Day 339: Nancie McDermott
“I’m an everyday person who always loved to cook since I was a kid, and I love to do it. … So I love it for the pleasure of it, I love it for the accomplishment, and I just think it’s this quintessential connection to life and answer to the world’s problems – cooking and eating and sharing it with people.”
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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Nancie, for agreeing to be part of this Project, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?
Nancie McDermott: Sure. It’s an honor and a pleasure. I’m Nancie McDermott. I’m a food writer, cooking teacher, and I write cookbooks, mostly. I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and I’m a North Carolina native. I spent my first 21 years here, went to Peace Corps in Thailand, lived in New York City, lived in southern California after I got married for 15 years, and 10 years ago moved back here with my husband and two daughters, who are now 15 and 19. I just feel very lucky to be who I am, doing what I am doing.
Toni: Well, fantastic, and we feel very fortunate to have you on the Project. Nancie, when you think of the word inspiration, who do you inspire, and how does that happen?
Nancie: Who do I inspire?
Toni: Yes.
Nancie: I inspire everyday people. I think just work wise what I give people is what I’ve always appreciated getting, which is encouragement and confidence to just go out there and do something and set perfectionism aside. Perfectionism is my big demon, and I will, I’m sure, on my very last day be saying, “Oh yeah, we needed to get that lesson again today.” Because my expertise as a cookbook author is not that I studied in France or, you know, have worked in a restaurant kitchen, but I’m an everyday person who always loved to cook since I was a kid, and I love to do it.
I personally love to scout around and go to the Asian market and try something really hard, but I’m also very grateful to find a box of macaroni and cheese on a night when my kids were little. So I love it for the pleasure of it, I love it for the accomplishment, and I just think it’s this quintessential connection to life and answer to the world’s problems – cooking and eating and sharing it with people.
I think that’s just a truth in my life, and I think when I write about it and teach it and so forth, that’s the message that people get. And I just feel really lucky when somebody like sends me an email or writes me a letter and says, “I made your ‘X’ and it came out great and my family really loved it, and we had a good time.” I just think, “Wow! I got to be in Oklahoma City or Shoboku, Japan or somewhere in a little way.” That is really a treat.
Toni: How do you think you help others to explore their own potential?
Nancie: I give away the magic. That is not my phrase – I got that from a “how to be a teacher” course that I took at UNCG when I came home from Thailand. I taught English as a second language as a Peace Corps volunteer in middle schools and came back here and wanted to be a teacher … and so I had to take education courses.
One of my professors – I believe his name was Dr. Purple … I didn’t make that up – talked about teaching as … he didn’t say this, but there’s sort of the “I know something you don’t know” or “give away the magic” and I just … the first few years that I did it, I just worried so much that I would have time left over or forget something, and I always had to look at the recipes. And I thought, “Oh God, they must think I’m such an idiot that I have to read my own recipe,” and you know, the rice would start burning while I was standing up there, and it took me probably about 10 years to realize that’s actually the best part of it for a lot of people.
Very few people are fooled that you are the brilliant genius you think you should be, and that I’m just up there doing something that I love and saying it’s okay to mess up, and saying, you know … my grandmother probably took 475 batches of biscuits before her biscuits got to be that good. And so, if your third try doesn’t come out so great, so what? Just keep trying or give up. So I just kind of keep saying what works for me, and that seems to be a pleasure for me to do.
Toni: Well Nancie, do you think … tell me what you mean by giving away the magic. What’s the magic?
Nancie: Well, when I find something out, then the truths that I find I share them. And nothing makes me happier than somebody taking … learning something from me and then going on. And if they open their own restaurant and got famous for it, I mean, a little part of me would say, “Oh no, I should have done that!”
You know, there’s this fear of like, you know, this is “my recipe” and your “secrets” and what I have that makes me special. And I think that I really don’t have any secrets, but if I know something, I want to share it, and if somebody else can take it and do something even more successful with it, great, because I need to be figuring out something else wonderful, not holding onto that one.
Toni: Absolutely.
