The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  Roden’s reputation preceded her to Asturias. We were met at the airport near Oviedo and invited to beautiful restaurants where the rice pudding was “deconstructed” (rice on the bottom, caramel in the middle, and a froth of milk on top) and the lamb chops served in a sauce of baby snails, the young chefs of northern Spain being much under the influence of Ferran Adrià, the Catalan kitchen impresario who had taken the French idea of “creator cuisine” and elaborated on it to the point where you couldn’t tell if the foam you were spooning was asparagus or trout. Roden had expected simple food in what is still a largely undiscovered region of green fields and streams running from mountain caves (where the shepherds smoke a sharp local blue cheese called Cabrales) to the fishing villages of the Atlantic coast. She cheerfully ate her way through ten-course nueva cocina dinners, but the things she asked about and jotted down in the outsize flowered folder—“Gauguin, from the National Gallery”—that she carried everywhere with her were the best of the local foods: the beans and sausages; the fresh anchovies, marinated in an escabeche that could easily have come from Persia; the morning’s dorade, baked in white wine, shellfish stock, and a simple sofrito of onion, garlic, saffron, and smoked paprika, and finished with a splash of cognac. (“This will go in my book,” she said after her first forkful.)

  She has a horror of fusion food, “on principle,” though she allowed that nothing she ate in Asturias was quite so “fusion” as the dish called “Egyptian sushi bottarga” that she was served on her last trip to Cairo, in 2003. (“I was giving seminars to Egyptian chefs,” she said. “I told them, ‘You’ve got to have your food. At the time of the Mamluks, you had three hundred recipes; now you make only four. Don’t do fusion. Please!’”) Pepe Iglesias, a local food writer who was Roden’s touchstone on the Asturian trip, had told her that there were now twenty-five serious young fusion chefs in Asturias, and after a few days’ eating she ventured the opinion that that was perhaps more “creators” than a barely touristed province of a million people needed. (“When I travel now, I’m so used to being looked after,” she said later. “I’m used to accepting what happens, but no one can control what I do or think.”) What interested her more was the history of Asturian food. She was curious about the influence of the local monasteries, because Spain’s religious orders had been in large part responsible for the development and refinement of traditional Spanish cuisine—much more so than the aristocracy or the upper classes, which had been eating “Bourbon food” since Philip V inherited the Spanish throne, in 1700, and moved from Versailles to Madrid. (“The monasteries were the centers of gastronomy here,” she told me. “They had money and land and their own peasants. Some of the great Lenten recipes came from them.”) She was curious about the influence of the “Indianos”—poor Asturians who had sailed to the Americas, made fortunes in tobacco, sent their brides to cooking school in Paris, and come home at the turn of the twentieth century with a taste for big painted Mexican villas, Cuban rum, and French crêpes. By then we had been to Casa Fermín, the great traditional restaurant of Oviedo, eaten its best dishes, and talked recipes with the chef. Now she wanted to talk to ordinary people, who lived from the sea and the land, about what they cooked at home.

  On our last night in Spain, we drove into the Picos, to an old farmhouse near a cluster of villages where the family of a forty-year-old Asturian named Jaime Rodriguez has farmed for generations. We had met Rodriguez by chance, coming out of a shop in the town of Cangas de Onís that specialized in Asturian beans, and he had invited us home. For Roden, he was one of the “good things that just happen” when she cooks or travels. He was personable, articulate, intelligent, and, it turned out, an enthusiast of Asturian food, someone who had leaped through centuries, going from “two pigs, some sheep, and a cow” to university in Barcelona and on to a good government job—after which he and his wife had added a wing to their farmhouse and turned the rest into a bed-and-breakfast, where people hiking or fishing in the Picos could stay and, if they were hungry, eat. His mother-in-law made supper for the guests that night: vegetable soup from the garden and a tuna loaf, made with eggs, onions, and red peppers, called rollo de bonito, “from the part of the tuna that rich people don’t like.” While she was cooking, Roden took out her folder, settled into an armchair by the television, turned to Rodriguez, and started asking questions.

