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A PEANUT BUTTER KID IN A VELVEETA WASTELAND

I AM CERTAIN I WAS BORN HUNGRY. I COULD NEVER GET ENOUGH ATTENTION, enough love, or enough peanut butter. I was the focus of my parents’ adoration for only three years before my sister, Margie, butted into our lives.

“Your mother is bringing home a little monkey from the hospital,” my grandmother said, which was her way of observing that my sister, unlike blue-eyed, platinum-ringleted princess me, was golden-skinned, with shaggy black hair and big brown eyes. A monkey? I took that literally. The three of us were fine. I didn’t need a sister and I didn’t need a monkey. I feel I can remember fierce anger even as an infant when my mother left me out on the porch, zipped up in a baby bunting (because fresh air was supposed to be good for babies). I screamed, she said, and kicked, desperate to get a foot free, and to this day I sleep with one foot outside the covers no matter how cold it is.

There is a photograph of me that says it all, a flaxen-haired toddler pushing a doll buggy with such force and fierce determination, I wonder if my mother wasn’t terrified.

My mom asked my dad to shower me with his attention so I wouldn’t be jealous of my little sister, Margie. That was the beginning of Daddy’s girl. A Daddy’s girl stands on Daddy’s shoes and dances to Frank Sinatra on the record player. A Daddy’s girl is precocious and flirtatious. A Daddy’s girl goes to his office on Saturdays and pastes up ads like Daddy does. At the age of seven, I wrote some little stories based on family gossip, and my father pasted them into a tabloid page called “Chit Chat of This and That” and had it printed. I charged a nickel each for tear sheets that I passed out at the next holiday dinner, when a long table and all its extensions stretched across Grandma’s dining room into the living room to accommodate all the aunts and uncles (half of whom were not speaking to the other half, at least half the time), with a bridge table at the end for the youngest cousins. A Daddy’s girl can do anything, and whatever she does in life, she will be a star. At least that’s the message I got from my dad. Always. I was gifted, brilliant. I would excel in whatever field I chose to exercise my multiple talents—art, writing, theater, film. This may sound like your typical pathological narcissism, and maybe it was. But I would swear it wasn’t really anything my ego dreamed up; it was the message I got from him.

Some of my close friends grew up in dysfunctional families, or so they say. The stories they tell are shocking and hard for me to imagine. One of my most intimate friends insists I must be in denial, making it up that my family was not dysfunctional, too. But the truth is, for better or worse, my family was fully functional. My father, Nathaniel Robert, known as Nate and later Nat, a Clark Gable type with a mustache but not the dimples, worked in advertising in that early decade. I thought he was handsome and, later, so did my teenage friends and most of the women in his orbit when he moved into the retail fashion world. His professional scene in the forties was nothing like the hypercreative ad world of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. He had a one-man office and bound volumes with numbers and drawings that he cut out and pasted into layouts that would become newspaper ads for supermarkets. My mother, Saralee, shopped, kept Daddy sane, took his side on every issue, thawed and overcooked dinner, and played mah-jongg with the girls. Two crack. Three bam. I did my homework to the click of the Bakelite tiles.

There was always a maid. When the big freezer first arrived on the domestic scene—a huge white coffin in the basement that would revolutionize a housewife’s world—it seemed like Mom loved it more than she loved any of us. Our dinners were almost incidental. She cooked to feed the freezer, lovingly labeling and dating containers of pea soup and chili, goodies that got carried home from parties but were never eaten, and later the top tier of her daughters’ wedding cakes. I think the loving couple was supposed to thaw the thing and share it at some appropriate wedding anniversary. But one by one, my mother’s children tortured her by divorcing—yes, even my brother, Jim (who arrived a few weeks after Pearl Harbor). Perhaps we all had exaggerated romantic expectations. I’m not sure what Saralee did with these sweet iceberg hunks, if she was ever able to bring herself to the finalty of tossing them in the garbage.

