During the last week of December 1975, at the age of fifty-three, my mom took her very first job.
Like almost everything in life, it started as one thing and turned into something else, completely changing her life as well as the lives of her immediate family, her siblings, and her friends.
Happily, even though I was now living three thousand miles away, I managed to be there at the very beginning.
You know how in sitcoms, the screen goes wavy and suddenly your favorite character is wearing a bad wig and unfashionable clothes and is twenty years younger? Picture this page getting wavy. I’m taking you for a bit of a ride via a family flashback.
* * *
AFTER MY YEAR in London, I returned to Los Angeles to spend my senior year of college at UCLA. My passion for learning was still great but my passion for the piece of paper saying that I was learned was fading rapidly. So with one day and my last set of finals to go, I dropped out.
My parents were remarkably understanding about my decision not to graduate and they weren’t at all surprised when I announced I was moving back to New York. But they were more than a little bewildered when I chose to move to a rat-infested (well, one rat, but that was more than enough) basement apartment in Manhattan’s West Village. I loved that apartment. It was on Perry Street just off Seventh Avenue, around the corner from the Village Vanguard jazz club, my fantasy hangout, and it had a brick wall and an incredibly cool tin ceiling. There were a few things it didn’t happen to have, like a complete floor (I solved that problem by putting a sheet of plywood over the dirt hole that led to the subway below), a shower, a bathtub, a stove, or a refrigerator. I never managed to get the bathtub but I did figure out how to add the other three luxury items at a reasonable price. It was a railroad flat—fitting, considering it often felt as if I were living in a moving subway car—with a fairly large front room that functioned as a bedroom and living room, a small square room in which I fit a low dining table (low because I couldn’t also fit chairs, so it was Japanese sit-on-the-floor style minus the elegance or, in fact, any semblance of style), and another square room that ultimately housed the stove, fridge, and shower. There was a closet-size room after that with a toilet. That room didn’t have a door but I solved the problem by putting up what I was certain was a very attractive burlap curtain. Separating the other two rooms were strands of multicolored beads that I thought were totally cool. The view from my bedroom/living room looked up onto the building’s garbage cans, which were stacked in front of the only two windows in the whole apartment, and the first time it snowed after I’d moved in, I came home at night, flopped down on my bed (my waterbed!) to find some very cold, very wet sheets. It had snowed through the rickety window into my apartment.
My parents came east soon after I was ensconced. Before seeing my new living situation for the first time, my mom lectured my father, telling him that no matter what they thought, they had to be supportive and enthusiastic (they’d been prepared for the situation by their friend Edward, who occasionally took me out to dinner so I wouldn’t have to subsist solely on my Saturday visits to Ratner’s, and told my folks that he was afraid to sit down in my living room). My mom repeated her lecture to my dad several times, the last time during their entire cab ride downtown from the Upper East Side, where they were staying. When they finally arrived, descending beneath the garbage and through the dingy underground hallway, I opened the front door and before she could even get a peek at my digs, my mother, desperate to be positive, yelped in delight, “Oh, it’s fabulous!” I had to say, “Um … don’t you want to actually come in and see it first?” They then stepped inside. My mother stayed silent. So did my father—for about half a second. Then he said, in as supportive and enthusiastic a voice as he could manage, “Oh my god. What a shithole!”
* * *
ONE YEAR LATER, I’d finished writing my first novel, which I was certain would turn me into the next F. Scott Fitzgerald. That didn’t quite materialize, although it was published by a real publisher and earned me enough money to order a steak once or twice when I went out to dinner—okay, just once, but it was a very satisfying cut of meat. I had also managed to fall in love. Cindy lived in L.A. but had come to New York on October 1, 1975. The reason I remember the exact date is that it was the start of the Red Sox/Reds World Series, the one with the Carlton Fisk home run, which caused me to become a baseball fanatic again after five or six hippie-ish years ignoring the game. She arrived with a girlfriend and they wound up staying with me after a long-distance introduction from a mutual friend. I don’t remember the girlfriend’s name and paid little attention to her but I fell hard for Cindy.
By the time she left to return home to L.A., I was a goner. There were stars in my eyes, and the combination of infatuation, lust, and distance was causing a somewhat painful and continual ache in the pit of my stomach. So I did what any red-blooded twenty-two-year-old boy would do: I immediately called my parents and lied to them.
The Rat Apartment, 2016, now a men’s spa. But still a shithole, with the same lovely view from the windows …
I told them I was missing them and would love to visit them for Christmas and wouldn’t they like to pay for me to come home for a week or so. It turned out, they would. My dad said he’d send me a check and I could buy my long-before-e-ticket plane fare.
I then waited a week or two before deciding it was appropriate to raise a new topic. I phoned the folks and chatted for a bit. Then I let it drop that I kind of had this new girlfriend and she was kind of in L.A. and I was really kind of looking forward to their meeting her and, uh, oh yeah, she was kind of going to be staying at their house with me for the week I was there.
Whatever the opposite of a shrinking violet is, that was my dad, particularly by this point in his life. My cousin Jon once compared him to Hugh Griffith in the movie Tom Jones. The gist of his instant retort was: “Over my dead body…” “Keep dreaming…” “Nice try…” and … “Not a chance.”
… and the same revolting stairway my parents descended many years ago.
Although his acting career had ended when I was three or four years old, he still had an actor’s theatricality. His favorite role was that of “father”—he liked being a dad and playing a dad and he took the role very seriously. He was a valuable sounding board for me, personally, professionally, and morally. However, I didn’t take too kindly to his instant door-slamming reaction to my staying-at-their-house-with-girlfriend bombshell. I didn’t laugh at it, the way I did with a lot of his moral bombast, and I couldn’t ignore it. At twenty-two, it’s almost impossible to laugh at or ignore anything that stands in the way of sex and romance.
What I did instead was start whining that I was really coming out to see Cindy—inadvertently torpedoing my whole “I’m dying to see you” strategy that got me the plane ticket in the first place. My dad countered with, “Then stay at her place.”
I had to admit that I couldn’t because … um … she lived with her mother.
He took that as a triumphant end to the conversation and hung up. My mom lingered long enough for me to whine another minute or two and for her to say, somewhat sympathetically, “You know your father.”
I did indeed. But despite that knowledge, somewhere around three in the morning, after a night of boilermakers and more than a few tokes, I sprawled on my perpetually damp and chilly waterbed sheets and wrote the most pretentious, arrogant, annoying letter in the history of father/son relationships.
I pointed out, in long-winded and very specific detail, his hypocrisy—his recently divorced friend Edward was, as I scribbled, staying in my parents’ house with his new, much younger girlfriend!—as well as his nineteenth-century values and fake morality, and, in a particularly nice vein of attack, how out of touch he was with real life because he was so old.
I was so pumped up, I finished the letter in twenty minutes or so, stuck it in an envelope, went out into the predawn, late-autumn Village streets, and, with a satisfied and smug smile, shoved the letter into a stumpy corner mailbox.
As the paper left my fingertips, the smug satisfaction instantly turned into genuine panic. Reality set in with the subtle impact of a shiv in my shoulder blades. An angry father equaled no airfare. No airfare equaled no Cindy for Christmas. No Cindy for Christmas, in my suddenly addled brain, equaled a lonely, female-free, sexless future for the rest of my downtrodden, miserable life. What had I been thinking? I grabbed wildly for the letter but could only feel the air as the envelope floated downward and nestled into the heap of other less self-destructive letters left by other less desperate sons.
Gathering myself as best I could, I ran back to my rat hole and called my brother in L.A. (we were still on good and close terms). Waking him up, I said, “Okay, don’t ask questions. I need you to go to Mom and Dad’s tomorrow, camp out by their mailbox at the end of the driveway, and wait there until you see a letter from me.”
“What?”
“When you see the letter, take it out, don’t read it, burn it. Totally destroy it. Immediately.”
“Who is this?”
“Seriously, you have to make sure Dad doesn’t see it.”
“I’m going back to sleep now.”
“Really. Eric, I’m serious. Name your price!”
“Bye-bye now.”
“Oh, come on…”
“Byyyyyyye.”
This was the kind of situation my brother loved and it was hard to blame him. I was the one who, for a change, had done the totally moronic thing. I was the one about to face the wrath of God or, in this instance, our father, which was way worse because I actually believed in the wrath of our father.
Starting that morning, I called my parents every day from work. The first three days, all was fine. The usual chitchat. On day four, my dad answered and when I said, “Hey,” there was a pause of about one one-hundredth of a second before he said, “I’ll put your mother on the phone.” His voice was so icy, I was surprised the telephone wires didn’t freeze from coast to coast.
Moments later, my mom picked up. “So,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage, “did Dad get my letter?”
“He did.”
“So … um … what did he think?”
“He’s already mailed you his response.”
“Do you want to give me a hint?”
“You’ll get it when you read what he sent.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“He doesn’t want to talk.”
“Are you still paying for me to come out there?”
“You’ll have to read his note.”
