Olivia

by Judith Rossner

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  For Ray and Nancy

  What did the Zen Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor?

  “Make me one with everything.”

  It was my intention that this memoir be a lighthearted kitchen romance, My Life in Food. I would describe how, the daughter of two professors, I was drawn to cooking as a small child, eventually became a professional chef, and after working for years in Italy, returned to the States to become known as the talky-impulsive host of the TV show “Pot Luck.” I meant to glide lightly over my marriage to Angelo Ferrante and life with our daughter, Olivia. If I was supremely comfortable with mishaps before an audience and occasionally courted disaster to liven up my show, I’m far less easy with the mistakes and misunderstandings of real life and had no desire to recount them to strangers.

  I was first diverted by the question of names. My maiden name was Sindler. I’d changed it automatically when I married Angelo in 1974, and there’d never been any question of going back to Sindler when we divorced. If Ferrante suggested someone I was not, neither was I a Sindler anymore. A new name would solve the problem in theory even while denying my past. Nor did I like the awkward hyphenated labels many women were choosing. My maiden name, was, after all, not just mine but my father’s. Using it seemed to negate my life since leaving home. I finally decided to be Ferrante for publishing purposes because that was who could get a contract. In fact, my professional name would be a useful reminder of what the book was to be about. Settled.

  Well, not so settled. For as soon as I began writing, I was swamped by memories that weren’t the ones I’d intended to evoke. Stories about Angelo. Good and bad times with Livvy—Olivia, as I’m instructed to call her. And finally I realized I’d made the same mistake I had when she was young, in assuming I had two lives, in and out of the kitchen, and that she would take this for granted as I did. I was an adoring mother from the time Livvy was born, but I was patient and attentive only when I wasn’t cooking meals for twenty to sixty people at a time. Now her memories of me are of a kitchen monster, a whirling dervish who never turned from the stove except to scream at her. Nothing I say can make her believe the pleasure I took in her, what wonderful times we had, while her memories of Angelo are of a father who adored her until he remarried and life changed, to an unimaginable degree, for the worse.

  It’s so much easier to deal with food than with people. The difference between people and food is that if you take identical pieces of food and treat them identically, they will turn out the same way. Eggs whipped for a long time will be frothier, meat will grow tender if you pound on it, sour cream that’s separated by heat can be restored in the blender. Results are predictable, damage can be disguised or repaired.

  It took me a long time, with Livvy, even to understand that some attempt at repair was in order. At first I thought she was simply a teenager gone haywire. I could pinpoint the moments when adolescent irritability erupted into volcanic rage; they never appeared to be about anything really terrible. One of the worst occurred after the first television show I did, in 1989, when I was called in as a last-minute replacement on the cooking segment of “Johnny Wishbone.”

  “Hi, everybody. I’m Caroline Ferrante and the camera is visiting my summer cooking class in Westport. We’ve just finished making a buridda, the Ligurian fish stew that you can see in these pots on the stove. I was thinking about a change of pace for ‘Johnny Wishbone,’ and fresh vegetables seemed like an obvious choice at this time of year. Don’t get scared. This isn’t going to be one of those, uh, Everything-You-Ever-Were-Scared-to-Ask-About-Sterilizing routines. But I’d like to encourage you to, say, prepare some fresh tomato sauce and freeze what you don’t use in a couple of washed-out yogurt containers. Everyone’s learned about pesto geneovese in the last few years, it’s all over the place. But it doesn’t seem to occur to people that plenty of other herbs can be frozen when they’re fresh and dry. Or pounded or ground up with oil into pestos, pastes, and frozen in those little pill bottles you never had any use for, then added to sauces, soups, all kinds of dishes that need to be livened up a little. Including vegetables. I mean, vegetables aren’t sexy the way meat is, but meat without any vegetables is . . . is sort of like sex without a mattress. The good stuff is there, but it isn’t quite as easy to enjoy. By the way, those little bottles are good for tiny amounts of leftover sauce and gravy, too.

  “Anyway, today we’re going to do a salsa verde. A green sauce. It’s usually easy to get the main ingredient, good Italian parsley, the kind that doesn’t curl up so hard you can’t taste it. Some people use arugula and basil as well. If I have time, I’ll do different versions of green sauce, and encourage you to do the same. See which one you like best. Think about which food you’d like to put it on.

  “Use your imagination. I don’t mean try cinnamon if the recipe says capers or anchovies. But if it calls for basil, and you’ve got a lot of mint in your backyard, try the mint. Look at whatever else is around that’s green. Taste it. Try to imagine how the combination’ll taste. If you think it might be good, throw it in. The worst that can happen is it’ll be awful, in which case you’ll play with it to make it better. Or throw it out.”

  As I spoke, I’d been chopping garlic, then parsley and basil. Now I started to put them in the Cuisinart, then realized that the bowl was clean, but the blade wasn’t in it. I saw the Waring Blender nearby on the counter, pulled it over, took off the cap. I put in the garlic, parsley, and arugula, then measured in the mustard, lemon juice, and olive oil.

