by Amy Thielen
And we were constantly replenishing the salad bar. Arlys would toddle out there to check the lineup, her nude pantyhose drooping down to puddle around her ankles like excess skin, while one of the lowly kitchen assistants trailed quietly behind her holding a plastic bowl of luminous, unbroken Jell-O.
Jorg always had a new five-dollar-an-hour summer hire, usually a teenage boy, to dice the carrots, onions, and celery for the soups and of course to shred the potatoes for the hash browns. During the height of the tourist season the restaurant would sometimes serve over four hundred people a day, and as a great percentage of them ordered breakfast at any hour, we easily went through three large plastic bus tubs of shredded potatoes daily.
Jorg made hash browns as his mother, Gisela, had, beginning with a stockpot of russets. He covered the potatoes with water and when the water came to a boil he turned off the heat, let them sit for five minutes, drained them, and shredded each potato by hand. If they’d been fried in real butter instead of the mysterious semiliquid orange grease we squirted on them, they would have been phenomenal, but they were still easily the best hash browns around.
That summer I shredded my share, running the cold half-cooked russets against the sharp face of the box grinder, trying to imagine my arm as a pumping gear. When I was called away to work the grill, Jorg would stand at the prep table and furiously shred them himself, visibly fighting off childhood memories.
Jorg was loyal to his mother’s recipes, pounding out the schnitzels and sprinkling them with red paprika salt; boiling whole peeled carrots until they were as soft as putty and cutting them with a crinkle cutter; adding fresh grated nutmeg to the chicken noodle soup. Half of the cooking there was beautifully old-school and half was straight off the truck. He’d bring in a hog that he’d raised on the family farm, toting it over his shoulder, and we’d spend the morning running the slices through the tenderizer (which looked like an old-fashioned mangle iron) and freezing them in packages. His German noodles were particularly firm and chewy when fresh, and had he warmed them up in a pan with a little brown butter, they would have rivaled my mother’s. But out of habit he refrigerated them and then re-warmed them in a sieve set into simmering murky water until they were hot and overblown—at which point we plopped them onto the plate unadorned. The rye bread, moist with added mashed potatoes and thick buttermilk, was too soft and heavenly on its first day to go through the slicer, so he waited up to a day or two until it hardened to slice and serve it.
The lesser items of the book-length menu traveled a straight path from the freezer to the deep-fryer: fish patties, slipped between two butter-toasted halves of a confectionery bun; chicken-fried steak, squiggled with tan gravy base; breaded shrimp, fried into tight fists and sent off with a twisted lemon slice. The freezer also contained the sea sticks—fake crab. For chef salad orders, we thawed one out in the microwave, letting it ride in there until we could smell its peculiar crustaceous funk, deep but not offensive. A typical lunch special was a grilled ham and cheese with a cup of soup for $4.25.
One Saturday, the kitchen gears halted. A waitress didn’t show up, leaving the one whom Jorg accused of stealing from the till to work alone. Everyone was ordering smoked pork chop breakfasts, and we had to cut more chops on the saw. It was then that the five-dollar teenager dropped a tub of hash browns on the floor in a puddle of water. Jorg yelled at the kid with such force that he seemed to blow backward, his white apron a sail. Within seconds he bolted out the side door. We were down a kid and a tub of browns and the little bell on the front door was going crazy. People were just gushing in.
“Arlys!” Jorg bellowed. “Put on more potatoes!”
A food-service delivery guy showed up in the back hallway and called out, “Hey, Jorg!” Jorg spun around and then walked slowly to the back, reeling in his fury as if it were a loose rope. He spilled the entirety of his terrible morning, all the way up to the dumped hash browns, to the Sysco guy. The guy said, “Don’t you have a Hobart?” and pointed to the enormous standing mixer across the kitchen. It was an animal, six feet tall, with beefy steel arms.
Jorg nodded. “Ja.”
“Why don’t you use the Hobart shredder attachment to shred your potatoes?”
Jorg stiffened and his eyes drifted slowly across the room. “Ja…I could do that.”
