Batterie de Cuisine

“Wouldn’t it be fun to start again? I could buy all the new stuff that’s out there now and really get it right.” Brushing my hand over a soft new dish towel, I sighed.

The shopper standing near me, bemused by the display of small kitchen utensils nodded. “I know – I feel the same way. I can’t even give my old stuff away to my kids – they don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

Kitchens and the tools and instruments they embrace have played an important role in my life. Cooking is a way for me to express myself, and the cutting boards, pots, pans, knives and whisks I’ve collected, are my canvas and brushes.  My batterie de cuisine has been curated over forty years of baking, braising, and basting my way through five or six different kitchens.

When I was in college, sharing a room and working in the cafeteria for extra money, I bought my first cookbook – the blue-covered New York Times edition that Craig Claiborne created. I had no kitchen but loved reading the recipes, imagining dinners I would prepare when I moved out on my own. Beef stew with Red Wine and Herbs sounded so much better than the brisket I had grown up eating; Poulet Marengo trumped chicken fricassee handily, I imagined.  In the drawer of my built-in dorm desk, I had a black-handled paring knife, chopsticks lifted from a nearby restaurant and a tea-strainer – the beginning of a kitchen collection that I treated with the same regard masterpieces are awarded “Wouldn’t it be fun to start again? I could buy all the new stuff that’s out there now and really get it right.” Brushing my hand over a soft new dish towel, I sighed.

-->

The shopper standing near me, bemused by the display of small kitchen utensils nodded. “I know – I feel the same way. I can’t even give my old stuff away to my kids – they don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

Kitchens and the tools and instruments they embrace have played an important role in my life. Cooking is a way for me to express myself, and the cutting boards, pots, pans, knives and whisks I’ve collected, are my canvas and brushes.  My batterie de cuisine has been curated over forty years of baking, braising, and basting my way through five or six different kitchens.

When I was in college, sharing a room and working in the cafeteria for extra money, I bought my first cookbook – the blue-covered New York Times edition that Craig Claiborne created. I had no kitchen but loved reading the recipes, imagining dinners I would prepare when I moved out on my own. Beef stew with Red Wine and Herbs sounded so much better than the brisket I had grown up eating; Poulet Marengo trumped chicken fricassee handily, I imagined.  In the drawer of my built-in dorm desk, I had a black-handled paring knife, chopsticks lifted from a nearby restaurant and a tea-strainer – the beginning of a kitchen collection that I treated with the same regard masterpieces are awarded in a museum.

After I graduated, I moved into an apartment with college girlfriends. We three twenty- year-olds each held shiny new keys to a third-floor walk-up. “A gas range, a full sized fridge,” I crowed, as I looked around our new home, imagining menus for meals I would create. I began planning how I would outfit the dingy rental kitchen, as Alice and Linda checked out the windows, and ceiling lamps.

“Sure, Ellen, go for it.” My roommates, both art majors had little interest in anything that didn’t involve linseed oil and sable brushes. They continued assessing the light sources.

With whatever spare funds I had, I bought spatulas, long-tined forks, cast-iron skillets and pastry cutters from thrift shops. I purchased inexpensive equipment, acquiring cake pans and cookie sheets, cutting boards, and more knives. The gaps in my collection were filled in with pots given out at local banks for opening new accounts, and stuff I pilfered from my mother’s home in New York. Some of the things I took from her kitchen had sentimental meaning like the red bakelite handled sandwich grill with which she made golden brown, melted cheese and tomato sandwiches, and the metal juicer used to squeeze oranges for a breakfast treat when she had the time. Others were simply things Mom no longer used in her life alone as a widow. “I don’t have room for this,” she lied to me, handing over the large turkey roaster. She had accepted that her days hosting family dinners were coming to an end.

In 1970, I was married for the first time. Wedding shower luncheons planned by wannabe bridesmaids provided a slew of interesting, but often useless pretty things for my kitchen. Cousins gave me shrimp cocktail servers, fondue pots and forks, coasters and sets of gold-rimmed espresso cups. In-laws heaped on the designer dish towels and tablecloths. GIfts piled up; thank you notes went out. “We so appreciate the crystal goblets you sent, Aunt Ruth. I know how much we’ll enjoy using them,” I wrote. After the nuptials, those fragile, ornate glasses stayed in their box, stored in a closet that we never opened.

Months later, following an awkward dinner with my new in-laws, I left their New Jersey house with an impressive, slightly used, heavy stainless steel, dutch oven - still one of my favorites. Bea, my mother-in-law, stopped me at the door. “Take this with you,” she muttered, handing me a shopping bag.  Her other daughter-in-law had inadvertently “un-koshered” it when cooking dinner as a surprise for her husband’s family. Laura had made the mistake of buying supermarket chicken instead of going to the kosher butcher.

