by Adam Gopnik
Anyway, you let the lamb very gently braise for about two hours, until it’s tender. I bought one of those elegant Chinese-hat tagines, and it works well, but no better than a normal Dutch oven. (The high-steepled shape is meant to draw up and reuse moisture in a North African climate where water is scarce, but the key to a good tagine, to a good stew, is always to use less liquid than the recipe says, and make the oven or burner heat even lower than it suggests. Simmer and braise, never stew and boil.) Then—this is ridiculously simple—you boil down the liquid, add a teaspoonful of honey, some prunes (“dried plums,”) or the apricots in water, and at last the little saffron stems. They’re not really stems at all, they’re threads. It’s intoxicating—sweet and spicy, meaty and fruity. Kids love it and adults, when you add harissa paste to it, they die. It’s never missed for me. And yet it’s the kind of taste that was banned for so long, as sex outside of marriage was banned for so long.
What’s lost, of course, is rigor: the sense that we are doing right by eating well. We show our maturity by rejecting the easy pleasures of obvious mouth tastes as cloying and too rich, and transmute the judgment into a moral taste by insisting that the limited flavor of a few herbs is morally superior to the wide-open spaces of many spices. Moral taste works by rejecting a delicious tagine as slack. Of course this lamb tastes good! I hear you cry, newly awakened out there in Gumbo. How could it not? But the taste is not a taste coaxed and respected and teased out of a natural thing; it is an infantile taste imposed on something, indifferent to that something’s subtleties. Anything would taste good dipped in honey and saffron and cinnamon and fruit. That isn’t cooking, that’s just … eating, eating as “primitives” do, as children do, even, perhaps, as animals do. You write about this with indignation and intelligence, describing bad hosts.
In excess they would emulate the banquets of the ancients, though they are too refined by far to revive the old vomitories—the indispensable antidote. Before dinner is half over, palates are jaded. “Fine shades” can no more be appreciated, every new course awakens fear of the morrow’s indigestion. Art despises show, it disdains rivalry, and it knows not excess. A Velázquez or a Whistler never overloads his canvas for the sake of the gorgeous detail. To the artist in words, superfluous ornament is the unpardonable sin. And so with the lords of Gasterea, the tenth and fairest of the muses. Better by far Omar Khayyam’s jug of wine and loaf of bread, if both be good. Neat in mind the master’s model luncheon and its success. No menu could have been simpler; none more delicious. The table was laid for three, a goodly number, for all the slurs cast upon it. At each plate were “two dozen oysters with a bright golden lemon”; at each end of the table stood a bottle of Sauterne, carefully wiped all except the cork… after the oysters roasted kidneys were served; next truffled foie gras, then the famous fondue, fruit followed and coffee; and last two liqueurs, “One a spirit, to clear, and the other an oil, to soothe.” Be not content to read, but go and do likewise.
The “master” you refer to, by the way, is, as I finally figured out, Brillat-Savarin—odd for you to honor him so, since you have the right literary prejudice in favor of Grimod, though perhaps your politics got the better of your taste. What are your politics, by the way? Are they bien-pensant liberal-socialist, like Brillat-Savarin’s and your friend Oscar Wilde’s? Or do they turn, as your beloved Whistler’s did, a touch toward the irascible right? I wonder…
Well, you knew that all tastes are compressed arguments, arguments reduced to sensual instructions, moral cases made by pointing at the menu. And the taste argument you’re making is plain enough. Saffron and cinnamon, you think, are to taste as gold thread and lapis lazuli are to the eye—of course they delight and entice, but they are a cheap form of seduction, compared with the solidity of massive form, compared with the ability to paint one gray sky as it is.
Yet look at the luncheon you point to as the model! And consider the complexity of it—sweet white wine with oysters (that would seem to us now as cloying as honey with lamb seems to you), where we could drink only a flinty Chablis or a brut champagne. So once again the march of progress becomes the circle of argument, and we are drawn back into the past to find that it was more advanced than we are. History comes back to bite itself on the tail, and all we can hope is that the tail is well seasoned. Saffron and cinnamon always delight. That, your time says back, is just what’s wrong with them. And to that we have no answer.
