Dinner with Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship

by Isabel Vincent

Overview

“I loved every moment of this book . . . Everyone deserves their own Edward--and everyone deserves to read this book.” —Susannah Cahalan, bestselling author of Brain on Fire
 
When Isabel meets Edward, both are at a crossroads: he wants to follow his late wife to the grave, and she is ready to give up on love. Thinking she is merely helping Edward’s daughter--who lives far away and has asked her to check in on her nonagenarian dad in New York--Isabel has no idea that the man in the kitchen baking the sublime roast chicken and light-as-air apricot soufflé will end up changing her life.

As Edward and Isabel meet weekly for the glorious dinners that Edward prepares, he shares so much more than his recipes for apple galette or the perfect martini, or even his tips for deboning poultry. Edward is teaching Isabel the luxury of slowing down and taking the time to think through everything she does, to deconstruct her own life, cutting it back to the bone and examining the guts, no matter how messy that proves to be.

Dinner with Edward is a book about love and nourishment, and about how dinner with a friend can, in the words of M. F. K. Fisher, “sustain us against the hungers of the world.”

“A rare, beautifully crafted memoir that leaves you exhilarated and wanting to live this way. Edward is a marvel of resilience and dignity, and Vincent shows us that the ceremony of food is really a metaphor for love. The key is to live your life generously.” —Rosemary Sullivan, author of Stalin’s Daughter

“Isabel Vincent delves deeply into matters of the kitchen and the heart with equal and unabashed passion . . . Rich with description of meals savored, losses grieved, and moments cherished, it’s at once tender, revealing, and utterly enchanting!” —*Gail Simmons, judge on Bravo’s Top Chef and author of Talking with My Mouth Full  

“One of the most stylish and emotional works of nonfiction I have ever read. I savored every page.” —Bob Colacello, author Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up

“Although the food (I am partial to the roast chicken, lovingly described) is excellent, it is the charming and effortlessly wise company that makes this sweet read a charming way to pass a day.” —George Hodgman, New York Times bestselling author of Bettyville

“Delightfully combining the warm-heartedness of Tuesdays with Morrie with the sensual splendor of Julie and Julia. This is a memoir to treasure.” —Booklist, starred review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616206048
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	05/24/2016
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	242
Sales rank:	430,359
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Isabel Vincent is an investigative reporter for the New York Post. Her work has appeared in magazines and newspapers all over the world, including the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, L’Officiel, and Time. She is the author of four books: Gilded Lily: Lily Safra: The Making of One of the World’s Wealthiest Widows; Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas; Hitler’s Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold and the Pursuit of Justice; and See No Evil: The Strange Case of Christine Lamont and David Spencer. The recipient of numerous journalism honors, including the Canadian Association of Journalist’s Award for Excellence in Investigative Journalism, she has been a journalism fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto. Vincent grew up in Toronto and lives in New York.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Grilled Sirloin Steak, Sauce Bourguignonne New Potatoes Chocolate Soufflé
Malbec

In the beginning I would invariably arrive at Edward's apartment with a bottle of wine.

"No need to bring anything, baby," he said, although I often ignored the advice, finding it difficult to show up for dinner empty-handed.

And there was no need to knock on the door or ring the doorbell, Edward told me. He always knew when I was coming because the doorman would call up to his apartment when I walked through the front doors of his building. Besides, he usually kept his door unlocked. Still, soon after we met he insisted that I have my own key, just in case the door was locked and I wanted to drop by when he was taking his morning or afternoon nap on the couch. He gave me the key attached to a purple plastic fob. EDWARD and his telephone number were written in bold, block letters on the white insert in the key ring. We both knew I would never actually use the key to get into his apartment but I accepted it graciously — a gesture of friendship, a daily reminder that Edward was now part of my life.

Whenever I did bring wine, Edward would write my name on the label, then tuck it into his makeshift cellar in the hall closet, where he kept winter coats. By the time I got there, he had already chosen his wines carefully for the meal and would save my offering for a more appropriate pairing.

At one early dinner I had made the mistake of bringing Edward some of the salted cod croquettes that I had cooked from my mother's recipe. I should never have expected him to serve them with our meal. I sprung the food on him without any warning. In those early days of our friendship I never imagined the amount of thought and effort that Edward put into each dinner. I knew it was a faux pas as soon as I handed over the lumpy tinfoil--wrapped bundle of croquettes, and I could see Edward was momentarily confused. But he graciously accepted my offering, inviting me to dinner later in the week so that we could enjoy them together.

