At noon he came in and I was still chopping, though now finally just the shallots and chives for the salad dressing. Salad done, I set out ham, cornichons, Brie, and a bowl of beets left over from the crudité platter. He looked pleased. He clicked on the Tour de France and I started in on dessert.
I’d bought peaches and apricots for the fruit salad, so I pitted them and tossed them with sugar and some mint the gardener had brought from home. Najiyah said she was not hungry, but noticed that the fruit hadn’t been peeled, and clicked her tongue. No peel pour eux. I set to work peeling the halves. I wanted to serve the veal Italian-style, with butter and lemon. The pan was too hot and the butter scorched. I started over and remembered they wanted plenty of parsley, too. I hadn’t gotten enough from the garden, so I started digging some out from the salad. The veal started to curl in the pan. Najiyah sounded the buzzer. The gardener had stopped watching the television and was now watching me with his mouth slightly open.
I spoke aloud in English, slowly, to get it all straight: veal on platter, butter, lemon, parsley. The platter was warming in the oven. I burned my wet fingertips taking it out, then burned the other hand scooping the veal out bare-handed. I squeezed the lemon over it and fished out the seeds. I tried to spread out the scant parsley. The veal had not browned, so the scallops looked like pale, green-flecked shoe inserts. I averted my eyes as the platter rose up the dumbwaiter.
The next two weeks i did not improve. More guests arrived, so for a week I made similarly botched meals for six and eight instead of two and four. My mistakes doubled and trebled. The Countess started to notice unusually high bills from the Super U, for the extra eggs, butter, and olive oil needed to mend my mistakes. Najiyah came in four and five times before each meal to make sure everything was covered. The guests, other aristocrats, were charmed by the idea of “une jeune américaine” working in the castle. But I was afraid to ask what they thought of the food.
Gradually, though, I came to see that I was more nervous than I needed to be. My food was not great, but it was good enough. Even when it wasn’t, help appeared. For the first leg of lamb I roasted, Julia Child’s timing actually worked, and a dinner guest who had come to the kitchen to practice his English insisted on demonstrating the proper way to slice it. Another night, when I mistook green peppercorns for capers and served a tremendously spicy beef tongue, the Count laughed it off, saying that the men all loved it, it was just the ladies who found it “trop piquante.”
Pinterest
