Just a year old, Matthews’ cleverly named One Blog West overflows with his entertaining and educational views on everything from recipes (watermelon salad, veal brisket with Vietnamese spices) to cooking techniques (how to prep soft shell crabs, preserve a lemon, cut a pineapple) to encyclopedic lessons on unusual or beloved ingredients (bird egg beans, porcini mushrooms, wineberries, karela squash).
But the posts that most interested me were the ones in which Matthews shares his own food and restaurant-related musings—and rants. In one revealing entry from the summer, he uses improv jazz and butterflies to help explain precisely why he hates writing recipes: “Writing a recipe is like taking a photograph of a beautiful butterfly in flight,” Matthews writes. “You end up with a snapshot of a gorgeous, ephemeral creature, but in no way can you capture the essential beauty of its flight.” Like the light flight of the butterfly or the infinitely variable saxophone playing of Charlie Parker, Matthews perceives cooking and meal preparation as a creative process that reflects his moods, emotions, whims—and, more practically, is a function of the ingredients available at the farmers’ market that day. The recipe provides the framework, but the muse adds the magic.
I’ve met chefs who paint, chefs who garden, chefs who fish and many chefs who’ve published cookbooks. But Ed Matthews is the first Virginia-based chef I’ve discovered who finds—or makes—the time to reflect on the cooking process and to interact with diners through the Internet and the written word. In addition to giving readers a snapshot of life in a restaurant kitchen, the blog also gently reminds us of the importance of dining room etiquette. In one anecdote, Matthews recalls a group of lunching women who, for 20 minutes after being seated, chatted enthusiastically among themselves, menus open, with little apparent interest in food. Then, suddenly, one of them impatiently asked a server when someone would take their order. The chef’s reaction: “First, we do our utmost not to interrupt a conversation; that’s just rude. Second, we look for some sign that you are ready to order. The surest sign is when everyone at the table has a closed menu. ...”
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