It's the Little Things

On Paying Attention, Giving Credit, and Culinary Pleasures

One morning this week, I had a little extra time to prepare breakfast, and I finally decided to make a potato chip omelet, a dish I first saw prepared on season 2 of “The Bear.” In case you haven’t watched it, this isn’t a dish that’s prepared from a past or future menu of the restaurant in question, or even something meant for public display. The restaurant’s CDC, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) makes this for a table for one: for Natalie (Abby Elliott), the restaurant’s project manager and the pregnant sister of the restaurant’s executive chef, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White). Natalie has been so preoccupied with getting the restaurant ready for its imminent launch that she hasn’t eaten anything all day. Sydney offers to make her something, and sets to work.

Unlike so many previous cooking scenes in the show, this sequence isn’t set to an iconic rock song or Altman-esque dialogue, but instead to the ASMR-like sounds of a cook at work: the gentle beating of a fork against a sieve, the sizzling of butter in a pan, the crunch of a bundle of chives neatly sliced on a cutting board. It’s also one of the few recipes viewers can replicate just by watching it: beat three eggs through a sieve (to remove the chalazae, the stringy parts of the egg white, for a smoother finish), melt a knob of butter in a nonstick pan, gently cook the eggs by shaking (not stirring) until they form soft curds, pipe a long tube of soft cheese (Sydney uses Boursin) in the middle, add more butter (natch), then roll the omelette over the cheese to close and tip onto a plate. Then my favorite details come in: after polishing the omelette with butter and garnishing with chopped chives, Sydney crushes some ruffled potato chips (sour cream and onion) between her fingers and sprinkles them over the top, then finishes with a few crunchy grinds of black pepper. She sets out a chilled glass and pours two juices into it, orange and blood orange, and sets it all on a tray with a polished fork and cloth napkin. Sydney delivers it to Natalie’s desk, she gasps with delight, and we know everything before Natalie even takes a bite.

I worried so much that, in a show that got so much right about the restaurant industry and about food preparation in general, that something was going to be lost as soon as they shifted the storyline from that of a struggling but beloved sandwich shop (The Beef) to that of a new business (The Bear) launching into the rarefied world of fine dining. This scene, however, reminded me of what The Bear gets radically right about food culture: the idea that pleasure, and the forms it takes, can come from almost anywhere, and be delivered to almost anyone, when mutual respect informs the experience. Though Sydney has been classically trained, her making an omelet for Natalie is not simply muscle memory from culinary school, or the firing off of a functional dish for a pregnant woman, but something she goes out of her to way to infuse with pleasure and affection. She makes it worth savoring because she sees Natalie as someone who deserves to be not just fed, but delighted by what she eats.

Sydney’s philosophy echoes the work of a key food writer I’ve been researching for my latest dissertation chapter, one who I’m convinced represented a major shift in culinary history. Clementine Paddleford, a food writer for the New York Herald Tribune, could have been stuck to her training in industrial journalism, a popular field for many home economists in the early twentieth century completing their coursework at land-grant colleges. And in the context of the 1920s and 30s, it would have been within Paddleford’s purview (and paygrade) to act as a content mill for economical, nutritious, and scientifically-sound recipes and homemaking advice, as so many other women did. Yet Paddleford insisted that pleasure and joy were essential components of a full culinary life, and she used her columns on the food markets not only to inform people about what they should cook, but also to offer enthusiastic, florid, and funny descriptions of how things tasted. In a 1940 piece on identifying American-made substitutes for European cheeses when imports slowed down, Paddleford wrote lovingly of the origin stories of American-made cheese, of the “delicious Tillamook of the mountain-studded Oregon country, the green sage cheese of Vermont, New York’s black-rind cheddar, cave-cured. America’s first wine-cured cheddar was perfected in Manhattan eight years ago by a local cheese dealer. Pineapple cheese, as American as maple sugar, was made first in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1845.” She wrote with just as much specificity and pleasure about every food, from mushroom caps (“pixie umbrellas”) to a wild rice stuffing (“lifts any barnyard squab or chicken to heavenly levels”) to freshly picked apples (“the teeth crack into the brittle flesh, a winy favor floods the mouth—the soul of the apple blossom distilled.”) Paddleford had a deep and abiding respect for culinary craftsmanship, wherever it emerged, and rather than burnish her reputation heralding the luxuries of high cuisine, she found items and stories worth celebrating in every region of the country.

