The Table Comes First

by Adam Gopnik

  Of course, vegetarians are not Nazis—but there is a sense in which sensitivity to animals has nothing at all to do with any other ethical acquisition. People have, historically, as often used cruelty to animals as a justification for being cruel to people as they have as a reason for not being cruel to anything. See how they treat their horses, was one cry of the Mongols about their enemies. The path from sensitivity to the suffering of animals to sensitivity to the suffering of humans is, as a matter of plain fact, far from open or easy.

  Our little dog, Butterscotch, lives for steak. It is the beginning and end of pleasure for her. Her nose quivers, her whole small fluffy body shakes, gripped by a primal hunger so intense that she can barely contain it. She smells steak and she does a sit, does another sit, tightening the first one—falls to the floor in a “down” and then does a head-down and a spin and a shake; her whole repertory of tricks, just to show how much she wants it and how eager she is to do anything she needs to do to get it. We slice it fine for her, and then watch her inhale it—well, she is a carnivore, a little wolf, not by sentiment but by genetics: isn’t her hunger for meat some sign that eating it is, not compulsory certainly, but hard to call evil in any recognizable sense? An appetite implanted so deep in our natures seems less of a sin and more of a scar—something that we just have, as part of living in the world we live in with the heritage we share, and that we can only improve by being certain that we are not cruel in its pursuit.

  I don’t know; I shudder at the verdict of our descendants even as I recognize the carnivorousness of our animal natures. And I go on eating, and serving, steak.

  In slicing the pommes soufflées, and readying the two Dutch ovens for their brief role as frying pots, I am aware that there is an element, what I believe could be called a “stark” element, of show, of carnival barkerishness, in the dish. This used to be part of the business of the chef—public amazement—which was then judged vulgar and largely banished. Or rather expelled to another world, to the nightly ribbon of spectacle. I wonder what you would make of cooks on cable television? What would you think—cook after cook, traveling and arguing and competing, making part of the public show things that were kept in the sanctity of the kitchen? Now, I am aware that for all that we have in common, you depended on servants a bit more than your writing quite likes to show. And nowhere more than in the pommes soufflées business—let’s be candid, your airily summoning up a plate of them does not mean that you are about to go off to the kitchen, Elizabeth, and make them. It means either that your cook has been busy or that you are imagining them, as eaten in Paris. One thing that separates our time from yours most firmly: there are no cooks outside the kitchen in yours. You mention famous chefs from time to time, but they belong to the distant and remote past.

  So I wonder how you would feel about our cable carnival of cooking? Every night, there are competitions, tours, chef against chef, young cook against old cook—thirty minutes head-to-head. We are supposed to be disapproving, of course, and to see this as a degradation of the art. And the idea of food shows on television is a paradox that Chesterton could not have imagined: food watched, food that no one can taste or smell or eat. To be honest, while my taste for recipe books is insatiable, my appetite for cable cooking shows is very limited. The ideas take so long to blossom, the preparations so long to prepare, that I get impatient.

  But there’s nothing really offensive or “off” about it: it celebrates, in however debased and diminished a form, an idea of expertise, of craft, which is the one thing that is vanishing from our world. Mario and the Iron Chefs are there because they have finish—they’re good at what they do, rather than being freakishly who they are. Being good at what you do is so odd and rare a thing in life now that just showing someone being good at something is enough to hold several million people. Even the contest shows make at least a pretense at excellence: the viewer can’t taste the food but Padma can, and the alarming sternness of the judgment at least simulates, pantomimes, the idea of something being at stake in the act of craft. (One can’t imagine a Top Artist show because the standards of what is considered art and poetry are by now so essentially whimsical or arbitrary that no one could agree: being good at rhyme or drawing has only a tangential relation to being famous for being a poet or an artist.) At least, when a chef makes something, she is making something. It’s either tasty or it isn’t, and the taste rises from the practical mastery of a craft. This is surely the reason that people respond with such excitement even to things that seem to me tedious, like Dancing with the Stars or American Idol—the “cruelty” to the contestants isn’t cruelty at all; it may be the only time many people in the audience have seen a craft standard enforced with craft severity: there really is and isn’t a right way to tango, as there is a right way and wrong way to make pommes soufflées.

