Yes Chef Page 3

  Pantry is almost too fancy a word for where Mormor stored her food. Hers was a closet at the foot of the basement stairs. A pull-chain light hung from the ceiling and the single bulb revealed a space so small that by the time I was ten years old, it was no longer a viable option for me in our games of hide-and-seek. The closet doubled as a root cellar with burlap sacks of potatoes lining the floor along one wall. Above them were shelves of savory foods—pickled onions, cucumbers, beets, and different types of herring: strömming, sill, and the store-bought matjes herring, prized for its delicate, less fishy flavor. The far wall held the sweet preserves, which were placed in rows that went back three jars deep. Each was covered with a handwritten label:

  Röda vinbär, augusti 1980 (Red currant, August 1980)

  Saltgurka, oktober 1981 (Pickled cucumber, October 1981)

  Mormor made jams from the berries she grew in her front yard as well as from what she found in the woods near our house, like lingonberries, the quintessential Swedish fruit, which have a texture and tang similar to cranberries. She preserved cloudberries, black currants, raspberries, and gooseberries; and made jam from apples, pears, and plums, all of which came from her own trees. That dark little closet was my grandmother’s version of a jewelry case, and the bright jellies and jams were her gemstones.

  ———

  I LOVED SATURDAYS as a kid. Saturdays meant soccer practice for me, ice-skating and riding lessons for my sisters, and almost without exception, Saturdays meant the best meal we would have all week because dinner was almost always at my grandparents’ house. As soon as I got home from soccer, I would jump on my bike and speed over to Mormor’s house. It took me exactly seven minutes to cut across the nature preserve that abutted our property, speed down the road on the other side, and make it up the long driveway to my grandparents’ house. I dumped the bike at the foot of their steps, took the stairs two at a time, and walked as fast as I could to Mormor’s kitchen. There was no running in my grandmother’s house. She’d look at me standing there out of breath and say, “Ah, there you are. Come. I have a job for you.” She would pull out a stool and set me to string rhubarb or shell peas or pluck a chicken. I’m not sure why my sisters never joined us in our Saturday afternoon cooking sessions; and, at the time, I didn’t care. I was only too happy to have Mormor to myself.

  Her signature dish was roast chicken, which meant chicken soup the next day. In kid words, it was yummy, the perfect food, warm like the kind of hug only a grandmother can give. Looking back, my grandmother’s food was my introduction to rustic cooking. It had more levels of flavor than a twelve-year-old boy could understand. She didn’t know how to build textures the way chefs build texture, but she got it. In her body, she knew how to create those levels.

  Growing up in Skåne, my grandmother had learned to kill a chicken old-school style. Grab the bird, knife to the neck. Like, “Come here, boom.” You learn to respect food in a different way when you have to kill it yourself, she would say. I never forgot that lesson, even though when I was a kid we didn’t kill the chickens we ate for dinner. But the fresh birds my grandmother purchased still looked like birds—they had feet and feathers and we had to handle them and pluck them ourselves. It was something I got good at, too, the kind of tedious work that needs to be done carefully and quickly, that would one day prepare me for the lower levels of professional kitchens.

  After we plucked the chicken, my grandmother would salt it generously. Right there, she created a level of flavor. But why did she salt it? Because even though she had a refrigerator, she wasn’t raised with a refrigerator. In her mind, she couldn’t be sure how many days the chicken would last. And what happens when you salt something? The skin gets firmer. You’ve preserved it and the meat gets more tender. Right there, she was creating texture.

  After she salted it, she would put the chicken in the basement and leave it there for a couple of hours, because that’s where it was cold and dry. As a chef, you would leave the chicken by the air conditioner so the skin gets dry, which helps you when you roast it. Same basic principle. She had these intuitive moves that we teach in chef school.

  When she was ready to cook the chicken, she showed me how to add spices—cardamom, ginger, coriander seeds—that we’d grind and rub all over the skin. Then she would put carrots in the roasting dish, making a little bed for the chicken to sit on. She stuffed the bird with ingredients that came from her own yard: rosemary, apples, onions, maybe a little garlic. She’d sew the chicken up and put it in the oven. While it was roasting, she’d get going on the stock. Everything that was left over—the extra skin, the neck, the giblets—went into the soup pot for stock. Then she’d put any vegetable scraps into the pot, too, and let it simmer.

