Nancy Allen, the Admiral Peary of cooking
By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor
Nancy Allen has written the textbook she says she needed when she was teaching cooking. Her 933-page book, Discovering Global Cuisines, complete with recipes and photos, overviews of culture, history and geography from all over the world, is the result of five years of unflagging endeavor. The work required not just sitting at a computer terminal for endless hours, but actually preparing the food and trying out the recipes with her friends and neighbors and also testing them in places like Meadowlark, a long-standing organic subscription agriculture farm on the Leelanau Peninsula.
“Nancy’s created a community around the farm food and the cooking,” says Jenny Tutlis who with her husband Jon Watts founded Meadowlark about 20 years ago. “People love to come for Friday meals. We were so lucky to be a part of her process. I was blown away and humbled by the sheer amount of information. The connection between culture and food is a really strong part of the book.”
Discovering Global Cuisines didn’t spring, like Athena, full-armored from the forehead of Zeus, but rather was a process of long-becoming, the result of years of cooking, studying, teaching and global wandering. It’s designed for use in the classroom but it would also serve as an excellent basic reference book in the kitchen of any worldly cook. “In the book,” Allen says, “I focused on the food of the people, not the food of chefs.”
Allen has two things she wants to teach in the book: one, the opportunities for eating enjoyment by using a vast variety of foods and food combinations from many nations; and, two, how understanding the way flavors work together makes it possible, over time and with practice, to cook without recipes. She says, “I want to free people from recipes.”
Allen, the daughter of first-generation immigrants, grew up in a multi-ethnic neighborhood in Detroit. “There were so many different cultures and kinds of cooking all around me,” she says, “How could I not be influenced by this?” She describes her mother as a good cook who used fresh ingredients, cooked intuitively and didn’t use recipes.
If you think about it, it’s only natural that someone from our immigrant nation, where we have people from all corners of the globe who are cooking in a hundred different ways, should develop a textbook on global cuisine. People may leave their language behind, even their religion, but the cooking stays. A typical community potluck will have dishes from everywhere.
The church cookbooks all across America have the foods of their residents, everything from Romanian stuffed cabbage to Mexican enchiladas alongside the Betty Crocker-style standards such as macaroni and cheese and meatloaf, long considered American classics. In fact, Greek salad not to mention Greek yoghurt, are now American classics, right along with Italian-style lasagna and Mexican-style chili, because we’ve now been immigrants long enough in our adopted country that all these previously “foreign” foods are foreign no longer. Allen didn’t make this happen, she recognized that it had happened — and codified it in a textbook.
The last 200 years saw all kinds of discoveries and inventions, everything from Rear Admiral Peary’s trek to the North Pole to Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone. But Allen’s cookbook is a journey of discovery of a different kind, an exploration of one of humankind’s most universal and basic daily activities, cooking. Allen examines the reasons we cook in certain ways so that we can understand the concepts behind the process and ultimately eat better and live happier.
Cooking defines us as human beings, according to Michael Pollan, considered both a historian and prophet of food, and is one of the reasons we evolved to have bigger brains. Cooked food, according to Pollan, takes less time and energy to chew and to digest because the cooking breaks down the proteins making them more accessible. Cows, he points out, spend every waking moment chewing. Cooking also provides an opportunity for people to get together and socialize. “It makes us tamer,” he says.
Nancy Allen and Pollan both write about umami, a Japanese word that means the mysterious charisma of a savory taste that is so basic it’s one of the major ingredients of mother’s milk. (I’m not kidding.) “Besides being a flavor,” Pollan says, “this [umami] particular amino acid is a cellular fuel and molecular building block that is of special value to the stomach and intestines of the growing infant,” and may set in place the body’s ability to release hormones and other things needed for digestion or absorption.
Umami, a Japanese word now used by cooks everywhere to describe a fifth taste, after salt, sweet, bitter and sour, is not just a word but a concept. The inclusion of the umami concept in Allen’s book is indicative not just of how international foods and recipes are being used, but whole new ways of thinking.
“Umami-rich foods can increase a dish’s flavor eight-or-nine fold,” according to Allen. Umami is often created, as we do here and in northern Europe, by hours of stewing meat and vegetables in an oven; or, in Japan, by days of drying fish and reconstituting it; or, in Korea, by months of fermenting cabbage in clay urns in the ground to make kimchi.
Umami is the Rosetta Stone of cooking, the thing that unlocks the secrets of the way foods work together. Although cooks have been fermenting foods for eons, and we’ve been stewing meats with vegetables to make things taste better since the days of the cave, laboratory science can now shed light on why these time-consuming and seemingly unnecessary processes not only make better-tasting food but have essential health benefits.
“I think she [Nancy Allen] is a patient and wise explorer of food, marrying flavors in dishes [in ways] that both honor traditional recipes and creates something new,” says friend and neighbor Bronwyn Jones, a professor at Northwestern Michigan College. “It has been remarkable to watch her create this book and we were lucky enough to be invited over to eat the delicious results of recipe tests that migrated across the globe.”
When Allen submitted her book proposal to Pearson, a textbook publisher in New Jersey, she received a contract from them almost immediately. She was astonished by the rapidity of the response. She knew from talking to other writers and from her own previous attempts to publish that a writer should expect long delays when dealing with publishers as well as many rejections. She looked at the contract and couldn’t believe it, calling her husband to come read it to make sure she wasn’t imagining things.
Like Darwin’s theory of evolution or Eli Whitney’s cotton gin invention 100 or so years ago, a cookbook of global cuisine is an idea whose time has come for the peripatetic generation of global citizens spawned by cheap air travel and the Internet. The publisher, rightly, recognized this. It seems only natural, in thinking about it, that a book on global cuisine should come from the 400-year-old melting pot that we call the United States. It follows, too, that it should come from an intrepid woman who grew up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood of Detroit and worked her way around the world and — before she became a gourmet cook, educator and textbook writer — earned her living as a hair dresser, a job she says she loved because of all the different kinds of people she met.
Allen says now that if she’d been born at a different time and into a different family, if she’d known herself better and if her parents had had a more enlightened vision of career paths for females, she might have studied psychology or architecture. However on the east side of Detroit in the 1950s — where your immigrant family had brought with them their old world peasant East European ideas about what women could do, especially what women from humble beginnings could do – opportunities for women appeared to be limited. Yet in spite of this, or because of it, Allen felt compelled to seek out something. “I’m a searcher,” she says. “I just kept searching.”
Contrary to what might be some of our preconceptions about people who write 900-page textbooks, Allen didn’t acquire her expertise solely through formal education or working in test kitchens with a bevy of instructors and assistants. Instead, she pursued a more intuitive and haphazard and perhaps better path: she travelled the world and learned from cooks wherever she landed.
“In Crete, a fisherman once threw an octopus up on the dock for me,” Allen says. “I didn’t know what to do with an octopus. You have to pound it on rocks to soften it. Then boil it. Then char-grill it. It’s a white meat. If someone closed their eyes and ate it, they wouldn’t know they were eating seafood.”
In Manhattan Allen taught at the Institute for Culinary Education for five years and she also taught for many years at Chateau Chantal on the Old Mission Peninsula. Currently she still cooks at Meadowlark Farms in Lake Leelanau every Friday for the field hands in order to test recipes for her next book, possibly the dessert recipes she left out of her first book, she says, or recipes from all the countries she hasn’t visited yet.
Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). She is currently working on a collection of essays, The Long Arc of the Universe. Follow her stories and excerpts in the Glen Arbor Sun.
