A Celebration of Chefs and Others

When I was 15 years old I went to Royce Hall at UCLA to see Marcel Marceau.  I really hate admitting that because people razz me about it all the time, but honestly, I was dazzled by what I saw. The idea that you could make people laugh without uttering one word fascinated me.  Seeing him play the strong man in the circus and give the illusion of holding an enormous barbell as he bends all the way back to the ground, or “walkeeng against zee weend”, or being trapped in ‘zee box’, just blew me away man.

I don’t know what gave me the balls to do this, but I went backstage. After gushing for 5 minutes I asked him if he could recommend someone in Los Angeles who could teach me the technique. Let me first say, that when he opened his mouth and spoke, out came a high-pitched, reedy voice. He chose the right trade. But the guy was so kind and gracious. He told me that Richmond Shepard was a former student of his and a good teacher. 

Although my commute is a short one, traffic puts me in a bad mood. I’m impatient and irritated, not qualities that make for a tranquil drive.  My commuter’s grumpiness was recently soothed by none other than Jacques Pepin himself, master chef, teacher, and internet star along with the beloved Julia Child and others.  He didn’t actually sit next to me flipping crepes in the passenger seat, but he did write the wonderful book The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), and I borrowed the audio book from the equally wonderful public library. 

Pepin does not do the narrating on the audio book himself, and I suspect his accent may have been one of the reasons.  The lack of his own voice is perhaps the only issue I have with the audiobook.  The narrator speaks with just a smidge of a French accent, so he is easy to understand, but he is not a skilled reader and sometimes lets the natural drama in some of Jacques’s stories fall flat.  If you’ve ever seen Jacques Pepin on one of his television cooking shows, you know he has personality, and his energy and humor would have made the audio version of a wonderful read soar.  Stories of childhood summers spent on farms during World War II and then years in his mother’s restaurant followed by grueling apprenticeships in classical French restaurants often made me wish my drive home was longer.

Call it denial having taken this long to write about it. Call it anything you want but there will be NO MORE Gourmet magazine in anyones mailbox ever again and that will take a lot of getting use to. It was always the first food magazine that I opened each month, the others could wait. Of course it's shocking and sad, the end of an era and no more Ruth piloting the ship. And I will most miss her.

I have to admit that I was less then happy when she became the "new" editor, the magazine changed so dramatically or was it overdue to become more modern? Less elitist, less snobby, more real, perhaps? Well, Ruth you sure changed it! Last year I had the pleasure of spending a few hours with Ms. Reichl at a literary writers weekend in Camden, Maine. As part of the weekend event the hosts invited us to a Saturday night "church supper" Maine style. In the big, white Congregational church nestled among the oldest grove of Maple trees in full color was the venue for the event. Various restaurants in the area were picked to make each different course for the dinner.

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.