Judy Garland has nothing on me. All she had to do was wake up on that little farmhouse featherbed and discover her Emerald City odyssey had been a dream. Symbolically, every oddball character wound up on the right side of the bubble. Even the Wicked Witch, for all the havoc she wreaked, came out smelling sweet. Of course, upon Dorothy’s return from Oz she was still the same sweet girl, facing the same saccharine prospects.
For me, on the other hand, everything had changed.
You can be sure that Alain Llorca, Frédéric Rivière, and Claudio Piantini weren’t camped out around my bed, grinning like Dorothy’s Kansas pals. Their effect on me had been mighty—and mighty real. Nor had that wreck of a rental car been a figment of my imagination; a bill for outstanding damages lingered on my nightstand. In truth, no one was waiting for me when I staggered back from Europe. Call me pathetic, but I harbored a little hope that Carolyn would meet me at the airport. She didn’t, nor did she call during my long drive back home. There were two cartons from the post office stuffed inside my front door. The papers finalizing my divorce sat atop the towering stack of mail.
Cold reality jolted me back to the here-and-now, but that wasn’t to say that the outlook appeared bleak. The uncertain world I’d inhabited before I left hadn’t vanished. The unreturned calls from concerned friends. The accordion shades always drawn to ward off drop-in visitors. The wide-screen TV tuned to the Yankees game so that the crowd sound filled empty rooms. The unopened boxes of vinyl records, once a source of instant pleasure, gathering dust along the baseboards. Sheaves of a coffee-stained manuscript, pages I’d pored over, anguished about, and shed blood upon, scattered on every available surface, and then some. The matching volumes of photo albums chronicling a courtship, a marriage, family vacations, another life. The secondhand furniture I’d borrowed from friends, a lover’s nightgown hanging in the closet, those wire casings on the windowsill from Champagne bottles opened to celebrate even the most insignificant event: yet it all looked different to me now. I’d gone to Europe to reclaim something. Cooking—its endless combination of tastes and contrasts of flavors, its kitchens alive with the symphonic ruckus of pots—represented something fixed and durable that couldn’t be pulled out from under me.
Somewhere along the way I had learned how to cook. Of course, I couldn’t claim very much in the way of experience, certainly less when it came to creativity or accomplishment. But I had gotten great advice from wonderful teachers, studied every detail of their preparations, written down everything they said, learned to respect tradition, smelled and touched all the ingredients, and tasted, tasted every dish in every stage of preparation, until an awareness, a kind of intimacy, developed that I grew comfortable with.
I had learned how to cook. Different ways in France and Italy, but all good lessons for life, in general. In France, where I was ordered around by martinets, I’d learned the importance of discipline and technique. (I left France like a whipped dog—although, oddly, I kind of enjoyed the experience. As a result, I’d become a foot soldier for cuisine.) In Italy, I’d learned the importance of simplicity, authenticity, and, of course, love. And having mastered, or at least laid, these foundations, I had learned to settle into a kind of unforced ease—that calm quality I observed and envied in the best chefs.
I had learned how to cook. I learned how to be in the kitchen, to think and act like a cook, to anticipate and respond. I had learned how to trust my instincts—whatever my natural culinary ability. Somehow I had learned the secrets of the universe, and I was eager, I was burning, to put them to the test.
And I couldn’t wait to play with my new toys. Within hours of landing in the States, I filled the car with the entire spectrum of chef’s wares. It must have looked like I had knocked over a Williams-Sonoma store. The back seat and trunk overflowed with boxes: a new food processor, a food mill, a nonstick frying pan, a stick blender, a deadly mandoline, a chinoise, silicone baking mats, a net scoop for deep frying, a blender, a tart pan, a porcelain soufflé dish, a food scale, all sorts of molds, a pastry bag, an oyster knife—an oyster knife!—a vegetable shredder, metal mixing bowls, ramekins, an apple corer, a knife sharpener, spatulas, kitchen twine, cookie cutters, cutting boards, and enough plastic wrap to give Christo a hard-on. I was ready to roll.
