Voracious

by Cara Nicoletti

  I returned to Brooklyn after Christmas, just in time to work a dinner shift on New Year’s Eve, followed by a brunch shift on New Year’s Day, which also happens to be my birthday. As a baker, I had gotten used to never having my birthday off, since New Year’s Day is one of the biggest brunch days of the year (resolutions be damned—hangovers need biscuits). So I slogged through my birthday brunch shift, feeling just the tiniest bit sorry for myself as I rolled brioche after brioche with my sticky, cramped fingers.

  It finally came time, after a two-hour walk-in refrigerator deep clean, for me to leave. I was so exhausted that I didn’t even notice that my bag was significantly heavier upon leaving than it was when I had left the house that morning. I got on the subway, opened my backpack to take out my book, and instead pulled out a huge bottle of champagne and a tiny tin of caviar left over from the New Year’s Eve special the restaurant had run the night before. Attached to it was an order slip with “Happy Birthday!” written in scratchy handwriting and the signatures of all the cooks. Much to the horror and confusion of the woman next to me I actually burst into tears right there on the G train—total body exhaustion mixed with pure, unadulterated joy sometimes has that effect on me.

  I had never eaten real caviar before, and I rushed home so quickly I almost cracked my head open on my icy stoop. I stepped out of my boots and, unable to help myself, ate two tiny spoonfuls standing in the kitchen in my coat and bare feet, wiggling my toes with each briny crunch, before finally deciding to give the caviar the respect it was due. Rex Mottram and those blinis… with their mingling of cream and hot butter and their sprinkling of chopped onions still on my mind, I immediately set to work whisking and frying, feeling lucky, and tired, and loved.

  BRIDESHEAD REVISITED

  Blinis with Caviar

  Makes 3 to 4 dozen

  2¼ teaspoons active dry yeast (1 packet)

  ½ cup warm water (110°F)

  ¾ cup all-purpose flour

  ¼ cup buckwheat flour

  ½ teaspoon kosher salt

  2 large eggs, separated (place whites in the refrigerator until ready to use)

  ½ cup buttermilk

  1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted and cooled, plus more for frying

  ½ teaspoon sugar

  Caviar, crème fraîche, chopped red onion, and chopped fresh dill, for topping

  Dissolve the yeast in the warm water in a small bowl and set aside until foamy, about 10 minutes.

  In a small bowl, sift together the all-purpose flour, buckwheat flour, and salt.

  In a large bowl, beat together the egg yolks, buttermilk, melted butter, and sugar. Mix the yeast-water mixture into the egg-buttermilk mixture. Now slowly pour the wet mixture into the sifted dry mixture and stir until smooth. Cover and place in a warm spot for 1 hour.

  After about 50 minutes, beat the chilled egg whites to stiff peaks. Gently fold them into the batter.

  Melt some butter in a medium skillet over medium-high heat. Using a 1-tablespoon scoop for consistent sizing, scoop the batter into the skillet. Fry until golden brown on each side and serve warm, topped with caviar, crème fraîche, chopped red onion, and dill.

  The Corrections

  CHOCOLATE CUPCAKES with PEPPERMINT BUTTERCREAM FROSTING

  During my sophomore year in college, I worked mornings before class as a barista at a coffee shop in the West Village. Most of my opening shifts were with Elise, who was in her midtwenties and had just moved to New York from Minnesota the year before. She had a wide, friendly face and sturdy calves. I felt safe and calm around her, as though everything in the world that needed doing that day would get done. Each morning, when the coffee urns let out their final, steamy gurgle-hiss, she would kneel down on the floor melodramatically and throw her head back and her hands in the air, thanking the coffee gods with a throaty laugh before pouring us each a mug. I liked her immensely.

