cleop

Restaurant Relics and Recipes part 1

In search of culinary artifacts from the ephemeral meals served in Bay Area restaurants today, I started an archeological dig, and uncovered a mountain of records and relics: Craig Stoll’s “brain” diagrams of mise en place scribbled by nervous new cooks, and chef’s plating illustrations. Like searching through an ancient shell mound, I found water-resistant tags, once attached to shellfish deliveries, piled up next to order sheets, annotated menus, and partial recipes scrawled with a Sharpie – each recipe written in the restaurant’s regional dialect.

As I deciphered the hieroglyphics of kitchen-speak, I found some to be distinct to a specific kitchen while others combine a wide range of influences. A printout from the “Zuni Recipes” computer file lists “1 c. mirepoix.” This translates to modern cookbook language as “one eight-cup leftover ricotta container filled with a ¼" dice of equal parts carrots, onions, and celery.” Dennis Leary, chef-owner of Canteen, writes recipes in a generalized familiar kitchen language: a combination of English, Spanish, French and baker’s terms. A single scrap of paper might list ingredients as: “huevos, sel, AP, azucar, BP, lait, and monteguilla.” All common kitchen words, Leary uses any combination he likes because he does most of the cooking himself at Canteen.

At Ajanta, I found a clipboard with tattered recipes. The ingredients are measured in “spoons,” referring to a karachi serving spoon. “Fry” is used instead of “sauté,” but the names of all spices are left in their original Indian languages. Lachu Moorjani, a successful cookbook author, created this version of English specifically for his cooks because they all come from different places (South India, Punjab, Pakistan, Mexico) and don’t share a common native language.

“Greens runs like an airport,” Executive chef Annie Somerville likes to say. The amount of detail and legibility of a restaurant’s recipes is generally determined by how far removed the chef is from personally cooking each dish. Labeled binders full of detailed recipes in plastic sleeves fill a whole shelf in the upstairs office at Greens: Grilled Apps; Lasagna and Cannelloni; Griddle Cakes; Soups; Tomato Soups; Potato and Winter Squash Soups; Tarts; Stews and Ragouts; Crepes and Enchiladas; Risotto, Pasta, Ravioli and Gnocchi; Filo Turnovers and Timbales; and Gratins. The oldest yellowed recipes are handwritten on a form, photocopied so many times the headings are barely legible. In the early ’80’s, Greens got an IBM Selectric typewriter. Then the recipes evolve through a dot matrix phase, to the current Laser Jet. Handwritten notes between the lines, in margins, and on sticky notes show further recipe evolution. The completed recipes that I found in restaurants, unlike cookbook recipes, usually read the way a cook on the hot line works: with prep out of the way, the recipe quickly lists essential steps with instructions “to order” or “to finish.”

My careful digging paid off when I hit a vein at Masa’s and piles of recipe shards spilled forth. Some of Gregory Short’s most precious recipes are on ten-year-old sticky notes. Early notebooks contain the neat, nervous details of a new cook working for Thomas Keller: cooking instructions (“season salmon and cook skin side down first!”) are preceded by a map of Short’s mise en place setup at his poissonier station. Like most chefs, with experience, he quickly began to rely on his cooking knowledge rather then detailed recipes. Fragments of paper with quickly scratched lists of ingredients fill the “notes” portion of an old business checkbook and the stray pages from an unbound Moleskine notebook that suffered kitchen abuse. Some of Short’s detailed recipes remain on Thomas Keller’s “Menu Item Worksheets” written out in full detail under the headings: Ingredients, Equipment, Technique, Variations.

The hill of remnants that I sifted through at Delfina amounted to a Rosetta Stone of kitchen artifacts. Craig Stoll transfers the contents of his brain directly onto scraps of paper in the unfiltered language in which he thinks. A page in a legal pad contains shorthand recipes mixed in with menu planning notes: “Ragu Napolitana–Pork Riblets, Braciola, Riggalare bene, Add 1 btl. Vino, ½ onion, passatod pomodoro. Cook 1½ hours. Basil, Salt. Or Sausage, meatballs.” His pizza recipe can be traced back to a travel notebook in which he wrote a timeline of everything he did working at a pizzeria in Napoli, the names of all of his coworkers and the fact that they only put four basil leaves on a pizza. The scraps of paper that make up Stoll’s “Brain” are cut from old menus as the side work of one of Delfina’s employees. Stoll doesn’t like the waste involved with sticky notes. Reading his notes is a random, stream-of-consciousness encyclopedia of every aspect of running a restaurant: “Alla vecchia maniera (a reminder to do things in the old style); Season early; Use the knob on the stove (a reminder to cooks not to seer on too high a heat–lower it and get some carmelization in all the nooks and crannies); Don’t dump stuff down the drain; New cheese yuck; Make a cherry chocolate cannoli; Plant bougainvillea.”

