Part 8 (1/2)
Saute them in some fat
Brown piece(s) of meat (or other featured ingredient)
Put everything in a pot
Add some water (or stock, wine, milk, etc.)
Simmer, below the boil, for a long timeAs a practical matter, the virtue of this sort of skeleton recipe, for me anyway, is that it makes cooking any such dish much less daunting-and daunted is how I usually feel when confronted by a multistep recipe. But once you get a feel for the basic theme, all the variations become much easier to master.
Paring away the dense undergrowth of culinary detail from a whole genre of recipes has the added virtue of helping to expose what a particular mode of cooking-of transforming the stuff of nature into the occasion of a meal-might have to say about us and our world. Do it often enough, and you begin to see that cooking with fire implies a completely different narrative, about the natural world on one side and the social world on the other, than does cooking with water. Cooking with fire tells a story about community, and, perhaps, about where we fit in the cosmic order of things. Like the column of smoke that rises from the pit, it's a story that unfolds on a vertical axis, with all sorts of heroic (or at least mock heroic) flourishes. There's a priest, sort of, and a ritual, too, even a kind of altar; death is confronted, and the element of fire is brought under control.
To turn from the bright sunlight of this Homeric world and come into the kitchen of covered pots and simmering liquids feels like stepping out of an epic and into a novel. So, if every recipe tells a story, what kind of tale might cooking with the element of water have to tell?
II.
Step Two: Saute Onions and Other Aromatic Vegetables
I knew I needed some help finding my way in the kitchen, and I found it in a young local cook by the name of Samin Nosrat. As it happens, I was Samin's teacher before she became mine. I met Samin five years ago, when she asked to sit in on a food-writing cla.s.s that I was teaching at Berkeley. She had graduated from the university a few years before and, though working as a chef in a local restaurant, she also had ambitions to write. Samin has a big personality and soon became a figure in the cla.s.s, sharing her deep knowledge about food as well as her cooking. Each week, a different student would bring in a snack for the cla.s.s-maybe a favorite childhood cookie or an unusual heirloom variety from the farmers' market-and share a story about it. When Samin's turn to do snack came around, she showed up in cla.s.s with several hotel pans of piping hot lasagna, both the tomato sauce and the pasta handmade from scratch, and proceeded to serve it to us on china with silverware and cloth napkins. The story Samin told us was about learning to cook, first at Chez Panisse, where she'd worked her way up from bussing tables to prep cook, and then in Tuscany, where she'd spent two years learning how to make fresh pasta, butcher meat, and master the kind of ”Grandma cooking” she loves best. Samin's lasagna was probably the most memorable thing about that semester.
That's the first time I can recall ever hearing that phrase, ”Grandma cooking.” For Samin, this was the sort of traditional food that emerged from her mother's kitchen, which was nominally in San Diego but in every other sense-and especially those of taste and smell-in Tehran. Her parents had emigrated from Iran in 1976, three years before the revolution; as a follower of the Baha'i faith, her father feared persecution from the ascendant s.h.i.+a. Samin was born in San Diego in 1979, but her parents, nouris.h.i.+ng a dream of someday returning, treated their home as sovereign Iranian territory. The family spoke Farsi at home, and Mrs. Nosrat cooked Persian food exclusively. ”The moment you come home from school and step over that threshold,” Samin remembers being told as a young child, ”you are back in Iran.”
Samin was definitely not the kind of child of immigrants who could be embarra.s.sed by the old-world dishes her mother would tuck into her lunch box. To the contrary, she loved Persian food: the aromatic rice dishes, the kabobs, the rich stews made with sweet spices, nuts, and pomegranates. ”One time at school I was made fun of for my weirdo lunch. But my food tasted so much better than theirs! I refused to be insulted.” Her mother, who ”definitely wore the pants in our house,” would drive all over southern California in search of a particular taste of home: an unusual variety of sweet lime called for in a particular dish, or a kind of sour cherry a.s.sociated with a seasonal feast. Growing up, Samin never gave much thought to cooking-though her mom would occasionally recruit the children to squeeze lemons or sh.e.l.l big piles of fava beans-”but I was very interested in eating. I loved my mom's cooking.”
It was during college in Berkeley that the seed of the idea of cooking as a vocation was planted-in the course of a single memorable meal eaten at Chez Panisse. Samin told me the story one afternoon, while we were standing around the island in my kitchen, chopping vegetables. I had asked her if she would be willing to teach me how to cook, and we had started having lessons once or twice a month, four- or five-hour sessions that invariably began around this island, each of us at a cutting board, chopping and talking. Conversation, I soon came to realize, was the best way to deal with the drudgery of chopping onions.
As usual, Samin had a white ap.r.o.n tied around her waist, and the thicket of her black hair raked partway back. Samin is tall and st.u.r.dily built, with strong features, slas.h.i.+ng black eyebrows, and warm olivey-brown skin. If you had to pick one word to describe her, ”avid” would have to be it; Samin is on excellent terms with the exclamation point. Words tumble from her mouth; laughter, too; and her deep, expressive brown eyes are always up to something.