Saralee and Nat were very lovey-dovey. I see them when young, Daddy hugging her from behind as she stands at the sink . . . laughing because we are watching. She turns her lips toward him and they kiss. It was a wonderful way to grow up—not quite Leave It to Beaver, but definitely not A Long Day’s Journey into Night. So I am not sure if anyone in my family is to blame for the fact that my Rorschach test made my first psychotherapist so nervous.

Unlike many of the legendary food-world greats, I did not grow up in a country kitchen steamy with the fragrant smells of muffins and pies just out of the oven or glorious stews simmering on a back burner. My grandma’s cook did not sneak me cookies or spoil me with last summer’s peach conserve piled on freshly baked bread. My grandmother’s cook was my grandmother. Jam was Smucker’s. My aunt Eve did cook—she was famous for her chocolate cake and her caramelized baked ham draped with rings of pineapple and maraschino cherries (we didn’t know red dye number four was toxic, but she didn’t do ham that often, so nobody died). I never got to watch her cook. Cooking wasn’t on my agenda. I didn’t see my future self finding intellectual fulfillment confined to the kitchen with a can of Crisco and a flour sifter. But then, neither did Julia, I am sure, or Martha. My vision was pretty much formed by Hollywood career gals like Rosalind Russell and Kate Hepburn.

Indeed, I was born on the frozen steppes of a vast culinary wasteland. Saralee was never at her best in the kitchen. She made macaroni and cheese from the recipe on the box. It became my template for great macaroni and cheese. True, her layered Jell-O molds were much appreciated at weddings and showers and her pea soup was world-class (amazing, considering she did it without a ham bone and without an onion). Mom cooked meat until carbonized because that’s the way Daddy liked it. There was one lone cookbook in our kitchen, The Settlement Cookbook, violated and bruised, rudely grease-stained, its spine long ago broken.

There was a certain aura of terror and paranoia about food in our house, disguised, of course, as innocent fussiness, as in “The guy’s a finicky eater.” No garlic ever darkened our kitchen because Daddy had an aversion to garlic, which, for some reason, he was unable to detect in its unbridled abundance at his favorite Italian restaurant, Lalli’s. This is not something my mother would have called to his attention—he had a temper when provoked, and I remember my mother as dedicated to smoothing ruffled feathers and rearranging reality to protect Daddy from blowing his stack.

So I didn’t grow up primed and stuffed from birth to emerge a passionate foodie. Still, it must have been in my DNA. Deprivation and hunger unleashed it. In a family of finicky eaters, I was the only adventurer. On the maid’s days off—Thursdays and Sundays—when we ate out, often at the Atlantic Garden, Mom ordered egg foo yung, sauce on the side, while Dad and my sister, Margie, got breaded veal cutlet. I begged Mom to taste my fabulous wor shu oop, but she begged off, as if breaded duck were some alien Chinese conspiracy that might prove to be a by-product of opium. My affection for chicken livers and my cracking the bones of fried frog’s legs with my teeth were considered adolescent affectations . . . or a sadistic plot to make my sister lose her appetite.

“Whose child is she?” my mother would ask. “Frog, crab. Next it will be snails.” She’d read that the French ate snails. Mom had a good point there. I couldn’t possibly be the child of these parents. I liked to imagine I was the illegitimate child of royalty, left on their bourgeois doorstep, except that, if you discounted my blue eyes and blond hair, I did look a lot like a mix of the two of them.

At camp, my first time away from home, when I was seven, I was tall, so my folks put me in a bunk with the eight-year-olds. I hated every minute. Being hopelessly unathletic, the only activities I was willing to sign up for were art and raiding the icebox. Each cabin took turns hijacking the fridge. We carried flashlights and tiptoed, but even at seven, I was suspicious. Surely someone knew what we were up to. That giant tub of peanut butter on a low shelf and the saltines alongside seemed too obvious. You’d think I might have gotten cozy in a camp with such large jars of peanut butter. But no. Every time my parents called, I cried, begging them to take me home. Finally, unable to stand the pitiful sobs and my litany of trauma, they drove up and took me home. I am sure this is why I never learned to play well with others. All my life, people have assumed I am an only child. No, I am not an only child. I just act as if I were the only child. I am left-handed. That’s enough to overcome.

