Food epiphanies

how I came to cooking

Modern American food enthusiasts often talk about their illuminating experience with real food in Europe as the moment that set them on their path to relishing and enjoying food. From Julia Child on eating sole muniere for the first time when she landed in France to Alice Waters rhapsodizing about the cheese, bread and salad greens she experienced as an exchange student in France. Even today most American born chefs will say the same thing “I never realized that such and such ingredient could taste so good or be so special until I tasted it in....”

I understand the sentiment although I experienced it backwards. Growing up around the Mediterranean in an era when it was still really rural and the foods consumed were by and large locally grown, raised and produced I didn’t really think about what I was eating.

It was only when I came back to live in the US that I started to understand how good and special the food I was raised on was. I went to high school in rural western Maine at a time when the great American revolution in foodyism had just started to begin in cosmopolitan cities like New York or San Francisco but certainly hadn’t reached rural communities like mine. I was at first puzzled, once I grew bored of being able to eat a hamburger and fries for every meal, about how to find the food I was used to eating. I remember ordering a tomato pizza-translating pomodoro into English and being shocked and confused at the pizza that came out covered in hard pale rings of industrial roma tomatoes. I had been expecting, what I just assumed was the standard everywhere, a Roman slab of plain flat bread covered with san marzano tomato puree which cooked down while baking to concentrated sweetness spiked with salt and spicy dried oregano.

It wasn’t all grim in America, my grandparents were staunch Maine Yankees and that meant they planted a working vegetable garden every spring. I remember the joy of fresh snapped asparagus for breakfast and tender romaine leaves dipped in vinegar (distilled white) and then sugar. It’s a food memory I have sometimes tried to recreate by making a maple syrup vinaigrette as a more sophisticated version but really, I don’t think anything compares to the bitter crunch of the lettuce with the sharp harshness of vinegar and the little trail of sweetness from the dissolving sugar grains.

When I went off to college is when I began to really try to break the code for how to cook and make things that were familiar to me and that I wanted to eat. The Silver Palate cookbook was a huge reference- I learnt to make hollandaise to go with fresh spring asparagus and a cranberry walnut bread that I still crave. I also spent a summer working at a restaurant in Tuscany, friends of the family who took me in as more or less free labor, but I was dying to spend the summer in Italy and would have done almost anything to be there. The restaurant was elegant but rooted in the traditions of the land and history. Sun ripened tomatoes were brought up in crates in the early afternoon with skins that just slipped off with the flick of a knife as they were transformed into a seedless, skinless pulp used to make a very fresh tomato sauce or swirled into a soft roll to be baked in the wood fired oven. If nothing else, I developed my reverence for the land and the idea that the best things came from closest to you- the less amount of time they had to travel the riper and more flavorful they could be. I lived upstairs with the married couple who owned the restaurant and the young cook who it became increasingly obvious the man was sleeping with on the side. Eventually it blew up to lots of drama, tears, slamming doors and one morning I came downstairs, and the young cook was gone- banished by the wife. A small village in Tuscany was pretty sleepy for a 20 something and while I loved certain aspects-the sound of the roosters in the morning, the smell of the fields, the dust in my nose from the gravel roads I walked on in the afternoon heat between lunch and dinner shifts I did not yet see myself as a professional cook and I definitely missed the fervid energy of city life.

Still that summer cooking in a fancy restaurant in the Tuscan countryside brought me closer to cooking professionally. It awoke in me the curiosity and the hunger to be able to cook, to recreate taste memories but also relish the power of being able to feed myself well.