Summer Bonus Episode | MJ Adams - Foodie Pioneer and Cookbook Author
Summer Bonus Episode with MJ Adams - Foodie Pioneer and Cookbook Author
The story of how she built her culinary career alongside Edna Lewis at Gage & Tollner
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.
MJ Adams: Hi, my name is MJ Adams and I'm the author of The Corn Exchange: From the Big Apple to the Black Hills.
Suzy Chase: When you graduated From the French Culinary Institute in July of '89, there was really not a lot of work. New York City slows down and everyone leaves for the Hamptons or elsewhere. You got a job trailing at Gotham Bar & Grill, but that job never came to fruition. Had it, you would never have had the opportunity to work at Gage & Tollner, one of Brooklyn's most famous restaurants.
Suzy Chase: Gage & Tollner was originally opened by Charles M. Gage in 1879. Eugene Tollner came on board five years later. It just reopened a few months ago with much of its Victorian charm fully restored. Edna Lewis, known as the grand dame of Southern cooking, ran Gage & Tollner's kitchen for over four years. During which time the restaurant soared and the place was mobbed.
Suzy Chase: Her menu introduced many Southern dishes using local ingredients from the Union Square Greenmarket and Manhattan's Fulton Fish Market. Her specialties were crab cakes, catfish stew, whole flounder wrapped in parchment and Smithfield ham on corn pudding. Her she-crab soup became legendary.
MJ Adams: It was the fall of 1989 and I remember the New York Times had a little note in the Wednesday food section in a blurb that listed what was happening around town. It mentioned Edna Lewis was cooking at Gage & Tollner. They still had the old chophouse menu, but they had also created a separate menu of items from Miss Lewis' culinary repertoire.
Suzy Chase: Besides the kitchen that was on the main floor, there was a small one on the next floor up. This had been turned into a little bakery for Edna.
MJ Adams: Yeah. I remember it was a little place for her to make pies and other desserts out of the hustle and bustle of the kitchen. This was where she would also simmer her Smithfield hams. They were huge and it would come in this burlap sack. Looking back and realizing she was 73 and working as hard as she did, it was just amazing. She would bring the hams to a boil in a huge pot and then let it set overnight.
MJ Adams: At the restaurant during service, we would cut some of the meat and use it to flavor broad beans or green beans that would be placed along the side of the spoon bread and her quail, or slices of the ham would be accompanied by beans and corn pudding.
Suzy Chase: It boggles my mind that she started there when she was 73.
MJ Adams: I mean, I'm tired of cooking when was still in my 40s, but I always tell people I'm 60 now, but 160 in chef years.
Suzy Chase: Take me back to the Christmas stollen she made.
MJ Adams: I think it was almost like five feet long for that special Christmas Eve menu. It was just over the top. I mean, she had to stretch that dough over a special table we had set up upstairs next to her little kitchen. There was also like palm pudding with a nutmeg sauce, minced pie with a hard sauce, double chocolate cake with schlag, I think a bourbon pecan pie.
MJ Adams: I mean, it's hard to believe because I still have that menu and it was 29.95 per person. I mean, it was an insanely huge menu to execute and you could do over 300 plus covers a night there.
Suzy Chase: Can you describe the Gage & Tollner kitchen?
MJ Adams: It was in the back of the restaurant and the kitchen was laid out in a U-shape. One door was for coming into the kitchen and the other was for going out. Coming into the kitchen from the dining room, the wait staff could portion out the soups themselves. They could also portion out the coleslaw. This was a constant battle since every waiter wanted a generous tip and would put huge amounts of slaw as a portion.
MJ Adams: This was of course frowned upon by the kitchen staff because we spent hours shredding up the cabbage and mixing all the slaw into these huge bus tubs. The wait staff, they also loved to fill the soups to the brim or just give people a free cup of soup, which of course caused another frown from us in the kitchen. Let's see. There were flat tops along the back. Then they had two stoves with ovens, and I believe there were eight burners, possibly 10. This is where Edna would cook.
MJ Adams: We had large diver sea scallops on the menu that came with sautéed spinach and quail, which you were given two per order. Edna would lovingly place them breast side down, crossing their legs and we would put a pie tin on them so as to keep them flat for cooking. Then actually in the pie tin, we would put a brick, so just kind of would press it down.
MJ Adams: This station also took care of the parchment chicken, the parchment flounder, which would go on the oven along with the soufflés and everything else. I mean, it was just like a mad house. At the end of the shift, or a little earlier, sometimes Edna would leave around 8:00 or 8:30 in a cab that was provided by Peter Aschkenasy, and who was the owner, or sometimes he'd put her in a car service.
