Best Food Writing 2013

by Holly Hughes

  “Your father must have taken them,” she said, ruefully, when I asked. But it didn’t make any sense: Why would my father want the bottom of the fondue set but not the top? Why would he take the knife part of the electric knife, but not the handle?

  “Just for spite,” she added, with an angry gimlet eye.

  “Come on, Mom,” I said. “You’re being silly.”

  “Then they just disappeared. Who knows what happens to these things?”

  In my mother’s world, inanimate objects are always developing minds of their own. When they get good and tired of being neglected and ignored, they simply say goodbye, good riddance and off they go, stomping away in the middle of the night like a knife and fork dancing across the screen of a 1950s drive-in movie: a single fondue fork and the top part of the electric carving knife, marching out the door in a conga line. She had even managed to lose an entire set of flatware that I once bought for her when she somehow, inexplicably, was running low. If you aren’t a party-thrower, and you don’t have dinner guests over on a regular basis, how do you lose flatware? But for my mother, it makes sense: she doesn’t cook—she is fearful of food and every morsel that passes her lips sends her careening backward in time to the days before she lost all the weight and became a television singer, back to when she was a fat child—so the idea of caring for, of coddling cookware like it was a baby or a prized pair of Chanel pumps was utterly, ridiculously crazy.

  But crazy is relative. And so on the other hand, I was equally insane about what lived in my kitchen, and I doted on its contents the way you would a small, brokenhearted child: In my house, no knife ever sat in the sink. No pot filled with baked-on mess ever traveled through my tiny, eighteen-inch-wide dishwasher. No cast-iron pan ever saw a rinse of soapy water or a damp sponge, or even soap.

  “This is disgusting,” my best friend Abigail once said when she came over for brunch, picking up the Lodge cast-iron pan I’d bought specifically for making a honey-glazed, blue-corn corn bread I’d once eaten at an uptown, neo-Southern restaurant. She ran her finger along its surface and made a face.

  “It’s just age,” I said. “And the fact that you’re never supposed to wash it.”

  “And I just ate something cooked in this thing? How the hell are you supposed to clean it?”

  “With salt,” I answered.

  “Salt? Just salt?” She was aghast.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s the way it’s been done for centuries. The coarser the better. Like maybe, a nice flakey Maldon sea salt from England.”

  “So you scrub your pans with imported English sea salt. Tell me that’s not completely nuts.”

  “It’s not,” I told her, waving a copy of Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking in her face. If it was good enough for Edna, it was good enough for me.

  “Honey,” Abigail snorted, “you may have noticed: you’re not exactly a six-foot-tall black woman who likes to do things the way her great-grandma did back when she was a slave. Go out and buy yourself some dish soap.”

  In truth, the idea of using salt to scrub a pan thickly caked with baked-on food was something that I had always found secretly terrifying, especially after my first bout of food poisoning ended with a doctor friend coming to my house to hook me up to an IV for a few hours while we watched daytime television together in between my unhooking myself and racing for the bathroom. Scrubbing cast iron with salt was one of those mildly upsetting, romantic constructs, like threading adorable, tiny birds on a skewer and roasting them whole in a wood fire, like Richard Olney used to do in his tiny, sweet, sundrenched house in Provence. It was like a ride through culinary fantasy land until you stopped and thought about it for a minute.

  When I better-examined Auntie Et’s nested set of jet-black, clean-as-a-whistle Griswold pans sitting on the counter, I couldn’t imagine for the life of me how they’d gotten that way, or if they were just so old that the stuck-on food had disintegrated and fallen off over the years, like the now-empty can of rubbed sage from 1953 that Susan’s mother still kept in her spice rack over her sink, having evaporated into light-green dust sometime during the Tet Offensive.

  “Et must use a lot of salt on these babies,” I said to Susan later that day, holding one of the smaller pans up to the light and running my finger along its surface.

  “Are you kidding?” she barked. “Her secret is far more subversive.”

  “What is it?” I whispered, leaning in close.

  “Soap and water. And a good, long soak in the sink,” Susan said, matter of factly. “Salt is just so—I don’t know—twee.”

