The Table Comes First

by Adam Gopnik

  The Paris food scene, the first “culinary field,” is in this way partly an extension of “the habit of cultural explanation,” an incursion of intellect into an area previously thought to be the simple province of Nature. But the food writers never forget that natural appetite persists in the face of all systems. Brillat-Savarin, the disillusioned liberal, remains a man of the Enlightenment, bringing order to the table; Grimod, the reactionary, is very much a man of the counter-Enlightenment, seeking in abiding pleasures salvation from all those scary absolutes. But both know better than to plan a perfect meal.

  Brillat-Savarin and Grimod divide between them the empire of food; they are the two working philosophers of taste who invented its literary form, and almost all food writing since has taken as its mask either Brillat’s warm ironic smile or Grimod’s brilliant epigrammatic grimace. Yet they have much in common, too. The soft snap and crackle of long-braised rueful wisdom in the work of Brillat-Savarin and Grimod is very different from the racket of arriviste learning. The table’s intuitions always trump its new rules. Food writing was born in the wake of the revolution and the Terror, and one hears in its corridors and back hallways the sigh of those who stayed alive, returned from exile and panic, and are now grateful for the smallest of pleasures. It’s an animal truth—the pig’s truth at Christmas, the turkey’s the day after Thanksgiving—and more welcome for that: the wisdom of those who survive is that survival is itself a kind of wisdom.

  This tone, and this kind of food writing, seems uniformly easy to like. Still, we should also see that while Brillat-Savarin’s writing on food is reformist and optimistic, Grimod’s, for all its genius, is a counsel of defeatism and despair, and was seen that way at the time: the Almanach des Gourmands soon had a rejoinder published by an angry liberal: The Almanach of Starvation. In Grimod’s celebration of eating, there are the first intimations of the cordoning off of the French palate—the emergence of the idéologie française, the myth of a douce France, safeguarded from outside influence and living on its own bounty and beauty, that would do so much harm to the Republic. Not by accident does Grimod’s brilliant grimacing take the very same tone as that of Robert Courtine, the famous twentieth-century food critic who took over Grimod’s pen name, La Reynière, and wrote for decades in Le Monde with the same wincing high style. Only after his death did the eminent newspaper discover, or reveal, that Courtine had been a virulent anti-Semite and an extreme right-wing Vichyiste. The turn to the table can be made as often in bitterness as in benevolence.

  Indeed, among the real La Reynière’s circle, a reactionary countermyth soon sprang up, romanticizing French food. Instead of being the work of métissage, mixed-up influences and urban crossbreedings, French cooking was said to be quite simply the cooking of the noble French peasant and the simple French provinces brought to the tables of the city. This attempt to make the cooking that had grown up in Paris look as though it had always been stewing in the same pious pot would have its bad effect on French cuisine.

  The culinary historians who have written the new history of the restaurant are mostly what might be called “sizzlists.” They think the atmosphere, the sizzle, around the steak is more important to its aura than the steak itself. Most of the new culinary historians practice “niche” history, and, like the best of such books, theirs are rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories about the making of familiar things. They also practice what you might call the new secret-code school of history—history that claims that some familiar thing, like a pair of pants, which is supposed to do one thing (say, cover your legs) is really there to do another (say, show off the insecure double nature of bourgeois masculinity).

  The trouble with this kind of reading—and one of the more obvious banalities of seeing everything as a social construction, the ultimate postmodern vice—is that it vastly underestimates the difficulty of doing things, as opposed to thinking about them. It implies that ideas are hard, while pants (or soup) are easy. In fact, it is as hard to make good chicken soup as it is to make a reason that it is good for you, and the technical history of cooking is, after all, not a tourist trap for historians but a necessary subject.

