Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen Read online

  15

  ONE NIGHT IN 2006, DURING A VISIT TO ISRAEL TO COVER the conflict I knew more intimately than any other, I sat at a bar in Jerusalem with my friend Matt. A pregnant woman sat next to me. I was eating a steak salad.

  “Is that good?” she asked me.

  “Yeah, you want some? I've had enough.”

  “Sure,” she said, and I slid it over to her.

  She ate it all.

  “There,” said Matt, to whom I had just explained both my urge to learn to cook using my mother's cookbooks until I could do it according to her definition of proper cooking and the difficulty my wife and I faced in having a child. Pernilla and I had given it our best shot, making a baby, but it wasn't happening. My not being around for half the year—and often at precisely the wrong time for conception—did not improve our already biologically lowered chances. “You've just fed a child. That's what it's all about, really, isn't it? You want to feed your own child.”

  He was right. And so my cooking took on another purpose. Once back in London, where I had already been cooking to find my way back to the past, I now began to see cooking as a path to a hoped-for future. I began to read about the impact of diet on unborn and newborn children and about researchers in Pennsylvania who had discovered that even our future taste preferences are partially formed in the womb. After three months, the taste buds of a fetus are almost fully developed. If strong flavors like cumin, garlic, and onion meander through the amniotic fluid to the unborn child, out comes a little boy or girl who will tend to like cumin, garlic, onion, or whatever strong-flavored foods they've been fed before they've even seen the light of day. All of it, of course, going through the mother. I couldn't do much more than take vitamins and cut back on the booze to boost the number and swimming skills of my sperm. Pernilla had a whole lot more to deal with. So the least I could do was to keep her very well fed. I reckoned some well-directed French food could help build her body into a receptive place for a child, and, once the child was inside there, I could start feeding it. I wanted it to grow up big and strong and with a distinct liking for estouffade de boeuf à la Provençale.

  Or steak with bordelaise sauce. We had moved on to in vitro fertilization, and in preparation for our first attempt, the doctors and nurses at the fertility clinic insisted that both Pernilla and I consume as much protein as possible. Immediately after hearing the recommendation, my mind started to wander to The Ginger Pig, an extraordinary butcher in Marylebone that sells the best beef I've ever tasted in Britain. It's dry-aged for at least twenty-eight days, and the butchers will position their hacksaws on the joints wherever you want them to. “A little wider, please.” The steaks are enormous, leaping with beefiness to the extent that mustard or garlic butter would be an insult to the meat, and the raw flesh sinks under the pressure of your thumb and only slowly resumes its shape. So that's what I cooked for us and for friends on the first Saturday of May 2007.

  The evening before, Pernilla and I had walked through Queen's Park into a shaded area the park managers keep in an inner-city version of countryside wildness. Waist-high stinging nettles, the main ingredient of a soup I wanted to make, lined the path. I snapped on a yellow rubber glove, pulled out the scissors, and began filling the plastic bag we had brought with the nettles. I had shopped for everything else—the huge T-bones, some marrow bones from The Ginger Pig to make Elizabeth David's bordelaise sauce for the incredible steaks, cream and coffee beans for her mocha glacé (an odd, simple way of making the purest coffee ice cream), and two bottles of rosé prosecco. And I had called the wonderful Golborne Fisheries fishmonger and asked them to keep a lobster for me the next morning.

  One day we should feast on lobster and tankards of pink champagne as Bond does in From Russia with Love, my friend John had e-mailed me that week, apropos of nothing, and I silently decided that that's what we would start with.

  I had never cooked a lobster. But for once I knew exactly how to do it, without even looking in a book, let alone keeping it open. As I drove home with the thing thrashing about in a bag on the passenger seat next to me, I could see my mother standing in the kitchen in Ardnamurchan, picking up the nice blue lobster we had pulled out of the sea in a creel, dropping it into a big pan of boiling water, hearing a high-pitched whine, and looking in to see an entirely pink lobster. And an entirely dead one. “I hate this part,” she would say.