My archeological rummaging took place when the restaurants were closed. As I sat in an unlit dining room with chairs upended on the surrounding tables, and stacks of papers before me instead of a plate, I imagined what I might have tasted.

Reading his notes, I join Steve Jaramillo for another imaginary meal as he sits down with a glass of wine to wind down after work at Lalime’s. He flips through favorite cookbooks, jots down a few page numbers, ingredients, times and temperatures, and we are part of the reverie of tomorrow night’s meal.

Restaurant Relics and Recipes part 2

Romantic visions of chef’s logs befitting a pirate captain filled my head as I began my archeological dig through the food stained piles of paper records of meals served in contemporary restaurants. I imagined finding well-worn leather notebooks filled with secret recipes, future menus, and personal accounts of feasts in distant lands. But the treasure chests I unearthed contained hastily scrawled, barely legible notes written on check stubs, frayed binder paper, pieces of old menus, and post-it notes. I sat in empty dining rooms looking over what seemed like plates of gristle, bone, and shells, as if I had missed the feast. Then, careful study of the artifacts revealed insights into the production and creative process of the culinary arts.

The “red book” (the At-A-Glance Standard Diary) is the closest thing I found to my illusionary chef’s log. At Masa’s, it serves as a less romanticized business record and tool for communication between staff on different shifts. An entry by chef Gregory Short: “Soup—chix consommé, fried thyme. Canapé—miso black cod wakame. Reservations, started—74; finished—74. 19—6 course; 22—9 course; 33 à la carte. 1—8 top want a 9 course. Rugged first seating, lots of changes on stations, then smooth sailing.” There are occasional inventory or menu notes between chef and sous chef. Short began keeping a “red book” after working for Thomas Keller, who uses his “red book” to look back at the previous year’s weather and number of covers each night. At Foreign Cinema, the diary is used as the manager’s log. It focuses more on front-of-the-house business, with notes on service, complaints and how they were resolved, wait times, and staff issues. Each entry also lists the number of covers, weather, and total sales. The chefs read the conversations between different shift managers and add their own comments.

Chefs tend to abandon their logs quickly, and those that remain are thin. Lalime’s chef Steve Jaramillo’s notebook starts out with plating diagrams for each course of a New Year’s meal, then quickly digresses to barely legible sentence fragments. Zuni chef Judi Rodgers says simply, “Notes don’t make the food good.” Although she instinctively commits things to writing, she rarely looks back at the loose sheets of random paper that she stashes in various drawers. She explains that it is much more important to have interest, passion, and pay attention to the food, rather then writing long descriptions of it. Her notes become more succinct each year because there is less that is new.

Handwritten, but fleeting, guest checks are used at Masa’s instead of a computer ordering system, which doesn’t accommodate the variables on the menu and personal information that servers note. The dessert orders are written on the back of pieces of old menu. These are all tossed at the end of the night with one exception. A small art gallery in the pastry kitchen called Pepe’s Corner is dedicated to a server who draws caricatures of coworkers on checks, which he delivers with the announcement “ordering.”

Inside Masa’s pastry kitchen, chef Keith Jeanminete keeps a five-tier system of production notes in a 4" x 5" spiral-bound notebook. Every two weeks he uses up a notebook making daily lists for: himself, his assistant, the ice cream and candy assistant, tomorrow’s tasks, and a list of ideas for future projects that he usually thinks up in the parking lot of the market in the morning. Keith says, “If the writing starts at the top of the page and goes on to the back, I can’t waste a second.” His assistants understand his succinct language of words and symbols: cut high clouds, puff stix, green tea mix/foam, panna shots, coins, prep rice rings, shiso honey,  (attn. pastry assistant), ∅ (attn. ice cream assistant), * (come ask me). They respond with their own language on the masking tape labels on food storage containers: “Popeye’s girlfriend” means it’s full of olive oil sorbet.

Most chefs prefer to develop new dishes hands-on with their cooks. At Chez Panisse, a week’s worth of instructions from the pastry chef, and the pastry assistant’s end of shift comments, all fit in the margins of a single menu page. As Chris Cosentino of Incanto puts it, “Why plan a menu ahead of time if, when I go to market in the morning, I’m not going to find a goat?” One artifact that remains from menu planning is Lachu Moorjani’s “matrix.” A former engineer with an MBA in finance, Moorjani likes to keep track of the one appetizer and three specials that he changes each month. His graphs, started in 1996 and written in ballpoint pen on the back of used financial print-outs, list Appetizer, Lamb, Specialty Meat, Chicken, Seafood, and Vegetarian categories to insure variety in the rotation of new dishes.

