Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen Page 6

  Julian Barnes seems to be happily resigned to this condition. But every time I remembered my mother's mild taunt about keeping the recipe book closed, I felt more and more like a fraudulent cook. And to make matters worse, I knew that my pedantry could turn to tyranny. Cooking by rote is, after all, primarily about controlling every detail.

  Only months after meeting me, even before we got married, Pernilla began to dread my urges to cook for people. When gourmandism is shared, it has the most marked influence on the happiness which can be found in marriage, wrote Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in The Physiology of Taste.

  Yes—when it is shared.

  I would choose recipes with ingredients like orange dust in them and invite too many people for my capabilities. I would become very stressed as the time of the guests' arrival approached if matters were not entirely in line with how the recipe said they should be. My spousal manners were not always what they might have been.

  “I don't like you when you're cooking,” Pernilla said one day. “I don't think we should have any more dinner parties.”

  “But I'm cooking because I want to make people happy,” I said.

  “You're not making me happy,” she said. “You're a dictator.”

  She was right. Nor was cooking for many people under the sort of pressure Jack Bauer works under in an episode of 24 making me particularly happy. The oohs and aahs that came in the wake of orange-dusted shrimp satisfied my ego, I suppose, but it was not exactly fun and celebratory.

  Once, without any sense of irony, I told my friend John that he wasn't “cutting the onions properly.” And when my wife was cooking, some impulse pushed me into the kitchen to stand at her side and say things like: “You need to stir the pasta more often. It's sticking together.” Or: “I think the heat is up a bit high.”

  “Get—away—from—me,” she would say. Sometimes she would use less decorous phrases to precipitate my departure.

  Long before my mother's from-the-grave reminder about learning to cook properly, I had sensed that I needed to lose my Saddam tendencies in the kitchen. I realized now that perhaps she was suggesting to me how I might not only learn to cook but learn to enjoy cooking. I used to think about Saddam a lot—it was part of my job—and at one point I decided that even before he was toppled during the invasion of Iraq he was probably the most trapped and fearful person in the country. He was scared of nearly everyone. Being a dictator was not actually much fun after a while. Chefs say that you must cook with love, that the diners can taste it in the food. I cooked with the stress and restless fear of the tyrant, and I'm sure you could taste that too. My mother—and quite a few others around the world—cooked with love. I had to learn that trick.

  There was something about going back to French food, to the Mediterranean cooking that Elizabeth David and then my mother had learned and reveled in, that made me feel like I was beginning again at the beginning—of food, of feeding. I could not help feeling that there was no cuisine as fundamentally joyful and somehow attached to the earth, to other people, as Mediterranean, particularly French food. Mediterranean food is about meals, not dishes; ritual celebrations, not one-time events; home cooking, not restaurant cooking; long, unfolding afternoons in the outdoors, not hurried dinners in city dining rooms; flowers and herbs growing around the table on the patio, not flowers arranged at the end of the dining room. It is about families and friends and welcoming newcomers. It's about giving, not showing off, feeding people rather than dazzling them. It suggests memories we're not even sure we really have. Perhaps they're ancestral memories or memories we long to build up.

  Until now I had flitted around the globe in my kitchen as much as in my working life. My cooking was like my languages. I could say “thank you,” “hello,” and “journalist” in many languages, but I couldn't speak any fluently. On my kitchen bookshelves was a UN-like multinational force of cookbooks—Thai, Indian, Moroccan, Spanish, French, American, English, Scottish, Italian, Persian, and Indonesian. And dessert. I realized that I could cook nothing with any authority. So I closed my ears to the babble of exotic tongues on my shelves and listened only to the Latins. It was a relief to narrow down the world of food a little bit.

