My Mother's Kitchen

by Peter Gethers

  My mother wound up with a whole cadre of new friends and, in particular, gay friends, because she was completely nonjudgmental (a few years hence, after Wolf opened the original Spago, the manager, Johnny, a wonderful guy and as gay as it is possible to be, said to my mom, “I want you to think of me as the daughter you never had”). People talked to her because they knew she was responding to them and their issues, not projecting from her own past or her own prejudices. In fact, she had no prejudices. If a person could relate to food, my mother could relate to him or her.

  Above all, my mom learned to cook.

  Really cook.

  A couple of years after my mother had taken her plunge into Patrick and Wolf’s world, I went to L.A. on a business trip. My mom was in her kitchen fooling around with a small blowtorch.

  “What the hell?” I said. “Are you welding now?”

  She explained that using this particular tool was the only way one could get the crust exactly right on a crème brûlée.

  Of course it was.

  I got one as a gift the next Christmas, one of the very few people of the Hebraic persuasion to ever get a fire-breathing tool as a present from his mom.

  She talked about food constantly. And her palate, which had always been good, stepped up to a whole other level. My family would have what we thought was a superb dinner at a restaurant and we’d all be raving about it, then we’d look at my mother and because of the slight frown of disapproval on her face one of us would ask, “You didn’t like it?” My mom would more often than not say, “It was okay.” And then we’d get a dissection of what was actually wrong: too much salt, too dry, too wet, overcooked, undercooked, the sauce was too runny, the crust was too doughy, the olive oil in which it was cooked was obviously not fresh enough, something that should have been fresh was frozen. My mom didn’t have an ounce of pretension to her; this was not a question of putting on airs. She simply knew more than we did and she no longer felt the need to keep that knowledge to herself.

  For many years before he died, I got to edit books written by the brilliant Robert Hughes. Known as a fierce art and cultural critic, he wrote a book about the one thing he loved uncritically: fishing. In his opening to the book, Hughes wrote about how fishing put him on the road to becoming an art critic. When one put a rod in the water, he explained, one was penetrating a calm, still exterior. It was necessary, however, to try to visualize the turmoil, the movement, all the things that were roiling underneath the stillness. One had to try to understand exactly what was beneath that which could only be seen. Exactly what an art critic must do, he explained.

  Exactly what my mother was now capable of doing with food. She could bite into something and taste every ingredient. She could deconstruct almost any dish—after tasting it, she could re-create it from scratch.

  Everyone in our family responded in different ways to my mother’s remarkable transformation.

  My father embraced it joyously. He had spent years building her confidence, quietly urging her to be more independent, and now she was flowering. He particularly enjoyed the fact that my mother now swore. Not often, not inappropriately, and not with the vulgarity of the proverbial longshoreman, but when she did curse, her point was made. Until I was in my mid-twenties, my mom never swore. She seemed incapable of doing so. If she hit her finger with a hammer while hanging a picture—my mom was the only one in the family who would ever dare take up a hammer and nail and try to actually do something with it—she would stutter out a “Shoot.” She just could not bring herself to use bad language.

  The change came after she began working at Ma Maison. Suddenly, if she broke a nail or screwed up some puffed pastry, she’d let loose with a “Shit!” Or she’d be talking about someone who did something nasty to my dad or to Wolf and she’d quietly go, “Fuck him.” Then she’d smile proudly. Her cursing was both shocking and wonderful, and the frequency of it seemed to rise along with her fortitude. My mom had always been quietly steely, but now her unbending will expressed itself much more vociferously. She stood up to my dad more. She stood up to everyone more. My dad started telling everyone: “Oh … she used to be Sweet Judy. Now she’s an animal.” He began calling her “the Animal.” And they both loved it.

  As my mother got older, I think she came to see her cursing as a sign of her inner strength. Even at age ninety-three, she’ll mutter “Shit” if something goes wrong and I’ll say to her, “I still can’t believe you’re such an animal.” She’ll look at me, nod, and—her aphasia on temporary hold—say, “Fuckin’ A” or “You bet your ass.” She always laughs, but there is a sense of pride behind the laughter. It’s her way of letting the world know she is no one to be trifled with.

