A Cook's Tour (29 page)

     ‘
You stop!
You get off now!
’ screamed the lead cop, the others yelling along now in Khmer, their weapons fully extended. I dismounted first and immediately got a gun barrel thrust in my face, five or six people screaming at once. Another rifle prodded me to turn around, the little cop indicating he wanted me to put my hands on my head. Misha got off the back of Andy’s bike and, familiar with the drill, calmly placed his hands on his head, too. Andy and Tim were last, as it takes a minute to put down kickstands. All the while the screaming and the threatening continued, the gun barrels becoming more intrusive, no longer a prod, but a shove. When all of us were standing there in the middle of the street, our hands clasped on top of our heads, bikes silent, the little cop demanded to know if we had any guns. This seemed to please Misha, who translated.

     ‘
Where you go?
’ demanded the little cop, his face still red and twitching.

     ‘We’re going to the brothels,’ said Tim in English, following that up with a few words in Khmer and that evil laugh again.

     As if by magic, the cop’s face relaxed, the picture of instant serenity and congeniality. Smiles all around. Like the maître d’ of an expensive restaurant, the little cop, who only seconds before had looked like he would most certainly be shooting us dead any moment – or at the very least dragging us off to jail – stepped back and to the side, arm extended in welcome, and ushered us theatrically through.

Fire Over England

England’s burning.

     Turn on the telly, open up a newspaper, and you’ll see or hear about smoldering mounds of stiffened livestock, quarantines, checkpoints, disinfectant, and body counts. No one seems to know when the killing will stop – maybe, it sometimes seems, when every edible creature in the UK has been executed, burned, and bulldozed into a pit. Just when diners were learning to live with the remote possibility that the beef they’re eating could riddle their brains with spongiform bacteria, turn their cerebral cortices into loofahs, the foot-and-mouth thing (which does not affect humans) comes along, causing fear and uncertainty among the populace and giving yet more comfort and succor to the forces of darkness and evil.

     The battle lines are drawn. Good and evil have met – and the front line is England. Nowhere else can the threat be so clearly defined. Nowhere else are good guys and bad guys so visible and apparent, the choices so black and white, devoid of gray.

     I love England. I’m there a lot. So I have a vested interest in the outcome. Few cultures are as resolutely grounded in the appreciation of a nice thick slab of fatty meat, a well-brewed beer or ale than the English.

     No country was experiencing the kind of foodie gold rush, that boomtown mass psychosis that suddenly causes everyone to become obsessed with all things to do with food, restaurants, chefs, and cuisine, that England was (except maybe Australia). Things were going so well. Now? Everything hangs in the balance. It’s war. A fight for the hearts, minds, and souls of future generations. If the dark forces win? They’ll be looking across the Atlantic; don’t doubt that for a second. They already have their operatives in place. They’ll be looking at your plate, inspecting your refrigerator. They already are. They want to take your meat away.

     They even want your cheese.

Japanese porn is ugly, violent, and disturbing. German porn is ugly, fetishistic, and disturbing. American porn is stupid, slick, and produced in multiple versions (how explicit depends on what major hotel chain you’re staying at) – sex as a mass-produced corporate endeavor. Brit porn, however, is the absolute bottom of the barrel – stuff so witless, brainless, joyless, and strange as to remove from the imagination immediately any possibility that sex might ever actually be fun.

     The actors are crude, fat, and saggy and have bad teeth and dirty feet. Even their tattoos are artless. The cast members, apparently, are compelled to have sex through their underwear, tonguing saliva-soaked Jockey shorts until the questions about why Brits have historically been so fucked up about sex are answered: Judging from the videos I saw, it’s all about bum whacking and undies. There is no hope. Bear with me here; I’m leading up to an allegory.

     Eventually.

     One can be forgiven, I hope – on first look – for thinking that the only people getting laid in England are rock stars and chefs. (Which is entirely appropriate. The two professions have traditionally been at the vanguard of sexual adventurism.) In England, as in America and Australia, the population has gone chef-crazy, reading about them in the tabloids, watching them on TV, buying their recipe books, losing themselves in lurid fantasies of cutting-board penetration and sweaty tangles in the larder. If food is the new porn – a less dangerous alternative to the anonymous and unprotected shag of decades past – then the mission is even more urgent.

