My Mother's Kitchen

by Peter Gethers

  He began by showing us how to hold the knife—by the handle, naturally, but also keeping one’s index finger on the bolster. Not only does this grip provide more leverage and stability when chopping hard and fast, it also prevents carpal tunnel syndrome. It is indeed a dangerous life being a chef.

  Using a paring knife, he showed us how to core a tomato (in my naive appreciation of learning these skills, this was kind of thrilling) and how to peel an orange so that the peel came off in one, long, curling piece (this was showing off because he made it look really easy; it isn’t). Using a cleaver, he slashed down on a thick potato, demonstrating the tool’s power. He also told us a story about how a student in one class almost cut him—Chef Phlemmermannn—in half by waving the cleaver around carelessly. He explained how to properly dismantle an onion (you’re supposed to cut off the end so the onion can lie flat while you chop—a genuine revelation to me). After that, he showed us how to place our fingers on the chopping block, our knuckles square to the knife, so even if we slipped up we wouldn’t do any serious severing. He explained the differences among mincing, chopping, dicing, and cubing; then he had us practice on garlic. He also showed us how to smoosh the garlic pieces with the flat edge of the blade. “Smoosh” is not the technical term, I’m sure, but I didn’t take note of the word he actually used and “smoosh” does justice to the process.

  After that, we paired off (except for me: I was the odd person out, which was fine with me; I’m not much of a team player in or out of the kitchen) to make salsa—using our onion, tomato, garlic, and hot pepper (also provided for us). We quietly chopped, minced, smooshed, and spiced—he urged us to taste as often as necessary and bring it to the level of heat that we most liked (I like things as hot as possible, so I used my entire pepper). The same urging applied to the use of salt and pepper, with which we were also provided.

  As we worked, our teacher for the day went around and appraised our work for each segment and vegetable. He seemed impressed with my garlic mincing/smooshing but not so much when it came to dicing the onion—I was left with several long onion strands, no matter how I tried to imitate his turning and angling demonstrations. From his raised eyebrow and slight nod, I suspected he gave my tomato coring and dicing a solid C.

  The last part of the lesson was the tasting. We each received a spoon and there was one large tray of toast points that had been prepared by an invisible person in a nearby test kitchen. The team to my right won the group vote. I preferred my level of heat but theirs was definitely the best overall from a texture and taste perspective.

  The end result?

  I didn’t cut myself. Not even a nick. And I am determined to get myself a set of really perfect and beautiful knives. That will probably be my gift to myself when I type the words “the end” on these manuscript pages. And yes, the class did help me when making the celeriac remoulade. I used the cleaver—with surprising confidence—to cut off the ends of the celery root. The paring knife was used—not exactly expertly but competently—to remove the peel and the spongy inside. I used the chef’s knife for the rest of the cutting.

  When I took the concoction up to my mom’s apartment, I brought a cutting block into her bedroom—she wasn’t up for a trip to the kitchen that day—to proudly show off my newfound skills, dexterity, and knowledge.

  I explained to her that I’d learned something in class I’d never realized before: the reason you are supposed to cut an onion or a carrot, or, literally, anything else, into the same size pieces is that those pieces will all cook at the exact same rate. My chest swelled up with this revelation as if I were telling her about my Nobel Prize–winning physics theory. Her response to this was, after several attempts at getting the right words out: “You couldn’t have figured that out on your own?”

  I told her that of course I could have, but it wasn’t anything I’d really thought about. “Sometimes,” I told her, “the best educational process is to just understand something simple that you might not have focused on before.” Even as I said it, I knew it sounded fairly lame. But she nodded politely in response.

  Undeterred, I then gave her a demonstration of my new mastery of the cutlery world. The whole flat-finger-knuckle thing. The anti–carpal tunnel grip. The smooshing and the paring and the skin peeling (which, I must admit, I had not mastered to the degree I should have before trying to show off).

