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
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