A Cook's Tour (3 page)

     When I told my boss at Les Halles, José, about my plans, and that we’d be needing a new chef de cuisine while I bopped around the globe, there was not the weeping and rending of garments and the ‘Oh my god! No! Noooo! What will we do without you?’ that I’d been secretly hoping for. The first words out of his mouth were, ‘Ah! Then you must go to Portugal. I will call my mother and tell her to start fattening a pig.’ I cleared my schedule, prepared to cut myself loose from everyone and everything I knew and loved.

Full Disclosure

Here’s the part where I reluctantly admit to something about which I’m deeply conflicted – even ashamed. I’d lie about it if I could. But you’re probably going to find out about it anyway, so here’s a little preemptive truth telling: Almost the entire time I would travel, there would be, somewhere in the vicinity, at least two people with digital cameras. They’d be wearing headphones. One set of phones would be recording, or at least monitoring, every word, curse, and belch issuing from my mouth. When I went to the bathroom, I would have to remember to turn off the little clip-on mike attached to the transmitter on my hip. I had, you see, sold my soul to the devil.

     ‘We’ll follow you around,’ said the nice man from the television production company. ‘No lighting equipment, no boom mikes, no script. It’ll be very inobtrusive. Just be yourself.’

     ‘It’ll be good for the book,’ said my editor.

     ‘We’ll take twenty-two episodes,’ said – God help me – the Food Network.

     Okay, it would make things easier. In Russia, for instance, when I wanted access to a Mafiya nightclub, it helped to have television producers from New York Times Television making the arrangements. The words
New York Times
, particularly when traveling in Communist countries like Vietnam, or in de facto dictatorships like Cambodia, tend to open doors that might otherwise remain closed.

     But you want to know what it’s like making television? Even a completely nonscripted, cinema verité, make-it-up-as-you-go-along travel and food show, where you do whatever the hell you want and hope the cameras can keep up? It’s being poked in the head with shotgun mikes so often, you feel like the leading lady in a late 1970s Ron Jeremy flick. There is no halfway. You don’t, it turns out, sell out a little bit. Maybe you thought you were just going to show a little ankle – okay, maybe a little calf, too – but in the end, you’re taking on the whole front line of the Pittsburgh Steelers on a dirty shag carpet.

     There’s a punch line to a joke – ‘We’ve already established you’re a whore. Now we’re just haggling over price’ – that fairly describes my predicament. I sold my ass. When I signed on the dotted line, any pretense of virginity or reluctance – of integrity (I don’t even remember what
that
is) – vanished. It means when the shooter says, ‘Wait a minute,’ you wait to enter the restaurant, jump in the river, or light a cigarette, so he can get the shot. When they want you to enter the restaurant again, shake hands with the owner, tell him how delighted you are to be eating fish head at his establishment – even though you just did that five minutes ago, when you meant it – you do it.

     I’ve had a lot of fun trashing Emeril and Bobby and the Food Network’s stable of stars over the last few years. God, I hated their shows. Now I’ve gone over to the dark side, too. Watching Emeril bellowing catchphrases at his wildly barking seal-like studio audience, I find myself feeling empathy for the guy. Because I know, I think, how it happened. One sells one’s soul in increments, slowly, over time. First, it’s a simple travel show (‘Good for the book!’). Next thing you know, you’re getting dry-humped by an ex-wrestler on the Spice Channel.

     I don’t want you to think I don’t like the camera crews that followed me around the world. As TV people go, they were pretty damn cool. Most of them had been shooting documentaries in hospital emergency rooms and trauma units before coming aboard my project, so they knew how to stay out of the way in crowded kitchens and how to behave around people with knives. They ate the same terrifying food. They stayed in the same at-times-septic hotels I did. They braved minefields and roadblocks to get their shots. They stood close, cameras running while, drunk off my ass, I wildly and irresponsibly discharged automatic weapons and high explosives. They froze when I froze, suffered the antimalarial drugs, the food poisoning, the bugs, the vegetarians that I had to. When challenged by locals to contests involving tequila, they did not let the side down. As I, from time to time, crawled, vomiting into some drainage culvert, so did they. They, too, were showered with blood, watched pig-fisting, throat-slitting, force-feeding – and filmed every second. They managed to shoot all day in Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen without causing injury to themselves or others. And they did it with considerable good humor. But when you hear me carping about how lonely and sick and frightened I am, holed up in some Cambodian backwater, know that there’s a television crew a few doors down the hall. That changes things.

