THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 29
were brought together by food. By se-
cretly not eating, I was isolating my-
self. As I grew thinner, I felt both proud
and terribly lonely. Toward the end of
the summer, my parents became aware
that I wasn’t myself; in photos from
that time I look gaunt and unhealthy.
When we returned home from the
shore, my parents took me to a child
psychologist, Sidney Hyman.
Dr. Hyman was in his late fifties,
wore a bow tie, and liked to crack silly
jokes. He didn’t ask many questions,
but I remember playing a lot of board
games with him. I’d become very seri-
ous, and I think he wanted me to re-
discover what it was like to have fun.
Trying to have fun is what started me
cooking. I opened a cupboard, found
some chocolate—I’d hardly touched
any since becoming obsessed with my
weight—and decided to make what I
called fudge. I put the chocolate in a
plastic container and placed it in the
toaster oven. The container melted a
bit, but the warm, liquefied chocolate
was delicious, and the fact that I’d
melted it myself was exciting: I had
transformed something.
The next thing I made was a sim-
ple chocolate cake. It came out well,
and I even treated myself to a slice, al-
though I was still carefully counting
calories. Before long, I was spending
all my free time in the kitchen. I worked
my way up to more elaborate confec-
tions, like dacquoise, a hazelnut me-
ringue layered with buttercream frost-
ing, and then to making savory dishes.
I especially liked sauces, which, in their
textural variety—thick or thin, trans-
lucent or cloudy, syrupy or velvety—
taught me the subtle poetry of haute
cuisine. I became fascinated by emul-
sions, the mixing of liquids that hap-
pens in fancy sauces like beurre blanc
and hollandaise but also in the sim-
plest vinaigrette. I pored over my moth-
er’s cookbooks and magazines, reading
about the great chefs who had defined
what it meant to cook seriously. On
weekends, friends would come over to
sample new dishes. I became a con-
noisseur of local food shops and butch-
ers. I ordered magret de canard from a
supplier in the Hudson Valley. Each
month, I would prepare a dinner
for my family, which I would “adver-
tise” a few weeks in advance by tuck-
ing a menu under my mother’s pillow.
When I was eleven, I launched a ca-
tering company, Adam’s Edibles, leav-
ing xeroxed copies of a handwritten
menu outside our neighbors’ doors. I
started with desserts and pastries, but a
year later I expanded my repertoire:Dr. Mr. or Ms.,
My name is Adam Shatz. Last year I ran
a successful dessert business. This summer I’m
adding appetizers and soups to the menu. My
food is delicious and not too complicated. All
the ingredients I use are fresh....I live on
106 Morningside Drive, Longmeadow, Mass.
I have the only red house on the street. I know
you’ll love my food!The menu included gougères ($3.50
for twelve), ravioli ($8 for four servings),
and vichyssoise ($4 with onions, $6 with
leeks, for four servings). I changed the
company’s name to Le Trésor—“Shatz”
means “treasure” in German—and
began to cater multicourse meals, mostly
for my parents’ friends. This meant that
I was now cooking in other people’s
kitchens. I would shop for ingredients
the day before a dinner, arrive at my
customer’s home the morning of, and
spend the entire day cooking. The cli-
ents must have found my presence
amusing, but to me it was no stunt. I
couldn’t have been more certain that
my future lay in the kitchen. I was al-
ready dreaming of going to cooking
school, apprenticing in France, and
opening my own restaurant.
Word of my exploits got around, and
my art teacher made a documentary
about me for the local cable-access
channel. She called it “Adam Cooks,”
and that’s pretty much what you see: a
nerdy, bespectacled twelve-year-old in
a chef ’s uniform making a baked-goat-
cheese salad, a chicken ragout with wa-
tercress cream sauce and morels, and a
raspberry crème brûlée. Later, he pon-
tificates on his culinary influences,
against a musical backdrop of classical
guitar. At one point, you see him apol-
ogizing for no apparent reason. The
reason was that I’d just screamed “Fuck!”
in front of the film crew, after burning
myself on a hot pot.
The cable-access channel had very
little content, and so “Adam Cooks”
was shown on a virtually continuous
loop for a couple of years. People as-
sumed it was a weekly show, rather
than a one-off, and I became a localcelebrity. “Garbed in a chef ’s hat and
cooking jacket, Adam rattled off the
names of his favorite chefs, debated
the influence of famed female and male
chefs, and the offerings of exclusive
restaurants in America and Europe,”
the Longmeadow News reported. In
that article, I discussed “the cooking
philosophies of Escoffier and Fernand
Point,” my preference for gas stoves,
and sexism in professional kitchens:
“Men are afraid to let women cook.”
The same year, I had a more bruising
encounter with the media, after my uncle,
for my thirteenth birthday, scored me an
invitation to a conference in Boston on
wine and gastronomy. There I met Ruth
Reichl, who was then a food writer for
the Los Angeles Times. That’s where she
wrote a short profile of me, under the
headline “Tyke with a Toque”:
“The most important thing in cooking is to
have your own style,” Adam Shatz, 13, is say-
ing, when his mother taps him on the shoul-
der. “Look Adam,” says Adam’s Mother, “it’s
Michael McCarty.” She turns so he can see the
great chef. Adam squares his shoulders and
walks manfully over.Reichl described a boy with “extraor-
dinary poise,” who boasts that he “never
cooks a dish more than once,” and says
“airily” that he charges “about $25 a per-
son.” I was devastated. And I’d got off
easy compared with my parents, who’d
done nothing more than take me to
the event:
Adam’s father snaps a picture....Before
long there are four chefs surrounding the young
prodigy. His proud papa is still snapping
aw a y....Stage mothers were once all the rage,
but now it’s time to bid farewell to the movie
mama as we make room for the latest breed of
pushy progenitor—the stove-top parent.In fact, my parents tried to protect
me from the media. When ABC tele-
vision approached them about making
a movie based on my life as a child chef,
they immediately rejected the idea.S
till, Reichl was right about one thing:
I was awfully serious. But cooking,
far from being an expression of my “ex-
traordinary poise,” was a refuge from
the world of my peers. True, I had a
new circle of friends, who appreciated
my cooking and didn’t taunt me, and I
was no longer seeing Dr. Hyman. Yet I
still kept fastidious track of what I con-
sumed and felt terribly uncomfortable