I Feel Bad About My Neck (3 page)

Meanwhile, we all began to cook in a wildly neurotic and competitive way. We were looking for applause, we were constantly performing, we were desperate to be all things to all people. Was this the grand climax of the post–World War II domestic counterrevolution or the beginning of a pathological strain of feminist overreaching? No one knew. We were too busy slicing and dicing.

I got married and entered into a series of absolutely insane culinary episodes. I made the Brazilian national dish. I wrapped things in phyllo. I stuffed grape leaves. There were soufflés. I took a course in how to use a Cuisinart food processor. I even cooked an entire Chinese banquet that included Lee Lum’s lemon chicken. Lee Lum was the chef at Pearl’s, the famous Chinese restaurant where no one could get a table. If you did get a table, you remembered the meal forever because there was so much MSG in the food that you were awake for years afterward. Lee Lum’s recipe for lemon chicken involved dipping strips of chicken breast in water-chestnut flour, frying it, plunging it into a sauce that included crushed pineapple, and dousing the entire concoction with a one-ounce bottle of lemon extract. Once again, the recipe was from the Sunday
Times
column written by Craig Claiborne. Craig of course had no difficulty getting a table at Pearl’s, and I looked forward to going there with him someday, after we had actually met and become close personal friends. I’d gone to Pearl’s once and was stunned to discover that it was not only impossible to get a table if you weren’t famous but that being famous was not enough—there were degrees of famous. There was famous enough to get a table, and then there was famous enough to get Pearl to come to the table to tell you the nightly specials, and then there was true fame, top-of-the-line fame, which was famous enough to get Pearl to allow you to order the sweet-and-pungent crispy fish. This was what it came down to in New York: You had to have pull to order a fish.

I became a freelance magazine writer. One of my first pieces, for
New York
magazine, was about Craig Claiborne and Michael Field, who turned out to be at war with each other. As a result, I met Craig Claiborne, and after the article appeared, he invited me to his house. What he served for dinner was not memorable, and in any case, I don’t remember it. Then Claiborne came to our house for dinner, and I served a recipe from one of his cookbooks, a Chilean seafood-and-bread casserole that was a recipe of Leonard Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre. I can’t believe I remember her name, much less how to spell it, especially given the fact that her recipe was a gluey, milky, disappointing concoction that practically bankrupted me.

I don’t think it was Felicia Montealegre’s fault that Craig and I never became friends, but there was no question in my mind after our two meals that we had no future together. Craig was a nice guy, don’t get me wrong, but he was so low-key that once I’d gotten to know him, I was almost completely unable to have even imaginary conversations with him while cooking his recipes.

Around this time I met a man named Lee Bailey, and I guess I would have to say that if there were any embers burning in the Craig Claiborne department, they were completely extinguished the moment I met Lee. Lee Bailey was a friend of my friend Liz Smith, who believed that everyone she knew should be friends with everyone else she knew. So one night, she invited us to Lee’s house for dinner. Lee lived in the East Forties, in a floor-through below the ground, and what I distinctly remember about it was that it had some sort of straw matting on the walls that probably came from Azuma, and it was just about the most fabulous place I’d ever seen. It was simple, and easy on the eyes, and comfortable, but nothing was expensive, and there was no art to speak of, and no color at all. Everything was beige. As Lee once said, “Be very careful about color.”

And then dinner was served. Pork chops, grits, collard greens, and a dish of tiny baked crab apples. It was delicious. It was so straightforward and plain and honest and at the same time so playful. Those crab apples! They were adorable! The entire evening was mortifying, a revelation, a rebuke in its way to every single thing I had ever bought and every dinner I had ever served. My couch was purple. I owned a collection of brightly painted wooden Mexican animals. I had red plates and a shag rug. My menus were overwrought and overthought. Would Lee Bailey ever in a million years consider cooking the Brazilian national dish? Or Lee Lum’s lemon chicken? Certainly not. It was horribly clear that my entire life up to that point had been a mistake.

