There’s a heightened alertness, ions get cranked when restaurant people walk into a restaurant. Restaurant people instinctively recognize each other. At North Shore we’d get the best table (you can see everybody, everybody can see you, not near the kitchen, the entrance or the powder rooms) and the best waiter, Jim, who nodded his head when we ordered and said, “Very good, Mrs. Volk.” When we ate out with Dad, we’d tell him what we wanted and he would speak to the waiter: “My wife will have . . . My eldest daughter would like . . .” But when no man was present, we ordered individually. Mom had the pork chops with applesauce, my sister and I, the sliced steak. The house salad, iceberg tossed with Romaine, was sixties predictable. It was the dressing that set it apart. White, acidic, garlicky, and full of Dijon mustard, it didn’t slide off the leaves. It was clingy and piquant. Piquant is too rare a sensation in food. For echt piquancy, nothing can touch the Welsh rarebit sandwich at the counter of the Fountain Restaurant in Fortnum & Mason with its molten Day-Glo cheese. Listed on the menu under Toasted and Savory it is extreme piquancy, involving everything in the oral cavity in a head-on collision. The tongue curls. The palate throbs. The gums hum. You feel it in your teeth.
I was sixteen the day I came home from school and found Mom in the kitchen. She’d never made dinner except for Sunday bacon and eggs. But there she was lifting lids, sniffing, stirring. She’d tied one of Mattie’s white aprons over her Gino Paoli knit suit that would someday be mine.
“I’m making dinner!” she said. “Wash your hands! It’s almost six!”
No matter what was going on in our lives, we sat down to the table at six. Watches were synchronized. One minute late was not tolerated. You had to be in your seat with your napkin in your lap at six exactly. That was when the food was so hot it still sizzled. That was when it was timed to be served. No one could start eating until everyone was seated. If you weren’t at the table at six on the dot, people would have to wait for you. Keeping hungry people waiting for food was unforgivable. Treating Mattie’s labor with indifference was unforgivable too. No one should have to eat cold food just because you lost track of time playing strip poker in your boyfriend’s basement.
“What are you making?” I asked my mother.
“Veal Stroganoff,” she said.
At six we congregated in the breakfast room. Mom carried in the silver well and tree. The well and tree, a wedding present from Aunt Gertie, had three parts. The wells on the sides cradled side dishes—the vegetables and starches. The concave tree in the center was for the main course. Whenever my father sliced steak or roast beef and put it in the tree, the juices ran down the concave branches and puddled in the root ball. He would soak them up with bread, then feed some to my sister and me. It was hot, blood-soaked white bread, softer than cotton candy. When Dad carved, he stemmed drips off the carving board with white bread dams. Those we ate too. Jus lie was good for you. It “built you up.” My friend Steve’s mother used to juice raw steak for him. He started every day with a glass of blood.
Mom stood at my left with the well and tree. I tonged some beans on my plate, spooned a little rice, then covered it with the Stroganoff. It was a creamy café-au-lait color.
My sister helped herself, then filled Mom’s plate. When she returned from the kitchen, Mom brandished her napkin and we dug in. I stabbed a strip of the veal. I put it in my mouth. I looked sideways at my sister. She was looking at me. There was no way we could swallow it. Something was terribly wrong.
I pressed my napkin to my lips. The only taste in the world, besides medicine, the only food taste I couldn’t stand, that even the thought of made me gag, was licorice. Licorice meat?
“What are you doing?” Mom said.
“Taste it.”
She took a bite.
“My God!” she said.
In the kitchen, she reread the recipe. She checked the spices and sniffed the sour cream. “I don’t know what it could be, girls,” she said. Then she examined the bottle of white wine she’d grabbed to stew the meat in.
RICARD ANISETTE, the label read.
We headed for North Shore. Over steak and pork chops, we laughed about Mom’s Veau Ricard. She didn’t cook dinner again for thirty years.
Now I love her cooking. Like all things Mom decides to do (taking up tennis in her forties, then whipping me, going for a master’s degree at sixty-four), she does it with style and commitment. She researches. My favorite dishes are Aunt Renee Birns’s Chicken Curry and Mrs. Brill’s Cabbage Soup. No one can make a burger as crusty on the outside and rosy on the inside as she can. My mother is a world-class searer. She seals the juices in a fragile carapace of carbon. She can hear when the pan is ready. Her chopped egg is her brother’s favorite food in the world.
