Two days this week I had lemon mayonnaise with asparagus. The last time for lunch I had it with sardines in olive oil and Swedish rye crisps. I can imagine it as the dressing for a fish salad or a classic French Grand Aioli.
 
In a bowl, mix to taste:  mayo, lemon zest, lemon juice, ponzu sauce, Shio koji or MSG or salt. Salty fish eggs of all kinds or snipped seaweed strips would be nice as garnish.
 
***
 
I’m in the home stretch of something important. I’m not going to be writing here weekly. When food books or cookbooks interest me, I will write about them. There’s a cookbook on its way to me that I’m excited about. I’ll cook from it for a bit first.
 
I’ve been learning to tell longer stories and want to practice it more. There’s one at the top of my To Do pile. I hope to post those attached to a subscription of some sort when they are ready. I also have some good ideas around teaching. All in good time. 

***
 
“The only thing that matters is what is on this page.” Robert Caro. Turn Every Page is a documentary that delivers lessons of the highest order.
 
Where you will find me on a hot, humid summer night is in the kitchen with a stock pot of water boiling on the stove and wiping sweat from my eyes. Someone brought me a bunch of rhubarb this week and I turned it into a few jars of jam. I like small batch production. This is a favourite to enter the jam-making season — rhubarb, honey, and rosemary — from Christine Ferber.
 
***
 
Always listen to new music.

Passing through Naomi and Sarah Wilkinson’s joyful cover to the dedication, I had a sense that ‘What is Queer Food? was a love story. Then I read the last sentence of the acknowledgements, “It’s all just pork chops, baby,” and I was pretty sure it was an embrace.
 
John Birdsall is a writer I look up to. The way he puts words to thoughts is playful, The Loneliness of Rhubarb is a chapter title. His sentences are sometimes sparse, “Blurring was survival.” He admits to resorting to “speculative reconstruction,” to great effect. There’s also the structure, like the steppingstone descent of Herman Schmidt’s travel itinerary from Shanghai to Gibraltar. The books architecture reads like a menu. 
 
What is Queer Food? is a party with a supreme host. The vignettes are a loose weave, like the yellow and terracotta background on the book cover. There’s the literati hedonism of Café Nicholson in Manhattan with Edna Lewis at the stove. The poignant story of Richard Olney’s parents showing up for him with love. And the autobiographical, The Unshown Bed, a story that has a young Birsdall catching his reflection in Craig Claiborne’s brioche. “A cryptography so effective that even a dumb virgin kid, fourteen years and a couple thousand miles away from where that photo was staged, could crack it.” Acceptance and inclusion are present in abundance, as are compassion and fierceness. And the sex is another writing skill to admire.
 
Birdsall turns the reader outward. Reading took me to my cookbook shelves, to look at the image on page 473 of the New York Times Cookbook, and to read MFK Fisher’s Foreword to The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which made me burn with anger. His notes and sources are a place to hang out in—like a beloved library or bookstore.
 
The heart of What Is Queer Food? is that lush sensation we all chase—belonging. The undercurrent of great gatherings or restaurants. A potent mix of food, people, atmosphere, and sex. It calls in a community. It's there in the second paragraph at the begiining of the journey for John and Perry, in the diner in Hudson, New York, “Lil’ Deb’s has the beat of a place where anyone who knows they belong has permission to stay.”

***
 
I took a break from writing here from December to March to look at my childhood in group therapy. It was terrible and beautiful. It left me at 62 years old wondering what label to affix to myself. A question everyone could ask entering a new life stage. Queer feels right. My appreciation of adults is as broad as my appetite for vegetables. This celebratory book landed in my hands at a ripe moment.
 
A friend sent this to me yesterday.
 
***
 
The songs are for me, and for you, too, if you like.

Alice and Martin Provenson are the illustrative talents behind The Fireside Cookbook. Along with James Beard they were a trio, and the cookbook reads like they had fun together. It's ripe with life and the words, recipes and images play together on the page. It feels like you could run your fingers along the book block like a flip book.  For the assignment, the Provensons took a preliminary sketching trip to Europe—a plum assignment.
 
