by Adam Gopnik
So I decided instead to just plop them on the lamb and see what happens. It turns out that they make a wonderful goo, and you pour off the fat, and pour in some white wine—I used flat champagne, since there was some left over—and cook it down, and it was great, the bacon crumbled over the lamb and the sauce pungent with the anchovies. Served with a simple buttery purée and buttered green beans with ginger, which should have been better. (I have only one killer vegetable side in my repertoire, a Brussels sprouts thing—and you know what, it has bacon in it. Oh, well.)
So here, in Pennell form, is my recipe for leg of lamb with bacon and anchovies, the Salt-Lover’s Delight: You take a good grass-fed leg of lamb, about four or five pounds, and liberally salt it. Then you put it in a roasting pan that won’t burn too much, and put garlic cloves and olive oil in the pan. Then you roast it for half an hour to forty minutes in a very hot oven—around 400°; though if you go up to 425° it will brown nicely, even if the garlic may scorch. Then, pull out the pan and lay four or five rashers of very thick-cut bacon right across the top of the gigot, and a nice handful of prepared white anchovies on top of the bacon. You can do it the other way round, and it’s just as good, maybe better: anchovies first, bacon on top. I haven’t tried this with the canned or jarred anchovies, and am sure that they won’t be as good as the white ones, since they never are—but since the anchovies melt anyway, I bet it won’t matter, much.
Then roast the lamb again at 400° or slightly less, depending on your oven, for another fifteen to twenty minutes, until the bacon is nicely browned and the anchovies have started to fall off and dissolve. Then take the leg out and make sure it’s done as you like it—lamb is difficult, because it tends to stay bloody and mildly unappealing even to lovers of rare meat in the middle while the outer parts are well done; there’s nothing to be done about this: it’s lamb and you live with it. (Cook’s Illustrated has a fussy, promising thing where you turn the lamb over and about with paper towels in the middle and trim and cut it in half, and if you can do all this and want to, more power to you. I just slice some well-done bits, some pinker bits, and give the semiraw stuff in the middle to the dog.)
Meanwhile, put the lamb on a plate and pour off all the fat from the pan; there’ll be burned bits of garlic and lamb there, but that’s okay. Pour in, oh, a cup of white wine or flat champagne, whatever you have—wine in the sauce all comes out more or less the same—and scrape and cook down; it should be a jus, not a thickened sauce. So cook it down to make the flavor intense, but not to thicken it too much. Then slice the lamb, crumble some of the bacon on it—put a whole rasher on, if you like—along with some of the burned anchovies, and pour lots of the pungent wine and drippings on it. Lots. Serve with a purée of potatoes without too much complexity, just potatoes, cream, and butter and salt (but for once not too much, since the meat will satisfy the salt-hunger). And green beans with sweetly caramelized shallots, better than gingered ones, I think. See if it isn’t the best gigot you’ve ever had, with the gamy lamb and the salt-bitter anchovies and sweetish pork and smoke of the bacon and the good winy-salty juice on it. Good food. No more than that. Can we ask for more? Did you? When a secret ingredient is laid out flat on the dish and then transported to the top of the finished food, is it still a secret?
All best,
A.G.
PART II
Choosing at the Table
AFTER WE ARRIVE, at the restaurant or at home, we have to choose what we want to eat. At the restaurant, it’s simple: we scan the menu and decide. But at home we choose first, shopping and deciding. And at that dangerous place, the friend’s house, we have to pray that they have chosen, and chosen well. (And we pray, too, that they will have finished cooking before we arrive, so that the horrible hour in the kitchen, as they fuss and mix, is one that we are spared. Even with a glass of wine in hand, it is hard to watch another cook—and when they have the food still in plastic wrap… it’s too much.)
Fish or chicken? Red meat or none? Vegetables boiled or braised? And what to drink, and how much should we care? If arriving is a story of hope, offered and deferred, choosing is always comparative. Behind every choice we make is another choice rejected. What shall it be? And when shall we get it?