  I performed for my mom as if I were an eight-year-old Penn and Teller, amazing my audience with this view into a world of magic where few dared to tread. When I was done, my mom smiled.

  I’m not sure she was impressed.

  But I am sure she was pleased.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When I was around three or four, various members of my mother’s family, including my gramps, Jake, gave in and followed their wayward daughter and son-in-law into the wilds of Manhattan. Not to Stuyvesant Town but to the near-identical but slightly more upscale development called Peter Cooper Village (adding the word “Village” rather than “Town” to the official nomenclature was a clever attempt to make the look-alike redbrick complex sound superior).

  Jake and Ceil, his second wife, my mom’s sister Belle (with her two children but minus her husband, who had died), and eldest sister Natalie with Spatzi and their two sons, all moved into Peter Cooper. It was hard to split up families in those days. Or maybe it was just the Harmatz clan that liked to cluster around each other forever.

  Peter Cooper, directly across 20th Street from Stuy Town, ranged up to 23rd Street and, like Stuy Town, sprawled from First Avenue to the East River. The apartments in both places were very similar, but Peter Cooper had security guards (I’m not sure what they were guarding other than the tenants’ egos) and the grounds were slightly nicer and less family friendly. The most important difference was that the Peter Cooper residents were allowed to have air conditioners in the apartments whereas Stuy Town inhabitants were not.

  Not long after my mother’s family moved next door to us—and not exactly by coincidence—my parents moved out of the city altogether. The Gethers family became ensconced about forty-five minutes north of Manhattan in West Nyack, New York. We lived in a very cool and eccentric house that was owned by the local water and electric company. It was pre–Civil War and was actually used as a stop on the underground railway to hide slaves traveling north to Canada. As a result, and to my delight, there were all sorts of strange, secret hiding places scattered throughout the place. The house was situated on three and a half acres of land, bordered on the back by a lake and, according to what I could understand from my parents, quite cheap. I have no idea how my dad was able to find it and rent it, but he always had good taste, was quite confident in his taste, and had a knack for deciding that he wanted something and then finding a way to make it happen.

  West Nyack was more farmland than suburbia back then. It was like a benign version of the Billy Mumy Twilight Zone episode town: kids rode their bikes everywhere, schoolteachers came over to their students’ houses for dinner, parents didn’t need to supervise trick-or-treaters on Halloween, and the town doctor made house calls and knew everybody’s medical history without checking his charts. It was the kind of place Ronald Reagan crazily thought all of America was like before the rebellious 1960s. Even West Nyack wasn’t really like that. But it sure seemed that way to me from the ages of five through ten.

  The town had Boy Scout troops galore and bowling teams and Little League battles and killer dodgeball games on the school playgrounds. I instinctively shied away from any activity or group that involved uniforms and uniformity. That five-year period is when my basic perception of mankind seems to have been formed: stay away from any gathering of more than two people if they think they know more about life than you do—especially if they’re all wearing the same clothes.

  The one thing West Nyack didn’t have was my father. At least on a regular basis. Out of necessity he became a part-timer.

  The television industry had rather abruptly relocated from New York to
Los Angeles. Since this is what put bread on our table—he had abandoned acting to become a screenwriter—my dad had to move with it. He resisted as long as he could, for several years spending six months on the West Coast working on various television series and movie projects, and then coming back to Nyack for the next six months to write or just be a dad. I thought it was all pretty exotic having a half-time father who, when he was home, was home twenty-four hours a day. I thought that six-month, twenty-four-hour-a-day period more than made up for the long absences. I was happy in my youth-spun cocoon. My brother, six and a half years older than I, and going through all the normal traumas of teenage-hood—hormonal, psychological, and emotional—wasn’t nearly as sanguine without a dad. And my mom … well … at the time I had no idea how hard it was on her and how strong she had to be to deal with my dad’s disappearances for such long stretches, especially to the land of starlets and glamour. But I never saw a trace of any difficulty. Instead, I saw a mom who would throw the football around with me in the backyard (she was a way better athlete than my dad) and drive me everywhere and help me with my homework.

