“How many people are you expecting?” I asked Darina.
“Sixty.”
I thought the English language was tripping me up again. I have difficulty discriminating between the sounds of “sixty” and “sixteen.” “Did you say sixteen?” I asked.
“No, sixty, six-zero.”
“How can that be? I have never done a full-participation class larger than twelve. You must do something. Return the deposits. Get the class down to no more than fifteen, fifteen.”
Darina smiled. “There is no way I can do that. Many students are already here. Others are on the way. Some are coming from as far as Australia and South Africa. And everyone is so excited by your being here. It will be all right, you’ll see.”
Victor smiled too. “Non fasciarti la testa,” he said, alluding to the family proverb about not bandaging your head before it is broken. “I’ll give you a hand.”
And he did. I see him still, on the day we made risotto. All the stoves were going, and Victor was flying from pot to pot, making sure that everyone was stirring correctly and that when they ladled in the broth, it was neither too much nor too little. We came up with a new cooking statistic: Sixty pairs of hands can make wonderful risotto.
My course was the last of the school year at Ballymaloe. When all the students had left, Darina invited me to join her and her staff for a farewell dinner at an unusual restaurant. The chef opened only when he had a minimum of twelve guaranteed reservations. When fewer than those had booked, they were not confirmed until enough other bookings came in to complete the necessary number. The restaurant was on Hare Island, a stony lump breaking the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Transportation to it was in an open dinghy. It would give us a feeling, Darina said, of what living on the wild west coast of Ireland could be like.
The day started out with a gray sky that soon produced that steady, light drizzle that the Irish affectionately call “soft rain.” It may have been soft, but by the time we reached the shore and the dinghy’s landing, it was a very wet and cold rain. Out of the trunks of our cars came blankets and towels, into which we snuggled up to our eyes. I felt like a refugee being driven to the sea. We stepped into the open dinghy, the water on its bottom an inch deep. I could see nothing but water: water above, water below, water ahead. By the time we had been rowed to the shore of what looked as inhabitable as a piece of the moon, I was as wet as I could ever be short of dissolving into a puddle. We made land, but our trek wasn’t over. We were on a scraggly path, which we followed until we reached
On Hare Island, off the west coast of Ireland
the first white stone house, one of two on Hare Island. There still was water above, but at least we had solid land below. When we eventually came to the house, I went in not knowing what I might find or whether there would be any hope of returning to a less liquid state. It was cheerful inside, warm and cozy. We dropped our soaking blankets and, like puppies released from their bath, shook off as much water as we could. Dry towels appeared, and what was even more effective, whiskey and wine. The dinner—I remember a perfect lamb rack—was comfort and salvation. We ate, we drank, we sang, we were happy. On the way back, the sun came out.
Annette Kessler, a short, dark-haired, lively woman speaking clipped British English, was urging us to go to South Africa. Annette, an editor at Fairlady, a South African women’s magazine, had come to Venice with a photographer to do a story about the Cipriani hotel, and one about me. I would be very happy to visit South Africa, I told her, but I couldn’t consider it as long as the antiapartheid sanctions against her country were in force. In 1990, however, the South African president, Mr. de Klerk, launched the process of dismantling apartheid. Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and a year later, the United States government lifted its sanctions. We left for Cape Town at the end of February 1992. On March 17, the country voted on a referendum that asked whether or not it approved of the government’s reforms and its intention to negotiate a new constitution. On that evening we were guests at a referendum party at a private house, and when the news came that a large majority had voted “yes,” we were clasped to one another by sensations of relief, hope, and exultation.
On the Fairlady tour, I demonstrated a menu for a large audience, which was followed by a dinner based on that menu. I gave the same demonstration three times, each time in a different hotel in a different city. I started in Cape Town, went on to Durban, and finished in Johannesburg. The dinners were cooked by the chef and kitchen staff of each hotel, an arrangement that has always made me extremely uncomfortable. I usually decline to participate in such programs because it is a rare chef who cooks my dishes as I do. The one shining exception was Michel at the Hong Kong Mandarin. But I wanted to see South Africa. I had been promised some nice excursions—a stay in the mountains, another in a game park with a private guide—and it seemed worthwhile to ignore my misgivings. We added two weeks on our own to our stay, hoping to see more of the country.
