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

"Nonsense," I heard her say into the phone. "We all feel fine. And we ate everything."

2 - GRANDMOTHERS

Х I had three grandmothers and none of them could cook.
My mother's mother didn't cook because she had better things to do. She was, as Mom proudly told everyone she happened to meet, an impresario.
My father's mother didn't cook because she was, until Hitler intervened, a very rich woman.
And Aunt Birdie didn't cook because she had Alice.
Aunt Birdie wasn't really related to me; she was my father's first wife's mother. But she desperately wanted to be a grandmother, so when I was born she went to the hospital, introduced herself to my mother, and applied for the job. She was well past eighty, and this looked like her last chance.
Mom was happy to take any help she could get, and Aunt Birdie threw herself into the job. About once a week I would come out of school to find her waiting on the sidewalk. My friends instantly surrounded her, enchanted by standing next to a grown-up who was just their size. At four foot eight, Aunt Birdie was the smallest gown-up any of us had ever seen and when she said, "Let's go to Schrafft's!" there was a general moan. Everybody envied me.
We always ordered the same thing. Then we ate our chocolate-marshmallow sundaes slowly, watching the women ascend the restaurant's wide, dramatic stairway and commenting on their clothes, their hair, the way they walked. Aunt Birdie always acted as if I were the world's most fascinating person. I wondered if she had been this way with her daughter, the one my father had once been married to, but each time I said the word "Hortense" she pretended not to hear me. Everybody did.
Afterward, Aunt Birdie always took me back to her house. After the long bus ride I'd run into the kitchen, throw my arms around Mice, and beg her to let me roll the dough for the apple dumplings she made every time I slept over. "Well now," she always said in the soft Barbados accent she had retained after sixty years in America, patting me with her floury hands. She was a handsome old woman with brown skin, short black hair, and a deeply wrinkled face, She smelled like starch, lemons, and if she was baking, cinnamon as well.
I loved helping her, loved feeling the fresh buttery pastry beneath my hands, loved the clean way the core came out of the apples. I loved carefully wrapping each apple in a square of pastry and pinching the top shut, just so. We'd arrange the dumplings on a baking sheet, Mice would put them in the oven, and we'd both go into the living room to watch The Perry Como Show. This was a big thrill too; my parents didn't own a television.
Mice always left as soon as the show was over. Then Aunt Birdie and I ate whatever she had left simmering on the stove for supper.
On Saturday mornings we ate the remaining apple dumplings. We brushed our teeth. We made our beds. And then we went into the kitchen to make potato salad for my father. It was the only thing Aunt Birdie ever cooked. "Mice is the cook in our family," she said.
My mother would have pointed out that Mice was not really in Aunt Birdie's family. She did not consider herself a particularly prejudiced person and she often pointed out that she and Dad were married by a black minister. "He was the husband of Dorothy Maynor, the singer," she'd go on, bragging about the beautiful music. But I had noticed that, with the exception of celebrities, Mom's world was entirely white and that she referred to whichever brown-skinned women happened to be cleaning our house as "the girl." Dad was different: he was totally without prejudice, a fact he attributed to having been brought up in Germany. He understood Alice's position perfectly
And so each time Aunt Birdie handed him the jar of potato salad he would fold his tall frame until he could reach her cheek, kiss it, and say gently, "Alice is a fabulous cook. But you make the world's best potato salad,"

AUNT BIRDIES

POTATO SALAD
3 pounds small potatoes 1/3 cup vegetable oil
Salt and pepper to taste '/2 cup white vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar 2 tablespoons water

2 onions, sliced


Boil potatoes for 15 to 20 minutes until just tender. Drain and let cool slightly. Peel and slice into even rounds.

Season with salt, pepper, and sugar. Add onions. Add oil and mix gently.

Dilute vinegar with water and bring to a boil. Add to potato mixture while hot and mix well.

Serves 6 to 8.
ALICE'S APPLE DUMPLINGS

WITH HARD SAUCE
2 cups flour 5 apples, peeled and cored
1 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cups shortening 1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup ice water 1 tablespoon butter


Mix flour with salt. Cut in shortening with two knives until the shortening is the size of peas. Add water slowly until you can gather the dough into a ball with a fork.

Roll out dough and cut into 5 squares. Put an apple in the center of each square.

Mix sugar and cinnamon. Fill the center of each apple with the sugar mixture. Put a dab of butter on top of each. Bring pastry up around the apple to mahe a package, dabbing edges with a bit of water if necessary to seal. Chill 30 minutes.