Food

FOOD

Before I married, I mastered two culinary creations: tuna fish salad and popcorn. I had no interest in cooking or in food with the possible exception of home-churned, fresh peach ice cream in August.


As luck would have it, I married into a culinary family. My father-in-law was the manager of the Grill Room, a famed restaurant in the Savoy Hotel, which was once the pinnacle of elegance. My husband's uncles, Italian and living in London, were all in the food business. His cousin in Italy was foreign marketing director of Martini and Rossi, the folks who make Asti Spumante.


Since then, I have had many adventures in the Department of Culinary Matters. Some stories I have written about those adventures are below.

The White House Chef

One afternoon when I was a reporter for The Waterbury Republican, a daily morning newspaper in Waterbury, CT, I arrived at the newsroom and found a reporter named Ron waiting to talk to me.

"Jane, I have been assigned to cover a Board of Education meeting tonight. I want you to know that it's not my idea to cover a meeting on your news beat," he said.

"Why aren't they sending me?" I asked.

"You are assigned to cover a talk by Rene Verdon, the White House chef when JFK was president," he said.

"Me? I don't know anything about food. Why would they send me when you worked as a cook?"

"I don't know. You'll have to ask the assignment editor," Ron said.

The assignment editor told me that the executive editor told him to assign me to cover Rene Verdon’s talk because I was the only woman on the city night news staff. The executive editor thought the story should be written from “the woman’s point of view.”

The city editor was planning to put the story on the front page below the fold with a photograph. After eating my usual tuna fish salad on toast at Drescher’s Restaurant where the city side reporters met for supper every night, I left to attend the White House chef’s talk.

With a dramatic stride, Rene Verdon stepped out on the stage wearing a white chef’s hat and coat with an apron tied around his waist. He bowed graciously, smiled broadly, and exulted in the crowd's applause. When he spoke, I was standing on the side of the hall near the front.

I could hear his voice clearly, but his French accent was so thick that I could not understand what he was saying in English.

What was he talking about? Was he speaking about JFK or Jackie or their children, John and Caroline? Was he revealing the favorite dishes of any or all of them? I could not hear.

As he was preparing to cook on stage, he held up a clump of bananas and peeled one. With a deft movement of his right hand, he sliced the banana with a knife. Moving to the stove, he turned it on and put a large quantity of butter in a pan. He tilted the cutting board over the pan, and the sliced bananas fell into it.

Gently, he coaxed the pan back and forth across the burner, adding sugar to the bananas. Then, he poured heavy cream into the pan, turned the heat higher and forcefully moved the pan back and forth. “Voila,” he said loudly as he took the pan off the heat and set it aside.

Next, he took a mixing bowl, sifted some dry ingredients into it and added something he poured out of a pitcher. After mixing this, he took another pan and carefully poured in the semi thick liquid to cook on the stove.

I had no idea what he was doing, and I still could not hear anything he was saying except for “Voila.”

I was feeling desperate. What was I going to write? Former White House Chef Rene Verdon came to Waterbury, cooked bananas and said “Voila?”

Maybe someone in the audience understands his accent, I thought. Maybe someone in the audience understands what he is cooking and how he is cooking it.

I looked at the audience to see if I recognized anyone. To my surprise, I knew more than half a dozen women. They were my mother's friends, women I had met at the Middlebury Swim Club on Lake Quassapaug and women who were alumnae of the girls’ school I had attended. Two women had asked me to babysit for their children. I wrote all their names in my notebook.

After the talk, I approached the chef to get a close look at the book he had been holding on the stage. It was an ancient copy of the Physiologie du Gout, The Physiology of Taste, signed by its author, Anthelme Brillat – Savarin.

Rene Verdon was standing next to me as he said, “I love this quote from the book: “The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.”

I was ecstatic. I had one quote for my story.

Back at the newspaper office, I grabbed the telephone book and the telephone. I called all the women I recognized. One after another, they said that they could not understand the chef’s English well, but they did learn one cooking tip. With each woman, I reviewed what he was doing when he was cooking on the stage.

Then, I wrote my story.

I described how Former White House Chef Rene Verdon cooked banana crepes, the dish he made on the stage with bananas, butter, sugar and heavy cream. I enumerated his cooking tips, which the women I telephoned had passed along to me. In the newspaper's library, I looked up a few details about his service to the Kennedys. I used the quote from Brillat – Savarin.

The night editor said that I had not filled all the space reserved for the story. I replied that he should make the photograph larger to fill the space. I had nothing more to write.

After filing my story and writing a caption for the front page photograph, I was leaving the newspaper when Ron asked me, “How did it go?”

“Well,” I sighed, “it was a challenge. I wish you had been covering it instead of me.” 

