I grew up with cooking parents - one Portuguese American who was raised in California and one Southern, through and through. We lived in Tennessee so the Southern side dominated and I was standing on a stool cutting out biscuits or mixing cornbread as far back as I can remember. My father concentrated on all of the exotic Mediterranean dishes, my mother and grandmother on the Southern cooking and my grandfather on the butchery. We lived on a working farm where we raised our own chickens, pigs and cattle for meat and eggs, and grew most of the vegetables we ate throughout the year - potatoes, onions, beans, squash, cucumbers, corn, tomatoes, radish, peppers, cabbage, and turnip greens (we didn't eat the turnips, they went to the pigs). While I learned to can, freeze or store the vegetables in the cellar, the processing of our own meat is some of the most memorable and valuable experiences of my childhood. The annual hog slaughter was a two day ritual of butchering, lard making, sausage making and curing. The hams and bacon when into the smokehouse and the red formica kitchen table would be piled high with ground pork, handfulls of spices and a pile of canvas bags. Everyone helped hand knead the sausage mixture and stuff it into the long canvas sacks so that it too could be hung in the smokehouse. Likewise there was a day long ritual around the chicken processing and the cows were sent to a local slaughterhouse. My mother and I would watch Julia Child's French Chef series and continued this tradition together right through the 70s and 80s with Julia Child and Company and Dinner with Julia. I received a copy of The French Chef cookbook when I was 12 and fumbled my way through a four course dinner from it shortly thereafter. I never stopped cooking after that Sunday dinner. I learned everything I could from my parents and just kept going. Entertaining friends throughout college and graduate school and then living in Malawi, southern Africa, for two years where I started cooking Indian and African dishes. In the 1990's my family moved to San Francisco and my access to ingredients and cuisines expanded greatly. I spent about five years trying to master the entire volume of The Italian Baker by Carol Fields. I also worked on the cooking forums for CompuServe Information Service, where I staffed the Tools and Techniques, Breads, and Ethnic Foods topics. I also ran online conferences for the cooking forum, hosting a special guest each month, including a show with my mother on canning when she was well into her 70's and fascinated by the whole "social network" aspect of the computer. CompuServe opened up doors that led to the opportunity for me to meet Julia Child four times. The first time I was too nervous to even speak and as I tried to squeak out a few words, she patted me on the hand and said, "That's okay, it happens," in the most unpretentious way. The second time was at an IACP event and that went much better, actually holding down a conversation with her - about what I can't remember - but a conversation never-the-less. The third time was after a public interview in San Francisco when I asked her who her hero was. She told me it was Escoffier and that the two of them would have made a marvelous couple. The last time I met her was at her 90th birthday party at Copia in Napa. I cherish all of the minutes these four encounters add up too and let them wrap me up in a blanket of culinary inspiration. Over the past 10 years my life has focused more on my career in medical education and my family, which now includes raising an energetic boy, but eGullet feels like an opportunity to get back to what stove.
