by Adam Gopnik
More than any dessert I know—more than any soufflé, or molten cake—this rice pudding seems to delight the crowds, and what’s more, it appears to be sophisticated work. I suppose the blend of cardamom and coconut gives a misleading impression of premeditation. (Obviously, this would not be the case in India.)
My third rice pudding hails from Paris, and is a variant of the riz au lait that is such a standard dessert there. It isn’t quite like Greek-coffee-shop rice pudding, that New York staple, which is just a mix of rice and milk and sugar and vanilla, with, let it be said, cornstarch added. This one does something a little more ingenious than most recipes, which are really just marriages of milk and rice cooked slowly so that the rice soaks up the milk and the natural starch in the rice does the work of thickening. In this one, you make that kind of riz au lait—you know, Elizabeth, it’s so simple that it’s embarrassing to recipetize it; you just make sweet milky rice by simmering them together. The only trick is not to let it get too dry. Then you beat by hand a cup and a half of cream till it’s whipped but not quite in that stiff form, and you blend the sweet rice in with the whipped cream and then—this is important—pour it into a narrowish mold and let it refrigerate for quite a while, so that it stiffens up even more.
And once again, it suggests the magic of rice pudding: it overwhelms people, delights them, makes them smile and feel part of some peasant ritual, some rite of passage, even if the ceremony is only a midweek dinner. This is especially true if you serve either the Indian or the French rice pudding with little pots of extras: cherry jam, or dried apricots poached in white wine, something nice. It gives the whole thing a sense of unearned splendor, like listening to Keith play the opening riff of “Start Me Up” and then realizing that it’s just a bar chord and a simple minor seventh shape, up and down the neck of the guitar, simplicity itself, with the recklessness of true simplicity.
Why does rice pudding, in any of its forms, have this ritual resonance? The answer, I think, lies simply in the slowness of its achievement. Eggs are little miracles; one minute slime, the next a meal. Meats are primal. But a rice pudding develops in slow and gradual stages—not even stages, phases, a slow and gradual field, passing from inedible hard grains and unpalatable raw eggs and milk to some combined, involved, semisoupy, semicereal, sweet and starchy but both at once delight. Rice pudding is like life: it’s hard at first, gradually thickens, and ends well enough to make you wish you could have it again. No wonder we use it to mark life passages.
Yet I know, know deep down, that Keith would like these puddings. And your friend Whistler? Ah, Whistler would best like the baked one my mother does, which would remind him of his student days at West Point, of his youth in America, of his mother, too—who, we know, sits in her chair, patiently, while her brilliant boy paints her portrait, and thinks of what she will cook for him when he is done at last.
All best,
Adam
PART IV
Leaving the Table
THE SAVORY, serious part of the meal is over, and the talk is settling, and then—what happens? The sweet comes out, which some of the diners (the women, as it happens, most often) refuse to eat, and others relish. And there is a last drink, perhaps, and at home people begin to look at their watches (and the hosts longingly at the door), while in the restaurant the weary waiters begin to stack tables and pointedly if politely ask if you will be wanting anything more. At that moment, the bill to pay, the thanks to be offered (“It was absolutely wonderful!”—the degree of hysterical affirmation usually in direct reverse proportion to the degree of pleasure really taken), some sense of summary, of finish, even, perhaps, of a moral, is sought by those who came to the table. They want, it seems, something to take home….
15. Paris at Last
I WORRY about French food in the new age of spices and world cooking, as one might worry about English damp in the age of global warming, or about Canadian civility under the stress of imported talk radio. Something that one just took for granted as a fixed feature of the world suddenly seems fragile and fugitive, even ailing—even, perhaps, on its way out.
Having written about the crisis in French food early on, I suppose I always secretly assumed that French cooking would snap right out of it, the way that North American ice hockey did under the stress of Russian competition. The internal resources of France for cooking were so deep-seated, so powerfully entrenched, so much a part of the logic and wit of French life, that the narrowness and stultified repetition that had overcome so much French cooking seemed sure to end simply with a renewed act of will. Since no one can be more willful than a French chef, it seemed to me merely a matter of time and timing before the inevitable opening-out would take place. A new Robuchon, a next generation Ducasse would seize, say, on North African spices as Carême had once seized on the herbs of Provence—and French cooking would be reborn.
