The Man Who Ate Everything (2 page)

Later that evening, my lovely wife was kept up by an upset stomach, and I was kept up by my wife. She swore never to eat Greek food again.

Lard.
Paula Wolfert’s magnificent
The Cooking of South-West France
(Dial Press) beguiled me into loving lard with her recipe for
confit de porc—
half-pound chunks of fresh pork shoulder flavored with thyme, garlic, cloves, and pepper, poached for three hours in a half gallon of barely simmering lard, and mellowed in crocks of congealed lard for up to four months. When you bring the pork back to life and brown it gently in its own fat, the result is completely delicious, savory and aromatic. I had never made the dish myself because, following Wolfert’s advice, I had always avoided using commercial lard, those one-pound blocks of slightly rank, preservative-filled fat in your butcher’s freezer.

Then, one snowy afternoon, I found myself alone in a room with four pounds of pork, an equal amount of pure white pig’s fat, and a few hours to spare. Following Wolfert’s simple instructions for rendering lard, I chopped up the fat, put it in a deep pot with a little water and some cloves and cinnamon sticks, popped it into a 225-degree oven, and woke up three hours later. After straining out the solids and spices, I was left with a rich, clear golden elixir that perfumed my kitchen, as it will henceforth perfume my life.

Desserts in Indian restaurants.
Eight Indian dinners taught me that not every Indian dessert has the texture and taste of face cream. Far from it. Some have the texture and taste of tennis balls. These are named
gulab jamun,
which the menu described as a “light pastry made with dry milk and honey.”
Rasmalai
have the texture of day-old bubble gum and refuse to yield to the action of the teeth. On the brighter side, I often finished my
kulfi,
the traditional Indian ice cream, and would love to revisit carrot
halva,
all caramelized and spicy. But I may already have traveled down this road as far as justice requires.

STEP FIVE,
final exam and graduation ceremony.

In just six months, I succeeded in purging myself of nearly all repulsions and preferences, in becoming a more perfect omnivore. This became apparent one day in Paris, France—a city to which my arduous professional duties frequently take me. I was trying a nice new restaurant, and when the waiter brought the menu, I found myself in a state unlike any I had ever attained—call it Zen-like if you wish. Everything on the menu, every appetizer, hot and cold, every salad, every fish and bird and piece of meat, was terrifically alluring, but none more than the others. I had absolutely no way of choosing. Though blissful at the prospect of eating, I was unable to order dinner. I was reminded of the medieval church parable of the ass equidistant between two bales of hay, who, because animals lack free will, starves to death. A man, supposedly, would not.

The Catholic Church was dead wrong. I
would
have starved— if my companion had not saved the day by ordering for both of us. I believe I ate a composed salad with slivers of foie gras, a perfect sole meuniere, and sweetbreads. Everything was delicious.

STEP SIX,
relearning humility. Just because you have become a perfect omnivore does not mean that you must flaunt it. Intoxicated with my own accomplishment, I began to misbehave, especially at dinner parties. When seated next to an especially
finicky eater, I would often amuse myself by going straight for the jugular. Sometimes I began slyly by staring slightly too long at the food remaining on her plate and then inquiring whether she would like to borrow my fork. Sometimes I launched a direct assault by asking how long she had had her terror of bread. Sometimes I tricked her by striking up an abstract conversation about allergies. And then I would sit back and complacently listen to her neurotic jumble of excuses and explanations: advice from a personal trainer, intolerance to wheat gluten, a pathetic faith in Dean Ornish, the exquisite—even painful—sensitivity of her taste buds, hints of childhood abuse. And then I would tell her the truth.

I believe that it is the height of compassion and generosity to practice this brand of tough love on dinner-party neighbors who are less omnivorous than oneself. But the perfect omnivore must always keep in mind that, for one to remain omnivorous, it is an absolute necessity to get invited back.

May 1989, August 1996

Nothing

but the

Truth

Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not
bread?… Eat that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in
fatness.

—
ISAIAH 55:2

The world is divided into two camps: those who can live happily on bread alone and those who also need vegetables, meat, and dairy products. Isaiah and I fall into the first category. Bread is the only food I know that satisfies completely, all by itself. It comforts the body, charms the senses, gratifies the soul, and excites the mind. A little butter also helps.

Isaiah was a first-class prophet but untrained as a dietitian. A good loaf of bread will not delight your soul in fatness. It contains almost no fats or sugars and lots of protein and complex carbohydrates because it is made from three elemental ingredients: flour, water, and salt. If you wonder why I left out the yeast, you have discovered the point of my story.

Every year I have had an intense bout of baking, but these episodes now seem just a prelude, a beating around the bush, a period of training and practice for this year’s assault on the summit:
le pain au levain nature!,
naturally leavened bread. I have slipped into a foreign language here because this is a bread most commonly associated with the Paris baker Lionel Poilane and his ancient wood-fired oven at 8, rue du Cherche-Midi, the most famous bakery in the world. When the baking is going well, Poilane’s bread defines the good loaf: a thick, crackling crust; a chewy, moist, aerated interior; the ancient, earthy flavors of toasted wheat and tangy fermentation; and a range of more elusive tastes—roasted nuts, butterscotch, dried pears, grassy fields—that emanate from neither flour, water, nor salt, but from some more mysterious source. This is the true bread of the countryside, Poilane writes, the eternal bread. This is the bread I can eat forever, and often do. This is the bread I am eating right now while trying to type with the other hand.

