The Food Season III: A Short Story 'The Night Out'

We walk down a street.  We do not talk, both stare down at feet or way ahead.  Constant, heavy traffic whips by, the sound from the rain slicked street is incessant.  The spray does not reach us but we are both soaked.  The umbrella is almost useless.  The rain slants with the wind.  Raindrops big as grapes pepper us.

It is a fight, an argument.  One said something and the other got angry.  And now we are not talking, steaming.  And now it is raining.  Hard.  We are both hungry.  Neither of us wants to be with the other.  It is dark, cold.  We are wet, hungry, unhappy.  It is depressing, oppressive.  Each of us, secretly, want simply to turn away and go off alone, leave the other, disappear.  But we don’t.  Some times this can last days, some days hours.  It is a street we've walked many times.

“Are you hungry,” I ask, knowing the answer will be a shrug.  She shrugs, which means 'yes, but I am so pissed I would rather die than admit I want to eat.'  We keep walking, slogging.  She is almost crying.  I am a knot.  I want to throw up I am so mad upset pissed off.  We just walk.

We pass a few okay restaurants but do not even slow down.  We know each other.  We may be frustrated, angry, hungry, wet, depressed.  But.  We like our food.  A bad meal or a bad place would be worse than the misery on the street. 

Finally, across the street, past the flying cars kicking up clouds of mist, there is a busy room behind a picture window.  The glass is steamed but through the window comes a light.  It is warm, not bright.  Through the fogged-glass we see a man hard at work playing a piano, occasionally pulling on a cigarette.  Tall waitresses in black pants, white blouses and long white aprons race through the room, around the crowded tables, with trays stacked high.  A man near the window pulls on his beer.  She nudges me.  I nod.

We jog across the street and push into the room.  Welcomed warmly.  No reservation but not a problem.  ‘Why don’t you wait at the bar,’ we are asked.  Fine with us.  We sit at the long bar and have a drink, don’t talk but are done with the fight.  The hostess brings us a kitchen towel I watch my wife wipe her hair with the towel, which makes me laugh.  She smiles.  Familiar.  I am smart enough not to ask her to say she is sorry.  I order two more drinks.

We fall into a deep conversation and before we know it we are asked if we’d mind, there is a table in the back by the kitchen doors, not usually used, but it’ll be a long wait if we don’t want this small table in the back.  They like us.  It's nice, being here.  We go look and the table is fine.  We don’t mind.  We sit down with our drinks.  We watch the servers fly in and out of the kitchen; when the double-hinged doors swing open it is like a portal to another world; we glance at the line, watching the chaos and the shouting in the heat of a bustling kitchen.

Our waitress comes up.  She is sweet and smart.  She smiles with her eyes and brings us warm bread and menus before we are settled.  We have our drinks from the bar and order mussels in a broth of wine and garlic and butter.  We dunk warm bread into the sauce.  We finish our drinks and order a bottle of red wine.  We can barely hear the piano over the talking and the occasional burst of talking and shouting which flows from the kitchen when the door swings open.  And the kitchen team is listening to something loud and fast; when the door swings shut the music swings back to gentle jazz of the piano in the bar.  Door opens to the kitchen and a wall of guitars rail.  It is funny.

We order our meal, the waitress answering questions and steering us to this or that. 

The room swallows us and we talk through roasted lamb, curried chicken, crisp roasted potatoes, perfectly sautéed spinach in lemon sauce, an asparagus and wild mushroom thing that tastes like melted gold.  Somewhere during the meal we order another bottle of a good red wine, dry and round and blood-red.  Not cheap but not not cheap.

We both eat – no picking at the edges of the plate.  We both tuck in.  When the plates go away they are shiny-white; we joke the chef could take the plates, reload them with a fresh meal and send them back into the room.  She says 'I am sorry.'  I smile and say 'me too.'  that's it.
Later, the waitress slides a slice of pie between us and says ‘it’s on me.  Welcome.’  We share.  We never share.  And then we order another desert, a warm apple crisp with vanilla ice cream, and two glasses of a liquor the waitress recommends to join the pie.  It is like a treacley drug, warming our throats and we feel it take off inside.  A good drunk.  We are hours in and no time has passed.  We laugh about the fight.  We are drunk, drunk, drunk and have no intention of leaving.  We talk and talk.  Finally, we drink oil dark coffee. 

We sit and hold hands across the table.  The waitress drops the check on the table and smiles.  Says as long as they don't lock the door not to worry.  When finally our table is cleared the room is quiet.  The rain has stopped. The staff are winding up now, talking.  When the doors swing open Reggae blares from the kitchen and the shouting now is in Spanish.

If we had not found this place the fight would have lasted two days, maybe longer, I can tell.  As it is, we found the place.  The fight is gone.  What can we say?  We like our food.  We love good places.  We know each other.

We make up the pie in the tip.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio

The Food Season II: Cooking For Friends During The Dark Months

            Second piece on meals.  I still cook the chicken cutlets with long pasta I first new in Ernestine Rocchio's kitchen.  The smell when I cook that meal takes me right back to being a kid with his grandparents.

