Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen Read online

  In her state, she could never cook my meals for me again. She didn't even want to. Her battered mind, for all her recent stability, no longer allowed her to help much in sorting out the problems that her grown children faced, and she had known that, had tried to tell me that. I had to let go of that dream. Or so it seemed to me now. Of course, I had no idea if she had really intended her “close the book” advice as a message beyond the kitchen. But that's what I decided she must have meant. I had to learn to cook for myself, to look after myself, and to look after others. So she told me to learn to cook properly, so that I would not be reliant on the words and instructions of others, so that I could be in charge of feeding myself and other people on my own terms. Only when I could close my mother's cookbooks, and close the book on my need for her, relying on what I had learned and on my own instincts and my own creativity and my own willingness to take risks—only then could I move on with my life.

  As I ran home in the gloaming, I decided that giving my mother's name to a daughter, if we ever had one, was actually a dumb idea.

  The change had been happening for a while, without my noticing it much. In these months of cooking from my mother's cookbooks, there had been some gradual changes. Less and less did I find myself drawn to the elaborate and the slow. I never got round to making anything from her Le Cordon Bleu file. I now wanted to cook simple and relatively quick dishes. Okay, so perhaps that's because it's a lot easier to remember how to grill a piece of fish than to encase beef in choux pastry and then cook it at the right temperature for the right amount of time. But there was something more elemental, something more natural about my cooking. Cooking simple food made me understand and appreciate the ingredients more. I calmed down in the kitchen because there was less to worry about, and Pernilla came to enjoy being in the kitchen with me rather than hating it—and the drill sergeant I used to become. I had toppled the regime of the shopping list, grabbing from the farmers' market or store whatever looked good and then working out later what to do with it. It had all changed.

  Here's an example. On a Friday in early January, I e-mailed my friend John, father of two small children, to see if there was any chance he and his wife, Kate, could come for dinner that night. I wasn't expecting them to say yes. As it turned out, however, they could. His parents were staying with them, so they had babysitters. I was delighted, but I had a lot of work to do that afternoon.

  When John and Kate arrived just before seven, I was still at the supermarket. Sometime after eight, I served dinner. There was a platter of jumbo shrimp briefly sautéed in olive oil, garlic, fresh red chili pepper, white wine, a little fino sherry because I ran out of white wine, and flat-leaf parsley. A plate of serrano and chorizo. Red peppers sautéed with garlic until the peppers were droopy and melty and sweet. Beetroot boiled, peeled, chilled, and sliced into a salad with vinaigrette and whatever was at hand—green onions, coriander seeds. Pernilla made perfect, garlicky hummus and, remembering a thousand lunches in the West Bank and Gaza, I toasted some pine nuts, diced some lamb, and fried the tiny morsels. I tipped out the pine nuts and lamb onto the hummus, scattered flat-leaf parsley on top, and drizzled it all with olive oil that a friend who lives in Israel had brought from the Golan Heights. There was pita bread, close to what I would have had in the refugee camps of Nablus, warmed and delicious. And a salad of grated carrot, saturated in vinaigrette. And olives. And perhaps more. We drank fino and red wine and I found that I could cook without thinking much, and I could chat and laugh as I cooked, and I didn't find people in the kitchen an impossible stress, and the four of us ate and laughed with an ease that had never appeared when I had deliberated through the shopping and the chopping and the cooking, hoping to impress and shine.

  With that sense of freedom came something else, something just as useful if not exactly what I'd been hoping for. Cooking had not brought my mother back. It had been an amorphous idea in the first place, one that I talked myself into believing. I had tried to bluff my way past my own dogged atheism, my own immovable sense that when someone dies they really, truly are just gone. I had convinced myself that through sheer willpower, through action, I could make something right that felt so wrong. I had hoped that I would find myself talking to her as I cooked, swimming in happy, food-sparked memories all the time. But while the process sparked off memories, there was no miracle. It had been a rather artificial and contrived plan, I now realized, the only thing I had been able to come up with in the first crippling blast of grief. The goal to memorize one hundred Elizabeth David recipes had faded away. It had increasingly rung false with me. I had continued to fill up my own recipe book, but more and more the recipes came from my own generation of cooks—Nigel Slater, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver, and others. Some I made up myself. I continued to consult Elizabeth David, but I no longer felt obliged to her primacy in my kitchen. To some extent, I let her go. And with her, I had begun to let my mother go.

