How to Cook Like a Man

by Daniel Duane

  I get a hot kind of adrenaline rush when I’ve got a new obsession, and that’s how I felt as I banged out every Ad Hoc at Home recipe not just once but two or three times, taking care to practice every core technique, challenging myself like an athlete. I cut vegetables with a ruler, to make sure my half-inch dice was precisely half an inch. I roasted chickens and Rack of Pork Arista. I sautéed broccoli raab and I oil-poached sturgeon and I braised short ribs. There were soups and there was vinegar; there were even soft-boiled eggs. I never cooked a meal without a gigantic pot of boiling water for my daily practice of “big-pot blanching.” I even salted my food in precisely Keller’s recommended manner, grabbing big pinches of his recommended brand, Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt (in perfect accordance with Gopnik’s assertion that “the salt fetish” is driven primarily by our desire “to bond with the pro cooks”).

  Soon, I’d developed a distinctive daydream in which somebody I’d invited to a dinner party would call moments before arriving, asking permission to bring a friend. This friend would turn out to be Keller, and I would be trussing a chicken to roast, from Ad Hoc at Home, when Keller walked in. I would not worry about the taste of my food because I would trust Keller to enjoy having a meal made for him in the warmth of a nice home. Instead, I would ache for Keller to notice that I was sautéing with a light touch and salting with my fingers and using vinegar to bring up the acid profile. I would ache, in other words, for the Seventeenth Chefy Lama to smile that beneficent Zen Master smile and say what Yoda says to Luke Skywalker in The Return of the Jedi: “No more training do you require. Already know you, that which you need.” (Luke’s reply, while we’re at it: “Then I am a Jedi?”)

  Nora Ephron, I knew, had suffered similar cookbook-motivated crushes, including one on Craig Claiborne. Ephron writes of wondering what she’d even cook, if Claiborne ever came to dinner, and whether or not it should come from one of his own cookbooks. (“Perhaps there was a protocol for such things,” she wrote. “If so, I didn’t know what it was.”) Claiborne did come for dinner, in the end, and Ephron even got invited to Claiborne’s house, but it was her later obsession with a cook named Lee Bailey, whom she met through the gossip columnist Liz Smith, that felt so deeply like my Keller thing: “I became Lee’s love slave, culinarily speaking,” Ephron writes, admitting that he “replaced all my previous imaginary friends in the kitchen… . I began to osmose from a neurotic cook with a confusing repertory of ethnic dishes to a relaxed one specializing in faintly Southern food.” Then, the clincher, proving we’re all a bit alike: Bailey, Ephron confesses, “was, in his way, as close to a Zen master as I’ve ever had.”

  Ad Hoc at Home turned into a bestseller, winning awards and forcing me into the classic psychology of the fan: believing there to be something special about your own fandom; insisting, to yourself, that you loved the hero way before he became huge (utterly preposterous, in the case of Keller and myself); imagining even a deeper understanding of the artist than other fans could possibly share, and feeling certain the hero could recognize this understanding, if only you could meet.

  We did finally meet, when the magazine for which I worked asked me to put together something called Five Meals Every Man Should Master. The idea was to find a chef who could teach us, in exquisite detail, five meals to cover every key occasion in a guy’s life, from the hot date to the poker game. For reasons I still do not understand, Keller agreed to be that chef. I’d been a journalist for a long time, and I’d never really felt nervous about meeting my subjects. But I felt intensely nervous about meeting Keller because my magazine assignment was, first and foremost, a way to pass through those French Laundry kitchen doors on personal business, so that I could find a way to gauge if my skills were even barely adequate.

  So I hardly believed it when I heard that “Chef” would spend two hours with me, from ten to noon, on a Monday, at the French Laundry. Chef “wondered” if I could stay for lunch and, if so, if I’d like to eat what we cooked together or, rather, if I’d like something sent over from the restaurant.

  Were they crazy?

  There was even a voice mail request about attire: Chef would like to know what he should be wearing. Casual? Or chef’s whites?

  I almost wept: Keller, asking me what to wear!

