Dirt

by Bill Buford

We proceeded down the other side of the hill, a windy, steep road that I hadn’t known, Boulud directing me. And then, as if on cue, he pulled out his phone and called the great man himself, right then and there, and said he’d be seeing him in five minutes.

  “Do you mind?” he asked me. “Every time I come to Lyon, I have to see Paul, first thing.”

  It is only now, in retrospect, that I realize that this was another instance of Boulud’s silent enhancement of my life in Lyon. He knew all along that he would be seeing Bocuse. He didn’t need a ride from the airport.

  I may have been driving slowly—or maybe there was a shortcut I didn’t know—because, by the time we reached L’Auberge, Jérôme was already there, having a cup of coffee with his father. Evidently, Jérôme, too, needed to see “Paul, first thing.”

  A breakfast was produced—cakes, mainly, and toast—and it seemed evident that the three of them—dad, son, and Daniel (who could have been called the “surrogate other son”)—met often, talked more, and were extremely at ease with each other.

  Monsieur Paul touched his chest, a modest cough, which both of his sons noticed, and he explained that he had been having trouble breathing.

  Daniel and Jérôme were instantly solicitous. (“Have you seen your doctor?” “Have you tried steam?”)

  Bocuse was frail, and everyone panicked when he was ill. “But no,” he said, “it is not a medical issue.” He insisted: “Really, it’s not.”

  “It’s the pollution,” I said, maybe a little loudly, emboldened by having suffered the same trouble and by being able to contribute, however modestly, to a conversation among the representatives of three generations of great Lyonnais chefs at one table.

  Bocuse turned to me. “That’s it.” C’est ça. “You’re right. He’s right,” he said. “It’s the pollution.”

  “The two of you don’t live in Lyon,” I said. “You don’t know.”

  “That’s right,” Bocuse said again, and I liked that we agreed, both of us emissaries of the city in our different ways, and that we both were prepared to say the thing that is never said: that Lyon, this uniquely soulful, historically evocative, and seldom visited beautiful gem of a city, a sand castle between great rivers, neglected and in need of defending, has pollution. The city is not to blame, unless it can be faulted for the accidents of geography. The pollutants are from factories along the east of France, and from vehicle emissions from the north-south traffic on the Autoroute du Soleil. They funnel into the Rhône Valley and, on hot, still days, seem to gather heavily as a brown pestilence, float above the summer-languid Saône, and not move.

  As the breakfast proceeded, which no one was eating except yours truly, who was not about to pass up a chance of eating anything chez Bocuse, it seemed that Jérôme and I were joining a continuing tutorial between Monsieur Paul and Monsieur Daniel. Boulud and I had completed our project, the two dozen “iconic dishes,” and, without my knowing, he had been regularly in touch with Monsieur Paul to ensure that he was getting the dishes right.

  “The poulet en vessie,” Bocuse asked. “You sorted out the knot?”

  Boulud’s kitchen team had run into a problem keeping the bladders from deflating.

  Boulud confirmed that he had.

  “The volaille à Noelle?” he asked, alluding to the miraculous performance piece of the completely boned chicken then reinflated with various mousselike fillings.

  “It looked good,” Boulud said. It was really very flashy.

  “You remembered the asparagus?” Bocuse asked.

  “Yes, thank you, Paul.” One mousse was made with asparagus.

  “White or green?”

  “Green.”

  “Johannès used white,” Bocuse said, alluding to the elder Nandron.

  “White?” Boulud asked.

  “Always.”

  “Oh,” Daniel said. (He turned to me and whispered, “Merde!”)

  “And the jambon au foin?”

  “Yes, thank you, Paul,” Daniel confirmed. “The jambon au foin was very successful.”

  “And the herbs?” Les aromatiques?

  “The herbs?” Daniel asked.

  “Yes, because hay isn’t fragrant enough.”

  Daniel looked at me again in a panic. This, too, we had made together, with a tractor’s worth of alfalfa, but the barnyard aromas had dissipated in the cooking. We had both noticed it, but didn’t make a big deal about it, because it was what it was—hay. It smelled sweet, maybe, if you stuck your nose right into it, but more like a muddy football field in midwinter than the poetry of cut grass on a summer day, and nothing like the animal’s feeding trough that we expected.

