Give a Girl a Knife Read online

  “I know,” Rich says, blinking back emotion.

  Making a sandwich for a line cook after work at one in the morning, even one composed of the kind of crappy deli turkey breast their professional palates would otherwise never touch, elevated these unseen girlfriends to beatific levels. It had never once occurred to me to ask Aaron to make me a sandwich. He would have, happily, had I requested it. I just had no idea that a sandwich made by other hands meant so much.

  —

  My feeding impulse overflowed into my off hours. I never grew sick of cooking. I desperately wanted to cook Thanksgiving for Aaron and our friends, and begged Shea for the day off.

  “Please,” he said. “We all want Thanksgiving off. We’d all like to cook. We’re open that day.” And then he reconsidered: “Tell you what. You make pie, right, in Minn-a-sow-ta? You can have Thanksgiving off if you make me twenty-four pies. Not for service, just for us.” That worked out to at least half a pie per cook. But I came in early and stayed late that week and made twenty-five pies: ten buttercup-bourbon, ten of my grandma’s macerated apple, and five maple-pecan. I copped a buttercup-bourbon for my own Thanksgiving at home the next day. When I took the pie home and sliced into it, I was crushed to discover that the crust was overly sturdy, not nearly as delicate as the piecrusts I’d made when I was a teenager. My recipe remained the same, Grandma Dion’s, but she would have been appalled. Clearly, hopping the fence from home cook to professional had turned my luck with the piecrust of my Midwestern youth. I might have mastered olive oil sablé and duck-fat pasta dough, but I was now on the dark side of pie.

  Yet a few weeks later, when Shea asked me to take over the recently vacated pastry chef position, I wasn’t surprised. The pastry chef’s last day was coming fast and we had yet to hear who would take his place. I sat with Shea in the front bar room watching the rushing daytime crowd on Fifth Avenue and considered it. I had no experience in pastry, no bank of essential recipes—the formulas that are like gold to pastry chefs. It would mean more money, but with just a hundred-dollar increase, it was not bona fide pastry-chef money. I burned inside at the “girl salary.” Still, as head of the sweet side, I would finally be a chef, in charge of my own menu. This was my chance to create original dishes. I thought of my recipe notebooks, heavy with ideas.

  I looked out at the enormous waterfall of apple blossoms sitting on the bar and ran my thumb over the crop of bumpy pink eczema between my fingers, my permanent worry stone, and tried to think. After many months of eighty-hour weeks, I couldn’t imagine how I would explain to Aaron that I was going to start over in a new, higher-pressure job, that I would need to work extra hours to assemble a menu, and that the small percentage of time we spent together would actually decrease. Every slurp from my takeout coffee cup echoed weirdly in the room and sounded about ten times louder than it should have, as if the cup were having trouble clearing its throat.

  “I know you’ve never worked pastry, but that savory edge is where pastry is headed. I think you could do it. Nothing too flashy. A chocolate cake. A panna cotta. Five desserts total.”

  I was silent, which was unlike me.

  “You can try it and if you don’t like it, you can go back to savory, I’ll make you a sous chef.” I could hear him thinking, If you’d just do me this one solid.

  Indecision numbed my tongue. I knew what this job would take and I honestly didn’t know if I was prepared to pull it off. And ironically, the very minute that Shea had trusted me, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. I reluctantly agreed to take the job—but only temporarily, until he could find a permanent replacement.

  Somehow, without a single day of pastry experience, without a stash of tried-and-true recipes, working from morning until night with a skeleton staff—most of the pastry crew had abdicated with the former chef—I managed to serve five desserts to the Cru customers in search of a sweet conclusion to their multicourse meal. My approach to pastry was indeed savory and redolent of memories of home: I ordered some wood-parched wild rice from my local Minnesota parcher on White Earth Reservation, fried it until it popped like popcorn, and steeped it in cream and maple syrup for panna cotta. I pressed slices of kabocha squash and sugared Meyer lemon into confited blocks of terrine to serve with the cheese course. I poached apricots overnight in a bath of spice-scented duck fat. Remembering the flavor of the anise hyssop that grew wild at our house in the woods, I made a syrup from its purple flower tufts and drizzled it over translucent slices of plum carpaccio.

