The next day, Lucia calls in sick. As a result, the station to my left is empty and I only have Snake Eyes to my right.
“Did you poison her?” Snake Eyes asks with a smirk. “How very seventeenth-century French of you.”
“What is wrong with you?” I hurl back. My head is throbbing with the kind of headache that follows a night of no sleep and too much thinking.
“I hear belladonna was used back then.” He looks around him and whispers, “I know a place that sells the berries.”
“Please stop talking.” I stare at him, incredulous. Is he suggesting we poison Lucia? And how did I get sucked into this conversation?
I make a mental note never to take any food from Snake Eyes’s hands—especially dark berries.
Chef Troissant enters the kitchen carrying a basket of vegetables under her arm. She doesn’t greet anyone as she walks about the room, setting a different vegetable on each student’s station.
When she reaches Lucia’s station she clicks her tongue. “Malade,” she says under her breath in a tone that implies disbelief. Her eyes land on me and I feel a cold shiver run down my spine.
“Mademoiselle Fields, I believe you have earned these sunchokes,” she says, placing the funny-looking tubers on my station. “I want a soup. Keep the skin. Make it potent.”
“Oui, Chef,” I respond with a nod. Snake Eyes covers his mouth with his fist to suppress a laugh. When Chef Troissant is out of hearing distance he aims a farting sound in my direction.
“I’m sorry, should I get you a whoopee cushion while you’re at it?” I deadpan.
“I don’t know this whoopee. But you may need a cushion to sit after eating that soup.” He laughs at his own joke, which I don’t get.
“What are you talking about?” I ask, quickly losing what little patience I have left.
“You’ll see.”
I ignore him and get to work on the sunchokes. I melt butter in a pot and use it to sauté chopped onions, leeks, and garlic. I add vegetable broth and drop in the sunchokes, leaving on the skin as Chef Troissant directed, and wait for them to fully cook. Using an immersion blender, I puree the soup until all the lumps have disappeared and it’s smooth. Then I stir in cream and seasoning. For my presentation, I garnish with toasted pumpkin seeds and a drizzle of pumpkin seed oil.
Chef Troissant works the kitchen, moving from one station to the next as students announce their dishes are ready. She dips a spoon or fork into their plates and passes judgment in one-word verdicts like “overcooked,” “tasteless,” and “unoriginal.”
I raise my hand to indicate I am ready for a tasting. Chef Troissant looks at me from across the room and narrows her eyes. The ominous feeling from the start of class returns, and this time I know I’m not making it up.
My stomach goes into overdrive. Does she know about the beurre blanc? But how? A rope of tight knots forms in my abdomen and climbs all the way to my throat.
Chef Troissant doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t even look at my soup. She pulls a spoon from the pocket of her chef’s coat—like she had planned this all along—and hands it to me with an acerbic, “Eat.”
“Pardon?” My mind whirls. She wants me to eat my own soup?
“Eat,” she repeats, pushing her spoon into my hand.
Everyone stares in silence.
My hand trembles as I reach for the spoon, knowing something is very wrong with this picture.
She’s trying to break me, I tell myself. This is part of the test.
I take the spoon, dip it into the soup, and bring it to my mouth. It has a delicate artichoke flavor with an earthy aftertaste.
I move my hand to set down the spoon but Chef Troissant pushes the plate toward me and says, “All of it.”
I pause for a beat, trying to sort out what’s going on. Chef Troissant crosses her arms over her chest and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. Her eyebrow arches as if to say, I don’t have all day.
I load up my spoon and eat the puree. I pause again, thinking maybe she will leave now, but she doesn’t. She’s just standing there! Like some crazy chef statue.
Meanwhile a rhythmic pounding inside my head has taken my temples hostage. It literally feels like my head is about to explode into an atomic bomb-sized mushroom.
I eat another spoonful. And then another. I keep doing this, like a robot, until the dish is empty and the room is spinning at warp speed.
“Bon,” Chef Troissant says when I’m finished. The left side of her lips slightly ticks upward as she says, “My regards to Mademoiselle García.”
My stomach grumbles as I watch the back of her pristine white coat walk away from me and disappear into her office.
I glance in Pippa’s direction, but she looks away like she’s trying to avoid me. So instead of doing the sensible thing and just letting it go, I walk over and flat-out ask her, “What’s going on?”
“You tell me,” she says, cleaning the sides of her dish. Her vegetable was an eggplant, so she prepared an eggplant Provençal that looks and smells amazing. But my stomach is not having it. It rumbles again, so loud Pippa can hear.
She puts down her towel and sighs.
“I heard you,” she says.
“I think the entire kitchen heard me,” I say, wrapping my arms around my stomach. That soup did not go down well. At all.
