Eat, Memory

At the lowest point of my life, I was cooking all the time. Normally, I cook most when I'm feeling contented, say, when the writing is going decently well and the family is happy. But during the fall of 1990, I was cooking and miserable.

I was 25 years old, sharing an apartment in Manhattan; two years earlier I had quit a first job on Wall Street to try to become a novelist, and had a lot of nothing to show for it, 500 pages of a book that was terribly clever and impressive but compelled no one. I had run through my savings and was guiltily living on the largess of my parents, who were paying the whole of the mortgage and maintenance on the co-op we had originally purchased ''together'' when I signed on for the fancy position.

For food and drink while I was writing the Great Novel, I took on occasional jobs, writing articles for a free downtown newspaper, temping as a secretary for the dean at a fashion school, playing production assistant on modeling shoots. I couldn't afford taking dates out to restaurants, so I made precious, odd-ingredient dinners, overplaying my hand as the struggling but resourceful artist. But on top of all that -- which by most lights should only be a welcome period of youthful, romantic folly and self-inflicted toil -- my mother was enduring stomach cancer.

The one good thing was that I was able to go up to Syracuse to see her whenever I wanted, or was needed; mostly what I'd do was take care of the house, the cleaning and cooking. ''You should be at your desk, not in the kitchen,'' my mother would say, but I knew better; not writing was a relief. I'd prepare the Korean dishes she always made, the scallion pancakes and clam-and-spinach soup and broiled porgies and an assortment of banchan -- side dishes of vegetables and savories.

I was cooking well, strangely well, though the better a dish turned out, the more somber our mood grew. My mother was no longer really eating then. But what else was there to do? I was cooking for my father, who came home each night with fresh hope on his face that would soon give way to an epochal weariness, and for myself, to keep moving as much as I could and to feed my own brutally keen hunger. And I think now that I was cooking most of all for my mother, who would take a scant taste of my offerings, for a salve, for a memory.

When I'd return to New York, a hollowed-out feeling would bloom in my gut. I was working like a fiend, trying to chip away at the homely rock of my novel but succeeding only in making it smaller and more misshapen than it already was. The only solace of the day was to make food -- the basic things, soups, simple pastas and bread.

I'd get up and start the yeast and then sit down to my work and then take breaks to punch down the rising dough. By midday there would be some passable baguettes that my roommate and I would eat with apple butter, and later, after I finally depleted myself with the writing, I'd wander down First Avenue and try to buy dinner provisions for less than $10, including a very cheap bottle of wine, some tawny vin de pays from the closeout bin, the dregs of which I'd use for an ersatz puttanesca sauce the next day, substituting green olives for the capers, which seemed, like everything else in my life, much too dear.

Those days ran into one another, the dreary rhythm broken only by a call one evening: my father saying in a lean, quiet voice that perhaps now was a good time to return home. I was just finishing the last revisions on the novel, so I planned to print out the book, send it off to an editor and take the train upstate. Printing hundreds of pages took a long time with a daisy-wheel printer, literally half a day, and I passed the time by renting a few movies I wanted to see, ''Tampopo'' and ''Babette's Feast.'' ''Tampopo,'' of course, is the great Japanese noodle-soup Western, hilarious and delectable and full of a certain sorrowful beauty for the pleasures of eating, but it was ''Babette's Feast'' that stopped my heart.

The film is about a Parisian chef named Babette who escapes the Communard uprising of 1871 and lives for 14 years in the harsh Jutland region of Denmark, where she has been given refuge by a pair of kind spinsters who head a religious sect in their bleak seaside village. The sisters, we learn, have sacrificed their early talents and hopes -- one for singing, the other a true love -- for the sake of sustaining their father's sect. Babette submerges her culinary talents -- she is one of the great chefs of Paris -- while living with them, contenting herself with cooking endless piles of fish.

But when she hits the lottery, she decides to repay their kindness with a seven-course meal for the sect members, who giddily delight in the exquisite richness of the caille en sarcophage and baba au rhum, and even ask for second glasses of the ''lemonade,'' which is in fact Champagne. The lifeblood rises in their faces and, we think, in their hearts too. When the sisters realize that Babette has spent all her money on this one meal, they ask her how she will possibly get by now, how she will ever be able to return someday to Paris. Babette answers that she will manage, and utters, with a solemn resolve, ''An artist is never poor.''

