You may know chef Michael Smith from the cooking shows he has hosted on television for more than 25 years, but the house he grew up in didn’t even have a TV.
“We were pretty unique on that score … and let me say, I was kicking and screaming at the time, but I’m so thankful for it now,” Smith told Antonio Michael Downing on a recent interview on The Next Chapter.
His childhood was spent either outside with his brothers or curled up with a book.
“My mom would drop me off at the local library on Saturday morning,” he said. “She’d come back three, four hours later, grab me and I’d have a stack of books.” He’d devour the whole stack and repeat the process the next week.
A love of books has never left him, says Smith, who is also the author of numerous cookbooks, the latest of which is Wood, Fire & Smoke: Recipes and Techniques for Wood-Fired Cooking.
Smith joined The Next Chapter to share some of the books that have had the most impact on his life, both in and out of the kitchen.
A favourite read from his youth
James A. Michener’s novel Hawaii, first published in 1959, was the first book Michael Smith picked. (Dial Press Trade Paperback)
His first pick was Hawaii by James A. Michener, a classic first published in 1959, the same year Hawaii became the 50th U.S. state.
“James Michener gave me a sense of the world, and I think of Hawaii as one of his seminal works,” Smith said.Â
“I think the first 50, 60, 70 pages of that book, he hasn’t even introduced a human character yet. And it’s just the island itself being born of those tectonic forces and the planet coming alive.”
Smith estimates he was in his preteen or early teen years when he started reading Michener, and that he learned a lot from “the way he so uniquely described disparate cultures.”Â
“For me, that was everything.”
Two cookbooks that helped shape him as a chef
Smith said Joy of Cooking was not only an important reference for him as his career got underway, it also stood out for the way it presents recipes in a storytelling fashion. (Scribner, Rombauer Estate)
“Next up for me is The Joy of Cooking,” said Smith. “As a cook, and now as a book author, this book is seminal in my career — a book that has just served as a reference for me for all time.”
In addition to the breadth of recipes in this tome, Smith says what really made it a bedrock for him and so many other cooks is the unique way those recipes are structured.
“Every other cookbook does what all of my cookbooks do: you start with a long list of ingredients, and then you tell folks what to do,” said Smith. “But that’s not how The Joy of Cooking is written. It’s written as a story.”
“I know now that storytelling is a very big part of who I am and the way that I’ve approached cooking and the way I approach hosting guests.”
Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking is the book that helped Smith understand the science behind what he does in the kitchen. (Scribner)
Smith’s next book pick was On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee.
“Once I found myself stumbling into professional kitchens and working my way up the proverbial ladder and becoming a chef, I needed more than just a basic recipe for pancakes,” said Smith.
“I needed insight…. ‘Why am I asked,’ as a random example, ‘to use an egg yolk in this mayonnaise thing? What’s going on here?'”
He says McGee’s book has had a profound influence on generations of chefs who wanted to understand the physics and chemistry of their work in the kitchen.
A powerful novel everyone should read
Smith says Annie Proulx’s Barkskins is one of the most impactful novels he’s read in the last decade. (Scribner, Gus Powell)
Despite the effort it takes to master the craft of cooking, Smith said he’s never stopped reading for pleasure.
For his fourth book, Smith said he cast his mind back to some of the most impactful books he’s read over the last decade.
“One of them keeps coming to mind: Barkskins by Annie Proulx,” he said. Â
Smith says he was moved, not just by the eloquent turns of phrase that earned Proulx a Pullitzer for The Shipping News in 1994, but by the story that spans 300 years in the Acadian forests that surround him on the East Coast.
“Barkskins are the people that work in the woods, that move the wood, that fell the logs, that move them down the streams, and put their lives at risk to do that,” said Smith.
The book tells the story of two young Frenchmen that arrive in New France in the late 17th century, are bound to a feudal lord and forced to clear the land. One marries an Indigenous woman, and their descendants are trapped between two cultures.
“So it resonated both on a local level through a much deeper understanding of Aboriginal cultures around me [and with] the underlying message of ecology and sustainability,” Smith said.
“Nature is not an infinite resource, and how that realization affected people and their lives, and the choices they made, and the people they spent time with, every bit of that is as current today as it was then.”