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  On their flight from Göteborg to Stockholm, my parents had chosen our Swedish names. I was born Kassahun but would be called Marcus. My sister Fantaye would become Linda. They began to call us by these names right away. My father bent down to say hello to Linda, who vanished behind the folds of Seney’s skirt.

  Linda was five, old enough to have remembered everything: our village outside of Addis, our mother, the hospital where she died, and the wards where we’d competed for food, attention, and survival. Linda was silent all the way home from the airport. The only thing that gave her comfort was holding on to a small square of tattered fabric she’d brought from Ethiopia. She didn’t cry, she remembers, because tears and the vulnerability they symbolized were too rich a gift to give to Anne Marie and Lennart, the man and woman she now viewed as potential enemies. So she sat next to Anna in the backseat of our parents’ car while I sat in the front, sleeping in our new mother’s lap.

  In his application, my father promised to raise his adopted children in a good family, one with a dog and a cat, “both very friendly toward children.” He described their neighborhood, Puketorp, as having about three hundred families with a surrounding forest where “we hike in the summer and ski and saucer in the winter.” He promised small lakes with crystal clear waters, perfect for skating and swimming, and a modest house with a flat lawn and an outdoor playhouse, tailor-made for “jumping and playing with balls.”

  The house, neighborhood, and surroundings were all as he described, but it would take more than the comparative opulence of Göteborg to win Linda over. She trusted no one except her new sister, Anna. Linda was my protector. If our new mom reached down to pick me up without securing Linda’s permission first, Linda would pry me out of her arms and scold my mother in Amharic. When my mother tried to put me into the bathtub, a frightful contraption with a mad gush of water, the likes of which we’d never seen before, Linda would cling to me so tightly that my father would have to lift the two of us, stuck together like conjoined twins, and drop us into the tub together.

  My mother learned to ask Linda’s permission each and every time she wanted to make contact with me. Mom spoke to Linda in Swedish, enunciating each word carefully and raising the volume a notch or two, as if that might help. With a mime’s gift for hand gestures and facial expressions, each day my new mother made herself more easily understood, and after many months, Linda loosened her grip.

  THERE IS AN ETHIOPIAN FAIRY TALE called “The Lion’s Whiskers.” It’s the story of a woman who is in an unhappy marriage. Her husband comes home late from work every day, and some nights he does not come home at all. Distraught, the wife goes to see the village elder. He assures her that he can fix this trouble. “I will prepare a medicine that will make your husband love you with an unbounded devotion,” he says.

  The woman can barely contain her excitement. “Abba,” she begs, using the word for a man who is father to the entire village, “make the potion right away.”

  The elder shakes his head. “I need one essential ingredient and it is not an easy one to get,” he explains. “You must provide me with a whisker plucked from a living lion.”

  The woman is in love and unafraid. She says, “I will get it for you.”

  It was not the elder’s wish to cause the woman any harm. On the contrary, he had lived a long time and he believed that in asking her for an ingredient that was as fantastical as fairy dust, he was letting her down easy. Some things were the way they were and always had been. Husbands got bored and sometimes came home late or not at all. Time had taught the elder that his most important job was not to mix potions but to listen. For a woman who is anxious and lonely, the reassuring counsel of an elder was its own kind of balm.

  But that was not the case with this woman, for when she loved, she loved fiercely.

  The next day, she took a slab of raw meat down to the river where she had, on many occasions, watched a lion take his morning drink. She was afraid, but found the courage to walk up close and throw the meat to the lion. Each morning, she returned and fed the beast, getting closer and closer to him until, one day, she was able to sit by his side and, with no danger to herself at all, pluck the whisker from the lion’s cheek. When she returned to the village elder, he was shocked that she had completed the seemingly impossible task.

  “How did you do it?” he asked.

  The woman explained and at the end of her story, the village elder spoke to her with deference and respect. “You have the courage, patience, and grace to befriend a lion,” he said. “You need no potion to fix your marriage.”

