by Bill Buford
The reverie occurred at the end of Stage One, when I lifted the pan off the flattop and sprinkled it with the thyme. What can I say? I loved this moment. For a few seconds, nothing happened. The leaves were on the hot metal of the pan, taking in the heat. Then, one by one, they swelled, barely perceptibly, and exploded, a string of tiny explosions, like minuscule pieces of herby popcorn. And with each pop there was an aromatic eruption of thyme. I closed my eyes and put my face into the pan, breathing in the exploding herb leaves. I don’t know how long I stood there.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
I opened my eyes. It was Frankie.
“What the fuck are you doing?” He was standing inches from my face. The others were staring at me.
“I like the smell of the popping thyme,” I said weakly. I was expecting scorn or a string of profanities, mockery at the very least. Instead, Frankie seemed surprised and didn’t know quite what to say. His face became soft and puppy-dog-like.
“Oh, well, then,” he said, finally. “That’s all right.” I think he was embarrassed.
IN ALL THESE DISHES was an ingredient you can’t get at home: the restaurant’s pasta water. At the start of the evening, it was perfectly clear—you could see through it to the shiny bottom of the pasta cooker—and very salty. (“Like the sea,” Mario always said, and then reminded you to keep dipping your finger into the boiling water, tasting it and adjusting it, until it evoked a childhood memory of your first trip to the beach, but I never mastered the quick dip or, for that matter, thought of my childhood—only that I’d just burned my finger again.) Midway through the service, the shiny bottom of the pasta cooker disappeared. This was the cloudy phase, about two hours before the muddy one, when the water ceased being normal water and became an increasingly thick vehicle for soluble starch: yucky-sounding (and yucky-looking) but in fact rather wonderful. By the time the water reached this condition it behaved like a sauce thickener, binding the elements and, in effect, flavoring the pasta with the flavor of itself. Even so, there was no escaping the fact that the water the pasta was cooked in at the end of the night was very different from what it had been at, say, six o’clock. (“I would never,” Elisa confessed once, “order a pasta after ten.”) Just how different was evident when you finally had to clean the “bitch,” as the pasta cooker was called when you finally got to know her—my task, and an indication of my position in the hierarchy. Later, it slipped out that, when I wasn’t there, I was known as the “kitchen bitch.” Nice touch, I thought, as I mulled over the relationship between my status and my end-of-the-day responsibility: the kitchen bitch, cleaning the kitchen’s bitch.
For all that, it was a straightforward contraption. After you removed the pasta baskets, it was just two sinks and a large, gas-fired heating element. The difficulty was in what you found at the bottom of the sinks—usually a layered expression of the restaurant’s archaeology, composed of, say, goat cheese (because the tortelloni always leaked), butternut squash (because the lune lost a little as well), and tiny bits of everything else, including shellfish (where did they swim in from?). Also, the cooker was hot—furnace hot. Even when the heating element was turned off, it remained very hot, and the green abrasive “scrubby” that you used to clean it steamed on contact, softened slowly, and eventually started to cook, like a piece of plastic ravioli. It’s not that you get hot, cleaning the bitch; you just don’t cool down. You’re already very hot and have been very hot for many hours. I have never been so hot. It would take hours before my body temperature started to drop. At four in the morning, when I finally went to bed, I continued to radiate heat, my insides a meaty something still cooking, my mind unable to stop the recurrent thought that this was my life: I’d become a sausage.
Why don’t more people use pasta water at home? Sometimes I thought it should be bottled, because there is no way that your home water could ever achieve the starchy viscosity of a restaurant’s. It would be cheap—being liquidy leftovers—and the jar should be very large, probably darkly tinted, like a wine bottle, because there would be no reward in looking too closely at what was floating inside.
The thought also made me curious about the moment in the history of American cooking when efficiency won out over taste and, instead of using a pair of tongs and pulling the spaghetti straight out of the pot, people started using a colander (an evil instrument) and letting all that dense, murky rich “water” rush down the drain. The practice is described in the original, 1931 edition of The Joy of Cooking, in its “Rules for Boiling Spaghetti, Macaroni, Creamettes and Noodles,” along with the even more alarming one of taking your colander full of spaghetti (rather mushy, since you’ve boiled it for an hour) or macaroni (easy to chew, after being boiled for twenty minutes) or creamettes (no longer a supermarket item, alas, but once the essential ingredient in a baked creamette loaf) and rinsing it in cold water—oh, heresy of heresies—just to make sure nothing is clinging to it. I hold the author responsible for the many plates of sauce-heavy spaghetti that, as a feature of my own American childhood, were prepared by my mother, who was born two years after the cookbook was published. To be fair to both my mother and the author, a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce remains an eternal comfort food, even if the meal was not about the pasta. Still, the cultural disregard for the noodle contributed to my ignorance of it. It also contributed to my prejudice about dried pasta, a prejudice that I finally overcame in an epiphany of sorts.
