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more crunchy surface and almost no mushy interior.
    POTATO CAKE
    For a potato cake, peel and shred three pounds of all-purpose potatoes on the coarse side of a four-sided grater, then vigorously twist the shredded potatoes in a clean white towel to squeeze the water out. Barely film a nine-inch steel or well-seasoned cast-iron pan with vegetable oil. Heat the oil almost to smoking, then, with tongs and a spatula,pile the potatoes neatly in the pan or skillet, forming a cake about a half-inch thick. The potatoes will shrink as their water evaporates. Shake the pan once or twice to loosen the potato cake; lower the flame so that the bottom won’t burn before the center cooks. Loosen the bottom, if necessary, with a spatula. When the bottom forms a brown crust, and before it blackens, remove the pan from the flame, hold a plate tightly over the potatoes, and invert the pan, pouring off any excess oil. Then replace the potatoes in the pan, brown side up, and brown the other side slowly, to be sure the inside cooks. If all goes well, the outside will be crisp and the inside creamy. You can add snipped chives, green onion, grated nutmeg, salt, pepper, and/or whatever else pleases you to the shredded potatoes before you cook them.
    There are lots of other ways to fry potatoes as cakes or hash browns—for example, by using day-old mashed or baked potatoes, or raw potatoes shredded on a mandoline or diced, but the basic procedure is the same. Unless they have already been mashed or baked and are therefore dry, remove as much water as possible, heat a little oil or butter or a combination in a smooth pan, and cook them slowly with your choice of extras. Then turn them over and brown the other side. For hash browns, don’t form a cake but hash them up, flipping or tossing them with a spatula as they brown.
    The restaurant where I worked that summer was an ambitious Howard Johnson franchise with a full diningroom, table linens, and a bar opening onto an outdoor dance floor under a canopy with live music on weekends. That first postwar summer, I came of age, believing along with everyone else that we had won the war to end all wars and looking forward to a peaceful future in the best of all possible countries under the world’s wisest rulers. I had learned the rudiments of a craft that I have never forgotten and, even more important, learned to respect the skills and the wisdom of my fellow workers—even those who plundered the boss’s bar—who showed me, in the days when stainless steel couldn’t hold an edge, how to care for my carbon-steel knives, which would turn black at the merest hint of acid and rusted in the humid kitchen. I learned that summer to make emulsions, to reduce veal stock for demi-glace, to sear and sauté fish and meat without having it stick in the days before Teflon, to use arrowroot to keep a blueberry pie from leaking without making it gummy, and to test a steak for doneness with my thumb until, by the end of summer, I could tell just by looking when a steak was rare, medium, or well. At midnight, after work, the cooks and waitresses would drive down with a case of beer to the stone breakwater at Hyannisport to cool off, and when the nights were too hot for us to sleep indoors we would spend the night on the flat rocks until awakened by the dawn. I also fell in love that summer, with a witty girl whose picture was on the cover of the August issue of the
Woman’s Home Companion,
and wonder still from time to time what became of her.

FOUR
LUNCH IN A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
    F or much of my life, I worked in the book-publishing business, mostly as editorial director at Random House, content to let others do the writing while I served them as banker, midwife, valet, and press agent. I also published a number of cookbooks by famous chefs and wrote several articles on cooking for various magazines. This probably explains why my friend Billy Norwich, who was working at
The New York Times,
called me in the