When people see my cookbook library I don’t think many realize how humbly and singularly it began. But I recall it with crystalline clarity. The year was 1978. I had been cooking for seven years. But … I had not gotten what you would call serious about it as a true profession. For many of us it was simply a way to pay the bills and hang out with some fun people while waiting for whatever mystical road might actually be the one for us. The restaurant that employed me held the map but it was not at all clear to me that was the case. For the initial months it was like many jobs that met the criteria of beating back the wolf of blue class poverty and supplying me with fellow fun loving Key West dwelling renegades. The events that unfolded one day during work started off in the typical way. I worked the breakfast shift alongside the amazingly fast and fast talking Bahama Village woman named Betty Howard. She could put out two plates to my one. Then it was time to get ready to knock out lunch. That is when I heard the sous chef talking to the executive chef about an idea for a special that would include a veal velouté. That was a term way over my head and it bothered me that he knew something and I didn’t. And that ‘grit’ formed the pearl.
I needed to get schooled to keep up or I’d be a line cook slaving away like many of the men and women I’d worked with older than me in those early years from Illinois to Colorado to Florida. I’d heard what going to a cooking school for a degree cost and that was vastly beyond my means. I’d always loved to read though and God or something caused me to stop in the ‘Old Island Bookstore’ on Duval and magically choose the book I celebrate in this video. It laid down a beautiful, understandable foundation. Over the course of the next year I came to a place where when I was asked to fill out a form asking my occupation I now wrote the word ‘Chef’ in bold letters.