A Cook's Tour (2 page)

     Unreasonable? Overromantic? Uninformed? Foolhardy?

     Yes!

     But I didn’t care. I’d just put down a very nice score with an obnoxious and overtestosteroned account of my life in the restaurant business. Inexplicably, it had flown off the shelves. I was paying rent on time for the first time in my life. I had, amazingly, health coverage at long last. I actually had money in the bank and the goodwill of a publisher on my side. After a few months of traveling the English-speaking world, flogging my book, giving the same witless three-minute interview over and over and over again, I was no longer a useful factor in the day-to-day operations of my kitchen. My cooks had long since begun calling me ‘Pinchay Famoso’ and making fun of me when I’d show up slathered in TV makeup after yet another segment showing me warning the public about ‘fish on Monday’ and the ‘perils of hollandaise.’ I needed something to do. I needed another idea for a book – preferably while I was still in good odor from the last one. I may love cooking, and I certainly love the life of the professional chef, but I did not, at age forty-five, forty-six, or ever again, want to find myself slopping out brunches in some West Village café when my knees went completely and my brain turned, finally, to mush.

     ‘How about this?’ I suggested to my editor. ‘I travel around the world, doing whatever I want. I stay in fine hotels and I stay in hovels. I eat scary, exotic, wonderful food, doing cool stuff like I’ve seen in movies, and looking for the perfect meal. How’s that sound?’

     That sounded like a good business plan, right? I’d comb the world looking for the perfect mix of food and context. Upriver in Southeast Asia to eat snakes and bird’s nests, back to La Teste for a bowl of
soupe de poisson
, scale the mountains of the new haute cuisine – the French Laundry in Napa Valley, I hadn’t eaten there yet! That Arzak guy in Spain – all the cooks are talking about him. I’d look and look, and eventually I’d find the best meal in the world – according to me anyway – and I’d write about it.

     Of course, I knew already that the best meal in the world, the perfect meal, is very rarely the most sophisticated or expensive one. I knew how important factors other than technique or rare ingredients can be in the real business of making magic happen at a dinner table. Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life. I mean, let’s face it: When you’re eating simple barbecue under a palm tree, and you feel sand between your toes, samba music is playing softly in the background, waves are lapping at the shore a few yards off, a gentle breeze is cooling the sweat on the back of your neck at the hairline, and looking across the table, past the column of empty Red Stripes at the dreamy expression on your companion’s face, you realize that in half an hour you’re probably going to be having sex on clean white hotel sheets, that grilled chicken leg suddenly tastes a hell of a lot better.

     I talk about these mysterious forces all the time with my chef cronies. Nothing illustrates them more than the Last Meal Game. ‘You’re getting the electric chair tomorrow morning. They’re gonna strap you down, turn up the juice, and fry your ass until your eyes sizzle and pop like McNuggets. You’ve got one meal left. What are you having for dinner?’ When playing this game with chefs – and we’re talking good chefs here – the answers are invariably simple ones.

     ‘Braised short ribs,’ said one friend.

     ‘A single slab of seared foie gras,’ said another.

     ‘Linguine
pomodoro
, like my mother used to make me,’ said another.

     ‘Cold meat loaf sandwich,’ said another, shuddering with pleasure. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

     No one I’ve ever played this game with came back with ‘The tasting menu at Ducasse.’ No one remembers their best meal ever as being consumed jacketed and tied, in a starched dress shirt, sitting bolt upright in a four-star restaurant. That particular combination of skill, technique, prime ingredients, and artistic genius was not really what I was looking for – though I was determined to give it a shot now and again. There are other forces at work in the enjoyment of a truly great meal. Nice crystal, mood lighting, squeeze-bottle-applied sauces, good china, attentive service, spectacular wine – I was already well aware of their strange and terrible powers to seduce and delight. Though not always capable of fully harnessing them myself, I was fully conscious of them. I knew how those things worked, the classic interplay between food and service, the effects of low-wattage peach-tinted lightbulbs, the sound of well-polished sommelier’s shoes gliding across a dining room. The entire food business as show business is what my friends and I have been doing our whole lives. I knew about that like I knew about the physical forces at play in the kitchen: gravity, decay, coagulation, fermentation, emulsification, oxidization, reduction, caramelization. I didn’t want to think about those things. I wanted to detach myself from the hard wiring, the way my whole nervous system becomes aware of every movement in a crowded restaurant, habitually monitoring the busboys’ progress in the neighboring station, eyeing an overflowing bus pan, a backed-up service bar, listening for the sizzle as my fish hits a hot pan in the kitchen.