  I left early on the appointed morning, constantly checking the traffic on my iPhone. I drove across the Bay Bridge, through Berkeley, and up toward Napa. I drove too fast and then I worried about crashing, or getting pulled over and thus arriving late, having to explain to Keller that I’d been arrested. When I got to Yountville and parked my crappy Subaru across the street from the French Laundry, a lovely young woman awaited me out front. Her name was Kristine, and she put me right at ease while leading me into the little white bungalow where Keller’s father had lived. The bungalow still flew the American flag out front, along with a flag from the United States Marine Corps. We stepped through a small living room with simple furniture and a Bocuse d’Or 2009 commemorative object. Beyond that lay a sun-filled kitchen—not big—that I later learned to be an exact replica of the Bocuse d’Or competition kitchen. After his father died, Keller had had the home’s kitchen redone as a Bocuse d’Or practice space: Keller himself had been selected as the American team’s president that year; his French Laundry chef Tim Hollingsworth had beaten twenty-four other American chefs to be the team’s head chef, and Keller had given him months of paid leave to practice.

  Suddenly, I saw Keller himself, talking on his iPhone, tall and slender in his fresh chef’s whites. He shut off the phone and gave it to Kristine and extended a hand while I set down my pile of his cookbooks. We’d already settled on our five dishes: Roast Chicken; that Bouchon Bavette Steak; Rack of Lamb with Asparagus; Pork and Beans; and a sandwich that Keller had earlier developed for the Adam Sandler character in the movie Spanglish, a BLT with melted cheese and a fried egg. Keller was instantly warm and friendly, but he was all business, too, asking what sort of recipes I wanted for this article. What format should they take? Should they be conventional, full-blown formal recipes? Or something simpler?

  Before I could stop myself, I blurted out that I just loved the recipe format in Bouchon and Ad Hoc at Home, and that I’d personally found these recipes a great gift to the reader. I suspected instantly that I’d given the wrong answer—that Keller, like Alice, would chafe at a love for even his own recipes. Reaching up to a shelf, he flipped opened the cookbook he said that he’d found most inspiring in his own journey, Fernand Point’s Ma Gastronomie. Looking through it with him, I found the recipes deeply worrisome in their sheer Frenchiness, and frighteningly imprecise. Oeufs à la Gelée, for example: “Poach 2 eggs for each person to be served, and prepare a jelly with pigs’ feet and some veal and chicken bones. In the bottom of a mold arrange a little foie gras and the poached eggs… . Pour in the jelly, allow it to set, and serve chilled.”

  I broke into a cold sweat just thinking about all the unexplained techniques. (Now, okay, wait, does he really want the pig’s feet and the chicken bones fixed inside the jelly?) But then Keller flipped to a less disturbing example, for Truffle Salad: “Brush and clean thoroughly some fresh truffles from Périgord. Slice them on a mandoline and marinate them for ten minutes in a mixture of lemon juice, salad oil, salt and pepper. Serve immediately with some foie gras on the side.”

  “See, I love that,” Keller told me. “You have to have confidence to be able to do that. That’s like two sentences! But it becomes yours precisely because it’s not like, ‘Take five hundred grams of truffle, add, you know, fifteen centiliters of lemon juice, it’s none of that stuff. That’s why this book was so beautiful to me; it allows you to be the chef.” Keller told me that when he began writing The French Laundry Cookbook, he actually hoped to work in the same vein, creating a cookbook without recipes. His editor wouldn’t have it, so he’d gone with the more traditional American recipe format—with a few exceptions that he wanted me to see. Keller then picked up my copy of The French Laundry Cookbook and
I said, preemptively, so as not to be caught out, “That’s the only one of these books I really haven’t cooked from much. I’ve only made the veal stock.”

  Just as these words came out of my mouth, the book fell open, in Keller’s hands, to the veal stock recipe. He paused to look at it, knowing what a claim I‘d just made. With a single finger, he pointed to a lone brown stain on the page: “Look at that,” he said. “You really did make it.”

  Having failed a first imaginary test, by revealing my recipe-love, I was thrilled to have passed a second. When it came time to roast the chicken, therefore, I tried to double down by asking if I might truss the bird on my own, with Keller’s supervision. I’d trussed dozens of chickens, by that point in my life, all according to the identical description offered in Bouchon and in Ad Hoc at Home. But Keller stopped me almost as soon as I’d begun.

