LAYERS OF CREATIVITY & INSIGHT TO SAVOUR

I'm writing late on the Cinco de Mayo (the date the Mexicans defeated the French, quite unexpectedly since they were much less well equipped, in 1862.  The French did manage to take Mexico City a couple of years later where they proclaimed Napoleon lll's brother Maximilian emperor of Mexico).  And it's also a full moon day, an especially big fat full moon they tell us. I caught a glimpse last night as I walked through the streets late after the Beard Awards, happy to be out in the air and walking with a friend.  The moon smiled benignly down, or so it felt to me.

I wrote that first paragraph last night, then hit the hay.  New York can do that, just get the adrenalin going, and going, and then suddenly I run out of gas.  Yesterday after our Beard Cookbook committee meeting I headed up to Kitchen Arts and Letters.  Nach Waxman was not there (he's more likely to be there early in the week), which I regretted, but being in the store is always a treat.  There are treasures to discover each time.  And each time I know I've only scratched the surface, leaving many wonderful books unnoticed.

Just as well perhaps, because covetousness starts to take over - yes I'd like to own that one, and that one, oh and yes perhaps those two...  I came away with two books, one of which I am especially pleased to have.  It's by Phyllis Bober, who died about ten years ago, a tall intelligent force-of-nature woman, beautiful, with dark red hair and a distinctive style.  She taught classics at Bryn Mawr but I knew her through food.  She had a deep interest in traditional foodways, and her two passions, for history and for food, come together in this book: Art Culture & Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy.

I first met Phyllis on an Oldways trip to Tunisia.  One day five of us rented a car and drove to the ruins of a Roman city called Bulla Regia in the northwestern Tunisian plain. I'll never forget Phyllis's enthusiasm as we guided us around the site.  She knew it intimately, from her studies and reading, but had never been there.  She showed us the amazingly intact mosaics, explained the distinctive architecture (houses built with underground areas to give coolness and shelter from the summer heat), and her delight in it all brought the place alive.

And now I have her clarity on the page, helping me decipher some of the early history of emmer and other wheats, the role of barley, the food traditions in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
I need this help, to prepare for the Foods that Changed the World course that I'll be teaching at the School of Continuing Studies at U of T, starting in mid-May, for six weeks.  It's all coming together, but as always with interesting rich subjects, I now feel that I could take double the time, or more, to explore each of my topics.

From Kitchen Arts and Letters it's an easy 19 block walk to the Whitney, where I saw the Biennale.  I had read some pans of it, but I like to see for myself.  The most outstanding-to-me art that I saw (which may just mean, the things I understood at least a part of) were: a thoughtful installation by Nick Mauss, Dawn Kasper's nomadic studio; Nicole Eisenman's multi-painting collections, and her one large painting, (such versatility and intent); Tom Thayer's fragile-looking haunting birds and suspended sculptures; Liz Deschenes' subtle and somehow powerfully memorable photo print sculptures; and finally the extraordinary multi-media installation by Werner Herzog called Hearsay of the Soul, which is mesmerising.

Yes, it's a bit of a long list.

A walk back north took me to the Met to spend more time at "The Steins Collect."  What a contrast, with order and colour and form the priority.  But it's worth remembering how shockingly wild Matisse was at the time with his violent use of colour (hence that label "fauve").  Weekends are a crowded time to be at the Met, but not, I discovered, after 6 in the evening.  It's open until 9 pm, so civilised, on Friday and Saturday, and the crowds thin nicely.  Afterwards, after a look at the Byzantine and Islam show, and a little time with the Van Goghs (now there was a guy who shocked in his time - I love the Berceuse), I went to the balcony that overlooks the entrance hall and had a glass of white wine (a very pleasing Alberino) and started reading Phyllis's book.

It was dusk, with the moon up but not visible in the cloud, as I headed back south the 35 or so blocks to my hotel.  What a wonderful privileged rich day.  I'll have lovely things to think about as I sit around at JFK this evening waiting for my plane to Toronto.

Thank-you New York.

ENRICHING IMMERSION & OTHER NYC THOUGHTS

Here it is April 1, and I’ve fooled no-one, at least not yet.

But I do feel as if things are a little unbelievable. I’m sitting writing on my laptop in a light airy room on the top floor of the steep narrow house on 12th Street West that James Beard lived in for so many years. It’s now James Beard House, a headquarters for the eponymous foundation and a place chefs come to prepare feasts from time to time. There’s no food feasting here today, just presentation, consumption, discussion - of ideas. I’m about to talk to some IACP conference-goers about “how to find real food when you go somewhere, and how to bring it home”. I had another session yesterday that filled, so this is a second one. It’s all about immersion, and being prepared to be open to the moment, the place, the people; and that means no rigid plans and a certain necessary change in attitude/appraoch. Ah, here they come now....

