It’s relatively easy to see what brings people together to form a family. And it’s very easy to see what makes a family fall apart. It is usually harder to understand what holds them together.
My mom adored my father; when they were young, it was almost to the point of hero worship. The older she got, the more she realized she was his equal and she was able to see him for what he really was: not a hero but a flawed and wonderful man. The flaws did not alter the feelings she had for him; to the contrary, they made her love him even more. Looking back, I am struck by how much their relationship changed over the years—and it didn’t just survive, it got stronger, and they became even more intertwined. In some ways, my mother’s weaknesses when she was young—her insecurities, her lack of a definition unconnected from being a wife and mother, her inability to create an identity for herself other than the one her brothers and sisters insisted on foisting on her—drove my parents’ relationship for the first part of their marriage. My dad knew he had to toughen her up, to help her define herself as a separate human being. Later on, his weaknesses—his career frustrations, his compromises in certain areas, his inability to compromise in other areas, ultimately his illness—came to the forefront and added a new dimension to their already strong bond. My dad understood the specifics of the world. My mom has, in her quiet way, always understood the world as a whole. The older I get, the more like her I strive to become.
As with my mother, I have two distinct images of my dad that glow like neon reminders of the past. And as with my mom, they, too, are food- and drink-connected.
One mental snapshot captures any fall or winter Sunday morning in the 1960s through the mid-’70s. My dad is in bed watching football, a six-hour endeavor that basically involves not moving his body except for his arms to eat, drink, or clap, and his mouth to chew and to roar in appreciation or groan in dismay at the changes in score and the final point spreads. He is wearing a dark brown terry-cloth kaftan, a bit of leisurewear that made him look vaguely Roman emperor–like, and is propped up against a thick wad of pillows that rest against my parents’ king-size, freestanding, elaborately carved wooden headboard. Across his knees is a sturdy breakfast tray, on which sits a large plate of scrambled eggs, along with smaller plates that hold a bagel, sliced raw onion and tomato, slabs of cream cheese, and several slices of smoked salmon. My dad is as relaxed as he gets, laughing, reveling in the athletic performances on his enormous TV screen (a console; this was pre–flat screen) and enjoying the presence of his younger son, sprawled on one side of the bed, also absorbed in being a football fanatic, also munching on a bagel with lox and cream cheese and onions. When I am older and living in New York City, we bet on the games every Sunday over the phone and keep a careful, running track of our wins and losses. We bet real money, either ten or twenty-five dollars a game, and any debts have to be paid promptly. Sometimes my dad even lets me put twenty-five dollars down in a separate bet that he places for me with his bookie, whom he calls Big Al, even though I find out later he is much closer to an accountant than to some sort of thug. When we place these bets, I know my dad’s in his giant bed in L.A. watching his enormous TV. I’m in a similar position on my smaller, less imposing bed, watching my much smaller, less imposing TV, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, wishing someone was plying me with Ratner’s-like delicacies. To this day, conjuring up this picture of my dad makes me smile and yearn for something I rarely yearn for: my childhood.
The second image is much later, late fall of 1989. My dad is propped up in a different bed, a hospital bed. He is thirsty, making short, gasping noises that emanate from his cancer-ravaged lungs. The large black male nurse, a would-be actor who had given me his 8 × 10 headshots, just in case my dad makes a miraculous recovery and goes on to direct another TV movie, hands my father a cold root beer. My mom keeps him supplied with a constant stream because that has always been his go-to soft drink. My dad sips it through his straw urgently, deliciously. Unlike many years later when my mother bites into Dominick’s croquembouche, the root beer is not a reason for my dad to stay alive. At this point, he does not have a real reason to stay alive. To him, I am certain, it is simply proof that he is alive.
My parents met at summer camp in 1936 when they were both fourteen years old. Camp Mohican was the boys’ camp, Reena was for girls, and both camps straddled a lake on the New York–Massachusetts border. My mom won awards for Best Archer and Best All-Around Camper, which used to make her blush because she didn’t like being remembered as such a good girl, but now she’ll boast about it, saying, “Well, I was very good at everything.” My dad won Best Performer in the Camp Play. Other than that, his biggest claim to fame was that he almost got kicked out one summer because he and his younger brother, George, snuck into a rival kid’s cabin around five o’clock one morning, kidnapped him, tied him, naked, to a flag pole, and then waited for reveille to be blown so the whole camp would come out to stand at attention and see the kid’s penis, which was probably not standing at attention by that time.
When they met, my father’s name was Seymour (usually called Sye) Gushen. It changed to Steven Gethers a few years later when he resisted the opportunity to go into the family business—a leather tannery—and decided to become an actor, perceptively realizing that the Cary Grant roles he sought were not going to come to guys whose names sounded like a Hebraic sneeze. He took the name Steven because he wanted to keep the same first letter of his given name. To keep the same surname initial, he borrowed his new last name from his family’s housekeeper’s boyfriend, Johnny Gethers, a black man from South Carolina.
