Dirt

by Bill Buford

  He is remembered for making Washington a “capital of dining,” for teaching Americans how to play with their food, for being among the rare great chefs (like Carême, Point, Lenôtre, and Michel Guérard) who brought the high technical skills of pastry to the whole kitchen. What do his friends miss? Richard’s inventiveness, his uncanny confidence that he could make every dish better (and did), his Frenchness (because, finally, just about everything was provoked by something in the classic repertoire), and mainly his joy in the kitchen. And his company at the table: In my life, there has been no one more fun to have a meal with.

  * * *

  —

  Four weeks later, Dorothy Hamilton died.

  The head of the French Culinary Institute (now renamed the International Culinary Center), once my modest antagonist, had become a robust good friend. I was now a Hamilton devotee. She doted on George and Frederick, who called her Aunt Dorothy. She regaled us with stories of Julia Child and made us feel connected to her with a vividness that surprised and moved me. Hamilton had a sage’s confidence about the influence Jessica would wield over a new generation of women wine drinkers. She and Jessica set up a dinner to plan a joint venture of some kind and scheduled it for the week after she returned from Nova Scotia. She had grown up in a fishing village, Fourchu, and was now campaigning to promote a local celebrity crustacean, the Fourchu lobster. It was a characteristic Dorothy endeavor: a financially selfless act to benefit a small community (the fishermen had no idea of their worth) that was ultimately about the natural purity of a simple North Atlantic Ocean flavor. En route to a meeting with the Fourchu City Council, she collided with a pickup truck and trailer. The driver had been speeding with such abandon, passing on curves, that witnesses later stepped forward to testify to his recklessness. Hamilton had been coming around one of those curves when she was hit head-on. These things happen, we die, but the circumstances—the selfishness of the driver, the selflessness of the victim (with so many good acts in her future), the fact that the driver and his bud were pulled from their burning cab and lived while Hamilton, trapped in her vehicle, was dead—were brutal in their capricious indifference.

  After the memorial service, one of monumental sadness, a New Orleans Dixie funeral band, with loud percussion and unrestrained Dixieland brass, marched mourners down cobbled Crosby Street to the International Culinary Center. There followed a feast held on every floor of Hamilton’s five-floor school, each one given over to the cooking of a different region of France. Dorothy’s memorial and Michel’s were a week apart.

  * * *

  —

  We were in Lyon in the summer of 2017, the boys eleven, and there were two restaurants I wanted them to try. One was La Mère Brazier, where they had the lunch that Viannay had told me, on our first meeting, they deserved to eat.

  It featured, finally, both Viannay’s quenelle (the airy lake-fish soufflé looked like a slice of exotic French toast, with a brownly caramelized crust) and his poulet en vessie, cooked in its rustic sack, as per tradition, but coated with a green version of a sauce suprême, which was not the tradition. The sauce was intensely vivid to look at and to inhale and seemed like a tribute to a lush summer garden. It was served with bright, perfectly popped-out-of-their-skins peas. I enjoyed the peas especially. I ate them slowly, one by one, my pleasure enhanced by knowing just how long someone in the back had spent squeezing out each one just for me.

  “She is here, you know. Mère Brazier. We all feel her presence in the kitchen, her spirit, whatever it is. She will always be here. She was here before me. She’ll be here after.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  A waiter gave us menus. They used to be silver and gray, and conveyed urban (and a rather masculine) sophistication. Now they were firecracker red. They were brash. A history of the restaurant was told on the back (also red—or rather RED!!!!) and included a short essay by the granddaughter Jacotte and a photograph of Viannay kissing an almost life-sized Brazier doll on the cheek. Her image—in photos and cartoons—seemed to be everywhere. The feeling was loud, maybe a little crude, and verging on caricature. It was as if Viannay had connected to a spirit that, yes, we had in fact all felt in the building, and the building had rewarded him with resounding success.

  And the food: It was no longer his. It was his take on hers.

  Viannay was joyful, self-deprecating, forthcoming, and easy to be with. In the evening, he was flying to Dubai to sign a contract to open a restaurant there, and he had, on top of everything else, the manner of a man who was about to take a luxurious vacation and be paid loads of money. Even the boys’ drumming on their Limoges plates with their spoons didn’t disturb him or, to be strictly accurate, only eventually disturbed him when, suddenly, he stopped talking and looked pointedly at them.

