Patricia Fieldsteel
Recipe Box
By Patricia Fieldsteel
When I moved to France I brought along my 1960s Peanuts recipe box bulging with recipes, smudged, faded, and torn. This battered box is filled with memories – delicious, complicated, simple, occasionally sad, often happy, always rich. It also holds my secrets, hidden deep in the spaces only I can see. There are the requisite clippings from magazines and newspapers, now yellowed and soft as cloth, folded to fit the tiny rectangular box. More important are the hand-written cards, many from people who’ve long since vanished from my life; others, incalculably precious, from people I love who have died. Many of the recipes, especially those clipped from newspapers and magazines, have never been tried. Others by now are part of the cellular makeup of my life.
The most used card, always toward the front, is written in my own hand on a 2x5 Peanuts card that came with the box. In the upper right corner is a three-color drawing of Sally spooning spumoni from a carton. She is concentrating intently on her task, her tongue curled up at the corner of her mouth. The recipe, written in blue ball-point ink, is nearly obliterated, but just enough remains to make out the magic potion that summons up a world and a lifetime:
Ida Cookies
1 lb sweet butter
1 cup sugar – cream together.
Add 4 egg yolks & 4 cups flour. Chill overnight.
Bake 15 mins. at 400º
No further instructions are included; anyone who has tasted Aunt Ida’s ambrosial creation knows the batter is formed into little balls, slightly flattened with a dent made with one’s index finger, and filled with a dab of currant jelly or raspberry jam.
Aunt Ida was the younger sister of my great-grandmother, Ray. Ray was wildly eccentric, elegant, greedy, fascinating, a formidable presence. Ida was soft, loving, kind, a humble homemaker. Ray was regal, tall and stately, unabashedly vain and self-centered. She bedecked herself in cashmere, jewels, enormous scarves and furs, and had the daring flash of a gypsy queen. She gave orders and was accustomed to being obeyed. She also ate like a savage, packing in great quantities of food with grunts, sighs, and slurps — often eschewing cutlery for the use of both hands. When questioned on her eating style, she would respond with a regal wave of one greasy hand: “Dahlings, on the Continent everyone eats like this.” And of course when she was “on the Continent” she would say, “Dahlings, in America everyone eats this way.” Her “baby sister” would simply roll her eyes.
Ida was quiet, short and plump, never far from her home, the stove, and her apron, always ready to serve. In the summer, Ray would close up her mammoth West 54th Street apartment across from the Museum of Modern Art and install herself uninvited at Ida’s house on Long Island. When asked about her lengthy encampments, she would reply gallantly: “Dahlings, Ida doesn’t mind – it’s her pleasure!”
Saturday mornings we would collect Ray from Aunt Ida’s and go on for the day to Atlantic Beach. Uncle Lou, a terrifying Cerberus to me as a child, would be parked in his wheelchair on the front porch, the victim of what I realized many years later must have been a devastating stroke. Past Uncle Lou and the scratchy, obligatory kiss, at the end of a long corridor was paradise: Ida’s buttery white late-1940s kitchen.
Saturday was baking day. Professional Kitchen Aid mixers would be churning, filled with batter and dough, as she pulled schnecken from the oven. A milk bottle, glasses, and plates would be set out on the Formica table with cookies and cakes. But best of all was Aunt Ida herself and being enveloped in her protective embrace. Oddly, I do not remember actually eating in her kitchen (though I know I did) but I do remember the warmth of that creamy sunlit sanctuary, exaggerated perhaps by distance and memory, but nonetheless real.
There is a magic to Ida Cookies that transcends their taste; maybe the gentle spirit of Ida herself, living on through her creation. Here in France, as well as in New York, children have always delighted in coming to my house and helping me make them – beating the batter and licking it raw from the bowl. Sweet and buttery with a slightly tart surprise in the middle, these cookies vanish quickly.
