An Onion in My Pocket

by Deborah Madison

  “Full?” I think. “But now is when a soufflé should be eaten. Not tomorrow!”

  I find his response to the “more soufflé” question admirable, but hard to understand. I, of course, go for the seconds while it’s hot, full or not. I have found that leftover soufflé is not too bad the next morning fried in butter—but then, what isn’t? By then it’s another dish altogether; heavier and somewhat sodden; no longer a puff of air. But it makes a very good breakfast.

  That’s how Patrick is. Of course, he is thin. He doesn’t eat when he’s not hungry. He stops eating when he’s full. He knows when he’s full. He eats slowly. “You don’t have to sit and watch me eat” is a statement I hear often. I’m still on that rapid-fire zendo schedule.

  We are not alike when it comes to the table. In addition to the fast-slow, full–not hungry continuum, Patrick has an excellent palate for both food and wine, and a good wine memory, while my palate is a bit off, I suspect, and I have a more feeble wine memory, though it has improved over the years of opening some amazing bottles and having many winemaking friends. Patrick is good with wine. Not only does he remember it, but he has designed wine labels and created a few brands.

  Once, only, in thirty years of marriage have I seen Patrick consult one of my cookbooks and that was because he was supposed to bring a bowl of coleslaw to a Super Bowl party and didn’t know how to make it. He said it was difficult: so much slicing! When he complained about how hard it was for him to cook pasta dishes that didn’t all taste alike, I suggested that a cookbook might help and I reminded him that not only did I have a huge library of cookbooks but I had written a number of them, with Patrick himself as my chief taster. Just the other day he called a friend for her recipe for latkes, never mind that there is one in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. But it was a delight to hear him becoming truly excited about slicing an onion, grating a potato, and frying the latkes. He seemed astonished by the act of cooking, and the results were good.

  While Patrick isn’t generally inclined to go so far as to open a cookbook, it is because he doesn’t cook (at least for the most part) that he’s a pleasure to cook for. He truly appreciates my efforts and he thanks me always.

  Patrick and I got married at Dan’s house in Santa Fe almost thirty years ago. Dan and David Tanis, an old friend from Chez Panisse days, cooked our wedding dinner. “Some sort of peasant food, I think” is how Patrick described Dan’s little pizzas, the grilled salt cod, the roasted king salmon, the flower-graced cake. Although he insists that it is I who called it “peasant food.” I can’t remember if we fed each other cake at our wedding—I think we did—but we have enjoyed a sweet and mutual nourishment in our care for each other and our enjoyment of the table, despite our differences.

  Although Patrick and Dan are dissimilar when it comes to the kitchen—Dan being extremely enthusiastic about food and cooking and eating in a way that Patrick isn’t—in other ways they are so much alike that I have to ask, Did I marry the same man twice? Both have a low tolerance for rodent visitors, for example, whereas I don’t really mind them—except for gophers.

  Patrick has known Dan nearly as long as I have. Patrick, Dan, and I shared many of the same experiences over the years, as Zen students and Zen dropouts (or recovering Zen students). Because the three of us enjoy one another’s company and get together often, Patrick and I refer to Dan as “our first husband.” I hope he’s okay with that.

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  I had chosen to move to Santa Fe for several reasons: it was more sophisticated than Flagstaff when it came to food, I had planned to open a restaurant, and I didn’t want to go back to California. Also there was a farmers’ market, which was very important to me. There were the remnants of older cultures, which, after living in Rome, was important to me as well. And Patrick and I had thought Santa Fe was a better choice than either Flagstaff or Little Rock, his home, so we decided we’d give it a try. It’s been thirty years and we’re still doing that.

  When we moved here, the day after arriving and before I had even unpacked, I went to the farmers’ market, where I overheard a man say he could use some help running the market. I tapped him on the shoulder and told him I could help. I’d come to open a restaurant, but that was now a year or more away so I was free. He was delighted and told me I could start by managing the market the following week. I asked if I could team up with him first to see how it was done. Fortunately he agreed but after that I was on my own, arriving before dawn in the chill hours, setting up barrels and tapes and trash cans, welcoming sleepy farm families as they pulled their trucks into their spaces, then later, spelling them while they walked around or bringing them hot coffee to warm their hands come late fall. I had volunteered to do this because easier access to good food was partly what brought me to Santa Fe. But it turned out that I was the one who benefited. I met so many people in the farming community who told me their stories, who were warm human beings working hard to raise our food. I became stitched into the life of northern New Mexico in a way I wouldn’t have been otherwise.

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  The farmers’ market movement was in its toddler stage at this point. There were about three thousand markets across the country, and I started wondering about the existence of these volunteer, more or less pop-up markets that unfolded every weekend around the United States. I began to tie my cooking classes out of town to market visits, from Portland to Kansas City, Phoenix to Cleveland, New York both upstate and in the city, until I finally gave up the teaching component and went on my own to visit markets—nearly one hundred markets in all. I wanted to write a book that was not so much about our market in Santa Fe but about the rise of farmers’ markets on the whole. No one had really written about that and it was such an interesting phenomenon. Today, many markets have their own cookbooks, and a beautiful book has been written about our market—finally. It came out in 2016, but in 1990 it was too soon.

