Some Advice For Young Foodies

Since it is graduation time, it seems that everyone and his dog are offering advice for young people. It seems only fair, since I offer a source of temptation for foodies, that I offer some cautionary advice to those young people who are of a foodie bent.

First, how do you know if you are a foodie?

If you wake up in the middle of the night with an experimental recipe gnawing at your brain, if you smell a dead skunk and study the aromatic profile of it, if you find yourself on vacation, without a kitchen, but still have the urge to check out the produce section at the local market, you probably are a foodie.

If you would buy a mansion in a posh part of town and grow tomatoes in the front yard, because the light is best, you probably are a foodie.

If you learn botany, organic chemistry, zoology or any other science just to get a better grasp of your ingredients, you are a member of the club. If you can name more chefs than you can quarterbacks, you probably are one of us. If you can elaborate on the specific contribution to the world of food from each of the chefs, you are deep in it.

If you are a vegetarian, forget it. You are no more a foodie than I am an expert gymnist. If you think that bran tastes good, then you are a lost cause.

So, you are a foodie?

At some point you must make the decision of whether or not to turn pro. My general advice is don’t. If you don’t believe me, then read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Bourdain is right when he says that people become professional cooks when they can do nothing else.

Bourdain talks good sense, but you need to hear it from a Catholic point of view. Professional kitchens can destroy you. If you are at all wishy washy in your faith, if you too easily succumb to the temptations of sex and heavy drinking and drugs, then you need a career in the kitchen as much as a modern university needs more Marxists.

When I graduated from college I had to make the decision. I had been doing some catering and was beginning to find my voice in the kitchen. Career opportunities for harpsichordists were dismal, and retail was wearing me down. I had a good friend who was a sous chef and it seemed inevitable that I would go that route. My friend put it this way: “a kitchen is a place where you put a bunch of demented bugs and let them play with fire and sharp knives.” It sounded fun.

I can only attribute it to Grace that I managed to avoid this career path. I have successfully stayed out of restaurant kitchens. I worked in a food lab (a great place for a foodie to work), and eventually ended up as a restaurant critic. I take on gigantic cooking projects for friends and family, and that seems to keep my unwholesome impulses in check.

If you are a young Catholic of sufficient faith and formation to withstand the life of a professional cook, plan on doing these things to stay that way:

1. Pick your chemical indulgences well. You will be surrounded by drunks and drug addicts. If you can honestly handle a fair amount of drinking, then great. Work out a drinking regimen that will keep it under control (something like Mencken’s rule of never drinking when the sun is up is a good start). Pay attention to how much you drink, and if it is within the bounds of relatively good health and good morals, then stick to it. If you have a desire towards stimulants (again, you need to figure this out in advance), then cultivate an espresso habit. It is legal, works well, has good health benefits, and will help you avoid the ever-present cocaine and meth. If you like tobacco, then settle on a good amount to consume and stick to it. Do not take a dualist view of smoking. Most professional cooks smoke, and you probably will as well, even if you don’t plan on it. Don’t divide the world into chain-smoking and non-smoking, because then if you find yourself enjoying a post-shift cigarette, you will label yourself as a smoker and will find it difficult to establish limits. The language of the addiction recovery business is rooted in the horrid philosophy of Calvin. Avoid it. There are many levels of consumption between zero and a pack a day. Ideally, I would advise young cooks to smoke cigars, as they have all the benefits of tobacco (focusing thought, giving aromatic pleasure, etc.), but take a more contemplative turn (it is much harder to absent-mindedly light and smoke a good cigar than it is a cigarette, and absent-mindedness is the cornerstone of a bad smoking habit). I would not recommend a pipe for a cook, as there is too much fiddling around with the works for someone in this milieu.
2. Plan on attending daily mass and weekly confession. The devil finds work for idle hands, and the pace of a kitchen is such that what used to not seem like idle time, becomes idle time. It is amazing the amount of mischief a cook can get into in a five minute lull in a hectic shift. You need all the fortification you can get in this environment.
3. Look for restaurants that came out of the Chez Panisse world. The philosophy you will encounter in those places has much more in common with Catholic thought than some of the flashier places.
4. Make an exit strategy. Figure out how to turn a kitchen job into a food lab job or something with a more sustainable pace. You probably don’t want to be on a line six days a week when you are in your late sixties.

Beyond that, good luck, God bless and all that. Cook well (but not my steak, thank you).

For those of you foodies who are not going to go into the business, you will have to come up with some way of dealing with your foodie impulses. You will probably need to find a spouse who is somewhat of a foodie, but not so much that you compete. Your non-foodie spouse will need to eventually cede the kitchen to you and realize that some dishes must be prepared by you, because you get fidgety if someone else cooks them in your kitchen.