Yet though I would still rather eat in Paris than anywhere else in the world—eating, once again, is a social act before it is a purely sensory one; it calls on our moral taste more than our measuring tongue, and my own moral taste still leads me back inexorably to the wit and intelligence of French civilization—I recognize that the rebirth has not happened, that the crisis I identified, only half-playfully, a decade or more ago is more entrenched now than it was then, and that fewer and fewer people who care about cooking now think of France as first among all others.
And still we go on searching for signs of life. New generations of bistros open, and though they seem more tense than tempting—the demands of French labor laws often lead to the smaller restaurants’ being staffed by an overstressed spouse and an overworked staff—I try them, and cheer. New geniuses are announced and sometimes even new guides are published, and of all of these the most “mediatized,” as the French say, and at the same time the most puzzling, is certainly the food guide published by the group that calls itself, with deliberate insolence, Le Fooding. (The insolence lies in using an English word.)
I suppose I would have an easier time deciding if Le Fooding is going to be able to accomplish all that it has set out to accomplish—which is nothing less than to do the whole of the job that needs to be done, to save the preeminence of French cuisine from going the way of the Roman Empire, the five-act tragedy, and the ocean liner—if I had an easier time defining what it is and what its principles at bottom truly are. That it is a phenomenon is beyond dispute, its success having reached the point where the French daily Figaro announced, last summer, that French food is now divided into two families, each with its own public and cultural identity: “On the one side, Michelin, with its century of cultural expertise; on the other the Fooding guide, born ten years ago in an attempt to break the codes and finally offer real change to a gastronomy that its authors judge to be outdated.”
Yet what, exactly, the new family stands for can be hard to say. At some moments, Le Fooding seems earnest, in the manner of the slow-food movement; at others, it is merely festive, a good-time gang; at still others, it appears determined to wrench the entire culture of good food in France from its historic place, on the nationalist right, to a new home, in the libertarian center. To spend a few months studying its founders and their ideas is to get pretty much the same feeling you get when, studying French history, you have to take up the story of Jansenism at Port-Royal in the seventeenth century: all you can really figure out is that it’s important, that it’s a heresy, and that it’s hard to follow.
The Fooding restaurant guide is the most obvious of the group’s activities. Since its founding, in 2000, by Alexandre Cammas and Emmanuel Rubin, two gastronomic journalists exasperated by the conformity and conservatism of French food culture, Le Fooding has published, from its Right Bank offices, a handsome, atypically larksome, and unusually honest annual encyclopedia of the restaurants and bistros of both Paris and the provinces. (The guide boasts on its cover that its writers pay their own checks and can prove it—not a thing universally true of French food guides.) But the guide is, in
a sense, merely the word, not the act, of the enterprise. The movement, which has been reinforced over the years by a constantly changing team of other Fooding-istes, also sponsors mass picnics—“Foodings”!—at which three-star French chefs, long separated from their diners by a kitchen door and centuries of decorum, offer good food in casual, high-spirited settings. These Foodings take place all over France; the atmosphere is somewhere between a buffet dinner and the Woodstock festival.
Le Fooding is in part a move to épater la bourgeoisie—it was at a Fooding event that the young chef Petter Nilsson famously assembled a plate of vegetables that symbolized the world’s religions, with a giant frite in the shape of a cross on top—but it has also been accused, by left-wing journalists, of representing the bourgeoisie; the populist left-wing magazine Marianne charged that it was a kind of cosmopolitan fifth column in the continuing modern assault on French values, and Emmanuel Rubin left the movement last year, disillusioned by what he considered its loss of moral mission.
