The Cookbook Collector

  Jess swallowed hard, moved by the rabbi’s words. “I’m going to pay you back as soon as possible.”

  “Don’t pay me. Pay the Bialystok Center of Berkeley,” he said. “Then you can write off the donation on your taxes.”

  “I’ll pay you and I’ll pay you interest,” she resolved.

  “No interest,” said the rabbi, spreading his hands. “No monetary interest.”

  “What other kind of interest is there?”

  “Ah.” The rabbi smiled at her. “I am thinking of a more substantial interest.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I am interested in you.”

  “Me?” Jess asked.

  “You have heard the expression ‘Time is money,’” said Helfgott. “Some people prefer payment in money. I prefer payment in time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come to us for Shabbes,” he told her. “Or come to class, and when you’re done coming, then”—he drew out the word in a singsong voice—“thehen repay the loan.”

  She was late to work. Half an hour late, forty-five minutes late. George sat at his desk at Yorick’s and called Jess’s home number, but no one answered. He began to call the Tree House and then hung up.

  His old black telephone sat silent on his desk. The boxes he had stacked near European History remained unpacked. She’d quit. That was the most likely scenario. She had decided to leave but hadn’t bothered to give notice. That was usually the way with students. She had run off with her boyfriend, an amphibious creature George had met just once in passing at the Farmers’ Market, where Jess hailed George from a booth selling root vegetables.

  “I want you to meet someone!” she called out in her friendly way. Then she drew Leon from the shadows, as one might draw a dark slug off a lettuce leaf. The boyfriend was a tall Russian, or Armenian perhaps, with slippery black hair and olive skin, and eyes of an unusually pale, druggy shade of blue. The better to see you with, my dear, thought George. “This is Leon,” Jess said.

  “Hey,” said Leon as George extended his hand.

  “This is my boss, George,” Jess told Leon.

  Leon sized up George. “You’re the bookseller.”

  “I am.”

  “Good for you,” said Leon as though George were a child or a student or a dog performing some stupid trick. “What’s selling these days?”

  George frowned. “Nothing you’d like.”

  How quickly Jess had traded slacker Noah for sinister Leon. She was now over an hour late, later than she had ever been. Maybe she had not run off with Leon. Maybe she was dead.

  He walked to the shop window, which Jess had set up with a display for Shakespeare’s birthday. Used paperbacks of the Histories and Comedies framed a leather-bound Complete Works, and a Tales from Shakespeare in two volumes, very fine condition, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. She had opened one volume to display a color plate of barefoot Miranda dancing with fairies on her father’s island, but George had vetoed that idea, closing the book to save its spine and protect its colors from the sun.

  No one outside even stopped to look. The fine fall weather kept people out of dark little bookstores. He told himself this, although on rainy winter days, he tended toward the other opinion, concluding that few would venture out to browse when they could stay home and order books online or reread books they already possessed. Vanity, vanity. Instantly accessible, infinitely searchable, the Internet precluded physical transactions, so that there was little point to keeping a bookshop, even in Berkeley. Moments of discovery in the store were sweet but all too rare: the reunion of a customer with the long-sought Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the discovery of Linus Pauling’s copy of On the Origin of Species. Why live for such occasions? He only felt lonelier afterward.

  He pushed away those melancholy thoughts and looked ahead to dinner. He had invited Nick, and his friend Raj as well. He had his own dissolute companions—or by the end of the night he’d make them so. There would be no wives or girlfriends, only good food and drink, George’s favorite kind of evening. Why, then, was Jess late today? She was holding him up. He had planned to leave early so that he could pick up dessert (he didn’t bake) and begin cooking.

  The bell rang, and as the shop door opened, George backed away from the window lest he seem anxious. Surprised, he recognized the woman who walked in: not Jess, but Sandra.

  “Welcome,” he said, noting her cloth bag. She had come just twice over the past nine months, and each time she had brought an ordinary book. A first-edition Fannie Farmer, and an old Mastering the Art of French Cooking. He had offered only ten dollars for the last, and she had left Yorick’s in a huff. Then he concluded that, when it came to her uncle’s estate, Sandra had already sold him the crown jewels, such as they were. “Another cookbook for me?”

