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This collection of recipes, most from noted area restaurants such as The Heathman Hotel, L'Auberge, Nick's Italian Cafe but also from the kitchens of Brooks' food-loving friends, was published in 1993, which is when this review first appeared in Willamette Week. I've updated it a bit, but the gist remains the same. While some of Brooks' discussion of the Northwest food scene is dated, her book is still a good resource for recreating the local cuisine.
My first culinary encounter with Karen Brooks was more than 15 years ago. I was a fledgling free-lance food writer, she the doyen of restaurant reviewers at Willamette Week. I had been invited to a seder, the Jewish feast celebrating Passover, at the editor's house. The editor, like Brooks east coast and Jewish, suggested I could bring some traditional dish usually served at the seders of their youth. Now I had read almost everything ever written by Saul Bellow, but I was still an Oregon goy through-and-through. So while thoughts of pickled herring, matzoh, and harrosa raced through my head, the editor yanked me from the diaspora with this simple command: "make a green bean casserole."
Did he mean the green bean casserole, the same dish I'd eaten at every Thanksgiving and Christmas meal I could ever remember, the primary use for canned cream of mushroom soup, the only known recipe that ever called for canned French-fried onion rings? Yes.
Tradition is important to me, and I've made green bean casserole many times, though only at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's simple. To either canned or frozen green beans-and while our family would vacillate on that, we always used the French cut beans-you add a can or two of canned mushroom soup. The onion wrings go on top for crunch, and the whole thing is popped into the oven.
But this was someone else's tradition. I'd never been to a seder, though I knew about the historical and religious significance of the different items of food. Then there was Karen Brooks. A food critic. Dare I resort to canned soup in such august company?
Well, the short version is that I picked through mounds of fresh green beans, made a mushroom-sherry cream sauce, and finally topped my casserole with the canned onions. And everyone was disappointed. They'd expected the canned beans and canned soup, too. It taught me an important lesson about the real meaning of food: eating does more than fill our bellies. It connects us to our pasts and each other.
Over the next few years I worked for Karen quite a bit, especially during the annual orgy of eating and writing that culminated in WW's Restaurant Guide. When she became the Arts and Culture editor and found her time for restaurant reviewing limited, she recruited me as an apprentice, and in time I became one of the principal restaurant critics at the paper. After a few more years, she went to work for Portland's only daily paper, the Oregonian, as the editor of the weekly entertainment guide. Karen still writes the occasional restaurant review.
Brook's Cuisine of the Rain mirror's her restaurant reviewing style. Her writing excels at evoking the subtle interplay of unfamiliar flavors or the visual impact of juxtaposed colors. When Brooks writes about food, she often spends more time describing atmosphere and emotion than the actual meal, and it usually works. But she doesn't let the facts get in the way of a good line.
A recent review of Saigon Kitchen in the Oregonian serves as an example. Brooks wrote that the waiters used cellular phones and returned to that image as a metaphor for their high speed efficiency. But the "cellular phones" are really a single cordless unit, and it's used more for take-out orders than anything else. It's a small point, but those little errors eventually undermine credibility.
Similarly, Brooks drops a few whoppers in the lead-ins to her collection of recipes from renowned local chefs. She writes that a Marionberry is a "cross between the loganberry and wild mountain blackberry" when it's really a hybrid of two mostly forgotten blackberry cultivars, the Ollalie and Chehelam varieties.
In the preface to a recipe for a game pate, Brooks calls eastern Oregon the land of "juniper, jackrabbits, venison, and sage," and says "game hunting is still a popular sport in these parts," implying that buckaroos bag the leggy long ears for the table. Most of the rabbits dying east of the Cascades are roadkills. Few, if any, are ever eaten, and the west side accounts for most of the deer shot by Oregon hunters.
Geography raises its ugly head again when Brooks says that both the Tillamook and Rogue River Valley creameries are on the coast. Tillamook, yes, but Central Point, home of the crumbly and sharp Rogue Gold cheddar, remains comfortably inland, at least until the next big earthquake drops a hundred miles of rugged mountains into the Pacific.
A few other gaffes were reported by Barbara Durbin in a review of Cuisine of the Rain in the Oregonian's Food Day section. Readers may have been shocked to see the daily criticize one of its own, even in a typical bit of front-page advertising masquerading as news. But the Food Day's faint praise only brought to the surface a long-simmering internecine conflict between the paper's old-timers and the new generation of editors represented by Brooks.
Despite the lapses of verity and hints of corporate media backbiting, Brooks' book is actually quite useful. The recipes, collected from Portland's best restaurants, food writers, and gourmet aficionados provide a nice sampling of the different faces of the so-called "Northwest Cuisine."
Preserving such recipes as pear waffles and Frangelico syrup from combative Harriet Reed's stormy but memorable Eat Now Cafe and petrale sole with Champaign sauce from Karl Schaefer's tiny, doomed Le Cuisinier, it acts like a time machine to Portland's restaurant past.
Knowing how to make mussel chowder from Cafe des Amis or Genoa's sweet and sour salmon with fennel greens gives you an opportunity to revisit favorite meals or sample flavors from those to come.
So, if you'd like to cook some of the same dishes served to the culinary cognoscenti, or just want to know what's in them, by all means buy the book. But while you're reading, keep the salt shaker handy.