It was time spent well, and if we hadn’t had a class coming to Venice, we would have stayed longer. We were attracted by the towns on the coast east of Cape Town, which we discovered while driving to the Cape of Good Hope. Victor and I talked about finding a place there to stay during South Africa’s long sunny winter, but life rushed by before we found time to go back. The Nederburg winery was one of the sponsors of our tour, and they generously introduced us to some of South Africa’s best wine estates, in Constantia, Paarl, and Stellenbosch. Their vineyards are among the most beautiful in the world, framed by spectacular mountain scenery and graced by handsome, whitewashed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch Cape architecture. Victor, who regards a great sweet wine as the highest achievement of the wine-making art, was overjoyed to discover superb late-harvest, botrytised wine made from Riesling grapes, known there as Weisser Riesling. In his cellar, he still hides some bottles from the cache he took back with him to Venice, and on an extraordinarily deserving occasion, he may reluctantly pry one out. I was astonished by and powerfully drawn to this country close to the bottom of the world, a many-complexioned nation—African, European, Indian—whose vast territory can equally accommodate French wine grapes maturing in a Mediterranean climate and a bush that is home to lions and elephants, where one parks the Land Rover under a full moon, with a drink in hand, to watch lionesses lope by looking for dinner.
Alas, it was the cooking that let me down. The ingredients were marvelous, the fish and lobsters in particular, but in the month that we were there we hardly ever ate well. I spent a great deal of time in the kitchens of the hotels where I gave my demonstrations, and what I saw was disheartening. The vegetables they served came out of cans, and there was no thought of cooking something fresh to order. A grilled fish might have been cooked an hour or two earlier and reheated before it was sent to table. But it was the fate of the magnificent lobsters that all but filled my eyes with tears. They arrived at the kitchen fiercely alive, but they were immediately boiled. If you ordered a steamed lobster, they would plunge it in boiling water again. If you ordered it grilled, the already cooked lobster would be split and run under the broiler. It was pitiful that those splendid creatures had to surrender their lives for such sorry results.
The tears did rise to my eyes the evening of the first demonstration. I was demonstrating homemade egg pasta and how to use it for lasagne, which I had chosen as the pasta course. Because I didn’t trust the kitchen to follow my recipes, I spent the entire afternoon with an assistant who had been assigned to me, making the Bolognese meat sauce, the béchamel, and all the pasta sheets necessary for the seven-layer lasagne that would be served at dinner. I showed the chef how he would later have to cook, assemble, and bake the lasagne. I went up to my room to change, and since I had time before the demonstration, I stopped in at the kitchen to check on the preparations. I asked where they had put the pasta I had made, and they brought out several steel basins filled with water. The pasta was inside, dissolving into glue. I summoned the chef and had him mobi
lize the full kitchen staff to make a new batch of pasta. I didn’t leave for the demonstration until I had made sure that the basins of water had been banished from the kitchen, and that the chef and everyone else involved understood exactly how they were to proceed. When I finished the demonstration, I took advantage of the time it took the guests to have a glass of champagne before sitting down at the dinner table to dash into the kitchen and survey the situation. It was going well, and the lasagne turned out to be delicious, all seven thin layers of them.
In Durban, my next stop, I had words with Annette Kessler. My meat course was a lamb dish that I consider one of my tastiest. It calls for shoulder of lamb that skips the pre-browning and is cooked slowly with vegetables and juniper berries for two hours. On the plate, it isn’t exceptionally beautiful to look at, but the meat is of a tenderness and richness of flavor that no other method can surpass. Annette had been disappointed by its appearance when it had been served in Cape Town and demanded that I use chops instead of the shoulder. I refused. I tried to explain that after two hours of cooking, the chops would not look particularly pretty—they might even come apart—and moreover, the meat would almost certainly be dry. We talked and talked, and I know she was not persuaded, but it didn’t matter because it was the shoulder that we continued to use.
