by Ruth Reichl
Melt the chocolate with the cocoa, butter, oil, and water over low heat, stirring until smooth. Remove from the heat and whisk in the sugar.
Cool completely, then whisk in the eggs, one at a time.
Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt, and whisk into the chocolate mixture. Shake the buttermilk well, measure, and stir that in.
Pour the batter into the pan and bake on the middle shelf of the oven for about 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
Cool on a rack for 10 minutes, then turn out, peel the parchment from the bottom, and allow to cool completely.
Praline
½ cup slivered blanched almonds
½ cup blanched hazelnuts
¼ cup water
¾ cup sugar
Toast the nuts in a 350-degree oven for 10 minutes. (If you’re using hazelnuts with skins, put them in a towel and rub the skins off, but don’t bother being fussy about it. Whatever comes off easily is fine.)
Combine the water and sugar in a small saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Boil without stirring until it begins to darken, swirling the pan until the mixture turns a beautiful deep gold. It takes a while for the mixture to darken, but once it does it goes very quickly, so don’t walk away or it will burn. Remove from the heat and stir in the nuts.
Pour onto a baking sheet that you’ve lined with foil, parchment, or a Silpat, spreading evenly. Use an oven mitt—a burn from hot sugar can be very painful. Allow to cool completely.
Break into pieces, put into a plastic bag, and smash with a rolling pin until you have lovely crushed pieces you can sprinkle over the frosting, adding both crunch and flavor.
Frosting
Mix 2 tablespoons of sugar into a cup of mascarpone. Spread the frosting on the cooled cake and heap the praline bits on top.
I GLANCED AT MY WATCH and my heart began to race: late again. I had to pick Nick up in fifteen minutes.
“Gotta go,” I shouted at Robin, running out the door and sprinting down the street to the subway. By the time I reached the school, panting and out of breath, only two forlorn children were still standing on the steps.
Nick’s look of relief quickly changed, and his face clouded with accusation as he ran down to meet me. “Why can’t you get here on time?”
“I’m sorry, sweetie.” These days that’s all I seemed to say. I bent to kiss him, inhaling the deliciously yeasty little-boy scent.
I’d known, almost instantly, that promising to be at Gourmet every day was a mistake. I just hadn’t known how big, hadn’t realized how frantic I would become trying to do two jobs.
And I’d forgotten all about the book tour.
“What an opportunity!” Maurie gushed when she learned that the paperback edition of my first memoir, Tender at the Bone, was going to be published that spring. She took immediate charge. “This can be your unveiling. Do you know how much press we’ll get? Everyone wants to know what you look like when you’re not in disguise.”
Maurie’s formidable publicity machine ground into gear. Then it was joined by my book publisher’s, and a perfect storm of media attention came raining down. Richard Avedon was on the phone, Ann Curry, Terry Gross, Susan Stamberg. Louisville offered me the keys to the city if only I’d show up. The Today show followed me around for a week.
At first it was exciting. Then it was just exhausting. I’d wake, already apprehensive, at four every morning and drag myself out of bed to write the scripts for my daily restaurant review on WQXR (the station was owned by The New York Times), thinking, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up. I’d be away for almost a month, which meant prerecording every show. I was eating out sixteen times a week, trying to get ahead of my restaurant schedule, and between meals, when I wasn’t posing for the press, I was shuttling back and forth between the newspaper and the magazine. I was always frantic, always late. The few hours with Nick were the best part of every day, but I was making a mess of that too.
“I should never have said I’d be at the magazine while I was still at the paper,” I’d said as Michael and I lay in bed, hoping for sleep. “And now there’s this national book tour….”
Michael heaved a deep sigh. “I have something to tell you….” I braced myself. “You know that piece I pitched a couple months ago on nuclear terrorism? All of a sudden they want it right away. I’m leaving for Colorado in a couple of days and I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone.”
I went numb with fury. Now? He was leaving now?
“I know the timing’s bad.” Was that an apology? “Who’s going to look after Nick while you’re away?”
Rage had overwhelmed me: While I was away? What about him? The feeling was as familiar as a toothache. Things may be better now—although I have my doubts—but in 1999 when a child got sick at school, the nurse never called the father. Working men did what was convenient; working women did everything else. And felt constantly guilty: No matter where you were, it always felt like the wrong place.
Later, when young editors came to tell me they were pregnant but planned to keep working, I’d find myself warning them about the guilt to come. Because all the talk about “quality time” is utter nonsense; children don’t need quality time. They need your time. Lots of it. And they let you know it.
When Nick was six, he made it very clear that he was not getting enough from his work-obsessed parents. “You need to spend more time with him,” Michael said. And I agreed; it did not occur to either of us that he might be the one to change his schedule. As a restaurant critic, I had no way to spend my nights at home, but days were a different matter. So no more nanny: I was now the one who picked Nick up at school, standing on the sidewalk at 3 o’clock alongside a posse of hired caregivers.
