One of my favorite things about my copy of Life Magazine’s Picture Cookbook (1958) is how outrageously sexist it is. For instance, did you know:

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If you can’t read the tiny print:

“Whenever the menu calls for a delicate dish or a fancy pie, most men are more than happy to let their wives take care of the cooking. When it’s a matter of steak, this tolerant attitude is replaced by an unassailable belief in masculine know-how. Steak is a man’s job.”

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Ladies, you are fine with your fancy pies, but a big slab of juicy meat can only come from a man. If you had any doubts, just look at this candid, unstaged photograph of steaks being grilled in the wild.

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Note the woman’s submissive interest in the fire being tended by the man. See her pet steaks cavorting about her skirts, waiting for their turn on the grill. I have to assume that the two men in the background not cooking steak are of ambiguous sexuality.

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However, all you fancy pie owners, do not despair. There is one area that is the unquestioned Domain of the Woman: the kitchen. As a later article reads:

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“Almost all U.S. kitchens are designed by men. That housewives are not entirely happy with man’s conception of woman’s domain was made clear at a U.S. housing administration forum at which women explained what they think ails modern houses. Having considered their complaints, one of the country’s few successful women architects, Margaret King Hunter of Hanover, N.H., planned an interior to suit her own needs.

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“Her design so impressed General Electric Company executives that they built it. Mrs. Hunter’s kitchen does away with walls and is stationed in the middle of the living space. Motor-driven shades lower to enclose kitchen or screen any side. A ventilating fan is in plastic skylight over kitchen. Here Mrs. Hunter stands in the hub of her house while son Christopher and friends have supper. Dining area is in foreground, living room at right.”

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If anything, it makes me think that the kitchen on The Brady Bunch was kind of progressive since it was the center of the house (TV room to the left, living room to the right) and had the same kind of open plan. Also, I would love to know if the U.S. Housing Administration still holds forums where it asks housewives what’s wrong with their homes. Maybe they meet in an auditorium designed by one of the large number of unsuccessful women architects that the caption implies?

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So, just in case you had any doubts:

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Steak = man’s job

Kitchen = women’s domain

Architecture = difficult for women

Running GE = easy for men

Fancy pies = woman

Steak = man

Delicate dish = woman

Steak = man

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Later, there will be a quiz.

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While the Lady Chef Stampede is only supposed to talk about lady chefs, I’ve been deviating from that path a lot recently. Whether it’s Rosaura Guerrero, the founder of Rosarita Foods, or Amy Scherber, the baker who founded Amy’s Breads, I’ve been mixing it up and keeping you off balance. Today, I want to keep it unpredictable by talking about one of the food world’s most important cooking teachers, Madeleine Kamman.

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A candy version of Chef Kamman made by Cindy Atmore.

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Called the “the superego of modern America’s food revolution” by the New York Times, she has been viewed as a cook’s cook, the French chef who had a long-running feud with Julia Child, a temperamental Yoda who taught a generation of cooks, a tireless self-promoter, an intellectual, and a terror. However history is going to categorize her, that’s up to history. I just want to stick with the facts.

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Born in Paris, Kamman grew up on the complex home cooking of her mother and grandmother, which all but disappeared during World War II (“We lived on beets,” she said after detecting some beet juice in a dish at a restaurant. “It was the only food we had. I can tell you if there’s a teaspoon in a quart.”). Later in life she would harshly criticize chefs like Paul Bocuse for stealing the food that had been invented by their grandmothers and taking all the credit (there is something to this accusation, and some brilliant female French chefs like Eugénie Brazier have been forgotten). As a teenager she worked for her aunt’s restaurant in the Loire Valley She wanted to be a historian, but couldn’t afford to pay for more than a year of university. She became a secretary (albeit one who spoke three languages) and got a job with Swiss Air. She attended the Cordon Bleu, married an American, and moved to Philadelphia where she continued working for Swiss Air until 1962 when she had her first son.

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Around the time she had her second son in 1966, she began to teach French cooking classes at home, which came out of a deep depression. “I went into transcultural shock,” she said in a New York Times interview about moving to the United States, “not being able to speak my native tongue, eat my food, see my architecture, listen to my music. I got strep throat after strep throat. I was so lonely I started to cook in my kitchen. Then I realized I really knew how to cook.” In 1961, Julia Child had published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which quickly became a best-seller, and in 1963 her popular television program, The French Chef, began to be broadcast, so Americans wanted to know more about French food and how to make it. This was the awakening of the American palate and Kamman was right there in the middle of it. In 1968 she moved to Boston and opened her restaurant, Chez La Mere Madeleine, and The Modern Gourmet, which was staffed by students from her school.

