Voracious

by Cara Nicoletti

  Our friends came, bringing jelly jars of homemade farmer’s cheese, and fresh herbs grown on their fire escape, and bottles of wine pilfered from restaurant jobs. That night I felt vaguely aware that I was only twenty-four, that if Didion was right I still had four more years until I would feel, as she had, that I had “stay[ed] too long at the Fair.” I’m here now, in my twenty-eighth year—my tenth in New York—and I’m still waiting.

  “GOODBYE TO ALL THAT”

  Grilled Peaches with Homemade Ricotta

  Makes 6 filled peach halves

  3½ cups whole milk

  ½ cup heavy cream

  ¾ teaspoon coarse sea salt

  3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

  3 ripe peaches, cut in half and pitted

  2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for drizzling

  2 teaspoons sugar

  Flaky sea salt (such as Maldon), for serving

  Coarsely ground black pepper, for serving

  Pour the milk, cream, and salt into a large, heavy-bottomed pot and cook over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until the temperature reaches 190°F on a candy thermometer. Remove the pot from the heat and stir in the lemon juice. Allow the mixture to sit for 5 to 7 minutes before straining it through a sieve lined with three layers of cheesecloth. Let the cheese drain into a bowl for 1 to 2 hours.

  Preheat a grill to medium.

  Brush the peaches with the olive oil and dust them lightly with the sugar. Place the peaches, flesh-side down, on the grill and cook until char marks appear, about 2 minutes. Transfer the peach halves to bowls and spoon the fresh ricotta over them. Drizzle the ricotta with olive oil and sprinkle with flaky sea salt and coarse black pepper. Serve immediately.

  American Pastoral

  HOT CHEESE SANDWICH

  Having served food to the public in one capacity or another for more than a decade, I have encountered my fair share of truly terrible customers. Even years later I can conjure the very worst ones in my mind like it was yesterday, their sour faces and cruel words, their determination to be dissatisfied. There was the hotshot in his expensive suits who always called me “Big Guy” when he came to order his double Americanos. A joke, maybe, but precisely the kind of joke a nineteen-year-old girl who has just packed on the freshman fifteen is not entirely equipped to handle.

  There was the woman who always paid for her bagel and coffee with hundreds of pennies, and the man whose vanilla latte was never hot enough, even when the milk was burned. The person I dreaded most, though, was a seven-year-old boy—a tiny ruddy-cheeked terror whose memory still makes me shudder. Every morning, without fail, an enormous production was made about what the little boy would eat for breakfast. Would it be a croissant? No! He hated croissants today. Maybe a bagel? Disgusting! Yogurt, no. Sandwich, no. Muffin, no. His parents cooed and soothed and petted, but the decision was never simple. He stomped and huffed and flailed, whining like a mosquito. In the end, he always got a chocolate chip cookie as big as his face, despite having refused it multiple times, and left looking smug, leaving a long line of frustrated customers in his wake. Even now, my palms sweat to think about him. I was amazed by the power this tiny child had over his parents, over all of us.

  When I read Philip Roth’s American Pastoral a few years ago for my book club, I thought of this little boy the entire time, because his food rebellions reminded me so much of Merry Levov’s. For Merry, what she eats and how much she eats is the first thing she is able to control in her life, and she uses her eating habits as a weapon against her parents, whose idyllic, bourgeois American life she detests and seeks to destroy.

  Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s favorite pseudo alter ego and the book’s narrator, learns of the “tragedies that have befallen” Merry’s father, Seymour “The Swede” Levov—the golden god of Newark, New Jersey—from Seymour’s brother, Jerry, while at his forty-fifth high school reunion. Jerry tells Nathan that his brother has just died of prostate cancer, after suffering for years in the wake of Merry’s terrorist act of bombing the local general store. Jerry launches into a venomous speech about Merry, whom he calls Seymour’s “darling fat girl,” saying, “It’s one thing to get fat… but it’s another to jump the line and throw a bomb.” It seems that these two sentences stick with Nathan, because in his reimagining of Merry’s story, her relationship to food is an integral part of her rebellion.

