by Julie Powell
“It’s Amanda Hesser from the Times.”
It was the second Thursday of the month, board meeting day, so I’d been at work since 7:30 in the morning. I was also having one of those days where I kept getting this faint whiff of a smell somewhere on me, but I couldn’t find the source—my clothes weren’t dirty, my armpits didn’t stink, my hair was fine, but somehow I smelled like someone had smeared Burger King special sauce on my bra or something. So I was in a foul mood when the phone rang. Let me tell you, though, getting a call from Amanda Hesser who wants to write a story about you in the Newspaper of Record has a way of improving your frame of mind. True, you will move instantly from surliness to hysteria over the right insouciant wine, but a little hysteria is good for you. (I’m living proof of that.)
I wasn’t, by this time, a complete offal amateur. I’d made several sorts of sweetbreads and actually learned that I rather favored them, except when they smelled like formaldehyde or I overcooked them to squooshy gray hockey pucks.
I’d even cooked brains. This is a funny story, actually, because on the day I was cooking the brains, I was doing an interview with someone for the radio. The guy came to the apartment and talked with me for half an hour while I was preparing for that night’s dinner. Everything was fine until the interview ended and the gentleman asked if he could use the facilities before he packed up and left. It was only once he’d gone into the half bath and shut the door that I remembered I had several calves’ brains soaking in the sink in there. Poor guy. At least I didn’t try to make him eat them.
It isn’t so much the taste, with brains, though that’s no great shakes. And it isn’t the ick factor—the way, when you wash them, you inevitably wind up with bits of brain matter strewn Tarantino-esquely about the sink and your garments, and the weirdo gummy white matter that holds the brain together, which is sort of like fat, I guess, but also looks and feels like something that could very well be called “spongiform.” No, the real problem is the philosophical tailspin part. The inconsolable mystery of life, consciousness, the soul. I want a brain to be tightly knit and deeply furrowed, conduited with the circuitous pathways of thought and deep receptacles of memory, but no. It’s just this flabby, pale, small organ that disintegrates in your fingers if you let the faucet run too fast. How can this be? How can we be?
We’d invited Sally over that night to share our brains prepared two ways—Cervelles en Matelote and Cervelles au Beurre Noir—on the grounds that Sally was the only person I knew who’d ever eaten brains before. Hers had been goat brain curry in Calcutta. Sally was bringing her new sophisticated wine-drinking boyfriend David (the old David, the one with the motorcycle, who couldn’t keep his hands off her, was long gone), which struck me as either a courageous gesture of faith in their budding relationship or, possibly, an attempt to hit his eject button.
Cervelles en Matelote were brains gently poached in red wine, which red wine was then cooked down and thickened with beurre manié, a paste of butter and flour, to make a sauce. For Cervelles au Beurre Noir the brains were sliced and marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, and parsley before being browned in butter and oil and tossed with a Beurre Noir, which is just a stick and a half of butter, clarified and browned to a nut color, with parsley and cooked-down vinegar. Only Eric had bought cilantro instead of parsley, so actually no parsley. I could take the brains in red wine sauce with onions and mushrooms, because it tasted mostly like onions and mushrooms and red wine. The brains just sort of melted away. But the pan-fried brains—I don’t know. Almost unbearably rich—and I like rich—and with this smackery texture that sort of makes me shudder just thinking about it. Let’s just say that the dessert of crepes filled with almond custard and topped with shavings of absurdly expensive Scharffen Berger chocolate represented a vast improvement.
So I had the organ meat experience. And while some people might have considered that when they were having a famous food writer from the New York Times over for dinner they ought not try to prepare kidneys for the first time in their life, I wasn’t too worried. Just like sometimes you have to dye your hair cobalt blue, or wear jeans and beat-up motorcycle boots to your government-wonk job, sometimes you have to put yourself out there without a net. I’d done the brains—I figured if I could manage that, I’d be all right.
So there was this problem with the wine, though. I thought about asking Sally to ask her new boyfriend, but to tell you the truth, I thought her new boyfriend was kind of a tool, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking him for advice. It occurred to me that Nate, actually, probably would know something about wine—he’s one of those slightly bacchanalian Republicans, like Rush Limbaugh, who smokes illegal Cuban cigars or indulges in some kind of mildly deviant behavior. But no, I couldn’t ask him. He’d be absolutely insufferable about it. He’d pester me until I told him who was coming to dinner, and when he found out it was the New York Times, he would think up some way to make a nuisance of himself. But here it was, three o’clock. Amanda Hesser was coming to dinner that night; I needed someone to ask for help. Oh, damn.
