by Jenna Weber
WHITE
JACKET
REQUIRED
A CULINARY COMING-OF-AGE STORY
JENNA WEBER
AUTHOR OF THE BLOG Eat, Live, Run
STERLING EPICURE is a trademark of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
The distinctive Sterling logo is a registered trademark of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
© 2012 by Jenna Weber
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4027-9378-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weber, Jenna.
White jacket required : a culinary coming-of-age story / Jenna Weber.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4027-7777-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4027-9378-3 (ebook)
1. Weber, Jenna. 2. Food writers—United States—Biography. 3. Cooking, American. 4. Cordon Bleu Cookery School. I. Title.
TX649.W435A3 2012
641.5973092—dc23
[B]
2012010845
For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or [email protected].
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
www.sterlingpublishing.com
To my brother
I miss you more than
you could ever know.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Introduction
1. ORIGINS
Linguine and Clam Sauce
All-Occasion Yellow Cake
Chocolate-Buttercream Frosting
2. MAKE IT HAPPEN
My Mother’s Spaghetti Sauce
3. FACT FINDING
Girls’ Night Turkey Burgers with Spicy Sweet Potato Fries
4. WORKING GIRLS
Kicked-up Turkey Meatloaf
Homemade Baked Beans
5. RUNNING ON EMPTY
Potato Pancake for the Blues
Slow-Cooker Pulled Pork
6. OUI, CHEF!
Pasta with Sautéed Vegetables and Pesto
Spicy Roasted Root Vegetables
Chicken-Pepperoni Parmesan
7. MAKE THEM FEEL LIKE YOU CARE
Old-Fashioned Gingerbread Cookies
8. KNIVES OUT
Croque Monsieur
Lemon–Brown Sugar Chicken
Spicy Chicken Tortilla Soup
Homemade Chicken Stock
9. HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Linguine with Escarole and Brie
Old-Fashioned Chocolate-Walnut Torte
10. MOVING ON
First-Day-of-Class Biscuits
Spicy Sesame Noodle Bowls
11. BREAKING BREAD
Whole-Wheat Pizza Dough
12. WRITTEN IN CHOCOLATE
Raspberry-Rose Macarons
Blood Orange Tarts
13. PIECE OF CAKE
Flourless Chocolate Cake with Vanilla-Buttercream Frosting
14. THE CLAW
15. GOING HOME AGAIN
Pumpkin Whoopee Pies
16. NIGHT AND DAY
Creamy Tomato Soup
17. WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED
My Brother’s Favorite Banana Bread
18. JOHN’S GONE
19. THE NEW NORMAL
Lowcountry Shrimp and Grits
Benne Seed Sugar Cookies
20. UNEXPECTED TRAVELS
Old-Fashioned Potato Rolls
Simple Greek Salad
21. NEW FRIENDS
Golden Granola
22. STRANGE ELECTRICITY
Mushroom Risotto
Adam’s Mexican Cheesecake
23. DISLODGING
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
IN DECEMBER OF 2007, I STARTED A BLOG TO SHARE MY PASSION for food and my experiences as a new culinary student. In addition to the blog, I began keeping a detailed journal of interesting conversations with chef-instructors and fellow students, dreaming that someday these might become part of an actual book.
For as long as I can remember, all I really wanted to do in life was write about food, and I figured culinary school was the best place to start. After much debate, I decided to name my blog “Eat, Live, Run” to depict a healthy balance of food, life, and play. In the beginning, I only had three readers: my mom, my dad, and my roommate. However, as time went by and I kept at it, I was shocked to discover that people loved reading my blog as much as I loved writing it. Soon, my three readers multiplied into three hundred, and then into the thousands. As the years went by, I transitioned from blogging about culinary school to blogging about life in general, until I finally found my passion and niche for writing tasty, family-friendly recipes.
When I was given the opportunity to write a book, I couldn’t wait to dive in. As much as I loved writing the blog, I was so excited to show my readers a deeper side of my life and share my experiences from culinary school and the year that followed. This book aims to do just that.
