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Mary Sue Milliken: 'Early Riser'

For over two decades, Mary Sue Milliken and her business partner Susan Feniger have transformed street foods and comfort foods into critically acclaimed cuisine and become some of the country's foremost authorities on the Latin kitchen. Today, they own the popular Border Grill restaurants in Santa Monica and Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay, and Ciudad restaurant in Downtown L.A. They have authored five cookbooks and appeared in 396 episodes of their television programs Too Hot Tamales and Tamales World Tour for the Food Network.

Back before I hooked up with Susan Feniger, my partner in crime at the old City Restaurant, Border Grill, and Ciudad, I corralled various cousins for my culinary adventures. In fact some of my earliest cooking triumphs were the result of lazy, restless summers at a resort in Michigan, where my grandparents lived and much of our extended family rented holiday cottages.

My mom and dad would come up some weekends, aunts and uncles would come up others, but most of the time we cousins were under our own supervision, running wild, free to get ourselves into (and out of) all kinds of trouble.

My cousin Carol and I often babysat her youngest brother, Jimmy, who had a fiery temper and a penchant for throwing tantrums. At the beginning of one summer, when he was still too young to speak, we gave him a pile of carrot sticks in an effort to get him to stop yelling. They seemed to do the trick—until one got stuck up his nose and the end broke off. We tried to get it out, but it was unreachable. Not even the village pediatrician could get it to budge, but he pronounced it harmless, and eventually we all forgot about it. Then, during an evening downpour after a big Labor Day weenie roast, as we all crowded onto the porch swing watching the thunder and lightning, something made Jimmy howl with laughter. And out popped that carrot looking as fresh as the day it got stuck. No one has yet to come up with an explanation for that perfectly preserved carrot that lived in my cousin’s nose for nine weeks.

We were always looking for something to occupy ourselves, and one afternoon we resorted to flipping through copies of one of our mothers’ magazines -- maybe it was Redbook, or Ladies’ Home Journal -- and we were intrigued when we came across a recipe for something called "apricot coffee cake." I was in fourth grade at the time and my cousin was just a year older than me, so neither of us had cooked much more than Bisquick pancakes at that point in our lives. We had never drunk coffee, and I know that I had certainly never eaten coffee cake before. I felt lucky when I got my hands on a doughnut as a kid, or if my aunt splurged on a tube of Pillsbury Poppin’ Fresh cinnamon rolls.

I’d never been drawn in by a recipe in one of my mom’s magazines before, but this one seemed so preposterous that my cousin and I couldn’t help but read it again and again. It sounded like instructions to a science experiment. There were lots of precise measurements -- the dough, the waxed paper, softened butter -- so we got out a ruler and tried to figure out what the thing would look like. Then there were strange instructions for enclosing the butter, chilling, rolling, folding again and again -- each time with hours in between when you were supposed to wait and let the dough "rest," whatever that meant. Every step of the way, the recipe just got more complicated.

My curiosity was piqued, big time. When we finally looked up from the pages of the magazine the decision had been made. "We gotta do it," I said, and we were off. We jumped on our bicycles -- somehow I always forgot to hurry to the bike rack, which meant that I ended up on the blue black, fat-tired clunker we had nicknamed The Bruise. We pedaled our way over to the local A & P supermarket, me arriving hotter, sweatier, and several minutes after Carol. And then we started shopping, going up and down the aisles calling out to each other. Butter, check. Flour, check. Sugar, check. Yeast, check. Dried apricots, check. Soon we had everything we needed to make the coffee cake -- not that we knew exactly what that was.

Despite the fact that we had no idea what we were doing, we did have the sense to follow the directions -- to the letter, word for word. Mixing and kneading, rising, chilling, softening, smearing, we approached every detail with diligence and precision, rereading each step of the recipe to make sure we’d get it right.

A yeasted, butter-rich Danish dough, which is what we were making, is a day-long task. But since we were baking on impulse, we got a late afternoon start on the dough. That meant that the final rising stage when the yeast worked its magic ended at the less than convenient time of four a.m. The two of us were deathly afraid that any deviation from the rigid rules of the recipe would result in disaster, however, so we set our alarm clock for the middle of the night and tried to get a couple of hours of sleep.

Of course, being preteen girls embroiled in an exciting adventure, we could barely keep our eyes shut. I was afraid the alarm wouldn’t wake me and we’d already spent so much time and energy on this darn cake that I was determined to see it through successfully. This was no Betty Crocker mix we’d spent twenty minutes on; it was a significant investment of time and concentration. I guess that’s why we were up long before the alarm went off and caught our older siblings sneaking tipsily up the secret pine stairway to the bedroom window after a forbidden teen beach party. This observation would come in handy a few years down the road -- but on that night we just hurried past them, rubbing our eyes. We were on a mission to see what this wacky concoction was going to look like and how it would taste. At four a.m. on the button, we did the finger test and the dough held the print -- telling us it was ready.

Then came the moment of truth: we popped our creation into the (preheated, exactly, of course) oven, sat in front of it in wooden chairs, and watched the foggy window like a TV set, waiting….

Much to our surprise, out came a beautiful, burnished cake.

It was perfection, buttery layer upon buttery layer of delicate dough; it rose up big and tall and flaky. I remember being absolutely blown away that I had made this thing, this coffee cake. It was so complicated, but it came out right. And that was it: I was crazy about cooking from that moment on. My cousin and I baked for every bake sale and cakewalk after that. We cooked for the family -- our older siblings couldn’t get enough of our buttery cakes in the mornings when they were nursing hangovers. We cooked every chance we got.

One year, when I was about twelve, Carol and I treated her parents to a formal anniversary dinner. We made Cornish game hens and wild rice, we got dressed up and recruited some boys and taught them how to be waiters and had them hold folded towels over their arms -- it was very refined. For dessert we were serving the pièce de résistance: cherries jubilee. But at the moment before the boys were to carry it, aflame and glorious, to the dinner table, we hit a snag. We couldn’t get the thing to light. Not to save our lives. We kept bringing the matches close to the alcohol on the plate but as soon as we’d get the match really close we’d jerk our heads back -- we had read the warning in the recipe and we didn’t want to singe our eyelashes. Unfortunately, every time the match got close it would drown in the alcohol and extinguish. (We didn’t know then that you have to warm alcohol a little to get it volatile enough to catch fire, though that’s the sort of thing you only need to learn once.)

We went through an entire box of kitchen matches trying to get that thing lit, while Gammie and Gampie, Uncle Al and Auntie Frill waited patiently. By the time we gave up, we had a big pile of ash and sulfur and crepes and cherries and kirsch. I’m certain the dessert had more sulfur flavor from the matches than the taste of cherries.

Setbacks like those less-than-jubilant cherry crepes didn’t deter me. It was one of dozens of lessons I’ve learned from failures, like why not to drive all night with your cousin’s wedding cake in the back seat of your Maverick while you’re flicking ashes from your Newports out the window; unless you want to end up with a gray-speckled cake and have to make new buttercream in a church basement with only a bowl and a whisk -- after which the stress of the cake repair will cause you to sleep through the entire ceremony and drink too much at the reception. But that’s another story.

Through it all, I remained obsessed. I took all the home ec classes I could -- there weren’t any cooking schools for kids back then. I worked in a doughnut shop and a pizza joint and took extra classes so I could get out of high school early. I left Michigan for Chicago where I enrolled in chef school at seventeen.

The first time we made Danish dough in pastry class, a light bulb went off in my head. I realized I had made it before, though it took me a second to figure out when. And then that wacky day and night that my cousin and I spent slaving over that coffee cake came rushing back to me: it was my first kitchen triumph!

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