  “Just stick it in a pan of boiling water,” the fishmonger confirmed.

  What he neglected to say was how I should keep the thing alive in the meantime. So I got all innovative and humane—before the merciless slaughter—and filled a big bowl with cold water and sea salt and put it in the fridge. From another room I could hear its well-armored tail and legs clinking against the glass of the bowl. “It's obviously happy,” I thought. Ten minutes later the clinking stopped. I opened the fridge door. The lobster was motionless and did not stir when I picked it up. I had managed to drown it. Shit. Could you even eat prekilled lobster? I called the fishmonger.

  “Yeah, that will have killed it,” he said when I explained what I had done.

  “But I was trying to give it a happy last few hours,” I wanted to say. A bit of the Atlantic in my fridge.

  “Oh,” I said. “Will it be okay to eat?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  Our friends came, among them Sophie, my ex-girlfriend. She was very pregnant—with an IVF baby whose maker was the same doctor at work on our efforts. I was cooking for the unborn, for her baby, and hopefully for ours, preparing a protein-filled home to welcome it.

  “You know, if this works, the baby will be an Aquarius,” Pernilla said, as I fired up the barbecue.

  “As long as it's human,” I said.

  It was amazing steak that my wife put into her body that afternoon.

  Entrecôte à la Bordelaise

  The only thing that really, really matters when cooking steak is buying it. I'm not the first person to say that, but still, spend big. If it's not that great, steak becomes a bit of a task about a quarter of the way through the eating. With great steak, you never want it to end and you never really feel full.

  It's hard to beat a very good steak with absolutely nothing on it at all. No mustard, no sauce, no garlic butter. But a bordelaise sauce, which is really just another form of cow meat, is an exception because it actually enhances the steakness of the steak. It doesn't compete with the meat or distract you from the meat. It is a loyal friend to the meat.

  Bordelaise is just chopped shallots, beef marrow, and chopped parsley.

  Elizabeth David, in French Provincial Cooking, recommends buying the marrow bones a day before the meal so you can soak them in cold water, changing the water several times. This keeps the marrow nice and pink, whereas normally it's a rather unappetising grey. When you're ready, boil the three-inch-long pieces of marrow bone for twenty minutes and then scoop out the marrow.

  Spread the marrow, shallot, and parsley mixture on top of the steak as it is being grilled.

  16

  THE NEXT MORNING I PARKED ON A QUIET BLOCK IN CENTRAL London, the city's streets all but empty at this early hour on a Sunday morning, and Pernilla burst into song.

  “This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius,” she sang, through her laughter. “Aquaaaarius.”

  We entered the white town house in Marylebone, the clinic of the richest doctor in Britain. He and his fellow doctors were Egyptians, and that made me feel oddly at home, a team from my old Middle Eastern haunts working on something so domestic and personal. Pernilla was taken downstairs to the basement while I sat in the waiting room among all the would-be-pregnant and newly pregnant mothers staring into the home-decoration and gossip magazines that lay in rows on the coffee table in the center of the room. I waited for the would-be father upstairs to finish his part of the equation. After a long while I became anxious, assuming that he had finished up and left his sample behind and that the team of pretty, blond Australian nurses in the office had forgotten to come into
the waiting room to tell me it was my turn in the jerk-off bathroom. Given the harvesting of my wife's eggs that was going on right now in the basement of the clinic, I reckoned it was important that my part in this procedure was done on time. So I picked up my bag, which contained a transparent cup and a brown paper bag, and I cornered one of the nurses.

  “Um, I've been waiting rather a long time. I'm just worried you've forgotten about me.”

  “No, no, the other guy's just finished.”

  I gave her a look of surprise—had he been struck by stage fright, or was he just concocting incredibly elaborate doctors-and-nurses fantasies up there?—and she smiled.

  “We'll call you through in a minute.”

