The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  The book is sly. Think of it as a pro-choice cookbook decorously wrapped in carrots and beans and lettuce leaves. Apart from the chicken broth, you won’t find anything “animal” listed in Madison’s recipes, but read what she has to say about some of those recipes, and you will detect the beginning of a stealth operation—a call to sit down at the dinner table together and put an end to the testy herbivore-carnivore divide. I should have guessed that Madison herself had crossed it, years earlier. And no doubt I would have if I’d looked more carefully at the author’s bio on her jacket flap, and discovered that she had sat on the board of the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance (a piece of information discreetly dropped onto the end of a list of worthy commitments, right after her place on the board of the Seed Savers Exchange), or if I’d found the old interview in which she confessed to being “not a strict vegetarian,” and cheerfully added, “I eat everything, and eat whatever is served.” But I didn’t. A few weeks after I got the book, I took out a bowl of leftover wild rice that I’d served with a leg of lamb the night before. My first instinct was to chuck it, but, given that the book was right there, next to the fridge on the kitchen counter, I looked up wild rice in the index, turned to a recipe with the appetizing, if somewhat oxymoronic name Savory Wild Rice Crepe-Cakes, and glanced at the short passage with which Madison introduces all her recipes. “Try them with a dab of sour cream flecked with chives and smoked trout,” it said. Trout? In a Deborah Madison cookbook? A license to poach on those sacrosanct vegetarian preserves? That was the moment I really started reading.

  In no time, I was cooking Rio Zape Beans with Salt-Roasted Tomatoes, under the spell of this suggestion: “If you crave smoke with your beans, cook these with smoked pork shanks.” For more “smokiness,” I made my broth from the carcass of a smoked chicken, the way Madison allowed that she does whenever a neighbor with a smoker brings her one. I even doubled the amount of spices, as carefree in collaboration with a vegetarian recipe as I’d been when I bought Greens more than twenty-five years earlier—and rarely since. Soon I discovered bacon among the “good companions” that Madison suggests for collards; meats among the good companions for her potatoes; and—introducing a recipe for turnips in white miso butter—her paean to the fish soup, its clam broth sweetened by white miso, that she always eats during stopovers at the Atlanta airport. I bought the miso and made fish soup and, a couple of days later, her extremely delightful turnips.

  Madison, of course, had never kept anyone from fiddling with a recipe before. She simply hadn’t mentioned the possibility, perhaps for fear of offending any of her millions of constant readers for whom détente, let alone the thought of a pork shank sitting in Deborah Madison’s bean pot, would amount to capitulation. But now she was out of the culinary closet, embracing difference. Her good companions for heritage and ancient wheats were braised and roasted meats, and if you didn’t want meat with your farro, white bean, and cabbage soup, that was okay, too. The relief shows. Vegetable Literacy is a happy book—warm, chatty, and immensely informative without being at all didactic—and the odd thing is that Madison has never written so much or so well or so attentively about vegetables as she does now.

  It had been easy to love Greens, maybe because the few vegetarians I knew back then were the kind-of ones, and the serious ones hadn’t become so pious. And I had often cooked from Vegetable Soups, the book in which Madison, who by then had married and moved to the country outside Santa Fe, introduced me to a battery of Mexican herbs and interesting grain-and-vegetable combinations (as in masa dumplings and summer squash in a spicy tomato broth, which I have to admit my husband hates) that I probably wouldn’t have found in any of the other cookbooks I owned twenty years ago. But my eyes had glazed over when I opened Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for the first time. It weighed more than The Raj Quartet (a better read, but still bone-bruising if you happened to be reading in bed), which in itself discouraged browsing, one of the great pleasures of owning a good cookbook. Besides, there was no way anyone could browse through 1,400 (now sixteen hundred) recipes—not unless she was a vegetarian running out of things to make and willing to put in four years, trying a different recipe every night. Vegetable Literacy, by contrast, has 300 recipes and a lot more text. Read it as an introduction to your inner garden—a painless lesson in botany, sensibility, and appreciation that lets you celebrate the depth and beauty of plants in the context of whatever else you’re making. The result may be that, like me, you will soon be serving Madison’s corn and coconut-milk curry with a platter of grilled pork (a “good companion”), her sorrel, watercress, and yogurt sauce over a piece of salmon (another good companion), and little pieces of chicken (yet another) tossed with the tofu cubes in her soy and five-spice braise.

