The Last Course | Claudia Fleming
The Last Course
By Claudia Fleming
with Melissa Clark
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Claudia Fleming: Hi. I'm Claudia Fleming and I'm here to speak about the rerelease and my cookbook, The Last Course.
Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now, on with the show.
Suzy Chase: Personally, the thing I love about The Last Course is it speaks to everyone, perfect for home cooks like me. You are acclaimed for having set an industry-wide standard at New York City's Gramercy Tavern with your James Beard Award-winning desserts. Gramercy Tavern is my all-time favorite restaurant here in the city. Danny Meyer said it so accurately in the cookbook, he wrote Gramercy Tavern strives to combine luxury with warm, down-to-earth hospitality. The New York Times called The Last Course a cult out-of-print cookbook. I'm not alone when I say I'm thrilled you've rereleased it. It's rare for a cookbook to be rereleased, so I'm curious to know why you chose to rerelease it now.
Claudia Fleming: It wasn't my choice. The publisher reached out to me and asked if I'd be interested in reissuing the cookbook, and of course I said yes. It was so many years later. Yeah, I mean, I get weekly requests for books and I didn't have books. People were always wanting to buy the book and I guess the demand got back to them and they decided to rerelease, thankfully. Good for me, yay.
Suzy Chase: Yeah, good for all of us. Before we dig into the book, I'd like to do a little walk down memory lane.
Claudia Fleming: Okay.
Suzy Chase: 1984, on 79th Street, you're working at Jonathan Waxman's ode to California cuisine, Jams. Then, Danny Meyer brought you to Union Square Cafe. Then Drew Nieporent hired you as the pastry assistant at Tribeca Grill in 1990. 1994 Tom Colicchio brought you on board Gramercy Tavern. Those are four visionaries in the restaurant business. I mean, what a star-studded list. Can you think of one takeaway that you learned from each of them? Jonathan, Danny, Tom, and Drew?
Claudia Fleming: Oh, sure. Well, Jonathan did bring a revolutionary style of cooking and cuisine to New York and it was my first exposure to luxury dining. Every single thing you touched in that restaurant was the very best, the Ginori china, the Hockney paintings, the Italian tiles. Then of course, all the ingredients that he used. I remember there being towers of FedEx boxes that came from California with all those baby vegetables, the likes of which I'd never seen before. It was so incredibly exciting. So I think from Jonathan, it was just his approach to cooking. It was very California, it was very light and laid back. In those days we were still immersed in the French style of dining and cooking and eating, and this was just a whole new world. It was incredibly exciting and I just felt so honored to be in it and part of it.
Claudia Fleming: Danny, of course as we know, is just Mr. Hospitality. Danny, I think, brought respect to those of us who worked in the industry that before that time it wasn't a job for educated, ambitious people. It was, and I think still is, a little bit of a place for lost toys or broken toys. The restaurant industry definitely attracts a different kind of personality. But still, Danny gave working in the restaurant industry respect, not to mention his brand of hospitality, which is just warm and inviting and ingratiating and a delight to be around. I mean, he really had a knack for seeking out people whose, I think, driving motivation is to please people.
Claudia Fleming: Let's see, Drew. Drew, I have never met a person who remembers names, numbers. He was just the ultimate maitre d'. Of course, he got so much larger than that. He was just more of an entertainer I think than Danny was, but still that same kind of loving people who came to the restaurant and wanting to do anything to make them happy. If you met Drew once, he remembered you forever. I mean, I remember years after working for him, calling him and him calling me back within five minutes. There was no one he didn't get back to. He was amazing that way, or is amazing that way. Follow up, I would say is one of the things that Drew has taught me. Never let a phone call go on answered or a request unintended to.
Claudia Fleming: And who was our last name?
Suzy Chase: And Tom Colicchio.
Claudia Fleming: Oh, Tom. Oh, my mentor. Tom taught me how to cook, taught me how to think about food, taught me about seasonality and locality, and informed the way I cook and create desserts to this day.
Suzy Chase: In between Tribeca Grill and Gramercy Tavern, you jetted off to Paris to study pastry. Talk a little bit about that.
Claudia Fleming: Jetted off. Wow, that sounds glamorous.
Suzy Chase: Doesn't it?
Claudia Fleming: It was a little less glamorous. I think I was living on like $20 a week. I would make a pot of lentil soup on Sunday and eat it all week long. Buying myself a piece of cheese was a luxury. Luxurious, it was not. I worked in bakeries, because after having worked in restaurants I wanted a more technically-driven education as opposed to the stylized creations that one learns when you work in a restaurant. I chose bakeries because they are so basic and traditional and technically oriented.
Suzy Chase: Growing up, you didn't cook with your mother or grandmother, and you were a dancer. Needless to say, food wasn't at the forefront of your passions or thinking.
Claudia Fleming: No.
Suzy Chase: When did that pivot?
Claudia Fleming: Once I started working at Jams I think, but make no mistake, I mean, my family, Italian-American family and my mother and her sisters were food obsessed. I think from the time they woke up until the time they went to bed, all they did was talk about food or what the next meal was going to be or how to enhance this or make this better. This is so great, but if we just did this, it would be that. I mean, it was never ever far from the forefront of their minds. My mother was an excellent cook, so we always had great food, never a frozen vegetable or a canned vegetable. I remember begging for iceberg lettuce because we had escarole and chicory and I just wanted plain old boring iceberg lettuce.
Claudia Fleming: So food was very, very important in my family. I guess as a dancer it was kind of the forbidden fruit, which is perhaps why I was attracted to it. But I would have to say at Jams is when it really became something that I was attracted to as a creative outlet, because it was food cooked and presented in a way that I had never seen or imagined before.