… I wrote all that yesterday morning, in New York, and now it’s Monday April 2 and I’m back in Toronto. I am so grateful to have been asked to give that talk (and to have been able to do it twice in two very different venues). It forced me, in preparing, to name to myself some of the elements that make travel and food exploration special, to me, and what the basics are.

It does all come down to respect, I think, repect for others and for their food in the broadest sense; appreciativeness is another slice of the idea. The question is, how to get there? And that’s where I began the sessions, with the idea of immersion, letting go of your personal plans and expectations and tuning in to the place where you are.

As always with these things, the preparation, the process of thinking and reflecting on what I want to say, is very valuable. So too is the feedback, in the form of questions during the session and then conversations afterward. I especially love hearing from young people, those starting out, already with experience, and still hungry for more, with their eyes wonderfully wide open and inquiring. So if any of you IACP-ers are reading this, just know that I appreciate all your attentiveness and your participation.

Yesterday was a big day too because in Burma the bye-elections, while not perfectly run, did lead to victory for the opposition NLD in most ridings, including for Aung San Suu Kyi. Now we’ll all watch and hope, fingers crossed that the country continues to move forward toward national reconciliation and more open government and human and civil rights. All in all a great April 1.

I have to mention three meals I had in New York.

The first was breakfast with a friend at a place neither of us had been to, plucked from a Google list. It was delicious, tasted like we were in someone’s kitchen: perfectly boiled eggs with toast fingers; roasted potatoes that came with some skeins of fried onion; and roast peeled whole tomatoes, all so satisfying on a chilly grey windy Saturday morning. Where? you ask. At the odd-looking (both inside and out) Maritime Hotel on Ninth Avenue at 17th; the resto name is Bottega.

The second, on Saturday night, was truly home-cooked, by my friend Jane. Simple, but not simple. Great dried pasta, fettuccine, dressed with clams cooked in a guanciali-rich sauce. Unbelievably satisfying and delicious. (If you don’t have guanciale, cured pork-cheek “bacon”, that’s not smoked, and is best used chopped into small cubes, you can substitute pancetta, but it’s not quite the same.) There was a green salad (uncluttered with stuff like tomatoes, so much the best way) to refresh our mouths and brighten them. And then dessert was good ice cream made extraordinary with a blueberry sauce: simmered blueberries with plenty of lemon zest, some preserved ginger, a little vanilla, and some sugar. What could be bad? you say. Exactly!

Others at the IACP of course went out dining and checking out the NYC scene. Good for them. But I was happy, so happy, to feel home and dry. Food made with love in a home kitchen: there’s nothing better. A restaurant gives a wonderful sense of occasion and society that’s stimulating and exciting. But after a long day, intimacy is what I craved.

On Sunday after my Beard House time, there was another excellent breakfast – well, closer to brunch I guess, but I had poached eggs (on a bed of chunked tender squash and some greens and potato) so it was breakfast-feeling to me. The resto is Morandi, at Seventh and Waverley Place. What an appealing menu. And we were a family-ish group, comfy on a Sunday morning and happy to chat about two docs, the Pina Bausch and the Gerhardt Richter, as well as about the pleasures of Provence, where all but one of the six other people at the table had been together recently. It set me imagining, seeing pictures in my head - of St Remy, Mont Ventoux, the clear light - and conjuring up smells and tastes.

And that brings me back to travel, and the pleasure (and necessity, I’d argue) of whole-hearted immersion. If you can manage to immerse, then you are immeasurably enriched, not just in the moment (already a special privilege) but also in times to come, for the imprinting you get from immersion stays with you, enables you to remember and to dream…

SOLSTICE THOUGHTS AND RECIPE TESTS

We've crossed that huge marker, the summer solstice, so now the long days start getting shorter. I'm not ready for this! Meantime all is green and growing, from the wall of ivy out back to the clematis, now starting into rich purple bloom (a hardy jackmanii that rewards each year; I keep saying I'll plant a white one, or another more exotic, to keep this one company, and have not yet managed to).

