Pistachio

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
– DaVinci

I met Jeff in 1999, when we were both sous chefs at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He worked in the restaurant, and I was on special events, so we never worked side by side, but I kept my eye on him, because his ideas were always very interesting to me.

He favoured simple executions with high-quality ingredients, constant reminders of the influence of Alice Waters, of one of his culinary heroes, and mine as well.

Waters was famous for telling her cooks, “Humble yourself in front of your ingredients,” which made a lot of sense to me. It was about how the cook would honour the ingredient’s best qualities and bring that to the plate.

Often, just before lunch service, I’d wander over to Jeff’s station to see what he’d done for the day’s special. My favourite was a treatment for the fish of the day, a sauce of olive oil, lemon, parsley, currents, capers and pine nuts.

As he showed it to me, he ran his spoon through the sauce to show its characteristics. Everything was fresh, balanced and simple. I knew immediately how it would taste and saw that each ingredient’s flavour had been given its due, and that all together, they would deliver something they couldn’t on their own.

It’s rare to be captivated by a dish in this way and for so long, but then, simplicity and elegance are irresistible.

::

Jeff’s talk at the September Women in Food Industry Management meeting caused a bit of a stir. A slide of his winter salad of root vegetables begged the question: where was the lettuce and tomato?. There wasn’t a speck of each “because they aren’t the best of what earth is producing for us in winter,”  he told the crowd.

WWe have to reconsider our notion of salad,” said the chef of The Ancaster Old Mill Restaurant. In fact, Jeff would also like us to reconsider our notion of food in general. As the person who brought Slow Food to Ontario, Jeff is an advocate and ambassador for the international movement, which is named for the antithesis of fast food.

“My idea of fast food,” says Jeff, “is prosciutto and the other charcuterie we make at the inn, which illustrates the Slow Food principle rather well. Charcuterie is traditionally made during the winter months, so that it can cure in a cold cellar and continue to develop in flavour until it’s ready to eat in the fall. It’s fast, because you simply slice and serve, ideally with good bread and some wine.

The Slow Food Movement was born in Italy in 1989. It calls itself ‘a non-profit, eco-gastronomic organization to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”

Showing us the gorgeous slides that will illustrate his upcoming book, Jeff also took us on a tour of how he and his kitchen brigade forge relationships with local farms or compete for culinary recognition in Europe.

Watch for From Earth to Table, to be published by Random House March 2009

Drop by to see Jeff at The Ancaster Old Mill.
Check in with Toronto’s Slow Food Movement
Subscribe to Jeff’s gorgeous blog Earth to Table.

As promised, here’s the Foodservice & Hospitality profile of Cindy and Dominuqe Duby and their creative approach to ambrosia …

SWEET SCIENCE

Cooking class highlights with Bonnie Stern, as promised:

Challah making and shaping
We’re using Jenny Stolz’s recipe, Bonnie’s grandmother, who had 11 children. She was famous for repeatedly winning top honours for her challah at the county fair. The prize? Enough flour to feed the family another year.

Should I make a three-, four-, five- or six-strand braid for challah? Bonnie gave us drawings and clear instructions, but it was Bonnie’s hands themselves that sorted out each of our challahs.

Shakshuka [eggs poached in spicy tomato sauce]
Her descriptive phrase above describes this dish perfectly. Shakshuka is one of Israel’s most popular dishes. Although it’s simple, Bonnie’s rendition shows a fine sensibility and requires restraint and a light touch. The sauce is a gentle cook-up of mashed tomatoes, not a homogeneous puree. The heat comes from harissa and the ancient flavour accent from cumin. Bonnie says she’s eaten versions of the dish from Jerusalem to Australia. Some break the eggs [Shakshuka means "all mixed up], but the dish is much more elegant following Bonnie’s technique, leaving the eggs undisturbed.

Soufflé rolls with smoked salmon
The foundation of this dish is classic soufflé: béchamel, separated eggs, beaten whites folded in to aerate. The mixture is cooked on a shallow tray and becomes a sheet of soufflé Once cooled, spread with mascarpone/sour scream/yogurt in the combination you prefer [we had mascarpone] and lay down some smoked salmon. The roll is then sliced to showcase the spiral filling.

Bonnie’s suggestions for substitute fillings: cold shrimp, crab salad, a hot seafood mix or even creamed broccoli.

French toast casserole
Bonnie calls this a cross between French toast and bread pudding. Nuff said. Except maybe a teasing mention of brown sugar and maple syrup.

On patriot maple syrup
A third of the students were expat Canadians, which made it interesting to hear one of them pipe up about how silly we are in our nationalistic zeal to make it sound like Canadian maple syrup is the best.

“Vermont produces great maple syrup,” he rightly points out. In terms of terroir, there can’t be that much difference between Vermont and Quebec maples.

