Heat (47 page)

The review was a rave. Mario walked in, just after nine-thirty, with an enlarged photocopy (the text had appeared on a Web site). “Among the restaurants that make my stomach do a special jig,” Bruni wrote, “Babbo ranks near the top, and that’s one reason a fresh review appears today, six years after Babbo opened and received a three-star rating from Ruth Reichl.” Bruni confirmed the restaurant’s three-star status but suggested he’d wanted to give it a fourth star. At present, he pointed out, there were five four-star restaurants, and all of them were French. Was there a reason that an Italian restaurant was not among them? “Why not Babbo?”

“There is a short, emblematic answer: the music. On the first of my recent visits to Babbo, what thundered—and I do mean thundered—from the sound system was relatively hard rock. Bucatini with the Black Crowes? (‘Their second album!’ a waiter proudly informed us.) Linguine with Led Zeppelin?”

It was the perfect Batali review: the food was so good it could have been French; the food was so good it could have got the city’s highest accolade; but, in the final reckoning, the place was too rock ’n’ roll, a rebel without a fourth star.

It was also a vindication of Frankie. I went back and found him leaning against the pass, reading the enlarged photocopy. He had been running the kitchen for half a year. He’d gained weight (the butter) and lost hair (his dark Italian-American curls receding to reveal an older man’s sage forehead). And he had a calmness I’d never seen. Ever since I’d met Frankie, he had been preparing for this day—when a critic would wander in and judge his cooking. The day had come, and Frankie had acquitted himself: he was running a four-star kitchen, marred only by the music tastes of his boss. In fact, if Mario hadn’t been here, worrying about Frankie’s kitchen, the music wouldn’t have been so loud—only Mario jacks up the volume so high that everyone in the restaurant is compelled to listen. Was it possible that Frankie, on his own, would have got the fourth star? Frankie chuckled. “I’m happy,” he said. We embraced. What can I say? He’s a dickhead, but a dickhead with talent, although I will always be mystified by the complicated process of restaurant pedagogy, the one where Mario learned so many things from Marco Pierre White, including not to be like Marco, and that then continued into the next generation, where Frankie learned so many things from Mario, including how to be like Marco Pierre White.

I lingered, relishing Frankie’s day, this once-in-a-lifetime moment, a culmination of years in hot kitchens, the hours of learning, perfecting, memorizing, until finally you reach a point where you’ve learned enough. Mario’s story came to mind—surviving that London pub, the humiliations of Italy, the failure of Rocco. It takes a long time. It had taken Andy a long time. And now Frankie: he had arrived.

29

S
O,”
M
ARIO ASKED ME,
“what about your own restaurant? Say, a small place in Italy, maybe in the hills. Italian for the Italians. A few tables. Open only on weekends. Completely authentic. Jessica in front, you in the back. Or,” he paused theatrically, “you could do something here.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “We have the means…”

It was a ridiculous suggestion, but I accepted it as a flattering indication of how much I’d learned. I had no idea how much that was until I sat down with Mario and jabbered away about the girello, speculated on what could be done with the sottofesa, enumerated the miracles that can be performed on a shank. I’d assumed anyone who had spent time in Italy knew this stuff. I hadn’t recognized that not even most Italians didn’t.

“Please,” Mario said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Wow. In this small area of expertise, I know more than Mario. The apprentice has become a disciple has become a—what? Something: if nothing else, the Maestro’s student, and Dario’s, as well as Betta’s. (It’s only now that I realize I’d forgotten an important lesson from the butcher shop: that when I got home no one would know what I was talking about.) Even so, against my better judgment, my mind wandered, contemplating Mario’s suggestion, preparing food that was genuinely Italian and genuinely simple. Could “simple” work in New York? Or a version of the macelleria? I pictured the display case, the eccentric opening times, the hours I’d put in memorizing Dante:
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.”
Midway through my life, once again.

