The Cook

by Maylis de Kerangal

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  1

  Berlin

  DONER KEBAB

  A train moves toward Berlin. It speeds through wide-open spaces, past smoking fields. It’s fall. Sitting in a second-class car, head leaning against the window, is a slender young man, about twenty years old, traveling light, a book in his hands; I am sitting on the bench facing him. I decipher the title on the book’s cover—La cuisine de référence, the famous French handbook for culinary professionals—and see the three stylized chef’s hats drawn against a red, white, and blue background, then I sit up and lean forward, propelling myself into the book’s pages with their rows of illustrations and italicized captions, step-by-step photographs that feature no human face or mouth, only torsos and hands: precise hands with clean, neatly trimmed fingernails; hands holding metal, glass, or plastic utensils; hands plunged inside containers, hands wielding blades, each hand captured in an action.

  The young man leafs through the book’s pages, consulting the table of contents and the glossary, the preface and the appendixes. He seems to be hovering around it without actually reading it, as if he didn’t know where to start. In fact, I think he doesn’t know much at all, not even what he’s doing on this train on this day at this hour, and if you asked him the question, if you put him on the spot and demanded, “Why Berlin?,” I imagine he would shrug, close his eyes, let his head sink back against the seat, and withdraw into himself. The only thing he is sure about is the fact of sitting in this car, immersed in its imitation leather and gleam of brass, in this atmosphere of confinement—damp warmth, detergent smell—his shoes touching this carpeted floor; the only thing he feels with any certainty is the steady power of the machine that carries him forward. A grayish blur through the window, the landscape is an old mattress; the boy closes the book and falls asleep.

  * * *

  October 2005, and it’s freezing cold in Prenzlauer Berg as Mauro, travel bag slung over his shoulder, leaves the train station a few hours later and walks to a building on Lottumstrasse, where a friend of his has an apartment, rented for next to nothing, that will still be too big for the two of them. The staircase echoes, and when he reaches the landing, he finds the door open. Mauro enters, calls out—there’s no one. He sits cross-legged on the floor next to a coal stove sculpted like the base of a fountain. He looks around: the large room is arranged with a few pieces of restored furniture. He rubs his hands, realizes he’s hungry. He’s here for three months.

  * * *

  All Mauro remembers of this Berlin period is the mix of cold, white, empty days and dark, hot, overpopulated nights—a balance that suits him. All the same, for the first few weeks, the daytime impresses him with its empty hours and its fibrous texture, like glass wool. Solitary hours in the apartment while Joachim—his roommate—works in a hip bar on Rosenthaler Strasse; floating hours where even the slightest movement makes the apartment creak, prompting him to turn up the music to its highest setting so he can’t hear anything else. He chills out in this sonic cloud until the time comes for him to slip into another one—at the bar, where he goes to meet the others. There, he focuses on the gestures, expressions, faces, of those around him since he doesn’t speak a word of German, and he writhes until dawn among the crazed bodies.

  One morning, though, he stirs himself, shakes himself like a young colt. A small loaf of black bread, a café americano, and he’s out the door. He goes out on reconnaissance, peacoat buttoned up tight, collar raised, less than ten euros in his pocket, and his gait now is that of a tracker on a hunt, as resolute as his path is random. The next day he goes out again, and he does the same the day after that. The streets in Berlin are organized clockwise: Pankow, Friedrichshain, Schöneberg, Dahlem, Charlottenburg, Tiergarten … Even so, he wears out his sneakers, his heels are covered with blisters, and when, from my window, I see him pass in the evening, on his way back down Lottumstrasse, I notice that he is limping slightly and remember a decoction of sage and green tea in which you can soak your feet to relieve the pain in the arches.

