by Amy Thielen
Oh, yes, very probably, most certainly yes, the director said, nodding vigorously. My mom’s face glowed with a rapturous inner light.
“Je t’aime Céline Dion!” she boomed, getting it mostly right.
Our mission here was done.
—
On the second day of the trek toward Laguiole, a dot of a town smack in the middle of the map of France, the road began to narrow and wind around the hills even more tightly than the day before. My mom was starting to sigh about this ever-lengthening side trip and even I was beginning to think, This had better be mind-blowingly good. I hadn’t been keeping track, but it seemed that she had already spent a ridiculous amount of money. We nearly drove right by the innocuous sign: MICHEL BRAS was printed in light type on a whiteboard, announcing the entrance to a thin black asphalt trail. Looking up, I could see the restaurant, a glass-walled building perched on the hill, as flat as the horizon itself.
This is the working French countryside, where men in dusty overalls drink beer (not wine) in the tabac in the morning. We had just stopped at one, looking to buy some water, which cracked up the crowd standing at the bar. Their big cheeks shook and one of the guys walked around the bar to get me an empty container, indicating that I should fill it with tap water. I couldn’t make out anything he said but “l’eau,” so the bartender translated. “Best water you’ll ever drink, he’s saying, comes from right here.” I felt sheepish, as if I had just walked into the Two Inlets Country Store back home and asked the crew sitting at the horseshoe bar where I could buy some nice imported New Zealand venison. They would have laughed and the owner would have slipped into his apartment in the back, grabbed a white package from his deep freezer, lobbed it to me, and said, “Take some of mine! We have plenty.” It occurred to me that we’d been driving for days, straight into the midwestern heart of France, a place where common sense ruled.
Any rural posturing stopped at the door of Michel Bras. The building was striking and yet unobtrusive, a contemporary jetty cantilevered gracefully out from the tallest plateau. It had a helipad on its roof.
They seated us in front of the enormous picture window that seemed to slice off one side of the restaurant, looking out onto a grassy meadow stuck with little daisies. One of them was in a vase on the table next to a dish of yellow butter and a bowl of homemade crackers as brittle as old paper. All of the butter in France was richer than any I’ve ever known, but this one tasted of sunburned grass and of time left to sit out and absorb the local humors and moods. Real cultured butter tastes like culture.
Every dish seemed to have a clarity to it, a message: “This is the spring day we took a picnic on the hill.” “This is a gray day’s supper in front of an open fire.” “This is the melt and the high water and the first green chives.” “This makes up for the week of relentless freaking winds.”
The cooking at Michel Bras wrestled with place in a way that I’d never known possible, somehow conveying the range of emotions that belonged to those who live all their lives in one spot and see their childhood refracted through the lens of their adulthood. This is the middle of nowhere and the center of the universe. It contained the hometown struggle set against the backdrop of the landscape. I had been wrong: The local pride did not end at the entrance to Bras; this was where it bloomed open.
The fourth course was a flat puddle of fawn-colored sauce encircled with a fairy ring of mushrooms, small ones I’d never seen before. I ate it slowly, looking for the fireworks I’d found in everything we’d had up to that point, but couldn’t find them. My mom seemed to read my mind.
“See, I love this one. Everything doesn’t have to change you. Sometimes things can just taste of what they are.”
And that’s what mothers are for, to remind their children of the simple things, of their particular, unspectacular, indelible histories.
“Oh, look at that.” She nodded toward the table next to ours, where an older woman in a long skirt, not dressed as a waiter or a cook, was ladling a creamy puree high into the air from a copper pot, stretching it like taffy. It was aligot, a regional specialty, smooth ivory potatoes stringy with masses of local tomme fraîche de l’Aubrac cheese. The waiter assisted her, scooping out pillows of the potatoes and making quenelles of them with two spoons. “I think the chef has his mother making the potatoes!”
Indeed, he did.
The family devotion to this hill in the middle of France was palpable. And a gust of bittersweet homesickness for my own small house in the hill in the middle of nowhere arrived with the dessert.
