to keep some order at the table.
Three weeks into it, just when I thought I would die from tater tots and baked chicken, we had session change, and all the parents came up to camp for Parent’s Visiting Day. At last, I could really roll out a spread—a spicy, slimy, wiggly, bitter, green, and bony spread. I couldn’t spend any real money—it wasn’t in the budget—but I could cook anything I wanted. We were giddy, Shaun and I, to have our hands in stinky Vietnamese fish sauce for the vegetarian spring rolls, which we packed with cilantro and jicama and carrots and cucumbers. The four kitchen helpers were maybe not so enthused to be pulling the beards out of and scrubbing twenty pounds of mussels for the chilled mussels on the half shell with vinaigrette, but if working in a kitchen was something they all had wanted to “check out,” this was a perfect introduction. As best as we could, using the butter-yellow melamine plates, we artfully arranged soppressata, Alphonse olives, hard cheeses, and bread that had crust and body—that could actually hurt the roof of your mouth if you were unaccustomed. We fried fatty, bony duck wings and coated them in toasted sesame seeds. We untangled mounds of curly bitter endive and tamed it with pear and walnuts and vinegar with bacon fat.
It was a perfect New England summer day, hot and breezy and a saturated blue sky made more beautiful by puffy white clouds. Parents in clogs and Tevas, having almost all arrived from Brooklyn in Volvo station wagons, were swarming the campus, moving from bunk to arts barn to theater to see all of the clever and crafty things their kids had been doing for the past three weeks. I was transferring a whole side of cold poached sea bass from a sheet pan onto a serving platter—the fish a little longer than our largest platter, unfortunately—and getting ready to dress it with some parsley oil, when I noticed one of these parents standing at the pass-through, watching me with amused curiosity.
“Hello there,” I said.
“Are you responsible for all this?” he asked, pointing back to the buffet.
“Um, I guess so. Yes.”
“I’m Emma’s dad. She’s been telling me about you all summer.”
“Emma’s dad!” I cried, lighting up. “I love Emma!”
I put down my spoon and went to the pass to shake hands.
“I’m Gabrielle.”
He said so many kind things about the food, and I felt so rewarded, but I noticed that he spoke about the food the way that only someone who works with food could. There is a way, a distinct way, that people who work in the industry speak to each other about food and you can tell, within minutes, that they are part of your extended clan. It’s not like an obnoxious foodie talks about food, ostentatiously throwing around kitchen terms and names of ingredients they have researched at length. It’s not like an appreciative eater talks about food—awed and enamored and perfectly happy to speak of his enjoyment without having any idea of what he’s just eaten or how it was achieved. It’s the way only someone who works in the industry talks about food, by almost not talking about it, but just throwing out a few code words and signals—like a gang member flashing you his sign. Every single time that I sit at a restaurant’s bar, order the txacoli or grüner veltliner rather than the sauvignon blanc, ask for the razor clams and not the calamari, I am sniffed out immediately by the server as an industry peer. Having said nothing.
“Who are you?” I finally asked, having picked up every single one of his gang signs.
“I’m Mark. Mark Bittman.”
The father of Emma turned out to be Mark Bittman, the cookbook writer and New York Times columnist. Of course she loved balsamic vinegar and Parmesan cheese and fresh ground black pepper.
At the end of every summer, I was asked to prepare a lavish and special dinner for the staff. The tradition was to have lobster, that creature that most signals luxury and splurge. After the last weeping deeply tanned kid had pulled out of camp, with his Popsicle-stick cabin and tie-dyed T-shirts in the trunk of his parents’ car, waving out the dusty back window to all of his beloved counselors the entire length of the gravel road until he was out of sight, we were all left alone on the beautiful campus. We had to clean up and close down. Between this very