I reluctantly stuck my head inside the door of Nate’s office. He was, oddly, not on the phone. “Do you know anything about wine?”
He flung his feet up on his desk. “Why do you ask, my little government drone?”
I rolled my eyes at him. “I just need a good wine. Something that will go with kidneys.”
“You’re going to eat kidneys? I knew you were a twisted liberal, Powell, but kidneys?”
“Oh, come on. Can you help me or not?”
“So this is some kind of special occasion, is it? You having some bigwig over for dinner? Hmm? What’s this all about?”
“Okay, Nate, it’s just that I’ve got this very intimidating person coming over to dinner, I need to have insouciant perfect wine, I’m freaking out, come on!”
“Insouciant, eh? Very intimidating person, eh? Like who? Tell me who. C’mon, Powell, just tell me. Who?”
“I’m not telling, Nate. Help me, don’t help me. I don’t care.” I started to march out of his office again.
“Oh, okay, okay, don’t be so sensitive. Jeesh, Democrats.” Nate took his time, twiddled his thumbs, made me wait for it. This is the kind of stuff Nate loves. “Well, I do like Chateau Greysac Haut Medoc. The Chateau Larose Trintaudon Côtes du Rhone is another savvy choice. And, if you want to be outrageous, I think that BV Coastal Cabernet Sauvignon is one of the great deals out there in big reds.”
I’m only paranoid because people are always holding out on me.
So before going home to prepare a dinner of Rognons de Veau en Casserole, kidneys cooked in butter with mustard and parsley sauce, with sautéed potatoes and braised onions, and Clafouti for dessert, for Amanda Hesser of the New York Times, I rushed into Astor Wines and asked the guy for Greysac. It was the easiest wine-shopping experience of my life—no wandering aimlessly in the Burgundy aisle, choosing by Robert Parker points. When I got home I set the bottles on a table near the front door, and goddamned if practically the first thing Amanda said when she walked through the door wasn’t, “Oh, Greysac! Where did you get it?”
So I’ve got to give Nate his due on that one.
Amanda Hesser, food writer for the New York Times, is—and this is an extraordinarily unoriginal observation, but nearly impossible to let go by un-commented-upon, it’s like seeing me and not thinking, “Gee, that lady really needs to get some electrolysis!”—very, very tiny. She’s so tiny that you can’t understand how she can eat food at all, let alone for a living. She’s so tiny that it’s hard for a big-boned misanthropist, who has nurtured a secret wish all her life to be considered “cute,” to not hate her. Though Amanda Hesser is not cute. She’s adorable, empirically, but when you’re a thirty-year-old secretary who can’t really cook, it’s not appropriate to call the tiny famous food writer sitting in your kitchen watching you make Rognons de Veau en Casserole “cute.” “Intimidating As Shit,” more like. Hating Amanda Hesser is something
of a cottage industry in certain, admittedly small and perhaps excessively navel-gazing, circles, and it would be an easy enough bandwagon to jump onto. But when she’s going to be writing an article about you in the Newspaper of Record, there’s really no sense in starting off on the wrong foot. Besides, I was going to be cooking kidneys for the poor woman—the least I could do was give her the benefit of the doubt.
With Amanda and a photographer watching, I browned the kidneys lightly in butter. Back in March I’d made a leg of lamb stuffed with lamb kidneys and rice. Those kidneys, the lamb ones, had been entrancing—dark and firm and smooth, heavy as river stones in the hand, like a sort of idealization of innards. I’d just assumed that that was what kidneys were like. These kidneys, though, the veal ones, were large and messy and many-lobed, striated with white fat and filaments. They spit up a lot of liquid as they cooked. I glanced anxiously at the book—“a little juice from the kidneys will exude and coagulate,” Julia wrote.
“Does this look like ‘a little juice’ to you? It doesn’t look like ‘a little juice’ to me. It looks like a lot.”
