An Onion in My Pocket

by Deborah Madison

  Stir-fries were out of the question. They were too pedestrian, too much like what people were cooking at home, plus they could never be as good as those that could easily be ordered in one of San Francisco’s hundreds of Chinese restaurants. And besides, stir-fry was not my favorite dish, outside of those made in a good Chinese restaurant.

  Mostly I looked for dishes that could be folded, stacked, layered, or otherwise given shape. Tart-based and crêpe-based dishes were shoo-ins when it came to form and they still are. Crust always helps provide definition and many things can fill a tart shell besides the classic quiche filling that had introduced the idea of a savory pie in the first place. Some possibilities were chard and saffron; roasted eggplant and tomato; artichokes, mushrooms, leeks with lemon, and goat cheese (new then); winter squash with Roquefort; goat cheese thinned with cream and seasoned with fresh thyme. A tart made into a single serving with the help of special small tart pans really stood out. It was far more special than a wedge, even if everything else about it was the same.

  I came up with a far less rich but tender yeasted pastry as an occasional alternative to the buttery short crust I usually used. Eventually, years after Greens, I left behind the tart shell formed in a tart pan when I discovered that either type of pastry could be rolled into a rough circle, the edges flopped over a vegetable filling to make a more rustic pie, just the way a fruit galette was made. Because everyone likes a pie, I developed ideas for savory galettes. One of the first articles I wrote, in 1986, was for a magazine that wanted a vegetarian menu for a wedding. That was really when I came up with the idea of a savory vegetable free-form pie. It was handsome, flexible, caught the eye, and basically did everything an entrée should do. As I was not settled anywhere during that difficult transitional year of the divorce, I phoned my story in from a truck stop somewhere in Arizona. Later that year a friend showed me her Rolodex card for me with one address after another crossed out then replaced with a new one. But despite personal upheaval, I still managed to cook.

  Although I didn’t know about sweet or savory galettes when I was at Greens, now they’re familiar foods in our culture. Sadly many people won’t eat any crust at all, because of the carbs, or calories, or because they’re trying to be gluten free. This is especially true today. But at the same time, good grains of all kinds, including older wheat varieties, are being grown organically—which means no glyphosates—on a smaller scale than industrial wheat, and carefully milled.

  Crêpes had the dual advantage of being familiar and being endlessly versatile. Personally, I don’t think crêpes ever really lose their appeal; I still make them and people always like them. Plus there are a great many things you can do with crêpes. At Greens we made them using different flours—wheat, corn, buckwheat, masa harina—and filled them with an assortment of good things, then folded, rolled, or stacked them. Today I season a crêpe batter with saffron and herbs and serve it in place of bread. I also use quinoa, spelt, and other flours that have since entered the culture in the batter. The Many-Layered Crêpe Cake, inspired by a Marcella Hazan recipe, not only was one of the most delicious entrées we served, but, when cut, its eight exposed layers told the diner that a lot of care had gone into her entrée, and surely that counted for something.

  Years later, I was on a book tour with Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (where those savory galette recipes ended up) when I had a memorable meal with Miss Edna Lewis and her friend and assistant, Scott Peacock, at the country home of Anne Quatrano and her husband, Cliff Harrison, of Atlanta’s restaurant Bacchanalia—one of my favorite restaurants. When I arrived, Scott was just putting the final touches on a stacked cake, which consisted of a dozen thin cake layers joined with a chocolate frosting that also covered the top and drizzled down the sides. Speaking in his soft Southern drawl, Scott explained that making all those layers showed honor to someone because they took more trouble than a mere two- or three-layer cake. I was truly honored. What was also wonderful to me about that meal was that yes, there was that famous roast chicken of Miss Lewis’s, but also a great many vegetable dishes. She didn’t speak much at lunch, but she did point out that one could eat a lot of vegetables and a very little meat, as we did that day. At that time that was quite a forward-thinking view.