Midway through my sophomore year in the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Michigan—I’d skipped three times in grade school and arrived at sixteen—I was paralyzed by the despair of unrequited love for an ambivalent upperclassman I’d found at the Michigan Daily and by the discovery that my precocious artistic talent as a child was utterly inadequate for a career in design. I was in the wrong college. I was in the wrong body. I was in the wrong century. Voluptuous had not been fashionable for years.

I needed to change my major and stop eating dormitory food, but I was anxious about admitting defeat. I would be entering the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, three semesters late, after everyone else had already waded through the Great Books and my only hope of catching up were Classic Comics. I don’t think Classic Comics did Aristophanes or Dostoyevsky. The Count of Monte Cristo, yes. This educational gap may have affected my writing. It certainly has affected my abilty to do crossword puzzles. Somehow, I managed to convince my parents a year in Paris would cure my romantic malaise (about which I was convincingly vague). I am sure neither I nor they had any idea what a year in Paris could mean for a seventeen-year-old girl on her own. It was 1952. No one we knew had been to Paris. One of my aunts knew a woman who knew a woman who would rent me a room in her Right Bank apartment. That sounded safe enough to Nat and Saralee.

Freed from the Velveeta cocoon, I leaped into the richness of a world I could not have imagined. Who wouldn’t be impressed by the vast range of mysterious vegetables unknown in Detroit, a whole universe of cheese and unheard-of innards. Even on my allowance, I could afford boeuf à la mode, juicy navarin of lamb, couscous, and sweetbreads smothered in cream in the little mom-and-pop bistros in the student quarter. (I quickly found my way to the Left Bank when madame with the room to let asked me to move out because I took too many baths and was such a pig that I’d used her precious perfumed soap to wash my bobby socks.)

Every morning, I ran down five flights from my ancient studio with its warped wooden floor on the rue Dauphine to collect my breakfast in the markets of the rue de Buci—a crusty baguette, a bottle of milk, and, every morning, one hundred grams of a different cheese. Great dining was hardly primary on my list of desired sensory awakenings when I fled Detroit, but my innocent palate was ripe for seduction. One morning, I woke up covered with red spots. I accused my landlady of harboring bedbugs. She accused my curly-haired Algerian boyfriend of something worse. No, no, not my adorable Albert. He might have been an incurable male chauvinist, but he was scrupulously clean, even though it cost twenty-five cents to take a bath.

“You have an allergy to le Petit Suisse,” the doctor said, blaming my favorite cream cheese. I wanted to have faith in his prescription, a powder to be dissolved in red wine and sipped slowly twice a day, since it was so un-Detroit, so French. My first gastrointestinal disease. My first alcohol-based cure. What could Detroit possibly offer me after moments like these?

Abandoning Paris for a month in Italy, I was offered a haven in Rome by the regal Principessa Katya, who had seemed amused by my energy when we met a week earlier on the beach in Positano. At first, she seemed rather indifferent to the kitchen and left me to make do nutritionally on my own.

One day, La Principessa came home bursting with exuberance and spilled a bag of walnuts on the counter. “Green walnuts,” she said. “It’s the season.” It seems that green walnuts were to her as the madeleine to Proust as peanut butter was to me. Peeling the pesky nuts was tedious, and I watched in horror as her silken white fingers stained purple and brown. She didn’t seem to care. Happily sautéing rice and bits of lamb for a nutty risotto, La Principessa (then in the throws of annulling a White Russian husband) salved the fears of impending poverty that consumed her. “Watch me. Learn,” she cried. “All it takes is a bit of rice and ten cents’ worth of lamb. . . . You need never go hungry.” How wonderful not to be a virgin in Rome. It was there I discovered cunnilingus. And, on a lesser plain, linguine. In Latin, they seemed to be related.

