Dirt

by Bill Buford

  I set my bowl on the boulder and slip off.

  The ritual of taking animals to the high ground is called the “transhumance,” a Latin word (trans + humus, “earth,” “dirt”), harking back to an ancient peasant practice. The animals, dressed up with flower necklaces, extra bells, and colorful blankets, are paraded through the village and, with much hoopla and music making, up the mountain. After a recent trip to the Canadian Rockies—where the forest’s wild ruminants, moose, bighorn sheep, elk, come down to the valley at the end of winter, but instantly go up to the high mountains to graze once the snow clears—I have come to suspect that the transhumance practice predates society, that it harks back to an era when aurochs roamed what we now call France, that wild animals have always known how and where to eat, and that it was early peasants who learned from animals and not animals that needed to be directed by peasants.

  The appeal of a mountain myth—that rennet was discovered by a wild man dressed in branches—is that it is probably true. One of the earliest vehicles for cheese making is said to have been in Sicily: a baby goat’s stomach. That is where the curdling takes place. And before? Cheese making was discovered by hunter-gatherers. It is the eternal principle of hunting: Eat everything. Cheese was in the tummies of the baby animals they killed. We learned our know-how of the process from them, the hunter-gatherers, the wild men.

  Maybe it is altitude or the strange clarity of the light or simply that I haven’t had much sleep, but I find that I am on the verge of making connections that probably aren’t entirely logical or sensible, but feel, almost, as if they should be.

  Like the fact that there are so many different kinds of cheese in France, more than anywhere else in the world, twelve hundred of the twenty-two hundred unique European varieties, according to Michel Bouvier, the former curator of food and drink at the Gallo-Roman museum near Vienne. And now, my hands still smelling of milk, I find it miraculous that there would be so many. The miracle isn’t because France has a varied landscape with varied food-making practices arising out of it, although it does; it is implicit in the sheer antiquity of how long cheeses have been made here, each one originating out of a specificity of place that is probably pre-civilization, when the horizon was not much more than the perimeters of where you could walk in a day. Each cheese is necessarily unlike any other and could well date back thousands of years, to the hunters and gatherers and auroch slayers. And each cheese was essential to survival, especially in winter or in famine, an efficient piece of protein that met the caloric needs of a hungry family when there was nothing else.

  What French cheese is now seems more complex, I find myself reflecting, because most families have enough food to get through the winter and yet, as though a rite, continue to end their meals with cheese. They are trained to end their meals with it. The boys do in their schools. It is a cultural imperative. Why? Is it that eating a piece of cheese is, more than any other food, akin to honoring a piece of place? Is it that, in preserving and continuing to cultivate twelve hundred unique and mainly handmade cheeses, the French express their respect for food and its relationship to the dirt it comes from?

  Claude appears. I feel I am also seeing some kind of connection to extreme seasonality and the magic of this Alpine sun, and make an effort to share my ramblings with him. He seems to understand and even, possibly, to agree.

  He then kicks a dense green-leaf outcropping nearby. The soil breaks up a little—it is less dirt than a network of roots—and he pulls out some plants with his hand. It is the soil he wants me to look at, the subterranean chaos of it. It is foamy, complicated, the fibrous stuff of decomposition.

  “Humus,” he says.

  “Humus,” I repeat. It is the same word in French and English and Latin.

  Humus: It is the fertility of the soil. It is the capital of nations. It is how the earth dies and is reborn. It is, according to Albert Howard, now regarded as the godfather of organic farming (he died in 1947), what you find in unmanipulated nature, in the forest, in an open meadow, amid the high-altitude stretches of the alpage, and on rustic farms, where peasants “can tell by a glance at the crop whether or not the soil is rich” and where plant life—in what is perhaps Howard’s most quirkily brilliant observation—develops “something approaching personality.” Howard wrote mainly in the 1920s and ’30s, when science, having discovered agriculture, was just setting out to make it more efficient, more profitable, and he witnessed firsthand the consequences of pesticides and chemical fertilizers and the disregard—the destruction, in fact—of humus: a slow poisoning of our dirt that is, in his description, “one of the greatest calamities which has befallen agriculture and mankind.”

