The Table Comes First

by Adam Gopnik

  Still, I take this to heart. My great-grandparents moved around town, as it happens, but we ended up on Locust Street—just a few blocks away from Chestnut and right by Walnut, and I spent my quite “assimilated” but still distinctly literary-Jewish-intellectual boyhood riding and racing on Spruce and Pine. So I felt, reading these words by you, as blue and betrayed as if I had found my wife in flagrante with another man—and a young, blond SS officer at that. And I have since discovered, what is harder to accept, that this was not a passing bigotry in an otherwise openminded life, but a recurrent theme of yours: your husband, Joseph Pennell, in particular, was an obsessed anti-Semite in a time not short on them, who wrote and illustrated a long book about the hideousness of Russian Jews, serialized, bizarrely, in The Pall Mall Gazette.

  We have, of course, been here before. My beloved Chesterton had a true program (a word that sits in sinister poise with “pogrom”) for Jewish expulsion from England. With an effort of will, one can see, if not sympathize with, the shock of Old Americans at the newcomers—a prejudice not entirely unknown to the Jews who, having been here for a century, now see their “own” neighborhoods and landmarks disappear under the pressure of Muslims and West Indians. But there it is. You hate my kind, in the place where my kind went, in exactly the street where not just my kind but my family lived.

  Can we eat in peace knowing you despised my grandparents? Must I put a stopper on our relations? Should I end these e-mails, this imaginary conversation? One part of me thinks I should: the only meal I truly regret in my life was a tray of hors d’oeuvres passed around at (the very elderly and deaf) Diana Mitford’s place when she came back to an apartment in Paris from her long life with Oswald Mosley in Versailles. I plead ignorance—her children were lovely people, and my friends, and I did not know then just how Hitlerite she had been, or I would have stayed away. One of the strange sad truths about the gastronomic tradition since Grimod is that good food writing has always bent right, and often toward the extreme right. One had already gone through this pain with Robert Courtine, the great food writer of Le Monde, when it was revealed after his death that he was not merely an anti-Semite but an active collaborationist—and that this might have been so, must have been so, one sees retrospectively in the contempt for all but France and anything but French cooking that runs through his work.

  In a way, a bitter way, I should be grateful for this discovery, for it raises the central point of these pages, the key issue, the one big thing too easily avoided: how much can the table truly reconcile—how sweetly can, or should, the rituals of social life reconcile us to our opposites? It is sentimental, surely, to pretend that the ugliness of life escapes the table; we rightly condemn the French intellectuals and artists who made too easy a social peace with their occupiers. But is it unrealistic to wish that some reconciliation of opposites might yet take place there? It’s a hope, at least. Very different people do dine together, or try to. We think about Dr. Johnson, greatest of religious conservatives, reconciled over a good dinner in 1776 with John Wilkes, greatest of libertine libertarians, through the good offices of James Boswell, and we recognize that some of the sanity of British political life, compared with French, is owed to such primal acts of sociability. We can’t wish away differences, but we can hope for an end to hostilities. Disdain for others is part of life; learning to dissimulate it through manners is as good a cure as we can hope for. While we wait for the reign of Universal Love, we can at least share the premise of the Common Table.

  After all, the good angel I have on my other hand, Jacques Decour—whose letter began this book—was, for all his heroism, a committed and unrepentant communist, which means, in plain French, a Stalinist, albeit one of enormous courage and humanity. And now, on my other, an anti-Semite… upend the table or keep it set and hope for pleasure to uplift our hearts? We write glossily of the continuities of the table, but this is the perpetual fragility of its concord, which breaks on bigotries and false beliefs that can’t be wished away.

  But that they can’t be wished away doesn’t mean that they might not yet be reconciled. Good things do happen when people sit down for dinner. That’s itself a faith. Obviously, we don’t want to sit down to dinner with Nazis, and we rightly condemn those French artists who did. But we do want to sit down to dinner with people before they become Nazis, if it might help keep them from becoming so. It is not wrong to hope that the revelation of a common human touch, a common taste, shared and relished, can become itself an argument for humanity. We disapprove, and rightly, of those who sat down with their occupiers, but we smile, and often, at the countless travelers’ tales of violence averted by bread and salt and beer.

