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HOLIDAYS
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
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,
“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.”
photo by
Romney Caruso