Great Eaters by Russ Barnes

GREAT EATERS (TM)

by Russ Barnes

Forward

"He was a great eater." That was the way Nikos Kazantzakis eulogized one of his friends on the occasion of his friend's death.

The spirit behind this personal and random cookbook has the same kind of respect for great eaters. Many of you who hold this booklet in your hands have eaten at least some of the dishes described in the recipes that follow. I've been a happy witness to the fact that you are great eaters.

A chef is, by all accounts, a master someone like the father in the movie Eat Drink Man Woman. I come nowhere close to the great masters before whom I offer humble devotion. I'm more like a cook, and an amateur cook at that. But then G.K. Chesterton reminds us that the root of the word "amateur" is "love." He said we have too many professionals in our lives. We don't want a professional to dance for us. We want to dance ourselves. We don't want a professional to make love for us. We want to make love by ourselves with our beloved. Chesterton concluded, "Anything that's worth doing is worth doing badly."

That's my approach to cooking. It's a love. It's a need. I love serving people food. I can't figure why.

The recipes in this book have no consistent culinary theme. They represent the hodgepodge of my life: the people I've known, the places I've been. You will perceive three geographical influences in the recipes here.

One is my childhood home in Uniontown, Pennsylvania from which I received my understanding of Mediterranean peasant cuisine. I learned this love from ethnic cooking which I experienced in my friends' homes. I learned respect for eating in Uniontown. For one thing, my grandparents took us out for Sunday dinner at the White Swan Hotel just after church. We were taught manners. We were taught that manners and ritual at the table are fun, pleasant. The waiters wore tuxedoes. After dessert we were presented with solid silver finger bowls. Our meals at the White Swan were contiguous with the Eucharist. My many friends in Uniontown were great eaters. When we met in the evening at sixteen or seventeen, we would say to each other, "Let's dine." That word, "dine" had magic to it.

Another important piece of geography is New Orleans where, as an employee of The Delta Queen Steamboat Company, I gleaned the inner logic of Cajun and southern Louisiana cooking. And I learned the spirit of it. I learned that there is so much joy in this life, it's hard to fathom. This body is meant to be burned up with pleasure, and then you go to heaven.

And finally there was my ten-year stay in Austin, Texas where Tex-Mex food is even today dynamically evolving. What I learned in central Texas is that no recipe is fixed. There is no idea fixe. A cook can infinitely substitute one ingredient or herb for another. The point is to focus on integrity. If integrity is adhered to, the recipe could and should be departed from for the sake of exploration. Another thing I learned in central Texas is the benefit of slow cooking. Barbecue ribs, for example, are cooked on low heat for twenty- four hours at least. No rush. Even vegetables are cooked on low heat and just this side of "done."

That's the geography. Then there are the people. I've met culinary masters and they have taught me. I have learned with gratitude. There are many. But three stand out.

The first is Joe Heidelmeier of Austin, Texas. I stood in his kitchen and watched. I was a student. Joe bought the best ingredients he could find. He had an infallible intuition of what ingredients went together in what quantities. And he tasted. He let himself be open to what his palate told him. And then he adjusted accordingly. Joe loved animals, both when they were alive and when they were dead on his kitchen counter. He lovingly and respectfully touched the carcasses of the animals he was preparing.

I say that Joe Heidelmeier bought food materials. He also shot and killed them. Deer, rabbit, turtles, beaver. Anything in God's kingdom was treated royally in Joe's pot of herbs or on his barbecue. One time when I was making chile for a party, Joe arrived with a seven-foot long rattle snake in the back of his pick-up he had just run over on the road. He respectfully skinned and cleaned the snake, marinated the meat, and we included it in the simmering chile stew.

My second master is Christine Schuyler. I lived with Christine for two years in the early ninety's on Thomas Jefferson Street in Georgetown, Washington, DC. Christine was an incomparable chef. She had once been the photo editor of The Time-Life Books series on cooking. She was a French food maven, but she was catholic in her taste. Christine taught me to use my palette for cooking purposes. I stood by her side in her kitchen -- her humble student -- as she stirred a pot or pan. She said, "Now, Russ, taste this." And she held out a serving spoon. "Okay, I'm adding the juice of one tomato. Taste again. What's the difference? What's the balancing ingredient to this additional acid and sugar? Use your intuition. That's right. Try some more cheese. What kind, Russ? Okay, let's try it and see. We'll know when we taste it. Don't worry, if you're wrong, we can correct it." Thus Christine ran me through the culinary gauntlet. And I came out the other end with much more consciousness of food.

Christine Schuyler took a trip to France while we lived together. She spent as much time with cows as she did with chefs. She loved being around French cows. She called me on the telephone from France. "They're beautiful!" she exclaimed. It was then the truth of it hit me! Cows make the milk that makes the cheese that is the foundation of French cooking. Those cows are coddled by the French -- for good reason. It was then I realized that a cook must have an appreciation for the plants and animals that go into the cooking of food. The love can't be a grocery store love. The cook must love nature and the creation, and must be close to both.

My third culinary master is Robert Farrar Capon, Father Capon. His recipes are good, but not outstanding. He is an amateur like myself. Unfortunately, I've never met him, but I've read his book, The Feast of the Lamb, and I was immensely affected. His point about eating is that dining involves both an offering and a sacrifice. The animals and plants are sacrificed for our continued life. And while there is a certain tragedy to the death of these plants and animals, there is dignity to their death as well. If we as humans prepare and present (offer) their deaths with dignity, respect, and even, if I may say so, with hilarity and uproarious joyousness, then we eat in a holy way. In this way, holiness is bestowed on the animal, the plant, and on ourselves. Father Capon recounts a story from Dante's Divine Comedy. One of the characters is in the inferno. She asks for an onion. It's thrown to her and she's liberated from hell. That's what good, passionate cooking, and its appreciation, accomplishes.