Eating alone is a trying thing for some people, writing cooking and eating off
as products of a banal bodily necessity. I love to eat and cook alone,
using the kitchen as an improvisational laboratory to experiment with
recipe ideas, flavor combinations, and cooking techniques. MFK Fisher,
a witty food writer with a fluid, deeply expressive writing style
bursting with gastronomic knowledge, shared my passion. She was one of
the best food writers out there, blurring the lines between the genres
of food anthropology, ecology, travel literature, and cooking.
Simply put, she made being a foodie cool long before it was fashionable. Her
great strength as a writer is her ability to drag you into her prose to
taste, smell, and feel your way through her experiences in and around
the kitchen. Mary Frances was not afraid to dine alone, in fact she
loved it, and one short and sweet chapter of her An Alphabet for Gourmets
I always measure bliss in minutes. Our 220 minutes ticked away at the restaurant on Rue de Bac in Paris. We were meeting our friend, Nicolas outside of the closed restaurant on a Saturday afternoon where he worked. He was the ‘Chef of the moment’ in a city where that accolade can be very fleeting. We had made plans to have dim sum and afternoon tea with dessert at one of his favorite secret places. We would spend the afternoon walking and talking about food, like we often did.
It’s fortunate that the world’s largest atom-smasher shut down in Geneva, Switzerland this past week and had to be repaired after just ten days of operation. Los Angeles’s own human particle accelerator 2003 Bon Appétit Chef of the Year Alain Giraud was gearing up to teach class at the always stimulating Chefmakers Cooking Academy in Pacific Palisades (Chefmakers.com) last Thursday and there is no way these two powerful kinetic instruments could work at the same time if planet Earth hopes to remain on its axis. (Chef Giraud has a great new restaurant called Anisette Brasserie in Santa Monica and Alain thought he would take a breather from his 7:30 am to midnight duties and teach a class to 26 drooling citizens. I’ve been there for breakfast and lunch and I can barely chew because I’m smiling so much after each bite.)
In the summer of 1966 I worked as a dishwasher in a summer camp near Hunter Mountain in upstate New York. This was in the pre-automatic dishwasher days meaning dirty dishes were dumped in a super hot sink of soapy water and washed and dried by hand. I used to come in around 6 a.m. to clean the breakfast pots and pans. Henry, a very tall, rail thin man who had been a cook in World War II in Europe, had gotten there at least an hour before me; I usually found him smoking a filterless cigarette and slowly beating powdered eggs and water in a huge stainless steel bowl or ladling out pancakes on the football field-size griddle.