An Onion in My Pocket

by Deborah Madison

  We opened the door and this time stepped into a silent, chilly foyer. No one was in sight, but we could hear the clanking of pots and pans, doors opening and closing, the bangs and thuds that were all familiar kitchen sounds. I gently pushed open the kitchen door, and there stood the cook.

  “Hello!” I called to her. “Would it be possible to have lunch?”

  “Oh no, dearies,” the cook replied. “I haven’t any soup!”

  While soup would have been as welcome as a hot bath, its lack hardly mattered to us. It was possible that the cook mentioned the soup to discourage our stay, but then she graciously agreed to feed us after all.

  “You’ll have to wait a bit, though, if that’s all right,” she warned as she led us to a small parlor.

  Waiting was fine now that we knew lunch was coming. We sat on wooden chairs, fed coins to the heater, and sipped from a flask of whiskey (now those flasks made sense!) until the cook reappeared, opened the doors of the dining room, and invited us to enter.

  The dining room was a comfortable space, neither too big nor too small. We sat near the windows and looked around. The pale yellow walls were entirely covered with large blue and white china platters. The tables and chairs were simple and wooden, worn perhaps, but not shabby. There was a fireplace, but no fire was burning. Though it was cold and empty just then, it was easy to imagine this room filled with people, the warm babble of conversation, the snap of the fire. But lacking that, we gazed outside at the remains of the summer’s garden. Most of the leaves were withered and brown. Orb spiders had joined various branches and stalks of plants together with their gossamer threads, now decorated with baubles of mist. At first glance it didn’t seem that there were many prospects for food in this garden, but as we continued to look we gradually detected cabbages, their heads protected from frost by their ample leaves, some hardy Brussels sprouts, a row of potatoes that was just partially dug, and some tall leeks, their blue-green flags somewhat wilted with cold. Beyond the garden a ways was a small lake and behind the lake, mountains, whose flanks were covered with a plaid of dark pine squares edged with golden larch.

  At last the dining room doors swung open and the cook walked in, nestling one of those big platters in her sturdy arms. She smiled, set it down in front of us, then apologized once again for the lack of soup, and retreated. On the platter were two fish from the lake perched on a soft bed of mashed potatoes, cabbage, and leeks, surrounded with a necklace of Brussels sprouts. Our lunch was the mirror image of our view. Given its innate goodness and startling simplicity, seasoned so well with our hunger and the kindness of strangers, this meal tasted better than any I could recall eating. Its close relationship to the garden and the lake established for me what became the template of the good meal that has lasted my entire life: eating food in its place and its season. It is simple, but hard to find. This rare meal gave me my one true constant, my north star.

  The year was 1976, the day before Jimmy Carter was elected president and decades before words like “local” and “seasonal” were used in connection with food.

  LOUD BANANAS

  My father’s father worked for United Fruit Company—I know, that is not at all cool—and when he came to visit he brought us bananas and a little red record of the Chiquita banana song, which I can still sing. My grandfather’s job was to make people aware of bananas so that they would start buying them. I couldn’t imagine that was a problem. From eating the bananas he brought us, I concluded that a banana was like nothing else we knew: You could practically unzip that skin. A question like “Would you pick up some bananas?” probably didn’t exist yet, and having bananas in our house as a matter of course was inconceivable, let alone having enough of them to make banana bread. You had to be rich to do that. Today at my local market there are entire bags of bananas selling for a dollar because they’ve gotten spotty and need to be used within a few days.

  Bananas were exotic, but people were starting to buy them. I knew this because for one blissful week when I was about six, I got to go to a free Mormon day camp in Ithaca. We kids would arrive in the morning and put our lunch sacks in a wooden shed until lunchtime. The shed got so hot that for a few hours all those smells issuing forth from the white bread and baloney sandwiches, the mayonnaise, the peanut butter and grape jelly, and the bananas became richly entwined and aromatic. “Loud” is how my Southern husband would say it. When you walked into that shed to get your lunch, there was this huge banana-dominated smell, and it left a big impression on me. It wasn’t disgust or revulsion; it was the smell of plenty. It was wonderful and promising, hinting at things to come, though what, I had no idea. Just the smell of that food was exciting. It smelled, somehow, right.

