Give a Girl a Knife

by Amy Thielen

  ALSO BY AMY THIELEN

  The New Midwestern Table

  Copyright © 2017 by Amy Thielen

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  clarksonpotter.com

  CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Thielen, Amy, author.

  Title: Give a girl a knife : a memoir / Amy Thielen.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016054943 (print) | LCCN 2016044399 (ebook) | ISBN 9780307954930 (ebook) | ISBN 9780307954909 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Thielen, Amy. | Cooks—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | Cooking, American—Midwestern style.

  Classification: LCC TX649.T46 (print) | LCC TX649.T46 A3 2017 (ebook) | DDC 641.5092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016044399.

  ISBN 9780307954909

  Ebook ISBN 9780307954930

  Cover design by Jen Wang

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Amy Thielen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  I

  1. My Kitchen Affliction

  2. Sugar and Color

  3. Home Cooking

  4. Meat Versus Vegetables

  5. Herring Dares and Chicken Turtles

  6. Twenty-Five Pies

  II

  7. The Sweet Smell of Home Fries

  8. Give a Girl a Knife

  9. The Perpetual Popcorn Pot

  10. Old Five-and-Dimers

  III

  11. Are We Going to Bake This Bread in My Lifetime?

  12. The Old Time of My Youth

  13. If You Don’t Look You Don’t See

  14. Circus of the Ridiculous

  15. Good Neighbors

  16. Chef Salad, No Eggs

  IV

  17. Pounds and Pennies

  18. Morbid Sugar

  19. Stalking the Beast Called Dinner

  20. Primary Sources

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  For Aaron

  PROLOGUE

  “Everything takes five minutes.”

  This was the first decree of my line cooking career, and it made no sense.

  My eyes flicked fearfully to the industrial clock hanging on the wall; I was too scared to look at it and too scared not to. On this night, my first working the hot line at Danube after three months’ purgatory on the salad station, I knew that the chef was going to yell at me—but I didn’t yet understand how the clock, its minute hand lurching toward the dinner hour, would be the one to kick my ass.

  I’d shown up an hour early, but T1, one of two Austrian sous chefs named Thomas in our kitchen, was already prepping my station, presiding over three wide-bottomed pots on the steel flat-top stove, two filled with violently boiling water, the other with a hissing swarm of sliced shallots turning from gold to bronze. He stood in front of a cutting board popping the cores out of halved mature carrots with a long knife. Wedging the butt of his slicer into the faint line between flesh and core, he torqued for pressure and ejected each light orange center with a pop, leaving behind a smooth carrot canoe. This operation he performed without looking down, as if he were shelling peas.

  As I hustled to set up my cutting board next to his, I asked him, in my not-very-Minnesota-nice blunt way that actually sort of works in professional kitchens, where speed is of the essence: “Don’t some things take longer than that? Like making risotto?”

  T1 held his knife loosely and dully replied, “Risotto isn’t the only thing you’re making,” then pointed his blade toward the pots on the stove. As if to demonstrate the heroic number of tasks that he could fit into a mere five minutes, he hooked a spoon head into the handle of the pot of caramelizing shallots and jerked it to the cool edge of the stove, did the same to his sauteuse of red wine syrup, its center erupting magenta bubbles, and had already turned back to the industrial blender of parsley water, now jet-washing the canister in violent green, before he repeated: “Everything takes five minutes.”

  So apparently time was not time, and that subject was closed.

  Before I knew it, while I’d been mincing shallots and herbs, T1 had stocked my vegetable entremet station and I slid—fully prepped but not in any way prepared—into my first dinner service on the hot line. We cooks on the meat side stood shoulder to shoulder like soldiers in formation, facing a mirror image of fish-side cooks across the hot double-sided flat-top. The Austrian chef de cuisine—Generalissimo Mario Lohninger, Chef David Bouley’s chief henchman—assumed his position at the head of the flat-top, at the white-cloth-draped area known as the pass. There he stood waiting for finished plates to land for his inspection before handing them off to the food runners, who would steer them high overhead, like spaceships, to their proper tables. And then it was on.

  Firing Table 16! Two cheese ravioli—one gröstl—and one skate! Followed by two venison—a dorade—and a squab!

  The two cheese rav was me, as well as the garnish for the gröstl, the Austrian term for the mixed bag of leftovers Tyrolean grandmothers might fry up in a cast-iron pan for skiers returning home from the mountain, otherwise known as hash. Our gröstl was made with a lobster claw, a pad of seared foie gras, and some tissue-thin veal tortellini—you know, just some scraps from the kitchen. The cook to my left flung the lobster and the foie gras on a metal sizzle plate in my direction like a bartender slides a beer down the bar. I dropped a circle of red wine reduction on a white plate, topped it with the foie, the lobster, and then three veal tortellini. I crowned the lobster with a frothy head of milky green-pea foam, its bubbles rapidly winking shut one by one, and then turned around to whip up a small pot of corn sauce for my cheese ravioli.

  “Soigné!” Mario snapped, calling for perfection in French—the universal language of European kitchens—tapping his finger on the rim of my ravioli plate. My eyes followed his finger. Five ravioli in a row, but the triangle points weren’t lining up. One was upside down. I flipped it over.

  “Oh, bueno!” he mocked in the kitchen Spanish he was picking up in New York. “Corn sauce, Ahmy! On y va,” he urged. “The skate is dying here for your käise ravioli.”

  As the chaos of the nighttime dinner kitchen mounted—the wall of sound increasing, the space between whirling cooks decreasing, the hot liquids seething, the cavalcade of tiny copper pots being chucked into the dirty bin in a crescendo of clunks—I located a weird stillness in myself. As the intensity tightened, the more my inner reverb began to hum.

  Visually, it was a swarm. The portions were small, the tasting menus were long, and the plates were Technicolor. There was glowing red-beet-and-wine-soaked pasta. Neon-pink watermelon juice. Spinach puree the color of artificial turf. The night was an endless parade of bright sauces and shapes—blots and foamy peaks and swirled commas—accompanied by the fervent clacking of fine porcelain.

  Before long, my vision became so nearsighted that I could barely see beyond the rim of the plate in front of me. The parts of dishes for which I was responsible began to look like familiar characters: floppy half-wilted leaves of spinach standing up on two legs before falling into corn sauce; tufts of horse
radish cream swirling in cumulus patterns into rusty swaths of short rib jus; marble-size bone-marrow dumplings topped with fleecy tan beanies of buttery bread crumbs.

  The cooks blindly moved copper pots around on the flat-top as smoothly as professional card sharks. Their movements looked at first to be haphazard but turned out to be as precise as animal instinct. Cooking here was all about caramelized edges and pooling juices and delicious pan-smudge and spoon-spit—that moment when you’re plating and a final droplet of sauce falls at the last possible second onto an otherwise pristine plate, when the thing is so damned beautiful that the spoon itself looks to be drooling.

  It was a mad world, but I got it. The food at the center of the plate was protected from the tumult of the kitchen—all its split-second saves and sharp words eddied at the perimeter, protecting the still eye of the storm. Remarkably, the two coexisted in a kind of harmony, like a steaming roast at the center of a moody family table. It kind of reminded me of home.

  Very quickly I came to understand what T1 meant about the five minutes. Jobs like cleaning soft-shell crabs or trimming artichokes both took more than five minutes of any veteran cook’s time, but the point was that proper hustling addled the brain, causing a thirteen-hour day to fly by like a six-hour one, and each thirty-minute block to feel like five minutes.

  The kitchen operated on a bunch of these different clocks, only one of which corresponded to Greenwich Mean Time. The synchronized cooking of each dish for each table was coordinated by shouting out the minutes to plating. Once a table was fired (“Fire Table 22!”), the meat roast cook called out his requirement (“Five away on the venison!”) and we all counted down from there. “Two on the squab!” the guy to my left shouted. “Two on the dorade!” answered the fish cook. These minutes did not correspond to the exact ticking seconds but to a shared feeling of the same imaginary descending time line. Nightly, fights sprang up over the accuracy of a cook’s minutes. (“Serge, dude, your two is more like six!”)

  The point is, if you cook on the line for long, your personal time signature will change. It took about three months for my internal clock to flip over, but when it did, the time I spent cooking on the line slowed down and everything before and after sped up. My free time outside of work narrowed to a sliver—and even then, on the street or in the grocery store, I no longer just walked: I beelined, I took the turns tight, I dodged to the right, I foresaw the road ahead. Because once you’ve taught yourself to shave seconds off every task in order to be the most efficient, quickest cook you can be, it’s hard to stop. Like saving precious moments of life, that’s how essential it feels.

  To me, time in the kitchen was like a loophole, a bubble, a cure. Once I found it, I crawled inside and told myself I never wanted to leave.

  1

  MY KITCHEN AFFLICTION

  The place from which I’d come before cooking at Danube couldn’t have been any more different if I’d imagined it—and sometimes I think I did.

  To trace my journey to that kitchen in backward fashion, you have to climb up into a twelve-foot U-Haul truck with me and my boyfriend, Aaron, a truck whose broken-down starter requires us to park each night on a downward-facing slope that will flip-flop-flip-flop the starter to life each morning and keep us driving…up, down, and around the tight hills of upstate New York; then along the thick blacktop artery that clings to the southern coast of Canada, stopping periodically—without cutting the engine—to pick up foam clamshells of fried perch-and-chips in the finger of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; across the stubby swamplands of Minnesota through ghostly towns called Ball Club and Remer and Federal Dam on thinning two-lane blacktop; all the way to the dead-end, minimum-maintenance road that leads us back to the house Aaron built in the Two Inlets State Forest. This tall, one-room log cabin was best known to others for what it lacked—running water, electricity, all modern amenities—but was to us our scrappy home of the past three years. This humble place of origin, whose housekeeping hardships we generally ignored, gives you a pretty good idea why it never occurred to us to return a rental truck with a nonworking starter.

  Aaron and I hadn’t just driven a few thousand miles from northern Minnesota to Brooklyn; we’d also jumped forward a good hundred years. Our early life together was nothing if not a creative use of the time machine. At the house in the woods, we pumped water by hand from our own sand point well and hauled it into the kitchen in plastic jugs. We kept our meat cold on blocks of ice, lit oil lamps for light when the sun went down, and showered outside in the breeze. On the hill jutting out into a swollen creek, home to a crew of honking swans and a natural stand of wild rice that separated us from neighbors for miles, we basically lived on an island of the 1880s within a sea of the late 1990s. I liked to think of it as our own private epoch, but looking back, I’d say we pretty much lived in our heads.

  I admit, when we first started dating—at ages twenty-four and twenty-one, respectively—and Aaron told me about his house I thought the whole enterprise sounded a little suspect. But that was before I came to understand his pragmatic optimism, his gift for turning flamboyant fantasies into realities that parade around the room as common sense.

  Before we dated, I’d known of Aaron vaguely for years. He was my childhood friend Sarah’s unusual older brother, one of our hometown’s only ratty-haired punks, the sequin-caped lead singer of a glam rock band, and a sculptor. By the time I met him, he had graduated from art school in Minneapolis, was recently divorced from his high school sweetheart, and had moved back home to Park Rapids to build his house in the woods. He thought of himself as an old man and mockingly referred to himself as “retired”—a joke that hid a key shift of perspective. Going against the prevailing wind that nudged all artists toward backup plans, he reacted by throwing himself a retirement party and signing up for AARP. Making art would not be a secondary pursuit for him, but plan A.

  And the new retiree was looking for a cheap retirement outpost. By building an off-the-grid house out in the country, he whittled his expenses down to nothing so that he could afford to work on artwork full-time.

  That was the public story.

  Privately, he also built the house because he was convinced that he was going to die. Only twenty-four years old but plagued with a bunch of mysterious physical symptoms (foggy thinking, odd blood tests, an unusual new tremor in his rib cage) he thought would kill him, he figured he’d better build the house he’d always dreamed of out on his family’s hunting land.

  Later we’d find out this wasn’t just run-of-the-mill hypochondria talking, but instead the first bubble of a sedimentary anxiety—the artist’s malaise—to burst to the surface. His sensitivity was largely spatial, ticklish to place. Sprawling big-box stores with thrumming fluorescent lights, suburban houses with overly wide hallways, and blinding expanses of Sheetrock—those were bad. But a small, low-lit house with high ceilings and lots of head space out in the middle of the woods felt right.

  Fortunately, his health problems faded as his house rose up. Without any power tools—just a shovel, a cordless drill, his grandpa Annexstad’s old Swede saw, and his own young back—he built his place right where his ten-year-old self had thought it should go: on a far hill overlooking the creek, miles away from the nearest electrical box, at the eighty-acre plot’s most scenic, most inconvenient spot. When he was done, he dug out a garden and planted a few lilac bushes and thought of it in the future tense, as a homestead—in the evenings, a dreamer’s somewhat lonely homestead.

  Soon after, he got a girl to live back there with him, and that girl was me.

  My decision to move to a rustic one-room house way out in the middle of the yawning forest was a puzzlement to my parents, my friends, and initially even to myself. Aaron’s house lay only a precarious twenty miles away from Park Rapids, the hometown to which I’d never expected my postcollege self to return. As I drove past the green Park Rapids sign POPULATION, 2,961, I saw my former isolation with clear eyes. My two-stoplight hometown was deep in lake
country, four hours north of Minneapolis–St. Paul, and hours away from any town that might be considered a city. It was flush with nostalgia and pine trees but pretty short on great restaurants, bookstores, or cultural events—everything I’d come to love during my college years in Minneapolis. It wasn’t exactly where I envisioned myself settling. I can track this trajectory shift back to a single moment, the coda to my Park Rapids childhood: When I turned sixteen, the winter my parents split up, I learned how to properly whip my car into a doughnut (what we called a “shitty”) on the icy tundra of the empty nighttime grocery-store parking lot. My friends and I were good girls and didn’t usually do such things, but we assiduously practiced our car twirls—speeding, whipping the wheel, and spinning wildly out of control—feeling the circadian swoop low in our bellies, as if by mastering it we could conquer our fears of moving out and moving on. When my family split and we left a few months later, it was as though I’d been interrupted midspin, leaving me for years afterward with an irrational surplus of feeling for my hometown. It was like a dumb phantom limb that wouldn’t stop tingling.

  Going almost home, to Aaron’s house twenty miles north, felt close, but reassuringly out-of-bounds. It wasn’t exactly a homecoming, but a do-over.

  At the time I pinned my attraction to the place—in addition to the romance of shacking up with my new boyfriend in the woods—on our large garden and the chance to grow all our own food. As was typical of a late-1990s liberal-arts college graduate, especially one who had spent her senior year combing through farm women’s journals for her thesis on outsider American lit, I was burning with desire to cook like the pioneers.