Essay and recipe: Grilled Radicchio and goat cheese salad

There is some food you cook from memory and some food you cook for memory.

The other night, I made grilled radicchio with goat cheese to remember my father. Not the father of the last few years, clawing at what remained of his dreams, making desperate phone calls from an over leveraged house, talking of lawyers and smelling of smoke, his legs growing skinner by the day. No, I made it to remember the man who years earlier had answered his door at 5 a.m. to find me standing there, fresh off the road and looking for a place to crash.

I was 17, a high school graduate and not much else. I’d gotten in my little red Honda Civic in New York and found myself some three weeks later pulling into pre-dawn LA. The light was already tinged with pink and my father was the only person I knew in town. It didn’t occur to me to call. I showed up and knocked, and he answered. I stayed for three months, got a job as a cocktail waitress in a corset and flirted with the surfer boys at the local fish shop where my father would go most days to find something for the grill. At night, dad would change into his Japanese bathrobe, pour himself a large glass of red wine and start making dinner sometime around 7 or 8 pm.

Dinner was not something you could rush. There was always music and sometimes all conversation would have to stop mid-word if Billie hit a particularly sweet note or Miles was ready to bruise your mind. Dad would stand, wine glass in one hand, the other set of fingers folding slowly into a white-knuckled fist, his face scrunching until his teeth bared. His eyes squeezed shut. “Yeeeeeessss,” he’d say, holding himself in the moment until it passed. Then his body would unfold and he’d flip the olive-oil-and-lemon-marinated shark steaks or the long lines of eggplant and ask, “What were you saying?”

Preparing dinner would take a long, long time.

There are two dishes that stay with me from this time. The first, we had only once and I’ve never had a meal like it since. My father made grilled langoustines, gently marinated in his standard olive oil and lemon and pepper. He described them as soft-shell lobsters and we ate them, skin on, dripping and charred, and, as always in my father’s house, when there was no company, we used our hands. The memory is like that of a chance encounter with a beautiful man in a foreign country. Vivid, but unrepeatable.

The second dish, which he made several times, was roasted radicchio with goat cheese. I don’t have a clear memory of how he made it, but I think he may have used his toaster oven. I do remember the results. A deep purple leaf wilted with heat and olive oil, white veins leading to a cupped center that had grown translucent with the roasting. At the center of the cup was a small mound of goat cheese, which was warm and soft, but not melted. He would drizzle the whole thing with a little bit of balsamic vinegar and top it with fresh thyme and black pepper. Life. That’s what it tasted like. Sweet and bitter, tangy and smooth, with a little bit of funk thrown in.

Those three months in LA were an oasis in an oft-stormy relationship. They were also a time when my father was full of dreams not yet unrealized, promises not yet broken.

I wanted to taste that memory.

I decided to grill the radicchio and served the goat cheese cold on top, mostly because I figured my kids might like it better that way. I served it with grilled porgy marinated in olive oil, lemon and pepper. I added gray salt, even though my father never added salt to anything. On the side, I made a Boston lettuce and basil salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

I forgot to drizzle the vinegar on the radicchio and the flavor was missing something when I took the first bite. So I rolled up a piece of the radicchio with the goat cheese inside and then took a piece of the Boston lettuce from the salad and wrapped it around the roll, like a Vietnamese lettuce wrap. Sweet and bitter, tangy and smooth, with just the right amount of funk. And I ate it with my hands.