Nancie: Yeah, so just, you know, like here’s the cookbook. I don’t want anybody to Xerox my cookbook and sell it. I mean that … business wise, there’s an aspect of this where this is my income and my living. But as far as what I share and that inspiring somebody else, or somebody else who’s doing Thai food or Southern food or something, it’s like … that’s all, you know, that’s all fueling the same fire.
Toni: And so, when someone is either in your presence as a student or as a customer of one of your books, I would imagine that their potential becomes explored in the realm of cooking, taking chances, and the ease with which you teach them.
Nancie: Exactly. It just buffaloed me, when I was teaching in southern California 1985 to 1989 before I got the chance to do my first cookbook, and there were little cooking schools and big cooking schools all over the place. And you could really make a living running around to all of those if you had a good car – all over the LA and Orange County and San Diego area. I would go up to LA and teach classes at these fancy schools, and I’d try to look cool and act like I completely belonged there, but I was terrified, because, you know, Jacques Pepin had just been there and, you know, I just sort of felt like, I’m a fraud, but maybe they won’t catch it … if I really do something.
People would come up afterwards and say, “This was great … of course we never use recipes, but you know, we got some great ideas and really enjoyed your class. Thanks so much.” And I thought, well, if they don’t use recipes, why … you know, I couldn’t understand it. Because first of all, I love recipes, and I think there are people who just can’t abide to follow one and there are people who cannot bear to vary from one.
I like to follow them, and then I’ve become over the years where I enjoy playing with things, and of course since I write recipes I’ve had to jump off the high dive and get in there and swim around. But I really understand people who follow the recipe too carefully better than I understand the free spirits who always knew that that was okay, who always knew that this is just something that somebody wrote down, not The Ten Commandments right straight from God’s desk.
So that sense of what I need to be … and also I feel like sometimes it’s not even the recipes. It’s … I think, you know, it’s kind of attitude. I know that there are people that I like to listen to because I like their take on things. I get reassured. I get comforted. I get inspiration, you know, from somebody who’s kind of saying “This is how it looks to me.” I get real irritated or frustrated or intimidated, somebody saying, you know, “I looked it up and this is it, so you might as well just go home.” There’s more than one way to do it.
Toni: Well, Nancie, let me ask you this, because I think you’ve touched on it a little it already – what inspires you?
Nancie: I like old, old ways. I like history. I like the past, and I like people doing ordinary things. So I like the lady at the farmer’s market who retired from her job at the post office and makes pound cakes. I like the Thai Temple outside of Fayetteville where women who married soldiers in Thailand and Vietnam came over and are still going to the Buddhist temple, and their kids are grown, and they come on Sundays and bring Laos-style food, or some of them bring American. Some of them bring meatballs, you know?
So these people came from very far away at a very different time, and they’re here now doing this old school. So all those stories … so it’s like, how did the monks get here, and what do they think when they go to Wal-Mart? What do the ladies think? Do they ever go home? Do they grow these ingredients? Do they care if they use prepared food? You know, just all … I like sort of the ordinary and the everyday, and I just get interested in something, and I feel like I’m a detective and so I’m just going to go ask those questions.
I have trouble as a writer when I do interviews because I try to make a list of questions – that helps a lot – and I take so many notes and then I come home and I have, you know, 1500 words, and I have enough notes to do a book. And I want somebody else to go through them and organize them, and thus far, we don’t have a staff. I think, “Why did you do that? Why didn’t you just stick to the questions?” But it’s just interesting to me.
My first book was called Real Thai and I thought, oh yeah, I used to do Asian food. I still do that. Now I’m doing Southern food, and it’s so different. But I realized after my Southern Cakes book came out that I am actually doing the same thing, which is looking at what are the old time things? I’m not interested terribly much in what chefs are doing or what the modern … or what the cool things are.
It’s like, I love to go eat at a restaurant and see what chefs are doing, but I’m interested in why ladies insisted that you needed to use Snowdrift versus Crisco in the biscuit recipe in 1947, and where the hell did red velvet cake come from? Nobody … I can’t pin that down. I just know it didn’t come from the Waldorf Astoria. So, I like just following the trails around, and then I like to stop and eat.
