I waved to my friend Robyn, who stood at a table quietly kneading dough as she chatted to another young woman who was leaning over a sheet of paper, taking notes. She smiled back. Everything seemed so calm, so pleasant. The kitchen even had a wall of windows that overlooked a meticulously tended garden. All of the palpable urgency and testosterone that prevailed so obviously in a restaurant kitchen simply did not exist here. It was like kitchen Valhalla. How hard could this trail be?
“We are the only national food show on a major network,” Savannah, the kitchen director, said, politely impressing upon me the prestige of the show. She had a kind face: soft and round, with bright blue eyes. She always—always—said “please” and “thank you” and “ma’am,” blanketing every syllable in a rich and sweet southern drawl. Most of the chefs I’d known so far were dead set on instant intimidation, but not Savannah. I knew from Robyn, who had quickly become one of her fans, that Savannah knew her stuff, and she knew food. This was a different world: She didn’t need to intimidate or scream and yell to get respect; she simply earned it, and as kitchen director, she held my fate in her hands. She handed me a chocolate macaroon recipe and instructed me to alter the cookie in three distinctly different ways.
Robyn had told me I’d be given such a task, one that would measure how well I could manipulate recipes and develop ideas, which was a large part of the freelancer’s job. Because the show aired daily, there was an endless need for new food segment ideas and original recipes. So, though we might comb through cookbooks to get basic ingredients and proportions for a given recipe, that was only a starting point. The recipe would go through trial after trial, with each change noted and tracked until the perfect recipe and finished product were achieved and approved by Martha herself. I had to pass the macaroon challenge.
I didn’t wear a chef ’s coat; no one did. Instead, I just tied a long white apron around my waist and rolled up my sleeves. I pulled back my long hair, dyed near-white with black stripes (people working in restaurant kitchens are usually allowed a certain amount of freedom with their appearance that I, like Jemal, reveled in), and tucked my black-rimmed glasses into the collar of my shirt. I’d worn the glasses in an attempt to look a bit older, more serious. People often underestimated my age and thus, I feared, my ability.
I looked at the recipe and thought of different ways it could be changed: nuts could be added, or flavored extracts. They could be dipped in chocolate after cooling. Maybe they could be spread out on a sheet, the recipe tweaked, and reinvented as a bar cookie. Probably I could cut down the amount of sugar or substitute brown sugar for white. I got started measuring out ingredients using standard cups and spoons. Unlike restaurant recipes, which were almost always weighed out in grams (if there was a recipe at all), all of MSLTV recipes had to be accessible to the home cook. What use was making something on TV if a home viewer couldn’t then make it herself?
Batch by batch, I baked different macaroon varieties, trying to remain organized and cleaning along the way, valuable work habits in any kitchen. From time to time, Robyn looked over her shoulder to make sure I was okay, and when I had questions everyone was eager to help. It was the quietest and most civilized day I ever spent working in a kitchen. Not a single profanity was uttered. I started dreaming about the calm and female-friendly work life that was so close at hand. No more sexual comments, no more oversized men’s uniforms. No more working weekends.
When Savannah asked me to get cleaned up so we could talk, I reached into the collar of my shirt to retrieve my glasses. But my glasses were gone.
“Wait,” I blurted to Savannah, who stood waiting for me to follow her onto the set where we would have privacy, “I lost my glasses.” She just looked at me; she didn’t care if I’d lost my glasses. I should have known better than to try using a prop. I tried to retrace my steps.
Suddenly, I knew with absolute certainty where they were. I did not slip them into my bag as I should have, nor had they fallen into the trash or onto the floor. I walked over to the oven I’d been using to bake my cookies and opened the oven door. There they were, resting in the fold of the oven door, warm and fatally warped.
Savannah and I sat in one of two unused darkened kitchen sets where Martha filmed the food segments, and, amazingly, she offered me three steady days of freelance work a week. Once again, I said good-bye to the restaurant world.
Glen did not congratulate me on my latest career move, but he accepted it, and after giving him two weeks’ notice, I embarked on my new life as a part-time test kitchen freelancer. Three days a week, I took a train to Westport, Connecticut. My commute to the self-contained “compound,” as we called it, was more than two hours door to door. I looked forward to using my time on this reverse commute to catch up on the reading I never seemed to have the time or energy for while working in a restaurant.
