A Generous Celebration of Himself

My son, Francois, and I went to New York for an anniversary party of Per Se, the elegant restaurant of Thomas Keller that opened 20 years ago.  It’s located on the fourth floor in what used to be called the Time-Warner building that overlooks Columbus Circle and a corner of Central Park.  Only New York or London, I think, could have a building in which the 78^th floor penthouse was sold in 2015 by a Russian Oligarch for $51 million.

            When we arrived, the restaurant was already completely filled with guests who, like us, were handed a glass of champagne as we entered, and then left to walk around, greet others we knew, and taste food.

            I don’t like eating that way – nibbles of random food – but Francois doesn’t feel the same way and tasted until he had used all of his prodigious store of taste buds.  For me, the visit was purely evocative.

            My memories of Per Se’s opening 20 years ago are vivid.  On a cold spring day, I toured the building with its developer and Thomas when it was still being constructed, admiring the fancy shops that hadn’t yet opened, not fully appreciating the magnitude of the enterprise, cowed by the opening of the Whole Foods in the basement that was grossing a million dollars a week even though it hadn’t yet worked out a customer service that allowed shoppers to leave the store before their lettuce had wilted.

             There is a chapter in my book about Thomas Keller and the opening of Bouchon Bakery in Yountville.  I was the bakery’s consultant in 2004, and traveled from Yountville for the opening of the bakery there, to Las Vegas for the opening of the bakery inside the Venetian Hotel, and then to New York for the opening of that branch of Bouchon Bakery inside Per Se. 

            I had met Thomas in 1995 when I was the opening baking instructor at Greystone, the West Coast branch of the Culinary Institute of America, known as the CIA, but I never dared to call it that as I had previous experiences in another CIA that most of us in Washington know.

            In the late Eighties Thomas had a restaurant in New York, a critical success and a commercial failure, and then a restaurant in Los Angeles, a critical success and a commercial failure.  After those disappointments, he scraped together enough money to buy The French Laundry from the good-hearted couple who wanted him to have it.  He had opened it in 1994, and by 1995, although Thomas was receiving a lot of attention from his colleagues, the restaurant was still so new that it had not attracted much press attention. 

Jean Louis Palladin, my friend in Washington, too was beginning a new life, moving from Washington to Las Vegas.  Even the building known as Greystone, built as the Christian Brothers Winery, was beginning a new life as a culinary school. 

            All the owners of vineyards in Napa and Sonoma Valley were invited to attend a party put on by the new Las Vegas hotel in which Jean Louis’ restaurant was to be located.  But they didn’t come. 

Why should they have come?  What should Napa Valley winemakers have cared about a new restaurant in a new Las Vegas casino?  They were California wine makers.  They certainly weren’t attracted by the wine the Rio was to show off – they had their own.  And so the cavernous Barrel Room of Greystone was nearly empty.

But we were there, Greystone faculty, Napa Valley chefs and a few other chefs – Roberto Donna from Washington, Eric Ripert from New York, Jean Joho from Chicago, friends of Jean Louis who had flown in, and some Napa Valley chefs, all standing in little booths around the great room, ready to serve food to the guests who didn’t come.

            None of the chefs complained.  We enjoyed seeing each other and were looking forward to being together that evening.  Besides we didn’t care about the winemakers; we had gone there to honor the new life step for Jean Louis who, because he continuously celebrated the success of others, because of his generosity to other chefs, had brought us to Napa Valley which wasn’t – and isn’t – such a bad place to be even if the winemakers didn’t come.

            A bizarre little man wandered by, wearing a black suit with a jacket that flared and black tie, pushing up his horn-rimmed glasses with his middle finger.  “You may have read that I had the great honor last week,” he told me sententiously and without my having asked a question, “of presenting the Baron Rothschild with a check for one million dollars for a perfect vertical collection of Chateau Lafite, his great wine.” 

            Indeed, in the front of the huge room were high pedestals on which were resting Imperials of 1982 and 1961 Lafitte.  I took another large glassful of the greatly inferior wine being served to us.

            “When are you going to open those,” I asked, pointing to the huge bottles at the front of the room.

            “Ha, ha, ha, very funny,” he turned away.

            I was bored.  The room was practically empty.  I had baked breads and was standing at a table on which I had piled my loaves.  The slices I had cut were drying in baskets at the front of the table.  I was going to meet Jean Louis and the others later and thought I might move our closing time up a little.  Even Jean Louis, being honored, looked bored.

            I wandered away from my table to look at what the other chefs were serving; and at the very back of the room below vast windows at the front of the building, I came upon Thomas Keller standing in a little booth behind perforated trays of his not-yet-famous little cornets with salmon tartar, crème fraiche, and caviar peeking from trays that looked like painters’ palettes.  I had never met him.

            “What are you doing here,” I asked him.

            “I was wondering the same thing,” he said.

            Francois found me at the celebration, thrusting his caviar at me.   I wandered over to the table that held it.  Tin after tin of it.  I followed him to the truffle table where a server was shaving obscene quantities of black truffles over pasta.  Oysters, snapper ceviche, beef Wellington, a great platter of cheeses, charcuterie, a Wagu “corn dog,” Hobbs bacon and quail eggs.

            I wanted to see what has happened to the bakery that I had helped open.  The corridor back through the kitchens was filled with guests eating chocolates being made in the chocolate room and pastries made in the pastry kitchen. 

A lot had changed back there.  I didn’t recognize the oven being used to make bread; it was an oven that replaced the one I had used.

            The evening went on.  The noise was too loud for an old man with little hearing.  Thomas was dressed in whites so that guests could see him.   Laura was dressed beautifully – she always is.  Francois and I wore jackets and ties; other guests were dressed in wild outfits.  The celebration was fabulous.

            Thomas is a remarkable man of great talent, one of whose qualities is an equally endless generosity.  No one I know other than Thomas would empty a fabulously successful restaurant for an evening, fill it with three dozen cooking stations making food to give away to all those he invited to treat.

