The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  Keller began cooking mainly because his mother—who ran restaurants but whose culinary genes started and stopped at “spaghetti and onions tossed with cottage cheese”—handed him an apron when her cook got sick. (A few days later, I was pleased to learn that the mother of Judith Jones, the Knopf editor who had brought me Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, and Irene Kuo, was no better at the stove than mine or Keller’s; she owned one copy of Fannie Farmer, and had a bluestocking’s horror of garlic.) Keller had never really read a cookbook before he drove to Narragansett, hoping to find a job that would float him through a season of America’s Cup partying in Newport. He met his mentor, Roland Henin, on Narragansett Beach, and he says that what he admired most about Henin then was less his stock reductions than the fact that “he was six foot four, French, in his thirties, and had a great-looking girlfriend and his own jeep.”

  Jacques Lameloise, the Burgundian chef, tells a French provincial version of the same story. He started cooking only because his older brother, who was expected to take over the family restaurant and its three Michelin stars, got smart and went off to college and was soon running a business of seven hundred people. Jacques, however, hated school. What he liked was hanging around Chagny and playing soccer, and so, faute de mieux, the family consigned him to its famous kitchen. “At first I cooked like I played foot,” he told me when I stopped at Lameloise, in June, to pick up his cookbook and treat myself to his poitrine de pigeonneau rôtie à l’émiettée de truffes, parmentier de béatilles—something I wouldn’t dream of attempting myself, though of course I have the recipe. “There was no sacred flame. It was simply a matter of learning that if you’re going to cook, it’s better to love cooking and to cook well. This idea of genius is overblown.” Lameloise rarely admits to reading cookbooks. Why would I do that? was the look he gave me when I asked. “What I adore is simple things,” he said. “For lunch at home, I will make a lobster salad, then frog’s legs, sautéed the way my father made them, then a côte de boeuf, then a crème caramel. Simple!”

  When I saw Frank Stitt, the Birmingham restaurateur who wrote the wonderful cookbook Southern Table, he told me that his recipe for squab—my favorite, with grits and a bourbon red-eye gravy—was “inspired” by eating at local diners where tired truckers would stop for a wake-up meal drenched in ham fat and coffee dregs. “It’s the playful takeoffs I do best,” he said when I told him how much I loved that recipe, if not those last few minutes at the stove, known in the trade as “the assembly,” when everything is supposed to come together. Stitt’s first good cookbook was Richard Olney’s Simple French Food, and he bought it while he was studying philosophy at Berkeley and volunteering in Alice Waters’s kitchen at Chez Panisse. A few days later, he bought his second Olney, and after that it seemed quite reasonable to call his parents in Birmingham to say he was quitting school in the second semester of his senior year to cook. Eventually he went to Provence to work with Olney, who was famously misogynistic and fired Stitt after his girlfriend “started dropping in with a suitcase.” Today Stitt reads food histories and old cookbooks. Charleston Receipts. The old Delmonico’s cookbook. Compilations of New Orleans recipes from the nineteenth century. Not that he keeps them at his restaurants, though he will sometimes cut out a picture from one of Alain Ducasse’s cookbooks—“things like how to cut a lemon”—and show it to his staff. “Remember, most of my staff have never eaten in a great restaurant,” he told me. “So I’m more like a coach to them, or a team leader. I go to the market, see the food, and I click in. The dish comes to me, like a thought to an idiot savant, and I show them how to make it. I am totally unlike, say, Ferran Adrià at elBulli”—Adrià being the Spanish chef with the gadget that turns everything to foam, and whose own cookbook, which comes with a CD, will set you back $350, plus the price of a laptop for the kitchen.