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At Chez La Mere Madeleine she was using lime, chilis, and ginger before any other chefs in the US. In a lot of ways, she was helping to lay the groundwork for the New American Cuisine that would emerge in the 1980′s. She was always prickly as hell. “The passion for truth is annoying to other people,” she said, but she refused to let that stop her. She wrote a letter to the New York Times criticizing Craig Claiborne, the food editor’s, recipe for escargot. He visited her, wrote an article about her that appeared in 1970 and she got her first book deal for The Making of a Cook from it. She has since written seven cookbooks, and they’re all still in print.

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In 1980, she moved back to France, seeking a bigger, better-equipped space, and she opened a cooking school in Annecy, but returned to the US two years later, complaining that high French taxes (and France’s endemic sexism, Paul Bocuse liked to make charming statements that women belonged in the bedroom, not a professional kitchen) had required the shuttering of her school. Her career was in trouble when she returned, with many people claiming that she had washed out in France and was over as a chef. Her friend James Beard went to bat for her, letting people in the food world know she was still there, still Madeleine, still great, and she got her feet back under her.

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She moved to Glenn, New Hampshire and opened a cooking school and restaurant, Auberge Madeleine, and then learned that she had heart disease. The bad kind. The kind that was going to kill her if she didn’t change her life. Closing the restaurant, she and her family moved to California where she opened the School for American Chefs in the Napa Valley (she also embraced Buddhism). Napa felt like home to her because people there took food seriously. “I finally found a place in the United States that I Iike,” she said.

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The School has been wildly popular with sometimes 100 chefs jockeying for eight slots. In 2000, Kamman, then 69 years old, decided to stop teaching. Since then she has written books and enjoyed her family, and mellowed. Although her students describe her as tough, demanding, and a perfectionist, those who respond to her teaching also describe her as unfailingly generous and a real source of support in their lives and their careers.

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Madeleine Cooks on TV!
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As for the feud with Julia Child? Even that mellowed at the end. Early in her career, Kamman decried Julia Child’s The French Chef pointing out that Child was neither French nor a chef. “I am French! Why would they want an American French chef?” She forbade her students from either reading Child’s books or watching her show, and apparently wrote mean letters to Child, who reportedly turned them over to her lawyer. The remarks stung, however, because at a dinner in 1985 Julia Child remarked of Kamman, “I shall grab her by the short hairs (wearing gloves of course) and I will grind her alive, piece by piece, in my food processor.” Ouch.

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Much later, both women were far more mellow. Kamman said more recently, “It is not a question of not getting along. I don’t know Mrs. Child, and she doesn’t know me. I may disagree with Mrs. Child’s technique and what she does, but that doesn’t mean the person is obnoxious. I recognize what she has done has been very useful for the country, and I have been the beneficiary.” And Child herself said that Kamman was not her enemy and that she welcomed everyone in the business.

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For all I know, Madeleine Kamman is still alive, cooking for her grandchildren, keeping up with the hundreds of her students who have become chefs around the world, and still cooking in her kitchen, like her mother, her grandmother, and all the great long line of France’s female cooks who stretch out into the past, elevating their country’s cuisine but never getting the credit until far too late.

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Here are some great articles about Kamman:

One in the San Francisco Chronicle and one in the New York Times

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July 1 is Canada day! And that means the Dirt Candy Store has to have a sale. It’s a law. But one day is not enough to celebrate the might of Canada and so we’re celebrating Canada all MONTH with a Canada Day Month Sale. July will be the last month of free shipping from the Dirt Candy store, we’ll have cookbooks signed by Ryan Dunlavey, and we’ll be offering everyone 20% off (which is almost $4 off the cookbooks!). It’s practically free. And what better way to show your love for Canada?

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So keep your eye on July 1. That’s when the Canada Day madness begins!

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From the 1970 Campbell’s Cooking with Soup cookbook. I don’t think I need to add anything to this except to say that this is now the mission statement in my proposal for a new restaurant.

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Well, it happened. I sold out.

