by Bill Buford
“I keep telling him to slow down,” the director, Jerry Liddell, told me. “He’s got plenty of time.”
I was watching another flight of shows in Liddell’s control room. He could have been producing a sporting event—no retakes, the camera choices made on the spot.
“Cooking is about transformation,” Liddell said. “You take a number of ingredients, and they become something else. That’s Mario’s show. That’s the narrative. For most of us, how a bunch of ingredients will behave together is completely unpredictable. Even here, in the control room, watching the show on the monitors, menus in hand, even we don’t know what’s going to happen next. That’s the appeal of a live program like this—Mario’s knowing the result and our trying to follow him.” Even so, the effect of so many transformations, rendered at such speed, can be dizzying. “There is no question you learn something, but it’s coming at you so fast it’s almost too much: it’s right on the verge.”
BUT WHAT do you learn? To find out, I recorded nine months of shows and watched the videos, one after another (a visual diet analogous to eating a gross of oysters, and, like Jim Harrison, I wouldn’t recommend it). There were recurrent lessons. “At home, you rarely get the depth of flavor that you find in a restaurant,” Mario said on his first show, browning mushrooms in a ferociously hot pan, “because home cooks are not prepared to take the risks of professional chefs, who push their pans right to the edge. They want it browner than you’ll ever do at home, darker, hotter.” He has been repeating the lesson ever since. It’s why he lets his olive oil heat to the smoking point, which provokes the most frequently asked question—” Are you supposed to do that? Aren’t you burning it?”—and one that, in ten years, he has never answered (the result is often a pan’s bursting into flames, flamboyantly, just before a break). There is the pasta-water-in-your-sauce lesson, along with the your-sauce-is-only-a-condiment (heard on the first show and many times thereafter). There are pithy platitudes (“Squid—thirty seconds or thirty minutes: in between they’re rubber bands”). There is an unsung cut of meat, the shoulder, invariably lamb, which, for all its historical neglect, has lyrical qualities that Mario has been singing for many years.
Then, midway through my stack, I remembered the first time I watched Mario on television, November 1st, 1996, when I made a preparation he’d demonstrated on the show, an arancina, a deep-fried risotto-rice ball stuffed with tomato sauce and smoke-dried fish. I went to the Food Network’s Web site and printed out the recipe, because I happened to have a smoke-dried sablefish in my refrigerator (and had no idea why or what in the world I was going to do with it). I made two hefty arancine for a Sunday lunch, deep-frying them in two liters of my local deli’s olive oil. Later, on a visit to Porretta Terme, I spotted crispy little arancine in the shop windows there and understood what the word meant. An arancia is an orange; arancina, a little orange, a fair description of Porretta’s tangerine-sized rice balls. Mine had been neither tangerines nor oranges. Mine could have been carved out and put on the porch with a candle inside at the end of October.
The episode provides me with an occasion to account for how I found myself in this predicament, not just watching hours of Molto Mario but the whole package: hooked up with the guy, trying to survive as a line cook, wanting to learn about food in this sometimes punishing firsthand way. I am not a food professional—that’s perfectly evident. Until now, I’d been a literary type. In fact, this Babbo business started while I was an editor at The New Yorker and, unable to get anyone to write a profile of Mario, I was allowed to take the commission myself and suspected, correctly, that I might be able to use the assignment to get into Mario’s kitchen. I was there six months, a longish time to research a magazine article, and was sorry to leave. By then, I wondered if I was a magazine guy anymore. I had been on the verge of discovering something—about food, about myself. I also felt I had earned a new competence, maybe even enough competence to run a difficult station on the line without someone around to back me up, and this was something I wanted to do. (I was wrong—I wasn’t close—but I didn’t know that yet.)
The profile appeared, but I remained troubled by the thought that I was missing an opportunity, until two months later, when I quit my desk job and returned. There were other factors in my quitting—including my having been an editor for twenty-three years, which was plenty—but the result was the same: I went from a day spent sitting down to one spent standing up. Maybe it was a boyish longing—my wanting to be in a kitchen, like someone else’s dreaming of flying an airplane or riding on the back of a fire truck—but it was also born out of a recognition that a chef has a knowledge about food that I wasn’t going to get from books, and I wanted that knowledge. I was a flawed cook. My meals were chaotic, late, messy. But I was also a curious one (which was probably why I had a sablefish in my fridge).
