One winter evening in 1987 at an expensive French restaurant in SoHo, my best friend Bernard and I couldn’t decide what to order for dessert.
Should we lean classic with crème brûlée or tarte Tatin, or trendy with chocolate torte in a passion fruit coulis? Or perhaps go for the homey red-wine poached pear, so often overlooked?
Recipe: Red-Wine Roasted Pears With Cardamom Crumble
If the least consequential choices are sometimes the toughest to make, this choice ended up being simple, and would change both our lives.
I was an English major at Barnard, as enthralled with M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David as I was with the Brontës, and I planned to become a lawyer. What else was a dutiful daughter of Jewish doctors to do when she couldn’t dissect a frog in biology?
Bernard was two years older, a fashion design student at Pratt with a thing for fancy food and rustic men. He also had a father in Texas who had agreed to bankroll the B.F.A. on condition that it be followed by an M.B.A. and a Wall Street career. Secretly, though, what Bernard really wanted to be was a chef.
We met at Dean & DeLuca, where we both had part-time jobs, quickly bonding over our love for funky aged cheeses and for the curly-haired boy who sold them (but who loved neither of us in return). We’d spend lunchtimes paging through cookbooks borrowed from the gifts department, pointing to things we wanted to make, while munching on yesterday’s half-price éclairs.
Of all my friends, Bernard was the only one as fixated on food as I was, and our relationship deepened because of it. We threw elaborate dinner parties in his cramped East Village walk-up, using our employee discount to get the good stuff: smoked duck breast, quail eggs, chanterelles. He had a sharp sense of humor that showed in his cooking, like his roasted rabbit on a bed of baby carrots, and dishes named after his favorite fashion designers (Geoffrey Beene-s with cannellini and bacon). Bernard cranked up Maria Callas and Mirella Freni while we diced and whisked. He devised menus for a make-believe restaurant, while I daydreamed about writing a cookbook someday.
Not that either of those things was a real possibility. It’s true that my folks spent their off-hours cooking through Julia Child, and Bernard’s parents loved nothing more than their weekend trips to New York to take their son — and his socially permissible date (me) — to Lutèce. But for them, food was a hobby, not a viable career, a view Bernard and I had fully imbibed.
We had our parents’ taste but not their budgets. It had taken Bernard and me months to save up for that dinner in SoHo. Over warm goat cheese salad and escargot, Bernard glumly described his latest phone call with his parents.
‘Melissa,’ my friend whispered conspiratorially, ‘don’t you see? We need to have it all.’
His father, a lawyer, had a line on an internship at a Manhattan firm for me. As for Bernard, with graduation from Pratt approaching, wasn’t it time to get started on those business school applications?
The muffling clouds of a nice, safe future loomed unnervingly close, dulling the thrill of beef daube and roasted lamb with ratatouille.
We had started a listless discussion about LSATs and GMATs when the waiter arrived to take our dessert order.
I hesitated.
It would be sensible to split one, almost profligate to order two. Then I noticed Bernard smiling at me.
“Melissa,” he whispered conspiratorially, “don’t you see? We need to have it all.”
I knew exactly what he meant.
Why just one or two desserts? Why a career in law or finance when food occupied our whole hearts? Why not a cookbook and a restaurant? We were adults. We were paying. We could get whatever we wanted.
We ordered all four desserts.
Surprisingly, that red-wine pear turned out to be the best, glowing like garnets beneath a snowdrift of whipped cream.
The next September, Bernard enrolled at culinary school, then went on to work for some of the most exciting chefs in the city, including Jean-Georges Vongerichten and David Bouley.
I wrote my first cookbook a few years later, followed by others. In them, you’ll find recipes for crème brûlée, tarte Tatin and chocolate torte. But only now am I getting to the red-wine pears, because they proved the hardest to get right. The key is roasting them slowly in spiced red wine, then topping them with pistachios, crunchy cardamom crumble and an extravagant heap of crème fraîche.
In the four decades it took me to write about all four desserts, the food world has grown dramatically. But some things remain the same — a dish of winy, sweet pears can still change your life.
Melissa Clark has been writing her column, A Good Appetite, for The Times’s Food section since 2007. She creates recipes for New York Times Cooking, makes videos and reports on food trends. She is the author of 45 cookbooks, and counting.
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