Dirt

by Bill Buford

  The striped bass: grilled skin-down until crispy, five minutes, and then finished by a minute on the fleshy side. The exotically oily sablefish: four minutes in a 500-degree oven, boned with a pair of fish pliers, painted with a soy-and-sake glaze, and then (when fired) sizzled in the salamander until it bubbled blackly.

  Soft-shell crabs were the exception, arriving daily in a box, alive, with eyes, lined up in rows on a straw bed, each no bigger than a child’s fist, ocean-wet, stirring slightly, and smelling of barnacles and anchors. They were also fun to eat, crustaceans that you could pop into your mouth and munch on in their entirety, claws, shell, everything.

  They are a specialty of the Chesapeake Bay, but not a unique breed. What is unique is the breeding. Crabs shed shells and regrow them. They molt. Chesapeake Native Americans discovered that if you pull a mid-molting crab out into the air, the shell never hardens. It is, therefore, delightfully crispy when sautéed. Richard’s were especially crispy, because they were deep-fried, after being filled with a mix of mayonnaise and crabmeat, an unconventional touch, stuffing a baby with the meat of the adult—basically, with what the little soft-shells would have grown up to be had their adolescence not been abbreviated.

  “The mayonnaise is for the acidity,” David told me during a lesson on crab prep. He searched for an example I might understand. “Think fish and chips. The English splash them with vinegar. Fat loves acidity.” (David, I have to observe affectionately, had an inexpressibly charming, sweet way of conveying the utter awe he felt in the face of my culinary stupidity.)

  To do crabs, you need only a pair of heavy-duty clippers and a metal bowl. With your left hand, you pick up the critter from just behind the claws; with your right, you snip off its head from just behind the eyes, which makes a light plonk when it hits the bowl. The now wide-open carcass is impressively roomy, especially after a little squeeze, which, when you think about it, makes perfect sense. A crab’s new shell is like buying a coat for a fast-growing child—you want something the little guy will grow into. Of course Richard would make use of this space! It was as much a feature of a soft-shell’s uniqueness as its paper-thin housing. A crab filled with mayonnaise? It was like a fried seafood sandwich. Why hadn’t more restaurants stolen the idea?

  To fry, you dip the crabs in a batter made of two parts pastry flour (low-protein, fluffy), one part corn flour (for mouth feel), a bottle of sparkling water (the effervescence of which mysteriously survives the frying), and an elusive ingredient called “curry love.” The term was used by a line cook, Gervais Achstetter, who shouted, “Chef, the crabs need a little more curry love.”

  “Gervais, be careful, please,” David said. “There is a journalist in the house.”

  Curry love, once it was finally accepted that the journalist wasn’t going away anytime soon, turned out to be food coloring. Its use in savory dishes is universally forbidden, although for no reason that entirely makes sense, since it is tolerated in the pastry kitchen, which, in essential philosophic ways, Richard never left. A lot of Richard’s dishes had a little extra love. The bright green of the “basil oil”? Or the ratatouille, its vibrant saffron-red? Or the deep, deep purple-red of the “wine sauce” that went with a steak?

  I later asked Richard straight-out—“Do you use food coloring?” We were having lunch. It was mischievous of me. He didn’t know that I knew. He paused, trying to read me.

  “No,” he said. “Never. Beet juice, of course. But not food coloring.”

  I repeated the exchange years later to Daniel Boulud—the brazen audacity of it—and he said, “Huh.”

  When I later found myself in Boulud’s kitchen, and was on my own, downstairs, among the prep cooks, I fell into admiring the deep, egg-yolky tortellini that the pasta guy was making, and after asking if I could see the recipe discovered that, oh my, it included yellow food coloring.

  Spoiler alert number three: I would end up cooking with Daniel Boulud.

