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| My grandfather Giovanni del Grosso(2nd row, 2nd from left) |
Like so many of my generation who found their way into the professional culinary establishment, I did not set out with the intention of making a career out of cooking. In fact, at about the age of 12, I'd settled on the idea of becoming a professional scientist- and it almost happened.
In 1980, as I approached the award of an undergraduate degree in Environmental Science, I decided that I really wanted to to study paleoclimatology with an eye towards exploring how variations in paleoclimate may or may not have influenced the evolution and distribution of species across time and space. Towards that end, I worked with my undergraduate thesis adviser to refine my thesis for publication and applied to doctoral programs that I hoped would help me get the skills I needed to satisfy my research interests.
the time the thesis was published, I'd been accepted into a doctoral program, declined to attend and had moved on to what became the career that became my life's work.
I remember having mixed emotions when I heard that my paper had passed peer-review and had been published in the journal Micropaleontology. I should have been thrilled to have the "stamp of approval" of a prestigious scientific journal, but while I was certainly pleased, I'd become so deeply involved in learning and practicing the craft of cooking the news felt like a sucker punch. It was as if I was being told that someone pretending to me was being honored and that I was supposed to be excited for someone I didn't know.
Seen from the vantage point of middle-age, I have no trouble accepting that the objects of the intellectual passions that rule my life could shift so dramatically, but back then, well, it didn't feel so good.
But then, nothing (other than burgeoning athleticism- I'd begun began running at 18 and was doing 80 plus miles a week by age 20) about my early 20's gave me much cause for satisfaction. Even my new vocation was tinged with angst -in no small part because I'd realized that cooking was regarded as a low prestige job by everyone who wasn't a serious cook (which was almost everyone). Making it ll worse, there was a lot about the what I was doing for a living that seemed to support those who behaved as if they believed that anyone who chose to cook for a living was a serious chump.
To wit
When I got the news that my paper had been published, I was working as a line cook in a New York Times rated Two-Star French restaurant where my daily responsibilities included mopping floors and being screamed at or hit with a spoon by a sclerotic old Frenchman who had abandon his formal education at the age of 15 to apprentice in the kitchen of a hotel in Nazi Germany.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here. I haven't told what made me decide to choose mopping floors and being beaten -I mean "cooking"- as an alternative to pursuing a career in science.
It really boils down to genealogy.
See, my paternal grandfather and several of my great-uncles (4 out of 5 brothers) were professional chefs and most of them were married to women who were every bit as talented and serious about cooking as they were.
As a kid I never got to see my grandfather at work at the Hotel Pierre even though he had worked there since its opening in 1930 until he retired 1961. Kids weren't welcome in the kitchen and I was pretty young. But I did get to see him cook on special occasions when he would cook dishes in the manner of the haute cuisine of the hotel. I should add that the hotel's kitchen was organized and staffed by Auguste Escoffier, one of the most important chefs ever to emerge from France and who is often given credit for making it possible for the globalization French classical cookery by publishing the most comprehensive and widely read accounting of the classic repertoire to date (1903) Le Guide Culinare . I don't think that my grandfather ever worked directly for Chef Escoffier (he worked for the chef Escoffier trained and placed on the job as chef de cuisine), but there is no question all of the dishes he cooked at home for special occasions were straight out of the master's version of the classical repertoire.
So when I began to have doubts about continuing on to a doctorate, I remembered my grandfather and his brothers and their skill and how it seemed to inform everything they did and said. And I thought about my grandmother and my Zia (aunt)Tonietta and how much respect they all received from everyone in the family for their fine cooking and for keeping alive the dishes from our ancestral villages of Borgo val di Taro and Pocigatone in Emilia Romagna.
Then there was the depression thing.
When I was a kid, my father liked to make the point that because my grandfather cooked very high-end french food at a very high-end hotel that catered to wealthy people from all over the planet, he had been able to hold a job and feed his family when other people with better educations were standing on bread lines during the Great Depression.
As I wrestled with the decision to go on to grad school and the financial hardships that would entail and very mindful of the fact that the future was likely to bring a decreased demand for people who specialized in the use of microfossils as indicators of paleoclimate (long story but the short of it is that cheaper, more reliable methods have all but replaced it), my mind kept returning to the notion inspired by my father that "a chef who cooks at a very high level will always have work."
So there you have it: genealogy and depression caused me to become a chef -and I couldn't be happier.
Here's a photo of another relative who lived and breathed cooking. This is my uncle Arthur Fenaroli from the Porcigatone side of the family. He owned a restaurant in New Jersey. It was up on a bluff overlooking the place where the George Washington Bridge ramp is today. He was pretty famous among Italian ex-pats for his rendition of the cuisine of Parma, among them Arturo Toscanini was a regular customer.
Okay, this post is already too long. But hopefully I've given you enough to get an idea of where I'm coming from so you have sense of what to expect from me.
