by Daniel Duane
I asked Cosentino for cookbook suggestions, advice on how I might pursue deeper understanding of the organs and the extremities. One thing led to another and, on Cosentino’s suggestion, I got a work gig taking me to London to cook with Fergus Henderson himself—a genuine kitchen education from the Maestro of the Odd Bits, Virtuoso of the Viscera. A couple of Ambien saw me through the red-eye to London. Three cappuccinos beat back the fog at Heathrow Airport, and a London taxi took me right to the bustling eight-hundred-year-old Smithfield Meat Market. Commuters hustled every which way, tiny cars buzzed by in a hurry, horns bleated and sirens rang, and hard-hat butchers hacked at hundreds of bloody animal carcasses. Seagulls cawed in the cold gray sky, and display cases openly offered products never allowed in the door of American supermarkets: lamb’s balls and gory skinless goat heads with gawking eyes. Signs advertised “Offal Brokers” and “Tripe Dressers,” as if these were perfectly normal businesses. Delivery trucks roared off to the city’s meat shops. Historical plaques proudly celebrated the good old days when locals buried plague victims right exactly here, in mass graves, and sold their unwanted wives at this very market, and subjected religious heretics to the archaic form of horse-assisted human butchery known as drawing and quartering.
Fergus’s restaurant, named St. John for the nearby Priory of the Knights of St. John, a still-active religious order that once sent Crusader monks to slaughter Muslims, sat on an unpromising street near a random pub offering “roasted ox kidney with mash and mustard sauce.” Crowds of off-duty butchers, wearing white coveralls drenched in bright red animal blood, from their graveyard shifts, smoked cigarettes and devoured eggs at sidewalk tables. A wire fence surrounded the installation site of a new Urilift, a public urinal meant to rise hydraulically from the sidewalk every night at 10 P.M., when everyone stumbled drunk from the pubs. (Apparently it would vanish again at 4 A.M., every morning.)
I’d seen pictures of the old St. John building, gray and black and white, so I recognized it immediately. But the sense of disorientation began the moment I scanned a menu pinned up outside: plain white paper, black type, and a list of unfamiliar dishes presented without explanation, as if they were just the ancient standards of some long-established culture. Pigeon & Swede; Stinking Bishop & Potatoes; Roast Middlewhite; Cockles, Bacon & Laverbread; Roast Bone Marrow & Parsley Salad; Tripe, Carrots & Bacon; Smoked Eel, Bacon & Mash. And sure, a few less challenging foods, but even they carried this unusual style: Roast Beef, Turnips & Aioli; Salsify, Watercress & Poached Eggs; Skate & Monk’s Beard. The disorientation deepened when I sought to enter and yet could not decide if I should use the unmarked door to the right or the car-sized tunnel to the left, leading toward double glass doors. Choosing the latter, I passed through a second set of double glass doors into an equally curious industrial space with non-parallel walls painted stark white, black metal stairs leading both up and down from odd corners of the room, absolutely no art anywhere, and a chest-height metal bar, with a bartender on an elevated platform, so that I felt as if I’d shrunk to child size, straining upward to catch the bartender’s attention. When I failed, I used my cell phone to call Fergus’s media-relations person, with whom I’d arranged the whole trip, securing even agreement that I’d learn to cook from Fergus himself, right in the St. John kitchen.
“You say you’ve come to the restaurant?” she said now, as if surprised.
“As promised, right?”
“Okay. Right.”
“But you knew that.”
“Yep, yep. Right! Okay! So, let me see if I can find Fergus.”
Ten minutes later, he appeared at my shoulder: graying, buzzcut blond hair; round and ruddy-red face a little blank due to his Parkinson’s disease. Crushingly hip black plastic eyeglasses magnified Fergus’s pale blue eyes, and his blue canvas smock—over a crumpled white button-down shirt—made him look like an avantgarde midcentury sculptor. He’d had major brain surgery a few years earlier, apparently controlling his Parkinson’s symptoms so that he didn’t tremble like Muhammad Ali. But when it came time to express himself to me, Fergus’s head and left arm snapped backward and to the left, as if grabbing at words hidden behind his left shoulder. Hurling them forward again, he spoke in a curiously old-fashioned mumble, as if he’d stepped out of The Canterbury Tales to ask if I’d like a “mumble-mumble.”
