by Bill Buford
Outside of Italy, you see “ravioli” more than “tortelli,” but the two words seem to have been used interchangeably for centuries. Technically, ravioli are what goes inside (it’s still possible to get ravioli nudi—naked ravioli—which look like little balls of filling, as though the chef that day had run out of flour), and tortelli are the casing. Tortelli are the diminutive of torte—small torts or tarts—and a torta is one of the oldest food preparations on the Italian peninsula. In the Middle Ages, the word described nothing more than a container of dough with something inside, probably more like a savory pie or tart than a pasta, although it appears to have meant both a savory pie and a pasta. Recipes for making it appear in the Liber de coquina, the first known Italian cookbook, written at the end of the thirteenth century. (Miriam’s other pasta, the tortellini, are much smaller—they’re the diminutive of tortelli—and date from a later time, probably the early Renaissance, a specialty of Bologna. According to the most common story of their origins, they were invented by a clever baker to look like the navel of a married woman he was having an affair with—done with such verisimilitude that the likeness was identified by the unhappy husband.)
At the time, my research was informal and limited because, although I was learning Italian (I’d been dutifully attending a two-hour Saturday-morning class at the Scuola Italiana in Greenwich Village, conjugating my verbs with flash cards on the subway), I couldn’t read it, and most of the early Italian food books haven’t been translated into English, except for one, possibly the most important, certainly the most illuminating. (Like Miriam’s pasta, this, too, changed my life in another one of those small but enduring ways.) The text, written in Latin, was inspired by a fifteenth-century chef known as Maestro Martino and was called De honesta voluptate et valitudine, “On honest pleasures and good health.” Tellingly, it had been translated into English only recently, even though, since its publication in the fifteenth century, it had rapidly appeared in almost every other European language and become one of the Continent’s first international best sellers. It was also the most influential book on cooking for two centuries.
The author was not a chef but a librarian at the Vatican, a Lombard known as Platina, a scholar, a humanist (his other works include a biography of the popes, a treatise on war and one on peace, one on love and one against it), and an eater. In 1463, a year after he arrived in Rome, at the age of forty-one, he was invited by Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan, a legendary gourmand, to escape a hot summer in the city and go to the cardinal’s hilltop retreat in Albano, southeast of Rome. Maestro Martino was the cardinal’s cook.
The Maestro, born near Lake Como, was also a native of Lombardy and, like Platina, had only just arrived in Rome (from Milan, where the chef had cooked for the nobles of the city). The two men, probably the same age, established an immediate rapport. For Martino, Platina appears to have been one of the first non-chefs to appreciate a great chef’s talents. For Platina, the Maestro’s preparations were a revelation—the first time he’d witnessed cooking as “art”—and he spent the summer at the Maestro’s side, learning everything he could of this new discipline. His informal study represents, in effect, the first known example of “kitchen trailing” (the lingo for a newcomer following a chef to learn his approach).
The book Platina then wrote is really two books. One is a humanist treatise on nutrition and living well, written in the style of Pliny’s Natural History as a succession of numbered paragraphs (on sleep or salt or figs), each one ending with a salutary observation: that five almonds eaten before drinking protect you from getting drunk; that an occasional portion of porcupine meat reduces bed-wetting; or that “the testicles of younger animals are considered better for you than those of old animals,” except the testicles of roosters, whose testicles are good for you regardless of the age of the bird, especially if served alongside calves’ feet and spices, in the Roman style. Then, halfway through, Platina’s style changes radically. “Oh, immortal gods,” he declares, in the middle of describing a white sauce. “What a cook you bestowed in my friend Martino of Como!” He goes on to extol the Maestro’s eloquence and to insist that, in his cooking, we are witnessing the future: an example of the “modern cooking school,” where ingredients are taken seriously and subjected to “the keenest of discussion.” The rest of the book is given over to the Maestro’s recipes, told in a noticeably different voice—the Maestro’s, I suspect. In hanging around a chef’s kitchen just long enough to steal his recipes, Platina is also illustrating an early example of a modern practice (recipe theft), and, when, four hundred and sixty-four years later, a manuscript of the Maestro’s recipes, written in fifteenth-century Italian, was discovered in a bookshop by an American food writer, it became obvious just how extensively Platina had plagiarized his teacher, deviating from his recipes only in error (leaving out an essential ingredient, say) or to add one of his Pliny-like medical observations, as in his addendum to the Maestro’s recipe for boiled cannabis meatballs (offa cannabina), a dish “to be fled from, for it nourishes badly, arouses squeamishness, generates pain in the stomach and intestines, and dulls the eyes.” (There are several cannabis recipes, a dissonant detail for the modern reader, evoking what would seem to be an anachronistic picture of fifteenth-century stoners loitering in the Vatican Library.)
