Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  It was the first day of autumn, and the weather had got hot again. The vineyard workers were coming in for lunch and wouldn’t be back in the afternoon. When grapes overheat, they behave unpredictably, and the practice is to hope for cooler temperatures in the morning. Giovanni was ahead of the others, and most of his sangiovese had been picked. Buckets of it were being dumped into a small truck, with dry ice poured on top to prevent the fruit from stewing. For Giovanni, the grape was another item essential to his Tuscan identity, and his making a wine from it connected him to the soil’s history. “Everyone knows that sangiovese has been here since Roman times,” he told me once. “It’s in the name: sangue, blood, plus Jove. But few people believe the Romans introduced it. We think it had been here already.” Like raising cows, growing sangiovese grapes was, in Giovanni’s view, just another one of the practices that the new tenants always appropriated: that, ever since these valleys have been inhabited, people have been drinking a version of a god’s blood.

  On the far side of the valley was Castello dei Rampolla. There the grapes were the smaller, darker Bordeaux varieties planted by Alceo, another ghostly patriarch, although I couldn’t tell the difference from where I stood. I saw only symmetrical leafy green lines, with slumping, tired people walking up the hill between them. My wife and I had recently been received by Alceo’s daughter, Maurizia—wispy, evanescent, in her late forties, with a Bohemian’s baggy dress sense and an intellectual’s no-nonsense manner, living with her brother in the windy castello. She normally refused visitors and rarely ventured out, even to promote her own wine, drinking it only “every now and then, when in Florence, perhaps,” professing to like its Bordeaux perfume more than its taste. “At our family meals,” she confessed, “we preferred milk.” Unlike every other winemaker in Chianti, she hadn’t been worried by the brutal summer (her grapes will do well or they won’t), because she was philosophically indifferent to the extremes of weather (“Let nature do what nature does”). She harvested by phases of the moon, unless instructed by certain configurations of the stars, and rejected any practice that seemed too obviously modern: like the use of refrigeration or pumps or air-conditioning or filtering, although one night my wife and I were convinced that, looking across the valley at the castello, we spotted electric lights. At the end of our visit, Maurizia took us into the family’s famous cellar, where wines have completed their fermentation for more than 1,100 years. The cellar, built in the 900s, was the same age as the church.

  I have been toying with a theory, one being played out now in this valley. It had originally been put in my mind by Enrico, the Maestro’s son. Enrico occasionally stopped by the butcher shop, but I never had a conversation with him until we attended an event in Montaperti, not far from Siena, to celebrate the anniversary of a battle fought there on September 4th, 1260. Until the advent of firearms, it ranked as one of the Italian peninsula’s most devastating days of war. Ten thousand Florentines were killed, one by one, a detail that Dario relishes with a butcher’s enthusiasm for knives. Dario was the guest of honor. The event featured a lot of Dante, recited in Dario’s gaslight, vaudeville manner to uproarious applause. There was also a performance by one of the last practitioners of a mournful, singsongy troubadour-like bellowing. The bellower was from Pistoia and pretended to make it up as he went along: a “spontaneous” two-line rhyme, followed by a new couplet and then the original rhyme. The structure was something like this:

  I am an old man who is very boring,

  I know you know this because you’re snoring,

  What can I do? This is my medium,

  Which seems like a poem but is actually tedium,

  Besides, this is no game, with lots of scoring,

  Just a drunk old man who is very, very boring.

  The evening was interminable and I remember little about it, except for a brief exchange with Enrico about his olive oil. I wanted to know why it was so good.

  “There are two reasons,” Enrico said. “When I pick and what I pick. Nothing else matters.”

  Enrico begins his harvest in September, when common sense suggests that your trees should be left alone. In September, the olives are green and hard. Most people pick in late November or December. “Ten to twelve weeks later, the olives are swollen and full of juice. The more juice you get, the more oil you can bottle, the more money you make,” Enrico said. “But for me, the olive is bloated. It is pulpy and full of water.” The fruit is like “mush,” his father’s word. “As a result, the oil is thin. You have volume, but no intensity. For me, intensity is everything. For me, less is more. My oil is very, very intense.”

