SHACKING UP
Here it is, almost Thanksgiving, and aren’t you glad I’m not offering tips for roasting the bird, dishing up sides, or sandblasting pie crust? Instead, I include here my favorite recipe for chicken livers Marsala, a dish I made often in the early years of cohabitation. I’m not sure if there’s anything you can do with turkey livers, however, other than chop them up for giblet gravy, but while we’re on the subject allow me to augment your holiday reading with a link to one of my favorite short stories, Alice Munro’s The Turkey Season. Gobble, gobble!
How and why Mr. Landi and I decided to find a place together was one of those fateful decisions neither of us really remembers. All I recall is that my roommates were scattering, and this seemed a logical next step after “dating” for more than a year. We ended up looking mostly on the Upper East Side because he had no desire to live anywhere west of the park (“the old country,” as he put it), and, astonishingly, one could still find a reasonable rental in a good neighborhood.
We ended up in a floor-through apartment on the second story of a narrow brownstone on East 83rd Street, just off Madison, about three blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were adorable amenities, like a pier-glass mirror in the living room and a working fireplace in the bedroom. A little study in the back, for Mr. Landi, could accommodate a desk and filing cabinets but not much else. The bedroom windows overlooked a garden, which was the province of the ground-floor tenants.
Of course, there were problems. The refrigerator and tiles in the tiny triangular kitchen were streaked with mold (wispy strings of fungal matter hung from the racks in the fridge). Some previous tenant had tried for a casbah-like effect in the bedroom and left behind remnants of paisley fabric above the moldings. The landlord, as I recall, did not much care about leasing a freshly painted and habitable apartment to new tenants (and maybe that wasn’t even the law back then), but we counted ourselves lucky to have found this place for about $600 a month. So we did not complain and set to work sprucing up the premises and making a home for ourselves.
Mr. Landi built bookshelves in the bedroom, and I took charge of the furnishings. I had slipcovers made for the grad-school sofa bed in a dark blue fabric with bright-green piping. My mother gave us a pair of wing-back chairs, which I had reupholstered in a blue-and-white diamond pattern. In the bedroom we had a big brass bed and a bentwood rocking chair (I fell asleep the other night remembering the exact texture and color of our off-white Indian bedspread). The darling little working fireplace came in handy when the boiler broke down, which was frequently during our two winters in the apartment.
And there were the cats—specifically his two from his studio apartment on East 76th: Lover, the fat neurotic one who despised me, and her sister, whom I’d rechristened Spike because I didn’t like her original name and had decided she was mine anyway since Lover was so deeply protective of Mr. Landi that she hissed whenever she saw us together.
Many cute kitty things happened in that apartment, beginning with the felines’ arrival on the uptown bus because Mr. Landi couldn’t find a cab on moving day. The driver, in one of those serendipitous acts of New York kindness, helped him load the critters in their carriers onto seats at the front. We had two separate phone lines in the apartment—I guess one for us, one for his “business” (or maybe it was the only way to keep his Butterfield 8 exchange)—and sometimes during the day, he would phone me while I was working in the front of the apartment and affect a nasal accent: “Long distance calling, Lover for Spike.” When he brought home a new coat from Bloomingdale’s, we left out the commodious box as a treat for the cats. And since they refused to share, it became a locus of contention between the two of them. Spike was smart enough to create diversions in another room that would attract Lover’s attention, so that she could hightail it back to the box and claim the territory for her own. When we separated the cover from the bottom of the box, to make two separate cat playpens, they both lost interest.
This is what happens when you don’t have kids. You tell stories about your cats.
Although I had gone to high school on the Upper East Side—Birch Wathen was only 12 blocks, less than a mile, to the south—I nonetheless found the neighborhood intimidating. From an art lover’s standpoint, it was great to have the Met and the Whitney and the Frick so close by, but I often felt like a refugee from an Eastern European shtetl among the private townhouses and uniformed doormen and expensive shops, few of which I set foot in. If I bought groceries in Gristede’s on Madison Avenue, instead of schlepping over to the d’Agostino’s on Third, I suffered a certain discomfort standing in line behind the mink coats, buying cheap-o Café Bustelo and ground chuck.
