Dirt

by Bill Buford

  We yanked out intestines, the upper ones, a long hose, fifty feet, maybe more, and squeezed out their brown contents by pulling a segment between a thumb and forefinger and moving the solids toward an opening. Ludovic had the hose. He gave me an intestine and asked me to blow into it to open—it was warm against my lips—and he rinsed it out. He then rolled it up in a ring on the ground.

  (I thought: Really? Is that it?)

  He removed the bladder, and squeezed out the liquid, like water in a balloon, a steamy stream.

  “Here, this is for you to blow up, too.” He held it out in two hands, very reverential. “This, too, is an honor,” he said.

  The others stopped and watched.

  An honor, eh?

  I took a deep breath. The wet mouth of the entry (salty), my wet lips. I blew hard.

  Nothing.

  The men laughed.

  I took a deeper breath. I blew harder.

  Nothing. More laughter.

  I took a really deep breath, my face changing color—probably to something between red-pink and purple—and the bladder yielded.

  I closed the passage with my thumb and forefinger, Ludovic looped it into a knot, and nailed it, too, to the post to dry out.

  “For the poulet en vessie,” he said.

  Ludovic mixed his sautéed aromatics into the blood, tasted, added salt and pepper, tasted again (like a chef finishing his sauce), added more pepper. I inserted a funnel into the mouth of an intestine, and Ludovic poured. We twisted the intestine sausage-style at six-inch intervals, tied it closed, and looped the rope into a straw basket. When the basket was full we walked it over to the kettle—a hot vapor cloud when we opened the lid, not boiling, not even simmering—and eased a length of boudin inside.

  A poem about preparing boudin noir was written by Achille Ozanne, a nineteenth-century chef and poet (he wrote bouncy poems about dishes he cooked for the king of Greece), and finds a loose rhyme between “frémissante” and “vingt minutes d’attente.” Frémissante is “trembling.” It describes the water: hot but not quite boiling. Vingt minutes d’attente—twenty minutes—is the approximate time that you keep the boudin submerged. It is akin to cooking a custard. It is done once it is only just done. You boil a custard, it curdles. You boil blood, it curdles. Ludovic pricked a casing with a needle. It was dry when it came out. The blood had solidified. He removed the boudin. I cooked the next one.

  We carried our basket into a kitchen, and found a dozen people already there, preparing the accompaniments: roasted apples, potatoes, salad, bread, bottles of the local Côtes du Rhône, made by someone down the road, no labels. The room was warm, the windows were fogged up, and we ate, the boudin like a rich red pudding, spoilingly fresh, complexly fragrant of our morning pig, and we drank, and afterward went back out into the courtyard, feeling stiff and sleepy, to make sausages and other preparations that needed aging.

  It doesn’t take long to kill a pig. But reassembling it into edible forms would take until nightfall. We had killed a beautiful animal. The food from it would last for months.

  Henri Béraud, a novelist and journalist (as well as a fascist and an anti-Semite—and, nevertheless, an astute observer of the city where he grew up), describes Lyon as oddly situated. There is no port or nearby sea. Only farms and the roads that lead to it. And dairies as well and vineyards and rivers and mountain pastures.

  * * *

  —

  ONE EVENING, CHRISTOPHE, OUR NEIGHBOR, APPEARED AT OUR DOOR, bearing a large envelope. He reminded me of the matrimonial squabble that had occurred during our apéro.

  “My father,” he said, “is an amateur historian. He spends a lot of time in the Archives.” The Lyon Archives, which date from the year 1210, hold the raw documents of Lyon’s (often tragic) history. “I mentioned our conversation to him,” Christophe said, “and my father made a copy of a document that he thought might interest you.” Christophe would become a good friend. He would drop off ducks that he shot during hunting season, and once invited me to join him. He now had a sly, quiet smile. It said: So—there might be something in what you were saying.

