by Adam Gopnik
However we prefer our cookbooks—as grammar or encyclopedia, as storehouses of craft or illusions of knowledge—one can’t read them in bed for many years without feeling that there is a conspiracy between readers and writers to obscure the ultimate point. A kind of primal scene of eating hovers over every cookbook, just as a primal scene of sex lurks behind every love story. In cooking, the primal scene, or substance, is salt, sugar, and fat held in maximum solution with starch; add protein as necessary, and finish with caffeine (coffee or chocolate) as desired. That’s what, suitably disguised in some decent dimension of dress-up, we always end up making. We make béarnaise sauce by whisking a stick of melted butter into a couple of eggs, and, now that we no longer make béarnaise sauce, we make salsa verde by beating a cup of olive oil into a fistful of anchovies. The herbs change; the hope does not.
Mark Peel, in his Campanile cookbook, comes near to giving the game away: “We chefs all lie about our mashed potatoes,” he admits. “We don’t tell you we’ve used 1½ pounds of cream and butter with 1¾ pounds of potatoes. You don’t need to know.” (Joël Robuchon, the king of his generation of French cooks, first became famous for a purée that had an even higher proportion of butter beaten into starch.) After reading hundreds of cookbooks, you may have the feeling that every recipe, every cookbook, is an attempt to get you to attain this ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state without having to face it head-on, just as every love poem is an attempt to maneuver a girl or a boy into bed by talking as fast, and as eloquently, as possible about something else. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate” is the poetic equivalent of simmering the garlic with ginger and Sauternes before you put the cream in; the end is the cream, but you carefully simmer the garlic.
Yet, though the end of the poem may be to get the dish in bed, its entertainment lies in how many steps it takes to get there. Though the end is salt, sugar, and fat in high solution, the entertainment lies in how we get there, too. It is not as if anyone thinks the story would be improved if Jane Austen described Darcy and Elizabeth actually screwing—not because these things violate the conventions but because they are so obviously the point that it is embarrassing to see them spelled out. We elide them not because we don’t want to know but because we know already. Salt, sweet, fat, and starch, caffeine, alcohol—we juggle these simple things in endless rounds, just as we juggle our limbs and other simple things night after night (if we’re lucky) out of a conviction that while the substance of the exertion sustains life, it is the variety that keeps life interesting. The truth that variety is the spice of life carries within it the implicit recognition that monotony is the daily meal.
All appetites have their illusions, which are part of their pleasure. That’s why the husband turns those pages in bed. The truth is that we don’t passively peruse the pictures and leap to the results; we actively read the lines and internally act out the jobs. The woman who reads the fashion magazines isn’t passively imagining the state of having; she’s actively imagining the act of shopping. (And distantly imagining the act of wearing.) She turns down pages not because she wants merely to look again but because, for that moment, she really intends to buy that—for a decisive imagined moment she did buy it, even if she knows she never will. Reading recipe books is an active practice, too, even if all the action takes place in your mind. We reanimate our passions by imagining the possibilities, and the act of wanting ends up mattering more than the fact of getting. It’s not the false hope that a dish will turn out right that makes us go on with our reading but our contented resignation to the knowledge that it won’t ever, quite.
The desire to go on desiring, the wanting to want, is what makes you turn the pages—all the while aware that the next Boston cream pie, the sweet-salty-fatty-starchy thing you will turn out tomorrow, will be neither more nor less unsatisfying than last night’s was. When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven’t been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven’t yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that’s the game.
3. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL:
Anchovies, Bacon, Lamb
Dear Elizabeth Pennell:
Or Liz, if I may. The thrill of coming across someone in another time whose take on the world resembles your own—not in the big things, which are common enough to be shared, but in the small ones—is enormous. We all expect people in the past to love their children, seek a better world—but we are stunned when they prefer a Volnay to Château Pétrus, or roast chicken to veal saddle. We expect nineteenth-century people to be noble, but not to be nice, exactly—we sometimes expect them to fight for women’s rights and envision the democratic age, but we also expect them to like saddle of veal and old port.
