An Onion in My Pocket

by Deborah Madison

  Oldways took us to many countries. There were always well-known food people on these trips so Patrick couldn’t really ask them what they did or who they might be. Everyone was also known to one another—except for Patrick, who was an artist and my spouse. To break the ice, he asked what this or that person ate when he or she was eating alone. And he took notes. I found them years later when we were moving. Entranced, I asked him what they were and he explained. I thought they were the start of an interesting book, so every time the art market died, I reminded Patrick about those notes, until finally he went into his studio and made some illustrations. They were delightful, and so we began working on What We Eat When We Eat Alone.

  We interviewed all kinds of people—very old people, friends, family, strangers, retirees, youth, bartenders, students, writers, farmers. We had masses of material, and once the book took over, it showed us that there were natural chapters and differences among groups of folks and it readily took shape. There was meat and there were vegetables. Patrick designed the book and illustrated it, too. We both wrote it and it came out in 2008, just as the stock market crashed and the banks failed. It flopped. But it is a good book and a beautiful book to look at, too. I’m not sure how much it actually helped people who were cooking just for themselves, but I hope the humor and optimism in the book were encouraging. After all, we all cook for ourselves alone at some point in our lives.

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  While going through all the ups and downs with the original Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, I wrote some other books. The Vegetarian Table: America, was part of a series that Chronicle produced, and it looked as if I had drawn the short straw: Italy would have been much easier as so many contemporary vegetarian dishes that we were eating at the time came from there. Because America didn’t tend to offer the same plethora of meatless foods, I decided to take a historical approach, spending a few weeks at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard researching old books and more recent community cookbooks on American food. I found what I had suspected, that we were indeed a meat-obsessed culture for the most part, but there were some good stories and a few recipes that I unearthed and brought into the present. It turned out to be quite a wonderful experience to immerse myself in American food history. The book came out the year of the anniversary of America’s first cookbook, by Amelia Simmons.

  Then my editor asked me if I knew anyone who could write a book on tofu. I thought I could find someone, but I procrastinated for so long that I finally said I would do it myself. I had a history with tofu and a point of view: Basically I liked tofu as tofu, but not as pretend ricotta or other soft cheese. I liked it in its Asian context. Some of the recipes were a bit hybrid—part Asian, part Western—but every time I brought Patrick a new dish to taste he would say, “This can’t be tofu!” and that became the title of the book. It’s a little book that soldiers on.

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  A trio of books followed that I think of as soups, suppers, and desserts. The subject matter is pretty well defined for soups and desserts. It actually is for suppers as well, but for that book it is more varied. I had long wanted to write a book that answered the question What’s for supper? That, I’ve found, is the hardest question to answer for people trying to make a menu that doesn’t rely on meat. There are good wine suggestions, too, from Greg O’Byrne, a man who really knows his wines, which you’d think would help—but to no avail. The book didn’t do well. My mother ripped off the cover and threw it away—“It doesn’t look like you at all!” she complained. Patrick said it looked like a remaindered book, which didn’t help either. It was a new low.

  The soup book had a better reception. I loved making soups and I loved pottery and I used this book as an opportunity to feature a wide variety of dishes, from simple white bowls to exquisite contemporary ceramics and a few folk art pieces. As so often happens, once I began working on the book, groupings appeared that I had not initially thought of. Some were obvious, like soups based on beans, but some weren’t, such as soups that used bread in some way. It was actually a fun book to write and it was fun to pair the recipes with the ceramics. There was a meal and book signing in a gallery in Aspen, Colorado, where we ate from dishes made by some of the featured artists.

  Even though there was a brothy spring soup on the cover and despite the numbers and kinds of gazpacho that appear on summer restaurant menus, readers still insisted that soup was for cold weather. That’s one of those mind-sets that’s impossible to change.

  As with Local Flavors, Seasonal Fruit Desserts from Farm, Orchard, and Market was a book that I truly enjoyed crafting. I’d worked as a pastry chef, I loved fruit desserts, and I had some sense about the fruits that different areas offered. For example, we often don’t have stone fruits in New Mexico if there’s been a late freeze, and when we do, they’re very small but very good. In California they are not only plentiful but sweet, big, and juicy, and filled with flavor and nuance—unless, of course, they’ve been picked green and shipped to a supermarket. Or consider the popularity of Lambert cherries in the Northwest, huckleberries in Montana, and wild blueberries back East. Or take quince, one of my favorite fruits. Quince trees actually grow in many places, but few people had heard of their fruits or knew what to do with them. My father taught me about quince when I was a kid. Foods often showed me my deeper life, not just a recipe of the moment.

  After soups, suppers, and desserts, I retreated. I was old enough that I knew what I liked to eat and grow, that is, what worked for me, so I was not that interested in pursuing difference for the sake of difference. And I was repeating myself. I backed off and didn’t produce anything for a few years. I turned my attention elsewhere—school gardens, Master Gardeners, Chefs Collaborative, Slow Food, the Seed Savers Exchange, local agriculture, articles, and talks. But I always kept an idea file on my desktop and occasionally I added something to it.

