Dirt

by Bill Buford

  Marie-Laure: “That it all started with the Italians. Of course it did.”

  Christophe: “Marie-Laure, are you out of your mind? The people who invented pizza?”

  Marie-Laure: “Oh là là, Christophe. It is obvious. Think of Névache.”

  Christophe: “Névache? In the French Alps?”

  Like many Lyonnais, the Reymonds had a simple second home in the mountains. Theirs was near the Italian border.

  Marie-Laure: “Christophe, it is a mountain pass. The Italians have always been passing through. It is not hard to understand.”

  Christophe: “It is hard to understand, because it is not true.”

  * * *

  —

  When we got home, there was a voice message. I recognized the speaker—English, but with a strong French accent. It was Daniel Boulud. He was in Lyon for the Bocuse d’Or—“You do know about the Bocuse d’Or, don’t you?” he asked, and this time I could certainly confirm that I did. It was a cooking competition held every two years. I’d been told by many people not to miss it, gastronomy in the gastronomical capital, and had already arranged to attend. Boulud was taking members of the American delegation to lunch in Ain.

  “Could you and Jessica and the boys join us?”

  Ain was in what I now know to be the beautiful and mysterious Dombes (that place of birds, rivers, swamps, and wild game that Mère Brazier came from), but I noticed none of it except that the roads were windy, the restaurant was sixty miles away, and George got carsick. Then Frederick did.

  When we reached our destination, where a chef was preparing a monstrously overambitious meal (since the great Daniel Boulud and his team were guests), there was no food. There was also no immediate prospect of any. The boys, now hungry, were in a bad way. When the boys are in a bad way, their mother is in a bad way. When their mother is in a bad way, their father isn’t doing so well, either.

  We were positioned at the end of a long table, Jessica opposite me, both boys clinging to her. We were more self-ostracizing than ostracized. We did not deserve adult company. We had launched ourselves, with needy toddlers, into a strange city that no one visits on a prayer that I would become a French chef. Hah! We were in the wrong place.

  Jessica hissed. I hissed.

  George climbed onto his mother’s lap, bearing a dessert that he had discovered in another room, something dark and sticky, which dribbled slowly and copiously down his crisply pressed button-down shirt. It dripped onto Jessica’s dress.

  She hissed again. I hissed back. Mid-hiss, Daniel appeared.

  He had abandoned his role as host and crossed the room to sit with me. He was solicitous.

  He wanted to know how it was going. (I looked over his shoulder at Jessica. She mimed Boulud’s concern.)

  “Oh, you know, maybe a little rough,” I said, upbeat(ish).

  (Jessica flipped me the bird.)

  Boulud wondered: Had I found a place to work?

  “Well, no, not exactly, not quite yet.”

  And what about my French? How was that coming along?

  “Well, you know, slowly.”

  (Jessica chortled.)

  Here I was in Daniel’s territory, in the Dombes, in the heartland of the heartland, with an unruly family, manifestly struggling. He seemed to marvel at the audacity of our venture. He seemed to feel partly responsible. He wasn’t, of course—the responsibility (or the irresponsibility) was all my own.

  (Why didn’t I drop down on my knees and plead: “Daniel, you know people! Help me”?)

  It was dark when we started back. We went via taxi, the four of us, overlapping limbs, asleep.

  The Bocuse d’Or began the next day.

  * * *

  —

  UNTIL 1985 OR THEREABOUTS, BOCUSE WAS A VERY FAMOUS CHEF. He was a household name, with an image so widely disseminated that just about everyone could tell you what he looked like—big nose, big ears, the big lips, the toque, and holding a live poulet de Bresse in his arms, say, and petting its head—even if few people knew what his food was like. Then, around 1985, Bocuse turned into an icon. One moment: famous guy at stove. Then: pope of restaurant people. He became the undisputed emissary of the kitchen mission. He became Frenchness. He became, in every metaphoric sense of the word,

  GIGANTIC.

