Dirt

by Bill Buford

  Until now, I hadn’t thought about the sauce. It was what people ate with roast beef. I hadn’t eaten it with a meaty fish. I also had never tasted a version so perfectly rendered, with a brightly vivid vinegar acidity that seemed to wrap itself around every round molecule of the sauce’s fat. I liked, too, that it was different from most other French sauces, which are wine-based and can be manipulated to match the food they are served with. A Béarnaise doesn’t have to match. It’s just there. It could be its own food group.

  I now regularly embarrass myself by how much I openly love it. By no reckoning will it ever be deemed to be good for you.

  French cookbooks regard making a Béarnaise as a no-brainer, or at least they seem to, but since our meal on the banks of the Rhône, just about every sauce I ordered at a restaurant was a disappointment: overcooked, thickened with flour, unpleasant, having been neglected during a busy service. A Béarnaise is an emulsion—a way of getting two incompatible elements, liquid and fat, to bond (actually, the secret code of French cooking—its flair—seems always to involve getting two incompatible elements to live with each other).

  Christophe regarded the sauce as tricky. It became an issue between us, after I’d declared, during one of our personnel catechisms (because I was still making lunch), that, for la sauce, I wanted to prepare a Béarnaise, and he said, “No,” flat-out.

  “A Béarnaise is difficult,” he said.

  It was a perfectly responsible position. Christophe wanted to feed his staff.

  “Have you even made a Béarnaise?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Often?”

  “No.”

  “Then why make one now?”

  “Because that is why I am here.”

  He was confused.

  “To learn. I am here to learn.” Je suis ici pour apprendre. It seemed obvious, but obviously it wasn’t.

  Christophe uttered a faintly audible “huh.” He got it. I wasn’t going through an initiation rite to become a French chef. I was here only to learn what a French chef does.

  The following week, the protein was steak. “Go ahead,” Christophe said. “Make your sauce.”

  * * *

  —

  “Ah, the perfume of the mignonette,” he said, entering the kitchen after I’d got started on “my sauce” (which was, I admit, encouraging). Mignonette describes the infusion, the dark tropical spice of black pepper, the licorice fragrance of tarragon, in a bracing white vinegar, simmering slowly. The infusion is one of the three components of a Béarnaise, which on paper looks straightforward. The other two are egg yolks and clarified butter.

  I removed the infusion from the heat and let it cool. It was pretty concentrated.

  For twenty-five to thirty people, I needed two kilos of butter, which you let melt into a liquid state, whereupon the solids sink unappealingly to the bottom. It’s the bright-yellow liquid on top that you want: You pour it off into a container, careful to keep the solids back. (The kitchen is so hot you never have to melt the butter as such; you just leave it out on a shelf.) I used eighteen eggs, and separated the yolks, with Christophe looking over my shoulder to make sure that I wasn’t cracking them on a rim but tapping them authoritatively against a flat surface. In fact, if you’re me, you’ve been practicing that authoritative tap for a long time: too little authority and you have to tap a second time (whereupon it often goes splat); too much and…well, it definitely goes splat.

  * * *

  —

  Both Béarnaise and Hollandaise are at the heart of the French kitchen. Hollandaise, which may or may not have come from the Netherlands (akin to how a Béarnaise may have come from Béarn but probably didn’t), is one of Escoffier’s five “mother sauces,” the fundamentals you build many variations with. The others are béchamel, velouté, tomato, and espagnole, the wonderfully intense veal-tomato combination that is said to have been conceived by a Spanish cook at the wedding of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria in 1615—and, if so, a glimmer of innovative activity during the long period when French cuisine was just being born, maybe, even though no one thought to record the event definitively. Hollandaise and Béarnaise are basically alike, differing mainly in their particular acidity: A Hollandaise is lightly enhanced with lemon, a Béarnaise, emboldened by the vinegar reduction. Some cooks cut the vinegar with white wine. In Lyon, the Béarnaise is done only with vinegar and only with the most in-your-face version of it, white vinegar, based not on a wine but cellulose (i.e., tree bark) and what housekeepers use to clean with. It is a sauce that bites back.

