For information
on Robert Reynolds' weeklong classes, call 233-1934 or consult
his Web page: www.RobertReynoldsCooks.com.
He will teach individual sessions at In Good Taste, 248-2015.
Robert Reynolds is a chef's chef. He owned and cooked at
Le Trou, an intimate French restaurant in San Francisco,
and runs a cooking school in Provence, but he lives most
of the year in Portland, where he consults with restaurants
and gives cooking lessons. Akin to those little-known pros
who give golf lessons to Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo, or
those obscure coaches who teach fancy moves to Shaquille
O'Neal at Big Man's Camp, Reynolds is a cook other cooks
seek out when, say, they are contemplating a way to pair
apples and chocolate to achieve a cake with a burnished
Renaissance color palette.
As a decent but strictly amateur cook, my needs are simpler,
but when I recently had a week's free time, I decided to
take five days of lessons from Reynolds. Because it turned
out that I was the only pupil, I needed all his assurance
that I was wasting neither his time nor mine. To give a
bit more heft to the classes, Reynolds summoned a different
chef each day; being three, we could make (and thus consume)
more dishes, and the interactions in the kitchen would be
more complex. Our efforts were amplified by the likes of
June Reznikoff (former chef at L'Auberge); Rosie Lindsey
from Caffé Mingo; Kerry DeBuse from Genoa; Linda
Wisner, Portland Culinary Alliance board member; and, most
impressive of all, Vitaly Paley from Paley's Place. I was
definitely the new kid on the block, and my big-league debut
wasn't helped when I forgot to put a lid on a whirling blender--a
jarful of liquefied sorrel hit the ceiling with a great
green splat. Nevertheless, the week proved nothing short
of a transcendent and transforming experience.
Reynolds is a Hegelian chef: He talks about culinary theses,
antitheses and syntheses, speculating on how an unlikely
combination of Jerusalem artichokes and guavas might work
together to produce a startlingly new taste. When the incongruous
ingredients were cooked to complement one another, the 'choke
was coaxed to release a nutty flavor. Reynolds has a chef's
mantra: "God made you perfect," he intones, picking up a
glistening eggplant. "Now what will you become?" Or, holding
a sparkling salmon and walking a fine line between hubris
and reverence: "God made you wonderful, but he ought to
have made you a mousseline. I will do it!"
We decided that the classes would focus on methods and
techniques. While there was little attention to chemistry
per se, the emphasis was on the way ingredients become transformed
in the cooking process. "If you're concerned with fat, you
have a responsibility for technique!" Reynolds urged, thus
combining a disdain for the fat police with a concern for
wonderful ingredients, precise proportions and perfect execution
that might, just might, constitute a satisfactory substitute
for the offending globules. The question that hovered in
the air was always "What happens to this food when you subject
it to heat?"
Reynolds would demonstrate the range of an ingredient by
taking us, for example, through the full "spectrum" of asparagus--from
raw and grassy to blanched (for crudités), from Chinese
al dente to French caramelized. (He once taught an entire
class on olives, including ice cream made with olive oil.)
Similarly, he might follow a particular dish from region
to region, showing the subtle differences in the treatment
of fish soup as it moves along the coast from Nice in southeastern
France across the Italian Riviera to Genoa and beyond. Most
importantly, I learned to be alert to the continuous transformations
taking place on the stove, always tasting, salting, retasting;
or blending, puréeing, tasting, adding half-and-half
("That's milk," Reynolds says, with a sneer at fatophobes),
retasting, learning how to concentrate flavors and make
them come forward until we got just the taste and texture
and patina we sought. I learned to touch everything, to
see the difference between a timbale setting firm and one
setting soft. You train your eye and your fingers, of course,
but Reynolds even uses his sense of hearing--"That sounds
as if it is doing what it should be"--in the cooking process.
As someone who cooks from recipes, I was both liberated
and terrified to rely on knowledge and instinct instead
of simply reproducing someone else's version of a dish.
The goal was to make a dish with ease and authority and
without self-consciousness. "Don't cook it as Julia would
do--cook it as you would do," advises Reynolds. "Do a recipe,
then put it away and get it into your memory and your bones
so you can vary it a hundred ways."
Reynolds believes that cooking is like music or dance:
You do it again and again until you understand everything.
So I cut up an onion, set it aside, cut up another one,
on and on five more times--dicing, slicing, chopping, chunking--until
the moves became instinctive. "The act of cooking," says
Reynolds, "ends in creativity but begins in the hands."
Reynolds talks about cooking the way we might talk about
love. One ingredient must "meet" another and "seduce" it.
So we tried to bring out the flavor that a pear could not
yield without our help: The pear must be "flattered into
surrender." But for Reynolds, cooking is a lesson in both
the possibilities and the limits of civilized intervention:
"Foods are wild elements," he says. "We try to domesticate
them, but they insist on taking us back to the wild."
We met in the kitchen each day at 9 am and discussed food
philosophy for an hour: one day the scandal over the prevalent
use of standardized American butter rather than regional
butters that taste of local fields; the next day the concept
of terroir--the importance of soil, traditions and geography
to ingredients (the way, for instance, the beef of coastal
Poitou is presalted from the grasses swept by the saline
Atlantic mists). Then we had an hour's briefing on the recipes
Reynolds had planned for the day (Monday from Périgord;
Tuesday, Poitou-Charente; Wednesday, Alsace; Thursday, Savoie;
Friday, Venice). From 11 to 2 we cooked, with focused but
casual intensity. And from 2 until 4 we ate our labors:
One day we feasted on a purée of asparagus with crayfish
stock and smoked-salmon quenelles, lamb with endive sauce,
noodles and mustard butter, a salad of fresh mint and a
frozen mousse with bittersweet chocolate and Gewürztraminer.
Afterward we engaged in the delicious postmortem that enhances
rather than distracts from the meal. Reynolds explained
how his menus pick up themes and reiterate them with slight
differences. A spring selection that emphasizes delicacy
requires that the main course must never erase the taste
memory of the appetizer but preserve it. That same menu
also traced green and orange colors throughout; vegetables
became the jewels in the crown of the meal.
I survived despite a gaffe or two. When I made a vinaigrette--nothing
simpler than that, right?--Reynolds declared it viscous
and tasteless. I had put the salt into olive oil, not into
the acidic vinegar that would permit the salt to dissolve
properly. But my mentor was sweetly nurturing and never
pulled rank. In fact, he could not have been a more inspiring,
gentle teacher--he is passionate about his craft and the
search for clear flavors, he's a great storyteller, and,
most of all, he encourages you to step beyond yourself.
How can you not relish a chef who, when he's made something
perfect, declares as he beholds it, "Ah, my beauty"?
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Willamette Week | originally
published June 16, 1999
|
