An Onion in My Pocket

by Deborah Madison

  Today, Spanish smoked paprika (pimenton de la Vera) introduces smoke to a dish without the heat (unless you want the hot pimenton). This means that your split pea soup can taste as if a ham hock has been involved without climbing the Scoville scale scarcely a point. It’s delicious with potatoes and eggs and wherever you might imagine a piece of bacon has been. Before smoked paprika appeared on the scene, I had the idea of cutting Delicata squash into rounds, seeding them, smoking them, then threading them together to make what I called Missing Links. The dried squash slices would become a vehicle for the smoke, and, again, there was no heat. They looked very odd once they were reconstituted in a dish, like a big ugly bone, but they worked, and, like a bone, they could be removed. A more successful smoke-inducing ingredient than my Missing Links were the smoked dried tomatoes from Boggy Creek Farm, in Austin, Texas. Since Larry Butler started making them in the 1990s, I’ve seen other smoked vegetables at farmers’ markets that serve the same function, introducing smoke without heat.

  Salads of spinach wilted with hot bacon fat were popular in the 1980s, but of course we didn’t have the option of using bacon. For our Wilted Spinach Salad I heated olive oil and wilted the leaves with that, then tossed them with olives, feta cheese, crunchy croutons, red onions, and torn mint leaves. Sherry vinegar, another new ingredient then, provided the acidic kick. It’s a good salad still.

  Inspired by Chez Panisse’s forays into pizza making, we made small pizzas for lunch. Our standard pizza was covered with onions and red bell peppers cooked down to a jam and seasoned with thyme and tomato, Niçoise olives, and thin slices of fresh lemon, which provided a surprising lift for the mouth. We called it a Niçoise pizza. It was nothing like pizza I have eaten since in Nice, but it was good, especially with those bits of lemon embedded in the onions and peppers. We branched out into other toppings that were also unusual for the time—new potatoes and grilled peppers; mushrooms with Ig Vella’s dry Jack cheese; escarole and walnuts; or, for the pizza Mexicana, a jalapeño and cilantro pesto, which gave it a sizzling punch.

  The mesquite grill got used for grilling peppers and eggplants and other vegetables intended as ingredients in soups and salads. One of the benefits of the grill we hadn’t even thought of was that its fragrant fumes spilled onto the sidewalk in front of Greens, warming the air and the appetite with the scents of rosemary and charcoal, the best invitation to come in and eat. But it was also used daily for brochettes, which involved a lineup of skewered vegetables and cubes of tofu that had been marinated in wild mushroom and red wine broth for days. (I cannot stand the sight or smell of this marinade today!) This was a colorful, pretty dish that was served with brown rice and herb butter. We did have requests for brown rice, so it was always available but we cooked with other grains as well. Quinoa, however, had not yet appeared, though it would soon.

  Another popular dish was the TLT—a sandwich of the marinated and grilled tofu with lettuce and tomatoes. We also made an egg salad–like spread using tofu, but otherwise we didn’t get into tofu look-alikes and meat analogs. Tofu never went into a lasagna on my watch, that’s for sure. I’ve never cared for tofu that pretends to be cheese, but I do like tofu as tofu. For a short while a young Japanese Zen student was working with us and a few times we featured a special that included the fresh tofu she made along with small Japanese vegetable salads. Her tofu was exquisitely delicate, nothing like the durable Chinese blocks of firm tofu that we blithely tossed on the grill. I was surprised—and pleased—to see that these specials always sold out.

  I wanted to go in the direction of making more of our own tofu and featuring it in traditional Japanese dishes, and there seemed to be an appetite for it. Making our own tofu would have showcased some of the possibilities that could be realized when tofu is truly fresh. But to start making tofu in earnest required the kind of dedication that we simply didn’t have then. Like cheese, making tofu requires some consistency and practice in order to produce a really fine product, and at Zen Center people were always leaving for different jobs. You couldn’t just turn to someone on the crew and say, “Would you make the tofu today?” as if it were mayonnaise. In fact, we could barely manage making mayonnaise. We were not a sophisticated crew with a lot of culinary experience.