I spent last weekend with a family I like spending time with and they gifted me this gem. 
 
That I love illustrations in cookbooks is no secret. The artistry is the first thing to capture my attention. I could pull a bunch of cookbooks off my shelves just based on how visually extraordinary they are. A great cookbook is a balance of words, stories, photos, recipes, and illustrations and always expresses a unique character, likely the result of collaboration. It has depth because a confluence of extraordinary talents came together.
 
I want to live in the “cocktail snacks” section with the four variations of devilled eggs and the recipe that begins with cream cheese, anchovies, and garlic. I’m looking lovingly at my cast-iron skillet while considering Shenandoah Fried Chicken made with cracker crumbs, lard, and “rich milk.” A whole page is devoted to aged ham. A fox trots through the chapter on chicken. Have you ever had a fricassee you didn’t like? There’s a method for cooking smoked beef tongue and an oxtail ragout I tagged. And no end of vegetables like Baked Hubbard Squash and Pennsylvania Dutch Tomatoes.
 
I was getting excited flipping toward the dessert section, but it's clearly on the diet the book opens with—there's a handful of pages covering fruit. Was this written during one of Beard’s slimming periods? It surely made a few Upper East Side socialites happy. As an avowed dessert lover, it's missing some potential.

***
 
I have lived in Toronto for coming on twenty-five years and I got a call this week about a community garden plot for me in a spot near the Humber River in the west end. Sadly, I had to turn it down because I have too much on my plate. But yeah, one step closer to a garden that is equal parts vegetables and flowers.
 
There’s a toddler who’s moved in two floors above me and around dinner and through the early evening I can hear little feet running around. It’s an adorable sound. Kids are rare in buildings like mine and there’s no good reason why.
 
On the topic of flip books, this is a Japanese gem from this week.

​Women cooking. 
 
***
 
I had no idea who Clifton Chenier—the King of Zydeco—was before hearing this tribute by Lucinda Williams. That’s why I listen to the new music playlist every week. The song fits her vocals like her trademark black leather pants. Vandelux has two versions of this Motown classic, and both make me want to dance.

When I left Stratford the hardest goodbye was with my recovery group. I still feel that spot in my heart soften when I think of the people who made me feel safe first. I’ve always kept journals and at that time I had a significant number filled with some of the details of the early days of freedom and drudgery. I got hung up on figuring out if I should pack my journals for the move, or let them go. I broke down one night in a meeting in the last week, and the crying had nothing to do with the journals, I wasn’t sure how to let go. Then someone around the table told me to bring my journals in and the group could decide. The room erupted in laughter — full on belly laughing. They were there for me right to the end. The journals went to the dump.

I’ve never shared a photo of my friend Ghaithaa. I feel protective of her, and she is modest. She’s like a sister to me. The other night she smiled beautifully for me with this large platter of Idlib tabbouleh, made with lots of cabbage and a pomegranate syrup dressing. I sent a message the next day asking if I could post the photo. The image is what she sent back to me. *heart-melting*
 
Good life advice.
 
***
 
I finished Dideon & Babitz this week and both these women are mentioned. Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt, help me I’m melting.

I joined bakers from around the globe making sweet doughs and breads this weekend. Baking Sukkar Bi Tahin, Beirut Tahini Swirls, is a pleasure. I added orange zest and Fiori di Sicilia to the tahini filling for the first time. Sometimes I just open the bottle of that essence and inhale. This pastry is insanely good with a strong cup of tea or coffee. The dough is rolled and folded and develops flakiness. I have made them so often I’ve personalized the process.
 
***
 
The missions, shelters, and foodbanks are sharing images of the elderly. It reflects their users. Covid and the cost of living have made life precarious for seniors living on a public pension. This is not a new problem; I remember a neighbourhood senior man from my days working in kitchens in Stratford — a WWII veteran. We helped him how and when we could.
 