Pain au levain
was the first leavened bread, probably discovered in Egypt six thousand years ago. Professor Raymond Calvel, in his definitive
La boulangerie moderns,
places this breakthrough
“chez les Hebreux au temps de Moi’se,”
which is when
les Hebreux
were enslaved by
les Egyptiens.
I would love to believe this account but find it improbable. My own
pain au levain
adventure began much more recently.

Saturday, October 7, 1989.
I have collected a three-foot pile of books and articles, popular and scientific, in English, French, and translations from the German, including thirty recipes for creating a starter or, as the French call it,
le chef.
This is a piece of dough in which wild yeast and lactic-acid bacteria live happily in symbiosis, generating the gases, alcohols, and acids that give this bread its complex taste and chewy texture.

Commercial yeast is bred to produce clouds of carbon dioxide for a speedy rise, at the expense of aromatic compounds. Your first loaf of
pain au levain
can take six days to make from start to
finish. Then each new batch of bread is leavened with a piece of risen dough saved from the previous baking. Compared with bread using commercial yeast,
pain au levain
is unpredictable, slow, and prey to variations in weather, flour, temperature, and the seasons. “Playing with wild yeast is like playing with dynamite,” I was warned by the technical manager of a giant U.S. milling company.

Chez
Panisse Cooking
(Random House) has a lucid and detailed recipe contributed by Steve Sullivan, owner of the Acme Bread Company in Berkeley and a stupendous baker; he uses organic wine grapes to activate the starter. I am in luck: the New York State grape harvest is under way. I order a variety of excellent flours from Giusto’s Specialty Foods in San Francisco, which supplies flour to Acme, and when they arrive I walk around the corner to the Union Square Greenmarket, buy several bunches of unsprayed Concord grapes, tie them in cheesecloth, lower the cheesecloth into a batter of flour and water, squeeze the grapes to break their skins, put the bowl near a pilot light on the stove, and go away for the weekend.

Two days later.
What a mess! My mixture of flour and grapes has overflowed, sizzling and seething over the stove and running into those little holes in the gas burners from which flames used to emerge. I start again. There is something terrifying about the violent life hiding in an innocent-looking bowl of flour and grapes, and I lie awake at night wondering where it comes from. Have I mentioned my long-held belief that if the planet Earth is ever invaded by aliens, they will arrive in the form of microscopic beings?

Depending on whom you believe, the wild yeast and bacteria on my stove originated either on the grapes themselves, on the organic wheat flour I put them in, or in the air around me where microbes of every race are ubiquitous. My computer has collected 236 scientific abstracts on naturally leavened bread, but none has a definitive answer—as many as 59 distinct species of wild yeast
and 238 strains of bacteria have been spotted in sourdough cultures. The truth is vital to me. Wild yeasts living on the wheat berry would create Montana-Idaho country bread, because that’s where Al Giusto says his wheat is grown. If they live on the grapes, it would be upstate New York country bread. But my goal is to bake
Manhattan
country bread with a colony of wild bacteria and yeasts that can grow and flourish only here. I apply to
Vogue
for the funds to run DNA traces and gas chromatographs on all my breads and starters. I have received no reply as of the present writing. Maybe tomorrow.

Saturday, October 14.
I have made a few loaves of bread with my grape starter—the early ones were pale purple, and all were dense and sour—but must abandon the project in a few days when I leave New York to eat, professionally, in Paris for three weeks. Besides, I am extremely suspicious of yeasts that live on grapes. They are too fond of wine rather than wheat. I am looking for yeasts that love bread as much as I do.

Monday, April 2, I990.
In the August 1989 issue of his indispensable newsletter,
Simple Cooking,
John Thorne gives instructions for
pain au levain
based on the methods that Poilane himself employs. But I will wait until I can get hold of Poilane’s paperback handbook,
Faire son pain,
and read it for myself. My friend Miriam promises to find one for me in Paris.

Meanwhile, I turn to
The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book
(Random House) and its recipe for
desem
(the Flemish word for
levain},
which is fastidiously designed to develop only those yeasts that live on stone-ground whole wheat. Recently milled organic flour must be used so that the microbes will still be alive and well; everything must be kept below 60 degrees Fahrenheit until the final rise to discourage the growth of acid-generating bacteria that thrive at higher temperatures; and everything must be sealed to avoid colonization by airborne yeasts. I telephone Giusto’s and ask them to send me a sack of whole wheat flour by overnight
mail the moment it is milled. Then I walk around the house testing the temperature. Bread writers who live in the country typically tell you that the perfect place for this rising or that is on the creaky wooden stairs going down to your root cellar. Don’t they know that most people live in apartments? At last I create a zone of 55 degrees by piling a twenty-four-quart stockpot on a cardboard box at the edge of my desk with the air conditioner set to turbofreeze. Now all I need is the flour.

