I think I can trace back my desire to get serious about cooking to a single evening. My mom was visiting us in Chicago with her best friend. Her friend was a refined Londoner I had known my whole life, and whose Italian home I had visited any number of times in Perugia, so it was a pleasure to have them stay while they explored the city for a few days. They arrived too exhausted to endure a restaurant, but my mom asked if there was anything easy for them to snack on. Thinking of all the meals these two women had made for me over the years, I felt it was imperative that I whip up something nice for them. My wife wasn’t home yet, so being on my own, I pulled out a paperback copy of the Fanny Farmer Cookbook I used when I occasionally took over the responsibility for making dinner.
I wanted something quick to make, so I chose a simple recipe that has now long been my “go-to” meal-in-ten-minutes specialty: scrambled eggs topped with asparagus tips sautéed in Parmesan butter. They loved it, and Sally, the English expatriate, looked at me and asked me how I had learned to cook like that. That galvanized my desire to learn more about cooking and, admittedly, maybe garner more fabulous praise like Sally’s.
Soon after I arranged a week off from work to take cooking classes from a school in the western Chicago suburbs run by two retired one-star Michelin French chefs. At their recommendation I took the course on making classic French sauces. In retrospect, I should have been paid by these talented but cunning cretins to take these classes. What they didn’t say was they ran a small, eight table bistro in the front of the kitchen, and my other classmate and I were responsible for all the prep to serve dinner for the single seating at 6pm each evening. We arrived a 7am each morning, and before there was any mention of possibly making, let’s say, some French sauces, we sharpened knives, cleaned chickens and rabbits, and chopped mirepoix until our hands shook. Around noon we lunched on remainders of the previous day’s meal, and finally started roasting veal neck bones for stock.
We made oceans of stock, boatloads of demi-glace, and mounds of glace. From there the sauces finally flowed, and each evening around dark, I’d arrive home exhausted but equipped with a quart of the sauce I’d spent the day making over and over until the chefs declared it just right. The neighbors would be waiting in the cul de sac with bread in hand, waiting to dip right in before I barely got out of the car. The desire to please people with food has never left me.
I still use that old copy of Fanny Farmer because it remains the vital guide to overall American cuisine, but I’ve kept my saucier skills sharp with a copy of the Cordon Bleu Cookbook given to me for my birthday that year from one of those grateful neighbors. This year though, I’ve fallen in love with a new sauce book by Holly Herrick. Her Sauces cookbook in The French Cook series (Gibbs Smith Publishing, 2013), is a tidy yet complete volume of all the essentials. Cordon Bleu trained, she presents recipes and techniques that are classic, and the photos (and what good is a cookbook without photos?) are plentiful, large and in full color. I strongly recommend Sauces for anyone looking to cook well from the start, or to raise their skills a classic notch. As I often tell people who don’t even like to spend time in the kitchen, if you can make a quick and simple Béchamel, you’ve just turned a boiled box of pasta into a French culinary delight. Bon appetit!
berowne.com 