Portland, Ore. chef Naomi Pomeroy died tragically final week. Because the information reverberated that 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 rare particular person. The entire metropolis is grieving,” stated Karen Brooks, the meals editor of Portland Month-to-month, who broke the information about Naomi. She drowned whereas tubing on the Willamette River along with her husband.
The self-taught chef, who’s often 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 Finest Chef: Northwest and Pacific in 2014. In 2020, Naomi rechristened Beast as a market and bistro known 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 means of bringing a brand new French restaurant into being.
Picture by Alicia J. Rose
My pal 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 prime of the record, 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 have been responding to the controversial advert.
“Some individuals write or name and say it’s lovely,” stated Naomi. “Others have known as us murderous jerks. I had one particular person write saying he was the most important 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 identical time, it’s like, Hey, individuals, meet your meals. Each animal product you eat was as soon as alive. If you happen to’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 known as the Good Meat Venture and wrote a memoir about her journey, known as Killing It. “She had such an affect on me with out even figuring out it,” Camas stated once I first texted her about Naomi’s passing. As she mirrored additional by electronic mail, she couldn’t but think about her prior to now tense: “She is one of some cooks on the town whose meals seems like house to me. Whereas we by no means turned pals within the conventional sense of the phrase, we bought 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 all the time went deep quick, about reinventing oneself, about being a feminine chef or butcher in a male-dominated world, about dropping individuals we love, about legacies, about working your personal enterprise and barely making it, about parenting, about not figuring out what the hell you have 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 & Method, which was a finalist in Food52’s (then) annual match of cookbooks, The Piglet. Members of our membership cooked by way of it collectively final yr and commenced revisiting her dishes final week in her reminiscence.
“I often flip again to Style & Method for all or a part of a recipe,” stated member Sheila Scully. “I cherished that she included seasonal pairing choices for the protein dishes—altering them up and making the dishes recent and typically 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 prepare dinner. Once we lined it, I realized the fantastic thing about her substances and their versatility. She taught me loads.”
We’ve excerpted her Sole Picatta with Lemon Confit and Fried Caper Relish, the recipe the membership cherished most from her guide. Prepare dinner together with us in the event you can. Following Naomi’s exact steps, resembling maintaining the lemon confit on a delicate simmer with “tiny bubbles no greater than these in Champagne” seems like the right strategy to spend time with a pioneering chef who taught us a lot in regards to the labor and love concerned in making nice meals.