  * * *

  —

  One weekend, flipping through a magazine, Richard had come upon a picture of a flowering plant in a glass vase. The vase made him stop. He closed his eyes and visualized the possibility of a salad that looked like a gift from the florist, with “soil layers” below and leaves and edible flowers on top. By the time he got to the restaurant on Monday morning, he couldn’t wait to get started. He had already grabbed a sheet of paper and was drawing what it might look like: on the bottom, the “dirt” (eggplant, sautéed with shallots in olive oil and finished in the oven to a sweet paste); on top, jellied tomato water; and in between a fluffy yogurt—“Not sweet, Americans always want sweet, but savory, seasoned with cumin” (a low-note heat, North African, earthy)—whipped by a technique that he had learned from Lenôtre.

  “Which was?”

  Basically yogurt plus gelatin, Richard said.

  I was perplexed. Even I knew that you can’t add gelatin to a refrigerated yogurt and expect it to set. Jell-O 101 teaches you that you have to dissolve it in a hot liquid and chill it.

  “Ah, mon ami, we don’t dissolve the gelatin in the yogurt. We dissolve it in a cup of hot cream and then fold it in.”

  And for the whipping?

  You put your mixing bowl inside a larger bowl of ice. The effect is to heat and chill at once, but more chill than heat. The result is richer than the normal yogurt, owing to the cream, and disjunctively savory, owing to the cumin, and wonderfully textured, pillowy and expansive, like the soft-serve that you get from an ice-cream van. It is also stiff. You can poke salad leaves into it.

  But there was a problem with the dirt. “Merde!” Richard said. The eggplant looked like shit. Food must never look like merde.

  He came up with a fix the next morning. He would roast the eggplant as before, but substitute onion (red) for the shallot, and add beets (red), tomato (red), and vinegar (red)—plus garlic, this time, for intensity. He put everything in a blender and strained it through a sieve, which yielded a bulky, almost dry texture like baby food. It also had an appealingly deep red-brown hue. (I couldn’t help myself: Had Richard added food coloring when I wasn’t looking?) It looked like a desert at sunset. It was too beautiful to be buried. It would be the topsoil. The weird, wobbly tomato would go to the bottom and be a summery surprise when your spoon reached it.

  The weird, wobbly tomato, incidentally, was basically tomato water intensified, what is left over after skinning your tomatoes, having plopped the seeds and skins in a sieve. Richard loved tomato water. I wasn’t unfamiliar with it, but found it pretty fussy. Now, transported by Richard’s enthusiasm, I regard it as such a rare and essential feature of summer that it deserves its own molecular describer: H2OT4, say. If you put the H2OT4 into a pot, reduce it slowly, and poke your finger in to taste, you will discover a liquid so intense that, for no reason you understand, you find yourself thinking of hot, listless afternoons in August. Cool it with gelatin and you have some very weird wobbly. Richard loves the really weird wobbly.

  The salad was a miracle to look at, with the come-hither appeal of a dessert, but wholly savory. It was like a ratatouille that had been rendered into a flower. It was sprayed with a vinaigrette.

  We were about to taste-test it, Richard and I at the chef’s table, when Tyler Florence showed up, in town, no reservation, hoping for a bite to eat. Florence is a restaurateur and Food Network host. We ate the salad together. Florence ate his with a spoon.

  “Whoa, Michel. What is the white custard thing? It is unbelievable.”

  “Yogurt,” Richard said.

  Florence tasted it again. “This is not yogurt.”

  “It is. Taste it again.”

  “Michel. I know what yogurt tastes like.”

  “No, you just don’t know good yogurt.” Richard stretched out the word “good.” “This is gooooooood whole-fat yogurt.”

  Florence had another bite, and conveyed, unmistakably, that he
knew he was being bullshitted and that Richard was an asshole.

  I later asked Richard why he didn’t tell him.

  “And then watch him getting credit for it on his television show, and on his Web site, and his next book? No.”

  Chefs do not invent dishes daily. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the author of The Physiology of Taste (1825), the famous meditation on eating, compares a new recipe to discovering a star. But here, in Richard’s kitchen, just about every item on the menu was new. And new ones appeared routinely, a bright idea on a Monday morning, a long-term experiment (like his effort to reinvent pâté-en-croûte—“Don’t you find the crusts are always soggy?”), or some impromptu innovation done in the spirit of “Why not?”

