Kitchens of the Great Midwest Read online

  “Not a lot of carrot cake,” Lars said. “I mean, a small portion. A baby portion. I’m just concerned about the nuts in the recipe. I mean, I guess I could make it without nuts. But my mom always made it with nuts. What do you think?”

  “Eighteen months. At the earliest. Probably wait until age two to be safe.”

  “I could be wrong, but I remember my younger siblings eating carrot cake really young. There’s a picture of my brother Jarl on the day he turned one. They gave him a little carrot cake and he smeared it in his hair.”

  “That’s the best outcome in that situation, probably.”

  “Well, now he’s bald.”

  “Looking over your dietary plan here, I’d have more immediate reservations.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, pork shoulder to a three-month-old baby. Not advisable.”

  “Puréed, maybe?” Lars asked. “I could braise it first. Or maybe just roast the bones and make pork stock for a demi-glace. That wouldn’t be my first choice, though.”

  “You work at Hutmacher’s, right?” Dr. Latch said. “You do make an excellent pork shoulder. But give it at least two years.”

  “Two years, huh?” He didn’t want to tell Dr. Latch that this conversation crushed his heart, but the doctor seemed to perceive this.

  “I understand your eagerness to share your life’s passion with your first child. I see different versions of this all the time. The time will come. For now, just breast milk and formula for the first three months.”

  “That’s awful,” Lars said.

  “Maybe for you,” Dr. Latch said. “But your daughter is going to be monstrously satisfied with this diet. Trust me. Now, I’m going to refer you to the most vigilant pediatrician I know.”

  • • •

  Back at their apartment in St. Paul, lugging all of the unfamiliar baby gear out of their car, Lars was grateful they could afford a place with an elevator. While waiting for the doors to open, he saw the building’s lightly used concrete stairway, which he’d climbed a few times over the years for exercise. Feeling the straps of a diaper bag dig into his shoulder and the plastic handle of the portable baby seat against his palm, he guessed he might never use it again.

  • • •

  When they weren’t sleeping, trying to sleep, or holding their newborn daughter, Lars and Cynthia were usually in the kitchen. Lars didn’t want to take his eyes off of his beautiful girl for a minute, so he kept her strapped in the baby seat on the counter.

  “Don’t you think it might be dangerous to have her in here?” Cynthia asked him the second night, while chopping garlic and parsley for an Alfredo sauce.

  “That doctor can take away her right to eat,” Lars said. “But she should still be around the smells. Next best thing, you know.”

  “Yeah. Smelling a bunch of food she can’t eat. It’s probably frustrating the hell out of her.”

  “Well, this is where we are, and I want her with us.”

  “I don’t know, putting a baby in a room full of knives and boiling water.”

  “Where would you like her to be?”

  Cynthia shook her head. “Somewhere else.”

  Lars turned and looked at Eva, who was wearing a pink stocking cap for warmth, and mittens so she wouldn’t scratch her own face with her tiny fingernails. He didn’t ever intend to stare at her for such long stretches; it would just happen. When their eyes met, bam, there went five minutes. Or twenty.

  Cynthia tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Water’s ready for the pasta.”

  “Where’s the fettuccine?” he asked her, opening the fridge.

  She took a green Creamette box out from the lazy Susan by his feet. “I figured we’d try this brand. It was on sale.”

  “I remember when we used to make our own pasta. I guess those days are over.”

  “Thank God,” Cynthia said. “What a pain in the ass.”

  • • •

  Cynthia was still twenty-five, and bounced back to her skinny frame with color in her cheeks and bigger boobs, while Lars just grew balder and fatter and slower. He had learned, before she was pregnant, that he had to hold her hand or touch her in some way while they walked places together, so that other men knew they were a couple. Now that she was the mother of his daughter, he was even more wary, snarling at passing dudes with confident Tom Selleck mustaches and cool Bon Jovi hair. Cynthia, pushing a stroller as they perused the winter farmers’ markets, didn’t mind Lars’s hulking shadow or the expressions he’d snap at ogling perverts; she was mostly just happy that she could drink again.

