Eating (14 page)

Alice’s invitation to Craig’s annual summer party meant that she had been accepted into his pantheon. On the day she arrived, we had lunch in my garden: Gardiner’s Bay oysters on the half-shell, and lobster rolls with curly potato chips, in dappled sunlight under my frail old cherry tree. This was her first experience of a Maine lobster roll, and she was suitably impressed. The following day, we drove over to Craig’s, and soon I lost
track of Alice in the crowd. Finding an unoccupied space on a couch, I asked the handsome woman with snow-white hair who had already taken refuge there whether I could join her. She was Maida Heatter, whose dessert cookbooks I had collected and treasured. I have forgotten what we talked about, but when I got up from the couch to find Alice and drive back to Sag Harbor, I had become Maida’s publisher, and she invited me to her home in Miami for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving had always been my favorite or least unfavorite holiday, since, unlike Halloween, Christmas, and Easter, its pagan soul had not been turned into a marketing opportunity by monotheists. On eastern Long Island—amid the late-fall harvest, with rows of pumpkin, cabbage, and cauliflower still on the ground, and the cornstalks not yet cut—the ritual feast seemed real: a brined wild turkey stuffed with local oysters and corn bread and served with sweet local rutabaga mashed in butter. Because Lincoln had made it a national holiday, Thanksgiving also retains an element of the sacred, especially in Sag Harbor, with its Civil War monument and old houses, most of which, like mine, were standing just where they are today when that war was fought.

Maida’s Miami, with its sea-washed sunlight, was not a typical Thanksgiving venue, but in her sunny kitchen, with its polished copper and its graduated nest of red Le Creuset pots, and her ginger biscotti, panforte, and chocolate brownies on the spotless counter arrayed as if for a photo shoot, everything was clean, well lit, and in
its place, comforting, reassuring, mellow, with the Inter-coastal Waterway sparkling just beyond the glass doors to the deck. Maida’s husband, Ralph, was alive then, and the other guests besides myself were Maida’s great friend Wolfgang Puck, whose cookbooks I had begun to publish; his wife, Barbara; and Craig. Judy, who was not yet my wife, had flown in from North Africa via Paris, arriving with a branch of fresh dates and a vacherin cheese just as Maida was lifting her magnificent popovers from the oven. Wolf had brought with him from California pumpkin soup and the turkey, which was now out of the oven. I brought caviar, Craig brought champagne; and so we celebrated the harvest.

My publishing career has been an extension of my formal education, a lifetime enrollment in a personal university whose faculty is the authors I publish and whose curriculum is their books. But with cookbooks the rewards can be more than merely intellectual. A dozen years ago, for example, I signed a contract with Frankie Pellegrino, the co-owner of Rao’s, a tiny Italian restaurant with a mere ten tables on the corner of Pleasant Avenue and 117th Street in East Harlem, a relic of the old Italian neighborhood that had once flourished there, before East Harlem became Latino. Rao’s is an intense distillation of that old Italian culture, and its tables are the de facto property of their longtime occupants:so-and-so “owns” table number one on Mondays, someone else has it on Thursdays, and so on. So, to book a table when one of the regulars stays home, you have to call Frankie on his private
number. I offered Frankie a contract for
Rao’s Cookbook
not only because Rao’s serves the best Southern Italian menu in New York, if not the world, and I wanted the recipes, but because I hoped that Frankie would award me a table of my own. My scheme backfired.
Rao’s Cookbook
became a best-seller, and the demand for tables swamped Frankie’s facilities.

One of the charms of Rao’s had been that when you booked a table you had it for the night. You could sit over a bottle of wine and dessert and listen to the jukebox while now and then Frankie or one of his operatic customers would sing arias and others would join in. I was always surprised by the number of passable tenors at Rao’s. But now that the book had become a best-seller, Frankie had no choice but to book two seatings and let people wait three deep at the bar for the regulars to leave. Before I published Frankie’s book, I managed to eat at Rao’s three or four times a year. Now I don’t go at all. Instead, I make Rao’s seafood salad, his orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausage, and his chicken scarpariello at home. The dishes are utterly simple to prepare, and after the usual trial and error you will think they came straight from Rao’s kitchen.

