Maman's Homesick Pie

by Donia Bijan

  2 for zest and juice

  3 whole cloves

  1 medium onion

  2 medium carrots

  2 celery stalks

  3 tablespoons honey

  1 lime, zest and juice

  3 clementines, zest and juice

  1 cup chicken stock

  4 sprigs thyme

  ¼ cup cider vinegar

  2 tablespoons butter

  1. Preheat the oven to 450°F.

  2. Remove the neck and the wing tips from the duck and reserve for later use. Season the duck generously, inside and out, with salt and pepper. Place 2 sprigs of thyme and 1 orange studded with 3 cloves in the cavity and truss. To truss, place the duck, breast side up, on a cutting board. Using kitchen twine and a trussing needle, poke through the upper part of the wings to secure them to the body. Then pass the needle in the opposite direction through the thighs. Tie the ends of the twine together and snip off the extra string. Trussing allows the duck to cook more evenly.

  3. Place the duck on its side in a roasting pan and slide it into the oven. Roast for 10 minutes, then turn over onto its other side to roast for another 10 minutes. Turn the duck on its back and roast for 10 more minutes.

  4. While the duck is roasting, dice the onion, carrots, and celery into ½-inch cubes.

  5. Remove the pan from the oven and surround the duck with the aromatic vegetables, neck, and wing tips. Turn the oven down to 400°F. Return the pan to the oven and continue roasting the duck for approximately 15 minutes per pound (therefore a 4-pound duck would roast for about 1 hour). Every 10 or 15 minutes, baste the duck and vegetables with the cooking juices to keep them moist, working quickly so as not to lose the oven heat.

  6. Remove the duck from the oven and transfer to a platter. Cover loosely with foil and allow to rest a minimum of 25 minutes before carving. If you don’t need the oven for anything else, turn it off and place the duck inside with the door ajar to keep it warm. It will continue to cook while it rests.

  7. To make the sauce, discard the liquid fat in the pan and place the roasted trimmings and vegetables on medium heat to brown for 3 to 4 minutes. Drizzle them with honey and toss to coat everything evenly. Just when they begin to caramelize, deglaze with the orange, clementine, and lime juices. Bring to a simmer, then add the chicken stock, the remaining thyme, and the cooking juices that have drained from the duck while resting. Cook 5 to 6 more minutes before adding the cider vinegar. Simmer gently for 5 to 8 minutes.

  8. Strain the sauce through a sieve into a small saucepan, pressing down on the vegetables and trimmings to release their juices. Bring the sauce to a boil and taste for seasoning. Add the reserved citrus zest. If needed, add another tablespoon of cider vinegar for a nice lift. Simmer until the sauce coats the back of a spoon, then whisk in the butter, a few nuggets at a time. Remove from heat and keep in a warm place until ready to use.

  9. To serve, carve the duck by removing the legs first and then the breasts. Arrange the meat on a warm platter, drizzle half the sauce over the duck, and pour the rest in a gravy boat. Serve immediately.

  Chapter 9

  FRANCE HAD GIVEN me a lasting parting gift: to leave a place with longing in your heart to return. Knowing I would always come back to the place where I had learned my craft, I flew home to America, anxious to begin work in a kitchen where I could learn more. Showing up to interviews with my knives in a canvas pouch, I went from one restaurant to the next. One chef used the interview as an opportunity to catch up on his mise en place, piling shellfish in front of me to shuck, then asking me to fill in for a prep cook who had called in sick. I quickly learned that this is the norm for kitchen interviews: Nine out of ten times, all you have to do is show up on time, ready to work, and you are hired. A résumé is superfluous—you can say you were the White House chef or an escaped convict and nobody will care. A nice suit or, mon dieu, nail polish? Forget about it. If you really want to work, show up in your uniform with your knives sharpened, keep your nails clean and trimmed, tie your hair back, leave your jewelry at home, and don’t have plans for later. In most kitchens, there’s a good chance they could use an extra pair of hands right away, and if they can’t, you probably don’t want to work there. Few working chefs have time to sit across a desk from you and ask about your hobbies (if you have any, don’t mention them) and skills. Everything relevant becomes evident in the first fifteen minutes in the kitchen. If you have just one lazy bone in your body, it will sound a siren before you’ve tied your apron on. The chef who hired me was an apple-cheeked Englishman in a crisp chef’s coat and a mile-high toque, who ran the kitchen of a landmark San Francisco hotel. He escorted me to his office, which was perched on stilts like a tree house, with glass windows overlooking a labyrinth of cooks. I desperately wanted to be a part of it. I was assigned a locker, then given a uniform and a time card.