”I had never even heard of Chez Panisse! In fact, the whole concept of a 'famous restaurant' was totally alien to me, because my family never went to fancy restaurants. But my college boyfriend had grown up in San Francisco, and when he told me all about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, I was like, dude, we have to go! So, for that entire school year, we saved our money in a s...o...b..x, throwing in loose change, quarters from the laundry, money from bets we made between us. And when we had collected two hundred dollars, which was just enough to pay for the prix-fixe meal downstairs, we set the alarm on a Sat.u.r.day morning to make sure we'd get through the minute they started answering the phone, so we could make a reservation for the Sat.u.r.day night exactly one month later.
”It was an incredible experience, the warm and glittering dining room, the amazing care they took of us-these two kids! They served us a frisee salad with 'lardons of bacon'-and I remember thinking, What is this?! The second course was halibut in a broth, and I had never eaten halibut before, so I was really nervous about that. But what I remember most vividly was the dessert: a chocolate souffle with raspberry sauce. The waiter had to show us how to punch a hole in the dome and pour in the sauce. It was really good, but I thought it would be even better with a gla.s.s of milk, and when I asked for one, the waitress started laughing! Milk was a total faux pas, I now realize-you're supposed to drink a dessert wine, duh-but the waitress was so nice about it. She brought me my gla.s.s of milk. And then she brought us a gla.s.s of dessert wine-on the house!
”The food was beautiful, but I think it was the experience of being totally taken care of that evening that made me fall in love with the restaurant. I decided right then that, someday, I wanted to work at Chez Panisse. It seemed so much more special than a normal job. Plus, you'd get to eat all this amazing food all the time!
”So I sat down and wrote a long letter to the manager. I talked about how I'd had this life-changing meal, and could I please, please, please work as a busser. And by some crazy fluke, they called me in and I was hired on the spot.”
Samin reorganized her schedule at school so she could work several s.h.i.+fts a week at the restaurant. She remembers her first one vividly. ”They walked me through the kitchen, and everyone had on these immaculate white coats, and they were making the most beautiful food. Someone showed me where to find this old-school vacuum cleaner, and I started vacuuming the dining room, and I remember thinking, 'I can't believe they're trusting me to vacuum the downstairs dining room at Chez Panisse!' I felt so honored. And that's the way I felt every day I went to work there.
”I'm sort of obsessive-compulsive, in case you haven't noticed, and this was the first place in my life where everybody seemed just as OCD as I am. Everyone there was seeking perfection in whatever they were doing, whether it was the way they tied up the trash or made the best souffle they could ever hope to make, or polished the silver just so. I could see how every task, no matter how trivial, was being done to the fullest, and that's when I began to feel at home.
”It clicked for me the first time I was taught how to load the dumbwaiter. You had to load the dishes in it just so: Keep the hot plates away from the salads, use the s.p.a.ce superefficiently, and arrange things in such a way that the china would make the least amount of noise. It's a tiny, rickety old building that has to feed five hundred people every day, and give them the best possible experience, so everything has been carefully thought through over the years, and developed into a system. Which means that if you take a shortcut it can mess things up for everyone else.
”When, eventually, I started cooking, this whole approach translated seamlessly into how I approached food. For me, cooking is about seeking the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything I make. About extracting the absolute most out of every ingredient, whether it is a beautiful piece of salmon or a plain old onion. And that way of thinking about food started the day I was taught how to load the Chez Panisse dumbwaiter.”
Sundays with Samin-our usual day together-always began the same way, with her bursting into the kitchen around three in the afternoon and plopping a couple of cotton market bags onto the island. From these she would proceed to pull out her cloth portfolio of knives, her ap.r.o.n, and, depending on the dish we were making, her prodigious collection of spices. This notably included a tin of saffron the size of a coffee can. Her mom sent her these eye-popping quant.i.ties of saffron, which whenever a recipe called for it Samin would sprinkle as liberally as salt.
”I'm soooo excited!” she'd invariably begin, in a singsong, as she tied her ap.r.o.n around her waist. ”Today, you are going to learn how to brown meat.” Or make a soffritto. Or b.u.t.terfly a chicken. Or make a fish stock. Samin could get excited about the most mundane kitchen procedures, but her enthusiasm was catching, and eventually I came to regard it as almost a kind of ethic. Even browning meat, an operation that to me seemed fairly self-evident if not ba.n.a.l, deserved to be done with the utmost care and attention, and so with pa.s.sion. At stake was the eater's experience. There was also the animal to consider, which you honored by making the very most of whatever it had to offer. Samin made sure there was also a theme undergirding each lesson: the Maillard reaction (when browning meat); eggs and their magical properties; the miracle of emulsification; and so forth. Over the course of a year, we made all sorts of main course dishes, as well as various salads and sides and desserts. Yet it seemed our main courses always came back to pot dishes, and we probably cooked more braises than anything else.