The Table Comes First

by Adam Gopnik

  Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit faith that if I know how it is done I can show you how to do it. The premise of the recipe book is that these two things are naturally balanced; the secret of the recipe book is that they’re not. The space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how actually to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense. What kids make depends on what moms—or, now, dads—know: skills, implicit knowledge, inherited craft, buried assumptions, finger know-how that no recipe can sum up. The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by demonstration, a knack posing as a knowledge. We say, “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How exactly do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!” the honest answer is “Be me!” “What’s the recipe?” you ask the weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look, since the recipe is the totality of the activity, the real work. The recipe is to spend your life cooking.

  What is this thing, the recipe? Where did it come from, and how does it work? As the cookbooks keep coming, and we continue to turn down their pages—The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook, The Adaptable Feast, the ones with disingenuously plain names, like How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking (a good one, in fact, by Michael Psilakis), and the ones with elaborately nostalgic premises, like Dining on the B & O: Recipes and Sidelights from a Bygone Age—we begin to ask, What? Why? Patterns emerge. Changes over time. Once-familiar things depart from their pages silently, like Minerva’s owls. “Yield,” for instance, a word that appeared at the top of every recipe in every cookbook that my mother owned—“Yield: six portions,” or twelve, or twenty—is gone. Maybe it seemed too cold, too technical. In any case, the recipe no longer yields; it merely serves. “Makes six servings” or “Serves four to six as an appetizer” is all you get.

  Other good things go. Clarified butter (melted butter with the milk solids skimmed and strained) has vanished—Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, once used it like holy water—while emulsified butter (melted butter with a little water whisked in), thanks to Thomas Keller’s sponsorship, plays an ever-larger role. The cult of the cooking vessel—the wok, the tagine, the Dutch oven, the smoker, the hibachi, the Tibetan kiln, or the Inuit ice oven, or whatever—seems to be over. Paula Wolfert may have a book devoted to clay-pot cooking, but it feels too ambitious in advance; we have tried too many other modish pots, and know that, like Elvis’s and Michael Jackson’s chimps, after their hour is done they will live out their years forgotten and alone; they’ll end up on the floor of the closet, alongside the fondue forks and the spice grinder and the George Foreman grill. Even the imagery of cooking has changed. Sometime in the past decade or so, the actual eating line was breached. Now the cooking magazines and the cookbooks are filled with half-devoured dishes and cut-open vegetables. Michael Psilakis’s fine Greek cookbook devotes an entire page to a downbeat still-life of torn-off artichoke leaves lying in a pile; the point is not to entice the eater but to ennoble the effort.

  With their own torn leaves and unyielding pages, the newer cookbooks show two overt passions: one is for simplicity, the other is for salt. The chef’s cookbook from the fancy place has been superseded by the chef’s cookbook from the fancy place without the fancy-place food. David Waltuck, of the ever-to-be-mourned Chanterelle, started this trend with his Staff Meals from Chanterelle, and now we have Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home, and, from Mark Peel, of the Los Angeles hot spot Campanile, New Classic Family Dinners. (“Every single recipe was tested in Peel’s own home kitchen—where he has only one strainer, just like the rest of us, and no kitchen staff to clean up after him.”) Simplicity’s appeal as a religion is inherent. But the trend is in part also a reaction to the cult of complexity of the Ferran Adrià school of molecular cooks, with their cucumber foam and powdered octopus. Reformations make counterreformations as surely as right makes left; every time someone whitewashes a church in Germany, someone else paints angels on a ceiling in Rome.

  But simplicity remains the most complicated of all concepts. In one month we may stumble over six simple recipes for a ragout or Bolognese—plain spaghetti sauce, as it used to be known, when there was only one kind—with chicken livers or without, diced chuck roast or hamburger, white wine or red. Yet all movements in cooking believe themselves to be movements toward greater simplicity. (Even the molecular gastronomes believe that they are truly elemental, breaking things down to the atomic level.)

  Simplicity is the style, but salt is the ornamental element—the idea of tasting flights of salt being a self-satirizing notion that Swift himself couldn’t have come up with. The insistence on the many kinds of salt—not merely sea salt and table salt but hand-harvested fleur de sel, Himalayan red salt, and Hawaiian pink salt—is everywhere, and touching, because, honestly, it all tastes like salt. And now everyone brines. Brining, the habit of dunking meat in salty water for a bath of a day or so, seems to have first reappeared out of the koshering past in Cook’s Illustrated, sometime in the early nineties, as a way of dealing with the dry flesh of the modern turkey, and then spread like ocean water in a tsunami, until now both Keller and Peel are keen to brine everything: pork roasts, chicken breasts, shrimp, duck.

  Although brining is defended with elaborate claims to tenderness, what it really does is make food taste salty; we’re doing what our peasant ancestors did, making meat into ham. All primates like the taste of salt; that’s a feature, not a bug. Salted food demands a salty sweet. I read that in Spain recently one connoisseur had “a chocolate ganache coated in bread floating in a small pool of olive oil with fleur de sel sprinkled on it,” while we can now make pecan-and-salt caramel-cheesecake chocolate mousse with olive oil, and flaky-salt sticky peanut cookie bars for ourselves.