“Hmm?”
“Fernet mumble?”
“I’m afraid I don’t …”
Fergus raised one finger and both eyebrows, like a circus performer pantomiming Not to Worry, All Shall Be Revealed. “A miracle,” he said. With a wave of the hand, he had that towering bartender pour two shots of Fernet Branca, an 80 proof Italian herbal liqueur, jet black in the glass.
I was already in a vertiginous blur of half-comatose, half-speedy nausea, and I wondered aloud if I could really risk a cocktail just then, but Fergus said, “Cures all known ailments. Might sort you out.”
So I drank my shot and felt a kind of calm sweeping over me. Then Fergus said, “Well, any interest in seeing the kitchen?”
“Ah … well, of course. Right?”
“Righty ho. So, let’s go.”
Crossing the white St. John dining room, Fergus entered the kitchen but stayed carefully out of the way of the men doing the actual cooking. In one corner of that small, busy room—a room in which I imagined Fergus and I would soon dive into chopping, cutting, and cooking together—I saw hotel pans piled with beef hearts bigger than cantaloupes. A veteran chef from another restaurant, working without pay to get his ticket punched, set each heart on a cutting board, trimmed away the hard white fat and gristle, sliced apart the heart chambers, cut off the big gaping veins and arteries, and then cut the dark red heart meat into slices thin enough for char-grilling. I paid special attention, so that I’d be a quick study when it came to be my turn; same with another outside chef, also volunteering, working through a box of lamb kidneys. One by one, I noted, he set those little red organs on the counter, cut out these weird white lobes inside—I can do that, I thought—and moved the kidneys to another tray, where he’d toss them with a spicy dry rub. A heavily tattooed deliveryman arrived carrying a white plastic crate with an aged side of beef that also happened to be dripping blood all over the restaurant floor and down the deliveryman’s ornately decorated forearms (not aged enough, apparently). Cursing in rage, the deliveryman wiped himself off, left the room, and returned with a crate full of skinless rabbits looking more like headless, footless greyhounds that had been killed mid-run, legs extended. Another white plastic case carried pigeons individually wrapped in plastic—little dark lumps the size of your fist.
A third cook—on the payroll, this one—chopped up what Fergus told me were “chitterlings, pigs’ poop pipes,” to be fried in duck fat and served with radishes. A fourth chef, slicing a big deer’s liver, paused to show us where a bullet had plowed through, leaving an ugly hole. Then Fergus cracked open the heavy door of St. John’s walk-in refrigerator, and I ducked as I trailed him inside, entering a cold low-ceilinged space where packed shelves carried chickens still attached to their own heads and feet, a complete leg of a lamb, looking very much like a leg, and massive piles of marrow bones. Figuring I’d have to run in here chasing some ingredient or other, I made mental notes of the pork livers wrapped in muslin cloth just like my own at home—dried in a mixed cure of salt and sugar. I took notice of the big sheets of pig skin, too, waiting to be cut up and cooked either as cracklings or as a way to add gelatin—and thus body—to various soups, stocks, and braises. A big bucket brimmed with suckling pigs: pretty pink-skinned babies, still looking young and happy, as if they’d been napping in the sun when the power went out.
Back in the dining room, we took a table and talked for a while, and then Fergus ordered us a round of Champagne and several dishes for lunch, which I considered unnecessary, but a fine way to warm up toward our cooking sessions. The St. John dining room had begun to fill, and Fergus raised his glass and we both drank.
&n
bsp; Then he said, “So, what brings you … to London?”
“What?”
“London. All that way, California. Anything particular? Friends? Family?”
“They didn’t tell you?”
“Me?”
“I’ve come to write an article. About you.”
“Oh, right.”
“I hope that’s okay.”
“Of course! But that’s all? That’s why you’ve come?”
“No other business.”
