In some ways I come closest, I suppose. But it still isn’t all that close. I get a huge amount of pleasure out of life but also understand melancholy and fury and frustration. I am capable of punishing myself with regret over poor choices and missed opportunities and just plain screwups, can seethe over the injustices I perceive in the world, all too often struggle against the inevitable future, rage against narrow-minded thinking and people who shrink away from knowledge and facts, and feel defeated by the things I am unable to affect and change. I can also be brought to a near-murderous fury, especially when talking to Verizon representatives or pondering our insane gun culture, or reading about female genital mutilation in Africa or having to live through James Dolan’s reign over the Knicks, making the odds approximately a billion to one that I will ever see another championship banner in the Garden in my lifetime.
I wondered how my mother could be so damn accepting, wondered if I could ever be like that. If I really wanted to be like that. The fact is, I have always kind of liked my anger and thought I had it contained just enough so it worked in my favor. But now I was intrigued: What would life be like if I found that kind of peace? That kind of comfort? And I began to wonder how the hell one could achieve it.
I am not in any way a spiritual person. I never accepted that inner peace could come from something I basically think of as make-believe. I also never saw much difference between worshipping dead religious figures of yore, be it Jesus, Mohammed, or Joseph Smith, and worshipping circus clowns or balloon sculptures. They all have the same degree of believability as far as I’m concerned. I don’t understand patriotic fervor, either, which seems to be the other thing that grounds people and links them together. I’m not quite able to grasp the whole concept of thinking you’re better than someone else because of the geographical location in which you were born.
Narrowing things down, I also never thought that contentment could truly come from other people—from relationships or children or family. I think that to have a good relationship, one has to bring a certain amount of confidence and stability to that relationship, not hope to just make a withdrawal. Love and relationships and all that good stuff could build upon a foundation of happiness, but, for me, they could not create that foundation.
That pretty much exhausted my perceived channels to attain some kind of spiritual peace. I didn’t really know what the other choices were.
I looked at my mother across her dining table as she took another bite of Joyce’s duck, abandoning the whole hard-to-handle fork thing and taking the last piece in her good hand and putting it into her mouth. Chewing firmly, a small piece of the duck hanging from the corner of her mouth, she smiled without bothering to look up at me. “Yes,” she said, ending the conversation about the air conditioner and how hard things were for her or for me. “I still like my life.”
I wondered: How did she get to be who she is?
* * *
I LEFT MY mother’s apartment and for several days afterward I found myself obsessing more and more about the idea of family: What is it? Why do we either cling to our natural one or create new ones? What actually holds a family together or splits it apart?
Why does it seem to be the one thing in the world that, for better or worse, winds up defining who we are and how we respond to the world around us?
And perhaps most important: What is it about family that seems to be our main source of comfort—or the main reason we can’t find any?
At some point during my grappling and pondering, I realized that, going back generations, there was one thing that unquestionably dominated my family dynamic in a bizarre variety of ways: food.
My mother’s family owned a legendary Jewish dairy restaurant on the Lower East Side of New York City called Ratner’s. Started by my grandfather in the early 1900s, the restaurant had a huge influence on my family’s identity and on so many of our complicated family relationships—I know it had a profound effect on my mother as she was growing up. It shaped her—and later my—understanding of human nature.
In her fifties, my mother went to work at another legendary restaurant, this one in Los Angeles, Ma Maison. That move changed and reshaped her own life to a substantial degree, and it changed the lives of many others, especially those of her husband and her two children. It raised our level of sophistication, it broadened our views, it introduced us to a universe of people who possessed previously unknown skills and talents and even genius. It also, as she grew and evolved, caused a fairly seismic shift in the family dynamic and the roles we all eventually played going forward.
My father, who never in his life cooked a meal, as far as I know, loved to eat and drink. He also delighted in going to restaurants: he relished the fuss made over him as a regular customer and he got a thrill talking about wine to the sommeliers. Most of all he loved to use food and wine as a way to celebrate and to share. That has had a huge impact on the way I see life—and the way I perceive people who either share or don’t share.
So, at my instigation, my nonagenarian mother and I began to talk about food in a more in-depth way than we had probably ever discussed anything other than our immediate family.
I knew that food and the preparation of food were essential to my mother’s sense of well-being, but I realized that I didn’t know the actual foods that were important to her. I decided that was something important to me. So that’s where we began. I pressed her for specifics. It took some time, due to her aphasia, but over many meals—in and out of her kitchen—and a decent amount of wine, beer, and vodka, she eventually came up with a list.
We started with dessert and although she had something in mind, it was rough sledding. She struggled to come up with the name of even one special sweet. I asked pointed and focused questions, as one does with aphasic people, to try to narrow things down.
“Is it chocolate?” I asked.
“No.”
