Have Blade Will Travel: The adventures of a traveling chef (29 page)

  ― ● ―

Linguini Leonardo

2 tablespoons (30 mL) olive oil

¼ cup (60 mL) mushrooms sliced very thin

¼ cup (60 mL) diced bacon, cooked until crisp, then drained

2 tablespoons (30 mL) unsalted butter

½ cup (120 mL) diced leeks, well rinsed, and blanched

½ cup (120 mL) heavy cream

grated Pecorino Romano

2 cups (480 mL) linguini, cooked

• Heat the olive oil until smoking, then sauté the mushrooms until golden brown.  Transfer to a small bowl and set aside.
  
• Heat the butter and sauté the leeks.  Add the mushrooms, bacon, and cream and heat.  Dip the linguini in hot water, drain well, then blend together with the sauce.  Season as needed with salt and pepper, and serve topped with the grated cheese. 
  

― ● ―

Spinach Linguini Yasamin

Spinach linguini cooked al dente, then garnished with a sauce consisting of shallot cooked in butter, flamed with gin, garnished with fine julienned and blanched celery root, sliced sweet Italian sausage, finished with a little heavy cream and topped with grated Parmesan cheese.

Fusilli Jackson

Fusilli tossed in asparagus cut on the bias and sautéed in butter, garnished with diced browned bacon and diced fresh tomato, topped with grated Parmesan cheese.

Fettuccine Natalia

Fettuccine tossed with sliced mushrooms, leeks, and shredded radicchio sautéed in butter, finished with heavy cream and topped with grated Parmesan cheese.

 
― ● ―

In 1979 I landed the Chef job at the now defunct Amelio’s – a site that had been a bordello in the years following the 1906 earthquake, and a speakeasy during Prohibition.  Amelio’s had been revived by the very charming and debonair Chris Shearman, former Palestinian police officer turned successful San Francisco restaurateur.  Shearman was a real gentleman, and probably the single most genuine and gracious restaurateurs I have ever known.  He treated everyone with courtesy and respect, and I developed a great affinity for him.  He passed away on June 3, 1999, aged 72, and remains known only among a handful of former restaurateurs in the bay area.

Amelio’s catered to a fairly well-to-do clientele, though in a nod to hearty, working class fare, I put a Grilled Hangar Steak on the menu now and then, with a very piquant relish to accompany it.

 
― ● ―

Creosat Relish

1 medium cucumber

1 green pepper

1 bunch scallions

1 large hot house tomato (must be ripe and flavorful), peeled and seeded

½ cup (120 mL) cornichons

¼ cup (60 mL) large capers, drained

¼ cup (60 mL) olive oil

2 tablespoons (30 mL) red wine vinegar

2 tablespoons (30 mL) Dijon mustard

2 tablespoons (30 mL) white Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon (5 mL) fresh thyme leaves

• Peel the cucumber, split in half, then remove and discard the seeds.  Cut the cucumber, pepper, scallion, tomato, and cornichons into a ¼-inch (.6 cm) square dice.
  
• Add the remaining ingredients to the vegetables, and blend thoroughly.  Cover, refrigerate, marinate overnight.  Serve with grilled beef, lamb, venison, or pheasant.
  

― ● ―

I was very pleased to have landed the job at Amelio’s, but in truth, I was completely burned out.  So, in the Spring of 1983, I landed a summer chef job in Chatham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, taking a break from Bagdad-by-the-Bay - which was the start of another culinary adventure in the life of the Traveling Chef.  

Afterword

Where Is the Art in the Culinary Arts?

To the youngster who discovered Egg Drop Soup on a restaurant menu at the age of seven, and subsequently attempted to recreate that dish by dropping eggs into a pot of boiling water, the art in Culinary Arts is taken in a very literal way.  It was this mindset that led me, in part, to pursue a career in the food service industry – as a chef – and it is that notion of art which I have spent many years examining and re-examining in countless ways.

