COMFORT ME WITH CHOCOLATE MOUSSE
WHAT MIGHT HISTORY HAVE BEEN IF EVE HAD TAKEN THAT APPLE AND baked it into a tarte tatin and shared it with the snake? For Don and me, having tasted the fruit of the foie gras, there was no turning back.
Back home, the pursuit of cuisinary perfection became all-consuming. We worked, yes. You need money to dine well. And Don was ambitious, a committed newspaperman. For me, journalism was just a hobby, providing running-around money till I sold that novel. But novels take forever. By then, I was in weekend-warrior attack mode on the three hundred pages of a novel not even I quite understood. Meanwhile, to cook a great meal was instant gratification.
I cooked following the catechism of Craig Claiborne. I whisked yolks into zabaglione in my copper bowl and whipped the cream over icy water, per the counsel of Julia Child. I conquered my fear of dough with six lessons from the English cooking teacher Dione Lucas in a studio above her shop, Once Upon an Egg, later O’Neal’s. I mastered boning a duck without breaking its skin, stuffing it with assorted ground meats, and baking it in a pastry blanket. Helping Dione stretch my twelve inches of strudel dough till it overhung a six-foot table and you could see through it was thrilling. That she sent her nylon stockings to the laundry and they came back ironed was impressive, too. I never did either at home.
Our friends were possessed early foodies, too. When I recognized the dark-haired woman buying a boodle of serious cheeses at Fauchon in Paris as a woman I’d met at a Burgundy Society Tastevin dinner in New York, and then ran into her twice again in the next four days—at the legendary shop selling copper pots and pans in Les Halles and at dinner on the Côte d’Azur—we both took it as a message from the fates. Naomi* and I are still soul mates, now forty years later. It was she who persuaded an uncle in the cheese business to create American crème fraîche with instructions she brought home from France. For neophytes with only a vague notion of what crème fraîche might be and what it was doing in the supermarket dairy case, there was a little folder of Naomi’s recipes glued to the container top. The only drawback for me was my insider knowledge, aware from the beginning that the divine ooze was 87 percent butterfat. Even before cholesterol entered the axis of evil, that struck me as dangerous.
As the avant-garde of the gluttony to come, we did dinner parties, my foodie friends and I, wowing one another with whole ducks boned and stuffed, and pistachio-studded pork terrines, devoting long hours to reproducing all the moussemerizing, béarnaising, and vinaigretting we picked up in many rounds of cooking classes and gourmand travel.
We cheerfully commited to shopping that took days and military discipline to organize. Since Don worked mostly nights at the Post, he was free to chauffeur me around town in our little red Volkswagen to gather the best ingredients. There was no Fairway then, and Eli was probably still teething on a bagel from the family grocery, Zabar’s, which had not yet gone global. We had to cross town to Cheese of All Nations, hit the Village for bread at Zito’s on Bleecker Street, double-park outside the Nevada Meat Market for quality veal or lamb, and stop at Esposito’s on Ninth Avenue to buy the best ground pork for the pistachio-studded terrine. Don got a shop foreman at the Post to cut a lead weight that fit precisely inside my terrine mold to compress my classic pâtés. He immediately had a vision of my dropping the weight on my foot and made me promise never to weight my terrine unless he was home. Great editors are like that—always anticipating the worst.
I bought my battery of knives from the notoriously terrible-tempered Fred Bridge, famous for snarling at innocents who dared ask uninformed questions in his mythic kitchen-supply bazaar. I tamed his savage bark by buying oeuf en gelée molds, and expensive truffle cutters (as yet unused), as well as springform pans, charlotte molds, and tart pans with removable bottoms (which I did use). I baked an exquisite, terrifyingly complex poire bourdaloue from Time-Life’s Classic French Cookbook. It knocked everyone out, and then I quite sensibly decided I never had to do that again.
The oenophilic competition of our men grew heated even as our cellars and wine closets were required to grow cool. Don’s boyhood friend, Jules the ophthalmologist (who had directed us to La Pyramide), put down seven hundred bottles of the ’61 vintage in a humidity-controlled storeroom. Once Jules explained what that meant, Don and I, cellarless but determined to hold our own, found cases of France’s most celebrated Bordeaux at Macy’s wine shop and brought home Château Margaux, Lafite, and Mouton Rothschild at $225 a case. That was a wanton extravagance then, but they were the only names we knew.
The two of us tried to recapture the rapture of France in Manhattan at restaurants like the Veau d’Or and Café Chauveron. We psyched ourselves to feel comfortable in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons and braved the Coach House, where the proprietor, Leon Lianides, could look right through you if he was in one of his moods, which he clearly never was when favorites like Craig Claiborne and James Beard were lapping up the tripe in avgolemono soup, followed by the fabulous lamb steak with its kidney still attached. Even the great French chef Jean Troisgros was dazzled, we were told, by Maryland lump crabmeat rolled inside Hormel prosciutto, thick Madeira-haunted black bean soup, native sirloin paved in pepper, Comice pears with American cheese, and pecan pie. Troisgros left carrying two iron baking molds and the recipe for the Coach House’s grainy little logs of corn bread.
We went to El Parador because Craig wrote that he loved the margaritas and guacamole. And in between these exercises in excess, we ate simply and cheaply at Oscar’s King of the Sea, at King Wu in Chinatown, where Don’s friends had thrown his bachelor party, and at our favorite Shanghai local on Broadway at 103rd Street, where we inevitably had the pressed duck—a lushly crusted dish I haven’t seen anywhere for decades. We haunted movie revival houses, hating the dip in the middle of the Thalia but driven there by our hunger for movies. But mostly, I cooked. I crisped soft-shell crabs and deglazed the pan with a splash of white wine or shook bay scallops in a bag of bread crumbs and then sautéed them in butter. Sour cream made anything taste better. I invented fabulous frittatas, those layered Italian omelettes, using a week’s worth of leftovers from the fridge. And I indulged Don with bananas flambé and crème caramel. We were trim and young. No one had ever heard of cholesterol. Detroit was rocked by riots, in which forty-three died. Away on our honeymoon, we missed the October demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the Pentagon. Home again, we were the Bonnie and Clyde of West End Avenue, with our gourmand swagger. We were so in love.