Cooking

I’ve been cooking for over forty years, first as the wife of a journalist when we lived in Wash.D.C., which is a dinner-cocktail party place, a town where deals are made over food and drink. I was the young wife who somehow knew instinctively how to cook and to enjoy it. Mostly, I relied on Julia Child’s The Mastery of French Cooking. I became a vegetarian soon after I began to study yoga with a Persian woman, an Indian classical dancer, who taught classes, comprised mostly of the wives of Congressmen,  in the basement of her Cleveland Park house with she lived with her husband who worked at the Indian embassy. In those days I was a closet vegetarian, as it seemed then an odd pursuit, and I continued cooking meat for friends and family, feeling it wasn’t right to inflict my views or diet on other people. I’ve recently changed my mind and now cook vegetarian and vegan food exclusively, weather for friends or catering clients. 

My first professional cooking job was in the late seventies when I was the chef at Wheatleigh, a five-star restaurant and inn in Stockbridge, a Berkshire cottage, designed in the manner of  a 16th century Florentine palazzo. How I got this job, considering I never attend a culinary institute nor took a single cooking lesson in my life, is another story, which  you can find under Writings on this blog. 

I opened my own restaurant in Housatonic with my brother, Jay, in l982. It was called Embree’s and was very popular as the place to eat, have fun and dance to live bands on the weekends. Many stories there, which you can find under Writings.

I’ve also been the cook at other restaurants, such as The Bronz Dog, Babalouie, and my take-out place, Embree’s At Home. I’ve catered retreat weekends at Fox Hollow for Kripalu, countless weddings and all manner of affairs for the last eighteen years, since retiring from cooking in restaurants. 

Alfred Haynes’s poem describes why I gave up eating meat:

  

                         The Slaughter House

Under the big 500-watted lamps, in the huge sawdusted

government inspected slaughter-house,

head down from hooks and clamps, run on trolleys over

troughs,

the animals die.

Whatever terror their intelligences feel

or what agony distorts their most protruding eyes

the incommunicable narrow skulls conceal.

Across the sawdusted floor,

ignorant as children, they see the butcher’s slow

methodical approach

in the bloodied apron, leather cap above, thick square

shoes below,

struggling to comprehend this unique vision upside down,

and then approximate a human scream

as from the throat slit like a letter

the blood empties, and the windpipe, like a blown valve

spurts steam.

But I, sickened equally with the ox and lamb

misread my fate,

mistake the butcher’s love

who  kills me for the meat I am

to feed a hungry multitude beyond the sliding doors.

I, too, misjudge the real

purpose of this huge shed I’m herded in: not for my love 

or lovely wool am I here,

but to make some world a meal.

See, how on the insubstantial air

I kick, bleating my private woe

as upside down my rolling sight

somersaults, and frantically I try to set my world upright;

too late learning why I’m hung here,

whose nostrils bleed, whose life runs out from eye and

ear.

I’m available for vegetarian/vegan catering and private cooking on a selective basis

413-298-3595

joanembree@roadrunner.com