Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  White had another bite. I had another bite.

  “I’d have aged it a bit more,” Marco said, “but not much.” He explained that he had experimented with aging. What he said in fact was this: “I’ve aged birds for one day, two days, three days, four days, five days, six days, seven days, eight days, nine days, ten days, eleven days, twelve days, thirteen days, fourteen days, fifteen days, sixteen days, seventeen days, eighteen days, nineteen days, twenty days, and twenty-one days.”

  “Your conclusion?” I asked.

  “Twenty-one days is too long,” he said.

  “Pretty nasty?” I asked.

  “Fucking inedible,” he said.

  We carried on. He had a bite. I had a bite.

  “The croutons are not correct,” Marco said.

  I ate a crouton. Marco was looking at his as though he’d discovered an insect impaled on the tine of his fork. “It should have been darkened by the heart and liver,” he said. “You make the heart and liver into a kind of paste.”

  He tasted the sauce. “It’s not right, is it, Bill?”

  I tasted the sauce. To me, it tasted of—well, sauce. But was it right? I had no idea.

  “You can serve the bird with a sauce,” Marco explained, “but the sauce needs to be light. Personally, I prefer the roasting juices. That’s my sauce: the natural juices of the bird, and nothing else. This sauce is too fancy.” He tasted it again. “It is made with a veal stock reduction, isn’t it, Bill?”

  I tasted it again. Maybe I wasn’t very good at this. It really seemed like, you know, a sauce.

  “Plus there’s a little port and Madeira, isn’t there, Bill? And butter at the end. You don’t need this kind of a sauce. It’s too intense. You can’t taste the bird.”

  He had another bite. I had another bite.

  “The bread crumbs—they’re disappointing, aren’t they, Bill?”

  “Are they?” I asked. I duly tasted my bread crumbs. What did I know? Nothing, except that, until now, I had been enjoying my meal: erroneously, I was coming to understand.

  “Well, they haven’t been cooked through, have they, Bill?” He ran his fork through his bread crumbs, the disgust on his face now undisguised. “They should be golden, the bread crumbs, shouldn’t they, Bill?”

  He had a bite. I had a bite.

  “The butter sauce,” he said. “I mean, really. It should have been foamy. And the bread sauce—it has been overcloved. A bread sauce, with grouse, is very important,” he said, sounding like an exasperated schoolteacher. “You take an onion, right?—a half, studded with a clove. You pour in your milk, bring it to a boil, and drop in your bread. But you don’t make it too fancy. One clove, do you understand me, Bill? Just one fucking clove. You’re not making a fucking dessert.” He was becoming agitated. I noticed—just past Marco’s shoulder—that our waiter had been joined by other members of the kitchen: you could see in their eyes that they saw the future and weren’t liking it.

  Marco continued. “And there were too many herbs. A bird can be ruined by herbs. You have to be careful. We’re here to eat a fucking bird, are we not, Bill? Isn’t that why we’re here, to eat a fucking bird?” The waiters had been joined by a cook in a toque. Marco, meanwhile, was inching up to the edge of his chair, and his eyes were bulging again. “We’re not here to eat a fucking herb garden. Would I have ordered grouse if I wanted to eat a salad? And the parsley. I mean—look at it. There’s no fucking point, is there, Bill?” His eyes were darting round the room wildly. His eyes said: Some fucker was responsible for this, and I’m going to find out who. “I just don’t know why it’s there. Do you, Bill? Is there someone here who can tell me why this fucking parsley is sprinkled all over my grouse?” Marco was shouting. “If someone will tell me what it’s doing there, that will be fine. But I don’t have a fucking clue.”

  He sighed heavily. “It’s all about good eating.” He said this quietly. “Good smells and good eating. Very straightforward, very English. Nothing fancy, except that it’s very hard to get the simple things right. What do I want? The pure taste of grouse. Not too strong. I want the gamey flavor without its being overpowering: I want to taste it here, in the back of my palate, a secondary flavor, evocative of the moors. Everything else is on the platter—the bird, the bread sauce, the bread crumbs, the gravy, and the carving of the bird, right there in front of you. It’s very visual. Nature is the artist.”