I HATE TO COOK

January 13, 2023

Half a century ago as the women’s movement was becoming really influential, Peg Bracken, a Portlandian, published a funny, cynical book she called The I-Hate-to-Cookbook.  It contained some good recipes, some not so good, and some wisdom.   This book was published at a time when a lot of people, mostly men, still thought that a woman’s place was in the kitchen.  Men ruled restaurant kitchens and husbands grilled in the back yards of their homes; but they rarely entered their home kitchens, not even to grill.  Kitchens belonged to women.

So of course, it was women who, yearning to spend less time in the kitchens to which tradition had tied them, began looking for cooking short-cuts.  Frozen orange juice, TV dinners, new kitchen gadgets; in the Fifties and Sixties we began inventing ways to make kitchen shortcuts trendy.   

The passion for spending less time in the kitchen has continued.  It has prevailed even though interrupted in the Seventies and Eighties when some of us were willing, with Julia Child and The Silver Palate propped on our counters, to devote entire weekends to making quiche Lorraine, boeuf bourguignon, and baguettes.  But that enthusiasm was limited to certain kinds of people, those who were shopping at Dean and Deluca and Sutton Place Gourmet, discovering foods not yet at that time generally embraced.

I have enjoyed cooking all my life and I am not a woman.  Those facts color my views about cooking shortcuts.  Even now, even though I spend my days looking at food, cooking food, talking about food, I still look forward to the end of the day when I can imagine on the way to my home what is in my refrigerator and how I can put together something I’d like to eat for dinner

I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT FOOD CRAZED – ALTHOUGH NEARLY EVERYONE I KNOW IS.

I find it hard to understand why many other food-crazed people spend time inventing cooking shortcuts.   Here: 

“Good Morning.  The punishing heat continues where I stay.  While I’m turning on the stove occasionally, my meals are running no-cook and salad-adjacent: say, marinated celery salad with chickpeas and Parmesan…Who wants to labor over a burner when you could eat delicious cooling food instead?” 

That’s Sam Sifton who writes about food for The New York Times and who evidently does not have air conditioning in his home.

Or this: 

“People love avocados but preparing them can take forever. With Wholly Avocado, you can now serve fresh 100% pure, perfectly ripe Hass avocados every time without having to slice, pit, or scoop them yourself.”

Dicing an avocado can take “forever?”  Really?

Is that tool really needed?

Some recipes do take “forever.”  It’s true.  Beef Wellington, Turducken, ratatouille – some recipes are complicated, and some require a lot of prep work and a lot of cooking steps.  But that is not true of most cooking.  It is real disservice to overcomplicate cooking when so many people these days are so quickly discouraged when they imagine embarking on it.

I don’t like the culinary laziness that is being encouraged so often by professionals who, instead of promoting the virtues of corner-cutting, could be helping others to learn to enjoy the rewards of being organized, feeling competent, and having fun in the kitchen.

I was surprised to read a recent email from Mark Bittman whom I admire arguing that mis en place, getting everything ready before beginning actually to cook, is “a fraud,” available only to those of us who have staffs to prepare ingredients required for cooking. 

It’s wonderful to have staff to do the peeling and chopping; but being organized in the kitchen is a skill available to everyone.   I am afraid that kitchen gimmicks often are sold to us as ways of making us feel more organized, something we can do with nothing more than a vegetable peeler, a little knife and a big one, and a cutting board.      

But gimmicky kitchen appliances did not start with Instapots and immersion circulators, even with microwave ovens.  Those were preceded by egg cookers, rice cookers, and the George Foreman grill, many briefly trendy appliances that promised to make cooking easier or less messy.  Most of them fade pretty quickly from the market, left behind to clutter our counters and the offerings of eBay.

Currently, the most popular fad is sheet pan cooking.  I see it advocated everywhere I look.  The queen of this non-cooking is Melissa Clark and, like Mark Bittman, she really knows better because the recipes she writes and tests for the New York Times day to day – sheet pan claptrap aside – are really good.  

But in her advocacy of sheet pans she says, in effect, that because it’s so hard to stand at the stove stirring and sautéing and then have to wash pots and pans, why not just dump all the ingredients for a dinner onto a sheet pan and let your oven do the work? 

Because it’s a bad idea. 

Here’s a sheet pan recipe: 

Start by roasting sliced oranges, red onion and chopped fennel on a sheet pan. Rest salmon fillets, seasoned with salt, pepper and orange zest, on top, and return the pan to the oven to cook the salmon. (If you like your salmon well-done, roast the vegetables and fish together from the start.) A few minutes before the fish is done, pour on a bag of frozen or fresh spring peas, and return the pan to the oven. A few minutes later, once the peas turn bright green, the dish is done. Sprinkle it with torn mint and serve.

But foods don’t cook at the same rate.  So in this recipe, the sheet pan with fruit and vegetables is put into the oven to roast before the salmon is added.  Otherwise, the salmon will surely overcook.  But without adding oil or butter or liquid to the vegetables, they are simply going to shrivel.  And when the fish is put onto the fruit and vegetables, it will drip fish flavors and make everything taste fishy.

Why do it this way?  Why roast those vegetables in the oven when in five minutes you can sauté them in a pan with a few drops olive oil and have control over the ingredients that sheet pan cooking does not allow?  And why not sauté the salmon separately in a pan that you can watch? 

Just to avoid a second skillet?  It’s far easier to clean a round frying pan than it is to wash a rectangular sheet pan with it’s four corners too little for anyone’s fingers.

Simple as they are, there’s a certain alchemy that happens when food hits the metal surface (f a sheet pan), arguably making these humble kitchen staples the most important tool in your arsenal. 

That is nonsense.  What alchemy?  Is there no alchemy when food hits a hot frying pan? 

Of course, roasting in the oven makes sense if you’re roasting because you want to produce crusty, caramelized foods.  But on the whole, sautéing foods gives better results than baking them. 

And what about frying, a cooking technique so much easier and so much more controllable than cooking in the oven? 