  The answer, I think, is that there isn’t one. We try to reconcile as many kinds as we can, and when we can’t, we can’t. We tolerate all that’s tolerable, eat with whom we can, draw lines as we have to, accept as much as we’re able. Liberal tolerance is an injunction urging efforts, not an instruction manual making rules. It says, Do your best with as many as you can until the very last moment when you can’t anymore. And how will you know when you can’t? Why, by the feeling in your stomach.

  …behold the mutually hostile

  Mouth and eyes of a sinner married

  At the first bite by a smile.

  So I quoted Auden, back at the beginning of this book, in the epigraph I intended only as a benediction. Now, under the pressure of finding out some more of who you really were, or thought, Mrs. Pennell, I think harder, and now I’m inclined to believe that Auden thought the mouth and eyes were hostile because the mouth always seeks pleasure and the eyes always make judgments. Reconciling the two, our molars and our morals, is what a great meal does—but it can only do it for a moment. Then we are back in the real world of mixed emotions and dubious alliances, where those who share our pleasures are rarely those who please our minds. Brillat-Savarin, whom you called the Master, thought that the rituals of the French table were soft power for decent liberals like himself, but though soft power is power it is still always soft. Would you have taken the trouble, seen a wiser way, with better company and a larger view? I don’t know. But, having summoned you back to life I am surely allowed to hope you would have. I wish I could have tried.

  Wild salmon, broccoli, and brown rice. Delicious without being indulgent, good to eat while having some tang of austerity, of firm assertion, about it, I shall make this meal tonight. Cleansing, somehow. A kosher meal, come to think of it!—though, given your obsessions, this is a thought that probably occurred to you before it occurred to me. Come over in spirit and I will cook you all of these things. Salmon, and broccoli purée and perhaps lentils and brown rice, the simple penitent foods. I cannot exactly forgive you. But I can still feed you. Four minutes on one side, three on the other. Salmon should be done in a cast-iron pan. Broccoli is best steamed for eight minutes. Brown rice just takes time.

  A Gopnik, of Locust Street

  17. Endings

  JUST A YEAR AGO, I gave up sweets. I was in a restaurant in San Francisco, and, for the first time that I can recall, when the waiter said, “Dessert?,” in that conspiratorial, perky way they have, I said… nothing. And then the next night, at another place, I did it again.

  The usual reasons that move men and women as they age moved me: I was self-conscious about gaining weight, crossing into the world where you slowly become doughier and wake up as a middle-aged man with a paunch. (“I looked in the mirror,” a woman novelist-friend said not long ago, “and saw that I was … stout. Like a character in Trollope: ‘She was a stout, upright lady in the prime of life…. ’ ”) It is true, of course, that the paunch was once a hard-sought ornament of abundance, rather than a flying buttress of overindulgence—the stout lady or gentleman was once the only steady lady or gentleman—but though that time might be one to envy, still we live in this time and not some other. So I decided to stop eating desserts, to see if that would help. Like all diets, both the reducing kind and the religious kind, mine had an element
of logic (lose those calories neatly, and at once!) and an element of magic, too (give up the thing you like best and you will appease the gods of aging).

  I love desserts. I think of my mother and I taste desserts. My mother, though a scientist with an academic career, made her own desserts every night of my childhood: lemon tart, chocolate cake, wonderful coffee custard with bittersweet chocolate hardened like a winter lake on top, and hot apple pie with light custard sauce. I am aware that pies and cakes and cupcakes are the more usual thing to love from Mom’s kitchen. But she was a Francophile, and made soufflés, and those I loved best of all. Yet they were the one dessert of hers that I couldn’t make for my own children. When I left home, she gave me a self-published recipe book that included her formula for apricot and Grand-Marnier soufflés. I had followed it dutifully over the years, and never gotten it quite right. There was a moment when you were supposed to know that the egg whites were beaten—a zone with danger and failure on either side. “DO NOT OVERBEAT / DO NOT UNDERBEAT!” she had written in the recipe, and once again the written orders hurt as much as helped. Although I had seen the proper moment, the true loft, countless times, the presence of the words somehow froze the operation, made the right state of beaten egg whites an unobtainable condition. I could never find the zone.

