Dirt

by Bill Buford

“For three years, I never went home. I never saw a movie. I learned everything: apprendre, apprendre, apprendre.”

  On September 3, 1965, Richard took his pâtisserie proficiency exams. The French system: You do an apprenticeship, you take an exam, and you are certified. He was now a trained chef.

  “Monsieur Sauvage never did any work, except at Christmas, when we started at four a.m. and worked until ten at night. But Monsieur Sauvage loved me. He never said so. But I could tell.” After Richard left, he phoned Monsieur Sauvage every year, just before the new year, thanking him for taking him on. “He gave me something. He passed on a body of knowledge.” When Richard was in Los Angeles, by then established and very successful, he still phoned—“With best wishes for the new year and gratitude for being my first teacher of pâtisserie”—until, finally, he was told that Monsieur Sauvage could not come to the phone, because he had died.

  The next day was our last day, and we were returning to Paris.

  * * *

  —

  On the train back, I riffed.

  I talked about acids in French foods (“In the United States, no one uses vinegar—in France, no one doesn’t”), my new love of mustard, my children’s love of very spicy mustard, their appreciation of mayonnaise, and how I now made it at home, and how Frederick, having eaten it so often at school, could smell my making it from the other side of the apartment.

  “Can you smell mayonnaise?” he asked. (I panicked: What? You can’t?) And he then added, quietly, “I add a little bit of crème fraîche at the end”—a tip, to which I, still in high-riff mode, managed to say, “Oh. That’s interesting,” and carried on babbling. How French food is built on making opposites work: butter sauces (suspending fat and liquid), or foams like sabayon (fat and acid), or the magic of puff pastry.

  “I have a theory about when French food became French,” I then said.

  “Really?” Richard said.

  “Nostradamus, in the 1550s. His treatise on jam making.”

  “Really?”

  “Sugar,” I said.

  I described the flavor of the cherries of the Rhône Valley, their sweet-tart intensities, and the Mère Brazier sauce that went with duck, and how I then made a jam with the cherries afterward, fascinated by the molecular change that occurs before your eyes, the sugar ratio finally making the water hotter than boiling.

  Richard nodded (and I thought: He thinks I’m off my rocker, doesn’t he?).

  I talked about my irritations.

  “So much French cooking history is anecdotal and unexamined. Like, why does everyone stick a clove in an onion when they make chicken stock?”

  “A clove in an onion?”

  “Yes, you see it in every French chef’s chicken-stock recipe. You peel an onion and push a clove into it. Why?”

  “Oh, yes, that is true.” He nodded, a small gesture, like a professor entertaining an overexcited student during office hours.

  What was I trying to prove? I paused.

  “Have you eaten at Alain Chapel?” he asked.

  “Yes!” I said.

  “Did you eat the foie blanc?”

  Did I eat the foie blanc? I couldn’t remember.

  “Really? It is a famous dish. And what about Marc Meneau, in Vézelay?”

  “Yes! L’Espérance!” It was where Jessica, a sixteen-year-old school-year-abroad student, had experienced her first meal made by a grand chef. We went there for an anniversary.

  “And the foie-gras bonbons?”

  “Yes!” I said, as if I’d got a quiz answer right.

  Had I eaten at L’Auberge de Paul Bocuse?

  I had!

  “Did you eat the bar en croûte?” Sea bass in puff pastry with a sauce Choron.

  “No, but I’ve made it.”

  “Really? Was the pastry cooked through?”

  “Yes!” The pastry hadn’t been the problem. It was its appearance. Like a massive prehistoric pollywog that had been stepped on by a dinosaur.

  “What about the filet de sole Fernand Point?”

  “No.” I hadn’t eaten it yet. I have since. The dish defies understanding in its deliciousness: perfectly cooked sole mixed in with fresh tagliatelle, plus copious quantities of butter. No one in Italy would do such a thing to a plate of pasta, and the idea, to an Italian, would be horrific. But trust me: genius.

  “And you’ve eaten at La Pyramide?”

  “Yes!”