  • • •

  “They’re looking for a new sommelier at Hutmacher’s,” Cynthia said one morning, while Lars was changing Eva’s diaper. Cynthia’s sensitive nose couldn’t handle the smell of her daughter’s poop, but for Lars, after a decade of making lutefisk, it was easier than flipping an omelet.

  “It’s only been a month,” Lars said. “They said you could have three.”

  “They said I could come back after three. It’s not like they’re paying me maternity leave.”

  “Then take the full three. We have savings.” This was not true, after the hospital bills, but Lars didn’t want Cynthia to worry about all that.

  “I know, but I’m going batshit here. It’s the middle of summer and I can’t do anything useful outside with that kid strapped on me. And I can’t stand what’s on TV in the afternoons. And I can’t get more than twenty pages through a book before she starts wailing.”

  “So you want to go back to work early?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it, and I bet we can work out a schedule so that one of us is always home. And Jarl and Fiona are around if we need them.”

  Lars’s younger brother and his girlfriend also lived in St. Paul, a few miles away, and were eager to babysit their niece, but Lars had privately hoped that his baby girl would never be away from both of her parents simultaneously except in an absolute emergency. “Don’t you have to take a course or something to be a sommelier?”

  “I know the restaurant and its customers better than anyone they could bring in. I also know that wine list back to front. I even picked out a few. The Tepusquet Vineyard Chardonnay from ZD Wines—that was mine.”

  “I don’t know,” Lars said. He realized that if he was meeting her that day for the first time, he would’ve told her to go for it, pursue her dreams, all that kind of stuff. But now, looking at his beautiful, impulsive wife, he thought of his stoic, pragmatic mother. If Elin had ever wanted to be anything besides an unpaid bookkeeper at a bakery and a mother to three boys, Lars sure never heard a peep about it. Was it selfish or realistic to look at Cynthia and want the same, to want to look on in admiration as her arms, legs, hips, and devotion thickened? He didn’t know.

  “I think you don’t want me to do anything with my life besides be a mom. Well, that’s bullshit,” Cynthia said, and she left the room.

  It would be bullshit if it were true, and it partly was. Yes, he just wanted her to want to be a mom, in the same way that he felt, with all of his blood, that he was a dad first, and everything else in the world an obscure, unfathomably distant second.

  • • •

  Lars was lying on the brown shag area rug, reading to his daughter from James Beard’s Beard on Bread, when Cynthia pushed open the front door. Lars could tell how her meeting had gone from her heavy footsteps. Instead of Cynthia, the restaurant had hired “the famous and respected West Coast sommelier Jeremy St. George” and offered her a job as “supervising floor waitress,” which wasn’t even a real job, just something they’d made up on the spot to appease her when she started making a scene.

  • • •

  Cynthia was so furious that evening, she opened a single-vineyard Merlot from Stag’s Leap that she’d been saving, and paired it with a bowl of macaroni and cheese from a box.


  “Why did he move out here from San Francisco to take this job?” she asked Lars, as if he knew. “He could have any sommelier job in the country!”

  She told him that the manager had shown her Jeremy St. George’s résumé and headshot, because all of the big California sommeliers had headshots that made them appear both studious and sensual. Cynthia said he was in his early thirties, a graduate of UC Davis, formerly a sommelier in Napa Valley and San Francisco, and he looked like an underwear model. Lars wondered for a moment why she had to say “underwear” and not just “model.”

  Still, what concerned Lars more was the box of macaroni and cheese. It had been a pretty darn brisk slide from their first store-bought pasta to their first processed dairy, and he had to admit that their financial situation was mostly to blame. They were living on just his income, and while everyone outside the restaurant industry seemed to think that being a chef at a nice place was a path to riches, it sure wasn’t the case. Even with his working fifty hours a week as a chef at Hutmacher’s, there were going to be tight months ahead.

