Giustos was the source of all the whole grains and cereals we used, from wheat to barley flour, buckwheat, rye, corn, millet, cracked brown rice, wheat berries, and soybeans, along with cashews, almonds, raisins, and other fruits and nuts. Many orange Giustos bags filled our pantry. In business since the 1940s, they delivered products that were—and still are—regarded as healthful and unadulterated. At one point we acquired a mill and started to make our own flour. It was a very noisy, long process to grind enough grain for bread, and it never took off in a big way for us, but it did produce some tasty foods. Pancakes and quick breads made from freshly ground flours are special indeed. Today I have my own stone mill, a Mockmill 200, which lets me mill with quiet ease flours from ancient grains.
Our vegetables came from the San Francisco produce terminal and the Alemany farmers’ market in South San Francisco, California’s first farmers’ market. The latter was a very different market than today’s farmers’ markets with their fair-like atmosphere. Going to a farmers’ market wasn’t a hip thing to do then. Foods weren’t labeled organic, and in any case, growing organically wasn’t something the mostly Filipino farmers and shoppers seemed concerned about. Rather, it was the price, which was low, and the types of vegetables available to that population. But the market energy was high, exchanges loud and energetic with everyone shouting and thrusting their dollars and handfuls of produce at the vendors, like in a market you might find in another country. There were greens, vines, herbs, and tubers I had never seen before. None of it was particularly standardized and there were no frills, no T-shirts or coffee stands or bands. The Alemany market was a very down-to-earth place. It was always invigorating to shop there, and while confusing, it was a walk in the park compared to going to the produce terminal.
The San Francisco produce terminal had its wild side, too, but it was a different kind of wild and it wasn’t an easy place to figure out. It was a tough, loud, and occasionally violent market with lots of forklifts whizzing around and men shouting in what sounded like code. Some sheds were frankly hostile to small-fry buyers, like us. (I often went with another person.) Others weren’t but we had to figure out which was which by wading into the fray. Whether we got helped or not depended on who was working that hour, or how the day, which was just ending for the sellers, had been going. We had to be fast and decisive about what we were buying and few sellers were willing to take a little extra time to help us. It was get it or get out of the way. We managed to learn the ropes and do all right.
My helper and I were expected not to dally at the market, but we usually took a half an hour to catch our breath over breakfast at the terminal, where we could observe from a safer distance, over eggs and toast and coffee, those burly men tossing crates of “grass” or moving palettes of “chokes,” and listen to all the interchanges that go on, the insults, the threats, the kind of rough camaraderie that unfolds when working to keep the energy up at the end of a long shift moving food. Then it was back to Page Street to unpack it all and put it away.
* * *
—
When I first started cooking at the Zen Center, in 1970, there were scant resources to turn to outside of those few vegetarian cookbooks in existence, like the Seventh-day Adventists’ book Ten Talents or the recipes that were collected in The Farm Cookbook, some books on macrobiotic cooking, and a few other oddities I picked up at yard sales. The former was heavy on meat analogs and the second on nutritional yeast-based gravies. And macrobiotic food was, well, macrobiotic. As none of these approaches were what I was looking for I turned elsewhere for information and inspiration.
To augment the recipes in the cookbooks that were lying around the kitchen, I bought one of my first cookbooks, The New York Times International Cook Book by Craig Claiborne, which I pored over in search of ideas for dishes to cook in the Zen Center kitchen. I also used a chunk of my stipend for a subscription to Gourmet magazine. I read my Gourmets religiously, especially Caroline Bates’s reviews of California restaurants. Here was this woman who, month after month, ate in places, some not far from where I lived, where she had ecstatic experiences that were simply inconceivable to me. She was a wizard at describing food and I was particularly entranced by her frequent references to silken sauces “napping” pieces of fish and other foods. I had no idea what she was talking about most of the time, and I despaired at not knowing what it was to have a gourmet experience. Had I had one? Would I know it if I did?
I gathered that the main thing is to be transported by something you’re eating, but how far and where to, I was unsure. Unable to answer the gourmet question for quite a while yet, I was, in the meantime, getting the idea that food might be terribly exciting, just as it had been for me when I lived with that couple in high school who were not my parents. And even if I was going to cook vegetarian food, couldn’t it also be good enough to be exciting, if not transporting? I was sure it could be if I could just somehow figure it out.
More practically speaking, I got a lot of useful ideas from Craig Claiborne’s international collection, partly because some of the countries he included had very vegetable-intensive cuisines. A number of recipes were already worked out, such as spanakopita, crêpes, curries, and ratatouille. They could, I discovered, with some tweaking, become vegetarian main dishes if they weren’t already. What’s more, they could be paired with other foods from the same chapter so that there was some sort of cultural integrity within each meal, and this was a great help. At this time I hadn’t yet begun to travel, but I knew I didn’t want a mishmash on the plate with bits and pieces from all over the world.