  “But it’s not like it once was, is it?” Richard said. “The young man there—what’s his name?”

  “Patrick Henriroux…”

  “Yes, Henriroux. He’s fine. But he’s not Point. Point was a grand chef.” He drew out the word grand, rendering it with its fullest cultural heft. Richard then paused, as though in silent wonderment at the high mountain of achievement that had been Fernand Point.

  “When you make your puff pastry,” Richard asked, as though curious, “do you use water?”

  “To make the pâton?” Pâton is the piece of dough that you fold the butter into. “Yes.”

  “I never use water. It’s a rule. Sometimes a sweet wine like a Sauternes, or apple juice, or pear. I love pear.”

  I made a note in my notebook: Don’t use water.

  “Do you make it with butter?”

  “The puff pastry? Well, yes.”

  “Sometimes I make it with foie gras.” He paused. “You need to understand what is producing the effect in a recipe. What kind of flour do you use?”

  “Normal flour, fifty-five-weight.” In France, flour is sold according to its protein content. Pastry flour is the lightest (thirty-five-weight), bread among the highest (up to 110-weight).

  “I use bread flour.”

  “Bread flour?”

  “Because you want gluten development. You want the pastry to stretch and puff.”

  He continued.

  “Fish sauce? It is better if you add mussel juice at the end.”

  Madeleines?

  “Yes! I make them with my leftover egg whites.”

  “Oh, I also use the yolks. My measurements are one, one, one, and one. One egg. One cup of butter. One cup of flour. One cup of sugar. Baking powder?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Good. Are they booby?”

  “Booby? Yes, I think so. They’re pretty booby.”

  “Booby is good.”

  “Do you get the booby by whipping?” I asked.

  “I whip only the butter. Sometimes I use a little bicarbonate.”

  I mentioned making a Béarnaise for le personnel.

  “I make mine with olive oil and basil.”

  “Whoa. A Béarnaise with olive oil?”

  Apples: He peeled them by dropping them whole into a fryer, then dipping the fruit in ice and removing the peel with a towel. “It is then a perfect apple, no knife marks. I do the same with cherry tomatoes.”

  I’d brought a book. I kept forgetting to show it to him. It was Gaston Lenôtre’s first, published in 1975.

  Richard stared at it. “I worked on this book.” He continued to stare, as though afraid to open it. A tear beaded up on the lip of each eye, which he wiped away with the back of his hand. David Bouley had told me that Richard was a secret author. “I tested them all. I wrote many.”

  “Can you remember which ones?”

  He considered. “No.”

  He slipped the book into his bag.

  I had come to France, learned the language, attended a cooking school, worked in restaurant kitchens, and only now was I understanding Richard’s achievement. In Washington, he had seemed like a magician. He wasn’t. But he might be a genius.

  I accompanied Richard back to the George V. The weekend marked la rentrée, and the
city, so empty and beautiful when we left it, was now congested and loud.

  What is Citronelle like now? I asked.

  “Oh, you didn’t know?” Citronelle had closed. The hotel was deemed unsafe—the sinking foundation, its tilting walls, its leaking roof. “We had to evacuate.”

  Citronelle closed? And I didn’t know? In Richard’s company, I had been so transported into another time, his time, that I never thought about his life in the United States.

  “And David?”

  “He is at Central.” Richard’s Franco-American bistro.

  “But, Michel, you don’t have a restaurant?”

  “It’s true. I will find something. I always have a restaurant.”

  VII

  Italy (Obviously)

  How to roast and garnish turtledoves and quails in various ways

  Take the turtledove in season, which is from June through November, and, as soon as it is dead, pluck it clean and cook it briefly over coals without gutting it, then put it on a spit over a robust fire, turning it quickly so the fat does not drip underneath; and when it is almost done, dredge it in flour, fennel pollen, sugar, salt, and bread crumbs. When fully cooked, it should be served hot.

  To tell the young from the old turtledoves, you need to know that the young have darker meat and whiter feet, and the older white meat and red feet.