  In normal life, “simplicity” is synonymous with “easy to do,” but when a chef uses the word it means “take a lifetime to learn.” I made a practice, therefore, of asking Marco about really simple things. I once asked him how he cooks an egg.

  “Whoa,” he said, “an egg is very important. Give a chef an egg, and you’ll know what kind of cook he is. It takes a lot to cook an egg. You have to understand the egg in order to cook an egg, especially if it’s one you want to eat.”

  For two days, we talked about eggs. How does he fry one, for instance?

  “You start by always knowing the temperature of your pan—heating the butter in it, not too hot, never letting it froth—then add your egg and start touching it. And you keep touching it: you have to be on top of your temperature, always, waiting for the protein to firm up, not fully cooked, and at the last moment you spoon some of the butter on top.”

  How does he scramble them?

  “In the pan, never before—that’s where you whisk your eggs and then cook them very slowly.”

  I asked him about other foods. A piece of wild salmon?

  “Season the pan, not the fish, and flip it once to release the juices, which you use to cook it—never add oil. Then wipe out the pan before making your sauce.”

  Foie gras?

  “It’s all in preventing a shoe from forming—you need to put paper underneath it, otherwise it cooks too fast.”

  How does he fry a potato?

  “Know your supplier. Potatoes are grown on hilly fields. The top fields make the best chips. The bottom ones make shit chips. Soak them for two days to wash out the starch. Chip and blanch them in hot fat until half cooked—the French like arachide [ground nut oil] but I use beef drippings—and put them out on a tray. They will carry on cooking without coloring. If you cook them until they color, they’ll be hard in the middle. Then put them back in for a second time, which makes them crispy: now they’re soft in the middle.”

  On fat?

  “Cooked fat is delicious. Uncooked fat is not. Why do you stuff a goose or duck? Chefs today don’t know because they don’t learn the basics anymore. You stuff the bird so it cooks more slowly. With the empty cavity, you let in the heat, and the bird is cooked inside and out, and the meat is done before your fat is rendered. Stuff your bird with apple and sage, and the fat is rendered first.”

  ONE DAY, I met Marco for lunch at the Drones club, his experiment in everyone’s-my-friend membership dining, a narrow room, with wood-paneled walls and large paintings of large women with very large breasts. Marco thinks of the place as an extension of his home (on the mantelpiece are pictures of his children and a pair of his shoes), although it also conveys an atmosphere of a gentlemen’s club: at lunch, the diners are male, with crisp white shirts and strands of long gray hair tucked behind their ears (at the table next to me, a man was negotiating a deal with someone from Tehran). It also looks like a Las Vegas cabaret bar from, say, forty years ago, done up for New Year’s Eve: suspended from the ceiling are pink balloons and two disco balls, and, at night, “the suits are replaced by unbelievable birds.” It’s the first restaurant where Marco has permitted music—principally Dean Martin. “Don’t you think it’s like a New York club?” Marco asked me, calling to mind a question he’d put to me when we’d eaten at Max’s, another White establishment (“It’s like a Paris bistro, innit?”). Marco is terrified of airplanes and has been to neither a Paris bistro nor a New York club. The truth is that Drones was like nothing in New York. It was Marco’s idea of how he likes to spend an evening.

  Someone gave Marco h
is mail, which included a letter from Malcolm Reid, a co-owner of the Box Tree restaurant, in Yorkshire, where Marco worked after the hotel in Harrogate. (“The Box Tree turned my life from black and white to color.”) Marco put the letter on the table, and I read it upside down and happened to notice how much trouble he was having reading it right side up. His face was in pain. He was stuck on the first paragraph. “It’s dyslexia,” he conceded. “Very bad dyslexia. I didn’t find out about it until my children’s teacher told me about their problems—dyslexia is often hereditary—and I thought: Wait a minute! This is me!” He mentioned a recent fishing trip with his boys. “We went to get a boat, but I was confused by the sign. It said, ‘Mackerel fishing, no nemesis.’ What the fuck does that mean? No nemesis? I read it again. ‘Mackerel fishing. No nemesis.’ I don’t get it. I read it three more times. I said to my son, Marco, ‘Marco, what the fuck is “No nemesis”—this posh big word, from Latin—what’s it mean?’” The word was ‘omnibus.’ A mackerel omnibus, a shuttle boat. Marco had scrambled the letters, finding the “n” and “o” in omnibus and was unable to see the word any other way.

