The Table Comes First

by Adam Gopnik

  I spend, for instance, a large portion of every day of my life worrying about the shape of sentences. Semicolon or period? Replace a polysyllabic word with a monosyllable for drop-shot effect, or replace a monosyllable with a polysyllable for ironic overcharge? And I patiently follow the rules of English grammar. “That” or “which”? Where’s the antecedent? What’s the rule here? I believe in the one right sentence, in the one way to write, just as passionately as anyone can believe in the one right meal. Yet my mom, as it happens, is a linguist, and when she wasn’t teaching me how to cook she taught me the one hard truth: there is no natural grammar, no “right way” to write. She taught me that rules and practices and usage change all the time, and dramatically, and that “prescriptivism” in language is as bogus a concept in linguistics as green cheese is in astronomy. There is no grammar of the gods, just as there is no timeless taste.

  So why do we stick to the rules? We dutifully follow the rules of grammar not because the rules are right, or fixed, but to show to others our love of language and our regard for a tradition. It’s a signal, not a slavish act. The green eater, in her secret heart, is doing the same thing: not eating what she should, but eating in a way that shows who she is. By eating the “right way,” we communicate to the other people at the table our passion for food and our willingness to look a little foolish in showing it. Obvious fictions often have important moral points—that’s why Jesus, that apostle of the open table, always spoke in parables. You needn’t prove to me that this grass-fed veal is healthier for me; you need say merely, the grass-fed veal symbolizes the kind of world I want to live in, and the meat from the industrial abattoir does not. It’s a symbol not of a natural order but of a community of belief.

  So perhaps we’re now in a better state to say what we mean when we talk about taste. By “taste” we mean the social customs and practices that let us negotiate between our fashions and our values. A taste is more durable than a fashion, more mutable than a value. Taste is an argument compressed into an instruction. It is complicated, ironic knowledge turned into a choice on a menu. The idea that on one hand there are mere fashions and on the other hand enduring values is false. The best way to get people to change their values is by first changing their fashions, and it takes a new taste to do that. We show people that organic apples taste better, and we hope that the values of sustainability and true food will penetrate; we want people not to bait bears or hold cockfights, and we make it unfashionable before we can make it immoral. The fashionable chef knows to serve wild salmon; the one with values knows why wild salmon is better than farmed; the one with taste knows that if you are serving wild salmon you ought to serve it with rhubarb and organic quinoa to make a proper meal. In life, as on the plate, there is a constant interchange between fashion and value, between “surface” and “substance”—and taste is what carries the charge between them. That’s why it’s never at rest.

  There were, I wrote, two famous Latin tags that everyone knew. The other, of course, is what was once the national motto: e pluribus unum. Out of many, one. It is a supremely democratic slogan, since it does not pretend that the one that is made loses its plurality, but speaks to the closest thing we have to a secular miracle: that we do pull along, most of the time, and that we can manage.

  What isn’t well known is that it is a culinary metaphor. It comes from a recipe for salad dressing—or so you’ll be told if you pursue it—taken from a Latin poem called “Moretum,” long attributed, probably wrongly, to Virgil. Actually, it’s a recipe for pesto: a peasant cook is pestling together cheese, garlic, and herbs and oil. When it all comes together, well, e pluribus unum.

  (…Symilus the rustic husbandman…)

  Th’ aforesaid herbs he now doth introduce

  And with his left hand ’neath his hairy groin

  Supports his garment; with his right he first

  The reeking garlic with the pestle breaks,

  Then everything he equally doth rub

  I’ th’ mingled juice. His hand in circles move:

  Till by degrees they one by one do lose

  Their proper powers, and out of many comes

  A single colour, not entirely green

  Because the milky fragments this forbid,

  Nor showing white as from the milk because

  That colour’s altered by so many herbs.

  Now, as anyone who makes pesto knows (I make mine with lime; I’ll give you the recipe), what makes it interesting is that unlike a hollandaise or a crème anglaise, it’s just like in the poem—it takes on a composite character different from its starting elements, but the elements remain alive within the mix. The cheese and basil and garlic all come together, and yet they all remain distinct. Choosing this for their motto, the founders chose well, and with good taste: pesto is a model for a composite country.

