Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (6 page)

By June, it starts to get too hot for even the superhero to turn the oven up to 450. I move the asparagus to the grill. This involves threading stalks of asparagus onto three skewers until I have built a kind of raft that rests on the grill without falling through. Some of the asparagus stalks are too thin to be pierced this way. Inevitably, something about the precarious arrangement fails. Stalks fall onto the coals and shrink into sparklers. Some stay on top but blacken. The few that survive make it worth the effort.

I keep eating. I don’t know what nutrients are in asparagus, but I am infused with them. I ride my bike and plant herbs outside. To be this happy in Michigan borders on insanity. Yes! The old winter depression bordered on insanity too. Living in a place of lesser contrasts, how would you know what it feels like to come back from the dead?

I steamed, I roasted, I grilled. I was not tired of it yet.

There was no particular reason, after a while, for my determination to eat asparagus every single day it was in the market, except that I had been doing so since the beginning and was assuming the pride of a challenge. By June, there were other vegetables in the market. I could have quit. But I wanted to be
Spargelfrau.
Sometimes, eating alone, you are humble. Sometimes, though, the reason to go through with cooking for yourself is the chance to brag about it afterward. When I talked to my ex-boyfriend on the phone, we would recount meals we had made for ourselves—
see, I live pretty nice on my own.
The asparagus thing was more of a party trick.

Perhaps I should have admitted from the beginning that there is something I love about asparagus aside from the miracle of spring, and even aside from its deliciousness: I love the pee. Nothing seems to redeem the workings of the digestive system like asparagus. It’s another verification, after a long winter, that I am alive. Natural processes are working! In fact, what the human digestive system and asparagus do to each other, each proclaiming itself, seems downright heroic.

I have heard the pee is genetic: some people get it, some people don’t. The first bite of that first stalk of raw asparagus was all it took for me. The pee smells like absolutely no other pee. It almost smells good. And it always makes me feel redeemed. This is the pee from a healthy vegetable! Beet pee, on the other hand, is always alarming—I never
remember
that I have eaten the beets, and I think I am dying—and coffee pee makes me suspicious, as if the coffee has stripped all the minerals from my insides and dumped them, like a whole bottle of vitamins, out at once.

Despite my airing of it here, digestive processing of asparagus is an intense personal experience. You should enjoy it alone. Some things you should make sure to eat together with people—garlic, sardines. Your breath will smell, your hands will smell, you will exude a special kind of sweat, and it will all be wonderful if your friends are doing it too. But you can eat asparagus all alone and then socialize without fear. Kiss whom you like. The pee (I hope) is yours alone, unlike your breath or your sweat, which you can’t help but share.

In fact, too many people should
not
eat asparagus together. When I worked at a restaurant during the height of asparagus season, when every employee was eating some form of it for their meal, the unisex staff bathroom was impenetrable with a kind of asparagus fog.

The superhero starts to flag in her determination. Asparagus season is as long as Lent. I have to fool myself by not making asparagus the main, plain ingredient. After all, I remember, it’s supposed to be a side dish. Those evil supermarket asparagi sit around all winter waiting for someone to overcook them and leave them in a puddle next to a Kroger pork chop.

I can disguise the asparagus by cutting it up in bits and tucking it into things. Leftover cooked asparagus goes into omelets and frittatas. I hide asparagus underneath Gruyère on toast. I sneak it into risotto with lemon and Parmesan. I make it into soup with cream and tarragon. I put it in pasta with garlic and anchovies. I eat it in bites that alternate with bites of hardboiled egg.

As fussy as you might get with asparagus recipes, the superhero has some limits. Stop at hollandaise sauce—there’s always too much of it. Nor is it superheroic to wrap asparagus in prosciutto. It insults both the prosciutto and what’s inside it. That kind of food is made to impress people—not that a heap of asparagus isn’t good with a heap of prosciutto.

But now there is solid good weather and a variety of produce. I have come back to life, and I am forgetting my gratitude for the vegetable that summoned me from the dead. Will I ever be able to pee again without forcing a reprise of my meal into my head? Is there anything new I can do with this stuff? In late June, I start to hate asparagus. My body is desperate for nonasparagic nutrients. The superhero skips a day. Two days. The superhero crumbles, forsaking her old fuel.