  This is a fairy tale that all children in Ethiopia learn, but for me, it is also the story of my early days in Sweden and how my sister and I became Samuelssons. The brave woman was my mother, Anne Marie, and Linda was the lion.

  THREE SWEDISH FISH

  MY LOVE FOR FOOD DID NOT COME FROM MY MOTHER.

  For my mom, putting dinner on the table was just another thing to get done in the course of a long, busy day. Cooking competed with ferrying her three kids back and forth to soccer, ice skating lessons, horseback riding, doctors’ and dentists’ appointments. Once I became old enough to test my daredevil skills (Dad wanted a boy!) on my skateboard and bike, there were regular visits to the emergency room as well.

  It’s not that my mother was a bad cook, she simply didn’t have the time. In the late 1970s, she subscribed to a magazine that had “try it at home” recipes for the busy homemaker, slightly exotic concoctions that featured canned, frozen, and boxed ingredients. This was her go-to source of inspiration. She made pasta as not even a prisoner would tolerate it, with tinny tomato sauce and mushy frozen peas. She served roast pork from imaginary Polynesian shores, with canned pineapple rings and homemade curry whipped cream. She experimented with something called soy sauce. She wanted us to eat well, to experience other cultures, but she also didn’t want to be tied to the stove the way her mother had been. Her mother, Helga, had worked as a maid since the age of eleven, and now, even in retirement, was unable to break the habit of cooking and serving, cooking and serving. My mother saw that and ran the other way.

  What she valued in a meal was convenience. It’s funny that the one dish of hers I adored was the one that could not be rushed: cabbage rolls. I loved sitting on the counter and watching as she blanched the cabbage leaves, seasoned the ground pork with salt and pepper, then scooped the pork into the leaves, wrapping them like cigars and placing them carefully on a platter. My mother’s cabbage rolls were special because the very preparation of the dish forced her to slow down so I could enjoy her presence as much as her cooking. The literal translation for dim sum is “little bits of heart.” My mother’s cabbage rolls were my dim sum.

  My mother organized our dinners the way she organized the household—efficiency and routine ruled the day. No more than ten dishes made it into her regular rotation. On Mondays, we had meatballs with mashed potatoes, lingonberries, and gravy. On Tuesdays, herring. On Wednesdays, a roast. On Thursdays, we ate split pea soup and on Friday, fish casserole. Once in a while, we veered from the routine. But not often.

  Tuesdays I loved most of all. That was the day the fishmonger drove his beat-up Volvo panel truck into our neighborhood’s modest shopping area, which consisted of a tailor we never used, a grocery store owned by the Blomkvists, and the newsstand guy from whom I could occasionally cadge a peppermint and where my father bought canisters of loose tobacco and cigarette papers.

  My father, the son of a fisherman, was no fan of the fishmonger. “His fish is not fresh,” he said disapprovingly.

  “Day-old is better than frozen,” was my mother’s ever-practical reply. “And his prices are better than good.”

  My mother always took me with her to the fishmonger on Tuesdays, but not before raking a comb through my hair, yanking so hard that for the next hour, I could feel the aftershocks on my scalp. My laces had to be tied, my freshly ironed shirt tucked in. My mother dressed up, too: lipstick, a leather purse, and a sharp
red felt cap that she felt gave her a more sophisticated air.

  We would both watch as the fish man, Mr. Ljungqvist, parked his truck at the curb in front of the Blomkvists’ market and unfurled his blue-and-white-striped awning. Mr. Ljungqvist was shaped like a bowling ball, with thick white hair curling out from under his black fisherman’s cap. He wore a sweater under his smock and a red apron on top. No matter how cold it was, his pink hands were bare, chafed and scraped from handling so much ice, sharp belly scales, and spiny fins.

