Voracious

by Cara Nicoletti

  A few days later I was invited to his apartment for dinner. I was building up the nerve to tell him that I couldn’t make it past fifty pages of his favorite book when I noticed a stack of multiple editions of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road on his coffee table. Opening one up I saw that it was absolutely covered with underlines and stars, notes and exclamations, in boyish handwriting—it looked not unlike all of my favorite books. It suddenly occurred to me that I had tortured myself with The Road for no reason at all. This guy was no Cormac McCarthy fan. And while I can chalk up forgetting the name of your favorite novel to first-date jitters, allowing Jack Kerouac to define for you what it means to be a man is, for me, an issue. That dinner was our last.

  I gave my unfinished copy of The Road to my neighbor across the hall and didn’t touch another postapocalyptic novel until a friend gave me a copy of Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars a couple of months ago. She, and many of the reviews I read, described it as “The Road but with hope,” which is probably why it took me so long to pick it up—I was terrified of reading anything remotely like The Road. When I finally did crack it open, though, I was not sorry at all.

  In sparse and heartrendingly beautiful prose, Heller tells the story of a man named Hig who has lost everything to a superflu that wiped out ninety percent of the human race. He lives in the hangar of an abandoned airport with his dog, Jasper, and a man named Bangley who seems to enjoy the cruelty and violence that surviving in a postapocalyptic world allows him to enact. What sets The Dog Stars apart from other novels of its kind is Hig himself. The Dog Stars is more about what it means to be human than about what happens when “civilized” society crumbles.

  What really set this novel apart for me, though, was the food. Normally in novels of this kind there is very little (if any) food, and what’s there is seldom appetizing. The food in The Dog Stars, on the other hand, is mouthwatering. Hig plants beans, tomatoes, and potatoes, eats venison heart, cooks catfish with dandelion salad and basil, makes wild strawberry, black raspberry, and mint tea from a jar of summer flowers, eats shepherd’s pie dripping with butter, and drinks pitcher after pitcher of cold milk. The most powerful, most prevalent food scenes in the book, though, are ones involving fishing—trout fishing specifically.

  By the third sentence of the novel Hig has already told us that before the superflu, his favorite pastime had been to fish for trout. Once it hit, Hig watched as most of the animals on earth disappeared, but he never cried, he says, “until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.” The most poignant memories Hig has of his wife, Melissa, are of her fishing for trout with him—how “she didn’t have the distance and accuracy in her cast but she could think more like a trout than probably anyone alive.” Hig fishes before disaster strikes, he fishes when the flu hits; when Melissa dies, he fishes with Jasper in the mountains, salts his catches on flat stones, and “pull[s] out the skeleton from the tail up, unzipping the bones.”

  In the summertime when I was growing up, my dad would wake me while it was still dark outside and we would go fishing for sea bass in the cold black of the Atlantic Ocean. It was thrilling, sneaking around the bedroom trying to get dressed as quietly as possible while my sisters slept. My dad waited in the kitchen, where the smell of newspapers and coffee and aftershave hung heavy, the nighttime sounds of crickets still creaking through the window screens.

  After fishing we always went to a breakfast place called Arno’s and ordered enormous stacks of buttermilk pancakes and tiny griddles of corned beef hash. At first this was what I looked forward to most about these fishing excursions. The casting and the waiting and the shivering were, in the beginning, just a means to an end, but eventually I grew to love the pre-pancake ritual, too. I never became a great fisherwoman, but I learned volumes about patience and silence.

  One morning I caught a horseshoe crab by accident and reeled it in as it scrambled and scratched against my hook. I had only ever seen dried-up pieces of them on the shore, so catching one in all of its prehistoric glory gave me pause. It was as if the world suddenly threw back its hood and revealed just how tremendously old and sturdy it was and how easily it would continue to thrive once we are, all of us, gone.

  THE DOG STARS

  Whole Roasted Trout

  Serves 3 to 4

  1 (2-pound) rainbow trout, gutted and scaled

  Kosher salt

  2 thyme sprigs

  2 garlic cloves, halved

  ½ lemon, sliced into thin rounds

  1 tablespoon unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  Coarsely ground black pepper

  1 cup dry white wine

  Preheat the oven to 450°F.

  Rinse the fish and pat it dry. Salt the inside of the fish well and place it in a shallow baking dish. Stuff the cavity with the thyme, garlic, lemon slices, and butter. Rub the outside of the fish with the olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Tie the fish in two places with kitchen twine to hold the herbs and lemon in place. Add the white wine to the baking dish and cover with aluminum foil.

  Roast for 15 minutes. Remove the foil and roast for 7 to 10 more minutes. The meat will release from the bones and you should be able to “unzip” the fish and enjoy the meat easily.

  The Hours

  BIRTHDAY CAKE

  Early on in my days as a baker, I was given the last-minute task of creating a birthday cake for a high-paying regular customer. My boss was out sick, so the job fell to me, a Duncan Hines cake mix enthusiast with zero formal pastry training and caffeine-shaky hands. In tears, I called my older sister, a professional cake decorator, from the restaurant’s trash closet, pleading with her to leave work and come help me. The best she could do was send me a quick email with some pointers and tricks, which I clung to like the last life vest on a sinking ship, reading and rereading it until I had it memorized.

