by Bill Buford
“I want to go to New York,” Sylvain said.
“Why?”
He thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
I don’t think he had ever considered the question.
“I just know that I want to be in New York. Would a French chef find work there?”
It would be a recurrent theme, not just for Sylvain, but for most people in the kitchen, although none more often than Sylvain. No one wanted to go to Spain or Japan or Denmark. (England? Never.) And it wasn’t for cooking reasons. For instance, none of the cooks believed that New York had something to teach them in the kitchen. They wanted to go to New York because they wanted to go to New York.
Once, a Lyon monthly magazine (called, tellingly, Lyon People—French magazine, English title) put Daniel Boulud on the cover, photographing him on the hood of a New York yellow cab, arms thrown wide open, as though inviting his friends in Lyon to come visit. There was a copy at the end of the bar. The bar area was where we ate le personnel. There wasn’t a single member of the brigade who didn’t pick up the magazine, read every page, and then stare at the cover. The Lyonnais don’t know Daniel Boulud. It’s chefs who do. Boulud is the one who got away.
* * *
—
At least I knew how to prepare an artichoke, and this, finally, was a relief. Artichokes are Italian. Artichokes weren’t new to me.
Sylvain was astonished. “Really? You can turn an artichoke?”
“You mean cut away the leaves and carve out the heart?”
“Yes. You can do that?”
“Yes.”
“C’est vrai?”
“Yes, really.”
I wasn’t trying to prove that I was more than a novice. I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I had worked in Italian restaurants. At L’Institut Bocuse I’d actually asked for an artichoke lesson, just to confirm that I was basically doing the right thing. Artichokes are important in Lyon. I’d learned that early on.
Sylvain conveyed that he was very impressed, in that exaggerated theatrical way of a grown-up talking to a toddler, and said something about my being more schooled than he’d realized. He was showing me—no question—an immediate new respect.
This made me uneasy.
He set up an impromptu artichoke station. He took a plastic bottle from a shelf above the sink—citric-acid powder—and shook some of it into a large bowl of water. The citric acid keeps the artichokes from browning. Then he pulled a street-sized trash can next to our worktop. It is astonishing, the sheer volume of leaves that you end up jettisoning just to get down to the vegetable’s small and tender heart. Does no one dip them in butter and scrape them off with their teeth?
He fetched a crate. We got to work.
I can’t remember what I did. If I try to conjure up my effort, an image comes to mind, but it is of a perfectly turned artichoke, two to three inches of stem, gently curved, the heart smoothly symmetrical, looking like a flower. I genuinely felt that I had achieved what I’d intended to do. I hadn’t known that it was a failure until I showed it to Sylvain.
What I did at the time was this: I made him cry.
What I presented, evidently, was so mutated-looking that Sylvain burst out laughing: at it and me. He laughed so hard that tears ran down his cheeks. He laughed so hard that he buckled over. Everyone in the kitchen then stopped their tasks and started laughing, too, weakly at first, because unstoppable laughter is always contagious, even if you don’t know why, until you then discover why, and, with your funny bone suitably warmed up, you, too, break out into laughter: pointing at the offending object and at the person who made it.
Eventually, Sylvain threw my artichoke emphatically into the trash and said—with difficulty, because he was still laughing—that perhaps I wasn’t quite ready for turning artichokes.
Only one person wasn’t laughing. This was Christophe Hubert. Hubert was the executive chef.
He had crossed his arms across his chest. He stared out with displeasure.
Christophe continued staring until, one by one, each member of the kitchen slowly brought his laughter under control.
In truth, I was to blame. I knew this, and suspected that Christophe was thinking the same: If I hadn’t been there, with all my dysfunction, no one in his kitchen would have started falling about in hysterics.
The room quieted down. People resumed their duties. Christophe waited another moment, a long one. “Merci,” he said, with exaggerated gratitude.