The satisfactions of making a good plate of food are surprisingly varied, and only one, and the least important of them, involves eating what you’ve made. In addition to the endless riffing about cooking-with-love, chefs also talk about the happiness of making food: not preparing or cooking food but making it. This is such an elementary thing that it is seldom articulated. After my stint at the pasta station, Frankie urged me to go back to the grill and master it properly, because it would be more fulfilling: at the pasta station, he said, you’re preparing other people’s food. The ravioli, the ragù—they’ve been made beforehand. But at the grill, you start with raw ingredients, cook them, and assemble a dish with your hands. “You make the food,” he said. The simple, good feeling he was describing might be akin to what you’d experience making a toy or a piece of furniture, or maybe even a work of art—except that this particular handmade thing was also made to be eaten. I found, cooking on the line, that I got a quiet buzz every time I made a plate of food that looked exactly and aesthetically correct and then handed it over the pass to Andy. If, on a busy night, I made, say, fifty good-looking plates, I had fifty little buzz moments, and by the end of service I felt pretty good. These are not profound experiences—the amount of reflection is exactly zero—but they were genuine enough, and I can’t think of many other activities in a modern urban life that give as much simple pleasure.
THE FOOD NETWORK is a different enterprise from what it was a decade ago. During its first year, the network had six and a half million subscribers; now it has fifteen times that number and is a highly profitable member of a publicly traded company. With the bigger numbers, executives don’t use words like “chefs,” let alone “artists,” but “talents” and “brands.” Molto Mario is now openly talked about as “old-fashioned”—an example of the “how-to, stand-and-stir” format, according to Judy Girard, who was put in charge in 2000 and ran the network during its first financially successful years. “The format relies on the information being more interesting than the presentation, with a chef behind a stove, like a newscaster behind a desk.”
Since Mario first appeared on television, there have been efforts to enlarge his “brand,” but they have met with “mixed results,” according to Girard. One was Mediterranean Mario—in effect, Molto Mario expanded to include North Africa, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and France. But the show was a stretch—Mario’s preparing French Provincial dishes was not only wrong, it seemed immoral—and was abandoned after two seasons. More recently there was Mario Eats Italy, a foodie’s road show, with a buddy and a script. But the script was somebody’s hammed-up version of Mario (isn’t the real one exaggerated enough?), and the role of the so-called travel buddy—a fat guy in a T-shirt, who was never introduced or explained—was to utter sentences that started with “Gee, Mario, I don’t get it…“ Ciao America was next, and for months Mario was somewhere else, a television crew in tow, seeking out Italian-American eateries and getting their proprietors to explain their specialties. But Mario had never been an Italian-American cook or a food journalist, and, after thirteen episodes, this, too, was discontinued.
Meanwhile, the network’s programmin
g was developing a house style, and it was difficult to see how Mario fit in. “Mario is high end,” Girard said, “and you can’t build a network around high end.” The new shows put a premium on presentation rather than knowledge and tended to have intimate-seeming camera close-ups of foods, as though objects of sexual satisfaction. The skin-flick feel was reinforced by a range of heightened effects, especially amplified sounds of frying, snapping, crunching, chewing, swallowing. There seemed always to be a tongue, making small, wet, bubbly tongue sounds. The “talent” (also known as a “crossover” personality, usually a woman with a big smile and no apron) was directed to be easy with her tongue and use it conspicuously—to taste food on a spoon, say, or work it around a batter-coated beater, or clean the lips with it. The aim was spelled out for me by Eileen Opatut, a former programming executive. “We’re looking for the kind of show that makes people want to crawl up to their television set and lick the screen.” (I heard this and thought: Yuck.)
