Hungry (4 page)

Nancy and I exemplified psychologist William Sheldon’s classification of basic body types and the temperaments to go with them, a personality lineup taken very seriously for a long time. I was the linear ectomorph, particularly skinny in the arms and legs, as was Jacob. I imagined that I would age into the shape of my dad’s father, who in his later years resembled a tangerine on tooth-picks. Like Nancy, Lisa was a muscular mesomorph, gaining weight more easily than Jacob. Lisa couldn’t help noticing these differences and finding them unfair.

During Nancy’s and my youth, being a little more meso than ecto was good for girls. On daily episodes of
The Mickey Mouse Show
, celebrity teenage Mouseketeer Annette Funicello had noticeable breasts under her short-sleeved turtleneck sweater. On Saturday afternoons, we watched the ideal girl handed down from my mother’s generation. Impossibly cheerful, apple-cheeked Shirley Temple sang and tap-danced into our hearts in
Curly Top
and
Poor Little Rich Girl
, that like our era’s enduring
Pollyanna
, promoted the notion that if you kept your sunny side up things would turn out fine. These were our heroines.

Nancy was the good eater, beloved by grandmothers everywhere, but she had a nonweight health problem that drew concern. Eczema caused her neck, the backs of her knees, and the insides of her elbows to redden, swell, and itch like crazy when she encountered an allergen. For a while, she went to bed with plastic wrap swaddling her elbows and knees, which caused her to crinkle and me to mock. Because of her sensitivity, the nut tree in our back-yard had to go. One day she played in the neighbor’s tomato patch and broke out so badly that she was sent to the closest grandparents to recover. She endured endless creams. But the biggest effect on her life, on family life, was her restricted diet.

The regimen kept changing. Nancy definitely couldn’t eat oranges or eggs, but the other culprits weren’t so clear. For several weeks, she ate only applesauce, rice, and lamb. For years she took her breakfast cereal with apricot juice, and later with soymilk. One day Mom gave evaporated milk a shot, but Nancy noticed she was the only one and refused to try it. I offered to pour it on my cereal, too, expecting something that looked like milk to taste somewhere in the same ballpark. It was an early lesson in looks being deceiving, especially for food.

Chocolate and nuts are what Nancy remembers as being more problematic. The best candy bars, the Butterfingers and Snickers bars we got at the Saturday movie matinee, were all about chocolate and nuts. “You got chocolate and I got caramel,” Nancy says now, a little edgily. “Luckily I still like caramel.” Or not so luckily. Caramel is melted sugar, with none of the antioxidants and endorphins associated with certain kinds of chocolate.

Also less lucky for Nancy, mesomorphs often find weight control a constant struggle. Nancy never got fat, but she never got over the mind-set that food and drink required constant vigilance.

Our grandmothers were German-born Jews, one laser-focused on tidiness and order, the other alert for constant danger. One inspected our drawers for unfolded clothes; the other thought eight was too young to be riding bicycles. They both were short and round, like grandmothers were supposed to be. We called them by their husbands’ names. For Nana Bill, a neatnik from Berlin who maybe reached five feet tall, the purpose of dinner was to have the dishes done and put away. While others sat and talked, a redheaded cyclone swept away half-finished plates. The fleshier Nana George had a sweet way of speaking, even when she got mad, using “her” when she meant “she.” She must have missed the pronouns lesson in English class. The only scary thing about Nana George was that she kept a bottle of prune juice in the refrigerator and was always ready to use it on the child who admitted to not having a bowel movement that morning.

Nancy pretty much grew out of her allergies, not by puberty as doctors had promised, but by her late teen years. In the college dorm she didn’t have to pour apricot juice onto her granola.

As an adult, Nancy stays healthy by walking every morning. She enjoys eating, but not with abandon. Nancy’s family attends baseball spring training in Phoenix but has never been to Pizzeria Bianco. Widely regarded as the best pizza place in the United States, Pizzeria Bianco would be my family’s first stop, perhaps our whole reason for visiting Phoenix. Nancy keeps kosher and health-conscious. After an anniversary party at her house, I stood by and watched as Nancy
threw out
the remains of an excellent chocolate cake.