  Dyslexia—the term is derived from the Greek to describe a difficulty with words—is a neurological disorder that disrupts the brain’s ability to process language. Like most dyslexics, Marco responds best to information in a nonwritten form. He can spend an hour reading a page of The Times and remember nothing. “But if you read it aloud, I can recite it word for word.” In a dyslexic, the brain’s abnormalities at processing visual information often develop into unlikely strengths. Marco has an exceptional sense of proportion. “Those disco balls—no one believed they’d come through the door and they started to take down the frames, but I knew there was a millimeter to spare.” He also has a knack for numbers (“It comes from the other side of the brain”) and an uncanny visual sense. White has a photographic memory for dishes and, according to Crompton-Batt, an ability to recall every plate served to him in the last twenty years.

  I found myself thinking of the way Marco insists on the visual in food preparations—there is a history of diners who have known that he was in the kitchen because the composition of their plates was so uniquely expressive—along with the quirkier moments when he’d been stopped by something he’d seen: sunrises and sunsets and the changing light. A butcher’s shop in the hunting season was “a work of conceptual art—hares, rabbits, pheasants, each with their own markings and colorings, hanging on a rail in the window.” In talking about his first job, working alongside the butcher, he described the older man’s knife skills in exhilaratingly precise detail. “I love the way he opens a piece of meat up with his hands, using his palms and fingers, the whole thing so effortless, and how he then rides the knife through, as though it’s a part of his hand. Forget the knife. It’s like this. These are your fingertips, right? They just glide through. The knife is just an extension of your fingertips. That’s knife discipline. That’s what it’s all about. And I used to stand next to this old boy—I was sixteen, and he was in his fifties—and watch him, until finally I’d learned enough that I was told I could do the turkey legs, to bone them and take out the sinews. It was my first important job, and I’d learned how to do it from hours of watching. Then I tied the legs—to get used to working with string—massaging the meat first, to even it out. It was so difficult in the beginning, you’re so uncoordinated, until it becomes natural, as if someone has programmed your fingers.”

  When Marco talked like this, I thought, You’re a freak. You’re not seeing the same world I see. He’s like the tall guy in school, who, because of his height, can play basketball better than anyone else. Marco has, in effect, an exaggerated facility to survive in a kitchen. At some point, Marco learned he had this gift but kept it to himself. “Early on, I realized I had a photographic memory for food but wouldn’t tell the chef. I’d be at a new job, working on starters, say, but was always watching and memorizing the other stations so that when I was moved to one I knew exactly what to do. They all thought I was a genius.”

  Marco’s genius might be nothing more than an exaggerated variation of Mario’s “kitchen awareness,” but it made me realize how this visual facility was not one I had developed, probably because I’m a word guy—most of us are—and for most of my life the learning I’ve done has been through language. Most metropolitan professions are language-driven—urban, deductive, dominated by thought, reading, abstraction, from the moment you wake and wonder how you should dress for the day and read a weather report to find out. Until now, everything I had known about cooking was from books. A different process was at work when I found myself in a kitchen for twelve hours. I wasn’t reading; to an extent, I wasn’t thinking. I watched and imitated. The process seems more typical of how a child’s brain works than an adult’s. It was like learning to throw a ball. For instance, how to bone a leg of lamb. Now I have a picture of Memo’s working down the thigh bone with his knife. Or how to tie a piece of meat: there’s a brain image. How to use a plastic squirter bottle to create a circle of green dots on your plate (with olive oil) or a dark one (with vin cotto) or a rich brown one (with a porcini reduction). How to know that your vegetables are caramelized, that your fennel is braised, that your dandelions, although floppy like a washcloth, are ready. How to recognize that a branzino is cooked because you can smell its skin turning crispy. How to toss a pan so that everything in it turns over. How to toss it so that only the things on the outer rim turn over—like ravioli, which need to be coated with butter, but gently so they don’t break. How to compose a plate, how to use asymmetrical items with a sense of symmetry. How, in effect, to learn like a child.

