Moving on, our intrepid reporter broached the elephant in the room. Hollywood.
“So, now that you’ve moved from your glitzy life in la-la land to quiet Vermont, should we be looking out for an influx of Hollywood visitors?”
And I didn’t think twice; I didn’t think. I just answered with honesty and my usual utter lack of tact and charm.
“Oh, God, I hope not!”
This is when I choose to be natural on camera: my face squirrelly and filled with disgust, spitting out my dread at the thought of my old life descending on the quiet of Vermont.
I can’t take a decent still either. There’s a little write-up in a local magazine with a picture of me holding some pastries. I knew Ray was looking at the article when I heard him howling with laughter in the back of the store.
“I’ve never seen you smile quite like that.” He’s very tactful. Unlike his wife.
“I know. I was muttering under my breath the entire time.”
And if you know this and you take a look at that picture, you probably have a good shot at guessing what I was saying. As a matter of fact, I think I was up to a word that rhymes with “plucking” in my mantra “take the plucking picture already” when the flash went off.
In the past, with each successive mention in a local paper or a national magazine, we’d get a respectable bump in business. A few more people than usual asking to see me in person; a few more stickies of doom; a few more trips to the office supply store for Post-its. And then we’d settle back into our comfortable groove, having added a couple regulars to our family but nothing we couldn’t handle with good cheer, great pastry, and strong coffee.
But a visit from the Food Network, that’s what every small food business dreams about. And the experience of being on camera, of constantly smiling and simultaneously baking, it wasn’t half bad. The hosts were charming, even when the cameras weren’t rolling. The crew was lovely and respectful of our shop. And everyone brought a degree of enthusiasm to the endeavor that shocked me because I was so used to the “seen it, done it” attitude that travels with movie crews. These people were genuinely excited about food. And they were excited about food in Vermont. And about telling the world about food in Vermont. That made it easy to do something I’d never imagined doing—being in front of a camera. It’s easy to share something, even in front of millions of people, if you love what you do.
Getting in front of those millions of the food obsessed also gives you a huge spike in business. At such a perilous economic time, with food prices up 50 percent for most of our core ingredients, gas prices affecting everything else, and our entire economy in an official recession, it’s a miracle that anyone is making ends meet. This kind of exposure could be the difference between making it another year or closing down after Christmas.
It also translates into thousands of macaroon orders, keeping me in the shop long after we close. High school kids cram into the kitchen after class, helping me scoop and filling the hot bakery with spastic energy. The shop is filled to the rafters with customers who’ve come from all over the country and beyond, even at those hours when we used to have a restful lull. Our regulars are getting pushed to the side, waiting in line when they’ve never had to before. Ann’s popping into the back with a cocktail shaker, to take the edge off. I don’t sit down at three for coffee anymore.
I’m so inundated with work that I’m no longer capable of complex thoughts; I exist on a mental plane filled with white oven noise and the smell of ground almonds. And though our sales are up, way up, we have to hire more people to keep up with the demand. Which pretty much evens out any financial gains we could make.
I’m also getting emails from home bakers who’ve seen me on television, exclaiming their deep passion for the floured arts. They want to know how I did it, how did I open such a lovely shop without schooling or experience in such things. They want to take the plunge too, maybe get their chance of being on the Food Network!
I don’t answer these emails for fear of stomping on such high hopes.
Because the answer is quite simple: don’t do it! And don’t use me as a guide; I’m not a good influence. My story isn’t uplifting and inspirational. I had meant to go to school for this stuff. Really. But my baking took on a life of its own, and it just happened. If I could do it again, I’d get my ignorant self educated. Because someone at some point would have said to me, “You know, if you go out on your own and open a bakery, you’re not allowed to sleep.” At the very least I would have learned how to manage such a place. So my first instinct is to tell that home baker with the big dream that they should hold fast to the joy they receive in baking for pleasure. And if they must pursue a career in it, go to school. Or work in a hard-core bakery, where the hours are abysmal and the production is monumental. Don’t mortgage your life to bake unless you know what the hell you’re doing. And be careful what you wish for, because while being on TV can give you unprecedented business and exposure, it can also sap you of any will to live and increase your daily gray hair count astronomically. That lady you saw on TV, wearing make-up and a clean shirt, that person doesn’t exist. I just brought her out for a few minutes to appear on the little screen; ten minutes after the camera crew left, she transformed back into a baking pumpkin.
We’re asked, “Are you going to expand? Open more stores? Go national?” But the only relevant question is, “Are you going crazy? And if not, when?” Because this is painful; no one tells you how much it hurts when you succeed. You hear about the failures and how it sucks to lose your dream to low sales figures and bad management. But no one tells you about the travails of having your business double overnight or quadruple or more, because this can cause failure as well. If we don’t live up to the demand from this exposure, we can’t count on getting another break to prove ourselves a second time. So we’ve got to make it work right now, and that means I have to stay here all night if that’s what it takes to get these orders out.
But when this insanity isn’t bringing me to the brink of sobs, I’m as close to Buddha under the bodhi as I’ll ever be, just without the sitting still. Because I’m doing what I was meant to do, and every once in a while I’ll eat a stray macaroon. And they’re damn tasty. Buddha never had it so good. And I’ll tell the home bakers with big pastry dreams, that it is possible. It may kill you, strip you of sanity and finances, but it can also be rewarding. And sometimes—and those times may be few and far between—sometimes it is nirvana.
Passionfruit Healer
I TRIED THIS COCKTAIL for the first time in Buenos Aires. Ray and I went for Christmas for two whole weeks of vacation. A hemisphere away from mile-high snowdrifts and unintentional power slides on black ice. No waking at 3:30 a.m. and to bed at 8 p.m. We ate dinner at midnight. I rode some hyperactive horses with genuine gauchos. We’d have a cocktail to pass the time while we mulled the wine list. I exposed my ankles to the sun and ate grilled meat for breakfast. But what I took back with me as my fondest taste memory was this beautiful concoction.
When we’ve got two seconds to relax and have a cocktail, this little number brings back the ease of Buenos Aires. It’s tropical, mysterious, and a great healer.
MAKES TWO SERVINGS
A few fresh mint leaves
A drop or two of ginger extract
12 ounces white cranberry juice
8 ounces lemon vodka
2 tablespoons Triple Sec
12 ounces passionfruit juice
Muddle the mint leaves, ginger extract to taste, and a touch of the white cranberry juice in the bottom of a serving pitcher to release the oil in the mint leaves. Ginger extract is potent stuff, so start out timidly. Add the vodka, Triple Sec, passionfruit juice, and remaining cranberry juice. Stir and add ice. Serve in large glasses and behold a miraculous recovery.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Running Regrets
6 p.m.
HEN I’M DONE BAKING and we’re closed, I run. In the spring, through summer, and into fall, I take a
right outside of our shop and hightail it down Route 12. I follow the river past the nature center, toward the town of Worcester. In the winter, I’m on the treadmill at home. This is my time to think, to remember what it is I’ve surely forgotten during a long, flour-coated day and to talk to my mom. Along with baking, running is one of the great legacies she left me.
In 1995, I was standing in the hallway outside of the bathroom, my forehead resting against the doorjamb, when my mom called to tell me she had colon cancer; I started softly knocking my head against the wood to stop from crying. She had been hedging her health bets all her life: restricting her diet, exercising, abstaining from alcohol, driving cautiously. At first they thought it was just a minor abnormality, a polyp. Maybe even hemorrhoids. I laughed because anything vaguely defective in my mother’s health was impossible. She was a superhero! She ate whole grains with glee and slurped wheatgrass like fine wine. And she was a marathon runner.
Mom had taken up running after I made one of those gracious remarks that are the staple of preteen mother-daughter conversation.
“Why do your arms jiggle like that?”
She was making a left-hand turn into a gas station. The hand-over-hand motion highlighted a barely discernible looseness in her triceps. As she was gassing the car, just the midsection of her body visible from the passenger seat, I saw her pinch herself up and down her arm, assessing the damage of time, smarting from my cruel comment.
She started by running a few quarter-mile laps around the block. Despite my valuation of her physique, she looked great. She was thin and leggy. Back then she had a belt that really said it all: “Foxy Lady!” My sister’s high school suitors timed their visits to coincide with Mom’s launch from the backyard. “You sure you and Sandy aren’t sisters, Mrs. Bullock?” The neighborhood gents were especially pleased by her new exercise regimen and found time to manicure their lawns and prune hedges, all the while yelling their encouragement.
“Looking good, Helga! Keep it up!”
I was less supportive and found her public sweating mortifying. She wore tiny, shiny running shorts. Not to mention she’d wear lipstick, and her coif moved with a luxuriant Prell bounce.
She ran the same streets alone, over and over.
“Why don’t you run somewhere else for a change? It’s embarrassing.”
When my mother was diagnosed, my first thought was that she’d have to stop running. That would be a loss to both her and our neighborhood. But she turned her back on running and her past pursuits at securing a long life. She grasped on to the tragedy in the pronouncement and carried it with her. Her fight, it seems, had been in the prevention, the supplements and the exercise regimens. The leafy greens and organic reds. It was all for naught and she’d lost. There’s always a chance that someone will pull through, go triumphantly into remission, but you can’t depend on it. And the stories you hear—the ones where the feisty lady clenches her fists and cries, “I’m not going to let it get me! I’m going to fight this and win!”—that wasn’t my mom.
She did, however, have a score to settle and wanted company doing it. She was ready to open her mind and her digestive tract, because she didn’t know how long she’d have use of either. So after she was diagnosed she ate everything: dairy, meat, a couple of fillet-o-fishes. Boy, was she pissed for denying herself for so many years. It was an epic food bender.
Coffee and cake found itself on the daily docket. There were restaurants that needed to be visited. She kept reviews and made a detailed list for my father. Get a reservation; we don’t have a lot of time. My mother was known for her palate; nothing of her own making ever passed her lips that had an artificial ingredient, so she recognized the chemical components to the atom when she ate out. Her greatest praise of a restaurant meal was that it tasted “clean.” When we set out to sample wedding cakes for my upcoming nuptials because we’d be too busy to make our own, she dissected the alleged buttercream we were proffered and announced in no uncertain terms, “This isn’t buttercream!” and then rattled off what she surmised it was. And she was dead on.
The Inn at Little Washington was highest on her list of culinary destinations. Veal, goose fat, oxtail consommé, she was up for the challenge. She was even willing to eat their desserts, although they’d pale in comparison to her own handiwork.
My mother and father spent a long weekend at the inn and took every meal there. She recalled minor culinary details with awe, from breakfast to dinner. She ate each morsel and ventured with a threatening fork into Dad’s plate more than once. She thought the whole experience, to quote my grandmother’s greatest compliment, “vunderfohl.” She went so far as to buy the cookbook sold by the inn. That was high praise indeed, from my mother.
We went out to dinner on New Year’s Eve, to the venerable Hay-Adams Hotel in the heart of D.C. New Year’s had been a holiday kept well within my mother’s controlling hands—the meal, the entertainment, and the alcohol all of her choosing. She’d cook and bake for days, arrange an elaborate buffet in the dining room. She would orchestrate the downstairs for the feuerzangenbowle, the traditional German flaming punch, making sure that the table and the immediate environs weren’t flammable. And the entertainment was easily arranged. The guests were all opera singers or musicians. Everyone would sidle up to the piano, sheet music in hand, drunkenly dueling each other with high Cs and maddening breath control. Sandy and I would cringe in the corner waiting for an intermission from the noise or for dessert to be served, whichever came first. But my mother always saved the best for last. The lights would dim, someone would push “play” on the audio, and she’d appear at the top of the steps wearing sheer gauze harem pants, a scarf festooned with tinkling coins tied at the waist, and a tiny bustier embroidered with more of the same racket-making coins. She’d descend slowly, castanets clacking away in her hands, and when she hit the bottom of the stairs, Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils would begin. To my utter horror.
My mother hadn’t put on that particular belly dancing show in some time, not since her muscled abdomen had been left with foot-long scars from surgery and certainly not since she consented, under much protestation, to getting a colostomy bag. So this year we sat at the beautiful table in the restored dining room of the Hay-Adams, conservatively dressed, drinking Champagne, and enjoying, not a great meal, but a lovely meal nonetheless. She might, at one point in her cancer-free life, have proclaimed the meal unclean in parts, but she wasn’t wasting time seeking out the unpleasant anymore and stuck to the tastes that made her happy.
We spent hours together rifling through recipes, some scribbled on loose paper in old German script and others ripped from the food section of the Washington Post. She considered their relative merits and put aside those that she felt I had to have. Butterzeug, the butter cookies she made every year at Christmas, always heart shaped. Sandy and I would sneak onto the side porch where she kept them stored in tins in the cool air and eat as many as we could before we got frostbitten. Zwetschgendatschi, the beloved plum tart of childhood. New York cheesecake, the closest to Lindy’s she could reverse engineer. Her famous Pecan Chocolate Torte, also known as the Orgasm Cake. She handed them to me resolutely. I have them, still sitting in a box, unopened. There are some recipes that I memorized, never needing to consult her handwritten notes. But for those that I haven’t, whenever I go to the box to find them, I get sucked into her handwriting and the memory of her. The loops and slashes of the letters still bearing the shape of her German grade school lessons are living pieces of her. Like the outgoing message we can’t erase but dare not play. Or the cassettes of her singing.
There are some recipes I can’t make because I’d rather have her make them.
Our last task was to visit Germany before she was too sick to make the trip. We visited Nürnberg, her hometown, and the most famous German Christmas market, the Christkindlsmarkt. We ate small lard-packed and darkly browned bratwurst sausages nestled side by side on a hard white roll. We smothered them with spicy mustard and wa
lked among the stalls, taking in the handcrafts and merriment, stopping for glühwein, a warm, sweet mulled wine, to warm up between bites, and then finishing up with a lebkuchen, the Nürnberger spice cake.
We visited our family in Bergen nestled in the Bavarian Alps and walked slowly up the neighborhood peak, Hochfelln. At the top, we settled into worn wooden benches and had coffee and cake, Kaiserschmarrn and topfenstrudel, Alpine sugar bombs both. In Germany, cafés sit atop every treacherous mountain, making the most grueling ascent worth every blister and curse because you sit with the most breathtaking view at three thousand feet in a cozy cottage with warm food and a cold beer. So often, I’ll make a painful physical journey to a beautiful place in America and lament the absence of these things that I find sacred.
Decades after her first marathon and five years after her diagnosis, when my mother lay dying of cancer, I took care of her. We’d spend time in the early morning, visiting while she made her way through a tower of pills. When she fell into a narcotic doze, I’d watch her with profound regret.
So I started running her route while she slept. I didn’t have her stunning road presence, just a ponytail and sloppy shorts, but I wanted to honor her by running in circles and to honor her life, and as I bounced along the pavement of my childhood I kept reminding myself to live without regret and with love.
Now that she’s gone, I still run and think of her. And every year at Thanksgiving and Christmastime, when my mother broke out her culinary genius and let go of all things healthy, Sandy and I will start trading calls if we aren’t spending the holidays together. The conversation is always the same.”Okay, so I have the fingerling potatoes, the mayo, and the shallots. I know I also need oil. What am I forgetting?” There are recipes that were never written down: for the potato salad we had on Christmas Eve along with marinated white asparagus and the Nürnberger bratwurst we smuggled in from Germany in little lard-packed cans in the summer; or the Thanksgiving gravy my mother and my aunt would conjure from the drippings of the bird; or the exact range of spices she used to dress the bird to make it so flavorful and crisp. We’ll never remember them without each other’s help. So we talk to each other at least five times in the day to consult about ingredients and to report back the results. While we always do a good job, we also know that it will never taste as good as Mom’s. And we agree that we’d never want it to be any other way. She gave us so much in the way of love and memories. And when she broke out the good stuff, eschewing the lean and the green fiber-packed roughage to bring out the fatty food of celebration, her love shone as bright as the star of Bethlehem.
Confections of a Closet Master Baker Page 15