 

 

 

When Chez Panisse opened in 1971, I lived a few blocks away and never even looked at the menu posted outside. I was studying journalism and social unrest at the University of California, Berkeley. Soon after, I moved to a cottage in Silicon Valley and, to keep a little Berkeley with me, I became a vegetarian. Sometimes I made my grandmother’s blintzes and sometimes an even-richer dish, spinach lasagna, for guests. But mostly I ate vegetables, took up jogging, got very skinny, and dabbled in the New Agey Human Potential Movement. One dalliance involved a three-day fast, an organized event bookended by the group gathering at the start and then breaking the fast together at the end. After the first day’s headache went away, I felt light and energetic. I went running. I went to see a new movie,
Rocky
. Bloody fight scenes, screaming, and triumphal music went down easily on an empty stomach, but when Sylvester Stallone swallowed raw eggs to build up his strength,
that
was repulsive. I could have kept fasting much longer. Later, I would compare my experience with Lisa’s anorexia, but for me, starvation lacked purpose; It was just something to try.

I was bored. The problem was, my fast occurred over a long holiday weekend. I had made no plans and no one was around. Actually, my plan was to reach some misty point of enlightenment, but it could go the other way and I’d be very grumpy, so I thought it better to keep to myself. Now there was too much time in the day, with no friends and no meal planning, preparing, or cleaning up. I wondered what the other fasters were doing, but I didn’t even know their names. I napped a lot. I couldn’t wait to get eating back in my life, not so much for the food itself as for the activity.

I never would have met Ned in a fasting group, or even in a restaurant. He loved the hot fudge sundae at Lyon’s coffee shop and the chili burger at Original Tommy’s in Los Angeles, while indulgence for me was the slightly greasy lentil patty at the Good Earth, an early health-food restaurant. We were introduced by one of my college roommates. When Joyce met Ned, they knew after one date that they were not made for each other, not least because Joyce had so many food allergies. A taste of ice cream made her puff up and break out in hives. Ned could not imagine life without ice cream.

I ate ice cream. On our first date, a scoop of chocolate ice cream was the dessert. We went to Susie’s, a fifties-style dinner house featuring chicken-fried steak, not an easy menu item to find in the Bay Area. Still sort of a vegetarian at the time, I ate the iceberg lettuce salad, steamed vegetables, mashed potatoes, and bread, which was unlimited but stale. Somehow at Susie’s the bread was always stale, which struck Ned as one of its charms. Did they leave it sitting out to attain the right degree of dryness? I thought he was nuts.

A signature dish from my grim kitchen was soy “meatloaf.” Chewy little soy grits formed a loaf that neither mustard, catsup nor any other sauce could moisturize. I liked soy loaf because it made me feel virtuous. Ned thought I was nuts.

But this dark-haired, bearded guy with deep brown eyes liked the fact that I enjoyed learning about places I hadn’t been, restaurants as well as concerts and beaches. He made me laugh. We went to see plays and comedians, and waited to see the stars afterward at the stage door. I didn’t know you could even do this. After a terrible play, we waited for Katharine Hepburn, and Ned actually spoke to her, asking her to say the famous line from a good play,
Stage Door:
“The calla lilies are in bloom again.” She stopped and ripped off her whole opening monologue!

Once we hit the food trail, vegetarianism started dropping like breadcrumbs. Others shun meat for serious reasons: to promote the ethical treatment of animals, to fight factory farming and agribusiness, to conserve resources, to rebel against parents. I just liked saying I was a vegetarian. It gave a person a whiff of superiority, the exhibition of steely control, like a Spartan warrior—in much the same way as anorexics regard themselves. Anyway, fancy restaurants were silly extravagances at a time of social upheaval and there was important community-building work to be done. Not that I did it.

I was willing to be dragged along to all kinds of restaurants by a true enthusiast.

Fish and seafood came back right away. Because, you know, if the restaurant’s specialty is roast crab, who are you punishing by not having it? And why live in the San Francisco Bay Area if you aren’t going to eat fresh Dungeness crab? It took longer to rekindle a love of red meat, but not all that long. I craved a hamburger every day of my vegetarian years. The occasional lentil burger looked the part, but it didn’t drip juices. On our first pilgrimage to Chez Panisse, which had quickly become the West Coast basilica of food worship, wouldn’t you know that that night’s entrée would be roast pork tenderloin? I could have asked for a vegetarian substitute, but I was starting to understand that my knowledge of food was very limited. If they had selected roast pork as the high point of dinner, who was I to say, No thanks, I’d rather have zucchini?