  In the envelope was an account of a meal prepared for sixty visiting ambassadors from the cantons of Switzerland on February 25, 1548. It was a financial reckoning of an ambitious evening: the acquisition of plates (288 of them), German knives, and wineglasses; twelve musicians; wine from three suppliers plus four hired servers; the ingredients for each service—entrées, plats principaux (the main courses), salads, and desserts. Since the feast was held on a lean day, the ingredients included pâtés of trout, frogs, and anchovies, the lake fish that the Swiss and Lyonnais would have in common (like lavaret and omble, for which no exact translation exists because the fish never leave the region), and exotica like tortoises and whale tongue. But no meat.

  At the time, most French banquets were simpler, more medieval (the reference cookbook, routinely reprinted in Lyon, was the fourteenth-century Le Viandier by Taillevent): a rotisserie for meat, a pot over a hearth, a lot of boiling. Meals were eaten mainly in one course, either by hand or with a tranche, a stale piece of bread used as a trowel, and with the aid of a knife (the fork, a feature of the Italian table, hadn’t yet caught on).

  The meal prepared for the Swiss ambassadors was different and more typical of the Italian Renaissance, bright and celebratory, a festa, an illustration of convivium, the Roman word that translates loosely as “coming together over food” and that ultimately makes a meal among the greatest pleasures in a person’s life. I feel compelled to describe the meal as more “Italian” than French. The date is interesting, too: the winter of 1548. In the fall, Henri II and his wife, Catherine de’ Medici, would make a famous and famously Italian entry into the city.

  There was magic in the message that Christophe conveyed to me, a world of eating and drinking that was both proximate (many of the suppliers—the butchers, the fishmongers, the wine merchants—may have lived on the very streets of our quartier) and so far away as to seem unknowable. The place had become intriguing and mysterious.

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon, I don’t know why, I found myself thinking of Dorothy Hamilton and her urging me to attend cooking school. No, you really don’t need to, I still believed, provided that you are without financial obligations or children, are able to throw yourself absolutely into the kitchen, are fourteen years old, and, with a mind as flexible as your youthful body, have a capacity to learn just about everything, every station, every dish, very quickly.

  For the rest of us, we need to be taught. Dorothy was right.

  I looked up the admissions director of L’Institut Paul Bocuse, Dorine Chabert, took a deep breath, and phoned. I was a journalist who had worked in kitchens, I said, and wanted to attend the institute in some capacity, I wasn’t sure how or what. Would she see me?

  We made an appointment for the next morning. I left a message for Bob. I would be in after lunch.

  * * *

  —

  L’INSTITUT is housed in a turreted late-nineteenth-century “castle,” in a wooded park, just outside of Écully, a historic village four miles north of Lyon. Madame Chabert seemed happy to meet me but declared outright that she had no idea what she could do for me. The school then offered a three-year course to about three hundred students. And although it was not unfamiliar with visiting journalists—there was a media changing room (you are not allowed into the zone culinaire until you’ve been fitted out in a paper lab coat, sanitary booties, and a tight-fitting shower cap)—l’institut had no experience of someone who was both a cook and a journalist. Or, to be more precise—and my mistake was probably in being more precise—the office had no experience of someone who wanted to learn to be a cook in order to write about what he had learned.

  At one point, Madame Chabert declared, “Des chaussures de sé
curité! You don’t have a pair, do you? You are not really a cook if you don’t have them.”

  These are heavy, high-platform, waterproof, electricity-proof, slide-proof chef clogs that are good for nothing except standing in one place and protecting your feet. As it happens, because of the nature of my appointment, and in the hope that it might include a kitchen visit, I was wearing a new pair. I pointed to my feet.

  Madame Chabert didn’t believe me and rose from her chair to confirm. She was impressed. Then she was distressed. She had never met a writer with chaussures de sécurité. Now she had a new problem, because by now she really wanted to be obliging but really didn’t know how.

  “Ha!” she declared. “I will phone Alain.” And “Alain,” evidently intrigued by the prospect of my presence, approved it.

