Eating (3 page)

Over the years, with the help of
Fannie Farmer
and
The Settlement Cook Book,
her repertory improved. I remember in summertime bowls of coleslaw, beet soup, platters of fried or roasted chicken, peach, apple, and blueberry pies; in winter, double brisket and braised parsnips, breast of veal stuffed with Swiss chard, lamb shank and shoulder braised slowly for hours, caramelized, falling off the bone, and ginger cookies. My grandparents were ethnically Jewish but unobservant freethinkers who spoke a Yankee-inflected Yiddish with a few French Canadian exclamations among themselves, and a Yiddish-inflected Yankee to us. “I reckon,” my grandfather, who wore fireman’s suspenders and canvas trousers, would say when he meant “yes.” On Jewish holidays, my grandmother cooked for the synagogue, having convinced her neighbors, as she had convinced herself, that she was a superior cook. On those occasions, her chickens had to be killed and dressed according to Jewish ritual. It was my job to stuff three or four of her plump fowl into burlap bags and carry them live down Prospect Hill to the ritual butcher, who, in dim light under a low ceiling in a windowless cellar, slit their throats, left them to bleed into a funnel, and handed them over to be plucked by a hunched figure all but invisible in a dark corner, as in a Rembrandt etching. Some years later, I helped my older cousin Leon, who was enrolled in Columbia College, where I would later study, carry a set of Macaulay’s
History of England,
which he had found in a secondhand bookshop, up the hill.
The books were heavier than the chickens. Climbing up Prospect Hill with chickens and books—a prelude to my life.

Today, with fair-quality farm-raised chicken breasts, skinned and boned, in the supermarket, and inexpensive chicken parts to enrich the organic broth sold in cartons, there is no excuse for a dry and tasteless chicken pot pie.

First I bake separately a puff-pastry disk a little bigger than the circumference of the cocotte in which I make the filling. I bake the pastry between two sheet pans to form a crunchy, buttery, waferlike crust barely a quarter-inch thick.

I begin with two and a half cups of all-purpose flour, a pinch of salt, and half a stick of cold, unsalted butter, roughly chopped in chunks, all whirled together in a food processor until the butter is incorporated into the flour but still a little lumpy.

Then I add a scant half-cup or so of cold water a little at a time and pulse off and on quickly until the dough begins to form a firm, crumbly paste, which I scoop from the processor, form into a ball, and flatten into a rectangle. You may want to wrap the dough in foil and let it rest for twenty minutes in the refrigerator, long enough for the gluten to relax, but I don’t bother with this step. If the dough is too crumbly, I add a little water and knead it into the dough. If it’s too wet, I knead in a little flour. Next I roll this dough out on a cool marble slab into an oblong about an eighth of
an inch thick, and cut and shape a quarter-pound of unsalted butter into a somewhat smaller and thinner oblong, which I center atop the pastry. Then I fold the dough in thirds—like a letter—around the butter, crimping the edges so that the butter is completely enclosed.

Now I turn the dough with its butter filling ninety degrees, roll it out again as an oblong, and fold and repeat the process for six turns, being careful at each turn to keep the butter tightly sealed. You can keep track of the turns by marking each with a thumbprint. You must work quickly, in a cool kitchen, or the butter will melt. To avoid this, chill the dough in the refrigerator after each turn. This will keep the butter firm and give the gluten a chance to relax, so that the dough won’t spring back when you roll it out. I use an old-fashioned glass rolling pin, actually a bottle that can be filled with ice water, with a glass handle at either end. Finally, with a very sharp knife (or a pizza wheel), I cut the dough into a round whose circumference is slightly larger than that of the pot in which I will make the pie filling, being sure to crimp the edges to keep the butter from leaking out. With the oven at
425 degrees, I then cut a circle of parchment paper the size of the pastry circle and lay it on a baking sheet and lay the pastry atop the paper, pricking a few holes in it here and there. Then I lay another round of parchment paper atop the pastry, place a second baking sheet atop the second parchment, and bake the pastry for about fifteen minutes, until crisp and beginning to brown. Next I reduce the heat to 350 degrees and bake for another fifteen minutes, being careful not to let the crust burn. I roll out and bake the scraps in ornamental shapes. This is less complicated than it sounds;nevertheless, you may prefer Dufour or another brand made with butter, in which case follow the instructions in the package.