  Like lots of coffee shops in the city, we got our pastries from a commercial mega-bakery that churned out muffins and scones of completely uniform size, shape, and flavor. They were there every morning, waiting for us in large brown boxes stuffed precariously inside the store’s metal grate, forever threatening to spill out onto the sidewalk as soon as we lifted them. The only times I ever saw Elise less than chipper were on the mornings that it was her duty to arrange the pastries in their wicker baskets. She ripped that box tape off like hot wax and shoved the sign-skewers into the scones as if they were voodoo dolls—it was positively aggressive, but I never had the nerve to ask her about it.

  Finally, one slow day, we got to talking about what we did outside of work and school, and what we ultimately wanted to do. Elise told me that she had moved to New York with the hopes of selling her homemade pastries to shops around the city. For nearly a year, though, she had been watching her savings dwindle while she battled with licensing offices that, for reasons I still can’t entirely understand, wouldn’t allow her to sell anything made in her Lower East Side apartment to the public.

  It was Elise’s grandmother, a German immigrant who had moved to Minnesota in the 1950s, who had taught her to bake. Elise called her “the only culinary bright spot in an otherwise bleak midwestern foodscape”—a phrase I memorized after writing it feverishly in my journal that night. She told me tales of foods I had never imagined: Jell-O pretzel salads, creamed chipped beef, sticky buns made with butterscotch pudding and dinner rolls, and city chicken—which wasn’t chicken at all, but skewers of cubed, fried pork. Her grandmother’s pastries were the only things she ate that didn’t come from a can or a box. They were kneaded and punched and rolled by hand, and that meant a great deal to Elise.

  The next day she brought me a box of her pastries and we sat on the counter and ate one of each with steaming mugs of black coffee in the quiet moments just before opening. There were plum kuchen, folded into flaky, palm-sized triangles, and savory hand pies (she used the British term “pasties”) heavy with smoky ground sausage. There were silver-dollar-sized spirals of yeast dough, dripping with honey and studded with spiced walnuts, and fat, crispy donuts slathered in sour cream icing. In the box, too, there was a book, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. “Read this,” she said, chewing her donut carefully. “It will prove to you I’m not lying about what I ate growing up.” She turned to a dog-eared page and pointed to a circled sentence describing a salad of “water chestnuts and green peas and cheddar-cheese cubes in a thick mayonnaise sauce.” I suddenly felt even more grateful for the flavorful kuchen I was cradling in my palm.

  Having never spent an extended period of time eating in the Midwest, I can’t say for sure if Elise and Jonathan Franzen weren’t both exaggerating, but there is no doubt that The Corrections is a novel absolutely haunted by food. Enid Lambert, the deeply unsatisfied matriarch of the Lambert family, wields her power the only way she can—through the meals she serves her husband and children. When her husband forgets to say good-bye to her one morning on his way to work, she throws all of her anger and bitterness into dinner, creating for him a meal so vile it is referred to as “The Dinner of Revenge.” It consists of “ferrous lobes of liver” dredged in “brown grease-soaked flakes of flour,” rust-colored bacon, boiled beet greens that “leaked something cupric,” and mashed rutabaga that “expressed a clear yellowish liquid similar to plasma or the matter in a blister.”

  This hostile culinary environment affects each of the Lambert children differently, both as children and in their adult lives. As a child, Gary Lambert always eats all of his vegetables, even asking for seconds of those mashed rutabagas, which “had the texture and temperature of wet dog crap on a cool morning.” He eats them not because he loves them, but because he sees pleasing his mother as a means of survival. At night, tucking him in, Enid fawns over him, calling him her “good eater” and making him promise that he will remain so.

  As an adult, Gary builds the life he thinks he is supposed to build; he gets married, has children, and lives in a beautiful house, but he is on the verge
of collapse. To Gary, it is important that his family gather around a meal together just as he did growing up in St. Jude, even though his wife, Caroline (who refuses to cook and accuses Gary of having an unhealthy relationship with food), asks him, “It’s not important to me, it’s not important to the boys, and we’re supposed to cook for you?” At first, preparing his signature mixed grill for the family’s dinner brings him great pleasure, but eventually it comes to represent everything that is horribly wrong with his life—all the repetition, “the eternal broiling, broiling of the damned.”

