The Table Comes First

by Adam Gopnik

  Our life, in contrast, is not really that life of the appetites but the life of desire, a different thing, as Brillat-Savarin understood. Concepts come between our hungers and our pleasures. Our desires make us scrutinize the sequences of life to find out their small conceptual secrets: what comes first, the butter or the scotch, the caramel or the cause? The cause, it is the cause, my soul… our life is spent breaking and making codes, cooking being one of them. For animals, there are no codes, because there are no causes—codes are possible only because we know about intentions and disguises, smiles and masks—there is only sensation and the scary, the delicious and the disgusting, which comes at you as it will. The “second mirror” of self-consciousness, the mirror we have that faces the mirror in our mind and lets us see ourselves as we think, is not in the mind of the dog. They see, they sense, they live. We cook in order to reenter the world of pure sensation, but we only do it by stringing concepts and causes together in the form of steps and spices: first this, then that, and then more. The state in which Butterscotch lives naturally, where tastes just fall out of the sky, in a happy, humming paradise of sensation—we have to sneak up on that state from behind, with the help of a glass of cold champagne and a handful of cardamom. Butterscotch is joyful but never surprised by joy, as we are, we creatures of codes and plans, who are shocked when everything comes together, because we know how hard it is to get the sequence right, and how lucky we are when we do.

  We follow codes and plans, and, sometimes, invent them. You recall, back when I first wrote to you, that I mentioned that I had invented one new thing in cooking? Well, I have, truly, though it is a bit of a Blotting Paper Pudding. I think every home cook has one Blotting Paper Pudding, don’t you? By Blotting Paper Pudding I refer, of course, to the White Knight’s recipe in Alice, which, you will recall, was the cleverest thing he had ever invented, and which he thought up during the meat course in time for the dessert course. The pudding was never actually made, as he explains—and yet it was a very clever pudding to invent. “It began with blotting paper,” the Knight tells Alice, and then gunpowder and sealing wax were part of the recipe, too, all mixed in. All of us amateur cooks invent things in our heads as we go about following the rules we find, and we are sure that they are clever, but it is probably just as well that they never get made.

  My first Blotting Paper Pudding was an actual pudding, or a sort of pudding, anyway. One week, when we were children, my older sister and I, having been somehow delegated the week’s worth of desserts, made Jell-O one night (the box, hot water, mix and refrigerate), then Jell-O pudding the next (the box, warm milk, stir and refrigerate), then Jell-O again the night after (I see green—could it be lime?), and then pudding again, and then on the last decided to combine our genius and make a mixed Jell-O and Jell-O pudding, with results you can imagine.

  Since then, my best Blotting Paper Pudding has been an idea I’ve had for a new kind of béarnaise sauce, one that would be made just like a normal béarnaise sauce—tarragon, shallots, white wine, and vinegar reduced to nothing, then emulsified with egg yolks and butter—only with the wonderful Thai mix of herbs in place of tarragon: cilantro, mint, and basil. I think of this sauce all the time, because I love that trio, and because it has such a beautiful inner logic to it. It should be excellent with salmon, for instance, or with chicken, and perhaps with lamb, too. (Mint béarnaise already exists, though I’ve never tried it.) It has logic, fusion, and a certain originality to it, and I will confess that there were moments in the past when I talked about it with other people as though I’d actually made it when what I really meant was that I had invented it, and intended to make it soon. Sometimes purely intellectual acts can feel so present that we confuse them with sensual ones, though this leads us down long ramps of the Internet where we should not go.

  And then, just the other night, I made it at last, and it was fine, very good, call it Bangkok béarnaise—catchy name, too. I have never been to Bangkok, I probably will never go to Bangkok, and though I may get to the Béarn someday, I haven’t actually been there, either. But now I had invented and made a sauce that combined the herbs of one with the style of the other, and put it on grilled salmon. If I ever open a restaurant, in another life, it will be a specialty of the house, and meanwhile I will casually yawn and mention it if I have the chance. Bangkok béarnaise, my one true thing. The White Knight would be proud.

  Yet, as I suspect the Knight intuited, it was, on the whole, more fun to have invented, and imagined, than it was to eat. Not that it wasn’t good—but thinking about food, though never as satisfying as eating it, is often just as interesting. Just as we have to read past certain classic texts, we eat past certain new recipes, registering the excellence of the idea as much as the deliciousness of the dish. Parsnip steaks and eggplant desserts, turkey tartar and duck confit sorbet—these things are excellent, but they are excellent as my Bangkok béarnaise is excellent. They are Blotting Paper Puddings.

  This is a term, I think, that can be extended far beyond the confines of the kitchen: there are Blotting Paper Puddings in many walks of life. Most of these new Brooklyn-incubated speculative novels, six hundred pages long, strike me as Blotting Paper Puddings: I don’t believe most of them will ever be read, but who can deny that they were very clever puddings to invent? All political platforms are Blotting Paper Puddings: they will never be cooked, but they, too, were very nice to contemplate.

