To the Bone

by Paul Liebrandt

  If you described the kind of food I cook today to either of my parents at the time, it would have seemed the stuff of high comedy or maybe science fiction. Yet who would’ve blamed them for their skepticism? My father grew up in Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, in a family where meals were considered sustenance and little more. My mother came of age in London in the aftermath of World War II and had the jaw-dropping stories to prove it. One day, playing with friends in a vacant lot, she discovered the skeletal remains of a German fighter pilot; another time, an unexploded bomb turned up in the yard next door. As a young girl, she drank powdered milk and ate whatever was rationed to her family. Food was sustenance, if sustenance was to be had at all.

  All of which is to say that I don’t know where my interest in food came from, but I did tend to experience it rather intensely, just as I felt certain other pastimes very intensely—none more so than movies. One of my favorite boyhood rituals was spending Sunday afternoons in the cinema with my Dad. My father had, and retains, a commanding presence, but he was never an intimidating figure to me. Quite the opposite, in fact: he was loving and attentive, understood the place of a father in a son’s life, and made it a priority to be that man for me. The first movie I remember him taking me to was Return of the Jedi at the Dominion Theatre on Tottenham Court Road, one of London’s premier cinemas of the day. To celebrate the release of the third Star Wars film, the theater was screening all three of the installments that had been produced to date, back-to-back, in marathon fashion.

  Rhubarb, Strawberry, and Cucumber Royale

  This royale was inspired by fragrance, a paean to the English countryside, specifically springtime at St. Aubyns, when berries are on the bush and verbena and cucumber sweetly perfume the air. Just as I once stood in that garden, eating berries while surrounded by the scent of cucumber, the body of this royale—made of fraises des bois and rhubarb, a semifrozen crème Chiboust (a pastry cream) with rhubarb and lemon-verbena infusion at its core—is wrapped with a cucumber gelée that is in turn encircled with slivered cucumber. (Young green rhubarb has a whiff of cucumber about it, and this dessert plays on that fact.) To reinforce its botanic origins, the dish is garnished with verbena, shiso, and violet petals, and adorned with a hibiscus meringue. All of these themes are underscored by a moat of chilled rhubarb and strawberry consommé with a hibiscus-verbena infusion and a cucumber granité to the side.

  “Let’s go see all three!” he announced a few days before my seventh birthday, and I could scarcely believe my ears. I had seen the previous movies on television and had amassed an assortment of the action figures and spaceships: Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo … I had them all. I was most drawn to Darth Vader, but it wasn’t because he was the villain; it was the purity and clean lines of his black-as-night costume.

  We saw the movies, one after another, and it was a revelation to me, an all-encompassing sensory experience, utterly overwhelming and transporting. There was even a culinary component to the marathon: Butterkist, a popular caramel popcorn concession item, added to the day, as it did to all my moviegoing excursions. Butterkist has a fascinating, distinctly British history: during World War II, many foodstuffs were strictly rationed, but not the ingredients required to make Butterkist—a state of affairs that enabled the product to rise to prominence and secure a place in the popular culture.

  During the breaks between the movies, as my father and I went for a walk or a quick bite, I was so excited that I had a hard time sitting still. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. They call movies escapism and that’s what they were for me—a way to forget about the emerging cold war between my parents at home and my growing sense of solitude, and to lose myself in an internal diversion while at the same time taking in the energy of the audience. As I grew older, I often went to the movies on my own, which I know is anathema to many, but which is completely comfortable and natural, even appealing, to me.

  As I grew older, there was another, emerging fascination for me. You could often see me, at age ten, tall for my age, standing amidst the commotion of Berwick Street Market—an open-air food bazaar near our London home, complete with vendors announcing specials and prices on the fresh foods of the day, delivering each deal with the full-throated gusto of carnival barkers. Not only was the marketplace a vibrant, bustling hub for farmers and food purveyors who sold fruits and vegetables from their carts, but it was also, incongruously, London’s red-light district, with prostitutes lingering seductively in doorways and flashing neon signs advertising live sex shows.

