Cooking My Way Back Home: Recipes from San Francisco's Town Hall, Anchor & Hope, and Salt House [A Cookbook] - Hardcover

Rosenthal, Mitchell; Pult, Jon

 
9781580085922: Cooking My Way Back Home: Recipes from San Francisco's Town Hall, Anchor & Hope, and Salt House [A Cookbook]
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 158008592X ISBN 13: 9781580085922
Verlag: Ten Speed Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

A collection of 100 of Mitchell Rosenthal's personal recipes for Southern-inspired comfort food with a California influence.

In Cooking My Way Back Home, Mitchell Rosenthal delivers the same warmth, personality, and infectious enthusiasm for sharing food as can be found at his wildly popular San Francisco restaurants, Town Hall, Anchor and Hope, and Salt House. With his trademark exuberance and good humor, Mitchell blends Southern-inspired comfort food with urban sophistication and innovation, for exciting results.

Reflecting on the classics (Shrimp Étouffée), updating regional specialties (Poutine), elevating family favorites (Chopped Liver), and reveling in no-holds-barred, all-out indulgences (Butterscotch Chocolate Pot de Crème) are what’s on order in this collection of 100 imaginative and irresistible recipes. Like a good friend offering up a platter of freshly fried Oysters Rémoulade, these robust, full-flavored recipes are impossible to refuse.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mitchell Rosenthal is the co-owner and executive chef of three San Francisco restaurants, Town Hall, Salt House, and Anchor and Hope, plus Irving Street Kitchen in Portland, Oregon. Mitch was a chef at the Four Seasons in New York City, Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio in San Francisco, and Granita in Malibu. Visit cookingmywaybackhome.com.

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A little about me

I grew up in restaurant kitchens. Honestly. From the time I was fifteen and washing dishes in a Jewish deli in Jersey until today, my entire life has been spent wearing kitchen whites. My chosen trade has allowed me opportunities I never thought possible. I’ve worked in some of the best restaurants in the country, and now, with my partners, Doug Washington and my brother, Steven Rosenthal, I own three restaurants in San Francisco and one in Portland, Oregon. Cooking has taken me places I never dreamed of. I’ve eaten food at roadside stands in Thailand and grand brasseries in Paris, sampled world-class smoked pork in rural Kansas and Iberian pork fat on the Catalan coast of Spain. But there’s one place cooking never took me, and that’s home.

I’ve survived much of the last thirty-five years on staff meals. The last thing I wanted to do after a double shift on the hot line was to go home and cook. But more recently things have changed. After establishing Town Hall, getting Salt House off the ground, and laying the groundwork for Anchor & Hope, I realized I was becoming a restaurateur. With each project, I was moving a little bit further away from the visceral pleasures of the kitchen. The less I cooked at work, the more I missed the simple act of cooking, of using a set of skills to create something memorable and delicious.

I offer this background by way of explanation for what I’m about to say: I had never really cooked at home until recently. Sure, I would whip up an omelet every once in a while, and knock out a turkey at Thanksgiving. But the experience of cooking for a few familiar faces around the kitchen table is new to me. It was only when testing the recipes in this book for the home cook that I actually cooked, really cooked, in my home kitchen. You see, I’m old school. I came up when kitchens still functioned on the apprentice system. I learned through the shared knowledge of the cook and a list of ingredients. Someone took you under his or her wing, showed you the proverbial ropes, and it was trial by smoke and fire. Those ingredient lists were just that: no amounts, just a list. I learned to cook by instinct, by feel. The idea of measuring a tablespoon of, say, black pepper, well, I just wasn’t used to it. This produced some tense moments in the kitchen when my wife, Mary, and I first began testing these recipes at home. She’s also a cook, and a good one, so when, by reflex, I would toss a couple of healthy pinches of salt into a pot of pozole, there would be a sharp, “Mitch, what are you doing? Did you write it down?”
 
