I have always been suspicious of Friedrich Nietzsche, more now than when I was in school. Nietzsche was mad from syphilis by the age of 44, and dead at 48, he never saw his ‘artist warrior’ grow old without a pension plan, as I have done. As for Immanuel Kant, his writings always confounded and eluded me. The logicians I studied seem like technocrats, detached from the living. Aristotle is different; he seemed to know the self-policing moral community was coming, as if he had an inkling of social media two millenia before its time. Similarly, our virtual world seems populated by Plato’s forms. I always did like David Hume, he read like someone you would meet in a pub, all soft and friendly; in the end, I think he had it right. Whereas Hegel was Hegel, and world terror was world terror. By my third year of university, the only philosopher I had really fallen for was Søren Kierkegaard, the tall and lanky mid-nineteenth-century Danish thinker. I loved his idea of process. That a person’s passion in a process held a truth. How their engagement in an activity was more important than the outcome of the activity. This idea made sense to me, and I thought I had found my guy. Then Julia Child entered my life. And within a year, my rich tryst with Søren morphed into a love affair with Julia.
Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was not on any of my syllabi at McGill, but it was the first book I bought with my student loans in my third year. I studied the recipes and devoured the introduction. Passionately, I recited Child’s words to my friends. She warned readers the recipes would be long and involved, and that only the brave of heart should embark on this journey with her. That her book was written for those who loved cookery, and not for those who simply loved to eat. Child’s language rang with Kierkegaard’s ideas. For the first time I saw a means to apply the philosophies I had learned. An application that did not involve participating in a Marxist revolution or creating self-deprecating art installations. I could simply cook.
Like a disciple I read of L’Omelette brouillée and L’Omelette roulée in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. With my fingertips, I felt the book’s heavy stock. The pages were soft and coloured a creamy beige. The recipe titles were in French, the culinary world’s Latin, and set in the Granjon font - chosen to honour the great sixteenth-century type-cutter Robert Granjon. Printed in bold on the left side of each page were the measurements; on the right, matter-of-fact instructions. From time to time, pen-and-ink drawings of elegant hands would illustrate an instruction. I’d imagine these disembodied hands as my own. I saw myself gracefully performing Child’s words from Chapter Three, entitled ‘Eggs.’ I was in awe of the ten pages revealing the two quick techniques for cooking an omelette. Her devotion to the act was a revelation to me. How she found intimate and critical moments in every manoeuvre. How each motion had a purpose.
It began before the egg. To cook an omelette, I would need a proper pan. Julia Child spoke to me of this pan, how it should be treated, washed, stored, and how sacrilege was committed if the pan were used for any other cookery. She talked of the material from which it was made, its weight, how it conducted heat. Why the pan’s depth, the angle of its edges, the width of its surface, were of great importance. How the pan’s dimensions determined the amount of beaten egg used, measured not in number of eggs, but in liquid ounces. She spoke against the omelettes of my childhood, decrying the cast-iron pans overloaded with a mixture of beaten eggs, dried herbs, and raw button mushrooms, slowly baked in an oven like a corn cake. Child instructed me to count forty strokes of a fork as I beat the eggs; to ensure the pan was hot and lubricated; to see the butter foam from the heat before I added the beaten eggs; to watch the liquid eggs coagulate in the first few seconds. She demanded my courage, that I be fearless and rough with the eggs as I jerked the pan at a twenty-degree angle. One jerk per second, until the slightly congealed mass was loosened from the pan’s surface. Without hesitation, I had to tilt the pan sharply away from my body and give another jerk, followed by an immediate tug backwards. If I was successful, the mass of the egg would begin to fold onto itself. Again and again, jerk and tug, until a rolled omelette emerged to be guided lovingly onto the plate. The outside golden and lightly crisp; the inside moist and tender.