  “I yield to none in my love of the Cuisinart, but the fact is you’re really supposed to do all this with a mortar and pestle, so I don’t think you should worry if you have to use a blender. In fact . . .” I pressed one of the buttons, smiled at the camera. I was about to say that it barely mattered which button you pressed, but I stopped speaking because the contents of the blender, the cover of which I had neglected to put back on, were spraying my hair, my neck, and the near side of my face, as well as everything else in the vicinity.

  I looked down to find the button to turn off the machine and the green gunk flew into my eyes.

  “Oh, my God!” I moaned, trying to find the buttons. “This is like braille!”

  I found them and pressed one. The machine stopped. I groped for a dish towel, which one of the women in my class came forward to hand me. They were all giggling. The cameraman turned to catch them, returned to show me cleaning myself off.

  “I just remembered—did you ever hear about the Jew who gave a blind man his first piece of matzo?” I pretended to be the blind man, running his fingers over the big, crinkly matzo cracker that is foreign to him. “And he feels it, and feels it, and after a while, he asks, ‘Who wrote this sh—junk?’ ”

  As the class laughed harder, the cameraman signaled that I had four minutes to fill.

  “Actually, this reminds me, when my daughter was little, maybe two years old, we lived in Rome, and I was the chef in a restaurant there. . . . The Italians do not believe, as the French and Americans do, that women shouldn’t cook in an establishment where money changes hands. . . . Anyway, one day Livvy wanted something to eat and she looked down into a bowl of salsa verde and asked what the grasso verde was. They may sound similar, but one is green sauce and the other is green grease.

  “Let’s see. Where was I? Okay. We can clean up the mess later. I guess the first thing to do is . . . No, even before that, we’re going to cover the blender. Then we’ll tu
rn it on for a few seconds and see what we’ve got left.” I took off the cover, stuck in my finger, withdrew it, and tasted it. “Hmmm. What I’ve got is a pleasant blend of some herbs and garlic, to which I’m going to add some oil and a little lemon juice, and I’ll end up with a pleasant little salsa that’s a little better or worse than the one I usually do. Or maybe it’ll make a nice salad dressing. Flexibility is the important thing. . . .”

  Two minutes.

  “I’m reminded . . . Telling the story about Livvy reminded me of another one. Some years ago, my brother, Gus, came to visit us in Rome during Easter vacation. Gus is a physicist, the kind of person who wants to know everything about a place before he goes there, and he’d read a lot, not just on the museums and the Vatican, but about food. He’d read that abbacchio, baby lamb, was a Roman Eastertime specialty. He was delighted because he hated fish and he’d been afraid he’d have to eat pasta all week. He was dismayed to discover that the restaurant owners hadn’t read the same book as he had, and almost every good place in Rome was closed for Easter week. Of the open, more modest ones, nobody was serving abbacchio, which is not only very expensive, but difficult to hold in its rare and juicy state for any length of time.

  “The Italian word for lamb is agnello, and abbacchio is a word Livvy had probably never heard. Anyway, we were all sitting around in the restaurant, our restaurant, before dinner hour, and Gus was complaining about not being able to find abbacchio, and I was saying I’d make it for him, and Livvy asked what it was, and Gus explained in his detailed, physicist’s fashion, and Livvy sat there staring at him. Something horrible had clicked. I think until that moment, she’d never connected meat to the pictures of animals she’d seen in her books. She ran to me for protection as though Gus might take it into his head to carve her up next! And nothing I said could change her feeling about him.

  “It was a while before my daughter would look at any kind of meat. On the other hand, I’m happy to tell you that by the end of that week, Gus was eating two kinds of fish.”

  The first three phone calls were from Sheldon, my agent, now producer. 1. I was wonderful. 2. I was to get back to my parents’ house immediately so he could reach me. 3. If anyone wanted to talk to me about a show, I should just give them his number. Not try to talk to them. And I should please, for God’s sake, put on some makeup and comb my hair before anyone saw me on the street. You never knew who . . . (I’d had ten minutes to prepare for the show and hadn’t been able to worry about my appearance. I am an ordinarily attractive female with light-brown hair and dark-brown eyes who, when I was younger, got looked at on the street no matter what I was wearing. Now I was more likely to have my existence noted by strangers if I dressed up a little.)

  I made my way back to my parents’. I hadn’t thought to call and tell them to turn on the set. It was just as well; I’m not sure they knew yet that it worked during daytime hours. Unfortunately, the same was not true of everyone else in Westport.

  “You think I’m Mickey Mouse or something?” were Olivia’s first, furious words as she stormed into the house, having been told by a friend’s mother that I’d talked about her on TV. Thank God the friend’s mother hadn’t repeated the anecdote. “You think I’m some kind of character you made up?”

  It crossed my mind that a case could be made for my having, indeed, made her up, but I wasn’t about to sacrifice all hopes of peace for a one-liner.

  “I can understand if you don’t want me to make a habit of talking about you in public. But I was asked to fill in for someone on a cooking show. Last minute. I needed to fill the time—”

  “That’s what you think I’m here for? When you need to fill time?”

  “No,” I said, “but the stories were about when you were little and it didn’t oc—”

  “I don’t want you to talk about me!” she shouted. “Ever!”