I have read so many sheet pan recipes that would, if followed literally, produce bland food, unevenly cooked food.  Why do we take those recipes seriously?  I think it’s because food writers who advocate sheet pan cooking are afraid to tell their readers that they ought to cook.   Instead, they tell their readers how hard cooking is and how easy it is to throw ingredients on a sheet pan.

It’s an irony.  The Post has a food section.  The Times has a food section.  So do most metropolitan newspapers.  Bon Appetit and Food and Wine Magazine print in their food sections practically nothing other than recipes.  I get a daily email from the Times telling me how to cook, sometimes two a day.  There has never been more information and advice about cooking than there is now.  So how can it be that so many food writers – the same ones who send recipes to us – are telling us at the same time how to avoid cooking because it is so hard to do it?

I wish they would stop telling us that we hate to cook.  Stop telling us that cooking is drudgery, that we don’t want to get our kitchens hot, use too many ingredients, keep our cooking time under 30 minutes, and use only one pot, preferably none.

Do they really think we can prepare good food using no pans, no pots, no ingredients, no time, and no work?

Uptown Market

At 7 am today we got a new neighborhood food store.  Inspections were passed; staff were being trained; products delivered and recipes retested; shelves are being stocked.  It’s Uptown Market just across the street from us and I think it will be a major addition to our neighborhood.

“Our neighborhood?”  What is our neighborhood?

We are not a classic Washington neighborhood like Cleveland Park that came about at the turn of the Twentieth Century when the extension of the streetcar made  possible living in “the suburbs.”   Everyone knows Cleveland Park; it’s a national historic district.

I am not clear even about what to call our neighborhood.  Is it Van Ness or Forest Hills?   I would have called it Forest Hills years ago.  But that was before the University of D.C. expanded and became such a presence in Van Ness which is now is a built-up jumble of not-so-attractive buildings that dominate a neighborhood of pleasant and comparatively modest homes.

Whatever it is called, I have a lifelong relationship with this neighborhood.  The first house I bought, in 1970, is on the dead end of 29^th Street just below Albemarle, half a mile from Bread Furst.

My relationship with the neighborhood started even before that. My first real job after college was at ABC News.  Its Washington bureau then occupied the second floor of a Deco strip mall on the east side of Connecticut Avenue.  It was a wonderful block.  Hess Shoes at the corner of Albemarle, Shanghai Garden a few doors down, a large People’s Drug Store on the north side of the mall, Kitchen Bazaar, a terrific local kitchenware store.  And I could have breakfast at the Hot Shoppe across the street where the Burger King and Zips Cleaners are now.

The neighborhood was not a food destination, however.  The little strip mall had two or three little restaurants.  My boss, Howard K. Smith, the newsman, didn’t care much for Chinese Food so we didn’t often go to Shanghai Garden in the peculiar little red and white building just beyond the mall.  But he liked Carmack’s and so we lunched there two times a week.  There was no retail food store in the strip but a building across the street had been constructed 50 years earlier to be a Safeway at a time when supermarkets were much smaller stores.

That is the building we now occupy.

Those were the days when Washington’s retail food was dominated by two chains, Safeway and Giant.  They controlled 80 percent of the food retail.   They were not challenged.  There were mom and pop stores to be sure.  A bit to the north there was a great one, Clover Market across from Higger’s, the drug store.  Noah Steinberg, the son of the owners of Clover Market works in our pastry kitchen.

Now, today there is a change.  As of today we have Uptown Market that in some respects a throwback to the era of neighborhood food stores, and I think it’s going to be wonderful. I went to look again yesterday to look at the store, so my information for you is impeccably fresh.

Fresh like the fish they are going to sell.  Like the meat they are going to butcher.  Like the baguettes we are going to bake for them.

Some readers may know Santi Zabaleta who immigrated from Spain in 1999 and eight years later took over a purified water store on Bethesda Avenue and opened a Spanish foods-oriented market.  Later he added a butcher shop across the street and still later opened Kensington Wholesale Fish.

Now he and his partner Adam Leichtner take over a large space across the street from Bread Furst in the apartment building the B.F. Saul Company built to replace the little mall atop which I worked in 1961.

So we have another real food store  in Van Ness, Forest Hills, UDC, or whatever we are called. It starts today with beautiful Spanish cheeses including a raw milk Manchego, an aged one, and even French cheeses because as Santi generously admits, “Nobody makes cheeses like the French.”

The whole chickens I saw yesterday look fresh and beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is wonderful for me to see a beautifully tied veal roast in the meat case.  The butcher is French, again a throwback to The French Market, the Georgetown market to which I was devoted for many years.

There’s wine too and beer although hardly the selection offered by Calvert Woodley, a great anchor of the neighborhood.  And there are those special Spanish foods in addition to some of the basics that will provide convenience to the neighborhood.

As you might gather I am excited to have another food store between the commercial strips of Cleveland Park and Chevy Chase Circle, our own neighborhood food store.   I hope that others will come to this neighborhood to shop — I am sure that they do too — but this store is for Forest Hills, Van Ness, etc., whatever we are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cokie Was Unique

I don’t remember exactly when we met.  I arrived in Washington in 1961 immediately after college and went to work for her mother’s cousin, Howard K. Smith, the radio and television commentator. Cokie’s sister, Barbara, was my friend; Cokie was Barbara’s younger sister, still in college.  I spent a lot of time that summer at the Boggs’ home and I must have met Cokie sometime that summer.

I read a lot of the obituaries published this week.  I know what she meant to other people –  wise political observer with unique perspectives particularly on Congress, feminist, brilliant journalist.  But Cokie was my friend and what a friend Cokie was!  She wasn’t like other people.  She was Superfriend.  She was more sister to me than friend.   I know that many others feel that way.

Cokie and Steve have a huge circle of friends.  We always spent Passover and Hanukkah at their home, always the same guest list augmented by the children of her friends and the friends of their children, gradually the grandchildren too.  Anyone connected to her friends and family was welcomed.

