“Cooking With Kaye”
The Milwaukee Sentinel – Oct. 2, 1975
LOS ANGELES, Calif. – “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the best Chinese cook of all?”
Should he ever pose such a question, Danny Kaye needn’t worry about the answer. The mirror would crack of shame should it utter any Caucasian’s name but his.
Kaye’s talents as a comedian, dancer and singer have been celebrated for more than three decades. He came to Chinese cooking somewhat more recently and his interest blossomed into a passion a dozen years later when, on impulse, he bought a Chinese stove one day in San Francisco.
The stove, a huge steel structure with spaces for giant woks, wouldn’t fit through the doors of Kaye’s home, so it was deposited in an alley behind the house. When it was hooked up to the existing gas line the available fuel couldn’t even sustain a pilot light.
Undaunted, Kaye had an enlarged gas line installed and in time built a shelter in the alley to surround his stove. Linked to the house proper by sliding glass doors, it has become a tastefully decorated separate kitchen with ample space to seat guests at a round table placed away from the cooking away.
A second generation stove, custom made by Robert Yick of San Francisco, was put in place earlier this year and its powerful, nearly silent exhaust system keeps the room free of smoke and excessive cooking odors.
The surprise of a Chinese meal at Danny Kaye’s isn’t that the food is good. His reputation as a cook is too solidly endorsed to be a publicist’s creation. Even as they briefly sipped a drink on a recent evening (no lingering over cocktails before the chef performs), a group of first timers that included R. J. (Bob) Wagner, Natalie Wood and David Janssen knew they would be pleased.
Kaye, busy planning a multi-
“Danny may never have thought about it,” an acquaintance commented, “But when he
took up cooking it had to be Chinese. The other great cuisine is French. Its glory
is sauces. They take hours and undramatic slow cooking. Chinese cooking has the excitement
of stir-
“Cooking is like conducting,” Kaye (who has had no formal training in either discipline) told his visitor. “Instincts tell you what to do. You taste, smell and feel. You even listen. Cooking a squab dish I turn my back. When I hear a certain sound the meat is ready.
“I watched and I learned (most often at the San Francisco restaurant of his friend Johnny Kan), but no one had drilled do’s and don’ts into me. As a result, along the way, I’ve made more bad dishes than anyone in the world. But I’ve invented and improvised a lot of very good ones, too, because there was no caution light to stop me, to say, ‘No! You can’t do that.’
“I don’t cook by books or recipes, I don’t measure. Someone asked me exactly how
much salt I use in a dish. That’s silly. I told her one and seven-
When in residence at his Beverly Hills home Kaye serves Chinese and Italian dinners almost nightly. He even combines recipes and techniques of his two favorite cuisines. One of his triumphs is an Italian dish of calves’ liver he cooks in a wok. Sylvia Fine, Kaye’s wife, said they haven’t employed a cook since the launching of the Chinese stove. There’s no need for one when they are away; no room for one when Danny’s at home.
Kaye likes to say he can cook an eight dish meal for 30 days in succession without repeating himself. He keeps a careful log of guests and the dishes he serves them so he can present an entirely different menu on return visits.
The menu he was preparing that day was to feature two soups, one of them an exquisitely simple combination of chicken broth, cucumber and fresh coriander.
A duck that had been split down the front and pegged resembled a long necked banjo (thus the name of the dish, “banjo duck”) was being dried by a fan. Later it would receive a coating of a hoisin and garlic rich marinade and be cooked until the skin was crisp in a special vertical roasting oven. Then Kaye, his guests watching, skillfully carved the bird into tiny pieces and reassembled them on a serving platter.
He patiently demonstrated a technique of separating flesh from bone on leg and wing
joints and gathering the flesh at one end to form “chicken lollypops,” and sliced
beef that later would be stir-
Then he mixed nearly a dozen ingredients into ground pork to create flavored meat balls that, after they had been seared and steamed, were to become the most popular dish of the evening. He produced a thick, dark sauce he has nursed like a sour dough starter for 11 years. Some of it was destined to enhance the flavor of squabs.
Those who have watched his wild comic antics as a performer might expect Kaye’s approach to cooking to be careless and zany. Instead he preserved delicate flavors and tamed robust ones in the various courses to fashion a harmonious meal.
Slender and fit, looking not at all like a man in his early 60s, he talked knowledgeably about the healthful aspects of the low fat, vegetable rich Chinese diet.