INTRODUCTION
France, 2007
DESPITE IT BEING MID-JULY, THE AIR WAS CHILLY IN PARIS AS I made my way to a travel-writing workshop. The walk was a little over a mile and scenic, with pastry shops, crêperies, and crumbling buildings scattering the streets on the Left Bank. Usually I would just eat a cold bowl of muesli in my apartment before starting my walk, but I was out of milk and hadn’t had time yet to stop at the store. Hunger knotted my stomach, and I decided to stop at my favorite bakery just past Rue Mouffetard, on the way to the Paris American Academy campus on Rue St. Jacques.
The shop, called Pain au Naturel, was known for its organic and natural breads. I loved the small hazelnut rolls most of all. They were only about the size of my fist, hard and crusty on the outside, with a chewy interior studded with raw hazelnuts. The nuts gave the rolls an almost lavender color. I liked mine best torn apart and dunked in a frothy cappuccino.
I shifted my backpack on my shoulder and got in line outside the bakery. It was only 8:30 a.m., but the shelves behind the register were quickly emptying as people grabbed their morning croissants and rolls. Although I had taken five years of French in school prior to coming to Paris, I was still very much a rookie in the language and only knew a few food-related phrases that I felt confident using. I often found myself in large crowds, not having any real idea what was being said around me.
When at last I made it inside, I smelled yeast, fire, and toast. A short, heavyset woman behind the register was taking people’s money and handing them loaves at an astounding pace. When it was finally my turn, I spoke in slow, broken French.
“J’aimerais un rouleau aux noisettes, s’il vous plaît,” I said, the syllables feeling thick and twisted on my tongue. I handed the woman my two euros in exchange for a roll and thanked her before hustling back through the line and out of the shop.
As I continued to walk toward school, nibbling on my roll, I couldn’t help but wonder about the life the woman in the bakery led. The idea of it was so strange to me, coming from a family where everyone worked in PR and marketing. It was always assumed that after I finished college I would move home and get a job at an agency, perhaps as a copywriter. I dreamed of someday writing my own books, maybe even a cookbook, but had no idea how to get there.
An ad for Le Cordon Bleu hung in the entrance to the next Métro stop, depicting a smiling woman wearing a tall chef’s hat. How cool that would be, I thought, to go to Le Cordon Bleu just like Julia Child did. I could only imagine what life for the students would be like as they baked bread and learned
classical French cooking techniques day in and day out. Of course I could never go. I hadn’t heard much about culinary school, except that it was ridiculously expensive. Plus, I was just about to graduate from college. It would be silly to jump back into school now, without getting a bit of job experience first.
I thought back to the time two years before when I had practically begged my parents to let me drop out of college and go to culinary school instead. I had sunk into some late-teenage funk, and had grown bored of lecture halls and fraternity row. I had called my parents from a school psychologist’s office in tears, telling them I wasn’t cut out for this and that my heart told me culinary school was a much better option. They talked me out of it, and I was glad they did. Instead of dropping out of college altogether, I ended up taking a leave of absence before transferring to a different school. I found happiness at the College of Charleston, on the shores of South Carolina, and absolutely loved my time there.
The idea of culinary school still intrigued me, though. It was like an itch I couldn’t scratch, especially here, where I was surrounded by beautiful Parisian bakeries and pâtisseries. I envied the bakers, who would probably never have to work in a drab cubicle or write copy for real estate agencies. As I ate the last crumbs of my hazelnut roll, in a foreign city an ocean away from home, I wondered if there was some way I could make the baker’s life my own.
