Last Bite: A Novel of Culinary Romance

by Nancy Verde Barr

  For the next twenty minutes, Danny charmed his way into Mr. McLaughlin’s suspicious heart. He told him how he wanted to cook with only ingredients that were grown and raised with care and feeling. He said that no amount of culinary training could compare with the skill needed to produce those ingredients. The derivation of McLaughlin’s name had not escaped him, and his brogue had become so thick I could hardly understand him. When he told Mr. McLaughlin about spending summers on his grandparents’ farm and how they never ate anything that they didn’t raise themselves, the older man put his arm around Danny’s shoulder. I wondered if my summers at Girl Scout camp would have had the same effect. By the time we were ready to leave, Danny had locked up a place in Mr. McLaughlin’s limited customer base and, seemingly, his heart; but Sam and Ella’s dad still refused to appear on Morning in America.

  “You’re going to have to work on your blarney, Casey,” Danny said as we were getting back into our helmet gear.

  “Well, if anyone could teach me, it would be you. That was very impressive. Did you really spend summers on a farm?”

  “Would I lie?” he asked with a grin.

  “To get what you want? My guess would be yes.”

  He laughed and then asked if I was in a hurry to get back to the city.

  “Not really. Why?”

  “I know this great little place on the way back that serves the best café liegeoise this side of Belgium.”

  “What’s a café liegeoise?”

  “Hop on. You’re in for a treat.”

  We drove for about twenty minutes and then Danny pulled off the highway, turned down a side road, and stopped in front of a small, charming bakery with blue-and-white-checked curtains and blooming flower boxes. Inside there were six small round metal tables. Danny told me to grab one while he ordered. “Do you want a pastry or two or a dozen to go with the café? It has ice cream, but you may want something else as well.”

  “I’ll start with the café and see after.”

  He returned to the table with two tall, thick-handled glasses with soft whipped cream oozing over the top. He handed me a long spoon and a straw. “Which one do I use?” I asked.

  “Both,” he said, plunging his spoon into the bottom of his glass, taking a bite, and then sipping through his straw. I did the same, and since I’d never been to Belgium, I found it the most incredible café liegeoise this side of anywhere. The bottom of the glass held hot, strong espresso coffee, topped with vanilla ice cream—homemade, with visible flecks of vanilla beans. The ice cream was drizzled with a dark chocolate sauce, and the whole was topped with real whipped cream. The combination of flavors and hot and cold temperatures was totally seductive.

  Danny was halfway through his when he looked at my empty glass and asked, “How many more do you want?”

  “One should do it.”

  I forced myself to eat and drink the second one more slowly so as not to look like a complete pig and was halfway through when Danny finished his. When he took a spoonful of mine, I was sorry that I hadn’t finished it before having to share.

  “Aren’t they good?” he said, digging in for another bite.

  “Positively orgasmic,” I answered, immediately regretting my choice of words.

  “I wish I’d known sooner that a little ice cream and whipped cream was all it took.”

  “Let’s not go there.”

  “Struck out again. I’m getting a complex.”

  “Look, Danny. I like you. I mean, you are arrogant—”

  He put both hands on his chest, raised his eyebrows, and asked, “Me?”

  I nodded at him. “Yes, you. But you are also very nice.”

  “Uh-oh.” He looked wounded. “That’s the kiss of death.”

  “What.”

  “Nice. ‘Nice’ is always followed by ‘but’ and some made-up excuse, like that your star sign is wrong for me.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  He raised his right hand as if in oath. “Undeniable fact. Only you were probably going to say, ‘You’re nice but we can’t ignore the fact that you are, after all, still a vole.’”

  I raised my right hand. “Undeniable fact.”

  He fiddled with the spoon in his empty glass, then said, “You know, you didn’t tell me the other day. Are you attached to someone?”

  I was pretty sure I could talk about it without crying, so I told him that I’d just ended a long relationship.

  “I see,” he said. “What happened?”

  “It’s a very long story, but it came to blows over this trip to Italy. I wanted him to come along and play Gregory Peck to my Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, and he wouldn’t.”

  “You wanted him to do what?”