  It is not entirely clear how this happened, because (and Bocuse agreed) there were more talented chefs around. He never hosted a food show. Although a master of the photo op (hamming it up in drag, stripping down to show off his tattoo of a Bresse chicken, straddling his Harley-Davidson), he rarely appeared on television. He published cookbooks. None was a game changer. Apart from two forays abroad—one in Japan and another at Walt Disney World in Florida (Monsieur Paul, which thrives, run by his son, Jérôme)—he never franchised his name beyond Lyon. And yet, in the mysterious way of these things, Bocuse had something that no other chef has had in the same abundance: an undeniably infectious culinary charisma. Bocuse was what people want a grand French chef to be.

  In Lyon, it was different. In Lyon, he was an even bigger deal. In Lyon, Bocuse was, extravagantly, undeniably, the biggest deal there was.

  His main restaurant, L’Auberge, on the Saône, a couple miles north of the city, has been awarded three Michelin stars every year since 1965, making it the longest-running three-star establishment in the Michelin Guide’s history. It was also Bocuse’s home. He lived upstairs. In addition, he had (at last count) eight other, more informal Bocuse “brasseries,” including four named after the compass points (Nord, Est, Ouest, and Sud). In Lyon, Paul Bocuse was, somehow, always nearby.

  He created a school. In the 1980s, Jack Lang, the minister of culture, lamenting that France had no educational institution dedicated to preserving the patrimony of French cuisine, appealed to Bocuse. Voilà: Money, teachers, and in 1990, L’Institut Paul Bocuse opened for business. It is now regarded as the nation’s pre-eminent cooking school, the place where serious culinary students go to learn how to cook serious French food.

  He rejuvenated the “foires.” In Lyon, the word, which conventionally translates as “trade fair,” is loaded with history. Since 1419 the foires were a two-week-long tax-exempt international event, four times a year, around the religious holidays; vendors of everything—spices, wine, cheese, silks, musical instruments, cured pork legs—came from everywhere, by foot or by animal over the mountains or up the Rhône by barge. People composed poems for the foires, produced theatre, wrote ribald stories, performed music, sang songs, and played very, very hard.

  But the modern foires? Not so much fun. Since 1916, when the modern foires were introduced (with symptomatic bad timing—in the middle of World War I), it had been a place where someone tried to sell you a tractor.

  The modern foire had nothing like the history or the magic of the Renaissance foires. Even a biennial foodie spin-off (called Le Sirha, an international salon of restauration, hotels, and alimentation) was, well, just business. But once Bocuse became involved—with the advent of the Bocuse d’Or—it regained its wild glamour.

  * * *

  —

  The event is organized like a World Cup (twenty-four nations competing, each represented by a team of two, a chef and a deputy) and run like a dog show, with dishes paraded through a stadium in front of forty-eight judges. It culminates in an award ceremony that manages to use the iconography of the Olympics (a podium for gold, silver, and bronze), the Oscars (the statuette), and a New York City bar mitzvah (strobe lights, loud oom-pah-pah music, and a ceiling drop of gold confetti). It is “Tacky” meets “Technique,” but the “Technique” is real: On display is the flashiest, most accomplished food on the planet.

  I showed up at 9:00 a.m. Chefs had been there since five. Each two-member team was crushed bumpingly into a mini-kitchen cubicle the size of a changing room at a
bad beach resort. The mood was of adrenaline and stress and sweat. Every cook, intensely aware of the clock ticking, was focused and very quiet. The bleachers—installed to accommodate supporters of the national teams—were already filled. They held five thousand people. The Japanese spectators were dressed as samurais, the Mexicans, sombreros. The Swedes, the Danish, and the Americans, draped in national flags. There were a mariachi band, a drum-and-bugle corps, a pit-percussion team, some guys banging cymbals, and many morons with stadium air horns. There wasn’t anything obvious to be thundering about: no eviscerating of live goats, no fist pumping, no chef standing up and saying, “Bam!” But the cheering, which was thunderous, never stopped.

  I felt uninformed and naïve—how could I not have known that this kind of cooking (hunched-over, tortured people manipulating little things in little ways) was a nationalist sport?—when, lo and behold, Paul Bocuse appeared.