  “C’est bien, garçons?” he asked. (George, in a moment of spontaneous cheekiness, replied: “Très bien, et vous?”)

  “I will be taking them later in the month to eat their first meal at Paul Bocuse,” I said, and Viannay nodded. “I’ve always wondered—how did you meet him?”

  “Here. Once I got to Lyon, I drove out to L’Auberge and asked if Bocuse would see me.”

  “When you were making sandwiches?”

  “Yes, when I was making sandwiches. I explained to him that I regarded Lyon as my culinary and spiritual home.” Viannay’s uncle, his father’s brother, was from here, and had a house in the watery Dombes, and Mathieu had spent summers there with his cousins.

  Bocuse liked Viannay. “You will always be welcome at L’Auberge,” he said. “You will always be able to reach me on my cell.”

  When Viannay opened his first restaurant, Les Oliviers, he had a well-known diner on his first day—Paul Bocuse. When he opened M, Bocuse was again in the dining room. As Viannay was preparing to open La Mère Brazier, Bocuse asked if he could eat lunch there before everyone else. For Bocuse, La Mère Brazier was at the heart of what Lyon represented.

  He ate there with Jacotte Brazier, the granddaughter.

  “There were workmen downstairs,” Viannay said. “On his way out, Bocuse had to step over wood planks, but he was already on his cell phone. He was calling François Simon.”

  Simon, who then wrote for Le Figaro, was France’s most feared and influential restaurant critic. Simon phoned Viannay the next day, the day before the restaurant’s opening. He would be there at 6:00 p.m., he said and needed to be on a train to Paris by 8:00 p.m. He wrote the review in transit. It was the headline in the weekend edition: LA MÈRE BRAZIER IS BACK! (in English for no reason except for its headline punch). It was exhilarating. It was somehow a bugle call to Frenchness. Le Monde followed, and L’Express, Libération, the local news, the national evening news, the national afternoon news, and the French news in English. La Mère Brazier was not just back. It was relaunched.

  “This was all Paul Bocuse,” I said.

  “It was all Paul Bocuse.”

  * * *

  —

  We had made a 7:00 p.m. reservation at L’Auberge on the last day of our Lyon visit. The boys were electric in their anticipation. It was akin to going to the North Pole.

  Bocuse had been appearing rarely. The preceding winter, he had missed the Bocuse d’Or, even when it seemed possible that an American team might win the trophy, his dream, because he was in the hospital with a lung infection. (In the event, the Americans did win the trophy, an incomprehensible feat, and all summer long our Lyonnais friends grumbled: “It was rigged. They did it for Monsieur Paul.”)

  Afterward, Bocuse resumed his appearances, but not reliably.

  I called Boulud in New York. “The boys haven’t met Bocuse. Could you help?”

  “I will phone him,” he said. In fact, he ended up phoning a lot of people before he called me back. “Paul is tired. But he will try to come down. I changed your reservation to six p.m. Be early.”

  I refl
ected on my hitherto unexamined reasons for wanting to see Bocuse. I wasn’t a complete stranger to him. He recognized me at events and made small gestures to indicate acknowledgment. But I was scarcely a longtime friend. I wasn’t even a short-time friend. The truth, which I was not entirely comfortable admitting, was that I wanted to see him before he was no longer there to be seen. I wasn’t the only one. The restaurant’s manager and headwaiters were busy, with people coming to pay respects before respects were actually called for. What did we want? To touch the hand of the handoff guy? To feel we were among the chosen to carry on the mission?

  I arrived with my family and was positioned at a table facing the corner he would come from. We ordered. The boys, now fully trained in matters French culinary, were at ease, and hungry. Once again, I fell into utter admiration of what made the food here unusual: its meticulousness. You could eat just about every dish on his menu somewhere in Lyon, or nearby, or in the Rhône Valley. But no one made the dishes with the same precision. Of all the many qualities that Bocuse is meant to have embodied, the one rarely mentioned was the most obvious: He made perfect Lyonnais food. I kept looking up from my plate. He wasn’t coming. I imagined him upstairs, in his bedroom, sleeping.