  THE MEAL JANE MADE FOR ME

  It was a hard year, the year I wrote The Greens Cookbook. Newly divorced and feeling raw, I really wanted to go to bed and get up when it was over, when the pain was gone, in a year or however long it would take. That’s when Nancy Wilson Ross’s words about being game came into play for me. I did get up, I took off my lead suit, got dressed in something lighter, and got to work. But I never really enjoyed the recipes I was working on, partly because I had no appetite. Fortunately I did have a hungry roommate and a neighbor with small children so there was a place for the food to go once it was cooked and tasted and notes made.

  I was terrified of the upcoming book tour. I couldn’t imagine how it would work. The chef Ken Hom invited me to dinner and gave me lots of advice while he cooked Shrimp Billy Crystal. (Who was Billy Crystal? I wondered but didn’t dare ask.) Other chefs pitched in with helpful words and horror stories about the traps one could fall into. Soon I would have my own stories to tell, but then I was just wide-eyed and full of dread.

  The poet Jane Hirshfield, who had been my main assistant for dinner at Greens, gave a dinner party for me. That much-needed reassuring gesture was already a generous thing for her to do. But what made it even more special was that everything she cooked came from the new book. Of course I had tested all these recipes and eaten them many times, but after laboring over a dish for an hour or two, plus not having any appetite, it didn’t have the same impact that it did if I had just come onto it. This I remembered from Greens—that was why it was important to sit down and eat in the dining room on occasion. So when I sat down to Jane’s dinner and took a bite of the first course, a surprise awaited me: My appetite suddenly returned. There was a reassuring familiarity about the dishes. I knew this food and I liked it. When I told Jane how wonderful every dish tasted, she laughed and said, “They should be good; they’re your recipes.”

  “Are you sure?” I couldn’t believe this was true. “Are they really from the book? You didn’t change them?”

  And Jane assured me that everything was from the book and that she hadn’t changed a thing. Having cooked with Jane, I believed her. She wasn’t the type to improvise; Jane loved the form of the recipe and was exceptionally faithful to it. But I was still taken aback. I never could have experienced my recipes this way, with such a fresh palate, without someone else cooking them for me just as Jane had.

  I ate with gusto for the first time in months. The gloom of the last year lifted, and even if I had never been on TV before, or on the radio or done any of that which I was about to do, maybe I could give it a try after all. The food was good. It worked better than I had imagined and I felt a first small glimmer of confidence. This meal was the most extraordinary gift, for it nourished hope and confidence.

  HOT ROLLS AND COFFEE

  There was so much to do just to get the farm at Green Gulch going that for a while there was a special morning work period right after zazen and service. This was when it was just getting light out and the fog was dripping like rain from the trees onto the roof of the zendo. The zendo had originally been a barn and there were still a few horse stalls in front, which had been converted into student housing. I lived in one of the horse st
alls. Later, when Greens began, Dan and I lived in an old bull pen, made into a charming but fairly dysfunctional Japanese-style cabin. This was also at Green Gulch.

  Once we changed into work clothes, we gathered in the meeting area where the kitchen crew had set out trays of Vienna rolls, just pulled from the oven, plates of cheese, bowls of jam, and big pots of strong coffee. These soft, white rolls had crisp, golden crusts with poppy seeds glued to their tops with a wash of beaten egg. As I pulled one apart, a fragrant yeasty steam rose to my face and the heat of the rolls warmed my cold hands. This was the most delicious food I could imagine. Butter melting or a slab of cheese softening into the warm bread, a spoonful of jam bringing its sweet flavor forward to be followed by the bitter taste of strong coffee, conspired to make this predawn meal one I recall with acute affection. As much as I didn’t enjoy being cold and hunched over planting potatoes in the mist for the next two hours, I always remembered that moment when I walked from my little horse-stall room into the drafty meeting area of the barn, where I met up with those warm rolls and coffee.

