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 Years
ago I was a personal Chef in a private home in a very swank suburb of
Boston. My sister got me the interview for the job, I liked the family
immediately and they liked me. My job consisted of getting to work at 10
in the morning, quite civilized, I was the last of the “staff” to
arrive at the house. I would head to the kitchen to pick up my list
from the madame of the house and read the pages of notes and the menu
for the dinner that evening. There was always a shopping list and at
the end of the pages she would underline that they were on a very low
fat diet with an exclamation mark! A big part of my job was to bake
cookies every day to be ready when the two kids came home from school
and they had to be “fresh out of the oven”, my choice of what kind,
but they had to be piping hot.
 I was given an adorable MG convertible
to tool around in with my many bags of grocery and a charge account at
the local high-end grocery store. I would make dinner for 6 o'clock
sharp, clean up and head home for dinner at a later hour. The first day
on the job my sister called to ask how was it going so far and what was
the house like? The “large” house was a Frank Lloyd Wright design with
a Japanese landscaped yard. It was beautiful. The house was full of
art, paintings and prints were everywhere even on the finished walls
going to the basement laundry room. I told my sister on the phone that
the art was hung in so many places that it was tacky until she came
over for lunch a couple of days later and we both toured the house. The
art was real! Kandinsky, Picasso, even a Monet in the formal dining
room. There were so many pieces I assumed that they were all prints,
but no, it was the real McCoy, my own museum all day until the kids
came home.
A
month before Passover the “J” family asked to speak with me about
putting on a large formal dinner and they wanted something “nice”
because both their parents were coming for Passover. We worked on the
menu for a few days and created a classic Passover feast. Legs of lamb
would be the main course that I started aging 3 weeks before the event.
I think the J’s were a bit nervous as they checked it daily and the
legs got darker and smaller at each view. I reassured them this part of
the menu I was comfortable with, I had aged legs of lamb many times and
it would “cut like butter."
 Not to worry, but worry they did. I read
everything on the subject of Jewish cooking, comparing the techniques
of making matzo balls and extrapolated from at least 20 recipes. The
chicken stock would be a picture perfect stock except I would double
the amount of bones and then reduce it by half to get an intense
flavor. I mapped out my timeline and tweeked my recipes. Mrs. “J”
reminded me daily that her Mother was very fussy and not all that
sweet. The fear was building, I had never had a matzo ball or charoset
never mind having to cook all this for 25 experts or should I say
guests. My head was on the chopping block!
The
day before Passover Mrs. “J’s” mother arrived from New York...Otherwise
known as Manhattan. She dropped her bags and joined me in the kitchen,
fear surged through my veins! She peeked in the refrigerator, she
lifted covers on the stove and sniffed, she glared at the shrunken lamb
legs without muttering a word....then she looked at me and said “are
you Jewish?” with this deep voice. I said “No, I'm Greek.” She looked
at me and said “not bad, come on let’s cook together” and that is what we did! She shared with me all her
Passover secrets, how to make the chicken soup more yellow by putting
in tomato peels, how to make matzo balls light, how to make a Seder
plate properly and what the traditions of Passover meant. I showed her
how to make a proper pilaff and age lamb, how to hold a knife-we
laughed, we cooked and we shared. If only Mrs. “J” had cooked with her
mother all those years, things would have been much different between
them. Dinner turned out flawlessly but I still feel “the guilt” that it
was me cooking and enjoying that wonderful Mother of Mrs. “J” and not
Mrs. “J”......
Brenda Athanus runs a small gourmet food shop in Belgrade Lakes, Maine with her sister Tanya called the Green Spot.
The Green Spot
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207.465.2921
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