This is a municipal, provincial, and federal issue. Meaning, it’s all of our problem. I’m all for building housing for families and improving transportation and infrastructure, but where do insecure and homeless seniors fit into the scheme? You can't imagine how many women are among them. Sidelining anyone is a moral issue. Feeling loved and cared for is as simple as a cooked meal or a bag of groceries.

***
 
I’ve been wearing my grandmother Theo’s maple leaf pin on my jacket. It feels right for so many reasons. 
 
The willows along the Humber River had a chartreuse aura on Thursday morning. Fleeting, impossible to photograph, but easy to stop and admire.

Saturday evening dishes and Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth.
 
***
 
Sometimes two songs together sound like a close dance.

The era my professional cooking is grounded in:
 
I put a chef jacket on for the first time in 1985. I was an apprentice in a French restaurant with a chef-owner from Lausanne, Switzerland. Fortunately for me, André Donnet looked toward Europe. I was free to dream of staging in France and eight years later it happened.
 
I matured through the 90s during the New York and British invasion (that’s what it felt like to me in my mid-20s to 30s) and I was influenced by a young Jean Georges Vongerichten at the Lafayette and JoJo, Joel Robuchon at Jamin, Lydia Shire at Biba in Boston, St. John, Sally Clarke, The Quilted Giraffe, Mark Miller, Alastair Little…
 
Some of the chefs I admire:
 
Eugénie Brazier, I hope soon you’ll know all the reasons why. Fernand Point for his joie de vivre, abundant spirit, and his respect and admiration for women. This is something I wrote about them a few months before going to writing school.
 
Deborah Madison. Who can forget Greens? I was a vegetarian for a long stretch of time in my teens and it was formative. My favourite station to work in a restaurant kitchen is entremetier.
 
Joyce Goldstein...Judy Rodgers…Peggy Smith…Lindsey Remolif Shere…Barbara Tropp
  
Professional cookbooks that are precious to me:
 
River Cafe Blue Book. I have a British edition full of memorabilia. As soon as I got it I knew I would stage there and five years later I was getting off the Tube at Hammersmith station. That spring morning walk along the Thames to the restaurant is a tattoo on my memory and spirit.
 
Chez Panisse Cooking. Paul Bertolli with Alice Waters. the Gail Skoff edition. Again, crammed full of love with pages falling out from how much I have cooked from it. Also, a former student gifted me a copy of Patricia Curtains, Menus from Chez Panisse (signed for me) and it is a book that I sometimes fall into visually.
 
The Natural Cuisine of Georges Blanc. Extraordinary and revolutionary. It vividly expresses a love of family and place.
 
White Heat. I have a first British edition bought in 1990. Shook is how I felt at the time — in the first year of cooking school.
 
La Varenne Pratique by Anne Willan. It should still be in print. My bible for most basics. It was the companion text to Escoffier at chef school.
 
Food writing that changed me:
 
Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. Christmas 1991 was alive and magic because of it. I read a chapter in it for research this past week.
 
The Unprejudiced Palate by Angelo Pellegrini. A charming and wise voice for immigrant Italian culture and cooking in the Pacific Northwest.
 
Kermit Lynch’s Adventures on the Wine Route. Read it as a first-year student on the urging of a wine instructor. Many of us have made the pilgrimage to his shop in Berkeley.
 
Jeffrey Steingarten in Vogue. I shared so many of his articles with my Larder students.
 
What do I cook now?
 
Vegetable and vegetarian side dishes. I like having a few things in the fridge that improve with time. Dishes that I can shape shift with other ingredients over a day or two. I made the carrot and chickpea curry above last week with a watercress, mint, and coriander salad. It was vegan and a tight-budget pleaser.
 
Funky dinner salads with canned, fresh, or smoked fish and shaved vegetables and crispy rice — thank you for the inspiration Daniela Galarza.
 
Anything I can marinate in Shio koji — chicken is *swoon.*
 
Fisherman’s Sauce made with too much garlic and anchovies.
 
