Kuhn Rikon Switzerland - Celebrity Chef Arthur Schwartz

Featured Chef Arthur Schwartz

Bio

Arthur Schwartz, also known as The Schwartz Who Ate New York, was one of the first male newspaper food editors in the country and is now a cookbook author, cooking teacher, and host of "Arthur Schwartz With Food Talk," a daily program heard on WOR radio, New York's most venerable talk station. His web site is appropriately called www.thefoodmaven.com.

Schwartz's career started nearly 33 years ago as assistant food editor and food feature writer at Long Island's Newsday. Nine years later he created, as executive food editor, the New York Daily News "Good Living" section, and became that newspaper's food and restaurant critic.

All four of his cookbooks have been nominated for national awards: Cooking In A Small Kitchen (Little Brown, 1978), What To Cook When You Think There's Nothing In The House To Eat (HarperCollins, 1992 and 2000), Soup Suppers (HarperCollins, 1994), and his latest work, Naples At Table: Cooking In Campania, which, when it was published by HarperCollins in November 1998, immediately hit the Los Angeles Times Hot List.

He is currently a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and has written numerous articles for a wide range of magazines, including Saveur, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Cuisine, Vintage, French Vogue, German Lui, Playbill, and Great Recipes. He has been the New York restaurant critic for Travel-Holiday magazine's annual Good Value Dining Awards, and a New York restaurant critic for Food & Wine magazine.

During the summer of 1989, he was the food critic on Fox network's (WNYW-TV) local morning show, Good Day New York. He has also appeared on Good Morning America and Live With Regis, and continues to make frequent TV appearances -- on the Food Network, The Learning Channel, Discovery Channel, the Lifetime Network, New York's Metro Guide, and on many public television cooking programs.

He is on the food writing/media faculty of Greystone, the Culinary Institute of America's continuing education center in Napa Valley, California, and has lectured and conducted seminars at, among other institutions of higher education, New York University, Columbia University, New York City Technical College, The French Culinary Institute, and the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). He introduces the Naples and Campania section in the CIA's new graduate "Cucina e Cultura" program at Hyde Park, NY.

Schwartz teaches and lectures to sold-out classes at all the major cooking schools in the metro New York area -- The New School and Peter Kump's New York Cooking School in Manhattan, The Silo and The Complete Kitchen in Connecticut, à la Carte in Lynbrook, Long Island, and across New Jersey at the four Kings Cooking Studios, Classic Thyme, La Cucina d'Ana, Cooktique and Chef Central.

In November 1997, he was honored as Cooking Teacher of the Year by the New York Association of Cooking Teachers (NYACT), of which he is now on the board of directors. He is an active member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) and in 1999 received the IACP Award of Excellence in Electronic Media. In October 2000, he was honored, along with opera diva Licia Albanese, at New York City Hall for his contributions to Italian heritage and culture in New York. He is a trustee of the new Italian Garden at the Staten Island Botanical Gardens. In April 2001, Arthur Schwartz was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Queens Chapter of the New York State Restaurant Association.

His radio program was also nominated several times by the James Beard Foundation as the best radio show on food.

Interview

Why do they call you "the food maven?"

Maven is a Yiddish word that means connoisseur, or expert. I am the Food Maven because I am that. I am a food know-it-all.

I may have been an accomplished cook in 1969, when I went to work for Newsday, but I was not yet encyclopedic about culinary subjects. My serious, out-of-kitchen education started when I was told I was going to write a question and answer column. The column, called Feedback, still exists in Newsday, and it tackles all and every kind of food, cooking, equipment, shopping, historical and cultural question. If I didn't know the answer, which of course I didn't, I'd do research and find the answer. That experience gives me the ability to go on the radio every day and field questions about every conceivable gastronomic subject.

Please tell us about your latest cookbook.

My latest cookbook is called "Naples At Table: Cooking in Campania." It was published by HarperCollins in November 1998. It is the only cookbook on its subject in the English language - if you discount the couple of poorly translated picture book cookbooks sold in tourist gift shops in Naples. It is the one of my four cookbooks of which I am most proud. It covers the traditional Neapolitan cuisine, which is essentially the mother cuisine of the entire Italian south and the basis for Italian-American cooking.

I wanted to validate the cooking of my Neapolitan-American friends in this book. Since the middle of the 1970s, when so-called Northern Italian foods became popular and the sophisticated thing to eat, Southern Italian food (as represented by Italian American food) was unduly and ignorantly denigrated as coarse and heavy. The food of Naples is still often as unfairly maligned as the city itself. In fact, modern Neapolitan cooking, which is largely based on pasta, fish, vegetables and fruits, and olive oil, is lighter and more healthful than most Northern regional cuisines.

In Naples At Table, I have taken the hallmark recipes of the cuisine - over 250 - and put them in cultural context with short notes and essays about the life and history of the region. Food is as much an expression of a culture as its painting and music, and I always emphasize in my classes that any cuisine is a function of geography, climate, history, and politics. It's not only something good to eat.

What trends do you see in cooking today?

People give a great deal of lip service to the idea of cooking from scratch and eating at home, but the tendency is still to spend as little time as possible in the kitchen on an everyday basis and perhaps to devote time and energy to cooking only on weekends. I think that after a decade of chef worship we're learning that chef's food is best left and enjoyed in a restaurant and that we can, indeed, eat well if we cook simply and with only a few prime ingredients.

