by Daniel Duane
Soon, however, I found myself seduced by the photographs in Bouchon, the restaurant elegance of the food and the casual professionalism of this Keller guy and his gorgeous girlfriend, shown relaxing over red wine and mussels, within Keller’s own place of business. Not one Chez Panisse cookbook, I realized, offered a single photograph of the restaurant, a chef, or even a plated Chez Panisse meal. Not one, in nine books. Everything about their conception seemed to encourage one’s own imagination. Meditating on such images now, in Bouchon, I sought out and found similar ones in The French Laundry, over at Debbie’s house—slightly out of focus, shot from eye level in a blur, as if to simulate being in the French Laundry kitchen, during service. The whole idea was to fuel the consumer’s love affair with restaurants and professional chefs, and with remarkable speed those photographs ushered me toward what Nicholas Lemann has called toque envy: hoping that I might become “practically indistinguishable from a real chef, except that—really just a tiny difference—you would be cooking at home instead of at a restaurant.” Lemann pins me like a lepidopterist’s butterfly when he writes that “chef has become, to a certain type of urban adult, what astronaut is to a seven-year-old boy—the standard fantasy occupation.” Bouchon didn’t just offer photographs, either; it offered magically precise instructions for the simplest of salads, explaining every nuance of every step and technique required to get bistro-level results. I began to think that, even if we weren’t going to have huge dinner parties anymore, perhaps Liz would let me try to impress her parents, the greatest restaurant-goers I knew. They’d gotten me started in the first place, I’d come a long way, they’d actually been to Bouchon, and yet I hadn’t cooked for them once, ever.
Doug and Judy had moved to California by this point: sold their Massachusetts home, rented a San Francisco pied-à-terre, and bought a golf-resort condo in the Napa Valley. We’d since eaten Judy’s great cooking at both of these places—San Francisco and Napa—and Doug had treated us all to many restaurant meals. So I suggested hosting them.
Liz agreed, several weeks passed, and nothing happened.
I suggested it again.
Liz agreed, and several more weeks passed, and nothing happened.
So I asked: Baby, what gives? They don’t want to eat with us? They don’t believe I can cook?
Liz claimed to have no idea what I was talking about.
“Well, just tell me what exactly happens when you invite them.”
“I don’t,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t really want my parents here for dinner.”
“I ask you to invite them, and you just don’t?”
“I’d be too tense.”
“About what, the messy kitchen?”
“Maybe.”
Or the house. “It’s the fucking house, isn’t it?”
Playing with fire, now: Liz had been freaking out about living space, all four of us crammed into 750 square feet, and she’d gotten this idea that we should convert her downstairs office into a new parental bedroom, getting us a little nighttime privacy and allowing each of our daughters to have a separate room. My own office could then become Liz’s office, and I could move my desk maybe into the basement, over between the two water heaters, by the gas furnace. She had a point; we did have a tiny place, and we did have growing children, and it really was stupid having our single biggest room occupied only by Liz’s tiny desk and laptop. New challenges looming, in other words; family needs going in new directions, well beyond that old “somebody cooks dinner while somebody changes the diapers” formulation. But I told Liz that, piss-filled Mason jars notwithstanding (she’d found a half-full one next to her computer keyboard, remnant of the sleep I was still getting in her office), we still had a palace by the standards of 99.9 percent of humanity. Liz replied that A) she wasn’t interested in 99.9 percent of humanity, and B) she didn’t think hoping for a grand total of 1,250 square feet to raise a family in made her a spoiled bitch. I pointed out that I would never, ever call her such a thing, and that I was pretty sure that Buddhism (or Hinduism, I didn’t know which) taught that all suffering came from desire, and that Liz could liberate me from all my suffering by letting go of her desire for another room. Liz then demonstrated, convincingly, that we spent more on wine and groceries every month than on our mortgage, and that I might therefore want to hold fire on desire-equals-suffering.
