Read Yes, Chef for Free Online Page A

mother. Just as I had with the boats, I was eager to show I was a big man, that I didn’t need anyone’s help. I quickly washed some potatoes, then boiled them in a pot of salted water with dill, just like
Mormor
did. My father had brought our frying pan from home and I set it on the stove, put the flame on high, then added a large knob of butter, which slowly melted at the center. While I waited for the pan to heat up, and for the butter to bubble and turn golden, I dipped each fillet in a mix of flour, breadcrumbs, salt, and pepper. I waited until the butter was good and hot, and I tested it the way I’d seen Helga do many times, by scraping into the pan a tiny bit of flour that had caked on my finger. When the flour sizzled and popped, I laid in the strips of fish, side-by-side. I knew then, maybe for the first time, that I wasn’t just my grandmother’s little helper. I had absorbed some of her gift for the movements and the timing, but the sense of how to make the meal taste
just
right—more salt, less pepper—came naturally to me, even without
Mormor
there to supervise me.
    My father and Uncle Ludvig drank beers and spoke in their dialect while I cooked and they didn’t seem to notice that I had put the dill in with the fish too soon, so it was a crispy black by the time I retrieved it from the pan. The meal was more than the thrown-together ingredients that we’d eaten the entire week; it was a rewardfor a week of hard work: quick, delicious food for hungry, hardworking men.
    We ate the potatoes and the fish and I was proud to have not only helped my father do his work but to have prepared the workingman’s simple meal. The next day, as I helped my father give the boats a light sanding and a final coat of paint, I thought of what Uncle Torsten had said about our mackerel lunch and how much he might have enjoyed the supper I had prepared. Although I was still a kid and years away from any thought of becoming a chef, I was learning the beauty of food within a context: how important it is to let the dishes be reflective of your surroundings. Hot smoked-mackerel sandwiches on dark brown bread in the smokehouse with Torsten. Panfried fish and potatoes with my father at the end of a long, hard day. If the ingredients are fresh and prepared with love, they are bound to be satisfying.
    “Marcus,” my father called out after me when the last boat was done.
“Val gjort, lille yrkesfiskare.”
Well done, little fisherman.

SIX MATS
    I T WASN’T UNTIL I ’D STARTED GRADE SCHOOL THAT THE QUESTION OF race became real for me and my sister Linda, in large part because Anna had integrated the Samuelsson household years before we’d arrived. For Anna, biracial and fair-skinned with an Afro that could have rivaled Angela Davis’s, the arrival of two dark-skinned siblings was a revelation. At nine years of age, she had never known children who were browner than she was. In those first few days, she would stroke my cheek and run her hands through my woolly hair, curiosity overriding her Swedish reserve. We may have been a novelty to my oldest sister, but because of Anna, Linda and I were never the “black kids” in the family. We were two
more
black kids in the family. All theskin touching and hair pulling and curious questions came to Anna first and by the time we arrived, it went without saying that this was a mixed-race family. As a black girl in Sweden, Anna always stood out. But she handled it all in her own elegant way, in part because my mother and her parents never made race an issue. We were Samuelssons now and that was all they felt they, or anybody else, needed to know.
    Once we got to school, there were comments, at first more curious than cruel. And as I got older, as a boy, there were more than my fair share of taunts and playground fights. Still, it’s important that you know that growing up black in Sweden is different than growing up black in America. I have no big race wounds. And I owe that to Anne