The housekeeper’s name was Louise Trotty and my father met her when he was thirteen. His mother was quite ill—she died a year or so later—and his father sent him out on the Brooklyn streets to the employment agency to have them recommend a few housekeeping candidates who could clean, cook, and deal with a dying woman. Louise had just arrived from South Carolina and was waiting at the bus station when my dad passed by. She was young herself, only twenty-five, probably not truly equipped to run a Gushen household comprised of a domineering father, a bedridden mother, and three young children. But she and teenage Sye started talking, she needed a job, he convinced her to head home with him, and she not only helped raise him, his brother, and his sister, she later helped raise my brother and me. Years after we were grown, she went on to also help raise several of my young second cousins.
In the early days of my parents’ marriage my dad was a broke and often out-of-work actor. Ten years after the fortuitous bus stop meeting, Louise would come to the newlyweds’ apartment in Stuyvesant Town, a postwar middle-income apartment complex in Manhattan, to clean the place. She adored my dad; thought of him as her own son in many ways. So she’d work for half a day and, instead of taking money for her labor, she’d leave my dad twenty bucks because she knew he needed it. Later on, she lived with us for years, first in a move to the New York suburbs and then in Los Angeles. She provided solace when needed (as a baby I can remember her letting me play with her fake pearl necklace, which would snap apart and then back together, a never-ending source of great delight), discipline when called for (as an older child, I remember her swatting at me and my brother with her shoe to keep us in line), and she made certain foods I still dream about: crispy, perfect fried chicken; ice box pie with slices of frozen bananas and peaches; meat loaf with hard-boiled eggs placed strategically throughout the middle of the loaf, which I always thought was something magical; and chocolate pudding, the remains of which I was allowed to scarf up while the chocolate skin was just beginning to harden.
As a result of her arrival in our lives, and the ensuing name change, I have a strong suspicion that I am one of very few Caucasian Gethers living in the United States. This is because in the early eighties, as a present for my dad, I bought one of those let-a-retired-school-teacher-research-your-family-history-and-put-it-in-a-cheesy-leatherette-binder mail-order books. It listed every Gethers in America and a number of them had names like Alfonia and Vernell. Fine names all but a far cry from Chaim and Schlomo. I recently met an African American Gethers but didn’t explain our name theft. He said, “Distant cousins,” and we both shrugged and smiled.
Judy and Sye/Steve got married in 1943 when they were twenty-one and my dad was home on a brief leave from the army. A portent of the way he’d go through life, my dad insisted they honeymoon at the ritzy Essex House, on Central Park South, in Manhattan. They checked in on August 23, 1943, the day after their wedding. There was a note waiting for them in their room, number 1608, from the managing director of the hotel. It was addressed to Corporal and Mrs. S. Gushen and in it the M.D. promised to do everything in his power to guarantee “a delightful stay.”
Lovely fake leather book with all living Getherses in the United States, circa 1983
Names from my fake Family Tree. I feel particularly close to Vernell and Alfonia Gethers.
Corporal and Mrs. Sye Gushen a few months before their wedding
At the bottom of the stationery, in a banner, is the hotel’s slogan: Home of the Casino on the Park, where smart New Yorkers dine and dance.
I suspect that my father’s lifelong path of living as well as possible and somewhat beyond his means was because he was a fugitive from his own family.
My dad did not go into his father Irving’s leather tannery business outside of Boston. Instead, he set out to be the next Clark Gable—and as a result of that rejection, my grandpa Irving refused to have anything to do with him. They didn’t speak for years. When my older brother, Eric, was born in 1946, my mother—who revered her father-in-law—decided to take matters into her own hands. She sent Irving a letter, saying he had a grandson and she didn’t want him to grow up without one of his grandfathers. She told him it was time for a reconciliation and invited Irving to come see the baby. My grandfather sent a brief response, the essence of which was: No thanks. Not interested.
Irving Gushen at the racetrack
My father’s family was, on the surface, less bizarre than my mother’s. But only on the surface. All one had to do to see the weirder and darker side was to dig a wee bit deeper into the worlds of my aunts and uncles, my great-aunts and great-uncles and my second cousins. My father fled from them—and there were plenty of things to flee from: hidden alcoholism, pathological cheapness, extraordinary negativity, and self-absorption.
And, just like with my mom’s siblings, there were a few financial transgressions. Or, as they might be called if they weren’t contained within the family circle, fraud.