Liz doesn’t like a fight. She’s strong. She’s proud. But she’s a peacemaker, and she cares for me the best she can, so she found a compromise, threw me a bone: she got her mother to let me cook dinner at the Napa place. Bouchon’s Roast Chicken with Summer Squash and Tomatoes (Poulet Rôti aux Courgettes et Tomates Persillées), sounded easy enough, and it really wasn’t a bad choice, but I didn’t read the recipe until midday of the dinner in question, well after buying all the ingredients. Sitting in Judy’s immaculate white Napa kitchen, with only six hours to go, I noticed that right there, within the ingredients list, Keller called not just for “two chickens,” but for “two 2¼to 2½ pound chickens, brined for 6 hours as directed on page 192 and drained.” Everything still could’ve turned out fine if I’d recognized that—even in the narrowest definition of my own self-interest—the next little step in my private pursuit of technical improvement was far less important than delivering a safe, simple, no-fuss family meal, on time and with minimal domestic disruption. In other words, I could’ve chosen not to brine, but then I wouldn’t have learned the primary restaurant-chef lesson I thought Keller was offering to teach here, so I flipped to page 192 and saw not only crystal-clear instructions for immersing the birds in the brine, but a note that, for the brine itself, I’d have to turn to page 325, where the masterful brine recipe began, disappointingly, as follows: “It is a good idea to make this brine a day ahead and refrigerate it. Don’t add meat to warm brine and don’t leave it in brine longer than the specified time or it may become too salty.”
I hadn’t even begun, and I was two days behind. But I was also stunned by how much this Bouchon book had to teach, far more than any Chez Panisse book even attempted. And so, badly wanting to be man enough for Bouchon, I rummaged around in poor Judy’s beloved cabinets until I found a large pot to hold a gallon of water, a cup of salt, a dollop of honey, a dozen bay leaves, a half cup of garlic cloves, two tablespoons of black peppercorns, a few rosemary sprigs and a bunch of thyme, and some grated lemon zest. Then I waited anxiously while this took twenty minutes to boil, and only after it boiled did I wonder how the hell I was going to chill it fast enough to get the birds in. The only solution I could see at the time was to pull everything out of Judy’s well-stocked freezer—party ice, frozen peas, Ben & Jerry’s, frozen waffles—and shove them into Ziploc bags dug from a drawer and then immerse all those bags in the chicken brine, to cool it down. I still have no idea why I thought that was acceptable behavior, without permission, in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, but I did. Nor did I see a problem with clearing stuff from Judy’s fridge to make room for the big brining pot, once I’d added the chickens. So I did that, too, and then I up and left the house for several hours, off to the golf-resort spa—Jacuzzi, steam, magazine in the sunshine, thinking I’d pull together dinner at the last minute. When I returned at four thirty, still with a couple of hours before dinner, Doug and Judy were entertaining three surprise visitors: the adult daughter of a dearly missed Massachusetts couple, this daughter’s husband, and their baby. Judy felt awful that she’d double-booked her afternoon, arranging to play golf with some new California acquaintances. But Liz reassured her mother that we’d look after the Massachusetts couple, and that we could all have dinner together later. Judy left; and I went to look at the chicken, finding a surprise: Judy had taken her frozen goods out of my brine pot and put them all back in her freezer, so as not to ruin them. She’d also put my brining chickens out on the back porch in the ninety-degree sunshine, to make room for her milk, eggs, and butter to go back into the refrigerator. A quiet desperation overto
ok me. Feeling punked, humiliated, but still focused on triumph, I took the milk, eggs, and butter back out of Judy’s fridge, and put the chicken back in Judy’s fridge, and made a mess chopping all the herbs and vegetables for the zucchini and tomato sides. Then, sometime around five o’clock, I felt seized by the need to leave that mess in place and go buy some running shoes.
I didn’t even run, back then.
With dinner due on the table at seven o’clock sharp, to allow the Massachusetts couple time for the drive home to San Francisco, I put Liz in the station wagon and drove twenty minutes away to buy shoes that brought me no satisfaction, and for reasons that remain to this day utterly mysterious.