     I wanted magic. When is food magic? What are the common denominators? Certainly, when food is the result of a brilliant and obsessive personal vision, it can take on mystical, magical aspects. At their best, chefs like to consider themselves alchemists, and some of them, particularly the French, have a long and glorious tradition of turning lead into gold. For what is a humble shoulder or shank or strip of gut if not leaden and unlovely, and what is daube of beef Provençale or osso buco – when every bit of flavor and texture has been coaxed gently by skilled hands – but pure gold? And it’s not just magic for the person eating. It can be magic for the chef as well, seeing that tough, veiny, uncooked hunk of meat and bone going into the oven, swimming in purplish and not very distinguished red table wine, then seeing it, smelling it, tasting it only a few hours later, the sauce reduced, a hearty, thick, mellowed, and wonderful witches’ brew – transformed.

     It’s an understanding of this process that raised the French (and Italians) to the forefront of classical cuisine. It’s why we love them – even when we hate them. Few sane persons enjoy French pop music – or even the French much – but they know what to do with every scrap of hoof, snout, entrail, and skin, every bit of vegetable trimming, fish head, and bone. Because they grew up with that all-important dictum.
Use everything!
(And use it well.)

     Why is that? Why them and not us?

     The answer is, in many ways, to be found elsewhere in the world – in Vietnam, Portugal, Mexico, Morocco – because they had to. It was not – in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France – as it is not today in much of the rest of the world, an option whether to use the nasty bits. You had to.

     They damn well better have figured out something to do with calf’s face, pig’s feet, snails, old bread, and all those cheap cuts and trimmings, or they’d go broke, starve, never be able to afford the really good stuff for special occasions. Sauces, marinades, stewing, charcuterie, the invention of the quenelle, the sausage, the cured ham, salted fish, confit – these were strategies, the results of necessity and countless experimentation. Coq au vin? Tough oversized bird, marinated in red wine and braised long enough to be able to be chewed. Pot-au-feu? Boiled tongues, tails, bones, and cheap root vegetables. Pâté? Scraps and trimmings and fat, ground up and seasoned and decorated until somebody was interested in putting it in his mouth.
Confit de canard?
I got no refrigerator and I got no freezer and all these damn duck legs are going bad! Those shrewd and wily French toiled mightily over the years, figuring out ways to make just about everything that grazed, creeped, swam, crawled, or hopped, and every growing thing that poked through soil, rotted on the vine, or hid under dung, into something edible, enjoyable – even magical.

     Long after the arrival of the refrigerator, while Americans ate plastic-wrapped fluffy white chicken breasts and denied even the existence of legs or giblets, secure in the certain knowledge that sirloin, filet mignon, and prime rib were really the only ‘good’ parts of the steer, that everything else was hamburger, the French kept at it like nothing had happened. They’d come to love their hooves and snouts. They’d found something to love in every little bit – if it was done right – and, as with so many cultures on this big planet, they’d come to value, to cherish, the humble, poor man’s fare of their past. Merchandising, once a necessary device for the transformation of the inedible to the edible, had fostered an entire cuisine, an approach, a philosophy, a way of life. And magic was the mainstay of the process – a valuable arrow in any cook’s quiver, even one playing with thousand-dollar-a-pound white truffles and torchons of foie gras.

     Respecting the ingredient may no longer be an economic necessity in much of the emerging world; it is now a pleasure, to be experienced and enjoyed at one’s chosen time and place. When everything is just right, a well-made
tête de veau
can be not only a thing to be savored for its challenging yet simple combination of flavors and textures; it can, with the haunting power of sense memory, remind us of times and places long past.