  When I was reading Vegetable Literacy for the first time, the book that surprisingly came to mind was Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Meat, which begins with a disquisition on good husbandry, takes you through the rituals of nurturing and feeding and slaughtering, and deposits you at your stove, cooking with an unexpected understanding of—and strong sense of connection with—the animals you are about to cook, the aromas that will fill your kitchen, and the flavors you will soon taste. Vegetable Literacy does the same for vegetables. “It started with a carrot that had gone on in its second year to make a beautiful lacy umbel of a flower” is how Madison begins, in her own garden. She noticed similar flowers blooming on herbs like parsley, anise, chervil, and cilantro, and quickly discovered that those herbs not only were related botanically to one another but shared the same culinary characteristics and correspondences as the big vegetables in their Umbelliferae family—the carrots, fennel, celery, parsnips, and celeriac—and would “flatter” those vegetables in a dish. She started experimenting. She curtailed the teaching and traveling she had been doing for years. She called this “committing to a garden”—tending to it, finding the richest organic soils for it, learning to plant and turn it in the company of fat worms, glossy beetles, “exotic wasps,” and the occasional “creepy” desert millipede. She carried everything edible that it produced into her kitchen and tasted all the affinities she had reaped.

  Madison describes her project as “cooking and gardening with twelve families from the edible plant kingdom.” Each chapter of Vegetable Literacy is about one of those families. They are not necessarily small families (or even all the possible families), and in a few cases the consanguinity can be fatal. Think of a big extended Italian family with an uncle in the ’Ndràngheta, or an Arab one with a rogue nephew in Al-Qaeda, when you learn that the potatoes, peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes in Madison’s garden are in the same family—botanically speaking, the Solanaceae—as the night-blooming datura, the base of my favorite perfume but stupefying if you stick your nose into a blossom and sniff, let alone sprinkle it onto your eggplant Parmesan. (And, by the way, beware of eating green potatoes; you won’t die, but as Madison learned, dutifully sampling one for her Solanaceae chapter, you will never forget the cramps.) Madison sticks to the cousins you would want to eat for dinner, opening each chapter with a section on the properties of the family, and then, one by one, on each of those edible cousins, with a look at its history, advice on its varieties and cultivation, some kitchen wisdom as to what parts of it to use (or not to use), and of course, her thoughts on its good companions: the herbs and spices and other vegetables; the sauces and cheeses; and scattered judiciously among them, the fish and meats. By the time you get to the recipes for that plant, she has moved you seamlessly into a state of high anticipation and appreciation—which is to say, you have become a starving connoisseur. The recipes are perfect.

  By now, there are ten or fifteen other new (to me) vegetarian cookbooks on my study floor. Most will soon be dispatched to Housing Works, and none have made me miss the garden I tend in Italy in the summer, the way that Deborah Madison just did. I miss the May peas and favas, the June garlics and onion shoots and basil, the July arugula and zucchini, the August melons, eggplants, and tomat
oes, and the first pumpkins of September. Oddly, I no longer miss my chili party, or even regret those ten pricey pounds of beef abandoned in their red bean pot. I find that I’m not much in the mood for meat lately—well, maybe my breakfast bacon, or my monthly porterhouse fix, or one of Madison’s good-companion roasts, braising in a pot of vegetables and herbs. But as often as not, I eat those vegetables first, and most of the meat goes in the fridge.