  “Alain” was Alain Le Cossec, MOF, the executive chef and director of culinary arts at the institute. The MOF after his name stands for Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (Best Workers of France). Once you’ve earned the honor of being among them (every four years, a nationwide competition is held in many disciplines, including pastry and bread making), the MOF initials are attached to your name, and your neck is forever adorned by the colors of a French flag instead of a normal collar. The flag tells everyone you meet that you are the most badass alpha dog in the pack and can kick the butt of anyone else in the kitchen. (MOF, in French, rhymes with “woof.”)

  The normal routine for students was a week in a kitchen, followed by a week of theory in a classroom. With “Alain’s blessing,” Madame Chabert invented a crash course for me, consisting of only the kitchen curricula, and it involved my jumping into whatever cooking class was being conducted at whatever level, which, at that moment, happened to be a weeklong session at Saisons, the school’s gastronomic restaurant.

  “You don’t normally begin at Saisons. You’re meant to earn your place,” Madame Chabert said. “And it will be with first-years.” She looked at the calendar. “And you will be there for the Valentine’s Day dinner. Chef Le Cossec’s Valentine’s dinner is reserved a year in advance. Shall we do it?”

  Shall we do it? Yes! I was about to be in my first restaurant kitchen since arriving in France.

  I signed a contract, agreeing to pay tuition on a class-by-class basis (a week in Saisons was 1,000 euros), was given a locker (“Never arrive in the clothes you cook in”), a five-page glossary entitled Vocabulaire professionnel de cuisine et pâtisserie (“The words you need to know before your first class,” Madame Chabert said), and a copy of the school textbook, La Cuisine de référence, a 1,040-page large-format, floppy paperback (35 euros). “The bible,” she said.

  I would start the following Monday. I needed to tell Bob.

  * * *

  —

  Bob, I reflected on my way back into the city, had introduced me to a Lyon that no guidebook would have shown me.

  I learned about its eating societies. I learned that there were eating societies, a proliferation of them: one for the real (les véritables) bouchon-owners; another for the real bouchon eaters. One for the true (les vrais) bistros, and another for the modern ones. There was a Society of Eight, which, by the designation of its members (Le Fleurie was one), included the eight coolest, philosophically unfussy kickass restaurants in Lyon. Its counterpart was the Club de Gueules (which might be translated as the Den of Gluttons), a round table of chefs and restaurant patrons who met to eat and drink with purposeful abundance. Three societies were committed to hosting a real machôn (whose members did gather early in the morning and ate and drank until nightfall). And there were serious grown-up societies, like Les Toques Blanches—named after the tall white toque—whose members were the grandest of the region’s grand chefs.

  Through Bob, I began seeing Lyon from the inside, as the Lyonnais saw it. When I crossed the city, I now met people I knew. I was comfortable. I was starting to feel at home.

  I was now about to quit. I stepped into the boulangerie.

  “Bonjour, Bill.”

  “Bonjour, Bob. Bob, I have decided to go to cooking school.”

  Could I have been more blunt?

  He was behind the counter. I was where the customers come in. He took a step back as if he had lost his balance. He whispered, “I knew it was too good to be true.”

  What had I done? I quickly tried to explain, how I needed to learn kitchen skills first—

  “Of course.”

  —and that I would be back soon. If he would have me. That there was so much more that I wanted to learn from him. “Like your touch. The way you make bread without fingerprints, that lightness….”

  The air seemed to be leaving him in my presence. His shoulders sloped. He was just a baker, his posture said. He was Bob. Just Bob.

  “You’ve been accepted to L’Institut Bocuse,” he said. In Lyon, there is no other cooking school. In France, there is (effectively) no other cooking school.

  “I have been accepted.”

  Bob whistled.

  “But I will be back.”

  He didn’t believe me.

  We stood like that. His gaze then slid over my shoulder. He seemed to be thinking.

  “At L’Institut Bocuse, you will learn la grande cuisine,” he said forthrightly, with energy, like a fist pounding a table.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you will. It is Bocuse.” He seemed excited. “Maybe, for the first time in my life, I will eat a grand meal and enjoy it. You will make me something from the repertoire of la grande cuisine. It will be like Bocuse but without all the Bocuse.”

  “Of course I will.”

