By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Richard Hebein taught Latin and Greek at Bowling Green State University for many years.
Long retired, he’s still teaching. This time he’s not teaching Greek and Latin, rather it’s the craft of cooking as he’s learned it and practiced it over the years.
In November, “The Old Professor’s Cookbook: How to Become a Better Home Cook” by Hebein was published. It’s available through Amazon. The book, published through Palmetto, is printed on demand. “That service it makes so much more sense. … It saves paper,” Hebein said.
His training as a home cook began back home in Milwaukee learning from the women in the family. “I was always hanging out in the kitchen,” he said.
He was charged, he said, with peeling and slicing the apples for pies.
Then he was taught how to make crust.
Then he was asked to make the whole pie. He could put it together without the benefit of. recipe.
“’Dicky, you make the best apple pie,’” he was told. “’That’s your job.’”
He agreed. Now looking back on it, he realizes that “I was scammed.”
But a love of cooking had been kindled. When he left home to pursue his doctoral work, he had to start cooking for himself. “I started again to make the old family recipes,” Hebein said. “But I was always wanting to try something different. I kept saying to myself: ‘If you don’t write these things down you’ll never remember them.’”
Hebein, 80, had always said he’d write a cookbook once he retired. He retired in 2009 after having worked at BGSU both as a professor and administrator since 1965. But he didn’t sit right down to write the book. “I was still experimenting with recipes,” he said.
Two years ago his family doctor, who has tasted his cooking, told him: “You really ought to get going on that book.”
With doctor’s orders, he set to the task. It took him a year and a half.
Even though he has extensive experience working on academic journals dating back to his days as a graduate student, the cookbook posed a difficult job.
Every measurement, every timing had to be triple checked.
He said he’s read the manuscript about 10 times, and still picked up a “to” that was supposed to be a “too” in the manuscript.
“Your mind plays tricks on you, ” Hebein said. “You read it fairly quickly, and you thought you saw what it should be. But it wasn’t.”
The cookbook is not a comprehensive, basic cookbook. It’s a reflection of his years of cooking and experimenting, and his desire to pass along all he’s learned over the decades.
Ever the teacher, Hebein wants to help the reader learn the various tools, techniques, and methods needed to be comfortable in the kitchen.
He knows he has to be able to connect with a variety of learners. Some recipes are very detailed and can be replicated easily. Others are little more than suggestions – put this together with that and taste.
“I can’t make the same thing twice,” he said, before qualifying that statement. “That’s not quite true, but I’m always wanting to try different accompaniments, different seasonings. That was part of the philosophy of the book.”
When he went back to his recipes, he noted that the one that had been rewritten the most was for hamburgers. They are “a good blank canvas on which to learn how to use these seasonings.”
Hebein urges readers to develop their taste memory, so they know what goes with what as they fix their own variations on recipes.
He’s constantly finding better ways to cook and is not averse to using the microwave to cook corn on the cob, or even beets.
Cooked on the top of the stove, beets take an hour. In the microwave, they can be peeled, covered and cooked on high for five minutes then left with the cover on another five minutes, and then tested for doneness. They may, he said, need another minute or so.
The recipes largely reflect his Upper Midwestern upbringing, but he also delves into Italian and French cuisines. “Here again, it’s just go and explore.”
For all his improvisatory flare in the kitchen, Hebein also believes in thinking ahead.
When hosting a large dinner, he said, he will write out the menu as much as two weeks before. He’ll periodically check it, to see if anything needs to be changed. And then as the day approaches, he’ll study it to determine the order in which the dishes need to be prepared.
Once, his husband Mark Kimball, saw him staring at the list posted on the cupboard. He asked what Hebein was doing.
“I’m cooking,” Hebein said. “Well, planning is part of cooking.”
The pandemic, however, put the kibosh on the elaborate dinners and buffets he and Kimball love to host.
On Christmas, they will be joined by a couple who live nearby them in Waterville.
The dinner will start with a bread course, and then a salad. Hebein likes sturdy greens – iceberg and Romaine – rather than “frou-frou” specialty greens.
The main course will be fish, Hebein said. “I’m kind of a nut for fresh seafood.” It is a difficult to find fresh fish in the Midwest. He orders it directly from the Fulton Fish Market in New York City. It arrives in two days.
For Christmas, he’ll take the halibut just delivered from New York and cook it much as his mother would. He’ll dredge it in flour and cook it in a mixture of butter and olive oil.
Then he’ll make a pan sauce with white wine and lemon juice. The flour from the fish provides just enough thickener for the sauce. Then he adds a few large capers.
For dessert? Hebein admits he doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, so the book goes light on that section.
The plan for Christmas is that the diners will retire to the visitors’ home for dessert.
Hebein admitted he hardly ever bakes an apple pie anymore. Now he would need a recipe, and there’s not one in “The Old Professor’s Cookbook.”
