Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  In general, the Bretons practice only one method of preparing their lobsters, true or spiny—boiling them in sea water, which is fine if what you want to taste is lobster. In lobster à l’américaine, on the other hand, the sauce, which cannot be produced without the lobster, is the justification of the indignity inflicted on him. If the strength of this dish, then, lies in the sauce (as I deem indisputable), its weakness, from a non-French point of view, lies in the necessity of mopping up the sauce with at least three linear meters of bread. Bread is a good medium for carrying gravy as far as the face, but it is a diluent, not an added magnificence; it stands to the sauce of lobster à l’américaine in the same relationship as soda to Scotch. But a good pilaf—each grain of rice developed separately in broth to the size of a pistachio kernel—is a fine thing in its own right. Heaped on the plate and receiving the sauce à l’américaine as the waitress serves the lobster, the grains drink it up as avidly as nymphs quenching their thirst. The grains do not lose form or identity, although they take on a bit of rondeur. Mere rice cooked any old way won’t do the trick; it turns to wallpaperer’s paste. The French in general are almost as bad with rice as the Chinese, who are the very worst. The Armenians, Greeks, and Turks are the best with it. The conjunction of my Greek cook’s langouste and his pilaf was a cultural milestone, like the wedding of the oyster and the lemon.

  At the end of July, six weeks and several dozen langoustes after making the Greek’s acquaintance, I left Paris. I came back in November, arriving at the Hôtel Louvois on a chill evening. I left my bags unopened and hurried through the chill to the little shrine I had discovered. Langouste was too much to hope for at that season, but the Greek also made an excellent couscous—a warming dish on a cold night, because of the fiery sauce you tip into the broth—and he was sure to have that on the bill. The aspect of the restaurant had not changed. There were still paper tablecloths, a zinc bar, a lettered sign on the window proclaiming GRANDE SPÉCIALITÉ DE COUSCOUS. But the faces—one behind the bar and the other framed in the kitchen window—were not the same. They were amiable faces, man and wife, but amiability is no substitute for genius. I ordered couscous, but it was a mere cream of wheat with hot sauce and a garniture of overcooked fowl—a couscous de Paris, not of North Africa, where the Greek had learned to make his. I had a drink with the new patron and his wife when I had finished. They were younger than their predecessors, and said that they knew and admired them. They would “maintain the same formula,” they promised. But restaurants don’t run by formula. The Greek had sold out to them, they told me, because he and his wife had quarreled.

  “Why did they quarrel?” I asked.

  “Because of their art,” the new woman said, and smiled fondly at her husband, as if to assure him that nothing so trivial would come between them.

  In 1927, the crepuscular quality of French cooking was not discernible to Root and me, because the decline was not evident at the levels at which we ate. (We ate independently, for we did not know each other then. Root was a copyreader on the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, earning fifteen dollars a week, and I was a combination Sorbonne student and remittance man, living on my father’s monthly bounty.) The cheap and medium-priced restaurants that we patronized held good; slimming and other eccentricities affected only the upper strata, and only the rich had automobiles. Motoring and eating were still separate departments. Root, remaining in France during the dozen years that followed, was perhaps less aware than I of what my lamented Dublin friend Arthur McWeeney would have called the “disimprovement” of French cooking. The experiences of an individual do not follow precisely the descending curve of a culture. A man as wily as Root—gastronomically speaking—might eat so well every day that he would be insensible to the decreasing number of good restaurants. The number was still high then—and is even now, although, naturally, there are fewer today, and the best aren’t as good as the best used to be, or the next-to-best as good as the next-to-best used to be, and so on down the line. Good bottles, however, persist, especially among the classified growths of the Bordelais. The proprietor of a legally delimited vineyard, constrained to produce his wine on the same few acres every year, cannot change his ingredients to fit deteriorating public taste. Good year, bad year, the character of his wine, if not its quality, remains constant, and the ratio of good and bad years is about the same every century. (The quantity of bad wine sold annually in France has certainly increased, but that is another matter; it is sold under labels of vague or purely humorous significance, or en carafe as something it isn’t.) When the maligned Second Empire delimited and classified the vineyards of Médoc in 1855, it furnished French culture with a factor of stability, such as it furnished Paris when it made a park of the Bois de Boulogne. Both were ramparts against encroachment. Wine drinking is more subjective than horse racing and nearly as subjective as love, but the gamble is less; you get something for your money no matter what you pick.