     Think about the last time food transported you. You were a kid, had been feeling under the weather all week, and when you were finally getting your appetite back, after a long, wet walk from school in the rain, mom had a big steaming bowl of homemade minestrone waiting for you. Maybe it was just a bowl of Campbell’s cream of tomato with Oysterettes, and a grilled cheese sandwich. You know what I mean.

     Your first taste of champagne on a woman’s lips . . .
steak frites
when you were in Paris as a teenager with a Eurorail pass, you’d blown almost all your dough on hash in Amsterdam, and this slightly chewy slab of
rumsteck
(rump steak) was the first substantial meal in days . . . a single wild strawberry, so flavorful that it nearly took your head off . . . your grandmother’s lasagne . . . a first sip of stolen ice-cold beer on a hot summer night, hands smelling of crushed fireflies . . . leftover pork fried rice, because your girlfriend at the time always seemed to have some in the fridge . . . steamer clams, dripping with drawn butter from your first family vacation at the Jersey shore . . . rice pudding from the Fort Lee Diner . . . bad Cantonese when you were a kid and Chinese was still exotic and wonderful and you still thought fortune cookies were fun . . . dirty-water hot dogs . . . a few beads of caviar, licked off a nipple  . . .

     Nostalgia aside, good ingredients are not to be discounted. One tends to remember vividly one’s first really fresh piece of fish, one’s first taste of top-quality beluga, an early encounter with truffles, fresh baby peas right out of the pod, a perfectly marbled prime
côte de boeuf
, an introduction to fresh morels, or stuff you’d just never tried before and maybe didn’t even know existed, like a hunk of raw
o-toro
, or sea urchin roe. I wanted more memories like these. New ones. I knew time was running out. I was forty-four years old and I’d been basically nowhere. I was becoming a little slower as a line cook, a little bit crankier. When I got swamped on my station, when it seemed sometimes like every order was coming off my sauté station, I began thinking it a conspiracy. The waiters were sandbagging me! Loading up Pops with sauté items, just to see him sweat. Listen to his knees snap crackle pop when he bends down to that lowboy. Look at him, snarling and cursing under his breath – he’s losing it! While my Mexican
carnales
soldiered quietly on under mountains of orders, I would rail at the powers that put me in this awful spot. It was getting to me: the pressure, the relentless nature of feeding that bottomless pit of hungry public, of every day sending out food into the Great Unseen Maw in the dining room, only to have to do it again and again, with no end ever in sight. Even my expediting was suffering. I hate admitting this. Because when you’re done as an expediter, you are truly fit only for the glue factory (or a consultant’s job). The realization came on a busy night at Les Halles, when after screaming loudly, ‘Fire table eight!’ my Bengali runner, Mohammed, gently nudged my arm and whispered tactfully, even pityingly, ‘No, Chef, it’s table seven.’ I almost cried. My eyes actually filled. I was losing it.

     What the hell. I’d eat my way around the world, right? Fearlessly, I’d look for magic in Vietnam, Cambodia, Portugal, Mexico, Morocco – and anywhere else that occurred to me. There would be nothing I would not try. Okay: one thing. My wife, Nancy, already unhappy about me leaving her behind while I flew around the world, told me flat out, ‘I hear of you scooping the brains out of some cute little monkey’s head while he’s still alive? It’s divorce court. Got it? And try to lay off the dog and cat. You do still have a conscience, right?’

     No problem. The novelty value of tormenting a little monkey (not to mention the risks of some simian spongiform bacteria) did not, to my mind, offset the cruelty factor. I don’t know if that even qualifies as a meal.

     I would, however, revisit Japan. Do it right this time and try that poisonous blowfish I’d heard about. In France, I’d eat an oyster, fresh out of the water, from the same oyster beds where I’d had my first as a kid – and see if there wasn’t some magic to be had there. I wanted to find out if all my cogitating on memory and context was on target or not. I’d go to rural Mexico, to the little town in the state of Puebla, where all my cooks come from, maybe have their moms cook for me, find out how come they’re all so damn good at what they do, what the roots of their particular kind of magic powers might be.