The United States of Arugula (29 page)

FOR THOSE BAY AREA
gourmets for whom even humanely raised meat was inhumane, there was Greens, the vegetarian restaurant run under the auspices of the San Francisco Zen Center, with produce trucked in from the Zen Center’s own spread in Marin County, Green Gulch Farm. Greens didn’t open until 1979, but it, too, was a product of the sixties counterculture—in this case, as experienced by a young Zen Buddhist named Deborah Madison. A graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she had studied sociology and city planning, Madison moved into the Zen Center in 1969, another idealistic kid seeking refuge from the violence at the barricades.

The Zen Center kept a vegetarian kitchen. At the time of Madison’s arrival there, the cooks were experimenting with macrobiotics, a movement that, like J. I. Rodale’s organic philosophy, had been around for a while but hadn’t received much attention in America until the hippies discovered it. The modern macrobiotic movement had been founded in the 1930s by a Japanese man, George Ohsawa (1893–1966), who borrowed from ancient Chinese philosophies (Taoism, Confucianism) and traditional East Asian dietary practices to devise a multidisciplinary nutritional and philosophical program that, above all, sought balance between the complementary dark and light forces of the universe—the proverbial yin and yang. Ohsawa placed special emphasis on whole grains such as brown rice as the most “balanced” of foods, while arguing that sugary foods, processed foods, and animal-based foods (meats, eggs, dairy products) were either “too yin” or “too yang,” and were thus to be avoided. While his Asian disciples were able to fashion myriad flavorful dishes faithful to this philosophy, such as miso soups and vegetable stir-fries, in the United States, where Ohsawa’s teachings were poorly understood in the sixties, “going macro” seemed to be mostly a matter of dutifully, mirthlessly eating brown rice to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

The Zen Center was an exception, Madison recalls, a place whose head
cook, Loring Palmer, “made macrobiotics what it could be, in terms of realizing its great potential for balance and flavor.” But even for Buddhists who had forsworn material pleasures and outside diversions, Palmer’s meals were a bit scant, and many of the students used what little funds they had to duck out to the coffee shop down the street. When her turn to run the kitchen arrived, Madison aimed to woo back her fellow Buddhists, preparing crowd-pleasers like waffles and pancakes and “bringing on the butter and the cream and the cheese.” It worked, but it wasn’t especially healthful fare, and Madison realized that she had a lot to learn about vegetarian cooking, and cooking in general.

The early seventies were a good time to go down this path. In 1971, a Berkeley woman named Frances Moore Lappé published a vegetarian manifesto called
Diet for a Small Planet
that became a surprise best seller. A bible of the burgeoning ecology movement, Lappé’s book argued not only that a perfectly healthful, protein-rich diet could be had without any reliance on meat but that a nationwide switch to vegetarianism would ease world hunger. Having put aside her graduate studies at the University of California in the sixties in order to research the root causes of famine and poverty, Lappé came to the conclusion that the issue was not one of food scarcity but of misbegotten policies: America was investing more than half of its grain in the feeding of its livestock, an inefficient use of resources. If people ate this grain themselves and left the animals alone, they would get all the nutrition they needed and have plenty of food left to give to disadvantaged peoples.

Lappé’s outlook might have been politically naïve, but she presented her argument in a measured, non-crackpot tone that was persuasive to a lot of readers.
*
She became a counterculture heroine, and her book sold nearly two million copies in the seventies, earning her mainstream press recognition as the “Julia Child of the Soybean Circuit.” The same year
Diet for a
Small Planet came
out,
The New York Times
seized the opportunity to harness the zeitgeist by publishing
The New York Times Natural Foods Cookbook.
The
Times
’s book was written not by Craig Claiborne but by another food writer, Jean Hewitt, who compiled its recipes from those the paper had received from readers more interested in lentil stews and tabbouleh salad than
in filet de boeuf braisé Prince Albert.

Even the Zen Center had its own culinary star of sorts, Ed Brown, author of
The Tassajara Bread Book
(1970). Brown was a monk in training at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the organization’s monastery located in Monterey County, inland from Big Sur. A gentle soul who had endured a difficult childhood, losing his mother at age three and spending much of his early life in an orphanage, Brown found in Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen Center’s founder and abbot, the loving authority figure he’d long sought. Eager to do something to demonstrate his gratitude to Suzuki and the other monks, Brown took up baking bread. He turned out to be very good at it. The book of recipes he compiled, appealingly packaged in a folksy cover of rough brown paper decorated with exotic typography and pleasant line drawings—the food journalist Ann Hodgman wrote in 2003 that the volume looked like something that “should be sitting on a butcher-block kitchen counter 30 years ago, next to an avocado pit that someone’s trying to sprout in a jar of water”—became another left-field publishing phenomenon, selling 750,000 copies and establishing itself as a fixture on the hippie cook’s shelf.

Baking bread was an especially popular activity among vegetarians and back-to-the-landers, redolent of self-sufficiency and independence from the nefarious corporate chemists who foisted rubbery presliced Wonder Bread upon the masses. Even James Beard got in on the act, writing
Beard on Bread
in his debut as a Knopf author. The late sixties had been something of a literary fallow period for the Big Buddha, who had coasted on reputation and not sold many books. But Judith Jones believed that the old-timer had plenty of worthwhile work left in him, and she lassoed him into her stable of cookbook stars.

Beard on Bread
was something of a commercial comeback, winning
great reviews and doing brisk bookstore business upon its 1973 publication. Jones had shrewdly packaged it in earth tones, its type set in dark brown, its illustrations done in light brown, its cover a scrawly pen-and-ink illustration of a yeasty country loaf on a wheat-beige background; whether by accident or design, the book looked like a Yankee cousin of
The Tassajara Bread Book.
With lots of whole-grain bread recipes and a dedication at the front of the book to that simple-life sensualist Elizabeth David (who was at work on her own baking masterpiece,
English Bread and Yeast Cookery), Beard on Bread
connected its author to a whole new generation of readers who might have otherwise regarded him as a jolly, fat anachronism.

But as the saying goes, man cannot live on bread alone. Vegetarianism remained a tricky business in the early seventies, its culinary potential often obscured by nut-ball ascetics who advocated chewing each mouthful of brown rice in meditative silence for ten minutes (Fletcherizing redux!) and overcompensatory mad-scientist cooks who believed in meat-substitute “nut loaves” fashioned of cashews, sunflower seeds, cream cheese, curry powder, carrot shavings, eggs, raisins, and dried apricots. Even a credible text like
Diet for a Small Planet
made meatless eating sound like an arduous if redeeming chore. Lappé was so concerned with nutritional credibility that she advocated complex meal-planning prescriptions in which foods with low amino-acid counts needed to be combined with foods with high amino-acid counts in order to satisfy the body’s protein requirements.
*

Madison, for her part, just wanted to figure out a way to make vegetarian meals as flavorful and rich in variety as the stuff that Julia Child cooked. While studying and cooking at the Zen Center and at Green Gulch Farm, she indulged in an active fantasy life about food, subscribing to
Gourmet
(“I’m sure I’m the only Zen student who did”) and devouring any reports she could get her hands on about the burgeoning Bay Area scene,
whose restaurants she couldn’t afford to visit on her tiny stipend. “I would read reviews that Caroline Bates wrote about California restaurants, and I had no idea what she was describing,” Madison says. “It was like hearing about an orgasm when you’re ten years old and you can’t possibly understand what it might be. She was describing all these veloutés and textures, and it just sounded like the most wonderful thing in the world—this absolutely over-the-top thing that could be had for nothing. I mean, it was
legal
—you just needed money.”

Fate intervened when, one day in 1977, Alice Waters and Lindsey Shere paid a visit to Green Gulch Farm to see what it was all about, and Madison was assigned the task of showing them around. “I just started asking them questions,” Madison says. “Have you ever heard of Richard Olney or Elizabeth David? Oh, you
know
Elizabeth David?! Do you—do you make tarte tatin?” The amused Waters and Shere were enchanted by the overeager Zen student and invited her to dine at their restaurant some time as their guest. Madison took them up on their offer the very next evening, arriving at Chez Panisse’s doorstep with her then husband, a fellow student at the Zen Center.

