Scarpetta's Winter Table

by Patricia Cornwell

  These days, not surprisingly, key limes are very difficult to find, thus making the dessert all the more rare and wonderful. Scarpetta gets her limes from Florida Keys Key Lime Products by making generous donations to the Marine Resource Development Foundation, in hopes that science might yet save the precious fruit. She usually orders half a bushel a month and freezes the juice, which is why she happened to have some on hand the day after Christmas when she entertained Marino and Lucy. Scarpetta thawed half a cup, which also included a hint of grated rind.

  Her crust is a very basic mixture of two cups of all-purpose flour kneaded with two-thirds of a cup of softened butter. Sprinkle a little water and spread the dough paper-thin in a pie pan. Bake until a light golden brown.

  Mix the key lime juice with one can of Eagle Brand condensed milk (it works as well as anything made from scratch). Add a touch of salt and two barely beat­en egg yolks. Stir until thickened. Pour the filling into the pie shell and lick the spoon and swipe the sides of the bowl with your finger when no one is looking. Don't waste a molecule of it. Whip up a quick meringue using the two leftover egg whites and two tablespoons of sugar. Beat until stiff but not dry and spread in thick peaks over the pie. Bake for maybe fifteen minutes until lightly brown. Return your attention to the main course.

  Scarpetta's Holiday Pizza (Continued)

  By now your sauce should be getting very thick and rich. Continue to simmer and stir, and at least forty-five minutes before you're ready to assemble what every­one is impatiently awaiting, place a pizza stone in a very hot oven. Begin the crust by mixing one teaspoon of salt, a shake of sugar, and one teaspoon of active dried yeast with maybe a fourth of a cup of warm (but not hot) water. When frothy, add several cups of the high-gluten flour and a tablespoon of olive oil. Mix and knead on a floured surface for a good ten minutes. Place in a greased bowl and cover with a towel. Let this rise in a warm place.

  Scarpetta favors a very simple salad of arugula or Boston lettuce, or whatever mixture of greens you wish. She might add tomatoes and shaved carrots and diced celery, but nothing more. Her dressing is a hearty red wine vinegar mixed with olive oil, pressed garlic, fresh ground pepper, and oregano. For the more robust appetites, she might add crumbled feta cheese. Do not toss the salad with the dressing until you are ready to call your guests to the table.

  Now we are ready to create our pizza. When the dough has doubled in size, knead it some more, using your knuckles to press it out to the edges. Swipe olive oil on the pizza stone and center the dough on it, being careful not to make con­tact with the stone or set it on the wrong surface, as it is extremely hot. Spread a generous layer of sauce over the crust, followed by at least an inch of the meat/vegetable/cheese mixture. Squeeze the balls of mozzarella, removing as much fluid as possible. Pinch off pieces and place them over the top of the pie. Cover cookie sheets with aluminum foil and place On the second rack of the oven, as the pizza will drip no matter what. Place the stone on the top shelf, baking your pizza at the highest setting. Cook until the cheese is browning. Remove from the oven and allow to rest a moment as you serve the salad and pour a nice red burgundy. If white or red makes no difference, a Puligny-Montrachet is crisp and cleansing. You will have to eat Scarpetta's holiday pizza with a knife and fork.

  On this night after Christmas, it was quiet all through the house as Scarpetta's guests sat around her table and began to eat and drink. After several lusty moments, Marino spoke first.

  "Anybody don't want their oysters, you can hand 'em over here," he said.

  "And how are we supposed to extract them from everything else?" Lucy wanted to know.

  "Pick 'em out. Assuming your fingers are clean."

  "That's gross."

  "Who's in charge of music?" Scarpetta asked.

  The three of them looked at each other as they ate, then Marino scooted back his chair. He got up and went to the CD player, red-checked napkin tucked into the front of his shirt. He put on Patsy Cline.

  3

  * * *

  The New Year began with a chasing out of the old and a reckoning of what was to come. For Lucy, this meant brunch on January 2. It was raw and barely snowing in Richmond. She had followed her Aunt Kay's advice and had invited friends to drop by. Scarpetta was still visiting her mother in Miami, and therefore was not present either to supervise or indulge in her niece's culinary talents.

  "Who wants eggs?" Lucy asked her visitors, all from various federal law enforcement agencies.