  Enrico has a thousand trees, but he picks only half of them. “The others are too young.” He sells off the olives from the younger trees or lets them fall and rot, but his tone said that only a contemptuous sniveling snail of a human being, without pride or dignity, and not a true Tuscan, would make oil from a young tree. “I’m not making oil to make money,” Enrico said.

  (I wonder if I need to stop here and acknowledge that exchanges of this sort were becoming fairly familiar. I quote Enrico as though he were a perfectly normal human being. But occasionally, as I nodded in a socially affirmative way, saying nothing, patiently listening to sentiments of this kind—like, “I’m not interested in bizzzness,” or “I don’t care if the weather ruins my grapes” or “I do this only for the smell”—I had to hit an imaginary pause button, as I’ve just done now, and admit to myself that there was nothing normal about what I was hearing. Sometimes when I was having these pause-button-like reflections, I wondered what made these people into hill-poet freaks. Was it not eating enough vegetables when children? An excess of protein? I wanted to scream: Hey, you there, Enrico! Don’t you like island holidays and flat-screen televisions? Don’t you like money?)

  Enrico’s olive oil, I can testify, is very good, but there are a lot of good olive oils, made by other nutty earth artists with no interest in money, obsessed with smell, looking over their shoulders to make sure they’re the first on their mountain to pick their greenly pungent unripe olives, squeezing the tiniest amount of intense juice from their oldest trees. The viscous, gold-green liquid that dribbles out from their stone-like fruit is unlike any other oil I have tasted, and the makers chauvinistically boast that none of it leaves Italy.

  For me, these oils have qualities that you also find in the region’s good wines (and there are plenty of good wines—in Chianti, it’s hard to go to bed sober). Giovanni’s best bottling (his Flacianello, named after the Roman village by the old church) is made from old, gnarly, tree trunk–sized, unproductive vines. Like old olive trees, old vines make less fruit, but the grapes produced by them have a grapiness (again that intensity) that you don’t get from younger vines. Giovanni’s riserva is very good, but for me the olive oil is the precious thing. Unlike an expensive bottle of wine, a good oil doesn’t improve with age. It is most vibrant just after the olives are crushed. Then its vibrancy dissipates, ineluctably, minute by minute, until it is gone: evanescent, like a season.

  My theory is one of smallness. Smallness is now my measure: a variation on all the phrases I’d be hearing, like the Maestro’s “it’s not in the breed but the breeding” or Enrico’s “less is more.” As theories go, mine is pretty crude. Small food—good. Big food—bad. For me, the language we use to talk about modern food isn’t quite accurate or at least doesn’t account for how this Italian valley has taught me to think. The metaphor is usually one of speed: fast food has ruined our culture; slow food will save it (and is the rallying manifesto for the movement of the same name, based in Bra, in northern Italy). You see the metaphor’s appeal. But it obscures a fundamental problem, which has little to do with speed and everything to do with size. Fast food did not ruin our culture. The problem was already in place, systemic in fact, and began the moment food was treated like an inanimate object—like any other commodity—that could be manufactured in increasing numbers to satisfy a market. In effect, the two essential playe
rs in the food chain (those who make the food and those who buy it) swapped roles. One moment the producer (the guy who knew his cows or the woman who prepared culatello only in January or the old young man who picks his olives in September) determined what was available and how it was made. The next moment it was the consumer. The Maestro blames the supermarkets, but the supermarkets are just a symptom. (Or, to invoke a familiar piece of retail philosophy: the world changed when the food business agreed that the customer was right, when, as we all know, the customer is actually—well, not always right.) What happened in the food business has occurred in every aspect of modern life, and the change has produced many benefits. I like island holidays and flat-screen televisions and have no argument with global market economics, except in this respect—in what it has done to food.

