Eating for Beginners Read online

  ***

  I began this project with a lot of other people's ideas about food in my head—including what I've proved beyond a doubt to be the entirely false one that if you just offer children a variety of food, they'll eat it (some children will, of course, but definitely not mine). By the end, I had my own ideas. I let the food itself and the people who produce and cook it, rather than the hype surrounding it, teach me. No one I met told me what to eat. They told me what they eat—both bad and good—and they told me why they think about food the way they do. Knowing that each of them, from the chefs to the farmers to the distributors, had committed his or her life to food in a way I have not, I weighed their experiences and then I made sure I understood the other side of their arguments, too. Among other things, I learned how much work it takes from numerous people to make it possible to eat something as simple as a salad of local lettuce with beets and goat cheese, and that new knowledge permanently changed the way I see that salad. I also learned that even the most devoted among us still buy food that isn't local or organic because to be human means to be an eater and to seek solace or delectation in food from time to time, regardless of its origins or composition.

  I picked produce at a farm upstate, I made cheese, I worked many ten-hour shifts in the applewood kitchen (and watched David do the same after being up all night with one or both of his daughters). I rode through the night in a delivery truck after packing produce for hours in a frigid cooler room. I milked goats and went fifty miles out to sea on a fishing boat. These experiences taught me repeatedly that knowing something is true—we should eat as locally as possible, we should support small farms—and understanding why it's true are two very different things. They also taught me about the pleasure, as opposed to the duty, in making these choices. Meanwhile my son, inveterate tosser of plates and refuser of cheeses, taught me that knowing what your child should eat—variety, organic—is useless in a face-off with a willful toddler, and that accepting that truth, just like eating the occasional strawberry in winter, has its place.

  Like parenting, eating in twenty-first-century America is riddled with choices, challenges, great joy, and utter confusion. There's no single right way to do either one, but if you're lucky, you can learn to accept both on their own terms and live with the surprising results. On my first day in the kitchen at applewood, awed and daunted by all the French terminology (chinois, anyone?) and the gigantic utensils being thrown around, I was asked to pick herb leaves from their stems for garnishes. I sorted tarragon and chervil into white plastic containers that would be part of the mise en place—the ingredients prepared in advance for the chef's use—near the grill. With the seriousness I thought befitted the moments just before dinner service began, I handed the fresh green leaves to David and watched him line them up with the rest of the evening's necessities, which were in cylindrical plastic quarts on a bed of ice.

  Then I noticed, next to the herbs I'd just sorted and the finely minced chives and flaky sea salt, a glistening pile of orange, red, yellow, and green Sour Patch Kids in an identical container. "Dig in!" David said to me, throwing a few into his mouth and turning back to the stove. And so I did.

  1. In the Beginning

  THIS IS HOW you butcher a duck. Make a slit down one side of its backbone, then insert your knife and scrape down carefully along the breastbone, swinging the tip of the knife in smooth arcs while pulling the breast meat away with your other hand as it comes loose. When it's free, slice it off. Repeat on the other side. Trim off fat, sinew and vein. These will be everywhere. Things will be slippery. You could make the wrong cut. When the breasts are trimmed and set aside, remove each leg from the body by bending it back and cutting through the joint. You will feel as if you're wrestling with someone covered in oil. Put the legs aside for confit. Then stand up the carcass and, with a big cleaver, chop it down the center so it falls into two pieces. Cut each piece crosswise. Put the four pieces in a pan and into the oven to roast for stock. Repeat with nine more ducks until the breasts are coming off a little less raggedly and you think you may be getting the hang of it.

