Self-Taught Homework #13: You make cheesesteaks for comfort and mini Wellingtons for hubris
As you enter the last traditionally oriented "Self-Taught" week, you make beef and parse out ambition, domesticity, and self-destruction.
After you serve individual Beef Wellingtons on Thursday, your boyfriend closes his eyes. That’s the signal for “this is good.”
When he returns to his body and his eyes open, he says, “I think it’s time for you to make your own recipes.”
You don’t say anything for a second. You’re a rule follower, a syllabus maker. As your knife slices through the pinker round of the small Wellington, you take a second to feel something small. Amazement? Pride? Before this week, would you even be able to imagine you’d be able to cook Beef Wellington, even if cooked as a miniature? Did you even know the elements of what Beef Wellington was?
But how could you plot out your own recipes if there is still so much you have never made before? What about all the technical, layered dishes—curries, coq au vin—that aren’t centered around store-bought pasta and chicken stock?
“I don’t know,” you respond after you take another bite of the meat pastry with a layer of a jammy mushroom sauce. “I think this ended up a little too salty.”
On Tuesday, you and your boyfriend cook cheesesteaks.
He’s one of the most Philadelphia-loving people living outside of the zip code. A few Thursdays ago, you and your boyfriend took a car and drove to Federoff’s. Federoff’s is the only New York spot that Philly people will legitimize. It’s like the Kennedy Center of cheesesteaks. As you pull the wax paper, slick with cheese whiz, from your sandwiches under watercolored illustrations of South Philadelphia neighborhoods, your boyfriend yells that this is it. This was the cheesesteak he’d been missing.
But what if you could make cheesesteaks at home? Isn’t it worth a try to save the trip?
Cheesesteak recipes online feel simple, because it is a simple sandwich of beef and cheese. Most of these sandwiches turn out fine. You personally have been happy ordering them from pizza shops or with sacrilegious produce like lettuce and tomato. This was a few years ago before it seemed to spark disgust in the people you knew.
For a simple sandwich, there isn’t a clear It Factor that garners Pennsylvanian sandwich approval. As one Reddit user on a cheesesteak thread writes, “Do not seek advice from a Philadelphia native. They are too close to the subject and cannot be trusted. The air in the city breeds a kind of 'cheesesteak madness' that deteriorates the brain. It produces good sandwiches, but the side effect is bizarre hyperbolically angry opinions about a variety of potential toppings that are all basically fine.”
If you had to imagine what factors a really Philly person wants, it’s a sturdy hoagie roll, beef strips melted into cheese whiz. Maybe onions, if the customer is a foodie. Cheesesteak places will vend peppers and mushrooms as toppings, but this is a tourist trap from what you can gather.
On a scale of one to Mare of Easttown, you’re an unofficial Philly resident. You don’t root for the Eagles. Even though you don’t keep track of football scores, you stand by your controversy-ridden Commanders and refuse to spend money on the Eagles franchise buying him the one thing he wants every year for Christmas, Eagles gear. That said, all your roads lead back to Pennsylvania. You went to Penn State. Your boyfriend’s friends and family live there. Your mom’s inn now rests an hour outside of the city. You were born in Danville while your dad was in residency at Geisinger. Your grandparents grew up in Scranton, where you still have family in the house where your grandfather grew up. Your summers growing up were at your grandma’s house in the Poconos, twenty minutes outside of Scranton. You have almost as many people in the greater Philly area than you do in your hometown—and with your extended family in D.C. easily stretches above 100 members, it’s amazing any city can even compete. You celebrate the Mummer’s Parade on New Year’s Day most years. You have watched the Super Bowl in a South Philly townhouse and checked for road disruptions after that one terrible call during the Chiefs game. You have a favorite Italian restaurant, a favorite dive bar with a live band, and a given spot for cheesesteak bao buns. You have stayed at your friend’s guest room in Fairmont enough that she started to call it “your room.”
The celebrations happen in Philly, the weddings, the bridal showers, the babies. People plan weekend trips and don’t ask about jobs. You find it an odd city where a historic brick building, a newly constructed apartment building, and a chain-linked lot of yellowing grass sit side by side on a cracked sidewalk with limited parking. But people are a short drive from their families and down for a ski trip, beach trip, or weekend getaway.
You used to live in New York because you thought you would find a job here, thought you might find an external plug of inspiration or community to get you to break through.
Almost five years later, you feel like you’re moving backwards.
Do you care about the wrong things?
You keep searching for the right cheesesteak recipe.
A single comment on a YouTube video convinces you of the recipe’s authority: “As a fat Philadelphian that eats maybe 150-200 cheesesteaks a year for 40 years, this is the best homemade cheesesteak I’ve seen outside of Philly ever.”
You’ll follow this recipe.
By that, you mean you are going to follow the ingredient list and go from there.
While you commute home from work, your boyfriend picks up a pound of ribeye, Italian rolls, and American and provolone cheese. No whiz in Brooklyn supermarkets, it turns out. (Whiz, your boyfriend warns, is not to be confused with Velveeta, but you still wonder if they are the same thing). Nevertheless, he persisted.
