Dirt

by Bill Buford

  “Earlier they looked okay. Now they look as though they might go off, don’t you think?”

  I added them to what I was doing, my last mad thirty minutes, six sauté pans at once, and three items still in the oven, including a gratin de pâtes that I had made just in case and that was browning but not yet crusty.

  Mathieu Viannay had told me: “I made you cook le personnel because you were always late. I hoped it would teach you to be on time.” It did.

  I was loving speed.

  On Fridays, there was now a feeling of collaboration between me and the others, of making the lunch into a fête. They knew I could cook. There was no hazing or mocking.

  Johann made a wild-blueberry tart. Cheeses appeared. Multiple salads. Leftover desserts. Sylvain made dishes, too: one week, a perfect Spanish tortilla; another week, a quiche Lorraine. (They were also statements. He hadn’t said they were coming or introduced them; he only morosely dropped them off and returned to garde-manger. The tarts said: I made this while running my station by myself. Don’t you see that I am in the wrong place?)

  Fridays taught me the French philosophy of the leftover, codified (I later discovered) in my Institut Bocuse textbook and older books, such as the 1899 Art of Using Leftovers. There were rules—never store a leftover in a serving dish or a cooking vessel; never store a warm liquid in a closed container without cooling it first; never reuse a preparation made with raw egg; never keep anything for more than three days; and, the most important of all: Never, under any circumstances, use a leftover twice. A leftover has one chance: to be made even better than the original.

  I made celeriac rémoulade, repurposed from the morning’s mayonnaise. I made blanquette de veau repurposed from a veal roast.

  And, once, just after 10:00 a.m., Sylvain dropped a quantity of raw tuna on my worktop without explanation. Il y a du thon, he said (“There is tuna”), and walked away.

  I studied it: considerably more than a kilo, not insubstantial, but not enough to feed everyone if cut into steaks and sautéed. I had a thought. In the pantry, there would be soy sauce. In the walk-in, chives, shallots, and lemons. I asked Johann if pastry could spare the bread rolls. I was making tuna burgers, Michel Richard’s tuna burgers.

  I made lemon mayonnaise, adding a squeeze of the juice at the end and mixing in the zest (six minutes).

  I made a marinade: shallots, chives, soy (six minutes).

  I cut the fish by hand. Christophe—who was watching, because he was always watching—would call this thon au tartare, tuna done like a steak tartare (six minutes).

  I put four sauté pans on the flattop.

  I put my hand-cut tuna in a bowl, added olive oil, and smashed it with the back of a plastic spatula, making a squishy pulp, emulsifying the oil with the fats of the fish, binding it (three minutes). I added splashes of the marinade and shaped the emulsified pulp into twenty-four burgers (six minutes), sautéed them (quick—I wanted them rare)—forty-five seconds on one side, thirty seconds on the other—removed them to cool, inserted them in buns, dressed them with the mayonnaise, and stacked them up in a clean roasting pan. They looked eminently grabable. Franchement, they were sensational.

  * * *

  —

  After lunch, Frédéric stopped me. He was sitting on a worktop, eating his second burger. “Delicious,” he said. “How did you make the mayonnaise?”

  “Lemons plus the zest.”

  “Ah. The zest.” He nodded, appreciative.

  “I learned it from Michel Richard.”

  “Richard? Hmm. I’ve never heard of him.”

  I returned to the kitchen.

  “Excellent,” Christophe said. “You know, you can also use eggs. To bind the tuna. You add egg to the tuna.”

  Yes, I said, but then wondered: Why would you do that? With eggs as a binder, you can’t cook the tuna rare. People don’t like raw egg.

  In an instant, I understood Richard’s preparation. The French practice: Bind with egg. But then your tuna needs to be cooked through. Meanwhile, the world has discovered seared tuna, barely cooked tuna, sushi-grade tuna, and no one is interested in an overcooked tuna with egg.

  “I learned the technique from Michel Richard,” I told Christophe.

  “Richard?”

  He, too: bafflement.