“Mom, seriously, can’t you just—”
But she couldn’t just do anything. I sensed that my dear, dear mother, who always took my side and always offered total support, was enjoying this. I’d made a major blunder and I could visualize the same smile on her face that she used to have when I was a teenager and it was raining and she’d tell me to take an umbrella but I’d refuse, telling her I hated umbrellas. She wouldn’t argue, she let me go out and get drenched. The smile would come the next day when I would wake up with a cold and she’d tell me that perhaps I’d learned my lesson—but since it was my own stupidity that led to my sneezing and runny nose, I had to get up out of my warm, comfy bed and go to school. Now!
It took three more days for my dad’s letter to arrive. My hands were trembling just a tad and my stomach was churning as I tore open the envelope. Inside, to my relief, was the check so I could buy my plane ticket. Along with the check was this note, which I have saved and framed and still have hanging on a wall of my apartment:
It’s putting it mildly to say I felt like the biggest shmuck in the world.
I called home. My mom picked up and heard me say a downtrodden “hello” and then ask to speak to my dad.
“I’m an idiot,” I said when he got on.
“Yup,” he agreed. He didn’t gloat; he simply savored my resignation.
“That was an excellent response.”
“I’m a writer. I have a way with words.”
I didn’t really have anything else to say. I’d lost, outboxed by a master.
“Do you want a real answer?” he asked. And when I mumbled a clever assent along the lines of, “Okay,” he said, “It’s my house. I’m too old to be uncomfortable in my house. It’s not a question of morality or judging what you’re doing. I’ll feel uncomfortable if my son is sleeping here with some young woman I’ve never met. You can stay somewhere else and you’re welcome to come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner or any other time except sleeping. Or what you’ll most likely be doing instead of sleeping.”
I managed to get out the words: “That seems fair.”
“Good. I’m looking forward to seeing you and meeting her. And, by the way, a lot of work went into tracing my hand. I hope you appreciate the effort.”
A couple of weeks later, I was in L.A., staying at my best friend Paul’s house, about a mile from my parents’ home. Paul’s mother had died when we were seniors in college and he and his dad had been playing Felix and Oscar, living together since then. But the dad had recently met a woman and had just gotten remarried, moving into the new wife’s place, so Paul had the run of his parents’ house until it was sold. Cindy and I got to use one of Paul’s now-married sisters’ bedrooms while Paul and his brand-new girlfriend, Laurie, stayed in his old bedroom, the one in which he and I used to race slot cars when we were ten years old.
Cindy and I got the parent test out of the way quickly and Cindy passed with flying colors (despite a fairly severe attack of nerves when I made the mistake of telling her the story about my dad and the letter). One night we had a lovely, trauma-free dinner with them at the forbidden house and, over dessert, my mom said that she wanted to take Cindy and me out to lunch the next day.
That turned out to be my mom’s LC Day—Life-Changing Day.
My dad, being a serious restaurant guy, loved going out to hot new places and this place, my mom said, was their new favorite. They’d been going two or three times a week. My dad liked it because it was becoming a big show business hangout. My mom loved it, she said, because the food was incredible. When she spoke about eating there, I noticed that something new and interesting flashed across her face. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, although I was able to put a name to it later: passion.
The restaurant, she told me, was called Ma Maison. And there was a new baby chef who she thought was brilliant. His name, she said, was Wolfgang Puck.
So the next day, my mom picked Cindy and me up—the proximity of Paul’s house to mine was convenient when we were childhood buds and just as convenient now, since my parents had forbidden any carnal acts in my old room (when I actually lived there as a teenager, they never had to—the size of my Adam’s apple and Jewfro pretty much took care of that all by themselves).
The restaurant was at the corner of Melrose and La Cienega in West Hollywood. On the surface, it wasn’t anything special. There was an outdoor patio with cheesy-looking plastic chairs and an ugly plastic tarp that could be pulled over the roof to protect patrons from too much L.A. sun or the dreaded and greatly feared L.A. rain. Inside there were several rooms, all of which were so casually decorated, the restaurant had the feel of being in someone’s long-lived-in house (thus the name, Ma Maison, I suppose). There was an upstairs room with a fireplace and a downstairs room that featured a beautiful bar. The atmosphere as well as the service felt informal and friendly and remarkably new. The crowd as well as the staff were young; a good time was being had by all. I suspect that everyone—from the owner, Patrick Terrail, to the young chef, Wolfgang, to the various sous-chefs, to the goofy, charming waiters—was stunned that they were at the epicenter of the hippest, most successful, most talked about restaurant on the West Coast of the United States.
We sat out on the patio—that was the place to sit, despite all the plastic—surrounded by Orson Welles (I’m trying very hard not to say that he would have surrounded us if he’d been there all by himself), Ed McMahon (who conceivably and depressingly was more famous than Orson Welles in 1975; I later learned from the inside guys at Ma Maison that Johnny Carson’s sidekick used to have private parties at the restaurant and get them to pour cheap wine into empty expensive wine bottles so his guests would be impressed but he didn’t have to fork over the money for the actual good stuff), Sammy Davis Jr., and a bunch of people who, judging by the white belts and sweaters expertly and offhandedly strung around their necks, I assumed ran TV networks, movie studios, talent agencies, and record companies.
The beautiful Ma Maison menu
Forty years later I remember exactly what I ate: fish soup was my starter, followed by warm lobster salad. Those were the two most glamorous things on the menu, in my mind. Fish soup was something I thought was only available in France, the country I most fantasized about living in. The first taste of that soup was so potent and fragrant and thick and fine, it instantly transported me to the Left Bank of Paris and a tiny divey restaurant where I’d first spooned the stuff into my mouth when I’d gone there at the age of seventeen.
Ordering the lobster was a less complicated choice; that simply was, to me, the fanciest, most expensive food on the planet Earth. Mixing a warm, expensive thing in a cool mélange of lettuce and onions and tomatoes and vinaigrette seemed unimaginably creative to me, as well as deeply satisfying. I don’t remember being transported by that dish but I do recall with great precision the chewy texture and the trace of vinaigrette lingering on the lobster meat as it slid down my throat. I’m reasonably certain that my mother had Wolf’s legendary Poulet à la Moutarde, which was deglazed with port, had a bit of cream, and was finished off with mustard, and I absolutely do recall that I begged Cindy to get the Croque-Monsieur, because that was also so French and exotic (how a grilled cheese sandwich can be made to seem exotic I didn’t and to this day don’t understand, but it was and still is). She obliged and was knocked out by it. Going purely French all the way, I ended with the Crepes Surprise, which I’m pretty sure had chocolate and some form of chestnut puree. Two espressos were the sublime finishing touch. I could have had a double but the dainty, tiny cups also seemed the more sophisticated way to go in my unsophisticated vision of coffee drinking, so I downed one, then another, rather than just taking the same thing in a larger, less interesting vessel.
The food was mind-blowing, but what happened during the crepe eating and the espresso sipping was the game changer.
Patrick Terrail, the owner—with slicked-back, Pat Riley–ish hair pre–Pat Riley, a fleshy but handsome face, and a manner that emanated a strange combination of welcoming, eager-to-please host and distancing, I-don’t-have-to-please-anyone-because-my-joint-is-so-successful arrogance—came over to join us because my mom was such a regular customer. He pulled up a chair, sat, and began chatting. After a few minutes, my mother touched his arm and said, “I’d like to become a good French cook. What do you think I should do?”
I believe my mother had something short-term and fairly dilettantish in mind, as in going to France for a few weeks and taking some cooking lessons. Instead, without missing a beat, Patrick said, “Come to work in our kitchen three times a week. We won’t pay you and you’ll basically be our slave, but after a year you’ll be a real French cook.”
I remember thinking, Yeah, right, that’ll really happen, but I didn’t have a chance to say anything because my mom responded instantly.
“Okay,” she said. And that was all she said. Just: “Okay.”
I still remember her inflection on that one word. Her voice trailed upward, as if surprised that the word had come out of her mouth. The lilt in her voice carried a definite sense of jubilation.
I smiled and said something eloquent along the lines of, “Wow, this is very cool.” I didn’t want to get too excited. I figured her jubilation wouldn’t last much past the moment when she told my dad she was going to work.
I could not have been more wrong.
My father’s response was instant and unwavering: he thought it was a wonderful idea.
My dad, as I’ve said, was a fantastic guy and I loved him dearly. But he was used to being catered to. Everyone was surprised how quickly he acquiesced to this new situation. My sense is that if he had said no, my mother would have stayed home. I’m not positive about that—and she’s not sure, even to this day, if that’s true—but I suspect I’m right. He didn’t just say yes, however; he was wildly enthusiastic. And as my mother’s love for her new world and her satisfaction in her success in that world grew in leaps and bounds, he was even more wildly proud. And boastful. At some point, two or three years later, the food world in L.A., at Wolfgang’s instigation, began calling him “Mr. Judy Gethers.” His face lit up every time those words were uttered. Before too long, we’d show up for dinner at a restaurant, my dad would go up to the host and say, “Mr. Judy Gethers for four,” and we’d be led to our seats. Eventually, Wolf and his then-girlfriend, later wife, still later ex-wife, Barbara Lazaroff, gave my dad a birthday present: a chef’s apron on which was printed, in large block letters, MR. JUDY GETHERS.
