Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen Read online

  “This is ridiculous. I'm getting the fuck out of here,” he said, turning his back on me. I followed.

  This was me at thirty-six, about a year after my mother died, and at the back end of years of visiting and living in war zones: Slumped against the wall of the Jabal Amel Hospital in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, I tried to get a Lebanese man's blood off the soles of my sneakers and onto the sidewalk. I looked at the sky where the unseen Israeli drones were buzzing and began to think about a meal I would cook when I got home. I needed to start on my Elizabeth David-led course of self-education. It would be from French Country Cooking, which I kept in my bag at all times during this bad, stupid war. It would be a heavy meal, aggressively extravagant, with bacon-fatty casseroles, tureens of soup with potatoes, desserts with cream, so much warm heaviness that my guests would be pinned down by the weight and the homeliness and the coziness of a classic French meal.

  There was not a lot of conversation going on right now as my friends and I sat and stood outside the hospital. A photographer friend pulled on a cigarette and said, “This is the last one, honestly. I'm not doing any more wars.”

  “Same,” I said. We both knew we were lying, and yet I recognized the trapped look in his face. How else could he make a living? How else could I? Wouldn't we miss it too much?

  We had just come out of the emergency department of Jabal Amel. It had become the main stage in the most pointless and one of the most vicious wars I had ever covered. This was where the medics, themselves targets for Israeli missiles, brought the injured.

  Inside, moments earlier, we had watched a man die. We had tried to avoid slipping on his blood, which had poured onto the square tiles of the hospital floor when the porters had carried him into the room. By then he had only one arm attached to his body, and his instantly barbecued flesh was filling the room with a bitter meat smell. The doctors had not really bothered. They had placed a transparent plastic tube down his throat, but it was a token gesture. After about a minute he was dead. One of the doctors, his hands protected by white latex gloves, had felt around in the exposed mess of muscle and windpipe and blood and spine in the man's neck and had pulled out a two-inch piece of metal. It was one of many pieces of the three Israeli rockets that had sliced into the man as he stood with a small cup of coffee in his hand on the side of the road a few minutes earlier.

  “Ah,” the doctor had said, holding up the rocket fragment for the others to see.

  My friends and I milled about outside. We were all suddenly desperately thirsty and drank all the water we could find.

  I saw these friends in places like this, places like Tyre, in the middle of wars that subsided and then elided into more wars, mainly those that were the ever-growing concentric ripples caused by the events of September 11, 2001. Some of them had been at my wedding a few months earlier. We had been very close to this attack, rushing down the road toward the targeted Lebanese man after the first two missiles hit him, not anticipating the third. Three of our group had come back from the scene with their own minor wounds. I thought back to the cocktail of superhuman energy and Zen calm I had felt in the lemon grove in Gaza, the hills of Kosovo, the streets of Nablus in the West Bank, at times even in the middle of the battle of Fallujah. That feeling was gone. Now I just wanted to get away. Fight had been worn down to raw flight. I knew war and its set pieces well: suicide bombings, roadside bombs, sniper bullets. The novelty of horror makes it attractive. The sense that recording that horror might help to end it is also a powerful draw. And then there are those delicious, addictive chemicals in the brain. But when it all becomes too familiar, when the almost out-of-body experiences dry up, and when your increasingly ineffectual words are buried on page thirtysomething of the newspaper on day thirtysomething of a war between irrational actors who couldn't care less what journalists from the United States write about, well, then there is less of a reason to stay. And when the danger level is as high as it was in Southern Lebanon, it becomes even harder to understand why you are still there. I had stayed in the south of the country, where it was most dangerous, and I had made a mistake. It was a bad call. But by then we were stuck in Tyre, unable to travel safely.

  I hid in the imaginings of unexplored culinary lands, places of comfort where I knew I could not do much good to the world at large, but perhaps I could make my friends and family happy. And myself.

  “I've never made pastry,” I thought. “That would be new and challenging. I've never boiled potatoes for gnocchi, boned a duck, shucked oysters, or cooked a soufflé. I've never made cassoulet. I should definitely make a cassoulet when I get home.”

  When the afternoon at the hospital was over, I lay on my bed, and the warm summer Mediterranean wind passed through the open windows of the white apartment in the old city of Tyre. I was renting the apartment from an old man who had refused to leave town. The breeze licked at the pages of French Country Cooking. I hoped Elizabeth David would relax me, but instead she began to put me a little on edge. Her prose scared me. She was bossy. I was not used to this—contemporary cookbook writers want to be your friend (Jamie), your lover (Nigella), your mentor (Batali; Jean-Georges).

  But then I read this: I should be surprised to hear that anybody had ever followed any cookery book menu in every detail. This was news to me. Recipes and instructions, I thought, were written in books for a simple reason—because they were correct, perfect, precise. Apparently it wasn't quite as simple as that.

  As I read more of her recipes, I noticed something else that seemed both reassuring and alarming: Elizabeth David doesn't always tell you exactly what to do. Most modern cookbooks lead you by the hand. Frequently, Elizabeth David doesn't give precise measurements or cooking times or temperatures.