  “It’s an old movie, from the sixties. It was always my mother’s favorite, and my father gave her the tape when I was a little girl. So Mom and I used to watch it together all the time. I liked the idea of two people riding a scooter through a foreign city better than an alien riding a bicycle across the moon.” I told him the story, about how Gregory Peck is a journalist who meets Audrey Hepburn, a princess who has escaped her demanding duties for one day of freedom in Rome. At first Peck thinks he’s going to get the story of his life, but in the end they just spend twenty-four hours exploring Rome on a Vespa scooter and falling in love. “It’s very romantic.”

  “Why didn’t your guy want to do it?”

  “That’s part of the very long and not very interesting story. I’d really rather not go into it.”

  “So, it’s this long, uninteresting story that’s preventing me, a lonely stranger in your country, from the benefit of your company?”

  “You have my company. I’m here now. I’m happy to be your friend.”

  He grinned. “I should have said ‘orgasmic’ company.”

  “I’m sure you can find lots of that.”

  He leaned across the table toward me. “Not from someone like you. You’re not only beautiful and smart, you have a very special spark about you.”

  Vole or no vole, he was incredibly charming and I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was proving to be a pretty decent guy—full of himself, but decent. And if I wanted to be honest with myself, I’d have to admit that he did turn me on. But I didn’t want to be honest about that, so I lied to myself. “Thanks, Danny. That’s very sweet of you. But the answer is still no.”

  “Ah. ‘Sweet’ is a step up from ‘nice.’ I’m making good progress here. Slow, but good.”

  We rode back to Manhattan and he dropped me off at the train station. As he was strapping my helmet and jacket on the back of the bike, he asked if there was anything he still needed to know about next Wednesday’s shoot.

  “Yeah. Don’t get in before me. You’re making me look bad.”

  “Not a chance,” he said, revving up the engine.

  SONYA HAD NOT SCHEDULED any cooking shows for Thursday, Friday, or Monday so that I would have time to finalize the scripts for Italy. Since I was now single and had the weekend to myself, I finished them on Saturday morning. Sally was leaving for London that night, so I called her to let her know I would be e-mailing the recipes and scripts to her.

  “Would you rather I faxed them to London?”

  “No, e-mail,” she said. “If I don’t get a chance to open them now, I’ll have my PortaPrinter with me and can open them anywhere.”

  “How are you doing, Sally?”

  “Fine. I’m all packed up and ready to go.”

  “I meant you, Sally. How are you feeling about putting London on the market?”

  “I told you, Casey. I have to, so I don’t think about it. I just bull it through.” That was so much like Sally. She was proud of the fact that she was descended from colonial Virginia settlers who had had to fight the elements, the Indians, and a shortage of taffeta. I wanted to believe that she would do what she had to do and be fine, that she’d just bull it through. But I was also afraid that, this time, the toreador might be tougher than the bull.

  Chapter 13


  You can’t make a heel toe the mark.

  —Wanda Jackson

  The funny thing about a lot of comedians is that offstage they’re not so funny. Sal Vito cracked people up when he was in front of an audience. Backstage, he seemed ready to crack someone in the head. Sal is an Italian comic—been around for years. He does a lot of nightclub work, mostly Vegas. Audiences roar at his routines, which typically poke fun at his Italian mother, who is constantly feeding everyone. What’s so funny about that? Every few years he turns out another cheaply produced paperback cookbook: The Mama Mia Cookbook, The More Mama Mia Cookbook, The Even More . . . and so on. He comes on the show a few times a year, and we try hard to stay out of his way.

  On Tuesday morning, Sal was the talent for a live spot. The recipe, his mother’s pasta with cauliflower, was from his latest book. It’s a good, simple Italian home dish and a pretty easy setup: finely chopped cauliflower, minced garlic, and a little hot pepper sautéed and tossed with spaghetti. The problem is, it’s all white. Sonya had tried to talk Sal into doing something more colorful, but he’d blown her off—rudely. It would have been okay if the viewers were going to see the dish only when Sal put it together, because they would clearly understand what was going into it. But the director called down first thing in the morning for a beauty shot.

