Cookbook offers food for thought
Coi chef’s tome has stories and recipes
Chefs who quote poets and jazz greats or ponder art films are, I’d say, rare.
But that’s San Francisco chef Daniel Patterson for you. The chef-owner of the twoMichelin star Coi is promoting Coi: Stories and Recipes, a cookbook that wants to be poetry.
The ingredient lists in this cookbook aren’t exactly handy — they’re placed at the back of the book. However, the recipes are talky and full of technical information and commentary. “It’s meant to be read like a story,” he says. “It was most important that I keep the voice vibrant.”
Chefs will (or should) love the cookbook, but home cooks might retreat from cooking from it; however, if they read it, they’ll certainly become smarter, more thoughtful cooks.
Cooking is a craft, he maintains, not an art, but like crafts, it can be artistic in expression. “Once chefs start to think of themselves as artists, it sets them in a very wrong direction.”
Cooking and feeding people, he says, is an act of generosity. “It’s the most primal thing you can do. You cook for people, and you forget it at your own peril. Art isn’t necessary for survival; it’s necessary for the soul to make life worth living. But we need a house to live in and food to eat.”
He weighs in with Ezra Pound, “He once said poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music and music atrophies when it gets too far away from dance.”
In the same way, he says, food is diminished once you remove it from the human context.
He takes almost as much pleasure in writing as in cooking (18-hour shifts in the kitchen don’t faze him). As with music, he finds food is difficult to capture in words.
In cooking, Patterson tries to distil ingredients into “a form as direct as possible and stay as close as possible to what they actually are,” he says. “That’s where most of the emotion of food comes from. It’s the closest link between the person who cooks and the person who eats.”
The goal in the Coi kitchen, he says, is to make food delicious, thought-provoking and memorable. Seasoning is a big part of hitting maximum deliciousness. Patterson goes so far as to collect sea water (“we have to go a little offshore”) for the perfect seasoning for some vegetables.