Clogs Abroad: Collioure Connections, Part One

 "So we must leave the North Star behind us," said Miss Bianca to Patience. "Can you remember?" - Miss Bianca, by Margery Sharp     

 

Let's start with the obvious: Train travel is so different from flying. On a train, one generally leaves and arrives in a city’s center. There isn’t much time devoted to security on trains – shoes stay on, electronics stay packed, you’re not shuffled through a line like a bellowing beeve. Train travel is slower, but easier. 

           Except – sometimes the extra time built into air-travel for the shoeless-shuffle can make a big difference in terms of being oriented to departure gates, restrooms, and water stops.

            I reflected on those differences as I jumped out of my taxi in Barcelona, dashed into the, yes, centrally-located train station, and, in a perfect sweat of worry and disorientation, looked at the departure boards. I was headed to Collioure, France, with a transfer in Perpignan. None of the signs wore words resembling either.

            Sure, Collioure is tiny, and also after a transfer, so I wasn’t expecting to see it listed on the boards. But I’d hoped there would be an indication of, like, This way for France, buddies! There was, but I was too rushed to spot it. I asked a uniformed person (ask is not the right word: I thrust my ticket out and gasped, "Donde? Donde?") where I should go and she calmly pointed me toward an escalator leading down to the platforms for trains heading to, oh, silly me, Gare de Lyon. That way to France, buddy.

            The train was more crowded than I’d expected it to be. Full, actually. I found my seat after glancing repeatedly at my ticket – as it cripples my language abilities, travel stress affects my retention of numbers; I should have allowed myself at least a thirty minute cushion at the train station, but arriving early to anything is not in my nature. At least I hadn’t thought I had time for a quick smoke outside the station.

            I settled in and watched Barcelona give way to suburbs, and then to farms, still brittle and brown in the early March sunshine. The Pyrenees rose in the distance, their peaks cloaked in snow, an unexpected geographical and visual treat.

            An hour and a half later, we crossed the border into France and stopped at Perpignan. I grabbed my little blue suitcase, hopped off, and went to find my connection.

Here is something I have learned. Traveling solo means you can make all the mistakes. There is nobody to deride your rationale for thinking a certain bus goes to a certain station when you find yourself going in the opposite direction. Nobody needs an explanation for how you missed the signs. Indeed, the opposite direction can lead to some interesting adventures and knit together the landscape of a place in a way you might otherwise have missed. Accidental forests are discovered and explored. There is also no one to apologize to for making a mistake. There is no reason to have your day ruined by the internal conversations of imagined rebuke and self-blame. Am I harder on myself (and possibly my occasional fellow travelers, all of whom, by the way, are a lot of fun to travel with) than I should be? Who knows. What I’m saying is that, freed from another person’s expectations, appetites, fatigues, desires, and walking speeds, travel is simplified.

So, when you learn the connection from Perpignan to Collioure is by bus because those particular rails are under construction, you are free to dash around and outside of the train station looking for the bus stop in the ten minutes you have before the bus departs. You can go to every exit, ask for directions, follow them into dead ends and blocked doors. You are free to let sweat trickle down your spine. You are released from feeling like you need to apologize to anyone when it becomes abundantly clear you’ve missed the bus without ever finding where it was supposed to depart from.

            And, there is the added benefit of finding out another train to Collioure, on a different set of rails, I guess, would be along in about thirty minutes. A train, mind you; I didn’t want to take a dumb bus anyway. This was working out in my favor!

            I relaxed with a citrus soda and a smoke, all the time in the world.

             A note about smoking cigarettes. If you don’t, don’t. If you’re like me and enjoy surrounding yourself with a toxic cloud as an excuse to leave crowded gatherings or other awkward social interactions (“going out for a think and a stink,” you might say to no one in particular as you put your coat on and walk outside to stand alone in the rain, snow, freezing temperatures, locusts, or tornados), Europe is a fun place with ashtrays everywhere. (There also may be some truth to the stereotype that "breaks" do not exist in restaurants for non-smokers, but that is a different story, possibly about Wage Theft.)

            Collioure is on the Mediterranean coast of France, a tiny hamlet tucked like a pearl into a necklace of other tiny villages. In terms of culture and atmosphere, there were at least six other places where I could have disembarked and enjoyed an experience similar to the one I had. But my reasons for going to Collioure were specific – I was on a Side Quest, a chance to step away from the real reason I was in Europe in the first place, a reason I don’t feel like writing about at the moment.

            I was there to visit Patrick O’Brian’s grave.

            Few writers have given me the kind of pleasure O’Brian delivers. He’s probably not for everyone, but if you like tall ships, and battles at sea, and enjoyed watching the movie “Master and Commander”, I’d recommend his books. Font size, some sparseness to the language, and a hard-to-pin-down melancholy are, admittedly, challenges. But that is why I have reading glasses, and I learned to love the way a day’s-long battle is described in one devastating sentence, and I guess I don’t mind a little melancholy. (I’ve written about his books here before in "The Master and the Marmalade," February, 2014.)

