by Cathy Erway
I left work at six and got home, as usual, about fifteen minutes before Ben. As I dumped my things on the dining table, I looked around the apartment once more. Yesterday, when I’d first arrived home from my trip, I did notice a few changes around the apartment. No major rearrangements of furniture, just little touches: A neat stack of magazines was placed on the coffee table with the TV remotes placed on top just so. A rug had been turned ninety degrees to make the room appear longer. My empty flower vases were nowhere to be seen.
But none of this could have prepared me for the topic of conversation that began a few moments after Ben walked in. He seemed stressed, nervous, and uncomfortable. He began by restating that some things “had changed.” I waited for more.
“Don’t you think so, too?” he pried.
“What things? I have no idea what things you’re talking about.”
He went on. It was a lot of little things, not any one big thing. But for him, at least, they were enough to make him decide that he wanted a major change. After three hours of back-and-forth debate, frustration, and utter confusion, at least three things were clear. One, Ben and I were breaking up. Two, he would take the apartment for the rest of the lease while I found someplace else to live. Three, I was no longer going to Richard and Sam’s wedding in Mexico next month, and Ben would eat the cost of my plane ticket.
The next night I went to see Erin sing with her band at a small bar, and all my friends were there. I think they were just as blind-sided by the breakup as I was, which felt somewhat comforting. Erin had just stared for what seemed like a full minute after I told her the news.
“But why?” she finally demanded to know.
There was little I could tell her. Immediately, my gut had told me that Ben’s decision had something to do with a certain coworker whom he’d been spending a lot of time with lately. But he had hotly denied this, and my accusations got us absolutely nowhere over the course of the fight. I put this suspicion aside and didn’t offer it to my friends at Erin’s show. Just as soon as their initial shock had worn off, they were quick to jump to my ego-boosting aid. I’d be better off now, they assured me. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I believed this was true, too.
That week, as I began hunting for a new place to live, Ben avoided being in the apartment as much as possible, staying with friends on most nights. All of a sudden, I was cooking weeknight meals for just one.
My mom and Jo-Jo had planned to come over for dinner that weekend after my trip, to see my photos, claim their souvenirs, and enjoy a homemade Moroccan dinner. It was also going to be a late birthday celebration for Jo-Jo. But the day after my return from vacation, Gong-Gong was taken to the hospital with a case of pneumonia. He was moved to intensive care the next morning. My mother called me that day to tell me the news. The doctor didn’t want to keep our hopes up. He was doubtful my grandfather would live much longer than a few days, in his fragile state. My mom spent the next day in his hospital room along with Jo-Jo. Later that night, with Jo-Jo beside his bed, he passed away He was eighty-two years old, and my last living grandparent.
We decided to still do dinner at my apartment that Sunday. Gong-Gong’s funeral wouldn’t take place until a few months later, when his ashes would be placed to rest in a temple. For the time being, they would be held in the crematory, and to pay respect to the dead, my uncle was observing a Buddhist tradition of abstaining from meat for eighty days. He encouraged me to go ahead and cook anything I wanted on Sunday, and he would just eat whatever vegetables were there. But I decided to prepare an all-vegetarian feast. Fortunately, this wouldn’t be too difficult with Moroccan cuisine.
I planned to make the taktouka again, this time with better bread, a spicy braised eggplant dish, and a savory vegetable couscous. Our Marrakesh cooking-class instructor, Mohammed, had begun his lecture by explaining that couscous was Morocco’s national dish and its importance could not be understated. Classic vegetable couscous was a focal point of the Moroccan table, from wedding banquets and holidays to everyday meals, and a proper feast wasn’t complete without it. Since it took so long to prepare, Mohammed recited only a recipe for seven-vegetable couscous during class, which we jotted on notepads.
As he described the painstaking process of gently massaging the grains by hand, setting them out on a wide, flat surface, then kneading them again to give them the proper texture and firmness, I could hardly believe what I was writing down. Wasn’t couscous just supposed to be drenched with hot water and left to sit for five minutes until done? This sounded like an obscene amount of prep work, and for what payoff, I didn’t know.
