Seasons by the Sea: Menus and Stories They Tell
I used to keep a menu book. No one seems to know what those are anymore. If you Google them, all you get are restaurant supply stores offering you big leather-bound menu covers, or books like “7-Day Menu Planner for Dummies” and “Dinner: The Playbook — a 30 Day Plan for Mastering the Art of the Family Meal.” In other words, all you find are books for people who hate to cook, or don’t have time, and probably don’t even want to sit down to dinner with their family and friends. One friend asked, “Isn’t that something socialites used to do?” Probably. But for the 10-year span I kept a menu book, I was a hippie-dippy type working at National Public Radio and then NBC News as Roger Mudd’s researcher. I just loved to cook for friends.
I found this menu book recently and discovered as I read through it that there is a definite narrative arc. It spans 10 years and all 160 pages are filled. My husband and I lived together for five years, before we got married. The book begins one year after we got married (1985) and ends in 1995, when we were separated and on the verge of divorce. The last entry of May 14, 1995, was three weeks before I was to have surgery and discover that I had ovarian cancer. But here I am now, 20 years later, alive and well. (I served glazed chicken Germaine, by the way, with pickled carrots and steamed rice.)
It’s too bad my handwriting is so atrocious. If I’d been paying attention in penmanship class, this book would be quite lovely. Alas, my scribbles look like rat tracks, there are more exclamation points than a teenage girl’s diary, and my “wine notes” show a complete lack of understanding of how to read a label, a problem I have to this day. I was definitely enamored of Patricia Wells’s “Bistro Cookbook” and Lee Bailey’s “Country Weekends.”
I repeated some recipes so many times that two friends visiting from California, eight years apart, remarked “Haven’t we had this dish before?” Mortified, I consulted my menu book and there it was: “Drew and Barbara here from California — butternut squash with ginger and rosemary.” Isn’t that one of the points of menu books, so you don’t repeat the same foods? By the way, that dish is so good, I’ve already published it twice in this column.
There are plenty of historic tidbits in the menu book. Such as the dinner party of Dec. 7, 1991, the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. Menu: anchoiade, lamb shanks with black beans, roast Provencal tomatoes, butter lettuce with dill and toasted almonds, plum torte with vanilla ice cream, Saintsbury pinot noir. Or more significantly, Jan. 11, 1992: My brother, John, in town to attend a Washington Redskins playoff game against the Detroit Lions and the ’Skins won! Like I said, lots of exclamation points. Menu: homemade chicken liver paté, chicken with mustard and capers, gratin of zucchini, peppers, and potatoes, salad Bressane, and cinnamon vanilla souffle. I repeated that souffle many times and it never came out correctly. It was always a flat, very cinnamony, chewy thing with a bit of crunch from granulated sugar. I didn’t even know then that souffles are meant to be airy and light.
Looking back at the guest lists, I gotta say, I’m impressed. One dinner had the actor Bruce McGill (“Animal House,” “Silkwood,” “Family Guy,” “Miami Vice,” “Lincoln”) and Bob Mondello, then a brand-new arts and film critic at NPR. When we lived in Dallas, a little pipsqueak named Scott Pelley was a frequent guest and look at him now, anchor of “CBS Evening News.” Nathan Lane came once. He was part of a comedy team with our friend Pat Stack. I think we all know who he is. There are also quite a few guests who are no longer with us: Jack Kehoe, my cousin Kathleen, E.J. Mudd, Laurie Stack, Mary Martin, and, saddest of all, my ex-husband, who died last March.
A frequent entry was what I called the Friday Night Bachelor Club. Every Friday night it seemed to be yours truly with a bunch of men. Boo hoo! The charter member was my college classmate from Kenyon, Matthew Smith. He was working for George H.W. Bush and had a secret source for authentic key limes, which he delivered every time he came. I am positive they were from some big cheese in the White House, but he never fessed up. We ate a lot of key lime pies! As you can see, I have learned to tame my enthusiasm for the exclamation point.
I felt I really had to step up my game for some guests, such as Daniel Zwerdling, then and now a fine reporter for NPR, and his wife, Barbara Rothschild. They are superb cooks themselves and wrote the second-tier restaurant reviews for The Washington Post. Phyllis Richman would get the Citron (Michel Richard) and Jean Louis (Palladin) reviews, and Danny and Barbara would get the obscure Vietnamese pho shops in Arlington. Sample menus showing off for my foodie friends: salmon with garlic confit in parchment, beet and radish salad, raspberry tart. Alsatian onion tart, lobster salad with basil, that damned butternut squash again, brandysnap cups with Grand Marnier mousse. Trout with vermouth and orange zest, leg of lamb, potato with celery root and Gruyere pancake, creme brulee with berries.
There are many birthdays and goodbye dinners and my son’s christening party. Some dinners were at a friend’s farm in LaPlata, Md., some in East Hampton, a few in Dallas, and most in Virginia. On Oct. 8, 1994, our Catahoula dog, Gumbo, ate all the brownies. On Sept. 4, 1985, the police came knocking on the door because a neighbor had reported that “a bad smell was coming from next door, we think it could be a decomposing body.” I was barbecuing bluefish on the back porch. One entry says “March 1, 1992, what the heck happened here?” Apparently, I marked the date but forgot the menus and who came.
My father died just before Christmas in 1988. In an effort to cheer up our mother on New Year’s Eve I prepared an all-French menu. (She had spent most of her youth in France.) Menu: la soupe a la farigoulette, roti de file de veau, mousse de chaux sur. It was just the three of us — my husband, Clem, mother, Honoria, and myself, a really bereft trio. She adored my father, and I wanted so badly to take her out of her grief, if only for a three-course meal.
They say that taste is our strongest sense memory. I can still remember the first lettuce from our community garden, May 7, 1992. Dec. 4, 1991, homemade peach pie lovingly and laboriously made the previous summer. Craig Claiborne’s veal meatballs with tarragon, March 19, 1994. And so many more. It’s a bittersweet 10-year record of a wonderful period of our lives, ending when life suddenly wasn’t so wonderful.
I am grateful and glad I still have this menu book, this culinary diary. Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point!
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