Pippa’s face softens. “I’m talking about yesterday. I heard you talking to Snake Eyes in the locker room. And Lucia told me what you did. It’s not right. We need to stick together.”
My fingers dig through my scalp. At this point, I don’t know what hurts more—my head or my stomach.
“I didn’t mean to . . .” I say. “It was a mistake.”
“Then you should tell Chef Troissant,” Pippa says. “It’s not fair.”
I think of the repercussions of such a confession: no more apprenticeship, no more Michelin-starred kitchen.
I’d rather live the lie.
“Especially as it looks like she already knows,” Pippa tells me.
“What do you mean?” I ask, gripping the sides of her station for support.
“She gave you fartichokes. And made you eat them,” she calmly explains. “The skin is the worst part.”
My face goes blank. What is she talking about?
“They’re notorious for their bowel-busting terror,” she adds. And somehow bowel-busting terror doesn’t sound any better when said with a British accent.
As if on cue, my stomach thunders like it’s about to burst in terror. I run to the nearest bathroom and barely make it in time.
I tell myself to research poisonous foods when I get home. If I ever get out of this toilet, that is.
I stop by Monsieur Barthélemy’s stand on my way home. I’m preparing “un bouillon de légumes,” I tell him, grabbing a bunch of carrots from a basket for a broth.
“Where have you been?” He sings the question in his heavy French accent. “My vegetables miss you.”
“Very busy,” I say, and then explain in French the whole apprenticeship thing.
“Bah, Michelin!” he hisses with a dismissive wave. “The best chefs go crazy for those tiny macarons,” referring to the French nickname for the little rosettes in the guide that indicate the number of Michelin stars a restaurant received.
“Just last week . . . What was his name? He killed himself!”
The memory of Chef Bernard Martin’s death comes back to me. Has it only been a week? It feels like a lifetime ago that Pippa, Lucia, and I were talking about it in Grattard’s kitchen.
Monsieur Barthélemy searches for something behind his booth and returns with a worn copy of Le Figaro newspaper. He shakes his head in disapproval, holding the pages for me to see. A headline proclaims “TV Personality and World’s Best Restaurant Chef Dead of Apparent Suicide.” I take the newspaper from his hands and read.
Last month, Le Illusionaire was named the world’s best restaurant on the prestigious La Liste released by the French Foreign Ministry. Yesterday, its 44-year-old owner, celebrity chef Bernard Martin, was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home outside Paris.
Martin was a young star in the competitive world of high-end dining, having earned his third Michelin star when he was only 36 years old. His charming personality fueled the success of the beloved food and travel TV series Places Untraveled.
His death came the day before the Michelin guide was to announce its ratings for this year. Rumors had circulated that reviewers for Michelin were not as impressed with Martin’s new, modern take on classic staples.
“He gave everything to his craft,” said Le Illusionaire’s sous-chef and Martin’s close friend. “A true creative genius and a kind soul. It hurts to think of a world without Bernard in it.”
Monsieur Barthélemy’s voice takes on a grim tone as he says, “Chasing perfection, they say. If you ask me, there is no such thing.”
I stare at Chef Martin’s photo on the page. His lips are smiling but there’s something like sadness in his eyes. A knot forms in the back of my throat. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of pressure led Martin to take his own life. How scared and desperate he must have felt in that moment. And how incredibly tragic he didn’t realize his life was worth so much more than a bad review.
“What does it matter, these macarons, anyway?” Monsieur Barthélemy asks, waving a bunch of dill in his hand. “Here, you will need this for your broth.” He drops the herbs into my basket.
“It matters a lot,” I say absentmindedly. “Reputation, success, fame; more people want to visit your restaurant, eat your food.” It’s something I read in Art Culinaire magazine, but looking at Chef Martin’s photo I’m suddenly questioning everything I thought I knew about the career path I’ve chosen.
What the Art Culinaire article left unsaid was how much exactly these things do matter. Enough for someone to completely forgo a life outside of the kitchen? Enough that they become so identified with a role that nothing else matters? Enough that they don’t see a future? Enough that they don’t feel how much they’re loved?
Is this what I’m doing?
I swallow hard.
“Reputation and success, bah!” Monsieur Barthélemy fusses again. “They are traps, these things. They own you. And they take away your peace in here,” he says, pointing at his head, “and here,” gesturing at his heart. “I have no reputation, no success, no fame. But I am very happy man.” He smiles wide and throws a free head of garlic into my basket. “Best garlic in all of Bessenay,” he says with a wink.
I add a few onions and also pick up some leeks and potatoes. I take a ginger root in my hand that looks too similar to a sunchoke. “This is ginger, right?” I ask.
“Of course it’s ginger! What else would it be?” he protests, then adds a bulb of fennel to my basket. “Fennel—aromatic,” he says, wafting his hand in front of his face.
