Janis and I, over the years, have proved to be very different types of cooks. She knows a lot about the science of food. I know absolutely nothing about the science of food. To be fair, I know nothing about the science of just about anything, so at least food isn’t my worst category. She doesn’t like to experiment; I love to experiment. When throwing a dinner party, I will happily throw myself into cooking something I’ve never tried to make before, a concept that absolutely horrifies her. My attitude is: What’s the worst that can happen? It’s no good, we’ll order in Chinese food. Friends will understand. Her attitude is: The worst will happen. The food will be terrible. We’ll go hungry. Friends will never call again and we’ll be humiliated. What can I say? It’s a different perspective on life.
Janis was essential to the making of this meal for several key reasons:
1. Grams vs. ounces? Kilograms vs. pounds? And what the hell is a milliliter? I needed someone who understood such things and wouldn’t look at me as if I were a complete moron when I said things like, “Milliliter—doesn’t three yards equal a milliliter?” It turns out Janis was not actually that person. But I dealt with it.
2. Don’t ask me why but I have always been afraid to cook with rhubarb. I love rhubarb and order it every chance I get. My mom, when I was young, made stewed rhubarb and it was one of my favorite things in her repertoire. But it always mystified me. Do you skin it? Would you really die if you ate the leaves? (Apparently yes, but happily most places sell it sans leaves.) I needed someone with no rhubarb phobia who also wouldn’t roll her eyes at the thought of my rhubarb phobia. Turns out Janis wasn’t actually that person, either. But I dealt with it.
3. Most of all, I needed someone who would let me try to figure this out and trust my judgment but who would have my back just in case. Janis was totally that person.
First thing to figure out from the recipe: at the start of Yotam’s jottings, he says that two quail are needed. Later on, the recipe calls for sixteen quail. Actually, the first part says that two “butterflied” quail are needed, but for some reason I read that as “butterfield” quail. Do you have any idea how humiliating it is to say to a butcher, “Do you have any Butterfield quail?” as if you were asking for “Perdue chickens” or a “Smithfield ham”? The answer: pretty humiliating. But I did make an executive decision and decided to make this with two quail and only two quail.
Of course, once I made the decision, I couldn’t find any quail. So I substituted poussins. They worked splendidly—no normal person could tell the difference. And best of all, I got to make amends for my Butterfield query. When I asked the butcher if he had any quail he said, “No, I just have quail eggs.” I told him, “Okay, then I’ll come back in nine months.” I got a good thirty-second roar out of him.
The rest of my shopping was much more straightforward. Or it was until I went looking for liquorice. The only liquorice I could find was the black and red candy type. I figured: How different could it be from whatever the “liquorice sweets” thing Yotam says should go into this concoction? I hesitated over the red kind; black seemed more Ottolenghi-appropriate and less Halloweenish, but when I asked one of the aproned helpers on the floor of the store, he said, “It all tastes the same. It’s liquorice.” So I bought red and black.
The next quandary was “Baharat spice mix.” That’s not something that’s readily available in the good old USA unless you’re shopping at a specialty spice store or online. But I didn’t have time for that: I wanted to cook this damn thing ASAP. So I turned to Google. Sure enough, within seconds, I had a recipe for Baharat Middle Eastern seasoning on my phone screen:
1½ tablespoons dried mint
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
1½ teaspoons ground coriander
1½ teaspoons ground cumin
1½ teaspoons ground nutmeg
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
DIRECTIONS:
Using a pestle or the blunt end of a wooden spoon, mash all of the ingredients in a mortar or small bowl for 2 to 3 minutes. Can be made 1 week ahead. Cover and chill. Makes ¼ cup.
No problem. Done and done. Although this did bring up another issue, brought to the forefront by the “makes ¼ cup” at the end of the preparation paragraph. Was the ¼ cup of Baharat spice supposed to add tang to two quail or to sixteen quail? Hard to know, since I’d never made this before and basically didn’t understand at least 50 percent of the measurements anyway. So I decided to just buy what my eyeballs told me should be right for two small birds.
