The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  They also rely on Duguid’s prodigious memory. She remembers everything—from the date she sailed to Europe with her parents on the Empress of England (May 12, 1961) to the minutiae of cases she argued twenty-five years ago to the names and smells and colors and textures of foods she sampled months before in a Tajik yurt near the Khunjerab Pass or at a stand in a market in northern Laos, and the order in which different cooks put those foods in the pot, and even the shape of the pot. Alford, for his part, absorbs what could be called the praxis of a particular place: the way a fire is tended in Tibet, where even a cup of tea can take an hour to heat; the way the spices are ground and roasted separately for a coconut-chicken curry in Kandy; the way a mound of sticky dough turns into a five-foot strand of “flung noodles” when a burly Uighur grabs each end and, with a flick of his wrists, sends it looping through the air—a process that he and Duguid describe in Beyond the Great Wall and admit to never having mastered.

  Sometimes they miss something or remember wrong. (The “spicy chickpea fritters,” from their fifth book, Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent, will fall apart unless you think to beat a couple of eggs and add them.) Sometimes their recipes are more interesting than appealing; it is hard to imagine working up an appetite for Tibetan bone broth, even if you take their advice and substitute oxtails or beef shanks for the yak. But most of the time they send you straight to the kitchen. I’ve cooked from their books since Hot Sour Salty Sweet came out, in 2000, and I made an instantly addictive Thai soup—the one with, among other good things, wild lime leaves, bird chilies, oyster mushrooms, lemongrass, and a lot of fresh shrimp. James Oseland from Saveur told me, “The difference between Nom and Jeff is precisely what makes them complementary as observers. Nom is the person reaching out, leaning over, looking into the pot of that soup lady in Thailand and finding out how many kids she has, and Jeff is the one who is there, quiet, filing away the information in his head, processing it, and someday they will use it together.”

  Duguid and Alford live with their sons in the house on Henry Street that Duguid bought the year before she went to Tibet—a brick Victorian row house with a garden in back and a small carriage house off the alley behind it. They have not changed much in twenty-three years, though Duguid’s idea of a great suit now is apt to involve an antique Akha tribal jacket from a Laotian flea market and a pair of jeans, and Alford’s ponytail has long been replaced by short, if unruly, gray hair, trimmed at home by a hairdresser he met in the park one day; she told him that he “needed work.” But the house has changed. It is stuffed with memories of travel, in the form of fabrics, hangings, bowls, pots, posters, jewelry, and a lot of unidentifiable objects that Duguid refers to generically as “rescued stuff.” It is also where they write their books, reconstruct the flavors they carry home in their heads from halfway around the world, and consult a food and travel library that over the years has spilled out of the big study they share on the second floor up to the door of the master bedroom, on the third, and down to the workshop in the basement where Alford listens to world music, restores whatever “useful” (or possible) furniture he finds, discarded, on Toronto’s sidewalks—the family eats at a big open maple counter that was once a length of floorboards in the local Chinese Methodist church—and mends old bicycles, including the two red mountain bikes that saw them safely from Kashgar to Gilgit in 1986.

  When the Alford-Duguids work on a book at home, they divide the recipes between them, cook something, and then see if the other eats it or thinks it’s “right.” Duguid describes the testing they do as a kind of translation, because they cook in a simple hand-me-down Western kitchen, with ingredients that any of their neighbors would be able to find, albeit with some effort, in an Asian market. She says that they test “by taste,” though this is a term that for her can include the smells from the brazier in a tribal kitchen and even the stories the women cooking in it tell. They are less interested in accuracy than in authenticity. (The exception, of course, is baking.) Call it the evocation of a world on a plate. I spent a couple of weeks with them in Toronto, and on my first day in their kitchen Duguid told me to stop worrying about what their recipes said, because “our whole point is that you’re not a cookbook, you’re in your own kitchen with your own pots and pans: relax, go to the market, think ‘yummy,’ and use what’s there.” She and Alford are splendid cooks—which doesn’t always follow from being splendid cookbook writers—but if dinner on Henry Street is “less good” sometimes, she says, “it’s not the end of everything.”