  The historian Amy Trubek has pointed out, rightly, that one of the most momentous changes that the restaurant brought to French cooking was simply the invention of stock. While the drinkable restaurants became restaurants in our sense, they also became stocks, and the use of stocks, as Trubek points out, is what distinguishes French cooking from all other kinds. You could simmer some bones and vegetables in a pot full of water, cook it down and reserve the liquid. Add something else and finally you would have a dish that tasted both like the stuff you simmered and the something else you bathed in it. (This is different from putting a sauce on pasta, or adding chutney to a curry, where the idea is that the main thing and the sauce are nothing alike.) This way of enriching and layering flavors seems obvious once you think of it, and, once it was thought of, the range of fine shadings became so vast that by the 1820s, French cooking had built its whole “grammar” upon this way of relating each thing on the plate to every other.

  Grammars are easier to teach than accents, as every Berlitz instructor knows, and because French cooking had a grammar, within fifty years it was the only kind of cooking rich people wanted. The restaurant was, among other things, the potential originator of sauces, and it was sauces that became the glory of the new cooking. Whether for the goose or the gander the sauce was the thing even more than the thing being sauced.

  With the end of the revolution, and the restoration of the monarchy, the restaurant got a new life, as the bourgeois palace par excellence. It moved for good from the complicated, “semipublic” space, the Palais Royal world, of before the revolution to the “semiprivate” space that it has been since. The restaurant in later nineteenth-century Paris was a place that only seemed to offer a public experience; in fact, you were having a private, anonymous experience. You were out and about, in society, yes, but without being social. So it is that restaurants became, in Rebecca Spang’s words, “places of daydream and fantasy.”

  Should we believe that there is no substance in cooking beyond the economy of signs passed for a price? When we sit down to that dinner on those red velvet banquettes, are we taking part in the overture of pleasure, or are we just paying to play out a fantasy: a brief impersonation of power, in a rented theater of false possibilities? There is an impulse among historians, who like narrow, punitive moralities, to divide the new republic of eating in two, and imagine the café as the good popular institution that the working classes found for themselves, while the restaurant is the bourgeoisie’s spiderweb where working-class girls go to be seduced and working-class boys go to wait on tables. It is part of the cynicism of such historians to say that the bourgeoisie merely replaced the old aristocracy as masters of the table. The merchant with his three chins took the place of the count with his three mistresses (and pet dogs waiting to be fed). The locale changed, but the relation between shearer and shorn didn’t.

  But this is to understate the degree to which the restaurant, no less than the café, really was a popular invention. Republicans and reactionaries alike found what they needed in the restaurant. Brillat-Savarin and La Reynière—a singed victim of the revolution’s excess—are both categorical about this: the free market in food meant that for the first time someone could get rich by cooking good food for many people, who had the choice to go eat elsewhere. Choice was limited by money, of course, but there was, for the first time in history, choice. Brillat-Savarin writes in wonder about the sudden democratic spread of restaurants meant chiefly for the poor, and of how they raised the possibilities of eating as pleasure even for the impoverished.

  This larger argument about the meaning of the café and the restaurant reflects one of the few academic-seeming arguments that all thinking people ought to care about: the one between the mid-twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault and his disciples and the still-living German phi
losopher Jürgen Habermas and his, about the real meaning of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Was the Enlightenment really that, a progression toward a more humane and just world, as Habermas would have it? Or was it just an effort to answer with absolutes questions that could only be settled for a moment, a con game designed to empower a new class by pretending that they had special access to certain new knowledge, as Foucault insists?

  Do the café and the restaurant represent a class prison—or are they revolutionary cells with coffee on the boil? Many of the new historians of cooking come down very hard on the restaurant as a typical lair of bourgeois trickery. The Enlightenment promises freedom and everywhere is forging chains; the essence of the restaurant racket is that the diners are shut off from the hot and messy kitchen, where the real work, and exploitation, goes on. Sale métier, indeed. The restaurant acts as though it is all-welcoming and anyone can come in, and then hands you the check that far from everyone can pay—consider it a form of “culinary imperialism.” But if “imperialism” has any meaning at all, it is surely that the imperialized are getting something they don’t want; in the restaurant they get something they do want, so much so that they are willing to pay people they don’t much like for it. The spread of French cooking is not an example of cultural imperialism. It is an example of culture.

