EAT THE WAY YOUR FAMILY DID
DURING OUR CONVERSATIONS, several chefs lovingly called out their parents who were not good cooks. To preserve the peace at his family’s next holiday gathering, I won’t name the chef who said of the woman who gave him life: “She can screw up cold cereal.”
Another chef explained that both of his parents were world-renowned surgeons, so meals at home were handled mainly by babysitters who heated frozen dinners in the microwave for him and his siblings. On the rare night when his mom would cook, it was often a specialty they called “Desert Chicken.” You’ll never make it, but here’s the recipe: “She would take chicken breasts, put them on a sheet pan with oil, put it in a cold oven, and turn it to three fifty. She would put rice in water, turn that on, put carrots in water, turn that on; then she would go upstairs and take a bath. Whenever she came down is when dinner was ready. By then, the chicken was screwed, the rice was a mess, and the carrots had turned to particles.”
Future chefs who grow up like this start cooking out of self-preservation. But many more cited the way their parents or grandparents cooked and ate at home as the basis for their most healthful eating habits today. Here’s what previous generations did right, and what inspires their chef progeny to eat well today.
Lesson 11: Smart chefs’ parents cooked without processed convenience foods
“I was one of the lucky kids—I have a Greek and Sicilian mother,” says Michael Symon. The owner of three metro Cleveland restaurants rarely ate out as a child. As a result, he benefited from a mostly Mediterranean diet at home: “A lot of greens, vegetables, meat, and fish. My father is Eastern European, which is another kind of food family—sausages, pierogies, stuffed cabbage.”
As someone with forebears from Kiev myself, I have to say that those Eastern European delicacies are not exactly spa cuisine. But Symon points out that “everything was made from scratch, which I think is the biggest factor in staying fit. I’m a firm believer that all this packaged stuff Americans are buying up in gobs is making them fatter. When my grandfather wanted pie, he made a pie.” His father’s father, he adds, is ninety-four years old. “Healthy as a horse, lives on his own, golfs three days a week in the summer and bowls three days a week in the winter.”
Today, Symon and his wife, Liz, cook at home often. Like the elder Symons, he reaches for real foods, not butter substitutes or any other supposedly healthful imitators (he shuns even turkey “bacon” as a processed impostor). Symon was particularly passionate and emphatic on this point, but many chefs felt the same: Eat real food. Food like previous generations ate—food made from ingredients that grow and eventually rot, not those that are manufactured and stick around unchanged through several presidential administrations even when exposed to the air.
The man with the pig tattoos still puts together the kind of balanced plates his mom did: “I love meat—it’s my Midwestern upbringing,” says Symon. “We do eat meat often, but we also eat a ton of vegetables and a lot of grains—quinoa and farro.” Roasted beets are a frequent vegetable, and a favorite dinner, lifted from a houseguest’s recipe, is chicken thighs with kale and potatoes, cooked in one pot. (The recipe follows.)
Lesson 12: They sought out great ingredients—and used them wisely
“My mother was very passionate about good food and good ingredients,” says Alex Guarnaschelli. “I would joke that my mother would do the grocery shopping and then my parents would pay the rent.”
I don’t think anyone should endanger their mortgage for groceries, but her family had the right idea: Make wholesome food a priority. While wholesome and homemade doesn’t necessarily mean fancy, buying more fresh, organic vegetables, fruits, fish, and meat may mean your grocery bill will go up. This is where it helps to borrow some restaurant chef behavior: Waste nothing. If you’re going to invest more in quality ingredients, get as many meals as you can from them. (More on this in Chapter 6: Eat In Often.)
Even though preserving techniques like pickling, curing, and jarring feel old-fashioned today, Marcus Samuelsson argues that, “to truly be modern and contemporary, we have to know the past.” As kids in Sweden, he and his two sisters would spend part of the autumn pickling vegetables and making jam with his grandmother and mom. “That wasn’t work; that was fun; that was how we got together,” he recalls. “Fall was plums and apples. Then mushrooms. I was having a good time, playing soccer with apples, throwing them at my sisters and cousins. Then cooking them with Grandmother. It sounds very old-school, but I grew up that way. Americans throw away one-third of our food today. That is not the way to move forward.” I have to agree with him. While I’m not prepared to go full-on pioneer woman—freezing keeps food nicely too—I love the idea of a future where we all buy better-quality food, waste less of it, and are better fed and healthier for our efforts.
