The chef April Bloomfield—of the Spotted Pig, the Breslin, and the John Dory Oyster Bar—likes her carrots cut into oblique chunks, so that, cooked, the outside becomes soft while the center keeps some crunch. She feels that spices should be toasted separately. She likes one egg at a sitting. Her grandmother, when the family travelled, brought her own gin. Her grandfather always packed a cooler of kidneys. I learned of all this not in the hours I spent profiling Bloomfield in 2010, but from her new cookbook, “A Girl and Her Pig.” (Emma Allen, at the Book Bench, attended a celebratory party, where she sampled Moscow Mules via ice luge.) Her first book, it contains a hundred and four recipes, for signature dishes (gnudi, devils on horseback), and for others you’d never guess she’d be fond of (My Chicken Adobo). Written with J. J. Goode, a gifted interpreter of Bloomfield’s voice and sensibility, it traces her journey from the Birmingham, England neighborhood of Druids Heath to Manhattan’s West Village. It’s autobiography by cups and ounces. How to make it in America, the Bloomfield way: take taxis and chop your own onions.
Reading “A Girl and Her Pig”—and you can read it, as much as you can leaf through and gawk at pigs’ ears and mark the recipe for Smoked Haddock Chowder and the Sausage-Stuffed Onions that you want to make—brought back, for me, the pleasure of Bloomfield’s company (“Drain the chard well in a colander, but don’t squeeze it to buggery,” she writes), while deepening my understanding of her aims in the kitchen. Before I wrote about her, I had assumed that the success of the Spotted Pig was due, perhaps, to the “gastropub” concept—that the charm of the place lay in the fact that someone had thought to hang a shingle, unspool some tartan, and ply New Yorkers with blue-cheese burgers and rosemary-flecked shoestring fries, rather than in their execution. I realized soon, as I watched Bloomfield prepare a radish salad with a maneuver that she and her friend the chef Fergus Henderson refer to as “the claw”—it’s a way of “smooshing and bruising things to get all the flavors to come together”—that I was badly mistaken. Bloomfield is humble; her food is sophisticated. If I were to rewrite the piece after reading “A Girl and Her Pig,” I’d want to say something about the way she works to squirrel delight into each bite of straightforward-seeming dishes (a nugget of carrot in a silky soup should constitute “a little prize”); and about the almost-synesthetic totality of her perception—how she cooks in onomatopoeias, pouring “glugs” of olive oil rather than tablespoons, slathering toasts, smooshing parsnips. “Everything should look nice and sweet,” she wrote to me one day, in an e-mail, describing how I’d know when to stop frying some chicken.
Goode writes, in the book’s foreword, “It’s a great tragedy, by the way, that a vegetable savant like April has become best known for burgers and offal.” Try the Carrot, Avocado, and Orange Salad. (Bloomfield calls it her “six degrees of Kevin Bacon salad,” for its seemingly disparate ingredients.) He’s right. But Bloomfield’s cooking, it’s apparent from “A Girl and Her Pig,” still centers around what she calls the “not-so-nasty bits.” Her heart is on every plate.
Photograph by Martin Schoeller.
