RICK TROUT

I was born in Houston, Texas, and lived in the old East End of the city until we moved to Baytown, on the shore of Galveston Bay. Although there were only two children in my own family, we had aunts, uncles and cousins who lived close by. We always shared holidays and birthdays together, and I came to love the traditional Southern recipes that my mother and aunts prepared for these days. I trained as a lawyer and worked in banking for most of my career, but in the mid Eighties I began cooking for fun, in many cases trying to recreate the dishes we had eaten in my grandmother's back yard in the Fifties. I've taken a stab at cooking just about everything, from frying turkeys to baking biscuits to roasting lamb over grapevines, and it's all fun. About thirty years ago, at my mother's funeral, I was speaking with one of her cousins about my grandmother's chicken and dumplings recipe. I had never been able to duplicate it, and the more I thought about it, the more I longed for the pillowy, delicious dumplings she made so simply in her little apartment. I mentioned this to a cousin in 2013 and she remarked that she had our grandmother's chicken and dumplings recipe. She sent it on, it was delicious, and I decided then and there that the traditional food in our family needed to be recorded for posterity. My first book, Rick Trout's Kitchen, is part memoir and part cook book, recalling the people, the times, and the events around many of the recipes. It is an attempt to bring together all those wonderful people from my past and sit them down together for one more family gathering. My second book, Comfort Food, deals not so much with old family recipes, although some of them are in the book, as it does with food that is important to other families. The sociology of food is a fascinating topic for me. Different ingredients and techniques often reflect differences in class, status, and gender that are at first opaque, but upon reflection make perfect sense--and the food is delicious. There are many other more formal treatments of the subject, but this book is more about cooking than sociology. I moved to the Pacific Northwest twenty years ago and have made a permanent home here with my wife Leslie. I love the mountains, the forests, the desert, and the people. Although I am 2,500 miles from where I was born, I still travel back, if only through memories, by cooking a traditional meal in my kitchen.