For Brower, as for those early editors of Homer who clustered at the great library of Alexandria, a text was an enclosed, fixed object inviting purification and explication, not subjective reaction. Brower was himself not much given to subjectivity. The one overt expression of strong feeling I ever witnessed from him was therefore a real shocker. The week the television quiz show scandal broke around the Columbia English teacher Charles Van Doren in the fall of 1959, Brower walked into our small “section” class of Hum 6 (Harvard attempted to counter the formality of large lecture courses like Hum 6 with regular sections that permitted students to discuss the course material with a faculty member, usually a teaching assistant, but my great good luck had been to land in Ben Brower’s own section) looking troubled. “What do you think of this Van Doren business?” he asked the class. There were various reactions, which eventually petered out. We were waiting to hear from Brower. He looked at the back of the little room, over our heads, and said, “If it were me, I would kill myself.” Then he directed our attention to a passage from the book we were reading closely together, E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread.
During senior year, I met with Brower nearly every week in the grand study-library that was his office in Adams House, the undergraduate residence where he was master. We talked of many things besides my thesis on The Odyssey, which he read with the same scrupulous attention he gave to all texts. It was a terrifying scrutiny—which, since he undoubtedly applied the same high standards to his own writing, explained in some measure why his scholarly output had been limited over the years, limited but diamond hard and exemplifying authority.
What I remember most clearly from those meetings was something Brower said about Greek composition, probably in reaction to my complaining about Greek K, which I found a dry exercise in turning English paragraphs into pastiches of Plato’s Greek. Following the custom of centuries of students in this deliberately uncreative discipline, we were constrained to use only the exact vocabulary, grammatical constructions and syntax that Plato himself, the acknowledged master and model of classic Greek prose, had used.
Brower defended precisely what I deplored: “What would it mean to improvise an ancient Greek sentence? Greek is not an ongoing enterprise. It is only what the ancient Greeks wrote. The sole reason to compose sentences in Greek today is to revive, as best we can, their language, so that we can feel it as our own. That—in theory, at any rate—makes us better readers of Plato.” There was no arguing with that. There was never any arguing with Reuben Arthur Brower, gentle man, with adamantine soul.
The lesson took. So when I thought about classic French food, another seemingly finite body of received culture, it was natural for me to think of it as I had been trained to think about dead languages. This was not a good analogy. As I soon realized, the most cursory look at early French cookbooks revealed a universe of cooking far removed from the haute cuisine system that grew up in the nineteenth century and that we had inherited in the form codified by Escoffier, a system that would shortly dissolve into a kaleidoscope of new, shimmering ideas before our dazzled eyes.
Even regional “cuisines” turned out to have histories. The “classic” dish of the Auvergne, in central France, the puree of potatoes and cheese called aligot, could not have been older than the introduction of potatoes into France from the Andes after Columbus. According to one theory, it was “originally” made with bread instead of potatoes, by monks who gave it to pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. Similarly, in Spain, gazpacho in its present tomato-based form could not have been cooked before the sixteenth century and probably emerged much later. Cervantes’s gazpacho is not ours.
Pizza has a history, too. Of course, everything has a history. But that is not what was in my mind in the 1960s when I was discovering the food of Europe and the rest of the world. The historical attitude would come later. And I was also not describing the reality of my experience as an eater in those years when I maintained that my ecstatic gorging was some sort of cold-blooded investigation of a vast archaeological museum of human food culture.
In fact, I was just eating whatever piqued my interest, in restaurant after restaurant, country after country, region after region—and trying to taste as many dishes as I possibly could. I’m sure I never gave a thought, in the summer of 1960, my first time in Europe, to cuisines as calcified legacies. I was, of course, eating my way through the cuisines of Europe, but unsystematically, happily devouring the menu at hand.
My approach, instinctive, rabid and utterly natural, had much in common with language learning. As a matter of fact, I was operating in the same indiscriminate, sopping-up mode with French that summer, taking in every new word that came along, looking each one up obsessively in the dictionary, forcing myself to check every word I didn’t know in the paperback of Dumas’s La dame aux camélias I’d bought from a bouquiniste on the Quai Voltaire near my hôtel garni, thus acquiring a large vocabulary for discussing tuberculosis and coughing.
