Comfort Food Read Free

already reported quotes, by none other than Gus Simpson. Oh, how she hated that! Being interviewed for one article—which had been published over a year ago—and then finding those same words popping up in every other journalist’s food story.
    The lesson she’d learned: Don’t ever say anything, cutesy or cutting, that you don’t want to hear parroted back to you for the rest of your life.
    Gus thought about crumpling up the paper and tossing it in the bin, but there was no one around to see her dramatics and she always felt that grand behavior wasn’t really worth the energy when there was no one to witness it. Television had trained her well. Instead, she sighed and left her spot at the breakfast bar for more comfortable surroundings. She shooed her white cat, Salt, out of an overstuffed wing chair in the bay window and watched her pad her way over to lie in a ray of sun with Pepper, who was black and had a somewhat pungent attitude.
    Then, coffee in hand, she settled herself down on the sturdy white twill (for Gus had strong faith in her guests’ ability to not spill and in the power of Scotchgard if they did). The large kitchen was a space in which Gus keenly felt a sense of home and was where she did all her important thinking, be it coming up with new recipes or sorting out the endlessly complicated lives of her daughters. The wing chair closest to the French doors, long ago dubbed her “thinking spot” by Aimee, was perfectly positioned to lend a view of the flagstone patio. She could enjoy the color of her divine garden come spring—currently a bit of leftover snow and slushiness from a Westchester winter—as well as have full range of her gleaming kitchen. Sitting in this chair provided what she always called the “viewer’s-eye view” because it was how her home appeared on television.
    Hers was a dream kitchen, with a deep blue Aga stove, a marble-topped baking area, those granite counters, a deep and divided white farmer’s sink, the artfully mismatched cabinets designed to look as though they were pieces of furniture added over time (assuming every flea market and antique shop would miraculously contain wood pieces with precisely the same bun feet and crown molding), and a bank of Sub-Zero freezers and refrigerators along one wall. The pièce de résistance ? The substantial rectangular island, with eight-burner cooktop and raised backsplash, ample counter space, and breakfast bar to one side (though not immediately in front of the cooktop, of course, where it might ruin the camera shot). The island was the part of her kitchen most familiar to her viewers.
    What a great idea it had been to suggest filming at her home when she began her third CookingChannel program, Cooking with Gusto! , in 1999. It certainly cut down commute time and, much more important, had turned the reno into something she could write off. And Gus, for all her professionalsuccess, was a devotee of socking away money. For a rainy day. For her retirement. Which had always seemed way, way off, on account of the fact that she was so tremendously, eternally, divinely young. A someday worth planning for but nothing that seemed as though it was about to arrive soon. She was too busy.
    In the early years when she first started on television, long before the plump paychecks and the merchandising deals, Gus hosted a half-hour programcalled The Lunch Bunch based on her menu at her gourmet spot The Luncheonette. It filmed in a studio in Manhattan and she took the train home to the small two-bedroom home she shared with Aimee and Sabrina. It was the same compact Westchester bungalow that she had initially moved into with Christopher, after they’d returned from their overseas Peace Corps stint and had given up living in Manhattan, back when they were barely married. When he’d raved about every dinner she burned and she made him brown-bag lunches, with sexy little notes tucked inside. When they were too new at life and marriage to