But why self-deprecate? It was an odd little moment away from home. It’s impossible not to compare your destination to it, but really, we don’t need to pit an apple with an orange. Vive notre difference.

The best part of watching Bonnie Stern teach a class at James Beard House in New York City is not having my own ball of challah dough to play with, although that was fun. The best part is watching Bonnie spar affectionately with co-instructor Mitchell Davis.

To celebrate the new book each of them published this year, they put together this cooking-class weekend: a workshop on Saturday and a multi-course brunch the next day.

Mitchell grew up in Toronto and moved to New York in the mid-1980s. He has been the Beard Foundation’s communications executive for 14 years. They met when Bonnie started keeping the Foundation abreast of Toronto’s restaurant news. [It turned out their parents spend summer vacations at the same resort.]

Simply on his own, Mitchell is impressive. He’s an adjunct professor and PhD candidate in New York University’s food studies program, which would explain his encyclopedic knowledge smattered throughout the workshop. He’s published four books and contributes to GQ and Food & Wine. Worth mentioning: he makes his own butter and his own vanilla extract.

Ten years of friendship have Bonnie and Mitchell finishing one anotherss sentences, good-naturedly disagreeing on cooking times and piping up with, ” didn’t know that” when the other has offered up a choice bit of information, and all of it ego-free.

Mitchell was the day’s value-added, but it was Bonnie I came to see, and she didn’t disappoint. Her understanding of food is visceral. It’s a pleasure to watch her hands, and she’s comfortable under close scrutiny.

The set-up is intimate, with instructors surrounded by a U-shaped butcher-block counter that puts their students less that a meter away. She’s warm and has her students bursting into laughter more that a couple of times.

Favourite lesson of the day:
The challah dough should feel like the inside of a woman’s thigh.

“Or the underside of a man’s forearm,” Mitchell pipes up.

Tomorrow: reports from the class

Me.

How many ways has Bonnie Stern distinguished herself?

I can confidently say …

:: no other Canadian cooking teacher has written as many books,

:: invited as many acclaimed chefs and cooking instructors to teach at her school

:: or hosted as many respected authors to discuss their work with a dozen of their fans at a time — while serving them a meal inspired by the book.

I’d like to know which American would match her accomplishments. [An unofficial mission beginning today]

Count’em…
Books

Food Processor Cuisine, 1978
At My Table, 1980
Cuisinart Cookbook, 1985
The Bonnie Stern Cookbook, 1987

Appetizers, 1990
Simply HeartSmart Cooking, 1994
In the Kitchen with Bonnie Stern, 1995
Cooking with Bonnie Stern, 1996
More HeartSmart Cooking with Bonnie Stern, 1997
Simply HeartSmart, 1997
Desserts, 1998
HeartSmart Cooking, 2000
HeartSmart Cooking for Friends and Family, 2000
Simply Heart Smart Cooking, 2003
Bonnie Stern’s Essentials of Home Cooking, 2003
HeartSmart: The Best of Bonnie Stern, 2006

Chef/Cooking Teachers
[a partial list]

Marcella Hazan
Giuliano Bugialli
Carlo Middione
Thomas Haas
Rick Bayless
Rob Feenie
Nina Simonds
Madhur Jaffrey
Caprial Pence
Susur Lee
Mark McEwan
Mark Bittman
and more

Authors
[another partial list]

Vincent Lam
Stuart McLean
Margaret Atwood
James Chatto
Margaret MacMillan
Marnie Woodrow
Lori Lansens
Camilla Scott
Nino Ricci and more

Everything is relative.

Cooking school means one thing to the would-be professional chef, and another to the home cook. Bonnie Stern’s School of Cooking is one of the latter. She opened it in 1973, long before there were foodies, foodtv or molecular gastronomy. She was a pioneer for selling the city on the idea of cooking classes long before we got the choices we have today. She also gets kudos for lasting as long as she has. There’s a lot of to be said for constancy, and she’s a great example of that.

Because my training was for the professional kitchen, I knew little about Bonnie, until now. I was going to be in New York for a few days, so I looked into which celebrity chef would be cooking at James Beard House. The Greenwich Village home of the father of American gastronomy is a culinary destination. And there was Bonnie, doing a Saturday workshop and cooking a Sunday brunch during my stay there. I quickly signed up for both, and in the meantime made an appointment to interview her here before watching her in action away from home.

I met with Bonnie on Valentine’s Day, ostensibly to talk about her school from a business point of view, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Which is not to say she didn’t give me a warm welcome. She certainly did. She put on a friendly pot of coffee, laid out some cookies, set me down in her dining/classroom, with the kitchen at one end, where two women were doing some prep for an upcoming class.

But she didn’t want to talk about business, no matter how I approached it.

“For me, it,s all about food and cooking,” she says. “I’m passionate about it. I love it.”

Happy Valentine’s, Bonnie.

More on Bonnie to come.