I finally left Greens to go back to Tassajara for a practice period to be the head monk, or shuso, something every ordained student was expected to do. It was my turn. I stayed for a year. When I arrived at the monastery, I broke out in boils. It was as if all the anxiety and doubt about running a restaurant was mixed up with the hunger for a meal that wasn’t leftover food warmed up but food cooked maybe just for me, or me and fifty others. The tension finally had to erupt one way or another, and nasty red boils were the way. Then they subsided and I had other worries in my new position. After all, the shuso was the one who got up extra early and ran through Tassajara ringing the wake-up bell. The shuso had to give lectures and make the compost. And at the end of the practice period, the shuso was grilled by all the students in a ceremony where they asked their most difficult questions. This position, too, was a challenge.
20. Kitchen Lessons
There were lots of lessons to be learned in running a restaurant. The experience felt a lot like, in the words of Dogen-zenji, “one continuous mistake.” I made mistakes with the food, with the staff, with customers, with myself. They did seem to be endless, and they were especially endless when we started doing dinners. With the single menu everything had to work. Of course that was always true, but it was even truer at dinner because the customers didn’t have any choice about what was coming to them.
Some of the lessons I learned at Greens were about making menus and about simply paying attention. Without realizing it until the last minute, I might discover that my menu was made up of all white foods: onions, tofu, potatoes, risotto. Or maybe everything was soft, or all the shapes were round. Or maybe I had made a menu that was cooked entirely on the stove or mostly in the oven, resulting in some pretty frantic evenings. Actually, these were the kinds of mistakes I learned from very quickly; I only had to make them once. But I did have to remember, as a matter of routine, to make sure that the serve-up was spread out over the kitchen and not cooked entirely in the pizza oven, or that there was sufficient variation in color, form, and texture to make a pleasing meal. Discovering and correcting errors like these was really about learning my craft in the kitchen. There were other kinds of lessons though, lessons that were often taught by our customers.
DON’T APOLOGIZE
One lesson that I’m still working on after all these years is not to apologize. Alice had told me that. Julia Child had written that. I guess we all have to learn it. I don’t mean not to apologize for things that should be apologized for, mistaken orders and that sort of thing, but there’s no need to go out into the dining room and tell everyone you’re sorry for the disappointing food they’re about to have, even though you may feel that the impending meal is going to be a disaster. Sometimes I wasn’t so confident about a new dish, I was not sure it would work, but beyond giving it my best effort, the next best thing was to try to relax, move carefully and deliberately, and of course, not cry. At least in the kitchen.
One night we were serving a mushroom soup, the Bresse mushroom soup from Jane Grigson’s vegetable book. Someone had mistakenly transferred the finished soup to a stainless steel warming pot, but the wrong one. It was a thin pot used only for pasta water. Bit by bit as the evening went on, the solids that fell to the bottom of the pot had begun to scorch. It wasn’t obvious to us and no one noticed until a waiter came in and said, “So-and-so wants to know how you got that smoky flavor in the soup. He loves it! He says it’s a ten!”
“What smoky flavor?” I wondered. There weren’t supposed to be any smoky flavors in this soup. I rushed over to the pot, tasted the soup, discovered that it had become scorched. Not wanting to spoil things for our guest, I lied and said that we grilled the mushrooms first for that soup. Then we quietly changed out the soup and substituted another for the rest of the evening.
If he thought it was a ten, so be it. Why ruin it for him? After all, the lines between smoked, scorched, caramelized, and just plain burned are often more crooked than straight, more blurred than exact. Baba ganouj made with eggplant cooked slowly over a fire until scorched and collapsed has a rich smoky flavor, but if you’re not prepared for it, it can be read “burned”—and therefore most likely wrong. Fortunately, that night, at least for one customer, it was possible to read scorched as smoked, and therefore right. But after that mishap we got jacketed pots for the evening’s soup so that there would be no more scorched “tens.”
