Dorothy Kalins - The Kitchen Whisperers: Cooking with the Wisdom of Our Friends

For Roger,

who sees it all

For me, foodand cooking for othersis almost indistinguishable from love. Like Dorothy, I have many cherished voices in my head when I cook, each one coaxing me to cook so many different things in so many different ways. And like her, I have almost no voice thats telling me how to bake a cake. (Im fortunate to have a wife and a daughter who are so good at dessert, theyve given me a hall pass from confronting my own reluctance to cook with exactitude.) So, while Im not obsessing about exactitude, I do think a lot about how to pinpoint flavor. There are so many voices. Ill try to name a bunch of them.

I grew up cooking with my dad quite a bit, on the outside grill, and at the stove, too. From early onI was five, six, seventhe love of cooking was a bond between us. The first thing he taught me to make was ratatouille; we named our miniature French poodle after that dish. On weekends, wed make Eggs Saturday: scrambled eggs with crispy crumbled bacon on top. Or wed make Swiss Eggs: cook bacon, drain off almost all the fat, put the bacon back in the pan, crack a bunch of eggs on top, season with salt and pepper, blanket it with Swiss cheese and paprika, and put the lid on just until the cheese melts and the yolks are still soft and runny. The food wasnt always great, but it was fun. And it was always more about who I was with than what we were making.

Without question, my dad is in my head, still.

As soon as I got my drivers license, Id drive to the house of our cherished housekeeper, Mary Smith, for Saturday afternoon lessons in the fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and collard greens shed grown up with in Mississippi. As a junior in high school, I was the only male in home ec class. I loved the girl-boy ratio for sure, but I really loved the teacher, Mrs. Holecamp. I brought home and cooked every recipe she taught us, like pizza and tacos from scratch.

Eventually I wanted to turn my love of cooking into doing it the right way. In college, thanks to my dads travel business, airfare was incredibly cheap, so I could go to Italy for a long weekend. I went every chance I got and learned from every meal I had.

When I moved to New York at age twenty-two, I wanted to keep this cooking thing going. I signed up for cooking classes from an amazing woman, an Egyptian-born Jew named Andre Abramoff. She had a sweet little restaurant called Andres Mediterranean in a town house on East 74th Street. I learned to make kibbe her way, and bouillabaisse, too. And to this day, I almost always make Andres turkey for Thanksgiving. She didnt brine it; shed layer a pound of bacon strips on top of the bird. The bacon-draped bird goes into a really hot oven (450F to 500F) for half an hour. I remove the bacon strips (setting them aside for tomorrows turkey sandwiches) and lower the temperature to 375F. The bacon creates a tasty sear, sealing in the juices. Meanwhile, every 15 minutes I baste the bird with the bacon drippings. Its antithetical to conventional turkey methods and takes a lot less time. And its so good.

My love of barbecue led me to cook with some of Americas best pitmasters, whose voices I still have my head. Low and slow, with plenty of stories while cooking. I have Roman cooks in my head. I have Joyce Goldstein, the San Francisco chef and cookbook author in my head, I have the French chefs I worked with in Bordeaux in my head. And Ruthie Rogers from Londons River Caf speaks to me constantly. Ive come to realize that everybody who cooks with other people has their own Kitchen Whisperers.

From the very early 1990s to about 2010, I was keenly interested in experiencing as many Michelin-starred restaurants as I could. Its kind of where the puck was for fine dining during that era. But since then, my taste in restaurants and my taste in cooking has just gotten simpler and simpler. Theres a sensibility among people who are at home in a great trattoria, in a great bistro. A large part of my inspiration for Gramercy Tavern, which opened in 1994, were the two-star restaurants in the French and Italian countryside, not the urban three-star restaurants. These places werent trying to be fancy. They were warm. Their food was way better than average.

I was never interested in choosing between eight kinds of bottled water or five kinds of butter. But then I stopped being interested in all of that. For the last ten or twelve years, Ive found that I just want to have a great bowl of pasta, or a great roadside version of something really goodburger, ribs, pulled pork, or breakfast tacos. My wife, Audrey, and I went to Santa Fe in 1991 when David Tanis was cooking at Caf Escalera and liked it so much we went back for more the very next night. We never do that when traveling! What Davids food has (and Dorothys, too) is the confidence to season pristine ingredients and leave everything else off the plate.

Daniel Humm, of Eleven Madison Park, is as a talented a chef as any Ive ever had the privilege of working with, but I do not have his voice in my head when I cook. I dont even know how he pulls off his technique. I love experiencing his food, but his fried chicken is the only thing I can imagine cooking. Its going-out food, and when I cook, I want you to feel like you are coming home.

Ive never cooked a meal where I tried to impress anybody. Two Kitchen Whisperers who really are in my head are Michael Romano, the defining chef of my first restaurant, Union Square Cafe, and Michael Anthony of Gramercy Tavern. Michael Romano has perfect pitch as a taster and chef, and Mike Anthony taught me all about layering flavors. His cooking does not require tweezers or showing off. It one hundred percent succeeds at blurring the lines between going out and coming home.

The minute I walk into Dorothys kitchen for one of the many dinners weve shared over the years, I know the amount of effort that went into what shes prepared; yet she doesnt let us see any of that. Not only have I had the privilege of sitting down at her table, but I believe I could probably remember every single dish Ive ever had there. It starts with comfort and love. What she lets us see and feel is her joy of preparing a meal for us.

I know theres going to be a salad, and I know it is going to be great for whats not in it. She makes sure that every ingredient on the plate is so good that you wouldnt want to add more. She cares about each lettuce leaf, judiciously dressed, and a beautiful presentation. Her salad takes me to Chez Panisse and to Chez LAmi Louis in Paris. Its just a bowl of salad, but it is damned good!

What she lets us see and feel is the experience; whatever she happens to be interested in at the time: Morocco in one meal. France, California, Spain. The through line besides the generosity and love that went into it, is that ineffable thing that I love so much: I went out and I came home. Dorothy is one of my Kitchen Whisperers, and Im moved by how much we still keep learning from each other.

Danny Meyer

Alone in the kitchen? Impossible! My kitchen is noisy with chatter. Swirling around me in that room are voices from other kitchens, other lives, nudging me, reminding me, making me smile. Its how I became a cook, how most of us dohearing the words of a mama or a grandpa, a wise writer or a savvy friend, remembering their wisdom, and repeating their moves. These messages from the past help make us the cooks we become.

People who do not cook, or who are uneasy doing it, assume that good cooks go into the kitchen and just whip something up. They become anxious when this kind of magical transformation of disparate ingredients into a meal does not happen for them automatically in their own kitchens. What they do not know is how far ahead the cooking process begins in your mind. How constantly its recalibrated with every decision. And how much you just make up as you go along, trying to sniff out the next move, sense where each ingredient wants to go. I wake up worrying where my next meal is coming from. My first thought: Is this a market day? (Union Square Greenmarket: small on Mondays, progressively larger on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Wednesday means I get to walk to the market opposite the United Nations, nearby.) I picture whats in the refrigerator: In my mind I smell the cantaloupe I bought yesterday. Ripe enough? Prepping in my head, I slice its cool orange flesh, rind on, with a wedge of lime (do we have limes?) and a branch of mint (if Im lucky). Any good salad greens lurking in the veg bins? A nubbin of fresh ginger? Are those shiitakes I bought last week still good? Anything to work with from dinner last night? Or the night before? What stocks in the freezer? Such is my version of a morning practice; as a routine, it is hardly meditation. Its neither calming nor enlightening. Only necessary.