  “What is the food of the mountains?”

  “White beans. Not the biggest, they’re too expensive. We eat green beans sometimes, in expensive restaurants, with crab or lobster or langoustines. But for everyday, we eat small white beans. My parents grow four kinds. We eat fabada all the time.”

  “How many times a week?”

  “At least four times, always with pork, but not necessarily with chorizos. We also eat cornmeal, eggs, onions, and bacon.”

  “When did the corn and beans come?”

  “In 1546.”

  “And are eggs important?”

  “Eggs, meat, beans—those are the most important.”

  “And fresh vegetables?”

  “We eat very few fresh vegetables in Asturias. The beans, some peppers, potatoes, and peas. This is a region of meat eaters. The sea is a small slice of it. We eat a lot of game: rabbit, boar, deer, birds, wild goat.”

  “What else is traditional here?”

  “Crêpes, with sugar or honey and apples. And of course sidra—hard cider.”

  “How many families make their own cider?”

  “In my village, two.”

  “What are the local tapas?”

  “Croquetas. Chorizos with sidra. Big blood sausages—you boil them, slice them, and then fry them. Pork tripe. Pork cheeks. And fresh bacon, boiled and served with potatoes.”

  “And for a wedding?”

  “Baby goat, and especially lamb. Inside, you fry the lamb with onions and white wine, and then you stew it. Outside, you use burning embers.”

  “What do you eat for dessert?”

  “We have apple cake and flan. The flan is traditional. My mother makes it only with eggs and sugar, not milk.”

  “And how does she make it?”

  “Over a corncob fire. The first layer is caramelized sugar. Then she adds the sugar and eggs, and then she covers the lid with charcoal from the corncobs. Every few minutes she stirs the flan and adds more charcoal.”

  “Is the flan creamy?”

  “No, it’s very dense. We eat it a lot—it’s very common. For special occasions, we make rice pudding.”

  “Rice pudding? With anise? With butter and milk?”

  “Not with butter. With rice, milk, cinnamon, sugar, lemon rind, and yes, anise or a little cognac.”

  “Do you think I could get the recipe?”

  Claudia Roden’s masterly compendium of Iberian culinary arts and history, The Food of Spain, was published in 2011. She remains, at eighty, the president of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery.

  THE PHILOSOPHER CHEF

  NOVEMBER 2012

  In 1997, in Amsterdam, Yotam Ottolenghi finished writing the last chapter of his master’s thesis on the ontological status of the photographic image in aesthetic and analytic philosophy, rode his bicycle to the post office, and sent copies of the manuscript home to Israel. It was his second year away. He was twenty-nine, and nearing the end of an adventure in indecision that began a few months after he had completed the coursework for a fast-track interdisciplinary bachelor’s and graduate degree at Tel Aviv University—known among students as “the genius program,” because only fifteen freshmen a year were admitted—and decamped with his boyfriend to sample the famously accessible offerings of the city of marijuana cafés, Ecstasy raves, and breakfast hams. When he wasn’t celebrating his release from school, he worked. He edited the Hebrew pages of a Dutch-Jewish weekly known by the acronym NIW, plowed through the essays of Ernst Gombrich, passed the qualifying exams for a doctorate in the United States—he was thinking comparative literature at Yale—sat through long nights as a desk clerk at the
kind of hotel he wouldn’t recommend, and wrote his thesis. “I’m incredibly self-disciplined,” he says. “I never would have not written it.”

  One copy went to his thesis adviser in Tel Aviv, and another to Yehuda Elkana, the philosopher who created the genius program. A third copy—“the one I dreaded sending”—went to his parents in Jerusalem, where his father was a chemistry professor at Hebrew University and his mother, a former teacher and herself the daughter of a professor, was at the Education Ministry, running the country’s high schools. It was a moment of truth, Ottolenghi says. He slipped a note into the envelope—“actually, buried it in the manuscript”—which read, “Here is my dissertation. I’ve decided to take a break from academia and go to cooking school.” A few months later, he was in London, rolling puff pastry at the Cordon Bleu.