I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about over couscous then, and Jordan and I certainly didn’t get it when we were served a bland, dry couscous on our first day in Marrakesh. The British and Australians in our cooking class didn’t seem to understand, either, and one of them commented on how the vegetables in couscous he had seen were so overcooked as to look “sad.” But at a rooftop restaurant during a stop in the mountains, I decided to give the dish another try and noticed a distinctly satisfying lightness to the flavors in it that time. Then, after cooking my own vegetable couscous at home following Mohammed’s directions, I think I finally got it.
Couscous was not something to be tucked away underneath chicken or a lamb chop, or swept to the side of the plate in a measly portion. It was in itself the main attraction in Moroccan meals, when cooked with the right care. Mohammed’s recipe began by searing a bit of shoulder meat (preferably lamb) with bones in a large pot, for flavor. To that he added a sliced onion and spoonfuls of spices, followed with a chopped tomato. After twenty minutes of cooking, the pot was filled with cold water, large chunks of turnip, parsnip, and carrots, and a bunch of fresh cilantro and other herbs as desired.
In the meantime, the couscous was sprinkled with just a tiny bit of water and oil, gently mixed by hand, and spread flat on a plate to dry. Next, one had to break up the clumps by hand thoroughly, then transfer the little grains to a steamer rack placed on top of the pot. The idea is that the grains, held together by moisture to prevent them from slipping through the steamer rack’s holes, would absorb the soup’s flavors as it steamed above it. I didn’t have a steamer and substituted a metal colander that fit nicely on top of my biggest pot. And even though I was worried because the holes in it were quite large, true to Mohammed’s instructions, the couscous didn’t fall through much at all. By the time the couscous was fully cooked half an hour later, my entire apartment smelled of the most wonderful broth in the world.
That leftover broth turned out to be my mother and Jo-Jo’s favorite part of the meal. Because of Jo-Jo’s fast, I skipped the addition of lamb shoulder for flavor in the recipe. Still, those turnips and root vegetables had simmered for a deeply savory, soothing stock with a rich golden hue and almost floral subtleties in flavor. Steamed with this stock, the couscous fell to the plate in moist, yet separate grains and had a delicate firmness of texture. Mimicking what I’d seen done in Morocco, I’d piled the couscous in a great, pointed dome and arranged the cooked vegetables around it like campfire logs. I poured a ladle of hot broth over the heaped dish, and then it was ready to serve.
After polishing off this course, along with the roasted-pepper dip, eggplant, and half a loaf of homemade bread, we sat around the small kitchen table in my apartment with the scraped dishes. My mom and uncle helped themselves to seconds and thirds of the vegetable broth and held their soup bowls close like cups of tea as we continued to talk. Ben had made a point of staying out of the apartment that evening, and I’d told them that he was merely out with friends.
Looking down at his bowl of soup, focused in thought, my uncle uttered his first words about Gong-Gong’s death. He had been in the hospital room with him when the nurses told Jo-Jo it was almost time. Gong-Gong’s heart reading had dropped to its faintest, most infrequent beat. My uncle had gotten down on his knees to pray to Buddha.
He looked up again, but not directly at either of us. “I think it was good. It
was a good ending,” he said.
Throughout that night, I never brought up the fact that Ben and I were splitting up and that I was looking for a new living arrangement. I didn’t think it would have been appropriate. That night was Jo-Jo’s. But the next day, on the phone, I told my mother the news of our breakup.
“I knew it,” she said.
How, I still don’t know.
“I just knew,” she repeated.
I had another cooking commitment to attend to that week. Just before leaving for Morocco, I’d gotten a heads up from the editor of one of my favorite food websites, Mark Douglas from “Culinate.” He’d asked me to participate in a food-blogging contest they were holding, focused on chocolaty recipes. The prize for this contest was a trip for two to the annual Death by Chocolate food festival at the COPIA: The American Center for Food and the Arts in Napa. To compete, any food blogger just had to come up with a recipe that appropriately fit the theme, “Death by Chocolate,” and write a post on it. I’d promised I wouldn’t disappoint.
