It’s a long one today, folks, a VERY long one, and a nostalgic one at that! Buckle up or hit delete and check back in next week…I know it is A LOT of prose for a Sunday morning, but I couldn’t help myself. And this is the edited version! Food brings me so much joy: cooking, as an outlet for creativity, and dining, as a source of pleasure. For some reason, recently I have been thinking a lot about the people who particularly stand out on my food journey and about what they have brought into my life; how each of them has contributed to this passion of mine in a very different way.
Obviously, first and foremost, there is my mother, still the first person today with whom I will share a recipe or ask to taste test something that I made and report back. I enjoy discussing recipes and ingredients with her. Doing this with her is probably the reason why I always try to take a dish apart in my mouth, in the same way that other people can distill a musical composition into individual notes. She also instilled in me the importance of the varied family dinner, and her dedication in providing her family with a proper multi-course meal pretty much every night guided my wish to do so for my child. She is also responsible for expanding my culinary horizons by introducing me to my first European temple of gastronomy and taking me to Vienne in France when I was 18, for the sole purpose of eating at La Pyramide, Fernand Point’s world-famous restaurant, the world’s oldest three-star establishment.
The setting was lovely, the service divine, the food and wine exquisite. The evening was made further memorable when Madame Point, alerted by her staff to the teenage American sampling everything that wasn’t nailed down and asking a myriad of questions about the food and service, invited me into the kitchen and let me poke around, handed me spoons to stick into all the pots and pans and explained what I was tasting, and allowed me to bother the exceedingly busy kitchen brigade with questions. I never had the opportunity to go back and thank Madame Point for turning an interest into an obsession as she died three years after I met her, but I will always remember her as a true exemplar of the tenets of hospitality. I believe that I still thank my mother periodically for introducing me to the joys of cooking and eating and if I haven’t recently, I do now.
Next comes my maternal grandmother. She was a brilliant instinctive cook who cooked simple food, the kind of fearless cooking where there is no place to hide, which taught me the importance of quality of ingredients. From her I also learned how to make bread and the fluffiest of Yorkshire puddings. Watching her I understood alchemy; how a simple garden-fresh zucchini for example, with a knob of butter, an egg and a sprinkling of salt could, with the proper cooking methods and application of heat, become a sum greater than its parts. The zucchini was cooked, covered, slowly and deliberately in the butter and its own juices, the egg was poached in a vortex of water, and then gently placed over the delicate vegetable, its yolk primed to ooze down over the dish as soon as a knife was applied by the eager diner (me). She was also a fabulous dessert-maker (a skill which I sadly did not inherit). I remember, when I was about ten, trying to master piping so as to decorate a cake, and watching in wonder (through copious tears, I will admit), as, without missing a beat, she turned my unfortunate squirt of bird poo green icing across the very middle of the cake surface into the stem for a fantabulous collection of intricate frosting flowers.
My husband, up until his death, was a dedicated foodie and from him I learned both how much fun eating out could be and how gratifying it was to cook for someone who was really appreciative of what was being served and always thanked and discussed what had been made for him. He turned every meal into a celebratory occasion: a random dinner at home became an event through the choice of a special wine from his collection, dinner out became an adventure through the discovery of a new off the beaten track hole-in-the-wall restaurant with incredible food, or a sheer delight when he would surprise me with a reservation at one of Paris’ gastronomic meccas, just because it was Tuesday. He loved to eat, and he loved to talk about food, often discussing the next meal he planned on having as he was eating. He was larger than life, and very French, and his party trick was to “sabrer le Champagne”, which essentially is to cut the top off a Champagne bottle with a saber, bypassing the cork, and getting it just right so that the Champagne doesn’t go all over the place, but fizzes celebratorily into the waiting glasses amongst “ooohs” and “aaahs”. Even when he was at his sickest from chemo, he could usually muster some vestige of gustatory enthusiasm from somewhere, even if it were only for a few bites of food, and I remember making a lot of rustic apple galettes in his final months as these miraculously somehow always stayed down.
After his death I ended up, through a series of chance encounters, working for Chef Daniel Boulud. I had never realized how much happens in a gastronomic restaurant that has nothing to do with cooking – from PR to administration and human resources – and soon realized that I had also been clueless when it came to how much work went into all of the delightful culinary creations I had eaten as a dedicated diner.