Jonathan Lynne is no longer with the Food Network. He quit for a number of reasons, including his colleagues’ wish to buy a Japanese-produced show called Iron Chef, a competition that treats cooking like an evening of Sumo wrestling. (“I refused to be the American executive responsible for putting that show on air.”) The show, acquired after Lynne left, became the network’s most watched piece of television. When Mario appeared as a contestant on a spin-off, Iron Chef America—fast, spontaneous, dazzlingly improvisational, both large and larger than life—network executives realized that they’d finally found a venue for him: no script, just a stage. The brand, I’ve been assured, is intact. In the end, what did Lynne know? He was an old-fashioned sort of person. He didn’t understand American television. But he did appreciate its power: those lines outside Babbo on a Saturday night, for instance, which number twenty-five or thirty people, even though the restaurant is fully booked. “That’s because of the Food Network,” Lynne told me. “Let’s be frank, if it wasn’t for the Food Network, Mario would be no one. He’d be an interesting but unknown downtown late-night chef running a popular local spot, but not a restaurant like Babbo, which visitors from Chicago or Los Angeles go out of their way to get into.”
14
IS THERE A FOOD older than polenta? Not in Italy, at least from what I could discover, although until Columbus returned from the West Indies with a sack of corn what people understood polenta to be was gray mush, not yellow. For several thousand years, polenta usually meant barley: a stodgy cereal, easy to grow, indifferent to the excesses of the seasons, brown like mud, high in carbs, low in protein, and with the earthy flavor of a mature weed. In its barley incarnation, polenta predates rice and, for ten millennia, was what people put into a pot and stirred over a fire until suppertime. Some Italians claim the dish came from the Etruscans (not unlike insisting that fish and chips were served first at a round table by Merlin: maybe it’s true, probably it’s not, no one knows because no one knows much about the Etruscans except that, from their tomb paintings, they liked eating, drinking, dancing, and frolicky sex and are always pantheistically invoked as the forefathers of all qualities nationalists long to think of as Italian). The Romans, more persuasively, say they picked the dish up from the Greeks. Pliny, in the first century, describes Greek barley as “the oldest of foods” and the essential ingredient in a preparation that sounds a lot like—well, polenta. Where did the Greeks learn what to do with barley? No one knows, although the earliest evidence of it dates from 8000 B.C.
Barley doesn’t have the gluten of wheat or the sweetness of corn, which is why you don’t see it in many modern preparations except for barley water (a disgusting sugary brew, drunk mainly near the Scottish borders), hippie soups, livestock feed, and beer—brewers being the largest consumers of the world’s harvest. But I’d become curious and set out to make a bowl of it according to a 1570 recipe written by Bartolomeo Scappi, the private cook of Pope Pius V, which had been included in Scappi’s six-volume Works in the Art of Cooking.
In time, I would become a Scappi admirer, but this was my first foray into a Renaissance text, and it wasn’t easy for me to figure out what was being said. In the event, and after predictable struggles resulting in the obliteration of my useless Italian-English dictionary after it exploded on impact against the wall where I’d hurled it, I was able to locate and then follow a perfectly lucid set of instructions telling me how to wash the barley with three changes of water, soak it, cook it, and be vigilant to keep it from drying out before it is ready, a condition Scappi describes as a falling-apartness. I ladled out a hearty helping and poured myself a glass of malt whiskey, perhaps, in its long history, the cereal’s most successful expression, my meal consisting then of barley in a liquid and a liquidy-solid form. But even the whiskey couldn’t disguise that a bowl of barley polenta is a pretty drab business. You can add salt and pepper, of course, and a big splash of olive oil. Scappi suggests adding a spoon of capon broth, perhaps some cheese and butter, or sugar, even melon—anything to give the thing some flavor. It was a problem. I felt I was hunting for something tasty in a bowl of edible dirt. Traditionally, polenta is a winter dish—cereals can be stored when nothing else is growing—but after a bowl in its barley form I came away with a grim historical picture of what January and February must have been like for most of humanity, miserably sustained by foods that were colorless and sad, like the season’s sky.
