Have Blade Will Travel: The adventures of a traveling chef (3 page)

NB: There still exists today some disagreement over the true origin of
Homard à l’Américaine
.  Some contend that the contemporary name is a corruption of Lobster à l’Armoricaine, in reference to its roots in Brittany, the nor th-western-most region of France, and the location of a mountain mass known as the Armorican massif.  Brittany is well known for many lobster dishes, given its proximity to the North Atlantic, but it is not known for tomatoes.  This dish, raw lobster sautéed in olive oil, and simmered with tomatoes, onion, garlic and parsley, is found in pre-19 th-century French cookbooks – notably Jules Gouffé’s
Le Livre de Cuisine
, published in the late 1860’s.  Until the 19 th-century, tomatoes were scarcely known outside of the Mediterranean region, giving further credence to Gouffé’s name for this dish –
Homard à la Provençale
.  Provence, a region of France located on the Mediterranean coast, and a celebrated gastronomic region – well-known for an abundant use of tomato, garlic and olive oil.  Chef Michel Reculet, at the celebrated Parisian restaurant, Noël et Peters, made famous a dish entitled
Homard à l’Americaine
, about 1860, supposedly for a distinguished American diner.  August Escoffier (1847-1935), the father of modern French cooking, contended that an unnamed cook created
Langouste de la Mediterranée
at Le Restaurant Française in Nice, then exported the Provence-style dish to the United States when he opened a restaurant there by the same name.  It was then re-imported to France with the new name.  I tend to side with Escoffier, because of his reputation, although the truth of the matter is probably somewhere between Noël et Peter’s
Homard à l’Americaine
, and the
Langouste de la Mediterranée
created by an unnamed cook.

Chapter 2

 The French Chef Enigma Thing 

About a year after the dinner at Ho King, our family structure changed dramatically – when my parents separated and eventually divorced.  As the sole male member of my household, many responsibilities were moved onto my shoulders.  Since my mother was now compelled to work to support the family, it became my task to have dinner ready when she returned home from work.  While the divorce did not sit well with me by any measure, I was initially able to rise to the challenge of helping to run the household.

Mom taughtme  a basic repertoire of dinner dishes – and this would be where the French naysayers might stand up and intone, “Zut alors!  No wundair you Americans cannot kook!”  While French youngsters were learning to sauté fattened goose liver, lard beef filets, roll out puff pastry, and simmer
Pot au feu
, I was learning
Creamed Tuna on Toast, Baked Knockwurst and Potatoes
,
David's Special
and
William’s Glop
.  (Glop?!?)

But the difference is more a matter of terminology than technique.  Still, though
Creamed Tuna
was an elemental dish, it did require preparing a roux – a butter-and-flour paste – then blending in milk, bay leaf, salt and pepper in order to create a cream sauce, thus conveying to me, at the age of eight, a basic understanding of classical French sauce-making.

The
Knockwurst and Potatoes
, a tribute to my mother’s Teutonic roots, gave me a chance to explore the possibilities of cooking inside an oven, and was clearly several notches above the proletarian “hot dogs.”  And finally, there evolved a dish named in my honor – in truth, invented by my mother – though she has insisted ever since that we created it together.  I clearly remember the evening she directed me through its creation, as well as the story that presaged the evening – a cherished tale from the family history, and which laid the groundwork for my soon-to-come effort.  Here’s my mom, sharing a story from her newly-wed days:

“During our early days in Los Angeles, David’s father learned that he had some distant cousins who also lived in Los Angeles, and was encouraged to contact them.  The Williams’ owned a spaghetti factory and were quite affluent.  He telephoned, and he and I were invited over for Sunday dinner.  David was just a baby then, so we left him in the safe hands of our landlady, got dressed up, and headed off for our dinner rendezvous.  En route we speculated about what was in store for us for dinner.  Knowing how well off my husband’s cousins were, we imagined being served
Pheasant Under Glass
, perhaps a
Roast Squab
, or at the very least, a juicy steak.  We laughed about it in great anticipation, and were certainly hungry enough in those days.”

