The Art of Eating In

by Cathy Erway

  Finally, an empty taxi stopped in front of me. I waved good-bye, thanked him again for the pizza, and got in. It was my first slice of New York pizza in more than a year. I was still working on the cheese when I noticed that Matt had called and texted a few times to see whether I was okay. I returned his messages while slurping my sloppy slice. The next morning, I found that my cell phone and purse had orange goo all over them. And I had a disgusting taste of pizza and pink booze in my mouth. Never again, I vowed.

  Less than one week before our supper club was scheduled, panic broke loose. Jordan, who had decided to wait until the week before to invite her coworker, in order to make it seem more “casual,” discovered from another coworker that he was gay.

  “I got nothin’. Or no one, as it were,” she wrote to the core supper club members (signed, “Fifi”). A few minutes later, I received an e-mail from Karol.

  “Why don’t you send a casual invitation about the newly formed supper club to a bunch of male acquaintances of yours? Hopefully ones who Jordan might like,” she wrote, reading my mind exactly. I realized that, of anyone else in the group, I would be best suited to this task since the dinner was at my home and everyone knew how nuts I was about food. But I didn’t feel up to playing match-maker again; before Karol had gotten George to come, I tried to invite someone I thought she might like to dinner, as her secret SOS date. It was Adam from Ted and Amy’s supper club. But I couldn’t fathom inviting just Adam without also inviting Kara; it would seem rude. So I ended up inviting them both, and settled in to see what would happen. As it turned out, Adam already had plans, but Kara was eager to come. Of course, we were all happy to have Kara at our dinner, and one extra guest couldn’t hurt. At the very least, it might make the game more interesting. But I was wary of things backfiring now. Plus, with all the recipe planning, food purchasing, and preparation to take care of, I was beginning to feel frazzled and overextended.

  But I gave in. I wrote to about a dozen male friends of mine who I had a vague notion might be single. The first one who replied was Thaddeus. It was settled; he would be Jordan’s “date.”

  I suddenly realized how brave all those people who held supper clubs, like Kara and the Whisk and Ladle residents, were. Who knew what types of people might come through their door, and into their very homes? What if they were lunatics?

  The next day, Tuesday, I got an e-mail from Matt. Earlier, he had reported that Lauren had agreed to come to SOS, but since a friend of hers was in town from France, she’d have to bring him along, too. The four of us were just fine with this—a mystery man, why not? And from France, no less! Plus, it would even out the girl-to-guy ratio and bring our group of diners to ten.

  Matt’s message began, “NOOOOOOOOO! p.s. I told you she liked you better than me” (signed, “Dash Probington”).

  I scrolled down to see the forwarded e-mail below. In a previous message, Matt had offered to cover Lauren’s $35 dinner price, and she’d followed by saying, “Oh, that’s really sweet but I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly accept it. Plus, my girlfriend would be really jealous if she found that a nice man such as yourself were treating me to dinner.”

  I cackled aloud. Perfect—Lauren was not only in a relationship, but also a lesbian. We really should have considered things like sexual orientation before starting our date seeking. I forwarded the message on to Karol and Jordan and giggled to myself the rest of the day.

  The Saturday of the dinner, I spent the entire day cooking. I’d already braised the beef cheeks for six hours the night before and done some other prep work, too. I’d gotten the beef cheeks from a small butcher in the West Village, one of the only places that had them through special preorder. The cheeks were enormous in size, big juicy slabs of tough, red meat. I was shocked at first, not quite sure what to do with them. But I went with the normal route of braising stew meat, and cut them into larger-than-normal chunks. I patted them with a little flour and salt and pepper, and browned them in my Dutch oven. Then, once I had added red wine, a couple of carrots, onions, and celery, I brought the pot to a boil and stuck it inside the oven, covered, to braise the rest of the night.

