The Fresh Fun Foods Blog: The Formation of a Chef, and Pigs (pork roasted with apples and red cabbage)

Years in the restaurant biz will teach you that titles mean very little. I started cooking in Pocono hotel kitchens when I was a kid. While the food may not have been fancy, those ladies behind the stove blew out a large quantity of good, family style eats for an unrelenting five months a year. It was impressive. They had their weekly menu and roared it out of the kitchen. Later I went to seafood houses, burger joints, grille rooms and corner bars. In those kind of places, it was rare that anyone would call himself “chef,” because they were just doing journeyman work. Get it out, make it consistent, give the customer value.

That changed with Philly’s “Restaurant Renaissance.” For the first time, high quality ingredients were available from the farms in Bucks, Chester and Lancaster Counties. New kinds of produce from Jersey started making it to the city. I remember getting fresh basil for the first time in 1983. Independent folk like Roy, “The Mushroom Man” showed up on our loading dock with a basket, really a wicker basket, filled with fresh mushrooms that he had either picked or grown. We bought everything he had. It took months before he gave us a phone number. It took even longer to find out that his last name was Bjornson. He was just the guy who came to the back door with fungus. Mark and Judy Dornstreich were heroes. On their Branch Creek in Farm in Perkasie, PA they grew the best baby lettuce and herbs. My favorite thing that I got from them in the early years was miniature leeks. Beautiful leeks, perfect, no bigger than a scallion that begged to be braised in fish stock and served with seared red mullet and a buerre blanc. Their peas, always the first of the year, still make me remember why I love spring.

The downside of the new availability of all this good stuff was that few knew what to do with it. You learn to cook through an extended period of apprenticeship. With the explosion of new restaurants, the pipeline of quality cooks was sucked dry by the mid 1980s. Consequently, entrepreneurs read a couple of Jasper White or Alice Waters cookbooks, got a loan from Dad and called themselves Chef, always with a capital “C.” And always with a worse attitude than the guys who really knew what they were doing. The most talented French guys insisted that they be simply called cooks.

Everyone had their own “cuisine.” I don’t know how many people told me that I would have to be completely retrained to learn their technique. For one guy, who got quite famous, his Thai-French Cuisine consisted of making a traditional French sauce and hitting it with Tabasco and lemon juice. Even the paté. Another, a former pastry cook who went yahoo, put on overalls and killed goats in the alley behind his kitchen. Elaine Tate was the Inquirer’s food critic at the time. She was a miserable, barely human thing, a former fashion writer, who panned every restaurant that didn’t have Asian food on their menu. Me, I was running country French places. Not much room on the menu for wontons and hoisin, so I got slammed every time she came in my place. In fact, I got fired twice after her reviews. Witch!

I was in no mood for this. I had worked with a guy from Maxim’s. If you play the Kevin Bacon game, I am five steps away from Escoffier and already had my gig down. We put up with grand egos, slimy investors and paychecks that bounced. It was tough to put out a quality product when the owner was wacked, snowblind on the Bolivian stuff, completely out of control. People who ate out at this time always seem to remember what a creative period this was in Philly’s restaurant history.

Working cooks, well we have a different take. We saw lots of bad food. Does anyone else remember grilled rosemary chicken with a strawberry confit? Salmon skin, fried and dusted with chocolate powder? The guys on the line, yes it was almost all men, developed a quick way to weed out the pretenders from the real cooks. First, you had to have a serious recommendation. You had to have worked with someone that I got drunk with in the very recent past. Secondly, you had to know how to boil a chicken, one of the most basic things that cooks do and also one of the easiest things to screw up. Lastly, finally getting to today’s recipe, you had to know how to roast pork.

Pigs were sent directly from God to humans for our enjoyment, to be honored and savored. A pork roast was the most common thing served at the staff meal, which was prepared by junior members of the staff. The 1^st cooks and the chefs were normally too busy setting up the evening mise en place or doing pre dinner shots and coffee. If that young cook screwed up his peer’s dinner, he might find his prep trashed or his uniforms customized. Something well prepared and tasty would win accolades and mercy for most of the remainder of the shift. Here's a typical staff dinner.

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Pork Roasted with Apples and Red Cabbage serves 10

3# pork loin roast

1 medium head red cabbage, chopped

6 large apples, Jonathon or Braeburn, sliced

1 cup onion, diced

1 cup cider vinegar

1 tbs. salad oil

1 tbs. unsalted butter

salt and black pepper