My Recipe Book

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Published on Sunday, 04 September 2011 17:23
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Included in the photographs tonight is my recipe book. I thought if everyone had a look at it the story behind it might make more sense. My young and observant assistant Thomas recently commented that if I had all the recipes on a hard drive I could access them faster and organize them ….. you get the picture. There is no argument there. Thomas is absolutely right, I should. Why I have not is a question worth exploring, most likely on a couch in an office that would cost me $80.00 an hour. I didn’t tell Thomas how I came about using it, I find that tedious for young folks to be burdened with old geezers obsessions. I will however say that all the recipes in the book have been recorded by myself over the last 29 years and they all work very well.

Here is why.

In 1982 I was working for The Hyatt Regency in Monterey Ca, as the chef in charge of all banquet functions. There were three grand ballrooms seating 800,800, and 1200 people respectively. Sales at that time were over $800,000 a month in banquet food alone. I had between 25 and 30 cooks working in my department, not including dishwashers, pot washers,  ect…

In a hotel that large there is a need for a purchasing agent to procure everything that is needed for the hotel to operate, including food and beverage. George was the purchasing agent, Pierre was his assistant. George was a Hungarian Jew that had survived Hitlers death camps, and Pierre was a Cambodian exile. I only knew this about George because I noticed tattoos on his arm one day and he told me of his experience. Before I explain my recipe book I have to say George was not without a sense of humor as this story will reveal. In a hotel all product is issued by a system of requisition.

You fill out the form with what you need(shopping list), and the storeroom will issue the goods to you. One day Pierre had left for some reason and the storeroom was left unattended. My friend the sous chef, who will remain nameless,went in out of desperation for product he needed for a V.I.P. party.

In the process he “liberated” a case of terry clothe bath robes that were for the executive suites. When he came back to the kitchen he distributed one to everyone in the brigade, including Thaddeus the new pot washer from Poland. Like Robin Hood in a chefs hat he was very proud of his heist. By the way Thaddeus did not speak a word of English. We all took our booty to the locker room to be taken home that night. The next day I was carving ice on the loading dock and George came outside for one of his two packs of camels he would smoke a day. Who comes strolling into the parking lot sporting nothing but a San Francisco Giants baseball hat and his brand new bath robe but Thaddeus. He walks by George and myself to report for work like nothing was amiss. A conversation quickly ensued between George and Thaddeus that sounded like a combination of Yiddish and Polish with a few fucks thrown in for good measure. George stormed into the purchasing office and I took Thaddeus to the locker room for some kitchen duds. About an hour later George walked into the kitchen, I could see his eyes were still tearing from laughing too hard. He walked over to the afore mentioned sous chef and said “If you are going to steal bath robes at least tell the poor bastard its not the new uniform!”. George was a good guy.

About my book.

Part of my responsibility as banquet chef was to give cooking lessons to large groups that needed some activity for the day. It might be the spouses from some convention, mostly people just bored out of their skulls. The chef suggested to me to develop a cooking with wine seminar, with the idea being that if alcohol were involved the people might bother to stay awake. You might say I took this assignment more seriously then he had intended. I made it my mission to learn everything I could about cooking with wine, not ever considering how much this would cost. Over a period of two months I experimented with all different techniques and wrote a twenty page booklet on cooking with wine. My experiments of course involved reducing many different types of wine from a bottle down to 8 ozs. To see what the differences in flavor would be. Every variety of white there was. Five different types of Merlot, Cabernet, Zinfandels, Pinot Noir, and on and on.

Is there a difference between reducing a Chateau Latour at $125.00 a bottle verses a $10.00 bottle from Napa. I was going to find out. All this of course had to be requisitioned from the storeroom, and with the volume of business we did could have gone not noticed, except for George. One day he called me to his office and had a stack of requisitions on his desk. He gave me the look of someone that thought he was on to something and asked me “What gives with all the wine?” I went and retrieved my notebook that I kept with all the dates and reductions I had made with notations on the flavor differences, notes on color, viscosity, everything. I also showed him my first draft on the cooking with wine seminar. He almost seemed relieved and was impressed with the volume of work. He told me if I needed any help to let him know, and that was the end of it. Until about a month later. There was a  V.I.P. party I was to be the chef de cuisine for, and I submitted my requisition for everything I needed. When I took my cart to the prep kitchen and unloaded it, at the bottom of a crate of parsley was my new recipe book and a bottle of Haut-Brion. The note from George read “Only enter what works, that way you won’t have to erase anything, enjoy the wine.”

There are no eraser marks in my book. Over 29 years I have entered recipes that have proven to work, and I still enter 6 to 8 every year. I had to duct tape it as it was falling apart. It has more food stains from being in working kitchens and I could most likely make a good stock out of it. So I guess I should put it on a hard drive. Or not. The question is not if technology is better or not. It most certainly is. The difficult question for me is what do you leave behind, and when. How much of how we do things is who we are?

The superficial observation would be that its hard to teach an old dog a new trick. I’m all for new tricks, it’s the old friends I worry about.

Best,

Mike