Finally, duck, chicken, and snails were stirred into the thick broth and we ladled the mixture into bowls, adding dollops of the aioli. I headed to the terrace, where I could look at the acres of fig and olive trees and the rosebushes lining the walks, and eat my snails slowly, wondering at the magic of the midnight rain.
How I Got Started
On my first day in 1959 as emergency substitute cook of the Harvard Coop, I reached with confidence into the oven to retrieve the tuna fish casserole. It smelled like it should, I knew, for my mother had made it repeatedly for the family, although with cream of mushroom soup and American cheese rather than sautéed onions and a cheese sauce like the newspaper recipe I had followed. I could hear a little gurgle from the oven, which meant all was going well, I thought; when I last peeked in, there had been little bubbles on the surface, looking like it was cooking as it should. But I couldn’t see the breadcrumbs, which in the recipe picture were on the top, and had been sprinkled over my casseroles as well.
When the first long Pyrex dish emerged from the huge oven, grasped by my thick cotton hot pads, I saw a bubbling cauldron of grease and gray rather than tinges of light brown crumbs dappling the cheese sauce that was to hold the conglomeration together.
Panic rose in my throat as I experienced every cook’s nightmare—the inability to feed waiting mouths. At nineteen, I was ill prepared to cook dinner for the twenty ravenous young men and women milling around the dining room of this international student house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I had desperately wanted to succeed at this meal. Now it looked like I might fail. Again.
The members of the co-op in 1959 had been reluctant to let me take on this task. Like my father, they wanted their dinner on time. Each resident paid fifteen dollars a month for dinners, and ate, boardinghouse-style, at six o’clock each night. My rent was thirty-five dollars a month for a room I shared with three other girls. I had already shown my incompetence at my first agreed-upon chore.
The Harvard Coop had no resident manager. It was as close as I ever came to a commune, but it was a far cry from that. Still, it was daring, as I was sharing quarters with both men and women, or, as I called them, boys and girls. We were a diverse lot—some MIT students, some Harvard, others who were researchers and/or graduate students, and me. None of us had any money. There were four girls in my room, and even at that the rent seemed high.
We each had an assigned task. Mine had been forwarding the mail to residents who had moved away. I rarely did it, putting the mail in the top drawer of the hall chest up with my good intentions. Two of the Mormon students, who had left to go on a Mission, came back to the house to visit, but also to see what happened to their mail. The mail included draft notices advising them to show up on what turned out to be the next day, for active duty in the Army. Everyone, including myself, was pretty disgusted with my disorganized indolence.
Simultaneously, the cook, a heavyset woman with massive arms and a tendency to sing spirituals with a thick Boston accent as she cooked, got sick. Her husband called us to say she would be out for a few weeks for an operation. In order to get myself in the good graces of my housemates, I volunteered on the spot to take over the cook’s job since I kept my own hours at my paying job, coming and going as I pleased. I knew I liked cooking, had spent some time in the kitchen visiting with the cook, and thought I could do it. I didn’t really feel there was an option—I was never good at chores, per se, and couldn’t see myself doing anything else. I had started the day of the tuna fish casserole.
Maybe it felt a little like a hair shirt, this idea of cooking every day, but I thought I could do it. Until my greasy tuna fish casserole stared me in the face. Now it looked like I was going to sink deeper into failure and shame. I had moved to Cambridge to become a new person, and found I still was not the woman I wanted to be.
I had multiplied the entire recipe by three in order to have enough food, and miscalculated, hence the resulting disaster, a layer of grease topping a gloppy lumpy slosh of milk, flour, and cheese, sprinkled throughout with breadcrumbs and clumps of tuna fish on the bottom. I felt a burning in my throat—a familiar feeling when I thought all was lost and I would flop and did not want to, did not want to, did not want to, fail. I needed to fix this, to find a way to turn the disaster into a modicum of success, or at least something
