by Holly Hughes
Years of seeing no appreciable effect had taken its toll; I felt steely, almost implacable when The One suggested we invite her again. Still, I reluctantly agreed.
To welcome her, I made Ina Garten’s lemon chicken with Croutons, a dish I made the family one December, which I knew Callie loved. My hope was the smell of an honest, no-agenda meal would envelop her and soften reentry, for both of us. The door opened and she slunk into the house, eyes downcast, the tails of her earbuds wriggling down either side of her face.
“Hi, Uncle David,” she said shyly. Why was I so afraid? I thought. She’s barely 5-foot-2. I scooped her up in my arms, lifting her off the ground as I hugged her. Her clothes smelled of kitchen grease and mildew. Before The One even had time to shrug off his coat, I started my never-fail Cool Uncle Routine. See, The One is preternaturally clueless to anything hip. For years, he thought Fergie and the Black-Eyed Peas referred to Sarah Ferguson, the former wife of Prince Andrew, and one of her food charities.
As I was toasting the croutons in a skillet, Callie sidled up to me, and together we mercilessly teased The One about his remarkable unfamiliarity with pop culture. A shared look between him and me let me know he was okay with being the town fool for the evening. A hit for the greater good, he seemed to be saying.
While I carved the chicken, she volleyed questions: “Uncle David, remember the pasta and shrimp you made for all of us that time?” “You know, we never made those chocolate chip cookies you promised me.” “Uncle David, remember that time we sat in the freezing garage while we made the stars for the snowflake cake that one Christmas?” “Oh, and remember when my dad made those chimichangas that summer?”
It was then I realized so many of our memories—and, it seemed, her best memories—were wrapped around food. I decided that for the time she was with us, I’d make every single one of the dishes she’s liked throughout the years—a kind of greatest hits of the table.
By the end of dessert—my favorite love food: sour cream apple pie—Callie couldn’t shut up. Across from me wasn’t a tough, tattooed 18-year-old young woman but the warm, sensitive kid who loved to prance around in her bathing suit, taking the occasional arc through the backyard sprinklers.
“And did my mom tell you,” she said, pointing her fork at us, “I’m going back for my GED then going to school for medical billing?” Praise God, and pass the peas. Her mother, who was also planning to do the same, had mentioned Callie was considering taking the GED. The One and I were determined not to bring it up unless Callie did, so as not to pressure her—although we hoped while she was with us we could encourage it.
“She’s changed,” he said later that night, taking pillows from the bed. “More mature, more sure of herself, don’t you think?”
“I do,” I said. “I’m impressed—and ashamed I didn’t want her here. I’m sorry.” He nodded. It was complete forgiveness, the kind that only seventeen years can bring.
For the rest of the time Callie was with us, I served favorite after favorite. And as I stood chopping, frying, and stirring, it was as if I were trying to infuse the food with the will to go back to school. I imagined, as silly as it seems, that years of wanting her to make something of herself were concentrated, like a demi-glace, and dripped from the wooden spoon into the frying pan. That common sense were ground up with a mortar and pestle and sprinkled in along with salt and a hint of pepper.
And it appeared to be working. Several days into her stay, Callie relaxed. She chatted more freely, forgetting to check her cell phone every minute, trippingly discussed dreams for the future, and relentlessly teased both of us. (Apparently my Cool Uncle Routine was good only until circa 2006. After that, I, too, was clueless.) One morning at breakfast, while she flipped through her grandmother’s recipe file for her black bottom cake recipe, I whispered to The One, “I think we broke through.”
“I hope so,” he said, crossing his fingers.
“I found it! Can we make it? Please?” There was that girl in the sprinklers again.
“Of course,” I replied.
The One and I stood back from the counter that afternoon and let Callie bake. The One shook his head when he saw me lean in because she wasn’t sifting the dry ingredients the way I would, and I backed off. I cleared my throat when he wanted her to use couverture chocolate instead of the Nestlé chips called for in the recipe. He demurred. The result, her first cake, wasn’t bad. But more important, it was a connection between Callie and her grandmother, a connection that otherwise lives only in a smudged envelope full of dog-eared photographs she keeps tucked in her purse.