  I was on the other side of the continent during the years when these major changes were developing in my mom. But I followed her development closely. Even though I didn’t see my parents all that often—I’d go to L.A. two or three times a year; they’d come to New York about the same—my mom and I grew closer. By this point, she fully accepted me as an adult but I was also able to accept and deal with her as one. She wasn’t just my mother anymore. She was a person with a real life and real accomplishments. Sometimes she came to New York on her own and we’d have dinner. We could talk about all sorts of things that we never really discussed before: her family; the mistakes she felt she’d made with my brother and me; her relationship with my dad; her regrets; even, to a degree … gulp … her sex life. She told me that my father was the only man she had ever been with and that, at times, she wished she’d had more experience. I managed to survive that particular conversation without passing out.

  I was fascinated by my mother’s gradual alteration. Just as I loved my dad, saw his flaws, drew from his strengths, and enjoyed both the limits and the boundaries of our relationship, I was able to enjoy new and surprising dimensions in my relationship with my mom. She was now my equal in some ways, my superior in others, my friend in many ways, and my mother in all the ways that counted.

  Each of her siblings dealt with the new Judy in his or her own fashion. Her brother Hy was condescending, acting as if he ran a real restaurant while Wolf and the rest of my mom’s chef crowd were involved in something ethereal and a little bit fake. Lil took my mother more seriously but still treated her as a little sister. I’m not sure Natalie ever quite figured out what the hell was going on. Belle, not surprisingly, relished my mom’s ascension. She began coming to L.A. more often and loved hanging with the chefs and the staff. Wolf and Barbara were crazy about Belle: whenever she walked into Spago, day or night, there was always a bottle of scotch waiting for her.

  Both my brother and I, as adults, connected to my mom, in some ways, through food. Not only did I begin to edit cookbooks and produce food-related TV shows, I began to cook and, much to my surprise, I enjoyed all aspects of it—the preparation, the creativity, the giving of pleasure.

  Eric began cooking, too, and he was a far better cook than I was right from the start. He had a real flair for it. He made delicacies that were much more difficult to prepare than anything I attempted. He was able to be more precise and was far more disciplined (he’s also a terrific musician and very good with languages, and I think there must be a connection, since I’m a total washout in both of those areas). To me, however, my brother’s culinary attempts seemed to lack some kind of core. I cooked solely for the fun of it. I sensed Eric’s adventures in the kitchen were a way to try to reconnect to the family, from whom he’d slowly been moving away.

  I don’t think food is a tool that can be manipulated to bring people together. I think food is usually an extension of the person preparing it. People connect to other people. Food is the pleasurable bridge upon which both sides cross.

  My mother’s food has always been exactly like my mother: appealing, comforting, genuine, unpretentious, at times whimsical, always elegant. And always with a certain unknowable complexity.

  WOLFGANG PUCK’S SALMON COULIBIAC

  This was the very first dish t
hat Wolf ever taught my mother to make, the first thing she learned to cook at Ma Maison. Of everything on her list of dishes that are important to her, this is perhaps the most important.

  My mom loves Wolfgang Puck. I don’t mean she likes him a lot, I mean she loves him.

  Their relationship was special right from the start. Like a lot of European chefs, Wolf had left home as a teenager to start work in a professional kitchen. He trained throughout Europe in restaurants in his native Austria and France and, in 1975, became the chef at Ma Maison when he was twenty-five. The restaurant had been open for two years by then without causing much of a splash. Wolf got rid of the dishes that used canned sardines and packaged vegetables and began buying his food fresh every morning at San Diego’s Chino Farm, which was a two-hour drive from L.A. Patrick Terrail was a great host and he wooed the stars and big shots from the movie and television industry. As a result of Patrick’s odd but seductive charm, the A-list crowd, and, above all, Wolf’s brilliant and innovative food, Ma Maison quickly went from being a kitschy outdoor café to become L.A.’s first great, world-class restaurant. In many ways, Wolf is the inventor of what has come to be known as California Cuisine and, along with Alice Waters, brought that cuisine to the world. Ma Maison became so insanely popular that, at some point, Patrick actually unlisted its phone number. Think about it: a restaurant so popular that unless you were a regular, you couldn’t even call to book a table!

