Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (29 page)
Read Recipes for a Perfect Marriage Online
Authors: Kate Kerrigan
3–4 shallots, chopped
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1½ cups lamb stock
2–3 sprigs rosemary, leaves removed and chopped
2 handfuls tiny new potatoes
8 small whole baby carrots
red wine
Method
Brown the rack of lamb for 3 minutes on each side in a hot pan. Remove from the pan and throw in your shallots and garlic for 1 minute, then remove. Throw the hot stock into a saucepan and add potatoes, carrots, and rosemary, then bring to a boil. Place rack of lamb on top, cover, and simmer for 15 minutes (rare) or 20 minutes (medium rare). Remove rack of lamb and the vegetables with a slotted spoon and place in a shallow casserole dish. Cover with a tea towel and leave to rest for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, reduce the pan liquid by a third (on a high heat for 2–3 minutes). Once reduced, add a good slug of red wine and leave on high heat for another 2 minutes. Take off the heat and cover with a lid to keep gravy hot. Slice the lamb into six cutlets, place 3 on each plate, and spoon the spuds and carrots around them. Add the red wine sauce just before serving.
Accompany with buttered, wilted white cabbage sprinkled with thyme. (Finely chop a quarter of a head of white cabbage, simmer over a very low heat with 2 knobs butter for 10 minutes, adding a little of the red wine. Add thyme 2 minutes before removing from the heat.)
My darling Tressa,
It may be old fashioned for me to believe, in this day and age, that you will ever choose to get married. And while my instincts have led me astray many times over the past seventy years, I feel certain in my belief that you, of all the people I have known, will find lasting love. My hope for you is that my story, as true as I am able to write it, will help you hold onto that love when you do find it. Because it has taken me all of this time to realize that there is nothing in this world worth speaking of more than love.
Since your grandfather died, I have become more clearly aware of the connection between food and love. Not having him to cook for anymore, I turned away from my kitchen and to his old desk in my need to record the details of our marriage. In these pages, he has come alive to me again and I have found great comfort in that.
You are probably wondering why I chose you as my audience rather than your mother. All I can tell you is that sometimes it is difficult to be absolutely honest with your own child. I was able to love you as my grandchild yet enjoy a light, friendly freedom I never had with Niamh. It may have seemed, as you grew older, that your mother envied the closeness we enjoyed; our mutual love of cooking, the easy immediate way we could talk and joke together
— but I know Niamh better than anyone and I know that she reveled in it too. You may pass this on to her if she asks to read it, but I doubt she will. Niamh knows all she needs to know about my story because she carries the truth of it in her blood. Your blood and mine is diluted so I feel freer to speak the truth out.
If you never marry, you may never read this
—but I hope you do. We love best by giving of the things we love best. In my marriage, I moved from one recipe to another and through them learned the lessons I needed to love. I would like to think I am
leaving some legacy behind in teaching you my kitchen skills and telling you my story. Use them both to love more thoroughly, more generously than I did.
I hope that your husband is everything you have ever wished for. But mostly, I hope that he is kind and that he loves you. They are the only two things that matter in the end.
Love and every happiness, Grandma Bernadine
The first year of my marriage didn’t work out quite how I planned it, in all sorts of ways.
The photographs of our kitchen, which
New York Interiors
magazine had shot months before (and we had more or less forgotten about) hit the newsstands. The response to our customized cupboards was astounding, and I was suddenly overwhelmed with requests to design kitchens. Except that everyone wanted a one off “original” like ours. Dan had an idea. He called Gerry and the two of them started calling in favors. They borrowed some muscle, big wheels, and started trawling around salvage yards and building suppliers. Before I had time to really figure out what was happening, the three of us were running a kitchen design and manufacturing company called, of all things, Eclectic Kitchens. We sold the apartment in Manhattan, trading it for the lease on a showroom, and less than three months in business we were shortlisted for a new business award. It has been the craziest, busiest, scariest, and most profitable experience of my life. Dan and I spent our first wedding anniversary in a tiling factory formulating our new range of retro colors. And here’s the craziest thing of all:
I loved it.