The intense advance prep work so that dishes could be cooked and plated within a reasonable time during service, the planning, the huge stock pots of bones for stock, the dismembering of entire animal carcasses into portions, the time consuming task of picking over all the herbs needed for the day (always assigned to the lowest cook in the kitchen hierarchy), the busy pastry commis and sous chefs mixing, baking and decorating all day to be ready for dinner, the bakery brigade making hundreds of rolls and loafs of bread and canapes related doughs each day, the constant washing and polishing, the fact that there was an actual person, my friend Pascal Vittu, who dedicated a great deal of his time to making sure that all the cheeses for the cheese cart were exactly as ripe and delicious as they could be, and the myriad of tasks undertaken by the unsung heroes of the restaurant industry -- from the dishwashers to the bus boys to the team who placed food orders, and unpacked all the provisions for the day, and made the back of the restaurant function like clockwork. It was such a delight for me to watch - everyone working in tandem with the only goal of ensuring that beautifully presented, delicious food was delivered by courteous and attentive waitstaff to crisp white tablecloth covered tables dressed with polished glasses and shining silverware, in what was, to all intents and purposes, our shrine to the gods of the culinary arts, namely the flower and candle filled dining room.
One of the great perks of my job was that I could order something from the menu for lunch each day and, apart from a two-month period where one of the young chefs assigned to cook my lunch discovered that I hated olives and decided to add a sliver to each of the dishes he cooked for me, I really enjoyed that daily bonus. I also, except for the day when he hid the olive sliver in the border design of my plate, found and brought the offending piece of the Olea Europaea back to him after each lunch.
Another huge benefit of working in the restaurant industry was my introduction to many of the city’s chefs, which begat reservations and entrée to all of Manhattan’s top eateries as well as friendships with some of these chefs and also front of house staff. One of these was with Jean Luc LeDu, the sommelier at Daniel, whose encyclopedic knowledge of wine and his capacity to remember every single vintage he had ever drunk and exactly what it tasted like made for fascinating conversations and wine tastings. In particular, a brilliant meal at the legendary and much regretted Veritas restaurant stays with me, where Jean Luc ordered a different glass of wine for each of our eight courses and, while I distinctly remember the sensation of not being able to feel my face part way through the meal due to the abundance of spirits, I also remember the lovely food and perfect wine pairings that enhanced the meal very well. Knowing him made me think a lot more about wine and the huge part it played in the dining experience.
Sharing an office with Daniel further expanded my horizons because I could listen to all the professional food talk and personalize his constructive criticism of the dishes that were brought for him to sample by applying them to my own cooking at home. This eventually taught me that I had a long way to go on my culinary journey. I remember the pastry chef bringing two dishes of an elaborate tropical fruit sorbet that he was working on for us to taste. As I tasted mine, I tried to follow the verbal notes that Daniel was making to the chef via my tongue. Though my palate was pretty developed for an amateur cook, at least enough so that I could find a sliver of olive in any dish, there were so many ingredients that he could single out as individual components that I could not taste that I lost my confidence and did not use my kitchen for nearly six months after that, except to make morning coffee.
Eventually this annoyed me, so I invited Daniel and his wife (who privately told me that she thought I was crazy) to Sunday lunch, along with a group of non-culinary industry friends who I knew would be supportive with delightful conversation if my food flopped. When Daniel disappeared after the meal, I was thrilled to find him in the kitchen, carving knife in hand, slicing thin pieces from the leftover pork roast and obviously enjoying them. I did a little jig on the spot, sing-songing “I can cook, I can cook” much to his bemusement, and resumed cooking and experimenting the next day. I have never looked back.
L.’s dad is a chef and, though I am not sure that he expanded my culinary horizons in any way, he certainly kept me within the industry that I still love so much, long after I was no longer a part of it, with continued access to the inner workings of a variety of restaurants. His dishes are very pretty, and I learned a lot from him about the visual pleasures of dining and the art of plating. He also gave me L., my greatest culinary companion yet.
L. has been a dream, always up for any new taste sensation or dining experience. I will always remember the look of pure astonishment on his face the first time he was given solid food at four months, and how – at around the same time when we gave him a tiny taste of ice cream – his whole face lit up with the joy of baby’s first sugar, like someone has switched on a light. I also, surprisingly proudly considering his many other more important accomplishments, remember him, age three or four, standing with his mouth open, trembling, until the last vestiges of red Jell-o that he had been given to taste fell from his mouth so noxious did he find its taste.
