About Kitchen Work

When I was in college I met a professor who changed my life and who started me on a circuitous route to think that perhaps the world could use a modest little printed quarterly magazine about eating and drinking.

It’s not because he, Robert Boyers is his name, would tell you that he has even one gastronomic bone in his body. He might say he could tell a good brisket from a great one, but he would insist that his interest in food ends there or just after with a piece of rye bread for the drippings. It’s always been this way, and I’ve known him for twenty-five years.

There’s a caveat perhaps in the footnote that Robert and his wife Peg have for decades hosted lavish dinner parties at their home in upstate New York. At these dinners as many as twenty people, including bunches of the greatest living poets, fiction writers and essayists in the world, have situated themselves at the table in Robert and Peg’s dining room and sometimes at another one extending into the living room. As good as the food sometimes is (Peg’s mother was the author of a Cuban cookbook and Peg herself is an excellent cook), and as well planned and carefully conceived as the dinners always are — complete with multiple courses and coffee and ice cream for dessert, they have never been about the food. If he can manage it, and he always can, amidst the collection of extraordinary minds at the table, Robert stokes the conversation, introducing and rehashing ideas and provocations until it’s past everyone’s bedtime. An untold number of famous guests over forty years would attest to this.

Robert himself is a luminary. For many years he held an endowed professorship in arts and letters at Skidmore College, he is the director of the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, he is the author of many noteworthy books. The magazine of humanities and social sciences he founded, called Salmagundi, last year celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. And while someone could make a career out of any one of those enterprises, the list still seems incomplete because it might be that his greatest passion of all is teaching. I had a chance a few months ago, after twenty years away, to sit in one of his classrooms. While I could not ever forget it, I was reminded of his profound investment in the discussion and in the thoughts of his students. I cannot imagine someone taking more care to prepare a seminar, though his own presentation is for him just a small piece of the work involved. He is consumed by the idea that has been the focus of his life’s work: we stand a much better chance of living happy lives together if we practice and train not just our own critical skills but also our propensity to engage and listen to others.

So it won’t come as a surprise when I tell you that these days brisket dinners Chez Boyers are sometimes catered by the deli at the local supermarket. Upstate New York first of all is not generally known as a place with an abundance of high-quality options when it comes to buying prepared food. That the food is edible or often much better, that it’s warm, that on a platter it will seem reasonably enticing at least to a group of people gathered around a table in the middle of winter to talk and break bread together, these are the vital characteristics. It’s easy to see that domestic efforts like these could inspire work on a quarterly journal of humanities and social sciences like Salmagundi, by keeping many of its authors in the mix and loved and well-nourished. It’s less clear, I know, how this particular taste of intellectualism gave rise to the magazine presently in your hands, which of course is focused on gastronomy.

The most important bridge between me and Robert, more compelling than our mutual tastes for baseball and knishes, the subject around which my bond with him was sealed, was the work of late Victorian writers like William Morris, John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. My experiences in school had always felt a little muddled, in the sense that I often wondered what the humanities, as they were often called, were about in the first place. I had tried when I was a freshman in high school to muster some enthusiasm for the dull trudge through a thick French novel on which my teacher insisted, but I wondered at every turn what was so important about such a long book that I should spend so much time reading it. In a course with Boyers called Victorian culture and literature I strained to digest hundreds of pages of 19th century English writing and what seemed even at the time like very paramount ideas. These guys — Morris, Ruskin and Arnold, and John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman, made a pretty good case to me for the importance of the humanities, with all of their love and devotion to art and to the subject of beauty, and the ways in which healthy societies depend upon intellectual and creative vigor and integrity.

