Chef Deena Chafetz of the Santa Fe School of Cooking in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is preparing fried potatoes the same way Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the 20th century’s most significant and intriguing artists, enjoyed them at her historic adobe home and studio in the nearby town of Abiquiú.
I’m at the regional cooking school’s popular “Cooking Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe” demonstration class and three-course luncheon that it hosts with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, also in Santa Fe. Attending cooking classes when I travel is one of my favorite ways to explore a destination and its food culture. My fellow students and I are a small group of seven. Having first explored the Santa Fe School of Cooking’s retail area stocked with a colorful array of specialty foods, culinary gadgets, cookbooks, and tableware, we’re now seated in high-top stools affording up-close views of the school’s well-appointed commercial kitchen and Deena at work.
Nicole Ammerman, director of operations at Santa Fe School of Cooking and daughter of Susan Curtis, who founded the school 30 years ago, sets the stage for our three-hour event.
Deena’s guide for our class and accompanying luncheon, Nicole says, is the cookbook, A Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe, by Margaret Wood. Margaret worked as a companion for Georgia O’Keeffe from 1977 to 1982, and she prepared many meals under O’Keeffe’s particular guidance. When they met, Margaret was 24. O’Keeffe was 90, her sight compromised by macular degeneration.
Margaret is also on hand in the kitchen at Santa Fe School of Cooking. The author and Deena are working in tandem, weaving their talents and personal tales to create a sense of Georgia O’Keeffe.
Deena alternates between the prep counter spread with an assortment of food items in various stages of readiness and the cooktop, a hefty appliance with six gas burners and a griddle. In addition to fried potatoes – a prized breakfast treat for O’Keeffe that used leftover baked potatoes – our menu includes watercress salad with herb dressing, corn soup, baked chicken with lemon, and Norwegian apple pie cake with rum sauce.
Margaret, meanwhile, shares fond remembrances and insights into O’Keeffe’s life, perspective on food, and, of course, art. Margaret refers to her as Miss O’Keeffe, her voice radiating respect and affection for the legend, who died in Santa Fe in 1986 at the age of 98.
I scan our printed recipes. Whole mustard seeds accent the salad dressing. The soup calls for fresh corn and milk. Lemon and garlic scent the chicken. Apples, pecans, and cinnamon form the cake base, and brown sugar, heavy cream, and rum compose the sauce. Surprisingly, there’s no red or green chilies, ancho pods, or serrano peppers anywhere on the pages – ingredients that would signal we’re in the heartland of New Mexican cuisine, where heat-spiked, spicy flavors are the tradition. Rather, the dishes we’ll soon enjoy seem quaintly tame and even geographically displaced for the Southwest.
Then again, maybe the dichotomy isn’t so unusual after all.
“Georgia O’Keeffe had an inspiring vision for her painting and her life,” Margaret says. “The way she lived and ate was remarkable.”
I’m learning that O’Keeffe’s culinary sensibility was as much uniquely her own as was her boldly innovative art.
Georgia O’Keeffe and her food philosophy
Influenced by author Adele Davis, a prominent nutritionist in the mid 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe placed a high value on vitamins, minerals, and food balances.
“She really appreciated simple foods that were in season and grown and handled with care,” Margaret explains. “She favored a healthy diet, comprised of simple food, and fresh and pure ingredients.”
O’Keefe’s own bountiful garden in Abiquiú provided most of the produce she ate, and it was the primary reason she bought her property in the late 1940s.
Although the ground was in poor condition at first, O’Keeffe revived and cultivated it, fashioning large, lush, rectangular plots separated by flagstone paths. Vegetables occupied the largest space, accompanied by fruit trees, flowers, and herbs.
The artist grew lettuces, broccoli, cabbage (she made sauerkraut from the surplus), snow peas, beets, turnips, cucumbers, squash, string beans, onions, tomatoes, peppers, and chilies. Trees of mulberries, pears, apples, and peaches shaded the plot. Irises, lilacs, poppies, and roses added brilliant color. Marigolds repelled insects the natural way. She loved herbs for their healthful properties, including tarragon, dill, purple and green basil, summer savory, sorrel, marjoram, thyme and sage. She steeped mint and spearmint into tea.
O’Keeffe contacted Rodale, a publisher of health and wellness lifestyle magazines, for information on how to make her garden organic.