Craig Stoll likes to convey more to his cooks at Delfina than is possible with a hastily-drawn sketch in a notebook. A diagram of his risotto’s beautiful simplicity, with bits of white asparagus in a white bowl with no garnish, would look like dots in a circle. Instead, he might tape a picture of a dish of pasta that he had in Italy to the shelf in front of a cook’s station to show the proper amount of sauce to use, or the correct depth of color for the cuttlefish ink. He uses travel photos and personal instruction to show how to ribbon the lardo on the plate to give it volume without fussiness, how to chunk parmesan, and how to stop twisting greens to be tall on the plate like CCA (California Culinary Academy) teaches.

“The most inspired person in the kitchen is the one who just got back from a trip,” says Michael Tusk of Quince. Rather then writing in a journal when he travels, he collects menus, scraps of butcher paper, business cards, and bills from meals. Looking at a bill that simply lists the number of antipasti, primi piatti, secondi piatti, contorni, and formaggi that he ordered, he can describe the details of his whole meal, because “if it’s really good, I remember the flavors” without an ingredients list. A former art history major, he’ll “throw out a Mondrian reference when instructing cooks in plating zucchini and tomatoes,” or play with the positive and negative space on the plate like a Henry Moore sculpture. He thinks of Cézanne when apples are around, and Rothko when harmonizing various colors of pepper purée. The difference, Tusk says, between making art and food is the camaraderie in the kitchen.

Dennis Leary of Canteen, a former literature major, who writes a combination menu plan/ inventory/shopping/food-prep list all on the back of an old menu, also mentions the teamwork in the kitchen. But he lists commercial considerations and perishability as major influences that make execution of the culinary arts radically different from its inspiration. To him, writing is a contemplative, cerebral process and cooking is mostly action—more of a craft involving repetitive reworking and an element of cunning. He used to take notes when dining in restaurants but now he sees familiar patterns in food and prefers to be in the kitchen, without outside influence, to see what he comes up with from a mess of raw ingredients. When he has an ingredient to use up, he looks through old classic cookbooks, relatives’ recipes, and searches the web. He adds spices, changes proportions, and makes the recipe his own. “Most people aren’t going to make it everyday for three weeks like I will,” he says. “But sometimes the first day is the best.”

Chef Gayle Pirie of Foreign Cinema, a painter and a former art history major, compares the process of writing a new menu every night to a jazz riff “bouncing off notes you know and putting ingredients in a logical, poetic place.” She begins by looking around the walk-in and finding four containers of perfect ingredients to make that day’s soup, reads the closing cook’s “night note,” and continues by receiving new orders, writing notes on her hand, a napkin, or old menu while rushing up and down the stairs, ending up with a seasonal variation on the previous night’s menu. She says her painting informs everything. “If you’re comfortable with a blank canvas, one thing leads to another, which leads to another.” Each plate is a composition, and each piece of food has a beautiful side and an ugly side.

My search for artistic chef’s logs was like studding an x-ray of a painting masterpiece for clues to the creative process: the scraps of paper with sentence fragments that I unearthed were like the layers of ghostly images roughly sketched underneath the final composition. The absence of records isn’t for lack of artists, writers, musicians, or even pirate captains in the kitchen. It is because, as Pirie puts it, “Cooking is more spontaneous than art because it all has to be done by 5 o’clock.”

This is part two of Restaurant Relics and Recipes found in the Fall 2006 Edible San Francisco
Cleo Papanikolas is the author and illustrator of Cook Until Desired Tenderness. www.cleops.net

CLIP ART - 83 food paintings

Now available on CD, high-res scans of my food paintings. Email me if you are interested in purchasing this collection.

Food Journal Classes

I'll be teaching book arts classes about kitchen notebooks, chef''s logs, and culinary travelogs at two locations:

Sunday August 12th - Castle in the Air, Berkeley CA

Three evenings starting Monday October 23rd - The San Francisco Center for the Book, San Francisco CA

illustration & Graphic Design

Cleo's illustrations have been published in Taste magazine, The Bark magazine, The San Francisco Examiner, and Edible San Francisco.

Comfort Queens - is a licensed property based on best selling author Jennifer Louden's books and illustrated by Cleo Papanikolas. Visit www.comfortqueen.com for more details.

