Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

Jess herself had not eaten fowl or roast or even fish in years, but the books awakened memories of turkey and thick gravy, and crab cakes, and rib-eye roasts. Redolent of smoke and flame, the recipes repelled and also reminded her of pink and tender meat, and breaking open lobster dripping with sweet butter, and sucking marrow out of bones.

Hunger drew her into George’s garden, where she devoured the food she’d brought along, her sprouts and avocado sandwich, her carob muffin. Cold pastoral. She returned to epic tales of fish and wild boar, every course a canto, every feast a bestiary. And all these interleaved with the collector’s private fantasies, no longer strange to Jess, but familiar, even comforting. Scribbled lines from Jonson seemed the right response to instructions for whole pike and suckling pig, and swans dressed for the table. A reclining nude with grapes was really not so out of place. The food in these cookbooks not at all moral or metaphysical, but dug from the earth, plucked from the garden, slain in the woods. Animals still quivered with life, and required cleaning after slaughter. Red deer ran with blood, broths seethed.

Jess knew some French, but little German and no Dutch. Those works were more mysterious, and also less distracting to catalog. The English cookbooks with their joints and forced meat, their Bacon stuck with Cloves , read like Jacobean tragedies. Jess devoured them, scarcely looking up, until Concepcion’s vacuum startled her. Then she realized the afternoon was gone, the sky was deepening, and she was hungry once again.

She began to bring more food, a second snack for the end of the day. Rice cakes and a thermos full of miso soup. She ate snap peas and bags of almonds on George’s sunny kitchen deck, and bent to sniff the herbs his gardener cultivated in pots. She closed her eyes and smelled basil, thyme and rosemary, spearmint, peppermint, chocolate mint, dill, parsley, lemon grass. Thus fortified, she shouldered her backpack and drove home to the Tree House, where she lived her other life.

In July Leon came to the Tree House for several days to work and re-provision. He assumed that she would drive north with him, and when she told him she needed more time with the books he said, “Jess!” almost like Emily.

“What?” she asked him.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m working,” she said once again. “I know you think cookbooks are trivial.”

He nodded. “Completely.”

“You think rare books are frivolous—but actually when you sit down with them …”

“When you sit down with them or when you sit down with him?”

“Don’t be rude!” she said, half-laughing. He was already dressed. She had just come from the shower.

“This job is a total setup.”

Bending over, drying her thick hair, she told him about the Brandenburg cookbook. “It’s got a clasp like a locket. It’s a jewel,” she told him. “And wait, when you open it and you look at the frontispiece—can I tell you …?”

“Can I tell you about Wood Rose Glen?” he countered. “We’ve got rangers up there every day, and loggers with megaphones harassing everyone who tries to defend.”

She dressed in silence, chastened. “I’ll come up in two weeks.”

“Come because you want to come. Come because you need to come,” said Leon. “Don’t do me any favors.”

“I do want to. It’s just …”

“Just what?”

How could she explain to him what she could scarcely articulate to herself? The cookbooks weren’t trivial at all. They were, in and of themselves, an entirely new world. She had never felt this way. She dreamed about the books at night. Their collector haunted her. She lived in suspense, speculating about his life, his love, his strange dark handwriting. Sometimes she could hardly bear it—the edge of discovery. “To have a chance to work with a collection like this—” she began.

Leon cut her off. “Watch out or you’ll end up in the collection too.”

“You’re jealous!”

“No,” Leon told her coolly. “You can have him.”

“Have who? Have George? But I don’t want him.”

“Maybe you don’t, but he wants you.”

Jess thought of the exquisite, empty house. “He’s never even there.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Leon’s anger was never desperate or uncontrolled, but he was angry. Cold as liquid nitrogen, he burned.

They heard footsteps overhead, and talking in the hall. When they fought, the other Tree Savers could overhear. She kept her voice down. “You have no right to speak to me that way, when you always leave me here alone.”

“I don’t leave you here. You choose to stay.”

“I want to climb with you,” she said, “but I can’t.”

“That’s bullshit, Jess, and you know it. You told me six months ago you were going to climb—and every time, you decide at the last minute that you can’t. The truth is that you can, Jess. You can. But you won’t. You have an irrational—”

“I know it’s irrational. I know it’s an irrational fear.”

“Well, if you know it’s irrational, then why don’t you do something about it?”

“Just because something is irrational doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” Jess said.

“Call it whatever you want, it’s childish.”

“Why are you so nasty?” Jess asked him.

He didn’t answer.

“You’re nasty, and accusatory, and paranoid.”

“I’m not paranoid,” Leon said.

“Oh, so you admit to nasty and accusatory.” She almost laughed, but he did not.

“Irrational or not, it’s your choice, so don’t whine about getting left behind.”

Whenever she defended herself, or called him on something, Leon said don’t be stupid, or accused her of whining. She took a breath. “I’m pointing out that my job is real too.”

“And your so-called job is to work for your patron in his house.”

“You have patrons! You have that guy from Juniper Systems, and that woman, that actress with the house in the city. You just wish that George were funding you.”

“Right, if he were funding us that would be different.”

“You’re jealous. You really are.”

He turned away slightly.

“Don’t you think for once you might possibly be wrong?”

“Wrong about your rich friend? I’m not wrong about him,” said Leon.

“You don’t know him,” said Jess.

“Yes, I do.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Jess said.

Leon answered, “Just tell me what happens when he comes home.”

That afternoon, while working in George’s dining room, she felt something new, a strange apprehension. She jumped to hear the house settle, and started at Concepcion’s key in the lock, but George did not burst in on her that day, nor did he visit her the next. He never came home early. While Jess talked to him on occasion, when she stopped in at Yorick’s, she never saw him at the house. She left him notes. Still working on the Salzburg . Also, McClintock lists three recipes for swan .

He rarely wrote in reply, or if he did, he simply scribbled, Good . Or Back up the index as you go . He could follow her progress on the laptop, where she was creating the annotated bibliography. She knew that he was reading it, because he used the Track Changes tool, and sometimes added to her descriptions of the books, inserting details in red. Occasionally he left books out for her in their foam cradles. Weighted strings held them open to reveal a beautiful engraving, or some particular recipe he had noticed.

Once he left the Haywood out for her with a page number on a scrap of paper, and she opened the book to recipes for “Distillation.” Jess laughed at the page George had found for her. There, between instructions to make rose water and clove water, were instructions to make jessamine water: Take eight ounces of the jessamine flowers, clean picked from their stalks, three quarts of spirit of wine, and two quarts of water: put the whole into an alembic, and draw off three quarts. Then take a pound of sugar dissolved in two quarts of water, and mix it with the distilled liquor . George left no comment on the recipe, but she read, and read it over, aware that he was thinking of her.