For people who live to eat, this is a golden age. Food documentaries, where every last oyster is lovingly and tenderly plated in slow motion, abound. There are hundreds of shows—competition-based, conversational, and educational—devoted to the topic. BuzzFeed’s Tasty exists.
But something can get lost amongst this glut of imagery: the inherently personal nature of the work, the obsession it requires to make supremely good food, and why people do it in the first place. Not so with Barbara Lynch’s new memoir Out of Line: A Life Playing with Fire, which chronicles her life from poor kid growing up in South Boston—Southie—to cruise ship chef to working with Todd English to restauranteur (with several other notable stops along the way). As Chef/Owner of Barbara Lynch Gruppo, Lynch owns seven restaurants, all in Boston, and has acquired a lengthy list of accolades, among them several James Beard awards.
All of this is more impressive given that Lynch is self-taught; she got her start cooking for priests at her neighborhood rectory, and, as she describes it, fibbed her way into her first jobs, much as she did during a youth marked by numerous cons of varying sizes, like stealing booze and sneaking onto airplanes. A trip to Italy soon after she started cooking professionally moved Lynch so much she’s fully embraced what she calls Italian food’s “bold simplicity,” but her earliest memories are beautifully rendered retellings of her mother’s specific predilection for flavor combinations likely not exalted by many as cream of the crop.
I was always telling my friends, “I’ll catch up with you later. I have to run to the druggie”—the corner store, to buy her lottery tickets or one of her three daily papers: the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe, and the South Boston (Southie) Tribune; “and then the deli,” to get her favorite Land O’Lakes cheese, sliced off the block on Number 4, just the right thickness. Or I was off to de Angelo’s to pick up her favorite sub, Number 9—steak and cheese with mushrooms.
…
Even that young, I had an interest in food, sparked by my mother’s cooking. Though she made plain, down-to-earth meals, with heavy reliance on convenience products, she had particular tastes and added her own special creative touches. Like in her tuna-fish sandwich, which I loved, she’d only use Starkish white albacore in water and Cains mayonnaise, never Hellman’s, thinned with splashes of milk and a secret ingredient, Vlasic pickle juice. She’s shred the mixture with two forks until it was creamy, spoon it onto Sunbeam, not Wonder Bread (which had too many holes), and top it with pickle slices. Before brown-bagging the sandwich, she’s double-seal it in clear waxed paper and topped then with Sarah Wrap.
At school, I’d stick the bag between the cast-iron tubes of the radiator, both to warm it up and so I could enjoy the tuna-fish pickle smell until it was time for lunch.
Though it’s the descriptions of food that capture easily, that’s only because Lynch’s memory for it all is remarkably good, which she credits to years of keeping journals to help with her ADD, which “forced” her to be that way (“I’d have to remember tastes and flavors, because I couldn’t follow a recipe really,” she told me in phone interview last week as she stopped through Eataly for lunch. “I’m telling you, the food is friggin’ beautiful here,” she said of the market). But Lynch’s book is not just a food history, but a personal history and city’s history all in one. The youngest of seven children from a widowed mother, she tackles her memories of notorious crime boss Whitey Bulger and the Boston busing crisis, and a particularly difficult and chaotic young adulthood, one that was marked with abuse. And so though at first it seems that her path to success was unlikely, you also get the sense that it was only possible in this way because of her background. “…the story of my education,” Lynch writes, is simple: “using low-down cunning or, if necessary, my fists to overcome limitations I couldn’t understand.” Where others might have seen obstacles, Lynch never quite contemplated them as such, as she explains of when she started her first restaurant, No. 9 Park, in 1998. “In a way, my Southie background paid off. The words financial obligations didn’t mean much in a culture where scamming and theft were reasonable, acceptable options for getting by,” she writes. “There was no difference, in my mind, between $30,000 and $3 million. Both sums were unimaginably huge and out of reach.”
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