But then, on the tables of the real
Spargelfrau
in the farmers’ market, the bunches start to fatten and then to dwindle. I am penitent. It is going to disappear, and I am going to miss it for another ten months. I buy from this last burst of asparagus, pay homage, cooking it so that it shines alone, roasted in olive oil and salt and pepper, with just a little lemon over it.

And thankfully, it is gone. Mirage or no, there is not a stalk left in the field. There is so much in the market—eggplants, carrots, beets, bell peppers, red and blue and brown potatoes, fade-to-white leeks—that I don’t have to champion any one thing at all—until the fall, when I will be the Empress of Pears.

HOW TO BE AN ASPARAGUS SUPERHERO

Begin at the first hint of asparagus in your area.

Pick asparagus in the early morning while it is still dewy, or find people who wake up on dewy mornings and pick it for you. Have some coffee.

Eat the first piece raw. Test your biceps.

Week One: Cook the asparagus unadulterated for as long as possible. Keep some eggs and starches—rice, pasta, bread—around, and just enough meat to use as a condiment, like some bacon or a jar of anchovies.

See how fast you can run, how high you can jump.

Alone or in company, use your fingers.

Have plenty of fluids. Pee regularly.

Tell everyone you never skip a day. Eat to impress.

If you use the grill, make sure to have a steak or a fish to put on it too, so you won’t be disappointed when you lose all the asparagus to the coals.

Week Six: Just when you think you cannot be a superhero any longer, break asparagus into bits to hide it inside things.

Week Seven (The End): Roast one last time. Squeeze lemon to finish. Finish.

L
isten, truth is, I don’t cook. As a matter of fact, I hate to cook, I really do. I mean, I love to eat, I just hate to cook. So I married a man who cooks, and he was an amazing cook—a chef, really. Then again, great chef, lousy husband. Now there’s a surprise.

Anyhow, now that I’m alone again, or rather, now that I’m single again, everything my ex taught me to cook turns my stomach. Which is a shame, really: his artichokes with vinaigrette were fantastic. His Israeli salad was a piece of cake. And that other dish…what’s it called? It’s Middle Eastern, and there are numerous variations, but all you need is a can of tomatoes, an onion, a couple eggs, and bread…. No, I can’t remember what it’s called.

Just as well, I suppose, because I can’t make those things. I mean, I know how to make them, I just can’t bring myself to make anything that reminds me of my ex. Which takes me back to my long history with rice. Rice and sugar. Rice and soy sauce. Rice and beans. Oh, there you go—there’s something: my rice and beans are edible. Good thing, too, because that’s about all I can afford to eat these days. Honestly, there are days I’m still scraping change for the subway, so, fortunately or unfortunately, cooking is the least of my worries.

You know, the other day, I was eavesreading on the subway, and there was an ad in the paper that said
Get Your Gourmet On…
We’re talking
AM New York,
okay? Of course I had to laugh, but this whole fine dining, pop-star chef, Food TV craze, it’s gone too far. But what really kills me are these people who say things like,
Oh, I could never live without great food and wine.
And on one hand, I know what they’re saying, and I try not to be self-righteous, I really do. But on the other hand, I just smile, thinking, I’m sorry, but…do you know what an
asshole
you sound like saying that? Actually, come to think of it, my ex-husband used to say that. Gee, what a coincidence, huh?
Joke.

All I’m saying is that we came from completely different worlds, and to be perfectly honest, there was a time that had no small appeal. I was fascinated. I mean, come on—when we started dating, I was working two or three part-time jobs, trying to write, subsisting on a steady diet of Uncle Ben’s, and he was a master sommelier with a degree in restaurant management who’d moved to New York to open his own restaurant. So of course we had very different views on the place and importance of food in our lives, that was a given. What I didn’t know was just how much food could unite or divide two people.

My husband summed it up in a single question, which I remember him asking while we were standing in that broom-closet-size kitchen on Chambers, shortly after we’d married. And the reason I remember is because I thought it was one of the strangest questions I’d ever heard. Were you raised on
canned food
? he said. And I’m telling you,
the look,
the shudder of disgust that ran up and down his spine as he spoke the word
canned—
obviously, something was wrong, but I had no idea what. I was just like, babe, you know the can opener’s the one piece of kitchen equipment that I know how to use.