Lesson 13: They knew where their food came from
“My grandfather had an amazing green thumb,” recalls Sueños chef-owner Sue Torres. “He took incredible pride in it. I mean, the grandkids could get away with a lot, but we didn’t play ball around the garden, because that would be big trouble—you know, God forbid a ball should find its way into Grandpa’s garden.” This was her mother’s side of the family, Italian and based in Bay Shore, Long Island. “The Italian side of my family was big into gardening, fishing, crabbing. We would bring a bridge table down to the marina with chairs and a deck of cards. The bait for the crab was chicken. My grandfather made his own crab nets, and we had a killie trap. Once we had some crabs, then we would go fishing—a big family affair in the summer.”
A visit to Torres’s other grandmother, who was Puerto Rican and lived in Corona, Queens, sometimes meant a trip to the slaughterhouse. “My sister and I would call it ‘the petting zoo,’” she says, laughing. “We would play with the little animals.” While this struck me as surprising for a New York City borough in the 1970s, Torres points out that it wasn’t at all odd in that community, with its many immigrants who had grown up in rural areas. Back on the farm in Puerto Rico, “She would go out, pick up a chicken, kill it, clean it, and start making dinner.”
It is not as if Torres is catching her own crabs and slaughtering her own chickens. But the same attitude is easily adopted, without the hassle of a fishing voyage or trip to a slaughterhouse. (Note to Manhattanites: Would you even know where to find an abattoir, now that the meatpacking district is inhabited by fashion designers?) These days a big part of her job is working with purveyors to get the best ingredients. “That goes back to my Italian heritage—you have to have the best possible ingredients to make a great dish.” It remains good advice: Buy the best you can. Look for local fish, meats, dairy, and eggs at your grocery and spend some time browsing the farmers’ market.
But what came naturally to our grandparents can be both inspiring and daunting today. I would love to be the sort of cook who can prowl the market for what’s freshest and looks most delicious, composing a meal in my head as I go. Ted Lee, despite being an expert recipe writer, is sympathetic. “My problem is I want everything, and I’ll spend a hundred and twenty dollars and have nothing that goes together,” he says. “I prefer a script.” His coauthor and brother, Matt Lee, on the other hand, is one of those roamers who says, “The best-looking vegetable is the one I’ll design a menu around. That’s usually the way dinner begins.” Try this, as he does, when you’re not cooking for guests. “I prefer when the stakes are low,” says Matt. “When it’s just me and my wife, I swing for the bleachers a little bit. This is an opportunity to experiment.”
It’s understandable if none of this comes instinctually. Many of our parents were straight out of the canned-vegetable generation. The Lees had two parents who cooked; their father, they recall over our lunch together, was raised in a home with a big vegetable garden, and their grandmother and mother pickled. “But when we were growing up he made this chipped beef with artichoke hearts, remember?” says Ted.
“He used Buddig packaged deli beef that you shred,” adds Matt.
“With canned artichoke hearts . . .”
“And the binder was cream of mushroom soup.”
“Anyhow,” says Ted, “it was delicious.”
Lesson 14: They used meat sparingly, and kept portions modest
Wolfgang Puck’s mother was a hotel kitchen chef in Austria, but at home “we ate very simple: noodles, salad, things from the garden,” Puck remembers. “Very little meat, because it was expensive. Twice a month, maybe, we would have Wiener schnitzel.” For the same reason, their portions were smaller than what most Americans today are used to. “When we cooked a chicken it was for six people.” Not by coincidence, he says, “There were no big, fat people in the village where I grew up.”
