Stir

by Jessica Fechtor

  She cooked for me, too, a strange task in those days since nothing tasted right. Any number of things were to blame: the brain injury from the initial hemorrhage, the aftereffects of the anesthesia, the infection, the antibiotics, my damaged sense of smell. The blandest cereal was sickeningly sweet, chocolate tasted like metal, and the mere sight of anything green—broccoli, spinach, even lettuce—made my skin crawl. My mother was on it, with batches of chicken soup and a palatably gray mushroom-beef-barley stew. I ate what I could, which wasn’t much. Anyway, what I really wanted to do was cook.

  One night, despite the fact that I could barely stand long enough to brush my teeth, I decided that I wanted—needed—to make dinner. I told my mom and she didn’t hesitate. She picked up a pen, dug a scrap of paper from her purse, and transcribed the list of ingredients that I called out from the sofa. Mushrooms, cream, some frozen peas, though the thought turned my stomach. We had pasta and lemons already. When she got back from the market, she helped me into the kitchen. Eli was over by the sink, and he turned when I walked in. He looked happy to see me, but nervous, too, and very tired. It was great, he said, and weird, to see me back in there. The light felt bright, and I made it through three mushrooms, just washing, not even slicing them, before my legs grew heavy, my head light, and nausea flooded my chest. Eli helped me back to the sofa, and my mother finished preparing the meal. I think I might have slept. I wish I could say that those three mushrooms felt like a victory, but really what I felt was fear. Three mushrooms. I had to get back in there.

  Lemony Pasta with Morel Mushrooms and Peas

  The dish I set out to make that night was inspired by some pasta with morel mushrooms and fresh peas that I ate on my twenty-seventh birthday. Eli and I were living in San Francisco at the time while I was a visiting graduate student at UC Berkeley. With the birthday, the semester coming to an end, and our return home to Cambridge approaching, we were feeling celebratory and up for a splurge. We made a reservation at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’s restaurant on Shattuck Avenue.

  Morels are difficult to describe because of how singularly delicious they are. They’re woodsy and wild, you might say, arboreal in the way of hazelnuts and pine, succulent like meat. I’d never tasted one until that night, and I was thrilled by how much there was to taste. I did my best to re-create the pasta dish at home and it became part of our permanent rotation. It’s best in the spring with morels and fresh peas, but we make it year-round with cremini or shitake mushrooms and frozen peas. If you use cremini or shitake mushrooms, you’ll need to cook them for a few extra minutes to get them brown and crisp around the edges.

  ½ pound morel mushrooms (or cremini or shitake mushrooms; see above)

  1 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt

  ½ pound (227 grams) dry linguine

  2 tablespoons unsalted butter

  Sea salt flakes, like Maldon, to taste

  1 cup (150 grams) fresh or frozen peas

  2 tablespoons fresh thyme, chopped

  Zest from 1 lemon

  ¼ cup heavy cream

  1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

  Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

  Juice of ½ lemon, plus more to taste

  Fill a large bowl with cool water and prepare the morels: Slice them in half lengthwise, swish them around in the water for a few seconds to loosen any grit—not too long; you want them to absorb as little water as possible—fish them out, pat them dry, and lay them out in a single layer on a dry towel. (If you’re substituting cremini or shitake mushrooms, skip the bowl of water and wipe them clean with a damp paper towel instead. Then cut them into ¼-inch slices.)

  Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and add the kosher salt. Add the linguine to the boiling water and give it a stir to keep the strands from sticking. Cook until just shy of al dente. (The pasta will finish cooking in a hot pan later on.) Drain the pasta and set aside.

  Meanwhile, melt the butter over medium-high heat in a 12-inch pan. When the butter foams, add the morels, taking care not to crowd them in the pan. If your pan is small, you may need to work in two batches. Sauté the morels for six minutes, stirring occasionally. Sprinkle with a pinch or two of sea salt flakes, and cook for another 1 to 2 minutes, until lightly brown, crisp around the edges, but still tender. Transfer them to a bowl and set aside.