Last weekend I travelled to New York City with friends for a weekend of no work, just play. We saw a couple of shows, something I've never done there. That part of town, Times Square/Broadway, is another world, with all of us out-of-towners and also the bridge and tunnel people, all lining up outside theaters, mostly patiently. On Friday night we were at a musical, the revival of the 1934 Cole Porter musical "Anything Goes". I hadn't really been looking forward to it, for musicals aren't my favorite thing. And how wrong i was in my dim expectations. It was wonderful, brilliant words and sharp acting and staging, a real show. The next night we saw an entirely different kind of performance, "The Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo". It was at the very cosy and old-style charming Richard Rogers Theater. I still haven't read reviews, but i'm told that some love it and some hate it. I thought the acting and the conception and staging were all terrific, until the last fifteen minutes or so, when instead of quiet thoughtfulness we got bombast from the tiger (played by Robin Williams, who otherwise did NOT overact or upstage the others). The cast was so strong, a great lesson in ensemble acting. I feel lucky to have seen it.

Apart from the shows, we also spent time walking along the newly extended High Line, so well done in design and execution. And I got back to see the McQueen exhibit at the Met, and had another visit with the Stella paint stick on linen black and white "drawings", so intense in their huge spaces and their interaction.

Coming back to the day-to-day here took some adjustment. I'm now well launched into my history section for the back of the Burma book. It's a kind of integrated bibliography and history, and so far so good. And with help from a friend I am getting to the retesting of some recipes that need another tweak, or another check and fine-tuning. This evening we're doing two with pork belly, which in Asia is generally called, in whatever language "three-layer pork", a more attractive name than pork belly, I always think. The other test is a vegetable curry alternate. The original is made with pumpkin, but I also want to check out using sweet potato instead, for it's often more available in North America than pumpkin. The pumpkin version is delish. In ten minutes I'll taste the sweet potato curry and see how it does (there's tamarind in there as a balance to the sweetness of the vegetable).

I hope you're able to be out in the long evenings these days, enjoying the lingering brightness in the sky, and dreaming of the possible and the impossible.... that's my ambition these days.

GENEROUS FEASTS & ENCOUNTERS

I've just walked in the door, through snow and chill, returning from a short trip to New York. Snow delays at both ends mean my flight arrived about two hours late, but somehow there was amiability rather than short tempers at the airport and on the plane, so it felt relatively painless. Another treat was a pleasurable conversation I had at a bar at JFK while waiting for the flight, with a young woman who was also headed to Toronto.

SO what about flight hassles, when the day's been so wonderful. Earlier today I got to the Met and saw the exhibit of photos by Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand. SOme are soft and tender, other formalistic; Georgia O'Keefe's hands and breasts and neck and everything; reflections and buildings and geometries, as the images moved through the first decades of the twentieth century. I loved the effects Strand got by using a gum something-or-other to add colour, hints of colour, to some of his black and white silver prints. I know nothing about printing techniques, but the results were haunting, some of them. The most famous image using this technique are the three versions of the Flatiron building print, each coloured differently.

It was a major shift of gears to walk from that into the Gossart exhibition. He was an early Renaissance painter from the Netherlands, late fifteenth and early sixteenth century (he died in 1532). There are Mary and Christ-child images, some very intimate-feeling, others more formal and stylized, but also portraits that are astonishingly humanistic and modern in feeling. Worth a long look, both exhibits, though a little indigestible viewed in the same visit (like eating oysters and chocolate ice cream in one sitting perhaps?)

In for a penny... so I hurried on to MOMA to see the "On Line: Drawing in the Twentieth Century" exhibition. It ends February 7; get there if you can. You begin with line and gesture, Picasso and Braque and then Jan Arp and Sophie Arp and lots of names I don't remember... Calder is there of course, line suggesting volume, and Agnes Martin and others in pure linearity but nuanced and thoughtful, deeply absorbing. Then the more recent works by still-developing artists are another surprise: Julie Mehretu's huge piece there grabbed me, and so did a huge layered hanging web of threads connected by small beeswax balls that hangs in the entrance to the show (artist's name not in my mind right now, sorry).

I am going on and on, apologies, but it was just one of those "art is so transporting!" days and I am still bursting with it, as you can tell.

My last stop before heading to JFK was to hang around in T's welcoming kitchen for an hour. Such a good friend. She fed me an array of yummy leftovers and made me a neatly wrapped sandwich to take on the plane. What a great thing to have when the plane is delayed, a prosciutto and dried tomato and mozzarella sandwich on multi-grain bread.

And there was a bonus to arriving late in Toronto: no line-ups at passport control.

I came rushing out of the airport at nearly midnight, my handcarry slung over my shoulder, to see the TTC bus just rolling past the terminal. I waved and the driver took pity and stopped for me. What a lovely thing that is, when a bus or streetcar driver stops specially! It makes me feel rescued, cared for, attended to. And tonight after that delayed exit from NYC, the driver's flexibility felt like a extra-welcome gift.

Now here I am snug at home with Tashi and with Silky the cat. No energy to make tea or do anything but lumber to bed, feeling grateful.