* * *
—
In my modest culinary life, I have been terrified by the possibility of having to work garde-manger, the place where newcomers normally start. (Garde-manger: fussy and fast. Me: sloppy and slow.) At La Mère Brazier, the station had two people, Michael and Florian. Michael (pronounced the French way—Mee-KELL) worked hard and seemed to be always on the verge of a hissy fit. Florian worked harder and was permanently in a state of near-hysterics. Sylvain was Florian’s godparent. He introduced us, folding up his arms and rocking them, recalling Florian as a nine-week-old infant.
Now there were three. Garde-manger was where I would begin.
Florian was nineteen. He was the youngest person in the kitchen. From time to time, there would be younger cooks—interns, including a student from a lycée (the equivalent of an American high school) who had a bedtime curfew and left early—but none were on the payroll. Florian got a check: every Thursday, from Viannay personally, who shook his hand and stared into his eyes with an intensity that seemed to say, “Boy, I own you.” Florian was an official member of the brigade.
My first task involved assembling seventy-five highly elaborate lobster-and-fennel mouth-taste constructs. At the time, they were the most ridiculous pieces of food I’d been asked to make. Each one seemed to take ten minutes, which is impossible: The math doesn’t add up, because Florian and I were both doing them, and it didn’t take us five hours. But it took a long time. Worse, you can’t make mouth-taste constructs too far in advance or they dry out. Therefore, you make them as late as possible, which, in a kitchen, was a very uncomfortable time to be doing anything.
The lobster constructs were erected in soupspoons, the familiar Japanese kind, white, ceramic, pretty, made in Limoges (in France, every precious food-related product has its place, and, for plates, it’s Limoges), and small.
We poured panna cotta into the bottom—a thickish dribble. Panna cotta is an Italian dessert. It is a cousin of a French one, the custard, but made with cream instead of milk (“panna cotta” = “cooked cream”), and egg whites instead of yolks. This one, our version, was infused with fennel fronds, the green pom-poms that sprout from a fennel bulb. They were for color. At the last minute, sheets of gelatin were melted in. These were for wobble.
Next: lobster claw, only a morsel, sautéed in butter. It was placed atop the panna cotta as if afloat. The image seemed to be nautical. (Maybe it wasn’t, but it was how I made sense of it.) The green panna cotta was the sea; the red lobster morsel, the seafaring vessel.
“Toothpicks”—meticulously carved out of the fennel bulb—were the masts. Each one had a crow’s nest, too: a flimsy red baby-tomato ring, placed atop the fennel toothpicks. (“Land-ho!”)
The challenge was the flimsy red rings.
Actually, everything was a challenge. I didn’t have the right fingers. It was my genetic heritage. Some people: born to play nocturnes by Chopin. Me: born to pull out root vegetables in cold weather. I don’t have fingers. I have stumps. A flimsy red ring is a torture to prepare with stumps.
To make a flimsy red ring, you roast a tomato—not the round cherry kind but the plum-shaped Italian one—until it is shriveled and dehydrated. Then you slice it, thinly and carefully, crosswise. You can’t slice it too thinly. Anything thicker than too thin is too thick. When you brush away the stray seeds, you are left with several fine red circles—loops, really�
�like a miniature version of what you, if you were about six inches tall, might toss onto pins at a county fair to win a stuffed animal for your six-inch beloved.
It was a myopic labor. I was hunched over. Florian was hunched over. Two grown men, bent in half, doing itsy-bitty-bitsies with their finger-tippy-tipsies.
“Attention!” Florian said sharply. He pointed to my nose.
A bead of sweat was swelling threateningly on the tip.
Johann appeared.
Johann was one of the pastry chefs. The kitchen had two. Both were named Johann, and, somehow, each one knew which Johann you wanted when you called out “Johann.” One Johann was relaxed. The other was manic. The relaxed one forgot to wear his toque. His pants were falling down, low-rider style. He had a seashell necklace. He would rather have been in sandals than in clogs. The manic Johann looked medieval. He was like a court jester. He had a head like an egg, very narrow at the top, a massive Adam’s apple, buggy eyes that gave nothing away, and he didn’t smile, even though he was never serious. (He was also preternaturally competent and never used an electric device for making the restaurant’s soufflés, because he could whip faster by hand than any machine.)