I was by now possibly a little fixated on what I’d come to regard as the polenta question (as well as its history, its various preparations, and its role in Western culture), and, from what I could tell, my fixation was shared by almost no one else in the world. We all have our limitations, and, in the matter of polenta, mine date from a specific meal, and, like a chemist unable to reproduce lab results of an experiment that had succeeded once, I hadn’t eaten anything like it since, although I kept trying. Until then, I couldn’t imagine what the appeal of polenta might be, because, until then, the only kind I’d known was the two-minute instant variety—pour into boiling water, stir once, serve—and the result tastes of nothing most of us are able to remember. I’d been utterly unprepared for the real thing, therefore, when I happened to have a bowl of it at an Italian restaurant. The chef had bought her cornmeal from an artisanal miller in Piemonte, and the polenta she made was a revelation—each grain swollen from the slow simmering and yet still rough, even gravelly, against the roof of my mouth. For a moment, it put me in mind of risotto. But risotto is cooked in broth and finished with butter and cheese, and tastes of the rice and everything else you’ve added. These crunchy stone-ground corn grains tasted only of themselves: an intense, sweet, highly extracted cornness. In an instant, I had a glimpse of the European diet at a juncture of radical change. For one generation, dinner had been gray, as it had been since the beginning of time; for the next generation, dinner was crunchy, sweet, and golden.
So far, I haven’t been able to date precisely when this change occurred, although the first Italian allusion to corn as a food substance appears to be in a 1602 medical treatise published in Rome, more than a hundred years after Columbus’s return. What interests me is how Italians then cooked it. For instance, no one imagined dropping a cob into boiling water, when, after two minutes, it can be eaten right away—smothered in butter, sprinkled with sea salt, and served with a barbecued hamburger on a summer evening. Instead, they thought, “Hey, what a funny thing! This looks like a barley ear but gigantic! We should shuck it, remove the kernels, dry them in the sun, grind them up into a meal, and cook them for hours.” After 9,600 years of barley mush, Italians were obviously pretty set in their ways. They must also have been desperate, because they ate so much of it they gave themselves a disease, pellagra, which went undiagnosed for two centuries: no one understood the correlation between polenta gluttony and the subsequent appearance of the gluttoners, who tended to shrivel up in the winter with horrible disfigurements, unless they kept eating their polenta through the summer, in which case they shriveled up and died. (A diet of
too much corn is deficient in niacin. Corn, originally a food of the Native Americans, was often planted with beans, a niacin nirvana.)
For all that, when Italians talk about polenta today, they still get a little soupy, not unlike the preparation itself, and are reminded of a blackened kettle and a long wooden spoon wielded by an aunt somewhere in the north (a northerner is called a “polenta eater,” mangiapolenta, just as a Tuscan is a bean eater, and a Napoletano is a macaroni eater, the belief in Italy being not that you are what you eat but that you’re the starch). Invariably they mention a passage in I promessi sposi—“The Betrothed”—by Alessandro Manzoni, as proof that polenta is more than a food: it’s the soul of their Italianness. The Betrothed—about the turbulent 1620s (invasions, bread riots, repressive land-owning oligarchs), written during the turbulent 1820s (invasions, bread riots, repressive land-owning oligarchs)—was Manzoni’s only novel and is regarded as a great expression of national consciousness: every child reads it in school, and the first anniversary of the author’s death, in 1873, was commemorated by Verdi’s Requiem. The polenta passage is a Little Dorrit–like account of a peasant family at dinnertime, the father on his knees at the hearth, tending the meager supper, stirring until it can be ladled out (the family “staring at the communal dish with a grim look of rabid desire”) onto a piece of beechwood. The appeal is in the ritual—the beechwood, the pot, the smooshy blobby way it’s served—and the passage is cited in every polenta recipe you read, with one detail usually omitted: that Manzoni’s polenta is made of buckwheat. (By the 1500s, just before corn arrived, Italians had got so sick of barley they pulverized every pulse-like thing they could get their hands on—green peas, yellow peas, black-eyed peas, chickpeas, and buckwheat—and called it polenta.) In fact, the buckwheat is an anachronism—the novel is set in the time and place where the polenta revolution had already occurred—but Manzoni had his reasons: that’s how bad peasant life was, he’s telling us, even the polenta was miserable. But it’s curious that the buckwheat is so seldom mentioned. Is it because the detail undermines the ideology of the dish? After all, to acknowledge that the polenta in the famously nation-building passage is buckwheat is to concede that what is eaten now is a foreign ingredient and that at the heart of everyone’s Italianness is a little piece of North America.
