To the Bone

by Paul Liebrandt

  Copyright © 2013 by Crumpet LLC

  Photographs copyright © 2013 by Evan Sung

  Photograph on this page by Evan Sung features a photograph taken by Jacques Gavard and is used courtesy of Pierre Gagnaire.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  www.clarksonpotter.com

  CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Liebrandt, Paul, 1976–

  To the bone/Paul Liebrandt and Andrew Friedman.—First edition.

  pages cm

  1. Liebrandt, Paul, 1976– 2. Cooks—United States—Biography. 3. Cooks—Great Britain—Biography. 4. Corton (Restaurant) I. Friedman, Andrew, 1967– II. Title.

  TX149.L48A3 2013

  641.5092—dc23

  [B]

  2013007785

  ISBN 978-0-7704-3416-8

  eISBN 978-0-7704-3417-5

  Book design by Stephanie Huntwork

  Jacket photography by Evan Sung

  v3.1

  I dedicate this book to my father, who set me on the road that I am on. Never has there been a wiser word said to me by any man other than you.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  FOREWORD BY HESTON BLUMENTHAL

  INTRODUCTION

  FIRST STIRRINGS

  (LIKE A) CULINARY VIRGIN

  INTO THE FIRE

  DISCOVERING THE NEW WORLD

  A TASTE OF FRANCE

  CITY BOY

  LIGHTNING STRIKES

  EMPIRE STATE OF MIND

  TOE IN THE WATER

  SHADES OF GREEN

  A PAUSE FOR REFRESHMENT

  GOING FOR BROKE

  FINDING MYSELF, FOR NOW

  EPILOGUE

  RECIPES

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  FOREWORD

  Although he has made his name at the terrific Corton in New York, Paul Liebrandt is, like me, a London boy. In the opening pages of this captivating book he writes evocatively about a number of experiences I can relate to. Chinatown, Butterkist popcorn, and watching movies in the big West End cinemas were all part of my upbringing, too. Paul tells of how, as a kid, he was fascinated by the hare and grouse hanging in the Berwick Street butchers’ windows, marveling at the mechanics of taking an animal and separating it into neat cuts of meat. (His dish, Royale of Hare, is in part inspired by this.) Similarly, I remember well being made to trudge round a West London market on Sundays with my gran, with only the promise of an ice cream at the end of it all to keep me going. Ever since, ice cream has been a special enthusiasm of mine. Such formative influences have a great impact on your creative life.

  Paul and I took very different routes up the ladder of our profession. I’m a self-taught chef, whereas he undertook apprenticeships at various establishments—L’Escargot, Marco Pierre White’s legendary The Restaurant, Pied à Terre, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Pierre Gagnaire, Bouley—all of which he memorably describes here. He’s good on the crazy nature of restaurant life: the dodgy dorms, drinking binges, sleep deprivation, camaraderie, and quirky personalities, and the infernal heat in poorly ventilated kitchens that had him periodically tipping an entire bottle of water over himself. He’s thoughtful and eloquent on the downsides of culinary life that can make it hard to take: the repetitive drudgery, the pressure of proving yourself day after day, the isolation. Reading these pages, you’ll get a good sense of what it’s like to be in the kitchen, the highs and the lows.

  Although we cut our teeth in different ways, when Paul came to eat at The Fat Duck, I quickly recognized a kindred spirit—someone who, culinarily speaking, speaks my language. For me, good food is ultimately about emotion. Of course, you have to practice, develop, and perfect the necessary techniques (as you’ll see, Paul learned how to devein foie gras the hard way), otherwise there are likely to be limits to what you can achieve creatively. But eating is a multisensory experience, and a large part of the deliciousness of food comes from its appeal to the five senses: taste, smell, sight, touch—in terms of our appreciation of different textures—and even sound. (You’d be amazed at how much of our detection of the freshness of, say, an apple, comes from what we hear as we crunch into it.) And this appeal in turn triggers all kinds of memories and associations that can enormously enhance the perception of flavor.

  This is something that Paul understands. Early on in his apprenticeship, he says, he realized that in cooking there was “a simple animal attraction to the tasks that appealed to my senses.” It’s this sensual appreciation that gives his cuisine a strength of character. Thus his dish “The Marine,” with its oyster, apple, onion meringue, and shallot cream, grown out of Paul’s fondness for the heady saline scent of sea foam. His Smoked Caramel and Pomegranate picks up on the caramel flavor of the Butterkist popcorn he relished at the movies. Many people think that this emotional aspect of cooking doesn’t fit well with a technical, scientific approach. To me this attitude never made much sense, and Paul takes a similar viewpoint. Working with pastry in the early days of his apprenticeship showed him the value of precision and consistency and, like me, he saw no reason why that shouldn’t apply to savory dishes just as much as sweet ones. This has become part of his signature style. There’s a telling moment early on in this book where Paul talks of his youthful enthusiasm for Star Wars action figures. “I was most drawn to Darth Vader,” he says, “but it wasn’t because he was the villain; it was the purity and clean lines of his black-as-night costume.” Purity and clean lines—it’s a pretty good description of his style of cooking.

