Dirt

by Bill Buford

  In addition to Le Cuisinier françois, La Varenne was the author of two other books, The French Pastry Chef and The French Confectioner (jam making again), although, as with The School of Ragùs, it is possible that the name La Varenne was less a name than a brand. Most of what we know about him is in the first book: in its internal references (the chapter on the battlefield kitchen, fascinating for its blunt practicality—e.g., take five sheep…), and its preface, which includes allusions to cooking colleagues and expressions of gratitude to his employer, du Blé.

  The château was now owned by three families. In exchange for saving a historic building from ruin, they were rewarded with what was, in effect, a high-luxury, high-status time-share. They held costume balls, and masquerades, and dinners, and at the end of the day pulled their vehicles into the grounds, closed the gates, and enjoyed the premises as if they were their own.

  There was a moat and a garden maze, where our boys disappeared behind head-high shrubs for an uncomfortable-making long time. I found myself studying the kitchen that had a service door, where traders would have appeared (their visits implicit in La Varenne’s ingredients): gamekeepers, gardeners, river fishermen, trappers, poachers, bearing freshwater eels and mussels, black birds, woodcock, swan, wild boar, and the many different kinds of ducks, like the allebran, not just a wild variety but the young wild variety.

  One owner was in the courtyard, mending a long piece of white linen. It seemed inconceivable that nothing from La Varenne’s kitchen had been preserved. Something must have been retrieved from the fire—an invoice or an inventory, a cache of letters, a journal. He was too important.

  I introduced myself and mentioned my interest.

  “La Varenne,” he said. “Yes. I’ve heard of him.”

  “He was the chef under the marquis du Blé,” I continued. “Many regard La Varenne as the founder of French cooking.”

  The owner stared at me. He was Spanish: Monsieur Olvidaros. Maybe French cooking wasn’t his strength.

  “He is believed to have cooked here, but the kitchen he worked in burned down in the eighteenth century.”

  “Yes, a fire destroyed the south wing.”

  I described what I was hoping to find, any record, any scrap, an archive.

  “When was this?”

  “From 1630 to 1650.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “They weren’t here then. They were in Paris.”

  “In Paris? For twenty years?”

  “No one was here.”

  This wasn’t making sense. “That can’t be possible.”

  “The château had been effectively abandoned.”

  “What about Nicolas du Blé, the firstborn son?”

  “I don’t know about him.”

  “He is said to have been born here, in January 1652. According to church records. In Chalon-sur-Saône.”

  “We don’t know.” On ne sait pas.

  “And his father,” I pressed on, perplexed, “he was a military man, always in battle….”

  “Yes.”

  “How could he raise an army in Paris?”

  “On ne sait pas.” He stared at me. “In any case, there is nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think he was lying. I just didn’t think he knew. But what I did or didn’t believe was immaterial. The kitchen was gone, and the records were gone. Even the house in Paris: gone. My search for a buried treasure? Zip.

  The three-and-a-half-page preface to Le Cuisinier françois contains everything we know about La Varenne.

  I would be back.

  Meanwhile, I had a distraction. The MOF: the hardest competition in French cooking. No, I wasn’t a contender. And yet, in a way, I was.

  DUCK PIE

  I hadn’t signed up for the MOF because I didn’t regard myself as one of the most trained and disciplined cooks in all of France and didn’t see the virtue, or the comedy, in failing (yet again) spectacularly.

  The MOF is designated by that badass French-flag collar worn by Viannay and Bocuse and Le Cossec and Michel Guérard and just about every grand chef in the country. It was conceived in 1913 to honor the good work being done by the many hitherto unrecognized artisans and laborers, les meilleurs ouvriers de France, the best French workers, and then, having been held every four years, like the Olympics, had, for kitchen people, gradually acquired an unanticipated stature that only France, with the mystical value it places on food, could ever have facilitated and then socially rewarded. You get named an MOF and you’re set for life, and everyone—Christophe, young Mathieu, Frédéric, Ansel, two chefs from Boulud’s kitchen in New York, even Florian—had thrown their names into the proverbial hat, because, after all, what have you got to lose?