  Originally I thought of this book as Saturday Market, Sunday Lunch. That title reflected what I did—shop heavily at the Saturday market then produce a lavish lunch on the following day for friends, but that was just at home, of course. If I were visiting a market in Santa Barbara, I was more likely to fly home on Sunday with a few quarts of amazing strawberries on my lap than to cook lunch where I knew no one. Besides, with time I found I was eating food from the farmers’ market all week, not just on Sundays. Titles have a way of shifting around and Saturday Market, Sunday Lunch became Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets.

  I loved writing Local Flavors, visiting so many different markets and talking with farmers and managers and shoppers. I included stories about individuals, like Jake West and his melons, about weather—how a hailstorm could destroy a farmer’s livelihood in a matter of minutes—about different kinds of sweet potatoes, avocados, and other foods, about a Hmong market under a California freeway with all its strange vines and beautifully bundled vegetables. No two markets were the same, and I wrote about the good ideas I came across that might be picked up by another market via a reader. Of course the book was filled with recipes inspired by the markets I visited. Among them were eleven recipes for meat because meat was just starting to appear in markets and it was of high quality. Mostly, though, it was vegetables that ruled the scene, for that’s what farmers’ markets were chiefly known for and they were what I liked to cook. But meat was there, too, and cheeses, and in our market, chicos and chile.

  Books are like children, in a way. You spend a long time with them, nurturing them and hoping they’ll get a good start in life. I shouldn’t confess to this, but Local Flavors was one of my favorite books to write. And its theme—markets, farmers, and produce—is one I have returned to over and over even though markets themselves have changed a great deal and there are nine thousand or more farmers’markets today.

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  Around
the time I was managing the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market I went to Esalen, in California, to give a weeklong cooking class. The students were all caregivers and they needed to find some way of nurturing themselves. Learning to cook might just be one way, so over the course of a week we made everything—salads and their dressings, soups, stews, gratins, breads, cereals, desserts, breakfasts, tofu dishes—everything that we could possibly fit into a week. When the class ended and I was putting gas in my car and leaving for Santa Fe, I thought how much easier all this would be if a whole lot of recipes could be captured between two covers: something like a vegetarian Joy of Cooking.

  At this time, soy milk was a totally strange substance that you had to buy at a health food store. I personally held it at a distance until a woman wearing a leopard skin coat came to class in St. Louis and asked about soy milk. Why? Because her children were seriously intolerant of dairy products. She was clearly not a vegetarian, but she had a problem that soy milk might solve. Might that not be true for other people who were looking for the foods that I had learned about through some strange outsider publications? What about putting everything on a level playing field? Surely such a book existed, I thought. I went to bookstores but I didn’t see it. Maybe I’d have to write it. I was quickly seized with the idea of the Vegetarian Joy of Cooking. By the time it came out, seven years later, its name had changed and I was vastly relieved to be finished with it.

  Clearly Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (VCFE) was a book that had its own parameters: The way I saw it, it was, again, not about me but about food in the culture. What foods were people eating that were meatless and what might vegetarians expect to find in such a volume? For example, I was not a fan of stir-fries, but they were very popular when I was writing the book, so there had to be a number of them. I hired someone who was really good at making this sort of dish to teach me and then I included stir-fries. I might skip breakfast (I don’t), but the word was that we shouldn’t, so there is a breakfast chapter. And so on.

  I also wondered what dishes people might be thrilled to find in the book, foods that they might be able to serve their vegetarian children or nonvegetarian husbands. Would a rolled soufflé work? Or Battered and Baked Stuffed Chiles with Roasted Tomato Sauce? Or that eggplant gratin with a saffron custard? It didn’t all have to be hummus and eggplant Parmesan, although they had to be there as well.

  And I wanted to give attention to each vegetable, its characteristics, what it went well with, what were some simple ways of featuring the vegetable. And while I was at it, what about beans and ways to cook them? Or the nature and variety of grains, or tofu, or miso. I was thinking this should be a book that could teach one about ingredients and how to cook in general as well as a book full of recipes from the most simple to the more complicated. People often have told me that I’m in their kitchen, or they refer to VCFE as the Bible. When they say they have my book, I know that’s the book they mean.

  Getting VCFE out in the world was as challenging as writing it. There were issues of all kinds that didn’t have to do with the theme of the book. We wanted to use a dark red for a second color, but it reminded the vegan designer of blood so he wouldn’t use it.

  Bantam wanted to end their cookbook program with this tome, but if that happened, who would care about it and promote it? After such a long, involved project, this mattered. Could we move to another company? We did. That took about a year. Meanwhile, Joy of Cooking was coming out with a new edition the same year my book was coming out, so could we change the title? We did and it became Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

  When the book finally came out I was on the cover holding a lot of wooden spoons over one shoulder and looking a little strict. “The vegetarian dominatrix” was what one friend called me in that picture. Actually, I was exhausted from a day of shooting but that picture (and comment) embarrassed me for years. Occasionally I’ve met people (now young adults) who “knew” me from that cover. In one case the book was at a child’s eye level so that this youngster in fact did spend a lot of time at least looking at my picture when he was a certain height. When I finally met him, he acted as if I had been in his mother’s house for years.