In restaurants, I acquired a huge new vocabulary of dishes, andouillette, marcassin, cou d’oie farci aux lentilles, râble de lièvre—none of which I had eaten before, or even known about in English; nor would I see them in America for decades. These dishes were a bit like the words for tubercular conditions in Dumas: not likely to be useful in my daily life in the States but part, nevertheless, of a growing collection of factoids that entered my consciousness, my self.
Obviously, my food experiences contributed more than lexical entries to my memory of those meals. I tasted every one of those dishes with gusto and could still give you a vivid account of the flavors and textures in many of them. But those sensations—the ugly technical term for them is organoleptic—were not the important ones. For me, they never have been of primary importance, except at the time I was experiencing them. What mattered most was the dish, in all its aspects.
Take sole meunière. Yes, I love this flat white fish’s tender, smooth flesh and the way its mildness is set off by the lightly browned butter and the acid of the lemon juice it’s cooked in. Because I have eaten the dish many times, I’m able, as a critic, to judge a restaurant’s specific presentation, comparing it against others from my past. But even that kind of judgment rests primarily on my sense of what defines the dish, of what might be called its Platonic form in my mind.
I am thinking of a canonical sequence: four boned fillets dredged in seasoned flour, quickly sautéed tableside in browned butter, which, just as the fish is cooked through, sizzles from the addition of the lemon juice. It is this sizzle, at the climax of the waiter’s enactment of the dish, that defines my sense of sole meunière. I am also interested in the epithet meunière, collapsed from à la meunière, in the manner of a miller’s wife. Like many French names for dishes, it is probably entirely fanciful. But the philologist in me can’t help wondering if there once was some kind of connection, in folklore or in a chef’s experience, that honored a miller’s wife’s way with a saltwater fish that was clearly not pulled up from the family millrace. Perhaps it was the flour coating, the miller’s product.
Other people no doubt give their organoleptic memories pride of place. Not me. I am, first and last, attracted by the concept of the dish, its definition, the kinds of information you’d find in Gringoire and Saulnier’s Répertoire de la cuisine or, for a more detailed description, in a standard recipe.
I have a philologist’s sensibility. I see an unfamiliar term on a menu and I want to order that dish, add it to my vocabulary. In 2009, at the excellent Chicago restaurant Spiaggia, I spied the unfamiliar word pagliolaia on the menu. The waiter said it meant “dewlap.” I thought of the hounds in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Their heads are hung / With ears that sweep away the morning dew; / Crook-knee’d, and dew-lapp’d like Thessalian bulls; / Slow in pursuit, but match’d in mouth like bells.”
Spiaggia cooked its dewlaps with diver scallops and wild mushrooms over a wood fire. I ordered the dish, amused that a midwestern chef was one-upping t
he trend for beef cheeks started by Mario Batali in New York with an even more arcane part of the bovine head. In my review, I hewed to the organoleptic: “The hearty beef fragments and earthy fungus highlight the slippery elegance of the seafood. Having dewlaps myself, I winced for a minute but surrendered to the brilliance of the conception and the resourcefulness of Spiaggia’s butcher.” I did not disclose my white-magical motivation for ordering pagliolaia, which was to learn a new word by consuming the thing itself.
Did I realize back in 1960 or in the next two decades that I was approaching food in this way? Undoubtedly not. I thought I was ingesting cuisines, cultural artifacts frozen like the smiles on archaic Greek statues. And when the smile melted, when those gelid monoliths changed shape before my eyes, I continued to see the change as a systematic mutation, a wholesale revolution, which it was. But the revolution expressed itself through individual dishes, one recipe at a time. And that, of course, was how I experienced the nouvelle cuisine and every one of the later convolutions that have transformed the way we eat, and continue to transform it.