I initially thought I’d be inspired by Morocco and have a chocolate dish ready to concoct once I got back, perhaps with unique spice combinations. As I mulled over this and other possibilities, I searched the website, rereading the entry rules. A graphic on the contest page read in bright pink, “Treat your sweetie! Win a trip for two.”
Clearly, I was in no place to treat any sweetie. Maybe I’d just sit this one out, I thought. But I did like the idea of eating spoonful after spoonful of something chocolaty until I hurled. Did it matter what?
It suddenly came to me. Pain au chocolat.
In French, this would mean “chocolate bread” or “bread with chocolate,” and pain au chocolate is a buttery, croissantlike pastry filled with chocolate. Maybe I’d make something involving bread and chocolate, I began thinking. And then call it “pain with chocolate”—and that’s the English, not the French kind of “pain.”
Of course, this dessert wouldn’t be as straightforward as a chocolate croissant. What, then, should I make? Chocolate bread pudding? Too boring, I concluded. Some kind of chocolate-topped bread crostini? Not impressive enough.
A chocolate trifle, I finally decided, with tiers of deep, dark chocolate pudding and torn white bread pieces instead of the traditional sponge-cake bits and vanilla pudding. Then, how about tossing in some more chocolate bits, in chunks throughout? And just as the classic trifle takes a drizzle of brandy or sweet liqueur, this one would have chocolate liqueur to meld it all together. A classic English trifle with a twist: pain instead of cake. And chocolate instead of fruit.
I baked a loaf of white, basic no-knead bread before getting the plan under way. Next, I whisked together a batch of dark chocolate pudding. I purchased some chocolate liqueur to drizzle in between the layers, and some rich dark chocolate to chop up and also shave as a topping for the finished dessert. Finally, I’d need a traditional glass, footed trifle bowl to serve and photograph the dessert in. I called up Sean and asked whether I could borrow his trifle bowl.
“Sure,” he replied.
I took pains to photograph the cooking process and to shoot the final, ceremonious heap in the trifle bowl. Within the recipe’s post, I described making the dish in all its painful glory, peppering the entry with deliciously morbid insights on breakups and the gloom of Valentine’s Day for the singleton.
While the judges took a day or two to read the entries, I had a good look at all of them myself. I found myself drooling over the chocolaty recipes and photos on the other blogs, some of which looked very professionally made. But something told me that my post had a little more meat on its bones than the other ones, a bit more story, even if it was decidedly unromantic.
Mark Douglas wrote to all the finalists to tell us that a winner would soon be contacted by phone. That same day, I had just submitted an application for a one-bedroom apartment I was hoping would soon be all mine. It was February, and even though the last few days had been freezing, after work I decided to get off at a subway stop a little farther than usual from my home to enjoy a long walk through the brownstone-lined streets. It would be one of my last walks through Fort Greene while I could still call it my home. The apartment I had applied for was a ways east in Brooklyn, in Crown Heights.
As I walked, my cell phone rang. It was Mark Douglas.
“So, you know you won?” he said.
“No way!” I yelled. I felt like dancing in the street.
I’d need to book the plane tickets first, he instructed, as flights were beginning to fill up. I would be receiving all the details about the hotel and rental car that came with the prize trip from COPIA soon. Mark would also be attending the chocolate festival that weekend and hoped to round up a small group for dinner on the last night.
“I’m real curious to see who you’ll bring along as a date,” he chided, right before we got off the phone.
I’d laughed along, pretending that my plus-one was up for contention. But really, I knew all along whom to bring.
“Mom, we’re going to Napa,” I said a little later over the phone.
“What?” she shrieked.
“Pack your bags. It’s next weekend.”