  I really didn’t want to put the word “vegetarian” in the title, but “Plant Foods for Everyone” lacked a certain ring. Ironically, that would probably be an acceptable title today.

  After seventeen years, I felt VCFE needed updating. Times and foods had changed—again. Stir-fry was no longer the “it” dish for home cooks. Some recipes for stir-fries came out, but not all. Soy milk was now in any supermarket, but so were hemp, almond, rice, and other plant-based milks whose existences I had never even guessed at when writing VCFE. Today we have coconut oil and a coconut milk beverage as well as coconut sugar and flour. We can buy really good ghee. Olive oil is a different creature now, no longer pressed through mats, which changes the language related to it. Teff, black rice, quinoa, amaranth, frikeh, emmer, spelt, farro, and other grains are far easier to come by. Arugula, fingerling potatoes, and heritage pumpkins—even heirloom tomatoes—can now be found in supermarkets. It is a different world.

  23. Book Tours

  Before food TV there were book tours. A constant feature was the TV morning show that ended its day with a segment in which an author talked for a minute, two at the most, about something that had taken years to produce. Then she would make a recipe. It was usually a she. It was like the women’s pages of newspapers past.

  Of course it was an honor to be able to tour. It got me out of my neighborhood and into the larger world, plus tours help get an author known and tours sell books. I went on several long tours and they were grueling. And strange. Tours today, such as they are, are much better—more meals in restaurants that feature your book’s food, less TV or even no TV. But they can be a little more difficult for companies to figure out.

  When The Greens Cookbook came out I got shoved into the world unexpectedly fast. I had been, until then, living in the Zen Center, working at the American Academy in Rome, at Chez Panisse, and otherwise dwelling in the food-obsessed Bay Area. I had never bought new clothes, had a facial, a television, a dog. Suddenly I was on a crash course, at least for clothes, facials, and TV. The dog came much later. I think I was more terrified of going on a book tour than I was opening Greens.

  Book tours were opportunities for misadventures. Some of these have grown humorous with time, others less so. TV was the hardest part, the worst part, and the least satisfying part for me. But by the time I said I’m not doing TV anymore, it was over. The Food Network and cooking shows had taken the place of the final segment of the morning magazine. Still, before that, one did TV every day, like it or not.

  I’d never owned a television as an adult nor did I grow up with one, so I had never even watched a morning show. But I started my tour in San Francisco on a morning show that featured a swarm of gorgeous women dressed in gowns for an upcoming ball. I watched from the sidelines, my stomach lurching; then, it was my turn. I walked out onstage and tried to smile and look relaxed. Yes. I was going to make a warm vegetable salad that got turned in olive oil and lemon zest and fresh herbs. This was a pretty dish and took the idea of salad away from lettuce leaves. The pot of water was boiling for the vegetables, which were cut and set out on a platter. A woman from the Midwest was called up to the stage to be my guest; it was her birthday. The vegetables easily slid into the pot, but when I went to take them out, the strainer was larger than the pot. I could only dip a corner of it in and get a few asparagus spears. I couldn’t empty the pot into the sink because there was no drain. The producer was circling her hands to hurry me up, so the few bits of asparagus and shards of other vegetables I was able to fish out got plunked in enough olive oil for the entire mass of vegetables. It was a disaster. I said to the guest, if I had known it was her birthday I would have made a cake, then I served this poor woman, who clearly didn’t know what to make of any of it, a few bits of asparagus s
wimming in olive oil. Then it was over and I went home to my little sublet apartment in the Mission District.

  And that was just the beginning.

  I learned that the sets were always fake. There was never a drain in the sink and the situation in San Francisco was not unusual. TV kitchens were not well equipped. It felt as if an office worker had been given some petty cash and told to buy things for the studio kitchen at a garage sale. In Los Angeles old diapers were used for pot holders. In Washington, DC, the Fox set was filthy and the plants that once gave it cheer were dead—no one had thought to replace them. Elsewhere the counter was grimy. The staff obviously warmed up their lunches in the TV kitchen, but they didn’t clean up. I quickly learned that it was a good idea to arrive at a studio early enough to make things look fresh and clean. I didn’t forget to bring flowers or fresh herbs along with a sponge and paper towels. I also learned to accept that the host was probably just becoming acquainted with my book moments before the camera rolled.

  There was always something topical in the news. On one tour it was surrogate motherhood. On another it was organ transplants. It was as if the same groups of people were traveling around the country with me. On one tour I kept running into the comedian Phyllis Diller, who slid onto the set looking as if she hadn’t gone to bed yet. She was funny and I was grateful for her presence, her humor. During the surrogate motherhood stage, we both watched a formidable lineup from our backstage vantage point: the hopeful mother, the nervous father, the possible surrogate, any children that were the products of the current marriage or previous marriages, a priest, a lawyer, maybe a theologian. They were all talking at once about whether or not God would permit this. We thought that he/she wouldn’t simply because it was so damn complicated.