I love to bake and will forever be grateful for the quality of my professional pastry training. It set me apart from a lot of cooks.
 
What is my ideal season?
 
I could not do without all four Canadian season. But as a proficient canner and jam maker, I’m built for May to October. What tastes better than raspberries, apricots, black currants, Brandywine tomatoes, asparagus, flat green pole beans, Lacinato kale, and Hubbard squash. The pleasure of opening a jar of something special on a February day when I’ve stopped believing in everything.
 
What historical figures would I like to cook for me?
 
Myrtle Allen, Alain Chapel, Robert Carrier, Penelope Casas.

***
 
My mom had a Cricut machine and made a scrapbook for me. I was going to crop the congratulations out and then I realized it’s perfect. That’s me in grade seven accepting a prize for an essay I wrote for the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority. It’s wild how long I’ve thought I wasn’t a writer. *laughs*
 
Slow Down.
 
***
 
I needed love this week.
 
I’ll listen to any song with a horn section and a woman in a leotard and leggings. Snoh Allegra is this generations Roberta Flack — a sublime voice and a seductive tempo.

​I saw this video on Instagram from film production talent in Hollywood. The billionaires behind the big studios have bet everything on AI. People who write, edit, and work in production are no longer needed. Trained individuals with a wealth of experience 20 or more years deep, in their 40s and 50s at career peak, have been made redundant with little notice. For greater shareholder value and to brutalize unions.

Look at their faces when they tell you what they could lose. They are the tip of an iceberg.

Now, think of your favorite movie and the long screen roll you sometimes sit through at the end because you’re so shook and need to recover from a moving or challenging experience. Most of that talent was told to take the yellow brick road to the private sector, like it’s the Wizard of Oz. Meanwhile, Covid and the cost of living have stripped many people of their financial buffers. 

Going to the movies is high up on my list of good things. What is better than being embraced by a good story with a room full of people? At a showing of the newly remastered Thelma and Louise at TIFF not long ago, we laughed, cheered, and groaned every time Darryl appeared. Who can forget the shot of the note hanging in the door of an open microwave, back lit by the tiny light in the dark kitchen, with a beer in the shadows, sometime after midnight, while the phone rings. The fury you feel for Thelma. That scene started as words on a page. Callie Khouri wrote it.  

I want the people who make movies and television to have good lives. I want the same thing for people who write books, features, and newsletters that I enjoy. To have enough for themselves, and their families. To earn from a talent seems like a reasonable expectation. Why can we believe in billionaires and not this? 

***
 
My friend Voula took me to a concert on Thursday night with her daughter, Maxine, and niece, Emily. The talk across generations before the show was a pleasure and we danced ourselves into a sweat along with a crowd of people and Zaho de Sagazan who left the stage a couple of times to step into the crowd and dance and sing with us — a brilliant intimacy. I associate the colors in the picture on the left with the energy of the night and people. I was surrounded by French conversation on the 29C Dufferin bus going north after the show. 
 
It’s ice cream and a walk season. 

I laughed real good a few times listening to this Seth Rogan interview. It’s also a story of community. Sam Fragosa is a master.

***
 
I went looking for a love song for Canada this week. We need it. Radiohead came in soon after and fit like a glove.

This nostalgia came out of a friend’s collection. 

I fall into the first double spread on page two and three — the chartreuse tablecloth, Faience crockery, imagining the weight of the silver in hand, the jar of macerating cherries on the lunch sideboard alongside two tourtes and a platter of steak with bone marrow, a glazed terra cotta urn topped with a basket of oranges, paint puddles of yellow and white light through the June Plane tree. Dining in a lovingly restored Provençal windmill.

An OG of Entertaining books and a snapshot of 1980’s French Riviera. If I see it in your collection I like you more. Roger Vergé looks like he had fun. The son of a blacksmith, he was raised in a culture of craft. The words Le Moulin de Mougins taste like chilled rosé. So many other French chefs from that region and time leap to mind. I staged with one. I can see Richard Olney and Lulu Peyraud in it. 