The art in the Culinary Arts is by no means a pure expression.  While art in some form does exist in a food medium, it is not the overriding nor predominant characteristic.  I recall an article some years ago, published in the San Francisco newspaper, which reported that a notable restaurant chef had quit his job due to “artistic differences” with the owner.  A food server brought this story to my attention, though he found the tale immensely humorous, and made a very voluble display of his opinion.  "This is not art!,” he announced.  “This is just food.  You cook it, I serve it, the customer eats it, and that's it!"  I asked the waiter why he thought the field was referred to as Culinary Arts, which initiated a lively debate.   But unfortunately, I failed to convince him that there was more to the cooking than just slapping food on the plate and filling one's stomach.

Among mediums where there is some form of creative artistic expression, cooking is unique – and it is this uniqueness that fills the arena with a number of dichotomies.  The primary difficulty in expressing art in food is that food is first and foremost fuel for the human body.  Artistic expression is the least of one's expectations when one is hungry and seeking nourishing sustenance.  And this dichotomy is part of what has led many a culinary practitioner to burn-out, and in some cases self-destruct – which often manifests in the form of excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages and other controlled substances. 

To illustrate this point, consider a restaurant patron who instructs his food server to send “compliments to the chef,” for a properly grilled, flavorful, and tender steak.  Grilling a steak to the degree of doneness ordered is hardly a sign of exceptional cooking skill.  Rather, it is only one of a myriad of basic skills that any competent cook is expected to perform – like a carpenter’s ability to assemble the internal frame of a house; or the major and minor scales a musician performs on a musical instrument; or the warm-up exercises an opera Diva will perform before walking on-stage. 

Thus, when the dining patron makes such a comment, they are in fact insulting the cook – for there just isn't much creativity involved in prepping and properly cooking a steak.  Since the presence of a steak on a fine-dining establishment is a simple matter of marketing – as in offering a broad enough range of items to suit the restaurant patron's tastes – the culinary artisan accepts the necessity of having such a dish on the menu as a reality of operating a successful restaurant.  He then puts a more creative focus on other dishes, often in the context of an ever-changing daily special.  Here he pushes his creative abilities into high gear, where the danger of insult comes from the other edge of the sword.  An exquisite Roast Chicken with a rosemary-flavored gravy, accompanied by soufflé potatoes and a garnish of beautifully tournéed vegetables simmered in sweet butter, is subsequently returned to the kitchen by the uninformed guest who complains about the absence of rosemary nettles on the plate (this actually happened to me on one occasion).  After all the planning, simmering, careful roasting, and vegetable shaping, the artisan can only stand off to one side and shake his head in disgust.

Culinary practitioners can be found on the Larousse Creativity Gauge anywhere between the extreme left – the Artistic side – and the right side – the Mechanical side.  Both mechanics and artists are essential in the world of food production, though both are as different as pasta is from rice.  The mechanic tends to be quiet, easy going, and able to produce any dish on a menu with even-handed consistency night-after-night, mon th-after-month, year-after-year.  The artist is working towards expressing his/her creative passion, and does so with mood swings, great enthusiasm, a high degree of inspiration, and sometimes a prima donna persona that can be quite irritating to other members of the brigade.  Every culinarian exists somewhere along this linear scale, with varying degrees of mechanic nature and artist nature working together simultaneously. 

Tani, a cook at the original, and now long gone Vanessi's in San Francisco, was the quintessential mechanic.  He worked methodically at the open range behind the front counter during the evening shifts.  I ate there on occasion, and always sat near Tani's station, so I could observe his unique style.  Tani was a native of Japan, where he had received formal training, followed by five years in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Marseilles, France, after which he came to the United States.  His knowledge of classical cuisine was deep and complete, yet here he was, cooking fairly pedestrian fare in a popular eatery, serving what I call a working-class style of food.  This is not a put-down on Vanessi's, a very popular and elegant dining destination for the nearly 50 years it operated.  It just seemed curious that a culinarian with such a high degree of expertise, who possessed the ability to prepare virtually any style of cuisine, was working at a fairly ordinary level.  His primary assets were his even-temperedness, relaxed demeanor, and consistent production.  I marveled at his quiet and graceful movement behind the range, and his ability to pace himself throughout the evening.