Some foods sprouted naturally on the land, like early spring dandelions, whose greens went into mashed potatoes. Friends hiking beside nearby springs would supplement her inventory with wild asparagus they picked. Springs furnished an abundance of water. She had a compost pile. She owned her own mill to stone-grind flours. A neighbor provided brown eggs. When she differed with her gardener on how to plant corn, she, unsurprisingly, always won the argument. Produce was dried, frozen, or canned to be enjoyed year-round. She bundled herbs and hung them upside down in the pantry to dry.
O’Keeffe provided Margaret with specific directions for handling ingredients at every step.
“Wash spinach with the leaves down, stems up,” Margaret recalls. “When mixing ingredients, dig down and lift. Was lettuces gently and save what isn’t used wrapped in paper towels for the next day.”
I ask, “Did Georgia O’Keeffe equate food to art and aesthetics?”
Margaret ponders. “Miss O’Keeffe didn’t talk about that, but she may have thought it, for she liked her surroundings and food prepared and presented simply, carefully, and impeccably. She used plain white plates, brushed silver stainless steel ware, and soft white, fringed napkins. Everything was simple, but lovely. Close to austere, like many of the forms she painted.”
In the kitchen with Deena at Santa Fe School of Cooking
Deena, too, is excited to feature O’Keeffe’s everyday recipes, which are a distinct departure from the American Southwest standards that dominate at the Santa Fe School of Cooking.
“As a chef, ‘Cooking Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’ is a great class,” Deena enthuses as she dices, then sautés onions in olive oil in an industrial-size cast-iron skillet for the fried potatoes.
“It’s nice to make something other than New Mexican food, which is great fun,” she continues, “but this is clean and pure and beautiful and good ingredients. Don’t wreck them, put them on a clean, pretty plate, and now you know how to cook. It’s really that simple.”
My stomach rumbles in anticipation as the onions’ signature, come-hither aroma envelops the room. When their initial eye-watering pungency gently morphs into soft sweetness, she adds cubed potatoes, slowly coaxing the all-white root vegetables into a sizzly, caramelized mélange.
Deena provides a lively running commentary. She encourages questions, imparts culinary wisdom, shares her personal history, and recommends local restaurants (La Choza for authentic New Mexican. Il Piatto, an Italian farmhouse kitchen.) while she measures, chops, stirs, sieves, blends, bakes, seasons, garnishes, and tastes.
She began cooking as a side gig in college, she tells us. On her second day of being a cook, she quit school. After cooking in country inns in the Northeast, she daringly moved to Santa Fe – sight unseen. She exudes energy and a passion for her craft, presiding over the kitchen at Santa Fe School of Cooking with efficiency and precision honed during years of opening restaurants on both the East and West Coasts.
Prior to class, Deena gathered fresh herbs and scallions from the school’s adjacent raised garden for the herb dressing. Margaret has brought stems of lovage, one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s favorite herbs, and passes around the small green bundle for us to regard. As far as I know, I’ve never seen or tasted just-picked lovage, and the aroma is pleasantly lemony and celery-like.
“If it grows together, it goes together, so use ingredients from the same region,” Deena insists.
She gives the tender herbs a brief, gentle chop on the cutting board, advising us that “if you attack them aggressively, they turn black and take on the look of lawn clippings.”
She goes “old school,” creaming butter and sugar for the Norwegian apple pie cake by hand with a sturdy wooden spoon. “My grandma was a wooden-spoon cooker with triceps like a wrestler,” she laughs.
She tucks a bright lemon slice under the skin of an airline-cut chicken breast, then sears it skin-side down in a heated, oiled skillet that’s “hot, but not enough to catch the chicken on fire,” she cautions. “You want chicken crispy, flavorful, golden brown, juicy and tender.” She decries boiling chicken, which turns it “saggy, soggy, and drippy.”
At last, we eat.
You can just see, smell, and taste the goodness.
Wholesome and delicious, our food resonates with a vibrancy and depth. In my imagination, I envision Georgia O’Keeffe creating a similarly warm and inviting ambiance when she entertained guests and nourished them with the wealth of her garden.
Margaret reads a passage about Georgia O’Keeffe from the introduction of her “A Painter’s Kitchen” cookbook:
“In her nineties, she only occasionally ate in the homes of a few close friends and rarely dined out in restaurants. When she did dine elsewhere, she often remarked afterwards that it compared poorly with the food she was served in her own home. Miss O’Keeffe often wondered aloud, ‘Do you think other people eat as well as we do?’ “
I know the answer. Today, at Santa Fe School of Cooking, we are.
Thank you to the Santa Fe School of Cooking for hosting me as a media guest at its “Cooking Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe” demonstration class and luncheon.
