Green Acres

On that same topic, I was recently listening to an interview with Bill Buford -- the guy from the New Yorker who sold his ass onto the line at Mario Batali's Babbo (and elsewhere) as research for his book Heat -- in which he said this: "I found two kinds of people there: those who had gone to culinary college, and the few who had not -- including Mario himself. What you needed to be a cook, [Mario would] insist, was not schooling, but working -- in a proper top-flight kitchen -- provided that when you got home, you read your McGee."

That's Harold McGee, author and professor and dedicated amateur food scientist, who in 1984 published the massive, 700-page On Food and Cooking, which -- in its own bizarre way -- contains everything any working cook could ever need or want to know about the science (and history and uses and creation and chemistry and psychological underpinnings) of all things culinary. A couple of years ago, McGee came out with another version of On Food, this one almost 900 pages. And both Buford and Batali are firmly of the opinion that this guy -- formally educated or not -- is an indispensable resource for chefs.

I'm the same way with Beard. I don't love him. I find his essays occasionally impossible to read. And yet his books are like small hardback and cloth-bound boxes meant for the containment of very large and wide minds. Like McGee, he's a guy who -- through his obsession and attention -- does more than just chronicle or categorize food, putting it into a frame of reference that careful cooks can use to trace back all of today's weirdest and wildest nouvelle cookery.

So can you be a professional chef without having gone to C-school? Absolutely. But I'm with Buford and Batali on this one: You can cook without a diploma (and may even be a better cook), but not without a well-stocked book shelf. Read your Beard, your McGee (and your Escoffier, your antique Betty Crocker, your Julia Child and White and Keller and Michael Ruhlman and on and on), and you'll know, beyond question, that the calf's head should always be served with mustard, the ducks always split across the back, and what wine to serve with pig face. (It's pouilly fumé, by the way.)

Leftovers: As if the guys at Frasca needed anyone else telling them how brilliant they are, chef/ partner Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson will be named one of John Mariani's "Four Chefs to Watch" in Esquire's November food issue. (Not surprisingly, he's right beside former co-worker and French Laundry veteran John Fraser, now at Compass in New York.) This means that in the past couple of months, either Frasca itself or the guys at Frasca have collected a Top Fifty Restaurants nod from Gourmet (Frasca was 33), a "Hot List" bump from Conde Nast Traveler (the only Colorado restaurant to get one this time), a "Rising Star" nomination from the James Beard House, and now a quick, literary hand job from Mariani. Not to be discounted, I also said the place was pretty good in last week's Second Helping.