by Daniel Duane
Ruth Reichl leads the most visible counterattack against the Disappointed Cookbook Lovers, dismissing their pursuit of perfection and claiming to love, instead, the way no dish ever turns out the same twice, guaranteeing that Reichl’s cooking will always be an adventure. “I cook for other people, and to me, cooking is an act of giving,” Reichl continues. “When I leaf through cookbooks or magazines I am imagining all the people who will be sitting around my table, and I am looking for food that will make them happy.” I liked the sound of this, back then; and I know that I wanted the emotional extra credit owed to anybody cooking in this spirit; but even I knew that I was cooking almost entirely for myself, hunting perfection in precisely Gopnik’s spirit, horrified by the idea of culinary adventures and of dishes turning out differently, night after night. So I knew what Lane and Gopnik were talking about: recipes always sound good, but they rarely work out the way you’ve dreamt; words on a page cannot a chef make. And yet, even here, as with that whole Recipes Give Me a Headache ideology, I was blessedly unafflicted in the early days, because my own ache was so unrelated to food. I could no more ache for Alice’s Turnip and Turnip Green Soup, to cite a dish from the subsequent soup phase (Asparagus Soup, Black Bean and Roasted Tomatillo Soup, Corn Soup with Salsa, lot of soup), than for the moons of Jupiter. The words “Turnip” and “Turnip Greens” meant nothing to me; together in a combined noun, they might as well have been Fortran. Turnips and turnip greens did sound unlikely to be worth eating, and I suppose that’s at least a little bit of meaning, but it was a meaning based on suspicion, not information.
Once I’d cleared that baseless suspicion from my mind, nothing remained, allowing me to see the words “Turnip” and “Turnip Green” as they really were, for me: empty of the power to signify, much less to evoke an ache for Turnip and Turnip Green Soup. And it was precisely this emptiness of specific meaning that acted like a tonic upon my self-hating mind: it was precisely because I hadn’t a clue that I could experience the quest to acquire that clue as purposeful, answering this man’s immediate emotional need to spend at least one part of each day chasing tangible, useful (edible) results.
When that quest became difficult, as in the case of “2 bunches young turnips, with their greens,” I found pleasure in the pursuit. Turnips may be among the most common of vegetables, available in every grocery store everywhere, but I personally had never knowingly eaten one and hadn’t the vaguest idea what a turnip even looked like. So I first had to ask Liz, who did her best to describe them. Then I foolishly began my search in our neighborhood. Full of optimism, I grabbed my wallet and walked down our narrow little lane to Cortland Street, the local business district. I passed a beauty salon regionally famous for expertise in black women’s hair, and the Chinese restaurant proudly displaying, in its window, a newspaper review headlined “Hunan Chef Doesn’t Suck.” The pet store came next, and then the neighborhood grocery. There, I found only turnips of the type I now know to be ubiquitous: dull pinkish-white tennis balls looking like they’ve fallen out of a garbage truck and been run over a couple of times before tumbling into the gutter. No greens involved, and therefore no end to my turnip quest.
The next Saturday, with spring finally coming to California, we all woke up early. Liz, the prior afternoon, had consumed her first latte since giving birth. Hannah, as a result, had absorbed copious coffee-spiked breast milk and slept hardly a wink. So I struggled to convince a bleary-eyed Liz that we might have fun on a family turnip mission to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, a place I’d not yet visited. I’ve since come to see this market as Mecca to the Northern California cult of fine food. Not the Innermost Temple—that lies somewhere inside the Chez Panisse kitchen, wherever Alice browbeats interns into the endless peeling of tiny fresh fava beans—but a place of pilgrimage nonetheless, hallowed ground on which aspirants practice all the skills of their worship, reaffirm commitment to certain codes and values.
Thrilled to have company, Liz and Hannah coming along for the ride, I took the freeway north, swooping over the Mission District and past downtown to the 4th Street exit. We passed underneath the Bay Bridge, where I parked along the glittering waterfront. As we walked toward the market, we joined a river of the food-obsessed affluent, a human current of the anxiously inbound (GOT TO GET SOME FUCKING NETTLES BEFORE THEY’RE GONE!!!). Legions of the happily outbound hustled the other way, bags bursting with baby leeks and Chioggia beets, wood-oven baguettes and live lobsters: That’s right, got mine!