“C’est très joli ça,” the medieval Johann said from behind my back, ever droll. Very lovely.
I was repositioning a fennel frond. Yeah, right, I thought. Let’s make fun of the Neanderthal.
“Oui, oui,” I said. “Je sais, c’est super-joli.”
I un-hunched, stood up, and turned. Johann wasn’t being ironic, except that this was impossible, because he was always ironic.
I wondered: “C’est vrai?”
“Oui,” Johann said, (ostensibly) without irony.
I looked hard into his face. “Non,” I said.
“Oui,” he said, “c’est vraiment joli,” and he walked off in an impressively impassive display of his convictions.
I re-examined my soupspoons: not merely as expressions of narcissistic fussiness (as they will, alas, forever remain, in my pedestrian eyes), but also as, maybe, something pleasing. Where was the pleasure, exactly? I found myself analyzing them according to three criteria:
Color: the vibrant red, the shades of green.
Texture: the crunchy vegetable, the soft sponge of the lobster, the pudding-ness of the panna cotta.
And volume: the undeniable three-dimensionality of a lobster barge with a mast and a crow’s nest.
I stepped back. No question: I was in a French kitchen.
* * *
—
Florian was, for his age, surprisingly good company, mainly because he was so transparently himself. He never tried to be better than he was, and, for all his teenage gawkiness, there was, between us, an instant camaraderie developing: two novices, one young, one not so young, hoping against hope to become masters.
He was skinny and tall, probably midway through a final growth spurt, with straight dark hair, big ears, a big nose, an unusually long neck, and lanky arms; he looked something like a giraffe, with the disposition of a Chihuahua. He talked to himself. (“Le stress! Le stress!”) He swore at himself. (“Florian! Putain de merde!”) He hit himself: usually a smack, left hand striking the right. This was done to control a tremor. It came from nerves. Sometimes the nerves got so bad he hit himself with force, raising his hand high in the air, casually, as though in a stretch, and then smashing it onto a countertop (quickly, as if taking the hand by surprise).
Unlike my stumps, Florian’s fingers were long and delicate. They could have been a pianist’s fingers, except that he would never have been able to control their shaking. The nerves came from fear, he confessed. He was afraid, at the start of every day, that he was about to fail.
Sometimes he gaspingly clutched his chest as if in enormous pain. I first witnessed this when I showed up late for an evening service.
“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” he explained. He was hyperventilating and was bringing his breathing under control, with long, slow exhales.
(It was shaming that I was late, and I seemed always to be a little late. In the kitchen, nothing matters more than punctuality. But I was happy to feel that I was needed.)
One morning, having successfully diced a shallot, Florian thrust his fist into the air and cheered. “Je l’ai fait!” I did it!
I thought: So I am not the only one. Nobody tells you this, but in your first weeks, a shallot is a tricky tease. You have to produce so many of them in a French kitchen (only salt and pepper are more fundamental), but they are imperfectly shaped and so impudently slippery that, even though you believe you know how to cut one into a pile of perfect tiny cubes, they keep refusing to cooperate, and you know that it is taking longer to prepare than it should, and that everyone must be noticing.
Florian conceded, in his characteristically open manner, that he had already failed twice here. Spectacularly. He shook his head, remembering. He had started at the meat station, he said (in a tone of “Can you imagine?”). It was a disaster. Christophe had to step in. Florian was humiliated. (No one, in my humble opinion, was more efficient at the ancient practice of sucking out the confidence of a weaker creature like a straw than Christophe.)
Florian was given a second chance. The next night was worse.
“But I wasn’t fired. I was given a third chance.”