Edward was neither a snob nor an insufferable foodie. He just liked to do things properly. He cared deeply about everything he created — whether it was the furniture in his living room or his writing. He had built and upholstered all of the furniture himself and wrote out his poems and short stories in longhand, patiently rewriting each draft on unlined white paper until he felt it was good enough to be typed by one of his daughters. He treated cooking much the same way, even though he had started doing it late in life, in his seventies. "Paula cooked for fifty-two years, and one day I just told her she'd done enough work, and now it was my turn," he said.

Edward had learned from a young age to appreciate fine food. When he was fourteen, after he failed his year at school, Edward's parents had sent him from their home in Nashville to spend a summer with his wealthy aunt and uncle in New Orleans. His aunt Eleanor, a teacher, was determined to instill discipline and get him back on track. But she was also determined to instruct him about French cuisine.

"I had an introduction to a world I didn't know existed," he said, recalling a meal at the legendary Antoine's in 1934. "I will never forget the first time I had soft-shell crabs. They were fried in a light batter and served with hot melted butter. They were just delicious."

When he started cooking, he borrowed from Antoine's French-Creole menu, but he liked to tell me that he also appreciated the simplest things. He could still remember as a boy eating boiled cabbage, with "a gob of butter on it, which elevated it to the heavens!" And he sought inspiration everywhere: He claimed that he picked up his trick for scrambled eggs from St. John.

St. John?

He was a cook on Amtrak. "His whole life people just called him 'Boy,' " said Edward, who met him on a ten-hour train journey he once took with Paula. "After he joined the Baptist church and was taken under the wing of a cook named Miss Emma, he started calling himself St. John the Baptist."

St. John had a knack for eggs. When Edward asked him the secret of his scrambled eggs, St. John told him that he never cooked them all at once; he did it in a few steps. Edward had shared the trick with Paula and now insisted on showing it to me. He took farm-fresh eggs, their yolks glistening orange as he cracked them into a bowl, whisking them with a splash of milk or cream, salt, and pepper. Then he melted sweet butter in a hot frying pan, adding only half the egg mixture to the skillet when the butter was just on the edge of turning brown.

"Never all at once," Edward repeated. "You do the eggs in two steps."

After the first part began to sizzle and bubble, Edward gently loosened the eggs with a spoon, reduced the heat, and added the rest, cooking the slippery, pale yellow mixture until the eggs were light, fluffy, and completely coated in butter.

Years of childhood hardship in the South had taught Edward to be resourceful. He saved fresh herbs in Ziploc bags in the freezer, quartered the lard he bought in blocks from his Queens butcher and carefully wrapped each in waxed paper for storage in his refrigerator. Edward loved to shop at specialty food stores such as Citarella and Gourmet Garage but he happily made do at his local supermarket. He didn't own any fancy kitchen implements, and the few cookbooks I saw, which he almost never opened, had been gifts from well-meaning friends.

"It's just cooking, darling," he said, when I asked why he didn't use cookbooks. "I don't ever think of what I'm doing in terms of recipes. I just don't want to bother looking at recipes. To me, that's not cooking — being tied to a piece of paper." He hung his old but immaculately polished pots and skillets on a pressed-wood pegboard coated in tinfoil in his kitchen.

I marveled at his resourcefulness but also knew he had his own rarefied tastes. He used only Hendricks gin in a martini or when making gravlax, insisting that the cucumber essence brought out the best flavor in cured salmon. For martinis, he mixed Hendricks with dry vermouth in a Pyrex measuring cup and chilled the mixture and the glasses in the freezer until his guests arrived. Edward's martinis were neither shaken nor stirred — he simply poured gin and dry vermouth into a measuring cup and allowed the mixture to become ice-cold. He garnished each glass with a small piece of cucumber that he had also chilled until it was cold and crisp.

Whenever his elder daughter, Laura, who brought her own culinary peculiarities back from Greece when she returned to live in New York, extolled the merits of olive oil in a piecrust, Edward winced. She suspected he was giving away the golden olive oil peach pies she made for him. "When it comes to cooking or baking, he's very specific about some things," Laura said.