Finally, I saw the portal through which I’d have to pass to enter the market: the phalanx of sizzling, smoking restaurant booths forming an outer flank of temptation. Like baleen in the mouth of a whale, all those expertly cooked softshell-crab sandwiches, sustainable-pork BLTs and pastured-egg omelets filtered out the unserious by encouraging them to blow off shopping, eschew cooking, screw personal growth, and just buy a big, beautiful plate and settle in to chow.
I paused there a moment, looking up at the Ferry Building clock tower and the blue sky beyond. I felt my pulse accelerating. I hadn’t even entered yet, and I wanted everything: I wanted to eat every bite from every booth and thus to know what all these people knew. But then I remembered the turnips with turnip greens and took the plunge. I marched straight past all the breakfast-eating amateurs and right down the throat-like corridor of the lavender-and-flower merchants into the whale’s belly—the farm stands themselves. There, I found a once-in-a-millennium conglomeration of the world’s most beautiful plant foods, with “dry-farmed Early Girl” tomatoes looking like the Platonic Ideal of tomato-ness, and whole plants of basil for sale cheap, and mountains of multicolored sweet peppers, and exquisitely tender frisée. The fevered crowd, swirling around me, engaged in the uniquely San Franciscan contact sport of elbowing past the chutney-buying tourists to grab the last of the jumbo levain loaves at Della Fattoria—sweating the hot sweat of panicky desire, bribing pissedoff kids with five-dollar cinnamon twists and six-dollar smoothies, and then paying way too much for a pig’s liver that ought to be free, given how nasty a grown-up pig’s liver typically tastes (suckling-pig organs are different). Out of the corner of my eye, in the swirling kaleidoscope of agricultural bounty, I saw a woman holding postcard-perfect French breakfast radishes up to the light, scrutinizing their flawless tender greens for the slightest signs of wilt. I remembered suddenly that Vegetables had a radishes chapter, and the memory made my pulse quicken even more. A bead of sweat ran down my ribs. I could see picture-perfect baby carrots—no bigger than my pinky, priced like jewels—and I could recall a recipe or two for which they’d be ideal. I could see a sign saying “Tat Tsoi,” and another reading “Amaranth Greens,” and both were key ingredients I’d not only never seen before but never thought I’d find as long as I lived.
Bolting to bag some radishes of my own, I wondered: How many bunches do I need to knock off every single radish recipe tonight? My wallet now more open than closed—Liz a little appalled, I think, to see my profligacy with our grocery dollars—I began to bounce from farmer to farmer, buying anything and everything as if my life depended on my project’s completion, as if this market were the only place on earth to find the essential ingredients, as if this very Saturday might just be the market’s last day ever, before the Judgment Day upon which a wrathful God might demand to know why the hell I’d not yet completed the shelling-peas section of Vegetables.
Then I saw them: young white turnips, smaller than golf balls, fresh green leaves truly sprouting off their tops.
A familiar voice said, “What up, double-D?”
I looked up from the turnips and, to my surprise and delight, saw a guy I’d known in a former life, a tall, unshaven, shaggyhaired surfer named Joe. The very sight of Joe’s face brought a knee-weakening tide of nostalgia for weeks on a certain Baja beach, surfing all day in warm water, eating fish tacos and drinking beers at night, and sleeping blissfully with Liz, just the two of us. But Joe stood on the backside of the farm table, surrounded by several shockingly b
eautiful young hippie-farmer girls. So I asked what the hell he was doing in San Francisco.
“Selling turnips, man! I’m a farmer!”
Liz, speaking softly to me, said, “Sweetheart, I’ve got to get out of here. Hannah’s melting down.”
“Hold on, sweetie. Joe’s got turnips. You remember Joe, don’t you?”
She smiled at him. Then, to me, Liz said, “Honestly, honey, I can’t deal anymore.”
