by Kim Perel
My husband and I are both only children, the sole inheritors of numerous family traditions, including recipes. A few weeks before the wedding, a set of neatly printed index cards arrived in the mail from Gwendal’s grandmother Simone. Among the recipes were detailed instructions for Gwendal’s favorite childhood dessert, le bon jeune homme, which he rapturously described to me as a carefully molded mountain of chocolate cream surrounded by a lake of crème anglaise. I glanced at the card; the first paragraph alone involved forty-five minutes of continuous stirring. The first time I made it, I burned the chocolate. The second time I stirred for an hour and ended up with chocolate milk. The third time, I cheated. Consulting Nigella Lawson’s recipe for chocolate pots, I whisked in a solitary egg. My custard was firm to the touch, and no one was the wiser. Unmolding the chocolate mountain was simply too much pressure, so I served the chocolate custard in tall parfait glasses, topped with a layer of vanilla-flecked crème anglaise. Gwendal looked slightly disappointed, until he tasted it. Perhaps I would be worthy of carrying the torch after all.
I spoke a lot to my own grandmother that year. Like many Jewish Americans, my ancestors hailed from Eastern Europe—Minsk, Pinsk, or somewhere in between. I was hardly the first woman in my family to learn to cook in a new culture, a new city. My grandparents were married in 1941, and during the war my grandfather, an engineer, was sent to Utica, New York, to work in an aeronautics factory. My grandmother learned to cook from the Italian ladies she met on line at the butcher. “Always use two kinds of meat,” they told her. “Don’t burn the garlic.” “Dried parsley will do.” The recipe that has come down to us is full of love and contradictions: a Jewish grandmother’s spaghetti sauce full of juicy pork ribs.
Six months after our wedding, my father-in-law was diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer. I was helpless, and furious. I watched Gwendal and his mother navigate a medical system with excellent care, but no one to talk to. It was impossible to obtain more than a whispered diagnosis or any real discussion of treatment options. Unable to force the issue the way I would have in the United States—pitching a tent at the nurses’ station, demanding to see the head of the department, the only place I could make myself useful was in the kitchen. My mother-in-law was surprisingly graceful in letting another woman take over her stove. I made simple things I’d learned from her: bags of baby scallops from the freezer, sautéed with diced onion, white wine, and a heaping tablespoon of crème fraîche. I pinched small amounts of sea salt from a ceramic jar my father-in-law, an artist, had made. The glaze was a deep blue mottled with gray tears, the lid sticky from kitchen grease. My mother sent over American measuring cups and bags of Domino’s dark brown sugar, and I made batch after batch of chocolate-chip cookies. No pecans, dried cherries, or other fancy footwork was appropriate, just the recipe straight off the back of the Toll House bag. Even as his appetite faded, my father-in-law hoarded these cookies with a comic possessiveness, eating them with tea during the long winter afternoons.
When I got homesick, and reruns of The West Wing would no longer suffice, I would take a trip to Thanksgiving, a store in the Marais selling overpriced American imports. A package of Philadelphia cream cheese was seven dollars. Like Audrey Hepburn at Tiffany’s, I would sweep my hands along the shelves of Pop-Tarts and raspberry fluff. I stopped to read the ingredients—something I would never do in the States—drinking in the comforting, polysyllabic beauty of it all.
Strangely enough, I never bought anything, not even a nostalgic can of Pillsbury vanilla frosting. It seemed wrong somehow, like eating pho in Bogotá—ne’er the twain shall meet. There were just too many wonderful things to eat in Paris to get stuck in my childhood obsession with partially hydrogenated soybean oil.
Thanksgiving itself—the holiday, that is—simply disappeared when I arrived in France. No one had the day off, or was plotting a 5 a.m. shopping spree to Best Buy for a forty-eight-foot flat-screen TV. Even if I had been linguistically capable of asking my butcher for a twenty-pound turkey, I suspect he would have laughed in my face. In any case, we didn’t have an oven.