  The rest of the novel is Zuckerman’s piecing together of the years leading up to Merry’s violent act of terror, his attempt to get to the root of how things had gone so terribly wrong for a man who had always done his best to do everything right. Zuckerman is determined to find the cause of Merry’s violence, to draw a complete line from her childhood to the day that she blew up the general store, to show us the signs that the Swede missed. To the Swede, who is blinded by his love for Merry, her violence springs from nowhere, completely unexpected. Zuckerman, however, paints her as a little girl who is rebellious from the very start and who wields her power early on by what and how much she eats.

  Merry’s first act of rebellion is not eating the lunches her mother packs her for school. She hates bologna, detests liverwurst, abhors tuna—the only thing Merry likes is Virginia ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and hot soup, which she can’t have since she is constantly breaking even the most indestructible of thermoses. Merry throws her lunches away every day, subsisting only on the ice cream she buys with the dime Seymour leaves at the bottom of her lunch bag, and her favorite food—melted cheese sandwiches.

  As a teenager, Merry continues to refuse any food served to her at home, but at school and elsewhere gorges on junk food “so that almost overnight she became large, a large, loping, slovenly sixteen-year-old.” By gaining weight, and refusing to brush her hair or teeth or wash her face, Merry defies everything that is most important to her beauty-queen mother, and also rejects the American ideal of beauty. Right before Merry plants the bomb she goes to a diner and orders a BLT and a vanilla milkshake—a meal she thinks of as “the ritual sacrament.” Merry hates, detests America, but she actively consumes it in the most literal way through the foods she chooses to eat—cheeseburgers, processed-cheese sandwiches on white bread, milkshakes, BLTs, pizza, onion rings, root beer floats, and French fries.

  When Seymour finds Merry, five years after her terrorist act, she has converted to Jainism, an Indian religion whose followers pledge never to harm any living being. This belief leads Jainites to stringently abstain from eating all animal protein and by-products, and any plants whose cultivation harms any living creature. When Seymour sees her, he is shocked at how thin she is. Her extreme behavior still relies on food as a controlling device, a form of rebellion. Early on it was gluttony, later in her life it was abstinence—two sides of the same coin.

  When my book club met to talk about the book I made BLTs and vanilla milkshakes—Merry’s “ritual sacrament”—but my heart wasn’t quite in it. I couldn’t get the melted cheese sandwiches out of my brain. When I was young, my dad used to take my sisters and me to a diner called the Nite Owl near where he grew up, in Fall River, Massachusetts. The diner was a tiny stainless-steel box striped with red enamel and dressed up with neon signs. It sat smack in the middle of a Shell gas station parking lot. Although they offered cheeseburgers and Coney Island–style hot dogs, we went there for one thing and one thing only—a sandwich called the “hot cheese.”

  This was not a grilled cheese sandwich, it was a buttered, grilled hamburger bun stuffed with melted cheese that had the texture of curds and the tang of a super-sharp cheddar. It was slathered in yellow mustard and piled high with diced raw onions and sweet pickle relish. It was heartburn-inducing heaven, that hot cheese. We washed it down with Autocrat coffee milk and felt the burn of it in our chests all day long. Every time Merry’s melted cheese sandwiches were mentioned I thought of those hot cheese sandwiches, their grease-spattered paper collars, their potato bun like the smoothest surface of the moon, a tiny American flag toothpick buried in its craters�
�American diner food par excellence.

  AMERICAN PASTORAL

  Hot Cheese Sandwich

  Serves 1

  1 teaspoon unsalted butter

  1 hamburger bun (the cheap kind)

  4 ounces very sharp cheddar cheese, cut into thin slices

  1 teaspoon French’s yellow mustard

  1 tablespoon sweet pickle relish

  1 tablespoon minced white onion

  Preheat the grill or a stovetop grill pan, and the broiler. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil.

