The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  Last year, when a hundred-mile swath of the province was devastated by weeks of earthquakes and more than three hundred thousand huge wheels of Parmesan were damaged, he offered his services to the Parmesan consortium, invented a recipe for risotto cacio e pepe, made with Parmigiano-Reggiano instead of Pecorino, and dispatched it to cyberspace. The recipe went viral. Thousands of people bought cheese and cooked it. Six months later, nearly a million kilos of Parmesan had been sold, with one euro per kilo of the proceeds going to earthquake victims.

  It’s hard to keep up with Bottura. Giuseppe Palmieri, his estimable sommelier of thirteen years, says, “Max met me one night (he was having dinner at the restaurant where I worked), called from his car on the way home, and invited me to follow him. I’m still running. I love him, and if you work with Max, to love him is essential.” Bottura hires like that—fast, on instinct. His three head chefs, who take turns traveling with him, have been at Francescana since 2005: Yoji Tokuyoshi knocked at the door, “starving,” on the last day of a two-week visa from Japan, was given a place to stay and a six-course feast that began with a leek-and-truffle tart and ended with a “hot-cold” zuppa inglese, and started working the next day; Davide di Fabio had just begun sending out applications when his phone rang and a voice said, “Hi, I’m Massimo. Come to my kitchen”; Taka Kondo arrived as a customer, ate lunch, and before he knew it, was at the stove, making sauces.

  Bottura’s staff worries that, at fifty-one, he has been racing through maturity the way he races through Modena on his new Ducati. Enrico Vignoli, who studied engineering and now manages Bottura’s office (and his micro-vaporizer), says, “Max’s frenetic energy is a curse. If he stops, he dies.” His daughter, Alexa, who is seventeen, reads Greek and Latin, and seems to have inherited his palate—he calls her “the queen of passatelli”—says, “My dad is always challenging me. Do better. Do better. It’s like he challenges the guys in the kitchen. It’s stressful, but it stretches you. He stretches himself most of all.” Bottura has had some sobering wake-up calls. His brother Andrea died of cancer at forty, and not long ago he lost Kenneth Gilmore, whom he calls “my other father,” to Parkinson’s disease. His son, Charlie, who is thirteen, was born with a rare genetic syndrome and requires special care. What drives Bottura today includes a strong desire to secure the future for his family.

  Next January, and with trepidation, he is opening a traditional Italian restaurant, in Istanbul, for Oscar Farinetti’s Eataly chain, and is sending Yoji Tokuyoshi to run it for him. He describes the project as “introducing Italy to Turkey with a reflection on my past—on osso buco with risotto, on veal with a little sage, a little lemon.” He has been sifting through offers to endorse everything from refrigerators to shoes. Back in July, I drove with him to Milan for a photo shoot for Lavazza coffee, at the Ambrosiana Library. When I left at eleven to take a walk, he was arguing with a woman from the company who had just informed him that his shoot was going to include a model. When I came back, half an hour later, he was smiling over a big pot for the photographer, with three Leonardo codices behind them. And there was the model—dressed, from her bondage stilettos and sexy black sheath to her chaste white collar and owl-rimmed glasses, as a Helmut Newton librarian about to engage in some seriously painful discipline—mincing back and forth with a stack of books for him to drop into the pot to simmer. Bottura suggested calling the shoot “Cook the Books,” but he was overruled.

  Toward the end of my last week in Modena, I asked Bottura about his worst moment as a chef. He answered right away: spring 2009. He had his second Michelin star and had just jumped to thirteenth place on the “world’s best restaurants” list. People were flocking to eat at Francescana—not to mention cook there. And a lot of Italian chefs were jealous, or jealous enough to pick up the phone when Canale 5—Silvio Berlusconi’s version of Fox News—called with invitations to appear on its nightly show Striscia la Notizia (“The News Slithers”), where they accused him of poisoning Italy with his “chemical” cuisine. “Eight million people heard this,” he told me. “Alexa came home from school crying—saying, ‘Daddy, is it true you’re poisoning people?’ I said, ‘Alexa, no way! They’re talking about natural things, things like soy lecithin and agar, things you find in every kitchen—even Nonna Luisa’s.”