            The train station in Collioure is about a quarter of a mile above the cluster of houses and restaurants forming a rough letter “C” around the beach. I headed down the hill, dragging my suitcase until the noise of the wheels against the cobblestones started rattling my teeth. I picked it up and carried it, walking with intent, as one does when arriving in a strange place.

The entrance to my hotel was hidden so effectively I’m frankly surprised they had any trade at all. I inadvertently performed a preliminary reconnaissance of the place, occasionally looking at my phone for directions, a tiring game of “Warm, Hot, Warm, Cold, Cold, Cold.” I might have even muttered, “oh come on,” when I found the sign with an arrow pointing down an alley I had walked past about six times – it’s a small town, but has that Mediterranean Maziness you may have encountered in places like Genoa or Barcelona.

After checking in and getting a map, I went to my room to wash my face, change my socks, and plan my route to the hillside cemetery. Plenty of hours left in the day, despite the missed connection in Perpignan. 

So far, so good.

Dull Knives and Cold Pans

 

 

 Keep your knives sharp and your pans hot

 – Just something we say to each other sometimes

 

           These knives are pretty dull right now. Unlike chef knives, which lose their edge with work, my writing “knives” need use to stay sharp, and I’ve neglected them for several years.

            It’s true: I was going great-guns there for a while, working on this blog, working on an amalgamation of the blogs with an autobiographical skeleton to hold the meat of the essays. Agent letters were going out. Book pitches galore. I was using my time away from cooking wisely. To a point. Although, honestly, I was feeling pretty idle in August of 2018 when I got a call from a former Exec Chef;  he wanted me back for a minute! I returned to my first command for a year-long stint at the helm, a bittersweet, rat-heavy stint.

When I left, I thought I was done with kitchens forever. My lower back was so happy.

With a little time on my hands again, I began working on a different, third-person version of the cooking memoir, which had nothing to do with the clog blogs, but really tended to focus on the highs and lows of a long kitchen career, including my profound loathing of cocaine (I do go on!), and the personal growth and sacrifices with which this career rides tandem. I found it fairly compelling, enough to give it a pithy title (To Hell with All That) and worked on it almost every day.

The record-scratch of March of 2020 occurred and I, like a bunch of other people, found it almost impossible to concentrate on the literary equivalent of pushing peas around a plate. Work slowed down. Stopped.  

            A couple of months later, I sort of started again, but really couldn’t see the point of it all: The state of the world was more interesting than the state of my navel. I returned to the project a few times, but the work produced was nonsense-adjacent, slightly feral in tone, and, I suspect, incomprehensible to anyone living outside of my head. And I badly needed to find a job-job at that point.

            The job I found was a great gig. Tiny little place with a great reputation in Seattle, a lot of creative room to maneuver, a name that inspired me on a daily basis to begin an essay about my feelings of insecurity whenever my writing work was compared to that of a giant in the field (vanity much?). A different kind of rat ruined the experience, but the timing worked in my favor – I needed a month off for traveling and that would have been almost impossible to swing if I were still in my clogs every day.

            Journaling comes pretty easily to me when I’m out and about. The little notebook-and-pen combo are like good paring knives – they stay sharp enough to trim Brussels sprouts and garlic without taking off the tip of a thumb; I couldn’t have fashioned a tomato rosette with one of these little knives (we’re talking figuratively here) without a trip to the whet stone, but they were used every day, with some interesting results. Sketches, reflections, food notes, all embedded in the chronology of the journey.

            With those journals in mind, I’m changing the course of these clog blogs for a bit, while I get back into the groove and feel ready to tackle the large scale butchery that is Trad Pub – the knife set I’ll need to hack into that beast must be very sharp, so I want to get some good practice reps in here first.

            But while we’re here, talking about knives, let’s talk about sharpening, a field I am decidedly not an expert in, so the talk will be brief and might consist entirely of: Should you like to learn more, there are many resources out there for you. (My former Sous Chefs’ jaws are hitting the ground right now – I’m a honer, and an infrequent sharpener, at best; my knives are pretty annoying to the Razor Lads. If they thought I had the audacity to describe a method, that I actually believed I was a good source of information here, were worries plaguing me while writing this. So let that short and italicized instruction suffice.)

One such resource is a book called Knives Cooks Love. I’m pretty sure I have a copy around here somewhere….

I found it. Flipped through it – it’s a Sur la Table book with a very onion-heavy focaccia on the cover, the kind of book stacked next to the store’s register. While the clerk is wrapping your le Creuset Dutch Oven – this season’s colors run from Brioche, to Peche, to Rhone, to Red, by the way – while the clerk wraps up your latest gorgeous kitchen treat, you decide to buy the book, for yourself, for a friend who loves to cook but simply can’t master the knuckle-claw, it doesn’t matter: It’s a book with a lot of information and dinner-party recipes. I don’t remember how it landed up on my shelves – I’m too smug/vulnerable to have purchased it myself – I’m supposed to know how to do the knife stuff by now, and I am not a home cook, I do not need a recipe for a beet and walnut salad.  This is an unfortunate, insecure combination of feelings, a frequent tightrope walk through my culinary-school-free career. But we aren’t all born knowing everything, and I’m not as knife focused as many chefs.