Something that has fascinated me since my first exposure to those writers is the fact that all of them were born in the early part of the 1800’s, which happened also to be the peak years of the industrial revolution. So the attention and focus each of them brought to ideas like craft and detail, the importance of shrewd and disinterested criticism — to me they have seemed like responses to the advances of the times. While people around the world were marveling at the possibilities of manufacturing and engines and machine tools, these men concerned themselves with poetry and printmaking, and questions of taste and civic society. For the last twenty years, in moments when I have felt inundated by the giant and irrational tide of material goods and technology, I have at times been lucky enough to remember these priorities of the Victorian age. In the arts and teaching but also in the details and practice of small enterprises in our everyday lives, beauty and optimism and feelings of self worth are never very far away.

It took me many years to rediscover this idea in my own work, and they were long hard years. For quite a while I had it in mind that I should try to be a writer, or at least a critic. My aspiration was that I would become practiced enough at saying smart things that different publications would pay me to say them. I could write about politics, films, the state of universities, capitalism, whatever, and wouldn’t that be a terrific life, because who wouldn’t want to wake up in a nice bed in Lower Manhattan in autumn, and take a stroll for a croissant and a perfect coffee and have a light lunch before sitting down for a couple of hours in the afternoon to pen a newspaper column full of insight that lots of people would want to read.

Two things occurred to me while I was wandering around imagining that gilded future, however blurry it seemed. The first was that it turned out that there are far fewer people in the United States with enough of an attention span to read a newspaper column than I had thought. It was a minute before I realized that those people are these days a scant minority. The second thing was that there are already hundreds if not millions of people who think they have important things to say. Many of them actually earn incomes from being a ‘talking head’ or a pundit or even a thoughtful writer. We already have quite a discussion going on and it plays at quite a cacophonous volume, regardless of whether or not very many people are saying even moderately intelligent things. I didn’t like the chances I thought I faced, and anyway I didn’t really care much for the sort of writer I thought I would probably become. Lots of writers say bold things without necessarily having very much idea what they’re talking about.

What I began to feel I much preferred was going out and knowing something, or maybe even more than one thing. Then I would have something to write about. I looked around at musicians who practiced an instrument for fifty years, and surgeons and teachers and carpenters and cooks, and I thought I would really appreciate getting to know something really well in the time I’m on this planet. The writing would come of its own accord, or it wouldn’t. But I became actively averse to joining the ranks of the minions who pontificate, and gradually more dedicated to the prospect of trying to do something good myself. Furthermore, what did all the smart critics mostly want for the world but more gifted teachers, more visionary filmmakers, more inspired cooks, more talented everything. I thought it would feel better to go out and set some sort of good example myself instead of pointing my finger everywhere.

Food was always a bit of an obvious application for me. I think I liked it from the day I was born. I grew up fat but not because I had a slow metabolism. I went to work at McDonald’s straight away when I was fourteen years old and thereafter bested my breakfast biscuit binges with lavish indulgences in a sandwich shop, helping myself and my coworkers to miniature sandwiches with meatballs swathed in melted cheese, and before too long with good warm and crusty bread and lemon cream sauce left over in the pan at a very good French restaurant. The work part started in earnest for me a few years after school was over in what is referred to as hospitality, or as front-of-the-house jobs. In the early days I thought I was just doing it for the money and because it wasn’t something I found empty and detestable, though looking back now it’s easy enough to see that I was attracted in a real way even to waiting tables.

Without my knowing it was happening, the restaurant industry marched me away to culinary school for six months when I was in my thirties. I was working in a position as a wine buyer and sommelier, and I decided I couldn’t go any further in my career with wine without learning a lot more about food and cooking. The worst thing that could happen I thought was that I’d wish I had spent six months doing something else, and get a little more adept with a frying pan. I spent an awkward couple of days suddenly being back in school after ten years away and as the second-oldest student in the class. Then I was shortly off to the races in pursuit of my Victorian life. I was turning carrots and sweetening lemon curd. My cooking school instructor once told the class that the reason a certain dish had turned out well was that I had cut all the vegetables quite uniformly, and I’m sure I swooned. I was finally in the realm of John Ruskin, busying myself by paying attention to detail and trying to make beautiful things.

