The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (17 page)

Eduardo lifted the plate of foie gras to his nose and inhaled. He put it back on the table and then suddenly lifted it again to his nose, bringing it so close this time that it nearly touched his nostrils; he jerked the plate in small clockwise circles, agitating the foie gras to release its aromas.

It was a funny ritual—it was liver, after all—but it struck me as especially strange because the pâté had been prepared by Eduardo and his small staff the previous winter. After his flock is slaughtered, the livers are preserved, either as a pâté like the one we had sitting in front of us or in jars as confit—individual slices of liver stored in their own fat. Eduardo was not simply evaluating his liver; he was evaluating how well he himself had prepared it.

He inhaled, this time very hard, and his shoulders shot up toward the ceiling. With a nod to the waiter, we were left alone.

“Last season’s foie gras,” Eduardo said, scrunching his nose apologetically as he returned the plate to the table. “It’s all I have.” If the restaurant’s atmosphere and decor made an unlikely setting for a culinary revelation, the room-temperature slab of Eduardo’s foie gras pâté kept with the trend. There was an air of low expectations.

Eduardo waited for me as I dug into a small section and brought it over to my plate. “Last year’s liver,” he repeated, smiling.

I took a bite. The smell was what got to me first, because as I chewed I was struck by the smell of meat. I most especially smelled liver. Foie gras, as a rule, is never described as delicious
liver
—you wouldn’t describe white truffles as perfumed fungus, either—but here I was, unmistakably tasting liver. And not metallic, muddy-tasting liver, but sweet, deeply flavored,
livery
liver. It occurred to me, as I took another bite, that foie gras is essentially a small amount of liver flavored by a whole lot of fat. I had never thought about it that way because I had never known any other foie gras. Eduardo’s foie gras was very different: it was a whole lot of liver enhanced by a small amount of fat.

When I mentioned this to Eduardo, I noticed he wasn’t eating. He nodded in agreement. “To taste just fat is to taste nothing. The fat should be integrated, to carry the flavor.” I took another bite, amazed now at the texture—it cut like room-temperature butter but again tasted like deeply flavored meat. It was incredibly delicious.

The waiter appeared with another plate. This time, a jar of Eduardo’s confit of foie gras sat in the center. Using a spoon, I dug into the center to reveal what looked like a marbled prime rib, leveraged by yellow, glistening fat. I took a bite. And then another. I tasted cloves.

“Eduardo,” I said, “the cloves are perfect here.”

“Cloves?” he said. “No, no cloves.”

“Really?” I said in disbelief, because I truly didn’t believe him. “Star anise?”

“No, no star anise.”

If you want to irritate a chef, start by questioning his palate. “No cloves, no star anise,” I said, a little testily.

Eduardo shook his head, spreading the meat on a piece of baguette. “No seasoning.” He qualified that he
sometimes used salt and pepper—but even those were superfluous if the geese had the correct diet. He quickly listed
certain plants that provide salinity, and others that impart peppery qualities. “If you have these in the right proportion,” he told me, “your meat will, too.”

“You season your livers in the field?” I asked.

“The geese eat what their heart tells them to eat,” he said, letting his fingers do a quick dance on his chest to show what an easily understood, animal thing the heart is. “I just make sure what they want is available to them.”

I took another few bites and watched Eduardo eat. Even when he stopped chewing, his lips moved silently. He appeared to be lost in thought, or prayer.

“Eduardo,” I said, dipping back into the jar for another bite. “How many chefs are serving your foie gras?” He shrugged and shook his head.

“Which chefs?” I asked again as I went for more foie gras. “Are they only in Spain?”

He shook his head again, jutting out his lower lip for emphasis. “No chefs.”

I put down my fork. Some of the most famous chefs in the world are in Spain. Chefs like these demand only the best ingredients. This was the best foie gras. How could he not be selling his livers to chefs? It seemed impossible.

“Chefs?” he said, gently wiping his mouth. “Chefs don’t deserve my foie gras.”

A
CHEF
’
S
WORTH
is largely determined by his interpretation of great ingredients.

During one of my first nights in the kitchen at Chez Panisse, in 1994, a dessert leaving the pastry station caught my eye. Actually, I more or less gasped in disbelief, and that’s not because the dessert was so beautiful (it was) or because I hadn’t seen a dessert like it before (I hadn’t). I gasped because it was so
crazy
. It was a single peach on a dessert plate, no sprig of mint, no swish of raspberry sauce. It was Peach, unadorned.

I walked my New York City attitude over to the pastry chefs. The peaches were stacked on the counter, delicately wrapped in cellophane and lined up like soldiers, awaiting deployment. The chefs lovingly cradled each peach on its way to the plate; the waiters ferried them away, walking gingerly as though they were carrying soufflés. Everyone acted as though this was nothing remarkable at all, as only Californians can act around things like fresh fruit and the weather.