BE FOREVER GRACIOUS
When people came in the kitchen beaming and then exclaimed that they had just eaten one of the best meals they’d ever had in all their lives, I had to bite my lip not to say, “You’re joking!” and simply say instead, and with some enthusiasm, “I’m so glad you enjoyed it.” It was the hardest thing in the world to do. I suspected they were crazy and had been eating only the most awful food available, maybe even cat food. But I finally did learn that the food I’d been looking at, smelling, and tasting for the past few hours was not the same food the guest experienced. Nor was standing on aching feet in a hot kitchen the same experience the customer had just enjoyed. To the customer everything was new and fresh and physically comfortable, even as I was hot and tired and struggling to figure out dishes and menus, then make them come to life. That Saturday night’s leftovers, rewarmed the following day for lunch, tasted good always surprised me. Even though they were damaged and smushed together, they were, in fact, delicious.
TREAT EVERYONE THE SAME
Another lesson that I learned more painfully was a simple one: Always do your best for everyone. Treat everyone the same. No exceptions.
After giving me some time to figure out what I was doing at Greens, Alice came to dinner. We were having a salad with artichokes for the first course, and I had set aside the most beautiful ones for her. I made sure that someone was tracking her table, then I made her salads, spending extra time on them, using the prettiest leaves of lettuce, the best artichokes. Then, a bit more hastily, I made the salads for the next two orders. Of course they got mixed up and I was utterly humiliated on all accounts. Not that the second set was bad, but I wished it had been as nice as the one I made for Alice. It still hurts to recall this.
SALT AS YOU GO
I had a real cooking lesson when Marion Cunningham came into the kitchen after a dinner and pulled me aside. “Debbie dear,” she said, which was what she always called me. “Is it against your religion to use salt?”
I found such a possibility rather amusing, though I have since learned that salt and other seasonings had, in the past, been intentionally left out of the food of some fanatic vegetarian groups. But not ours.
“Of course not!” I answered. “Why?”
“Well, your food tastes a little flat; it all needs salt.” Marion was always very direct.
She then proceeded to tell me that every part of the dish should be salted as you go, a practice I quickly adhered to. Since I had traveled in both vegetarian and nonvegetarian worlds, I had noticed that meats seem to have their own salts, and that if you were really vegetarian, you tended to want or need less salt. Since my palate was pretty meat free at that time, what seemed all right to me, or to any of us in the kitchen for that matter, might well not have been up to par for most of our nonvegetarian diners. True enough. But the whole business of when you add salt is crucial. If you just add it at the end, you get something—whatever you’ve made—plus salt. If you salt each part of a dish as you go, you feel like you’re reaching for the salt all the time and you are, but in the end, it should be well balanced. Maybe you want to add a few drops of lemon, other acid, and a pinch of salt to correct any lacks, but you won’t need a lot. Your dish will be seasoned.
This is now such a given in my cooking that I find it very odd that Marion had to explain it to me. It was a long time ago and it was a gift that Marion was so frank; it would have been a shame to see all our hard work and effort fail due to the lack of something as simple as knowing how to salt a dish. I will
always be grateful for her honesty and also her encouragement, for she seemed to really like Greens and she ate there often with her friends. And she wrote the foreword for The Greens Cookbook.
EAT LIKE A GUEST—IN THE DINING ROOM
One way I came to understand not only the salt level but also the overall impression of what our food was like was to eat it, not simply taste it before service or standing up at the end of the night eating at the counter like a famished little animal, or reheating leftovers on Sundays. I mean eat it sitting down, in the dining room, and experiencing a meal in its entirety, from beginning to end. It was hard to get a picture of what our food really was like, how the menu flowed, whether the portion sizes were interesting or tedious to eat, without experiencing it the same way our customers did. Also, because our dinner menus didn’t read the way meat-based menus did, it was important to see how they worked or if they worked.