So, coming upon you and your work while reading about recipes gives me the sense of a friend at court: greedy, Francophile (but with enough Italy in you to make you introduce pasta to your readers), and aesthetic. And then, more selfishly, you gave me a form. I had wanted to write recipes for this book—what is the point of writing a book about food if you cannot put in the ways to make the food you like best?—but realized that it was an inappropriate idea. A wildly inappropriate idea, actually. Quite apart from the question of compromising the dignity of the essayist, full of wise saw and modern instance, by perkily telling you how to make rice pudding, there was the obvious truth that any recipes I have, apart from one, are not really my recipes, but other people’s that I happen to like or cook a lot.
Yes, of course, everybody’s recipe is someone else’s recipe, with the exception of those few rare new things that someone really did invent. (I’ve invented one, sort of.) But there is a recipe that has, so to speak, through suffering become yours, unlike those that you have simply copied out of a book. We recognize the concept of sweat equity in recipe writing: if you have labored nightly over a stove in a restaurant kitchen cooking the thing, then you can write it down, even if its origins lie ultimately not in your own mind but in someone else’s cooking. But if you have merely written down what someone else wrote down first, having cooked it in the meanwhile, it isn’t yours. In your beautiful book, though, you offered both the method and the object. The method, which you invented, of turning every recipe into a little story, a bit of narrative, shows that recipes need not be neat tables of chemical interactions but short stories of mixed emotions: what I did that day, and why I did it.
And then I liked the idea of our conversation, however much it might be a dialogue des morts. You were the woman who, in the nineteenth century, without a vote or often a voice, save for a small one in the Pall Mall Gazette, had the nerve to call herself not a housewife or a domestic philosopher but a Greedy Woman—not cooking for her children or organizing her household but eating for the thrill of it. I loved that. And here was I, another writer in a weekly magazine, doing the reverse in a way, eating for pleasure but also cooking for a family… a kind of dialogue of amateurs, with the understanding that your announcing yourself as an eater first of all was as weird then—“subversive” would be the academic word, but the wrong one—as my announcing myself a cook first of all is now. The man in an apron is as typical, and yet as awkward, as wistfully underexpressed, an invention at the beginning of the twenty-first century as the woman with a napkin tucked under her chin was at the end of the nineteenth. I eat from greed! was your brave announcement. I cook from need! is my far less nervy but equally awkward one. The man in the apron, the woman with the napkin—you see them everywhere but they rarely speak for themselves. So let me write to you, and if the exchange of recipes is notional, or imaginary, well, recipes from the dead are the sum total of what civilization is.
Did they have “secret ingredients” in your day? When I was a child, secret ingredients were everywhere. Colonel Sanders had a secret recipe; the recipe for Coke and Pepsi were murmured over;
one had orange zest and one had lemon. (Or so they said: I grabbed only the most surreptitious sips and clandestine snacking of either, with my mother. Save, now that I think of it, for a brief, six-month phase when my family lived in your town, London, where we got KFC chicken on several occasions. My mother’s rules of engagement were somehow suspended in a place which, in those days, had only dank Maltese burgers and murky vindaloos for takeout.)
But even beyond that, there were cooking secrets. People, chefs, on television, the Galloping Gourmet for one, winked, hard, at the camera, when people asked about them. I recall reading a piece in Time magazine when I was about eight, about a man who made omelets at parties. Chic people in New York had this guy in a tux over to make omelets—with sour cream, as I recall. It was a big thing. And when asked—I know that memory plays tricks, but I recall this with indecent clarity—he said that his secret ingredient was Tabasco sauce, and he added more the later it got and the drunker the guests got. I think the word “drunk” wasn’t in there, but that was the sense. The excitement I felt then, at the idea of someday landing at such a party, where, holding your drink and smirking in your dinner jacket, you would nonchalantly order an omelet, as James Bond himself might order an omelet! “One. With sour cream. Oh—and double the Tabasco. Your… secret ingredient? Poured by hand, please.” (I wrote a spy novel of my own in that period, called “To Be or Not To Be,” my first extended work—come to think of it, I haven’t written anything as continuously extended since—in which, varying the shaken-not-stirred martini formula, I gave the rather Bond-like hero a notable weakness for cream doughnuts.)