  He said, “Wait, is that how you understood my instructions?” Keller waved me aside, pulled my string right off the chicken, threw it away, and cut a fresh strand. Then he demonstrated a trussing technique I’d never seen anywhere. I was already deeply confused when Keller finished by tying a slipknot, something else I’d never done. Then he cut the string, untrussed the bird, offered me a piece of string, and told me to give it a try. I did fine, until that slipknot. Keller demonstrated—this loop, that strand, pull snug—and I tried it myself, and I failed. So Keller snipped off the string again, cut another length, and I tried again. I failed again. Instead of growing tense about the time, however, or frustrated by my dumb fingers, Keller appeared calmed by this, as if happy to recognize a genuine teachable moment, and to embrace it—as if he were thinking, Ah, here we go, the real thing. For exactly eighteen minutes of his life, Keller ignored everything in the world except making sure that I mastered a simple knot. When I finally did—when I finally got it right, and successfully trussed that chicken—he responded as though the victory belonged to both of us, and we could now carry on.

  Something similar happened in our second cooking session, at Keller’s Manhattan restaurant, Per Se. We’d developed a certain familiarity with each other by that point. I’d faced up to the inescapable fact that people like me aren’t even really cooks, to people like him. We simply cannot get the infinite hours of the requisite repetition, searing a thousand fish fillets a week, for years on end, or trimming fifty racks of lamb a day, every day. But Keller let me know, somehow, that he recognized and appreciated my love for even the smallest technical details of his craft. When it came time to make that steak, for example, at Per Se, Keller playfully insisted that I notice everything down to the way he tilted the skillet while flipping the meat, letting all that hot oil pool out of the way, to on one side, so it wouldn’t spatter. When it came time to baste the steak, he plopped half a stick’s worth of butter on top of the meat, letting it melt slowly and then foam into the pan. He tilted the skillet again, and then he set a smashed garlic clove into the butter, along with a rosemary sprig. Then Keller asked if I’d like to do the basting, spooning the butter from its pool up over the steak, keeping the topside of the beef warm while infusing it with flavor. Once I began, clanking that spoon against the metal pan, scooping up the butter, Keller laughed and took the pan from me.

  “Listen carefully,” he said, with an affectionate, teasing smile. The rhythm of his own basting—of his own spoon, clanking with each scoop of butter—had a distinctly faster and far more macho rhythm, almost like insistent knocking on a door.

  “So what are you doing this weekend, anyway?” Keller asked me.

  Right on the tip of my tongue was “Not much, want to get a beer?” But I said, “Nothing really, just hanging out.”

  I realized that we would soon part ways for good, and I wasn’t quite certain that I’d gotten what I’d come for. So I said, “Hey, can I ask you one last thing? I’d love your advice on where exactly I should go next, in my cooking. I mean, I’ve really cooked almost everything from Bouchon and Ad Hoc at Home. So maybe The French Laundry Cookbook next? I feel pretty ready for that.”

  In hindsight, I can see that I badly wanted Keller to say, “Absolutely, Daniel. Having watched you work in my very own kitchens, I can see that you’ve mastered the basics and you’re ready for the next level. Onward, my son! Onward to greatness!”

  But Keller thought about the question, doing me the honor of taking it seriously. Then he said, “You know what I think? I think you ought to just stick with the kind of food we’ve been doing together.”

  I felt stung, of course, taking this to mean that he didn’t think I was ready for the French Laundry, that I ought to stick with the basics a little longer. At first, I ignored the advice. I found myself thinking about our Fernand Point exchange, and Keller’s remark about how a recipe “becomes yours,” allowing you to test yourself against it. As I understood this, Keller meant that a cook never quite absorbs a hyper-detailed recipe—having to return, always, to the book, and to the precise measurements. In that way, a cook never broke the recipe addiction, never trusted himself to create. Recipes like Point’s, on the other hand, functioned more like a friendly voice saying, “Hey, why don’t you slice up a few truffles and serve them with a piece of foie?”

  That wasn’t a recipe, see, that was a suggestion. Following it required filling in so many details that the finished product wouldn’t be Point’s in any meaningful sense; it would be yours. You’d also remember it—not as a recipe to look up, but as a move you’d once made, and could easily make again. I’m not drawn to poached eggs in aspic, and I knew I’d have to sell my old truck to buy a meaningful number of Périgord truffles, what with all my Oregon truffles long gone. So I devised a solution of my own: creating, for my own use, the French Laundry Cookbook that Keller had wanted to write in the first place. Keller, then, could become my own Fernand Point. Starting with a dish called Clam Chowder, I first followed every instruction, nose in the book. Then, a few days later, I made it again, but this time from handwritten notes I’d made in the spirit of Point: “Sweat open some clams in white wine and herbs, incorporate the juice into a cream sauce, spoon a little sauce onto each serving plate, and top with a panfried cod cake, then a piece of sautéed cod filet, and, finally, a ‘chowder’ made from the reserved clams.” After making this dish a few times, I threw away even my handwritten notes. That’s when the dish became my own—not because I could make it from memory, but simply because I knew how to sweat open shellfish, make a cream sauce, fry some fish cakes, and sauté filets, and I could now try this with any fish combination that struck my fancy.