  The moral is that smart people can be masters of many trades, though Ottolenghi claims that it took him a lot longer to “really experience pastry with my hands” (six months) than to make his way through Hegel (an excruciating few weeks). At forty-three, he is not much changed from the recovering geek of his Amsterdam years—lanky, loping, and quite tall, with the same short, sticking-up dark hair and fashionably stubbled chin, and even a version of the same black-rimmed student glasses. The difference is that today he wears the happy smile of a man who has left behind The Phenomenology of Mind for baked eggplants with lemon thyme, za’atar, pomegranate seeds, and buttermilk-yogurt sauce—and in the process become the pen, prime mover, and public face of a partnership of four close colleagues who have quietly changed the way people in Britain shop and cook and eat.

  At last count, his eponymous reach extended to two hugely popular London restaurants, the flagship Ottolenghi in Islington, and in Soho, NOPI (for North of Piccadilly, but known to foodies as “Yotam’s new place”), as well as three packed gourmet delis, in Notting Hill, Kensington, and Belgravia, which are never without his favorite pastries and his signature platters of butternut-squash salad, roasted aubergine with yogurt topping, grilled broccoli with chili and fried garlic, and fresh green beans. The delis, along with the Islington restaurant, also provide a catering service that will deliver a dinner party to your door or, if you happen to be the queen, put together a groaning board of snacks (as in “golden and candy beetroot, orange, and olive salad with goat’s cheese, red onion, mint, pumpkin seeds, and orange blossom dressing”) for the eight hundred and fifty people sipping champagne at your jubilee party at the Royal Academy of Arts.

  Ottolenghi himself is the author of a weekly food-and-recipe column in The Guardian and a visually irresistible vegetable cookbook called Plenty—proof that an education in aesthetics is never wasted—and with Sami Tamimi, his Palestinian executive chef and one of the early Ottolenghi partners, the coauthor of two other cookbooks, the latest of which, Jerusalem, is about the food of their hometown and the rich symbiosis of Arab and Jewish culinary traditions that survives in the markets and kitchens of an otherwise fractured city. (The book came out in Britain and America this fall, but the British got a preview late last year, when Ottolenghi became the peripatetic guide and narrator of a BBC documentary about his research, Jerusalem on a Plate.)

  No one who has grown up in the Mediterranean Middle East can really live without the colors and textures and tastes of home. The food that Ottolenghi serves and writes about often includes them all, but it isn’t ethnic cooking grounded in one tradition, and it certainly isn’t fusion cooking or its muddled suburban hybrids. He uses the fish and meat and produce that everyone in Britain eats, and then, he says, “borrows from here and there” the tastes that will produce a recipe he likes. His instincts are collaborative and practical. When he started the column in The Guardian six years ago, he wanted to create recipes that a home cook could pretty much put together from the shelves of a decent supermarket. (At first he sent them to friends to test. His bottom line: a harried childminder in Hackney, with two children of her own to feed.) He was wrong about supermarkets. But his column was so successful that the chain Waitrose began to stock his favorite condiments and spices. And he eventually launched an extensive online catalogue, in the hope of restoring domestic calm to readers like the woman who wanted to make his whitefish-grapefruit-and-fennel seviche. She ignored his advice about the quarter teaspoon of dried fennel pollen—“Don’t worry if you can’t get it, though. This cured fish dish will still taste great”—and wrote to the paper, “I’m a bit of a Yotam fan, but his mere mention fills my husband (who does most of the shopping) with dread. This week’s ‘dried fennel pollen’ might send him over the edge.”

  Ottolenghi’s first word was “ma.” He didn’t mean “mama,” and he didn’t mean marak, which is soup in Hebrew. He meant the croutons that his mother scattered on the tray of his high chair while the soup was simmering. (“Store-bought croutons,” he maintains.) He can still name everything his parents cooked, from his mother’s beef curry, stuffed red peppers, and gazpacho to his father’s polpettone and polenta. His older sister, Tirza Florentin—a businesswoman who lives in Tel Aviv with her family—says that as a boy in Jerusalem, he was “very passionate about food,” but much more interested in talking about what he ate and where it came from than in actually cooking any. It was a household of cosmopolitan tastes and backgrounds. Ottolenghi’s mother, who comes from a Berlin Jewish academic family (her uncle was the modernist architect and critic Julius Posener), had arrived in Palestine via Sweden, where she was born, in 1938, the same year that his father’s Florentine merchant family arrived from Italy. Two prominent secular Zionist clans had pulled up stakes in the wake of the Hitler-Mussolini military pact and, with it, the certainty of disaster.

  Ottolenghi calls them a strong-minded and resilient people—smart (one grandfather started the mathematics department at Tel Aviv University) and, like him, masters of many trades (one grandmother worked for Mossad, forging documents for the agents who, most famously, captured Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires and delivered him to an Israeli prison). His sister calls it a family of high unstated expectations “that were simply something we grew into.” The burden of them fell on Yotam when he was twenty-three, and his younger brother, Yiftach, was killed by friendly fire during field exercises toward the end of his military service. “For Yotam, I think it was a tragedy on top of a tragedy,” Florentin says. “Yiftach had been the star; he was outspoken, charming, always in trouble—making us laugh—and very bright. Yotam was the reserved one then. And like me, he was in a kind of under-the-surface competition with our brother. He wanted to find his niche. When Yiftach died, we were very concerned about how my father would get through the loss. He was a conservative person, which made it terrible for Yotam. Not talking to him about being gay—that was the price he had to pay for a long time.”

  Every Israeli boy spends three years immediately after high school in the Israel Defense Forces. (Girls spend two.) Ottolenghi had studied Arabic in school—in part, in the hope of avoiding assignment to a fighting unit. He succeeded and went to army intelligence headquarters instead. “Otherwise, I was a conformist boy,” he says. “I studied physics and math because my best friend was good at that, but I was really much more interested in literature. I read a lot in the army. I had a good time and made lots of friends and went home at night for dinner.” A few months before his discharge, he fell in love with a twenty-five-year-old Tel Aviv psychology student named Noam Bar, and that fall—after a summer in Berlin, learning German—he moved to Tel Aviv, started college, and began experimenting with his father’s Florentine pasta sauces. (Bar did the dishes.) He also managed to land a part-time job on the news desk at Haaretz. “I’d arrive at four-thirty in the afternoon, when the news was coming in fast,” he says. “It was very exhilarating—everybody was young, everybody smoked. I was going to become a journalist if not a chef.” His parents were still thinking “a professor.” Four years later, with a thesis to write, he left for Amsterdam with Bar. “We arrived the month of the Rabin assassination and joined the demonstr
ation,” he says. “That death was the end of a moment of high optimism at home. Israel became a very closed culture again, living according to its own rules. There was a desire growing in me to live somewhere else.”

  In Amsterdam, he began to cook in earnest. He prowled the fishmongers for mackerel and herring. He stopped at the butchers he passed for bones, and made his own stocks. He roasted, sautéed, and baked his way through Julia Child, started ordering from Books for Cooks, and “cooked for everyone who asked.” So many people did ask that at dinnertime, his walk-up, on Herengracht, turned into an open house. “We were his guinea pigs,” a Tel Aviv friend named Ilan Safit, who was studying in Amsterdam at the time, told me. “I had a Dutch girlfriend. We were living practically hand to mouth, but even after we got married we must have eaten at Yotam’s every other night. He loved the kitchen. He was obviously an intellectual—a first-class intellectual—but he wasn’t happy writing philosophy in his study. He was happy feeding people. He said, ‘Ilan, I don’t want to go back to academia, I don’t want to live with books.’”