My last working stop was Johannesburg. In Cape Town and Durban, Victor and I would take long walks, but we were told it was not advisable to do so in Johannesburg. Most women carried guns in their purses, I was informed, and it would be prudent for us not to step out of the hotel. There was nothing on my schedule in Johannesburg aside from a reception, the demonstration, and the dinner, save for an appointment to have tea with a Mrs. Oppenheimer. I didn’t know who Mrs. Oppenheimer was. We never asked and no one told us, assuming we knew. I was sure I had never met her, but when I traveled it was not unusual for me to receive invitations to people’s homes, and I was happy to get out of the hotel. A car collected Annette, Victor, and me at the hotel and drove us quite a distance into a lovely, hilly suburban area. “What do you know about this Mrs. Oppenheimer?” I asked Victor. Victor, who had just learned it from Annette, said, “Her husband is the chairman of De Beers, the diamond company.”
The tall iron gate where the car stopped was guarded by several men carrying machine guns. They asked us to show identification, then spoke on the intercom to someone in the villa, and the gate opened. After we had been shown inside, a tall, portly woman who walked with a cane greeted us: “I am Mrs. Oppenheimer, and I am so happy you could come.” She was wearing a simple, loose-fitting black dress, her shoulder-length hair was black shot through with gray, and she had the most exquisite manners I have ever encountered. She looked at you straight, with a serene smile, and spoke gently, unaffectedly, as though we had had a long experience of talking to each other. The sitting room where tea had been laid held several works of art, of which I remember two tall Goya panels. After a few minutes of conversation, a man appeared carrying a silver tray with cookies. I didn’t immediately recognize him, but I recognized the cookies as the ones we taught in Bologna. The man reminded me: He had been in Bologna in 1986 for the last course I taught, the one to which Burt Lancaster had come. He was John Arthur Dove and he was the Oppenheimers’ chef.
We were shown Mr. Oppenheimer’s study. A Renoir hung on the wall behind his desk. “He bought that when he was a student at Oxford. Don’t you think that was clever of him?” said our hostess. I assented, thinking, “Clever, of course, and with a generous allowance besides.” “Would you like to see the garden?” Mrs. Oppenheimer asked. It was more a park than a garden, and I thought how kind it was for her to take me there when it was evident that walking was hard for her. It had the informal, unregimented look of some English and Irish gardens, with something that other gardens didn’t have, splendid sculptures. I remember a Moore and a Rodin, but not the others. And something else there was different. The path we walked on was paved with small, round, flat stones that glittered. “What are they?” I asked. “When they drill for diamonds,” Mrs. Oppenheimer explained, “the cores that come up may contain minute diamond fragments. We have them sliced into paving stones.”
In the car, on the way back to our hotel, Annette turned to us and said, “You have just been given tea by South Africa’s royal family.”
How Not to Get Rich
1972-1993
I KNOW HOW TO COOK, and I know how to teach, but I have never known how to make a great deal of money. Growing wealth should be like growing anything else: Drop the right seed on the right ground, and cultivate it. Many good seeds have flown out of our hands; a few have put down strong roots and become fruitful, but somehow it was never for us to harvest those fruits.
There was a time in America when, in culinary matters, if it was French it was good, and if it was good, it had to be French. Chuck Williams, the founder of Williams-Sonoma, came across to me as a dedicated exponent of that principle. I had never seen a shop like the early one he had opened in San Francisco, so white, so tidy, so pure, so dazzling. And so frightfully French! Except for ceramic jugs and other trifles, there was nothing seriously Italian in it. When I came to know Chuck a little better, I asked him, “Why don’t you bring in some good things from Italy?” “What is there in Italy?” he shot back. His was a flippant and dismissive reply, to which I chose to make none of my own. Nonetheless, the question rankled.
