Linda’s Kitchen by Linda McCartney, Paul’s first wife, the vegetarian cookbook that had initially spurred her yearlong attempt at vegetarianism (with cheese and eggs, thank you very much) right after college. Margo used to have to drag Calvin into such phases and had finally lured him in by saying that surely anything Paul would eat was good enough for them.
Because of Linda’s Kitchen, Margo had dived into the world of textured vegetable protein instead of meat, and tons of soups, including a very good watercress, which she never would have tried without Linda’s inspiration. It had also inspired her to get a gorgeous, long marble-topped island for prep work. Sometimes she only cooked for the aesthetic pleasure of the gleaming marble topped with rustic pottery containing bright fresh veggies, chopped to perfection.
Then Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells caught her eye, and she took it down. Some pages were stuck together from previous cooking nights, but the one she turned to, the most splattered of all, was the one for Onion Soup au Gratin, the recipe that had taught her the importance of cheese quality. No mozzarella or broken string cheeses with—maybe—a little lacy Swiss thrown on. And definitely none of the “fat-free” cheese that she’d tried in order to give Calvin a rich dish without the cholesterol.
No, for this to be great, you needed a good, aged, nutty Gruyère from what you couldn’t help but imagine as the green grassy Alps of Switzerland, where cows grazed lazily under a cheerful children’s-book blue sky with puffy white clouds.
Good Gruyère was blocked into rind-covered rounds and aged in caves before being shipped fresh to the USA with a whisper of fairy-tale clouds still lingering over it. There was a cheese shop downtown that sold the best she’d ever had. She’d tried it one afternoon when she was avoiding returning home. A spunky girl in a visor and an apron had perked up as she walked by the counter, saying, “Cheese can change your life!”
The charm of her youthful innocence would have been enough to be cheered by, but the sample she handed out really did it.
The taste was beyond delicious. It was good alone, but it cried out for ham or turkey or a rich beefy broth with deep caramelized onions for soup.
She bought plenty. Asked for the girl’s name, fully intending to contact the store and say how helpful she’d been—but as with all things like that, Margo forgot.
And as with most things Margo forgot, she ate cheese instead.
Margo loved best pulling the browned melted cheese off the lip and sides of the bowl after broiling it. It was a hard-earned delicacy like no other.
She made a mental note to revisit that soup, but tonight she needed carbs. Tonight she needed Marcella Hazan. The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. It sounded dull, right? That’s what Margo had thought every time she passed it in her grandparents’ kitchen. Until that time she’d desperately needed her grandfather’s Bolognese recipe and learned it came straight from the book. It didn’t matter; that might be his source, but to her it was still the dish she ate and loved at the long, scarred wood table in her grandparents’ modest apartment kitchen, the wood out of place on the ugly linoleum floor, yet perfect when topped with the slightly chipped porcelain plates he brought back from the tiny restaurant he owned, when he could no longer serve on them, and the fresh, bright green salads and crisped, buttery garlic bread that was a must with every meal.
There was no question that if she was going to have one solid comfort meal, it would be one of Marcella’s pasta dishes.
Screw Calvin. She was going to do it.
First she set one of her four-quart All-Clad saucepans on the stove. America’s Test Kitchen had rated them highest once upon a time, and she had been collecting bits and pieces ever since. Most treasured were these beautiful, bright, Skittle-colored lacquered pots.
Next, she took out a head of garlic from the bowl on the green-flecked black countertop she’d once loved passionately. Now it was just a surface, but it was a strong enough surface for her to crash her fist down on the head of garlic and split it into multiple cloves, which could then be easily separated with a knock on the broad side of her favorite knife.
Shun to the rescue again. She smashed eight cloves of garlic and set them aside, knowing whatever she made she wanted it to be rich and garlicky, then swept the bits of papery skin into her hand and threw them in the trash.
Next, she heated the Le Creuset gently on the gas stove. The piece was robin’s-egg blue on the outside, cream on the inside, like an old convertible or a young girl’s gingham dress and pinafore. The color had seemed so fun and retro when she bought it. Calvin hated it, said without explanation that it was so like her to pick that.
When, in fact, it wasn’t. In some senseless, unidentifiable way, it had been a compromise. Maybe she’d just gotten so used to thinking that anything she hated equaled something he liked, and vice versa.
In reality, she wanted pretty things. Especially in the kitchen.
She wanted pastel chaos—a cacophony of sweet colors to set ablaze on the gas stove and from which to plume well-spiced aromas.
Who knew how long she’d compromised unnecessarily, but nevertheless, here she was in her stainless and marble kitchen, surrounded by dull-oak cabinets. A spark of color found only where she’d been unable to resist it.
Like this Le Creuset Dutch oven.
When her energy dipped again, she paired her phone with the speaker Calvin was always silencing and put on her retro playlist. Etta James wailed out “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” and Margo shut her eyes and forced herself to give a damn about anything.
Margo tested for the right heat by flicking a speck of water onto the hot surface of the Dutch oven. When it sizzled and evaporated, she put in some pungent olive oil—not extra-virgin, nothing around here was—and let it heat until it shimmered.
It wasn’t until then that she decided what to make: that thick, meaty Bolognese sauce. It didn’t normally call for the garlic, but so what? She happened to have some, and she loved braised garlic in anything. She would eat the soft, tender meat straight off a knife if that was all she had at hand.
She went to the ventilated drawer she’d had installed under the counter, where she kept the root vegetables. She took out two medium yellow onions and one Vidalia. Piece by piece, she cut the ends off, sliced into the brittle skins and pulled them off, dropping them into the trash. She loved onions, but they made such a mess. A subtle one, tiny bits of papery skin on the counter and floor, but a mess nonetheless. When they were all peeled, she set them aside and got the dish sponge so she could clean up all the little flecks of skin that had stuck to the counter and cutting board.
Then she chopped the onion finely and dumped it into the hot pot with a sizzle. A little salt to sweat the vegetables, and within moments the savory aroma was rising into the air. Her appetite pinged in reflexive reaction.
She took carrots and celery out of the fridge and peeled and chopped, stopping every now and then to stir the onion to keep it from sticking. It was getting sweet and translucent, so she tossed the other vegetables in and added a pinch more salt.
Mirepoix. She thought the word to herself, rolling it around in her mind. Mirepoix, mirepoix, mirepoix. Cajun “Holy Trinity”—onions, celery, and carrots, diced fine, heated to savory sweet, and left to bring magic to whatever dish they were added into.