Emma Walton and Stephen Hamilton
A dinnertime dialogue informed by place.
By Brian Halweil

English tea sweetened with Ohio maple syrup could be the perfect metaphor for Emma Walton Hamilton and Stephen Hamilton’s culinary coming together. But not quite. That precious ambrosia from the center of the country, which the Hamilton household buys by the 5-gallon jug, makes it into nearly everything the familyb cooks, from corn bread to tomato sauce to meat marinades. But it doesn’t grace the tea that Emma, whose parents are British, sips by the potful whenever her mother and book-writing partner, Julie Andrews, is in town and the two are on deadline.

Perhaps food isn’t so much metaphor as backdrop for Emma and Steve, who founded Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theatre nearly two decades ago, and who now rrun the new Southampton Playwriting Conference at Stony Brook Southampton.

“We have offices but nine hours out of 10 we end up working in the kitchen,” says Emma. Sure enough, on a brisk fall day the two were laptop to laptop on a long kitchen table, their 13-year-old son, Sam, and 6-year-old daughter, Hope, playing in the next room.

“When I was a journeyman actor out of New York,” says Steve, “the first thing I would do when I traveled to a city was to find a grocery store. I would be in these little apartments in the vicinity of the theater and I would fill up the refrigerator.” He remembers buying groceries in Albany, Atlanta, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco and Tucson. It made him feel grounded.

As befits a young actor new to New York, Steve also worked in restaurants, including a stint as a waiter at a Turkish joint. But he landed his first kitchen gig when Sy Hyman, the owner of Mc- Glades bar on the West Side, discovered the New York newbie licking his wounds after having just lost his first Gotham gig to a young Turk.

“I was only in town for less than a month, and was slightly desperate,” Steve says. The owner gave him $10 to buy a white, short-sleeved shirt and directed him to report for work the next morning. “A man named Chan taught me short order, and the ballet of working in a small kitchen,” he says, pantomiming the comedy of his brief kitchen apprenticeship and repeating Chan’s famous words to a rapt audience of Sam and Hope, who know just where the story is going: “You don’t want to be no f***ing cook! Go back to Ohio and be doctor, engineer!” (Two weeks later after Steve assisted Chan in a particularly tough lunch seating, Chan declared with pride “Now, you are cook!”)

It wasn’t all for naught. He was briefly “head chef of a oneman kitchen” at Pershing’s, a gay bar, on Columbus and 69th Street. And, today, Steve can cook for large numbers—knowledge that came in handy during a recent reunion when 17 Hamiltons were supping on pancakes and burgers. Most days, he is the workhorse of the kitchen. (“It was so funny,” Hope says of a recent playdate at a friend’s home. “The mommy was cooking dinner.”)

But he’s not entirely a solo act. This evening, for instance, while he prepares to roast a loin of pork and mix a salad as part of the Hamiltons’ contribution to a dinner party, Emma makes the dressing (an eggless Caesar her son says she’s famous for). Even when it’s just Steve with the apron on, Emma notes, “I’m usually there talking with him.” And, regardless of who is cooking, dinnertime is “sacrosanct,” says Steve. “It’s everybody together at dinnertime. I grew up with it.”

Emma has her own pantry pedigree. Her stepmother, Gen Le-Roy, was coauthor of the Loaves and Fishes cookbooks: “I spent many formative summers watching Gen cook.” When she and Steve were courting, she wooed him with baked goods. Several years ago, she started baking bread (which friends and neighbors are lucky enough to enjoy). “That’s my job,” she says. “Two to three days a week.” The inspiration came in the form of a gift from friend Susie Merrell—a cast-iron pot (now well-used), containing a packet of yeast, a bag of flour and a recipe (as well as a freshly baked demo loaf). Having dabbled in various whole wheats, rye and rye raisin, she mixes by motor memory.

More than anything, locale seems to inform so much of what the Hamiltons do, in the kitchen and elsewhere. It’s no surprise that an adaptation of Peter Matthiessen’s fishing tale Men’s Lives was the first show performed at Bay Street in 1991, even before the paint on the new performance space had dried. “That’s a perfect example of when place and arts come together. It spoke to our desire to produce work that was meaningful to this community,” says Steve. “Reading that book [Men’s Lives] really placed me here.” (The adaptation, by Sag Harbor neighbor Joe Pintauro, went through a dozen rewrites, but eventually made one family out of all the families in the book.)