Some of my most-used recipes are no longer in the box; recipes where measurements don’t have to be precise, such as Grandma Ruth’s chopped chicken liver. On the rare occasions my parents condescended to visit my paternal grandparents’ tiny apartment on West End Avenue, Grandma Ruth would start preparing days in advance. Her operating theory was that more is better and even more is better still, whether it was the quantity of food prepared or the proportions of ingredients going into it. She was also a chopper, by hand of course. A lifetime’s frustrations and “nerves” went into chopping those livers. If most people used one or two hard-boiled eggs for chopped liver, Grandma Ruth used five or six, chopping the whites and yolks separately. Her recipe was simple:
Grandma Ruth’s Chopped Chicken Liver
Sauté several sweet white onions, finely chopped, in rendered chicken fat (to which I add a small amount of chopped garlic). Remove & reserve onions; sauté 1 pound chicken livers in onion-flavored fat, adding more fat if needed. (I add a small amount of Sherry or Madeira.) Remove cooked livers from fat & cool on paper towel. Chop as if your life depended on it. Then mix ingredients together, adding more fat if needed. Season with salt & fresh-ground pepper. Chill.
From Grandma Ruth’s point of view, the sole purpose of our visitations was for her to feed us. We would eat at a card table set up between the sliver-sized kitchen and living room with its massive dark “credenza.” The meal itself, like all occasions where my parents were present, was strained. After dinner, Grandma Ruth would assemble an enormous shopping bag filled with tightly packed, plastic-wrapped, rubber-banded containers of foods replicating in triplicate the meal we thought we’d just finished. There would always be a giant-sized glass Yuban instant coffee jar packed to the brim with chopped liver. One time, as we prepared to leave, Grandma Ruth handed one of my younger brothers the overloaded brown bag, nervously shouting detailed instructions to keep one hand under the bottom, hold it straight, etc. When we stepped into the elevator, Grandma Ruth started to scream as if she were being hacked to death with a machete: My brother was no longer holding the bag. Amidst unbridled hysteria – even the elevator man got involved – it was revealed that my brother had mistaken the bag for the dinner garbage and dumped it down the incinerator chute. Grandma Ruth lived for another 25 years, but she never fully recovered from that evening’s events.
Some of the recipes on hand-written cards, such as “Mary’s Crab Meat Casserole,” are reflections of certain times and culinary trends. In the early 1960s we thought Aunt Mary’s creation epitomized sophisticated dining. It was made only for special occasions and required Minute-rice, frozen crab meat (I still remember squeezing out the water), chopped hard-boiled eggs, undiluted Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, and Wonder Bread crumbs studded with “dots” of margarine. The “secret ingredient” was a daring splash of Holland House Cooking Sherry.
Somewhere toward the middle of the box are dozens of recipes written in my own then miniscule, angular, perfectly formed but constricted hand – the words so tiny as to be barely readable – along with about a dozen cards penned by my mother in her spacious, curvy script. None of the recipes copied by me were ever made, though at the time they were written I was an avid if not obsessive reader of cookbooks, menus, and articles about food. In my imagination I cooked and devoured countless glorious feasts; I dined at Lutèce and Luchow’s, had Big Macs and fries, hot-fudge sundaes at Rumplemeyer’s and Schrafft’s; I ate my way through Chinatown, as well as Italy, France, and sometimes Mexico. If I actually did permit a morsel or two (usually spoonfuls of diet yogurt and a tangerine slice) it was done furtively, with guilt and overwhelming fear. And when I was overcome and ate far too much, nothing was permitted to stay in my body. During those 2 1/2 decades, the annihilating stranglehold of my parents, mainly my mother, dominated what little was left of my life. By plying me with recipes, obsessive discussions about dining and cuisine, the importance of diet and exercise (the latter two were also of paramount importance to my father), she used food as a weapon to break me to her glacial will. The kitchen in my parents’ house was cold and sterile. Everything in it was hers, as in: “Who’s been stealing food from MY refrigerator?!!!” When she made Ida Cookies, she counted them, daily.
Once the cards from my mother stop, the recipes in the box (like my handwriting and my life) take off. I look at these many cards fondly for all the happy times, wonderful meals, and beloved friends they conjure up. During this period another kitchen began to figure in my dreams – a basement kitchen glimpsed only through a small window below street level for many years. It was around the corner from my Jane Street apartment and belonged to the French cooking teacher and author, Lydie Marshall. It had a long French farmhouse table, covered in blue-and-white-checked oilcloth, which along with some copper pots and faïence pottery, was partially visible from the sidewalk. Often when I passed by there would be a cooking class in progress. Decked out in pink-and-white checked aprons, the students would be rolling pâté brisée, slicing, chopping, stirring, and tasting. Other times there would be a dinner party with an elegantly set table, candlelight, free-flowing wine, spectacular food, and happy, animated guests. More often, however, the table was empty save a bowl of fruit or a pitcher of flowers, and its allure was both simple and intoxicating. Years later I would learn that I was not the only person who had been seduced by its charm; neighbors who didn’t know the Marshalls referred to them simply as “the people with the blue-checked tablecloth.”