But the steaks Edward was grilling tonight in a hot cast-iron grill pan came from the meat fridge at the grocery store. They had been marinating in balsamic vinegar and now he seared them to perfection, laying them out on dinner plates he had warmed in the oven. The fatty juices from the steak bled across the expanse of the white porcelain, mingling with the small mound of new potatoes that he had boiled in their skins and topped with a dab of butter and chopped parsley. Then Edward swirled a velvety brown sauce on the meat before he brought the plates to the table.

The steaks were perfectly tender and tasted as though they could have come from the best butcher in Manhattan, rather than Gristedes. The sauce was buttery and rich. When I asked him how he had made it he launched into a long explanation, one that required him to take two trips to the kitchen to show me the demi-glace that was the basis for most of the sauces he made.

"Demi-glace is a long process," Edward said, pulling out a small plastic container from his refrigerator of the brown sauce that he had made from simmering roasted veal bones and vegetables until the mixture had reduced by more than three quarters and was thick and gelatinous. Like many French chefs, Edward uses demi-glace, or "glaze," as he likes to pronounce it, as a starting point for sauces and even to enrich soups.

"You can't just wish it there," he continued, referring to the long prep time. "It's not going to happen. It just cooks and cooks for days, becoming more and more concentrated."

I nodded my comprehension and spoke in hushed tones about how wonderful everything tasted. Not because I was trying to please him, but because I was truly in awe. For Edward, cooking was not just about satisfying hunger. Cooking was a passion and sometimes a serious art form, to be shared with a select few. He refused to provide tips or write out his recipes for people he felt had no affinity for cooking. As he poured some Malbec, he told me about another dinner guest who had raved about his chicken paillard.

Oh, Edward, you must give me the recipe!

But Edward told me he had no intention of sharing his paillard secrets with her. "Real cooking requires devotion," he pronounced. "And I could tell she was not devoted."

I've learned a lot about cooking from Edward. He has taught me to make the most sublime roast chicken using a paper bag and a handful of herbs, to create the perfect pastry ("Butter, and a little bit of lard in the dough, darling"), and to sprinkle balsamic vinegar on pasta to allow the sauce to cling. But from the beginning of our relationship, I knew instinctively that his culinary tips went far beyond the preparation of food. He was teaching me the art of patience, the luxury of slowing down and taking the time to think through everything I did.

When I asked him for a lesson in deboning a chicken in order to make a galantine, I knew that what Edward would end up imparting was far weightier than the butchery of poultry. In hindsight, I realize he was forcing me to deconstruct my own life, to cut it back to the bone and examine the entrails, no matter how messy that proved to be.

EDWARD LIVED ON ROOSEVELT Island in a stately co-op with wide terraces, poured concrete hallways, a sunken swimming pool, and large picture windows overlooking the East River.

I had recently moved to Roosevelt Island at my husband's insistence in a last-ditch effort to save our marriage. Unlike Edward, I was a reluctant inhabitant. A year earlier we had relocated to Manhattan from Toronto with our young daughter so that I could take up an offer to work as an investigative reporter at the New York Post. We had been living a few blocks from Hannah's school on the Upper East Side, and a day didn't go by that my husband didn't rail at our confined quarters, the crowds on the subways, the garbage-strewn playgrounds in our neighborhood, and alternate-side-of-the-street parking — that twice-a-week municipally ordained torture only New York City vehicle owners understand.

Maintaining a car in New York is a logistical nightmare. If you park on city streets, as do many New Yorkers who cannot afford the $400 or more monthly garage fees, you need to move your car twice a week in order to accommodate the city's street cleaners. Because parking spots are at such a premium, most drivers move their cars across the street and sit double-- parked in their vehicles for the hour and a half that it takes the street sweepers to do their job. Then they quickly slide back to their old spots.

For me, alternate side parking was but a minor inconvenience, a quaint and necessary hardship of city life. It's true I wasn't the one who had to sit in the car for an hour and a half until the street-sweeping trucks passed by. But there were other nuisances, such as lugging heavy bags of groceries on the subway, exorbitant prices for just about everything in Manhattan, rushing the wrong way through the wall of rush-hour crowds to get to an assignment, or to collect Hannah from school. I felt these were small issues, endured by everyone around me — all of us part of an exclusive fraternity of the shared frustration that is life in New York City.

In fact, having spent most of my professional life reporting from the developing world, I loved the chaos of New York. The city is its own third world country, with its snarling traffic, its overflowing garbage cans, its corrupt politicians, and its rats that scurry across darkened streets and subway tracks. On muggy summer days, I kept the windows open in our apartment to welcome the clamor of the traffic and construction.

