Smaller Recipes for a Smaller Spring Table
Champêtre: Ma Cuisine-when "deux oeufs" are enough!
Although this story is mainly about scaling down recipes to serve one or two, it also is about scaling down time. While later I became well known for my slow cooking and long French preparations like cassoulet or poule au pot, I was always a fast cook first. It began with a very small kitchen 40 plus years ago—a few square feet of a galley on a 42-foot sailboat called the Winward, based out of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas in the USVI in the early 1980s—and a well-thumbed paperback cookbook that I found in its one cupboard.
Learning About Speed in the Kitchen
My earliest training in production cooking came as I went to sea, seeking adventure and travel hijinks in the Caribbean as a private and charter yacht chef. Charter yachting was a little bit rough and ready, if not downright pirate-like, forty-odd years ago. In 1981, I met one of the first women charter captains and soon-to-be life-long friend Ann Avery while looking for work walking the docks of the marina in St Thomas. Captain Annie was in her early thirties, and I would turn 30 that month. We decided to team up for the winter season. I had just passed my first charter as stewardess on the former King of Spain’s large sailing yacht without touching land for two weeks, and my sea legs were protesting, having grown used to swaying on the decks below. That experienced cook, the Captain's wife, was from an old Nova Scotian family well versed in the classic elegance of a service bell and multiple courses of roasts and vegetables served on bone china. After hearing the bell ring non-stop for two weeks, I vowed never to be someone else's kitchen slave and maid again. I would run my own galley instead.