Under the Table

What would it be like to grow up in a restaurant?

And I mean literally grow up in a restaurant, where your father is the chef, your mother is the pastry chef and all the servers give you maraschino cherries and bring you little plates of food as you sit in the dining room doing your homework.

I'm fascinated by restaurants and their culture.  Charlotte Silver's Charlotte au Chocolat:  Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood chronicles the years in which her parents and then her single mother (I'm not giving away any major plot points here, I promise) owned the restaurant Upstairs at the Pudding in Boston's Harvard Square.  The restaurant, in a crumbling, Harvard-owned building, is above the famous Hasty Pudding club, which every year crowns celebrities Man and Woman of the Year and puts on a famous annual show that always features men in drag.

It makes for a fascinating setting, but what is more interesting is how restaurant life is perceived through the eyes of a girl.  For many chapters, it seems that she is the Alice in Wonderland of the restaurant world, crawling under tables and scaring customers, sitting in prim little party dresses for the amusement of the same customers and eating the fabulous desserts that her mother makes.  School nights and normal bedtimes don't really come into consideration.

When Silver described the swagged dining room with its pink accents, I couldn't help but think of a certain class of restaurants from a bygone era.  For many chapters, I thought that the time frame was in the 1950s through the 1970s--up to the point where I realized that Silver was younger than me.  The restaurant closed in 2001 after a lease dispute with Harvard, although a version of it reopened elsewhere--minus the unique atmosphere of the original.

While Silver isn't a great writer--the book is repetitive in spots--I admit that I was fascinated by her childhood.  It lacked structure and was constantly chaotic, but I wanted to be that little girl hiding under tables, stealing bites of her mother's famed charlotte au chocolate dessert, after which was was named, and speaking Spanish with the revolving cast of waiters.  I wanted to be this version of Alice in Wonderland.

It's a short book, but an appropriately sweet one for anyone interested in a unique perspective on restaurant culture.

Wanderlust and Garlic Bread

The last Friday in February, the book group met to discuss Wanderlust by Elisabeth Eaves.  The nonfiction story of a woman who realizes in high school that she has an irresistible itch to travel would not seem to be controversial.  The fact that she was incapable of doing so in the absence of a love interest in every locale was.

This book group is a fabulous circle of professional women--some originally from Alaska, one from New York, one from New Orleans--Alaska is fascinating in that sense, because maybe a quarter of the people I meet are originally from here.  We span a diverse group of ages, ethnicities and experiences, but we were all united in one respect:  none of us wanted to travel with this woman. 



Check out those fabulously colored rice cakes in the background, from one of
the three Korean bakeries in Anchorage.  Three?!?  Who knew?

I loved her writing, and as someone who has done more traveling in the last three years than in the previous (ahem) thirty-five, I understand the urge to hear different languages, immerse oneself in different cultures and be completely peripatetic.  However, must she act like an ugly American?  And why does finding herself mean that she has to pick up a different man in every location?  (I'm totally serious here.  In the second half of the book, I couldn't keep track of which guy she was talking about.)

In the end, the book was pretty much roundly denounced and the conversation turned to what made a great travel companion.  Well, that and the international variety of snacks that everyone brought in keeping with the book's theme.

So...garlic bread.  It's the humblest of foods, but I never want to eat another storebought loaf coated with what seems to be garlic-flavored Crisco.  I generally avoid it altogether in favor of roasted garlic cloves smeared on bruschetta.  However, Lidia Bastianich's garlic bread is simple, quick and feeds a crowd.  She has three variations in her book, one of which is a take on pan con tomate, but needless to say I'll wait until the tomatoes in Alaska look a little better before I try that one.

Garlic Bread Two Ways

Adapted from Lidia Bastianich's Italy in America

1 large loaf Italian bread, halved lengthwise and cut into twelve pieces

3 tbsp. good-quality olive oil

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 tbsp. parsley flakes

1/2 cup Pecorino Romano, finely shredded

1 tsp. red pepper flakes (optional)

Combine the minced garlic and olive oil and allow to steep for half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Spray a large baking sheet with nonstick cooking spray and arrange the bread pieces on it., crust side down.

Using a basting brush, brush the pieces thoroughly with the garlic oil.  Sprinkle half the pieces with the parsley and red pepper flakes, and the other half with the cheese.

Bake for five to eight minutes, until the slices are lightly browned.  Serve immediately.

Dancing About Architecture

Confession:  I am a voracious reader.  High literature, the occasional chick lit, lots of magazines, sometimes genre fiction.  One of the best indicators of whether I'll like a book is whether it has a definite sense of time and place.

Whenever I get ready to travel, I read lots of books set in the place I'm going.  For this past trip to Italy, I bought novels set all over Italy--so many that I'm still reading them.  I just finished two books set in Italy, one a big snooze and the other a slight but lovely read. 

There's a quote:  "Talking about love is like dancing about architecture," a variant of which is apparently "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."  No one knows who said this originally--maybe Elvis Costello?--but the gist  is that capturing the essence of something wonderful is near-impossible.

The first book I read, Nocturnes:  Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by the terrific writer Kazuo Ishiguro, has two stories set in Italy.  They happen to be the two best stories, both about musicians and their unorthodox mentors, that capture the canals, the piazzas, the langorous mood.  It isn't his best work--that's either Never Let Me Go or The Remains of the Day--but it's well worth reading.

By contrast, Love of My Youth by Mary Gordon, made me want to hit my head against the wall.  Two former lovers meet again forty years later in Rome, walk and talk and worry over what went wrong all those years ago.  Every chapter set in the present takes place in a different, evocative location in Rome, but the book doesn't give any sense of what those places are like.  Never have I wanted to yell "Shut up, already!" to two characters more.  I'm not sure I've ever seen this plotline done really well in a book, but Before Sunset did much the same for Paris, and it's a pretty perfect movie.

David keeps saying that he is ready to go on vacation again.  We just returned from Italy two months ago, and until we can actually go back I'll keep dreaming...and cooking...and reading.