  Timbales—those vegetable and herb-saturated custards paired with sauces—also made good entrées with their solid yet tender textures and attractive shapes. The basic idea came from Julia Child’s Art of French Cooking, but we expanded on it, changing the size and shapes of our timbales so that they could transcend their original role as a small garnish to a meat dish and assume their position as a main course. Roulades, or rolled soufflés, were light and pretty to serve with their spiraled interiors showing the layers of filling. Being egg based they went especially well with spinach, chard, sorrel, and mushrooms, or sauces based on these vegetables, such as the sorrel-mushroom sauce in The Greens Cookbook. Filo pastries assumed the form of spanakopita but not the flavor as the fillings changed to include vegetables other than spinach (such as artichokes), plus nuts (like hazelnuts), and cheeses other than feta.

  We were careful about serving pasta as a main dish. A main dish had to have some volume so that it lasted for a while, but a large portion of pasta could become tiresome to eat—and it could chill down before it was finished if people were eating slowly, as they generally were when enjoying dinner and conversation in a restaurant. Yet there were many intriguing pasta recipes to explore, especially filled or layered ones. If we did serve pasta as a main course, we made our own dough, formed it into crescent-shaped agnolotti, and filled them with things such as herb-flecked ricotta, butternut squash with toasted pecans and sage—not common then—or a mixture of roasted eggplant and pine nuts. We might feature wild mushrooms in a lasagna. Simpler pasta dishes appeared as smaller first courses, where they could be eaten more quickly, without being too filling.

  Cheese and Nut Loaf was the kind of seventies vegetarian dish that I dreaded meeting up with. I didn’t see any need to offer meat substitutes when vegetables could be so stellar on their own, but when a senior student brought in a recipe that her sister had sent her with the promise that this was a truly fantastic dish, I felt obligated to try it. We did and unfortunately people loved it. There was no big mystery as to why they liked it so much, despite the funky name. Nut Loaf was insanely rich with roasted cashew nuts, pecans, a miscellany of grated cheeses, cottage cheese, eggs, mushrooms, and finally, a little bit of brown rice to give all this fat something to cling to. It was dense, chewy, and good in an obvious sort of way, the way sausage, bacon, and meatloaf are good. Once we put it on the menu as a lunch special it was hard to get rid of. We served it just like meatloaf with tangy tomato sauce; turned it into a meatloaf sandwich, grilling it first over mesquite; and we used it to stuff peppers and cabbage. It made a few appearances on the dinner menu but I always found it embarrassing to serve. Still, people loved it.

  Aside from this foray, we never made bean and lentil loaves and dishes of that ilk, but we did serve both beans and lentils as side dishes, where today they are still underutilized and underappreciated. Warm, well-cooked legumes seasoned with butter or olive oil and a smidgen (or handful) of fresh herbs are simply delicious; their modest flavors make the olive oil and butter sparkle. We could also garnish them with crisped bread crumbs, or bake them into savory crusty gratins with great success. We had no problem figuring out other side dishes, sauces, and all the other flourishes that accompany dinner. There were far more recipes jotted down in my notebooks than there were opportunities to make them.

  In general, the dishes that had the best possibilities of succeeding were those usually served as first or second courses, or as (amplified) garnishes to the main dish in more classic cuisines. If I just shifted everything a notch and eliminated the meaty center, I could usually solve my main dish problem. Even a vegetable gratin worked if I made it in an individual dish and slid it onto a bed of wilt
ed greens or perhaps a salad that benefited from being wilted by the heat. One of my favorite gratins was Richard Olney’s recipe for eggplant layered with tomato, then smothered with golden custard of saffron-stained ricotta. Rice drank up the juices that ran out of the fresh tomatoes we used, and the reds, golds, and purples were handsome indeed. It was always very successful for us and I still make it today. This was one of those dishes to which I added Gruyère cheese that wasn’t called for because I was nervous about our food not feeling substantial enough for our diners. (The cheese has long since left.) Also, because we had plenty of summer tomatoes from Dorothy Coil, we made a fresh sauce that happened to be on the thin side. Today, not having that luxury in New Mexico, I make a thicker sauce from canned tomatoes, another difference. But it is still a fine dish.

