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goutez, goutez, goutez

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

I have a growing shelf of books about the experience of being a chef, thanks to my friend Mia who is kind to send one at every birthday and Christmas, and sometimes in between. This Christmas’ offering was The Sharper the Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn. The book has both interested and encouraged me.

I had to run an errand on the way to work one day last week and ended up with a few minutes in the parking lot before I had to be in the kitchen, so I pulled the book out to read for a bit. In the middle of the chapter I was reading, Flinn described the Chef making a consommé:

Chef carefully removes the clarifying ingredients and pours the consommé through a passoire. He tastes again with his spoon. Satisfied, he adds perfectly diced vegetables.

“Goutez, goutez, goutez,” Chef begins. “C’est tres important . . .”

Anne translates. “Always taste, taste, taste, as you cook. Chef Guillard believes this is very important. If you wait until a dish is done, then it is too late to fix the seasonings. You must taste everything as you go along, every ingredient.”

Thursday night it was Chef #2 and me in the kitchen again. Tuesday night I had made a concerted effort to approach things differently. I had a much shorter prep list for him and worked hard to frame things so I didn’t play into an adversarial relationship. He seemed more accommodating as well, and the evening went OK. Part of the change I made was to take the lead in calling the tickets as they came in and give him a more limited responsibility, and he responded well, leading me to rethink my assumption that the problem was his lack of passion; perhaps he was just struggling to keep up. Thursday night, we saw our first customer a little before six (we open at five) and our last just after eight – in between there were sixty-seven others who came, unannounced, for dinner. In that time frame, also, the printer in the kitchen became temperamental after we changed the paper and a couple of tickets got lost. One of our servers, in particular, became discombobulated.

Duke Dining Services sends anonymous students in from time to time to evaluate all the eating establishments on campus. (You can see this coming, can’t you?)

The server came back first to ask if a customer could get an appetizer portion of the Butternut Squash Ravioli. My answer was yes. Several minutes later, she came back with a ticket for said ravioli to be served with a medium steak. A crucial detail is I make the ravioli myself, but I can’t make them to order, so I freeze them. They have to be in the pasta water for a good four minutes to thaw and cook; when I pull them out of the water, I always press them to see if they are cooked before I drop them in the sauce to finish the dish. About the time we started the ravioli, six dessert orders came in, so I asked Chef #2 to finish the dish. He timed it with the steak, which had already been cooking, and sent them out together.

The ravioli came back. It was still frozen.

When the server returned, she said she had forgotten to write a Roasted Chicken Marsala on the ticket and needed one, as we say, on the fly. Once again, I needed Chef #2 to get it done. I was finishing the desserts as the dish went out. A few minutes later, one of our other servers came to tell me one of his friends was eating dinner with us and was doing an evaluation. I went out to see how their dinner had been and, yes, they were on the receiving end of all that I have just described.

Needless to say, we got a poor evaluation, which listed, among other things, that the ravioli was still cold and the Marsala was bland. I could hear the French Chef saying, “Goutez, goutez, goutez.”

My mind was full of woulda-coulda-shouldas. I should have gone out when the ravioli was sent back. I should have double-checked his dish before it went out. Then I moved on to the reality of our needing to send an order out every two minutes for two hours. Those things crossed my mind before I even got back to the kitchen. As I opened the kitchen door, I made a decision not to say anything to him about what had happened. Part of my choice was driven by my need to finish the inventory before I went home; part of it was I wasn’t up for a confrontation; part of it was I’d been in his shoes. I picked up my clipboard and finished my tasks.

We had had a good night. One table – a table with an evaluator – had gone bad. Next Tuesday, I thought, as we are getting ready for service, I will go over the evaluation and remind him to taste, taste, taste.

About that time, one of the other servers came in to tell me there was someone else in the dining room who wanted to speak with me. I went over to a customer seated close enough to the evaluator for him to have heard what had happened.

“I just want you to know,” he said, “I had the ravioli and it was amazing. The cinnamon pasta. The filling. I’ve never had anything like it.”

His order went out after the frozen one. While I was still doing desserts. And Chef #2 cooked it. I was grateful I had chosen not to speak to soon.

On Friday, I stopped by the used bookstore in our neighborhood because of a comment on my “Redemption Center” post that mentioned Flannery O’Connor. I got two of her books for about five bucks and came home to read the story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” which tells the story of Julian and his mother, whom he despises for her unwillingness to change with the times. The story is set in the South, in the thick of the Civil Rights struggle. Julian and his mother are white, and they are riding on public transportation, which means blacks are on the bus as well. When she embarrasses him by her actions, he comes down both angrily and condescendingly. When the story ends, he is on the precipice of what O’Connor describes as “his entry into the world of guilt and shame.”

