Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  I cubed pork for a ragù (only after my first batch was returned—“These are chunks, I asked for cubes”) and learned how to trim the fat off a flank of beef. Jointing rabbits, I was taught how to tie up the loin with a butcher’s looping knot and was so excited by the discovery that I went home and practiced. I told Elisa about my achievement. “I tied up everything,” I said. “A leg of lamb, some utensils, a chair. My wife came home, and I tied up her, too.” Elisa shook her head. “Get a life,” she said and returned to her task.

  I became captivated by the kitchen’s smells. By midmorning, when many things had been prepared, they were cooked in quick succession, and the smells came, one after the other, waves of smell, like sounds in music. There was the smell of meat, and the kitchen was overwhelmed by the rich, sticky smell of wintry lamb. And then, in minutes, it would be chocolate melting in a metal bowl. Then a disturbing nonsequitur like tripe (a curious disjunction, having chocolate in your nose followed quickly by stewing cow innards). Then something ripe and fishy—octopus simmering in a hot tub—followed by what seemed like overextracted pineapple. And so they came, one after the other—huckleberries, chicken broth, the comforting chemistry of veal, pork, and milk as someone prepared a Bolognese ragù.

  Until now, my cooking had been based on what I got from books. I was a home cook, always longing to do more than a simple supper, although my meals, especially when prepared for friends, tended to be stressful affairs, distinguished by two incompatible qualities: their ambition and my lack of experience. My friends would do a calculation, trying to figure out just how late they should show up, because they knew what they’d see if they got it wrong: their host bespattered, in a panic, unbathed, and wishing they’d go away. Once, guests arrived at the height of a modest conflagration, a black cloud billowing out of the kitchen, as I stood at the door, paralyzed, unable to remember how to put out a grease fire.

  I hadn’t worked in a professional kitchen and had always respected those who did. They knew something I didn’t. Now I was among them. Once I mastered some basic skills, I discovered that I stopped feeling self-conscious. I was a member of a team of cooks, closed away in this back room, people’s knives knocking against cutting boards in the same rhythmic rocking way, mine as well: no windows, no natural light; no connection to the outside world; no idea, even, what the weather might be; only one phone, the number unlisted; unreachable—a great comfort, surrounded by these intense associations of festive meals.

  2

  CALIFORNIA. In the spring of 1985, Mario returned from Europe and went to San Francisco. He’d been hearing about a Bay Area food revolution and wanted to join up. (“What’s cooking in cooking,” began an article in Life entitled “The New American Cuisine,” published the month before Batali moved out west, “is nothing less than the rediscovery of America.”) The revolution was distinguished by a radical use of local ingredients, but, in Batali’s first job, working for a large catering firm, he saw little that was radical or local. At an Apple Computer office party for seven thousand people, held in a baseball stadium, Batali was in charge of the shrimp; he pushed it out in a wheelbarrow and served it with a shovel (“I mean, really, how much fucking fun is that?”). His brother Dana had moved down from Seattle, and the two rented a Victorian house in the Haight Ashbury district, an arrangement that was not without its predictable stresses. Dana’s job (in computer animation) was across the bay, in Oakland, a forty-minute commute, and he regularly woke to discover a party in its last throes: his brother along with any number of strange, smelly chefs in various stages of collapse on the living room floor—the house cloudy with smoke, empty bottles everywhere, the stereo on loud.

