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| At Home in the Kitchen |
| by Sarah Karnasiewicz |
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In the preface to your new book, Mouth Wide Open, you soften your stance a little on some of the food trends you've been suspicious of in the past, like food television and the culture of chef worship. What made you reevaluate your opinions?
Well, as far as chef worship goes, I haven't bought into that, to tell you the truth. And I don't own a television, so I've seen only two cooking shows. I think it was, what's his name…the Naked Chef?
Jamie Oliver.
Right. I actually thought he was pretty charming. But Iron Chef, you couldn't get me to watch that at gunpoint.
I guess what has changed is that I now have a relation who's a chef, and because I know him and like him and have followed him as he's gone from job to job, I've realized how hard he works and how very different the job of a real chef is from what is glorified on TV. They work like dogs. It's very hard to produce the same dish over and over again, and it's something I've never even remotely thought about doing. I've also realized that because of the economics of the restaurant business, chefs have an influence that a layperson can't. I have to go find the farmers' market, but the farmers' market will come to the chef because he buys so much. I've warmed up to the world of professional cooks, even though I think that most of it has only a limited application inside the home kitchen.
You write a lot about your practice in the kitchen but focus less on your results. Do you find that once you've perfected a dish you lose interest in making it?
That's absolutely true, and one of the things I look for in any subject is the possibility of continuing to play with it, because once I can replicate it in a way that my wife, Matt, and I both really like, I get bored with it. Still, often just the smallest amount of tinkering can transform a dish. For that reason, I prefer simple dishes because the more complex they are, the harder it is to play with the variables. Take this morning, for instance: I opened our refrigerator and saw a big bowl of cauliflower that Matt had prepared, and because it's white, the first thing I thought of was potato salad. So then I thought, Hmm, what would cauliflower potato salad be like? Cauliflower and potato go so well together in curry; they might go together in a potato salad. That's the kind of thing that gets my mind turning. I try it, and it might be good, it might be awful.
Speaking of breakfast, on your website, www.outlawcook.com, you keep a chronicle of your morning meals. What is it about breakfast that makes it such good fodder for writing?
What I find so appealing about breakfast is the solitariness. You're sleepy, and you feel the need to coddle yourself. It's the same thing when I go to bed when I get my midnight snack. There's just something about the focus of it—it doesn't require any great intellectual thinking. It's just pulling together something that's pleasing to you, alone, personally, with no worry about anyone else watching you.
Strange things come out of you during that time. That is something that has always fascinated me. When you have to cook in order to feed a family, you don't really get to explore the inner recesses of your psyche. It's only when you cook for yourself that you find out how good some strange things can be. It's like the time I decided to live without any clocks. You see different things in the world. What I realized was that I would have lunch at around ten o'clock in the morning and supper at three o'clock, making five or six meals a day. So, eventually I went back to clocks!
You grew up in an army family that moved around a lot, but many of the dishes you've meditated on in your essays, like baked beans and corned beef hash and chowder, are archetypal Yankee fare. How have the years you've spent living in New England shaped your sensibility?
I would say that there's a real part of my psyche that feels uncomfortable when it's out of New England. I went to Florida once, and I just thought, This is the weirdest place. As far as food is concerned, the book that deals the most pointedly with the subject of New England is Serious Pig. I wrote it when Matt and I lived in Maine, way out in the country. To get anywhere you had to drive, so you stop thinking about driving as being a prologue; it was just part of the experience. We would go to one place to get potatoes and another to get lobster. It was very, very different from being here [in Northampton, Massachusetts], where you go to the supermarket or maybe a farmers' market. That's not the same as being in Maine and coming upon boxes of blueberries that someone has left on the side of the road.
Recently I've been thinking about how, in the United States, almost all of us have immigrant pasts, and when you think about the herbs we use, they're all things we brought with us. The Indians didn't use rosemary or oregano. There is a way, if you're in a place, you have a habit of eating the landscape. I remember once reading a story about an Italian family who had mattress stuffers come and restuff their mattresses every year. The stuffers would arrive carrying a salad bowl and a bottle of olive oil, and when lunchtime came they would just go out in the field and pick up a huge salad. Now, if you stuck you and me you out in a field, we wouldn't know the pigweed from the amaranth. That seems a tragedy to me. But, if anything, being in Maine brought me closer to feeling like someone who could live like that.
Why did you leave, then?
There were two reasons: we hated winter lasting until May, and Matt wanted to be closer to her nephews as they grew up. Truthfully, though, much as I love Maine, I began to find it rather restrictive. Just about the time Matt and I went to get our last 50-pound bag of potatoes, I suddenly thought, I want rice. I guess, in the end, I didn't possess the moral determination to live off that little plot of land.
In your essays, you do experiment at length with international dishes, but travel is never part of the equation. Do you believe that you can be a culinary adventurer without being a globe-trotter?
Absolutely. The thing is, when you read Paula Wolfert's books, she always seems to meet these little old ladies who insist on sharing their secrets. Then you go overseas yourself, and the little old ladies want nothing to do with you. Some people have a personality that invites people to them, but the rest of us have to figure out how to do it differently. Since I'm terribly shy and terrible at foreign languages—I find English difficult enough—I've settled for going into my Vietnamese grocery store and trying to have a conversation without being dumbfounded.
Speaking of cookbooks, in one piece in your new book you admit to something that would be considered heresy among many food writers: you don't believe it's necessary to test recipes in order to review a cookbook. Care to make your case?
Sure. I think first you have to say, What is my gift as a reviewer? The cookbooks that attract me are ones where I find the personality of the cook absolutely engaging; imitating their recipes isn't my focus. In fact, I'm consistently unable to follow people's recipes. It's like being back in school: when I was in college, the only way I could listen to a lecture would be to draw two little squares on a piece of paper in front of me and label one of them "agree" and the other one "disagree". I couldn't argue—these were lectures, not class discussions—so I would scribble notes to myself.
When I pick up a recipe, I can't just leave it alone. So when I really like a book, it's because it's got me thinking about lots of different things that I've never done before, and when I don't like a book, it could very well have nothing to do with the recipes. So, I guess my argument is that there's more to cookbooks than recipes, and isn't it fine to have at least some reviewers looking at that other world for the reader? I know it's not a popular position. In fact, I was at this culinary event not long ago, and someone on a panel I was taking part in said every reviewer should test at least seven recipes. I kept my mouth shut, but in my heart, I was busily scribbling, "Disagree."
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