Perhaps the parallel is a bit overstated for what happened Thursday night, still it strikes me that the entry into the world of hurt presents itself, sometimes, as a clear gateway and other times as a trap door. I had decided Chef #2 was low on passion and high on attitude; I watched and listened a bit longer and found he’s trying to adjust to an environment that may not match his skill set. He does have some of the attitude, but not for the reasons I assumed.

We are often offered opportunity to enter the world of grace, and take those around us along. As I learned again Thursday night, most of the time I find that door by stumbling in.Like the chef tasting and tasting along the way as he prepared the soup, I had managed to find some redemption in the evening by moving slowly and not over-seasoning my responses.

At least I can see that looking back.

Peace,
Milton

dig

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

I spent yesterday sorting through
the stacks of papers – bills, mailers,
magazines, notes, bills accumulated
on the dining room table; some
required a decision of me; others
needed nothing more than to be
thrown away. I had to pay attention.

I understand more why archaeologists
have to dig through layers and layers
to find those who came before us.

Peace,
Milton

redemption center

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

About a month ago, as I was sitting in church, my mind bounced from one hymnal to another as we sang something familiar from our song book and the next thing I knew the song playing in my head was an old Sunday night favorite from my Baptist days:

Redeemed, how I love to proclaim it
Redeemed by the blood of the lamb
Redeemed by his infinite mercy
His child and forever I am

(The tune most people know is this one, but my favorite is Aubrey Butler’s version.)

I spent about a week working through a blog post on what the word redeemed means to me, starting with licking S&H Green Stamps for my grandmother so we could go together to the Redemption Center and turn them in for stuff. When I was in seminary, I used to drive by the an S& H Redemption Center and imagine lines of people waiting to be changed, in much the same way I wish, when I hand my parking ticket to someone and ask to be validated that they would say, “You’re awesome.”

Every time I have tried to write about all of this over the last few weeks, I get here and I don’t know where to go. Though I love the melodies, I have always struggled with the sacrificial atonement as it was taught to me because I never understood who needed to be satisfied. (A discussion for another post or seven.) Somewhere along the way in my life, the word took on real meaning for me because of a phrase in the King James Bible that occurs twice (Ephesians 5:16 and Colossians 4:5):

redeeming the time.

I always read the phrase to mean making meaning out of what was happening. I came back to the phrase and my vain attempts at writing about redemption after reading the article on Bruce Springsteen in the new Rolling Stone that called out at me in the supermarket line this morning as I stopped to buy cereal and applesauce on the way to work. As he talked about how he grew into his life as a rock singer, he said,

But if you learn to organize your desires and demands and shoot them into something that is more than just being you, you start to communicate. I wanted to be a part of the world around me.

Wait – there’s more.

All you want is for your voice to be part of the record, at a particular time and place. You try to be on the right side of history. And maybe some other kid will hear that and go, “Oh, yeah, that sounds like the place I live.”

At the risk of being overly quoteful, one more:

And the fire I feel in myself and the band – it’s a very enjoyable thing. It carries an element of desperateness. It also carries an element of thankfulness. We are perched at a place where we want to continue on – with excellence. That’s our goal. And all the rest of the stuff – we’re gonna figure it out.

Though I wonder if Fanny Crosby and Bruce have ever been mentioned together in a blog post before, I have no doubt she knew of the creative tension between desperation and gratitude that Springsteen so beautifully names. If the two were street names, we would know the address of the redemption center: that place where we continue on with excellence, figuring the rest of the stuff out.

Peace,
Milton

lots to learn

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

I love watching Top Chef.

I’m particularly intrigued by the scenarios the contestants are forced to face, which often call forth skills beyond cooking that they may or may not have. A couple of weeks ago, the episode was called “Restaurant Wars” and the eight remaining contestants were divided into two teams and given the challenge to open their own restaurant for one evening. The two chefs who won the opening “Quick fire Challenge” became the leaders, though neither of them were actually leaders. Both restaurants suffered as a result. Ultimately, the reason one chef who was asked “to pack her knives and go” was not because of her cooking but because she didn’t lead her crew.

“If you’re the chef, you have to act as though no one else is going to do their job,” one of the judges said to her.