Within a few minutes he had the machine going and was pushing potatoes through the top, eyes gleaming, laughing and carrying on like he had just struck water. Arlys stood on the sidelines, a carrot in one hand and a swivel peeler in the other, too shocked by the change to speak. In a voice about as joyful as I’d ever heard him, Jorg said, “We got six tubs of hash browns, you guys!” and whacked the walk-in door shut with his heel.
—
There was rarely a moment when I didn’t love that job, when I didn’t leave sweaty, with swirls of pancake batter splattered on my bare arms, totally content. Especially in late August after the tourists had left and my garden at home was finally ripening, all at once. Each day after coming home from work at four o’clock and pumping myself a full quart jar of bedrock-chilled water to drink, I filled the giant enamelware boiling water canner and the big water kettle, then brought them up the hill. My tomatoes were ripening rapid-fire and I was loving canning them, standing in front of my butcher block, leaning hard on one hip, blanching and peeling my heirloom romas. One year I grew San Marzanos, the next Amish Paste, but this year the best yet, Opalka. They grew huge and heavy. Eastern European tomatoes liked our climate. I concentrated on boiling them just enough—not too much, not too little—so that the thin outer epidermis of the tomato peeled off in one great whispery translucent sheet, leaving the smooth, basal tomato sublayer behind. Thus peeled, the tomatoes were comically slippery, almost impossible to hold, and were, I was sure of it, more flavorful than the carelessly blanched.
For weeks during the late-summer harvest, this was my routine. The needs of our place were beautifully predictable. But personally, down in my subconscious, my own needs were starting to fog up. I realized that my inner clock was ticking too slowly; real time was passing me by.
One day at the Schwarzwald I saw my dad’s order on the check wheel—chef salad, no eggs—and put his salad in the window, then padded out to the dining room with a cup of coffee and sat down at his table.
“So what are you doing now?” he asked me, making it sound official.
“I guess I’m having a cup of coffee with you. It’s slow. I can take a break.”
“No.” He leaned forward. “I mean, what are you doing with your life?”
This was the guy who, when pop-quizzed, never knew my college major, which hadn’t ever changed. (It was English.) He’d been coming in for lunch, eating the best chef salad I could make out of the scraps we had in the kitchen, and had never hinted that he expected something else from me. His complete lack of criticism was generally welcome—but his uncanny gift for suspending all judgment about his kids also sometimes left us without much guidance. At this moment, “What are you doing with your life?” was a question I was actually relieved to hear him ask. Out poured my idea, which I’d only just floated with Aaron a few nights before.
“I was kind of thinking of going to cooking school. In New York City. To become a chef.”
To my surprise, not only was my dad fully supportive, he was a cheerleader. “Then do it!” he said, raising a fist in the air. (“Do anything!” was probably more what he meant.)
It took me about three days to convince Aaron to move to New York. Ruralness was a part of his ethic, his story, his belief system. But his friends Rob and Sara and some others from Minneapolis were moving there to make art, and New York was doubtlessly the center of both the art world he needed and the cooking world I needed. The move seemed suddenly obvious.
I found a cooking school in the back of my latest Saveur magazine. It was in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, cost two-thirds less than the famous Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York, and would only take five month
s of my time. Aaron overcame his reticence by coming up with a plan: his brother, Matt, was a pilot who flew planes carrying checks regularly out of Washington, D.C., and whenever he wanted to get back home Aaron could simply take the train down to D.C. and hop the plane home with Matt. His exit strategy figured out, Aaron agreed: New York City it would be. Our plan was to live there six months of the year and then move back home to Two Inlets in the summers to garden. It would be like moving to Minneapolis for the winter, but just a little farther. Or so we thought.
