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Washington chef Greg Atkinson's new book In Season defies easy classification. It's not exactly a cookbook, even with 75 recipes. Some of the chapter-length essays describe his introduction to cooking and evolution as a chef, but this is no memoir. And while regional foodstuffs from apples to oysters serve as the focus of much of the writing, the book doesn't really serve as a guidebook to northwest cuisine. But not since James Beard or M. F. K. Fisher has anyone written about food so honestly.
In Season is a book about our most elemental needs, about the sustenance of both belly and soul and how closely the two are linked. In his very first sentence Atkinson reveals a basic truth about the emotional nature of food, "I have always cooked," he writes, "primarily to please people."
It's this sense of food as an expression of feeling that's absent from most contemporary writing on the subject. Rather than show us how to impress company with the cuisine-of-the-moment, or send us hunting for rarefied ingredients in a futile striving for culinary authenticity, Atkinson uses the seasonal provender of the upper left coast to connect good eating with everyday life.
We share that life through simple stories about his own experience as a student, cook, husband, and father. Atkinson travels from Florida to the northwest to attend college, begins his culinary career in the school cafeteria, tends his first garden, falls in love, and learns even more about why we cook as he feeds his young children. And with each story, he shares a recipe or two for foods that, like Proust's madeleine, evoke some favorite memory.
The stories begin, as all good things do, in the Spring, the season of morels, spot prawns, rhubarb, mussels, lamb, and tender wild greens just emerging from the under the winter's debris. It's a time, Atkinson writes, when he "has the sense that anything could happen in the kitchen." He recalls the spring day he and his family abandoned the drudgery of spring cleaning when they caught a glimpse of a morel at the edge of their San Juan island yard. That memory brings into focus thoughts of "the dewey pink light of a spring evening," and then his children, grown older since that foray for mushrooms, jolt Atkinson back to the present. He knows that the island forest where they gathered morels has been long since clear cut, but the taste of the wild mushrooms can take him there any time.
Summer means strawberries, fresh peas, sweet peaches, corn on the cob, and salmon with raspberry butter sauce. And to Atkinson, summer is about the friendly rivalry between a pair of island strawberry growers and the gardening descendants of the Quakers who settled on tiny Waldron Island to live as pacifists. The long hot days remind him of childhood afternoons in Florida waiting for the Georgia peach farmer to drive into town with his juicy cargo for sale, and how he now waits for the peach grower's truck from Yakima or Wenatchee.
One of my favorite summer stories is about blackberries, maybe because I feel the same as Atkinson about them. "I find it hard to sit still when the blackberries are ripening," he writes. "I feel compelled to bake something with them, to preserve them, to get the little jewels into jars." While my feelings go back to a childhood spent among the prickly canes, his are of a more recent origin. "I identify with the less-desirable towering Himalayan," he notes, after pointing out that this symbol of the Northwest summer isn't a native. But neither is he, and Atkinson goes on to say that "the ripening blackberries remind me that time is possessed of a current, that we are all caught up in it, and that none of us will be here forever."
And so it goes through the Fall, a time to gather in the root vegetables, to bake bread, and to hunt for chanterelles. Winter is for hearty stews, cold fried chicken to eat outside on blustery winter picnics, and oysters. That chapter is titled "Oysters for Mary Frances" and tells how the island chef came to know the famous author.
Atkinson read M. F. K. Fisher's 1941 classic Consider the Oyster nearly than 50 years after she wrote it, and he sent a letter to tell her how much he liked it. She replied and asked him to visit her in northern California, at what she called "Fisher's Last House," where she was living with Parkinson's disease.
Atkinson and his wife Betsy loaded their car with the best bivalves they could find, from Westcott Bay on San Juan Island, and other foodstuffs from the area. But Fisher had no appetite for the Ellensburg lamb, Washington pears, or cheese made by Shaw Island nuns. All she wanted was oysters. Atkinson served them on a bed of ice, each topped with a spoonful of a citrus salsa made from the zest and pulp of lemons, limes, and oranges, slightly sweetened and flavored with crushed coriander seeds. Fisher ate hers and those of her nurse, and talked of living in France and meeting Colette. But she tires quickly and must lay down, and Atkinson reads his stories to her and says, "She was young again and laughed through her old body about bad salad dressings and bad people."
Even if you never turn on the stove, you could certainly read In Season just for stories like this one. But the recipes let you share Atkinson's culinary adventures on another level. Most seemed culled not so much from Atkinson's career as a chef at several restaurants in Friday Harbor, but his home cooking for friends and family. From Dungeness crab cakes with Grandfather's remoulade to home-canned peaches with vanilla beans, the recipes offer more than just really good food. Each recipe holds a little bit of the author's soul, and when you cook something from the book after reading the story, the food you make holds some of yours.