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 1st 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.
_____
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
Trim any excess fat from the outside of the pork roast. Season with salt and black pepper.
Heat the oil and butter in a large roasting pan.
While the pan is heating, deeply core the red cabbage...
and chop it into 1/2 inch chunks.
Sear the seasoned pork roast on all sides.
Roast it for 20 minutes at 400° F.
Peel and core six apples. Slice them thin, about 1/4 inch.
Dice the onions, then...
sauté them in the oil and butter.
Add the apples.
Remember to compost the peelings.
When the onions and apples have cooked down...
add the diced red cabbage. Sauté the cabbage until it wilts.
Add the cider vinegar. scrape the bottom of the pan to release the caramelized bits.
Reduce the oven heat to 350° F. Return the roast to to the pan.
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| Slice the roast and serve on top of cabbage. |