  The lobster was a lot trickier to cook. I picked up two live lobsters that morning from a seafood market in Chinatown. It felt ludicrous to tote live lobsters in a double-wrapped plastic bag on the subway home. I’d cooked live lobsters and other crustaceans before, on family vacations by the shore. I wasn’t looking forward to killing the things myself, of course. But, I figured, this was the reality of cooking and eating animals, and somebody had to end their lives at some point. That whole week I’d scrounged the Internet for tips on the most humane way to kill lobsters. I found a lot of theories, and the one I most consistently saw (aside from slicing the head in half deftly with a sharp knife) was to stick the lobsters in the freezer for fifteen minutes before boiling them. This would put the animal into a state of “shock” and was thought to sort of anesthetize the creature before the otherwise agonizing boil. This seemed simple enough to me. Keeping the lobsters in all their baggage, I stuffed them into my freezer the moment I got home and slammed its door shut.

  Really, no one knows what the least painful death for lobsters is, except for lobsters. Studies have shown it’s impossible to determine, or we just don’t have advanced enough science to figure out what goes through the lobster’s limited brain. There are some who say that they might not even be capable of feeling pain at all. All we know, and all that the theories are based on, is intuition—from chefs, fishmongers, years of tradition, and experience with the animals. It’s true that chefs have a special connection with animals they must kill before cooking. There’s an intimate knowledge of the animal’s reactions, and almost every chef seems to consider the comfort level of the animal when he or she puts it down.

  I filled my largest stockpot with water and brought it to a boil. Fifteen minutes after they had been in the freezer, I took the lobsters out. Now, you have probably gathered by now that I’m not really a girly-girl about such things. But when I held the first lobster above the water with tongs (true to the advice I’d read, it had been extremely sluggish, almost to immobility) and saw it react by flinching its whiskers the moment its dangling claws touched the surface, I, for one, felt a sharp pain. I pushed the bugger underneath the water as quickly as I possibly could and clanged the lid on top. Because the pot wasn’t big enough for both of these huge, gangly beasts, I’d have to cook them one at a time. After about ten minutes, I carefully lifted the first one out with tongs. It was morbid to see it now so bright red, and its weight felt completely different from the live thing it had been just minutes before.

  I’d popped the other lobster back in the freezer while the first one cooked, lest it wake from its stupor. I took it out again, and as I peeled back the plastic bag, I was suddenly struck with a horrible thought: What if it saw the other cooked, red lobster, hanging out on my counter right before its death? How terrifying! I quickly hid the cooked lobster inside a bowl before taking the second one out. With the stockpot still going at a rolling boil, I popped the next victim inside. This one went in slightly better than the last; it barely moved. After it was boiled, I spent the next few hours cracking open the tough shells with a hammer and my fingers (for lack of a proper tool—my oversight). It was tough work removing the chunks of meat, and after that had been accomplished, I saved the empty shells and enormous heads to make a savory broth to cook the risotto with.

  My apartment reeked of seafood all afternoon. After making a run to the grocery store for some last-minute ingredients, I came back and was hit with the scent of the seafood stock I was making. I worried that this might not be the most appropriate mood-setting aroma for the night. But by evening, it seemed to have left the apartment a bit, or at least I’d gotten used to it. By then, the room had overwhelmingly taken on the savory smell of the reheating wine-braised beef cheeks.

  By seven, all the core supper club members had arrived and were giving me a hand with setting the table
. Jordan had brought little glass vials with flower buds and place cards with each diner’s name to set at the table. I was grateful for the help; I’d been cooking for several hours straight and my fingers were blistered and torn from all that hacking away and picking at lobster shells. Then the first guest arrived. It was Morgan. He was carrying a load of wine bottles and filled the fridge with the white wine.

  “For a girl who doesn’t eat out, your fridge is kind of empty,” he noted.

  I didn’t realize it until then, but I’d been so swept up in preparations that I’d eaten hardly a thing all day. I was starving. I’d baked a loaf of no-knead bread to serve with dinner and broke a chunk off of it. Slowly, the rest of the guests trickled in: Kara, George, Thaddeus, Lauren, and her French friend François, who wore thick black-rimmed glasses that made him look sort of like the French version of Buddy Holly. I was nervous about how Jordan would react to Thaddeus, and rightly so, as it turned out. Shortly after he arrived, she whispered to me in a corner that she was not at all interested. Thaddeus was definitely the most dressed up for the evening, in a black suit with a T-shirt. Lauren appeared a completely different person from the party-outfitted girl at the Pink Ball, wearing camouflage cargo pants and a thin beige tank top, her long curly brown hair tied back.