     A sampler of England’s hottest ‘chefs’ would include a mostly hairless young blond lad named Jamie Oliver, who is referred to as the Naked Chef. As best as I can comprehend, he’s a really rich guy who pretends he scoots around on a Vespa, hangs out in some East End cold-water flat, and cooks green curry for his ‘mates.’ He’s a TV chef, so few actually eat his food. I’ve never seen him naked. I believe the ‘Naked’ refers to his ‘simple, straightforward, unadorned’ food; though I gather that a great number of matronly housewives would like to believe otherwise. Every time I watch his show, I want to go back in time and bully him at school.

     Another TV demigod is Nigella Lawson – the object of desire of nearly every male I met in England – and the apparent dream of perfection for most women I encountered. She’s a wealthy and beautiful widow who cooks in a denim jacket. When she leans over the workbench, her breasts are the focus of intent contemplation and rhapsodic praise by the male television audience.

     Last time I was in England, it was all anyone seemed to want to talk about: ‘Nigella’s breasts . . . have you seen them?’ While she may not look like too many cooks I know, she does seem to cook a lot of exuberantly cheesy, fatty, greasy stuff – not shying away from the butter and cream – which puts her on the side of the angels in my book. How many upper-crust widows do you know who say, ‘Fuck it! Let’s eat what’s good!’ Not many. I like her.

     There’s the Martha Stewart-like Delia Smith. There’s the gel-headed Gary Rhodes. And then there’s Ainsley Harriott – a man who makes Emeril look like William Buckley. Harriott, who tried his act in New York for a while, specializes in eye rolling, cooing, squealing, flattering, and mugging. It makes me cringe to watch a grown black man doing shtick, capering and coddling an audience of bison-sized white women who, were Harriott not on TV, would probably call the cops if he wandered into their neighborhoods.

     The big dogs in England, the good guys, the people actually cooking in restaurants (which is what chefs are supposed to do, isn’t it?), the folks actually fighting the good fight are what’s really interesting about the English food scene. Swaggering, eccentric, aggressive, competitive, often brilliant, they’re a refreshing change from their US counterparts in the celebrity chef racket.

     In our country, when a blue-collar goof scores any kind of commercial success, he immediately strives to stop dropping his
g
’s, to begin enunciating consonants, to stop using the word
fuck
as a comma. He may, as in the case of one much-praised colleague, immediately hire the services of a personal hairstylist and voice coach. In the UK, it’s different. There, once a measure of success has been attained, the chef feels free to become the badly behaved, borderline-violent hooligan he always wanted to be, freely displaying the inner rude boy. Which is one of the reasons I feel very much at home in London.

     It’s competitive over there. When I casually mentioned to an English pal that I had lent a case of mesclun to the chef at the restaurant across the street from me in New York, he was outraged.

     ‘
What?
Bloody hell! We’d never do that here.’

     What happens if he runs out of mesclun? Would he borrow?

     ‘Wouldn’t give the bastard the satisfaction.’

     Camaraderie is somewhat rarer. To associate too freely with other chefs is to trade with the enemy. When a sous-chef leaves a position to start his own operation, it’s like he defected. He becomes the Person Never to Be Mentioned Again. In New York, if the chef across the street steals your saucier, you don’t harbor too much of a grudge. Everybody knows you’ll be stealing his grillardin if you get the chance. And everybody involved is probably going to end up working together some day anyway – so get over it. Stealing of cooks and recipes is part of the game – even part of the fun for some of us. In England, feuding with food critics, commentators, and other chefs is encouraged – and may even be a good career move. In New York, the idea of throwing the
New York Times
food critic (if you are lucky enough to recognize him) rudely out into the street with his guests would seem suicidally foolish. In England it’s good public relations.

