the group

Meredith Erickson (second from left), co-author of The Art of Living According to Joe Beef (Ten Speed Press, October 2011), is one of the original members of the Joe Beef staff and has written for various magazines, newspapers, and television series.

I guess it was around year 4 that Fred, Dave and I started seriously talking book. We would be setting up for the night at the restaurant and brainstorm, never really about recipes per se, more like chapter themes and thoughts on design. We would talk about wanting to do weird stuff, like a studio photo shoot riffing on Kraftwerk album covers with the black figures in the red background, but instead of the figures playing keyboards, they would be cutting bread and chopping vegetables.  We would talk about how we could include the painter Riopelle (through cheese!), and how we could sneakily include a recipe with horse meat (wrap it in bacon, put it on toast and add an egg!).

We came up with chapter themes based on our likes, loves and what was around us: Eating breakfast for dinner, brown booze, Northern gardening, the St. Lawrence and its venerable shellfish snack bar, and (of course) Fred’s fanaticism for trains. And then at one point there were so many “If we did a book, we should…” that it just made sense.

eclair velveeta

Velveeta éclair

Looking back at a proposal for a book that you have since completed is a funny thing. You feel confident but you also shake your head at the conceptual ideas that really had no chance at becoming “real”. For example, we wanted to do a “Wheel of Taste” chapter that somehow melded the great Canadian Food Guide (a pyramid model that we all grew up on) with the Big Mac theory of taste and create some sort of algorithm. Molding that into a chapter that made sense to anyone else was impossible, probably because it didn’t make any sense to begin with. Still, reincarnated, this is eventually what the “Tall Tales, Taste and A Few Theories” section of the book became. It was our chance and place to include all of our weird shit, or rather our “thought experiments.”  And it was vetted by our editor!

Average Lunch

lunch

The most “challenging” part of writing this book was writing the recipes, as not one of them had ever been put down on paper. I mean, a couple here and there for newspapers and magazines but nothing concrete. The reason? The kitchen at Joe Beef is a small and desirable place to be, so those who come to work usually stay for a couple of years at least. And the menu changes each week (with a few item exceptions) so the list of recipes of ever growing and changing. Fred, Dave, and I sat down and looked over menus from the last 4 years and chose about 180 or so that could work in book form. And Fred and Dave narrowed it to about 140 from there.

ingredients

recipe testing

Mostly we worked out of Fred’s kitchen, which was really nice of Allison (his wife and third Joe Beef partner) to allow, as we consistently brought in box loads of vegetables, fish, and meat, and in general, ran it as our recipe lab. Looking back, those first few weeks were complete trial and error with recipe writing.  But we rolled with it and found our own rhythm. As excruciating as it was to get those recipes down, it was also a highlight as it was like a year of private culinary education.

Another consideration was to capture Fred and Dave’s individual interests without watering down the voice of Joe Beef. Although he has a great time on train trips, Dave isn’t interested in train books. And Fred would never pretend to know a great deal about wine. But these are integral parts of Joe Beef as a whole, so the book had to be multidimensional and balanced in the biggest sense of the word. And I think it is.

-M.E.

Intoxicated by Joe Beef and want to see more? Click the cover below to see our smorgasbord of all things Joe Beef: tweets from some of  its biggest fans, a video, recipes from The Art of Living According to Joe Beef and the book’s foreword by David Chang.

The Art of Living According to Joe Beef