I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (5 page)

Dolores Fraser’s Meat Loaf

2 pounds ground beef

1 envelope onion soup mix

¾ cup bread crumbs

¾ cup water

1/3 cup ketchup

Oil or butter for greasing

2 tablespoons ketchup

2 tablespoons mustard

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine the first five ingredients in a medium bowl and mix well with your hands. Form into a loaf and bake in a 13 by 9-inch
baking or roasting pan greased with some oil or butter. Frost with 2 tablespoons ketchup mixed with 2 tablespoons mustard.

Bake for 1 hour. Don’t be alarmed by the fact that the meat loaf will be red when you take it out of the oven: That’s only
the frosting; it’s done.

Serves 4 to 6.

Confident that I could cook for two, I was ready to up the numbers. Kit and I invited new friends from work and old friends
from school to dinner parties. Though our expandable Ikea table was a far cry from my mother’s dining room set, I took the
same care she did setting the table. I had one of her many sets of silver, this one mysteriously devoid of soup spoons, which
was fine at the time; I wasn’t ready to make soups. There were eight place settings of china my grandmother, long dead, had
won years before at a benefit luncheon for a charity she was involved in that helped struggling Italian immigrants (as if
there were any of those by 1970). The downside of these otherwise delightful dinner gatherings was my increasing awareness
of Kit’s ability to seemingly drink as much as our other guests—combined. He was a gracious host, a witty toastmaster, and
a burgeoning master mixologist—or, as I interpreted these things, an alcoholic. I confronted Kit; I was concerned for him,
and for us. Kit denied that he was anything other than a guy who liked to have a good time, but it was becoming abundantly
clear that his relationship with alcohol—and subsequently me—was anything but good.

Living together magnified our differences. I was ready to settle into a domestic routine. Kit had other things he wanted to
do with his life, primarily having to do with drinking. Just about every weekend he had a bar crawl planned with Joe, John,
or some guy known simply as Clam. These typically lasted until the early morning. If I wanted to go out on a Friday or Saturday,
I had to make my own plans. One Friday evening in spring, I went to the market and picked up fresh asparagus to sauté in white
wine and garlic and serve over angel-hair pasta. I made the sauce, put the water up to boil, and waited; Kit never came home.
Eventually I ate the pasta alone. Kit had decided to join a poker game at the office, after which the players toured the bars
of Midtown; then Kit came home with a Budweiser tall boy to drink before going to bed at four a.m.

Angel-Hair Pasta with Asparagus

1 pound asparagus (the thinnest kind available)

2 tablespoons olive oil

Pinch of hot red pepper flakes

1 clove garlic, sliced thinly

1 teaspoon salt

½ cup white wine

½ pound angel-hair pasta

Freshly grated parmigiano or pecorino

Freshly ground pepper

Wash asparagus and use only the tenderest parts. You can determine which those are by breaking each stalk with your hands.
The tough fibers will separate at exactly the right place all on their own. Cut the remains diagonally into 1-inch pieces.

Warm the olive oil over medium heat, then add the red pepper flakes and garlic. Sauté until the garlic is golden, then add
the asparagus and coat with the olive oil. Add salt, cook for 5 minutes, then add the wine and cook for another 10 minutes
or until the asparagus has softened to your liking.

Cook the pasta according to the directions
here
, stirring often; angel hair is particularly vulnerable to knots. When
the pasta is done, drain it in a colander and add it to the skillet with the asparagus. Stir and cook over a low heat for
about 20 seconds, then serve in warmed bowls. Sprinkle with cheese and freshly ground pepper, if desired.

Serves 2 but will be eaten alone.