My father never discussed any of this with me. Ever. But my mom did. She told me that although my father had rejected the idea of going into the family business, when Irving died my dad inherited a third of it. His sister, Helen, and her husband, Jack, along with my dad’s brother, George, and his wife, Hope, inherited the other two-thirds. Soon after my grandpa Irving’s death, my mom said that the Massachusetts foursome came to my dad with a proposal: He had no interest in running or even knowing about the leather business, so why didn’t they buy him out? He’d get some needed money and avoid any unnecessary aggravation that might come with being part owner. My dad quickly agreed and everyone was happy. It didn’t take long to negotiate a fair buyout price. Well, except for one minor detail that was left out of the negotiation. According to my mother, my dad’s siblings and in-laws knew something that he didn’t know: there was an interested buyer for the business and that buyer was going to pay a lot more than the price my dad had agreed to.
And voilà: a near-lifelong family feud.
* * *
WHEN MY PARENTS got married, their families lived a few blocks from each other in Brooklyn. My mom’s family lived at 251 Montgomery Street, directly across from Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers played. My mom was something of a tomboy—I wish that word hadn’t faded from use—and she had baseball cards autographed by almost every National League player from the 1930s. Naturally, her mother, Granny Fanny, threw them all out when my mom got older. Or, as I like to think of it, my grandmother burned up my million-dollar inheritance!
In his early twenties, my dad didn’t want to just change his name, he wanted to separate himself physically from his family—and separate my mom from hers. He wanted to move forward into the future with his wife while both his parents and his in-laws much preferred clinging to the past. The future, for my dad, was all of three or four miles away, across the Brooklyn Bridge, in Manhattan. So after the war—my dad served in the Pacific, where his most harrowing moment came when he tripped over a tent and broke a finger—he yanked my mom along with him to Stuyvesant Town, which had started construction in 1942 and was finished in 1947. The Stuy Town complex had—and still has—8,757 apartments spread out over eighty-nine buildings, from 14th Street to 20th Street and ranging from First Avenue to Avenue C and the East River. All the buildings looked the same and in front of most of them were small gardens protected by chain-link fences and wonderful cement playgrounds, all designed for happy, safe, inexpensive family living. For their parents’ families, though, it was as if they’d moved to Berlin at the height of Hitler’s reign. Manhattan equaled danger. And far worse, separation.
Not surprisingly, my most powerful Stuy Town memories all involve food.
As a very young boy, while my dad was off trying to get acting gigs—he eventually became one of the leads on a soap opera, Love of Life—my mother used to coax me into the kitchen to help her cook. Well, “help” is a bit of a misnomer. What she would do is let me put all sorts of things in a bowl—eggs; eggshells; flour; sugar; toys; mud; you name it. Then I’d gleefully mix it all up and she’d put it in the oven at a robust 350 degrees. An hour or so later she’d call me in, take what she swore was my concoction out of the oven and, lo and behold, it had transmogrified into a delicious homemade cake. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it was quite a few years before I figured out that my mom was making the ol’ switcheroo while I was off napping or playing with my blocks. At age two, I was pretty certain I was already a master baker, but at age seven I learned to handle the disappointment of finding out otherwise.
Stuyvesant Town 1949. Paradise for my parents. Siberia for their parents.
I heard my very first swear word when I was around three or four. This incident was also food-related. My mother was still far from being a gourmet foodie, but she was very interested in healthy cooking. I vividly recall a Sunday family breakfast—my mom, my dad, my brother, and me—for which my mom decided to make buckwheat pancakes, which were supposedly better for us than the normal flapjacks. She served it to the three of us—three sensitive guys. We each took a bite and chewed. And chewed. And chewed some more. That’s when my dad said, “This tastes like shit.” I didn’t quite understand what it meant, but I knew it was something naughty. Then he said, “I don’t mean it tastes bad. I mean it tastes like actual shit.” My mom did not take this too well. I remember some crying—but then she tasted her portion. And then, without another word, she cleared the plates. We never had buckwheat pancakes again.
My parents had two couples they considered their closest friends. One was a married couple named Teri and Irv who lived in the building next to ours in Stuy Town. They had three children and I was always over at their place for dinner. If I ate there early in the month, we’d have a normal dinner—meat and potatoes and a good dessert. Toward the end of the month, we’d sit at the dining table and out would come peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for all. I never minded but years later I found out why the food followed such an odd but consistent serving pattern: Irv, a gruff high school principal—he always reminded me of Ralph Kramden—was a compulsive gambler. By the end of each month, he’d run out of money and thus Teri couldn’t afford to buy the same level of groceries.
