What’s frugal about fish sauce?
The origin of Copple’s love of cooking is so innocent it’s almost embarrassing. At home on Saturday afternoons as a boy, usually by himself, usually in the course of flipping through the available 13 channels, he’d land on PBS and “The Frugal Gourmet.” He credits the show with not only sparking his interest in cooking but in the history of it as well. “I’m a fan of the trivia of cooking,” he says. “And that’s one of the things that really drew me in.” Copple became adventurous after enough episodes and looked to mimic the show. “The first time I tried fish sauce, it was just, like, a disaster,” he says. “I had no idea what I was getting into. I was probably 13 or something like that. I went to the store, bought fish sauce, smelled it and thought, Oh my God! This can’t be right. And I threw it away.” He was beginning to discover all that was within his reach in the kitchen. A point Copple revisited nearly 15 years later when he returned to cooking professionally. He graduated from Kansa
