In those days, Nantucket was already populated by the superwealthy, especially in the summertime, but it was the old, proper, New England kind of wealth that nobody talked about openly or flashed around. My grandfather was able to buy the inn on a high school principal’s salary, which would be absolutely unheard of today. When my grandmother passed away in 1980, my grandfather sold the inn for next to nothing, too heartbroken to haggle and desperate not to be living alone in a place so much associated with their life as a couple.
Despite the fact that my grandfather sold the Grey Goose, we still went to Nantucket every summer when I was a kid. We rented the same cottage year after year and spent long days hunting for crabs, playing paddleball, and swimming in the chilly, black ocean. At night, my dad read Moby-Dick to my sisters and me, telling us that Captain Ahab was actually the old whaling captain who had lived on Hussey Street. My dad was always happiest on these vacations. I think he felt his parents’ spirits most clearly on the island.
When I was ten or eleven we stopped going to Nantucket. The island had changed to a point that my dad barely recognized it anymore, and the cottage that we always rented was sold and knocked down—it felt like the closing of a chapter.
It was nostalgia and a longing for that place and time that led me to pick up my dad’s worn copy of Moby-Dick the summer before I entered college. I was astounded to discover how much of it I still knew by heart from all of the summers spent listening to it before bed. Herman Melville is so widely associated with Nantucket, and he so vividly captures the spirit of it in Moby-Dick, that it’s nearly impossible to believe that when Moby-Dick was published in 1851 he had never set foot on the island.
Although Melville didn’t know Nantucket firsthand, he knew the East Coast and the whaling life well enough from personal experience to write the book convincingly. His life at sea started in the summer of 1839, when he was twenty years old, as a “green hand” for a ship sailing from New York to Liverpool. In 1841 he joined the crew of a whaling ship called the Acushnet and sailed with them for eighteen months before deserting the ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived among the Typee natives for three weeks. He sailed with two other whaling ships after the Acushnet, partaking in mutinies and spending time in jail along the way.
Given my view of the world, I can’t help but wonder if part of the reason for Melville’s desertion and mutiny on these whaling voyages was the state of the meals on board. The food on whaling ships was often close to inedible—moldy, hard biscuits with bug-infested molasses and heavily salted dried horse meat were common fare, and there was little variety. It’s no wonder that Melville, upon deserting the Acushnet, was so happy to be with the Typee, who ate fresh fruit, roasted suckling pigs, and even whole raw fish—bones, eyeballs, and all.
In the opening chapters of Moby-Dick, Ishmael spends his final nights before setting sail aboard the Pequod at the Try Pots Inn on Nantucket, preparing for his journey at sea. Part of this preparation, it seems, is enjoying one final good meal before the inevitable culinary wasteland that awaits him at sea, where “all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.”
The chowder served to him by the innkeeper, Mrs. Hussey, is so good he spends the rest of the chapter discussing it. The chowder “was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.” Besides the pounded ship biscuit—also known as hardtack, this was used as a thickening agent in the days when heavy cream wasn’t as readily available—this chowder sounds just like the soup I grew up eating in New England. (I like to remind my New York friends that even Melville, who was from Manhattan, was clearly a fan of the New England style of clam chowder.)
MOBY-DICK
Clam Chowder
My dad’s chowder is one of the things I look forward to most about being home, especially in the summertime when the seafood is freshest and the corn is extra sweet. He generally uses a spicy Portuguese sausage called linguiça, but that can be hard to find, so we’ll stick to salt pork here and add a heavy dose of Tabasco at the end.
Serves 6
7 pounds littleneck clams
¼ cup sea salt
1 teaspoon unsalted butter
4 ounces salt pork or bacon, cut into ¼-inch pieces
1 large yellow onion, diced
2 celery ribs, diced
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
Kernels removed from 2 ears sweet corn
4 medium-size starchy potatoes (such as Idaho or russet), scrubbed and cubed
1 bay leaf
Leaves of 4 thyme sprigs
1 cup heavy cream
Tabasco sauce
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Oyster crackers, for serving
The night before you are going to make the chowder (or at least 4 hours before), place the clams in a large pot, cover them with water until they are submerged, add the sea salt, and put the pot, covered, in the refrigerator. If you can’t fit a pot this big in your refrigerator, you can use very cold water and allow the clams to sit in the salted water at room temperature for 4 hours. This will allow the clams to spit out the sand that they are holding inside their shells so that you don’t end up with a gritty chowder.
The next day, or after 4 hours, remove the clams and rinse them with fresh cold water. Rinse the pot of any grit or salt, return the clams to the pot, and add 4 cups fresh water. Bring the water to a boil over medium heat and boil until the clams just begin to open up, 8 to 10 minutes.
As soon as they open, remove the meat from the shells over the pot, to make sure that any juice that comes out ends up back in the stock. Discard the shells and set the clams aside.
Pour the liquid that you boiled the clams in through a coffee filter or double layer of cheesecloth into a separate bowl. You should have about 5 cups of clam stock.