  I liked to hoist myself on the bottom lip of the service window and see what was waiting on Mr. Ljungqvist’s icy deathbed. It never turned out to be anything too exciting—some cod, some perch, some sill, which is what we called herring—but I always hoped he’d procured something more surprising and exotic from the bottom of the sea, like an eel or turbot or squid. But there were no surprises as to what my mother would buy or how my mother might cook it. The big, oafy-looking cod would be ground into fish balls. Perch would be broiled and served with butter and lemon. And the herring? The herring was our hamburger.

  Herring is the classic Swedish fish. It was on almost every table at every meal, figured into almost every course but dessert, and showed up at every holiday. It was even woven into the language. You could be deaf as a herring or dumb as a herring. Tram conductors who carried trolleys full of commuters were called herring packers. If you were exhausted, you were a dead herring. Smelly shoes were called herring barrels.

  Ljungqvist’s customers bought lots and lots of herring—to poach, pickle, bake, and layer into cheesy, creamy casseroles with leeks and tomatoes. On the nights my mother would fry the herring, she bypassed the ten-inch-long Atlantic herring in favor of the smaller, silver-skinned strömming that came from the Baltic and fit better in her cast-iron pan. As a Swedish woman who came of age in the 1950s, she may have happily served mushy peas from the tin, but she scaled, gutted, and filleted the herring herself. For her, that wasn’t a kitchen skill. Knowing how to clean a fish was as innate as knowing how to open a door.

  I helped my mother pick out our fish. What you wanted to avoid at all costs were cloudy eyes and blood spots on their gills, telltale signs that the fish was not fresh. My father, who had grown up in a family of fishermen, did not trust my mother to pick the fish. It was my job, he told me secretly, to make sure she made the right choices. When we found the acceptable choice for that night’s supper, Mom nodded to me, I nodded to Mr. Ljungqvist, and he picked the fish out of the ice, added it to the others he had laid into the crook of one arm, and wrapped them in newspaper.

  Next, my mom would pick out the anchovies for our Friday night dinner, Jansson’s Temptation, a traditional Swedish casserole of potato, anchovy, onion, and cream. Mr. Ljungqvist dug into a shallow pail of anchovies with his red scoop, and then shook out the extras until he had exactly the right amount. They glimmered, metallic and shiny, against the ice. Put that one back, my mother would say. No, no, I want that one.

  There was a kind of “who’ll blink first” thing going on between my mother and Mr. Ljungqvist, each respectfully trying to gain the upper hand. To this day, I could not declare a winner in their silent battle of wills, except to say that learning how to pick the freshest fish, for the best value, helped lay the groundwork for my work as a chef. And as my sisters did not accompany us on these fish-buying expeditions, they would never know that, occasionally, despite her virulent anti-sweets policy, our mother could be swayed. Every once in a while, after we’d made our purchases from Mr. Ljungqvist, I would talk her into walking over to the newsstand and buying a little candy. Salted licorice for her. Colored sour balls for me.

  FOUR HELGA

  AFTER MY PARENTS ADOPTED ANNA, MY MOTHER’S PARENTS, WANTING to be nearby and to help in any way they could, moved to Göteborg from the southern province of Skåne. They bought a small one-bedroom house just a few minutes away by bike, close enough that we crossed paths several times a day. We called Helga and Edvin Jonsson mormor and morfar—terms of respect that translate to “mother’s mother” and “mother’s father”—and loved them like the adoring set of bonus parents that they were.

  At Mormor’s, the smell of food was omnipresent: The yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread or the tang of drying rose hips hit you as soon as you walked in. Something was always going on in her kitchen, and usually several things at once. My grandmother would start chopping vegetables for dinner while sterilizing jars for canning, while stirring a pot of chicken stock or grinding pork for a month’s worth of sausages. If I had to try to pinpoint my earliest food memory it would not be a single taste, but a smell—my grandmother’s house.