  Royale of Hare

  This refined, modern take on the French dish royale of hare (shown on following pages) never fails to remind me of the butcher shop that so obsessed me at Berwick Street Market. But, for all the acclaim in which it’s held, I’ve always found the traditional royale of hare—a labor-intensive, braised mainstay of classic French fine dining—a bit heavy on the palate.

  My version of the dish is rendered in five parts. This photograph is the third: with the loin presented as a ballotine (deboned, stuffed with a forcemeat, and tied to maintain a shape like a large sausage), with a truffled boudin (sausage) and sweet, vanilla-infused turmeric mousseline at its center. The ballotine is cooked sous vide (under pressure, in a vacuum-sealed bag), then sliced and topped with a jus that is finished with a drop-by-drop addition of hare’s blood, giving it a compelling, metallic flavor.

  The meats from the braising liquid are removed and incorporated into a game torte—rather than stuffing the hare with foie gras and truffles, the conventional way to serve it. A pomegranate tuile made with the juice of the fruit adds crucial acidity and crispness that bring balance to the plate. (There’s a dialogue that occurs here between the redness of the game and the redness of the pomegranate.)

  The composition is completed with grilled baby onions, a strong flavor that fits right in, and some light eucalyptus oil, which adds a pleasing earthiness.

  I’d sometimes find myself at the market on a Saturday afternoon, paralyzed with wonder: fresh fish on ice, vegetable-lined crates, and basket upon basket brimming with my favorite plump strawberries. I was drawn to all of those ingredients and their possibilities. Cementing the moment in my memory is the smell of roasting chestnuts, split open and shaken on a grid over a flaming oil drum, then sold by a vendor in small white paper bags.

  My attention always went to the little butcher shops along the perimeter of Berwick Street and the scene in the windows. The shops recalled a Renaissance painting, with hare, partridge, grouse, wood pigeons, and other dead animals hanging in the windows, their full plumage still intact. The butchers made their own sausages, which hung like Christmas lights in the window, and sometimes you could actually see them making it, cranking the red meat into long casings. Most children my age would have recoiled at the bloody spectacle of animals being taken apart, but I would watch with rapt attention as the disparate parts were manipulated and then came together into something as neat and clean as a casing-enclosed sausage. How do they do that? I wondered.

  If I close my eyes, I can still imagine myself right there, on that street, watching it all unfold, scarcely changed since the turn of the prior century. In my mind’s eye, it’s always twilight and always Christmastime. The sun is descending behind neighboring buildings, ominous shadows lengthening across the market, the air growing cold, the wind kicking up. And, through it all, my eye remains fixed on that shop, the line of customers, the butchers handing brown paper–wrapped specimens to them. I didn’t know anything of cooking yet, and so the entire transaction was a source of mystery. How would those wild animals be converted into something palatable in people’s homes?

  Of course, I couldn’t know it then, but now I realize that in many ways the chef within me began to grow and develop in that market, what with being in the presence of the riot of ingredients and, in the butcher shop, watching the progression from raw to finished product. I still wasn’t aware of that chef, but he would make himself known before too long. />
  When I think back on my childhood discoveries, I must admit that The Food was beckoning to me. It was beckoning in the market—and when my family and I would eat in London’s Chinatown. There the conversation and ambient noise would fade away when the food arrived, and I’d find myself lost in a reverie of flavor. It was my first sense that food could be more than sustenance, that it could transport you, teach you about another culture, plunge you right into the bath of human history. My favorite was wonton soup, and not only because of the flavor: a lone woman would often be positioned in the window of the restaurant, patiently filling and sealing the doughy little dumplings, and, as with those Berwick Street butchers, I was endlessly fascinated by her dexterity and by the transformation of raw ingredients into the finished product that was delivered to the restaurant’s customers.