  Turn the heat down to medium, add the peas to the pan, and cook for 1 to 2 minutes (3 to 4 minutes if your peas are frozen), stirring once or twice. Return the mushrooms to the pan, stir in the thyme and lemon zest, and cook for 30 to 60 seconds. Add the boiled pasta and mix gently with the morels and peas, scraping up any brown bits from the bottom of the pan. Pour in the heavy cream, swirl it around the pan, and remove the pan from the heat. Add the olive oil, some sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper, to taste, and lemon juice, and mix gently. Taste, and add more lemon juice, if necessary. Serve immediately.

  Makes enough for 3 to 4.

  CHAPTER 21

  Home Is a Verb

  I was home but I wasn’t. This was our apartment. Same red table, same bench, same sofas, same chairs. Same smell, presumably, though I wouldn’t have known. The difference was me. I was sicker now, and my home only reminded me of that. The chair in my office demanded that I take a seat and turn on the computer, but I couldn’t sit up for more than a few minutes at a time. I couldn’t look at the bright screen without a lump of nausea lodging itself in my chest or read a page of text without my eyelids slamming shut. Everywhere I looked, I found evidence of my own absence, even as I stood right there. Loud things had gone silent and things that moved stood still: the mixer on the counter, the squeaky oven door, knives and napkins, notebooks and pens.

  Before I’d gotten sick, I’d touched these objects every day. They were the tools I used for work and for play. From where I sat propped up on the sofa, a helmet on my head and a PICC line in my arm, they felt like artifacts of a previous life.

  I didn’t say a word to Amy about any of this when she arrived that first week in November after my mom went home. I didn’t have to, because she knew.

  • • •

  Home is a verb. It’s not only where we live, but how. I learned this as a little girl from Amy by watching her in her own home—especially in the kitchen.

  Amy’s kitchen and how she ran it were among the first things I noticed about her. The room was more like a studio of sorts, with its tools and towels and three kinds of flour. She kept her sugar in an old tinted glass canister with a metal lid and funneled whole black peppercorns into a ceramic mill. Her spoons were wooden, her pots heavy and worn. At eleven years old, I had never seen anything like it. I hoped that someday I’d have a kitchen like that, too.

  Amy made uncomplicated meals that left you feeling the good kind of full. Her food, like everything about her, was straightforward, exactly what it seemed. A salad of black beans, red onions, cilantro, and corn cut straight from the cob. Grilled chicken with parsley and lime. Long before I’d ever heard of Chez Panisse or Alice Waters, I learned from Amy that the best food is food that tastes like itself, simple and clean. A potato at its utmost is a potato; a green bean, a green bean. To cook, Amy taught me, is only to help our ingredients down the path toward becoming their truest selves. It’s no surprise then that she is a champion of vinaigrette, whose very function is to amplify what’s already there. Splashed with vinaigrette, beets taste beet-ier, leeks, leek-ier.

  Making vinaigrette is easy, but before Amy, I’d never seen anyone do it. She’d start with a near-empty Grey Poupon jar, spoon in some oil, then some vinegar, sort of measuring, sort of not. She’d screw on the lid and shake and taste, shake and taste, adjusting accordingly, usually in the direction of vinegar. Then she’d add some parsley or chives, a minced shallot, whatever she had on hand. I was thrilled by the efficiency of it: how those scrapes of mustard helped emulsify the oil and vinegar into a uniform dressing, how a j
ar at the end of its life had one more job to do.

  Things happen fast in Amy’s kitchen, though she never seems to hurry. She just moves quickly, casually along, from the cutting board to the stovetop, from the mixer to the oven door. Each task takes only as long as it takes. I hadn’t known this was a way to be.

  Amy taught me that butter should soften on the counter before it hits the table, how to toast pine nuts in the oven and say your own name out loud with proper exasperation when they burn. She was the first person I’d ever met who believed in cooking for its own sake. She’d page through a magazine, spot a cake, and bake it, for no other reason than that it was something she wanted to do.