Now, after more than six years of operating a restaurant, the value and beauty of good cooking and of being hospitable are old hat. I sometimes take them for granted. On a Saturday morning, I’ll separate thirty-two egg yolks and make a batch of fresh pasta for the cooks, or I’ll fill in on the line when we’re short a person. And then I’ll realize that I had forgotten, in the midst of my two solid weeks of administrative work, how good it feels to hold a knife, or chop a bowl of onions, or compose dinner plates. But it extends further than that. My appreciation for all kinds of beautiful things has grown. I don’t mean to sound too corny about it, as though I walk through the world like some starry-eyed little boy who sees bluebirds on every branch, but I do smell the flowers, so to speak, and I think I do it more all the time. I like my scrambled eggs in the morning with just the right softness and amount of salt, and, later that afternoon, if I’m lucky, I think to try and say just the right thing, with just the right seasoning, to one of my employees.

So it dismays me greatly that ours is a culture that cooks less at a moment in time when we are falling all over ourselves to deny that it’s the case. We think of ourselves as “foodies” — that word is like a badge of honor, but we don’t make chicken stock or soup or braise meat or cure fish or assemble casseroles. Some of us watch television and go on mad dashes around town to find bottarga and the right micro greens to replicate the perfect steak tartare that was demonstrated by the famous chef. People with less money buy food at big box stores that they should hope won’t give them cancer. As I write, a company said to be enjoying a meteoric rise in popularity is preparing to send another round of thousands of kits with different ingredients through the mail to consumers all over the country so that they may fantasize about shopping for their own food and planning and preparing their own dinner from scratch.

I was at a conference in New York last year called ‘The Little Magazine in American Culture,’ to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Salmagundi, Professor Boyers’ magazine of humanities and social sciences. It occurred to me that we are not defenseless when it comes to the conversation we are conducting about food or about what and how we eat. It may be true that most of what passes for food writing and restaurant criticism has been hijacked by the same kinds of business interests that so diligently feed us our unrelenting diet of Hollywood movies; those that would have us believe that everything about our lives is sensational. Food as a subject of course is not immune to the marketing distortions and outright deceptions peddled by every other industry. But there seems no reason to believe that real people can’t write about their real experiences with food, and cooking and wine and the costs of things, and recipes and dishes that made for remarkable meals.

The aim of this magazine is to assemble a delicious slice of that writing. I can’t say very much about how it might evolve or look over time because there remains some mystery about that. I hope very good writers from different parts of the country will be inclined to write about something so mundane as breakfast or about a trend they noticed at their local market and submit those pieces for publication. The idea from the beginning was that there would be a sufficient supply of thoughtful material each quarter to be collected and printed, and with the publication of the first issue in sight I can say now that I think there’s ample reason for optimism. How thrilling it has been to receive sincere treatments from people of infinitely diverse backgrounds, about subjects as diverse as cheese production in Vermont, wild mushrooms in California’s Sierra foothills and family breakfasts in the Phillipines.

Most thrilling of all was receiving, as the very first submission to the magazine, a short piece about the experience of eating in museum cafes by Professor Robert Boyers, who was on board from the very first minute. In spite of the fact that food is not even nominally, not even something he could plausibly say occupies even a peripheral sort of SPOT in the most REMOTE part of his psyche, he would sit down to the keypad with purpose, and take his best crack at saying something deft and interesting and fresh for his pal Matt’s new magazine. He wondered whether I would deem what he produced to be the sort of thing I might think about including, but probably figured at least he would deliver me something thoughtful and with perfect paragraphs.

Not that I was surprised by what a lovely little piece it is — the tiniest bit practiced as he is at writing well, and masterful as he is in his senses of proportion and tastefulness and discretion. After fifty years of practice, he knows a few things about nurturing a good discussion.

I hope this and future issues of Kitchen Work, and kitchen work itself — deliver you provocation and inspiration, gratification and pleasure.