Ron said, “I was all at sea at the Board of Ed. I had to get the secretary to go over everything with me after the meeting.”

When I arrived at work the next afternoon, City Editor Floyd Knox called out across the desks in the newsroom, which occupied the entire top floor of the railroad station. “Hey, Jane, Mr. Pape wants to see you in his office. Right away.” My stomach sank.

Mr. Pape was the publisher of both the morning and afternoon papers, which had separate staffs. Mr. Pape ran the business side of both newspapers. Mr. Pape always wore a three-piece suit with a watch on a chain. Mr. Pape kept his door closed. Mr. Pape never talked to reporters.

With fear and trembling, I knocked on his office door. “Come in,” he said. I stepped inside and closed the door. At least, when Mr. Pape fired me, nobody in the newsroom would witness my humiliation.

"Sit down," he said. I sat down.

“Mrs. Pape read your story in the newspaper this morning,” he said.

“Oh?” I said. My heart felt as though it had skipped a beat.

“She was especially interested in what you wrote because she attended the chef’s talk last night,” he said. I gulped. My heart felt as though it had skipped several beats. I had only just started in journalism, and now it appeared my career was over.

“I want to tell you,” he said, “how much Mrs. Pape enjoyed reading your story. She said that the chef’s French accent was very thick, so thick that she could not understand a single word he said.”

I was speechless.

“You did an excellent job,” he smiled.

I took a deep breath. My heart was beating again.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

As I backed out the office door, Ron was waiting outside.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you at Drescher’s,” I said.

Food and the Homeless

When the Associated Press sent me to Washington D.C. as a regional reporter, I lived with my husband, Peter, above his architectural office on Dupont Circle. If I was going to the Associated Press office from Dupont Circle, the most efficient way to get there was to walk. That meant encountering homeless people on the way to work.

On weekends, it was impossible to avoid homeless people on the way to our three favorite grocery stores. Vace sold fresh pasta and sauces, Larimer’s was for fine cheeses and specialty items, and Safeway was for everything else. Between these shops and our doorway at 1503 Connecticut Ave., we always passed at least half a dozen homeless people.

One day, Peter sat down next to a homeless man named Andy at the lunch counter of a drug store on the other side of Dupont Circle. Andy said that the world of the homeless was cutthroat after dark. You had to have money to buy dinner, but you had to make sure you had almost no money left after dinner or the other homeless people would steal from you and rough you up.

Andy had a set of clear signals to indicate whether he needed money or whether he did not want anyone to give him money. Andy told Peter that when he needed money, he stood on the grate on the corner of Connecticut Ave. and Q St., N.W. When he did not want money but needed to be warm, he stood off the grate leaning against the building on the same corner.

One Saturday, on the way to the store, Andy was standing on the grate alone. I reached out my hand to shake his so that he could take the folded bill from the palm of my hand into his hand without anyone seeing the money.

“How are you?” I asked. “So so,” he said.

“It’s getting colder at night. Are you sleeping in the homeless shelter now?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he said, “I will sleep there soon, though.”

I asked Andy, “What is your favorite food?” He said he loved cheddar cheese. From then on, we added to our weekly shopping list a chunk of cheddar cheese for Andy.

As autumn turned to winter and the nights grew colder, I often thought of Andy and hoped that he was sleeping in the shelter and keeping warm. A nurse who looked after my young son while I was at work was also worried about the homeless in Dupont Circle. She learned where the nearest homeless shelter was and volunteered to serve dinner there sometimes.

When Melba asked me to serve dinner there myself, I told her that I could not commit to any activity outside of the Associated Press. My job was exciting, and I loved my work, but it was not a 9 to 5 job. It was work that expanded to fill my waking hours. I told Melba that I would cook a casserole on the weekends if she would serve the food at the shelter.

I developed a nutritious recipe for lentils casserole that included cheddar cheese. Each time Melba served this at the shelter, she returned the next day with my largest baking pan and said that the homeless loved this dish.

Years later, when my son was in second grade, I was waiting for the school van to drop him off at the end of the school day. I was wearing Peter’s flannel shirt over a t-shirt and carrying my younger son, then an infant. I knew I would have to wait awhile for the van, and I did not want to waste a good mug of tea.

So I took my mug in my free hand and went down to Connecticut Avenue to wait for the van. After I had finished sipping the tea, the cup was still in my hand while I held my baby in the other arm. People were rushing by me on their way home from work. 

Suddenly, I heard an unfamiliar sound. Looking in the cup, I saw a half dollar coin in the bottom.