  He hated to admit it, but if they wanted to eat better and have fresher, more nutritious food around the house for their daughter—who was finally old enough to be eating mushy fruit and vegetables—Cynthia had to go back to work.

  • • •

  Lars proposed that she demand part-time sommelier duties if she returned, and although Cynthia chafed against the idea of being some West Coast hotshot’s “assistant,” she admitted that having a job title, any job title, with the word “sommelier” in it could make returning to Hutmacher’s more bearable.

  The owners of Hutmacher’s agreed to the new assistant sommelier title and the job duties, just so long as she also picked up waitress shifts and Jeremy St. George approved of the whole thing. Jeremy St. George said he’d have to meet her first, and after they met, Jeremy told Cynthia that he’d been waiting for an assistant like her all of his life.

  The night of her first shift, she came home late, ninety minutes after close, careening through the doorway, singing a Replacements song. He hadn’t heard her sing in maybe a year. “How was it?” Lars asked, but he could tell.

  At the end of the night, she turned to him and said, “Thank you,” before passing out on her side of the bed. Her face, even while asleep, was full of love, and Lars chose to be reassured.

  • • •

  With Cynthia out of town on wine trips as part of her new job, Lars’s rounds at the St. Paul Farmers’ Market were more logistically difficult, but still just as fun. For some individuals, the process of carrying a two-month-old infant, her diaper bag, and her stroller everywhere could be tiring and complex, but it actually made Lars feel invigorated, even when he had to do it all by himself. With Jarl and Fiona now officially on babysitting detail during the hours that Lars’s and Cynthia’s shifts overlapped, Lars wanted to make the most of every minute with his daughter.

  The late summer heat flooded his body as soon as he stepped outside; armpit stains blossomed in his Fruit of the Loom T-shirt while he was still in the elevator, and he was wheezing by the time he got Eva and her stuff down to the car. But the St. Paul Farmers’ Market would, as always, reward their efforts. Mid-September meant the end of peak season for late-harvest tomatoes, and Lars had plans for more chilled soups, sauces, and mild salsas that he knew Eva’s young palate would just adore, based on how much she loved the tragically few things that Dr. Latch let him feed her so far.

  He’d never realized how couples dominated the farmers’ market scene until his wife started going out of town. Saturday morning pairs meandered playfully through the aisles of apples, beets, and lettuces, many with strollers or children in hand. Some were childless, flush from the impulse buy of true love and its heady aftershocks, hands still lingering on each other, as if to make sure the other person was still real. Lars tried to remember what that felt like, but the people stopping to adore his baby daughter distracted him from dwelling on the lone missing member of their little family.

  • • •

  “Do you know that half a cup of marinara sauce has almost eight times the lycopene content of a raw tomato?” he asked his wiggly daughter as he guided her through the slow field of couples that ebbed and pushed around them. “We’re going to find some good sauce tomatoes today.”

  Eva looked up at him, pinching her eyelids against the bright sky, but making happy eye contact with him that seemed to say, I love Dad, or maybe, I just took the runniest shit my father will ever see. In direct sunlight, it was hard to tell.

  • • •

  Karen Theis’s tomato stall, which for close to a decade had supplied the five-county metro area with consistent, handsome Roma, plum, beefsteak, and Big Boy tomatoes—nothing fancy, just the major hybrids—was Lars’s first and only tomato stop. But that morning in September, it was gone, and in its place a heavy man and heavier woman sat on purple beach chairs, selling dirt-streaked, unappealing rhubarb (it was way, way past ideal rhubarb season) from a stained cardboard box.

  “Oh. What happened to Karen?” Lars asked the hefty woman.

  She stared back at him. “Who’s Karen?”

  “Want some rhubarb?” the big guy asked. “We’ll bargain with ya.” Flies were landing on the sugary stalks, rubbing their front legs together. The couple made no attempt to shoo them away.

  “Karen ran a tomato stall here for the last eight years, right in this location. Just wondering what happened to her, if she moved or is just on vacation or something.”

  “Oh yeah, that name sounds familiar,” the guy asked, and then turned to the woman. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “People have been asking about her all morning.”

