INSTEAD OF HAVING a big New York wedding at Eleven Madison Park, as we’d once considered, Erin and I contrived another plan. One April weekend in 2006, we got married by a county clerk in Naples, Florida—where her mother and stepfather live—and the following month had our wedding blessed in a formal ceremony (Erin wore a wedding dress, and had a maid of honor) at the quirky little Anglican church of St. Mary Woolnoth, in the City of London. My daughters came, as did friends like Dorothy Kalins, Christopher Hirsheimer, the Jausases, Peter and Mary Ward, Jonathan Waxman, Tim Johnston, and Carl Doumani (at whose Napa Valley winery I’d gotten married the first time), and, of course, lots of Erin’s family and their close friends. Our Texas singer-songwriter friend Kimmie Rhodes sang “Amazing Grace” as we walked out of the church—which was apposite, as the hymn’s lyrics were written by the abolitionist cleric John Newton, rector of St. Mary Woolnoth from 1780 to 1807.
Then we repaired to my old friend Terence Conran’s Blueprint Café, overlooking the Thames on the top floor of the Design Museum. We sat at two long tables, set not with flowers but with sprawls of artichokes, asparagus, and other fresh spring vegetables, and the chef, Jeremy Lee, served us a knockout banquet of Scottish langoustines with homemade mayonnaise, pâté de campagne and Middle White pork rillettes, roasted rump of Belted Galloway beef with pickled walnuts, English peas with mint, and Jersey Royal new potatoes, and, in place of a wedding cake—neither Erin nor I is a great lover of dessert—an entire wheel of Mrs. Montgomery’s cheddar, topped with several sets of vintage wedding figures, with chocolate truffles on the side for those who needed something sweet.
WHEN I LEFT SAVEUR a few months after our London ceremony, I signed a contract to write ten long restaurant pieces a year for my old friend Ruth Reichl at Gourmet—not reviews, exactly, but appreciations of individual establishments, chefs, regional food scenes, or culinary genres. It was a perfect job for me, with a generous monthly retainer that paid me more than I would have made if I’d stayed on at Saveur. Again, I had a wonderful time, traveling around America and Western Europe, writing stories that were not unlike the big pieces I’d been doing for a dozen years at Saveur. I went to Gambero Rosso, in the Tuscan coastal town of San Vincenzo, where Fulvio Pierangelini was cooking some of the best food in Italy. I did pieces on the food and wine of the Valle de Guadalupe in Baja California; on the innovative, vegetable-loving chef Jean-Luc Rabanel in Arles; on the River Café in London and its alumni; on the surprising Mexican food scene in Durham, North Carolina. I ordered and compared the same multicourse dinner at the Guy Savoy restaurants in Paris and Las Vegas (they came out roughly even). I wrote about Jitlada and other wonderful Thai restaurants in Los Angeles and Richard Melman’s restaurant empire in Chicago, and revisited my old friends Jaume Subirós at the Hotel Empordà and Jean-Pierre Silva at his beachside L’Ondine in Cannes.
I traveled for other reasons, too. In early 2007, Peter Ward asked me if I’d come back to Nenagh on St. Patrick’s Day and help cook a dinner he had planned for the Tipperary Slow Food Convivium. I said sure. Then I started wondering if I’d lost my mind. I love to cook, but I usually do it just for myself and Erin and sometimes my daughters. The last time I’d worked on a restaurant line was eight or nine years earlier, when I’d gone into the kitchen at Chez Panisse one night to assist in the production of a dinner from Saveur Cooks Authentic Italian. (No one was dazzled by my technique.) Now Peter had put me in charge of the main course for sixty-five paying customers, and I’d be working in the kitchen with a couple of practiced professionals. What was I thinking? Peter had said that there’d be whole lamb shoulders, and I wasn’t even sure what to do with those; the only bone-in lamb I’d ever cooked had been legs or chops (or racks). Before I left for Nenagh, I called up Jonathan Waxman and asked him what a real cook would do with lamb shoulders. “Roast them in a hot oven for about an hour,” he said, “then lower the heat and let them cook for about three more hours.” Okay, I figured, that didn’t sound too hard.
