In “One Good Meal,” we ask cooking-inclined creative people to share the story behind a favorite dish they actually make and eat at home on a regular basis — and not just when they’re trying to impress.
For years, the artist Adam Pendleton and his husband, Karsten Ch’ien, have made an annual pilgrimage from New York, where they live, to San Francisco’s Zuni Café, where the kitchen prepares sumptuous summer squash, cheese-stuffed pumpkin flowers and its signature roast chicken, a gorgeously browned bird with crispy skin that’s plated with toasted bread salad — or, as Pendleton calls it, “simple food done exceptionally well.” He was originally drawn to the restaurant because of its late chef Judy Rodgers, whose “poetic drive toward detail” reflected his own, he says — and who wrote his favorite cookbook, “The Zuni Café Cookbook” (2002).
Indeed, the couple, who married in 2015 at New York’s EN Japanese Brasserie, share a passion for memorable, if unfussy, dining experiences. For Pendleton, the quality of a meal comes down to the care that went into its preparation and, of course, the integrity of its ingredients, sentiments he traces back to his childhood in Richmond, Va., where he was raised vegetarian. While his mother has never required a road map when it comes to cooking, Pendleton prefers to rely on recipes, which he adjusts and rewrites — not unlike how he has often experimented in his artwork by recontextualizing language in monumental canvases and towering installations. “I’m into processes of transformation,” he says. “I like seeing something be one thing and become something else.”
At 38, Pendleton was included in this year’s Whitney Biennial and was the subject of a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where he displayed his abstract paintings: accumulated layers of drips and sprays which, when completed, appear as dense fields of varying black and white hues. His latest canvases take irregular geometric forms as their starting point, and will be presented as part of “In Abstraction,” at Pace Gallery’s Geneva location, and alongside new collages and a video work in “Toy Soldier,” at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich.
He’ll complete the work for these engagements over the next several months, mostly in his studio in Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, about a mile from his and Ch’ien’s apartment on the third floor of an elegant Fort Greene brownstone. There, one recent Saturday, he prepared a stack of oat flour pancakes modeled after a recipe by another celebrated farm-to-table chef, Alice Waters, who once employed a young Rodgers to cook lunch at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse and of whom Pendleton is also a fan. He frequently whips up this meal on the weekend as a special treat for himself and his husband, although his take involves nearly submerging the batter in a heaping solution of butter and — somewhat unexpectedly — olive oil. This alters the smoke point, giving the flapjacks additional heft and moisture. Pendleton, who lives part time upstate in Germantown, N.Y., and who is particular about purchasing top-notch ingredients from local producers, serves the dish with a syrupy strawberry compote he makes using honey from Hudson Valley Bee Supply in nearby Kingston. That’s because he believes that a good meal, like good art, can feed the soul.
Adam Pendleton’s Take on Alice Waters’s Oat Flour Pancakes
Pancakes (makes eight)
1 cup rolled oats
¾ cup milk or cashew milk
1 large egg
2 tablespoons ghee
3 tablespoons butter
½ teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon baking powder
Compote
½ cup frozen strawberries
½ tablespoon honey
¼ cup water
● Pour the oats into a blender or food processor and blend to a fine flour.
● Temper the milk, butter and egg by placing them on the counter for 10 minutes. With a fork, beat the milk and egg together in a medium bowl.
● Stir in ghee and one tablespoon of butter. Add the oat flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder, stirring continuously until they are combined. Let the batter rest for 10 minutes or until thickened.
● Combine the compote ingredients in a small saucepan. Heat the pan over medium-high heat until the mixture begins to boil. Turn the heat to low and stir until the liquid has reduced to a syrupy consistency, then remove from the heat.
● Heat a skillet over medium-high heat. Melt two tablespoons of butter and drizzle in olive oil until the bottom of the pan is covered. Spoon in about ¼ cup of batter per pancake. Cook the pancakes in the liquid until golden brown, then flip them over and cook until golden brown on the other side. For each new batch, add additional butter and olive oil as needed.
● Transfer the pancakes to a plate. Serve hot with compote spooned on top.