  He had turned up backstage and taken it upon himself—the toque, the whites, in a collar that looked like a French flag—to walk across the floor. He padded by me, softly and stiffly, imposingly tall in his chef posture, doing small papal waves, and seemed not to notice that a queue of competitors was forming behind him. Only a moment before, they were locked down in their panicky prep when one of them noticed that Bocuse was in the house, abandoned his station, and began following the great man around. He called to the others in their mini-cubicle kitchens, urging them to join in. The line quickly became much longer, conga-style.

  No one really knew what to do next—you can get away with doing the conga behind Paul Bocuse for only so long—when someone touched the great man and dropped out of the queue, satisfied by the contact. The next person in the queue touched a sleeve. Then it was a shoulder, the back of Bocuse’s hand. An Asian chef was next up, and he seized Bocuse’s apron by the hem, released it, and held the hand that had done the seizing by its wrist, staring at it and screaming as though his skin were burning. A cook fell to his knees and kissed the ground where the chef had trodden (which—I don’t know, call me prudish—seemed a little excessive).

  It got grabby, and just as it was seeming outright dangerous, Bocuse was gone. Handlers appeared and ushered him through a backstage door.

  I got a lift back to Lyon, and reflected on the theatre of the day and how stubbornly inaccessible the kitchens of Lyon persisted on being for me. Maybe I should try Bob after all. By the time I reached the apartment, I was resolved. I know where to start my culinary training, I told Jessica, by learning the fundamentals. I’m going to work for Bob. I’m going to become a baker. In fact, I said, I’m going to walk over there now and present myself.

  * * *

  —

  It was eight in the evening, but I was pretty sure he’d be there. Bob was known for his hours, his light on in the back when the rest of the quartier was dark. And he was there, but only just. He had his coat on and was heading home for a nap.

  Bob knew why I was here. He also knew that I hadn’t found a kitchen to work in. So, when I made my proposal, straight-out, no introduction—“Bob, I’ve decided, on reflection, that my book should start with you, that I want to do a stage here, in your boulangerie”—he knew I was lying.

  I hadn’t moved to Lyon to work with Bob. I wanted Marc Veyrat, or Mathieu Viannay, or Patrick Henriroux.

  “No,” he said.

  “No?” The backup to my backup of my backup was rejecting me?

  He stared. Was he trying to read me?

  I come to you, I said, not only to learn how to make bread, but your bread. “It is famously good. What interests me is why.”

  His gaze drifted above my head. He seemed to be calibrating, imagining (I imagined) what the consequences of my being in his company might be.

  Bob was forty-four. He was jowly and wide of girth and, when unshaven, looked something like a genetic intermarriage of Fred Flintstone and Jackie Gleason. His hair was brownish and shaggy and usually matted with flour. There was flour on his clogs, his sweater (he never wore an apron), his trousers, and adhering powerfully to his beard. Bathing was not a priority. He slept when he could, and didn’t sleep often, and seemed to live by an internal clock set to an alarm that was always going off—yeast, dough making, the unforgiving speed of a hot oven, delivery urgencies. He was always on his feet. He seemed never to tire. He knew that his bread was exceptionally good. He also knew that no one knew how really good it was.

  He was not, in his view, a genius. In a city of food fanatics, he was just a baker, even if a good one. He was in fact just Bob. And, of course, he wasn’t even that. His real name was Yves. (No one knew why he went by “Bob.” I once asked him, and he was vague: “Somebody, a long time ago…”)

  “Yes,” he said slowly: Ouiiiiii. He actually seemed to be getting excited. I could see his excitement in his fingers. They were drumming a counter. “Come. Work here. You will be welcome.”

  “I will see you tomorrow.”

  We shook hands. I made to leave.

  “You live across the street, right? You can stop by anytime.”

  I thanked him.

  “If you can’t sleep, come over. At three in the morning, I’ll be here. On Friday and Saturday, I’m here all night.”