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Like Dionne Warwick and the Psychic Friends Network, like Mary J. Blige and Burger King’s crispy chicken wrap, or Claire Danes and the Latisse Eyelash Prescription Treatment System, I am endorsing a product. Which appeals deeply to my childhood self. I mean, I grew up seeing Bill Cosby eat Jell-o Pudding Pops and Michael J. Fox drink Pepsi, so joining their ranks (in some small way) kind of makes me want to jump through time and high-five my eleven-year-old self. The product?

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From now until infinity you will not be able to use a Wusthof knife without thinking of me.

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Do not attempt this at home unless you want to cut off your nose.

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You can see the entire campaign over on their Edge site.

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When they asked me to endorse them they sent me a nice chef’s knife in the mail, as well as a letter inviting me to be one of their spokespeople as well as a bunch of material outlining the campaign they were planning. I opened the package, took the knife (“Cool,” I remember thinking. “They sent me a knife because I’m a chef.”), glanced at the rest and thought, “Junk mail,” and tossed it in the trash. A week later someone from the agency putting the campaign together called.

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“Did you get the knife?” she asked.

Oh, great. Now she was going to try to sell me something. Well, ha, ha, sucker. I’ve got my knife and I don’t have to give it back.

“Yep, thanks. It’s nice.”

Now, just try to sell me more knives so I can refuse you.

“What did you think about it?”

What did I think about the knife? Well, it’s sharp and it cuts things? What does she mean? What is she talking about?

“Um…”

“You know, the proposal?”

The trash was long gone. What had I done? I tried to fake it.

“You know,” I said, “I thought it looked good, but why don’t you refresh me…”

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It’s amazing I’ve survived this long around so many sharp knives and so much fire, to be honest. But, ultimately the joke’s on Wusthof. What they don’t realize is that they didn’t need to pay me to endorse them. I was doing it a long time ago for free. Way back in 2004 I did my first ever interview as a chef. Ted Lee (of the Lee Bros. cookbook out now!) needed some chefs to talk about knives for a piece he was writing for the New York Times. He figured that I worked with vegetables so I’d have a different take on it. He’d talked to lots of chefs about their fancy Japanese knives, their hand forged custom steel, their ceramic knives built by robots. Me? I used a Wusthof.

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Amanda Cohen, a sous-chef at Pure Food and Wine in Manhattan, bought her less exalted Wüsthof chef’s knife at a Bed Bath & Beyond store in Manhattan. But she is every bit as sanguine as Mr. Heflin about its form and function.

“My knife fits my hand so perfectly,” Ms. Cohen said. “Every time I pick it up, it’s like, `Hello, old friend!’ “

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I’ve always used whatever knife I had lying around. I usually go for a Wusthof if I’m buying one, because I take my knives to hell and back and really beat the tar out of them so $900 knives that require constant maintenance are wasted on me. Later in the NY Times piece:

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“As long as you get the job done on time, a knife is a knife,” said Ms. Cohen, the sous-chef at Pure Food and Wine. “I see all these guys with their knives in fancy carrying cases, and I always want to ask them, `Does that make the food taste better?’”

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I’ve got a Wusthof tossed in my bag and that’s kind of all I need. Just the 6″ chef’s knife. From now until I go off a cliff, I’m Thelma and this is my Louise.

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2 gether 4 ever.

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So thanks, Wusthof, for putting a price tag on a relationship you didn’t even know already existed. And the campaign’s not just about me. Marc Vetri of Vetri in Philadelphia and Katherine Clapner the pastry chef who owns Dude, Sweet Chocolate in Dallas are both part of their campaign as well this year, so I’m in good company.

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And I got a free knife!

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This week, on the Lady Chef Stampede, we get baked with Amy Scherber, the woman behind Amy’s Bread. Normally I am deeply suspicious of bakers, regarding them as a mutant offshoot of pastry cooks (if you want to know about pastry cooks, I suggest reading some H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote about them in great detail). But two things made me want to write about Scherber. And now you have to keep reading to find out what they were.

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Originally from Minneapolis, Scherber moved to New York and went into marketing before going to New York Restaurant School in 1987. Afterwards she worked pastry at Bouley and Mondrian before she realized that she liked baking things just as long as they weren’t dessert. Cue a trip to France where she worked in three different bakeries before coming back to New York City to open a bakery of her own.