Making Maple Syrup

One spring when the days were warm and the nights were cold, my younger brother and I decided to surprise our parents. My brother had figured out how to tap a maple tree so that sap would flow into a bucket, and with that sap, we could make maple syrup.

All we had to do was to boil the sap on the kitchen stove.

Once Mom and Dad had left the house for the evening, my brother brought the bucket from the edge of the woods up to the house. I got out all the saucepans and the stainless steel frying pans until I had six pots and pans, one for each burner on the stovetop.

My brother poured the sap through a strainer into a pitcher and tipped the pitcher over the pots and pans, pouring some sap into each one. I turned on all the stovetop burners to high. Soon, the burners were neon red around the bottom rims of the pots and pans. 

The sap came to a boil, and steam rose. Soon, the steam rose higher, coating the walls. Finally, the steam hit the ceiling, having brushed against the wooden cupboard doors on the way up.

“I’d better get the stool and a sponge and wipe the steam off the cupboard doors,” I said.

“Look, the steam is dripping down from the ceiling. I’ll get up on the other stool. Hand me a sponge,” my brother said.

We got up on the stools and wiped the cupboard doors, the walls and the ceiling. We got down off the stools and rinsed the sponges in the sink. We did this over and over.

“Is your sponge sticky?” I asked my brother.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Was your sponge sticky before or did it get sticky when you wiped the ceiling?” I asked.

“My sponge wasn’t sticky before. Hey, what’s going on here? This steam on the ceiling is sticky even before I wipe it with the sponge,” my brother said.

“Maybe we’d better turn the burners off. We can pour out the maple syrup we’ve made and call it a day,” I said.

My brother turned off the burners while I doused my sponge in warm water in the sink, squeezed the sponge and climbed back up on the stool to wipe the surfaces again.

“You’re not going to believe this,” my brother said.

“What?”

“There’s no syrup.”

“What do you mean, ‘there’s no syrup.’ There must be a little syrup.”

“Jane, I’m telling you, there’s no syrup, just sap. There is less sap than when we started, but it’s just sap and not syrup.”

“I thought you said that when you boil sap, it turns to maple syrup. We must have missed a step. Were we supposed to add something?”

“I don’t know,” my brother said. “Maybe we should call the nature center. They tap maple trees, and they boil the sap in that sugarhouse in the woods.”

By now, we were using dry towels to wipe large areas of the wall surfaces, the cupboard doors, the stovetop and the counter near the stovetop.

“Where’s the phone book?” I said. “I’m calling Duncan MacDougall.”

Duncan was the director of the nature center in town. I had recently interviewed him for a story in the Newtown Bee, a weekly newspaper that had hired me for my first job as a reporter and photographer. Duncan answered the phone, and when I told him what had happened, he chuckled, and then he laughed so much that I started to laugh, too, even though I had no idea what he was laughing about.

“Did you ever hear of the ratio, 40 to 1?” he asked.

“No, what's that?”

“Well, you have to boil 40 parts sap to make one part syrup.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No, that’s why we have the sugarhouse in the woods. When the sap boils, the steam rises because the water content in the sap is evaporating, but the sap has a sugar content, too, and that’s why the steam is sticky,” Duncan said.

“Are you saying that it would take 40 tablespoons of sap to make one tablespoon of syrup?”

“Yup. Forty tablespoons is two and a half cups so it takes two and a half cups of sap boiled down to make one tablespoon of syrup. That’s a lot of sticky steam,” Duncan said.

I told my brother what Duncan said.

“Are we going to tell Mom and Dad about this?” my brother asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Apples as Wealth

When I was a child, my family was living in rural poverty, but I did not know it then. As a youngster in a simpler time, I did not have any measurement of wealth.

One autumn day, we were invited to go to a circus made of wire figures animated by the artist who created them, a neighbor named Alexander Calder. Sandy was a kindly man married to Louisa, who exuded warmth. 

Dad, Mom, my brother Eric, and I went up Painter Hill Road in Roxbury, CT, to Sandy's studio behind the Calders’ clapboard house, which Sandy had painted black. 

Other friends and neighbors and their children were also there. I was enraptured by the spellbinding circus. Afterward, it was time for refreshments.

The Calders passed around a gigantic wooden bowl of apples. I held my open hand over the bowl trying to decide which one of these mouth-watering red apples I should choose. Finally, I took one.

Looking up at my father, I said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Daddy, the Calders are rich. They have so many apples.” Mrs. Calder told me to hold out my skirt so she could fill it with apples before we went home.

Mont Blanc

Before I was married, I went to London to meet the parents of the man I was dating. The culinary highlight was going to the Savoy Hotel to dine in the private quarters of his father, Luigi Vercelli, the manager of the Grill Room restaurant at the hotel.