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon, I overheard Courseille, the pastry chef, mention Marc Veyrat. I knew about Veyrat, the “mountain chef” in the Alps. I had never eaten at his restaurant, though I had tried once when visiting a friend in Geneva, and it was closed.

  In Courseille’s description, Veyrat had ghostly transparent skin, wore a black, rimmed Savoyard peasant’s hat even when indoors, a black capelike shirt, Sgt. Pepper round tinted glasses, had the manner of a seer, and was just awful, utterly terrible to work for. “Rude. Condescending. Treated his cooks like slaves,” Courseille said. “The staff starts at dawn, are given straw baskets and clippers, and told what trails to climb, and what to look for, and then they all go into the mountains—as in the Alps, as in Mont Blanc—and don’t return until their baskets are full. They clean what they gathered. They prep it. Then they get ready for the dinner service.”

  I thought: He sounds mad. I thought: He sounds perfect.

  I also thought: This was the virtue of being in Richard’s kitchen. For the gossip, and the talk, and the visitors. This was how I was going to find where to work in France. In fact, maybe I had just found it.

  “Almost no one in the United States knows him,” Courseille continued, “except Jean-Georges”—Jean-Georges Vongerichten, in New York City. “Veyrat came to see him once in New York. They went foraging in Central Park.”

  I called Jean-Georges.

  “I love Marc,” he said. “He is my spiritual cousin.”

  Could he help me reach him?

  He wrote an introduction and gave me an e-mail address and a phone number. I was surprised how easy it now seemed: You learn about a figure, you get an introduction. Jessica, my French ventriloquist, wrote a masterpiece letter (I would never again sound so good), respectfully expressing the hope that I might work with him, and off it went.

  No reply.

  She sent it three times. We phoned. Nothing. I asked Jean-Georges for advice.

  “Marc is an unusual man.”

  The next day we got an e-mail from an assistant. (Had Jean-Georges intervened?) Marc Veyrat and his brigade were looking forward to welcoming me. Nous vous accueillerons. The verb, Jessica said, accueillir, is important. It is not used casually. It means to welcome you in one’s home. I stared at it. I didn’t try to pronounce it. Did this amount to my having a plan?

  I mentioned it to David.

  “What a terrible idea.” David once applied for a job there and spent a weekend trailing in the kitchen. “His executive chef cheats at soccer.” Here David paused, giving me the chance to take in the enormity of the claim.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “We’ll think of something,” David said. “I’ll speak to Michel.”

  I didn’t dismiss the prospect.

  A proposal came soon enough.

  * * *

  —

  Cedric, the chef at Richard’s Central, and David were an unlikely pair. They regularly finished their evenings together in the Citronelle kitchen, drinking a bottle of wine, sometimes until two in the morning (by which time I was the guy drooling with his head on the chef’s table). Cedric was forceful, strong, a large neck, a big chest, a rugby player to David’s quick-twitch soccer hooligan. Also in their relations with Richard: David worked to realize Richard’s will; Cedric fought it. (“Doesn’t Cedric understand I own the restaurant?” Richard asked me once. “Doesn’t Michel understand that these are my grandmother’s recipes?” Cedric asked) One night, Cedric and David were telling me how they met. They had both worked together in northern Burgundy—at La Côte Saint-Jacques, a two-Michelin-star restaurant in the Yonne. It was, in their description, family-run, second-generation, situated on a famous river, with plenty of fish, and on the edge of a forest, with plenty of game, and near legendary vineyards.

  I couldn’t quite picture where it was, and they tried to locate it for me, in the north of France, and not far from Lyon—

  “An hour,” Cedric said.

  “No, not an hour. More like three hours,” David said. They stopped. They had the same thought.

  “Lyon,” David said.

  “Lyon,” Cedric said. “Americans don’t get it.”

  “It’s the gastronomic capital. I’m going to talk to Michel. I am sure he has a friend there, someone.”

