If you sustain yourself with fast meals assembled by a stranger and collected at the drive-through, or by boxed entrees nuked in the microwave, you re missing an essential ingredient.
Daisy Martinez was about 3 years old when she figured out exactly what it was.
We would all come back from Mass and we would all go and have breakfast at my grandmother s house. And I remember her dining room. She had what seemed to me the longest dining room table in the history of creation. And it would always be dressed up on Sundays especially, with a white cloth and all her pretty dishes, and the table just bowed over with food, said Martinez, host of Daisy Cooks!, which airs in Toledo Thursdays at 2:30 p.m. on WGTE-TV, Channel 30.
There was noise and people laughing and the smell of coffee. And I remember as a little girl, I looked for my grandmother at the table and she wasn t there. And I remember turning in my chair and seeing her standing at the entrance to the dining room leaning against the doorway with her arms crossed and just a little teeny, tiny smile.
Martinez s voice begins to shake.
And I knew at that moment I m sorry, my grandmother passed last year and I still get emotional when I talk about her I knew then, how much my grandmother loved her family. And her love was exhibited on that table. I knew, as I grew up, someday I d like to recreate that experience, that moment, for my family.
Indeed, Martinez is showing thousands of people how to cook with, and for, love. The author of Daisy Cooks! Latin Flavors That Will Rock Your World, will speak Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Great Hall of the Stranahan Theater. Her appearance is part of the Authors! Authors! series sponsored by The Blade and the Toledo-Lucas County Public-Library.
If you talk about the language of love, that s the one that I would write it in. I would write it in food, she says.
Martinez, who turns 49 today, began her program in April, 2005, in 10 test markets, and five months later, expanded it to 250 public television stations.
For me, cooking is therapeutic. When I have been challenged or troubled, I found peace in the kitchen. I can work things out. It has a beginning and it has an end. And at the end I can give it to people I love and they feel better.
Kitchen as a hub
Vivacious and eager to share funny anecdotes, Martinez is the wife of Jerry Lombardo, her physician-husband of 25 years, and mother of Erik, 24, Marc, 21, David, 18, and the one on whom the sun rises and sets, 12-year-old Angela. Both she and Lombardo are the oldest of five siblings. They live in a 14-room Victorian in Brooklyn s Prospect Park South, a house suited for lots of gatherings.
It was enough room for my husband and I to raise our children without having the neighbors bang on the walls when the kids were doing what children are supposed to do, which is grow up. You don t put them in a Skinner Box, for crying out loud.
She s the daughter Puerto Rican immigrants: Her father, a firefighter, arrived in the United States as a preschooler; her mother, at age 15.
During her first five years, the family lived next door to her grandmother and around the block from cousins. She didn t speak English until she entered first grade, but after reading the newspaper with her father every day, by the end of the school year she was the top reader in the class.
A student at Long Island University hoping to go to medical school, she met and married Jerry, and they began their family. A friend suggested she try modeling, so she took a 10-week course, had photos taken, and was hired to appear in commercials and as an extra in films and television programs. The money was good and the hours were flexible for the mother of young ones.
And every day she cooked, all types of foods for all occasions.
My home became the hub. My sister hates to cook. My brothers were police officers. I loved to do it and I had the space. And if it wasn t the family, it was friends, and the kids friends.
She read cookbooks like some people read novels. For her 40th birthday, Lombardo took her to L Ecole, a restaurant operated by the students at the French Culinary Institute in New York. After they were seated, she realized she was in the presence of greatness: Jacques Pepin, renowned television chef, author, and personal chef to three French heads of state in the 1950s.
There he was, in the flesh, breathing the same air I m breathing.
Then, Chef Jacques strode over to her table. Now I can t breathe. My throat is locking, she says, sounding all verklempt.
And he spoke: Miss Martinez, on behalf of the French Culinary Institute I want to welcome you to the FCI family, she said. So I thought I must be in a coma someplace and I m having this dream.
Her husband wished her happy birthday and admitted he had matriculated her into the intensive six-month program. Even better, he promised to look after the children and run the household. He didn t have to tell me twice.
The only thing that I did was when I came home from school at 4 o clock, I would replicate the lesson I had learned in school that day for dinner, for self-reinforcement.
Her final project, a several-course meal which she called the Passionate Palate, won the top prize among the institute s 32 students.
I think that food is incredibly sexy. And cooking is one of the most intimate things that you can do for someone. It involves all of the senses. You eat with your eyes first. I take it a step further, you eat with your nose first, then with your eyes, then with your mouth. You get into the whole tactile thing, the texture of the food in your mouth. I just made my own mouth water. So it s a very sensuous thing.
Comfort food
She was hired by a rich New York family to cook dinner (whatever she wanted on an unlimited budget) three times a week. And she was hired as prep chef for Lidia Bastianich, who cooks Italian on television shows.
It was during a lunch break on Lidia s show that the executive producer asked Martinez what kind of food she liked.
I said I like all kinds of food, but if you re asking what my comfort food is, it would have be Latino food. He said he always thought of Latino food as brown. I looked at him and I said, what are you, crazy? There s nothing but color! she said.
If you stop and think that Latin America has 37 or 38 different countries, spanning Central America, South America, North America, the Caribbean, the mother influence of Spain there s nothing but color, there s nothing but flavor, there s nothing but diversity.
That was enough for him to suggest she host a cooking show. She started meeting with a group of people expert in food television, and a culinary producer with whom she spent a summer at home testing all 200 recipes in the book that led the series.
I said this project is going to be incredible on two completely different levels. On the first hand, for mainstream Americans, who when they hear Latin food think of tacos and burritos immediately, this is going to serve as an educational experience for them.
First of all, not only is there so much more, but second, tacos and burritos, as good as they are, are not even Mexican. That s very much a Tex-Mex thing, she said.
The other aspect, for people who have grown up eating these foods, for people who call this food theirs, this is going to serve as such as sense of pride to have their food, their culture, their heritage portrayed in a positive light for the mainstream.
Daisy Martinez will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Great Hall of the Stranahan Theater, 4645 Heatherdowns Blvd. Tickets, sold at the door and in advance at branches of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, are $10 for adults and $8 for students. Information: 419-259-5266.
Contact Tahree Lane at: tlane@theblade.com or 419-724-6075.
First Published May 6, 2007, 10:06 a.m.