  So Root the individual was eating voraciously and perceptively, and with total recall, all during that twelve-year interval, and laying the basis for his masterpiece. (I don’t think he will ever write a book on the food of Britain. In his monumental treatise, he says, “I used to think…that the English cook the way they do because, through sheer technical deficiency, they had not been able to master the art of cooking. I have discovered to my stupefaction that the English cook that way because that is the way they like it.”) Root and I met in the winter of 1939–40, during the drôle de guerre, and we shared some good meals; then for a month, between May 10, when the Germans invaded the Low Countries, and June 11, when the French government quit Paris, we had more pressing preoccupations. (I still remember with gratitude, though, a meal of fresh brook trout and still champagne taken at Saint-Dizier, behind the crumbling front; a good meal in troubled times is always that much salvaged from disaster.) When the government pulled out, Root invited me to accompany him in pursuit of it in a small French automobile. “Maybe we can find some good regional food on the way,” he said. I left France for the United States eleven days later; Root, with his French wife and their infant daughter, followed in a month. He returned to France when the war was over, and has spent most of his time there since. The Food of France is a monument to his affection for a country as well as for its art.

  The originality of Root’s approach to his subject is based on two propositions. The first is that regions compel the nature of the foods produced in them, which is only partly and sketchily true, and, by extension, that the characters of the foods, the wines, and the inhabitants of any one region interact and correspond, which makes for good anecdote but is pure whimsey. (De Gaulle has not a poor mind, although his province, Flanders, has a relatively poor and restricted cuisine; Camus’s mind is balanced, not overseasoned like the food of his native Algeria; Mauriac’s is thin and astringent, not voluptuous like his native cuisine bordelaise, which he adores.) Root’s erudition is superior everywhere but at its best south of the Loire. Alsace and Normandy haven’t his heart, although he tries to be fair, and he doesn’t perform a sufficient obeisance to Anjou; on Provence, Nice, and the Central Plateau he is superb, and in his attack on the cooking of the Lyonnais heroic. Still, to call the cuisine of Alsace an offshoot of German cooking, as he does, is as unfair as it would be to dismiss French culture as an offshoot of Roman civilization. A lot has happened since the shooting in both cases.

  In Provence, though, where he has sunned his well-covered bones during much of the past decade, Root is without peer:

  The grease in which the food of a country is cooked is the ultimate shaper of its whole cuisine. The olive is thus the creator of the cooking of Provence. A local saying points this up. “A fish,” it runs, “is an animal that is found alive in water and dead in oil.”…Garlic may not belong to Provence alone, but at least it gets special recognition there. It has even been called “the truffle of Provence.” A third element must be noted as particularly typical of Provençal cooking—the tomato, which
manages to get into almost everything…. The rabbits of this area hardly need herbs; having fed all their lives on thyme, they have inbred seasoning…. Artichokes…are ubiquitous in the region…. In the Vaucluse area you may be surprised if you order something listed on the bill of fare as asperge vauclusienne, for it is a joking name in the tradition of Scotch woodcock or prairie oysters, and what you will get is not asparagus at all but artichoke. It will be a very festive artichoke, however, stuffed with chopped ham and highly seasoned with a mixture of those herbs that seem to develop particular pungency in the dry, hilly terrain of upper Provence.

  This is the lyric portion of the book; it is in Provence, I think, that Root’s New England heart now lies.

