I began cooking when I was ten. There are few things in this life better than the taste of good food prepared well. So, it seemed natural to me that I needed to learn to make it myself. I know exactly what inspired it, beyond just good taste. In the late 1950s and early 60s, my parents and five other couples used to gather monthly for what they called “Gourmet Dinners.” Six course meals with every recipe coming from the two-volume Gourmet cookbooks, with each dish prepared by one of the couples.
The gatherings were hosted by a different couple every month. I remember distinctly being sent off to bed long before the evening even began when it was held at our house. And it was after these nights when my parents hosted the meal, that I got my first, real taste for gourmet cooking. I may not have been allowed at the table, but the following morning, while my parents slept off the excesses of the night before, the leftovers were all mine.
I can hear my father saying to the other guests as he always did: “Don’t worry about cleaning up. The maid will get it in the morning.” Of course, those of us who got up before the maid, invariably my mother, got the spoils. There were incredible delights left behind: desserts half eaten, various meats in all kinds of swanky sauces, and half-filled glasses of cocktails and wine. The good life. This was what cooking was all about, and I wanted my share.
When I finally asked my mother if I could cook, she gladly acquiesced, letting me do so once a week. It’s safe to say, those initial forays weren’t culinary disasters, rather emotional rampages. I was incensed if everything didn’t come out perfectly, and it rarely did. My parents vowed and threatened on every occasion to stop my excursions into the culinary arts, since it made me so upset. The problem was I showed talent. I had only begun developing my sense of how things tasted together. My sudden anger at my many mini-failures, however, continued. OK, continues.
I got my first restaurant job at 12 washing dishes in a local German restaurant, and helping the cook by putting the sausages that had been ordered into the big pot of boiling water steaming on the stove. I was amazed by the incredible variety of German sausages and their many shapes, colors and flavors. I got fired after two days when I nearly blew up the place, forgetting to turn off a gas valve to the hot water that went to the dishwasher. It didn’t matter. I had gotten my first professional cooking taste.
My second gig didn’t last much longer. It was at a pizza kitchen at a local bowling alley. I knew almost instantly that pizzas weren’t my thing, but there was something to the swirl of the tomato sauce ladle as it circumnavigated the pizza dough I loved. My failing was the pizza dough, itself. I never quite got the twirl and toss, let alone the correct baking time so it was neither undercooked nor burned to a crisp.
I used those few days of “professional” restaurant experience to get another short-lived job in a catering restaurant. Here, I quickly learned how difficult it was to cut up a fresh pineapple, or rather how easy it was to cut my finger instead of the thick-skinned fruit.
It was not until I was sixteen that I lasted longer than a week in a kitchen. I got hired as a pantry boy at the Hungry Tiger Restaurant, a steak and lobster house, run by a group of retired Flying Tigers, who were now relegated to flying fresh Maine lobsters from the east coast to the west, rather than shooting down German Messerschmitts. A primary part of my job was to kill lobsters in a variety of not very delectable ways. I must have killed thousands over the two years I worked at the Hungry Tiger.
I loved eating lobster, always have, even after my time as a first-rate lobby-executioner. It was only years later, when I had begun my Buddhist practice, that I realized the karma I must have accrued causing all those innocent deaths. Yum.
I loved eating lobster, always have, even after my time as a first-rate lobby-executioner. It was only years later, when I had begun my Buddhist practice, that I realized the karma I must have accrued causing all those innocent deaths. Yum.
Ah, but this was my first professional opportunity to cook. At the end of the evening, long after the dinner rush, I was given my chance behind the steam tables and in front of the ovens and broilers. The other, far more experienced cooks, willingly began teaching me the ropes. How to tell the doneness of a steak by touching it with my thumb, the distinction between rare and medium rare, and how the steaks continued to cook even when removed from the fire. How to recognize when the lobsters were appropriately ready and not over-cooked. How to mark a salmon steak without it falling apart. All this wisdom was generously passed on by the older cooks, because it was how they learned, too. Cooking, in this fashion, was not simply talent, it was transmission, as well.
When I was five or six, my father’s mother would take the train from Milwaukee, where she lived, to come and visit her four west coast children and their families. My father was one of nine children, and my grandma fed them all. She made Jewish cooking taste like a royal delicacy. I couldn’t get enough. I don’t remember her ever leaving the kitchen when she visited us, except perhaps to walk with me to the “little market” near our house, to get something my mother’s kitchen didn’t have. I loved those journeys, walking down Hesperia, our street, to Saticoy Ave and then over to Bert’s, aka “the little store.” My grandmother holding my hand as we maneuvered down the streets. I knew an ice cream awaited me when we arrived. The warmth and kinship I felt with this old Ukrainian woman. Cooking was obviously in the DNA. I loved my grandma, and I knew she loved me. I’m sure she equally loved her 26 other grandchildren, my cousins, but I knew I was the one. “Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie,” She would say. “Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie.”