“Darling,” he says, thrilled, “you made this for me?”
She mounds it in the caviar server, then circles it with Ritz crackers. “All for you, Bob.”
He eats it up, piling the crackers high. Years later, when he’d lost his sense of taste, he’d eat it anyway, loving it from memory. “Audrey darling, this is terrific,” he’d say.
Mom’s trick with chopped egg is chopping the mayonnaise and salt into the eggs while they’re still warm using a double-bladed mezzaluna in a wooden cutting bowl. She doesn’t overchop, so the whites are still squeaky. Don’t bother making Mom’s chopped egg if you’re going to practically purée it or chop it in a Pyrex bowl. It won’t taste the same. Do microscopic bits of wood get into the egg? Does ancient mayonnaise leech out from the wood?
Whenever we went to Long Beach, she’d make chopped egg sandwiches and wrap them in waxed paper. The eggy mayo would soak into the warming Wonder Bread and turn it yellow. But the real taste of Long Beach was a hot dog at the Roadside Rest. Or a sloppy, flappy burger piled high with mayonnaisey slaw and a slab of tomato at the Texas Ranger. I’ve tried to duplicate the taste of a Rangeburger, but you need a greasy griddle and it’s hard to find meat that cheap.
I started going to Long Beach the July I was born. My parents would rent a house, and my grandparents would rent one next door. Then my great-grandparents would move in with them. In summer we duplicated our four-generation Manhattan Diaspora by the Atlantic. I would sleep under mosquito netting and watch the light stream through the swirling dots of dust. I would pour orange juice into my milk and cereal and pretend it was a Creamsicle.
In Long Beach what we ate still came from the store. Not that we ate the prepared food, good as it was. Restaurant families rarely do. They have their own tastes. Homemade recipes are too labor-intensive for a popular restaurant. No good chef has the time to cook everything à la minute.
Morgen’s kind of kitchen has vanished. Santos, the head chef, could make anything. The trend in fusion cooking today combines two cuisines. Santos kept his cultures pure. He cooked what was called a continental menu. Each foreign dish was made strictly the way it was made in its country of origin. The inventiveness came from the inventory, the repertoire, how many main courses you could make and what would accompany them. There were the usual Diamond Jim Brady prime ribs, steaks, chops, and seafood. Customers counted on standbys. But Morgen’s was also the United Nations of food. The dinner menu from Wednesday, June 3, 1981, lists eighteen foreign specialties of the day plus the usual thirty-six entrées. Vichyssoise was on tap. Polynesian Chicken with Javanese Coconut. Duckling Montmorency, Swedish Salmon in Aspic with Mustard Sauce, Steak à la Deutsch, Veal Piccata, Shish Kebab à la Turque, Calves Liver Veneziana with Noodles Sienna, Curried Scallops with Rajah Rice, Fillet of Sole au Fruits de Mer, a giant, unfinishable slab of mittel-European meat called Gedampte Rinderbrust, and my all-time favorite menu listing, unleashing the virtuosity of his menu muse, Dad’s take on chicken soup: Essence of Young Fowl with Matzo Dumpling.
We love savoureux—food with plenty of taste. We appreciate subtlety, but we like to spring a food’s energy. The difference between salt added before cooking, during cooking, and after cooking is oceanic. The difference betwee
n salts. We tune food. Just because something’s good, doesn’t mean more of it is better. All cooking is a pas de deux between complements and contrasts. How do you wring the most out of a radish? How do you fry an egg so the border is crackling brown lace? What does sugar do for tomatoes? How much vinegar do you add to the honey so it tastes more like honey than honey without vinegar?
My mother was home for dinner, but four lunches a week she was on the floor, working the line. She and Dad were a team. Mom, the elegant beauty in the fabulous Donald Brooks, Geoffrey Beene, or Bill Blass for Maurice Rentner. Dad, Clyde Beatty in the center ring. They orchestrated fifty tables, the bar, 194 customers, 16 waiters, 16 busboys, 1 captain, 1 manager, the hatcheck girl, and Miss Car-lotta, the riveled attendant in the ladies’ room. At lunch, when the place was rocking, they used a code of hand signals to signify “Get a busboy to clear the deuce at six!”, “Table twelve needs a check!” Or Mom would raise three fingers above the crowd, and Dad would raise three back if he had a “three” and she’d release the next clot of customers from behind a red velvet rope.
