by Julie Powell
I was just getting ready to start the Pot-au-Feu when the phone rang again. “Hi, Julie. It’s Gwen.”
(Gwen always announced herself on the phone as if she wasn’t entirely sure I was going to remember her.)
“Hey, honey.”
“What’re you doin’ tonight?”
“I’m eating Pot-au-Feu with Heathcliff and his friend Brian and Sally and her new boy. Eric’s having one of his days, we’ll see whether he gets up for it.”
“Sally’s got a new boy already? Damn, that girl moves fast.”
“Yup.”
“I need to get her to give me some pointers.”
“You and me both.”
“I need me a man, dude.”
“Yeah. You wanna come over?”
“Sure. Should I bring booze?”
“Sure. Around eight?”
“Around eight it is.”
After I hung up, before I commenced to hacking away at meat for the Pot-au-Feu, I went over to Eric, still prone in bed.
“You feeling better?”
“Mm-hm.” This without lifting his forearm from over his eyes.
“We’ve got some people coming for dinner.”
“Oh?” He tried to sound happy about it.
“Gwen and Heathcliff’s friend Brian and Sally and her new boy.”
“Sally has a new boy?”
“They’re coming at around eight. And the Croatian movers are coming at twelve thirty tonight to get the couch.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“I thought they were coming at noon?”
“That was a misunderstanding.”
“I thought they were Czech.”
“Sally misspoke.”
“Okay. What time is it now?”
“Two.”
“Okay.”
Eric set to dispatching his headache with renewed, if utterly motionless, gusto, while I went to get started on the Pot-au-Feu.
First, the meat. I spent the better part of half an hour working the thick, large-pored pig skin off the enormous pork shoulder I’d bought, but when I finally pulled it off, I was rewarded with a hearteningly grisly prop. “Look, Eric!” I leaned out of the kitchen door into the bedroom, holding the ragged pig flesh to my bosom. “It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.”
“Hm? What?” He didn’t remove the arms flung over his eyes.
“Eric! You have to look! It puts the lotion—”
“What is that?”
“It’s the skin from the pork shoulder.”
“No, what you were saying, about the lotion?”
You know that dejection that comes upon you when you realize that the person you’re talking to might as well be from Jupiter, for all the chance you have of making them get what you’re saying? I hate that. “You haven’t seen Silence of the Lambs? How can that be?”
“Hey, we should put that on our Netflix!”
It was the most animated I’d seen him all day. Not that that’s saying much.
After the skin was off I hacked the shoulder meat into two pieces, wrapped up the piece with the bone in it for the freezer and set the other aside for the pot, tying it up with kitchen twine first until it vaguely approximated something that had not been torn to pieces by rabid dogs. Then I clipped the chicken in half down the middle with kitchen shears. I tied up one half of that with string as well. (I was halving the recipe, which was making for some rather odd butchering assignments.)
Trussed chickens always look like sex-crime victims, pale and flabby and hogtied. It turns out that this goes double for trussed half-chickens.
The great thing about Pot-au-Feu is that, although it takes donkeys’ years to cook, there’s nothing much to it. I stuck all the meat into my biggest pot, poured some chicken broth over it, and brought it up to a simmer. Julia has this sort of uncharacteristically persnickety, unnervingly Martha-esque suggestion of tying a long piece of string to each piece of meat and tying the other end to the handle of the pot, so you can easily check the doneness of the meat. I did it, but I didn’t like it.
I took a break to check my e-mail. While I waited through the horrendous dial-up screech for the “You’ve Got Mail” bleep, I contemplated how much more bearable my life would be if only I could afford broadband.
Just as soon as I’d gotten a connection, the phone rang, cutting it off. It was Sally.
“I just realized I’m not going to Bay Ridge. How do we get to you?”
One dial-up screech later, the phone rang again. It was Gwen.
“Hey. How do I get to your new apartment, anyway?”