  By the time everyone had their first glasses of wine, we gathered at the table. We had to scrunch close together—too close, in fact, and as I had only a long coffee table that could fit us all, we were seated on pillows on the floor. I’d imagined this might be intimate, but in reality it was pretty awkward.

  The first course was my amuse-bouche, or, put simply, the bite-sized appetizer before the formal five courses began. I’d put together tiny stacks of goat cheese, roasted red pepper, and basil on crisped bread slices, and placed them for a few moments under the broiler until they were warm and oozing, with the tops lightly charred. Next up, I served my asparagus salad. I’d blanched the asparagus, then tossed the sliced spears with avocado and watercress, dressed in a lemony vinaigrette.

  I began to arrange soup dishes of the lobster risotto shortly afterward. I was so focused on serving everyone that I didn’t get in on much of the table conversation. I was seated all the way at the end of the table, too, beside Thaddeus and across from Karol. Jordan had initially arranged the seating so that each SOS member was next to his or her “date,” but after people started picking up the cards out of curiosity and getting them all mixed up, the seating arrangement got a little confused. Plus, both Jordan and Matt had already forfeited the mission of dating their “dates.” Only Karol was still seated beside hers.

  I looked curiously at Morgan, seated across the table. Over the past couple of weeks, we’d exchanged a number of e-mails and tried making plans to meet up, but they’d fallen through due to our different schedules. Still, there were pretty clear indications of flirtation on both sides. I wasn’t picking up on any of it tonight, though. In fact, he seemed more interested in talking to Jordan.

  After the risotto, everyone felt they needed to take a break before the next course. Without realizing that five courses plus an amuse-bouche is a lot of food, I’d piled a heaping scoop of risotto on each plate, big enough for a full meal itself. Each was topped with a delicate arrangement of the lobster claw and tail meat, drenched in hot butter, a dollop of crème fraîche, a miniature scoop of caviar, and a sprinkle of fresh fennel fronds. Everyone, including myself, was already stuffed.

  Across the table, it looked like conversation had broken down into small groups: Matt and Lauren were chatting up a storm, pointing at photos on one of their cell phones. Kara, François, and Thaddeus, to my left, had lifted themselves onto the couch. I guess kneeling on the floor for an extended period of time isn’t exactly for everyone, especially guys. For a period, we had been talking about the meaning behind the logo on Thaddeus’s T-shirt, but once that question had been sufficiently answered by Thaddeus, conversation dropped to a lull. George was being especially quiet, only talking to Karol in low tones every now and then. Karol, too, was being unusually quiet. And Morgan was still talking to Jordan. All at once, he addressed the group:

  “You know what the greatest rock album of all time is?” he said.

  “Uhh ... no, what?” said Matt.

  There were a few guesses around the table—Nevermind? The White Album? Personally, I had no interest in addressing such ultimatums. I wasn’t sure what context the question had risen from, anyway.

  “Appetite for Destruction,” Morgan proclaimed. “By Guns N’ Roses.”

  Very slowly, the blank faces around the table began to nod.

  “I’m going to plate the next course,” I said, excusing myself from the table.

  Clearly, the group wasn’t really gelling in any sort of way. And there was nothing romantic going on, either. Karol had warned me that George was really shy and awkward around strangers, but it didn’t occur to me that he couldn’t make eye contact. At least everyone wasn’t taking turns explaining what he or she did for a living, which was the boring state of conversation at some of the other supper clubs I’d attended. But nobody seemed to be terribly interested in talking to one another, either. Each time a new course was served, Morgan gave a two-minute lecture on the type of wine he’d paired the dish with, where it was made, and how. I got the sense from the lack of conversation afterward that nobody cared terribly much about wines or the subtle art of wine pairing. I was too distracted by hostessing to really think about the notes in the wines I was knocking back myself. I just hoped the main course—and some more wine—might spark up conversation a bit.

