In the end, I have chosen to say I’m an omnivore—if I have to say anything—not because I have a deep, atavistic response to the dishes that my dad cooked when my mother was away each August, but because I prefer to be flexible rather than rigid. Patrick is also flexible, but because he grew up in a household where steak was served several times a week, he still occasionally enjoys one, whereas steak has little appeal for me. It’s not a food I know from my deep past, except for the gray experimental university steak. I do like a real BLT at least once during a summer, though if I don’t have any bacon it doesn’t matter that much. The ripe tomato, however, does.
I am also an omnivore because I want to be open to those who are involved with meat, both ranchers and eaters, as a way of being able to change our culture’s practices, to become less meat reliant, to enjoy it in smaller amounts or less often or even to forgo it, or to correct wrong impressions in the industry when they exist. Jim Hightower, the former agricultural commissioner of Texas, chided me about this, reminding me that the middle of the road is where you’re likely to get hit. And it’s true. If you’re a neither-nor, like I am, you might just be squashed because you don’t really belong in any camp. The middle of the road is a dangerous place and I do have to dress my wounds from time to time.
While the meat I have eaten has taught me about how to make vegetarian food work for nonvegetarians, I love the food I cook without it. I love vegetables. I like tofu a lot. I’m very happy eating vegetarian food. And sometimes I eat meat.
22. Making Books
The summer I was sixteen I acquired my first cookbook. It was French and I wish I still had it. I liked it because the pictures showed food in a more earthy way than we were accustomed to seeing then. In the 1960s food looked flawless and perfect on the pages of magazines and cookbooks. In the 1970s ribbons got added to the food. And flowers. But in my French book, the apricot tart was shown with some of the edges of the fruit burned. It was a bit shocking, but it certainly gave permission for life to be what it is: Sometimes the edges do burn. (And don’t we like those best?) In 2015, food was regularly shown with all the burns and imperfections that are usually present when it’s made at home. Food has also been shown partially eaten, crumbs stuck to a fork, dirty dishes on the table, a cigarette extinguished in the remains of a dish—real to the point of being off-putting. Food images in the last years of Gourmet were dark and the people at the table looked as if they could use a good scrubbing. I had to wonder if the photographer even liked food. But in the 1960s and on into the 1980s, it was as if home cooking could sustain no imprint of the human hand or chance of any kind, let alone a stray crumb, and that wasn’t so great, either.
While at Greens I did a few photo shoots for national magazines. Cumbersome lights were hauled into the kitchen and ice cream was formed from Crisco so that it would hold up under their heat. All the food we made was garnished with inedible items like shoe polish (for grill lines) and shaving cream (for whipped cream), so we had to throw it out. When I finally was able to work with photographer Laurie Smith on my own books, she used only natural light and all the food was edible.
Since leaving Greens, I’ve written fourteen cookbooks. That’s probably how most people know me. I’ve loved making books, seeing them grow from an idea to something you hold in your hand and open and, in my case, cook from. Over the years, I have found that no matter the subject and how clearly I’ve thought about it, a book has a way of coming into its own and saying quite firmly at some point, “This is what I am.” Even “ ‘who’ I am.” Until that happens, the book is vague and amorphous, cloudlike. But there’s nothing to do except to noodle away, pushing at this, pulling at that, working while knowing there has to be that moment when the breath of the book is suddenly taken. Then you become partners, you and the book. It may be an uneasy partnership, but that’s okay. Finally you are working together.
The Greens Cookbook was my first book. I had already tried to sell the notion of writing it to the Zen Center Board but the board didn’t think it a good idea. “Who would buy it?” they asked. I remembered all the requests we had had for recipes.
A few years later, when I was living in Rome and had just about decided to stay there, I got a call from an agent who told me that Bantam was interested in starting a cookbook program and that they want to start with The Greens Cookbook. Did I want to talk with them? Of course I did! Greens reflected years of my work and I knew that if I didn’t write the book, someone else would. That was how Zen Center worked. So I flew back to California, had the meeting, and signed the contract. Then I moved back to the States, settled in Berkeley, and got started. I had my notebook of recipes from Greens, so even though I was no longer there, I had a lot to go on—plus I had the fairly recent memory of cooking there.