“It was just the most memorable meal,” Madison says, “because the sensibility of food that I’d kind of gained through reading but had never really experienced—there it was! Jean-Pierre Moullé was cooking, and he made this beautiful little shellfish ragout with mussels and clams and scallops. We had a lamb course of little lamb chops and turnip puree. Of course, there was a little salad. And then there was a cheese course. My husband and I had goat cheese for the first time ever and just, like, went ballistic. Then we had little fruit tarts. And we also went through two baskets of bread, and lots of butter.”

Flush with food, wine, animal fats, and excitement, Madison returned late to Green Gulch Farm and noticed that the abbot’s light was still on. “I knocked on the door and I went up,” she says. “And I said, ‘I’ve just been to Chez Panisse, and
I have to work there!’
You didn’t do that at Zen Center. You didn’t announce what you
wanted
to do. It was a very hierarchical situation
where you were told, ‘You’re going to go to Tassajara,’ or ‘You’re gonna be on the board,’ or ‘You’re not gonna be on the board.’”

The abbot, Richard Baker, who succeeded Suzuki upon the latter’s death in 1971, was an intimidating figure who didn’t brook uppitiness among his students.
*
But it was Madison’s good fortune that Baker was almost as food-obsessed as she. Not only had he, too, dined at Chez Panisse; he had privately been mulling the idea of opening a restaurant in conjunction with the Zen Center, and was only too happy to let one of his students apprentice with Alice.

Madison was immediately thrown into the Chez Panisse whirl as the deputy to Lindsey Shere, the pastry chef, and took over desserts completely for a couple of months when Shere went away for the summer. The following year, she joined Waters and several other members of the Chez Panisse staff on a culinary tour of France. While overseas, Madison collected seeds for all manner of salad greens and vegetables—radicchio, borage, chicories, different varieties of cucumbers—that were relatively unknown in America at the time, and handed them over to the head gardener at Green Gulch Farm. In one fell swoop, she introduced a whole mess of new options to the Bay Area salad mix.

By 1979, Madison was seasoned enough as a cook to open Greens, a San Francisco restaurant that magically reconciled the precepts of austere Zen Buddhism and hedonistic Chez Panisse–ism. “Attention to detail is such a big thing in Buddhism,” she says. “I’ve always felt that there was a strong element of that in the Chez Panisse kitchen. There could be opera playing, there could be zydeco music, there could be hustle and bustle, but in terms of real focus, the level of concentration was phenomenal. It was a beautiful example of what Buddhist practice might bring to a similar situation.”

As lofty and New Agey as this statement might sound to skeptical ears,
it sums up the achievement of the post–Jeremiah Tower Chez Panisse. Waters could be derided for not having “restaurant chops” as a cook—a charge that was also leveled with some frequency at Beard, Child, and Claiborne—but she was exacting in her vision. Even as her restaurant went through its carousel of chefs of different influences, from the traditionally French Moullé to the Southwestern-minded Mark Miller to the savory-Italian Paul Bertolli (whose hearty, gloppy, slow-cooked preparations of short ribs and pork shoulder were called “swamp cuisine” by the waitstaff), Chez Panisse retained the indelible Waters mark: seasonal, local, fresh, composed, everything just so.

In embracing this philosophy for Greens, Madison lapped the vegetarian competition and put to shame the drab, brown-rice hippie-hangover feedlots that still dotted San Francisco. Madison believed in bright purees of multicolored summer tomatoes, elegantly composed salads, and upscale borrowings from ethnic cuisines. She served polenta with gorgonzola and braised greens, made crepes out of masa, the dough used by Mexicans to make corn tortillas, and offered goat-milk panna cotta for dessert. She furthermore rejected the “fake meat” approach of some veggie outlets—she detested soy cutlets almost as much as she did the word “veggie”—and the overcompensatory school of vegetarian cooking that demanded sixteen ingredients in every dish.

IN A SENSE, GREENS
was the culmination of a move away from joyless vegetarianism that had begun in the early seventies with such places as the Moosewood Restaurant, a utopian hangout in Ithaca, New York, that opened in 1973. The Moosewood, distant as it was from California, was yet another countercuisine shrine with Bay Area roots. Its original head cook—“chef” seems too high-flown a word—was Mollie Katzen, an East Coast girl who had soaked up the patchouli funk of the West Coast while studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and taking folk-dancing classes in Berkeley.