  The next day, try to trim your one-year-old's fingernails. Things will be slippery. You could make the wrong cut. You will feel as if you're wrestling with someone—a small someone—covered in oil. As you try to hold him still, reflect that it was much easier to cut his nails when he was a newborn and couldn't move, then on the startling fact that a duck is about the same size as a newborn. Realize with surprise that you genuinely feel it's easier to butcher a duck, something you had never done before yesterday, than to give a one-year-old a nail trim. Realize, too, that your life since you became a parent has been one long learning curve with no end in sight. That you long for a sense of accomplishment and that maybe butchering ducks is a way to get it. Scrape, slice, trim, cut, chop, and you're done. When a duck is butchered, it's butchered.

  ***

  In the applewood kitchen there is no busywork. Just as there is no unusable part of a bird or other animal, no fruit or vegetable too unfamiliar to cook with, so there is no time wasted, no resource untapped—not even the amateur on her first day. I was there to serve my own purposes—I had suggested the arrangement, which involved a few days a week at the start but grew to include more later on, and was still somewhat amazed at the ease with which David had agreed—and I was not being paid because I was, after all, researching a book for which I had been paid. But from the moment I arrived at one o'clock for my first dinner shift and was told to go downstairs to the lockers and change into a chef's jacket and pants (which in my mind was tantamount to impersonation and thus probably a crime in at least a few states), it was terrifyingly clear to me that I was going to serve David's purposes as well. That is, I was going to cook, which seemed reasonable except that it meant the food I prepared would be served in the dining room that very evening. In a matter of hours, I would be transformed from a person accustomed to watching the food she offered either go untouched or get thrown on the floor to one making food for paying customers—people who sat on the other side of the swinging door warmed by the lovely atmosphere and the assumption that there was an actual chef in the kitchen preparing their meals.

  I was posted, with no fanfare and little introduction around the kitchen, at the garde manger station. Garde manger, which means "keeping to eat" or "keeper of the food," traditionally referred to the cold room in which meats, fish, and other foods that had been preserved were stored, and also to the art of that preservation in forms like charcuterie, terrines, and cheese. It also included using produce creatively. In other words, coping with all the stuff that goes bad if you don't figure out what to do with it in fairly short order, the stuff that in my household gives rise to remarks in front of the open refrigerator along the lines of, "What could we make tonight with beef, heavy cream, kale, mushrooms, and a bunch of radishes? Oh, and also chicken." (One of the skills I hoped to gain at the restaurant, where the chefs stand in the walk-in refrigerator every afternoon in exactly this same way, was how to answer this question with words other than "Um.")

  At applewood, garde manger is the station that makes salads and cold appetizers during the dinner service, and it consists of exactly one person. Once things got under way at five o'clock, I would be able to ask questions of anyone I could grab between tasks, theirs and mine, but otherwise I was on my own.

  Fortunately, having correctly assumed they wouldn't let me anywhere near the stove on my first day, I'd studied up on my subject the night before. I'd gotten hold of Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen (2000), published by the Culinary Institute of America in the Hudson River valley. David and Laura had both gone to cooking school at the CIA—they'd met there, in fact—so I figured its book was a reasonable place to start. I pored over it the night before my first shift and found certain passages popping into my head the next day.

  "The opportunities and challenges of the area of cooking known today as garde manger are fascinating," it trumpeted. I couldn't have agre
ed more. "It is in this specialty that artistic sensibilities can find their outlet." I liked the sound of that. "The quality of the food is still the most important key to success." Check, thanks to applewood's commitment to fresh local products. But then came this. "The visual appearance of the food is a close second. Presenting foods to look their best is a skill that you can spend a lifetime perfecting." Hmm. This must be where the artistic sensibilities came in. But somehow I doubted that David really wanted me to take a lifetime to perfect my salad-plating technique when he had a full book of reservations that night.

  I had no chopping skills, I'd never even heard of some of the vinegars I was using, and I had heard of but never seen some of the vegetables (ramps, morels). It hadn't occurred to me to bring my own knives. (When I did the following week, their dullness produced looks of barely suppressed hysteria. Liza, David's other full-time chef, marveled, "It's like they're not even knives!") Apparently there were chefs commuting all over the city with bags of freshly sharpened cutlery—a realization that gave me new perspective on whom to seek out in a crowd during an emergency.

