Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (45 page)

“Sam says it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to keep kosher.” She paused. “But he’ll eat this too.” Sarah and Daniel looked at each other, re-entering into an ongoing debate without needing to speak. Daniel felt it was permissible to humour her; Sarah felt the elderly must be pressed to keep in touch.

“Sam is dead, Rachel,” she said firmly.

“Of course, dear.” Rachel sounded surprised. “Several years ago now, dear.”

She smiled as though she had won an argument and lifted her fork to her mouth.

On Wednesday, Sarah was reading the newspaper in the living room when Maxime arrived home. She had only just
finished breakfast and seen Daniel out the door when the bell rang. Fearing some solicitation for a charity, she stepped into the hall with hesitation. As she opened the door and saw it was her son, she did not have time to wonder how Maxime could have caught a train from Montreal that arrived that early in the morning, but could only cry out: “What happened to your hair?”

“I cut it.” He smiled a bright and brittle smile.

He had not simply cut it, he had all but shaved his head, leaving only a dark fuzz that showed where bare flesh would normally stop and hair begin. Gone were the curly locks his mother had once twisted around her fingers. He walked into the hall with the same shy defiance with which he had refused to take a bath as a child or to stay home Friday night as a teenager.

“Your hair.” She said the words in French again, now more in sorrow than surprise. “What has happened?”

“Time for a change,” he replied in French. She had been right at least about that, he had regained his comfort in her language during his years in Montreal. He then switched into English, with a degree of archness, as though parroting someone else: “A change is as good as a rest. My friend Marie always says that. A change is as good as a rest.”

Marie, Marie. She tried to remember which of Maxime’s unseen friends she was.

There was an issue that Sarah had largely ignored in her quest to establish Maxime’s career. Certainly, she assumed he would marry. She had always listened with a sharp ear to the names of the Montreal girls he would drop casually like this, weighing the competing demands of language and
religion, aware she was unlikely to be satisfied on both fronts simultaneously. Leah, Ruth, Esther: these would be daughters-in-law. Cendrine, Marie-Claire, Marie: her grandchildren would eat bacon but at least they would speak her language in Maxime’s home. But Sarah did not think to question why none of these girls were ever invited back to Toronto. If the preparations for her son’s professional future were concrete issues continually discussed and debated in the house in North Toronto, then the possibility of his eventual marriage and fatherhood was an abstract thing that shimmered on Sarah’s horizon too distant and too vague in its outlines to be easily brought forward for conversation. It seemed possible to worry out loud about marks and exams; almost impossible to ask about dates and girlfriends. She presumed that Daniel had discussed sex with Maxime when he was a teenager—her husband was a doctor, after all—but she never raised the subject herself. Perhaps she sensed she could only fight successfully on one front, that Maxime would only tolerate so much intervention in his life, so she left the affairs of her son’s heart to take care of themselves. Beyond the requisite little talks in which he had indeed engaged his adolescent son, Daniel was also silent, but he glimpsed the future more clearly than his wife. He had seen the signs, wondered at Maxime’s occasional awkwardness, and would, that evening, quietly recognize this new haircut for the statement that it was. He said nothing to Sarah and she was to remain naive, or perhaps blind because she did not wish to see. So, as Maxime kissed a hospital nurse whom he had dutifully invited out on a date, felt his lips like rubber and his loins quiet, as he buried himself in work and avoided old friends, as he prolonged his residency year after year, as he politely declined his father’s increasingly
infrequent offers of a partnership in the family practice from which Dr. Segal would soon retire, as he introduced himself to colleagues across town and became increasingly engrossed in their research project, as he made new friends, as he took his first tentative steps towards a man at a party, as he lived these years, his mother did not know him.

During that time, Sarah had been investigating the idea of a stew. She had often considered it a mediocre supper, a bland solution for tough meat that hours of boiling would reduce from indigestible hunks to stringy shreds. The vegetables were sodden and the beef caught in your teeth, leaving you surreptitiously picking at them long after the meal was over. And yet, the authors of every French cookbook on her ample shelf considered the
pot-au-feu
a staple of the bourgeois home and the
boeuf bourguignon
a test of a good restaurant. Like many failed dishes, the fault of a bad stew lay surely with the cook, not the recipe. Sarah began to experiment, varying the cut of meat, the length of cooking, the heat of the oven, the quantity of wine in the sauce. She produced good stews full of flavourful vegetables and meat that was succulent rather than stringy. Yet still her tongue was not satisfied. A certain fragrance, a particular softness eluded her.

The breakthrough occurred in her doctor’s office as she was waiting for her checkup. She had visited the same colleague of Daniel’s for years now—that was the proper way to proceed, to seek an opinion independent from her husband’s—and anticipated with neither delight nor trepidation their annual conversation about a few nagging varicose veins, the importance of breast self-examination, and the merits of hormone replacement therapy. (Daniel favoured
it; her doctor was against.) As she waited for him, she idly flipped the pages of a decorating magazine and, amongst a clutter of short items towards the beginning, found a few paragraphs about the
pot-au-feu
. In isolated French villages, the anonymous magazine writer maintained, housewives still took their meat and vegetables at night to the baker who, at the end of his shift in the hours just before dawn, banked the wood fires of his brick oven and placed their stewpots to cook. By noon, the women could return to buy a fresh loaf and pick up a meal that had long simmered in an oven only now slowly cooling.

Sarah had read this story before, in her kosher cookbooks. In the
shtetls
of Eastern Europe, the cholent was cooked in the communal bread oven, a feature of village life dating back to the Middle Ages. Before dusk on Friday night, the women prepared their pots and took them to the oven. On Saturday morning, when the long services were finally over, the men then came to fetch them on their way home from the synagogue, and so the family could eat a cholent that had been cooked to perfection without the housewife ever working on the Sabbath. Here was the secret wisdom of her ancestors: a good stew should be cooked overnight in the dying heat of a bread oven.

Adapting this practice in a contemporary kitchen for an evening dinner hour took some juggling. Sarah briefly debated a brick oven, but rejected it as impractical. Over on Eglinton Avenue, the neighbourhood Italian restaurant cooked its gourmet pizzas in the real thing, but she was unsure how one might manage stoking a wood-cooking fire in a private home even if she were to convince Daniel the kitchen needed to be expanded yet again. Nonetheless, she did have the benefit of a large gas range. In the eighties,
she had become convinced of the merits of gas over electricity—everyone said it produced a moister heat, better for both roasts and baking—and Daniel had paid to have the pipes that now fuelled their furnace extended into the kitchen. Their first gas stove was a straightforward affair in white enamel, with four burners on top and an oven big enough for a significant piece of meat underneath. Sarah was an instant and happy convert, and soon pined for one of the giant, spanking new restaurant-style ranges in shining stainless steel. It appeared magically in the kitchen on the morning of her sixtieth birthday. Normally, Sarah cooked bread and pastries in the electrical convection oven that she had used for years, its fan circulating the air inside to plump up her baking, but she now began to experiment with the gas range.

And so, more than an hour before the late and feeble dawn of a damp November morning in 1997, Sarah was standing in her kitchen punching dough. It was six o’clock. She had prepared the dough the night before and placed it in the refrigerator where it had slowly risen to double its bulk, pushing the clean dishtowel with which she had covered it up into a comforting fat mound. Pulling the dough out of its bowl onto a floured board, she punched it down again, kneading the overblown lump back to a more reasonable size and putting it to one side. She bent down to open a cupboard and pulled out a deep, round baking tin with high-fluted sides. She was making brioche. She greased the interior of the tin with a little knob of butter and then carefully placed her ball of dough in it, covered it with the same dishtowel, and gently lowered it onto a heating grate in the kitchen floor before she went back upstairs to bed. While she dozed lightly, awake enough to luxuriate in the delightful sensation of being asleep, the dough would rise again.

