“Because of my job and the nature of my life, I’m very kitchen focused,’’ says Kim Severson, New York Times food writer and author of “Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life.’’
(Soo-Jeong Kang)
G FORCE | KIM SEVERSON
Life lessons in the kitchen
“Because of my job and the nature of my life, I’m very kitchen focused,’’ says Kim Severson, New York Times food writer and author of “Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life.’’
(Soo-Jeong Kang)
Kim Severson is a food writer for The New York Times. In her new book, “Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life,’’ she writes about an existence in which food has been a constant presence: from “pork chops, baked potatoes, and milk’’ in childhood to working at a Little Caesars in college to sharing sushi with Ruth Reichl as a journalist. Reichl is one of the cooks in the subtitle. Others include Marion Cunningham, Marcella Hazan, and Severson’s mother. Severson, 48, was attending a seafood conference in Monterey, Calif., when we spoke on the telephone.
Q. What did you have for breakfast this morning?
A. They had really nice Dungeness crab and basted egg. They had berries, which were great. They also had apricots. That had me all excited, because we don’t get them on the East Coast right now. There was coffee, too, and some guys squeezing Valencia orange juice from oranges grown in their own grove.
Q. What was it like to run a shift at a Little Caesars?
A. It was hilarious. I would put out a lot of pizza. We wore these bad beige aprons, and they would totally smell of pizza dough by the end of the day. I can still walk into a pizza place and smell that same smell. I loved making pizza dough, though. I also liked being a short-order cook. I loved the idea of completing that task — you know, going through the orders up on the rack. It prepared me for life at newspapers.
Q. What’s it like to have Alice Waters in your home when, as you note in the book, there are chicken nuggets cooking in the toaster oven? A. I do want to point out they were good chicken nuggets! I am who I am. All you have to do is hang around people who do things really well to realize you don’t. I try to eat the best I can eat at a given moment, but I also try to allow my little reptilian brain to have what it wants when it wants.
Q. Not many books include chapters on both Rachael Ray and Alice Waters. A. I do think Rachael Ray is a little misunderstood. I don’t mean to be an apologist. I know there’s a lot about her that’s annoying. And you can argue not a lot of her food is the greatest ever. But a lot is quite good. The fact is both Alice and Rachael did the same thing: bring people back to the kitchen and start them cooking.
Q. “My heroes,’’ you write, “are women who never abandoned the kitchen.’’
A. It’s easy to read this book and see it on some level as an exercise in trying to work out my relationship with my mother. It’s cheaper than therapy. It’s my story. Because of my job and the nature of my life, I’m very kitchen focused. So the source of strength for me in life is people who nurture and feed others.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
Interview was condensed and edited.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