After I passed my PhD orals at Harvard, in the spring of 1965, I got a chance to explore French food in great depth. Instead of supporting myself as a teaching fellow in Cambridge while writing my dissertation, I accepted a job as a correspondent in Newsweek’s Paris bureau. In the early mornings before the office opened, I researched the scholarly literature on Theocritus at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Later in the day, I researched the menus of French restaurants.
Newsweek had hired me because someone at the magazine believed it would locate abler staffers at America’s better college newspapers than it was finding among older journalists at professional papers and magazines. This turned out to be a false theory, in the sense that almost every one of the Harvard Crimson–hatched trainees except me left Newsweek for law school or other greener pastures after a short stint at the magazine.
Fully expecting that I would return to academia, too, with a completed thesis, I went to work in the Newsweek offices off the Champs-Élysées. I ought to have been very busy, chasing news while simultaneously plowing through the scholarly literature on Hellenistic poetry of the third century b.c. In fact, I had almost no news to chase, and the Theocritus scholarship was almost completely irrelevant to my specific interest in the father of pastoral poetry’s creative reuse of rare Homeric words. Previous researchers had not spent much time on this question, which allowed me to flip through and discard hundreds of articles brought to me by disgruntled stack “boys” of advanced age every weekday morning. Soon there were no more tomes to check out. I had stumbled onto untilled ground, but by then I had lost interest in academic life and tabled the thesis.
In the bureau, I was the fourth of four correspondents, and the youngest by far at twenty-four. In the French idiom, I was the office benjamin (after Joseph’s youngest brother in the Old Testament). In practice, this meant that, aside from reading seven daily newspapers and thirty magazines, I had almost nothing to do. The other three correspondents, better connected, more skilled and more aggressive, hogged all the available work. And there wasn’t much of that, considering the very small amount of its precious space that Newsweek would allot to a backwater like France in a normal week.
Even French reporters didn’t have much of a story to follow then, because France under President Charles de Gaulle was essentially a benevolent dictatorship. De Gaulle had a chokehold on the news. In this quasi-totalitarian atmosphere, a very junior American correspondent had almost no chance of breaking stories major enough to interest a stateside editor. I had to plead to get the bureau to submit my name for accreditation to the only major event of my two years in France, a De Gaulle press conference, which one of the veteran correspondents would actually cover.
Yet I was a full-fledged foreign correspondent with a very official-looking clothbound press card and, fatefully, an expense account. So I busied myself with entertaining “sources” (most often just friends with marginally newsworthy job descriptions) at restaurants of high gastronomic quality. No one in the office minded. In fact, the bureau chief seemed glad not to have me nagging him for work, and it amused my colleagues that I was putting so much energy into establishing contacts in corners of French life they had no time to investigate.
When I left for a job in the New York headquarters, in 1967, the bureau gave me a copy of the antiquated but still respected Larousse gastronomique as a token of my colleagues’ respect; or perhaps it was their mildly scornful recognition of my being a person for whom food was a passion.
I had eaten at the big-name restaurants, the three-stars, which were venerable exercises in period performance. Chez Maxim was all deco froth. Lapérouse specialized in Gilded Age naughtiness, with dining alcoves that could be closed off from public view by pulling a drape to hide you and your poule de luxe. The Tour d’Argent gave you a card inscribed with the number of the canard à la presse they had just served you. Mine, I believe, was the 22,987th to be crushed and exsanguinated in that calf-sized silver device that glittered at one edge of the dining room high above the Seine with its famous view of Notre-Dame. On the street level was an actual museum, featuring menus from the Paris Commune of 1871, when the Tour d’Argent had served its besieged patrons with the flesh of animals “liberated” from the zoo of the Jardins des Plantes, a few blocks away.
The closest a fin bec could get to a creative sensibility in a high-end Paris restaurant in 1967 was either at glamorous Lasserre, near our office, or at Chez Garin, the remarkable bistro near my Left Bank apartment. Lasserre had a mechanical roof that opened to the sky in warm weather, to provide relief from the heat and to clear the accumulated Gauloise smoke from the elegant room. Tables sported costly articulated metal birds, which the intoxicated sometimes tried to purloin, under the waiters’ watchful eyes. It was part of the fun to see some pinstriper caught red-handed with a glittery peacock or snipe in his briefcase. The food was first-class and vibrantly cuisiné, showing the hand of a chef not yet ready for the mortuary.
