Bitter - The World's Worst Business - Chapter II
Healthy reflection is useful.
I am house cleaning. Time to climb into the attic of the mind to open and rearrange the stacked boxes of a lifetime, curate accumulated experiences, and bring some down into the light. I’ll discard others, keeping what I have held precious and determining what will be finally forgotten or forgiven.
This is an alchemical process of distillation, an evaporation of the unnecessary or poisonous, to condense a vapor into a complex aurelian elixir, an eau-de-vie of consciousness. A sip is all that I need to stimulate the five tastes--salt of tears, sweetness of reunion, bitterness of injustice, acerbic sting of necessity, and the savory, unctuous satisfaction of friendship.
And so I dive into the first box—The Burden of Being a Chef—labeled in thick, dark strokes of uncial. It is not a large box, but it is heavy. There are many other boxes, most of them—The Lightness & Joy of Being a Cook—are labeled in carolingian, airy, tall, and elegant, a letterform of tranquility and stability.
Restaurant work extracts a price, particularly from kitchen workers. We work when others play. The hours of our jobs are the same hours of family time. Winding down from a day at work is not at sunset but rather bedtime. While your cocktail hour falls at six, ours arrives at midnight. Your weekend days of recreation are our busiest. Our Saturday night at the bar with friends does not begin until the early morning hours of Sunday. This routine wreaks havoc. We morph into creatures of the night. We become addicted to adrenaline. Often our antidote becomes self-abuse.
One chapter of my service to Food echoes in my daughter’s voice and continues to haunt me: “Dad, I never really knew you the first ten years of my life. You were always at work.” I worry what effect those ten years have had. The bitterness lingers.
Over the holidays, my daughter shared facets of her own personal work, healthy reflections on her challenges. This revelation was a gift, an opportunity to speak with her directly about my failings and the burden of the business. We unpacked that box of ten years lost, and she continues to sort the strangeness of her dad finally showing up after a decade’s absence.
She has distilled the years after that, too, when daily family dinner at the restaurant became the norm. In her late teens she worked there, and from her perch at the hostess stand, she saw how hard her mother and I worked, how we treated all staff with respect, how we derived joy from serving others, how we led with kindness and compassion, how we supported our community, and how we wrestled with the challenges of building—and sustaining—our business. These daily lessons contributed to her passion for justice and her dedication to improving the lives of others through equitable education. She is proud of what our family has achieved. However, these stories are in those other boxes.
This unpacking and distillation is the mise en place for an approaching feast: The Feast of A Final Food Adventure. Replacing the mantle of Chef with that of Cook, I aim to celebrate my muse : FOOD.
One of the courses at that feast follows below.
Bitter is the last taste of the five that a cook masters, for it is a challenging flavor and the one we are most sensitive to. The speculation around its evolution is that detecting bitter is essential for avoiding the consumption of poisons. Many plant-based toxins are bitter, ergo, spitting out the bitter ensures survival. However, not all that is bitter must be spat, so I set forth to master this nuanced skill in discernment. The complimentary tastes to bitterness are saltiness, sour, and a touch of sweetness, like my daughter's reflections.
BITTER
A SALAD
Ingredients for 4
5 large leaves of sugar loaf radicchio, cut chiffonade
8 leaves of red Italian radicchio, cut chiffonade
1 pink grapefruit, cut into sections, any seeds removed, skin peeled without pith for zest
2 TB. black walnuts
1 tsp. very coarse sea salt
For the dressing
3 TB. full-fat plain yogurt
1 ½ TB. mayonnaise
1 TB. black walnut oil
1 TB. ½ & ½
2 tsp. zest of pink grapefruit
1 TB.. apple cider vinegar
3 TB. freshly grated horseradish
2 TB. black walnuts
Zest of pink grapefruit
1 TB. frond of fennel, chopped (or fresh dill)
½ tsp. freshly ground black pepper
METHOD
Make the dressing. Combine yogurt, mayonnaise, ½ & ½ in a bowl. Whisk to mix. Add grated horseradish root to the apple cider vinegar. Allow this to sit for 10 minutes, then whisk into the yogurt mixture. Whisk in the black walnut oil, the grapefruit zest, and black pepper.Mix together the two radicchios in the bowl with the dressing, toss well. Just prior to serving, toss in the grapefruit sections and the black walnuts. Portion on four plates, season with the coarse salt, and garnish with the black walnuts.
Mark Rosenstein
February 2020