Teri fantasized about going to Japan. Her apartment was decorated in a kind of pseudo-Japanese style and she often wore kimono-type clothes and put her hair in a bun, held together with sticks that looked like Japanese chopsticks, and she sometimes made what then passed for Japanese food: teriyaki. She often talked about one day fulfilling her dream and going there. When I was in college and living in California, fifteen or so years after I’d eaten my last teriyaki beef or peanut butter sandwich at their dinner table, she and Irv finally did save up enough money to live the dream and go to Japan. Before they landed, however, their plane crashed into a mountain and they never made it.
My mother was also in L.A. when word reached us about the crash. My dad was in New York. She and I were both wrecks, sad beyond belief, and didn’t know what to do. So we went to a movie, The Sting. Neither of us thought we could possibly enjoy it but it turned out to be an extraordinary release from the gloom of real life (or death). We walked out practically giddy, went to a Hamburger Hamlet, once a great restaurant chain in L.A., to get some excellent burgers and fries and a few glasses of beer—until that night, I never knew my mom drank beer—and we talked about what had happened, able to reminisce about her close friends without either sobbing or crumbling into silence. The Sting, the sheer pleasure of the movie, provided some perspective and we both saw a glimmer of hope in the future. It was also the first time I’d ever sat alone with my mother and drunk alcohol, and I believe there was an extra added comfort for her that I was now grown up enough to deal with the tragedy as an adult. For the first time, I didn’t have to lean on her for support; I could be the crutch. At least for a few hours. And a few beers.
My parents’ other best friends were Esther and Albert, who also had three kids with whom I was friendly. Esther and Albert both worked in the garment center. Esther was lovely, smart, and soft-spoken but with a will of steel. A fairly high-powered executive in the garment business, she was a slightly scarier version of my mother and with less of a sense of humor. Albert, also a garmento exec, was always puffing on a large cigar and running off a string of jokes—he reminded me of a Catskill or Vegas comedian, a cross between Alan King and Jackie Mason—and he had a secret life that I thought was the coolest thing ever: every Monday night he played the drums in a Dixieland band on Grove Street in the West Village, at a place called Arthur’s Tavern. I learned two valuable lessons from knowing Albert: 1) Being funny all the time does not mean you’re not angry—in fact, it usually means you are angry and doing your best to hide it; and 2) Doing the one thing you really love only one night a week does not equate with happiness; it leads to frustration—repressed anger and frustration: not a recipe for a glorious life.
Esther and Albert were responsible for the next big step my mother took in the food world, though.
Albert convinced my dad that the two families should find a place to summer together—someplace out of Manhattan where the grown-ups and children could all experience nature and breathe some non-city air. So the two men drove up to Central Valley, a forty-minute or so drive out of Manhattan, right near the West Point military academy. While driving around, they accidentally stumbled upon a place called West Point Farms, a restaurant that also had a few guest rooms. The main building was modern but the whole place had a remarkably old-fashioned feel. The owners were an elderly couple—at least they seemed elderly to me at age three; they were probably in their late forties or early fifties—Henri and Barbara Apisson. Henri was an architect in France—he designed their restaurant—and he was Maurice Chevalier–level French: a thick and charming accent; an ever-present twinkle in his eye. Whenever someone complimented him on the food or service, his answer was always, “Zat’s because everysing we do and make, we do and make weez love.” Barbara was Armenian and she was almost a caricature of a perfect grandmother. In my mind’s eye, I picture her always wearing an apron and bustling around and tsk-tsking anyone who wasn’t being productive; she was small and spindly and brittle-looking but overwhelmingly kind.
Half an hour after meeting Henri and Barbara, Albert and my dad agreed that both of our families would spend a month or so at the farm. On their drive back to the city, my father mentioned how amazingly inexpensive the place was. Albert kind of shrugged and said it didn’t seem that inexpensive. It turned out that Henri, generous gent that he was, determined that my dad was not in Albert’s financial league and, even though they’d never met before, decided my father was a nice guy and deserved a break—so he charged my father half of what he charged Albert.
My family wound up spending the next few summers at West Point Farms. It was a magical place. But the most magical thing of all was that Mrs. Apisson was a brilliant cook. She made amazing phyllo dough and stuffed it with various savories and sweets. My favorite was something called beureks—phyllo triangles filled with different cheeses. She served them piping hot and they practically melted in your mouth. She also cooked the most delicious vegetables imaginable—so good that even a four-year-old would eat them.
Barbara (I never called her anything but Mrs. Apisson) was the first person who really taught my mother about food and how to prepare it. She was not just a superb cook, she was a superb healthy cook, back in the late ’50s and early ’60s when healthy cooking was hardly the rage. In the mid-’70s, she even coauthored a cookbook called A Diet for 100 Healthy Happy Years: Health Secrets from the Caucasus. In the book, Barbara describes herself as a woman “of Caucasus-Armenian extraction” and says that healthy eating is the reason people from the Caucasus often live to be a hundred years old. My mom paid close attention to Barbara’s preaching about organic farming and healthy eating, and the place was so informal that within days of our arrival, Barbara just took my mom into the kitchen and began showing her how things were done. Soon, my mother was going into the kitchen on her own to cook. And it wasn’t long before she was coming out of the kitchen having made her own jams and mustards and mayonnaise and yogurt and pastries with made-from-scratch phyllo dough.