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In 1991 there was a big hole in the NYC market. There weren’t many high end bakeries in the city and restaurants were mostly serving nondescript rolls. Fancy artisanal breads weren’t a thing. Scherber realized that this was a part of the market she could corner, so she found a storefront in Hell’s Kitchen with cheap rent and opened Amy’s Breads in 1992. Raising money was a pain because she couldn’t find any investors, and the SBA and banks laughed at the idea of an inexperienced woman making money from baking. She also didn’t want to go to her friends and relatives for money because what kind of return on their investment could she promise when she wanted to re-invest her profits in the bakery? She wound up taking straightforward bank loans, usually ten-year loans at one point above prime, and making sure she paid them back.

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At first she sold three breads: a country sourdough, a black sesame, and a semolina bread with raisins and fennel, which became one of her signature loaves. When the bakery began to attract attention from the New York Times and other food world outlets she added sweets and slowly expanded production. In 1996 she opened a storefront in Chelsea Market, and it became the central bakery for all her operations. Next she opened an Amy’s Bread on the Upper East Side but it couldn’t break even so she had to shut it down. Then she opened a store in the West Village that managed to last. In 2012, she moved all her baking to a former Oreo factory in Long Island City.

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In 1996, she published a cookbook, Amy’s Bread, and these days she oversees 150 employees between her four locations and makes 200 wholesale deliveries a day. With her storefronts running smoothly and selling cakes, scones, sandwiches, and bread without her direct daily involvement she’s able to do more on the marketing side of things and in product development, which is the fun stuff if you’re a chef. She also makes a ton of television appearances.

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Like I said before, I wasn’t going to include bakers in the Lady Chef Stampede since I don’t understand them, but I read two quotes from Scherber that really spoke to me. The first comes from a much longer (and really interesting) interview with Star Chefs:

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“When first opening a store or restaurant, you have to start with a small base then build your way up. My first store in Hell’s Kitchen was small with cheap rent. [Once we knew it worked], we began adding on sweets and expanding our production. Slow, steady, and managed growth is essential. After I expand, I usually spend three years at a plateau where I really don’t spend money just to make sure that I can manage. I opened a store on the Upper East Side (before the West Village store) – it was a small place with expensive rent. We weren’t breaking even, and I had to close it.

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The West Village store is a little smaller and has higher rent, but it’s much busier [than the Upper East Side store], so it could sustain itself. You need to constantly study and analyze food costs, labor costs, and the unexpected costs. There are things that break and equipment that needs to be replaced or repaired. In our Chelsea store, we had a little graffiti etched into one of the large window panes; insurance covers some of it, but then my insurance goes up! There are a lot of little things that you just don’t think about but have to take into your costs.”

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First off, I respect a woman in this business who’s willing to talk nuts and bolts. So many chefs base their careers on smoke and mirrors, hiding the real work from their customers, that sometimes I think restaurants are a magical kingdom where tiny unicorns deal with all the actual nitty gritty details that I feel like I sweat over every single day. Second off, in the second paragraph she demonstrates all the problems that come with being a business owner that no one thinks about. Things break all the time, equipment constantly needs to be replaced, and sometimes I feel like I’m on a treadmill where I have to keep ordering new cooktops or I fall off and get crushed by broken Cuisinarts. Also, the graffiti – yes, it’s an art form, etc. but when you own a business and are having to repaint all the time because awesome kids whose parents pay for their skateboards like to tag your storefront to prove how “street” they are and how their mom and dad can’t tell them what to do, man, you have a different perspective.

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Scherber with one of her business partners.

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The second quote comes from an interview with Ladies Who Launch:

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“I have been burned by people who have figured out a loophole to steal product or money. They’ll ring something up a different way… they’re (ringing up) the item as $1 when it’s supposed to be $5, so they get a $4 tip. Every time it happens, it’s just like being punched in the stomach. Then you have to regroup and figure out how it happened and why. Why does an employee have a sense of entitlement when we have tried to treat them well and pay them well? When these things happen, it’s been shocking because people who have been stealing have been those that I have trusted.”

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It’s not so much what she’s saying (I personally love employees who steal because you always catch them and it’s so cathartic to see their faces when you fire them) but the fact that even with hundreds of wholesale customers, three locations, and a giant bakery in Long Island City, she’s still feeling the pain when some person on a register steals $4. That’s what it’s like when you own a business. You have all these big things going on, and from the outside people think you’re lounging around on a rainbow coming up with recipes and enjoying your success, and really what you’re doing is weeping tears of blood over your prep cook’s schedule, or trying to make sure your dishwasher is fixed by service, or worrying about someone stealing $4.