I’m deeply regretting the choice to write about this topic. Nothing leads to greater public shaming than calling yourself out on your own dull-ass knives. But, as it’s an essay about writing tools, and it’s going all over the place and isn’t really coming together in a particularly cohesive way, I have, perhaps, illustrated the point in a graceless, ragged way. Let us persist.

            My first serious knife was a gift from a guy named Hilbo. I worked with him just before the turn of the century at a long-closed spot called, Hilbo’s Alligator Soul. I consider him my first mentor (in kitchens), and remember his ferocity and kindness with a full heart. I named that knife Chopper, a santoku with a Granton Edge, the way a girl might name her first cat Fluffy. I don’t name all of my knives. That would be weird. But there was Kingfisher, a gorgeous knife that I brought along when I traveled in 2010. My daily sharps for cheese and butter are anonymous; my chef knives live in a knife roll right now.

            As for hot pans, I have no real need anymore, not with the kind of cooking I currently do. I’m not searing steaks or scallops, because I don’t have a hood in my kitchen, but also because I’m not interested in eating those fleshy bits right now. I don’t need a hard sear on a batch of lentils. If you are interested in high-heat cooking, hey! It’s summertime (she writes, wrapped in a blanket because it’s June in Seattle), get out there and do some grilling.

            Let the spirit of the saying guide you: May your knives forever be sharp, may your prep callous not grow too large, may your pans forever be hot, and may the oil not spatter your face. It's meant as a blessing.

 

Cooking Lessons

"If I close my eyes when I smell the cooking aromas of roast lamb I'm transported..." 
     - Francis Mallmann, Seven Fires

"There are better chefs in the world. One comes reluctantly, yet undeniably, to that conclusion early in one's career."
     - Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential


Three years ago, I was standing in another Chef’s kitchen wondering how to make his version of corn soup. There wasn’t a recipe – just a requisite batch size that seemed huge, enough soup for three, maybe four hundred people. I looked to the Chef, a bear of a man who was fiddling with the ice cream maker at the end of the long prep counter, and started to ask, “Chef, how do I make….”

He interrupted. He knows me and has read this blog enough to make a pointed comment. “Put your damn clogs on, Posey. For crying out loud.” Obviously I was already wearing shoes, but I took his meaning and got to work.

Started with onions and butter, loads of corn, deglazed with a delicate white wine. Cooked it down, added cream and milk. Salt and white pepper. A simple late-summer affair meant to be finished with lump Dungeness and basil pistou on the pick up. I pureed the blend and tasted it. Very husky, unpleasant eating, though the flavor was nice. Taking my cue from a practice I used at another restaurant, rather than taking my cue from years of experience with blenders, I decided to pass this enormous batch of soup through a chinois – a cone-shaped mesh “cap” used to catch any particle larger than this period here:

.

I ended up with about 12 gallons of sweet, corn-flavored milk. Chef took a look at my disaster and walked away without a word (I did get a Look, though), mentally rescheduling his tomorrow so he could transform my corn drink into soup. After that, I was put on ice cream duty and a young cook with a higher tolerance for blender noise took over the soup making. 

At the time I wasn’t working as a Chef, but as a prep cook in two different restaurants. This one was in the Opera House (hence the batch sizes), the other was a fancy Seattle landmark on Capitol Hill. But this Chef's remark, and my results, crystalized something I’d begun to notice about my cooking habits. Perhaps out of respect for the Chef in charge of the House – his methods, recipes, preferences, and palate – or perhaps because I was suffering from a persistent cognitive laziness – I was beginning to feel as though each time I walked into a new kitchen, I was walking in with no previous knowledge. A newbie with twenty-five years of experience, totally reliant on the spattered Recipe Binder that may, or may not, exist in any given kitchen. Whereas when I’m running a kitchen, I have methods, practices, opinions, KNOWLEDGE, and guidance galore. Honestly, it’s a little bit embarrassing.

At the risk of making a fool of myself, here is another example.

The Chef at the Capitol Hill restaurant, one of the calmest dudes I’ve ever worked with, or for, brought in a whole lamb. Now, this wasn’t the lamb you’re picturing – cradled in the arms of a gentle shepherd, quietly baa-ing, or gamboling in the fields. No. This was a giant, a hogget (he was four), an animal whose behavior had become so belligerent he ended up with no head, skin, or feet, on a wheeled cart in a tiny walk-in (take note, youngster ungulates). Any time I needed something from the back of the walk-in, I had to squeeze past his body; his legs dragged along the front, or back, of my chef coat and then sprung back to their original stiffened position. His was a grisly, but quiet, companionship.

After the Chef broke him down into about 60 different pieces, the "lamb" was ready to be braised. Now, I’d worked in this house for about a week at this point, and hadn’t braised anything there but octopuses. So, when confronted with this new, mammalian project, I tried to remember what the house rules were for braising. I was alone until the Chef or Sous arrived around 1 pm, so I cast back to my training and could hear the Sous Chef saying….

“We braise everything the same way: red wine and something something something.”

The octopus was braised with red wine and red wine vinegar. 

“Well,” thought I, “that’s a strange combination for lamb, but maybe they know something I don’t.”

