Erica De Mane

My great aunt Gina with her collection of fishing tackle.

Recipe below: Sole à la Bordelaise with White Truffles, by Sister Angelica

This is my mother’s aunt Regina. My great aunt. Quite cute, I think. She was a Franciscan nun, a member of the Poor Clares. The family called her Gina, but her working title was Sister Angelica. I didn’t know her well. We met a few times when I was a maybe eight or nine. At the time she was working at a hardware store in Glen Cove, Long Island. She somehow knew a lot about small metal gadgets, so this job was, as my grandmother said, “a perfect match.” Not long after, when she chose her true calling, Aunt Gina moved south, to Alabama, to the Convent of the Poor Clares. I’m not sure if her entering a convent or going south perplexed my family more, but she seemed happy down there. It was then that we began hearing stories about her new-found interest in fishing, which she was apparently allowed to do as a nun. She said fishing was holy. My family didn’t care all that much about holy. When my grandmother wrote to her she always asked about her social life. I don’t think Grandma quite understood the whole nun concept. She seemed to think Gina would find a nice guy down there and get married. I mean, get real, Grandma. In her replies Aunt Gina wrote almost exclusively about fishing and fishing tackle. She was specific in her ideas about tackle. She was learning to customize the hooks to make them more forgiving. She also wrote about fish cookery.

Considering that she was a nun of an order that prescribed to the simplest life, some of the dishes she mentioned were surprisingly elaborate. Cream sauces, lots of butter, white truffles, Beluga caviar, champagne, chanterelles. She must have had quite a food budget. Her letters were always the same—fishing, fish hooks, fish cooking. My grandmother worried that Gina had been “completely sucked in by God and fish.” “Drowned,” she once said. The Aunt Gina situation started to get on everyone’s nerves. Correspondence slowed.

When I was 14 I went through a transformative cooking experience of my own. I became a baker. I hunkered down in our family kitchen to turn out zucchini bread, ricotta cheesecake, carrot muffins, maple scones, pignoli cookies, sausage lasagna, anchovy pizza, calzones, all to the bewilderment of my parents. They ultimately sent me to a psychiatrist, which was totally unnecessary.

Word of my kitchen “troubles” got around. Evidently my grandmother wrote to Aunt Gina, possibly looking for spiritual guidance. I’m not sure Gina gave any, and considering her own obsessions, I can’t imagine she would have thought there was anything so terrible going on. I had never been happier in my life.

Shorty after that, Gina died, and I received a package from Alabama. What could she have wanted to send me, rosaries, fishing tackle? I unwrapped the bulky package and found inside it five little metal boxes with gold crosses painted on the tops. They contained a decade’s worth of fish recipes, her own recipes, written out on small cards in a tight hand. My parents seemed angry. They thought the gift would only encourage me. The fish focus did make me nervous, and the recipes seemed too complicated. It was strange to me that this Italian-American’s recipes were almost all haute French. There was a card for poached oysters with fennel vinaigrette, and one for something called Lobster Cherbourg, which contained egg yolks and Calvados, and there was sole Meunière with caviar, and scallops with black butter and truffles. I felt I was entering another dimension, a strangely decadent one. On the card for salmon with cream, tarragon, and chanterelles, she had penciled a note that read “Octopus and squid are holy creatures, not to be eaten but to be observed and idolized.” I don’t know where Aunt Gina picked up her pagan leanings, but in terms of fish cooking, she must have had access to Larousse Gastronomique or books equally serious. The recipes were picky and rigid, filled with religious asides, and they all looked fantastically delicious. I realized years later that one of them had been lifted almost intact from the cookbook Vincent Price wrote, which I picked up at a used bookshop when I moved into the city. I recognized it immediately. It was for a whole fish stuffed with vinegar and wine-soaked croutons and then steamed in a dishwasher. She wrote on the card, “Brilliant idea. Saint Zita would approve.” How such an unorthodox book had turned up at a convent was beyond me.

One thing I came to believe as I studied her recipe cards was that she might never have actually cooked any of the dishes. The more I learned about cooking, following recipes, adapting them to my own taste, creating my own, the more these ones seemed vague yet formal and strangely empty, almost as if she was just a translator. And there were no amounts or servings indicated, as if she were cooking in the sky, not for people around a table. Was this just the fantasy life of a mostly silent nun? At first the idea made me sad. What did she do with her life? But as I focused more deeply, I felt her passion, against convent restrictions, pouring out of the courtly little cards. They weren’t empty; they were written in a sort of code. She was doing what she could to create a private intense life. She wasn’t a loser or a nut. She was a virtuoso.

Sole à la Bordelaise with White Truffles, by Sister Angelica

Kill the fish with mercy and fillet it with the utmost neatness, or your dinner will be horribly bitter.

Peel some button mushrooms with a sharp knife until they are snow white. Cook them in a good amount of butter. Do not drop any mushrooms on the floor or there will be hell to pay.

Butter a casserole dish, and sprinkle the bottom with finely chopped shallots and carrots. Do not cut yourself while chopping, since the bleeding will be hard to stop. Season the fillets of sole with salt and pepper, and arrange them in the dish. Add a bouquet garni and a good amount of white Bordeaux wine. Do not use any other type of wine or the fish will disintegrate while cooking.

Poach the fillets until they’re done, and then drain them, retaining the liquid you drain. Arrange the fillets on a serving dish surrounded by the mushrooms. Add 2 tablespoons of demi-glace to the cooking liquid and reduce by half. Add a knob of butter, sieve the cooking liquid, and pour it over the fillets. Shave a good amount of white truffle over the fish.

Serve only to people you hold in high esteem.