1
ORIGINS
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, THE KITCHEN WAS A PLACE of comfort to me. My mom tells me that when I was little, my favorite seat in the house was a large wicker basket that I would place on the kitchen floor and sit in as she prepared dinner. She would toss me strips of bell pepper and chunks of baked potato, and I would happily sit and munch away. When I was five years old, my parents took me out to my first fancy meal at the Williamsburg Inn, in Williamsburg, Virginia, where we lived. I was given a high chair and a children’s menu but vehemently beat my spoon against the table until I was given what I really wanted: the wild mushroom soup. From that moment on, I was officially classified as a foodie by the grown-ups around me. I was a child who was always eager to try anything on my parents’ plates. When normal children were eating peanut butter on white bread, I was nibbling on risotto and Brie. I ate frozen peas straight from the bag as if they were candy.
When I officially outgrew the basket, I started to create my first culinary masterpieces straight out of Little House on the Prairie. I threw my eight-year-old efforts into producing hardtack (a flat, hard cracker eaten by soldiers during the Civil War), white bread (I was still unsure of the role of yeast), and rock-hard biscuits. My favorite thing to do in the kitchen was experiment, and it was not uncommon for me to add drops of green food coloring to my baked goods or create new forms of edible playdough or homemade glue (simply flour and water). My mom acted in the role of sous-chef and followed me around with a sponge and water, scrubbing at dried spots of pea-green dough and dustings of flour.
My dad, on the other hand, never really took part in the culinary activities. He was from a small town in Texas and a house of all boys. His mother—my grandmother—despised cooking and often would give each boy a plate and tell them to ring the neighbor’s doorbell to get dinner du jour. Because of his lack of culinary upbringing, later in life he made it a point to find a wife who could cook. After a series of horrendous dates, he became a flight attendant for TWA in an effort to travel the world and (he hoped) meet a quality woman. Luckily, he met my mother. They were set up by mutual friends while living in a coastal suburb of Los Angeles. My mother was a flight attendant as well, and in an effort to impress her, my dad made quiche in a blender on their first date. He lived in a shoebox-size apartment in Los Angeles, and it was the only recipe he knew. My mom, having come from a tight-knit Midwestern family and a long line of great cooks, simply smiled, nodded, and ate the quiche, which couldn’t have been that bad, since they’ve been married now for about thirty years.
Throughout my whole childhood, my mom cooked. She had grown up in Milwaukee, and her grandparents on both sides were immigrants. They passed down recipes and lore from Norway, Poland, and Germany, which my mother ultimately passed down to me. Scandinavian treats were the norm in my house during the Christmas holidays, and my favorite of these treats were the light, airy cookies called rosettes. Every December we baked rosettes in the shapes of stars and snowflakes on the traditional rosette iron that my grandmother had passed down to us. When the cookies had puffed up into a golden caramel color, we quickly peeled them off the iron and dusted them with powdered sugar. I had a bad habit of burning the tips of my fingers on the hot iron in an effort to pull the cookies off without breaking them, but the end result was always worth it. In addition to the rosettes, my mother always made homemade crêpes with strawberry sauce on Christmas morning while my brother and I opened all the gifts under the tree. The crêpes were so thin you could almost see right through them, and I loved mine with extra strawberries and a big dollop of fresh whipped cream. There were also miniature Swedish meatballs and gingerbread cookies made from a recipe perfected in my great grandmother’s Minnesota kitchen.
When I was nine years old, my mom decided my passion for cooking was completely out of her hands and enrolled me in a summer cooking class for kids, along with my best friend, Helen; her twin brother, John; and our friend Ashleigh. It was that summer that my passion for cooking really began.
The class was taught by a tall, older Asian woman with short black hair and wire-rimmed glasses. She spoke with a thick Chinese accent and, ironically, didn’t really seem to like children very much. She had little patience and was very serious about disciplined cooking. I didn’t mind, though, because I was just so happy to finally be free to make food on my own, without my mom peering over my shoulder. Three afternoons each week, we met at the local public school in an empty classroom that was set up with Bunsen burners and a few pots and pans. Large tables filled the room, and construction-paper pies and cakes decorated the walls. I shared a table with my three friends. Miss Kim was constantly telling us to stop chatting, and when she wasn’t looking we would make funny faces behind her back.