At first, I was given simple tasks, like shopping, which should have been brainless and easy. But rumors of Martha’s perfection-ism paralyzed me. I knew that nothing got by her and that she held everyone and everything up to her incredibly high standards. I’d heard more than one story that ended with someone crying—and it wasn’t Martha. I would drive one of the company vans to the local store, shopping list in hand, and if Idaho potatoes were on the list, I would end up staring blankly at the bins of potatoes, suddenly second-guessing myself: Are these Idaho? I worried that the mangoes I chose wouldn’t be ripe enough, that the grapes came from the wrong country, that I’d mistaken Napa cabbage for Savoy.
By the time I finally met Martha, my expectations had become so high that it felt anticlimactic. She marched into the test kitchen where I was working, remarked on the exhaust fans, looked at me as if I’d done something wrong, and then paused, as if suddenly realizing that a stranger was in her house.
“Ma’am, this is Dalia, our new freelancer,” Savannah said, stepping forward. “She worked at Nobu.” Savannah thought my experience at Nobu, a restaurant Martha liked, would help endear me to her. It didn’t seem to. Martha simply nodded in my direction and walked out of the kitchen. At least she hadn’t made me cry, but then again why should she? Her demands were no more challenging than those of any top chef. I had already worked with some pretty difficult chefs, and my thick skin had remained firmly in place. In fact, I respected her for demanding absolute quality and accepting nothing less. I could only guess that the rest of her staff, those who worked at desks beyond the confines of the test kitchen, were less accustomed to an occasionally gruff boss who, like a chef, had little patience for “feelings.”
Once I started to relax, I loved shopping detail. I was getting paid to go to the grocery store and pick out the finest ingredients, something I did for fun at home or to pull myself out of a dull mood. And when I wasn’t shopping, I was working in a gorgeous kitchen, using the finest ingredients and equipment with Robyn and Savannah, who were quickly becoming friends.
We were free to experiment with different foods, to cook without the pressure of a dining room full of hungry customers waiting to be served. On any given day we might try to come up with the perfect picnic lunch, the perfect chicken salad, the perfect lemon cake. We had a camaraderie, the three of us, bonding mostly over our love for cooking and, more important, eating, and working toward a common goal: coming up with ideas and recipes that would please Martha. Our only guideline was that anything we used to produce a dish had to be available—at least by mail order or via the Internet—to the average viewer. Martha insisted on it.
Quality ingredients were important, and whenever possible they came directly from Martha’s property. We used eggs from her own chickens, which lived at her Westport home. The free-range, totally organic eggs were delivered by one of her helpers. We stored the blue, green, and brown eggs (even the eggs came in quintessential Martha colors—we were sure she chose chicken breeds based on their egg color) in large bowls in the walk-in. We set aside most of our food waste to be used as chicken feed and were careful to follow this rule. It was not beyond Ma
rtha to peek into our garbage cans to make sure we had not wasted any chicken food. Conversely, she would occasionally check the chicken food to make sure we hadn’t carelessly given them something harmful, like a rubber band. The colorful eggs made beautiful props for the set, and their flavor was a revelation. The yolks were a bright yellow verging on neon, and their taste was exceptionally creamy and rich. When they were in excess, we eagerly scrambled them up as a snack.
But it wasn’t just the eggs. Everything that Martha had on the show was authentic. Any edible props on the two sets were made in the test kitchen. The “mud room” off of one kitchen set was lined with shelves of jam made in the test kitchen, often with fruit that had come from one of Martha’s properties. Why would we make jam from store- or even farm-bought fruit when there were blueberry bushes right outside? One gorgeous summer day we spent hours picking blueberries off the bushes that lined the front of the building. Martha’s show was nothing if not authentic, and I was happy to work toward her goal of keeping it that way. No wonder she had so many adoring fans.