  Why did I respond to such stimuli while those around me were simply shopping or eating? It’s like asking why you’re drawn to certain people or places more than others. Chefs come from all walks of life and in all temperaments, and over time I’ve come to accept that there is no “why.” I was simply acting on instinct.

  It was this fascination, as well, that led me—at age thirteen, seeking a way to earn some spending money for the annual summer break—to answer an ad in the Evening Standard for a kitchen job. A new restaurant was preparing to open, named (prophetically, given where I ply my trade today) New York, New York. I applied for a busing job, but all they had was a dishwasher position. I took it anyway; such was my eagerness for employment in a real restaurant. I fibbed about my age, telling them that I was sixteen and that my national insurance card—the UK equivalent of a social security card—was in the post.

  It wasn’t long-term planning that led me there, at least not consciously so: my plan at that point had been to follow in my father’s footsteps and begin my military training when I turned sixteen. These were peaceful times, and without an ongoing conflict threatening, there was much about the military that appealed to me: its rigor, its routines, and the fact that it was the occupation of my father. I had been on the shooting team at my school, I was drawn to the militaristic ideal of organization and focus, and I was keen to travel the world.

  But The Food hooked me first. New York, New York was my first introduction to the kitchen life, and I found myself fully in my element—right at home alongside the harsh lighting, the sizzle and hiss of the hot line, and the cooks themselves. I couldn’t put words to any of it at thirteen. All I knew was that, even though I wasn’t doing the cooking, I liked being there, wanted to be there, didn’t particularly care to leave at the end of a shift, and couldn’t wait to return the next day. This was in part because life at home had become unbearably sad: my parents had at long last divorced. My mother had moved out of our apartment, and I lived with my father. While he and I remained tight, he had a series of girlfriends, a dynamic I found difficult to navigate and accept. As a consequence, I would often leave the house and roam the streets of Chinatown.

  The kitchen environment grew me up fast. Not only did I have responsibilities that I took very seriously (getting plates and pans cleaned and returned quickly to service), but I was suddenly hanging around with people, including girls, in their late teens and early twenties. This added to my addictive desire to be at work, especially as many of the young women changed in the locker room right alongside us, granting me my first look at the opposite sex in various states of undress. On one memorable afternoon, I came bounding into the room to find a coworker standing there in nothing but her knickers, her boobs on full display. There was an awkward locking of the eyes before, red faced, I clumsily excused myself, backing out the door and only managing one word by way of apology: “Whoops.”

  As food, girls, and adult life infiltrated my days, music became another obsession. I devoured all types of British alternative rock music and most especially The Cure, who, under the leadership of Robert Smith, produced a distinctly British, troubled-youth sound that fit my introverted soul like a glove. I vividly remember listening to their albums on audiocassettes, walking around London with a Walkman strapped to my belt or clutched in my hand, comforted by the feeling that somebody understood this time in my life and in this place.

  When I look back at my teenage interests, I realize that in addition to being intensely personal to me, they were also expressions of distinct intimacy. While food may be consumed in the company of others in a restaurant, and music and movies enjoyed in crowded venues, the immediate experience is a profoundly direct one between chef (or artist) and diner (or audience). I might not have had a gift for socializing in those days, but I felt a connection not unlike friendship with the directors and actors, musicians and singers who held my interest.

  That said, I did start to come out of my shell a bit at New York, New York. Though I was too young to socialize with them, watching the cooks was a revelation, and I immediately realized that I wanted to be one of them. The food might not have been complicated—salads, sandwiches, burgers, and ribs—but it was all done in-house with fresh ingredients, and I was transfixed by the orchestration of the team. The constant, indelicate clanging and motion could blind you to the fact that there was a sublime collaboration taking place. Orders were called by the expeditor, and each station would get to it, readying any number of dishes that fell to them, then delivering them, plated and ready for the customer, to the pass along with the rest of the order. This particular kitchen was divided into larder (cold preparations), hot preparations, and puddings (pastry), and the organization of each station was fascinating to me; the way they all worked together filled me with awe and admiration. To be able to do what they did, to be able to work like that and keep up, became my first professional ambition, my first sense of what I might like to be when I grew up.