  My first night on the pastry line, my ice cream quenelles looked ragged, unsure of themselves. After they got better and I got rolling, I was happy with the individual flavors, but the composed desserts themselves were still in sketch mode—not working as harmonically as I had envisioned them—and it pained me to send them out the door. Devastated, my ego took the blows and kept on going, wobbling forward like a smashed car in a demolition derby.

  When the first hothouse rhubarb arrived, I went back to what I knew, the thing that had gotten me the job in the first place: pie. As was the current fashion, I deconstructed it: rhubarb confit, marinated diced rhubarb in raspberry syrup, a crisp lid of pastry, a milky-green sweet-celery ice cream. I added more butter to the pie dough than I had to the twenty-five Thanksgiving pies and reversed the method; I creamed the butter and flour first like it was a French sable. It wasn’t the fragile crust of my Midwestern childhood, but it was more tender. I balanced the pastry disk on top of the rhubarb confit. I was hopeful.

  When Shea came back to the pastry department to taste it, he shot it down immediately.

  “I think you should bake this crust until it’s almost burned, dunk it in milk, infuse it, and turn it into a cream or an ice cream,” Shea snapped, crumbs falling out of his mouth. “It’s way too fucking dry.”

  “Without crust, it wouldn’t be a pie then, would it?” I volleyed.

  “Exactly. The texture is distracting. People want, you know, mum-mum.” He gummed his lips together dramatically. “Think toothless. They need to end on something soft.” He widened his eyes at me and walked away, shooting me the very same disappointed expression that Mario had given the pastry sous chef who gave him the dumpf plum dumpling to taste years before at Danube. I wanted to defend the primacy of American-style piecrust, but maybe he was right. Divorced from its pie and its function as the sling vessel for a sluicy middle, pie pastry was a touch dry.

  I crumbled up the pastry, threw it into a quart cup of milk, and tossed it on the walk-in shelf. I went back to the mixer and whipped up a Madeira-infused olive oil cake as plush as moss for a rhubarb upside-down cake, which eventually made it onto the menu.

  After three months of running the pastry kitchen, of sampling cakes and custards and syrups over and over again, a sickly taste of defeat came to settle semipermanently in the back of my mouth, and I realized something: working pastry made me very hungry. And a little nauseous. I scavenged what I could to fill my hollow—stray meat from the walk-in, cheese trim from the cheese plate, bread from the basket—but eating didn’t ferry it away. It was a strange, seeking, serrated kind of hunger, one that no amount of stolen duck meatballs shoved into stolen crusty rolls could fill.

  —

  Although my deftness in pastry was still up for debate, by this time I considered myself a full card-carrying member of the haute cuisine workforce, my self-transformation from civilian to professional complete. I knew how to break down any fish; how to make meat submit to full tenderness; how to confit anything—fruit, or vegetable, or protein—by gently coaxing out its natural juice, concentrating it, and encouraging it to flow back inside its bulging skin. The way I minced garlic illustrated how full circle I’d come. Back before I cooked on the line I took the word mince very literally and meticulously diced the garlic into tiny cubes with my dull, doltish knife. Later, in the subterranean Danube prep kitchen, when faced with an entire pint of garlic, I smashed the cloves against my board and ravaged them to bits with my sharp knife, as my fellow line cooks had t
aught me to do. By the time I reached Cru, my knife skills had caught up to my original nearsighted devotion, and I went back to slicing each ivory clove into thin pleats before dicing them into minuscule cubes, as you would an onion—but three times as quickly as before—so as not to get any of that sticky, bruised garlic juice on my board or in my sauté pan, where I knew that its old-tasting funk would flower in the hot fat. That was how picky, how fastidious, I had become.

  So I don’t know if it was the relentless parade of swirls, dots, and quenelles that ran like ticker tape behind my eyes, or the steady pressure from Aaron to go back home to Minnesota, or just basic fatigue, but one night, while I was staring into the blurry mirrored surface of the stainless-steel prep sink, digging out crud from its drain, the moment arrived when I knew that my tour of duty was over. My professional cooking tenure measured nine years, if I counted the Schwarzwald Inn. I was thirty years old. Possibly too old to remain just a line cook. Possibly too old to fight against Aaron’s insistence on our original plan, our seasonal flight pattern between New York and home.