  Earlier that morning, when the alarm went off at eight, I threw the covers back and raced down the stairs with MacGillicuddy following me, sounding like a stampeding herd of cattle in the otherwise still house.

  “What are you doing?” Susan groaned from upstairs.

  “I’m making dinner,” I yelled back.

  “Now?”

  “Yes—now. It’ll go in at eleven and be ready at three, you can take me to the station at 4:30, and I’ll be back on the train home to New York by six. So, now—”

  At eight on this mid-December Sunday morning, with my still-new love interest drowsing away upstairs, her slobbering dog following me around the kitchen hoping I’d drop something, and the braciole that Arnaud had cut for me on Friday, it was now or never. I wasn’t going to freeze meat as gorgeous as this, so I got up to make supper, roughly an hour after the white, wintry sun had come up.

  Susan’s refrigerator, a mammoth black side-by-side Kenmore, so immense that the moving men had to slide it through the living room and over the counter on blankets—like an obese Pasha perched on a flying carpet—had a reputation for swallowing up anything you happened to be looking for at the very moment you needed it. I opened it, and cheese—soft, hard, harder, some white, some yellow, some blue—fell out at my feet, draped in varying degrees in plastic wrap. A small, blue-striped yellow ware bowl from the 1930s containing beige, cardboard-colored ground turkey and covered with foil sat precariously close to the edge of one of the sliding glass shelves. I searched and looked, lifting up packages of deli meat and containers of yogurt like a child does on a scavenger hunt. But no braciole.

  “Where’s the meat?” I yelled up the stairs.

  “What?” Susan was still half asleep.

  “The beef—THE BEEF, DAMMIT—from Arnaud,” I shouted, anxiously, like I was having a dinner party in a few hours to which Russian royalty might be in attendance.

  “It’s there,” Susan pleaded. I heard her get up, her feet hitting the floor above me. “I didn’t touch it!”

  “I don’t see it!”

  “Look behind the shaker,” she shouted.

  I stomped back to the fridge, removed the cocktail shaker still half-filled with the watered-down remnants of the bourbon Manhattan that we’d sucked down before running to Et’s house for the chicken slop, and there, nestled between a loaf of Pepperidge Farm white bread and a Tupperware container of leftover macaroni and cheese, was my outrageously expensive beef.

  I rummaged around the kitchen cabinets for a small platter and came up with one—part of a whole set of blue-and-white Anne Hathaway’s Cottage service for twelve—that would allow the two pieces of braciole to come to room temperature comfortably and slowly without daring to touch each other, which, if they did, would result in unacceptable, uneven, oxidized spotting. I covered them with foil and set them aside, out of reach of the dog, and went back to the fridge to search for the handful of wild mushrooms—golden chanterelles, hen of the woods, and brown spongy morels—that I’d dropped fifteen bucks for at Dean & DeLuca. By the time Susan trudged down the stairs, I was sitting at the counter, gingerly rubbing and patting the dirt off of them with the dry piece of raw white silk that I’d neatly folded up, wrapped in a white handkerchief, and tucked into my coat pocket before leaving my apartment on Friday. Soft, delicate, and with the tiniest amount of nap, raw silk is the perfect tool for cleaning mushrooms without br
uising them.

  “Good morning, honey,” Susan said, giving me a sleepy peck on the cheek.

  “Good morning,” I said, with an edge, looking at her out of the corner of my eye.

  “Can I ask what is it that you’re doing?” She filled up the tea kettle at the sink, and glared at my little patch of silk.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Dusting? Drying the tears of a weeping morel that misses its mother?”

  “Very funny,” I replied, putting the last of the mushrooms on Susan’s small tag-sale wooden chopping board that was in the shape of an apple. “I need a knife—do you have anything sharper than this?”

  I held up a five-inch chef’s knife with a plastic handle that I’d found in a drawer near the sink; a full quarter-inch of its tip was missing, sheared clean off, like it had been circumcised.

  “They’re all in here,” she said, opening up a narrow drawer near the stove. I poked around and pulled out a paring knife that had a thin crack in its plastic handle. There was a long, heavy chef’s knife, and both of them had seen better days and were about as sharp as limp celery.