I began to laugh. “Wow, tough night,” I said to the pastry chef. She looked at me but did not respond. So I picked up a dessert menu and was introduced to my first Californian farmer. “Mas Masumoto, Sun Crest Peach,” it said, and nothing more.

It’s hard to imagine there was a time, not so long ago, when chefs didn’t name the farmers they purchased from.
Organic
and
local
weren’t buzzwords on restaurant menus. The sign of a serious restaurant was to present
impossibly large imported raspberries in the middle of January. Chefs in training back then didn’t generally go to California to learn; they went to France. I went to France by way of California, as a young line cook in various kitchens. Alice Waters’s famed Chez Panisse was a last stop. A few weeks of observation in the kitchen turned into several months of exploration on the farms that supplied the restaurant.

I stayed largely on account of that peach. When I took a bite of it later that night, did the lights dim and the warmth of a religious spirit come over me? No, but I’ve never tasted something quite so peachy. In that sense, it was not unlike my experience of tasting the Eight Row Flint polenta ten years later. As I bit into it, I remember thinking that the peach had a fullness of flavor to it—bold, like a stew of meat—that made you think you had in your mouth something much richer than fruit. I was struck as much by the acidity as by the sweetness. It was like a nicely balanced wine. The juice ran down my face and chin. One bite, and then another few bites, and pretty soon all that remained were bits of flesh sticking to my face.

It was the best peach of my life, but I have to qualify that, because, like most Americans born in the past fifty years, I didn’t know what a peach should taste like. Breeders in the 1970s and ’80s created new varieties for functionality, not for flavor—low-acid, high-sugar peaches that could be picked while still hard, capable of withstanding the rigors of cross-country travel.

Masumoto’s peaches were incredibly delicious. But more than that—as if a peach needs to be more than that—they got people to consider good food as inseparable from good farming. You’d think that would be obvious, but chefs often make it difficult to see. When we cook ingredients—whether peaches or foie gras, or most anything—we transform them. Foie gras is seared and paired with mangoes and sherry wine vinegar; peaches are peeled, poached, and perfumed with lemongrass and vanilla. The cooking technique, or the flavor combinations, can be surprising and delicious. (The more aggressive the technique, or the more far-reaching the combination, the more it’s likely
to taste merely surprising.) Either way, when it’s in a chef’s hands, all the vectors point back to the chef. Process trumps product.

Alice was saying:
Taste what Mas Masumoto created; I can’t do better
. She did not say what most chefs say:
Taste this dessert I made with Mas’s peaches
.

The surprising thing about the prerogative of the chef is that until recently it didn’t exist. The chef’s authority (and celebrity) is such an accepted fact of fine dining today that it obscures the fact that for most of the past century, it was the diner—not the chef—who held power over the menu. Restaurants were the public’s domain, places where patrons could count on a familiar repertoire of recipes with the luxury they lacked at home. They came for entertainment, yes, but also for convenience and comfort.
Restaurants, after all, are named for a
restorative
, a large bowl of soup.

Like early musical compositions, classic dishes were often passed on without attribution. Chefs cooked in obscurity, handcuffed by the weight of tradition. That’s a bit simplistic, of course—Fernand Point, Auguste Escoffier, and César Ritz are famous exceptions—but for the most part, to be a chef was to be a practitioner of recipes that had been worked out long ago. The Guide Michelin, the preeminent guide to the great restaurants of France, introduced the star rating in 1926 to recognize good cooking, but it almost never highlighted chefs.

Paul Bocuse, the legendary French chef, once said that in 1950, a chef’s life amounted to being “
locked up, cloistered in his smoke-filled basement . . . at command, and without real power of creation.” With no sense of agency or reward of public recognition, it meant the life of a chef was one of toil and hardship.

The hardships loomed especially large in the kitchen, where the conditions were laborious, oppressive, and, for the most part, unkempt and
dangerous. George Orwell famously described his descent into culinary hell in his memoir
Down and Out in Paris and London
. “The kitchen was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined,” he wrote, “
a stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar, red-lit from the fires, and deafening with oaths and the clanging of pots and pans.”

The professional kitchen was foul, furious, and crude. To compare today’s chefs—highlighted and exalted as we are in magazines, television, and fund-raising events—with the anonymous, hard-drinking, hard-living laborer chefs of the past is to recognize a change not only in lifestyle but in vocation.

How did it happen? It’s difficult to point to any one person or event as a pivotal turning point, especially since the influence and prestige of chefs have continued to evolve. But it’s worth giving credit to Paul Bocuse for redefining how the world perceived not just haute French food but what it meant to be a chef.