  Mormor had this bad Chinese soy sauce, which was the best she could get in Sweden in the 1970s. She’d say, “I don’t like white sauce. Gravy has to have color.” Mormor thought like a chef. She wanted the food to be not only tasty, but visually appealing. She’d take a pan, the drippings, flour, soy sauce, and make gravy. She wasn’t raised with butter because she couldn’t afford it, so she cooked with grease fat. That’s the flavor she put into a lot of her gravies and sauces. Then she’d take a few tablespoons of the stock she’d just made and use that to thin out the gravy. She’d hand me a slotted spoon and say, “OK, Marcus, get the lumps out.”

  Later that night, she’d serve the meal we’d created, always giving credit to “my little helper.” No matter how many times we prepared the same dish the same way, I was always excited to see the meal I’d helped to make, presented formally on a silver serving tray: chicken roasted with rosemary, accompanied by carrots glazed with a little bit of honey, ginger, and sugar.

  The next day my mother, my father, my sisters, and I would often come back for chicken soup. She’d have taken all the meat that was left over from the Saturday night supper and added it to the stock along with a boiled pot of rice or potatoes. And that was the meal. It was so full of flavor because of her upbringing, the poverty that she came from. The preserving technique that made everything taste richer, deeper. The fresh chicken that she had hand-picked. Drying the bird, which gives you the perfect skin. The salting because she never trusted refrigerators, the two or three days’ worth of meals that she would create from one chicken because being poor makes you inventive.

  The roast chicken I make today is a homage to hers. I have luxuries that she didn’t. I use perfectly fed chickens, ones that weigh exactly three pounds. My grandmother bought whole chickens from the market, some fat and some skinny. I use real butter instead of grease fat. But the layering of flavor and the techniques? They’re all hers.

  FIVE WITH RESPECT TO THE SEA

  EVERY SPRING WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, MY FATHER WOULD TAKE A TRIP to Smögen, the island off the west coast of Sweden where he’d been born and raised and where our family spent most of its vacations. Every Easter break, he drove there alone to prepare the summer house and the family’s fishing boats. I was twelve, just about to start middle school, when he invited me along for the first time.

  “This is not a holiday,” he warned. “We are going to get the boats ready. You can’t come along unless you’re willing to help.”

  During the summer, Smögen was flooded with tourists who came to see Sweden’s longest boardwalk and eat prawn sandwiches from brightly colored wooden huts which, from afar, looked like they were made of Popsicle sticks. But this was not summer and we were not tourists. In March in Smögen, the salt air coated your skin and its gritty texture made you feel tougher, both inside and out. “Just us two men,” my father said, my father who had so longed for a son that he had flown paper planes—adoption forms in triplicate—all the way to Africa to make his dream come true.

  The road from Göteborg to Smögen was a patchy two-lane that veered between rugged shoreline, thick forests of pines and spruce, and meadows full of yarrow and twinflower. Sometimes there was no vegetation at all and the road cut through vast rock formations, endless fields o
f dark gray granite that looked, from the car window, like elephant hide. It took almost three hours to get there, and I measured our progress by the blue road signs showing how many kilometers were left to go: Smögen 13, Smögen 6, Smögen 2. We skirted the edge of Kungshamn, the last mainland town at the tip of the thumb-shaped peninsula, and crossed the Uddevalla Bridge. We were close, I knew, when I saw the first cluster of red-roofed houses, the docks, the bobbing boats, the small beach, and the steely water of the fjord that would eventually spill into the sea. And then I saw it, the first sign that we had arrived: a white two-story house with a red roof, set back from the road, with no other houses around. This was the house of my great-uncle Torsten, my father’s uncle and the closest thing I had to a paternal grandfather, since my father’s father had died more than twenty years earlier. Torsten’s house sat at the foot of the new bridge, one that hadn’t existed when my father had been a boy. To get to school each day, he’d had to row himself and his three siblings forty minutes each way across this inlet of the Baltic. I wondered what sort of prayers he must have said on stormy days when his boat seemed so small and the fjord seemed so wide.

