The Monday Night Cooking School - By Erica Bauermeister Page 0,27
a starched white snowfield. Isabelle folded napkins of the same heavy material into sharply creased triangles and set them to mark each place, then fetched silverware and white dinner plates. With a taper, Antonia lit the candles that ran down the length of the table, their yellow glow reflecting in the thick, uneven glass of the old windows.
The rest of the class came in from the kitchen, led by a triumphant Ian and Helen, carrying a large steaming platter. Ian held the serving dish while Helen carefully placed on each white plate five squares of ravioli no thicker than paper, their edges crinkled, their surfaces kissed with melted butter, scattered with bits of shallots and hazelnuts, like rice thrown at a wedding.
They each took their places at the table. “Happy Thanksgiving, everyone,” Lillian said, raising her glass.
They sat for a moment, simply looking. The smell from their plates rose with the last bits of steam, butter releasing whispers of shallots and hazelnuts. Antonia raised a bite to her mouth. A quick crunch of hazelnut, and then the pasta gave way easily to her teeth, the pumpkin melting across her tongue, warm and dense, with soft, spicy undercurrents of nutmeg. It felt like going home, and she relaxed into her chair with a sigh of happiness. She looked about the table, wondering what the other students thought, watching as they ate slowly, and then more slowly, concentrating only on the flavors within their mouths, oblivious to the table around them. Ian’s eyes caught hers.
“Do you like it?” she asked him. “The ravioli?”
“It is beyond good,” he answered, enraptured. “I can’t believe Helen and I made this.”
“Hey, now,” Helen interjected with a laugh from two seats down.
“You know what I mean,” Ian responded. He paused, and then looked back at Antonia. “Do you eat like this all the time?”
“No…” she replied hesitantly.
“You do, don’t you?” he replied quickly, “or at least you have. I mean, that explains a lot.”
“What?”
“Why you…” Ian backtracked: “Never mind.”
“He is saying you are beautiful,” Isabelle said matter-of-factly, and put another bite in her mouth.
“Ahh…” Antonia looked down, a small smile on her face.
THE TURKEY EMERGED from the oven, juices sizzling within the metal wrapping.
“Here,” said Antonia to Isabelle, “lean over the top.” She opened the creased foil and Isabelle inhaled as the steam caressed her face.
“Christmas,” Isabelle said. “My grandmother always cooked the entire dinner with things she had grown herself—except for the turkey; she got that from the neighbor. I loved to walk in her garden after dinner; it felt alive, even in the winter. She always told me that rosemary grows in the garden of a strong woman. Hers were like trees.”
They left the turkey to finish cooking itself outside the oven and went to watch the others. Chloe and Claire were talking happily, enveloped in the comforting smell of chocolate. They had taken what looked like a long, thin layer of shiny cake from the oven and were cutting it into slices, turning them on their sides on the cookie sheet, where, like magic, they suddenly transformed into traditional oval biscotti.
Nearby, Carl and Tom were consulting over the pot of polenta as it bubbled and shot small bullets of hot, liquid corn into the air. Antonia noticed that for the moment Tom’s expression had lost the sadness that clung to him like a signature.
“It’s too hot!” Carl said.
“Let’s turn it down, and then I think it’s time to add the Gorgonzola,” Tom suggested, picking up crumbles of milky cheese, blue-veined like marble.
Antonia peeked over their shoulders. The polenta was a cauldron of summer, vibrantly gold against the black of the pot. Carl was stirring with a long-handled wooden spoon with a hole in the center while Tom dropped in small bits of cheese that left white comet trails as they melted into the moving yellow mass. Nearby, Lillian was squeezing a lemon over a mountain of green beans steaming in a white bowl.
“Antonia,” she said, “can you take care of the pine nuts?”
Antonia took the long handle of the frying pan on the stove, gave it a quick shake to flip the pine nuts that were browning in the heat. A couple more flicks of her wrist and they were done, and she shook them across the top of the green beans like confetti tossed at the stroke of a new year. She looked up to find Tom watching her, his expression filled with sadness again. She gave him a questioning look.
“It’s nothing,” he