The Secret Ingredient: Eggplant
"My goal is not to push myself to the edge. It’s to grow but not to push myself over the friggin edge."
Sometimes I think I want too much. I worry that I can’t simultaneously work in food and continue to find joy and creativity in cooking. Or that having big dreams is incompatible with a sustainable lifestyle. And then I think about Paige, who pours herself and everything she loves into Archestratus but, as she points out, is still a human being separate from the place. I’m sure she’ll be embarrassed if she reads this, but she’s an inspiration to me, not because of the success of Archestratus, but because of her confidence in pursuing what’s important to her without sacrificing herself at its altar. Incidentally (or not so), the work environment she’s created is the most sustainable of anywhere I’ve worked in the food industry.
Our conversation is about…eggplant? But also the art of resourceful cooking, the difference between passion and workaholism, and why Paige will never be a film director.
Paige: There’s so many people that don’t like eggplant. And there's no other explanation other than that they’ve never had it prepared properly. I don’t follow lots of rules, or think that food has rules a lot of the time, but with eggplant I guess I do. I guess I have two rules.
One is that you need to salt your eggplant. Then you wash off the salt and you either roast it or fry it. And that all has to be done pretty quickly, within five hours or so. And then the second rule is that you should eat eggplant the next day. The day after you make it, all the oil has absorbed into the flesh. The cooking it’s endured, it feels like it’s absorbed whatever trauma it went through. [Starts laughing] So cheesy, but you know what I mean? Like you taste that fresh fry or something that’s just been roasted and it tastes a little burnt. If you have a burnt eggplant, the next day it becomes sweet. The next day everything changes and transforms, especially with eggplant.
I also feel like people have had bad experiences with eggplant parm where it’s a little tough and not moist, and I think that’s because it's not cooked all the way through. You really have to cook through your eggplant before you put it in the oven. Even though it sits in the oven for another hour, it does nothing to the cooking of eggplant.
Kate: So did you learn all this from your Nonna and the way she would cook?
So what's funny about the whole Nonna thing is that I never learned any cooking from her. I learned through tasting her food. Nonna is 100 years old, I’m 35. She started losing it when I was a teenager and she was in her 80s. So I never learned directly from her. There were a few months that I took before I opened the store, where I had this time and I was like, I’m gonna figure these out and nail them down.
K: I think we discount that in thinking about learning to cook from people. A lot of it is just about learning to taste.
Totally. And learning what you think tastes good. I learned from Nonna to salt your eggplant. Absolutely. I didn't learn from her to eat it the next day, I figured that out. The tomato sauce is definitely a memory. Like me figuring out what that tomato sauce is, I had to test a lot of different ways of doing it.
One of my strongest childhood memories with eggplant is the environment, because whenever we would go to my Nonna’s in the summertime, when she was growing eggplants, we would have a barbecue and on the grill would be steaks and eggplant — that's the one exception where you should eat the eggplant right away! And we’d have amogghio, which is this tomato-garlic-oregano-sauce, and we would put it all over the steak and all over the eggplant. And that’s like the best. So in my mind, eggplant is tied to New York summers barbecuing, and LaGuardia Airport planes. That’s the sound of eggplant, LaGuardia airplanes flying over Ozone Park.
My Nonna also used to make this thing called spiedini, which means spear, and it’s anything on spears or toothpicks, like a rolled thing. She used to make it with thinly pounded veal, and then you would add breadcrumbs and caramelized onions and cheese and parsley in the center and then roll it up, dip it in egg and breadcrumbs, and you could fry it or just put it in the oven. When I was vegetarian for many years, she started to do the same thing with eggplant and so now that’s become a thing that I make here for dinners. It's so good. It has a really specific flavor that I can’t — to me it just tastes like Nonna’s cooking. It’s like onions, sweet, it’s like fresh parsley meets the fattiness of the cheese, that is just like Nonna flavor to me.
K: I think of you as being good at just putting things together without recipes and creating really good flavor combinations that are sometimes surprising.