My life in restaurants started in 1975, when I got a job washing dishes in the kitchen of a small Jewish joint in Edison, New Jersey, called Jack Cooper’s Celebrity Delicatessen. It was run by Tom Plaganis, a big Greek guy who was passionate about food. After a few years of scrubbing pots and rinsing plates, he began to let me cover the breaks for the short-order cooks. Tom taught me not only how to handle a sauté pan, but also how to handle myself in a restaurant kitchen, how to understand the hierarchy, how to view the kitchen as a kind of machine. He taught me to focus on making sure my part of that machine operated smoothly. I fell in love with the whole idea and with its processes. Using all of my senses to create something tangible for someone appealed to me. But satisfying the customers wasn’t the only thing that I appreciated. I was also interested in the relationship of the chef to his crew. That early apprenticeship gave me a thrilling sense of being part of a long story, part of the elemental passing on of knowledge and technique.

When I was a kid, at vacation time, the whole family would pile into the car and drive south—to Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia. I was immediately taken by the world below the Mason-Dixon Line: the pace, the people, the hospitality of the South made a real impression on me. So did the food. There was nothing shy or genteel about southern flavors. And I liked its social function, how food brought people together.

As I became more confident (and competent) in the kitchen, Tom allowed me to start putting some of my own dishes on the menu at the deli. This was right around the time that a friend gave me the landmark cookbook Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen. If I had been impressed by the up-front flavors of the Piedmont South, imagine my reaction to the strength of flavor and seasonings that Prudhomme put into play. I immediately started adding dishes from the book to the menu at the deli. Looking back, there was something funny about serving New Orleans–style Cajun food in a Jewish-style delicatessen. Fortunately for me, Tom didn’t care. The disconnect is apparent now, but at the time, nothing seemed strange about putting kishke, knishes, and corned beef sandwiches alongside jambalaya, blackened chicken, and gumbo.

This was in the mid-1980s, when Prudhomme was taking his restaurant, K-Paul’s, on the road. When he came to Manhattan, I knew that I had to eat his food. I grabbed a buddy of mine, drove up to New York, stood in line for three hours, and, at long last, was given the chance to eat chef Paul’s food. I was blown away. After the meal, Prudhomme graciously spent time with me, speaking at length about the techniques that made his approach unique. It was a heady experience, a kid from Jersey who cooked Cajun out of a Jewish deli in Edison talking to chef Paul Prudhomme, the king of New Orleans kitchens, about his philosophy on cooking.

K-Paul’s was in town for six weeks. Of course, I went back. The line was long, but my patience was rewarded with another incredible meal. Prudhomme was the talk of New York, and I had heard that he occasionally let cooks train at K-Paul’s, so when he made the inevitable visit to our table, I asked him about his “stage,” a culinary internship program. Paul told me that they weren’t bringing anyone on just then, but to call him on Friday and he would let me know. At noon on that Friday, and every other Friday for months, I would go into the office at the deli and call Paul Prudhomme. Finally, after nearly six months, I called one Friday and Paul said, “Come on down to New Orleans and cook.”

During my two months at K-Paul’s on Chartres Street in the French Quarter, I experienced a professional kitchen and the camaraderie that exists among chefs for the first time. Every single cook in that kitchen shared an enthusiasm, passion, and respect for food.

I felt as if I had received years’ worth of experience in that short New Orleans stay (you need only look at the contents of this book to see how Prudhomme’s influence has carried me forward). When my stage ended, I took that new knowledge and headed back north to cook at the Four Seasons in Manhattan. That’s where I met Executive Chef Seppi Renggli, one of my most important mentors. Seppi taught me that it was okay to be unconventional, and that a chef did not need to stick to a single cuisine. On the same menu, he would offer an Indonesian curry alongside veal Pozharsky—and it worked. Some of my most interesting ideas about food, as well as my basic kitchen philosophy of being open and adventurous, of not being bound by a single cuisine, of letting varied styles intermingle on the menu, come from my days working with Seppi at the Four Seasons.

After the Four Seasons, I began an unsettled period in my career, moving from kitchen to kitchen, my peregrinations landing me in such places as Le Cirque, and Coco Pazzo in Manhattan, Gitane in New Jersey, finally ending up at a resort on the island of Saint Lucia in the West Indies. After six months, the authorities found...

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Verlag
Ten Speed Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
158008592X
ISBN 13 
9781580085922
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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