  Starting in the basement once again, I was assistant to Rosa, the garde-manger chef in charge of all the cold appetizers. A generous woman with a big laugh who easily shared her knowledge and skill, she called me hija, daughter, but her tone was no-nonsense. I thrived under Rosa’s watchful eyes. She taught me everything without the assumption that I already knew certain things. The reality was that I didn’t know anything. Those recipe index cards from my Cordon Bleu studies were of no use to me in a real kitchen.

  Little by little, I learned to work in Rosa’s station, where I quietly assembled what at first seemed astonishing quantities of hors d’oeuvres: fifteen hundred cherry tomatoes stuffed with mozzarella, three thousand salmon blini, cheese boards like ocean liners, cascading with clusters of grapes and wheels of cheese the size of car tires. I learned to carve tropical fruit towers with pineapple turrets, apple swans, tomato roses, melon boats. On Rosa’s day off, I would follow her list but leave out the birds and the boats, presenting the pâtés, the charcuterie, the cheeses, simply, on slabs of marble or wood as I had seen in the markets in France. I wasn’t trying to be smart; I had a different aesthetic and I didn’t like to fondle a perfectly good apple to make it look like a bird.

  When I was all caught up, I would be sent to Freddy, the pantry cook, who also happened to be Rosa’s husband, but nobody was supposed to know or talk about it or the lady in human resources would make trouble. Freddy was a happy-go-lucky man who drove Rosa crazy for his lack of organization and inability to memorize the recipes he used every day.

  Rosa, Rosa, please tell me how to make the Caesar dressing.

  No! No way, Freddy! I showed you yesterday. You’re stupid, Freddy, leave me alone.

  Rosa, Rosa, ROSA! Please, mi amor, tell me one more time. Please, I’m a shit. I’m no good. Please, Rosa! I’m an ass-hole, good-for-nothing cabrón.

  Goddamn you, Freddy! Asshole, asshole, asshole! I hope the chef fires your lazy ass. You can go live with your mama.

  Rosita! I love you, Mama. You are my florecita.

  But Freddy had a delicate touch composing his salads and sandwiches. He would often fall behind on the orders pouring in from room service, taking his time to warm the bacon for a BLT, or arranging hearts of romaine for a Caesar salad. The waiters hollered and banged their fists on the stainless steel shelf that divided them: Rápido, cabrón! I’m coming around to kill you with my own two hands, you hear me? Freddy would turn a deaf ear and whistle while he gingerly placed toothpicks in a club sandwich. I rushed around trying to help him catch up.

  In Tehran, my mother would sometimes treat us to lunch at the Hilton Hotel coffee shop for Continental food. Each time, I would order a club sandwich and a vanilla milk shake, anticipating the miracle of that triple-decker triangle of bacon, poached chicken, mayonnaise, and tomato on toasted white bread, all held together with a frilly toothpick. My mother would smile approvingly at my choice, and inevitably someone at our table would express regret for not having ordered the same thing.

  So Freddy taught me how to assemble my old favorite. I would confidently send him to lunch and offer to man his station. I thought I was bein
g clever when I assembled a dozen clubs before the lunch rush, only to find the executive chef towering above me in his tall hat, his cheeks ablaze. He cleared his throat in a knowing way, before ordering me to take all those sandwiches I had proudly assembled to the staff cafeteria. We assemble our sandwiches to order, mademoiselle. And I thought, Ah, so that’s why they behold that perfect combination of crisp and melt-in-your-mouth. I was up to my neck in orders when I returned from delivering the clubs. I had so much to learn.