  Humus. It introduced itself to Jessica and me, the boys on our shoulders, as we walked through that wild wheat field after our saucisson tasting, our first spring in Lyon, the messy dirt, full of sticky decomposing stuff, with insects gnawing at our ankles.

  It figures in a film, Natural Resistance by Jonathan Nossiter, in a scene in northern Italy, featuring a winemaker, Stefano Bellotti, on a dirt road that separates two properties. One is Bellotti’s.

  “We are standing on the same slope of the same hill and these two soils”—Bellotti gestures to his land and his neighbor’s—“are identical.”

  His neighbor’s vines look like what we expect a vineyard to be. The rows between them have no weeds. They are tidy. The earth looks as though it could have been swept. It is appealing to the eye.

  Bellotti’s plot is a mess. A tumble of weeds and grasses.

  “Let’s take a shovel,” Bellotti says. Andiamo a prendere una vangata di terra.

  He walks to a spot between his vines and pushes the blade into the earth and turns it over. It is loose and red and brown and yellow. It is busy to look at: roots, straw, much of it decomposing, mulch, worms. “There are several generations of grass here.” Last summer’s, the year before’s. “A kind of digestion is obviously at work,” he says. Albert Howard uses the same word, “digestion.”

  “Let’s look at my neighbor’s,” Bellotti says.

  The cameraman follows and stops and asks nervously, “Vado?” Isn’t this trespassing?

  Bellotti shrugs.

  He walks in among the vines and makes to slide the shovel into the earth. It doesn’t budge. He steps on it, wiggles it, and then it breaks the crust. He turns it over. It is uniform in color and texture. It is gray. It is compacted. It looks like cement. Nothing stirs.

  “Smell it,” Bellotti instructs the cameraman. “It smells of laundry detergent.

  “Wine is a cultural commodity,” Bellotti explains, “and it commands an unusually high price.” Bellotti, a small producer, working fifty acres of land, makes a living. He is threatened by his neighbors, he is harassed and fined for not using pesticides—“This year the fines might be as much as one hundred fifty thousand euros”—but he can get by because of the commercial value of what he produces.

  “But grain farmers, they’re more vulnerable.”

  An image comes to mind of my drive through the French “breadbasket,” miles and miles of a mono-colored monoculture, arid, still, like death.

  I finally sip my bowl of milk. It doesn’t taste green. It isn’t even obviously fatty. But it is good. I have another sip. It is long in the mouth, the milkiness lingering after swallowing. Is it a little fruity? It is certainly sweet. Mainly it is good because it tastes fully of milk. I am surprised by it. It seems to be healthy and alive and tastes overwhelmingly of itself.

  I slide off my boulder and bounce. The dirt is spongy. I knock back the rest of the milk, and try to spot the cows on the mountain, and I can’t.

  PARIS

  In one of my routine fantasies, Michel Richard flies to Lyon. We speak French. I bring him to La Mère Brazier, seat him in the bar, and make his dinner, perhaps the caneton with a thick dribble of cherry-veal sauce
, or the poulet de Bresse, with the truffle under the skin. I put him up not at the Villa Florentine, because he would be provoked by its Italianness, but at Le Royal, on the Place Bellecour, where Bocuse students now prepare the breakfast. In the morning, we visit Bob—born in Brittany, like Richard—and discuss what it is that makes his bread unique. For lunch, we go to Paul Bocuse. In my fantasy, I show Richard that, inspired by him, I have made Lyon, and its kitchens, my home.

  When I started at La Mère Brazier, I phoned him. I urged him to come.

  “Maybe.”

  I phoned again, around Christmas.

  “Maybe in the summer,” he said.

  In August, he called. “I am coming,” he said, but not to Lyon. Paris. “My hotel is always the George V,” he said, grandly flamboyant. “And then we’ll go to the Ardennes, where I grew up and first worked in a kitchen.”