  Oh, yes, the pommes soufflées. Well, I did them, ever so carefully, slicing and prefrying and then true frying… and they failed, totally and utterly. Not a single blossom or blister or even a hint of puffing and expanding. Obviously I had the width wrong, or the heat wrong, or the order wrong. There is a reason that French restaurants don’t do them; they’re too much trouble for too little reward. The reward is just the look, the puff, the hot air inside—the potato is still the same.

  The infusion of air is always a sign of elegance, in your day as in ours. How many things in the kitchen involve simply beating in air: meringues, whipped cream, pommes soufflées, soufflés themselves. It is, perhaps, no accident that we call a book cover’s blurb a “puff.” We condemn hot air even as we eat it. Air is the forgotten medium of cooking.

  Did I say they all failed? In truth, there was a single pomme soufflé—one slice had popped and blossomed amid the rest that had decided to remain potato chips. I looked at it and put it aside, and then fed it to the little dog.

  Very best,

  Adam

  12. What Do We Write About When We Write About Food?

  RECENTLY, THERE WAS an exchange in the pages of The Times Literary Supplement about the presence, and the propriety, of recipes in novels, and I intend to settle the questions that have arisen there in the American way, right now, and for good. There are four kinds of food in books: food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it; food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are; food that an author cooks for characters in order to eat it with them; and, last (and most recent), food that an author cooks for characters but actually serves to the reader.

  Most books that have food in them, including the classic nineteenth-century novels, have the first kind of food. In one Trollope novel after another, three meals a day, the parsons and politicians eat chops or steaks or mutton, but the dishes are essentially interchangeable, mere stops on the ribbon of narrative, signs of life and social transactions rather than specific pleasures: “Mr. Peregrine greatly enjoyed his chop” or “For Dr. Patterson, even the usual satisfaction he took in his beefsteak and porter was somewhat diminished by this thought”—such food provides space for a moment of reflection. The dishes are the foam peanuts in the packaging of classic narrative. There are moments in Trollope when what a character drinks matters—claret good or bad, porter or port—but his food is, in every sense, at the service of his story.

  Next come the writers who dish up very particular food to their characters to show who they are. Proust is the second kind of writer, and Henry James is, too. Proust seems so full of food—crushed strawberries and madeleines, tisanes and champagne—that entire recipe books have been extracted from his texts. But he’s not a greedy writer; that his people are eating lobster or veal matters to who they are and how they feel about who they are, but we are not meant to leave the page hungry. Proust will say that someone is eating a meal of gigot with sauce béarnaise, but he seldom says that the character had a delicious meal of gigot with sauce béarnaise—although he will extend his adjectives to the weather, or the view. He uses food as a sign of something
else. (It’s what social novelists, even mystically minded ones, always do: J. D. Salinger doesn’t like food, either, but the fact that his characters are eating snails or Swiss-cheese sandwiches tells so much about them that it must be noted, and felt, like every other detail.)

  The third kind of writer is so greedy that he goes on at length about the things his characters are eating, or are about to eat—serving it in front of us and then snatching it from our mouths. Ian Fleming is obsessed with food; gluttony, even more than lust, is the electric current of his hero’s adventures. Newcomers to James Bond, imagining him to be the roughneck he has once again become in movies, will be startled to see how much time he spends in Casino Royale and the other early Bonds giving advice to his girls and his spy superiors on what to eat, with the author hovering over his shoulder as he examines the menu: the problem with caviar, Bond announces, is getting enough toast (not true); English cooking is the best in the world when it’s good (certainly not true then); and rosé champagne goes perfectly with stone crabs (very true). His creator, one feels as the excitement builds, is not just itemizing the food, waiter-like, but actually sitting at the table and sharing it with him.

