Teddy

The recent passing of Teddy Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the coverage of the funeral services stirs up so many memories for us that it’s hard to isolate one from another, but the first time we met the late senator stands out, of course. It was the 1994 Easter brunch at Hickory Hill, home of the late senator’s brother Bobby. The brunch was hosted by Bobby’s widow, Ethel, whom we were working for then. President Clinton did not attend—-he was at Camp David with his family—-but the rest of the Kennedy clan was expected, and the entire Clinton cabinet was there: Janet Reno, Robert Reich, the late Ron Brown, Warren Christopher, Mickey Kantor, and so on. Others in attendance included James Carville and Mary Matalin and Dee Dee Myers, and everyone brought their families. The late Art Buchwald was dressed, as usual, as the Easter bunny, and the prize for finding the most eggs (hidden the night before by Mrs. Robert Kennedy’s personal secretary) was a real French rabbit, lopears and all. We Hickory Hill staffers chased down three different bunnies before the floppiness of the ears satisfied Mrs. Kennedy.

All of these people had arrived, but we were still waiting for Teddy Kennedy and his family. When he arrived, the party finally came fully to life. Part of this had to do with the late senator’s larger-than-life personality; we also feel that it was because Teddy connected most directly to the hope and promise of the New Frontier. He was Jack’s and Bobby’s actual brother, after all. At first the guests were formal in his presence, but after the initial greetings, Teddy said, “Let’s have fun!” and removed his tie. Cautiously at first, some of the others removed theirs, then jackets came off, and the women dropped or removed their purses and handbags and Easter hats.

A rappel line ran from the top of the Hill to the poolhouse, and the children had been riding down the slope all morning. The line had been installed back when Bobby’s children were young as a fun way to get down to the pool. You climbed up a few steps, grabbed a bar attached to a pulley, held tight, pushed off, and let gravity carry you nearly thirty yards downhill. When the kids saw the grownups beginning to relax, they began to prod them to try it, and eventually some of the men did. We seem to recall that Mickey Kantor went first. Teddy began prodding the more hesitant to take a ride on the line. We can still see him standing in his customary navy blazer, yelling at the men to “have another Bloody Mary or glass of wine, and it’ll get you all to do it!” Sen. Kennedy even began to egg Janet Reno. “Get up that tree and take your shot!” he told her. Mrs. Reno looked at him steadily from behind her familiar eyeglasses and said, “Not in this dress.” Her security detail burst out laughing, as if knowing that under other circumstances, she might have been first in line.

The party carried on for nearly an hour until the guests were invited to help themselves to the buffet set up in the dining room. We served Eggs Benedict, Eggs Norwegian, Fruit Salad dressed—we kid you not—with Vintage Dom Perignon, Sliced Roast Beef with Fresh Horseradish, Chicken Divan, Boneless Leg of Lamb with Mint Jelly, Potatoes Lyonnaise assorted breads and rolls, hard-cooked eggs, and several Kennedy family dishes that we served whenever the clan and guests gathered. This included the Kennedy Shrimp Salad: the shellfish was boiled in clam broth with crab boil seasoning, cooled, and tossed with homemade mayonnaise and capers. We made Red Potato Salad, New England Cranberry Salad (strawberry-flavored gelatin tossed with fresh whole cranberries and lemon zest), traditional Thick-Cut Bacon with a Caramelized Brown Sugar Crust, and the famous Hickory Hill Iced Tea. We won’t divulge the recipe here, but guests loved it, and we made it by the dozens of gallons over our years of service at Hickory Hill. For dessert we made Lemon Bars, Profiteroles (another Kennedy staple), and a Chocolate-Peanut Butter “Turtle” cake. The family and their guests dined on the house’s famous flagstone terrace or down by the poolhouse.

Well into the afternoon, the Senator and others played croquet, with other played tennis. The festivities were still in high gear and everyone was still having a good time when Teddy began saying his goodbyes around five. As soon as he left with Vicki, something went with him. The event, it seemed, was over. As if clouds had passed over the sun, everyone began gathering their belongings and thanking the hostess. We don’t remember if Janet Reno cast one longing look back at the zipline or not.

A Summer Wedding Luncheon

Last month we did a wedding luncheon for 75 at the Sheldon House in Jamestown. The mansion, which sits at the corner of Lakeview Avenue and Falconer Street in the north-central part of town, was owned by Julia Sheldon Ludwig Livengood, a member of the Sheldon family. The family’s fortune accumulated in the late nineteenth century due to the hard work of Julia’s ancestors, who founded The American Aristotype Company, which developed and manufactured one of the first photographic papers made in America. Their success attracted the attention of George Eastman as he was creating the Eastman Kodak Company; when he bought out the Sheldon family around the turn of the century, he paid them in shares of Kodak stock, which eventually made them wealthy. When Julie died in 1980, she left her house to the local community college, and one of us has had a long connection to the House.

