Meat got all the glory, but the roast position seemed to me the most straightforward one in the kitchen. The protein had to be cooked to the correct temperature, no question; that was easy to see. And not that hard to do once you got in the groove, cooking identically sized portions of the same things night after night. Once it was sliced, it was truth time. The color told you whether to cook it harder the next time or ease up.
The garnish, though—the starch and the vegetables and the sauces—were all more subtly make or break. Oversalted or undercooked yellow wax beans? Those are invisible mistakes. Lack of soulful cooking, also invisible. And, crucially, in order to sing on the plate, the starches and the vegetables need to contain some soul. Undercooked fish came right back to the kitchen for refiring and was grudgingly reaccepted a few minutes later, but if a diner bit on the tough core of a carrot they registered it the way a carpenter does a nail found in the center of a board: with supreme annoyance, but silently.
Everyone, even the big bulky guys, referred to cooking the garnish well as cooking “with love,” a phrase rarely applied to the protein. The first time I heard it, I was taken aback. A big lumbering guy, reminiscing about his days cooking at Alain Ducasse in Monaco, said: “The guy I trained with, he cooked the vegetables with so much love…” and shook his head, as if trying to dislodge a big, fat imaginary tear in his eye, a kaleidoscope that turned the sauté pan before us into twelve swirling gems of vegetable-garnish loveliness.
At the time I saw the world in much the same way, in terms of colors, sounds, and shifting textures: silken scarves of hot squash puree, dunes of homemade bread crumbs as mottled and cool to the touch as beach sand. Fresh parsley puree of a stinging green, pure liquid chlorophyll. The cackle of thyme and garlic hitting brown butter, its reassuring scent rising up. I also admired the seared golden-crowned scallops and the sliced pink duck breasts and the dark lobes of venison split open to reveal their savage red interiors—but I fell in love with the garnishes. In fact, nearly every emotion I felt during that time was connected to the food; my relationships with humans were secondary. (And I say this with deepest apologies to Aaron because he knows it’s true.) My egg-shaped silver plating spoon was an extension of my hand, the plates an extension of my thoughts. I was pie-eyed for the garnishes and knew nothing of current events. Even now, when someone mentions a major happening from my line-cooking tenure, I often look at them blankly. (Hanging chads from that contested 2000 election? No flipping idea.)
At the end of the day I fell into bed and a color factory of sauces and purees washed over me: the bright yolk yellow of the corn sauce; the milk-green of creamed favas; the inner glow of beets in red wine.
This is what happens to a cook when she spends so many hours gaping at the contents of the pan before her, waiting for doneness. It’s not unlike the way a gardener watches her tomatoes ripen. Both end points mark the moment at which a vegetable contains as much liquid sweetness as it ever will. When perfectly cooked, a wedge of white turnip will drip juices as if its light purple veins run with fat, and its tissue will soften and taste like butter. On the raw side of things, an utterly ripe tomato at the end of August swings low on its vine, opalescent and suntanned gold at the shoulders, its voluptuous flesh nearly falling out of its skin.
To me, becoming a cook meant being able to spot that point and know when the time came to stop—to pull it, slice it, and put it on a plate. Raw or cooked, that is the vegetable finale. And to me and all my entremet sisterhood—both the women and the men—it looks pretty much like happiness itself.
5
HERRING DARES AND CHICKEN TURTLES
In 2003, Fort Greene, our neighborhood in Brooklyn, seemed bipolar, rapid-cycling between decline and boom—a symptom better known as gentrifying. The dusty-shelved corner bodega, an obvious front for a numbers joint, soon gave way to a slick sushi place. When the first posh pet-accessories store opened, we worried that our rent would soon be increasing and we were right: Two years after we moved from the illegal sublet across the hall into a cavernous two-floored space big enough for both our living space and Aaron’s studio, the landlord nearly doubled our rent.
I wasn’t deflated, just pissed. We’d re-created a mini-Minnesota in the building. Not long after Matt’s death, Aaron’s sister, Sarah, came home from the Peace Corps and moved into our second bedroom, and Sara Woster, our painter friend from Minneapolis, had moved into our vacated studio across the hall. (We called them Sister-Sarah and Woster, respectively.) Together with Rob, who came over to smoke cigars with Aaron in his studio a few times a week, we expat Minnesotans dropped into one another’s apartments with frequent, casual, sitcom ease. We all spent much of our free time going to art openings. Rob was doing well in the art world; he had a gallery in Chelsea, had made it into the Whitney Biennial, and was selling sculptures for big sums of money, but he and Aaron were still working carpentry day jobs together and working on artwork at night. On Thursday and Friday nights after openings, I’d meet up with all of them at the late-late after-party, pulling up with greasy hair, my heavy cook’s bag tilting me crooked, and try to catch up to their loose-jointed states by ordering a shot and a beer chaser, which I was usually too tired to finish.
But when New York bore down its realities, the time came for us all to scatter and find new homes.