CITY Issue 55 - (Page 38) CITY LIFE / THE AMUSED BOUCHE ASSURANCE AGENT Forget spoons and sauces, pots and pans. Of all the tools in a chef’s arsenal, the most valuable one might not be found in a kitchen cabinet. Eva Hagberg discovers her culinary confidence. I t starts with a misunderstanding and ends with butter. It starts when I meet John, my f iend who is a boy, and we’ e talking the usual getting-toknow-each-othe talk, and I mention that I like cooking, a bit, and he mentions that he likes food, too, and once cooked dinne fo people. nd so, f om this, I infe , given my state of absolute unabashed lime ence that leads people in these situations down all kinds of infe ing oads, that John is a b illiant chef. I do not pay attention to the fact that John doesn’t cook when we’ e at his house. Eve . I only pay attention to what I hea , and what I hea is that he is a cook, and a good one at that. So, fo six months, we sc amble fo dinne . We o de in, we go out. Somehow, in that New o k way, we neve eally focus on what we’ e going to eat, o eally eve have complete meals. But he e and the e, we cobble togethe ou su vival. nd then I ealize that I miss messing a ound with bowls and spoons, so I sta t small, with a few things. I tell him that I’d like to use his kitchen fo some expe iments, if he doesn’t mind, and so I sta t expe imenting, but only with things I know how to make, like pancakes. nd then, New ea ’s Day, I look in his f idge, and see that his butte expi ed. long time ago. Like, in . I’m shocked. I ask him. nd we clea things up. It tu ns out that by “cook dinne fo ” he had meant “put something big in the oven.” By “like food” he had meant “like to eat it.” nd, immediately, my confidence goes th ough the oof. I buy fo his bookcase (but eally fo myself) lice Wate s’ The t of Simple Food. I info m John that, f om now on, things a e going to be diffe ent a ound he e. I tell him to get eady fo a few missteps but even eadie fo a few hits (we don’t have to talk about the Tuscan white beans with kale, but I see a lot of ca damom b ead pudding ahead). When I t uly ove step and we have a few g and failu es, I ealize that I should p obably scale back and sta t with the basics, lose my ego, and gain some knowledge. s a bake , I want to loosen up in the kitchen and become mo e of a cook, so I buy Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Coo in , which takes me out of my béchamel sauce–making, Daniel Boulud ecipe–following ove confidence, and eminds me that it just might be a good idea to get good with the basics. Which a e, I lea n f om Ruhlman, essentially heat and salt. I slow down. I stop cooking ove my head, and sta t cooking things I know I can manage. Spinach and chickpea stew. Maca oni and cheese. Vegetable lasagna. These a e easy dishes b oken up into even easie steps, and I sta t unde standing what’s happening when I d ain my g ated potatoes fo latkes (the sta ches a e, um, doing something), and when I catch myself whisking a white sauce with my ight hand while pou ing in milk with my le , I think I’ve got this down. Halfway th ough this e-development of my cooking confidence, I have dinne at llen & Delancey (even the most newly enthusiastic chef needs the night off). nd the e, lines down a menu that is full of wo ds like “shavings” and “fi nge lings” and “cavia ,” is a dish desc ibed only as “cabbage, beef, and onion.” I know I have to have it. It’s not that I pa ticula ly like cabbage, o b ake all that much fo beef, o eally c y ove onion. It’s that I know, somehow, that this CITY 38 TY dish was cooked and named with confidence. nd that’s also what it will take to o de it. So I do. nd it’s amazing. It isn’t as simple as the name suggests — the chef, Neil Fe guson, tells me late that it’s one of the most complicated dishes on the menu — but it’s delicious: both efi ned and elemental. So I ask Fe guson about confidence. I think he’s a good one to talk to because he used to wo k fo Go don Ramsay, a guably the King of all Ego, and because when he took ove llen & Delancey it had been languishing unde delays and d ama fo so long that people we e sta ting to mumble that it would neve open, and if it did, that it would most likely fail. (It hasn’t.) I suggest it must have taken a se ious dose of confidence fo him to jump in and immediately sta t putting cabbage, beef, and onion on the page, su e of the custome s’ confidence in him, but it tu ns out it isn’t so simple. “I eally tea myself apa t when I w ite a menu,” Fe guson says, talking about not just the titles of his dishes, but the essence of the combinations themselves. “It’s not as easy as many people think sometimes.” Most dishes, he points out, a e changed at least five times befo e they complete the cycle f om mind to kitchen to oad-test to menu. nd it’s knowing when to stop that’s mo e than half the battle. “Having that mechanism in you that says ‘that’s enough,’ that’s confident cooking,” he says. I think of some of the st ange dishes I’ve had ecently, ones that we e the estau ant ve sions of my multi-stage, multi-cou se failu es, and Fe guson jumps ight in. “ ou’ll fi nd a younge cook, and they’ve got all these g eat ideas and wo ked in all these g eat places, seen all these amazing things, so they t y and put them on a plate and you end up with a mess,” he says. “Whe eas the mo e seasoned, expe ienced, and confident cook is going to have bette judgment on when a dish is fi nished and eady to go.” The confident chef, Fe guson a gues, is one who knows how to tell a good ing edient f om a bad, an excellent sou ce f om a te ible. It’s one who knows when to stop. Fe guson’s confidence makes sense given his histo y in sto ied kitchens, but I think of anothe chef, Michael Psilakis, whose opening of One a spea headed what became a full-blown G eek evival. No one was feeling G eek food on the level that Psilakis was doing it when he fi st showed up, but it’s th ee yea s late and he’s eopening a ve sion of the shutte ed G eek-Italian Dona with p oven-t ack- eco d pa tne Donatella paia, and flying high on the success of the ult a- efi ned nthos. I ask him about how he found his confidence to stick with such a then- isky move. “I think the e has to be a ce tain amount of ego fo you to be able to p oduce at the highest level,” he says. “But on the fl ip side, the e can’t eve be a time whe e you lose sight of the fact that if you sta t to believe in that ego too much, what ends up happening is that you don’t have balance.” He says it wasn’t until a yea and a half ago that he found the matu ity to a ive at a level whe e he “wasn’t t ying to imp ess as much anymo e — I was just t ying to c eate things that we e going to be beautiful.” Now that takes guts. SPICES: PHOTO BY ANTHONY CROSS.
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