Cookbook Club
Cooking With Naomi Pomeroy, in Spirit
To honor the legendary Portland chef, join us in revisiting her recipes.
Portland, Ore. chef Naomi Pomeroy died tragically last week. As the news reverberated that the city had lost one of its most consequential, trail-blazing chefs, everyone whose life had been touched by her friendship and her cooking expressed their anguish. She was only 49.
“She was an extraordinary person. The whole city is grieving,” said Karen Brooks, the food editor of Portland Monthly, who broke the news about Naomi. She drowned while tubing on the Willamette River with her husband.
The self-taught chef, who is regularly credited with turning Portland into a dining destination, was also a master of reinvention. After her first marriage and restaurant empire imploded, Naomi opened a fine-dining restaurant, Beast, where she earned a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific in 2014. In 2020, Naomi rechristened Beast as a market and bistro called Ripe Cooperative, a nod to her former supper club and restaurant group. She had since opened an ice cream shop, Cornet Custard, with a longtime collaborator, Mike Paredes, and was in the process of bringing a new French restaurant into being.
My friend Camas Davis was Portland Monthly’s food editor when Beast first opened, and in her guide to the city’s best restaurants in 2008, Beast was at the top of the list, along with a short interview with Naomi. Camas brought up the now-iconic image of Naomi holding a pig carcass to her chest photographed by by Alicia J. Rose as part of an ad campaign for Beast. The nose-to-tail movement was in its infancy, and Naomi had embraced it, quite literally.
Camas asked Naomi how people were responding to the controversial ad.
“Some people write or call and say it’s beautiful," said Naomi. "Others have called us murderous jerks. I had one person write saying he was the biggest pork fan but the picture was disgusting. I understand how, when you are a vegetarian, it can be hard to be bombarded with images like that. I was a vegetarian for seven years, so I know. But, at the same time, it’s like, Hey, people, meet your food. Every animal product you eat was once alive. If you’re uncomfortable with that, I respect that, but you shouldn’t be eating it.”
Camas, too, was once a vegetarian who switched sides, left food media, and became a butcher. She started the Portland Meat Collective and a nonprofit called the Good Meat Project and wrote a memoir about her journey, called Killing It. “She had such an influence on me without even knowing it,” Camas said when I first texted her about Naomi’s passing. As she reflected further by email, she could not yet imagine her in the past tense: “She is one of a few chefs in town whose food feels like home to me. While we never became friends in the traditional sense of the word, we got to know each other over those plates of pasta and oysters she'd put down on my table. Our three minute conversations at her restaurants always went deep fast, about reinventing oneself, about being a female chef or butcher in a male-dominated world, about losing people we love, about legacies, about running your own business and barely making it, about parenting, about not knowing what the hell you were doing in life and trusting the process.”
Three thousand miles away, I also felt the depth of Naomi’s loss as members of our cookbook club began reminiscing about her recipes from her cookbook, Taste & Technique, which was a finalist in Food52’s (then) annual tournament of cookbooks, The Piglet. Members of our club cooked through it together last year and began revisiting her dishes last week in her memory.
"I regularly turn back to Taste & Technique for all or part of a recipe," said member Sheila Scully. "I loved that she included seasonal pairing options for the protein dishes—changing them up and making the dishes fresh and sometimes surprising."
Patty Leman admitted that Naomi's book was intimidating at first given the number of "sub recipes," or recipes within recipes. "I had purchased it before we covered it in the club and wasn't as strong of a cook. When we covered it, I learned the beauty of her ingredients and their versatility. She taught me a lot."
We’ve excerpted her Sole Picatta with Lemon Confit and Fried Caper Relish, the recipe the club loved most from her book. Cook along with us if you can. Following Naomi’s precise steps, such as keeping the lemon confit on a gentle simmer with “tiny bubbles no bigger than those in Champagne” feels like the perfect way to spend time with a pioneering chef who taught us so much about the labor and love involved in making great food.
Written by: Nicole Davis
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4 Comments
I followed her career and was amazed and awed by her resilience and what a champion she was for restaurants during the pandemic. Heartfelt condolences to her family and friends.
Whitewater is dangerous. Currents are strong, and the water does crazy, unpredictable things under the surface. This tragedy could have been avoided.
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