  Richard landed at Orly, via an experimental all-business-class service in which Richard was the “visiting” chef for the season and was rewarded with first-class air travel. I stood opposite the automatic doors by the immigration and customs agents. The last time I had seen him, when he dropped me off at Union Station, France was an abstract and intimidating idea.

  Richard appeared, dressed in a capacious purple T-shirt, a shoulder bag for luggage, the familiar smells of wine and sweat, a miraculous sight, fast-talking, thrilled to be in Paris, explosively effervescent. He was traveling with his business manager, Carl, who reported that Richard had entertained passengers with stories of his first stage, working for Monsieur Sauvage. “Michel didn’t sleep,” Carl said, “but, then, neither did anyone else.”

  We went to a bistro for dinner, Le Petit Marius, wobbly wood chairs, small tables, chalkboard menu, loud and hot and perfect. Richard, still in high performance mode, engaged every female within chatting-up distance: the waitress (complimenting her on her English), a woman sitting nearby waiting for a boyfriend (“How can he make you wait? Don’t you know that every man here would abandon everything to spend the rest of his life with you?”), a woman at another banquette (“I am sorry, mademoiselle, but you are so beautiful I cannot concentrate on my food”).

  The diners, Parisians, were confused by Richard’s outgoingness, his lack of inhibitions, his un-Frenchness, and his accent.

  “Where are you from?” a man asked. (Richard had just sung an aria of weakness and infatuation.)

  “From here! Like you!”

  “But your accent. It’s not Canadian, but it’s not—”

  “Yes! It’s French, just like yours!”

  I had never understood Richard’s French when I was in his kitchen. In a language that I now followed, he was more fully dimensioned, as if I had known only half of him. He attacked the most hackneyed phrases with ironic vigor (how the staff at his hotel were “très gentils,” or the restaurant was “très joli,” and the wine “très, très bon”). I said “Loire” as “Lwah,” without pronouncing the final “r,” and Richard roared the word back at me with a full guttural roll at the end. “Feuilletée,” he corrected, when I told him how I was finally making puff pastry—“No, not ‘foy’ like ‘foil’ ”—and he did that thing that young Frederick can do, rendering what had seemed like a simple word into the multisyllabic aural equivalent of a caterpillar.

  But when our plats principaux arrived, roasted chicken for both Richard and me (the test of a bistro’s competence), and he asked for “le plus grand,” the biggest serving, and I asked for “le meilleur,” the best, Richard erupted in a high-pitched and joyous laugh.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “we travel to the past.”

  * * *

  —

  We boarded a local train that passed the vineyards of Champagne, slate roofs, shiny-damp from a morning fog, the sad battlefields of World War I, and the famous Forest of the Ardennes. Richard hadn’t been on this track in forty years. “My face then was covered in black ash when I hung my head out of the window.” A steam-engine memory. The line ended at Charleville-Mézières, where Richard had his first full-time job as a pastry chef. We found it, and Richard boisterously introduced himself to the pastry shop’s owner, startling him considerably, then tasted his chocolates (and then spat them out when he wasn’t looking). “They’re very hard. I wanted to tell him how to make them softer, with walnut oil for lightness, but what is the point?” He looked at a display case. It was messy, colors running murkily among ill-shaped stacks of macarons.

  We rented a car and drove north, the river Meuse on our right, toward Belgium. Fumay, forty minutes away, a village on a cliff, was our first stop and where his family had moved to on leaving Brittany, surrounded by factories, “thirteen of them,” all within walking distance. He pointed to windows on a top floor. “That was our home. A family of six that was about to become seven” (because his mother was pregnant again).

  “That was where Father came home, walked to the kitchen, and started beating my mother, who was pregnant, knocked her down, and kicked her in the stomach. I broke a wine bottle and tried to stab him. I wanted to kill him.” He paused. “I wonder if he had just learned that my mother had a daughter and a son before he met her. He probably had.”

