Last Bite: A Novel of Culinary Romance (6 page)

“I’m
not
interested, Mary. He’s an opportunist. But I will see him again and again. I have to work with him, and he’s asked us all to a party at his restaurant this Thursday night.”

“Are you going to go?”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure Sally is going to want to go. She hasn’t been to Oran Mor and she hates not being up on what’s hot. That means I’ll go. Why don’t you come with us?”

“You don’t have to ask me twice. I use all the connections I can to go everywhere. Wait right here.”

Mary left and returned in a minute with a little black dress that was clearly not designed for warmth. “Here try this on.”

“Try what on? I don’t see anything but a black handkerchief.”

She pushed it toward me. “Try it!”

Had God been sitting in the dressing room, he would have listed the dress as the eighth deadly sin. It was a soft, smooth silk, and its only shape was my body. Thin spaghetti straps met a bodice cut so low you would see China if I bent over. It stopped about two inches above my knees and would stop my Nonna’s heart if she saw me in it.

“You look incredible. You
have
to wear that to the party. Wear the black Jimmy Choo heels you bought in Nantucket last summer.”

“Are you crazy? I’ll get arrested, or at least propositioned on Second Avenue.”

“You’re not going to be on Second Avenue. You’re going to be in the high-rent district, and this is what people are wearing.”

“Not my people.”

“No. You’re right about that. Your people are wearing baggy pants with fruit all over them, white coats with little kerchiefs tied around their necks, and funny hats. Trust me, Casey. You look amazing. Chef Danny will see what’s really cooking.”

“I told you. I’m not interested.”

“Well, that’s the point. You want him to crave you for you, and then you can reject him for using you. Payback.”

She had a point. Revenge goes with our heritage. I took another look in the mirror. The dress was skimpy, but it didn’t reveal parts of me that I’d been taught to hide. After making sure the dress was shrinkproof in case of rain, I bought it, along with several stylish pieces for the trip. If you didn’t count the sexy payback dress, the entire wardrobe barely set me back a week’s pay.

Cookin’ good.
—Nancy Apple

W
ednesday morning I ignored the pastries on the breakfast buffet and took a plain yogurt. No sense in risking a bulge in my little black dress. I ate half the yogurt and then started to unpack the organic groceries. Mae came in as I was trying to decide if tempeh really deserved a place in this world. I didn’t have to guess where she would stand on the question. I hadn’t seen her look that happy since, as my dad would say, “the pigs ate her little sister.”

“Is she here yet?” she asked, dropping her backpack on a stool. “Sara, I mean.”

“Mae, I have really bad news for you. They rushed Sara to the hospital with a severe case of additive deficiency. They’re feeding her liquidized Chee-tos and pepperoni pizza through a tube, and she is responding well. She’s begun to ask for take-out from Wendy’s.”

Mae lifted her arms into a cross as if to ward off evil spirits. “You shouldn’t even contaminate the room with the name of that place. Trust me, you’ll be eating your words as soon as you
meet Sara and taste her cheesecake.” Cheesecake made me think of the cheese Danish I had passed on earlier that morning. I figured one couldn’t hurt and headed back to the buffet.

Our vegan chef, Sara Paul, turned out to be a delight, and her tofu cheesecake was as delicious as Mae had promised. We were even able to get all four Tonys to taste it. They declined offers of the tempeh fajitas, however, and although I did taste them, I didn’t think the local beef-heavy, Tex-Mex restaurant had to worry about being replaced. The morning’s only dicey moment was when I took Sara up to makeup and she asked if the products had been tested on animals and no one knew.

“I just can’t use them, then. I’m sorry, but the very thought that they could have been is terribly upsetting to me. Can’t I just go on as I am?”

I took a good look at her. She was wheat. Her hair, her eyes, her eyebrows, her complexion, her blouse, they were all one shade of beige. The camera would have trouble finding her. “I don’t think so, Sara. Can you just get made up for the show and we’ll wash it off immediately afterward?”

She shook her head back and forth slowly. “I just can’t. I’m sorry. I think of those poor defenseless little creatures and it makes me too sad.”

The last thing I needed was a sobbing animal-rights activist beating tofu, frying tempeh, and dedicating the segment to helpless, chemically altered Spot. Not a good show. Then I had an idea. “Wait here,” I said and ran down to my socially conscious assistant. “Mae, do you have makeup with you?”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“Everything but your Magic Markers.”