  You can roast quail in this same way when it is fat and in season, which starts in mid-August and lasts to the end of October. Even though in spring you see a lot of flocks passing over Rome, and even more near Ostia and Porto, they are not as good as they are in their season.

  Sometimes fat quail are cured with salt and fennel pollen; you leave them in a wooden or earthenware bowl for three or four days, and then sauté them in melted lard with chives and serve hot with black pepper on top. You also can split them in half and marinate for a day or so, then flour them and fry in melted lard. Serve them hot with sugar and bitter orange juice or with the marinade.

  BARTOLOMEO SCAPPI, OPERA DELL’ARTE DEL CUCINARE (ON THE ART OF COOKING), 1570, TRANSLATED BY JESSICA GREEN

  When Jessica and I were living in Panzano, in Tuscany, and I was working at a butcher shop, I used to walk there in the mornings on a small road called Via Giovanni da Verrazzano. Verrazzano was the Italian explorer who discovered the water inlet now known as New York Harbor. Today the long suspension bridge connecting Staten Island and Long Island is named after him, traversing the bay where the explorer had probably dropped anchor. Verrazzano was born in a fortified castle overlooking the market town of Greve, ten miles north of the village of Panzano, and I enjoyed the connection between my Italian village home and my American urban one.

  In Lyon, my walk to La Mère Brazier began with the walled mural across the street from our home, the fresque of the Lyonnais, a history of the city in pictures. One painting was eye-level with our third-story apartment, and I saw it every time I opened the shutters. It was of a bearded man with an ermine-lined coat, a compass in one hand and a globe in the other. Who was he? Eventually I discovered an inconspicuous square of text at the bottom of the wall. It was a legend to the pictures. The bearded guy, it said, was “Jean Verrazane, the famous Lyonnais explorer who discovered New York Harbor.”

  Verrazane? Is this a Frenchified Verrazzano? Was the hero of New York Harbor from a castle near my Chianti village, or a French guy from my newly adopted home in Lyon? He was both.

  Just about all food historians are familiar with the aforementioned Catherine de’ Medici myth: The Florentine bride made her way to France, by land or by boat (the myth has different versions), and then embarked on teaching the lowly Gauls how to cook. There is a man on the moon, there is a tooth fairy, and there’s the Italian Catherine, inventor of la cuisine française. The idea can’t even be argued. It no longer warrants a footnote. It is dead.

  Given its longevity—there are references to the idea dating from the eighteenth century—its passing is a relatively recent event. This occurred in 1983, the year when the American librarian Barbara Ketcham Wheaton killed it. Wheaton is the curator of the culinary collection at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1983, she published Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789, one of the first efforts to treat early recipes as historical documents, in which she deals with this Queen Catherine nonsense in a brisk, dismissive two pages.

  How old was Catherine when she came to France? she asks.

  Fourteen.

  Who was she? The Medici equivalent of a princess: a child in an arranged marriage with a prince.

  What, seriously, would she have known about the kitchen? And, at that age, from that family, en route to a royal wedding, she was also meant to have crossed the Alps? No, Wheaton says, enough mythologizing, I’m not buying it. Besides, she took a boat to Marseille.

  It was a riff, but with enough conviction that it has been accepted as a historical truth and is now cited in reference books in both English and French, but especially in French. Savoring the Past was published in France in 1994, where it is celebrated in academic circles for its kiboshing of the myth. It informs Un Festin en paroles (A Feast in Words), a popular literary history of gastronomy, written by the late Jean-François Revel, a philosopher-journalist. His chapter on the Italians is entitled “The Ghost of the Medicis.”

  Now, after five years in the city, I have a different view.