I was stunned by the first omelette I made properly. How eggs were transformed by my own hands into something glorious. Eggs, the modest staple in my parents’ fridge, bought by the dozen without thought, fried, scrambled, boiled, sufficient and lifeless, stirred in me emotions and dreams as I took another bite. I—I—had brought the egg to life. I became passionate about awakening eggs. In the weeks that followed, I cooked omelettes for whomever walked through my door - day or night. After ten days my roommate began to refuse my omelettes and our friends announced their lack of hunger as they entered our apartment, listing their meals of the day before I could make my offer. At last, my friend Lisa intervened with a smile and said, “Ronnie! Enough with the omelettes. We love them. We love you. But now stop.”
Before my omelette revelation, before I held Julia Child’s book in my hands, I was already sliding into a lifetime of cookery. It was a passive slide, a trajectory I can see only in hindsight. Each day I came closer to becoming a chef. In retrospect, I blame the city of Montreal for providing the first nudge. It possessed a dreamy combination in 1992, when I arrived from Toronto to attend school; a low cost of living, paired with an alluring food culture and a robust nightlife. Rent could be paid with a few busing shifts in a restaurant, leaving money and time to shop and cook and drink. An irresponsible life could be lived in a respectable manner. I loved it, I indulged in it then, and miss it now, though my love for Montreal has never wavered.
In those early Montreal days, I would head home from school bundled in layers of winter clothes, often engrossed in some problem with being and time. After I walked along Saint-Laurent Boulevard for a short time, a warmth, like the one imparted by a snifter of Calvados, would settle in as I bathed in the street’s glow. If snow had freshly fallen, it would calm the fluorescent illuminated signs above the storefronts. It would muffle the street sounds: the tinned Christmas tunes spilling from small speakers laced from lamppost to lamppost, the garbage truck hoisting a large container into its back bin. The snow even seemed to stop time; life on Saint-Laurent was littered with artifacts from a bygone era. Old Chevy cars lined its curbside, and quart bottles of Labatt 50 and Export A cigarettes filled the tabletops of its old taverns. Late at night, the same taverns would play Nirvana and Pearl Jam to their new generation of clients. While in the mornings, men in heavy wool sweaters under butcher coats and aprons could be seen hustling pig and veal carcasses into butcher shops. On very cold days, the frost coating an old bakery’s window would hide warm rye bread and old salesclerks’ cold faces. As I trudged along Saint-Laurent’s sidewalk, through a narrow path in the snow tunneled by the shuffling feet of countless pedestrians, my thoughts would leave questions of being and time, and drift towards meat and vegetables.
Standing before the shop windows, I fell into a trance of indecision. Do I enter this shop or that one? Meat was a must, be it sausage or a fresh cut. Potatoes or rice seemed obligatory. Broccoli, cabbage, string beans; I would stand in front of the vegetable counter and stare. I thought of my budget, my pantry, what might taste good, how I would prepare what I chose. I had little knowledge of cookery in those days. Time would slip away as I shifted my weight from one leg to the other and stared at a fridge or a counter, until I made a choice.
I would then head home to my apartment on Clark Street. The building’s nineteen-fifties exterior repulsed any semblance of character, and inside it was no better. Faux-marble floors and florescent lights in the hallways led to my small apartment; two small box rooms with low ceilings, one for my futon bed, one for my futon couch. In each room, a side-sliding aluminum window. Cramped behind a small door was a half-sized bathtub with a dysfunctional showerhead, a toilet, and a sink, all in a rotten avocado green. Next to the bathroom was a corner, advertised as a kitchenette. In the three-feet-by-three-feet space was a sink, a twelve-inch counter with an overhead cupboard of the same size, and a fridge and oven-range, both half-sized. That apartment does not deserve any further description. I only lived there for twelve months.
One of my favourite meals to cook began with a small cabbage and a fresh pepperette sausage from Saint-Laurent. Using a wobbly, thin-bladed knife with a plastic handle, I’d cut the cabbage into square chunks. I’d boil the cabbage and sausage together in a shallow pot with just enough water to cover the two. Once the cabbage was a brilliant translucent green and the sausages had stiffened, I’d remove the sausage and reduce the liquid (now a sausage-and-cabbage broth). The broth would thicken lightly as it reduced and glazed the cabbage, and I’d even encourage the cabbage to brown a little. I’d add a dollop of butter and black pepper. Once the two elements of my meal were on the plate, I would serve myself a spoonful of Dijon on the side.