  For the first time, though, I find myself eating Blotting Paper Puddings in place of real puddings. When you go out to eat dessert, you find yourself not with a cake or pie or real pudding, but with some strange collision of unlike parts—mousses and gels and foams and vertical biscuits. But then, nothing is the subject of as much mockery as innovative cooking. I suppose in a sense all avant-garde activity is a set subject for satire—the all-black painting, the silent concerto—but they tend to take on aggressively a little bit of the aura of avant-garde purpose; you have to be a bit of a dope to make fun of John Cage. Yet the intuition that originality in food will run in narrower paths than originality in any other art is not false—and is, in truth, one of the things that make cooking other, though not lesser, as an art. We dream of making Bangkok béarnaise, and end up making Blotting Paper Pudding. Then we find out that Bangkok béarnaise is Blotting Paper Pudding, and we turn back to the Jell-O box.

  While we are on the subject of simple classics, I suppose I should say something about roast chicken. Was there a cult of roast chicken in your day? I don’t see it in your pages. Perhaps it was still a luxury dish, not easily set apart from all the other ones. But in ours a whole cult of roast chicken has grown up, a literature in which roasting a chicken right becomes identical with acting virtuously. Well—as Humpty Dumpty says, when it comes to reciting poetry, I can do it as well as other folks. “It needn’t come to that,” Alice says, hurrying to stop him from starting, but she can’t. When it comes to roasting chicken, I can do it as well as other folks—and I shall not be stopped, either, any more than Humpty could.

  I do roast chicken three basic ways, and I do them often because both children treat roast chicken as the default birthday and holiday meal—or, perhaps, being pestered to say what they want, think of roast chicken in lieu of anything better. Though I’m a crazed briner, salt water and juniper and sugar dripping from my roast pork and Christmas turkey like the weird encrusted stuff in Pirates of the Caribbean, I find that for a normal chicken, brining merely “koshers” it without actually enriching it. So I don’t bother.

  My basic roast chicken is like everyone else’s, though simpler: the lemon-up-the-bum chicken beloved of British cooks. (Martha hates it when I say lemon-up-the-bum chicken, though, as she hates when people say a pregnant woman has a “bump.”) The one trick is to use a very hot oven: 400° is good, but 425°, if you watch the skin and cover it with parchment or foil to keep it from burning toward the end, is still better. The one biggest difference between pro kitchens and home kitchens, truly, is the heat they can mu
ster in their ovens and ranges. If there is a single kitchen secret that I have learned from hanging out with real cooks, it is that the real cooks either go very hot or surprisingly cold: they roast at 400°, 450°, or even higher, and they braise at 275°, 250°, or even lower. They can do this because they have time—time to braise, space to take the bird out and let it rest after it roasts. “Three seventy-five is death,” Dan Barber told me once, meaning that in that homey zone where almost every roasting or baking recipe takes place, birds dry out and become dull. So I roast in a very hot oven. Simple chicken is best with a small, blue-foot-type bird; I learned to do it with the poulet de Bresse of France, but since you can’t get them here—someone in Quebec was breeding them, and shipping them to Fairway, but then they were stopped, perhaps by a sudden explosive descent of French paratroopers protecting the name—I use the little D’Artagnan birds, which are excellent. The nice thing about this chicken is what you can do all around it: put it in a cast-iron pan to roast with a little film of olive oil on the base, and you can put in cubed potatoes, whole shallots, cloves of garlic (late in the process so they don’t burn), and everything comes out lovely. You can’t really do a sauce from the drippings, if you fill the pan with extras, but my kids love a simple mustard–crème fraîche–white wine sauce with chicken anyway. (You just don’t mention the white wine.) Make carrots with cumin and orange juice on the side, which is easy but tastes hard, and a broccoli–crème fraîche purée; the colors, bright orange, pale green, brown-chicken-skin caramel, are lovely together. Feed to teddy bear. Of course, cooking for children is not simply a matter of pressing the right button and getting the right response; children like what they like and they can’t be persuaded to like what they don’t like. We drag our educated palates behind us like Marley’s ghost drags his chains. What children like is various. But it’s what they like.

  The second method I use—and this would work well on a rotisserie; in fact is made for one—is the method they use in Paris. This involves no lemon—stuffing for a chicken is like hoop earrings with a black dress, I always think, too much, though Martha sighs at both thoughts with desire—again very high heat, but lots of duck or goose fat and salt slathered on the chicken before you roast it. You can use butter, but the duck or goose fat (which you can buy packaged these days from various places) gives it a luxurious wow! quality that is much prized. The trick, though, is to keep the secret ingredient secret from the diners, lest you run into this kind of conversation:

  CHILD DINER-TO-BE: What are you making for dinner, Dad?

  DAD-COOK: Roast chicken! Your favorite!

  CDTB: Oh, good. (Long pause) What’s that white stuff you’re putting on the chicken, Dad?

  DC: Oh, it’s duck fat, baby. It makes it delicious.

  CDTB: (Deeply suspicious) What do you mean, duck fat? How do they get fat from the duck? It’s, like, wool from a sheep?