This was the kitchen whose look and spirit I craved. When I got to know the Marshalls better, I stayed in their Paris apartment and, too shy to ask, I searched the city in vain for that blue-and-white-checked oilcloth. Once we became close friends, I asked her where I could find one and it became the centerpiece of my New York apartment, as it is now in my kitchen in Provence. I became a regular in that glorious basement kitchen, as well at Lydie’s château here in Nyons. The recipes from her cookbooks, as well as those not in the books, are staples of my cuisine. I adore cooking for friends, which is a marvelous way to relax, be creative, and give of myself. I cook to music, usually the opera, often accompanied by a glass of wine or San Pellegrino. Even more important than the setting and the food is the joy of eating with friends gathered round my table, laughing and talking long into the night.
One dish I prepare often is Lapin (rabbit) Ali Bab, adapted from my friend Ron Cook and from Lydie, who adapted it from Ron. The first time I made it I was cat-sitting alone in Lydie’s château before I moved here. A friend of hers – also a cooking teacher and the mother of a prominent New York chef – was arriving for a few days, so I knew her welcoming dinner had to be special. I bought the rabbit at the hypermarché, where it is less expensive, cut up and pre-packaged, rather than whole, elongated, and eviscerated with its organs hanging out in the customary French presentation. Carefully checking the package, I reassured myself that the rabbit was unrecognizable and more important, the head had been removed.
The night before the dinner, I decided to unwrap the rabbit. I screamed: folded beneath the legs was the ghastly skinned rabbit head complete with little black popping eyeballs! Hysterical, I shoved it back inside the refrigerator. That night I barely slept. In my nightmares I was pursued by a bloody disembodied rabbit head; everywhere I went, the head appeared. There was no escape. I broke out in cold sweats, hot sweats, dry heaves and shakes. I tried to calm myself with wine, which only made the horror worse. Even if I were to throw the rabbit out, I would still have to open the refrigerator door. If I threw it in the garbage, I was sure Lydie’s neighbors, elderly and frugal Provençal peasants, would find it and be horrified at L’Américaine’s waste. Always on a tight budget, I couldn’t bear to spend more money on a chicken substitute. At dawn the rabbit and its head were still in the refrigerator, and I was ill. Nauseated and trembling, I opened the door and removed the package. I vaguely remember taking Lydie’s enormous meat cleaver out of the drawer. After that, I remember nothing until dinner. To this day, I’m told, Lydie’s friend raves about my rabbit as does everyone else who eats it at my house. I now spend the extra money and order it from the butcher, emphasizing that I want it cut up and sans tète (without the head).
Rabbit Ali Bab
One 3-lb rabbit (or chicken) cut up
4-5 sprigs fresh rosemary
cluster of fresh sage leaves, chopped
salt & pepper
5-6 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
2 T. tomato paste
1 can tomato sauce
1 cup Chardonnay
1/4 cup Nyons olive oil
1/2 tsp. hot red pepper flakes
6 large French long onions sliced lengthwise (available in NYC at Fairway)
1/2 cup Vidalia or sweet onion, chopped
1 T. grated fresh lemon rind
2 T. grated, chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
Coat rabbit pieces with oil in 5 1/2 quart heavy casserole. Layer onions, garlic, herbs, pepper, salt & red pepper flakes over rabbit. Pour tomato sauce and combined tomato paste and wine on top. Cover tightly and cook over moderate heat approx. 1 hour, turning rabbit pieces over. Uncover and raise heat, reduce sauce until slightly syrupy, turning rabbit and onions. Taste, and season according to taste. Add grated lemon rind and parsley. Serve with boiled potatoes, potato/celery root purée, or pasta.
Today my little Peanuts box is bulging and filled to capacity. A few years ago I started to paste some of the recipes in a patterned cloth loose-leaf recipe notebook from the 1950s. Many of the recipes now are written in French on cards from neighbors and friends. Sometimes I read my way through the notebook and box, much as one would look at a scrapbook of one’s life. Maybe that’s why I don’t throw out the old, unused recipes or cards from my mother. In the creation of a magnificent and memorable feast, some of the necessary ingredients are bitter and unpleasant on their own. The magic of cooking is being able to transform them into something delicious and beautiful; even more so, a life.
