An Onion in My Pocket Read online

  ALSO BY DEBORAH MADISON

  In My Kitchen

  The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

  Vegetable Literacy

  Seasonal Fruit Desserts

  What We Eat When We Eat Alone

  Vegetable Soups

  Vegetarian Suppers

  Local Flavors

  This Can’t Be Tofu!

  Williams-Sonoma Vegetables

  Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

  The Vegetarian Table: America

  The Savory Way

  The Greens Cookbook

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2020 by Deborah Madison

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to reprint “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Madision, Deborah, author.

  Title: An onion in my pocket : my life with vegetables / Deborah Madison.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019039918 (print) | LCCN 2019039919 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525656012 (hardback) | ISBN 9780525656029 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Madison, Deborah. | Cooks—United States—Biography. | Food writers—United States—Biography. | Vegetarianism—United States. | Cooking (Vegetables) | Greens (Restaurant : San Francisco, Calif.)

  Classification: LCC TX649.M326 A3 2020 (print) | LCC TX649.M326 (ebook) | DDC 641.5092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019039918

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019039919

  Ebook ISBN 9780525656029

  Cover photograph by Patrick McFarlin

  Cover design by John Gall

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  To the memory of my very different parents, each of whom made their best effort, and to my very much alive and equally different siblings

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Deborah Madison

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. Twenty Missing Years

  2. Sesshin

  3. Family

  4. Young Life in Davis

  5. My Mother’s Recipe Boxes

  6. My Central Valley—Flat and Fertile

  7. Dashi Days

  8. My Buddhist Family: Living and Eating Together

  9. Shopping for Food

  10. Twenty Missing Years Again

  11. Three Nested Bowls

  12. Guest Season at Tassajara

  13. Also in the Seventies

  14. Three Diversions Before Greens

  15. Starting Greens

  16. Creating a Predictable World

  17. The Menu

  18. Dinner

  19. What Inspired the Food at Greens

  20. Kitchen Lessons

  21. My Vegetarian Problem

  22. Making Books

  23. Book Tours

  24. More About Books

  25. Nourishment

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Introduction

  Onions, Snakes, and What Matters

  If there are not onions in my pockets or my purse, maybe there are shallots, or some amaranth leaves, or seeds collected from the garden, or something else food related. Once there was a four-foot-long gopher snake in my purse—safekeeping for the walk home. These snakes do lower the numbers of those garden pests. But there was a day when there actually was an onion in my pocket because I had been cooking with my pal Dan, and I had brought the onions that we needed for a pizza. There was one left over. In Spanish class I pulled out the extra onion and put it on the desk so I could find my notes and pens—also crammed into my pockets that day. People started to laugh. To me it was utterly normal.

  That’s partially what it means to be a food person—that it is normal to find an onion in your pocket. Or that you fly home with quarts of fragrant berries on your lap, or you stuff a bag of superlong stalks of late-summer rhubarb into the overhead. It’s likely that when a friend visits you in your new desert home she arrives with egg cartons in her suitcase—a ripe fig nestled into each little depression—or that another friend arrives with an extra suitcase filled with quince. Food swirls around us. We reach out for some of it; other times we toss something good into the swirl for others to enjoy. It’s the forever potlatch of gift and exchange.

  I didn’t always know I’d be so involved with food and I’ve long tried to piece together when it first happened, when food became something good and compelling. I think it was when I was sixteen. My parents had gone to Europe for a sabbatical and farmed each of their four kids out to another family. I got to live with a couple who did not have children, who had lived many times in France, who loved food and knew how to cook. Living with them I discovered that food could be good every night of the week. Given my parents’ uneven temperaments and my mother’s frugality I had no idea that this could be so. But it was and it was miraculous. Cheese soufflés, chicken poached in wine with mushrooms and cream, salads from the garden—it was all so delicious and it was all new to me. When my parents returned from their trip, they remarked on my new round face, evidence that butter and cream, predinner gin and tonics, and the much better wines we drank—the plenty of very good food and drink, in short—had had an effect. When people ask me when I became interested in food, I tell them it was when I discovered that food could taste good. Every night of the week. These meals did change my life.

  The man in my temporary household was, like my father, a botanist; only his specialty was alliums, not grass. Like all botanists and food people I have known, his eyes were open to all kinds of possibilities, especially culinary ones. Over a long weekend we took a trip to Mount Lassen. Once there and settled into our motel, we set out on a hike with the intention of spending the day on the trail. Shortly into our walk, I noticed some funny-looking things poking out of the ground. I asked what they were and the botanist and his wife both responded with ecstatic shouts: “Morels! They’re morels!” We immediately filled our hats with them, abandoned the walk, and drove into town in search of butter and cream.