The book’s production is Flammarion, and the design team is five people deep besides Vergé. It reads like they enjoyed working together. I could write at length about the people and the art in it. 

Learning the book was picked up in America by Stewart, Tabori, and Chang made me smile. Immediately I thought of Martha Stewart’s Entertaining. The two books are iconic-symbiotic — Stewart published in 1982 and Vergé in 1986. Both are lush with the spirit of the times. I imagine Martha looking like a star on the patio at Le Moulin de Mougins. 

***

​I walked on the shoulder of a hilly winding road up to his restaurant. I could not afford to eat. It was my first trip to France. This is part of how I spent my one day off during the Festival de Cannes. I don’t know why I wasn’t on a local bus that day, maybe I was thinking exercise. I’m sure there’s an easier route than the one I took. I don’t recall having a water bottle. 

I bought Le Moulin de Mougins Calisson in the gift shop and I’m still glad I did that. I was an early international stagiaire and had enough for a six-week stay. I was cared for, but I wasn’t eating at a hit parade of 3-star restaurants. I did the same thing with Louis Outhier, walked east on the Promenade de la Croisette, the Mediterranean rolling in to my left, a good long way toward L’Oasis. I have made other pilgrimages on subsequent visits. Eating is ideal, but sometimes you can’t do it for an arm’s-length number of reasons. Then, I was on a pan bagnat budget. Everything was still ridiculously delicious.

I made those journeys because I wanted to be near the chefs and restaurants I’d read about. As a young woman, I came into restaurant kitchens full of hope and dreams. André, Mark and I talked for hours about chefs we admired and meals we wanted to eat. One of the many gifts of the early years.   

***

Jeni Glasgow has joie de vivre and a thoroughly unique and seductive way with food and hospitality. She chefs at a writers’ retreat in the Luberon at La Gonette. It’s on my bucket list. I can hear my friends say, ‘Inshallah,’ in unison.

***

New music week.  

On Friday night, I was invited to a Whole Animal Dinner at Beast. Nathan and I have been friends for a while, and we share a love of French food. He wanted me to taste his quenelle de brochet à la Lyonnaise, a fish mousse made from pickerel, shaped into a large quenelle, poached and served with sauce américaine and in this case, on a thin layer of savory mushroom custard. It was tender and rich, and If I closed my eyes I was in a bouchon in Lyon. 

Half of his kitchen team are women — their white button-up shirts are spotless. Thanh is from Bà Ria-Vũng a southeast coastal province in Vietnam. The City of Sagamihara in the prefecture of Kanagawa near Tokyo, Japan is Yuri’s home. Two dishes carried the imprint of their spirit and talent. They brought them out to me, leaving the kitchen for the first time, and explaining in detail the ingredients.

Lobster and American cheese were some of the ingredients in Thanh’s spring rolls and were so good I ate it before I got a photo. *laughs* The wrapper is from her family in Vietnam and was the thickness of a butterfly’s wing. I have never tasted a brighter nuoc cham — a crystalline pool of fish sauce, chilies, palm sugar, and acid.

And then there was shrimp sausage the precise texture of boudin blanc. Nathan likes the French chef technicians. He has gone through many of their recipes mastering the sausage’s texture. It was sliced and set on a pool of beurre blanc. Yuri came out with a small pot of something dark and mysterious, a fermented Amazake spicy sauce, that included sansho pepper, ginger, garlic, konbu, and star anise, and put a dollop in the tart beurre blanc. The three elements of the dish had the same harmony as the three cooks in the kitchen. 

Thanh and Yuri are full participants in an environment where they can shine. Learning and practicing are core kitchen values, and the team is playful with ideas and execution. Nathan doesn’t take himself too seriously. He has never underestimated me. I can’t tell you how refreshing that is.

Thank you Mel for entertaining my Ken Watanabe obsession. And to Jan, Brandon, Stew, and Scott. The hospitality was outstanding. My autograph is on the wall twice. Between two visits, someone drew a strand of flowers beside it.