My mom particularly loved a dish that Barbara made called celeriac remoulade. It was not particularly healthy, nor was it an Armenian dish; it was about as French as it could be. Barbara made it because it allowed Henri to feel as if he were back in Paris.
Barbara was not just a great cook but also a great teacher, and her belief in healthy and natural foods profoundly changed my mom’s approach to shopping and cooking. We stopped having sweets—especially packaged sweets—and suddenly our dinners were as locally focused as they could have been in those days. I never again tasted a frozen or packaged food until I went off to college and lived on frozen chicken potpies and Cocoa Puffs for most of my freshman year.
A couple of years after our summers at West Point Farms had ended, we were up in Massachusetts, visiting my dad’s family. A tenuous peace between Grandpa Irving and Steve/Sye had been made sometime after I was born; the détente went in and out over the years. Late one afternoon, I headed over to a friend’s house to play. As it started to get dark, my friend’s mom asked if I wanted to stay for dinner and I immediately said sure. She called my mom to make certain it was okay. Then she asked me if I had anything I’d really like to eat. I said: “Cold cereal.” She explained to me that she could make pasta or hamburgers or anything that was really good and I said that was fine but if I got to choose, I wanted cold cereal. She called my mom again to tell her about my offbeat request and my mother explained that she didn’t keep anything like Sugar Frosted Flakes or Sugar Pops or any kind of sugared cereal at home so she wasn’t surprised that I craved such forbidden fruit. She graciously gave her blessing—so that night, the parents and kids ate a real meal and I ecstatically gobbled down several bowls of Trix.
The next night, back at the house in which my parents, my brother, and I were staying, my mom made dinner. As an appetizer, she made Barbara Apisson’s cheese beureks (sometimes spelled boreks or bouregs; they are delicious under any spelling), which she had perfected by then. I liked them just as much as the bowls of Trix.
That was the first time I ever realized that something delicious you ate in a restaurant could also be made and eaten at home. Good food wasn’t something that magically appeared from behind closed doors (unless you had a mother who turned mud-and-eggshell pies into perfect cakes). Cheese beureks were something that normal people could cook if they only knew how.
It was a major revelation at an early stage of my development: like almost everything good in life, good food was the result of hard work.
Celeriac Remoulade
INGREDIENTS:
1¼ celery root
½ lemon for rubbing and for juice
½ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sour cream
2 tablespoons mayonnaise, preferably homemade
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
DIRECTIONS:
With a sharp knife, slice off the ends of the celery root and then most of the brown peel. Trim the bits of brown remaining and slice the root in half. Remove the spongy area in the middle by cutting it out. Rub the pieces with the half lemon to prevent them from browning. Cut the pieces in half again for easier grating. Shred/grate the celery root now (you can use a food processor with a grater attachment). Transfer to a bowl and toss with 1 teaspoon salt and juice squeezed from half the lemon. Let marinate for 30 minutes but no longer than 1 hour.
For the dressing, mix together the sour cream, mayonnaise, mustard, and pepper. You may want to loosen it up with a little more lemon juice. Fold the dressing into the celery root. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours.
* * *
OKAY, THIS IS pretty simple to make. It is also the biggest surprise, for me, of all my mother’s choices for her fantasy menu. I never got attached to this dish. It’s too sour for my taste and too refined. Over the years, I’ve gotten to appreciate sour, although it’s not my favorite taste, but I’m not quite grown up enough yet for refined. But my mom loves it and it’s an important recipe to her, so here it is.
I did make my own mayonnaise because that’s what my mom used to do, and once again I was surprised by how easy it was. Even though the celeriac recipe only uses two tablespoons of the stuff, it was pretty cool to dip those measuring spoons into a jar of freshly made mayonnaise. I recommend taking the extra ten minutes or so it takes to create a jar of mayo because you can use the leftover concoction on a BLT or a tomato sandwich, which are pretty much the only other things I can imagine using that mayonnaise for, except for the once-every-three-or-four-year craving I get for a tuna fish salad sandwich.
Recipe for Homemade Mayo, adapted from my mom’s recipe found in her recipe card box and that seems to be adapted from a Julia Child recipe
INGREDIENTS:
3 egg yolks
3 tablespoons lemon juice
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon dry mustard
2 pinches sugar
1½ cups olive oil
DIRECTIONS:
Warm the mixing bowl by running it under warm water. Dry the bowl and add the egg yolks, beating for 1 to 2 minutes, until they are thick and sticky.