The change in Nick’s attitude toward me was dramatic. He had always been the sweetest child, but as he began to trust that I would be there every day, he stopped being on his best behavior. Now every bad thing that happened was my fault. And that was fine with me; I didn’t want my son treating me with kid gloves. Children, I came to understand, need you around, even if they ignore you. In fact they need you around so they can ignore you.
“But how will I find the time?” the young editors always asked. It’s a reasonable question; you have to give up something. We each find our own answers. In my case, I gave up sleep; after Nick was born I discovered I really didn’t need that much, or at least that I could get by on just a few hours. To this day, I feel guilty spending more than five hours in bed, as if I’m being profligate with precious time that could be better spent. I also saw less of my friends. That is, until Nick was a talking, sentient being and they all wanted to be his adopted relatives.
Now, as Nick and I walked home from school, I realized the book tour would also have to go. We had no New York relatives, and I could not possibly leave town for a month. I tried figuring out how I’d break this to my publishers, who had spent months working on the tour schedule. They were not going to be pleased. I was so distracted that when we entered the apartment to find my brother there, it took a moment to register. My brother lives halfway around the world.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as Nick ran joyfully to greet him.
“You sounded desperate when we spoke last week,” Bob said simply. “So I decided I should come help out.”
I’m not a crier, but I was so overcome that I burst into tears, unable to believe this unexpected answer to my problems. “Can you spare a month?”
“My kids are grown. My marriage is a mess. And I have some time off. If you want to know the truth, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than spend a month in New York with Nick.”
Bob has always been the perfect brother. Thirteen years older than me, he’s the child of my mother’s first marriage, and we’ve never really shared a house. He lived in Pittsburgh with his father when I
was growing up. But he’d come home on holidays, arriving late to sneak me out for hot-fudge sundaes in the middle of the night. He came to visit when I was at camp, sometimes took me along on dates, and was always the first person I called when Mom was at her craziest. Even when he was living abroad with a family of his own, he’d always been there when I needed him. But this time it had seemed too much to ask.
Bob’s one of those extraordinarily gregarious people who make instant friends with strangers; after two days of school pickups he was intimate with mothers whose names I didn’t even know. He organized games in the park, took kids out for pizza, made elaborate weekend plans. And he happily spent entire afternoons wandering the aisles of FAO Schwarz with my son. “Don’t worry about us,” Nick said importantly as I left for the airport. “Bob and I are going to be bachelors together.”
I suspected that meant brownies on demand, no baths, TV at all hours. I didn’t care. Nick was happy. As I stood waiting to board the airplane, it hit me that for the first time in months I did not feel guilty.
Then reality intruded. “Ruth!” The voice was familiar. “You going to L.A. too?”
It was Paul Goldberger and David Remnick. Paul had been culture editor when I arrived at the Times, which made him, briefly, my boss. With his pale skin, small nose, and soft mouth, he always made me think of an extremely dapper rabbit. He was, as usual, beautifully dressed, clutching the most elegant carry-on I’d ever seen. Glancing at the rope dividing us, he said incredulously, “Are you flying coach?”
“Book tour,” I explained.
The two men exchanged glances. “But you’re at Condé Nast now,” said Paul. “You’re an editor in chief.”
“I’m not actually on the payroll.” Why did I feel so defensive? “I don’t start for almost two months.”
“But you shouldn’t be traveling like that.”
It sounded like an accusation; I was supposed to be a member of their club, and I obviously didn’t know the rules.
“Where are you staying?” His voice was hopeful.
My heart sank; no redemption here. “The Hilton,” I mumbled.
“The Hilton…” Paul’s voice went squeaky with distress. Once again the two men exchanged glances, and I could feel my face getting hotter. Even the hotel’s location—the intersection of L.A.’s two noisiest thoroughfares—was undesirable.
At that moment the loudspeaker announced that the first-class passengers were about to board, and the men loped toward the plane with the unhurried assurance of privilege. I looked after them, clutching my battered suitcase. I had never traveled first class in my life.
I worried the entire flight that they would see the friends who were collecting me at the airport. It would do my Condé Nast cred no good to be caught climbing into a battered, rusted-out old pickup.
I need not have worried. By the time my carriage came wheezing and hiccupping to a stop, the Condé Nast limos were long gone. “Sorry we’re late,” said Laurie.
Some things don’t change.
In the mid-eighties, when I became the restaurant critic of the Los Angeles Times, I kept running into the same young couple when I went out to eat. Did they, I wondered, spend all their time in restaurants? You couldn’t miss them; they were extremely conspicuous in the small Asian and Mexican restaurants they seemed to favor.
He was pale and puffy with long, thinning hair and the mushroom complexion of someone who rarely sees the sun. She was tall, with golden skin, wild black hair, and a lean body that seemed to be all legs. No matter the weather he wore a scuffed black motorcycle jacket, while she favored bright prints in clashing colors. They were such an improbable pair that every eye invariably swiveled toward them.
For months we pointedly ignored each other. Then a waiter in some tiny Koreatown restaurant specializing in tofu insisted we share a table. We were the only non-Asian patrons in the place, and the man refused to take no for an answer.
