The only advice my mother gave me when I got married was, ”Don`t buy your meat at a grocery store. Go to a butcher.” When my husband and I landed on the doorstep at Cambridge, the first thing I found was a bookstore. I asked, ”Does anyone know where a good butcher is?” And this very strange old graduate student who was an amateur cook said to me, ”Oh, you have to go to this butcher.”
Well, he turned out to be Julia Child`s butcher. I remember saying to him, ”Can I come and watch you cut up meat? I`d really like to cook, and I know I will understand it more if I see the side of veal and see the muscle structure. I`ll understand why this part has to cook longer and this part less.” We got to be great buddies. He gave me Julia Child`s book, ”Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” I met her there and found out that I lived catercorner from her. I had a friend who was an intern at WGBH, so I did volunteer dish-washing for Julia Child`s first television show.
What got me involved in food was poverty. I cooked out of necessity. I was a graduate student married to another graduate student, living on my stipend in Harvard married student housing in Cambridge, facing reality. I was married three weeks after I left undergraduate school. Before that, I lived at home, and then I lived in a dormitory. And now I was Mrs. Reis! So I had to cook.
We didn`t have any money, but we always had company. I like people, I like being around them, I like making them happy, and that`s part of cooking and being a good cook.
My mother-in-law gave me ”The Joy of Cooking” for a shower present. Thank God, she didn`t give me Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines. I might still be eating out of cans. I opened it up and started cooking. You know, if you do scientific experiments, when it says .1 gram of magnesium, you add .1 gram. So I`d go through a recipe like the outline of an experiment. And if you do that from a book like ”The Joy of Cooking,” you get good results. That gives you some freedom to say, ”Well, maybe I`d like a little tomato in there.”
I just turned out to be a natural at it. Then I had an opportunity to spend a little time in France, and I went to some courses at the Cordon Bleu. And I knew a Cordon Bleu chef in Boston that I took some classes from.
If I`ve lived through one decisive time, it was when I decided that I was not really enjoying being a scientist, that I needed to look to something more fulfilling, even though I had spent my life since I was 12 in pursuit of high- powered science. I can remember back at that age when my family doctor introduced me to Albert Sabin. I can remember shaking hands with him. I remember the red bow tie he had on, where he was standing, and I thought I wanted to be him. I adopted him as my role model in 30 seconds.
For as long as I can remember, research had interested me. I worked at Cincinnati`s Children`s Hospital when I was 12.
I was 23 when I got my doctorate. Going to graduate school at Harvard was such a brain trip. It was all how smart you were and how fast you caught on. I think in my time in school I had at least three Nobel Prize winners as teachers. That was very heady stuff.
In graduate school there were a great many opportunities to share where you were at in your work. I remember in our laboratory there was a conference room with a big oval table. There was a coffee pot always on and a few copies of the New York Times.
You`d come in and sit down, and a lot of people would bring a brown bag lunch or one of those instant soup things. You`d sit down and say, ”I`ve been doing this for three weeks, and I`m not getting anywhere. What do you think, because I know you were working with sea urchins, too.” People are open; they want to help one another.
And then you get out into the world. The real world isn`t the shared camaraderie that graduate school was. That was the first rude awakening. The people who were colleagues at one point were collegial but not grandly so. There were plenty of people who were doing very fine research at a higher level. But when you`re kind of doing it for your job and your ego, you don`t have the time to deal with somebody else.
What I learned from that (aside from finding that there were a lot of ugly people in the world who would step on anybody to get ahead) was that I really like the sharing of ideas. A Nobel Prize can be a total one-person thing. That`s why I ended up going away from that, because I need people. That turned out to be much more important to me than the intellectual stimulation of the other side.
It took me probably a good two years to finally assimilate why I would wake up in the morning with a knot in my stomach instead of a thrill in my heart about going off to save the world.
I was working at Children`s Memorial in Chicago at the time. I was married. I had a kid. It took a while to figure out the knot in my stomach, because I had always loved work. I thought I should be happy because I had this new baby and this great job. The professor I was working for was very understanding about my having this child, so I worked only three days a week. I could come in at 9:30 in the morning after I had fed the baby and played with him a little bit. I didn`t make any money at it–it was a wash with the housekeeping services–but that was fine. I hated domesticity from before I could spell it.
I was very fond of the man who hired me. He was my link. I could come and sit and talk with him for 20 or 30 minutes about what I was working on, and he would spur me on with all kinds of ideas. Then he took another job, and I never got along with the man who took over after he left. One week into it I knew it wasn`t going to work.
So I took the summer off. I would guess that that was probably the first summer I can remember that I just did nothing. From the time I went to camp at 8 or 9, I never stopped to smell the flowers. So I went every day to the beach with my baby, who was about 2. I took clipboards, and on one side of the paper I wrote lists of what I liked to do, what I liked about myself and what made me feel good. On the other side, what I don`t like to do, what I don`t like about myself. I`d sit there, and he`d build sand castles and I`d have fantasy dreams in my head. By the end of the summer, it came out that I wanted to do something in food.
It was a huge change. I came from a family that was not geared into your doing the service. It was geared into someone`s servicing you. I don`t mean that they were terribly wealthy. They were comfortable. I grew up with someone who helped my mother cook and run the house. Cooking wasn`t chic. In my mother`s day it was kind of, ”Nice ladies don`t cook.” I can`t remember any friend of my mother`s who was really a good cook. So in that regard, it was hard for me to say that I was going to go into people`s homes to cook. Looking back, I don`t know where the nerve came from. To say at 23 or 25, ”This isn`t really for me,” that`s a very hard thing to do.
I thought that as a transition between being an elitist scientist and cooking for people I would be in the consulting business, something like a wedding or party consultant. I thought I was going to help with the menu and futz with the flowers and do all the fun stuff. I called a million caterers, but the hours were just not conducive to someone who had a 2-year-old.
But I found one company that advertised about party consultants. When I called them, I did not know that I was talking to the wife of the president of the company. She laid out a scenario for a particular party that they were working on, and I came back with a menu. She said, ”Do you have the cook?”
And I said, ”I`ll work on it and call you in a few days.”
So I started looking at the ads for cooks and calling these people and asking, ”Can you make blintzes?” And they didn`t know what the Sam Hill I was talking about. So I called her and I said, ”I`m embarrassed, but I can`t find anybody who can cook the food.” And she said, ”Why don`t you cook it?
You`ve taken cooking classes.”
It was for 60 people, and I made about 10 different kinds of hors d`oeuvres. I got a bartender from Northwestern University, and, voila! I was a caterer. Everything was wonderful. I was a good cook and I had good taste and I made everything myself–stuffed every mushroom, rolled every crepe. In what other kind of business can you walk around and have people say, ”Oh, God, you make me so happy. We`re so glad you`re here. You`re so wonderful.” Aside from my husband, in the last year no one had said, ”Oh, I love that! Oh, my God, you`re wonderful!” And I was hooked.
I was a biochemist at 9 in the morning and at 3 in the afternoon I was a caterer. On my Christmas wish list I gave up The Journal of Molecular Biology and replaced it with Gourmet.
