We arrived after several sweaty hours of riding down country highways in the sun baked old Chrysler. Its fishbowl design not offering much shade. I was ten years old and the luxury of riding in air conditioned comfort was still quite a few years off for our family. We turned off the highway and onto a bumpy dirt road marked only by a hand painted sign leaning on a rusty mailbox. The words " FRESH CORN" and "TOMATO'S" printed in dark paint on white plasterboard. The car lurched to a stop. The dust cloud raised by driving down the unpaved path caught up to us and engulfed our car after just a few short seconds on this bumpy lane. I opened my door and a searing combination of bright un-shaded mid-day sun and swirling dry tan dirt forced my eyes closed as I left the car. I heard the driver's door slam shut. As I wiped the grit from my face and opened my eyes I saw Dad, focused and obviously unfazed by sun or dust, already halfway to the worn whitewashed farm stand. He was on a quest and I was his Sancho Panza. Only this Don Quixote wasn't looking for damsels or windmills, he was on the hunt for a leafy green vegetable he called schav.

Hunting Schav, Sour Grass or fresh sorrel (its more common name) was as much a summer ritual as mowing the lawn or playing golf was to most other Dads. He wasn't completely compulsive about it, just almost. This summertime pursuit was one of my father's lesser known obsessions. He was farm stand junkie anyway and wouldn’t think twice about a half hour detour from his day if it meant it would take him past a farm stand. He had a connection to farm stands that went beyond just the produce I think. These direct sales outlets connected him to a time when as a child his family lived on a farm. We weren't country folk by any stretch of the imagination mind you. Both he and mother were raised on the Westside of Chicago. An as urban and Jewish a neighborhood as you could find outside of Brooklyn. But there was a time in his youth that his family lived on a farm in Michigan and that was enough for him to keep a love of the land for the rest of his days. No matter what job he had, and he had several from what I remember, he would often manage to wind up far enough out in the country sometime during the day to find a farm stand. He would arrive home with a huge smile and armloads filled with bags of sweet corn, tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, cucumbers and such. But his biggest grins came whenever he was able to fetch home, at the height of summer, a cache of the prized schav.

This quest started when he was a young man, with a recipe passed on to him from his mother and continued by him through the years. The recipe was planted in his head by watching her prepare it every year during the sweltering part of summer. She brought this recipe for cold borscht with her from Eastern Europe along with my uncles, Dad’s older brothers, and a satchel of copper pans. The borscht was best made with sorrel but over the years, and with Mom's modern inventions, sorrel had gradually been replaced by ordinary spinach. He learned to love it, but it wasn't the same to him. Every opportunity he had to find the real ingredient, he took it. It was even something he took with him when he and mom retired to Palm Springs, California. His search pattern then would haunt the farm stands and markets of Riverside County and the Imperial Valley. A habit he kept until he was no longer able to drive.

Today, French sorrel as we know it is relatively easy to find. It appears in upscale markets, trendy restaurants and the pages of fashionable food magazines. In fact, it wasn't until many years after our visit to that dusty roadside stand that I finally made the connection of schav to sorrel. I was a young cook in a French restaurant kitchen. The Chef was one of my first mentors and was very happy to teach me every trick and technique he could. One day he was showing me his recipe for a classic French Sorrel Soup. I was busy with another project when he started so didn’t see the preparation. He called me to his stove to explain what he was doing and offered me a spoon. After my first taste I remember shouting out to the amazement of the Chef and kitchen staff around me, "that's Schav".

Did I say I was living in a house without furniture? Well I really was, almost. There was a bed I would occasionally sleep in and the before mentioned bed side table. Rounding out this palatial suite was a dresser that held a very small black and white T.V. That was it. It was all a guy needed who was working 18-20 hours a day, six and sometimes seven days a week. Sure, this was a large three bedroom house in an upper middle class Chicago suburb. But it certainly wasn’t a typical one. The nuclear family that had lived here, my nuclear family, had begun the late 20th century convention of empty nesting. Only our version just happened to be in reverse. At 19 I stayed home and my parents left. My brother was long gone. He was older and left the nest several years earlier to start his career as a newspaperman. The parents, after lifetimes of snow, sleet and struggling to finish and furnish Mr. Blanding's dream house, all of a sudden it seemed decided to pick up and move to the sunny climes of the California desert. So here I was, left in a big suburban house with only three pieces of furniture all in one room.