  That night after service I blew into the office and gave Shea my two weeks’ notice.

  “This just isn’t working for me,” I wailed in distress. “I’ve spent years mastering savory. I’m just not skilled enough in pastry to keep putting out desserts that are ‘good enough.’ It’s making me crazy.”

  To this news Shea simply said, “Fine,” and looked away. “I’ve found your replacement.” His reaction to my giving notice, typical of most chefs, nonetheless pinched me with instant regret and a deep sense of betrayal, as intended.

  As a serial quitter, I was used to it, but leaving this job felt different. For years, I’d just put one foot in front of the other, marching from one top kitchen into the next, amassing more fine-dining experience than any cook needs, until I reached a fog-filled fork in the road. My urge to go home was just as strong as Aaron’s. The only thing I knew for sure was that while he pined for the landscape and the head-spinning weather, I itched to cook the hours-old vegetables from my garden.

  At the news that I was quitting my job so that we could spend the summer in Two Inlets, Aaron wasted no time in flying back home to check on the studio and to plant the garden. He called me with his giddy report: “You won’t believe how much the apple trees have grown! The plums are starting to bud out, and those black currants my dad planted took, too.”

  Meanwhile, I resolutely finished out my two weeks in pastry, quenelling perfect ovoids of salted caramel ice cream, filling sesame tuile cylinders with light poufs of olive-oil-passion-fruit curd, daydreaming of the fantasy European-inspired country restaurant I wanted to have someday, scribbling in my notebook sketches and recipes that I would make when I got back to Minnesota, all of them exercises in raising our rural ingredients to my new standards. Braunschweiger wasn’t that different from mortadella; it could be made into a buttery mousse. The apple-saffron puree I’d been making would taste even better—stronger, brighter—if I used our crab apples. The luscious smoked lake trout of my childhood could go anywhere salt cod could go: brandade, fritters, Spanish croquettes.

  Even though my pastry stint was clearly not a runaway success, I knew that cooking—meaning the job, the driving pace, the community of food freaks—had saved me. I’d been on the opening teams for two Manhattan restaurants, and on the first-year teams of two others, an experience that had pretty much served me my ass and my motivation on a platter all at once. The long hours and devotion had been worth it. Every mistake I’d made—and I’d made most of them by this point—had taught me how to dodge it in the future. I’d become more receptive to an ingredient’s needs. I knew that when I went home, I’d finally be able to give my heirloom Italian garden zucchini the respect it deserved. I thought back to a postservice meeting Shea had held during the opening weeks of Cru, when he thanked us for our over-overtime and our commitment to the team with a backhanded compliment: “But of course none of you are doing this for me. No one would be crazy enough to work hours like these unless they have bigger plans to be a chef of their own place.” We all nodded. I remember pausing with the cold ring of a postservice beer glued to my lips, wondering: Is that true of me? Will we stay in Brooklyn long enough to make my dream of cheffing a place come true? How would I ever find the resources, or the strength, to open a small, artful, ingredient-driven restaurant—the only kind I could envision having—in the wilds of rural northern Minnesota?

  Now that feeling returned, more insistent: Had I really sacrificed seven sleep-deprived years to the Kitchen God so that I could become a better civilian home cook? Like Shea said, that would be crazy.

  Despite the fact that my tour of duty was nearing its end, my food fixation kept on growing. It felt insatiable. The better I got at the job, the needier I became. I was always craving more: better raw materials, brighter spinach, tauter fish, shinier eggplant, more feral fruit. The original cooking habit that became an affliction was now morphing into something of an addiction. And when an addict reaches her bottom, she wants only one thing: to start over at the beginning with that flush of first attraction. This cooking enterprise had begun, and needed to culminate, with my roots. Not just the geographical roots of my home, but literally in the dirt. With the horseradish. Parsnips. Potatoes. Onions.

