There’s a wonderful moment that arrives late in the new season of “The Bear,” the Emmy-studded Hulu series about a motley crew of Chicagoans striving (with much creative angst, yelling and dropped plates) to elevate a grimy beef sandwich joint into a fine dining spot worthy of a Michelin star.
It comes in the final episode, in which the show’s central character Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) flashes back to an apprenticeship with real-life superchef Thomas Keller at his famed Napa Valley restaurant French Laundry.
As Keller shows Carmy the fine points of trussing a chicken, he explains: “I know people call me a chef, but our trade is cooking and that, to me, is such a profound profession, because we get to really be part of people’s lives in significant ways.” Ultimately, Keller says, the duty and the legacy of cooks are “to nurture people,” which Carmy realizes is his higher calling.
No doubt foodies and restaurant geeks will nod knowingly at Keller’s wisdom. I can relate, having spent years immersed in the industry as a publicist for the Zagat guides. I got to know such A-list chefs as David Bouley, Eric Ripert, André Soltner, Daniel Boulud, Keller and others who made a rarefied art out of feeding their customers.
But the real reason his advice resonated was sitting beside me on the couch — namely, my wife, Sarah. Well before Season 3 of “The Bear” dropped, I tried calculating how many meals Sarah has made me in our 47-year relationship. Even accounting for how often I’ve dined out, the total could be 30,000 or higher (same-day breakfasts and dinners included). In Keller’s book, that makes Sarah a four-star nurturer deserving of her own monogrammed toque.
When Sarah and I started dating in 1977, I was a spindly runner who ate once a day, usually a take-out falafel sandwich and Italian cheesecake. My oven stopped functioning, and I used it to store my New Balance sneakers. Sarah nourished me with veal piccata, chicken patties and tortellini with pesto. Unlike friends who scoured for recipes in Gourmet or Bon Appetit, Sarah discovered her own comfort dishes, including our longtime favorite, kosher hot dogs and tater tots.
Once we had children, Sarah went into factory mode, churning out prodigious, bespoke meals for our finicky family, including a daughter with food allergies. But her quality never waned. We feasted on Sarah’s yummy soups, pastas, stews, stir-fry concoctions, croquettes, couscous and potpies.
When moods were foul and heads drooping, she always knew what would hit the spot — spaghetti with olives and artichokes for me, short ribs or lamb chops for the kids, along with a charred, heavily salted ground beef invention she called doggie burger. Everything but dessert. And before the kitchen closed for the night, she’d have prepared her own breakfast omelet for next morning, ahead of rushing to work as an administrative judge. She even broiled special chicken scraps for the dog.
Now, whenever I skimp on breakfast, she whips up grilled salmon and sauteed chicken breasts to boost my protein. When she travels, she tees up days’ worth of dinners in containers, with reminder labels. Even when we’re fighting, her food-as-caregiving reflex kicks in with meals ready for the microwave, never mind if we aren’t speaking. Once a nurturer …
Sarah long ago gave up manicures because of her hours at the cutting board. Her fingers bear multiple nicks from gristle trimming and vegetable chopping — she wears surgical gloves for handling raw meat and other KP chores. The toaster oven is a workhorse miracle, constantly heating Sarah’s foiled packets of seasoned broccoli, turkey bacon bits, roasted potatoes, garlic toast and other treats to accompany her main offerings. For years, her email password was “CHICKEN” — a prompt she could never forget.
In the world outside her kitchen, Sarah has a challenged sense of direction — she can get lost walking around the block. Her notion of time is elastic: Witness her four-hour calls with her best friend Susan. However, at her cooking station, she brings an air traffic controller’s command of all moving parts — a boiling pot of pasta, an oven meatloaf on the verge of being done, string beans pan-searing on the stovetop, croutons in the toaster and a fresh salad dressing in progress. I can’t boil an egg without getting confused; whereas, she lands all her planes in perfect sequence with never a mishap. And to watch her unpack a four-bag delivery from our nearby kosher marketplace is a pantry marvel — how she squeezes so many cutlets into our freezer could be a case study in industrial design.
For Sarah, it’s never about cuisine or presentation, though when company comes, she sets a pleasing buffet. She rarely visits farmers markets, has never reduced a sauce or snipped an herbal sprig to accent a plate. But I would stake her culinary chops against the best the Food Network has to throw. My old boss Tim Zagat used to say, when asked to name his favorite restaurant, “It’s the one you know best and the one that knows you best.” That would apply to Chez Sarah. I regularly snap photos of meals she’s prepared — not for show-off posts on Instagram, but to remind myself how fortunate I am to have her as my meal ticket. And I never need a reservation!
Sarah and I both came down with COVID-19 cases recently. I took my usual sustenance of pretzels and carrots. Sarah — shaking off chills and a low-grade fever — supplemented that with kasha and scrambled egg whites for breakfast, and rigatoni with shitake mushrooms, rosemary and shredded chicken for dinner.
“I can’t stand to see you fumble around the kitchen,” she said of my inability to make a proper meal. To which I could only reply humbly like Carmy, “Thank you, chef.”
Allan Ripp runs a press relations firm in New York.
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