  These urban wanderings are punctuated by brief pauses in the cafés of Neukölln to down a quick beer; prolonged pauses in the lines outside kebab shops at lunchtime, long queues where people breathe steam into the biting cold, where they stamp their feet, where they hop up and down, arms folded, hands wedged under armpits. The doner is a Berlin institution; there are more kebab shops here than McDonald’s. Mauro will taste more than thirty during his stay, finally deciding on his favorite—made in a van at the Mehringdamm U-Bahn station. Crunchy slices of meat, sweet grilled onions, crisp fries, soft bread, the smooth sauce soaking through all of it, and hot, hot, hot: the perfect fuel.

  These long walks are a way of orienting himself, of mapping the city in his mind, but they are also a way of giving himself space to think: while his body steams in the icy air, while he cleaves his way through the congested geography of a city in the midst of metamorphosis, it is his own life that Mauro maps out and orients, his own life that he elucidates.

  Mile after mile, he goes over the past few years. The semesters in economics that he devoured at Censier until he got his degree, passing the final exams only by pulling an all-nighter, the sole burst of intensity in a year as transparent as glass, as soft as cotton wool; basking in the mud pool of collective sloth, the days veiled and the nights thickened by the smoking of joints, everything lost in a generalized haze with zero mnestic peaks showing through.… Fuck, where did those years go? The Lisbon parenthesis like a sun-soaked orange: the business school for young bourgeois heirs of the system, deserted in favor of an experiment in communal living, and all those roommates who were empty bellies, devoting themselves to four- or five-hour feasts consumed amid continuous talk, a confusion of tongues—Basque, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian—and Mia’s tongue playing with his; Mauro cooking enormous gratins, lemon blancmanges, French toast, all sorts of soups and broths; the endless supply of homemade jams and farmhouse charcuterie, treasures wrapped in newspaper and smuggled at the bottoms of gym bags. The “comedown” with the arrival of summer, the end of the Erasmus course, the master’s achieved, and it’s bye-bye, Lisbon, the death knell of the lovers’ banquet, and suddenly his life is a void, the future opaque. Then it’s all poverty and brooding, and the car breaking down on the drive home, in the courtyard of a Charente farm where his cousin lives with Jeanne. It’s midsummer; the countryside buzzes idly. For two months, Mauro does nothing. He has no plans, but he is sure of one thing: he will not go back to university in the fall.

  At this stage of his Berlin wanderings, Mauro often takes a break. He goes into the first bar he finds, grabs a table near the door, and thinks about Jeanne.

  A straw hat on her head, a pair of cut denim shorts revealing her sprinter’s thighs, small rounded feet in leather ballet pumps, and a staggering workload—sheep, chickens, pigs, vegetable garden. He watches her as she crosses the farmyard, spade in hand, concentrating. He listens to her when she sits down outside the kitchen door and says to him as she rolls a cigarette: So, you’re doing economics? Startled, he nods. He’s leaning against the hot wall, holding a beer. Jeanne is interested in economics: she takes part in discussions on blogs, in forums, reads theoreticians of degrowth, studies new networks for organic agriculture. She smiles: Aside from the cigs and the wine, the vast majority of what we c
onsume here is produced on the premises, hadn’t you noticed? Mauro shakes his head; no, he hadn’t noticed anything.

  She is the first cook he meets. A professional now, she’s been cooking for as long as she can remember. That summer, she shows him something beyond the gastronomical ingenuity of artists, which is the kind of cuisine he already knows, the kind done by friends who mix up their cultures. She introduces him to another realm—the realm of ecology, the territory of earthly resources. This is a vast expanse of fruits and vegetables: blond pears, speckled zucchini, new carrots and beefsteak tomatoes, tasty roots, elongated eggplants and wild herbs—chervil, sage, nettles. It is a continent populated by small poultry birds that you grab by the neck, where there’s a pig called Napoléon, where the bull Soleil is king. It’s a humane kind of cooking. Another world. Something is happening. Mauro loves how she lives, the way she thinks, connected to the earth, to the seasons; he loves her energy and the purity of her moods—sunny cheerfulness, stormy anger—and I feel certain that he was blown away by the assurance of her gestures, her gait, her look.

