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I left Chicago with the ink barely dry on my BA in English lit from Northwestern, the week after Teresa’s enormous wedding, and headed straight to Paris for culinary school, having done a semester abroad there junior year and fallen in love with the city. I did the Grand Dipl?me at Le Cordon Bleu, and then staged around France for a year at various Michelin-starred restaurants. Michel Troisgros recommended me to a friend of his who had a small Relais and Chateaux property in a little town in Burgundy, near Beaune, that had a restaurant shooting for its first star, and a sous chef who had announced an imminent departure to open his own place. On Michel’s recommendation I was given a one-week tryout at Chez L’Ami Bernard in the Auberge D’Ortolan, and by the end of the third day had been offered the job. And there I stayed until my mom called to tell me Dad was sick.
“Okay, but you’ve been back for, like, seven years? More? Pretty sure the Wi-Fi works fine here.”
“I hate the idea of all that shit. All the time suck, the inane crap that everyone seems to get obsessed with. What am I really missing, Candy Smash?” I have to admit to myself, my lack of computer participation has much more to do with my being something of a technophobe. But it sounds so much better to just be dismissive of the negative aspects of such a plugged-in life, kind of like those people who say they don’t have a TV because they love to read. Not nearly as worldly to say you don’t have TV because you don’t know how to work a remote control and would be too afraid to try to hook up a DVD player.
“Crush. Candy Crush. You’re a wonder, my friend, a true wonder.” Marcy stayed in Paris after graduation to do extensive continuing pastry courses and then worked at the legendary Patisserie Stohrer before moving to Chicago to work at the Peninsula Hotel, partially because I had always raved about how much I loved the city. While she was still in Paris, I would always go back and stay with her in her little flat in the 9th between stages, and she would always take her holidays to come see me wherever I was. Sometimes we would meet for weekends in other European cities, exploring the markets in Amsterdam or the food halls in London together, sharing pitiful tiny rooms at shitty hotels so that we could afford to eat at the best restaurants. I was sad when she left Paris, but relieved she landed in Chicago, and we were fairly good about staying in touch in the years she was here and I was still there.
“Speaking of wonders, what’s in the box?” I say, desperate to change the subject.
“Some testers Sophie and I are working on for the new place. Want your opinion,” she says, pulling the box over and slicing the tape open with her thumbnail.
I look inside. There is a large roll, a miniature pie about four inches across with a golden crust that is sprinkled with large crystals of sugar, a stack of cookies, a square of what looks like bread pudding, and a small tub.
“Okay, what am I looking at?” I say.
“This is the rustic roll I was telling you about last week, the one based on the classic Poilane bread.” My favorite bread of all time, with its dark, almost burnt chewy crust and the tangy, fermented chestnut-colored crumb.
“Yum, very excited about that.”
“Us too. I think we’ve finally nailed it. This is what we are thinking for pie service, all individual whole pies instead of slices. This one is classic apple.”
“Because you still can’t stand it when the servers don’t get the pie slices out of the pan perfectly.”
“True. The cookies are cornflake snickerdoodle, Black Forest, and ginger lemon cream.”
“Cornflake snickerdoodle?”
“Sophie’s thing. She wanted a cookie that tasted like the top of a good noodle kugel.”
“She’s fucking brilliant, that woman.”
“I know, right? This is a piece of the palmier bread pudding, and that is the vanilla semolina pudding.”
My mouth is watering.
“Is this an official tasting?” I ask. Marcy and I often just cook for each other, and might offer some generic notes and suggestions on things after, if the other asks for feedback. But officially tasting during recipe testing is a whole different beast.
“Yep, if you are up for that.”
“Of course. Let’s finish our wine and snack and then we can get to work.”
I’m relieved, since if we do a tasting officially, we are doing it by essentially competition standards. We take sips of water and nibbles of plain bread to clear our palates between bites, and we make careful notes about every aspect of the item: texture, flavor, balance of elements. Looking for anything that can help take the recipe into the realm of perfection. This means there will hopefully be no more talk about the various important relationships that I have let simply fall like so much sand through my open hands, and I won’t have to think about why it never occurred to me to simply close my fingers and try to save at least some of them.
Three
El-o-eeeze,” Geneva singsongs as she hops into the kitchen. “Why are you so faaannncccyyy?”
I look down at myself. I’m wearing a gray pencil skirt that pulls a little too tight around my midsection, but my black wrap-style sweater covers that part fairly effectively. Black tights, and my tallest pair of shoes, a wedge-style black suede, because Mrs. O’Connor was the first person to make me feel good about owning my height, and I want to be as tall for her as possible. My hair is twisted up into a chignon, slightly more polished than my usual messy bun, and I’m wearing a little bit of makeup. As soon as I finish dinner for the Farbers I am heading straight to the funeral home for the visitation. Mom will meet me there.
“I have to go somewhere after work, peanut,” I say to her as she climbs up onto one of the stools, and I reach over the counter and tweak her nose.
“Where you goin’?”
I think about this. The Farbers are pretty honest with their kids about most stuff, but in the time I’ve worked for them there has not been a death to deal with, as far as I know, so I err on the side of caution. “I’m going to a kind of a party.”
She looks me up and down and makes a face. “You don’t look like a party. You should have pink!” She throws her arms open wide to indicate exactly how much pink she thinks I should have. Geneva loves pink.
I laugh. “I probably should, kiddo, but I’m afraid all of my pink was in the laundry.”
She nods solemnly at me. This is something she understands, because whatever Geneva really desperately wants to wear at any given moment is likely to be in the laundry, much to her consternation. Shelby has often said that she is going to start just buying two of everything for her so that she doesn’t have to endure the exasperated lectures from her four-year-old on her substandard laundry habits.
“Geneva,” Shelby says, coming into the kitchen. “Leave poor Eloise alone, she needs to finish.”