  Six months later, Mario found work at a Four Seasons hotel, the Clift, and, six months after that, was made sous-chef, his first senior position since the days of Stuff Yer Face. This was a more representatively Californian experience, and the kitchen, like so many at the time, was experimenting with all kinds of unlikely combinations (chilies and lemongrass and Chinese black beans, neo-Latino meets Asian fusion meets the lady next door selling apples). Much has been written about the California Revolution; much fun has also been had at its expense: a post-modern moment in food, united by a Bay Area commitment to an anything-goes improvisation, including outright goofy inventions. I was living in Berkeley as a student until 1979 and now appreciate that the revolution had begun only a few blocks away at Chez Panisse, the famous restaurant run by Alice Waters. I had two meals there and two recollections: a vague one of a dish distinguished by its outlandish deliberateness (homegrown snails, perhaps, in a kiwi Jell-O adorned with edible flowers—something, in any case, that was saying “Admire me” very loudly); and a specific one of Leonard Michaels, a fiction writer and English professor, eating at the next table. Michaels had grown up on New York’s Lower East Side, had an urban, jaded manner, and was refreshingly suspicious of wacky California enthusiasms. But on this occasion, Michaels, surrounded by three rapt disciples, was holding forth with uncharacteristic animation on a piece of food—an asparagus spear. He was holding it between his fingers and addressing it as if it were no mere green vegetable but a matter of great urgency—a manuscript by Milton, say, or Susan Sontag. Dinner had become an intellectual issue. In America, food had never been intellectual. In this asparagus was a revolution.

  One of the revolutionaries was Jeremiah Tower, the restaurant’s executive chef. By the time Batali arrived, Tower had left Chez Panisse and opened Stars. He was among the cooks featured in Life magazine. (“Those Nubian goats,” a caption quotes Tower as saying as he gazed upon the animals with amorous intensity, “how I love their looks.”) Tower describes his cooking as Franco-Californian: French techniques with American ingredients and a New World sense of play, or “new-old food in a new-new setting.” In his autobiography, California Dish—What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution, you’ll find recipes for a marijuana consommé (the stems and seeds are toasted before being steeped in chicken broth), his interpretation of Chinese spring rolls (a fatty fish skin instead of a pastry), and a sea urchin soufflé served with eels simmered in their own blood. He has a famously energetic sexuality (“What about a hand job in my Mercedes out back,” Batali recalls being asked by Tower when the two first met), a self-destructive knack for the occasion (brainlessly serving suckling pig at a Jewish social event), and a commitment to dinner as theatre (“I commanded each cook to down a glass of champagne and pick up two huge sauté pans,” he wrote, recalling a press lunch in 1983, marking the moment when California cuisine was first widely recognized). “On a signal from me, they filled the pans with mixed tropical fruits, raspberries, and passion fruit sugar syrup; then all of us in unison tossed the fruit compote up in the air like master omelet makers. That got a standing ovation.”) For Batali, Stars, in San Francisco’s Civic Center, was “the perfect resto of the moment.” Steve Crane, a friend then working as a waiter, remembers that he and Mario (“a clown on a Suzuki 1100 painted to look like a zebra”) spent their after-hours there because “it was the place”—all the chefs went to Stars when their shifts were done. “Tower made lively, stylized food with attitude and energy,” Batali says. “In short, much of the inspiration for everything I have done since.”

  Batali’s recollections make me think of something from another era—a bookstore or a literary café rather than a restaurant: like City Lights, from twenty years before. “It was at Stars, during the California explosion, that I first met chefs who wanted to talk about their craft, and where I learned that the palate is a very individual thing.” Intensified flavors, strong contrasts—these qualities (these extreme qualities) characterized much of the cooking: citrusy vinaigrettes and brightly colored salsas, raw seafood and intensely marinated shellfish. This, according to Batali, was where he developed an appetite for vinegars and lemons. “Since then, my food has always been on the upper edge of acidity, which is where I naturally like it. I tune things up with acidity. I fix things with acidity. A lot of
flawed food made by these French guys would be brightened up with just a touch of acidity—to get you salivating.”

  AFTER TWO YEARS at the Clift, Mario was invited to work at the Biltmore in Santa Barbara, a stately old Spanish colonial hotel the Four Seasons had just bought and wanted to revitalize. Mario was brought in for all the obvious reasons (“energy, edge, fire, youth,” according to Brian Young, the manager who hired him), was given his own restaurant, La Marina, and became, at twenty-seven, the highest-paid young chef in the company. Andy Nusser, a computer designer at the time, met Mario at a late-night druggy party (Batali drinking tequila from a goatskin boda bag, the liquor splattering all over his face). Someone had brought foie gras but didn’t know how to serve it, and, rising to the challenge that a good cook should be able to make a meal with whatever is to hand, Mario prepared a sweet, vinegar-like reduction of Orange Nehi soda and Starburst fruit candies. (“First you remove each Starburst fruit gum from its wax-paper wrapper and put the candies in a saucepan, where, over a low heat, you melt them slowly until you have a bright-colored syrup, and then, separately, you cook the soda, until it’s reduced by half.”) Nusser insists that the result was very good, and was so impressed that he decided then and there to become a chef.