I recently told my mom how everyone was surprised that he was so instantly supportive. “I know,” she said. I asked if she’d been surprised. “Oh yes!” was her answer. “I was shocked.”
We shouldn’t have been so startled. My dad was wise enough to see what no one else could see about my mother at that time, including my mother: she was restless. She was ready to evolve. It was time, at the age of fifty-three, for her to become a different person. My dad loved the person she’d been for her first fifty-three years. He was secure enough, comfortable enough in his own skin, and confident enough in my mother that he knew he would also love whoever she became for the rest of their time together. And that the new Judy would love him right back.
My mother went to work at Ma Maison as soon as the New Year began. She cooked two nights—late nights—and one full day per week. It quickly became an all-consuming passion and her life soon revolved around crème caramels and salmon mousse and various foods en croute, and she had a new family, comprised of chefs (well, mostly Wolf, with whom she quickly developed a mother/son–like bond), sous-chefs, waiters, busboys, and just about anyone who spent time in the back of the restaurant.
There was, unquestionably, a new kind of exhilaration to my mother’s life. She had, in a sense, been set free. Every day was a new learning experience, either technically in the kitchen or in the way she was now dealing with her new family of restaurant workers. She was suddenly the go-to person when wisdom needed dispensing. She could discuss the ups and downs of marriage from the role of observer as well as participant. My father had always been the storyteller and teacher in our family, but now, with relative strangers, my mom assumed that role. And the lessons she conveyed were not always the same as her beloved husband’s. She would recount a tale from their past and realize that she had her own completely separate interpretation and perspective.
She liked coming home (or calling me in New York or going out to lunch with a new friend) and discussing her own experiences instead of having to listen and comment upon the experiences of others. For the first time in her life, she became the center of attention and she was surprised as well as delighted when she realized that she was worthy of that attention. At the same time, she remained remarkably without ego and never minded not being the center of attention. She could empathize with almost anyone’s hurt or confusion but she also developed enough confidence in her point of view that she was now able to say to people, “You’re wrong.” Those two words coming from my mother were never said harshly, nor were they meant to stop someone in his or her tracks. They were spoken with kindness, and my mother’s intention was always to help someone evaluate the path being taken before that path became irreversible.
In the kitchen, she was learning from experts (in the case of Wolf, an actual genius) and it thrilled her. As an extra bonus, I think my mother’s new career probably gave my dad the courage—or at least the impetus—to move to a new level in his own work world. He started directing—two-hour TV movies and miniseries—and went back to his first love: playwriting.
Many years of being the calm center of many family storms stood my mom in good stead in the midst of the insanity and turmoil in one of the hottest kitchens in the country. There were divorces, feuds, and rampant jealousy (both personal and professional). There was even a murder (Dominick Dunne’s daughter, Dominique, was strangled by one of the sous-chefs in the Ma Maison kitchen!).
My mother wound up with a whole cadre of new friends and, in particular, gay friends, because she was completely nonjudgmental (a few years hence, after Wolf opened the original Spago, the manager, Johnny, a wonderful guy and as gay as it is possible to be, said to my mom, “I want you to think of me as the daughter you never had”). People talked to her because they knew she was responding to them and their issues, not projecting from her own past or her own prejudices. In fact, she had no prejudices. If a person could relate to food, my mother could relate to him or her.
Above all, my mom learned to cook.
Really cook.
A couple of years after my mother had taken her plunge into Patrick and Wolf’s world, I went to L.A. on a business trip. My mom was in her kitchen fooling around with a small blowtorch.
“What the hell?” I said. “Are you welding now?”
She explained that using this particular tool was the only way one could get the crust exactly right on a crème brûlée.
Of course it was.
I got one as a gift the next Christmas, one of the very few people of the Hebraic persuasion to ever get a fire-breathing tool as a present from his mom.
She talked about food constantly. And her palate, which had always been good, stepped up to a whole other level. My family would have what we thought was a superb dinner at a restaurant and we’d all be raving about it, then we’d look at my mother and because of the slight frown of disapproval on her face one of us would ask, “You didn’t like it?” My mom would more often than not say, “It was okay.” And then we’d get a dissection of what was actually wrong: too much salt, too dry, too wet, overcooked, undercooked, the sauce was too runny, the crust was too doughy, the olive oil in which it was cooked was obviously not fresh enough, something that should have been fresh was frozen. My mom didn’t have an ounce of pretension to her; this was not a question of putting on airs. She simply knew more than we did and she no longer felt the need to keep that knowledge to herself.
For many years before he died, I got to edit books written by the brilliant Robert Hughes. Known as a fierce art and cultural critic, he wrote a book about the one thing he loved uncritically: fishing. In his opening to the book, Hughes wrote about how fishing put him on the road to becoming an art critic. When one put a rod in the water, he explained, one was penetrating a calm, still exterior. It was necessary, however, to try to visualize the turmoil, the movement, all the things that were roiling underneath the stillness. One had to try to understand exactly what was beneath that which could only be seen. Exactly what an art critic must do, he explained.
Exactly what my mother was now capable of doing with food. She could bite into something and taste every ingredient. She could deconstruct almost any dish—after tasting it, she could re-create it from scratch.
Everyone in our family responded in different ways to my mother’s remarkable transformation.
My father embraced it joyously. He had spent years building her confidence, quietly urging her to be more independent, and now she was flowering. He particularly enjoyed the fact that my mother now swore. Not often, not inappropriately, and not with the vulgarity of the proverbial longshoreman, but when she did curse, her point was made. Until I was in my mid-twenties, my mom never swore. She seemed incapable of doing so. If she hit her finger with a hammer while hanging a picture—my mom was the only one in the family who would ever dare take up a hammer and nail and try to actually do something with it—she would stutter out a “Shoot.” She just could not bring herself to use bad language.
The change came after she began working at Ma Maison. Suddenly, if she broke a nail or screwed up some puffed pastry, she’d let loose with a “Shit!” Or she’d be talking about someone who did something nasty to my dad or to Wolf and she’d quietly go, “Fuck him.” Then she’d smile proudly. Her cursing was both shocking and wonderful, and the frequency of it seemed to rise along with her fortitude. My mom had always been quietly steely, but now her unbending will expressed itself much more vociferously. She stood up to my dad more. She stood up to everyone more. My dad started telling everyone: “Oh … she used to be Sweet Judy. Now she’s an animal.” He began calling her “the Animal.” And they both loved it.
As my mother got older, I think she came to see her cursing as a sign of her inner strength. Even at age ninety-three, she’ll mutter “Shit” if something goes wrong and I’ll say to her, “I still can’t believe you’re such an animal.” She’ll look at me, nod, and—her aphasia on temporary hold—say, “Fuckin’ A” or “You bet your ass.” She always laughs, but there is a sense of pride behind the laughter. It’s her way of letting the world know she is no one to be trifled with.
I was on the other side of the continent during the years when these major changes were developing in my mom. But I followed her development closely. Even though I didn’t see my parents all that often—I’d go to L.A. two or three times a year; they’d come to New York about the same—my mom and I grew closer. By this point, she fully accepted me as an adult but I was also able to accept and deal with her as one. She wasn’t just my mother anymore. She was a person with a real life and real accomplishments. Sometimes she came to New York on her own and we’d have dinner. We could talk about all sorts of things that we never really discussed before: her family; the mistakes she felt she’d made with my brother and me; her relationship with my dad; her regrets; even, to a degree … gulp … her sex life. She told me that my father was the only man she had ever been with and that, at times, she wished she’d had more experience. I managed to survive that particular conversation without passing out.
I was fascinated by my mother’s gradual alteration. Just as I loved my dad, saw his flaws, drew from his strengths, and enjoyed both the limits and the boundaries of our relationship, I was able to enjoy new and surprising dimensions in my relationship with my mom. She was now my equal in some ways, my superior in others, my friend in many ways, and my mother in all the ways that counted.
Each of her siblings dealt with the new Judy in his or her own fashion. Her brother Hy was condescending, acting as if he ran a real restaurant while Wolf and the rest of my mom’s chef crowd were involved in something ethereal and a little bit fake. Lil took my mother more seriously but still treated her as a little sister. I’m not sure Natalie ever quite figured out what the hell was going on. Belle, not surprisingly, relished my mom’s ascension. She began coming to L.A. more often and loved hanging with the chefs and the staff. Wolf and Barbara were crazy about Belle: whenever she walked into Spago, day or night, there was always a bottle of scotch waiting for her.
Both my brother and I, as adults, connected to my mom, in some ways, through food. Not only did I begin to edit cookbooks and produce food-related TV shows, I began to cook and, much to my surprise, I enjoyed all aspects of it—the preparation, the creativity, the giving of pleasure.
Eric began cooking, too, and he was a far better cook than I was right from the start. He had a real flair for it. He made delicacies that were much more difficult to prepare than anything I attempted. He was able to be more precise and was far more disciplined (he’s also a terrific musician and very good with languages, and I think there must be a connection, since I’m a total washout in both of those areas). To me, however, my brother’s culinary attempts seemed to lack some kind of core. I cooked solely for the fun of it. I sensed Eric’s adventures in the kitchen were a way to try to reconnect to the family, from whom he’d slowly been moving away.