  And yet she can be quite the rigid, rule-issuing schoolmistress. She discusses, for example, what sole cooked in a rich sauce of cream and mushrooms might go with: It must not be preceded by a creamy mushroom soup, nor followed by chicken cooked in a cream sauce. Have some regard for the digestions of others even if your own resembles that of the ostrich.

  Her voice seemed familiar to me somehow: authoritarian, but interested in devolving power, not hoarding it. She knows that she knows best, but she wants to pass on her knowledge and she wants you to try and fail until you have worked it out for yourself. I wondered if my mother liked Elizabeth David's slightly imperious tone so much because it matched her own. Or had she learned it partly from Elizabeth David?

  I sat up and looked out at the Mediterranean, which both my mother and Elizabeth David had adored. The sea had become our main source of food here. There was so little to eat in the besieged town by this stage of the war that on some days we had to rely on the local fishermen who swam out beyond the reefs and past the riptide to throw dynamite into the waves, collecting the stunned fish as they floated to the surface. The fishermen knew that Israeli missiles would sink them if they got into their boats. The men explained that the dynamiting was an old technique, not limited to times of siege—and not always successful. Or safe. One young man walked around with stumps at the end of his arms.

  One evening, the fishermen we befriended set out a long table on the rocks between the crashing water and the old city walls. At the appointed time we threaded our way barefoot through the narrow, ancient streets to pick at the bombed fish they had grilled for us. The white flesh was delicious and tender. We brought the beer, and together we drank it and filled the warm night with laughter. We stripped to our underwear and swam in the black sea while unseen Israeli helicopters thwacked away at the sky somewhere overhead. These nightly, threatening vespers scared us because we knew they could see us. I myself had looked down on human targets from the user end of that technology once before. Standing with a group of American soldiers gathered in a tent in Iraq, I had watched a green-tinged computer-screen image fed from a drone over Fallujah as they guided a bomb onto a house of insurgents. We could clearly see each man until the bomb hit. But even if the Israelis were watching us now fr
om a command center in Tel Aviv, as I had watched the Iraqi insurgents, we were not to be deterred. We laughed and swam. It felt, for an evening, as if we had escaped. We were friends around a table filled with fish and beer.

  It was time for me to scale back my visits to war zones. I had my mother's Elizabeth David books to guide me to something else. It was time to celebrate around a table, to smell, to taste, to drink, to feast. And I now had someone to do that with. A wife.

  12

  I HAD MET A GIRL ONE EVENING IN A FRIEND'S APARTMENT in Little Venice. It was at the back end of 2003 and I had just moved to London. We sat next to each other at dinner, and I twirled her around later when someone put some old standards on the stereo. Her name was Pernilla. It took me two or three times to get the name right. By the time I had it right, I realized that the woman who bore it had the most amazing ability to make me happy. So we went to Rome for New Year's.

  At about a quarter to midnight on December 31, I felt a sharp pain in my left side. We were on the second or third course of a seven-course prix fixe menu in a romantic spot near the Via Condotti. I felt the embarrassment of someone who is about to get very ill at a very inconvenient moment. It worsened. I was about to ruin our first big, romantic trip together.

  “You know, I hate to say this, but I have an incredibly sharp pain in my side,” I told Pernilla.

  I took some breaths and a sip of wine and it went completely away.

  At five minutes to midnight, Pernilla looked at me and said: “This is odd, but now I have a pain in my left side.”

  She took some breaths and a sip of wine, but her pain did not go away. Just after midnight, as everyone in the restaurant settled down to course number four after shaking hands and kissing their fellow diners, we left. I dragged Pernilla through the packed streets, and I could see that everyone who passed by thought she was very drunk. There were no taxis. I walked her across a bridge over the cold Tiber and we reached the hotel. She was very ill. Three days, three hospitals, and an ambulance later, we made a break for the airport. I worship Italy. I think it is God's gift to the world, especially its food. But I have seen better hospitals in Afghanistan than the ones Pernilla saw in Rome. Have you ever had to bring your own toilet paper to a hospital? We did not tell the doctors we were leaving. They must have returned from their saint's day holiday to find an empty room.

  That's how Pernilla began what we grew to call her special weight-loss program. First went a failed kidney, the source of the incredible pain in Rome. Weeks later, they wheeled her away from me on a bed in a hospital in West London, and I sat in the hospital café for three hours in a slight, unnecessary panic. Then a few other bits and pieces had to come out. There were tests, bad-looking shapes appearing on scans, fresh surgeons for each new region of her body. And still she managed to make me happier than anyone I had known. I first told her I was in love with her in February, while sitting in a chilly winter garden in Baghdad, speaking to her on a satellite phone. A year later I was back in Baghdad, sitting in my hotel room one afternoon, when a bullet ricocheted around my balcony. A hot, twisted slug ended up on the white tiles, next to the white plastic picnic table I sometimes sat at to get what passed for fresh air in Baghdad. I assumed it was just a random round fired from a rifle that had arced through the sky of Baghdad from a mile or two away, perhaps fired into the sky in celebration of a wedding. It wasn't personal. But that bullet seemed like a quiet sign to me that Iraq was not my place any longer. I left two days later. I had decided to ask Pernilla to marry me when I got back.