  At the end of that year, the Four Seasons management asked Mario to run a more exclusive restaurant, in Hawaii, at an even higher salary (“they begged me, they were desperate”), but Batali turned down the offer; then he quit. He was bored: by Santa Barbara, by the Four Seasons, by “human resource types in suits.” After the heady time in San Francisco, he had stopped learning but couldn’t stop playing. He has trouble recalling a single menu from his own restaurant—” some weak pastas, a smoked veal rack, a grilled lobster with fried artichokes”—and is then vague. “The truth is, I do not have too much memory of the time. The truth is, I was staying out late. I was staying out very, very late.” He couldn’t account for his salary. “I wasn’t buying clothes. I had nothing to show for it. Where did all the money go? You know what I mean—where did it go?” It had become imperative that he leave. He thought about going to Italy. He wanted to learn how to cook like his grandmother Leonetta Merlino Batali.

  Leonetta Merlino had grown up working in the first Italian import store in Washington state—Merlino’s, which her parents had opened in Seattle in 1903. The store was sold in the late 1960s, and it has been a nagging source of regret to Mario that his father didn’t take it over (“They lost it. They fucked it up”). Everyone in the family has powerful memories of visits to Leonetta’s house for lunch, which featured her handmade ravioli. (Her husband, Armando, who died when Mario was six, had looked after the meats, raising his own pigs to make prosciutti, black pudding, head cheese, and sausages, and bartering with Native Americans from a nearby reservation for deer and elk.) Although Leonetta made large batches of ravioli, a thousand, twelve hundred at a time, using a family recipe from Abruzzo (calf’s brains, pork sausage, chicken, Swiss chard, parmigiano and Romano cheeses) and rolling out the dough with a long pole, prized for the texture it created (“rough, like a cat’s tongue”), she allowed the children only six pieces each. They still talk about it. “We knew there were more!” Gina Batali recalls. “We could see them!” But Leonetta was determined to teach them to eat a family meal in an Italian way, with pasta coming after antipasto—a plate of salume and marinated vegetables—and before the secondo, a roasted meat, often lamb, always cooked with rosemary, always well done. The ravioli recipe is still in the family—Mario’s brother prepares it on Christmas Day. Leonetta, having made the ravioli so often she had no idea how she did it, was filmed by a cousin, who prompted her with questions. Other recipes are preserved on two thousand three-by-five cards: a pasta sauce made from spare ribs (with, Mario recalls, “this kind of red pinky piggy flavor”); tripe; and, a feature of New Year’s Eve, a salty baccalà (dried codfish, rehydrated with milk), served with hot polenta poured out onto a wooden board.

  Armandino Batali sent me copies of the recipes. I found the stack of cards surprisingly moving, a kitchen conversation between the dead and the living. I’ve often thought that food is a concentrated messenger of a culture, compacted into the necessity of our having to eat to survive, and I felt this powerfully as I read these mementos from another generation and listened to Armandino’s children talk about the eccentric-seeming recipes of their grandmother, who had learned them in the back room of a food store in Seattle from her mother, who, in turn, had learned them from her mother in a house in a village in Abruzzo.

  Mario phoned his father. Did he know of a place in Italy where he might work with a matronly Italian cook in exchange for room and board? He didn’t, but some friends might know. He wrote five letters. He got one reply, from a trattoria above a town where airplane parts were made for Boeing. Room and board for the son of Armandino? A sous-chef at a Four Seasons restaurant? When can he start?