  The salt fetish has, I think, a deeper and more psychological cause, too: we want to bond with the pro cooks. Most of what a pro cook has to his advantage comes down to the same advantages that Caribbean sugarcane planters used to have: high heat and lots of willing slaves. (The slaves seem happy, anyway, until they escape and write that testimonal, or start that cooking blog.) But the pro cook also tends to salt a lot more than feels right to an amateur home cook; both the late Bernard Loiseau and the Boston cook Barbara Lynch have confessed that hyperseasoning, and, in particular, high salting, is a big part of what makes pro cooks’ food taste like pro cooks’ food. The poor home cook, with no hope of an eight-hundred-degree brick oven, and lucky if he can indenture a ten-year-old into peeling carrots, can still salt hard—and so salt, its varieties and use, becomes a luxury replacement, a sign of seriousness even when you don’t have the real tools of seriousness at hand.

  The desire to bond with the restaurant recipe book is a form of its own now. No one really believes, or believes deeply, that it is possible to cook at home in the way that we eat at restaurants. When we buy Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook—though I will admit that his short ribs are a steady thing—on the whole we grasp not only that you can’t do it, but that there is something gauche in even trying. It is a form of pretense, with a gauzy mask over your own features. You’re not Thomas Keller or Gordon Ramsay, or whoever else. So what’s the use? To read them is to grasp not a dish you’ll make, but a new sequence of possibility: we read a long recipe and take from it a single feature—a new way of reducing onions, the idea of mixing cubed potatoes with the green beans, a gesture rather than a gestalt—just as the woman in bed beside you reading Elle, though she will never buy anything she sees, finds new matches, current cuts, ways of rearranging. We read epics, and end with a single spice. One elegant idea—beurre monté, say (butter whipped with water)—sustains a hundred pages of perusing.

  What the restaurant cookbook never delivers is a way to replicate the restaurant experi
ence. Like the “home version” of the game show presented to departing contestants on the game shows of my childhood—The Match Game, or Hollywood Squares—the home version of a restaurant cannot even vaguely approximate the applauded version, whose whole point, after all, was that it was not taking place at home. Even Gene Rayburn and Paul Lynde had their unique quiddity, their aura of celebrity not reproducible by your sister, or even by your ambiguous uncle. There is no true home version of Password, and there is no way to put Balthazar between hard covers, The Balthazar Cookbook notwithstanding. The home games’ made-up celebrities—Harry Holsum; Stella Starlit; Slick Nick; Susie Slurp; Tim Type; Alice Actress—were mocking you, in effect, for imagining that you could reproduce the thrill of the show at home. When it comes to Thomas Keller or Ferran Adrià, we are all Susie Slurp, each one a Harry Holsum.

  Yet the urge to meld identities with the pros is tied to a desire to get something out of a cookbook besides another recipe. For beneath these conscious enthusiasms lies a deep new uncertainty that complicates the traditional relationship between the recipe book and its reader. In this, the Great Age of Disaggregation, all the old forms are being smashed apart and looted like piñatas at a birthday party. The cookbook isn’t spared. The Internet has broken what once seemed like the natural membrane of recipes, just as it has ruptured the newspaper’s old containment of news stories. You can find pretty much any recipe you want online now. If you need a recipe for mustard-shallot sauce or boeuf à la mode, you enter a few search terms, and there it is.

  So the old question “What’s the recipe for?” gives way to “What’s the cookbook for?,” and this existential crisis has moved the cookbook, like everything else these days, toward the memoir, the confessional, the recipe as self-revelation. Barbara Lynch’s preface to her Stir sounds like the opening lines of Goodfellas: “We were poor, fiercely Irish, and extremely loyal…. The older boys I knew grew up to be policemen, politicians, and criminals (often a mix of the three)…. If I ever had thoughts at all as to what I might be when I grew up, they were modest ones. I might have pictured myself running a bar (in Southie) or maybe opening a sub shop (in Southie). But having a restaurant of my own on Beacon Hill? No way. In fact, if a fortune-teller had told me at fourteen what good things were in store for me, I would have laughed in her face and told her where she could shove such bullshit…. I marvel that any of us made it out of there without winding up in jail or the morgue.” Michael Psilakis, in How to Roast a Lamb, includes his own childhood traumas: “As I sat on top of the lamb, watching it struggle to free itself, as if in slow motion my father came up behind me, reached down over my right shoulder with a hunting knife, grabbed the lamb’s head and ears, and, in one swift motion, slit the lamb’s throat…. Blood shot out of the lamb like water from a high-pressure hose.” You never had a moment like that with Julia Child or Joseph Wechsberg.

  The pull toward storytelling is perhaps more than a reaction to the crisis in book publishing or even to our personality-driven culture. It may well be a clue to the origins of the form. Recipes, like cave paintings, are seen only in their maturity, when they astonish us by their confident finish. Less perfect earlier versions are wiped away like the early drafts scrawled on the cave wall. We see a mystical liturgical whole and miss the background of trial and error. For centuries, cooks must have passed down “receipts” to other cooks. They appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in a compressed language—very much like the “fake books” that jazz musicians compiled raggedly over the first half of the last century, with chords and melodies scribbled in—just enough to tell someone already expert how to do the tricky turns.