There was always an outdoor summer party too.  I think that one was created to feed friends the gifts of Steve’s garden.

Friends whose books got published could look forward to a book party arranged by Cokie and Steve held in their backyard where a tent had been put up and a caterer hired to feed people and a bartender to care for them.

She created a party for me and insisted that I invite everyone, practically everyone in the world to celebrate the Beard award to me; and then she had to miss the party because that was, I presume, when her cancer returned.

Cokie was the celebrant and caretaker of all her friends.  If she hadn’t heard from me in a while she would check in to ask how I was.  We’d make a date, a dinner at my house, a lunch somewhere in Bethesda, a little visit at the bakery.

When my sister was dying, she wanted to take care of me. I wrote to her, “No one is like you.  No one keeps in touch as you do.”  When my brother in law died she insisted on picking me up at the bakery and driving me to the synagogue.

At one of our lunches, Cokie suggested that we reach back to our youth and invite to my home all of our circle who had remained friends for 50 years, an anniversary party of our friendship.  We did it.

This “swamp” for Washingtonians is not a vile place filled with “bureaucrats.”  It is our home filled with people who devote their lives to serving the public and trying to make things better and writing about that.  Now we have lost the person who understood all of that better than anyone, our homemaker.

Steve and Cokie were to have dinner at my home on Wednesday. By today she would have written, “What can we bring?”

I would have responded, “Don’t be silly.  It’s what I do.”

She would have responded,  “We’ll bring some squash.  It’s weighing down Steve’s garden.  And you could adopt my mother’s saying since it would suit you so, when asked what to bring she says, ‘Nothing but your own sweet self’.  Give that a try!

As September changes to October we would have reminded each other that we were beginning our month of sadness, the month in which my sister died, in which her sister died, and in which her father’s plane disappeared in Alaska.

But Cokie now misses the month of sadness and leaves it to me.

 

 

 

A Few Days of Bliss

From time to time during the wet summer heat of Washington I wondered why nature made summer the best time to eat.    Many days here are so hot and the air so heavy that we don’t feel like eating some of the most wonderful foods that exist like pork shoulder or roasted potatoes or desserts with heavy cream.  In addition many families are on the move during the summer and that makes shopping for food more difficult for them.  So too often they must settle for take-out.

None of that affected me in the middle of this year as I spent half of July in Carmel California.

I confined myself to a cottage sublet to me by my friend Phyllis Theroux, owned by a friendly couple who have lived for a long time in Carmel Valley.  My home for two weeks has two rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen and it was  enough for me.   Outside my door was a large grapefruit tree, a little outdoor patio, and a sensational view.

That patio was perfect seven hours a day between the time that the fog lifted at 9:30 am and returned at 4:30 pm.  During those seven hours the sky was bright blue every day and the temperature warmed to 75 degrees.  Evenings required a sweater.

I wasn’t particularly active during the month as I had gone there to try to finish the middle of my book – the part that describes my food experiences in Washington during the early 1960s and the rise French food here during the Kennedy Administration

I worked each day as long as I could and when I stopped working I went to a pilates class in Carmel-by-the-Sea and walked in the town. It was an idyllic two weeks

The food I fixed for myself there was somewhat different from the food I prepare here for others.  It was very, very simple like the food here.  I like simple food but this was food stripped down, usually two or three ingredients; and I didn’t eat much bread as I could find no good bread.   If it were not for my life-long self-imposed diet curse and my determination to write I could have made great food as the ingredients around Carmel were always very good.

I was on the coast of the Salinas Valley, a huge American farm region.  There seem to be no seasons in that part of California.  Strawberries grow not only in the spring as they do in Washington, but all the time.  And apricots have flavor.  I could shop for virtually everything I ate at two farmers markets – a small one in Carmel Valley on Sunday and a very large one on Friday morning at the Monterey Peninsula College.  I could have gone to any one of a number of others like the ones in Pacific Grove and Salinas and in Carmel-on-the- Sea.

I returned to Washington before the peak of our growing season.  During our summer, there are wonderful tomatoes and beets of different sizes and colors.  Peaches, melons, blueberries, summer squash and green beans that actually have flavor, and corn.

The Saturday Van Ness market, a block away from the bakery, is only a few years old and gets better and better with more and more famers selling more and more produce.   I go there on Saturday mornings as does Robert Dalliah, our savory kitchen’s chef, and we look for what we want to buy. Then at the end of the market, some of the farmers drop off for us to buy what they were unable to sell at the market. We buy as many tomatoes as we can get and can them and make sauce both of which are sold on our shelves into the autumn or as long as they last.   And of course we put the tomatoes into our summer sandwiches and will do that as long as the tomatoes last.

But however good the produce is here,  I am sorry to say that it all really tastes better in California. Carrots are sweeter, peaches are juicier, the centers of strawberries are red not white.  Nature is kinder in California and I took advantage of its kindness, wishing I could do that for a period longer than two weeks.

 

Happy Birthday to Us

We failed to celebrate our anniversary last month and probably I should have boasted about our being five years old.  But it’s not our style to boast.  Even so I shouldn’t allow the moment to pass without thanking you.

We opened Bread Furst believing it would be successful. Of course.  It’s pretty foolish to risk so much to open a business; but what fool would start a business without believing in the likelihood of success?  That’s the nature of entrepreneurship:  It’s the ability to persuade yourself that your idea is so good, it is unlikely to fail.  That’s the way I felt about opening Bread Furst.  Need I add that it doesn’t always work out for everyone? But it did for me.

The other day I walked around the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood at the behest of a long-time resident.  She had come to Bread Furst as a customer the preceding weekend and asked me as I served her across the counter and as people often do, whether I wouldn’t like to open a bakery in her neighborhood.  I put my hand tenderly on her hand and said what I always say when people say to me, “Will you consider opening a bakery in Tenlytown, Ivy City, Bethesda, Capitol Hill, Silver Spring?”

“I am 80 years old and have here all I want,” I told her.  But she implored me to walk with her in Mt. Pleasant and I did so a couple of days later.