  3

  LIKE MANY New York restaurants, Babbo accepts “externs,” cooking school students who work for no pay and then write a thesis about the experience—often the final requirement in a cooking degree. The United States has two hundred and twenty-nine officially recognized cooking schools, which produce 25,000 graduates a year, including older ones (not unlike me) who always wanted to cook but didn’t know how. The Harvard and Yale is the Culinary Institute of America, the CIA, two hours north of New York City on the Hudson River, which offers a four-year degree course for an annual tuition of $20,000, including knives and aprons. Not cheap, but most Babbo cooks had gone there. I now understood that, when Mario took me on, I was filling a spot left by the last extern, and I felt lucky to have it. One morning, I read his thesis, which included a recipe for preparing sheep intestines for seventy-five people and the quantities of flour, eggs, and goat cheese needed to make 1,500 pieces of tortelloni—not without use, I reflected, if I found myself crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, say, and the whole kitchen staff suddenly died and word went round that a guy on board had mastered two recipes from the Babbo kitchen bible (a blue notebook containing instructions for every dish in the history of the restaurant, kept on a shelf between a juicer and a machine that pulverizes beef cheeks into a muddy-looking goo), and hundreds of passengers, fearful of going hungry, huddled together and urged me into the ship’s galley, where, after searching through the cupboards and a small walk-in, I found a sufficient quantity of sheep’s intestines to put my knowledge to a practical purpose.

  Elisa was routinely greeting chefs-in-training at seven in the morning and telling them how her kitchen worked. Every three months or so, that’s what she did. They needed her, to complete their studies, and she, I was starting to learn, needed them to complete all the things she had to do in a day. The difference between them and me was obvious and accounted for my continuing testing time. She kept thinking of me as someone who should know what he was doing. One morning, she instructed me to run to the basement for twenty-five oranges and fifty lemons. “Use your apron,” she said, and then, noting my confused look, sighed and gathered the two corners of hers like a hammock, by way of illustration. When I returned, she held up a zester. It’s the thing you use to peel a citrus fruit. “You do know how to use a zester?” she asked with such poorly disguised irritation that I understood her to be saying, “Don’t tell me you’re so ignorant you don’t know what this is.” I then became very reluctant to admit that the zester she gave me wasn’t zesting—it was so dull it was mauling the fruit—until my cutting board was a sticky battlefield of maimed oranges and lemons, and I hesitantly suggested that maybe this zester wasn’t one of the kitchen’s better zesters.

  The trickiness of my role was confirmed one Friday, always a long, stressful day because you’re preparing food for not only that evening but the whole weekend. I was in the walk-in, trying to find a place for a tray of morel mushrooms. There was no place. Elisa was on the floor, transferring chicken stock from a twenty-quart container into a twelve-quart container, because she needed a twent
y-quart container and none was to be found. (Chicken stock was the only acceptable meat stock—one made from anything else would be too French—and every morning a pot was filled with the feet and water and boiled for hours. Chicken feet are a vivid sight—like human hands without a thumb, curled up and knuckly—and the first time I saw them, bobbing in their giant vat, they looked as though they were attached to the arms of so many people, clawing at the churning water, trying to climb out, the bubbling pot a portal from Hell, there in the back of the kitchen, against the wall, the hottest place.)

  Andy was in the walk-in as well, devising what he called a “walk-in special,” a feature of the weekends, to clear out an ingredient that wasn’t selling before it went off. “Crispy branzino” was a walk-in special, because “we’ve bought enough branzino for twenty a night but have been doing only nine, and it’s nearly Sunday, so we’ve got to move it or toss it, and there’s some porcini, which hasn’t been moving either, I don’t know why, and there’s always pancetta, so let’s reinvent our fish dish with porcini and crunchy pancetta on top and sell the hell out of it.”

  Gina DePalma was in the walk-in, too, and she was the problem. Gina was the pastry chef—an executive role, like Elisa’s—and the two women ran the morning kitchen. Elisa arrived at six and started on a long list of foods that needed preparing for the evening. Gina got in two hours later and made the desserts. Although they had many things in common—both had grown up with big Sunday lunches with their Italian grandparents, for instance—they couldn’t have been more different.