  The masochist in me regrets I never worked in Marco’s kitchens. He’s moved on. He has since sold both 50 St James and Drones, perhaps having discovered there’s more money in real estate than in cooking. But in the end I learned some things (over and above the most obvious one, which is that chefs are some of the world’s nuttiest people). I learned how much I had to learn.

  11

  I WENT TO ITALY, where,during my first lunch, I ate a homemade pasta, and my life, in a small but enduring way, was never the same.

  I was on a brief culinary tour of the Po River valley—much of my itinerary proposed by Mario—but, at the suggestion of a friend, had made a detour to visit Zibello, about twenty miles from Parma. This was the livestock heartland of Italy. (All day, and everywhere, there was a pervasive porcine smell and invisible particles of something I didn’t want to think about clinging to my hair and clothes.) The pasta was prepared by Miriam Leonardi, the fifth woman in successive generations to be running the Trattoria La Buca. Miriam, as she insisted upon being addressed, ran the trattoria in the Italian style of you-don’t-cut-an-onion-until-the-dish-has-been-ordered and, after each course, waddled out and asked me what I wanted next. She had just turned sixty-two. She wore a tight-fitting, white chef’s cap—more scarf than hat—and had dark eyebrows and a big, hooked masculine nose. She was a little over five feet, with a wide girth, and, moving slowly with her legs apart, had an overwhelming sense of ease and confidence: she has, after all, been making this walk from her kitchen to one of her tables and back again for forty-five years.

  My friend had mentioned several dishes in addition to the pastas: eel, frog legs, tripe, and culatello, a specialty of the village. Culo means “ass.” Culatello translates loosely as “buttness” and is made from the hindquarters of a pig—boned, stuffed into a bladder, cured, and hung for two years in the damp local cellars. The method is deemed unmodern by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and culatello is forbidden in America. The friend who recommended Miriam’s now has developed such cravings for it that he imports her culatello illegally.

  I had a plate of it, served with shavings of butter on top. It was a deep red brown, with a light, soft fluffiness—no obvious fat, although obviously fatty—and a piggy intensity I’d never tasted before. Afterwards, Miriam invited me to see her operation, a cantina just behind the kitchen w
here I counted the culatelli, a hundred rows of ten, hanging from the cantina’s rafters and being refrigerated by nothing more than the breezes off the Po. I breathed in deeply, wanting to enjoy the romance of what Miriam referred to as the profumo profondo della mia carne, the perfume of her meat, and concluded, after identifying the dank smell of aging animal and the ammonia sharpness of the mold adhering to a thousand pig bladders, that the perfume was probably an acquired taste. I mentioned I was trying to cure meats myself, under the instruction of Mario Batali (as it happened, Miriam’s daughter, who will be the sixth woman to run the trattoria, had eaten at Babbo on a recent trip to New York, objecting only to the tripe, which didn’t “stink enough”). For the rest of the afternoon Miriam kept referring to Mario, “the famous New York chef,” and cackling. “He probably uses a refrigerator, he’s so smart,” she said and laughed uproariously. “What I prepare in my kitchen,” she said, by way of definitive explanation, “is what my grandmother taught me. She cooked what her grandmother taught her. And she cooked what her grandmother taught her. You think I’m interested in a famous New York chef?” She said “New York” as though it were a bad taste in the mouth.

  I then ate two pastas. One was tortellini, small, complicated knots of dough with a mysterious meaty stuffing. The other was giant pillowy ravioli, distinguished by their thin, floppy lightness. I’d never had anything like them. They were dressed with butter and honey and filled with pumpkin, so that when you bit into one you experienced an unexpected taste explosion. The pumpkin, roasted and mixed with parmigiano cheese, was like a mouthful of autumn: the equivalent of waking up and finding the leaves on the trees outside your window had changed color. The dish was called tortelli di zucca (zucca means “squash”) and was so memorable it provoked me to find out where it came from.