The Cookbook Collector

preserve every tooth and shard of bone.

Who are you? she asked silently, as she laid away the collector’s quotations, his drawings, his scraps of famous poetry: Come live with me and be my love … interleaved with menus: oysters, fish stew, tortoise in its shell, bread from the oven, honey from the honeycomb. The books were unsplattered but much fingered, their pages soft with turning and re-turning, like collections of old fairy tales. Often Jess thought of Rapunzel and golden apples and enchanted gardens. She thought of Ovid, and Dante, and Cervantes, and the Pre-Raphaelites, for sometimes McClintock pictured his beloved eating, and sometimes sleeping in fields of poppies, and once throned like Persephone, with strawberry vines entwined in her long hair.

Whom did you love? she wondered to herself, but she found no name for the mysterious woman, and no description. Only the ink drawings, beautifully detailed, and McClintock’s fantastic menus, culled from recipes that read like poetry.

To make a tarte of strawberyes, wrote Margaret Parker in 1551, take and strayne theym with the yolkes of four egges, and a little whyte breade grated, then season it up with suger and swete butter and so bake it. And Jess, who had spent the past year struggling with Kant’s Critiques, now luxuriated in language so concrete. Tudor cookbooks did not theorize, nor did they provide separate ingredient lists, or scientific cooking times or temperatures. Recipes were called receipts, and tallied materials and techniques together. Art and alchemy were their themes, instinct and invention. The grandest performed occult transformations: flora into fauna, where, for example, cooks crushed blanched almonds and beat them with sugar, milk, and rose water into a paste to cast Rabbets, Pigeons, or any other little bird or beast. Or flour into gold, gilding marchpane and festive tarts. Or mutton into venison, or fish to meat, or pig to fawn, one species prepared to stand in for another.

Cooks turned pigeons out of pies, plumped veal with tongue and truffle, stuffed bustard with goose, with pheasant, with chicken, with duck, with guinea fowl, with teal, with woodcock, with partridge, with plover, with lapwing, with quail, with thrush, with lark, with garden warbler, so that each bird contained the next, each body enveloping one more delicate in mystic sequence, until at last the cook stuffed the warbler with a single olive, as though revelers might finally taste music, arriving at this round placeholder for breath and open voice. Edible decibels. Savory olive for sweet song.

Modern recipes were clean and bloodless by comparison, suppressing violence between cook and cooked. Not so here. Truss them …, lard them, boil them quick and white. This, Jess read, was how to prepare rabbits. Cut your woodcocks in four quarters and put them in a sauce-pan; but remember to save the Entrails…. Incantatory, hortatory. All verbs in the imperative: Raise the skin; tie up the necks; parboil them; roast them. Adjectives sparing, nouns succulent and rich, bespeaking bacon, and crisp skin curling from roast fowl.

Jess herself had not eaten fowl or roast or even fish in years, but the books awakened memories of turkey and thick gravy, and crab cakes, and rib-eye roasts. Redolent of smoke and flame, the recipes repelled and also reminded her of pink and tender meat, and breaking open lobster dripping with sweet butter, and sucking marrow out of bones.

Hunger drew her into George’s garden, where she devoured the food she’d brought along, her sprouts and avocado sandwich, her carob muffin. Cold pastoral. She returned to epic tales of fish and wild boar, every course a canto, every feast a bestiary. And all these interleaved with the collector’s private fantasies, no longer strange to Jess, but familiar, even comforting. Scribbled lines from Jonson seemed the right response to instructions for whole pike and suckling pig, and swans dressed for the table. A reclining nude with grapes was really not so out of place. The food in these cookbooks not at all moral or metaphysical, but dug from the earth, plucked from the garden, slain in the woods. Animals still quivered with life, and required cleaning after slaughter. Red deer ran with blood, broths seethed.

Jess knew some French, but little German and no Dutch. Those works were more mysterious, and also less distracting to catalog. The English cookbooks with their joints and forced meat, their Bacon stuck with Cloves, read like Jacobean tragedies. Jess devoured them, scarcely looking up, until Concepcion’s vacuum startled her. Then she realized the afternoon was gone, the sky was deepening, and she was hungry once again.

She began to bring more food, a second snack for the end of the day. Rice cakes and a thermos full of miso soup. She ate snap peas and bags of almonds on George’s sunny kitchen deck, and bent to sniff the herbs his gardener cultivated in pots. She closed her eyes and smelled basil, thyme and rosemary, spearmint, peppermint, chocolate mint, dill, parsley, lemon grass. Thus fortified, she shouldered her backpack and drove home to the Tree House, where she lived her other life.

In July Leon came to the Tree House for several days to work and re-provision. He assumed that she would drive north with him, and when she told him she needed more time with the books he said, “Jess!” almost like Emily.

“What?” she asked him.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m working,” she said once again. “I know you think cookbooks are trivial.”

He nodded. “Completely.”

“You think rare books are frivolous—but actually when you sit down with them …”

“When you sit down with them or when you sit down with him?”

“Don’t be rude!” she said, half-laughing. He was already dressed. She had just come from the shower.

“This job is a total setup.”

Bending over, drying her thick hair, she told him about the Brandenburg cookbook. “It’s got a clasp like a locket. It’s a jewel,” she told him. “And wait, when you open it and you look at the frontispiece—can I tell you …?”

“Can I tell you about Wood Rose Glen?” he countered. “We’ve got rangers up there every day, and loggers with megaphones harassing everyone who tries to defend.”

She dressed in silence, chastened. “I’ll come up in two weeks.”

“Come because you want to come. Come because you need to come,” said Leon. “Don’t do me any favors.”

“I do want to. It’s just …”

“Just what?”

How could she explain to him what she could scarcely articulate to herself? The cookbooks weren’t trivial at all. They were, in and of themselves, an entirely new world. She had never felt this way. She dreamed about the books at night. Their collector haunted her. She lived in suspense, speculating about his life, his love, his strange dark handwriting. Sometimes she could hardly bear it—the edge of discovery. “To have a chance to work with a collection like this—” she began.

Leon cut her off. “Watch out or you’ll end up in the collection too.”

“You’re jealous!”

“No,” Leon told her coolly. “You can have him.”

“Have who? Have George? But I don’t want him.”

“Maybe you don’t, but he wants you.”

Jess thought of the exquisite, empty house. “He’s never even there.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Leon’s anger was never desperate or uncontrolled, but he was angry. Cold as liquid nitrogen, he burned.

They heard footsteps overhead, and talking in the hall. When they fought, the other Tree Savers could overhear. She kept her voice down. “You have no right to speak to me that way, when you always leave me here alone.”

“I don’t leave you here. You choose to stay.”

“I want to climb with you,” she said, “but I can’t.”

“That’s bullshit, Jess, and you know it. You told me six months ago you were going to climb—and every time, you decide at the last minute that you can’t. The truth is that you can, Jess. You can. But you won’t. You have an irrational—”

“I know it’s irrational. I know it’s an irrational fear.”