Looking For the Pope

With Frédy Girardet — After Lunch Line Up

It all began with a conversation in an espresso house in New Orleans with my two great friends Charlie Trotter and Emeril Lagasse. They said, “You must go see “The Pope” with us”. I knew they didn’t mean the Holy Pontiff in Rome .. they meant Chef Frédy Girardet in Switzerland. This…

Looking For the Pope

Food Culture

Heading East … and Back

THE ASIAN CONNECTION AND ITS REVERBERATIONS One of the most intriguing elements in this evolving cuisine has come from the cooking of the people who came to the New World from Asia and of how the products of the New World have caused culinary reverberations throughout their countries. There are two reasons…

Memories and Musings

LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL

When I was 19 I discovered a few very old hardcover books in my grandmother, “Nana’s” collection. They were in excellent condition unlike her battered paperback detective novels she had taken a fancy to late in life. She had always been more than happy to share any part of her boundless love…

Recipes

Full Moon Saloon Fish Sandwich

FULL MOON FISH SANDWICH, ‘FULL MOON SALOON’ Norman Van Aken © All rights reserved. No sandwich in the history of Key West was consumed by more drunks on premise than this one. No sandwich saved more people from a certain, potentially lethal, hangover. Essentially it is a fresh as can be fish…

Turntable

“Remember When”, Alan Jackson

There are certain songs that make you fall in love with your life partner all over again… If you are very lucky. And this song is certainly one of ‘those songs’ that will release that emotion. It is his patience and strength that I find in his voice that makes ‘Remember When’…

Press

Interview, D’Artagnan, “Center Of The Plate”

Courtesy: Center of the Plate

At D’Artagnan we proudly work with chefs across the country, providing them with quality ingredients to express their creativity in the kitchen. Some we have decades-long relationships with, and others are new to the family. The chef we interviewed for this blog post falls in the former camp. Chef Norman Van Aken is…

Memories and Musings

Meeting Julia Child, (The First Time)

I didn’t grow up watching Julia Child on television the way many people of my generation did. My television hours were not inclined toward any aspects of cooking, though we did cook in our home. My mother was a both a restaurant worker and also (for a time) a Girl Scout leader….

A Word on Food™Series

A Word On Food: Gas Station Grub

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The intoxicating smell of fried chicken could be detected from the moment our car tires ran over that hose that rings a bell when you pull in to a gas station just about anywhere. Once fueled I walked into pay … but by that time I’d been seduced and needed to go...

A Word On Food: Burnt Ends

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We got out of the car and paid the meter. A blues guitar in the form and sweaty passion of Tab Benoit seethed out of the porch speakers of the Taurus Beer and Whiskey House. The song was ‘Cherry Tree Blues’. The lyrics are … memorable. If music were weather this would...

A Word On Food: The Story of Otto

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About a year before my great friend and chosen brother Charlie Trotter passed on he began saving me his weekend collection of the New York Times Book Reviews. Charlie loved books … and he knew I did as well. It was one of the most common topics of our shared conversations and...

A Word On Food: Nana’s Hands

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I came home from the store. I had bought a chicken that had been cooked on a rotisserie and was still nearly molten hot. I put away our other groceries and automatically set up a little area by the kitchen sink, which looks out over our yard. I wanted to act pretty...

A Word On Food; P.B. & J’s

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True confession. When I was going to grade school in Diamond Lake, Illinois, I ate a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich every, single, day in our school lunchroom. By 7th grade it had become more of an act of completion. Some kids wanted perfect attendance. My goal was a perfect P.B &...

A Word On Food: Chicharrones

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We had attended a one man performance by actor comedian John Leguizamo at the Adrienne Arscht Theater titled, “Latin History for Morons”. It was excellent and even though certain nuances of some of the dialog that was both in classic and slang Español. I can handle a lot of ‘kitchen Spanish’. Yo...

A Word On Food: Moonshine

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The stories of moonshine and moonshiners have a mystical appeal to many. The practice seems entwined with dark magic. One episode in the history of American Blues music depicts the dangers of moonshine and had to do with the poisoning death of one of the chief architects of that stream of music,...

A Word On Food: Maida Heatter

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In 1992 while working at the Betsy Ross Hotel, now renamed the “Betsy” to make it less tied to the past and shooting for the future, I had found out that Maida Heatter had quietly been in and had dinner the night before. How I found this out I’ll get to shortly....

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@NormanVanAken

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#fusion #newworldcuisine

“If the map of the world were a tablecloth, and I could choose a place at that table, I would sit at the Southern tip of Florida, at the nexus of North America and the Caribbean. My plate would touch Cuba, the Florida Keys, the Yucatan, the West Indies, the Bahamas, and South America. And, if time could tell, I would listen to the tales of voyagers, discoverers, traders and mystics who, in searching for “the Indies”, the Great Kahn and the riches of China, discovered something much more valuable and enduring, A New World of Culinary Treasures. Almost instantly, the cuisines of the Old World began to merge with foods of the new one; This evolutionary and inexorable fusion lies at the heart of New World Cuisine.”

— Norman Van Aken, July, 1993