A Restless Craftsman
Sep 12th, 2010 | By Hank Shaw | Category: French, Wild Game | Comments | 21 Comments |
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
I’ve been restless lately. Unsatisfied. In one of my moods. I grew up with this funny notion that, if I put my mind and effort to it, I could indeed be the best at something, really anything. That if I worked hard enough, I could approach something akin to perfection. Funny, isn’t it? Intellectually I know this is foolish, even emotionally dangerous. Yet the belief is so deeply ingrained within me that when I fail to meet my own expectations, I find myself wandering around for days, feeling wounded.
So it is with food. It is a general belief among serious cooks that only an exalted few can truly call themselves artists; the rest of us are merely craftsmen, and imperfect ones at that. Cooking as art, at least to me, reaches beyond taste and nutritional satisfaction — it should affect both the cook and the eater on some higher level.
I want that. I want to make food that people remember for years, like the lines from a classic film or a picture in a gallery. It is a genetic urge, as I come from a family of artists: I am the son of a surgeon and a concert organist. One sister is a professional artist, another designs books. One of my brothers writes books for a living. Art is in our blood.
Even though I cook almost every day, and all day several days a week, every now and again I cloister myself in the kitchen to walk the high wire. I’ve convinced myself that only by walking this tightrope again and again and again — falling every time – will I reach the other side and create a dish that reaches the higher level I’ve been seeking so long.
This is why you see a crazy-looking croquette in the picture above. It is one of four dishes I made on the high wire last week, all involving doves. It’s dove season, and Holly and I have shot plenty of birds for me to work with. I know I already have plenty of dove recipes that work, and some are downright fantastic. But to me, none even remotely qualify as “art.”
These dishes had to be better, somehow. I am a nose-to-tail eater, as I believe all great cooks must be — you cannot ignore anything edible if your canvas is food. To do so would be like a painter refusing to use the color yellow. So most every bit of the dove would go into these dishes: hearts, skin, bones, legs and wings, no matter how small.
A great dish needs to have lots of different textures, a cohesive color scheme, a striking aroma or series of aromas, varying temperatures, varying flavors. Everything on the plate needs to be there for a reason, and restraint is our highest virtue.
But a great dish also needs a reason for being, a story to tell. Otherwise it will lack focus. For these dishes, the story is a dove’s life. I like to pair wild game both with foods the animal ate in life, and with other plants or animals it would have known. In the case of doves, that means grain, seeds – and quail; doves and quail live alongside one another.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
I got two of the three in this dish. It is Mexican-inspired, and I really made it because my brown and black tepary beans were ready to harvest. I decided to make a two-bean Mexican salad, with queso seco, green onions, etc. and sauce it with a cilantro-green chile sauce. The fried quail egg is gratuitous, but I love fried quail eggs.
The breakthrough is the dove. I boned out a dove breast to get the supremes — each only about the size of a half-dollar — dipped them in beaten egg and then in ground sunflower seeds. Doves, if you did not know, really, really love sunflower seeds. I suspected they’d taste good together, and I was right. Doves are lean (usually), so the rich sunflower seeds added needed fat. (Here is the recipe.)
I like this dish, although I failed to cook the tepary beans enough; they require a long time to soften, apparently. Was it a great dish? Maybe not. But I got the sunflower crust out of it, and that counts as a victory.
The croquette I made with all the dove legs and wings I’d collected from some dove breast recipes I’d done earlier in the week. These are teeny, teeny little appendages, only a couple inches long. If I were to make this a fine dining dish — and I was in that frame of mind at the time — then I’d need to strip the meat from the bones. To me that meant confit, which is what I did.
Where the Mexican dish focused on seeds and the quail, this one would focus on a mainstay in a dove’s diet, wheat. I mixed the confited dove meat with farro flour and an egg, then rolled it in panko bread crumbs. To complete the trope I made an aioli using wheat grass. The dish needed some acidity, so I added preserved lemon.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
I love the look of this plate. Problem is, it is prettier than it tastes. I should have made the croquettes smaller and used less farro. The whole dish needed a bright note, too. The preserved lemons, while beautiful, added more salt than acid — and I needed acid.
The dish has promise, but no recipe for you yet. When I nail this, I’ll post it.
Back to sunflowers. After the fried dove experiment, I wanted to combine dove and sunflower again, this time using the seeds as a texture. I also had the dilemma of what to do with the dove hearts, skin and the itty-bitty tenders that came off the back of each dove breast. An odd salad is what I came up with.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
Yeah, it’s in a tomato. I blanched it and peeled the skin, then hollowed out the center to make a sort of boat. The salad itself is a simple play on texture and color: Peas simmered in butter for color and softness, seared dove bits and roasted sunflower seeds, brought together in a basil vinaigrette.
It was good. A perfectly fine dish. Nothing earth-shaking, though. I liked the meaty-starchy-sweet-salty thing going on, fer sher. But something about this dish just seemed, well, not right. Can’t place it yet.
But I do like the concept of the tomato boat a lot. I know, it’s not terribly original, but it works, and can be played with later.