I broke down at that moment, the only time I've cried because of a movie, the tears and sobs coming so hard that finally I had to use the sofa pillow to quell myself. And although I would relinquish most everything to report that it went well afterward, that I returned home and my mother miraculously recovered and is still savoring the days, I cannot. It would prove to be her last season, her last Thanksgiving and Christmas. That novel was gently but firmly rejected. It is in most every measure gone. And yet, what remains is the notion -- no, the insistence that overwhelmed me then: one ought never give up. Never. Even when you've lost all.

Free Ranging

Each year, American cooks are confronted with a staggering array of new cookbooks, equipment, techniques and ingredients. In Free Ranging, I will seek out the most provocative and most useful among these new ideas.

This week's focus is an ingredient, salt-packed capers, and a technique, frying them. Salt-packed capers have become a growing presence in grocery stores. They tend to be larger than capers cured in vinegar and brine, more like the flower buds that they are, and pleasingly vegetal in flavor. When you fry them in olive oil, the oil intensifies their saltiness and turns their outer leaves into a crisp shell, creating delicious crunchy bits that can be used as both seasoning and texture.

You may use capers in vinegar for frying, but they don't open up quite as much, and I have found that much of the flavor associated with these capers comes from the vinegar in which they are preserved. Whichever capers you choose, if you're frying them, pat them dry completely so they don't sputter when they hit the hot oil.

Use them sprinkled liberally over a platter of vitello tonnato, or in a Caesar salad. Toss them with fried calamari, fried chicken and breaded veal escalopes. Here, they stud fillets of pan-roasted striped bass, and in the salad that follows, the crisp, salty capers play against the sweetness of beets.

Pan-Roasted Striped Bass With Fried Capers
[serves 4]
2 tablespoons salt-packed or brined capers
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for frying
1 clove garlic, crushed
4 fillets striped bass (about 2 pounds)
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper
1 lemon, cut into wedges.

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Soak the salt-packed capers for 10 minutes, drain, rinse, then thoroughly pat dry. (If using brined capers, drain them and pat dry.) Pour 1/2 inch olive oil into a small saucepan and place over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot enough to toast a bread crumb in 30 seconds, add the capers. Be careful, the oil may sputter. Fry until the capers fluff up and begin to brown on the edges, 30 to 60 seconds. Drain the capers on a paper towel.

2. Pour the remaining 2 tablespoons oil in a large nonstick saute pan. Place over medium-high heat and add the garlic clove. Season the fish with salt and pepper. When the garlic bubbles on the edges, lay the fish in the pan, skin side down. Saute until browned on the bottom, 4 to 5 minutes, then put the pan in the oven and roast until the fish is just cooked through, 5 to 8 minutes.

3. Set a fillet on each of 4 plates. Sprinkle the fried capers over the fillets and serve with wedges of lemon.

Beet Salad With Horseradish and Fried Capers
[serves 4]
1 1/2 pounds small beets, trimmed and scrubbed
1/4 cup olive oil, plus more for beets and frying capers
2 tablespoons salt-packed or brined capers
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 1/2 tablespoons horseradish, more to taste
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon sour cream
Sea salt to taste
1 clove garlic, crushed.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place beets on half of a large piece of aluminum foil. Drizzle with a tablespoon of olive oil. Fold the foil and seal the edges. Lay package on a baking sheet and place it in the oven. Roast until beets are tender, 45 to 60 minutes. (Test by poking a fork through the foil into a beet.) Remove from the oven. Be careful when opening the foil; steam will race out. While still warm, peel beets, then slice into wedges and place in a bowl.

2. Soak salt-packed capers for 10 minutes, drain, rinse, then pat dry. (If using brined capers, drain and pat dry.) Pour 1/2 inch olive oil into a small saucepan over medium-high heat. When oil is hot enough to toast a bread crumb in 30 seconds, add capers. Be careful; oil may sputter. Fry until capers fluff and begin to brown on edges, 30 to 60 seconds. Drain on paper towels.

3. In a small bowl, whisk together mustard, horseradish and vinegar. Whisk in 1/4 cup oil, followed by sour cream. Pour half the dressing over beets; mix. Taste, adding more dressing or salt, if needed. Rub a platter with crushed garlic, then spoon on beets and sprinkle with fried capers.