By the time I finished with her, it was time to go into the kitchen and add to the Pot-au-Feu the vegetables—carrots, turnips, onions, and leeks. (These Julia wanted me to tie up into bundles with cheesecloth, but no. Just . . . no.) But oh, the Bavarian! I was supposed to be stirring the goddamned Bavarian, and I’d totally forgotten! I raced to the refrigerator, but it was too late. The Bavarian was set, hard as a rock. Not soup, at least, though it did look funny, sort of puckered. “Damn,” I said.
“What was that, honey?”
“Nothing, goddammit!”
In the way these days happen, between poking at the meat and checking on the e-mails and worrying over the dessert, it was seven o’clock at night before I knew it. Eric dragged himself out of bed and into the shower, and came out looking like a man who might just not die in the next five minutes. As I was dumping some sliced kielbasa into the Pot-au-Feu pot, Heathcliff came in with two bottles of Italian wine and his friend Brian.
“Brian? Oh my God, Brian!” I gave him a hug, more to prove to myself the reality of him than anything else. Because Brian had turned into an Adonis. A deep-voiced, super-genius, string theory-spouting, hugely muscled, fabulous gay Adonis. I would not have recognized him; at least, not unless he smiled at me. When he smiled, he was five again. He had a smile you couldn’t stay mad at, a smile that made you think he would never be unhappy as long as he lived. All maturity had done was inject a dose of sexual charisma right into the impishness. A good, good smile.
Everybody else would be here soon. But, oh Christ, I’d forgotten to make the mayonnaise for the beet and potato salad! Maybe the fact that the Bavarian seemed to have set into something other than broth had me cocky, but I decided to beat it by hand. I had never made my own mayonnaise before, but there are nine different recipes for it in MtAoFC, so I figure I ought to get started on them. Anyway, how hard could it be?
Heathcliff, Brian, and Eric all looked on as I beat some egg yolks and then, trembling, began to whisk in the olive oil, pouring it from a Pyrex measuring cup with a spout. I whisked and whisked and whisked, adding one drop of oil at a time just like JC said, most of the time, anyway. It was hard to avoid the occasional nervous, sloshing tremor, given my history with setting jelling things. When I’d gotten it sort of thick, I beat in hot water, as an “anti-curdling agent,” and it thinned right out again. Well, anyway, it tasted fine—like olive oil, mostly. I mixed it in with the beets and potatoes, which were by now violently pink. Then the mayonnaise was violently pink as well.
Gwen and Sally and her boy David came all in a rush. Gwen immediately set about mixing everybody vodka tonics, a skill at which she was expert, while I bustled around with dishes and forks and scooped up the Pot-au-Feu. I tried to be neat about it, heaping some of each vegetable in each corner of a large square platter, with a pile of mixed meats in the middle. But there are some dishes you oughtn’t try to make pretty, and a boiled dinner is one of them. My efforts resulted only in a medieval pile of flesh—the prim separation of vegetables just highlighted the essential barbarity of the food.
No, boiled dinners are not made to be looked at, they’re made to be eaten. Once we had all served ourselves, everything looked, smelled, and tasted as it should. We all got meat dribbles down our fronts, which has a way of putting people at their ease.
The potato and beet salad really was
quite an unnerving shade of pink.
“Maybe we just weren’t meant to eat pink food, as a species I mean,” considered Brian as he gingerly took a small serving. “I’m feeling some pretty primordial fear here.”
“What about cotton candy?” countered Gwen, who was piling the salad on her plate with more abandon.
“Okay—no pink moist foods then, maybe.”
“Strawberry ice cream?” Sally’s boy David bravely suggested, though he too was looking a little green.
“No pink moist savory foods.”
But then everyone tasted and agreed that primordial fears were made to be gotten over.
“Amazing, beets. Isn’t everyone supposed to hate beets?” asked Eric, who looked considerably pinker himself, and was taking seconds.
“Like Brussels sprouts, right.”
“I love Brussels sprouts!”
“Me too!”
“Sure, sure—but that doesn’t change the fact that Brussels sprouts are supposed to be disgusting.”
