When organ transplants were in the news, I was in Michigan, again peeking from behind the curtain at an audience of beefy, jowly people listening to one member of the audience telling the rest how his beeper went off when he was shopping for groceries and how he had to just leave his cart with all the food in it, just like that! and go for his organ transplant. Then I came out and made a salad. I have never felt so irrelevant.
Sometimes a news story was breaking and you just got dumped—after getting up at 5:00 to be at the station, that is, having landed at an airport late the night before. A young child wanted to set a record and so she tried to fly a plane across the country. It crashed. She died. It was a sad and stupid story. And suddenly I was not interesting anymore. In fact, I was utterly dispensable, as I had suspected all along.
Escorts were hired to pick me up at the airport and take me wherever I had to be. They had done the shopping for me and maybe made my dish since I didn’t have a kitchen. Usually I was so tired when I finally landed somewhere that the last thing I wanted to do was answer the one question the escorts tended to ask, “How did you get interested in cooking?” Really, I just wanted to go to sleep. But they worked hard and tried hard and I couldn’t do a book tour without them. Occasionally they rescued me from situations I didn’t want to be in, inviting me into their homes for a meal and maybe a bed in a quiet bedroom. A few of these hardworking escorts have become friends over the years and have gone on to their own successful careers.
Today, there are no more escorts. At least for me. Rather, a person from my publisher goes with me on a small tour, and it is fortunate that we’ve had a great time together. Other authors might go by themselves, hopefully to places they already know, but sometimes not. Uber and Lyft make some things possible, but they can’t do it all. They can drop you off at an address, but it’s hard to go inside a bookstore alone and find the person who sits with you, bored, while you sign books. The escorts usually have close and warm relationships with the booksellers, which is really important. They chat while I sign.
I did get to stay in extremely nice hotels, hotels that served Japanese breakfasts for Japanese businessmen and me, the former Zen student. They welcomed me with chocolates and handwritten notes, and prided themselves on having bathroom fixtures that were unique—like drains. Once I checked in there was nothing I wanted to do more than take that hot bath, but there were times when I couldn’t figure out how to make the water stay in the tub. I wanted to cry in frustration, but I called housekeeping and waited for the man to come and show me how this particular drain worked. Until he arrived, I was stuck, waiting. And every moment was precious because I was going to have a very early wake-up call in order to be shunted to the TV station hours ahead of time to do my little dog and pony show. After that, I had a day of radio and print interviews before being dropped at the airport. It was a city a day.
* * *
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I was very thin on my first tour because I was unsure about my life and frankly terrified. A woman on a radio show in Detroit took a swipe at me. “You probably don’t even have children—you’re too thin.” I’m not sure what the one thing had to do with the other, but I noticed she was substantially overweight. I suspected she was angry and that she thought I was too vain to be suitable mom material. Or a cook, for that matter. Thin or not, I was not a happy person. I felt like a leaf about to be blown away, and she was openly hostile. I didn’t enjoy this leafy feeling. But other than this particular show, I loved radio. It was immediate, warm, alive, and not nearly as silly and vain as TV tends to be.
Television hosts were often silly but they were rarely mean. In fact they generally tried to be favorable and nice, even if you were no more than that leaf in the wind to them. When I was on tour to promote California artichokes one woman started the segment by declaring she hated, absolutely hated artichokes. What a great opportunity to jump in and ask why or say that indeed, they do resemble hand grenades—but at the time it was a bit too startling and I was taken aback. If people hated a food, I never believed in trying to make them like it, I really didn’t. But I still had to cook those artichokes. I did cook them—it was a little sauté with asparagus and scallions—and it all worked out. The hostess managed to muster some enthusiasm, and I was starving so I did, too.
