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Thursday, January 21, 2021
GO! magazine — A&E in Northeast Oregon
BEYOND BANANA BREAD ~ noteworthy non-cookbooks of 2020
Bill Addison
Los Angeles Times
(TNS) — Cookbooks are always about connection — written to share the love of a cuisine or celebrate ancestry, or
sometimes to eulogize broken bonds and safeguard history.... If you’re thinking about the broader context of food in
our troubled culture, take heart and inspiration from these two noteworthy non-cookbooks.
Fermentation as Metaphor
Sandor Katz calls himself a “fer-
mentation revivalist.” He’s spent the
last 25 years learning and practicing
the microbial transformation of foods
into sourdough starters, yogurt, kom-
bucha, kimchi, beer, wine, cheese and
cured meats. His dedication meets
a moment in America when the
food world has embraced fermentation as an aspect of
culinary reclamation — which is to say, as a reaction
against industrialized food systems.
With this slim, 118-page volume, Katz turns from
recipes to philosophy. He considers the wider meanings of fermentation:
“Anything bubbly, anything in a state of excitement or agitation, can be
said to be fermenting.”
Later he is more specifi c: “When a group of people whose reality has
been pathologized organize to claim respect for who they are, that is
fermentation.”
“Fermentation as Metaphor” is a swift, spicy, timely read. Addressing
viruses (including his own experiences living with HIV), our obsessions
with cleanliness and borders, and the need for ferment in a time of social
upheaval, Katz is provocative but also calm and reasoned. If his observa-
tions stoke your literal appetite, check out his bestselling books “Wild
Fermentation” and “The Art of Fermentation.”
An Onion in My Pocket
Since publishing “The
Greens Cookbook” in 1987,
Deborah Madison has been
one of America’s guiding
thinkers and instructors
around modern plant-based
cuisine. She cooked at Chez
Panisse before becoming, in
1980, the founding chef at still-thriving Greens
in San Francisco.
Her books mirrored the evolving California
culinary ethos: eat what grows close to home,
study the world’s cuisines for unending inspiration. Any serious cook
should own her two knowledge-packed masterworks, “Vegetarian Cooking
for Everyone” and “Vegetable Literacy,” if only to crib her gifts for fl avor
combinations.
“An Onion in My Pocket,” Madison’s foray into memoir, traces her up-
bringing in Davis, California, the path to opening Greens, the hard lessons
she learned helming the restaurant and her transition to cookbook author.
The kernel of the narrative, though, emerges from the nearly 20 years she
spent as a student and practitioner at the San Francisco Zen Center. It’s
a period of her life, she admits, that she’s spent little time examining until
now. The self-inquiry pushes her writing into absorbing terrains.
Though I’m a lapsed Zen student, I recognize the existence Madison
EDITOR ’ S NOTE :
The cookbook portion of this article was published
in the last two editions of GO! magazine.
describes: the aching knees after hours of meditation, the disappearance into community,
her struggles as tenzo (head cook) to please everyone’s tastes. Zen teaches you to observe the
mind — your own as well as the commonalities of the human mind — and there’s a wonder-
ful, ambling quality to the book’s fl ow that feels keenly infl uenced by Madison’s reclamation
of her Zen years.
“What had been special about eating in the zendo (meditation hall) was the opportunity to
experience food that was truly modest, even humble, and maybe not very well prepared, and
have it be okay. Even more than okay,” she wrote. “For me zendo food was about having less
and discovering that it was more.”
The intersections of food and spirituality are under-explored topics in American literature.
Nourishment can be about more than an inventive recipe or a dazzling meal. Madison’s
refl ections remind us of larger, slipperier kinds of hunger that call to be satisfi ed.
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