1.
I apologize for being late to the
party with Food Flirts. I fell for it from the first episode. It’s an
entertaining show - how did it come about?
In 2010, we were doing a 1-hour Holiday Special for the Cooking
Channel. We were going to bake and cook
with the firefighters at our local Taylor Square Firehouse in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. We met with Bruce Seidel,
the then Vice President for Programming and Development at the Food Network and
the Cooking Channel, for lunch at Morimoto’s Restaurant, in New York City. We ordered black cod, which was cooked, and
everyone else ordered sushi. We had
never had sushi before. Bruce asked us
if we had ever eaten sushi before, and we said, “No.” He asked if we’d be willing to try it. Since we were at Morimoto’s Restaurant, and
he was an Iron Chef, we felt that it was one of the safest places to eat raw
fish. Bruce, at that time, was the
Producer of Iron Chef America.
We ate the sushi, and it was actually very good. We started talking with Bruce about all of the
foods we hadn’t eaten or tried, or prepared, and he asked us if we’d be willing
to try eating and cooking and baking those foods? It was a sort of “fish out of water”
approach.
We did the Holiday special.
A couple of years went by, and we were writing a cookbook, BAKING WITH
THE BRASS SISTERS for St. Martin’s Press.
We saw online that Bruce had left the Food Network and the Cooking
Channel and started his own Production Company, Hot Lemon Productions. We contacted him to congratulate him. We talked, and he said that he still wanted
to do a series with us. We told him that
we had to finish BAKING WITH THE BRASS SISTERS first.
We spoke on the phone several times, and Bruce came out to
Cambridge to shoot some film. He wanted
to see what we would be like when he shot the footage. He also wanted to see whether we could do the
long days it would take to shoot a series.
He was thrilled with the footage he shot. We were in our seventies then. Sheila is now 81, and Marilynn is now 76, and
we like to say that we are “overnight successes.” It took us only 79 and 75 years to become
Co-Executive Television Producers.
We all worked hard to raise the funding for the series, and PBS
was interested in airing it. Last April,
we went to New York City to attend the James Beard Foundation Awards Show and Dinner. We were one of three finalists for The Best
Television Series on Location. Although
we didn’t win, it was an honor to be nominated.
The winning series traveled all over the world shooting. We shot in Cambridge, Somerville, Dorchester,
Boston, and Provincetown, Massachusetts.
They had a very large crew. We
did our series with six people and two culinary assistants. Everyone helped clean the bathroom. Bruce cleaned off Sheila’s car and vacuumed
the rug. The days ranged from 10 to14
hours, mostly 10 hours.
2.
What has been the response from the
public?
We have heard from viewers all over the United States and
Canada. They love the show! We have received comments from young people
and older people. We like to say, “It’s
not just what you put on the table, it’s what you bring to the table!” THE FOOD FLIRTS is a celebration of the
multi-ethnic cultures of America. As
Sheila said, “It’s food without borders.”
We would love to see a return to civility where people learn that they
are very much alike when they sit down to eat together.
3.
Have you thought of “flirting” in
other cities, such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.?
Yes, we have thought of shooting in
other cities, and even other countries.
We always come back to a kitchen, usually ours in Cambridge,
Massachusetts to mash up the two cuisines we’ve learned about. We are going to be exploring ways to find
more funding so that we can do more seasons.
At this time, we managed to shoot in New England, but there’s a great
wide wonderful world out there.
4.
Any chance you’d come to my state,
New Jersey, the diner capital of the world?
We love diners! We love the
informality and congeniality of them. We
love diner food. We have great respect
for people who own or work in diners or both.
It is a hard life, but the sense of community is marvelous. As for New Jersey, we think of tomatoes and
blueberries. There is nothing so unique
as a “Jersey Girl!” We would love to be honorary “Jersey Girls.”
5.
Marilyn and Sheila, how did you
become interested in the history of cooking and baking?
Our mother, Dorothy Katziff Brass taught us how to cook and bake
when we could just about reach the kitchen table in our second-floor kitchen on
Sea Foam Avenue, in Winthrop, Massachusetts during the 1940s and 1950s. We lived in a three-decker near the beach.
As teenagers, we found that we were buying copies of GOURMET
Magazine, and we loved them. There was a
lot of information in them about food history, travel, and lots of challenging
recipes. Later, when we were in our
twenties, we started to buy copies of THE WOMEN’S DAY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COOKING,
which could be purchased in the local supermarket for about $1.68 a volume. We both collected our own sets of 12
volumes. Later we started collecting the
TIME-LIFE books on cooking all over the world.
Even later, we decided to collect cookbooks. We collect two kinds of cookbooks – printed
cookbooks, and handwritten Manuscript Cookbooks. We joined the Culinary Historians of
Boston. We love meeting people and
learning about the food they eat and how to cook and bake it. Knowing what people eat tells us a lot about
how they live, how they buy food, nutrition, culture, and how they teach others
how to cook and to bake.
6.
I love the ice cream molds you
brought out in the “Thailand Meets Tres Leches “ episode. When did you
start collecting and where do all of them come from?
When we were about seven and twelve, we visited a cousin who
worked in a grocery distribution center in the Wharf section of Boston. He gave us a gift of some small tartlet pans
used for sweet pastry and savory pastry, such as appetizers. We still have them. When we started buying and selling antiques
about 42 years ago, we bought our first mold, a copper and tin jelly mold for a
dollar at a house sale. It had an ear of
corn motif on its top. We started doing
research, and we found and collected food molds that are made of copper, copper
and tin, tin, pewter, and porcelain.
We also collect menus, culinary ephemera, and culinary
antiques. We have more than 5,000 items in
our collections.
7.
You also collect recipes and
cookbooks from the 1600s on up. Again how did this come about? Can those
recipes be used today?
About 30 years ago, we started buying handwritten Manuscript
Cookbooks at yard sales, flea markets, house sales and book shops. Everything old is new again! Manuscript and printed cookbooks can serve as
inspiration for today’s cooks and bakers.
Because everyone’s stove was different years ago, and heated by wood or
coal, the woman or man who used it knew how to stoke it and clean it. Stove temperatures were inconsistent. Flour and sugar were different then, and the
texture and composition of ingredients were different. It mattered which mill you obtained your
flour from. Fannie Farmer was one of the
first to standardize measuring ingredients.
So, the old recipes have to be “translated” for modern cooks. We test the Heirloom recipes for our
cookbooks six to ten times each.
8.
What do you think of today’s cooking and trends like the Paleo
diet?
We don’t know a lot about the nutritional aspects of the Paleo
Diet, but it’s interesting that people are exploring the really old ways of
eating.
9. Both of you love baking and cooking. What are your favorite
recipes and can you share them with us.
The recipe for Brown Sugar Brownies
is wonderful. It has appeared in both
HEIRLOOM BAKING WITH THE BRASS SISTERS and BAKING WITH THE BRASS SISTERS. The recipe in BAKING WITH THE BRASS SISTERS
was changed slightly. We’d have to
discuss this between ourselves and talk with you about this.
The last - the famed Foodie
Pantry I have to ask question
10) Which sister is the better cook? Who’s the better baker?
This is a very hard question to
answer. We both bring something
different to our cooking and baking. We
approach cooking and baking differently, but with what we like to think is
genuine creativity.
Sheila is very precise in baking and
cooking, and Marilynn finds that she can improvise as she cooks entrees. However, Marilynn can be precise when she
bakes and cooks, as well.
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