Save Me the Plums

by Ruth Reichl

  “You said to make them easy.” There was a slight edge to Gina Marie’s voice. “So I went with buttermilk drop biscuits. They’re no work at all.”

  “Still…” said Zanne. “Maybe you could try adding a little cheddar?”

  “And Parmesan too,” Kempy weighed in. “It would add complexity.”

  “While you’re adding ingredients,” Richard tossed in, “could you throw in some chopped parsley or scallions? Think how pretty those biscuits would be if they were lightly flecked with green. The camera would love them.”

  “Anything else?” asked Gina Marie.

  THIRD TASTE

  The sloppy-joe filling, we all agreed, was now perfect. Richard’s scallions were a hit. But Zanne still had doubts about the biscuits. “I’m wondering if they really need to bake in a four-hundred-fifty-degree oven. Try them at four hundred and see how that works.”

  Gina Marie muttered something under her breath.

  “And those green beans…” added Richard.

  “What’s wrong with my beans?” Gina Marie bristled. “They’re crisp. They’re perfectly seasoned. I don’t see a problem.”

  “But look at them! Sad green things lying limply on the plate.” We all stared at the plate; the beans did seem rather pitiful. “The readers need to be able to taste these meals with their eyes,” said Richard, “and if they can’t see the onions, they can’t imagine the flavor.”

  “And how”—Gina Marie’s hands were now on her hips—“would you propose I make those onions pop?”

  “Red onions, maybe, instead of white?” Richard was quietly reminding us all that he was a wonderful cook. “Cut larger?”

  “You could quarter and then roast them,” Kempy offered.

  Gina Marie picked up the plate, rotating it as she gazed at the beans. “I’ll quarter small red onions, drizzle them with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and zap them in a really hot oven. Then I can toss them with the parboiled beans at the last minute. They’ll look great.”

  “And could you leave the beans whole?” Richard suggested. “It would be such a great visual.”

  FOURTH TASTE

  A daily diet of sloppy joes leaves something to be desired. Today when Gina Marie made up the plate, she shoved it aggressively onto the counter. “The beans are really good”—her voice held a challenge—“but I liked the biscuits better the last time around.”

  “It was worth a try,” Zanne said a bit defensively. “But you’re right. Let’s go back to the last biscuits.”

  FIFTH TASTE

  “I don’t think I can do any better.” Gina Marie set the entire menu before us. “The biscuits are perfect. The sloppy joes look good. And the beans are great.”

  “The readers are going to love it,” I said.

  “And I,” said Gina Marie as she untied her apron, “am never eating a sloppy joe again.”

  On first arriving at Gourmet, I’d thought this intense and tortured process too hard, too time-consuming, and too expensive, but I’d been reluctant to interfere; it was not, I thought, my place to tell Zanne how to run her department. But I soon changed my mind about the testing. The Gourmet method was fussy and democratic, but it was an essential piece of the magazine’s success. You could trust those recipes; they really worked.

  But Richard took another step: He made you long to cook those dishes, and not by simply romancing the food. For this shoot Richard hired a group of models, sat them in front of a television, put on a horror film, and asked them to react to what was on the screen. You couldn’t see what they were watching, but the scene was so vivid, their reactions so strong, that you yearned to be there with them. You couldn’t be, of course, so you did the next best thing: You made the meal that they were eating.

  You can make these biscuits larger if you’re going to use them as a base for sloppy joes, but I like to make small ones to serve with barbecue, chili, fried chicken—they’re extremely fast and easy and they go with just about anything.

  GINA MARIE’S CHEDDAR SCALLION BISCUITS

  (Adapted from Gourmet magazine)

  •••

  6 ounces cheddar cheese

  3 tablespoons Parmesan (finely grated)

  3 scallions

  ¾ stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter

  1¾ cups all-purpose flour

  ¾ cup stone-ground cornmeal (not coarse)

  4 teaspoons baking powder

  1 teaspoon sugar

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 cup buttermilk (well shaken)

  Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

  Butter a large baking sheet.

  Coarsely grate the cheddar; you should have about a cup and a half. Mix in the grated Parmesan.

  Chop the scallions—both the white and the green parts.

  Cut the cold butter into ½-inch cubes.

  Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, then cut in the butter with two knives until it’s about the size of peas. Stir in the cheese and the scallions and then gently mix in the buttermilk, just until the dough comes together.

  Drop the dough onto the baking sheet in twelve mounds, leaving space between them. Bake until fragrant and golden, about 15 minutes.

  * * *

  —

  GINA MARIE’S NEXT big assignment was a children’s birthday party. “I’ve had this idea for the cake….” In her Bensonhurst accent, the word “idea” ended in “r.” “What if I made little tiny cupcakes and used them like decorations? They’re the perfect size; the kids could just pull them off.” She mimed a toddler holding up a miniature cupcake. “They’d like that. Then when all the cupcakes are gone, the parents can eat the cake. Kind of like, you know, having your cake and eating it too.”

  Gina Marie iced the cake in white and covered it with jaunty polka dots. She piled the tiny cupcakes, each a vivid bright color, into a pyramid on top. Richard took one look and put the cake on the cover, setting it against a vibrant green background. It was bright, it was cheerful, it was innocence personified. And it really caught your eye.

  The issue sold extremely well, so the first angry letters took us all by surprise. How dare we, subscribers wanted to know, put cupcakes on the cover? I was baffled. What were they so upset about? But as the letters continued to pour in, I began to understand that longtime readers of the magazine had decoded a message we hadn’t even known we were sending.

  Throughout human history, food trends have come from the top, slowly working their way down from royal tables to the modest homes of the hoi polloi. Restaurants owe their very existence to the French Revolution, which sent chefs who’d been feeding the aristocracy looking for new ways to earn money. Old-guard gourmets considered this trickle-down cuisine the natural order.

  But the world of food was in turmoil. For the first time in history, food trends began to work their way up from the street. In 2004, when David Chang opened Momofuku, a tiny ten-seat restaurant in a scruffy downtown neighborhood created a national ramen craze. Then tacos took off, and street-cart cuisine began elbowing its way into white-tablecloth restaurants. The clientele for upscale restaurants was changing too; now the people who mattered most weren’t old white men in suits but diverse young people in jeans, and their notion of fine dining differed enormously from that of their elders. They had no use for stuffy restaurants; they wanted noise, color, excitement.

  Gina Marie’s cupcakes perfectly captured this moment in time. What were cupcakes, after all, but the direct descendants of Hostess and Sno Balls? People who rejoiced in finding soufflés and croquembouches on the cover of their favorite magazine did not appreciate the apotheosis of less prestigious dishes. “What will you put on your cover next?” one reader wrote. “Hot dogs?”

  They sent us
vitriolic letters, using words like “gross,” “distasteful,” and “low.” One woman insisted the cover was so offensive that she’d been forced to tear it off and throw it away. “I just couldn’t bear to look at it,” she wrote. Younger readers joined the battle, gleefully supporting the cake by sending in photos of their homemade versions.

  The battle raged for more than a year, and while I’ll admit I stirred the pot and printed the letters, I never really understood what the fuss was all about. Now, looking back, it is very clear. Gourmet cried, “Let them eat cupcakes!” and our readers got the message. The exclusive little world of food was growing both larger and more inclusive, and those who’d thought they’d owned it didn’t like it one bit.

  “LOVE, LOVE, LOVE THE CONTROVERSY over the cover,” said the voice on the phone. “Oh, honey, good for you!”

  “Stevie!” Like many other people, I was always delighted to hear from my mother’s oldest friend.

  My father called him the Thin Man because he looked like Noël Coward and was the most sophisticated person any of us had ever met. Stevie Kaufmann went everywhere, knew everyone, and lived a life straight out of a thirties movie. He was the uncle I never had, the nearest thing to a living relative in New York City, and whenever he said, “Meet me for lunch,” I put on my coat and walked out the door.

  I found him at his regular table at Michael’s, the restaurant New York media moguls preferred for power lunches. Stevie always acted like he owned the place, nodding graciously to acquaintances around the room. His table was strategically placed so that everyone who entered the restaurant had to pass by him. Even at ninety, Stevie was the most elegant person in the room, his great dome of a head gleaming as he smiled at the parade of people, enjoying every minute. But, then, no one ever had a greater talent for finding pleasure everywhere he went.

  Stevie and Mom grew up together—their mothers were best friends—and they had an unshakable ritual: Every year, Stevie took Mom to the 21 Club for her birthday. She always went—even when she was deeply depressed—because no one ever said no to Stevie.

  “You should see the way they treat him!” she’d say afterward, launching into her favorite tale. “Did I ever tell you about the time Stevie showed up at 21 in his uniform? It was during World War Two, when the restaurant had a strict no-uniform policy, but they changed it on the spot. They didn’t want to turn Stevie away.”

  She repeated this story every year, as if we’d never heard it before. Then she’d tell us all the delicious stories Stevie had told her about his famous friends. He knew Greta Garbo, Lena Horne, Rock Hudson, the brother of the king of Sweden….Stevie had inherited some money at twenty-five, quit his job, and devoted the rest of his life to art, music, theater, and people. “His best friend,” Mom always told us, “is Bill Blass. I think they might have been lovers, and I know they talk to each other every day.”

  Sometime in the early eighties Stevie announced, a little mournfully, “Blass says I need to get a job.” Stevie was seventy—an almost unimaginable age to my thirty-something self—and I peered at him in disbelief. “You can’t start working now,” I said ungraciously. “You’re much too old!”

  Stevie was not offended. “I know.” He shook his head ruefully. “I never intended to let this happen. My parents both died in their sixties, and I figured I would too. I thought there’d always be enough.”

  He went to work for the company that manufactured Bill Blass suits. I never was entirely clear what the job was; I imagine it was mostly looking good, being charming, and taking people out to lunch, all the things Stevie was good at. Maybe it was more than that, but he never discussed it; his life was much too full to waste time talking about work.

  I barely heard from Stevie during the years I was in California, so it was a surprise to pick up the phone in my L.A. office and find him on the other end. “They tell me,” he said, “they’ve offered you the Times restaurant-critic post.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” I cried. “I just got off the phone with them.”

  “Don’t you know I hear everything?” I pictured him on the other end of the phone, dressed in one of his gorgeous suits, airily waving a hand. “You must come. It’s high time you took me to lunch.”

  I did, and often. No one was ever better company; during my six years at the Times we shared a lot of lunches. Once, to his enduring delight, I wrote him into a review. And, of course, Stevie was the first to call when Condé Nast came knocking. “You have to do it,” he said, “if only for Mim. Think how your mother would have loved this!”

  “But who told you?” I asked. Mere hours had passed since my meeting with Si.

  “Oh,” he said vaguely, “I used to know Si’s mother, Mitzi.” She’d been dead for years, but this was clearly the only explanation I was ever going to get.

  Now that I was at Condé Nast, Stevie thought it was time I attended Fashion Week. “I’ll get you a ticket,” he said, “and you can finally meet Blass.”

  “Next year,” I said. And I kept saying it…until it was too late.

  “Aren’t you sorry?” Stevie asked the next time we had lunch. “Now you’ll never have the chance.” It was the first time in my whole life I’d seen Stevie looking sad. “Every morning I pick up the phone to call Blass. And then I remember that he’s gone. I’m dreading Thanksgiving. We always spent it at his house.”

  When he grew uncharacteristically quiet, I tentatively suggested he might want to share Thanksgiving with us. He didn’t say anything, and I blushed; of course Stevie didn’t want to come to our house. He undoubtedly had dozens of more interesting invitations.

  The silence lasted a few seconds and then Stevie blurted out, “Blass could have left me more in his will.” It was so unlike him that I chalked it up to mourning. “It all went to some dog organization,” he continued, “and he knew I could have used the money.”

  But today Stevie was his normal ebullient self, and I settled in to enjoy the show. “You order for me,” he said to the maître d’. “You know exactly what I like.” Meals with Stevie always reminded me of that scene in Gigi where Aunt Alicia shows the young girl how to judge jewels, eat ortolans, and choose cigars: It was a window onto a life of a bygone era. Sure enough, the waiter was soon shaving great fat slices of truffle over our pasta, the scent hovering deliciously above the table.

  Stevie waited until we were alone. Then he picked up his fork and waved it at me. “I need to tell you something. I want to set the record straight.”

  About what? I wondered.

  “They’re closing my company. The owner’s decided to move to Israel.”

  “It’s probably time,” I said. “You are, after all, ninety.”

  “Probably,” he agreed cheerfully. “But the bookkeeper called the other day to ask where she should send my weekly check.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither did I. But it turns out that for the last twenty years Blass was secretly paying my salary. He even left a stash so it would continue after his death. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  I stared at him, speechless.

  “I wanted to tell you because I was so ungracious about his will.” He peered at me. “Ruthie, are you crying?”

  “Of course not.” I hastily wiped my eyes. It wasn’t the money—which would have been nothing to Bill Blass. It was the trouble he’d taken to save Stevie’s pride.

  When Stevie died, just short of his ninety-first birthday, the Times titled his obituary “The Death of an Unknown Man Who Knew Everyone.” “He never did a single thing of note in his life,” the author wrote, “except find a million ways to enjoy it.”

  The extraordinarily long obituary ran in the style section, and people talked about it for days. Stevie would have loved that. He would have loved everything about the piece, especially the notion that his talent for happiness was both worthwhile and exceedingly ra
re.

  But I couldn’t stop thinking about Bill Blass. I thought back to that first night with Giulio, when he’d looked at three chefs talking together. “You don’t get it, do you?” he’d said. “What an amazing world you live in.”

  Now, for the first time, I thought that maybe he was the one who hadn’t gotten it right. Every world has its extraordinary side. It’s just that so few of us know how to find it.

  LET ME SAY RIGHT NOW that if I had known that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had been targeting the Maine Lobster Festival for some ten years, I would have realized that sending David Foster Wallace off to write about it was a bad idea. But as the great man set off for Maine, I remained blissfully ignorant.

  DFW was a legend, a brilliant, iconoclastic writer with a devoted following. I loved his work, and even though Gourmet had a long history of publishing great literary writers, when Jocelyn Zuckerman suggested asking him to write for us, I doubted that he’d do it. In the early years, distinguished writers Ray Bradbury, Hilaire Belloc, Kay Boyle, Annie Proulx, Joseph Wechsberg, Anthony West, Anita Loos, Anthony Burgess, Mary Cantwell, and Laurie Colwin had all appeared in Gourmet’s pages. In recent years we’d persuaded Pat Conroy, Calvin Trillin, Diane Johnson, Michael Lewis, Richard Ford, Julian Barnes, Jane Smiley, and, of course, Ann Patchett to write for us, but I still didn’t think DFW would be game.

  To be honest, I’m not sure why he agreed to do it: From the beginning he made it clear he had no interest in free trips or luxury junkets. First he turned down an all-expenses-paid voyage to a boozy gathering of malt lovers in Scotland. He scoffed at our offer to explore la dolce vita in Rome. The Oxford Symposium on Food held no appeal for him. We came up with dozens of suggestions; David Foster Wallace always said no.