Six months later, Florian was still on probation, although “probably” nearing the end of it. He was treated by the others, and especially by Christophe, as a pet now trained enough (almost) to be trusted not to wreck the place.
In itself, Christophe’s attitude toward Florian was exceptional. Christophe encouraged no one. Every now and then, he would ask Florian to get him a bottle of sparkling water (only Christophe was allowed to drink the sparkling water) and then, in a gesture of spontaneous magnanimity, tell Florian to get one for himself. (“Oui!” Florian would quietly say to himself, pumping his elbow.)
Once, Christophe patted Florian on the shoulder. Christophe touched no one. (His handshake was damp and reluctant and, for me, especially memorable for a last-second reflex that would leave me holding only his sweaty fingertips.) Florian beamed. He was going to be a chef one day.
* * *
—
Jessica secured our Cartes Vitales, the green plastic totems that guarantee health care—without which, frankly, it is impossible for a family to live in France—but only after highly confrontational visits to the Health Service Administration (called CPAM, for the Caisse Primaire d’Assurance Maladie) on a miserable street equidistant from the sordid Perrache Railroad Station, the sordid old prison, and the especially sordid Place Carnot. Jessica was unfazed by the surroundings. It was combat that she appeared to relish.
“There is no sport the French like more than arguing,” she said when she finally returned, victorious.
She was more forthright than her New York City self, and struck back with wicked vitriol whenever she had suffered a rudeness. Civic officials, at least in our arrondissement, seemed not to have dealt with an American before, and did not understand why they should have to start dealing with one now. Regardless, no civic official, I am confident, had ever seen an American like Jessica once crossed. She had been emancipated by the French language. There is a quality about French rudeness—a self-righteousness, probably—that provoked Jessica to the point of rage, especially if she was the target: as when a diner (again, a man) crossed the very small restaurant where we were eating with friends to tell her that she laughed too loudly, or when a diner (a man, of course) at the next table at the Bouchon des Filles leaned over, after observing that she had filled my glass, and told her that, in France, it is the man, not the woman, who pours the wine. Jessica expressed exaggerated surprise, given that the woman in question was a wine expert, that she also consulted on the wine list of the restaurant, which was pointedly called Bouchon des Filles and was o
wned and run by women. (The man was witheringly silenced, and his wife spent the rest of the evening apologizing for the behavior of her spouse.)
In our family, Jessica both opens the bottles and pours them.
She dealt with the grèves, the strikes, which were regular and unannounced: You showed up at the school and the front door was closed, a piece of paper taped to it, announcing that the teachers had walked out, or the canteen workers, or both.
She surmounted the horror of no-school Wednesdays, having discovered a citywide program of alternatives, held at outposts of the MJC (Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture—House of Youth and Culture), which were so popular they filled up within an hour of opening for enrollment. Jessica, at the front of the line, found places for the boys at a branch of the MJC just behind La Mère Brazier. I then took to wheeling them over in their stroller, a brisk clip, needing to stop first at the kitchen to secure a cutting board before there were none left, the cooks uncomfortable to find toddlers in their presence, the incongruity of defenseless children in what was an unapologetically aggressive kitchen, both boys staring out wide-eyed, astonished: their fragility, their softness.
During the spring, four friends from Jessica’s “tasting club” made the trek to France to see her and, in effect, to resume their studies. It was a telling tribute of loyalty. It was also an obvious field trip: We were, after all, situated within easy driving distance of several major grape groups. Encouraged, Jessica signed back up to complete her WSET diploma at a teaching facility in Mâcon, about fifty miles away. The classes were small, and conducted over long weekends in French; Jessica made four very good friends there and only one enemy, a pompous (male) fellow student whose acts of condescension she had found herself incapable of allowing to go unpunished, and from whom she would eventually have to be physically separated. For the remainder of the course, Jessica and the pompous one were made to sit on opposite sides of the classroom. When both of them passed one class and enrolled in the next, the seating arrangement continued.