I don’t think food is a tool that can be manipulated to bring people together. I think food is usually an extension of the person preparing it. People connect to other people. Food is the pleasurable bridge upon which both sides cross.
My mother’s food has always been exactly like my mother: appealing, comforting, genuine, unpretentious, at times whimsical, always elegant. And always with a certain unknowable complexity.
WOLFGANG PUCK’S SALMON COULIBIAC
This was the very first dish that Wolf ever taught my mother to make, the first thing she learned to cook at Ma Maison. Of everything on her list of dishes that are important to her, this is perhaps the most important.
My mom loves Wolfgang Puck. I don’t mean she likes him a lot, I mean she loves him.
Their relationship was special right from the start. Like a lot of European chefs, Wolf had left home as a teenager to start work in a professional kitchen. He trained throughout Europe in restaurants in his native Austria and France and, in 1975, became the chef at Ma Maison when he was twenty-five. The restaurant had been open for two years by then without causing much of a splash. Wolf got rid of the dishes that used canned sardines and packaged vegetables and began buying his food fresh every morning at San Diego’s Chino Farm, which was a two-hour drive from L.A. Patrick Terrail was a great host and he wooed the stars and big shots from the movie and television industry. As a result of Patrick’s odd but seductive charm, the A-list crowd, and, above all, Wolf’s brilliant and innovative food, Ma Maison quickly went from being a kitschy outdoor café to become L.A.’s first great, world-class restaurant. In many ways, Wolf is the inventor of what has come to be known as California Cuisine and, along with Alice Waters, brought that cuisine to the world. Ma Maison became so insanely popular that, at some point, Patrick actually unlisted its phone number. Think about it: a restaurant so popular that unless you were a regular, you couldn’t even call to book a table!
My mom and Wolf connected just as Wolf’s star began to shine. Because he’d left home at such a young age, my mom quickly fell into the role of his surrogate mother. He talked to her about women, about his complicated relationship with Patrick, about his career. Simultaneously, he recognized her love for this new world and her desire to soak up everything she could about that world. She helped keep him grounded. He helped lift her off that ground.
My dad was also crazy about Wolf, and that affection was mutual. Wolf gives my father credit for helping to shape his sense of humor—and to Americanize it. My dad was often gruff with his jokes and he was a master of deadpan delivery. At Ma Maison, when Wolf was just beginning his rise, a waiter would ask how the food was and my dad would say, “Terrible.” Wolf would hear about it in the kitchen and come out to see who had insulted his soup or his veal or the delicate sauce on his fish. His first response was to get angry, but then my dad would indicate his plate, which had been licked clean, and point out that he’d eaten there three times that week, and Wolf would realize that he needed to both toughen up and lighten up. He lightened up considerably and became a great practical joker. My parents became so fond of the young chef that they began going on vacation with Wolf and Barbara and another couple, the legendary dessert chef Maida Heatter and her husband, Ralph Daniels. They became a tight sixsome.
A year after my mother started working in the restaurant kitchen, Patrick erected a new building on the restaurant’s parking lot and opened Ma Cuisine, Ma Maison’s cooking school. My mother became its first manager and main teacher. She was now cooking and teaching alongside Julia Child and Paula Wolfert and her new friend Maida, the stars of that era’s food universe, as well as with the new generation of great California chefs: Jonathan Waxman, Nancy Silverton, Mark Peel, and so many others. My mom became good friends with all of them and a surrogate mother to many of them.
Part of the new job description: giving cooking lessons to celebrities and L.A. power brokers and the wives or girlfriends of L.A. celebrities and power brokers. It was crazy. I went out to L.A. on business periodically and would always try to time my visits to the school to coincide with the end of my mom’s cooking lessons because after each lesson everyone would sit around and eat the food they’d just learned how to make. I popped in there once to find my mom wrapping up a session showing Sammy Davis Jr. how to roll pastry dough.
My mom wasn’t one of those people who left her work behind at the office. Cooking was not just her job now, it was her all-consuming passion. The dinner parties she threw became more and more elaborate and quickly became legendary. And that is not an exaggeration. Olivia Goldsmith, the bestselling author of The First Wives Club, wrote a novel in the ’90s, Flavor of the Month, in which one of her fictional characters is “lucky” enough to be invited to the home of the Hollywood couple known to throw the best dinner parties in town: Steve and Judy Gethers. In the novel, Goldsmith provides a vivid description of my parents’ home and the elaborate food my mom served. An iconic mention in a trashy popular novel: it doesn’t get much more legendary than that.
Ma Maison was a phenomenon—culturally and from a cuisine standpoint—and stayed that way until 1982, when Patrick and Wolf went through a nasty professional divorce. In the wake of the unpleasantness, Wolf decided to open up his own restaurant, Spago. A lot of people at the time thought he was crazy. Even my mom was concerned about the gamble. Leaving Ma Maison to open what Wolf was describing as a “pizza place”? The move turned out not to be so insane. It was an instant and enormous success. I think that the original Spago, with its offbeat waiters and gorgeous view and its reinvention of Italian food with such unheard-of dishes as smoked salmon pizza, was perhaps the greatest restaurant experience ever, anywhere in the world. The food was spectacular and it was just so damn much fun. There was a playfulness to that restaurant that is almost impossible to describe and is absolutely impossible to re-create.
And Spago was hardly a fluke. Three decades later, Wolf has probably become the most successful chef and restaurateur in the history of the planet Earth. I won’t attempt to count the number of restaurants he now has around the world because by the time I try to list them, several more will have opened. He led the way for big-name chefs to open in Vegas and Singapore and other cities that are now food meccas. He opened Spago cafés in airports around the world. He’s on the Home Shopping Network with an extensive line of cooking utensils. And he’s got frozen foods. Unlike my uncle Hy’s foray into the frozen blintz business, Wolf’s frozen pizza is actually good. I was recently in Tokyo and, wandering the streets one afternoon, walked right by a large sign with a photo of Wolf on it, hanging outside his Tokyo restaurant. I took a photo with my phone and e-mailed it instantly to my mom.
The A-list followed Wolf to his original Spago, deserting Ma Maison almost immediately. And my mom, too, moved on from Patrick’s cooking school. She pushed Wolf to write his first cookbook and helped him with it. She tested recipes for Nancy Silverton and Mark Peel’s first cookbook. And then, years after writing the Ratner’s cookbook with her niece, she began writing her own. The Fabulous Gourmet Food Processor Cookbook came out soon after Cuisinarts and similar contraptions became the rage. She followed that with what I think is her best work, Italian Country Cooking. For research, she drove around Italy with a friend, Joan Hoian, for three weeks, talked her way into family kitchens, used Wolf’s references to observe in restaurant kitchens, and just stumbled into whatever interesting food she could find. My dad, against his wishes, was made to stay home: my mom wasn’t allowed to stand by his side while he was directing; he couldn’t be demanding her attention while she was learning to make a perfect minestrone soup or bread salad. It was clearly a good call on her part. The book is superb. I’ve yet to find a better pesto recipe anywhere else.
An ad for a cooking class and book promotion—my mom in her L.A. doyenne period
After that she published The Sandwich Book, which was simple and lovely. And then came two books she wrote with Mary Bergin, the second pastry chef at Spago: Spago Desserts and Spago Chocolate. The chocolate book was picked by Food and Wine magazine as the best cookbook of the year.
In time, my mother became the doyenne of the L.A. food world. The waiters she was nice to became maître d’s at other restaurants and then managers and even owners. The young chefs she mentored went on to open restaurants all over the world and to write cookbooks and to spread some of the wisdom they had learned from my mother, in and out of the kitchen. Her active involvement in the food world lasted into the early part of the twenty-first century, when she was in her eighties; up until the time she had her stroke in 2007, she was still teaching and writing, sometimes formally, sometimes informally.
For those thirty years, my mom enjoyed a great rarity: an extraordinary second act to her life. But despite all the successes and all the wonderful accomplishments, I don’t think she ever experienced the same exhilaration, the same sense of pure, unfettered enjoyment that she had that first year at Ma Maison and those first few years at Ma Cuisine.
Wolfgang Puck’s Salmon Coulibiac Recipe
In Wolf’s book Modern French Cooking for the American Kitchen, the recipe calls for pike instead of salmon and crayfish instead of shrimp. But my mom, at her dinner parties, made it with salmon and shrimp, and that’s what you’re going to get here. Wolf does specify that shrimp make a fine crayfish substitute, and he makes it clear that salmon works just as well as pike, so I figure I’m on safe ground.
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
INGREDIENTS:
1 recipe brioche dough (NOTE FROM AUTHOR: DON’T PANIC, I’M GIVING YOU THAT RECIPE, TOO; IT FOLLOWS SOON ENOUGH.)
2 pounds boneless salmon fillets
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 eggs
1½ cups heavy cream
1½ cups white wine
2 shallots, minced
1 tablespoon minced fresh tarragon
6 tarragon stems
1 recipe court bouillon (AUTHOR’S NOTE: NO NEED TO PANIC AGAIN, I’M GOT YOU COVERED HERE, TOO.)