“After an hour’s drive, we arrived at the cousin’s home, an expansive estate, and met them for the first time.  They were quite gracious and the four of us chatted over Pimm’s Cup cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.  We eventually moved to the dinner table, where it was quite amazing that we behaved ourselves and didn’t dissolve into uncontrollable laughter.  For dinner consisted of a casserole containing ground hamburger, diced canned tomatoes, cheese, and elbow macaroni.  Tasty, of course, but hardly what we expected.  And so, it became a standard for us, and a precursor to
David's Special
.  And in honor of our cheapskate cousins, whose faces and names were quickly forgotten, we named it
William’s Glop
.”

I have always cherished that tale, though there’s more.  Here’s Mom again, with Part II, entitled
How I Turned My Son Into A Chef
: “I remembered how my mother had squelched any pleasure I ever had in cooking, because she had to supervise closely everything I did, and it always had to be her way.  The cake batter had to be beaten exactly one-half-hour, the flour had to be sifted and folded in exactly the way she showed me, and so on.  As a result, I hated cooking, was a complete novice when I got married, and turned into a nervous wreck whenever I had to prepare a meal.  With all of this flashing through my mind, I encouraged my son to be creative in the kitchen.” 

“One hot summer day, as the kids and I were driving home from the beach, the inevitable daily question arose: ‘What’s for dinner Ma?’  So with the tale of William’s Glop fresh in our minds, I pulled out some ingredients – rice, hamburger, canned tomatoes, basil leaves from the garden, and some cheese for grating.  David was only about ten years old then, but somehow we just put it all together, and named it
David’s Special
.”

“Years later, during his second year of college, he announced that he wanted to study cooking – which reminded me of his interest in cooking dating back to his earliest years.  He went on to become a very creative and able chef, authored a couple of cookbooks, and I like to think that some of the credit for all this belongs to me, because his sisters and I ate his creations with great gusto!”

― ● ―

    David’s Special
(Serves 4-to-6)

1 medium red onion, peeled and medium-diced

½ pound (¼ kg) ground beef chuck (15% fat content)

½ pound (¼ kg) ground pork

salt and pepper to taste

6 cloves garlic, peeled and pressed

12 basil leaves, cut into fine strips

the leaves of two sprigs of fresh thyme

¼ cup (60 mL) capers, drained

1 cup (240 mL) Basmati rice

12-ounce can (360 mL) diced tomatoes in juice

grated Pecorino Romano cheese as needed

• Sauté the onion and ground beef and pork over a medium flame, stirring frequently, until the meat is fully cooked.  Season lightly with salt and pepper.  Add the garlic, herbs, and capers, and cook another few minutes.
  
• Add the rice and stir, blending well.  Add the tomatoes, and blend.  Cover and simmer over very low heat for 30 minutes, or until the rice is fully cooked.
  
• Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper, and serve with grated cheese.
  

― ● ―

If terminology was the primary difference between what I was preparing and what my counterparts over the pond were creating, then it was simply a matter of adjusting the terminology.
 Thus, by shedding the old nomenclature, I was able to lay claim to the most advanced culinary repertoire of any eight-year-old-future-chef-of-the world in the United States of America – or anywhere, for that matter. 
Et voilà, my first répertoire!:

La grande cuisine de jeune Davide, cuisinier Americain
(The Great American Cooking of young David)

Blanquette du thon, sur la croûte.
(Creamed Tuna on Toast)

Saucisson Allemande rôti, à la fermière.
(Roasted Knockwurst with Potatoes)

Le plat du jour à la façon du Davide, aussi connu si hachis William.
(Special of the Day in the Style of Davide, also known as William’s Glop)

Now, it is undeniably true that
Le plat du jour à la façon du Davide, aussi connu si hachis William
sounds more impressive than
David’s Special
,
also known as William’s Glop
.  And imagine what it would be like if prepared tableside – flamed with a bit of Kentucky Bourbon (Kentucky Bourbon?... French Bourbon Kings?... see what we are up against?!?!) by a waiter dressed in a tuxedo who would offer – in a thick accent – to grate some ancient, hard goat cheese from central Italy (alla Romano) over the top. 