  Our family’s house was a three-story wood-frame Victorian built in the 1800s. The house could sleep forty; back when my grandmother was alive, she ran it as a boardinghouse for fishermen, feeding them and doing their laundry. During the summer, my family stayed on the third floor, my uncle Leif and his wife and their two children stayed on the first, and the second was rented out to vacationing families from Stockholm, the logic being that Leif’s family had the benefit of having no one underfoot and easy access to the yard and street. Our family had the benefit of being on top—the best views and no noisy neighbors overhead. And the renters, sandwiched in the middle, didn’t have many benefits at all. They paid the expenses necessary to keep the house going.

  “We’ll stay down here this time,” my father said, taking our bags into Uncle Leif and Aunt Barbro’s room. His entire academic career had been designed to escape this hard fisherman’s life, but I could tell from the way he inspected the rooms, cranked up the radiators, cast his gaze toward the sea, and breathed deep in the cold salt air that my father had missed Smögen. That, in fact, he’d been counting the days until he could get back.

  I WOKE UP AT 5:30 the next morning to the sound of a radio news program and the smell of hot chocolate. Groggy, I walked into the dark kitchen just as my father’s best friend, Stellan, burst through the back door. In Hasselösund, which was the tiny community where my father was from in Smögen, no one bothered to knock or call before coming over.

  Stellan had been a yrkesfiskare, a professional fisherman, for twenty-five years. The punishing sixteen-hour days out in the boats were like too many rounds in a boxing ring: They made his body sore in ways that sleep and ointments could never fix. He now held the less demanding role of handyman for the Smögen elementary school. As soon as my dad started speaking to Stellan, he lost his city accent. He no longer sounded so intellectual, choosing instead to speak in a local dialect so thick I could barely follow along. I sat at the table and ate the breakfast my mother had packed—orange marmalade and sliced hushållsost, a mild farmer’s cheese, on a triangle of rye crispbread—and I listened, picking up a word here and there. My dad and Stellan drank coffee and talked about how well the fish were biting, what mackerel was going for at the local fish auction, and what we were about to do with the boats. They talked about the sea, always with great deference to its power. My father’s father had died at age fifty, on a boat, and it scared him, I think. It made him want to go to university, to make a living with his head, not his hands. He wasn’t afraid of hard work and he wanted to work outside, but he didn’t want a fisherman’s life. Geology was a way out.

  It was a three-minute walk to our boathouse. Like every other boathouse in Hasselösund, ours was painted a carnelian red with an even darker red pitched roof and white trim around the eaves, doors, and windows. The houses were small, not much bigger than the average American two-car garage, and arrayed in a perfect line up and down the pebbly beach. Inside was our boat and a mishmash of tackle: nets, traps, rods and buckets, buoys and oars and fish knives. When I got a little older, my father promised, we would also store water skis there.

  The day before our arrival, Stellan had drowned the boats, pulling each one out about four feet from shore and filling it with rocks until the hull filled with water. The boats had been out of the water all winter, so the aim was to make the wood swell, which in turn would make it easier to shave off the old paint in preparation for a fresh coat.

  My great-uncle Ludvig met us at the boathouse and he, Stellan, and Dad waded into the water, wearing rubber boots that came up to their thighs. They surrounded each boat and, on the count of three, pushed and pulled it up to the shore as cold, brackish water sloshed out. They tilted it to one side, dumping out the rocks and the last of the water, then inverted it over two thick boards they’d laid out on the beach.

  I grabbed my own scraper and joined the men as we took the paint off each boat until it revealed its shell of plain wood. Every once in a while, Ludvig might correct my grip or Stellan would remind me to go along the grain of the wood instead of across it. We kept going until each boat was as brown and smooth as a walnut shell. In the hours that I worked my father said nothing, but I basked in his smile—so much more relaxed and easy than it ever was at home.

