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HOLIDAYS

“Working on an article about St. Patrick’s Day and wanting to think outside the corned-beef-and-cabbage, green-food coloring box, thinking also of Maurice and his love of both the Irish and chocolate, I began contemplating a chocolate cake, in which the bitterness that is part of chocolate’s unique seduction, was heightened by the use of Guinness in the batter.”

crackle. His exuberance was, perhaps, just this side of crazy, but whether you were his friend, colleague, subject or daughter, you could not help but be charmed and intoxicated. 
 I could, and someday probably will, write a full-length memoir about Maurice (who, among other things, was Marilyn Monroe’s first biographer).But for the purposes of this story and recipe (my Guinness Extra Stout Chocolate Layer Cake), you need only know the following about my father: 
1. That he adored the Irish, especially Irish writers and especially James Joyce. 
2. That, on no factual basis whatsoever, he considered the Irish one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. 
 3. That he loved eating and, until it got the better of him and he finally quit, drinking. 
4. That after he quit drinking, he developed a ferocious sweet tooth and grew voraciously fond of chocolate. 
And, for the purposes of this story, you need only know the following about me: 
 1.That I write in five different genres, one of them being culinary, and that I sometimes invent or develop recipes. 2. That, from the early ’80s through the late ’90s, I co-owned and ran a country inn, which for six years included a restaurant, in an Ozark mountain village.
 Overlay these two sets of facts, and you can well imagine that my father loved coming to visit us in Arkansas, staying at the inn and eating at its restaurant. His favorite dessert was a densely chocolate-y bread pudding, served dolloped with softly whipped, barely sweetened cream and a squiggle of raspberry sauce.
 The night I first brought it out to him from the kitchen, he removed his glasses so he could examine it closely. Then he plunged his spoon into it and placed it into his mouth. His eyes closed in bliss as

he rolled its velvety custard on his tongue. He swallowed. He opened his eyes, said, “Wow,” and took a second bite. After that, glasses still off, he gazed up at me from the banquette, his pale blue eyes large. “Cres,” he said sincerely, “On a scale of one to 10, I give this a 10,000.” 
 WhenNed and I got back fromLos Angeles, we returned to our then lives as innkeepers/ restaurateurs. I renamed the dessert “Chocolate Bread Pudding Maurice.” The squiggle of raspberry became an “MZ,” piped on quickly, valentine red on the white plate, the scoop of bread pudding, whipped cream, a few fresh berries, a sprig of mint, across from the “MZ.”As the waiters would peel in and out of the kitchen, they’d call out their dessert orders. “I need a Maurice!” “Three Maurices!” Sometimes, hearing his name in this new-old context made me cry, sometimes smile. 
 During this same period, I listened to 28 cassette tapes of various Alcoholics Anonymous talks my father had given. He spoke about how drinking was associated, in his early years, with the mythology of writing; about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and, inevitably, Joyce. “On my first trip to Dublin, I couldn’t wait to have a Guinness. That was what James Joyce drank,” he said in one talk. The night he arrived,he’d left his hotel,gone to the nearest pub, and eagerly ordered one. “It was bitter,” he said, his voice on the tape with the same old crackle, though he himself had vanished from this world. “And at room temperature. I said to the bartender, ‘It’s bitter!’ and he said,‘Sure, and it’s supposed to be.’”Maurice spoke about how he thought at first he’d been too good for AA. “At one meeting I mentioned James Joyce. Someone came up to me after the meeting and said, ‘Yeah, Jimmy Joyce, I know him, lives in the Valley,

photo by Romney Caruso

Besides being my much-loved father, Maurice Zolotow was a show-business biographer. We knew him precisely as Fionnula described him: the life of the party as always, at what turned out to be the last party of his life. So large were his enthusiasms, so deep his engagement, so limitless both his own stories and his interest in other people’s stories, so bracing his laugh, so eccentric his theories (at least some of them), that he gave off a kind of

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