Grilling was my first cooking lesson, fitting, therefore, that my national fame as a chef started twenty-five years later, standing over an outdoor grill at a press lunch in Newport. It started with a lesson when I was five. My teacher was an old Aborigine named Nick, whom I met peeling potatoes out behind the kitchen of an island resort in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Nick had taken me on as a cause. First he taught me how to spike coconuts on a log, whack them with a machete to clean the husks away, open them up, drink the water, eat the flesh. Sucking down the young coconuts, the meat still jellylike and mixed with fresh molasses from sugarcane, seemed to me so sinful, indulgent, and anti-parental that it is to this day one of my favorite things on a hot, steamy beach. Nick also tried to teach me about the birds and the bees, without the benefit of bees, making do with my little lizard (as he called it) instead. I preferred the cooking lessons.
From Nick’s dugout canoe I caught a barracuda, which he showed me how to roast over a coconut-shell fire on the beach. It tasted awful, like a meat loaf with fish in it, but I put on a good face. I posed for a photograph eating it, and then fed it to the ravenous cats lurking in the banana trees outside the restaurant. As did my portion of the wild parrots, or galahs, which he cooked on spits on the beach. Eating those was to me like cooking the Australian family budgie. All I could see was the bright raspberry pink plumage of the birds in the palms above the beach, and even though there were thousands of them, I couldn’t imagine killing one, let alone eating one. Seeing my disappointment in both these treats, my mentor took me off to the tide pools on the reef, some Olympic-size, some small enough to reach into for oysters, mussels, little crabs for frying, big black shiny sea urchins, and the short spiny purple ones we ate on the spot.
After that I was allowed to watch a fishing expedition carried out by the adults at dusk. It was in the failing light that the big and best eating fish like barramundi came in to shore to get away from the tiger and hammerhead sharks prowling close to the beach for their evening meal. My father, fueled with several pink gins, went chin-deep into the water to provide a strategic “anchor” for one end of the net while the other end was towed around in deeper waters by a little rowboat. The rest of us watched, breathless, from the shore, knowing that a scream from my father meant no dinner, at least not for us.
The ever-darkening waters were screamless. The catch was brought in, gutted, cleaned, and slathered in coconut oil, salt, and chili pepper. The coals of a big bonfire, started to provide light for the cocktail hour, were raked down into a three-inch bed, over which the grill grates were laid. When Nick declared them sizzling hot enough by spitting on them, the fish were set on the grill, big ones first, and then, in stages, all the rest. We ate our fish, crayfish, and grilled oysters while the fire-engine red and Macedonian-gold parrots, pink and gray galahs, and thousands of multicolored budgerigars swirled overhead, their deafening shrieks descending into murmurs in the inky equatorial darkness. Nick squeezed fresh limes on the oysters, sprinkled chili powder mixed with salt on the crayfish, and poured a sauce made from coconut milk, oil, fresh chilies, and lime juice over the cooked fish.
This, I realized, was how life must be.
Cooking these exotic animals from the sea in this tropical setting fixed a love for grilling in my mind forever. I didn’t yet know the word paradise, but I knew the concept, and sensed that tropical islands meant abundance, color, and the perfumed life I would always crave. My instincts told me to savor every moment of it and, in the future, never to let those feelings get very far away. Deprived at an early age of being an orphan, I was forced to live with my parents. A childhood hardly suitable for children, at least to onlookers; to me it was an adventure.
In early 1947, when I was four, my parents moved us from Connecticut to Australia. My father was sent as a managing director of Westrex, part of the original AT&T’s Western Electric manufacturing arm, to make sure their movie houses had the right equipment to take their soon-to-be-developed stereophonic sound.
I had never been on a plane, and the trip from San Francisco to Honolulu was airsick-horrendous enough for me to never want to get on a plane again. Fortunately there was a layover in Honolulu, during which we stayed in Waikiki at the very grand Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and in the first hour there I wanted to stay in Hawaii forever. All it took was a few minutes on the balcony; the bodies on the beach and the balmy tropical climate bonded me with Hawaii forever. Then with increasing misery I watched the hours go by before we had to once again get in that little DC-3 airplane for Sydney.
