Lisa Donovan - Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger: A Memoir

PENGUIN PRESS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright 2020 by Lisa Donovan

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Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN -PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Donovan, Lisa, 1977 author.

Title: Our lady of perpetual hunger: a memoir / Lisa Donovan.

Description: New York: Penguin Press, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019049571 (print) | LCCN 2019049572 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525560944 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525560951 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Donovan, Lisa, 1977 author. | Women food writersUnited StatesBiography. | CooksUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC TX649.D66 A3 2020 (print) | LCC TX649.D66 (ebook) | DDC 641.5092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049571

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049572

Cover design by Christopher Brian King

Cover photograph by Yve Assad Photography

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FOR

JOHN,

MY CHAMPION

She was an American girl

Raised on promises.

AMERICAN GIRL, TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS

I HAD THE K IND OF MANGO between my fingers that you really have to suck on before you can even start to bite the sinewy flesh, otherwise you risk losing all its juices down the length of your armand, occasionally, clear into your armpit, depending on your position at the time.

In the South, we call this a trash-can fruitusually a peachbecause at a certain time of the year, they are so perfectly and impossibly ripe, almost gnarly in their fecundity, that you have to stand over a trash can to eat them. But I wasnt in the South. Not my South, anyway. I was sitting in the passenger seat of an old pickup truck in Costa Rica, letting the juices flow. I had a warm beer between my knees and my bare, dirty feet firmly propped up on the sun-bleached red-now-pink vinyl dashboard as if they had been there my entire life. I bounced up the side of a mountain staring at my long toes, which landed somewhere between elegantly Romanesque and boyishly ugly. Theyre feet that I usually didnt take the time to look at, much less admire. They took a different shape that day with the dark, volcanic beach sand still between my toes and their arches just a bit more pronounced for some reason.

She startled me, the woman I had become, the woman I hadnt paid attention to for so many years between the baby raising and the decades of standing on those strong feet in a kitchen and the fast adaptability to make it all work, with her lean legs, her high-arched feet, her sticky mango-covered hands, and the way she took big, satisfying swigs from a body-temperature beer. She didnt even like beer. She also never felt this kind of distilled sense of being beautiful, not in her real life. She was always the smart one, the interesting one, the one who could crack a joke to make all the boys blush and bust out into a holy-shit-who-said-that kind of laughter. But she learned long ago that she would not float through this world on her beauty.

Yet there she was. There I was. A beautifulpretty, evengirl in a tattered sundress, with little rosebud lips, dark olive skin, and good, strong eyes that scared me a little when I caught myself in the side mirror.

I was far away from the story of myself: a steep, uphill climb, with a baby on my hip, and then two, and an early-onset high expectation for my life that I was not willing to forsake. I worked for a career that I loved, one in which I was celebrated and one where I did work that made me proud. I followed a path that became clear only as I placed one foot in front of the other and said yes, very often with unknown outcomes. I can take credit for paying attention, working hard, and knowing the values I wanted to honor. Ive come equipped with a kind of compass, one that is utterly mysterious in its origin but always overrides fear and doubt and is, thankfully, nearly always accurate and persistent as fuck. And with it, I found a home in my work. I found beauty there. I found moments that defined something about my life, something about what I knew I needed as a human to move forward while still being present and useful in the moment. A lot of those moments happened standing behind a prep table, next to an oven, with spatula in hand.

In the morning, there is a quiet light and an almost ethereal hum in a restaurant kitchen. This moment is one of the pastry chefs many rewards. Unlocking the door, the first one in after a night of clatter and shouting, whispered cursing, eye-rolling, loud laughing, sweating, slamming and pounding, the aftereffect leaves a crisp silencea silence that might be alarming if I didnt know it was all going to be over sooner than I was ready for. Its a kind of postapocalyptic silence, after the fallout but just before the zombies show up.

There are hardly ever windows in these kitchens. The glow and hum do not come from anything celestial or planetary but from the equipment. The lowboys creak and buzz, keeping all the leftover mise en place cool in their quart containers with their perfectly cut blue-tape labels on their collars, looking like little schoolboys standing at attention with their perfectly pressed lapels. The soft-serve machine aches because it is never used properly and is grossly mistreated throughout the night. The dishwashing machine taps at random moments, waiting to be turned on, waiting to be ridden hard for seventeen hours straight like the monster that it is. And the elephant of the walk-in cooler makes a noise so deep and constant that it doesnt register until one day it breaks down, revealing itself as the audible baseline of the whole kitchen, the tail end of a Buddhist prayer bell that grounds everyone, that serves as the key of collective energy for the entirety of a space.

I would take my time in those early moments. I never rushed it.

Those mornings fell between my life as the mother of two young kids, as the wife of a really good human who needs conversation much more than I ever do, and as the head of my own department with three cooks under me who were all novices at pastry. There was also the occasional cook from the line who was being punished. The line is where service is executed, where all the action happens every night. Pastry was sometimes treated like the cargo hold of an airplane, for the storage of things that were not useful and for people who were doing penance for lack of preparation or other general fuck-off behavior. My already weak managerial skills, pressed to the max. So those small moments to make coffee, to write prep lists, to gather my thoughts, to try to fit my heart back into the equation, became more essential to me than sleep or water. It became my ritual, my morning prayer. Tea and oranges that come all the way from China, lulled Leonard Cohen as I tasted my bitter coffee, black with no cream, no sugar, just dark and hot and strong and pushing my eyelids higher with each sip.