Toni: Well, it sounds as though really you can hear that that history and those stories and storytelling is very important to you.
Nancie: Absolutely.
Toni: And when you think of inspiration from what gets you going in the day and maybe a day where you need to be inspired more than others, are there certain tools and resources that you tend to reach for on a consistent basis that help you to stay inspired?
Nancie: For me, I think the most inspiration I get is grocery shopping and going to markets, and I don’t mean just the gorgeous farmer’s market with the perfect in-season produce. I mean just stopping at a little Mexican grocery store and walking down the aisles, and oh my God, here’s this form of sugar that’s shaped like a nuclear reactor and it’s hard as a rock, and how do people cut this up? Just sort of seeing the physical, old timey things out there, that just … I just find that pleasantly distracting.
My family will not go to the grocery store with me, I mean like the big Harris Teeter. I mean, I can’t spend under an hour in a regular grocery store, because I’ll pick something up and … I mean, in my grocery store there’s … okay, so in the rice aisle, so I’m standing there, and there’s a box of rice from a fair trade, you know, kind of wonderful company.
And so here’s this rice and that rice, and then there’s one and it says, Surin Red Rice and I said, “Surin?” That’s the province that I lived in in Thailand as a Peace Corps volunteer, back when a lot of people didn’t know where Thailand was. We knew where Vietnam was when I went to the Peace Corps, but Thailand and Thai restaurants were not, you know, a household word in 1975 in most of the United States.
So here’s a rice co-op in Surin, the province where I used to live, whose stuff is packaged and marketed at the upscale Harris Teeter grocery store right down the road from me. What a connection. So I’m standing there reading the box and I’m thinking “Should I contact them? Should I go on a trip?” So my family won’t go with me. They’ll drop me off and come back in an hour.
So yes, being distracted is a bit … you know, it could be a handicap, but it’s a good thing that I’m a writer, and it’s good thing that my husband has a day job.
Toni: I love the term pleasantly distracted. I may have to use that myself. So Nancie, the final question of the Project is, what are you doing now to explore your own potential?
Nancie: I’m cleaning out the clutter of 30+ years of what I’m doing. I’d say my big demon is … it used to be sort of holding onto stuff, like “Oh, I got this mug from such-and-such at such-and-such time.” I got over that about 10 years ago. But going through papers and deciding “keep this, throw this away” … I still have files that I put together way before the internet, and so there’s a lot of stuff around that is distracting and superfluous. So I’m working on getting routines, which do not come easily and naturally to me. My husband can’t live without them, and I’m just realizing that’s the key.
So I’m trying to keep going with all that I’m doing but set aside a block of time, you know, morning and afternoon, to just buzz through a box, and I find the paperwork that I brought home from the ICD conference four years ago with business cards of people I was absolutely going to contact and notes, and do I keep this because it’s interesting? Do I sit down and read this article for 15 minutes? And to just sort of say, you know what, just kind of quickly look and see if there are any photographs of my children at a young age, and otherwise just send that on, because there’s … Facebook and Twitter and this new time with … it’s like, what are you doing now? What’s happening right now?
I realize how holding onto … not dealing with that stuff is kind of holding me back, so I’m kind of working on being in the present moment. Not an original idea, but I keep coming back to that one.
Toni: But you know, you get to marry the inspiration that you draw from history, and that will always work with you, whether you’re in the present moment or not.
Nancie: Absolutely.
Toni: And so you get to marry both, and isn’t that pretty cool.
Nancie: That’s right – my present moment is looking back at history!
Toni: Absolutely.
Nancie: Look at that! Hey ya’ll, look at this!
Toni: Oh my gosh – well, it has been an absolute joy listening to you today, and we cannot thank you enough for being part of the Get Inspired! Project, and good luck to you.
Nancie: Thank you so much. I hope we meet sometime. I’ll cook you some Thai food.
Toni: I would love that, thank you. Take care, Nancie.
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For more information about Nancie McDermott: www.nanciemcdermott.com
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