  It’s this approach that leads to the kind of dishes included in this book: Cod Cheek with Smoked Bone Marrow and Black Trumpet; Beet-Hibiscus-Glazed Foie Gras with Trevise; Black Sesame Crème with Purple Potato Ice Cream and Cashew Paste—these are beautiful, precise, well-thought-out plates of food. But from the way Paul talks about his cooking, you can also understand the emotion that has gone into them—how his Rhubarb, Strawberry, and Cucumber Royale is infused with memories of his Sussex boarding school. How the dress-shaped white-beer gel in his Summer Crab Composition reflects Paul’s Sundays spent girl-watching in the pub. And how his take on “The Bagel” and the skyscraper shape of his “Gold Bar” dessert both reflect his excitement on first arriving in New York as a twenty-three-year-old looking for work. If you’ve ever wondered where the heck a modern chef gets his inspiration from, these pages will give you some idea of how it works. You’ll get privileged access to one of the most innovative, skillful, and idiosyncratic chefs in America.

  Paul calls this book—which is part-memoir, part-cookbook—a literary tasting menu. It’s time to dig in and enjoy.

  —HESTON BLUMENTHAL

  INTRODUCTION

  From the time I was old enough to make decisions about such things, my life has been defined by The Food.

  I write it that way because that’s how I think of it: as the object of an existential quest, to be pursued at the expense of just about anything else. In the name of The Food, at one time or another, I’ve worked for nothing in faraway lands where I didn’t speak the language, lived in meager and unsanitary quarters, commuted to and from work at times and in places that would make any mother fear for her son’s safety, and slept on a banquette or the floor in my own restaurant for days on
end.

  Why would I, or anyone, voluntarily do such things? It might be difficult for those not blessed and burdened by such attachments to understand, but at some level, cooking is an art that relies on the marriage of craft and inspiration. Craft is the easy part: anybody armed with the requisite aptitude and discipline can master the technical part of cooking, though it might take years. Inspiration, on the other hand, is like a demanding lover who flits in and out of your life as she pleases, insisting that you be available for her arrival and ready to act on a moment’s notice, lest the opportunity pass you by.

  Then, of course, there’s the cruel joke perpetrated on chefs by the cosmos. It’s not enough to have one perfect idea; it must be realized dozens of times each day, at great expense, with most of the work carried out by people who don’t have the benefit of living in your head. There are no Emily Dickinsons in the cooking trade, no chefs who toil anonymously and independently in their family attics, leaving their work to future generations to discover and appreciate. On a daily basis, chefs need a well-equipped place in which to work, cooks to prepare our food, and guests to pay for the privilege of eating it. If you’ve ever wondered why so many chefs are known to terrorize their staffs, or behave like alcoholics after a night on the line, or burn out and fade away at tragically young ages, much of the answer can be found in the pressures created by that unholy trinity.

  Does all of that sound unhealthy? It can be. But in my experience, the highs justify the lows. I discovered The Food as a painfully shy, unhappy boy, and it gave shape and meaning to my life. Hailing from a single-parent household, it offered me an alternate home in which to pass my days and nights. Without a specific ambition, it provided something to strive for; as a child never given to words, it gifted me with a vocabulary of flavors, colors, and textures with which to address and engage the world.

  It also became the lens through which I see my life. Where some people have photo albums and journals, I have The Food. The ingredients and techniques I have worked with, and the way they come together in my dishes, are nothing less than snapshots of my life—not only of the kitchens in which I’ve worked and the influences I took from them, but also of where I was living and what I was thinking and feeling at any given time.

  In these pages, I share a bit of my story, along with some dishes that mark the stops along the way—all with the hope that they might give a sense of what it’s like to become and to be a chef. I’m too young to consider this a memoir. And there are not enough recipes to qualify it as a cookbook. Think of it, then, as a literary tasting menu, a representation of one chef’s life so far, summed up—as all chefs inevitably are—by the dishes cooked and eaten along the way.

  —PAUL LIEBRANDT, New York City, Summer 2013

  FIRST STIRRINGS

  London 1982–1990

  The more I think on it, the more I regard The Food in near-religious terms.

  Chefs come and go, contributing what we can to the continuum, but we are players in something much larger than ourselves. Moreover, for me and for many who have taken up this pursuit, The Food was our salvation, offering a shape to our lives, a sense of purpose and direction that was lacking before we found our calling.

  Kitchens aren’t just kitchens: they’re insane asylums, penitentiaries, and classrooms all rolled into one. In a way, it’s amazing that any cooking actually gets done in them, but then again, cooks have to eat, too.

  Cooking has become a more respectable pursuit in the past few decades, so it attracts a broader swath of eager participants than it once did. Not long ago, it was the profession of last resort, the final stop on the way out of society or the first stop on the way back in. Now it promises glitz and glamour, but only to its most famous practitioners. At its heart, it remains a menial endeavor that often demands sweatshop hours and wages, requires one to work on weekends and holidays, and leaves you unable to relate to anyone other than your kitchen brethren.

  Whatever attracted me to such a place?

