Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh

by Unknown

  “My father did not organize truffles the way I do today,” says Michel Troisgros of La Maison Troisgros in Roanne, where our truffle party has encamped the next day. “He was very serious about truffles, very classic, and he cooked truffles for the sake of the truffles. With the bread-maker, he would cook a whole truffle in a loaf of bread. He did not want to play with associations the way I do today.” Michel recalls being at home, in the kitchen watching preparations for a family gathering, when Pierre Troisgros did something unimaginable to a truffle. “My father julienned the truffle, cut it in sticks like matches. It had better texture, more elegance, and even the taste was different. The same product cut differently had a different taste!” From then on, he became a student of truffles. He came to understand that sheer prodigality was not their best use. He discovered that the black truffle tasted best when combined with fat.

  “For me,” he says, “the best friend of the truffle is foie gras and also butter, the kind with rock salt inside.” He also came up with a most unlikely combination from reading an old Italian cookbook that recommended pairing the white truffle of Alba with a fresh anchovy fillet.

  From that he devised what he says is his finest truffle creation—slivers of raw black truffles, salted anchovy fillet, and salted butter on a thin cracker.

  To me, it sounds like extra-smelly snack food. When I taste it, I’m stunned. The anchovy is no longer acting as a member of the fish family; it has become truffle-helper. It supercharges the truffles. It is a detona-2 6 8

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  tion of truffle flavor. Had I eaten this creation wearing a blindfold, I do not believe I would have identified the presence of an anchovy.

  His truffle dinner, which follows the hors d’oeuvres, is unsurpassed.

  He serves fava and cocoa beans with black truffles in a light broth made from chicken stock, lemon juice, and olive oil. It is perfect, even obvious, and I can’t understand why it hasn’t been done before until he tells me that every one of the beautiful cocoa beans, which are ivory white with maroon veins, has to be peeled by hand. The dish is both rustic and cerebral, intellectual fare for the farmhand. There are soft lan-goustines with leeks, julienned truffles, and strips of raw pear, as well as a variation on chicken Kiev, which is one of the warhorses of Continental cuisine. His interpretation has pigeon breast, foie gras, and truffles in a lightly breaded crust—thankfully, no butter squirts out. He has cheese enrobed in truffles, too, but my heart is still with Bruno’s goat cheese, truffles, and olive oil. At my request, he gives us one of his father’s legendary truffle dishes—potatoes, shallots, and truffles in a warm vinaigrette. I find the acidity overwhelming, and when I tell him this, he shrugs and says, “It’s a classic. I didn’t create it.” So much for truffles the old-fashioned way.

  On the wall of a municipal building in the village of Richerenches is a plaque from the national council of culinary arts certifying that truffle masses are celebrated here. That is correct: each year, on the third Sunday in January, the truffle is formally revered.

  I have come on a Saturday, the day of the truffle market. The streets are packed with truffle buyers and truffle sellers. There is a pizza wagon, proof that plenty of tourists are around, too. Many of them are eagerly sampling truffle liqueur, which they will buy as presents for unappreciative aunts and uncles who will leave it unopened in closets for decades. After the fair, I accompany Hervé Poron, owner of Plantin truffles, to his warehouse, and I am fortunate to be there when one of his buyers (more correctly referred to as a broker) brings in a truckload of truffles, about four hundred pounds of them.

  I ask him if his prominence in the business assures him of getting F O R K I T O V E R

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  the best truffles in Provence, and he replies, “I’d like to believe that, but it often happens when you buy truffles that there are not enough of the best ones. They’ve been sold to restaurants.” He is exceedingly practical, not prone to poetic loquacity when the subject of truffles arises. I mention the romancing of the white truffle that takes place in Italy, how restaurant owners compete to purchase the largest white truffle each season for tens of thousands of dollars so they can be photographed next to it. “With black truffles, we do not do the pictures,” he says.