  It was everyone’s favorite personnel. But the credit for it went unjustly to me. And I didn’t want it. The credit was wholly owed to the restlessly reinventing Michel Richard.

  * * *

  —

  Jessica woke in the night with a migraine. A bad one. She couldn’t keep anything down and was writhing.

  I phoned the kitchen. No answer. I left a message. “I will be late.” It seemed dangerous to leave her alone. “I will come as soon as I can.”

  I arrived after eleven. The staff lunch, which I hadn’t made, was just finishing. I apologized to Christophe.

  “You are very late.”

  “I know. I am sorry. Jessica had a migraine. I left a message.”

  “I got the message.”

  I knew the drill. La rigueur. In the kitchen, you never have a reason for not showing up.

  “I didn’t believe it was safe to leave.”

  Christophe nodded. “You were missed, Billou.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and then played his reply over in my head. You were missed. Tu nous as manqué.

  * * *

  —

  I was at La Mère Brazier for six months, just as the restaurant was entering its second year. There was no official send-off, because, when I left, it was to attend to a piece of business (I made two one-hour films for the BBC about my time in Lyon called Fat Man in a White Hat). I intended to resume my place when it was done. The films took longer than expected. I stopped in on Viannay every now and then to confirm my intention and just to check in. Once I found a space in the back, to practice a dish that I had watched his making: fois gras and artichoke hearts rolled up as a cylinder in a boned poulet de Bresse and served, sliced, crosswise, with that intense veal-cherry sauce that we made at the meat station. In the summer, I produced it for friends who had a son the same age as George and Frederick. They, and especially the boys, devoured it. (The secret, I think, was the sauce.)

  In the interim, Hortense was gone. She had broken her foot and didn’t return. Chern was gone. He had earned the credit he needed to complete his degree. Frédéric was in Japan, a chef’s job. And Sylvain had left to work at Bocuse’s Brasserie Le Nord. (“Monsieur Paul is there every Thursday at eleven.”) It was nearby, on the Presqu’île. Sylvain’s job title was chef de cuisine. Was this a step down? Le Nord didn’t have a Michelin star. It wasn’t “grande cuisine.” And Sylvain wasn’t an executive chef, or a sous-chef, but he wasn’t, at least, the guy running garde-manger single-handedly.

  “Viannay wouldn’t submit my name for the Pâté en Croûte World Cup,” Sylvain said. “I needed a sponsor. He refused.”

  Sylvain had embarked on a career based on the traditional kitchen assumptions of hard work and fair rewards: that if you were rigorous, disciplined, punctual, and attentive; if you had deep knowledge of the French repertory—your Escoffier, classic dishes, pastries, sauces—and that if, as well, you secured a job at a fine establishment, such as the three-Michelin-star Restaurant de Georges Blanc, then you could count on rising up in the hierarchy. You would be rewarded with increasing responsibility, prestige, and a reasonable salary. You could raise a family. It was for life.

  Was Sylvain competent? Absolutely. Rigorous, disciplined, reliable? No one more so. The classic training? Definitively. But there was a new element he hadn’t prepared for—creativity. Was he innovative? Possibly not. It had never been assumed that you needed it.

  At La Mère Brazier, Sylvain seemed to have lost his future. He had the manner of a
man betrayed: not just by the restaurant, but by the culture of the kitchen, by France.

  I asked Viannay about him.

  “Sylvain was not good enough,” he said. He looked at me hard to ensure that I got the message. “He wasn’t what Christophe needed. Sylvain is a bistro chef.”

  * * *

  —

  I had a word with Christophe. I will be back, I promised.

  “You will be welcome.”

  But I didn’t see him for nearly a year.

  VI

  Dinner

  At the table, the Lyonnais are intolerant of sparkling water. They drink dry wine. When, on a whim, they dilute it with a bit of water, it is only the good water of the Rhône. They know it is pure and of good quality.

  The Lyonnais do not like eating fast. In this they prove their passion, because, by controlling the urges of their stomach, they can savor the varieties and pleasure of their food….