Each of the books I’ve written serves a very specific function, and The Greens Cookbook was intended to duplicate the flavors of the restaurant. As such, the recipes tended to be complicated, reflecting what a ten-person crew might pull off in a morning. When the first “fancy” vegan cookbooks came out, I remember looking at them and thinking, “This is too much work!” Then it occurred to me that’s how people probably felt when they first saw The Greens Cookbook! And it was true—there were a lot of ingredients and a lot being done to them because that was what we did to get the flavor to go beyond something merely simple. Now vegan cookbooks, like vegetarian cookbooks, are far simpler. Sometimes too much so. But when they’re complicated, they’re also too much so. How to find that happy middle? That was a challenge I’d face with later books. But this one, I felt, had to accurately reflect the flavors of Greens.
I included the recipes as they were made at the restaurant because they were the taste and flavor of the food at Greens and I didn’t want people to be disappointed in their results at home. Still, I have always been amazed when people tell me that they use The Greens Cookbook all the time. I don’t necessarily believe them, but then I go to the book, look carefully, and see that in fact there are quite a few very straightforward, even simple recipes among the more complex ones. So maybe they do use it often. Even more amazing is meeting people who tell me they were raised on The Greens Cookbook. And I fear they are telling the truth.
It took a year to write The Greens Cookbook and another year to turn it into a book. There’s a reason publishers tell you to read your book when you finally hold it in your hand but before you take it to the world. After a year, it’s possible that you’ve forgotten quite a few details.
* * *
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The year I moved to Berkeley was a hard one for me, as were the following few years. I was still newly separated from Dan and Zen Center. I wanted to somehow stop being “me”—the Zen student, the former chef of Greens, the vegetarian. And now I had this cookbook to underscore the vegetarian part and the Greens part. I’d say yes to all kinds of invitations, then back out at the last minute. My friends had been generous with their invites, but at some point I realized that I’d better say yes and mean it with some follow-through or there wouldn’t be any more invites coming my way.
It was partly a reaction to Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No!” campaign against drugs, but to “Just Say Yes!” gave me the encouragement I needed to start following through with some action. Just Saying Yes helped me do that for quite a few months, but I did get into some trouble when I went to L.A. to meet up with a possible new boyfriend. He was interesting, to be sure, but maybe a little bit too much so that weekend. Saturday night, after dinner, we got into his big black Mercedes. He was carrying an enormous boom box and was playing Wagner. Loud. He carried it into a liquor store where he bought some vodka. He was already pretty high on cocaine but that didn’t seem to matter. We started driving up the Pacific Coast Highway. Fast. At some point he showed me the gun strapped to his chest, which he said the government allowed him to wear because of his work, which was indeed dangerous. It was about then that I thought m
aybe just saying yes to everything wasn’t such a good idea. When he turned the car around, I vowed that if I lived through the weekend, I’d apply a little more common sense to my actions, and I did. But it was a useful and good policy for a while. It definitely got me out of my expected ways. And it made me realize that maybe it was time to move.
* * *
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A friend had told me if I ever had a chance to hear Sweet Honey in the Rock, I should go, no matter what. It turned out they were coming to sing in San Francisco so I called the Great American Music Hall and bought a ticket. I had never done anything like that before and it didn’t occur to me to invite someone to come along. When the night of the concert arrived, I got dressed and went. I found a table and sat down. People kept coming up and asking if the other chairs were taken and when I said no, they just took them to another table. I was hoping someone might want to sit at the table, too. I felt so alone. But it didn’t matter, because when the women came onstage and took their seats I felt immediately at ease, safe in an ample lap where I was at peace. When they started to sing I basked in this sense of newfound calm and safety, and I realized that now was the time to leave San Francisco. I had been fearful about moving to a new city where I knew no one, but now my fears were gone. I could calmly see what was next. My eyes were clear and I felt joyous.
