Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  I have known one of these passionate cooks, and for many years—Bertie Bastalizzo. By now she is retired from her own kitchen: she married a man even more ancient than she who fell in love with her food and holds her and it for himself alone, to our hungry chagrin. While she was practicing on her own, I did my best in both overt and underhanded ways to learn her secret ingredients, but I remain foiled.

  She had been very lonely after her first husband died, and to keep herself from the river she began to cook about three dishes for local families smart enough to recognize her superiority. The routine of ordering and then fetching one of her preparations was rigid, and involved appointments, reservations, and occasional frustrations if Bertie’s schedule was full. She was very fussy about the kind of dishes her creations were to be served in, and several of us invested in large, handsome pottery baking dishes, which sit on our shelves unused since that old robber stole Bertie from us. We knew her instructions about how long to let the food “rest” before serving it, what temperature to let it rest in, and even what to do with it once it was at its peak of restedness. In fact, she dictated everything but our actual digestion, serene in her power over our palates, for she and we knew, with conditioned fatalism, that never again would we taste the likes of her delicate little dumplings of herbs and chicken, her flat tarts of thin noodles and mushrooms, her feathery mixtures of capellini d’angelo and a kind of pesto, which was, naturally, “secret.”

  One summer, I spent several weeks flattering her into letting my younger daughter, who had all the makings of a good cook as well as a private investigator, act as her kitchen helper. I kept notes unashamedly on the reports of this sorceress’s apprentice, but any results I produced were nondescript. Something was simply not there, and neither my accomplice nor I could guess what.

  Much later, Bertie offered blandly—as if to punish me for my obvious breach of trust—to write her recipe for the dumplings. I felt humbled and grateful, as if a small halo had suddenly been awarded me in spite of my sins. I have kept her large piece of pink butcher paper to remind me of these mixed emotions, for its scrawl is unintelligible to me—cryptic, completely meaningless. It lists ingredients that are never mentioned again. It notes measurements ranging from “some” to a monstrous “101/2 pounds” (of salt!). Perhaps Bertie believed that she was giving me her true recipe. Perhaps I cannot translate it because her own English was too limited to write it. Perhaps she was simply having some fun.

  I still like her and regret that since she succumbed to a second love we no longer taste her beautiful dishes. But part of me rebels at her seeming trickery. Her scribbled directive is one more exhibit in my private Hall of Gastronomical Ill Fame, for I really cannot believe that a good cook will distort a prideful recipe. I continue this stubborn and obviously naïve faith in the face of many more such pitiable little tricks, and prefer to console myself by thinking back on the wonderful odorous kitchen I would go to when it was time to pick up one of Bertie’s mammoth casseroles.

  This was a ritual, as well as a pleasurable ordeal, for I must be there exactly when I had been told to, or a little before, and on each of countless times I was instructed in how long to let the dish rest and was quizzed sternly about what else would be served with it. If Bertie approved, occasionally she gave me a jar of her fresh pickled zucchini as a tacit benediction. And always, as if she could not bring herself to let one more creation leave her own familiar kitchen for a stranger’s, I must sit down and consume a beaker of one of the worst drinks I can remember in a long life of polite subjection to them. It was kept in a half-gallon jug in the icebox, and drunk straight, from cottage-cheese glasses with daisies on them. The recipe, always reverently accredited to the deceased Mr. Bastalizzo: pour one pint from a full jug of dark sweet vermouth made by a local vintner, add one pint of bourbon whiskey, shake a little now and then, and enjoy. Simple, near lethal, and challenging!

  One time, there was some delay in getting the dish from Bertie’s hands into mine; she ran out of aluminum foil to cover it and had to find a new roll. It was much like the way a mother will nearly miss the train that is to take her tender child to camp. I drank two tumblers of her husband’s brew, and with the flash courage of unexpected inebriation I asked my friend point-blank if she had really meant ten and a half pounds of salt. She simply cackled, like a tipsy old Mona Lisa. I reeled carefully to my car, my arms filled with another example of her culinary mystique.

