Savor the flavor
NEW BOOK | Pair creates encyclopedia that makes sense of foods and their pairings
When culinary luminaries Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page are in town to promote their new book The Flavor Bible, it seems appropriate to have lunch at an old testament to Chicago dining.
"I can smell it steaming," Dornenburg says after a cook arm twists him into a double cheeseburger at Billy Goat, 430 N. Michigan. "It's got that 1950s paper smell. You can smell the paper, burger and the bun at the same time. I like the kaiser roll aroma."
(Rich Hein/Sun-Times)
Dornenburg never had a Billy Goat cheeseburger. He grew up in the East Bay outside of San Francisco.
Page, his partner in life and in work, attended high school in suburban St. Charles after being reared in suburban Detroit. She knows the brawny Chicago smell of the Goat.
In their new book they write that aroma is thought to be responsible for as much as 80 percent or more or flavor.
"We've been known to walk out of restaurants if we take one whiff and there is an off smell," Page says. "Whether it is old grease they've been cooking with too long. Or bug spray."
Old Grease and Bug Spray are two items you will not find in The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs (Little Brown, $35).
Think of it as a Baseball Encyclopedia for foodies.
Need to know something about Brussel sprouts? You look it up in the 380-page Flavor Bible. I never knew oregano was a botanical relative of marjoram, but there it is in black and white in the book ,between maple syrup and mascarpone.
The Flavor Bible took eight years to assemble.
The New York City-based couple reviewed Web sites, chef's cookbooks (published after 2000) and menus from across the United States. They ate at hundreds of restaurants and interviewed scores of chefs.
"We deconstructed a meal in our minds as we tasted it," Page explains. "We looked at the way chefs used a favorite salt or pepper that would bring out flavor. Eric Ripert's four-star seafood dishes at Le Bernardin [in New York City] tended to call for a little cayenne pepper. We asked him why that was. You would think it would blow out the flavor of some of these delicate fishes. He said it was all about proportion. You use a little dash to turbocharge the rest of the dish.
"We started a massive data base of every ingredient we encountered, from apples to zucchini blossoms then took note of all the herbs, spices and other flavorings chefs tended to reach for in the dishes. We analyzed it, took the ones the chefs were most passionate about and incorporated those in the book."
Dornenburg and Page conduct interviews together.
"Andrew hears things differently than I do," Page says. "I do not do a lot of cooking. Andrew is a professional chef. He hears slang through chef speak. And I'll be the one who says, 'Wait a minute, what do you mean by that?' I try to explain it for the least common denominator reader, which I think is me."
During their visit, Dornenburg and Page signed books at the Green City Market in Lincoln Park, which prompts Dornenburg to elaborate on his food gathering strategy. He says, "I see what looks good and smells good in the market. I bring it all home and cross reference the items to see where they lead. That will be our dinner for the next couple nights. Then, nights three or four I have a refrigerator full of leftovers and something like cauliflower in the Tupperware."
That takes Dornenburg to The Flavor Bible, where he is reads that apples and curry go with cauliflower.
"I serve it as protein du jour," he says. Then he takes another bite from his cheeseburger.
In the book's foreword, the authors add that cooking evolves as a way of "being" in this world. Dornenburg says, "If you have potatoes and are going to make potato soup, look out the window and see what the soup needs to be. If it's cold, it's going to be hot potato soup with bacon. You also listen to what your body needs to do. Maybe you need to warm your body inside. And the occasion. Maybe I'm going to cook differently on my anniversary with Karen than I will on that Thursday prior.
"The being is being connected to everything."
Page connected with Dornenburg when she was at Harvard Business School. He was an apprentice in the kitchen at the acclaimed East Coast Grill in Cambridge. Page suggested that Dornenburg buy a book on how to become a chef. There were none.
"The Food Network did not exist," she says. "It was '91 and I researched and saw the chef's profession was one of the top ten careers for the next decade or two." They wrote up a book proposal for Becoming a Chef and signed their first book deal on their anniversary: Aug. 25, 1992. Becoming a Chef came out in the summer of 1995. It won a James Beard Award for food writing. Their subsequent book Culinary Artistry is a favorite of acclaimed Chicago chefs Grant Achatz and Stephanie Izard.
Page's father was a chocolate salesman for Nestle Co. She was a waitress at Dave's Italian Kitchen in Evanston and a journalism student of former Sun-Timesman Henry Kisor at Northwestern University. She graduated from Northwestern in 1983 before moving to New York City.
"Henry gave me lessons I will never forget," she says. "I got a B + on my first assignment, which was unheard of at Medill. So I started writing about the same subject again and again. He finally wrote me a note how he remembered when he was in college and he was writing articles about being deaf. One of his professors said not to be a 'Johnny One-Note' and broaden yourself in terms of the topics you write about. That's something I never forgot."
That's the ingredient for success.