  Eventually fine tofu made its appearance in our culture, but not at Greens. There is Hodo Soy Beanery in Oakland making more delicate, organic tofu and yuba, or tofu skins. Sylvan Brackett’s Izakaya, Rintaro in San Francisco, makes its own tofu. Umenohana, sadly now closed, in Beverly Hills had a menu driven entirely by handcrafted tofu. This was an elegant, expensive restaurant with a tranquil, minimalist setting. One of the dishes served at Umenohana was tofu cooked at the table. A spell in a wooden tub set on the table converted soy milk into a quivery warm custard that you scooped into your lacquer bowl then garnished with a sauce. It was exquisite and even more ephemeral than the tofu I remember eating as a teenager in little cafés in Sacramento. In the fall of 2005 Food & Wine magazine ran a piece called “It Takes a Tough Man to Make Tender Tofu,” which elevated tofu to heights never before glimpsed in our food culture. Were I still at Greens, I would want to have a dedicated, skilled tofu maker on board, too.

  Of course we made good use of all kinds of lentils and legumes, largely in soups but also in gratins that might feature grilled eggplant or pasta as well. We made a lentil salad that was brightened with grilled red peppers, capers, feta cheese, tomatoes, and herbs. The comment it produced from one customer still makes me laugh. He came into the kitchen and announced, “You’ve done for lentils what Kennedy did for the presidency!” More than anything this compliment probably pointed to how stodgy lentils and other legumes used to be, as well as the presidents who came before the handsome JFK.

  We always had a pasta dish or two and frequently we made our own pasta, which was just as expected then as cooking over mesquite was. Everyone was making fresh pasta and people loved to eat it. Fear of carbs (and grains) hadn’t been lodged in the American psyche yet and pasta could be combined endlessly with vegetables as they passed through the seasons. Pasta could also be finished in cream, which we didn’t hesitate to do. This was the era of rich food and not only at Greens. It was everywhere.

  Our repertoire of soups was large and they changed each day. We rotated through a number of sandwiches, salads, and entrées, and of course, everything changed week by week in response to the weather and what was available at the farm or market.

  Salads were a joy and there were always plenty of beautiful lettuces from our farm. Because I was living at Green Gulch when Greens opened, it made sense to drive down to the foggy fields each morning to pick up what our gardener, Wendy, had for me to use that day, load it into the back of my dark green Honda station wagon, and drive it into town.

  I usually called Wendy at the end of the day to find out what was available. The pattern of our conversations went something like this.

  “Wendy, do you have any cauliflower?” I’d ask.

  “Oh, we have tons of it!” she’d tell me. “I’ll have it ready for you in the morning when you come down.”

  Reassured by her voice and enthusiasm, I’d hang up the phone and start to figure out how to use these tons of cauliflower. But the next morning there were six, or maybe seven, heads waiting for me. I think Wendy loved her vegetables so much that they grew tonnage in her mind. Eventually I learned to gently ask for specific numbers and still factor in for exaggeration, but after a while it didn’t really matter how few or many heads of broccoli, cauliflower, or anything else there was. I knew there would be a collection of this and that when I drove down to the fields, and not a great deal of any one thing.

  The farm was still young and not producing masses of anything yet, but I had that twenty-five-minute drive to the restaurant to figure out what to do with this miscellany of vegetables. Invariably it ended up as a Farm Salad, the dish that expressed the flavor of our farm in its purest form.<
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  The random nature of the daily collection let me start fresh each day, something you don’t get to do much except with specials. The standard menu items were meant to be reliable, unvarying from day to day, in large part for the sake of the kitchen staff. The repeated items lent a bit of sanity to already hectic days. But customers also developed their favorites, which they always ordered and grew to depend on. The Farm Salad, however, was the most dynamic, changeable, and impeccably fresh dish we served. Sometimes the vegetables fit together easily into a jumble; other days mounding discrete little salads on the same plate seemed a better way to go. Either way, fresh herbs and eggs, also from Green Gulch, their bright yellow-orange yolks just beaming at you, always found a place on these plates. Later, when we started doing dinners, the farm salads became small, jewel-like first courses. Green Gulch was able to supply some, but not all of our needs, but those dishes that revolved entirely around the farm’s produce were, for me, the most inspiring ones to make. They just cooked themselves, basically, and I tried not to get in the way.

