“The Best Girlfriend You Never Had”

RED FLANNEL HASH

Full disclosure: it was the red flannel hash that led me to Pam Houston, and not the other way around. Rebecca, one of my favorite customers at the butcher shop, frequently comes up to the counter with a basket full of eggs, beets, and potatoes and asks for a pound of thick-cut bacon. It’s pretty easy to imagine what could be done with bacon, potatoes, and eggs, but the beets always threw me. When I finally asked her what she was making, her response was one of the loveliest food names I had ever heard: “red flannel hash.” The name alone warms you right up.

It is surprising that I had never heard of red flannel hash, considering I’m a die-hard fan of all forms of breakfast hash. As a kid I went through a Libby’s canned corned beef hash phase so intense my mom feared that I would die of salt poisoning. I wanted it on everything—mashed potatoes, chicken, broccoli. I looked for corned beef hash at every restaurant we went to and ordered it stuffed inside an American cheese omelet with a side of buttered white toast. I’m not proud of any of this.

I told Rebecca that I’d never heard of red flannel hash and she said that she had learned about it from Pam Houston’s short story “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had.” Even more surprising than the fact that I had never heard of red flannel hash is the fact that I had never read any Pam Houston. When Waltzing the Cat (the collection of stories that includes “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had”) was first published in 1998, my older sister bought a copy of it at a Barnes & Noble because the boots on the cover looked like her Doc Martens.

Coffeehouse culture was still relatively new in 1998, and taking your notebook to a coffee shop to scribble slam poetry or curling up with your impressive, existential novel next to a soy chai was all the rage. The neighborhood Starbucks was the closest thing we had to a cozy, intimate coffee shop, and my sister used to take her copy of Waltzing the Cat there and stay for hours, drawing creeping vines and crying girls and scribbling Ani DiFranco lyrics in the book’s margins. She was in love with Drew, the barista, who had bored eyes and a safety pin stuck through his left ear, and she was forever hoping that he would ask her what she was reading. Thankfully, he never did because I think she never actually read a word of it, but she turned the book into a piece of her own artwork, a time capsule of her youth and her tireless and hungry quest for love.

The book’s narrator, thirty-three-year-old Lucy O’Rourke, is as tireless in her pursuit of love as my seventeen-year-old sister was. Despite myriad fails and countless rejections, Lucy continues to throw herself into destructive relationships, each time falling back on her best friend, Leo, for comfort. The intimacy and comfort between Lucy and Leo is clear from the very first sentence of “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had”: “A perfect day in the city always starts like this: My friend Leo picks me up and we go to a breakfast place called Rick and Ann’s where they make red flannel hash out of beets and bacon, and then we cross the Bay Bridge to the gardens of the Palace of the Fine Arts to sit in the wet grass and read poems out loud and talk about love.”

Houston, in her minimalist prose, is able to convey volumes—not only about Lucy and Leo’s relationship but about Lucy herself—in this one sentence.

In many ways, I’m glad that I didn’t read this collection of stories until recently, because I feel that it came to me at precisely the right time (books often seem to do this, don’t they?). “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” is as much a story about romantic and platonic love, love that destroys or heals or consumes, as it is about the love of a place. Much of the story is simply a love poem to San Francisco. In the last year I have lost three of my best friends to San Francisco, each one tiring of New York’s snow and grit and grind, and disappearing in a blur to build new lives far away from me. Each of these friends represents a very specific time in my ten years as a New Yorker, and watching them go feels like closing a much-loved chapter of my life here.

When Mo announced to me last spring that she would be moving to San Francisco in only a few days’ time, I had just picked up Waltzing the Cat. I cried because I would miss her, because I was happy for her, because ten years does feel like quite a long time to be in one place. That night I read “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” four times.

I found immense comfort in reading about Lucy’s budding relationship with her new surroundings, not only because it allowed me to picture more fully the new lives of my friends, but also because it reminded me of my own love affair with New York, and specifically Brooklyn, which is ongoing and ever-changing. This place destroys and rebuilds me on a daily—or sometimes even hourly—basis, and I am deeply in love with it.

“THE BEST GIRLFRIEND YOU NEVER HAD”

Red Flannel Hash

People are always scared of egg poaching, but fear not—I’m here to show you that it’s actually very easy.

Serves 4 generously

1½ pounds fingerling potatoes, peeled and cut into ½-inch cubes

1 large sweet potato, peeled and cut into ½-inch cubes

2 medium beets, peeled and cut into ½-inch cubes

1 pound thick-cut bacon, cut into chunks

1 large yellow onion, finely chopped

1 garlic clove, minced

4 thyme sprigs

¼ cup white vinegar

4 large eggs

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Set a steamer basket over a large pot filled with enough water to just reach the bottom of the basket. Place the fingerling potato and sweet potato cubes in the basket and bring the water to a boil over medium heat. Cover the pot and steam the potatoes for 7 minutes. Transfer to a bowl.

Next, steam the beet cubes for 12 minutes.

While the beets are steaming, fry the bacon in a cast-iron or other heavy-bottomed skillet over medium heat until lightly crisp. Add the chopped onion and minced garlic and cook over low heat. Once the beets are steamed, add them to the skillet, along with all of the potatoes and the thyme. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are crispy, about 20 minutes. Discard the thyme sprigs.

Fill a sauté pan or skillet with water. Add the vinegar. Heat the vinegar-water over medium heat until very hot, but do not let the water come to a boil, or even to a simmer. You want it to be at that point where bubbles are forming at the bottom of the pan and steam is rising from the surface.

Crack 1 egg into a ramekin and create a whirlpool in the water with a spoon. Gently slip the egg into the water and let it cook for 20 seconds. After 20 seconds you can start very gently nudging the white up around the yolk. If the egg is sticking to the bottom of the pan, just use a spatula to loosen it. Cook for about 3 minutes—the white should look cooked, but you should still be able to see the yolk wiggling around inside. Lift it out with a slotted spoon, place it on a paper towel to drain, season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve on top of the red flannel hash. Repeat with the remaining eggs.