     All told, however, the writing of this book has been the greatest adventure of my life. Cooking professionally is hard. Traveling around the world, writing, eating, and making a television show is relatively easy. It beats brunch.

Where Food Comes From

‘The pig is getting fat. Even as we speak,’ said José months later. From the very moment I informed my boss of my plans to eat my way around the world, another living creature’s fate was sealed on the other side of the Atlantic. True to his word, José had called his mother in Portugal and told her to start fattening a pig.

     I’d heard about this pig business before – anytime José would hear me waxing poetic about my privileged position as one of the few vendors of old-school hooves and snouts, French charcuterie and offal. Chefs adore this kind of stuff. We like it when we can motivate our customers to try something they might previously have found frightening or repellent. Whether it’s a stroke to our egos or a genuine love of that kind of rustic, rural, French brasserie soul food (the real stuff – not that tricked-out squeeze-bottle chicanery with the plumage), we love it. It makes us proud and happy to see our customers sucking the marrow out of veal bones, munching on pig’s feet, picking over oxtails or beef cheeks. It gives us purpose in life, as if we’ve done something truly good and laudable that day, brought beauty, hope, enlightenment to our dining rooms and a quiet sort of honor to ourselves and our profession.

     ‘First, we fatten the pig . . . for maybe six months. Until he is ready. Then in the winter – it must be the winter, so it is cold enough – we kill the pig. Then we cook the heart and the tenderloin for the butchers. Then we eat. We eat everything. We make hams and sausage, stews, casseroles, soup. We use’ – José stressed this – ‘every part.’

     ‘It’s kind of a big party,’ interjected Armando, the preeminent ball-busting waiter and senior member of our Portuguese contingent at Les Halles.

     ‘You’ve heard of this?’ I asked skeptically. I like Armando – and he’s a great waiter – but what he says is sometimes at variance with the truth. He likes it when middle-aged ladies from the Midwest come to the restaurant and ask for me, wanting to get their books signed. He sidles over and whispers in confidential tones, ‘You know, of course, that the chef is gay? My longtime companion . . . a wonderful man. Wonderful.’ That’s Armando’s idea of fun.

     ‘Oh yes!’ he said. ‘Everyone does it in my town. Maybe once a year. It’s a tradition. It goes back to the Middle Ages. Long time.’

     ‘And you eat everything?’

     ‘Everything. The blood. The guts. The ears. Everything. It’s delicious.’ Armando looked way too happy remembering this. ‘Wait! We don’t eat everything. The pig’s bladder? We blow it up, inflate it, and we make a soccer ball for the children.’

     ‘What’s with the soccer ball?’ I asked David, also Portuguese, our bar manager and a trusted friend. He shrugged, not wanting to contradict his countryman.

     ‘That’s in the north,’ he said. ‘But I’ve seen it.’

     ‘You’ve seen it?’

     David nodded and gave me a warning look that said, You don’t know what you’re in for. ‘There’s a lot of blood. And the pig makes a lot of noise when you . . . you know . . . kill it. A
lot
of noise.’

     ‘You can hear the screams in the next village,’ Armando said, grinning.

     ‘Yeah? Well, I’ll bring you the bladder, bro,’ I said, deciding right then and there that I was going to do this, travel to Portugal and take part in a medieval pig slaughter. Listening to José’s description, it sounded kinda cool. A bunch of villagers hanging out, drinking, killing things and eating them. There was no mistaking José’s enthusiasm for the event. I was in.