  The Lyonnais do not give away their recipes. They protect them. They never ask for the recipes of others, because they never want to have to return the favor.

  In Lyon, they do not eat with music, even if they are passionate about the art. They don’t like, in fact, to mix their joys and be distracted from one of the most important functions of life, eating their meal.

  Traditional Lyonnais take their coffee and liqueur at the table to prolong the pleasures and the time there….

  In politics, the Lyonnais know that it is with good dinners we govern mankind and that the best political document is in a very well-written menu.

  FROM LA CUISINE LYONNAISE BY MATHIEU VARILLE (1928), TRANSLATED BY GEORGE ELY BUFORD

  LYON, CHRISTMAS. My mother, seventy-seven years old and a recent widow, flew from Florida, changing planes in Washington, D.C., and Frankfurt, where her flight arrived late and she missed her connection and didn’t know how to make her cell phone work. Finally, unflappable, she appeared in Lyon to visit her grandchildren for the holidays and check in on their parents, who had told her that they would be staying in France six months but had already been there much longer and had no apparent plans to leave. On Christmas Eve, I phoned Brasserie Georges to confirm they were open. (I didn’t know; our first Christmas didn’t involve going anywhere.) The restaurant, built in 1836, has high ceilings, red leather banquettes, waiters in tuxedos, children under four for free, a birthday song on the limonaire every quarter-hour, as proverbially busy as the train station next door, and room for two thousand covers a night—with, in my opinion, an exceptional steak tartare made tableside. It is a throwback establishment—the kind of place you read about in history books but never survive—and evidently was where Lyon went on Christmas Eve. Yes, they were open, but the waiting list was already so long that no more names would be accepted. We had never, in our many visits to the place, been turned away. It seemed a physical impossibility. I had thought that Lyon was now ours, that we knew its customs and its practices, but we hadn’t been here long enough to know its family practices on Christmas Eve, the rituals of dining in the historic Christian city.

  We settled on a popular bistro, not in our quartier but not far, and walked there on what had become a brisk, still night, cobbled streets full of many more people than I had expected to find.

  George began singing a song and, after a refrain, was joined by Frederick:

  Qui a la barbe blanche

  Et un grand manteau?

  Qui a la barbe blanche

  Et sa hotte sur le dos?

  It was the first time I’d heard it. When the boys reached the refrain, strangers joined in. A guy on the corner smoking a cigarette. Couples on their way somewhere. All adults, and no children in their care. They stopped, stood still, and sang. My mother hadn’t noticed, and I told her to listen: a chorus led by two elfin American children, their perfect French, their fragile soprano voices.

  Qui descend du ciel

  Une fois par an?

  Qui descend du ciel

  Pour tous les petits enfants?

  C’est le Père Noël

  Père Noël

  C’est le Père Noël

  Pour mon joyeux Noël.

  Applause echoed off stone walls and the cobbled street and from around a corner.

  French had come easily to the boys, but not as fast as we expected. But when, finally, they became fluent, they were deeply fluent. Jessica and I can date the moment, a full year after we arrived, an evening when we had arranged for Stephen, their rambunctiously energetic “sitter,” to look after them. The boys let him in.

  “Hello, George and Frederick.”

  “Bonjour, Stephen,” they said, in an impeccable accent, and Stephen, after a glance at us, replied in French, and they, in turn, did the same, and, from that arbitrary-seeming moment, they never spoke to him in English again. It was as if they had managed to twist their brains and (click!) the French one was now in the front and in charge, and the English one was a backup in the back. Now, if you woke them in the night, they emerged in another language, from French dreams.