4. How Does Taste Happen?
DE GUSTIBUS non disputandum est: There’s no disputing taste. This is surely one of the most familiar Latin tags or mottos left to us, one of only maybe two that we still know and grasp. We hear it and we think we recognize its truth; it enjoins a shrug of acceptance in place of a futile argument: you like it your way and I like it mine…. You may say potato and I may say potahto, but if you like tomatoes and I like potatoes? Nothing to do but walk away.
But of course, the next thing that strikes us is that taste is all we do dispute. We dispute our taste in music. Who do you like better, Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell? You do? You can’t! Why? Every bookstore assumed—or assumes—disputes about taste. Those music lovers do nothing except dispute: Which do you prefer, the Beatles or the Stones? Blur or Oasis? Dixieland or bebop? To tell a fifteen-year-old boy or girl that it’s all just a question of taste is infuriating, not helpful. Of course it’s a question of taste—the question is, whose taste is right?
This distance between the pat certainty of the slogan and its obvious untruth reminds me of something my grandfather once said. He arrived in what he always called “this country” from the Old Country when he was twelve, and his English was accentless but still spoken at the slight puzzled remove of the second-language speaker. As a very old man he once confided to me that there was a single phrase in English that he could not understand: “What do they mean when they say that you can’t have your cake and eat it, too?” he asked me, bewildered. What else were you supposed to do with your cake? Having it and eating it were parts of one description, a single act. There is nothing else to do with your cake. Like the claim about cake, the claim about taste seems like a falsehood parading as a fatuity.
When it comes to food, taste disputes can be intense, even wild. Meat-eaters against vegans, the locavore against the supermarket patron, or even just those who like the pallid look and squishy finish of meat boiled in vacuum bags against those who live in cast-iron pans. But when it comes to the kind of taste that people who care about taste care most about, the disputes are both more immediate and more peculiar. For we mean by “taste” both small taste—the flavor of what we put in our mouths—and big taste, the way we decorate our walls and clothing and lives. There is mouth taste, how it feels when you eat it—is it salty or sweet or bitter or buttery or somewhere in between, with all the fine gradations of lime and lemon and vinegar that mark out the general category of “sour.” But then there is what we might call “moral taste”—the place of the food we eat within an epoch’s style or our own self-image.
We could simply call these two “flavor” and “fashion,” and that wouldn’t be all wrong. But “flavor” and “fashion” miss the depth of the commitment that we make to our food tastes. In religious matters, we see this all the time. The Orthodox Jew likes the flavor of brisket during the Seder, but his liking it is something more than fashion. It is a moral taste—in his eyes, eating brisket is an ethical position. But this is just as true of seemingly smaller affections. I like the mouth taste of Dan Barber’s food, but my liking to eat at his restaurant at the Stone Barns organic farm is something more than fashion. It is a moral taste, in the sense that I’m proud to be seen there, and like to pretend to participate in the project of sustainable produce and heritage breeds.
Of course, “moral taste” of this kind is in our era highly moralized: we think we’re helping the planet by eating at Dan Barber’s. But in every epoch, mouth taste leads to moral taste—the two are linked, and it is those links that drive our diets. My parents, mere college professors, in their youth went to Paris every year and ate at the new palaces of nouvelle cuisine, at Michel Guérard’s or Alain Dutournier’s old Au Trou Gascon. It was in the days before eating became s
o intensely “ethicalized,” and so questions of where the lamb was born and how much the duck suffered to give up its liver were very secondary. I doubt that anyone even asked them. But the choice of France, and French cooking, involved many other self-defining positions. It was a moral taste, as it had been for every American gourmand from Fisher to Liebling. It meant choosing to make much of food as a humane activity, which in turn meant choosing Paris over Prussia, pleasure over austerity, extravagant expenditure in the interest of materialism over middle-class thrift, the indulgence of appetite over the suppression of hunger. It was tied to attitudes about sex, travel, God, life… in all those ways, the mouth taste for Dutournier’s cassoulet was part of a moral taste for what the cassoulet so beautifully—and beanfully—meant.