  The true cookbook—the kind this lonesome bedtime page-turner hungers for today—only appeared very late, in the nineteenth century. Like so many things that seem part of a semieternal order of eating—the soup starter, the white wines before red—the recipe book is younger than the novel, more dewy-eyed than the end of slavery. In its first blush the cookbook was not for the professional but for the home cook, and it was less a matter of self-help than business management. Modern cookbooks were meant not to teach women how to cook but to teach women how to teach other women how to cook. Part of the apparatus of the domestic chatelaine, cookbooks like Mrs. Beeton’s famous tome of the 1860s allowed one to instruct the female servants, unlettered girls, in the preparation of standard dishes. Taking charge of all things domestic certainly bound women to the home, but there was something emancipating about it. The cooking woman was also a managing woman, a woman who ran things, not a doll but a doer.

  “Men are now so well served out of doors,—at their clubs, well ordered taverns and dining houses, that in order to compete with the attractions of these places, a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practice of cookery,” one cookbook author wrote. The erotic message—the mistress needs to compete—is buried but implicit. It was the same message that was still being impressed on women as late as the early sixties—please him at home and he won’t go wandering. (Think of the Burt Bacharach and Hal David song “Wives and Lovers”; by the end of the decade the same great team had composed “I Say a Little Prayer” in a very different spirit.) By then, too, the middle-class woman had a more robust role model and manual than Mrs. Beeton: Julia Child was calling cooking an art and calling women to mastery of it, in a world once again mostly without servants.

  It is easy to mock the Victorian books and ideas now, when we are safely out from under their weight, but one need only read the sections on Dora, David Copperfield’s “child-wife” in Dickens’s novel, to see how much infantilism was expected of, or forced on, young women, and how much the mastery of a kitchen supplied a woman’s only shot at mastery of her own life. (When David remarries after Dora’s death, his wholly admirable second wife, Agnes, is rather a send-up of a Mrs. Beeton’s reader come to life, running her household like a cavalry regiment.) To women free from the household, Mrs. Beeton looks repressive; to women enslaved to domestic helplessness, she must have seemed like a great emancipator.

  Yet beneath the neatly ordered and bureaucratized recipe regimens, the rumble of real life, and of women’s lives, could still just be heard. As it grows, the recipe book is always reaching back toward the hearth, toward telling a story; then it bends again toward being usefully businesslike. Cookbook manuscripts appear throughout the nineteenth century, just as family cookbooks exist to this day. (My mother’s Your Favorite Dishes and Then Some, distributed to her children, contained all those brownie, Danish, and apple pie recipes I tried to make, mostly in vain, as well as anecdotes, tales, advice, the voice of lived experience.) Despite the cleaning and pressing undertaken to turn talk into type for America’s first cookbooks, the real sounds of real women, who talked, cooked, read, and made love as parts of one whole and sensual being, could not help being heard.

  The most original, and until our own day probably the best of all these attempts to blend the narrative and the instructive, was the work of the now-forgotten English writer Elizabeth Pennell, whose revival we owe to the historian Talia Schaffer. Pennell was the first to see the cookbook as a literary form—a thing worth saving and collecting, analyzing and writing for its own sweet or savory sake. Pennell was one of those rare astonishments, a person genuinely “out of time.” She would have been right at home in the 1980s, far more than she was in the 1890s: the Nigella Lawson of the Age of Whistler, or the Padma Lakshmi of Oscar Wilde’s set. She was many things—an English aesthete, who wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, and one of the first feminists who was not a bluestocking. “Gluttony is ranked among the deadly sins; it should be honored among the cardinal virtues” is the arresting first line of her 1896 Diary of a Greedy Woman. Her portraits show her as handsome, as the time would have had it, rather than really pretty—a slight offprint of the Getty Girl type. She affirms women as gluttons, creatures of the flesh; and the erotic—indeed, oral-erotic—content of her book is so evident as almost to embarrass the modern reader. “Acc
ept the gospel of good living and the sexual problem will be solved,” she says, in one of the bluntest and most magical sentences of the late nineteenth century. Her self-declaration as a “Greedy Woman”—not a dainty epicurean damsel, not a loving wife and mother providing for her wee mouths, but a woman with an appetite on her and a hunger in her—is one of the most charming, and yet truly “radical,” self-fashionings of the era.

  Yet her diary is a cookbook—of a kind that wouldn’t reappear until our own time, a first-person account of how to eat by cooking things. She recommends wine for breakfast—she is a partisan of Graves particularly, finding Pinot Noir too heavy, a judgment leading one to think that the clarets of our great-great-grandfathers’ days were much less fruit-forward than the ones we know—to be followed by Cognac but no sweet. She calls the British sandwich “grim and gruesome” (which, until around 1980, it invariably was). Her ideal dinner is eerily contemporary, very much like one at Chez Panisse: a filet of beef with mushrooms but only market-fresh ones, pommes soufflées, no dessert, but a Port Salut cheese, and a single tangerine, the whole thing washed down with a good bottle of Burgundy.