Poor Man's Feast

I decided that we should stay downtown on the night of the James Beard Awards this year; it was admittedly a bit of a splurge — hotels uptown and in midtown tend to be a little bit less expensive, and they would have been closer to the location of the Awards dinner, which was in the West 30s. But considering that the James Beard Awards happen exactly once a year, I rationalized a stay below Houston Street, at the Soho Grand.

Beard nominations can do strange things to one’s psyche: last year, I had the honor of going up against one of my personal heroes, Barry Estabrooke, and the lovely author of the blog Red Cook, Kian Lham Kho. The three of us couldn’t have possibly been more different, and to mark the occasion, I went a tiny bit batsh*t, and bought a very fancy suit; I then had my makeup done by a nice lady at Bendel’s who made me look like an entirely different person with a small Joan Crawford obsession.

“At least now you have eyebrows,” my mother said ruefully, watching while the nice makeup lady brushed chocolate brown gel powder above my light hazel eyes a few hours before the awards.

“And best of all,” the nice makeup lady added, “is that they’ll last for a while. Days, even.”

“Have we met?” my friend Kathleen Purvis of the Charlotte Observer asked, extending her hand, at the pre-award cocktail party.

“Yeah, Kathleen—” I responded, rolling my eyes. “It’s ME.”

Having to introduce yourself to someone who already knows you after getting your makeup done is never a good thing.

In any case, last year I lost to Barry and had a delightful evening with Susan and the Edible Communities folks, who won Publication of the Year. We went out to the Ace Hotel after the awards were over, and I have a dim memory of everything being very noisy, dark, and a bit gin-drenched. Susan and I crawled back to our tiny and sad midtown hotel room, and the next morning crawled into our car, which crawled up the West Side highway and home to Connecticut.

That day, I vowed to keep my future post-awards crawling to a minimum. And if I was ever to be nominated again, I decided, I didn’t so much need the fancy suit, nor did I want to look like a cross between Groucho Marx and Mildred Pierce. I just wanted to have a nice night, to hang out with a lot of people I love who I never get to see (why is it that so many of my culinary crushes live on the other coast? is this a sign?), and to be ensconced in the Zen-like atmosphere of the Soho Grand, where, if you require one, the front desk will bring you a personal goldfish for the duration of your stay. (I passed.)

Last week, on the day of the awards, I checked in, dropped my bags on the bed, and went straight to the window, which is what I always do in a new hotel room; I could just sort of make out the corner where Kenn’s Broome Street Bar still stands, and remembered the burgers I ate there at lunch when I worked at Dean & Deluca in the late 1980s. Anyone could have wandered in back then and did: Eric Fischl, Mary Boone, Jean-Michel Basquiat were all skulking around the neighborhood at the time, generally avoiding the high-priced New Soho restaurants that had edged out the stalwarts where artists sat in their paint-spattered white canvas sneakers, drinking beer, eating French fries, and generally trying not to smudge meat juice on their wire-rimmed glasses. If I really craned my neck, I could see part of the brick building further up West Broadway, now housing Eileen Fisher but forever embedded in my brain as Oh-Ho-So, the eclectic Chinese restaurant where I ate clay pot-cooked Plum Squab as a teenager with my mother and her boyfriend; when the server removed the lid, I gasped out loud at the heady, meaty sweetness of the tiny bird that had been braising for hours in its own juices until, with one delicate slice the length of its supple breast bone, it fell apart.

Staring out the window at my former haunts, I understood why I had to be in Soho that night: when I think of the fork in the road of my professional life — I had to choose between safety and passion, and a culinary retail job where a day might start with a visit from Edna Lewis and end with an hour long lesson on how to properly shave a black truffle into slowly burbling Carnaroli rice drizzled with meat juices propelled me headlong into the passion camp — I came to that fork in Soho, a very long time ago.

The Beard Awards were a swirl — Susan and I shared a taxi to the ceremony with Heidi Swanson, who was staying around the corner, and who won a Beard for her remarkable Super Natural Every Day; we stopped to talk with my dear friends Grace Young, Laurie Buckle, and Kim O’Donnel; toasted to good luck with the amazing team from Chronicle, who is — lucky me — publishing my book, Poor Man’s Feast, in early Spring 2013; clanked medals with Ted Allen; sat with Maria Guarneschelli and Rodale‘s Steve Perrine and his wife Jen; got bear-hugged by my pal Andrew Zimmern; went weak-kneed after being smooched by Marcus Samuelsson; and cried a little bit when Laurie Colwin‘s lovely and talented daughter, Rosa Jurjevics, stood up to accept the medal inducting her late-mother’s iconic Home Cooking and More Home Cooking into the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame.

“I used to read Home Cooking on the subway back to my apartment,” I told Rosa that night, “laughing my ass off all the way home from my job in Soho.” She smiled; I’m sure she hears that a lot.

When it was all over—when the awards crowd began to break up and file back out into the street—there was talk of going out to party, of having bourbon someplace uptown, of a long night of crawling ahead.

“Whatever you want to do—” Susan said, but I had already decided: I just wanted to go back downtown, and to be alone with her. There’s something about winning an award like this that, despite the throngs of well-wishers and kind, heartfelt congratulations, is very, very personal.

So we fought the Friday night crowds in the lobby of our hotel, changed into jeans, and went back out to look for a place to sit down and have a quiet glass or two of champagne to celebrate Poor Man’s Feast‘s win in the category of best individual blog, to raise a glass to all the readers who have stuck with me over the years, and to say a hearty cheers to my fellow nominees Gwen Pratesi and Aran Goyoaga, and the Beard Foundation. Susan and I walked and walked up West Broadway and over on Spring to Thompson, up Thompson and east across Prince.

“Here–” I pointed, stopping in front of Raoul’s.

The last time I’d been inside was 1988, the night of Dean & Deluca’s opening party at 560 Broadway. I had taken my mother and stepfather along as my guests; during the party, and standing in the back of the store in my apron (all employees had to work that night), I looked up to find my mother and Craig Claiborne, arm-in-arm, strolling over to the meat case.

“Come, my dear,” he said to her, his reading glasses perched at the end of his nose, “Let’s go look at the lamb chops.”

I watched them bend down, point, and stare — Craig, at the lamb, my mother, at the pork roast she thought was lamb. After the party was over, my mother, stepfather, and I, at my boss Jim Mellgren’s behest, walked a few blocks west to the small, then cigarette-smokey bistro, where we were led through the kitchen to a table in the enclosed garden room, and ate plates of the city’s best steak frites.

“How do you ever find these places?” my mother said, shaking her head.

“In here?” Susan asked last week, peering in beyond the velvet foyer drapes. It was late, and Raoul’s was dark and not overly crowded. There were two seats at the old, wooden bar. Paint It Black was blaring over the speakers.

Twenty-four years after I’d first eaten there, Susan and I sat down next to a older man in ancient white Smiths drinking a beer. We ordered two glasses of champagne, and I put my hand in my jacket pocket to feel for the Beard Award that I’d brought along with me at the last minute, just to make sure that it was real.

{ 21 comments }

She has never slept, for as long as I can remember.

First, there was the hair, which, when I was very small, was very tall; these were the days of teasing, and to keep her updo in place, she climbed into bed every night next to my father with three feet of toilet paper wrapped around her head, a six inch tail of Charmin hanging off the pillow, blowing in the air-conditioned breeze like a Coppertone banner dragged behind a beach plane. She lay there stiffly all night, immobile and exhausted, and sat up the next morning, her hair perfect.

Eventually, it was just plain pique that kept her awake — the constant working of herself into a lather over imaginary transgressions, while my father and I and the world around her, ever the transgressors, slept soundly. When the black and white numbers on her bedside clock flipped over to 6:30 a.m. and the alarm went off, she swung her legs off the side of the bed and stood up, already furious and seething.

And then she made eggs.

A lot of eggs.

At first, when things were still good and happy, they were soft boiled, and sat in the broad end of our porcelain egg cups, their tips sliced away so that my father and I — perched side by side at the breakfast counter half an hour before he dropped me off at the school bus stop on his way to the subway — could dunk untoasted fingers of Pepperidge Farm Diet White into the runny yolk. As my parents’ marriage wore on and she grew angrier, the eggs were medium boiled, their firm yolks like thick golden velvet, with spots of remaining tenderness just barely discernible.

When I turned fourteen, my mother began hard boiling our eggs; she’d put them in a small pot filled with a shallow inch or two of water, set them on the stove, crank up the flame, and walk away. Eventually, they’d explode, their snow white glair erupting like Vesuvius through the fissures of her discontent. I’d refuse to eat them at that point, and when she came back into the kitchen, she’d grab the black plastic handle of the pot and dump its contents — the water had long since evaporated — directly into the trash.

My parents divorced the following year.

My mother still doesn’t sleep, and she still cooks eggs every single morning, even with cholesterol that hovers near the 400s if she’s forgotten her to take her Lipitor. She’s been through a passel of saucepans — the brown and white Dansk pan that followed her into the city after her divorce, and that she burned until its white enameled interior melted away into a noxious cloud; two RevereWare pans that we brought to her apartment from our basement stash— they’d belonged to Susan’s mother who had them for fifty years. My mother burned them until their insides turned black as coal. Now she uses a tiny butter warmer, big enough to hold exactly one jumbo egg.

Eggs are my mother’s mood barometer: when she’s happy, she’ll deftly separate yolk from albumen, throw out the former, dump the whites into the one tiny stick-proof pan she owns, and while they bubble and spread, she’ll lay a piece of Diet White bread right down in the middle of it, and top it off with a dollop of honey. This, she says, is her version of French toast, and she loves it. If Susan and I are staying there and she’s feeling glad, she’ll insist on scrambling some whites for us because, she says, they’re low fat and good diet food, and together we’ll sit at her dining room table, having breakfast, while the traffic rumbles down West End Avenue twenty-one stories below. Not overcooked and not runny, the eggs bear no evidence of seasoning; it’s just them and us, a piece of bread, and my mother’s favorite morning cup of hot water. If we’re staying there and she’s furious, she’ll boil the eggs until a sulfuric haze wafts out into the living room; we’ll leave while the pan is still rattling over the flame.

“I had to throw them OUT,” she’ll tell me later.

The correlation between cooking and scorn is a fraught, famous one; food created by angry people seems, somehow, to be bitter, and so attuned to their off flavors and textures am I because of my mother’s eggs that once, when a conversation with a well-known cookbook author took a sudden and surprising turn south, I had to get rid of her book, because every one of the dishes I cooked from it after our argument tasted of her rage; no matter what I did, none of the recipes worked anymore. Food cooked in anger becomes collateral damage; meat is carbonized, pasta becomes starchy mush, vegetables go limp and sad, and it’s not like you can — or even want to — revive them, to coddle or comfort them, or to save them for another meal. You simply can’t do it. If the optimum way to cook and live and run a kitchen is, as Tamar Adler says, with economy and grace — use everything, every shard and peeling and drop of fat with care, kindness, and thoughtfulness — scornful cooking results in the opposite: profligate waste and clumsy distraction.

It was six in the morning last Sunday; I lay in bed, listening to the ticking of the ignition on my Viking’s pilot light. There was the sound of running water, the clank of a pan on a burner. When my mother came to visit us last weekend and awoke in the throes of pre-dawn Bad Mood, she rifled through our refrigerator, pulled out four eggs, set them in shallow water, turned the burner on high, and cooked them until they burst with fury.

” I couldn’t sleep,” she barked from the guest bed where she’d laid back down after preparing the breakfast she decided I needed to eat, “so I made you eggs. THIS is what you should be eating for breakfast—not the heel of a baguette and a piece of cheese.”

She had been watching me that closely the previous morning; to my mother, a piece of bread — no matter how small — spells o-b-e-s-i-t-y. She was in a rage.

“But I don’t have any eggs,” I answered, suddenly remembering the half-crate of six local duck eggs that were hovering in the back of the fridge, waiting for a recipe test.

“They’re in the SINK—” she shouted from the guest room.

I walked into the kitchen and there they were, in a now-dry All-Clad saucepan, the shells cracked and broken, their whites extruding like Elizabethan collars. Susan broke one into a cup to see if the yolk was hard-cooked, and somehow salvageable; it was raw and cold. The eggs had been sitting out at room temperature for over two hours.

My mother marched into the kitchen behind me and watched Susan put on the tea kettle; I stepped on the pedal of the trashcan and tossed each duck egg out, one by one, like small grenades.

Fried Duck Egg with Toast and Truffle Salt

It doesn’t matter if it shoots forth from a hen, a quail, a goose, an emu, an ostrich, or a duck; an egg is a tender and potent harbinger of optimism. When Willem Dafoe carries a precious, stolen one to Juliette Binoche, ensconced in Villa San Girolamo at the end of World War II in The English Patient, it signifies hope and humanity. Having lost his thumbs to torture, Dafoe drops it, and we know the war isn’t yet over. Treating an egg badly — wasting it, misusing it, using some of it but not all of it — feels, at its very core, malicious, inhuman, wrong. Sad. Treat it well — poach it, fry it, boil it — with focus and attention, and it means hope.

Duck eggs, to me, are special; now that I’ve had the experience of singing to the chickens who live next door, their eggs are special too. Duck eggs are just, well, eggier; I like to serve mine on toast that’s been lightly coated with tapenade, and then carefully sprinkled with good truffle salt.

Serves 1

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 duck egg

1 tablespoon prepared tapenade

2 toast fingers, kept warm

pinch of truffle salt

freshly ground black pepper

Heat the olive oil in a medium frying pan over medium high heat until it begins to ripple; break the egg into the pan, cover, and cook until the edges are golden and the yolk has just set, about 4 minutes.

While the egg is cooking, spread the tapenade on the toast points. Serve the egg on top of the toast, and sprinkle with the truffle salt, and a light grinding of freshly ground black pepper.

{ 42 comments }