I understood exactly what he meant. In a job that depends on everyone doing their part, you have to be prepared in case someone doesn’t come through. At the same time, however, you have to trust each other – even depend on each other as though everyone is going to do excellent work. When both things are held in creative tension, good food happens.

One of the reasons I’ve never made a good Calvinist is I believe people will rise to the level of trust you put in them. When I took kids to youth camp as a youth minister, our “rules” consisted of, “Live, act, and speak like the children of God that you are.” And they did. I took the same basic approach as a high school teacher and now as a chef it’s the way I choose to relate to the folks on the line with me.

I have two guys who alternate nights working with me at the Duke restaurant. One, Abel, I have written about before. The best way I can communicate his approach to his job is to recount what happened the other night. We had some fresh trout to sell that evening, which we were going to dip in an almond crust and fry. As he was getting ready for the dinner service, he said, “I’m going to cook the best trout they have ever tasted.”

And he did.

The other cook who works with me is capable, diligent, yet he lacks the passion Abel articulated. I don’t know his story. I don’t know what has hardened him. I do know it feels to me like he comes to work on an assembly line. I don’t think he gets much joy out of his work. He is filling orders more than he is feeding people. I don’t know how to help him. You can teach technique but you can’t teach passion.

That last realization calls me to live in yet another creative tension, between the poles of my own passion for excellence in what we are doing and my responsibility as both his supervisor and a human being to find a way to look at him that is something more constructive than judgmental. I may not be able to teach passion, but I can learn not to write him off.

Right?

I’m reminded of something my first therapist said to me: “The two things you can change in a situation are what you do and what you say.” I can’t make Cook #2 be different than he is; I can choose to be more creative in the way I deal with him, which means acting my way feeling something other than frustrated. Perhaps I can act and speak in a way that offers him the opportunity to feel something other than frustrated, as well.

The contrast from night to night for me is palpable. Abel comes to work and he is full of energy and intentionality. He and I like each other and we work well together. We have done so long enough now that we know how to help one another, even anticipate one another, when we are on the line together. Abel has risen to the trust I put in him from the beginning. On the alternate nights, I’m working with someone I don’t know as well, with whom I have not worked as much, and who doesn’t exude the same energy and intentionality. He is more dutiful than creative. He doesn’t appear to be interested in more of a relationship than is required to get through the evening.

I’m the chef. It’s my job is to work with both of them to create consistency both in our kitchen and in the food that comes out of it, which means, as much as anything, I have to go to work everyday looking to learn and seeking to rise to the level of trust that has been put in me.

And I still have a lot to learn.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There’s a new recipe (finally).

day off

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

were you to ask what I did today
I might be tempted to say nothing
because I had the day off from work
but that answer would be lazy
I went to the grocery store
and the bank, baked bread,
made a couple of soups,
ate lunch with my wife
played with the pups
and took a nice long nap,
which may have been my
greatest accomplishment

Peace,
Milton

what love can do

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

I’m tired. Things are going well at the Duke restaurant, and well means thirty more customers a night without any more help in the kitchen. I’m going early and staying late – and having fun as well. I’ve worked hard to put a new menu together for our newly renovated space and some of the new dishes are really fun to make (butternut squash and pear ravioli in cinnamon pasta, for instance).

In a week when I’ve watched my brother go back to working too much too soon after his back surgery, I’m aware, at 52, that working eleven and twelve hour days when I don’t sit down is not something I can do indefinitely, particularly if I want to grow old with the woman I love. And so I’m spending my nights driving home from work praying about what the years ahead will hold, even as I am grateful for what fills my days right now.

One of the things high on the present list is a new Bruce Springsteen album came out today. Thanks to an iTunes gift card from my boss, I got to preorder it and found it waiting for me when I got up this morning. And one of the gems I found was this song, “What Love Can Do.”

There’s a pillar in the temple where I carved your name
There’s a soul sitting sad and blue
Now the remedies you’ve taken are all in vain
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

Darlin’, I can’t stop the rain
Or turn your black sky blue
But let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

Well, now our truth lay shattered you stood at world’s end
As the dead sun rose in view
Well, if any of this matters, with a kiss my friend
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

Darling, we can’t stop this train
When it comes crashing through
But let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

When the bed you lie on is nails and rust
And the love you’ve given’s turned to ashes and dust
When the hope you’ve gathered’s drifted to the wind
And it’s you and I my friend
You and I now friend

Here our memory lay corrupted and our city lay dry
Let me make this vow to you
Here where it’s blood for blood and an eye for an eye
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

Here we bear the mark of Cain
We’ll let the light shine through
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do

In the midst of my long days, which are dwarfed by what is happening around the world from Gaza to Sri Lanka to the Congo to Darfur to wherever else you want to name, I need to hear him keep singing,

Here where it’s blood for blood and an eye for an eye
Let me show you what love can do

Yes, yes. Please show me.