Rinse out the pot again and melt the butter in it over low heat. Add the salt pork and cook until all of the fat renders out and the meat is lightly crispy, about 7 minutes. Add the diced onion and celery and cook until the onion is translucent, about 5 minutes.
Whisk in the flour and cook until the flour is lightly toasted and smells fragrant, like a biscuit, 1 to 2 minutes. Whisk in the clam stock a little bit at a time until it is all incorporated. Add the corn kernels, potatoes, bay leaf, and thyme and simmer until the potatoes are fork-tender, 10 to 12 minutes.
Add the clams and whisk in the cream. Season with Tabasco, kosher salt, and pepper to taste, and serve with oyster crackers.
Down and Out in Paris and London
RIB-EYE STEAK
When I started working in restaurants as a student at NYU, I assumed that my two lives—my life studying English and Latin, and my life making and serving food—would be totally separate. I never expected that so much of my time in the kitchen would be spent talking to my coworkers about literature. Kitchens are physical places, and all of the chopping, sweating, tasting, poking, and bumping into each other naturally leads to a lot of bawdy, mindless chatter. In between all of the nasty jokes and posturing, though, in the quiet, reflective moments that kitchen work can also bring, we talked about books.
Of all the books I talked about in kitchens over the years, the one that came up most often was George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. I had read 1984 and Animal Farm in high school, neither of which was particularly life-altering for me, but when Morgan, one of my favorite cooks, told me that Down and Out was the reason he first decided to set foot in a professional kitchen, I finally sat down and read it.
The thought of someone pursuing kitchen work because of this book still baffles me (Orwell’s account of his backbreaking eighteen-hour days for pitiable pay is nearly unbearable at times), but I can certainly understand why someone accustomed to working in kitchens would love it. Orwell’s description
s of the frantic exhilaration of a dinner rush, of the feeling of emerging from the hatch into the cool night air after a fourteen-hour shift, of the camaraderie that exists between unlikely people in a kitchen and the satisfaction of a post–dinner service drink—these are all spot on. Orwell is young and hungry, and like so many of the people I’ve worked with over the years, he is cooking as a way to get by, and loving it.
One of the things that surprised me most when I first started cooking was the sheer amount of touching and shaping and tasting that goes into creating a dish. Even in the cleanest kitchens, I never worked with a chef who wore gloves. Chefs dip their tasting spoons into sauces more than once, they arrange the greens with their bare hands, they tidy the dots of sauce around the plate with their thumbs—it’s very intimate. The kitchens Orwell was working in, and the cooks he was working with, were filthy, which makes the idea of this hands-on treatment slightly more stomach-turning, but the sentiment is still the same: “Food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment.… Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.”
According to Orwell, steak, which is often the most expensive item on a menu, is also among the most poked and prodded. In his experience, when a steak is brought to the head chef to be inspected before getting sent out, the chef “does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again.” Right before the waiter comes for pickup, the chef gives the steak one final loving poke “with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning.”
On a cooking line, the role of protein cook is highly regarded and is usually reserved for either the head chef or the head line cook. I think the same rule applies in a lot of home kitchens—the most skilled cook handles the meat—because there is a notion that it is the biggest, scariest, and most important job. From working at a butcher shop I’ve learned that a lot people are absolutely terrified of cooking meat. My coworkers and I spend a good amount of time talking people down from their pre–dinner party, picky-guest, former-vegan ledges, writing step-by-step directions in Sharpie on their paper-wrapped cuts of meat, seasoning their steaks, assuring them that they will have enough and that it will be delicious.
I’m not sure if it’s the size, or the bone, or the price, but the steak that seems to terrify customers the most is the bone-in rib-eye, which also happens to be my favorite cut. I hope you’ll let me take the fear out of the rib-eye for you. You don’t even need a grill. The only tools you need are a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet and a meat thermometer.
DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON
Rib-Eye Steak
Serves 2
1 (1½-pound) bone-in rib-eye steak, cut 1½ inches thick
Kosher salt
Freshly cracked black pepper
2 tablespoons high-smoke-point neutral oil, such as grapeseed oil
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
Pat the steak dry with a paper towel and leave it on the counter to sit out at room temp for 30 to 45 minutes prior to cooking. About 10 minutes before you’re ready to cook, season the steak liberally on both sides with salt and pepper.
Heat the oil in a cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat until it just begins to smoke. Add the steak and cook until the surface has a good crusty sear, 6 to 8 minutes per side. For a steak cooked to just shy of medium (which is what I recommend for a rib-eye), the internal temperature should reach 135°F; the temperature will come up about 5 degrees while the steak is resting. Transfer the steak to a cutting board, put the butter on top to melt, and tent it with foil. Let the steak rest for about 10 minutes before slicing it against the grain and serving.