“Another flavor? Vanilla or coffee?”
“No.”
“A cake?”
“Yes, a cake.” Then, “No … not a cake. Like a cake.”
“A pie?”
“A pie.” Then, “Kind of.”
“Kind of a pie?”
She nodded.
“Fruit?”
She nodded again. It seemed like we were getting close. “Fruit.”
“Apple?”
“No.”
I went through a list of every possible pie fruit I could think of until I couldn’t even come up with the name of another fruit except for breadfruit, which I’m reasonably sure isn’t actually fruit. I even included, in my promptings, lychees and pomegranates, both of which I refuse to even acknowledge as actual foods. None of them bore fruit, as far as an answer. So I changed tack.
“Is it American?” I said. “Something you first ate here or in Europe?”
“Europe. Ate it … in Europe.”
“France?”
“France … Paris.”
“Is it a tarte tatin?”
“No.”
“Really? A kind of fruit pie you ate in Paris and it’s not tarte tatin?”
“No.”
“Are you sure it’s not apples?”
“No … I mean yes … I’m sure.”
“And it’s not lemons?”
“No.”
I started going through my fruit list again. “Raspberries? A raspberry tart?”
“No.”
“Pears?”
“No!” For some reason my mention of pears, the second time around, seemed to annoy her, as if it was a ridiculous choice.
“I think it’s a tarte tatin, Mom.”
“It isn’t.”
“Okay,” I said. “I know you’ll think of it. When you do, tell your companion so she’ll remember to tell me. Or you just call me.”
I went home soon after that exchange. Three hours later, she called me. When I picked up the phone, I heard:
“I thought of it.”
“Great. What is it?”
�
�Tarte tatin.”
I did my best not to laugh. “That’s the dessert you like the most?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m glad you thought of it. I never would have come up with the name on my own.”
Eventually, over time, we came up with her complete fantasy menu. We did it by meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, because that’s the way my mother tends to think: in total meals rather than just individual dishes. She thinks of food the way Sinatra, in the fifties, and the Beatles, in the sixties, took the concept of albums to a different level: they became whole entities, not just compilations of songs. As we went over the possible foods—and there were many—I did my best to narrow them down. The ones that made the final cut were selected not just because they are delicious but because they have emotional resonance for her. Each dish on the menu is in some way deeply meaningful to my mom.
When the list was complete, I didn’t know quite what to do with it. I wasn’t sure there was anything to do with it. But it was knowledge—some insight into my mom—and I was glad to have it.
And then one evening we started talking about a lot of things: my father, families in general, our family in particular, relationships, love, disappointment, pleasure, getting older, changes.
“Why did you like cooking so much?” I asked her. “’Cause it made other people so happy?”
“No,” she said, surprising me. “Well, partly … but … not really … about that.”
“Then what?”
“I like making other people happy. But … more about … me.”
She was silent for a while after that, but I waited. I could tell more was coming. That’s one of the interesting things about dealing with people who have lost some aspect of themselves that the rest of us take for granted. You pay closer attention to details that otherwise might be ignored. My mother couldn’t always say what she wanted but she always managed to communicate in another way—sometimes even through something as simple and eloquent as silence.
“I like understanding something … so well … I can turn it into whatever I want. I like the … the…”—her eyes started to roll in frustration; she was prepared to quit but then it came to her—“… the precision. A kind of … therapy. Chopping and cutting … hypnotic. No tension in cooking. Just…”
She tailed off and I thought she was finished until I prompted her one more time and she said, “It just works. I like doing something that works.” There was another silence and then she said, “It makes me … happy. Gives me…”
“What does it give you, Mom?”
She shook her head. She’d lost the word. Then she found it: “Definition.”
* * *
DEFINITION. DESPITE HER aphasia, my mother had nailed it. If there was anything that provides genuine comfort to people, it is finding and defining their own identity.
We use various labels to define ourselves. I am a Catholic. I am a Texan. I am a scientist. I am a feminist. I am a conservative. I am a rebel.
We find what makes us comfortable and we put ourselves in that box.
I am married. I am independent. I am rich. I am an artist. I am funny.
I am whatever links me to the world to which I want to be attached.
But food? As a way of providing a sense of self?
On my way home from my mother’s, I had a sudden flashback. Years ago, I spent quite a few weeks in Sicily, writing a novel and staying at a small caretaker’s cottage on the property of a thirteenth-century abbey. I had edited and published a cookbook by Wanda and Giovanna Tornabene, the mother and daughter who owned the abbey—and within that magnificent walled structure they ran the best restaurant on the whole island. Letting me stay in the cottage while I was on my writing jag was their way of thanking me for publishing their book and getting involved in their lives. And while I was there, they cooked for me—oh, man, did they cook. Their pasta was the best I’d ever eaten, and I ate an immense amount of it every time I sat down at their table.