  I still make farm salads today, only now they’re farmers’ market salads, or I call them platter salads, or even garden salads made from vegetables and herbs picked from my garden.

  18. Dinner

  Once we got lunch more or less figured out, we added weekend dinners at Greens. Dinner was the meal that transformed Greens from a noisy, busy lunch place to a more tranquil restaurant. Tablecloths were laid out. Chunks of Swedish crystal held candles, and the dining room atmosphere turned quietly festive, a place where diners could take time with their meals while enjoying the unfolding evening sky and the eventual end of the day.

  This is where I immediately took up the Chez Panisse style of offering a set menu rather than an à la carte approach. Now Greens offers a limited choice dinner menu, which I imagine makes it much easier to accommodate today’s more choosy eaters. But then we really didn’t have requests to cater to the special preferences of vegans and others. I’m not sure that there were vegans then. But that’s not what influenced my decision to go for a set menu. I simply felt it would work well for us because it would help introduce the concept of a somewhat formal four-course vegetarian dinner, which was still a foreign notion to a great many people.

  How do you put together a menu for a meal that is meant to go on for a while, without the anchor of meat? This was the question I faced every weekend and how to answer it was a challenge for me, for us. I imagined it might be even more baffling for our customers, to have things all twisted about, to have what were usually appetizers suddenly become main courses. Some form of crêpe? A vegetable ragout with polenta? Today this is hardly as problematic as it was then. Good vegetarian food—and Greens itself—has been around long enough that the meatless menu is not as mysterious as it once was. But in 1980 such possibilities were new, and people were unaccustomed to the idea of eating this way, without meat at the center of the plate.

  There was another reason for the set menu. By being able to concentrate on a single menu and a particular progression of dishes, rather than having to produce a whole range of foods, I was hoping that we might be able to undertake somewhat more challenging fare, which we did. And having an ever-changing dinner menu was a way to accommodate all the new ideas that I had been putting in my notebooks, but it made for some dicey afternoons and evenings.

  Most of the dishes we made none of us had ever cooked before, or even tasted before. We put our heads together and tried to figure them out before we started cooking. Of course getting that food from an idea to the table was a group effort. I could never have done any of it without the amazing staff I had. Jane Hirshfield, the poet, was then working with me. She was the most faithful and trusting right (and left) hand one could have. I’d ask Jane to make something I had only a vague idea about, and she would pleasantly say, “Okay,” and charge ahead without showing any worry or fear. I think she actually believed that things would work, and her assumption gave me the belief, or at least the hope, that they would, too. I wonder if she would have been so accepting had she known how thin the ice beneath us actually was.

  Usually our untried dishes worked. But I held my breath a lot, hoped a lot, and I was continually anxious and always vaguely amazed when people let us know how much they liked the food. The best moment was when a guest would come into the kitchen and tell us, “The food was so good that we completely forgot there wasn’t any meat.” That was the highest compliment.

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  I’d never forgotten the good bread and butter that started the first meal I ate at Chez Panisse in 1977. Why not begin a meal with the best promise possible, good bread? (Remember, people ate bread then.) Those giant fougasse that Alice and I had bought in France impressed me with their bold shapes, and I thought we could make smaller ones suitable for two-tops or four-tops and just put them, still warm from the oven as they invariably were, right on the tables for people to break apart. A few slashes of the knife followed by a series of tugs, and an oval slab of rustic dough flavored with olive oil assumed the shape of a ladder or a tree. Sea salt and rosemary or sage were rolled into the surfaces and when the breads came out of the oven, they were brushed with olive oil. Their crusty perforations invited customers to pull off a rung or break off a branch. The crumbs scattering over the tablecloths said, “Relax and enjoy yourself; you don’t have to worry about keeping that tablecloth pristine.”

