A Celebration of Chefs and Others

My mother's bedside table was laden with books about food. On any given night it might be Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Or Michael Field’s Cooking School. Or the massive two-volume set of The Gourmet Cookbook.

I ended up with her copies of those books, and when I took them home and paged through, I wasn’t surprised that not a single page was soiled. That’s because although she loved, loved, loved food, she didn’t actually cook…except for blanching and roasting the occasional pound of almonds on the cook’s day off. 

The pages with Julia’s roast duck and basic quiche recipes are now well splattered, since I not only read those books but I also love to cook.  My cookbooks are well behaved and stay in the kitchen, but my bedside table is often loaded with books about food. 

My daughter has the kind of relationship with her grandmother that I envy. I have only one memory of my maternal grandmother; she’s lying in a hospital looking small and old offering me Schrafft’s sourballs out of their clear glass jar. At 55, after birthing 13 children, she died of breast cancer. My paternal grandmother lived with us for a year when I was a girl so I have more memories of her. In each one she is wearing black from head to toe and in all of them, clutching her rosary beads.

Besides the black outfit and the constant Hail Mary’s, I remember my mother describing her as “straight off the boat.” (From Ireland) I also remember the nasty “game” my sisters and I played on her the year she lived with us. We would steal her eyeglasses, hide them and then collect a dollar from her for finding them. That’s it, my pocket full of grandma memories.

My daughter, Siena, though, has a grandmother who, at 93, is very much alive and kicking…and getting awards! Lucky girl, not everyone gets to have the famous recipient of the James Beard Lifetime Achievement award, Cecilia Chiang, for a granny. More of a rock star, Cecilia was never the kind of grandmother who knit booties or baked cookies. She gave gifts of green jade and cooked dim sum!

And I was never the daughter-in-law she could relate to. Back tracking a bit here let me say I’ve had three mother-in-laws and all three have been pretty much the same person only with different cultural backgrounds. A coincidence? In therapy it’s called a pattern!

A group of good friends, connected by a love of politics and good food, always used to get together every August in Santa Barbara.  Life slowed down; we’d cook together using all local produce – sweet corn, plum tomatoes, Armenian cucumbers, peppers, tomatillos, Blenheim apricots, avocadoes, Santa Rosa plums – and then feast as the sun went down behind rolling hills planted with avocadoes and lemons.

So you can imagine our excitement when we heard that Johnny Apple – the legendary political columnist and food writer at the New York Times – was coming to town with his wife Betsey.  Johnny was (as many have noted) a force of nature. I first met Johnny when he came to LA to do a feature on Asian Pacific food.  We hit three restaurants in four hours one evening, going from Vietnamese to Chinese dim sum to a Chinese restaurant famous for its “pork pump”.  I was so exhausted I begged off the next three days of eating. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone enjoy food and wine more (even that third dinner you have to eat when you’re a critic.)

Francois Truffaut has been famously quoted about the process of making a movie being similar to a wagon train crossing the country.  You start out the journey with high hopes and the spirit of adventure and halfway through, you just want to get there alive.

That’s pretty much what my journey with cooking has been like.  I seduced my husband with duck breast and wild rice pancakes with apricot sauce.  That was nothin’.  I really loved to cook.  People were always surprised by that and I was always surprised they were surprised.  What? Women in comedy can’t cook?  Every Hungarian Jewish woman has to be a good cook. It’s biological destiny.