  It was a mournful autumn, when Lyon is lonely like no place I’ve ever known, and damp, and decaying, and winter comes in intermittent warnings, those cold blasts. The city seemed to be waiting for a father who was ill, and uncomfortable, and wouldn’t die, and you didn’t want him to die, and you didn’t ever want to imagine a life without him, but he would die, and so, despite yourself, you imagined it, briefly, reluctantly, and then he was dead. Paul Bocuse died on January 20, 2018.

  In an instant, you find yourself thinking not of the end of the life but of the whole life, the kid in the picture at his vast father’s feet, the mustache he sported in his thirties, the Michelin tires always on his vehicle, the success during France’s wild “golden era”—the late 1960s and ’70s (Brigitte Bardot and Club Med and Serge Gainsbourg and filterless Gauloises and la libération). There was a photo that I kept looking at, over and over again, of the young Bocuse giving chase to a young woman shaded by a parasol on a hot day—Raymonde, who would become his wife. Another showed him giving Mère Brazier a tour of the cellars at L’Auberge (and the look on her face of utter horror at the grime and filth of the place). Other photographs, a bunch of them, never published, and only just discovered by Mathieu Viannay in a drawer of the home that, in his new prosperity, he had bought in Beaujolais. They depicted a party that the house’s previous owner, a female vigneron, had hosted for Bocuse at her château—plus Georges Blanc, Michel Guérard, the Troisgros brothers, others, everyone in various states of undress. I flicked through them quickly, everyone kissing, being kissed, the food and drink, the idea probably at the core of Bocuse’s life that raucous good things happen at the table.

  Daniel Boulud was among the friends who gathered at L’Auberge the night before the funeral—no speeches, a solemn repast, Bocuse still upstairs in his bedroom, dressed in his whites, in a coffin. In the morning, in a cold, beating wintry rain, a cortège of three hundred police led the hearse along the now gray Saône, down to the Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, where Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici had been received, and where Henri IV and Marie de’ Medici were married, and where the hypocrite scumbag Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand was ordained bishop, and where Napoleon and Josephine were honored, and where a child Mozart performed, and where Paul Bocuse would make his final appearance, fifteen hundred inside and a modest crowd outside, under umbrellas.

  The funeral was military in manner, as though a great general had passed, with a strict hierarchy: the central pews occupied by French-collared MOFs, the undecorated chefs whitely in the wings, the Bocuse family in the front, the civilians in the back, but there weren’t many. The kitchen was saying goodbye to their chef. The best speech, the most felt, might have been that of Gérard Collomb, the city’s mayor, with a righteous politician’s gift for rhetoric, honoring the passing of the man who understood the city and how both it and the man himself had been shaped by its history, by the generations before him, just as he had shaped everyone who was there to honor his death. Paul Bocuse was Lyonnais. (Two years later, on January 18, 2020, the Michelin Guide removed one of Bocuse’s stars and, for the first time since 1965, his restaurant, the Auberge, had only two. Although it is the Michelin practice when a chef dies to remove a star, it was still a shock.)

  * * *

  —

  More fitting, and true to the spirit of the city, was the achievement of Andrea Petrini, an Italian transplanted to Lyon (like so many Italians before him), and now a local culinary entrepreneur and the mad captain behind the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, who put together a food festival in the city two months after Bocuse’s death. There were kitchen “performances” in twelve new restaurants, a “Night Canteen” featuring a new dish every hour from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., a goat fête, displays by visiting chefs (high achievers all), and, appositely enough, a Bocuse tribute involving a dozen masters, Têtedoie among them, reinterpreting Monsieur Paul’s greatest hits. The fête was a week in duration with just about every kitchen called into service. It was an answer to Bocuse’s death. The city’s restaurants had never been more vibrantly gastronomic. Lyon creates chefs. And, yes, the achievement arises from where Lyon happens to find itself, among vineyards and rivers and mountain lakes, among birds and pigs and fish, but mainly because of the belief, shared by everyone here, that what happens at the table is among the most important activities in civilization. It is about intimacy, convivium, creativity, appetites, desire, euphoria, culture, and the joys of being alive.

  The Pope of Lyon has died. But what a culture he has left behind. What a privilege it has been to be a member of it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The quote at the beginning of “No Food Road More Important” is from Mémoires de chefs (2012), compiled and edited by Nicolas Chatenier. The early history of cheese (“Small Brown Cows on High Green Hills”) draws from conversations with Michel Bouvier, historian of the wine and foods of antiquity, and from his Le fromage, c’est toute une histoire (2008).