24 rock shrimp (ME AGAIN: THE RECIPE CALLS FOR 24 LIVE CRAYFISH. GOOD LUCK FINDING THAT IF YOU DON’T LIVE IN NEW ORLEANS OR ELSEWHERE ON THE GULF COAST. ROCK SHRIMP—THE TINY ONES THEY USE FOR POPCORN SHRIMP—WORK JUST FINE. THEY’RE ABOUT THE SAME SIZE AS CRAYFISH SO I FIGURED I’D USE THE SAME NUMBER. I WAS CORRECT.)
8 to 12 stalks asparagus, cooked until al dente
1 bunch basil leaves (FINAL AUTHOR’S NOTE FOR THIS PART OF THE RECIPE: FOR SOME WEIRD REASON, WHEN I WAS SHOPPING FOR ALL OF THIS STUFF I COULDN’T FIND BASIL ANYWHERE. I HESITATED, MEDITATED ON WHAT TO DO, AND TOOK THE PLUNGE, GRABBING A HANDFUL OF MINT INSTEAD. A FEW MINUTES AFTER MY CAREFULLY CONSIDERED CHOICE I PANICKED AND CALLED JANIS. I ASKED HER WHAT SHE WOULD DO IF SHE HAD TO SUBSTITUTE SOMETHING FOR BASIL, BUT I DIDN’T GIVE HER ANY OF THE CHOICES I HAD. SHE PONDERED FOR A MOMENT THEN SAID, “MINT?” I LOVE VALIDATION.)
½ pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
Lemon juice
DIRECTIONS:
1. Prepare the brioche dough a day in advance (through step 5).
2. Slice 1 pound of salmon into small pieces. In the bowl of a food processor, puree the salmon with the salt, pepper, cayenne, and 1 egg. Transfer the mixture to a chilled bowl.
3. Whip 1¼ cups cream to a soft Chantilly. Over ice, fold the cream into the salmon mixture. Test the mousse for taste and consistency in simmering water (to do this, poach a spoonful of the mousse in simmering water for 4 or 5 minutes. Remove the mousse from the water and taste) and correct the seasoning as necessary. Refrigerate until needed. (AUTHOR’S NOTE: NO WAY DID I BOTHER TO TEST THIS.)
4. Marinate the remaining 1 pound salmon fillets in a mixture of ½ cup wine, 1 shallot, and the tarragon.
5. Bring the court bouillon to a boil. Add the crayfish and return to a boil. Remove the crayfish and, when cool, shell twelve of them and reserve the other twelve whole. (NOTE: JUST REMINDING YOU THAT I DIDN’T USE CRAYFISH, I USED SHRIMP, AND EVEN THOUGH THEY WEREN’T ALIVE, I STILL BOILED THEM EXACTLY AS INSTRUCTED ABOVE. IT ALL WORKED FINE.)
6. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. (NOTE FROM AUTHOR TO COMPUTER KEYBOARD DESIGNERS: WHY THE HELL DON’T YOU HAVE ONE OF THOSE LITTLE CIRCLE SYMBOLS THAT SYMBOLIZE “DEGREES” ON YOUR KEYBOARDS? I HATE HAVING TO WRITE OUT THE WORD “DEGREE” EVERY TIME. COME ON! SHAPE UP!)
7. Divide the brioche dough in half and roll out one piece ⅜-inch thick on a baking sheet. Spread half of the fish mousse down the center. Arrange half of the salmon fillets over the mousse, top with the asparagus, and spread the remaining mousse over the asparagus. Finally, arrange the remaining fillets over the mousse.
8. Lightly beat the remaining egg for an egg wash and brush all around the edges of the dough. Roll out the remaining piece of brioche, large enough to cover the fish. Press the edges together and trim. Brush with egg wash. Decorate with strips of dough and poke a vent in the top. Bake for 40 minutes.
9. While the fish is baking, reduce 1 cup wine, the remaining shallot, the tarragon stems, and ¼ cup cream until one-third of the liquid remains or until the bubbles are thick.
10. Using the food processor, puree the basil leaves. Add the butter and process until well blended.
11. Slowly add the basil butter to the reduced wine. Strain and correct the seasonings, adding a bit of lemon juice if desired. Add the shelled crayfish (SHRIMP!) to the sauce, just before serving.
PRESENTATION: Using an electric knife (or a very sharp chef’s knife), slice the coulibiac into six or eight slices. Nap each plate with the sauce and arrange the whole crayfish (SHRIMP) decoratively on the plate. Center a slice of coulibiac in the plate.
BRIOCHE RECIPE
INGREDIENTS:
To make 2 large brioches or 16 to 18 individual ones
1 pound 2 ounces all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoons dry yeast
½ cup milk
6 eggs
10 ounces unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 egg, lightly beaten, saved aside for egg wash
DIRECTIONS:
If brioche dough is allowed to rise in too warm a spot, the yeast will be killed and an odor will develop. This recipe should give you perfect results; smaller proportions will not be as successful.
1. In the bowl of an electric mixer, using the paddle, combine the flour, sugar, salt, and yeast. Add enough of the milk to make a stiff dough that pulls away from the side of the bowl.
2. Add the 6 eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Continue to beat until the dough is elastic.
3. If your machine has a dough hook, substitute it for the paddle and add the softened butter, a small amount at a time, until it is well incorporated and the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl.
4. Transfer the dough to another bowl, cover with a damp cloth, and allow to rise at room temperature for approximately 1 hour, until double its original size.
5. Punch down the dough, cover again with the damp cloth, and allow to rise overnight in the refrigerator. Be sure to cover the bowl with a plate weighted with a brick (or other heavy object) to prevent the dough from over-rising and over-fermenting.
6. Form the dough into two large brioches and place them in lightly buttered 6-cup molds. Allow to rise until double in size.
7. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. (AGAIN: WOULDN’T IT BE NICE TO HAVE ONE OF THOSE LITTLE CIRCLE SYMBOLS?)
8. When the brioches have risen and are ready to bake, brush with the egg wash and bake for 20 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 degrees F (NEED I SAY IT?) and continue to bake for 30 minutes more, or until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. The baking time will be shorter for smaller brioches. (AUTHOR’S NOTE: I DIDN’T REALLY HAVE TO INCLUDE STEPS 6 THROUGH 8 BECAUSE FOR THE SALMON COULIBIAC, WE ONLY NEEDED TO FOCUS ON STEPS 1 THROUGH 5. BUT I PUT IN THE WHOLE RECIPE FOR TWO REASONS: 1) I JUST LIKE BEING THOROUGH, AND 2) THERE’S AN ACTUAL MISTAKE! I TYPED THE RECIPE EXACTLY AS IT IS IN WOLF’S MODERN FRENCH COOKING BOOK AND, IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, IT SAYS “PREHEAT THE OVEN TO 350 DEGREES” AND THEN, IN THE VERY NEXT STEP, IT SAYS TO TURN THE OVEN DOWN TO 350. I AM NOT SAYING ALL THIS TO ADMONISH WOLF. I AM POINTING THIS OUT TO SHOW THAT ANYONE CAN MAKE A MISTAKE. AS YOU WILL SEE IF YOU KEEP READING.)
COURT BOUILLON RECIPE
2 medium carrots
2 stalks celery
1 leek, thoroughly washed
1 sprig fresh thyme or pinch dried thyme
1 bay leaf
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 quarts water
2 cups dry white wine
DIRECTIONS:
1. Slice the carrots, celery, and leek into ¼-inch pieces. Put them in a saucepan.
2. Add the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Continue boiling for 20 minutes, until the liquid is flavorful.
Okay … the first thing I did when I finished studying this recipe was to get borderline hysterical. I almost dozed off twice while reading, at some point had to get up and walk around my apartment, and after finally wending my way to the end, all I wanted to do was have a shot of bourbon and smoke a cigarette, even though I’ve never smoked an entire cigarette in my life. You should be getting the point by now: I was unnerved. A brioche? A mousse? Sauce? Several machines? What was I thinking? At the very beginning of this process, I thought that by learning how to do all this and eventually putting together the perfect dinner for my mother, I’d come to some understanding of her and her entire philosophy of life. What I was thinking after going through this recipe is that I was way out of my league and had no shot of pulling this off. Matzo brei was one thing. This coulibiac extravaganza was another.
Eventually, without benefit of either alcohol or tobacco, I calmed down and read through the directions carefully. If I took it step-by-step, this was doable. It might not be good, but making it was doable. The only thing that worried me was the brioche. Bread scared me. I’d tried baking it several times before and hadn’t done well. But I knew someone who wasn’t afraid of bread. A close friend. Close enough that I decided I could test the limits of that friendship. I called my pal Abby Levine.
The conversation went better than I thought it would. I played upon his parental sympathies (“Abby, I’m doing this for my mom. It will mean so much to her”) and our years of being buds and fellow Martini Brothers (“Come on, it’ll be fun. We’ll hang out, we’ll cook, we’ll talk politics, sports, and women. C’monnnnnn”). And I closed the deal with bribery (“I’ll make superb cocktails, I’ll buy you lunch, and I’ll have doughnuts waiting”). He said yes.