As I suspected, Meg’s cosmetic bag held bottles and tubes all clearly marked that they had not been manufactured at the expense of any critter two- or four-footed. Sara got a little color
and the audience got an exciting lesson in the uses of tofu and tempeh. Well, perhaps exciting is an exaggeration.

After the show, Mae went out for a smoke and I headed to the buffet for a muffin. I was fairly certain that I had burned off the calories of at least the Danish I’d already eaten by running up and down the stairs to makeup in search of politically correct cosmetics for Sara. I returned to the kitchen and sat down at Romeo to look over the scripts for Sally’s two taped spots.

The prep for taped spots is different from that for live ones. If something goes wrong in a live spot, there’s no way we can fix it; the talent just has to deal with it. So we only have to set it up once. With taped spots, there is always the possibility that we will have to do it more than once. If the talent makes a mistake or the camera misses something, the producer or director can ask for another take. So we have to have enough backup food prepped to repeat the shot as many times as necessary. It’s not a problem if the food hasn’t been disturbed, because then we can just wipe things clean and start again. But if the food has been cut or cooked or mashed about, we need backups. That means that for every food item on a tray that may be altered we need at least two identical items waiting in the wings. It’s my job to know which ones and how many of them we need.

Mae returned to the kitchen with the Tonys. She was still going on about Sara to them. “You should
definitely
go to her restaurant. The food she serves will change your whole perspective on eating. You’ll get into a whole new way of life.” The Tonys were nodding their heads enthusiastically, but I knew the only thing they wanted to get into were Mae’s pants.

I had made a huge number of notes on the tarte Tatin scripts and was trying to decipher what I’d written when Mae sat
down. “Is Sally coming to the studio this morning?” she asked.

“She’s going to try. She took an early shuttle from Washington and if it’s on time and the traffic isn’t bad, she told Sonya, she’ll stop in.”

“I want to give her the invitation for the Oran Mor party.” It seemed to be all that was on Mae’s mind.

“I told Sonya we were all invited and she said she’d tell Sally. I’m sure she’s going to want to go.”

“Well, duh! That’s a def. Who wouldn’t? You’re going, aren’t you?”

I tried to look bored. “I am.”

“What are you going to wear?”

“Nothing.”

“Huh?”

“Mary talked me into buying a dress that is so skimpy, I might as well wear nothing.”

Mae leaned toward me and raised her eyebrows. “So, you bought a new dress? A skimpy new dress. Are you hoping to impress anyone in particular?”

I crossed my arms on Romeo and leaned into the distance she’d left between us. “Now, who could you have in mind? Mr. Love-’Em-and-Leave-’Em? Why don’t
you
go after him? You’re the one who thinks he’s so charming.”

“Because he’s obviously into you.”

“I’m going to assume that’s a plural ‘you,’ referring to the majority of the female population in the midtown area.”

“You’re only guessing that he’s a player, Casey.”

“Trust me. It’s a safe guess and I’m not interested. I bought the dress because I needed it.” Even
I
didn’t believe the sound of that. “What are you going to wear?”

“I’m putting together an Irish outfit.” She leaned back and squinted in thought. “I haven’t quite figured it all out yet, but I
found the right color green spray paint.” She didn’t seem to have any idea how weird that sounded. “Speaking of clothes,” she said and left the topic of spray paint, “did you find anything cool for Italy? You must be getting so psyched about going.”

“Yes to the clothes. The jury’s still out on the trip.”

“Because Richard’s not going?” She sounded ready to jump on me about it.

“Because George Davis is.”

A look of disdain replaced her unsympathetic frown. “Hello! The Prince of Darkness. Who invited him?”

“He did. He says he has business with Sally there.”

“Gross! I don’t understand why she has anything to do with him. He’s, like, so totally creepy. And, you know, he has her doing things that are so un-Sally. Did you see that commercial he arranged for her to do for laundry detergent? I mean, it’s so embarrassing. His whole being around is a totally weird deal. He’s like that Sven-something guy.”

“Svengali.”

“Yeah. Svengali. He’s probably hypnotizing her into doing what he wants.”

“I think that’s a real stretch, Mae.”

“Well, there
has
to be something. Maybe they’re, like, getting it on. You know, a lot of lonely widows get trapped into doing crazy things by some young gigolo.”

“Give me a break! Sally’s suffering a lapse in judgment, not going blind. Have you taken a good look at George Davis?”