MJ Adams: Then at the end of the night when the kitchen crew would finally clean up everything, we would all head down to Junior's, the famous cheesecake restaurant, to drink. Then since the bars were open in New York until 4:00 AM, oh my gosh, you could put in a lot of drinking.
Suzy Chase: Edna Lewis, chef, writer, activist, born in a small farming settlement in Virginia in 1916, was the granddaughter of an emancipated slave. Lewis helped change the course of American cuisine. She championed the use of fresh seasonal ingredients.
MJ Adams: After the lunch rush was over, it would be time to clean sheet pans of soft shell crabs, we'd blanch and peel tomatoes for gumbo, shuck the corn and puree it for corn pudding, peel shrimp. These are the times I think back on sitting with Edna in the kitchen, along with her sous chef, Tom Jordan, or as she called him, Tommy. She had brought him up from Middleton place when she came to Gage & Tollner. We would gossip a little bit about who was lazy at work or what the other chefs were doing.
MJ Adams: Edna loved peeling the tomatoes, and there was a little table area where she could sit and do her task. We would pick through crab meat to make sure there were no shells. If you worked the morning shift, you would make the she-crab soup, which required a roux first to be cooked so the soup would have that rich thickness to it. We would also make the gumbo soup base or catfish stew, and then both of these would just be reheated in a pan for service with shrimp being added to the gumbo per order.
MJ Adams: Edna was just one of those people that just had a glow to her and you wanted to be around her. She had the greatest smile that would light up a room. I loved that I could find my way over the sauté station to cook next to her at night. I felt protective of her. In the heat of the night, Marcy Bloom, that was Peter's wife who was expediting, would bark out orders and wonder where the food was. I was always shocked at how could you yell at someone who was 73?
MJ Adams: I would look over at Edna and we would both have a little smile on our faces and we could at least chuckle about our predicament. She always wore her sandals and had a colorful African wraparound skirt and would have a chef coat over this. Then Peter would come back and want Edna to walk around the dining room and engage with the customers. She always hated this part.
MJ Adams: She really was relatively shy unless she knew you and Peter would tell her, "It's going to sell cookbooks and they want your autograph."
Suzy Chase: By late spring, your hours had been cut in half and you had a student loan to pay you ended up leaving Gage & Tollner but your friendship with Edna Lewis continued on.
MJ Adams: Yes. It was really a tough decision. I would meet her at the Union Square market where you would feel like you were walking with the African queen. Ms. Lewis was tall and slender and her sandals had oh about a one and a half inch heel, which would make her appear even taller. We would look through the various market stands and admire all the produce. It was just a delight for the both of us.
MJ Adams: Then afterwards, we would walk over to the coffee shop that was on the corner and just have a small bite. Later on, we would often meet up with Tommy who then had moved on to Dean and DeLuca and was heading up their takeout food department. Later on, I was also able to do freelance work there with them, and on several occasions we would hook up with Edna for supper.
Suzy Chase: What did you like and admire about Edna Lewis?
MJ Adams: I guess what I liked and admired about Ms. Lewis was she was rather Bohemian. I felt like she was ahead of her time, cooking simple food from the heart. I do not understand why a lot of macho chefs think simple food has no place in the kitchen or think it's just boring. I think cooking food simply is the hardest thing to do. So many times I have eaten out and the dish just has too much going on or is not executed properly.
MJ Adams: I've been lucky enough to have eaten at like French Laundry and Charlie Trotter's, at the River Café in London, walked through farmer's markets in Paris. I mean, these all have played into my cooking as well as the many art museums I have visited. Honestly, just living in New York City, it was like an education in itself. I think the fact that I came late to the culinary world in my late 20s is what gave me that edge.
MJ Adams: I found that most people had no idea who Edna Lewis was, or Jane Grigson or Elizabeth David. A lot of the restaurants I trail at, I was just disappointed in what I was being taught.
Suzy Chase: You say Edna was right at home in front of the stove. I'd love to hear about that.
MJ Adams: I think Edna's food had a touch of England, which you would assume some influence with people settling over from England and bringing their recipes such as puddings with hard sauce or nutmeg sauce, some of the preserves and popover recipes, cooking with game. I learned how to cook in front of a stove and finish things in the oven. A lot of places don't cook like that. Edna was right at home in front of the stove. It was like they were old friends.
