Mastering the Art of French Cooking Part 2

Culinary Memoir

My introduction to  Mastering the Art of French Cooking was by Gary Rowsell, shortly after we were introduced by his sister, Donna, at a soiree he was hosting at Borzoi Hill. We made an instant connection that night. Not long after our meeting, I felt the excitement, youthful optimism, and anticipation of wanting to spend time with this charismatic and engaging raconteur. Now from a greater perspective, I was smitten and in love with being in love. Meeting someone as striking and charming as Gary was a mighty rush. And, of course, Gary could cook, and he liked to cook and entertain. He was witty, book-smart, creative and a dog lover. At the time, our meeting seemed predestined.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking Part 2

When Gary and I lived together in the late 1970s, he worked briefly at the Villa Restaurant, owned and operated by Tony and Irene Demas on Richmond Street. He learned to prepare Greek rabbit stew with cinnamon and tomato, cleaned squid and prepared avgolemono soup. When he left the Villa, he inadvertently left behind his two Mastering the Art of French Cooking volumes.

Incidentally, in 1980 the Villa Restaurant was purchased by enterprising restaurateurs Nick and Carolyn Bonfrere, former owners of the London Fishery. (I had my first job as a waiter at the London Fishery, thanks to Tim Munroe, who would later operate Crabapples Restaurant with chef Jacqui Shantz. I recall an interviewer asking Shantz nearly three decades ago how she saw herself in the culinary hierarchy. Her tongue-in-cheek answer was "above (Paul) Bocuse." We talked about the famed misogynist French chef when he passed away at 91 a few years ago, and Shantz confirmed that when she went to see him in France, there was a sign on the gate that stated: "No Women Allowed." Bocuse clearly distinguished between the cuisine of great chefs and "little women," even though he admitted women instructed him. The gender-based paradox is that the lion's share of chefs and ninety-four percent of professional chefs in France are men, evoking a mother or grandmother when discussing their vocation. Cooking, considered feminine in the domestic realm, becomes masculine professionally.

The Villa became Anthony's Seafood Bistro, and David Chapman became the chef. Nick Bonfrere sold Anthony's to Anne and Archie Chisolm, and Chapman stayed on, eventually becoming chef and owner. After 18 years, Chapman reinvented himself and opened a traditional French-inspired restaurant next door that has been operating for 25 years. The emphasis has not just been on seafood but rustic French cuisine. David Chapman retired earlier this year.

As an avid reader and collector of Gourmet magazine for decades, the recipes were explicit, and I attempted to follow them to the letter. In the mid-eighties, when Gary and his partner Barry operated a consignment sales shop in Chesley, Ontario, they lived in isolated farmhouses. They moved eight times in eight years, trying to find the ideal living situation until Barry built an apartment beside their storefront. I remember they had an extensive collection of old Gourmet magazines. When I visited, I would often stay a week or more, depending on the time of year. I would fill my days reading while they worked in the store.

Much of the content in the pages of Gourmet magazine was primarily culinary articles, restaurant profiles, meticulous recipes by the magazine or recipes submitted by readers, recipes requested by readers, and culinary counsel sought by readers. The magazine evolved by continually reinventing traditional concepts. I was thrilled when a reader asked Gourmet for the recipe for my almond-flavoured Orzata semi-fredda. Although it was easy to discount Gourmet as a culinary magazine for the privileged, it was a harbinger of evolving food culture.

More recently, I was silently distraught when my friends Anne and Paul disposed of their decades-long LCBO's Food & Drink magazine collection at their cottage in Sauble beach. It, too, was an essential archive of Ontario's food and drink culture. More recently, I have been reading back on issues of La Cucina Italiana from the mid-90s. In the last year, I have picked up La Cucina Italiana at Eataly in Toronto and learned that Conde Nast now owns the 100-year-old publication.

There was a decade-long obsession with Marcella Hazan, the matriarch of Italian cuisine. The Classic Italian Cookbook and Marcella Cucina were intelligent books to explore the Italian culinary repertoire. I loved giving this book as a gift. It was the River Café Cookbook by Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, a gift from my friend Marc Linton, which informed my cooking style at Murano restaurant. I still consult the River Café's "the blue book" as a reference for several staples. My "yellow book" has gone missing, but I have the "green book" and the "silver book." 

My formative years were spent in the kitchens of the Canadian-owned Keg restaurant and later the medieval-themed Corkscrew steakhouse chain. I learned the high turnover business side of the restaurant industry when 26-item salad bars, steak and lobster, and Dungeness crab with tinned cheese sauce was the apogee of late 1970s cuisine.