  “Do I need to bring my knife roll up next week?” I asked.

  “What wrong with these?” she said, holding up the paring knife.

  “What year are they from?”

  “My mother gave them to me. Or they might have belonged to one of the aunts; I can’t remember.”

  I snorted. I prized my knives, which I never, ever let rest in the sink, or ever see the rough vulgarity of a dishwasher.

  Susan shook her head, exasperated.

  “I don’t understand what the difference is—if it’s a good knife, it’s a good knife.”

  “But don’t you think you should take better care of them? I mean, look at this one.” I held it up, and nodded at the missing tip. Susan swooned, and took it out of my hands.

  “I love that knife. I think I found it at a tag sale, at the bottom of a box. I felt badly for it—it just needed a little love.”

  “You sound like Linus at the end of A Charlie Brown Christmas, when he gets down on his knees and wraps the tree in his blanket.”

  I was involved with a woman who had rescued a stray knife from a tag-sale FREE box because it needed a little love. My knives came from Bridge Kitchenware in the East Fifties, back in the day when the infamous owner, Fred Bridge, was considered the Soup Nazi of professional cookware. If you wanted to buy a bird’s-beak paring knife from him and you weren’t planning on using it to carve roses out of baby radishes like Jacques Pépin, he wouldn’t sell it to you. My knife roll contained an eight-inch chef’s knife, a six-inch carbon-steel Sabatier that rusted in mild springtime humidity, four paring knives, a Japanese cleaver, a nine-inch slicer, and a seven-inch filleting knife. And all of them were kept in pristine condition: the moment I saw a ding in one of them, I hurried it to a specialty sharpener on the Lower East Side, like an hysterical mother who rushes her baby to the emergency room after a sniffle.

  “Tell me what you need chopped,” Susan said, sipping on a steaming royal-blue mug of odorous Lapsang souchong, a tea so simultaneously sweet and pungent and smoky that it made the dog throw up.

  I looked at her.

  “Come on—I’m really good at chopping—I’m a designer, remember?”

  I reached into the vegetable drawer in the fridge and extracted a large onion, two celery stalks, and two carrots.

  “Can you chop me a mirepoix?”

  I was so fucking haughty about it, and she didn’t even bat an eyelash.

  “No problem,” she said, putting her mug down. She took a scuffed plastic cutting board from behind the faucet and set it down on top of a lightly dampened paper towel, to keep it from moving around. I just stared at her, my arms folded.

  “You gonna ask me what a mirepoix is?” I said.

  “You gonna keep talking?” she replied, looking at me over her reading glasses.

  And with that, she began to chop everything using that sad, tip-less tag-sale knife. When she was done, she dumped the carrots, celery, and onion into three Anne Hathaway’s Cottage soup bowls, pushed them toward me, picked up the newspaper and her tea, went into the living room, and sat down on the couch. The vegetables were perfect eighth-inch cubes and lovely. I remembered the day we met, when she touched the tiny scar on my right hand.

  Details.

  Two hours later, while the braciole—paper-thin slices of Arnaud’s prime beef rolled around black truffle–scented wild mushroom duxelles, parsley, and Pecorino di Pienza, and then browned in olive oil and butter—sat braising in red wine and San Marzano tomatoes in Susan’s only high-sided sauté pan, Susan began to rummage around the fridge.

  “I’m hungry,” she said, gazing into it like she was expecting a human voice to spring forth from its depths.

  “I’ll cook,” I announced, putting the newspaper down, certain that she would somehow manage to change the oven temperature and turn the braciole into shoe leather.

  “Sit,” she said, pointing at the oven. “You’re making dinner, remember?”

  “Okay. So, what will we have? Grilled cheese? God knows we have enough pecorino to feed a small village in Tuscany.”

  I moved to the other side of the counter so I could keep an eye on things.

  She pulled a small, dented Revere Ware saucepan out from the drawer under the oven, filled it with water and a few tablespoons of Heinz vinegar—the sort that my grandmother used to mix with water to clean the windows—and brought it to a simmer. She placed the smallest of the Griswold pans over a burner, heated it dry over medium heat, and set down four overlapping slices of Canadian bacon in it, like an edible Venn diagram.