Graphic design; mural painting; web design and text for artisanbakers.com.

PAINTINGS

all paintings:
oil, ink jet print, thai mulbery paper, crinoline, rabbit skin glue.

Soup 48" x 64"

Spoon 26" x 39"

Pasta with Clam Sauce 47" x 70"

Cupcake 56" x 38"

Banana Split 53" x 54"

"Cook Until Desired Tenderness"

Cook Until Desired Tenderness is an intimate, beautifully illustrated peek into the fictional journal and sketchbook of a culinary artist. It is an enchanting journey of reminiscences, drawings, and morsels of prose in which food is a love story, and love is a food story. Filled with vivid descriptions of luscious feasts, misunderstood menus, and kitchen chaos, these rich tales simmer with flirtation, passion, heartbreak, and humor.

Purchase on line from North Atlantic Books, or Amazon.

Reviews for "Cook Until Desired Tenderness"

sautewednesday
I love Cleo Papanikolas's new book, " Color Cook Until Desired Tenderness". Here's an excerpt:

I knew he wouldn't like the avocado and almond butter on sprouted wheat that I used to dredge out of the cooler in my childhood...I cut two delicately thin slices of a fresh pain de mie, lightly spread them with a cream of sweet butter and freshly grated horseradish, then laid on transparently thin slices of bresaola. I unclipped the sharpie marker from my dirty apron and in a delicate script on the top slice of bread wrote, "Bite me!" Then I threw it at him.

superchefblog
By JULIETTE ROSSANT

Cook Until Desired Tenderness (North Atlantic Books 2005) is a curious and interesting book about food, life and love. The author, Cleo Papanikolas is a painter and the book is filled with her illustrations. Her bio says that she "has earned her living painting pictures, murals, and decorative finishes on almost any surface." The book is described as a fictional journal of a culinary artist and it is written with rich and imaginative prose.

The first chapter takes place in a family's summer digs at a commune named Karma Clan Ranch, previously the MacKlaran Ranch, which the kids nickname Karmicland where the main character, Sugar discovers a tin recipe box in the neglected kitchen. Inside are recipe cards, many reproduced on the page along with illustrations of the dishes Sugar reads about straight out of a 1950s American home: Jell-O molds, sugary salads and Baked Alaska, completely opposite to the non-sugary food she is fed:The refrigerator never had a functioning light bulb. Inside its dark interior, only useless food: lecitin, tahini, wheat germ, brewers yeast, opened plastic bags of miso paste, Postum, canning jars of blended things like goat's milk or nut milk (whatever it was, it was once frothy but had separated and formed a skin on top).

Sugar longs for the unavailable, processed foods she reads about on the recipe cards.
Among the recipe card are collection of letters and cards by Mrs. McKlaran about how she courted her future husband with food. These letters cover the pages with an elaborate script with so many flourishes and smudges that it's not clear the reader is suppose to spend the time deciphering them or not, and yet they are tantalizing. The recipes have aphorisms from the chef printed on the recipe cards like: "Appetizers are the introduction to the meal, and as the name suggests, are intended to tempt the appetite." Sugar mulls over the aphorisms and the long ago ups and downs of Mrs. McKlaren's as she reads the recipes smuggled into bed with her at night.

The next chapter is about a boyfriend whose favorite food is Jell-O and lives off of packaged foods stolen from fast food restaurants and convenience foods. "He neatly wrapped the marinated chicken in tinfoil packages with some herbed frozen vegetables and popped them into the oven. The food never touched his hands, dishes or counter, which left him free to work on me like the winning calf-tied in the rodeo." (p. 31) Sugar ends up cooking his family a Thanksgiving dinner in the boyfriend's kitchen, creates a mess, and then flees with the food. The rest of the book continues such adventures.

Cook Until Desired Tenderness is lavishly illustrated – spoons hanging from wall and chandelier, drawings of walk-ins and dishes.

This is an adult's novel-cum-picturebook. While you could just read the story, you feel compelled to marvel over the illustrations. Still, Cook Until Desired Tenderness is a coming-of-age story for Foodies that revolves around the way we eat and cook

bigsweettooth

My Book of the Moment: Cook Until Desired Tenderness

Notebook thin but packed to the rim with hotshot (and often hysterical) one-liners, Cleo Papanikolas' new book is a beautifully illustrated sketchbook/walk-of-life about falling in and out of love, in and out of the kitchen.

This book is the sort of small treasure that had me plopping on the couch when I got it and not moving until I'd digested every single word and actually touched the pages covered with absolutely breathtaking drawings (all food-based, of course).