It helped that there weren’t endless choices in this book; it kept things from getting confusing and gave me something of a base to work from. For example, once I got spanakopita figured out, I could take a next step and come up with other ways to use the idea of filo dough layered with a vegetable to make a dish that departed from the spinach-feta mixture. Today there are books that cover Greek cuisine and culture in depth, and with them in hand it’s possible to see still other, yet traditional, ways of getting some vegetable matter between those flaky layers of filo pastry. But when I first started cooking, this wealth of information hadn’t yet come to light. Given a template, I pretty much figured things out as I cooked. In short, I made things up based on recipes and approaches that already existed in our limited lexicon. I didn’t consider myself to be an especially creative cook as much as I was a person who was alert to possibilities. And that’s true today, too.
Other books entered my life at that time as well. Escoffier’s tome, Ma Cuisine, Larousse Gastronomique, James Beard’s books on American food, and others of the classic French or American variety: Joy of Cooking, Henri Pellaprat’s gigantic volume, and Fannie Farmer. I already had Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which my father had given me for a birthday, along with a good knife. Larousse Gastronomique was a book that I mined for ideas as well as basic information about cooking itself. In effect, Larousse pretty much became my cooking teacher, and from its hundreds of pages of little entries I learned the names of techniques, methods, equipment, dishes, even foods themselves. When I finally opened Julia Child’s books and started to cook from them, all that information from Larousse came to life.
Escoffier, along with Pellaprat and Mapie de Toulouse-Lautrec, also gave me ideas, especially for appetizers, soups, and desserts. I appreciated the detail Escoffier went into about, say, innumerable potato dishes, egg dishes, savories and toast dishes, and so forth. I still go to Escoffier now and then and always come away refreshed by some recipe, some approach he’s taken, even though Ma Cuisine is now a very dated book. His flavor pairings, especially for desserts, hold up well, despite the new fruits, herbs, and spices that we have and our tendencies to merge sweet with savory flavors, some of them downright whacky (bacon ice cream?). Still, a bowl of peaches with a champagne zabaglione and wild strawberries is always exquisite.
* * *
—
Marcella Hazan came to San Francisco in the mid-1970s to teach a class that I took. That’s when I first learned about risotto, but risotto didn’t really get going in the culture, at least my corner of it, for a while. Sun-dried tomatoes from Italy arrived about the same time Marcella gave her class, and I remember tasting them for the first time at Carlo Middione’s shop, Porta Via. They were plump and moist, dripping with the olive oil they were packed in. They came from San Remo and were very costly. Carlo had invited a bunch of Bay Area chefs to come taste these succulent bits. We swooned. We certainly weren’t using them at Zen Center, at least not those tomatoes. We did later, when sun-dried tomatoes took off as a new product among the more sophisticated members of the farming community, but they were nothing like these gems that Carlo was offering. The tomatoes were usually just dried in the sun, the succulent (and costly) bath of olive oil forgone. While useful as an ingredient and a great way for farmers to make use of their excess tomato crop, these dried-in-the-California-sun fruits never reached the height of lusciousness that those from San Remo did. Although I have never come close to even liking the inevitable sun-dried tomato, goat cheese, pine nut combination, I occasionally buy sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil when I’m in Italy, and then I’m reminded all over again of what all the excitement was about.
Being Americans, we’ve added our own twists and turns to this product, just as we have with tofu, hummus, and other foods that have entered the culture from elsewhere. Texas farmer friends in Austin grew, dried, then smoked their tomatoes before packing them in olive oil. These were delicious in their own right, and even more important, they provided a way to introduce smokiness without heat to vegetarian cooking.
Another friend dries his heirloom tomatoes in a dehydrator until they are crisp. They aren’t attempting to be anything other than crisp, dried tomatoes, but you can crumble them into stews or braised greens, where they give their bits of color and sharp flavor to the dish. They are a different beast altogether than those from Italy.
* * *
—
In turning to classic French, Italian, and American food for inspiration, I often found that if I looked hard at a meat-based recipe, I could ferret out some aspect of it that could be translated into a meatless dish. Something à la forestière had a mushroom component that I worked into a mushroom ragout, for example. That’s a dish we take for granted today, but it didn’t exist then except as a traditional garnish. I had to extract it from the beef or the chicken it was paired with, then give it an additional component that transformed it into a vegetarian dish, such as—turning now to Italy—risotto or polenta. This is how I came up with vegetarian dishes that were outside the tofu–nutritional yeast realm, by going back to more classic culinary sources and working out techniques and flavors from there.
