I admire her nerve. I would never dare to cook them a home-cooked meal from my grubby apartment kitchen. When we turn down the lights after dinner, roach feelers wave out from the crack between the counter and the sink and mice peep out of my burners on their haunches to have a look at what’s going on. I can’t bear to ask them over.
At this point, my mom is about seven years divorced from my dad and largely recovered from it. Single and thinner, she has lost her trademark perm, and she is ready to go looking for her roots, the homeland of her long-ago-departed French-Canadian father. All of my coworkers at Danube expect my trip to France to include some kitchen stints (called stages) at three-star Michelin restaurants, but no—we plan to eat in them. Our first Michelin stop will be Pierre Gagnaire in Paris, our second Michel Bras in Laguiole, deep in the Auvergne countryside. On this trip, neither one of us gets to play queen cook in the kitchen; we will both be submissive eaters, absorbing our family’s French lineage through the plates.
Actually, I wish I had asked Bouley and Mario for dinner, because “the meal” is, as always, quite impressive. Her pork, specifically, is a marvel. Hours of slow, low-temperature baking turn the meat inside to pure plush—as soft as angel food cake—and its outside into a cage of golden, holy crisp. The fat slowly leaks out of the roast’s carapace, leaving behind vacancies, like the comb in a beehive. This effect cannot be achieved if the cook continually opens the oven to peek and poke at the roast, allowing the pent-up humors to fly out the door. No, honeycombing happens only to the faithful.
I’d tried to make her crispy roasted pork a couple of times back at our house in Two Inlets, but it always came out tough; I blamed the first failure on the local-pastured pork roast, the second on our leaky 1940s Roper oven. When I tried making it in my Brooklyn kitchen, with a store-bought Boston butt roast and the same plain, cheap, air-locked oven my mother had at home, it still refused to collapse for me the way it did for her. Long-cooked pork went properly slack for me at work, but this one defied me. I cursed myself and then thought that I was not entirely sure that she has really given me the real recipe. Maybe it’s not three and a half hours, but more like five. Maybe the temperature is lower, below her stated 325 degrees. When it comes to recipes and the women in my family, you can’t trust them to hand over the truth. You’d think after having watched her make it all those years I would have absorbed her technique through the skin, but some meals, they’re like pets. They have an unshakable loyalty to their owners.
And for the first time, I am slightly sheepish about one facet of “the meal,” a thing she does that marks us with our small-town origins: the cheese sauce.
Like all of her sauces, she prizes this one for its thinness and the way it cloaks the steamed broccoli and runs so nicely into the meat, but still, it’s just block American cheese melted in milk. I loved it as a child, for the way the bland yellow cheese ran down my throat, but now I think: It’s so processed. And—what’s the deal?—she doesn’t even put any butter in it. She puts butter in everything.
The tensions in this kitchen run high.
“Move a little slower!” she says tightly. She hates the way I lob the sauté pan from one hand to the other as I make the browned Brussels sprouts, my sole contribution to this meal. It’s macho, I suppose. Some of that testosterone-rich swagger has rubbed off on me. Also, totally irritating to her, I cook over such high heat that flames dance under the pan.
“Amy,” she says with shock, “fire is shooting up the sides!”
“Mom! The Brussels sprouts need to brown or they’ll taste steamed.” What can I say? I’m a newly minted line cook. I live to sear.
What my mom sees in me is a pace of working that seems frantic, a speed that disgraces the memory of my great-grandma, my grandma Dion, and herself. That I am her only daughter but have not inherited their smooth, almost vehicular way of moving in the kitchen is a shame. She purses her mouth in disapproval.
We are like flipped-screen images of each other. On the surface I look to be frenetically juggling three things, but on the inside I’m as calm as a cat; her outward movements are as smooth as a ball in the air, but I can feel in my head, as constant as a metronome, the insistent beat of her inner fretting. When I’m cooking with her, I enter a weird kitchen void. I am caught between the worlds of home cooking and professional cooking, of my past and my present, like a panicky bug trapped in the space between the window and the screen.
I know that the emotion below the iceberg is the fact that I’m not trying to replicate her best dishes, as a good daughter should. She thinks I only want to cook like Bouley, like Mario. I don’t think it occurs to her that I’m trying to cook in my own style, to fashion my own repertoire that will take influence from all of the great cooks I’ve known, including, obviously, her. But I can’t figure out a way to explain this without offending her, so I say nothing.
We are both perfectionists, but with different motives: I like to invent a dish, resolve all its problems, and then I don’t feel the need to make it again. She has a tried-and-true arsenal of about twenty blockbuster meals. It’s an age-old battle, really, between improvisation and repetition.
Silently, we fuel a standoff that pits professional cooking against home cooking in the unfairest of ways. She seems to take no interest in what I’m learning to cook firsthand from the best chefs in New York City, asks me no questions about it, and never wants me to make anything. To her, I am turning my back on our food, on our family.
Neither of us is wrong.
Essentially, we take sides that neither of us really believes in. It will be at least another five years before she allows me to contribute a dish of my own to her Thanksgiving table. It will be just as long before I give her the full measure of props she deserves.
As we sit down at the table, even after our plates are loaded her eyes stay on me, and when her chewing slows, her food sitting in her mouth like marbles, I know she’s trying to hold herself back from saying something and I know what it will be. “Oh, honey, your plate looks dry.” By this she means that my plush mound of soft meat is undersauced, vulnerable, open to the air—the worst of all plate offenses. “Can someone pass Amy the cheese sauce?” Even though I don’t think it needs it, I dutifully comply.
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