Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (20 page)

I knew I needed some help finding my way in
the kitchen, and I found it in a young local cook by the name of Samin Nosrat. As it
happens, I was Samin’s teacher before she became mine. I met Samin five years ago,
when she asked to sit in on a food-writing class that I was teaching at Berkeley. She
had graduated from the university a few years before and, though working as a chef in a
local restaurant, she also had ambitions to write. Samin has a big personality and soon
became a figure in the class, sharing her deep knowledge about food as well as her
cooking. Each week, a different student would bring in a snack for the class—maybe a
favorite childhood cookie or an unusual heirloom variety from the farmers’
market—and share a story about it. When Samin’s turn to do snack came around, she
showed up in class with several hotel pans of piping hot lasagna, both the tomato sauce
and the pasta handmade from scratch, and proceeded to serve it to us on china with
silverware and cloth napkins. The story Samin told us was about learning to cook, first
at Chez Panisse, where she’d worked her way up from bussing tables to prep cook,
and then in Tuscany, where she’d spent two years learning how to make fresh
pasta, butcher meat, and master the kind of “Grandma
cooking” she loves best. Samin’s lasagna was probably the most memorable
thing about that semester.

That’s the first time I can recall
ever hearing that phrase, “Grandma cooking.” For Samin, this was the sort of
traditional food that emerged from her mother’s kitchen, which was nominally in
San Diego but in every other sense—and especially those of taste and smell—in Tehran.
Her parents had emigrated from Iran in 1976, three years before the revolution; as a
follower of the Baha’i faith, her father feared persecution from the ascendant
Shia. Samin was born in San Diego in 1979, but her parents, nourishing a dream of
someday returning, treated their home as sovereign Iranian territory. The family spoke
Farsi at home, and Mrs. Nosrat cooked Persian food exclusively. “The moment you
come home from school and step over that threshold,” Samin remembers being told as
a young child, “you are back in Iran.”

Samin was definitely not the kind of child
of immigrants who could be embarrassed by the old-world dishes her mother would tuck
into her lunch box. To the contrary, she loved Persian food: the aromatic rice dishes,
the kabobs, the rich stews made with sweet spices, nuts, and pomegranates. “One
time at school I was made fun of for my weirdo lunch. But my food tasted so much better
than theirs! I refused to be insulted.” Her mother, who “definitely wore the
pants in our house,” would drive all over southern California in search of a
particular taste of home: an unusual variety of sweet lime called for in a particular
dish, or a kind of sour cherry associated with a seasonal feast. Growing up, Samin never
gave much thought to cooking—though her mom would occasionally recruit the children to
squeeze lemons or shell big piles of fava beans—“but I was very interested in
eating. I loved my mom’s cooking.”

It was during college in Berkeley that the
seed of the idea of cooking as a vocation was planted—in the course of a single
memorable
meal eaten at Chez Panisse. Samin told me the story one
afternoon, while we were standing around the island in my kitchen, chopping vegetables.
I had asked her if she would be willing to teach me how to cook, and we had started
having lessons once or twice a month, four- or five-hour sessions that invariably began
around this island, each of us at a cutting board, chopping and talking. Conversation, I
soon came to realize, was the best way to deal with the drudgery of chopping onions.

As usual, Samin had a white apron tied
around her waist, and the thicket of her black hair raked partway back. Samin is tall
and sturdily built, with strong features, slashing black eyebrows, and warm olivey-brown
skin. If you had to pick one word to describe her, “avid” would have to be
it; Samin is on excellent terms with the exclamation point. Words tumble from her mouth;
laughter, too; and her deep, expressive brown eyes are always up to something.

“I had never even
heard
of
Chez Panisse! In fact, the whole concept of a ‘famous restaurant’ was
totally alien to me, because my family never went to fancy restaurants. But my college
boyfriend had grown up in San Francisco, and when he told me all about Alice Waters and
Chez Panisse, I was like, dude, we
have
to go! So, for that entire school year,
we saved our money in a shoebox, throwing in loose change, quarters from the laundry,
money from bets we made between us. And when we had collected two hundred dollars, which
was just enough to pay for the prix-fixe meal downstairs, we set the alarm on a Saturday
morning to make sure we’d get through the
minute
they started answering
the phone, so we could make a reservation for the Saturday night exactly one month
later.

“It was an incredible experience, the
warm and glittering dining room, the amazing care they took of us—these two kids! They
served us a frisée salad with ‘lardons of bacon’—and I remember thinking,
What
is this?
! The second course was halibut in a broth, and I had never
eaten halibut before, so I was really nervous about that. But what I
remember most vividly was the dessert: a chocolate soufflé with raspberry sauce. The
waiter had to show us how to punch a hole in the dome and pour in the sauce. It was
really
good, but I thought it would be even better with a glass of milk,
and when I asked for one, the waitress started laughing! Milk was a total faux pas, I
now realize—you’re supposed to drink a dessert wine, duh—but the waitress was so
nice about it. She brought me my glass of milk. And
then
she brought us a glass
of dessert wine—on the house!

“The food was beautiful, but I think
it was the experience of being totally taken care of that evening that made me fall in
love with the restaurant. I decided right then that, someday, I wanted to work at Chez
Panisse. It seemed so much more special than a normal job. Plus, you’d get to eat
all this amazing food all the time!

“So I sat down and wrote a long letter
to the manager. I talked about how I’d had this life-changing meal, and could I
please, please, please work as a busser. And by some crazy fluke, they called me in and
I was hired on the spot.”

