Dirt

by Bill Buford

  In fact, on any given day, there will be a situation when your towel will be inadequate, since it continues not to be a mitten, and you will count on adding someone else’s towel, urgently—as in “Hot, quick, you, your torchon—please!”

  Once, I tucked two towels under my belt, both draped across my right hip, an obvious no-brainer, I thought. Why, when you are hunched down before an oven door, should you call out to the kitchen at large behind you, hoping that someone will appear and miraculously produce an extra towel before you get burned?

  Lemaire spotted my two-towel transgression. He pointed and sneered. No words, just a high-pitched hoot of contempt. I felt that I’d been caught out trying to open a car wash.

  On another occasion, I was spotted dipping my salsify fries into an eggy batter with my hands. I had no idea this was such a flagrant crime. In Italy, you get your hands dirty and are proud of it—it’s a way of being in touch with the soul of the food. (Or something. What do I know? Maybe there was a towel shortage.) In France, you use two spoons. It was, I had to admit, more hygienic, and, afterward, you don’t have to go searching for a container of water to wash your hands in. (And, duh, you then don’t have to use your towel.)

  I had a cooking partner, a nineteen-year-old woman named Marjorie who was the second-most soft-spoken student in the entire institut. (The most soft-spoken was her best friend, Hortense: In the three months there, I never once heard her voice.) One morning, Marjorie, making conversation, asked me (in her barely audible fashion) why I was here. I began by saying that I had once worked in Chianti. My intention was to say that, having learned northern-Italian cooking, I now wanted to learn the cooking of Lyon.

  She had never heard of Chianti.

  I said “Toscane.” I said it loudly (maybe too loudly), to compensate for the softness of her voice.

  She had never heard of Toscane. I tried “Toscano.” I tried “Tuscany.” I scored with “Florence.” I conveyed that I had once worked in Florence, which I hadn’t, but it didn’t matter; besides, I still hadn’t answered her question.

  Lemaire knew where Toscane was. He knew the word “Chianti.” I wondered if, in his eyes, I had put myself forward as an Italian expert. The know-it-all writer-guy Italian expert.

  Later, Lemaire asked Marjorie and me to help him with his “cannelloni,” which were meant to be rolled around braised beef cheeks. The trouble was the pasta sheets. They kept sticking. Lemaire had poured olive oil into the boiling pasta water to keep them apart. We were given tweezers. The sheets were overcooked along the edges, cakey in the middle, and everywhere olive-oil slimy, and you couldn’t separate them without tearing.

  “You can assume that I know how to cook pasta,” Lemaire said to me. Why did he want me to know he could cook pasta?

  “Of course,” I said.

  “The Italians,” he added, “are not the only people who make pasta, you know.”

  I agreed.

  “The French also make ravioli.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Ravioles. They invented them.”

  “But it’s such an Italian word,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying.

  He corrected me. “No, the French invented ravioles.”

  I then wondered if this might have been a test (and another of Lemaire’s lessons in rigor), never to disagree with a chef.

  “Of course,” I said.

  I was reminded of the spat between our next-door neighbors. Why did the idea of Italy put the French on the defensive?

  * * *

  —

  During the break between lunch and dinner, I took a bus back into town. I had been told there was only one place to buy the two-red-striped regulation torchons: Bragard, on the other side of Lyon. Bragard was also the place to update my kitchen wardrobe, which, evidently, was in need of attention. I picked up the boys en route.

  A chef was already in mid-acquisition when we arrived, slowly refitting his entire staff. We waited. Within seconds, the boys were bored. Within a minute, they were lying listlessly on the floor.