They didn’t. 

After merrily searing the 60 pieces of lamb, tucking them into hotel pans with garlic and thyme, I covered the meat with red wine and, you guessed it, red wine vinegar. Gallons of the stuff. I dutifully wrote on the Ordering white board that we were now out of vinegar. All the pans were covered with parchment and foil and tucked into the ovens for three and a half hours. And I went on to my next task.

At noon, the Sous walked in. He looked at the white board and said, “Why do we need red wine vinegar?” But even as the last word left his mouth I could see – I could hear – something click in his mind and he looked at me with abject horror. I went completely cold, from scalp to clog. Of course, the "house rules" for braising were really just the actual rules for braising. At almost exactly the same time, the Chef walked in the front door. I threw myself on his mercy.

“Chef,” I said, “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

Instead of asking me to leave the restaurant, the city, and the Industry, he asked how long the meat had been cooking. By then, all the pans were out of the oven. The complicated scent of lamb, wine, and vinegar wafted through the kitchen.

“Well,” he said in his trademark calm voice, “Let’s switch out the liquid for stock and see what happens.”

I did so. Throughout the process, in my mind, I kept throwing apologies to the animal, even though by all accounts he’d been kind of a jerk in life.

The finished product wasn’t inedible. I’m sure in a place like Uzbekistan the meat would have been a local delicacy. Pungent, and a little tart. Just not what the Chef expected from me.

After that, and the Corn Soup Episode, I realized I needed to trust my own instincts, knowledge, and experience. I also realized that as fun as prep cooking can be, one needed to eat and pay rent. 

A year later, I was again working as a Chef, this time back in the restaurant which framed so many of my experiences in Seattle, and inspired many of these blogs. A restaurant which, not to put too fine a point on it, held my attention with a grip strong enough to break my writing habits and leave my blog fields fallow. A restaurant family is an important one to have during good times and bad, and I was going through a rough time; I was grateful to have the distraction of work and the satisfaction of watching a crew come together. But still, the memory of the Mis-Braised Beast clung to me like a gamey smell on a sweater.

And so it was, until I finally found a chance to redeem myself for my Uzbekistani lamb. 

There was a small leg of lamb in my father's fridge, from a tiny farm in Virginia, sold at the local Farmers’ Market. The piece of meat was only about six pounds, and small enough in circumference to be truly from a real youngster. The idea was that I would cook it for dinner one night, and make sandwiches the next day. My dad had had a real touch with lamb, though he liked it cooked to medium well, so I asked him what his secret was. He swam up from the bottom of the morphine pool he was submerged in at the time and answered, “You know how to cook.”

It’s true. I do.

Rubbed in olive oil, salt and pepper, herbs, and a crust of Coleman’s hot mustard, my dad’s favorite secret ingredient (besides molasses), I roasted the leg for a time with some carrots, onions, and wine. When the lamb was ready, I cut slices off for the five of us, noting to myself that there would not be enough meat for five sandwiches the next day, simultaneously strangling the thought that there might be only four of us by then.

Forks weren’t really working for my dad at this point, so, after we pulled him up into a sitting position, I handed him a plate with three slices of meat and two pieces of carrot. His long fingers hunted around the plate, as graceful then as they were when he was hammering out novels on a manual Smith & Corona. After days of showing no real appetite, he ate the lamb and carrots with a surprising gusto. Pleased with myself, I left the room to clean the kitchen. When the call came down from upstairs that he’d like a little more, I was knocked sideways by a weird jubilation, as though he'd been cured, as though this little animal’s sacrifice, smeared with some mustard and herbs, had beaten back the inevitable, and chased the flapping black wings out of his bedroom and back into the Darkness that Comes for Everything (his line, not mine). That was cooking in its cleanest sense -- food made to nurture the sick while sustaining the caretakers. 

After another day of sitting quietly next to his bed, my brother and I flew back to Seattle. The day after that, I was summarily dismissed from my job. My dad outlived my career by four days, but never knew I’d been fired. When I packed my things to leave the kitchen for the last time, I left my clogs behind. 

It's time for something new. 

Spaghetti Westerns

The Spaghetti Harvest

I don’t have the numbers at hand, but I’d hazard a guess that I’m asked, “What’s your favorite thing to cook?” seven times out of every ten conversations about careers. In terms of questions unanswerable in polite society, it’s right up there with, “What’s the best thing you’ve ever read?” and “Hey, how’s the novel coming along?”

There isn’t one dish I consider “my specialty,” just as there isn’t one book I’d pick out of all the others. Cooking, eating, reading – these are all activities based on mood, availability, time, and inclination. It’s an altogether reasonable possibility that my favorite book has yet to be read, and I’ll practically die when I finish the last page, but the first 300 pages may be so incredibly boring that the discovery of this favorite is contingent upon being shipwrecked and finding the book in one of the suitcases bobbing in the lagoon of my desert island. And me! With so much time on my hands! Read away, girl, while your soft shell crab skewers brine in equal parts sea and coconut water, flavored with palm fronds and a pinch of crushed scallop shell.