  The sounder of Root’s two propositions, in my opinion, is his division of all French cooking into three great “domains,” in accordance with his dictum that the grease in which food is cooked is the “ultimate shaper” of the cuisine. Root’s “domains” are that of butter (northeastern and northern France, the Atlantic coast to below Bordeaux, and the center as far south as Lyon), that of fat (Lorraine, Alsace, and the Central Plateau), and that of oil (Provence and the County of Nice). The Basque coast has a mixed cuisine based on all three media and so refutes the universality of the system. It is true that the old division of France by orthodox fines gueules into gastronomic “regions” (in many cases smaller than départements, of which there are ninety in Continental France) has been in the process of breaking down since the remote date when the abolition of serfdom made it legitimate for the population to move around. The Revolution, the diligence, the railroad, and, finally, the automobile ended the pinpoint localization of dishes and recipes—and in any case, as Root shows, these traditional ascriptions of dishes to places are often apocryphal. Repeatedly, as he leads the reader about France, he points out instances where adjoining provinces dispute the invention of a dish, and where a province that didn’t invent a dish does it rather better than the one that did. There are, however, broad similarities in the cooking of certain subdivisions of France that are larger than the old provinces or the modern départements. These similarities (and differences) do not follow any purely geographic lines, and Root’s “domains” are an ingenious beginning of a new taxonomy; he is like the zoologist who first began to group species into genera, observing that while a cat, a monkey, a man, and a tiger are different things, a man is rather more like a monkey than like a cat, and a cat rather more like a tiger than like a man. Somebody had to start, and Root is a true innovator. Whether the cooking of Périgord really is more like the cooking of Alsace (because both use the fat of the goose and the pig) than like that of the southwest (which, like Périgord, uses garlic) is another question; some future scientist of taste may attempt a new grouping on the basis of seasoning. If the inventor of the new system has as much love for his subject and as much learning as Root, the result can only be another good book, as rich in the marrow of argument as The Food of France.

  Now that Root’s monument has been erected for the ages—a picture of a cultural achievement, fixed to history’s page before the snack bars and cafeterias and drive-ins could efface it from men’s minds—he seems a trifle melancholy. “It’s hard to find such good eating in the provinces nowadays, even at the present high rates—or maybe I’m just getting old and cranky,” he wrote me not long ago. “The fact is that it’s a long while since I have come upon one of those bottles of wine that make you sit up and take notice, and it’s even pretty rare nowadays to have a memorable meal.” Here, however, he was unduly sombre. There will still be enough good bottles and good meals to last us all a few more decades; it is only that they are becoming harder to find. The rise and fall of an art takes time. The full arc is seldom manifest to a single generation.

  1959

  “It started out with lactose, but now he’s intolerant of everything.”

  IS THERE A CRISIS IN FRENCH COOKING?

  ADAM GOPNIK

  Nine o’clock on a Friday morning, and David Angelot, the commis at the restaurant Arpège, on the Rue de Varenne, has begun to braise tomatoes for dessert. The tomate confite farcie aux douze saveurs is one of the few dishes in the Michelin red guide whose place on the menu has to be clarified with a parenthesis (dessert), indicating that though it sounds like a veggie, it eats like a sweet. It is a specialty of the kitchen of the great chef Alain Passard, which a lot of people think is the best and most poetic in Paris, and probably all France; it requires a hair-raising amount of work by the commis, the kitchen cabin boy; and many people who care about French cooking believe that it is a kind of hopeful portent—a sign that the creative superiority of French cooking may yet be extended indefinitely. Normally, a braised tomato becomes tomato sauce. (“The limitations of this insight,” one of Passard’s admirers has noted gravely, “describe the limitations of Italian cuisine.”) To make a tomato get sweeter without falling apart not only is technically demanding but demonstrates, with a stubborn, sublime logic, an extremely abstract botanical point. Tomatoes are not vegetables; they are fruit.