The 130-seat Keg' N Cleaver had a rustic décor, rough cedar walls (Maclean's magazine called it barnboard chic), heavy tables and chairs and dim lighting when it opened at 330 Richmond Street in London, Ontario, in November 1973. I started in the kitchen by washing dishes and became kitchen manager within a few months. 

My education and passion for fine cuisine and regional cooking began while working at Toronto's first wine bar, The Vineyard, and a seven-year stint at Gabrieles in London, Ontario, the symbiosis of classic German and French culinary traditions. 

I worked at Le Trou Normand and Le Rendezvous in Yorkville during their heyday in the early to mid-1980s. At the risk of encouraging a trite and dated stereotype, sometimes there is just the proper fraction of cultural hauteur from the staff at French restaurants. It is a professional demeanour that adds to the ambience and romanticism of the dining experience. Isn't it disarming to be served by someone who takes pride in their job and is confident in their expertise? 

 I worked at Le Trou Normand twice and have written short stories about the chef and his wife. Le Trou Normand is the restaurant that has had the most profound influence on me as a young chef and restaurateur.

In my early twenties, I was fortunate to attract several life-changing mentors. I had the opportunity to work with talented chefs and restaurateurs with strong temperaments and personal agendas that consolidated ideas about chefs as artists and as propagandists for certain culinary ideologies and taboos. They helped me develop a solid culinary backbone. I am fortunate to have trusted friends and colleagues who are part of my extended family and have remained steadfast in my life from those early years. 

Initially, I was an ardent student of regional French cuisine, its temperament and traditions. Still, after trips to Italy in the late-1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, I had to acknowledge that I was more inspired by regional Italian cooking. I moved beyond France as my primary focus of gastronomic interest. The codification of culinary principles, the five mother sauces and their derivations, and the common-sense sequence that underpins French culinary technique have renewed my interest and commitment to regional French cuisine. I recently discovered the pithivier. 

As far as I can remember, my travels in France and Italy and my discovery of food writers MFK Fischer and Elizabeth David ignited my passion for food writing. I am fortunate to own the collected works of MKK Fischer and Elizabeth David. In any case, it was Italy where I first encountered giant turtles fated for soup pots, wild game, and various unusual feathered birds. I adopted my routines, including scouting the open-air food markets in Pisa and Florence and the Rialto market on Venice's Canal Grande. Later, the cuisines of Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont, Tuscany and Abruzzo became a prime focus. The Italian market is a food lover's nirvana, with abundant fresh and saltwater fish and shellfish varieties. The fruit and vegetable markets piled high with seasonal produce and foraged fungi.

Returning from working at La Sablonnerie, a 16-century farmhouse hotel and restaurant (now Michelin- starred) on Little Sark in the Channel Islands, off the coast of Normandy in the southwestern English Channel. I was cooking at a swanky dinner club in Chandler's Ford in Hampshire, England, in the early 1990s, just as mad cow disease evolved from a cryptic veterinary puzzle into an epidemic affecting 120,000 cattle. Speculation and conflicting reports about the mad cow's relationship to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans had created a frenzy of alarm and mistrust. I realized that I had been naive to put my confidence in the perceived safety of our food supplies. At this time, I became politicized and acutely aware of food safety and security.

In 2000, as guests of the Italian Trade Commission, my friend and colleague Fernanda Cerone and I embarked on an ambitious culinary journey with seven Canadian chefs to Emilia-Romagna. Later we travelled to her hometown of Celano in Abruzzo. We dubbed ourselves the "squaqeroni" in homage to the delicious local calves' milk cheese traditionally served in Romagna with the local flatbread known as piadina. On this trip, I was introduced to "Slow Food," the movement to safeguard traditional regional specialties, time-honoured techniques, and farm-to-table cuisine. It was in Italy I had a culinary epiphany about regional Canadian cooking and the local terroir and changed my focus. 

After a decade at my restaurant, Murano, and the trials and tribulations of owning a chef-driven restaurant, I reevaluated my priorities. The constant demands of the hospitality industry took a toll on my mental and physical health and overall outlook. After thirty years of being tethered to restaurants, the idea of returning to the business was anathema to me. I divorced myself from the business (the separation was painful) and took a lengthy hiatus from the industry (15 years), except for several brief hands-on restaurant consulting jobs. Eventually, my focus and rehabilitation from being a high-functioning but persistent workaholic came from a well-ordered and contented home life, which had eluded me previously. 

I became a culinary ambassador/food editor/writer for Eat Drink magazine while developing community and farmers' market projects and tourism-related experiences. After all, first and foremost, I view myself as a communicator; it is the fundamental drive of a writer. -BL