  My mom began to really get serious about cooking around this time. It was the era of horrible frozen TV dinners—whole families used to sit down in front of the television at dinnertime with prepackaged aluminum foil trays that had come out of the freezer and gone into the oven, and they would eat small portions, subdivided by aluminum foil walls, of turkey with gravy, mushy potatoes, mushier carrots, and some form of pudding. They basically were the precursor to airplane food. Eric and I got none of that, though. My mom used to make her own TV dinners. She’d prepare steak or pot roast and roasted potatoes and vegetables (horribly enough, I remember portions of Brussels sprouts) and rhubarb cobbler and she would freeze them, so we’d always have healthy and nutritious dinners ready to heat up. Then, when my dad popped in for his extended visits, she would prepare new and elaborate dinners.

  A semi-single mom with her two angels. Somewhere around this time she was explaining sex to Eric and showing me how to hit a baseball.

  I remember my mom making something that I thought was totally exotic: quail. It’s not the perfect food for small boys because it’s delicate and that’s not something we boys do very well. It was delicious, though, and no one else in West Nyack that I knew of ever ate quail. Years later, I learned there was a very specific reason she came to love cooking this small, tasty bird. All the men in the Gethers family liked the dark meat sections of their fowls. So did my mom. But when she made chicken or even turkey, because she was who she was, she let us take the parts we liked best and she took what was left, which meant no dark meat for her. I grew up assuming she preferred white meat. Uh uh. She just ate it because it’s what remained after her husband and two boys had ravaged the legs and thighs of the large birds. But quail was too small to share. Everyone got his or her own tiny bird to pick up and rip apart and try to figure out how to eat. Which meant my mom got her share of dark meat, even if quail legs were not the meatiest.

  My mother wasn’t the only person doing kitchen duty in our West Nyack house. Louise Trotty, the woman who had helped raise my dad and who was responsible for the Gethers family name-change, lived with us. She had a bedroom in the converted basement—I went down there at all hours of the day and night to watch a black-and-white TV with her—and she came out of loyalty to my dad, who knew she would make my mom’s life easier. As an extra bonus, he could now afford to pay her. Louise often cooked for us, even when my mom was home—her food was delicious but limited in scope—and when my mom was visiting my dad in California, it was Louise who disciplined us, often with her potent shoe swat.

  There were advantages to being the baby in the family. I didn’t get into nearly as much trouble as Eric did. As a result, I was often rewarded for being “the good one.” My favorite reward, by far, was Louise’s chocolate pudding. She made it from scratch. I remember her pouring lots of milk into a pot, melting dark chocolate, and stirring with a wooden spoon for a long time while a skin would form on top of the pudding and around the sides of the pot. While it was still warm, she would spoon it into small bowls, put a strip of cellophane over each individual bowl, and put the whole collection into the fridge. But there was still that pot. And that spoon. If I timed it right—and especially if this wonderful delicacy was being made anywhere close to something bad Eric had done, which was not very difficult because he was usually doing something bad—I’d get to lick the spoon. And then use that spoon to scrape the sides of the pot and lick that sucker until the cows came home.

  When I was seven years old, my mom disappeared for a couple of months. I was aware that she was in the hospital in the city—I visited her a few times—but I didn’t fully comprehend what was going on. What was going on was that she had cancer. A melanoma, to be specific. On her calf. She was given a 5 percent chance of being able to stay alive for twelve more months.

  Melanoma was and still is the most severe and scariest type of skin cancer, but all I really understood was that when my mom eventually returned from the hospital, she had a huge chunk of her calf missing. The gouge in her leg was probably six to eight inches long and several inches deep and I thought it looked monstrous. I’m sure she was self-conscious about it but she never hid it, at least not that I recall. And I think one of the reasons my dad was such an excellent husband is that he never treated her enormous and rather grotesque wound and subsequent scar as anything but a part of her that he loved like all the other parts.