  “I always add rosemary,” Bocuse said.

  “Rosemary?”

  “Yes.” Beaucoup. “Lots and lots of rosemary.”

  “Merde, merde, merde,” Boulud whispered.

  Daniel and I walked back to the car. “How could I forget that it was white asparagus?” He looked stricken. “I knew it was white. I’d seen it.”

  Bocuse knew Gérard Nandron, Daniel’s first boss. He knew Nandron’s father, Johannès. He knew Jean-Paul Lacombe when he started at Léon de Lyon, because he knew his father, Paul Lacombe. He knew Anne-Sophie Pic when she started in Valence, because he knew both her father, Jacques, and her grandfather André. He knew not only the great Alain Chapel, but the great man’s father, Roger. Bocuse had been there. He knew exactly how food had been made in Lyon for the last hundred years—and much longer—because he knew the people, generations ago, who had learned how to cook from the generation before them. I don’t know anyone else who has this kind of firsthand, eye-witness know-how. Bocuse, himself the son and grandson of chefs who had made food on the very spot where we now found ourselves, was a steward of the region’s historical culinary record.

  In an instant, I understood a Bocuse dish—not the preparation, which was chicken cooked in a bladder, but the name, poulet à la Mère Fillioux. Bocuse hadn’t worked for Mère Fillioux. She died in 1925, the year before he was born. He had worked in the kitchens of Eugénie Brazier and Fernand Point. At La Mère Brazier, he was in charge of poultry operations. I liked the connection: that I had been in the same places, both of them, and had learned the dish just as Bocuse had done (i.e., Mère Brazier → Fernand Point → Paul Bocuse → me!!!). But I was missing the point.

  In Lyon, Fillioux remains a culinary icon, even though no person living has eaten her food. She continues to appear, in murals and photographs, in the same costume, overdressed in her prudishly puffy clothes, hair bundled up, bearing her miraculously tender chicken. And of course Eugénie Brazier, before she became Mère Brazier, worked in Fillioux’s kitchen. That’s where Brazier learned the dish. And then, at the hands of Brazier, Bocuse learned it.

  Bocuse was the handoff guy.

  Bocuse is known as the leader of nouvelle cuisine, the most prominent member of the pack of innovative chefs who, inheriting a cuisine that had been codified and largely unchanged for 150 years, had been united by a battle cry to make it new. In fact, Bocuse was not a nouvelle-cuisine guy. He never called himself a “nouvelle-cuisine chef.” He was instead merely the most prominent member of a generation of chefs when French cooking, in many forms, nouvelle and not-so-nouvelle, had a wonderful postwar flourishing, a renaissance that had been two or three generations in the making. He was, in effect, just the most charismatic guy.

  What he was, more than anything else, was a Lyonnais chef. His food: It is what people have been eating in Lyon for a very long time (made new, sometimes, and sometimes just made well).

  Michel Richard was a nouvelle-cuisine chef: not of the first generation but powerfully liberated by it. His influences: Fernand Point (for his philosophy), Michel Guérard (for his inventiveness), and Gaston Lenôtre (for his creed: “as long as you make it better”). Bocuse opened a restaurant with Lenôtre. He
was Guérard’s good friend. He enjoyed their company but wasn’t the same kind of chef. Bocuse’s worldview was local. Every item on his menu has an archaeology: Mère Fillioux’s poulet en vessie; Mère Brazier’s sea bass en croûte; Fernand Point’s Dover sole on fresh, handmade tagliatelle. Then the local dishes: the chicken from Bresse, the chicken au vinaigre, the quenelle from the local river fish, the lake fish, the local crawfish.

  What makes Lyonnais food exceptional is—just as Bocuse had told me when I first met him—a chef’s access to the nearby ingredients. Lyon is a geographical accident of good food and food practices. The Dombes, with its birds and its freshwater eels and monkfish; the rivers, with their brochet; the mountain lakes (Lac du Bourget, Lac d’Annecy) with their unique fish varieties, found there and nowhere else; the farmyard cooking of Vienne and Condrieu and Ampuis, with their pigs and goats; the Alps with their cheeses; and everywhere, in each place, a local wine. All the ingredients are “cartable,” the distance, between fifty and seventy-five kilometers, that food was conveyed before the era of motorized vehicles, by foot or animal or boat, basically the route to a market city since the invention of the wheel and the domestication of animals and the discovery that wood floats.