Long before the Food Network, before endorsement deals and signature frozen food products, Bocuse was an unapologetic promoter of his image. He refused to toil anonymously. He named his restaurant after himself, which was not a commonplace practice, as it is today. Bocuse was the impresario, taking the place of the maître d’hôtel. It was an idea so radical it might have failed had he not been such an effective self-marketer.

Within the context of the 1960s and ’70s (and even by today’s standards), Bocuse was a pioneering global chef—the first to export French products to Japan, for instance—earning himself the cover of
Newsweek
in 1975. He became the most famous chef in the world.

Bocuse’s rise to prominence coincided with the birth of a new cuisine in France. Chefs like Michel Guérard, the Troisgros brothers, and Alain Chapel, with Bocuse as a kind of ringleader, conceived of
la nouvelle cuisine
française
as a reaction against the confines and extravagances of classical gastronomy—the so-called
grande cuisine.

It was food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau who first identified and celebrated the movement, in 1973. “
Down with the old-fashioned picture of the typical bon vivant,” they wrote in their restaurant guide,
Le Nouveau Guide Gault-Millau
, “that puffy personage with his napkin tucked under his chin, his lips dripping veal stock, béchamel sauce, and vol-au-vent financiere. . . . No more of those terrible brown sauces and white sauces, those espagnoles, those Perigueux with truffles, those béchamels and Mornays that have assassinated as many livers as they have covered indifferent foods. They are forbidden!”

Nouvelle cuisine
,
by contrast, stressed lightness and simplicity. Inspiration for dishes came from around the world, but chefs connected the food to their own regions, adapting traditional recipes with new cooking technologies (like microwave ovens and vacuum-pack cooking) and revised techniques.

More than any other technique, sauce making was reconsidered. Sauce (which starts with a great stock—bones, meat, and vegetables simmered in water) is the most important French contribution to gastronomy. It is a reduced version of the thing you’re eating, as opposed to a condiment or chutney, which serve to complement or counterbalance the thing you’re eating. Sauces enrich, deepen, and layer flavors. Until nouvelle cuisine, sauces like béchamel and béarnaise were easily recognized and timeless. But the new guard of chefs insisted that these classic sauces masked the flavor of the protein on the plate. Their new variations were an attempt to instead enhance it with a lighter style. There was less butter and cream, and limited use of flour as a thickening agent. Such changes may sound insignificant, but most of France saw them as heretical, a challenge to culinary and cultural heritage no less dramatic than a group of American chefs questioning the culinary wisdom of serving a bun with a hamburger.

Even the ingredients themselves were reconsidered. Nouvelle cuisine was also, less famously, the first farm-to-chef movement. Chefs like Alain
Chapel developed direct connections with the morning markets and created menus around ingredients they found and sometimes specifically requested from farmers. The goal was to let the ingredients speak for themselves. Gone were the elaborate platters and ritualistic table-side carvings. Instead chefs began plating food individually, with an interest in a few unique flavor combinations. (Nouvelle cuisine can take credit for the
menu dégustation
, a tasting of multiple distinctive, smaller-portioned courses.)

What emerged was a modern, innovative, and highly personal style of cooking. From sourcing to preparation to presentation, nouvelle cuisine forced diners to concentrate on the aesthetics and aromas of what they were about to eat. It made them experience flavor in a new context, thereby redefining the role of chefs—as artists, masters of their own creations—as much as it revolutionized cuisine.

And the effects were global. These kitchens were the incubators for the great chefs of the 1980s and ’90s, like Wolfgang Puck, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, David Bouley, and Jean-Louis Palladin. They used the Bocuse model—talent and increasing prestige—to demonstrate that a chef could continue to step out of the kitchen. They showed how chefs could engage with the public to nurture a wider appreciation of food and culture. And they did it while opening multiple restaurants throughout the world.

Jean-Louis Palladin, whose food included fusion, fruit in savory preparations, and sometimes ornate presentations, never liked the term
nouvelle
to describe his cuisine. He nonetheless was the first to modernize American food in the same vein as the nouvelle cuisine chefs in France, by foraging for only the best ingredients and highlighting those ingredients with imaginative cooking.

There’s no better example than rewinding to the plate of chicken Palladin prepared that night in Los Angeles, with all the ignoble parts. The real brilliance of the dish wasn’t the use of underappreciated cuts, nor was it that Palladin had the birds raised by a farmer following his precise directions. The brilliance was the sauce, which Palladin himself labored over all afternoon.
Those secondary cuts could sing only because they were bound together by superior technique.

Culinary historian Paul Freedman has written that nouvelle cuisine
“in a sense
extends on either side of the borders of simplicity and artifice, for if on the one hand its advocates praised freshness and integrity, they also wanted to expand the imagination of the chef, embracing such French 1968 slogans as ‘everything is permitted’ and ‘it is prohibited to prohibit.’” Which is what truly great cooking is all about.