  Somehow, that made it all worthwhile. I, for one, was easily bought off.

  Once Greens opened, though, there was a gardening crew to do all this and I never had that experience again.

  THE SMELL OF THE SEASON: A PLUM IN JANUARY

  My first summer jobs were all vaguely food related. I worked at Hunt’s cannery in the chemistry lab assaying samples of tomatoes as they rolled in from the California fields. The next year I worked in the enology department at UC Davis. Another summer I was in poultry, and finally I was in a food science lab where the colors and flavors of ice cream were mismatched and given out to students to taste and assess. The students had to write down what they thought they were tasting so that the scientist could see whether color and flavor enjoyed a tight relationship—or not. I spent that summer snacking on tiny cups of pink banana and yellow blueberry ice creams.

  Years later, when I was working at Chez Panisse, Alice came into the kitchen, told me to close my eyes, then thrust something under my nose to smell. “What is it?” she demanded.

  The object in question was a ripe plum that someone had brought her from Chile.

  It was a cold January day and the damp air, as well as the smell of wet wool coats stashed in the wine room mingling with the braising meats and simmering stocks, made the summery perfume of a plum inconceivable and ultimately unrecognizable. It was all wool and winter in that kitchen and I couldn’t sift the fruit’s scent from the rest of the smells.

  A plum? Of course! I could see that once I opened my eyes. So yes, it turned out that the habitual arrangements of color and flavor—sight, taste, and smell—were essential for something to be recognized as seasonal.

  BIRTHDAY CAKES

  My grandmother always made the same cake for family birthdays, a white cake flavored with mace and served on a plate touched with gold and swaths of pink blowsy flowers. In my mother’s house, however, none of our birthday cakes were the same. I don’t even know if each of us four kids had a favorite. Probably we yearned to have something that was store-bought. Even a cake made from a mix would have been terrific.

  On my fifteenth birthday, my mother made a cake from scratch, most likely the standard cake we always had from Joy of Cooking. Our oven tilted a bit so the cakes were higher on one side than the other. For this three-layered birthday creation the layers had been stacked so that the cake was maximally cockeyed, fat bits against fat. The too-wet frosting failed to cement the layers together well enough to overcome their tendency to go with gravity into a slide. To stabilize the cake my mother secured the layers with some metal shashlik skewers. Then, to make them festive, she tied ribbons through the skewers’ ornate handles, after first paving the surface of the cake with bright pink icing and covering it with sprinkles. Candles were added, of course.

  It was pretty and festive looking, but when the candles were lit and the cake was presented I became a mortified fifteen-year-old. I so much wanted a cake that wasn’t homemade, wasn’t crooked and shored up with skewers and festooned with ribbons. I was not particularly sensitive to my mother’s efforts at that time, nor was I grateful for them. I am now. But little appreciation came into play at that age when social pressures, real or imagined, were strong. The ribbons could catch fire. The layers were crazy. The cake was simply wrong.

  Years later I was traveling in southern Mexico with two friends. We stopped for gas on a dust road. Next to the pumps was a little café, and there, on the counter, was a cake that looked very much like the one that had embarrassed me so many years earlier, minus the skewers and ribbons. It wasn’t as crooked, but it did have a bit of a tilt and it also had pink icing and sprinkles. I paid for a piece. A woman placed a slice on a plate and handed it to me. The layers were joined with more pink frosting, and I saw that the crumb was not particularly fine. Clearly it had been made with regular flour, not cake flour, an ingredient my mother didn’t have, either. It was homemade. I took a bite and it swept me back to that birthday. It was my mother’s cake. I brought pieces out to my friends and we stood on a road in Mexico eating cake that was the taste of home and my childhood. It felt like my birthday that day, and it was good. And finally, I deeply appreciated my mother and her crazy, festive cake.