  The truth is that everything that happens when you cook is chemistry. Anyone who has watched a steak char, or the broth in a risotto bubble away, or the sugar in a couple of drops of water turn to caramel, knows this. But in much of Italy words like “chemical” still mean magic, science is heresy, and if you add postmodern or molecular to that virtual pasta pot, they become political—codes for something foreign, dangerous, and worse (Berlusconi’s favorite), Communist. They marked Bottura as a culinary terrorist, serving chemical weapons disguised as a new kind of Italian food to innocent Catholic people. Bottura is thin-skinned; I have heard him quote, detail by detail, a bad review in a restaurant guide from 2002. But Striscia was arguably much worse. “They had sent people to eat at Francescana who filmed my plates with hidden cameras,” he said. “After Striscia, we had health inspectors there all day. Twice. I called my guys at the restaurant together, and I said, ‘If you believe in what we’re doing, stay. If you want to leave, you’re free to go.’ All of my guys stayed.”

  Bottura wasn’t alone. The other important poisoners were Adrià and the British chef Heston Blumenthal. The difference was that the people where they lived laughed. People in Italy stoked a debate about “authenticity” and “the health of Italy” that went on for months, and of course was nightly television fodder. It probably didn’t help that the well-known art critic and historian Achille Bonito Oliva, speaking in Bottura’s defense, called him “the sixth artist of the transavanguardia.” (The rest were painters like Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia.) But Bottura was thrilled. He likes to repeat those words. The irony for him lay in his obvious devotion to Italy and its food—and to the demonstrable fact that whatever “chemistry” he had introduced and whatever tastes he had incorporated from abroad, Italy was vivid in every dish he served at Francescana.

  Italians have made a myth of all those mothers and grandmothers happy in the kitchen. They have lived (profitably) with the country’s revolutions in design—in fashion, in furniture, in everything from cars to espresso makers—but “the way we have always cooked” remains their last defense against modernity. Four years ago, Bottura, having reinvented the grandmothers, added a selection called Traditions to his tasting menus. “I did it for the locals,” he told me. “It was an homage to the food they liked, a way to show that it could be improved, that it was okay to improve it.”

  Massimo Bottura’s cookbook, Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef, came out in 2014, and two years later his Osteria Francescana in Modena was voted the best restaurant in the world. Since then he has opened two permanent soup kitchens—first the Refettorio Ambrosiano at the Milan Expo and then at the Olympic Village in Rio, using volunteer chefs to create healthy hot meals for the poor, using tons of food waste that would otherwise have rotted or been thrown away. The next refettorio will be in Queens.

  PART III

  Books, Essays, and Adventures

  THE QUEST

  SEPTEMBER 2005

  I read cookbooks. I am addicted to them. I keep a pile on the floor of my study in New York, knowing that if I manage to write a couple of decent pages I can treat myself to a $4.50 Chinese lunch special in the company of Richard Olney or Jasper White or Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, thinking of all the succulent things I would cook for dinner if I didn’t have to go back to work in the afternoon. I keep another pile on my bedside table, knowing that if I wake in the middle of the night I can pick one up and drift off into a soothing dream of Joël Robuchon’s mashed potatoes or Claudia Roden’s pumpkin dumplings or Marcella Hazan’s red-and-green polenta torta, with a layer of onions, pine nuts, and ground pork between the spinach and the tomato. In my kitchen dreams, there are no crises. My books preclude them. The leg of
lamb is never withering in the oven, waiting for a late guest. The chicken pot pie never collapses under the tug of its own crust. And I have sous-chefs—I think of them as husbands—standing quietly behind me, ready to shuck the oysters, stir the cornmeal, pit the olives, pound the pesto, grind the achiote, whisk the sabayon, or at a nod, fly to my side, like angels, bearing sieves and spoons and spatulas, Thai fish pastes and fresh banana leaves and rare Indonesian spices and thick French pots so well calibrated that the butter browns without turning into cinders. My own husband, who is an anthropologist, finds my passion for cookbooks peculiar, something on the order of my addiction to thrillers and crossword puzzles. When we were first married, he would leave a copy of the Tractatus on my pillow, hoping that Wittgenstein would cure me. But Wittgenstein, of course, kept me up worrying about reality. My cookbooks are more like the lipsticks I used to buy as a tenth grader in a Quaker school where not even hair ribbons or colored shoelaces were permitted. They promise to transform me.