Or take a touching moment from Craig Claiborne’s Time-Life volume Classic French Cooking, from the mid-sixties, where he talks about visiting young friends in Mamaroneck, New York, who had taken on the true faith of haute cuisine: “If they have hamburgers, they serve hamburgers au poivre flambés au cognac. If they have veal it is served with fines herbes.” They make consommé Celestine and sole Marguery and for dessert serve a soufflé Rothschild, and somebody lights a Gauloise and, Claiborne writes, “for one haunting moment I felt as if I were in the South of France.” This strikes us as overwrought, but choosing that imaginative Francophile life at that time, too easily nostalgized now, of processed cheese and Corfam shoes was a hard choice, a real choice, a good choice. Moral choices look silly only after others have made them for our benefit.
We have mouth taste and moral taste—and, as Charlie the Tuna long ago discovered, though intricately related they are not quite the same. “Charlie, StarKist don’t want tunas with good taste, StarKist wants tunas that taste good,” the small wise fish used to explain to the big cartoon tuna, who tried to show the StarKist company, in a series of mid-sixties ads, that he had good taste by wearing berets, hanging abstract art on his wall, and so on, in order—according to the weird convention by which cartoon animals want to be killed and eaten—to convince StarKist that he tasted good. “Guys with good taste always go places no one ever heard of.”
About mouth taste we know a lot, chiefly how susceptible it is to framing effects. The order in which a thing is introduced, information about its origin—wines labeled “California” always taste better than wines said to come from the Dakotas—the context in which it’s taken, what comes before, what comes after… all of this changes our perceptions. Some of these effects—the way that water tastes sweet after eating an artichoke—are purely physiological and well understood. Others, like the ways that labels affect our tastes in wine, are more cagily social. But they are all framing effects in which what we sense on our tongues is secondary to what we believe in our heads.
We know now, for instance, that, in addition to the taste buds in our mouth, we have still more taste buds of another kind in our gut, which cannily regulate and oversee our desires, too, making sure that we eat not just what our tongues like but what our livers need. And we know, too, how much we depend on a kind of eternal game of truth or dare with our brains and their chemistry: we eat capsicum peppers, for instance, only because we know that our brain will superproduce opiates to make up for the burn on our tongue. If it didn’t, then chili or curry would be literally unbearable. Whole civilizations every night are head-faking their nervous systems. We learn to use our sensory ability to sense rot in order to relish controlled rotting, as in cheese and truffles and Madirans. We are not slot machines of taste, passively registering information as it arrives on our palate, but poker players, bluffing out our own neurons.
But Charlie the Tuna often was not so wrong. Good taste always starts with tasting good. Moral taste is often an expanded metaphor rising from mouth taste. If metaphors of sight are our pet metaphors of abstract intelligence—our kids are bright, or dim (well, not ours), our vision of the future is clear or cloudy, our problems are well-illuminated or dimly understood—then metaphors of taste are our favorites for intuitive sensual experience. The tongue terms speak to the immediate sensual shock: the girl’s or boy’s manner is so sweet or too bitter, too saccharine or too sour.
The curious thing is that as mouth taste changes, so does moral taste, and on the same cyclical, revolutionary principles. Even in—particularly in—a stable and prosperous middle class, tastes in food, and in dining, change with remarkable speed. When I was a boy, a book called Masterpieces of French Cuisine, complete with recipes taken from every three-star palace in France, was among my favorite reading: its cover shows a three-star chef in chef’s whites, gesturing haughtily toward the masterpieces contained inside—what now looks like twelve gratin dishes of indistinguishable brown sludge—while inside the recipes from the great chefs of France seem almost unmakeable, not to say indigestible. It’s a rule. The good food of twenty-five years ago always looks unhealthy; the good food of fifty years ago always looks unappetizing; and the good food of a hundred years ago always looks inedible. Knowledge progresses, but cooking does not, or only in partial ways. Diet is always the site of ritual convincing itself that it is reason.