Paddleford also had a longstanding appreciation for ordinary women, whose knowledge constituted the foundation of America’s culinary canon. Her weekly columns featured routine shout-outs to women whose edible innovations might otherwise go unheralded: to the New Jersey woman whose “praline recipe was the only soluble asset” for her family; to the Long Island woman who spent twenty years crafting society wedding cakes adorned with realistic flowers; to a doughnut maker from South Dakota who took her training in home economics to some of the leading food manufacturers in the country. When such luminaries couldn’t travel to New York to showcase their own recipes, Paddleford traveled to them, becoming the paper’s official “roving food reporter” in the late 1940s, scouting food stories wherever they emerged (and flying herself to get there, in her own Piper Cub plane.) Unlike a local restaurant critic or an on-staff home advice columnist, Paddleford went to where the dishes were born, and in doing so, told the stories of the people and communities who sustained them.

Perhaps most importantly, Paddleford disdained the idea that food was only worth writing about as a source of sustenance. Even in times of tremendous hardship, and even when the work of maintaining the American household was anything but an easy task, she encouraged her readers to think about themselves as creative, subjective, deserving human beings. As she wrote in September 1936,

“The old Puritan notion that things were good for the development of our souls if we did not like them is a hand-down notion with some influence to the present day in the average person’s attitude toward scientific eating. But we believe, as many nutritionists do of late, that good foods may be good for us only if we like them. Our foods are not tried out by the use of test tubes and white rats, but human guinea pigs, not afraid to declare their likes and dislikes.”

Statements like this were radical coming from Paddleford, who—unlike her contemporary M.F.K. Fisher—was writing for a major newspaper’s intended audience of middle-class homemakers and not European expats or aspiring gourmands. The women who read Paddleford’s columns had been raised in households where the dominant rhetoric of femininity was self-sacrifice for the good of one’s husband, children, and the country. Yet in the early twentieth century, the possibility of becoming New Women—women empowered by the vote, by employment, by access to spheres of social, political, and cultural significance—also opened the possibility of a right to sensorial selfhood. Was cooking become a feminist act if it also included the possibility of tasting, and enjoying, one’s food? Paddleford seemed to think so, and with her abundant and enthusiastic use of food descriptions, she made the results of cooking come alive.

It may be a stretch to see affinities between Sydney’s simple omelette and Paddleford’s lifetime of reportage, but I think they honor the same thing: the notion that everyone should have the chance to experience and relish the joys of an intentionally and lovingly prepared meal. When we reduce cooking to a mere necessity, we stop paying attention to the grace notes—the bright crunch of potato chips against a creamy bite of omelet, the crisp taste of a well-chilled juice—that can turn a meal from ordinary to extraordinary. Taking food seriously shouldn’t require a suspension of our most basic pleasures—if anything, it should offer a more intentional space to honor and make space for them.

Recommendation: In my continued role as freelance booster for the career of Helen Rosner, I really loved her latest piece in The New Yorker, on the opening of the new restaurant Cecchi’s in the shadow of its space’s former inhabitant, the much-beloved Café Loup. Rosner questions whether it is possible for new restaurants to ever dispel the ghosts of occupants past, or even of culinary tastes past. I like thinking about how restaurants that intentionally summon nostalgia (via retro menu offerings, plating gestures, design aesthetics) do so as a claim to originality rather than an attempt at resurrection, and whether the phrase “everything old is new again” works as well in edible form as it does in fashion and art. Though Rosner’s look at Cecchi’s is not entirely flattering, as always, it gives one plenty of food for thought.

The Perfect Bite: This was a rare week of much more dining-out than cooking at home, and so I have to go with my favorite dish from a tapas dinner at Barcelona in Brookline: a dish of roasted chorizo and figs, roasted until they were so rich and jammy that you could eat them with a spoon. With sides of patatas bravas, bacon-wrapped dates, and blistered shishito peppers, it made for a spectacular meal.

Cooked & Consumed: The omelette, natch. But I’ll report back on my recipe testing this week to let you know how it turns out…