82 FEBRUARY 2020
Scrawled on their pages is the story of how I became a chef.
The first time I wrote in one, I was a 20-year-old sophomore in
college, six months pregnant with my first child. I lived alone
with a cat and had no idea what I was doing, in life or in the
kitchen. I got out the notebook, one I’d previously used for
sketches and moody poetry, because I needed to remember that
I changed Bernard Clayton Jr.’s formula for hot-water pastry.
I had decided his was too stodgy, that it needed a little more
finesse. Little did I know that dull heft was the entire point of
a hot-water pastry dough—I had essentially rewritten it into a
basic pâte brisée without even knowing it. It would take me a
few more years, and several more notebooks about my strange
kitchen and eating habits, to realize that this self-education
was the stirring of a career as a pastry chef I did not yet know
I was going to have.
Over the next few years, that first notebook became a stack
of scratch pads, and the first child was joined by a second as
I steeped in the tradition of women who help support their
families by baking all night while the babies sleep, selling pies
and cakes to neighbors or out of their cars in the parking lot
near the center of town. Baking served many roles in my life,
but mostly it was a kind of safe place to quiet my head and feed
my family during the intense, wonderful, and stressful years of
being a young mother. Baking provided order. Baking provided
sustenance. Baking reminded me to be generous, even when
I felt, some days, like I had nothing left to give. People would
order pies for Thanksgiving and Fourth of July, sometimes by the
hundreds. I would take a week to prepare ingredients—filling,
pie dough by the pounds—and then spend one intense night
building and baking, rotating them all in and out of a 1950s
oven in a rented apartment kitchen. In the morning I’d load
the babies into their car seats and then the pies into the trunk,
pop a Bowie CD in the player, and, in an old Volvo that smelled
gloriously of butter and chess pie, I’d go collect a month’s rent.
Being self-taught had its rewards. I was engaged in a constant
conversation with myself about technique, and I developed a
habit of critical thinking that cannot be taught. By the time I
stepped into my first professional kitchen five years later (when
chef Anne Kostroski, owner of Crumb bakery in Chicago, invited
me to be her pastry assistant at the not-yet-opened City House in
Nashville), I was sharp and ready, with good routines in my bones.
Routines are important in baking; they help you establish
what works and what doesn’t, keeping each action fresh in
your mind. Learning technique and allowing it to build into
creativity takes practice. Like a very good student (or an eager
young cook with a lot to prove to herself, who felt forever behind
because she did not go to culinary school), I had written every
step down. Nothing was left undocumented so that I could
retain details, so I could get better, so I could be good or maybe
even, I hoped, great someday.
Yet no matter how comfortable I had been in my baking skills
and my ability to learn, before I worked in professional kitch-
ens, I had never plated a dessert, written a menu, or cooked for
such a consistently large crowd. My notes became even more
important as I ventured into that landscape. Learning how to
adjust in those ways was the finest education I had ever been a
part of, and it happens in real time on those pages.
For the next 15 years, at City House and Margot Café & Bar
in Nashville, and at my pop-up that came to be known as
Buttermilk Road, the notebooks were my most important tool.
They were not, in the beginning, laminated sheets of typed
formulas neatly organized in a three-ring binder, as they even-
tually came to be for the sake of a staff that needed to consis-
tently know what my recipes looked like beyond scrappy notes.
That came much later. These little notebooks were always in my
pocket, on a table with cream spitting from the stand mixer or
eggs being whisked or cake batter being weighed. They were
never precious. They were functional. They were, essentially,
my brain—doodles and splatters and stains and all. Sometimes
I wish they were neater, but then they wouldn’t be as honest.
They helped me keep myself straight, hold myself accountable,
remember details. By the time I got to Husk, I had an arsenal FOOD STYLING: TORIE COX; PROP STYLING: CLAIRE SPOLLEN