  One such folder was labeled “VL,” for “Vegetable Literacy.” It had been on my desktop for the past decade, so it was fairly large. I happened to mention it to my agent one day and she loved the idea of a book that was to explore plant families. I wrote a proposal and shortly after it went out, I got a call from Jenny Wapner at Ten Speed Press. I was so thrilled that she liked the book enough to actually pick up the phone and call me that I decided to go with Ten Speed, originally a Berkeley publisher. The West Coast was a good fit for me. It’s where I’m from and where I wanted to be.

  Vegetable Literacy was about just twelve plant families, those that contain our most common edibles. After the book came out, the poet Gary Snyder growled at me, “You didn’t include okra!” I tried to explain that that particular family included pretty much only okra as a common edible, but apparently it was a vegetable that meant a lot to him. With writing as with cooking, you can’t please everyone.

  I could have gone on forever with plant families—and about people’s singular feelings and attachments to them—but one had to stop at some point, draw that line in the sand that declared a family was in or out. But that’s not to say I didn’t have some lingering passion. I did and I do. Take the laurel family (Lauraceae). What an interesting and strange collection of plants abide here. Unlike the cabbage, carrot, and mint families, the laurel family is made up of largely warm-weather, evergreen tropical plants that don’t grow in the United States except in a few places—California bay in coastal California and Oregon, sassafras in Kentucky, and avocados in Southern California. Mostly these plants prefer places like Southeast Asia, Brazil, central Chile, Madagascar, Japan, and Central America. None grow in my northern New Mexico garden; the winters are far too harsh and the air too dry, and my only experience of growing a family member was limited to a small bay tree in a pot. Yet some of these exotics are familiars in our kitchens—bay leaves, cinnamon, avocado, and if you’ve visited at all in Mexico, avocado leaves. Some flavors we enjoy, like sassafras, the original flavoring in root beer an
d the stuff of filé powder. And there are also jackfruit and breadfruit in this family, familiar in name only here, but important foods for many. Lauraceae is an amazing family that has just short of three thousand members.

  I uncovered some—though not the Lauraceae—botanical family stories and histories, showed their relationships, and included a few hundred recipes that were generally pretty straightforward. Oddly, the one that was truly old school and more complicated than the rest—a classic 1980s tart with caramelized onions, cream, and eggs—was the favorite for many and the one I heard about most from readers.

  Vegetable Literacy was hands down my favorite book to write. While I was working on it I read, talked to botanists, researched, and managed to grow almost every plant that got mentioned in the book. It was a wild summer in the garden and when it was too hot to be out-of-doors, it was a wild summer at my desk.

  It was only when I began to garden that I started to miss California. I didn’t miss it so much in Flagstaff, because while I was there it was important for me to be away from San Francisco, or when I first lived in New Mexico, because I was busy writing cookbooks and traveling. But when we moved to where we’ve been living for seventeen years and I finally had a real garden, I longed for my golden state. It was so hard to grow anything here, our season was so short and half the year was brown. I’d go back to the Bay Area in February and see all those star magnolias and almond orchards in bloom and ask myself, Why did I leave? I ran into my brother on his farm in Northern California walking around with what looked like long sticks. He crammed them into the earth and when I next returned, they were beautiful trees! That just doesn’t happen here. But now what were the beautiful months in California, September and October, are the months of horrible fires, and what should be the welcome rains of winter produce mudslides.

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  In 2015, I began tweaking Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which was almost twenty years old. I wanted to take out recipes that were too rich for today, recipes that we don’t make much anymore. I mentioned one as an example at a talk I was giving, and two women practically shrieked, “No! Please don’t. That’s a dish we always make each other for our birthdays!” So the Sizzling Risotto Gratin stayed in. Clearly there were celebratory foods and everyday foods. I liked that.

  I added a section of easy-to-make vegetable sautés, which reflect more how and what I cook. Miso now stands with tofu and tempeh as a soy-based food. Sometimes I placed one of the new plant milks where it needed to make itself known. Recipes were labeled with a “V” when they were vegan so that those who were looking just for those dishes could easily find them. But often recipes were easy to make vegan if one was willing to use plant milk in place of dairy, or olive oil in place of butter, and so on. Still, I don’t turn to fake cheeses and such in The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. As always, if people want to use them, it’s their choice. And if they want to serve the vegetables with meat, that’s their choice, too. Still, I felt that a lot of the recipes seemed dated. I liked them, but they were what I grew up with, in a sense. Today’s sentiments concerning food are much more lean—vegan, gluten free, free of this or that. I just couldn’t fall into those camps. Perhaps it was time to stop.

  After the redo of VCFE, I was thoroughly tired of food and recipes. I announced to all my friends “I’m done!” This is always a mistake, especially for a mutable double Gemini. I should know: I’ve been saying this since 1990. But when Jenny Wapner approached me about a book we had talked about in the past—a collection of recipes with much more narrative and lots of photographs—I agreed to do it. I felt this would be a nice conclusion for an entire body of work. It’s called In My Kitchen. There is a lot of narrative, just a hundred recipes, and photographs of dishes that I didn’t have to style. It’s a handsome and useful book, at least for me. And now I really am done. At least, I took Patrick and Dan out to dinner, raised my glass of champagne, and toasted what had been a long and very interesting career.

