I may have grown up in Texas and the Midwest. My mother may have bought and served Betty Crocker Potatoes au Gratin. We may have considered Stouffer’s to represent the high end of culinary art. Upon my arrival in Northern California some thirty-five years ago I was very much a Julia Child makeover, addicted to butter and cream and all those marvelous calorie-enhanced goodies that only a hyperactive, hyperskinny 20-something could eat without bursting every seam in his wardrobe. Despite my processed-and-frozen upbringing, I was a foodie then, but of a very different stripe than now.
For a while I was sure that Northern California would leave me unscathed, that I would go on happily chowing down on unrepentantly unreconstructed French food, doled out in massive portions, blithely ignoring the California Cuisine revolution going on all around me. Those sprout-munching, tofu-slurping killjoys weren’t going to get me, no way.
But Northern California has a way of seeping into the bloodstream; live here long enough, especially in the intensity of the SF Bay Area, and there’s really no avoiding a steady genetic change. In my case, I went from being a partisan of old-timey ultra-French cooking to a natural-ingredients, simplicity-first domestic foodie.
A foodie of the domestic variety is to be differentiated from the public species. The domestic foodie pursues his interests mostly at home, via cooking and shopping. The public foodie, on the other hand, is a habitué of restaurants, a happy hobby here in San Francisco with its bounty of marvelous eateries. Very few people are either all one thing or the other, but foodies do tend to gravitate towards one side of the scale or another. I know many folks who eat out constantly, more or less every day of the week, sometimes for more than one meal. I know a few others who haven’t willingly set foot inside a restaurant for years.
I’m not any kind of extremist but for the most part I am a home-cooking guy. I enjoy good restaurants immensely, but given my profession and income levels I have a simple choice: I can eat out a lot, or I can have money for my ever-enlarging cache of electronic gizmos. I have chosen the gizmos over the restaurants. But I’m never one to tut-tut an invitation out to dinner; Jardinière, Acquerello, Harris’s, et al., have all had a swipe at my credit cards, and I’ve considered it plastic well spent.
Another advantage to domestic foodiedom is being able precisely to control the ingredients of my meals. Like many middle-aged people, I need to watch both the calories and the cholesterol levels. There’s nothing like making it yourself, from mostly all-fresh ingredients, to keep all that stuff closely under watch. I know that I’ve used nothing but heart-healthy olive or canola oil; I know that there are no trans fats; I know what the salt levels are.
But more to the point, domestic foodiedom is a quiet celebration of the elemental magic of food. Fine ingredients combined with careful preparation — not necessarily fancy — is the trick. I don’t require expensive caviars, mustards, rare oils, truffles, etc. I’m much happier with pesticide-free produce, a bit of meat untainted by antibiotics, perhaps an egg produced by a non-tortured and properly nourished hen. Michael Pollan puts it beautifully when he says to avoid eating foods that contain ingredients your great-grandmother wouldn’t have recognized. Ergo, a loaf of whole grain bread should list the whole-grain flours, water, yeast, and salt, and nothing else.
There’s nothing ascetic about it; quite the opposite. One spends more time futzing around with meals than one would ordinarily, thinking and planning and scheming and imagining. Nor does being a domestic foodie preclude little treats of various kinds, even mass-produced ones. I’ve been known to order a nice big pizza from Marcello’s (definitely a quality item, but a pizza nonetheless.) The Conservatory’s little in-house café makes a perfectly nice tuna sandwich on a baguette. It probably contains commercial mayonnaise sporting a laundry list of chemical additives, but as I said, I’m not an extremist. However, my last foray into a Big Mac with fries ended badly; I threw the noxious thing away only one-third eaten. Perhaps I’m losing my grease tolerance. I do not consider this to be a problem.
I can’t imagine ever turning into one of those horrid sanctimonious types who treat food like some kind of arcane medicene. Or the cultist foodie who jumps on every little fad that comes along. At least I hope I never will. But there’s a joy in cooking, and it doesn’t have to consist of spending one’s afternoons slaving over tournedos Rossini garnished with souffléed potatoes, with a Gateau St. Honoré for desert. And it needn’t be expensive, either; tonight’s dinner is an encore of a soup that I made several days ago, consisting of sun-dried-tomato-and-chicken sausages, onions and garlic, carrots, kale, tomatoes, and oyster mushrooms in an organic store-bought broth, the whole flavored with fresh basil and a bit of lemon. Served over a hunk of multigrain bread and topped off with a sprinkling of Parmesan, it’s a low-calorie, low-cholesterol delight — and it probably set me back about $2.00 per serving, if that.
Bon appétit!