  I divide my cookbooks into two categories: the ones I’m not worried about getting dirty—about spilling sauce or spattering fat on the best pages—and the ones like Keller’s, which I tend to think of as coffee-table books, not only because of their size and their gloss and their four-color illustrations but because they seem to have replaced art books as the status offerings you find casually stacked in front of the couch in Manhattan living rooms. I don’t keep cookbooks in the living room, but I treat them cautiously, like a new silk shirt that hangs in the closet for a month before I give in, risk the inevitable spot, and actually put it on. It took me at least a month, more like two, to move Keller onto my kitchen counter, ready for its first splotch and for the careless company of the books I think of as my workhorse cookbooks—homely, tattered affairs with awkward drawings of hands folding ravioli and boning capons.

  In Paris this summer, I visited the French-cookbook historians Mary and Philip Hyman, who were hard at work on an Oxford Companion to French Food, and learned that there was nothing new about coffee-table cookbooks. The Hymans had shown me a few of the sixteenth-century workhorses from their collection—recipes lifted from the court classics and sold by street peddlers as soon as there were customers literate enough to read them—and those books were plain little things, like penny dreadfuls, no bigger than four or five inches, that could be carried home in a pocket or a small purse. Then they showed me the books they called the “here’s what’s happening at the table where you’ll never be allowed to sit” cookbooks—the ones that probably never saw a kitchen and lived in the libraries of the new rich, gold-tooled and bound in Moroccan leather, alongside the Virgil and the Voltaire and the folders of Veronese prints and the first editions of Diderot’s encyclopedia. There was Taillevent’s Le Viandier, written in the fourteenth century for Charles V and considered by the French to be the first major cookbook in Europe since Apicius; and La Varenne’s seventeenth-century Le Cuisinier François, which according to the Hymans marked the beginning of modern cooking; and Vincent La Chapelle’s eighteenth-century Le Cuisinier Moderne, in five volumes, written with a certain amount of borrowing from other chefs and filled with engravings of spectacular serving dishes and foldouts of table settings for a hundred guests.

  There wasn’t a woman among the writing royal chefs, which may be why none of their books looked used. But by the nineteenth century, when many of those chefs had been reduced to opening restaurants or cooking family dinners in the kitchens of the bourgeoisie, some of them looked to the future and took to writing profitable, practical cookbooks—cookbooks for housewives—although their shame was such that they often published under women’s names. Hence the irresistible Tabitha Tickletooth, an “Englishwoman” whose book was published under the title The Dinner Question, or How to Dine Well and Economically. (“Economically” was not a word likely to burnish the reputation of a male chef de cuisine, moonlighting from a precarious job at an English castle.) The women who actually did write cookbooks then were not important chefs. I like to think of those women as more like me: women who read cookbooks and learned to cook that way. The Americans among them often simply collected recipes from European books and translated them, adding a bit of cautionary down-home commentary. I own a tiny edition of Miss Leslie’s Domestic French Cookery, which was published in Philadelphia in 1832 and stayed in print for the next quarter century, and which I cherish for its recipe for oyster stuffing and its maidenly shudder at the voluptuary French practice of fattening geese.

  Authentic American cooking, in all its regional variety and ethnic influences, really came into its own when women’s groups—book clubs, church groups, suffrage groups, daughters-of-this-or-that groups—started putting together “community cookbooks.” Community cookbooks are a purely American phenomenon. They began to appear during the Civil War, written by housewives, North and South, who contributed their best and hitherto secret recipes, published them locally on a shoestring, and sold them to raise money for the hometown troops. And they outlasted the war by at least a century, because for one thing, everyone covets a recipe so good that generations of your neighbor’s family have refused to
share it, and because for another, they carried the imprimatur of charity and were considered a respectable womanly pursuit—not likely to produce a bonneted Martha Stewart, abandoning hearth and husband for fame and fortune in the big city. (I like to think that Miss Leslie, whose name was Eliza Leslie, assumed her literary “Miss” in order to reassure her readers that she was not sitting at a desk, neglecting some man’s hard-earned household.) Community cookbooks still account for about half the American cookbooks published, though the ones you find in bookstores now are mainly regional or ethnic cookbooks, not charity books, and the women who put them together, and even the women who contribute recipes, usually want to make a few dollars for themselves. And why not? Charity aside, Mrs. Clarence W. Miles, who contributed “tomatoes brown” to the cookbook Maryland’s Way—tomatoes brown are tomatoes stewed for hours in brown sugar, and they make a gooey treat—deserved to be collecting royalties.