  He doesn’t go back to Paris right away, preferring to stay at the farm past the summer, working with the seasonal laborers and, in late September, leaving the Landes for Berlin, where he will meet up with Joachim—a way of extending this period of uncertainty. In Paris, Mauro stops by the Gibert bookstore in Place Saint-Michel, where he buys a Berlin guidebook and a stack of textbooks on cooking aimed at students taking professional exams.

  * * *

  That November morning, in the blue-aired apartment on Lottumstrasse where condensation streams down the windows, Mauro sticks an arm out of his duvet and plunges his hand into his duffel bag, waving it about inside as if testing the temperature of bathwater. This exploration, intended to bring him a few euros in change, leads his fingers to brush against the cold cover of one of those books on cooking, forgotten there, never opened. He takes it out and stares at it in surprise, as if he has just carried it up from the depths of time to the surface of the present. Then he gets up and walks to the Bibliothek am Wasserturm, on Prenzlauer Allee. At what moment, at what precise moment, does the course of one’s life narrow, solidifying this particular path as a possible or desirable future, this path and not that one or any other? I often think that it was during this stay in Berlin—of which he retains only an impression of cold and of long distances—that Mauro began to emerge from latency, that kingdom of youth. And so it is that he finds a seat in the reading room and opens the book. The library is a modern, clear, calm place. It’s warm in there.

  2

  Aulnay

  CAKES, CARBONARA, HOMEMADE PIZZA

  He had never considered cooking as a possible profession. Nowadays, everyone talks about the little boy who used to hang around in front of the saucepans at mealtimes, standing on tiptoes, nose in the casserole dish, eyes riveted to the oven window, finger dipping into the cream—What are we eating? What’s that? They like to remember the skinny, studious kid who, having been given a book of cake recipes while still in elementary school, spent the next few months making one every day when he got home from school, the way other kids might go to their bedroom to construct worlds out of Lego, or organize cosmic robot battles, or play PlayStation, or draw soccer players, or read a comic book. These are the anecdotes that build a legend, that help to create a logic along the lines of “Even when he was very young…” Because, in truth, all that stuff about a calling, a voice whispering in the ear, a passion drawing the body forward in a firm straight line … there was none of that back then. I searched for some trace of it in his notebooks, his drawings, the letters he wrote to his grandmother at Christmas, but I didn’t find any at all. At seven years old he wanted to be a circus clown. At fifteen he wanted to be rich, dreamed of bundles of cash, a classy international-playboy lifestyle—though he probably said this mostly to annoy his parents, a talented bohemian couple for whom this money obsession was just a phase, an awkward adolescent stage: they reacted with shrugs and wry smiles.

  * * *

  Mauro grows up in Seine-Saint-Denis in a family of artists—jack-of-all-trades father, sculptor mother, a younger sister. In Aulnay-sous-Bois, the couple found more than a place to live; they found a space in which they could create.

  It’s true, they’re not rolling in money. Yet there is never any compromise in what is served at the family dinner table. The meals are delicious and varied; they don’t eat just anything. Nor do they eat any old way: the plates are flower patterned, the glasses tulip shaped, the cloth napkins rolled inside boxwood rings. What is at play during mealtimes is conceived as a relationship with one’s body and an engagement with the world; the idea of self-awareness, or, in other words, what distinguishes humans from animals—Mauro’s father, Jacques, recalls in his tenor voice that German has two verbs for “eat”: essen (for humans) and fressen (for animals).

  From the maternal—Italian—side of the family, the commensal culture of togetherness around a table brings a ritual aspect to each daily meal that is respected by all. What it also brings, alongside Anna—the adventurous, refined mother—is the sudden appearance of a grandmother, maker of legendary meals and walking repository of Tuscan cuisine, her recipes taken from the famous Talismano della felicità. From this point on, when the child enters the kitchen and ties a dish towel around his waist, he is under the dual influence of these almost polar opposites; or rather, as with all cooks, his odyssey is catalyzed by the continual friction between creativity and tradition, innovation and custom, surprise and simplicity.