“I used to eat jarred beets when I was a baby,” I said. I hadn’t thought about this in years. “Mom thought I was nuts. Then of course I stopped eating them, because who eats beets, right? But you know the thing about beets? They’re really beautiful. Once you cook them and peel them and slice them, they’re gorgeous inside, marbled and crimson. Who knew, right?”
Later, as everyone fell deeper into their cups and began on second and third helpings, I felt a little pang, watching my friends eat around our table, sitting on ottomans and packing boxes around a table in a badly lit, crappy Long Island City apartment. There was Sally with her new boy, who was broodingly handsome and funny and couldn’t keep his hands off her. There was Brian, most unlikely beauty, grinning ear to ear as he explained superstrings to Eric, who looked like he’d never been sick a day in his life. There was Heathcliff, tomorrow headed back to his girlfriend in Arizona, and who knew where the day after that, flirting amiably with Gwen in the way of friends who will never be a couple, and there was Gwen pushing back her plate with a husky laugh, lighting her first cigarette. “Hey,” she said, pointing up at the ceiling. “Do I hear something crawling around in your ceiling?”
“Oh, that’s just the cat.”
“Which one? Cooper?”
“Yeah.”
“Crazy.”
I felt like a Jane Austen heroine all of a sudden (except, of course, that Jane Austen heroines never cook), confusedly looking on at all the people she loves, their myriad unpredictable couplings and uncouplings. There would be no marriages at the end of this Austen novel, though, no happy endings, no endings at all. Just jokes and friendships and romances and delicious declarations of independence. And I realized that, for this night at least, I didn’t much care if anyone was the marrying kind or not—not even me. Who could tell? We none of us knew for sure what kind we were, exactly, but as long as we were the kind that could sit around eating together and having a lovely time, that was enough.
Which just goes to show, I guess, that dinner parties are like everything else—not as fragile as we think they are.
The Bavarois à l’Orange turned out, well, oddly. When I shook it out of its Bundt pan mold I saw it had separated into layers—the top one light and mousse-y, the bottom one a deeper orange, Jell-O-like. But when I sliced it and placed it on plates for everyone, it actually looked very pretty, almost like I’d planned it that way. Instead of a union of airy cream and gelatin, I had made two separate layers, idiosyncratic but complementary interpretations of orange. It was not the way Julia had intended it. But perhaps for all that, it was just the thing.
May 1945
Kunming, China
“Thank God the food is an improvement, is all I have to say.”
“Well, you’re right about that. I just loved our meal last Sunday, didn’t you?”
“Wonderful.” Paul sat on his bunk, attempting to finish up his letter to Charlie by candlelight, as the lights were out again. Ceylon or China, some things, it seemed, never changed.
Julie was perched in the chair by his small desk with one of her long legs hitched up on the seat, sipping from a juice glass of Chinese gin and reading the copy of Tropic of Cancer he’d lent her. She gave a deep sigh and stretched. It seemed to Paul she’d grown quieter in the year he’d known her, more thoughtful. It was a pleasure spending time with her on these quiet nights. Though of course her laugh could still blow out the windows. “There’s quite a forest of cocks here, isn’t there?” she remarked.
“I suppose so.” Julia’s self-consciousness about sex grated on him slightly, but he would never say so. It wasn’t her fault, anyway; she was just inexperienced, and young for her age.
“Still, it’s astonishing. Thank you for lending it to me.”
“Of course,” he murmured distractedly. He was struggling over a passage in his letter; Charlie had written to him of some of Bartleman’s further predictions concerning Paul’s romantic life, this grand future he could expect to fall into his lap at any time. The mingling of nearly mad hope and increasing cynicism put up such a buzz in his head that he couldn’t think straight.
“Paulski, when shall we try that restaurant Janie mentioned? Ho-Teh-Foo, she called it. Oh, if I could have some Peking duck right this instant!”
“Perhaps I can get a half day one of these Sunday afternoons soon.”