I e-mailed him the recipe and we discussed it over the phone. We concluded that this was a two-day job: one day to go through steps 1 through 5, one day for all the rest. We set a date, several weeks in advance, and I decided to ramp up the stakes: I invited a few people over for dinner that second night, including Abby’s wife, Micheline, with whom I’ve been close friends since before she married Abby, who is a finicky eater and loves to give me a hard time. The pressure was on.
The first cooking day was a Friday. Abby came over at about one p.m. As promised, I had doughnuts stacked on a plate—coconut cream, vanilla icing, and a cinnamon—and take-out Middle Eastern food from a great place called Mamoun’s, down the block from my apartment. As the pièce de résistance, I also had a cocktail shaker full of boulevardiers, the bourbon version of a Negroni: equal parts bourbon (whereas a Negroni is gin), Campari, and sweet vermouth. I did it up right, crushed ice and everything. Before we started in on the coulibiac, we put ourselves in the mood. We started with the doughnuts, of course. Then had a boulevardier each, then went for the hummus, pita bread, falafel, spinach pie, baba ghanoush, and grilled lamb kebabs. We debated having a second boulevardier, decided it couldn’t hurt, so we poured, sipped, then decided we were ready to tackle the brioche. It was now two p.m.
I’d bought all the ingredients earlier that morning except for the yeast, which Abby, as a regular baker of bread, had plenty of. The first step involved mixing flour, sugar, salt, yeast, and some milk. This was a no-brainer, especially because I was an old hand with my electric mixer. My KitchenAid is my favorite food-related possession. I am comfortable using it, and I even am reasonably sure which of the various attachments is a paddle.
So we set up the mixer, poured in the ingredients, and … watched in horror at the disaster spinning right before our eyes. We saw no evidence of a stiff dough pulling away from the side of the bowl. Abby was particularly critical of the mixture and exhibited signs of panic. I insisted we pour in more milk. Abby thought that was a loser move. I did it anyway. Still nothing.
Stymied, I suggested another boulevardier and we agreed that maybe we should only have half a glass each this time. We did, keeping an eye on the whirling KitchenAid. By the time we were on our second sip, the dough was kind of stiff and sort of pulling away from the sides of the bowl. Despite our amazement that we’d somehow screwed up the easiest stage of the entire recipe, we moved on. Eggs were added. We beat until elastic (the mixture, not us). We then spent a few minutes trying to decide which of the remaining attachments was a dough hook. We finally picked one that seemed right and replaced the paddle. We added the butter as instructed and, once again, waited for the dough to pull away from the sides of the bowl. At some point, Abby said, “The dough’s not even on the sides of the bowl. How can it pull away?” I decided that meant it was ready. So we transferred the dough to another bowl, covered it with a damp cloth, and waited an hour for it to double in size. That hour was quite productive: we polished off the remaining doughnuts, finished our third boulevardiers, and solved most of the world’s problems. When we checked, despite all that extra milk, the dough had, in fact, risen to double its original size.
Abby allowed me to punch the dough—and really, that’s what you do, you punch the dough as if it’s a speed bag at a gym—and then prepared to put it in the fridge. I ventured an opinion that I didn’t really need to weigh the dough down with a brick equivalent, but Abby explained to me that I was an idiot and that if I didn’t, the mixture might take over my entire refrigerator. Yielding to his greater experience—and having seen The Blob when I was a mere lad—I found a heavy trivet, put that on a plate, put them both on top of the mixture in the bowl, and stashed the thing in the fridge. Abby and I congratulated ourselves on a job well done, although he still insisted it would fail because of all the extra milk. We finished the last doughnut and decided we’d meet again at noon the next day.
In anticipation of the work we had to do on Day Two, I had looked up the word “coulibiac” to see what it actually was. I’d always assumed it was French through and through, since Wolf taught my mom how to make it in the kitchen of a French restaurant and the only other place I’d ever had it was at Lutèce, for many years New York’s best old-fashioned French restaurant. It turns out those pesky Frogs had appropriated the dish from the Russians. Although the French had probably added the fancy sauce as an accompaniment, unexpectedly I was, once again, delving into my roots.
Lunch was ready when Abby arrived—Chinese takeout. He was appreciative but said he’d been thinking about it and decided I was still an idiot for adding so much milk to the brioche dough.
“Oh yeah?” I said, and stepping over to the fridge, I took the trivet-and-plate-covered bowl out with a flourish and revealed a perfect brioche dough.
Pressing my luck, I staggered Abby just a tad when I revealed that I had also decided to make another of my mother’s favorite dishes for dinner that night. We were going to have the coulibiac as an appetizer and, for a main course, I was making tournedos of beef with a black truffle cream sauce. He covered his surprise with a shrug and an almost imperceptible eye roll and, after boulevardier number one of the day, we were ready to start making the inside of the coulibiac.
The guests were coming at 7:30. We started cooking around two. We were finished and ready for company at 7:29. This thing is definitely work-intensive.
The surprise was that none of the work on Day Two was all that difficult. Everything required precision and exactness and those equate to time-consuming. I will say that this also proved to me the value of a real chef having a “line.” There is no way in hell I could have done this by myself. There were too many choices, too many steps happening simultaneously; it was all just too much. Even for the two of us, it was a little overwhelming. Every hour on the hour we would look at each other and decide we would probably be dining around midnight.
One reason I needed Abby is that he’s mechanical. He can actually fix things that have wires attached to them and put things together by looking at nonsensical line drawings on so-called instruction sheets. The coulibiac recipe called for the use of a Cuisinart and, although I had one, I’d never used it. I had no idea how to attach the blades or feed food into it. If left on my own, I’d be food processor–less (and this from someone whose mother wrote a food processor cookbook!). I’m not sure how I’d managed to avoid the confounded machine for so long, but I had. Abby heard my confession and forgave me for my sins. He handled the Cuisinart like a pro, set it up easily, and allowed me to feed the salmon into the whirling blade. The experience was surprisingly satisfying in a Fargo-like way.
I worked on the mousse and the fillets while Abby whipped up the court bouillon.
All the separate elements looked good, so we split the brioche dough and spread half of it on the roasting pan. I layered the various elements—the mousse, the fillets, the asparagus—over that bottom half. We covered the top of the mixture with the remaining dough. Pleased and surprised, I said to Abby that our version looked much the way my mom’s coulibiac looked when she used to make it in L.A. But Abby held up his hand, could no longer hide his self-satisfied smirk, and pulled out a line drawing of a fish that he’d been carrying around all day. He placed the drawing on top of a leftover piece of dough and, using a knife, traced the fish drawing. Then he placed the little fish of dough on top of the coulibiac.
The salmon coulibiac, ready to go into the oven, with Abby’s brilliant fish tracing
It turned our cooperative effort into a work of art. Perhaps not a Picasso or a Matisse but definitely a Puck or a Boulud.
Into the oven it went. Now, all that remained was to prepare the sauce. A breeze. The only question being: Would mint work as a basil substitute? The answer, from all the guests, was a resounding yes. Even Micheline, who, when she walked into my apartment, announced that she hated salmon and wouldn’t even taste it, consumed a fairly hefty piece after hearing all the oohs and ahhs and the praise heaped upon us.
Was it as I remembered from thirty-five years ago? Yes, it actually was.
Was it as good? I’m not sure. Would my mother have thought so? Probably not.
But if she’d been there that night for this tryout, I’m certain she would have agreed with my ultimate assessment and appreciated the language with which it was expressed: it was pretty fucking satisfying.
SOLFERINO’S STEAK WITH TRUFFLE CREAM SAUCE
Twenty-five years ago, not too long after Janis and I became romantically involved, I wrote a book about my amazing and very handsome Scottish Fold cat, Norton. The publisher felt confident that the book—called The Cat Who Went to Paris—was going to be a success, so before it was even published I agreed to write a sequel. I knew exactly what the sequel should be and happily the publisher agreed, so Janis, Norton, and I went off to the south of France for a year so I could write about my further adventures with my brilliant feline.
I had, in my twenties and early thirties, found ways to spend a fair amount of time in Paris and the French countryside—writing a couple of films there, working with authors who lived there, doing business with French publishers. I’d come to love the country, the cuisine, and the culture and was determined that someday I would live in France, specifically Provence. Not surprisingly, it was my mother and her connection to Wolf that led me there.
Wolf and Barbara got married in 1982 at a hotel and restaurant called Oustau de Baumanière, in the magnificent town of Les Baux. My mom flew over for the wedding (my dad was working and couldn’t make it) and the owner, Jean-André Charrial, treated her like a treasured guest. He even let her do some work in the kitchen, which was my mother’s idea of a perfect vacation. When she returned, she created a picture of the Oustau that I couldn’t get out of my mind, and it quickly settled into my brain as my fantasy retreat.
A year or so after the Puck/Lazaroff wedding, Jean-André visited Los Angeles and stayed at my parents’ house for a week, cementing the connection. A few years after that, I managed to go to Provence and stay at Jean-André’s hotel for a couple of days—the place was more beautiful and the food far beyond what I’d imagined. So when it came time to head off to write the second Norton book, I knew I wanted to be somewhere near Les Baux. Amazingly enough, I found the exact house I had pictured and hoped for in the perfect town of Goult, in the Luberon.
