by Dawn Drzal
As Molly O’Neill observed in a wonderful essay, the cook’s dessert—one that accommodates those resistant to following a recipe—is tarte Tatin, an upside-down tart made by caramelizing fruit in a skillet on top of the stove, covering it with pastry, and baking the whole thing in the oven. When finished, it is flipped over onto a serving plate. Any fruit that will caramelize will do, but the original apple is best. I first fell in love with tarte Tatin when working on Simca’s Cuisine by Simone Beck, and since that time, whenever I am called upon to produce a dessert, it is what I make.
Oddly enough, I exhibited a predilection for upside-down baking from the beginning. The very first dessert I ever attempted back when I was a teenager (aside from chocolate chip cookies) was a pineapple upside-down cake, which employs the same principle of caramelized fruit on the bottom and batter on top. I chose it almost at random from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, and although it turned out beautifully, I don’t remember baking anything again for almost a decade. My grandmother, who was my formative influence in the kitchen, had stopped baking by the time I started following her around. The only things she made in that department were pizzelles, thin Italian cookies that required an appliance resembling an electric waffle iron, and her justly famous peach cobbler. Cobbler, too, come to think of it, involves caramelized fruit dotted with batter. So perhaps I was programmed early to be wrong side up when it came to baking. Or, more likely, the only way I can circumvent my baking anxiety is to go about it backward: starting it on the stove with the crust on the top, where I can keep an eye on it.
My father-in-law was the most disciplined man I have ever known. Like many children of the Depression, he benefited from the GI Bill and became, by dint of education and hard work, a successful professional. (By the time I met him, he was a name partner in a midsized Manhattan law firm.) He, however, took the familiar story a step further. Born Jewish in straitened circumstances, this boy from Newton physically transformed himself into a Boston Brahmin. By the time I met him in his mid-sixties, he was upright and sinewy, with blue eyes and a shock of flossy white hair reminiscent of Robert Frost. Carrying an ancient briefcase and sporting his perpetual Turnbull & Asser bow tie and silly Protestant hat, he could have stepped from the pages of J. P. Marquand’s The Late George Apley. In looking at his college graduation photo, it was almost impossible to detect any resemblance to the current man.
My husband and I had been married for about ten years when my father-in-law was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Perhaps it should not have come as such a surprise when he got sick—he was nearly eighty years old—but he had so single-mindedly outfoxed the heart disease that had killed his own father that it never occurred to anyone that he would succumb to another ailment. Because of his exemplary habits, it had been a running joke among his friends since law school that he would outlive all of them. He had fiercely believed that good health, like success in all other areas of life, was simply a matter of will power and intelligence. As a trust and estates lawyer, it was his métier to outsmart the two things that everyone else avoids thinking about: death and taxes. His will was a masterpiece of complicated legal instruments, but to ensure that his heirs would never need to resort to it, he exercised like a demon for an hour a day seven days a week, kept his weight at the unnaturally low level recommended by a longevity study based on rhesus monkeys, avoided all known carcinogens—and got leukemia anyway. Now he felt betrayed. Discovering that that there was only so much uncertainty he could remove from the equation was tantamount to discovering that there is no equation at all.
My father-in-law and I had not liked each other very much during the early years. I thought he was pompous and controlling; he thought I was arrogant and unrealistic. The incompatibility of our temperaments led to mutual distrust, which gradually gave way to wariness and then to neutrality. I was surprised, then, to discover how distraught I was when he got sick. He was told he had a year, perhaps a bit longer. For the first time, I looked for opportunities to be with him. As he got sicker, I often spelled my mother-in-law at the hospital because she would not leave his bedside unless someone was there to take her place. Mostly, I just kept him company, sitting with a book in my lap as he read and dozed. It was a relief that he wasn’t one for confidences.
After two rounds of chemotherapy and an unsuccessful bone marrow transplant, they sent him home. Always thin, he was now painfully so, and my mother-in-law became frantic because he had no appetite. She scoured the city for delicacies that might tempt him, but after a bite or two, he would look at her apologetically and push his plate away. One day I had an inspiration that something homemade might do the trick, so I phoned my mother-in-law and offered to make him anything in the world he wanted to eat. She was dubious, but said she’d ask him and call me back. The phone rang before I had a chance to put it down. “Tarte Tatin,” she said.
I could not remember ever having made them a tarte Tatin, which was surprising given that my father-in-law was not only a fanatical apple-lover but also an inveterate Francophile. He and my mother-in-law were part of the great postwar influx of American tourists to France, but unlike most tourists, they were not people who did things halfway. When they began visiting in the fifties, you had to write a letter months in advance to secure a reservation to a Michelin three-star restaurant, and by the time I met them, they had eaten in every storied establishment from Paris to Lyon. In the 1970s, my father-in-law bought a wine vineyard in Côte Rôtie as much for an excuse to visit France twice a year as for the love of wine, hiring a tutor to teach him French while he did his morning exercises. Tarte Tatin, for him, represented a last taste both of the apples of his youth and of France itself.
On one of our early trips to Paris together, my husband had taken me to his parents’ favorite cookware store, E. Dehillerin. One of my purchases was a 12 ½-inch copper tarte Tatin pan. I had never used it till that day, when I discovered why it had been on sale: it was a pan of Pantagruelian proportions. After using the required number of Granny Smiths called for in the recipe, the pan was still almost half empty. I filled it with some “eating” apples I had in the refrigerator. This, I discovered, was a mistake. Juicy apples are wonderful, but not for tarte Tatin. I tried pouring out the juice, then spooning it out, finally resorting to a turkey baster, but still the apples wouldn’t caramelize. After nearly an hour, they did, but when I put the pastry on top, a gap of more than an inch remained around the circumference. It looked ridiculous, like a tiny hat on a huge head. I poked the apples under it and put it in the oven, hoping for the best. When it had finished baking and I flipped it over, juice and apples slopped over the edges of the extra-large plate. I suctioned the juice out with the turkey baster, forced the apples under the crust, and wiped the plate with a towel. It still dripped a bit, but tarte Tatin has miraculous self-healing properties: it looked good. I dropped it off at the door. Later that night, my mother-in-law phoned. He’d actually eaten an entire piece. It was more than he’d eaten in a week. To this day, I have never been as pleased with anything I’ve made as I was with that imperfect effort.
Given the great success of the flawed tarte Tatin, I was now inflamed with the desire to make a second one. I was determined that my father-in-law’s final taste of tarte Tatin should be the Platonic ideal. This time I used my grandmother’s cast iron skillet, as usual, and enlisted the help of one of my few baker friends, who was known for her buttery, flaky piecrust. The apples caramelized perfectly; she unfurled the crust off the rolling pin and crimped it expertly. When we flipped it, it glistened like topaz, the apples overlapping as perfectly as fish scales. I delivered it, but no call came. After two days, I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. I phoned my mother-in-law and asked how he liked it. Although she was quick to exclaim how delicious it was, it became clear from what she left unsaid that he hadn’t managed to taste it.
As I hung up, I realized that the scrupulous kindness of her tone had jarred loose a memory that had been nagging at the edge of my consciousness,
like a disturbing dream that keeps rising almost to the surface throughout the day. I was fifteen years old when my father wasted away in similar circumstances, except that he was not eighty but forty-five. I had asked my father in his final days what food might tempt him, and he, too, had asked for something sweet: honey cake from the Jewish bakery up the hill. I promised to bring it when I visited the next day. My stepmother had tried to warn me that he wouldn’t be able to eat it, but it didn’t matter in the end. When I arrived in the morning with the string-tied white box, the hospital bed in the living room was empty. The ambulance had taken him away for the last time. Redemption can come in strange and humble guises. In its topsy-turvy way, thirty years after my first upside-down cake, tarte Tatin helped to right an old wrong.
is for
Urab Sayur
The white-gloved bellman in the lobby of the Concorde Hotel hesitated before loading our luggage onto his gleaming cart, but it was hard to blame him. Jeremy and I had traveled to Kuala Lumpur straight from a longhouse in the Borneo rainforest, and we hadn’t realized how grubby our bags were until we saw them piled on the lustrous marble floor of the hotel lobby. Not that we looked much better: hygiene is challenging when one of your hosts showers alfresco with his rooster. Following the bellman’s reluctant back down the corridor, we paused outside the room I would be sharing with my husband and agreed to meet in the lobby restaurant in half an hour.
I sat on the edge of the bed and unfolded the note Nathan had left at the front desk. My stomach sank at the familiar sight of his blunt, back-slanted handwriting, which made him real in a way he hadn’t been for more than a week. He had missed me. He was in conference sessions all day but was looking forward to the official dinner that night, for which he had packed me some clothes, now laid out on the bedspread next to me. It’s funny how self-justification works. The guilt I had been feeling vanished when I saw what he had brought for me to wear—panty hose, pumps, and a long-sleeved paisley dress he’d given me years before in one of his many bids to make me look like his mother. The neckline was too high and the torso too long, and I’d never been able to force myself to wear it, yet here it was on a bed halfway around the world reminding me of why I wanted to leave him. I hated the dress. I hated his decade-long campaign to dress me—worse, to dress me like his mother. For that matter, I hated his mother, who had asked me over dinner before I left, “So, is this Jeremy gay?”
“No,” I replied, adding brazenly, “Why do you ask?”
“I just wondered,” she’d said, suddenly taking a great interest in her soup.
Showered and feeling more presentable at a white-clothed table in the atrium restaurant downstairs, Jeremy and I discovered we were ravenous. Our last good meal had been at the night market in Singapore a week earlier. We had shared a plateful of flowering crab, which is a fanciful name for a dish also known as mud crab with chili sauce. Since then, eating had been primarily a utilitarian attempt to keep body and soul together while not getting sick. Scanning the limited late-afternoon menu, we both decided on a French Dip, then sat back and luxuriously drained our glasses of ice water—water from a pitcher, with ice, that you could actually drink! A sandwich materialized a few minutes later like a mirage, so perfectly did it fulfill my fantasy—meltingly tender filet mignon, sliced and laid on a lightly toasted and buttered baguette scored with grill marks, ideal for soaking up the neighboring cup of fragrantly meaty beef stock some stagiaire had been slaving over since morning. A bottle of syrupy Guinness provided the perfect complement. Was that French Dip truly the best sandwich I had ever tasted, or was hunger simply the best sauce? In any case, Jeremy sat back when he was finished, cocked an interrogative eyebrow at me, and just as the thought was forming in my mind, signaled for the waitress and said, “We’ll have the same again.” It was one of the things I loved about him, the uncanny flash of sympathy that divined I wanted to eat my “last meal” twice.
After a strained reunion, my husband and I joined Jeremy downstairs in the hotel lounge for drinks. Squaring off our awkward little triangle was Grant Abbott, a fellow attendee at the human rights conference, whom I had just learned would be accompanying us on the next leg of our trip. Grant seemed nice enough, earnest and well-meaning like most of the people Nathan worked with. Far more interesting was the queue of gorgeous women in skintight emerald cheongsams streaming into a room at the rear. What we guessed was a beauty contest turned out to be the interview process for Malaysia Airlines flight attendants. Our cocktail waitress, nearly as beautiful, was similarly attired in more muted silk, her dress so form-fitting it forced her to bend at the knees rather than the waist while serving drinks. My husband didn’t seem to be interested in our stay with the Iban, a tribe who had given up headhunting so recently that some of the men bore tattoos boasting of decapitations they had performed, but Grant seemed eager to hear our traveler’s tales. Jeremy told him about being tested by the chief on the six-foot blowpipe using darts formerly tipped with poison latex and about the blue kingfisher that flashed over our multicolored longboat on the river. By then, I had had a stiff drink, so I chose to recount an amusing if slightly inappropriate story.
I had contracted a painful urinary tract infection that grew steadily worse as we headed out of Pontianak into the rainforest. By the time our guide told us that the bus was approaching the last stop for picking up any necessities like batteries or rain ponchos, I had to raise myself off the seat every time we hit a bump in the road. I leafed through my Bahasa Malaysia dictionary for a translation of my ailment, but my heart sank as we pulled into what looked like the stage set for an old Western—a packed dirt street, one block long and lined with stores on both sides. I couldn’t understand the signs, so I peered through the plate glass windows of each dim storefront until I spotted one whose shelves were lined with dusty apothecary jars. There were no lights on inside, but in the back two men were talking. I squinted up at the jars on the wall, hoping against hope that one of them contained powdered snakeskin or some local herb that could cure me. I shyly approached the counter at the rear and, in a desperate fit of courage, whispered “pundi pundi empati,” which my dictionary translated as “bladder sick,” but which I later learned means something closer to “gall bladder empathy.” The man stifled a spasm of laughter and inquired in nearly Etonian English, “Is that Bahasa Malaysia?” When I nodded, he asked gently, “What seems to be the trouble?” I leaned over and whispered in his ear, not wanting the other man to hear. “Oh,” he said, face brightening, “why didn’t you say so? Want some sulfa drugs?” And he reached for one of the apothecary jars overhead and grabbed a handful of orange and yellow capsules, which he dropped into a small paper bag. Advising me to drink plenty of fluids, he charged me the equivalent of a dollar and kindly wished me good luck.
The waitress had been pouring Grant’s beer when I got to “pundi pundi empati,” and the bottle clattered against the rim of his glass as liquid sloshed onto the table. For a moment, we thought something was wrong with her. She had been so impeccably ceremonious until then. But a glance at her face showed that it was contorted with suppressed laughter, quickly replaced by horror that she had spilled something for perhaps the first time in her life. Apologizing profusely, she hurried off to find something to wipe away the evidence.
Her laughter had been contagious—Grant was still wiping his eyes—but my husband sat stony-faced. Was it that he disapproved of my story? Or did he mind that others thought it was funny? In the past, he had often kicked me under the table in similar circumstances—not hard, just enough to get me to shut up and to let me know that I would hear about it later—but this one was too low to the ground. My giddiness vanished; like the dress and pantyhose I was wearing, which felt so constricting after a week of shorts and sandals, this moment was a reminder of what I was so desperate to escape. I heard the cage click shut again and didn’t say another word until it was time to go into the cocktail hour, where I ate hors d’oeuvres and felt Jeremy’s eyes on me as I glad-han
ded like a politician’s wife.
It was a relief the next morning to bust out of the Concorde Hotel after a fitful night and board the train to Port Klang with Jeremy. My husband was safely occupied in sessions until dinner, and by the time I boarded the high-speed ferry to Crab Island he was just a dull knot in my stomach. I can still feel the wind on my face as I sat in the prow of the boat, eyes closed, face tilted to the sun, letting the air sluice off the staleness of the previous twenty-four hours.
Crab Island—Pulau Ketam—is not really an island but a bizarre city on stilts, a series of interconnected boardwalks five feet wide that rise up out of a mangrove swamp in the middle of nowhere. Stepping onto the dock of the filthy fishing village was a shock after the shiny perfection of the city, but there was a paradoxical comfort in the dirt, only partly obscured by splashes of pink, blue, and yellow paint, the children bathing in tin washtubs, the stray dogs. They were a relief from the hard, unforgiving surfaces of the hotel, which I associated with the sense of restriction I felt there. On the other hand, lunching on the island’s eponymous shellfish, which presumably emerged from the surrounding malodorous muck, would be going too far. We opted instead for the safety of a roti canai eaten with a plastic fork and washed down with soda straight from a glass bottle. A few hours of wandering on dead-end walkways induced in both of us a growing claustrophobia. There was something existentially horrifying about the place: an artificial structure built in the middle of nowhere, where there was no ground beneath your feet and literally nowhere to go. It felt like one of the settlements in The Martian Chronicles.
Nevertheless, I, at least, dreaded returning to the hotel. Kuala Lumpur, at least the “KL” of the international hotels, might as well have been New York—complete with husband. Nathan was in the room when I got back, giddy with freedom now that the conference was over. He had arranged for us to meet Grant for dinner at the American Graffiti Diner, where we ate burgers and fries surrounded by Malaysian businessmen excitedly calling each other on prototypes of Japanese cellphones, like boys with new walkie-talkies on Christmas morning. When we left to go bowling in the basement of a neighboring hotel, they were still at it, causing me to wonder why human rights workers, of all people, felt the need to relive our country’s glory days in an Asian capital whose technology was apparently outstripping our own.