The other end of the spectrum is illustrated by the late Luc Brondel, my instructor in Classical Cuisine at the Culinary Institute.  Luc was a bit manic, even in the relatively relaxed environment of culinary school.  But he was a frustrated artist in every sense of the word.  He had spent many years working in the celebrated French restaurants of New York City before coming to the classroom.  I learned much from him, not only in actual culinary practice, but also what I needed to watch out for in the profession. 

During class one day, I noticed him standing in front of an open door of a reach-in refrigerator, his toque-topped head tipping back occasionally, as he perused the contents of the reach-in.   I could not imagine what would precipitate his head tipping back, but upon later examination, I saw that there was a bottle of red wine on the top shelf, with a loose fitting cork, and a small glass hidden behind it.  I realized that Brondel lived in such a tormented emotional state as a culinary practitioner/ frustrated artist, he required the calming effect of an occasional sip of red wine to dull the pangs of frustration and soothe his tortured soul.  He had never found creative fulfillment working with a food medium in the fast-paced world of restaurant production.  After graduation, I also had an opportunity to visit him at his home, and learned that he also wrote poetry, played guitar, and dabbled in oil painting.  And after several glasses of table wine, he would get weepy-eyed reminiscing about his days behind the range in the great French dining establishments in New York. 

There are some unique advantages to working as an artist in a food medium, but one must develop a certain detachment from that medium in order to avoid getting too involved with it.  In other words, the eternal tasting and sampling of all those mou th-watering and delectable food items – glistening in the aroma-filled air of the production arena, can lead to not only an increase in body weight, but a numbing of the body’s natural rhythms and distortion of the need for sustenance.  One must separate the individual dining experience from the demands on the palate – the constant tasting – if one is to maintain a separate and healthy grasp of gastronomy.  In other words, at the end of an evening of preparing and plating dozens of plates of food, I would like to be able to have a bite to eat and a glass of fine wine with my co-workers or my significant other, as we unwind after the evening’s work.

In my own script there have been more than enough clues – like the Great Egg Drop Calamity – to lead me into the culinary profession.  But I have always had an artistic bent, and in midlife I began to work very seriously in more permanent mediums – in part to balance out my experience with the eternal transience of the food medium.  But when I have worked in a production kitchen, whether the audience (dining patrons) appreciated the art or not – I could play artist if I was in the mood to, or kick back and play highly qualified mechanic, part of a team of competent food service professionals who make a food service operation successful.

In an effort to justify my creativity in the kitchen, I have considered the unique manner in which food is perceived.  Of all artistic mediums – and that includes music and opera, painting and sculpture, theatre and film – art of a culinary nature is perceived by all of the senses.  Music, opera, theatre, and film are essentially perceived only by our visual and audible senses; painting and sculpture, by our visual senses. 

Food on the other hand, is perceived by visual, tactile, gustatory, olfactoral, and on occasion by audible sense – if one includes the sizzle of a steak or the pop of a champagne cork.  The thought of reaching and of touching a dining patron in such a powerful manner, has often sustained me at times when the dining guests missed the beauty and magnificence of my work.

As an artist, I have come to believe that the transience of the culinary medium is a negative quality.  Imagine laboring with great passion and creative fire on various culinary creations, only to see them disappear in a matter of minutes, gobbled up to fulfill a base physical need (hunger).  Imagine then, the challenge to those who carve ice – the most transient of all physical mediums.  Even before an ice sculpture is completed, the ice begins to dissipate.  But when one sees the incredible ice work of some of the Japanese sculptors, the element of transience takes on a different meaning.  The Japanese ice sculptors train for five years, and some of their award-winning works are expressions of incomparable beauty and exquisite detail.  Why would an artisan even consider working in such a transient medium?  What is it that sustains these sculptors, when their work is doomed to destruction?