PICKINGS

“I never saw the moor, I never saw the sea; yet know I what the heather looks and what a wave must be...” —Emily Dickinson 

 

     I started as one of the prep-cooks at a high-end restaurant in NYC years ago and I remember the chef, passing at our station like a 3-star general, saying: "Heads down, folks, pick, pick pick; but lightly." He was referring to the fragility of the nature of herbs and culinary edible flowers we were processing for the salad entrees, preemptively alluding to their summertime vividness as key to the presentation and sensorial experience of our dining patrons. Our hands were primarily the "tactile instruments" into the careful handling of tendrils, filigree leaf shoots and gem-like florets as if they were preserved butterflies on pins ready for mounting on a golden frame. (By the way, I was the only guy on the team, the lead was a Colombian woman who had worked there forever, and the other was from Milwaukee fresh out of cooking school; delicate hands mattered.) We stood together for hours picking, picking, picking, yet we had learned so much from each other and the marvelous plants we were caring for. That was the flashback in my mind while I was eating my breakfast this morning, at the same time thinking of what to write (see photo; it conjured all these memories; I made a simple floral consommé with young Asian greens from Hana farms, some leaves were variegated and purple, thus the bleeding out of a pinkish broth in the soup creating the classic color of heather flowers; thus the poem inspired).   

     In my bowl is the cosmos, too. The cosmos is also one of my favorite flowers in the world of wild meadows. This time of year through the countryside of Unju (persimmon country) in S. Korea, the cosmos hedges line the rice paddy dikes winding along the road, and the hills on the distance are so fresh. The country is seventy percent mountain ranges rolling around the peninsula, and ancient villages are tucked and protected in the valleys hardly have any view or knowledge of the Chinese sea, legend says it - "yet know what the cosmos looks and what a wave must be" - given the landscape they undulate through on grassland as beautiful they swell as the sea. The pink soup currently on my table comes a long way from home, and I'm happy it made it back. But beautiful memories last forever. My hands are as they were. I eventually rose through the ranks at the restaurant, actually cooking not just picking, yet those humble beginnings at a professional kitchen focused on aesthetic workmanship to food art truly were like stories that opened up books I would cherish for the rest of my life.