You are what you read...

Abigail turned one this weekend and my folks are in town for that and to help celebrate Nicole’s folks’ fiftieth (!) wedding anniversary... Among Abigail’s many gifts were several books; she’s generally too young to appreciate them yet for any qualities beyond, say, flavour or texture, but she will, soon enough, and for now, the colours and pictures do seem to draw her eyes, and the pages are already fun to turn. The birthday morning I noticed another gift, this one to me, while sitting on the couch with my mom and a cup of coffee, both of us chatting and...reading. You see, in my family, we don’t just ‘like to read’ we READ like crazy; there are books, newspapers and magazines everywhere you look. Our lives are storied and lettered to the point that it is a perfectly natural act for a conversation to go on hold while I ‘just finish this page...’ or to walk around one of our houses and see an open or bookmarked book in more than three rooms, thus outnumbering the actual number of people in the given home (unless you count Meg, my parents’ Chihuahua.) The gift my folks gave me is that love of the word, that life alongside, that ability to think on the page and to escape, to imagine, and to learn.

Music was my big dream in my late teens and early twenties, and at that point in my life you would have found my bookshelves stacked with biographies of my favorite musicians; trade and music entertainment magazines littering my coffee table; and other books just mentioned by the musicians I favored (thanks, Jim Morrison, did you actually finish Thus Spake Zarathustra? Really?) I also found a love of theatre and its trappings in college and my shelves filled with plays by the increasingly more literary but probably less likely to be staged fringe of modern, absurdist, and surreal playwrights (I’m not exactly sure what career that degree would have brought me, but based on the few staged plays of Beckett, Pinter, or Ionesco that I did manage to attend, I’m fairly sure it would have involved some incredibly tiny and just more than slightly uncomfortable audiences...)

It is telling that when I realized I wanted to be, not just a cook, but a chef and artisan in a food tradition, one of my first acts was a yearlong (circa 1996) decision to put aside all other reading. I did not read novels, I read food and cooking memoirs; I did not read music magazines, I read food trade magazines; I did not read plays, I read cookbooks. I immersed myself in the literary, philosophical and practical world of cooking words. I am not claiming that this choice alone would have made me into a great cook or a chef—that path is only blazed through a forest of cuts, burns and many long, hot days at the stove—but it did give me an edge. It gave me a language to describe what I did, a sense of camaraderie and kinship, and a means to communicate.

Reading does not replace learning, it colourizes it. It fills in the gaps; it makes learning more fun. In my first year of college I, unsure of my eventual vocation, took introductory courses in a number of different disciplines—through that experience I determined a pattern. Each of these courses offered a vocabulary; each spent a class period covering a word, a term, a group of phrases; they were teaching us how to speak the sacred tongue of Anthropologese, or, say, a dialect of Psychology-ican. In some cases, the learning of another language was literal, as in Latin for the sciences or Spanish, for, well, Spanish...But in others it was more subtle, English using English to describe English, or words we knew that meant a new thing in the context of our new (potential) discipline.

Kitchens are no different. Once through the swinging door, you are in the ‘back of house’ you are grabbing ‘half-pans,’ ‘firing tickets,’ ‘counting covers,’ ‘plating four-tops,’ ‘eighty-sixing’ items, or even ‘digging yourself out of the weeds.’ Words and phrases appear unannounced; for instance, in our kitchen at the branch we use a loft space for the storage of dry goods, and within a couple of months of being open it became ‘the sky’ and the ladder to reach it became the ‘flight’ (as in ‘flight of stairs’) When open, the ladder blocks one of our hand sinks, a condition that led to the perfectly logical mnemonic couplet ‘when you sky at night, don’t forget to remove your flight’ a bit of nonsense that is completely sensible in context. Our small silicon spatulas became ‘jerries’ for no reason other than that ‘jerry’ is easier to say than ‘small silicon spatula’ 300 times in an evening service. A girl from New Jersey introduced me to the term ‘wazzing’ for blending, and a friend in San Francisco gave me the Yiddish word ‘schmutz’ (which I’m fairly sure has an unpleasant definition...) to refer to any pasty concoction with a smear-able texture like that of hummus or peanut butter. These terms travel from kitchen to kitchen like viruses and eventually, as a whole, become the lexicon of our daily life. Our language.

I feel very lucky that I love to read. It has helped with all of my choices, helped me find context for my interests and it has made me a more complete person. Usually, within a few minutes of meeting someone, I can tell if they are readers as well and have a foundation on which to build a common bond. I sometimes feel like the readers out there are like Harry Potter’s wizarding friends with the non-readers making up the Muggle population—I would be slightly worried about that comparison offending the humourless, but I doubt that a non-reader would even get it. Or be reading this. See what I mean?

My year of cookbooks didn’t just help me learn how to be a better cook; it helped me begin the process of thinking about cooking, eating, and food as a whole philosophy. Cookbooks by Alice Waters and Deborah Madison helped me find food philosophy books by Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, which lead me older books by Rudolf Steiner and even Esscoffier. I spent time with Harold McGee and Julia Child and Peter Mayle; and I travelled the world on a plate, with books about food from every corner of the globe. Through these discoveries and adventures I became informed, not just about how to be a chef, but why. I came to understand that eating is more than just sustenance, but also a way to relate to the world. Cooking, as a trade, came through my work, practice and effort, but my reading filled in the gaps, my reading is what gave me the confidence to be a chef.

Abigail may only taste her books right now, but I do hope she develops that taste--it has certainly made my life sweeter.