28 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
The author in 1985, during the filming of the TV documentary “Adam Cooks.”
PERSONAL HISTORY
The Tyke with a ToqueFor a bullied child with weight issues, haute cuisine provided an escape.BYADAMSHATZ
DONALD TREEGER/THE REPUBLICAN
T
wice a month, when my daugh-
ter, Ella, spends the weekend with
me, my apartment turns into a cook-
ing school. Ella is thirteen and started
to make cookies and scones a few years
ago. She moved on to tarts, fresh tagli-
atelle, and, lately, croissants. Early on
Saturdays, before heading to our local
green market, we have impassioned
conversations about her dinner plans.
Pork adobo with citrus and coriander,
she asks me, or red lentils simmered
Ethiopian-style, with fresh tomatoes
and berbere? And then she’s sure to ask
if she can bake. I’m already thinking of
the scabs of flour I’ll be scraping off
my counter on Monday morning, and
of how much pâtisserie I’ll have con-
sumed, but I give in. I love watching
the skill and authority of her fingers in
a bowl of flour, eggs, butter, and choc-
olate; her intensity as she pipes ganache
from a pastry bag or dusts éclairs with
finely ground pistachios.
When she’s not cooking, she often
watches shows like “Chef ’s Table,” the
sumptuously produced Netflix series
featuring sombre, admiring portraits
of culinary stars. With painterly cine-
matography and introspective voice-
overs, “Chef ’s Table” pays professional
cooks the kind of homage once re-served for artists. Most of the dishes
are impossible to replicate in a home
kitchen—who has the time to make
Enrique Olvera’s thousand-day mole,
or even find all the ingredients?—but
Ella doesn’t watch the show for reci-
pes. She watches it for the spectacle of
mastery, much as other teens hang out
on YouTube watching Lionel Messi’s
greatest goals or Yuja Wang playing
“Flight of the Bumblebee.”
The show’s self-serious musings on
the mysteries of food make me cringe
a bit, but I was once fluent in that idiom.
From the time I was nine until well
into my teens, I was determined to be
a chef. I ran a catering business out of
my parents’ house, in Longmeadow,
Massachusetts, and did apprenticeships
with notable chefs. So when I watch
“Chef ’s Table” I can’t help experienc-
ing the slight pang you get from see-
ing someone living the life you chose
not to live. Could I have been a con-
tender? When I was cooking, food was
everything to me; I haven’t known as
consuming a passion since. The kitchen
is where I learned the only foreign lan-
guage I speak: brunoise, pâte feuilletée,
and demi-glace were among the first
French words I knew, and they retain
an incantatory power.I
started to cook after my friends—at
least, I thought they were friends—
began to bully me for being overweight
and Jewish. Pudgy was my nickname,
and as they threw change at me in the
hall I learned that to be a Jew was to
love money. I punched one boy in the
neck when he called me a dirty Jew,
and felt very pleased as he fell to the
ground. But the problem of my weight
couldn’t be handled by vigilante justice.
I wasn’t ashamed to be Jewish, but I
was embarrassed to be plump. While
vacationing at the Jersey shore with my
family, I began to hide food, furtively
removing items from my plate and plac-
ing them in a napkin. I would bury
much of my dinner in the sand outside
the house my parents had rented. I
counted calories, and spent hours ap-
praising myself in the mirror, measur-
ing my progress.
This wasn’t much fun. For one thing,
I was depriving myself of the pleasures
of my mother’s cooking. Some fami-
lies are brought together by faith; we