by Bill Buford
“Talk to him.”
I rose and walked to his table.
“Hello. I am sorry to interrupt.” The queue jumper had two carafes of red wine and was reading a French cookbook (La Cuisine du soleil, a worn, out-of-date-looking cover). He looked up. Oh. I do know this man. This face: It had seemed familiar before because it was familiar, the James Beard award ceremony, the photo on the book jacket that I had two copies of.
But the name? It started with “M.”
Michelin?
Mirepoix?
They stared up at me, this now famous-seeming James Beard guy and his hooligan.
I thought: Wow. This is the man I just assaulted.
I said, “Are you a chef?”
I couldn’t bring myself to say: Are you a French chef whose name begins with “M,” which I can’t remember because I can’t remember French names?
I added, “Are you, in fact, a very famous chef…by chance?”
The man didn’t move. Maybe he didn’t speak English.
He took a breath. “Yes,” he said, “I am a famous chef. Yes! I am very famous.” He was grand—a little ridiculous, but grand people often are. “Allow me to introduce myself.” He extended his hand as though I should kiss it (Panic! Should I?) and declared, “I am Paul Bocuse.”
Paul Bocuse! I’d got it wrong! I’d assaulted Paul Bocuse? Bocuse is the most celebrated French chef in the world! Am I meeting Bocuse? Now I was confused. Also, wasn’t Bocuse 115 years old? And didn’t he live in Lyon?
“No, no, no, no,” the man said. “I am only joking.”
(Oh, joke, right, funny.)
“I am not Paul Bocuse.”
(Whew!)
“Paul Bocuse is dead.”
(What?! I am being made fun of, and Paul Bocuse is dead!)
“Or maybe he’s not dead.”
(He wasn’t.)
“I don’t actually know. I am Michel Richard. The chef and patron of Citronelle, Washington, D.C.’s finest restaurant. I repeat. Michel”—he paused in order to give the surname the full operatic treatment—“Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-CHARD!”
* * *
—
I would spend most of the next eight months in Richard’s company, off and on, not too much at first, and then, by the spring, pretty much full time, when I found a place on the line, cooking at the fish station. Our next meeting was a dinner at Citronelle, at the chef’s table, in the kitchen and with a view of its workings, and involved Jessica and me, Richard and his wife, Laurence, an American born of French parents whom Richard met when he lived in California. (“She never eats in the restaurant, she doesn’t like my food,” he said with a curiously upbeat irony, “but she will want to meet Jessica, and they will speak French.” And they did.)
The first course was scrambled eggs with salmon, which it obviously wasn’t going to be and wasn’t (it was raw scallops that had been liquefied in a blender with cream and saffron, and cooked like scrambled eggs, French style, admittedly, which is to say slowly, but they were still what they were: shellfish). The next was a cappuccino. (Ditto.) It was actually mushroom soup, except that it wasn’t, not actually, because it had been made without water, or stock, or any other liquid. It also had no mushrooms. (Mushrooms sweat when heated; the “soup”—which calls for fifty kilos of various fungi—was, in effect, nothing but the sweat. It was brilliant, and unheard of, and very concentrated—I would eventually try it at home and spend hours trying to put monstrous dark gobs of leftover mushroom goo to some kind of second use only to give up—it started to harden into a black crust—and, with a thud, threw it into the trash.)
Richard made a salad inspired by Claude Monet’s water lilies.
I thought: really? There are centuries of paintings inspired by food. How many foods inspired by painting?
I wandered into the kitchen to watch its being assembled. Around a white platter, floppy circles of “tube food” were being arranged—they had been sliced thin on a meat slicer—and included (I was told) tuna, swordfish, red and yellow peppers, beef, venison, and eel. The platter was dressed—frondy-looking herbs, a basil-infused, exaggeratedly green olive oil—and transformed into a swampy, mossy masterpiece. It was very Zen-making to look at, even if such a challenge to think about—I promise, the first thought that occurred to me when eating a thin round white disk was not “Oh, it’s eel!”—that it made you realize how recognizing your food, which we do all the time, was a precondition to our being able to taste it. (And I’m still trying to figure out what I’m meant to learn from that.)