  A square prefabricated building a few miles farther was once a disco where Richard, in a new collarless Sgt. Pepper–inspired Nehru shirt, showed up on a Friday night one October and met a girl named Monique; they danced, and they kissed, and they had “bong-bong,” and he stayed the night, and they had “bong-bong” the next day, and more “bong-bong” the day after, and he returned to Charleville-Mézières because he was expected at work. She then tracked him down and announced that she was pregnant.

  In Givet, Richard asked me to stop at the church where the two had been married on Bastille Day in 1967. We went inside, and he lit a candle.

  Givet is where Richard remembered growing up—he was eight, when he arrived—a fortress town, on the border with Belgium. The factory where his mother worked was on the outskirts, a one-floor assembly-line construct, abandoned now, looking like an ancient monastery with a courtyard. There was a row of row houses. We stood by a low wall and looked into his childhood home from the back, the garden a bounty of summer vegetables with outsized lettuce, zucchini, eggplant, green and yellow peppers. From Richard’s original telling—he described chickens, rabbits, ducks, fish caught from a stream across the road—I’d imagined a place on the edge of nature. The countryside wasn’t far away (“My mother spotted rabbit tracks in the snow and would set a trap”), but it wasn’t in the least country. It was more that his mother’s economies (preserving green beans, strawberries, tomatoes, meat in Mason jars) were country practices that she knew and that could be applied in the city, a large family in a tough factory community, trying to make ends meet.

  “There was a schoolteacher who thought that I had creeeeativity,” Richard said, stretching out the word self-mockingly. “He lived here.” He pointed to a house two doors down the street. Something in the window of the schoolteacher’s former home caught Richard’s eye, and he was momentarily lost to me. It was a kitchen table. Richard was staring at it and seeming to imagine his younger self sitting at it.

  We got back in the car. Monsieur Sauvage was our next stop.

  I asked Richard, “When did you realize that you had a talent that people were prepared to pay money for?”

  “Oh, I don’t really make so much money.”

  “But you have an ability to surprise, an inventiveness, a creeeeeativiteee that means you have something that others don’t have, and you will always be paid to open eateries, feed people on trains, or airplanes. Your pastry shop in Los Angeles, your many restaurants—”

  “It’s true; twice, I’ve made more than a million dollars a year.” He reflected. “You don’t make much money as a cook. Or as a chef. You have to be a patron.” He gave the word its strong French pronunciation. “When I came to New
York for Gaston Lenôtre, I made seven hundred dollars a month. One month later, I was in Santa Fe, running my own pastry shop and making five thousand dollars a month.”

  He thought further. “Actually, it was Gaston Lenôtre. He showed me that I had something.”

  We drove on.

  As we approached Carignan, factories appeared, built the size of airport hangars, now abandoned. When we arrived, Richard declared: “Where are all the people? On Saturdays, it used to be so crowded you couldn’t cross the square. There were festivals and fairs and dances. Where did everyone go?”

  We visited the original pâtisserie, now owned by a chain and run by a husband and wife. “This was my first stage!” Richard told them, forever exuberant, and they recoiled with alarm, as if at any moment he was about to produce a document that proved it was his place and not theirs.

  Afterward, we sat in a parking lot, directly behind. The family was having lunch, and eyed us uneasily through a back window.

  “I arrived on August 29, 1962.” (Richard remembered every important day in his life with a preternatural calendar specificity.) “My first day was September 1. We started at seven a.m. and had to be in a little bed upstairs by midnight, with a jug of water and a bowl, no days off except a half-day on Sunday.”

  Léon, eighteen years old, was the chef. “He liked to hit me. You make a mistake, you get smacked. ‘You burned your croissants!’ Smack. ‘You didn’t clean this corner!’ Smack. ‘You cooked a meringue in a copper pot!’ Smack. ‘You ground the almonds too fast and the rollers are stuck! Imbécile! Putain de merde! You don’t make mistakes!’ ” Education by humiliation.

  “I was at my station, my back to the kitchen, and a knife flew by my head and pierced the wall in front of me. The chef thought it was funny.”

  Richard hit him on the head with a rolling pin and knocked him unconscious. Finally, the two had established a rapport.