I always loved to watch the clear fat squirt from the hot sausage as my wobbly knife cracked the skin. A balanced taste would emerge; fiery, acidic mustard awakening the soft, round flavours of butter and sausage fat. Black pepper piercing the sweetly bitter cabbage. The harmony of it all would leave me in wonder. Sausage and cabbage. It was only sausage and cabbage and mustard. I did not know these meals resembled a classic plate of ‘choucroute’, that word would have had only a vague meaning to me at the time. My plate of food at that time was nothing more to me than a meal picked and pocketed on my way home from school. Yet I have since then learned it was more. In those days, unbeknown to me, Saint Laurent Boulevard had become my first cooking instructor, and I loved it - every step, every door, every taste.
Alone, I would sit on the edge of my futon couch, listen to the radio, and lean over the plate of food. My plate always rested on a forest-green trans-Atlantic metallic trunk; my mother’s trunk, the one she packed and sailed to Norway with in 1961 as exchange student nine years before I was born. I have had it with me ever since I left home. On one such night, as I sat in front of my mother’s trunk eating my cabbage and sausage, I heard a familiar tune from my childhood playing on the radio. The tune was ‘Don’t Stop’ by Fleetwood Mac and it played in the background of a news report from one of President Clinton’s inauguration balls. The reporter spoke with enthusiasm in her voice about the significance of the song, how it was Clinton’s campaign song and how it announced to the world the baby-boomers were finally running the show. It was the same optimistic voice I had heard a few years earlier when the Berlin Wall came down. Change had come, everything was going to be ok, the world would now be a safer place, the good guys had won. I, like many, naïvely believed it.
At the beginning of my fourth year of school, I walked into Pecker Brothers on Saint-Laurent flush with cash from my student loans (the ones I paid off at age forty-three). The store’s single room was flanked by aged wooden shelves that narrowed in depth as they climbed the walls, it looked like the framing of a ship’s hull as it is being built. In the middle of the room a knee-high platform left a tight pathway. Sparsely spread on the shelves and the platform were pots, pans, strainers, oversized whisks, spatulas, and a few stacks of plates. The effect was more random than cluttered; it felt like a gallery of found objects. At the end of the storeroom was a desk. Behind the desk were two older men who appeared to be at the end of their run. Both wore cardigans, faded dress shirts with breast pockets filled with pens and small notebooks, and had their white and wavy hair combed back, once a familiar look among Montreal’s storekeepers. (Most are gone now; I sometimes wonder if that is how I will dress before I vanish.) I picked up a shiny, heavy-set sauté pan, and the old men looked at me and Lisa with reserved enthusiasm. The man in the chair smiled and returned to his paper. The other man approached.
“Clad metal, aluminum core between two layers of stainless steel. Goes all the way, not just the bottom.”
“What does that mean?”
“It keeps the heat - spreads the heat. The heat is even across its surface. And when you put something into the pan, the pan stays hot. Not like this one here.” He bent over and picked up a thin metal saucepan coated with an even thinner layer of black non-stick material. We all knew the black material would be scraped in a short time; everyone has a pan like this at home – they are never loved. “This one is good for small things. But it will lose its temperature quickly. You won’t be able to brown your meat properly. Whereas the pan in your hand will brown the meat nicely.”
I handed him a hundred dollars. He handed me back a loonie from one pocket, and then wrapped my five twenties around a roll of bills he had removed from his other pocket.
He looked at me and said, “That’s a good purchase. You will have it long after I am dead.” He laughed and walked away.
