Wild Game My Mother, Her Lover, and Me - Adrienne Brodeur Page 0,1
the beach. There they enjoyed the coastal abundance before them: brackish air, a sky glowing pink with sunset, the ambient sounds of seagulls, boats on moorings, and distant waves.
My older brother, Peter, made his entrance after a long day’s work as a mate on a charter fishing boat out of Wellfleet. He was sixteen, blond, and tan, his lips split from too much salt and sun. He and Ben talked striped bass—what they were eating (sand eels), where they were biting (past the bars but still close to shore). It was understood between them that this type of sport fishing, with its lowbrow chumming and high-test fishing line, was not the real deal. Ben was a fisherman’s fisherman. He tied his own flies and made annual trips to Iceland and Russia to fish the world’s most pristine rivers. He had already caught and released over seven hundred salmon in his lifetime, and his goal was to make it to a thousand. Still, a day on the water was a day on the water, even if it was spent with beer-guzzling tourists.
“When’s dinner, Mom?” Peter asked. My brother was endlessly ravenous, always impatient.
That was all it took to get everyone back into the house. We knew what was coming next.
My mother flicked on the kitchen lights, rinsed her hands, and busied herself unwrapping the headless birds, lining them up on the countertop, and blotting their cavities dry with a fresh dishtowel. The rest of us settled onto the sturdy, high-backed stools, our elbows on the green marble counter, where we could enjoy a clear view of Malabar in action. On the enormous butcher-block island directly in front of us, aromatic herbs—basil, cilantro, thyme, oregano, mint—sprouted from a vase like a floral arrangement. A rectangle of butter had softened into a glistening mound. A giant head of garlic awaited my mother’s knife. Behind us stretched our living room, framed entirely by sliding glass doors that opened onto a panoramic view of Nauset Harbor, where islands of marsh grass and sandbars were visible at low tide. Beyond the harbor was the outer beach, a strip of khaki sand punctuated by dunes that buffered us from the Atlantic Ocean. From time to time, my mother would look up from her mincing or stirring or grating, take it all in, and smile with satisfaction.
My mother had been coming to this town on Cape Cod since she was a young girl. Orleans is located at the elbow of what from the sky resembles an enormous arm pushing sixty-five miles out into the Atlantic and then flexing back toward the mainland, narrowing all the way to the curled hand of Provincetown. As a child, Malabar lived in Pochet; while married to my father, she owned a tiny cottage in Nauset Heights; and a few years ago, no doubt with some assistance from Charles, she’d bought a couple of acres of waterfront. She’d had a major renovation done when she bought this house, and it was no coincidence that the kitchen was the room with the best views.
If the idea of a woman in the kitchen calls to mind the image of a sweet homemaker in a ruffled apron or a world-weary mother dutifully fulfilling her obligation to feed her young family, you’re picturing the wrong woman in the wrong kitchen. Here, at the very last house on a winding road to the bay beach, the kitchen was command central and Malabar its five-star general. Long before open kitchens were in vogue, she believed that cooks should be celebrated, not relegated to hot rooms to labor alone behind closed doors. It was in this kitchen where meringues were launched onto seas of crème anglaise, perfectly seared slabs of foie gras were drizzled with fig reductions, and salads of watercress and endive were expertly tossed with olive oil and sea salt.
My mother rarely followed recipes. She had little use for them. Hardwired to understand the chemistry of food, she needed only her palate, her instincts, and her fingertips. In a single drop of rich sauce placed on her tongue, she could detect the tiniest hint of cardamom, one lone shard of lemon zest, some whiff of a behind-the-scenes ingredient. She had an innate feel for composition and structure and how temperature might change that. She also had a keen awareness of the power of this gift, particularly where men were concerned. Armed with sharp knives, fragrant spices, and fire, my mother could create feasts whose aromas alone would entice