A Celebration of Chefs

Feast on Me

I’d just finished writing my memoir Siren's Feast, An Edible Odyssey, a coming of age tale filled with recipes from my Armenian youth, my vegetarian restaurant on the island of Ibiza and various exotic locales I’d spent time in.

When I first told people I had written an autobiographical cookbook, they offered perplexed looks.

“A what?” was the usual response.

An editor at a large publishing house told me my combination autobiography/cookbook was not feasible for a large bookstore display.

“Where would it be placed?” she asked. “In the cookbook section? With the travel writing? The biographies?”

“Put it everywhere,” I told her. “People will figure it out.”

Discovering Mexican Flavors

Who knew from Mexico whilst being brought up in the Monopoly board burbs of Southern New England in the fifties? It seemed a very distant land – exotic, fantastic – as foreign and far away as California. The word Mexico called to mind jumping beans, dancing with sombreros, "Z's" slashed midair, Cisco and his humble sidekick Pancho galloping away, Pancho Gonzales slamming a tennis serve, Speedy Gonzalez slamming a cat — a lot of really speedy stuff. It's no wonder I thought the Mexican peoples only ate fast food.

I was growing up in the miraculous new age of instant gratification grub. Chinese food, pizza, take out burgers, and foods hunted and gathered from pouches and frozen boxes were America's new staples. New sorts of consumables were purchased by my parents weekly. I recall my first corn products off a cob – daffy yellow corn chips crunched hand over fist in front of the television console, lumped into a large category called "snacks." Anything one ate away from the dinner table and consumed mindlessly, endlessly, with no silverware, that soiled your fingers and "ruined your appetite" was a "snack." So when I visited California in seventy-two and experienced Mexican food at a party for the first time, corn chips dipped in a tasty chartreuse paste, it continued to seem "snack," and not to be taken seriously.

Suzanne Goin's Succotash

This year, in our house, we're cooking our version of Suzanne Goin's succotash. Of course, Suzanne Goin doesn't call it succotash; in her book Sunday Suppers at Luques, she calls it sweet corn, green cabbage and bacon. We call it succotash because we throw in some lima beans and way more butter:

Cut 6 thick slices of bacon into small pieces and cook in a casserole until crispy. Remove and drain. Melt 1 stick of butter in the remaining bacon grease and add 1 sliced onion and some salt and pepper. Saute for a few minutes, then add half a small green cabbage, sliced, and cook until wilted. Add 2 packages of cooked frozen lima beans and 2 packages of frozen corn. Cook about 5 minutes, stirring, till the corn is done. You can do this in advance. Reheat gently and add the bacon bits. (Of course you might be able to get fresh corn, in which case feel free to overreach.)

- Recipe courtesy of Nora Ephron

Page 15 of 15

A Celebration of Chefs and Others