How to Cook Like a Man (17 page)

Every morning, when I was in high school, I'd eat Raisin Bran while looking out the window at a sidewalk where a broad-shouldered man often walked by, on his way to work. David Goines, as a longtime boyfriend to Alice Waters, and the graphic designer behind logos for Chez Panisse and many of Berkeley's other marquee businesses, was like our very own Betsy Ross. And his personal style suggested that he and my dad were auditioning for different roles in the same Hollywood western. They both wore bushy mustaches and faded Levi's, but my dad's pointy cowboy boots and snap-button shirts placed him with the ranch hands—standard attire, in those days, for left-wing social-justice lawyers like Dad, fighting the good fight—while Goines's denim work shirt, silk vest, and comfortable leather shoes pegged him for the highly principled newspaper printer in the small western town. But the ranch hands and the printer, in this particular movie, fought on different sides of the battle over the frontier's future. Dad had grown up Irish Catholic in 1950s Los Angeles: altar boy, Eagle Scout, fraternity brother, and navy lieutenant. He was already a UC Berkeley law student dating my sorority-sister mom by the time he volunteered for civil rights work, back in Georgia, in the early sixties: politically liberal, in other words, but socially conservative, starting a family.

David Goines and Alice Waters, on the other hand, were both still undergraduates in 1964, when Dad returned from Georgia. So Dad was already a third-year law student when Goines became locally famous as one of the original student radicals surrounding a cop car and kicking off the Free Speech Movement. In a similar generational hairsplitter, Alice opened Chez Panisse during the very same week in August of 1971 when the Black Panthers buried George Jackson, a member who'd murdered three guards while trying tried to break out of San Quentin Federal Penitentiary. Kamp, in
The United States of Arugula
, has pointed out that these two events marked a fork in the road for the Berkeley political revolution, with my father's radical strain fading out while the gourmet-hedonistic movement caught wind. A lawyer friend of my father's, Fay Stender, had been Jackson's attorney in the past, even helping him write a bestselling prison memoir called
Soledad Brother
. Shortly after George Jackson died, Huey Newton himself invited Dad to his Oakland penthouse, asking Dad to represent one of Jackson's breakout accomplices, a man named Johnny Spain. Afraid of getting used, and doubtless thinking of his two little kids, Dad said he'd only take the job with fifty grand up front. That didn't work out, and Dad often reminded himself it was just as well by telling us how the Black Guerrilla Family broke into Stender's home and shot her in bed, leaving her paralyzed; she killed herself in Hong Kong in 1980.

So, while Dad backed away from criminal clients to make a safer living, Willy Bishop's heroin and Jeremiah Tower's cocaine at Chez Panisse represented everything decadent about the direction his town was trending. When that trend made its curious right turn toward bourgeois Baby Boomer complacency, and epicureanism—Chez Panisse the social epicenter of Berkeley, the
place to be and be seen in the Court of Queen Alice—my father simply wanted no part.

Throughout my Chez Panisse cooking years, and especially when I mentioned Alice to my father, I'd felt this quiet little discomfort at the table, as if I were allying myself with the wrong faction in our hometown's culture wars. I felt that discomfort again when I learned that a friend of my sister's, a kind, lovely woman named Caroline, happened to work in Alice's office, running Alice's philanthropic Chez Panisse Foundation. Calling me up one day, out of the blue, Caroline said she'd heard about my cookbook-bingeing and wondered if I'd help Alice write a speech. The timing could've been better—back when I was cooking from Alice's books, for example—but it could've been worse. I felt badly frustrated by my attempts at making Keller into my final Kitchen God, the man to bring me into confident mastery; and I needed the work, not least because those architects, the putative friends tasked with telling us where to put an interior staircase, had delivered a Master Plan with the marvelous news that we could meet all our space needs, forever and ever, if we just gutted our two downstairs offices and transformed them into a beautiful master bedroom/bathroom suite with hardwood floors and all new furniture and fixtures, connected it by hardwood stair to the upper flat, demolished our current bathroom, built two gorgeous new bathrooms, blew out most of the upstairs walls and reframed the building to create a “great room,” and then made up for those lost offices by shoring up the foundation and reframing and finishing both the attic
and
the basement.