  Although I was embarrassed at the time by my mother’s cake and all its imperfections, I can’t claim to always turn out a perfect cake myself. On turning sixty and in want of some cheering up from my friends, I planned a festive afternoon, a cake and champagne party. I imagined the table covered with different cakes, all of them favorites and most of them layer cakes because I adore layer cakes. Of course I assumed that, just as my mother had, I would bake them myself. It was summer and we were in the midst of a heat wave. Patrick and I were also recovering from a long flight home from Greece two days earlier that had left us jet-lagged and confused. Against Patrick’s doubts and cautions, I was determined to make my own birthday cakes.

  Every one of them failed. Each cake had something wrong with it. Something big. The butter cakes fell—not uncommon at high altitudes but then I should have known how to correct for that. I had been a pastry chef, after all. My olive oil cake remained stuck to its pan and wouldn’t come out regardless of how patiently I teased it. A big chocolate cake broke in two because I didn’t let it cool long enough before moving it from pan to platter. Nothing was salvageable unless pieces were to be cemented together with whipped cream, and somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Instead, everything went to the compost—all that organic butter, all those expensive eggs, the good chocolate. Food for the worms and the raccoons, if they’d have it.

  Fortunately, Patrick, uncannily able to anticipate these very results, had ordered a cake from a bakery, an iced cake with my name on it and clusters of flowers sculpted in butter cream. It arrived with a friend and it was perfect. It was pretty, it was sweet, and it was good to eat. Even in the heat, it didn’t melt, or slip, or slide, and everyone enjoyed it, especially me.

  SLITHERY OKRA FOR BREAKFAST

  When Patrick and I first got together, I ended a book tour in Arkansas so that I could spend some time with him. He met me at the airport with a pizza in his van in case I was hungry. It smelled so enticing, and I admitted to Patrick that it was my first “take-out” pizza, and that’s in quotes, because it came from a family’s small pie shop and not a chain. This gesture showed me a caring man and I much appreciated it.

  The morning I was to leave I woke up to a very different smell: Patrick was frying okra. It was slithery, and greasy, and I can’t say I loved it, but the way I saw it was that he was sharing some of his food culture with me, and that I appreciated as much as the (very good) pizza.

  ERNIE’S LUNCH

  When I moved to Flagstaff I had a few goals. One was to start life afresh, to be out of the Bay Area and away from everything that kept defining me as I had been known, main
ly as a Zen student and the chef of Greens. Another goal was to learn a sport, so I bought a mountain bike and took up that perilous form of riding. A third was to learn to barrel race and my mentor was Ernie Macy, a former cowboy then in his eighties who dreamed of moving to Colorado, “where the water was.” He had two quarter horse stallions, Pride and Cochise, and we rode them in the cinder fields that spread out east of Flagstaff. I always carried a canteen on our rides, and Ernie always looked at it, then stared into space and drawled, “Water just makes you thirsty.” I can only imagine what he would make of our hydration-obsessed culture today.

  One day Ernie invited me to lunch. It was summer, I wasn’t at all hungry, and I had company coming that evening to cook for. I didn’t really want to go, but it was a kind gesture and without thinking much about it, I accepted the invitation. The menu consisted of a large steak from Smith’s fried in salad oil, two foods I would never buy or eat on my own. There was also sliced zucchini cooked for about forty minutes in an entire stick of margarine, another food I didn’t eat. The margarine, that is. Surprisingly, it was a delicious meal. That soggy, overcooked zucchini really tasted like squash, and though I wasn’t much of a steak eater, the steak was good, too. Really good. I recall nothing else about the menu, but I have a sweet memory of Ernie cooking at his little stove in two cast-iron skillets and his big smile when I said, “This is so good!” and meant it.