But what if we look at the cooking question from a different angle? Rather than thinking about “a specialty” item, perhaps what the question really points to is a preferred technique. Instead of getting hung up on “what do you like to cook?”, I should instead think about how I like to cook. Much less of an annoying question, much easier to answer! I’m a pretty old-fashioned cook in this area – until I learn more about modernist techniques, I’ll stick to high-temperature cooking, an exercise in profound transformation. Indeed, watching the way heat changes the ingredients’ molecules provides a ready source of keen pleasure, and may be the number one factor keeping me in this profession. Of course, the way heat and stress work on the molecules of my body may be the number one reason to leave this profession. A story for another time.

Occasionally, the What’s Your Favorite Thing To Cook question rides in tandem with, What’s Your Favorite Thing to Eat? Again, does it really have to be just one thing? As with reading, my eating doesn’t really have any one genre to which I cling hard and fast. Well, there may be a correlation between my fondness for tacos and my affection for Los Angeles-based, homicide-detective-driven mysteries. But that’s different.

There is one dish, though, the Watership Down of my culinary cravings, and that is a humble plate of spaghetti.

I took a long break from eating pasta, mostly because I have the self-restraint of a St. Bernard puppy when it comes to semolina and sauce, but also because I had started feeling a bit loogy the morning after a spag bender. Granted, a strand of spaghetti isn’t a nutritional powerhouse, and if you’re eating half a pound at a time, either right before or right after two in the morning, you’re not going to feel so great. But life is better with spaghetti in it, it just is. So, I decided to try having a Lunch Pasta, take it slow, and just see how I felt later in the day. And hey! Despite a mild headache and racing heart brought on by the blood sugar influx, the daytime pasta experiment was a success.

Spaghetti was the meal eaten most often in my home when I was growing up. Shake cheese and butter. Chili flake. A perfect demilitarized zone on my plate between the saucy area and the pasta area – that way, I could enjoy three different dishes: saucy spaghetti, buttery noodles with cheese, and the middle area of slightly saucy, slightly buttery, slightly spicy. In retrospect, I suppose the third area was my first experience with umami. Whenever I ate spaghetti at a friend’s house and his or her parents mixed the sauce and the pasta together before serving, I experienced a sense of disappointment altogether disproportionate to the actual travesty playing out in the dining room. I may have even sulked a little bit, staring down at a landscape of uniform red, a plate of food wherein every bite tastes like the last one. Gross.

Making spaghetti sauce became more complicated as I grew older. That’s not quite true. My involvement in the process became more complicated, especially as spaghetti was a meal we could make with very little parental oversight, and we could usually cajole the youngest into doing the dishes. Thinking back on the process behind making a meat sauce out of a frozen block of ground chuck, an onion, a can of tomato paste, a can of tomato sauce, and some dried oregano, fills me with olfactory nostalgia. The opening notes of butter and onions, the gradual swell of browning meat, the sudden bright notes of tomato paste caramelizing on the bottom of the pan, the earthy, shrub smell of oregano, while on the big burner the metallic smell of heating elements on copper-bottomed pans gave way to the slightly low-tide smell of boiling salted water, which in turn gave way to the starchy wet flour smell of almost cooked pasta…..these were the instruments in a dinner concerto.

Spaghetti at home was delicious, mostly because I could control my saucing (again, no control, whatsoever, when it came to portion size). But there have been other hot spots, as well. While I was living in a dorm, an impossibly long time ago, my roommate always made a point of letting me know when it was “spag night” in the dining hall, and I’d feel a glorious excitement about not having yet another bowl of cereal for dinner. There was Neopolitan’s (I mean, Neo’s, of course), a tiny hole-in-the-wall spot in Nederland, an old mining town up the canyon from Boulder. Their plate of spaghetti in meat sauce had a ratio of sauce to pasta that normally would have put my hackles up, but there was something about having such a generous ladling of sauce that I enjoyed. It was sort of like eating a vat of sloppy joe filling with a few strands of pasta left over from the pot’s previous use, as though they only had one pot in the kitchen and didn’t really clean it after cooking the pasta, the way I picture cooking for overcrowded summer camps.

My love affair with spaghetti may have hit its prime during “spaghetti special” nights at the Gondolier, a Boulder restaurant that has been in my friend Guy’s family for fifty years. Under the Gondo’s roof, I met a type of homemade spaghetti that inspired a lifelong love of wide-wale corduroys. There was also exposure to ravioli, garbanzo beans, olive oil and garlic “sauce”, tortellini, ricotta cheesecake, and so many other flavors, so many culinary collisions, so many glimpses into a world I had no idea I would belong to for this much of my life.

In terms of transformative processes, cooking pasta doesn’t necessarily have the same drama as cooking meat. The relaxation of a stick into a ribbon isn’t nearly as cool as the Maillard Reaction, but it does have its charms. It actually sounds kind of nice, almost like relaxing into a hot tub, or just taking a minute away from the fires and knives. Spaghetti and I are going to become a little closer in the coming weeks, not only because it’s relatively inexpensive, but because I’d really like to be able to answer that last question, the one about the novel.