  Alford likes his recipes simple. “Pure” and “cheap” is the way he describes his style. Their friend Ethan Poskanzer, who claims the distinction of knowing the Alford-Duguids before they knew each other—he crashed (and cooked) with Alford in Ireland as a student, and a few years later turned up at law school in Toronto with Duguid and then at the same law firm—told me that “if there are only three ingredients in one of Jeff and Nom’s recipes I know the influence is his.” Today I read their cookbooks with this in mind. The Hani pork jerky in Beyond the Great Wall, which came from a sidewalk vendor in Jiangcheng, near the Laos border, is unmistakably Alford’s—pork butt, coarse salt, black pepper—and so is the story of how he came to eat it: “I was feeling a little let down by Jiangcheng the next morning as I waited for the bus. Then I spotted a Hani woman with a woven basket sitting on the sidewalk … everything got better from there on.” Duguid, on the other hand, likes her food “bountifully simple,” to which she often adds “soft” and “maybe a little sweet.” Her stir-fry with pork and chives, on the facing page, starts with red chilies, minced garlic, and thin slices of cornstarch-coated pork loin, each seared in a little peanut oil and then combined and enriched with a new taste or texture every minute or two: salt and chives, then broth, then soy sauce, and at the end, a sprinkling of fresh coriander. In the book, she describes the effect this way: “This pork stir-fry from Yunnan uses chives for flavor and color. The strands of green are very pretty among the strips of pork. You can substitute garlic shoots if you wish, or else scallions, cut into ribbons.”

  A few days before I left Toronto, Alford and Duguid decided to have a dinner party—meaning that whenever a friend called that morning Duguid, who is irrepressibly hospitable, said “Come.” At noon, with the guest list at ten and growing, she told me, “Well, do we want to muddle along today, stretch some Kazakh noodles, or seize the day with marketing,” and the three of us headed to Kensington Market to shop. Alford markets the way he cooks: he buys just what he needs and nothing more, and if something is missing, he makes do. But Duguid markets the way she cooks; whatever she sees that pleases her goes into her shopping bag. (Alford, who had been thinking of a “simple feast,” maybe some noodle soup and grilled boar, quickly headed off to a music store, saying he couldn’t bear to watch.) We came home with rhubarb, ginger, and asparagus from a Tamil organic grocer called Potz; coconut milk, pickled mustard greens, and chili-bean paste from the Hua Sheng Chinese Supermarket; rice flour and mung dal from the Indians at House of Spice; pressed tofu from the Vietnamese “tofu lady” at Fong On; and limes and celery root from the Portuguese greengrocer. Duguid used it all.

  The asparagus and the limes ended up in a Thai chicken and vegetable salad. The rhubarb topped an “anyday skillet cake” from Home Baking. (“I do my grandmother’s thing,” she said, plunging the stalks into hot and then cold water three times. “Rhubarb leaves fuzzies in your mouth usually, but not this way.”) She minced the ginger with garlic, shook them into some hot peanut oil in her favorite wok, stirred for a minute, added the chili-bean paste, stirred some more, added the celery root, peeled and sliced, and a little soy sauce, tasted it, sprinkled salt, stirred again, and simmered it all in boiling water. Meanwhile, she had started the dal—a Henry Street staple—sniffed it, thought for a bit, and tossed in a handful of the mustard greens. While the dal cooked, we dry-roasted some Ethiopian coffee beans, wolfed down a lunch of pickled-vegetable and pork-pâté
sandwiches from the local Vietnamese takeout, and tried the tofu. The phone rang, and with the receiver scrunched to her ear, she talked a Washington food reporter through a recipe for Tibetan stew while measuring the water for a pot of Asian rice (place the tip of your index finger on the rice; stop pouring when you get to the first knuckle).

  Forty minutes into these whirlwind preparations, she instructed me on the essentials of a Thai beef salad, somewhat embellished since it first appeared in Seductions of Rice, their second book, but still the recipe everyone mentions as the one they can almost taste, just by reading the ingredients: rare sliced sirloin, lettuce, cabbage, shallots, cucumber, dandelion vinegar, fresh coriander, pepper, minced hot chili, lime juice, and “whatever else looks good,” as long as it’s laced with Thai fish sauce, preferably the kind with the picture of a squid on the bottle. When she finished the list, she laughed and said, “How good is that!”

