Goode J. J. - A Girl and Her Pig

Published in 2012 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

www.canongate.tv

This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books

Copyright April Bloomfield, 2012

The moral right of the author has been asserted

First published in the USA by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 85786 731 5

eISBN 978 0 85786 732 2

Designed by Suet Chong

To Rose Gray

Huge thanks go to the amazing team at Ecco, especially to publisher Daniel Halpern, editor Libby Edelson, interior designer Suet Chong, and art director Allison Saltzman for helping me create a book that I adore.

To my superstar agent, the very handsome Luke Janklow.

To my friend and co-writer, JJ Goode, for his patience and for always pestering me to measure, measure, measure and test, test, test.

To my friend, the immensely talented photographer David Loftus, and to food and prop stylist Georgie Socratous, for lending me a little of their magic.

To the talented Sun Young Park for her incredible illustrations.

To Martin Schoeller for contributing the lovely cover photo.

To Amy Vogler and Jill Santopietro for their careful, thoughtful recipe testing.

To my mentors, past and present, culinary and otherwise: Adam Robinson, Nick Smallwood, Chris Lee, Paul Rankin, Theo Randall, Rowley Leigh, Simon Hopkinson, Rose Gray, Ruthie Rogers, Fergus Henderson, Jamie Oliver, and Mario Batali.

To my wonderful staff, past and present, who kept everything running while I toiled at this book. Special thanks to Peter Cho, Ralphy Johnson, Joshy Schwartz, Katharine Marsh, Dwayne Joseph, Christina Lecki, Preston Miller, Edie Ugot, Charlene Santiago, Scotty Boggs, and Ryan Gannon.

To my friend and partner, Ken Friedman, for taking a chance on a girl from Birmingham, and to Jay-Z, Norman Cook, Paul McGuinness, Pete Tong and Michael Stipe for their support.

To my diligent assistant, Emily Stroud, and to my beloved former assistant, Jenn James (and her Bug).

To my great friends Pete Begg, Dolly Sweet, Mike Dowding, and Rachael Smith for their advice, their support, and lots of laughs.

To my wonderful family, my nan and granddad, my mom and dad and sisters. I love you all so much.

To Amy Hou. Youre my rock.

Finally, to the Man Upstairs for giving me passion and a second chance.

April Bloomfield hunches dejectedly over a bowl of meatballs, leaning a cheek on one hand. With the other, she pushes the meatballs around the bowl, eyeing them with great disappointment.

Were on the third floor of the Spotted Pig, her Greenwich Village restaurant, where weve spent more than a year working on this book. She cooks. I watch and ask questions, scribbling down notes or taking video. Today shes made lamb meatballs in a slightly soupy cumin-spiked tomato sauce. At the last minute, she added fresh mint to the pot, dolloped in thick, tangy Greek yogurt, and cracked in a few eggs to poach. When the meatballs were ready, she filled two bowls, passing one to me and keeping the other. I take my first bite and experience a sensation familiar to anyone who has eaten her food: eye-widening, expletive-inducing pleasure. The meatballs are stunning, a dish I thought I knew taken to a new level of deliciousness. Yet she sighs. Horrible, she says. These meatballs are horrible.

Spending time in Aprils kitchen is not typically a melancholy experience. Just the opposite, actually. When she starts cooking, all of her stress from a broken exhaust hood at the Breslin, the requisite food celebrities stopping in for lunch at the John Dory Oyster Bar, interviews with the media, which she dreads evaporates, like wine in a hot pan.

As she preps, she looks as though theres nothing shed rather be doing than peeling shallots or chopping carrots. She practically ogles young onions and spring garlic. She inhales deeply over a pan of sizzling chicken livers, taking in one of her favourite aromas. Browning the lamb meatballs, shes utterly transfixed. Oh, that lovely colour! she says. It makes me go all funny in the knickers. Theres always a song stuck in her head, and while she works, shell sing whatever it is in her Brummie brogue: a peek into the oven to check on a roasting lambs head, the flesh shrinking from its mandible, prompted snippets of the Lady Gaga song that goes, Show me your teeth. Whether shes turning an artichoke or filleting anchovies, its clear shes having fun.

Yet as the meatball episode demonstrates, April battles her own demons in the kitchen. She sets stratospherically high standards, standards so high that even she cant meet them. Her success and torment have a paradoxical relationship: her food is so good because she rarely thinks her food is good enough. When she is happy with the results of her labour, she often denies responsibility, assigning the deliciousness of, say, her roasted carrots to the carrots themselves for being so perfect and sweet. (Its a great tragedy, by the way, that a vegetable savant like April has become best known for burgers and offal. Ive never eaten more lovingly prepared vegetables than those from her kitchen.) And she barely eats what she cooks, instead assembling bites and plates for anyone nearby.

April does not impose her will from the kitchen; her lack of egotism leads her to empathise with the people who eat her food. When she composes dishes, she aims to re-create the little moments that bring her joy. Once, just before she whizzed stock and vegetables for a soup, I watched her fish out a slotted-spoonful of carrot chunks, then return them to the pot after blending. This way, she said, its like a little prize when you bite into one later. Isnt it lovely, she told me, when youre eating fried rice and you hit some egg? Ill search and search until I find another piece, for another hit of that fatty flavour. Of course, you dont want too much egg you want to have to dig around for it. She cooks like someone who loves to eat.

Watching her reminds me why I love cooking itself, not just the food it produces, and inspires me to spend more time in my own kitchen. The essence of her food is simplicity. The luxe ingredients and ostentatious embellishments that define so much ambitious, big-city food are conspicuously absent. Instead, its unrelenting fastidiousness that defines Aprils food. A few fussy aspects of preparation obsessively trimming tomatoes of any pale flesh, making sure each sliver of sauting garlic turns golden brown, chilling radishes for salad lead to totally unfussy food. Her marinated peppers and Caesar salad, veal shank and chicken liver toasts are not deconstructed or creatively reimagined dishes. Theyre exactly what they promise to be, but they taste better than you ever imagined possible.