  We are so conditioned to the threat of the Secret Ingredient, and the acceptance of trickery, that even honesty has become suspect when we are brash enough to ask for recipes. My own mother always disclosed calmly her “secret” in making the best mustard pickles in the world, but almost nobody believed her, simply because she told it. She made the pickles according to a fairly standard recipe, almost measure for measure like many I have read, but she added to it one nine-ounce jar of Crosse & Blackwell’s Chow Chow. There was no substitute, she said, and it was the honest truth, as anyone could prove by trying. Here, because it seems the right place, is her method:

  EDITH’S MUSTARD PICKLES

  1 quart very small cucumbers, whole.

  1 quart large cucumbers, sliced.

  1 quart green tomatoes, sliced.

  1 quart small white onions, peeled.

  1 large cauliflower in small flowerlets.

  1 pint green string beans, 2 inches long (cut).

  4 green peppers in 1-inch cubes.

  4 quarts water.

  2 cups salt.

  1 cup flour.

  6 tablespoons Colman’s mustard (dry).

  1 tablespoon turmeric.

  1 cup sugar.

  Vinegar.

  1 9-ounce bottle Crosse & Blackwell’s Chow Chow.

  Let vegetables stand overnight in brine of water and salt. Heat to scalding point and drain. Make smooth paste of flour, mustard, turmeric, sugar, and enough vinegar to make 2 quarts. Cook in double boiler until thick. Add Chow Chow. Mix with vegetables. Heat through, and bottle.

  And here, almost in refutation of my mother’s candor, is the best version I have yet evolved from Bertie’s directions for her pickled zucchini:

  8–12 medium zucchini.

  1 cup vinegar.

  1 cup brown sugar.

  4 cloves garlic.

  1 cup chopped parsley.

  1 tablespoon oregano.

  1 tablespoon salt.

  1 teaspoon pepper.

  Leave zucchini whole, or slice thickly, lengthwise. Brown gently in olive oil. Pack vertically in jars. In same oily skillet, boil vinegar and sugar. Add rest of ingredients, boil gently 5 minutes, and pour over zucchini to cover. Add more oil on top if needed to make 1/4-inch cover. Keep in icebox. Serve drained and cold for antipasto or with cold meats.

  Needless to say, this translation is not exactly right, but its result is a fresh, delicious hors d’oeuvre in the summer, kept for even a week or so in the icebox, and made if possible from vegetables fresh from the vine and preferably not more than four inches long. (It is also very good with any kind of supper entrée, hot or cold.) I honestly have no idea what the Secret Ingredient might be, but charity will excuse my obtuseness, perhaps, if I give one short example of Bertie’s prose, found under my door apropos of a later rendezvous for ten dozen of her mystery dumplings: “Please If you fene time, cools me up abaut 5 pm clook up.” Add measurements to this, and you have an undecipherable code!

  People like Bertie—and even my honest mother—are increasingly rare, and I have a dismal feeling that they may soon disappear completely. It is not so much a question of their supplies as it is of their own unquestioning demand for quality. The things they used in their recipes were not hard to grow, or buy, and while they bowed to seasonal riches and made pickles when the vegetables were at their best, because that is the way they had to, we can buy zucchini and beans and even green tomatoes the year around in the supermarkets. We can assemble everything even cryptic directions call for, from vinegar to turmeric and, with a li
ttle effort, Crosse & Blackwell’s Chow Chow (and none other!). But do we? Why bother? Why clutter the icebox with a couple of jars of chilled zucchini? Who wants a dozen bottles of mustard pickles sitting around? Who has the time, when you come right down to it, to fuss with such maneuvers? So-and-so is almost as good, and a lot less trouble.

  There was an interesting proof of this conjecture lately in our town, when the second of two birthday parties was given for an honorable lady of ninety-eight. Ten years before, when we celebrated her comparatively youthful anniversary, we did special honor to her by blackmailing another friend of almost the same age to make hundreds of her famous sand tarts to eat with the punch. They were delicate thin little wafers, light and crisp and not the classical sand tart at all, and for decades her recipe for them was her sternly guarded secret. Perhaps it was age that softened her pride, for when I discreetly and admiringly asked if perhaps a hint of old-fashioned lemon extract might be the Secret Ingredient, she gave me a pleased nod—and later the recipe! On it she wrote at the end, “…and 1/4 teaspoon of???”—our private joke.

