into the kitchen. To this day, I feel Julia Child's helpful, guiding presence at the stove.

Once we finished school, the Navy sent Jim off on back-to-back eighteen-month deployments. The first seven years we were married, we moved thirteen times. When Jim finally finished his obligation to the Navy, he landed a job in Colorado. We moved to a small mountain town that bears a marked resemblance to the Aspen Meadow of the Goldy books. Our family grew to include three sons. I did volunteer work at our local church, in our diocese, and for our political party. I tutored in a correctional facility and counseled rape victims. I helped raise funds for various community projects, cared for the kids and the house, cooked up a storm, and in what there was of my spare time, I read. I never forgot Emyl Jenkins's advice, but I did not yet know how to use it.

The problem with doing scads of volunteer work is that, as with any profession, you can get burned out. When you are a volunteer, the hours are long, appreciation is minimal, and gratitude, if it's doled out at all, is sparse. And of course you are not being paid. Our three kids had to go to college
somehow
. Denver, an hour away, offered scant employment opportunities, none of them part-time.

At thirty-two, I still had not tried to become a professional writer, although as a volunteer I had done plenty of writing. I felt directionless, so I took a writing class.

I loved it. I took another class and then another. And I wrote—a lot. Often frustrated, I'd finished and rewritten three novels before
Catering to Nobody
was accepted for publication.

But where do you get your ideas?
is a question writers frequently hear at bookstores and libraries.

What I reply is that a cook goes to the refrigerator to take out ingredients to prepare a meal; a writer goes to the
emotional
refrigerator to cook up a book. The first ingredient for the Goldy series that got stored in my emotional refrigerator came from my volunteer work. There, I had repeatedly seen a phenomenon that nobody seemed to be talking or writing about in those days: the middle-class—and sometimes wealthy—physically abused spouse. (This was pre-O.J., when nationwide consciousness was suddenly raised.)

I had heard that women stuck in poverty were sometimes beaten up by their husbands or boyfriends. But the abused women I was encountering were my fellow volunteers and committee members. One woman said, “Look at where my husband broke my thumb in three places with a hammer.” He was a social worker. Back then, a woman had to be willing to testify against her husband, and many women simply could not afford to do this.

The laws have since changed, but abused spouses and partners, ex and otherwise, are still not safe. If you need help, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. Trust your intuition regarding threats from a partner. If you doubt your intuition, please read
The Gift of Fear
by Gavin de Becker.

From the stories I'd heard, I created Goldy's ex-husband, the Jerk. From my own experience raising our three sons, Arch and Julian were born. The characters are composites. But I had plenty of material. A typical Arch story might come from the true story of going clothes-shopping with one of our adolescent sons. (I always seemed to embarrass our sons.)

“Mom,” our son said, this time in a low voice, “when we go into this store, do not call my name. Do not show me any clothes. Do not point out any girls you think are cute. In fact,
pretend that you don't know me
.”

Some readers have commented that Arch speaks to his mother in a disrespectful manner. When
they
were growing up, these readers say, that kind of language and behavior would not have been tolerated. Well, that was when
they
were growing up. And by the way, all of our sons were viewed by their teachers and peers as being exceptionally well-mannered. So there.