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Michael Gebert: Your books come up so often when I talk with chefs about how they got into the business of making food—if you’re a chef in your 30s, then The French Laundry Cookbook, which you wrote with Thomas Keller in 1999, probably hit you at a pretty pivotal moment in your development. And I feel like you helped make the broader audience receptive to thinking about how chefs think about things. Do you take any responsibility for the modern chef culture, or do you want to evade that?
But we got along from the beginning. He cared about the same things I did. And as it turned out, I could begin to intuit really what mattered to him. And so, I had just learned all the fundamentals of cooking, and I was out with the one of the best practitioners of those fundamentals, who was also one of the most aware, thoughtful—not chefs, but people—that I’ve ever encountered. So it was a combination of my loving story, of isolating what’s important, of his awareness of the world around him and of cooking, that brought that out.
That flowed from me only. That’s something that I happened to be passionate about—that I cared about, I don’t like the word ‘passion,’ I wish I hadn’t said that. I loved the idea that we created this extraordinary food, not to appreciate it for our own gratification, but for the survival of our species [through preserving meat]. And we hardly knew anything about it. It was going away, all we had in America was Oscar Mayer salami, which is cooked.
If you already know how to cook and want a specific recipe for, say, your mom’s meatballs, then a recipe is good. I’ve got a recipe for meat dumplings which I tried, which is part of my family history, and they were an epic fail. I completely screwed it up. The recipe’s written in hand by my great-grandmother, the dough was a potato-flour dough wrapped around cooked meat, it was basically a way to use leftovers. I completely fucked it up. It really pissed me off.