  I loved flipping through her recipe file, a binder thick with photocopies, torn-out magazine pages, and newspaper clippings that peek out on all sides. She stores it flat on a shelf in the cupboard above the oven, and when you pick it up, you have to squeeze so that its guts don’t slide out onto the floor. You might think there is no method to it, but from constant use, a natural organization has developed based on what she likes to cook and what our family likes to eat. Recipes made most recently and most often gather at the top of the heap. Recipes made for a holiday meal, she slides back into the pile together, informal family histories of July Fourths and Thanksgivings.

  Amy is the one who showed me that even when it seems like there’s nothing good around to eat, there almost certainly is. Thaw a tub of chicken broth, open a can of tomatoes, empty the crisper drawer: soup. Fold last night’s greens into omelets, chop a lone scallion into a nub of soft cheese. Grab a box of crackers, maybe a bunch of grapes. You have lunch.

  Yes, home is a verb. To feel again that my home was mine, I’d need to set it back in motion. Amy understood that, so when she showed up in Cambridge that November, there were suddenly things to do. She made sure of it.

  Rearranging furniture was at the top of the list. Amy is notorious for the pleasure she takes in moving things around. A bed turned ninety degrees and pushed back against the far wall, a dresser here instead of there: a new room. We decided to tackle the office-kitchen-overflow room (the one that drove me nuts). Amy and Eli nudged a filing cabinet into position, then lifted the long wooden sidebar away from the wall and slid it up against the windows. I shuffled around, taking stock, relieved by the movement, the newness, the extra floor space.

  Amy spotted the philodendron in the other room. It had grown too big for its pot and was shrugging its leaves up and over onto the table. Amy suggested a several-block walk to the hardware store for soil and a larger pot, and I prepared myself the way I once had for my long Sunday runs. A few bites of food. Some sips of water. I tied on my running shoes, and Amy grabbed me a Gatorade from the fridge. We moved slowly, stopping twice so that I could rest and drink.

  Back at home, I lay down on the sofa, the muscles in my thighs twitching from fatigue. Amy spread some newspapers on the floor right beside me. She crouched down, dug out the plant and its roots, transferred it to its new home, and pressed the soil into place. As she brushed off her hands, she looked up, and a puff of satisfaction blew through me.

  Amy’s Potato Salad

  Until I met Amy, potato salad meant mushy peeled potatoes, maybe some celery and onions, and lots and lots of mayonnaise. Amy took a different approach, mixing skin-on red potatoes with crisp green beans and tossing them with scallions, chopped basil, and a mustardy vinaigrette. Over the years, I’ve tweaked things here and there: radishes instead of scallions; some combination of parsley, chervil, chives, and tarragon in place of basil. I’ve added hard-boiled eggs, too, which make me feel entirely justified in helping myself to a big bowl of this potato salad and calling it a meal. I like to eat it for dinner with the potatoes still warm—they’re nice against the cold, snappy beans—but it’s great from the fridge, too, for picnics and packed lunches.

  You can boil your eggs for this recipe however you like to boil your eggs. My method is to put the eggs into a pot large enough so that they lie in a single layer, cover them with cold water by an inch, bring to a boil, then immediately remove the pot from the heat, cover with a tight-fitting lid, and let sit for 9 minutes. When the timer goes off, I fish out the eggs with a slotted spoon and drop them into an ice bath to stop the cooking. I recommend starting with eggs that are a week or two old. They’re easier to peel than fresh ones.

  For the vinaigrette:

  6 tablespoons olive oil

  3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

  2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

  ½ a large shallot, finely chopped

  1 tablespoon of chopped fresh herbs, any combination of parsley, chervil, chives, or tarragon

  For the salad:

  2 pounds red waxy potatoes, scrubbed under cold running water and quartered

  1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

  Diamond Crystal kosher salt

  1 pound green beans, washed and trimmed

  6 radishes, washed, dried, and thinly sliced

  5 large eggs, hard-boiled and quartered

  Freshly ground black pepper

  Combine all the vinaigrette ingredients in a jar with a tight-fitting lid, shake well, and set aside.