  “No.” She pushed her long hair back over her shoulders, a gesture surprisingly young for a woman so gray.

  “May I help you find something?”

  “No.” She stood quite still before him. “What I would like,” she said, and she spoke with precision, “is to take you to the house.”

  “To your house!”

  “My uncle’s house,” she amended. “The house he left me. I’m interested in an appraisal.”

  Why now? he thought. And why him? Did she want a second opinion? Or was he the first? Just how desperate was she?

  “Some of the books are valuable.”

  Let me be the judge of that, he thought.

  “Some are unique.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Currently,” she said, “eight hundred and seventy-three.”

  The number startled him, because it was bigger than he expected, and more exact.

  “Sorting out that many will take time.”

  “That’s just it; time is of the essence,” she told him. “Would it be possible for you to come this afternoon?”

  With some humor, he considered his empty store. “Sure.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “I’d have to lock up,” he said. Jess should have been there to cover for him.

  He stuck a Post-it on the glass shop door. “Back in an hour.”

  Then he dashed off instructions for Jess, who had a key. He took his fountain pen and covered a note card quickly with his small tight cursive:

  J.—I assume you’re writing a new theory of moral sentiments or testifying against Pacific Lumber. In either case, the books have not been shelved. Take care of that and break down the boxes!—G.

  They took George’s car, because Sandra didn’t drive, and they drove through Elmwood with its beetle-browed old bungalows. Towering hedges of eugenia nearly obscured Sandra’s home from Russell Street. Her uncle must have bought the place for about a dollar, thought George, as he picked his way through a jungle of ornamental plum, live oak, and Australian tea trees, trailing their branches luxuriantly. There were figs and lemons, roses and giant rhododendrons, all overrun with thorny blackberry canes.

  “Watch out for the cat,” Sandra told George as he followed her up peeling steps to the front porch.

  She gestured for George to step in close behind her as she unlocked the door. Like a furry missile, the black-and-gray cat launched himself, trying to escape outdoors. George blocked him with his legs. Sandra scooped him up in her arms. “Down, Geoffrey,” she ordered, as if chastising a dog, and she dumped the animal onto a couch draped in dark green slipcovers. Geoffrey jumped onto the back of this well-protected piece of furniture and glared at her with furrowed brow and narrowed eyes.

  The living room was stuffed with armchairs, end tables and bookcases, stacks of magazines and yellowed newspapers. Empty antique birdcages filled the front bay window. Abandoned pagodas. Flanking the dining table, open cabinets displayed bowls and goblets of dusty ruby-colored cut glass. A phalanx of botanical engravings adorned the walls. No bright tulips or orchids here. The engravings were all pale green and gray, portraying and anatomizing moss and lichen
s. Odd choices, George thought. Geoffrey purred, and instinctively, as he leaned over the green couch for a closer look, George touched the cat’s soft fur.

  “He bites,” said Sandra.

  Too late. George gasped as the cat nipped his finger.

  “I warned you.” Sandra’s voice rose.

  The wound looked like two pinpricks, the puncture marks of a tiny vampire.

  “I told you. I said watch out for the cat. He’s a very …”

  She disappeared into the next room, and George followed her into a kitchen that smelled of bananas and wheat germ and rotting plums. The paint on the cabinets was chipped, the countertops stacked with dishes and small New Age appliances: rice cooker, yogurt maker, fruit dehydrator. Little cacti lined the windowsills. Prickly cacti, hairy cacti; spiky, round, bulbous, hostile little plants of every kind.

  “He was my uncle’s cat,” Sandra explained. “He was abused when he was younger. My uncle found him and took him in, and then when my uncle passed …”

  Ignoring this sob story, George marched to the sink.

  “He felt abandoned,” Sandra said.

  George turned on the tap and a cloud of fruit flies rose from the drain. Disgusted, he held his finger under the running water.