The Maestro, clearly a gifted chef, was also something of a show-off. When he prepares his blancmange (a sweet, meaty white sauce made from minced capon breast and almond milk), he suggests dividing it in two and adding egg yolk and saffron to one part, so you can then serve two parts together, a swirl of white and bright yellow. (I read this and thought: So Marco Pierre White’s extravagant basil-and-beurre-blanc two-sauce French concoction originated in Italy after all.) On occasion, the Maestro’s flashiness was too much for Platina. He dismisses the Maestro’s roasted eggs, for instance, as a “stupid concoction, one of the absurdities and games of cooks.” (The Maestro delicately pokes a needle through the shell of a raw egg and suspends it over the fire, turning it gently, as though the needle were a spit, until the egg is ready to eat.) There was also the Maestro’s use of meat to fill his torta, which was controversial, French, and inexcusably pretentious: typical, Platina says, of “the pampered tastes of our contemporaries”—the reference is to the Renaissance practice of grand feasts—when “we are all so given over to gullet and stomach” that people now want their torta made from meat and “birds and whatever fowl they wish, not from vegetables. They are revolted by chard, squash, turnip, parsnip, borage—their native fare.”
The hissy digression intrigued me. For Platina, there was already a traditional way of doing things. Your torta and your tortelli were filled with vegetables. That’s how things were done. To be fair to the Maestro, most of his recipes are the established ones—established, that is, in 1465. The Maestro’s torta di zucca, for instance, calls for grated pumpkin, boiled in milk and mixed with parmigiano, plus a little ginger, cinnamon, and saffron—the familiar spices of the Renaissance. Traditional then, and traditional still: this (minus the Renaissance flavorings) was what Miriam served to me in her tortelli di zucca. In fact, the impression I drew from the Maestro’s recipes—and the eerie delight I got from reading them—was not only of difference (the exotic spices, the fascination with sugar, the pot suspended over a fire because there was no oven) but of overwhelming continuity. Now, when I look back at my time at La Buca, I am astonished by what I understand: versions of every dish I ate there can be found in Platina’s book.
The tripe: from the Maestro, I learn that the trick is to cook it twice (Miriam’s trick as well), not to use salt during the first cooking (which makes it tough), and to add a pork bone (“It will be tastier”).
I ate eel. (I returned to La Buca in the evening; people had driven miles for the eel.) For the Maestro, an eel is cooked either on a spit or by braising, when it is then served with parsley and vinegar—which was Miriam’s preparation, too.
The frog legs were made in the same way by bo
th Miriam and the Maestro—he rolls his in grain, she rolls hers in bread crumbs, and then both chefs fry them in olive oil. But the Maestro’s more colorful presentation, served with a salsa verde (salsa viridi) and fennel pollen (ac feniculi floribus)—the yellow-green fennel pollen on the bright green sauce—was distinguished by what I now recognize to be his greater visual flair.
“I am not creative,” Miriam told me. “That’s not what I do. What I do is what has been handed down to me. For ten generations—and maybe longer, I can’t tell, there are no records—we’ve been cooking for people who weren’t hungry.” Her ancestors learned how to prepare the food she continues to serve in the medieval kitchens of the local nobles. The Maestro’s first kitchens—the medieval kitchens of the nobles of Milan—were not far away on the culinary map. Coincidence?
