Eating for Beginners

May 24, 2010
Rehak (Girl Sleuth), a Brooklyn resident and new mom, spent a year toiling delightfully inside the kitchen of a neighboring restaurant to get a handle on where the food we consume really comes from. Volunteering to help long hours at Applewood, a small restaurant in Brooklyn owed by trained chefs Laura and David Shea and devoted to the idea of supporting local farmers and sustainable agriculture, Rehak was able to observe and participate in the "choices and the compromises" of gathering, preparing, and cooking the food we consumers pay good money to eat. At the same time as she manned the garde-manger station, preparing aesthetically pleasing salads and cold appetizers, Rehak had to deal with her finicky toddler, Jules, at home as he refused to eat even toast. Eventually, Rehak was happily promoted to the fish station, and Jules took a bite of a chicken leg. By turns, Rehak proved game at making cheese at a diary farm in Connecticut, sorting beans at an organic vegetable farm in Hamden, N.Y., and, hilariously, getting violently seasick while catching monkfish aboard a lobster boat off Long Beach Island. Lovely recipes at the end of each chapter display her culinary achievements. As part of a welcome, continuing spate of recent works concerned with rehabilitating American eaters, Rehak's chronicle is pleasantly lowkey, generous, and nondidactic.