  “Um, Morgan,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Did you have a different wine to pair the meat dish with?”

  “Oh, yes. Right. It’s up on the counter, the red wine,” he said, turning away from Jordan a moment to address me. “Actually, I’ll get it,” he said, after a pause.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Matt walked by me on his way to the bathroom. I pulled him into the hallway for a moment.

  “Can you believe this?” I hissed.

  “What?” he said. I nodded in the direction of Morgan, who was gesturing as he talked to Jordan.

  “Ah, forget him,” Matt said. “Seriously, I think you can do better than him. Appetite for Destruction?”

  I looked back. Jordan was giving wan nods every now and then. She’d hardly uttered a word all night, least of all to Thaddeus. She turned to gaze around the room and caught my eye for a moment. We exchanged hapless looks.

  “So much for SOS,” I muttered.

  “It’s taking on a whole new meaning,” Matt said.

  Karol came to the kitchen to give me a hand.

  “What do you need me to do with this stuff?” she asked. I instructed her to put scoops of the butternut squash puree on the bottom of each plate; on top of each one I arranged a few nice-looking chunks of braised beef cheeks, and then ladled some of the pomegranate reduction sauce on top, followed by a sprinkle of chopped parsley and fresh pomegranate seeds as garnish.

  “This looks amazing,” Karol said.

  I had to admit—it did look pretty impressive. The butternut squash was a rich, sunset orange color, and the pomegranate reduction, thickened with a touch of cream, painted the plate with splashes of deep magenta. We brought the plates to the table and rinsed out the white wine from everyone’s glasses. Morgan gave a brief introduction about the red wine he’d paired the course with, a bold and fruity something or other, from someplace or another.

  “Wow, this is really good,” Kara said, digging in.

  “I’ve never had beef cheeks before,” Lauren noted. “They’re really good.”

  “I think you just have to braise them forever, with wine. Everything tastes good if you cook it like that,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you made it really good,” Jordan said. The compliments brightened my mood a little. I pecked around at my plate, too antsy to eat much, and worried about plating the next course. I had run out of plates to ser
ve everything on, so I’d need to wash the first set of plates, which were stacked in a splattered, messy heap in the sink. How did places like Whisk and Ladle serve all those diners? I couldn’t wrap my head around how much work a supper club involved.

  When the meat course was finished, or at least half finished, since most of the guests were beyond full by now, Karol helped me wash and dry a set of ten plates. The final course before dessert was something I’d devised called “East-West Eggplant.” Each plate had one Japanese eggplant half placed down the center, which had been sliced lengthwise, seared on the cut surface, and roasted until soft inside. On one side of the plate, or on the “West,” I’d piped a streak of classic, Italian basil pesto. For the other side, “East,” I’d made a Chinese sesame seed paste and soy sauce-based sauce, with a bit of sugar and rice vinegar for pungency. The diners were meant to cut the roasted eggplant and dip it in either sauce as they pleased. From past experience, I had seen how basil could be a potent, effective aphrodisiac. I was now desperate for its charms. We carried the plates to the table.

  “What are we looking at here?” François asked. I explained the concept of the dish to the group, and everyone nodded appreciatively.

  “Cathy’s mind, on eggplant,” Matt pronounced.

  “I love this pesto,” Morgan commented. Good, I thought.

  “Wow, but that ‘East’ sauce is incredible,” Kara said.

  “Yeah, I want to know how to make something like this,” Lauren added.

  If I’d had the patience to plate the dish with more care, I might have piped neat, elegant squiggles of each sauce to the left and right of each eggplant half. But as it was, I’d simply squeezed angry glops of the stuff on either side, so that the pesto resembled a pile of mangled seaweed, and the Asian sauce was a medium-brown, thick sludge. Anyway, that’s how I saw it in my miserable state of mind.