12
I NEEDED TO LEARN pasta. I longed to join a tradition that had already been established and codified by the time a chef had come to Rome from Milan in the 1460s. Besides, I didn’t understand how something so simple (flour, water, usually an egg, a pot of boiling water) could be so different in different hands. And by “pasta” I now meant the soft, handmade kind, like Miriam’s, what in Italy is called pasta fresca—fresh pasta. Dried pasta, pastasciutta, now seemed to me an industrial food, made by a machine—not the real thing.
I went back to Babbo. I had been away for three months. “Mario,” I said. “I want to work the pasta station.”
“You can’t,” he said. “Look at you. You physically can’t do it. You’re in your late forties. You’re too old. You have to be in your twenties. It’s too fast—you no longer have the mind for it.” And this same mind, thus warned, sank momentarily into a Shakespearean despair, recognizing the limits of mortality and despondently surveying the many things in life that were now, owing to its age, definitively beyond its capacities, like higher mathematics or the infinitesimal subtleties of molecular biology, until I stopped myself. The issue was boiling food in hot water. How difficult was that going to be? And Mario relented. Which wasn’t the same as his agreeing: his last words were “Okay. I warned you”—not exactly an enthusiastic endorsement.
In the time I’d been away, Nick Anderer, the former pasta guy, had gone to Italy and returned. I was in the dining room when Mario and Gina were talking about him. Nick had grown lonely and missed his girlfriend. “He fucked up,” Mario said. “He will never have a chance like this. He’s just pissed away his future.”
“But he did it for love,” Gina said.
“Love? What the fuck are you talking about?”
I located Nick, now a line cook during the day at another Manhattan restaurant. (“Unbelievable,” Mario said when I told him. “All that promise and he’s doing lunches?”) Nick had always wanted to be based in Rome and cook according to the fresh-fresh-ingredients philosophy of southern Italy, but hadn’t saved enough money to work for nothing and couldn’t find a restaurant in Rome that would pay him. He ended up in Milan, at a risotto station at San Giorgio e il Drago (Saint George and the Dragon). In the six months he was there, he mastered risotto. (“The received wisdom is, you don’t let your rice stick to the bottom, but in fact that’s how you make a good risotto. You want that rustic grinding of the rice against the pan, so that the grains almost burn and break up, releasing the starch. The point is to get out the starch.”) But Milan was a modern city, rainy and cold, and very lonely.
Memo had left Babbo. Restaurant Associates, one of the largest catering corporations in America, had offered him a job as executive chef at Naples 45, a busy pizza-and-pasta place next to Grand Central Terminal, frequented mainly by lunchtime office workers. At Babbo, Memo had grown resentful. He’d taken to criticizing the food openly, which, in the military hierarchy of a kitchen, was a profound taboo. “These stuffed guinea-hen legs,” he’d said to me once, removing one from the oven with his tongs as though it were a locust carcass and flinging it onto a counter. “This is not three-star cooking. It’s a disgrace.” (Were they really so bad? I objected silently. They’d been boned and stuffed with bread crumbs, orange zest, and parsley, which I knew because I’d made them.) “Or this poor excuse for a pizza. Look at that thing,” Memo said, pointing to a flattop pizza that a pantry chef was making. Mario had been testing the preparation for the pizzeria, which now had a venue, One Fifth Avenue. The address had been cursed by so many failed restaurants that Mario and Joe decided to gut the space and name it after the cross street, which was 8th. Otto is “eight” in Italian. Otto was going to open in September: then, October; then, November. Now no one had any idea. A curse, it turned out, wasn’t so easy to shake off.
“I don’t know what that thing is, but whatever it is, it’s not a pizza.” The whole kitchen had gone quiet. “You guys are to blame,” Memo said, suddenly very angry. “You writers and journalists, you media types, fawning all over Molto Mario. He believes it all. He thinks that everything he touches turns to gold. You haven’t noticed he can’t cook anymore.”