Pride and Prejudice
WHITE GARLIC SOUP
One of the questions I dread being asked most is “What’s your favorite book?” It’s not that I don’t have an answer, or that my answer is always changing, or that it’s some obscure book you’ve never heard of, it’s just that my answer always seems to disappoint people a little bit. The fact is that Pride and Prejudice is my favorite book. There, I’ve said it. I’ve read it well over fifty times since my junior year of high school and have found something new to love about it on every single read. But somehow saying that it’s my favorite book always feels kind of obvious, like saying Andy Warhol is your favorite artist, or Adventures in Babysitting is your favorite movie. (No? Just me?)
When I first read Pride and Prejudice at age sixteen, I knew nothing of Jane Austen’s enduring influence and popularity. What I did know was that I was an American teenager, reading the book nearly two hundred years after its first publication, and not only did I understand it, but it was making me laugh out loud. This type of reading experience is at the core of what makes Austen extraordinary—that her wit and humor and portrayal of the human condition are still relatable and relevant, even cross-culturally.
There are many reasons that Austen has remained a household name while so many of her contemporaries—authors like Fanny Burney, Charlotte Lennox, and Eliza Haywood, who were also writing novels of social satire and domestic comedy—have fallen by the wayside. Austen’s ability to write a fully realized and compelling story without burdening it with overly intricate details is a large part of her staying power.
As a reader, I never feel as if Austen’s novels are lacking in detail because I can imagine her characters and settings so clearly, but if you actually go back and look for the particulars you will find only vague outlines. There is no lengthy description of Elizabeth Bennet’s face, or the dress that Jane wore to the Netherfield ball. We never know Mr. Darcy’s exact height, or just how beautiful the library at Pemberley really is—and yet we see all of these things in our heads so clearly. Austen allows us to build these details ourselves, to imagine elements of our own lives within the novel’s confines, which is, I think, part of the reason that people feel so invested in and connected to her books.
This lack of specificity extends to food—Austen’s novels are full of food and eating, but we rarely hear about any of it. The characters in Pride and Prejudice are forever sitting down to breakfast and commenting on how splendid their dinner was, they spar over luncheons and play cards after supper—but what are they eating? In her letters, Austen wrote constantly of the food she ate—lobster and asparagus, cheesecake, apple tarts, spareribs, rice pudding, pea soup, sponge cake—but in Pride and Prejudice she tells us only “the dinner was exceedingly handsome.”
No matter how much I love Pride and Prejudice, I find its lack of food description excruciating. One scene in particular drove me crazy for years, and had me searching for Regency-era cookbooks whenever I went to the library. In the scene, Bingley tells his sister that he has decided to throw a ball at Netherfield, and that he will send out invitations “as soon as Nicholls has made white soup enough.” What does this mean?! Why is time being measured by the creation of a really boring-sounding soup?! Curiously enough, I found the answer in Jane Grigson’s English Food while looking for a recipe to make a traditional English-style cured ham for Austen’s Emma.
White soup, it turns out, has a long history, dating back to medieval England and France, where it was served only in the wealthiest households. Given the aristocratic and courtly French origins of the soup, it seems that Bingley is saying that only the best will do for his finicky houseguests—Mr. Darcy, who is wealthy enough to keep a French cook, and Mr. Hurst, who prefers French cooking. Bingley’s own humble English cook, Nicholls, will have to try her very hardest to impress these gentlemen, and as soon as she feels up to the task, they will have a ball. It’s a small moment, one that is certainly not crucial to the plot, but understanding these small moments furthers our understanding of the world that Austen was writing about, which to me is important.
Recipes for white soup, sometimes called potage à la blanc or soupe à la reine, varied from kitchen to kitchen, but usually had a base of veal s
tock, cream, and almonds, and sometimes included bread crumbs, leeks, egg yolks, or rice. John Farley gives a recipe in his 1783 book The Art of London Cookery:
Put a knuckle of veal into six quarts of water, with a large fowl, and a pound of lean bacon; half a pound of rice, two anchovies, a few peppercorns, a bundle of sweet herbs, two or three onion [sic], and three or four heads of celery cut in slices. Stew them all together, till the soup be as strong as you would have it, and strain it through a hair sieve into a clean earthen pot. Having let it stand all night, the next day, take off the scum, and pour it clear off into a tossing-pan. Put in half a pound of Jordan almonds beat fine, boil it a little, and run it through a lawn sieve. Then put in a pint of cream, and the yolk of an egg, and send it up hot.
I tried this recipe, and any others I could get my hands on for white soup, and I’m sorry to tell you that I hated them all. The texture was funny, the almonds a little bit too sweet, the veal stock too jellied.
Before finding out what white soup actually was, I had spent years imagining what it could be—I thought maybe cauliflower or parsnip, potato and leek, or a fish chowder—and it’s most likely because I had imagined all of these possibilities that the real soup didn’t taste quite right to me. So, in the tradition of using our imaginations and filling in the blanks, as Austen so often asks us to do when reading her books, I’ve made a creamy, white garlic soup as a stand-in for the true almond and veal concoction. It’s hardly courtly but it’s certainly delicious—worth the risk that no one will want to kiss you at the ball after you’ve eaten it.
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