A Culinary Continuum

As much as I try, I haven’t been able to identify the defining moment in my life when I went from being a casual eater to a serious (but fun) diner. Suffice it to say, however, that some of my most distinct childhood memories revolve around the preparation and consumption of food.

At three I “helped” my mother bake bread by burying my green plastic dinosaurs in a pile of flour that I imagined was prehistoric snow. At five I sat crying in the sand at Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach because I couldn’t find a vendor from whom to buy a steaming, golden potato knish. At eight I began reading one of the family cookbooks, and in an attempt to render the dishes more palatable, used red pen to eliminate every reference to zucchini (my first foray into the world of editing). At nineteen I lived in an apartment with my best friend, and although we didn’t have much money, an upscale restaurant could have raided our fridge and created a delightful cheese course with the contents.

When I dropped out of college with only one year to go, people around me seemed hard-pressed to understand my reasons, but I was fed up with spending my money on courses when I hadn’t yet figured out my true calling. I got a job in a gourmet food store, where I learned how to tell the difference between Cerignola, Picholine, and Gaeta olives, and had my first experience with fresh mozzarella. I tasted wine varietals I’d never heard of before like Viognier and Gruner-Veltliner, and decided that no matter what people told me, white wine was just as interesting as red. I also discovered that one can tell when a piece of meat is cooked correctly by pressing on it, and that it isn’t necessary to cut it open and spill its precious juices. I subscribed to seven cooking magazines, and even though I didn’t have health insurance, I cooked with truffle butter and ate smoked oysters.

Financial pressure eventually drew me to an office job, but at night I worked at a cookware store. Working two jobs didn’t improve my financial situation, however, since I spent three times as much as my second job’s salary on gleaming Viking pans, Wusthof and Global knives of all lengths and shapes, and Emile Henri dishes the color of very ripe tomatoes. I acquired these delights at a rate usually reserved for the recently wed, and I supplemented them with a Kitchenaid mixer, a pasta maker, and silicone spatulas that wouldn’t melt if you threw them into Mount Saint Helens. I worked more hours than I would have liked and still didn’t have a car or cable TV, but managed to augment my collection of gastronomic tomes by purchasing a cookbook published for the 1895 World’s Fair and splurging on a rare collection of recipes from Iceland.

People scolded me when I left my job(s) to return to school, but I’d discovered that some people make a living by pondering food and writing down their thoughts – and I wanted to join them. I studied memoirs by such notables as Ruth Reichl and M.F.K. Fisher, and created Excel spreadsheets in which to record any recipes that I invented. Around the same time, I came to the realization that food could be tied to every subject imaginable (except astronomy, perhaps – unless the moon really is made of green cheese). I begged the local university to let me design a major in “Interdisciplinary Food Studies,” and after I submitted a large quantity of documents in which I argued for the academic worth of my endeavor, the faculty approved it. My chief work over the course of the year was a 32-page paper on the ethics of eating which I, a serious and committed lover of animal flesh and fine restaurants, worked on with a vegan professor who wasn’t shy about the fact that his lunch often consisted of black beans straight from the can. I didn’t convince my professor that he should wholeheartedly take up a gourmet lifestyle, but I did get an A+ on the paper, and included some of my food ethics ideas in commentary about sustainable food choices that I wrote and recorded for Vermont Public Radio.

Gastronomically (and in other ways), the past year has been the most exciting of my life. I moved out of an apartment with a half-sized fridge into one with a full-sized fridge. I purchased a share at a local farm and have been able to cook with exquisitely fresh organic vegetables, even during the Vermont winter. I got married to a fellow food-lover, and our honeymoon consisted of a gastronomic tour of the San Francisco area, which involved dining at both Chez Panisse and the French Laundry. And finally I quit my office job to become a full-time freelance food writer and editor, with a little web design thrown in for good measure. All of these changes are wonderful – the new apartment is big enough for my 254-book food library, I’m able to help support local farms, and my husband is not only an excellent cook and a great writer, but he also gives me all of the psychological support I need to be dubiously employed. We won’t have a lot of disposable income in the near future, but I can guarantee that we will be eating well.

Suzanne Podhaizer is a freelance food writer from Burlington, Vermont, and a columnist for The Gilded Fork.  Her favorite activities include cooking with local meat, cheese, and produce, and snapping up all of the exciting culinary texts from local used-book stores before anybody else can get their hands on them.