Thank you very much. As far as the putting things together, I don't know, I just always did that. I didn't watch my mom do that. My mom would use recipes all the time, she had these very specific recipes in her cookbooks that she would go to. And I love that because I love cookbooks, but I almost never go to recipes. I think it’s because of some larger thing within me that doesn’t approach things that way. There's something organic and resourceful and musical and necessary that happens when you just use what you have. To me, it’s more satisfying and nourishing. My favorite meals are from these moments of like, just feeling the confidence that I can feed myself. I can do this. Like, we have an onion and we have some water, we have soup.
You know when actors talk about finding the character from the outside in? I feel like I find the meals from the inside out. Everything comes out of the ingredients. I’m never like, I want to make a spinach dip. I’m like, I have yogurt and I have spinach, let’s make a dip.
Sometimes I think, there’s so much stuff in this world, and I feel the existential dread and weight of so much stuff, and I don’t want to add it. I have this confidence, I don’t know where it comes from, but there’s a confidence that we’ll be fine. We’ll make something good. If you have good ingredients, then we’ll figure it out.
K: I’ve talked to people who work professionally in food, and they’ve said that this ability to cook with inspiration and discovery is something they had to leave at home or maybe even gave up when they started cooking professionally. Do you feel like you’re able to bring that into your work cooking?
Thankfully yeah. I cook in a style where I’ve laid out blank canvases. Arancini is a blank canvas. You have to make these structures for yourself where you can keep the inspiration going, so for us it’s arancini because we’re constantly putting new things in it. Like, I don’t ever need to make rainbow cookies again in my life. I know how to make them, I’ve made them a million times, I’m excited to teach the people how to make them. But if that was my only job, I would not find creativity or inspiration in my workplace. You have to make those canvases for yourself, to be able to use what’s around you, be resourceful, be sustainable, and also be creative.
I purposely put the timballo dinner after this other event, because that food will feed into the timballo. It’s meant to be this kind of kitchen sink meal — that’s the idea of timballo and arancini, to use up your leftovers. And then as far as emotional health and physical health, it’s super important for me to space them out every two weeks or I start to get a little bit [makes dying sound].
K: I feel like a lot of people in the food industry don’t know that they’re getting [makes dying sound] or they feel like their job is just to push through it.
Totally. I didn’t get into this to be that way. I didn’t ever want a restaurant for that reason. I have a cafe and when we opened, I had so much less. And what was great was that the feedback was more food, more food, more food and then build and build. But no, I would never want to own a restaurant and I would never want to direct films. Those seem like really stressful fucking jobs, where everything is constantly time-sensitive and slipping through your fingers. I've been through a lot of therapy, I've been through some stuff in my life, my goal is not to push myself to the edge. It’s to grow but not to push myself over the friggin edge.
I went through some really intense life experiences before I opened the store, where I basically lost someone that was really close to me. And then after that experience I was like, fuck everything. I was just like, I'm gonna open the store. I'm gonna do what I want, and we’re gonna see what works. We’re gonna see if people like it. And I’ve lived that way. And what's really amazing is that people seem to like it and it's going okay, but if they didn't, that would be okay too. I'd try something else. It wasn't like I came to this like, this is the only thing I can ever do. I definitely was like, I want to do this wholeheartedly, and I gotta try. But I'm more than the store. I'm a human being, you know, separate from this place. So I felt, when I opened the store, I’m not doing this to find a family. I’m not doing this to find friends. I’m not doing this to prove something to myself. I was like, I'm not gonna be happy working for someone else. I'm not gonna be happy if I'm not creative all the time. I’m not gonna be happy if I don't get this thing that I know is inside me out of my body. I have to try. But I didn't go into it wanting fame and money. Or to push myself. Or with the idea that we're in New York and so we have to be a certain way. From the beginning, I had so much pushback. Why aren’t you open this many hours? Why are you closed on these days? Why don't you serve croissants? Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? Bla bla bla bla bla and I was always like, we’re just not doing that. And it’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.
What I’m Cooking
Eggplant and pine nut pasta (v)
It’s a little early in the season for eggplants, but after reading that interview, don’t you just want that tender, buttery eggplant flesh?
The trick in this pasta is using toasted pine nuts, which add a meatiness that’s almost like sausage. It’s one of my favorite dishes I’ve made. Recipe for paid subscribers:
Coolio!