How and why did you get interested in pressure cookers?

My grandmother taught me how to use a pressure cooker. We'd use it to make various soups - especially vegetable soups, split pea soup, and mushroom-barley soup - and to cook applesauce. When my grandmother's old-fashioned and unsafe pressure cooker blew up and projected applesauce all over the ceiling, I gave up on the pressure cooker for a long time. Then one of my friends, another food writer, told me about the new generation of safe pressure cookers, and I bought my first Kuhn Rikon. I now swear by the pressure cooker for so many things. It is the only speedy, but uncompromising way to cook risotto. I like to braise meat it in. I use it to cook beans and soups, of which I eat a lot.

Do you have any tips for someone using a pressure cooker for the first time?

Err on the side of undercooking, rather than end up with something overcooked. The pressure cooker is flexible and you can always put the lid on and go for a few more minutes. Or, you can often finish a dish conventionally if it is slightly undercooked -- such as let the stew simmer a few more minutes (perhaps also to reduce the sauce), stir the risotto for a final few minutes.

What do you think about the technique of thermal cooking?

I've just started using my new Kuhn Rikon Durotherm pot but I already love the idea of being able to hold food for a time without it overcooking. I found it handy the other day when I needed an extra burner on the stove. I was able to make fluffily white rice off the stove, letting the heat retention of the Durotherm do the cooking on a counter. Vegetables, cooked without water, come out so vibrantly flavored, you will reduce your use of salt and seasoning. And the mirror finishes of the chrome and stainless on the pot are so beautiful, I would not hesitate to bring the pot to the table or place it on a buffet.

What's your next project?

Being a third-generation New Yorker, from a food family, and a New York food reporter-writer-editor-broadcaster for more than 33 years, I think I know more about New York food and food history than anyone. Indeed, my column in the New York Daily News was called "The Schwartz Who Ate New York." So the next project brings me back home. It's a pictorial history of New York as told from the food point of view. With more than 150 recipes. Everything from what the Indians and the Dutch liked to eat to what we are eating now. It will be published by Stewart, Tabori and Chang at the end of 2004.

You say you were born with a wooden spoon in your mouth. Please tell us about your family and childhood experiences with cooking and food.

Some people grow up with a silver spoon in their mouth. They're rich. I grew up with a wooden spoon because in my family we were always cooking and tasting food in the kitchen. I grew up in a family of great home cooks and serious eaters.
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in an Italian and Jewish neighborhood (with a sprinkling of Irish). Indeed, my father grew up in a two family house with a Neapolitan family, the same house my grandparents continued to live in until I was in my 30s. Then, until I was six years old, I also lived in a two family house with a Neapolitan family. I was often sent downstairs to the Italian family for meals and snacks (they had children my age), and I sometimes joke that my first solid food may well have been ziti with ragu. So I had Neapolitan friends at an early age, and I must have developed Neapolitan taste buds.

Within my own family, however, we had two important cooks - my maternal grandmother, who was of Russian decent and with whom we shared a house from the time I was six until she died when I was in my 30s; and my paternal grandfather (the one who lived with the Italians), who had been a professional chef and restaurateur earlier in life, but was a curmudgeonly waiter in a Jewish dairy restaurant by the time I came around. Still, he was the one, not his wife, my paternal grandmother, who prepared the Sunday dinners we always had at my grandparents.

Food was a regular subject of conversation in our house. Shopping for food, not cooking it, became my father's expertise. He knew where to buy the best of everything and he didn't mind getting in the car and making the rounds all over Brooklyn to get what he considered the best Italian sausage, or the best Nova Scotia lox, or the best freshly made mozzarella, or the best bagels, the best whatever.
To eat foods that we didn't prepare at home we went to restaurants. It was nothing to drive into Manhattan to eat in Chinatown, or to go uptown for a Scandinavian buffet in the Theater District, or to go to Lundy's in Brooklyn or Paddy's in Midtown for seafood. Or to take a ride in the country, or to another city, when my father got a hot restaurant recommendation.

By the time I was five, I wanted to cook for myself. My specialties were vegetable soup and deviled eggs. I was allowed to cut vegetables for soup because my grandfather taught me how to handle a knife. One of his specialties was cole slaw, which, at one time, he sold to bars and grills, and he was always looking for a better tool to shred the cabbage. We always returned to a big knife, so I learned how to use a chef's knife at a young age. After he died, I inherited my grandfather's collection of mandolins, Mouli shredders, and other cutting/slicing gadgets. He had a closet full.
By the time I was a teenager, I cooked regularly, and I had learned how to shop from my father, my grandmother, even my mother, who didn't really like to cook, but who became very good at finding foods she didn't need to cook. Early take-out.

After one year in a college dormitory, eating in the school cafeteria, which was then required of students, I managed to convince my parents that I was seriously deprived of good food and needed my own apartment so I could cook my own meals. They bought it.

I then, with all the cooking knowledge I had learned from my family, plus a trusty copy of Fanny Farmer and the then brand new two volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child (and company), I set out to become a serious cook.

By the time I graduated from college, I was prepared for my first job: Assistant Food Editor of Newsday, the Long Island newspaper.

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Check out his recipe for Lentil Soup with Fennel and Sun-Dried Tomatoes

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Featured Chef Arthur Schwartz

Bio

Interview

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