You dice two onions and throw them in a skillet with butter, salt, and pepper. The spatula moves through the snowfall of diced onion over and over until the flecks golden, wilt, shrink, then brown. You’re partially distracted as the onions caramelize. Any cheesesteak you’ve bought has translucent, not browned, onions, so this is an improvised choice of yours.
From the breakfast table, your boyfriend takes the ribeye chunk and slices it into thin ribbons, then chops across it horizontally. Together, you talk about your days.
You tell him you’re following his lead for this recipe, because he will have a better idea about what that missing Philly oomph might be, but you also want this to feel like his cheesesteak, his taste of home. You both discuss this cheesesteak before its done like the first attempt of several future tries to find the right mix of elements. Neither of you, it seems, are entirely confident that you can compete with the swollen reputation of a cheesesteak.
Your boyfriend as head chef only asks for things once: “Can you toast the rolls for me? Can you set aside four slices of cheese?”
You move quickly, happy to take direction.
In the short amount of time it takes for you to butter and toast the rolls in a pan, your boyfriend has plated the onions, browned the meat, divided it in half, layered cheese slices, then dressed the sandwich with the set-aside onions.
The buns actually need more time.
Part of it is a miscommunication about the right way to toast them—you suggest a broil, he suggests butter in a nonstick pan. You do that thing you do where you follow a direction, but you kinda have an attitude like, “Oh, well, if you think that’s the best way.”
You’re not used to sharing the kitchen.
But you also don’t mind being told what to do. You just have an opinion when the directions are laid out.
Not your best quality, compromise.
Ultimately, for all your attempts to toast the rolls in a nonstick pan, they were a losing option to start. (Both you and your boyfriend agree that a roll doesn’t break into halves while toasting is good for the future cheesesteaks.) These plastic bag Italian rolls fall apart and drop the fatty, cheesy steak mix onto your plate.
Other than that, these taste different than any cheesesteak you’ve had before.
They’re sweeter, juicier, richer than the dried out steak prepared by the dozens. The American-provolone mix isn’t as aggressive as the orangeness of whiz. The fine chopping of the onions and meat make them melt in your mouth. You scrape a fork against your plate to catch any dropped onion or steak crumb from your lackluster roll.
After the first bite, your boyfriend sits there.
His eyes don’t close (the signal of a slam dunk), but they go wide.
“I can’t believe how good that is,” he said. He had mentally prepared himself for a prototype and landed with a finished product. “That’s so much better than most cheesesteaks.”
It wasn’t the best cheesesteak he ever had, but it was up there. (It was one of your favorites, but you’re not an expert.)
His eyes went wide again. “We have to make this for the fellas,” he said. You all have a beach vacation in August with your Philly friends where people sign up to cook meals for the group. “We should make this,” he suggests. Rolling this recipe out in front of a group of cheesesteak experts was the vote of confidence you needed to know this was that good. This was it.
For Valentine’s Day, you planned to make Beef Wellington, a radicchio Caesar salad, and vanilla crème brûlée in your beloved ramekins. An elegant three-course meal to escape the trap of overpriced fixed menus and wine pairings at a mediocre Manhattan restaurant. (You know it’s a scam because you’ve fallen for it at least once.)
Like most commercialized holidays with a lot of surrounding hype, yours goes sideways quickly.
You imagine yourself cooking Beef Wellington as a grand finale. This is the last week that you’ll make staple-focused, two-person meals to test out for yourself and your boyfriend.
This time the following week, as you plan a dinner party, you’ll be on your own to determine what to eat on a nightly basis, no syllabus to tell you what to do.
This project has given you an anchor in a largely unsteady time. You read your reference books, you attempt something, you get better at it week after week. You never would have learned how to cook without this block of unplanned time, or it would’ve been more difficult to do while working in a corporate environment, pushing yourself for a promotion that’s not guaranteed, hoping to make enough money to enjoy yourself in this city.
During your unemployment, you don’t know who you are, and you don’t necessarily believe in yourself. Why did you come here? What are you doing?
The most difficult recipe doesn’t ask that of you. It gives you the steps, and you can follow it as best you can. If you get off track, you’ll still have something decent.
Nonetheless, you come home from nannying, and you are overwhelmed at your own ambition. Three courses in a few hours? What were you thinking? You’re not Gordon Ramsey over here!
There’s no recipe for your life. You thought that the grades, the work, the internships, the coffees, the overtime would add up to something, but you’re now on an uncharted path. By now, you thought you would be Somewhere, some destination of success lauded by others. You thought New York would be your Somewhere, that something would happen for you here, but everyone else seems to do better elsewhere.
Have you held yourself, and your boyfriend, hostage in one of the most expensive cities because you’re feeling entitled to some recognition in a ruthless city?
Have you ever considered what you actually wanted for your life, or did you only imagine that you wanted a generalized version of Success that feels intertwined with a big-money New York lifestyle?
Between the nannying and the cooking, are you honing your domestic skills toward a life you could at least recognize instead of stepping into the terrifying void of an unchartered creative career?