  Leaving Cru for Park Rapids was what my line-cooking buddies would call “not a strategic move.” Any restaurants near the level at which I’d been working were in Minneapolis—two hundred miles away. Unless I wanted to return to the Schwarzwald Inn—and I did not—I wouldn’t be able to cook professionally there. Thankfully, Aaron’s art sales, together with the cheapness of our country place and the subletting of our New York apartment to cover its rent, bought me some time.

  Thinking that I might have to fall back on my English degree and try to somehow write recipes and food stories for publication, I permitted myself to jot down sensory details about the kitchen in my notebooks—notations I’d previously refrained from making, considering them contraband, a mark of traitorship. One, my gray notebook, was filled with pages of cooks’ dialogue, the real illicit stuff. On the last day I realized that all of my notebooks were missing. I searched the kitchen frantically and eventually found two of them hiding behind the electric slicer—but not the gray one. I interrogated everyone about its whereabouts, ending with Shea.

  “You got some hot recipes in there, huh? You didn’t type them up?” He couldn’t stop the light from rolling over his face. I thought he looked as guilty as hell. This guy, who indulged in a practical-joke exchange with a chef friend that culminated in a padded envelope of express mail containing a “special kind of chocolate” that turned out to be the other chef’s line cook’s fresh turd…Even if he had killed the game for breach of decency, and sanitation, still: that guy would never steal a cook’s notebook.

  I never did find it, or discover who took it, but I’m pretty sure it was blatant sabotage. I loved these guys like my brothers. They could all be such little shits.

  As I walked back to the pastry kitchen and packed up my tools—bundling into my knife roll my sharp Japanese knives, offset spatulas, needle-thin cake-testers, the precious espresso plating spoons I’d stolen so long ago from Danube—the move home began to feel distressingly real. I was struck with the uneasy feeling that, as always, my idea of Minnesota-home was double-sided. It was not just one place but two: our home in the woods in Two Inlets, and its nearest town, the Park Rapids of my youth. Through the door cracked open by my memories of those natural flavors—the domineering wild raspberries, the sweet, grassy chives, the searing horseradish—other flavors rushed in, and as they came at me they grew progressively older and more troubling. The oily-bellied smoked lake trout I loved was there, along with the deep sweetness of my mom’s beef braised with onion soup mix, but they were followed by a march of powdered apple cider, canned black olives, mucky cream-of-mushroom-soup casseroles—the cheap, industrial, stereotypically Midwestern flavors that, as much as I wanted
to deny it, were folded up into my taste memory and my history as well. Specifically, the American cheese—sitting in a lurid pool like a melted sun, the cheese sauce that at one time so efficiently glued my mom’s pork roast, broccoli, and spaetzle together on the plate—and my family together at the table, had come due for a proper reckoning. I’d spent years trying to erase those homely flavors from my past, but when I gave my nostalgia an inch, it ran down the road a mile. Like an archaeologist picking in the hard-packed clay, I felt a need to return home to excavate the old flavors and all the feelings I’d ever tied to them.

  It occurred to me briefly that anyone with more sense would have just let the past stay flapping back behind her and moved on—like every other reasonable small-town girl who had moved to New York to find her people.

  7

  THE SWEET SMELL OF HOME FRIES

  Park Rapids, my hometown, is marooned way up in northern Minnesota, hours away from any big cities, but its location is fairly epic if you’re into American geography. Our town sits just a few miles from the headwaters of the Mississippi River, right on top of the Laurentian Divide, the invisible landmark named “The Height of Land” by the local Ojibwe people. On a map, the dotted line of the divide is what stakes the direction of water to flow in two directions, either north to Canada or south to the gulf, so the river veers sharply upward before heading back down all the way to the gulf in the shape of a shepherd’s hook—basically turning the country’s great waterway into one long, drawn-out, ever-thickening question mark. Park Rapids is positioned right in the crook, in the spot where the river hesitates before figuring out which way to go, at what might be called the river’s most dubious juncture.

  Even though the prevailing spirit in this community of three thousand inhabitants is overwhelmingly rural, I didn’t grow up in the country. I grew up in our town’s most aspirationally suburban neighborhood, within biking distance of Main Street, wearing side blinders to the wilderness. Believe it or not, given my childhood isolation, four hours from Minneapolis–St. Paul, I thought of myself as almost urban, because I was not a country kid; I was a townie.