Suzy Chase: Do you think because your training wasn't as structured as that of many other pastry chefs, you can come up with interesting flavor combinations, like roasted pineapple with pink peppercorns, by thinking outside the box?
Claudia Fleming: I think that's fair to say. I also was very influenced by the cooks in the kitchen. I kind of wanted to do what they were doing and I wanted to sprinkle and saute and not necessarily measure exactly and play with mis en place. So yes, I was open to experimenting and Tom was open to having me do that.
Suzy Chase: Speaking of experimenting, one thing I used to love about your desserts at Gramercy Tavern was that it wouldn't be just a slice of cake or a piece of pie. There would be at least three components on the plate that I could tell were so carefully thought out and mind-blowingly delicious. Lucky for us, the last chapter in the cookbook is a collection of your signature composed desserts. Talk a little bit about that.
Claudia Fleming: Again, to go back to watching the cooks compose a plate, it's what I wanted to do. I wanted to have a primary element, whether that be the tart or the cake, and then enhance it with something cold or something hot, something crunchy, something tart, an herb, a spice. I was just always looking to make things more complicated than they were. In retrospect, it was such an incredible luxury to be afforded that time to just immerse myself in flavor combinations that weren't necessarily part of the sweet kitchen. I was borrowing from the savory kitchen. I saw chefs and cooks borrower from the sweet side of the kitchen, so I thought, well, why can't I borrow from them or find complimentary things from the savory side that would be equally complimentary to desserts? That was just how I started to approach things.
Suzy Chase: You use hard boiled egg yolks in your biscuits. I have never heard of this before. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Claudia Fleming: It was something I learned from a woman that I worked with. It is a tenderizer and it's very Austrian. You can find it in a lot of linzer recipes.
Suzy Chase: So interesting.
Claudia Fleming: I know.
Suzy Chase: What does the boiled egg yolk do? Does it make it fluffier, or?
Claudia Fleming: It makes the dough more tender or softer.
Suzy Chase: Tell me about the North Fork Table and Inn that you opened with your husband, Gerry Hayden, and Mike and Mary Mraz.
Claudia Fleming: Yep. Well, let me start by telling you, I sold the North Fork Table and Inn. Last week we closed.
Suzy Chase: Congratulations.
Claudia Fleming: Thank you, yes, very happy. 15 years, it was a wonderful, challenging, bittersweet time. We went out there to realize a dream. It was very, very hard, but such an amazing experience to work so closely with farmers and fishermen and just all the local purveyors that we used, building relationships, people coming to the back door whenever they had something special that they wanted us to use or try, and being in a small community where everybody is just there to support everybody else. The food community out there developed or evolved so much over the years that we were there, and there were just so many likeminded people wanting to live a kinder, gentler life. It was lovely, albeit incredibly challenging and ultimately not sustainable.
Suzy Chase: For the listeners who may not know your husband, that you met at Tribeca Grill, who was a pioneer in the farm to table movement, sadly passed away in 2015 from ALS, and I am so sorry.
Claudia Fleming: Thank you.
Suzy Chase: Could you talk a bit about cooking and grief? Has baking, cooking, and being in the kitchen helped your heart heal, or has it made it more excruciating?
Claudia Fleming: I think it's different at different times. But I have to say, although I'm in the kitchen every day doing production, running a restaurant eclipsed that aspect of being at the restaurant. It's very hard to be creative when every day is crisis management and it was mostly about getting it done most of the time so I could move on to, I don't know, working on PR or solving problems or trying to figure out why we weren't doing more business this Saturday this year than we did last Saturday last year. I mean, it was just constantly evaluating the business and trying to figure it out and rationalize and reason why things were changing so dramatically all the time.
Claudia Fleming: I think being busy, I'm not sure that it helps in the healing process, but it's certainly a great distraction. I kind of feel somewhat like I'm waiting to have some time to mourn, frankly, now that the restaurant is closed and I can look back at all the wonderful things we accomplished, but when you're struggling, it's very hard to recognize all that. So I look forward to being able to appreciate what we accomplished now that the struggle is subsided.
Suzy Chase: Now that you've closed the inn, what are your plans to start a new chapter in your life?
Claudia Fleming: Well, there is a new cookbook in the pipeline. I imagine I'll be consulting. I'm staying on with the new owners of the restaurant to do some consulting on the dessert menu. Hopefully, there'll be some travel in my future and discovery and exploration.
Suzy Chase: Over the weekend. I made your recipe for individual chocolate souffle cakes on page 217. Can you describe this dish?
Claudia Fleming: These are actually a Nancy Silverton adaptation from a thousand years ago. When something is this simple, the most important thing is to use the best ingredients you can get. In this instance, of course, you want to use high quality butter and farm fresh eggs, but the chocolate is really where it's at. In those days, Valrhona was where it was at. Not that it isn't anymore, but there are so many other chocolates that that one could explore with.
Suzy Chase: Now, for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook, other than this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?
Claudia Fleming: Nancy Silverton's dessert book, her first dessert book. It launched me into my passion for dessert and pastry in 1986, maybe it was. I devoured that book. I was living in Aspen that summer and the person I was staying with had a copy of the book, and I read it backwards and forwards, forwards and back. It was very classic, but with lots of twists and her interpretations. I just loved it and I love her still, after Tom is probably my greatest inspiration.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Claudia Fleming: I'm @chefclaudiafleming on Instagram and the same for Facebook.
Suzy Chase: It has been so lovely chatting with you, Claudia.
Suzy Chase: Thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Claudia Fleming: Thank you for having me, Suzy, great to talk to you.
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