I promise my next entry will actually be about a restaurant, but until then...
One of the many useful but financially fruitless benefits of an expensive liberal arts education is the obligation as a writer to contextualize myself in my writing. As such, it seems only appropriate that I should introduce myself, my work and therein offer you, my dear and unseen reader, some window into who I am in this gastronomical wasteland of food writing.
I started cooking when I was 13. My mother, in a brilliant stroke designed to ease the burden of cooking nightly for a family of four, decided that each of us should be responsible for preparing dinner one night a week for the family (Thursdays would still belong to Houlihan’s and the mall). I am still not sure whether she anticipated the dramatic drop in quality of our family dinners, or whether she cared. Until that point, my culinary expertise consisted of over-boiling a diced potato, draining the water, adding diced ham and cheese to the pot, cracking three eggs in and stirring until a solid mass of protein, fats and carbohydrates formed. I would then dump this concoction into a bowl and consume it while watching whatever crappy early afternoon television was available. Thankfully I never shared this particular culinary genius with my family. My actual contribution, however, was not appreciably better.
For the first year, my staple family dinner was “Pizza.” I have inserted quotes because I live in New York now and I know better. Unrolled from the can, my pre-made dough would almost perfectly fit our only sheet pan, jarred tomato sauce, shredded mozzarella, sliced bell pepper and pre-sliced pepperoni. 11-14 minutes later, dinner was served. My father’s staple meal was black beans and rice: 2 cans of black beans warmed in a pot with a bit of salt, rice from the rice cooker, and diced raw white onions. My sister was more inventive though I only remember one of her dinners. She would search out recipes and in the fashion of the day; they were usually quick, strangely inventive solutions for over-worked moms to get their kids to eat vegetables by disguising them with meat and cheese. Her dish: Broccoli, rolled in sliced smoked turkey, placed in a casserole dish a-la enchiladas, then covered in cream of mushroom soup and baked for 30 minutes. We were not a culinary dream team, but my mom relished the nights when she didn’t have to cook. She would happily load the dishwasher when we were finished eating and we would return to our respective televisions.
“So how do you get from there to here?”
I’m glad you hypothetically asked…
In my junior year of High School my father hurt his back. As disconnected as that event seems from the quality of our family dinners, it was a pivotal moment in our dining history. After refusing surgery and seeking out any and every opinion he could find, he finally accepted a long and physically limiting regimen that demanded he stay in bed, or more often on the floor for the next six months. It was then, before the food network was even born, that he began watching cooking shows. Julia Childs, the Frugal Gourmet, and Jacques Pepin had cooking shows and my father watched obsessively. He began to fetishize their copper cookware and Viking ranges. He would dream of crème brulee and chateaubriand. To his credit, he never asked my mother to attempt any of these dishes, but when he was able to walk and work again, he began his own campaign to overtake the kitchen-a battle that my mother happily surrendered. His first challenge was also his first love: Black Bean Soup.
Watching my father work on something is not unlike watching a bullfight. Like the bull, he has an incredibly singular focus and a drive to win, or rather defeat. For months he battled that soup, under-soaking, over-soaking, burning the bottom of pots, buying dampeners to control the simmer, calculating ratios of pureed beans to whole beans, measuring cilantro, drying cilantro, freezing cilantro purees for the next batch. When he finally emerged with his quintessential “Black Bean Soup” he had literally been working on it for 6 months. It is delicious, silky, earthy, and aromatic with an herbaceous bite and a sweet balsamic driven finish. His black beans and rice from the year before became a running joke in our family. Sadly the black bean soup has become one as well, only because we can never get him to make it since the recipe takes three solid days. In my memory, it is amazing.
Fresh off his victory he began to conquer all of his culinary dreams: Coq au Vin, pate sucre, creme anglaise, crème brulee, pancakes, waffles, scrambled eggs, roasted pork and lamb of legs (sorry-- I just liked the rhythm of the list). As my father reworked recipes, I became his official guinea pig. He would chart each minor change and with my sister away at college, I was tasked with giving constant feedback. Every Sunday’s pancakes had to be noticeable better or he would berate himself for an ill-advised shift in the recipe. Cardboard tubes of pizza dough were banished from the kitchen and a pizza stone took up residence in the oven. Food became the central topic of conversation.
When I left for college, my parents moved to a house with a better kitchen and a place for my father to hang his copper pots. Every Christmas he would unveil a new series of successfully conquered dishes and we would talk food for hours. Food was always safer than politics so my sister and I were happy to indulge him. Along the way, I became his holiday sous chef and with the skills he taught me, I began seducing girls at school with my ability to make a green peppercorn sauce.
When I graduated and started waiting tables (please refer to usefulness of said liberal arts degree), we had even more to discuss. I began to bring home tips, tools and ingredients from the restaurants where I worked and we would trade sous chef responsibilities. My father cooked from his intricately tested and proven recipes, I would cook like I had seen the chef’s at work cook, intuitively moving through the kitchen, tasting, changing, tasting, plating. We would cook together and review our meals for missteps and successes. As I moved through a second bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and 5 restaurants over 15 years, our relationship revolved around food. From time to time we might stray into his politics or into my sculpture, but those topics were always too difficult and fraught with our mutually perceived failings and disappointments. In the kitchen, we are the same blood, so we stay in the kitchen.
Despite having ventured through several degrees and academic pursuits, food is the subject that drives me. For years I spent more time in restaurants than in the studio, initially as a means by which to support my studio practice, but more recently, I have come to embrace the industry and the work as an environment in which I thrive, and a language in which I’m fluent. But beyond having a faculty for the subject, I have come to realize that I love it. I can talk about food for longer than most people would like to listen. I will taste anything and everything, often twice. Foods that I don’t like initially, I spend more time with, parsing their components to ensure that it is my taste and not their new-ness that I am objecting against. In the past 10 years I have tracked food network stars, rising chefs, food trends and the once burgeoning, now global obsession with food. In that time it has been my work, my hobby, and my connection to my family. It is only here and now that I am also able to recognize with confidence and pleasure that it is also my future.
