A Holiday Promise

This year, Susan and I spent Thanksgiving–the week before and a few days after–in the Bay area (as I write this, we’re actually still here, staying with friends in their gorgeous house on Lily Street, with Audrey, their small-space-creature-Italian-Greyhound); we were staying for most of the time in a rose-bedecked cottage in Mill Valley, which we now consider the most perfect place on earth. Anyway, a few days after we arrived, our good friends, author/teacher/chef Deborah Madison and her husband, painter Patrick McFarlin joined us on their way to visit family in the Central Valley, driving all the way from New Mexico. We couldn’t wait. We adore spending time with them, and I’ve mostly evolved beyond the mild hysteria that accompanies the knowledge that blindfolded, this woman cooks and writes circles around pretty much anyone I know.

But of course, until last week, I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to cook for her, and rumor has it that people who spend their professional lives as chefs and teachers and food writers like it when other people cook for them. So for a while, I was pretty mellow about the idea.

“So, um, what are you going to make for Deborah and Patrick when they arrive from Santa Fe?” Susan said, on our flight out. “You know you can’t cook for her from her own books. That would be a bad idea.”

At first, I was all defensive. What do you mean what am I going to make for them? You suddenly forgot how to turn on the oven? Susan was abandoning me.

But then I started to think about the possibilities: a big salad. Some fish. A lot of vegetables not cooked according to any of her recipes. And then I decided, somewhere over Utah.

“I know—” I said. “I’ll make beef stew.”

“You’re going to make Deborah Madison, the most important vegetarian cookbook author of our time, beef stew—” she said, looking at me over the top of the book she was reading.

“I am,” I responded. “They’ll be tired. I want to make something that doesn’t smack of hysteria, and that’s hearty and warming. That I can put in the oven and forget about. So, beef stew.”

” Good thought,” Susan said. And then she inflated her neck pillow and went to sleep. I wasn’t too worried about the meat thing: Deborah and Patrick aren’t vegetarians anymore, and the best lamb I’ve ever eaten in my life I ate at their house.

Of course, what I neglected to consider is that, when you’re in a strange place where you don’t know the kitchen and don’t know what kind of tools they have, it’s generally a bad idea to be too rigid. Susan and I arrived at the Mill Valley cottage to find, mercifully, a pretty fleshed-out batterie de cuisine, so I was unerring in my plans: I’d start marinating the beef early in the day, with some herbs, garlic, and red wine. I’d begin cooking at around three-thirty, and I’d serve dinner at six. By the time Deborah and Patrick arrived, the stew would be simmering, we could give them some wine and let them put their feet up and maybe take a nap. There’d be nothing left to do, and therefore, no there’s-a-famous-chef-in-my-kitchen worry on my part.

But plans, of course, are meant to go haywire: the house had everything but a cast iron pot, so I couldn’t let the stew simmer evenly in the oven. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get a sear on the meat (even after it’d been patted dry and placed, in batches, in hot, neutral, high-heat oil). I couldn’t get the sauce to thicken, and instead wound up with a kind of lumpy off-color liquid, like what Laurie Colwin famously referred to in describing a stew her husband once made:

“The result was a kind of gray water — rather like the gray-green, greasy Limpopo River in The Elephant’s Child by Rudyard Kipling.”

The vegetables were mushy. The parsnips were purple. Everything that could have gone wrong with it, did, and by the time Patrick called to say they’d just come over the San Rafael bridge and would be there in twenty minutes, I considered drinking heavily. The kitchen was a mess. And the stew—which I’ve made hundreds of times and which usually results in happy guests gorging themselves on lush, velvety sauce enveloping tender, fall-apart beef— looked like a science experiment. I felt like a fraud. I could have been the star of a new cooking show called In the Kitchen with Helen Keller.

Our friends arrived, we got them settled in, and the moment of truth happened: Deborah lifted the lid on the stew pot and gazed in.

“Mmmmmmm….” she said, inhaling deeply.

“It looks like a car crash,” I said, working on my second glass of wine.

“For god’s sake, it does not,” she said, taking the whisk out of my hand to finish the polenta, which I’d amended with copious amounts of Cowgirl Creamery marscarpone as an edible divergence from the chewy, brown meat and mauve, flaccid parsnips that would be served on top of it.

Deborah was kind. And I’m pleased to say that now that I have that first, totally fraught, cooking-for-my-friend-the-chef thing under my belt, I don’t have to worry anymore and neither does she. Like In the World According to Garp, when Garp and Jenny are house-hunting and a small plane flies into the side of the colonial they’re looking at.

“We have to buy this one,” Garp says, “because it’s been pre-disastered. The odds of a plane hitting the house again are astronomical!” There’s nowhere to go but up. So, Deborah, here’s a promise: dinner was pre-disastered.

It can only get better from here.

Tagged as: beef stew, Deborah Madison, Laurie Colwin, Patrick McFarlin, The World According to Garp