After seven years of cooking in New York City, I arrived at the moment that I can now pinpoint as the end of the end: I was sitting on my haunches behind the pastry counter in the basement of Cru, scarfing a hot duck meatball on a roll, trying to erase the sour taste of discontent in my mouth, plotting my defection. It was the tipping point. My future in restaurants was in peril.
Aaron was faring better. He had quit carpentry to make art full-time. Not only that, he was selling every piece he made, putting us, for the first time in our life together, into the financial black. His career as an artist outweighed mine for both primacy and drama, a shift in focus for which I was thankful—but that meant that it was time for us to have the talk.
Aaron and I both knew that someday we would return to our house in the woods to sit on the porch and grow old, but for now our loyalties were evenly split between the city and the country. We thought of both places as equally dramatic: the country for its stunning remoteness, the city for its relentless density.
Like classic expatriates, we were a little addicted to the outsider feeling that accompanied every return, and our imaginations were always attuned to the place where we weren’t. We basically lived in each place with one foot in the other. In Brooklyn, we thought of ourselves as rural people on a long sojourn, listened to a steady diet of old country music, and bemoaned the loss of our multigenerational social circle back home. (Where are all the older people?) When we went home for the summer, we felt like visiting New Yorkers, seemed not to need Waylon or Willie, and missed New York’s creative culture, its museums, its restaurants, its fellow artists and cooks.
But nine years into our relationship, the same split loyalty to both country and city that had originally kept us teeter-tottering between homes began to dip to one side—at least it did for me. Our youth was waning; at some point we’d have to make a choice on which side to land. At the present moment it looked like Brooklyn, where we could each make a living in our respective careers, was the more responsible choice.
Sitting at our tiny dining-room table facing the windows that overlooked congested Atlantic Avenue, Aaron plumbed the depths of his algae-green spinach soup, his spoon clinking, telegraphing to me his wish for a little texture. He’s not a puree guy. Not even for one as thin and elegant as this one, spiked with both truffle oil and melted clouds of Taleggio cheese—an aphrodisiac double-down.
No amount of seduction could stop him from saying what I knew was coming. The ghost in the room—a black-and-white photo of our house in the woods—hung on the wall like one of our ancestors. It was spring, that time of year. I knew what he was thinking. The road less traveled begins to disappear, and I had to admit that it was true: Our dirt driveway back home had started to blur at the edges with brush. The forest was starting to reclaim it.
“I think we should take the money I’ve made this year to pay for a new studio building back home,” he said, testing the waters. “Eventually, I’m going to need a place to work back there, and now’s the time. I’ve already called Vern and he can do it.”
“You’ve already called Vern?” I put down my spoon. He meant Vern Schultz, a carpenter neighbor whose skills were in high demand.
I was not game for spending our precious surplus cash on our impractical place back home. No. I was settled here. I was hoping we could use that money to buy a place in Brooklyn, or at the very least burrow into a better rental and hold on to it as prices rose, because they always rose. I cursed the intrusion of our original plan. It was getting inconvenient.
He continued. “And then we’re just going to have to hook up to the grid.”
“What?” I said, shocked to realize that the power lust with which I’d previously struggled could be so easily bought. We could now afford to run the power line two miles down our driveway to the house—if we chose to.
“Running power back there will give us the thing we need more of, and that’s time,” he ramped up, having obviously prepared his argument. “You can’t spend all your time heating up water for dishes and I can’t spend all my time lugging it. And I’m going to need to run power tools in my studio.”
My first thought was, Then I’m getting a stand mixer. Instead I challenged him: “Don’t you need to stay here, where the art world is?”
“Don’t you always say you want to cook out of the garden?” he shot back. “I need to be wherever I can make the most work. There, we’ll both have more time and more space.”
He was making it sound logical, even audacious, to ply our crafts at our home in the middle of nowhere, he with his Japanese chisels, me with my Japanese knives.
“Besides,” Aaron said, inverting the cheesiest of New York clichés with a maddening grin, “if you can make it in Minnesota, you can make it anywhere.” He rested his case.
Paradoxically, the minute we had enough money to relieve the constant stress of trying to make it in New York, I felt my claws for staying in the city retract. For years I’d let Aaron carry the heavy weight of pining for home, but in truth Two Inlets had its hooks in me—even more so if it had electricity. He might have built the house, but we built the place together. Between the creek full of wild rice, our garden, the orchard, and the trails that cut through acres of wild raspberries, we had built an edible kingdom. It was a cook’s paradise.
And it was becoming increasingly obvious to me that place of origin was the primary tool in any chef’s toolbox. Dishes that leaned too hard on culinary trends felt slightly derivative, no matter how technically perfect they were. The most powerful cooking I’d ever tasted—Michel Bras’s Trout with Milk Skin that mimicked the clotted top of his mother’s cream; Bouley’s Scallop with Ocean Herbal that was thick with the pulpy vegetables his grandmother had cooked in the brushfire coals; Shea’s Tomato-Sauced Ricotta Cavatelli that pulled hard on his Italian-American upbringing—had sprung organically from taste memories. The link to the past was what made these dishes contemporary and what made them original. Even if I wouldn’t be cooking professionally in Two Inlets, I knew that it was time for me to play around with the ingredients I had access to there. I was a proud Midwesterner, and yet here I was, making purees instead of stews; I never made anything that called up my personal history. I closed my eyes. It was either a bad game of Monopoly or the story of my life or—just maybe—my fate: in order to move forward, I had to move a few steps back.
Aaron knew me too well. I hadn’t helped him plant those cherry trees or dig out that garden by hand for nothing. I gave him, and Vern, the green light to build the studio. The next day Aaron called the power company and sent the check that would hook our place up to the twenty-first century.