  The first time I made it, at L’Institut Bocuse, I marveled at how, with my whisking, the sauce foamed and frothed and mounted in my pot into something insubstantial-seeming. The difference between a Béarnaise and other emulsified preparations, like, say, mayonnaise, is that in a Béarnaise you are also heating up the eggs while whipping them and hoping to land on that awkward custardy temperature that is precisely between raw and scrambled. How hot? Well, according to Harold McGee, it should be fifty degrees Celsius. But according to L’Institut Bocuse’s textbook, it’s sixty degrees Celsius. And according to Joël Robuchon, sixty-five degrees. And all the figures are useless, because you’re not about to poke a thermometer into your pot while you are wildly whisking away, afraid that at any moment it’s going to break. I use my finger, quickly, and if I burn myself, I know I’m in trouble.

  A failed Béarnaise is a liquid mess. Some describe it as scrambled eggs. It’s not. It’s barf. It is awful to look at. I know this because, for reasons that I never understood, my efforts at home sometimes failed. But then, sometimes, they succeeded, and I didn’t know why. Thus, my determination now: I wanted to know that I could nail the sauce and understand it.

  This time, my Béarnaise appeared to be working, and after it frothed up impressively, I slowly added a golden thread of the clarified butter, whisking, whisking, whisking, as the sauce, like a metaphor of its maker, seemed to defy gravity and puff up.

  I tasted it. I added salt and pepper. I tasted it again. I added lemon. It seemed to be missing something.

  Christophe tasted it. “What does it need?”

  “Vinegar,” I said.

  “Vinegar?” He looked at me, stupefied. “Vinegar, really?”

  The sauce already had a lot. I knew that. I don’t even know why I proposed adding more. I just said it. I tasted it, and thought: More, please.

  I added some vinegar, Christophe looking powerfully doubtful.

  We tasted again.

  “You were right,” Christophe said.

  It was a good moment.

  Then it was a bad moment. As we were standing there, the sauce broke. It failed. It was barf.

  “Look at that,” Christophe said. “It’s broken.”

  “Why did it break up?”

  “I have no idea.” He seemed very amused.

  * * *

  —

  To fix the broken sauce, put cold water in a pan, not much, a glass’s worth (plus an extra glass nearby in case you need it), heat it, and add your ruined sauce by the spoonful, whisking it in, as though it were a piece of butter, and then another spoonful, and so on. “The trick is the water,” Christophe said. “You want to get the sabayon right.”

  “Sabayon.” Of course. Someone had used the same word at L’Institut Bocuse: “You’re making a sabayon.” I had been thinking that, as with every other sauce, you reduce it as tightly as possible, concentrating it. Like a great veal stock: Take five gallons and reduce it to five ounces. Or fruit sauce: Take a container of orange juice and reduce it to a test tube. And then you build it up. But maybe Béarnaise wasn’t French.

  A sabayon is a foam sauce as much as it is an emulsion. As Harold McGee points out: Yolks will foam pretty well on their own, but they will foam spectacularly with water. Mine had failed
because they didn’t have enough water. I had reduced it too much.