Fed up with eating at home by myself, I enrolled in a free culinary education funded by the seemingly unlimited expense account
of my friend and former colleague Deborah Kwan. Deborah was the daughter of Chinese immigrants who owned a restaurant in San
Francisco; her interest in and love of food was deep, like mine, and tied to family. Deborah worked at a publishing house
that seemed to throw the money around, and we went somewhere fabulous nearly every night on the company dime—we enjoyed simple
bistro cooking at the Odeon or savored complex and delicate flavors at Bouley. We ate at new places, old places, culinary
shrines, and tourist traps. We held the line for ages to get a coveted reservation and waited at the bar forever at any first-come-first-served
establishment we deemed worthy. Deborah left publishing to pursue a career in the kitchen, and from there the gravy train
only got richer. After a short course at Peter Kump’s, she became a pastry chef at 44, the restaurant at the Royalton Hotel,
famous at the time for being the ad hoc cafeteria for all the big magazine editors: Anna Wintour, Graydon Carter, and Tina
Brown lunched at the prime booths every afternoon. Deborah fell in love with the sous chef (whom she eventually married),
and when she wasn’t on duty we would eat at the restaurant. We didn’t have to order a thing; we just sat back while Erik sent
up plate after plate of brilliant food, for which we would be charged next to nothing. A Kump’s classmate of Deborah’s went
to work in the pastry kitchen of Le Cirque, and we ended up there one night with a bottle of champagne and an array of sixteen
stunningly beautiful desserts before us, including a chocolate stove with a marzipan skillet full of strawberry sauce atop
it (the waiter sang a little song before he dumped that skillet’s contents over the stove), Grand Marnier soufflé, chocolate
pots de crème, and a tower of tiny ice-cream cones, each a different flavor. These excursions served as finishing school for
me—they educated my palate, informed my understanding of food, and made me a better cook.

No matter how many sorbets, gelées, or beignets I was presented with on a given night, my expeditions never went on as long
as Kit’s. In the early days of our cohabitation, I waited up, worried about him traveling on the subway to our “emerging neighborhood”
at four, five, even seven in the morning. Even the neighborhood watch patrol of local residents who walked up the block in
reflective shells had called it quits by then. Eventually, as Kit’s nights on the town became more and more frequent, I stopped
worrying and just went to bed. Eventually, instead of relief, I felt annoyance when he finally came in the door. One night
I was awakened by the sound of Kit making dinner after a night of drinking. Here is his recipe.

Kit’s Drunken Soup

Open can of Progresso chicken noodle soup. Put in saucepan over medium heat. Pass out on couch. Cook until girlfriend hears
strange crackling sounds and gets out of bed to see what’s going on and turns off burner to deal with the mess in the morning.

Time: Usually about 4 hours.

Serves: no one.

I was angry with Kit a lot of the time during the four years we were together, and not only because of his drinking. Whatever
it was that kept me away from men for so long continued to linger and do its thing to prevent me from getting too close to
Kit. Kit’s nocturnal escapades seemed to perform a similar function for him. Still, I was never fully convinced that Kit’s
drinking was as big a problem as it actually was. I always allowed that I might be blowing his indulgence out of proportion
in order to create another barrier. There I was wrong. Though my perception of Kit throughout the four years we were together
remained as distorted as it was the day after our first date, when it came to putting distance between us, he met me halfway.

One night while we were both in bed asleep, we were startled by a terrifying crash from the other room. When we ran out to
see what had happened, we found that the kitchen cabinets had fallen off the wall. Our collection of dishes—some from Kit’s
mother, some from my mother, and several from my grandmother—were in pieces all over the floor. The symbolism here escaped
neither of us. Not long after that, Kit moved out.

While I never managed to get Kit to value the delicious subtlety of a creamy, perfectly cooked grain of arborio rice, his
intellectual fascinations did rub off on me. Together, we grew to be adults, and the things I learned from him—like how Sara
Murphy, best friend of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and inspiration for Nicole Diver in
Tender Is the Night,
always wore her pearls when she sunbathed on the French Riviera—enhance my cocktail party repertoire to this day. Kit credits
me with teaching him how to hail a taxi—essential knowledge for the burgeoning New Yorker—and for introducing him to his all-time
favorite band: the Jesus and Mary Chain. Kit has since quit drinking, and he is one of my dearest friends.

M
y father was an otorhinolaryngologist, a word I still like to say, even though everyone else goes with the shorter ENT. As
a child, I was proud of the fact that my father was a physician and the status it connoted on our family in the days before
the invention of HMOs and hedge funds. In first grade, when we were learning the alphabet and I was called on to come up with
a word for the letter
V,
I said “vein,” which I thought was an awfully smart word to know. In second grade, for show-and-tell, I presented a mounted
thirty-two-by-twenty-six-inch diagram of the inner ear borrowed from the wall of my father’s office.

That office was in the basement of our house. In the lower left-hand drawer of his big mahogany desk, my father kept a supply
of Tootsie Pops, which he offered to the many children whose tonsils he removed. “Would you like strawberry, cherry, grape,
or chocolate?” I heard him asking one of them, as I happened past the door to his consulting room, in a soothing tone not
often heard by his own children. I envied those kids.