He can afford to eat whatever he likes now, but those early decisions made out of necessity inform how he eats to this day: He doesn’t eat a lot of meat, preferring fish. When he does order a steak, he’ll often split one eight-ounce portion with his wife. You don’t need a lot of meat, he says, and, “You don’t have to fill the plate.”
I should add here that I don’t believe having food be prohibitively expensive is a good way to cut down one’s consumption. But meat in contemporary America has become perhaps too affordable, owing to shameful factory farming methods and animals confined to feedlots. It’s worth it to pay extra for well-raised meat without added hormones and antibiotics, and if the upshot is that you’re inclined to stretch it into a couple more meals by eating smaller portions, so much the better.
A little chicken story: After a disappointing corrupt-file experience at the computer fix-it shop, I was seeking solace and dinner makings in the nearby Chelsea market, with its Italian specialty grocer, excellent produce mart, and heritage-breeds butcher where the meats are laid out as if in a Tiffany jewel case. I asked for a small chicken, to roast for three people.
The man behind the counter—if his poultry was from old breeds, he was that new breed of tattooed hipster butcher—weighed it and told me the price. I flinched.
“Really?” I asked, and instantly felt a little shame at hearing my own accusatory tone. I wanted to add, “I’m not one of those people who expects to pay pennies a pound for factory-farmed chicken.” But this was a very dear chicken.
He became gently defensive: “It’s a red cockerel, very delicious. Very chickeny.” I nodded and, somewhat shamed, paid for my little bird while listening to the internal monologue I’d inherited from my thrifty ancestors. Very chickeny? So what should it taste like? I later asked my mom what she was paying for well-raised chicken in Los Angeles. When I told her what I had paid, she said, reliably, “For that money it should have puckered up and kissed you.”
You can bet that I treated that chicken with care. I massaged butter into its skin like a suntan lotion jockey at a posh hotel pool and roasted it with lemon and herbs in its cavity. I made stock from the neck and carcass, sliced white meat for sandwiches for my son and me, used the dark meat for tacos one night, and kept the rest in the refrigerator for a few days with my husband picking off a drumstick and wings.
You know what? When I stopped to consider what I’ve paid for a single-portion roast chicken dinner in a nice restaurant, I have to admit to you and to my tattooed butcher that this chicken was actually a good buy. And, yes, very chickeny.
Lesson 15: They didn’t have dessert after every dinner
Although he was the youngest chef to earn the prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France certification in pastry, Jacques Torres did not grow up surrounded by desserts. As in many French families, postmeal sweets weren’t a big part of typical dinners. “My mom would do dessert from time to time, but that was a special occasion,” he recalls. More often dessert for Jacques and his brother was fresh fruit, abundant in the south of France, or a petit suisse, a fresh cheese with a similar consistency to yogurt, sold in individual containers. “She would put that on a plate with a little bit of sugar and a couple of strawberries mashed with a fork. That was a great dessert.” Still is, if you can find it in your local store.
Michael Psilakis, raised by Greek parents in Long Island, New York, says, “We ate dinner together as a family for the first twenty years of my life, and dessert was a special thing. Mostly we had fruit after dinner; if we were watching TV, we would eat watermelon. My mother kept a bowl of fruit on the table. If you were walking by, looking for a snack, it was in front of you,” he recalls. When he began losing weight, he remembered that. “It’s a trick of suggestion, since whatever is in front of you is what you’ll grab. If you have those grapes or berries or apples on the table that you pass constantly, you’re sending a message to yourself: This is what you should be eating.”
Another good trick from Sue Torres’s family: The Sunday dinners she remembers were often a salad and pasta with meat—meatballs, sausage, braciola—and before dessert was served, fennel. “Grandma would bring out the fresh fennel with nuts and figs and say, ‘It’s good for your digestion.’ Yeah, but with everything I just ate, is it really going to help?” She laughs. “But I love fennel.”
