Jeff Crump and Bettina Schormann
by Malcolm Jolley

Jeff Crump and Bettina Schormann are poised to take over the North American cookbook world from their unlikely perch at The Ancaster Old Mill, a restaurant and banquet hall in the suburbs of Hamilton, Ontario. Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes from an Organic Farm is a chronicle through a year of cooking with the chef and his pastry chef. But it's also book book: purposefully sized smaller than typical cookbook (so you can read it in bed, claims Crump) it's full of stories and profiles of famous chefs like Thomas Keller, Heston Blumenthal and Dan Barber. But then again, Crump is a pioneer who brought Slow Food to Ontario and cooked with Blumenthal at The Fat Duck after staging at Chez Pannisse. For her part, Schormann won an Ontario Hostelry Institute scholarship which took her to New York to cook at Craft and Per Se. Neither one suffers from acute Canadian modesty, and the book is as courageous and confident as their resumes, laced with the photography of Edward Pond. No wonder Michael Pollan calls it a "beautiful book in every way." Earth to Table follows Crump and Schormann through a year of working with farmer Chris Krucker at ManoRun Farm. I sat down with the duo this week just before they served a four course dinner at George Brown's Chef's House for the benefit of the OHI scholarship program.

The Interview

Malcolm Jolley: This is a seriously slick book - beautifully produced. Obviously, it comes from a place with the farm and everything, but it also strikes me as international in outlook. You have American and British chefs profiled, for instance.

Jeff Crump: Sure. Well, the book is me up until now. It's my opinions and everything I've learned. Since I started in this industry, I've approached it academically. I study and read books constantly. I read about who's doing what, where, and why. It's really the view from my shoulders, and I love chefs.

MJ: You're very generous with this book. You talk about other chefs more than yourself.

JC: [Laughs and turns to Bettina Schormann who has just joined us.] At one point, when we were writing it, Bettina said "when do we get kicked out of this book?" You know, really what we're trying to do is raise our own boat. These chefs are famous and we're not, but we're cooking the same food, doing great stuff and we're proud of it but not everybody knows it. So we asked Heston, if he'd be in the book. When he said yes, everyone else did too. Like Michael Pollan. I've never met him, but he agreed to read the book and recommend it.

MJ: I know you cooked for Blumenthal, and at Chez Panisse - but how do you get Dan Barber and Michael Pollan and all these star chefs to help you out?

JC: Relentless networking over the years! I just ask, and ask, and ask. You just ask.

MJ: That's it?

JC: That's it. Bettina worked at Per Se when she was in New York on the OHI scholarship, so we asked Thomas Keller if we could meet him and he said yes. In some ways it was that simple.

Bettina Schormann: That was the beautiful thing. Everyone we approached, even though they had so much fame, were so gracious. Everyone was warm and open and wanted to help and support us. It made us want to promote good food even more.

JC: You expect them to be snotty or something, but they're not. You think to yourself, Heston Blumenthal just patted me on the back, and you can't believe it.

BS: We're doing the James Beard dinner in New York and [restaurateur and co-owner of Hearth, Insieme and Terroir] Paul Grieco told us "whatever you need, we're there."

MJ: Someone must have said no, though?

BS: Suzanne Goin said no.

JC: Yeah, from Lucques. And with Thomas Keller, it was really his agent who said yes and gave us 15 minutes. When he came into the room he probably didn't know who we were but he was amazing.

MJ: But Bettina, you worked for him?

BS: Yes, but I never actually met him. When I was at Per Se, they just started 'Bread Service', like wine service, there was bread for every course. And as we were setting it up, my bosses kept calling him 'TK' as in "TK is coming tomorrow, it has to be ready." But I kept missing him and he arrived on the day after I left.

MJ: This book is a little different from a straight forward collection of recipes. Is this the book you had in mind or did it just work out this way. It seems almost like it was created organically?

BS: This was the book we set out to do. We knew it had to be about the farm and divided into seasons.

JC: The draft table of contents that I wrote to show Bettina what I wanted us to do in 2006 is exactly the same as the one in the book. I wanted profiles, how-to's, seasonal recipes, kitchen stories, farm stories. I guess one thing that's a little different is that I love Anthony Bourdain's writing, so I wanted to a few more kitchen stories. Our editor was really focussed on the farm stories, though. We got one in, anyway. And, hey, Random House bestowed on us this great honour, so we were happy to take direction.

MJ: And how did you get your book deal?

JC: A lot of work, constant calling and networking. We met with [award winning cookbook authors] Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid who told us to get an agent. And [photographer] Edward Pond and [food stylist] Claire Stubbs took us on, so that helped a lot. They did Susur Lee's book. THey helped us write a proposal. I did what I always do, ask the best person. And then we found Sarah Davies, whose job it had been to accept proposals for Random House.

BS: We were so lucky. She was on mat-leave and she happened to live in Hamilton.

JC: It was amazing. As soon as people saw that it wasn't a "Jeff Crump thing" or a "Bettina Schormann thing" or an "Old Mill at Ancaster thing " but a concept around eating local and seasonal, they all got behind it.

MJ: There's a lot of American content, as well as local Ontario.

JC: If we did it just Canadian, then there would be no hardcover. The Americans want American content. But there's lots of Canadian content too, and we're proud of that. These stories should translate to anywhere in the world.

MJ: I love the title as a play on 'farm to table', did you mean it as a wake up call?

JC: No! We didn't think of that. But our editor said it was a joke at Random House. Someone would say "Earth to Table" and someone else would say "Come in table".

MJ: What do you think about the whole farm to table thing? You've been cooking this way for a long time,  but all of a sudden it's very hot. Do you worry it's just a trend?

BS: what's in the book is what we do. We hit a nerve, for sure, when we submitted our proposal to Random House. But we didn't make it up.

JC: That's the thing. We did it before and we'll keep doing it after. We're not even really locavores. We have a relationship with ManoRun Farm because Chris Krucker's food tastes the best. And it's great that we're keeping our money in our community, and it's great that were saving the environment, and it's great that we have a relationship with a real person who grows our food instead of a guy who drives a food service truck - you can get into it for any reason.

Malcolm Jolley is the editor of Good Food Revelation.