Cooking for James
VANCOUVER’S STREETS were slick and wet, the pavement disappearing under iridescent puddles, the sky closing in on a Saturday afternoon in September 1982. I was avoiding my cooking school homework, soaking in Kitsilano’s shabby-chic ambiance, shop after shop blurring like their reflections in the puddles as I idled along West 4th Avenue on my bike. When I stepped through the door of the kitchenware store, the room was redolent of garlic and damp wool; the aisles, crowded. All faces were turned to the chef behind the stove.
James Barber was already really famous in Vancouver. His raspy voice had become familiar to Canadians over the CBC’s radio airwaves, first as culinary tutor to Don Harron and then, more recently, to Peter Gzowski, on Morningside. But within the decade, James would become a global figure. Following TV culinary pioneers like Julia Child and Graham Kerr, The Urban Peasant—as James called himself—would broaden the horizons and palates of his audience while championing simple, local cooking.
I took the last seat in the store’s small demonstration area, marveling at how James made everything seem so easy and straightforward as he chatted and chopped his way through a brunch menu. When he finished cooking, I joined the snail-like queue to meet him, clutching my courage like a wrinkled apron. Finally face-to-face, I tripped over my words but somehow remembered to tell him I was a culinary student, then surprised myself by spontaneously inviting him to dinner that evening.
When he raised his eyebrows and inquired, “What will you be making?” I blurted out a lie.
In as airy a tone as I could muster, I said, “Oh, you know, crepes.”
But I hadn’t planned to make crepes. For months, as a newly minted vegetarian, I’d been investigating Indian food, entranced by the layers of flavor and color as beguiling as Indian women’s clothing, those flowing pants and tunics called and . As a preface to each meal, I grated ginger; pounded galangal, coriander, and fennel; and dry-roasted and ground cumin. I was slowly learning how to build subtle curries and refreshing and spicy —all messy but delicious and worlds away from the restrained roast beef, pork chops, and mashed in my black cast-iron pan to mop up the juices. But crepes were French. Surely they had more cachet than curry, especially to this man about the world. There was a contradiction buried there, between James’s fondness for simplicity and my sense that he’d like something more nuanced than curried carrots, but I didn’t see it then, and Indian food did not yet have much culinary currency.
