The Supplication of Seeker

Happy Thanksgiving!

Feast On Your Life comes out next week! Grab one of the remaining tickets to my NYC launch, a live taping of Revisionist History on December 4!

Dear Tamar:

I’m at a crossroads in my culinary career. What would you say to your thirty year old self who can cook, but wishes to level up? I’ve always found the restaurant world too linear, lacking oxygen. But I’m torn about whether I need to buckle down and learn restaurant systems so that one day I can run a kitchen of my own—and have the skillset to do so—or seek another path to learning.

Is there a cooking school that embodies the ethos and receptivity to process and creativity that you cook with? Is there a place where I can devote myself to learning that isn’t just my own kitchen and my bible of cookbooks? Any thoughts you could send my direction would mean so much!

With admiration and determination,

Seeker

Dear Seeker,

I expected to be answering a question about how to avoid overcooking turkey breast without undercooking turkey legs. (1. Spatchcock it Or 2. Break it down and cook each separately Or 3. Carve off breast in two lobes when it’s cooked then return the rest to the oven. Keep it covered and reunite with the remainder when ready).

Or giving my hot take on stuffing—I’m in a hot take state of mind. (Enough with all the apples and chestnuts and pecans and wild mushrooms and tricks and debates over broth versus cream! You need sage and celery and either onion or leek for stuffing. After that, all that matters is that the bread is stale enough, correctly salted, that there’s a lot of fat, and that there’s enough liquid to plump it up.)

Instead, I’m considering epistemology—how we know what we know. I’m grateful that I was prepared with answers, though. I have them for one reason: Because I’ve been cooking for so long. I’m 48. I’ve been cooking for decades. It doesn’t mean I don’t mess up. (Two nights ago I over-emulsified while marrying my spaghetti and pasta sauce. Yesterday, I made a questionable decision about how to deal with a strangely butchered turkey.) It only means that I can usually fix my mistakes, or adjust my aim in a way that keeps things calm and delicious.

In other words: I’m convinced that what matters more than where you cook is that you cook and keep cooking—that, much as we’ve learned about almost everything, with a certain amount of practice, anyone will end up quite good at anything. I’m not going to desert you with so few specifics, but I find it worth articulating that if you are cooking—standing on your feet, holding a knife, handling perishable edible organic matter—no matter where you are, you are on a relevant and useful path.

Now, specifics: I had a professional crisis when I was close to your age. I’ve had at least three since, and expect to have another as soon as my next book is published, next Tuesday. I expect to come crashing down and to flail about, looking for pieces of myself to use in the construction of something new. Each time this happens, I return to two pieces of advice I was given at the crisis that befell me right around thirty, at which age I’d already been a magazine editor, been accepted to and deferred law school, been chef of a restaurant and left it, and cooked at Chez Panisse. I was re-considering all of my big decisions and trying to figure out if I should continue cooking, or go to law school after all, or go to school for food policy, or for journalism, or try writing, or, or, or.

Some of the advice (which I’ve mentioned in this column before) came from Fred Kirshenmann, a brilliant philosopher farmer I was lucky enough to call a friend. I asked him a question like yours: Where should I go to learn more and be of use? Where can I go that embodies the values I think we share? He told me that his path only looked like one in retrospect, and that he’d made all of his career decisions by saying “yes” to any interesting opportunity that arose. This was hard to believe, but the older I get, the more I know it to be true. His esteemed career came not from making the right decision but from making affirmative ones, seeing how they felt, and going from there.

The second piece of advice came from Alice Waters. I’d quit my job cooking at Chez Panisse, explaining pitifully that I no longer felt called to cook. I asked Alice’s advice on whether I should go to law school or school for public policy or journalism school. She answered, in her quiet trembling way, that I already had a voice—that I spoke the language of food and my approach to food. She worried that if I were to go to law school or school for public policy etc., I would be forced to change my voice. I would adopt the language of whatever field I entered—which would not be bad but would muffle or dilute the voice I’d spent my time so far honing.

I invoke both wisdoms as guidance whenever I feel untethered—as I am sure to, shortly. I also have advice of my own, far more prosaic. Cooking in restaurants makes you a faster cook. I never became an especially fast restaurant cook, but I still do most things quickly for a home cook. This is more useful than I ever imagined—to my role as a mother and partner, to my role as a friend and community member, to my role as someone who writes recipes. All would be more challenging if it took me longer to do knife work, or butchery, or vegetable processing. I’ve even wondered if the reason I’m able to feed my family at home and write about eating and cooking, and contribute food to my community is, in the end, not my inner grace or philosophy, but that I can just do it pretty quickly.

I ran a restaurant kitchen without having worked in one (other than a few months of Saturdays at Prune.) “Restaurant systems” as you incisively call them, are worth mastering before you take the helm of a restaurant. They range from the most efficient and reliable ways to store seafood and meat to the right size and shape of containers to how to design a kitchen hot line to par-cooking to the location of the dishwasher. You can learn all of this on your own and your investors’ time and dime—as I did. But there is sense to learning it under a teacher, or the series of teachers that make up a restaurant ecosystem, which include the chef, the existing containers and how they’re used, the layout, and more.

I hear your desire for an education that is less linear and restrictive than a restaurant job can be. Given that culinary school is expensive, I wonder if you might be able to neither spend money—as you would going to school—nor make money—as most of us need to—but spend time as an apprentice. By apprenticing in kitchens that you find inspiring or noble or interesting, you can learn a lot, quickly. When I was younger, lots of restaurants accepted volunteer labor, provided it came with either references or early proof of proficiency. I started cooking at Chez Panisse as a volunteer, before a line cook was assigned bed rest and I was hired. I also volunteered at Quince, Pizzaiolo, Marin Sun Farms, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and Gramercy Tavern. My brother, also a chef, did apprenticeships at St. John, Arzak, and Le Manoir aux Quat’saisons.

Dear cook, the most reliable advice I can give you is the advice I give myself as I approach the release of my fourth book next week. You cannot make the “right” decision because such evaluation is retrospective—and usually involves a slew of variables out of your control. You can only move ahead in a reasonable direction, more or less well informed, with an open heart and open mind—and open hands and open eyes. Say “yes” like Fred did, trust your voice, like Alice taught me to, and seek and seek, but without imagining that what you seek is the point—when after all the point is to enjoy the seeking.

I’m taking next week off for book events!

If you’re in Hudson, come hear the amazing Shaina Loew-Banayan and me at Spotty Dog at 7pm on launch day, December 2.

If you’re in NYC, get one of the last tickets to hear the brilliant Malcolm Gladwell and me at the 92Y at 8pm on December 4.

If you’re in Rhinebeck, come hear the extraordinary Lacey Schwartz-Delgado and me at Oblong Books at 6pm on December 5.