In any case, those are my four secret, or at least semisacramental, ingredients: bacon and anchovies, saffron and cinnamon. And do try the lamb; it’s best with couscous and a red wine from the region, something that the three kings would have drunk: a Château Musar from Lebanon, or, though it’s from a different continent, an Australian Shiraz, which at least has a name that sounds of the region. Shiraz could have been the name of a Fourth Wise Man, now forgotten, who made the first spice-giving journey. In eating much depends on names.
Ever,
A.G.
6. Meat or Vegetables?
ON AN OVERCAST, gray-to-white London summer morning, the British chef Fergus Henderson is standing and staring reverently at the edge of Smithfield, the great meat market in the East End. If it is still reasonably early by restaurant standards, it is late in the day by those of a wholesale market; though Smithfield, an arcaded nineteenth-century affair of bright-painted cast-iron arches and venders’ stalls, is beginning to close for the day, it still hums with a sense of sociable business ritual. Wholesalers in straw hats pack up their bacon and chops and trotters, some in Cryovac, some in shiny brown butcher paper. Henderson’s relationship to Smithfield these days is largely spiritual—he gets most of the meat for his nearby restaurant, St. John, from private country suppliers and small boutique slaughterhouses—but it is still an enchanted place for him. “It’s a bit of a closed society, with its own customs and traditions,” he says. “And it represents a certain tradition that began before pink-in-plastic.” (“Pink-in-plastic” is Henderson’s dismissive name for supermarket meat.) “For centuries, using the whole beast was the common sense of the market. Embrace your carcass and you’ll be richer and happier.”
Fergus Henderson is a man in love with meat. He even looks like an English butcher. His face is florid, with the raspberry blush that one associates with the kind of all-right-then-dearie butcher who might appear in a Boulting Brothers comedy of the fifties. Since he opened St. John, in 1994, he has become famous for his devotion to the odd bits of ordinary animals. Ox tongue and tripe, lambs’ brains and pigs’ heads, stuffed lambs’ hearts and rolled pigs’ spleen: St. John has returned them to the repertory of the world’s “high” cooking, while Henderson’s book Nose to Tail Eating—which for a long time had to be bought in the United States on a gray market of second-hand copies, where prices could sometimes reach a hundred dollars—has become the Ulysses of the whole food–Slow Food movement, a plea for the fullness of life that begins with a man eating innards. (It has at last been published in America, under the slightly cosmeticized name of The Whole Beast.)
Henderson starts walking the block and a half back to his restaurant. “The squirrels, I suppose,” he says, after a moment’s pause. He has been asked if any particular adventures in heterodoxy caused comment in London. “Squirrel is delicious—like an oily wild rabbit. We had some that had been trapped by keepers in the country, and I decided to do a whole plate of them. Re-create the forest floor: wilted greens, to suggest the bosky woods they come from. Rather poetic, the whole thing. But somehow serving squirrels created quite a stir.”
St. John, a converted nineteenth-century smokehouse, has two rooms: a twenty-foot-high sky-lit, cathedral-ceilinged front room, where the bar and bakery are, and the dining room, just beyond. The dining room is large and whitewashed; a row of knobs and hooks for coats goes around the room, giving it the air of an eighteenth-century eating house or tavern, though the open space is unlike any actual eighteenth-century tavern—it’s more Saatchi collection than Cheshire cheese, a
hint, perhaps, that archaism and modernism are in more complicated relation here than is evident at first glimpse, or smell. The kitchen seems to be visible from the dining room, but, as Henderson says, “It’s a very tricky kind of openness. You can’t actually see inside. It’s the Mount Fuji principle borrowed from Japanese prints. You should never see the whole of Mount Fuji, you know.” Henderson shows off the restaurant’s tiny, cool larder. Inside a steel drawer, a suckling piglet lies waiting to be eaten, its feet curled up comfortably, its eyes closed, its face smiling. It has been specially ordered, and will be roasted and served later that week, nose to tail.
