Renee Erickson and the art of food

It’s common knowledge that cooking is an art – but what happens when the cook is an artist?

For Renee Erickson, the celebrated Seattle chef and restaurateur, it means a slightly different focus — on flavors, on presentation, and on state of mind.

Erickson explores those symbiotic influences in her new book, Sunlight & Breadcrumbs: Making Food with Creativity & Curiosity. She’ll hold a combination cooking and painting event with PCC members Nov. 7 (sign up here).

Most diners know the Seattle-area native as the James Beard Award-winning chef who began her restaurant career with the Boat Street Café. The Sea Creatures restaurant group she now runs with three partners includes The Walrus and Carpenter, The Whale Wins, Lioness, Willmott’s Ghost, General Porpoise donuts and more.

But Erickson majored in art at the University of Washington, graduating with a degree in painting and printmaking, and originally thought she’d become an art teacher. A college exchange program in Italy and a server’s job at Boat Street eventually turned into a different life. After buying Boat Street from original owner Susan Kaplan, over the years she went from cooking on the line each night to overseeing an acclaimed citywide restaurant empire.

The beauty of restaurants

Art was always in the background. As a recent Seattle Met profile noted, “Erickson once brought a beloved dog to the paint store to color match a certain spot in his fur because she wanted the walls of her first restaurant, Boat Street Cafe, to be that same shade of luminous white.”

And really, art was in the foreground too. My own mother, who once ran an art gallery and had no idea about Erickson’s background, ate at Boat Street with me long ago and said the entrees were as distinctive as a painting, you could tell from across the room who created them.

Erickson’s Seattle restaurants and even her cookbooks (don’t miss the epic peach cobbler recipe from her first book), as different as one is from the next, all feature Erickson’s lovely sense of color and design. Artist friends like Jeffry Mitchell and Curtis Steiner are frequently featured as part of her signature aesthetic, usually described as a Northwest-influenced French countryside.

And yet.

As Erickson wrote in the new book, “Over the years it became easy to let my creative habits, even those that seemed so fundamental to my identity, slip by the wayside.”

That was true for literal art as well as cooking.

“Sitting down with a brush and paints or experimenting with a favorite ingredient became something I had to really save time for.”

Reconnecting with art

She realized she had to reconnect with that artistic spark. Doing so took a variety of forms — leaving a bowl of gouache paints in a pretty bowl on her breakfast table for daily practice, painting rocks with her beloved parents, even considering her thought process for plating foods.

“Take the case of a summer salad of cucumbers and melon,” she wrote. “I imagine the bright, thick whiteness of a whipped ricotta sauce and swirl that on the base of the plate. I mix rustic chunks of cucumbers and peachy-toned melon cut in wedgelets to echo the pointed leaves of garden-plucked tarragon. These I’ll pile up, not too high, not too low, making sure to reveal glimpses of the  ricotta below (negative space is always important to a composition). A few pinpricks of black pepper offset the pale summery colors of the salad; olive oil adds gloss in places. But that’s enough. No need for flowers or dribbled balsamic or bigger sprigs of other herbs. Every­thing serves a purpose in the composition, both in terms of flavor and appearance.”

The conscious practices helped Erickson refire her creative spark after the years of pandemic isolation and stress. She hopes some version of them might boost readers out of their own kitchen inertia.

She’s aware of the stylistic signatures she’s developed over time, whether deepening the flavor of a dish with high-quality anchovies or laying down gouache colors in “bold, kind of smooshy brushstrokes,” the different storytelling possibilities that come from each medium.

“Style evolves with repeated practice — your gestures are no longer something you are actively thinking about,” she writes.

So many touches in the book feel particular and personal to Erickson, whether she’s talking about her love for certain local ingredients (Holmquist hazelnuts, Billy’s tomatoes, Alvarez Farm beans) or her distaste for farmed salmon (“gross,” flabby, polluting) or her memories of dishes like the sweet corn flan that messed up the timing in the Boat Street kitchen with every order but was too good to take off the menu.

All those touches together make up a portrait of only one person — Erickson. But by the same logic, her message seems to be: the style you develop in your own practice, whether it be canvas or kiln or kitchen, can only be you.

Whipped Feta

This is just such an easy technique to make a little dip that stands in pretty swoops and folds onto a piece of toasted bread for easy crostini, or beneath a pile of oven-roasted tomatoes. I make it with two fresh cheeses: feta and ricotta. If you choose feta, find a version with sheep’s milk in it: I like Fleecemaker from Bow, Washington, but Valbreso from France is good too. Sheep feta has a softer aspect than goat-milk feta, something I love in this preparation. If you use ricotta, make sure to work with a smaller-batch variety of whole-milk ricotta like Bellwether or Calabro hand-dipped ricotta. Soaked in brine, feta is generally salty enough, so it doesn’t usually need much seasoning after being whipped, but ricotta may need a boost of salt. P.S.: These are universally great spreads for vegetarian sandwiches—coat both cut sides of a baguette with the whipped cheese and layer in cucumbers, peppers (raw or roasted), tender greens, grilled mushrooms, fresh or roasted tomatoes, you name it.

Makes 2 cups (480 ml)

8 ounces (225 g) feta cheese in a block, not crumbled
¼ cup (60 ml) plain whole-milk yogurt
Grated zest of ½ lemon
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for drizzling
Edible flower petals (optional)

Combine the cheese, yogurt, and lemon zest in a food processor fitted with a steel blade and start spinning the mixture. As the machine runs, drizzle in the olive oil through the hole in the lid. Whip on high until very smooth, about 90 seconds. Scrape into a bowl and chill for at least 30 minutes; it will firm up a bit. It will keep in an airtight container in the fridge for 2 days. To serve, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with the edible flower petals, if using.

Variation: Whipped Ricotta

Substitute 12 ounces (340 g) whole-milk ricotta (like Bellwether) for the feta and omit the yogurt from the recipe. Process the same way as above, and season with salt and freshly cracked black pepper to taste at the end.

From “Sunlight & Breadcrumbs: Making Food with Creativity & Curiosity” by Renee Erickson with Sara Dickerman (Abrams Books, $37.50).