Secret Ingredients (24 page)

But when I’m starting a piece about politics, especially French politics, I will often begin by preserving the lemons for a chicken
tagine,
perhaps because a forkful of good
tagine
inevitably takes me back to the home of the French-speaking sheikh whose wives taught me how to make it (to the sound of Tom Jones singing “Delilah” on a shortwave radio), and from there to the small restaurant in Paris where I ate my first
tagine
outside Morocco, and from
there
to the flat of a surly French politician named Jean-Pierre Chevènement, who lived near the restaurant, and who unnerved me entirely during our one interview by balancing cups of espresso on the breasts of a hideous brass coffee table that appeared to be cast as a woman’s torso, while barking at me about French nuclear policy. Similarly, I make choucroute whenever I’m starting a piece that has to do with music, because my first proper choucroute—the kind where you put fresh sauerkraut through five changes of cold water, squeeze it dry, strand by strand, and then braise it in gin and homemade stock, with a ham hock and smoked pork and sausages buried inside it—was a labor of love for the eightieth birthday of the composer George Perle; and since then the smell of sausage, gin, and sauerkraut mingling in my oven has always reminded me of the impossible art of composition, and set my standards at the level of his luminous woodwind suites.

On the other hand, when I write about art I like to cook a rabbit. My first rabbit was also, unhappily, my daughter’s pet rabbit, and I cooked it with understandable misgiving, one summer in the Vaucluse, after an old peasant sorcerer who used to come over during the full moon to do the ironing took it from its hutch and presented it to her, freshly slaughtered and stuffed with rosemary, on the morning of her first birthday, saying that once she ate it she would have her friend with her “forever.” We had named the rabbit Julien Nibble, in honor of our summer neighbor Julien Levy, a man otherwise known as the dealer who had introduced Ernst and Gorky and most of the great surrealists to New York, and my daughter, who is thirty-one now, has refused to eat rabbit since we told her the story, when she was six or seven. But I have kept on cooking rabbit, changing recipes as the art world changes, and always asking myself what Julien would have made of those changes, and, of course, whether he would have liked the dinner. There was the saddle of rabbit in a cognac-cream sauce that smoothed out my clotted thoughts about a middle-aged Italian painter with what I’d called “an unrequited sense of history.” There was the
lapin niçoise,
with olives, garlic, and tomatoes, that saw me through the first paragraphs of a story about the politics of public sculpture in the South Bronx. There was the rich, bitter rabbit ragout—a recipe from the Croatian grandmother of the Berlin artist Renata Stih—that got me started after a couple of earthquakes hit Assisi, shattering the frescoes on the ceiling of San Francesco into a million pieces. Dishes like these become invocations, little rituals you invent for yourself, in the hope that your life and your work will eventually taste the same.

Good cooking is much easier to master than good writing. But great cooking is something different, and during the years that I’ve stood at my stove, stirring and sprinkling and tasting, waiting for a sauce to thicken and a drab sentence to settle—if not precisely into echoing, Wordsworthian chords, at least into a turn of phrase that will tell you something you didn’t already know about Gerhard Schröder, say, or Silvio Berlusconi—my cooking has leaped ahead by several stars, leaving my writing in the shade. Some dishes have disappeared from my repertoire; tuna curry, for example, has been replaced by the crab-and-spun-coconut-cream curry I first tasted in Hong Kong in 1990 and have been working on ever since, and never mind that the crab in Hong Kong turned out to be doctored tofu, while mine arrives from a Broadway fishmonger with its claws scissoring through the paper bag. Some dishes I’ve sampled in the course (and cause) of duty are memorable mainly because I’ve tried so hard to forget them. For one, the crudités I managed to get down at Jean-Marie Le Pen’s gaudy and heavily guarded Saint-Cloud villa, with M. Le Pen spinning an outsize plastic globe that held a barely concealed tape recorder, and a couple of Dobermans sniffing at my plate. For another, the rat stew I was served in the Guyana jungle by a visibly unstable interior minister, who had accompanied me there (en route to a “model farm” hacked out of the clearing that had once been Jonestown) in a battered Britten-Norman Islander with no radar or landing lights and a thirteen-year-old Air Force colonel for a pilot. Some dishes I’ve repressed, like the cauliflower soup that was ladled into my plate in the dining room of a Belfast hotel just as a terrorist’s bomb went off and a wing of the building crumbled, leaving me, the friend whose couch I’d been using for the past week, and a couple of other diners perched in the middle of the sky—“like saints on poles,” a man at the next table said, returning to his smoked salmon. Some dishes I’ve loved but would not risk trying myself, like the pork roast with crackling that Pat Hume, the wife of the politician and soon-to-be Nobel peace laureate John Hume, was in the process of carving, one Sunday lunch in Derry, when a stray bullet shattered the window and lodged in the wall behind her; she didn’t stop carving, or even pause in her conversation, which, as I remember, had to do with whether the New York subways were so dangerous as to preclude her visiting with the children while John was in Washington, advising Teddy Kennedy on how to get through a family crisis.