  Usually, during variety shows, the monitor will display part of a segment that is coming up as a tease to the audience, so that they will stay tuned. The director asked us for a finished dish of pasta; that was the tease we call a “beauty shot.” White pasta with white cauliflower would need a lot of makeup to be considered beautiful, and Jonathan was doing all he could to make it look appealing.

  “It’s better than brown, Jonathan,” I pointed out, trying to encourage him as he got out a blue pasta bowl, some red-checked napkins, and a bottle of red wine.

  “No. It’s not. At least you can see the brown. This is going to look like a dish of Wite-Out.”

  The director agreed with Jonathan. When the camera lined up the shot, the dish didn’t look like much.

  “Can’t we throw something red or green in there?” The director asked over the loudspeaker from the control room.

  Sonya spoke into the microphone on her headset. “Well, there’s nothing red or green in the recipe. I’ll see if I can get Sal on the phone to check if it’s okay with him if we add something just for the tease.” She took out her cell, looked at her clipboard for the number, and started dialing. I went to the kitchen to see what we had in red and green.

  When I returned to the set with a plate of cherry tomato halves, Sonya was again speaking into her headset. “He’s nowhere to be found. He’s not answering at the hotel or on his cell.”

  “Well, we have to take the picture now if we’re going to use it during the show,” the director said.

  “Let’s shoot it two ways, and as soon as I get hold of Sal I’ll see if he minds if we add”—she paused long enough to look at what I was holding—“some tomatoes. If he does, we’re just going to have to go with the white version.”

  I handed the tomatoes to Jonathan. “Okay, Jonathan, knock yourself out.”

  AT THE START OF the show’s eight o’clock hour, the monitor began to run the teases, using the shot with the tomatoes. I figured Sonya had reached Sal and he was okay with it. We were ready for his live spot, so we were prepping for Danny’s three shows tomorrow. At eight-fifteen, half an hour before he was to go on the air, Sal stormed into the kitchen. I was on the far side of Romeo, facing the door, when he came in, so I could see his face, which was not registering pleasure. Mae and Jonathan were on the other side of Romeo, with Jonathan closest to the door. “Who the hell fucked with my pasta?” Sal screamed.

  Jonathan and Mae both started like jackrabbits, and Jonathan began to stammer at the same time that I tried to explain what had happened. Jonathan was closer to Sal, and either the big oaf heard only him or was deliberately ignoring me and picking his closest victim. In any case, from that point on, everything happened with such lightning speed, it was like a DVD on fast-forward. Sal, who was over a foot taller and about eighty pounds heavier than Jonathan, grabbed the startled stylist by his shoulders and lifted him off his feet. “Don’t ever fucking mess with my food. Do you fucking capisce?” Even if Jonathan did capisce, he probably couldn’t have said so because his teeth were chattering.

  Again I tried to explain, but this time I was drowned out by our own sweet, nonviolent peace activist Mae, who picked up the bunch of scallions she was trimming and swung them so that the green ends hit Sal across the face. “Put him down, you animal,” she ordered.

  Sal immediately let go of Jonathan, who fell to the floor still clutching the napkins he had been folding into lotus blossoms. That left Sal and Mae face-to-face. He yelled at her, spraying spit all over the place. “Why, you little bitch. You can pack your bags now. You will be finished here when I get through with you.” He took a small step toward her, and in a heartbeat two Tonys leaped over Jonathan and onto Sal’s back, screaming, “Run, Mae, run.”

  The fact that Mae was wedged behind Romeo and had nowhere to run was beside the point; it was a sweet gesture. Sweet, but foolish. I was sure Sal was going to shake our boys off and make mincemeat of both of them. Now, absolutely nothing in four years of culinary school had covered anything like this particular kitchen disaster. Overbeaten egg whites, broken mayonnaise, fallen soufflés, yes, but not fallen set designers, broken necks, or beaten stagehands. On the other hand, twenty-nine years of Conti Sunday dinners had covered it all.

  I lowered my shoulders and raised my hands up to either side of my chest, palms up and fingers pinched together. I vibrated my hands back and forth and raised my voice to a decibel level above Sal’s. “Stattazeet che cosa fa? Tu sei patzo.”