Peace,
Milton

in my heart, a dancer

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

Twenty years ago this weekend I met Ginger.

Last night, as a way to celebrate, we went to see the Dance Theater of Harlem Ensemble at the Carolina Theatre, since the love of my life is a dancer. The evening was full of good things both because of the dances and because one of the directors of the DTH used the “interactive” evening to explain how dances came together and what the dancers were doing. We’ve even got to ask questions, one of which was, “How do the dancers remember what they are supposed to do on stage?”

“We practice he said and use what we call ‘muscular memory.’ Our minds and muscles work together all the bits of information we have repeated and practiced over and over to bring it all together in performance.”

As the evening went on, I found myself intrigued by his vocabulary, as he talked about lines and conversation and relationship, all in the context of dance. They were not simply going through motions on stage; they were incarnating their hard work, their collaboration, even the love they shared with one another in order that we might sit rapt in our seats, finding our own place in their conversation.

This afternoon, we got to go to Cameron Indoor Stadium to see the Duke men’s basketball team play the Maryland Terrapins (thanks to a church member with extra tickets). As it happened, on this afternoon, Duke is arguably the best team in the country – and they played like it, beating Maryland 85-44. In one amazing sequence, one of the players scrambled to save a ball from going out of bounds, throwing it across the court to another who made a touch pass to yet another who was running ahead of him, who passed it on to a fourth, who made the basket. The team made thirty-four field goals and had twenty-three assists. Like the dancers, the power of their performance was in lines and conversation and relationship, and muscular memory; they, too, were incarnating something that mattered to them.

Ginger and I met on a youth retreat. She was a sponsor with one of the churches attending and I was leading the music. I saw her across the room that first Friday night and struck up a conversation. The next day, as the kids went about whatever it was they were doing, we sat and talked – for several hours. On Sunday, as we were preparing to leave, I asked for her phone number, and her response looms large in Brasher-Cunningham lore:

“It’s in the phone book under ‘Reverend V. R. Brasher.”

I went home. I looked it up. I called her and asked her to go see Lyle Lovett with me the following weekend. Twenty years (and at least that many Lyle Lovett concerts), six Schnauzers, six residences, and four cities are just part of the dance of our lives that leans heavily on our muscular memory drawn from all the day to day words and rituals that remind us who we are together.

I’m neither a good basketball player nor a dancer. To use either to describe myself could only be done as metaphor. Still, I know the deep satisfaction that comes from an assist – the touch pass at the right moment that lets her shine, and I know the trust and confidence that comes from knowing I am not alone, even as I feel the beat of my heart bring up a rhythm from deep in my bones when she takes my hand for yet another turn in the dance we have done together for these twenty years.

In a lyric I wrote for our wedding, I said:

how I want to dance together
how I want to taste forever
how I want to spend life with you

The dance has been better than I ever imagined.

Peace,
Milton

my inaugural poem

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
6

Billy and I were lucky today:
we had a TV down the hall –
and a radio in the kitchen.
In between getting the last
of the buffet ready for the
professors who would come
to satisfy their post-inaugural
munchies, I listened to the
proceedings until the time came.
“Let it burn, Billy,” I said.
“It’s time.” And we ran down
the hall in time to see our
new president sworn in,
and then we went back to work
and continued to chop and
cook as he delivered his
address; and I wondered.
I wondered what it meant
that one day someone will
ask where I was when our
first African-American president
was sworn in and I will say,
“I was in the kitchen” and
remember how hope filled
the room like an aroma
and my tears had nothing
to do with onions.

Peace,
Milton

memorying

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
3

it was a short note
an old friend wrote
all he said was
he was “vinlying”
John Denver records
that’s all, yet
the mere mention
of the melodies
sent me “memorying”
across layers of time
to long ago nights
when we played
and sang and talked
of poems, prayers
and promises
and things that
we believed in
I still know the chords
and the words
and the feelings
they have aged
right along with me,
as have the friends,
and I’m grateful
for them all

Peace,
Milton

(Thanks, Davy)

gingerbread lessons

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
4

I’m back in full swing at the restaurant at Duke since the second semester is just finishing it’s first full week. The big news for us is Duke Dining dropped some serious change to renovate our dining room; now it looks like a real restaurant instead of, well, a college dining hall. I’ve spent a good bit of time and effort trying to come up with a menu that offers some fresh imagination as well. Putting meals together means thinking about flavors and ingredients, and it also means thinking about who is coming to dinner and how much things cost. I also have to think about what I know how to do, what I can learn how to do, and how we can put up good, flavorful, consistent meals with just two of us cooking and – as they did tonight – close to seventy people showing up to eat in a two and a half hour period.