Some dishes I’ve left in better hands. It’s clear to me that I’m no match for the sausage vendor at the Frankfurt Bahnhof when it comes to grilling a bratwurst to precisely that stage where the skin is charred and just greasy enough to hold the mustard and then stuffing the bratwurst into just enough roll to get a grip on, but not
so
much roll that you miss the sport of trying to eat it with anything fewer than four paper napkins and the business section of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
In the same way, I know that I will never equal my friend Duke, a Herero tribesman known from the Kalahari Desert to the Okavango Delta by his
Dukes of Hazzard
T-shirt, in the art of thickening a sauce for a guinea fowl or a spur-winged goose in the absence of anything resembling flour. Duke was the cook at my fly camp when I was out in the delta researching a piece about “bush housekeeping,” and he thickened his sauces there by grating roots he called desert potatoes into boiling fat. But the secret was how many potatoes and, indeed, how to distinguish those potatoes from all the other roots that looked like potatoes but were something you’d rather not ingest. I never found out, because the day we’d planned to fly to the desert to dig some up a tourist camping on a nearby game preserve was eaten by a lion, and my pilot volunteered to collect the bones. Food like that is, as they say in the art world, site-specific.

Take the dish I have called
Canard sauvage rue du Cherche Midi.
I cooked my first wild duck in a kitchen on Cherche Midi in 1982, and during the sixteen years that I lived between Paris and New York I tuned the recipe to what my friends assured me was perfection. But it has never produced the same frisson at my New York dinner table that it did at the picnic table in my Paris garden, if for no reason other than that my neighbors across the court in New York do not punctuate my dinner parties with well-aimed rotten eggs accompanied by shouts of “Savages!” the way one of my Paris neighbors—a local crank by the name of Jude—always did, and that consequently my New York guests know nothing of the pleasure that comes from pausing between bites of a perfect duck in order to turn a hose full blast on the open window of someone who dislikes them.

Some dishes just don’t travel, no matter how obvious or easy they seem. I know this because I tried for a year to duplicate the magical fried chicken known to aficionados as Fernand Point’s Poulet Américain—a recipe so simple in itself that no one since that legendary Vienne chef has ever dared to put it on a menu. I have never even attempted to duplicate the spicy chicken stew that the actor Michael Goldman heats up on a Sterno stove in his damp, smelly Paris
cave,
surrounded by the moldy bottles of Lafite and Yquem and Grands Echezeaux that you know he’s planning to open as the night wears on. Nor have I attempted the Indonesian rijsttafel—which is basically just a platter of rice with little bowls of condiments and sauces—that my late friend George Hoff, a Dutch kendo master and nightclub bouncer, tossed off one night, in London, after a long and strenuous demonstration that involved raising a long pole and slamming it down to within a centimeter of my husband’s head. Or the fish grilled by a group of young Portuguese commandos in the early summer of 1974—I was covering their revolution; they were taking a break from it—over a campfire on a deserted Cabo de São Vicente beach. Or, for that matter, the s’mores my favorite counselor roasted over a campfire at Camp Fernwood, in Poland, Maine (and never mind that I hated Camp Fernwood). Or even popcorn at the movies.