  When we walked home after dinner, the bells were ringing for the midnight service, all of them in close proximity, the historic churches, a reminder that the city had often been under siege. Midway through the French Revolution, on May 29, 1793, Lyon had declared its independence, and Robespierre, indignant, declared that the city should be exterminated (“Lyon n’est plus!”). He hired sixty thousand mercenary troops to surround it, bomb it daily, starve it, and the bells rang in defiance, until many of the churches were leveled and, two months later, the city capitulated. The guillotines were on the Place des Terreaux, and some of the 1,684 corpses (each one named and numbered, since the Revolution was nothing if not punctilious) were stacked in an improvised morgue in the chapel nearest our home and by Bob’s boulangerie. The bells in Lyon are always a little mournful, even on the eve of a day celebrating a birth. They seem to fortify the Lyonnais in their Lyonnaisness.

  Christmas morning was bright and intensely blue. When young Frederick saw that Père Noël had left him a gift, he rushed to the window, with its long view of the Saône and the skies over Beaujolais and the Alps, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, as if the bearded guy’s visit had only just been completed. The expression of high expectation on his face has played over and over in my memory, like a rebuke for our manipulating a child’s innocence: Or maybe it’s just the nostalgia of a moment in France when everything was finally seeming right and good.

  I went out to Bob’s, who had told us only the day before that he’d be open on Christmas. He had pulled an all-nighter. The display of breads and cakes was vast and unprecedented. There were baguettes in what appeared to be every possible variation, including flûtes, which were long and unwieldy, and ficelles, the little ones like a string, and bâtards, the fat ones, and both the “short” four-footer (a joko court) and the long one, the six-foot joko long. There were braided breads, and winemaker loaves, plus pastries and the pains au chocolat that George and Frederick couldn’t do without. I had never seen Bob make such a variety. It expressed expertise and a sense of history.

  But the shop was not crowded. In fact, there was only one customer: me.

  “It is my fault,” Bob said. “I hadn’t made up my mind to open on Christmas until the last minute, and no one knew.”

  I bought a tottering armful—simply a ridiculous amount—and made my way back home, dropped them spillingly on the kitchen table, and went looking for a magnum of wine that I’d been saving for the right occasion—a red one from the Rhône—rushed back down the stairs, and presented it to Bob as a gift.

  I knew that I would be returning to work for him, and that, for my own selfish purposes, I needed to complete my stint there, if only because it completed a list of what I thought of as “French essentials”—not “haute cuisine” but, rather, the rustic fundamentals of foods that had
been made here for thousands of years, fashioned from the land: cheese and saucisson and bread. Bob was skeptical. In his view, I was now on to other things. Even so, we had become close. Our family was so often in his shop that it came to seem like an extra room in our home. Bob was family.

  Bob had an agenda, and he trusted me enough to know that I would want to understand it. He grew up with an idea of what a boulanger did. He had a refrain: Everyone deserved good bread. But there was more to it. It was like a calling or a social imperative: A boulanger can be counted on by the people he feeds. Opening on Christmas Day was, somehow, one of his duties.

  Recently, I contacted Steven Kaplan, a historian of the boulangerie. His Good Bread Is Back helped me to understand a rage that Bob felt at how factory breads—the kind, in fact, that La Mère Brazier then served (half baked, then reheated, with mixing tricks and chemicals to simulate the bounce and yeasty aromatics of an old-fashioned loaf)—had deprived a whole generation of French people from knowing what real bread should taste like.

  I told Kaplan about Bob, how his bread was recognized in Lyon to be the best around. “Bob,” I wrote, “says that the flavor is all in the flour. He has a guy in the Auvergne whose wheat he swears by, and I don’t know if it’s the farmer who mills it or someone else, but the flour is fresh, especially in the summer, and arrives not in bulk but every few days, and there’s a goat, on the wheat farmer’s property, Bob has a picture in his window, named Hector.”

  Kaplan wrote: “Wow. Your fellow Bob is very unusual.” There are many good bread bakers in France now, but he didn’t know anyone who was getting his flour directly from the farmer growing the wheat.

  It’s not much, a loaf of bread. Flour, water, and the dough left over from yesterday. It seems scarcely to exist. Let it rise, weigh it, shape it, proof it, slash it, bake it, and ask for 90 centimes. Maybe the secret really was the flour.