March 2, 2010
I enjoy cooking. I find it meditative. I love exercising for the same reason, plus for the oxygen rush. But what I love most of all is eating. Eating is what I am best trained at, and it took many years of training. I began as a fastidious eater. As a child I refused the bottle. At the age of two and a half I supposedly switched from solely drinking breast milk to a diet of fried bacon and Hungarian salami. My father, who was a soccer player and often traveled abroad for games, would smuggle the salami for me from Germany. I recall it hanging on the kitchen radiator, fat slowly dripping down. My mother doesn’t exactly recall the inception, but there was a year when all I would eat was steak tartare. If I wasn’t served what I wanted I simply refused to eat. Needles to say, I was an emaciated child that caused her mother much pain. There is however a place where I have always been a crazy omnivore and that is the garden. I grew up in a city in Northwestern Poland during the time when one had to stand in line for five hours to buy a kilo of sugar. In order to obtain meat and produce, my family went to the countryside to get it directly from farmers. I recall with fondness digging up and picking fresh vegetables and fruits in my aunt’s garden. I would eat them all, sometimes still covered with dirt, sometimes washed only by the rain. My all-time favorite things to eat in the countryside were potatoes cooked in the embers. These were whole, just dug up, potatoes thrown into the embers and left there for couple of hours. Essentially these potatoes were cooked by the smoke, but I never thought about this till I tasted that exact flavor again, fifteen years later, at L’Arpege in Paris. Alain Passard decided to turn his menu vegetarian shortly after I made the reservation, so it was a surprising dinner on various levels, the schnitzel size foie gras on the vegetarian tasting menu being the least of the surprises. I call this French logic. The epiphany moment came to me with the course of smoked potato. It was a single, peeled, white, small potato presented by itself on a white plate. At first glimpse I thought that the rumor was true and that the chef went mad. Then I took a bite. I was six years old, sitting in front of a fire at my aunt’s farmhouse, scrapping out the inside of a hard black shell, topping the white mush with salt and butter. The chef is a genius! How did he know? Sadly, my dining companions did not share my enthusiasm and this memorable meal was forever decried as the two grand potato dinner.