Seriously, canned food, as opposed to what, not eating? Really, what a
bizarre question,
I thought, and I almost started laughing, but all I said was, Yes, why? And then he just sort of nodded, like, oh, how
in
teresting…. We
never
ate canned food in my house, he said, taking his plate into the other room. It sounds trivial, I know, but it wasn’t—not to me, at least. Not if you knew the guy and knew how much food meant to him, what it said about a person in his eyes. And basically, I just got
slagged,
whether he meant to or not. So I stood there a moment, feeling confused, then strangely embarrassed of myself, my family…. So of course there was nothing to do but mock him, wrinkling my nose and repeating the comment in my snottiest tone:
We
never
ate canned food in my house….

Childish, I know: I freely admit that it was completely immature of me. But then again, it did make me feel better, mocking him, much better, actually. And the fact of the matter is that we did eat canned food in my house—and lots of it, too. What, does that make me
low class
? Fine. You know what else? Just for the record, I must have been twenty before I learned that Ragu wasn’t spaghetti sauce and iceberg wasn’t lettuce.

Yes, I was raised on your standard Monday-through-Friday menu of Shake ‘n Bake, Spanish rice, tuna casserole, goulash, and leftovers (aka Fend-for-Yourself Night)—you know, good ol’ bang-for-your-buck cooking. Out of a can, yes. I mean, seriously,
what did he think
? I told him we were poor—my family, my mother’s family—I’m sorry, but isn’t it common knowledge that poor means
canned,
and canned means
food
in a poor family? And you’re damn glad to have it, too: that’s right. Now shut up and eat.

That was my mother’s family, at least, which was your basic small-town Catholic lower-middle-class family of ten. In other words, there was no discussion about
food,
are you kidding? You ate what was put in front of you; you ate everything on your plate; and you never, ever complained. Because any child who complained or refused to eat everything on their plate got their ass beat and sent to bed, hungry. That’s Catholicism in my book: it’s not the number of mouths to feed, it’s the one who’s howling, getting their ass paddled at the kitchen table. And everyone else just keeps eating, absolutely.

But of course I would say that: one of the only times in my life I was ever spanked was at the dinner table. I was about three, I guess, and one weekend, my mom made this huge pot of chili—another house specialty, chili and Fritos. And because we were broke, she made enough chili to last a week, and it did. So, by Friday night, five nights later, I’d had enough of chili, and I refused to eat my dinner. Even worse, I sassed off right to her face.
I hate chili!
I said, going so far as to shove the bowl across the table. I mean, it was just your basic bratty kid behavior, right? So I was ordered to sit there until I finished my dinner, which of course I refused to do.

So I sat at the table. And I sat. And I sat. And from time to time, my mom checked on my progress, but of course there was none. Because I had decided I would rather spend the rest of my life at that table than eat another bite of chili. It was a Mexican standoff, all right, a Knee-high Noon, and I knew I was pressing my luck. Oh, hell yeah. I knew, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t eating that shit.

Finally, a few hours later—and granted, it might have been forty minutes, who knows?—but at some point, my mother asked one last time if I was going to eat my dinner.
Never,
I thought, throwing myself across the table and hiding my face in my forearms, nodding, but she wasn’t impressed with my performance. Keep in mind that I’d never been spanked before—my mother didn’t need to raise a hand, considering she had this terrifying register of voice that said
Don’t…fuck with me!
And that was the voice she used. This is your
last warning.
Are you going to eat your dinner? she said, firmly taking hold of my biceps. Double down, right? And I wasn’t scared—it was thrilling, actually.
Last warning:
I’d never made it that far! It was the moment of truth, and I said no.
No,
I said, and that was it: snap!

I mean,
she lost it.
Oh, man, she pulled me from the table with such force that I knocked over the chair as she started wailing, paddling my ass. Honestly, if she’d had a wooden spoon, she would’ve broken it on the first swing. But what I remember most was her hand coming down, that there was just this haywire rhythm to her arm, like she couldn’t hit me fast or hard enough, and I remember thinking—no, I somehow remember
knowing
that she couldn’t stop hitting me even if she wanted to. When she finally did, I was sent to my room, and we never spoke of it again.

In all fairness, maybe she only spanked me a few times, who knows, but that is definitely how I remember it. So it was a good twenty years before we ever talked about the incident. I’m not even sure how it came up in conversation, I was probably telling her what a terrible, abusive mother she had been all my life. Oh, that’s right—I cited the chili beating as but one example, and we started laughing, and then my mom finally told me the rest of the story.

