|
How did you end up writing for the
Globe
and working at
America’s Test Kitchen?
I didn’t intend to be involved in food for a living. I went to school for
architecture. I was quick to realize that a) I never should have been admitted to
architecture school, and b) even though I was admitted, it would be a grave mistake for
me to pursue it, because to quote Barbie, “Math is hard.”
So I was doing marketing for architecture firms. I spent a whole lot of time
cruising cookbooks, making dinners, and having friends over, but the light bulb hadn’t
quite gone off. I would come in every Monday morning after a weekend of cooking, and
regale my officemates with the various things that I had tried, and how they worked, and
what I wanted to change. One day, someone just looked at me and said, “What are you
doing here? Why don’t you just go to cooking school?” I mean talk about feeling like a
doofus. It had never gelled for me, even though my sister had been to cooking school,
and my whole family cooks. I promptly quit my job and went to the Boston University
Culinary Certificate Program.
At one point, I was in the office of the director, and there was another woman
waiting in the office to speak with her. The woman and I struck up a conversation. She
had done the program a year or two before me. She was an editor at Cook’s
Illustrated, which I read, but again, doofus moment, it had never
registered that it was just down the street in Brookline. I started talking to her about
what her job was and how she liked it. Then and there, I decided that I wanted to write
about food instead of actually cooking it.
I was on the poor woman like white on rice and just kept after her for a freelance
assignment here and there. That finally snowballed into a real job at Cook’s
Illustrated. This was in the early 1990s. I remember being in school
thinking, “Oh, God, I don’t want to work on the line in a restaurant. That’s too hard.
I’m too old. I don’t like the heat. What am I going to do?” It’s one of those incredibly
irritating right place, right time stories that you never want to hear when you’re on
the other end of it.
From the perspective of cooking in the kitchen, what has
turned out to matter more than you expected?
This sounds a little geeky, but the thing that I didn’t realize going into it,
especially because I don’t have a scientific mind, was that understanding some of the
science behind cooking is important. Leavening is still an uphill battle for me to
understand. All these recipes rely primarily on baking powder, but sometimes include a
little baking soda. Really understanding the acid neutralization in baking soda as an
ingredient and what ingredients are acidic is not something that they really teach you
in cooking school.
What turned out to be less important?
Not to shoot myself in the foot here, but kitchen tools. You really don’t need every
conceivable tool to cook well.
What would you consider to be the few basic tools a kitchen
needs?
Certainly a chef’s knife. A serrated knife is also really useful. A good, heavy
aluminum core sauté pan is important. You can do a million different things in it: sauté
obviously, braise, shallow fry, roast, bake… A good strainer, measuring cups, and
spoons are useful. I love bowls that have the measurements on them so you can get the
volume as you are mixing. I have an immersion blender that I use a ton. I would not want
to go anywhere without my immersion blender. I use the food processor quite a bit. I
have a standing mixer, but I could
probably get away with a hand mixer for most of what I do. Those are some of the
basics.
What’s your overall approach when you look at a piece of
kitchen gear?
I do my best to dump all preconceptions. Because I have had years of experience in
the area and exposure to the various tools and talked to various experts, I
automatically know what I’m looking for. But I have to try and let go of that stuff and
do the test as objectively as possible, because I may be surprised.
I remember testing grill pans that had ridges in the bottom, which are supposed to
create the visual effect of real grill marks. I’m a big cast iron pan man. I like cast
iron, and one of the pans in the line-up was a cast iron grill pan. Even doing my best
to drop the preconceptions, I still thought, “It’s going to be fabulous.” In fact, it
did heat up reasonably evenly, and it retained its heat. It made good grill marks. But I
was surprised by the fact that it was a pain to clean because of the shape and placement
of the ridges. Gunk would collect between them. I try not to use detergent and abrasives
on cast iron, because I want to care for the seasoning. If I have really stuck-on gunk,
I get in there with coarse salt and stiff brush, and there just wasn’t enough room for
the salt to really do its thing. After cleaning it twice, I swore I would never use it
again.
What’s your process for going from a first version, or
concept, to a final recipe for a
Boston Globe
article?
I’ve never really shaken the cook’s process, so I probably research and test more
than I have to. For instance, I’m currently working on fruitcake for a Christmas holiday
column. I start by looking online. I have a whole bunch of cookbooks at home, and I also
make liberal use of all the libraries in our area. So I’ll look at as many fruitcake
recipes as I can, say 40 or 50, or whatever is practical given my deadline. I will make
a little chart for myself, just a quick handwritten thing, of the types and variables in
a fruitcake recipe. Then I overlay my own food sensibilities.
For example, what color scheme I want, what ratio of batter to fruit and nuts I
want, what shapes and so forth. I will do what I call “cobbling together” a recipe. I’ll
give it a try. I convene my tasters and we taste it and analyze it. There’s no such
thing as a casual, thoughtless meal in this house. I want feedback on pretty much every
bite that everyone puts in his or her mouth. Then I’ll go back and make it a second
time. If I’m really, really, lucky, I can nail it on the second try. More often than
not, I will make it a third time. It’s a constant process of critique and
analysis.
Are there cases where you just get stuck and can’t figure
out why it’s not working?
I’m really lucky to have worked in the food world for long enough that I know a lot
of people, much smarter than I am, who I can always call with questions. Actually, for
one of my first columns for the Globe, I was doing a thing on
mangos and I wanted to do mango bread. I was trying to get the leavening right. There
was some molasses in there, and some puréed mangos, and this question of baking powder
and baking soda came up. I ended up calling a million different bakers to help me
understand the role of the baking powder and how it affected the browning.
I’ve been known to scrap recipes if they don’t work the way I want them to after the
third or fourth try, or if it doesn’t taste as good as I want it to. But I don’t
remember being so stuck in a problem that I wasn’t able to work it out without the help
of many smart people.
Has there ever been a case where you’ve published a recipe,
and in hindsight, said “oops,” or where the reaction was unexpected?
Oh, God, yes. It’s really difficult to please all of the people all of the time. I
remember publishing one recipe early on and when I went back and looked at it a couple
of years later, I thought, “What the hell was I thinking? That is just as convoluted as
can be.”
Have any of your recipes caught you off guard by how well
liked they were?
There was a lemony quinoa pilaf and asparagus with shrimp scampi recipe that I did.
I had discussed quinoa off and on with my editor for a while, because I really like it.
Now it’s in pretty much any supermarket, but at the point I was writing this recipe it
was new to me. People loved it. I got so much positive response from readers on that
one.
|