  "What kind?"

  "Chicken eggs," said Lucy.

  "Very funny."

  "Scrambled," Lucy told the truth.

  "Okay."

  "I thought you were making Bloody Marys," said an FBI agent whose fourth transfer had brought her to the Washington Field Office in our nation's capital, where it was not possible to catch up with crime.

  "What about bacon?" Lucy asked.

  She was in her aunt's kitchen, with all of its stainless steel appliances and overhead copper racks of Calphalon pots and pans. Lucy was busy snatch­ing eggs, bacon, milk, English muffins, and jars of V-8 juice out of the refrigerator. A fire was lit in the great room, and snow was scattered, small, crazed, and cold beneath a thick gray sky. It wasn't likely Lucy and her friends were going anywhere this day. Lucy was a bold and physical get-out-of-my-way kind of cook. Her recipes had never been written down and tended to change as she did.

  Lucy's Bloody Marys

  Start by getting out a large glass pitcher. Fill with as much V-8 juice as the crowd demands. Juice whole lemons and limes (this morning she used two of each and included the pulp), and add several tablespoons of the freshest horseradish you can find. Dash Worcestershire, hot pepper sauce, and fresh ground pepper to taste. Get out the salt if you want. But don't forget vodka. In a perfect world, Skyy, Ketel One, or Belvedere are Lucy's preferences. But Stolichnaya or Absolut are good, and frankly, with all this seasoning, you can use just about anything. Keep vodka and glasses in the freezer.

  Stir well and chill in the refrigerator. Lucy garnishes her drinks with a stalk of tender celery and two large green olives and a wedge of lemon skewered on a toothpick. She never uses ice because it dilutes, resulting in a weak, rather disgusting looking Bloody Mary. It is better not to drink too many of these before you fire up the grill and begin cooking.

  Lucy's Friendly Grill

  Mix eggs, milk, salt, and pepper, to taste. Whip until frothy. Heat up the grill. Scarpetta avoids propane gas, preferring charcoal for reasons of safety and flavor. Pour egg mixture into a simple cake pan lightly coated with oil or whatever serves the same purpose. Place the pan, strips of thick bacon, and English muffins on an upper rack of the grill. Cover with the lid to smoke. You will have to rearrange and turn the bacon fairly often, as the grease will drip and flame (adding to the flavor if you don't let matters get out of hand). Cook until obviously done. Remove and pat bacon free of grease. Serve immediately.

  After eating, clean up right away because later you won't feel like it. Keep the fire going, and perhaps the snow will begin to stick and neighborhood children will come out to play. You can watch them through the window and remember when you were that age and pray­ing there would be no school the next day. Hopefully, you have friends over, too. Tell them they can't go anywhere because of the weather. Talk all day. Share stories and dreams, and keep the cold away.

  Lucy's friends decided they were snowed in and it would be wise to stay over. It was a perfect night indeed for one of Scarpetta's soups. She keeps a good supply in her freezer, because it is her efficient tendency to cook great vats of soup at once. Lucy scanned freezer shelves of containers precisely labeled and properly sealed.

  "You guys hungry?" she called out to her buddies.

  Stretched out in the great room, made sleepy by the fire, they were in the midst of recounting embarrassing moments they had endured during their new agent days at their respective law enforcement academies.

  "Starved!"

  "Shit, you can't be.
You've been eating all day."

  "I have not."

  "Then where did all the Triscuits go? And the Vermont cheddar? And the peanuts?"

  "Anyway, like I was saying, here I was firing away on the range, cartridge cases flying everywhere, and one of them goes down the front of my shirt. And you know how hot they are."

  "Ouch!"

  "I started jumping around, trying to shake it out."

  "Not a good thing when you've got a loaded gun in your hand."

  "How 'bout something light with chicken?" Lucy called out.

  That was fine with everyone.

  Scarpetta's Wholesome Chicken Soup

  Drip several teaspoons of extra, extra virgin olive oil into a pot that is big enough to accommodate the volume of soup you wish to make. Scarpetta tends to use pots that hold at least sixteen quarts. Place skinless, boneless chicken breasts on a cutting board. Do not use wooden cutting boards because they are more difficult to clean and can harbor salmonella and its mutants. She prefers ceramic or hard plastic. Dice chick­en with a very sharp knife, keeping fingers well out of the way of the blade.

