A cookbook on the end of the world
Talking to Joe Beef chefs was darker, truer than just cooking chatter
LOS ANGELES— On a recent morning, chefs David McMillan and Frédéric Morin sat at Chateau Marmont, the swank hotel on the Sunset Strip, to talk about their new book, Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse, Another Cookbook of Sorts.
It is a sequel to their debut cookbook, which they also wrote with Meredith Erickson, and it is again about the pair’s much-lauded restaurant Joe Beef in Montreal, where they practice a distinctly Québécois style of French-influenced cooking.
In the diffuse light of the hotel’s patio-adjacent dining room there were double cappuccinos on the table, an uneasy smokiness to the air from the wildfires scorching nearby neighbourhoods and the distinct feeling that the ghost of Anthony Bourdain (patron saint of Joe Beef, a habitue of the Chateau) was among us. The end of the world, the unifying principle of their new cookbook, seemed a reasonable topic of conversation, though it quickly strayed darker and truer than just cookbook chatter.
I’m just going to start with the obvious: Why the apocalypse?
David McMillan: There was a moment when it hit us. We’d gone from lean-and-mean cooking machines who could work 120 hours a week and not feel anything and all of a sudden we had multiple businesses, three kids each, 80 employees. And there was a sense of anxiety — we both struggled with anxiety in our careers — and then this burden of responsibil- ity, of financial obligations. We also discovered that we’re also loving, sentient people, that these children that were thrust upon us as we were building careers meant the world to us. That all of a sudden we had this heightened sense of awareness that the protection of these beautiful children, that this love that we were feeling that we’d never felt before, that we didn’t even have for ourselves, was, you know, crippling to a point. But us being both, let’s say, in French you say “debrouillard.” Frédéric Morin: Resourceful. McMillan: We started to focus on the what ifs? We care so much about our families, about the staff who has worked for us for 10 years who are effectively our wards, now, about our restaurants. To some degree, you fear it all going away.
Morin: The thing is, the first book was easy, in a way. Anybody’s first book, you write it at 35 or 40, it’s like from zero to 40, everything you’ve done, every funny story you’ve lived goes in it. Now another fear of mid-life life is of repeating yourself, so we tried different approaches but it was all gimmicky. And then we arrived at this: the philosophical essence of how we perceive the apocalypse, but like in a practical, everyday way. We’re huge fans of Bass Pro Shop, of going camping, of alternative fuels.
McMillan: What’s the right axe? What’s the best chain saw? Cooking doesn’t define us. We are cooks, but everybody has a job. We’re both into art, mortise-and-tenon joinery, woodworking, couches, antiques, Persian rugs.
It’s about what gets saved versus what gets lost.
Morin: But it is the end-ofdays theme that brings it all together, about how knowing about all parts of life is what you’re going to need to know in the end. It’s a risky theme, because we could have easily gotten into the kind of doomsday, boys-like-guns apocalypse vibe, which we tried hard to steer away from. Because realistically, there’s not an AR-15 or a reserve of gold bullion or dehydrated potato or any thickwalled cement bunker that can help you live for 20 years in the desolate world.
I always put chocolate in earthquake survival kits.
Morin: It’s a good idea, because there’s always too much food at dessert.
McMillan: A lot of guys are way too cool to do chocolate mousse — Morin: Or to eat it. McMillan: But I’ll tell you, if you put chocolate mousse on the menu, it’s going to outsell everything else hands down.
Morin: What’s more important than your chocolate mousse skills is that you go, like a determined lemming, to the flea market on a Sunday morning, and pick up milk glass or a bunch of mismatched cups, six weird glasses to serve the mousse in. And that makes your dinner — that chocolate mousse in your flea market finds. There’s also a cow in the survival kit. For milk. You can do it with Carnation milk too; chocolate mousse made with Carnation milk is really good.
The cow is hard to fit in the root cellar. “What would Jacques Pepin do?” is a recurrent theme in your book.
McMillan: We grew up, both of us similar — me Anglophone, him Francophone — which is exactly Quebec. We grew up in the same kind of poor, suburban way. He didn’t have cable, I didn’t have cable, we got three channels on TV and one of them was Vermont Public Television. I’m a Vermonter at heart through osmosis because I watched Vermont television; he watched Vermont television — we’re both raised on the Victory Garden and Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Pierre Franey, This Old House. So when we had a restaurant, we planted a victory garden, we did all the carpentry, we’re doing French food, we want copper pots like Jacques Pepin, our restaurant is a PBS restaurant, our esthetic was always the antique plates, our food was French. Even with the Nordic trends in cooking, we were stuck with Pierre Franey.
And now we’re the last men standing that do liver with onions and kidneys with Madeira sauce and I can do crepes for dessert and people love it. These foods are extinct.
Rabbit with mustard sauce for two, extinct, duck a l’orange properly done, not fake gastrique and duck breast sliced, the whole damn thing, done right, the leg served to you as a first course with salad and then the breast as a second with the sauce and the press. This cooking is dead.