—
The thing about me and my mom is that even though our mother-daughter issues hum below the surface of our cooking lives, they always rise up through the food channels. No matter how sore the conflict, when the dust settles we will always return to take our places on either side of the stove to produce heroic quantities of food—whether laughing or fighting or both. We are mother and daughter, but, above all, we are two cooks in a kitchen.
That summer after the trip to France, we reunited to make the food for my brother Bob’s firstborn’s baptismal party. How we could return from an eating tour like that (a gastronaut’s blowout by anyone’s standards), and come to stand in my mother’s apartment kitchen in St. Paul, stirring a vat of diced chicken and canned water chestnuts glued together with murky, industrial, carrageenan-rich canned “soup,” the essential fixative in the Midwestern hotdish, is a total puzzler. And yet, when faced with the prospect of feeding fifty people a hot lunch, my mom reached into her recipe box, and into her past, and pulled out a card for Macy’s Hot Chicken Salad—known to all Minnesotans as chicken hotdish. Now, before it has dawned on her how bleak it sounds compared to what we’ve just lovingly gorged ourselves on in Grandpa Dion’s old country, we are already too far into it to turn back.
So here we are. I have pinned my knee into a yellow-flowered vinyl chair for leverage, because dragging a spoon through this quantity of chicken-chunk mixture is as hard as rowing a boat into the wind. I am amazed by the sounds coming out of it. Pleef!, it gasses, making the very same sound your sweaty lower back does when it disengages from a hot vinyl seatback. Like an elementary-school kid, I burst out laughing and say, “What did this thing eat?”
“It’s got indigestion!” she says.
My mom picks off a floater of chicken and lobs it into her mouth for a taste, and I think back to the way Michel Bras’s mother plucked at her potato puree to check its spring: Both of them make the same semi-agreeable “eh” kind of face.
But now my mom is crushing bags of crispy kettle chips and then raking them over the surface of the hotdish so that they will brown into an even gold crown across the top, and I have to admit, it is impossible not to pinch off a chip, its bottom soaked in a salty, sticky, implausibly delicious cream. What we are making is one gigantic, addictive dip.
The glorious junkiness of this thing does not elude me. For once, it is wonderfully comic. Mom and I are both hooting, noses up, then pitching forward, flimsy stems in a rollicking wind. Her famous hoot has been reduced to a whistling high C.
“Heeee!” she wheezes, hardly audible. “It’s no French chicken fricassee!”
She pulls down the low oven door and squats, reaching into the oven to take it out, and then stops and bends over in ripples of laughter and defeat.
The giant hotdish stands before us, the puddles of fat from the melted cheese twinkling with the reflection from the fluorescent lights. It has turned out perfectly, and we and all of our relatives will demolish it with relish. It turns out that the full poundage of our canned-soup chicken-and-cheese Midwestern heritage, the rich, dense weight of it, is too much for either of us to bear alone. I look for the other pot holder.
It’ll take the two of us to pull this sucker out of the oven.
4
MEAT VERSUS VEGETABLES
You can generally tell how a woman was raised by the way she wipes down a countertop.
Some mothers of my generation shooed thei
r daughters out of the kitchen in the hopes that they’d never have to toil in it and gave them little direct instruction. Others, like my mom, insisted that their daughters could “do anything” they wanted to do, but then continued to school them in the housewifely arts anyway.
When I was nine years old, my mom taught me how to wipe the countertop in the following very specific way: You soak the washcloth in steaming-hot water, wring it out hard with both hands so that it no longer drips, then stretch the cloth flat on the countertop and lay your hand on it, middle finger pointing toward a corner, that corner flipped back up over your fingers like a toboggan. This way, when you wipe (and if you haven’t seen this demonstrated, let me tell you, it’s a goddamned miracle), the corner of the cloth stays up over your hand. “With a flat expanse of cloth, you can pick up crumbs,” my mom stressed, her body leaning into the surface, running her cloth-covered nail tip into the crevice between the stove and the countertop. Her face, hanging above the shiny surface, was smooth and contented. Not joyous, not sad, but what you might call Placid Wiping Face. Unconsciously I absorbed the look of spine-tingling satisfaction she gave the gleaming countertop and knew it contained something even greater: hope for tomorrow and its many projects. If you’re despondent about the future, you don’t wipe like that. You let the crumbs lie.
