Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  I proceeded chronologically. In 1638, there was Pratica e scalcaria by Antonio Frugoli. Scalcaria means being a scalco, the head guy in the kitchen of a grand house. Since there were no restaurants, a scalco was the equivalent of our celebrity chef, and the 1500s and 1600s are full of scalco memoirs, often, like Frugoli’s, self-aggrandizing accounts of how my banquets are better than yours. Other books followed: The Three Theses of Mattia Giegher, including lessons in napkin-folding (1639); Bartolomeo Stefani (1662), the head chef at the Spanish Court in Venice. I thought of myself as a food detective, gathering up suspects so I could eliminate them. You there, what are you doing with that egg?

  I wrote academics. Massimo Montanari, a professor at the University of Bologna and an authority on the medieval kitchen, understood my question and its urgency. Yes, he agreed, the egg moment was important in the history of pasta—he even introduced me to a term to describe its function, which was to hydrate the flour (idratare la farina), the process in which the egg’s liquid content takes the place of water—but he didn’t know when it had first occurred. In his judgment, there had probably been not one moment but several, a gradually increasing use, begun in the Middle Ages, when eggs were added for taste, until, in the modern era, they were also used for their liquid.

  But when?

  He couldn’t hazard a guess. He consulted a colleague, a pasta specialist: nothing.

  Then I found it: a first eggy recipe. It was late in the chronology, the end of the seventeenth century, in Lo scalco alla moderna by Antonio Latini—another scalco fellow. The recipe was headed “How to make macaroni, lasagna, and gnocchetti exquisitely” and credited to a chef named Meluzza Comasca (a typical concession—in Italy, there are no original recipes, only discoveries). Comasca, it has been suggested by one commentator, was a rhetorical creation, and, I admit, it’s troubling that the man’s name appears nowhere else in the history of food. Everything we know is in Latini’s introductory homage: that, after leaving us with his new pasta recipe, Comasca died prematurely of an insect bite—a malarial mosquito, I suspect, although the phrase (morì di pontura, in its seventeenth-century spelling) calls up an image of a fat man in an apron scratching himself to death—and that his doughy inventions were so famous they were described in an epitaph on his tomb. There is no mention of where Comasca was buried, but the insect allusion suggests the Maremma, the stretch on the Tuscan coast known for fatal bugs, and not far from Da Caino, the restaurant run by Valeria Piccini (unlike Comasca, a chef who will go stubbornly to her grave before she shares her pasta preparations with me).

  The recipe is mainly about the process—the taxing effort of making the dough (un poco di fatica), how you roll it into a sheet about six fingers in length (everything according to the hands) and roll it some more, until it reaches its requisite thinness. The pasta recipe itself was simple: four eggs mixed with about six etti of flour (not quite Betta’s proportions but not far off), plus a sprinkle of salt, and, it’s true, a little water, but only a splash. The principal hydrating role is performed by the eggs, and, until now, this role had never been recognized in Italian cooking.

  Why did I find this when others hadn’t? I considered what I’d done wrong, including the possibility that my egg question was so dumb no one else was asking it. But the explanation may be that my discovery is overshadowed by a more radical one: not what to put in your pasta but what to put on it. Lo scalco alla moderna includes the first recipe for tomato sauce. Until this moment, no Italian had eaten tomatoes. This very recipe—a half-dozen tomatoes, peeled by blistering them on a grill and removing the charred outside (which brings out the sugar in the fruit), plus red onions, red chilies, and red wine vinegar, an early expression of the now very familiar sweet-sour-spicy approach—is what persuaded the wary people of the Italian peninsula that the suspiciously shiny American fruit that acts like a vegetable wouldn’t kill them. Could there have been anything more important? Taken together, these two recipes, the eggy noodle and the sauce that goes on top, have been at the heart of pasta preparations from their publication until today. In the history of cooking, I cannot think of two other instructions that, though seemingly modest, have had such enduring consequences.

  Latini’s Lo scalco alla moderna is the most elegantly written book about food since an arty humanist on a summer holiday wandered back into a cardinal’s kitchen and wrote about what he found there. Even I, with my elementary Italian, appreciate that Latini is a stylist, with a strong voice and a flair for narrative. Until 1992, when a manuscript of a Latini memoir was discovered, nothing was known about the author, a great but virtually anonymous chef of the late Italian Renaissance, a culinary humanist with an extraordinary sway, determining how Italians ate for the next four centuries.