  But not me.

  When the dishes were announced, they didn’t seem impossible. There was a fish to start with, and a duck to follow, and both looked eminently doable (I flattered myself into believing), especially the duck, which was prepared two ways: the breast sliced into thin aiguillettes and dressed with a cider-based sauce, and the thighs rendered in a puff-pastry “pie.” And that is exactly what it was called: a “pie.”

  I thought: I know how to do the breast. You remove it, you slow-sauté it, you flip it over, you’re done. Removing it is a little tricky, and the slow-sautéing has to be really slow, fat side down, fifteen to twenty-five minutes or longer, until the skin is crisp and the creamy white layer underneath is rendered.

  The breast: the easy part. The challenge: the “pie.”

  But I thought: I can make pie. Not only did I think I could make it, but I also wanted that pie in my repertoire. (Viannay called it a tourte, not a pie, from the same Italian root that gives us torta and hence tortelli and tortellacci. A tourte figures as a centerpiece in a sixteenth-century tapestry of a royal meal on display at that exhibit at Blois; I’ve come to regard it as a handoff dish between Italy and France.)

  The Saturday after the dishes were announced, we ran into Christophe and Viannay at our Potager bistro, and joined their table. Christophe was in training; Viannay, his coach. Christophe was temporarily relieved of his kitchen duties in order to practice his technique, his speed, his puff pastry, his sauce making. His test center was in Marseille. All the contestants, so they would not be known by the judges (who were local chefs), were dispatched far from home.

  Christophe had become my friend. Tu nous manques, he said again, softly but unmistakably. It was, I would learn, not an unusual transformation, the unexpected feelings of mutual respect between boss and novice, and though I can’t condone the French apprentice system—the unregulated bullying and humiliation—I had to concede that I had never learned so much. It made me into a cook. And the lessons seemed to have imprinted themselves into my psyche, permanently, in a way that I am not sure would have been the case had the instruction been more gently humane. (To this day, I hear Christophe’s bark when I am cleaning up: “Pas propre!” “Sale!” “Pas propre!”)

  The Potager meal—Viannay, in honor of my being at the table, ordered a magnum of fine Burgundy—was unexpectedly inspiring. I looked at the MOF instructions. They weren’t a recipe as such, but a set of conditions: ingredients you were allowed to use, others that were forbidden, the size of your serving dish, the weight of your duck. For the pie, you couldn’t make the puff pastry in advance. But you could arrive with a pâton, that wet pastry that you wrap your butter into. Stock: You were forbidden from using veal, but allowed to show up with chicken broth. The number of mushrooms was specified (twelve basic ones, called champignons de Paris, caps only), as was the number of prunes (six, pitted, from Agen), but not of turnips. And as for the duck itself: The breast was to be removed, cooked by itself, and served in thin slices dressed by a cider-based sauce; the meat from the legs was for t
he pie and to be cooked in whatever way you chose (“cuisson libre”). It was a test, but also a puzzle.

  I had continued practicing puff pastry and had frozen my efforts. In the freezer, I also had quantities of chicken stock. I thought: I really can do this. I set out to locate the requisite serving dish, but there was none in town. Every single one had been bought up by the contestants. (There had also been a run on the fish—carrelet, plaice—which wasn’t really in season. The local news ran a story on how it had increased from MOF demand: from 1 to 5 euros a kilo to 113 euros: the cost, obviously, of living in a city of aspirational gastro-cheffy types.)

  I searched for recipes in Escoffier, then everyone else. The specific MOF dishes were nowhere but everywhere…maybe. I found plenty of dishes that used cider. There must have been two hundred duck-and-turnip recipes. I settled on cooking the legs for a pie filling as a ragoût, although I had invariably thought of it as a ragù, the Italian spelling.