The meal began with a first course of Moules Marinieres followed by fish as the entrée. When the mussels arrived, I was deeply suspicious of eating a seafood dish I had never heard of before. But I took a deep breath and made the appropriate complimentary remarks, thinking that anyone who loved clams as I did could surely eat mussels and enjoy them. The fish was also delicious, along with the bread and the unsalted butter.

I was so full from the first and second courses that my intention was to skip the dessert. “We have a most special dessert tonight made especially for us,” Luigi said. I managed a small smile and thought to myself that I would have to eat a little dessert no matter how uncomfortably full I felt.

The door opened and there, in full chef’s regalia, replete with an enormous starched hat, was the head chef himself, a Frenchman named Alban. He had come by to say hello because Luigi’s son was visiting from America and had brought an American girlfriend to dine with the family. 

It was an honor for me to meet Alban. Then, as Alban gestured toward the doorway with a sweep of his large hands, two waiters entered the room carrying a huge wooden board. 

On this board was a three-dimensional mountain range with cascades of white snow on the peaks. It was an impressive sight. The waiters set down the creation and were introduced. I thought they were bringing a non-edible table decoration for Luigi to approve and admire.

After words spoken in Italian were translated into English for me, it emerged that the decorative mountain range they called Mont Blanc was made of meringue for the base of the mountains, pureed chestnuts poured from a great height to make the earth look textured on the mountains and whipped cream to make the snow peaks. It was edible. I was shocked. 

Everyone laughed at my surprise that the table decoration was dessert. I ate a small portion. My surprise turned to dismay. This was the most delectable, nutty, creamy dessert I had ever tasted, and I was so full I did not think I could eat another spoon. I rested for a moment and decided to ignore the protestations of my body. I continued slowly eating the chestnuts and meringue and cream until I felt as though the whipped cream was going to dribble out of my ears.

I was so sorry not to be able to eat any more of the Mont Blanc that I told Luigi I wished the dessert had been served first so that we could have eaten the dessert to our heart’s content and then had a little of the main course and the first course afterward. Luigi said that my comment reminded him of a formal meal that was once organized in just that way.

It was a celebration of Louis Bleriot’s airplane flying the loop or as Luigi described it, "the loop-de-loop." Bleriot had crossed the English Channel in 1909 from Calais to Dover, and then, in 1913, he and his airplane flew the loop, doing a somersault in the air. 

Luigi recalled that in 1914 a formal dinner was held as a tribute to Bleriot. The sponsors of the dinner, the Royal Automobile Club, wanted to do something special to make the meal reflect the "loop-de-loop" so they started with dessert and ended with the appetizer.

"I'd Rather Starve"

As a vegetarian since the age of 14, I have always been indifferent to the presentation of food. My primary interest in food has been the answer to a single question: “Is there any meat in this dish?” The substance of a meal was important to me, but the form of the meal never mattered. Never, that is, until the day when I arranged for Luigi Vercelli, my father-in-law, to go to a lunch for seniors at the community center in our Connecticut town.

My husband and I were new to both the region of northeastern Connecticut and the town where we lived in an old house we loved in an historic neighborhood. After my father-in-law retired, I invited him to move from London to live with us. I wanted Luigi, who was adjusting to life as a widower, to meet new people. 

So I arranged for someone to drive him to and from the lunch for seniors in another section of town while my husband and I were at work. That night after I came home, I asked Luigi how it went.

“It was horrible, absolutely horrible. The plates were white. The fish was white, the mashed potatoes were white, the gravy on the potatoes was white, the cauliflower was white, and the rolls on the table were white,” he said. 

After lunch, a woman with a large purse took the white napkins from the table and filled them with all the leftover white rolls and put these in her purse. Luigi shook his head. “It was disgusting,” he said.

As a highly accomplished professional in the food world in London, Luigi had spent his entire adult life committed to both the substance of a meal and the appearance. He had a saying he often used to describe a meal or a dish that involved great fanfare when it came to presentation but that did not measure up in terms of substance. The Italian saying was, “Tutto fumo, niente rusto,” which means, “All smoke, no roast.” I asked him what he thought of the quality of the food at the lunch for seniors. “Bland,” he said, “Niente fumo, niente rusto.”

Luigi viewed certain food-related customs as sacred. The idea that anyone would take food from a communal table to eat it later at home was new to him, and it did not go over well. I explained that in the United States, we have a custom called the “doggy bag,” a custom that has nothing to do with whether the person who requests a “doggy bag” has a dog or any other pet. He shook his head. “It’s not done where I come from,” he said.

Then, I asked him this question: would he be interested in going back to another lunch for seniors sometime?

“Absolutely not,” he said. “I’d rather starve.”