Amanda shrugged tentatively. “I’ve never cooked kidneys before.” Poor Amanda. Probably she was a little uncomfortable with expressing an opinion on this; probably she wasn’t often in a position to interview someone who so clearly knew so embarrassingly much less about these things than she did.
I removed the kidneys to a plate, terrified that I’d either over- or undercooked them. I added shallots and vermouth and lemon juice to the pan and let the liquid boil down, probably a bit too much, actually. I was also blanching pearl onions even tinier than Amanda Hesser, and sautéing some potatoes that Eric had quartered for me. I shuttled back and forth around the kitchen, from pot to pan to Book and back again, in a sort of mild chronic panic, which I tried to cover with continuous but not at all witty patter.
It was about a hundred degrees in the kitchen. Poor Amanda Hesser’s forehead was damp with perspiration, but she did not complain. Neither did she physically cringe from touching anything, even though all around me I could see the sticky, dusty, cat-hairy indications of my pathetic housekeeping. She did say, when she spied the pitchy black soles of my bare feet, “You need some chef’s clogs. It’ll help your back.”
The potatoes got a little burned. Amanda Hesser called them “caramelized.”
The onions got braised in butter, perhaps a bit too long, and were sort of falling apart. Amanda Hesser called them “glazed.”
I finished off the sauce for the kidneys with some mustard and butter, then sliced the kidneys, which were actually a not-too-terrible-looking pink on the inside, and tossed them and some parsley in the sauce. It was too easy to even talk about. Quickly I whipped up the batter for the Clafouti in the blender—milk, sugar, eggs, vanilla, touch of salt, flour. I poured a layer of it into my springform pan and, per Julia’s somewhat mystifying directions, heated the pan up for a minute or so on the stovetop so a film set on the bottom before dropping in some cherries Eric had pitted, pouring on the rest of the batter, and sticking it into a 350-degree oven to bake while we ate dinner.
When I’d told my mother that Amanda Hesser was coming over for dinner and that I was going to make her kidneys, she’d said, “But kidneys taste like piss.” But these didn’t at all. Though the potatoes were burned, the onions were nice. The Greysac was excellent. And it was so much cooler in the dining room that everyone started feeling giddy and joyful. I told Amanda Hesser the story about Poulet à la Broche, how I faked an “oven spit attachment,” whatever the hell that is, by sticking a straightened metal clothes hanger through a chicken and then winding the ends of the hanger around the handles of my stockpot and sticking the whole contraption in the oven with the broiler on and the door ajar. In August. Amanda Hesser’s eyes went wide in her tiny face. “You really did that?”
I’ve got to say, it’s a nice feeling, impressing Amanda Hesser of the New York Times. Even if it is with your idiocy.
The Clafouti was good too, puffy and browned, with the cherries studded jewel-like through it. The no-longer-quite-so-intimidating Amanda Hesser had two slices. I wonder where she puts it?
So what happens when you get an article written about you in the New York Times? I’ll tell you what happens.
First you’ll get a buzzing sensation in your ears when you see your picture, which makes you look fat but no fatter than you are, to be honest. You’ll see somebody on the subway reading the Dining section and think, with hysterical, dreadful anticipation, “Oh my God oh my God! I’m going to be recognized!” You won’t be, but you’ll hold your breath all the way to the office, waiting for it.
At work, you’ll keep expecting your coworkers to congratulate you on being so very kick-ass—though because many of them are Republican bureaucrats who don’t read the Dining section, you won’t get as much of that as you’d have thought. You will waste a good bit of time checking obsessively to see how many people have visited your blog. Very, very many people will have. Many of these people will think you should stop saying f*** so much, which makes the people who’ve already been reading the blog for a long time plenty pissed. Arguments will break out.
Back in the real world—at some point Nate the evil baby genius will stop by your desk. “Nice article in the Times, Jules,” he’ll say, leaning over you familiarly. Nate respects nothing as much as a mention in the Times, except a mention in the Post or the Daily News. “Was that who the wine was for?”
“Yeah. Thanks for that. It was a hit.”
“So you mentioned the job, I notice. Doesn’t reflect very well on the organization, when you say you’re unsatisfied in your work.”
“Jesus, Nate, come on. I’m a secretary. I’m supposed to be unsatisfied. Am I supposed to lie to them when they ask? It’s not like I called Mr. Kline an asshole or something. Who gives a shit?”