My God, the perpetual miracle of modernity! Mostly as a joke, I just now Googled “Time magazine man who makes omelets at parties”—and there he is! Rudolph Stanish was his name, and just as I thought—though I was a little older than I recalled—there was a Time piece about him, and a memorial Web page as well. According to the Web page,
he had worked as a chef for Mrs. Twombly (Cornelius Vanderbilt’s sister), and Joseph Donon, who trained with the famous French chef Escoffier. He also accompanied wealthy families to Europe as their chef, making twenty-six crossings, and broadening his skills with each trip. In the 1960s, Stanish became head chef of the Goldman Sachs lunchroom in New York City, and the “personal supper chef” for the Paul Mellon family. He became renowned for the personalized omelets he served at his employers’ late night parties. In 1968, a Time Magazine article on his expertise propelled his fame as “The Omelet King.” Stanish designed an omelet pan that was produced by Club Aluminum, and published a popular booklet of his omelet recipes. He had the honor of preparing the Inaugural breakfast for John F. Kennedy. Much in demand for his legendary omelet parties he traveled extensively to execute many celebrity entertainments. He continued to perform his omelet skills at many charity benefits until his death in 2008.
And there it is, dug in a micro-moment out of the Time archives. Except for dessert omelets, he adds one special ingredient: Tabasco sauce. “The later the night and the more the drinking, says Stanish, the more Tabasco.” So the word “drunk” was not there, but the word “drinking” was!
I should confess, right here, as I am about to offer recipes in the guise, or at least the form, of letters to you, that I have no business doing this, in addition to the no-business-doing-it reasons outlined above, because there are certain standard, anyone-can-do-it things that I cannot do. These include:
A decent salad dressing.
A good crème anglaise (they never thicken enough; I think I am too frightened of turning up the heat high enough).
Anything to do with a “salt crust.” Every book I have tells you how to form a paste of water and salt and build it over the fish or duck and then crack the baked crust and, for some reason, whatever is inside comes out succulent. I have tried, and I have failed, building little white igloos that collapse inward like sad snowmen, oversalting beyond all hope.
Omelets.
So, King Omelet II I am unlikely to become. I could be Mr. Scrambled Eggs, actually, since I do have a perfect recipe for those. I got it from Gérard Boyer, the great chef at Les Crayères, up in the champagne country in France. It was my friend the art historian Kirk Varnedoe’s fiftieth birthday—he hadn’t yet fallen ill, as he would a year later, with colon cancer, though I know now that the cancer was already eating its way silently inside him—and we all went to Reims to celebrate. “Lunch and a cathedral” used to be our motto; we did the cathedral first, usually, though it fit the rhythm less well. We did Chartres, Rouen, Amiens, and then Reims, most beautiful of all, with its lacy façade and smiling angels… then at lunch, the one thing we saw on the menu for my son, Luke, all of eighteen months old, was scrambled eggs and caviar, and we asked, as courteously as we could, if he might have just the scrambled eggs. Of course, the waiter said. And he brought back, twenty minutes later, a plate of scrambled eggs so creamy and bright yellow and gleaming that Luke devoured them in three minutes, the first plate of grown-up food that he had ever eaten—and perhaps to this day has ever eaten—without caution and doubt inflecting his bites. My wife, Martha, almost wept for joy, since at that point—despite his being a robust baby, costaud, as the French say—she was still chasing him from room to room with a jar of puréed coings, which he sort of liked, even though she did not know what coings were. (They’re quinces.)