  Dictionaries describe the French word sabayon as having appeared in the French language in 1803, even though the technique was probably in place long before. It comes from the Italian zabaglione (sweet wine, Marsala usually, the water element, plus egg yolks, whisked and cooked). It appears in two centuries of cookbooks, beginning with Maestro Martino in the fifteenth century. Martino was the gifted, flamboyant Renaissance chef who wowed Platina, a Vatican librarian who sampled his cooking while staying at a cardinal’s summer retreat. Platina then wrote a book that was among the first to treat cooking like works of art. It also plagiarized about half of Martino’s recipes—the manuscript of which is held at the Morgan Library in New York City—and created thereby an international best seller (of a kind) that would be translated into many languages, including French. (In many ways, it was the first book to export the Italian culinary Renaissance to the rest of Europe.) Might the origins of a Béarnaise be found there, in Platina? There is also a recipe from 1570, by Bartolomeo Scappi, regarded by many as the greatest Italian chef in history. Scappi’s recipe includes savory elements, like chicken broth, and is, frankly, not so different from a Béarnaise. Might the origins be there? Is there incontestable proof that the Italian chefs were introducing some of the sauces that would later become the fundamentals of French cuisine? Is there proof that the reverence for “the sauce” itself—its importance to a meal—actually originates in Italy? No, not that I’ve found…yet. But it seems highly likely.

  Incidentally, the trick to keeping a sauce from breaking up is, yes, not to allow your infusion to reduce too much—you need the water element—but also to take your time cooking it. You can achieve a consistency that you might believe the sauce should have by heating it over a medium flame and whisking like a mad Italian. It will take five minutes. But, in my experience, the emulsion hasn’t quite set, and the sauce might later fail. You’ll have more success if you approach it like a custard, slowly raising the temperature, for ten minutes, fifteen, whatever it takes, whisking the whole time, not in a frenzy, but with a measured steadiness, like a Frenchman.

  LEFTOVERS

  “Ah! If I were a poet! I would put all of this splendor in verse. Because I’m just a peasant, I put it in salad.”

  ALAIN CHAPEL AT THE MARKET, QUOTED IN CROQUE-EN-BOUCHE BY FANNY DESCHAMPS (1976), TRANSLATED BY JESSICA GREEN

  EVENING SERVICE, WHENEVER, A THURSDAY, MAYBE. We were about to run out of plates. I had to get some from the dishwasher in the back. It was urgent. The prospect? Ugly. The route? Nothing but obstacles—Christophe, Viannay, waiters, the pass, orders being called out, shouting, people hurtling back and forth from garde-manger. I clamped my elbows into my sides. I tilted my head slightly forward. I took a breath. In my mind, I was a robot on roller skates. I was off. I deviated in nothing: no head movement, no flickering of the eyes, nothing. I grabbed the plates. I rushed back.

  It was an exaggerated version of how people move in the kitchen, what I thought of as the “Frankenstein sprint.” I was doing it in parody. But was I?

  From a faraway corner, I heard my name, and a cheer.

  It was Sylvain. He looked happy, which was rare. In fact, he looked very happy. He was shouting: “Bravo, Bill! Bravo! You finally learned!” (I was confused, and then, slowly, I wasn’t, because, slowly, I got it: My joke wasn’t a joke?) “Bill, welcome to the kitchen!” He was very excited. “Do you have any idea what you looked like in the beginning?”—whereupon he did his parody, of a rag doll with its scatty eyeballs, bobbing up and down, looking this way and that, whatever, everything—and he laughed loudly. He could laugh because he was confident that I was laughing with him.

  And I pretended to (ha, ha, ha), while marveling: Really? That was what I looked like?

  * * *

  —

  I knew that I was slow. And there was actually merit in Sylvain’s observation: I had been trying to discipline my brain, not to change it, but to train it, like a client at the gym. I regarded it as blobby.

  It wasn’t obvious during service, because service is fast and buzzy. A dish is ordered; you make it. A table of dishes is ordered; you make them. It feels that you have a dozen items in your head at once, each at a different stage of preparation. In fact, you probably don’t. The orders are ordering your brain.

  Prep was harder.

  The worst? The day we returned in September for la rentrée and reopened. Frédéric poked my stomach when I appeared in the changing room, declaring loudly, “Qu’est-ce que tu as fait, Bill? Tu as mangé tout?”—what did you do when you were away, eat everything? I was told to make le personnel for eleven-thirty, which confused me until I understood. We were closed. There was no lunch service. It would take a full staff and fifteen hours to get ready for reopening—everything had to be prepped—and without the adrenaline of service, the day was arduous. I missed feeling that what I did mattered, right now, as well as the fundamental joys of making food that people were going to eat, right now. I couldn’t keep up.