On another show, I happened to have a lot of different dried heirloom beans in my pocket—maybe I was cooking a bean dish. There was a reason that I’ve forgotten. My hands had become coated with olive oil—yes, I must have been tossing a salad that included legumes—and at some point, when there was a lull in the conversation, I reached in my pocket and pulled out those beans to show the host. The oil on my hands made them shine. They were all different colors and patterns and sizes, beans I’d collected from markets in Mexico mostly. They were gorgeous. She gasped. “They’re so beautiful!” And suddenly, seeing her pleasure, it was all worthwhile.
In New York, on the Today show, I was set up out-of-doors, in Rockefeller Plaza, because David Bowie was going to follow my segment and he obviously needed a sizable stage. It started to rain but most of my desserts were sheltered under an enormous canvas umbrella. Toward the end of the segment, a homeless man wandered over and asked for a piece of cake. Matt Lauer tried to shoo him away—the cameras were still rolling—but I had no idea who this person was so I said, “Sure!” I thought maybe he was one of the crew. I cut him a piece and put it on a plate for him. Time went by so fast when I was on a TV set that I couldn’t register anything clearly. Guest? Homeless person? Crew? Did it matter? I had no idea.
I was exhausted when it was finally over. I had been nervously waiting since 5:00 A.M. and it was now almost 9:00. Patrick and I went to Carnegie Deli for a big breakfast.
Book tours, I concluded early on, were crazy! They were hard. I learned to think on my feet, but it took a few times. Looking back, I can’t quite see why it was so difficult to have fun with it all, but I think it was just the newness of being in the world like that. To me the world that television in particular portrayed was bizarre, and it was one I didn’t find easy to enter.
Book tours also tended to be bicoastal events. The middle of the country, except for Minneapolis and Chicago, was the flyover part of the United States. Those states were the ones I wanted to be in, on the ground, walking around, cooking, and talking to people. The cities may have been smaller, but they were interesting and the people often were, too. When Local Flavors came out I was able to revisit many of the communities, towns, and small cities I had researched for the book—Kansas City, Cleveland. Champaign-Urbana. Champaign-Urbana was great. True, I stayed in a motel that was packed with noisy, drunken fans of the Chicago Bears because their stadium was being rebuilt and the game had been moved, but when I went to sign books in a bookstore that was on the edge of a cornfield I couldn’t believe how many people came and how enthusiastic they were. I was so glad that I got to be there. Plus I met some amazing farmers and writers.
I did learn one very important thing from my first book tour, and that was that the Bay Area is nothing like the rest of the country. The foods I was used to cooking and eating had not yet surfaced in Minneapolis or Washington, DC, or Phoenix. No one was eating arugula. No one was cooking with celery root or fennel. The escorts really had to work hard to find these foods and sometimes they weren’t able to. Of course, over time our national pantry has changed as ingredients have spread from the West Coast to the East then started filling in the middle of the country. And they are still changing.
Another thing book tours taught me was that the only recipes that are ours are the ones we happen to be cooking—at that moment. Once they have left my kitchen, they’re impossible to own. Even if I have come up with something that seems really special and unique, when someone else cooks my food, it changes, and becomes something else—and someone else’s—altogether. This is inevitable and often, quite wonderful. I learned about the importance of visuals, what
they say about a dish and the person who cooked it. And of course, I learned about myself. Often my response to what others had done was “Why didn’t I think of that? This way is so much better!”
On my first book tour I was signing books in a supermarket where, I was told, the home economist was making a few salads from The Greens Cookbook. I arrived early and was chatting with her when I remembered the salads and asked her where they were.
“Well, you’re looking at them!” she said and pointed to some large plastic platters. Everything on them was perfectly and symmetrically arranged—asparagus spears all radiating out from the center; eggs, hard-boiled and neatly quartered, nestled between them; olives or capers placed just so. It looked like something out of a woman’s magazine circa 1986. Because I never arranged food that way—and didn’t even think to—I didn’t see it as “mine” at all. Of course I was embarrassed that I hadn’t recognized the dish, but it had never occurred to me that asparagus, eggs, and whatever else on the plate wouldn’t be tumbling over one another, loosely organized, the way I tended to do it. Years later while traveling in Tunisia I saw a lot of food set out in decorative, repeated patterns, not unlike that of the home economist, but somehow it looked right there, perhaps because it mirrored the symmetry of the tiles on the walls. Within their static design was an element of poise that I hadn’t recognized before in such perfectly arranged dishes.