Cost estimate? They had no clue, but they thought it “probably wouldn't be
that much.”
Poor Liz got her hopes up and tried to find a contractor willing to bid on the “the whole shebang.” But Contractor Number One looked around the house, looked at
the Master Plan, asked how much we thought we were going to spend, heard us say, “Oh, I don't know, thirty grand?” and nearly spit on us. He said we were looking at a half-million-dollar remodel for which we'd have to move out for a year. Liz, growing desperate, begged me to sign off on just taking out a second mortgage and going big; I told her this would be madness, given that we had neither retirement savings nor college funds for the girls. Liz came to her crestfallen senses and we tried, instead, to hire a journeyman carpenter to build the stair alone. But that failed, too: nobody wanted the job. So again I proposed building the stair myself. Liz agreed, and that was that: time to shelve the cookbooks, hang up the apron, and buckle on the old tool belt. I was not a good enough chef to satisfy myself; I was not done, emotionally, with that pursuit; but I felt clearly that I had to put more of my energies into activities directly benefiting the family.

I'd only just begun the project—power-sawing a giant hole into our current bedroom's floor, blowing my daughters' minds and making room for the staircase—when I drove to Berkeley for my first meeting with Alice. Despite my father's judgments, and even my own frustration with Alice's books, I wondered during the drive if I should see this as an acceptable end point to all my Alice study: not becoming a great cook on my own terms, nor even learning the core kitchen wisdom that could make me a better-adjusted human being, but rather joining Alice's office team as a minor player, a lesser courtier in my hometown's most exclusive society. I found a parking spot between Saul's Deli and the Bank of America branch at which Mom had given me that diamond wedding ring. Then I stepped under the Chez Panisse arbor and opened the hallowed door. I climbed the same stairs I'd climbed with Jane on my first dinner date, and I paused at the bar from which Ted, my father's law partner, had kindly treated my
sixteen-year-old date and thirteen-year-old self like adults. Then I saw Alice herself, smiling as she approached: surprisingly petite, dressed in the pretty flowing fabrics of the affluent Berkeley-woman-of-a-certain age. She was an attractive and radiant person, and her eyes had the brightest of twinkles, absorbing all of me, sizing up a young man and deciding he dearly needed a cold glass of Domaine Tempier Bandol rosé. She took a booth for the two of us, and then she ordered a lavish lunch for me: pizza, pork chop, fruit tart, killing me with kindness, showing me how lovely our partnership could be. The wine in particular, all the way from Provence, felt to me like drinking the Chez Panisse sacrament, the Blood of the Goddess, right on the altar itself. Starstruck, I lost control of my tongue, babbling about how much all this meant to me, and also about the Montessori thing, and how I'd done all this cooking, and on and on. Alice blanched—ruffled, I'm sure, by the reminder that she was old enough to have been the preschool teacher to a now-middle-aged man, so I tried to save the conversation by lavishing praise on her cookbooks, but that didn't work either. I'd forgotten the old recipes-suck rule of the professional chef, by which my claim to zillions of ticked-off Chez Panisse recipes could only mark me as an amateur or, worse, a culinary stalker. She responded especially poorly to my mention of the
Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook
.

“Oh, but the recipes don't even work in that one!” Alice said, horrified.