  He smiled. “I’m going to eat a grand meal, I’m going to eat a grand meal, a grand meal, a grand meal.”

  * * *

  —

  On Sunday evening, I prepared my clothes—chef’s jacket, kitchen trousers, and apron. I didn’t have a toque, which concerned me, but I would be given one when I arrived. (Today it is made of paper, with nothing on top—a curious feature, as though it were purporting to be a hat but isn’t one; it isn’t, in any case, something you wear outside in the rain.) I also didn’t have a kitchen towel, which didn’t concern me, because every kitchen has stacks of towels.

  III

  Instruction by Paul Bocuse

  You, Madam, don’t like cooking because it’s a tedious chore, endlessly repeated; it is beneath your intelligence….

  Permit me to respectfully disagree. Have you forgotten that cooking is the antechamber of happiness? Cooking is an Art; it satisfies our psyche by striking our senses; it is not unworthy of you. It is exactly like painting or music….Cooking as you understand it no longer exists: It has become the Art of Gastronomy.

  But is it appropriate for me, a man of science, a physiologist, to teach you an Art? Yes, since at the foundation of all art is science. And it is science that one teaches to make an Art understood. To understand music, you study physics in the form of scales, harmony, counterpoint. To understand drawing, you learn perspective, anatomy. To understand the Art of Gastronomy, an educated person must learn the science that this Art is based upon.

  For this science, I have proposed the name “Gastrotechnique.” It is a simple thing that consists in the application of six elementary principles of physics and chemistry that you already know:

  Boiling

  Frying

  Grilling and roasting

  Stewing

  Binding with starch

  Binding with egg yolk

  ÉDOUARD DE POMIANE, VINGT PLATS QUI DONNENT LA GOUTTE (TWENTY DISHES THAT GIVE YOU GOUT), 1938, TRANSLATED BY JESSICA GREEN

  Saisons was a Michelin-listed restaurant, popular among in-the-know Lyonnais gastronomes and regarded by them as their dining secret. There was nothing about the food that seemed “student-made” in the least. Chef Le Cossec p
rotected the restaurant’s reputation and oversaw every plate served. He was in his fifties, tall, thin, with a boyish smile and an equally boyish gap between his two front teeth. He had straight gray hair, cut pageboy-style with a forehead fringe. He looked like a monk and had a manner that was more butterfly than barking dog. He was also so peculiarly light on his feet that you rarely heard him when he entered a room. The effect, since he was in charge and entering rooms with liberty, was that he seemed fleetingly omnipresent. He was almost always amused, which was a peculiar quality in a head-honcho type. Chef Le Cossec was responsible for what might be called “culinary grace.” He was very easy to like. Or maybe he was just the “good cop.”

  His colleague, Chef Thomas Lemaire, oversaw the students and was responsible for lessons in kitchen rigor. He was a very mature-looking thirty-one—square face, glasses, unsmiling, with dour, thin lips—and had the classroom charisma of a resentful tax inspector. His first words to me pertained to a button.

  “Your top one. It is undone.”

  He stared at my crotch. “Your torchon” (the French word for “kitchen towel”). “Where is it?”

  The regulation uniform, I was informed, includes an apron held in place by a cotton belt, your towel tucked under it, falling on your right hip. It is always on your right hip, so that you know where to find it.

  You don’t, I would learn, ever use the towel for its normal towel-like characteristics, which, when I finally bought myself a stash, I couldn’t help doing, since it was a towel, and my fingers would, in the course of preparing food, become wet and greasy, and when I thought no one was looking, I did, I admit, reach down and give them a little wipe. (In the event, there was someone looking: Lemaire, who had been waiting for the moment, having identified me as a likely nefarious kitchen-towel abuser, whereupon I was roundly rebuked.) Instead, the towel is to be used for its oven-mitten qualities, even though a towel is not a mitten and has none of its qualities and is only a rectangle of very absorbent cotton (and there is only one kind of torchon, the regulation torchon, which has two light-red stripes down its length and is so thin that, after repeated washing, it tends toward transparency).