“I can’t use this unless I bury it for a year,” Bea huffed at me. “It’s yours.” It seemed, according to their rabbi, that only a year-long backyard interment could re-establish the pot’s state of purity. In Bea’s narrow eyes, there should be no eternal forgiveness for cooking trayf in a kosher pot, no legitimate un-koshering. So, it came to me, the apostate. And, it stayed with me, after my not unwelcome divorce, as did anything else I could claim as “my kitchen stuff”.

“Do you know a good realtor?” I asked my friends as I began to search for my own apartment. Starting out again alone was scary and exciting – something I hadn’t anticipated, but happily managed. I rented a two bedroom place, not far from where I worked. Aside from a parking space, a washing machine in the cellar and the absence of a  cheating, always-stoned husband, its most impressive asset was a large kitchen. There was even a dishwasher – something my mother never had in her house.

Drawer space was limited, but there was a pantry for storage. With the help of a friend or two, I built a pegboard wall-unit on which to hang my small utensils. I arranged the tongs and graters, the strainers and scissors, by color, size or purpose, appreciating my display as much as any museum installation. My cookbooks, now a modest collection, along with a few well-thumbed Gourmet magazines took up a shelf that my brother’d built for me, next to a shiny, white, wall phone.

My mother bought me my first good knives when she traveled to Germany in the early 70’s with my aunt.  I was, by this time, the heir-apparent to my family’s tradition of producing good cooks, and the two women wanted to bring me something special from my mother’s first trip to Europe. Mom was not a good gift-giver. She had always found it hard to choose the right present for people, never confident that what she offered was what the recipient wanted. But this time she’d gotten it just right.  With a little help from her travel companon, my Aunt Lillian, she’d found a Henckel's knife store in Munich. “What knives should I get for a new cook,” she asked the clerk. “My daughter – she loves to cook.”

“A paring knife, an eight-inch cook’s knife, a long bladed meat slicer for roasts, and a serrated knife,” advised the German knife seller. The serrated knife’s handle broke some thirty years later; I still have and use the other three. They are not as good as the knives I’ve bought on my own – the Sabatiers and the newer Henckels are superior, but I instinctively reach for the battered, brown handled knives my mother gave me. I  want to think she knew they would fit my hand best.

When I remarried, in the mid-1980’s, my husband Ernie and I bought a century-old house with a kitchen that badly needed a make-over. We pulled down cupboards, replaced countertops and together, created a modern, workable space for me to create meals for our small family. Remodeling is an expensive investment in the future, and there was no money left for new toys. Out of necessity, my old pots and pans, well-worn utensils and the dented, warped baking sheets I’d collected, claimed space in the new cabinetry, continuing their yeoman’s work.

Ernie is most appreciative and supportive of my definitely non-kosher, mostly inventive cooking. When I create something especially to his liking, he lavishes it and me with his greatest compliment – “I would pay money for this.”  Unlike my mother, Ernie does gifts very well, Over the years, he has given me beautiful pots, knives, dishes and even a nifty new “gourmet” stove, which doesn’t always work as well as it should. I gleefully use all my newer toys, but find myself still reaching for some of the old pots, pans, and spatulas I used when I found out that cooking and providing wonderful meals truly is the fastest way to most people’s hearts.

Lost Voices

The voices I remember aren’t the right ones. I can recall the tones and timbres, pitches and cadences, the favorite phrases and assertions of many people – even some casual connections, people of questionable importance to me. In dreams, I hear my people talking. And, when I wake, those voices are still with me. Yet, the two most essential, most longed-for ones are missing from my dreams and from my waking memory.

I can’t remember the voices of either of my parents. My father died long years ago – I was twenty then - but my mother’s passing is only a decade behind me. These two voices, the most important ones in my early life, the ones that should be hard-wired into my auditory synapses, are gone. Last night, lying in bed on the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death, I was running through a catalog of family members and listening for my past. Amid the chattering ghosts, I hoped I might hear my mother’s voice. Her often-repeated phrases reverberated, but, soundless - just pale words, hanging silently in the air.

“Ellen, comb your hair. Put on some lipstick.”

“What are you making for dinner?”

“Have you heard from your brother? Have you heard from Stevie?”

Aunt Isabelle, the wife of my mother’s only brother, is one voice I still clearly hear as if she were speaking aloud. Her gravelly, smoker’s utterances often carried behind them a hint of laughter – sometimes a giggle, occasionally, a more earthy chuckle. The promise of adult humor or something darker was present, as well. There were times when her voice turned cool – even cold – when she was displeased or wanted to exert control, but mostly, her declarations were gracious and welcoming.

Her teacher voice, practiced and honed by many years in the front of a middle school classroom, led discussions at our holiday dinners. She never struggled for colorful words and her narrative skills were legend. Well-constructed anecdotes looped together to make her points. Her own mother once suggested that Isabelle and her husband, my quiet, always proper Uncle Johnny, develop a radio or even TV talk show, based on the engaging, humorous stories that Isabelle retold so adeptly to underline her opinions.