Back on the sidewalk, Lisa laughed and said, “Dear God, I love that place. I hope it never closes.” But we knew it would, just like the other old shops along Saint-Laurent that languished in palliative care. Some of the owners seemed happy to be putting their stores to sleep, resigned to the truth that all businesses eventually die. Others seemed resentful of their approaching fate. Looking back, I can only imagine how they felt as they watched the storefronts of their own generation wilt and die, only to be papered up and rebirthed as funky cafés. It must have felt like a plague was closing in. I sometimes think of an old couple that owned a small grocery store and sold their house-made pickles from a plastic five-gallon pail. They must have known one day the last memory of their pickles’ taste would vanish, and along with it all they had loved and worked for.
I admit I never liked that old couple. They were always surly and cold whenever I popped in. Today I see them as a cautionary tale—how not to finish out one’s days. I want to close my doors with grace, to go out like the Pecker brother, who laughed as he sold me the pan I use to this day.
By the time I walked through the Pecker Brothers’ door, I was no longer cooking for myself alone; dinner parties with adventurous menus had become the norm. With blind faith, I braised a goose, putting an undignified end to the bird’s journey; I burnt my fingertips peeling freshly boiled chestnuts for a sausage stuffing; I rolled dry pasta dough with a rolling pin and created raviolis as thick as two latkes sandwiched together. I became engrossed in cooking. I found relief in the concrete rights and wrongs of the process. It was not metaphysics, ethics, a boundless existential crisis, or the signified of the signifier. Cooking was comprehensible. I could say to myself, “There is a salmon filet on my cutting board. It is a portion of a dead fish. The flesh is pink and red. I will cook it. It will be a success, or not. Either way, the result will be measurable and concrete.” Suddenly, school had slipped away and a tangible world had crept in.
Up until then, I had always rejected the idea of a career in restaurants. I had loved working in them; the years I spent as a server in hotels and steak houses were great fun, with a kinetic energy that chased me throughout the day. But I had also seen the traps and tribulations of a life in cooking. I had met ambitious cooks who finished their careers working at golf courses or at diners. I knew it was a lousy career choice, with little money or time for family. Yet, the act of cooking was where I found an identity. Cooking was what I thought about when I woke in the morning, it determined where I walked during my day, the vocabulary that fell from my lips, the objects I held in my hands. I had become more interested in a simmering pot than Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
Then one day I was honest with myself. I wiped away my previous perceptions of who I was and accepted what had to be done. I took a leap of faith and decided to become a chef.
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More than twenty years on and I am not sure that story is true - that I fell from philosophy into a saucepan and married Søren Kierkegaard and Julia Child in my mind. The narrative sounds nice. Even inspiring. Other times, I see a different story. I see the doors that closed after I dropped out of university. I see myself retreating into restaurant life rather than pushing forward. My default, a world I had known since I was sixteen. I understood a restaurant’s rhythms and rules; I was comfortable. Worse, in my dark and cynical times, after a few days of hard drinking, I scoff at both these stories and accuse myself of keeping up a charade. That I chose the career of a chef to perpetuate a hedonistic student’s life; cheap beer traded in for heavenly wines and spirits; fat steaks and butter and endless trays of freshly cooked lardons. Gout.
Other days, I am resigned to who I am as a chef. I have accepted my limits in cookery. I cook more from feel than technique, preferring to leave the sous-vide bags and vanity foams to others, to the kitchen logicians. I have settled on pans and fire and living with imperfections. But on the really good days, the ones that come after three days of sobriety, I hope I’ve done more than simply learning acceptance. I see my story as one of love and obedience.
The love part is easy. It happened on Saint-Laurent, when my passion for cooking rose above my affection for food. In my quests for nightly meals, I engaged in a process, a covenant. I fell in love with the riddles of food. Popping in and out of shops, gathering ingredients and ideas, I made my first steps in the process of transformation. Once home, my love deepened, as I witnessed meats, vegetables, and grains passing from form to form in my hands. From the beautiful raw to the beautiful cooked, and then into pure pleasure in the faces of others.