  Lyonnais food is quite simple. The simplicity is what gives the region its reputation. It is not necessarily elaborate cooking. It is local dishes, which are good, served with local wines, which are good, and the meals are always very good value.

  X

  The Greatest Adventure in the Lives of Our Family

  Their thoughts, for the most part, were solely of hunger, and their conversation, about food. I first witnessed this collective hysteria at the immensely large camp of Petrisberg—all prisoners knew or experienced it—which consisted of manic reminiscing about past feasts. They would gather in small, feverish groups with the sole purpose of talking about eating. A peasant would recite the menu of his wedding dinner and the specialties of his terroir, and the gourmands would describe in detail the menus of La Mère Poulard, Le Restaurant Larue, and Le Chapon Fin. Amateur cooks would exchange recipes with a precision that would intimidate a Cordon Bleu graduate, while others would take notes….

  FRANCIS AMBRIÈRE, LES GRANDES VACANCES, 1946, TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY FREDERICK BUFORD

  AT THE FOOT OF THE GRANDE MONTAGNE DE VIRIEU, BELLEY. Six years after reading Brillat-Savarin’s famous book in my urban cubicle in the offices of The New Yorker and vowing that, one day, I would replicate his walk into the high mountains to visit a monastery, I was doing it: Finally! I was off! I was on the trail! I was making my ascent! Then, I got lost.

  I wasn’t lost as in I’m-in-a-forest-and-can’t-find-my-way-home lost. I wasn’t even lost in the sense of I-now-don’t-know-which-way-to-turn lost. There was basically only one direction—up. But there had been several up-trending possibilities to choose from, when the trail just disappeared: smooshed into nonexistence by what seemed to have been a large herd of elephants suddenly deciding to take a group nap.

  Also—and this seemed peculiar to me—there was no one around. Since I’d started: not a soul. I found the situation, well—creepy, actually. It was a Saturday, the morning beautiful, the sky October blue, the weather fair, the breezes gentle. Where was everybody? Was I really the only one visiting this ruin? To be so unequivocally alone, and lost, even if I knew the likely direction to be heading in, wasn’t entirely comfortable. Guns were being fired—bird hunters, I assumed, which seemed seasonally apposite even if less than reassuring.

  Jessica had bought me a topographical hiker’s trail map in which every dinky forest, partial meadow, and dried-up brook was precisely represented—the document, published by the French National Geographic Institute, was, in my judgment, among the greatest navigational events since the invention of feet—and, after consulting it, I saw that I had mistaken the flattened grass for the trail (cows, rather than elephants, having been the likely culprits). I retraced my steps, located my route, and resumed my journey.

  There was a paved road, the D-53, which Brillat-Savarin obviously hadn’t followed since it hadn’t yet been created, so I tried to avoid it. The one I settled on had a chance of being the very trail that he had followed if only because there didn’t seem to be a better one. It started in the town of Virieu-le-Grand, at the base of the mountain. Brillat-Savarin describes it as a steep five-thousand-foot climb. I looked up—a sheer, flat, white rocky face (the kind you would take a ski lift to reach the top of or wear a parachute to jump from)—and thought: Oh, shit.

  Brillat-Savarin, I should clarify, hadn’t done the walk on his own. He was a member of a group of musicians in his hometown of Belley, about seven miles due south, and they had been invited by the abbot to celebrate the day of Saint Bernard, the monastery saint. No fine music had ever penetrated its elevated isolation, the abbot had said, and a musical performance would delight not just the monks but also the neighbors (“nos voisins”).