By now, I was on a roll: when I couldn’t find any date syrup, I opted to get a few dates instead and decided I’d just mash them up and see how that worked. When I couldn’t find any star anise, I bought an extra few strings of black liquorice and decided that, if need be, I could use some Sambuca I had stashed in my liquor cabinet at home. And when I couldn’t get hold of tamarind, I didn’t panic since I wasn’t 100 percent sure what tamarind actually was. I decided I could add another dollop of pomegranate molasses and that would cover it.
Voilà! Ready to cook up a storm.
Oh, wait. Not quite. First I needed to clear another roadblock: something called sous vide.
Until I read Yotam’s recipe, I’d never heard of this cooking technique. But since it seemed fairly crucial—the recipe calls for the quail to be cooked “sous vide” for twenty-five minutes before pan frying—I immediately went out and bought a sous vide machine, determined to do Ottolenghi justice. I also did a little research and learned that sous vide is a kind of slow cooking. You have to put food into an airtight bag, drop the bag into the sous vide machine, which is filled with boiling water, and the hot water cooks any kind of food at all—vegetables, meat, fowl—evenly and perfectly. It seemed simple enough.
Janis rolled her eyes when I pulled out my sous vide cooker. For one thing, she thinks I have too many gadgets. For another, she heartily disapproves of the whole sous vide craze. “It basically poaches things,” she explained. “It doesn’t brown them. Yes, it cooks everything evenly but it leaves food slimy.” For good measure, she added, “I think the whole sous vide thing is idiotic.”
Nonetheless, I wanted to do this right. That quail at Nopi was truly spectacular and if sous vide was a contributor to that, I was all in.
The stuffing was easy. True, none of the measurements quite matched up with cooking two birds, but I decided I was a good enough cook to eyeball it. Once I had the sausage chopped, I could see what proportions of the other ingredients felt right. The recipe did leave out little details: Were the peppercorns ground or left whole, for example? I went with ground—but I adapted as I went along. And let’s face it: it’s hard to screw up stuffing when it involves sausage, ginger, and pistachios.
Next came the rhubarb with the glaze. I did the unthinkable this time and read the recipe carefully, every last step, before trying anything.
Still somewhat shaky about the mysteries of rhubarb, Janis showed me how to skin it, which neither of us really thought was necessary, but since I’d actually read the recipe, I was determined to follow it. The cooking part was straightforward, although I overcompensated for the lack of star anise with too much Sambuca. And not bothering to measure 100 milliliters of red wine vinegar, I took a guess at what that meant and put too much in. But, quick thinker that I am, I added more sugar to compensate for the extra vinegar.
The glaze took longer than I thought to cook down but cook down it did, as all things liquid with heat under it must.
Here’s where things got particularly tricky.
The heading for the liquorice gel had this parenthetical statement next to it: “(inside the soil).” I had absolutely zero idea what that meant. I wasn’t really sure what liquorice gel was supposed to look like, but I had a vague concept of gel in general, so decided I’d just stop dissolving the stuff when it looked something like toothpaste coming out of a tube. I tossed in the red and black liquorice—which made me feel less like
a true gourmet chef than a guy at a cheesy candy stand at a circus.
While the gel was dissolving pre-“blitz”—and I had no idea what it meant to blitz something, so I decided I’d just turn the heat on really high and see what happened—I went to work on the liquorice soil. I was as lost as can be on this one. I not only had no notion of what this was supposed to look like, I couldn’t figure out how it even related to the rest of the recipe. The gel goes inside the soil? Okay, but where the hell does the soil go? It’s called soil, after all, so maybe it goes under the bird? That seemed plausible. But the rhubarb sauce is supposed to go under the bird, as well as drizzled on top of it, so does that go on top of the soil and gel or beneath them? The only thing that kept me going was that Janis was as clueless as I was. That didn’t just give me courage, it meant that she couldn’t make fun of me when I wound up with something that looked right and then also had a mound of soil and gel I didn’t know what to do with.