  My mom and Wolf connected just as Wolf’s star began to shine. Because he’d left home at such a young age, my mom quickly fell into the role of his surrogate mother. He talked to her about women, about his complicated relationship with Patrick, about his career. Simultaneously, he recognized her love for this new world and her desire to soak up everything she could about that world. She helped keep him grounded. He helped lift her off that ground.

  My dad was also crazy about Wolf, and that affection was mutual. Wolf gives my father credit for helping to shape his sense of humor—and to Americanize it. My dad was often gruff with his jokes and he was a master of deadpan delivery. At Ma Maison, when Wolf was just beginning his rise, a waiter would ask how the food was and my dad would say, “Terrible.” Wolf would hear about it in the kitchen and come out to see who had insulted his soup or his veal or the delicate sauce on his fish. His first response was to get angry, but then my dad would indicate his plate, which had been licked clean, and point out that he’d eaten there three times that week, and Wolf would realize that he needed to both toughen up and lighten up. He lightened up considerably and became a great practical joker. My parents became so fond of the young chef that they began going on vacation with Wolf and Barbara and another couple, the legendary dessert chef Maida Heatter and her husband, Ralph Daniels. They became a tight sixsome.

  A year after my mother started working in the restaurant kitchen, Patrick erected a new building on the restaurant’s parking lot and opened Ma Cuisine, Ma Maison’s cooking school. My mother became its first manager and main teacher. She was now cooking and teaching alongside Julia Child and Paula Wolfert and her new friend Maida, the stars of that era’s food universe, as well as with the new generation of great California chefs: Jonathan Waxman, Nancy Silverton, Mark Peel, and so many others. My mom became good friends with all of them and a surrogate mother to many of them.

  Part of the new job description: giving cooking lessons to celebrities and L.A. power brokers and the wives or girlfriends of L.A. celebrities and power brokers. It was crazy. I went out to L.A. on business periodically and would always try to time my visits to the school to coincide with the end of my mom’s cooking lessons because after each lesson everyone would sit around and eat the food they’d just learned how to make. I popped in there once to find my mom wrapping up a session showing Sammy Davis Jr. how to roll pastry dough.

  My mom wasn’t one of those people who left her work behind at the office. Cooking was not just her job now, it was her all-consuming passion. The dinner parties she threw became more and more elaborate and quickly became legendary. And that is not an exaggeration. Olivia Goldsmith, the bestselling author of The First Wives Club, wrote a novel in the ’90s, Flavor of the Month, in which one of her fictional characters is “lucky” enough to be invited to the home of the Hollywood couple known to throw the best dinner parties in town: Steve and Judy Gethers. In the novel, Goldsmith provides a vivid description of my parents’ home and the elaborate food my mom served. An iconic mention in a trashy popular novel: it doesn’t get much more legendary than that.

  Ma Maison was a phenomenon—culturally and from a cuisine standpoint—and stayed that way until 1982, when Patrick and Wolf went through a nasty professional divorce. In the wake of the unpleasantness, Wolf decided to open up his own restaurant, Spago. A lot of people at the time thought he was crazy. Even my mom was concerned about the gamble. Leaving Ma Maison to open what Wolf was describing as a “pizza place”? The move turned out not to be so insane. It was an instant and enormous success. I think that the original Spago, with its offbeat waiters and gorgeous view and its reinvention of Italian food with such unheard-of dishes as smoked salmon pizza, was perhaps the greatest restaurant experience ever, anywhere in the world. The food was spectacular and it was just so damn much fun. There was a playfulness to that restaurant that is almost impossible to describe and is absolutely impossible to re-create.

  And Spago was hardly a fluke. Three decades later, Wolf has probably become the most successful chef and restaurateur in the history of the planet Earth. I won’t attempt to count the number of restaurants he now has around the world because by the time I try to list them, several more will have opened. He led the way for big-name chefs to open in Vegas and Singapore and other cities that are now food meccas. He opened Spago cafés in airports around the world. He’s on the Home Shopping Network with an extensive line of cooking utensils. And he’s got frozen foods. Unlike my uncle Hy’s foray into the frozen blintz business, Wolf’s frozen pizza is actually good. I was recently in Tokyo and, wandering the streets one afternoon, walked right by a large sign with a photo of Wolf on it, hanging outside his Tokyo restaurant. I took a photo with my phone and e-mailed it instantly to my mom.