  At his home, he suggests we sit outside in the surprisingly warm January sunshine. We are surrounded by stone walls and gnarled vines, nosed by his friendly puppy, making our own truffle bruschetta. His wife has brought out a plate of toasted slices of baguette and a salad bowl filled with chopped black truffles drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with course salt. I am reminded of tales I’ve heard of visitors to the palace of the Shah of Iran who were dazzled by heaping bowls of beluga caviar.

  I realize I will never experience another aperitif moment to match this one. Never will I possess sufficient truffles, not unless I turn to crime. I wonder if I should drive back to the little wooded cove of the truffle hunter, get down on my hands and knees, and crawl around looking for fleas.

  “So,” I ask Poron, “is it true that the truffle poachers, the braconniers, are tied naked to trees if they are caught?” He has never heard such nonsense. He says when poachers are caught on another man’s land their cars are set on fire.

  This does not bother me. I have a rental car.

  I continue speculating. “Say the man walking the land that is not his happens to be a simple American tourist, perhaps even a hardworking journalist who has innocently returned to gather information. Would he not be released with a friendly kiss on both cheeks?” He shrugs.

  “Perhaps,” he says, “but sometimes they make mistakes.” j a n u a r y 2 0 0 4

  C H E E S E

  D O N ’ T S A Y “ C H E E S E ”

  Dinner consisted of fourteen courses, so nobody was going hungry.

  There were twelve of us dining together at Les Celebrities, the restaurant of Chef Christian Delouvrier. The meal was moving along nicely, so efficiently that I briefly regretted not having sufficient time to linger over the crispy duck braised in a ginger-scented sauce gastrique.

  I had anticipated a clumsy outing—all those courses, so many people—but I looked at my watch and happily noted that we would be on our way home by eleven p.m. Then I heard something that chilled me, a word that has become as ominous to me as a dark muttering from the pages of Poe. Over the years, all of us have come to dread certain restaurant announcements: “Does anyone here know the Heimlich maneuver?” Or, “Sorry, sir, your credit card has been confiscated.” None, to me, is as unwelcome as this one:

  “Cheese?” the captain asked.

  I recoiled. Please, please, please! I silently screamed. Please don’t ask for cheese. Cheese was not part of the menu. Cheese was not required after foie gras with figs and foie gras with grapes and lobster with truffle oil and sweet-water prawns with white truffles and codfish wrapped in prosciutto and roe deer from Scotland and, well, I think I’ve made my point. Unfortunately, Les Celebrities has a cheese trolley of which it is understandably proud, one with twenty-six varieties of well-ripened cheese, and I feared that somebody would say yes. Somebody 2 7 4

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  did. The squeak of the wheels as the trolley approached the table was like a gurney coming for my remains.

  Don’t get me wrong. I love cheese, in particular the melting creami-ness of the elusive French Vacherin and the teeth-rattling pungency of the dreadnought Epoisses. I serve cheese in my home, and I order cheese unfailingly whenever I’m dining in France.

  I even consider myself something of a cheese expert, one of the best. Maybe I should amend that to: one of the best domestically. I am probably familiar with half the cheeses served at Les Celebrities, which would put me in the top 1 percent of all Americans. In France, I would be a disgrace. Say what you will about the French, they know their cheese. That’s why the cheese trolley works in French restaurants. It comes to the table and diners absentmindedly point to the three or four they want without mis
sing a beat in their conversation.

  The cheese trolley, however, is a dining ritual that has no place in the American restaurant, where it is currently making terrifying inroads.

  The introduction of a cheese course to a dinner causes it to stretch on until it feels like detention hall.

  The problem is not the cheese but the people eating it. While cheese is one of the staples of the American diet—according to the New York Times, 80 percent of all main dishes served in the United States include cheese in one form or another—Americans know nothing about the cheese course. Explaining cheese to them is like explaining baseball to a Frenchman. I used to consider a literary reading the worst form of torment, but now I believe it’s sitting around a table, listening to Americans order cheese.

  The captain’s offer of cheese was accepted by one of the women at our table. And so the agony commenced. She settled back for a long cheese discussion. He patiently indulged her. Now, this woman knows food—she’s a well-regarded New York Times food writer—but you’d have thought she’d never experienced cheese in any form but grilled.