Add 1 tablespoon of the lemon juice, the salt, sugar, and the dry mustard. Beat for 30 seconds.
The egg yolks are now ready to receive the olive oil. Add it a teaspoon at a time while beating the mixture constantly. Watch the oil and not the sauce. When the egg yolks have absorbed the oil, add another teaspoon and not before! (NOTE FROM AUTHOR: I BASICALLY HAD NO IDEA WHAT I WAS WATCHING OR LOOKING FOR OR ACTUALLY DOING DURING THIS STAGE, BUT IT WORKED OUT WELL, SO DON’T BE TOO NERVOUS DESPITE THE STERN INSTRUCTIONS.)
Keep doing this until you have added ⅓ to ½ cup of the oil. At that point, you’ll see the sauce thicken and you can take a deep breath because the “crisis” point is over. If you are beating the sauce by hand, you can rest for a second. (ANOTHER NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I CONFESS, I RESTED FOR ABOUT A FULL MINUTE. THIS CONSTANT BEATING IS EXHAUSTING; ALL THIS PRESSURE AND TALK OF CRISIS POINTS DOESN’T HELP.) Then keep adding the oil, 1 to 2 tablespoons at a time, blending thoroughly after each addition.
When you have added all the oil, beat 2 tablespoons boiling water into the sauce to keep it from curdling.
Season to taste with wine vinegar, lemon juice, salt, pepper, mustard, curry, or any other spice you like. (FINAL AUTHOR’S NOTE FOR THIS RECIPE, I SWEAR: I WENT FOR SALT, PEPPER, AND A DAB OF WHITE WINE VINEGAR, MOSTLY BECAUSE I LOOKED AT VARIOUS MAYONNAISE RECIPES AND A LOT OF THEM USED WHITE WINE VINEGAR AS AN ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT; PLUS I LIKE VINEGAR AND IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA.)
If the sauce is not used immediately, scrape it into a small bowl and cover it closely so a skin will not form on its surface.
* * *
THE CELERIAC REMOULADE recipe is Julia Child’s, from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, because my guess is that Mrs. Apisson used a similarly authentic French recipe for her version. The same era, the same sensibility, and all that. I also used it because my mom wound up becoming friends with Julia Child. They worked and taught together when my mom eventually ran the cooking school at Ma Maison and they hit it off. Julia even once cooked lunch for my mother in Julia’s home in Santa Barbara. I had moved back to New York by then and my parents were living in L.A.—this was circa 1979–1980. My mom called me, as excited as I’ve ever heard her (except for the time she once sat next to Paul Newman at a dinner party and all she could do for several days afterward was sigh and repeat sentences with the words “hunk” and “those eyes are so blue!” in them). She told me that Julia had invited her and my mom’s close friend Joan to her house for lunch and they were about to start their drive up the coast. It all seemed pretty thrilling to me and I told her to call me afterward and let me know all the details.
She didn’t call me that night or the next day. I finally called home and when my mom answered the phone, I just went, “So how was it? What did she make?”
There was a lengthy silence. Finally my mom said, in a very quiet voice, “I’m going to tell you something but you can never tell anyone.”
Well … of course I promised. And for many years I never did tell anyone what I heard. But eventually I spilled the beans, so to speak, because this story was too good not to share. After quite a few years passed, my circumspect mother gave me her official permission to spread the word.
The word was that Julia Child made a horrible lunch.
My mother said she had never been more disappointed in her entire life. The salad was overdressed, rendering the greens way too wet and soggy, and she served some kind of chicken that was too dry. My mom no longer remembers what else was served, but she does recall that it was all tasteless. Describing the lunch to me on the phone that day, she was deeply apologetic.
She kept saying, “She’s a wonderful, wonderful teacher.”
I kept saying, “But she can’t cook?”
“No, no, of course she can cook,” my mother insisted, over and over again, “but she’s a better teacher than a cook.”
We went round and round until I said, once again, “I just want to get this straight: Julia Child is not a great cook.”
My mom sighed deeply and said, “She is not a great cook. The lunch was inedible.”
I don’t think my mother ever told anyone else, other than my dad and my brother, about that particular dining experience. She felt as if she would somehow be betraying the entire food community and striking a blow against the American way of life. In later years, when I’d bring up the touchy subject, she’d wave her hand and say, “Oh, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t inedible.” I’d just look at her until she’d shrug and nod in acknowledgment that I was remembering things correctly and then she’d say, “It was pretty bad.”
* * *
I KNEW I would not be swooning over the taste of Julia’s celeriac remoulade, but I also was aware that the recipe called for some fairly demanding knife work, so I decided to use the opportunity to take a cutlery class. I periodically thought about—and envied—my mother’s serenity when I discovered her chopping those carrots or onions lo those many years ago, but I’d never done anything about it. This was my chance to see what this serenity thing was all about.