At eighteen, I got a “real” cooking job at the Aware Inn. And in a matter of months, the head chef, Gene Hodge, anointed me night chef of this fine dining, fashionably hip, International-cuisine restaurant. Of course, there were only two cooks on staff. But that didn’t matter. Gene had taught me and trusted me.
The restaurant was always filled with Hollywood luminaries, because we were one of the few restaurants that featured organic vegetables and meats that were never shot with steroids, that tasted like real cooking as opposed to “health” food. The celebrities loved it. Marlon Brando, a frequent diner, even spoke to me once after I had inadvertently come out of the kitchen as he was walking by. He asked very distinctly, “Uh, where’s the bathroom?” I was momentarily speechless – this was Marlon Brando. Unable to reply to this brilliant, half-inebriated screen giant, all I could do was raise my arm and point to the awaiting pissoir.
There were other culinary influences who taught me along the way, notably a French chef, Pierre Pelish, who taught me how to make a variety of deliciously scrumptious sauces. All of these experiences of “passing along the art of cooking” led me to one of my greatest moments in the kitchen. My granddaughter, aged 8, wanted to cook something while her grandmother and I were babysitting her and her brother. Without a moment of hesitation, I said yes.
She told me she wanted to make something she could mix and stir, and the generational transmissions began. We quickly decided on pancakes, and then discovered a bag of chocolate chips. We got a mixing bowl and she measured a cup of pancake mix and poured it into the bowl, followed by a cup of milk and an egg, She then began to mix and stir. I had her measure a half a cup of chocolate chips, which she then added to the bowl and continued to stir. Once she had eliminated the lumps she pulled out the crepe pan her parents used for pancakes and the like, and I plugged it in for her. I then asked her if they had any blueberries, known in our family as, booberries. “We always have them,” she said.
“Are they washed?” I asked.
“My father always washes them,” she replied with the certainty of total trust.
When the pan was ready, I brushed it with some vegetable oil we had put on a paper towel, and when the green light went on, we knew we were in business. I handed her a large plastic spoon. With the skill of the innate, she poured two spoons full onto the appropriate spot on the pan, and repeated that five more times, until six round disks began to cook. I then had her added 5 booberries to each pancake. With that complete, we watched for the little holes to show up in the batter, which as I told her, signified it was time to flip the pancakes. Taking the spatula like a pro, she turned each of the now golden-brown pancakes over and in a matter of seconds, Chocolate chip, Booberry pancakes.
Once again, manipulating the spatula, she slipped the hot cakes onto a waiting plate and she and her brother, finished them off, lickety, lickety. Success! From grandparent to grandchild, the genetic transfer was activated and launched.
It’s what we do. We pass on what we know to our progeny and then its up to them. Of course, my daughters have been after me for years to write down my recipes they love, which I have never done. It’s not because the recipes are secret. OK, perhaps a few of them are. But there’s no secret to adding enough lemon to hollandaise, or butter, green chile sauce and sour cream to Enchiladas Suizas. Yes, taste is crucial, but the real secret is something greater, something deeper.
Adding a little sugar when necessary doesn’t hurt anyone. It just fills life with a little sweetness, which is a good thing, in spite of all the health reports to the contrary
I ask my daughters, can you taste how ingredients combine without actually doing so? That is an essential ability. You are either born with those sense receptors or not. My girls all have them. But they also know, adding a little sugar when necessary doesn’t hurt anyone. It just fills life with a little sweetness, which is a good thing, in spite of all the health reports to the contrary. To appreciate a little sweetness is to be open to the possibility that something leaden can be transmuted into something golden. That’s the alchemy of cooking, and the place where the real secret lives. It can’t be forced into or painted on after. It comes from an open heart that is realized when you are feeding people you love.
Teaching my granddaughter that will take time. But the real secret ingredient is always love. When I cook from my heart, it enters the food. It does, whether it’s with chocolate and booberries, or a saltimbocca or even kreplach floating in chicken soup. The essential ingredient is always love. That was the lesson my grandmother and my mother passed on to me. Every great chef knows that, which is why they are often so demanding of others. When love is left out, the food has no inspiration to satisfy. It’s always been the secret ingredient. Anyone can combine prescribed measurements, but without love, it’s not worth sharing from one generation to the next.
You can taste the difference.
It was evident in the joy my granddaughter felt as she and her brother devoured her creation. Whether she knew it or not, though I think she did, it’s where our hearts connected, and how ultimately, we get to connect to others.