"Ruth Reichl - Tender at the Bone V1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reichl Ruth)

But I immediately painted my bedroom red and made friends with all the wrong people. I didn't want to talk to my mother, much less whisper with her, and it would have taken torture to make me tell her any kind of secret. "Just leave me alone!" I found myself shouting, over and over.

Mom and Dad were taken aback to find that their adorable daughter had turned into such an awkward, troublesome teenager. When I started teasing my hair, wearing tight pants, and circling my eyes with black eyeliner they looked at me as if I were some creature from another planet. When I came home drunk they pretended not to notice. They weren't thrilled with my new best friend Julie either, "She's fast," Mom insisted, using one of those words I hated, And occasionally she would ask in a plaintive voice, "Aren't there any boys in your class who don't want to be mechanics?" I didn't even deign to answer.

My parents were upset and annoyed and they had lost the habit of caring for a child. On top of that, Dad found commuting tiresome and Mom hated suburban life. My mother began spending her days in town and staying for dinner. By ten I'd find myself listening for the inevitable phone call: "It's so late. Do you mind if we
don't come back?" In the end my parents gave up all pretense of coming home during the week. As my mother said to her friends, "Ruthie is so mature."
I proved my maturity by hosting an endless party. My new friends were happy to have a place to hang out when we skipped school, Which we did regularly. By November I had convinced myself that I had better things to do than read Moby Dick and learn about the Continental Congress. Cook, for instance.

I had been cooking all my life, but only as a way to please grownups; now I discovered that it had other virtues. I wasn't pretty or funny or sexy. I wasn't a cheerleader or a dancer and nobody ever asked me to the drive-in, I yearned for romance and dreamed of candlelight suppers, but I didn't have the nerve to invite Tommy Calfano to dinner. It was so much easier to say, "Why doesn't everybody come over to my house?"

They were happy to: it was a parentless paradise. The party was on. We drank. We danced, We watched television. We played strip poker. Mostly, however, we ate.

I started with the recipes I had learned from Mrs. Peavey and Alice, but I soon branched out. My mother's cookbooks all had titles like How to Make Dinner in Five Minutes Flat but I started going through magazines, clipping recipes. It never occurred to me that a recipe might be too hard; hadn't I mastered souffles at the age of thirteen? I understood the rhythm of the kitchen and I was very relaxed. And very lucky.

If anyone had cared about the outcome things might have been different, but everything I cooked turned out fine. I had a perfect audience: anything would impress my friends and nothing would impress my parents. And so I tried recipes that took four days or had twenty-five steps, just for the fun of it. I developed the asbestos skin of a cook, stirring the pans with my fingers if there were no handy spoons and occasionally forgetting a potholder before reaching into the oven, I learned to ignore minor burns, And
to improvise: my mother's kitchen was ill-equipped, so I used a wine bottle for a rolling pin and beat egg whites with a forty-yearold eggbeater.
When I shopped, I wandered greedily through the supermarket, picking up any item that captured my imagination. If my parents wondered why it cost so much to keep a teenage girl in food they never said. Mom handed over a wad of cash at the beginning of each week murmuring, "Teenagers are so hungry."
They are. But they like sweets best of all, and that year I discovered the secret of every experienced cook: desserts are a cheap trick. People love them even when they're bad. And so I began to bake, appreciating the alchemy that can turn flour, water, chocolate, and butter into devil's food cake and make it disappear in a flash.
Boys, in particular, seemed to like it.


DF%'IL'I FOOD CAI4F
1 cup milk 1/2 cup sour cream
3/4 cup cocoa 1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup white sugar 2 cups sifted cake flour
1 cup butter 11/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 cup brown sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt

3 eggs


Preheat oven to 3 50░.

Heat milk in a small pan until bubbles begin to appear around the edges. Remove from heat.

Mix cocoa and white sugar together in a small bowl and slowly beat in warm milk. Let cool.
Cream the butter with the brown sugar. Beat in the eggs, sour cream, and vanilla. Add cocoa mixture.
Mix remaining dry ingredients together and gently blend into butter mixture, Do not overbeat,
Turn into 2 well-greased and floured 9-inch layer cake pans, and bake 25 to 30 minutes, until cake shrinks slightly from sides of pans and springs back when touched gently in the center. Cool on a rack for afew minutes, then turn out of pans onto rack.

Wait until completely cool before frosting.


SEVEN-MINUTE FROSTING

4 egg whites 1 teaspoon cream of tartar

11/2 cups sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt