I don’t espouse the Bourdainian philosophy of exposing the little secrets in the culinary “underbelly.” After all, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Moreover, the motivation for such tactics now seems both entirely too avaricious and capitalistic for my own taste. Nevertheless, with the bitter wind of winter now yielding to the gentle breeze of the season of rebirth, I have been inspired to do precisely that, for the decidedly simple, innocent reason of preventing the entire world from self-destructing from its own shortsightedness.
Just kidding. This is no doomsday sermon. But this issue is important to me, and certainly should be to all of my fellow chefs. You see, I know many chefs, themselves inspired by the aforementioned wind of change, who eagerly await the arrival of the spring pea season…and then use frozen peas! I myself have been guilty of this egregious lack of integrity in the past. That is…before I saw the light, or more pertinently, tasted the light. Chefs most commonly justify this deception by highlighting two supposed advantages to the frozen pea. The first is sweetness. It is true that English peas, once harvested, begin converting their stores of sugar into starch and/or energy in a desperate effort to strengthen their structure and stay alive. Frozen pea producers the world over, from Clarence Birdseye to Trader Joe, are quick to emphasize and advertise that their peas are flash frozen within hours of picking, resulting in a sweeter, tastier product. (It is not surprising that in this era of unprecedented levels of diabetes and obesity, sweetness has become the paradigm of flavor in this country. Last I checked, it was just one of the four basic ‘tastes’.) I can understand when chefs from Smalltown, USA use frozen peas, as their lack of access to local growers make this product, picked at the ideal time, the best choice. (Then again, I guess I always assumed that peas were grown in Smalltown!) But this is certainly not applicable in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, the proverbial Breadbasket of the World, with world-class growers such as Louis Iacopi in Half Moon Bay pumping super fresh peas into the San Francisco restaurant machine within days of harvest. Pick up a sample next time you’re at his stand at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. I promise you will be rewarded with a subtly flavored vegetable with little to no resemblance to its bulk-frozen brethren. Tiny orbs bursting with the greenness of the earth, delicately nuanced with hints of sugar, soil, and herbs. Perfect.
Shucking open a fresh pea pod (an act in and of itself so tangible yet transcendental -- evoking within me the memory of warm spring evenings on the porch of my childhood home in the Deep South. It’s funny how those memories are now utterly devoid of mosquitoes!), one often encounters an imperfect still life. A mysterious gap here and there. A slightly misshapen pea. A dizzying array of sizes. Therein lays the problem for many. You see, chefs crave consistency with all of their being. We want every single dish to be prepared the same way, every single time. We want every dish to look the same every time. We want every dish to taste the same way every time. Perfect.
But consistency does not necessarily have to equate with uniformity. In fact, this imperfection reinforces the dynamic beauty of Mother Nature. She is constantly changing – be it producing a little rain here to shorten an otherwise banner tomato season or spontaneously creating a hybrid that becomes a culinary star, such as the Meyer lemon. She is clearly the most powerful force in the culinary realm (although I have encountered a few self important chefs who think otherwise). It is our role to meet nature’s ever-evolving challenges head-on and transform her product into something always tasty…and occasionally magical. It is this undertaking that constantly reminds me why I love to do what I do. And what elevates what we do from a noble profession into a soaring art. Perfect.
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