During this year abroad, my mother came over for a three-week visit. In the course of that visit, the four of us—my mom, Janis, Norton, and I—drove to Italy, with the express purpose of seeing the town of Lucca, where my brother had recently lived for a couple of years.
Lucca was as beautiful as Eric had said it was. We stayed in a lovely old hotel for one night and, using our guidebook, booked a dinner reservation at what seemed to be an excellent restaurant. In the afternoon, after strolling around the walled city, we struck up a conversation with the hotel owner. He didn’t speak English and none of us spoke a word of Italian, so the conversation was composed of incorrect but understandable French on both sides and a lot of hand signals. He asked if we were serious about food and we said we definitely were. I told him my mother was a famous chef, which got my mother’s usual instant response: “I’m not a chef, I’m a cook. Wolf is a chef.” That got my usual response, which was: “Mom, it doesn’t make any difference. No one cares.” And in this particular instance, I tacked on: “And he doesn’t understand what I’m saying, anyway.” But he did understand and he was impressed enough to tell us that the restaurant we’d chosen for dinner that night wasn’t very good and asked if he could recommend another place. We said sure. He then asked if we liked truffles.
I had discovered truffles while living in the Luberon. I’d read about them and had been desperate to try them and as soon as I arrived in Goult, I sought them out. You could buy them much the way people bought marijuana in Washington Square Park back in New York: from shady-looking characters who would go “Pssst” as you walked by. Farmers sold truffles under the table so they didn’t have to pay the astronomical taxes. If you knew the right street corners in almost every Provençal town, there’d be a guy in an overcoat, loitering suspiciously, and if you said the magic words, “Avez-vous des truffes, Monsieur?” he’d open his coat to reveal several pounds of truffles, layered into different pockets, cut into different sizes. Once you got over the overpowering odor, it was quite a magnificent spectacle. In the town of Apt, not far from Goult, I began to rendezvous regularly with the local truffle dealer and Janis and I had become addicted to the stuff, although we doled the nuggets out carefully to ourselves and our new friends since, even when purchased on the black market, they were quite expensive.
Which is why the immediate answer to our hotel owner was, “Yes, we love truffles.” Without saying another word, he picked up the phone, called a restaurant, and spoke rapidly in Italian. The only things we managed to catch were “famous chef” and “truffle dinner.” That was enough for me. We were there.
The restaurant, Solferino, was located in an old house; its various rooms were each used as small and separate dining rooms. Before we ordered, Janis said that my mom had been treating us to everything on this trip so she insisted on paying for dinner that night. That was okay by the three of us—my mom, Norton, and me. Norton was not big on picking up checks, although in a very real way, he was paying for the entire year abroad.
Soon after we were seated, the owner of the restaurant appeared before us, made a fuss over my mother, and said we didn’t have to order—we were being served their special truffle dinner. Over the next several hours, he proceeded to bring out a six-course truffle-laden meal. I can’t remember everything we ate but I know it included truffled eggs, three separate pastas with three different truffle sauces, and a truffle-stuffed Cornish game hen. About halfway through the meal I leaned over to Janis and said, “I have some bad news. You chose the wrong night to pick up the check since this meal is going to cost about ten thousand dollars.” She nodded, steeling herself for what had to be an astronomical bill.
Just when we all thought the meal had ended—and by this point we were grateful because we could barely move or breathe—we were served small filet mignons that were topped with generous portions of truffle cream sauce. The sauce dripped over onto the sides of the steaks and onto the plate and contained chunks of black and white truffles the size of small dice. It was a magnificent sight and, although we thought it was impossible, we polished off every last bite. My mother, who weighed a hundred and ten pounds on her heaviest day but could outeat a horse, proclaimed this steak the best she had ever tasted. The sauce was not at all cloying or heavy and the truffles exploded with scent and taste.
At some point during the meal, we had an extended conversation with the owner. It turned out he knew many of the chefs my mom worked with: Wolf and Nancy Silverton and a few others (we later found out that Nancy knew Solferino well and had even cooked with the owner). After our steaks, he led us into the kitchen, introduced us to his mother, who looked pretty frail but was clearly the one who had done all the cooking that night. She was thrilled to meet us, we were thrilled to meet her, we were presented with a bottle of homemade grappa as a gift to take with us, and then, back at our table, we were served dessert against our wishes—individual chocolate bombes with tiny American flags stuck in them—and yes, we ate every last bite.
Then we gulped and asked for the check.
Janis held out her hand, was given the bill … and discovered that all we’d been charged for was the two bottles of red wine that we’d downed with dinner. The whole meal came to about sixty bucks. When we protested, the owner—and his mother, who emerged from the kitchen to take part in the discussion—shooed us away and said that they were honored to have such a well-known chef dining with them and that they wouldn’t think of charging us. I practically had to cover my mom’s mouth with my hand to stop her from saying, “I’m not a chef. I’m a cook.”
The next morning, while driving back to France, we all started sniffing, wondering what the odd smell could be that was filling the car. At some point, Janis realized that it was the smell of truffles: our epic dinner was emanating from our pores.
Before returning to Goult, we stopped off for lunch at one of the ritzy towns on the French Riviera. A friend of ours was visiting someone with a house in Villefranche-sur-Mer and, knowing of our travels, invited us to stop by for lunch on our way home. The house was tasteful and elegant with a view of the Mediterranean, the hostess was gracious, and she and her two guests—my friend Nina and an elderly woman who was a legendary Parisian book editor—prepared a perfect lunch of cold roast chicken, roast beef, French cheeses, salad, and, of course, good wine. We donated our freebie bottle of grappa, which was a big hit.
As we ate, we regaled the three women with detailed descriptions of every meal we’d eaten on the other side of the French/Italian border. We focused particularly on every magnificent morsel we had downed at our truffle dinner. At one point, the book editor, who smoked continuously and had a deep, throaty voice, said, “Congratulations.”
We all turned to her, waiting to see whom she was congratulating and why. She nodded at me and Janis.
“You are now officially French,” she proclaimed. “You are eating one superb meal while spending the entire time talking about another one.”
Solferino’s Steak with Truffle Cream Sauce Recipe
⅓ cup heavy cream
2 egg yolks, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
Thinly shaved fresh truffles, to taste
DIRECTIONS:
Whisk together the cream and the egg yolks until thoroughly mixed. Place in a medium saucepan over low heat. Add the lemon juice and olive oil gradually, whisking as you add. Add the shaved truffles. Stir gently for about 5 minutes.
Serve hot.
STEAK PREPARATION
1 small tournedos of beef per person
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
Over high heat, with a bit of olive oil, char each side of the beef. Don’t cook through, just brown each side.
Put the tournedos in the oven and cook for exactly 15 minutes (although check after 10, just to be safe). This should leave you with perfect, medium-rare tournedos for everyone.
This is remarkably easy to prepare. Good thing, since this is the dish I’d decided to make at the last minute as a follow-up to Abby and Peter’s two-day salmon coulibiac fantasia. I didn’t think things could get any better than the coulibiac appetizer, but the people at the dinner party looked and sounded almost orgasmic when they bit into this follow-up dish. I think their response was largely due to the fact that people are rarely served truffles at a home-cooked meal.
I have only a few comments about how best to prepare this baby.
Normally, tournedos (a.k.a. filet mignon) is my least favorite cut of beef. I love skirt steak, sirloin, rib eye, you name it, but although tournedos might be the most expensive of them all, I’ve always found it somewhat tasteless and I’ve never loved the texture. To be totally snobby, I always thought that people who order filet mignon do so because it’s expensive and they don’t really know what they’re doing. Um …
I’m wrong. When topped with this truffle sauce, these steaks were amazing. I tried this sauce with a couple of different and usually preferred cuts of meat and, yes, they were all good—what could be bad?—but nowhere near as good. I have no idea why this is so, but it is.
The only other thing you need to know is that truffles are insanely expensive. A little rock of white truffle can go for five hundred smackers. The black ones are less costly but they ain’t cheap. I wouldn’t tell this to too many people, but you can supplement the real thing with a canned version of a truffle cream sauce. Try Urbani Truffle Thrills, Cream and Truffles. Each 6.1 ounce can costs about ten dollars on Urbani.com, and you might need more than one can, depending on how many steaks you’re serving. But this sauce has real truffles (almost all the versions of bottled truffle oil are chemical re-creations with no real truffles in there). Most people won’t know the difference. I wouldn’t use it instead of fresh truffles, but as a way of saving a few bucks, go ahead and use it with at least one fresh truffle to make more sauce. Real truffles are worth it. I swear.
A few years ago, I was in Tuscany and went on a truffle hunt. My small group and I trudged a few miles through a lot of dirt and mud, led by two dogs, a human guide, and the farmer who owned the land. By the time I got back to the hotel, I basically looked like a five-year-old boy who’d spent the day making mud pies. I was covered in the stuff.
But it, too, was worth it.
Here’s what I learned on my hunt.
—Most farmers use truffle dogs rather than truffle pigs to find these goodies. Dogs are smaller and more agile and can find truffles in spots pigs can’t get to.
—They train puppies to be truffle dogs by putting bits of truffles in their dog food, developing their taste for the delicacy. Oh, to be a truffle puppy in my next life.