Some months later, I returned from Italy with samples of aceto balsamico, balsamic vinegar, a product that I had been unfamiliar with and that, as far as I knew, was completely unknown in America. In fact, it was then also completely unknown in Italy, except to the people living in a small territory whose center was Modena, a city just northwest of Bologna. Every year at harvesttime for nearly the past thousand years, families in that area boiled down the juice of white grapes, poured it into small barrels, and let it sleep in the warm attics of their farmhouses. Fitfully, the sugary juice would awaken and ferment. Part of the sugar turned into alcohol, which was in turn converted into vinegar by airborne bacteria. For each batch, the process continued over a span of several generations, for a hundred years even, yielding a sublimely sweet vinegar, dense, dark brown, and complex. This priceless extract had transformative powers when drops of it were used as a condiment over salad greens and certain berries. It was too precious to be sold or given as a present, although a tiny cask of it might be included in a daughter’s dowry.
I have forgotten the exact year that I became acquainted with balsamic vinegar, but it happened in the early 1970s on a visit to Bologna, when the Fini food company of Modena announced its tradition-breaking intention to bottle it and release it commercially. Like all land-owning families in Modena, the Finis had been making balsamic vinegar for their own use for generations, and through marriage, inheritance, and acquisition, they had amassed a substantial stock of it. A small quantity was very old, and that was not for sale. What they intended to market was a good-quality five-year-old product, whose tasting characteristics were representative of, although not equal to, those of the venerable heirloom balsamics.
Giorgio Fini, the head of the family and of the company, hoping that I might help get the word out in the States about this ancient and yet new product, gave me a few samples of the vinegar and a prototype of the eight-sided bottle they were going to put it into. I never asked what was in it for me. I was happy to have the opportunity to approach my friends with a small spoonful of the elixir and say, “Here, try this, you have never tasted anything like it!” Craig Claiborne came over for one of our periodic lunches during which we chatted about our world, and he became the first person in America to taste it. “This will be a sensation,” he said. When two men I knew from Williams-Sonoma were in New York, I had them to lunch, and they also had their first taste of balsamic vinegar at my table. As their eyes opened wide, I brought up Chuck’s remark about Italy. Not too long thereafter, while turning the pages of the new Williams-Sonoma catalogue, I was startled to come upon an
illustration of the Fini octagonal bottle. It was offered at $15, a not inconsiderable price for a small bottle of an unfamiliar, curious vinegar from Italy. Nonetheless, its sales took off, and thus began America’s infatuation with balsamic vinegar.
I have no way of knowing whether my informal presentations at home had a connection with the appearance of Fini’s vinegar in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue. An acknowledgment that might have confirmed it never came from Chuck. The ones who thought I was owed some recognition were the people at Fini, who wrote me a warm letter of thanks, and who, to express their appreciation, liberally supplied my school in Bologna with complimentary samples of choice balsamico.
Jim Beard introduced me to Burt Wolf, a former mutual funds broker, around 1975. Burt was a captivating man who had begun to apply his adventurous salesmanship to food. When I met him, he was assembling a team, guided by the omniscient Barbara Kafka, that would produce The Cooks’ Catalogue, the first comprehensive, and still unrivaled, guide to cooking equipment. At the Stanford Court in San Francisco, I observed some of the classes that Barbara taught for Jim Beard, and she was dazzling. She had an unassailable command of her topics and her students. She handled questions with what in tennis terms would be described as a crackling return of service, fast and well-placed.
During that decade, Bloomingdale’s food department was the talk of the town. In addition to a floor stocked with an assortment of packaged foods from all over the world, they had begun to put specialized food boutiques into their storefront on Fifty-ninth Street. I remember the bakery, where we often got our bread, and the Petrossian fresh caviar and smoked salmon shop, where Victor risked sliding from self-indulgence to costly addiction. It was Burt’s idea that Bloomingdale’s should use one of those storefronts for an
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