No matter how long the line was, Mom would say, “Only five minutes!” when customers asked about the wait. And because she was so glamorous, so charming, people rarely grouched when it stretched to thirty. Turnover was key. If lunch went from 11:30 to 3:00, you could turn a table three, sometimes four times. Saturdays, after he’d closed the books, Dad would say, “Audrey Elaine, we did our best lunch ever Thursday!” My sister and I would grin. Another Morgen’s record broken.
This is how they met: “I was sixteen, visiting my friend Edna in the building,” Mom says. “And she read a letter she’d received from a boy who was going to the University of West Virginia. It wasn’t a romantic letter, but it was such a no-nonsense and poetic letter, and I hadn’t realized that boys could write interesting letters. I just felt they wrote about themselves playing football or jumping or something, and this was really an interesting letter. And I knew enough to know that this was somebody who could make life very, very important. So I said to Edna, ‘Boy, I’d love to meet him.’ And she said, ‘His family has just moved into the building. He’s away at school, but his sister, who is our age, is in the building, and you’ll meet her,’ and shortly thereafter I did. And I didn’t know how to get an introduction to her brother, so I suggested to her that my brother would be in for spring vacation from Lafayette and I’d like him to meet her, and she said, ‘Oh, I have a brother at the University of West Virginia, but he isn’t coming in till June.’ And I said ‘Well, I’ll have my brother call you when he comes in for spring break.’ And my brother did and they dated when he was in town and she was available.
“In June of that year on the house phone, her brother called and he said, ‘Are you free tonight? I’d like to take you out.’ It was a Wednesday night June fifteenth, and he came down to the apartment, and my bedroom door could be a little ajar so I could peek at the front door. And our housekeeper, Alma, answered the door, and I saw this wonderful-looking young man standing there, and I was all atremble. I couldn’t believe that this was going to be this blind date. He wasn’t called Cecil then. His name was Stuff Volk. Everybody called him Stuff. His sister Helen was Big Stuff. His sister Harriet was Little Stuff. I called him Stuff until we married. I didn’t think it was seemly to call a husband Stuff.
“That night, as I was buttoning my dress—it was a beige dress with a lotta lotta buttons down the front, and my hands were trembling so I couldn’t button them—that night I said to myself, What are you so nervous about, Audrey? You’d think you were meeting your future husband. And then I came out, and we went on our first date, and he took me down to a pizza parlor in the Village. I had never had pizza. And he ordered one with anchovies on it, and I thought, Now I will surely die, because I had never eaten an anchovy and I had no intentions of doing so. But my next thought was, if I don’t eat this, this very sophisticated young man who’s in college is never going to take me out again. So I managed to bite and swallow without much chewing. And I think we took the Number 5 Fifth Avenue bus home, which stopped at Riverside Drive, so that we could walk to 845 West End Avenue, to our apartments. The next day I thought he wasn’t very interested in me, because I hadn’t heard from him by one o’clock in the afternoon. So I took out my two-wheeler, and I told the doorman to ring the new people’s apartment and ask Harriet Volk to look out the window. But as I’d hoped, he came to the window, and he put his head out six stories up and said, ‘Hi! What are you doing tonight?’ while I was riding my bike. And I said, ‘Nothing,’ so we saw each other again that evening, and we saw each other every evening until June twenty-third, and that night we went to Glen Island Casino. We doubled with his sister and my brother, and I think Glenn Miller was playing there. We danced, and he gave me his class ring, and I was so thrilled, and that was the beginning.”
Two years later, on June twenty-third, they got married. “He never had a chance of escaping,” Mom says.
Now I’m getting married, and the only thing I’ve ever made is chocolate pudding.
“Mom,” I say, “what’ll I do? I don’t know how to cook.”
“There’s nothing to it, darling.” She gets up from the table and comes back with a cookbook written by a local woman who teaches cooking in adult ed: The Menu-Cookbook for Entertaining by Libby Hillman. “All you have to do is follow a recipe. Here. Just open the book. Any page.”
I open the book. Mom takes it from my hands.
“Breast of Chicken in Madeira,” she reads.
“I can’t do this, Mom.”