On the final day of that retreat, I bought the caretaker’s cottage in which I’d stayed. It is one of the most beautiful places on the face of the planet, but that’s not why I bought it. I bought it because the idea of eating Giovanna and Wanda’s food on a semi-regular basis was irresistible. Remembering that momentous decision—and acknowledging the reality that a 175-year-old cottage in what is basically the middle of nowhere in the Sicilian countryside was in my possession because I loved the pasta I could get there—made me realize something rather shocking:
Food doesn’t just make me happy. Since my mom went to work at Ma Maison when I was twenty-two years old, every major decision I’ve made and most key events in my life have revolved around food and drink as surely as the earth revolves around the sun. Whatever definition of myself I’ve managed to stumble into, it is unquestionably connected to what I have eaten or drunk.
At various times in my life, I’ve fallen in love, or thought I had, while eating sushi, homemade prune ice cream, and Tex-Mex. Thinking back on the women I fell for, I can’t always explain what it is I fell in love with, but I do know what I was eating when the lightning struck.
The same goes for the gory finales to most of those relationships. I’ve had my heart broken over tapas. I’ve been dumped while chewing on a roasted chicken (and to make it worse, I did the roasting).
In my thirties, I made the decision—over oysters, mignonette sauce, and champagne—to blow up my life, quit my reasonably high-powered job in book publishing, and move to the south of France for a year to write a book and, well, to live. My thought process was, in essence: Why am I wasting my life? I want to eat oysters and drink champagne in France as often as possible while I can still appreciate it. At the time, I would have moved anywhere for a year if I could have had mignonette sauce several times a week.
I meet a few times a year with a group of my closest friends. We call ourselves the Martini Brothers because our main bonding experience is the imbibing of that revered beverage.
I arrange dinners (or beg to be invited if those dinners are already arranged) geared around wine, almost always red; I spend too much money on the stuff, and I love talking about it. It’s possible that the happiest I’ve ever been—the closest I’ve ever gotten to a spiritual feeling—has been sitting in the cave of a great Burgundy winemaker, Laurent Ponsot, eating cold chicken and sipping (okay, swigging) Monsieur Ponsot’s superb juice. The friends who were with me periodically remark that they have never seen anyone quite as content as I was for those few hours.
It is not an accident, I am sure, that my girlfriend of two-plus decades is a literary agent whose specialty is food books. One of the top agents in the country for food writers and chefs, her first food client was my mom, who in turn led her to such clients as Maida Heatter, Nancy Silverton, and Suzanne Goin, legends all in the food world.
I still work in publishing and one of the many things I do is edit cookbooks.
I also produce television shows and movies, and the first unscripted TV series I had on the air was a cooking show on the Food Network.
Many of the best times I can recall involve cooking and feeding people, or having other people cooking for and feeding me. I have learned—and am still learning—about the true nature of my relationships with people, including my family, because of our relationships to food.
Food and drink are central to my life and they have been for a long, long time. But until these conversations with my mother, I have never really understood why.
The conversations began a process of understanding.
I’m not exactly sure when I realized what I was going to do with my knowledge, or with the perfect menu I’d managed to drag out of my mom. But when I did come to the realization, it seemed right and natural.
I decided that I was going to cook all of my mother’s favorite foods and meals. I’d cook with and learn from her but would also cook with and learn from others, so I could attempt to master the techniques she valued and understood so well and
attempt to master the things I valued but of which I had zero understanding.
And once I did, I would make her perfect dinner, not just for her but also for the people she valued and who valued her, the people who’d taught her and shaped her taste and molded her and, by extension, helped mold me.
I was going to learn exactly what made it all work. And what it all meant. Not just the food and drink, but other things as well. I was certain there was a connection between food and relationships and family and personal history. I just needed to find out what it was.
I was going to try to make a whole bunch of people—including myself—happy.
I was determined to find some kind of purpose while deciphering a few of the eternal mysteries that lie within the seemingly simple act of following a recipe and preparing a meal.
In the process, I was hoping to find some definition.
And, if I was lucky, some comfort.
PART TWO
BREAKFAST
Hope is a good breakfast but it is a bad supper.
—Francis Bacon
My Mom’s Breakfast Menu
Ratner’s Matzo Brei
The Beverly Hilton Coffee Shop’s and the Cock’n Bull’s Eggs Benedict
CHAPTER TWO
My mother was born on August 30, 1922.
Here’s what hadn’t happened yet at the time of my mother’s birth: Lindbergh hadn’t crossed the Atlantic; no one had spoken aloud in a movie; there was no such thing as Time magazine; there had never been a Winter Olympics; The Great Gatsby had not yet been published; and Mickey Mouse had yet to spring from Walt Disney’s imagination.
My Mother's Kitchen Page 2