Mission: Cook! (10 page)

METHOD FROM SCRATCH

One
hour before serving, boil the potatoes and cabbage until tender, about 25 minutes, then drain off the excess liquid and set them aside.

In a sauté pan, heat the oil until hot (but not smoking). Cook the sausage for about 20 minutes, lower the heat to medium, and then add the carrots and onions, cooking until the vegetables are tender, about 10 minutes.

At this point, add the potatoes and cabbage to the pan with the other ingredients, and continue to cook for 5 to 10 minutes more. Season with salt and pepper to taste. At this point, if you choose, you can add Tabasco or jalapeño.

The mixture should be getting a golden brown as you turn it, which is what you want for both flavor and texture. Finish the dish by adding chopped chives as a garnish.

W
HEN I BEGAN TO SEE AND TASTE MORE OF THE WORLD OUTSIDE OF MY
home and little town, I realized that there was a world of food to be explored. At first, I suppose I was just hungry and always pleased to find something to eat outside my everyday experience that actually tasted good. As I look back, though, I can see that in the important choices in my life, many of which changed me forever, I often used food as the springboard. It occurs to me that there is a question to be answered in this musing, as to whether we are drawn to the people and things in our lives that change us, or whether we draw them to us by concentrating on them. I'll have to chew that one over for a while and get back to it later.

I'm not sure why to this day, but my wanderings began at an early age and often led to open waters. When I was about eleven years old and near the beginning of my stint as a Sea Cadet, I had the opportunity to sail aboard the SS
Uganda,
an old-fashioned, classical cruise ship that had been converted from the tourism service to a floating “School to Work” program. It was a place where kids from all over the British Isles could meet, see another side of life outside of their comfortable home waters, and keep up with their school lessons at the same time. It was to be my first time on an extended trip away from home, sleeping and sailing on a real ship on the swelling seas, and it felt like an adventure waiting to happen before I even stepped out my front door.

It was on the
Uganda
that I had an epiphany, and met a sort of big, white rabbit that led me down a hole, or into a kitchen, into a world that I have been exploring ever since. The “big, white rabbit” was a chef named Robert Roper.

Robert Roper was a burly man who paraded past us in chef's whites wearing the big, poofy white chef's hat that made you an immediate target of laughter for preteenaged boys. Now, it may come as a shock to you, but at certain times in my youth, I could come off as a bit of an obnoxious show-off, though in my own defense and opinion, a talented one. I focused on the chef like a laser beam, and had a pretty fair imitation of him worked up in about two seconds. I did the voice, the scowl, and the classic “sneak up behind him and walk like him 'til he turns around and chases you” routine. For about fifteen minutes, I had him on the run. Then the tables suddenly turned. He stalked up behind me and slapped a big metal spoon down on the table in front of me, good and hard and loud. “If you think it's so easy,
big mouth,
and you can do better, then come and show me,” he snarled. After the initial shock
and affront of being called “big mouth” in front of my adoring fans, I followed him into the kitchen, and that ended up being “it” for me. Looking back, I think I was behaving in much the same fashion as a schoolboy with a crush on a pretty girl. I jumped about, made fun, demanded in no uncertain terms to be noticed, no matter what, until the man had no choice but to confront me. Secretly, unbeknownst even to me, I wanted to meet him and find out what he was up to back there.

At 6:30 the next morning, I reported to Third Chef Roper in the galley of the
Uganda.
He provided me with my first chef's jacket, pants, apron, and hat, and gave me my first task in the kitchen: preparing meat platters for lunch. I set to it with enthusiasm, not only because I was excited and intrigued to be behind the scenes but because it seemed I'd also neatly negotiated my way out of my school chores for the time remaining in the voyage, in exchange for “work study” in the kitchen.

This was everything I'd dreamed life on board a ship would be. Rather than being trapped in classes all day long, I rolled out of my bunk every morning with a
purpose
: to feed my shipmates. In my mind, I couldn't imagine how the chefs had ever gotten the job done without me.

Bob let me travel from station to station and learn. Under his watchful eye, I chopped onions and peeled potatoes, prepared cold cuts for lunch platters, learned how to roll out the dough for rolls and biscuits. I hauled food in and out of the walk-in refrigerators, wiped down the counters, swabbed the floors, and even learned how to make a couple of basic sauces. It was glorious. I was quickly adopted by the kitchen crew, an imposing collection of galley cooks, of pirates and old sea salts with fantastic stories to tell on breaks. The best part of my day was listening to them lie and laugh about times long past whilst I took pulls on one of their cans of cold Victoria Bitter.

After two weeks of hard, sweaty, satisfying work, I returned home on the train. Stuffed in my traveling bag among the dirty laundry were treasures. I had managed to get my hands on duty-free cigarettes for my mom and spirits for Dad, but most importantly, Bob Roper had sent me home with my chef's jacket and kit and my own set of kitchen knives. His parting words were plain and simple: “Enjoy 'em.” My mom naturally inquired if I'd had a good time, and the stories came out of me in a rush. I produced my new clothes and ran up to my room to put them on, so she could get the full effect. I appeared in the front hallway just as Dad was coming in the door.

“What's all this, then?”

He had a quizzical look on his face, happy to see me home but clearly won
dering what the getup was all about. It's a look that all good fathers acquire, that lasts from the birth of their children to their entrance into the pearly gates: a mixture of curiosity, fatigue, and pleasure, with a touch of “This isn't going to cost me too much, is it?”

I answered proudly, “I got it on the boat, Dad. I'm gonna be a cook!”

His reaction was the same as if I'd been standing there in scuba gear and announced that I was going to be a frogman, or in crown and scepter and announced I was going to be the king of Spain. He took it in stride, as do most parents of eleven-year-olds when they hear about a new career direction.

