Verified by 
The psychological aspects of various jobs and careers have always fascinated me—perhaps because, as a loner, I have evaded populous workspaces and, as a journalist, have spent years asking people what they do and why.
Being a chef—any kind of chef, anywhere—requires keen intelligence and psychological skills. Assessing the public's hunger. Discerning how to feed total strangers. Devising, making and serving dishes. Directing a busy (or sadly unbusy) kitchen: These are not tasks for the coward or the dullard.
But some chefs make the mental journey even more intense. Staffan Terje, chef-owner of the award-winning Perbacco Ristorante & Bar in San Francisco, is a Swede transplanted to America, where his fame is based on thinking like an Italian: And not just a modern-day Italian, or a generic Italian—because, in the latter case, there's no such thing—but as a 17th-century Genoan, say. Or an ancient Roman.
Arriving in the United States from Sweden at age 20, already highly trained in French cooking, Terje was already crossing multiple borders. Then he found his first job in an Italian restaurant.
"Even back when I was cooking French food, Italian food was always in the back of my mind: I loved its simplicity, the way its dishes are so delicious as to make you think they must have an incredible amount of ingredients, yet they don't."
He became a self-driven scholar, devouring vintage—even ancient—cookbooks along with sheaves of books on Italian history and geography. On research trips to Italy, "I talked to people about their approach to food, I watched them shop, and I examined the regionality of the ingredients," Terje recalls. "That made me start looking at history and the evolution of Italy: not only how people cooked, but historic events that affected and even created the dishes themselves. Which cultures occupied which areas? Which wars occurred where? This is where you really start to understand this food. And this is how I taught myself to 'think like an Italian,'" says Terje, whose menus at Perbacco have featured such rare fare as brandacujun (Ligurian whipped salt cod and potatoes), agnolotti dal plin (Piedmontese meat-stuffed pasta pillows) and Negroni caramel corn with gin-spiked sea salt.
"The phrase 'Italian food' is a misnomer. You can't really mix up all those regional cuisines. When you think like an Italian, you have to think not in broad national strokes but in regional detail. Sure, we have all these allegedly classic Italian recipes, but what we tend to forget is that the Italians have always been great explorers, very inquisitive and very innovative with their cooking.
"Every dish comes from a very specific place. I study that place's history: What did the court of Bourbon bring to Naples? A ton of things, including smoked spiced salami. If the cuisine of Torino is very elegant, that's because Torino became the seat of the royal house of Savoy" in the 15th century—"so historically speaking, this is the food of the aristocracy. How did Sicilian food acquire aspects of Greek and Arabic food? Because whoever invaded that poor island over the last few thousand years left a mark on its cuisine.
"And look at all the exotic spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg used in northern Italian cooking. Well, Venice was a portal to the East, all the way to the Silk Road. One of the world's oldest spice markets is still active in Genoa. These ingredients were brought to northern Italy by seafarers from the New World and the East.
"I need to know how various ingredients came to be in various places, and who brought them. That way, I can figure out how to add cloves or mustard, for example, to a dish and have it still taste very Italian."
One of Terje's favorite books is Apicius, the classic recipe collection compiled in the fourth or fifth century and featuring the favorite dishes of ancient Rome—such as the fermented fish sauce known as garum, a staple condiment as popular then and there as ketchup and salsa are here and now.
"It sounds disgusting, thinking of the Romans putting this gloppy fish-gut stuff on things," Terje muses. But in that time and place, strong flavors were otherwise hard to achieve. At Perbacco, creating house-made garums is part of the "whole animal" trend—a sustainable way to use fish parts that would otherwise be wasted.
"I start with fish guts, usually anchovy or sardine. But I've done it with octopus guts too. Whenever we pickle fish, we save the heads and add them to those guts. Salt it all down and six months later you have a beautiful fish sauce that can be used to braise meat and give other dishes a deeper flavor," says Terje, who recently prepared a roasted octopus salad featuring celery heart and young onions dressed with a garum-olive oil vinaigrette.
"The ancient Romans had many different types of garums, and they valued certain fishes over others to make it with. Mackerel and tuna were the most highly prized, and when I get a chance to make garum from those, I love to do it because then I'm recreating something that's been almost forgotten in the world, and I'm able to teach other people about it.
"In another old book, I read that the Romans sometimes perfumed their garums with honey and rose petals—not to mask the fishy flavor but to add dimensions. Well, after using roses in a dessert, we had some leftover petals. I dried them, and now I have sardine garum perfumed with rose petals. Add that to a pork dish, and it's just amazing," Terje beams.
"When I go to the farmers' market in San Francisco, I might find something that's not what we think of as an 'Italian' ingredient: fresh ginger, say. But if you do the research, you'll find that in Tuscany they had ginger before they had chili peppers. Zenzero, meaning 'ginger,' is a word in the Tuscan dialect. So with a little bit of thinking, I can bring ginger back into Italian cooking.
"That's what authenticity is about. People ask me why I read all these books: It's because I'm always trying to get to the bottom of how and why. You read something, and it takes you somewhere else."
Accompanying photograph by Kristan Lawson.