Our social life expanded to include dinners hosted by Ned’s friends and colleagues, where the vegetarian stance felt awkward. None of the options worked very well. I didn’t want to tell them ahead of time and have them cook something special for me, or silently push food around and hope no one noticed, or say, “I don’t eat the main thing you’ve cooked here, but don’t worry, I’m fine.” Dietary restrictions had yet to become common topics of discussion.

At home, Ned melted the rest of my resolve with fettuccine Alfredo and cheese-glazed chicken, which he served together. This was a lot tastier than soy loaf. However, his father had had several heart attacks. My counterpunch was to hector Ned into jogging, which at first he opposed because it was a fad. Ned eventually learned to love daily aerobic exercise. For my part, the fad of vegetarianism was over.

When we got married, the fabulous food gifts included Calphalon pans, Henckels knives, and a gift certificate for dinner at the French Laundry. The little Napa Valley stone building that Thomas Keller would later turn into the country’s most difficult reservation was in 1979 just a cool destination restaurant in an actual turn-of-the-century laundry. You got the table for the night, so that between courses you could take a walk in the garden or smoke a cigarette. The framed handwritten menu for September 15, 1979, hangs in our hall:

We had all three desserts. Then as now, no dollar signs were attached to the menu prices, a graphic style that washes numbers clean of meaning, as if the dish’s full name is “Scallops chaud-froid 3.25.” The French Laundry was an early adopter of this sneaky fashion in American menu design. Now it’s hard to find dollar signs on Chinese takeout menus, let alone the fancy French. Today, a Chef’s Tasting Menu at the French Laundry begins with Thomas Keller’s trademark humor:
and ends with:

In our family, Ned is the tightwad and I am the spendthrift, and although we each have our irrational moments (Ned: “We need toilet paper
again
?” Sheila: “These shoes are a little expensive, yes, but they will last longer!”), we pretty much agree about spending on food. It’s good to eat well. When we argue about restaurants, more likely it’s about parking, traffic, or some other difficulty in getting there than about the food. Ned refuses to pay for parking unless all other options are impossible, no matter how upscale the restaurant or how dicey the neighborhood. He is a little bipolar about food, searching for half-off coupons and then buying duck confit for a weeknight dinner.

Before having children, we camped in state parks in order to eat in restaurants up and down the West Coast. We would get dressed in the tent and roll out of camp just as everyone else was huddling around their barbecues and benches. By the time we finished our French Laundry figs and chocolate in cream, coffee pot de crème, and raspberry meringues and drove back into camp, all was peace and quiet. In the morning, we’d find a coffee shop.

Ned’s training as a reference librarian gave him extra skills for ferreting out places to eat. In the San Francisco Bay Area, restaurants tended to clump up in Berkeley and San Francisco, but weekend destinations to the north had been newly discovered. When we traveled, Ned made charts and then spreadsheets so that in case we got hungry in Versailles, Brooklyn, or Mendocino, we were less likely to make an unfortunate touristy mistake. Few newspapers ran restaurant reviews, and guidebooks were unreliable.

Sometimes we behaved more like cows than ferrets. We fell back on the herd instinct, and we were reminded that people like restaurants for many reasons, some of which we didn’t share. One of the more expensive reminders came during a trip up the California coast, when Mendocino was still an artsy little town. It had yet to become famous in the role of a New England fishing village in the movie
Summer of ’42
, but Mendocino had Ledford House, Margaret Fox’s irresistible Café Beaujolais, and other restaurants that are still worth the five-hour drive—much of it through beautiful valleys and along spectacular coastline. Those we knew. But one night we found ourselves up near Fort Bragg, and noticed a Hollywood-worthy seafood house on Noyo Harbor, a working port. This place was jammed. It must be great! We waited over an hour in the bustling and quaintly shoddy bar, and then . . . maybe we didn’t drink enough. From the relish-and-saltines tray to canned peas to frozen fish, the food droned on. Dining here was like being stuck in a traffic jam, staring at the pattern of holes in freeway divider concrete, thinking, “How bad can it be? Should I get off this road and go another way? Nah, it has to get better soon.” But it doesn’t. Bad appetizers seldom lead to good entrées, but sometimes dessert is so much better than anything that came before that it feels like you’re in a different restaurant. Not this time.