  Elizabeth David wrote mainly for housewives in the postwar era. As I read her recipes, I found that she makes assumptions that would sit easily with women who spend all day cooking for their families—or for people, like me, who have made a deliberate decision to slow down, stay rooted, and cook. She assumes, for ex ample, that you always have homemade chicken and beef stock at hand. That assumption implies days of preparation, including roasting whole joints of meat for other meals before the one you are now making. There is no shortcut to that, other than the shame of the bouillon cube or the canned variety. To make proper stock—which is not remotely comparable to the thin dribble produced by bouillon cubes, and superior to anything from a can, too—you have to buy big pieces of meat, roast them, eat them, save the bones, buy lots of celery you will never need once you've put a few sticks into the stockpot, boil the stuff for hours (so no going out to buy a pint of milk and no going out to earn a living), and freeze it in Tupperware.

  Want to make a cassoulet? Don't even think about it before you've spent two or three days shopping, cooking, eating, and boiling as described above. Because cassoulet, I discovered, needs stock.

  The more I read Elizabeth David's recipes and the beautiful snippets of culinary history she weaves between her recipes, the more I realized that it was going to take time to learn to cook like my mother. I needed to be cooking a lot, and slowly. Roasts beget bones, which beget stock, which begets soup. Meals that were once, for me, unconnected now began to be reliant upon one another.

  I read further in the long recipe for cassoulet de Castelnaudary to discover that Toulouse, Carcassonne, Périgord, Castelnaudary, Gascony, Castannau, all have their own version of the Cassoulet. The ingredients vary from fresh pork and mutton to smoked sausages, garlic sausages, bacon, smoked ham, preserved goose or pork, duck, calves' feet, the rind of pork and pigs' cheek.

  But which? How do you choose? How do you get it right? I do not happen to be from, nor have I ever visited, any of these places in the southwest of France. Where should my loyalties lie?

  The essentials are good white haricot beans and a capacious earthenware pot (the name Cassoulet comes from Cassol d'Issel, the original clay cooking utensil from the little town of Issel, near Castelnaudary).

  My initial confusion began to fade with those words. I started to feel that this one recipe—in fact, even just the Anatole France passage—hinted at more to me than almost anything I'd ever read about cooking. I hadn't really understood that cooking had a base, but now I could see it. And so the impossible feat of memory I had assumed was required for cooking such as my mother did—how on earth did one memorize a thousand measurements, ingredients, cooking times, temperatures?—began to retreat a little. “Remember the base,” I thought to myself. “Good beans and an earthenware pot.”

  That didn't stop me from making a detailed, panicky list as I headed out shopping. My progress, I sensed, would be slow. Like much of French cooking itself.

  Top of the list was a cassoulet pot.

  “Can I help you?” the lady in the kitchen shop in Swiss Cottage asked me.

  “I'm looking for a cassoulet dish,” I said.

  I was not entirely sure what they looked like, but I thought I had spotted a few likely earthenware candidates. This lady would know.

  She took me to the window and pointed at a big copper dish that looked like a clam. And cost a fortune.

  “No,” I said. “For making cassoulet. They're clay, aren't they?”

  “Well, that,” she said, looking at the copper clam, “is a cassoulet.”

  This was all going wrong already. I thought cassoulet was something you ate. This lady was saying that it was the pot itself. And the wrong kind of pot. “But Elizabeth David says I need a capacious earthenware pot,” I wanted to tell this nice wom
an, who I'm sure knew what she was talking about. But so did Elizabeth David. And Elizabeth David did not say I should buy a metal dish that looked like a clam and cost two hundred dollars.

  “Do you have any earthenware ones?” I asked, veering toward the dishes I'd been looking at earlier. They were a fraction of the cost of the clam—and would require no polishing.

  “You could use this one,” she said. I felt happier. She had taken me back to the earthenware-pot section. I took the most capacious one they had. And the lady sold me a circular flat metal thing that, she said, would prevent my nice new pot from cracking when I placed it on direct heat.

  I drove to Clifton Road in Little Venice. This neighborhood in Northwest London is now the turf of many of London's superrich. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s it wasn't quite as swanky.