  Despite the fact that the youngest Lambert, Denise, was in Enid’s womb when “The Dinner of Revenge” took place, it’s pretty safe to assume that she experienced her fair share of equally disgusting dinners growing up. As an adult, Denise drops out of college and throws herself headlong into the backbreaking, unstable world of professional cooking. She rises fairly quickly to chef-stardom on the Philadelphia food scene, but pays for it dearly with eighty-hour weeks and a seemingly endless train of dysfunctional and destructive relationships. The restaurant world is fickle and unpredictable, and Denise worries constantly about being shown up by her competitors, by her business partner, by the architecture of the restaurant itself.

  The foods she cooks are lovely, and a testament to the fact that Franzen himself must know food well, but something is missing. Although Denise is obviously talented, you rarely get the sense that she is driven by her love of food and cooking; rather, she seems motivated by a compulsive need to be the best at something.

  Of all the Lambert children it is Chip who gives Enid the most trouble over her cooking—which she can’t help but take personally. Unlike Gary, Chip is unable to fake it through the fried liver and mashed rutabaga that night. His father cheers him on, eating most of the rutabaga for him and promising him an Eskimo Pie if he can just eat that last bite. He tries, but he can’t force himself to swallow, and he is made to sit at the table for five hours—well past his bedtime—until he has that one more bite.

  When we meet Chip as an adult, he is working a tenure-track professor job at an elite college and seems to have his life together. He is well published, dating a historian, and hosting lavish monthly dinners for his students, at which he serves “langoustines, or a rack of lamb, or venison with juniper berries, and retro joke desserts like chocolate fondue.” After rejecting a number of advances from an attractive freshman named Melissa, Chip finds her at his door one night with a platter of cupcakes. He has just started making himself a dinner of haddock with broccoli rabe and acorn squash, but the cupcakes sitting on his counter—frosted with a buttery peppermint icing—keep taunting him, and finally he gives in.

  Once Melissa has plied him with cupcakes, Chip is helpless against her advances. Almost immediately after the cupcake incident, he begins an affair with Melissa that ends disastrously, and he has to leave the college in a cloud of embarrassment and shame. It seems fitting in some way that Chip, the boy who was never given the Eskimo Pie he was promised for eating his liver, is brought to his knees by a cupcake. Any cupcake this good (or this bad, I suppose) is worth replicating.

  THE CORRECTIONS

  Chocolate Cupcakes with Peppermint Buttercream Frosting

  Makes 2 dozen

  1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, sifted

  1 teaspoon instant espresso powder

  2 cups boiling water

  3 cups all-purpose flour

  2 teaspoons baking soda

  ¾ teaspoon kosher salt

  ½ teaspoon baking powder

  1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

  2½ cups sugar

  4 large eggs, at room temperature

  1½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract

  Peppermint Buttercream Frosting (recipe follows)

  In a medium, nonreactive bowl, whisk together the cocoa powder, espresso powder, and boiling water and let it sit until cool, about 20 minutes.

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line two 12-cup cupcake tins with paper liners.

  In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, and baking powder and set aside.

  In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the butter until smooth. Add the sugar and beat until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat until incorporated, scraping down the sides of the bowl intermittently.

  Alternate adding the flour mixture and the cocoa powder mixture to the butter and sugar, beginning and ending with the flour, until everything is mixed together and smooth (be careful not to overmix).

  Pour the batter into the cupcake tins until they are two-thirds full.

  Bake until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Turn the cupcakes out onto a cooling rack to cool completely before frosting.