  Afterward, I read the paper in a café on Marylebone High Street and had breakfast while I waited for Pernilla. Across the street was Divertimenti, one of Elizabeth David's favorite kitchen shops. As the embryologist at the clinic was extracting Pernilla's eggs and pairing them with my sperm, doing the job of conception on our behalf, I began to think about what I should cook for Sunday dinner. I needed to provide comfort and health for Pernilla, something homey and full of the protein her doctors insisted on her consuming as if she were bulking up for the Ms. Olympia contest. My mother would roast a chicken, I knew. The ultimate crowd-pleaser. The farmers' market in Queen's Park is on Sunday mornings, and a farmer there sells wonderful chickens that have run around fields and eaten good things all their lives.

  As we drove to the farmers' market from the clinic, I asked Pernilla if she wouldn't mind if we made a small detour to Eton Avenue. It was, by chance, the second anniversary of my mother's death, and I had been along the street where she died only once since that day two years ago. I had driven past on my own the previous year, desolate, glancing up through the pink flowers of the horse chestnut to the little window next to the chair she used to sit in. I hadn't paused and had driven home quickly. This time I drove slowly and thought of the therapist in Little Venice telling me that the second anniversary is usually much easier.

  Eton Avenue is a quiet, broad street and it was an unhurried morning there, so I idled the car and looked up. And there were the pink flowers again, marking the loveliest moment of spring, when the most graceful of trees fill the parks and fields of England with clusters of white and pink flowers that sway among the rustle of the thick, freshly green chestnut leaves splaying out in clusters below. There's no moment of the year that is more full of life. The brief appearance of the pink flowers would forever mark the time of my mother's death, I realized. And now, perhaps, they would mark the time of her first grandchild's conception.

  Pernilla's father had only recently died of cancer. Her poleaxing grief had come as strongly as my own.

  “Help us, Ann and Dad,” Pernilla said as we drove away, and I silently echoed her, asking my mother and father-in-law for an assist. Not that I really believed they could help. They were dead. But you never know.

  We stopped at the farmers' market and I bought a good, plump chicken.

  Roasting chicken was the one thing I could do with my eyes—let alone the book—closed. I could insert slivers of garlic into the breast; I could coat it in harissa; I could cover it with a blizzard of Maldon Salt, pepper, and herbs; I could—and this was my favorite—stuff the area between the breast and the skin with a prosciutto, butter, fresh herb, onion, and Tuscan bread stuffing. All without opening a book (because once you've done any of these mind-bogglingly simple things, you basically just stick the bird in the oven and, an hour and a bit later, you take it out).

  But perhaps my mother had found another way of roasting chicken in French Provincial Cooking, the book she called “the Bible.”

  I flicked through and my eye stopped at “Poulet Farci en Cocotte”—pot-roasted chicken with olive stuffing. I'd never pot-roasted anything before, and I was intrigued and attracted by Elizabeth David's promise: At the end of the cooking time the skin of the chicken is beautifully golden and crisp, and for once the legs will be cooked through as well as the breast.

  Uncooked legs had not, as far as I was aware, ever been a problem with my oven-roasted chickens, but Elizabeth David's insistence made me want to try this. The last paragraph of this rather long recipe is a transparent provocation designed to lure you in, and it worked on me.

  I should add, perhaps, that the olive stuffing, although so good, is definitely rather odd, she writes. If the chicken is for guests with conventional tastes then it might be better to substitute a routine pork or herb stuffing. And you may as well put down this book right now, you worthless, uncultured, parochial pond scum, she might have added.

  Luckily, I had the cast-iron Le Creuset cocotte—just a large orange pan, really—that she suggests is ideal for pot-roasting.

  I chopped some black olives, zinged some bread crumbs in the food processor, diced an onion, and chopped up a couple of sprigs of parsley I'd grown in a terra-cotta pot in the garden. With a beaten egg and some pepper, I squashed it all together in a bowl and stuffed it into the cavity of the chicken. This felt a bit old-fashioned and missed the point of having fatty, buttery stuffing seeping into the cooking flesh as it does when it's put between the skin and the meat, but it was also somehow reassuring to be stuffing a bird in the traditional way.