Suzy Chase: Then years later, a portrait of Miss Lewis caught your eye.
MJ Adams: Oh, yes. It was a New York Times magazine. I saw it was a portrait that John T. Hill had taken of Edna that was in black and white. I decided I was just going to reach out to him. I sent him an email and he was kind enough to send me a photo of her. Then he was like, "Just pay me whatever was in your cookie jar." I thought, "Well, I have no idea what that amount would be that he required."
MJ Adams: I went, "Oh." I'm like ... I didn't know if $75 was a good cookie jar amount, and I hope so, but it sits in a prominent place in my living room.
Suzy Chase: You left New York City and moved to the Black Hills area of South Dakota to open a bakery in December of 1996. That burned down in a fire. Then you opened up your restaurant, The Corn Exchange, in 1998. I love that you felt you didn't need to be in New York City to open a spectacular restaurant. During this time you called Edna on the phone.
MJ Adams: Yeah. She was living in Atlanta by this time with Scott Peacock who was her caretaker. It took her a few minutes of me reminding her of the things in the past for her to remember who I was. She had such a kind voice and you could hear the frailness that had come with the passing years as she talked. Over the years, I had visited with a few people from women chefs and restaurant tours at conferences and I would check in with the Atlanta chefs on Edna.
MJ Adams: They had told me she wasn't well, and then she ended up passing away in 2006. She was really a carefree spirit and one of a kind. I had reached out to Harpo Productions, that was Oprah Winfrey's production company, and I think it was like 1992. I was hoping that they would see the significance of Edna Lewis' contribution to Southern cooking and just her story was so fascinating. I thought they should do a documentary on her. Of course, I never heard back from them.
MJ Adams: As I said, she was ahead of her time and not that recognized in the early '90s. I remember her telling me that while at Café Nicholson, she went to a lot of interesting parties, various people there were dancers or artists. Just the regular fun Bohemian crowd. As she was leaving and walking down the stairs, she could smell the funny tobacco that people were smoking. New York City must have been an exciting time for someone who came all the way from a place called Freetown, Virginia.
MJ Adams: I always tell the people that I work with, "It's all right out there in front of you. Don't be afraid. They will either tell you no or yes, and sometimes you just have to seize the opportunities and not wait for things to happen around you." I mean, that's pretty much my philosophy and how my life has been.
Suzy Chase: Wow. What a life you've led. I think the most exciting time for chefs and restaurants in New York City was in the mid to late '80s, and you were right in the thick of it. You received a New York Times review from Eric Asimov when you opened Season's Restaurant in Brooklyn. You've been a semifinalist three times for the best chef of the Midwest with the James Beard Awards.
Suzy Chase: You've also hosted a dinner at the Beard House, and in January 2020, Florence Fabricant reviewed your cookbook, The Corn Exchange. Tell me about that and a little bit about the Corn Exchange Cookbook.
MJ Adams: Well, I think when people see it right off, it's kind of different because it doesn't have food on the cover. It has me petting a buffalo and I thought, "Oh, God, maybe this wasn't a good idea." But I did put a disclaimer in it. I wrote the book after I had closed the restaurant, but I really wanted it to be like my culinary journey, my story of my early relationship with food, and of course the story of The Corn Exchange.
MJ Adams: I think one of the things I really struggled with over the years was people in the Midwest, sometimes they're just forgot. It was like, if you only had a restaurant on the East Coast or the West Coast, that's the things that people remember. I felt like I was always trying to find a voice in Middle America. I think the best thing that happened with the James Beard Award, is that they actually started doing them in Chicago.
MJ Adams: Then Florence, which was just great, I reached out to her, I thought, "Well, heck, why not send her a book? Either she is going to like it or not." I got a phone call, which was just one of those moments where you hang up the phone and you cry because you're like, "Thank you, God." I mean, you feel like you've been validated. Then the next thing you know, COVID comes and put a lot of people's lives on hold.
Suzy Chase: I come from the Midwest too and in your salad section you wrote, "My early years consisted of salads made from iceberg lettuce with French dressing. Later, they would be topped with a cold tomato and a few shreds of grated carrot and croutons from a bag. When I moved to New York, the world of greens opened its doors. I never knew there were so many varieties of lettuce." Same here.
MJ Adams: I know. I mean, I still love a good iceberg lettuce salad, but I always tell people, for me, living in New York was like jumping into a cookbook. When I was growing up, we had Hamburger Helper. You know when you have like six kids, no one's going to spend a lot of time cooking, especially when both people are working. It was always like in my family, it was just like a necessity and it wasn't like you were celebrating food. It was just like, here's something we have to do and then we washed the dishes.