I shared this idea with my son, who is often in a race to get to dessert. Telling him this was an Italian family tradition (my mother’s father was half-Italian) made it appealingly exotic. So we tried it, and it helped that he liked the flavor. We don’t serve a fennel course with the same regularity that Torres’s family might have, but it is a nice pause before the end of a meal. I recommend it: Eat fennel. Okay, it doesn’t have to be fennel, though many more people than Torres’s grandma believe it is beneficial to digestion. If you don’t like fennel, pause with a different vegetable. But choose a crisp, refreshing one that you can serve raw. Enjoy it, and the space it creates before dessert.
Lesson 16: They gave thought to the food they ate and served
“Our whole lives were centered around what we were going to eat next,” says Portland chef Naomi Pomeroy of her bohemian upbringing in Corvallis, Oregon, in the 1970s. “My family was doing everything short of milling their own flour, almost. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had a garden and we ate out of it.” Pomeroy’s mother, who had been raised in a “boiled ham and iceberg lettuce” household, later lived in France and taught herself to cook. As a result, the way of life she created for young Naomi “was focused around food. That was what we did for entertainment.”
Living this way today takes time and effort. Is it possible to have a job and a family, and always be planning what you’re going to eat? Probably not. But even a little planning helps: Buying apples that you intend to eat as a snack, and then actually remembering to put them in your bag when you leave for the day. Making enough extra dinner to have some lunch left over. Putting some forethought into cooking, rather than ordering takeout or heating up convenience foods, is simply better for one’s diet.
“The more you cook at home, the more your lifestyle and health are going to tend to the good side,” says Mark Bittman. His own mom “cooked mediocre housewife food of the fifties and sixties. But I started to cook when I was very, very young. So I started eating well young.”
Note to myself: If a kid in 1950s Manhattan could pull a decent meal together, surely I can. I can’t do it every day, but I can devote time on the weekend to shopping, cooking, and prepping a few things for the week ahead, including double portions of meals that will be lunch for me at work. If, like me, you are an obsessive reader and clipper of recipes that never get made, let us vow together that we will not fantasize about someday meals, but actually take those clippings to the store and plan to prepare and eat the food that inspires us.
Lesson 17: They didn’t have hang-ups about carbs
As a boy, restaurateur Joe Bastianich ate most of his meals at Buonavia and Villa Secondo, the Queens restaurants that his mother, Lidia, and father, Felix, owned. (Lidia had worked in restaurants as a teenager, including a stint in a bakery run by the actor Christopher Walken’s father. Knowing this may not improve how you eat, but it makes me happy to share it with you.) But there was always Sunday supper at home, with mom or grandmother behind the stove. Joe and his siblings, he says, “grew up in a house where the whole day was centered around what you’re eating. We woke up at six a.m. to the smell of the first burning onions, because there was a fresh pot of consommé made. The amount of time spent talking about, and shopping for, and eating food was very different from what my friends experienced, which was maybe Hamburger Helper.”
Instead, the Bastianich family was enjoying “roasted chicken and potatoes made in a cast-iron pan in the oven. Sauerkraut with pork and sausages, a typical dish from Trieste, Italy, where we’re from. Or jota, a sauerkraut-and-kidney-bean soup. Seafood risotto. Tortellini in brodo. Always a lot of pasta.” How did they manage it? For one, their portions were as traditional as their recipes: Italians don’t consume pasta from a trough-size bowl the way some Americans do.
Some years later, in his thirties, Bastianich battled with his weight. When he remade himself as an athlete, the dishes from childhood became crucial building blocks of a healthy diet. He still eats pasta frequently, but now it fuels marathon or triathlon training sessions. Today, after a sixty-pound weight loss, he says, “My grandmother thinks I’ve lost too much weight. All she does is try to feed me.”
Joe Bastianich’s Spaghetti Pomodoro
This is a traditional sauce that is delicious straight up, or used as the base for Joe’s scoglio, a shellfish pasta, which follows. Used alone, the pomodoro coats a pound of spaghetti very lightly. Double the recipe to have some extra, and then store ½-cup portions in freezer bags for convenience.
serves 6 as a pasta course or side dish
FOR THE SAUCE:
¼ cup olive oil
4 garlic cloves
28-ounce can whole Italian tomatoes
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1. In a medium saucepan, warm the oil over medium heat. Crush the garlic cloves, remove the papery skin, add to the oil, and cook until fragrant and golden brown, about 1 to 2 minutes.
