Culinary Beginnings January 24, 2008

“Where did you go to cooking school?” This is the question I hear perhaps most often from people curious about what it’s like to cook for a living. They are always disappointed to hear that I have a master’s degree in medieval literature, although probably not quite as disappointed as the folks who financed that education. I always say I can answer any of the brown questions on Trivial Pursuit with about 95% accuracy, so the expensive education was not a complete waste.

The truth is that I began working in restaurants the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school, and have been hooked ever since. I went to undergrad at LSU, working my way through some really great restaurants under the guidance of chefs cooking creole and Cajun food using classic French techniques. While I might have slept through biology class, I never missed a shift at work or an opportunity to learn from these great cooks. From the first time I stepped into a restaurant kitchen, I knew that I would never feel more comfortable anywhere else. There are “front of the house” people and “back of the house” people. I’m married to a FOH, and I’ve worked hard to overcome my true BOH nature to build businesses and make my way in the world, but the truth is that I love the tiny bubble world of the kitchen, which has its own rhythm, its own language, its own inside jokes, and its own clearly defined culture and code of conduct. It’s . . . well, it’s really medieval in there. Rough, loud, hot, smoky, but when everything goes right, it’s like hearing the music of the spheres.

My mother and my grandmother taught me to love food. My grandmother was from north Louisiana and was the living embodiment of comfort food. She herself was large and soft, and she made food that was too—fluffy, heavenly biscuits and rolls; pastry that shattered with the edge of your fork, revealing creamy chicken potpie underneath or the dark purple mystery of huckleberry pie. From her I learned the pleasures of catching, growing and gathering your food, setting aside stores, and practicing the craft of cooking enough to achieve an intimate knowledge of the science behind it—to recognize the weight in your hand of the correct measure of flour or salt. My mother too knows how to feed a person’s soul. “Putting on a pot of beans” is her shorthand for offering hospitality to anyone in the vicinity. These are not women who plated food and garnished it, but cooked in huge pots for whoever might be tempted by the aroma of smoked pork, garlic, and above all, that great healer of lost souls, that mysterious liquor so much greater than anything that goes into it . . . gravy. No one can make gravy like my mother, and poor thing, I made her take a pain pill and make it on Thanksgiving, just several days after having both shoulders operated on. She could have stood there and told me exactly what to do, but magic requires the touch of the wizard . . .

My father, while a great cook only in certain, highly controlled circumstances, influenced me too. He is a great lover of brunch, and the repertoire of his kitchen successes includes all the New Orleans standards—eggs Benedict, brandy milk punch, and perhaps most important, bananas Foster. A successful trial lawyer in the 70s, he styled himself a Renaissance man and bon vivant, with a pilot’s license and 4-seater airplane. We often flew to New Orleans from Beaumont for brunch—I remember being there one snowy morning and making snowmen in the courtyard with the bartender, using olives and cherries for eyes and mouth. An only child (in the 70s), I was free to wander into the kitchen, where I would entertain the staff with my favorite song, “Let me Entertain You,” from Gypsy Rose Lee by way of Ethel Merman. No one in our house, or in that decade really, believed in censorship, or, obviously, the obsessive oversight of children. We traveled farther afield as well—to Delmonico’s in Mexico City, to “21” in New York. The 70s and early 80s culinary scene was marked by two elements that strongly influenced my choice of career—“tableside” service and the art of flambé. Menu items then were named classically—Caesar salad, cherries jubilee, bananas Foster, steak Diane. There was no poetry to the menu, just the names of dishes that everyone recognized. You looked at the menu (no prices on the ladies’ menus), ordered what you wanted, and a waiter would appear with a cart, and toss or carve your food, and if you were lucky, hopefully set it on fire. And that, ultimately, is why I do what I do. I recognized then that, as well as comfort and sustenance, food could be theater and spectacle. It can be anything you need it to be—it provides a means of connecting with other people that nothing else on this earth can match—intimate, formal, homey or dramatic, from the farmer planting the seed to the waiter flaming it tableside. Who wouldn’t develop a lifelong passion for studying that?