Very Important Corks

My mother let fly with a nonstop barrage of chatter the minute I arrived at her apartment.

“Look at this,” she said, holding an ancient Missoni sweater up to herself the way she’d held clothes up to me on shopping trips when I was five.

“It’s from 1988 — and I still have it!”

Keeping stuff from years ago that she could still wear if she wanted to gives her options, she says, even if she never actually wears them.

“Wait–” she said, “I have something else to show you. It’s fabulous. You’ll love it—-”

It was like she’d been suddenly released from a vow of silence, and her words erupted like bullets from a Tommy gun. She disappeared into her bedroom and came out with a delicate silk kimono that I’d never seen. It would have been enormous on her, so I knew it wasn’t hers.

“It was Grandma’s, from the 1920s,” she said, holding it up so I could see it, turning it around, front and back, front and back. It was a flurry of powder blues and dusty mauves, made from roughly textured raw silk, and printed on the very bottom hem was the word JAPAN.  I instinctively took a sleeve and held it up to my face to see if there was any essence of Grandma there — of the mothballs and Jean Nate and schmaltz that co-mingled to make up the Proustian essence of her. But there was nothing.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“When she died—” she said.

“But that’s thirty years ago — why didn’t you show it to me before?”

“It was buried behind other stuff–”

“Maybe you should get rid of some of the other stuff–”

“But then I wouldn’t have options, would I-–” she answered ruefully, and took off back into the bedroom with Grandma’s kimono flying over her shoulder. I heard the closet door swing open, and the clattering shove of hangers pushed far to one side. She hung the kimono up behind other stuff, and closed the closet door.

And that’s the thing about stuff; sometimes, we accumulate so much of it over the years that we start to forget about all the other, better, more important stuff that’s hidden behind it. During the holiday season, the accumulation of new stuff knows no limits, especially where kitchen stuff is concerned. There’s reading stuff, and cooking stuff, and baking stuff, all of which falls under the kitchen stuff heading. Sometimes, the reading stuff doesn’t always lead to cooking, even if it’s about cooking. It’s still good stuff. As George Carlin once said, a house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. 

When I got home after the kimono incident, I said to Susan, you know—for two people, I think we have way too much stuff. We were standing in the kitchen at the time, surrounded by kitchenware catalogs. I had just tried to open one of those drawers underneath my kitchen bookshelf (which contains some reading stuff that I use a lot), and it was stuck because something was clogging up the works: when I finally pulled it, hard, out flew a couple of very important corks (1993 Banfi Brunello, from our first trip together to Tuscany; 2000 Romanee-Conti Grands Echezeaux, and a gift from an author when I left Clarkson Potter in 2006) which were buried under a bag of those flat French sponges, which was wedged against the side of the drawer by a large Glad bag of twist ties given to us by my mother-in-law, who saves that kind of stuff, just in case.

“I mean,” I said to Susan, who was sipping on a glass of water while going through a pile of mail, “do we really need twenty-seven wooden spoons? Or those tiny pathetic little whisks meant for beating a single quail egg? Or a special teeny rasp for nutmeg? Why can’t we just use the regular rasp? And why all the twist ties? We don’t even use plastic baggies anymore—”

“Fine—then let’s get rid of some stuff–” she said, putting the mail down on the counter, alongside a stack of magazines and circulars and the free supplement that my local newspaper sends out every Friday.  A hardware store catalog featuring Santa dressed in Carhartt overalls and wearing Bose noise-canceling headphones slipped off the counter and fell into the dog’s water bowl, and I thought I was going to have a stroke.

Because most of my professional life is spent in either my office or my kitchen, I’ve lately become very sensitive to the towering pile-ups of stuff in those rooms. I’m not even sure if it’s lately, or if it’s just that I’ve finally hit my tipping point, like when your body hits its allergen wall and your throat suddenly closes up with no explanation. So I planned my course of action: I would go through books first, and whittle them back to absolutely only those I use and/or truly love. Whatever reading stuff I was getting rid of would go to neighbors (who cook) and friends, or to the culinary department at the local high school. Once the books were sieved down to the essentials, I’d attack the other kitchen stuff — the whisks, the tipless knives, the glassware that we bought because it was cute, the tart tins with the missing bottoms, the goddamned important corks — and by the time I was done, surfaces would be clear, shelves and drawers would be orderly, and our house would be able to breathe again, just in time for the arrival of more holiday stuff.