I like Mt. Pleasant.  I live nearby.  It’s decidedly urban and diverse and not too fancy, not yet “developed,” but even if I were still in the bakery-opening business, I would not open a bakery there. I tried to explain as she earnestly showed me a run-down storefront near Mr. Pleasant Avenue, the main drag.

I told her that parking is too difficult.  The storefront she likes is invisible.  A lot of the neighborhood’s population would not be able to afford to pay prices that are needed to make a small bakery profitable.  Many residents are not attracted by our kinds of breads and pastries.  The bakery traditions of Mt Pleasant are sharply divided by the geographic origins of its residents.

She told me that everyone in the neighborhood knows Bread Furst that many of her neighbors drive “all the way” across the park.  They would so love to have a Bread Furst near them, and that many of the neighbors would patronize us too.

 

It’s strange:  Customers say to me frequently, “I came all the way from Georgetown, Glover Park, Tenlytown, etc. to buy your bread.”  They mean that when they say it as a compliment and I take it that way. But Georgetown?  That’s three and a half miles from here.  Tenleytown?  That’s a mile away, less than that.  It makes me think sometimes when they say this that they all must have grown up in a French village where their neighborhood bakery was on the same streets as their homes.

I digress.

Before I opened Marvelous Market in 1990, I did a survey.  My sons and I walked in the neighborhood near Politics and Prose, my sister’s bookstore, then already six years old, and left questionnaires for residents to tell us what kind of food store they wanted.  I had the benefit of my sister Carla’s experience and vigorous opinions and my own knowledge of this neighborhood in which in 1969 I had bought my first house.

I did what I could to excite the neighborhood about the bakery before we opened and some of our neighbors plunged into the effort, helping to raise money and plan “landscaping,” and even encourage their children’s participation.

 

We were folded by the neighborhood into its development efforts already underway.

It all worked out.  The bakery might have been successful in other neighborhoods.  I hope that is the case as I would like very much to see others in other parts of the city do what we have done.  And perhaps it is happening.

 

Jonathan Bethony of Selou Bakery in Shaw

I hope it does happen.  I would be wonderful for the city to have a number of small bakeries in many other neighborhoods.  But none will have the advantage that I have had twice – with Marvelous Market in 1990 and Bread Furst in 2014.  That is so much support from a neighborhood that appreciates incredibly what we do, a neighborhood filled with people who are happy that we are there.

Every day, I look at families with little children and think that we are giving them something given to me every week starting in 1947 when I was old enough to notice – the baked goods of Silber’s in Baltimore, our neighborhood bakery, just a walk from our house.  We are giving each day the memories that will last a lifetime.  What a gift to them!  What a gift to me!

 

Autumnal Thoughts

From time to time I make notes for a book I will never write.  It would be called Ten Inventions That Ruined the World.  Some of them, I would have to confess, like the automobile, have redeeming qualities even though the automobile has ruined the world.  Others like television have no redeeming qualities at all.  I was reminded of my book that will never be written when I was in England a week or so ago.

I reached old age in the summer this year and realized that I should travel while I still can to places I haven’t seen before.  The English countryside was my first destination. Of course I began in London.  I took the tube at dusk on the day I arrived and then walked to have dinner with Claudia Roden at her home.

Claudia is the author of exceptional cookbooks that combine food information with history and culture; she is really as much anthropologist and historian as writer and cook.

Her home is in the north of London not a long walk from the Golder’s Green station and I looked forward to the walk as well as to seeing her.   When I turned the corner from the main road I began to smell something very familiar.  I knew exactly what it was, a smell I used to welcome each year in September and October.

I had forgotten it.  No, that’s not right.  I hadn’t forgotten it as I have thought about it at this time of year every year for two or three decades and have missed it, the sweet and sour, acrid, acidic, woodsie, musky smell of drying and rotting leaves.

Autumn has always been my favorite time of year. Its colors, dark and burnished, have always appealed to me.  The overture to winter has always seemed cozy to me.  Darkness seems cozy.  Autumn more than any other season stimulates my memories of childhood.  I remember raking leaves on the hilly front yard of my family’s home in west Baltimore, creating piles on the side of street, jumping into those piles to hide.  Our trees produced enough leaves to line the street heavily along our lawn.

It was the smells that have been most important of all to me, the smells of autumn that are even more evocative for me than the perfumed smells of spring.

I thought as I heard my feet crunching leaves on that London street and smelled what I think of as autumn perfumes how rarely I have that treat in Washington.  Well, of course, another of the worst inventions of my lifetime has replaced the sounds of crunching leave with those of a loud whiny engine just as it has replaced the sweet and sour odors of rotting leaves with the smells of burning gasoline – the leaf-blower of course.

People write to neighborhood list-serves at this time of year objecting to the sounds of leaf-blowers.  I agree with them.  A number of years ago I spent a great deal of time in Yountville California helping to open Bouchon Bakery.  Every restaurant and hotel in that little town had its own leaf-blowing team on the streets every morning, a population of machines so large that it seemed as if every leaf had its own captive blower.  The din was impressive and I tried to persuade the then-mayor to adopt a new town slogan:  “Yountville, Leaf-Blowing Capital of America.”  What I didn’t realize at the time because Yountville has no real seasons is that we were all being robbed by that infernal machine of all the smells of nature.

Here in Washington too but especially at this time of year when every embassy, every apartment and office building employs leaf-blowers or puts the machine into the hands of staff already there.

I never understand.  Why did leaves become the enemy?  Why is a pristine sidewalk more attractive than one covered with nature’s debris?  I understand why leaves should be raked once or twice during the fall, but every week?  Everyday?  Why?

And so I was so happy that evening walking the streets in northern London to listen to the crunch of dry leaves under my feet and to smell the complex perfumes of those wet leaves underneath.

Modernity is a thief.

 

 

 

 

 

Cooking to Buff

It’s unseemly, my grandmother would have said, to be obsessed about body weight – although she certainly was obsessed with hers.  It’s true; it is unseemly, especially for someone of my age.  But I am.