I didn’t encounter Edouard Pomiane’s charming book, Cooking with Pomiane, until long after I left Greens although it first came out in 1962. A new edition had come out in 1976 and I could have gotten some good help from a great cook and writer. After some 178 pages of classic French recipes, which are presented with such wit and humor that they are rendered utterly fresh and appealing, Pomiane broached the subject of, surprisingly, the vegetarian diet. It was posed as a penance, a temporary cure for immoderate eating, certainly not as a lifestyle, but he approached his vegetable-only days cheerfully and with optimism, which was surprising for someone who had just given us reason to savor all manner of rich, flesh-based dishes. He pointed out what his doubtful reader already knew, that vegetables were used as garnishes in French cooking; they were not what you brought to the center of the plate.
“A dish,” Pomiane wrote, “when it arrives at the table, must always charm one’s eyes as well as one’s palate,” which was, I believe, the main reason for garnishing meat dishes with those foods that contain color and beauty, that is, vegetables. He then went on to muse, why not apply the same idea to vegetables and combine them in ways that were also attractive and appealing? It came down to visual and gustatory harmony. Certainly a single vegetable seems lacking, this he understood full well, but what about combinations of vegetable dishes? He then gave the reader some suggestions, such as tomatoes à la crème on a potato puree; fried potatoes garnished with watercress; braised turnips with croutons; mushrooms in cream on toast. Pomiane also included a vegetarian menu in his book, a meal that began with a vegetable soup thickened with rice, went on to include fried salsify, sautéed porcini with watercress, fresh garden peas with cream, and pineapple and cream cheese for dessert along with more fresh fruit. This was hardly a lean, Spartan meal, but I would have loved to sit down to it.
There was one vegetarian cookbook that did what I was attempting to do, and that was Anna Thomas’s The Vegetarian Epicure. It felt as if Thomas just dropped out of the sky with a basket full of goodies. She didn’t come by way of any counterculture group; she just appeared via her book, which was vegetarian, but not strange vegetarian. She was smart, she traveled, she liked to cook and eat, and she happened to be vegetarian. She was fun to read—you could get on the boat right with her, or join her in a favorite French café, and taste what she had tasted. Her recipes were the ones we made for special occasions. They took more time and used richer and more expensive ingredients than those we used every day, but they were always well received. They made people happy and they inspired me. They also provided an avenue to more possibilities, for other ways to think about creating vegetarian dishes and building a menu.
As I pored through the little cookbook collection that I amassed in those years, I wasn’t looking for recipes as much as I was hunting for pairings and combinations of foods and flavors, sequences of steps, and basic techniques like deglazing or reducing. Since I didn’t have a lot of experience eating out in the world at that time, I didn’t have very well-formed ideas about what things tasted like. Later, as I began to eat out, I ate everything, including meat. Eating meat helped me discover what normal food tasted and felt like. It showed me saltiness, texture, balance, and harmony, qualities that I strived to build into my own plant-based cooking. Since vegetables tend to be sweet and lacking in anything that approaches the texture of muscle, it was a huge challenge to create vegetarian dishes that could get outside the sweet and soft ranges. It’s still a challenge. But the Zen Center kitchen is where I started to meet that challenge. Today I find that I really don’t care so much about meeting it or not.
10. Twenty Missing Years Again
I was being interviewed at the Social Security office when my interviewer peered into her monitor, hit print, then held up several joined pieces of paper for me to see. They were spattered with a record of my work history. She pointed out a gappy-looking area on the first page where there was no income, no taxes paid, no Social Security contributions.
“Is this right?” she asked. “It’s about twenty years that you didn’t work. Or is something missing?”
I told her that it was right. But I didn’t explain that those gappy years reflected the time I had a stipend at the Zen Center, about fifty dollars a month, whether for cooking, for being a director, or for whatever other position I held, except when I was chef at Greens. Then I was given a little more because I had to have my laundry done. She didn’t ask me what I was doing during those years, which was a relief. I didn’t want to tell this civil servant that I was a Zen student in California and then try to explain what that meant. She probably assumed I was young and married and raising kids. In any case, she didn’t ask and I didn’t have to say.
Zen Center had—and has still—a monastery, known as Tassajara Hot Springs. Once an Indian camp, Tassajara is located deep in the Los Padres National Forest, not far from Big Sur should you be able to fly like a bird. It had been a resort when the Zen Center bought it, in 1967, and it still is, during the summer months. People came and paid to be there, whether as work students or full-fledged guests, and they still do. But after Labor
Day, it was closed to the public and became our monastery, a place that mimicked the Japanese schedule for monastic events, like sitting meditation, work, study, sesshins, and Buddhist ceremonies. Some period of time spent in a place of monastic practice was expected for Zen Center students. It was a place where one could really focus on practice through a strict schedule of meditation and, one hoped, come to know oneself better. Unfortunately I didn’t have too many stays there over the twenty years I was at Zen Center, but I did enjoy a few practice periods.
An Onion in My Pocket Page 9