“See where it says ingredients? You buy them. See where it says six halves of chicken breasts, boned? You don’t have to do that yourself. Ask the butcher. And then you just do everything the recipe says in that order.”
For the next year, anytime anyone comes to dinner, they get Breast of Chicken in Madeira. I get pretty good at Breast of Chicken in Madeira. I get so good, when I take the cookbook out, it automatically opens to page 96. When I’ve mastered Breast of Chicken in Madeira, I invite my parents. I look through Libby Hillman for more recipes and pick out the things that sound the most delicious: Grilled Shrimp in Cream Sauce for an appetizer, and to go with the Breast of Chicken in Madeira, Tossed Salad with Creamy Cheese Dressing, Mushrooms in Port and Cream, Brussels Sprouts with Heavy Sweet Cream, Cauliflower Pie with Grated Cheese and Sour Cream, and for dessert, Chocolate Mousse.
I want the meal to be memorable. It is.
I speak a language with my mother I share with no one else. It is the language of clothes. It recognizes and respects the power of white piqué and navy to signal spring. It honors what a good coat can do for you in the world. It appreciates the whimsy of Moschino and the darts of Armani and the humor in a gray wool sweater with a “fur” collar made of gray wool loops like the one we recently saw in the Boca Loehmann’s. The sweater is on display. It is the last one.
“Isn’t it wonderful!” I say.
“Yes,” Mom agrees.
The saleswoman takes it down. It’s the wrong size. Here my mother and I part company. I buy it anyway.
Bengaline, organza, faille, peplum, toque, tattersall, Dupioni, moiré, paillette, ottoman, ruche, pavé, crepe de chine, plissé, revers, bouclé, blouson, bombazine. Lamé. Bolero, Eton, mandarin. I love to say these words aloud, words I use only with my mother. We describe clothes with exquisite economy: “It was a midnight-blue peau de soie djellabah with Alice blue passementerie and raglan sleeves,” the language of clothes being every bit as exotic and operatic as the language of food: Praline, persillade, caul. Carrageen, clafouti, capelli d’angelo. Bain-marie, friandise, rouille. Evasée, risotto, chinois. Sautier, demiglace, Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Flipping through the racks at Loehmann’s with my mother, I feel like a shark nosing out the kill. No, I feel like the shark’s baby who learns by watching its mother. Mom is still the best-dressed woman in the room. She’s still the prettiest girl there, wherever there is.
Aunt H
oney’s twin grandsons are being bar mitzvahed in California. I go with Mom for a fitting. She’s bought a German-designed black evening suit. It’s off the shoulders, but not décolleté, a twelve-inch cuff exposes her down to just above the start of her cleavage. It’s cut straight over delicately flared pants. The effect is like a bust of my mother on top of a black column. (It helps to be a hipless size 6.) Mom likes the outfit, but she wants the top to taper slightly then flare. She thinks the pants will look better if the inseam has a touch less fabric.
I sit in a chair at the boutique while three people wait for my mother to emerge from the dressing room: The saleswoman, the dressmaker, and the owner of the store. Mom steps up on the platform in front of the three-sided mirror. I am plunged back into my youth, my mother studying herself critically in the mirror, pointing where she thinks the pins should go. She knows what she wants. That’s something she radiates.
“A little here . . . a little here . . . Um-hmmm . . . No . . . Umhmm. What about this?”
The store people hover. They fret. They move pins and look at my mother looking at herself as she dips and turns.
After half an hour I start wandering around the boutique. There isn’t one thing I’d wear. The only thing I like from this store is what my mother has on. Did she find the one good thing? Or does it just look so gorgeous because she’s wearing it?
There’s a mini-conference going on about the length of the pants. Finally Mom’s ready to go. The saleswoman, the dressmaker, and the owner of the store seem anxious but pleased. A job well done. Or so we think. The next day the phone rings. The owner needs Mom to come back. She thinks there may have been an error. Something with the pinning may not be 100 percent right. She needs another opinion. The best dressmaker they have is coming in today and she’d like her to check my mother before they actually cut fabric.
We go back. Mom gets repinned. Then we head for the Boca jewelry exchange. Mom needs a necklace to go with the outfit. Joel, her Florida jeweler, has just the thing—a gold and diamond sunburst. My mother’s head is the sun, the sun’s rays are graduated diamonds beaming out of her neck. The necklace needs nothing. It is perfect.
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