Would you have said this to Nate under normal circumstances? Maybe. Or maybe not.
When you get home, you will have fifty-two messages on your answering machine. (Your number is listed; you’ve never had any reason for it not to be.) In your AOL account, 236 messages. You will think that your ship has come the f*** in.
Had it, though, really? It was hard to say. Everybody’s always got their own stuff to attend to, especially the bureaucrats at my office, who care about French food not at all, and in a surprisingly short amount of time things got back to normal. Well, sort of.
A week after the article came out I was in the West Village on my lunch break to pick up some more veal kidneys at my favorite butcher shop. The guy behind the counter said, “Hey, you had that article in the paper last week, right?”
“Oh—yeah?”
“Thanks for mentioning us. We’ve been getting all kinds of orders for offal this week—I’ve never seen anything like it.”
That was fun.
Even better, though, was when I got back to the office and Bonnie said the president wanted to see me in his office. She looked nervous. “You should just make nice—I think he’s pretty upset.”
So I walked down the hall to his office, and he pointed to the chair in front of his big desk. “Julie,” he said, looking very serious with his hands clasped on the desk in front of him, “it seems to me you’ve got a lot of anger.”
It seemed that someone had finally alerted Mr. Kline about the heretical content of my blog. I wonder if it was the thing I wrote about throwing vice presidents out windows that got him worried. “Are you unhappy here?” he asked.
“No! No, sir. I just—well, I am a secretary, Mr. Kline. Sometimes it’s frustrating.”
“You’re an asset to the organization, Julie. You just need to try to find a way to channel that negative energy.”
“Mm-hm.”
Channel that negative energy?! Since when do Republicans talk like that? I thought that was the one thing to admire about Republicans.
So I made nice, I nodded and shuffled and bowed my head like a chastised child. And yet, in my chest I fel
t a blooming, something that felt like liberty, like happiness. And sitting unspoken in my brain, repeating there endlessly, was one delicious, rebellious, freeing response: Or what? You’ll fire me?
Maybe my ship was coming the f*** in after all.
By the time you have completed half of this, the carcass frame, dangling legs, wings, and skin will appear to be an unrecognizable mass of confusion and you will wonder how in the world any sense can be made of it all. But just continue cutting against the bone, and not slitting any skin, and all will come out as it should.
— “How to Bone a Duck, Turkey, or Chicken,”
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1
DAY 365, RECIPE 524
Simplicity Itself
What kind of Darwinian funhouse trick is this? The blithe happy humans were just enjoying themselves too darn much to make time for procreation, is that it? Is the self-denigration mutation linked irrevocably to a heightened genetic immunity or something?
If you will be so kind as to indulge me in a quick flashback:
The time is crack of dawn, second Tuesday of July, 2003. I am due at my office in an hour for another in an endless series of early-morning meetings, for which I perform the vital duties of dais card setup, last-minute xeroxing, hysterical, high-heeled running up and down of hallways, and purposeful-looking standing around. This is all quite bad enough. But what is worse is that I have spent the previous three hours lying in bed, wide awake and bitch-slapping myself because I’d failed to make apple aspic.
Here I am with just over a month to go, fifty-eight recipes left, and instead of making the apple aspic like a responsible member of society, I wasted the whole night eating mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli and London broil. Yes, I made Champignons Sautés, Sauce Madère. Do you know what Champignons Sautés, Sauce Madère is? It’s beef stock simmered with carrots and celery and vermouth and bay leaf and thyme, then thickened with cornstarch; some quartered mushrooms browned in butter; and some Madeira cooked down in the skillet. Combine the brown sauce and the mushrooms and simmer. It’s horseshit, is what it is. I should just get that scarlet L branded on my chest now, because I’m a big LOSER. And then there’s Eric. “Maybe part of the Project is that you don’t finish everything.” Where has he been for the last eleven months? Doesn’t he get it? Doesn’t he understand that if I don’t get through the whole book in a year then this whole thing will have been a waste, that I’m going to spiral into mediocrity and despair and probably wind up on the street trading blow jobs for crack or something? He hates me, anyway. Look at him, curled over on his side of the bed like he doesn’t want to so much as touch me. It’s because I’ve got the stink of failure on me. I’m doomed. . . .