  A few weeks ago, eight of my Italy friends turned up in New York at the same time, and I decided to get them together for a dinner party. I cooked one of my favorite recipes, a hot pot involving lentils, spicy Italian sausages, and prunes. Two of the friends were vegetarians—one had been at that final chili party—so I did what I usually do, and made a pasta al pesto just for them. This time my carnivores actually took the meat they were served, but when I got to the table I discovered that most had dipped into the pesto, too, and were eating it before I could take it back. Later that night, cleaning up in the kitchen, I asked my husband if everyone we knew could possibly be turning vegetarian. He found the question ridiculous. He said I should know by now that if you put people who lived in Italy anywhere near a bowl of pasta, they would take some, and it didn’t matter if they were carnivores or herbivores, Americans or Italians. (He is an anthropologist and thinks like that.) I wonder. I pointed out that the sausages were the first “real” meat we had eaten all week, and that we’d already had vegetable soup one night (admittedly, with pancetta), and salad for dinner twice—and never mind if one of those salads had anchovies in it, and a little tuna. “That’s kind of kind-of vegetarian,” he said. “Different.”

  EAT, MEMORY

  SEPTEMBER 2016

  I love restaurants. I’m a serial eater-out, prowling New York for an uncommonly delicious dinner, at a bargain price, cooked by someone else. And never mind if the meal turns out to be disappointing. There is always the promise of the next meal, the next new place, and besides, the pleasures of eating privately in public tend to compensate for most culinary catastrophes that do not involve a cab to the emergency room after the latest hole-in-the-wall around the corner serves me last week’s clams. My husband says that I never learn; if there’s a new restaurant in our neighborhood, I try it.

  Given that Paul Freedman’s new book, Ten Restaurants That Changed America, is largely a history of eating out in this country, it’s worth noting that the “restaurant,” at least as food scholars define it, is historically quite recent. The word comes from the French restaurer, to restore, and was coined in the 1760s, after a nutritionally minded Frenchman known only as Boulanger (his first name has disappeared from the annals of gastronomy) decided to open a place in Paris offering a choice of “restorative” meat broths, along with tables to sit at, wine to sip, and possibly a bit of cheese or fruit to end the meal. (BOULANGER SELLS RESTORATIVES FIT FOR THE GODS, the sign on his door said.)

  People, of course, had been eating out for several millennia by the time the mysterious M. Boulanger boiled down the bones for his first soup. Cooking pots, set deep into stone counters, lined the main thoroughfares of ancient Rome. Street vendors in Southeast Asia hawked all the fixings you would need for an exceptionally tasty lunch or dinner, much as they do today. Inns served travelers from whatever provisions happened to be in the innkeeper’s wife’s kitchen; respectable women, forced by circumstances to travel alone, were expected to dine in their rooms (the beginning of room service); and couples could eat together downstairs in a room off the bar, which was reserved for men. What the French call maisons de rendezvous, not to mention the better brothels, served lunch and dinner to their guests—something I discovered toward the end of lunch one afternoon at an excellent restaurant near Tangier, when couple after couple (there were only couples) began to scamper upstairs with their bottle of amontillado before the cheese and the quince paste were even cleared. The great feasts of the aristocracy were cooked in the castle by a battery of chefs and consumed in vast dining rooms, where men and women could mingle freely. Status came with an invitation, not a reservation. The wealth that counted was measured in hectares, exclusivity was what you conferred on the friends (and more important, the enemies) you fed at your domain, and as likely as not, your menus were based on Cardinal Richelieu’s famous dinner parties—fancy and, obviously, French.