  Put the quartered potatoes into a large pot and cover with cold water by an inch. Add a few generous pinches of kosher salt, bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are fork tender, about 10 minutes. Drain the potatoes, transfer into a large bowl, and toss immediately with 4 tablespoons of the vinaigrette. Meanwhile, bring a second pot of water to a boil, salt it, and fill a large bowl with water and ice cubes. Blanch the green beans in the salted boiling water for 60 seconds, then transfer them to the ice bath.

  Dry the beans and add them together with the sliced radishes and quartered hard-boiled eggs to the potatoes. Add the rest of the vinaigrette and mix gently. Serve right away, or chill it first if you prefer.

  Serves 6.

  CHAPTER 22

  Doing the Math

  On Amy’s last evening in town, I wished out loud that I could bake an apple pie. The presidential election was the next day, and we had friends coming over to watch the television coverage. An apple pie seemed fitting.

  Amy had only a couple of hours before leaving for the airport, but soon she was cutting cold butter into flour, flicking ice water at the shaggy heap, and patting it into disks. Eli peeled apples. Amy’s cousin Sue Lena arrived to drive Amy to the airport and she picked up a peeler, too. My major contribution was holding myself upright in a chair wedged into the kitchen doorway and watching the pie take shape.

  It was my grandmother Louise’s pie, the apples seasoned simply and splashed with brandy and just enough lemon to help them hold their shape. My grandmother swore by Oronoque frozen piecrusts and kept a neat stack in the freezer in the garage. I’d updated the recipe with a homemade bottom crust and a crackly sugar shell-like lid in place of the one on top. From my chair in the doorway, I told Eli how to make it: Melt the butter over a low flame. Stir in the sugar, then the flour and nutmeg. He tipped the pot in my direction so I could sign off, then painted the soft paste over the bare fruit. When the oven door snapped shut with the pie inside, it was time for Amy to leave.

  “I don’t want you to go,” I said, wiping my eyes with my knuckles. When we hugged, my helmet clunked against her skull. She gave me four quick pats on the shoulder, her signature “there-there.”

  “I’ll come back,” she said. “We’ll rearrange more furniture.”

  Soon after Amy left, the pie came out and Eli placed it on a rack to cool. I stared. Without its aroma, it didn’t seem real. It was like seeing a picture in a glossy magazine or an image on TV. For a moment, I actually thought I could smell it, but no. My brain had been fooled by a lifetime of memories that knew just what the scent should be. This pie smelled like nothing.

  It’s hard to explain what it’s like to smell nothing. We hav
e the word “silence” to describe the opposite of noise, the complete absence of sound. But what’s the opposite of scent? As far as I know, there isn’t a word for it.

  Smelling nothing is not the same thing as not smelling anything. I think that’s why I’d known right away that something in my nose had gone wrong. You won’t smell anything in an odorless room, but you will still detect something inside of your nose, something you’d never notice, let alone think to identify as an actual sensation, if you have never felt its absence. At least I never did. For a smelling person, air has weight, and while you can’t smell weight, you can feel it. Much more so than the missing odors all around, the absence of this weight told me every day that my sense of smell had not returned.

  I drew my face in close to the pie and inhaled. Still nothing. But the hot steam on my cheeks worked my memory and there they were again, the outlines of scents: apples, cinnamon, brown sugar. I imagined my grandma Louise crouching by her open oven door, checking on her pie. I could conjure the scent of her, too. Like blueberries, first night’s sheets, a screen door in the breeze.

  She and my grandfather lived just outside of Hartford, Connecticut, up on a hill that had no grass, only trees. It was a long rectangle of a house, low-slung like a highway motel, a single floor that, because of the hill and the two-story drop from the wraparound deck to the ground, felt lodged high among the branches. The nineteenth-century writer and designer William Morris said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” I think my grandparents must have lived by this rule. The décor was midcentury modern, lots of clean, straight lines, plenty of open space. My grandparents traveled to sixty-eight countries together over the course of their marriage, and the treasures they’d brought home were on display all over: a life-sized wooden rocking pig in the living room by the piano, a painting of a naked man smoking a long black pipe over the sofa, and, my favorite, a full miniature orchestra carved from polished stones under glass in the den.