I immediately got a divorce, gave my ex-husband all the furniture, and began to make a study of Lee Bailey. I bought the chairs he told me to buy, and the round dining room table that seemed to be part of the secret of why Lee’s dinner parties were more fun than anyone else’s. When Lee opened a store at Henri Bendel, I bought the white plates, seersucker napkins, and wood-handled stainless flatware that were just like his. I bought new furniture, and all of it was beige. I became Lee’s love slave, culinarily speaking. Long before he began to write the series of cookbooks that made him well known, he had replaced all my previous imaginary friends in the kitchen, and whenever I cooked dinner and anything threatened to go wrong, I could hear him telling me to calm down, it didn’t matter, pour another drink, no one will care. I stopped serving hors d’oeuvres, just like Lee, and as a result, my guests were chewing the wood off the walls before dinner, just like Lee’s. I began to osmose from a neurotic cook with a confusing repertory of ethnic dishes to a very relaxed one specializing in faintly Southern food.

The most important thing I learned from Lee was something I call the Rule of Four. Most people serve three things for dinner—some sort of meat, some sort of starch, and some sort of vegetable—but Lee always served four. And the fourth thing was always unexpected, like those crab apples. A casserole of lima beans and pears cooked for hours with brown sugar and molasses. Peaches with cayenne pepper. Sliced tomatoes with honey. Biscuits. Savory bread pudding. Spoon bread. Whatever it was, that fourth thing seemed to have an almost magical effect on the eating process. You never got tired of the food because there was always another taste on the plate that seemed simultaneously to match it and contradict it. You could go from taste to taste; you could mix a little of this with a little of that. And when you finished eating, you always wanted more, so that you could go from taste to taste all over again. At Lee Bailey’s you could eat forever. This was important. This was crucial. There’s nothing worse than having people to a dinner that they all just polish off and before you know it, they’re done eating and dinner is over and it’s only ten o’clock and everyone leaves and it’s just you and the dishes. (And that was another thing about dinner at Lee’s: On top of everything else, he had fewer dishes to wash, because he never ever served a first course or a cheese course; and if he served salad, it just went onto the plate along with everything else.)

And by the way, Lee never served fish, so I never served fish, and I’ll tell you why: It’s too easy to eat fish. Bim bam boom you’re done with a piece of fish, and you’re right out the door. When people come to dinner, it should be fun, and part of the fun should be the food. Fish—and I’m sorry to say this but it’s true—is no fun. People like to play with their food, and it’s virtually impossible to play with fish. If you must have fish, order it at a restaurant.

You might think that having Lee as a real friend might have made it superfluous to have him as an imaginary friend, but you would be wrong. As I conducted my inner conversations with Lee—about what to serve, or what would be the perfect fourth thing to accompany what I was serving—it never occurred to me to pick up the phone and ask him. Lee was much too easygoing; he would just have laughed and said, anything you feel like, honey. He was, in his way, as close to a Zen master as I’ve ever had, and all of us who fell under his influence began with his style and eventually ended up with our own.

I always secretly wished that Lee would include a recipe of mine in one of his cookbooks—he frequently came to dinner and was always fantastically kind about the food—but he never asked for any of my recipes. He did take a photograph of my backyard for one of his cookbooks, and he used my napkins and plates in the photograph; but of course, I’d bought them at his store in Bendel’s, so it didn’t really count.

Meanwhile, I got married again, and divorced again. I wrote a thinly disguised novel about the end of my marriage, and it contained recipes. By then, I’d come to realize that no one was ever going to put my recipes into a book, so I’d have to do it myself. I included Lee’s recipe for lima beans and pears (unfortunately I left out the brown sugar, and for years people told me they’d tried cooking the recipe and it didn’t work), along with my family cook Evelyn’s recipe for cheesecake, which I’m fairly sure she got from the back of the Philadelphia cream cheese package. A food writer who wrote about the book carped that the recipes were not particularly original, but it seemed to me she missed the point. The point wasn’t about the recipes. The point (I was starting to realize) was about putting it together. The point was about making people feel at home, about finding your own style, whatever it was, and committing to it. The point was about giving up neurosis where food was concerned. The point was about finding a way that food fit into your life.