But what the hell did I need with a couch, dining table and all that other stuff people would normally have around a house? I certainly wasn’t going to dust it. And who the hell was I going to entertain. Did I mention I worked 18-20 hours a day? Whoever came over could sit on the stairs or the floor. Besides, the few friends who bothered to keep in touch that year knew there was no furniture in the house and came prepared for the non-traditional decorating plan. They also knew when I’d probably be at home. If I wasn’t at work, I was probably going to be sleeping on the one piece of furniture in the house where I could do that. So they would just pop by, usually after midnight. There was no calling first…that would have been a waste of time. If it wasn’t 5:00 a.m and it was my Chef was on the other end calling, I probably wouldn’t answer the phone anyway. Besides, this was way before answering machines or cell phones. Hell this way before anything. How did we live being so out of touch?

The only difficult part about their adventure of just showing up at my door was to wake me up. The doorbell was good. Banging on the door was better, but that would piss off the neighbors and nobody wanted to bring that kind of attention down on a probable illegal activity. (There was probably some surreptitiously obtained cheap wine and marijuana involved) So they used the doorbell like an alarm. I’d be awakened by the persistent ringing of the melodious chime like doorbell my mother was so proud of. The day my dad installed it she bent down to me and whispered with an enormous grin on her face “Isn’t that elegant”. And now my friends were using this elegant Big Ben imitation to annoy the crap out of me so I’d let them in.

Now in Skokie, as in any mid-American suburb in the seventies, there wasn’t a whole lot to do for the typical young adult other than drink illegally, smoke illegal substances or just hang out with your friends. (yes if your thinking it sounds a lot like“That 70’s Show” then your correct…it was). After all we were nearly a quarter century away from any Starbucks, Lifetime Gyms or multiplex theaters. Cable T.V. was still glimmer in some exec’s business plan and the guys I hung with didn’t have the money to party downtown on Rush Street yet. Besides the disco inferno was still just a small brush fire and none of us had discovered the fertile hunting grounds of polyester clad women under a shimmering rotating ball. So when it was party time, we’d grab a bag of weed from our favorite dealer (usually an old high school pal who it seemed discovered shortly after graduation the glory of marijuana and the tax free money that came along with it) and pay a visit to “our” liquor store on Howard St. This tiny store sat on the northern border of Chicago, Evanston was a dry town and there weren’t very many liquor stores in the heavily Jewish suburb of Skokie. We’d been buying our fizzy fruit wine and budget beer there since one of us could grow facial hair. In the summer the party would usually end up at the beach, until the cops cruised by, or in colder weather someone’s apartment or better yet…the empty house where someone’s parents happened to be gone. That was me!!

One late night, a kind of girlfriend showed up at my door with a bag of groceries and actually made me dinner. After several breaks for ...well you know, we finally ate about 3:00 a.m. That was a rare treat. Not the sex, but the food. Most of the people I hung with expected me to cook for them.  On one of those rare evenings when I wasn’t at work mopping the kitchen floor or peeling a pot full of vegetables, I happened to be home at the rare time of 9:00 p.m. and in bed with the same kind of girlfriend who cooked when the chimes started sounding. Since I was already being very nicely entertained and in no mood for the guys, cheap wine or their funny cigarettes, I ignored it. Only this time the ringing wasn't as persistent and came with polite sounding knocks instead of the typical raucous bangs of the young adult male with a buzz on.  

Suspiciously I got out of bed and padded barefoot across the hall to my old bedroom that faced the street. The blinds were open. (The blinds were always open giving the house that abandoned look I guess the neighbors must have really hated me for) Looking down on the driveway I saw the police car. The bell started its four tone track again and my heart leaped into my throat. ITS THE COPS!

The phone is ringing. The phone is ringing. Damn it, the phone is ringing.