  The watery eggs Gianni bought when he fell asleep after lunch: big food. Granny’s eggs sold under the counter to Panzano regulars: small food. The pig I brought home on my scooter: small food, even if it was in such big food quantities I couldn’t finish it. A ham from a chemically treated animal that has spent its life indoors in a scientifically controlled no-movement pen (every cut perfectly identical as though made by a machine): big food. The so-called ricotta in a supermarket: big food, don’t touch it. The ricotta in Lou di Palo’s shop in New York’s Little Italy—cheaper than the supermarket stuff, but because Lou is in the back making it and not at the counter serving you’ll have to wait an hour before you get any: small food. (Even in New York there are a few people in no hurry because you’re just a customer and therefore a dickhead.) Actually, Lou’s cheese is both small food and slow food; in fact, very, very slow food. But these are exceptions.

  Italians have a word, casalinga, homemade, although its primary sense is “made by hand.” My theory is just a variant of casalinga. (Small food: by hand and therefore precious, hard to find. Big food: from a factory and therefore cheap, abundant.) Just about every preparation I learned in Italy was handmade and involved my learning how to use my own hands differently. My hands were trained to roll out dough, to use a knife to break down a thigh, to make sausage or lardo or polpettone. With some techniques, I had to make my hands small, like Betta’s. With others, I made them big, like the Maestro’s. The hands, Dario says, are everything. With them, cooks express themselves, like artists. With them, they make food that people use their hands to eat. With the hands, Dario passes on to me what he learned from his father. With the hands, Betta gives me her aunts. The hands of Miriam’s mother, her grandmothers. The hands of Dario’s grandfather, the great-grandfather he never met, except indirectly, in what was passed on through his hands.

  Miriam, who can’t get a pastina to roll out the dough, no longer makes handmade pasta. When her daughter takes over, will she roll it out by hand? In Tuscany, you can’t get the meat at the heart of the region’s cooking, so Dario and the Maestro found a small farm that reproduces the intensity of flavor they grew up with. How long will that taste memory last? The Maestro will die. Dario will die. I will die. The memory will die. Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

  I HAD SOUGHT out the old church because I knew I’d be leaving. I felt I had probably learned enough, finally, although I didn’t know how to articulate what I had learned until I visited the butcher shop for the last time. By now, Dario was like a brother, and he wasn’t going to be easy to leave. And the Maestro?

  I gave myself a purpose: I was going to give the Maestro my steel—the thing you sharpen your knife against. It was an inside joke. The Maestro sharpens his knife five hundred times a day. It was the rhythm of his labor. His knife was very sharp. But his steel was very dull, and at some point he had taken to using mine: he hadn’t asked, he’d just taken it. I was flattered by this. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was a way of showing trust: yes, you’re making a mess of everything, but it’s going to be okay.

  “Maestro. Here. For your knives.” I shoved the steel in his direction.

  He stared at it for a long time. When he looked up, the rims around his eyes had welled up with tears. I stuttered pathetically, thinking: How do I say good-bye to these people? I will never leave.

  Then he exploded. “No!” he said. That familiar injunction. I’d heard it so many times. “No. I cannot take this steel. It would not be correct.” He opened his knife drawer. “It goes here,” he said, “until you return.”

  (That’s how you leave: by never saying good-bye.)

  And I learned that: to return. I came back the following year and the year after that. I hope to return every year (after all, I may never have the chance to learn so much), until I have no one to return to.

  DINNER WITH MARIO

  The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a prizefighter’s hours on the road. (I have read that the late French professional gourmand Maurice Curnonsky ate but one meal a day—dinner. But that was late in his life, and I have always suspected his attainments anyway; so many mediocre witticisms are attributed to him that he could not have had much time for eating.) A good appetite gives an eater room to turn around in.