And after a while, I didn’t have to have long internal dialogues with Lee—I’d incorporated what I learned from him and moved on. Four things were not enough; I went to five, and sometimes to six. I liked salad and cheese, so I served salad and cheese. So there were more dishes to wash—so what? On the design front, I left behind beige, and as a result I made all the decorating mistakes that are possible once you do.

And I got married again, by the way. In the course of my third marriage, I have had a series of culinary liaisons. I went through a stretch with Marcella Hazan, a brilliant cookbook author whom I had a somewhat unsatisfactory connection to; with Martha Stewart, whom I worshipped and had long, long imaginary talks with, mostly having to do with my slavish adulation of her; and only last year with Nigella Lawson, whose style of cooking is very similar to mine. I gave up on Nigella when one of her cupcake recipes failed in a big way, but I admire her willingness to use store-bought items in recipes, her lackadaisical qualities when it comes to how things look, and her fondness for home cooking. I especially like making her roast beef dinner, which is very much like my mother’s, except for the Yorkshire pudding. My mother didn’t serve Yorkshire pudding, although there is a recipe for it on page 61 of
The Gourmet Cookbook.
My mother served potato pancakes instead. I serve Yorkshire pudding
and
potato pancakes. Why not? You only live once.

On Maintenance

I have been trying for weeks to write about maintenance, but it hasn’t been easy, and for a simple reason: Maintenance takes up so much of my life that I barely have time to sit down at the computer.

You know what maintenance is, I’m sure. Maintenance is what they mean when they say, “After a certain point, it’s just patch patch patch.” Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don’t mean to be too literal about this. There are a couple of old boyfriends whom I always worry about bumping into, but there’s no chance—if I ever did—that I would recognize either of them. On top of which they live in other cities. But the point is that I still think about them every time I’m tempted to leave the house without eyeliner.

There are two types of maintenance, of course. There’s Status Quo Maintenance—the things you have to do daily, or weekly, or monthly, just to stay more or less even. And then there’s the maintenance you have to do monthly, or yearly, or every couple of years or so—maintenance I think of as Pathetic Attempts to Turn Back the Clock. Into this category fall such things as face-lifts, liposuction, Botox, major dental work, and Removal of Unsightly Things—of varicose veins, for instance, and skin tags, and those irritating little red spots that crop up on your torso after a certain age for no real reason. I’m not going to discuss such issues here. For now, I’m concentrating only on the routine, everyday things required just to keep you from looking like someone who no longer cares.

Hair

We begin, I’m sorry to say, with hair. I’m sorry to say it because the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

Tell the truth. Aren’t you sick of your hair? Aren’t you tired of washing and drying it? I know people who wash their hair every day, and I don’t get it. Your hair doesn’t need to be washed every day, any more than your black pants have to be dry-cleaned every time you wear them. But no one listens to me. It takes some of my friends an hour a day, seven days a week, just to wash and blow-dry their hair. How they manage to have any sort of life at all is a mystery. I mean, we’re talking about 365 hours a year! Nine workweeks! Maybe this made sense when we were young, when the amount of time we spent making ourselves look good bore some correlation to the number of hours we spent having sex (which was, after all, one of the reasons for our spending so much time on grooming). But now that we’re older, whom are we kidding?

On top of which, have you tried buying shampoo lately? I mean, good luck to you. Good luck finding anything that says on the label, simply, shampoo. There are shampoos for dry but oily hair and shampoos for coarse but fine hair, and then there are the conditioners and the straighteners and the volumizers. How damaged does your hair have to be to qualify as “damaged”? Why are some shampoos for blondes? Do the blondes get better shampoos than the rest of us? It’s totally dizzying, shelf after shelf of products, not one of them capable of doing the job alone.