  Lyon. I hadn’t been, except for that one-off bus transfer at dawn, but for the longest time I had wanted to learn about it. In Chianti, when I was at the butcher shop, it was mentioned regularly. It had been a city that Tuscans, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, had virtually appropriated: settling there, selling Italian goods at the city’s famous fairs (les foires), building themselves mansions. It was also the city where Italians, at least according to Italians, first taught the French how to cook.

  The first time I heard this—that French cuisine originated in Italian Renaissance kitchens—I had been in the butcher shop, and it wasn’t someone’s throwaway provocation, but a chorus of Tuscans, loud, declamatory, and theatrical. I made the mistake of asking them to repeat it—it was too ridiculous. They repeated it, even more loudly, with even more gesticulation.

  In practice, the idea wasn’t without merit: Namely, in Italy (or the peninsula we now call Italy), from the late 1300s to the early 1600s, grand meals were treated like works of art, orchestrated productions, with many plates and much showing off of the kitchen, a festa. At the time, the French did not eat this way. But in its telling, the idea could seem pretty cartoonish: that the changes in what we now think of as French cuisine were the doing of the princesslike daughter of the famous Florentine Medici family, Caterina, who, in 1533, at the age of fourteen, traveled from Tuscany to marry a prince who would become the king of France, whereupon she introduced Italian ingredients and culinary secrets to her subjects. Today people refer to this as the “Catherine de’ Medici myth,” which they cite with much hilarity.

  I researched the idea. Not much was written in support of the thesis. Considerably more, however, was written against it. But it wasn’t always persuasive. Some critics didn’t appear to read Italian. Some rarely (or never) alluded to the Italian Renaissance. Many, in my humble opinion, sound more Franco-chauvinistic than scholarly. In any case, the implications were intriguing to consider: that at one point French cuisine did not exist, or at least not in a form that we would recognize today; and that then, at another point, it did, and that the Italians may have had something to do with its coming into being.

  And then, I don’t know, maybe it was farfetched after all, and, besides, I wasn’t sure I had the scholarly equipment—I certainly didn’t have the French—and I abandoned my research. And then, now, here I was: contemplating Lyon.

  * * *

  —

  I called Jean-Georges.

  “Lyon is a wonderful city. I cooked there.” He had been a saucier—the person who made the sauces—for Paul Bocuse.

  “Lyon is the Ville des Mères, the city of the mothers, the mère chefs,” he said. “You don’t know? Since I don’t know how long, a long time, they’ve done the cooking. It is where it all started,” he said. “Yo
u really should go to Lyon.”

  When I next saw Richard, he was waiting for me at the chef’s table.

  “Lyon is perfect,” he said.

  Richard went to Lyon often and had a close friend, Jean-Paul Lacombe, another chef who had made the trek to the United States and regarded Richard as an unrecognized deity. “Jean-Paul runs Léon de Lyon. It is a Lyonnais institution. I will get Mel to write him a letter. You have found your restaurant.”

  * * *

  —

  Amid all this, Jessica, a sympathetic soul, who believed what her husband told her, had been planning her family’s future based on two assumptions—that we would be spending the summer in Paris and that our children would be back by the fall enrolled in some kind of educational institution: i.e., preschool.

  Getting your New York offspring into one turned out to be a competitive urban sport, and my wife was a proven competitor. She attended twelve admissions meetings. One was held in a gym with bleachers not large enough to accommodate the applicants, who sat on the floor of a basketball court: The crowd, estimated to be eight hundred, was told that there were fifty-two places. She got our boys not only into that school, but into every other one she applied to (it was very throw-down stuff), and finally settled on an establishment called Jack & Jill, her first choice. She texted me: Could she go ahead and pay the tuition?

  Yes, I said. I understood the implications. I was committed to finishing my French training by the fall.

  The next morning, Jessica phoned. “Jack & Jill starts on September 16. But the teachers want to meet the boys first, at our home, at nine a.m. on the tenth. Will we be back by then?”