Into the Fire

"...the firelight of their party was a pocket torch held under the blanket of the universe." July's People, by Nadine Gordimer

When we meet Buck for the first time, he is a dog drawn in spare strokes: Large, handsome, protective…all the things a rich Judge with a passel of grandchildren would want in a country-house dog. As the story progresses, however, and Buck becomes the hero of his own story, we see his transformation. We cringe when he’s beaten again and again, and worry, after 3,000 words about dogfights, whips, clubs, human-stupidity, and really bad weather, that he might not make it to the end of the book. But then, just as Buck decides to give up the ghost, he is rescued by John Thornton, a prospector with a heart of gold. Thornton rehabilitates Buck’s body and soul, and Buck responds to such ministrations as any thinking creature would. He falls in love with the man, and when Buck isn’t studying Thornton’s face or romping about the camp with him, he lies next to him, watching the campfire. As Buck’s eyes grow heavy, he sees visions of a primordial self, walking next to an equally-early version of human, visions of the deal struck so many years ago between these two species, flickering in the flames.

The fire, and the visions in the dancing flames, mesmerize Buck ever so slightly, just enough for him to ignore the call he hears ringing from the mountains, echoing among the black-barked trees in the dense dark forests, singing through the icy rivers running through the Alaska backcountry. As you know if you’ve read the story, the call becomes too strong to be ignored and Buck, who leaves and returns, leaves and returns, really only because he loves this man, finally leaves camp for days, harries a bull moose to a sad end, and then returns to John Thornton’s camp to find death and disaster. Not a dry eye in the house. But now Buck is truly free, unencumbered by any ties to humans, and off he goes, into the wild.

The Call of the Wild is, admittedly, an imperfect analogy for my career as it stands right now. Really, pretty flimsy. First of all, I don’t expect this current job to end with the sacking of the restaurant by invaders. I don’t expect to come back from a weekend to find overturned coffee urns, cutting boards on the floor, broken glassware, and slit-necked servers. That would be weird. I could, perhaps, make the case that I have pulled sleds with the best of them, over terrain that would have broken a weaker team’s collective heart, a case made in hyperbolic Londonian prose. I guess I could compare sled-drivers to head chefs, but I think that would make for really awkward reading, not to mention writing. But there are enough points of contact here that I’m going to make a loose effort, if only for the opportunity to talk about the infierno within the parameters of a story about returning from the forest.

This fire, the one I now cook on four nights a week, is mesmerizing in the way all fires are. Buck’s campfire, the warehouse fire in Backdraft, the yearly torching of Christmas trees at Golden Gardens. Fire holds us transfixed. This fire is the centerpiece of an expensive, popular, Downtown Seattle restaurant; in a profession that prides itself on its fire and knives, this is a one to be proud of. And, in the age of knobs and propane tanks, working with live fire is a throw-back skill almost as cool as mastering scrimshaw, or thatch. (Francis Mallmann's cookbooks are a great inspiration in this direction; his food eloquently illustrates the ways in which fire can consume, transform, destroy, and make delicious.) 

The infierno was custom-built for the restaurant. There are two grills on either side of a three-foot wide coal-rack and chimney. Periodically, when the bed of coals becomes too ashy, one of the cooks throws about twenty pounds of charcoal into the grate, or sometimes, depending on who I’m working with, he’ll throw the entire forty-pound bag atop the grate, a bag twice as wide and long than the ones I buy filled with dog food. After a few moments of dwindling returns in the coal department, the bag ruptures, spills out a belly of fire, and whooshes into a hot lavender and white-gold phoenix. And then we’re back in business.

As it grows, the fire devours the oxygen in a twelve-foot radius. I notice a slight headache as the area around the grill, my cutting board, the rack where I hang my tongs, my neatly stacked pile of kitchen towels, becomes as inhospitable as the interior of an active volcano. The familiar quick dance-steps of professional cookery become sluggish as I struggle to breathe, fighting with the beautiful monster for a mouthful of air. Reaching into the fire to set a cast-iron pan on a pillow of salmon-colored coals is like reaching into a kiln; the heat smacking into my forearms and face is a physical force, a wall I must reach through, and I’ve learned that exhaling as I step close and reach in to the fire seems to help, as though my tiny tithe of air was found a sufficient token, and I’m allowed to pass. My towel, on the other hand, comes away from the fire burning, as though tiny orange insects are eating holes into it. I smudge the insects out on the brick wall next to my station, and reach back into the fire to flip over the scallops searing in their cast-iron hell.

   

Sound doesn’t carry across such a short distance, as though the fire is consuming our very voices; thinking about it now, I can’t remember whether the blaze makes its own noise, or if it just eats our words along with our air. When a new ticket comes in, I cross the space between us with one hand flung in front of my face to call steaks and temps to the other cook. My silver necklace heats up and leaves a red line around my throat. The pen clip sticking out of my apron pocket burns me when I cross my arms across my chest, and I let out a startled noise. My t-shirt is soaking wet within seconds, which means that if I leave the grill area, and its 900 degree environment, I will immediately be beset with violent shivers, as though I’ve been wrapped in a wet sheet and set on a mountain top.    

Fresh charcoal spits sparks in every direction as if protesting its transformation from inert object into fuel. As we rake the pile of coals into heaps beneath our grills, the sparks are like bees spilling from a kicked hive, but I learned almost immediately to ignore their tiny stings and to continue working through the swarm.