As I have spent much of the summer alone in Hardwick, Vermont working on a book, and as I know no one here and eat alone, it seemed like a good time to get buff, really an objective unachievable but an imagined objective somehow more appealing to me than a simple weight-reduction diet.

I know that it is fashionable for people to diet by giving up all carbohydrates, or all white foods, or all foods people started consuming only after the Ice Age, or all sweets or alcohol or all of something. My way of dieting this summer is just less-ness, eating pretty freely foods I like but very small quantities of them.  As it is summer even in Vermont (and that means the temperature is 69 degrees) I have taken advantage of fresh produce and have eaten a lot of vegetables and fruits. But I have tried most of all just to eat less all the time.

I bought a chicken at the beginning of my stay here, in the second week of July.  I trimmed it and made a stock of those parts.  Then I cut up the chicken and froze those parts individually wrapped.  I portioned the stock and froze it too in portions. I still now after five weeks have most of the stock and half of the chicken.  I will try to do something with them by the coming weekend when I return to Washington.

I brought with me from Washington some very good dried beans and some very good pasta.  They are filling and not highly caloric if eaten in small quantities.  I have teamed them with vegetables through my stay here.

Fruit is pretty good in Vermont; that’s because most of it comes from Pennsylvania.  Still I have been able to pick berries around here and they taste very good.  And when accompanied by the best chocolate I know, Recchiuti ordered from San Francisco, peaches and berries make a very good dessert. A bit of chocolate after that is all I need to raise my blood sugar after dinner.

 

I have an advantage and I have said this before:  I like to cook even if only for myself.  I assume that everyone who thinks about food and writes about food also likes to cook.  So I was jarred a few weeks ago when one of my favorite Websites, Serious Eats, published this

       After a busy day, the last thing you want to do is spend hours in the kitchen pulling dinner together.  Luckily, we have wealth of delicious weeknight meals that will have you in and out of the kitchen in one hour or less.

I think it is pretty bizarre for a Website that devotes itself to the joys and intricacies of cooking to concern itself with time in the kitchen.  Certainly I don’t spend hours in the kitchen, but what I most look forward to after a day of work is cooking for myself.  I have had fun this summer doing that especially since all the ingredients I have wanted are available on Friday afternoons at the Hardwick famers’ market and on Saturday mornings at the farmers’ market in the picture-perfect common of Craftsbury where I am able to buy very good local cheese from Bonnieview Farm, raw milk, and organic eggs with bright orange yolks.

My diet, I admit it, is very different here than at home where all the temptations reside.  My greatest temptations in Washington are in restaurants and I don’t go to restaurants here although I intend to go once this week, my last week, to eat fried clams.

My biggest dietary problem is that I seem unable to resist eating all of a dish served at restaurants like Kinship and Bibiana.  it seems like such a shame to me to waste good food and it’s embarrassing to me to ask, “Will you pack that for me?”  And it all tastes so irresistibly good that I am unable to control the portions I eat when I am in restaurants.  If I go this week to The Scale House, a new seafood restaurant in downtown (so to speak) Hardwick, for fried clams, can I really send half the plate back to the dish room?   Perhaps I can buy an appetizer portion.

But I have not gone to restaurants here.  Instead, I have eaten in the little house I rent.   Breakfast, when I eat anything at all, has been a piece of toast with a schmear of peanut butter.  The Buffalo Co-op in Hardwick sells a delicious brand called Once Again.

Lunches have been an egg poached in a spicy sauce of fresh tomatoes, a poor man’s shakshuka, or a fruit salad or sliced tomatoes with onions and anchovies.  Or tomatoes mixed with little pieces of old bread.

I have started dinner perhaps four out of seven days with an ear of corn steamed for five minutes although corn hadn’t yet appeared at market during the first weeks I was here; but it’s here now.  After my ear of corn I have eaten a variety of vegetable concoctions made with tomatoes, corn, cauliflower, green beans, peas, local potatoes, made with very small quantities of olive oil but larger ones of lemon juice, herbs, and onions and garlic.

As for bread, I can’t give it up.  I am sure you understand.  But I have tried to limit myself to one slice at breakfast of the best whole grain breads I can find at the Co-op here and at the far larger one in Montpelier.  Those come from Red Hen Bakery (please, please don’t tell Sarah Saunders) and Elmore Mountain Breads.

All the while during these weeks, my fantasies of a cheeseburger have grown to the point that Mintwood Place has become an imagined paradise.

I return to Washington this weekend with a new resolve.  When I go to restaurants I will try to eat only a few ounces of particularly wonderful foods and then when the server isn’t looking I will, doubtless with an embarrassed look toward my dinner companion, slip leftovers into a couple of sheets of aluminum foil and plastic bags I will have carried discretely with me.

The Red Hen(s)

Mike Friedman, the owner of The Red Hen, a really wonderful neighborhood restaurant in Washington, dropped by yesterday morning.  He told me about telephone calls he has received from around the country and the number of death threats presumably from Trump supporters incensed about the denial of service to the White House press secretary at a restaurant with the same name in another place.

My favorite story about a restaurant’s refusal to serve a customer was one Jean Louis Palladin told me in the early ‘90s.

Palladin, in case the name is unfamiliar to you, was Washington’s first truly great chef.  Incongruously located in the unfashionable basement of the Watergate Hotel, his restaurant was internationally important.  Jean Louis contributed greatly to our development as a food culture, but that’s another story.

Shortly after it opened in 1979, Jean Louis at the Watergate was reviewed by Robert Shoffner, the Washingtonian Magazine’s critic who savaged it.  The review was really remarkable.  Jean Louis himself said, “Never in France have I read a review such as that.  He didn’t merely write about what he ate, he attacked me. He attacked my taste and my talent. If I were to believe him, I would go out there (into the Potomac River across the road) and disappear.”

Although Jean Louis moved to Washington when he was a Michelin two-star chef, the youngest person ever to have been awarded two stars –  although he was a man of great self-confidence, he told me twelve years later that he was so hurt by the review that, “Every morning when I woke up my first thought was about what I could do to him, how I would hurt him the way he hurt me.”  He got a chance only a few years later and only after Shoffner had written a second negative review.

Shoffner came to the restaurant one night for dinner.  When Jean Louis, in the kitchen, was told that Shoffner had arrived, he walked out into the dining room and told Shoffner he would not cook for him.

Shoffner told him that the law required Jean Louis to cook; his was a public accommodation and could not refuse a customer.  When Jean Louis did just that, Shoffner called the police.

Jean Louis told me, “They came – there were two.  One of them was ree-ally beeg and they were both wearing their pee-stoles and their talkie-walkies were loud.”  Shoffner made his complaint to the police officers who after they conferred with each other, told Jean Louis that the law required him to serve Shoffner.

Jean Louis retreated to his kitchen.  He told his staff to prepare a dinner but to send none of the restaurant’s cooking.   Instead they found a tin of fois gras a salesman had left months before.   They served oysters on the half-shell with lemon, no sauces. They sliced prosciutto and bread and they served butter and cheeses. For dessert they sent whole fruits.

The following day, I was told, Shoffner filed a complaint at the D.C. Office of Human Rights but I don’t know what happened to it.   I do know that Shoffner’s enmity persisted because I was a witness to it more than ten years later.

I have read a lot this week about a restaurant’s refusal to serve.  I am an intensely political person and have been all my life.  Indeed my political career began in 1948 when at the age of ten  I walked door-to-door in a working class neighborhood not far from my grandparents’ home in Baltimore to oppose the Ober Law that imposed a loyalty oath on public employees in Maryland.

I stayed political for many years  working in many political jobs.  In the late 1960s I worked for a United State Senator, Joseph Tydings, a Democrat from Maryland.  Because my responsibilities included his press relations, I got around a lot in the Senate.

One day I was in the press gallery to pitch a story on a criminal justice bill of which Tydings was the floor leader.   Sen. Everett Dirkson, the Senate’s Republican leader, was giving a little press conference while Sen. William Proxmire, was waiting to make a statement.  I watched Senator Proxmire, not the most light-hearted of men, subtly make faces that might distract Dirkson.  When he finished saying what he had to say, Dirksen rushed toward Proxmire in the pretense of an attack, both of them laughing.

Cokie Roberts has pointed out that politicians of that era, including her father, could be rivals but they couldn’t be enemies because they shared something that shaped their lives and feelings and politics, World War II.  Their feelings about having been part of something truly momentous, a common experience in which they were allies, was reinforced in an earlier Washington where politicians didn’t retreat on Thursdays to homes in their districts, but lived here with their families where their wives socialized and their children shared schools.

As Dirksen said,  I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.

That, as we all know, has changed.  It’s hard to imagine such comity.  When I was political we were competitive and committed but we were not angry.  But now politics has left me and I am left only with those values that were always important to me.

This is a time of anger.  This week I have been wondering how I would respond if the President’s press secretary decides to come here to the bakery.  Would I in this uncivil time be uncivil?

What happened last weekend started as a dignified and private protest of a small business owner against a President, a presidency, and a politics she can’t bear.  I have not heard that Stephanie Wilkinson, owner of the restaurant that declined to serve Sarah Sanders, was uncivil.  It was not she who told the world about her stand. Why did Ms. Sanders use her great power to bring danger to a little restaurant in a small town in Virginia – not to mention the one here in Washington – and the one in Maine – and all those with the same or a similar name?

It was not the owner the Red Hen who invited the President of the United States to attack a little small-town restaurant.  (Have we become insensitive to the absurdity of these Tweets, the unseemly President of the United States commenting on the condition of an awning outside a little restaurant in a little town?)

I wonder what is now going to happen and I wonder what is right.  The harassing of Secretary Nielsen in a Mexican restaurant.  The discussion about whether all Trumpers should be harassed wherever they go.

How may we who own food businesses in Washington, any of which might attract Sarah Saunders or Senator McConnell or Stephen Miller, express disagreement without incivility or should we worry about incivility at all?  I have read the argument of those who say that Trump enablers do not deserve civility.

I would be surprised if we in the heart of a residential neighborhood of Washington populated not by transient politicians but by people who live their lives here, ever see a Trump supporter.  But if one of those who work for the administration – or others to whom graciousness and honesty are foreign ideas did come here, I think I would compromise.  I don’t want either simply “to go high when they go low,” as Michelle Obama advocated, or, as Maxine Waters recommends, to harass people who are destroying our polity.

I think I would like to say simply to a Trumper, “’I want you know that I am furious about what you are doing to this country.  What may I get you?”

 

The Joy of Cooking

I am in Carmel, California working on a book that’s in part about the romance of cooking.   I don’t mean the romance of food. I mean of cooking.

I began learning how to cook at approximately the same time as my mother began learning how to cook. My mother hadn’t learn it as a child because my grandmother whom I adored never cooked. She didn’t have to. She employed a cook who might have taught my mother but that woman, a fixture in my family’s life, didn’t want to.

I don’t know how my mother would have acquired cooking skills if we had continued living in Baltimore, her birthplace and her mother’s and her grandmother’s, etc. But my father, then in the Public Health Service, was assigned in 1942 to Key West and then to the Florida Panhandle and therefore we all, my mother along with my two siblings and me, moved to Florida.

She, at the age of 32 made cooking progress faster than I did at the age of four but she had advantages: she had to feed a family and she could read the one cookbook she had – The Settlement Cookbook which was the most important one at that time for Jewish home cooks.

I didn’t do much cooking at the age of four but it started to become more or less a part of my life 10 or 12 years after that.  In fact in a sense that’s what I am writing a book about. As I am doing practically nothing in Carmel other than writing about food, it seems even more jarring than usual for me to read about cooking in newspapers:

“Quick and easy recipes to try this weekend”

“Cooking polenta is easier than you think.”