The Jewish holidays, in particular, took on a spectral, hidden presence. September in Paris is strolling weather. Walking along on our way to a movie, we saw men dressed in long black coats and wide-brimmed hats throwing bits of bread into the canal. In France, religion is meant to be completely absent from the public sphere, so it took me a moment to make the connection. The men were Orthodox Jews cleansing their sins in the water. And I had completely forgotten about Yom Kippur. I wondered how I had missed the holiday hustle bustle, even over the phone, and I was sad to discover there was nothing inside me that instinctively sprang to the surface on the day, even in a foreign land.
Food—and marriage, I would learn—represent an intimate comfort zone, a safe and loving space to expand your character, and occasionally a nest to retreat to when the world seems hostile and overwhelming. The summer after our wedding, I herniated a disc dragging a suitcase full of shoes through the streets of Paris. Hunched over and in pain, I wanted only one thing—take-out Chinese and a DVD of Grease. Gwendal tried to play along, hunched over on the edge of the sofa with his throwaway chopsticks and flimsy aluminum carton of pad thai. But the French are a civilized race. They prefer to eat meals at tables, with plates and napkins, and perhaps a glass of Bordeaux. On this point we would agree to disagree. I felt better than I had in weeks. I carefully flung my legs over the arm of the couch and laid my head in his lap. It was almost perfect. My kingdom for a Twizzler.
My husband and I will celebrate our ten-year wedding anniversary next year. Over time, our culinary habits have blended together. I am now a lover—and creator—of five-course French dinner parties, and Gwendal occasionally eats breakfast standing up at the kitchen counter. I still contemplate life’s big questions in front of the open fridge. He still refuses to drink milk out of the container. C’est la vie.
LE BON JEUNE HOMME
CHOCOLATE CREAM WITH CRÈME ANGLAISE
ADAPTED FROM TANTE JANE ADAM
I didn’t muster the will to try this recipe until several years after our wedding. Is any man’s childhood fantasy worth forty-five minutes of continuous stirring? Absolutely. Unmolding a mountain of wobbly chocolate cream seemed too risky, so I turned this into a black-and-white parfait, served in a tall glass. Gwendal looked slightly disappointed with the presentation, until he tasted it.
This is a great dinner party/holiday dessert—it looks terribly elegant, and because you must get it in the fridge the night before, there’s less hassle on the day!
FOR THE CHOCOLATE CREAM
1 egg
6 oz dark chocolate (70 percent cocoa; I use Valrhona or Green & Black’s)
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup whole milk
FOR THE CRÈME ANGLAISE
5 egg yolks
1/3 cup sugar
3 cups whole milk
1 vanilla bean
Fresh mint to garnish
For the chocolate cream: Lightly beat the egg in a small bowl.
Chop the chocolate and place in the top of a double boiler with the cream and the milk. Heat, stirring to combine, until just below boiling. Turn off the heat.
Quickly whisk the beaten egg into the chocolate mixture until smooth. Divide the chocolate cream among 6 tall glasses. Refrigerate for at least 6 hours or overnight.
For the crème anglaise: In a medium mixing bowl, beat egg yolks with sugar until a light lemon yellow. Set aside.
Pour milk into a medium saucepan. Split the vanilla bean down the middle; scrape the seeds into the milk, and throw in the pod as well. Heat over a low flame, until just below boiling.
Slowly add the hot milk to the egg yolks, whisking continuously. Pour the mixture back into the saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring continuously, until the crème anglaise coats the back of a spoon, about 10 minutes.
Cool briefly in an ice bath; store in an airtight container in the fridge. Like the chocolate cream, this can be made a day ahead.
Just before serving, top the chocolate cream with a layer of crème anglaise and top with a sprig of mint.
Serves 6–8
My Kitty-Corner Life
ANN HOOD
A week after we got married, my husband, Lorne, and I moved into a new apartment. All day we schlepped boxes and bags, furniture and clothes, across Providence. By eleven o’clock that night, I was too tired to unpack even one more dish, and my groom chivalrously offered to finish up. Happy and in love, I went to bed that night in our new queen-size bed with its wedding-gift, unslept-on sheets and comforter. I woke up to the smell of coffee brewing and the sounds of Lorne moving around. These heavy footsteps, this smell of shaving cream and Irish Spring soap, the tweeds and flannels peeking out at me from the closet, all signaled married to me.