  What the memoir reveals is that the author wasn’t Latini. Latini could scarcely write. In fact, his spelling is so bad it has been wondered if he was dyslexic. The stylist must have been a friend. Latini was illiterate, a street urchin who invented himself in the kitchen. The story calls to mind Marco Pierre White or any number of people who entered a kitchen as one thing and exited as something entirely different. Latini lost his family at age five (Marco lost his mother at seven). He moved to Rome to make a living (Marco arrived in Harrogate at the same age) and, knocking on doors, found work in a cardinal’s household, where he learned to be a trinciante (a butcher, Marco’s achievement, at the same age) and then a cook, moving up a hierarchy of household stations, until, at twenty-eight, he became a scalco, a kitchen’s highest honor (Marco earned his three stars at roughly the same age). Latini is regarded as the last author of the Italian food renaissance (the gloriosa tradizione gastronomica italiana), and it’s tempting to see a relationship between the way the era ends with the way it began, nearly three centuries before, with Platina’s copying out the recipes of Maestro Martino. In the beginning, there was a writer; the ghost was the chef. In the end, there was the chef; the ghost was the writer. In the beginning, a humanist borrows from the artisan, anxious that the subject may not be sufficiently serious. In the end, the self-invented artisan invents himself as a humanist, robust in his confidence that his subject is fully dignified.

  After Latini, the glorious age of gastronomy ends, as if there were nothing left to do: Italy now had its dishes, its cuisine, its philosophy. Two decades later, Latini’s book went out of print. Scappi’s works, in print for nearly a century, were no longer available. Platina’s account of Maestro Martino was being read in France but in Italy had disappeared. For the next two centuries, there were no notable cookbooks. The Renaissance was over, as was its spirit of adventure: that spirit, it seemed, had been packed away, like some evanescent genie, and disappeared into saddlebags on a train of horses crossing the Alps. I now understood why Italians believe that Caterina de’ Medici took the secrets of Italian cooking with her. How else to explain such a definitive demise?

  ONE DAY I phoned Miriam. I was unhappy with our last exchange, and maybe, too, I wanted some recognition for what I’d learned. At the very least, I felt I should take up the offer she had made—that she was prepared to let me into her kitchen for a day or two. I would like a day or two to refine the technique.

  She was happy to hear from me. I told her my news and asked if it might still be possible to pop by.

  “Certo,” she said. “Phone me when you are next in Italy.”

  I now understood the informal never-make-a-commitment approach. I would phone when I was next there. But Miriam was curious. “What do you think I can teach you?” she asked, repeating her motto: “I am not an original cook.”

  I went through my refrain: the mysteries of pasta fresca, the labors of wood on wood, the elusive know-how of getting the texture.

  “What in the world are you talking about?” she said. “I have old arms. My old arms cannot do this kind of thing anymore.” Besides, she added, she can’t get a pastina anymore.

  This was not a term I knew.

  A pastina, she explained, is a local wom
an who makes pasta. That was her job: every day, to roll out the sheets. “I always used to be able to get a pastina. No one does that sort of thing anymore. They’re too busy. Modern life. I use a machine. I make the dough and cut it by hand. But I use the machine to roll out the sheets.”

  A machine? Miriam, my romantic defender of the traditional kitchen, a disciple of Maestro Martino, a descendant of Scappi, a student of Latini—this Miriam uses a machine? I could scarcely speak.

  “Certo,” she said. “The pasta is fine. What’s important is the eggs. My eggs are the best in the region. They are very, very good eggs.”

  Yes, I agreed. The egg is very important.

  17

  BY NOW, the symptoms of the ”What-are-we-going-to-do-about-Andy? problem” had grown so impossible to ignore I was convinced he was going to be fired. He wasn’t making it easy. For Andy, there continued to be only one solution, and it involved an investment of someone else’s money in his own restaurant, the elusive Iberian eatery, a venture he stubbornly believed was going to happen. Even I wondered: Why should Joe and Mario back this? Their heritage was Italian. But Andy persisted, never explicitly saying anything was owed to him, but manifestly thinking it was. Maybe, it occurred to me, his hope was born out of the burnout nature of the labor—that you can cook someone else’s food, under this kind of pressure, for only so long: the regimentation, the stress, the voice, not yours, saying, “What about a little citrus or a little salty to get the saliva glands working?”