I flew out, solo, three weeks ahead of our move to find us an apartment. I walked the streets in Brooklyn, idiotically carrying my backpack on my front as had been advised, looking for addresses of apartments I’d found on Craigslist. After seeing a bunch of completely unsuitable dives, I finally handed my money over to a guy who was subletting his one-room studio with a sleeping loft in the on-the-cusp-of-gentrifying neighborhood of Fort Greene. He cautioned me, as he slid my three months’ rent, a thick pile of bills, into his coat pocket, that the landlord didn’t allow sublets. If he saw us, we’d be thrown out on our asses. If I had only known then that he planned to take our monthly rent and not pay the landlord…It was to be a newcomer’s storybook welcome to the intoxicating bedlam that is New York City.
Back at the house in Two Inlets, we got ready to move. We packed up a few things—our clothes, our tools, our freshly harvested wild rice, my canned pickles and tomatoes and preserves—all of which fit into the back of a twelve-foot U-Haul truck, and planned to set out the next day for Brooklyn.
Now that we had a secondhand solar panel from Dave, and the car battery to power it from Bruce, we were inching our way toward modern living out at Hazelbrush. On our last night there, as we walked back from the outhouse, our new solar-powered electric life glared out of the windows. We felt a little embarrassed about it, as if we’d somehow made a devil’s bargain. With the new overhead fixture illuminating the room to the corners, my evening reading lost all of its shadow-weight and felt about sixty percent less compelling. Compared to our formerly oil-lamp-lit house whose blurred edges faded into the black night, whose dim orange windows promised secret historical-society contents, this new brightness shot from the windows up to the house’s roofline so that we could see it for what it really was: a sturdy wooden pole shed dwarfed by swaying trees, with two sharp windows cut for eyes. Before, it had felt so monumental, so towering. Now it looked small, like a house in one of those decorative Christmas villages.
Like it wasn’t even real.
17
POUNDS AND PENNIES
After seven years of cooking in New York City, I arrived at the moment that I can now pinpoint as the end of the end: I was sitting on my haunches behind the pastry counter in the basement of Cru, scarfing a hot duck meatball on a roll, trying to erase the sour taste of discontent in my mouth, plotting my defection. It was the tipping point. My future in restaurants was in peril.
Aaron was faring better. He had quit carpentry to make art full-time. Not only that, he was selling every piece he made, putting us, for the first time in our life together, into the financial black. His career as an artist outweighed mine for both primacy and drama, a shift in focus for which I was thankful—but that meant that it was time for us to have the talk.
Aaron and I both knew that someday we would return to our house in the woods to sit on the porch and grow old, but for now our loyalties were evenly split between the city and the country. We thought of both places as equally dramatic: the country for its stunning remoteness, the city for its relentless density.
Like classic expatriates, we were a little addicted to the outsider feeling that accompanied every return, and our imaginations were always attuned to the place where we weren’t. We basically lived in each place with one foot in the other. In Brooklyn, we thought of ourselves as rural people on a long sojourn, listened to a steady diet of old country music, and bemoaned the loss of our multigenerational social circle back home. (Where are all the older people?) When we went home for the summer, we felt like visiting New Yorkers, seemed not to need Waylon or Willie, and missed New York’s creative culture, its museums, its restaurants, its fellow artists and cooks.
But nine years into our relationship, the same split loyalty to both country and city that had originally kept us teeter-tottering between homes began to dip to one side—at least it did for me. Our youth was waning; at some point we’d have to make a choice on which side to land. At the present moment it looked like Brooklyn, where we could each make a living in our respective careers, was the more responsible choice.
Sitting at our tiny dining-room table facing the windows that overlooked congested Atlantic Avenue, Aaron plumbed the depths of his algae-green spinach soup, his spoon clinking, telegraphing to me his wish for a little texture. He’s not a puree guy. Not even for one as thin and elegant as this one, spiked with both truffle oil and melted clouds of Taleggio cheese—an aphrodisiac double-down.
No amount of seduction could stop him from saying what I knew was coming. The ghost in the room—a black-and-white photo of our house in the woods—hung on the wall like one of our ancestors. It was spring, that time of year. I knew what he was thinking. The road less traveled begins to disappear, and I had to admit that it was true: Our dirt driveway back home had started to blur at the edges with brush. The forest was starting to reclaim it.