  Jürgen Habermas’s view seems to come down on the side of the new republic of eating. Habermas has famously argued that the rise of cafés and clubs and the like in the Enlightenment helped create “social capital”—what’s sometimes called civil society—by fostering the practice of arguing in small groups over tables. Where the Foucauldians suggest that the real purpose of the restaurant was to distract you from social life by lulling you into an effete reverie about taste—man was born to eat with his fellows, and everywhere you see him dining alone—Habermas sees it more hopefully: even if you were only arguing about pleasures, you were developing the habit of argument, exchange. Meal by meal and game by game and cup of coffee by cup of coffee, people got the knack of thinking for themselves.

  At the ideal Habermasian table, it seems, everyone would argue about what to have, and there would be a vote on it, and everyone would emerge a better citizen. (I have eaten with Germans like that.) The political scientist Robert Putnam has become famous in America for making a similar point: social capital is made up of bowling leagues and glee clubs and 4-H groups, and what’s lost when these groups are lost can’t be made up by the semiprivate realm of fast-food joints or video arcades.

  Surely a wiser point, though—one neither too German in its earnestness nor too unreal in its gloom—is that we build as much social capital, civic good, from semiprivate places as we do from public ones. There are many collegial institutions—the bowling league, the gardening club, the scout troop, the block party—that are obviously virtuous, and then there are some, like the restaurant, that may not be quite so wholesome but are benevolent all the same, in that they extend the blessings of freedom to letting you order what you choose. After all, the other exemplary nineteenth-century public place where you could go whenever you liked but couldn’t talk to the person beside you was a library. Our sense of liberty begins not with the freedom to argue but with the freedom not to have to argue—to do what we like, whenever we like to do it, without having to make an articulate case one way or another. This is why teenagers, despite their privileges, feel so un-free. They are stuck in Habermasian society, always obliged to make the case for their pleasures.

  Loneliness is not the “price” of liberty but part of the profit we take from it. The restaurant’s moral glory, like that of the library and the department store—another nineteenth-century bourgeois invention—is its semiprivate state, for semi-ness is the special half-tint of bourgeois societies. The bowling league has been replaced not by solitary bowling but, more decisively, by the gym, another classic semiprivate place: on the bike you read your newspaper as you pedal in a long row of solitudes.

  In the same way, at the restaurant on Third Avenue now as at the Palais Royal then, our joys intersect with those of others only at odd angles. My tenth birthday, though it passed so gloriously in the Howard Johnson’s, passed unmarked by anyone but my three friends, my parents, and me and left only a memory. My first lunch in the Palais Royal was another lunch service among ten thousand at the Grand Véfour, and no one else who was there will think of it again at all.

  That is not our sadness, except in the sense that all that passes makes us sad. It is also part of what makes a thing good. Happiness may come at us face-to-face, but joy always comes at us at an angle. We are used to the arrival; for a man it’s when your wife, the perfect girl, comes back from powdering her nose, and you first catch sight of her out of the corner of your eye. The pleasures of the restaurant are occluded, sudden, haphazard in this way. You’re eating at this table, and you listen to that one. You’re watching one woman, or man, and spy from the corner of your eye another. The taste of your dinner mingles, or used to, with the aroma of your neighbor’s cigar. Places of hope, restaurants and cafés are also places of reassuring mystery, and the mystery reassures because, in reminding us of lives and appetites beyond our own, they remind us of worlds we have yet to enter.