  Another one of Richard Olney’s recipes was a deceptively simple gratin of tiny cubes of winter squash dredged in flour and garlic and laced liberally with olive oil. It was one of the best dishes I knew, but it didn’t have enough complexity to work as a main dish. However, we did often serve it as a side dish and it was the painstaking fine dice from that dense winter squash being grown at Green Gulch—again, Perfection—plus its very slow baking that made this gratin special. A classic pommes dauphinoise, which also relied on few ingredients, worked because it was familiar, rich, and an unwavering favorite. So what if there was no beef next to it? Sautéed chanterelles or wilted chicories both worked beautifully, which was just the kind of pairing that Edouard Pomiane was suggesting in his books.

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  At that time I had a tendency to cook richly, using plenty of butter, eggs, and cream when it made sense. I was unsure about bringing vegetarian food into a mainstream venue, and I knew that we could always make something good when we relied on cream or buttery crusts, and that customers would like them. Fat was easy to fall back on in this way. Also this was 1979 and the early 1980s, an era of cream, butter, and cheese—not just at Greens, but in restaurants everywhere. Our dinners were rich, celebratory splurges, not substitutes for home cooking. I can’t tell you how many people have told me they were proposed to at Greens, or got married there.

  Think of this: When we first opened we had only one vegan customer, whom we nicknamed “Non-Dairy Jerry.” Jerry made a big deal about not having cheese in his meal and as he was the only one, we could easily accommodate his wishes. We could even give him a name. Today I suspect there are plenty of vegan, gluten-free, raw, grain-free, and other special eaters. But it is also true that now people find lighter dishes as appealing as the rich dishes that we offered then, even far more so than when we first got started and vegetarian food was pretty much a novelty and eating out was special, not just a way to find sustenance.

  When I look at the menu of Greens today online it seems much more sophisticated, occasionally lighter, sometimes more complex, and also more familiar in the sense that you will find some of these dishes in other Bay Area restaurants as well. More farms are mentioned by name, because there are more farms growing vegetables, and the same is true of dairies and the cheeses that come from them. Also more varieties of vegetables and fruits are named, something the Bay Area food culture is sensitive to today. And I know that the kitchen has for many years been staffed by professionals rather than reluctant students recruited from the Zen Center, and that makes a big difference in terms of what’s possible.

  19. What Inspired the Food at Greens

  My ideas for dishes came from different places. One was foods I had eaten and liked. To the extent that I had traveled, I had encountered foods that inspired me, but I was, once again, also inspired by reading. Looking at my library today I immediately recognize the books I used then by their torn covers and traces of greasy fingerprints. There’s Madeleine Kamman’s family memoir, When French Women Cook; Jane Grigson’s books on fruits, vegetables, and mushrooms; all of Elizabeth David’s work; Waverley Root’s books on France and Italy. By the time Greens was going, Italian foods were starting to insert themselves into the culture through chefs, restaurants, and cookbooks. In addition to Ada Boni’s book Italian Regional Cooking, there was Giuliano Bugialli’s The Fine Art of Italian Cooking, and Marcella Hazan’s classic volumes. Diana Kennedy’s and Paula Wolfert’s books on Mexico and Morocco respectively were terribly exciting to us. Occasionally one of us got to take a class from one of these great women, and when we did we returned to Greens with all kinds of ideas and techniques in hand to share. None of these writers were vegetarian, but again, I found that when I slowed down and looked closely at recipes, there was often an element in them that I could extract and use. For example there was a lamb tagine with fried eggplant in Paula Wolfert’s book Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco. That fried eggplant garnish was absolutely delicious and if you didn’t mash it up but just browned the slices, it was gorgeous, too. I did it both ways and served it as an appetizer or a side dish. I’m sure Paula would have been horrified had she known.