The occasion was a debriefing dinner—postponed by Mario (because of Bruni), although, post-Bruni, Mario no longer had the high-testosterone swagger I had known him by but something bigger: omnipotence, perhaps. Our evening had begun on the stoop, where Mario hangs out and summons waiters by cell phone to keep his wine glass refreshed. He had emerged in something of a sprint, customers grabbing him until he was out the door. (“Kathleen Turner just gave me tongue,” he said breathlessly, having been stopped by the actress before he escaped and who, rather than peck him on the cheek, had slipped in a wetty. “I hate it when people do that, especially with her husband staring at me.”) Mario was bearing two bottles of white wine, which disappeared so fast I don’t remember drinking them. (“Hey, Lynchy,” he said, phoning the wine steward, “bring us two more bottles along with your two best Mexican prostitutes.”) Those downed, we set out for Lupa, but not before dispatching three cops to Otto. They’d chatted with us on the stoop, tolerantly watching us slowly lose our ability to watch them. “Hey, Amanda,” Mario said, phoning the manager, “give them the corner table and lose the bill.”

At Lupa, we had a Vernaccia di San Gimignano (bottle number five), and thirty-five different dishes, many composed on the spot by the restaurant’s genius chef, Mark Ladner—a spread that, before my Italian experiences, I would have considered excessive, but now seemed perfectly reasonable: after all, compared with Scappi’s 1,347-plate pranzo, what’s thirty-five little plates? There were cured things, fried things, and vegetable things, including stuffed zucchini flowers deep-fried in a mix of olive oil and butter, which, according to the chef, made for a more interesting texture than normal peanut oil, a detail that fascinated me so much I wrote it in my notebook, believing I’d be scoping out the green market in the morning for zucchini flowers. (In the event, I missed the morning.)

We were on to reds, two bottles of Giovanni Manetti’s Flacianello, the one made from the very vines I’d seen from that ridge by the old church in Panzano. Those finished, Mario and I passed the half-case point, a full case in watery view. By the time pastas appeared (I hadn’t realized that the first thirty-five dishes were starters), my notes grew less reliable. According to one entry, there were eight pastas, but what I wrote seems incomplete: “ramps, breadcrumbs, spaghetti, wife” (when did she arrive?) followed by an instruction to her from Mario—” You will eat your pasta or I will rub the shrimp across your breasts”—which is confusing because I don’t remember any shrimp. By now, we’d had, by my count, forty-three plates of food, although I feel compelled to add that the plates really were very small. Main courses arrived. And more wine. (“Bricco dell’ Uccellone,” my notes say. Three bottles, which brought our tally to ten, mitigated by the presence of a third drinker, my wife—if she was drinking. If she was there.) I remember pork and oxtail stew and an uproar following the appearance of a swordfish. “It’s perfectly nice,” Mario protested, “but, hey, it’s a fish. It’s from under the sea. Who wants fish?” After this, who knows? For a start, my notes are upside down (never reassuring), and what means this remark—” Let’s push the envelope a little”? Or Mario’s request of the waitress: “It’s not fair I have this view all to myself when you bend over. For dessert, would you take off your blouse for the others?” (Lucky woman—she works for the guy.) Or this: “Two thirty; exterminator here.” To disinfect the restaurant or us? Alarmingly, we then left to get something to drink (Mario was parched), when he put the question to me again: so, a restaurant?

And I realized: no. I did not want a restaurant.

When I started, I hadn’t wanted a restaurant. What I wanted was the know-how of people who ran restaurants. I didn’t want to be a chef: just a cook. And my experiences in Italy had taught me why. For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer’s knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don’t have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and, it’s true, those who do have it tend to be professionals—like chefs. But I didn’t want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human.

I also had a piece of unfinished business I didn’t think Mario would understand. For more than a year, I’d been thinking of Caterina de’ Medici.

The Medici story was the one told endlessly in the butcher shop, although I’d heard it elsewhere as well; Gianni, in Porretta, for instance, repeated it as often as Dario. A beloved member of Tuscany’s favorite family crosses the Alps to become the queen of France and gives away Italy’s secrets. Thus ends Italian gastronomy; thus begins the French. Outside Tuscany, of course, no one believes it.
The Oxford Companion to Food
lists it among history’s most foolish food fables in an entry headed “culinary mythology” and describes how it is routinely demolished by historians who point out that Caterina was never meant to be a queen, but only a princess. What’s more, she was only fourteen at the time, so what would she have known about food? Besides, she probably didn’t cross the Alps but arrived by boat in Marseilles (ergo, no pack animals full of goodies) and for the next ten years was in the doghouse (fertility issues), anyway. And, finally, a codified French cuisine didn’t emerge for at least another century, long after she was dead.