The other way to wipe a countertop is to distractedly grab the wet cloth in a bunch, the sloopy ends dripping water, and run it along the surface, pretending you don’t see the crumbs that remain—which is how Aaron does it, and how many people do it, and which still generally gets the job done.
But inside my mom lived many generations of female ancestors who elevated mundane household maintenance into a craft. Women who wiped their countertops with rags so hot they steamed, who bleached their cutting boards monthly; women who thought that walking away from a crusty dish to let it soak would be like inviting the demon himself into her kitchen. From my barstool perch on the other side of the counter, I watched my mom wipe the mouths of glass condiment bottles, digging the crud out of the rim threads before putting the lids back on. I watched her transfer diminishing leftovers into smaller containers before putting them back into the fridge. For jobs too fine for a washcloth, she grabbed the old graying toothbrush from the bucket beneath the sink and frantically brushed the tight corners. The level of detail to which my mom and her mom, Grandma Dion, cleaned their kitchens was borderline obsessive-compulsive, and yet it pretty much sums up the entirety of professional cooking. Via the simple act of wiping, they passed on to me about 85 percent of what I’d need later on to survive my years of cooking in Manhattan kitchens—which is to say, the percentage of line cooking that depends on your ability to keep shit clean.
—
After my summer trip to France, I went back to Danube for a second helping—five or so nonillustrious months on the entremet station—before quitting once again. Out of fear that I was becoming addicted to the Bouley brand of dysfunction, I felt I needed to move on to another kitchen to see what else was out there. My next cooking job was at Daniel Boulud’s db bistro moderne (all lowercase), where everyone, whether subjected to housewife training or not, knew how to properly wipe down a countertop. Unlike at Danube, where I was often the sole woman, this place was flush with female cooks—and from what I could tell, they were all angry.
Jean-François, db bistro’s chef de cuisine, assigned me to train with Julie, who was working the cold station but moving up to entremet. She was to be my handler, and she did not look real happy about it.
Upon first meeting, all cooks posture to each other to let the other know exactly at which level of the game they’re playing. Men in the kitchen generally do this subtly, dropping clues of their experience whenever they find it convenient. Women in the kitchen get right to the point. The serious ones generally play to win.
Julie let me know right off that she had cooked for so-and-so and so-and-so, and also at Café Boulud for years, and was only working the cold station as a favor to the chef. They were short-handed because some pisser—naturally, a girl—had quit.
“Ugh,” she said. “The last girl sucked. Let’s see if you can do better.”
I wasn’t sure. The prep list was serpentine.
At the time, db bistro moderne was Chef Boulud’s third restaurant. He shared a French cooking pedigree and initials with Bouley, but they differed in temperament. Boulud’s comments were delivered at a higher volume, and he was more briskly businesslike. And because he also ran two other restaurants—Café Boulud and his flagship, Daniel—he was also less likely to be hanging around during service.
db bistro was in the theater district, meaning it courted the hell horde of pretheater dining: tables in by 5:30, out by 7:15. Unlike at Danube, there was no gradual slide into the dinner slam. And being newly opened, the restaurant was also mobbed with the usual New York City scene-chasers; there was usually one at each table who ordered the $27 db burger, a high-end ground-beef blend stuffed with braised short ribs and a center chunk of foie gras, topped with two petals of tomato confit, and a tuft of pale green frisée. Dubbed “the most expensive burger ever” by the press shortly after it appeared on the menu, the db burger pretty much had its own public relations team and absolutely required its own cook. There was one guy who just made burgers all day long, pressing the tri-ply meat cake into the clean lid of a mayonnaise jar to mold it, filling sheet tray after sheet tray with burger pucks. The rest of us put hundreds of portions of tomato confit—peeled plum halves that shrank slowly overnight in a bath of olive oil—into low ovens every night before we left.
