Our Culinary Roots

Cut it like this. No, a little finer, and make sure it is straight….. It has to be straight or the dish won’t have any uniformity, any cohesion, any symmetry. The chef in slightly dirtied kitchen whites explains to his prep cook the importance of creating the perfect julienne, and how that translates to everything else he does. If you can’t cut the perfect julienne, how can you create a perfect brunoise? Similarly, in food, writer Michael Ruhlman’s “The Soul of a Chef”, Thomas Keller explains this very idea. He asks, “Do you really care about everything that’s going on or just the finished product…. Because it doesn’t begin with the plate. It begins when you wake up. It’s got to be a philosophy. You have to be determined, determined to do it everyday. If you are going to have a clean plate, you’ve got to have a clean oil bottle.” For Thomas Keller it started in south Florida, which took him to France then to New York, then eventually to California. His culinary resume doesn’t include the Culinary Institute of America, nor Le Cordon Bleu or one of the Art Institutes. He learned classically, in France the art and history of cooking, where they had been doing this for decades. He learned how to make clear stocks and how to fix a cloudy one, mastered hollandaise but most importantly he was taught to understand and respect the ingredients he was using – what they were, where they came from and why they were valuable. This type of cooking had been going on for centuries, for millennia – and it had been occurring for no other reason than the fact that people had to respect and understand the value of their ingredients to survive. There was no supermarket around every corner, nor 24 hour fast food stops, and to this day it is like that in many cultures throughout the world. Even for the cultures that have made the transition into the modern day world of mass transit and urban lifestyles, we still very closely associate their cultures with certain, seemingly, primitive foods. In Mexico there is a tripe stew called Menudo, in France they marvel over calves brains, beef tongue and other seemingly foreign edibles, in Russia it is liver in the form of a Pate. In the American south we use chicken livers and gizzards; dust them, fry them up and the tender mineral taste can be otherworldly. In Italy, as their fish begins to go bad they make a hearty soup out of whatever is available – Cippino. They call it a Bouliabiase in France. In Portugal they catch Cod fish, preserve it by curing it with salt and, and it is subsequently available for months. Simply soak the fish in some water, and it will reconstitute, bringing it back to life – making it, well, edible. In Italy they call this baccala. You get the idea. This type of cooking and creativeness was imperative for the well being of cultures of the world that existed before the transport of produce cross country, before chicken farms were infested with hormones, and the idea of farm raising a fish, oyster or a softshell crab seemed asinine. Anyone that appreciates good food, understands and appreciates this type of cooking, but we also understand it is humbling, and was created out of a primitive necessity. Techniques that have been around forever are still used today, but things have changed, for the better, and culinary skills have turned into an art form. We see this with the perfect julienne, a perfect brunoise, or using a bottle of oil laced with herbs to garnish a plate. Metal into making rings to create a perfectly round portion of risotto, creates a focus on presentation that never mattered before. It didn’t have to, and that is how it all began… that is our culinary roots…. We have come a long way, haven’t we? Of course we have, but really good cooking in a way always goes back to our roots, never undermines the importance of basic foods, and always respects the lives that were sacrificed to make what we eat, well, food…


Have a Great Thanksgiving Weekend.
CH