The three-day plane trip across the Pacific was so traumatizing that my memory of anything leading up to the coral landing strip in Fiji is almost entirely erased. But I do recall a few things from those eighty hours in the twin-engine DC-3 prop plane: the smell of the DDT bomb set off in the cabin before we left Honolulu, the dry air, the turbulent plunges, and the French convicts seated behind us on their way to a penal colony (only the French would send their convicts first-class), who kept propositioning my thirteen-year-old sister. I screamed, threw up repeatedly, and pleaded ceaselessly for the plane to be stopped. By the time we skidded to a halt on Fiji’s bleached pink coral atoll, I was frantic to get out. As we arrived at the little corrugated-iron terminal building, I slung my arms around the nearest pole and shrieked at the top of what was left of my lungs that I would never leave.
I was approached by a huge man in a tapa cloth skirt, black hair teased straight up about a foot and tied with a red ribbon, his torso filling firmly a white military jacket with brass buttons. The fact that he had no shoes on his size-fourteen feet fascinated me so much I forgot that I was going to live and die on that pole. I loosened my grip with a failing of spirit brought on by the enormous, condensation-covered glass of golden yellow liquid he was holding, and by his voice, which was like a vibrating cello, as he told me to come and sit in his tapa cloth lap and have some pineapple juice. I am pretty sure that I had never heard of a pineapple, but as he waved the glass under my nose I knew I wanted to.
The smell and sight of that juice is my first and still one of my most vivid culinary memories. The pineapple had undoubtedly been picked only a few hours before in the cool morning and not refrigerated, just a few chunks of ice in it so the juice was kind to my teeth as it went down. The cool, sweet, refreshing liquid shut me up for the first time in two days, so when I asked for a whole pineapple that I saw in the terminal, my mother nodded wearily. The pineapple itself is my second culinary memory: a whole fruit seemingly half the size of me, its top cut off, and so ripe that I could dig into it with my whole hand and eat the entire inside with my fingers. The crew’s irritation that greeted me when I returned covered in pineapple didn’t matter. I had found paradise.
Promises of more juice for the twenty-four-hour trip to Sydney lured me back onto the plane. Their mistake. I drove the stewards mad with demands for more and more, until I was yet again violently ill, this time from all the acid of the canned variety. But I was hooked on tropical fruit, and within hours of arrival, now on firm ground at Sydney’s Hotel Australia, I lunged for the ripe fruit that was sent up by the manager: a huge basket of passion fruit, ripe finger bananas, and, of course, more ripe pineapples from tropical Queensland.
From a culinary standpoint, we were lucky that wartime shortages were still in effect and electricity was sporadic. An infrequent refrigerator meant relying on an old stand-up Coca-Cola reach-in cooler on the banana-tree-covered porch. It was powered by ice blocks, which meant that we ate fruit—which now included papayas, mangoes, guava, rambutans, mangosteens, and custard apples—only ice chilled. By the time the thirties power stations were updated with American machinery, even with our refrigerator working, we knew that refrigerated fruit loses the scent of its ripening in the sun, of the heady vapors of tropical jungle plantations of papaya and pineapple. The ice chest remained. As did my later insistence, when I had my restaurants, on never refrigerating tomatoes and other fruits.
I loved all the tropical fruit, including the different seasons for the various varieties of mangoes, and the excitement when the garnet red, peppery-aromatic huge papaw arrived. But my favorites were the passion fruits, still warm from the summer sun, growing along our backyard fence. Listening to the kookaburras overhead in the gum trees, I would bite the top of a hot, ripe fruit and suck out the juices while inhaling the perfume. The taste memory came to play a constant part in my menus and recipes twenty-five years later in my Berkeley, San Francisco, and Asian restaurants. Perfectly ripe tropical fruit—the only thing I had in abundance in my early childhood—was a measure of happiness and success.
I was a stranger to my father until he came back from World War II when I was three. Our status had not changed much, deteriorating from the start when I bit him in the groin at our first meeting. Not much improved on moving to Australia, but he did provide a grand lifestyle funded by the inheritance from his family’s and America’s first oil company. Although we lived in the wealthy Vaucluse suburb of Sydney, the large size of our house was a distinct disadvantage during routine power outages, with their resulting lack of heat and hot water.
In cold weather we ended up living in one room with an illegal heater monopolized by the dog; the smell of singeing hair reminds me to this day of deprivation. Home was far preferable to school, however, with its bare stone chapel, rank confessionals, enforced silence, and promises of life perfect only after death. As a Yank, I was mercilessly brutalized by my peers when I wasn’t subjected to the wandering hands of priests.