Cooking is a sequence of actions that disappear into memory. Every mouthful, every creation, is destroyed in the act of appreciation, as if a canvas of sunflowers were to melt away when gazed upon. Nor can culinary creations be identically repeated. From plate to plate, moment to moment, each preparation of a recipe happens only once. Our cooking, our material art, flows from the kitchen to the table where it is consumed by our audience. The art and the material then separate; the art slips into the audience’s memory, as the material continues its flow through their bodies and onward. While the art - the tastes - disappears, the process remains and is repeatable. A love of cooking is the immersion in its process rather than its outcome. Pride in our creations, yes! But we can never hold onto them. That is why I still love to make Caeser salad. I love to watch the drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil run slowly down the side of the bowl and emulsify with the egg, the crushed garlic and anchovies, the lemon juice and Worchester sauce. To control the tempo of my fork as the concoction thickens. Every salad tastes slightly different; a little more lemon in one, a little less salt in another. My love is not for Caesar salad, it is for the act, the process, of making Caeser salad. More than ten thousand salads, and I still watch and wonder and love.
Through my love of cooking, I learned obedience. It took time. In my first few years, I did not obey. I would push this and cut that, stir these and flip those. I would attempt to control my domain, the kitchen, and compel it to produce the dishes I wished to create. Yet, with every push or pull of this or that, a counterforce resisted my desired result. It felt like I was struggling with God’s will, with nature’s will. Then, over time, I learned not to struggle against nature, not to force the food, not to mangle the fangled. I learned that to cook is to submit, to obey the process and ingredients with humility. To adhere to daily practices and to follow guiding principles (innovate, yes! But always submit to the ingredient’s nature). Once I had learned to obey the food, I truly learned to cook the food.
I obey the yeast, the flour, and the water. I arrive in the morning, so I have time to make our nightly bread. All day I will obey the bread; the mixing of the yeast, water, and flour, the kneading of the dough, the resting and rising. I will give time for the flour to absorb the water and the dough to soften in texture. When the bread dough tells me it is ready, I will cut it, roll it, and shape it into five loaves. I will let them proof and rise and I will wait to hear from them again. I foster their growth and their rest, and when the loaves tell me they are ready for baking, I will bake.
We chefs obey the salt, the tastes of bitter and sour, and the sugar. We obey and attend to the hissing sound in a sauté pan when it cries a higher octave. We obey our instincts, touching meat on a grill to feel its inner tension, to sense when it has had enough time and heat. We are observant of the onion’s design as we cut through its flesh, of a melon’s shape as we gut its innards, of the carrot’s length as we peel off its thin skin. Water boils at one hundred degrees centigrade and freezes at zero. We obey these laws. Just as we obey the lamb shanks that demand to be braised as long as they need, and the salad that never wants to be overly tossed. We must ward against fanatical obedience, an obsessive obedience, one that veers into demagoguery in our kitchens (to those who have suffered me as a fanatical chef, I am truly sorry). When we practice proper obedience with authentic love, we achieve grace in our cooking.
Grace to weave a new recipe together or execute an old one. Grace to withstand the pressures of service as we push against time, and grace to wait patiently for the fish to be cooked to perfection, only to hurry it out of the kitchen. Grace to cook our best on our darkest days. Grace to keep cooking when the night goes long and fatigue sets in. Grace to hold back anger, to give us strength to be polite, to say thanks. Grace to avoid sinking into despair when a dish is returned to the kitchen, and grace to be humble when we get a positive review. Grace’s power of forgiveness and redemption keeps a kitchen’s wheels turning, it lifts the brigade’s spirits and in turn elevates the food. Grace was the hardest and last lesson for me to learn in cookery, and it is the lesson I must remind myself to keep learning.
Perhaps all the stories I tell myself are true; co-existing, they jostle for position from one day to the next. There may even be hidden plotlines, the ones I was too naive or willfully blind to see, that will emerge later in my life, or after it. Maybe those are the ones I should be most fearful of. But for now, my story needs some grace. It needs the feeling that I did something right, that my choices were good, and that, despite my recklessness, I learned love and obedience.