On another occasion a different home economist (do we even have these anymore?) made a vegetable stew from The Savory Way, cutting all its components into large, rough pieces. Again, I didn’t recognize the dish because my tendency was to cut things smaller and more carefully. My version had a very different look and feel about it, but I was surprised and delighted with hers and the bold statement that her vegetables made. I felt a lurch of jealousy. Why didn’t I do it like that?
I realize that often we do things just because it’s the way we do them; we don’t really think about it, it’s just the way we see the world and we probably don’t know why we see the world that way. I knew that I tended to cut things carefully and finely but not evenly, and here was someone who just went at it, producing big chunks of vegetables. It never occurred to me to make the dish that way—until the moment I saw hers. Clearly it had its own allure, but my own tendencies had never allowed me to imagine what that might be. Today, at least in respect to stews, I always stress the importance of making the vegetable components big and robust so that the eye has something to go to and settle on.
More recently, when I was touring Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison’s Kitchen, a chef in Seattle prepared a menu of my dishes in his restaurant. I was delighted that the food tasted so good. I knew that it helps to have a little distance from the actual cooking. But I was even more impressed with how the dishes looked. The chef made them chic, interesting, and slightly unpredictable. After changing my focus from restaurant cooking to the needs of the home cook so many years ago, I had, it seemed, gradually ceased to push my food to the same aesthetic limits a chef would in a restaurant setting. Suddenly, my own cooking seemed rather pedestrian, not so much the flavors, but the appearance. I was stuck in time and my food, at least the presentation, wasn’t up-to-date at all. I’m not sure this was necessarily bad—I still had my own particular style—but when I saw the chef putting out plates I found myself asking, as I often did, “Why didn’t I think of that?” The same thing happened at least three times in a restaurant just north of San Francisco. The chef there completely transformed my food, giving it sparkle and panache.
It’s jolting to see what others can do to transform your food.
A few years earlier a similar thing had happened at Charlie Trotter’s To Go in Chicago, where the impeccable young staff had prepared a few recipes from Local Flavors. I couldn’t imagine a more different approach to my food than Charlie Trotter’s. He was so refined and painstaking in his presentation while I tended to prefer food that fell onto the plate and arranged itself. I was a bit worried about the lack of fit here, but then, out came my dishes. I couldn’t believe it was my food; it was so “Charlie Trotter” and so beautiful, these little jewel-crusted bites. The young women had made my recipes look as stylish and pretty as they were. It felt good to be nudged into a new way of seeing. Danny Kaye had it right, that yes, you’re a swan, not an ugly duckling after all. Or at least you can be if you, or someone else, cares to make the effort.
Not all moments like these were so elevating, though. As spokesperson for the California Artichoke Advisory Board I did some touring on its behalf. On one trip the magazine director took me to the kitchens of a large midwestern complex where I was to demonstrate a few dishes featuring artichokes. As we toured the magazine’s vast facility, I noticed a young woman off to the side cutting vegetables. She was dressed in a lab coat, not a chef’s jacket, a net covered her hair, and her hands were sheathed in plastic gloves. A ruler sat on the counter. I watched her pick it up and measure a piece of carrot, a slice of artichoke, a bit of onion. When I realized that she was prepping the vegetables for one of my dishes, I rushed over to her, introduced myself as the author of the recipe, and told her that she didn’t have to measure everything so precisely. She replied that my recipe called for half-inch cubes and she was making sure that’s what she was cutting.
“But that was just a suggestion,” I countered. “You have to say something!”
My heart sank. How do you tell someone that you don’t mean for her to take your instructions literally, that measurements are only meant as ballpark figures? All her laborious cutting—the waste of time and of pieces that didn’t measure up—produced a dish that looked as if it had been made from a box of frozen vegetables. It was at moments like this that I despaired of recipe writing and wished it were possible to just give a suggestion to slice something thin or thick, rather than one-eighth- or one-half-inch thick.
