To this news Shea simply said, “Fine,” and looked away. “I’ve found your replacement.” His reaction to my giving notice, typical of most chefs, nonetheless pinched me with instant regret and a deep sense of betrayal, as intended.
As a serial quitter, I was used to it, but leaving this job felt different. For years, I’d just put one foot in front of the other, marching from one top kitchen into the next, amassing more fine-dining experience than any cook needs, until I reached a fog-filled fork in the road. My urge to go home was just as strong as Aaron’s. The only thing I knew for sure was that while he pined for the landscape and the head-spinning weather, I itched to cook the hours-old vegetables from my garden.
At the news that I was quitting my job so that we could spend the summer in Two Inlets, Aaron wasted no time in flying back home to check on the studio and to plant the garden. He called me with his giddy report: “You won’t believe how much the apple trees have grown! The plums are starting to bud out, and those black currants my dad planted took, too.”
Meanwhile, I resolutely finished out my two weeks in pastry, quenelling perfect ovoids of salted caramel ice cream, filling sesame tuile cylinders with light poufs of olive-oil-passion-fruit curd, daydreaming of the fantasy European-inspired country restaurant I wanted to have someday, scribbling in my notebook sketches and recipes that I would make when I got back to Minnesota, all of them exercises in raising our rural ingredients to my new standards. Braunschweiger wasn’t that different from mortadella; it could be made into a buttery mousse. The apple-saffron puree I’d been making would taste even better—stronger, brighter—if I used our crab apples. The luscious smoked lake trout of my childhood could go anywhere salt cod could go: brandade, fritters, Spanish croquettes.
Even though my pastry stint was clearly not a runaway success, I knew that cooking—meaning the job, the driving pace, the community of food freaks—had saved me. I’d been on the opening teams for two Manhattan restaurants, and on the first-year teams of two others, an experience that had pretty much served me my ass and my motivation on a platter all at once. The long hours and devotion had been worth it. Every mistake I’d made—and I’d made most of them by this point—had taught me how to dodge it in the future. I’d become more receptive to an ingredient’s needs. I knew that when I went home, I’d finally be able to give my heirloom Italian garden zucchini the respect it deserved. I thought back to a postservice meeting Shea had held during the opening weeks of Cru, when he thanked us for our over-overtime and our commitment to the team with a backhanded compliment: “But of course none of you are doing this for me. No one would be crazy enough to work hours like these unless they have bigger plans to be a chef of their own place.” We all nodded. I remember pausing with the cold ring of a postservice beer glued to my lips, wondering: Is that true of me? Will we stay in Brooklyn long enough to make my dream of cheffing a place come true? How would I ever find the resources, or the strength, to open a small, artful, ingredient-driven restaurant—the only kind I could envision having—in the wilds of rural northern Minnesota?
Now that feeling returned, more insistent: Had I really sacrificed seven sleep-deprived years to the Kitchen God so that I could become a better civilian home cook? Like Shea said, that would be crazy.
Despite the fact that my tour of duty was nearing its end, my food fixation kept on growing. It felt insatiable. The better I got at the job, the needier I became. I was always craving more: better raw materials, brighter spinach, tauter fish, shinier eggplant, more feral fruit. The original cooking habit that became an affliction was now morphing into something of an addiction. And when an addict reaches her bottom, she wants only one thing: to start over at the beginning with that flush of first attraction. This cooking enterprise had begun, and needed to culminate, with my roots. Not just the geographical roots of my home, but literally in the dirt. With the horseradish. Parsnips. Potatoes. Onions.
Leaving Cru for Park Rapids was what my line-cooking buddies would call “not a strategic move.” Any restaurants near the level at which I’d been working were in Minneapolis—two hundred miles away. Unless I wanted to return to the Schwarzwald Inn—and I did not—I wouldn’t be able to cook professionally there. Thankfully, Aaron’s art sales, together with the cheapness of our country place and the subletting of our New York apartment to cover its rent, bought me some time.
Thinking that I might have to fall back on my English degree and try to somehow write recipes and food stories for publication, I permitted myself to jot down sensory details about the kitchen in my notebooks—notations I’d previously refrained from making, considering them contraband, a mark of traitorship. One, my gray notebook, was filled with pages of cooks’ dialogue, the real illicit stuff. On the last day I realized that all of my notebooks were missing. I searched the kitchen frantically and eventually found two of them hiding behind the electric slicer—but not the gray one. I interrogated everyone about its whereabouts, ending with Shea.
“You got some hot recipes in there, huh? You didn’t type them up?” He couldn’t stop the light from rolling over his face. I thought he looked as guilty as hell. This guy, who indulged in a practical-joke exchange with a chef friend that culminated in a padded envelope of express mail containing a “special kind of chocolate” that turned out to be the other chef’s line cook’s fresh turd…Even if he had killed the game for breach of decency, and sanitation, still: that guy would never steal a cook’s notebook.