  For David, who may not see M. Passard all day long, they are work. David, who is eighteen, and who studied cooking at a government school just outside Lyon, cuts the tomatoes open (about fifty of them, from Morocco, in the winter), scoops them out, and makes a farce, a stuffing of finely chopped orange and lemon zest, sugar, ginger, mint, pistachios, star anise, cloves; then he makes a big pot of vanilla-scented caramel and braises the stuffed tomatoes in it, beating the caramel around the tomatoes vigorously for forty-five minutes without actually touching them. The tomato is a fruit, and can be treated like one, but it helps to beat a lot of caramel into its body, to underline the point.

  While he works, he thinks about his girlfriend (who is also a cook, and with whom he lives in an apartment in north Paris), his future, and his desire to someday visit Japan. He works in a tiny basement room in the small, two-story space of the kitchen, and he shares that room with another, more experienced assistant, Guilhem, who spends his mornings making bread. (All the bread at Arpège is made by hand.) Guilhem, while he works, thinks of going back to Washington—he calls it “D.C.”—where he has been before, where there is a constant demand for good French food, and where he has an offer to work in a French bakery. If David’s job at Arpège embodies one of the principles of high French cooking—the gift of making things far more original than anyone can imagine—Guilhem’s embodies the opposite but complementary principle: the necessity of making things much better than anybody needs. This morning, he will make three kinds of bread: a sourdough raisin-and-nut loaf; trays of beautiful long white rolls; and a rough, round peasant bread. All the bread will be sliced and placed in baskets to be presented upstairs in the dining room, and then mostly pushed around absentmindedly on the plates of people who are looking at their menus and deciding what they really want to eat. This knowledge makes Guilhem a little bitter. He thinks about D.C.

  In the main kitchen, a short flight up, Pascal Barbot, the sous-chef, is keeping things under control. The atmosphere there, with eleven serious short men in white uniforms going about intricate tasks in a cramped space, does not so much resemble the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie as it does the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie after it has been taken over by the Euroterrorists led by Alan Rickman: that kind of intensity, scared purposefulness, quickness, and heavy, whispered French. The kitchen is white and silver, with a few well-scrubbed copper pots hanging high up—not like the lacquered copper you see in rusticated, beam-heavy restaurant interiors but dull and scrubbed and penny-colored. The richest colors in the kitchen are those of French produce, which is always several glazes darker than American: the birds (chickens, pigeons, quail) are yellow and veined with deep violet, instead of the American white and rose. The assistant chefs start at nine o’clock, and will remain at their stages until one o’clock the next morning. When the service begins, around twelve-thirty, they will experience an almost unendurable din, which,
after a few days of work, they learn to break down into three or four distinct sounds: the thwonk of metal in water hitting the sides of a sink as a pot is washed by one of the Malinese plongeurs; the higher, harsh clank of one clean saucepan being placed on another; the surprisingly tinny, machine-gun rat-a-tat of a wire whisk in a copper pot; and the crashing, the-tent-just-fell-down-on-your-head sound of hot soiled pans being thrown down onto tile to be washed again. (In a good kitchen, the pans are constantly being recycled by the plongeurs.)

  The kitchen crew includes three Americans. They have worked mostly at California and New York restaurants of the kind that one of them describes as “grill-and-garnish joints.” They are all converts to Passardism. There is never anything entirely new in cooking, but Passard’s technique is not like anybody else’s. Instead of browning something over high heat in a saucepan and then roasting it in an oven, in the old French manner, or grilling it quickly over charcoal, in the new American one, Passard cooks his birds and joints sur la plaque: right on the stove, over extremely low heat in big braising pans, sometimes slow-cooking a baby gigot or a milk-fed pig in a pot for four or five hours on a bed of sweet onions and butter. “He’s just sweating those babies,” one of the Americans marvels under his breath, looking at the joints on the stoves. “Makes them cook themselves in their own fat. It’s like he does everything but make them pluck their own feathers and jump into the pan. Fucking genius.”