  And for a civilized one. For what, after all, is the purpose of this peasant poem? To show how complex, how far from simple, the simple life is. The poem shows that each time we cook we enact the means by which life is lived: through blending, unstable compromise, uncertain joining together of unlikely opposites. It is exactly against the idealized vision of the Georgics and pastorals of Virgil, where the shepherds live in ideal leisure. The peasants in “Moretum” are not blissfully enjoying the fruits of nature. They are at work, and their work, even making a salad dressing, costs them tears, takes time, and is the result of a thousand small decisions—tastings, in the literal and most exalted sense—that produce an eerie impression of unity.

  Not from many things one fixed thing, but from many things one thing that—if you just work it hard with a pestle—holds together well enough and long enough to taste good. The truth of all of us who live in our kitchens, whether as pros or dads and moms, is that we know the place of taste as a set of steps, not a series of diktats—an ongoing permanent negotiation between values and fashions, between fundamentally different views of what we want from life and what the plenty of nature can give us, where the child who hates broccoli meets the parent who fears malnutrition and where our belief in saving the planet meets the reality of the half-hour deadline. And where every time we make a plate of pesto we are wowed all over again by the sheer complicated weight of tradition, knack, and knowledge it demands—the way that principles of practice as old as the Roman empire meet particulars of practice as fresh as today’s basil and the price of pine nuts. We have our orders, like classicists; go to the market for organic basil, like Rousseauians—want to show our diners that it’s real pesto, not from a jar, so we add a ragged leaf or two, like Veblenians; and we recognize that we are investing not just in the scrumptiousness of the dish but in a set of values about jarlessness for our kids, and hope it pays off later on when in our toothless age they will invite us over for a jarless dinner.

  Chop wood. Carry water. Bake your cake. Then you have it. Then you eat it. The only thing to do with a cake is eat it. The submission to sequence is the source of the sublime. Taste is only “the art of knowing little things.” That’s what makes it big. In republics as in the kitchen, it’s the little things, respected for themselves rather than puréed into sameness, that make the finest sauces. Taste begins at the door, and ends in our dreams. It is not on our tongues, or in our hearts, or in our minds or our social roles, but everywhere at once. Taste is choice. Taste is labor. Taste is work. And taste is everywhere and results from everything. Taste is the totality of our lives. No surprise, surely. That taste is not a set of principles to be applied by rote but a daily negotiation among practices, prices, promises, and possibilities is what even the most peasantlike home cook knows. It’s the working chef’s wisdom. They should teach it to philosophers.

  5. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Lamb, Saffron, Cinnamon

  Dear Eliza:

  My goodness, are we still alive—or, in your case, comfortably dead—after all that argument! Lime pesto, I promised at the end, and so now I shall present it. It is part of the summer run of things, something to s
erve with grilled food. I love to grill, and the grill is the one part of cooking that I think opened up most since your time. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think that there was any real grilling going on in your day. Beautiful pictures of picnics abound, of course, but I think they were all sandwich-and-cold-chicken affairs. I suspect that the central summer sight of our day—the middle-aged man surrounded by smoke—was completely unknown in yours.

  Anyway, here it is. I like to serve it with grilled salmon. It’s simple. In a blender—yes, yes, I know that you should do this all by hand, with a mortar and pestle, with virtuous small steps, but, well, really—you take a nicely scissored mix of the three summer herbs, basil, mint, and cilantro, and add some chopped garlic, about one clove, and lots of fresh lime juice. No other sour thing—fresh lime juice, at least two and perhaps three limes’ worth. Then you take half a cup of pine nuts—yes, you can use walnuts, although it really isn’t as good, but I don’t think you have to toast the pine nuts for it to work out well—and whiz them together, and slowly stream in about three-quarters of a cup of good olive oil. Then you grate in as much Parmesan as you think right, grating it over the blender and mixing it in with a wooden spoon. Salt a bit if you like. It’s brighter and somehow cleaner tasting than other pesto. Is there anything made with lime that doesn’t taste good? Perhaps it’s the history of scurvy, buried in our blood, that calls for citrus?