For my slightly modified version of Rao’s chicken scarpariello for six, you will need two three-and-a-half-pound chickens, spines removed, cut into eight pieces each, each half-breast with the first wing joint attached and the ribs removed, legs and
thighs separated. Wash and thoroughly dry the chicken pieces, preferably overnight in the refrigerator, or with a hair dryer. Heat a half-cup of extra-virgin olive oil in a heavy pan or cocotte, and brown the chicken over medium-high heat, but don’t cook it through. Remove the chicken, and drain it on paper towels. Cut two hot and two sweet Italian sausages into bite-size pieces, and brown these in the same oil. Remove them with a slotted spoon, and pile them up with the chicken. Then julienne two large bell peppers and a jalapeño (no seeds);halve and slice thin a medium-size sweet onion, and mince a teaspoon of garlic. Toss the vegetables in the oil, and cook them until they soften, adding more oil if needed. Remove the vegetables, drain the oil from the pan, and wipe it dry, then return the chicken, sausage, and softened vegetables to the pan. Add two hot, vinegared cherry peppers, a half-cup of red-wine vinegar, a half-cup of chicken stock, and a half-cup of dry white wine with a tablespoon of dried oregano. Cut three or four fingerling potatoes in half lengthwise, and put them in the pot. Cover the pot and cook gently until the chicken is just cooked through, five or six minutes. Do not overcook the chicken. Remove the chicken, sausage, and vegetables, except the potatoes, and reduce the sauce until it is slightly thickened and the potatoes are tender. Add salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste, and ladle the sauce over the chicken, sausage, and vegetables. The prep will take half an hour or so, but the dish itself could hardly be easier. Be sure to wash your hands after handling the jalapeños. You should be aware of but not overwhelmed by the heat from the jalapeños and cherry peppers.

Rao’s orecchiette (little ears) pasta with broccoli rabe and sausage is as easy to make as its name suggests. Set a pot of salted water to boil. Cut two sweet and two hot Italian sausages into one-inch pieces, and brown them, along with a garlic clove, in a heavy pot filmed with olive oil, large enough to hold a pound of cooked orecchiette. When the water boils, add a bunch of broccoli rabe with the ends trimmed to about an inch, and as soon as the water begins to boil again, remove the rabe with tongs and plunge it into cold water. Then drain, squeezing out as much water as possible, and coarsely chop it. Toss it in with the sausage, and reheat it. Then add a pound of orecchiette to the boiling broccoli water, and when it is al dente, lift it out with a Chinese strainer and add it to the sausage and broccoli rabe. If you don’t plan to serve this at once, save the pasta water and use it to refresh the dish. Serve it with fresh-grated pecorino. It will be just as good as Rao’s, but not nearly as much fun as eating it at one of Rao’s tables in the old days, when Frankie would turn off the jukebox and a guy in the back of the room would get up to sing “Un Bel Di.”

For several years in the 1980s, when I was Gore Vidal’s publisher and friend, we would meet in Paris, usually in the spring, and head south to tour the great restaurants of the provinces: Pyramide in Vienne, Pic in Valence, Troisgros in Roanne, Père Bis in Talloires on Lake
Annecy, Moulin de Mougins, L’Oasis, and La Réserve on the Riviera, to mention only those that come first to mind after so many years. These were splendid trips. Gore was a fine companion—learned, stoic, easy, generous, incapable of low thoughts or motives, but with a cool wit and a sharp tongue. He was then at the height of his powers. I shared his pleasure. He had a gift for friendship but harbored no illusions about human nature. He had come of age in FDR’s Washington, amid the great nobles of the New Deal, and though he noticed the frailties of his distinguished elders, he regretted the long imperial decline from their Augustan moment.

Since neither of us was good at driving, especially after lunch—I think that Gore didn’t drive at all—we hired a car and driver. We were told that he knew the local roads. One late afternoon, as we were heading south, the driver lost his way. I remember a road sign pointing to Mont-de-Marsan, but where this was in relation to our destination neither we nor the driver had any idea. It had begun to rain, and through the windshield I could see our forlorn driver at the roadside, holding a map, staring up at the Mont-de-Marsan sign, as helpless as ourselves. Gore meanwhile had opened his red
Michelin
and taken command. “We shall dine and spend the night at Magescq,” he announced in his Napoleonic mode. “The route from here is direct.” “What is Magescq?” I asked. “It is a two-star inn, in Les Landes. If we head into the sunset,
we shall be there for dinner,” Gore intoned as I scribbled a few notes. We retrieved our driver and were on our way.

Except for its church, its mansard steeple an inverted pot painted black topped by a spire, like the Kaiser’s helmet, and the two-star Relais de la Poste with its pebbled courtyard, Magescq is little more than a widening of the old Napoleonic road from Bordeaux to the Spanish border. In a roadside field in the early-spring drizzle, the kitchen boys in their whites were kicking a soccer ball. Ours was the only car in the pebbled courtyard. The season had not yet begun. We were led upstairs to our rooms by the proprietor’s daughter, a pretty girl in her early teens, her smile conveying the correct solicitude and distance, as if she had been performing these duties for decades. In the morning, she would appear in her robe to serve orange juice, croissants, and filtre in a breakfast room off the lobby. In my narrow room, where the bed occupied nearly the entire space, a card was propped against the phone with the number of the local doctor.