  Alford, meanwhile, had been rolling cracker dough with a French pin—a long narrow walnut cylinder that he had dug out of a drawer full of flatbread stamps and rolling pins, many of them tin chapati pins that they bought in India in 2004, researching Mangoes & Curry Leaves. Alford controls the production of all things dry, flat, and salty on Henry Street (and Duguid the production of loaf breads and most of the cakes), and he is passionate and precise about his crackers (a teaspoon of salt and a cup of “warmish” water to every two cups of organic whole-wheat flour in the food processor). He rolls his dough to the kind of paper thinness that bakes in a minute or two and breaks into hot, crisp chips. “Push from the body, not the arms,” he kept telling me when I tried the pin. He sprinkled the first few batches of dough with Parmesan, stopped for a short argument with Duguid, who loathes Parmesan crackers—“The cheese burns and everything turns bitter and it’s like the terrible crunch of burnt toast in your mouth,” she says—and put the cheese down after she started tossing coriander leaves into a pot of pristine chicken soup (chicken and water) that he had simmering on the stove. Dom, who was home by then, told me that his parents rarely fought, but that they did have “some intense discussions” about food.

  Alford had promised me a lesson in making the Kazakh soup noodles from Beyond the Great Wall—flour, salt, and water, stretched by thumb and, in his kitchen, dried on a rack that had started life as a neighbor’s deck chair—so we slapped together some batter, with the help of a friend who had come early for a lesson, too, and had been waylaid slicing celery root. When the rack was full, we switched to hand-rolled Guizhou rice noodles, which you shape into balls between the palms of your hands and then flatten into pointy ovals by rubbing the palms together. (It’s harder than it sounds.) They felt gummy, so we dropped a few into Alford’s broth. Duguid tried one, pronounced it “tough”—it was—checked the label on the sack she had just bought, and said, “Aha, a rice-flour issue! This comes from India. It should have been Chinese flour. Much finer.”

  By then the house was full of people. (The youngest was two.) They sniffed the pots, said “ummm” or “cool”—the one prerequisite for food and friendship at the Alford-Duguids is a healthy contempt for the rhetoric of culinary appreciation—poured some wine from an assortment of bottles and Tetra Pak cartons, and settled down on the garden steps to watch Alford feed charcoal into an old Weber for a roast of rubbed wild boar. (His rub is Thai fish sauce and a lot of pepper: “accessible home cooking,” as he describes it.) Dina Fayerman, a high school English teacher and cookbook collector who met the couple at a concert of “two-headed Ethiopian lutes” in 1992 and quickly became their bottom-line taster and grammarian, sat down next to me, and we began to talk. A few days earlier, I had asked Fayerman to describe them, from her point of view as a Jewish intellectual who could tell a Montreal bagel from a Toronto bagel in a blind tasting. “They have that Wasp virtue of not being sheeted and compressed, that pioneer thing that drives people to repudiate expectations,” she told me. “I’ve watched them making sausage. They have no casing. Nom cuts the ends off a big plastic tonic bottle, pushes the meat in one end and out the other, and it’s a sausage. Jeff does the same thing with one clean sock, and saves the mate. They mesh with each other because they’re so completely different.”

  We served ourselves at the kitchen counter and ate in the garden. Nobody talked about food then. A television producer named Anne Mackenzie told me a funny story about trying to talk the CBC into a cooking show with the Alford-Duguids called Eyes Wide Open. (“Forget the movie,” she said. “It’s the way they travel around the world. And besides, it sounded cheaper to do than Nom’s title, A Travelers’ Kitchen.”) Dom, who is thinking about a doctorate in analytic philosophy, showed me his reading list. Tash emerged from a laptop session on the living room couch to announce that reticulated pythons were thirty-seven feet long. Duguid, who just that week had spotted the first lilies of the valley of the season coming up nicely a few feet from the front steps, wondered aloud if her delphiniums were doing as well at the family’s farm—ninety acres of fields and woods outside the town of Durham, a couple of hours northwest of Toronto, where the Alford-Duguids spend their summers and weekends. She was worried about skunks digging up her beds for grubs. Alford was worried about groundhogs—“my Moby-Dick”—digging up his fields. It was a warm night. We looked at the stars and ate. Everything was delicious. Toward ten, Fayerman held up her empty plate, shook her head, and said, “What do I need to cook for when I’ve got Nom and Jeff living down the street?”