That night, while watching Nine, The One handed Callie her birthday money, along with a tidy sum for helping him with stuffing envelopes—exactly equal to the cost of her GED tuition. Then came the slippery slope between being uncles and authority figures. “You know, there’s enough there to pay for your GED,” he suggested gently.
“Thank you,” she said, hugging him. I felt full, satiated.
After she left, it was radio silence. No thank-you card, no phone call, no text for three weeks.
“Hello, Callie,” I heard The One say into the phone yesterday afternoon. I listened to the one-sided conversation, anxious for an update.
“Did you enroll in the GED program with the money I gave you?”Yes. Please, say yes.
A long pause. I could read the answer from how he traced the edges of his book with his finger. “Clothes? Really?”
“All of it?”
Pause. “I see.”
I felt defeated. My instinct, because that’s the way I’m hardwired, was to go in the kitchen and cook something. That’s all she needs, I thought. I can fill her full of hope again. I know I can. Instead, I made myself a little something. I’m the one who needs the healing now.
BEFRIENDING YOUR PALATE
By Terry Theise
From Reading Between the Wines
Wine importer Terry Theise is a born iconoclast, championing small producers, advocating for German wines, and refusing to rely on oenophile jargon. Determined to de-mystify wine for everyday drinkers, Theise begins with a simple but inspiring premise: Believe in your own taste.
First you master your instrument. Then you forget all that shit and just play.
—CHARLIE PARKER, when asked how one becomes a great jazz musician
You’re at home watching TV in the evening. Let’s say you’re watching a DVD of something you really like. Unless you have some monstrous home-theater system, you’re looking at a relatively small screen across the room. You can’t help but see all your stuff strewn about. Usually you have a light or two on. You hear ambient noises.
Now pretend you’re at the movies. The lights go down, and you’re sitting in a dark room with a bright screen encompassing your whole field of vision. Even with others around you, there is a strange, almost trance-like intimacy between these huge, bright images and your emotions. All great directors are acquainted with this spell; it’s the essence of cinema. And it arouses a deep, almost precognitive attention from us.
We often think of palate as our physical taste receptor, the mouth itself, and, more saliently, the sense of smell. But a palate is more than what you taste; it is your relationship with what you taste. Palate isn’t passive; it is kinetic.
Palate is really two things. First, it is the quality of attention you pay to the signals your taste receptors are sending. Second, it is memory, which arises from experience. A “good palate” is able to summon the cinema type of attention. An ordinary palate—more properly called an indifferent palate—is watching TV with the lights on.
Most of us are born with roughly the same discrete physical sensitivities to taste. (But there are said to be so-called super-tasters who may have a larger number of taste buds than the rest of us do, in which case, lucky them; they’re getting bombarded with signals.) What varies is our sensitivity to this ... sensitivity. It seems to be an irreducible aspect of temperament, how the gods arranged the goodies in the box called
you.
I remember when I was a wine fledgling being complimented on my palate by people more experienced than I was. It wasn’t as gratifying as it may seem. I had no idea what a good palate was supposed to entail. I guess it was good that I had one. Then what?
Later, when I taught wine classes for beginners, I did a little exercise at the beginning, putting four different brands of tortilla chips on numbered plates, and asking the eager wine students (who must have been wondering when their refund checks would be mailed) to taste all four and write down which one they liked best and why. A lively discussion never failed to ensue: “Number three has the deepest corn flavor” or “Number one wasn’t salty enough” or “The taste of number four lasts the longest time.” When it was all over I’d say, “Okay, guys, now you know everything you need in order to become good wine tasters.” Ah, excuse me? But these students tasted variations on a narrow theme; they paid attention because they had to, and they put their impressions into words. They were tasters, and the medium didn’t matter.