I was relieved to find that generally they did work, although there were flaws I hadn’t noticed in the kitchen that did show up in the dining room. Once I experienced them, they were easy to correct. Of course, it was hard to eat in the dining room when I wanted to be cooking and it was hard to leave the kitchen and enjoy myself on the other side of the wall when others were working or without wanting to get up and go back every few minutes and check on things. But when I did manage to sit down and experience the food like a guest did, it always proved to be the most worthwhile experience. Although flaws and errors were revealed, it was also good to discover that the food was never as terrible as I feared; in fact, it was good. And it was an unexpected bonus to experience the niceties of the restaurant—the pretty room, the view of the Golden Gate Bridge, the flickering candles, the waitstaff doing what they did—and seeing other people eating and enjoying themselves. Yes, it was all a big experiment, but it seemed to be working.
KNOW THAT YOU WILL GET TO LEAVE ONE DAY
A very special lesson, or maybe it was more of a hint of things to come, came from another chef, who told me that the first six months would be the hardest, that I would never leave the restaurant during that period, but to have heart because the situation would change. My friend was absolutely right. It was practically six months to the day that I left the restaurant for the first time one sunny afternoon and went to North Beach to pick up our coffee at Graffeos. While out I ducked into Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store and ordered an anchovy sandwich and a beer. It was so wonderful to drink that thirst-quenching beer and bite into flavors that were entirely unlike those I had been immersed in for the past half year. I recalled my friend’s promise and took a deep breath. I’d made it. We had made it. At least six months. Today Greens is forty years old!
21. My Vegetarian Problem
Somewhere in the Midwest a smiling man rushed up to me in the airport and said that he had seen me that morning on a television show.
“Your food looked great!” he said. You could even say that he gushed; he seemed so enthusiastic. But then he became a little lower key, adding in a softer voice, that unfortunately he wasn’t a vegetarian.
Of course this sotto voce comment begged the question “But don’t you eat vegetables, too? At least sometimes?”
* * *
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This encounter was maybe the strongest reason why I didn’t like the vegetarian label—and still struggle with it. It seemed to be about pushing food away, not toward embracing all these wonderful new to many but old to the world vegetables and other plant foods. Unfortunately, our man in the airport was not vegetarian, as if you had to be one to enjoy these foods.
There are no recipes for meat, fish, or fowl in any of the books I’ve written with the exception of Local Flavors, which has eleven meat-based recipes. Local Flavors was about farmers’ markets, not about me, and meat had begun to appear there along with vegetables when I wrote that book. No one seemed to notice or care, but other than this handful of recipes, you could call the rest of them vegetarian, although I would just call them recipes for vegetables. I’ve always looked at my recipe offerings as the vegetable side of the plate—and many of them can take the center role if one desires. Or not. But there was the reviewer who really didn’t like that I didn’t describe The Savory Way as a vegetarian cookbook, as if it was criminal to devote a cookbook to plant foods without a warning. Again, the vegetarian spin narrowed possibilities. The Savory Way was suitable for a vegetarian but not, apparently, my man in the airport.
The vegetarian label has not been particularly admired in the food world at any time, and often for good reason. Say the word “vegetarian” and there’s always this uncomfortable pause that suggests you are not quite a legitimate eater, much less a legitimate cook. No wonder insecure vegetarians resort to naming famous people past and present who have carried that label—Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, Ellen DeGeneres, Paul McCartney. Of course there’s always the problem with Hitler. Still, you never hear meat eaters pointing to other famous meat eaters; they don’t have to. As a vegetarian you’re simply on the outs, unless you happen to be a movie star of course (Natalie Portman is another vegetarian); then it’s fine even to be vegan (again Ms. Portman).