  —A. J. LIEBLING, Between Meals

  NEW YORK, AUGUST 1998. The New York Times review that awarded Babbo its three stars, written by the paper’s restaurant critic, Ruth Reichl, was variations on the theme that here, at last, was a place prepared to take risks. The service was described as attentive but eccentric. Reichl was particularly taken by Joe’s table-breadcrumb removal technique, using a spoon, which he defended by saying that this was how crumbs were dealt with in Italy and, besides, “I like the way it looks.” The wine list was uncompromisingly Italian. “Try it and if you still don’t want it,” Mario was quoted as saying, advocating a bottle by an unknown maker, “I’ll drink it myself.” And the menu was “loaded with dishes that Americans are not supposed to like” (Reichl cited headcheese, octopus, beef cheeks, lamb’s tongue, and calf brains). Her favorite dish was a “spicy, robust” squid preparation called a “Two-minute calamari, Sicilian lifeguard style.” “Eating it, I always imagine myself on a wind-swept beach in Sicily,” Reichl wrote—an elegant adverbial touch: the critic not only liked the food but was already a regular.

  She had also been a target. When Reichl had showed up, she wasn’t to know how dedicatedly everyone had been preparing for her. Until her review was published, the restaurant’s second floor was closed; the bar accepted no more than six people; the maximum seating was restricted to eleven tables; and, by the end of the night, there were no more than fifty covers. (Today, Babbo does as many as three hundred and fifty.) When there, Reichl had the most experienced waiter, plus a backup waiter, a floor manager, and two runners. The music was either calculatedly purposeful—on Reichl’s first visit, a selection of Bob Marley tunes, to whom Mario had heard she was particularly partial—or else studiously atmospheric: a languid compilation of opera arias, say (and all of it very different from what you’d hear now, a motley miscellany, circa Rutgers class of ’82, of Moby, the Jayhawks, Squeeze, R.E.M., and the early Stones, intended solely to entertain the proprietor chef while he’s knocking back glasses of white wine at the bar, the high-volume message being that this is my house and I’ll play what I want to).

  All in all, the strategies built round Reichl’s visit call to mind a coach preparing for a big game. They also created an illusion of dining room serenity and a genuine serenity in the kitchen. Was her food different as well? There is no way of knowing, but its preparation was certainly more orderly than the normal high-stress frenzy. Elisa remembers that the whole restaurant (she was then making the starters) was in a condition of constan
t dress rehearsal—waiting for Ruth. Joe was in the front, overseeing the service. Mario was in the kitchen, whispering every order and inspecting it before it went out. Even Andy was cooking. He was working the grill and wasn’t allowed to expedite until after Reichl’s review.

  Reichl came to Babbo five times and ate everything on offer. The Times encourages its critics to make an effort at being anonymous. Reichl, with a head of black hair, was known to wear a blond wig and wouldn’t have made the reservation under her own name. But the practical truth is that a critic, after only a handful of reviews, is spotted by the people who worry about this sort of thing. Mario knew she’d be there long before she arrived.

  The importance attached to the review now seems exaggerated but was a symptom of the ambitions of the new restaurant: Mario and Joe wanted those three stars. (Before Otto opened, they went through a similar drill; the hope then was for a more modest two stars, which it duly received, a more than honorable laurel for a pizza joint.) But I was mystified by the stories—the stratagems, the clandestine preparations—and asked Mario if, knowing a critic was in the house, he could make the meal better than what otherwise might be served. Wasn’t the point of the kitchen consistency—a dish was a dish was a dish?

  “Trust me,” he said. “Our knowing makes a difference.”

  Reichl left the Times in 1999 and was replaced by William Grimes, who was the critic for the next five years. (Grimes gave Otto its two stars.) At the beginning of Grimes’s tenure, Mario was convinced that Babbo would be reappraised. The worry informed that first instruction on my first day: be prepared—the critics will be back. Mario never mentioned the concern again. Instead it became Frankie’s paranoiac refrain (the you-guys-are-doing-this-deliberately-so-that-Babbo-will-lose-its-three-stars-and-I’ll-be-fucking-fired refrain). When Grimes left, the spot was filled by Amanda Hesser, an accomplished food journalist and, it seemed, a friend of the Batali-Bastianich approach. I didn’t know there was a unifying methodology, but Mario seemed to believe in one: “She loves us,” he told me one day, citing her enthusiasm for Lupa, their Roman-inspired trattoria not far from Babbo, and the implication was that since she liked Lupa she’d like everything else. But Hesser didn’t take up the position permanently; it remained unfilled for another five months.