     Understand this about me – and about most chefs, I’m guessing: For my entire professional career, I’ve been like Michael Corleone in
The Godfather, Part II
, ordering up death over the phone, or with a nod or a glance. When I want meat, I make a call, or I give my sous-chef, my butcher, or my charcutier a look and they make the call. On the other end of the line, my version of Rocco, Al Neary, or Lucca Brazzi either does the job himself or calls somebody else who gets the thing done. Sooner or later, somewhere – whether in the Midwest, or upstate New York, or on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, or as far away as Scotland – something dies. Every time I have picked up the phone or ticked off an item on my order sheet, I have basically caused a living thing to die. What arrives in my kitchen, however, is not the bleeding, still-warm body of my victim, eyes open, giving me an accusatory look that says, ‘Why me, Tony? Why me?’ I don’t have to see that part. The only evidence of my crimes is the relatively antiseptic boxed or plastic-wrapped appearance of what is inarguably meat. I had never, until I arrived on a farm in northern Portugal, had to look my victim in the face – much less watched at close range – as he was slaughtered, disemboweled, and broken down into constituent parts. It was only fair, I figured, that I should have to watch as the blade went in. I’d been vocal, to say the least, in my advocacy of meat, animal fat, and offal. I’d said some very unkind things about vegetarians. Let me find out what we’re all talking about, I thought. I would learn – really learn – where food actually comes from.

It’s always a tremendous advantage when visiting another country, especially when you’re as uninformed and ill-prepared as I was, to be the guest of a native. You can usually cut right to the good stuff, live close to the ground, experience the place from a perspective as close to local as you’re likely to get. And José Meirelles makes the word
foodie
or
gourmet
woefully inadequate. José comes from a large family that, like its prodigal son, loves food. He went to New York, became a cook, and chef, and then made a rather spectacular success in the restaurant business. José may be quite comfortable, even passionate, about dining at Ducasse or swapping recipes with Boulud or cooking at James Beard House or trying out hot new restaurants in Manhattan, but you’ve got to see him at his family’s dinner table, eating
bucho recheado
(stuffed pig’s stomach), to see him at his happiest and most engaged. From my vantage point behind the line at Les Halles, I was always intrigued by the look of pure joy on José’s face as he’d plow through my kitchen (usually leaving a wake of destruction), hurriedly assembling a Portuguese-style cassoulet: a heap of
boudin noir
, chorizo, pig’s feet, pork belly and jowl with white beans baked in a pastry-topped earthenware dish. I was disarmed and bemused by his insistence on buying salt cod for our
brandade de morue
only from the Ironbound section of Newark, where there’s a large Portuguese population, and presumably they know about such things. His mania about top-quality fresh codfish (I’d never seen José yell until a seafood purveyor sent us cod that he found wanting), his love of high-test canned tuna in olive oil, white anchovies, costly sea salt, specially chiffonaded kale, dried chorizo, fresh and only fresh, wildly expensive whole cumin seeds from Kalyustan – all this made my food costs jump every time José walked through the door. He’d insist I buy specialty items for a rigorously French brasserie, things I’d have no idea what to do with; he’d get sudden compulsions to call D’Artagnan in the middle of the night and buy whole free-range pigs. For the first few months working with the guy, it used to irritate me. What was I going to do with all that quince jelly and weird sheep’s milk cheese? What the hell is Superbock beer? José would go into these fugue states, and the next thing you knew, I’d have buckets of salted codfish tongues soaking in my walk-in. You know how hard it is to sell codfish tongues on Park Avenue?

     And he talked continually about the pig slaughter – as if it were the World Series, the Super Bowl, the World Cup, and a Beatles reunion all rolled into one. I had to take his enthusiasm seriously. Not just because he’s the boss but also because along with all that Portuguese stuff that would mysteriously arrive came food that even I knew to be good. Food I could identify and understand as being part of a tradition of glorious excess, French-style: fresh white asparagus, truffles in season, Cavaillon melons, fresh morels, translucent baby eels, Scottish wild hare, gooey, smelly, runny French cheeses, screamingly fresh turbot and Dover sole, yanked out of the Channel yesterday and flown (business class, I think, judging from the price) to my kitchen doors. I had more than enough evidence that José knew how to eat. If he told me that killing and eating a whole pig was something I absolutely shouldn’t and couldn’t miss, I believed him. It’s very hard to not be hungry after talking to José for any length of time.