A week and a half later, we were driving from Napa Valley to San Francisco in a rental car. Our day had begun early, with a delayed flight due to snow in New York. We landed in California with just enough time to make it to a guided tour of Bay Area chocolatier Charles Chocolates, first up on our chocolate-filled agenda. Chuck Siegel, founder of Charles Chocolates, walked us through the facilities, handing out choice bits and even letting us dip gloved fingers into slowly churning tanks of fudge. It was all very Willy Wonka-esque, but by the chocolate factory tour’s end, what my mom and I could really have used was some lunch. So we decided to take a detour and spend the rest of the day and night in San Francisco.
Shortly after my parents married, they had lived in San Francisco for several years. There my father completed law school, and my mother worked odd jobs while acclimating herself to her new country of citizenship. My parents had met in Taiwan; my dad had gone to work for an import-export company in Taipei, as a bilingual associate (he spoke Mandarin and held an Asian studies degree) who would act as a sort of Western culture go-to person for the company. One of the first colleagues he met at the office was my mother. My mom had never dreamed of living in America, or anywhere else, really, before she’d met my dad. But a couple of years later, she was married, an American citizen, and living in San Francisco.
I’d been to San Francisco only once before, so my mom was eager to show me around the city she remembered so fondly. We went to Chinatown first and walked into the first Cantonese noodle shop we saw. It was only a couple of weeks since my Morocco trip, and stepping inside a restaurant again felt funny and frivolous. I wasn’t used to sitting before a steaming bowl of wonton soup anymore, at least in the States, but once it was brought to our table, the vapors flooding my nostrils with the scent of stock, a rush of familiarity swept over me.
The month had been a wacky one in more ways than just a deviation from my usual eating habits. Just the night before our flight, I’d picked up the keys for my new one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights and moved out of my old one for good. I’d hired movers, who dropped all my furniture into the new living room, and I left the boxes in the middle of the living room floor. I was a single girl now, with my own apartment.
The soup and congee that we’d ordered was comforting and fueled us for a lengthy walk around the city. I didn’t realize how much I missed the run-of-the-mill Cantonese noodle shop. It wasn’t just the food that mattered—it was everything: the roasted ducks and chickens hanging in the window, the butcher skillfully hacking into them on a block just behind the panes. The sound of other customers slurping loudly at the next table. The way our orders came rushing to our table about one and a half minutes after we’d placed them.
Afterward, we took a trolley downtown and shopped for a while, my mom pointing out familiar buildin
gs and streets from her past. I’d made reservations for dinner that night at a restaurant that an old friend of mine from college co-owned with his brothers. It was located in the avenues, outside downtown, and its specialty was Japanese-Korean fusion. After dusk, we headed back to Chinatown by foot to retrieve our parked rental car.
“I used to walk up this street to our apartment every day,” my mom recalled as we hiked up a steep cliff of a street. I was huffing and puffing after two blocks’ worth.
“Really?” I was surprised. New Yorkers did a lot of walking, but they had no hills like these to deal with. Despite its steepness, the street was busy with locals, tourists, cars, and trolleys, heading both up and down.
“Oh, yes.” My mom nodded proudly. “And I would sometimes carry groceries or my laundry right up this hill. I was your age then,” she added after a pause. “Twenty-six.”
Now, I thought I was pretty fit for chugging groceries around on my bike back in Brooklyn. But I could never imagine taking them up this hill. Or just climbing it, all the time, with or without a heavy load. I remembered that my mom also couldn’t speak English very well back then. I suddenly felt very small, walking beside her.
The dinner at my friend’s new restaurant, Namu, was much more impressive than anything I could have imagined a Japanese-Korean fusion to be. Plus, my friend spoiled us with extra sides, drinks, and specials. We had black cod ceviche served in fried wonton cups, grilled okra with shiso aioli, bourbon and Korean chili-spiced baby back ribs, and cups of sweet sake. It was a unique culinary experience. The best part of all was being treated like family, despite it being a busy night at the restaurant. I felt a little guilty about my not-eating-out habit. What if a friend were to open a restaurant in New York, and because of my wack principles, I wouldn’t support him or her by dining there? That wouldn’t be very nice, I considered. I was glad the dilemma hadn’t happened yet.