2. While the garlic cooks, pour the tomatoes into a bowl. Squeeze with your hands to break them up. Once the garlic is browned, add the tomatoes and any accumulated juices to the saucepan. Simmer over low heat for 45 minutes, adding water as needed to keep the sauce from becoming too thick. The sauce should be a rich red color. If it turns brick red, it’s too thick. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
FOR THE PASTA:
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for serving
1 pound good-quality spaghetti, or spaghetti chittara (chittara is long, square pasta; regular spaghetti works just fine too)
Fresh basil leaves for serving
Grana Padano or other hard cheese (like Parmesan or Romano), grated, for serving
1. Prepare pomodoro sauce.
2. While the sauce simmers, heat water for pasta. Add enough salt to make it as salty as seawater.
3. In a saucepan, heat up olive oil. Add pomodoro sauce (½ cup per serving) and simmer.
4. When the water comes to a full boil, add the pasta. Two minutes before the pasta is ready, remove the pasta from the water and add it to the pomodoro sauce. Cook the pasta in the sauce until tender, allowing it to absorb the flavor and color of the sauce. Add a little pasta water if needed to keep the sauce liquid. Serve with a drizzle of olive oil. Garnish with basil leaves and grated cheese.
NOTE: To turn pomodoro sauce into oreganata sauce, add 1 teaspoon dried oregano (preferably Sicilian) and several additional sprigs of fresh oregano to the pomodoro while it simmers. Remove sprigs before serving. To make arrabiata sauce, add hot pepper flakes to basic pomodoro sauce and simmer.
Adapted from Joe Bastianich.
serves 4 as a main course
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more as needed
8 medium-size scallops
8 medium head-on shrimp, peeled and deveined
2 fresh oregano sprigs
2 fresh thyme sprigs
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
8 mussels
8 clams
½ cup dry white wine
½ cup pomodoro sauce, as needed
1 pound spaghetti
1. In a large sauté pan, over medium-high heat, warm the olive oil. Cook scallops until golden brown on each side, about 1 to 2 minutes per side. Set aside. In the same pan, sauté shrimp just until they turn pink. Remove. Cut off the shrimp heads and add the heads back to the sauté pan along with 1 cup water, oregano, and thyme. Simmer for 10 minutes, scraping the bottom of the pan with a spatula to release any caramelized brown bits. Season the broth with salt and pepper to taste. Add mussels to the pan, along with a splash of olive oil, and cover with a lid. Remove mussels as soon as they open, about 2 to 3 minutes. Set aside. Repeat with the clams. Once the clams are open, about 10 minutes, remove and set aside. Remove the shrimp heads.
2. Cook pasta according to package instructions. While the pasta is cooking, strain the broth through a sieve set over a large bowl. Add the broth back to the pan, adding the white wine. Simmer over medium heat to cook off the wine. Add the scallops back to the pan, along with the pomodoro sauce. Add shrimp and a little more pomodoro sauce. Two minutes before the pasta is done, remove the pasta from boiling water and add to the sauté pan, stirring to coat with the sauce. Add more pomodoro sauce or pasta water as needed. Continue cooking the pasta in the sauté pan for another 2 minutes. Fold clams and mussels into the pasta. Serve immediately.
Adapted from Joe Bastianich.
Michael Symon’s Chicken Thighs with Kale, Inspired by Lo
Symon nicked the idea for this recipe from pal Laurence Kretchmer, who is Bobby Flay’s business partner. It has since become a favorite in my family too. Marcona almonds are milder and softer than typical almonds, which you may substitute.
serves 4
8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, each about 5 to 6 ounces
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 small red onion, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
2 Fresno chilies, sliced in rings (substitute jalapeños if you can’t find Fresnos)
2 bunches of kale, roughly chopped
½ cup marcona almonds, roughly chopped
1 bay leaf
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
½ cup parsley leaves
1. Season thighs liberally on both sides with salt and pepper.
2. Warm the olive oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat, and brown thighs, skin side down, for 3 minutes per side. Place the chicken thighs on a plate.