Suzy Chase: Salad was kind of an afterthought too. It was like, "Oh, well, we've got to do the salad, so here we go. Here's a big chunk of iceberg."
MJ Adams: I know. It was like you just had to eat it as part of like, "Here, drink your milk and have a piece of white bread." I think I wouldn't be the person I am today, especially with all my food background had I not lived in New York City.
Suzy Chase: As a lover of cookbooks, I'm dying to hear about the Meet the Author series that you launched with the James Beard Foundation.
MJ Adams: Once again, a blurb in the newspaper, James Beard had passed away and they wanted to save his house and make it a little foundation so I kept calling and they were like, "Well, we're not really ready." Finally, I think they were like, "Just let this person come down. She's going to drive us insane." Over time, they were trying to think of ways for people to come and enjoy this place where James Beard lived and it was called Meet the Author series.
MJ Adams: Peter Kump at the time, who had Peter Kump's culinary school was heading up the James Beard Foundation. They wanted whoever was coming out with a cookbook, well, let's call that person and see if they would be interested in doing something at the James Beard House. Then you would choose maybe a few recipes from the book and then have the cookbooks at the house, set a date. It was just like this really exciting event.
MJ Adams: Here I was at the time, I remember calling Jac Pépin and I'm like, "Oh, my God." I mean, it was crazy. Besides Jac Pépin, I did Barbara Kafka's book. She was, I think, the food editor at Vogue at the time, and Craig Claiborne and Judith and Evan Jones. At the time I'm like 26/27. It's just hard to believe that they would even let someone like me do that now.
Suzy Chase: That's when I started doing cookbook publicity in Kansas City and I think that was a real magical time for cookbooks, like '90 to '94.
MJ Adams: I agree. I look back. I mean, every time I go, "Do I really need another cookbook?" I'm like, "Yes." And I buy it. I go downstairs, that's where I have my cookbooks, and I probably have about 800. You really look then like Paula Wolfert's book. I just felt like there was so much more depth to a cookbook and substance to it. Now it's like, people just want to hurry up and print a cookbook.
MJ Adams: I like stories. I don't know. It just seems like now there're just so many being mass produced. It's hard to choose and pick out which gems that you want.
Suzy Chase: What cookbook was your favorite that you worked on for the Meet the Author series?
MJ Adams: I was thinking about that and I mean, of course we all love Jacques Pépin. I mean, he was just so great, but I really think Judith and Evan Jones, I mean, now knowing her history, because at the time I didn't realize she was the person who was like, "Look, here's this book, The Diary of Anne Frank. We need to publish this." Really her whole choosing the title for Julia Child. I even didn't know then. I was just sitting, talking to them and they were just so fascinating and they made me laugh. It was called The L.L. Bean Cookery Book.
MJ Adams: I remember the recipe, one of them that we did was artichoke heart dip, but they were just like ... I thought, "Wow, these are just the coolest people." They really reminded me of Edna because they were very Bohemian. I thought, "I could just sit on the couch and talk with them for hours." They kind of remind me, there's two people that I dedicated my cookbook to. They were my neighbors and they were both in their late 70s.
MJ Adams: They had lived in San Francisco and they really were a lifesaver because I could visit with them and have coffee. They really reminded me of Judith and Evans Jones. Yeah. I think that that was my favorite.
Suzy Chase: Tell me about dealing with Craig Claiborne.
MJ Adams: He was really interesting. When he found out my name was Mae Jeanne, he was like, "Why would you want to ruin a name like that? Why would you go by MJ?" He would wear an ascot around his neck and he was just really so charming and wonderful. He was just like, "You need to go back to Mae Jean. That's just such a wonderful name." I'm trying to remember what we did from his book, Craig Claiborne's Southern Cooking.
MJ Adams: I think it's a compilation of different recipes that were taken from all the other cookbooks that he's done. I guess it was a division of Random House, but he signed to Mae Jean Blessings, and that was 1980.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
MJ Adams: My website is chefmjadams.com and I'm on Instagram, under the name Chef MJ Adams.
Suzy Chase: As Craig Claiborne says, Mae Jean, thank you so much for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast for this very, very special bonus episode.
MJ Adams: Suzy, thank you. It's really special to visit with somebody who loves cookbooks as much as I do.
Outro: Follow Cookery by the Book on Instagram. Thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.