  Sometimes I wondered if Mario wasn’t a great burden in Andy’s life, that the most consequential day of his life might have also been the most damning, that evening all those years ago when Andy had wandered into someone’s kitchen and discovered a man performing an act of stove-top wizardry involving fruit candy and foie gras, and decided he was going to be a chef. For much of the next seventeen years, that stove-top wizard had been Andy’s boss, starting at Pó, where Andy had been Mario’s deputy and the two of them ran the kitchen—thirty-six covers, a line outside the door, a hundred and fifty people a night. Three years later, when Mario teamed up with Joe Bastianich and opened Babbo, Andy had followed and for the next five years had been the executive running the kitchen. By now Mario had a second life. “He’s a chip in my brain,” Andy said. “I couldn’t remove it if I wanted to.” For five years, Andy had never cooked, which had been Memo’s justification for quitting, believing that because Andy didn’t cook, he couldn’t cook, and how could Memo take orders from someone who couldn’t cook—a perfectly pitched piece of slander, since no one knew a thing about Andy’s cooking as few had ever witnessed it. “For five years,” Andy told me, “I put pasta on plates and screamed for runners. By the fifth year, I thought of myself as a self-basting turkey and my red Butterball button had long popped. I was dry and overcooked.”

  I accompanied Mario and Joe (now flushly swaggering from the undeniable success of Otto) on a visit to a possible Iberian venue, viewed by them as the potential “next big thing,” an empty monstrosity in the West Village, two floors, a courtyard, and a roof garden, large enough to seat hundreds (since a giant pizzeria worked, why not a giant Spanish place?). The two novice entrepreneurs then crunched their numbers unpersuasively; the exercise in itself—amounting to more than two million dollars before the first ingredient was ordered—illustrated the price assigned to Andy’s loyalty. Later, in the Babbo kitchen, I told him about the excursion. He hadn’t been invited along. He was curious but reluctant to reveal his curiosity, because it would betray the helplessness of his position. His face conveyed distress. “The size is wrong,” he muttered finally. “That would be a crash-and-burn paella beer hall.”

  Then Andy himself found what he wanted—small, recently deserted, cheap by New York standards (the rent was eight thousand dollars a month instead of twenty), near the Union Square green market, on a corner of Irving Place, a street only six blocks long, where the author Washington Irving had once lived. Peering through a window and noting a miraculously apposite Spanish-themed ceramic floor, Andy realized he had known the place he wanted without ever being able to describe it.

  Andy discovered food in Spain: it was there that he first saw how a culture (its history, its habits of mind, its way of being) can manifest itself not just in paintings or music or architecture but also in what it eats. I knew Andy had lived there as a teenager; until now, I hadn’t realized that he had been there at the same time as Mario. Armandino, as a Boeing executive, had lived in an expatriate’s apartment in Madrid; Andy’s parents had lived in an artist colony on the Costa Brava. (His mother was a tap dancer; his father, a painter of cowboys and western sunsets.) Barcelona was Andy’s Porretta, and year after year he has returned to it, especially to its “dirty, low-rent” food places, reinvigorated by each visit, liking their simplicity, their lack of pretension, reminders of why he was a cook. On one such trip—during his honeymoon—he discovered Cal Pep. (Andy’s wife, Patty Collins, a former Babbo cook, was pregnant with their first child; a hopeful, happy couple, but it makes you wonder at the social lives of chefs—of course Andy would have met his wife on the line, and of course their honeymoon had been an excursion of food research.) On another trip, he discovered Bar Pinotxo.

