Cooking Got Barbara Lynch Out of South Boston, and Brought Her Back

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/dining/barbara-lynch-south-boston-cooking.html

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BOSTON — Barbara Lynch never thought she would end up in South Boston.

The chef is a fierce daughter of Southie, a nickname for this neighborhood (and, she said, an old local term for the people who built it that’s rarely, if ever, used today). Generations of Irish-Americans forged iron and steel, built ports and ships, and hauled sugar and molasses in the area’s now-decrepit industrial buildings.

When Ms. Lynch, 53, was growing up in a housing project here in the 1970s, Southie was notorious for clannishness, racism and crime (organized and otherwise). But she was at home, surrounded by a network of relatives, by other children growing up on the streets, by other families with absentee fathers.

“That’s where Whitey Bulger lived when I was young,” she said, pointing to a brick building identical to the one next door, her former home. She remembers one night when a teenager dribbled a basketball a little too loud and a little too late at the playground down the block. Mr. Bulger, then already a felon, came storming out of the house with a carving knife, stabbed the basketball, then yanked it out and stabbed the kid. Then he bundled him into his car and drove him to the emergency room.

“The really strange thing,” Ms. Lynch said, “is that no one in Southie thought this was strange.”

In a new memoir, “Out of Line,” she charts her route. Cooking was the way out, starting at age 12: To help her mother make ends meet, she took an after-school job keeping house for the priests at St. Monica’s rectory. By the time she dropped out of high school, her studies had been reduced to one area: home economics. A teacher taught her knife skills and introduced her to pesto, stir-fries and crepes — each one an exotic revelation to a girl raised on basic pre-food-revolution fare like fried pork chops, instant pudding and canned peas. That was her entire culinary training.

Like many chefs in those days, she lied her way into her first kitchen job, could barely read a recipe (she is dyslexic) and had never eaten in a restaurant when she began working in one.

But for someone who stole a city bus at 13, begged for cash from neighbors for “charity,” spending it on fried clams and mescaline, and shoplifted clothes as smoothly as she now carves a chicken, a restaurant kitchen held no terrors. She got by on nerve and hustle (the cocaine the line cooks used to snort through dried penne probably helped, she said). Todd English first put her in charge of a kitchen, and she became the chef at his influential restaurants Olives and Figs.

She survived, persisted and opened her first restaurant as chef and an owner, No. 9 Park, in 1998. She traveled to Italy and finally, in 2004, to France. A dish she tasted there called poulet en pain — chicken in bread — inspired one of her favorite home-cooking recipes: a whole chicken, stuffed with carrots, celery, onions and herbs, sealed inside a pie crust and roasted.

“Restaurants should be able to do more things like that, instead of inventing new dishes all the time,” she said. Like most of her food, it is rooted in European tradition, demanding no special ingredients and no revolutionary technology. It takes the basic flavors of chicken noodle soup or potpie, concentrates them and transforms the textures into an indescribably good dish.

Since 2000, South Boston has been steadily gentrifying, and in a way, so has Ms. Lynch. (She still curses like a longshoreman, but without the Southie accent.) Since 2008, three of her six restaurants have been housed here, in a giant renovated warehouse full of warm light, smooth surfaces and winning food like tiny macarons in Froot Loops colors and perfect fried oysters served in oyster shells.

“Never in a million years did I think people would be eating foie gras in this neighborhood,” she said. “Or that I would be cooking it for them.”

Recipe: Roast Chicken in a Butter Crust

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