  “Let me get you some iodine,” said Sandra. “Let me …” Her voice trailed off again. “You do still want to see the books?”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  She had turned her back to open the kitchen cabinets. For a moment he thought she was searching for the iodine, and then he saw them. Leather-bound, cloth-bound, quartos and folios, books of every size. The cabinets were stacked with books. Not a dish or cup in sight. Only books. Sandra bent and opened the lower cabinets. Not a single pot or pan. Just books. She stood on a chair to reach the cabinet above the refrigerator. Books there as well.

  George stepped away from the sink without noticing that he had left the water running. Injury forgotten, he gazed in awe. He leaned against the counter and stared at bindings of hooped leather, red morocco, black and gold. Sandra opened a drawer, and there lay Le Livre de Cuisine. She opened the drawer below and he took out The Accomplisht Cook: or, The Art and Mystery of Cookery. He opened the book at random: Section XIII: The First Section for dressing of fish, Shewing divers ways, and the most excellent, for dressing Carps, either Boiled, Stewed, Broiled, Roasted, or Baked, &c. He had never tried to roast a carp. Take a live carp, draw and wash it, and take away the gall, and milt, or spawn; then make a pudding with some grated manchet, some almond-paste, cream, currans, grated nutmeg, raw yolks of eggs, sugar, caraway-seed candied, or any peel, some lemon and salt, then make a stiff pudding and … The cook in him wanted to read on, but the collector was distracted by the array in cabinets beneath, above, below.

  Where should he begin? How could he approach, let alone assess a trove like this? Books like these would take a specialist, a Lowenstein or Wheaton. The sheer numbers were overwhelming. The antiquity. And the strangeness of it all, the perversity of substituting cookbooks for utensils, domestic treatises for pots and pans, words for cups, recipes for spoons and spatulas and cutlery. Still cradling The Accomplisht Cook, George tried to comprehend the open cabinets and drawers before him. He did not make a sound until Sandra opened the oven. Then a cry escaped. Books piled even here, arrayed in boxes on cookie sheets! The collector had converted oven racks to stacks.

  “Where did he find these?” George murmured to Sandra.

  She shook her head. “After the War,” she said, “when he was young. But he kept them in boxes until he retired, and then slowly he unpacked them, and shelved them here. He didn’t cook.”

  George knelt before the open oven. He slid the top rack out partway and took a flat box in his two hands, keeping it level, as one might support a cake. “Oh, my God,” he murmured. Inside the box lay La Cuisine Classique, volume two, bound in worn red morocco.

  He opened the book, and scraps of paper fluttered to the floor.

  “What’s this?”

  The book was stuffed with folded notebook paper, even index cards, the precious volume interleaved with notes. George looked up at Sandra in alarm. “These aren’t acid-free. You see this?” He held up a note card covered with black writing. “The acid in this card will eat your book alive. This has to go.”

  Notes and even newspaper clippings. The nineteenth-century volume was stuffed with what looked like shopping lists and pages torn from address books, thin typing paper brittle with age. Black ink leached onto the title page.

  “You don’t keep folios like this,” he told Sandra. “Not in ovens! Look at this.” The collector’s block printing stained recipes for aspic, and smudged an engraved illustration of eight desserts, including pralinées aux fruit and abricots à la Portugaise. What had the man been thinking? Notes in permanent black ink pressed between these pages? He pulled out a folded article from The New York Times. An obituary for Samuel Chamberlain.

  “He asked me to keep everything,” Sandra said.

  George wasn’t listening. “Do you see this? A paper clip!” The silver wire clipped several scraps of paper to a recipe for petites meringues à l’ananas. George pulled it off, and showed Sandra the rusty impression left behind. “This is criminal.”

  The paper clip upset him most of all. And there were others. A rare cookbook with lavish illustrations required lavish care. What George saw here were pages stained and crimped. “Have you opened these?” George demanded.

  She shook her head.

  “Have you seen their condition?”

  “I try not to … I don’t want to crack the bindings,” she said.