"You're crazy," said Melissa, my colleague and new friend at the Post. A native New Yorker, she always longed for peace and quiet.

Those first months in the city, though, I was clearly out of my depth. One day I stood waiting for the 6 train at rush hour. I was in midtown and hurrying to pick up Hannah uptown. The subway platform was crowded three deep, and the approaching train was packed. I turned to a well-dressed and frail elderly woman standing next to me.

"Wow, I really don't think we're going to get on this train," I said, surveying the crowds.

She gave me a look that I can only describe as a mixture of pity and contempt. "Where are you from?" she asked.

"Canada," I said, sheepishly.

"You're definitely not getting on this train," she said with a smile.

Then I watched as this refined creature clutched her buttery leather handbag, and gently but purposefully nudged herself into the crowded train. She never had to push to squeeze into the packed subway car. There was an elegance and grace in the way she inserted herself into the train just before the conductor slammed the doors shut.

I waited for the next train. It was also crowded, but in that split second as the doors burst open, I became a New Yorker. Without any fanfare, with no "excuse me" or "so sorry," I joined the crowd and slipped onto the train.

My husband refused to adapt, and a week didn't pass that I wasn't greeted with a time limit on our stay in what to him was the worst place on earth. "One more year, and that's it," he would say. But it was more than our move to New York that was threatening our marriage. We had long carried our emotional baggage over two continents. We were constantly in motion, packing and unpacking boxes, arranging furniture at the different houses we owned, filling out long government forms seeking visas to travel to places as diverse as Kosovo and Brazil. All of this prevented us from dealing with our fraying relationship. When the bitterness bubbled to the surface, when the tension increased, we craved new vistas. And so after unsuccessfully settling in a cramped apartment on the Upper East Side, we decided to try another part of the city, both of us still convinced that real estate would save our faltering marriage.

Roosevelt Island had an affordable parking garage, even though it was dilapidated, with a leaking roof and barely functioning elevator. And the nearly two-mile-long island seemed to be a pleasant retreat from the chaos of Manhattan, yet easily accessible by tram and subway to midtown. In the spring, the promenade facing Manhattan's East Side is crowded with parents pushing babies in strollers, joggers, and couples holding hands. On summer nights, the smell of grilled beef lingers in the heavy air as residents gather at the barbecue pits that line the northern end of the island. There is a riverside café, which affords spectacular views of the United Nations, and tugboats chugging back and forth under the Queensboro Bridge.

And so a few months after I ate dinner with Valerie in the Upper East Side restaurant on Christmas Eve, I found myself living just blocks from Edward. Our meals gradually became weekly events. I knew he looked forward to them as much as I did. He spent hours writing out recipes for me and giving me rather frank opinions about how I was leading my life. He was still mourning his beloved Paula and I was starting to see just how unhappy I was in my marriage.

But whatever happened in the world outside Edward's Roosevelt Island apartment, dinner was a magical interlude. We shared cocktails, a bottle of wine, and whatever Edward was inspired to cook that day. Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Ute Lemper sang in the background, but sometimes there was just comfortable silence and the wind whistling outside his fourteenth floor windows.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Dinner with Edward"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Isabel Vincent.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Vincent intersperses recaps of Edward's meals with loosely connected episodes from the rest of her life. The story of their attachment unfolds like a genial dinner party where the conversation stays on the surface but the food goes deep and the host sets a buoyant tone.

The New York Times Book Review - Becky Aikman

02/22/2016
Vincent, a journalist for the New York Post, employs the rich language of a novelist and the economy of a reporter in this food-focused memoir. She buckles momentarily under the strife of life and the hurdles of divorce but opens her palate to a new relationship when Edward, a 93-year-old widower, teaches her to appreciate the art of living. Food lovers will swoon from the first chapter and opening menu as Vincent begins to relish their weekly tête-à-tête and Edward’s handwritten French recipes. In addition to the subtleties of cooking, she discovers what a fairy tale marriage Edward had with Paula, his wife of 69 years. She sees photos of Paula all over the apartment, and especially feels her presence in the kitchen where Edward fashions his delicate meals. It is easy to fall deeply for Edward’s tender heart as Vincent learns how he has savored his life, and over time, begins to create a life that’s more inviting and full for herself. Readers will finish the book satisfied, yet wanting more. (May)