  It occurs to me now, sitting in a farmhouse in Umbria, surrounded by thirty new cookbooks recommended by my daughter—a screenwriter and fellow cookbook addict—and wondering when to start dinner, that there is a strong connection between women who write and women who cook and who love recipes. This is something anyone who has read To the Lighthouse knows. It is impossible to follow Mrs. Ramsay through her vegetable garden and into the kitchen for that long braising of the boeuf en daube and doubt that Virginia Woolf read cookbooks, though she was too crafty to say so. It is, however, possible to sit through twenty or thirty of Trollope’s Sunday dinners and never know how the roast got to the table. Henry James never taught me how the Florentines made pasta, Proust never taught me how the cooks in Combray made madeleines, and I don’t remember that Flaubert even mentioned what Emma Bovary made for the doctor on the maid’s day off, let alone how she cooked it. I know how Hemingway grilled the fish he caught, but nothing about how he sauced them or what he did for dessert. I do, however, know what Rachel Samstat cooked in Nora Ephron’s roman à clef Heartburn, because the novel is full of recipes, surely making it the only saga to emerge from Deep Throat Washington whose revelations involve a stove. The list is long. Patrizia Chen’s lovely Italian memoir Rosemary and Bitter Oranges sent me straight to the kitchen with recipes for Livornese fish soup and lemon tea cake. Even Frances Mayes—whose ubiquitous memoir Under the Tuscan Sun has two chapters of recipes—started cooking as a young poet, which may account for some of the poetic license in those recipes; I have yet to read a real Tuscan cookbook or enter a Tuscan kitchen where the olive oil was so often replaced by butter and heavy cream.

  Maybe I am an anxious cook, like the woman who famously botched a recipe for “green onions” that she had taken so literally as to throw away all the white parts of her scallions. Not only do I keep buying cookbooks, I usually cook with three or four of them on my kitchen counter, open to different recipes for the same dish. But that is nothing compared with my psychoanalyst friend J. J. Dayle, who cooks from more than two hundred cookbooks, subscribes to (among other things) Cook’s Illustrated, Saveur, and The Rosengarten Report, and stocks forty kinds of sea salt in his kitchen. J. J. Dayle is not his real name, but it’s the name he is planning to use when he writes his cookbook, so that his patients won’t associate their gentle shrink with the man who refers to a great therapy as “like a great dish—something you know, in the first five minutes, where it’s going.” J.J. once drove down the Mediterranean coast sampling the fish soup in every town, and he describes his own bouillabaisse by crying, “I am Samson Agonistes with my soups! God damn it, I have to wrestle them to the floor.”

  I was quite comforted by J.J.’s quest for the perfect fish soup. It reminded me of my quest for the perfect sauce à l’américaine. Usually I try to avoid quests. Like most cookbook addicts, I buy a book, read it, and if I’m lucky, find a couple of recipes that sound right, and forget the rest. I can always locate those recipes, because my books fall open to the pages I cook from most, and after ten or twenty years they even fall apart at those pages—which I find convenient. My old Joy of Cooking is split at the Bulgarian cucumber soup and again at the fruit preserves; my Craig Claiborne at the Yorkshire pudding; my Silver Palate at the salmon mousse; my “Julia” at the choucroute garnie; my Madhur Jaffrey at the shrimp curry with the best spices. This is something I wait for—the spine of my first River Café cookbook is just beginning to go, at the zucchini soup and at the penne alla carbonara—the way I wait for splotches. (My latest splotches are on the Circassian chicken in Roden’s Picnic and on the boneless chicken breasts with lemon and capers in Southern Table.) But certain recipes elude me, and I go on quests. A few weeks ago, I almost went on a quest for calamari sauce. I had stopped at a small restaurant on the Lago di Garda called Nuovo Ponte, eaten a wonderfully inky pasta with calamari sauce, and asked the chef, Fiorenzo Andreoli, for the recipe. He wasn’t at all surprised. He had once spent two years in San Francisco, working for an old friend with an Italian restaurant, and he said that the thing he remembered most—the one thing that always made him smile when he met an American—was how everyone in the kitchen besides himself and his friend “cooked with his nose in a cookbook.” He told me that his calamari sauce “just came to me when I started cooking, because this is how calamari sauce is made on the Lago di Garda.” A little aglio, a little olio, a little basilico, he said, when I asked if he couldn’t be more precise.