But most things do travel, if you know the secret. A lot of cooks don’t share their secrets, or more often lie, the way my mother-in-law lied about the proportion of flour to chocolate in her famous “yum-yum cake,” thereby ending whatever relationship we had.
My
best secret dates from a dinner party at Gracie Mansion when Ed Koch was the mayor of New York. I had known Koch from his Village Independent Democrat days, when he pretty much starved unless his mother fed him. But now that he was Hizzoner the Mayor of New York City he could, as he repeatedly told his guests, order anything he wanted to eat, no matter what the hour or the season or inconvenience to a staff best trained in trimming the crusts off tea sandwiches. The dinner in question got off to an awkward start—“You’re Puerto Rican? You don’t
look
Puerto Rican” is how, if I remember correctly, he greeted the beautiful curator of the Museo del Barrio—and it was frequently interrupted by phone calls from his relatives, who seemed to be having some sort of business crisis. But everybody agreed that the food was delicious. It wasn’t elaborate food, or even much different from what you’d cook for yourself on a rainy night at home: pasta in a tomato sauce, good steaks, and hot-chocolate sundaes for dessert. But the meal itself was so oddly remarkable that I went back to the kitchen afterward and asked the cook how he’d made it, and he told me, “Whatever Ed likes, whatever he says he never got as a kid, I double the quantity. I doubled the Parmesan on the pasta. I
tripled
the hot-chocolate sauce on the ice cream.” Ed’s principle was “More is more.”

It’s not a principle I would apply to writing, but it’s definitely the one I cook by now, on my way from excess in the kitchen to a manuscript where less is more. If my couscous is now the best couscous on the Upper West Side, it’s because, with a nod to Ed, I take my favorite ingredients from every couscous I’ve ever eaten—the chickpeas and raisins and turnips and carrots and almonds and prunes—double the quantity, toss them into the broth, and then go back to my desk and cut some adverbs. I put too many eggs in my matzo balls, too much basil in my pesto, too much saffron in my paella. I have no patience with the kind of recipe that says “
¹
/4 teaspoon thyme” or “2 ounces chopped pancetta.” I drown my carrots in chervil, because I like the way chervil sweetens carrots. I even drown my halibut in chervil, because I like what it does to the reduction of wine and cream in a white fish sauce—though, now that I think of it, when I’m on a bandwagon, when I’m really mad at the world I’m writing about and the people in it, I will usually switch to sorrel.

The first time I cooked halibut on a bed of sorrel, I was in New York, laboring over a long piece about liberation theology in South America and, in particular, about a young priest whose parish was in a favela with the unlikely name of Campos Elísios, about an hour north of Rio de Janeiro. I wasn’t mad at my Brazilian priest—I loved the priest. I was mad at the Bishop of Rio, who was on the priest’s back for ignoring orders to keep his parishioners out of politics. At first, I thought I could solve the problem by taking the afternoon off to make
moqueca,
which was not only my favorite Brazilian dish but, in my experience, an immensely soothing one—a gratin of rice, shrimp, lime, and coconut cream, served with (and this is essential, if you’re serious) a sprinkling of toasted manioc flour—which provides the comforts of a
brandade
without the terrible nursery taste of cod and potatoes mushed together. I made
moqueca
a lot in Rio, because I was angry a lot in Rio. Angry at the poverty, at the politics, at the easy brutality of people in power and the desperate brutality of people without it. But it’s hard to make my
moqueca
in New York unless you have a source of manioc flour, and the closest I came to that was the seven-foot-long flexible straw funnel leaning against a beam in my living room—an object devised by the Amerindians, centuries ago, to squeeze the poison out of manioc so that they wouldn’t die eating it. I had wasted the better part of the afternoon on Amsterdam Avenue, searching for manioc flour, when I happened to pass a greengrocer with a special on sorrel. I bought him out, and a couple of hours later I discovered that the patient preparation of sorrel—the blanching and chopping and puréeing and braising in butter—had taken the diatribe in my head and turned it into a story I could tell.

There are, of course, moments in writing when even the most devoted cook stops cooking. Those are the moments that, in sex, are called “transporting” but in journalism are known as an empty fridge, an irritable family, and the beginnings of a first-name friendship with the woman who answers the phone at Empire Szechuan. When I am lost in one of those moments, I subsist on takeout and jasmine tea, or if takeout is truly beyond me—the doorbell, the change, the tip, the mismatched chopsticks, the arguments when I won’t share—on chili-lime tortilla chips and Diet Coke. If the hour is decent, I’ll mix a Bloody Mary or a
caipirinha
like the ones that the priest and I used to sneak in the kitchen of the parish house of Campos Elísios on evenings when the Seventh-Day Adventists would arrive at the favela in force, pitch a tent in a field, and call the poor to salvation through amps rented by the hour from a Copacabana beach band. But moments like those are rare.