  Sugar flows through every modern life, and body, with a fluidity that would have shocked our sugar-starved ancestors, and so we withdraw from it with the same difficulty that we withdraw from the other shapers of our senses, alcohol and caffeine. For the first time in my life I knew what a craving was, understood the otherwise puzzling condition of friends who had passed through AA or through crack addiction, and whose frailties I respected but whose needs I could never before quite conceptualize, internalize: what was it that could lead people to act in a way so plainly not in their own self-interest? Having seen what the bottle or the pipe does to you, why not just give up the bottle or the pipe? The answer, I now saw, is that the craving isn’t a war inside you, as in those old quarrels between the devil and the angel, the kind that used to perch on Sylvester’s shoulders as he decided whether it was wrong or right to try to eat Tweetie. No, it was more of an urge to surrender to some other self-willed person who lives inside you, controls your steps, and just wants in the worst way. I would wake up at night and, unself-willed, wander toward the freezer and the ice cream—the state of hunger for something isn’t the state of deciding to have, but lies outside decision, lies outside your self, even, exists as a kind of magnetic impulse to which one need only surrender. Hunger is a field that draws you forward and that you enter simply by choosing not to resist. If it were up to me, the addict says, I’d stop. And we shake our head at his rationalization—but it isn’t up to him. A habit is not a gleeful preference of something bad for you to something good for you; it is an attraction that draws you toward something that feels neither good nor bad, but only necessary. (Which is why, I suppose, addicts only get better in the company of others. They bond together to try to build a passive force field greater than that other force field, which brought them there.)

  The curious thing was that, while it was hard to do without sweets at home, it wasn’t nearly as hard when we went out to eat, and especially not when we went out to eat fancy food. It was as if the dessert chefs had given up on dessert, too, and produced something else in its place. At even a moderately upscale establishment, you would invariably get what I had come to think of as the Portman Plaza plate, since it so closely resembled the model that a developer would have proposed for the center of a crime-racked mid-sized city in the seventies: three upright cylinders—small towers of something wrapped in something—with the tops sliced at an angle; a crumbly landscape of some kind; and a reflecting pool running around the edge. The plate would be advertised as, let’s say, a chocolate-peanut-butter mousse cake with walnut-balsamic crumble and a sesame sorbet with Concord-grape foam. But the effect was always the same: not enough of a cakey cylindrical thing, too much of a crumbly thing, far too much of a gelatinous thing, and an irrelevance of an off-key runny thing. Without surrendering sugar, dessert had surrendered all its familiar forms—the cake, the soufflé, the pudding—as the avant-garde novel had surrendered narrative, character, and moral. Losing our faith in art is, in a secular culture, what losing our faith in God was to a religious one; God only knows what losing our faith in desserts must be.

  Leafing through books at the neighborhood cookbook store, I slowly became aware that our dessert modernism sprang from somewhere else, and had a more revolutionary purpose than I knew—that the Portman plates were to a European movement what the Portman Towers had been to the Bauhaus, the American domestication of something austere and rigorous. Here in New York, the true, uncompromised revolution was limited to a handful of places, and I went to one of them, Wylie Dufresne’s wd-50. I broke my sweet fast, and had a full roster of the pastry chef’s delicious devisings: cheesecake with dried pineapple, pineapple purée, and pineapple tuiles; lemongrass mousse with lemongrass foam. The chef, Alex Stupak, turned out to be an intense intellectual, clear and dry in his judgments.

  “I happen not to like sweets,” he said as we sat down after dinner and he began to explain his work. “It’s an idiosyncrasy of mine. I decided to become a pastry chef because it gave me autonomy. Whether you think your desserts are manipulated or not, they are! When you’re conceptualizing an entrée, a protein, you generally expect to get a piece of that thing intact. In pastry, it doesn’t occur. Pastry is the closest that a human being can get to creating a new food. A savory chef will look at puff pastry not as a combination of ingredients but as an ingredient in itself. Pastry is infinitely exciting, because it’s less about showing the greatness of nature, and more about transmitting taste and flavor. Desserts are naturally denatured food.” He looked at me sternly. “Birthday cake is the most denatured thing on earth.”