Could you ever make enough money to validate this choice, or is a stay-at-home mom your best career prospect?
Are you good enough for this?
To cook individual Beef Wellingtons, cosplaying at an elegant version of you that you have never been…it’s too much for you on a Hallmark holiday of jilted expectations.
You dizzy and exhaust yourself. You take a shower at 9 p.m. and throw yourself in bed.
Your boyfriend orders in pizza and brings it up to you. You immediately drop a slice sauce-down on your white duvet, and your boyfriend calls you Mademoiselle Spillsworthy. (That morning, your cat knocked over the coffee mug you put at your feet onto your white rug.) You rewatch Better Call Saul episodes in bed until you fall asleep.
The next night, you get home, and you make the darn mini Wellingtons.
The more sophisticated the techniques, the more attention you give the process. Maybe it’s nerves, the re-reading the recipe over and over to make sure you don’t do a step out of line. This all means you’re leveling up.
You’ve never had Beef Wellington before, so you don’t even know what it’s supposed to taste like. Neither has your boyfriend. A blessing of low expectations on a high-pressure item.
You sear two 2.5 ounce filets, both tied around their short middle with cooking twine. They’re petit, round, and bright red. When you snip the thread, the meat relaxes. You season with salt and pepper and give it a second to breathe and brine while you chop mushrooms and shallots. Then you sear the rounds, letting the top, bottom and sides all brown for a few seconds before putting them in the fridge, forgetting to brush them with Dijon, then pulling them back out to brush the Dijon onto every surface with your fingertips.
The shallot and mushroom chopping is easy. This is the part that you’ve had a lot of practice with over 13 weeks, dicing and chopping and mincing. The shallot sits in a small, green-purple mash while the cremini mushrooms glide under your knife like the softest pillow. When you sautée them in the skillet with the previous night’s ribeye-onion residue, the mushrooms shrivel, deflate, and brown quickly. With some salt and pepper in the skillet, they have a salty char to them. They dissolve into each other until it’s hard to tell the shallots from the mushrooms.
By now, you’re less reverent with directions. The red wine, heavy cream, honey, and herbs are thrown in hastily without measuring. (The red wine, the only item you measure into a little 1/4 cup, spills onto the counter, requiring an extra dash into the duxelle to balance it out.)
This mushroom duxelle mix sends your mouth dancing. It’s sweet and delicious enough to want it just on toast. Rivaling the sweetness and texture of a grape jelly, the mushrooms and shallots deepen the flavor by creating an umami flavor. When you lay out the puff pastry, you make a small circle of mushroom duxelle and place the chilled beef on top, and you find yourself pleased, then nervous, to wrap this up.
You aren’t focusing on the other dishes tonight. You’re not trying a salad and a dessert. You want to pick and choose one element, and you want to do it right. You’ve been no good when faced with all the options, it sends your head spinning. Only one item, and that’s it.
Eventually, you gather the puff pastry on top of the filet like a ponytail and chop off the extra pieces. You pinch the seams together, flip it, and bake it. Your living room smells sweet, and you hope that the zebra striping on the pastry dough doesn’t mean it’s stretched to its breaking point. You hope it will hold long enough to last the bake.
And it does.
Over the weekend, you’re back in State College and eating a fat burger at The Field for your brother’s birthday. It’s THON weekend for those who celebrate, and your sister is on hour 20 without sleep to raise money for pediatric cancer research. She is not at the dinner, but she has no service in the basketball arena where they house the dancers, so she doesn’t have to know.
As you drive around State College, you remember the year your friends danced in THON, and you were in Los Angeles with your unpaid internships. You felt on the cusp of something. That college feeling of impossible impossibility. No hurdles exist that can’t be surmounted. Fundraising goals, dream jobs, a full 46 hours without sleep: anything can be done.
Your friends took you to The Field in the winter of 2017 as a decoy from a surprise party in your apartment, a goodbye send-off. There were the same decadent milkshakes with extra whipped cream and caramel sauce etched on the side of a Mason jar, and when you listen to your brother talk about his upcoming musicals and his rehearsal schedule—which will continue on his birthday next Sunday—you remember how it felt to hold everything all in your hands at once. Friends, goals, parties, classes could all fit into one place, one zip code. How glorious that was, how delicious to be in a town where the server hands your brother his burger with a pink candle struck through the bun, lit with a handheld blowtorch.
The Wagyu with caramelized onions you ordered sends you into a small food coma, and the pierogi burger makes your boyfriend’s stomach feel weird.
You go to a hotel room your boyfriend ordered with his tax refund and Chase points five minutes outside of the college town you know, and you feel like you’re in a new world. This is a building you’ve never seen before despite knowing most other businesses in town, at least if they weren’t demolished in the last five years. You sleep to Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives on Food Network after your boyfriend says that he made the same types of meatballs with his old Hello Fresh subscription as this particular diner/drive-in/dive, and Guy drives off in a red convertible to pass the spotlight to another small town cooking great things.
Wait….no week dedicated to crème brûlée?
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