Kate Jacobs - Comfort Food

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Table of Contents

ALSO BY KATE JACOBS

The Friday Night Knitting Club

bread and butter

FEBRUARY 2006

Gus Simpson adored birthday cake.

Chocolate, coconut, lemon, strawberry, vanillashe had a particular fondness for the classics. Even though she experimented with new flavors and frostings, drizzling with syrups and artfully arranging hibiscus petals, Gus more often took the retro route with piped-on flowers or a flash of candy sprinkles across the iced top. Because birthday cake was really about nostalgia,she knew, about reaching in and using the senses to remember one perfect childhood moment.

After twelve years as a host on the CookingChanneland with three successful shows to her creditGus had made many desserts in her kitchen studios, from her creamy white chocolate mousse to her luscious peach torte, her gooey caramel apple cobbler and her decadent bourbon pecan pie. A home cook without culinary school training, she aimed to be warmly elegant without veering into the homespun: she strived to make her dishes feel complete without being complicated.

Still, birthday cake was something altogether different: one sweet slice fed the spirit as much as the stomach. And Gus relished that perfect triumph.

She loved celebrating so much that she threw birthday parties for her grown daughters, Aimee and Sabrina, for her neighbor and good friend Hannah, for her executive producer (and CookingChannel veep) Porter, and for her longtime culinary assistant whod recently retired and moved to California.

But Gus didnt stop there. She always made a big ta-da for the nations anniversary, which wasnt so out of the ordinary for an American, and for December 25, which, again, wasnt all that unusual for someone whod been raised Catholic. Then she also made a fuss for saints Valentine and Pat-rick,for Lincoln, for Julia Child (culinary genius; August 15), Henry Fowle Durant (founder of her alma mater, Wellesley; February 22), and Isabella Mary Beeton (author of the famous Mrs. Beetons Book of Household Management; March 12). No matter that those guests of honor were quite unavailableto attend, being dead and all.

Some hostesses love parties because they relish being the center of attention.Gus, on the other hand, found her greatest pleasure in creating a party world with a place for everyone and where she believed everyone would be made to feel special.

Let me fix a little something, Gus said to her daughters, their friends, her colleagues, her viewers. She truly loved the idea of taking care, of nurturingand nourishing. Especially those guests who found it hard to make their way in the crowd: Gus always looked out for those ones the most.

There was only one birthday that Gus was getting tired of organizing. Tired, really, of celebrating at all. Her own. Because in short orderMarch 25Augusta Adelaide Simpson was turning fifty.

The problem, of course, was that she didnt feel as old as all that. No, she felt more like a twenty-five-year-old (ignoring, as she often did, the logistical problem that her older daughter, Aimee, was twenty-seven and her younger, Sabrina, was twenty-five). And, as such, she found herself completely caught off-guardgenuinely surprised to add up the yearsto find that shed arrived at the half-century mark.

A half-century of Gus.

Youll want to use the best sherry you can afford when making a vinaigrette, she had said on a recent show, before realizing the sherry was almost as old as she was.

I could be bottled up and put on the shelf, shed said, laughing.

But a nagging dread had snuck up on her, and she resented it. Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, even forty-nineall those parties had been smashing.When she blew out her candles on last years cakea carrot ginger with cinnamon cream cheese icingand her producer, Porter, had shouted out, Next years the big one! she had laughed along with the crowd. And she felt fine about it. She really, really did. No, really. She did. She hadnt scheduled a session of Botox, hadnt begun wearing scarves to hide her neck. Fifty, she told herself, was no big deal. Until she woke up one morning and realized she hadnt done a thing to plan. She, who never missed a chance to have a party. And thats when she realized that she didnt want to do anythingabout celebrating, either.

The problem, she reflected one morning while washing her tawny brown hair with color-enhancing shampoo, developed somewhere between working on the show schedule for the upcoming year and learning that the CookingChannelwas slashing the budget and ordering fewer episodes than usual.

All the cable channels are losing market share, Porter had explained. We just have to ride it out. Hed been in the TV business a long time, longer than Gus, and was enviably successful, a black man in the very white world of food TV. There were rumblings he was even going to be named head of programming. Guss trust in Porter was absolute.

Then the CookingChannel had hired a style consultant who informed Gus that after a certain age some ladies do well to add a few pounds to smooth out the face. (Youre wonderfully slender but it wouldnt hurt to fill in the lines, you know, the stylist had said, not unkindly. Good lighting can only work for so long.) Finally, shed met Sabrina for dinner one night and admired the couple at the table across from them, a gorgeous black-hairedyoung woman in a bubble-gum-pink dress accompanied by a frowningolder woman, her butterscotch hair in a medium-length swingy bob and clad in an oatmeal linen pantsuit. She was startled to realize the wall across from her was mirrored and the grumpy-faced diner was herself. Are you okay, Mom? Sabrina had said, signaling the waiter for more water. You look as though youre a little ill.

Gus wasnt young anymore.

At first shed tucked this awareness away with her white shoes after Labor Day. But the truth refused to stay hidden, revealing itself when she spotted a wrinkle shed never noticed or heard a crackle in her knees when she bent over to pull out a saucepan. Or when her longtime sous chef announced, in what seemed like out-of-the-blue fashion, that she was retiring. Which meant shed reached retirement age. Alarming when you considered that it meant twelve long years had gone by since Gus had had her first CookingChannelshow, The Lunch Bunch, in 1994. That the young mom whod twisted her shimmering butterscotch locks into a loose updo, tendrils escaping,had eschewed aprons, and whipped up easy, delicious dishes now, was a parent of girls with jobs and lives and kitchens of their own. Girls who had, sort of, become women.

They werent really grown-up. Not in the real sense. After all, shed had two children by the time she was Sabrinas ageand that was in addition to a husband, and a year of adventure in the Peace Corps. Aimee and Sabrina, on the other hand, were far from self-sufficient. Aimee seemed never to have anyone serious in her life, and Sabrina changed boyfriends with the seasons. It was funny, really, how todays twelve-year-olds were far more sophisticated than any middle schoolers Gus remembered, and yet the twenty-five-year-oldsexisted in a state of suspended adolescence. She spent more time worryingabout them now than she probably ever had.

So it was easy enough to pop along with the day-to-day of life and not really think about aging in a personal way. But then small thingsa word from a stranger, a glance in the mirrorstartled her fantasy image. Suddenly,reluctantly, one fact became clear.

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