  I started visiting New Mexico the first year Greens opened. That and subsequent trips introduced me to another round of ingredients and flavors based largely on chiles, beans, blue corn, and posole, all of which I brought back to the kitchen. Slender volumes fastened with staples on the traditional Native and Hispanic foods of the Southwest inspired the recipes I developed, like Zuni Stew. (Having recently enjoyed a vegetable stew at Zuni Pueblo, I have to wonder about the one I made at Greens and what it had to do with Zuni.) Traditional American foods, such as Shaker and Amish recipes and the kinds of dishes described by James Beard in his memoir, Delights and Prejudices, also resonated deeply with me, but they were among the most difficult to work into our menus given their solid reliance on meat.

  My old, worn notebooks listed foods to learn about, dishes to make; there was so much to discover and realize. When I read down the columns of “recipes to try” and other notes, I still get at least an echo of that surge of excitement about food that filled my life then. I can’t say I often feel that way today, for, as tends to happen to people, I’ve figured out pretty much what I want to grow, cook, and eat, and feel less that I have to try everything I encounter, although I’m not entirely free of that impulse. Curiosity does last. When traveling, I’m still unable to order what I want as opposed to what I want to know about. Sometimes I’m jealous of my husband, who blithely orders what he wants to eat, say, in Italy, which can be the most unadventurous but mouthwatering plate of ravioli, while I’m left to face down a huge bowl of unpeeled fava beans swimming in a watery broth. On a recent trip to Turkey, I discovered a number of dishes that were made with spinach crowns, the parts usually thrown away here, and I ordered them every time I saw them. I was thrilled to taste them and to see them used, but I also wanted to try other foods. This time, I did.

  Unfortunately I didn’t travel to all the places that inspired my cooking today until after I left Zen Center. I have learned that it’s deeply sobering to taste food in its proper setting rather than approximate it through my own efforts, an experience that makes me feel either painfully humble or like giving up. Authentic flavors are very hard to translate. Some people can do it. Writer Clifford Wright is one. I am not one. But even without the benefit of travel, the food at Greens did, in its own way, work. The strongest thing we had was the integrity of our farm ingredients. In the end, I was a chef who “made things up,” not one who tried to duplicate the foods of other cultures.

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  One of the ways I spent my time in the kitchen was showing the other cooks, so often inexperienced, how to hold a knife and getting them to practice, to loosen their arms on the scraps of vegetables that would be returned to the farm for compost. Some students clearly did not want to be in the kitchen or anywhere else in the restaurant. It wasn’t what they had come to Zen Center for and they weren’t happy at the prospect of turning out hundreds of meals and missing the opportunity to sit zazen as often as they wanted to. I
didn’t blame them. I rather missed sitting, too, but I didn’t want to get up for zazen on Sunday mornings, when I was utterly exhausted from the week. I didn’t wake up with that mountain on my chest that I did before Greens opened, but I did wake up feeling as if I had been run over by a very large truck.

  I was not at Greens that long. Maybe just three years. It only seemed long. Very long. Regardless of its size or menu, it’s hard, hard work to get a restaurant up and running. It was a huge responsibility and it was exciting, but it wasn’t necessarily fun. There was the pressure to make Greens a success along with the reminders of what it had cost Zen Center to build the restaurant and how I was supposed to be nicer to the kitchen crew. I couldn’t do it all. Not only was I not very well trained but most of the staff had far less experience than I did and even less interest in cooking. The lack of interest and the lack of vision made starting Greens especially difficult. The lack of understanding from the Zen Center board about how exhausting it was meant there was little support for all of us. I never got credit for the restaurant’s success, either. I was just figuring it out as I went along. The nervousness I felt was there at all hours.