Cleo's character (though this is fiction, why do I feel like Cleo herself has lived to tell some of these stories?) waxes poetic throughout the book on the madness of relationships (that crazy high when you first meet someone and then, the heart-piercing low when it's time to get the hell out...and fast) and how she blazes her way through the kitchen (or not) to match each fellas personality. Who can't connect with that: Certain guys make you cook yourself silly and others have you not cooking at all.

There are no recipes in the book, but it never claimed to be a cookbook--it's more of a wild adventure into love, via the ups-and-downs of recipes (some turn out, some don't).

Cleo is a talented writer and I just loved the whimsical nature of this book. It left me wanting more, more, more by the end of the read and wishing that I could draw like that...oh, where life might have taken me with an ounce of her talent.

My favorite part is toward the end of the book where she is living in a one-room apartment and literally sleeping on a huge dining room table (she was too lazy to move it out when the previous tenants left), surrounded by silverware she's collected along the way to this existence. Sounds right up my alley.

slashfood

Book Review: Cook Until Desired Tenderness.
Posted Dec 3rd 2005 9:09AM by Andrew Barrow
Filed under: Books

What a wonderfully illustrated book. Absolutely packed with delightful coloured sketches by the author Cleo Papanikolas.

The back blurb says this is "an enchanting journey of reminiscences, drawings, and morsels of prose in which food is a love story..." There are five chapters; each telling a fictionalized food related story. Each is enchantingly written. The story covering food preparation in a restaurant kitchen is delightfully realised - the stress, the pressure, the fixation with a customer glimpsed through the serving hatch while the spoon collection - a short piece on a low point in a life has a quirky, sad edge with a touch of surreal madness. The story of trying to impress a lover with culinary extravagance is at once funny and also quirky. A lovely little book that would make a nice gift.

The author draws on her own restaurant experiences where she worked for many years. She resides in California.

Cooking With Amy

Remember the Griffin and Sabine books by Nick Bantock? They were beautiful, filled with the most amazing collage-style prints and illustrations. The stories were romantic and magical yet never mushy. They were like children's illustrated books but for adults.

Now imagine a culinary version and you have Cook Until Desired Tenderness, by Cleo Papanikolas. It's a gorgeous keepsake book that reads like a personal journal. Our heroine is Sugar, a girl growing up in the 70's in a household where refined sugar is forbidden. The story begins with her discovery of some old recipe cards and ends with her finding her place as a garde manger in a restaurant. But baked into the story you'll also find flirtations with spoons, a bite me sandwich, a nail cake, dinners gone awry and pots of butternut soup. A modern culinary fantasy, it has heartache, humor and a happy ending.

The illustrations are like a scrapbook of recipe cards, guest checks and watercolor creations. No actual recipes here, but a nice rainy day book to curl up with and savor over a cup of cocoa. If you crave a poetic mix of passion for cooking and cooking for passion, this slim volume is just the thing.

foodmusings

December 12, 2005
A Whimsical Book

"A delightful read, and a playful one." -- Catherine Nash, blogger, foodmusings.typepad.com
This is how my review capsule might read on the back of Cleo Papanikolas's Cook Until Desired Tenderness, an illustrated "journal" about one woman's love of food. It's the kind of book that is handwritten in parts, and typeset in others; where old recipe cards are reproduced with watercolors on the pages and whimsical illustrations of cakes and pies, of chickens pecking in the dirt and of tarnished silverware run along the border of every page. In its decorated pages, a young girl grows up, discovering the world of food her hippie parents hid from her (no sugar!) as she discovers herself. It's a quick read, and one that I enjoyed plenty. It would have gone nicely with a cup of tea or a bowl of vanilla ice cream in my lap.

My favorite scene tells of a Thanksgiving meal eaten with a group of strangers on the hood of a 1964 Lincoln Continental. Prepared in a boyfriend's house, then packed up when he behaves badly, the turkey and mashed potatoes are shared on the road after an unseen accident stops traffic. People pile out of their cars at sunset, offering up whatever they had planned to contribute to the dinner they were driving towards.

"We were a dozen Thanksgiving stragglers: last-minute invites to even up guest lists. In front of us was the first calm, warm sunset on the bay -- with a view of the city and all the bridges -- that any of us had seen in a long time."

A few loves are won and lost, then mourned before the heroine finds herself a job in a restaurant kitchen, and this is when she falls in love for good. There are no recipes, but one thought caught my eye: she whips up a chocolate cake batter, then pours it into a large silver serving spoon and bakes it in the toaster oven till it's cooked outside but still molten inside. Doesn't that sound lovely?