  I thought: If I can’t sleep at three in the morning, I don’t go for walks. But I understood the message. Bob was making himself available. I’ll be your friend, he was saying.

  * * *

  —

  The picture I had of Bob’s operations was during the weekends, especially Sundays, which were outright wild, owing to a law, still observed, forbidding trade: except for bakers. In Lyon, many boulangeries opened on Sunday. But it was Bob’s where people went.

  On Sundays, the boulangerie belonged to Lyon, and Bob worked without sleep to feed it. Late-night carousers appeared at two in the morning to ask for a hot baguette, swaying on tiptoe at a high window by le fournil, the oven room, an arm outstretched, holding out a euro coin. By nine, there were so many people going in and out the door that it never closed, the line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people, and from music (usually salsa) being played at high volume. (Bob fell in love with salsa, and then with Cuba, and then with a Cuban, his wife, Jacqueline.) Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands, all cash.

  The crowd fascinated me, all strangers, everyone leaving with an armful and with the same look—suspended between appetite and the prospect of an appetite satisfied. I learned something, I got it, the appeal of a good bread—as I was able to find it here, just across the street from our apartment: handmade, aromatically yeasty, with a just-out-of-the-oven texture of crunchy air. No one lingered. This was their breakfast. It completed the week. This was Sunday.

  At three on a weekday morning, the boulangerie was different and lonely. The river was different, at least on the night I ventured out, very cold, and looked like motor oil when, eerily, a river barge appeared a few feet away, a massive entity (you never hear its coming), a heavy bow like a plow, sluicing thickly. Lyon, too, couldn’t be more different, or more lonely: no vehicles, no people, not a light on in any of the apartments. (The city, from Thursday to Sunday—all-night drinking, loud open-windowed music, fights, car burnings, vandalism, vomiting—would never be described as of the “early-to-bed” variety. Maybe on other nights everyone rested.)

  Bob ripped open a sack of flour—he was clearly waiting for me—lifted it without a sign of strain (it weighed fifty kilos), and emptied it into a large steel basin. (Bob was strong, but his strength seemed more an act of will than the contraction of anything muscular.) He grabbed a milk carton with the top cut off, and told me to follow him to a sink—a startling sight, filled with coffee paraphernalia, grounds everywhere, a sandwich floa
ting in something black, a roll of toilet paper. He negotiated the carton to a position under the faucet and ran it hot.

  “You arrive at the correct temperature by a formula involving two other factors,” Bob explained. “One is the temperature of the air. This morning it is cold—it is probably two degrees. The other is the flour….”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s the temperature of the air.”

  “Of course.”

  “These two factors added together, plus the temperature of the water should equal fifty-four degrees Celsius.” So, if the air was two degrees, and the flour was two degrees, the water would have to be fifty.

  “Hot,” I said.

  “Exactly.” The water from the tap was steaming. Bob filled the carton.

  I asked, “Bob, you don’t use a thermometer?”

  “No.”

  “Do you own a thermometer?”

  “No.” He considered. “You know, I might.”

  In a notebook, I wrote: “Water + air + flour = 54 degrees.”

  Bob poured the warm water into the basin and started an apparatus attached at the top, a mechanical kneader. It wasn’t really “mechanical,” not in the modern sense of the word. It appeared originally to have been operated by turning a crank, and at some point had been upgraded with a washing-machine motor. Two hooks, looking like prosthetic hands, scooped up the dough very slowly.

  “It is no faster than if you did this with your own hands,” he said.

  “Then we take some of last night’s dough.” La vieille pâte. It was brown and cakey, wrapped in plastic film. He pinched a bit between his thumb and forefinger and tossed it into the basin. He took a second pinch, scrutinized it, thought better of the quantity, and tossed in half. This, in effect, was his “sourdough,” yeasts still alive from last night that would be woken up in the new batch. It wasn’t the only source. I knew enough about yeasts to know that here, they were everywhere. You could peel them off the walls. You could scrape all you needed from underneath Bob’s fingernails. Here, your breath had texture.