I know my love of cooking for friends comes from there.  Shopping for food and drink, prep-time with the radio playing, working hard right up until everyone arrives.  It is important.  It is how I connect.  

Small groups, up to eight, are best but I have fed twenty.  And we have a small house.  I like sauces and working with very hot pans.  I worked a line in college, late 1970’s and early 1980’s, at a pretty good fine American cuisine restaurant, called Dillon’s, where the owner/chef tipped the line cooks out with drugs and talked a lot about how Hawaii was better than Vermont.  It was odd but he was a very good cook.  He was a very tough boss.  I learned a lot on that line.  A lot.  And I learned a lot from my Gram.  And I have been cooking now a long time.  
I think the insight that made me confident in the kitchen, and is based on nothing more than having done it a long time, is cooking is chemistry.  You heat something up and it changes.  You heat a combination of things up and they change differently.  You learn what to heat up when, how hot, what to add when, how hot, and you become a good cook.  So I am comfortable firing foods and making meals.

Cooking in winter is in many ways the best.  Our bodies are looking for rich, fatty foods.  It is dark out.  There's nothing else to do.  It is cold out.  It is warm in a working kitchen.

I like to cook thin pieces of meat in hot hot oil on a stove, adding maybe some good soy sauce, white wine, mushrooms, lemon, maybe breading the meat or rolling it first in flour and egg.  I like making pan sauces, especially tomato sauce, which starts with olive oil, garlic, onion, a can of anchovies, adding meatballs or mushrooms or sausage or roasted peppers.  Other sauces I love to make are simple:  garlic, oil, pepper; roll meat, maybe chicken thighs or lamb bits or stew meat into it; add white wine (and fight with wife over using good wine for cooking); cover the sauce once the meat is brown; uncover it and add salt, pepper, cumin, fennel seed, who knows.  Let the sauce boil off a bit, add more wine (maybe lemon depending on what else is in there), serve it. 

In winter I aslo like to roast meats and root vegetables.  I’ll stuff a chicken with pretty much anything lying around the kitchen.  No two hens ever come out the same.  One favorite approach to roasting a chicken: I rub olive oil onto the bird’s skin, spackle it with salt and pepper, curry powder or other savory spices, stuff it with aging oranges or lemons or pears (or all three) and place the chicken into the extremely hot cavern of our oven with spanish onions all around it in the pan.  I cook it for ten minutes at temperatures reserved for reentering spacecraft and then turn the flame down to just under four hundred degrees Fahrenheit.  You can almost hear the bird cook.  When it is done it tastes sweet and crisp and rich.  The onion caramelizes and melts.

We buy a half cow from a friend and it sits in our Sears freezer in the basement.  The meat is lean and the steaks thick, red, delicious.  I cook the steaks outside on a wood fire.  I do this through the winter, at least until the snow covers over the stone firebox.  I love cooking steak over the open flame, watching it closely.  The wood smoke makes the cooked meat sweet.  I make the simplest of garlic breads over the same fire, a trick I learned from my Italian brother-in-law.  I take slices of baguette and toast them over the burning logs, grind raw garlic into the burnt toast and slather the toast with olive oil and salt.  That’s it. 

            The din during any dinner party in our house is a happy, satisfying sound.  I love to watch the conversation as one person is pulled in and another drops away; as some people laugh and others huddle and talk quietly; as stories get told; as it gets late and becomes a bit drunken.  We listen to some music, sometimes too loud, sometimes piped in low.  We drink a lot.

At one dinner party I made something new, which came out terrific.  I heated oil in a wok and added a can of anchovies, which dissolved to dust.  I added many, many chopped cloves of garlic.  I added some curry powder.  When the garlic was pulpy I tossed young squid into the hot mix.  The tentacles of the squid were cut into manageable bite-sized nests. I sliced the bodies into half-inch-wide tires and fired the squid in the oil.  As it roasted in the oil I added soy sauce and more curry.  The squid churned in the oil over a hot flame.  Occasionally I sloughed in good white wine.  As the wine boiled off I added more and more.  A bottle of good white wine ended up in the sauce.  It cooked for a long time on a low heat. 

We were all drunk when I finally served the squid.  I had no plates or small forks or toothpicks.  I had good French bread.  My friends dunked the bread in the broth and ate the squid with their bare hands.  It was messy and awkward but it was so damn good.  It all went.  We drifted to the table for dinner with burned, oiled fingers, already pretty much full, already a bit drunk.  It was a great night. 

            Some meals work better than others; some dinner parties are better than others.  I don’t know why.   Cooking is chemistry;  dinners are alchemy.  The music helps.  The alcohol helps.  People being comfortable with each other and themselves helps.  The look and feel of the room helps.  This is true whether the meal is in a home or at a restaurant.  Being with people you enjoy and being able to relax and eat.  I learned it in my Gram's kitchen.  It is the same here although completely different.  There is nothing new about cooking and eating good food with friends during the dark months.  It is I bet as old as the world.  

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio