by Adam Gopnik
While you are doing all this, I was reminded as I did it, you are thinking about the bouillabaisse, not about life in our time. Or, rather, you are not thinking about the bouillabaisse, or about anything: you are making the bouillabaisse. And here, I suspect, lies the difficulty with using cooking as the stock for the stream-of-consciousness stew. It is that the act of cooking is an escape from consciousness—the nearest thing that the nonspiritual modern man and woman have to Zen meditation; its effect is to reduce us to a state of absolute awareness, where we are here now of necessity. You can’t cook with the news on and still listen to it, any more than you can write with the news on and still listen to it. You can cook with music, or talk radio, on, and drift in and out. What you can’t do is think and cook, because cooking takes the place of thought. (You can daydream and cook, but you can’t advance a chain of sustained reflections.)
The recipes in these books are not, of course, meant to be cooked; they have literary purposes, and one of them is to represent the background of thought. Every age finds an activity that can take place while a character is meditating; the activity surrounds and halos the meditation. In Victorian fiction, it is walking; the character takes a long walk from Little Tipping to Old Stornsbury and, on the way, decides to propose, convert, escape, or run for office. But the walk as meditational setting and backdrop came to an end with Joyce and Woolf, who made whole walking books. In recent American fiction, driving was recessive enough to do the job; in Updike and Ann Beattie, characters in cars are always doing the kind of thinking that Pip and Phineas Finn used to do on walks. Driving and walking, however, do seem to be natural “background” actions. But you cannot have characters thinking while cooking; the activity is not a place for thought but in place of thought.
We need these devices in books, because we do not, in life, think our thoughts over time. Since our real mental life is made in tiny flashes in the midst of our routines, we have to stretch it out, taffy-like, in literature to cover a span of time worthy of it. If we accurately represented our mental life as it takes place—sudden impulses on the way to the washroom, a spasm of neurons unleashed over coffee—no one would believe it. Consciousness is not a stream but a still lock that suddenly drops into little waterfalls. The lengthy descriptions of cooking that we find in modern literature are a way of artfully representing, rather than actually reproducing, our mental life—a modeled illusion, rather than a snapshot of the thing.
So no matter how much cooking a novel contains, in the end it goes back to being a book, as all books will. Even cookbooks are finally more book than they are cook, and, more and more, we know it: for every novel that contains a recipe, there is now a recipe book meant to be read as a novel. When we read, in the great French chef Alain Ducasse’s recent Culinary Encyclopedia, a recipe for Colonna-bacon-barded thrush breasts, with giblet canapés, on a porcini-mushroom marmalade, we know that we are not seriously expected to cook this; rather, we are to admire, over and over, the literary skill, the metaphysical poetry, required to bring these improbable things together. You and I are not about to cook thrush breasts with a porcini-mushroom marmalade—Alain Ducasse is not about to cook them, either—any more than we are about to throw ourselves under the train with Anna or sleep with Madame Bovary.
The secret consolation may be that it works the other way around as well. The space between imaginary food in books and real food is the space where reading happens. The people we encounter in novels are ultimately mere recipes, too—so many eyes, so many bright teeth, so many repeated tics and characterizing mannerisms—and we accept that we cannot perfectly reproduce them, either. Our mental picture of Henry Perowne, like our mental picture of Lady Glencora Palliser, is as hard-won as the bouillabaisse from Saturday, as vague in critical aspects and as likely to vary from maker to maker, from reader to reader. (The characters in Flaubert are like the recipes in Escoffier; we are surprised to see how much is left out.) We read about Cabourg in Proust, and are unprepared for what we find when we actually get there. The act of reading is always a matter of a task begun as much as of a message understood, something that begins on a flat surface, counter or page, and then gets stirred and chopped and blended until what we make, in the end, is a dish, or story, all our own.
13. What Do We Imagine When We Imagine Food?
THERE ARE two schools of good writing about food: the mock-epic and the mystical microcosmic. The mock-epic (A. J. Liebling, Calvin Trillin, the French writer Robert Courtine, and any good restaurant critic) is essentially comic and treats the small ambitions of the greedy eater as though they were big and noble, spoofing the idea of the heroic while raising the minor subject to at least temporary greatness. The mystical microcosmic, of which Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth Pennell are the masters, is the more modern school, essentially poetic, and turns every remembered recipe into a meditation on hunger and the transience of its fulfillment.
The two styles can’t be mixed. If we are reading, say, about Liebling’s quest for the secret of how rascasse are used in bouillabaisse, we don’t want to be stopped to consider the melancholy lives of the remote fishermen who seek them out. And if we are reading David’s or Fisher’s sad thoughts on the love that got away or the plate that time forgot, we would hate to find, on the next page, the writer handing out peppy stars in modish kitchens. (The same thing is true of sportswriting: we go to it for either W. C. Heinz’s tears or Jim Murray’s jokes, Gary Smith’s epics or Roy Blount Jr.’ yarns, which suggests that, with the minor arts, our approach is classical and depends on unity of tone.)
The two styles, as we’ve seen, lie all the way back there, in the two first food writers. Brillat-Savarin was the founder of the microcosmic school, and his genius lay in his smiling sincerity; His contemporary Grimod created the mock-epic; his genius lay in his bitter wit. Since their day those two styles have dominated the world of food. (Bitter wit is more fun than smiling sincerity, but hard to build a world on.)
So when we read books about food we struggle to decide which school we’re reading. In The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine, Rudolph Chelminski’s biography of the doomed three-star chef Bernard Loiseau, for instance, the story of Loiseau’s restless search for a way to transform cauliflower from a discouraging vegetable into a radiant side dish by caramelizing it, we smile at first, thinking ourselves in the presence of the old mock-epic. It is, after all, only caramelized cauliflower. As the search picks up momentum and intensity, however, and we learn how Loiseau began to blanch and strain and purée, we start to succumb to the grandeur of the quest and think the story is microcosmic. Why should the search for caramelized cauliflower be any less significant than Ad Reinhardt’s search for the pure-black painting, or John Cage’s for pure silence? But then when we read that Loiseau committed suicide after his caramelized cauliflower failed to impress his critics, we rebel again, in shock. It was, after all, only caramelized cauliflower.
Loiseau seems likely to become a mordant icon of the eternal war between critics and cooks. He has a moving story to tell, with universal implications: the downfall of the artist through perfectionism and paranoia. Loiseau suffered throughout his life from a too-late-identified bipolar disorder, a syndrome that ought to be known by its old French name, folie circulaire. It’s a syndrome that can strike truck drivers and Zen monks as easily as cooks, so any general principles should be taken with caution. Still, Loiseau, if not typical, is in many ways exemplary of the chef’s dilemma.
Loiseau was a member of perhaps the last generation of artists who were true to an ideal and a practice that had begun in the nineteenth century. He learned to cook as an intern in the kitchen of the Frères Troisgros, near Lyon, where he mastered the terrifying discipline by chopping onions and filleting fish for twelve hours a day; he even learned to kill frogs by slapping their heads casually against the kitchen table. The Troisgros kitchen opened every door in those days, and in the early seventies Loiseau, with almost no other apprenticeship, made
a name for himself doing simple country cooking at a glorified bistro just outside Paris. He was financed by a shrewd promoter named Claude Verger, who saw that elemental food could be popular and still presented to the critics as something new: a variant of nouvelle cuisine.
That it was simple and not genuinely new does not mean that it was without value; no one had been cooking that way with passion or conviction for a while. Calling plain cooking high cooking was in itself a radical act. Loiseau became a star, and, with money advanced by Verger, he bought La Côte d’Or, a famous old restaurant in the Burgundy town of Saulieu. In the dense, deep-eating days of gratins and casseroles, the place had once held three stars in the Michelin Red Guide; by sheer effort, Loiseau built it back up, and the reader cheers with him when he finally gets his three stars, in 1991.
The trouble was that there was no reason to go to Saulieu except to eat, and this made Loiseau particularly, even uniquely, vulnerable to the Guide and its system of stars and inspectors. The Guide no longer had an easy or organic relation to French cooking. The Red Guide grew up with the automobile, and with the idea of the long journey away from Paris that required several stops for lunches and dinners. By the 1980s, though, the new autoroutes and the high-speed trains (and the planes, racing over) had reduced the need for road stops. The Michelin inspectors, gloomy middle-aged men eating alone, used to be indistinguishable from the other gloomy middle-aged men eating alone, and their stars were a kind of summary of the opinions of all those tired traveling professionals. Now all that’s left of this once self-evident system is the inspectors, dining alone and passing out stars. People do not drive by the restaurant and stop to eat; they drive to the restaurant and stop for a three-star meal. To be a destination is a difficult trade: it is nice to run a place where the food, in the famous phrase, is worth a journey; hard to keep it going when the only reason anyone makes the journey is to eat the food.
Loiseau was terrified of losing his stars, particularly when François Simon, of Le Figaro, hinted that La Côte d’Or was on its way down. The chef may have been paranoid in this, but he was hardly alone. All artists in all fields despise all critics all the time. (They may like the individual critic, but they despise his conviction that he has a right to criticize.) Still, there are levels of loathing, as there are circles in Hell. Writers at least recognize that the critic is a writer, and shares a table, if not an agent. Magicians, on the extreme edge, despair of those outside their circle ever knowing the difference between a trick that anyone can buy for six dollars and sleight of hand that only two people have learned in six years. Chefs are close to magicians in their certainty that their critics cannot tell the difference between something that takes time, thought, and talent and something that dazzles only by surprise, perversity, and snob appeal. But, even more than magicians, chefs depend on the good opinion of those whose opinions they cannot think are worth having—and the nature of Loiseau’s cooking left him open to the exhaustion of critics.
Chelminski points out that food critics are even more inclined than other kinds to fatigue. Most food critics are sick of eating rich, expensive food and will do almost anything to have something new; a perfectly prepared veal chop (one of Loiseau’s elemental specialties) first gets a smile, and then a yawn. But Loiseau, his biographer admits, was at an edge of simplicity so extreme that it hinted at innocence. (Chelminski suggests that Loiseau’s training was short on fundamentals; he was notorious among his staff for being unable to make even basic sauces.) Famous for the purity of his approach, Loiseau deglazed his pans with water instead of wine or even stock. It was admirably minimal, but it also tended to be oddly ascetic and depressing; the elemental and the elegant are sisters, but not twins. Loiseau had no hesitation about publishing a recipe for John Dory served with a purée made of boiled celery. (It seems so simple that one is convinced that it must be mysteriously great; I have made it, and it tastes like fish with boiled celery purée.)
Loiseau, it now seems, thrived briefly at a short, fundamentalist moment in the history of cooking, just between the Protestant Reformation of nouvelle cuisine and the rococo Counter-Reformation of today’s cuisine tendance (“trendy cooking,” though “speculative cooking” might be a better name), the kind of ostrich-tongue-with-rutabaga-foam-and-Jurassic-salt-on-a-stick cooking that unites Ferran Adrià, of elBulli; the Californian Thomas Keller, of the French Laundry; and New York’s own Wylie Dufresne, of wd-50.
Yet Loiseau is hard not to love. He was, like everyone, a casualty of history and his own demons; but he was also, as Chelminski insists, a perfectionist, for whom the disapproval of a single diner was almost impossible to accept, which is what makes his story heartbreaking and instantly understandable. “Why didn’t he like it?” he would moan inconsolably when one of a hundred diners sent a dish back unfinished. The chef’s life is a long struggle with the reality that tastes differ, and tastes change. The mutability of taste is a truth chefs live with every night.
And the Loiseau example suggests that the divide between the mock-epic and the microcosmic schools expresses an even simpler divide between the way critics and cooks experience food. The diner experiences it as a form of comedy and the cook experiences it as a form of work. (The cook’s recompense for not having fun—for those hours and hours of life spent chopping onions—is a sense of soul and of significance.) One goes for pleasure and believes in his right to mock and have fun; the other cooks in desperate exhaustion and believes in his right to a livelihood.
Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, a memoir of her time in the hottest of critical hot seats in America, that of restaurant critic of The New York Times, tells the story from the other side of the mirror. Her book would make a terrific romantic comedy, if Lubitsch or Billy Wilder were alive or if Nora Ephron wanted to make it. Reichl, in order to conceal her identity from the restaurant people who were desperate for her good opinion, dined in disguise throughout her five years at the Times, not merely wearing wigs and dark glasses but actually creating and inhabiting whole alternative characters: a chorine called Chloe, a sad Glass Menagerie–type lady called Molly, and even a motherly type, homey and sensible. A Method critic, she came to live these characters: they wrote the reviews. In the movie of her life, of course, the hard-eating, Falstaffian R. W. Apple, Jr., character would hate her in her fussy office identity as a “nouvelle” eater, and fall for her in one of her disguises in the restaurant. (There is even a wisecracking, snooty but winning friend—obviously the Stockard Channing role—who has to be converted to the merits of sushi.)
What makes Reichl’s book genuinely touching is that—in a plangent complication—she sees herself first of all as a cook, and seems to identify secretly with her targets. Compelled by admirable maternal instincts, within a two-career marriage, to take her son from one overpriced, overwrought restaurant meal to another, she convincingly suggests that the restaurant critic’s life is an ordeal; the recipes she inserts in the text (leg of lamb, matzo brei) seem to be intended as oases of sense in the midst of all this madness, and as signs of her real identity, as a cook.
At the same time, the book is wonderfully revealing about the double consciousness of the critic. Although pain-giving herself (and she likes to read “delightful” pans of restaurants), she is sensitive about criticism of her own criticism, and spends time collating phone messages for and against, walking the streets with anxiety when her first review comes out as she waits to hear what the bosses think. (Critics never allow these two parts of their brain to communicate, or stop to think that the pain you take, as the Beatles might say, is equal to the pain you make.) The back-and-forth between the soulful stuff that she writes about her family and the sometimes surprisingly catty stuff that she writes about her working life (she is not particularly kind about her editors at the Times) is conscious, certainly, but also deeply felt. You think, She really didn’t like the gig.
There is a moment when, after she reviews Le Cirque, she walks back
to her childhood neighborhood, reconnecting with what actually made food into a significant thing for her. She clearly feels that there is something ignoble, or at least remote from her original infatuation, in sending expense-account diners off to this or that French temple. This is the lesson critics learn the hard way, and we are as relieved as she is when she is at last set free and gets a job as editor of the magazine Gourmet. She is tired, we know, of eating in disguise, when what she really wants is to be cooking for her family out in the open.
Reichl, after all her experience, compares the restaurant world of New York to a theater, with the diners and critics merely players in it. But everything can be described in terms of performance and theatricality; all the world’s a stage. Surely it is identity politics, rather than just playacting, that is at stake in costly dining out. All those people waiting in line at Le Cirque are not waiting for their selves to be lost or exchanged; they are waiting to be affirmed, even enhanced, and they do it even at the risk of humiliation. Not “Enter and become another!” but “You belong here” is what we want the maître d’ to tell us. (And the illusion that we want the chef to give us is not “I work for you” but “I feed you from love.”)
This affirmation, it seems, is easier to get than we might think. Steven A. Shaw is identified by his publishers as a former attorney who began a second career as a food and restaurant critic in 1997. He has a book called Turning the Tables: Restaurants from the Inside Out, which attempts to show you how not to be intimidated or overwhelmed when dining out: he wants you to be an expert at eating in restaurants, even as the author is an expert on eating in restaurants. This seems a queer expertise, a self-evident specialization, but he does give much sound, neighborly advice on getting reservations (just humble yourself to the person who answers the phone, and someday the table, like your prince, will come) and some sane if fairly obvious counsel: “Understanding one’s own preferences and needs, as well as those of your dining companions, is foundational to making good restaurant choices.”