  * * *

  —

  My first effort wasn’t a disaster. I began by boning the duck. As with a chicken, you remove the legs first. For the breasts, you remove the wishbone and the wings and carve out the “steaks”—or at least I’ve come to think of them as steaks. They are separated by a long breastbone, and you start from there, slicing down on one side and loosening the meat from the breast plate, scraping, scraping. A duck’s breast cavity is different from a chicken’s, flatter, less oval, and the meat is more like the shape of a sirloin.

  I put the breasts aside. They would be for later.

  I chopped up the carcass, roasted it, put it in a stockpot, added a splash of reduced cider, and covered it with chicken stock. This would be my basic jus.

  The pie’s filling would come principally from the legs, plus whatever scraps I could get from elsewhere, including the “oyster,” what the French call sot-l’y-laisse (what only a fool leaves behind). The boning of the legs yielded up a disappointingly modest pile of morsels. (How would these fill a pie?) I browned and then gently simmered them in a small quantity of duck jus. I was reminded that there is a point when meat, even after it has been cooked for a long time, will hold its shape and texture. Then there is the point, just after, when it goes smoosh. Mine went smoosh. It was more ragù than ragoût, and would have been more appropriate atop a plate of freshly made pappardelle.

  I reviewed my instructions, including the press release, and noticed something that I had missed before: On the day of the test, journalists could visit a centre d’épreuves (a test center), provided that they showed up after the cooking had started and didn’t disturb the candidates. I looked at a list of centers. The nearest one was in Dardilly, just outside of Lyon. Why not?

  * * *

  —

  It was at a Lycée, a high school—teenagers with books, lounging on grass, looking so relaxed that the sight of them, their youthful leisure, was both disconcerting to come upon and nostalgia-making. The test kitchen was elsewhere in every possible sense. You followed a long dark hall to its end, climbed a darker staircase, and opened a door, and the atmosphere hit you: body odor, and cooking fumes, and a strong feeling that things were going badly wrong.

  The administrators were a married couple, late sixties, with the fussy rapport of two people who had uneasily spent most of their lives together. They were busy with a clipboard. Some candidates had submitted their dishes under the wrong number, and they couldn’t figure out what the numbers should have been. They had been administrating since five in the morning, were groggy, looked at me blankly, and asked what I wanted.

  I had a letter of accreditation. “I am a journalist. I am here to observe.”

  The woman, two hands on the counter, dropped her head. “Merde,” she whispered. “Find Pierre,” she said, and the husband went off to look for him.

  The kitchen was in the back, with a judging alcove off to the side, behind a “pass” where a candidate had just shown up with a tray of six plates, a plate for each judge—thin slices of duck arranged in a fan, a bright red-brown sauce, and a slice of “pie.” It was the first time that I had seen the finished dish. It looked like what you would be very happy to be served in a restaurant. It didn’t look particularly ambitious or difficult. It just looked right. The candidate—his apron flopped around him like a kite; there was also a stain on his jacket—had evidently failed. He was twelve minutes late. A candidate advances to the final with a near-perfect or perfect score—nineteen or twenty out of a possible twenty. By his tardiness, no matter how elegantly rendered his duck might have been, he was disqualified.

  Pierre then appeared, an elderly, elfin figure in a crisp white jacket and the bright collar flag. I knew him! It was Pierre Orsi! Lovely Pierre! Everyone knows Pierre. By now I’d seen him several times, with Boulud and in the dining room—Jessica and I ate there to celebrate an anniversary and were happily overwhelmed by his attentiveness. In me, he recognized a friend, and ushered me into the judges’ alcove as though offering me the best table in the house (which, in fact, it was).

  The faces of the judges said: This cannot possibly be protocol.