  A few days after returning from Iraq, on a Saturday afternoon in February 2005, I took her out for lunch at the restaurant where we had gone on our first date. Then we walked up to the top of Primrose Hill in the hoary cold. We bumped into a friend of mine on the way up the hill. I was terse with my friend and yanked Pernilla away quickly, climbing the hill with a hardened purpose. At the top I held her in my arms and asked her to marry me.

  “You should take your time and think about it a bit,” I said. She said that it was okay, she could make her mind up now.

  We walked to the nearest pub and drank glasses of champagne in a corner, not quite believing what we had done. We had to tell someone. So we walked ten minutes to the home where my mother lived and paid a surprise visit.

  “Mum, we're getting married.”

  “Oh, that is good,” she said when we told her. She got up from her armchair and kissed Pernilla.

  “You're the first person we've told, Mum,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, as if she expected nothing less.

  “And, look, I gave her Granny McAllester's engagement ring,” I said, pointing to the antique sparkles on Pernilla's finger, the ring my father's mother had worn.

  “That was meant to belong to me, you know,” my mother said.

  “Mum,” I said, staring her down.

  My mother, with some effort, veered back to civility.

  “It looks beautiful on you, Pernilla. Now I would like some grandchildren, please.”

  13

  AFTER MY MOTHER DIED, I HIRED A CARPENTER TO BUILD shelves in the home that Pernilla and I had bought the month of my mother's death. I wanted to fill an alcove in the kitchen with shelves for my cookbooks. The carpenter puzzled over how to fit the design around an inconvenient radiator that poked into the alcove along the side wall. “We could have a little column of smaller shelves above the radiator, pressed up against the wall,” he said, after staring for a while at the space. “Perfect for a few paperbacks.”

  That was where I put most of my mother's cookbooks when I took them home from my sister's. Slightly separated by the carpentry from their new, glossy successors, the old paperbacks were held together by tape and stuck together in places by years-old splotches of sauce and fat and gravy. That corner of the kitchen, hidden behind the door, became my reference library, taking me back to the past.

  I read my mother's cookbooks without much direction from my memory. Not many of the recipes in Elizabeth David seemed familiar to me. My initial remembrances of my mother's food were of simpler dishes, aimed at children more than at adults. But these were the books my mother had commanded me to read, and so I decided to choose recipes from them as they appealed to me, as she must have chosen dishes. I chose cassoulet, if only because it seemed the quintessence of hearty French cooking, a dish to be shared with family and friends. It would be the first dish I would attempt to master.

  Two days after I left Lebanon, I took down French Country Cooking from the kitchen shelf to which I had returned it upon coming home, and read how to make cassoulet. Elizabeth David, in her slightly irritating snobbishness, doesn't bother to translate the passage from Anatole France with which she opens her two-page recipe for “Le Cassoulet de Castelnaudary,” but I could more or less work out that it is about a small tavern, owned by a woman named Clémence, where there is only one dish on the menu. It's been that way for twenty years. From time to time, France writes, Clémence changes some of the ingredients in the cassoulet, but c'est toujours le même cassoulet. It is always the same cassoulet. What remains constant in Clémence's cassoulet, he writes, is the base.

  How can it be the same if it changes? I had tried making changes to various recipes in the cookbooks I had used over the years. It had not resulted in making anything you could describe as toujours le même. Toujours ruined, perhaps. So I had learned never to deviate. Ever.

  Elizabeth David might have been surprised to hear of the existence of those who follow cookbooks to every detail, as she writes, but we are many. The novelist Julian Barnes—who is one himself—calls us pedants in the kitchen. We follow recipes. And I had become okay at it. I could pretty much put the right ingredients together at the right time and at the right temperature. By the end of the process I would have read the recipe, always open on the table in the center of the kitchen, perhaps a dozen times. An hour later, I would remember nothing. I had merely been following instructions. It was not very difficult. When I coo
ked I was reading a map in a foreign city I knew I'd never revisit. There were so many great recipes in all the books that lined my shelves. Thou sands, perhaps tens of thousands, of amazing recipes to try out. Why, I had always thought, would I waste my time cooking any of them again?

  One Sunday in London, shortly after I moved there in late 2003, I cooked lunch for my friends, starting with “Sautéed Shrimp with Orange Dust,” a recipe I found in a book by New York's master of fusion, Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Orange dust sounded awesome to me. I made it, and it stuck nicely to the shrimp and tasted dustily orangey.

  The next day I had but the vaguest memory of what orange dust actually was. To make it again, I would have had to open the book and start from scratch. To make an omelet, for that matter, I'd have had to open the book.

  My food generally worked out, but it was not the result of what my mother—and many other people who seemed to be able to enter a grocery store without a list and a kitchen without a book splayed open on the counter from start to finish—would call cooking. My form of cooking and shopping was inseparable from words on the page. I just read out instructions and shopping lists to myself and the dishes appeared after a lot of rereading. It was like using foreign words looked up in a dictionary. I could pronounce the words and I could understand them, but I couldn't remember them and I certainly couldn't string them together in anything that resembled speaking.