***
 
This week there was news that Georges Blanc lost a star. The response from the family expresses savoir-faire:
 
“We'll make do with the two stars... maybe we'll be less elitist and a little more accessible.”

The Blanc legacy began with Elisa, who taught her daughter Paulette, who taught her son Georges. A family métier passing through three generations over almost one hundred years. All the twinkling stars in an indigo night sky are not enough. A restaurant that endures is spéciale.
 
Elisa Blanc was among a small group of women awarded stars from Michelin in 1933 — 2-stars for her cooking at the inn at Vonnas. Then and now, there’s poetry in the ratings symmetry. Some of my most memorable meals in France have been in Michelin 2-star restaurants. 
 
***
 
I am working on an interesting project and after I hit send, usually on Thursday, I still want to write. I switch into ‘today’ mode. I wrote the piece above on the Bathurst streetcar in my Notes app heading south toward Beast. A young woman offered me her seat on a busy Friday night. I embrace all that comes with grey hair. It felt like a good omen for the evening. 
 
***
 
Imagine you’re in a French nightclub.

Cellar Rat

Most people who do others dirty don’t bank on their victims landing a book deal. But that’s how it played out for Hannah Selinger. Cellar Rat, her first book, recounts in vivid detail a period in her twenties when she worked in several storied New York restaurants as a sommelier. Restaurant work is the filling in a sandwich—a period between completing an MFA in writing from Columbia University and eventually pursuing a career as a writer. 

The story has the cadence of a well-orchestrated Friday night dinner service. Selinger writes with candor and humor about events most people want to forget and has the backbone to put name tags on everyone present. Some details will rattle even well-seasoned restaurant employees. Her commitment to self-interrogation messes with the view that this is revenge-porn. 

Selinger demonstrates how her experience of childhood domestic abuse laid the groundwork for her attraction to restaurant culture. A business where there is no shortage of entitled men is alluring. As a young woman, the imprint of early abuse by her stepfather leaves her with weak boundaries, an inability to see red flags, and an attraction to predators. The pressures she writes about in the chapter, Theft, are heartbreaking. It’s hard not to burst into flames reading Fourplay and Chef Fucker. She uses a wide-angle lens to bring the enablers into focus. Among the many loathsome characters, this threesome is remarkable: 

“I imagined Tosi, Chang, Salmon, a rat pack of outright and internalized misogyny, gossiping about my dalliance with Johnny, aching to make some ill-timed joke at my expense. If the point was to cut me down so that I would know my place in the managerial hierarchy, the trick had worked.”

Cellar Rat is a forthright and progressive examination of addiction and restaurant culture. There are bottoms Selinger has to crawl out of. It’s a messy and emotional journey. “I began to understand that restaurant work might be hurting me,” she writes. 

Terrible events are eventually transformed by humility into instructive lessons. Selinger wakes up to all the ways restaurant culture denies women their appetites and agency. You will cheer when she retrieves what the Momofuku team tries to erase of her. You might wish she was putting the last nail in the coffin of celebrity chef culture, but as she writes, “Restaurants remain broken.”

In the end, Selinger grows up, takes the necessary steps to realize her dreams, and lays claim to her story. 

If you have the means, buy it for yourself in a local bookstore. A writer still gets dollars if you take it out of the library. It’s a book to put in the hands of young servers and cooks. 

***
 
Good peppers are often on the discount rack. Friday night, I roasted them with anchovies, garlic, rosemary, capers, olive oil, and seasoning as prep for Sunday night pasta. Then, I made a messy and delicious trout, crispy rice, watercress, carrot, and pickled beet salad with a ginger-sesame dressing. It was fresh and tasted like double happiness. 
 
A friend sent me a Beast Pizza gift certificate for my birthday—that was Saturday dinner sorted.
 
***
 
I had trouble settling on music, but these two songs fit the sentiment of this week. On Your Side came to me on Saturday from someone I follow on Bluesky. It’s lovely.