Picking blueberries, making jam, and scrambling fresh eggs with women I called my friends hardly seemed like work, but not all my days working for Martha were blissful. In fact, attempts to come up with yet another cookie to meet Martha’s standards could be torture. Things we proudly presented to her could be shot down with little explanation, and we’d be forced back into the kitchen to meet a deadline.
And the days on which we recorded the food segments could be long, tedious, and exhausting. If we’d created the recipes for a segment, preparation for the taping was always easier; we were familiar with the recipes and could easily prepare them in their various stages. But when the recipes came from a guest chef, we needed plenty of time to test and tweak the recipes because, almost without exception, restaurant chefs—who prepare everything using taste and intuition (rather than measuring cups) and in large quantities—sent us inaccurate recipes. We reworked (and reworked) their recipes using standard kitchen tools and measures, ensuring that viewers would be able to re-create the dish based on the recipe used on the show. One famed pastry chef sent a recipe that simply did not work, no matter how often we attempted to prepare it. It just didn’t make sense; pastry chefs are the ones who actually use their own recipes. He insisted time and time again that it was fine. We finally came to the conclusion that he’d done it on purpose to protect his spectacular French macaroons or his overblown ego.
Each segment (normally one dish per segment) had a designated cart on which we laid out everything Martha needed to execute the dish. Each ingredient sat in a different bowl, always with options so she could decide for herself at the last minute how to carry on. We also provided different forms of a given ingredient for use as a prop. If a recipe called for one-half cup of grated cheese, we included a hunk of the cheese (with the exact brand or producer, too, noted on a sheet of paper beside it), a grater, a measuring cup, and one-half cup of grated cheese in a bowl. We anticipated her every possible need and whim because nothing was worse than having Martha stop, mid-taping, to say, I need to grate the cheese myself. Why don’t I have a hunk of cheese? Thankfully, the props department was responsible for color coordinating the bowls, towels, and serving plates.
Generally, the only time I saw Martha was on taping days, as she was too busy tending to her varied successful businesses—magazine, website, catalogue, books—to spend that much time in our kitchen. It crushed the dreams of my friends who had visions of Martha standing over the oven right by my side, gently holding a wooden spoonful of sauce to my mouth for a taste. But on taping days, Martha was “in the house,” as we used to say, and her presence was felt even when she remained unseen. Monitors were mounted on the wall of the test kitchen, so we had a constant live feed of what was happening on set, which gave the kitchen a weird reverse Big Brother (or, in this case, Big Sister) feel. The monitors were in place for the show’s benefit, so that we would be ready to deliver a particular portion or stage of a dish at exactly the appropriate time. When Martha pulled just-baked cookies out of her oven on the show, she actually did pull just-baked cookies out of her oven; the test kitchen made sure of it. And, if she demonstrated a Greek Easter bread that was made in endless stages, we in the kitchen had each and every one of those stages prepared at the appropriate times so that she would have the freedom to improvise and depart from the loose script. But the monitors meant that we could also see Martha respond to our unplanned inefficiencies or our poor choices. Nothing was worse than watching her bawl someone out for a mistake that, in hindsight, should not have happened. We eased our tension by occasionally poking fun at her on-screen performance, laughing at her hard “aitch” pronunciation on the word herb, getting the giggles any time she mentioned French beans after we pictured her French-kissing a string bean. I watched from the kitchen as she confused another fair-haired, petite freelancer for me, amazed that she could notice the smallest detail in the food or equipment but confuse two only vaguely similar people.
I learned a vast amount, and the experience with food styling and with live television production has proved to be invaluable. I loved the variety, too, of working with different foods each week as well as with so many different chefs, everyone from Madhur Jaffrey to Bobby Flay, who was as affable in real life as he appeared on television. I even had the opportunity to cook for President Clinton when he came to the compound to speak at a fund-raiser that Martha hosted for a local politician. We spent days preparing the perfect lunch, under the watchful eye of the many Secret Service members who surrounded the compound preparing for POTUS’s arrival. It was impossible not to laugh at the absurdity of the situation: We were cooking for the President of the United States! We had presidential food tasters on the premises! It was one of the few times Martha actually joked around with us. It turned out that she, too, could do an imitation of the sunglasses-wearing Secret Service men who walked swiftly and purposefully, knees constantly bent, while simultaneously talking into their earpieces. Sadly for us, the show documenting our efforts for the presidential luncheon never aired because the Monica Lewinsky news broke just a few days before it was scheduled.