Before bed that night, I found myself recalling, with unexpected fondness, Dorothy Hamilton’s Techniques of Classic Cuisine.
In January, I began learning Richard’s preparations in earnest, beginning suitably enough with one of the tubes that he had used in the Monet salad—the red pepper one, as it happens.
“Tubes are very important in Michel’s cooking,” David Deshaies said. David was the hooligan on the train. He was the executive chef.
By now, I knew enough to know that “tubes” probably didn’t figure among the classic techniques.
We roasted five dozen red peppers, peeled them, and laid them out, still warm, on long sheets of plastic film, which David then bombed with aggressive clouds of Knox gelatin—quickly before the peppers cooled. Arranged thus, they looked like a thick, undulating red carpet, which he then tried to roll up, peppers squeezing out the sides of the film, and looking like three-foot-long, squishy burritos. There was obviously no tidy way. He kept having to push the red-pepper slop back inside until, finally, he succeeded enough to be able to tie up one end with string. After tying up the other end, he picked up his massive tubular confection and whipped it around his head like a lasso—the image, which was actually rather alarming, was of a cowboy twirling a very long pastrami. But it was beautiful when done: very red, very symmetrical, very shiny, like a primary-colored sausage stuffed to a degree less than bursting.
“Okay,” he said. “Your turn.”
“We” made ten—David made nine, and I made one (it takes a while to lasso with confidence)—whereupon I was told to hang them in the “tube walk-in.”
It was a freezer. Tubes hung from ceiling hooks as though in a butcher shop, except that they were pastel green, Easter yellow, white, pink, a few robust reds, and purples. They could have been frozen party balloons. The longest was five feet. The white one, a three-footer, was the eel.
You have never seen anything like them. No one has seen anything like them, because outside of Richard’s kitchens you will find them nowhere. There were tubes for blini batter, uncooked bacon, coconut, beet, various fish, and a dough for club sandwiches. There were really a lot of tubes.
* * *
—
Strangely, it never occurred to me that Richard didn’t make sense, that I should do something else. He was in Washington, D.C. I was in New York, an inexperienced father of twin toddlers. What do I do? Leave my family? Also I wanted basics. Richard was obviously “anti-basic.” He was also anti-obvious and subversive at every chance. His approach (more accurately described as his “anti-approach”) was to surprise the diner at every chance. He was an entertainer. His promise: to leave you delighted and pleasured. No, this wasn’t what I had in mind, but I couldn’t resist him.
He was educated in the classics, and many mornings I would find him at the chef’s table reading one, especially Ali Bab’s Gastronomique Pratique, a work largely unknown in the English-speaking world but a bible for many French chefs in the early twentieth century, published in 1907, 637 pages of detailed, practical explanations of the dishes of the French repertoire. But Richard never made a thing from it. Nothing.
Why do you read it? I asked.
“To be provoked. People think I have such original ideas, but I don’t, not really, they start with something I’ve read.”
No, Richard was not the obvious chef to teach a novice French cuisine. But pass this up? Not a chance.
Besides, he knew everyone: He would find a place for me in France.
* * *
—
Citronelle was in the basement of an old hotel, the Latham, a 140-room, not-too-pricey Georgetown property that, despite its condition (it showed an alarming tendency to tilt), had actually seen worse days. (Movie buffs might recognize it as the seedy hideout that shelters young Julia Roberts in The Pelican Brief.) Once Mel Davis, Richard’s PR person and deputy, negotiated a weekly friends-of-the-family rate for a room, I was resolved: I would come down to Washington, domestic urgencies permitting, on Sunday evening and return on Friday. (Those domestic urgencies weren’t always permitting, because any arrangement that resulted in Jessica’s being the unprotected parent of twin toddlers would turn out not to be such a happy one.)
* * *
—
RATATOUILLE. It was the next preparation that I learned, and I loved making it. It was served cold, with just-fried, hot-to-the-touch soft-shell crab. It seemed so radically basic—and, well, not.