Michel Guerard’s
Cuisine Minceur
, published in 1976, was a milepost along the road to a more defined and self-assured “American” cuisine, and a watershed in my own culinary evolution.  Guerard’s “cooking of slimness” was heralded at the time as an innovative contribution to “nouvelle cuisine.”  But in truth, it was little more than a publicity agent’s well-timed market strategy.

Nouvelle cuisine is not a modern phenomenon.  It dates back to the 5
^th
-century BC, its principles established by Archestratus, a Greek poet born on the island of Gela, who wandered the shores of the Mediterranean Sea writing commentaries of his experiences in verse, including his philosophical musings of the relationship between food and physique.  Even the title of Guerard’s book was a misnomer.  Minceur means “slimness,” yet his recipes were only slightly lower in fat, and he achieved those reductions by corrupting traditional dishes in absurd ways.  His
Sauce Béarnaise
for example, substituted some of the butter content with diced tomato and mushrooms.  Since when does a  
Sauce Béarnaise
 contain tomato and mushroom?

At a time when my colleagues and fellow aspiring chefs regarded Auguste Escoffier’s
Guide Culinaire
as an essential presence in our personal libraries, such corruptions represented transgressions of epic proportions.  While we were cutting our culinary teeth and formulating our professional philosophies, this wanna-be-famous-in-every-American-household import was busily destroying his own classical tradition.  A Béarnaise is a Béarnaise is a Béarnaise, and anyone wishing to cut down on the fat content in his or her diet should simply avoid sauces that consist primarily of fat – in the case of
Béarnaise
, egg yolks, hot clarified butter, essence of tarragon – and choose to eat something else. 

Guerard’s popularity here waned rather quickly, but I did discover some merit in his brief celebrity.  My very irritation had forced me to consider what I was about in the kitchen, and many of my compatriots did the same.  As a result of this introspective pause, we all became more conscious of what we were doing, why we were doing it, and how we wanted our cuisine to evolve.  Ultimately, he provoked us into realizing, “Hey, we’ve got some very fine ingredients here in North America, and we need to focus on those ingredients and use them to our best advantage.”

There was something else about Guerard’s book that I found amusing – something embodied in his photo-portrait on the jacket.  Standing alone in a chef’s coat with floor-length apron, clutching wooden spoon in hand and gazing poetically off into the distant horizon, suggested both a man-child purity and the personification of some quaint, lofty virtue. 
In his prologue, he had written, “I had my first gastronomic experience at the age of five,” followed with a story about his grandmère “…who simmered hearty, warming stews for me on winter evenings, always prepared with love, and so delicious.” 

It was both an admirable and enviable image, yet it made me wonder, “Does one need to be French to have a deep, family-connected introduction to food and cooking, with memories of a warm and loving grandmother’s winter stew?”

Indeed, the table of my own late Grandma Anne – God bless her sweet soul! – had been renowned among family and friends as a place where one dined exceptionally well.  She prepared dishes that were light-years beyond the typical middle-class fare of the day: a plate of clear
Consommé
, followed by
Roasted Breast of Chicken
(au vin, of course!),
Pommes Purée
(mashed potatoes slogged with unsalted butter, salt and pepper), “
Frenched
”
String Beans
(See?! There’s that French thing again….it’s everywhere!) with toasted almonds, and a salad after the primary course.  She was also known for her apple pie, a nearly legendary creation – a traditional American-style apple pie transformed by the addition of two of her “secret” ingredients.  How blessed I had been, back in my early adolescence, to have had the opportunity to assist her in preparation of that pie. 

Her technique of tossing thick, peeled Granny Smith apple wedges in sugar and cinnamon was fairly universal, but adding lemon zest was a unique touch.  And at the very end, just before sealing the top of the pie with a second sheet of dough, she poured a quarter-cup (60 mL) of heavy cream over the apples.  She also used lard for shortening – which gave it terrific flavor (fat is flavor!).  Oh baby, that was one gorgeous pie!