  I don’t usually cook from books in Italy; my garden tells me what to eat and the butcher tells me what he’s got, and I go from there. (Call it a vacation; to me, it’s cold turkey.) But this summer I packed up my new cookbooks and sent them off—and was quite lucky to receive them, inasmuch as they disappeared for ten days and had to be dug out of the customs shed at the Milan airport, where they were held for commercial duty on the ground (roughly translated) that “no one person has that many cookbooks.” I think it was also the exotic titles—Lulu’s Provençal Table, Couscous, Savoring the Spice Coast of India, The Key to Chinese Cooking, Hot Sour Salty Sweet. Italians have no interest in foreign food, and as for their own food—a lot of my new books were Italian—it is considered an insult not only to your mother’s kitchen but to your mother herself to suggest that anyone else’s mother may have cooked better.

  In the event, it was impossible to find any of the things I needed to savor the coast of India or make a proper couscous (for one thing, Umbrians do not eat turnips) or to unlock the door to Chinese cooking. In Italy, it is even impossible to sit down to a Provençal table. The one time I tried—I served braised rabbit on a bed of noodles to some Roman neighbors—they said, “Pasta is for before the meat,” and scraped the noodles off their plates. (On their last visit, they arrived with a new black garbage pail as a house gift.) Italians today are arguably more broad-minded than they were in the fifteenth century, when a food-loving papal secretary named Bartolomeo Sacchi was thrown in jail by Pope Paul II as a “sectarian of Epicurus.” (Under a nicer pope and using the pseudonym Platina, he produced the legendary cookbook De Honesta Voluptate.) But they do not willingly eat anybody else’s food.

  The quest I am on right now is for the perfect-au-feu—which is to say, a pot-au-feu as good as the one I ate this Easter in New York at the house of my friend Susannna Lea. Susanna is an English vegetarian who never cooks, so it stands to reason that she did not have a great recipe for pot-au-feu at her fingertips, or indeed any interest at all in pot-au-feu. But she is also a Paris literary agent married to a French writer, and having moved to New York last fall, they wanted to serve something ur-French at Easter to their American friends. Susanna’s pot-au-feu was in fact a kind of long-distance literary collaboration between three cookbooks she had bought for the occasion—Patricia Wells’s Bistro Cooking, Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook, and Guy Savoy’s Simple French Recipes for the Home Cook—and one of her Paris clients, a novelist named Marc Levy whose first book, a romance involving a lonely architect and a young woman in a coma, sold so many millions of copies that he went out and bought a six-burn
er Gaggenau stove and grill and a couple of Gaggenau ovens and started “reflecting,” as he told me himself a few months later, on reinventing pot-au-feu. His version takes at least two days, and he had walked Susanna through it by telephone, starting early on the morning of Good Friday and ending at noon on Sunday. It was very fussy. It involved not only hours of braising—not to mention steaming vegetables one by one over meat broth; poaching marrow bones wrapped in tinfoil; and making a vinaigrette with riced eggs and capers—but also a hunt for beef cheeks, which are not easy to come by if you live in New York, where the only people who sell them are wholesale butchers and you have to buy them in frozen blocks of thirty pounds. Susanna had to give up on beef cheeks, but even so, the work was worth it. I copied the recipe from the back of an old manuscript envelope by the phone on her kitchen counter. My quest began there.