A lavish dinner, la grande bouffée, would mark my homecoming with style. But…the menu had to be perfect, a kind of whistle-stop tour of all the places I’d been. I spent a week shaping it, shuffling and reshuffling dishes, putting them into as proper a regional context as possible. It would be a feast of gastronomic proportions. After great deliberation, the stage was finally set: a selection of irresistible appetizers (Paolo De Gregorio’s tartino di melanzana, Samira Hradsky’s lemon-lime marinated salmon, and Fred Rivière’s scampi mille-feuilles), followed by Bruno Söhn’s silky zucchini soup. For the main courses: Kate Hill’s duck confit and Claudio Piantini’s pork fillet stuffed with sage and Tuscan ham in a fennel cream sauce, accompanied by Robert Ash’s leek-and-potato dauphinoise and Valter Roman’s verdura alla griglia. Dessert was tougher to narrow down, but there were three dishes that were not to be denied: Arpège’s exotic tarragon tarte Tatin, which I dared to attempt without a net, Jean-Michel Llorca’s peach melba, and, of course, Madame’s strawberry soufflé (in Doug’s honor, I wouldn’t drink wine beforehand). I thought through who among my friends would most appreciate this bounty and planned accordingly.
For three long days I relocated to my tiny, steam-filled kitchen, turning out stocks and sauces like a madman. Still…there was a rhythm to it that I settled into, a frame of mind that allowed me to keep the wolves at bay. In any other time, I would have smashed two or three plates in an effort to appease the tension gods. But I whistled while I worked, answering the phone and playing air guitar along with the radio, as if nothing could shake my inner wa.
Lily wondered if I was having a breakdown. “You seem weird, Dad,” she said.
“Weird…how?” I wondered, too gaily, hoping to allay any doubts.
“Weird scary, like Hannibal Lecter weird. Like the front page of the Post.”
The absence of hysteria punctuated by profanity had thrown her a curve. Meanwhile, the workplace was orderly and neat, no bandages had been pressed into service, no cold packs or aloe extract to counteract scarring.
“Who helped you do all this work?” Lily asked.
My spirits lifted further as I dispatched half a dozen gnarly potatoes, establishing an even, steady motion with the mandoline: all in the wrist. Behind me, four burners sizzled and chuffed, though nary a complaint. Nothing to worry about, liquid bubbling, nice even browning, let’s hear it for patience. Order reigned.
With plenty of time on my hands, a late addition to the menu took shape. I sent Lily out to cut what was left of the mesclun growing in pots on the patio and searched through the cupboard for a tin of Mediterranean anchovies. Luckily, I remembered to buy fresh eggs. In a large metal bowl, I pounded a pinch of salt and some pepper into two cloves of garlic, added a few anchovies, and worked it into a grainy paste. After I’d whisked in enough Provençal olive oil and some lemon juice, I fried thick slabs of bacon until nicely crisp and set them aside to drain, while I arranged the salad loosely on plates. Later, when we sat down, I would fry the eggs and deglaze the pan with sherry vinegar before adding it to the dressing. Lily’s favorite—just in case there wasn’t enough to eat.
Lily set the table around six o’clock. It was a chore she particularly loathed and avoided like math homework, although this time she exercised great care in the details, an effort, I suspected, that was meant to keep an eye on me.
“You don’t seem too concerned,” she said, looking up from the work, “I mean, considering this is kind of like a reunion.”
She knew the whole woeful state of my rocky personal life and no doubt shouldered her share of its tremors. There was no escaping it, no matter how I’d tried to shield her.
“I’m cool.” The big toothy smile couldn’t have been all that convincing. “You know how I am under pressure: serene, rock-solid, master of Zen.”
“Puh-lease!”
We fenced and parried like that for most of an hour, our dependable version of stand-up to dodge the tougher issues. There was a lot of catching-up for us. I had been away from Lily for almost a third of a year, an eternity, especially in light of the divorce. She had grown up in that time, grown ever more beautiful, branching into abstract realms of young womanhood. She needed extra attention from me now, which is why I’d included her in the festivities. Neither of us intended to let the other out of their sight.
By seven, the preparations had reached a harmonious crescendo. I opened Champagne and a bottle of Monthélie that would stand up to the duck and pork. Candles were lit, roses rearranged. The kitchen felt dreamlike, always a refuge in its familiarity. On the counter, in the enveloping shadows, I laid out on four rectangular trivets serving platters heaped with food. Everything, including the soufflé, had turned out exactly as planned. How was that possible? I stepped back against the wall and admired the spectacular scene. The success of my pursuit was everywhere in evidence. It was sublime. The combination of colors, textures, and smells was so intense that even in a restaurant it would dazzle. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that it would taste as good as it looked.
Lily poked her head in the room and let out a gasp. The variety of food on display was shocking.
“What do you say we get started?”
“What about the gang?” Lily wondered. “Shouldn’t we wait until everybody gets here?”
I straightened the silverware on the other place settings. “I don’t think so, Sweet Thing,” I said. “This is all for you and me.”