  Some fifteen hundred cookbooks are published in America each year, and Americans buy them by the millions—no one knows exactly how many. Barbara Haber, who was the curator of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard for thirty years—and in the process invented the history of women and food—once told me that the sales figures for cookbooks are one of the real mysteries of the publishing business, perhaps because small presses with a cookbook or two in their catalogues don’t always report those figures separately. But one thing seems clear: the only people who can touch us, when it comes to writing and buying cookbooks, are the British, and they are only just beginning to catch up. Until a few years ago, not even the French were much interested in cookbooks. The great professional chefs inherited the old French classics, but a Parisian bride, say, could expect to find one good copy of Escoffier, from a godmother or an aunt, among the wedding presents (brides in the South got La Cuisinière Provençale, known in France as “that yellow book” because of its shiny yellow cover). And for her kitchen, that amounted to the canon. Italians rarely admitted to buying cookbooks or, for that matter, to consulting the classics that were their—and their mothers’ and grandmothers’—wedding presents. Those books had names like Il Talismano della Felicità or La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene, which was written in the 1890s, and includes, in its section on dolci, a recipe for a Roman pudding said to be as “seignorial” in its pleasures as the puddings from Turin or Florence. (I think of those books as Italian versions of the Christian-housewife marriage manuals that used to advise women to greet their husband at the door at night wearing a black lace teddy and carrying a shaker of cold martinis.)

  But Americans have been buying cookbooks since the eighteenth century, and by now it seems as if half the people who ever read one eventually write their own. There are more new cookbooks in my local Barnes & Noble than there are new biographies or novels. There are 17,000 cookbooks listed on Amazon.com; 16,000 cookbooks in Barbara Haber’s archives; and at least 10,000 in the splendid collection at the New York Academy of Medicine. More to the point, there are 12,000 titles (not counting the used books) in stock right now at my favorite bookstore—the small scholarly warren on the upper reaches of Lexington Avenue called Kitchen Arts & Letters. It has to be said that Kitchen Arts’s cookbooks go back to a facsimile of a Mesopotamian cookbook in cuneiform on clay, and that Nach Waxman, who owns the store, is more likely to be reading up on the sixteenth-century Hindu shastra called the Supa Shastra, which “treats of the arts of cookery and the properties of food,” than settling into an armchair with the new Batali. In fact, his perennial bestseller isn’t even a cookbook; it is a book called On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee, which involves a lot of biology and chemistry, and not a single recipe.

  Every man I know who cooks seriously owns McGee, but I am less interested in how things work than in how they taste and whether they taste perfect. And never mind the theories that would have me the victim of some late-capitalist delusion that it’s possible—indeed, my American birthright—to put a purchase on perfection, or even of some embarrassing religion of self-improvement. It is my theory that American women started reading cookbooks because they had left their mothers behind in Europe and never “received” the wisdom that is said to be passed spontaneously from generation to generation, like the gift of prophecy, in the family kitchen. My mother could not cook. She had no interest in cooking, making her about as helpful for my culinary purposes as a mother I would have had to cross the Atlantic to ask, say, if it was all right to substitute Port for Madeira in the sauce for ham on a bed of spinach. Nor could my grandmother cook. I set up housekeeping without benefit of one of those frayed looseleaf notebooks or little black file boxes filled with cards that grandmothers supposedly gave to mothers and mothers copied for their daughters. What’s more, I had married a graduate student—which is to say that we had no money for the Cordon Bleu. I learned to cook from cookbooks.

  I bought my first cookbook during a year and a half of fieldwork in Morocco, mainly because I needed a recipe for ras el hanout, the spice mixture I use in couscous, that wasn’t like my friends’ recipes—laced with hashish. (This was the late sixties.) My next cookbooks were the two volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, written by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and (for the first volume) Louisette Bertholle, but quickly known to the world of would-be sixties and seventies cooks as Julia. And the first important dinner I made from them was beef Wellington. This took me two and a half days, owing, among other things, to the fact that my kitchen was so small then that I had to scrub the hall floor in order to roll out the dough for the pain brioché after each rising. (There were two.) I made the beef Wellington for my husband in an effort to dazzle, or perhaps to convince him that despite all evidence to the contrary, I was a doting, domestic sort of person, a woman who squeezed oranges in the morning and wrote discreetly in the afternoon while the foie gras softened and the dough rose. (About twenty years later, he said, “I was just wondering, why don’t we have beef Wellington anymore?”)