Despite all of the plusses of working with friends in the perfect kitchen for the best food show on television, I couldn’t forget that I was in a corporate setting. Outside of the kitchen the mood was decidedly more proper, and office politics (always difficult for me) ruled. I never felt comfortable with the “outside” employees, who often turned to the kitchen to satisfy a chocolate craving, to have a cry, to simply find respite from the desk world. If I stayed on and tried to make a career in magazine or television test kitchens, I would have to learn to navigate those politics. I started to feel familiar pangs of envy whenever a restaurant chef came on as a guest. When Marcus Samuelsson came on the show, I wanted to tell him that I’d been a real cook and had even trailed for him years earlier. I wanted to tell Terrance Brennan that I had worked for his old chef de cuisine, Joey. Though I had left La Côte Basque after growing tired of restaurant life, after just six months away from it I felt myself longing for its excitement, purity, and, yes, prestige. Deep down, I didn’t want to work for a TV show that hosted these chefs; I wanted to be a chef.
And then Joey called.
THIRTEEN
Rising to the Occasion
Hi, Doll, Joey’s voice on my machine announced. Gimme a buzz when you get this. [Long pause.] There’s something I want to talk to you about. Again with the cryptic messages.
Cursed with terminal punctuality, I arrived fifteen minutes early for my meeting with Joey at a bar in west Soho on that late summer afternoon. Fifteen minutes to prepare myself for the possibility that Joey was finally opening his own place and was going to offer me a job. Fifteen minutes to consider and reconsider the pros and cons of reentering the restaurant world. I ordered a pint of wheat beer, grabbed a small table outside, and waited.
When Joey finally sauntered up I was already halfway through my beer, thoughts fully co
nvoluted. A tiny Yorkshire terrier lagged behind him at the end of a leash.
“Hi, Doll.” He bent down to kiss my cheek. I suddenly realized that I had no idea how old Joey was. He could have been thirty, thirty-five. Maybe forty. Forty-five would be a stretch, a big one, but it was possible.
“This is Sassy,” he said, picking up the small light brown dog, kissing it on the head. Sassy was his ex-girlfriend’s.
“Jenny gave me visitation rights,” he explained. He slipped Sassy’s leash under a chair leg and set her under the small table while he got a beer. I gave Sassy my finger to sniff and she gave me a noncommittal dog kiss in return.
“You’re drinking wheat, right, Doll?” Joey said, returning with a beer in each hand. I nodded, taking the glass. “I saw the lemon.”
I gulped down what was left of my first beer, hoping the alcohol would calm my jumpy brain. I still wasn’t sure if he had asked me there for a job. All of my mental straining might have been a complete waste of energy.
“So, Dolly,” he said once seated and with Sassy on his lap. “How’s Martha?”
“She’s okay,” I answered, suddenly worried that my every word carried an inordinate amount of weight. “There’s good and bad, you know. I like the variety, meeting all the different chefs and stuff. But,” I said, flipping the coin, “it’s not, like, really cooking, you know? And the commute is sort of getting to me.”
The two-hour commute hadn’t been nearly as relaxing or conducive to reading as I’d anticipated. More often than not I was grumpy that I got home so late or that I had to get up at four a.m. to make the occasional seven a.m. start time. I was oversimplifying my ambivalence horrendously, but I wanted to leave every door open.
Being with Joey again reminded me of how much I’d enjoyed working for him. His quiet confidence, his aura of nonjudgment. Since my only real cooking job had been with him, he’d had an enormous impact on my confidence and capabilities. In my year at Layla, he’d not only encouraged me to progress and grow but had always found time for my questions and never condescended. When he joined us cooks for drinks after work, he left whatever friction had come up during service back in the kitchen and instead bought us rounds of beer and led the high fives. After working in a few restaurants, catering, and television, I realized that what I really, really wanted in a job—any job—was to be respected, guided, taught, and treated fairly. Joey had provided all of this.
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