Chef wows foodies with Southern food, zest
Chef wows foodies with Southern food, zest Posted: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 9:27 pm By JENNIFER JUSTUS The Tennessean NASHVILLE (AP) — When the pastry chef behind Princess Diana’s wedding confections shows up for dinner, it’s not a night you’d want the cake to fall. But when 82-year-old Phila Hach put the finishing touches on a spread for the chef — along with a room full of other international pastry experts visiting Nashville for a world competition — it became clear she knew her grandmother’s recipe for custard pie would suit the group just fine. “I hope you’ll enjoy some good country cooking,” she said to them as the meal began. She kept a close eye on the contents of each plate to make sure nobody left hungry. “You didn’t get enough chicken,” she told Louise Hoffman, a New York chef. “I’ve been eating desserts all day,” the woman asserted. “Well, that’s why we did chicken,” Hach said, as she scooped another helping onto the woman’s plate. So how does a humble country cook entice a collection of renowned chefs to her bed-and-breakfast inn in Nashville? Don’t let the tight bun of white hair and old-fashioned apron fool you. Hach has Southern roots in the area for sure, having grown up near her Hachland Hill Inn, but she’s traveled and cooked with chefs the world over. While working for American Airlines, she created an early catering manual for the airline industry and hosted a cooking TV show in the 1950s, sharing her table with June Carter Cash, Minnie Pearl, Julia Child and a certain man by the name of Duncan Hines. As a young woman in her 20s, she even met Albert Einstein once and, in a moment of awe, recalls blurting out: “I love your theory of relativity.” But even after meeting and cooking for so many famous faces — or perhaps because of that — Hach knows the importance of keeping it real in the kitchen, and in life. Mealtime doesn’t have to be a place to show off; rather, it’s a place to share during the holidays or any time of year. “There’s something about sitting around the table,” she said. “It feeds our soul and our heart and brings back memories.” At her dinner party for the visiting pastry chefs, guests from around the world were seated along two tables the length of the long dining room. Hach lured them like trout from behind rocks as they crowded toward her end of the table, savoring every word of the catering stories she has collected from 60 years in the business. They listened as she relayed her memories about serving country ham and other Southern delicacies to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and about 1,800 dignitaries at a United Nations dinner. “Did Kissinger eat the ham?” one of the chefs asked as her story came to a close. “Honey, there were Muslims there who ate the ham,” she said. Hach, of course, means no disrespect. After her experiences, she well knows that sharing a meal connects all walks of life to their common humanity, encouraging appreciation for cultural differences without losing a special place for one’s own. “Now you can go back and be professional. You do what you do, and I do what I do,” she said, sending them off. “The pleasures of the table will always be there.” Phila Hach began cooking at just 3 years of age, making mud pies decorated with daisies for her father. But it wasn’t long before he went to Hach’s mother with a plea: “For goodness sakes,” she recalled him saying, “get that child some flour, sugar and eggs if I’m gonna have to eat it.” Hach inherited an early love for cooking from her mother, a home demonstrator. “She empowered me to have a passion for entertaining and life and good health and cheer,” Hach said. By the time she was 13, Hach was spending her summers learning from master chefs at the former Lookout Mountain Hotel in Chattanooga when she traveled there with her father, an entrepreneur and “visionary,” as she called him. Hach earned a degree in music from Ward-Belmont College, but it was her bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University in foods and nutrition that shaped her career. Her cooking repertoire took on a more worldly note when she began a career as a flight attendant with American Airlines in the early 1940s. Back when attendants stayed in fine hotels such as The Savoy in London or the Georges V in Paris, she spent her layovers popping into famous kitchens learning foreign techniques. An upscale Parisian hotel was also the setting where Hach met her future husband, Adolf Hach, a Sorbonne-educated businessman who offered to help with her luggage. She didn’t accept his aid but remembers having just a quick chat. “That’s what flight attendants do,” she said. “Speak to everybody.” Two years after their meeting, the man from that hotel recognized Hach on WSM-TV while working in Tennessee as a tobacco exporter. It was the early ’50s and Hach was hosting Kitchen Kollege, the first cooking show in the South. Adolf began to write her letters, which she’d promptly toss in the trash, until finally she relented for a date. “I never saw another man,” she said. The couple put their careers on hold to honeymoon for a year. The first of their two children was born 11 months later. They settled in Clarksville, near Fort Campbell, and began an inn together there. Four years ago, Hach moved back near her old home-place. She’s since turned out 17 cookbooks. She still caters for flights, working closely with the military, and still welcomes guests into her country inn. She takes no medicine, doesn’t make regular jaunts to the doctor, doesn’t wear glasses and rises often before the sun, sleeping only about four hours per night. Just this year she delivered the keynote address to 6,000 high-end caterers at a Las Vegas conference. “With my little, very simple business, they asked me to speak. Because I don’t care what you do in life,” she said, “to enjoy that life, you have to have passion for it, and then it isn’t work. I have a passion for the things we eat.” But surely after collecting all these experiences, she has one to name as tops. “Today is my favorite day,” she said. “It’s amazing.” Even when Hach isn’t hosting the United Nations or international pastry chefs, a night at her Sunday suppers guarantees good food and conversation. Earlier this year, for example, when she feted one of the few men to cultivate truffles in United States — he was visiting Nashville from East Tennessee — among the guests were a local chef, a socialite, a high-profile photographer and even a clairvoyant. “She meets no strangers at all,” said longtime friend Margaret Parker. “She collects people from wherever. She just has entertained the world, literally.” And after hosting a recent Sunday supper, an event that might cause cooks 50 years her junior to stagger with exhaustion, Hach’s cheeks stay rosy and her steps lively as she slips second helpings onto the edges of her guests’ plates. It’s only when car keys begin to jangle and guests begin to leave that she seems to get anxious. You imagine she’d just as soon have everyone stay the night with the food and conversation flowing until morning. “I’m just intoxicated with life,” she said. “I believe in Santa Claus. I believe in life, and goodness and everything.” ——— Information from: The Tennessean, http://www.tennessean.com Published in The Messenger 12.23.08
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