  Bar Pinotxo is Andy’s model restaurant. It is in the Boquería, the Barcelona food market, Andy’s teenage discovery as the Spanish speaker in the family, doing the shopping for his mother. The restaurant could be called a “market eatery,” run according to an ideology of freshness: ingredients only from the stands just outside, an open kitchen, counter service, crowded, no menu, and, when you finally got the attention of a chef, you pointed to an item, he prepared it, you ate it. “The appeal,” Andy said, “is its honesty. No magic, no tricks, no secrets. Good ingredients, barely touched. Even today, I get goose bumps when I talk about it.” Unlike most restaurants, the cooking at both Cal Pep and Bar Pinotxo is not done beforehand, but, always on view, is by one of three methods: a la plancha (on a flattop), deep-fried, or in a pan. The razor clams are pried open on being ordered, drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper, cooked facedown on the flattop for thirty seconds, and finished with raw garlic. The croquetas, balls of salted cod, are deep-fried. The baby squid are thrown onto a very hot sauté pan and swell on contact, inflate like balloons, and release a puddle of oceanness, which you swirl, reduce, and swirl some more; at the very end, you drop in a handful of baby rice beans to soak up the liquid: another sea juice–starch composition, a fundamental food of the globe. This, Andy said, would be the basis of his menu.

  “Dude,” Mario said, having accompanied Andy to Barcelona, “you’ve got a home run.”

  But did he?

  Back in New York, Joe inspected Andy’s venue: “This is one fucking small place.” He didn’t know how Andy could make money; there wasn’t the room to seat enough people to run a business; and Andy, panicking, drew a map on a napkin proving you could seat forty-two people—“Seven more than Pó!”—provided you enforced a rule of no standing, made everyone wait somewhere else (perhaps in the abandoned coffee shop next door—maybe it, too, could be rented), allowed no one near the bar (otherwise dinner would come to a trafficky rush-hour stop), and ordered tables with a drawer underneath to stash the water glasses (to keep them from getting knocked over). Andy did the calculation: if he could make nine thousand dollars a day (two thousand more than Pó), he’d probably break even. That is, if he filled up every night, he’d be fine. Realistic?

  Which raised the next concern: Could Andy cook?

  I was invited along as a member of a team of tasters informally assigned the task of finding out. Eight people (Mario, Joe, some friends) showed up to eat from the first menu Andy had done in his life.

  Andy was a wreck. “I have big-day jitters.” For years, he had been preparing Mario’s menu. Now he was cooking his own. “What if it sucks? What if I make all this food, and no one shows up to eat it?” The restaurant was budgeted to cost two hundred thousand dollars, and Andy, to s
ecure a twenty percent stake, had borrowed from his Aunt Doris and Uncle Floyd. He hadn’t been sleeping. He’d lost weight—forty pounds so far. He had a limp—he’d been on all fours using an acid to clean his floor and hadn’t noticed he’d incinerated the muscle tissue of his knees. Plus, his wife was days away from giving birth. Nearly two decades had passed since that night in Santa Barbara, and all the subsequent effort—the four years at the CIA, the apprenticing, the training, the long stint of doing his time—had come down to one moment.

  Andy later showed me Mario’s report card of the day, an item-by-item response to every dish, graded on a scale of one to ten, a glimpse of two chefs’ talking to each other in code. The cockscombs (my first rooster’s crest—the texture is vividly squishy) were ten out of ten, but Mario suggested a drizzle of olive oil and serving them on a room-temperature plate. (I read that note and thought—cockscombs! A room-temperature plate! Why didn’t I think of that?) The bacalao croquetas—“Perfect.” The orange aioli that Andy devised to accompany it—“Perfect.” The quail—“Perfect, perfect!!” (a “10” underlined twice). The oxtail—almost perfect, but “make sure you degrease the pan before you reheat the oxtails.” (And Andy looked at the note and said, “Silly me, I knew to degrease the pan—what’s wrong with me?” and I nodded sagely and thought: What’s he talking about?) The calamari—“Almost perfect, but better if topped with lemon zest and parsley. The lamb chops—perfect, but followed by a one-word note, “underneath?” which I knew to be Mario’s shorthand for splashing the plate first with a secret sauce (at Babbo, the disguised, never-mentioned-on-the-menu red-hot-chili-red-pepper yogurt) to mix with the juices of the meat: a trick, and not in the spirit of the “look-Ma-no-hands” Andy approach and probably some spicy, salty, sweety thing to get the saliva glands all worked up and full of spit. Andy would ignore the suggestion; he was not going to put anything underneath his lamb chops: it was not in the style of his restaurant, he was now his own chef, and if he wished not to mess with your saliva glands then that was his entitlement.