  “Stop!” I shouted, leaping up. “You’re not using oil? You’re going to destroy that pan!”

  “You need to not talk so much,” she said without looking up, carefully breaking four eggs into four small ceramic pudding ramekins. She put four slices of plain white bread into the toaster, stirred the simmering water to create a vortex, and one by one, using a slotted spoon, gingerly lowered each egg into the water, simultaneously reaching over and pressing the lever down on the toaster. The Alessi timer—the one shaped like a lady in a dress, that she’d brought back from a work trip to Italy the year before along with holy water from Lourdes and a Pope John Paul bottle opener—was set to three minutes. When it pinged, so did the toaster.

  Susan set down on two lovely, hand-painted Italian breakfast plates golden slices of toast topped with Canadian bacon and four magnificent, firm, buxom white orbs, the most perfect, perfectly poached eggs I had ever seen. I sliced gently into one, and its great gush of deep yellow yolk slowly flooded the plate and the meat and the bread. She pushed a small ceramic bowl of coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper in my direction. I took a pinch between my thumb and forefinger, rubbed them carefully together, and released a slow shower of tiny flakes over the eggs.

  When people over the years have asked me, “When did you know you were falling in love with Susan,” the answer is an easy one: just the simple, thoughtful action of having coarse salt in a small bowl instead of iodized dreck in a shaker was enough to make my heart careen from one side of my chest to the other. The tactile, ancient process of taking a pinch of salt from a tiny bowl between human fingertips, and rubbing it, sprinkling it, thoughtfully, on food, connects the diner with what is on the plate with a sense of immediacy. There is no need for a grain of rice to keep the salt dry in the humidity and the shaker clear.

  Bowl of salt. Fingers. Food.

  Susan began slicing up both pieces of her toast, bacon, and eggs into miniscule squares, like the mother of a small child would do for her baby who has just learned to use utensils, and I laughed out loud.

  “What’s wrong with it?” she asked. “It lets me read the paper and eat without having to use both hands.”

  Details.

  When we were done—it was early in the afternoon on a frigid Sunday—Susan got up and put the ti
ny cast-iron Griswold in the sink, filled it with soapy water, and let it rest.

  “Salt,” she said, “is for eating. Not for scrubbing.”

  The braciole, which filled the house with the earthy essence of tomato and truffle and wild mushrooms, cooked in a very slow oven for the rest of the day, and when it was time for me to leave for the city, was not quite finished. I left it to Susan’s hands, to slice into perfect roulades, which I was sure she could do expertly, since her mirepoix was so goddamned precise.

  “Promise me you’ll toss the sauce with the fresh tagliatelle I brought,” I said, as we drove to the train station in Hartford.

  “I promise,” she agreed, glancing over at me.

  “And that you’ll let the meat rest for ten minutes before slicing it exactly an inch thick.”

  “Oh for god’s sake, I promise already.”

  But it wouldn’t matter: without my being there, I was sure that the first meal I’d ever made for Susan was going to be an abject failure, and I wasn’t even going to be around to ask forgiveness. Or to make excuses.

  “How was it?” I asked that night when I called to say I was home. It was after nine.

  “Good,” Susan said, “but maybe a little tough. So I chopped up the meat and stuffing and tossed it all together with the pasta. And it was so much better.”

  Poached Eggs with Canadian Bacon on Toast

  In every new relationship, one dish emerges that becomes synonymous with love, safety, and goodness. Silly me, I thought it would be my braciole, but no; it was Susan’s miraculously cooked, splendidly perfect poached eggs. Soft, runny—but not too runny—they scream comfort and howl happiness. And today, years later, when I’m either feeling frisky or like I want to crawl under a blanket and suck my thumb, it’s Susan’s poached eggs that I crave. Forget the fancy poaching devices and tools that I used to sell at Dean & DeLuca: all you’ll need is a wooden spoon, a small saucepan, and a timer. Note to self: the fresher the eggs, the less the whites will hold together, so if your friendly neighborhood urban chicken-farming hipster rushes over with a few newly laid ones for you, give them a few days before you make this.