I’ve got to admit it’s a persuasive list of objections, but does it mean the story was made up? Okay, so Tuscans give Caterina too much credit—can you blame them? They’re Tuscans. But would this be the first time that modern historians, working in the established niche of myth bashing, had gone too far?

The queen, we know, was living in rough times. She didn’t have her first child until she was nearly thirty (downright old age in the sixteenth century) but then, getting the hang of it, had five in quick succession. The king turned out to be a philandering scumbag with a mindless penchant for running around in armor (he died in a jousting match, when the queen, now Catherine, was forty). The country was on the verge of civil war (Catholics and Huguenots), and there wasn’t a lot of time to think about lunch. But the most telling episode in Catherine de Médicis’s culinary life occurred in the 1560s, when she was not fourteen but well into her forties, and, with her sad-sack king husband gone, had become the most influential woman in France. To create unity at a time of factional fighting and to engender respect for the monarch (and for the reign of her three sons), she, as queen regent, mounted an extraordinary campaign. With an entourage of eight thousand horses, soldiers, and attendants, plus the royal chef, along with his extensive staffs of cooks, carvers, scalcos, and servers, she embarked on a two-year culinary tour of France, setting up banquets and festivals and regal entertainments in what amounted to a sixteenth-century royal road show. For two years, she sought to consolidate the monarchy in a way that an Italian would understand: by feeding people.

Where else, in the 1560s, was anyone in Europe preparing lavish, elaborate banquets with many courses? Not in France or England or the German countries. But an eight-course Italian pranzo comes to mind, one with 1,347 different dishes, made by Bartolomeo Scappi. The menu was undated—that was part of its rhetorical force when it was included in Scappi’s 1570 edition of his works—but was almost certainly prepared during the preceding decade. Such a banquet, or something like it, was surely one of the models for Catherine de Médicis’s road show: a Renaissance Italian feast.

But even this speculation misses the point. I am not persuaded that Catherine de Médicis taught the French how to cook, but I now believe she was one of several important culinary influences. By the sixteenth century, many in France recognized that Italian cooking had been enjoying a long renaissance—a sideshow beside the flourishing of the Renaissance itself. In 1505, Platina’s account of the Maestro Martino was translated into French and became widely popular. Ten years later, Giovanni Rosselli located the Maestro’s own manuscript (the one Platina plagiarized), claimed it as his own, and published it under the title of
Epulario:
this, too, was immediately translated. The papal courts in Avignon had Italian cooks, as did Catherine’s father-in-law. Rabelais had already written about his three trips to the Italian peninsula; Montaigne was about to embark on his own journey. Did Catherine single-handedly change French cooking? No. But she was clearly the culmination of a trend that had been well under way by the time she crossed the Alps (or the Mediterranean).

This was no time for me to open a restaurant. When I thought back on what I’d learned in Italy—the fifteenth-century arista, the Medicean terrines and ragùs, the thigh, the Renaissance ravioli, the recipes of Martino—I saw that I’d mastered food in one tradition (I’ll call it the Florentine-Tuscan-late-Renaissance tradition) up to a certain point: when Caterina became Catherine and crossed the Alps (or the Mediterranean) into France.

I’m not ready, I told Mario. There is still much to learn, and I may never have this opportunity again. I want to follow Catherine de Médicis. If I’m really to understand Italian cooking, I need to cross the Alps and learn what happened next. I have to go to France.

Acknowledgments

The reference to the first use of “pasta,” in Cagliari, in 1351, is from
Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food
by Silvano Serventi and Fransoise Sabban, translated by Antony Shugaar (2000). The reference to the first published account of a corn polenta in Italy is from
Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History
by Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari, translated by Aine O’Healy (1999).
Italian Cuisine
also describes the autobiography of Antonio Latini. The dominant demand food theory is described in
Culture of the Fork: A Brief History of Food in Europe
by Giovanni Rebora, translated by Albert Sonnenfeld (1998).