“Thirty minute spaghetti and meatballs.”

Those reassurances appear in many articles about food:  Only four ingredients are required. Only ten minutes of actual work.

And then they go to the opposite extreme and run articles about knife skills and how to poke meat to gauge its doneness, how to buy just the right pots and pans and immersion blenders, and smoke your own fish, and do sous vide at home – all of which reinforces the impression many people have: That cooking requires lots of expensive equipment and lots of skill.

 

 

I am told as you are that many, perhaps most of the people who watch cooking shows on television don’t cook. They watch those shows because they enjoy seeing other people cook or because they like competitions.

But I doubt that most people who read the food pages of newspapers do so just for their amusement. So why is the underlying assumption in newspaper food pages that people who read about cooking don’t know anything it? I suspect they do. I suspect that they love food and want to learn more about preparing it. For them ease of it may not be the most important matter.

I wish we could get beyond the theme that cooking is hard and not worth a lot of your time; therefore we have this quick and easy recipe for you.

It is true that some cooking these days exceeds the interest of most people. Few of us want to make our own spice mixtures and powders. Few of us want to buy sous vide circulators. Cooking from The French Laundry Cookbook is purely a labor of love and for serious hobbyists, not for people who want simply to make good food from good ingredients.

It never occurred to me as a young person that cooking was hard or that is wasn’t worth my time.   For me it was simply inevitable.

My generation learned to cook as we grew up. In my boyhood I fixed foods after school for myself and sometimes for a hungry sibling too. As young people we cooked from The Joy of Cooking and then from Julia Child’s first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

That became a bit of a bible for nearly everyone I knew and it was followed by the comprehensive American Cookery by James Beard. My aunt gave that to me when it was first published and every time I consult it I think of her.

Right now, in Carmel I engage in four activities, writing about food, Pilates, reading food literature, and feeding my weight reduction diet.

When I arrived in Carmel three weeks ago, I bought dried pinto beans and chickpeas, canned tomatoes, V-8, and olive oil. The next day I went to the Monterey College farmers’ market (I found it on the Internet) and bought there some chicken backs and tons of vegetables. I used the chicken with vegetable scraps (parsley stems, asparagus and scallion ends, mushroom stems, and two carrots and an onion that weren’t scrap) to make a chicken stock.

And that has been one of the bases of my cooking here.

I have bought other foods of course: Fish from a really good market I stumbled on, avocados, root vegetables, mushrooms and artichokes from the Ferry Plaza Market in San Francisco. as well as Richutti chocolates with which I reward myself after dinner each evening for my unwanted abstemiousness.

All sorts of fruits grow here, of course, including the best strawberries I have even eaten. Lemons and grapefruits grow on trees outside my door and that reminds me once again how different California is from the real world.   But although all this fruit is wonderful for snacking, it’s my food preparation here that makes those newspaper attitudes so jarring to me.

I made a vegetable stock in addition to the chicken one. I cooked in a little bit of olive oil vegetables and scraps that I then dumped into a pot, added water and salt, and simmered. I use this broth for cooking artichokes and poaching asparagus. It perpetuates itself as the vegetables I poach in it give it even more flavor.

I have added to it a couple of lemon rinds and more scrapes and I thin it with additional water sometimes. I use it as a soup base too and added a bit of it to a sauce I made from red bell peppers, canned tomatoes, onions, garlic, anchovies that I use to top fish I cook in a frying pan.

I keep the broth in the refrigerator.

I made a second sauce in the blender I found in the kitchen of this two room cottage. Anchovies, avocados, lemon juice, toasted walnuts, olive oil, a lot of garlic, and the leaves of a whole large bunch of flat leaf parsley made a parsley pesto that is wonderful with my artichokes and asparagus and good to add to winter greens I simmer with a bit of the vegetable stock.

I only have a few more days here and on Sunday I bought some small grape tomatoes grown in Mexico, violating my principle that tomatoes should be eaten only in season (our season). These I dehydrated in a small toaster oven to concentrate their flavor.

 

It’s all so easy. Sometimes I have to correct foods I make by adding more garlic or by thinning with V-8 or by thickening with a little tomato paste.   But there are very few rules.

For example: I could use raw vegetables when I make stocks but I know that cooking them first (either roasting in the oven or simmering in a little oil on the stove) makes the soups more flavorful.

Toasting nuts before eating them or using them as an ingredient increases their flavor.

Raw garlic and raw onions both which I love can be too sharp; so I marinate them in lemon juice or vinegar before I use them raw as a garnish.

But really even if I don’t do those things, everything works. It doesn’t matter if an onion is chopped finely or coarsely.   I can add lemon or orange juice to a sauce or not. I can top any food with toasted nuts, or not. I can combine small pieces of cooked cauliflower to any other vegetables. I can use my little semi-dried tomatoes as a garnish for whatever I make.

It’s so easy and relaxing and I remember that my mother used cooking as a way of getting away from her (by that time) six children and being by herself. I am entirely by myself here and cooking is for me a way to get out of my head.

But I have to stop.  I went to the farmers’ market last Friday but bought nothing other than farm eggs, artichokes, and strawberries. It was hard for me to limit myself but on Saturday much of the food I might try to take on the flight back to Washington would end up in the hands and perhaps stomachs of TSA agents whom I don’t care to feed.

The theme that runs though the classic cooking literature I am rereading here – M.K.F Fisher, Paula Peck, Laurie Colwin – is that cooking food is itself nourishing. It is rewarding in visceral ways to think about ingredients and flavors and particularly to make do with what’s available and in season.

Moreover the activity of cooking, joyful and engaging, ends with the pleasure of eating either with friends or family or the pleasure of solitary dining which is for me very peaceful.

There is no form of creativity that is easier than cooking. And there is no form of creativity whose failure is less important than cooking. That’s why I find it hard to understand when people say cooking is too difficult, too time-consuming, too fraught.   For me it is easy creativity. Failure is unlikely and, in any case, unimportant.