Even my own mother has cooked and served my recipes to her friends with scant regard for instructions. And while I have heartily believed that recipes themselves, like measurements, are essentially hints, there were points where I drew the line, such as when she blithely substituted ripe persimmons for dried plums, or refused to spend a few minutes on a crucial step or a few dollars on an important ingredient. I didn’t really want to claim the dish as mine, but I had to, and with good spirit. Another well-meaning friend cooked a simple soup that pleaded for true, ripe tomatoes, shallots, and basil. That was all. But it was December and she made the soup using winter tomatoes from the supermarket. Then she announced to one and all at the table that this soup was my recipe. I knew it was a mere shadow of what it could be and I wanted to slither to the floor. But in this situation I had to smile and say “Thank you.”
Sometimes I wished that people were just a little more responsive to my suggestions. But then if they were happy with what they’d made, did it matter?
I had to ask this question when I was invited to speak to an extremely nice group of vegans who had hosted my talk and made food from my books to serve to their audience. Before the program started, I asked them what they had made.
“Your Onion and Rosemary Tart with Fromage Blanc,” a young woman answered. She had a pretty smile, an enthusiastic smile.
“How did you do that?” I asked, knowing that the recipe called for butter, eggs, and fromage blanc, none of these suitable foods for vegans. She explained that they had cooked the onions with rosemary and put them on toast.
Now caramelized rosemary-scented onions on toast can be delicious, but these weren’t. The copious amount of rosemary, unmitigated by cheese, was overpowering. There was too little salt. And there was nothing to contrast with the onions aside from the too strong rosemary. On top of this, the bread was thick and earnest and more bread than toast, and the whole thing was cold, brown, and dowdy looking.
The other dishes they cooked followed suit. They looked nothing like the pictures in the book, which I had hoped might
serve as models. And they tasted nothing like my recipes. This was a discouraging moment. Why had I bothered trying to lift vegetarian food, vegan or otherwise, out of this pit of drabness for the past thirty-plus years when this was the result? We were right back in the 1970s. And yet, everyone but me seemed happy.
Did goodness matter? Not to them, apparently. Or maybe they found that their food was good and my standards weren’t the ones to judge with. Even if you had decided to strip away all the flavors, textures, and subtle qualities that come with cheese, say, you could still make a good dish. Goodness did matter to me. I didn’t feel these dishes were good and I was hoping we could do better by now. But I was grateful for the kindness and generosity of this group. In the end, this mattered more than the food. By far.
24. More About Books
After two years in Santa Fe, I was no longer managing the farmers’ market but was putting together a restaurant called Café Escalera. It was the only restaurant in Santa Fe that you could get to via an escalator, hence the name. David Tanis had moved to Santa Fe from Berkeley and he would be the chef. I wanted to be pastry chef because that position was quieter, but we all worked together. The contacts I had from the farmers’ market made our food vibrant and unforgettable. As the dessert cook I had the time to experiment with making simple cheeses like mascarpone, fromagina, and cream cheese, which became part of our dessert assemblages.
I loved the idea of having a job to go to after freelancing and waking up each day faced with the need to reinvent myself. But when, after two years of having a job, I was invited to be on a panel discussion in Spain, I thought that maybe freelancing wasn’t so bad after all. Of course Patrick and I went, and that was the beginning of a long relationship with Oldways Preservation Trust, a group with whom we traveled the shores of the Mediterranean countries many times and were introduced to the old ways of preparing foods, from couscous in Sfax to olive oil in Liguria and ouzo in Greece. At that time food people—writers, chefs, scholars—were very interested in authenticity and the old ways of doing things, especially concerning food. Today the world of food seems to be more “anything goes.” You want “sriracha hummus? No problem!” I’m too much of a purist for today’s tastes.
An Onion in My Pocket Page 22