  The text for La Varenne’s Le Cuisinier françois is the 1651 edition, introduced by Mary and Philip Hyman (2001). The text of Nostradamus’s 1555 treatise on jam-making, Traité des confitures, is edited by Jean-François Kosta-Théfane (2010). The facsimile edition of Ouverture de Cuisine (1585) by Lancelot de Casteau is edited by Léo Moulin (1983). The text of the 1555 Livre fort excellent de Cuysine, published in Lyon, is a bilingual edition translated and edited by Timothy J. Tomasik and Ken Albala (2014). Most of the other primary sources are online at Gallica, the digital holdings of la Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  Among secondary sources, the following are noteworthy: Ali-Bab, Gastronomique pratique (1928); Dan Barber, The Third Plate (2015); Joseph Favre, Dictionnaire universel de cuisine pratique (1905); Henry Heller, Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France (2003); R. J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron, The Reign of Francis I (1994); Giles MacDonogh, Brillat-Savarin, the Judge and his Stomach (1993); Marjorie Meiss, “L’Italie à la table des Guise (1526-81),” in Table de la Renaissance—Le mythe Italien, edited by Florent Quellier and Pascal Brioist (2018); Marie-Josèph Moncourgé, Lyon 1555, capital de la culture gourmande au XVIe siècle (2008); Prosper Montagné, Larousse Gastronomique (1938); William W. Weaver, Beautiful Swimmers—Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay (1994); Edward White, “Cooking for the Pope,” in the Paris Review (March 3, 2017); and Ann Willan, The Cookbook Library (2012).

  * * *

  —

  I am privileged to have been able to consult Dan Barber, Alain Ducasse, Allen Grieco of la Villa i Tatti in Florence (the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies), Thomas Hauck; Jean-Pierre Jacob (chef of the now-closed Le Bateaux Ivre on Lac du Bourget), Steven Laurence Kaplan, Harold McGee, Magnus Nilsson, Alain Vigneron,
and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. I am especially privileged to have had Michel Richard, Daniel Boulud, and Mathieu Viannay as my teachers in the kitchen.

  In fundamental ways, this adventure would have been impossible without the help of our Lyonnais friends, and expressions of gratitude are in order to the following: our downstairs neighbors la famille Azouley; Julien (“Papi”) and Marie (“Mami”) Boulud; Roberto Buonomo; Martine and Marc Broyer at Lavis Trafford; the principal of l’Ecole Robert Doisneau (whom I still know only as “Brigitte”) plus students Ambre, Marcel, Ben Omar, Salomé, Tristan, and Victor; Isabel Comerro and Yves Rivoiron (Le Bouchon des Filles); Franck and Mai Delhoum (Le Potager); writer and cook Sonia Ezgulian; Georgette Farkas; Jenny Gilbert; Jean-Charles Margotten; l’Institut Paul Bocuse, including alumni Edouard Bernier, Hwei Gan Chern, and Willy Johnson; Jonathan Nossiter; Martin Porter; Christophe and Marie-Laure Reymond; Emmanuelle Sysoyev of Only Lyon; Laura Vidi and Gerald Berthet; and Victor and Sylvie Vitelli.

  Early readers of the manuscript include Leslie Levine and Lexy Bloom (who read every draft and is my unofficial and heroic coeditor) at Alfred A. Knopf; John Bennet, David Remnick, and Nick Trautwein of The New Yorker; my literary agent, Andrew Wylie; and my gifted in-house line editor, Jessica Green. The fact-checkers were Gillian Brassil, Clio Doyle, and Michael Lo Piano. Lydia Buechler was the copy chief.

  Fat Man in a White Hat, a two-part documentary made for the BBC, based on my arrival in Lyon, was commissioned by Emma Willis, produced by Roy Ackerman and directed by James Runcie. Annie Arnold was the assistant producer and Christophe Foulon the sound recordist.

  The book was commissioned and overseen by Sonny Mehta—a privilege to have one of the world’s greatest publishers, and a friend for nearly four decades, as my editor. He was available to me just about always and often with no notice—for impromptu meetings, a phone call, lunch, a drink, or just to hang out in his office—and he directed me in ways that were subtle and profound. He lived to see the book completed, and I am grateful that he did, but died on December 30, 2019, before it appeared in print. I am among many, many people who mourn and miss him dearly.