  We simmered the morels in cream and piled them on buttered toast for lunch. They were magnificent and they taught me my first food rule: Break your plans in the face of something wonderful and utterly unexpected, like morels. Let them take over and push you here and there as they will. You will at least come away with a memory. This event is decades old, but it remains a vivid memory.

  * * *

  —

  Despite this introduction to the pleasures of the table and my excitement about food tasting good, I didn’t act right away. The thought “I want to be a chef” never occurred to me. Instead, I finished high school, went to college, dropped out, got back in, changed univers
ities, graduated, got a job, went to Japan, then became a practicing, even ordained, Buddhist for about twenty years. It wasn’t until I became a Zen student that I became interested in cooking and started to cook in earnest. It’s supposed to be so austere, that Zen life, but people still have to eat and someone has to cook. That person became me in 1970.

  I’ve cooked for a long time: in the San Francisco Zen Center; at our monastery at Tassajara; at our farm, Green Gulch; at Alice Waters’s restaurant in Berkeley, Chez Panisse; at Greens, the vegetarian restaurant I opened in San Francisco; at the American Academy in Rome; at Café Escalera in Santa Fe; and at home—when I finally got one. (I lived in community until I was forty.) At some point I decided to look back to find out what matters when it comes to food, and that’s what this book is about.

  1. Twenty Missing Years

  I was twenty-one when I carried out a study for a professor at UC Berkeley interviewing people who had gone from rat-infested dark old dangerous Victorian buildings to what was considered to be a more enlightened concept of public housing than the monolithic high-rise apartment buildings that public housing programs usually produced. It was fascinating to go into the homes of people who were unlike anyone I knew and listen to them talk about their lives. But it was also discouraging. Despite their clean, safe, attractive new homes with nearby laundry rooms and grassy lawns for their children to play on, they were filled with complaints. They wanted bigger apartments; the laundry rooms were too far away; they wanted different playground equipment. I began to question human nature itself. And I had to ask myself if I really wanted to be a city planner. Did it make sense to work to satisfy people’s wants if they’d never really be, for once and for all, satisfied? This was my big question, not what to eat. It’s what ultimately drove me to the Zen Center, but so did other things.

  After a Japanese class, a trip to Japan, and some other events I found the Zen Center in San Francisco. I spent nearly two decades there studying Zen Buddhism, but until recently I ignored that stretch of time, allowing those years, which for most people are important start-up career and family years, to remain blank in my personal history. There they are, unaccounted-for decades, an awkward pause that I haven’t known what to do about. Should I admit to those years? Ignore them? Try to explain them?

  Mostly I’ve been silent. I haven’t talked about them. When I think of that stretch of time, I feel distanced from it, partly because it was a long time ago, but also because I used to find myself regretting that I didn’t go to graduate school, where I felt I could be more effective at righting the wrongs of the world. Today there are students at the Zen Center who have gone to graduate school, gotten PhDs, and worked at interesting jobs before becoming involved with practice, but that wasn’t the case when I was twenty-one. Almost none of us had much experience in life before sitting down and crossing our legs on the round black cushion. We had been to college, maybe worked some, and that was about it. I had more experience than most, and that wasn’t a lot.

  Still, those years were exciting ones in the culture at large, as well as a deeply vital time in my own life. It was a time of enormous upheaval and hope with the hippies, the Fillmore, Janis and Jimi and Bob Marley, the Black Panthers. Not that I really was a part of that, except as a Zen student. I only went to the Fillmore once, when I heard Cream. Still, one could have done worse. At a certain point, I probably should have left the formal Zen life of robes, ordinations, and positions, but I didn’t know that so I stayed. When I did leave I was in my late thirties. I first lived in Berkeley, then in Rome. After a year I returned to Berkeley, wrote my first book, then moved to San Francisco, followed by a few years in Flagstaff, and finally, when I realized I’d never fit into life in northern Arizona, I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, mainly because there was a farmers’ market there. I’ve been in the Southwest for almost thirty years. I do sit occasionally, sometimes even quite regularly for periods of time. But I don’t belong to any Buddhist group. I tend to consider myself a recovering Buddhist.

  In the early years of Zen Center most of us were in our twenties or maybe, in a few cases, thirties. Early thirties. It was an unlikely bunch composed largely of young men that were actually putting together Buddhist practice in America. They had been doing it for a few years before I arrived on the tail end of what was then an exciting experiment. It was a challenging time, a crazy time. We didn’t know what we were doing exactly, but we were feeling our way into a practice life. Once Zen Center began to import Japanese teachers and with them all the rules and traditions of Japanese monastic life, many of these founding students peeled off and headed elsewhere. I saw Zen Center go from a group of young, eccentric, and enthusiastic individuals who were willing to do whatever had to be done to a center for Zen practice with an abbot who was a near miss for a CEO. This drift from the heart to the wallet corresponded to my time there—the end of the sixties, the seventies, and into the eighties. How did I even get there?