The occasion was an impromptu late-night family meal—two family meals, actually. The first was a gigantic pan of linguine alle vongole (linguine with clams), which Mark was making for the runners and dishwashers (each one took a plate and put a bowl on top to keep it warm, and then hid it behind a pot or underneath a towel—too busy finishing up to eat the food now but too mistrustful of others to leave it out). The second meal was prepared by me, a bowl of steamed cockles for the restaurant manager and wine steward: the executives in charge and entitled, by virtue of their positions, to be served at a table out front.
I’d become curious about the difference between cockles and clams. Historically, cockles are the larger of the two shellfish and found around the Mediterranean. Clams, which proliferate along the New England coast, tend to be everything else. Generally, if you’re perplexed by a shellfish, call it a clam. In practice, the two names are used interchangeably; at Babbo, they were interchangeable, because they were the same shellfish and came neither from the Mediterranean nor from New England but from New Zealand, every Monday and Thursday morning. These New Zealand “cockle-clams” were small, purple, and round, and prized for their uniformity: no variation in shape, no variation in cooking time, which, with your burner on at full blast, was exactly six minutes, a little less than the six minutes and thirty seconds it took to cook the linguine which, it turns out, wasn’t actually linguine, which takes nine minutes, but linguine fine (a thin, faster-cooking cousin). Frankly, I hated both shellfish dishes. The preparations were so fussy: one (“Ling!”) was started with garlic, red onions, and red pepper flakes; the other (“Cock!”) with garlic, red onions, and slices of a fiery green pepper. Green pepper? Red pepper? Do you think you’d taste the difference? One took butter, the other didn’t. One took white wine, the other tomato sauce. One finished with parsley, the other with Thai basil. Why Thai basil? Why does parsley work with New Zealand cockle-clams when they’re called clams and served atop pasta but not when they’re called cockles and served in a bowl without it? And, for that matter, why was I preparing cockles anyway? Where was the pasta? Why? Why? You know why.
By now, I had flash cards for all the restaurant’s preparations and lost a morning memorizing the supposed and, to my mind, wholly contrived differences between Ling and Cock. It wasn’t that I was having trouble remembering which was which—after all, it was the same shellfish in both dishes. I was having trouble doing that instantaneous, unreflected recall required by the pasta station. You got in trouble and fell behind if you switched your pan from your left hand to
your right (it took too much time); you got in trouble if you had to look for your tongs (too much time); you got in trouble if you had to ask or wonder or remember, so you aspired to have everything memorized on such a deep level—like language or the alphabet or numbers—that you never found yourself thinking. Also, frankly, I didn’t get the point of putting shellfish in pasta. You can’t eat the shells, can you? And the eating was all so elaborate. You needed a bib, an extra plate, a finger bowl, an extra napkin, and an extra quantity of vigilance just to make sure that you didn’t stick a shell in your mouth. It seemed a hygienic exercise, like bathing—in any case, not dinner.
I had another realization that night, which arose from my noticing that, when it gets late, the cooking that matters is for the staff and not for the diners who have just straggled in. Around midnight, the kitchen was something of a demilitarized zone, meant to be closed but still serving food, owing to the insistence of the maître d’, John Mainieri, who sometimes accepted late seatings and was openly loathed by members of the kitchen staff as a result: they hissed at his appearance, whistled, and erupted in a braying chorus of posh-sounding “Hallo!”s (a distressing thing for me to witness, not least because I was fond of John). In general, it is possible to argue your way into a restaurant just as the kitchen is closing. But I urge you, the next time you find yourself trying to persuade a maître d’ to accommodate you—bowing abjectly and apologizing, citing the traffic, the crowds‚ a fluent stream of obsequious servility, a crisp banknote in your palm—to recognize that the members of the kitchen know you’re there. They are waiting for your order, huddled around the ticker-tape machine, counting the seconds, and heaping imprecations on your head because you cannot make up your mind. They are speculating—will it be something light, a single course, perhaps? (“That’s what I’d order,” someone says, and everyone else loudly agrees.) Will I be able to drain the pasta machine? Will the grill guy be able to turn off the burners? Or will the diners—and late ones are referred to simply as “those fuckers”—be so clueless as to order a five-course tasting menu? It happens, and the response of the kitchen—a bellowing roar of disgust—is so loud everyone in the restaurant must hear it. By now the kitchen is different. At eleven, beer is allowed, and for nearly an hour the cooks have been drinking. The senior figures have disappeared: Andy is downstairs doing something with a computer; Frankie is doing something in the walk-in. No one is in charge. The people remaining are tired and dirty. The floors are greasy and wet—this is when the walk-in door swings open and someone is suddenly airborne. The pasta machine is so thick and crud-filled that the water has turned purple and is starting to foam. Do you need more details? Let me rephrase the question: Do you think, if your meal is the last order received by the kitchen, that it has been cooked with love?
But then—in the rush to clean up, the washing, scrubbing, mopping; the search for one-quart containers (why are there never enough one-quart containers?); the crash of a tray; the speed with which you clear away the food at your station, wrapping up some, throwing away most, including the ingredients needed to cook that tardy, last remaining order (sorry, Jack, that’s what you get for showing up so late); the trash talk about the maître d’, who has returned to see if there’s a family meal; the persistent hunger of the dishwashers (they have nothing at home); the late-night, slightly blurry, slightly drunken frenzy of a kitchen closing up, wanting to be done, wanting to get out—amid all this, I got the point of pasta with clams.