During that monthlong class, we made a wide variety of foods, from Belgian waffles to fried rice. We made jumbo chocolate chip cookies (and ate scoops of the creamy, chocolate-studded batter when Miss Kim wasn’t watching); omelets with cheddar cheese; Hawaiian salad full of marshmallows and pineapple bits; and a delicious cereal concoction called “Puppy Chow,” made with rice cereal, chocolate, peanut butter, and powdered sugar. We all took turns at the microwave, carefully melting our chocolate chips in glass-bottomed bowls. My favorite part, though, was slowly pouring the chocolate over the cereal in a long, thin stream. Of course, I also loved rolling up my sleeves and mixing everything by hand, chocolate getting underneath my fingernails and into the lines on my palms.
After class, Helen and I would race back to my house and remake what we’d made earlier, eagerly perfecting the art of cracking an egg into steaming grains of fried rice or creaming butter and sugar together to make chocolate-chip cookie dough. My favorite thing to make in class was delicate, crisp pizzelle cookies. They were made on an iron, just like the rosettes that I knew from home, but the Italian pizzelle also had a slight taste of licorice.
For my friends and me, cooking began to become something of a social activity. Instead of going over to someone’s house to play, we would go over to someone’s house to cook. Helen, Ashleigh, and I would often dress up like Laura Ingalls Wilder or Kirsten, the pioneer girl from the American Girls series. Sometimes we pretended we were on a ship sailing to America from Europe; we were cooks working in the ship’s galley. I begged my grandmother to sew me pioneer and pilgrim apparel to wear just for fun, and I took much joy in fastening my tiny petticoat (with ruffles on the end!), lacing up my boots, and tying my apron tight.
If my parents ever questioned their young daughter’s mental wellness, they never said anything, just smiled and let me do my thing. On a few occasi
ons, I would go as far as taking all the dirty laundry (or what I thought was dirty laundry) to the woods behind my house and then proceed to wash the clothes by hand, with homemade soap that I concocted using an old-time recipe. A few times I cut up green apples into very thin slices, threaded them onto string, and hung them all around the laundry room, to dry for winter. This being the 1990s, there was absolutely no need for me to ration food for winter, but I wanted so badly to be Laura Ingalls Wilder that I took matters into my own hands.
Of course, fantasizing about living in a different century was a childhood phase, but parts of it never really left me. Even as a teenager living in Florida, I would find myself rereading the Little House on the Prairie books in secret and being undeniably drawn to all aspects of frontier life. I loved to wear my long blond hair in two braids and took to old-fashioned activities such as horseback riding, knitting, and baking. I always insisted on baking my own birthday cake every year, and chose elaborate Victorian-style cakes with boiled frosting or meringue—the more layers to the cake, the better. I bought my first candy thermometer when I was fourteen and spent hours by the stove, perfecting the soft ball stage of boiling sugar and water together to create homemade ribbon candy.
Every night growing up, my family ate a homemade dinner together at 6:30 with candles on the table and, oftentimes, in the morning, a homemade breakfast as well. Mom loved to try new recipes, and dinners were healthy by most standards. We lived in a small resort town right on the Atlantic, and I grew up packing my little brother into our big red wagon, along with a bag of puffed rice and the family beagle, and setting out on elaborate “adventures” around the golf course that we lived on. After about two hours of forging new trails along the prairie, we got back just in time for dinner, which was usually chicken, seafood, or pasta. Seafood was easy since we lived in a place where fresh fish were caught daily. Because of this, we never ate too much beef—maybe a steak once a month, if that.
My absolute favorite dish was always linguine with clams. My mom used canned clams from the store and finished the dish with a squeeze of lemon, a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese, and hot chili flakes for heat. I would always push all my clams to the side of my plate and save them for last. I loved the salty, briny taste and the way they squeaked between my teeth. Still to this day, linguine and clams is my number-one favorite meal to request when I go home, and though I’ve tried countless times to re-create my mom’s version, I can never hit it just right on my own.