Your spouse must appreciate or at least tolerate your enthusiasms for strange ingredients. The spouse must tolerate your turning the kitchen into an abattoir when you come upon a five-prong buck or twenty pounds of beef liver. She must get used to, or feign getting used to, lifting a pot lid and having a pig’s head stare at her. She might set limits on your farming experiments, but should be reasonable. And remember, she has every reason to be a bit miffed when your escargot farm turns out not to be as secure as you promised. Also, she is not betraying you when she decides to pass on the delicious grasshopper flan you made, nor is she betraying you when you are out for the weekend and you come home to find empty cans of chili.

On the other hand, if she is secretly eating Chef Boyardee, then you need to do an intervention.

Also, I don’t think that a marriage between a foodie and a vegetarian will work, nor between a foodie and a teetotaler. If you can’t share a bottle of 1995 Kenwood Jack London Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon with the perfectly made venison saddle with a huckleberry/demiglace reduction that you are serving, then you probably need to think about counseling. There are limits to the mixed marriage, and it is good to understand those going in.

You will inevitably have non-foodie friends who fancy themselves foodies, and you must cultivate patience. They will invite you over to dinner and attempt to impress you with dishes far beyond their abilities. They are not your students. When they ask what you thought of it, they don’t necessarily want to know. NEVER phrase constructive criticism with “you might want to…” Instead say, “I had a dish like this at XXX. It was a little different…I think they did…, but I am not so sure. This is quite good, though.” These types of folks inevitably get something right, so complement them on it. It will mean more to them than you will ever know.

If you are really unlucky you will end up in a situation where you will have to cook with one of these non-foodies. This will take a more pro-active approach. You will have to instantly evaluate their knife skills. If they are slow and inaccurate, then you will need to assign them other tasks. If they think that garlic powder is a valuable spice, then you will need to keep them well away from the seasoning. Be polite, but there are limits.

Sometimes a dish simply cannot wait for their dilly dallying. Sometimes they will hover around the stove dangerously. You will need to cultivate a firm command position. You might be tempted to kill them, but that is a mortal sin. Instead, as they drift around between the stove and the sink, and you need to move a heavy, hot pot along, use standard restaurant warnings: “Hot, behind you.” Then, after the danger has passed, bump them with an elbow, but do not make it look intentional. Not enough to hurt, but enough to remind them of their corporeal existence in a hazardous environment. If they still do not get it, you may have to knock them over. Again, do this with charity and love.

The final relationship to work on in a foodie household is with the children. They are your serfs and students as well as your flesh and blood. As soon as they are old enough, they need to be taught knife skills. Mostly they will learn from example, but they might need explanations as well. Always convey that cooking is a fun adventure, and that the market and kitchen and family dinner table are privileged places. Remember that they will think of washing dishes as playing in the water if presented right. This stuff will probably come naturally. What you need to really worry about is teaching good manners when eating at other people’s houses.

The time will come when you are at someone else’s house and the kids are served some wretched mess of overcooked meat, overcooked green beans, watery potatoes, all served with that horrendous concoction known as iced tea. They must be taught to eat everything and to appreciate it, even to ask for seconds of the limp, drab beans. If the food is really inedible (deviled eggs come to mind), then they should be coached in realistically feigning grave illness or making the plausible explanation of severe allergies. Remind them that the grave illness escape only works in the rarest of situations, and that if repeated too often, folks will expect them to actually die. They also need to realize that the allergy excuse is blown if they eat some dish later that has the allergen in it (so, if allergy to eggs is cited, merengue cannot be eaten with relish – of course my own excuse (which is completely true) is that I had a childhood allergy to eggs and never have been able to develop a taste for them, unless they are sufficiently masked in souffle, quiche, etc.).

Children should know that the consequences of picky eating at someone else’s house are dire and can even involve having to observe the Eastern discipline of Great Lent for months at a time. They must always know that it is a blessing to grow up in a foodie household, but that blessing can be taken away for the sin of ingratitude.

If your children develop strange affinities for such dreck as canned spaghetti, Velveeta, and so on, have no fear. They will do this, and will grow out of it. Don’t make a big deal of it, but don’t go out of your way to indulge it, either. If they like cheesewhiz, they can eat it when they are at someone else’s house. If they try to weasel out of the family meal to watch sitcoms, on the other hand, they should be threatened with being turned out and deprived of the family name.

Explore, cook, and eat well!

Posted by erik at June 5, 2004 2:28 AM | TrackBack