The nuptials were those of Nichole Lynn Myers, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Dalbert (“Chip”) Myers of Jamestown, and Arthur Kuyumjian, originally of São Paulo, Brazil. Though the day was hot, the facility itself was cool and crisp and elegant as the wedding party and their guests arrived. Due to the wishes of the bride and groom, alcoholic drinks were not included on the menu. Instead, we passed Fresh Minted Iced Tea, Homemade Lemonade and sparkling water, along with Canapés of Smoked Salmon and Cream Cheese on Dark Rye Toast Points, and Medjool Dates stuffed with Almonds and wrapped in Bacon. Classical music played throughout the venue.

After the wedding party and their guests had relaxed and refreshed themselves (the schedule ran a bit slow because of the photographer), a buffet was set out in the dining room for a sit-down luncheon. Newlyweds, family members, and guests helped themselves to a Fresh Summer Fruit Salad, Chicken Cordon Bleu, Rosemary-roasted Red Potatoes, and Fresh Green Beans with a Shallot Butter. Salads of Mixed Baby Greens with Balsamic Vinaigrette were set at each place; the beautiful color scheme included mint-colored damask tablecloths custom-made for the event. Everything was served on the Sheldon House china with their house silver. For the traditional cake, a table was set in the marble foyer at the bottom of the grand staircase. The bride and groom chose a four-tier, separated-tier cake with traditional white frosting, and after slices were plated and passed, rich Brazilian coffee was served as a nod to the groom’s ancestry, and then his mother and grandmother, who had flown from South America for the occasion, passed around the traditional Brazilian wedding favor, individually-wrapped casadinhos. Casadinhos comes from the Portuguese word casado, meaning conjugal; the suffix -inhos is like -ini in Italian or -ine in French, making the adjective a diminutive. “Little married ones” is the best translation, and the cookies are so named because two smaller cookies are sandwiched together with something sweet, like jam, or chocolate, or pastry cream. We’d never seen this tradition before—we’ve not been to Brazil yet, but we would sure like to go.

We wish the newlyweds many years of health and happiness together!

The Feast of San Lorenzo

We had a chance to display the qualities of Juicy Dish Catering for friends here in Buffalo recently with a menu that’s intrigued us for years. Or should we say, menus. In The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook from 1982, there are two picnic menus, one inspired by Elizabeth David, and we decided to combine the two so that there was even greater variety of things to eat. The main item—the protein—was Grilled Chicken Wings marinated with Lemon Slices, Garlic, and Black Pepper. We bought a box of 125 chicken wings and to the box added a dozen lemons sliced as thin as we could make them with a knife. We added copious amounts of crushed garlic cloves, and lots of ground and whole black pepper. The craziest part of the entire meal was having to toss the wings around every hour or so. We were up to our elbows in chicken wings—literally—pulling the ones at the bottom of the storage box to the top and pushing the ones on top to the bottom. The grilling operation took about three hours total, using one gas and one electric grill. Apparently the aromas from our grill spread throughout the neighborhood, making several people wonder where they could get something to eat.

We made a “slaw” of shaved fennel and red onion with a simple red wine vinaigrette, a platter of roasted red bell peppers with a touch of anchovy and lots of fresh basil, a few dozen hard-cooked fresh quail eggs. Quail eggs are pretty to look at, but once they are hard-cooked they are incredibly difficult to peel. Next time, we’ll do the right thing and peel the eggs before service (we won’t, however, capitulate and buy them canned, as we were tempted at first to do). The most labor-intensive dish besides the chicken wings and the several dozen handmade biscotti—they were studded with sultanas (golden raisins) and almonds and delicately flavored with anise—was a salad of lentils with goat cheese. Prepping the requisite fine (and we do mean fine) dice of carrots, celery and red onion was the most time-consuming and nerve-wracking job of the entire menu, but it was worth the trouble because once the legumes were cooked and cooled and tossed with a chive-garlic-parsley dressing and fresh goat cheese, the result was a a delicious, Middle Eastern-flavored lentil salad. We sent “care packages” of it home with more than one guest.
One of the best—and most deluxe—dishes we prepared was a potato salad like no other. One of us made it back in the mid-Nineties for a party for Super Bowl XXIV; we don’t remember how the dish was received, but we do remember that the San Francisco Forty-Niners beat the San Diego Chargers, 49-26. For the salad, we cooked 14 pounds of red and white creamer potatoes just to the point of doneness, let them cool, and sliced them into quarter-inch rounds. When they were completely cool, we shaved two fresh black truffles over the slices and mixed them in thoroughly, letting the whole thing sit for most of the day (we used double-layers of basic kitchen garbage bags for several of these dishes) so that the heady truffle aroma permeated the potatoes as thoroughly as possible. We finished the salad with a simple shallot-red wine vinaigrette and corrected its seasoning; many of the guests never had fresh black truffles before, and asked about the dish.