Apparently I had not learned my lesson at Danube and had not found a mellower follow-up restaurant, if such a thing even existed in Manhattan. The schedule in this newly opened place was after my dad’s own workaholic heart: It was thirteen-hour days if you were quick enough to finish your work and six-day weeks. And sometimes, if for some reason Jean-François couldn’t finagle your day off, you lost that day and had to work fourteen days in a row. This happened at inopportune times, like during the Christmas holidays. Everybody got off for Christmas Day, though, because the restaurant was closed, and the lucky ones were even sent home with a Christmas capon from Daniel Boulud himself. I quietly shared my grumbling with my friend, the Scottish meat cook. He had introduced me to a special little snack of cribbed French fries shoved into a soft bun, “the chip butty” (pronounced “buh-hee”), and tried to raise our collective Christmas spirits by making an elaborate Scottish haggis out of lamb lights (lungs) and heart and tongue, assembled after he’d finished his significant prep list. Returning to work on December 26 at six-thirty in the morning, the Scot and I trudged up the steps together and he said, turning his cuffs back, his kind eyes drooping at the corners, “So I guess that was the ’olidays, then?”
Unlike the Scot, Julie didn’t seem to expect days off. She continued to ride me, following me around like we were twins, pointing out where I should have transferred my slightly-too-small amount of lobster mayonnaise into a container of a more befitting size, reminding me to cut my labeling tape with a scissors so that it had perpendicular corners instead of amateurish ripped ones, shrieking when I tested the artichokes barigoule for doneness with a meat fork, which left two small holes in the olive-green flesh. “Pinch them to test! Don’t leave holes!” (We sliced them and the holes wouldn’t even show, I thought, but whatever.) Whenever I appeared calm and in control—clearly not hustling enough—she ordered, “Come on, lady! Move your dick!”
I followed her around, too. For one thing, I was learning an invaluable amount of precious info from her, every bit of which was making me a better cook, but I also trailed her in the way that the abused cling to their abusers. She didn’t like it when I got too close, though, and when we were lined up in the tight alley behind the hot line she hissed, “I can feel your dick in my ass,” and bounced me back a step with a well-placed bump.
Dear Jesus. I could have complained and resisted her, but there was no point.
Engaging would have just egged her on. So I decided to take that moment to internalize her teachings and truly improve. I heard her voice even when she wasn’t around, changing out containers, religiously rotating my mise en place to be FIFO compliant (first in, first out), stretching my plastic wrap neurotically over the corners of the metal containers until not a wrinkle in the plastic remained, until the taut top looked as see-through as glass and its containment was totally invisible. I ripped apart forty live lobsters every morning the same way she did: furiously. I screwed off the big claw and threw it into the big claw bin, the small into the small; I swiftly spun the tails apart from the bodies, then twisted and ripped out the middle fan of the tail, taking with it the ropy gray intestinal tract. Then, firmly holding the muscular clenching tail, I shoved a wooden skewer up that same poop chute to flatten it out and tossed it into the tail bin while its little arms were still waving good-bye. I didn’t stop to watch the arms stop fluttering; I moved on to the next one. And the next. Nor did I take a minute to clean the lobster juice spittle from my glasses in the middle of ripping lobsters, but instead waited until it piled up so thickly that I could hardly see, when I was done with all of them. I tried not to feel sorry for these creatures, as I knew that would slow me down. My lobster meat was fast disintegrating into a goo. It needed cooking, pronto.
If Julie’s predecessors, such as T1, had taught me to cook well fast, she taught me to cook well even faster, and for bigger numbers.
I was in the vegetable walk-in at the end of my shift organizing my day’s prep when she came in. She leaped up to the top shelves to grab a nearly empty box of watercress, then the last of the carrot carton and a half-gone box of limes, manically taking to heart her own advice to keep things neat, and pitched everything violently into the center like she was making a pile for a bonfire. Something was really stoking her.