By Hailey Grohman
Chelsea Green Publishing
Chef Evan Mallett owns the renowned Black Trumpet restaurant in Portsmouth, NH. A three-time James Beard nominee for Best Chef Northeast and recently featured on NPR’s Here and Now, Evan’s new cookbook is titled, Black Trumpet: A Chef’s Journey Through Eight New England Seasons.
Evan’s goal is to inspire a new generation of adventurous home cooks and chefs alike to rethink local ingredients and flavors while at the same time rekindling interest in the kind of local food production that existed before the modern commodification of our food system.
Vermont’s Chelsea Green Publishing, which published Evan’s new cookbook, interviewed the New England native about cooking with local ingredients, the evolution of New England cuisine, and the state of the current food system.
As a chef, what do you find are the greatest challenges to sourcing and preparing local foods all year round? And how do you address these challenges or limitations, or even turn them to your advantage?
I especially like the second half of this question. Living in New England, of course there are challenges. We as a regional culture have made overcoming the elements a part of our identity. But where I believe we excel, citing the old expression “Yankee ingenuity,” is in turning adversity into advantage. There are actually several examples of how we have done this at Black Trumpet, but I think they all come back to a simple principle: You have to make the very most out what you have. This is why, as a rule of thumb, I find that geographic areas with great agriculture abundance tend to lack the commitment to collaboration, community, and local sourcing that we have in the Seacoast and other New England sub-regions. I chalk this up to ingenuity and perseverance, and believe in my heart of hearts that the ability to find flavor in what’s available is the mark of any chef worth his or her salt.
If you had to describe the overall style of cuisine at your restaurant, Black Trumpet, in just a few words, how would you characterize it?
Inventive, curious, wholesome, locally sourced, honest.
What kinds of readers are you targeting with this book, given that some recipes are quite simple, while others are more complex in terms of preparation or assembly?
While writing the book, I tried to appeal to a full spectrum of cooks. There are definitely some recipes for the advanced home cook, and a few for the intrepid, but I would say that more than half of the recipes can be executed by anyone with a passing knowledge of cooking. I believe that the process of menu making should be ongoing, and I encourage everyone to involve as many people as possible in the process. Making a recipe into a meal should be a fun, communal exercise that yields a far greater reward than the sum of its preparations.
Throughout the book, you write about not just locally sourced ingredients, but local people, networks, events, and celebrations. How important do you feel it is for a chef to be actively engaged in their local community?
This is a hard one because chefs are notoriously busy. I don’t presume, judge, or lord my thoughts on this over anyone, but I do put a lot of my own time into events that bring local chefs and community together, and I have seen the fruits of this effort in the camaraderie and motivation of our chef network. I don’t see why any community should be deprived of this joyous collaboration.
In 2006, Portsmouth and the New Hampshire Seacoast forged a mighty non-profit quorum referred to as “The Four Food Groups.” This collective effort of like-minded visionaries has set a fine example in the greater good-food movement of how such a community works. In my work with Chefs Collaborative, I have seen similar chef-driven communities emerge all around the country. It is a very exciting time to be a chef in this country for the very reason that being a chef now comes with the prospect of being a community leader.
How has New England cuisine changed during your lifetime, and how do you see it evolving in the future?
I ate some pretty uninteresting food as a kid growing up in New England, but there were glimmers of a bright future from time to time. Most of those glimmers came from gardens. New England staples—chowder, baked beans, boiled dinner, johnnycakes, baked stuffed fish—do not have to taste terrible. They are important parts of our identity. My recent journey has been about ingredients and their provenance. Each New England ingredient that has stood the test of hundreds of years of recipes also has hundreds of stories to tell. Some of those stories—like those of the Katahdin lamb, Roy’s Calais corn, and the Marfax bean—inspire me to apply my own imagination to their venerable tradition. I guess that kind of sums up this book and my whole career at this point.
One of the main themes in your own work with local, national, and international organizations has been the promotion of biodiversity in our food system. Why do you feel that this is so important, both for you as a chef and for everyone else?
From my first taste of Slow Food and the first Chefs Collaborative project I worked on, I have viewed the biggest fracture in our current food system as the departure we have made as a culture from a relatively biodiverse food climate to a scary monoculture that intrinsically imperils soil, pollinators, and ultimately us. In the meantime, we have almost lost the idea of regional foodways and the ingredients that make each food region special. Very few people understand the fundamental imperative that biodiversity in our agriculture and diet represents. I hope this book sheds a little light on that from my very personal perspective.
Read the full interview and more about Evan Mallett on ChelseaGreen.com.
-Hailey Grohman is a recent graduate of the UVM Food Systems program. Her research interests include food communications and media.