The dining room that evening was empty except for our driver at a corner table near the kitchen and a skeletal man and woman in matching black turtlenecks, who must have arrived after we did. They were silently sharing a
plateau
of Belon oysters. At the entrance to the two-star dining room, soigné but simple beneath an ancient beamed ceiling, were a silver tray of thrush and grouse in their feathers, and above them, propped
against the wall, a larger tray of feathered woodcock, their beaks crossed like swords at a military wedding. These and a display of pheasant were framed by boxes of white asparagus, and baskets of morels, mâche, and fraises des bois.

That evening remains forever vivid in memory: the dining room with its soft lighting and aura of well-being; the hint of butter, shallots, and herbs in the air; the captain serving foie gras with green grapes from a porcelain cocotte, then pouring a perfectly chilled Sauternes; later, the salmon, so fresh that its eyes seemed to blink when it was brought to the table, and the white asparagus with its subtle hollandaise, and the Corton, and then the lamb. After a pause, some local cheese, a soufflé, filtre, Armagnac, in dated pots. Gore went up to his room with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. I lingered over coffee and Armagnac in the empty dining room until the lights were dimmed.

I have tried to duplicate this meal, as fugitive as a dream, with no success, but when I return to Magescq, it is as if I had never left.

The Inn at Little Washington, about an hour and a half south of the District of Columbia, with its whimsical elegance, glorious service, and superb kitchen, is my other favorite country inn, which, like Magescq, exists in a timeless world of its own, despite the sleek Washington notables who punctuate its dining room. I had been hearing about the Inn for years and meant one day
to go there, but the trip from New York by plane to Dulles Airport and then by car to Little Washington seemed impossibly difficult. Then I came upon a remark by Patricia Wells, the Paris food critic, that her three favorite restaurants in America that year were Chez Panisse, the wonderful Café Boulud in New York, and the Inn at Little Washington. Since I had by then published the
Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook
and the incomparable Daniel Boulud’s
Cooking with Daniel Boulud,
I picked up the phone and asked Patrick O’Connell, the chef/proprietor of the Inn, if he would like to make a third. So we met at the Inn, and the fine book that resulted is like Patrick, wise, elegant, honest, the result of years of discriminating practice, and, as he writes in the preface, “uniquely American though full of influences from other countries.”
The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook
stayed on the
Washington Post
best-seller list for weeks. His lobster omelette with rainbow salsa is as easy to make as it is a joy to serve. It was awarded GQ’s Golden Dish Award as one of the ten best restaurant dishes in the world. How
GQ
managed to test all the restaurant dishes in the world to determine its list of ten is unclear. Patrick’s lobster omelette is the school-lunchroom Spanish omelette with great panache, fit for a king’s late supper with his lover or lunch with his wife the next day. For those who cannot make the journey to Little Washington, at the edge of the Shenandoah, Patrick’s
Inn at Little Washington Cookbook
is a reasonable substitute.

For a two-egg omelette to serve one, whisk two eggs in a small bowl with a tablespoon of water, a few grains of sea salt, and a dash of white pepper. In a small sauté pan, melt a chunk of butter and warm a tablespoon of finely chopped shallot and enough coarsely chopped cooked lobster to fill a two-egg omelette. If you warm a little extra, serve it alongside the omelette. Then, in a seven-inch sauté pan (I use Teflon;Patrick, a purist, does not), melt a tablespoon of butter and, tipping the pan this way and that, spread the butter across the bottom and along the sides. You may prefer to do this by holding the butter with a fork and painting the pan with the melting butter. Patrick holds his pan over a flame. I improvise a bain-marie by placing a pan over a pot of simmering water. In either case, the pan should not be too hot. As soon as the butter foams and gives out its aroma, add the eggs and scramble them with a fork. When the curds mount up nicely, stop stirring and remove the pan from the heat. If you are using a non-Teflon pan, gently loosen the eggs from the pan with a rubber spatula. Sprinkle a vertical row of grated white cheddar through the diameter of the omelette. Top the cheese with the lobster/shallot mixture, and cover with another sprinkling of cheddar. Patrick folds the omelette neatly, like a letter, by bringing the bottom of the egg mixture to the middle of the pan and folding the top of the mixture down, to make a flat package with a seam. He then plates the elegant omelette seam side down. Since I’m not serving paying guests, I simply roll the
omelette with its filling up with a fork and slide it onto a plate. The salsa is a little diced red, yellow, and green bell pepper with some diced red onion marinated for a half hour or so in equal parts balsamic vinegar and spicy olive oil and lightly warmed. Salt and pepper to taste. Spread the salsa along the length of the omelette, and place any extra lobster at the side.