3. Add onions, garlic, and chilies to the Dutch oven and sweat until translucent, about 4 minutes. Add kale, bay leaf, and 1 cup water. Salt liberally and bring to simmer. Place the chicken on top of the kale, skin side up, and place in 375º oven, uncovered, for 20 minutes, until chicken is cooked to internal temperature of 165º. Remove from oven and top with lemon zest and juice, almonds, and parsley.
Adapted from Michael Symon.
Sang Yoon’s Bubbe
The birth of a restaurant is, in its own way, thrilling. Sang Yoon’s Lukshon in Culver City, California, was not yet two weeks old when I ate there with friends, having earlier toured the place with its proud-papa chef-owner. On a February afternoon, Yoon showed me behind the scenes, where nothing was left to chance. He arranged for the water there to be filtered four different ways, depending on whether it is used to drink, wash dishes, become ice cubes, or rinse the stemware so as to not interfere with the taste of the cocktails. He revealed a remarkable system that he developed for serving wine on tap. Besides keeping air from touching the product until the minute it is drawn into a glass, his method is both less expensive and more ecologically sound than using bottles; I believe every restaurant should adopt it. He pointed out the sous vide machine, where beef for a spicy Malaysian curry rendang is cooked for forty-eight hours to render it “superdecadent, rich, and fatty. You’ll try it tonight,” he promises. I did; and it was.
Nothing was without a story. The menu is a showcase of modern takes on Southeast Asian cuisine, hitting many of the spots he traveled to with his father, a newspaper publisher. When I admired the cut-wood designs on the walls over the banquettes, he told me that they were laser-cut to precisely mimic swaths of vintage Chinoiserie wallpaper. Then there is the unlikely name. Lukshon means “noodle,” which may not seem odd, as there are noodles on the menu—except that it means noodle in Yiddish. Sang is a lot of things—chef, athlete, entrepreneur, first-generation Korean-American—but Eastern European Jew isn’t one of them.
“It’s because of my bubbe,” he says, using the Yiddish word for grandmother. He explains: “I had lost all my grandparents by age four. When I was in kindergarten my family met a woman who had grandkids in my class. She was a Jewish lady with flaming red hair and raspy voice who lived on Fairfax Avenue. When she found out I had no grandparents she instantly—no swearing-in ceremony—declared herself my grandmother. And it wasn’t just lip service. She had twin granddaughters, and everything they did, I did. She made no distinction between those two girls and me. The name ‘Lukshon’ is an homage to that.”
Besides being exceedingly generous to a boy who was a stranger, she was also, says Sang, an incredible cook. “Completely untrained, pure instinct. She was the first person to illustrate for me the difference between ordinary and Very Special. When she made chicken soup she would put in a beef rib bone to add more flavor, essentially cheating. Her neighbor would make us soup, and she’d say, ‘Her soup, it tastes like the chicken sat next to the pot.’ She was a massive influence on me. She taught me how to make gefilte fish from scratch. We made kreplach together. I’d say, ‘Hey, these are like wontons!’
“What I found amazing is that Jewish and Korean cultures have so many parallels: the immigration, the work ethic, family values, emphasis on education and very similar pasts: The Jews worked together as families and opened small businesses. Fast-forward thirty years and it’s all Korean store owners.” Though he made his name in high-end burgers and beer at Father’s Office, and built on it with Lukshon’s luxe Southeast Asia cuisine, Yoon feels pride at the expansion and acceptance of Korean food in Los Angeles. “The food in K-town keeps getting better. It’s interesting to see.”
His bubbe died in 1999, but her influence is still evident. While it feels like this chef/scientist/inventor can do anything in his kitchen lab, when he wants a challah, he returns to his grandmother’s old neighborhood. “I go to Beverlywood Bakery. That’s the only good challah in town. I can’t make that.”