This time when we moved back to Brooklyn we avoided the quicker straight-shot, Interstate 80/90, and took the same slow route we’d taken the first time, the high road that snaked through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, into Canada, then by ferry across Lake Erie to Tobermory, and then to New York, leisurely stopping to eat fried perch at small cafés the whole way.
As we drove the curving ribbon of midnight-blue tar from upstate New York toward the city, our truck slurping up the yellow middle lines like someone mindlessly mawing fries, I calmly faced facts: My cooking career as I knew it was probably over. Well aware of what kind of a cook I was—a complete control fiend—I realized that my conception of cooking and motherhood were totally incompatible. Other women chefs did it, and I admired them for it, but I knew I wouldn’t want to work the eighty hours a week, or even fifty, that my brand of cooking required. I wanted to be present for my baby’s first year—at least. I swallowed a small pill of regret: My perfectionism had done me in. I’d chosen to keep my head down in fine-dining brigades, at hedonistic close range, for too long, past the point when I should have been scanning the horizon for opportunities to helm my own kitchen. Before I’d left New York the last time, I dreamed of doing just that, of finding a chef job in a small place, maybe somewhere in Brooklyn, where restaurants were sprouting up like mushrooms and were in search of chefs with résumés like mine. But now I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t imagine not being pregnant; my devotion to our baby was instant and fierce. Indulging myself in a moment of mourning, I conceded that I might never hold the title chef that I’d worked so long to earn.
Back in our Brooklyn apartment, I searched my computer for catering jobs, temporary test-kitchen jobs in food magazines, anything temporary, with growing despondency. I had worked so long with outrageous, blunt, bawdy restaurant people, in restaurants that pulsed with electric energy; restaurants were my home. Two weeks later, like the homing pigeon I am, I beat my familiar footpath to Cru and asked Shea for a job.
In the Cru office, I informed him of my new condition. He looked shocked, as if I weren’t a woman of childbearing age, and said the first thing that popped into his head: “You look pregnant.”
I wished I’d replied “Are you going to throw me a baby shower, Chef?” but I wasn’t quick enough. I mumbled, “Thanks,” and looked down at my small paunch, hardly visible.
I wanted to cook for the next five months, but I didn’t want to work nights. Being that Cru was closed for lunch, I put the pressure on him to take me on as an extra cook—on what the guys and I referred to as “special teams.” Remembering my time working on the Danube cookbook, Shea hired me to spend my days in R and D, cataloging the recipes for both the VIP tasting menu and a future cookbook of his own. We met daily in the dining room and he filled my prep list with ideas swirling in his head: a bunch of different pickles, flavored butters, a new sauce for the scallop crudo, methods of cooking vegetables he’d never had the time to try himself. Without the pressure of an impending dinner service, and with my creativity on a long leash, I’d never been happier in the kitchen.
That first week back, my pregnancy shocked the crew, as if I’d crossed some invisible line that changed my species. When I walked in that day, exaggerating my small belly with a slight pregnant waddle, the guys on the line remembered that I was in fact female. The Spanish-speaking porters smiled and all ceremoniously offered to carry my full bus tubs up the stairs. “Oh, mami, mami, please let me do that for you.” Their kindness was touching, but as the weeks passed, it proved unsustainable. My trips were just too frequent. They looked over at me with sympathy as I softly trudged my tubs up the stairs, trying not to rest the bottoms on my growing gut.
Setting up my work area on the wide marble-countered wine station, I let my freak flag fly. I cooked dishes that straddled the line of too-caramelized or too-incongruous until one or two toppled over the peak of weirdness into originality. I fried hen-of-the-woods mushrooms in garlicky oil past the point of reason, until they were like mushroom jerky, and then crumbled them over roasted scallops. Shea liked them. “Toss these with torn mint,” he said, “and make me a batch for tonight’s VIP menu.” Emboldened, I ran my workstation like a communal experimental space for the line cooks to swoop by and drop commentary. Walking past, they pinched clumps of dandelion greens that I’d braised and topped with an anchovy Caesar-style dressing, to mixed reaction.
“Cooked dandelion gets way too bitter,” Todd commented.
Peter, the meat entremet, agreed. “But it’s an addictive bitter. Feels so good when it stops it makes you want more.”
They were unanimous about my milk chocolate pine-nut financier, though, lobbing chunks of it into their mouths until the batch was reduced to crumbs.
“Fucking good.” Rich looked at me incredulously. “Why didn’t you make that when you were in pastry?”
—
As my baby grew from a normal-size squash into a prizewinning pumpkin, the divide between me and the other line cooks grew, as did their curiosity. At a time when most pregnant women are conspiratorially sharing their baby names with their girlfriends, I was throwing mine by this crew.
“How about Sven for a boy?” I said. “Sven Spangler.”
“Sounds like a Norwegian bachelor farmer,” said Todd, who was from Minnesota. “Too Prairie Home Companion.”
“Vote for Sven. Sven rocks!” Jason called out from the crudo line where he was blowtorching a kombu-wrapped yellowtail loin.
“Okay, what do you guys think of Adeline for a girl?” I said as I poured a curried carrot-juice reduction into a pan of steaming mussels. I wondered, Should it have both dill and cilantro on the finish, or just dill? “I like it on a little girl, but when she grows up…I mean, is Adeline sexy enough? A twenty-five-year-old Adeline? Or an Addie?”
There was a long pause. “I’d take a twenty-five-year-old Adeline to bed,” Jason said, grinning.
“Oh, yeah,” the others confirmed. “For sure.”
As I ushered the clattering mussel shells into a serving plate, I looked over at Kyle, the one who had guessed my predilection for Heart, the one who had marked our quart of communal sugar with a satanic symbol and the words MORBID SUGAR and who was now labeling a container of braised baby romaine BABY REMAINS. That was one of his darker quips, but nonetheless consistent with his death-metal takeover of our kitchen. “Ky-o,” I called. “That’s so not funny, man. Do you see what I’m carrying here? You ever cook with a pregnant lady before?”
He swooped his head deferentially toward me. “Can’t say that I have, ma’am.”
“It’s mami, my friend.”
“Okay, Mommy,” he mocked. “You know what, when you go back to Minnesota you should make a really good version of sloppy joes, and you should call them ‘Morbid Joes.’?”
“Do you know what some people in northern Minnesota call sloppy joes?” I paused dramatically. “Barbecues. Plural.”