“You’re right. He’s pretty butt-ugly.”

“Ugly’s just the half of it. He’s unkempt. Tina could start an herb garden under his fingernails. The dandruff, the dirty shoes. His clothes never fit.
Oh!
” I groaned. “And that smug look. There’s no way he’s Sally’s type.”

“Well, there must be something. It’s too weird. If we were in a novel, we’d find out that he’s secretly her son from a teenage marriage to a drug dealer who beat her and she had to give him up at birth because he was born a crack baby.”

“
What
are you reading, these days, Mae? Anyway, that wouldn’t make sense even if this were a novel. Sally’s life is an open book. Literally. With three different biographies written about her, someone would have found a skeleton if it exists.”

“Hey, you never know.”

“I guess. Whoa. Look at the time. We’d better get busy.”

“Okay, tell me about the lobster spot.”

“Sally is going to show Jim the right way to eat a lobster. Jim and Sally will each have a lobster, so I’ve ordered six, which should be plenty. It gives us two backups. It’s just eating a lobster, not cooking it. What can go wrong?”

“Those are the four most frightening words in food TV.”

“You’re right. I take them back.”

“Do we need any food prepped for that spot?”

“Just melted butter, and we can do that in the morning. We should also cut up some lemons in case Jim wants to squeeze some on his lobster. It’s the tarte Tatin that’s going to be a bitch.” Mae and I each looked down at our recipes and scripts for the tarte Tatin. “With the tarte Tatin, Sally is not going to make the pastry crust but tell people to use their own perfectly made one. We can get those made today—three for three finished tarts, three for Sally, two of them backups. We can make the three finished tarts today and get all the apples we’ll need peeled and cut. Sprinkle them with lemon and sugar so they won’t turn brown. And be sure to leave some apples uncut, because Sally wants to show how to cut them up.” After trying it a number of different ways, Sally had determined that the
most efficient way to cut an apple into wedges was to cut it in quarters, core it,
then
peel it and cut the wedges. It eliminated the contest to see who could cut the longest unbroken piece of apple peel, but it was a lot faster.

I wasn’t surprised that Sally had chosen to demonstrate a tarte Tatin. It was a classic French dessert, delicious, a challenge, and it had a good story. The famous tarte Tatin or, as it was originally called,
tarte des demoiselles Tatin
, was created by two spinster sisters of the Loire Valley who supposedly forgot to put the pastry in the bottom of the pie pan, put it on top instead, and then reversed it after cooking, creating the upside-down apple tart. Sally got a hoot out of calling these two talented hotel owners “spinster sisters,” but what she really liked was the story, true or not, of how they just made the mistake work. More than once, she has told her audiences never to apologize to dinner guests. “If your cake is too moist and falls into pieces when you turn it out, scoop it up and call it a pudding.”

“Okay. Let’s start by giving assignments to the ten cast-iron pans and putting a Post-it in each one so we don’t get confused.” The Tonys each handed Mae a Post-it pad and a pen. She passed one of them over to me.

“When the segment opens, pan one will be on the stove with butter, already partially melted. Sally will add the sugar to that pan, then cook it until it caramelizes. Pans two and three are backups for pan one. Pan four will have already caramelized sugar and one partial circle of apple wedges. Sally will put on the second circle. Five and six are backups to pan four. She’ll put pan four on the stove to cook the apples until the juices are thick and syrupy. Pan seven has the juices already thick, and Sally covers the apples in that pan with the pastry dough, which will be rolled out and on the counter. We won’t need a
backup for pan seven because it will be easy enough to pull the dough off without disturbing the apples. Pan eight is a finished, baked tart for Sally to turn out; nine and ten are backup finished tarts.

“In case she drops eight.”

“Please, Mae. Not you too.” When fans meet Sally, they feel compelled to tell her how much they loved the show when she accidentally dropped poached eggs on the floor. But people remember it differently, so sometimes they say chicken, sometimes leg of lamb, sometimes a great huge fish. Sally never corrects them; she just says, “Yes, wasn’t that funny?” Some people remember incorrectly but with such detail that you can only wonder. One guy could hardly talk when he recounted to Sally how he and his wife almost wet their pants when she dropped the éclair on the floor and it landed frosting down. “Remember how you scraped the frosting off the floor and squiggled it back on the éclair? It was hilarious.” “Wasn’t it?” was all Sally said.