Fergus’s eyes widened. “Right.” He fell into thought. Then he said, in a gentle and considerate way, “Well, don’t fret. We’ll make sure you get everything you need, and that you have a good time. What do you need, anyway?”
I mentioned that I’d hoped we might cook together. Before he answered, we both looked down at a plate of duck hearts, little brown marbles atop a soft white mound of celeriac purée. Ox heart arrived next, thin sheets of that grilled meat, with a strongly flavored salad. Yet another plate held four upright marrow bones, each about three inches tall. These were slender veal leg bones—“like a lady’s ankle,” as Fergus described them, explaining that adult beef bones would look more like they’d come from rugby players. And then, at last, those chitterlings, the pig’s poop pipes, “though they’ve been brined quite far away from all that,” Fergus insisted, as if this could put me at ease.
Fergus emptied his Champagne glass, so I did the same, noticing that it was now only 11:30 A.M. Then the waiter set down a bottle of Burgundy and filled glasses for us both.
“Well, stab a heart,” Fergus said.
I found the marrow dish especially intoxicating—picking up a roasted bone, digging a knife into the marrow hole, scooping out the whitish-gray muck and then spreading it on toasted bread. Coarse gray sea salt lay in a pile on the plate, and the idea was to grab a pinch, sprinkle it atop the marrow on your bread, do the same with some of that parsley, and enjoy. I tried the ox heart next, and positively loved the dense, intense muscle fiber. So I asked Fergus the difference between this and pig heart.
“Right,” he said. “Well, by nature being hearts, hearts are the heart of the beast … ox heart really expresses … ox.”
He paused, as if worried that this sounded flip, or like a game he was playing with me. “Little duck hearts express … ducks, going bubumpbubumpbumpbubump. It’s an extraordinary expression of the beast they come from …”
He paused again, deep in thought. Then he finished the first glass of wine and poured another and topped off my own glass and said, “I like organs. They look like themselves.”
“Like kidneys,” I offered, thinking you’d certainly never mistake one for a rib eye.
“Kidneys,” Fergus said, visibly brightening. “There’s a magical squeak, when you bite them … and then a … give.”
Fergus spoke in curious stops and starts, like an experimental jazz drummer so contrapuntal you couldn’t tap your foot. He told me about spleen, too: “It’s wonderful, it swells in …”
“It swells in your mouth?”
“In love. It swells in love, which can be seen as a good thing or a bad thing, depending …” Pause. “That’s the brilliant thing about offal. You find these textures you don’t find in anything else. A squeak …”
Pause.
“… andthenagiiivve …”
Pause.
“We devil the kidneys … usually,” he said. “In well-seasoned flour … It’s my birthday breakfast. It sets you up very very well. And I believe it’s that squeak that acts as a sort of … Cupid to me. Like brains, it’s a textural experience.”
“Brains, right. Okay, so why don’t we talk about brains. What culinary potential do you see bound up in a brain?”
“Well, we poach them very gently, separate the lobes, and then … we bread and fry them. You get this crunch and then this rich, creamy give and … gna!”
“Gna?” It appeared to be a moan of delight.
“Maybe a green sauce, cornichons, capers … it’s sort of the Gna! Theory of Brains, so … that you have a couple of bites and it’s so delicious and it’s so rich and you sort of … gna! In fact, there’s some …”
Long pause, twitching.
“… story …”
Even longer pause, and even more twitching.
“Someone said, oh, I can’t remember, ‘… all those memories!’ “
“In a brain?”
“Ah!” He smiled. “There we go. But look, there’s one thing … sometimes it’s sort of entertainment for City boys in here. ‘Who’s going to eat the most scary thing on the menu!’ And that gives you the wrong … Nothing’s scary. It’s all delicious.”