  When it was my turn, I asked for a dozen torchons. I mentioned, in passing, that I was at L’Institut Bocuse, but not that I was a student. The manager’s manner changed. She insisted that I try on the institut’s official chef jacket (“the one Paul Bocuse wears”). It was a flap-over with snaps instead of the blocky straight-up-and-down with buttons. It was smooth—the thread count was like that of an expensive bedsheet—and only a little stiff, and surprisingly comfortable. Chef jackets, especially the double-breasted kind promoted in the early nineteenth century by the legendary cooking impresario Antonin Carême (he is often seen as the father of the French kitchen look), are wonderfully contradictory: heavy and fire-resistant, but aggressively pristine white (like purity itself), on an assumption that they actually will never be soiled. This one, I touched it and vowed: I promise, dear coat, that I will never dribble on you.

  I tied a silky white apron around my waist—the luxury model, the kind that circles the legs and comes down to the floor—slipped a pressed towel over the belt, and snugged it tight. The manager, who, I now concluded, must have thought that I was a distinguished chef visiting from America (my gray beard, my shiny pate, my conspicuous lack of youthfulness), climbed onto a footstool and put a toque on my head. She added a white kitchen neck-scarf and tied it from the front. (“I give you the scarf for free and insist you wear it. You are too elegant.”) I crossed my arms. I was a giant in white.

  The effect on the three-year-olds was immediate. They stood up and wowed. I admit: I had hoped for their wows. It was why I had picked them up, to share the theatre of my dressing up in chef whites.

  I called for a taxi—by now outright tardy—dropped off the boys, and drove on to the institute. When I reached the kitchen, Lemaire was already so distressingly deep into the evening’s batch of “cannelloni” (and possibly so embarrassed about being found there), that he didn’t rebuke me. He must have known that he had added way too much olive oil this time, but nevertheless had the forethought, just in case, to cook way too many noodles. In the effort to unstick them, most were ruined. The small number that survived were just enough to wrap the braised beef cheeks.

  The trick, by the way, is not oil. It’s a wooden spoon. To keep your pasta from sticking? You stir it.

  A staff member appeared and addressed me: “Chef Le Cossec wants to see you.”

  * * *

  —

  I had been invited to dinner. At a table, the two of us—alone in a dining room, attended by two servers—ate a meal that arrived in three courses. A sommelier poured wine from a decanter. Red Burgundy. The plat principal was duck with a red-cherry sauce. It felt as though I had been invited to the private chambers of a ship’s captain. I pictured the meal that my wife was having with our children at our wobbly kitchen table: a plate of nuggets de poulet heated in a microwave. I then recalled a friend who, on learning that I had come to Lyon to learn French cooking, had written me—“imagining you getting your butt kicked by all those French bastards.” In the locker room, earlier, I had listened to a message left by Daniel Boulud’s assistant—“The chef wants you to know that no one in America is doing what you’re doing—it is so hard-core.”

  My glass was refilled.

  Le Cossec was curious. What did I want?

  “To learn the skills of a chef. I have no illusions about my becoming a grand chef.”

  I had learned the distinction. Grand translates as “great,” in the way that you might say a “great baseball player.” But grand combined with chef is its own designation. It was invented (again) by Carême. He was also among the first to describe cooking as an art. (The cooking classes at L’Institut Bocuse are described as instruction in “les arts culinaires.”)

  Grand chef is, in effect, a title akin to nothing else in any other country, because no other country accords such a
lofty status to the person making your dinner. We don’t have the same thing in English. If you are mad enough to tell people that your aspiration is to be a great chef—as in “I am a student at L’Institut Paul Bocuse so that I will become un grand chef”—you will be dismissed as silly and deluded. But for many of the students at l’institut, that was exactly their ambition. They wanted to be Marc Veyrat. They wanted to be Paul Bocuse. Why? I don’t know why. A time-honored, highly inculcated reverence for dinner? It is, whatever the reason, at the very heart of Frenchness.

  But for the rest of us, there was French cooking, which we wanted to learn how to do, and that was plenty.

  * * *

  —

  One morning, I was sharpening a knife, running it up and down flat against a steel.

  Le Cossec interrupted. “Yes, you may start with the blade flat, but finish at an angle, moving up and down lightly, like a breeze.” (Comme une brise.) The angle hones the blade. When I touched it, I felt the fragility of the edge and its danger.

