Yes, Chef: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Two reviews of a berbere spice mixture from an otherwise first rate North African spice purveyor caught my eye because they were harshly critical of its make up. There was only one chef who immediately came to mind, the redoubtable Marcus Samuelsson. His recent volume, "The Soul of a New Cuisine" (apologies to Tracy Kidder) had the truth of the matter. Why go to a Swede for Ethiopian authenticity? That answer lies in this volume of his memoirs. The great former Chef de Cuisine for New York's Aquavit is Ethiopian. His adopting parents are Swedes.

Chef Samuelsson prepares quite a story. His voice is as clear as a glass of aquavit and his adventures as pungent as that berbere paste. He is an honest raconteur with little use for devices or manipulation. Rarely do you see full acknowledgement given to the ghost writer, including her own title. Veronica Chambers has done a nice job of getting the book out and not getting in the way.

He peers into the past without benefit of photographs or letters, but with a healthy mistrust of his own memory and even of the politeness of his people. He tells us the tale of an Ethiopian village patriarch, or "Abba", yes, just like in Sweden.

He has an easier time going back a few generations in Sweden. It was his grandmother that seeded his food memories. "Mormor" was a maid and domestic cook. She salted her chicken right after plucking, then cooling and drying in the cellar. So Chef Samuelsson speaks of putting chickens by the air conditioner to help dry the skin. Most do not know that you cannot properly roast a soggy bird. She nests it on a bed of carrot, rubs with spice and sews it up with an apple, an onion. Eat that chicken, as Mingus would sing.

Without sentimentality, Chef Samuelsson has genuine affection for his family of insanely larger-than-life Swedes. Like moonshine making Uncle Torsten, "... a strong old man. Freaky Strong. Farmer Strong...Even after he'd retired from fishing, he could lift an eka, a stout wooden rowboat, and flip it onto its blocks, by himself..." Lucky for us, young Marcus was fifty pounds lighter than many of his fellow footballers, suggesting to himself he opt for learning English and cooking.

There has been a spate of chef coming of age books lately; a couple of them are even good. Most read more like screenplay wanabees, but I do not recall any being filmed. Recipes are all the formula we need. Too many of these books are witheringly formulaic - cookie cutter on an achingly slow conveyer belt. The marketing blurbs usually emphasize their "me too" strategy. But Chef Samuelsson is having none of that predictable melodrama of tragedy and triumph, complete with evil chefs dancing on young graves and all that.

Instead, you get fairly honest memoirs without moralizing or posturing. He gives himself the occasional dope slap; sometimes he calls out the lout. He leaves recipes to his trio of cookbooks. But he weaves his observations on food into the flow. Here is one moment of illumination from his Garde Manger station in Switzerland under a top sous-chef:

The first time Giggs handed me a felt-tipped marker and told me to cover a plate in plastic wrap, I thought he'd gone off the deep end.

"Draw your food," he commanded, by which he meant he wanted the vegetables artfully arranged. "If you've arranged your veggies beautifully," he explained, "when it gets to the meat guy, he will respect the plate more. He won't just push everything aside to get his fillet on there".

That pretty much reflects what Chef Samuelsson has done with his book.

"In any professional kitchen, the lower-ranked staff responds to any request from above with military-like respect. "Yes, chef," is what I was taught to say whether he or she asks for a side of beef or your head on a platter. Yes, chef. Yes, chef. Yes, chef."

Marcus Samuelsson is orphaned at three years old. Anne Marie and Lennart live in Sweden unable to have children. Lennart has always wanted a son. When Marcus might soon be up for adoption, they are asked if they would like this little boy's five year old sister as well. Why put these two children through more truama; of course they will adopt her too.

Marcus learns early in his grandmother's,mormor's, kitchen, the art of cooking. The layering of food and technique belongs to mormor's tutelage. The simple logic of food comes from mormor: fresh bread the first day becomes toast on the next, followed by croutons on the next day and the leftover crumbs become the coating for the fish.

Marcus at twelve begins a ritual of accompanying his father to the fishing village of Smögen to repaint the boats for the next season. It is then that Lennart entrusts Marcus with the meal for their last night before returning home. It was then that Marcus understood the beauty of food within context; a simple fisherman's meal, potatoes and fish, after a hard day of work was perfection. The meal reflected the surroundings.

This is Marcus Samuelsson's story of defeat at being cut from the soccer team, the realization in his little town of Göteborg that the issue of race is something that he will encounter all his life, determining that he would not let himself be defeated he would go to culinary school, to eventually fulfilling his dream- his own restaurant in Harlem, Red Rooster.

But before his own restaurant, Marcus Samuelsson travels the world working in kitchens, working his way up the chef ladder. This look into the hierarchy, the etiquette of the kitchen tier, the grueling work to not stand out, not be noticed takes long, hard work. At night, Samuelsson writes in a notebook the foods, the spices the techniques and how he might change them, blend them to make a whole host of countries' cuisine into amazing dishes.

This memoir is fabulous for the way in which Samuelsson loves his Ethiopian roots, loves his adopted home of Sweden, loves New York and blends the foods of the world together just like his life into a beautiful thing.

While I haven't eaten any of Samuelsson's food, I have read his cookbooks, watched him on TV, and followed his career. His life story is intriguing and unexpected and I'm so glad he write this engaging, well-written, and frank memoir.

You won't find celebrity gossip, high crimes, or scandal here and that's part of what makes it good. What you will find is a man at the prime of his life reflecting on it and on what brought him to this point.

Samuelsson's life story is worth hearing. Born in Ethiopia, he was orphaned, along with his older sister, as a toddler after his mother died of TB. They both were adopted by a Swedish family and he learned to cook at his grandmother's side. After doing a culinary program in high school and working at a local restaurant, he went to Switzerland and began the long, hard process of becoming a chef.

Fast forward a few years and he went to New York to work at Aquavit, a Swedish restaurant. There he became executive chef, earned three stars from the New York Times and won a James Beard Award. Most recently he opened Red Rooster in Harlem.

Those are the bare bones of his story, which he amplifies throughout the book. It's so delightful and so well-written I found myself saying "just one more chapter . . ."

Samuelsson is quick to acknowledge the debt he owes to his family, his friends, and the chefs he's worked for. That's one of the best things about the book. It' such a wonderful portrait of a man who has worked hard, but hasn't forgotten what brought him to this point, who he is, or what made him into the man he became.

And how many memoirs can show us that?