It was the perfect end to the first year of what continues to be the biggest adventure of my life: marriage. When we got home that night, there was a package waiting for me from my mother. The covering note said that she was passing on my grandmother’s memoirs, which she had held onto all of these years, following Bernadine’s request that they be sent to me on my first wedding anniversary. I didn’t tear the package open immediately, as I want to savor her story properly as I have been doing with my memories of her recipes throughout the past year.
I found the first year hard because I asked too many questions. Questions are the sign of an active, intelligent mind, a filter you rinse your ideas through before you make a decision. But sometimes the filter gets clogged and then it becomes a barrier to the truth. The truth is that while I was busy wondering if I loved Dan enough, measuring him up against ex-boyfriends, being attracted to other men, sweating, deliberating, agonizing about my decision to spend the rest of my life with him, our marriage was just marching on anyway.
We moved home, we renovated a house, we negotiated around family, we built a kitchen, we entertained new and old friends. We lived, ate, slept together. Dan was busy just being my husband and despite myself, I had been a wife to him.
An adoring, generous-spirited wife? No. The words “grudging” and “duty” spring to mind, but I guess it’s a start. I thought that you could not make a commitment until you were truly in love. What I know now is that you cannot love truly until you have made a commitment.
I like to have all the answers up front, before I decide if a risk is worth taking. But with relationships, it just doesn’t work like that. Being in love has a shorter guarantee than a kettle, and in the long run can be a lot less use in a marriage. Better to be armed with a dose of blind faith, so that when the love runs out you can believe it will be back again. Because it will. What I have learned this year is that married love is never complete or finite. It has to be elastic, adjustable. If you become too attached to a way of loving, the beautiful buzz, the thrill, you’ll have no way of replacing it when it’s gone. Marriages are custom made; you just jiggle them around until you find a way to make them fit.
They say the heart rules the head, but sometimes it works the other way around. I was a grown woman when I married Dan. I married him because his heart was big and brave enough to take me on. It needed to be, as I discovered that my own heart was small and wretchedly weak. Lucky for me, Dan’s heart wouldn’t let me go. He told me once that he loved me enough for the both of us. It frightened me at the time, and I comforted myself with the fact that it was just a figure of speech. But it wasn’t—and I sure am glad that it was true. Do I love him now? Yes, but don’t ask me to put a 100 percent tag on it because I don’t know if that mysterious gap that craves certainty will ever be filled. In my most self-brutalizing moments, I still wonder if I married Dan just to not be alone. I wonder then if marriage is about love at all. Perhaps it is just the dance two people make, when they move quietly about the same house. Perhaps it is not how I feel about Dan’s little foibles that matters, but the fact that I know about them at all. Perhaps intimacy is not just loving everything about him, but knowing everything about him—and staying anyway.
This is my last chance at love not because I am too old to meet anyone else, but because it is just time to stop. Stop running, chasing this moving target I call happiness, and get happy with what I have got.
Dan is not the right guy or the wrong guy. He is just my guy. My husband. The one I chose on the day I chose him, and right now, I plan to go on choosing him for the rest of my life.
In the meantime, I am going to clear some space in my life to read my grandmother’s memoirs. Maybe I will discover what it was that kept Bernadine and James together for so long and perhaps my marriage to Dan will be different from theirs, but just as good. Like my Irish stew.
There is no magic recipe.
~
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Grace’s life changed with a list. Left in the kitchen by her mother, Eileen, this innocuous ‘To Do’ list states, below bread, telephone bill and bins: “Tell G I have ovarian cancer, probably terminal.” Brought up in rural Ireland in the 1950s, Eileen’s life has been ruled, in order, by the church, her husband and her child. She’s had little time to think about herself. But now time is running out. And Grace is determined to know everything about her mother before it’s too late.
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