He has supported me, though, all this time, eating my early experiments and taking me from a young age to see friends who owned restaurants. I remember being allowed to watch a real brigade system in action for the first time in the kitchen at Crane's, a little family place on Crane Street, when my father told his friend, “My son wants to be a chef.” He also worked to keep me on the straight and narrow as much as possible. There's still a part of me that is convinced that he would have been more pleased had I followed in his footsteps and tried for professional soccer, but I think the “cooking thing” has worked out better than either one of us could have imagined.

After my stint on the
Uganda,
I had food on my mind a lot, and was constantly on the lookout for information and new experiences. I started to collect cookbooks from secondhand shops. I started experimenting by creating dishes at home for the family, which they gamely sampled whenever offered. I often traveled down the road to our Australian neighbors', John and Wendy Waddington, who owned a favorite local pub called the George and Dragon. They let me work in the kitchen from time to time, and I mastered the art of toad-in-the-hole, fish and chips, and steak and kidney pie.

By the same token, my scholastic performance was underwhelming, to put it kindly, except in home economics, a subject that I pretty much took to on a dare and to meet girls. There was a thirty-to-one ratio of female to male in the class, me being the one, and the class turned out to be another early indicator of my life's work. I found it easy to complete the assigned cooking tasks, and spent the rest of my time helping out the young ladies with theirs; a good time was had by all. The rest of my marks were substandard, due to a lack of motivation and a general irritation with just about everything that had to do with my schooling.

I was always a highly competitive kid, and the fact that I was unsuccessful and unfocused in class fueled my frustration. My sisters were good students, and my brother, Gary, was exceptional academically. I liked sports, and I was
good at soccer, swimming, and rugby. At school, I was cheeky to my instructors, I played truant, and it was only when a man named David Bodfish, an adviser and mentor at my school, figured out that I was bored and unchallenged and helped to put me right that I started to get on track, at least in terms of my outlook. He was the one teacher who would prefer actually to set me down and talk rather than to chastise me. It was through David that I learned that everyone in authority wasn't necessarily out to get me. I will always be grateful for his influence.

On weekends, as a kid, it seemed as if my dad, a former military man himself, was always taking the family to some sort of naval installation for tours and souvenirs, usually in Poole or Hamworthy in Dorset. These were always fun outings, with lots of fresh air and neat things to see. My father often had a drink and darts with a friend and retired chief in the Navy named Harold Steadman, who introduced me to the Sea Cadets. The Sea Cadets were an English combination of the Boy Scouts and the Navy ROTC. I was soon going to meetings every Monday and Thursday, learning basic seamanship, rowing, running cross-country, performing color guard drills, and having a bash with guys my own age. We would often go away from home on weekends to camp and sail. We would board the HMS
Salisbury,
voyage out and back, and do our level best to act like the world's greatest sailors. At every chance, I still gravitated toward the kitchen, toward the chefs. I would sail by day and cook by night, and I knew I could always cop a free beer back with the cooks.

Soon, joining the Royal Navy just seemed like a natural progression. My dad was ex-Army, so that might have been his preference for me, but all in all, the military seemed like a good option, since nuclear physics was probably not in the cards for me, given my grades at school.

My father accompanied me down to the recruitment office when I was fifteen and we had a chat with the officer in charge. He liked my background in the Sea Cadets, and we all agreed that the Navy seemed like a good bet for yours truly, so I took the test. The test wasn't much different from most of the tests I hated taking at school, with some posers that basically called for common sense thrown in for good measure. Unlike in the adverts for the military today, there was no questioning about a career track, as in “Would you like to go in for submarine captain or test pilot?” anything like that. I certainly was never offered the chance to tell them about my hobbies, interests, or ambitions. They did, however, want to get an idea of what I might be good at, so they could best decide how they could put me to work.

A couple of days later, my results came back. The Navy was clearly not im
pressed, and had a fate in store for me that they reserved for those recruits whose aptitude scores fell as monumentally short of rocket science as mine had. I had done well enough to get in, was proclaimed physically fit, but my scores in math and English were as far below the mark as I had managed to keep them at school, with my resolute determination to ignore instruction and to never study.

Based on my testing, their recommendation for the best way for me to spend my time in the Navy was stated in a single word: “Cook.”

Ironically, it's one of the few words in the English language that is both a job description and a call to action. You are now a cook, my son…so cook. And so it went. Once I was in the service, I was required to bring up my scores in those “school” subjects. I took remedial classes while I trained, and I bloody well studied this time around. My attitude having now been severely readjusted, and having finally recognized that those grades could and would have a real impact on my life, I applied myself academically and aced them all.

And that's when I really started to cook.

I certainly benefit from the cumulative influence of my personal biases and of knowledge gained from having spent most of my life in professional kitchens. You learn to speak the language of food with an accent, and just like the accent of your birth and rearing, it is an accumulation of your thoughts, your upbringing, what you hear, what you see, what you select or neglect to say, that is apparent to the outside world. With some chefs, you can see where they are coming from before you ever meet them, just by looking at what they choose to put on a plate and how they decide to do it.

The style in which you choose to cook is unique to you—it is your culinary fingerprint—and you should learn to celebrate it. If you do, others will enthusiastically join you. Art, music, nature, vacations, relationships, weather, all these things influence our attitudes and moods and, therefore, our cooking. Paul Bocuse compared cooking to music, in that the finished dish and the performance depend on an element of improvisation, which are never part of the recipe or score. When this goes right, the results are magical.

Here are a few “classic” dishes that I have chosen to do in my own singular style because of some of the influences in my life. Once you've made them your own, you will probably do them a little differently, too.

Cooking is an expression of what's inside of you. It's the magic that matters.