  In the end, the cake was slightly crooked and covered in so many layers of vanilla buttercream my teeth ache to think about it. I dodged the task of writing in icing by making a banner out of brown paper and letter stamps and hid the cake’s frosting imperfections by dumping a layer of white nonpareils all over it. It looked homemade in a way that I hoped would be charming in the restaurant’s dim lighting. The customer was overjoyed, but my chef was horrified, and I was never allowed near a birthday cake order at that restaurant again.

  In cooking and baking there is almost always a discrepancy between what you imagine you are capable of creating and what, in the end, comes out of your oven. Sometimes this is a beautiful thing—that soufflé that you were certain would sink? It miraculously rose like a phoenix from the rye-toast ashes of your 1970s Mark Royal oven. And that leg of lamb you were sure you had oversalted? It was a revelation! But sometimes you are certain that what you are going to create will be a masterpiece, a dish so wondrous that it will communicate exactly how much you love the person you made it for and, probably because of these outsized expectations and grandiose plans, you are disappointed with the outcome. For me, this is never truer than with birthday cakes, which come with a tremendous amount of “This is my special day” pressure attached to them.

  Ever since I read Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours in my senior year of high school, it is impossible for me to bake a birthday cake without thinking of poor Laura Brown. Laura, a housewife in suburban Los Angeles in the late 1940s, is determined to create the perfect birthday cake for her husband, Dan—a cake that is as “glossy and resplendent as any photograph in any magazine,” one that will “speak of bounty and delight the way a good house speaks of comfort and safety.”

  Much like the famous boeuf en daube scene in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which Mrs. Ramsay stresses and panics over the necessity of the stew being absolutely perfect so that all of her guests will know that she is perfect, Laura’s cake is so much more than just a cake. In Laura’s mind, if she can create the perfect cake, it is proof that she can be the perfect wife and mother, that she can
be satisfied and fulfilled with her life, and that she can be happy—which she knows she should be and is not.

  This is much too much pressure to place on a birthday cake and on herself and it turns out, of course, to be “less than she hoped it would be.” There are crumbs caught in the icing and the “n” in “Dan” is squished from landing too close to the frosting roses. The whole thing “feels small, not just in the physical sense but as an entity.” The breaking point comes when Laura’s neighbor Kitty comes over for coffee and calls Laura’s cake “cute,” sending her into a spiral of agonizing shame over having “produced something cute, when she had hoped (it’s embarrassing but true) to produce something of beauty.” It would have been better, she thinks, never to have tried at all, to have been careless and cavalier and declare herself “hopeless at such projects” than to have been caught trying, and failing. Laura throws the cake in the trash and starts over.

  She feels better about the second cake, and despite Laura’s brief, hot rage at the sight of her husband spraying a sheen of spittle across her creation when he blows out the candles her cake is a resounding success. Dan declares it “perfect,” and Laura feels whole for the first time in days.

  The secret is, of course, that even the crumbliest, ugliest homemade cake will always, always mean more than the glossiest and sleekest store-bought cake. We know this by now, don’t we? In my life, the cakes that have brought me to tears, that have filled me with such gratitude and love that I feel swollen and glowing, were never beautiful. My favorite cake to make for my friends is a confetti cake, just like the from-a-mix kind you used to beg your parents for every year. It is nostalgic and delicious, and regardless of your cake-decorating skills, it will look beautiful under all those sprinkles.

  THE HOURS

  Birthday Cake

  This recipe produces a triple-layer yellow cake. If you want your cake to be white, substitute 1 cup vegetable shortening for the butter. Sweet butter extract can be purchased online or at specialty baking stores. It gives your cake that boxed-cake taste—in a good, nostalgic way. If you can’t find it or don’t want to use it, substitute 1½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract plus ½ teaspoon pure almond extract.

  Serves 8 to 10

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

  1½ cups sugar

  2 teaspoons sweet butter extract

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

  2¼ cups cake flour

  3½ teaspoons baking powder

  1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus 1 additional pinch for whipping egg whites

  1¼ cups buttermilk

  3½ cups rainbow sprinkles (the waxy kind used for ice cream toppings, not shiny sugar crystals, which will melt and disappear during cooking) or nonpareils

  Vanilla Buttercream Frosting (recipe follows)

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line the bottom of three 8-inch cake pans with parchment paper. Grease the parchment and sides of each pan and dust the pans with flour, tapping out the excess.

  In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the butter until smooth. Add the sugar and butter extract and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat the egg yolks into the butter mixture, one at a time.

  In a bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt and add to the butter mixture in three batches, alternating with the buttermilk. Beat until smooth.

  Transfer the batter to a large bowl and wash and dry the bowl of the electric mixer. Add the chilled egg whites and a pinch of salt to the mixer bowl and attach the whisk attachment. Whip the whites at medium-high speed until they hold stiff (but not dry) peaks. This can also be done in a large bowl with an electric hand mixer, or with some biceps strength and a whisk.