My fellow cooks were two people I’d gotten to know on earlier trips around Ireland: a pretty young blond chef, cookbook writer, and TV personality from West Cork named Clodagh McKenna, and an amiable chef-fisherman from the Aran Islands named Enda Conneely. I arrived from New York around lunchtime the day of the dinner, and we consulted on the menu over coffee and scones. The first course was going to be simple, a salad of local organic greens with a few slices of jamón serrano that one of Peter’s Slow Food buddies in Spain had sent him. Enda had arrived with a burlap sack full of Galway Bay mussels and a box of wrasse—scrawny little fish with not much commercial value, generally kept by fishermen for their own consumption—that he’d salt-cured himself in the traditional manner. He planned to steam the mussels and flavor them with herb butter, and to make his version of an ancient Irish fishermen’s dish of chopped-up wrasse mixed with onions in a floury white sauce, served with boiled potatoes. “Irish brandade,” I suggested. “Except that there’s no garlic,” he replied. “Isn’t that what makes it Irish?” I asked. Dessert would be Clodagh’s rhubarb crumble and also a bombe of crumbled meringues mixed with whipped cream and rhubarb, followed by a selection of Tipperary cheeses.
I went into the kitchen to have a look at the lamb, which came from a nearby organic farm. The meat was in the form of half a dozen pretty little shoulders, with collarbones attached, weighing no more than five or six pounds each. There wasn’t a fresh herb in the kitchen except for some little branches of green bay leaves, but there was a big waxed-paper-lined cardboard box full of lovely, sticky Irish butter. I massaged the shoulders with it and splashed on some olive oil and some lemon juice (from a bottle), then seasoned the meat with abandon with Maldon salt and ground black pepper. Then I put the shoulders into baking pans and slid them into Peter’s three-tiered convection oven at the equivalent of 475 degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour to get them nice and brown. Next, I lowered the heat to about 375, added some water to the pans, put some chopped-up onions and peeled, crushed garlic cloves around the sides of the meat, and threw in some of those bay leaves.
I’d brought along a pound of very smoky pepper bacon that I’d gotten shipped up from Velma Willett’s Lazy H Smoke House in Kirbyville, Texas, shortly before I left New York, and I cooked this crisp, to be crumbled, later, over the colcannon that Enda was going to make. I set the bacon grease aside in a little earthenware bowl, intending to mix it in with the root vegetables—parsnips, carrots, and celeriac—that I was going to roast, attaching a note to the bowl reading, “Do Not Touch—Valuable East Texas Bacon Grease.” Then I went off to check in to my hotel and take a nap, leaving the lamb to roast, with Enda and Clodagh agreeing to baste it for me.
About three hours later, I pulled the lamb out of the oven, set it aside to rest, and put all the pan juices, along with the onions and garlic and bay leaves and some middling Valpolicella that was sitting around, into a big pot. I brought the mixture to a boil, then reduced it to a steady simmer and let it cook down while Enda worked on his wrasse, Clodagh helped clean the mussels, and I started chopping up the root vegetables and tossed them with olive oil and butter and plenty of salt, throwing in some chopped-up baby leeks. I put the vegetables into the convection oven to roast, sadly without the Texas bacon grease. The dishwasher, like so many people in the service economy in Ireland, was Polish, and apparently didn’t or couldn’t read my note; when I got back to the kitchen after my nap, the bowl was empty and clean.
As the guests gathered in the shop, Enda made his colcannon in a big industrial mixer. Then he and I pulled the lamb off the bones with our hands, in big shards, and put it back in the roasting pans to reheat briefly in the oven. When it came time to serve, Enda and Clodagh and I start filling big oval serving bowls—a mound of meat at one end, with the sauce ladled over it, a big mass of colcannon in the middle, and heaps of the root vegetables on the other end. Out the food went. Almost immediately, the empty bowls started coming back to the kitchen—more please! We sent out the res
t, leaned back for a few minutes and drank some wine, and then started plating Clodagh’s desserts. When those, too, had been consumed, we ventured out into the dining areas. People applauded. They smiled, they called out, they wanted to talk. We circulated, answered questions, accepted compliments.
Then we perched in the front of the shop with a bottle of Jameson. Sweat was soaking my shirt beneath my apron, and I’d nicked the tip of my left index finger trimming baby leeks and burned a spot the size of a quarter on the back of my right hand on the roof of the convection oven, but it occurred to me as I sat there that I hadn’t felt so good in months. It also occurred to me that I wasn’t done with Ireland yet, that the surprise of Irish cooking—how good it could be, how varied it was—would make a book as unexpected, in its way, as Catalan Cuisine had been.
That fall, I had drinks with my agent and Bill LeBlond, the cookbook editor from Chronicle Books. Chronicle had recently published an attractive tome, with about 250 recipes and many gorgeous photographs, called The Country Cooking of France, by the esteemed director of the La Varenne cooking schools, Anne Willan. Chronicle wanted to extend the franchise, and Bill asked if I’d be interested in tackling The Country Cooking of Italy. Well, okay, I said, but what I’d really like to do is a book about Irish food. To his credit, he didn’t fall off his barstool laughing. In fact, once I’d explained a little about what I’d found in Ireland and sent him a copy of the Irish issue of Saveur, he offered me a two-book deal: first something on Ireland, then, once that was out of the way, the Italian book. I figured that he meant a modest little volume in the first case, but it turned out that he’d decided I should give Ireland the Country Cooking treatment, too.
Over the next year, I made half a dozen more trips to Ireland, spending probably two more months there, cumulatively, meeting more people, visiting more corners of the island, eating more good (and sometimes not so good) food. I logged many hours in the National Library in Dublin going through handwritten recipe books and folders of loose-leaf recipes in the estate papers from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and Anglo-Irish manor houses all over Ireland. I spoke with an archaeologist, a baker, several butchers, even an orchardist who was trying to grow French wine grapes a few miles from the Dublin airport. And, of course, I spent many more hours at Country Choice and at home with Peter and Mary. In between trips, I worked on the book at home, and gradually shaped it into something I could be proud of. Christopher had a good-size inventory of outtakes from our earlier travels to Ireland, and she and her colleague, Melissa Hamilton, made a long trip back to fill in the holes. They also helped test the recipes, especially the surprisingly elaborate and refined ones I had discovered in those old collections from grand estates.
The Country Cooking of Ireland was published in late 2009. Peter threw me a splendid party at Country Choice, and I did countless interviews in Ireland and America both. More than one interviewer asked me how a putative expert on the cooking of Catalonia and other Mediterranean regions like myself could be so passionate about Irish food. “Good food is good food,” I’d reply.
The book won James Beard Awards in 2010 as Best International Cookbook and Cookbook of the Year, and the 2011 Best International Cookbook prize from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. By that time, I had finished the project Chronicle had originally wanted me to do, too, and The Country Cooking of Italy came out in the fall of 2011. It was a very different kind of book from its predecessor, not so much an account of culinary discovery as a record of the food I’d eaten over more than forty years of visits to Italy. Maybe partly for that reason, though it was well reviewed and got nominated for several awards, it has never sold as well as the Irish book—which, as Chuck Berry once observed in another context, goes to show you never can tell.
MY AGENT HAD CLEVERLY MANAGED to get me working on two parallel tracks as an author: My contract for the Country Cooking books specified that I could work simultaneously on other projects that were narrative in nature, as opposed to cookbooks, and that Chronicle’s option on my next work, whatever that might be, applied only to books built around recipes. Once I’d signed up to write about Ireland and Italy, I took a look at the respective deadlines for the two and realized that I might be able to sneak another book in between them.
For a couple of years, I’d been thinking about Ferran Adrià, the then newly ascendant Catalan chef whose elBulli, on a small cove called Cala Montjoi, near the Costa Brava town of Roses, was starting to get called the best restaurant in the world. His new celebrity aside, I knew enough about him at that point to know that he, like elBulli itself, had an interesting story, and I wondered if there might not be a market for a biography of the man, interwoven with a history of the place.
I’ve recounted at length elsewhere how I met Ferran and gradually got to know him, and how eventually—with the help of our mutual friend José Andrés—I convinced him to let me write a book about him. I finished my Irish book in early 2009, then was able to focus on what was to become Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food for more than a year before addressing The Country Cooking of Italy. I learned the history of elBulli—how it began life in 1961 as a mini–golf course built by a German doctor and his Slovakian wife, evolved into a beach bar, then a grillroom, then a restaurant serving sophisticated French-style nouvelle cuisine. I followed Ferran’s story from his childhood in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, just next to Barcelona, to his first cooking jobs, which he took for beer and disco money, to his days as a cook in the Spanish navy, which in turn led to an apprenticeship at elBulli. I heard, from Ferran and many of his former colleagues, what life was like at this isolated place, unloved by the old-school Spanish critics, before it started to earn international acclaim, and I followed Ferran’s path as he discovered his own cooking style and eventually, as one longtime friend put it to me, “left the planet.”
