David Leite is the creator of Leite's Culinaria, a web-based recipe and cooking blog, which earned two James Beard Awards for "Best Internet Website on Food" in 2006 and 2007. The three-time James Beard Award winner joined us to discuss his journey to become a food writer, his cookbook, The New Portuguese Table, and his upcoming memoir, Notes on a Banana: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Manic Depression.
Listen to our full chat with David Leite above, and catch some of the highlights from our conversation below:
On finding the perfect story: "It has to be a story that I want to know about. Of course, early on when I was pitching stories to the Chicago Sun Times and later, the Washington Post and the LA Times, because I began in newspapers, they were stories that I was interested in, but I also had a full-time job in advertising so I wasn't relying upon it. Then when I moved over full-time to being a full-time food writer I realized that I had to write whatever came my way, regardless of whether I liked it or not. So there's actually a piece that I had no interest in: French butters vs. American butters, and it was for Food Arts magazine and it is on my website, and it took me forever to get through it. It wasn't something I was passionate about and that taught me a lesson that if I am not interested in or passionate about the information that I want to pass on to a reader or on The Splendid Table to a listener, than I really shouldn't be writing it or I shouldn't be doing the interview. Because I'm curious, I want to learn more, and I feel like if I'm curious so the reader will be and so will the listener be."
On the Proustian moment that made him become a food writer: "The next big spark came when my partner was making a vanilla cake. Remember he said, 'I'm going to make a cake,' and I said, 'Knock yourself out.' I'd gone back to school and I was going to become a therapist because this food writing thing wasn't really working out, so I'd become a therapist. And so suddenly he said, 'You want to lick the bowl?' And I said, 'Sure,' and I licked the bowl. And really that terribly trite and cliché Proustian moment, where I was hurdled back to my childhood--and that taste was so familiar--but I couldn't place it. And I called my mother and I said 'Mom, did you ever bake?' And I knew the answer was no. She said, 'Of course not,' and I said, 'Did Dina?', who was my godmother, 'Did Dina bake?' And she said that she made chocolate pudding. I said, 'Did vovó,' which is grandmother in Portuguese, 'bake?' And she said, 'Of course she did. She baked all the time.' And I was hurdled back, and from that moment on I never turned back... Her passing and then tasting something that hurdled me back to those moments with her when she was baking."
On his upcoming memoir, Notes on a Banana: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Manic Depression: "I think that what I've walked away from from the situations of the first step, which was the cookbook, which was solidifying my identity as a Portuguese person, a Portuguese man. This book continues that. It kind of retraces it and goes farther back and explains the story. And also allows me to say to people I'm bipolar and I'm not ashamed of it. It's just something that has happened to me. The same way people have brown hair and blue eyes. Some people are tall and some people are short. I have a mental illness and that's perfectly fine and that's who I am and I'm not ashamed. And same thing with being gay, I've come to realize and I've come to accept who I am. And it's become unshakable. And I think that it's a journey every person, no matter what they're facing has to take in their life, because there are things that all of us are ashamed of and there are things that all of us keep secret and there's no need to keep secret. And it all started really for me with my search for my identity as the son of a Portuguese immigrant."
For more information on David Leite or Leite's Culinaria, visit: LCcooks.com