  Most cookbooks today seem so far away from my own sensibilities that it’s a relief to no longer be involved with writing them. So many are blatantly vegan or vegetarian, or they focus on bowls, or the authors don’t seem to know or care that the Arabic word for chickpea is “hummus.” There are also some very interesting new books that I do look at and cook from, but it is truly time for the next generation to step in. For the moment I garden and cook often from books (including my own), something I haven’t had a chance to do for years. I give cooking classes in my home for one or two people only so that they can really be tailored to their needs and wants, and I’ve mentored a student at a local charter school. I am involved in starting a seed library, and since attending Grain School I’ve been growing, threshing, milling, and cooking with ancient grains and meeting with others who are doing the same. (Talk about seventy-two labors!) It’s a fascinating world that is unfolding for me right now. I give talks and write articles and cookbook reviews, but I’m also working on another book project that is not a cookbook. It’s different without the guidance of a cookbook idea and for me, harder.

  I still look forward to the weekends.

  25. Nourishment

  When I looked back to my first dinner at Chez Panisse and saw how vividly its memory remained and how it truly changed my life, I fully expected to recall all kinds of meals that were memorable for their goodness, their nourishment, meals that pointed me in some particular direction. But there were almost none. Surely I was mistaken about this. I combed over the territories of childhood and adolescence and beyond. Indeed, I came up with only a small list of meals that struck me as significant, even life changing.

  · My dad’s midwestern winter feasts eaten at the peak of a California summer

  · My first time eating in a restaurant

  · Eating in a foreign language: Japanese restaurants on the Sacramento River

  · My college graduation lunch, a truly beautiful meal that came, seemingly, out of nowhere

  · My first sesshin lunch of white rice and pickles

  · Strawberries and the mystery of gourmet

  · That first meal at Chez Panisse

  · Eating a custard cup full of butter from our Guernsey cows

  I don’t actually recall eating that dish of butter. I wasn’t even two. My dad gave it to me, thinking it was custard. He was distracted. But I included it because I thought the good milk and cream from our cows somehow shaped me into a butter eater and later, a cheese eater. My first spoken sentence was, I’ve been told, “I like cows.” And I still do.

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  But as I sat at my desk I asked myself, Wasn’t there more? How could I have passed through so much of my life with so little to remember of the table? The years of Zen Center meals were memorable as a whole, but apart from that sesshin lunch, the specifics were vague. There was the adventure of it all, but there wasn’t any dish or meal that compelled my memory to fly into action and announce, “This changed my life.”

  I find the paucity of such memorable foods surprising and also a little troubling. I fear that it points to a lack of joy and enthusiasm about meals, or a poor memory. What I wanted on my list of favorite meals were dishes and dinners that had power and punch, meals where food became the lens that would bring a larger view of the world into focus. I had enjoyed many stellar meals in three-star restaurants, but I wasn’t looking at those.

  While I was asking this for my own life, I wondered about all our lives: What were the encounters with food that lodged in our memories because they had the power to change how we saw the world and how we walked in it? Of course the details of what we would each see might differ widely.

  I didn’t originally think deep nourishment was what I was looking for, but it is what came up in the end: food that nourished with kindness, thoughtfulness, care, simplicity, and generosity. And it had nothing to do with th
e food itself, whether it was vegetarian or not.

  Here are some of those nourishing meals.

  A SIGNIFICANT LUNCH

  I did get to go to Europe with Nancy Wilson Ross. It was my first trip abroad. Tears seared my eyes when our taxi went under London’s Marble Arch; I hadn’t known about old things, really. We stayed at the Ritz and ate at the Savoy Hotel, where even the carrots and peas were amazing. Then we went on to Scotland and toured about in a tiny, borrowed car. It was November and it was cold.

  In the midst of a seriously chilly drive across a barren heath, Nancy and I had a case of the hungers. Not the peckish “I could go for a little something, could you?” type of hunger, but that ravenous appetite that made us antsy and on edge. We were crossing a vast section of land, a heath that was far from any town, and it was well after one in the afternoon when our hopes for lunch, which had been dismal, were buoyed: We rounded a curve and saw a weak thread of smoke rising from the chimney of a low, whitewashed stone building. We parked, unbent our chilled limbs, stumbled to the door, and slowly pushed it open. Immediately the low murmur of men talking came to a halt and we walked in silence to the bar. We were the only women in the room. The barkeep came up to us and suggested—kindly—that we would perhaps be happier if we would drive just a few hundred yards down the road. There, surely, he promised, we could have a drink and perhaps food, too. We thought we’d be happier as well, so leaving the men to resume their chatter, we did as he suggested and drove on to a small inn just, as promised, a short distance away.