  On my list of cold starters that first night were a pea shoot salad with crawfish and brown butter vinaigrette; marinated yellowtail with beets, cilantro, and black bean purée; a cheese plate; and a plate of house-made charcuterie (already prepared, luckily) with garlic crostini. On my to-do list were making the vinaigrette; roasting, peeling, and sectioning the beets; making the black bean purée; and making crostini, which involved cutting loaves of bread into very thin slices, drenching them in garlic-infused olive oil and salt, then baking them in the oven. In other words, a long list of things I had never done before.

  But my inexperience didn't seem to faze David, who was used to having externs from cooking school in the kitchen and had once let an art student work garde manger because she wanted to learn about the aesthetics of food. Tall and broad in his chef's jacket, navy-and-white-striped apron and pants, and tortoiseshell Buddy Holly glasses, David thoroughly enjoyed himself in the kitchen and would often ask me, "Did you have fun?" at the end of a night of disasters of varying degrees. He rarely ventured beyond the kitchen during dinner service. Once, when we were discussing the animated movie Ratatouille, about a rat named Remy who becomes a chef in a fancy Parisian restaurant, he described the scene he related to most: the one in which the head chef (a human, not a rodent) is summoned to speak to a patron, steps through the swinging door into the dining room, goes bug-eyed with horror at the sight of actual diners, and retreats right back into the kitchen.

  David's attitude was, of course, what allowed me to be there at all. In a more typical kitchen filled with tempers and hierarchy, I would never have survived if I'd even been invited in to begin with. But the applewood kitchen didn't run on viciousness or hypercompetitiveness or secrecy; it was the opposite of Kitchen Confidential. There was no macho there, not even at the grill, which is traditionally the most macho station (at least according to David, and certainly according to Bill Buford, who wrote memorably about his ferocious, and, it must be said, very macho, efforts to master it during his time in the kitchen at Mario Batali's restaurant Babbo). Instead, the grill at applewood was presided over by a young woman named Sarah. When I asked how she'd ended up working there after a night of "trailing"—standing by and watching the kitchen operate at full tilt to get a sense of the place—she told me, "It was the busiest Saturday night they'd ever had and everyone was calm. It was peaceful, no one was yelling, and the food was beautiful." Or, as the pastry chef put it when I finally got around to working at his station, "When you work for somebody who's already famous, the famous person is not in the kitchen, of course, because they're famous already. Nobody there is your friend because they all want to be famous, too. It's a backstabbing atmosphere."

  Laura, small and strong with dark curly hair to her shoulders, was the perfect Harriet to David's Ozzie. The public face of the restaurant, she was charming and social but not soft, and she had a lightning-quick sense of humor. She could read a customer in an instant, and if she saw someone could take it, she was a master of the snappy retort. She was also utterly unapologetic for her tough manner. If you told her teasingly that she was cranky, she played it up, replying with a cranky "So?" When she was in a bad mood, she stormed through the kitchen leaving worried glances in her wake, but she got over it quickly. When she was anxious before dinner service, she barked orders at the servers to clean fingerprints off the glass in the kitchen door or to straighten the napkins on the tables. David was a silent worrier, Laura a loud one; he ran the kitchen and she ran the front of the house, and they never interfered with each other.

  What David and Laura had in common (in addition to their marriage and their children, of course) was their understanding of what applewood was. This was something that dated back to 1996 and the first summer after they met in cooking school, when they'd had restaurant jobs at a place in upstate New York called the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company, about a forty-five-minute drive from the Culinary Institute of America.

  Old Chatham was then the largest sheep dairy in the country, with more than two hundred head of sheep. Besides the restaurant, the company included a ten-room inn, a bakery, and a cheesemaking operation. Laura described it for me. "They grew everything for the restaurant but tomatoes and corn. All their own greens, herbs, vegetables. There was a huge greenhouse for starter plants."