And in their work at Southampton Stonybrook, the two have been able to meld not only the arts and science (as befits a college concerned about sustainability), but also the related worlds of acting and writing. When the Hamiltons brought real-life thespians in to perform the work created during the recent weeklong Playwriting Conference—an academic and aesthetic success. (The chair of the College’s Writing and Literature Program, Robert Reeves, was briefly puzzled by the new-blood attendees: “I saw all these good-looking people. I realized they were all actors.”)

Emma is also executive director of the Young American Writers Project (YAWP), which brings playwriting, poetry, screenwriting, fiction and personal essay into local high and middle schools. Beyond teaching, she has coauthored 18 children’s books with her mother. The two often collaborate via webcam and iChat—Sag Harbor to Los Angeles. (“The best part is, so much of our time together now is forced to be together creatively. It’s freed us up from all that
other family drama.”) Their first book was Dumpy the Dump Truck, an attempt to attract the reading attention of Emma’s truck-obsessed young son, and it spawned a cast of vehicles and the humans who drive them in a town called Apple Harbor that is an amalgam of Sag Harbor and Alderney, the Channel Island that the Hamiltons visit each summer. (Emma’s father Tony Walton illustrates the series.)

Emma solo-authored her most recent book, Raising Bookworms: Getting Kids Reading for Pleasure and Empowerment, which points parents toward “activities that are life skills that secretly involve reading.” “One is cooking,” she says. “There are recipes to read, ingredients to go through. Have your children read the ingredients to you as you cook. If you hope to pass it on, the best shot you’ve got is to make it fun and pleasurable.”

It seems to be working. Sam is probably the most sophisticated palate in the house. He recently made an apple turnover cake with his father (the recipe was from Cook’s Illustrated, to which Steve subscribes). And when his father begins to make an herb pistou as a rub for the pork loin, Sam steps up to the counter and begins to assemble a food processor with precocious joy. When asked about any formative food experiences, Sam flashes back with incredible
accuracy. “It was when I tasted my first gnocchi,” he says. “It was in winter. We were shoveling her driveway,” he says, referring to LeRoy. He pauses and seems to taste it in his mind. “Gnocchi with tomato sauce. She gave them to us when we were done to warm us up. And I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Hope’s gastronomic interests are just as sentimental, even if they revolve around planning the centerpiece for her upcoming birthday—a chocolate cake with “raspberry fluff icing” selected from the Pink Princess Cookbook. It will be topped with a princess figure and princess crown. A belly dancer has been booked. “The good news is they go through phases,” Emma says.

And the household hearth goes through phases, too. “I’m not such a great summertime cook,” says Steve, who favors the Green Thumb in Water Mill or Country Gardens on Millstone Road in Bridgehampton for summer produce. But, in the fall, his appetite blooms, and he dishes up casseroles and stews. “Chicken risotto,” Sam says excitedly. “Chicken cacciatori.” There are variations on potatoes, Thanksgivings with Steve’s homemade cranberry sauce
(and sometimes cranberry baked chicken), Sunday breakfasts of pancakes, and gingerbread men at Christmas. There’s also a winter vegetable soup that, with a loaf of Emma’s bread (and perhaps some cheese), makes a meal.

“When cooking pork loin,” Steve says, “you really have to add flavor to it. You start with a rub.” Sam deposits a handful of selections from their nascent herb garden in a food processor. “Chop or grind?” Sam asks, as his father continues to wax porcine poetry. “Dad?” Sam asks again. “Either one,” Steve says, as he mixes a sauce—“a fruity thing, apples, cherries, cranberries”—that will be served with the loin. “You build the coals to one side. You put the
food on the other side. You put the drip pan on that side.” He pauses for emphasis. “The meat is on the side with the drip pan. Cover it and it cooks like an oven instead of a grill.”

Hope, who doesn’t let her below-counter height restrict her cooking, enters the scene, wanting to check in on some popsicles she has chilling. Her mother helps her inspect the forming ice, and in rearranging frozen bananas and other smoothie ingredients, gets distracted by the jigsaw puzzle of a well-employed refrigerator, and the possibility of a show-stopping punch line.

“Darling, your pork is hanging out,” Emma says. “Is that OK?”

Hanging rack
Emma: The hanging rack was a gift to us from our first au pair, a lovely young gal from South Africa who was partial to butterflies and gave that to us to remember her by. Steve installed it with some antique cut nails that he had salvaged from somewhere. The “Kiss the Cook” sign is separate—I think I gave it to Steve as a stocking stuffer once. It reminds me of how lucky I am to have a husband who cooks.