  Butter each half of the hamburger bun and grill it, butter-side down, until it’s toasted and you can see char marks. Pile the cheddar onto the bottom half of the bun and place it on the lined baking sheet. Put it under the broiler until the cheese is completely melted and bubbly, about 5 minutes. Spread yellow mustard on the top half of the bun, pile the sweet relish and raw onions on top of the cheese, put the whole thing together, and eat your heart out.

  Emma

  PERFECT SOFT-BOILED EGG

  It took me a long time to come around to Jane Austen’s Emma. I blame this mostly on the fact that my English teacher played Clueless for us before we read the book, a tactic that made most of the girls in my class adore Emma right from the get-go, but it sullied the experience for me. Every time Emma spoke, I heard the whiny Valley Girl drone of Cher Horowitz. Besides that, my friend-crush on Elizabeth Bennet was at that point so deep that I didn’t feel I had any room left in my heart for the deeply flawed Emma Woodhouse. She is insensitive and spoiled, irritatingly beautiful and talented, careless and often, well, clueless.

  Unexpectedly, it was butchery that brought me back to Emma. Say what you will about Emma Woodhouse, but that young lady knows her way around a pig, which I happen to find endearing. Two entire pages of the novel center on what to do with a newly killed porker from the Woodhouse property. Emma’s father, ever the worrier, is overwhelmed by the task of sending pork to a neighbor, but Emma puts him at ease, telling him confidently, “My dear papa, I sent the whole hind-quarter. I knew you would wish it. There will be the leg to be salted, you know, which is so very nice, and the loin to be dressed directly in any manner they like.”

  Last spring, while I was attempting to make a traditional English country ham at the butcher shop, this scene popped into my head, and that night I picked up Emma again for the first time since high school. My reading experience the second time around was entirely different from the first, perhaps because I’ve gotten even more obsessive about literary food scenes in my old age. Of all of Austen’s novels, Emma gives readers the clearest glimpse into the unglamorous, everyday tasks of running a household in the early 1800s, a time when even a woman as privileged as Emma Woodhouse would have been knowledgeable about the raising, killing, and preserving of her family’s livestock.

  In her letters, Austen herself writes often of the livestock kept at Steventon, where she lived with her family. In one letter she tells her sister, Cassandra, about providing a neighbor with pork from their land, much as Emma and her father do in the novel, saying, “My father furnishes him with a pig from Cheesedown; it is already killed and cut up, but it is not to weigh more than a stone; the season is far too advanced to get him a larger one. My mother means to pay herself for the salt and the trouble of ordering it to be cured by the spareribs, the souse, and the lard.” Even if the Austen women aren’t in the kitchen stirring the pots and baking the bread, each member of the Austen family is involved at some level in the keeping and processing of livestock and produce, knowledge that wouldn’t have been at all uncommon at the time or unladylike to discuss in letters.

  Mr. Woodhouse, Emma’s hypochondriac father, whose “own stomach [can] bear nothing rich,” is the catalyst for most of the food talk in the novel. He is constantly trying to convince people to eat something other than what they are eating, to eat less, or to eat nothing at all. At Mrs. Weston’s wedding he anxiously tries to dissuade the guests from eating the wedding cake, worried that it “might certainly disagree with many—perhaps with most people, if not taken moderately.” In another scene, Emma serves minced chicken and scalloped oysters to her dinner guests, while her father, whose “feelings were in sad warfare” on such occasions, recommends that they all eat gruel, as he is, for their health.

  When no one pays attention to him, he tries to push one guest in another gustatory direction, saying: “Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else; but you need not be afraid, they are very small, you see—one of our small eggs will not hurt you.” I remember thinking that this line was particularly funny my first time reading it—the idea that someone could understand boiling an egg better than anybody else seemed especially ridiculous. What is there to understand about the world’s simplest culinary task? I didn’t know then what I know now, which is that the method of perfectly soft-boiling an egg is (and apparently always has been) a contentious issue.