  The fourth kind of writer, ever more numerous, presents on the page not just the result but the whole process—not just what people eat but how they make it, exactly how much garlic is chopped, and how, and when it is placed in the pan. Sometimes entire recipes are included in the text, a practice that links Kurt Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, novels about the inadvertent mayhem that a man can inflict on a woman; in Heartburn, the recipes serve both as a joke about what a food writer writing a novel would write and as a joke on novel-writing itself by someone who anticipates that she will not be treated as a “real” novelist. These days, we have long cooking sequences in Ian McEwan; endless recipes in James Hamilton-Paterson; menus analyzed at length in John Lanchester; and detailed culinary scenes involving Robert B. Parker’s bruiser of a detective, Spenser. Cooking is to our literature what sex was to the writing of the sixties and seventies, the thing worth stopping the story for to share, so to speak, with the reader.

  Not long ago, I attempted to mimic some cooking as it is done in a number of relatively recent novels. I began, foolishly, with several recipes from Günter Grass’s Nobel Prize–provoking The Flounder, the epic allegory of German history told through the endlessly repeated parable of an evil fish, a gullible man, a virtuous woman, and a lot of potatoes. The talking Flounder, being both the evil daemon and the central consciousness of the piece, has a natural class interest in flounders’ not being eaten, so there is a shortage of fish recipes in The Flounder. (I was tempted by a detailed description of how to make stewed tripe, but who in my gang would eat stewed tripe?) There is one nice moment, though, when the eternal talking Flounder, who “knew all the recipes that had been used for cooking his fellows,” mentions simmering the fish with white wine and capers. Well, from his mouth to our plate: I did just that, with a nice filet from the Citarella market, and, as suggested, added some sorrel. Then, learning in a later section what could be done with potatoes and mustard—the potato, with its false promise of cheap nutrition for all, is, I suppose, meant to represent the false hope of the Enlightenment in Germany, but the mustard surely could represent the saving genius of the Bavarian rococo—I made a gratin with mustard to accompany it. It was fine, though it reminded me of why it is that, at a moment when Spanish cooking is everywhere sanctified and even English cooking, for the first time, canonized, not many people are making a case that German cooking is much more than fish and potatoes and sauerbraten. Eating Günter Grass’s flounder was actually like reading one of his novels: nutritious, but a little pale and starchy.

  Great masters are not meant to offer small plates. My eye fell next on School Days, one of Robert B. Parker’s excellent Spenser mysteries. Where John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, Spenser’s daddy in the genre, would occasionally throw an inch-thick T-bone on the grill of The Busted Flush, Spenser produces entire dishes, and we read about them bit by bit. (Nero Wolfe had a personal chef, and ate a lot, but it was mostly in the “the great detective dined on quenelles de brochet” line.) In School Days, Spenser, with his beloved Susan away at a psych seminar, and only the dog for company, makes a dish of cranberry beans, diced steak, and fresh corn, dressed with olive oil and cider vinegar.

  The beans alone establish Spenser’s credibility as a cook. “I shelled the beans from their long, red-and-cream pods and dropped them in boiling water and turned down the heat and let them simmer,” he tells us. A devotion to shell beans, I have noticed, divides even amateur cooks from noncooks more absolutely than any other food, and they are, into the bargain, a perfect model of writing. Like sentences, shell beans are a great deal more trouble to produce than anyone who isn’t producing them knows. You have to shell the beans, slipping open the pods with your thumbnail and then tugging the beautiful little prismatic buttons from their moorings—a process that, like writing, always takes much longer than you think it will. And then even the best shell beans, cleaned and simmered, are like sentences in that nobody actually appreciates them as much as they deserve to be appreciated. Shell beans are several steps more delicious, lighter and finer, than dried beans, let alone canned beans; but the sad truth is that nobody really cares beans about beans, and not many eaters can tell the fresh kind from the dried, or even the canned.

