—
To put the haute cuisine in which I found myself immersed into some kind of perspective, let me submit to you the rural Midwestern cuisine of my youth.
There were ice cream buckets, lots of them, and they rarely contained ice cream. In the summertime, women walked in the door with the handles of swinging buckets hooked over their arms like purses. If the potluck party was at our house, they stacked these buckets, two high, in our downstairs refrigerator. The labels promised Kemps French vanilla, Edy’s Grand rocky road, Blue Bunny butter brickle, but when you pried open the lids with a dry, cracking sound, the contents under the bluish plastic were always a surprise. You might find yellow potato salad, Italian macaroni salad, fruit-and-marshmallow Jell-O salad, or that wrong (but oh, so right) crushed-ramen-mock-crab-almond salad. Or maybe you’d find a pile of cold chocolate-chip cookies (which, in retrospect, did not even require refrigeration; however, if you ever want to refrigerate an entire batch of cookies, you should do it in an empty gallon ice cream bucket).
Later I would roll my eyes at the buckets, because I couldn’t see these milky, repurposed, plastic gallon containers for what they really were: a symbol of the whole community’s eating, a marker of generosity and thrift at the same time. In any other place, these ideas of abundance and frugality would sit at odds with each other, but in the Midwest of my youth they were bosom buddies, as tight as tongue and groove. The irony is this: Many of the traditional Midwestern favorites require a lot of time and effort to make but no one would ever want to say so. A neighbor lady might make potato salad by the gallon, spending an hour dicing potatoes into baby-bite-size cubes, but then, with consummate modesty, as if to say “No big deal,” she would carry it around in some junky, old reused plastic tub. If people sometimes wonder why Midwestern food hasn’t gotten the respect it deserves, I want to say that it’s not the food, which is generally quite good; it’s the shitty, self-deprecating plastic storage vessels.
There were also lots of plastic Tupperware containers with yellow and orange tops whose bright button centers looked exactly like childhood drawings of crayon-colored suns with radiating rays. Light aluminum nine-by-thirteen pans with plastic lids. Rinsed-out glass mayonnaise jars, none of which were ever thrown away. Some of the dearer salads, such as the mock crab and the clam dip, were ritually made in smaller batches and went into empty Cool Whip containers—that is, if you were a Cool Whip family. Which we were not.
No, Karen Dion’s taste defied the local inconspicuous consumption. She was in the habit of whipping real bona fide heavy cream for our topping pouf. And in general, going against the grain of the town’s collective thrift, she liked fancy things. Following her lead, we were all vulnerable to the charms of the tiny newfangled H?agen-Dazs pints. Just one of them was enough for my brothers and me if we ate our ice cream as she did, in a teacup, topped with a spray of broken pecans and a thick spoonful of Mrs. Richardson’s butterscotch caramel, the cold ice cream turning the caramel into thick, chewy clods. It was possibly some remnant of her French-Canadian father’s side that caused my mom’s penchant for all things “petit” in a supersized Midwestern world, but despite that, sometimes my mom bought ice cream by the gallon, once in a while anyway, just so she could have the buckets. They were that requisite.
She was no snob, though. At the store, honest ingredients like chuck roasts and fresh ginger shared her cart with bags of miniature candy bars, cans of mushroom soup, and Lipton onion soup mix—the addition she insisted made her pulled-beef sandwiches better than everyone else’s. (When I later found her beef recipe on the back of the packet, I was disappointed, but nothing could take away from the fact that that onion soup mix, with its telltale rattlesnake shake and its burned-sugar-and-soy tang, possessed the power to reach through the decades and jolt all my dead memories alive.)
She bought canned black olives, too, which at the time were considered—I’ll say it—a little bit exotic. In our town, those fat black O’s were everywhere: on top of chili, in Mexican Chicken Bake, mixed with slices of pepperoni and cubes of Swiss cheese in Pizza Enchiladas, and, of course, on pizza. Mexican, Italian, or even Asian, black olives were the diplomats of our diet, serving as foreign ambassadors from everywhere else. They ruled what our hometown grocery store called the “Ethnic Aisle.”
That we were card-carrying members of this Midwestern culinary world and yet two steps different was a feeling that lay dormant in me for years.
It was a distinction I remember noticing while accompanying my mom on her daily shop at the local Red Owl. She ran her finger over the tight plastic covering the top half of a chuck roast, sighing, showing me how this one didn’t have any of the proper marbling and wouldn’t get really tender. “This part, the deckle, is too damn lean,” she said, forcefully whacking the bell on the counter to see if she could score a better roast “from the back”—a bold position for a woman of her era, standing as she was beneath a poster advertising lean pork as “The Other White Meat.” Accompanying my mother at the meat counter, I always got the sense that some mysterious saboteur was stockpiling the good stuff, thick-cut pork chops of rosy dark meat and heavy jumbo-cut Boston butt pork roasts with thick caps of fat, behind the swinging doors.
—
My mom is in New York two days before we leave for France, making dinner for me and Aaron and all of our expat Minnesotan friends, and she is not afraid to cook for Mario. She’s making her specialty—slow-roasted pork with spaetzle and gravy—known in our family as “the meal.”
“Did you ask him?” Her lips slide into a wicked smile.
“No.”
“Well, then maybe Bouley wants to come for the meal. Did you ask him?”
“Mom, neither one of them can take a day off to come out here to eat pork roast and spaetzle.” Even though I think that her spaetzle, crowned with brown butter and possessing a soulful chew, is actually better than the photogenic, puffy ones we serve daily at Danube.
“And gravy!” she says.
“And gravy. I mean, I’m sure they’d be flattered, but they won’t do that.”