Most mornings during my apprenticeship to Chef John Snowden, this was the first sound I’d hear to drag me out of a beautiful solid sleep. The annoying shrill of the tiny bell in the 1960's powder blue Princess phone perched on my bed stand. The ring of this hand-me-down was only slightly louder than the beeping alarm of the clock radio sitting next to it on the small table. A table already loaded with books, an overflowing ashtray, a lamp with Chinese letters and figures in relief up and down it’s thick body and a shade torn from a recent shove over the edge. All of these, except the cigarette butts in the tray, were leftovers’ from my parents bedroom. Because that’s where I was sleeping. I was 19 and I hadn’t left home…my parents had, and this was the only room in the house with furniture. 

The alarm, which I always managed to sleep through, should have been enough. But both noises working together pushed their way into the finale of what ever dream I was deeply involved in. The pitch of the phone was just annoying enough to get me to open my eyes and bring the dream to a screeching stop. I reached for the phone and with every ounce of effort I could muster, Clearing my throat, I set my voice to sound as if I’d been up for hours. “Hello”, I said as cheerily as I thought it should sound. "You're Late" was the only thing the voice on the other side would say before he hung up. My awake sounding voice was never enough. Each time I’d hope he'd believe that I'd been up and delayed by some horrific accident in the bathroom that might allow me to stay in bed a few hours longer. But I never got the chance. "You're Late" was the only exchange to my "Hello" then a mechanical click and the buzz of a phone line gone dead. It was 5:00 a.m. and I was supposed to be there already.

If I had managed to roll in awake and ready for work (which I did every fourth or fifth day, by the way) my 5:00 a.m. duties would be to warm the ovens, make or reheat (John was notorious spendthrift) a pot of coffee. Then I would roll out and shape 4 dozen croissant. They had to rise about an hour in the warming kitchen before I could bake them. So there was a  real reason I had to be there by 5:00 a.m. The twelve morning students for John’s cooking class were due in about 10 a.m. and John insisted there be warm croissant ready for each as they arrived. There needed to be one ready for John's assistant/secretary/paramour, Diane, who arrived about 9:00 a.m. Two for John when he returned from walking his Afghan hounds about 8:30 a.m. One for me and the rest were displayed in a small bakery case at the front of the school for sale to the students to take home after class or to sell to the counter girls at the butcher shop next door. Occasionally I’d have to put a few aside for an afternoon meeting John and Diane might have with a potential catering client. But late in the day John would usually send me across the street with a small bag of 3 or 4 getting hard or no longer fresh rolls to the old German couple who lived above the old train station. He was our handyman and she would do John’s laundry on occasion when her arthritis didn't get in the way.

But that was on a normal day. And since I was always late...there were very few normal days.

The moment I walked into the parlor of the cooking school; I felt at home in a place I had never been. Sitting behind a large mahogany desk, strewn with books and papers, was a large black man in a white Chef's coat with a snow-white beard and a shock of white hair accentuated by a widow's peak. He welcomed me with a Santa like twinkle in his eye and an enormous toothy grin. I gently grabbed the hand for a quick and polite shake. His hand crushed mine in return with an intense yet friendly power.

This very charismatic and unique man was John Snowden and I was in his cooking school for Francophiles or anyone else interested in food. He also ran a semi-legal catering business that specialized in home parties to the elite North Shore set of Chicago. I was there to talk about taking classes. I was twenty years old and at a point in my career where I wanted to stop working in pizza joints and get a job in a real restaurant. As we talked he discovered that I was very interested in making cooking a career. He asked if I had considered becoming a chef. I immediately said yes, not knowing at the time what that meant or even what the difference was between a chef and a cook. He took this affirmation as an opportunity to enter into a long dissertation on the life of a chef. He painted a colorful picture of the hard work, long hours, and often, poor working conditions. He also told stories of great dinner parties, cooking for royalty, being in charge of a battalion of cooks and other chefs. He also spoke of the great chefs in history, names I had never heard before, like Tallevant, Careme, Escoffier and Point. I had just come off a three-year crusade of partying and having as much fun as possible while personally trying to end the war in Vietnam through protests and speeches. I was hooked by his fables. I had never imagined the world of cooking and kitchens to be so full of traditions and artistic challenges. I was caught in the rapture of a world I never knew existed and found it very comfortable to be there.