  The more I learn about you the more extraordinary you seem, and the more weirdly parallel our lives become, despite the century and sex that separates us. You come, it turns out, from Philadelphia, or were born there, as was I, and kept such an affection for it throughout your wanderings to Paris and London that it’s said you wrote a book about it! There’s a Philadelphia flavor to your work. You spent your best working years in London, but then returning home to America, you came to New York, and died in Brooklyn Heights, the most London-like part of New York, perhaps—certainly now, with its color-named streets and leafy rows of brownstones. So your triangle, the tripod on which you stand to eat—Philadelphian by birth, Francophile by choice, and New Yorker by default—are all mine, too, or nearly so. And then I like that you call cooking “cookery”—“Writing articles on cookery led me to buying books on cookery, also to receiving them for review.” As “Tigger” robs “tiger” of its teeth, and “Tyger” in Blake adds to it its mystical ferocity, the word “cookery” turns cooking from a pastime or chore to a craft: “He was wise in the ways of cookery,” something they teach at Hogwarts.

  I like your Francophilia, too, and that you lived in exile for so long. Greedy people who care about what you call “cookery in a philosophical frame” care most if they are partly exiles, permanent expatriates. The home diner knows what he likes; one of the reasons for the efflorescence of French writing on food, back when, and its partial absence now, is the effort of definition—Who are we? What shall we eat? You disapprove of Brillat-Savarin, as a bit of a tourist trap: I think this is a good judgment, in its way. Certainly Grimod’s was the wittier pen. When I’m eating, or shopping, I carry on a conversation with you, trying to see if, by explaining what’s different from our time to yours, I can explain to myself what really counts. I imagine calling you, spiritlike, from a kind of Limbo renamed, say, Gumbo, and explaining more to you of how eating has changed since last you ate.

  Spices—now they’ve changed. The strong ones are back in favor. In lots of ways, the revolutions of the nineteenth century—the restaurant revolution, the recipe book revolution—all turn around a revolution in spices and spicing, a tsunami in whose wake you still rock, but which has now, so to speak, rocked back. Throughout the medieval and early-Renaissance period, and of course going further back into the Roman, sweet and strong spices were the staff of life, the way food was, the way food tasted. Some spices were so strong that we have lost track of them today, so that they live on only in strange bestiaries. There are spices that have just vanished. We read about the lost spices of antiquity with the same wonder that occultists feel when they read about the (supposedly) sunken islands. Silphium, the legendary root spice that the Greeks used as easily as we use nutmeg, disappeared sometime in the first century A.D., and hasn’t been seen since, losing for us an entire range of flavors, a whole scale in the kitchen’s music. (Though if it’s true, as legend also has it, that the nearest thing to it is that other strange and smelly spice, asafetida, or hing, then it may be very well lost.) In any case, we’ll never taste the Roman delicacy of sea squirt and silphium. And what of balsam of Mecca, and what of tejpat? Both savory spices, once loved, now lost or cast aside. Thinking of them makes our regular diet of salt and pepper and the same six green herbs seem as limited as those pallid white marble neoclassical statues, compared with the polychrome and bronze surfaces that were the true marvels of antique art.

  The reform against sweet and savory spices—the banishment of cloves, the expulsion of cinnamon to a slightly disreputable, confined life in the dessert menu and the holiday punch bowl—was one of the rocks on which French cuisine, to which you so emotionally and naturally pledged yourself, was built. The great codifying chef Carême substituted the green plants for the brown spices, tarragon in reduced stock with cream for cloves in simmered red wine with cinnamon, and a new taste was made, one that lasted longer than most. The perceived virtues of the new green cooking—green in this herb- and plant-based way—probably had something to do with a kind of weird reorganization of taste: you had meat here, vegetables there, and you put them together on a single plate. There’s certainly nothing grander, is there, than the moment of the garnish, when a simple pot roast of chuck becomes a boeuf à la mode—when all the sparkling green peas and bright orange carrots gather around it, the sauce gleaming with the gelatinous shimmer of calf’s foot? Clarity, freshness, intensity of natural flavor instead of its concealment by spice—all of those virtues, more than the supposed ones of cream and butter, were part of the French revolution in cooking when it first happened. Food had been muddy as a city river; now, suddenly, it ran clear as a Swiss lake.