Slowly, reluctantly, we began to talk. Jonathan Gold turned out to be the music critic of the city’s alternative paper, LA Weekly, but there seemed to be no subject on which he lacked an opinion. The girlfriend, who also worked at LA Weekly, was as silent as he was voluble. Most of the time she sat watching him with large liquid eyes, nodding thoughtfully as he spoke.
He was a classical cellist and rap music aficionado who was close to people with names like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. He also claimed to have eaten at every taco stand in the city. I found this hard to believe, but it turned out to be true. Jonathan also knew a stunning amount about Thai and Korean food and could go on for hours about the distinctions between the foods of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. I found him slightly pompous, irritating, and utterly fascinating. I was pretty sure he felt the same way about me—minus the fascinating part.
Over the next year our edgy relationship did not prevent us from sharing many meals. Jonathan always talked a lot; his girlfriend rarely said much. So when Jonathan suggested I hire her as my assistant at the L.A. Times, I was disinclined.
“You should consider Laurie,” he insisted. “She’s the smartest person I know.”
I doubted that.
“I know Laurie’s quiet,” he persisted, “but I promise you she’s the best editor I’ve ever met. The least you could do is talk to her.”
It was a long time before I realized how much this must have cost him. Jonathan was a competitive person who wanted to be the best at everything he did. And he already knew what I was about to find out: Laurie Ochoa is one of those self-effacing people with a genius for making others look good. Unambitious for herself, she is enormously supportive of those she loves. She’s improved the work of every writer she’s ever worked with, and I am certainly no exception.
She asked endlessly thoughtful questions about my articles, picking up each word, touching it, tasting it, willing it to be the perfect fit. She read things into my writing I hadn’t known were there, so that each time I saw them in print I found myself thinking, did I really say that?
She was also extremely demanding. It was Laurie, in her quietly tenacious way, who insisted we try to take over the food section. “Think what we could do with all that space!” she kept saying as she urged me to write a proposal. I got all the credit for the excellence of the section, but at least half the ideas were Laurie’s, and I could never have done it without her.
Now I wondered how I could persuade her to move to New York. She’d agreed to consider it, but she’d seemed unenthusiastic, and as Jonathan drove, gears shrieking, to a Sichuan restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley, I marshaled my arguments. I planned to broach the topic at the table, so it was disappointing to find a few of their more eclectic friends—an experimental novelist, an avant-garde composer, and a performance artist—already there. I’d have to wait to make my case.
The proprietors greeted Jonathan with reverence and immediately brought out a huge hot pot, a vast metal bowl filled with meat and vegetables. While the others stuck to the vegetables, Laurie and I happily fished out sliced pig intestines and cubes of congealed blood; among other things, we share a taste for strong flavors. “I wonder,” said Jonathan as he watched us eat, “if there are any restaurants like this in New York?”
“We’ll have plenty of time to investigate,” Laurie replied.
And that is how I found out that they’d both decided to join the Gourmet experiment.
* * *
—
AIRPORTS. HOTELS. ROOM service. Interviews. In my memory, the book tour remains a blur of small-town America and endless plane rides. And then, at last, I was on my way back to New York and the final appearance on the schedule.
“Can Bob and I come with you?” asked Nick.
I looked at him, surprised. “You don’t think you’ll be bored? I’m just going to give a little talk and sign some books. It’s not all that interesting.”
“But I wan
t to see what you’ve been doing while you were gone.”
“There are never any kids there,” I warned him.
I was wrong about that. At the end of the reading, the very first person in line was a man pushing his small son toward me. “You owe him an apology,” he said.
Nick moved in closer to hear.
“I was the chef at Capsouto Frères,” the man continued.
This was not going to be good.
“ ‘Bitter salad,’ ” he quoted sourly—he had memorized the entire review. “ ‘Mushy sole. Cottony bread.’ They fired me after your hatchet job, and I haven’t been able to find work since.”
I sat there, chagrined and embarrassed as the man glared at me, unmoving, hand on his boy’s shoulder. I did not know what to say.
My brother stepped smoothly into the silence. “This,” Bob said, bringing up the next person in line, “is Evelyn. She says her mother was an even worse cook than ours. As if such a thing were possible.” Still glaring at me, the chef moved on, pushing his son before him.
Shaken, I looked at Nick, wondering how he’d taken it. In more than twenty years as a restaurant critic, I had never been confronted in public, and when anyone asked how I felt about negative reviews, my answer was cavalier. “You can’t be a good critic,” I’d say blithely, “unless you’re willing to tell the truth. Nobody believes a critic who only says nice things.”
But I wasn’t being honest. I never wrote a negative review without worrying about closed restaurants, lost jobs, and fired chefs; there was no joy in thinking about the harm my words could cause.
“You can’t be a restaurant critic,” Mary Frances Fisher once told me, “unless you are one of those ambitious sorts, willing to walk on your grandmother’s grave.” I’d quoted that in the article about disapproving of what I did, the article that had sent Truman to see me. And then I’d refuted it, ending the article by quoting A. J. Liebling. “All it really takes to be a restaurant critic,” I’d written, “is a good appetite.”