I pull a twenty euro note from my purse and hand it to him.
“Merci.”
He takes the money and gives me back some change.
“You come back soon,” he says before turning to help another customer.
I linger for a few seconds and finish reading the last part of the newspaper article.
The day after Bernard Martin died, the Michelin guide was released. His restaurant retained the three stars, but Martin wasn’t around to see it.
I thought I couldn’t possibly feel any worse today, but I was wrong.
Whenever anything in her life went wrong, Lala would say, “Más perdimos en Cuba, morenita.” And perhaps she did lose more in Cuba.
Lala left Havana with only two suitcases to her name. Her entire life was neatly folded and packed inside those two bags.
I think of all the things in our Chicago brownstone that would be difficult to leave behind—the framed family photos scattered around the house, a handstitched quilt made by Grampa Roger’s mom that Lala passed on to me, and a painting of a Mexican landscape my parents bought on their honeymoon. All of these reminders would be gone, as if the memories they represented never existed.
Six months after she arrived in Miami, Lala married Grampa Roger. They settled in a two-bedroom bungalow in Coconut Grove, the best he could afford on his salary as a Latin American studies professor at the University of Miami. “I never thought I would be that happy,” she once told me. She had a new life in Miami, but she had also managed to scrape together pieces of the old one: her aunt and cousins lived nearby, everyone around her spoke Spanish, and if she needed a taste of home, she just had to drive over to Versailles restaurant for a roast pork sandwich.
Within the year they were expecting my dad. “I wanted him to grow up surrounded by a big family, people who love you and care about you, who have a shared history,” she told me. But it wasn’t meant to be.
Grampa Roger’s mom got sick. “Mary wanted to die at home, so moving her to Miami wasn’t an option,” Lala told me. “We had to respect her wishes. She was born in this house, and she lived here her whole life. It was the only home she ever knew. I understood what losing one’s home does to you. It takes away a piece of your soul, morenita.”
That summer, after Grampa Roger finished teaching his spring semester course on the Chilean Revolution, they moved 1,500 miles from their cozy little house in Coconut Grove to a hundred-acre farm outside of Kansas City.
Once again, Lala left her life behind to start over. But this time there was no big Latin family, no aunt, no cousins, no Spanish, and no roasted pork sandwiches from Versailles. Instead, she lived in a big farmhouse where she used her nursing background to help her sick mother-in-law, who she had never met. “I cared for her like she was my own mother,” Lala once said proudly.
Lala didn’t speak English at that point, and Mary didn’t speak Spanish. The only place they could communicate was in the kitchen, where Lala would make Mary her caldo de gallina, or la sopa levantamuertos, as she would call it, because it apparently “could revive the dead.” And Mary in turn would teach Lala how to make her Blessed Pies.
“Mary taught me to write down all my recipes,” Lala said. “Back home we just knew what to do. I learned from Mami and my tías. Only a few things were written down. But Mary had a shelf full of notebooks.”
I still remember that shelf. The notebook pages were yellow and dusty, but every pie recipe ever baked in our family kitchen was written there.
“I wanted my own notebook. So I watched how Mary did it and I started writing down my own recipes.”
Mary didn’t have a daughter. And Lala’s mother had already died. Between the food and the love in that kitchen, they became each other’s family.
“We didn’t need words, mija. On pie days, Mary bounced out of bed and we picked apples in the backyard. I brought her café con leche and we sat out in the sun for a while. On those days, the color returned to her face. We peeled the apples, kneaded the dough, and cooked the syrup. Mary taught me how to lay the apple slices on the baking dish and how to cover them in syrup. Then she would place the pie inside the brown paper bag and close her eyes before putting it in the oven. At first, I didn’t know what she was doing. All I knew was that a peace took over that kitchen like a warm blanket. Later, when I asked Roger what it meant, he said she was praying over her pies so whoever ate them had joy in their heart. She didn’t need words to teach me how to bless the pies. I just felt it.”
Back at Villa des Fleurs, I drop off the basket of vegetables in the kitchen and head to my room. I pull my suitcase out of the closet and slowly unzip the top. There is only one thing I haven’t unpacked: Lala’s handwritten cookbook. The moment my hands touch the red cover fastened shut with kitchen twine, all the grief returns like milk that came to a boiling point too quickly, rising and spilling around the edges of the pot.
The love and loss both swell inside me until my eyes sting with tears. I move the book to my desk. I can’t bring myself to unknot the twine and open it. I find myself wishing I were back in Lala’s kitchen so she could pass on the final step of her signature recipe. It’s not written in her book; I know because I’ve looked so many times that some of the pages have come undone.
I think about making her pie and trying a blessing of my own to see what happens. But it’s so hard to believe in blessings when you feel so unworthy.