He must have sensed this, because I barely said a word during his narrative. He ended his oration with an offer for me to become his apprentice. He explained how I would learn far more as his apprentice than I would by merely taking classes. Most of the class sessions were geared towards home cooks and the basics they needed to be able to cook like a Frenchman. If I were to become his apprentice, not only would I attend every one of these classes, but I would also take part in the advanced classes for people who wanted to learn specialty cooking like sauce making or pastry. And then there were his catering jobs. These were mostly grand dinner parties in private homes where we would prepare the classics of French cuisine. He explained that this education wouldn't cost me a dime. In return for this fabulous gift I would work for him by keeping the kitchen clean and help him prepare and serve food for parties. If I was up to the work, he guaranteed I would walk away from this experience with a knowledge of cooking that would let me into any kitchen anywhere in the world. Without the slightest trepidation I eagerly agreed and shook his powerful two and half fingered hand to seal the deal.

We talked for another hour, or should I say he talked, about what it was to be an apprentice. I had an idea what an apprentice was but knew very little about the details of this particular position. In order to set the tone for my education he described his own experience as an apprentice in France under the great Fernand Point of La Pyramide in Varenne.(The very same restaurant to train Paul Bocuse many years later.) Chef Snowden, though he insisted I call him John, had left his home at the tender age of fourteen and traveled to France to become an apprentice. He worked in the kitchens of La Pyramide for four years as an apprentice before leaving for his first job as a full-fledged cook. During his apprenticeship he was not allowed to touch food for the first year. He would clean the kitchen, the dining rooms, tend the garden and look after Madame Point's dogs. This should have sent a clear message to me about my near future. But, I was so enthralled with this man and his stories, he was so charming and charismatic, that I put my apprehensions aside and felt welcome in this New World I was about join.

I know the fishing opener, baseball, the economy and hundreds other reasons probably got in the way...but you gotta do something for the missus or Mom tomorrow. There's no way out of it. So if you haven't made brunch recipes (and fat chance you'll find any now), or you want to save some change and do something at home. Here are some easy, and fancy, recipe that will make her think you scoured the food mags for weeks looking for just the right dish.

SAMBUCCA BROILED GRAPEFRUIT

Serves 8

4 large Pink Grapefruit

4 pinches Salt

1 tsp. Vanilla Extract

4 tsp. Sambucca Liqueur* (optional)

4 Tbsp. Brown Sugar

2 Tbsp. Unsalted Butter, cut into 8 thin slices

8 each Maraschino Cherries

Preheat the oven broiler to 500° F.

Cut the grapefruit into halves along the equator. Using a grapefruit knife (or any very sharp small knife), cut around the outside perimeter and all the sections (removing the core) to enable easy eating by your guests.

Place the prepared grapefruit halves onto a baking sheet with low sides. Cut a thin slice off the base of each one to make sure they all sit evenly.

Sprinkle the salt evenly on each grapefruit half. Pour the vanilla into a small glass and brush evenly over the grapefruit halves. Pour the Sambucca Liqueur over the grapefruit halves and then sprinkle the sugar over the grapefruit as evenly as possible. Dot with the butter.

Place the pan under the broiler and broil for 3 to 5 minutes, watching carefully.

Place a maraschino cherry into the core area of each half and serve immediately or at room temperature. These are also good as leftovers.

SWISS CHARD AND PROSCIUTTO BREAD PUDDING

Serves 8

12 slices Firm white bread, trimmed & cubed
2 cups Swiss Chard, chopped coarse and blanched
4 oz. Prosciutto ham, diced
2 cups Provolone, shredded

¼ cup Fresh Basil, shredded

¼ cup Italian flat parsley, chopped
6 large Eggs, slightly beaten
3 1/2 cups Milk
3/4 tsp. Kosher Salt
1/2 tsp. White Pepper

Bring 2 quarts of lightly salted water to a boil Add the Swiss chard. Return the pot to a boil and remove from the heat immediately. Drain the Swiss chard and cool immediately in a bowl of ice water. As soon as the chard, is cool, drain and squeeze dry.

Cover bottom of buttered 9 x 13 inch pan with 1/2 bread cubes. Layer Swiss chard, ham and cheese over bread. Top with half the herbs and remaining bread cubes. Combine eggs, milk, salt and pepper. Pour over bread pudding. Cover and refrigerate 2 hours or overnight. Bake at 350° until a knife comes out clean, 55 to 60 minutes. Let stand 10 minutes and cut into squares.

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