Most of all, though, Alice didn't want a new sycophant. She hadn't brought me to lunch to celebrate my devotion, or to become friends. She just needed a writer for a speech, for occasional speeches in the future, and, as it turned out, for a book on the Edible Schoolyard, a fruit-and-vegetable garden she'd sponsored in the same public junior high school I'd attended as a kid. She
described that garden with messianic fervor, every bit as determined to change and save the world as she'd been in her youth. I'm not a true believer myself—never been much for causes, however worthwhile—but I left that day with a handshake agreement and a good work assignment, and I got back to my home carpentry. Before I turned Liz's office into a proper construction zone, I'd realized, I had to build a new office in our basement—meant to be mine, in the long run, but great for Liz while I made a mess building the new stair. So I hired a young illegal immigrant off the street, a man named Antonio, from a tiny village in the jungles of Chiapas. I worked in the early-morning hours on my Alice assignments; I worked until late afternoon, with Antonio, in the basement; and it took an awful lot of wine, each night, to wash away all the filth, stress, and exhaustion of doing so much important work for which I had so little qualification—speechwriting, carpentry, job-site management conducted in a pidgin Spanish with a man who'd grown up speaking some ancient Indian language. For that reason, I suppose, and also because I was thinking in Alice's voice, several hours a day, my cooking slipped back toward comfortable terrain. I still couldn't bring myself to cook from Chez Panisse cookbooks, so I mined Alice's bibliographies instead, coming up with several obvious candidates: David, Olney, Roy Andries de Groot, Kamman. Beyond the bibliographies, Alice's books were peppered with names both famous and obscure. The famous tended to be diners, like the Dalai Lama. The more obscure names tended to be farmers, ranchers, Chez Panisse employees, and cookbook writers (never other restaurateurs). People offered up as props, in other words, populating the quasi-fictional Chez Panisse universe, allowing Alice to invoke various ideas and feelings. There was Bud Hoffman, the birds guy; Bob Cannard, with his farm just outside the Bay Area and
the vision he offered of a farm-to-table continuity, of funky Chez Panisse trucks banging up to the farm full of compost and returning full of greens; there was that Chino family farm, down in Rancho Santa Fe, a place of miracles; there was Olney, paragon of excellence and judgment, conferring approval; Kermit Lynch, too, the great wine importer with the funny name I'd seen emblazoned on a nondescript Berkeley building throughout my childhood (
Sesame Street
meets “Strange Fruit”); but, chief among them, exerting a curiously powerful influence, was this Lulu Peyraud. So I picked up
Lulu's Provençal Table
, a cookbook for which Olney spent a year taking notes in his dear friend's home. Alice's foreword offers that “the Peyraud family's example has been helping us find our balance at Chez Panisse for years. Like them, we try to live close to the earth and treat it with respect; always look first to the garden and the vineyard for inspiration; rejoice in our families and friends; and let the food and wine speak for themselves at the table.” And then Olney's text and the photographs radiate the kind of French-countryhouse-culture porn so craved by my hometown, with its long opening essay on “The Vigneron's Year,” conjuring this mythical natural-aristocratic existence in which the happy, loving winemaking couple and their children live and eat by the seasons and the changing of the vines, the aging of their own wines. But the recipes looked remarkably simple, and accessible—like pared-down versions of Chez Panisse recipes. So I began to give them a try: Turnip Soup was nothing but sliced onions salted and softened in oil, then slices of turnips (no greens required) warmed in the same way and covered with a little water and then a run through the blender and a sprinkle of pepper and croutons, and yet, to my immense pleasure and surprise, Liz loved it. Like, she
really
loved it, maybe more than anything else I'd ever made. Same for a cabbage soup I made the next
day, again without so much as chicken stock for the base: just cabbage, onion, potato, and carrot, chopped and simmered and served. Liz openly enthused, a reaction I treasured, but found confusing, too. I treasured also the reaction I got the next day, when I moved Liz's furniture down to the newly painted basement office, hooking up her computer, putting a flower in a vase, and winning a sweet, grand smile from her, as she settled in to write.

Not that the project went smoothly: the demolition of a single wall in Liz's older office, necessary for the framing of the new stair, revealed a dark truth. The wall had been made of garbage, quarter-inch Sheetrock nailed directly over ancient wallpaper fixed onto wide, thin wooden slats, probably from the Great Depression. I couldn't bear to cover it up with more Sheetrock, so I got Antonio to help me rip that garbage off every other wall in the room, and in my own office, until we'd ripped both rooms to the studs. This only exposed more headaches: substandard framing, no earthquake proofing, ancient knob-and-tube electrical wiring. I hadn't built a single step, and already I was looking at double the projected time and expense.

Liz grew fond of the basement hideaway, and Antonio was thrilled—he'd stumbled into serious long-term employment. I bought a large library of DIY home-improvement books; I found helpers, including a plumber and an electrician who agreed to work on a consulting basis, giving pointers and supervising my finished work, and also a few neighborhood contractors who hadn't yet learned to run when they saw me coming, and therefore got interrogated almost daily. Then came the morning when I picked up Antonio at our usual spot and he got in my truck sobbing and reeking of alcohol. He told me that his sixteen-year-old wife had died, back in Chiapas; their baby daughter was even now with Antonio's mother. I delivered Antonio several blocks away to an older brother
he'd never mentioned before, a vaguely scary-looking guy named Florentino, and I didn't see Antonio for a few days. When Antonio returned, he brought a second hitherto unmentioned brother, Nico. Nico turned out to be an absolutely terrific guy, equally hardworking, more skilled, and constantly cheerful and upbeat. When Antonio left for Chiapas, to be with his daughter, I bought him the new pair of basketball sneakers he wanted as a farewell gift, and I let Nico bring the elder Florentino, known as Tino, on board.