  “I guess I thought I was talking about me, too.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

  “It means that whether you like it or not, we have a great deal to do with each other.”

  “Nothing but money! All we have to do with each other is money!”

  “Oh,” I said wearily. “Well, if you can believe that, I guess there’s nothing to discuss.”

  “Except using me on your show.”

  I smiled slightly. “Well, I hope I’ll have a show to not use you on. If I do, all I ever really expect to talk about is food and cooking. On the other hand, it’s not giving away any secrets to say I have a daughter. Hundreds of people between here and Italy know I’m your mother.”

  “My birth mother!” she shouted back.

  “Birth mother?” I hadn’t heard the phrase before, though I gather it’s widely used. “Well, of course I’m your birth mother. Your birth mother and your nursing mother and your diaper-changing mother and your hugging and kissing—”

  “I don’t remember you ever hugged me or anything else! I don’t believe any of it!”

  “Oh. But you do believe I gave birth to you?”

  “No.” It was so fast as to take my breath away. “I don’t really believe it, except my father said it was true.”

  “I see. Your father acknowledged that I was your mother.”

  “He acknowledged”—the words were slowly and loftily spoken—“that your womb held me for nine months while I grew into a baby that could be born.”

  “I see. That’s all a mother, a birth mother, is. A womb. A holder.”

  “That’s right. Some mothers.” Not a moment’s hesitation or ambivalence.

  “Well, then . . .” It was coming slowly. I was amazed by the way my tears were staying in my brain and out of my eyes. “Perhaps my reward for carrying you for nine months is that I can say I have a daughter.”

  From that time on, I didn’t refer to Livvy in my classes, or, later, on the show. But I cannot eliminate her so thoroughly from my writing memories. Blood is stickier than desire, less subject to the owner’s whim, or to the wear and tear of time. Unacknowledged bonds are no less powerful and may even, like mushrooms, grow better in the dark. There are times when I think that if Livvy hadn’t gone so far in her rebellion the trip back would have been less painful.

  Whatever else is true, whatever I think is on my mind as I sit down to write, she is with me as the words begin to flow.

  When I was younger I was puzzled to hear women talk about cooking as though it were higher mathematics—some arcane field one dare not enter without the brilliance to divine the meaning of 1 C flour or 1 Tbsp. salt. Assurances to friends that some dish I’d served was straight out of a cookbook they could read as easily as I were met with admiring disbelief or uneasy laughter—as though I’d promised that if they’d just glance at a physics text, they would understand instantly why E equaled MC2.

  Aside from its physical pleasures, cooking always held for me the allure of the forbidden. My parents, having passed on to me their strong interest in eating well, resisted the notion that any subject so remote from the academy was appropriate as a life’s work. They both taught at Columbia University, my father, European history with emphasis on the Second World War and its aftermath, my mother, art, her strong interest being in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italians. Gus teaches physics at the California Institute of Technology. My older sister, Beatrice, is a psychologist—borderline academic but still acceptable to my parents.

  I was born in June 1954, my birth cleverly arranged by someone or other to coincide with my parents’ summer vacation. If its timing had been arranged, the fact of my conception had not. My brother and sister are eight and six years older than I, and my mother, having put in her years of full-time child care, was back at school, on the tenure track. From the time I was born, a full-time housekeeper always lived with us in our huge Morningside Heights apartment, which was owned by the university.

  While my parents appreciated women with other fine qualities, they were kind indefinitely only to those who were excellent cooks. And
from an early age I exhibited a strong affinity for those women, a tendency to be with them in the kitchen when the rest of the family was off reading or writing. As I grew up I became increasingly helpful in the matter of training new housekeeper-cooks, increasingly skillful at making a good meal myself.

  As I remember battles with my parents over school and homework, it strikes me for the first time that they tried to impose some split in my feelings not unlike the one I later expected of my own daughter. I was fourteen months old when my mother returned to Columbia, having hired a kind and competent woman to superintend me, the apartment, and the kitchen. My parents are good people and they were never awful to me, but during the school year they worked almost as hard at home, on their own papers and their students’, as they did at the university, and for a long time it didn’t bother them that the kitchen was the center of my home life. How convenient to have a little girl who was more comfortable with the housekeeper’s taking her to the doctor than she would have been with either parent; who was more than content to bake cake on a Saturday afternoon when they wanted to take the two older kids to a museum; who, when she learned to play Go Fish, brought the deck to the kitchen to see if the housekeeper would play with her, instead of nudging them. It was a long time before they became uneasy about my attachment to the kitchen and its primary occupant.

  My earliest memories are of Caitlin, the lovely Scots-Canadian who came to us when I was about three, who let me “help” her in the kitchen, and who allowed me, if we weren’t too close to dinnertime, to lick the bowl when we’d finished mixing and pouring the batter I came to prefer to baked cake. The batter was just for me, while the finished product had to be shared with the family. When Caitlin left to get married, I was heartbroken. She was replaced briefly by a cousin of hers from one of the Northern Canadian provinces whose culinary skills turned out to be of little interest to my parents (she insisted that the roast would not have been tough had my parents allowed her to look for moose or rabbit meat). But then Suallen came to make me and the kitchen happy.