Publishers Weekly

[Isabel’s] tonic is the example Edward sets of active engagement with the world and its delights, food being chief among them. Who wouldn’t swoon over his dinners? . . . The story of their attachment unfolds like a genial dinner party where the food goes deep and the host sets a buoyant tone.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Isabel Vincent delves deeply into matters of the kitchen and the heart with equal and unabashed passion . . . Rich with description of meals savored, losses grieved, and moments cherished, it’s at once tender, revealing, and utterly enchanting!” —Gail Simmons, judge on Bravo’s Top Chef and author of Talking with My Mouth Full

“[A] sweet memoir. With each roasted chicken and apple galette, Edward teaches Vincent not only how to cook, but how to savor life.”—RealSimple.com

“Life‑affirming, with no soppy sentiment. We all should have an Edward . . . [Vincent] does share a few of his cooking secrets. The one for flawless scrambled eggs (I tried it, with great success) is alone worth the price of the book.”—Toronto Star

“Although the food (I am partial to the roast chicken, lovingly described) is excellent, it is the charming and effortlessly wise company that makes this sweet read a charming way to pass a day.” —George Hodgman, New York Times bestselling author of Bettyville
 
“This is a book full of life lessons, a reminder that no matter how old we grow, we still have much to share, and to learn.”—Library Journal
 
“Delightfully combining the warm‑heartedness of Tuesdays with Morrie with the sensual splendor of Julie and Julia. This is a memoir to treasure.” —Booklist, starred review
 
“Food lovers will swoon from the first chapter . . . It is easy to fall deeply for Edward’s tender heart as Vincent learns how he has savored his life, and over time, begins to create a life that’s more inviting and full for herself. Readers will finish the book satisfied, yet wanting more.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“A rare, beautifully crafted memoir that leaves you exhilarated and wanting to live this way. Edward is a marvel of resilience and dignity, and Vincent shows us that the ceremony of food is really a metaphor for love. The key is to live your life generously.” —Rosemary Sullivan, author of Stalin’s Daughter
 
“One of the most stylish and emotional works of nonfiction I have ever read. I savored every page.” —Bob Colacello, author of Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up

From the Publisher

Investigative reporter Isabel Vincent first had dinner with her elderly and recently widowed neighbor as a favor to his daughter. In this short memoir, narrated by Elise Arsenault, the author recalls how one meal with Edward evolved into a regular date and details the ways their unlikely friendship helped them both move past personal sorrows. Although it will be easy for listeners to respond to the charming Edward and even crave his gourmet home-cooked meals, the audiobook is marred by Arsenault's choppy delivery. It’s particularly disconcerting in some of the emotional scenes. She also stumbles over several foreign accents, breaking the listener's attention. Regardless of the flaws, however, everyone will finish this audiobook wishing they had a friend like Edward. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

JULY 2016 - AudioFile

2016-03-16
In shape, size, and spirit, the latest from New York Post reporter Vincent (Gilded Lily: Lily Safra: The Making of One of the World's Wealthiest Widows, 2010, etc.) is like Tuesdays with Morrie with gourmet dinners. The setup finds the author befriending the father of a friend, a recent widower in his 90s who saw no reason to go on living since the death of his beloved wife. Vincent was also in the middle of a personal crisis, with her marriage "unraveling, despite my best efforts to pretend that nothing was wrong." She had joined the Post as an investigative reporter in hopes that a geographical change might benefit her family, but neither the job nor the move had been satisfying. Edward began cooking for the author once a week, giving them each something to look forward to, as "he was still mourning his beloved Paula and I was starting to see how unhappy I was in my marriage." Preparing elaborate meals largely without recipes, the self-taught chef taught the middle-age journalist something about cooking but even more about appreciating life. "He was teaching me the art of patience, the luxury of slowing down and taking the time to think about everything I did," she reflects, continuing, "I realize he was forcing me to deconstruct my own life, to cut it back to the bone and examine the entrails, no matter how messy that proved to be." The meals sound mouthwatering, but the food metaphors for the life well lived wear thin. Vincent's life did change, in pretty much every respect, and her relationship with her host deepened, but there's a limit to how much inspiration one can receive from even the best of meals. Vincent fills her pages with accounts of her life and Edward's past, but for readers, the narrative becomes lighter on epiphany than calories.

Kirkus Reviews