  I carried on with the recipe: Spenser takes a small steak from the refrigerator and dices it, sautés it, and then mixes it with the beans and some corn. I did this, and, honestly, I don’t think it’s a good idea. Maybe I didn’t do it right—there is a certain lack of specificity about what kind of steak he’s using and just how long he keeps it in the pan—but I found that my steak dried out when it was diced and cooked, and, anyway, didn’t have enough salty punch to play off against the floury blandness of the beans. Sausage, not steak, is what’s called for here. As for the corn, well, even off-season corn is pretty tasty mixed with oil and vinegar, and makes a good combo with the shell beans. It’s a nice dish, worth interrupting the murders for.

  Still, you have to wonder how well the food fits in the book. The purpose of the scene, after all, is not to teach a recipe but to paint a mood—to show the lonely Spenser as somehow more modern, broader in interests and resources, than lonely city detectives in fiction often are. Down these mean streets walks a man with a recipe in his head. What the reader recalls, though, is not the setting but the dish. Should the food come off the page onto the plate quite so readily, overwhelming the atmosphere, and does this indicate that there is something subtly off, nonfunctional, about the presence of elaborate food-making in fiction?

  Rising to a higher level of culinary ambition, I went on to make, the following night, a fish-stew recipe, a kind of English bouillabaisse, from Ian McEwan’s superb Saturday: Henry Perowne, the central character, a neurosurgeon, cooks this elaborate dish as he watches “monstrous and spectacular scenes” on television. Henry, though confessedly inexpert, is a convincing home cook; he admits that he belongs to the chuck-it-in school, the hearty school of throwing ingredients together in a pot—he likes the “relative imprecision and lack of discipline.” In the passage I was following, he makes a tomato-and-fish stock for his stew, and, at the same time, starts prepping the rest. He “empties several dried red chillies from a pot and crushes them between his hands and lets the flakes fall with their seeds into the onions and garlic,” before adding “pinches of saffron, some bay leaves, orange-peel gratings, oregano, five anchovy fillets, two tins of peeled tomatoes.” Then he takes some mussels from a string bag, throws those, with the skeletons of three skates, into a stockpot, and tips some Sancerre into the tomato sauce. Meanwhile, he readies monkfish, slicing tails into chunks, a few more mussels, and, finally, some clams and prawns. All the while, he is watching on the mostly muted television the run-up to the Iraq war—marchers in London, Colin Powell at the U.N.—and brooding on life in our time.
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  McEwan is obviously painting a picture of l’homme bourgeois as he is today, his hands filled with fish, his mind with intimations of terror. (McEwan really is serving this dish to his readers; a revised version of the recipe is right there on his Web site.) It’s a tribute to McEwan’s powers of persuasion that the scene would never work that way in reality. You can’t idly make a bouillabaisse while you brood on modern life any more than you can idly make a cassoulet; these are nerve-wracking concoctions. The mussels, which Henry drops into his stock straight from a string bag, need at a minimum to be spray-washed, and probably cleaned and checked for those obscene little beards they have. European mussels have fewer of these, it’s true—more like soul patches. (Later on, Henry scrubs the mussels, but he seems to be doing it absentmindedly, and you can’t do it absentmindedly.) The fish needs to be taken from its wrappings and washed; and then how fine do you chop the garlic, and are you sure the alcohol has boiled off from the wine? The “orange-peel gratings” are a story in themselves, since all the experts insist that you avoid getting any white pith in with them, and this is about as difficult as writing a villanelle. (It doesn’t actually matter much, but they say that it does.) Worse than that, having crushed a “handful” of those little dried peppers between your fingers means that you have to wash your hands instantly, with soap, since nothing is more common among home cooks like Henry than wiping a tear from your eye while chopping the onions, your hand still contaminated by hot pepper, with horrific results.