Hola. It has been a really long time since I rapped at you. Not a fan of this pandemic. Anyway, I have mostly enjoyed my few trips to Dave Chang restaurants. I have enjoyed cooking out of the Momofuku cookbook. I enjoyed the run of Lucky Peach and the associated cookbooks. I enjoyed getting to write about his TV show. I looked forward to reading his memoir. It was interesting to read about the struggles and growth of the Momofuku empire, but much more than I expected was about Dave Chang's brain, his depression, and his rage. A remarkable longform piece by Hannah Selinger captures the damage that rage caused to the people who happened to be adjacent to it. Go read it before you read this, because it's a much more important story than the one I am telling here.
Selinger's piece caused me to reflect on two moments I am proud of, and a whole lot of moments I am not. The not proud points are moments where I have poisoned the atmosphere in my own house when things aren't going well in the kitchen. Throwing spoons in the sink, that kind of thing. The time I lacrossed a failed grilled pizza off the deck and into the woods. The proud moments are further apart. In about 1998, I was just getting into cooking. I was very excited to make Korean short ribs for my dearly departed friend Dave, and some other folks. One of the other guests was Portuguese fighter pilot, who was on ecstasy at the time. (A long story, and not mine to tell.) Rolling Fighter Pilot volunteered to make the rice to go w/ the short ribs. When I brought the ribs in from outside. I discovered that RFP had made Portuguese red rice. Not at all what I had in mind, but I managed to say thanks and just go with it. It was fine. It was definitely better if I'd gotten mad and cooked white rice.
The other one was more recently, and not long after I finished reading Eat a Peach. My partner had a birthday, and requested bone marrow pizza. (In part as revenge for my infatuation with this.) I have been making pizza -- white, margherita, pepperoni -- a lot during the pandemic, using the Roberta's dough recipe and a Baking Steel, and it's something I feel confident making. Getting the required amount of bone marrow turned out to involve a lot more bones than I figured, and to take longer than I figured. On the way into the oven, the whole thing went pearshaped, and what came out of the oven was half pizza, half calzone.
Reading through Chang's memoir reminded me of something that had been haunting me since I read the Momofuku cookbook. Discussing oysters, after recounting a sleepless night after a service where Marco Canora ripped him apart for sending out a less than pristine oyster at Craft, he says "The big teardrop of juicy meat of the oyster is called the 'belly.' You do not want to puncture or pop the belly. (Whenever I see someone do that, I cringe; when I see someone at one of the restaurants serve a popped belly, I am powerless against the rage that overtakes me.)" Being stuck at home since March, we've ordered oysters from Island Creek or Rappahannock -- "for morale," as my partner likes to say. Ever since I read about Chang's oyster rage a decade ago, I have been haunted by the fear of a popped belly, as if Chang would manifest in our kitchen or picnic table and start yelling at me. I understand that being yelled at from a decade-old cookbook is not the same as being yelled at in front of a kitchen, but it gave me a tiny sense of how toxic this rage could be.
To return to the pizza -- I realized the situation was not ideal, and not really retrievable that night, and I also managed to realize -- in part from Chang's memoir -- that getting angry was not going to improve my beloved's birthday. So I went with it. We each got a decent slice of the bone marrow pizza -- pretty good, BTW -- and we had the malformed calzoneish thing to pick at. It was fine, and I'll take another crack at the bone marrow pizza sometime, I guess. Make no mistake, Eat a Peach is not a self help book. And as the Selinger piece details, admitting the harm you have caused is not the same as making amends. Chang would not be the first to write a memoir full of examples of what not to do.
In a different context, I have been thinking for a while about messy men -- colleagues or friends whose anger or narcissism makes messes that other people have to clean up. Any chef book will talk about the importance of working clean, having your mise set, and cleaning as you go. There are not Beard awards or Michelin stars for husbands or fathers or teachers, but I am aiming to move into 2021 trying to work a little bit cleaner.
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