According to David, my instructor, it is the taste of a French summer, because it is made with ingredients that every French household grows in its garden plot: eggplant, peppers, zucchini, onions, and tomatoes (plus garlic), in roughly equal quantities (except the garlic). Each ingredient is cut up chunky. “We once made a nouvelle-cuisine version, with small and perfect cubes,” Richard said, watching us from the chef’s table, “but it was too fancy. It’s a rustic dish and should always be one.”
The most important lesson: that each ingredient should be cooked separately. The onions are sautéed in olive oil. Then the zucchini (lightly); and finally the eggplants, but quickly and in a nonstick pan (no oil, because eggplant is an olive-oil sponge). The peppers are oven-roasted; then the tomatoes, but, according to the particularly French insistence of needing to remove the skin first. (“The French never eat it, because the skin comes out in your poop,” Richard told me confidently. “Really?” I asked, skeptical. “Really,” he said.)
You remove it by dropping each tomato into a bowl of just-boiled water, transferring it quickly to icy water, and peeling while it is in a state of shock. You then cut the naked tomatoes into quarters, scoop out the liquid and the wet, jellylike seeds, and drop them into a sieve atop a bowl. (This will be for later—for tomato water. By the end of your session, there ought to be a formidably goopy pile drip-dripping into a bright-red pond.) You then arrange the quarters—they look like red flower petals—on a baking sheet, paint with olive oil, sprinkle salt and sugar atop, and cook at a low heat for ninety minutes, until they’re plump and swollen. They are the jammiest of the jammy ingredients.
Only then does Richard mix the ingredients together—in a pot, with shots of red-wine vinegar (an unusual addition, a bright, slightly racy acidity to balance the dish’s summer sweetness)—and heats them gently for a short time. The practice—each vegetable cooked separately—is said to produce a more animated jumble of flavors than if everything had been plopped in at the same time. I didn’t think further on it, except to recognize that it had been a long time since I had prepared a ratatouille and that I liked this one so much that I would make it every summer, without fail, thereafter. (“Vegetable jam” is how David describes ratatouille: “My mother made it on Sundays and served it with roast chicken, and we ate it cold for the rest of the week.”) It was only on serving the dish to friends (who were excited by the result) that I learned that most people don’t bother cooking the ingredients separately, and many didn’t know it was a possibility. Even the most recent and generally pretty impressive edition of Joy of Cooking tells you to heap all your vegetables into a pot, give it a stir, cover, and cook, which put me in mind of that last ratatouille I’d made ten years before, inspired by the languidly lazy, self-consciously I-am-literary prose of M.F.K. Fisher, who had learned her preparation, in France, from “a large strong woman” who came from “an island off Spain.” This, too, was a dump-and-stir preparation that was then stewed for five to six hours. It tasted of mush. (Julia Child’s ratatouille is about half onboard and honors the basic practice—“each element is cooked separately”—but then, curiously, does some of the ingredients together.)
The cook-it-separate approach was my first genuinely French cooking lesson. Vignerons, bottling a wine made of different grape varieties, do something similar and either toss everything in a vat together and ferment the lot (like a “field blend”), or vinify each one separately and blend at the end: a more controlled effort in which you can often taste each grape. And many famous French stews turn out, at least in their traditional recipes, to be minimally stewed. Like a Navarin d’agneau, the spring-lamb-and-vegetable dish named after the navet, turnip, the traditional accompaniment until the advent and acceptance of the potato (circa 1789): The vegetables are cooked while the meat roasts—turnips (if you’re a traditionalist), potatoes (if not), or turnips and potatoes (if you’re both), baby carrots, small onions, and spring peas—and only then combined at the end.
The practice doesn’t seem to have a name, which is a curiosity in a culture that I was about to discover has a name for every tiny ridiculous preparation or tool, or if there is one I haven’t found it yet, although I may have come across the first instance of its being described: in Menon’s La Cuisinière bourgeoise (The Household Cook—the bourgeoise in the title has its eighteenth-century sense, “of the home”). There are many “cuisine bourgeoise” books in France—almost every accomplished chef has written for the layman—but Menon’s was the first. (Menon, probably a pseudonym, also wrote the first “nouvelle cuisine.” There are many nouvelle cuisines as well.) Menon’s Cuisinière bourgeoise describes two ways of making duck and turnips: the cheffy approach, with turnips and other ingredients cooked separately while the duck roasts, and the other, more informal one that involves, once again, the plop, the pot, the lid, and leaving until done. “Voilà la façon de faire le canard aux navets à la Bourgeoise.” (The recipe is not in the book’s first edition, published in 1746, but in the second, in 1759.)
