The Cookthink Questionnaire: Nancie McDermott
May 19th, 2009
Nancie McDermott is a food writer and cooking teacher specializing in the cuisines of Southeast Asia. Find out more about Nancie at her website or her brand-new blog. You can find some of Nancie’s recipes online at Cookthink.com.
Sweet or salty?
Salty/Sweet. They’re friends.
Which ingredient(s) do you use most?
Fish sauce, palm sugar, cilantro, wild lime leaves, eggs, butter and vanilla (not all at once in the same dish).
What’s the cooking sound you most love?
Sizzle
What’s your favorite cooking smell?
It’s a tie between jasmine rice and bread; that little aroma-puff released when they’re just about done.
What are the qualities you most admire in a dish?
Stories — clues to its roots in people, places and time.
What is your most treasured possession in the kitchen?
The granite mortar and pestle I brought home from Thailand in 1978.
What is a dirty word in your kitchen?
The recently coined, apologetic term “full-fat” as a descriptor of a previously respectable definitive ingredient, as in “full-fat cream cheese.” There’s cream cheese and then there’s “low-fat” or “2 percent” or “barely-there” cream cheese, or whatever we wish to express. But don’t go revising the real thing.
What are afraid to do in the kitchen?
Not make enough food; run out of food and leave guests hungry and unsatisfied. This I learned at my grandmother’s elbow; part of why I adore and am brilliant at using leftovers, at re-presenting food. Also abhor wasting food — this fear is the source of many tasty practical dishes I do believe.
Have you ever lost your appetite for a food you once loved?
Nope. Never. Not once.
Have you ever had a change of heart involving a food you once disliked?
Lord, yes! Lima beans, pimento cheese, tuna fish sandwiches, artisan bread (I’m from the South, home of biscuits, cornbread and dinner rolls, so at first, bless my little heart, I thought it was stale).
If you could choose one historical or living cook to make you a meal right now, who and what would it be?
It’s a tie between Mrs. Abby Fisher, author of What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking and Dr. George Washington Carver.
Which living cook do you most admire/despise?
Most admired: Leah Chase, chef/owner of Dooky Chase Restaurant, in New Orleans, Louisiana, author of And Still I Cook and the Dooky Chase Cookbook.
Which food website/blog would you be lost without?
You mean besides Cookthink, right? That would be a tie between, no, make that among:
101 Cookbooks, Orangette, Viet World Kitchen, Eating Asia, Austin Bush, the Food Time Line
(I am forcing myself to stop at six, even though nine is my lucky number).
Who are your favorite cookbook authors/food writers?
In alphabetical order: Brett Anderson; Anthony Bourdain; Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford; Mildred Council (Mama Dip); John T. Edge; Jessica Harris; Srisamon Kongpan; Edna Lewis; Andrea Nguyen; John Martin Taylor; Jess Thomson; Barbara Tropp.
What is your favorite food-related word?
Spoon
What is your favorite food-related scene from literature or the movies?
End of Big Night where the brothers eat in silence after a huge fight.
What’s your favorite food-shopping errand or journey?
Going to an upcountry market in a place where mass-production and food-biz hasn’t taken hold of the human food world.
To which country would you move for the food?
Thailand, Vietnam, China, Mexico, India
What’s your standard outfit in the kitchen?
Something that can get dirty — no aprons unless I’m teaching a class and have to present “respectable!”
If heaven exists, what do you hope they have on the menu?
Biscuits; skillet cornbread; Mama Dip’s fried chicken; Dooky Chase’s grits and grillades; Miss Louise’s lemon poundcake; my grandmother’s coconut cake and blackberry roll; sweet potato pie; foie gras; God’s five top French cheeses; Thai kanom jeen; kao soi; gaeng kio wahn gai; gaeng mussamun neua; nahm prik gapi; nahm prik plah tu; jasmine rice; sashimi; miso soup; oyako donburi; Taiwanese pork belly; sah poh nung (pickled radish omelet); jook with sweet potatoes; and Peking Duck.
If you came back as a fruit or a vegetable, which one would it be (and why)?
Wild persimmons and blackberries in the American south — wild, wonderful, mobile, adaptable, persistent and a source of seasonal pleasure and delight for all kinds of creatures.
What are you craving right now?
Paht Thai from the shop that served only that, in Nakhon Sawan, Thailand, where I first ate it as a Peace Corps trainee in 1975.
(Image created at Wordle.)