And of course I spent a lot of time at elBulli. Ferran opened the restaurant to me, inviting me to come anytime, go anywhere, ask anybody anything, observe and make notes on whatever I wanted. For days at a time, on one trip after another, I’d arrive at Cala Montjoi in the afternoon, park myself with my laptop at Ferran’s big worktable in the kitchen, and record everything I saw and heard. Sometimes Ferran would be in a talkative mood. He would sit with me and gab, interspersing bits of professional philosophy with anecdotes about his and the restaurant’s past. And he’d make jokes. One night, as I was sharing in the “family meal,” the always savory but unfailingly traditional repast he served his staff every evening, he exclaimed, “Colman! Tonight you’re eating at elBulli!” “I’m waiting for the next thirty courses,” I replied.
In fact, I did eat at elBulli, in the dining room, maybe half a dozen times while I was working on the book, and I came to see the restaurant as a magical place. Behind the scenes, the kitchen was comparatively quiet and very regimented. There was lots of repetitious prep work early in the workday, especially for the stagiaires (unpaid apprentices)—hours spent hunched over long stainless steel tables peeling pine nuts, meticulously shelling miniature fava beans, cleaving rabbit skulls in two and scooping out the brains. During the service, all the chefs and cooks and stagiaires moved through the room with what Micaela Livingston of Ports used to call the ant patterns, an interweaving flow of purposeful movement, fast and efficient and without collision. There was no open flame, no pyrotechnics literal or otherwise—the cooking was done with induction coils, circulating water baths, and sometimes liquid nitrogen (if that counts as cooking)—and the aromas of anything that smelled like food were rare. All this restrained precision, however, exploded into the dining room in a vivid display of unexpected flavors, textures, and, yes, aromas; the machinery behind the curtain somehow produced a spectacular, jazzy culinary show.
The building that housed the restaurant sometimes surprised people. Old mixed with new. You entered past an oxidized iron stele bearing the restaurant’s name, through an iron-slat gate. You approached
the front door through a parking area that suggested a Zen rock garden, then walked up broad concrete-slab steps, from which you could see into the cool, calm, modern kitchen through a huge bay window. Through the door, next to a piece of painted stone inset into the wall that depicted a French bulldog (a bulli), you found yourself walking past a pretty, partly covered terrace giving onto the cove. It looked like the kind of place where you could have sat and ordered a pizza and a bottle of rosé.
The dining room had whitewashed walls, dark wood-beam ceilings, and floors inset with decorative Catalan tiles. The tables were large and draped in white; the red-cushioned wood-frame chairs in one room resembled those you might find in any midrange Spanish restaurant, those in the other were more formal, with tall backs, upholstered with floral faux tapestry. A miscellany of bric-a-brac, old prints, and small paintings decorated the room. In short, there was nothing avant-garde, nothing surrealistic, nothing high-design about it. It seemed comfortable, lived-in, and organic, which it was. I know that the dining room developed this way over the years, and that at one point Ferran and his partner in the restaurant, Juli Soler, made a conscious decision not to remodel or redecorate the place. I always wondered, though, if leaving the place the way it had become was a subliminal expression on Ferran’s part of his belief that his revolutionary cooking was somehow intimately connected with the tradition it seemed to have left far behind.
I was enamored of elBulli, in any case. I know that I was in an extraordinary position: The restaurant so many other food lovers could only dream about, or at most would be likely to visit once in their (and its) life—the restaurant that first earned Spain its reputation as a gastronomic capital, and that influenced and inspired chefs all over the world—was open to me anytime, especially if I was willing to sit in the kitchen. And the dining experience that must have intimidated so many customers, at least at first, was never anything but a great pleasure to me—even when I didn’t like some of the individual courses, as often happened. But there was something so warm and right and confident about elBulli to me, that the moment I stepped through the door, I always felt immediately at home, in the same way that I had at Chasen’s, Scandia, and Eldorado Petit.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 28