  When I asked him who had influenced him, his eyes, which had been narrow slits of purpose, suddenly shone bright. “I admire Albert Adrià more than any other cook in the world,” he said.

  Everywhere I went, I heard similar talk of Albert, his brother Ferran, and other Catalan dessert wizards. Dan Barber, of the restaurant Blue Hill, spoke reverently of Jordi Roca, whose restaurant, run with his two brothers and situated not far from the Adriàs’ elBulli, had recently been voted one of the five best in the world; on a visit to New York, René Redzepi, whose restaurant, Noma, in Copenhagen, had in the same poll been named the best restaurant in the world, spoke of both Adrià and Roca with the same quiet awe.

  In search of the truth about the new sweets, I even went to the White House, whose pastry chef, Bill Yosses, I had been made to understand, was the Great Still Center of the American dessert. Yosses turned out to be a smiling, vaguely seraphic presence—at one point, he neatly, calmly distinguished caramel, mere burnt sugar, from butterscotch, brown sugar mixed with butter, for the benefit of his sous-chefs.

  “Dessert is aspirational,” Yosses said, laying out his philosophy. “It’s the one part of the meal you don’t have to eat. It’s the purest part of the meal: the art part. But it’s also the greediest part, the eat-it-in-a-closet part. We don’t have to have it, and we do. When I was a kid, I would stuff my face with éclairs. I still would, I guess…” His voice trailed off. “The real question is this,” he said. “How did this thing, this spice, sugar, become a staple? How did something that ought to be like saffron, a rare thing to add, become the thing we build on? How did a whole way of cooking creep up from sweetness? Why do we use it to end the meal? Those are the big questions.” I asked if I should go to Spain. He gave a Yoda-ish smile, and said, “Oh, yes. That’s a trip you ought to take.” When I consulted Dan Barber again, he was still more emphatic. “Go there!” he said. “That’s where it’s all happening. Go!” And so I went.

  On the plane over, I felt like Alec Guinness or Michael Caine in a Cold War spy movie of the somber, le Carré or Len Deighton kind: a black-and-white film, with a jazz scor
e and a grimly ambiguous ending. I was crossing the salt-caramel curtain, and no turning back.

  When I got to Barcelona, there was, just as there ought to be in such a movie, a cool, efficient beauty, in a black frock and a sports car, waiting for me. This was Lisa Abend, an American writer who lives in Spain, and who was to be my companion in Barcelona. She had spent the past season observing the innards at elBulli, while writing a book about the Oompa-Loompas of the operation.

  It was twilight, and we sped through the dark, narrow streets of the Old City on the way to our first stop, the Espai Sucre. This “Sweet Space” was, Lisa explained, a working research laboratory and school, where new desserts are regularly conceived and experiments made, with the results exhibited, and eaten, at a nearby restaurant. As we drove, the almost kinetic energy of the Catalan capital was evident, as it had been the last time I was there, twenty years before. At the time, the only dessert seemed to be flan, with a distinct salty taste that I associated with the local café con leche. I asked what had happened in the twenty years since.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of research, and it really seems to be the case that the legend is the truth,” Lisa said. “Twenty years ago, the Adrià brothers took over a struggling French restaurant up in Roses, and in the nineties they began to collaborate with a chemist here at the university. And, being isolated and inexperienced, they began to do new things. It really did come from two intense brothers who didn’t care what the rules were supposed to be.”

  We pulled up in the darkness to a modern glass storefront amid the medieval buildings and parked on the sidewalk. Inside, Jordi Butrón, the chief scientist-cook of the research center, greeted us solemnly and led us into his classroom. On the blackboard behind his head was a series of abstruse-looking diagrams. With a close-shaved beard and mustache, he had more the look of a severe French sociologist than of a happy Spanish cook. I explained that I was on a quest to find out what desserts really were and where they were going. He held up a hand and began to speak, in rapid, accented French.