April 11.
My freshly milled whole wheat has carpeted the floor of the UPS truck; the bag split in half somewhere en route from California. The UPS man is sliding and slipping from one side of his truck to the other. I telephone Giusto’s for another sack.

Late April.
The flour has arrived. It is a balmy spring, but I am wearing a winter coat at my desk so that
Laurel’s Kitchen desem
will feel comfortable. My wife has the sniffles.

Early May.
Both of us have come down with serious colds, complete with fever. The
desem
starter smells terrific, a fresh fruity scent unlike anything I’ve made before, and the bread is rough and wheaty, full of complex aromas. But like all whole-grain breads, the strong taste of unrefined flour obscures the more delicate flavors I am after. Long ago I concluded that the only bread worth its name is made with good white flour; small amounts of barley, whole wheat, or rye can be added for their flavor and color. John Thorne writes that “whole-grain breads … whether made of wheat, rye, oats, or any other grain, retain something of the seed’s stubborn unwillingness to be digested. They remain a kind of aerated gruel, filling but not ultimately satisfying.” If Isaiah were alive today, I’m sure he would agree.

Friday, June I, late morning.
Faire son pain
has arrived from Paris. Step One: Create a bowlful of life. Poilane’s instructions have you make a small piece of dough with one-ninth of the total flour and water you intend to use and leave it covered for two or three days while the wild yeast and bacteria awaken and multiply to form an active culture. This will be the
chef.

Bakers weigh everything because flour can be packed densely or lightly in a measuring cup and doughs can be tight or aerated; it is their weight that matters. I dust off my electronic kitchen scale and set it to grams. Poilane says that all ingredients at all stages should be between 22 and 24 degrees centigrade, which equals 72 to 75 degrees on Dr. Fahrenheit’s thermometer—a nice, moderate room temperature. Now I can turn off the air conditioner.

I weigh 42 grams of water and 67 grams of unbleached white flour, about a half cup, put them in a large bowl, and squish them together with the fingers of my right hand until the dough comes together into a rough ball. Poilane has you keep your left hand clean for scraping the dough off your right hand with the blade of a sharp paring knife, which sounds silly until you try it any other way. One writer, who evidently has not read Poilane, recommends tying plastic bags round the handles of your water faucets to avoid sealing them closed when the dough from your hands dries and hardens on them. Better to keep one hand always clean.

I knead the
chef with
extra flour on my wooden counter for two minutes, put it into a rustic brown ceramic bowl, cover the bowl with a clean, wet kitchen towel, secure the towel with a rubber band, and go about my business. This nonchalance lasts for five minutes, and then I am back in the kitchen, peeking under the towel to see if anything is happening. Twenty peeks and several broken rubber bands later, I scrape the
chef
into a clear glass bowl. It looks less like something from a French farmhouse but does facilitate obsessive observation.

I wash my rustic bowl in hot water and learn a lasting lesson: utensils coated with flour or dough are easily washed in
cold
water; hot water makes the starch and gluten stick to everything, including itself. If the dough has hardened,
soak
the utensils in cold water. If you leave them long enough, your wife may get d
is
gusted and clean them up herself. Do it too often and there will be a price to pay.

Where the side of the glass bowl meets the base, it swells and acts as a magnifying glass. For the rest of the day, at three-minute intervals, I search for the appearance of tiny bubbles in the
chef.

Two Stars for Bread

I
t is not possible to understand a meal without bread, wrote a French savant whose name I forget. Any restaurant review that fails to evaluate the quality of the bread is either incomplete or completely invalid; I can’t decide which. Fantastic bread can overcome an ugly restaurant with brutish service, recently defrosted desserts, and burned coffee.

Saturday,
June 2, immediately after waking.
In just twenty-four hours, the kitchen towel has grown dry and stiff, the dough has darkened and crusted over, and two spots of pale blue mold have appeared on it. This is not the life-form I had in mind.

I make the morning coffee and start all over. This time I use bottled springwater. New York City tap water is among the most delicious in the nation, but chlorinated water of any kind can inhibit the growth of yeast. And weeks later, when I grow attuned to small differences in the taste of my breads, I find that you can recognize things like chlorine in the crust, where flavors get concentrated. Distilled water lacks the alkalies and minerals that make water taste good and are said to contribute to a healthy rise and golden crust. Springwater is the answer.

Instead of Poilane’s white flour I weigh out some stone-ground organic whole wheat flour: stone ground because I am under the mistaken impression that the metal rollers in large
commercial mills heat the flour to temperatures that can kill wild yeast and bacteria; organic because pesticides and fungicides deal death to microbes; and whole wheat because if yeast do actually live on the wheat berry, it is on the outer bran layer that they will, I figure, be found. Instead of a colorful, charming kitchen towel, I use plastic wrap this time. It may prevent a friendly airborne microbe or two from settling on the
chef,
but it keeps the dough from crusting over.