Yet the approach path to wine seems so fraught (compared to tortilla chips!); there are so damnably many of them, they change all the time, and just when you think you’re getting a handle on the whole unruly mess you read about yet another obscure place entering the world wine market with labels that look like anagrams without enough vowels. It’s dispiriting; I feel your pain. But you’re completely wrong.
When I started my wine life I made the same mistake. I imagined some theoretical point of mastery that lay on the horizon, and I would reach it eventually if I just kept walking. But horizons are funny: they keep moving just as we do. The more urgently you walk, the more they recede. Bastards, mocking me like that; don’t they know I’m tryin’ here? Sure they know! They’re just going to keep frustrating me until I finally get the message: enjoy the journey, and notice your surroundings.
But aside from this corner-store Zen wisdom, here’s a practical suggestion: If the sheer cacophony of wine cows you, just ignore it. For at least three months—ideally even longer—choose two grape varieties, a white and a red, and drink nothing but those. Let’s say you chose Sauvignon Blanc and Syrah. First you drink all the Sauv Blanc you can lay your hands on, California, New Zealand, Austria, all the various Loires, Alto Adige, and Friuli; you steep yourself in Sauvignon, seeing how the wines differ and what core qualities they all seem to have. Write each impression down. Do the same with Syrah: Australia, Rhône valley, Languedoc-Roussillon, California. When you start getting antsy for change, that’s when you’re ready for the next duo. You’re getting bored with Sauvignon and Syrah because they aren’t surprising you anymore. But boy, do you ever know them. You know them in your bones and dreams. Your very breath smells like old saddles and gooseberries.
Let’s say you opt for Pinot Blanc and Cabernet Franc for your next duo. Right away you’ll notice the newness of these wines, not only that they are different, but how they are different. You’ve immersed yourself in those first varieties, and every subsequent variety will automatically be contrasted with them. To know wine, learn its elements deeply and deliberately. Then your knowledge will be durable and your palate’s vision will inexorably widen. Trying to skim over hundreds of different wines all at once will only make you cross-eyed.
This is hard for most of us because of all the many wines coming at us. Trust me, though: it’s mostly static, and if you really want to learn you’d best find a system, or use mine. It builds your knowledge slowly, but what you build stays built.
The palate is an instrument played by the taster, and you’re practicing and doing your exercises until you become facile. When that finally happens you think you’ve attained your goal, but you’re still in a primitive zone of merely demonstrating the mastery you have obtained by practice and repetition. Eventually, if the gods consent, you stop worrying about how and start worrying about what. You forget about playing your horn (or your ax in my own mangy case) and just start to play the music.
You go to a party in a house you’ve never been to, and they have a really cool dog. You like dogs. But this particular dog is introverted or bashful, and the more you approach, the more he backs away. All you want to do is scritch him! But looks like it isn’t happening, so you merge back into the throng and forget about Towser. Later you’re sitting talking with some fetching young thing and suddenly you feel something cold and wet on the back of your hand. Well, look who’s there: it’s old Towser, sniffing you, checking you out. Now you can scritch his handsome head all you want. Scritch away—what a good boy! You go back to complaining to your friend about how no matter how much you study wine, it doesn’t seem to get any easier....
Wine is like a shy dog. Lunge for it and it backs away. Just sit still and it draws nearer. Wine is less about what you can grasp than about how you can receive. You grasp it more firmly if you grab it less tightly. It will resist you if you insist on subduing it. You can accumulate only so much knowledge in quantifiable bits, but you accumulate understanding if you learn to relax. Wine doesn’t like being dominated. It prefers being loved and wondered about. It will do anything for you if you’re curious and grateful.