  I blame it on a radio station.

  I pretty much grew up with KPFA, Berkeley’s then truly radical listener-supported radio station, and the only station on in our house. Each day began at seven sharp with the shimmering duet from Bach’s Coffee Cantata, which for years served as my wake-up call. On Wednesday evenings I always listened to Pauline Kael’s movie reviews. My fifteen-year-old friends and I daringly referred to her at that time as “Miss Bitch.” But when she came to Davis and was on a panel with four men to discuss Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D., I saw that she was warm and compassionate and very, very smart. I wrote her a fan letter and she answered me with an invitation to visit her at her home in Berkeley. I went, and eventually I got to know her and spend a brief time as a “Paulette,” as her hang-about fans were called. Film was foremost on my list of interests for a long time.

  Also on KPFA was Kenneth Rexroth, that important connector in the sixties, mumbling his poems on Sunday mornings. Phil Elwood played jazz later in the day. William Mandel spoke each week on contemporary Soviet politics, and then there was Alan Watts’s program, Philosophy: East and West. These were the voices that came to feel intimate to me in my teenage years.

  In his refined, elegant voice Watts talked about Eastern thought and religion, Buddhism in particular. My father always listened to his program very carefully, to both weekly broadcasts. One day Watts was describing the life of Buddhist monks. As he talked about their quest for enlightenment, the practices of sitting meditation, chanting, and begging for food, I could see lines of monks in their black robes as clearly as if they were bowing before me with their bowls uplifted. It was an odd and powerful moment, a tap on the shoulder, a gentle push toward what did become my life for a period of time. Although this was an unforgettable moment, when I was a young teenager devoting myself to the big questions in life via Zen study was a frightening prospect. I was just becoming interested in boys, clothes, and what I hoped would be my wonderful but unknown future. The path of the seeker hadn’t figured in my life scheme at all and its first fit was an awkward one. “Later,” I told myself, keeping the possibility of such a radical change safely at bay while not discarding it altogether.

  When that “later” moment finally came, an impulse to go to Japan wasn’t as out of the blue as I first thought. Japan meant Buddhism for me. I didn’t know what I’d do once I got there but it was definitely a spiritual destination. I thought, vaguely, that I might end up studying Zen, but I didn’t have a clue as to how that might happen. Nor did I know anyone who practiced Zen meditation, or know how to go about finding a teacher in Japan in 1969. But I did think it would be useful to learn something of the language. The Free University in Berkeley was offering a Japanese class.

  I showed up one late afternoon at a house on Dwight Way and sat down at a wooden kitchen table with a handful of other students. I looked around. There was something very pleasing about this space. It was light, unlike my dark apartment on Shattuck Avenue. It was calm. Clean. Ordered
. The kitchen shelves were lined with jars of beans and grains. Food was cooking on the stove and it smelled good. Tea was brewed and served in small Japanese cups. We had left our shoes at the door, which seemed a bit odd, but now I could see that the sanded floors were free of dirt and they gleamed. Dust motes freed themselves from our clothes and glimmered in the golden afternoon light. Things were in their places. I liked it. We sat at a large wooden table and practiced writing and reading katakana characters until the calm was broken by the sound of a bell, which caused most of the students at the table to suddenly put their papers together, then head for a room upstairs.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the student next to me. He turned out to be Paul Discoe, the man who had organized the class because he was going to Japan to study carpentry. For five years.

  “Zazen,” he said. It told me nothing. “Sitting meditation,” he added, as if that were an explanation.

  I was, it turned out, in the Berkeley Zen Center. All at once those disparate elements from my past collided, bringing me to a place where Zen meditation was practiced—and just eighty miles from where I grew up. Unable to ignore the coincidences, I asked if I could sit, too. Mel Weitsman, the resident monk, gave me some hasty instruction. Keep your back straight, eyes lowered but open, count your breaths from one to ten, and don’t move even if your legs hurt! My Zen practice began the same day my Japanese lessons did.

  I did go to Japan a few months later, with my brother Mike. We boarded the Golden Bear, a merchant marine ship, and at the end of an ordinary weekday we pulled away from the pier in San Francisco and sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge as the afternoon fog poured in over the hills. There was the small crew and eight passengers. It was heaven to be on the ocean. My brother and I crouched on the deck and watched the waves break over the bow during stormy weather. We saw large birds. We ate well and often. We read and studied Japanese and all was well.