But we had such fine and funny times in that apartment. We entertained my parents at a small round table in the living room (precisely once, as I recall—more often we had Sunday dinners at their apartment). Usually we ate at a gate-legged table in the foyer. Mr. Landi made friends with the young doctor upstairs, and the two often went running in Central Park. The elderly woman who lived in a studio on the ground floor was as cracked as the fissure in her front door, which looked to have been made by an axe murderer. If she saw Mr. L in his red T-shirt, she made the sign of the cross and cursed him: “I know you! You’re the devil!” When my mother came to feed the cats and water the plants while we were away, she airily declared, “They’re not here. They’ve moved to Egypt.”
We were learning to be a couple, and I was so happy to be part of a couple after the two unhappy Princeton romances and then the string of one-night stands and short-term beaux in my early 20s. There were fights, of course, I went ballistic when I found a photograph of his former girlfriend, Jeannie, in waders and a bikini top on a fishing trip, her tanned bazongas spilling out as she firmly held a rod and reel, no doubt wrestling with a 20-pound steelhead (it wasn’t just the boobs….she seemed so much more sporting than I….but why would he keep such a photo? I wanted to know). I was furious when he bought a two-hundred-dollar overcoat (the one that came home in the Bloomingdale’s box) because I didn’t think we could afford such a thing and I was still wearing some beat-up fake fur jacket. When I put together a job chart, like the one I had with roommates detailing who would do what housekeeping each week, he laughingly tore it up.
But in general, the good times outweighed the bad. They had to, or we would not have survived. When I had the hiccups, which was often in those days, he “wheelbarrowed” me down the hallway, gripping my feet as I pushed forward on my hands. When I tried a new way of drying my long unruly hair, it got wrapped around a styling brush in such a way that it became impossible to remove the brush without cutting it free. He deftly clipped the ‘do into a Prince Valiant cut that held up until I could seek out professional repairs.
And of course we ate. The favorite local places were an Italian restaurant called Volaré that served giant martinis and a Chinese joint on Third Avenue called Panda Gardens (when I once gave our leftovers to a homeless guy on the street, he looked inside and complained that there were no chopsticks). But mostly we ate at home, and the food I remember cooking most often was chicken livers, a zillion different ways because they were so cheap and so versatile. I still make them for myself from time to time because they aren’t really elegant enough for a dinner party and they seem to be an acquired taste. If you have leftovers, as I usually do, you can pulse them in a blender or chop them up fine for a tasty spread on garlic toasts.
Chicken Livers Marsala
Adapted from ex-con and domestic tyrant Martha Stewart’s website. She flours the livers, but I don’t think that’s necessary. This recipe serves four, and I generally heap the livers on top of penne or rotini, not spaghetti as shown here.
Ingredients
· 1 pound fresh chicken livers, rinsed and patted dry
· 1 teaspoon coarse salt, plus more for seasoning
· 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper, plus more for seasoning
· 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus more if needed
· 3 to 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more if needed
· 2 shallots, minced
· 1/2 teaspoon dried Italian herbs
· 1/2 cup Marsala wine
· 1/2 cup homemade or low-sodium canned chicken stock
Directions
Step 1
Remove strings or sinew from livers. Sprinkle with the salt and pepper.
Step 2
Heat olive oil and 2 tablespoons butter in a medium saute pan over medium heat. Saute livers in two batches (using more butter and oil if necessary with the second batch) until nicely browned and still pink in the center, about 2 minutes on each side.
Step 3
Remove livers from saute pan; place on a plate, covered with foil, to keep warm. Drain off all but 1 tablespoon fat; discard. If there is not enough fat in pan, add more olive oil. Add shallots and herbs; saute until shallots are soft and slightly browned, about 2 minutes. Add Marsala; simmer until reduced by half, about 2 minutes. Add stock; simmer until reduced by half, about 3 minutes.
Step 4
Remove pan from heat, and swirl in remaining butter. Season with salt and pepper. Pour sauce over livers before serving.
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Cute photo of you and Mr.!
You kinda have to be in the mood for chicken livers, but they are a great winter dish!