This is what happened: Mark, having cooked up a large quantity of linguine for its regulation six minutes and thirty seconds, emptied it into a pan of New Zealand cockle-clams, sloppily dripping lots of that starchy water on them in the process, a big wet heap of pasta on top of several dozen shellfish. He swirled the pan, gave it a little flip, swirled it again, and then left it alone so that it could cook, bubbling away, for another half minute. (This was curious, I thought, watching him—you don’t normally leave a pan of pasta on the flattop.) Then he took a strand and tasted it. He gave me one. It was not what I expected. It was no longer linguine, exactly; it had changed color and texture and become something else. I tasted it again. This, I thought, is the equivalent of bread soaked in gravy. But what was the sauce? I looked at the pan: the cockle-clams had been all closed up a few minutes earlier, and as they cooked their shells had opened, and as they opened they released the juices inside. That’s what I was tasting in this strand of linguine: an ocean pungency. “It’s about the sauce, not the little snot of meat in the shell,” Mario told me later. “No one is interested in the little snot of meat!”
Most pasta dishes are about the pasta, not the sauce (that mere condiment): that lesson had been drilled into me over and over. But here, in this strand of linguine, I had discovered a dish that wasn’t about the pasta or the sauce; it was about both, about the interaction between them, the result—this new thing, this highly flavored noodle—evocative of a childhood trip to the sea.
IF YOU’RE TEMPTED to make linguine with clams according to the kitchen’s preparation, you should understand that the only ingredient that’s measured is the pasta. (A serving is four ounces.) Everything else is what you pick up with your fingertips, and it’s either a small pinch or a large pinch or something in between: not helpful, but that, alas, is the way quantities are determined in a restaurant. (When a cookbook is prepared, a tester comes to the kitchen, picks up all the ingredients needed to make a dish, and takes them away to translate them into quantities that people at home might recognize. In the foodie publishing world, these testers—who have very white kitchens with carefully calibrated ovens and computerized weighing devices—are the despots of the written recipe. But I’ve never been persuaded by the reliability of the translation: either the quantities in the restaurant original are so large that they don’t seem right when shrunk down—lamb shanks for thirty-four doesn’t look the same when it’s done for two; the chemistry is different, the sauce less rich—or the restaurant portions are so small that they don’t seem accurate when they’re assigned a specific measurement. For instance, do you really believe the Babbo cookbook when it tells you that a linguine with eels takes four garlic cloves, that a lobster spaghettini takes two, and that the chitarra take three? No. It’s the same for each: a small pinch. And what happened to the red onions, essential to the lobster spag—a medium pinch, as it happens—but not mentioned? Were there no red onions the day the tester arrived?) The downside of measuring by hand is what happens to the hands. At the end of an evening your fingertips are irretrievably stained with some very heady aromatics, and there’s nothing you can do to eliminate them. You wash your hands. You soak them. You shower, you scrub them again. The next day, they still stink of onion, garlic, and pork fat, and, convinced that everyone around you is picking up the smell, you ram them into your pockets, maniacally rubbing your fingers against each other like an obsessive-compulsive Lady Macbeth. At night, in bed, my wife and I had some tough times when I was working at the pasta station, ever since one of my hands flopped across her face and woke her with a revolting start.
My advice: ignore the Babbo cookbook and begin by roasting small pinches of garlic and chili flakes and medium pinches of the onion and pancetta in a hot pan with olive oil. Hot oil accelerates the cooking process, and the moment everything gets soft you pour it away (holding back the contents with your tongs) and add a slap of butter and a splash of white wine, which stops the cooking. This is Stage One—and you are left with the familiar messy buttery mush—but already you’ve added two things you’d never see in Italy: butter (seafood with butter—or any other dairy ingredient—verges on culinary blasphemy) and pancetta, because, according to Mario, pork and shellfish are an eternal combination found in many other places: in Portugal, in amêijoas na cataplana (clams and ham); or in Spain, in a paella (chorizo and scallops); or in the United States, in the Italian-American clams casino, even though none of those places happens to be in Italy. (“Italians,” Mario says, “won’t fuck with their
fish. There are restaurants that won’t use lemon because they think it’s excessive.”)
In Stage Two, you drop the pasta in boiling water and take your messy buttery pan and fill it with a big handful of clams and put it on the highest possible flame. The objective is to cook them fast—they’ll start opening after three or four minutes, when you give the pan a swirl, mixing the shellfish juice with the buttery porky white wine emulsion. At six minutes and thirty seconds, you use your tongs to pull your noodles out and drop them into your pan—all that starchy pasta water slopping in with them is still a good thing; give the pan another swirl; flip it; swirl it again to ensure that the pasta is covered by the sauce. If it looks dry, add another splash of pasta water; if too wet, pour some out. You then let the thing cook away for another half minute or so, swirling, swirling, until the sauce streaks across the bottom of the pan, splash it with olive oil and sprinkle it with parsley: dinner.