  The A-list followed Wolf to his original Spago, deserting Ma Maison almost immediately. And my mom, too, moved on from Patrick’s cooking school. She pushed Wolf to write his first cookbook and helped him with it. She tested recipes for Nancy Silverton and Mark Peel’s first cookbook. And then, years after writing the Ratner’s cookbook with her niece, she began writing her own. The Fabulous Gourmet Food Processor Cookbook came out soon after Cuisinarts and similar contraptions became the rage. She followed that with what I think is her best work, Italian Country Cooking. For research, she drove around Italy with a friend, Joan Hoian, for three weeks, talked her way into family kitchens, used Wolf’s references to observe in restaurant kitchens, and just stumbled into whatever interesting food she could find. My dad, against his wishes, was made to stay home: my mom wasn’t allowed to stand by his side while he was directing; he couldn’t be demanding her attention while she was learning to make a perfect minestrone soup or bread salad. It was clearly a good call on her part. The book is superb. I’ve yet to find a better pesto recipe anywhere else.

  An ad for a cooking class and book promotion—my mom in her L.A. doyenne period

  After that she published The Sandwich Book, which was simple and lovely. And then came two books she wrote with Mary Bergin, the second pastry chef at Spago: Spago Desserts and Spago Chocolate. The chocolate book was picked by Food and Wine magazine as the best cookbook of the year.

  In time, my mother became the doyenne of the L.A. food world. The waiters she was nice to became maître d’s at other restaurants and then managers and even owners. The young chefs she mentored went on to open restaurants all over the world and to write cookbooks and to spread some of the wisdom they had learned from my mother, in and out of the kitchen. Her active involvement in the food world lasted into the early part
of the twenty-first century, when she was in her eighties; up until the time she had her stroke in 2007, she was still teaching and writing, sometimes formally, sometimes informally.

  For those thirty years, my mom enjoyed a great rarity: an extraordinary second act to her life. But despite all the successes and all the wonderful accomplishments, I don’t think she ever experienced the same exhilaration, the same sense of pure, unfettered enjoyment that she had that first year at Ma Maison and those first few years at Ma Cuisine.

  Wolfgang Puck’s Salmon Coulibiac Recipe

  In Wolf’s book Modern French Cooking for the American Kitchen, the recipe calls for pike instead of salmon and crayfish instead of shrimp. But my mom, at her dinner parties, made it with salmon and shrimp, and that’s what you’re going to get here. Wolf does specify that shrimp make a fine crayfish substitute, and he makes it clear that salmon works just as well as pike, so I figure I’m on safe ground.

  Yield: 6 to 8 servings

  INGREDIENTS:

  1 recipe brioche dough (NOTE FROM AUTHOR: DON’T PANIC, I’M GIVING YOU THAT RECIPE, TOO; IT FOLLOWS SOON ENOUGH.)

  2 pounds boneless salmon fillets

  1 teaspoon salt

  ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

  2 eggs

  1½ cups heavy cream

  1½ cups white wine

  2 shallots, minced

  1 tablespoon minced fresh tarragon

  6 tarragon stems

  1 recipe court bouillon (AUTHOR’S NOTE: NO NEED TO PANIC AGAIN, I’M GOT YOU COVERED HERE, TOO.)

  24 rock shrimp (ME AGAIN: THE RECIPE CALLS FOR 24 LIVE CRAYFISH. GOOD LUCK FINDING THAT IF YOU DON’T LIVE IN NEW ORLEANS OR ELSEWHERE ON THE GULF COAST. ROCK SHRIMP—THE TINY ONES THEY USE FOR POPCORN SHRIMP—WORK JUST FINE. THEY’RE ABOUT THE SAME SIZE AS CRAYFISH SO I FIGURED I’D USE THE SAME NUMBER. I WAS CORRECT.)