The move didn’t happen immediately. I was still working across the bay at Chez Panisse and I wasn’t quite ready to leave that situation. But a few weeks later, on the fourth day in a row of being stuck in the stagnant crawl across the Bay Bridge on my way to work, I noticed a pickup in front of me with a dog in the back, and Arizona plates. That was it. I suddenly longed for the clear air of the Southwest. I was ready to go and within the month I left for Flagstaff, Arizona, a part of the world I had gotten to know over many summer trips to New Mexico. And I did know a few people there and my way around. It was a good place to be at that time. I felt like an adult on starter wheels buying my first house, first car, phone, and more.
* * *
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I never intended to write a cookbook, but writing The Greens Cookbook introduced me to bookmaking and I found I liked it, a lot. I wanted to write another book, and I had a stash of more personal recipes that weren’t in The Greens Cookbook, but I had moved to Flagstaff, where there was nothing to eat—at least nothing that I was used to finding in the Bay Area—so I was a bit stuck, at least at first.
My challenge, as I finally came to see it, was to find a way to produce all those good, lively flavors when there weren’t the same resources that a coastal, urban area offered. I gave cooking classes in my home to my new friends in part to learn what they were interested in cooking and eating. My students, I learned, didn’t want to spend the time to make complex dishes that layered flavors in order to end up with something that read as simple but actually was not. They had families and jobs, and not much time. But they did want to cook. The Savory Way was based on the limited variety of foods that were available and the limits of time, but not on the limits of flavor and appeal. Unlike The Greens Cookbook, The Savory Way was a more direct, personal, and intimate book. It also marked my beginning as a home cook and my commitment to write for home cooks who, like my students, were curious but busy and often overwhelmed.
In 1988 Flagstaff was pretty dismal as far as food went. I’d go into a Chinese restaurant and it was the smell of rancid oil that hit me. I might find fennel or celery root at the local supermarket, but I suspected that if I carved my initials into the base of these vegetables, I would find that they were all there weeks later. The checkers in the stores never knew what I was buying. “Is that an apple?” they would ask about the wayward quince I had found. But there were good things, too. I went to the county fair, noted the interesting vegetables grown by locals, and wrote down their names. When I met those people they were generous with their produce and advice. I took a gardening class and learned about sucking up grasshoppers with a Shop-Vac as part of gardening in that part of the world. I also learned that if you wanted good fruit, you contacted the Mormon ladies who went to Utah to bring back lugs of apricots, peaches, and tomatoes. I found good farmers who sold their produce. None of it was easy, but it was possible to get good food if you worked at it. After I left there was a Lebanese deli, a farmers’ market, and even a chapter of Slow Food, but while I was there, northern Arizona was something of an impossibility when it came to fresh food. Still I did manage to teach and write a book. I loved living where no one had heard of Chez Panisse or Greens and where it was expected that you would go to the pancake breakfast on the Fourth of July, where you would see a man riding a bull in the rodeo parade.
I really wanted Flagstaff to work for me. I loved the landscape of northern Arizona, the cinder fields and the San Francisco Peaks. It was close enough to California that when I needed more olive oil or wine I could—and did—jump in the car and drive out there. Plus I had a wonderful job as a studio assistant to the artist James Turrell, who was Dan’s cousin. But it never was a good fit. What finally did it for me was opening a bottle of Bandol rouge to let it breathe before a new friend arrived for lunch. When she called to say she couldn’t make it after all, I wondered about the wine. I had a few other friends who I knew would happily drink it, but they were devotees of Gallo’s Hardy Burgundy. I realized I knew no one who would enjoy this wine for what it was. And I also saw that I had to live where there was more agriculture and a farmers’ market and maybe even someone to open a good bottle for. I called Dan in Santa Fe and asked if I could come over. It was just 350 miles east of Flagstaff. He said sure, though I’d have to work out the details with his other guest, Patrick McFarlin.