My oasis was our vegetable garden, which my mother opted for after enduring six months of Australian postwar rationed vegetables: cabbage and its entire family, huge potatoes and carrots, the potatoes revoltingly full of deep-set black rotting spots, the carrots more wood core than sweet flesh. The garden was laid out in an old tennis court at the back of the property. It was set ten feet below the level of the garden, the top of the retaining wall was planted with nasturtiums, and the whole face of the hundred-foot wall was covered in a blanket of multicolored flowers; so began my love for them. The nasturtiums attracted snails, and since I was paid for my small bucket full of snails, I took on the job of planting and carefully tending these flowers—my first gardening project. As a five-year-old I made sandwiches of nasturtium flowers (an Australian treat) and later, in 1974, put the blossoms in salads at Chez Panisse. Ten years later when I started a cooking demo on ABC’s Good Morning America, host Joan Lunden announced, “I hate flowers [in food],” and went to a commercial.
After my success with the nasturtiums, I chose what I wanted from a seed catalog airmailed from Burpee in the United States and took responsibility for five rows of beans: “runner,” broad (fava), and lima. With great love and prodigious labor—Australia is the land of extreme climate, droughts alternating with monthlong deluges—we produced sweet corn that made the conservative Australians, unaccustomed to eating with their fingers, uncomfortable, but delighted our homesick American guests.
The rest of the Australian diet was lamb chops for breakfast, lamb sandwiches for lunch, and roast lamb for dinner, interspersed with a bit of flathead, a fish that was all we could come by when the fishermen were too nervous to venture out through the harbor for ocean fish. Fledgling communist terrorist groups had taken to blowing up Pan American flying boats anchored in the middle of the route out of the harbor. From our house we had the best view in Sydney of those explosions, but the thrill was significantly lessened by the thought of having to go back to eating lamb or flathead.
After a couple of years, things like fresh shrimp showed up in abundance, and my mother added a jambalaya to her party repertoire. Some of my fondest memories of that huge house are the sideboard groaning with the little there was to cook with, the jambalaya in the center of the display, and the arrival in Sydney of meat other than lamb, even if it was only silverside beef (top round), corned and as tough as nails. My treat on my way out of the butcher shop was to pinch some of the wet corning salt surrounding the beef as it sat in a ten-inch-deep marble table by the door, and suck on it until it dissolved.
The city’s hotels and restaurants featured twee interpretations of English food in a Dame Edna Everage atmosphere. Whenever it was time for my annual visit to the one renowned French restaurant, Chez Prunier, because it was my mother’s birthday, I would be beside myself with excitement. When the tolerant maître d’ handed me a huge menu with a silk tassel longer than I was and all the words in French, my mind began to race. From my many visits over the next three years, I memorized the menu and would insist on ordering for myself—a source of pride to my parents and eye rolling from nearby diners appalled by my high-soprano French pronunciation. I loved Chez Prunier so much that I was an angel of restraint and good manners, but since arrival was an hour before my usual bedtime, the deep gloom then fashionable in deluxe dining rooms made me sleepy. The deal was that I could put my head down on the table and sleep between the main course and dessert, the course that woke me up.
As obnoxious as my mangled French must have seemed, the owner-chef was charming to me and always brought me special things to taste. I was enchanted by his glamour, this man in starched white who had such authority in his domain. And he was a long way from my grizzled, half-naked, Aborigine cooking teacher.
Forty years later, after a lunch promoting California cuisine at the Regent Hotel in Sydney, an old man summoned me to his table. “I’d have recognized you instantly: you’re your father’s son,” he said. Then the owner of Prunier told his guests, “This is the little boy who used to order by himself in horrible French and after the main course put his head on the table to sleep it all off.” Twenty-seven years later Prunier was still open, and this wonderful old man was still cooking.
On these foundations of my life at six years old, I fixed my attentions on our world of food, wine, and gardening. They were at once a balm and an escape into a private universe of glorious sensation, and my only potential realms of mastery. I knew food plucked from trees, pulled from the sea, and thrown on hot coals. Now in the glamorous grand dining rooms of the poshest restaurants and in the kitchens of luxury ocean liners or hotels, these passions—a love of things cooked with bravura in their elemental state, where they came from, how they were grown, and a fascination with “fine dining”—became the foundation and structure of my life.