SOUL MEMORIES

Back in December I attended the annual dinner meeting of the Portland Culinary Alliance at Nostrano Restaurant in southeast Portland. Prepared by Chef Cathy Whims and her staff, our meal with its focus on regions of northern Italy was impeccable. We feasted on various house made salumi served with fragrant spiced pickled sweet cherries and a quince mostarda; a soup of Borlotto beans and sauerkraut, both heartwarming and savory; a Rabbit Squazet with Fuzi pasta, little quills of pasta painstakingly formed by hand; and a slow cooked shoulder of pork so succulent and tender that you could cut it with a fork. What I remember most about this meal is that the food had SOUL, a trait too often lacking in fine dining establishments. The food was not the contrived dishes so prevalent to these establishments but reflected a true essence of the traditional Italian family table.

Part of my career was spent on the road traveling from city to city doing the trade show circuit and other duties of a corporate chef. As a representative of a fine German chocolate company in the USA I had the opportunity to dine high and low from coast to coast. I have moved around and traversed many highways across this great country of ours. Few dishes remain in memory of food consumed in public houses but those that do ring out like church bells on a clear and cold winter morning – an heirloom tomato salad at Post Trio in San Francisco; pecan encrusted walleye at The Old St. Paul Hotel; steaming hot char shu bao, sticky rice and turnip cake at King Café in Seattle; a crisp and juicy fried soft shelled crab po-boy at the Ragin Cajun in Houston, Texas; a spicy and aromatic chicken vindaloo at The India Oven in Portland, Oregon; a bowl of Creole turtle soup from Commanders Palace, an oyster po-boy from Felix’s Oyster Bar and a Muffaleta sandwich laden with peppery olive salad from The Central Street Grocery in New Orleans; corned beef on rye or chopped liver and pickled tongue and a half-sour from Katz Deli in New York; a bowl of hot potato soup at some forgotten café in Pocatello, Idaho; roasted Cornish hen, polenta and steamed broccoli at the old Vat and Tonsure in Portland, Oregon; Kalua pork, tako poke and macaroni-potato salad from the Pukalani Superette upcountry Maui; chocolate soufflé with Vanilla Sauce at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia; country ham, fried chicken, grits, red eye gravy, cabbage salad from Car-O-Mi Lodge in Tryon, North Carolina. These are dishes memories are made of.

M.F.K. Fisher held the “firm belief that if a restaurant will be honest about a few things, it can outlive any rival with a long pretentious menu.” Public food tends to be, on the one hand, derivative and pretentious or on the other hand vulgar to bordering on the tasteless or inedible. Chefs that do it well do it simply, conducting ingredients to sing together in harmony while allowing the diva to take center stage. They do it with soul.