  I would have considered that impossible for a very long time. A betrayal, in fact. But now it felt almost like a relief. She had been dead almost three years. It was time to stop struggling for the impossible.

  There were living people and hoped-for, not-yet-born people to look out for.

  I went for another long run the night before we found out whether or not our third IVF had been successful. In the days after the implantation of the embryos and before the pregnancy test, I had slipped back into desperate yearning for it to work. One evening, while we waited, Pernilla and I watched Hannah and Her Sisters on television. I had forgotten the ending of the movie, when Woody Allen's character miraculously gets his new wife pregnant.

  “I'm not sure if we can take another failed attempt,” I had told my father in recent days. “I'm just not sure if I could cope with it.”

  Running pounded out the swirl of panic and yearning. The rhythm of the minutes passing by as I ran through quiet suburban streets in Willesden clarified my thoughts and stripped away the pointless, restless wanting of things that were not within my control to bring about or to change. In the last three years I had ended what were, essentially, years of wandering and avoiding. I had come to London and made a home, and with Pernilla I had made my own family there. I had been blessed with just over a year of my mother's final happiness. And her death had given me a chance to rediscover who she had been before her illness struck her.

  I felt a new peacefulness as I came home in the near darkness. I might not completely pull it off, but I decided that, whatever the result of the test the next day, I would simply accept it. My mother's illness and loveliness and death had all finally taught me something.

  Two years had not been too long—in fact, not long enough. But two years and nine months was finally sufficient.

  We went out for dinner that night. I couldn't be bothered cooking.

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to Elizabeth David's two biographers, Artemis Cooper and Lisa Chaney, whose excellent, lovely books provided me with descriptions and biographical information that proved invaluable, especially in reconstructing the scene inside Elizabeth David Ltd.

  My family and friends, many of whom appear in these pages, have been nothing but generous and patient, and they have my deepest thanks and love.

  I will be grateful forever to Flip Brophy for believing in this book from the second it popped, amorphous and raw, into my mind, and to the wonderful Sharon Skettini; to Beth Rashbaum for taking it on and giving it life and shape that I could not have found on my own; to Susan Kamil at Dial for opening the door for me to the loveliest of homes in publishing, for which I am truly thankful. In London, Felicity Rubinstein was an instant ally and helped me feel at home in my own town. She also helped me find what I had thought was a treasure lost forever.

  When I first met Felicity, my UK agent, she mentioned that her own mother had coauthored a cookbook in the early 1970s and that my mother had probably owned it. But because it was about cooking for the freezer, a sort of cooking that didn't interest
me much, I rudely didn't even bother looking for the book. Weeks later, when searching through my mother's books for something else, I found on the shelves a paperback of The Penguin Freezer Cookbook by Helge Rubinstein and Sheila Bush. It now struck me as another connection and coincidence that, as with others before it, meant nothing and yet seemed rather powerful. I began to flip through the book and found my mother's handwriting on a recipe for Koulibiac, a Russian salmon dish. My mother was, predictably, correcting the recipe a little. I flipped on and couldn't find any more annotations. And then the book fell open at page 144. There were stains on the yellowing pages. And, just back on page 143, the beginning of a recipe for strawberry ice cream. I had not been able to find my mother's strawberry ice cream recipe in Elizabeth David or any of the books I remembered my mother using regularly.

  Written next to the recipe, in pencil, my mother had scribbled: “V.G.”

  Very good.

  I made it, and it was.

  Please note: A few of the names in the book have been changed.

  About the Author

  MATT MCALLESTER is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for Newsday before returning to London, where he now lives with his wife, Pernilla. Winner of a number of other awards, including the Osborn Elliott Award for Excellence for his coverage of Nepal in 2006 and several Overseas Press Club citations for his international reporting, he is currently a contributing editor at Details.

  BITTERSWEET

  A Dial Press Book / May 2009

  Published by The Dial Press

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2009 by Matthew McAllester

  All of the photographs are from the McAllester family's collection.

  The Dial Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McAllester, Matthew, 1969–

  Bittersweet: lessons from my mother's kitchen / Matt McAllester.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33848-2

  1. McAllester, Matthew, 1969–2. Mentally ill parents. 3. Cookery.

  4. Mothers. 5. Mothers and sons. I. Title.

  RC455.4.F3M385 2009

  641.5′6—dc22

  2008054961

  www.dialpress.com

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