The act of ridding oneself of cookbooks is not an easy one for a writer, much less a writer who used to be a cookbook department manager at a well-known gourmet shop. Compound that problem with more than a decade of being a book editor at two major publishing houses. Add to that the fact that when one’s spouse works for one of the said major publishing houses as a book designer, fringe benefits include all the reading stuff you can handle, for a lifetime. And of course, reading stuff, like my mother’s 1980s sweaters, holds the promise of options, and possibility:  I could make Thomas Keller’s oysters and pearls if I wanted to, even though I never actually would.

Promise is so seductive.

Anyway, I was ruthless: unless it was a classic, or if I hadn’t opened it in a year, it landed in the giveaway pile. If it contained three or more handwritten notes angrily correcting recipes that obviously hadn’t been tested prior to publication, it went away. If its content was maddening — if it required immersion circulators and liquid nitrogen and an Ortolan — it was packed up.

“Aren’t you being a little bit extreme?” Susan asked. It was right after her surgery, and she was ensconced on the den sofa like a pasha, watching golf.

“Are you planning on buying an immersion circulator? Because I’m not.”

“Do I get to keep any of them?” she asked, sadly.

“Sure,” I said, putting my hands on my hips.

She got up and perused my toss pile and pulled from it exactly one book, on the baked goods of Sardinia.

“I’d like to keep this one,” she said.

“Will you ever use it? I mean, we’re keeping Maida Heatter, Jim Lahey, Peter Reinhart, all those tiny Elizabeth Alston baking books, and everything that Dorie Greenspan ever wrote. Do you really need a book on Sardinian baking?”

She looked at me over her light blue Lina Wurtmuller glasses.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.” And then she went back into the den.

I divvied up my giveaway pile of reading stuff among my neighbors, who were thrilled. Suddenly, my bookshelves were able to inhale and exhale, like they’d taken a shot of Afrin during a horrific head cold. I felt free, and joyful, but not for long: my next goal was to rid us of unnecessary cooking implements, like olive pitters and the aforementioned tipless knife. I wanted to whittle down our wooden spoon collection to a mere six. The French steel crepe pan, which I had to have, could go away, along with the All-Clad searing pan really designed for flambeing Bananas Foster. I never make Bananas Foster. And since that one unfortunate class in cooking school, I never flambe. The plastic cruet set that someone — I have no idea who — so obviously re-gifted to us would find its way to the Goodwill box, along with one of three digital thermometers and the dyed green St. Patrick’s Day toothpicks from the Reagan Administration.

But first, before I did anything, I decided to spend an evening with the books I really loved — the ones that would never, ever leave: there were all the idiosyncratic Chez Panisse books—the ones that assume you have access to Meyer Lemons even if you live in Newfoundland. There was Elizabeth David, and even though I have both the American and British editions of French Provincial Cooking, and hardcover and softcover editions of Italian Food, they all stayed. There’s Marcella’s The Classic Italian Cookbook, which I bought in the basement “book room” at Random House in 1985, days after I graduated from college. There were the books that I use on a daily basis, like all of Deborah Madison’s, and Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty. Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Cooking Every Day, which is worth its weight in gold for both its aesthetic and its recipes, is still in the kitchen. Edna Lewis stayed put, as did Laurie Colwin, Jacques Pepin, Marion Cunningham, Craig Claiborne’s New York Times, Amanda Hesser’s New York Times, Lord Krishna’s Cuisine, Paula Wolfert, Diana Kennedy, Nigel Slater, David Tanis, and Julia’s The Way to Cook. I couldn’t bear to part with Lee Bailey, even though I look at his books precisely once a year, usually on New Years Day, after everyone’s gone home. The Silver Palate could have gone either way, but when the book fell open to a spattered page and the recipe for chicken marbella, I couldn’t part with it.

Susan yelled hoarsely from the den “If you get rid of Jean Anderson, I’ll break your legs.”

Of course, I yelled back.

Naturally, my plan to rid the house of unnecessary stuff coincided with every magazine, newspaper, blog, and radio show doing their year-end mash-ups of must-have books and gadgets like that $625, multi-volume treatise on modern cooking, or a $200 Japanese ice cube maker. The other day, while standing in the wonderful Posman’s Books in Grand Central Station, I found myself in the cookbook section, staring glassy-eyed at all the new and gorgeous volumes that would attempt to seduce me into taking them home to my now corkless, stuffless lair, to refill the spots vacated by the books I’d shed so recently. For the first time ever, I was able to restrain myself.

Because, just for a little while, I want to be able to breathe. To know, cook from, and honor what I have. And to live with the hidden jewels that, like my grandmother’s mysterious kimono, might otherwise be obscured by the allure of the new, and the delicious temptation of possibility and promise.

Tagged as: Christmas, cookbooks, holiday shopping