His place is in the kitchen

Published 1:00 pm Monday, January 27, 2003

Chef John Ferry mixes ingredients for a quick class on cookery.

Stirring a pinch of haute cuisine together with a dash of scholarship, Ferry serves up 400 years of American culinary practice to open the fourth season of the Historical Society’s lecture series.

“I look at kitchens from a practitioner’s standpoint,” Ferry said. “Most food historians are ‘cookbook readers.’’’

Trained in traditional French cooking in Paris, John Ferry pioneered the “Pacific Rim” cuisine that merged gourmet preparations with a vegetarian and West Coast sensibility.

Celebrated in Seattle circles for his innovative menus for the Alexis Hotel and Union Bay Cafe, Ferry left cooking when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Bringing 30 years as a working chef to bear on the reading of history gives Ferry an edge in recreating the past.

“I come at it from the vantage point of a working chef,” Ferry said.

When Ferry visited Monticello, for example, he knew that the classic colonial down-hearth and pot-crane kettle that wow most visitors were only half the story.

“We know that Jefferson had French-trained staff when he was at the White House,” Ferry said, “because he sent them to France to be trained.”

Since Jefferson took the French-trained chefs home with him to Monticello when he retired in 1809, the recreation of that kitchen should have featured the stew-stove central to French cooking.

“They are finally getting around to tearing out the kitchen recreation installed in Monticello in 1941,” Ferry said. “But they are having a hard time recreating a more accurate version; it’s a puzzle they have to piece together.’”

Often, Ferry says, “historic” has been interpreted broadly to include any “old stuff” on hand.

The 1940s Monticello featured a fine collection of 19th century wooden stirring spoons and other utensils, called “treenware,” simply because a professor from nearby University of Virginia owned them.

“They all thought it would be great to have it on display,” Ferry said.

Cooking with gas

Ferry’s own kitchen in the historic Port Gamble home he recently finished renovating with his wife, Anne Eakins, is a compilation of present and past.

A Hotpoint gas stove Ferry and Eakins brought with them from Virginia is the centerpiece in a room that also features a butcher-block work station on wheels and a two-person kitchen table covered with a cheerful checked tablecloth.

“I do insist on gas for the stove top, although electric is fine for oven,” Ferry said. “People in the Northwest are used to electric, but my wife and I were brought up in Chicago, where people use gas.”

Ferry and Eakins’ quirky collectibles dress the kitchen.

An illustration from a children’s book depicts rosy moppets playing in an early 20th-century kitchen.

Blue-and-white Royal Wessex dishware shares shelf space with a collection of plastic tomatoes. A spice rack features green apothecary’s jars with beveled stoppers.

“Blanche” and “Hugh,” a pair of ceramic teapots in the form of maid and cook, hail visitors with upraised arms that double as spouts from their perch on the only extravagant item in Ferry’s kitchen: a gleaming vent hood suspended above the stove.

“Even that only cost $300,” Ferry said. “It’s Chinese, and it is designed to accommodate all the oil the Chinese use in cooking, so it’s equipped with filtration most Americans don’t have until you get into the commercial grade.”

The former chef emphasizes that, now as in the past, kitchens don’t have to be expensive to be functional.

“You don’t need a bunch of fancy gear,” Ferry said. “A knife, a whip, a skillet, a saucepan – that’s all you need.”

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The Bainbridge Island Historical Society launches its fourth annual History Series with “The Evolving American Home: Kitchen, Dining Room and Ancillary Spaces,” a slide talk by culinary historian John Ferry, 2 p.m. Jan. 26, at Island Center Hall. $5 for adults, $2 for youth. Information: 842-2773.