Secret Ingredients (10 page)

This is the lyric portion of the book; it is in Provence, I think, that Root’s New England heart now lies.

The sounder of Root’s two propositions, in my opinion, is his division of all French cooking into three great “domains,” in accordance with his dictum that the grease in which food is cooked is the “ultimate shaper” of the cuisine. Root’s “domains” are that of butter (northeastern and northern France, the Atlantic coast to below Bordeaux, and the center as far south as Lyon), that of fat (Lorraine, Alsace, and the Central Plateau), and that of oil (Provence and the County of Nice). The Basque coast has a mixed cuisine based on all three media and so refutes the universality of the system. It is true that the old division of France by orthodox
fines gueules
into gastronomic “regions” (in many cases smaller than
départements,
of which there are ninety in Continental France) has been in the process of breaking down since the remote date when the abolition of serfdom made it legitimate for the population to move around. The Revolution, the diligence, the railroad, and, finally, the automobile ended the pinpoint localization of dishes and recipes—and in any case, as Root shows, these traditional ascriptions of dishes to places are often apocryphal. Repeatedly, as he leads the reader about France, he points out instances where adjoining provinces dispute the invention of a dish, and where a province that didn’t invent a dish does it rather better than the one that did. There are, however, broad similarities in the cooking of certain subdivisions of France that are larger than the old provinces or the modern
départements.
These similarities (and differences) do not follow any purely geographic lines, and Root’s “domains” are an ingenious beginning of a new taxonomy; he is like the zoologist who first began to group species into genera, observing that while a cat, a monkey, a man, and a tiger are different things, a man is rather more like a monkey than like a cat, and a cat rather more like a tiger than like a man. Somebody had to start, and Root is a true innovator. Whether the cooking of Périgord really is more like the cooking of Alsace (because both use the fat of the goose and the pig) than like that of the southwest (which, like Périgord, uses garlic) is another question; some future scientist of taste may attempt a new grouping on the basis of seasoning. If the inventor of the new system has as much love for his subject and as much learning as Root, the result can only be another good book, as rich in the marrow of argument as
The Food of France.

Now that Root’s monument has been erected for the ages—a picture of a cultural achievement, fixed to history’s page before the snack bars and cafeterias and drive-ins could efface it from men’s minds—he seems a trifle melancholy. “It’s hard to find such good eating in the provinces nowadays, even at the present high rates—or maybe I’m just getting old and cranky,” he wrote me not long ago. “The fact is that it’s a long while since I have come upon one of those bottles of wine that make you sit up and take notice, and it’s even pretty rare nowadays to have a memorable meal.” Here, however, he was unduly sombre. There will still be enough good bottles and good meals to last us all a few more decades; it is only that they are becoming harder to find. The rise and fall of an art takes time. The full arc is seldom manifest to a single generation.

1959

“It started out with lactose, but now he’s intolerant of
everything
.”

IS THERE A CRISIS IN FRENCH COOKING?

ADAM GOPNIK

N
ine o’clock on a Friday morning, and David Angelot, the
commis
at the restaurant Arpège, on the Rue de Varenne, has begun to braise tomatoes for dessert. The
tomate confite farcie aux douze saveurs
is one of the few dishes in the Michelin red guide whose place on the menu has to be clarified with a parenthesis (
dessert
), indicating that though it sounds like a veggie, it eats like a sweet. It is a specialty of the kitchen of the great chef Alain Passard, which a lot of people think is the best and most poetic in Paris, and probably all France; it requires a hair-raising amount of work by the
commis,
the kitchen cabin boy; and many people who care about French cooking believe that it is a kind of hopeful portent—a sign that the creative superiority of French cooking may yet be extended indefinitely. Normally, a braised tomato becomes tomato sauce. (“The limitations of this insight,” one of Passard’s admirers has noted gravely, “describe the limitations of Italian cuisine.”) To make a tomato get sweeter without falling apart not only is technically demanding but demonstrates, with a stubborn, sublime logic, an extremely abstract botanical point. Tomatoes are not vegetables; they are fruit.

For David, who may not see M. Passard all day long, they are work. David, who is eighteen, and who studied cooking at a government school just outside Lyon, cuts the tomatoes open (about fifty of them, from Morocco, in the winter), scoops them out, and makes a
farce,
a stuffing of finely chopped orange and lemon zest, sugar, ginger, mint, pistachios, star anise, cloves; then he makes a big pot of vanilla-scented caramel and braises the stuffed tomatoes in it, beating the caramel around the tomatoes vigorously for forty-five minutes without actually touching them. The tomato is a fruit, and can be treated like one, but it helps to beat a lot of caramel into its body, to underline the point.