  The first commercial appropriation of seigneurial haute cuisine was a Paris restaurant that opened in the late 1770s—ten years before the storming of the Bastille and, appropriately, situated on the Rue de Richelieu. It was called La Grande Taverne de Londres, perhaps to signal its neutrality in the coming domestic head roll, a mile away on the Place de la Concorde. Fifty years later—with new money already flowing into New York by way of mining and stockyard barons, railhead property speculators, futures traders, and the politicians whose pockets they lined—two entrepreneurial brothers from Switzerland, Giovanni (soon to be John) and Pietro (soon to be Peter) Del Monico, raised the money to open the first important French restaurant in the United States. It was at 2 South William Street, in the heart of the financial district, and it came with 80,000 square feet of seriously opulent dining space, including, in the Paris tradition, private rooms available upstairs for negotiating business deals or, more frequently, the pleasant combination of adultery and dinner. The brothers and their descendants—in particular, a nephew by the name of Lorenzo, who turned out to be a visionary restaurateur—followed the money steadily and successfully uptown until at one point there were four Delmonico’s in the city, and in the third to open, a French chef named Charles Ranhofer, who in short order became the most celebrated chef in the United States. Together, Lorenzo Delmonico and Charles Ranhofer generated a passion in the public for their consummate if somewhat overwrought French food, a passion that began to chip away at the social wall between the city’s established first families and its new moneyed classes. If you were able to read a menu that ran to more than a hundred dishes (one of the pleasures of Ten Restaurants is its reproductions of dozens of menus), and had the time to linger over fourteen courses, you could go to Delmonico’s, and everyone who could did.

  Delmonico’s, fittingly, is the first of Freedman’s ten restaurants. It lasted, in its various locations, for nearly a hundred years, during which time it established its style of haute cuisine as the gold standard in American dining and spawned generations of imitations in big cities across the country. It remained the standard until its name was sold by the family in the 1920s, and its lingering reputation was eventually surpassed by the sanctum sanctorum of Henri Soulé’s Le Pavillon, another of Freedman’s ten. Le Pavillon was a seriously snooty place that in fact began as a tourist restaurant in the French pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, but by the 1950s it had morphed into an East Side gastronomic temple, where the possibility of dinner was conferred on a chosen few by its imperious patron, and nobody else could get a table. The fact that I ate there often (or at all) was entirely thanks to my friend and journalism’s budding gourmand R. W. Apple, who at the time was a correspondent for the overnight shift at NBC News and testing the limits of an already famous expense account. I was a graduate student living down the hall and subsisting on Milton, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and tuna curry (as in a can of tuna, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a tablespoon of curry powder).

  Le Pavillon set the midcentury style for fine French dining in New York—much of it classic brasserie fare refined by its estimable chef, Pierre Franey, into an almost ambrosial simplicity. Meanwhile, the front of the house, ruled by Soulé’s moody assessments of who mattered and who did not, kept customers in line through what Freedman calls the “intimidating ordeal of trial by snobbery,” and replaced the dread of a curdled sauce with the dread of a table in Siberia (a fate visited on Harry Cohn, the CEO of Columbia Pictures, when he bought Le Pavillon’s building, in the mid-fifties). It may be that Soulé himself shared the anxieties of a new urban postwar society eager to reconfigure old distinctions between different kinds of money and status. But,
as chef after chef escaped his reign of terror and opened admirable French restaurants of their own—twelve in New York alone—that legacy was bound to pall.

  Paul Freedman is a social historian—a medievalist by training, known in academic circles as the author of books such as Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, a classic study of the spice trade as it affected taste and status in European culture in the Middle Ages; and now, among foodies, as the paterfamilias of the food-history program at Yale, where he teaches and where he has broken down another kind of exclusivity by inviting chefs, food scientists, and writers to teach and speak. He has spent the better part of the past ten years eating out, and it is clear from the first few pages of Ten Restaurants that those restaurants are not the whole story he has to tell, but simply what you could call transformative prototypes—platforms from which to open a discussion of the way America eats, the ethnic and racial and regional and class and immigrant realities that its kitchens represent, and the entrepreneurs with the passion or the wisdom or simply the ambition to embrace (and profit from) the simmering of the stockpot of social change.