Upstairs at the Pudding (Cambridge Mass.) - Charlotte au chocolat: memories of a restaurant girlhood

MEMORIES OF A RESTAURANT GIRLHOOD

Charlotte Silver

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

New York

2012

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

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Copyright 2012 by Charlotte Silver

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ISBN 978-1-101-56024-2

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For my mother and M.C.D.

Contents

Prologue

I grew up rich. The settingor stage setof my childhood was the velvety pink-and-green dining room of my mothers restaurant, Upstairs at the Pudding, located above the Hasty Pudding Club in a redbrick Victorian building at 10 Holyoke Street in Harvard Square. My life was not a childs life of jungle gyms and Velcro sneakers, but of soft lighting, stiff petticoats, rolling pins smothered in flour, and candied violets in wax paper. It was a life of manners, of air kisses, of How do you dos, and a life for which I needed six party dresses a year, three every spring and three every winter. We were rich. Everybody knew it.

Yet we were not; we were not rich at all. For as long as I could remember, the restaurant had tottered on the brink of collapse. I always knew we would lose it one day. And we did lose it; we did.

In my memories of my childhood, it is always the nighttime and never the day, and I am always waiting. Waiting for what? I am waiting for one season to end and another to begin and for the menus to changefor soft-boiled eggs and fiddlehead ferns in spring; for lobster claws cracked open and bathed in hot lashes of nasturtium butter in summer; for baked apples in thickened pools of heavy cream in fall; and finally for winter, season of prime rib and potatoes gratin, caviar and sweetbreads, and chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. I am waiting for a waiter to bring me one Shirley Temple, and then another. I am waiting for this waiter to leave, as I know he will someday, and for another to take his place. I am waiting for my mother to brush past me in a haze of Joy perfume and plant a Coco Pink kiss on my cheek. I am waiting for my father who left us to return. I am waiting to go home at the end of the night.

I am waiting to grow up and, one day, leave this world.

One

HASTY PUDDING

M y name is Charlotte, and I was named for the dessert charlotte au chocolat, which used to be the signature dessert of the restaurant.

When I was a child, charlottesFrench desserts made traditionally out of brioche, ladyfingers, or sponge and baked in a charlotte moldwere everywhere. Charlotte au chocolat wasnt the only variety, though being chocolate, it had the edge on my mothers autumn-season apple charlotte braised with brioche and poached in clarified butter, and even on the magnificent charlotte Malakoff she used to serve in the summer: raspberries, slivered almonds, and Grand Marnier in valleys of vanilla custard.

But it is charlotte au chocolat, being my namesake dessert, that I remember most, for we offered it on the menu all year long. I walked into the pastry station and saw them cooling in their rusted tin molds on the counter. I saw them scooped onto lace doilies and smothered in Chantilly cream, starred with candied violets and sprigs of wet mint. I saw them lit by birthday candles. I saw them arranged, by the dozens, on silver trays for private parties. I saw them on customers plates, destroyed, the Chantilly cream like a tumbled snowbank streaked with soot from the chocolate. And charlottes smelled delightful: they smelled richer, I thought, than any dessert in the world. The smell made me think of black velvet holiday dresses and grown-up perfumes in crystal flasks. It made me want to collapse and never eat again.

I was also scared of charlottes, scared that someday I might become one. One of the line cooks once said to me, One of these nights when we run out of charlottes, were going to plop you on a plate and top you in whipped cream. Oh, the customers wont mind. I hear that little girls taste yummy.

I believed him. I even believed that I would fit on a plate. In those days, I seemed that small, and the rest of the world that big.

M y parents first laid eyes on the dining room of the Hasty Pudding Club when my mother was pregnant with me. Their good friend and future business partner Mary-Catherine Deibel was with them, too, that day. The three of them were shocked to discover that the undergraduates had trashed the beautiful old-world room with the hunter green walls and the domed, forty-foot ceilings that were majestic even by Harvard standards. Cleaning it up before opening for business, not long after I was born, they uncovered soiled toothpicks, bow ties, and garters. A hardened creamy pink substancemy father said it must have come from strawberry daiquiriscrusted the green velvet carpet that always smelled, even after being vacuumed, of a vague Ivy League potpourri of brandy and mothballs and after-dinner cigars.