  The guy nodded. “That’s where I know it from.”

  This kind of exchange was to be expected of people who attempt to sell rhubarb in mid-September. “So, what happened to her?” Lars asked again.

  The woman looked at Eva in the stroller. “Well, that’s a cutie. How old is your daughter, one?”

  “She’s about three and a half months. She’s big for her age. So you have no idea what happened to Karen’s tomato stall?”

  As the guy leaned forward in his chair, Lars noticed that one of the armrests was missing, and the man had a series of bright red circles on his left forearm from leaning it against the exposed pole. “Sir, if I know one thing,” the man said, “it’s never call a woman fat. Especially at that young age where it seeps into their unconscious.”

  “Can anyone help me find Karen Theis?” Lars shouted, looking around at the nearby vendors.

  “Out of business,” a nearby vendor of Nantes-type carrots said. “The Orientals chased her out.”

  Anna Hlavek, the herb vendor one stall over, yelled, “The Orientals didn’t chase her out, the Orientals grow better tomatoes.”

  Lars met Anna’s gaze, and it apparently gave her license to continue her argument.

  “What’s-his-name Oriental fella over there. That’s where the New French Café gets their tomatoes now, y’know,” Anna said, referring to the trendiest of the new Minneapolis restaurants. “How’s your little girl?” she asked, stepping out from behind her stand to touch Eva’s hands and lift them in the air. “Sooooo big! Soooo big!”

  Lars liked Anna, but people touching his daughter without asking him first got his blood up a little bit.

  “Tell me again,” Anna said. “Is she one, one and a half?”

  “No, three and a half months. She’s just . . . ambitious for her age.”

  “Where’s that cute wife of yours? Still in California?”

  “Yep,” Lars said. “It’s harvest time, for certain varietals.”

  “Oh boy, how long is that going to take her?”

  “Two weeks, I think.” It had been four already, but Lars knew that sounded bad.

  “I can’t imagine a mother being a
way from her child for that long. My Dougie goes everywhere with me. I never let him out of my sight for a minute.” Lars saw a sullen, towheaded four-year-old sitting a few feet away, stabbing pavement cracks with a plastic knife.

  “It happens in the wine business,” he said. “So where can I find a few tomatoes?”

  • • •

  The Southeast Asian vendor sat on a blue Land O’ Lakes milk crate, his body broad and oblong like an Agassiz potato, his fat tan legs splayed. He stared ahead—unsmiling, through Ray-Ban sunglasses—at everything, or nothing. Beside him, shimmering in the livid heat, sat platoons of beautiful, alien tomatoes, in heartbreakingly bright orange, red, yellow, purple, and stripes, in precise, labeled grids across a trestle table covered with a clean gingham tablecloth.

  • • •

  As Lars pushed his daughter’s stroller toward the stand, Eva reached in the direction of the tomatoes, her chubby fingers grabbing the air between herself and those brilliant little globes.

  “Hi. Do you have samples?” Lars asked the vendor.

  “No samples,” the man said, not taking his gaze from Eva’s outstretched hands. “You try, you buy.”

  “Maybe I will, then,” Lars said. “I’m looking for a sauce tomato, something high in lycopene, like a Roma VF. What do you sell that’s like a Roma VF?”

  “I don’t sell anything like a Roma VF. I sell tomatoes.”

  “OK. So what’s a Roma VF, then?”

  “Made in a lab by scientists.”

  “OK.”

  “Sir, if you want a lycopene-rich tomato, you want a Moonglow. Highest amount of lycopene. Of any heirloom.”

  The vendor picked up a small orange globe, between a golf ball and a baseball in diameter, and showed it to Lars, not handing it to him. Lars reached for it, and the vendor set it back with its sisters again.

  “The Moonglow is for slicing and salsas,” the vendor continued. “If you want a sauce tomato, you want San Marzano. Best in the world for paste and sauce.” He held up a long red tomato shaped a little like a red pepper and gently laid it in his own palm.