  Sack races in the garden at Ashworth Road

  We lived there. My first and second homes, on Elizabeth Close and Ashworth Road, are both a short walk to the shops on Clifton Road. I have a handful of memories of living in the neighborhood—standing in the street on Ashworth Road and looking up at the purple curtains in my bedroom window, looking down at the canal boats, dropping my sister at play school, meeting a basset hound in a park—and there are photos of me in the garden there. But I knew now that my mother used to come to these shops to buy food for me, the first food I ever ate. Sometimes in her last years, my sister told me later, my mother would return to sit and drink coffee alone in a café on Clifton Road, looking out at the streets where she had been sane and at her happiest. It seemed right to buy the food for this meal here.

  In the delicatessen I found cassoulet essential number two—a big jar of white haricot beans. They were already soaked and prepared. With pork stock in the freezer (serendipitously made after a recent pork roast) and the capacious earthenware pot in my car, I felt that I was halfway there. I looked around and there was a tin of confit de canard. It was not the preserved goose that Elizabeth David's cassoulet of Castelnaudary demands, but I felt sure it was on her list of regional changeables. “Duck will do,” I thought. As I was paying for it, I realized I had just bought off the list. I had extemporized. It was probably a bad idea. But I couldn't be bothered looking for goose when duck was at hand.

  The sausages came from the newly opened organic butcher across the street. I'd never been in the store before. I thought about how often my mother must have come here when this shop was Cobb of Knightsbridge, one of London's finest butchers, supplier of meat to the queen. I assumed Elizabeth David shopped here too. And that thought prompted a memory of something I'd read somewhere in her books.

  “Can I have some bones, please?” I asked the butcher.

  “What kind?”

  “I don't know. Whatever you have.”

  He looked at me.

  “Pork?” I suggested.

  He cut some up with a cleaver and put them in a plastic bag and charged me nothing. And even though I'd read it in books before—to get bones for stock, just ask your butcher—those passively read words had never quite turned into action when faced with a shop full of dead animals. Now, in this one moment, I'd skipped entire phases of making stock—the buying, roasting, and eating of a piece of meat. I could keep the frozen stock for another time.

  In the kitchen at home, I made fresh stock with the bones the butcher had given me. When it was ready, I began to slice onions and bacon and tomatoes; I crushed garlic; I put them together in a pan with herbs and salt and pepper. The salt I got from my mother's huge blue-and-white salt jar by reaching in with my whole hand. When I was a kid I used to think it would bite my hand off. The herbs were from my garden. Again a loose end struck me—Elizabeth David's list of ingredients does not actually include herbs. But I'd gone downstairs to the garden and snipped some thyme from its terra-cotta pot and rosemary from the gnarly bush in the flower bed, my fingers happily scented with the cozy, familiar smells of the Mediterranean. I was making my own call on the ingredients. For the second time in one dish. I poured the stock over it all and let it simmer, as Elizabeth David instructs, for twenty minutes.

  From this point it was bizarrely easy. I rubbed the pot with a sliced clove of garlic, the raw almost-white root giving its delicious moistness to the surface of the earthenware as my pursed fingertips pushed and slid it around the glazed clay. And then I dumped the sausages, bits of bacon, duck confit—it just slid out of its jar with all its congealed fat—and some goose fat into the garlicky-smelling earthenware pot. On top of that I poured the beans. And then the stock, with all its good herby vegetable bits.

  And then I defied Elizabeth David. And France. I skipped the bread-crumb-layer-on-top bit. I don't really get bread crumbs.

  Pernilla and my friend Richard Poureshagh, a dear friend going back to my days at elementary school in Edinburgh, sat around our dining table and could not stop saying how “light” the cassoulet was.

  I said nothing. I knew what had gone into this earthenware dish.

  “I'm just not in the mood for something heavy—it's summer,” Rich said. We had just come back from a bacchanalian Sunday afternoon at the Notting Hill Carnival, an event as far from the carnage of Lebanon as it was possible to get. Or from the oil war being waged by guerrillas in the Niger Delta region in Nigeria, where I was due to go in a few days.

  “Totally light,” Pernilla said, and they accepted spoonfuls more of the stuff.

  “That's how hot, melted fat goes,” I said to myself. It seems light as it slips down. It is shockingly heavy when it congeals. It is joyous.

