Food, Family, and the Friars

First off, let me admit my mistake. I thought “Friars” had to do with the Friars Club in Manhattan (who knows, maybe dirty jokes about food?) but it refers to the St. Joseph monastery in Harlem. The author, Gino Barbaro, runs a restaurant in Mahopac and taught a cooking class to the Franciscan postulants. This book is a collection of the recipes he taught them, and it’s a surprisingly entertaining read.

The first thing author mentions is the list of knives. Then come the temperatures for cooking beef, fish, lamb, and chicken. After that he lists the herbs, cheese, and beans. You might wonder what’s so special about that? Well he makes it as blunt as it gets. Most cookbook authors drone on and on with too many descriptions, but this chef keeps it brief, so you can progress quickly. It was funny, looking at the list of beans, because I never really stopped to think about the properties of each one (I just throw them together) and the same thing goes for the sauces. As for the Italian food in this book, it’s not the greasy, salty stuff you’d expect from the cheap Sicilian restaurant at the local mall. He stresses using fresh ingredients, making your own stocks and sauces, and keeping the food at the right temperatures.

After a while I realized why Barbaro keeps everything simple. When you’re teaching basic cooking skills to people who have no clue, you need to start with simple exercises. It’s just like a book on how to build model planes or paper mache, you need brief descriptions of the materials, a few starter projects, and then you move on to more complicated ones.

There is one minor fault I have in this book. Other than the short intro from the head of the order, it doesn’t say much about the Friars that he was teaching. I would’ve welcomed a few anecdotes about these guys, perhaps the screw-ups they made when they started? It would make for some funny stories.