  Yes, actually, the Italians did teach the French to cook. But it wasn’t only the work of the Italian queen, although she was demonstrably interested in cuisine and she did employ Italian chefs in the royal kitchens in Blois. She wasn’t the active agent. It was her French father-in-law, François Premier, who wanted Italy—or at least its northern provinces—so much that he went to war three times to try to possess them. But it wasn’t just the territory that he wanted. It was the Italian Renaissance. He wanted its culture, its buildings (all those ornate Italian-built châteaux on the river Loire), its music, its sense of fête, its spices, and its silks (he hired the two greatest silk makers, Turquet and Naris, in Piedmont, to move to Lyon, and rewarded them richly enough that one bought a residence in Vieux Lyon, at the end of an alley still called Impasse Turquet). He invited painters and poets and sculptors and architects, and housed them in his royal home, and spoke Italian with them at the table. And of course he made Leonardo—the Leonardo da Vinci—his immediate neighbor and friend.

  In Catherine de’ Medici, François Premier wanted (and got) the most sought-after Italian bride for his son. The marriage was the culmination of the Renaissance in France: and its future.

  Lyon, for more than a hundred years, was already, in the words of one local historian, home to a colony of Italians. In 1467, some of them, mainly residents of Vieux Lyon, directly across the Saône from our home, gave themselves a constitution and declared themselves a nation: la nation florentine de Lyon. Only after my discovery of “Verrazane” did I come to appreciate just how powerful their influence on the city had been. By the time Catherine de’ Medici arrived there as queen—eighty-one years later, in 1548, after her husband had been crowned King Henri II—Lyon was already extravagantly Italian. The city commemorated the royal visit with a week of feasting and drinking, with boat promenades on the river Saône (a barge dressed up as a fire-breathing dragon), publications of poetry, displays of fireworks, and performances of music and theatre so outlandish that merchants went bankrupt in the aftermath. In effect, the city celebrated the occasion by a very expensive pop-up version of a Frenchified Italian Renaissance. (Richard Cooper’s extraordinary The Entry of Henri II into Lyon depicts, in itself, a Lyon so dominated, if not outright overrun, by Italians in their High Renaissance extravagance as to make it very challenging, today, to credit historians who dismiss their influence.) Or, as one foreign diplomat could be paraphrased to have said, in one of his letters home, having gone sleepless fo
r three days during one of Catherine’s (later) visits, “These Italian French sure know how to party.”

  These Florentine Lyonnais included members of the Medici family and the Medicis’ rival, the Gadagnes. They established banking and foreign-currency exchange on a scale never before known in France. They enlarged the idea of a wholesale market, mainly by way of the foires, which they largely underwrote. Owing to Italian investment, hundreds of tons of spices (and silks and wines and foods) entered Lyon either by barge up the Rhône River or by pack animals through an Alpine pass from Turin. Because of the Italians, Lyon looked like a mini Florence with the sway of French Venice. It remains, like a movie set, a labyrinth of alleyways and teetering buildings and endless basement tunnels and secret villas with private gardens and red tile roofs and high stone walls evocative of an era otherwise unreachable—and honored by UNESCO as the largest example of Renaissance architecture in the world.

  Venture capitalization, another Medici and Gadagne specialty, included funding wars. They also funded, or contributed to funding, explorations across the Atlantic, hoping to locate a passage to the Far East, or to stake a claim on a new territory. When Verrazzano came to visit them looking for funds to sail to the New World (and who like many Italians in Lyon had changed his name to sound French), the Italian bankers persuaded François Premier to fund him.

  And the food? A review of the pre-Catherine chronology is illuminating.

  In 1494, twenty-five years before Catherine was born, the foires were re-established.

  In 1505, fourteen years before Catherine was born, a Lyonnais printer produced the first French translation of Platina—the plagiarist of the very gifted Maestro Martino. (Printing began in Lyon in 1473, and Lyon became the premier cultural printer in France until the Revolution.)

  In 1528, when Catherine was nine, another Lyonnais printing house published an improved “translation” of Platina. (There was no copyright, and the publisher, effectively regarded as the author, could do whatever he wanted.) During the next twenty years, there would be many other editions. Tomasik, my American culinary historian, analyzed the fourteen different French translations of Platina, “each one an improvement.” Each successive translation, Tomasik said, “drifted further and further from the original, and became more and more French, until finally the book ceased to be Italian at all.” Platina became, bit by bit, one of the first important texts of the French kitchen. On the question of the Italian influence, it was both metaphor and evidence.