The rest of the menu included simple things like fresh baguettes with parsley butter, nectarines, purple grapes, pears, and Niҫoise olives. We really made a concerted effort to select fruits that would be as close to the peak of ripeness the night of the party, and one of the guests remarked on that very fact, so we were especially gratified that our efforts to be choosy paid off for at least one person. Most importantly, it paid off for us, because we were the hosts of the event. It was the warmest and clearest night of what until that point had been a consistently soggy summer, and the party—a middle-of-August celebration of the Sign of Leo, the Perseid meteor shower, and the Feast of Saint Lawrence. We were privately inspired by one of our favorite movies, the Taviani Brothers’ dazzling La Notte di San Lorenzo (English trans., "The Night of the Shooting Stars") but as one guest remarked, Saint Lawrence is the patron saint of barbeques because he was grilled to death. Unlike, we fervently hope, our well-marinated chicken wings...

Julia...who else?

Through the Buffalo Film Society, we lucked out with passes to an advance screening of Julie & Julia last night, and it brought back our own cherished memories of the culinary legend. In the fall of 1991, one of us attended a "marketplace tasting" presented by the D.C.-area chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food, at Union Station in our nation's capital. We got to sample foods from the Capital Region, and bought one of Julia's cookbooks, which she personalized for us. How things have changed...the ticket price was a mere fifteen dollars! Union Station had only recently been restored, and it was a grand setting for the occasion.

In the late Nineties, the other one of us had the privilege of waiting on her and Chef Alfred Portale at Gotham Bar and Grill in New York City. She and the chef's party sat at Table 45, the large round table in the center of the floor. Julia was dressed in her trademark, no-nonsense matron francaise mode. After Champagne was poured and amuses-bouche of silken Goat Cheese Ravioli with Cremini Mushrooms and Parmesan had been delivered and devoured, Julia turned to the chef and said in her sing-song, plummy voice, "Now, what shall we eat?" Alfred, who we still greatly admire and respect, seemed at a loss for words, but Julia opened the menu and said, "Now, this sound delicious...Pheasant and Foie Gras Terrine..." We left them to discuss the strategy for ordering, and everyone else at the table wanted to know what Julia and Alfred were having before they ordered.

We remember that terrine almost as much as we remember being in the presence of the late, great author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The portion was a good half-inch slice of rich, wine-colored pheasant forcemeat studded with morsels of foie gras that nearly melted during the bain-marie bath in the oven. There were pistachios and peppercorns and a white ribbon of fatback around the whole terrine slice, which came with a salad of blanched haricot verts that snapped when you ate them, as well as some simple but delicious lentilles du Puy. We still make pates and terrines on special occasions, and are tracking down the technique and proper name for a chicken galantine we haven't made in a while.

The movie, incidentally, is enchanting. Bon appetit!

The Rain in Spain...

We did a menu recently that was a real success:

Salad of Valencia Oranges with Avocado, Black Olives, and Red Onion
Grilled Flank Steak with a Cumin-Paprika Dry Rub, Sherry Vinaigrette, and Cabrales
Juicy Dish Paella with Red Snapper, Shrimp, Chorizo, Scallops, and Fresh Peas
Fricassee of Chicken, Spanish-Style
Pappas Fritas with Aioli, Fresh Mushrooms with Red Peppers
and a Flourless Chocolate Cake with a Touch of Chili and Espresso Powder

The client's only initial suggestion was for the pappas fritas with the aioli, and as soon as we heard that, the idea of a grilled flank steak came to mind. Or should we say, to palate! We love grilled beef in the summertime--there's nothing better in the summer than a juicy ribeye right off the grill--and though the menu could have gone in a straightforward, tomato-salad-and-corn-on-the-cob direction, the pappas fritas idea suggested Spain to us. What we thought of next was a grilled flank steak with blue cheese and sherry vinaigrette. Doing an overnight dry rub of cumin and paprika would give the meat lots of flavors without going too spicy.

The rest of the menu fell into place pretty quickly. The salad was a way to make a green salad heartier, but we did this a week later for a private party without the lettuces, and it was even more delicious. The plated colors--orange, black, avocado, and purple--were all the table decor that was needed. We have an assortment of glazed terra cotta cookware that are like cazuelas, and we wanted to use those for service.