Samin reorganized her schedule at school so
she could work several shifts a week at the restaurant. She remembers her first one
vividly. “They walked me through the kitchen, and everyone had on these immaculate
white coats, and they were making the most beautiful food. Someone showed me where to
find this old-school vacuum cleaner, and I started vacuuming the dining room, and I
remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe they’re trusting me to vacuum the
downstairs dining room at Chez Panisse!’ I felt so honored. And that’s the
way I felt every day I went to work there.

“I’m sort of
obsessive-compulsive, in case you haven’t noticed, and this was the first place in
my life where everybody seemed just as OCD as I am. Everyone there was seeking
perfection in whatever they were doing, whether it was the way they tied up the trash or
made
the best soufflé they could ever hope to make, or polished the
silver just so. I could see how every task, no matter how trivial, was being done to the
fullest, and that’s when I began to feel at home.

“It clicked for me the first time I
was taught how to load the dumbwaiter. You had to load the dishes in it just so: Keep
the hot plates away from the salads, use the space superefficiently, and arrange things
in such a way that the china would make the least amount of noise. It’s a tiny,
rickety old building that has to feed five hundred people every day, and give them the
best possible experience, so
every
thing has been carefully thought through over
the years, and developed into a system. Which means that if you take a shortcut it can
mess things up for everyone else.

“When, eventually, I started cooking,
this whole approach translated seamlessly into how I approached food. For me, cooking is
about seeking the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything I make. About
extracting the absolute most out of every ingredient, whether it is a beautiful piece of
salmon or a plain old onion. And that way of thinking about food started the day I was
taught how to load the Chez Panisse dumbwaiter.”

Sundays with Samin—our usual day
together—always began the same way, with her bursting into the kitchen around three in
the afternoon and plopping a couple of cotton market bags onto the island. From these
she would proceed to pull out her cloth portfolio of knives, her apron, and, depending
on the dish we were making, her prodigious collection of spices. This notably included a
tin of saffron the size of a coffee can. Her mom sent her these eye-popping quantities
of saffron, which whenever a recipe called for it Samin would sprinkle as liberally as
salt.

“I’m soooo excited!”
she’d invariably begin, in a singsong, as she tied her apron around her waist.
“Today, you are going to learn how to brown meat.” Or make a soffritto. Or
butterfly a chicken. Or make a fish stock. Samin could get excited about the most
mundane kitchen procedures, but her enthusiasm was catching, and eventually I came to
regard it as almost a kind of ethic. Even browning meat, an operation that to me seemed
fairly self-evident if not banal, deserved to be done with the utmost care and
attention, and so with passion. At stake was the eater’s experience. There was
also the animal to consider, which you honored by making the very most of whatever it
had to offer. Samin made sure there was also a theme undergirding each lesson: the
Maillard reaction (when browning meat); eggs and their magical properties; the miracle
of emulsification; and so forth. Over the course of a year, we made all sorts of main
course dishes, as well as various salads and sides and desserts. Yet it seemed our main
courses always came back to pot dishes, and we probably cooked more braises than
anything else.

Much like a stew, a braise is a method of
cooking meat and/or vegetables slowly in a liquid medium. In a stew, however, the main
ingredient is typically cut into bite-sized pieces and completely submerged in the
cooking liquid. In a braise, the main ingredient is left whole or cut into larger pieces
(with meat ideally left on the bone) and only partially submerged in liquid. This way,
the bottom of the meat is stewed, in effect, while the exposed top part is allowed to
brown, making for richer, more complex flavors as well as, usually, a thicker sauce and
a prettier dish.

Samin and I braised duck legs and chicken
thighs, roosters and rabbits, various unprepossessing cuts of pork and beef, the shanks
and necks of lamb, turkey legs, and a great many different vegetables. Each of these
dishes called for a braising liquid, and at one time or another we used them all: red
wine and white, brandy and beer, various
stocks (chicken, pork, beef,
fish), milk, tea, pomegranate juice, dashi (a Japanese stock made from seaweed and
flaked bonito), the liquid left over from soaked mushrooms and beans, and water straight
from the tap. We also made dishes that were not, technically, stews or braises, but were
built on the same general principle, including sugo or ragù (or ragoût), bouillabaisse,
risotto, and paella.

More often than not, the general principle
called for a foundational dice of onions and other aromatic vegetables, which I would
try to get ready before Samin showed up. And more often than not, Samin would take one
look at the neat piles of chopped onions, carrots, and celery on my cutting board (the
height of said piles conforming to the prescribed ratio of 2:1:1) and tell me to rechop
them, because my dice wasn’t fine enough.

“In some dishes, a rough dice like
that is fine.” I tried not to take offense, but I didn’t think of my neat
cubes as “rough” at all. “But in this dish, you don’t
necessarily want to be able to see any evidence of the soffritto,” she explained.
“You want it to melt away into nothingness, become this invisible layer of
deliciousness. So … keep chopping!” And so I did, following her example
of rocking a big knife back and forth through the piles of diced vegetables, dividing
and subdividing the little cubes until they became mere specks.

On the subject of sautéing onions, another
operation I wrongly assumed to be fairly straightforward, Samin had definite opinions.
“Most people don’t cook their onions nearly long enough or slow enough. They
try to rush it.” This was apparently a major pet peeve of hers. “The onions
should have no bite left whatsoever and be completely transparent and soft. Turn down
the flame and give them a half hour at
least
.” Samin had been a sous-chef
in a local Italian restaurant where she had sixteen young men working under her.
“I was constantly walking down the line, turning down their burners, which were
always on high. I guess it’s some kind of guy thing to crank your
flame all way to the max. But you need to be
gentle
with a mirepoix or
soffritto.”