For the filling, you will need two approximately sixteen-ounce skinless and boneless organic chicken breasts, cut into one-inch cubes. Pat the cubes dry with a paper towel and toss them in two tablespoons of heated but not smoking vegetable oil in a heavy Dutch oven or cocotte until light brown but not cooked through, and set aside. Clean the pot, melt two tablespoons of butter in the clean pot, and add a dozen or so pearl onions. (You can peel them easily by trimming the stem end and placing them in a lightly oiled pan in a 400-degree oven for ten minutes until soft and lightly browned. When they are cool, slip off the skins.) Set the onions aside with the chicken cubes and add to the pot a cup of diced carrots, a cup of diced celery, a sweet onion neatly diced, and a half-pound of bite-size cremini or other interesting mushrooms. Small chanterelles or morels, if you can find them, are ideal. Or use small white mushrooms.

Add butter as needed. Sauté carrots and celery with the onions and mushrooms until soft and slightly colored, and set aside with the pearl onions and chicken.

Meanwhile, in a separate pot, bring four cups of strong, defatted homemade chicken broth to a boil, or reduce six cups of organic stock from a carton, enriched with chicken parts and defatted, to four cups. Clean the cocotte once more, and in it melt six tablespoons of butter. Whisk in three tablespoons or so of Wondra instant-blending flour or arrowroot, and cook, stirring, until just turning light brown, then whisk in the boiling stock, smoothing out the lumps, and one and a half cups of half and half, three or four tablespoons to taste of dry sherry, chopped leaves from a stem of fresh rosemary, and a tablespoon each of fragrant fresh thyme and Italian parsley. Add sea salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste and the juice of two lemons. Bring to a slow boil, reduce, and simmer until the sauce is thick enough to coat a spoon. If it’s too thick, thin it with more stock and/or half and half. Cover the pot with parchment or plastic wrap until ready to serve. If using fresh peas, cook them first over a low flame in a small pot with a few lettuce leaves and a little butter, but do not add water. When they begin to soften, remove and discard the lettuce leaves and add the peas to the reserved chicken and vegetables. Otherwise, defrost and add a box of frozen peas. When ready to serve, remove the parchment or plastic wrap. Stir in the chicken and vegetables, and heat gently over moderate heat, being careful not to overcook the chicken or burn the sauce. When the chicken is just
cooked through and firm to the touch, taste the sauce, correct the sherry, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, and turn off the flame. Return the pastry to a moderate oven until warm. Then cut it with a sharp knife into as many wedges as there are guests. Use the scraps for seconds. Serve the pie, which will serve six for dinner or eight for lunch, sprinkled with flat parsley, coarsely chopped, in large, warm pasta bowls, with the puff-pastry wedge pointed down into the sauce. I myself plate the pie with the puff-pastry wedges already in place, but others might bring the whole pie to table with the wedges on a separate platter.

When I was asked by a magazine editor some years ago to describe my kitchen, it struck me for the first time that I had unconsciously re-created my grandmother’s wainscoted and varnished walls and ceilings, big black stove, cherrywood countertops, yellow pine floors, willow-ware platters, and bright copper pots. This cannot have been accidental, for I have two kitchens—one in Manhattan, where I have a shelf for preserves, and the other in Sag Harbor on Long Island, and each is a collage of the other. In the Sag Harbor kitchen, my favorite perch is a blue armchair. My chicken pot pie is homage to my indomitable grandmother.

I have never taken much stock in psychoanalysis, with its contribution to narcissism and its emphasis on repressed memory. I believe that the important roots of human suffering are to be found within the shared failings of the species itself—in the human condition—modified
by personal genetic determinants, rather than in the accidental encounters of one’s childhood. Yet my preference for varnished wainscoting, for the robin’s-egg-blue kitchen armchair where I like to read, and my choice of the kitchen as a place in which not only to cook and eat but also to read, write, and contemplate the world, as well as my reflexive association to this day of England’s great Whig historian with a plucked chicken wrapped in a Yiddish newspaper, suggest that I have been too quick to dismiss Dr. Freud’s talking cure. My lifelong interest in re-creating the cuisine of my childhood is proof of the persistence of memory and its power to shape one’s days.