  Rosa knew I would not stay long in her corner of the kitchen. When I was offered a promotion to line cook, I was afraid of what I didn’t know, but Rosa shooed me over to the other side. It was not the hard work but the fire that made me doubt if I could take the heat. The first few weeks on the line, standing over twelve gas burners with the grill behind me, tested my mettle. The pace was alarming. It seemed as if everything happened at once and needed my attention then and there. I drank gallons of ice water and willed myself not to melt, while my colleagues, a team of middle-aged Chinese men, sipped green tea, checked a sauce, exchanged a joke, called an order, without so much as a bead of sweat on their brow. On my days off when I visited my parents, my mother gaped at the ladder of burns on my arms and swallowed her gasps. My father simply refused to look. What sort of idiot would do that for eight dollars an hour? We ate in silence, and after dinner I fell asleep on their couch, the exhaustion pulling me down.

  A year and a half went by before I felt ready to move on. I had overcome my fear of astronomical numbers: One thousand crab canapés? No problem. It was all a matter of organization, and I knew I could manage it. San Francisco’s culinary scene offered an array of talented chefs, and I was anxious to work in one of their kitchens. I rented an apartment a block away from the Hyde Street cable car, which took me to my new job every morning. The city was all mine at six o’clock when I hopped on. The conductor made jokes and called me sweetheart as we made our slow descent downtown. It was an era of renaissance for hotel restaurants, where every hotelier sought a gifted chef to transform his coffee shop into a signature restaurant. I was fortunate to be working alongside such a chef at the Pierre at Le Méridien. Those months of folding croissant dough paid off. The chef saw Fauchon on my résumé and I was hired; he didn’t have time to read what I had actually done there.

  I thought I had come from a fast-paced, efficient kitchen, but within days it was clear that this chef had extraordinary standards for maintaining order and cleanliness. From the instant I picked up a clean coat and apron from housekeeping, I joined a marathon and never looked back. Before service began, it was a race to prepare our mise en place, and once the first order was called, we kept our heads down and reached in every direction at once. Mistakes were not forgiven, so we simply did not make them. It was enormously gratifying when a dish came together and sparkled for a moment before a waiter whisked it away. Imagine a pheasant wrapped in lettuce with truffles and braised in the rich, brown stock of its roasted bones. You used all your senses: you looked at it, touched it, and smelled it to know it was done, then lifted it out of its caramel pool, tasted the jus, adjusted it with a squeeze of lemon, and sliced through the lettuce wrap, its emerald leaves now translucent against a milky white breast, the scent of truffles begging you to come closer. You were made of stone if you didn’t fall for this dish. I never tired of the pattern of assembling a dish, falling in love with it, sending it away. You shrug and start all over, but each time it feels different—you and your dish in perpetual courtship.

  The intensity of working in a kitchen was addictive. I thrived on the fever and the pace. I survived on cookies and torn heels of baguettes. When I had a day off, life on the outside was jarring and I had trouble switching gears. I hadn’t the slightest clue what new movies were out, what people were listening to or dancing to, what exhibits were at the museums. I managed only to watch reruns of Taxi or read every night before collapsing into uninterrupted sleep, unless I had nightmares. As if the daytime drama were not enough, kitchen nightmares would haunt me in my sleep, dreams where everything unraveled in an irreparable mess—tickets handed to me were written in a code I could not decipher, tidal waves rose inches away from where I stood facing the stove, empty walk-in refrigerators formed a treacherous maze. Increasingly I lost touch with friends, living an insular kitchen life, working longer hours, and advancing through the ranks of medieval kitchen hierarchies. Medical students experience this intensity, but few expect it to last past their residencies, unless they stay in the emergency room. In Iran, I had witnessed my parents live at this level of extreme fervor, vehement in their devotion to their patients. My father rarely remembered our birthdays or what grade we were in, often mixing up our names—not an unusual parental slip—but he never forgot a patient’s name or diagnosis. He left early in the morning, smelling so fresh from his aftershave and taking hurried sips of tea, not to return until late in the evening, exhausted. After a long, hot shower, it was all he could do to keep his head from falling into his soup, never mind helping me with algebra. My mother’s work in the hospital went hand in hand with raising her three daughters and managing her household. Later she juggled two or three jobs with various women’s organizations at a zealous pace. Once I was on the school bus, she hit the ground like a spinning top, somehow doing the grocery shopping, making dinner, sewing a costume for a school play, and hemming my sisters’ bell-bottoms, too. It wasn’t ambition that drove them; they simply didn’t know how else to work, and having watched them closely, neither did I.