  Looking for another French Laundry recipe to master, however, two things happened: first, I discovered a small essay in which Keller described precisely the chicken-trussing method he’d taken all that time to teach me, complete with the slip knot. Learning that very technique, it turned out, had served as a critical turning point in Keller’s own apprenticeship. It had also become a key metaphor in his vision of the culinary craft—exemplifying the foundational skills upon which all fine cooking depended. Perhaps I could tell myself that Keller, in passing this knot along to me, had paid me the only compliment that made any real sense: acknowledging my authentic desire to begin the real journey of the cook.

  The second thing that happened, when I went looking for another French Laundry recipe, was that I couldn’t settle on one I wanted to prepare three times in a single week, with Liz for my only audience. Liz herself had no problem with it: I’d gotten my cooking so controlled, after those visits with Keller, that I no longer made much of a mess. Liz and the girls even enjoyed those meals, excessive as they were, for weeknight meals at home. My resistance to moving forward, I concluded, had to be coming from within, which made me rethink Keller’s parting advice. Perhaps he hadn’t really meant that I was unprepared to learn fine-dining cuisine; perhaps he simply knew that fine-dining cuisine didn’t make much aesthetic sense for the daily life of a young family. The food I’d cooked with Keller—Ad Hoc food, in essence, the food I already knew how to make—very
much did.

  13

  What We Talk About When We Talk

  About Our Last Supper

  Anthony Bourdain’s introduction to My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals, a coffee table book edited by Melanie Dunea, argues that chefs, “more often than not, have dined widely and well. They know what a fresh white truffle tastes like. The finest beluga, for them, holds no mystery. Three-hundred-dollar-a-pound otoro tuna and the most unctuous cuts of Kobe beef are, to them, nothing new.” As a result, Bourdain writes, when chefs play that parlor game known as My Last Supper, kicking around visions of what they’d want to eat before facing the firing squad, “we seem to crave reminders of simpler, harder times. A crust of bread and butter … poor-people food.” Crusty bread does appear with impressive frequency in the fifty meals that follow, but so do all of the aforementioned luxury foods. Beluga and other caviars, for example, make Thomas Keller’s list (a half kilo of osetra), Martin Picard’s (a whole kilo), Jacques Pépin’s (an even ton), and also the lists of Hélène Darroze, Guillaume Brahimi, Anita Lo, and Charlie Trotter. Keller and Lo both like the sound of a little otoro, and truffles appear on the lists of Pépin, Eric Ripert, Darroze, Picard, Masa Takayama, Gary Danko, Jonathan Waxman, Scott Conant, Angela Hartnett, and Paul Kahan. Foie gras, that other marquee luxury food, pops up on the death-meal lists of Darroze, Brahimi, Conant, Lo, and Picard, and as for Bourdain’s reminders of “simpler, harder times,” Jean-Georges Vongerichten wants “a royal banquet at the Grand Palace in Bangkok” in the company of the king of Thailand, while Mario Batali self-prescribes eight or ten seafood courses at an outdoor trattoria on Italy’s Amalfi coast, in the humble company of international TV star Bourdain and Hollywood screenwriter and novelist Jim Harrison (as well as Batali’s whole family, to be fair), plus live music from both an REM-U2 combo and a John McLaughlin–Paco de Lucía reunion. Bourdain’s own last meal revolves around Fergus’s signature starter, the one I’d eaten at St. John, in London: “Roast bone marrow with parsley and caper salad, with a few toasted slices of baguette and some good sea salt.” You can’t argue with the poverty associations there: Paleolithic campsites bristle with cracked marrow bones, including Neanderthal bones, early evidence of that eternal human impulse to eat the competition. But Bourdain wants this dish prepared by Ripert, Batali, Gordon Ramsay, and Fergus himself, right at St. John, a star-chef quartet inside the world’s coolest restaurant, putting a distinctly non-poor-people spin on things.