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Richard W. Frank |
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Cooking |
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“Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are." “A cook may be taught, but a man who can roast, is born with the faculty.” — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste A significant portion of my life has been based around the art of preparing and consuming food. While my mother was an able cook, my grandmother instilled my fascination with cooking. Part of this fascination can be traced to the fact that my grandmother had more ingredients and experience at her disposal. Periodically, I would spend the weekend at Nancy and Neil’s, and my grandmother would take me to Gelson’s, the only fancy supermarket in Los Angeles back in those days, and we would shop for Saturday and Sunday dinner. We would have roasts and desserts I would never get at home. It was bliss. My favorite thing to make was the most difficult—the perfect pastry crust for black-bottom pies, pumpkin pies, and pecan pies. No one could roll out circles of pastry between two wax paper sheets like Nancy could. When I was at UCLA, I worked in the kitchen at Rieber Hall for extra cash. I was amazed at the size of the kettles and the dishwasher and the smells and sounds of people creating sustenance for so many others. My cooking experience there was limited to restocking the salad bar and putting frozen cookies on sheet pans and baking them in gigantic ovens, but it was a start. My culinary training began in earnest when I was unceremoniously dumped into Cobden’s small kitchen in Wales. Everything was homemade, and the owners made up for the limitations of their pub fare by having the best ingredients available. I learned to use the cream and butter delivered daily by George the milkman with abandon. Our warm comfort food was far from the healthy and stringent diets of Angelinos, but I adapted quickly. Upon return to the States, I decided that cooking was definitely easier than working on a salmon boat. However, the first several weeks working on the Alaskan cruise ship, the Sea Bird, were tough because I had to elevate my craft to the level that a cruise customer expects. Eventually, my ability to make cheesecakes in eight-foot seas enabled me to see more of Alaska and Mexico and keep my checking account fed enough to keep me traveling. Now that I have settled into our private kitchen the scale is smaller, but I have rediscovered the joy for cooking. Such joy is hard to maintain when cooking is your source for income (and you come home smelling of garlic and cumin). Meggan and I now make time in the evenings to make a decent meal and catch up over dinner. I have heard from people around the world that a kitchen is the heart of any home. I couldn’t agree more. |
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© Richard Frank 2007-2008. All rights reserved. |
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My favorite recipes These recipes are for simple dishes. Making fancy meals does have its charms, but for eating at home I much prefer having simple ingredients cooked well. [Recipes to come as soon as dig out the scraps of paper they are written on and type them up] Banana Bread Gazpacho Thai green curry Pizza Lamb roast Artichokes Empanadas Nancy’s sour cream chocolate cake with coffee chocolate icing Lemon Ice Brownies White chocolate and cinnamon muffins
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