  So the ten years passed, and when the time came to deputize a few of us to supply soppets for the ninety-eighth-birthday punch, I proudly produced the famous sand-tart recipe, feeling sure that the old lady who had not been able to reach that age would never begrudge it in honor of the one who had. But nobody had time enough to follow it—or, rather, it was mutually and immediately vetoed in favor of a wonderful new trick (just as good!) that involved packaged mixes of both cake and custard, frozen lemon juice, and sweet sherry. “Really fun to make…so quick and easy…and all you do is slice it.”

  That is the end of the story. Or is it? Where are the witches of yesteryear, the strange old women with their dogged involvement, their loyalty to true flavor and changeless quality? If at times they protected their “secrets” to the point of knavery, at least they had the courage to stay passionate about it. Perhaps that was the Secret Ingredient: the blind strength of timeless passion.

  1968

  THE TROUBLE WITH TRIPE

  M.F.K. FISHER

  The main trouble with tripe is that in my present dwelling place, a small town in northern California, I can count on one hand the people who will eat it with me. What is more, its careful, slow preparation is not something I feel like doing for a meal by myself at this stage of the game, or for several meals. It is one of the things that call for a big pot and plenty of hungry people. Not even my children really like it, although studiously conditioned reflexes forced them to taste it in various guises and countries and to give fair judgment, which in their case was No. Friends tell me that they hate tripe because they, in turn, were forced to eat it when young, or saw too much of it in fraternity boardinghouses as an “economy meat”—reasons like that. I myself could claim a childhood trauma if I needed to, and I admit that I did not face a dish of tripe from my grandmother’s death until I was a good decade beyond it. In modern lingo, tripewise I lay fallow. The old lady, gastronomical dictator appointed by her own vision of righteous Christian living, a nervous stomach, and the fact that she more than generously shared the expenses of our exploding household, for some reason approved of eating the inner linings of an ox’s first and second bellies.

  In Larousse Gastronomique, where tripe is discussed under “Offal” in the English edition, there is news for Grandmother. (She would dismiss it as foreign nonsense, of course.) “Rich in gelatine, tripe needs prolonged cooking,” says the culinary scripture, “and is not easy to digest, so that it has no place in the diet of the dyspeptic [or] sufferers from gout.” I sense that my beldame was practicing upon herself and us a kind of sympathetic medicine, to request that tripe be prepared and served—to be brave, eat a lion’s heart; to remain shy and timid, eat violets in a salad; and so on. Oxen are reputedly serene and docile, and she had a digestive system that ranked her among the leaders in Battle Creek’s regular army of dyspeptic missionaries and would have honored her with a front seat at any late-Victorian spa in farther waters, like Vichy or Baden-Baden. The reasoning, perhaps: since an ox has not one but two pieces of equipment for his continuous ruminative consumption of the grains and grasses known also to be salubrious for man, why would partaking of some of his actual stomachs not help Mrs. Holbrook’s own unhappy organ?

  My grandmother unwittingly enjoyed perfect digestion, thanks to her constant attention to it, and it was no more than her due reward if she believed that her hypersensitive innards would and could assimilate this delicate honeycomb of animal muscle, with gastric gratitude if not pleasure. She did not believe in the latter, anyway, as part of a true and upright life, and as for the hinted danger of gout, only gentlemen had that in her days of rigid divisions of the sexual hazards of existence.

  There was only one way to serve tripe fit to eat when I was little—that is, fit for Grandmother to eat. It was seldom prepared when my mother was feeling fit enough herself to maintain some control over the menus, but when she was low in our private pecking order we ate it fairly often. My father, quietly and successfully determined to remain cock of the roost with dignity, always found it commendable, or at least edible. The recipe for it, if I feel sturdy enough to give it in correct form, would start with boiling the rubbery reticulum in pieces, draining it casually, and dousing it with something called White Sauce, which was and will remain in the same class as my grandmother’s flour-thickened Boiled Dressing. The dish was at best a faintly odorous and watery challenge to one’s innate sense of the fitness of things.