  But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? There was a kind of maturity of taste in play. Kids like sweet tastes. To banish sweet and strong spices was to end the childhood of cooking. And primitive people, earth’s children in the eighteenth-century view, were thought to like strong flavors. Transcending our urge to eat sweet and spicy things was a way to transcend our infantile, barbarian past. Sweet and sour and spicy, molasses and lime and chili—all those were just too easy. Grown-up taste, studied taste, was subtler than that. You write about it quite directly, referring to your collection of cookbooks, and how the cooks of old practiced by “adding such a wholesale mixture of cloying sweets and rank spices that, as I read, I can but wonder if in the old days meat and poultry were not apt to be tainted and the cook’s art needed to disguise the fact. These were the horrors from which the French delivered the world.”

  But now, you see, the horrors have returned. The notion that spices were once heaped on tainted meat now seems false; at least, so the new culinary historians say. There’s no evidence that meat was more tainted then than now; it’s just another case where we regulate our prejudices in the model of our tastes—where we pretend our prejudices are the truth of healthy eating. People ate spicy food then because they liked the way it tasted. Now, you see, Elizabeth, people who think about food think the green herb and thick cream and white pepper and melted cheese taste which seemed so sophisticated to your time is itself infantile. It’s too easy, too, well, bourgeois. So the old brown spices your time banished to the nursery return in my day to the main table—but under another guise, as the banished so often do when they return, and that is as dashing foreigners. Tastes that were routine in premodern days, nutmeg and cardamom and molasses, are back, but as emissaries of the Great Khan. Returned under the demand for exotica, returned in the guise of travel.

  The pair of old spices I find irresistible is saffron and cinnamon. I don’t think that there can be any
thing—rice, chicken stew, flank-steak braise, even a tuna in tomato sauce—that isn’t better for having a touch of saffron and cinnamon. How did they come home? By way of North Africa, of course, where they were never lost. So I take lamb—I like gigot for roasting, of course, but lamb shoulder braises best. And here’s the thing: with this dish, with the dark, dense spices, it doesn’t really matter if you brown the lamb first or not. I know, that doesn’t make sense—it violates the cook’s first law, that browning at length is the key to “caramelizing” and to making things tender. We have a mental image, I think, that sounds right: the brown crust “seals in” juiciness. Of course, anyone who actually braises and stews stuff knows that juiciness isn’t sealed in. It leaks out, right out into the bouillon, which is why the bouillon tastes so good. Reducing the bouillon is what makes the thing great. It’s simply the taste of the browning we like best, and, if your nose and mouth have enough else to occupy them, it doesn’t matter. So you… just throw the things together. Two to three pounds of lamb chunks, and an onion, peeled but not chopped, and the holy trinity of cilantro, basil, and mint tied together—if it gets loose you have to strain it afterward, which is just a small step, but still—and a fresh fragrant stick of cinnamon, broken in two, with each half stuck in on either side of the lamb chunks.

  Yes, yes, I know: there are many different kinds of cinnamon. There is the true cinnamon of Sri Lanka, the strong Saigon cinnamon, and a kind of strange Chinese relation, cassia. I like to go down to Kalustyan’s on Lexington Avenue and shop for spices, make notes on the varieties and verities. Now that all the record stores are closed, and the bookstores are closing—oh God, you caught only the very beginnings of the record industry, and can’t imagine the glory of the record store at its height!—the spice stores are the last browsing places left. If we were truly virtuous, we would smell and taste each kind, and note the differences—I’m sure they exist—and do a cinnamon tasting, as, at the fancy places now, they do tastings of red volcanic salt against black basalt salt, or whatever.