Garin wasn’t so flashy, but for a lot of money you got top-flight versions of conventional cooking tuned up and rethought, sometimes with enough complication so that they really edged across the line into haute cuisine, or made the boundary between bistro and haute cuisine seem beside the point. Gael Greene ate there in May 1972 for New York magazine, about the last moment when any major French restaurant could still elicit ooh-la-las for trout stuffed with a pike mousse. The influence of the nouvelle cuisine’s great young chef Michel Guérard was already visible, if unavowed, in the two vegetable purees (celeriac and string bean) that Garin served Ms. Greene as a garnish for a split grilled kidney.
Just five years earlier, the nouvelle cuisine revolution had already begun simmering in the provinces. My bureau chief, Joel Blocker, proposed a story about someone named Paul Bocuse who was making news just outside Lyon. Joel struck out with his Bocuse proposal, but he would have been able to win space in the magazine for another modern French chef also trained by Fernand Point, if sudden political news hadn’t sidetracked him and forced him to send me instead to a small town in Alsace for the announcement of a third Michelin star to L’Auberge de l’Ill in tiny Illhaeusern.
Although the article on the restaurant that appeared in Newsweek’s April 3, 1967, edition was unsigned, it was nonetheless my debut as a food writer. The food I ate on this fateful assignment included a spit-roasted poularde de Bresse with truffles and golden Alsatian noodles. I have no memory of how it tasted or what it looked like, but it was clearly an attempt by the chef, Paul Haeberlin, to combine the very best chicken he could find with a luxury ingredient necessary to legitimize the dish as worthy of three stars, a cooking method that set it apart from everyday oven-roasted chicken. The noodles, a regional specialty, added handmade, local distinction. This, in itself, was a daring modernism, a belated nod to the automobile age. Haeberlin had bet his future that garnishing his signature chicken with humble noodles instead of an array of elaborat
ely turned vegetables out of the Larousse gastronomique would appeal to Michelin’s modernizing inspectors.
Restaurant Paul Bocuse at Collonges-au-Montd’Or, which features culinary innovation in a flamboyant atmosphere. (illustration credit 1.4)
This discreet nod to the Auberge’s remoteness from Paris, in a village so small it had no hotel, in a province whose identity was not securely French, would have resonated immediately with the Michelin inspectors looking for a rationale to justify adding this modest-looking hostelry to the pantheon of twelve three-star temples it had been enshrining almost without change for years. But, as neither they nor I could have said at the time, this dish, semiotically complex as it was (high/low, rustic/elegant, cosmopolitan/regional, French/German), would not count, when examined by hindsight anytime after 1972, as a forerunner of the radical changes soon to disrupt French kitchens. History was accelerating for chefs.
For me, the Illhaeusern reportage was important and memorable because of two other historically trivial reasons. It gave me a taste of food journalism, and it gave my son Michael, then on the verge of two, a taste of a really good soft-boiled egg.
I was traveling with him and my wife, Margaret, because the assignment had burst upon me on the eve of a skiing vacation. We piled into a rental Peugeot station wagon and drove due east through Nancy to Alsace. I had left Margaret and Michael in the hotel at nearby Ribeauvillé, thinking it would be unprofessional to bring them along for an interview at the restaurant. But when Jean-Pierre Haeberlin, Paul’s brother, who ran the front of the house, learned they were nearby, he insisted that Margaret and Michael be fetched for lunch.
Paul prepared a special meal for our infant, the egg and some remarkable mashed potatoes. When the egg appeared, Michael took a look at the amazingly reddish-orange yolk and exclaimed, “Apricot.” A gourmet had announced himself. When he finished eating, two school-age daughters of Jean-Pierre’s came out in regional costumes and led our boy upstairs for a nap.
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