  I recognize that such experiences can lead to cynicism, or the analyst’s couch. In my own case, they seem mainly to have stiffened my wish to prove them mistaken, and I am now a happy, if occasionally frustrated, tripe eater.

  I had a good beginning, the second time around (really a kind of ghost-laying), at Crespin in Dijon. The small restaurant is gone now, but for a long time it served some of the simplest and lustiest meals I have ever eaten, especially on market days, for the wine people who came in from all that part of Burgundy to talk about casks, corks, sulfates. There were always snails at Crespin, of course, except in very hot weather, and in the cool months oysters out on the sidewalk in kelpy baskets, and both downed by the dozens. There was the classic green salad to scour the maw, and a good plain tart of seasonal fruits if one could still face it. I remember some cheeses in the winter. And then there were sealed casseroles of tripes à la mode de Caen véritable.

  Those casseroles, for two or six or eight people, seemed to possess the inexpressible cachet of a numbered duck at the Tour d’Argent, or a small perfect octahedral diamond from Kimberley. They were unsealed at the table. The vapor hissed out, and the whole dish seethed. Plates were too hot to touch bare-handed, to keep the sauce from turning as gluey as a good ox would need it to be at a temperature more suited to his own digestion. It was served with soup spoons as well as knives and forks, and plenty of crusty bread lay alongside. It was a fine experience.

  Crespin, with its hoary, monstrous old oyster opener always there on the wintry sidewalk, his hands the most scarred I have ever seen and still perhaps the surest in the way they handled the Portugaises, the green Marennes, upon their dank beds of fresh seaweed—Crespin and the old man and even the ruddy marketers are gone, except on my own mind’s palate.

  The last time I went there, I was alone. It was a strange feeling at first. I was in Dijon late in the 1950s, to go again to the Foire Gastronomique. The town was jumping, quasi-hysterical, injected with a mysterious supercharge of medieval pomp and Madison Avenue–via-Paris commercialism. I went to several banquets, where ornate symbols were pinned and bestowed, with dignitaries several levels above me in the ferocious protocol of eating and drinking, and then I went by myself to the restaurant I wanted to be in once more.

  In the small low room there was a great hum and fume, like market day but even better, and every table but one was occupied by large, red-faced, loud, happy Burgundians. My table was empty, and it seemed indicated by the go
ds that I should come to sit at it. I had sat there many times before. It was a little apart, though not obtrusively so, up a step like the fantastic banquet boards still cluttered and heavy at the official feastings, and pleasantly enclosed on three sides, with the white window curtains at my back. If I had not come, a potted plant would have been set neatly in my place, I know. I felt pleased to be there instead, and as usual I was awed by my continuing good luck in life, especially now and then.

  I think I ate a few snails, to stay in the picture. (The old scarred oysterman was not there, it being early November and very warm.) Then, although after all the banquets I felt about as hungry as a sated moth, I ordered a small and ritual casserole of tripes. They were as good as they had ever been some decades or centuries ago on my private calendar. They hissed and sizzled with delicate authority. Nobody paid any attention to my introspective and alcoved sensuality, and the general noise beat with provincial lustiness in the packed room. An accordionist I had last seen in Marseille slid in from the frenzied streets and added to the wildness, somewhat hopelessly. When he saw me digging into my little pot of tripe, he nodded, recognizing me as a fellow wanderer. I asked him if he would have a drink, as he twiddled out near-logical tunes on the instrument he wore like a child on his belly. He looked full at me and said, “Sometime a pastis on the Old Port.” I have not yet met him there again, but it is almost doubtless that I shall.

  I could not know that the next time I returned, lemminglike, to the dank old town, Crespin and the white curtains and all of it would be gone, but it is. It is too bad to explain.

  The classic recipes for preparing tripe can be found in any good cookbook, which someone who has read this far will already know and be able to consult. I like the French methods, but there are excellent ones in almost every culture that permit the use of this type of animal meat. Here is a good one that is fresh to the taste, adapted from the trippa alla Petronius served currently in a London restaurant called Tiberio: