Midnight Dinners

March 14, 2012 · 24 comments

It was the very late nights — years ago — that I remember as being the most delicious; they almost always involved carbs, salt, grease, spice, egg, cheese, and a violent snowstorm of coarse black pepper ground in an ancient, light wood Peugot mill that I’d bought with my Dean & Deluca discount eight years earlier.

I lived alone with my cats (what else) in a small studio apartment on East 57th Street next door to one of the best high-end French Vietnamese restaurants in the city. I was single, and an editor, and a writer, and I went out four nights a week, not including weekends. My refrigerator, packed with a combination of high food (foie gras mousse, black caviar) and low trash (sliced white bread that my mother would leave for me during her unannounced visits while I was at work), always contained some sort of pungent sheep’s milk cheese — usually Roncal or Pecorino Stagionato — and eggs and a chunk of slab bacon. Boxes of DeCecco bucatini stood in the cabinet, lined up like dominoes. I’d come home famished in the wee hours — at three in the morning —after a night at Au Bar, place a too-small aluminum soup pot of water on my 24-inch apartment stove before I even took my coat off, and set about cooking myself a late supper.

It was a long time ago, in the ’90s; my stamina was better. Today, if I eat after ten pm, I have dreams about wind-up, cymbal-playing monkeys, and the IRS, and Heinrich Himmler showing up at my house. The next day, my ankles leach out over the sides of my shoes like small, overstuffed duffel bags. My fingers plump up like cervelas, and my narrow gold wedding ring cuts off the blood flow to my left hand.

Still, the notion of coming home starving after a night out and craving something elemental is unquestionably romantic; I’m clearly not the only one who feels this way — much has been written about this deeply personal of non-meal meals. It’s been fetishized the way good bread and a hunk of cheese has, and it usually involves things like Alia e Olio, or hay and straw, or Cacio e Pepe, or simple fried egg sandwiches. Way back when, if there was nothing of substance in my refrigerator, I’d sometimes make just that — I’d fry a single egg in a cast iron pan, plunk it between two pieces of the aforementioned disgusting white bread along with a slice of whatever cheese I had laying around (it acts like glue), and press it down with another cast iron pan until the bread turned golden and tight, and smooth as skating ice fresh from the Zamboni.

Part of why I don’t eat late like that anymore is the fact that I’m asleep long before the midnight dining hour rolls around; Susan and I, together for more than a decade, spend most Saturday evenings cooking elaborate meals for ourselves. Nine o’clock finds us listening to the radio on the living room love seat, surrounded by our snoring dogs. Ten o’clock, and we’re usually dozing off. By eleven, the dogs have been walked one last time, and the lights are out. It’s a sleepy, calm sort of life, and I love it, and waited a long time to find it. But when my schedule changes — when I have to travel for work — and I wind up coming home very late, anything can happen.

I was in Santa Barbara last week, to both attend and speak at the Edible Institute, an annual meeting involving scores of regional magazine publishers who produce the outstanding Edible Communities publications. Our meetings and conversations were, as they always are, inspiring and invigorating — it’s thrilling to be in the presence of so many people who have devoted their lives and careers to issues of local food, food justice, and sustainability. After three nights away from home, I flew back to the east coast, and at ten o’clock on Saturday night, Susan picked me up at JFK. I had been in the air for hours, wedged into a tiny blue vinyl seat; by the time I touched down, I was exhausted, and so I dozed on and off for the entire car ride home, which took nearly an hour and a half. When we walked through the front door — after the dogs calmed down, after the cats stopped having intimate relations with my luggage — I realized that I was hungry. Not hungry, but crazy hungry. Mad hungry, as Lucinda Scala Quinn would say. Famished.

Famished like it was 1996 all over again.

It was nearly one in the morning.

I’ll make you something, Susan said, her eyes at half-mast. I’d already taken down our six quart soup pot from the rack — stock pots just seem too big for late night cookery — and filled it. I salted the water heavily, and minutes later, it was at a full, violent boil.

You sit, I said to Susan, pulling over the little bentwood modern chair where she usually perches while I cook dinner on normal nights.

I can’t believe you’re doing this, she yawned. Are you really that hungry? 

After six hours hurtling through the air in a metal tube, I was standing in the kitchen and browning cubed slab bacon in a big cast iron skillet until clouds of meaty smoke wafted up into the oven hood. The bucatini I unearthed from the bowels of the pantry was too long to fit into the soup pot, so I broke the rules and snapped it in half; while it boiled, I ladled out a cup or so of the pasta cooking water, and beat two eggs with a fork in a small white batter bowl.

I think I might be able to eat, Susan said, hovering over my shoulder while I lifted the pasta into the skillet, poured in the eggs and the bacon, and swirled it over and over to coat every strand with creamy goodness; I showered all of it with a strong grating of Parmigiana Reggiano, a handful of freshly cracked black pepper, and a rough chop of fresh parsley.

It was one thirty in the morning when we finally sat down at the dining room table, twirling thick coils of salty, smokey pasta around our forks; we sipped small glasses of red wine while the dogs slept at our feet.

The midnight dinners of necessity I ate alone, standing up, in my tiny Manhattan kitchen, were very good.  But my late night meal with Susan, after a long ride home from the airport and three days and nights apart, was far more satisfying.

She looked up at me while she slurped her noodles.

This might be the very best thing ever, she said, sleepily. Ever.

We put our plates in the sink, went to bed, and slept until noon the next day.

Midnight Bucatini with Bacon and Eggs

Someone once said that it is not only what you eat that makes a meal great, but where and with whom you eat it, and they might be right; circumstance does count for a lot. On the face of it, the combination of pasta, eggs, bacon, and black pepper is a known quantity; ask any Roman what they eat when they want to be comforted and odds are, a version of this dish will be mentioned. But in the right conditions — late at night, when you’re starving and desperately need that combination of salt and smoke, fat and peppery warmth — it ceases being ubiquitous, and instead is utterly, mouthwateringly glorious.

Serves 2, with leftovers (which you will turn into a frittata the next day)

6 ounces bucatini

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup cubed slab bacon

2 eggs, beaten

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmigiana Reggiano

2 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper

flat leaf parsley, chopped (as much or as little as you like; I use quite a lot)

Bring a large soup pot of salted water to a boil, and cook the bucatini according to the package instructions, stirring it frequently.

While the pasta is cooking, heat the oil in a large cast iron skillet until it just barely ripples, and add the bacon; cook until just golden brown, about six minutes or so, and use a slotted spoon to remove to a small bowl. Wipe out all but a tablespoon of fat from the pan, and keep the pan warm over a low very flame. Ladle out a cup of pasta water from the soup pot, and reserve.

Using heavy tongs, lift the pasta directly from the soup pot to the skillet, and toss with the browned bacon. Slowly pour in the beaten egg, and combine it well, adding a tablespoon or two of reserved pasta water (or more, if necessary). Shower with cheese and black pepper and toss again, judiciously adding more water if the pasta seems too dry (the consistency should be slightly creamy).  Sprinkle with parsley, and serve immediately, with more cheese, if desired.

 

 

 

 

 

The Kindest Cookbook

February 26, 2012 · 35 comments

I didn’t know Sam, although I met him, once, when I was a baby; he was married to my father’s beloved cousin Josephine. Josephine was a few years older than my dad; she was on the Altman side of the family that eventually became obscured by time and a confluence of strong personalities and ancient resentments. Eventually, Sam and Josephine became little more than memory and lore, lost to the petty grievances that compel families to inevitably, sadly, prefer one side over the other.

So I don’t really know why, a few years ago, I decided to dig up Sam’s email address on the internet, and write to him. It seemed a weird, impetuous thing to do — to write to this man in his early 90s — and when he responded immediately, in a heavy, purple, gigantic san serif font that reminded me of the cover of Harold and the Purple Crayon, it made me nervous, like I was opening up a Pandora’s Box that wasn’t mine to unseal.

CALL ME INSTEAD, Sam wrote in all caps, giving me his phone number. I HATE THIS MACHINE.

So I called.

“You’re Cy’s little girl–” he asked, cautiously, his voice quivering a little bit. “I remember you. You had blonde curls—I heard he died in an accident.”

“I am … he did–” I responded. Just saying so still shook me to my core, eight years after my father’s car crash. “And you’re Josephine’s husband–”

“I am,” he answered gruffly. “And your grandmother — she liked to play cards.”

“That’s right,” I laughed. “She was very good at it—”

“Except when she wasn’t,” he barked.

There was a quick edge of anger in his voice; it was old and taut, and glazed with enmity. I had heard stories forever; I knew what was true and what wasn’t, and even after more than seventy years, it was all right there, on the tip of his tongue, dying to get out.

“We never liked each other–” he went on. “It was mutual–”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. There was silence.

“So what do you do?” he coughed, changing the subject. I was relieved.

“I cook— and I write about food.”

“Where?”

“In books. And on the computer.”

I said on the computer like I was speaking in some sort of geriatric dialect that I thought Sam would understand, even though he had been deft enough to respond to my email in large, purple letters. How we underestimate the elderly.

“I have something for you, then—I think you should have it. I don’t want it to get thrown away.”

It made me uncomfortable; I had last seen this man when I was possibly not yet out of diapers.

“When I married Josephine in 1938, she couldn’t cook. A regular disaster area. So as a wedding gift, I bought her a cookbook. It was the only one she ever used, and she learned from it. She loved your father, so I want you to have it.”

“But Sam—doesn’t she still need it?” I waited for the inevitable.

“No sweetheart”– he softened — “she has no memory anymore. It’s gone. So you’ll take care of her book then, if I send it to you?”

“I will Sam,” I promised.

He asked me for my address, and just like that, we said goodbye.

A few days later, an ancient Jiffy bag — it had clearly been used and reused; I remembered my grandmother’s penchant for saving plastic shopping bags just in case until they overtook her hallway coat closet like Tribbles — sat in my mailbox. He had addressed it using a thick black magic marker; the word Altman was three times the size of my first name and street address, all of which were written in giant caps, just like his email.

My father’s cousin Josephine had used The Settlement Cookbook for decades; it got stained, splattered, stuffed with other recipes for things like noodle kugel and cheese blintzes torn out of the Miami Sun-Sentinel and the Jerusalem Post. A page pulled out of a tiny spiral notebook described a recipe called EGGPLANT:

The twenty-second edition and published in 1938, Josephine’s prized cookbook had lived through World War II and Korea, the birth of children and grandchildren, and Sam’s son-in-law’s decision to move his family to Tel Aviv. When the book fell apart, which it did at least twice judging from the two layers of tape holding its spine together, Josephine and Sam simply performed surgery on it, and patched it back up. I called Sam to tell him it arrived and he told me to take good care of it; it was the one and only cookbook that Josephine had ever used, and the only one she owned. There was no reason to have another.

I have a lot of cookbooks on my shelves; hundreds, perhaps. Some have come from tag sales, others from remarkable stores like Celia Sack‘s Omnivore Books in San Francisco, and Nach Waxman‘s Kitchen Arts and Letters in Manhattan. Some I bought when I was in cooking school, or with my discount when I worked at Dean & Deluca; some were sent to me by authors, and others came from the years I spent as an editor at Random House and Harper Collins. They clog up my office, my living room, my den; they sit on a special shelf in the kitchen, and in boxes in the basement. I have a stack of them on my nightstand and a few in both bathrooms. And still, whenever I talk to other food writers or editors, or I participate in a panel discussion somewhere, invariably the conversation turns to whether or not the digital world will kill cookbooks. Do we still need them. Do we still want them. Are we getting all of our recipes from the internet, or via 140 word snippets on Twitter.

Do they still matter. 

And I look at this battered, beloved, dribbled-upon cookbook sitting on my desk tonight, that fed a hungry husband — and eventually, children and grandchildren — for 69 years, until Josephine lost her memory, and the book went unused in her kitchen while Sam took care of her for as long as he could.

Cookbooks tell us who we are, what we’ve done, and how we’ve lived. We’d do well to remember that, to hang on to them like family bibles, and to pass them on to others who’ll cherish them.

Yes, I think.

They still matter. 

 

 

 

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