The few days leading up to the class were anything but serene as most of my swing-thoughts—or chop-thoughts—tended toward picturing what my hands would look like with several fewer fingers than I currently had. Manual dexterity was not my strong suit. Quite a few people in my inner circle felt quite firmly that I should not be allowed to handle anything with a sharp edge. Several would add the phrase “or with a point.” One or two would probably include pencils in that equation.
But I was determined.
My mother has told me several times over the years that food preparation worked in lieu of psychiatry for her. She used her chopping and cutting time both to clear her head and to fill it with the thoughts that mattered. Dicing onions calmed her. Quartering mushrooms relaxed her. Slicing carrots into perfectly uniform quarter-inch circular pieces allowed her to focus on solving problems for her husband or her kids.
My first knife class was at Manhattan’s Institute of Culinary Education or, as it’s known to all who work and attend classes there, ICE.
I’ve mentioned my aversion to formalized instruction. And to precision. Add to that my growing fear of slicing off several digits on my left hand. So, heading to ICE headquarters—I kept picturing it as akin to Dr. No’s secret underwater den of evil—I was a bit trepidatious. But the space turned out to be fairly non-imposing, even kind of cool, with all sorts of different kitchens and workrooms and, given that it was on a very high floor at 25 Liberty Plaza, way, way downtown, it was the opposite of underwater.
My class had nine students in it, including me: five women, four men. They seemed like a reasonable and pleasant group, anxious to learn basic cutlery skills.
My mom with a drinking buddy …
… and a cooking buddy.
Everyone called the teacher “Chef,” which rubbed me the wrong way. Normally, I’m totally intimidated by uniforms and experts. I have no problem calling my doctor “Doctor” rather than Phil or Bob or Frieda. In fact, I prefer it. Calling doctors by their first names makes me think they’re too much like me and I prefer to get poked, probed, and cut by someone higher up on the food chain. And if I ever talk to the pilot of an airplane, I am happy to refer to him or her as “Captain.” I give them my blind faith that they will be able to get me from New York to L.A. by somehow making a couple of tons of metal sail thirty thousand feet in the air, so I’m happy to call them whatever they want. But I absolutely cannot bring myself to call some person in white pants, a white Three Musketeersy–looking coat, and a toque by a title. I know that kitchens are run somewhat militaristically, but it still seems off to me calling a chef “Chef” just because he is better at making béchamel sauce than I am.
Our chef/teacher turned out to be a nice guy and a good teacher. Everyone else in our class immediately started calling him “Chef” when addressing him, but I maintained my self-respect by calling him nothing or coughing into my hand and mumbling his name incoherently so he had no idea what the hell I was calling him.
His first bit of business was to tell us what he wanted to accomplish in this three-hour session and to give us a bit of his cooking and cutlery philosophy. It wasn’t quite Sartre or Kierkegaard but it was interesting—he was all about good, fresh ingredients; he thought knowledge about how best to use one’s tools was essential in any profession; and he made a passionate case for kitchen safety (yes!). Best of all, it was realistic. He broke it to us that we wouldn’t become Daniel Boulud–level chefs after three hours of learning how to handle different knives, but he did think we’d have a base of knowledge that would either suffice for our needs or be a good stepping-stone from which to go upward and onward if we so desired.
Diagram of a Chef’s Knife. I paid particular attention to the Tip and the Point, to avoid severing several knuckles. I was most comfortable with the Handle and I feel very confident in my Bolster ability.
We were each sent to separate workstations that all had folders with a few printouts tucked inside, various vegetables, different sized bowls, a cutting board, and several sharp-looking knives.
Chef—or ahemHmmnamlman, as I referred to him—asked us to look at one of the printouts, which had line drawings of different kinds of knives and labels for each of the various parts.
We were then shown what each of the knives at our station actually were, got a definition of each and a demonstration of how best to use them. I ate all this stuff up with a spoon, so to speak:
Paring Knife: This baby has a thin three-to-four-inch blade that usually tapers to a point and is used when intricate work is called for—it allows for a greater amount of control than a larger knife (so better for peeling fruit, for instance).
Chef’s Knife: The ultimate utilitarian cutting tool. It can be used for everything that has to do with chopping or slicing. It’s a medium-size knife and is the least intimidating because it doesn’t look like it does anything special. It just looks like a knife.
Cleaver: This is the blade that looks like it can do some serious damage and belongs in the hands of Luca Brasi in The Godfather. It chops through meat and can be used for vegetables or to remove meat from bones. We were told it was also good for scooping ingredients into cookware. I decided I’d have to work my way up to that one.