“Who do you think actually killed JR?” Isabelle asked in a mock-serious tone, one Thanksgiving.  “Ellen, Joanie, any guesses?” That I never watched that season’s blockbuster hit TV show Dallas, a cultural touchstone, hadn’t ever crossed my aunt’s mind.

At the other end of memory’s dinner table, was my Uncle Johnny, soft-spoken and precise in his choice of words. No hint of a Bronx upbringing or his LawnGuyland adulthood was heard when he spoke. His syllables were plummy, clear and clean - measured tones that played a calm counterpoint to his wife’s more volatile verbal acrobatics. “Isabelle, my dear…,” he’d begin, and gently redirect the discussion, especially if it approached the off-color jokes that we children were hoping to hear.

Dropping in and out of the tableau of my maternal relatives was the chattering magpie Barbara, my mother’s cousin, and her soft-spoken, mostly silent husband, George.

“You kids – out of the way…”, Barbara would bark out at us.

“George, get the platter. The turkey’s about to come out.”

“You need the electric knife. Where did you put it?”

“Yes, hon,” George would softly reply, “is there anything else you need from me? Does anyone need a fresh drink?” He’d smile sweetly at all of us, anxious to be helpful. Occupying himself with finding the knife or cutting a lemon to freshen someone’s drink, he’d attempt to stay clear of his wife’s busyness.

The eldest of them all, My Aunt Lillian with her imperial demeanor, and voice to match, would occasionally deign to join us, escorted by silent Uncle Leo. “Isabelle, how nice of you to have us. How kind of you to send your son to pick us up at the station,” she’d intone. “Leo, here’s my bag,” she’d say offhandedly, handing her purse to him, and her coat to Isabelle.

Even more infrequently, we’d be joined by Lillian’s secretive, elitist sister, Aunt Pauline and her husband Uncle Michel. Michel’s voice just barely hinted at his Parisian birth and retained in it, as well, a slight nod to an Eastern European ancestry. As with Aunt Isabelle, there was a laugh hidden somewhere behind his speech, or maybe just the whisperings of the intellectual cynic who never got over a love/hate relationship he cultivated with the mythical pre-war Europe he’d left as a child. “No, Ellen, I won’t ever go back to Paris. It’s not the city I left, though it had plenty of problems then, of course. But, I still miss it.” He never told me any more about those mysterious, dangerous worries that he guardedly kept unspoken.

My cousins, whiny, nasal, giggly Cari, her husky-voiced older brother, Allan, Isabelle’s son, Bobby – a slight hesitancy, a little uncertainty in his utterances, and Joanie with her warm, practiced, almost syrup-like sentences made up the rest of our small family on my mother’s side.

I can, too, recall my brother’s childhood voice – listening to him painfully practice the ancient chants for his Bar Mitzvah or yelling at my parents.

“Where’s my stuff?” he’d demand of my mother.

“Stay out of my room, damn it.”

His voice was an integral part of my life for nearly forty years. The influence he held over me was powerful and though I haven’t spoken to him in the many years he’s chosen to stay away, if he were to call today, I’d know instantly who was on the other end of the line. As little as a “hello” and my heart would fall, as I’d recognize his New York accent.

My father’s family and their speech patterns were less polished, except for the careful articulation of my other Aunt Isabel, Uncle Max’s wife. She was a Yankee, from a patrician background, and, having started her adulthood as an actress, had created a lovely, mellifluous manner of expressing herself. Max whose declarations were often mistaken for those of his younger brother, my father Peter, spoke with remnants of their childhoods on the edges of Polish-Russian pale. Yiddish, Polish and some Russian were the languages they shared growing up, and Max, though well-read and of a surprisingly sophisticated literary inclination, carried a suitcase of those mongrel cadences with him throughout his long life. To my second-generation ear, I thought he and his brother, my father Peter, simply sounded like every other old Jewish man in New York.

Their younger brother, Sidney, whined. My dad, in whose workplace he “borrowed” some space, referred to Sidney as a “schnorrer” – a moocher and a cheapskate. His pleading, wheedling words were always asking for something.

 “Pete, can you spare a few bucks?”

 “Is there a leftover half a sandwich?”

 “C’mon – you gotta give a guy a break.”

And finally, there was Aunt Ruth, whose self-appointed role in life, was to hold the family together. Her throaty voice pleaded and cajoled her errant brothers to remain close, “Mama would have wanted that,” she’d say to no one in particular, trying to hide her Brooklyn sing-song, hoping that someone would take heed. “Come by and have some tea and cake.”

I am able to lie in bed in the darkest parts of the night, ignoring my husband’s light snoring, recalling my family chattering and challenging each other. But I still can’t remember my parents’ voices. I know that if I heard even an exhalation of their breaths, a simple syllable, I would call out. I know their utterances are hidden somewhere in my auditory cortex and maybe one day, I’ll figure out how to access them. Until then, I take comfort in remembering the unconditional love and promise of security that was carried in those lost voices.