UMass Magazine Online

Spring 2005

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Cooking Lessons

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Cooking Lessons
Joanne Weir's recipe for life calls for food, wine, and world travel.

—Linda Smith and Carol Cambo




	Joanne Weir’s recipe for life calls for food, wine, world travel, and savoring every morsel along the way

JOANNE (TENANES) WEIR ’75 SHUCKS an oyster like most people tie their shoes. With a precise twist of the oyster knife, she opens its hinge and flicks the knife across the shell’s pearly lining, releasing the oyster and its liquor into a bowl. She makes quick work of several dozen—we’re preparing fried oyster Caesar salad—while encouraging us to give it a try, too. “We” are six students in a weeklong cooking tour in Napa Valley; each of us manages to free a few oysters as we watch, listen, and learn, riveted by the culinary force of nature in our midst.

Joanne Weir is a “celebrity chef.” Televised cooking shows gave rise to this fairly recent moniker. I am one of the millions of viewers who have contributed to the genre. I’m a food show addict, if truth be told. Standing here in this expansive kitchen (complete with wood-fired Tuscan oven!), grapevines quilting the hillsides out the window, I am in heaven. What could be better than learning how to shuck oysters (among many other things) from one of my favorite stars, in the heart of American wine country?

Weir is not what you’d expect in a celeb of her stature. While she travels the globe teaching and writing about food, hosting television shows, and acting as a spokeschef for the Sur La Table chain of gourmet food stores, she shows up to class with her mop of red curls still wet from the shower, makes wisecracks like a childhood friend, and shares wine with mid-1970s vintages from her personal cellar. Despite her near-instant familial repartee that puts everyone from divas to dishwashers at ease, she never stops teaching, never stops demanding the very best: the best ingredients, the best tools and methods, the very best of one’s self.

“Don’t buy precrumbled cheese or cut-up fruit—how long does it take to cut it yourself?” she scolds us. And, “I never look at the price of food. I just buy it if it looks good.” And: “When you beat egg whites, they should look like they are blowing in the wind, no foam rolling out of the bowl.” Only the finest cognac (Remy Martin) and the richest chocolate (Shaffenberger) are good enough for today’s dessert.

Weir’s star quality, however, runs deeper than a talent for whisking eggs in a single swish. Her passion for life—and make no mistake, food is her life—consumes her. She is like the aged cheeses and cellared wines she so enjoys. She has reached her peak, and what a crescendo it is.

Down on the Farm

Each night of the cooking school we meet for dinner. Tonight my classmates and I gather round a table in the cavernous wine room at Joseph Phelps Vineyard in Spring Valley, Calif., encircled by barrels holding up to 1,200 gallons wine. The vineyard sits on 600 acres of rolling hills studded with stands of California oak trees. In all, growers tend 120 acres of grapevines on the former ranch.

Joanne settles in at the head of the table and begins an informal lesson on wine, discussing grape varieties and vintages, food pairings, and growing regions. The relaxed dinner pace gives her a chance to share a bit of her personal background, too.

“I don’t know that there are many other things I could have done with my life. I so love seeing new places and tasting new things,” Joanne explains. “Food, for me, is in the blood.”

Food connects four generations of Tenanes women. Her great-grandmother operated a restaurant in Boston at the turn of the last century called Pilgrim’s Pantry. As a girl, Joanne spent time at her grandmother’s farm in Goshen, Mass., learning firsthand the allure of fresh ingredients. Joanne’s mother caught the food bug; she was a professional chef and caterer who worked for years with the legendary cookbook author Charlotte Turgeon. After getting a degree in art education from UMass Amherst and teaching fine arts in Boston, Joanne, like her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother before her, found her way back to the table.

Joanne’s path took her to Berkeley, where she spent five years cooking with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. She studied with Madeleine Kamman in New England and France, and was awarded a Master Chef diploma. Cooking was her medium, but teaching was her true calling. And so, through books, television shows, cooking schools, and culinary tours from Italy to Thailand, she shares her zest for food.

“I think of myself first and foremost as a teacher,” says Joanne. “I have always considered it a privilege to work with people and hopefully inspire them to cook more and to try new things. I think cooking should be accessible
to everyone.”

I try to remember this mantra the following day as I attempt my assigned recipe: a soufflé. It’s almost as if Joanne’s supreme confidence in the kitchen has shaken my own. I nervously separate a dozen eggs while learning big-kitchen etiquette: “Always walk with knife tips pointed down, and no drinking until the knives are put away” and calls of “Hot behind!” (what you say when you’re traversing the kitchen with a warm dish).

I succeed with the eggs, but falter on the béchamel. My job was to measure out the heavy cream, and I only added the half-and-half. Confronted with a goopy sauce, we finally figure out my mistake and manage to salvage it by adding the cream.

Thankfully, Joanne doesn’t measure culinary success solely in the loft of a soufflé or the viscosity of a French white sauce. She is a consummate professor—demanding, but willing to take time to make sure each student understands along the way. She even looks professorial: she wears her glasses to read, but takes them off each time she talks to us, whether to make last-minute changes to a recipe or to instruct us about what to look for in texture and consistency in our cooking. It’s no wonder her culinary awards are as long as a grocery list and her cookbooks could fill an entire pantry shelf.

The week was a whirlwind of cooking classes, food shopping, wine tasting, and gourmet dinners. I had filled every hunger and thirst 100 times over, and learned new skills in the kitchen that would keep me busy for months. The best part, though, was feeling like I’d made a new friend.

Related links:
http://www.umassmag.com/weir
http://www.joanneweir.com

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