San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Madeleine Kamman mentored many
A few years ago — I’m not sure when, because I remember it like it was yesterday — I was having dinner with Madeleine Kamman at a popular restaurant in San Francisco.
The French-born Kamman ordered the roast chicken. When it arrived, she brushed back her white hair, looked down at the plate then focused her piercing blue eyes on the server: “A chicken breast?” she asked incredulously. “I’d like a thigh.”
The nervous server explained that the restaurant only served the breast and Madeleine shot back. “I’m a simple woman. I don’t need anything fancy. I just want the thigh.”
I sat there cringing as the server went back to see what she could do. She returned to tell us they didn’t have any thighs.
“I’ve never heard of a chicken without thighs,” Madeleine said in her cultured, lilting voice dripping with sarcasm. Madeleine Kamman died July 16 at age 87 in Vermont after a long illness. Anyone who knew her could tell similar stories about her sometimes-combative nature, but they could just as quickly detail examples of her kindness.
Through the years she influenced more than a hundred chefs as the founder of the School for American Chefs at Beringer Vineyards in St. Helena that she ran from 1988 to 2000. On many sessions there would be more than 100 chefs, who had already launched their careers, competing for eight spots in her class.
Gary Danko and Joanne Weir both call her a mentor. So do I.
Through my many encounters with Madeleine — three trips to France with her and regular participation in her classes at Beringer and at her school in New Hampshire — she was responsible for teaching me to cook, and more importantly how to taste critically.
Without a doubt she had the most amazing palate of anyone I’ve known. She could take a sauce prepared by a student that tasted like dishwater and bring it up to the standards of the French Laundry.
I spent a week with her when she opened her school in Glenn, N.H., in 1984, we would dine out every night and she would question me relentlessly.
“What do you taste in the sauce?” she asked of what seemed like a simple beef jus. “Taste,” she demanded. “What do you taste? Can you detect carrots? There are too many carrots in the sauce. It’s unbalanced.”
Before long she had me picking out garlic, thyme and who knows what else in each dish we tasted.
That knowledge was continually reinforced by taking her two-week class in Annecy, France, where she would ride students relentlessly but would give them a hug and an encouraging word on their way out the door.
She had a well-publicized disregard for Julia Child, who was coming of age in Boston when Madeleine was running the Modern Gourmet cooking school and her student-run restaurant Chez La Mere Madeleine in the nearby suburb of Newton, Mass. During that time she famously hung legendary French chef Paul Bocuse’s portrait upside down in the dining room in response to an article that quoted him saying that a woman’s place is in the bedroom, not in the professional kitchen.
She was an early feminist, and no doubt resented the fact that Child became much more famous than she did. Child had perfect timing; Madeleine didn’t. She wrote seven cookbooks, and many were ahead of their time. She delved into scientific principles in “Making of a Cook” in 1971 (and completely revised it as “The New Making of a Cook” in 1995), long before Harold McGee wrote his tomes.
She wrote “Dinner Against the Clock” (1973) before quick-cooking recipes became all the rage. She championed female cooks in “When French Women Cook” in 1976. In fact, she accused French chefs of appropriating the cooking of their mothers and grandmothers and calling it their own. She also became known for her PBS cooking show, “Madeleine Cooks,” that aired from 1984 to 1991. She could cut down a 6-foot-4 chef with a look or a three-word admonition, yet most people in her classes — both lay and professional — would come away changed.
Madeleine was one of the most complex women I’ve known, and also the most talented. She stayed with me for several weeks when she was teaching at Tante Marie cooking school in San Francisco, and she was the most considerate houseguest I could hope for.
However, it wasn’t until I heard the news of her death that I fully realized just how important she was in shaping my career. I met her in 1981 when she was teaching in my friend Renie Steves’ cooking school in Fort Worth, Texas. I wrote a story about her in the Dallas Times Herald that was respectful but not necessarily flattering. She wrote back saying that it was fair, and invited me to visit her cooking school.
Of course there were bumps — she didn’t talk to me for about a year after I wrote a critical review of one of her favorite students, and I lost touch with her over the last few years — but I still recall snippets of our time together when writing reviews and stories.
I remember on the first trip to France, five of us, including two chefs and Steves, spent two weeks traveling around the country in a compact car. Each of us chose a place we wanted to go (mine was Carcassonne to taste cassoulet), and the trip became one of deep cultural immersion. Squeezed into the car one morning, she told one young chef, who was very talented but hadn’t gone to college, to put his career on hold and get a college degree.
On our various outings she pointed out the indications of Roman and Gothic architecture and how various cultures expanded the cuisine. “Until you know history you won’t understand how the cuisine developed,” I remember her saying. “Once you know that, you’ll be in a position to deviate and know why it will work.”
Always a student of history, she left the Napa Valley in the early 2000s to move to Vermont to work on a graduate degree in German literature. She later moved to Florida before moving back to Vermont near her two sons. Her husband, Alan Kamman, died in 2014.
She was a force in the American food scene, but when I ask younger food journalists about Madeleine, many don’t know who she was. However any serious student of our culinary history will put Madeleine right up there with Alice Waters, Julia Child and James Beard for the influence she had on her adopted home.