  (LIKE A) CULINARY VIRGIN

  London 1992

  Over the next two years, in my middle teens, I pursued those stirrings that started at New York, New York and began to explore.

  In the bookstore, I was drawn to an issue of WHSmith’s Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine (colloquially referred to as “The Caterer”). On the cover was a chef, resplendent in his whites, and inside a photograph and recipe for one of his dishes. I didn’t know what I was looking at—what comprised that explosion of colors on the plate—but it was my first, vague indication of what a chef, a real chef, did. I was drawn to the bearing of the man in his portrait, the easy confidence he exuded, as well as the visual impact of the food and the beauty of the craft, like a mellifluous foreign language that I wanted to learn and to be able to write in. I saw in the entire package a faint outline of what my own future might look like.

  I purchased that and other magazines, and began trying to make the recipes they featured. Never mind that I had never eaten anything of the caliber and sophistication represented. In particular, I was drawn to a terrine, I think because it represented the greatest transformation of raw ingredients into something beautiful and orderly. Looking at that marbled terrine was like gazing at a stained glass window at Westminster Abbey. Before trying my hand at cooking, there was another obstacle to be overcome: I didn’t know how to procure the necessary equipment (such as a mold) or ingredients (such as back fat). I strolled Berwick Street Market, only now, instead of merely observing, I had to work up the nerve to participate. Like a juvenile Sherlock Holmes, I went from booth to booth, showing the magazine to the vendors, asking them if they could point me to the sought-after equipment and ingredients. Mostly I was met with quizzical looks or eye rolls that mocked my youth. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, boy—I sell carrots for a living,” came one memorable reply.

  I might have given up, but a North Star emerged in my life, the enfant terrible who had taken hold of the London culinary scene in those days: Marco Pierre White. I first noticed White in a huge spread in the Sunday Times magazine, a level of attention usually reserved for prime ministers and other power brokers, and was instantly drawn to the way he mingled everything I was
interested in—namely, a rock star attitude and look, and artistry on the plate. I purchased the book White had penned just a few years earlier, White Heat, which depicted the chef’s life as it had never been captured before on the page. Ten years before Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, White Heat had a similar effect, pulling back the curtain on what it really took to be a cook and a chef. Before White Heat, the chef-penned cookbooks were all about the food, with occasional idealized philosophizing about the life of a chef, most of it conveyed in rapt and precious tones that bore no relation to the grim realities of the cooking trade.

  White had turned the British restaurant community upside down when he rose to prominence at his restaurant Harvey’s, opened in 1987 when he was in his midtwenties. At an unheard-of young age, White earned one, then two Michelin stars there, but that was only part of what made him an idol to an entire generation of young British cooks. A physically imposing man with a great mane of unkempt hair and an attitude as blunt as a right jab, he was a brash, rebel figure and an unabashed sex symbol. A BBC miniseries about White even featured a shot of the chef strolling a desolate London thoroughfare, a scene reminiscent of Gottfried Helnwein’s iconic painting James Dean: Boulevard of Broken Dreams. White was more than a genius: he was cool. The world back then had no “celebrity chefs” as we do today, and the only famous toques were French. But White was ours—young, British, and charismatic as hell.

  He blew the lid off the food world, revealing as never before the toil, the sheer soul-crushing exertion that the kitchen life demanded. In White Heat, much of this was conveyed wordlessly through Bob Carlos Clarke’s legendary black-and-white photographs of White and his cooks in all their bedraggled glory, many of the images complemented with Marco-isms (e.g., “We all wear blue aprons in my kitchen because we’re all commis, we’re all still learning”) printed on the edges of the picture or in the margins of the page. The contrast between those images—more like combat photos than glamour shots—and the breathtakingly beautiful dishes turned out by White and his team was the perfect summation of why we cooks put ourselves through the inhuman demands of the cooking life: the glory of the end result, The Food.