* * *
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Some years—it felt like a century—after Dan and I separated, I met up with Patrick McFarlin in Santa Fe. He was (and is) an artist and an old friend of Dan’s. We got together after that weekend encounter at Dan’s, one in which we finally clicked with each other after more than twenty years of being like oil and water. When our paths had first crossed at the San Francisco Zen Center he was a bearded hippie artist and I was an uptight Zen student who absolutely loved all those Japanese forms that he had no use for then, and still doesn’t. It wasn’t a fit for a very long time, not until that weekend when, after giving Patrick a hug and saying that I had heard X and hoped Y, he reached down and grabbed my ankle. It was a weird gesture, but somehow it opened my eyes to him and all at once we were more like vinegar and oil, and bound to make something together as fine as a good vinaigrette.
Recently we found out that his people in Scotland used to, centuries ago, steal cattle from my people. Maybe that explained our initial antipathy and just maybe our marriage healed an old, old wound. At least I like to think that it has.
As happy as I was when Patrick and I finally got together, my heart sank when he told me that he was a vegetarian and had been for the past twelve years. At that time I so wanted not to be a vegetarian. I wanted to shake off that image of uptight purity and become a full-bore lusty carnivore. Or at least I thought I did. I knew that while I was not exactly a willing vegetarian, meat was not that compelling to me, either. And while I was disappointed to learn of Patrick’s tendencies, I was also comforted by the thought that at least I could put my experience to use: I could cook for him, and that felt good. Eventually he discovered that pork was deeply entangled in his Southern roots. It took just one bite of Serrano ham eaten very late at night after a long day of travel from New Mexico to Spain to do the trick. He was so hungry he just ate it and suddenly he knew he wasn’t a Southerner for nothing.
After that trip, the vegetarian phase came largely to an end. Not that we don’t eat plenty of vegetarian meals; we both have that inclination for sure, but as I write, my freezer holds some bison from a rancher friend in Texas; elk steaks, a gift from a hunter friend; grass-fed beef raised by another rancher friend in New Mexico; and lamb raised by my ne
ighbor down the road. There’s not, but there could be, a chicken roasting in the oven. But I think we’re having a chard and saffron gratin tonight. We actually do prefer vegetables to meat.
The first time I went to visit Patrick, he met me at the airport with a big sign saying, ART IN AMERICA WANTS YOU. Once we got to his studio-home in the Arkansas woods I noticed that his kitchen shelves consisted of a wooden plank with two of everything on it—two plates, two bowls, two cups, two forks, two knives. I found that I loved cooking in this minimal kitchen. So many questions were answered by the lack of choice. Back home I had several sets of dishes and would accumulate even more.
It was hot and humid in Arkansas and I didn’t want to wear more than a T-shirt and shorts. But I had arrived with a Gone with the Wind dress in my suitcase—imagining romantic hours spent lounging on a grassy riverbank. The first thing Patrick said when we went for a walk the next morning was “Don’t touch anything green!” That is, unless I wanted to be covered with ticks and chiggers. That dress was never worn. Shorts and T-shirts became like that wooden shelf—minimal, sufficient, and workable.
Patrick is not too inclined to cook but he can feed himself if he has to. A few times—very few—I have had the pleasure of coming home to the smell of brown rice steaming and Patrick cooking a vegetable, an experience that has helped me understand how wonderful it must be for anyone to come home to the smells of his or her partner cooking. It is a wild, nearly inconceivable pleasure.
When I traveled, which I did frequently the first twenty years of our marriage, I left a well-stocked refrigerator. Invariably I returned to find everything pretty much as I’d left it. Patrick hadn’t eaten elsewhere; he simply hadn’t eaten. Mostly he was thinking about art. Or he was painting. He could ignore hunger. In fact, Patrick is the kind of person who, when asked “Would you like some more soufflé?” can actually say, “No thanks. I’m full.”
An Onion in My Pocket Page 20