“Okay, okay. Just hang in a little longer.” I got carried away, paying alarming prices not only for Joe’s perfect Tokyo turnips, as he called them, but for the rest of his early-spring offerings, like shallots and kale, chard and carrots, even strawberries and baby leeks. I feel a measure of guilt, in hindsight, over the way I led the exhausted Liz and the screaming Hannah onward through the rest of the booths, buying up still more foods I’d seen in Vegetables but never in a store: savoy cabbage, escarole, curly endive. I saw astounding things for which I did not yet have recipes, and could therefore not yet rationalize the splurge: shockingly tasty cheeses; fresh fish for a small fortune per pound; locally grown beef, chicken, lamb, pork, goat, and eggs. I led my wife and baby into the Ferry Building itself, too, a vast emporium with a high domed ceiling. Like one long large intestine, the hall branched off here and there into an All-Star lineup of Northern California’s very highest-status, highest-prestige local food labels, from Recchiutti Confections to Prather Ranch Meats, and from the Cowgirl Creamery to Boccalone (“Tasty Salted Pig Parts”) to Far West Fungi. Sur La Table alone, the upscale kitchenware store, carried so many things I suddenly wanted to own that I had to hustle Liz and Hannah out of the building and back down the waterfront as if I’d just smoked my first pipe of crack and liked the rush so much I knew I was coming back.
After returning home, while the enraged Liz and the oblivious Hannah fell asleep together, I diced and sautéed exactly the prescribed amount of onion and garlic. Then I sliced up those costly little turnips and added them to the pot, and I then added just the right amount of bay leaf, thyme, bacon, and vegetable stock that I’d made the night before. The turnip greens went in last, around the time Liz got up from her nap. I shaved a little Parmesan onto the top of our bowls and then, precisely because I’d resisted all impulse to improvise, I liked the soup. I liked it a lot.
“This is great,” Liz said, already willing to forgive. “I love this.”
“I’m so glad, baby.”
She smiled. “You’ll never make it again, will you?”
“Never.”
“And remind me why?”
“Forward motion, baby. Got to keep moving.”
4
We All Need Something to Believe In
“Food—at least as much as language and religion, perhaps more so—is cultural litmus,” according to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food. “We continually devise ways to feed for social effect: to bond with the like-minded.” Think of adolescents and their fierce interest in the finer shades of musical taste: “Well, I know she’s like totally smoking hot and super sweet and ultra smart and totally perfect for me in every imaginable way, and she even actually likes me, which is amazing, but I’m really worried that I don’t know what kind of music she listens to.” And when it comes to food, it’s not just the feeding: cookbooks play an outsized role, placing the food in its all-important cultural and aesthetic context, telling you what the food actually means—like Fergus Henderson’s cult classic The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, from which I would one day cook Deviled Kidneys (“the perfect breakfast on your birthday”) and Pot-Roast Half Pig’s Head (“the perfect romantic supper for two”), claiming membership in a club of the unsqueamish, presenting friends with Deep-Fried Lamb’s Brains and a facial expression that says, “Oh come on, please tell me you’re not grossed out. I’ve always loved lamb’s brains!” David Chang’s recent Momofuku, too, packaged his New York restaurants’ recipes in foulmouthed conversational narrative and blurry photographs of tattooed diners in cutting-edge urban street fashions—some of them secretly famous, at least in food circles—reassuring me that hours burned on making Chang’s magisterial ramen would get me far more than a great bowl of food, it would even purchase entry into the hippest current clique of the like-minded.