Back in Paris that fall, I dabbled in journalism, mostly using my Michigan Daily press card to get into couturier launches and fabulous publicity lunches. It was embarrassing trying to explain to my self-styled intellectual friends how Americans could be so naïve as to elect Dwight Eisenhower president or why the U.S. press was so tough on Charlie Chaplin, the genius of Limelight, or why we were determined to execute Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. None of these were my idea. From the perspective of Les Deux Magots, America seemed as boring as warm oatmeal. But I was homesick after almost a year away and decided to go home for Christmas in December 1952.

When the University of Michigan dropout dropped back in, that lamb risotto trick worked very well for me. With the dean of women’s permission, I lived off campus in Ann Arbor, in a basement flat with a small kitchen, and I could feed any number of friends for a dollar or two. That meant lamb bones, meaty but gristly, too. Still, I was quite popular to a wide range of suitors and loyal pals. No one else cooked. I guess I was quite a package on a basically conservative campus: free-range, no curfew, sensuous and choosy, but bedable. The bonny young Brit who slipped in the window at 2:00 AM, so eager for intimacy that he wore no underwear inside his rough corduroy pants, struck me as irresistibly gallant. I’m not sure how much his gift of chocolates figured in my warmth. They were imported. Sex and food, inextricably linked. (His charm served him well, because the next time we met, twenty-five years later, he was a member of Parliament.)

One evening just before my senior year, picnicking in front of a warming fire on a fluff of Greek flokati, all this vague gastronomic fumbling suddenly took on meaning over a casserole of baked ham layered with cheddar, green peppers, and canned tomato sauce. I’d gone off for a week in the autumn wilds on an island in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with a married man. I seemed to have developed a weakness for married men, possibly because they had a weakness for me. Not to be flip. In fact, I was mad about this man who sat next to me on the rewrite desk at the Detroit Free Press during the summer break of 1954. He seemed to me vulnerable and needy. But maybe that was me, vulnerable and needy. Perhaps it was just transient lust. Stolen sex was incredibly hot.

About that Rorschach test: The therapist reported that he’d never tested a subject who’d found more sexual content than I in those standard ink blots. What did this mean? Who could predict? Obviously, I had potential yet to explore. The referring physician shaded the therapist’s report a bit to shield my parents. They were already concerned about my moping and unexplained tears, and probably about what Mom caught me doing one night in the dark on the carpet in the library, a scene that caused her to retreat silently back up the stairs in her nightgown. That’s how the therapist got summoned. I think I told him—or maybe he told me—married men were a pleasant procrastination, a way to avoid commitment while one was growing up and figuring out who one might become. Clearly, I was borderline sane, not so neurotic after all.

And this is the food part. My borrowed guy and I were off the radar that chilling early-fall day, far from reality in a borrowed cabin on an isolated wind-whipped lake. I’d brought four recipes clipped from Ladies’ Home Journal—pork chops baked in buttermilk, hamburger in a biscuit wrap, cherry crisp, and that revelatory baked ham casserole.

Time has mercifully misted the taste memories. But I do know that everything I cooked was brilliant and extravagantly appreciated. Another point in favor of married men. No matter how pitiful your effort, it’s more dazzling than Hers. This man who looked a little like a blond Dick Tracy . . . of course he broke my heart. He went back to Her, who didn’t know how to layer ham and cheddar and green peppers, much less stuff canned cherries into Bisquick dough. (It was long before America fell in love with eating, but I suspect he would have said good-bye to me anyway.)

On Drummond Island, love and food became inextricably linked for me. It became a mantra: A woman does well to be beautiful, mysterious, haunting, witty, rich, and exotic in bed . . . but it never hurts to cook good. As in finger-lickin’ good. I became a cook, graduating eventually from tuna casserole to Craig Claiborne’s coq au vin and Julia’s apple charlotte. This passion for cooking as well as eating would turn out to be a powerful edge for me when I went public as New York magazine’s amateur restaurant critic.