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 Dave O’Connell recalls the vivid sights and sounds of New York in the  Seventies during which he started as a phone repairmen and trained and  worked his way into cooking at some of the finer restaurants of the day.   The cast includes everything from celebrities to minor hoodlums.  Dave  expresses his thanks to several generous souls who helped along the way  and gives time to some of the colorful but less praiseworthy  personalities.  He surveys the changes from the small, New York-centered  food scene of the Seventies to the current international explosion of  celebrity chefs.  He recalls the sweat, stress, and fatigue of the  kitchen that make the luxurious, air conditioned dining experience  possible. 

We were working together quietly when Chef René asked, “Was your mother a good cook?”

I had to think about that one. My mother was a much better cook than you would have expected from her Depression-era, Boston-Irish background. In Boston, to this day, a cigarette and a cup of coffee is considered an appetizer. Her father had banned Parmesan cheese from the apartment because it smelled like “stinky feet.” Her mother cooked for hygiene more than flavor; that piece of rump roast was going to stew long enough to kill all the germs and it would be mushy enough for my grandfather to gum down without his dentures. If you needed flavor, the dinner table always had ketchup, mustard and steak sauce in addition to the usual salt and pepper. All meals came with a stack of sliced white bread. My grandmother never bought bread less than a day old and casually scraped off any mold with the back of a knife.

My great-grandfather was a teamster. He was pulled from the hearse he was driving by the horses and the carriage wheel crushed his head. My great-grandmother was widowed with five children. There was breakfast and supper at her house but the kids were on their own for lunch. At the beginning of the 20th century, the saloons in Southie kept barrels of beef jerky and hard tack as free, salty inducements to drink more beer. My grandmother said she would catch the coattails of a workman on his way in and ask him to bring some meat and biscuit on his way out. If he came out at all and was sober enough to have remembered, she got lunch. Otherwise, she did without.

In 1939, my mother left Boston to study Home Economics at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I remember Home Economics as something the girls had to take in junior high school while the boys took Shop, but in 1939 it was still on the cutting edge of social activism, lifting immigrants and the working class out of poverty, connected with the New Deal and championed by my mother’s idol, Eleanor Roosevelt. In our house, its legacy was more economic and nutritional than culinary. Breakfasts alternated daily between cereal and eggs for cholesterol concerns. Orange juice and tomato juice came in different amounts because of their relative nutritional values. Rendered fats and margarine wrappers were saved for greasing pans.

One of my early cooking chores was to massage the plastic package of oleomargarine until the bright orange circle of coloring had mixed with the white vegetable fat to become approximately the color of butter. I was in high school before I tasted real butter. It has been fun to learn all these years later that the desired yellow color in real butter is artificial. It is produced by annatto seeds: the same thing that makes Caribbean rice yellow.

One dish I remember fondly was Pay Day Soup. My father was paid on the 25th of each month and by the 22nd you could feel the pinch. On the 24th, I would be dispatched to the deli to buy a can of tomatoes and five crusty rolls. Over the month, my mother would have accumulated a container full of leftover vegetables and a soup bone, usually ham. These, combined with the tomatoes, some diced potatoes and a liberal dose of black pepper made up my favorite meal of the month.

My mother was adventurous and could do amazing things with a pressure cooker, including one memorable pea soup that painted the ceiling.

     “Yes, she was,” I said.

     “Good. Because more and more I find myself trying to recapture the flavors of my youth.”

This was my maiden effort. It started as a simple essay on my belief that the biggest obstacle amateur cooks face is the lack of knife skills. I decided to add recipes for leek-and-potato soups as practical exercises. I could not resist some personal anecdotes before moving on to a survey of the New York culinary scene in the 70s. I only recommend this book if you feel you need the instruction. I took the anecdotes and history and reorganized them into Potage: the Memoir which is described above. Even I believe it to be a more entertaining read. 

Cooking begins with knife work. You can buy vegetables already cut. You can pay a butcher to reduce large cuts to bite-size pieces. You can use food processors. For $19.95 each, you can buy an array of widgets that infomercials say will simplify kitchen chores (once or twice before they break). However, if you are proficient with a good knife, you can do all of this for yourself and have superior outcomes.

More importantly, using a knife brings you closer to the food you are preparing. You have to pay attention, if for no other reason than to minimize your own bloodshed. When you peel and cut food by hand, you are continuously inspecting it. You are aware of its firmness, aroma and freshness. You know the subtle differences between this batch and the last. With experience, you can start making judgments about quantity, seasoning and cooking time to compensate for these differences. Intimacy with the ingredients is one of the pleasures of cooking.

The most important quality of knife work is uniformity. Even if the vegetables you are cutting will eventually be pureed, they need to be cut the same so that they cook the same. If the knife work will be visible in the finished dish, it needs to be precise in order to look, feel and taste the same in each mouthful. When I start cutting, I always hear Chef René or Bruno telling me, “Couper la même, cuire la même” (cut the same, cook the same).

When I watch a food show on television, the host automatically loses credibility if he picks up a knife by its handle as if he were about to lead a band. I know immediately that this one has never chopped his way through a case of carrots or celery. He has never had to slice and plate a meal quickly and with finesse under the pressure of a dinner rush. He is probably wasting my time. By contrast, some hosts produce food that I have no desire to eat or reproduce but, when I watch their hands, I have to respect their experience.

Knife work begins with the grip. In sports, no one imagines he can hit a golf, tennis or baseball without gripping the club, racquet or bat properly. The same is true in cooking with the added aspect of personal safety. A proper grip minimizes the risk of the knife slipping. When the knife is operating on its own, it is as likely to cut you as anything else on the counter. The grip determines the precision you can bring to fine work as well as the stamina for chopping large volumes of vegetables into uniform pieces.

Pick the knife up by the blade, pinching it between your forefinger and your thumb at the balance point. Be careful to crook your forefinger to prevent it from sticking out below the blade’s edge.

Extend the handle across your palm.

Wrap your three remaining fingers around the handle.

The knife is now an extension of your hand. It will rotate longitudinally and move vertically to the full range of motion of your wrist. The thumb and forefinger guide the blade while your palm delivers the force of your wrist and forearm. The knife cannot slip in your hand. You are ready for anything from a potato to a steak to a domestic disturbance.

(The book includes photo illustrations.)