  She pointed to the cheeses and asked for an explanation of every single one. Then she picked out seven or eight, and as the captain served them, she asked him to repeat his description of every single one.

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  After that, the trolley rolled on, and the cheese discourse began anew.

  It would have taken more than an hour for everyone who wanted cheese to get cheese, but I didn’t remain to find out. I pleaded illness— mal de fromage—and fled.

  I returned to Les Celebrities a few days later to implore chef and management to become the first important New York restaurant to disavow cheese. Chef Delouvrier not only rejected my plea for dining sanity, he said his cheese trolley would increase in size. He said on his last trip back to his native France, in every restaurant where he ate, “we see they are selling cheese to Americans like crazy.” I felt broken. I felt helpless. Fortunately, it didn’t affect my appetite.

  I again had the duck in sauce gastrique. My wife had pigeon accompanied by the best vegetable I’ve ever tasted: brunoise of vegetables braised with a whole black truffle, mixed with bacon and served with foie gras on top. Now that’s what I call vegetarian food.

  I was feeling wonderful. And then the cheese tray screeched to a halt in front of us. I frantically waved it away, but my wife insisted. She made her selections, which squandered fourteen minutes. I got my cheese quickly because I remembered what the captain had said to her and didn’t ask him to repeat everything. I don’t like to brag, but I appear to be the only American who can do that.

  The cheeses were magnificent, especially the Fourme d’Ambert, a sweet-tart blue cheese I’d not tasted before; a beautifully balanced Epoisses still a few days away from insanity; and an impeccable Explo-rateur. Afterward, I was suitably ungrateful. I told the captain that if this had been a dinner for ten and everybody had required fourteen minutes to select cheese, we would not have begun eating them until two hours and twenty minutes had passed.

  He thought that sounded wonderful.

  “That way they would be very hungry,” he said. “Imagine how much they would have enjoyed the cheese.”

  GQ, june 1997

  D A I R Y Q U E E N S

  When New Yorkers walk into Leo’s Latticini, a tiny, provolone-scented food shop in the Corona section of Queens, they no longer act like New Yorkers.

  Cops stand patiently in line, caps tipped back on their heads, gobbling samples of mozzarella. The moment they taste the freshly made cheese handed over the counter by Carmela Lamorgese, Irene DeBenedittis, or Marie DeBenedittis, the three women my wife nicknamed the Mozzarella Sisters back when we lived in nearby Forest Hills, they smile and cease looking at civilians suspiciously. The Miranda warning, their favorite poetry, stops echoing in their heads.

  Firemen double-park hook-and-ladders out front on 104th Street and walk in wearing their funny rubber suits. They’ve come straight from a Queens emergency run, having saved a family of twelve immigrants trapped in a one-bedroom apartment that burned because of faulty wiring installed by a landlord who had illegally converted a one-family home into a miniature apartment building. Their harrowing rescue behind them, they grab a Mama’s Special—an Italian sub made with fresh mozzarella—and begin eating even before they’re out the door.

  I’m not sure I understand what happens to customers who enter Leo’s—or Mama’s, as it’s often called. Perhaps it’s the cheese, softer and sweeter than mozzarella made anywhere else, but I believe an undeniable cause of the transformation is the exceptional kindness of the sisters and their mother. Leo’s Latticini (latticini are dairy products) is a 2 7 8

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  showcase of Old World virtues and familial affection. It is magical, the kind of shop travelers hope to stumble upon in some remote Italian village, yet it’s only a half-hour from Manhattan on the number 7 subway line.

  Whenever I’m under the influence of the Mozzarella Sisters, I possess no free will. I always drive there clearheaded and purposeful, my mission to purchase a few supplemental groceries for the household—a pound or so of mozzarella, a jar of meaty olives from Cerig-nola, a liter of olive oil from Puglia, a bit of scamorza (a mozzarella-like cheese perfect for melting), a tub of roasted peppers marinated in garlic and olive oil, maybe a container of ravioli in Marie’s fragrant tomato sauce. (It’s the only pasta dish I know that’s sublime when reheated the next day.)