  It wasn’t long before I persuaded my mother that I could not survive without the Larousse Gastronomique for Christmas, and talked my aunt Beatrice—who was just learning to cook herself and fed us chicken with rosemary and crème fraîche every Sunday—into handing over her new Gourmet cookbooks, two massive volumes in grainy brown bindings that turned out to be as grave and useless as a Britannica yearbook. I don’t remember ever opening the Larousse, but I did make a sweet-potato-and-walnut casserole from one of those old Gourmets and never consulted them again. My addiction to cookbooks properly began a few years later, when I made a pilgrimage to Vienne to eat at Fernand Point’s restaurant, La Pyramide. Point was the greatest French chef of his generation, and his widow had kept the restaurant open in tribute to what he had always referred to, modestly, as “ma gastronomie.” He had written one cookbook, and that of course became the title. The book, which I bought that night, was short, gracious, and taught me two extremely important things about cooking. The first was how much I didn’t know—nap your lobster with a sauce à l’américaine, it said, but what was a sauce à l’américaine, and how did you make it, and was it really American? (Or was it Breton?) The second was not to be frightened of what I didn’t know, because if making a sauce à l’américaine was so simple that, from the point of view of Fernand Point, it didn’t even merit a recipe, then surely I could make one. Not exactly. It took me seven years and, of course, a cookbook. The book was The Saucier’s Apprentice, the author was Raymond Sokolov, and the recipes were so satisfyingly complex that even Simone Beck, a notorious French snob when it came to Americans cooking, had been forced to admit, “This would be a useful book even in France.” I made the sauce in two days of hard labor, preceded by a day of collecting veal and chicken bones from half a dozen butchers and calling neighbors who might be willing to drop by and kill an angry lobster with a chopping knife. But it was a sauce worthy of Fernand Point, and I had been determi
ned to produce one. By now I own more than a hundred cookbooks, and I am determined one day to turn a few plump oysters and some tapioca poached in cream, buried in sabayon, and topped with caviar into a dish worthy of Thomas Keller, whose French Laundry Cookbook actually tells you how to do this if you happen to have six hands.

  I feel a certain affinity for Thomas Keller, despite the fact that he is the best chef in America (his “oysters and pearls” and his parsnip soup are hands down the best things I have ever eaten) and has real sous-chefs, and I am merely one of the two best cooks—my friend Juliet Taylor is the other—on the fourth floor of a Central Park West apartment house. We share a weakness for lobster rolls, Reuben sandwiches, hamburger joints, and Fernand Point. “So genuine, so generous, so hospitable” is the way Keller describes Ma Gastronomie, which he first read at the age of twenty, working for a classical French chef at a Narragansett beach club whose members, if my childhood memories serve, usually sat down to dinner three sheets to the wind and unlikely to taste the difference between a homemade demiglace and a can of College Inn. I met Keller in May at his New York restaurant, Per Se, toward the beginning of what I am reluctant to call research. I wanted to talk to cooks who read cookbooks all the time, and to cooks who hated cookbooks, or claimed to. I had already discovered that a couple I know in Los Angeles read cookbooks aloud to each other in bed, as part of what could be called their amatory ritual; and that another couple, in Berlin, nearly divorced over an argument about which cookbooks to pack for a year in Cambridge; and that a friend in New York got headaches just by looking at the teaspoon measurements for thyme and garlic in a coq au vin. I had learned that some of my friends cooked only from recipes they had clipped from magazines and newspapers, and wouldn’t touch cookbooks, and that others cooked only from hardcover books and wouldn’t even touch a paperback, let alone a page torn from the Wednesday food supplement of the Times. Now I wanted to know if the people who cooked for a living and whose food I loved read cookbooks. Keller reads them as well as writes them. He had just bought three new cookbooks on the day we talked, and he keeps the classics in his restaurant kitchens, “for sous-chefs looking for inspiration.” Not many of the great chefs admit to buying three cookbooks on their way to work, especially other chefs’ cookbooks.