While he works, he thinks about his girlfriend (who is also a cook, and with whom he lives in an apartment in north Paris), his future, and his desire to someday visit Japan. He works in a tiny basement room in the small, two-story space of the kitchen, and he shares that room with another, more experienced assistant, Guilhem, who spends his mornings making bread. (All the bread at Arpège is made by hand.) Guilhem, while he works, thinks of going back to Washington—he calls it “D.C.”—where he has been before, where there is a constant demand for good French food, and where he has an offer to work in a French bakery. If David’s job at Arpège embodies one of the principles of high French cooking—the gift of making things far more original than anyone can imagine—Guilhem’s embodies the opposite but complementary principle: the necessity of making things much better than anybody needs. This morning, he will make three kinds of bread: a sourdough raisin-and-nut loaf; trays of beautiful long white rolls; and a rough, round peasant bread. All the bread will be sliced and placed in baskets to be presented upstairs in the dining room, and then mostly pushed around absentmindedly on the plates of people who are looking at their menus and deciding what they really want to eat. This knowledge makes Guilhem a little bitter. He thinks about D.C.

In the main kitchen, a short flight up, Pascal Barbot, the sous-chef, is keeping things under control. The atmosphere there, with eleven serious short men in white uniforms going about intricate tasks in a cramped space, does not so much resemble the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie as it does the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie after it has been taken over by the Euroterrorists led by Alan Rickman: that kind of intensity, scared purposefulness, quickness, and heavy, whispered French. The kitchen is white and silver, with a few well-scrubbed copper pots hanging high up—not like the lacquered copper you see in rusticated, beam-heavy restaurant interiors but dull and scrubbed and penny-colored. The richest colors in the kitchen are those of French produce, which is always several glazes darker than American: the birds (chickens, pigeons, quail) are yellow and veined with deep violet, instead of the American white and rose. The assistant chefs start at nine o’clock, and will remain at their
stages
until one o’clock the next morning. When the service begins, around twelve-thirty, they will experience an almost unendurable din, which, after a few days of work, they learn to break down into three or four distinct sounds: the
thwonk
of metal in water hitting the sides of a sink as a pot is washed by one of the Malinese
plongeurs;
the higher, harsh
clank
of one clean saucepan being placed on another; the surprisingly tinny, machine-gun
rat-a-tat
of a wire whisk in a copper pot; and the crashing, the-tent-just-fell-down-on-your-head sound of hot soiled pans being thrown down onto tile to be washed again. (In a good kitchen, the pans are constantly being recycled by the
plongeurs.
)

The kitchen crew includes three Americans. They have worked mostly at California and New York restaurants of the kind that one of them describes as “grill-and-garnish joints.” They are all converts to Passardism. There is never anything entirely new in cooking, but Passard’s technique is not like anybody else’s. Instead of browning something over high heat in a saucepan and then roasting it in an oven, in the old French manner, or grilling it quickly over charcoal, in the new American one, Passard cooks his birds and joints
sur la plaque:
right on the stove, over extremely low heat in big braising pans, sometimes slow-cooking a baby gigot or a milk-fed pig in a pot for four or five hours on a bed of sweet onions and butter. “He’s just
sweating
those babies,” one of the Americans marvels under his breath, looking at the joints on the stoves. “Makes them cook themselves in their own fat. It’s like he does everything but make them pluck their own feathers and jump into the pan. Fucking genius.”

Downstairs, another of the Americans is slicing butter and teasing Guilhem about his D.C. plans. “Look at this butter,” he says to himself. “That’s not fucking Land O’Lakes.” He turns to Guilhem. “Hey, forget about D.C.,” he says. “It’s cold. There are no women. Where you want to go is California. That’s the promised land. Man, that’s a place where you can cook
and
have a life.”

Guilhem looks genuinely startled, and turns to speak. “You can?” he says, softly at first, and then louder, calling out to the back of the American cook as he races up the stairs with the butter pats for the dining room. “You
can
?”

Most people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again. My first night in Paris, twenty-five years ago, I ate dinner with my enormous family in a little corner brasserie somewhere down on the unfashionable fringes of the sixteenth arrondissement. We were on the cut-rate, American-academic version of the Grand Tour, and we had been in London for the previous two days, where we had eaten
steamed
hamburgers and fish-and-chips in which the batter seemed to be snubbing the fish inside it as if they had never been properly introduced. On that first night in Paris, we arrived late on the train, checked in to a cheap hotel, and went to eat (party of eight—no, party of nine, one of my sisters having brought along a boyfriend), without much hope, at the restaurant at the corner, called something like Le Bar-B-Que. The prix-fixe menu was fifteen francs, about three dollars then. I ordered a
salade niçoise,
trout baked in foil, and a cassis sorbet. It was so much better than anything I had ever eaten that I nearly wept. (My mother, I am compelled at gunpoint to add, made food like that all the time, too, but a mother’s cooking is a current of life, not an episode of taste.) My feelings at Le Bar-B-Que were a bit like those of Stendhal, I think it was, the first time he went to a brothel: I knew that it could be done, but I didn’t know there was a place on any corner where you could walk in, pay three dollars, and get it.