  My dad’s heart was quite large. And his pockets were equally deep. My dad loved spending money (a trait I unfortunately inherited in a big way), especially on my mom. He had never been happy with the wedding ring he’d bought for her because when they’d gotten married, all he could afford was the equivalent of one of those rings found in a Cracker Jack box. So when he found out that my mom had a terrible, life-threatening cancer, he immediately took out a bank loan and bought her the most beautiful diamond ring he could find as a replacement. To this day, if anyone asks my mom to tell the story of him giving her the ring when she was in her hospital bed, she will start to cry at the sentiment and sense of loss and laugh at the same time, thinking of the absurd romantic instinct of going into hock to buy a diamond ring for a supposedly dying woman.

  Once my mother was home, she was still very weak and had to spend a few more months in bed. My dad was present, of course, for the operation and immediate aftermath, but he had to return to his work in L.A. for a chunk of the lengthy recuperation period. I was given a very specific role to aid in her recovery. My mom had lost a lot of weight—she never weighed much to begin with—so my job was to make her a milk shake every day when I got home from school and to make sure that she drank it. Her favorite flavor was coffee, although she also liked chocolate and mocha, a combo of the two. She and I had the same taste in shakes; we liked them thick and kind of icy—chunky if possible, so they were more flavored sludge than smooth milk.

  My dad gave me another marching order, as well: I was to monitor my mom’s eating habits and make sure she ate dessert every night after dinner—an excellent assignment for a seven-year-old since it meant I got to eat the same dessert. She and I ate a lot of Louise’s chocolate pudding.

  My mother never accepted the fact that she was supposed to die within a year of her diagnosis. Quite the opposite. My father had written a play and it was opening on Broadway in October 1961, some nine months after my mom’s cancer was revealed. She insisted that she would walk into the theater for Opening Night and be completely healthy and she never wavered in her belief.

  The play, A Cook for Mr. General, is notable for three reasons, at least to me. One is that it was Dustin Hoffman’s first Broadway role. He didn’t even have a speaking role. He played a character called Ridzinski. My dad told me—after I saw The Graduate years later and Dustin Hoffman became my acting idol—that he’d been so talented in rehearsals that even though he wasn’t supposed to speak, they let him do some birdcalls ons
tage, just so he’d have something to do. Reason number two is that an actor named George Furth played one of the lead parts; his character had the tasteful moniker of Jockstrap Jordan. Furth later went on to write Company with Stephen Sondheim, a play that I found life-changing in its cynicism and dark, complex view of relationships when I saw it on Broadway years later. And the third reason the play was so memorable is that I very distinctly recall my mom, dressed to the nines, leaving our house in West Nyack to go to Opening Night.

  Reflecting back, my hope is that her dress was a little bit tight due to all the milk shakes I made her drink in my role of Master Sergeant of Desserts. But I don’t really know if that was true.

  I do know that she looked beautiful. And unbowed.

  And very much alive.

  LOUISE TROTTY’S CHOCOLATE PUDDING

  Louise Trotty was an amazing person. It feels a bit funny to say that she raised me because my mother was very present in my life as a kid, as was my dad. My parents were my parents and filled that role to the hilt. But Louise was also my parent. I could go to her when I was upset but didn’t want my parents to know how upset I was. She could comfort me and bring a sense of peace to my life that no one could do in quite the same way. I know that she loved me like I was her own son, the same way she loved my dad. And I loved her deeply in return.

  Louise did not suffer fools and she believed that hard work was essential to a good life. I have no idea what religion she was or even if she was religious at all. I do know that she consistently demonstrated a bottomless capacity for love, a deeply embedded kindness, and a somewhat scary impatience when Eric or I did something we weren’t supposed to do.

  I called her Trotty much of the time rather than Louise. I don’t know why but I liked it and she liked it, too. I would holler from upstairs, “Trotty, when are we gonna eat?” and she would admonish me for yelling, not for calling her by her last name.