  UNCLE TORSTEN WAS A TALL MAN, easily clearing six feet, and he kept his wiry salt-and-pepper hair tamed and slicked back with plentiful amounts of grease and the comb he holstered in his pocket. For more than fifty years he had supported his family by wrestling his living from the sea, and it showed in the deep lines and dark tan of his face. He had hard, rough hands, a ready laugh, and an easy grin, and he smelled, alternately, of tobacco and alcohol, musky and sweet. He was, to my mind, a Swedish version of the Marlboro Man.

  Torsten was a strong old man. Freaky strong. Farmer strong. Even after he’d retired from fishing, he could lift an eka, a stout wooden rowboat, and flip it onto its blocks, by himself, as easily as a mother turns a baby over to change its diaper. By this time—he must have been in his late sixties then—Torsten earned his living as a handyman for summering Norwegian tourists and the island’s fish processing plant, Hållöfisk. He wore paint-splattered overalls, and balanced a ladder on his bicycle as he rode from job to job. He also loved a stiff drink. He had this thermos of black coffee spiked with homemade vodka, and he carried it with him everywhere. When friends visited him from the city, they brought him Jack Daniel’s, a rare and luxurious treat. But Torsten, deep down, was a man of simple tastes and comforts: He liked his vodka moonshine better than anything you could buy in a store.

  Later, I’d think of men like Torsten and Stellan often as I made my way up the punishing ladder of the world’s finest kitchens. Those Smögen men, and I count my father among them, were unafraid of hard work. They were their own doctors, therapists, and career counselors. I constantly reminded myself that they would never quit a job just because of the name-calling and plate-throwing and brutal hours that are common in a professional kitchen. I made it my business to be tough in the ways that they were tough—on the inside, where it counted.

  The best memories of that first trip alone to Smögen with my father were when Torsten invited me to his smokehouse. My time spent in the kitchen with Mormor, combined with my own growing passion for food, had me intrigued by the process of culinary transformation: How did you take one thing and end up with something so different? Uncle Torsten’s smokehouse—the mysterious, rectangular wooden building at the back of his yard—was as important as any course I would take in culinary school. Here, I could watch that transformation occur.

  There was a loop of rope where the door handle should have been and when I pulled it open, a surge of smoke practically sucked all the air out of my lungs. The fire pit was a smoldering oil drum in the center of the room. Torsten tugged on a pipe while he smoked the fish: tobacco s
moke mixing with the pungent smell of the curing solution mixing with the driftwood smoke to create the kind of odor that would penetrate deep into your skin and cling to your clothes through several washings. I remember, as I stood there, thanking God my father and I had come on this trip to Smögen alone. My mother, as friendly as she was with Torsten, would have had a fit. More than once during our visits to Smögen, we’d seen or heard of a family’s smokehouse blowing up like a meth lab. The men were careful, but the buildings were old and makeshift. Without official regulations or inspections, they were also unsafe.

  The floor was littered with spare rods, old fish skin, and the odd pieces of stone that Torsten occasionally dropped into the drum with a clank and a hiss. Six or seven metal rods hooked into the side walls and spanned the width of the room; each rod could hold up to forty fish. Depending on the day’s catch, Torsten cured eel, herring, or mackerel. Eel was a rarity and therefore highly prized, but my favorite was the mackerel, which the smoking process magically transformed from a stripy gray and green to a shimmering gold and black.

  Hanging with Torsten in his smokehouse was more than a way to spend the afternoon. It was an initiation of sorts, into manhood. Chest puffed up, I stoked the fire, yanked fish off rods, and piled up stones. Torsten talked the whole time, loud and clear, always telling me what he was doing, asking me if I understood the process, what came next, why we did what we did.

  “Low heat, close the door, leave it overnight.”

  “I’ve done this before, Uncle Torsten.”

  “Come back every other hour,” he ordered. “Check the wood.”

  He handed me a pan of cured fish. “Has your father caught any mackerel lately?”

  “We brought in twenty-five this morning,” I told him.