The last dish I came up with was the one I think came closest to what I was looking for, but even here there is a caveat…
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
These, my friends, are dove roulades wrapped in blanched cabbage leaves, served with a saffron-corn sauce and garnished with some teeny popcorn I just happened to have in the house. And in case you haven’t grocked the theme yet, yes, doves eat corn.
I love this dish. It is beautiful, flavorful, and, most importantly, simple. There are not 500 things going on with this plate. It is corn, a green thing, and doves, plain and simple. You have vivid color, and the texture contrast between the popcorn and the roulades is everything I could have asked for.
The saffron was originally included because my corn was white, and I wanted a yellow sauce, but the end result added a hayfield-like aroma to the plate that mimics the fields we’ve been hunting doves on lately.
But does this dish rise to the level of art? If it does, then the author is not me, but Thomas Keller. As good as this plate of food was, it is a riff off Keller’s duck roulades with creamed corn in his French Laundry Cookbook.
So there it is, laid out before me. My best dish was wholly derivative of a master’s work. At best I’ve become a competent technician.
Yet there’s something to be said for that. Albrecht Durer is still remembered 500 years later because of his exquisite technical skill, and, as many artists know, Jackson Pollock was a master technician before he became famous for his action painting — the canvasses of splattered paint we all remember.
It’s Pollock who keeps me striving. Few people know I was an art major in college, before I changed and studied the history and political science that would become my career for nearly two decades. I loved art, and still do. And I will never forget what one of my teachers told me about greatness: Every great artist — no matter how abstract — was also at the very least a competent technician. It is the prerequisite for making real, true art.
So I will keep pushing, failing often and marking down my little victories. Maybe someday, I’ll stand back, exhale and be satisfied. But I don’t think that day will ever happen. There is just too much to learn, and life is short.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
You can really write.
Thanks, I enjoyed joining you in that contemplation.
Bp
Kudos, Hank. For many, time is spent logging in and learning by failing. At first you copy the greats but then if you listen you will hear your own voice coming through and that is where genius lies. I was just thinking about this today… true visionaries have a peculiar way of looking at the world and a very singular voice. Most of us never find it…some hear it the moment they see the light and bellow out of the womb.
Your piece was brilliant and so personal… the voice is there in your unique connection with the animals. They are showing you the way, aren’t they?
Hi Hank,
In 53 years I’ve only had one memorable professional meal that raised to the level of art: in France at Michel Bras. Check him out.
However I’ve had a lot of memorable home cooked meals. I’ve cooked them myself. Meals that, years later, I and friends remember fondly. But note I say meals not dishes!
From Gertrude Stein: “In a book I wrote called How to Write I made a discovery which I considered fundamental, that sentences are not emotional and that paragraphs are. I found out about language that paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not and I found out something else about it. I found out that this difference is not a contradiction by a combination and that this combination causes one to think endlessly about sentences and paragraphs because the emotional paragraphs are made up of unemotional sentences.”
Even at Michel Bras it was the meal that was the art, not the individual dishes. And like all good stories it had an arc – a beginning: leading to a middle: leading to an end – where the reader/eater/me was in a different place than when I started. The sculptor, Henry Moore said, “All great art demands the viewer finish it.” This simple observation has, to my mind, been lost on the current professional kitchen. They try to make “finished product”; a “finished dish” that itself has emotional content. It doesn’t work that way.
So think of meals and the story you want to tell with them. Richard Olney’s two books “The French Menu Cookbook” and “Ten Vineyard Lunches” address this issue directly. AND don’t forget the wine.
Best, Kim
Hank, as your style progresses, so does Holly’s. Your words compliment the dishes, just as her photos compliment your words (and your food as well).
This is true poetry. Now excuse me while I try and wrap my head around how you were able to blanch and core out a halved tomato without it turning to mush. You are a true craftsman, my friend.
Cheer up, bunky! The duck sugo was MEMORABLE. Your writing is an art unto itself, and presents nose-to-tail in an way rarely contemplated by most.
I appreciate that you use the word “grok.”
What a pair you two are.
I like that “the end result added a hayfield-like aroma to the plate that mimics the fields we’ve been hunting doves on lately.”
Terrior cuisine.
Kim: Great point, and one I have definitely been guilty of — it is the meal that can reach the level of what is essentially performance art, not the dish. Dishes are scenes in a movie, elements in a painting. And will most definitely not forget the wine…
Phil: Use a Roma tomato. Blanch it 60 seconds or so, then into an ice bath. Peel carefully and cut in half legnthwise. Use a paring knife to hollow out the center. Not too hard, actually.
Laura: I’m not actually upset or anything, justt feeling daunted I guess. And thanks about the sugo! (And does grok have a “c” in it, or no? Hmmm… )
Lara: We try.
Hank, keep trying…especially for those of us who get to sample your efforts. I don’t know how rewarding it is to you (it must be), but it sure is rewarding to us!
Your inner-search also reminds me of something I read from Kurt Vonnegut. He was talking about how he came to be an author, and to what he attributed his success. He explained that he was a biochemistry major in college, so as a writer he never felt the pressure to measure up to the literary greats.
And no, there is no “c” in grok.