  Within a year, I was put in charge of Le Méridien’s café, which served three meals a day plus room service. No longer an hourly employee, I worked eighty-hour weeks and I was ecstatic. I was given free reign to change the entire menu, going from standard Continental fare to crêpes and homemade granola for breakfast, grilled tuna niçoise salad for lunch, and homemade gnocchi with braised duck for dinner. It was a dramatic transition for a place where steak and eggs were served in the morning and niçoise salad meant an ice cream scoop of tuna salad with overcooked eggs and limp green beans. I had to train a staff rumored to be set in their ways, but enthusiasm is contagious and they could hardly complain when they saw me march in at 7:00 a.m., flip crêpes with them, prep for lunch, cook lunch with them, prep for dinner, cook dinner with them, and finally untie my apron at 10:00 p.m. We planted a garden behind the hotel and grew herbs and lettuces. We built a smoker out of an old plate warmer, packed it with apple wood, and smoked turkey breasts for club sandwiches—taking them to yet another level—and salmon for potato waffles with crème fraîche. I was having the time of my life, but I still had a nagging feeling that I was an amateur. I knew I had the right instincts, but my experience was narrow. I wondered if I could hold my own in a French kitchen, if I could write menus like poetry, revealing simple, known ingredients in a new light, instead of parading exotic combinations to fool and dazzle in an attempt to hide everything that I didn’t know.

  The Pierre often hosted chefs from France’s one-or two-star Michelin restaurants. We would feature their menus and work alongside them. The likes of Michel Bras and Antoine Westermann, who these days have three-star Michelin restaurants in France, were teaching me how to make spaetzle, allowing me to brown their squabs, dice their tomatoes, fold their raviolis. It was a marvel to watch them bring together two or three ingredients in a dish that was stunningly sincere, as if celery root and marrow were meant to be partners underneath transparent sheets of ravioli. It made you want to smack the side of your head: Of course! Working beside them, I couldn’t help measuring my skill against theirs. I knew it wasn’t magic they possessed, but magic they practiced.

  For me, France was the only place I could hone my craft. When I consulted my mother, she reminded me that over the years I had not spent a penny of all my earnings other than paying rent. Take your savings, pack your bags, go back to France, and work until your money runs out. At twenty-seven, when my career was in full throttle, I deliberately brought it to a halt and de
cided to return to France, accepting a stagiaire, an apprentice position without pay, at a three-star Michelin restaurant.

  The thought of his daughter’s not becoming a doctor remained unbearable for my father, who refused to give up hope that I would come to my senses once this kitchen fever subsided. He remained obtuse about the necessity of a respectable profession. I could not have pulled off this cookery scheme, as he came to call it, if we had returned to Iran. We would have been the laughing stock of our community: Ha, ha! Dr. Bijan sent his daughter to America to study medicine and she decided to become a cook instead! He could not contain his outrage at my pending return to France to work without pay. We have raised a fool! I sensed that my mother, despite her continued support, was beginning to have her own reservations, too. Would I continue working dog hours with little pay and no weekends off? Would I ever get married and have children if I remained chained to a stove? If my scars made her cringe, how would a man bear to hold my hand? What sort of underground world was this? It was one they could never fathom and I would not let them see. Too gritty, too loud, sometimes vulgar, with enough characters for a vaudeville show—why add to their worries?

  I felt I must prove to my parents that surely there was a chance of something emerging from my shocking breakaway from their expectations, something that I could be wonderful at. Would my father be open to seeing my dissent as a sign of an independent mind, even if he could never be happy about it? Or would he look at me and think, I don’t know you?

  Before my departure for France, my family became eligible for citizenship. We were due to be sworn in within weeks of one another and we each came to the ceremony with our own private thoughts about the significance of this final severing of ties with our homeland. Reading the Constitution, I was aware of a profound shift: the taking of an oath, and the turning away from another allegiance. But my ties to Iran were now purely emotional, a pledge to its memories, language, food, poetry, and landscape. After eight years, the other story, the story of uprooting and replanting, was ending, and an American tale was emerging. I joined a handful of fellow citizens in a classroom inside a government building, where we sat at school desks and recited the Pledge of Allegiance, making a promise I felt I had already made. There ought to have been more ceremony, but the afternoon was uneventful. I raised my right hand, and a half hour later I was racing back to work.