That was it for us. There are other types of knives, of course—a boning knife, a bread knife, a carving knife, for example—and all of them can have different types of blades (curved, serrated, wavy) and handles. But the three we were given seemed sufficient to get us going.
As I stood studying my printout, our teacher pulled out a long, thin, rounded tool. I knew I had one in my knife set at home, but I had no idea what it was. Turns out it was a knife sharpener. He then showed us how to sharpen our blades on it—rubbing the cutting edge first in one direction (down), then the next (up). It had to be done at the correct angle, about a forty-five-degree slant, and carefully. Having been given one of these sharpening sticks along with our three knives, we all went to work sharpening our blades. After a minute or two, I was sure I was getting the hang of it.
Chef—Coughahemmenfffgh—then showed us how to actually cut things up.
He began by showing us how to hold the knife—by the handle, naturally, but also keeping one’s index finger on the bolster. Not only does this grip provide more leverage and stability when chopping hard and fast, it also prevents carpal tunnel syndrome. It is indeed a dangerous life being a chef.
Using a paring knife, he showed us how to core a tomato (in my naive appreciation of learning these skills, this was kind of thrilling) and how to peel an orange so that the peel came off in one, long, curling piece (this was showing off because he made it look really easy; it isn’t). Using a cleaver, he slashed down on a thick potato, demonstrating the tool’s power. He also told us a story about how a student in one class almost cut him—Chef Phlemmermannn—in half by waving the cleaver around carelessly. He explained how to properly dismantle an onion (you’re supposed to cut off the end so the onion can lie flat while you chop—a genuine revelation to me). After that, he showed us how to place our fingers on the chopping block, our knuckles square to the knife, so even if we slipped up we wouldn’t do any serious severing. He explained the differences among mincing, chopping, dicing, and cubing; then he had us practice on garlic. He also showed us how to smoosh the garlic pieces with the flat edge of the blade. “Smoosh” is not the technical term, I’m sure, but I didn’t take note of the word he actually used and “smoosh” does justice to the process.
After that, we paired off (except for me: I was the odd person out, which was fine with me; I’m not much of a team player in or out of the kitchen) to make salsa—using our onion, tomato, garlic, and hot pepper (also provided for us). We quietly chopped, minced, smooshed, and spiced—he urged us to taste as often as necessary and bring it to the level of heat that we most liked (I like things as hot as possible, so I used my entire pepper). The same urging applied to the use of salt and pepper, with which we were also provided.
As we worked, our teacher for the day went around and appraised our work for each segment and vegetable. He seemed impressed with my garlic mincing/smooshing but not so much when it came to dicing the onion—I was left with several long onion strands, no matter how I tried to imitate his turning and angling demonstrations. From his raised eyebrow and slight nod, I suspected he gave my tomato coring and dicing a solid C.
The last part of the lesson was the tasting. We each received a spoon and there was one large tray of toast points that had been prepared by an invisible person in a nearby test kitchen. The team to my right won the group vote. I preferred my level of heat but theirs was definitely the best overall from a texture and taste perspective.
The end result?
I didn’t cut myself. Not even a nick. And I am determined to get myself a set of really perfect and beautiful knives. That will probably be my gift to myself when I type the words “the end” on these manuscript pages. And yes, the class did help me when making the celeriac remoulade. I used the cleaver—with surprising confidence—to cut off the ends of the celery root. The paring knife was used—not exactly expertly but competently—to remove the peel and the spongy inside. I used the chef’s knife for the rest of the cutting.
When I took the concoction up to my mom’s apartment, I brought a cutting block into her bedroom—she wasn’t up for a trip to the kitchen that day—to proudly show off my newfound skills, dexterity, and knowledge.
I explained to her that I’d learned something in class I’d never realized before: the reason you are supposed to cut an onion or a carrot, or, literally, anything else, into the same size pieces is that those pieces will all cook at the exact same rate. My chest swelled up with this revelation as if I were telling her about my Nobel Prize–winning physics theory. Her response to this was, after several attempts at getting the right words out: “You couldn’t have figured that out on your own?”
I told her that of course I could have, but it wasn’t anything I’d really thought about. “Sometimes,” I told her, “the best educational process is to just understand something simple that you might not have focused on before.” Even as I said it, I knew it sounded fairly lame. But she nodded politely in response.
Undeterred, I then gave her a demonstration of my new mastery of the cutlery world. The whole flat-finger-knuckle thing. The anti–carpal tunnel grip. The smooshing and the paring and the skin peeling (which, I must admit, I had not mastered to the degree I should have before trying to show off).
I performed for my mom as if I were an eight-year-old Penn and Teller, amazing my audience with this view into a world of magic where few dared to tread. When I was done, my mom smiled.
I’m not sure she was impressed.
But I am sure she was pleased.