PG Tips tea
Emma: That’s my English background. Both my parents are British and we spend a lot of time there. We used to have it sent to us by relatives in the UK, or bring it back in bulk when we went there. Now, you can get it at King Kullen in small boxes—but better still, Cromers has the BIG boxes.

Tea tin
Emma: The tea tin is actually a PG Tips tin. The English are big on their tins. Not sure where we got it, probably one of our trips to the UK, but it houses our—surprise—PG Tips.

John Courage pub mirror
Emma: My first apartment in New York had a big brick wall and fireplace that didn’t work. It needed dressing up.

Lots of wine
Steve: Bring anything from a stainless steel tub, and she will drink it. New Zealand sauvignon blanc is particularly popular now. I’m partial to the redder stuff, in particular a North Fork cabernet franc. I hear it’s a varietal best blended.

Cookbooks
Emma and Steve: We love her [Marcella Hazan] stuff. Her eggplant Parmesan. Our other favorite dish of Marcella’s is her minestrone soup, which is more like a dense vegetable soup and which I make a lot over the fall and winter. Favorites from The Best Recipes from Cook’s Illustrated are chicken stew, bouillabaisse, chicken potpie, bread pudding, apple pie and molasses/spice cookies.

Punt e Mes
Emma: It’s a sweet vermouth, and wonderful mixed with soda and served with an orange slice. It’s a summertime drink.

5-gallon jug of maple syrup from Ohio
Emma: The farm belongs to Harold and Grant Sanor, in Homeworth, Ohio, down the road from where Steve’s sister Amy lives. Amy goes there once a year and buys us several gallons, then ships it up to us. Steve (who is from “just near Cleveland”): I believe that being a traveler from some place, you need something of that place. What better than
the very sap? Now, Vermont maple syrup just doesn’t compare. It’s our second ingredient for everything. We always use maple syrup instead of sugar. My grandmother could measure sugar out in her hand.

5-pound bags of Bob’s Red Mill Wheat Flour
Emma: It’s nearly no-knead bread. I do knead it just a tiny bit. I make it before I go to bed so that it rises overnight. These days it’s all about whole grain, organic, starting our garden.

The Swiss connection
Emma: My mother’s side of the family has a house in Switzerland and I lived there. In high school, I hung around the local cheese shop.

Steve: My family is of Swiss decent, and when I visited the country for the first time with Emma, I said: “Everyone looks like Uncle Walter.” On family trips, we consume Hobelkäse, a mountain cheese made only in Saanenland region near Bern. It is generally eaten communally, freshly shaven into curls with gherkins and bread. They cut it on the table. (The word Hobel means a carpenter’s plane.) Our ski teacher can taste it and tell from the taste which cows and which mountain.

The milking stool
Emma: The stool came from a little house in Alderney, an extraordinary Channel Island in the English Channel—sister to Guernsey and Jersey, and home to the original Alderney cow, though now only Guernsey cows remain. (It still has its own dairy and the best butter and ice cream in the world.) My mom and dad bought the house after a brief stay on the island with their friend T. H. White (author of The Once and Future King). Alderney became a favorite getaway for much of my family, and my paternal grandparents eventually bought their own house and retired there (they are both buried on the island). That stool was one of the key things from the house that I kept, and I treasure it. Legend has it that I was conceived in that little house...I don’t know for sure, but I do have photos of my parents there during one blissful summer when my Mom was pregnant with me. There’s a chapter about it in her autobiography, Home. We still visit the island— it’s where we just went at the end of August, as my cousins now own my grandparents’ old home there.

Chairs
Emma: The Swiss chairs are around our dining room table. They belonged to my mom, who has had a home there for years, and I grew up dining on those chairs (we lived in Switzerland during my middle-school years). I also grew up with the ones in the kitchen, which are fairly beat-up English Windsor chairs and which were around the kitchen table in one of my other childhood homes (with my mom) in California. They still have paint on them from arts and crafts projects we did around the table when I was a kid—and now of course our kids are adding their own marks to them!

Painting of a bowl of cherries
Steve: Emma and I love original stuff. And we love representational stuff.

Emma: Adam Rhude painted it. We bought it at the Grenning Gallery—he’s one of her regular artists. We love it for its obvious connotations. Life is just a bowl of cherries, which is sort of our philosophy. Though, lately, Hope has turned us on to saying life is just a chair of bowlies.

Brian Halweil is the editor of Edible East End.