No c in grok.
The photo of the salad in the tomato is fantastic!!!!!!
I’m too busy chasing kids around and running a business to perfect shit-all. My good fortunes and joys come from pouncing on the simpler pleasures that are available to all. So artiste, I will not become. I applaud you in your quest.
Hank, I read this post yesterday and thought abou it a lot. I think the distinction between art and craft is an important one, and I’ve always balked at the idea of food as art. Your post made me really think about why.
Best I can figure, it’s because the idea of art is at odds with the idea of sustenance. There’s no definition of art, and we either have to fall back on the old I-know-it-when-I-see-it (notoriously unreliable), or we have to take the art elite’s word for what is art and what isn’t. I’m not sure that kind of elusive construct sits comfortably on something as fundamental to human life as food.
I’m with you on the importance of technical skill to art of all kinds (Tom Stoppard said, “Imagination without skill gives us modern art’), but I think we sometimes undervalue skill for its own sake (i.e. craft). Doing what you do — spending countless hours turning every edible thing the planet has to offer into something people eat and enjoy — is honorable, important work. That you want to do it better is an indication that you take it seriously and give it your all. I think it’s craft of the highest order, and I couldn’t admire or respect it more if it were art.
Long-windedly yours,
Tamar
I know this comment is going to slide right off your back, but I think you’re a bit hard on yourself, Hank. I consider myself a competent technician in the kitchen too, and I know when I turn out dishes that are merely acceptable. But I’m happy in the middle, with really good food that doesn’t need to rise to the level of art. Anyway, I concluded long ago that striving to become the master of an art so ephemeral as food was not worth the effort (for me). Most great artists at least have the satisfaction of producing art that endures long after they’re gone. Not so much with cooking. For me the prize is the glory of great food that I produce from seed to plate. Homely, humble, quotidian meals made with real food please me. Seems you understand that goal as well.
Blessings to you for sharing your journey with all of us who come here to soak in your superb writing. I love the alchemy of serving the dove with the same foods the dove ate, your nose-to-tail style, and the art of it all.
[...] Hunter Angler Gardener Cook: A Restless Craftsman [...]
Thanks, everyone, for your thoughts and support – it’s not so much that I am hard on myself as that I know I have the ability to do better, if only this or if only that. I’ll get there. Maybe.
Been there on this. I’ve been trying to make tomato cookies for the past three weeks. I’ve been failing spectacularly for three weeks.
I was thinking and I don’t want to overstep but, as per the croquette, what about a sorrel sauce or pomegranate? That deep red or rich green would be gorgeous alongside the preserved lemon and might add the bit of sour and acid you need.
I have a similar goal in my cooking, though I admit I make more rustic (peasant) style food. Some friends and family think I am too worried about perfection and yet none of them argue when I make what they think is the most perfect tart and I know I’ve achieved what I want in the kitchen when people tell me about something I cooked two years ago that they’re still thinking about.
What I think is really interesting is that while you believe you have yet to get to the place you want with your dishes, which I will never taste and therefore can’t comment on, you have achieved exactly that level of perfection and memorability in your writing that few food writers ever reach. Food writers often either sound pompously intellectual (professional food industry people talking down to home cooks and other interested people) or hopelessly sentimental (writers who love food as an emotional journey in life who want to show you how a pie turned their whole life around).
When you write about your cooking, hunting, and foraging I am on the edge of my seat because you have a way of making me into the hunter, the cook, and the forager. That takes an art with words. Making readers forget they’re reading at all and feel like they’re somewhere else is the ultimate achievement with any piece of writing. If I could achieve that level of skill and artistry with my own writing I would feel that I have done something extraordinary with my life. I believe I’ll get there if I keep working at it, keep trying to do new things with writing, keep challenging myself to reach perfection, just as you keep doing with your dishes.
So from my point of view, you have actually achieved in your writing what you seek to achieve in your kitchen.
[...] And the photographs of his culinary experiences, shot by his partner Holly A. Heyser, are g-o-r-g-e-o-u-s. What a perfect pair. Here are a few from his two most recent posts, one on dove hunting and the next on dishes that feature dove. [...]
It’s 2 a.m. and I have a headache, so this may not come out right, particularly since I enjoy your blog – and your talents and skills. But… Your piece reminds me of articles in art magazines. Over-intellectualizing life. Your food “constructs” are lovely, but they have nothing to do with food. They have to do with you wanting to be an artist.
Nothing much has to be done to a tomato or ear of corn or any vegetable you might have grown (or animal shot or caught), especially if it is a favorite, for it to be memorable. I’ve thought about this a lot this summer, as I, too, write about food (and gardening), and I’m starting to wonder if we really need so many recipes. Granted, that attitude will make for a very short blog/website.
Bottom line, you love the ornate, the complicated. I’ve reached a point personally where it is less importantt. There are many paths to the mountaintop, as they say. Appreciate and enjoy your talents and skills. Bottom line, most artists aren’t ever satisfied. Re-read the last paragraph of your above piece in moments of self-doubt.
Thanks for all your great work.
[...] Hunter Angler Gardener Cook: A Restless Craftsman [...]