John Ash on Raymond Carver
One of my jobs at the Enterprise-Record is to do the Food pages, which come out every Wednesday.
I covered the first of John Ash’s two duplicate cooking demonstrations at the Sierra Nevada Brewery Big Room Saturday. It was the opening event of the second annual California Nut Festival. Ash entertained the audience for almost two hours, talking almost nonstop. There wasn’t enough room on the Food page to make my story as long as I wanted it to be.
In the blogosphere, the only limitation is the reader’s attention span. I’m going to assume you’ve read the story and still have an appetite for a few more tidbits from Ash’s talk. Or maybe you will read this first and then want to have a look at the story.
Ash was asked whether farmers in this area should pursue “niche markets” for their products. This is already well under way in Butte County and Glenn counties, where almond, olive, rice and wine growers are capitalizing on consumers’ demand for gourmet foods.
He said in the long run this may be the only way small farmers will be able to survive. He said farming in Sonoma County, where he lives, has turned into a “monoculture.” Land has become so expensive that it can only support wine grapes.
But he said a few growers there have turned to specialty products. He said dairy farmers have started producing “the most extraordinary cheese” and he knows of a family that has started growing chestnuts.
He said farmers would be better off if they could get out of the habit thinking in terms of “this is the way we’ve always done it.”
I’m starting to believe there is a link between great culinary skills and a stoveside manner that gives rise to the most fascinating, rambling monologues. Most of the cooking shows on TV run only 30 minutes — minus ads — so the chefs have to stick to their topic. But after listening to Ash and Hugh Carpenter, the chef who gave last year’s cooking demonstrations at the Nut Festival, I’m beginning to think that creative, uninhibited cooking demonstrators will say almost anything.
One of Ash’s most memorable digressions stemmed from a confession about one of his nightmares about his career: “I worry that I’m going to end up being the graveyard shift cook at Denny’s in Bakersfield.”
He then advised the audience to go to a bookstore and pick up something by Raymond Carver, his favorite short story writer. Presumably, his gloomy scenario about a failed chef reminded him of Carver’s work.
Ash seemed to be unaware of Carver’s connection to Chico. The man who gained fame as a master of minimalist prose lived in Chico in the late 1950s and took his first writing classes at what was then Chico State College. Ash spoke feelingly yet fleetingly about how Carver affects him.
“In two pages, Raymond Carver can take me into another world, a world so black that it makes me feel like blowing my brains out.” Then, without missing a beat, Ash said, “If you’ve never made custard sauce, it’s absolutely the most delicious thing in the world.”