A good dish is a food collage, in a way: culinary multimedia. I want you to look at it, smell it, taste it, feel the textures of it in your mouth, and think about it long after you have cleaned your plate. With all that in mind, one of my favorite dishes on the new menu is the Butternut Squash and Pear Ravioli. The name tells you two of the ingredients in our house made ravioli, which also includes roasted pecan pieces, Parmesan cheese, chili power, a little bit of brown sugar, salt, and pepper, all wrapped in cinnamon pasta. When the ravioli goes in the boiling water, we sauté some julienned shallots and pears, along with some more pecan pieces, until the pears and shallots are caramelized a bit, add a little white wine, then some cream, some fresh baby spinach, and then finally drop the ravioli in the pan and all of that goes in the pasta bowl and out to the table. I like the dish because I think the flavors mix well together, from savory to sweet, that some little things can catch you by surprise, and that it hits on all the senses.

Part of the reason it works is the flavor combinations make sense. I’m not necessarily breaking new ground by putting butternut squash, pears, cinnamon, and pecans together. It matters more to me to do the dish well than it does to feel as though I’m the only one in town doing it. That said, after I got off work last night, I called Ginger, who was also leaving work, and she suggested we grab a bite to eat, since neither of us had eaten dinner. She had a gift card ready to be used, so we went to Six Plates, a wine bar owned by Matt Beason, whose parents are in our church and who was kind enough to help me learn the culinary landscape when we first got to Durham.

The name of the place speaks to Matt’s concept, which is original: six small plates (think half an entrée), each matched with a wine by the glass. The menu changes often and if full of great things, including one “tenured item”: the Lamby Joes, which are unbelievable little sandwiches of ground lamb and chorizo. (I had them last night – five bucks on Wednesdays.) Ginger and I snacked on the cheese plate and a beet salad as well (with herbed goat cheese and blood oranges) and then the chef, Ted, came out with a dessert for us to try: a gingerbread tower with layers of passion fruit mousse with a small scoop of goat’s milk yogurt gelato on the side. I love gingerbread (Ted said his was made with molasses and stout) and Ginger is a big fan of the passion fruit, but I had never thought of the two together, much less to think of making ice cream out of goat’s milk yogurt. But it worked. Big time. Amazing.

Un-freaking-believable.

Tonight after work, Ginger and I walked over to Watts Grocery for me to drop off my inventory list for my chef and so we could get some late night sliders (we were both hungry again). Most of the folks at the bar were servers and cooks who had finished their shifts and friends or significant others. One of the latter offered us one of her cupcakes. (That’s right, I make it a point to never turn down a cupcake.) They were butternut squash cupcakes with cream cheese icing and they were delicious. She said, “I had all of this squash and I found a recipe for bread, but the recipe made three loaves and I only have one loaf pan, so I decided to make muffins, but they turned out so moist that I figured they worked better as cupcakes.”

I loved getting to follow the trail of her creativity. I wish I could have heard how Ted found his way to the gingerbread tower — passion fruit, goat’s milk and all. What I’m sure of in both cases is they had some time and space – whether serendipitous or intentional – to let their proof, to use a baking term: to rise to their potential. You don’t come up with a fresh idea while ten tickets are hanging, the waiters are restless, and you’re about to run out of mashed potatoes. You might come up with a way to survive, but that’s about it. Creativity needs room to breathe, to grow, to get us to look beyond the heat of the moment.

The lesson carries beyond the kitchen. The Israelis and the Palestinians won’t find meaningful change if life is always lived battle-ready. Our two political parties are not going to govern creatively when their first concern is staying in office and their second is making sure the other party fails. Churches in the midst of these bleak economic times stand little chance of being captured by the creativity of the Spirit when their first question is, “What are we going to cut from this year’s budget?” rather than, “What do you think God wants us to do this year?”

I know new recipes are easier to come by than peace in Palestine and new culinary combinations are easier to talk about than church budgets. Still, tonight, after a week that has swung from long days to gingerbread and cupcakes, they don’t feel so far apart.

Peace,
Milton

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