By now, the gel was looking vaguely gel-like, so I pounded the almonds until they seemed ground, adding what I hoped was 160 grams of gel. (Google told me that 1 gram equaled 0.035 ounces. I got too impatient to even use a calculator so did a quick estimate and decided that it was close enough. It was at this point that I realized why the producers of the PBS show The Mind of a Chef had not called me as yet to appear on the show.)
I blew off the instructions to use a silicon mat—I didn’t know what that was and had no intention of finding out—so I just put the mixed-together soil on a baking sheet and put it in the oven at 200 degrees F. The recipe said 80 degrees centigrade, which comes out to 176 degrees Fahrenheit—so 200 seemed close enough.
While I was roaming in gel and soil purgatory, Janis handled the yogurt sauce.
I checked on the soil after forty-five minutes and it seemed dry. Of course, it seemed pretty dry before I put it in the oven. I took it out, not sure if it was supposed to be hot or room temperature. Since I wasn’t even sure what it was or where it was supposed to go, I figured that particular difference wasn’t going to be crucial to the end result.
But now that it was as ready as I could get it, it was finally time to sous vide.
The sous vide had a thermometer in both Fahrenheit and centigrade, so it was reasonably easy to set it to 85 degrees centigrade. Actually, it wasn’t quite that easy. It took me about ten tries to figure out how to work the buttons on the goddamn thing, and the cooking time doesn’t begin until the water reaches the proper temperature, which took half an hour. But, sure enough, once the temperature hit 85 and I dropped the bags in, twenty-five minutes later those birds were cooked through and through. They also looked remarkably unappetizing. Slimy-looking, as my co-chef had said they would. But they went into a hot cast-iron pan right away and before long turned golden brown on all sides.
I slipped those birdies onto two plates. The glazed rhubarb went on top (I lifted the little guys up slightly to spoon some of the red-brown sauce underneath them, too). I still had no idea whatsoever what one was supposed to do with the liquorice soil, so I just scooped a few spoonfuls underneath the poussins and another few spoonfuls on one side of the plate. The yogurt sauce went on the other side of the small fowls.
Much to my surprise, the poussins looked remarkably good. I poured two glasses of a superb Burgundy, took a few sips to steady my nerves, then Janis and I dug in.
I don’t have my mother’s razor-sharp memory for taste, so I don’t know if I came close to re-creating the quail at Nopi. I suspect not. But my version was absolutely delicious.
I looked at Janis and I could tell from the expression on her face that she agreed. I said, “This is really good. I could make this for my mom.”
She just nodded.
She was too busy eating to actually say anything.
PART FOUR
DINNER
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
My Mom’s Dinner Menu
Before-Dinner Drink: Peter Kortner’s and The Martini Brothers’ Perfect Martini
Wolfgang Puck’s Salmon Coulibiac
The Tornabenes’ Buccatini with Cauliflower, Pine Nuts, Currants, Anchovies, and Saffron
Solferino’s Steak with Truffle Cream Sauce
My Almost-Made-Up Fava Bean Puree
Nancy Silverton’s and Abby Levine’s French Boule and Challah
Romanée-Conti’s Greatest Red Wine: La Tâche
Smoothest White Wine There Is: Bâtard-Montrachet
Burgundian Store-Bought Cheese: Époisses
Martha Stewart’s Tarte Tatin
CHAPTER FIVE
When I was seven we started going out to L.A. for summers because summers are when TV sitcoms go forward in full throttle—writing and shooting—and my dad was in the TV sitcom business.
The first summer we stayed in the guesthouse of a mansion, an enormous ghost of a house, that belonged to a friend of my dad’s. Jerry Wilson was really a friend of my grandfather Irving’s but he had taken a liking to my dad and felt, for some reason, an obligation to house his entire family for three months. He had long white hair, his face was very creased and craggy—at least to the eyes of a seven-year-old—and he drank fairly constantly, muttered a lot in a cranky-sounding way, and was intimidating in a non-yelling, flashing-eye way.