That first meal in Paris was for a long time one of the few completely reliable pleasures for an American in Europe. “It was the green beans,” a hardened New Yorker recalled not long ago, remembering his first meal in Paris, back in the late forties. “The green beans were like nothing I had ever known,” he went on. He sat suddenly bolt upright, his eyes alight with memory.

Now, though, for the first time in several hundred years, a lot of people who live in France are worried about French cooking, and so are a lot of people who don’t. The French themselves are, or claim to be, worried mostly about the high end—the end that is crowded into the Passard kitchen—and the low end. The word
crise
in connection with cooking appeared in
Le Monde
about a year ago, with the news that a restaurant near Lyon, which had earned three Michelin stars, was about to close. Meanwhile, a number of worrying polls have suggested that the old pyramid of French food, in which the base of plain dishes shared by the population pointed upward to the higher reaches of the Grande Cuisine, is collapsing. Thirty-six percent of the French people polled in one survey thought that you make mayonnaise with whole eggs (you use only yolks), 17 percent thought that you put a
travers de porc
in a pot-au-feu (you use beef), and 7 percent believed that Lucas Carton, the Paris restaurant that for a century has been one of the holiest of holies of haute cuisine, is a name for badly cooked meat. More ominously, fully 71 percent of Frenchmen named the banal steak-frites as their favorite
plat;
only people past sixty preferred a
blanquette de veau,
or a
gigot d’agneau,
or even a pot-au-feu, all real French cooking. (The French solution to this has been, inevitably, to create a National Council of Culinary Arts, connected to the Ministry of Culture.)

To an outsider, the real
crise
lies in the middle. That Paris first-night experience seems harder to come by. It is the unforced superiority of the cooking in the ordinary corner bistro—the
prix-fixe ordinaire
—that seems to be passing. This is partly a tribute to the international power of French cooking, and to the great catching-up that has been going on in the rest of the world for the past quarter century. The new visitor, trying out the trout baked in foil on his first night in Paris, will probably be comparing it with the trout baked in foil back home at, oh, Le Lac de Feu, in Cleveland—or even back home at Chez Alfie, in Leeds, or Matilda Qui Danse, in Adelaide—and the trout back home may just be better: raised wild or caught on the line. Even the cassis sorbet may not be quite as good as the kind he makes at home with his Sorbet-o-matic.

The fear—first unspoken, then whispered, then cautiously enunciated, and now loudly insisted on by certain competitors—is that the muse of cooking has migrated across the ocean to a spot in Berkeley, with occasional trips to New York and, of all places, Great Britain. People in London will even tell you, flatly, that the cooking there now is the best in the world, and they will publish this thought as though it were a statement of fact, and as though the steamed hamburger and the stiff fish had been made long ago in another country. Two of the best chefs in the London cooking renaissance said to a reporter not long ago that London, along with Sydney and San Francisco, is one of the capitals of good food, and that the food in Paris—“heavy, lazy, lacking in imagination”—is now among the worst in the world.

All this makes a Francophile eating in Paris feel a little like a turn-of-the-century clergyman who has just read Robert Ingersoll: you try to keep the faith, but Doubts keep creeping in. Even the most ardent Paris lover, who once blessed himself at every dinner for having escaped Schrafft’s, may now find himself—as he gazes down one more unvarying menu of
boudin noir
and
saumon unilatéral
and
entrecôte bordelaise
and
poulet rôti,
eats one more bland and buttery dish—feeling a slight pang for that Cuban-Vietnamese-California grill on Amsterdam Avenue, or wondering whether he might, just possibly, enjoy the New Sardinian Cooking, as featured that week on the cover of
New York.

I would still rather eat in Paris than anywhere else in the world. The best places in Paris, like the Brasserie Balzar, on the Rue des Écoles, don’t just feed you well; they make you happy in a way that no other city’s restaurants can. (The Balzar is the place that plays Gallant to the more famous Brasserie Lipp’s Goofus.) Even in a mediocre Paris restaurant, you are part of the richest commonplace civilization that has ever been created, and that extends back visibly to the previous century. In Paris, restaurants can actually go into a kind of hibernation for years, and awaken in a new generation: Lapérouse, the famous swanky nineteenth-century spot, has, after a long stretch of being overlooked, just come back to life, and is a good place to eat again. Reading Olivier Todd’s biography of Camus, you discover that the places where Camus went to dinner in the forties (Aux Charpentiers, Le Petit St. Benoît, Aux Assassins) are places where you can go to dinner tonight. Some of Liebling’s joints are still in business, too: the Beaux-Arts, the Pierre à la Place Gaillon, the Closerie des Lilas.