When Boyer came to make his rounds, as chefs once did, at the end of lunch, I told Luke that that was the cook who had made his eggs, and he rose in his high chair and applauded. I asked Boyer how he had made the eggs and he told me, and I have made them ever since. All you do is place a big noisette of butter in a pan—Boyer did them in a bain-marie, a double boiler, but I have found this not necessary if you work carefully on a low heat—and let the butter dissolve, and then mix in three well-beaten eggs. You stir and stir, relentlessly but lightly, until they begin to form into curds, custardy curds, not fluffy American ones, and then, at just the right moment, when they are still just too wet to eat, you put another noisette of butter on top to polish and veneer them. Then you sprinkle gray sea salt, if you have it—that was Boyer’s grave, noncaviar touch—and any salt you have if you don’t. With brioche toast, they’re wonderful. From that day to this it is Luke’s default dish, the one thing he will eat when he’s tired or out late or worn out by life. “Can you make me French eggs, Dad?” he says, and I do.
So… I might become the Scrambler in the Rye. But I do, nonetheless, have a secret ingredient, or two of them, and they are anchovies and bacon. Garlic, Tabasco, Asian fish sauce, white truffle oil—all have their place as semisecret additives. But I find that I can add anchovies and bacon to pretty much anything, and it tastes better. Though not both at once, of course. Anchovies blended with garlic in a cooked-down tomato sauce; anchovies added to a paella. Bacon or bacon chunks, lardons in French, added to boeuf bourguignon or pot-au-feu or any kind of pot roast, actually, turns it from a faded thing into a bright and homey and countryish one.
“All you’re really doing is adding salt!” an unknown voice says, apropos the two ingredients. The salt thing again. Has it occurred to you, Elizabeth, as it has to me, that this “all you’re really doing” is the constant plaint against the chef, the one thing people say to cooks and greedy people that they won’t say to anyone else? “All you’re really doing is beating in fat,” they say when you blend in the melted butter. “All you’re really doing is adding fat to starch,” they say when you do pommes frites, which is true, but so what?
“All you’re actually doing is putting a pungent protein on a neutral starch,” and that’s true, too, of almost everything. In fact, that is the human meal, the one true meal. A neutral starch (pasta or rice or pizza dough), a pungent protein (curry or a tomato reduction or fish scraps in fermented sauce), and that is what perhaps six billion of the earth’s seven will eat tonight! A pungent protein piled upon a neutral starch; a neutral starch awaiting its pungent protein, male and female, which is which? (And yet
all that can be said about anything that we do is that it’s “all you’re really doing.” All you’re really doing is explaining what that passage means, Dr. Johnson! All you’re really doing is putting sticky colors on a canvas, Mr. Titian! All you’re really doing is seeing that every line has the same sound at the end, Mr. Pope! Everything we do is all we’re really doing—all tasks in the end are simple, repetitive, easily broken into parts, and all we’re really doing is all that can be done.)
Bacon is chic again, alas, and this makes me reluctant to write more about it. Face bacon, side bacon, even tail bacon, I suppose—the bits and pieces of smoked pig have become cool. “Alas,” because I have always loved bacon, and think that bacon is better as a guilty pleasure than as a fetishized fashion. Anchovies, though, seem to have resisted becoming fashionable. What could ever be more clearly the opposite of any idea of chic than an anchovy? So let it be said only that they come in two kinds—the gray greasy ones in the bottle and the lovely flat white ones you get at an Italian deli. I’ve always liked leg of lamb better than any other cut of meat, and so the idea of putting the three together was irresistible: bacon and anchovies on the lamb. There are ancient recipes in France for making little slits in the gigot, and then inserting the anchovies before you roast it, and I’ve tried them. But they salt the exterior without giving the punch and surprise that you want.