  Sal stopped moving, and the Tonys slid off his back.

  He turned toward me and raised his right arm, bending it at the elbow and making a fist. He reached his left hand over and placed it firmly on his upper right arm, a gesture known as the Italian salute, which is equivalent to dropping the F-bomb.

  I brushed four fingers of my right hand from my neck to my chin and thrust them forward, which I think means “Go to Naples, or hell, or anyplace but here—I couldn’t care less.” For good measure, I added a vaffanculo. The yelling and gesturing in Italian seemed to contain Sal’s anger. He didn’t try to hit me or lift me; he just kept giving me indecent hand gestures and foul words, which I matched pretty good for a Catholic girl raised in a middle-class neighborhood.

  As I said, all of this happened very quickly. So when Sonya walked in the door, Jonathan was still in a heap on the floor, Sal had bits of scallions on his clothes, the Tonys were hovering behind Sal, ready to pounce if necessary, and I was giving Uncle Mike’s version of the Italian salute, which is a bit more complicated but a lot more graphic.

  “What the hell—” said Sonya.

  “My neck is broken,” Jonathan moaned. “Call an ambulance.”

  “Casey?” Sonya’s face clearly asked, “What the hell is going on here?”

  “Sonya, please, get Sal out of the kitchen.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I had Jonathan up to medical, the kitchen back up to speed, and the sound on the monitor as low as possible. It was projecting a laughing, lighthearted Italian comic making his mother’s favorite pasta dish. I gave the set the evil eye.

  As I expected, Sal’s front man was in the kitchen at three minutes past nine, trying to smooth things over.

  “You know, performers get jittery before they go on the air. They do and say things they don’t mean. I’m sure you all understand. Sal wanted you all to have autographed copies of his latest cookbook.” He took some copies out of a grocery bag and put them down on Romeo.

  “I think you better go up to medical to check on our set designer. Sal physically assaulted him,” I said.

  He made a little “pshaw” sound. “People often mistake Italian enthusiasm for more than it is. I’ll
go see him.” As soon as he left, we threw the books in the trash.

  BY NOON, WE HAD all of our prep tucked away in the refrigerator, clearly marked DO NOT TOUCH. If we didn’t mark the food, the night staff would have eaten it all before dawn.

  “That’s it for today, guys. See you tomorrow,” I said.

  “What time do you want me here?” asked Mae.

  “We better start right at five o’clock.”

  “You got it. I’m outta here. See ya, boys. Thanks for the hand.” I didn’t know if she meant the food prep or the celebrity bashing, but they gave her big, toothy smiles.

  Before I left the studio, I went up to medical to check on Jonathan, but they had sent him home to see his family doctor. I knew his neck wasn’t broken; still, he was pretty shaken up. I made a mental note to call him later, not just because I was concerned about him but because I knew that the studio would give us a replacement tomorrow who would know nothing about styling food. It would make the shooting more difficult. Oofah. What a day.

  WHEN I GOT HOME around four o’clock, my Uncle Tony’s car was parked in the driveway and I could smell the cannoli the minute I opened the back door. This was definitely a situation. A good china plate with a dozen or so filled cannoli was sitting on the counter, and my mother, Aunt Maria, and Nonna were standing with their ears pressed against the closed dining room door.

  “Hey! What’s up?”

  The three of them turned together and whispered for me to shush. Then Mom tiptoed over to me and pulled me into the pantry.

  “Uncle Tony is here with Mrs. Alfano and Father Joseph. She’s been taking money from the candle donation boxes and he caught her.”

  “What? Why’s she taking money?”

  “It sounds like she’s been playing bingo a little too much.”

  “Come on! How much can bingo cost?”

  “Uncle Tony is trying now to get to the bottom of it.”

  “How’d she get caught?”

  “Well, she’s on the Altar Guild, so it was her job to bring the money to Father Joseph. He noticed that each week there was less and less and finally none. That’s when he confronted her on the altar. She panicked, said she didn’t deserve to live, and then threw herself on top of the votive lights. I suppose she planned to burn herself to death with the candles, but being so big and all she just snuffed out those that were burning and broke a few more. That’s when Father Joseph called your Uncle Tony.”