  DC: (Honesty is the best policy—or maybe sadism is the best entertainment) Not exactly. When they slaughter the duck and filet its breast and so on, they squeeze all the fat out of it and refrigerate it so it can congeal.

  CDTB: (Long pained pause) You’re really going to eat that?

  DC: We all are.

  CDTB: Not me. Can I have my slice without the duck fat? Luke! Daddy’s putting dead duck fat on the chicken!

  And so on.

  I might add that CDTB is sometimes MDTB—Mom Diner-to-Be. So keep the kitchen door shut, roast for an hour, and they will love it. If you do this in a pan, and pour off just enough of the fat in the pan to keep it from being too greasy, the browned bits and the duck-fat renderings just dissolved in a bit of pure water, nothing more, make a wonderful simple sauce. This is great with potatoes also sautéed in duck fat and then roasted in the oven. (A light meal? Well, no, not exactly. But a good one, and who goes to roast chicken on a diet anyway?) It’s particularly delicious with a Rhône Valley red, for some reason—I suppose pepper and fat make a nice team-up. I always think of this as bistro chicken; the first kind somehow for me is farm chicken.

  My third method is to make a paste out of mustard, olive oil, tarragon, and—secret ingredient—just a touch of soy sauce. I slip my fingers beneath the skin of the bird, beginning at the base and moving toward the breast, slowly working it loose from the raw meat, gradually slipping back down toward the thighs to open the skin there as well. Then I dip my fingers in the paste and slowly rub it in the space between the raw flesh and the loosened skin. This needs to roast in a slightly “slower” oven—400°, not 425°—so the paste doesn’t burn. It makes for a wonderful chicken, especially if you keep some of the paste aside to use as a condiment. Serve with a purée of potatoes, very simple with cream and butter, so that the mustard-soy-tarragon flavors dominate. Great with a good Pinot Noir, the velvet of the wine melting into the silk of the mustard paste.

  And then, let us not forget poulet crapaudine—the chicken split down its back and done facedown in one iron skillet while being pressed down from above by another iron skillet with a brick or something else heavy in it. “Chicken under a brick,” as the Italians call it. It’s nice to bread-crumb the breast first. Also very good with a shallot–white wine–mustard sauce, and curiously nice with a rosé wine. The children love this, as they love chicken pot pie, and I have a theory that it is the names, as much as anything, that move them—a “pot pie,” “cooked under a brick,” a vocabulary of hide-and-seek, and things buried beneath things, that appeals to them. Tastes that hide under bricks, in pots and pies, in crusts and gratiné; things that are scalloped and mashed and made cheesy. Delicious words all start with s, just as funny words all end in k. Scalloped potatoes, steak with sauce, salmon, syllabub, sassafras, saffron, salsa, and salads; though the ch and k sounds have their little charm (chocolate, chicken), it is the s’s that carry the day. Seared sole; sautéed sole; filets with oysters.

  The sounds of words, the roar of language, comes between us and the sensations that dogs enjoy. Butterscotch does not care, or know, what her chicken is called. But the concepts have their own pleasures. The hint of the plural, present in all s words, suggests plenty, and the hiss of the s suggests insinuation and promise. “Sweetbreads,” as a word for glands, proves this—as does its French equivalent, ris de veau. And the soluble s sound raises brains in France from oddity to delicacy—cervelles. “Ice cream” is another instance where it is buried as a soft c but sings the same way. The whispering sounds of secrecy and succulence combined. Henry James said that the most beautiful words of the nineteenth century were “summer afternoon”; the loveliest words of the kitchen are surely “ice-cream sundae.” They breathe between their teeth but do so sibilantly, like smiling sinners, not like serpents.

  All best,

  Adam

  8. Near or Far?

  TWELVE-THIRTY on a beautiful summer day, and the chicken committee of the City Chicken Project is meeting at the Garden of Happiness, in the Crotona neighborhood of the Bronx. The chicken committee is devoted to the proliferation of egg-laying chickens in the outer boroughs, giving hens to people and having them raise the birds in community gardens and eat and even sell the eggs (“passing on the gift,” as this is called in the project), and thereby gain experience of chickens, eggs, and community—or fowl, food, and fellowship, as one of the more alliterative-minded organizers has said. It is the pet program of Just Food, a small organization that is administered by a startlingly young-looking woman named Jacquie Berger, who is silently monitoring the proceedings.

  The Garden of Happiness is a sunny community garden with vegetable plots, a chicken coop, a corrugated-tin shed, and a few chairs beneath a grape arbor, where the chicken committee is meeting. The chicken committee is a lot more committee than chicken, its deliberations filled with references to “existing chicken situations” and “pursuit of newer egg opportunities,” and the slightly skeptical neighborhood people have to be gently won over by the carefully beaming professionals. They provide the nudging, let’s-get-back-on-track counse
l that community chicken organizers have to give potentially disorganized community chicken-carers.

  “It’s, like, a long questionnaire, you know?” one of the neighborhood people says, about a form to be handed out to potential chicken-carers.