W
hen William Wordsworth wrote “The Child is father of the Man,” he knew what he was talking about. The warmth of my grandmother’s stove on snowbound days, and the summer days when I read Dickens in her shed with its gleaming jars of pickled beets and applesauce determined the life to come. To these shaping memories was added a few years later a simple hamburger, barely a half-inch thick, charred at the edges, on a toasted bun, and eaten with a slice of sweet onion by a lakeside shack in Winthrop, Maine, at dusk, amid the August hum of crickets. Macnamara’s stand, with its fragrant raw-pine walls and neat hand-lettered sign on a canoe paddle above the immaculate screen door painted white, is long gone, replaced by an access ramp to the new Augusta highway. But the memory of those magical hamburger evenings beside the lake is fixed in my mind as firmly as my own name.

Macnamara’s shack occupied a well-lighted grass plot between Lake Maranacook and the old Augusta Road where I spent some boyhood summers during the War. In August, we toiled from dawn until dusk in the hot fields, picking snap beans, which we stuffed into burlap sacks and tossed onto trucks for the cannery that shipped them overseas to the troops. On Fridays, when we were paid at the end of the day, still in our bib overalls and shoeless, we paddled our canoes into town and spent our wages on hamburgers, Nehi, and frozen Milky Ways. Our leftover nickels went into Macnamara’s jukebox: Vera Lynn, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters. We were fourteen that summer of 1942, our front teeth still too big for our sunburned faces. Under bare bulbs strung over Macnamara’s outdoor counter, with its neat arrangements of ketchup and mustard bottles, salt and pepper shakers, and paper napkins, we were proud of our war work. Like victorious warriors after battle, we ate our hamburgers in the hazy twilight, and after dark raced our canoes home across the lake.

The memory of those evenings would outlast the century and provoke a futile quest to recapture the fugitive joys fixed in mind’s wanderings by those hamburgers beside Lake Maranacook.

Later, there were other hamburgers, but none so memorable. In the 1950s and ’60s, at the Hamburger Heaven chain in New York, the hamburger was a plump sirloin
pillow, and the bun sturdy enough not to disintegrate in one’s hands, as today’s supermarket buns will do unless the burger is cooked through. In those genteel surroundings, where Holly Golightly might occupy the next seat, one was served at the counter or at seats along the wall with hinged trays, like infants’ high-chair trays, by stately black waiters in white coats who delivered our hamburgers like a sacrament with ketchup and bowls of sweet pepper relish and raw onion. After lunch on days when the
Queens
or
Caronia
had landed, I would walk across Park Avenue to the Holliday Bookshop to buy the latest Henry Green or Ivy Compton-Burnett.

The Holliday Bookshop and the original Hamburger Heaven chain are gone, but today hamburger bars sprout up all over New York, and even the old Hamburger Heaven chain remains, under a different name, a pale, sad reminder of its suave old self. Today the ne plus ultra of the genre, at Daniel Boulud’s DB Bistro Moderne, has become a tourist attraction. This ziggurat of prime sirloin, foie gras, and short ribs is a cinch to make yourself if you have a kitchen crew to bake the buns, bone and shred short ribs, combine them with foie gras and black truffles, and add these ingredients to the best sirloin, which is chopped, then roasted and placed on a bun sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, toasted and layered with tomato confit and a horseradish mayonnaise. Then all you have to do is add tomato and frisée and serve with pommes soufflées.

For years I would drive past McDonald’s on the way
to Sag Harbor, noticing how many millions and then billions of their burgers had been sold. I was not surprised by these numbers, for McDonald’s had stumbled upon an evolutionary defect in the human brain: an insatiable craving for fat and sugar on which primitive survival depended, a craving that has not moderated under civilized conditions, when fat and sugar have become an addictive menace and a marketing opportunity. McDonald’s Pavlovian victims see the arches, respond to the primal need for energizing sugars and stored fat, and millions of stomachs, bypassing the brain, propel their owners toward them, oblivious to the risk of obesity and untimely death. McDonald’s supplies enough calories from fat to sustain a daylong mammoth hunt and enough carbohydrates in its McNuggets, shakes, and fries for a quick sprint should one become the quarry. But with no more mammoths to hunt or saber-toothed tigers to run from, this unused energy simply adds to the gross weight of McDonald’s billions of customers.