Then we drove back, I pulled the chickens out of the brine, I dumped out the brine, and I discovered that I was now supposed to truss the chickens, yet another move I’d never attempted, but would not consider forgoing. I went through twenty feet of string trying to follow the Bouchon directions, and once I’d gotten it I asked Liz to preheat the oven and put in the birds while I got banging on those vegetables. At ten minutes before seven, Judy came back and set the table frantically and asked how long until the chickens would be done (half an hour, minimum) and quietly started cleaning up the mess I’d created. The other couple, meanwhile, grew visibly anxious to escape.
Hannah, by that point, had completely turned her back on all food except hot dogs, macaroni-and-cheese, and chocolate croissants. So I let Liz whip together a kid dinner while we waited for the chicken. When the timer finally sounded, I opened the oven door, and the birds sat there cold and raw. The oven was not on.
I wanted to leave. I wanted simply to walk out the front door and never come back. I told myself this was everybody’s fault but my own.
“Time to order pizza,” I said to Liz.
The woman from Massachusetts said to a mortified Judy, “Hey, you know, it’s really okay. You don’t have to feed us. We should probably just head on back to the city.”
“No, no!” Judy said. “Don’t go anywhere! I’ll get steaks! Don’t leave!” She grabbed her keys and purse and bolted out the door. Just for the hell of it, I turned on the oven, put the birds in, and took a long solo walk in the cul-de-sac night. I saw a mother deer and a fawn, silhouetted against the blue-black Napa sky, out on the golf course. Liz put the girls to sleep while I was gone, and I returned so ashamed of myself I couldn’t make eye contact with our famished and frantic guests, who wished only to be liberated from this family psychodrama. Then we all heard Judy’s car honking as she sped up the block, sending out a sonic signal that help was on the way: Beep! Beep! She screeched into the garage, honked yet again, jumped out of the Infiniti, and ran inside yelling, “Steaks! I’ve got steaks!” Firing up a skillet, she slapped them in there, seared both sides, and set the steaks on the table, somewhere around 8:30 P.M. I set my cooked chickens right alongside, so that we could all eat in silence.
The next morning, Liz informed me that I was forever banned from cooking anything—ever again—at the Napa place. This stung far worse even than the menu crowd’s collapse, and I do believe it triggered in me a deeply helpful upwelling of confusion, a sense that I was still missing some critical lesson. But I responded in the short term by doubling down, certain that my salvation lay only in greater mastery. So I began reading every Bouchon recipe, beginning to end, a week in advance, to avoid nasty surprises. Then I’d lay out a plan of action, as with Keller’s Beef Bourguignon recipe: days for the beef stock; bottle of red wine reduced to a glaze with mountains of aromatic herbs and vegetables, to provide the base into which all that stock (and still more herbs and vegetables) would then go, for the braising liquid; covering this braising medium with cheesecloth before laying down the browned meat, so the browned meat could later be removed without odd overcooked bits of vegetable. Saturday morning, the day of the dinner, went toward shopping for Keller’s grand Bouchon shellfish platter, as my first course: giant pot of court bouillon simmering on the stove; said court bouillon used for cooking Dungeness crab, shrimp, clams. Oysters on the half-shell, mussels opened with a little steam. (“Honey,” I said, exasperated, “please don’t pull this bullshit again. There’s no way my shellfish is going to make you sick. Those crabs were trying to kill me five minutes ago.”) Part of being a pro chef, I figured, involved being one’s own sommelier; as a result, my drinking scene spiraled toward the dangerous fantasy that wine isn’t really booze, it’s a form of high culture, even art. Getting plastered on wine, according to this reasoning, has less in common with, say, getting plastered than it does with evenings at the opera. We’d already fed hot dogs to the kids, and they were happily amusing themselves, so I set out all that seafood and six bottles of wine with only Amy and Martin for guests. I told them we had a rare opportunity for a comparison tasting of non-malolactic Chardonnays from the Sonoma Coast against value-priced Chablis, and this made it almost impossible for them not to get stuffed, drunk, and drawn into our latest little domestic tension.