There have been a number of unfortunate associations that get tacked onto vegetarians and their food, such as an earnestness that’s regarded as naïve when the Bambi factor is appealed to—those who could never eat a bunny, deer, pig, or any other animal represented by Disney. There are vegetarians with political attitudes that they’re happy to express any moment they can. There’s the tendency of vegetarians to take high moral ground that leaves the nonvegetarian feeling judged. When I posted an event on my Facebook page for the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance, where there would be an opportunity to taste a rancher’s well-raised grass-fed beef, a vegetarian responded with the “Yeah, it’s a dead cow” message, which was both unhelpful and unnecessary. Yes, it was that, but that cow was also why a New Mexican ranch was able to support viable grasslands and attendant wildlife in a challenging environment. The meal was also going to show the diners how a little beef could go far because the meat would be featured as small bites of flavor, not as steaks or chops. The “dead cow” response simply did not take in the larger picture, and we do live in the context of larger pictures whether or not we want to.
Because we are a nation of avid meat eaters, I have felt that it’s important to explore other ways and approaches, besides eating a steak or becoming vegetarian, to raising animals and including meats in our diets: a middle way. I happen to prefer a plant-based diet, but I still think it’s more important that we all understand the complexities of food. Even so, when a truck passes me on the highway loaded with cattle or hogs or sheep, I feel heartbroken, knowing that these animals are going miserably to their deaths. There must be a better way.
Regenerative ranching does point to that better way, and maybe curbing our appetite for meat so that less is plenty is also a better way. I don’t believe that not eating meat (or eating Impossible Burgers) will solve our big problems, such as climate change, but changing the nature of modern meat would help us be healthier. This would mean getting rid of the feedlots and the mentality that goes with feeding cattle foods that harm them, and getting rid of antibiotics in their diets to make them grow larger and more quickly.
When writing for food magazines, I have often been asked to write about grains and beans even though I’ve cooked many more foods than these two groups and have spent time as a pastry chef. There’s an unending association of grains and beans with vegetarian food and “health food” when all foods might be healthful—and good. So often organic and good-for-you foods have equaled brown. Why couldn’t there be color, brightness, and charm along with goodness, was a question I asked myself for years. Vegetables themselves are gorgeous, as chefs today, like José Andrés and others who are getting very “farmy” about vegetables, well know. And nutritionists know that their colors matter, too. So why were they, at least in the 1980s, left out
of the picture in favor of the other plant foods that left such a stodgy impression? I suspect it was because vegetables were not yet interesting then. We forget that arugula, fingerling potatoes, endive, heirloom pumpkins and tomatoes, which can now be bought at Trader Joe’s without a second thought, were new and uncommon foods when Greens was just getting started. In this respect it was not so long ago.
It has been tempting to detach myself from the vegetarian label. And although I casually threatened to write the all-meat cookbook when I moved to Flagstaff, the truth was that I really did have a thing for vegetables. Meat was harder for me to relate to, mainly because I didn’t know it very well and I was not an intuitive meat cook. If I do cook meat, I use a recipe out of a cookbook. Still, I’ve never been able to get up on a soapbox and be preachy about vegetarianism. And I abhor the equation of vegetarian food with a better diet and improved health, although it’s true that for many, a vegetarian diet might well improve health, and that’s good. But there can be poor vegetarian diets, too. Coke and chips? That’s a vegetarian snack, if not a meal for some. I would never star a recipe or a dish on a menu as “heart healthy,” although it’s good to have a healthy heart, or “cruelty free,” although it’s very desirable not to inflict cruelty on animals and others. And I’ve never accompanied a recipe with the “eating-by-number” breakdowns of fat, calories, and carbohydrates—an omission for which I’ve been criticized, especially by vegetarians. I believe that if we are paying attention to what we eat and how we eat, we can figure out what foods are right for us. If we live in America and read any popular magazine or use the Internet, we can’t help but be informed about what’s in foods and how they affect us. But to find foods in this country that don’t harm us and others (field workers, wildlife, domesticated animals, waterways) takes work. A lot of work. You have to research food and farming practices. You may have to say no to GMOs, which I do as often as possible, or the like. Maybe attend a local farming conference to become informed. Good food does not come to us easily and the USDA is not always our friend.
An Onion in My Pocket Page 18