“Lovely. And a trip to one of the monasteries, don’t you think? Now that the weather is getting so nice.” With a contented sigh, she returned to her book, bending over it to make out the words in the dim light.
Paul wrote, in a scrambled hand, of how much he needed love. Years later he would read it again, and when he did, he would write angrily in the margins, bemoaning his obtuseness, at the years wasted by his blindness to what was right there in front of him, reading Tropic of Cancer.
But for the moment, he just licked the gummy airmail adhesive and sealed the envelope shut.
DAY 108, RECIPE 154
The Law of Diminishing Returns
> Hey. You there?
< Yup.
> I’ve got a problem.
< You’ve got a problem?! I’ve got a live one on the line over here!
It was turning out to be just one of those days. Between the purchase orders and the Republicans and the insane phone calls, I was beginning to think the bell jar had come down around my cubicle for good, until I heard that beautiful, beautiful popping sound, and up jumped the talk window in the center of my screen. It was Gwen, who had introduced me to instant messaging. God bless her.
> What’s she saying?
< It’s a guy, actually. He wants to build a football stadium on Ground Zero. With a special box for the victims’ families. Classy, right?
> Jesus.
You cannot imagine how it eases the suffering of serving a mind-numbing public, when you can snidely judge said public via IM at the same time.
< So what’s up?
> Remember I told you about this guy Mitch from the LA office?
Gwen works at a production company in Tribeca that makes music videos and commercials. This sounds like a cool job, and in some ways it is. She’s always going to film shoots and to hear bands way too hip for me ever to have heard of, and one time she got to call Jimmy Fallon a “fucking retard,” to his face, which must have felt pretty good. On the other hand, she too spends her whole day answering phones, and running out into the rain to the Garden of Eden when someone in the office becomes outraged that the only soy sauce in the fridge is “Kikkoman, for Christ’s sake? You must be kidding me!” Her boss is a neurotic, closeted coke fiend, a nice enough guy, though he does have a tendency to do things like bend over Gwen while she’s at her desk and bite her shoulder, then say, “Gosh, I haven’t gotten myself into a harassment suit, have I?” That isn’t what gets her bothered, though. What gets her bothered is Mitch.
Like Gwen said, Mitch works in the LA office, in some kind of higher-up position. I didn’t know anything about him, really,
except that he apparently gave very good IM. So Gwen had hinted.
< Sure. What about him?
> It’s getting really bad. He’s coming out here. For a “business trip,” so-called.
< Yay! That’s great!
> Yeah . . . except . . .
< Oh God. What?
> Well. He’s older than me. 35.
Gwen wasn’t trying to make me feel like an ancient hag, she really wasn’t. She’s only twenty-four. Sometimes it’s like talking to a third grader who wonders if she can have the change when you get your senior citizen discount at the movies. I try not to take offense.
< Not exactly pushing up the daisies or anything . . .
> Yeah, well, there’s something else.
< What?
What??!!!
> Well, it turns out he’s married.
Jesus. Is that all?
I suppose Gwen meant this news to be earth-shattering. But it’s a funny thing about instant messaging, how it somehow telescopes everything said through it, so that every event becomes reassuringly distant and compellingly lurid at the same time. Besides, this guy was from LA. Didn’t everybody sleep around in LA? I thought that was the whole attraction, that and the swimming pools and movie stars.
Still, I didn’t want to come off like a complete heel here. Gwen really liked this guy. She was disappointed.
< What a jerk. When did you find out?
> Oh, I’ve known all along.
Oh well. So much for shielding my friend’s delicate sensibilities.
> But if he comes to town, I’ll really have to have sex with him, Julie. Will you hate me if I have sex with him?
< WTF?! Why would I hate you??
> For being a skanky adulteress?
When did I become poster child for the sanctity of marriage? Just because I’ve been hitched longer than Gwen has been able to vote, all my single friends seem to think I’m some kind of moral authority. I don’t do sanctity. Gwen, of all people, should know that.