I first heard about Le Fooding in an e-mail from Raphaël Glucksmann, the filmmaker and human-rights activist (and the son of the philosopher André Glucksmann). “For once, I’m not writing on behalf of the Chechens, the Rwandans, or the Georgians,” he explained cheerfully, and then urged me to meet with his friend Zoé Reyners, who was coming to New York as a kind of avant-garde of the Fooding movement here. Zoé turned out to be an exquisite, nervous blonde in white linen, with a distinct resemblance to the young Brigitte Fossey, and she explained that Le Fooding was planning to come to New York for its first American event, a marriage of art, food, and festival that would be called Le Fooding d’Amour and would take place on the grounds of P.S. 1 in Queens, creating a kind of Lafayette-Washington moment. The best of the new generation of French chefs were flying in to meet the best of the new generation of Americans and cook alongside them. She gave me a copy of the latest Fooding guide, which was illustrated by the young cartoonists who bring so much life these days to French journalism. The cover showed King Kong ripping the dome from a Haussmannian restaurant palace with a look of utter satisfaction as he eats the bourgeois diners inside with an enormous silver spoon. The tone of the reviewing had a jocose quality quite new in France: the section on three-star-style temples was called “Fais-Moi Mal!”—literally, “Make Me Ache!” or, idiomatically, “Hurt Me!” Zoé asked if I’d like to meet Alexandre Cammas, who was arriving in New York the following month for an extended reconnaissance of the new world. “He will be taking a house in Brooklyn, with his family, in order to lay the groundwork for American Fooding,” she said.
I met Alexandre, with Zoé, in Bryant Park; he turned out to be the Danton of the Fooding movement, one of those passionately articulate young Frenchmen who speak with the relentless eloquence of French letters and philosophy, answering each rhetorical question as they raise it. “Fooding?” he said. “I was writing for the magazine Nova, and I needed a rhyme for the title of a piece.” We had now settled on a bench. “I intended the word as a mélange of ‘food’ and ‘feeling’—and I like the provocation of using an English word within the context of French cuisine,” he explained. “I was already a food writer—I had been at Libération for a while—and this was in 1999, a time when restaurants in France were already beginning to move, to change. There was a new element of design, a new element of casual yet serious food. The old choice between la cuisine de bistrot and la grande cuisine française was ending.
“I wasn’t, in the beginning, trying to do anything except characterize a little phenomenon—but I found it growing, in response to a new need.” He cleared his throat and leaned forward, like one who needs to resolve complexities that his innocent listener hasn’t even grasped yet. “What does it mean, the Fooding movement?” he went on. “Food and feeling—that’s the heart of it. But with what practical effect? ‘Feeling’ in the sense that we mean to be part of le goût de son temps—the taste of one’s time, though ‘taste’ in English is too weak a word. ‘Fooding’ means to eat and drink with feeling—to recognize that one eats with the nose, the eyes, and the mouth, with everything that makes us human! At the time we began, French culinary journalism was narrowly focused on the cooking of the kidneys, the tenderness of the poularde. What was on the plate was all that counted! But who lives that way? Who eats that way? We wanted cooks who cooked with the whole of their selves and souls, not technicians of the table. French cuisine was caught in a museum culture: the dictatorship of a fossilized idea of gastronomy. And this dictatorship has been enforced by tourism: you have tourists packing in to experience gastronomy in a kind of perpetual museum of edification. We wanted to be outside that, sur le pont, on the bridge, in front, defining everything that is new. We wanted to escape foie gras, volaille de Bresse, all the clichés.”
He caught himself, bad-mouthing foie gras being a bit like bad-mouthing the Communion wafer: “Not that we have anything against it—we adore foie gras, and who doesn’t love poulet de Bresse? But all this style that had been mechanically copied over and over—it’s not living cuisine. In a living cuisine, things move and mix together, and that’s what makes the cuisine of tomorrow. The classic French cuisine was dying. Everyone knew it outside of France, but it had to be said within. And it had to be said with joy—not as something to mourn but as something to celebrate, the beginning of a new taste of one’s time.”
Alexandre and Zoé went on to explain that the movement first made its mark with the publication of the guide, which immediately became notorious for ignoring some great names, like the restaurateur Guy Savoy, and honoring such masters as Alain Ducasse for their casual fusion places rather than for their grand restaurants. “We left out Guy Savoy not because he is not a fine cook but because he was adding nothing new,” Alexandre explained. “We want food to be a series of provocations, not mechanical pleasures. Food must belong to its time.”
I asked Zoé and Alexandre whom they would include on their list of Fooding chefs in Paris, and wondered if I might have lunch at a Fooding restaurant with a Fooding guru the next time I was over. Zoé mentioned a few places, including Stéphane Jégo’s L’Ami Jean, a small Basque bistro in the Seventh Arrondissement; Yves Camdeborde’s Le Comptoir, a twenty-seat dining room in the Hôtel Relais Saint-Germain; and Bruno Doucet’s La Régalade, a bistro out near the Porte de Châtillon.
