Cookbook Survivor: John Sedlar, Modern Southwest Cuisine
Saturday's Child Is Extremely Intimidated
I was a very fussy eater as a young child, but as a teenager, I very rapidly got interested in a much wider variety of food and became a much more adventuresome eater. My parents were active foodies, so in the last two years of high school and then into college, when I was home, I got a chance to go with them to some really great restaurants.
One of the places they took me absolutely stunned me and changed my entire idea of what a restaurant could be, what food could be. It was called St. Estephe, and the head chef’s name was John Rivera Sedlar. St. Estephe was in a strip mall in the South Bay in Southern California: it didn’t look like anything special on the outside nor particularly on the inside. But what came out on the plate was something else. Sedlar says it himself in the story I linked to above: “the food burned into the brains” of the diners—nobody had seen anything like it or tasted anything like it.
Sedlar combined a lot of characteristically Southwestern ingredients (posole, fresh tortillas, chiles, corn husks for tamales, etc.) with exaggeratedly artistic presentations and some classical French techniques (most notably a lot of cream sauces). When I say “exaggeratedly artistic”, I mean it: a plate of caviar and egg arranged to look like a kachina face, plates with ‘paintings’ on them, soft-boiled eggs in the shell with tentacles of blue-corn tortillas coming out of them. If it had just been the presentations, well, it would have been just kind of weird or aesthetically interesting, but the food was amazing. The flavor combinations have since become a lot more common (and mostly people have moved on from the specific French-Southwestern fusion that he used there, including Sedlar himself, who has had a series of really great restaurants since in Los Angeles and Santa Fe).
So I have had this cookbook since the late 1980s—it was, I think, the first “fancy” cookbook I bought after using the Silver Palate and the Frog/Commissary cookbook almost to death. I think I actually bought it in the bookstore in the Connecticut town where I worked for a short time as a cook—I remember being so excited to see the book. A restaurant I knew! A chef I had actually met (he came out to talk to my folks a couple of times when I went there). Food that seemed almost god-like in its originality!
And in all those years, I’ve cooked only two things from the book. One is a very simple and delicious recipe for a pork mole that is much less intricate than many other moles. I’ve made it maybe twenty times in thirty years, maybe more—the page in the book is splattered with sauce. The other is a duck “taco” in red cabbage leaves with a juniper berry sauce that I didn’t think was very good, but that might have been my technique (e.g., I might not have reduced the sauce enough). I made that once, a long time ago.
So I took the book off the shelf last week and said, “Time to really dig in on this one”. No, I’m not going to get rid of the book—it’s got too much history with me. But I will tell you that as I looked through the pages, I could see why it intimidated me too much to even think of using it back in the 1990s and early 2000s.
For one, a lot of the food in it is just too hard to source or too ridiculously expensive for even a dinner party. There’s a couple of sweetbread recipes, there’s a rabbit recipe, there’s a pheasant recipe, there’s that caviar tray. For another, at least a few of the artistic presentations shade over into being a bit silly (the kachina caviar plate is one of them) and some of them are ridiculous amounts of work. I also noticed that actually there’s a lot of recipes where the flavor is coming from a couple of repeated mother sauces or elements, so you have to think pretty carefully if you’re doing a few dishes not to overlap.
On the other hand, there are still things I love the look of and some dishes I’ve frequently thought about doing and then been just a bit too intimidated by. I feel ready to take them on (famous last words). The curious thing for me now as I read is that some of the recipes are wonderfully simple, like some of Sedlar’s best food (in many of his restaurants)—there’s a fried trout I toyed with making that’s basically just “fried trout with pine nuts”.
I settled on a “New Mexico” sushi that’s built around lobster and corn, an artistic pasta appetizer that will probably be the most challenging of the things I’m going to make, and some sliced lamb tenderloin with a tomato-chile sauce that should be simple enough.
Wonderful that you have this familial connection to his early restaurant. I only kept a few of John’s cookbooks, but I saved all his Charlie Trotter collection. I’ll never cook anything from them, but each reminds me of amazing dining experiences in the 80s-90s in the company of dearest friends. A couple of them are signed, too, by the chef. One of them commemorates a great meal John and I shared in honor of getting the job from which I just retired. Charlie was not only kind enough to sign the book; he sent us a second round of desserts and gave us a fresh loaf of bread (still warm inside its paper bag) to take home with us. Charlie and John are both gone now. The cookbook is staying with me.