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PROFILE Milking It CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL WANTS TO UPEND AMERICAN HOME COOKING. m c i z m a r @ wwe e k.com Christopher Kimball still recalls the fi rst time he had cilantro. It was 1963, and he was on vacation with his family in Mexico. “I can still to this day remember that bite—it was lamb and cilantro, and it was very pungent and floral and gamey and wild,” Kimball says from Denver, where he was touring with the food-themed variety show he brings to Portland this week. You could trace Kimball’s new maga- zine venture, Milk Street, to that day, when a kid from New England encountered an herb that’s now available at every grocery store in America. Fifty years later, the former America’s Test Kitch- en founder has pivoted to ingredient-focused cooking that eschews the careful technique and long cook times of traditional American and European recipes. Milk Street focuses on worldly recipes that are also easy—and if that sounds like a contra- diction, that’s just because you’ve marinated too long in a Eurocentric worldview. “We want the stuff that people cook on Tuesday night, as opposed to the more ornate and exoticized version of ethnic food,” Kimball says. “Most people around the world don’t think about cooking the way Mastering the Art of French Cooking did...Most people don’t figure out what they’re going to eat at 5 at night.” If you know Kimball’s name and bowtie, it’s probably because he launched the America’s Test Kitchen television show in 2001 (“In this day and age it’s really had to be a single-platform pub- lisher,” he says). The show featured Kimball and other chefs working out kinks in familiar recipes to make “the perfect chocolate chip cookies” and mainstreaming techniques like spatchcocking chicken. Kimball had an acrimonious split with America’s Test Kitchen in 2015. In October 2016, Kimball launched Milk Street with the premise that if you “start with the right mix of ingredients… the cooking almost takes care of itself.” “When I was in Thailand, it’s mostly prep. The cooking isn’t really the issue, it’s the prep. And they’re starting with such bold ingredients that you can’t really go wrong because you’re starting out with a ton of fl avor,” he says. “Americans love big fl avors and they always have. Look at the fast food people, they fi gured that out long ago.” The problem with traditional American cooking, in Kimball’s view, basically boils down to the fact that it takes too long and uses too much meat. That’s something we inherited from the Europeans who settled here. “Every place in the world came up with a cui- sine that made sense for that place. The fact that roasted meat was the centerpiece of the Western European plate is because it was cheap, and you had lot of fuel,” he says. “French cooking doesn’t really use spices because Europe didn’t really have spices—and it’s kind of weird if you think about it. I grew up with a cuisine that didn’t use spices, and that’s why it was all about technique.” RICK VODICKA BY MARTI N C I ZM A R Why has this shift taken so long, and why is it changing now? “Everybody in the last 10 years has a much wider experience with a variety of foods than they did before, and it’s greatly accelerated,” he says. “When I grew up in the ’60s, going to a Mexican restaurant was big deal—there was the band and the Saltillo tiles and the whole thing, it was some exotic experience.” But making food from another culture can, of course, create some tension. Cultural appropriation is now a hot-button issue in the food world, a phenomenon that became clear in Portland when two young American women went on a surfing trip to Mexico and then launched a brunch pop-up called Kooks, where they served breakfast burritos made from flour tortillas they learned to make by observing Mexican women’s tortilla-making techniques. It’s a fight Kimball watched closely. Appro- priation is, he says, “the third rail of the culinary world right now.” While he says that “stealing is stealing,” he also says that “you can’t copyright a recipe.” “Cooking is a performance art. If you get 12 people together and make the same recipe, every one of them will turn out differently. You can’t take a recipe out of a culture success- fully,” he says. “It’s not like it’s a piece of music or poem or a book—it’s an instruction.” But, Kimball says, it’s important to provide context and credit. “So as long as you give credit where credit is due and you’re respectful of that culture and the context, I think it’s fine,” he says. “Espe- cially if it’s a recipe where there are hundreds of variations that already exist.” That puts Milk Street in an interesting place—the whole project rejects Western culi- nary supremacy while delving into the wealth of cuisines from around the world. “At this point in society we don’t have to stick with what made sense 100 years ago. American cooking is still basically Fannie Farmer,” he says. “Obviously it has advanced, but it’s still the same precepts. People still talk about making stock and sautéing meats and pan sauces. Now that we have the option of using the other ingre- dients and techniques, we don’t have to do that anymore, let’s do what makes sense.” GO: Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Live appears at the Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 503-234-9694, aladdin- theater.com. 7 pm. $45-$95. Willamette Week OCTOBER 11, 2017 wweek.com 27