  Set on six hundred acres of rolling farmland, Old Chatham was, David remembered, "an absolutely beautiful place. In a lot of ways it was like Chez Panisse, but intensified because instead of going out to the farmers they brought all the farmers to them. They had the farm staff, the guy who took care of the sheep, the guy who did the produce."

  For David, working at Old Chatham was, in an odd sense, like going home. He grew up in Manhattan's West Village, but a place he refers to simply as "the farm" figures prominently in many conversations with him about food, family, and a lot of other things. A piece of land in Pine Plains, New York, that belongs to the parents of his closest childhood friend, Sean, the farm was where he and Laura and the kids went on their rare days away. It was also where, as a child, he had his first experience of the kind of food he would cook as an adult. "I've been going there all my life. Sean's mom is like my mom," he said. "His little brother was eight years old when his mom had to sit him down and explain to him that I wasn't his brother by blood." The bar David installed at applewood, which Sean's mother had salvaged from a tavern on Twelfth Street in Manhattan, was stored in the cellar at the farm for twenty years until David came calling for it, as if it had been waiting for him all that time.

  The job at Old Chatham Sheepherding Company provided David with his first Proustian moment, which came not with a cookie but with a vegetable. "It was tasting the food there," he recalled one day as we were shelling peas, "and realizing I had this vague sort of sense memory of eating tomatoes off the vine up at the farm, munching on them, the dogs running around." Old Chatham reintroduced him to something he'd always known but had buried as he went through chef's training. "At school they teach you that cooking is all these steps and all this secretive stuff and you have to work at it for this long and know all these things, and that's not the case. It just isn't."

  For Laura, who grew up in Chicago without a farm to visit, the job at Old Chatham was even more eye-opening. "It changed my ideas about food," she said as I helped her fold napkins for dinner service one afternoon. "Once you pull baby spinach out of the ground and eat it, warmed by the sun, it never tastes as good any other way."

  Of course other people already knew this. Out in Berkeley, Chez Panisse had been around for more than twenty years, while in New York City, the Greenmarkets, which had started in 1976 on a single lot, had blossomed into a citywide network of sources for good local food. The Sheas weren't strangers to the idea of local products, either, but those early mornings in the Hudson River valley were the beginning of their real commitment to it. When it came time to choose the suppliers fo
r applewood, those memories were still very much on their minds.

  "It's clean food," Laura told me, talking about how they decided where to buy their food. "Clean local food." In essence, they wanted to re-create, whenever possible, their own experience at Old Chatham—or at least give people the opportunity to have it. It wasn't so much that they insisted everything had to be organic, more that they wanted to know how it was grown and why it was grown that way. Had it been overly processed, or could it be traced back to someone who had put thought into raising it? The guarantee of a person they trusted was worth more than a USDA organic seal or a no-pesticides label. "If you had to choose between an organic product and a local product," Laura explained, "David and I immediately said local. I could call up the farmer, and ask why they treated the Gala apples and what they used. I learned about eco-friendly pesticides from that. You become less closed-minded."

  Once, when I was pestering her about defining the restaurant as organic or local or some other term, Laura said, "We wanted to open a place where we could feed everybody the way we feed ourselves and our children." Because I already knew about Sophie and the Cheetos, I pressed her a little further. Where her daughters were concerned, she said, "We're realizing that it's good enough to present good options. That lesson will be learned. They may blow us off and go eat pizza followed by ice cream followed by candy, but they'll know the difference." The same applies to applewood, where the Sheas know they aren't changing the world on a nightly basis, but hope they are at least affecting the way people think about eating. Though they may, in dreamier moments, believe that a single bite of salad has the power to provoke "an epiphany about food and make people not go back to that bag of Dole lettuce," as Laura put it, "we know that's not how it works. We don't advocate for anybody. We're doing what we do within our own framework and not outside of it. I don't really get my face into anyone else's business."