Flying home, back to Liz and the girls, I felt that he was right: everything I’d eaten, in both of his restaurants, was indeed delicious. I even tried to emulate him, for a little while. Certain ingredients made that easy: my gigantic grassfed cow’s heart, for example, looked and tasted much like the ox heart at St. John, and I loved eating it. To this day, it’s a favorite dish of mine. But soon I felt a very different thought overtaking me, especially when I looked through my livers and my kidneys from those grown-up cows and pigs, in my freezer: Fergus used none of these things. He cooked all the parts of animals, yes, but he didn’t cook all the parts of any one animal. Duck hearts, sure, but not chicken hearts; ox hearts, but only from a single farm in Ireland; adult pig hearts, never, although sometimes the heart of a suckling pig; marrow bones, indeed, but only from calves, and therefore never from the same adult cattle providing the hearts or the big sides of beef, and therefore also imported from Denmark, given that England no longer had much of a veal industry at all. And so on: calf liver, but not cow liver; lamb’s brains, but not pig’s brains. Fergus was indeed masterful with unusual proteins, but his real gift—the quiet, unsung source of his power, I decided—lay rather in the clarity with which he’d realized his own idiosyncratic vision. Organs and extremities contributed to that vision, but not as ends in themselves. They were ingredients, rather, props in the generation of an alternate reality, a parallel universe in which British history had taken a slightly different turn about a century back, arriving at a slightly different present tense in which small English farms coexisted with the monstrous modern London, creek and hedge-row still teemed with squirrels to braise and eels to bake. Which was nice and everything, but applicable to Northern California only as an abstract example, not a concrete map for how to eat, or to feed one’s family.
9
My Kung Fu Is Not Strong
Back before we got married, Liz and I presented her sister, Debbie, with a birthday present of Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook. Neither Keller’s name nor his three-Michelin-star restaurant meant a thing to me at the time. Judy suggested the present; Liz purchased it; I paid little attention; and I knew scarcely more about Keller when Jon, the liquor exec from the Menu Period, gave me Keller’s second cookbook as a gift. Named for the casual bistro Keller had opened just down the road from the French Laundry, Bouchon struck me initially as a cookbook not to use but to set on the coffee table, telling guests that you’d been to the mountaintop. (An ancient genre, according to Jane Kramer, who reports seeing sixteenth-century versions, at the home of the French-cookbook historians Mary and Philip Hyman, of what the Hymans called the “here’s what’s happening at the table where you’ll never be allowed to sit” cookbooks.) I felt a little stunned, too, by Keller’s utter lack of even the slightest nod toward Chez Panisse in Bouchon. No mention of Alice, nor of the hallowed California principles of seasonality, locality, and sustainability. I found myself thinking, in a grouchy mood, Who do you think you are!? Don’t you know Queen Alice reigns in these parts? Flipping through The French Laundry, as I did at Debbie’s house one evening, only worsened my outrage: in a reference to a French chef working in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s, Keller described him as the first chef in America to seek out fine produce from local farmers. It was like Keller imagined himself working not in the Californ
ia that Alice built—not in a bountiful landscape full of boutique bakers and specialty farmers eager to sell him great ingredients—but in some timeless, placeless hautecuisine tradition reaching back through his own mentor, Roland Henin (currently the head chef of the Yosemite National Park concessions, in a truly weird tangling of destinies), to every great French chef who had ever lived.
Now, however, I found myself a little intrigued: Keller was almost the perfect anti-Alice, the ideal post-Fergus. If Alice had embodied the maternal home-cooking lineage through which I’d gotten started, and if Fergus dominated a more experimental approach for which I simply did not have either the adventurous palate or the catholic audience, perhaps I could see Keller as the embodiment of the great chef-driven lineage running directly from Temples of Gastronomy like Paris’s Taillevent to the New York restaurants of Alain Ducasse and Daniel Boulud, and straight on up to the French Laundry. Perhaps I could see Keller, in other words, as my link to an unassailably classic tradition, the study of which might qualify as unassailably meaningful. As for Bouchon itself, it did feel a bit like Manhattan’s Balthazar or Pastis, a perfect Hollywood-worthy replica of a Lyon bistro, plopped into a different world—perhaps even more so in that Bouchon’s world was Keller’s hometown, the sleepy agricultural village of Yountville. And the food: Blanquette de Veau; Poule au Pot; Steak Frites; Quiche Lorraine; bistro classics presented in rigorous homage to an urban French restaurant form; the Napa Valley, a coincidental backdrop.