When the fire rages from the grate in flames three-feet high, the coals drop from the grate like newborn fire-salamanders, a species skinned in coral and rose. Eventually, the sparks simmer down. Eventually, the heat settles down to a bearable 500 degrees. If we don’t have any tickets working, I stare into the face of the beast and again, think about Buck watching a version of a world in which he is tame, struggling with the call he hears from the Wilds beyond the small ring of firelight. 

Like being a doctor or a lawyer, being a chef can supplant other identifiers. When people ask what you do, the question heard is, What are you? This is a question I’ve struggled with for years. I’m a chef. No, I’m a writer. No, I’m a chef and a writer. No, I’ll never cook again. I’ll starve before I go back into that world. I will write and illustrate children’s books and medical manuals. No wait, I’ll open my own restaurant, with sage colored walls and vermillion curtains, west-facing views over the water, wood-fired oven, a menu that speaks to the glacial moraine of the Riviera, the culinary intersection of Sea and Alps. And on, and on, for years, the answers changing depending on the audience, the mood, and the amount of vodka percolating through the system.

When the last chef job ended with the suddenness of being thrown off a moving bus, and I went into seven months of unemployment, I was free to run around and howl at the moon. I wasn’t making decisions based on paychecks or other people’s expectations, or my visions of food on plates, or my crippling case of carcass fatigue. Management style and the politics of restaurant hierarchy ceased to mean anything. These months graphed the geometry of freedom versus security, and, to a lesser extent, proved ol’ Janis Joplin right.

But there came a time when the freedom of having nothing left to lose made me take stock. I should have something to lose, right? I have a career, a resume, a future, all of which require returning to the traces and pulling again. And this doesn’t have to be a bad sled pulled over pitted snow. So I waited by the edge of the forest until I saw a fire I wanted to be next to.  And now, having found it, I will pull. 

Chef Philosophy, 201

“The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.” 
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

When I learned Food Riot was shuttering the shop, I stopped wrestling with topics to write about, much less actually work on them. The piece about bok choy: Abandoned. The one about the Miracle on 46^th Street? Nope. Pie Whimsy? Well, that one will live to see another day, once I get the recipe right. I can’t not write about my first successful lattice.

Rather than work on new pieces, I had a look at the work I did for that site. On the whole, I’m pretty pleased with it. Lord knows I could always use a good edit, but overall, not terrible. You have to break a few oeufs to make an oeuvre, right?

One of the pieces I reread with some pleasure was my first, written a year ago, back when I was so excited and happy to have the opportunity to write for another site. I like my blog, but it was fun to write for a larger audience, comprising more than my immediate family, some friends, and the odd cook who stumbled onto the site because she needs a new pair of clogs.

This particular piece was about Chef Philosophy, and it was a metaphor quiche – Sisyphus and the nature of restaurant work playing the part of ham, a hunter’s chase through the woods in search of a white stag in place of swissy custard. I hadn’t noticed the heady mixture, gazing as I was at my own navel. But after my dad called the mixed metaphor a “head-snapper,” I took another look and chatted with him about what may be my new favorite grammatical term. In spite of the head-snapper, his comments about the quiche-piece weren’t negative. Rather, he gave me another angle to consider.

Leaving the bounding hunt through the forest alone for just a moment, let’s look again at the idea that while work in general is Sisyphean, restaurant work epitomizes the nature of Sisyphus’s job to the nth degree. Every shift begins when you shoulder your boulder, every shift ends when you reach the top of the hill: The last pair of sliders during a late happy hour rush, SOLD; the final stack of pancakes, plated and windowed! The mats pulled, the floors swept and mopped, the till counted – all part of the restaurant’s daily cycle, a cycle which occurs during every dining period you provide. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The boulder reaches the top of the hill, and then it rolls back down.

For whatever it's worth, in my mind’s eye the boulder rolls down a hill a lot like the Ponderosa-dotted hills surrounding Boulder, my childhood home, which is, I understand, a somewhat  unuseful conflation of imagery. A boulder meets a Boulder, coming down the hill. Brains, man. Wacky stuff.

Anyway, even if we run down the hill because we are in the middle of a series of doubles, or clopening, or opening a new restaurant, we can’t beat the boulder. It has rolled, crashed, tumbled, bounced, and careened through the woods, back to the base of the hill faster than we can goat-hop down the slope. We shouldn’t even try to beat it. Instead of racing back down, let’s order a beer at Tantalus’s Table, a hot spot on the hill top (despite the owner’s extreme crankiness) and catch up with each other.

After all, the boulder isn't going anywhere; it came to rest at the bottom of the hill, after smashing through an abandoned barn, scattering a herd of mule deer, decapitating a fir, and crashing to a stop half-in and half-out of the creek. I will be wet to my thighs when I get behind that thing and shove. Possibly hypothermic.