  How to be faster? I purposefully reviewed my lessons: Sylvain’s, not to cross my hands; Cros’s, how to use the knife. I watched Étienne, the new guy, dicing shallots, how he prepped each one, slicing it vertically, then horizontally, the tic-tac-toe board, and how he then arranged them so that he could slice down from the top without having to put his knife down. I admired Étienne’s patience. It was slow but fast.

  “Vite! Vite! Vite, Billou,” Christophe said. In the kitchen you never stand still. (I now had a nickname, Billou.)

  I began by wanting always to know what I was going to do next. I don’t know why it took me so long. I don’t know where I got the idea from, except that it is obviously obvious. And, to my surprise, it resulted in a modestly enhanced concentration. Then, the second task completed, I stood wondering: What now?

  “Vite! Vite! Vite, Billou!” (Did he really have to repeat “Vite!” so many times?)

  That moment, standing there, wondering “what next” was my clue.

  I added another task. While working on task number one, I quietly repeated to myself the two that were coming up. The result was striking. No question—I enjoyed a new level of clarity.

  I tried to keep five in my mind, and the effect was even faster because I seemed to race to get to the fifth task, just to be relieved of having to think so hard about remembering all five. Five was exhilarating. I had to be fast. I had a lot of things—five of them, in fact—to get done. It was like an act of accelerated meditation.

  When I reached the last item, I paused, exhaled, and briefly relaxed. Then I compiled a new list.

  * * *

  —

  I told Jessica about my discoveries, as if they were real discoveries, how, in the kitchen, you need to know what you’re doing next, and what you’re doing after that, and you have to keep them in your mind, because you can’t write them down—your hands are busy, the surfaces are full of your work.

  (And she looked at me, no questions, with loving but undeniable pity, as in: Oh, poor thing, you’ve only come to realize this now?)

  My historic slowness must have been in the pauses, things that I’d forgotten and had to retrieve, the sloppy organization of not knowing what was coming next. I was fast with a knife. I knew my cutting board. I had the technical skills. I just needed to contain the wayward ways of my digressively civilian mind.

  I now think that I was picking up clues from the habits of those around me. I’ve concluded that my Frankenstein sprint wasn’t a joke: In effect, I was trying it on, to see if it might work. And it did. And the outcome was this: I came to love speed.

  What did I most enjoy in the kitchen? Making le personnel on Fridays, the one that had no menu, that was entirely improvised, the make-it-up-on-the-spot-with-whatever-you-are-lucky-enough-to-find end-of-the-week lunch. Once it
crushed me; now it thrilled me. And the thrill wasn’t in the leftovers in the chambre froide. It was in the ingredients that might not last until Monday, and there was a very elastic zone of judgment governing what constituted a food that was about to go off.

  Around nine o’clock, stashes started appearing, urgently passed to me like contraband, described sotto voce, some delicacy that hadn’t spoiled “yet” but was clearly “on the verge.” Squid, herring, lobster claws, squabs, foie gras, langoustines, a single spider crab. By ten o’clock, more foods had unexpectedly deteriorated and were deemed unlikely to last the weekend. Once, I was handed a quantity of caviar. (“Oh là là, this has probably already gone off,” Frédéric observed. “We really should eat it right now.”)

  Once, at ten-thirty, he gave me four chicken legs.

  “What am I meant to do with these?” I asked. “And what are you doing with chicken in the first place? You work the fish station.”

  “This is poulet de Bresse.” They were wrapped anonymously in butcher paper, which, his back to Christophe, Frédéric peeled away to show how beautiful they were, the famously faint blue tint in the sinews. “If you don’t cook them, they are trash.” Poubelle. Tu comprends?

  I stared at them. “I don’t have time to cook chicken legs.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why didn’t you give me these earlier?”