  I asked to cook the steaks.

  “Regarde,” he said.

  He put a sauté pan on the fire, waited, and confirmed the heat with his hand just above the skillet.

  “Listen to the butter.”

  He dropped in a spoonful—“Not much.” He paused. “Do you hear? It is singing.” (Il chante.) The sound was like a muted babbling. “You hear this singing just before you add eggs to make an omelet. You hear it just before you set meat down on the pan.” If it is too hot, the butter steams and burns. Too cold, and the protein sticks to the surface. He leaned over the pan with his ear. “You want it to sing.”

  He left the butter there.

  It carried on with its soft tune—the temperature hot but not too hot—until it frothed up.

  “This is a mousse.”

  He gave the pan a shake. He turned down the flame. He waited. The butter changed color. “This is beurre noisette.” Brown butter.

  He poured the butter from the pan and started over. He dropped in butter, it sang, and he added the filet. It had been bundled up with a crisscrossing string to keep its shape and looked like a small parcel. He added more butter. It melted quickly, and he spooned it over the top of the meat.

  “This is rissoler.”

  Rissoler means to cook an ingredient in a small amount of liquid, usually fat. The technique is an item in the vocabulaire culinaire. In practice, it involves a lot of spooning. You cook your ingredient from underneath by direct heat (in a pan; in effect, sautéing it) and from above, indirectly, by ladling the fat over it. Once the ingredient starts to brown (colorer), you turn it over. You see the technique in French kitchens, in movies, and in a parody: someone tilting a pan, pooling up hot juices along the lower rim, frantically spooning.

  Le Cossec corrected my posture. “Stand tall and make small, deliberate movements. Be easy in your body when you cook.”

  He showed me how to complete the rösti, the Swiss mountain preparation that renders potatoes into a crispy version of a fried hairpiece. They are cooked in a very large rectangular pan until one side is browned and crunchy. There is only one way to turn the rösti over: a flip.

  “Picture the rösti landing on its other side. Think of nothing else.”

  “Un. Deux. Trois.”

  I flipped. The potato was airborne. (“Yikes!”) It landed. I was surprised. Le Cossec wasn’t.

  For the Valentine meal, he set out two goose livers and put on a pair of gloves to remove their veins.

  I asked if I could do one.

  “Really? Have you deveined liver before?” He looked bemused.

  “No.”

  He gave me a pair of gloves.

  A goose liver is impressively and massively brown, and the veins are gnarly. A long one runs north to south. The other runs east to west. They meet somewhere in the lobe’s northern hemisphere.

  I followed Le Cossec’s lead.

  He dipped his hand into the liver—no hesitation, he simply knew where the veins met (and there is nothing on the surface that tells you where to drill down)—and pulled them out. It could have been effected with a scalpel. The liver looked undisturbed except for a light scratch on its surface.

  A quick intake of breath, a rough aim, and I plunged in feelingly with my fingertips.

  Nothing.

  I dug around. (You don’t want to have to dig around.) The tissue was startling in its mushiness. Then I had one, I felt it, a vein—it was like a twig in mud—I grasped it and tugged. The rest, all connected, seemed to be coming out with it. It felt as though I were pulling out the plumbing underneath a street. Success! But the liver looked decimated. I could have been installing a sewer.

  The messiness of my mess didn’t matter. It was a lesson in the behavior of fat—a goose liver is overwhelmingly fat—and how, under heat, it re-forms itself. For the Valentine meal, the foie was encased in puff pastry, and the result was smooth and luxurious and actually—no other word seems quite adequate—rather transporting. (The other menu items included a carrelet—plaice—served with a sauce made of the liquid it was poached in; guinea hen, beef fillets, and a cabbage embeurrée, made with butter and pork and, yes, more foie gras. It was not an easy kitchen to arrive hungry in.)