  The first thing I was ever asked to do when I went for a job trial at a restaurant was soft-boil an egg. The restaurant was fancy—much fancier than I had any business walking into with only home cooking skills in my back pocket—and I was shocked and ecstatic that this was my first test. I had hard-boiled a million eggs in my life, especially during those lean-wallet college days, and I had my method down pat. All I would have to do is cut that time down by maybe a minute or two and I would have a perfectly soft-boiled egg, right?

  The chef handed me an egg; it was ice cold, smaller than I was used to, soft blue, and covered in sandpapery speckles. “This just came out of the hen about an hour ago,” he told me without seeming very impressed about it, and walked out of the kitchen. I did what I knew how to do. I put the egg in a small saucepan, I covered it in cold water, I brought it up to a boil and kept it there for five minutes—two minutes less than I would have for a hard-boiled egg. Afterward, I dunked it in ice water and kept it there until I felt confident that it was cool enough to peel and carried it carefully to the office, rolling and clinking against the white china bowl with each step.

  Without glancing at it the chef grabbed the egg and gently tapped it against the corner of his desk, then he turned it over and rolled it along his desk, pressing it down gently with the heel of his flat, meaty palm. I felt oddly sorry for the egg then, its speckled blue shell crackling so violently in that clean and silent office. He turned the egg in his cupped hand and, with a raw, chewed-up fingernail, attempted to peel it. The first blue shard tore away and with it came a chunk of white so enormous that I could see the bright orange yolk within, bulging and straining to ooze out. “Nope,” he said, and I took that as my cue to gather my things and leave.

  Up until that day, boiling an egg was, in my mind, something done carelessly, out of desperation when my stomach was grumbling and there was nothing in my fridge. In the world of professional cooking, though, it’s as telling a sign of your kitchen skills as how evenly diced and unbruised your chives are. Any chef you ask will have her own precise method of soft-boiling an egg, and believe me, it will be the only and the best way. It turns out that Mr. Woodhouse was right, there are a million things to understand when it comes to perfectly soft-boiling an egg. The temperature of the egg before going into the water has to be considered, as does the age of the egg (the chef giving me an hour-old, very cold egg already put two strikes against me, which, in hindsight, was certainly part of the test). Weight, time, pot size, water amount—let’s stop here before this sounds impossible, because, really, it’s very easy. My favorite soft-boiled egg is a six-minute egg—it’s as simple as that.

  EMMA

  Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg

  Serves 2

  1 tablespoon kosher salt, plus more for seasoning

  2 large eggs, at room temperature (the older the better, in terms of ease of peeling)

  Cracked black pepper

  Pour 3 inc
hes of water into a 2-quart saucepan and add the salt. Cover and heat over medium-high heat.

  While the water is coming up to a boil, prepare an ice bath by filling a small bowl with ice cubes and cold water, and set it aside.

  Hold each egg firmly and, using a thumbtack or a needle, carefully prick a small hole in the bottom of the egg (it’s easier than it sounds!).

  Once the water has come to a rolling boil, gently lower the eggs into the boiling water using a slotted spoon, and immediately set a timer for 6 minutes.

  After 6 minutes, remove the eggs from the water with the slotted spoon and submerge them in the ice bath until they are cooled, about 5 minutes. Once they are cooled, peel them under cold running water.

  Split them in half and season them with salt and black pepper to taste.

  “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”

  GOAT CHEESE PUMPKIN PIE

  I’ve been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe for as long as I can remember, but the lack of food in his stories always frustrated me, mostly because I suspected that he would write about it beautifully. One of his lesser-known stories, “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” proved my suspicion to be correct. It is one of the only stories in which Poe writes in detail about what his characters are eating, and it is every bit as good as I always dreamed it would be. (Most likely this is also why it is one of my favorites.)

  The story, which takes place in the mid-nineteenth century, details the trip of an unnamed narrator to an asylum in France, where a revolutionary new method for treating mental illness, called “the soothing system,” is being practiced on the patients. After taking a tour of the asylum, the narrator is invited to dinner, where things begin to take an odd turn.