  In my own effort, I wasn’t trying to follow in Brillat-Savarin’s footsteps, as such—because, after more than two centuries, what would I expect to find? My hike was more like an act of reflective homage. Brillat-Savarin had undertaken his monastery visit at a time when its traditions were still intact: namely, a place where, for about a thousand years, really good food and drink got made. He wrote about it thirty years later, and he is clear about why. In the intervening period, the French Revolution happened, and the monasteries were ransacked, and the monks driven off. Many of the current generation, he says, have never seen a monastery or met a monk, and have no idea what they have contributed to the national cuisine.

  * * *

  —

  I had planned to go up and down the mountain on the same day, early start, late-ish return, and was staying at a hotel not in Virieu-le-Grand but the next village in the valley, Artemare, owing to a report of the good food there: an auberge in a former village schoolhouse, a venerable oak tree in the front—jumbly, cluttered (at the end of my hall were a vacuum cleaner and a priest’s confessional), and unselfconsciously old-fashioned. The night before, I ate féra, among the most prized of the lake fish, with an unusually firm meatlike texture (from Lac Léman—you rarely see it in Lyon), that had been cooked à la meunière, served with épinards au gratin, and topped with four identically turned vegetables, a carrot, a potato, a zucchini, and a turnip. The meal confirmed an enduring French expectation that, when you stay at a village hotel, you won’t get Michelin flash, but you can count on eating well.

  Like the hotel, the area—referred to as the massif of Bugey—was also delightfully anachronistic. Brillat-Savarin came here every autumn to shoot birds, a practice that was obviously still observed today. The villages still had communal water troughs and ovens to bake bread in, which were very much in use, blackened, a stack of wood nearby, a peel alongside it (the flat trowel that you slide under a loaf to remove it when it’s done). The sight of them revived in me a connection to Bob and what he had tried to re-create in his ovens on the Quai Saint-Vincent, some preindustrial, earth-produced taste that he had grown up with and I hadn’t. Jacques Pépin once told me that the greatest food of his life was the bread of his Lyonnais childhood, just out of the oven, with butter, and I regretted that no one was making any in the village ovens today.

  After my dinner, I approached the hotel’s husband-and-wife owners—they were eating dinner on television trays, drinking a local mountain wine, and watching the news—and asked if I could trouble them to make me a sandwich for my hike.

  “Chicken?” the wife confirmed, and the next morning I was handed most of the meat from a roasted poulet de Bresse crushed between two rustic slices and wrapped in foil. I put it in my backpack. It smelled like a Sunday lunch. My other items were a very large bottle of water, sunblock, a map of the site made after a nineteenth-century archaeological dig, and two books—my volume of Brillat-Savarin and a small handmade collection of recipes. I had bought it on eBay.fr.
The author, who is never identified (although there are clues), was a French prisoner of war held in a camp in Nazi Germany. The recipes were compiled as Europe appeared to be falling to the Nazis and seemed, like the Brillat-Savarin, to be written in the hope of being able to hold on to something that was very threatened—French food and everything that it had come to represent.

  In all this—the monastery, the handmade recipe book, even my chicken sandwich—there was, for me, a simple assumption that I feel compelled to make explicit: namely, that we are born needing to eat but not knowing how to make food.

  Among the functions essential to our survival (e.g., drinking, breathing, evacuating, sleeping, reproducing, etc.), eating, at least since the invention of fire, is different. Cooking—the how-to, the what—is taught: a set of skills handed over by those who know to those who don’t, and from one generation to the next (what a grandmother hands over to a grandchild, a parent, aunt, uncle to children, what Julien Boulud learned from his uncles eighty years ago and passed on to his son Daniel). Before the modern era, that knowledge was diurnal; it was the behavior of your local patch on the Earth, the modulations of the seasons. This is what will feed you in the winter. This is how to cure meat so that you have some when you have nothing else. This is how you make cheese, or wine, or bread. This is what food tastes like. And this is the knowledge that monasteries, like the one I was hiking to, the abbey of Saint Sulpice (founded in 1033), were great repositories of. If the knowledge isn’t handed down—if for reasons of war or famine or industry or revolution or a massive volcano that buries your civilization in ash—then the chain is broken, and there is the possibility that the knowledge will be lost.

  Saint Sulpice had only been granted protective status as a national treasure in 1994. But it was now officially a monument, in the fullest sense of the word: It marked a place where something happened which now was gone.