But when I met Memo for lunch at his new restaurant, he said I’d misunderstood. Sure, there were disappointing dishes, but Mario was actually a great chef. “I’d work with him again in a heartbeat. What I couldn’t tolerate was Andy. He was the one who didn’t know how to cook. He can run a place well enough, but a chef who doesn’t know how to cook can’t tell you how to fix a dish. That’s unacceptable.” There had also been the interminable question of Andy’s leaving to open a Spanish restaurant. “Mario said, ‘When Andy leaves, his job is yours.’ Andy was supposed to leave, and he was supposed to leave, and he was supposed to leave, and then, inexplicably, all the talk was about Otto.”
Memo’s executive chef job came with a big salary (“A hundred and twenty thousand a year—more than Andy was making, which Mario couldn’t match because he’s a cheap bastard”). But he missed Babbo. “Its flaws are its perfections—it’s like a jigsaw, so small that everything is in reach, so intimate that you know the smell of each person’s farts.” He’d wept when he left. Now he understands that “Babbo’s serious approach to dining” is actually quite rare.
“Here, I can’t do what Mario calls the conceptual dishes. One day, I made a special: sliced steak served on a caponata. It didn’t sell. Why? No one knew what a caponata was. For Valentine’s Day, I prepared a wood-oven-roasted lobster on a lemon risotto. I had thirty-five lobsters. I didn’t sell one. Valentine’s Day was dead. The busiest day in New York, but, for that special meal, everyone went somewhere else. That night, I cleaned the lobsters myself. I cracked the claws with my bare hands. All thirty-five. I wanted my hands to hurt. I wanted them to bleed. Then I froze the meat. I’ll make something with it later.”
With Memo’s going, Frankie became head sous-chef. Tony Liu, the other experienced person in the kitchen, was made the second sous-chef.
Dominic was gone. He’d been hired to run an Italian-American restaurant in the Bronx. (“Go figure,” Mario said, still mystified. “Who knew he’d be able to run a restaurant?”)
Mark Barrett, my grill coach, was now at the pasta station. He’d lost weight, standing in steam for eight hours. He’d also had corrective eye surgery, no longer wore glasses, and let his hair grow out, which curled prettily in the dampness of his corner. By now, he’d worked every station in the kitchen and had a swagger of sorts, arising out of this new confidence. When a woman entered the kitchen—a new waitress, say, or a stranger making a delivery—he walked over and asked for her phone number. “Hi, I’m Mark, are you married, and would you like to have dinner on Thursday?” The kitchen’s long hours no longer bothered him. He’d become a natural inhabitant of nocturnal New York, forsaking daylight and enjoying a city without traffic or crowds, organized around a Lower East Side matrix of late-closing bars and clubs.
TO START, Mario suggested I try my hand at making some pasta in the mornings and teamed me up with Alejandro. (At Babbo, fresh pasta is made during the day, frozen in plastic Baggies, and cooked to order in the evening. In my head, I heard M
iriam’s voice: “Mario Batali is so clever he owns a freezer!”)
Our first task was orecchiette. Orecchiette is a diminutive of orecchio, which means “ear,” and is regarded as one of the easiest pastas to make. The dough is made of nothing but water and flour (semolina, cruder than the all-purpose stuff), and you roll it out by hand until it’s a white tube. You then chop the tube into bite-size segments and crush each one on a ridged piece of wood with your thumb. Like a child’s magic trick, the pasta changes shape under the pressure and when it’s removed it has ridges underneath and is shaped like an ear (unless it’s like the one I peeled off my thumb that first day, in which case the ridges looked like a tic-tac-toe board, because I invariably had to do the thing twice, and wasn’t able to line it up correctly the second time, and the ear was all large and distorted, a floppy flap of dough, more like a cartoon elephant’s ear than a normal ear, because my hands were so clammy from the excitement of my finally making pasta that the damn thing wouldn’t come off my thumb). At the end of the session, Alejandro showed Mario examples of what I’d produced—mine were fatter than normal orecchiette, not squished enough, and verging on mutant—to see if they could even be served that night. Mario examined them. “Oh, they’re okay,” he said and chuckled in a way that meant, “Bill, this is the easiest pasta to make, and yet—”