  PEPPERMINT BUTTERCREAM FROSTING

  Makes about 4 cups

  1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

  ¼ teaspoon kosher salt

  5 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

  1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

  1 teaspoon pure peppermint extract

  3 to 5 tablespoons heavy cream

  In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the butter and salt on medium-low until smooth, about 1 minute. With the mixer running, slowly add the confectioners’ sugar until it is fully incorporated, being sure to scrape down the sides after each addition. Lower the speed to low and add the vanilla and peppermint extracts and 3 tablespoons of the cream. If the frosting feels too stiff, add 1 to 2 tablespoons more. Bring the speed up to high and whip for a solid minute to get it nice and fluffy. Transfer the frosting to a piping bag and frost the cooled cupcakes.

  The Aeneid

  HONEY–POPPY SEED CAKE

  When I was an English major at NYU, taking a foreign language was a much-grumbled-about requirement. Most students solved this grievance by taking introductory-level language courses for languages they had already taken throughout high school, hoping that it would earn them an easy A. The professors were hip to this scheme, though, and they made sure that the entry-level classes weren’t actually entry-level at all, which meant that one week into my freshman year I was already heading toward a failing grade in my “entry-level” Italian class.

  When I tried switching over to Spanish the same thing happened, so reluctantly I went back to Latin—the language I had been taking since seventh grade. There are forty thousand students at NYU, so I expected that there would be more kids in my college Latin class than there had been in my high school Latin classes. The first day of Latin, though, I walked into the classroom to see only six staring back at me.

  What started as a requirement turned into one of the classes I looked forward to most. That small group and the professor became a family of sorts, and although we were required to take only a few semesters, I ended up studying Latin all four years of college. I was in my junior year when we started translating Virgil’s Aeneid, and I had just broken up with the guy I had been dating since my senior year of high school. It was a hard breakup, if only because he was, at that point, my dearest friend and the greatest comfort I had in a city that still, after almost three years, didn’t feel quite like home. We made the decision not to see or speak to each other for two whole weeks, just to let our feelings settle, and during that time The Aeneid became a salve for me. The brainpower put toward translating it was the only thing that stopped my mind from wandering to loneliness and grief.

  You don’t have to be going through a breakup to be brought to tears by Dido’s tragic love for Aeneas, but it certainly helps. I was a wreck through the entire translation of book four. I cried ugly, messy cries in the library cubicles and chugged Red Bulls in order to stay awake long enough to finish more translating, before falling into bed at two in the morning looking like a more disheveled Hagrid, but feeling somehow purged.

  When Dido discovers that Aeneas, the man she considers to be her husband, is preparing
his ship under cover of night to sail away from her forever, she (understandably) flies into a rage. Unlike me, forever thinking to myself, I should have said that, Dido is perfectly, bitingly eloquent, even in the midst of feeling “so totally devastated, so destroyed.” Her parting words to Aeneas are some of the most powerful, and the most chilling, of any I have ever read:

  I hope, I pray, if the just gods still have any power, wrecked on the rocks mid-sea you’ll drink your bowl of pain to the dregs, crying out the name of Dido over and over, and worlds away I’ll hound you then with pitch-black flames, and when icy death has severed my body from its breath, then my ghost will stalk you through the world! You’ll pay, you shameless, ruthless—and I will hear of it, yes, the report will reach me even amongst the deepest shades of Death!

  Aeneas sails away, and Dido decides she can no longer bear to live. She asks her sister, Anna, to build her a pyre so that she can burn all of the things that Aeneas has left behind, and tells her that she is going to see a Massylian priestess in order “to bring him back in love for me or free me of love for him.” This priestess, Dido says, who “protected the golden apples / on their tree, and feasted the dragon / with morsels dripping loops / of oozing honey and poppies drowsy with slumber,” has the power “to release the hearts of those she likes” and “to inflict raw pain on others.” This, however, is not actually Dido’s plan. Instead she “clambers in a frenzy / up the soaring pyre and unsheathes a sword.” With “bloodshot eyes rolling, quivering cheeks blotched,” she curses Aeneas one final time before falling onto the sword and into the pyre.