  Turn burner on medium. Drop chicken into the pot to brown. Next, dice the mildest onions you can find. She always uses .Vidalia onions when they are available, but she does not over­whelm this delicate soup with them. Other vegetables that usually go into this healthy dish include celery, carrots, fresh sliced mush­rooms, red bell peppers, and chopped fresh spinach. Next, pour in at least four cans of fat free chicken broth.

  Season with a generous number of bay leaves, and salt and pepper to taste. Allow to simmer for several hours, tasting now and then to fine-tune the seasoning. Scarpetta often adds a splash or two of sherry, and typically serves the soup in deep earthenware bowls.

  Homemade sourdough or multigrain bread is a nice companion to this meal.

  If you wish to make the soup heartier, you can add rice or risotto, or her favorite, conchiglie.

  She recommends a light-bodied white wine, unless, of course, her motivation for serving you soup is that your digestive system is irritable or you are recovering from a cold or the flu. Then alcohol is taboo because it compromises the immune system, lowering one's defenses rather much as it does in all other situations in life. Assuming wine is not unwise, her choices are Chablis or Pinot Grigio. If you are in the mood for a slightly fuller bodied wine, a dry Chardonnay such as Cakebread or Sonoma-Cutrer is a fine idea.

  4

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Scarpetta had meals of her own to prepare at her mother's Miami home. The weather there was considerably different from Richmond's on this second day of the New Year. The sun was warm enough to sit outside, and after falling asleep several times in a lawn chair near the dead key lime tree in the backyard, Scarpetta was infected by the guilt she always felt when dealing with her mother: The grass was so thick it almost did not give beneath Scarpetta's weight when she walked across it, heading inside.

  "Mother?" she called out.

  There was no answer, and Sinbad, who was both sinful and bad, tangled himself in Scarpetta's feet. The cat was a cross-eyed hybrid Siamese and knew Scarpetta did not like him and never had. Thus, Sinbad was overly attentive.

  "Please move."

  Scarpetta nudged the cat out of the way. He was purring loudly.

  "Mother?" she called out again. "Sinbad, now I mean it, goddamn it!"

  The kitchen counter was spotless, the sink empty of dishes, because of Scarpetta's guilt. She opened the refrigerator as the toilet flushed down the hall.

  "Mother? What do you want for dinner tonight? Sinbad, I'm warning you!"

  "Don't yell at the cat!" yelled Mrs. Scarpetta, who was very old and languishing in bad health, as she had been for years.

  "I'm going to the store, I guess," Scarpetta said to the empty hallway as water ran in the bathroom sink and a cabinet door slammed shut.

  "Get toilet paper," Mrs. Scarpetta yelled again.

  "What about Dorothy?"

  "What about her?"

  "Is she going to eat with us?" Scarpetta hoped the answer was no.

  The loud talk went on as her mother carried the conversation into her bedroom and Sinbad butted Scarpetta's leg.

  "I think she has a date," Mrs. Scarpetta replied, adding one more detail. "I told her to bring him by."

  Sinbad bit Scarpetta's left ankle. She did not kick him hard, but made her point. Scarpetta drove her mother's Toyota to the local Winn-Dixie, and at times like these she knew how easily she could pick up smoking again. In fact, she experienced unbearable lust as she passed racks of Marlboros, Salems, Dunhills. She would cook a bad mood meal.

  Scarpetta's Bad Mood Shopping

  This always involves pasta, because a requirement on such occasions is to prepare a dish that consumes Scarpetta's energy, emotions, and attention. She moved with purpose through the dairy section and bought a carton of large eggs, opening the top to make certain none were broken. One was, and she excavated until she had better luck, carefully setting the eggs inside her cart. She searched for a wedge of Parmesan cheese.

  She added a two-pound bag of all-purpose flour to her groceries, and next spent studious minutes in the produce section. Around her, people were speaking Spanish and Portuguese. Many were buying plantains, pineapples, papayas, limes, leeks, green chiles, and pimentos. Scarpetta was interested in garlic, broccoli, shallots, asparagus, carrots, basil, and zucchini. She could have added heavy cream to this dish, and meat, such as chicken or prosciutto, but a rich, high calorie supper would only have further darkened the gathering storm clouds inside her. Although she was not inclined to please her mother at this moment, she remembered the toilet paper. Last, she bought a six-pack of Buckler non-alcoholic beer, knowing full well that Scotch, Irish whiskey, or wine would make her depressed or curt.