  But Pierre was the MOF in charge, and had, by his habits of civility, unreflectingly made an executive decision. What’s more, I already knew three of the six judges: William Jacquier (one of my first teachers at L’Institut Bocuse), Christian Têtedoie (a hotspur of ambition, who, over the course of months, had opened up four different restaurants in impressive succession, not counting the bouchon that he scooped up from Boulud), and none other than Jean-Paul Lacombe, the proprietor chef of Léon de Lyon, which, in one rendering of my adventure, might have been the place where I started. Michel Richard came to mind, a memory of our last day together, when he had told me that, in Lyon, I would meet all the city’s chefs, and I had dismissed the prospect; I then couldn’t even speak French. But he turned out to be right.

  Lacombe and I had since become friends, after a return visit to Léon de Lyon, when I told him how I knew Michel Richard. Lacombe, like others who had met Richard, regarded him as among the elite of the elites, and I was once again burnished by the brightness of his glory. Lacombe was the only chef without an MOF collar, and looked strikingly underdressed.

  Roger Jaloux was another judge, one of the city’s elders. I didn’t know him but knew his reputation, ex-Bocuse (the executive chef for four decades) and patron of two of the historic bistros in the city. I missed the names of the other judges and didn’t ask them to repeat themselves. I kept my notebook under the table. It seemed to burn in my hand.

  The judges were finishing up candidate number fourteen. They had been talking about his sauce. Jean-Paul Lacombe, who had seated himself directly across from Têtedoie, liked it. He gave it five points. Each submission was assessed on four criteria, each worth a maximum of five points.

  “How can you possibly believe that number fourteen was ‘good’?” Têtedoie asked. “The sauce was insipid.”

  “It was not insipid.”

  “It was.”

  “No, it wasn’t. I liked it. It tasted of apples.” It seemed that “apples” was a reference to an earlier exchange and something that the judges expected to find in a sauce made with cider. Lacombe looked impish.

  “Apples! It tasted of nothing. It was banal.”

  Lacombe knew that the remark would provoke Têtedoie. He persisted. “Five.”

  “No. Four.”

  “Five.”

  “Four.”

  A long pause. “Okay,” Lacombe conceded, “four.”

  The difference between four and five was enough, probably, to keep a candidate from advancing.

  “The pie?”

  “Five,” Lacombe said.

  “Absolutely not,” said Têtedoie. “Did you taste the mushrooms?”

  “Of course I tasted the mushrooms.”

  “I ate one that was hard.
” C’était dur. “It had not been cooked on one side.” The mushrooms were sliced and sautéed. Someone—whoever number fourteen turned out to be—must have been in a rush and inadvertently left the side of one mushroom incompletely cooked.

  “Four,” Têtedoie said.

  “Okay, okay. Four.”

  The anonymous number fourteen would never know how one mushroom had tripped up his or her advancement to the final.

  The group moved on to number fifteen. I inched my chair back quietly from the table, opened my notebook, and began writing in it on my knee.

  “Le visual de la pie?” asked Roger Jaloux. The pie’s presentation, the look of it?

  “C’est bon. Une belle présentation,” Jacquier said. It was good. Pretty. Five points. Four judges agreed. They gave it five.

  Têtedoie was last and furious, and his fury—his focus, an almost spitting rage—was directed at Lacombe. “Non. Non, et non.” It was immaterial that everyone else had liked the pie so much that they had unanimously given it five points.

  “Oh, Christian,” Lacombe sighed, in a tone that said, Ease up, please.

  “Four!” Têtedoie insisted.

  A judge I didn’t know dropped his head in resignation. The group had been judging for many hours.

  “Okay, four,” Jaloux said. “But, Christian, please behave yourself, s’il ta plaît? There is a journalist present. He is taking notes.”

  They continued. With the pie, the concern was either the filling (it needed fondant—a thick meltingness, a buoyancy—and most efforts were missing that) or the puff pastry, referred to during the judging as le feuilletage, which was often not cooked through (“Pas cuit”). You could never be an MOF if you couldn’t cook a puff pastry properly.