  What actually occurs on these visits is that Irene takes over and demands that I eat a complete lunch. I do so in about two minutes, while I am waiting for my purchases to be bagged. She thrusts a fistful of mozzarella at me, followed by a small plate of Marie’s extra-creamy chicken salad, and finally an ingot-size hunk of provolone cut from one of the 75-to-100-pound dirigibles from Calabria that hang from the ceiling.

  Sometimes Irene forces me to stuff the provolone in my mouth before I’ve finished the chicken salad, but I’m comforted by the presence of so many police cars and fire engines encircling the premises.

  They’re manned by public servants trained to provide emergency resus-citation to citizens who eat too fast. I find that requesting permission to chew my food properly is counterproductive, because then Irene gets angry and accuses me of not liking the food. “When we yell at the customers, it’s because we treat them like family,” she explains.

  I always try to make it to Leo’s on Thursday, the only day Marie makes her roast pork, and thus the only time all week that her sub stuffed with pork and fresh mozzarella, then lavished with gravy, is available. I am unable to look at a calendar and see Thursday approaching without trying to find a way to take the day off so I can drive to Queens. The outrageously savory pork seems to have hints of rosemary, F O R K I T O V E R

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  but Marie refuses to divulge the recipe, and the gravy is of a sort that no longer exists, dark and salty and tasting of pork drippings, gravy from a long-ago time when gravies did not come from cans.

  Although I occasionally become giddy with anticipation, awaiting the arrival of Thursdays, the other days of the week have their virtues (except for Sunday and Monday, when the shop is closed). Roast beef and Vir-ginia ham are both once-a-week items. Mama’s Special, the best sub in the city, is available daily. The roast turkey with gravy is on the menu every day as well, and I have to admit it is almost as profound as the roast pork. Wednesday isn’t too bad, either, since that is meatball day.

  Marie’s have the weight of puffs of clouds.

  Marie is the greatest Italian-American cook of her generation I know. Her white-meat turkey is as juicy as most people’s concept of pork, and her pork is as ethereal as most people’s concept of heaven. The sandwiches come on semolina rolls so fresh I have begged the sisters to tell me where the bread is from, but they refuse. The fact that I can’t get this information makes me suspect that it is from Brooklyn, better known for its bake
ries than Queens. I don’t mind that it comes from Brooklyn, if indeed it does, but I think the sisters worry that if it becomes known in the neighborhood that their bread isn’t local, they will be looked upon as snobs.

  The regulars—and it doesn’t take long to be accepted as one—are all treated identically. The sisters’ greetings are effusive, even if you’re stopping in for the second time that week. Irene or Marie comes out from behind the counter for a hug, and the questions begin: “Where have you been?” is usually the first, as though you have betrayed their trust by staying away for three days. After that, the inquiries delve into essential family matters: “How’s you wife?” “How’s your mom and dad?” Next they check into the in-laws. I always regret not carrying medical charts with me.

  Carmela is quieter, but I have always suspected the reason for this is because she wishes to appear composed in front of her daughter, who sometimes works in the store. Carmela’s daughter is still known as Little Marie, even though she is fully grown and teaches second grade 2 8 0

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  down the block at PS 16. Also in the shop every day is Nancy DeBenedittis, the mother of the three sisters and the woman who inspired the nickname Mama’s. Now in her eighties, she sits in her usual place, the single small table in the corner, where she slices open the long semolina rolls that are used for sandwiches or peels the garlic used in Marie’s recipes. “Write good thing,” she warned me, the last time I wandered into the store. I’m certain she didn’t realize she was holding a paring knife at the time.

  Many years ago, because of her presence, Leo’s started to be called Nancy’s by the customers. Then the girls were born and started running around the shop yelling “Mama, Mama!”—so the nickname changed.

  Nancy keeps an eye on her daughters at all times, determined to keep them serious. This is nearly impossible.