Very early on L. liked capers, tiny cornichons, anchovies and sucking on lime quarters – all strong flavors that children typically eschew. He also appreciated all the weird textures in Asian food that I knew from my childhood and mostly like, but which are not necessarily for the faint hearted. Barring a trying period when he was around three and realized that the only thing that I could not control in his life was what he put in his mouth and he triumphantly put himself on a diet consisting of a very limited array of dishes until the “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face” portion of his experiment dawned on him, L. has always tasted everything except my recent tofu scramble with an open mind, and always had a very definite why to accompany how he felt about what he had just eaten, good or bad.
He was a very even-tempered child, so I invested in a portable fold-away highchair that screwed on to any restaurant table. By the time he was two, he had eaten at many of New York’s top restaurants, with a marked penchant for the food at Nobu, a preference that has stayed with him to this day, with sushi being among his favorite foods. When we lived at the Savoy, where his dad was the executive chef, and therefore ate all our meals there, L.’s fondness for smoked salmon was so legendary that the hotel’s fish purveyor gave him an entire side of it for his third birthday, which we then had to hide and ration since it was all he wanted. It has been a true pleasure to introduce L. to all manner of diverse cuisines, to plan, eat and discuss a myriad of restaurant meals with him, to have him as a dinner conversationalist across any table, and to cook for him near daily, even if his constructive criticism of my cooking sometimes makes me want to smack him.
Hopefully one day, should he make a similar list to the one that I have just forced you to endure, I will got to the top of it and, when he is out on his own and cooking, he will seek to reproduce dishes that I have cooked for him over the years, some of which I have documented in this blog. I hope that he will remember little cook’s tips that I have shared en passant. Tomato sauce made with canned tomatoes needs a drizzle of Worcestershire and a pinch of cinnamon to best bring out the fruit’s flavor, whereas sauce made from fresh tomatoes benefits from a judicious splash of fish sauce, preferably Red Boat brand. You don’t salt a dish once, but a little bit throughout, at various strategic points. If you add herbs to a dish while cooking it, you should reserve some to add fresh at the end of the cooking process. An apple placed in the potato bin will help them last longer. You should always clean up as you go along, not wait until the end. Fried chicken made to classic rock will work out better than chicken fried to the notes of Vivaldi. No, I don’t know why, know that it is not based on any scientific fact, yet know this to be true. Cooking is part of a celebratory occasion, not just the means to get to the eating portion of the experience.
I want L. to remember that smelling and listening to cooking food is nearly as important as tasting it, and far more important than timing it. That incorporating a variety of seasonal vegetables into one’s diet is the best way to eat. That quality counts, and that a little bit of the best product is infinitely more gratifying to the palate than a lot of a subpar ingredient. That a foodie is someone who, among many other things, can taste the difference between a Caprese made from torn mozzarella and one where the mozzarella has been sliced, and knows in their bones which tastes best. That people who work in the food industry are among the warmest, most generous, creative, crazy people on earth and you want as many of them in your life as you can find because they will leave you enriched.
Last but not least, while I do not want him to equate eating with love (as I feel that is a potential gateway to obesity and other food disorders), I do want him to equate cooking and being cooked for with love and know without a doubt, through the dishes that I cooked for him daily, just how much he has been, and is, loved. I want him to want to pass that on to his friends and family through his own cooking now that he is poised to strike out on his own.
A short menu now follows my long intro as we are off to the Cape on Thursday morning. Therefore, no CSA box this week, but a lot of remnants and pantry/freezer items, so please bear with me for four slightly schizophrenic dinners. The CSA box and I will be back as usual next week and, while I will definitely have less to say, I may wax on a bit about the beauty of the Cape in Spring. Consider yourselves forewarned.
Sunday “Pantry Roulette”; fridge, freezer, and pantry item dinner]
Arugula Salad with Meyer Lemon Dressing
Sauteed Scallops with Pea Sauce
Taboule Inspired Warm Grain Salad
Monday [Wildcard; a more complex or fiddly dish than usual to test my culinary skills]
Green Salad
Cottage Pie “Gardens”
Tuesday [Pasta]
Mixed Salad
Pasta Carbonara for L.
Roasted Vegetable Buddha Bowl for me
Wednesday [L.'s choice]
Mixed Salad
Oregano and Garlic Marinated Grilled Branzino
Horta Vrasta (Steamed Greens with Lemon)
Farro with Herbs
Thursday [Fish]
Cape
Friday [Veggie-centric]
Cape
Saturday ["Picnic"; something that is easy to assemble and easy to eat in front of a movie]
Cape
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