As powerful as Chang and Henderson have been in recent years, at least among people like me, they scarcely rank next to Alice’s own act of cultural litmus-creation. California State Historian Kevin Starr, recognizing her rare gift for envisioning a beautiful life and then announcing that she and her dazzling friends already led that life in a way that could make millions crave instruction on doing the same, credits her with making food-and-wine connoisseurship a key membership test for the liberal elite. “Let the rest of the country vote Republican and eat out of cans and packages,” he writes, in Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990–2003. “Berkeley would reform the world … while dining on salads of dried cranberry, pecans, and arugula, free-range fowl from oak-fired ovens, fresh-baked whole-grain breads, and an appropriate white wine, with poached pears for dessert.” And if anybody was a born sucker for this dream, it was me—not least because my very own Republican grandparents had proudly worn formal dinner attire to eat Continental brown-sauce dreck at their country club while I’d worn jeans and skateboarding sneakers to Chez Panisse itself, on my very first dinner date. Thirteen years old and I’d proudly led the pretty Miss Jane H. up the Chez Panisse stairs into the upstairs café, wide-eyed with wonderment at a glittering world of grown-ups. Nervous kid on a big night, I’d been absolutely thrilled to see my father’s law partner, Ted, sipping wine at the tiny bar. I still recall Ted’s affectionate smile, the way he leaned back and bellowed, “Hi, Danny!” so that I felt special. Ted knew how much I’d love being treated like a grown-up, out on the town, so he kindly introduced himself to Jane and then left us alone drinking water at our two-top and sharing a calzone. Hot raclette cheese melted out of that crispy crust, and I’ll never forget Jane’s young skin, her brilliant eyes funny and alive. And sure, the bill did come to a little over nineteen dollars, and I did foolishly imagine this meant that my single twenty-dollar bill was enough to cover the tip, but it’s all a fine memory nonetheless, warm and happy and fun—and those were precisely the feelings evoked by my opening the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook itself, when Hannah turned one.
“After almost twenty years,” Alice wrote in that book’s introduction, “the Café is still a place where people hang out together, and measure out the years from Bastille Day to Bastille Day and from New Year’s Eve to New Year’s Eve.” And look, I knew perfectly well there couldn’t be a single, solitary, nondelusional, non-French soul in the entire Golden State honestly measuring out anything at all between Bastille Days. Nor was I blind to the overt salesmanship of Alice’s next bit about how “my old friend, film producer Tom Luddy, still drags in every foreign director and starlet imaginable… Retired professors and Nobel Prize laureates still lunch quietly, and our Saturday lunch regulars are still known by name to cooks and waiters alike.” But I craved that sense of belonging and I had a perfectly reasonable membership claim to precisely this imaginary clique.
I’d also run aground a little, with Chez Panisse Vegetables. Having finished all the soups, salads, and pastas, I’d been looking at a hundred-plus vegetable side dishes. Liz rightly wondered, during one dinner I made for friends, why anybody outside prefamine Ireland would serve a banquet consisting of potato pasta, potato gratin, a side of sautéed potato slices, and a platter of roasted fingerling potatoes. Unwilling to repeat dishes, I therefore needed a new raft of mains for my recipe-ticking mania. The Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, which I already owned, offered an obvious first step toward a solution. “We have paid special attention to the ingredients we left out of … Vegetables,” Alice wrote, also in that introduction: “fish and shellfish, meat and poultry, eggs and cheese.” In short, everything a man wanted to eat. Simply in broadening my mission, I realized, and redef
ining it as an assault on the entire Chez Panisse cookbook oeuvre, I could squeeze through this frightening little bottleneck by combining mains from the Café book and even others, like Chez Panisse Cooking, by longtime Chez Panisse chef Paul Bertolli, with all the Vegetables outliers. And that’s how I fell truly under Alice’s spell, her vision of a broader community—Paul Bertolli among its leading lights, along with various other cookbook authors—living the grand Chez Panisse lifestyle.
“One of my partners had befriended a farm family in Amador County in the Sierra foothills who kept a few hogs and who had agreed to supply us with suckling pigs,” Alice writes, and so I showed up at the Marin Sun Farms booth at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, and I tried to befriend the poor rancher while I scored the goods for Long-Cooked Pork Shoulder, Simple Cured Pork Chops, and Roast Pork Loin with Rosemary and Fennel. Somebody named Nancy Warner and her family, according to Alice, slept outdoors “with the chickens to protect them from attacks by coyotes and roaming packs of dogs,” and who wouldn’t like to feel that a slumber party might replace cyanide-laced deer carcasses and government “predator control” specialists? And, thus, I bought “pastured” Marin Sun Farms chickens for Pollo al Mattone with Lemon and Garlic, Chicken Ballotine with Chanterelles, and Grilled Chicken Breasts au Poivre. Nobody made business arrangements in Alice’s new/old Berkeley; they befriended people. The restaurant didn’t offer anything as tawdry as seasonal specials; it just hewed to “cherished traditions” like “serving spring lambs from the Dal Porto Ranch,” as if Alice and company were a big collective grail knight, bringing bourgeois fertility to blighted modern America.