  He did not believe her. Who could resist cracking books like these? He wanted to open them right now, one after another on the kitchen table. He wanted to shuck these books like oysters in their shells.

  “He asked me to keep the collection together,” she said.

  George caressed a quarto bound in brown leather, hooped at the spine, secured with a gold clasp curiously wrought with scalloped, spiraling designs, engraved initials CWM, and the date 1735. Inside the book a title page printed in prickly gothic letters: Das Brandenburgiche Koch-Buch. Oh, glorious. The frontispiece depicted men and maidservants dressing fowl, and roasting meat over a roaring fire. Through a stone archway the lady of the house watched over all, raising her right index finger to instruct the staff. She held a great key in her other hand. The key to the house? To the spices? To cookery itself? In a reverie, George turned the page—and discovered folded typing paper.

  He exploded. “You cannot stuff a book like this. Do you understand?”

  “These are my uncle’s notes.”

  “He was not a scholar,” George said, for he could not imagine a scholar imposing his notes on books like these.

  “Yes, he was. He was a lichenologist.” She watched as George unfolded the brittle piece of typing paper. “He was very well known—in his field,” she added anxiously. “His name was Tom McClintock. He held the Bancroft Chair in …”

  But George was lost in the thicket of McClintock’s words—poetry cross-referenced with recipes: I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow (iii crabbes and oysters) / And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts, / Show thee a jay’s nest and instruct thee how / To snare the nimble marmoset; / I’ll bring thee to clustering filberts (xiii iellyes, puddings, other made-Dishes) …

  “He taught at Cal for almost forty years,” Sandra said.

  George had found another paper, covered with hand-printed lines—part love poem, part recipe, part threat: … snare you, dress you, cut you with the bone still in. Mince you small with suit and marrow, take sweet Creame, yolkes of Eggs, a few Razins of the Sun … An ink drawing illustrated these lines. A nude woman lying on a tablecloth. She lay on her side, all line and tapered leg, head resting on her hand. The drawing was expressive, despite its small scale. The subtlest marks indicated the arch of her foot, her brow, her full breasts.

  “What have we here?”
George asked, even as Sandra snatched the paper from his hands and folded it again.

  “My uncle was a very scholarly, modest …,” Sandra began.

  “And what was he doing with these books?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered in reply.

  And George wanted the collection then. He wanted it, notes and all, to read and puzzle over. He wanted days and weeks with these rare books and their strange apparatus, the notes and drawings of their collector. He would satisfy his curiosity. But first, “I’ll need to bring in an antiquarian. I have a friend—”

  The front door rattled and Sandra jumped, hand on her heart.

  “What was that?”

  “Only the mailman,” she said. “He frightened me.”

  George looked warily at her. She was far too nervous, far too gray—ashen-faced, really—wide-eyed, shaken.

  “I’m afraid,” Sandra said.

  Oh, God, thought George, but he asked, “What are you afraid of?”

  She mulled the question. “I’m afraid in general.”

  “Afraid of selling?”

  “I need to sell, but I’m afraid of him.”

  “Your uncle’s gone,” George reminded her.

  “Yes, I know,” said Sandra, but her voice trembled. “He’s dead, and I’m going to betray him.”

  Red-letter day! He had heard from other dealers about triumphs at swap meets, or, as his friend Raj dubbed such adventures, Victories at Flea. He had heard of Alcott family papers in a New England barn, and a hand-drawn map of Arabia by T. E. Lawrence tucked underneath the endpapers of Lawrence’s eighteenth-century Josephus. These were tales of the trade, but he had never contributed a legend of his own.

  Sandra was a strange one. She had her apprehensions and her guilt, but George had never seen conscience-stricken sellers turn from good hard cash. He would make an offer to light up her gray eyes and make her feel almost young again. He felt euphoric. He would open his 1974 Martha’s Vineyard that night. Best of all his cabernets, the one he had been saving. He jingled his keys as he returned to Yorick’s. He could almost taste the deep red, lush Heitz.