  As with most interesting inventions of bourgeois culture, restaurant-going is cushioned on the surface, angular and dramatic just beneath. It is a study in tensions and role-playing. To visit Le Grand Véfour, the one restaurant that remains intact and has been in business continuously since Roze de Chantoiseau’s day, is to instantly take part in a drama that has gone on so long because its point is so unsettled. The maître d’ is both servant, having to wait, and master, being empowered to choose and offer. The customer is both aristocrat for an hour and anxious suitor. Even the closed kitchen, while it distances the work, increases the mystique. If the dimwitted diner doesn’t know what goes on back there, it is still the case that the ultimate compliment to the savvy diner is to be invited into the kitchen. We eat out to find out who we are, and part of who we are is who we pretend to be, and whom we elect to pay for our pretense.

  The roles we play are part of the people we are. All democratic society may or may not begin in small communities, but all civility depends on little lies. The restaurant is our classroom for what Dr. Johnson called “fictitious benevolence,” and teaches its first lesson: as important as finding people you have things in common with is learning to live in pleasure alongside people with whom you don’t. This may be why, though there’s a new “new cooking” every few years, the institution of the restaurant has shown itself so resilient, so durable, so amazingly the same across time and tears. The waiter now introduces himself by name, and he may have changed his tux for an Agnès B. collarless shirt, but he still comes and goes and rarely mentions money. We might gag on what was served at Chantoiseau’s restaurant, we might not be able to find our idea of a good meal at Véry’s little temple, but, seeing the pantomime of waiters and menus and mirrors and erotic murmur, we would know at once just where we were. Home, Robert Frost wrote, is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. A restaurant is a place where, when you go there, they not only have to take you in but have to act as though they were glad to see you. In cities of strangers, this pretense can be very dear.

  2. What’s the Recipe?

  A MAN AND A WOMAN lie in bed at night in the short hour between kid sleep and parent sleep, turning down page corners as they read. She is leafing through a fashion magazine, he through a cookbook. Why they read these things mystifies even the readers. The closet and the cupboard are both about as full as they’re going to get, and though we can credit the magazine reader with at least wanting to know what is in fashion when she sees it, what can the recipe reader possibly be reading for? The shelf of cookbooks long ago overflowed, so that the sad relations and failed hopes (Monet’s Table, A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews) now are stacked horizontally, high up. The things he knows how to make t
hat are actually in demand are as fixed as any cocktail-lounge pianist’s set list, and for a clientele of children every bit as devoted to the old favorites as the barflies around that piano: make Parmesan-crusted chicken—the “Feelings” of food—every night and they would be delighted. Though a dinner party looms, and with it the possibility of a new thing made and added to the repertoire, the truth is that, on the night, the amateur cook falls back, like the amateur actor, on the set recitation. It’s going to be lamb tagine or the roasted chicken thing with preserved lemons, and there’s no helping it…. Yet the new cookbooks continue to show up in bed, and the corners still go down.

  Vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns about the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. When I was in my early teens, the sick yearning for sweets that adolescents suffer often drove me, in afternoons taken off from school, to bake, which, miraculously, meant just doing what the books said and hoping to get the promised yield. I followed the recipes as closely as I could: dense Boston cream pie, Rigó Jansci slices, Sacher torte with apricot jam between the layers. The potential miracle of the cookbook was immediately apparent: you start with a feeling of greed, find a list of rules, assemble a bunch of ingredients, and then you have something to be greedy about. In cooking you begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of the appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.

  Yet, if the first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets. It is partly that the steps between—the melted chocolate’s gleam, the chastened, improved look of the egg yolks mixed with sugar—are often more satisfying than the finished cake. But the trouble also lies in the same good words that got you going. How do you know when a thing “just begins to boil”? How can you be sure that the milk has scalded but not burned? Or touch something too hot to touch, or tell firm peaks from stiff peaks? Define “chopped”? In those days I was illicitly baking in the afternoons, I was learning main-course cooking at night without recipes from my mother, a scientist by day, who had long been off-book, as they say in the theater. She would show, not tell: how you softened the onions, made them golden, browned them. This practice got you deeper than the words ever could.