It’s a cookbook, but it’s also a manual, a how-to guide for the DIY foodie, with everything you need to throw down-and-dirty feasts for your family and friends. You’ll find diagrams, line drawings, timelines, recipes, and other handy instructional materials showing how to create rugged feasts such as sturgeon cooked on cedar planks the way the natives do it in the Pacific Northwest, whole pig cooked on a vertical spit in a shed modeled after those I saw in the Black Mountains of North Carolina, and smoked barbecue brisket inspired by my wife Emily’s home state, Texas.
These gatherings are no Martha Stewart affairs. The pages tell you how to make old wine barrels into cooking vessels and outdoor ovens out of inexpensive cinder blocks. This book is for hardware junkies who like to play with fire, dig ditches, and get their hands dirty in both the garage and the kitchen. Each chapter in this book is a blueprint for a party including one big main dish, and in many instances also includes step-by-step instructions for building the vessel for cooking the main dish if you’re doing the full-size feast. Count on these feasts to involve more than a week’s prep, at least one trip to the hardware store, and often an outdoor fire. I recommend learning your way around the cooking equipment described in this book before diving in. Know how it operates and be careful, as with any cooking tool you’re working with for the first time.
Although the main feasts are designed to serve huge crowds, each feast also has a version that feeds closer to eight than eighty and employs conventional equipment, such as a stovetop or backyard grill. Likewise, side dish and dessert recipes yield eight or ten servings, but they were all designed so that they could be scaled up without compromise. Many of the components in all of the dishes can be made ahead of time. And because a feast inevitably yields leftovers, every chapter gives a recipe for how to make a delicious next-day meal from them.
I’m a chef. I own a gastropub in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Culver City. I’ve been cooking since I dropped out of USC during my junior year, where I had gone with the hope of becoming a professional baseball player. When that didn’t pan out, I didn’t want another career—I wanted another passion. I jumped in my car and headed up to northern California, where some friends were living, and moved into a flat on Union and Taylor. Car chase scenes were often filmed there, so every few months stuntmen would fly airborne outside my window. This was my idea of having arrived.
I had a restaurant job in North Beach, and then, after writing letters for months, I finally got hired at Chez Panisse, where I was schooled in the ethos of using local, seasonal ingredients. After I came back to Southern California, I worked at Campanile for a few years before opening my first restaurant, Chadwick, named after Alan Chadwick, who introduced biodynamic gardening methods to the United States.