  So cassoulet was the first dish I cooked with a bit of the flexibility and the joy that I wanted to bring into my kitchen. A bit more like the way my mother cooked.

  The first dish of a hundred, I decided in the next moment. I would create my own recipe book for my own repertoire. A book that, once completed, I would never need to look at again. In theory. Once I had filled it with a hundred recipes that I could make without actually opening the notebook itself, I would have fulfilled my mother's challenge.

  I bought a beautiful, leather-bound brown notebook. Trying my best to remember the details of cassoulet without consulting Elizabeth David—not entirely successfully—I began to fill out the first page of my recipe book.

  Cassoulet

  There are three parts to this, none of them difficult.

  First, the beans. If you don't simply buy them in a jar, you soak one and a half to two pounds of dried white haricot beans in a big bowl of water overnight. The next day you rinse them, put them in a pan of freshwater, and cook them for two and a half hours or so—until they're three-quarters cooked. Strain them.

  A slightly more involved recipe given by Elizabeth David—“Cassoulet Toulousain”—requires you to cook the beans with onion, garlic, pork rind, a piece of thick-cut bacon, and a bunch of herbs, including parsley, thyme, and a bay leaf.

  Of course, going to your deli and buying a lovely, ready-made jar of white haricot beans so you don't need to bother soaking or cooking at all is a very good cheat. I recommend it.

  Second, make a stock. Slice three onions, cut half a pound of bacon into smallish squares, slice five cloves of garlic, two tomatoes, add seasoning and some herbs of your choice (I'd go for thyme or rosemary), add the stock, and let all that cook for twenty minutes in a pan.

  Finally, take the earthenware cassoulet pot or dish and rub the inside of it with a clove of garlic. Just slice a clove in half and use the exposed end. Then dump the following into the pot, in no particular order: the bacon bits from the stock (if you can be bothered taking them all out), a pound of good sausages, and as much goose or duck fat from the confit or separate jars or cans of the stuff as you think necessary. Pour the beans over that delicious mishmash. And the stock goes over it all.

  Cook in a medium to hot oven for an hour.

  You can sprinkle bread crumbs over it at the end, but I'm not sure I see the point.

  I'd eat it with a simple green salad and a big red wine, perhaps a
bottle from Cahors in the southwest of France—or a bottle of Malbec from Mendoza in Argentina. (It's the same grape in both places. Either is usually heavenly.)

  14

  AS I BEGAN TO COOK MY MOTHER'S FOOD, I REALIZED HER recipes would take me only so far. During some of her happiest years I was either an infant or not yet born. I had to reach beyond my memories as well as into them. And so I turned my skills and effort as a reporter away from war and toward my mother.

  I began to spend hours talking to my father, to my mother's three siblings, to my sister. And as they spoke with an ease I had never seen when my mother was alive, I realized that my mother had to die before I could get to know who she was. When she was alive, those happy years remained largely hidden, an unbearably sad reminder—to herself, to those who loved her—of all she had lost. My father, I'm sure, would never have been as open if she had still been alive. Now I sensed it was a release for him to be able to talk about the woman with whom he had chosen to have children and to build a life, until she had gone crazy. “No one else will ever ask him about this,” I thought.

  And there were documents. Along with her cookbooks were family home movies I had never seen and a large collection of beautiful family photographs taken by my father, a black-and-white chronicle of captured moments that ends suddenly when I am about ten years old.

  I remembered that I, too, had a small archive. In my father's garage was a box full of every letter I ever received up until the age of about twenty. I had another box somewhere, I suspected, of the letters that came later. Many would be from my mother. I also had my diaries, which I began to keep when I was about ten and continued for a decade. They would be turgid and solipsistic, the product of my teens, but perhaps they would spark memories of my mother.

  And one day my sister mentioned my mother's papers. I had no idea there were any. I drove over and picked up two portable filing cases and one small suitcase. But, like the home movies, the pictures, and my mother's own recipe book, I left them undisturbed. Much as I wanted to see what they had to tell me, I wasn't ready. They were hot to my touch.