—White truffles and black truffles do not grow separately at vastly different locations or times of the year or different climates. They just grow at slightly different elevations and require slightly different amounts of water. We found both white and black ones on our hike.
—There is a huge illegal fake-truffle scam throughout France and Italy. These fake truffles are being created in Eastern Europe and smuggled over the border into legitimate truffle-growing countries, where they are sold for an indecent profit to unsuspecting and not-so-discerning foodies and importers. This news shook me to my very core.
After our search was over, we repaired to a small stone cottage next to the farmer’s main house. There, his wife served us red and white wines that they had made from their own grapes (very good), toast (from their homemade bread—so good) topped with olive oil (made from their own olives—scrumptious), and butter (yes, of course, churned themselves from the cream that came from their cows). And on top of it all were fingernail-size flakes of black and white truffles, shaved and placed to completely cover each slice of toast.
Worth it. Definitely worth it.
MY ALMOST-MADE-UP FAVA BEAN PUREE
If the coulibiac is the most important dish to my mother on an emotional level, and if the steak/truffle concoction is at or near the top of her taste chart, this side dish is probably the least important recipe on her list. It is here because she insisted that her perfect dinner had to have a vegetable, she settled on fava beans as her favorite green vegetable, and she really likes the backstory to this recipe. My mother has a wide range of things that make her laugh. But I think she laughs the hardest at stories that reveal me to be your basic dolt.
I made a fava bean puree for the very first grown-up dinner party I ever threw. I don’t know why I picked it. At this point in my life, I’m not sure I’d ever even tasted a fava bean. I just know that I got it in my head to do it, I found a recipe, and I was off to the races.
The reason for this particular dinner party was that Cindy—the girlfriend who drew me back to L.A. and was with me and my mother the day she decided to go to work at Ma Maison and who changed my life and career by giving me my Scottish Fold cat Norton—wound up moving to New York to be with me.
Cindy was relatively easygoing and had a very good heart. She also had a mother who was not to be believed: sour, mean, and nasty—and those were her best traits. My mom used to love hearing about Cindy’s mom because my mom came out looking so good in comparison. I would tell her some nightmare story about Cindy’s mother and my mom would just smile and raise an eyebrow. I’d go, “I know, I know, you don’t have to say anything,” and mostly she wouldn’t, although sometimes she’d mumble something about how lucky I was.
Not too long after I enticed Cindy eastward, her mom decided to pay her daughter a visit and see what all the fuss was about when it came to the new boyfriend. Cindy was a wreck, since her mother’s favorite sport was tearing down Cindy’s self-confidence. She’d say things like, “Oh, are you actually wearing that dress to go out?” or “Is that really the way you want your hair to look?”
Understandably, Cindy was a bit fragile around her mother, and always on edge. I decided I’d be the perfect boyfriend and give my pseudo- and horrid mom-in-law the time of her life. I was twenty-four years old, an assistant editor at a publishing company, and my first novel had just been published to limited sales (like, to my parents and their friends), so I wasn’t exactly rolling in dough. Nonetheless, I took the two women—making it clear it was my treat—to the fanciest and nicest French restaurant I knew of in the Village. I don’t remember what we ate but I do remember I ordered the best bottle of wine that was in my price range and that the entire dinner for three cost more than I earned in one week’s paycheck. What the hell: I was doing this for my beloved.
Dinner was reasonably pleasant. Then I called for the check, as suavely as I knew how, and paid it with my credit card, trying my best not to look ashen or tremble even minutely as I added a tip and signed my name. When it was all done, I lifted my glass to take the final sip of wine before we left, told Cindy’s mom how glad I was to get to know her, and posed the following innocent question: “So … did you enjoy your dinner?”
To this day, decades later, the words that came out of her mouth resonate inside my head as if spoken mere seconds ago. I can hear her distinctive, scratchy voice and hear her whiny, dismissive tone and see the not so subtle sneer on her face as she said:
“All food tastes like cold, gray lumps of clay to me. I’d be happy if I never had to eat again.”
I knew several things at that exact moment. First: that Cindy and I were doomed because if there was even a 1 percent chance that she was going to evolve—or devolve—into her mother as she got older, I would most likely wind up in prison after I drowned her in our bathtub (assuming that at some point in the future, I’d be able to afford a place with an actual bathtub). Next: that I could live to be 150 years old and never understand why Cindy’s mom hadn’t mentioned her aversion to all solid food before I’d spent my entire bank account on dinner. And finally: that I’d made a huge mistake by insisting Cindy and I have a dinner party two nights hence so Cindy’s mom could meet some of our friends.
I was out of the rat apartment by this time. Thank God for that because Cindy’s mom’s potential response to that place is beyond anything my fertile imagination could conceive. My new apartment was hardly fancy or luxurious, but it was at least rodent free with no visible garbage outside the window. I don’t remember the full meal that I prepared on that Saturday night. I’m sure it was something simple like a roast that I stuck in the oven and a salad (my idea of cooking back then was to make my own salad dressing, using oil and vinegar and a dash of mustard instead of buying a bottle of premade Italian dressing). But for some unknown reason, I had it in my head that I had to make a fava bean puree.
Somewhere, I found a recipe and it didn’t seem all that difficult. It was basically boiling a bunch of fava beans, mashing them up with butter and a few herbs, and voilà, a delicacy was born. So I bought whatever amount of beans the recipe called for and got up earlier than usual that Saturday morn, just to make sure nothing could be left to chance. I made myself a cup of coffee, read the paper, relaxed and confident, even though this was my first time preparing a real dinner for real company. Deciding it was never too soon to start, I turned to the recipe for fava bean puree and read the first instruction: “Shell the fava beans.”
No problem. I’d helped my mom shell peas before. I figured this was the same level of work. I took one fava out of the bag and began shelling. Five minutes later, I was still trying to get the bean out of the hard shell. I checked the recipe. Yup, the beans were supposed to be shelled before they were cooked. I squeezed, I cut, I squeezed some more. Cindy woke up about an hour later, came into the kitchen/living room area, and I greeted her with the words: “Look! I’ve been doing this for almost an hour and I’ve shelled five beans. Five! There’s thousands of the fuckers! It’s going to take me three weeks to shell all these fucking beans!”
It didn’t actually take three weeks. But it did take most of the afternoon. What no one tells you is that to properly shell fava beans, you either need Superman’s strength and stamina or about a hundred people working for you who don’t mind spending a good chunk of their healthy adult years trying to get little green beans out of hard green pods.
The beans were shelled by four o’clock in the afternoon. I was a sweaty, nervous, exhausted, bloody (well, just around my fingernails) mess by the time I got to step 2 of the recipe. I called my friends to tell them to come at eight instead of seven and begged Cindy to tell her mother that I was dead and she should just go home now to L.A. so Cindy wouldn’t have to deal with the dinner’s unpleasant aftermath. Cindy talked me down and we did our best to actually cook the dinner in time to eat before the chimes of midnight struck.
It must have turned out okay in the end. I don’t remember anything particularly disturbing that came out of Cindy’s mom’s mouth. My friends insisted everything was delicious and I’m pretty sure I got drunk.
Cindy and I did break up a few years afterward. She dumped me on Valentine’s Day. I always figured her mother would have thought that was a nice touch.
What follows is not the recipe I made for Cindy’s mom. It is, however, a recipe I have made since. One of the joys of living in the twenty-first century in Manhattan is that it is now possible to buy fresh fava beans that have been pre-shelled. It’s a life changer.
Fava Bean Puree Recipe
Yield: 1½ cups
Total time: About 1 hour (from Chowhound, adapted from Chez Panisse Vegetables)
INGREDIENTS:
3 cups fava beans, removed from their pods (from about 3 to 4 pounds of favas in their pods)
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling
2 medium garlic cloves, minced
¾ cup water
1 medium thyme sprig
1 (6-inch) rosemary sprig
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
freshly ground black pepper
salt
DIRECTIONS:
1. Prepare an ice water bath by filling a large bowl halfway with ice and water; set aside.
2. Bring a large pot of generously salted water to a boil. Add the shelled favas and boil until the bean inside the outer skin is bright green and firm but not hard, about 1 to 2 minutes. Drain the favas and immediately place them in the ice water bath until cool. Peel the light green skin from each bean to reveal two bright green inner halves. Discard the skins and place the beans in a medium bowl.
3. Heat 4 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large frying pan over medium heat until shimmering. Add the garlic, season with the salt, and cook, stirring occasionally, until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the favas and stir to coat with oil. Add the water, thyme, and rosemary and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for 10 minutes more. (Add more water as needed, a tablespoon at a time, to keep the beans from sticking to the pan.)
4. Remove and discard the thyme and rosemary sprigs. Transfer the fava mixture to a blender and blend on low until coarsely chopped. Transfer a third of the chopped fava mixture to a small bowl. Continue to blend until the remaining fava mixture is finely pureed. If the puree is too thick, add water a tablespoon at a time to reach the desired consistency. Transfer the puree to the bowl with the reserved chopped favas. Stir in the lemon juice and the remaining 2 tablespoons oil. Season with salt and pepper and drizzle with additional olive oil if desired. Serve warm or at room temperature.