  Using a spatula, gently fold the stiff egg whites into the batter until they are all mixed in. Quickly fold 1½ cups of the sprinkles into the batter (the colors will run quickly, so don’t overmix). Divide the batter evenly among the three prepared cake pans and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 35 minutes. Let the cakes cool in their pans on a cooling rack for a bit before turning them out onto the cooling rack to cool completely.

  Place the first cooled cake layer on a cake stand and spread the top with roughly ½ cup of frosting, smoothing until the frosting is in an even layer. Place the second cake on top and repeat. Do this again with the third layer and cover the outside of all three layers with a thin layer of icing. Place the cake in the refrigerator and allow the messy crumb layer of icing to set until it’s completely hardened, 30 to 40 minutes.

  Once the crumb coating has set, take the cake out of the refrigerator and frost it with the remaining frosting. Cover in the remaining 2 cups sprinkles and present to the birthday boy or girl.

  VANILLA BUTTERCREAM FROSTING

  Makes about 6 cups

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

  ½ cup whole milk

  2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract (clear, if you can find it, to keep the frosting white)

  8 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

  ¼ teaspoon kosher salt

  In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, combine the butter, milk, vanilla, 4 cups of the confectioners’ sugar, and the salt and beat on medium speed for 3 minutes. Slowly add the remaining sugar, ½ cup at a time, beating well after each addition. Once it is all incorporated, increase the mixer speed to high and beat for 1 more minute.

  “Goodbye to All That”

  GRILLED PEACHES with HOMEMADE RICOTTA

  Four years ago, after a string of terrible jobs and a long winter without heat, I started to wonder if New York was the right place for me. A number of my friends had begun to migrate home after college, back to Phoenix and Portland and Oakland—places I had never been and couldn’t picture. At night, after serving people coffee all day and making eight dollars in tips, I often found myself staring at photos of my old friends’ new lives—sunset hikes through craggy brush-covered mountains, lantern-lit tents on the beach under the stars, homemade chicken coops in the backyards of entire houses that cost less than a New York City studio. They all looked fitter, healthier, happier than I had ever seen them in New York, a kind of celestial glow throbbing around them and emanating out of my computer screen.

  So, one night, after a bit too much wine, my friend Willa and I bought two tickets to California. For ten days we adventured from Los Angeles to Santa Rosa to San Francisco, eating the brightest produce I had ever seen, riding two-seater bicycles around the Mission, feeling the sun on our backs. And then those ten days were up, and I arrived home to a rainy and unseasonably cold New York, still smelling like In-N-Out Burger and carrying a backpack full of peaches from the Ferry Building. My first day back I bought sixty dollars’ worth of cheese from an old man at the farmers’ market because I felt bad for him and cried at a wooden flute rendition of “Chariots of Fire” playing in a nail salon before crawling into bed and wallowing for almost thirty-six hours.

  Just when I thought nothing could pull me out of the “Am-I-still-in-love-with-New-York?” pity hole I had buried myself in, I noticed Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on my bedside table. I had meant to pack it to read on my trip but had forgotten, and there it sat, still unread and giving off that wonderful new-book smell. I cracked it open and read the first line to the essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”: “This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.” For the next four hours, as the light outside my apartment window went from yellow to orange to blue to black, I devoured every essay. By the time I got to “Goodbye to All That” and read the first two paragraphs I was crying like I hadn’t cried in years.

  Didion’s ability to capture perfectly what it is to be young and hopeful and in love with a place—specifically this place, this city, that has molded and broken so many—is the reason that “Goodbye to All That” has remained a cult classic for
ty-eight years after its publication. The essay first appeared in a 1967 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, where it was titled “Farewell to the Enchanted City.” Didion changed the name to “Goodbye to All That” for its 1968 publication in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, perhaps as a nod to Robert Graves’s 1929 autobiography of the same name, in which he writes about his “bitter leave-taking of England.” Didion’s leave-taking is not bitter, but her feelings of grief over leaving the city that she loved “the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again” are real.

  What stuck with me most about the essay wasn’t the moment that Didion realized that it was time for her to move on; it was the small moments she shared with this city when it was still so new and beautiful and exciting to her that stood out. Like the day she stood on the corner of Sixty-Second Street and Lexington Avenue eating a peach: “I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume.” It’s the tiniest, most innocent moment, but the familiarity of it knocked the wind out of me. Rather than feeling, as Didion did, that it was time to leave New York City, I felt my love of this place renewed.

  I pulled myself out of bed. I strapped on my backpack full of California peaches and hopped on my bike, suddenly aware of and immensely grateful for the early springtime smells of Brooklyn—hot concrete, wet mulch, old cigarettes, new grass, deli coffee. I rode to my friend Sam’s apartment, a tiny sublet with a clown-car’s worth of strange roommates and an enormous roof with a view of Manhattan that made it bearable. We climbed to the roof and split the peaches—which were now bruised and soft—and grilled them on a greasy hibachi.