Over Hobbit-like elevenses (seed cake and Madeira), Henderson begins to talk about the ascent that has turned him, at forty-two, into a public figure widely viewed in his homeland as a cross between Jamie Oliver and Sweeney Todd—an image that he sustains with a complex and comic irony. “Isn’t the approach to lunch the most wonderful time of day?” he asks. “Lunch is a choice, a decision of a sort. At dinner one must eat, but at lunch one chooses to eat well. There’s a certain excitement in lunch.” An assistant brings him the day’s menu, and he looks it over. Though he no longer works in the kitchen, he still oversees each day’s choices. Today’s menu, written a little defiantly in nothing but English (only “crème fraîche,” an adopted phrase, breaks the Anglo-Saxon attitude), is a calm, squirrelless document: there is to be middle white—a kind of northern pig—and also deep-fried tripe, veal-tail broth, deviled kidneys, and ox heart with beetroot and pickled walnut. The desserts are English, too, or Englishy—Eccles cake and Lancashire cheese, and even something called Eton Mess, which some people have suggested is not food at all but a succinct explanation of the sex lives of many British politicians.
In spite of his matey, Ealing Studios manner, Henderson is actually a former architect, with almost no formal training as a chef. “My mum was a good cook and my dad was a big eater,” he recalls, “and both of them were architects”—well-known second-generation modernists, in fact. “I trained as an architect, but I found lunch in architectural offices discouraging. People ate at their desks. Then, with a friend, I began doing big peasant dishes over in a restaurant in Covent Garden when it was closed. We did cassoulet or pot-au-feu and would have forty or fifty people come and sit at a common table. That led to my finding work as a chef, even though I didn’t have the training. I became the cook in a couple of places—I was lucky not to have to work for other people—and then I met my business partners. We found this place, and I began cooking here. We opened, got warm reviews, and, very quickly, turned the corner. I don’t know what that corner was, but we turned it.” (Henderson opened St. John at the height of the “mad-cow” disease scare, which made him modify his menu slightly; to this day, lambs’ and calves’ brains are out.)
Henderson had always liked innards, but it was only as he began to cook that he came to recognize the absurdity of our usual meat-eating, which clings to a few square feet of animal muscle near the skeleton, as timorous natives might cling to a few miles of coast on an island while avoiding the volcanic mountains inland. “There were all these wonderful, splendid bits of the animal being wasted, thrown out, while we were eating nothing but the filet,” he said, pronouncing “filet” in the English manner, with a hard last consonant. “It seemed positively insulting to the animal that one had raised to treat it with such contempt. So many wonders there. Spleen! Spleen is a very fine, perfectly framed organ. In fact, your spleen swells when you’re in love! How can you resist an organ that does that?”
He believes not only that animals should be made happy by being raised well, slaughtered humanely, and eaten entirely but that you can taste the emotional state of the animal on your plate. He senses this with hares. “Rabbits, when they’re wild, have a very different temperament, which is expressed in their muscles. Welsh rabbits used to have a certain… tension. You could taste their tension. Now we’ve been using more relaxed Yorkshire rabbits, which are splendid in their way, but not as tense and interesting as the Welsh rabbits.”
Henderson’s devotion to the bits of the animal that other people tend to throw away or make faces at is partly a revivalist aesthetic, a tribute to peasant traditions, but it is closer to certain weird outer ends of conceptual installation than to anything nostalgic. The more time one spends with him, the more inclined one is to think that certain of his American devotees can miss an edge of irony and po-faced British wit in his approach. This is not to say that he doesn’t think that noses and tails and heads and spleens are good to eat—he does think that, absolutely—but he also thinks that the idea that noses and tails and heads and spleens might be good to eat would be interesting even if they weren’t as good to eat as they are. He grasps that even sincere gestures in the kitchen become social symbols on the plate—that the idea of eating rolled spleen and pig’s tail has resonances and challenges apart from the taste of rolled spleen and pig’s tail in the mouth. He is, as an ironist, close to the artist Damien Hirst, an inventor who plays on the line between display and disgust, and yet Henderson steps soberly over that line to the constant edge of delight.
* * *
Henderson’s attitude toward the Englishness of his food is complex. Despite that menu written almost entirely in English, and English English, at that—no ricotta ravioli, no noisettes—the wine list is exclusively French. (“Of course, there’s the Aquitaine connection,” he says.) Yet when pressed for his influences he cites the Italian Marcella Hazan, and his favorite experience of eating is the walk in Paris through the Palais Royal toward the Grand Véfour on a sunny afternoon. The book that lurks behind his approach is Elisabeth Luard’s Sacred Food, an eccentric polemic for a kind of universal home cooking, a transformational grammar of whole beasts and comforting puddings, rooted in the conviction that a restoration of this kind of cooking, in each of its regional guises, is essential to the recovery of a whole civilization.
The most famous dish that Henderson has created is a study in the invention of English tradition through multicultural wit: a salad of bone marrow, parsley, and capers, which, though it seems today to be as rural and English as Eccles cake, occurred to him a decade ago after watching a French film, La Grande Bouffe. “It has that scene where the man delights in marrow bones,” he recalls. “And a friend had come in and all I had left were the marrow bones and the parsley and some capers. I thought that they would make a splendid marriage. I love the idea of food in which you participate. The singe is very important, getting the right singe on the bones. And the parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass. We discipline the parsley, so that it’s chopped, yet still parsley. And capers are so important. They’re the ‘Nyeh!’ factor in the dish.” He makes a kind of complaining, whinnying noise. “You always need a little ‘Nyeh!’ on the plate. Pickled walnuts do the same thing for ox heart.”
He sighs and looks over at the kitchen. “I wish I could stay in the kitchen through the service, but I’m not really trustworthy with this ropy left side of mine,” he says. For the past few years, Henderson has been struggling with Parkinson’s disease, which courses through his body like a lightning storm in summer, sending his left arm and hand into paroxysms of uncontrolled movement. He is neither melodramatic about it nor showily brave. “It was a bad day,” he says of the moment he learned from his doctors about the disease. “My hand had been moving steadily to my chest, John Wayne in a Western movie, and I thought, How odd! And then it turned out to be this.
“I sat down and had a good lunch and felt somewhat better.” His wife, Margot, and his three children, he says, have come to accept his “ropiness.” (Later that year he had experimental surgery to place electrodes in his brain to try to control it.) “Disgust is always rooted in a perception of asymmetry,” he says suddenly. “Geometry cures it. Take the haggis, for instance. It’s made of sheep’s stomach and sheep’s lights, but people will eat it because it’s comfortably round. Sausages have always been allowed in, because of their shape. People
are somehow reassured.”
Disgust, the psychologist Paul Rozin has suggested, may be a kind of optimal strategy for solving what he calls the “omnivore’s dilemma”: animals that can eat everything have to be especially cautious about what parts of other animals they eat. The default assumption seems to be that all animals are disgusting, and we have to learn an item-by-item list of what’s acceptable. In this way, we enclose our children in our own double wrapping, composed of both common sense and collective neurosis. Yet it is also obviously true that the mind overgeneralizes its fear of the unshaped, and knows it. So along with the “Don’t eat it!” impulse comes a “Dare you to eat it!” impulse, and it is between these two impulses that Henderson dances.
By now, lunch has progressed through many meats, with various quick detours into the vegetable world—St. John serves leaves, and even excels at them—and there is the promise of an unequaled dark-chocolate ice cream ahead. Henderson finishes off his ox heart with pickled walnuts. “The heart is the most expressive muscle in any animal,” he says as he cleans his plate. “It’s amazing, a muscle that works so endlessly and tirelessly to keep us alive. And yet it emerges tender and distinctive. Each animal heart is resonant with its animal. Ox heart has an honest beefy quality, lamb’s heart rubs up against you. Each heart tastes like the animal that depended on it.”
In Henderson’s own heart there is, one senses, a harmony between man and his food that comes from eating all of the animal there is to eat, a mysticism rooted in fatality and the fact of our being, head to toe, animals, too. We are all meat, trembling and fresh, dying and spasming, and we enter into our humanity, as we leave it, by way of our animalness. We are beasts eating beasts, and the real bestiality, he suggests, lies in avoiding the truth of it. “Taste that!” he says, pressing a bit of fatty middle white on the visitor from New York. “It comes from a happy pig. You can taste the difference. People eat meat. You can be an unhappy carnivore, and eat pink-in-plastic, or a wise carnivore and eat the animal with care and respect. To eat the whole beast is to accept existence. Embrace your carcass! It’s simply common sense.”