  After that, I heated some olive oil in the pot, browned the chicken on both sides of the breast, covered it, and let it sit there on a low heat and in its own juices for an hour and twenty minutes or so.

  When it was done, we ate it with reheated butternut squash (mashed up with some maple syrup) I had barbecued the night before and some plain broccoli. Elizabeth David was right about the legs—they were more tender, more delicious than legs from an oven-roasted chicken. And the skin was brown, crispy, and delicious. The stuffing was not, of course, in the slightest bit odd.

  I could remember how to do this with the book closed. I wrote the recipe in my repertoire notebook. The recipes in the book were growing in number.

  One of the nurses called the next day to say that only three of the eight eggs had fertilized. We had hoped for a higher number of embryos.

  “But, you know, there are now three little things in the world that we made,” I told Pernilla. “It only takes one.”

  On day three, they were ready. I felt like this was all a glorious recipe and my wife's womb was the preheated oven. I kept this analogy to myself. One of the embryos had multiplied into seven cells, one into a whopping eight, and the runt of the litter—five—got left behind in the Petri dish. If it did well over the next few days, the clinic would freeze it.

  We drove to the clinic. I held Pernilla's hand in the operating room.

  One doctor turned the lights down in the basement room, and the other squirted the two bigger embryos into my wife's uterus. Nothing much actually happened. But it had the glorious shock of the new. And I was overcome with an urge to feed my wife, to feed the two embryos inside her, to keep them alive, to do my bit to make them grow, to give them strength. I couldn't do much—making a baby is woman's work, really—but I could shovel good nutrition toward them. Perhaps they could learn early to like a goat's cheese omelet made with free-range eggs, and velvety butternut squash soup drizzled with white truffle oil and served with a slice of wholemeal organic toast with slivers of Parmesan on top and drizzled with a bit more of the truffle oil that I had picked up in Croatia during a recent trip. Because they were getting the omelet for their first lunch and the soup for their first dinner.

  Before dinner, I ran around Queen's Park, and the world felt full of connections. For the godless, connectivity is about the only meaning we can hope for. Connections can feel like the legs of a stool, keeping you up, keeping you stable. I played Kate Bush on my iPod. “I know that something good is going to happen,” she sang, as I ran under the swaying horse-chestnut trees in the rain and wind. Spring itself felt like a connection, the right time to be planting and growing. The shrink had said that the two-year anniversary of my mother's death would be easier tha
n the same date a year earlier, and he was right. It was partly time. But it was also this coincidence of death and creation, the sense that the vacuum left in the world when my mother left it could be filled, as of two days previously, by one or both of the little things inside my wife right now. I had never felt closer to sensing a circularity, a connectivity, and a logic to life that made it, for the very first time, perhaps okay that my mother had died.

  I ran back through the rain to the kitchen. I never enjoyed making a meal more in my life.

  Goat's Cheese Omelet and Butternut Squash Soup

  with Truffle Oil and Parmesan Toast

  For two people, use two full eggs and three yolks. Or two and two if you want. I prefer a yolky omelet. With a fork, gently beat the eggs in a bowl. Really, you're just mixing them up a bit. Drop little chunks of a soft goat's cheese into the mixture.

  Heat some butter in a nonstick pan until it's sizzling, and then pour in the egg mixture.

  You can use a spatula to lift one side of the omelet while you tip the pan so that the uncooked egg mixture slides under the bit you're lifting up. But don't flip the omelet like a pancake. The only turning over should be when you turn one half of the omelet over on the other—just before you take it out of the pan.

  The soup I have stolen directly from Jamie Oliver. I saw him do it on television and never even needed to consult his book for the recipe—it's that simple.

  Fry some sage leaves in olive oil. Take them out and put them aside.

  Chop up a carrot, an onion, some garlic, some celery, a red chili, and rosemary, and cook in a pan for ten minutes with salt and pepper.