Jerry Wilson and his three sons owned and ran a clothing store called, cleverly enough, Wilson’s House of Suede, which was a Beverly Hills landmark right on the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica (naturally, it is now a Starbucks). Jerry obviously liked my dad just fine, and tolerated having kids in his house, but he was absolutely crazy about my mother. My mom had that effect on gruff, tough, unhappy men. As I learned, it was because she neither judged them nor was afraid of them. Most of them were awful with and around women. But they could relax and be themselves around my mom. My mother, in those years, did not have any close women friends who were separate from relationships she and my dad established with other couples. That came later. When she was young, men loved her because she was not threatening. When she got older, women loved her because she was not threatening and she was so damn tough.
The second summer was the steak-and-eggs-Beverly-Hilton June through August. But for the two summers after that, my dad rented us a house. Being in our own home for those months allowed for a more normal lifestyle. My parents enjoyed entertaining and my mom, with Louise Trotty’s help—she, too, now came out for the summers—began throwing dinner parties. This was the next phase of my mother’s maturation process. She had begun as a shy Brooklyn girl, the youngest daughter in the family, whom no one took too seriously. The growth process began when she met my father and developed when they moved to Stuyvesant Town. The independent, non-Brooklyn Judy continued to develop in West Nyack as she dealt with problems and shouldered the burdens of everyday life in my dad’s absence. In L.A.—not coincidentally, situated farther and farther away from her family—she gained confidence in leaps and bounds. She was thrown into a far more sophisticated crowd and held her own. And the identity of the new Judy Gethers was becoming more and more clearly defined.
One other thing helped define her—and me—during this period: in 1963, not long before we were flying out to L.A. to spend the summer there, my mother’s brother Ted was killed in a plane crash. My father flew back immediately from the West Coast to be with my mother and to attend the funeral in Philadelphia; I was petrified when I made the connection that to be with us he had to get on a plane. At the funeral, my parents put Eric and me up in a motel, not far from Ted’s family’s house (Eric was old enough to stay on his own and to watch over me). We stayed up all night and watched TV and had a weirdly good time, separated from the stifling family grief just a mile or so away.
A few weeks after the funeral I had to get on a plane to go to L.A. for the summer and that was something I absolutely refused to do. Getting on a plane meant that I was going to die.
My mom talked to me at length about why I needed to make the trip. I was adamant and refused to budge. And then I got the first of only three letters I ever received from my father. He had gone back to L.A. and he mailed me a one-page thoughtful, typed-out message. I don’t have that letter today, sadly, but I remember it in great detail. He wrote that he understood my fear, that he had had many fears he had to deal with throughout his childhood and adulthood, that fears never quite go away, and that everything in life is a risk: crossing the street, riding in a car, going to school. Everything that brought pleasure also carried with it some kind of danger, whether physical or emotional. So he explained that I had two possible paths: Was I going to give up all the pleasurable things in life because I was afraid or was I going to conquer my fear and keep on living life the way it was meant to be lived? He said that, like everything else, it was my choice. I remember crying when I read that letter, and I remember my mom coming into my room to discuss it with me, which could not have been easy since it was her brother who had so recently been killed. I was being let into the inner world of both of my parents, seeing their fears when I had assumed that grown-ups had no fears, seeing their sadness when it had never occurred to me that sadness wasn’t something that one outgrew. By the end of the conversation with my mom, having done my best to grasp the bigger meaning of my dad’s note and implicit challenge, I knew I was going to L.A. A few days after that, I went to the airport with my mom and my brother. Eric didn’t seem to have the same fear I had. I guess he was older and his wider range of experience gave him more perspective. Or maybe he was as afraid as I was but, unselfishly, had conspired with my mom to keep it from me, so as not to exacerbate my own terror. Or maybe he was just old enough and male enough to want to keep his fears all to himself. I know that my mom never mentioned my fear during the time it took us to get on the plane, nor did she say anything at all to me when the plane was taking off or in flight. She watched me carefully to make sure I was all right. But my dad had given me a choice, I had made my decision, and my mother was smart enough to let me be so I could deal with that decision on my own.
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