     I threw a late-night party awhile back at a place in London’s meat district to launch my book. I invited a lot of chefs, a good number of the press, and booksellers. The hope was that the chefs would swing by after work and have some fun. They did.

     A terrifying mob of blood- and sauce-spattered culinarians lurched in the doors, many still reeking of sweat and fish, made straight for the bar, and began baiting and bullying the vastly outnumbered civilians. On at least two occasions, I had to step in between some white-clad chef and about-to-be-ass-whupped journo or bookstore manager to avert senseless butchery. As the chefs’ numbers swelled to a mob of alcohol-swilling madmen, their accents growing thicker and their tone more belligerent, the representatives of the press appeared to contract slowly into a defensive perimeter by the bathrooms. A good time was had by all.

On to the good guys.

     ‘This was a happy pig,’ says Fergus Henderson, looking down with pleasure at the head of a carefully roasted medium-sized pig. He emphasizes his pride and respect for what he knows is damned delicious (perfectly crispy skin, buttery sweet – nearly ethereal fat, tender, ropy cheeks) by moving his arms up and down robotically. Behind clear glass lenses, his face is a little flushed, the corner of his mouth a little stiff, and one leg is pretty much checking out for the day – he’s dragging it the last hour. Fergus represents England’s best hope for salvation, the man at the spear point, a warrior, pioneer, philosopher, and fearless proponent of what’s good – and has always been good – about English cooking; he knows about the pure enjoyment of high-quality pork and pork products.

     Hours ago, we returned from Smithfield Market, where we spent the early-morning hours looking at meat, poking at entrails, prodding carcasses, and waxing poetic about animal fat. The day began in a cellar pub at 6:00 a.m., the chef and I enjoying a hearty breakfast of Guinness and deviled kidneys, the room filled with meat cutters in white plastic helmets and long white lab coats. Now, standing over my table, Fergus is tired. He’s been up since God knows when, was at his restaurant for lunch service, and is now presiding over an elaborate procession of nearly everything on the menu for my dinner. There are surely better chefs in England, but Fergus is my favorite – he’s a hero to me, one righteous, solitary soul-surfing, daredevil motherfucker. I hesitate to mention that he’s struggling with Parkinson’s disease, because he was already a titan in my eyes, long before I knew. If there’s one real hero chef in this book, a man who deliberately put himself outside the pack, staked out a position, and then held it – against all comers – it’s Fergus Henderson, chef of what is maybe my favorite restaurant in the world: St. John, in the Smithfield area of London. Never has his country needed him more.

     Years ago, when the prevailing wisdom among foodies dictated quaint, tiny, sculpted portions of brightly colored odd bits – light on the protein and heavy on the veg, Fergus was reveling in pig – pig fat, pig parts, and pig guts – his plates rustic-colored palettes of browns, beiges, and earth tones – maybe the occasional flash of green – simple, unassuming, unpretentious – and absolutely and unapologetically English.

     While most of his contemporaries, newly empowered by Michelin stars and a suddenly food-crazed public, rushed to the squeeze bottle and the metal ring, to Japanese and French classics for inspiration, Fergus was alone on the hill, running up the Union Jack. He went to a neighborhood where nobody wanted to go, set up shop in an all-white abattoir-looking space down a seemingly uninviting alley, and began serving what he refers to as ‘nose to tail’ eating, a menu so astonishingly reactionary for its time, he might well – in another country – have been imprisoned for it. Today, while lesser mortals cower around their veggie plates in hemp sandals, cringing at the thought of contamination by animal product, St. John’s devotees – and there are a lot of them – flock to his plain, undecorated dining room to revel in roasted marrow, rolled spleen, grilled ox heart, braised belly, and fried pig’s tails.

     It was a very ballsy position to take back in the early nineties – and it’s an even ballsier proposition today, when the Evil Axis Powers of Health Nazis, Vegetarian Taliban, European Union bureacrats, antismoking crystal worshipers, PETA fundamentalists, fast-food theme-restaurant moguls, and their sympathizers are consolidating their fearful hold on popular dining habits and practices.