The most intriguing dish was the flourless chocolate cake with a touch of chili powder, cinnamon, and espresso. We'd heard of the idea of chocolate and chili before--just saying that makes us think of Aztecs and pyramids and ancient gods--but we wanted something both elegant and intriguing. Sure enough, once the moist chocolatey goodness began to melt on the tongue, the chili flavor came forward. There was a moment when we wondered, Will it be too much? But just as we thought that, the flavor receded and the chocolate reasserted itself. With a dollop of fresh whipped cream, it was a great dessert. We made the cake the following week with all organic ingredients, and it may have only been our imaginations, but it tasted even better.

Summer Herbs

Summer will always remind us of Cape Cod. For several summers back in the mid-Nineties, we worked for the late Diana Trilling. Mrs. Trilling was one of the last of the New York Intellectuals, but when we took the job, we knew her mostly as a widow of nearly ninety who needed a driver and a companion. Mrs. Trilling hired us partly on the basis of our experience in restaurants, as well as our enthusiasm for cooking and eating in general. We got to know her, her history, and her work over the course of three summers in Wellfleet, but we got to know her best through food and cooking.

Mrs. Trilling enjoyed fresh fish, tomatoes (pronounced with the long "a", natch) and corn on the cob. She commented constantly about how bad food in America was becoming; this was a good decade before the current uproar against what post-war economic expansion has done to eating in our culture. She loved steamer clams, although she was squeamish about cleaning them, and once in a while, enjoyed the treat of a fresh lobster. Eating this summer's peaches and tomatoes and corn here in Buffalo, we can't help thinking, "Hmm...that's not the best peach I've ever had..." And when we're shopping at Wegman's, we find ourselves thinking with her mind, speaking to ourselves with her voice. "That canteloupe is too large...choose smaller fruits...they taste better...Americans think large is best, and that's a fallacy."

We thought of the herb garden we gave her for her last, ninety-third birthday. Mrs. Trilling loved tomatoes with basil, olive oil, and salt and pepper, and the expense of herbs at the local market--Hatch's, which sits on the edge of the parking lot behind the Wellfleet Town Hall. Her last July--her birthday was the 21st of this month--we bought a large terra cotta pot, a bag of potting soil, and a collection of potted herbs, including basil, thyme, marjoram, dill, and oregano. She was delighted by the miniature garden, and enjoyed the herbs as much as she could that last summer of her life. When we left the Cape at the end of the season, we had to leave the pot there. Perhaps someone transplanted them without telling us; perhaps some of the plants were discarded, but found their own way to sink their roots into the sandy Cape soil.

Independence Days

The Fourth of July weekend reminds us of the work we used to do in our previous "lives" in New York City and Washington, D.C. Though those two cities are traditionally associated with the holiday, we typically had to work at our employers' homes elsewhere along the Atlantic shore.

Chef Tracey used to work for International Medical Consulting, and entertained at a house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for their president and CEO. He would arrive the Wednesday or Thursday before the holiday weekend, shop the following day for local produce and seafood, and spend a day or two doing prep work. Guests arrived Friday for a self-serve lunch buffet; dinner was usually a family-style casserole-type meal--homemade lasagna, since the employer was Italian-American (he was related to Albert J. "Cubby" Broccoli, Jr., the producer of the James Bond movies in the Eighties) and since guests tended to trickle in throughout the evening. Saturday brunch was an abbondanza of eggs, fruit, and pastries; lunch a cold buffet, with a semi-formal dinner that evening. Smoked salmon, blackeyed peacakes with corn salsa, shrimp satay were passed beforehand; guests frequently enjoyed extra-thick veal chops studded with garlic and fresh rosemary and grilled to order. Risotto, Caesar salad, and ratatouille were the most frequent accompaniments. After dinner, everyone adjourned to the roofdeck for digestivi and fireworks.

Meanwhile, a six-hour drive up the Atlantic shore, another member of our team was ensconced on Lily Pond Lane in a home decorated in white-on-white. The table was set for such guests as Calvin Klein, Vera Wang, Alan Alda, Senator Alphonse d'Amato, Joe Namath, Regis Philbin and many other boldface names. Hors d'oeuvres included miniature crab cakes, fresh corn arepas, and classic pigs-in-blankets; the bartenders shook rum, cachaca, fresh lime, and mint for mojitos and caipirinhas. At table the dishes frequently included fresh paella with ample ocean bounty--lobster, chicken, clams, and shrimp--from the new Citarella's in East Hampton, and dessert was often a creamy caramel flan with ripe midsummer berries. In the pool room after dinner, reposado tequila and Upmann cigars were passed to the sound of Rod Stewart's classic "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"