When I wandered down the stairs and into the living room, where I’d left Lorne unpacking, I froze in the doorway. Each piece of furniture stood in a perfect straight line against the walls. Nothing at an angle, no chair set kitty-corner. Even the candles stood like marines along one shelf. I looked, horrified, from one row to the next. And the next and the next. Then I burst into tears. How had I landed in a perfectly aligned life when I had worked so hard to live anything but?
I grew up in a small, depressed mill town in Rhode Island, in the same house my great-grandparents bought when they emigrated from southern Italy in the late 1800s. My grandmother, Mama Rose, was born there, got married there, went on to have ten children in her childhood bedroom, and died sitting at the kitchen table after making enough sauce and meatballs to feed us for the next year. My mother—her ninth child—brother, and I moved in with Mama Rose while my father was based in Cuba for the navy in the early sixties. After he came home, he moved in, too. My father died fifteen years ago, but my mother still lives at 10 Fiume Street. The thought of leaving has never once crossed her mind. I, on the other hand, could only think about leaving that house, that town, the entire state.
Everyone in West Warwick followed the same predictable path. The town was made up of a cluster of small villages that had sprung up along the Pawtuxet River during the industrial revolution, and was dominated by churches and mills. Although the churches had official names—St. Anthony’s, St. Joseph’s, Sacred Heart—they were known as the Portuguese church, the French church, and the Italian church. The immigrants who came to work in those now-empty mills, lived in small neighborhoods together, and their ethnicity dominated those communities. The town’s life cycle revolved around the various festivals held at these churches. The sight of zeppole, the cream-filled Italian pastries, in bakery windows signaled the beginning of spring. If the smell of chourico and the sounds of nonstop fireworks filled the air, we knew the Portuguese La-La had started and summer was over.
Catholic life ruled the town. Little girls in lace mantillas walked hand in hand to church with their black-clad grandmothers. Celebrations centered on church rituals: baptism, First Communion, confirmation. Every Sunday of my childhood I woke up to the sound of church bells. Not just the ones from Sacred Heart down the hill from us, but from all the churches all over town. In the school yard, we debated what to give up for Lent. We went to school late on Ash Wednesday, proudly showing off the smudge of ash on our foreheads. On February 2, we came to school late, stopping first at church to get our throats blessed, the long white taper candles passed solemnly under our chins as we knelt at the altar. If you felt really close to someone, you shared what you would tell the priest at confession on Saturday. Once, at recess, when we asked the new girl, Sandra Goldsmith, which church she went to, she burst into tears and confessed, “I’m not Catholic!” Then she ran home.
My father liked to say that our path was predetermined: we went from getting baptized at Sacred Heart, to having our wedding reception at the Club 400, to our wake at Prata’s Funeral Home. Indeed, the Club 400 served up Italian wedding soup, ziti, and chicken Marsala to every bride and groom in town. In the center of the banquet room, a fountain bubbled out whiskey sours. On every table, paper plates sat heavy with cookies baked by grandmothers and aunts. The favors—a small tulle bundle of candy, tied by the bride’s youngest siblings and cousins with a ribbon that matched the wedding theme color—never varied.
All of this sameness brought comfort and security to seemingly everyone in town. Except me. The day Sandra Goldsmith ran in shame from the playground, I felt jealous of her otherness. If she wasn’t Catholic, then what was she? I imagined veiled women, minarets, mysterious chanting. At my cousin Cynthia’s wedding at the Club 400, I vowed to have my own distant reception somewhere far away, like Newport or Providence. Or maybe I wouldn’t get married at all, I thought as I watched the bridesmaids in cranberry velvet gowns clutching their colonial bouquets. Maybe our small-town path was set, but early on I was determined to veer from it as often and as far as possible. The first time I read Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Less Traveled,” I cried with relief. Here was my anthem, at last.
“Why are you crying?” Lorne asked me that morning, a look of complete bewilderment on his face.
I just shook my head and cried harder.
How could I put into words what I felt? How could I explain that this furniture that he had so carefully lined up against our living room and dining room walls represented a box, a failure, the road too traveled.
“Did I do something wrong?” he persisted.
“Everything is in a straight line!” I said.
Hearing the words out loud brought on a fresh round of sobs.
It is important to know that the person standing there crying was no young bride; I was thirty-eight years old. This was my second marriage, and I’d had my share of live-in boyfriends, brief intense relationships, and more than a few one-night stands. True to my long-ago vow to follow my own path, I had met this husband while I was separated but not divorced from the last husband. I had decided that I would never get married again, that once (for the record: in a meadow) was enough. Therefore, I hadn’t bothered to get divorced. Within six months of meeting this husband, we decided to have a baby; two weeks later I was pregnant. On the morning I stood crying at the sight of that furniture, seeing it as a metaphor for my future, our one-and-a-half-year-old son, Sam, was upstairs asleep.
It would seem to anyone looking in, that despite the military decorating style, I had indeed fulfilled my desire to live an extraordinary life. Despite everyone, from teachers to guidance counselors, telling me that it was impossible to become a writer, I had found a way to do just that. My path to my dream career was as kitty-corner as my path to marriage and parenthood had been. In search of adventures, after college I went to work as a TWA flight attendant instead of pursuing an MFA in creative writing or taking an entry-level job at a magazine or publishing house.
I fled West Warwick and the state of Rhode Island, moving to Kansas City, Boston, St. Louis, and finally New York City. While my friends shared Upper East Side apartments, I lived in a series of studios in the East Village. Walking those streets alone, I felt my cells rearrange themselves, settling into place for the first time. I ate cheap Indian food on East Sixth Street and breakfast at old Polish diners. My boyfriend was a handsome, sexy, mercurial actor. As we sat at rooftop parties in our leather jackets drinking tequila and discussing Mamet and Chekhov, or roamed the miles of books at the Strand Book Store, I knew I was living the life I had imagined for myself. My comfort came not from the familiar, but from the unknown. Nourished on routine and ritual, I now woke every day not knowing what lay ahead.
Eventually I married another writer, and my life spun into yet more uncharted territories. The sound track to our life was the sound of typewriter keys clacking. We moved to then-ungentrified Brooklyn, writing our books in adjacent rooms, reading what we’d written
out loud to each other over dinner and wine each night. Most of our friends were writers, too. I used to marvel that a girl from a mill town had landed here, in New York City, surrounded by people who, like her, loved words.
Even when that marriage broke apart five years later, I did not change my kitty-corner ways. I moved to the way West Village with my two cats, and traveled to Egypt and beyond, collecting adventures and experiences, living a life that surpassed even my most outlandish girlhood fantasies. On the night I arrived at the University of Rhode Island to appear on an arts panel, I had no plans except to keep writing and keep living exactly as I pleased. When the handsome guy who kept appearing at my side all night literally blocked my way out and invited me for a drink, I said yes mostly because I said yes to just about everything.
Before we finished our first glass of wine, we had figured out that we had met over two decades ago on New Year’s Eve at the Rhode Island premiere of the movie The Poseidon Adventure. Lorne had worked at camp with my high school boyfriend; he had grown up a mile from me; we had even overlapped at the same college for a couple of years. In other words, Lorne was everything I had run away from. Whereas many women would have seen danger in the other men in my life, Lorne’s stability and steadiness terrified me. The next morning, I went back to New York, fast. But it was already too late.
This love, instead of hurtling me into an exciting future, sent me backward. Before long I was navigating familiar roads in a secondhand Volvo. The divorce I didn’t think I needed was finalized. The place I wanted to leave was home again. Had I risked so much for so long only to land right back on the path I had so carefully avoided?
• • • • • • • •
Even after I angled a chair in one corner and rearranged the pillar candles into a vague geometric shape; even after I hung all of my religious folk art on the walls and walked through the apartment smudging each room with a smoky sage stick; even after I tried to explain all of this to Lorne and he tried to understand, still I worried that I had made a huge mistake by moving back to Rhode Island.