  Like so many cooks, I stumbled into it, then realized it was where I belonged. I’m not sure whether to call it fate or luck or a combination of the two, but fortune definitely played a role because I was born into a life bereft of anything resembling fine dining. I didn’t grow up in the Hudson River Valley eating ramps or in Paris with fresh bread on every corner. My first and only taste memory from earliest childhood was the occasional strawberry-picking trips my family made to the countryside outside London. I was too young to remember exactly where we found them, but I remember being fascinated by both their vibrant red color and the pleasures unleashed with each bite, qualities about which I ruminated on the drive back to London. Those berries stand out in my memory, bursts of color and flavor against the gray backdrop of my youth, like the flashes of an amnesiac. There were no external signs pointing me to where I am now, but when I look back at those berries and how vividly I recall them, I realize that there was within me the seedling of a chef, a larval being waiting to be nurtured and coaxed into existence.

  Were I prone to melodrama or self-pity, I might say that I had the most clichéd of beginnings: the unhappy childhood. I was an only child, and my parents had no extended family. It was just me and them, and they did not get along, separating when I was six years old, then getting back together for one last, ill-fated go at it when I was eleven. Life at home was turbulent and isolating, even though we lived in the center of London, one of the busiest cities in the world. I could look out the window or venture outside into the street, with thousands of people rushing by, yet my enduring memory is one of complete and utter loneliness.

  Our living situation was the great silver lining of those years: we resided at 90 Charing Cross Road, a government-subsidized Victorian building in central London. Like many working, middle-class families—my mother was a flight attendant for British Airways, my father a military man—my parents had put themselves on the wait list for such an accommodation. When our number came up, we lucked out with a spacious three-bedroom penthouse flat beyond what I ever could have imagined. The location itself was unconventional, the equivalent to living in New York City’s Times Square.

  My mother was a passable cook, but for the sake of convenience, we often ate ready-made meals. To her credit, she sought out the very best prepared foods available, such as those sold by Marks & Sparks, the nickname by which we all referred to British retailer Marks & Spencer. My favorite, both for its flavor and presentation, was a perfectly rectangular piece of cod that came packed in a vibrant, green parsley sauce in a vacuum-sealed bag. You boiled the bag (my first introduction to a kind of sous vide cooking), then snipped it open and laid the fish out on a plate. My mother served it with petits pois and homemade mashed potatoes in our family living room.

  Even those dinners were emblematic of my parents’—especially my father’s—modus operandi: always making the most of their resources to give me the best things possible within our means. For the same reason, they worked their asses off to get me into a proper school and also to get me out of our odd but luxurious location in central London. And so, there I was at eight, a shy lad arriving at St. Aubyns, a boarding school in Rottingdean, a lovely, quaint little village just down the British coast from Brighton. The school was an exclusive academy with just a dozen or so students per class, and was a far sight better than the overcrowded classrooms of London.

  St. Aubyns was populated by the upper crust: classmates’ names were preceded by “Lord” and “Lady,” “Duke” and “Duchess.” Every three weeks, we were allowed to go home for the weekend, but because my parents’ schedules often found them in far-flung countries or literally in the air, I wouldn’t always have a home to go to. Fortunately, some friends invited me to stay with them, but the dichotomy between their lot and mine was stark. One classmate lived on an estate in Buckinghamshire, an expansive and manicured property that you entered through regal, motorized gates opening up to a private road, at the end of which stood a Georgian-era almost-castle with forty rooms a
nd more staff than family. We rode quads (motorized four-wheel bikes) around the grounds and shot clay pigeons out in the field.

  The food at St. Aubyns lacked such grandeur or nobility. Breakfast, served at long, wobbly wooden tables, might be fried eggs swimming in a tray of fat or, in the winter, gigantic bowls of porridge, thick as cement, that’d we’d top with milk and—in the British fashion—mountainous heapings of white sugar. The first day they served it to us, the cooks perpetrated a harmless prank, swapping dishes of salt for the sugar. The other students were scandalized, leaping from their seats and cursing the kitchen staff; however, I couldn’t help but chuckle at their malicious sense of humor, perhaps a sign of the cook that lurked inside me.

  If you could look past such indignities, there were some sensory pleasures to be had at St. Aubyns. In springtime, the gardens were redolent with cucumber, and wild strawberries and raspberries winked at us from beneath the low-lying bushes like hidden Easter eggs. We students loved nibbling on those berries, but the faculty didn’t appreciate it. They thought our snacking showed a lack of discipline, and the picked-over shrubs weren’t near as lovely to look at as those in full fruit. And so the faculty dreamed up a myth, perpetuated to dissuade us: “Don’t eat the fruit off the tree. You’ll get sick.” (I hear it in my memory as a variation of the infamous schoolmaster rant in Pink Floyd’s The Wall: “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?”)

  Did I say that I didn’t think much about food as a child? Let me amend that: those berries, forbidden fruit that they were, positively obsessed me. When I was certain nobody was looking, I’d help myself to a few. Their flavor, relative to their size, never failed to put a smile on my face. Like those strawberries I’d picked with my parents, they were among the first delicacies I’d ever tasted. How could so much bright flavor be contained in those little berries? I wondered.