At eight, she heard Daniel stirring beside her—it was Sunday, and he was sleeping late—and she got up and went back to her kitchen. She lit the gas, set the thermostat to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, and turned to the fridge. She got out a single egg out of the carton, broke it into a bowl, mixed it up with a fork, and then took a pastry brush from a drawer. Retrieving the pan from the floor, she delicately brushed its newly risen surface with the egg so that it would shine with a tempting sheen once baked. She had placed her favourite enamelware stewpot on the counter and was beginning to get out the meat and vegetables, when a small beep indicated the oven had reached the required temperature. She opened the door and slipped the bread onto the lower rack, noting with satisfaction the rows of red bricks she had placed there the night before. They created an inner wall around all three sides of the oven’s box; for their roof, she laid another layer on the upper rack. It was her secret weapon, her own invention: the thirty-six clay bricks, coaxed from the owner of a building yard who was accustomed to sell them by the truckload, would hold heat in the oven long after the metal surfaces had cooled.

She could hear water running upstairs—Daniel was showering—and she set to washing, peeling, and chopping her vegetables with energy before turning to the meat. She cut it into small chunks, removing any particularly large streaks of fat and setting them to one side. She dusted the pieces in flour, heated a few spoonfuls of oil in the bottom of her stewpot, tossed in the fat she had removed from the meat, and when it was all liquid, she quickly seared the beef before tumbling the vegetables on top and dousing it all in wine. At nine o’clock, the bread would be ready to come out of the oven and she would replace it with the stew
before turning off the gas. At nine-fifteen, they would sit down to a leisurely Sunday breakfast of coffee and fresh brioche; that evening, Maxime would come to dinner and they would eat a
pot-au-feu
that belonged to another century.

“Nice stew, Ma.” Maxime chewed slowly, concentrating on the food.

“Your mother lines the oven with bricks, that’s her secret. She talked the man over at Dominion Coal into giving her some. They don’t usually sell such small loads, but when he heard what it was for…”

Maxime nodded. His father had told him this story on at least two previous occasions. He suppressed his annoyance and then wondered guiltily if his parents could not keep track of which piece of domestic news they had told him, and which was as yet untold, because he seemed to come home for dinner so infrequently these days. He stayed away too much. Tonight, he would say something. He was thirty-one.

He drew a deep breath, but his parents were speaking. His father was discussing the likelihood of a doctors’ strike.

“You know, the government talks big but…”

Maxime skewered a piece of vegetable with his fork and tried hard to savour the mingling flavours of onion, wine, and beef as it collapsed on his tongue.

“It’s all very well for the specialists, but what they don’t realize is that the family doctors carry the system.” That was his mother, outraged on his father’s behalf. The political debate continued throughout the main course, and then Sarah went to fetch the salad. Daniel topped up his son’s wineglass.

“Wine doesn’t really go with salad but…”

“It’s the dressing actually,” Sarah added as she placed the wooden bowl on the table. Maxime had heard this many times before: don’t drink wine with salad, the vinegar in the dressing obscures its flavour. He offered his family’s customary response—“But it can’t hurt…”—and reached for his replenished glass. His parents had always drawn the line at kosher wine, and were drinking that night a hearty Bordeaux. Now, they were talking about a neighbour’s trip to Europe.

“Great fares at this time of year, but it rained every day they were there.”

Maxime stabbed at a leaf of radicchio—“It’s almost tasteless, even a bit bitter, but it does look so pretty in the salad,” his mother would say—and conveyed it to his mouth. She had put mustard in the dressing, and it stung his tongue.

There was an apple tart for dessert, glazed with apricot jam. Maxime ate one mouthful but found the flavour only papery now. He spoke.

“I am helping with some research over at the Don Hospital…”

“The Don Hospital?” His father seemed to greet this with delighted surprise. “You know I clerked there when I was in med school. It was a foul place then. We used to call it the Contagion, you know, because it had been Contagious Diseases, back in the old days. We thought they’d close it down any day. Sarah, do you remember…”

“I guess they’ve done some renovations,” Maxime offered, frustrated that he had only woken memories for his father.

“That was the place they put me when I had measles, do you remember?” Sarah turned to her husband.

“That’s right.” Daniel looked across at Maxime. “We probably never told you about it. It was just before your
mother and I were married. She somehow got measles. It must have been going around. You know, they didn’t have the vaccine in those days and…”