  Duguid likes cooking with friends around. She likes the conversation, the gossip, the chance to hear a good story. She takes her time, and she isn’t bothered when dishes pile up in the sink. She says, “Friends in the kitchen? What could be more communal than that?” Alford likes cooking alone—the concentration, the economy of thought and gesture. “Nom will take an interest in what I’m cooking—she’s more experimental, she has such an active head,” he says. “But I have zero desire to hear her suggestions for change.” He washes the pots and the plates he uses as he goes along and “all the surfaces, then the fridge.” By dinnertime, the floor is mopped and the kitchen is clean. “For me, it’s a kind of meditation,” he told me. “Like building our barn at the farm or making a stone wall or quilting. It’s all the same.” (Alford learned quilting from his mother; he makes quilts, mends quilts, and will happily spend “more money than I ever spend on anything” if he comes across a nineteenth-century double pink at a flea market.) Duguid likes the buzz of Toronto life—dim sum with friends, a morning at the museum, her weekly belly-dance classes, the pleasure of being anonymous in a big city. Alford, whose concession to city life mainly involves a morning trip to the corner Starbucks for a cup of coffee, prefers the farm—a day on his John Deere tractor or out in the woods, hacking paths, while Duguid gardens or drives to the shape-note group she sings with.

  Duguid likes the party they throw in Toronto in December, the night before New Year’s Eve, with the house so crowded and toasty and the kitchen so full of good smells. Alford prefers the party they throw at the farm in July, although he complains afterward about the lawyers who drive up from the city in “a stream of BMWs.” He says that the lawyers intimidate him. (Duguid tells him, “Phooey, it’s you who intimidate them. Get over it. Preserve the harmony.”) The party at the farm lasts all weekend. Alford keeps a wood fire going in the grilling pit that he put together with rocks from the farm and rebar grating from a local hardware store. People pitch tents, and if it’s chilly at night, they grab some padding from a pile of down jackets that he and Duguid buy by the armful at a Toronto resale establishment called the Pound, where two dollars buys a pound of clothes. They hold figure-eight bicycle races. They dance to a DJ’s track and to Alford’s remix disks in the big barn that the family has been rebuilding since 2000—the year after they bought the farm and started stripping the farmhouse—with the help of a local writer, barn scholar, and shiitake farmer by the name of Jon Radojkovic. Radojkovic, who has since become Alford’s closest friend, told me that there wer
e “two Jeffs”: the Jeff from Toronto, who doesn’t answer the phone, and the Jeff from Durham, who farms all day and talks by the fire all night.

  Last summer, Alford and Duguid decided that the time had come to take on separate projects. They were at an impasse on the research for a new book, about Celtic cooking. Duguid had flown to Galicia and Asturias in November, to see what remained of traditional Celtic food in fusion Spain, and hadn’t found much besides spelt bread. Alford had flown to Wales and found some, but most of the people cooking it were rich Londoners in weekend cottages. (“The best thing I learned in Wales was when I passed this guy, way out on the Llŷn Peninsula, who was building stone walls,” he says. “I pulled over. He taught me so much about walls!”) In the end, they were relieved to stop. Duguid, who has always thought of herself as “a photographer first and a food writer second,” wanted to put together a book of her own—a book of photographs and maybe an exhibit to go with it—about “how humankind has fed itself, but without being geeky.” The title she had in mind was Food Everywhere (“from planting and threshing to herding and marketing and cooking,” she said), and she had already started taking pictures for it, on a trip to Ethiopia last spring. “There was an aroma of butter and woodsmoke in the air—I thought of Tibet,” she told me. “And the people? They were ecstatic, they were kissing their churches, they were melding with the walls!”