Both Zoé and Alexandre had the warm glow of revolutionary sectarians in their eyes, and, having shared their fond exasperation with the stasis of French cooking, I was inspired. At the same time, their desire for a head-to-toe, well-articulated renewal of French cuisine, complete with a guide and an advance guard of agitators, seemed a peculiarly calculated way of achieving increased spontaneity. The systematic, thought-through approach to a renaissance in casualness might itself be a symptom of the problem, it occurred to me, as though they were saying to one another, If only we could persuade our countrymen to stop being so entirely French, we could persuade them to be entirely French.
When I next got to Paris, later that summer, I realized that I had heard some of this before: American critics had been complaining for a while that French cooking, which had led the world in the idea that food might be art, had become stereotyped, unreal, and remote from life, and the complaint had at moments echoed in France. I had been one of these critics, and not the quietest or most decorous, voicing the complaint myself at length in an essay back in the nineties, to the anger of some in France and the pained acceptance of many others. (The critic Michael Steinberger had more recently gotten a good book out of the same theme.)
The grounds of the complaint, as I had made it once, and others since, wasn’t just against French food, which was still as good as ever, but against the stasis in French cooking. Italian cooking, in particular, had established itself as the base, the longed-for country, the dominant style. In England, Italy had cleared all before it, become what France had been a century before, when Elizabeth Pennell took the greatness of French cooking for granted, and spaghetti had been
sneaked in as a strange exotic possibility. Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray had, at the River Café in London, created a kind of satellite version of Italy which some of us thought as good as anything in the Old Country. More important, they had made Italian cooking—expressed strictly in English, without any of the patina of the moda antico—the natural language of the English cook. In America, Italian cooking, under the more temperamental presence of Marcella Hazan, still had something Old World to it, was “spoken” with an accent—Italian restaurants still had Italian waiters—but it was what men with expense accounts wanted for lunch and what women with children cooked for dinner. The grammar of French cooking itself—a lump of protein sautéed in a pan, the pan cleansed by a liquid, the liquid reduced to a sauce—which had been so radically new only a century before, now seemed tired on your plate and lethal to your heart. In its place, a variety of techniques, some old and Asian, some new and Catalonian, had taken their place: the grilled fish with a relish, the sweet-savory quick cook and slow simmer, based on curries and stir-fries, had become dominant. A kind of West Coast offense (short gains with quick slants) had taken over cooking—lots of small, intensely flavored plates instead of one big rich main. We live in a tapas civilization—quick-hitting bursts of information and gossip and malice—and a veal chop with butter and mustard sauce or a filet of beef with pastry and peppercorns suddenly seemed as dated as the four-hundred-page novel brooding on a single woman’s plight.
As always in life, you voice a complaint against your beloved only to regret it later. “A Lover’s Complaint” is the title of the first love poem, not the last. In New York, the empire of the French restaurant, which in my first years there had stretched from Le Lavandou, on East Sixty-first Street, to Le Périgord, on East Fifty-second, one long imperial highway stretching across the Upper East Side, had been reduced to a single restaurant. On birthdays we went to La Grenouille for the old food—cheese soufflés and Dover sole with white sauce and filet of beef with those green peppercorns—and cherished the last refuge of the red banquette and the towering bouquet. There was still good brasserie food around—the simple country-based food that had itself been fast food in France a century before, grilled chicken and choucroute, which is just franks and beans. That you could find all over. But I longed for another kind of French meal: that veal chop with mustard sauce, a purée of endives and a small potato gratin, a sharp salad with a smooth and tangy goat cheese and then a bright and supple apricot soufflé. A foie de veau with raisins and mustard-tarragon butter, and an endive salad and île flottante and profiteroles. Lobster à l’Américaine, sole à la neige, poulet à la normande. You didn’t find them much even in Paris, for while there might be stasis in French food, it was stasis that had frozen the high end and the lower end while leaving out the middle. The cuisine bourgeois was passing even as the old bourgeois themselves were. City food for city people. Food for twilight times. You couldn’t find that anymore.