  * * *

  —

  In pastry, I was told, “Water—essential to fruit, but its enemy in the kitchen.” To clean a strawberry: never soak and always use two bowls (quickly in and out of one to wash, quickly in and out of the other to rinse). “Water dilutes flavor. In the kitchen, you want to enhance it.”

  I was told, “Air—essential to life, the enemy of conservation.” Everything is stored on “contact,” a piece of plastic film on top, the air pushed out.

  I was told of the three lives of vanilla: fresh (first use) for intensity; dried (second use) for stewing and infusions; then, dried again (third use) to be stored with sugar.

  The egg: never cracked on the rim, only on a flat surface, once sharply, so as not to be contaminated by the shell, which is unhygienic.

  I was corrected on how to stir (“from the bottom up, circling, cleaning the sides as you go”), which I assume everyone else knows but which I never seemed to get right. I was corrected on my whisk (“limp wrist, figure eight, hitting four points of the bowl as if it had corners”), which I hadn’t known and which is both efficient and actually rather flash (you can reach exhilarating speeds).

  I learned all the pastries and, with my classmates, made them in student-body lunchtime quantities (e.g., 350 chocolate tarts). My favorite, without question: pâte feuilletée (in French—or “puff pastry,” in English). Both terms, the French and the English, describe the preparation (large amount of butter enveloped in a small amount of dough rolled out and folded over many times and in several directions) with remarkable physical specificity. Pâte feuilletée describes the pastry before it goes into the oven. Feuilleter can mean “to leaf through a book,” and if you slice firmly through the uncooked dough with a sharp knife it will look something like the neatly cut pages of an old novel. “Puff pastry” seems like a bad translation but is a good description of what you eat. In a hot oven, the pastry puffs: The butter melts, the water content evaporates, and the evaporation creates a hot blister between the layers of dough. What ought to be the world’s heaviest food tastes, confusingly, like one of the lightest. For me, the English “puff pastry” captures its crunchy and ethereal contradictoriness—if cooked to perfection, if the fat is completely rendered—and, at the risk of my being eternally censured by L’Institut Bocuse, is the term I swear by, will use in this book, and urge the French to adopt.

  Puff pastry is an absolute blast.

  Pastry was all about the rules. The French kitchen was about rules: that there was always one way and only one way (like trimming the gnarly ends off your beans—with your fingertips, never a knife). And I liked the rules and
how they were never questioned. Correction: I loved the rules.

  I liked how my days started, which now included an iron that I purchased on the way home one night at Monoprix, the French everything-store, after Le Cossec had appeared unnoticed and shouted across the kitchen where I was working, “Mais, Bill, regarde ta veste”—your chef’s jacket! (And everyone stopped and stared at me.) “Are you sleeping in it?”

  I now woke at six and pressed it. The jacket was heavy and the sleeves needed extra attention. I pressed the apron, a luxurious swath of white fabric, like a piece of extravagant formal wear. I pressed the double-red-striped cotton towels, four of them, one after another. (There is, I confess, wonder in a pressed towel.) I folded everything into a tidy bundle. The activity took my brain to a happy place that it hadn’t known: everyone else asleep, the repetition, the hiss of the iron’s steam, a cup of coffee nearby, having only the day ahead to think about.

  I fetched my knives and clogs and set out before seven, carefully, so as not to wake the boys, whose room was by the front door.

  When I began at l’institut, the mornings had been dark, but each day the sun arrived a little earlier. I crossed the Saône on the footbridge, my shoes clacking on the slats. It took four minutes from my front door to the stop for the number-19 bus. Thirty-five minutes later, it arrived in Écully: a walk through the woods, another coffee at the bar, and then—boom—the fast high-focus intensity of physical labor in a French kitchen.

  * * *

  —

  Classes were small, no more than eight people. My schedule tended to include a group from the second year, starting with its stint in a restaurant called F&B (short, alas, for “Food and Beverage”), which was daringly student-run and aspired to feed a sophisticated French lunch to everyone—faculty, staff, friends, visitors, about four hundred people—in two shifts.