  To start with, though, the idea of creativity is dominant. That comes first, for the child, probably from seeing his mother, day after day, practice adapting and enhancing what she has at hand; seeing her use her resourcefulness and ingenuity to defy the constraints of tight purse strings. In other words, Mauro is taught the infinite variations to be drawn from simple, cheap products, with meat only once a week, and never a trip to a restaurant.

  * * *

  From the beginning, Mauro enters the kitchen as if he were entering a magical sphere, part playground and part laboratory. There, he employs fire and water, commands machines and robots, and soon he has mastered several metamorphoses: melting and crystallizing, evaporating and boiling; the passage from solid to liquid, from hot to cold, from white to black (and vice versa), from raw to cooked. The kitchen is the theater of the world’s transformation. In this way, cooking quickly becomes something more than a game with fixed rules; it is an object lesson, a chemical and sensory adventure.

  So Mauro is ten years old when he starts on the cakes. Each evening, he throws his schoolbag across his bedroom and enters the kitchen. At that time of day he is alone in the house, master of all he surveys. He probes the cupboards, makes an inventory of the fridge, then opens the cookbook and chooses a recipe that corresponds to the ingredients at his disposal, which he places on the table so that he can see them all readily. Next, he reads the recipe and visualizes the process. Soon he is pouring, breaking, weighing, beating, crushing, heating, measuring, decanting, manipulating, kneading, cutting, peeling, cooking, arranging, mixing, mimicking adult gestures. Soon he is making food for his family.

  Because, right away, cooking entails other people; it entails the presence of others contained within the cake like the genie in the lamp. Because the preparation of a dish immediately calls for a set table, another guest, language, emotions, and every theatrical element of a meal, from the presentation of the dish to the remarks it provokes—the digestive rumblings of guests with full mouths and wide-open eyes. This is precisely where the pleasure lies for Mauro, who, as he becomes an adolescent, is known among his friends as the chef the way others take on the roles of the looker, the grease monkey, the geek, the brawler, the panty dropper, the athlete, or the joker of the gang—the gang in question being six boys who hang out together for seven years, through middle school and high school, without ever growing apart. I’ve never cooked just for myself—and he hands me a plate of
octopus à la plancha.

  * * *

  What amazes me, from this era of patisseries, is the magical power of the cookbook. As if the cake resulted from the recipe, as if it came out of language the way it comes out of the oven when the cooking time is over. So that the more experienced he becomes, the more his vocabulary is enriched, incorporating the words of gastronomy. Following a recipe means matching sensory perceptions to verbs and nouns—and, for example, learning to distinguish what is diced from what is minced, and what is minced from what is chopped; learning to specify the different actions of boiling, broiling, poaching, grilling, sautéing, roasting, baking, reducing; learning to connect the array of colors, textures, and flavors to their infinitely nuanced counterparts in the culinary lexicon. Mauro acquires this language like a foreign tongue through a series of charlottes, babas, floating islands, marble cakes, cheesecakes, lemon meringue pies, bread puddings, macarons, pistachio financiers, Bavarian creams, crème brûlées, petits gâteaux, clafoutis, tiramisus, reines de saba, and other balthazars.

  At the same time, Mauro trains his senses and is soon able to estimate by sight the capacity of a thimble, a teaspoon, a pinch of salt; he is able to gauge the volume and mass represented by 250 grams of flour and 50 grams of butter; knows how to adjust temperatures and cooking times, how to date an egg, a crème, an apple. Little by little, his sensations become more precise; at each stage of the preparation, they are mobilized as one, coalesced into a single movement, as if the boy himself were becoming unified; it’s synesthesia, a feast, and now he can cook by ear as well as with his nose, hands, mouth, and eyes. His body exists more and more; it becomes the measure of the world.