Spoiler alert: Astonishingly, albeit painfully, I would indeed learn to read French and even speak it.
* * *
—
I made breadcrumbs the Richard way, which were not uniform or powdery (he shook out the dust in a sieve) but jagged and uneven and rough to look at, and then toasted in the oven until deliciously noisy. With a dab of mousse, they adhered to Richard’s “chicken nuggets,” and then, when fried at maximum heat, emerged highly textured on the outside (they snapped when you bit into them), soft in the middle, with a hint of chicken cream in between, and very surprising in the mouth. (I tried the nuggets on my children. They liked them. They also liked the frozen ones from the supermarket. They were not discriminating. What they really liked was ketchup.)
I made tuna burgers the Richard way (tuna burgers at a high-end restaurant? Why not? They were scrumptious). You start with a thick red slab of the fish, dice it, and then mash the cubes vigorously with the back of a wooden spoon against the sides of a bowl. As the cubes break down, you’re effectively whipping them. You add a splash of olive oil. You continue mashing. By now, you’re probably starting to sweat (unless you’re me, and you’re streaming off the tip of your nose). Midway through, you spoon in a vaguely Japanese-y sauce that you’ve made in advance (ginger, shallots, and chives emulsified in a blender with soy sauce) and mash some more. The goal is to break down the tissue so effectively, smooshing it, as to render the fish’s natural fats. They are the binder, what will hold the shape of the burger. It is then cooked rare, and has zingy freshness, with an unapologetic almost-sushilike gingery rawness, and is served in a bun made with olive oil and wild yeast, something like a Mediterranean version of a brioche.
I enjoyed the burgers so much that I always made an extra one just before we broke down
the kitchen and kept it warm on the flattop to eat at the bar upstairs along with my customary glass of Pinot Noir.
* * *
—
I was taught how to make a Richard soufflé that never fails (it uses three different meringues, Italian, Swiss, and French). I prepared savory potato tuiles that have as much snap and texture as a Pringles chip but no fat (they were inserted into Richard’s burgers to give them crunch). Both were among the house secrets, kept in a much-guarded recipe bible, and the fact that Richard was prepared to share them with me was proof that, in his eyes, I was utterly harmless. During my tenure, the kitchen wasn’t making the “mosaic salmon,” regarded by many as Richard’s most accomplished dish, a gravity-defying masterpiece covertly held together by transglutaminase (i.e., meat glue) and known to me from how it figured in the story of a former sous-chef, Arnaud Vantourout, a Belgian who confessed to me that, after he left Citronelle for a grand-sounding position at a famous Brussels restaurant that he asked me not to name, he realized that he had been hired only for Richard’s recipes. “They made me tell them everything”—the Tube Technology, the soufflé, the tuna burger, Richard’s perfectly peeled apples, and the “mosaic salmon.” (“They really wanted the mosaic salmon.”) Then, after the famous Brussels restaurant that Arnaud asked me not to name had exhausted all the good ideas that he’d learned from Michel, they had no use for him. “They threw me away.” (Frankly, I don’t understand why the good-hearted Arnaud was so careful to protect an asshole establishment, and even though the late great New York Times food critic R. W. Apple, Jr., named it among the top ten dining experiences in the world, I, for one, have vowed never to go there.)
* * *
—
On a Thursday afternoon, just before the dinner service, I learned that none other than Michel Rostang and his brigade had arrived from France and would be showing up in the kitchen in the morning. They would be taking over Citronelle for a weekend of elaborate meals, an annual event, something like a “Paris in D.C.” festival. There was no reason why I should have known about it in advance—I was still finding my way. But the news astonished me: Michel Rostang—the Michel Rostang, the very person that Dan Barber had worked for and urged me to train with as well—would be here, with his executive chef, his sous-chef, his line cooks, everyone. It was my chance. I was excited. I was frightened.