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So, Amy Scherber, I eat a cake to you tonight, and raise high my glass of wine. You have convinced me that bakers…they’re just like us.

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I have been banging my head against this dish for three months now, and it’s finally getting close to being ready to go on the menu. My big breakthrough came about a month ago when I made this dish for the nine millionth time and was so angry at it that I smashed the plate and…well, more on that later. For now, gaze upon my Broccoli Dawgz!!!

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They’re not in their final form yet, but those are salt and vinegar broccoli rabe chips. Oh, yeah! It’s summer and time for a picnic on your plate!

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Don’t forget that if you’re at GoogaMooga this weekend you can skip the Yeah Yeah Yeahs concert. You can forget about the Flaming Lips. What you need to go to is my literary wrestling match on Saturday, May 18 @ 3:45. I’ll be in the literary fancy pants tent called Cafe GoogaMooga and my husband and I will be presenting The Dirt Candy Food Porn-u-copia. Clothing will be optional! (Get your tickets to GoogaMooga here)

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Also, on Sunday, May 19 @ 2:15pm the Dirt Candy cookbook artist, Ryan Dunlavey, will be playing Food Pictionary with the audience and the able assistance of cartoonist Lucy Knisley also in the Cafe GoogaMooga.

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It’s hard to remember the big restaurants from last year, let alone from a couple of decades ago, but I recently came across Life Magazine’s Picture Cookbook. They do a round-up of “the best” restaurants in the world (circa 1958) and I thought it’d be info-taining to reproduce the New York section, both pictures and text, to remember the forgotten restaurants of 50 years ago.

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Le Pavillion. Owned by Henri Soule, a great restauranteur, Le Pavillon rates as the finest French restaurant in America. In the copper dish are quenelles de brochet Pavillon, egg-shaped mousses of sieved pike poached and served with lobster sauce. On the serving platter at right is mousse de sole Pavillon which is served, as in foreground, half covered with lobster sauce and half covered with champagne sauce.

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Brussels. Born of the 1939 – 1940 World’s Fair where its managers operated the Belgian Pavilion restaurant, the Brussels has become one of the city’s finest restaurants. Here Maître d’hôtel Leon Lievens lifts a chateaubriand en papillote from the paper in which it was cooked. On a side table are the asparagus with sauce mousseline of hollandaise and whipped cream, and pommes soufflées to go with it.

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The Forum. A restaurant with an off-beat touch is The Forum of the Twelve Caesars. In foreground is alpine snow hare stewed in wine and served with maize and lingonberries. At left is an appetizer of clams, oysters, crab meat, lobster, shrimp. Ramekin holds pike mousse. Menu goes in for Latin (eggs Benedictus) and flaming foods — “fiddler crab lump a la Nero.”

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Voisin. Quiet and elegant, Voisin has for 45 years been famed for its desserts. Below is an assortment: a chocolate soufflé (top), served with vanilla sauce (in sauceboat), a gâteau St. Honore (at left), two chocolate boxes of spongecake and chocolate butter cream flanking a strawberry strip, eclairs, strawberry tarts and a vanilla pot de crème.

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Just for fun I thought I’d include a Chicago restaurant, The Pump Room because, well, having this guy in your restaurant probably wouldn’t go over real well today, but in 1958 it was the height of class. Also, flaming swords of food!

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Pump Room. Famed for flaming swords that carry speared sustenance ranging from shashlik to Alaska crab, the Pump Room in the Ambassador East Hotel is one of America’s most spectacular dining rooms. Bright-coated waiters march back and forth bearing the sizzling swords to the tables while (at night, not at lunch) the lights grow dim. In this picture, the array of hot swords from left carry shashlik, deep sea scallops, broiled lamb chops, whole chicken livers, milk-fed chickens, crab meat rolled in bacon, and filet mignon. Presiding is the coffee boy.

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That’s coffee MAN to you, buddy. Mr. Coffee Man.

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There’s something so hopefully romantic about this cookbook photo. Maybe it’s the two glasses of champagne, one flat and the other suspiciously foamy? Maybe it’s the pink roses peeking in from the right? Maybe it’s the idea of attracting a woman by feeding her a store bought pie crust oozing with pink Cool Whip? Whatever it is, I bet the person who made this ate it alone.

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