The simple fact was we had no money—I mean,
no money—
no food, nothing. We had absolutely nothing else to eat in the house—no juice, no milk, bread, cereal—and my mom didn’t know how she would feed me the next morning, or the next day, or the next. I don’t know how she got us through that weekend; I could never ask. So yeah, she lost it. And I’m sure I would have done the same in her position. Which might have something to do with never having wanted to be in her position, but anyhow.

Now my mother is an amazing woman, truly, but she’s nothing if not proud. Seriously, it took years of pleading before she allowed me to trick or treat, because she always called it the Beggars’ Banquet, and
we did not take handouts.
Good Lord. Anyhow, a few years later, sometime during the late seventies, I can only imagine how difficult it was for her to apply for welfare. Then again, she had a kid, and you do what you have to do.

So we did our shopping at stores that took food stamps, and I was enrolled in one of those programs you see advertised on the subway, usually in Spanish. You know those posters with a picture of a smiling young woman and her baby or maybe just some cute little kid—
such bullshit,
but anyhow. You know what I’m talking about, those posters advertising food programs in which the low income can enroll their kids, so you can be sure your kid gets fed one solid meal a day. Which is usually breakfast, every day before school. At least that was the program I was enrolled in, and it used to shame the hell out of me, slipping out of the cafeteria every morning.

Of course it’s ridiculous now, but I used to live in mortal fear that one of my classmates would see me and then the whole school, K through nine, would know that Courtney Eldridge was a welfare case…
oh, no
! Yes, I laugh. Then again, looking at it now, it’s hard to say who was more proud, my mom or me.

I will say that my mother never encouraged or discouraged me from the kitchen. For better or worse, my guess is she never wanted me to feel the kitchen was my place—not unless I wanted it to be, and I didn’t. There were just too many other things I wanted to do. But what I realized early on was that the kitchen was always the easiest place to talk to my mom, if I caught her while she was cooking, and how meditative it seemed, watching her hands chopping and stirring. I used to sit on the far counter, watching her cook, and we’d talk in a way that we never spoke anywhere else. Intimately, I suppose, for lack of a better word.

In fact, the first and only time I ever asked my mother if she believed in God was in the kitchen. I mean, I must have been twenty years old, I’d never been confirmed, my mom hadn’t been to Mass in a good twenty years, and I was
still
afraid to ask. It’s just one of those things we don’t talk about. God and food, yes.

Now my husband, on the other hand…My husband was Israeli first and Jewish second, as they say. Secular, in other words. But if you ask me, all that really means is the guy had no problem complaining and no tact when doing so. Needless to say, he was extremely, I daresay violently, opinionated on the subject of fine dining in New York City. Case in point: I had to edit the word
battlefield
out of his business plan, okay? And furthermore, not only was our fine dining completely substandard, New Yorkers didn’t know
anything
about great food and wine, in his opinion, and I had no choice but to hold my tongue.

I mean, there was a part of me that balked at what I considered nothing more than typical Eurotrash condescension, but then again, how could I argue? Like I said, when we met, I didn’t know my Michelin from Meineke, I’m serious. Whereas my husband’s entire life was spent traveling the world, staying at four-and five-star hotels, dining at three-and four-star restaurants, and living a very good life, as he was always the first to point out—well, unless his mother was there to remind him first. In any case, when I said he was a chef, I didn’t mean he held a culinary degree from CIA or Johnson & Wales, or any of those schools—what need? He had his mother.

Oh, I heard all about his mother, long before we met, yes…. Former actress, former model, semiretired world-renowned food critic—a
gastronomic writer,
to be exact. The only thing I heard about more than his mother, really, was his mother’s cooking, because
no one
cooks better than my mother, he always said. And not only had she been teaching him about food and wine since infancy, the two of them had been attending special cooking schools and private classes all over the world since he was in his teens, basically.

So yes, my husband was an unapologetic snob, but not impolite. No, he was always polite in the restaurant, but I always knew what was coming, soon as we stepped out the door. This look would just cross his face, somewhere between rage and asking if the chef ate canned food growing up. But of course it wasn’t just the food, it was the entire dining experience: the layout; the decor; the lighting; the service; the menu; the specials; how efficiently the kitchen was running that night; and then, the moment of truth, when the first course appeared….