“I think we should take the money I’ve made this year to pay for a new studio building back home,” he said, testing the waters. “Eventually, I’m going to need a place to work back there, and now’s the time. I’ve already called Vern and he can do it.”
“You’ve already called Vern?” I put down my spoon. He meant Vern Schultz, a carpenter neighbor whose skills were in high demand.
I was not game for spending our precious surplus cash on our impractical place back home. No. I was settled here. I was hoping we could use that money to buy a place in Brooklyn, or at the very least burrow into a better rental and hold on to it as prices rose, because they always rose. I cursed the intrusion of our original plan. It was getting inconvenient.
He continued. “And then we’re just going to have to hook up to the grid.”
“What?” I said, shocked to realize that the power lust with which I’d previously struggled could be so easily bought. We could now afford to run the power line two miles down our driveway to the house—if we chose to.
“Running power back there will give us the thing we need more of, and that’s time,” he ramped up, having obviously prepared his argument. “You can’t spend all your time heating up water for dishes and I can’t spend all my time lugging it. And I’m going to need to run power tools in my studio.”
My first thought was, Then I’m getting a stand mixer. Instead I challenged him: “Don’t you need to stay here, where the art world is?”
“Don’t you always say you want to cook out of the garden?” he shot back. “I need to be wherever I can make the most work. There, we’ll both have more time and more space.”
He was making it sound logical, even audacious, to ply our crafts at our home in the middle of nowhere, he with his Japanese chisels, me with my Japanese knives.
“Besides,” Aaron said, inverting the cheesiest of New York clichés with a maddening grin, “if you can make it in Minnesota, you can make it anywhere.” He rested his case.
Paradoxically, the minute we had enough money to relieve the constant stress of trying to make it in New York, I felt my claws for staying in the city retract. For years I’d let Aaron carry the heavy weight of pining for home, but in truth Two Inlets had its hooks in me—even more so if it had electricity. He might have built the house, but we built the place together. Between the creek full of wild rice, our garden, the orchard, and the trails that cut through acres of wild raspberries, we had built an edible kingdom. It was a cook’s paradise.
And it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that place of origin was the primary tool in any chef’s toolbox. Dishe
s that leaned too hard on culinary trends felt slightly derivative, no matter how technically perfect they were. The most powerful cooking I’d ever tasted—Michel Bras’s Trout with Milk Skin that mimicked the clotted top of his mother’s cream; Bouley’s Scallop with Ocean Herbal that was thick with the pulpy vegetables his grandmother had cooked in the brushfire coals; Shea’s Tomato-Sauced Ricotta Cavatelli that pulled hard on his Italian-American upbringing—had sprung organically from taste memories. The link to the past was what made these dishes contemporary and what made them original. Even if I wouldn’t be cooking professionally in Two Inlets, I knew that it was time for me to play around with the ingredients I had access to there. I was a proud Midwesterner, and yet here I was, making purees instead of stews; I never made anything that called up my personal history. I closed my eyes. It was either a bad game of Monopoly or the story of my life or—just maybe—my fate: in order to move forward, I had to move a few steps back.
Aaron knew me too well. I hadn’t helped him plant those cherry trees or dig out that garden by hand for nothing. I gave him, and Vern, the green light to build the studio. The next day Aaron called the power company and sent the check that would hook our place up to the twenty-first century.
—
A few weeks later I gave Shea my notice at Cru. We sublet our Brooklyn apartment and moved back home to our house for a three-month summer, which we hadn’t done since our wedding in 2002. We immediately planted the garden. I carefully unpacked my Japanese knives in my incongruously rustic kitchen—the propane stove, the water jugs above the sink, the buckets below. The new electric line powered a few more lights, but we didn’t have the money to go all the way and plumb the house for running water. Not having a job, and not seeing a way to get one, I concentrated on our daily three squares. I picked vegetables from the garden, brought them up the hill, cooked them, and then we ate them. The amount of cooking that would have taken me just an hour or two back in a restaurant kitchen now filled an entire day. Within weeks of arriving from New York, my internal clock had slowed to a calming tick.