Grooming: Kelly Andrews Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer
There’s a comforting, soothing aspect to both food and music. When I’m offering food to somebody to nourish them or when I’m offering music to nourish their spirit or their soul, I realise I’m doing the same thing.
I cooked super-early; I was cooking at six. We were cooking dangerous food, too. My first was french fries: hot grease, flame and a kid on a chair. Crazy, but yeah, we did it and it was fun.
When I think of childhood memories I’m like, “Oh, wow, I was doing everything these farm-to-table chefs are doing!” When we went fishing, we would dispatch and gut. And we did that with rabbits. We used to cook rabbit in a thousand different ways. I’m not a hunter now, but we knew where food came from.
In my 20s, I had a small catering business in California. I was trying to get the music going and then also being hired for small dinner parties. And it was like, “Well, what’s paying the most?” Sometimes a catering job would pay a little bit better than the music at the time. So, often I carried the two outfits in my car.
I’m probably as comfortable expressing myself in food as I am with music. It’s like a juggling trick: “Hey, I can do this! But I can also do this!” There’s some talk that my dinner parties are famous, I don’t know. Stevie Wonder keeps saying he’s gonna come to my house. But it hasn’t happened yet.
I don’t want to offend the British public, but I haven’t had an amazing ribeye steak here yet. Hawksmoor I did, but that’s in an American style. But I’ve had steaks here where I was like, “What cut is that? That’s like an angular slice of a cow’s ass!”
In the last few years, I’ve had a desire to get my family back together. My mother has been dead for many years and she was the glue. And so I moved back to California [from New York] to have these big dinners. I bought a long table and I bought this house that has some space so we can all get together. Everything is here: I’ll prepare the food, let’s just get together. We had a ball. I say we “had” because Covid, that couple of years was tough. My brother died and my sister died. So obviously we can still get together but there’s two that’s missing. But I did it. I did it. And the value of the house has already been paid back. The place can go through a hurricane now because in a way, we did it! I did what I wanted to do.
Christmas dinners at my house, it’s not 13 people. It’s 113 people! We set up all stations: turkeys, rib roasts, salmons, ducks and lamb. My wife making her three, four Christmas Russian salads. And I’m making all the other side dishes. Four ovens going, it’s just madness. Only thing that is difficult to time is that you want the gravy and the sauces to be perfect at the right time. But the first 60 get good sauce and gravy.
California style is slamming things together. Currying a salmon or doing a rib roast with some interesting Asian sauce, Korean tacos – all of this is acceptable in California. I love mixing sweet and savoury, that’s kind of my thing. The idea of a cornbread stuffing and cranberry sauce mixing together on the plate: that’s the ultimate.
My wife is Russian and I’ve had beautiful cooking experiences in eastern Europe. At home, we have caviar, which is not caviar. It’s the caviar that most Russians eat: eggplant and squash, zucchini, minced with tomatoes, onions and garlic, and it’s spread over bread. It’s called peasant caviar and it’s delicious.
If this music thing ever slows down, I want to open a small restaurant. You know, an eight- or 10-table kind of thing. But I would want it to be hands on. I’d want to give all these people plates of love … maybe it’s just a pipe dream.
My favourite things
Food
A great ribeye with peppercorn sauce or some herb butter, and a complex wine to go with it. Yes, I should have some potatoes with it. But you could bring another side of steak, actually.
Drink
I’m partial to an Old Fashioned. It feels like I’m jumping out of a vintage car, ha ha! Stepping into my library.
Place to eat
In New York, there’s a place I really love to go: EN Japanese Brasserie. The attention to detail is the thing that struck me: it was the first high-food experience that I didn’t feel awful for spending that kind of money.
Dish to make
I love cooking salmon in a whole bunch of different ways. I often dust it with curry for the sweet and savoury combination, or do a mango chutney with it. But I love it just with rosemary and butter.
Gregory Porter’s album Christmas Wish is out now (Blue Note/Decca)