To wit: I’d suggested building that interior stair myself, to solve our space problems; Liz, as she repeated for Martin and Amy, wanted to say, “Go for it, baby, rip down the interior chimney and tear up our house for six months, make a hash of the stairs and then demolish them in a fit of perfectionist pique and redo them three times until you’re satisfied, it’s all good, the girls and I want to live right through it all and stand by our man,” but she ached for us to be one of those normal middle-class couples who got to hire contractors and have jobs done quickly and correctly. Amy agreed with Liz’s reassertion that this still did not make her a spoiled bitch. I told everyone the whole subject (of the stair, not Liz’s hypothetical spoiled bitchiness) was moot until we knew exactly where to put a new staircase in the first place, and then baleful screaming erupted from down the hall, sounding like the younger of Amy’s two daughters. Amy sprinted in her stiletto heels into the girls’ room, and somehow generated a much bigger crash and then a loud, strange, anguished cry of her own. The rest of us ran to find Amy on the floor, eyes dilating, holding one of her wrists limp in the other hand. Hannah and Amy’s little girls, it turned out, had together discovered the totally hilarious game of spraying Hannah’s hair detangler—silicone lubricant, in mist form—all over the wood floor, to make it smell pretty. Thus, the little slam and cry, when Amy’s daughter had slipped and fallen; and likewise thus, Amy, upon rounding the bed to console her just-fallen youngest, finding herself horizontally airborne, the side of her head impacting in advance of her body. With a dark bruise already clouding her pretty cheekbone, Amy trembled and held that swelling wrist and looked me in the eye and said she was fine—that she really didn’t want to miss that braised beef.
Being human, I loved this; I felt a ferocious excitement at what Keller was bringing me. This food is so goddamned good that even after cracking her head on the floor, my guest wants more. But I suspected it wasn’t just the food; I suspected it was also Amy’s intuition about how desperately I wanted everybody to applaud my creations.
I’d only just ladled a serving into each bowl when Amy confessed that her arm really was beginning to hurt.
“Do you think I might have broken it?” she asked.
“Honey, you did not break your arm,” said Martin.
Looking at the wrist in question, I did see a visible bump forming fast, along one of the bones. So I faced a conundrum: lying about my true diagnosis, to make sure everybody experienced my culinary brilliance and then praised it effusively before Amy’s arm ruined the night, or putting the meal aside and focusing on a friend. (As Brillat-Savarin would have it, “To invite people to dine with us is to make ourselves responsible for their well-being for as long as they are under our roofs.”)
Speaking directly to me now, Amy said, “Dan, do you think I broke my arm?”
I looked at Martin, afraid to undermine my buddy.
He said, “Ames, come on! It’s not broken. Let’s eat!”
Amy appeared quite worried, holding that limp wrist.
I asked her to move the hand up and down, and she said that she could not.
“Okay, so here’s the truth,” I said. “I’m no doctor, but that’s a broken arm. It would totally make sense to find an ER.”
The next morning, we learned that Amy had not only broken her arm, she’d sustained a serious concussion. A few weeks later, suddenly slurring words and losing her balance, she had a new CAT scan revealing unresolved bleeding on her brain. Amy’s fine now, but I still felt awful about this when Liz finally made her own trip to the emergency room. She’d invited some architect friends to dinner, looking for advice on placement of the stairs, and although I’d planned my simplest menu in months, I did put out a full Bouchon seafood platter, as a main course. Thus, the fateful question, from these putative friends: “So, how do you guys see remodeling the house, long-term?”
“We don’t,” I said. And then, catching the look on Liz’s face, “I’m telling you, honey, the seafood is fresh.” (Which of course it was; my fish guys were heroes, beyond reproach.)
“That’s ridiculous, sweetheart. Of course we see remodeling, in the long term.”
“No we don’t,” I replied. “Grab some crab.”
She hesitated, stared at the claws groping off the dish. “How can you say that we never want to remodel anything, for the rest of our lives?”
“Crab.”
She glared at me, grabbed some.
“More. Go on, more crab. And I’m not saying never. I’m saying it’s not on the horizon, so why discuss it? Go on, crack the shell.”
So she did.
“Pull out the meat, with a fork.”
“Honey, I know how to eat crab.”
