Portland, Ore. chef Naomi Pomeroy died tragically final week. Because the information reverberated that the town had misplaced one in every of its most consequential, trail-blazing cooks, everybody whose life had been touched by her friendship and her cooking expressed their anguish. She was solely 49.
“She was a unprecedented individual. The entire metropolis is grieving,” mentioned Karen Brooks, the meals editor of Portland Month-to-month, who broke the information about Naomi. She drowned whereas tubing on the Willamette River together with her husband.
The self-taught chef, who’s recurrently credited with turning Portland right into a eating vacation spot, was additionally a grasp of reinvention. After her first marriage and restaurant empire imploded, Naomi opened a fine-dining restaurant, Beast, the place she earned a James Beard Award for Greatest Chef: Northwest and Pacific in 2014. In 2020, Naomi rechristened Beast as a market and bistro referred to as Ripe Cooperative, a nod to her former supper membership and restaurant group. She had since opened an ice cream store, Cornet Custard, with a longtime collaborator, Mike Paredes, and was within the technique of bringing a brand new French restaurant into being.
Picture by Alicia J. Rose
My good friend Camas Davis was Portland Month-to-month’s meals editor when Beast first opened, and in her information to the metropolis’s finest eating places in 2008, Beast was on the high of the listing, together with a brief interview with Naomi. Camas introduced up the now-iconic picture of Naomi holding a pig carcass to her chest photographed by by Alicia J. Rose as a part of an advert marketing campaign for Beast. The nose-to-tail motion was in its infancy, and Naomi had embraced it, fairly actually.
Camas requested Naomi how individuals had been responding to the controversial advert.
“Some individuals write or name and say it’s lovely,” mentioned Naomi. “Others have referred to as us murderous jerks. I had one individual write saying he was the largest pork fan however the image was disgusting. I perceive how, if you find yourself a vegetarian, it may be onerous to be bombarded with photographs like that. I used to be a vegetarian for seven years, so I do know. However, on the similar time, it’s like, Hey, individuals, meet your meals. Each animal product you eat was as soon as alive. For those who’re uncomfortable with that, I respect that, however you shouldn’t be consuming it.”
Camas, too, was as soon as a vegetarian who switched sides, left meals media, and have become a butcher. She began the Portland Meat Collective and a nonprofit referred to as the Good Meat Mission and wrote a memoir about her journey, referred to as Killing It. “She had such an affect on me with out even understanding it,” Camas mentioned after I first texted her about Naomi’s passing. As she mirrored additional by e mail, she couldn’t but think about her prior to now tense: “She is one of some cooks on the town whose meals looks like dwelling to me. Whereas we by no means grew to become associates within the conventional sense of the phrase, we acquired to know one another over these plates of pasta and oysters she’d put down on my desk. Our three minute conversations at her eating places at all times went deep quick, about reinventing oneself, about being a feminine chef or butcher in a male-dominated world, about shedding individuals we love, about legacies, about working your individual enterprise and barely making it, about parenting, about not understanding what the hell you had been doing in life and trusting the method.”
Three thousand miles away, I additionally felt the depth of Naomi’s loss as members of our cookbook membership started reminiscing about her recipes from her cookbook, Style & Approach, which was a finalist in Food52’s (then) annual match of cookbooks, The Piglet. Members of our membership cooked by means of it collectively final yr and commenced revisiting her dishes final week in her reminiscence.
“I recurrently flip again to Style & Approach for all or a part of a recipe,” mentioned member Sheila Scully. “I liked that she included seasonal pairing choices for the protein dishes—altering them up and making the dishes recent and generally shocking.”
Patty Leman admitted that Naomi’s guide was intimidating at first given the variety of “sub recipes,” or recipes inside recipes. “I had bought it earlier than we lined it within the membership and wasn’t as robust of a cook dinner. After we lined it, I realized the great thing about her substances and their versatility. She taught me so much.”
We’ve excerpted her Sole Picatta with Lemon Confit and Fried Caper Relish, the recipe the membership liked most from her guide. Prepare dinner together with us in case you can. Following Naomi’s exact steps, similar to retaining the lemon confit on a delicate simmer with “tiny bubbles no larger than these in Champagne” looks like the right approach to spend time with a pioneering chef who taught us a lot in regards to the labor and love concerned in making nice meals.