  Before moving to Göteborg, my grandmother lived where she had grown up, in the province of Skåne. To say a person comes from Skåne carries a lot of meaning for a Swede. At the southernmost tip of the country, Skåne is to Sweden, in many ways, what Provence is to France. With the mildest climate and the most fertile soil in Sweden, it is the country’s chief agricultural region. Not surprisingly, Skåne has always been known for its rich culinary landscape, a landscape that gave birth to a generation of instinctively inventive cooks. My grandmother was no exception. She spent so much of her time at the stove that when I close my eyes and try to remember her, it’s that image of her back that I see first. She would toss smiles and warm welcomes over her shoulder, never fully taking her eyes off the pots she was tending.

  Mormor had the unique experience of being surrounded by luxury despite living in poverty her entire life. Her work as a maid for upper-class Swedish families had kept food on the table for her family through the lean years surrounding the rationing of two World Wars. From the families she worked for, she learned how to make restaurant-worthy meals. This kind of training, coupled with her own thriftiness, meant that she made almost everything we ate from scratch and wasted almost nothing; her larder was so well stocked that I barely remember her shopping. Maybe she’d send me out to get sugar or she’d go to the fishmonger herself, but otherwise, everything she needed seemed to appear, as if by magic, from her pantry or emerge from the garden that she tended with the same careful devotion that she used to prepare our family’s big Saturday suppers.

  Mormor’s one indulgence was wallpaper. The walls of her house were covered in exuberant flowers, exploding colors, and bold vertical stripes. But other than that, her house was simple and quiet, much quieter than ours. You could open the door and know that no children lived there: There was just the low murmur of my grandfather listening to the news on the radio and my grandmother clanking away in the kitchen. She did all of her prep work by hand and preferred mortar and pestle to the electric mixers and blenders my mother bought her in the hopes of making her life easier. She was suspicious of newfangled inventions. Having cooked most of her adult life on a wood-burning stove, she never entirely warmed to the electric oven in her modern kitchen.

  Mormor treated her house like it was her own little food factory. She made everything herself: jams, pickles, and breads. She bought large cuts of meat or whole chickens and game animals from the butcher and then broke them down into chops and roasts at home. It’s so funny to me how, today, we celebrate braising as some refined, elegant approach, when it’s the same slow cooking method Mormor used. Her menus followed a simple logic:

  You have bread today because it’s fresh.

  You have toast tomorrow because the bread has gone stale.

  You make croutons the next day, and whatever bread is left after that gets ground into crumbs that you’ll use to batter fish.

  I don’t think I saw a rib-eye steak until my late teens when I started working in restaurants. At home, we ate mostly ground meat that was rolled into balls and stretched even further by ample additions of breadcrumbs. We ate our own Swedish version of a hamburger: pan beef, a patty topped with caramelized onions. Sometimes we ate beef Lindstrom: a hamburger patty mixed with onions, capers, and pickled beets before being seared in butter. That’s comfort food where I come from, and i
t’s damn good.

  In the United States, the best-known Swedish dish is meatballs, but pickles and jams connect the dots of Swedish cuisine and make an appearance in almost every meal and dish. At breakfast, we’d pour buttermilk over granola and sweeten it with black-currant jam. A favorite summer dessert was ice cream topped with gooseberry preserves, and a late-night TV snack would be toast with cheese and jams. Seared herring would be served with lingonberry jam, and liver pâté sandwiches were topped with pickled cucumbers.

  Swedes traditionally prefer a pickle that is salty, sour, and quite sweet. To achieve that blend of flavors, we use a solution called 1-2-3: one part vinegar, two parts sugar, three parts water. But for the pickle to be truly Swedish, the vinegar has to be ättika, a beechwood-based product that has a sinus-clearing, eye-tearing bite to it, twice as acidic as American vinegars. Mormor spent an enormous amount of time pickling and preserving, using the 1-2-3 solution to pickle cauliflowers and cucumbers, herrings and beets, which she stuffed into jars and stored in her pantry.