The cycles of mouth taste and moral taste are still more evident at greater distance. We know that a century ago the taste for the nonseasonal and exotic defined a sophisticated eater; the man who could get strawberries in December and poulet de Bresse on Madison Avenue was the man with taste. Now the same enlightened diner is defined by his rejection of the remote and out-of-season; he’s the man who refuses strawberries in December, and wants his chicken grown and strangled in his own basement. Diet changes all the time, and the top diets change as often as the top chef.
Consider the place of seasonality in dining out. In Balzac’s Lost Illusions, Lucien, after blowing his money on a first-night dinner at the Palais Royal, has to start eating in a Left Bank bistro. Flicoteaux, the cantine that poor Lucien is forced to patronize, has only local and seasonal produce. Balzac describes in great detail how the owner, M. Flicoteaux himself, keeps down prices by shopping only for what’s just off the farms, only cabbage in cabbage season and turnips in turnip time and so on—and describes just as well the shame and suffering that the diners feel in having to eat in so peasantlike a manner right in the middle of Paris. It is part of their sad fate as poets that they have to eat there. Part of the price of poverty was seasonal eating. Now, of course, we pay three hundred dollars prix fixe at Alain Passard’s, only a few streets away, to have a single plate of sliced tomatoes—though strictly in tomato season.
These changes not only involve what gives us pleasure—or what we say gives us pleasure—but our whole idea of what pleasure is. Take an instance of the vagaries of taste even nearer, and odder. Read two great British journalists of the 1960s and 1970s, Bernard Levin and Kenneth Tynan. No one did more to break down British puritan injunctions against eating as a humane act, and a kind of art. They were both utterly devoted to great food, which they identified, as most educated people did at that time, with Continental three-star cooking. Their diaries and journals testify to their enraptured love for great French food—and to the constant feelings of sickness and indigestion that all that cream- and butter-based cooking costs them. Yet for Levin and Tynan feeling ill after you ate was not a hint that something might be wrong with the way you’d eaten. It was proof that you had really eaten well. (I well recall my own culinary mentor, Eugenio Donato, a professor of comparative literature, taking pills to stave off a crise de foie before he sat down to eat six courses.) This cruel eating even had its tragic side. I once told one of A. J. Liebling’s friends how keenly I admired Liebling’s food writing, and he shook his head with sorrow. “I can’t read Joe on food,” he said, “because I watched him eat himself to death.” Eating himself to death may have been neurotic, but it was Liebling’s conscious neurosis, chosen to make a point. Anyone could diet; it took a real man to die of gout.
This may astound us only a generation later—but the first thing we know about pleasure
is that it is intricately tied to perversity. Our own absurd perversities in eating are hidden from us by the fog of our own epoch—it is, after all, always our own epoch that is foggiest to us; the past presents itself with crystal clarity—and as I trudge once more to the farmers’ market for hard-neck garlic, I can only imagine the bafflement of my grandchildren. Or think again of salt! We have replaced the ordinary small salt that served our mothers so well with gray and orange and crystal salt, of the kind that one used to find only on soft pretzels. Can we not hear the first faint titters of posterity at that choice?
And we know that such changes in taste are tied to social changes, to questions of class and rank and caste. Who is likelier to eat today the diet of the American farmer or the Russian peasant of the Old Country—brown bread and freshly grown local vegetables, free-range chicken and raw-milk cheese—the farmer’s great-grandchildren, or the professor of comparative literature at the nearby liberal-arts college? All taste is relative in the sense that it is historical, specific, and context-bound. One of the most piquant details in the Twilight saga, as any father of a prepubescent girl can tell you, is that the good vampires of the Cullen Clan refer to their voracious consumption of fresh animal blood as “vegetarianism”—and though I suppose some indignant vegetarian has objected, no one within the confines of the series ever disputes the designation. In comparison with the other vampire’s diet of hot human flesh, killing wild deer with your bare hands and sucking their life out is morally equivalent to eating lentils and greens. Even what you call a vegetable finally depends on the ferocity of your taste for blood.