  While we always had the bread, another thing I liked to do was present a table with roasted, salted almonds twisted into a package of parchment paper. This was an idea I gleaned from a few sentences in Elizabeth David’s book Spices, Salts and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, about a Somalian cook she had in Egypt, who twisted roasted almonds in paper to stave off nibblers. We could have put the almonds in a dish, but there was something about the rustle of that paper parcel being opened that warmed up the big dining room, especially early in the evening, before it filled. And of course, everybody likes a present, even roasted almonds.

  First courses and soups weren’t a problem; we were pretty competent there. Salads made with the beautiful lettuce and herbs from Green Gulch were something we could count on to please. And from my time with Lindsey Shere at Chez Panisse, I was confident about making desserts to fill out the offerings from the Tassajara Bread Bakery. It was what to put in the center of the plate that I had to wrap my head around.

  As I mentioned, our customers were not necessarily vegetarians. People came to Greens for the view, its growing reputation, maybe curiosity about what vegetarian food was like, but not because they were true believers. A lot of women came to lunch, then when we opened for dinner, they dragged along their husbands, who were probably looking forward to a steak, not to a meatless meal, on Friday or Saturday night. We had a good wine list, but I imagined the husbands would prefer to pair a Chalone pinot noir with a piece of beef over whatever we could offer. I tried to imagine some tired man dully anticipating a plate with a big hole in the middle where the meat would have been, should have been. He was the customer I worried about, and I thought constantly about what might fill that hole in the center of the plate. This was my big concern, what I lay awake thinking about.

  I knew that it had to be something that caught the eye and proclaimed without wavering, “Here I am! I’m what’s for dinner! No need to look elsewhere!”

  Of course, the “it” dish also had to be sufficiently familiar that the diner felt at ease. It was the same problem I had dealt with so many years earlier in the Zen Center kitchen. But it also had to have physical stature. It couldn’t be some shapeless thing like a plate of pasta or a stir-fry or a vegetable ragout. It had to have substance and form, be something you could point to, look at, focus on. As one gets used to not eating meat, this problem pretty much tapers off and finally goes away, invariably returning on special occasions when, once again, the answer to “What’s for dinner?” has to be more than the nam
e of a vegetable.

  The most difficult kind of dish to present, and this was generally true whether there was meat present or not, was a stew, or ragout, which was too bad because these were dishes that I felt I had something of a gift for. Sadly, lunch favorites, like the Zuni Stew or Corn, Bean, and Pumpkin Stew, never made the dinner cut, and a dal, as appealingly as it can be made and garnished, didn’t either. Not then, anyway. A mushroom ragout, I found, did work, though, if it were paired with something that had a clear shape, like triangles of grilled polenta, a square of puff pastry, or a timbale of risotto. But the stew also had to have a very good and well-crafted sauce, and wild mushrooms helped enough that they became almost mandatory.

  Years later, after having left Greens, I was visiting Calgary’s Blackfoot Farmers’ Market, researching my book Local Flavors. That chilly fall evening I ate at the River Café, a rustic building that sits on an island in the middle of a river. There the chef presented me with a vegetarian stew, which worked perfectly in her fine-dining restaurant although I think she made only the one serving since it wasn’t on the menu. The stew was based on winter root vegetables, but this handsome dish also contained black lentils and a potato puree and it was all circled with a rich, deeply flavored red wine sauce. The flavors were harmonious and complex. There were different textures to go to so that the dish was interesting to eat. It was also gorgeous to look at and extremely satisfying in every way. It was a perfect vegetarian entrée. In fact, I was so impressed that I came up with my own version of it in Local Flavors. That was the kind of stew that worked at Greens, but you can see how many elements have to be there for it to really grab the diner.