When we've finished our beers, I'll start back down. But look there – a clearing, a fallen log where I can rest for a while, a moment, before getting my ass back down the hill and pushing again. A breeze whispers through the pine branches, subtle scents of vanilla play with the smell of mint and wet stone rising from a nearby rill. Maybe I’ll simply sit quietly and consider the elusive white stag, a chef’s sublime quarry, and the mysterious ways in which line cooks are (or are not) motivated. With no Food Riot to write for, no restaurant to cook for, and barring any unforeseen existential crises, I can sit for a good minute before I have to push again.

Except – the dog needs to go out, the dishes must be washed, agent letters must be written, and the bloody book must be rid of darlings. Perhaps this particular chapter in my career is not just a walk down a hill, but a chance to see, to fully apprehend, the sheer number and variety of rocks, boulders, stones, and pebbles we all push up hills, all the time, every day, as well as having the opportunity to see some folks I missed while I was occupied. I have momentarily abandoned my primary, half-submerged boulder to work on other things that will, no doubt, appear cyclical when they are at last completed, the next one begun. But seeing it as a cycle, with the big push followed by a pleasant jaunt, brings me closer still to understanding Camus. It’s not that Sisyphus is content because he has a job, maybe even one with benefits; he is content because he understands the nature of work, that, as with a latticed pie, effort brings reward, but pushing upwards is only half of the story. 

Next time on Chef Philosophy: Tantalus and the Benefits of Delaying Gratification (possibly until the end of time), or, Forget Fire: The Gods Offered Two Marshmallows to Humankind.

Radicchio is the Thing with Feathers

As seen in slightly different form on FoodRiot.com, part of the New Riot Media Group.  

A  few years ago, I put together a Valentine’s Day menu which included such treats as “The Broken Hearted Caesar” (hard-bias cut romaine, traditional Caesar accouterments, fried oysters), the “Soft Underbelly of Love” (pork belly, plate action, tangy driz), and “Because it is Bitter and Because it is my Heart” (grilled radicchio, shard of pistachio-plum brittle thrust into it, balsamic redux). This particular menu didn’t sell very well: the servers, save one or two, didn’t understand the references – either what they were or why they were there – and the diners really just wanted a seared salmon or a steak.  Maybe a duck breast, for the daring few. They weren’t there for the Chef’s not-altogether-positive ruminations on love, expressed through snarky menu names; it was Valentine’s Day, for crying out loud.

I was frustrated by the menu’s overall sales, but I felt a little bit sad the radicchio had had so few takers. Not only did the dish’s name inspire in me an upwelling of hilarity, a variety of glee I usually feel only when told jokes about what numbers say or do to each other, but “Because it is Bitter and Because it is my Heart” was understated in plating, well-rounded in flavor, gorgeous and delicious. And no one wanted to try it.

But I understand why not. 

Bitter is the last flavor we learn to like. A child will look at you with horror – real horror, like, Why are you trying to kill me? horror – if you present her with a frisee salad, or a dish of sautéed rapini. There is a basis for such terror – nature often uses bitterness to express toxicity, as any bird who has gone for a certain kind of caterpillar will tell you (if it weren’t dead). Our tongue’s taste buds demonstrate a certain amount of variation in flavor receptivity; they are not laid out quite as simply as sweet at the front, salty and sour on the sides, umami everywhere (maybe add pungency and astringency to the overall gestalt of flavors), and bitter at the back. But, that bitterness is tasted most strongly at the back of the tongue does seems like nature’s last chance to exit the highway, a last chance to spit out willow bark and think about its flavor later, like when you’re inventing aspirin.

Early experiences with bitterness include poking at cafeteria grapefruits, spitting out a mouthful of gin and tonic, and being dumped in my senior year via yearbook inscription. It is in my nature, however, to find balance, and now I taste the sweet in the ruby red, raise toasts with gins and tonics, and will maybe go on a date again someday… avoiding the bitter does not make sweet sweeter. Quite the opposite. Cue the beginning of my exploration of bitterness as a flavor, in food and life. Let the broadening of an emotional and culinary palate begin!

Top of the list of things to try was radicchio. With its striking combination of white and burgundy, colors I wanted to eat, hang as curtains, or wear like a boyfriend’s letter jacket, this bitter “green” is an object of absolute beauty to me. A quartered head looks like the feathers of an exotic bird, an animal time forgot. A rough chop of radicchio provides color and flavor in salads and sautés, a backdrop against which other ingredients can pop and shine. When radicchio is lightly marinated in a vinegary solution and grilled, flavors of char, acid, and bitterness combine to create a taste sensation I associate with being the survivor of a shipwreck off the north coast of France in the early nineteenth century – brackish, alkaline, salty, and as sweet as finding a bed of rushes and reeds.

More recent experiences with bitterness include discovering the Pacific Northwest’s extremely hoppy IPAs, ordering bitter melon in Chinatown, and losing my job. There are many times of the year in Seattle when any kind of blow to self, any experience with bitterness, is compounded by a low sky and half-frozen rain rattling against single-paned windows. But this is not that time. While it may be a little while longer before I feel grateful for an unlooked-for major-life-change, right now I have sunny skies, a hot grill, a feathery heart of radicchio, and my friends, who are toasting the summer with Negronis. I have time to think hopefully upon what’s next.  Right now, I will savor the sweet.