  Most of the drive home was spent on West Flagler Street behind a red Plymouth Horizon with a license plate dangling by a twisted coat hanger. A side window was broken out and covered with a square of cardboard; the car was obviously stolen, as were so many in Miami. Scarpetta would have gotten far away from it had traffic permitted. A Mercedes with purple-tinted glass almost rear-ended her at the next traffic light, and a Porsche gunned past a Jeep, both drivers making obscene gestures at each other and screaming in foreign languages. The sun was directly in Scarpetta's eyes.

  Her mother's neighborhood was in the southwest part of the city, not far from Our Lady of Lourdes Academy, where Scarpetta had gone to school and impressed the nuns. She reached the house without incident and climbed out of the car. Since her heartfelt concern for the environment had prohibited her from selecting plastic bags when asked by the cashier, the paper bags rattled as she carried her purchases through the front door. Immediately, she noted that the burglar alarm was not set.

  "Mother!" she called out yet one more time this day. "You know to leave the alarm on STAY."

  "You worry too much," came the reply from the bedroom. "I was taking a nap. I wish you wouldn't nag."

  "Home invasions, burglaries, rapes. They don't just happen after dark."

  Scarpetta made her way past the old Baldwin upright piano which her mother hadn't played since the last time it had been tuned, whenever that might have been. A lamp was on, but didn't do much good because her mother usually kept the draperies closed, and a clock ticktocked loudly from the wall. The pale blue carpet was worn and darkened with stains from the decades, and porcelain figurines of courting couples and elegant ladies from lost eras were strategically placed. Nothing had changed much, really, since Scarpetta had been a child.

  Those years had been painful and scary, and the shadow of them always settled over her whenever she came home. Her father had lingered five years with leukemia before dying in the master bedroom down the hall, where her mother, this minute, was shoving coat hangers around in the closet. Scarpetta had learned to take flight into overachievement, for even making friends was hard when one was intelligent and sensitive and stunned by loss. Early
on, she had cooked, cleaned, and managed the family budget while her sister wrote self-absorbed poems and stories and became increasingly addicted to boys.

  Scarpetta set the bags on the counter by the sink and began removing her purchases. She washed vegetables and peeled and chopped, and an hour later Bach was playing on the classical station she always tuned in to whenever she was home, and a ball of three-egg pasta dough was peacefully resting beneath a bowl. A pot of water was ready on the stove, and a skillet glistening with olive oil awaited vegetables. She had begun to grate Parmesan cheese when her mother appeared and sat at the kitchen table before the window overlooking the backyard. Scarpetta had opened the curtains. It was getting dark out.

  "What have you been doing?" Scarpetta asked, as she briskly worked the hard cheese over the grater.

  "On the phone."

  Mrs. Scarpetta rattled the newspaper, scanning the obituaries and feeling apprehensive when she noted that someone else her age had died.

  "Gloria is ready to shoot Jose," Mrs. Scarpetta commented.

  "Again?"

  "I don't know why she puts up with him."

  "Oldest story in the world," said Scarpetta, as she checked on the dough. "It's called dysfunction."

  "You should know."

  Mrs. Scarpetta turned to the editorial page, shaking the section as if it had misbehaved.

  "I never understand these cartoons. Do you, Katie? The political ones. Who is this, anyway? Some communist, I guess, riding a missile like a cowboy."

  Scarpetta was hurt by the reference to the romantic choices she had made in life, but she kept her feelings to herself. It was true she had not picked well when she had married Tony. She had been out to wound herself when she had fallen in love with Mark, and then fallen in love with him again many years later after she was divorced and he was a widower. Benton Wesley had broken her heart, and she had learned that nothing is ever right when a relationship begins as an affair. Although his wife eventually left him for reasons that had nothing to do with Scarpetta or him, the knowledge of what she and Benton had done had been a stain, a cracked window pane, something forever broken in the life they eventually built together. Now, he was gone, too.