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.