I learned this the hard way, and so will you, if you don’t already know it. I made quite an ass of myself strutting with my sexy-pants wine knowledge, and I wasted far too much time arguing with other wine geeks to prove my alpha cred. Learn from my sad past! The first hint I can offer is to try to distinguish between true complexity and mere complicatedness. The latter is usually frustrating, but the former is usually wonderful. You have to direct a beam of mind to pick a way through complicatedness. You set your jaw and grind your teeth until you’ve prevailed. You’ve nailed the flavors, quantified and named every nuance, and decided precisely how much you liked the wine on whatever scale they told you to use. But complexity asks the opposite. It is an immediate sense of something you can’t know, something you won’t be able to isolate or explain. Complexity is quiet; complicatedness is noisy. With complexity you have to relax your mind and see what happens. I can’t promise this mental state is available to most of us, unless you are the Dalai Lama, until you reach a certain ... ahem ... age. It has been years since I worked at wine. I work with it, of course, and it’s fun work, but I’m sure that after a certain point, the more we work at our pleasures (we say we “pursue” our pleasures, tellingly), the more they’ll back away from us. Show me someone who “plays hard” and I’ll show you someone who has forgotten how to play at all.
Of course, it is play, for many of us, to deconstruct and describe all of a wine’s elements. But to the extent that they can be detected, what we’re describing is intricacy, not (necessarily) complexity. A wine is complex when it suggests something that can’t be seen or even known, but it is definitely, and hauntingly, there. A complex wine seems to channel the very complexity of living. A complicated wine is just a mosaic we piece together with our senses.
Here’s what I think you’re after: a point of utter receptivity in which you’re seeing only the wine instead of seeing yourself seeing the wine. Oh, it does sound very Zen. But I’m persuaded it’s the way to pleasure and sanity. If you don’t see past your own discrete palate, you can’t get past What am I getting from the wine? It starts and stops with “I.” What am I getting, what do I think, how many points will I give it—all I can say is, if you drink wine this way, I sure hope you don’t make love this way, because your partner’s bored.
I know how it is; you’re trying to get a handle on wine, and so you grasp for a handhold. If you’re drinking a wine you like and someone tells you it was fermented with cultured yeast, the light-bulb goes on over your head: Aha! Cultured yeast = wine I like, thus I must posit the theorem that better wines are made from cultured yeast. Innocent enough. The problem arises when you cling to your belief despite any new evidence. It’s tempting to add knowledge nuggets to your basket, and discouraging to chuck them away. But you have to; wine will force you to. It will lie in wait the minute you get certain abo
ut something, and trip you up in front of your friends, your sommelier, and the date you hoped to score with. Not that this has ever happened to me personally....
It’s actually best when you make a mistake. And the easiest mistake is thinking you’ve got it aced, because now you’re not asking questions anymore, you’re waiting for each wine to confirm your conclusions. Yet wine will contrive to confuse your assumptions in order to force you to still your ego and listen. If you hold wine too tightly, it can’t dance with you. Hold it just right and it will glide over the floor with you as if you were a single body.
ON TOAST
By Michael Procopio
From FoodForTheThoughtless.com
When professional waiter Michael Procopio launched his blog Food for the Thoughtless in 2008, he finally found his calling, dishing out mordant observations on food and life, sometimes (but not always) with recipes. Even so simple a subject as toast can lead to surprising conclusions.
Some mornings, when I am awakened by the sound of my alarm clock or my grumbling stomach, I do what millions of others do—I crawl out of bed, head for the kitchen, and make toast.
I was going to say that I make it without thinking, but that would be untrue, since I do not own any appliance specifically designed to do the thinking for me in terms of heating and browning bread. I do without these appliances because they are a luxury I cannot afford in terms of counter space.
So I make my toast in the oven. There is a certain amount of thought that must go into the process, but nothing so mentally taxing it would send me back to bed.
I crank my oven up to broil and place two pieces of bread on the middle rack to let them dry out a bit as I wait for my tea kettle to boil. Just before the kettle has a chance to express itself audibly, I remove the bread slices from the oven and place them under the broiler to brown. It is a fairly straightforward process on most days. Unless I am either too tired or too distracted to be properly watchful, in which case not even dental records could prove that the charred remains at the bottom of my broiler ever bore the name bread.