Dirt

by Bill Buford

  The idea: Each student was the chef for a day, prepared a menu, ordered the ingredients, drew plating diagrams, and, creating a brigade from among their colleagues, executed the meal. The dishes included a vegetable terrine en gelée, a salmon in puff pastry, and a duck confit with an unctuous red-wine sauce made with fifty kilos of duck carcasses roasted by yours truly.

  The reality: The menus never worked (not once). Between principle and reality were Paul Brendlen and Édouard Bernier. Brendlen fixed, Bernier implemented. Nothing was more seat-of-the-pants.

  Brendlen, the top dog, was strong, stocky, unstoppable. You felt the stress of his kitchen the moment you walked in: Bang! Seven a.m. and everyone, including Brendlen, was sweating and running. Routine was impossible, and there were injuries—a slashed finger, a hand, a limb—and Brendlen, irritated, impatient, would seize the maimed piece of anatomy, examine it fleetingly, blood dripping on the floor, give it a shake, and dismiss it. It was not so bad.

  “Oh, pas grave.”

  Someone was burned. The kitchen smelled of toasted skin.

  “Pas grave.”

  A server dropped a tray of food, broken ceramic everywhere.

  “Pas grave.”

  José Augusto was making the lunch on a Wednesday. He had endeared himself to me for his (largely clandestine) love for Italy. Augusto had persuaded the authorities to let him go to Italy to do his stage. (Every student has to do three stages, apprenticeships, at established restaurants. They were at the heart of the curriculum.) Augusto—he is still amazed that he was allowed—chose Dal Pescatore in Mantua. His F&B menu, not surprisingly, was Italian.

  For a starter, he planned a plate of antipasti—vegetables (artichoke hearts, zucchini, carrots), a slice of prosciutto, a chunk of Parmigiano, and an olive-oil-and-balsamic-vinegar dressing. He prepared one in advance—in effect, a “demo model”—and set it on a counter for Brendlen and Bernier to approve.

  They stared at it, their arms crossed. Brendlen turned his head to one side. “C’est une catastrophe,” he said to Bernier. “What are we going to do?”

  “It’s after ten o’clock.”

  “Oh là là.”

  Brendlen addressed Augusto. “The starter is your diner’s first impression. You don’t get a second chance at making a first impression.”

  Bernier explained: “This is not good. You have ignored the three principles.”

  The three principles of a French plate are color, volume, and texture. They are rules of presentation. If your dish uses color strategically, volume (i.e., has height), and texture (mixes soft and hard, or juicy and crunchy), then it will appeal to a diner.

  Of the three principles, Augusto’s plate had none.

  “Regarde la couleur,” Brendlen said.

  Apart from the carrots, the plate was green (the zucchini—thick slices overcooked) or gray-green (the artichoke) plus a bit of straggly brown (the prosciutto). It was like a lawn at the end of a very hot summer.

  “Regarde les dimensions.” The dish was flat. It was unclear to me where anyone would find a third dimension. How do you teach a flat slice of zucchini to stand up?

  “Et la texture! José!” Brendlen made a masticating sound, because everything was the same in the mouth, slightly slimy or squishy soft.

  I wondered: Shouldn’t someone have had a word with Augusto before he ordered forty kilos of zucchini?

  “How much time do we have?” Brendlen asked.

  “An hour.”

  Brendlen and Bernier continued studying the plate, hoping to Frenchify it.

  For color, Brendlen proposed burying the artichoke.

  “It will be a surprise, hidden, like the heart,” Bernier said.

  But how?

  “Bread?”

  “Toasted?”

  “Grilled.”

  “But cut thin, so that it snaps when you bite into it, and shaped into an oval,” which was the approximate shape of the artichoke heart. If you then propped the toast up against the artichoke, the dish would gain a height element (the elevated toast) and a new texture (grilled crispiness).

  Bernier suggested that there was potential in the green zucchini and orange carrots—this time sliced thinly rather than roughly—and arranged in a semicircle.

  “Can we make a zucchini mousse?” Brendlen wondered. The textural possibilities of a gourd were not infinite.

  “Not enough time,” Bernier said.

  Brendlen turned on Augusto. “Why didn’t you make a mousse? What is wrong with you?” It would be the last time that Augusto was addressed directly. The dish was no longer his.

  “Let’s cut them lengthwise with the meat slicer.”

  “Paper thin,” Bernier said.

  “So you can see through them.”

  Sliced thus, it could even be taught to stand up.

  There were about five kilos left.

  “There is also prosciutto,” Bernier said.

  “Another problem.”

  What do you do with a gangly slice of cured meat? If you’re in Italy, you pop it into your mouth with your fingers. But here you don’t do things with your fingers.

  Brendlen picked up a piece—with his fingers, as it happened—and popped it into his mouth. “Good fat,” he said. “Maybe it could be sautéed with some carrots and the rest of the zucchini en brunoise” (diced into uniformly small cubes).

  “Plus tomatoes. A summer ragoût.”

  The tomato introduced both a new color and yet another texture. A ragoût was different from the other vegetables—it was cooked and not slimy, and could be spooned atop the artichoke-leaning toast.

  Within ninety minutes, the dish was reconceived and reorganized (Parmigiano crumbled on top), and plated, although it was tight: The last one hundred or so were being finished as the first two hundred were being served.

  I admired the finished plate. It made me want to eat it. It wasn’t Italian. But it seemed instructively French, or was at least an illustration of what the French might do to a plate of antipasti if they ever invaded Italy and took it over.

  I wondered: Is creativity more easily expressed in rigorous structures?

  * * *

  —

  On the last cloudy day of winter, walking from the bus stop to the school, I noticed snow flurries and wondered when spring would come. The next day, washing up my bowls in the pantry of a pâtisserie kitchen, I looked out on the grounds and saw daffodils, and the day was bright.

  On the first day of spring, there is a parade at the boys’ school, un défilé, for la fête des pentes. A pile of leaves is set alight, to drive away the last of winter, and the children, dressed in homemade costumes, march through the quartier—barriers along the pavement for onlookers to stand behind—and climb up the pentes. The pentes are steep inclines that lead to the high plateau of the Croix-Rousse. You mount them on zigzaggy stone steps that were built centuries ago by the monks. Then the parade returns to the square by the boys’ school, the Place Sathonay, and lunch. It was jubilantly festive, Jessica told me, because of course I missed it. I was making profiteroles. But I saw the pictures, and would see the parade the following year, our children dressed up like rosebushes, wearing wool hats for the still very cold March morning, and sunglasses for the unequivocally springlike glare, each holding the hand of another student.

  * * *

  —

  Alfredo Chávez, a third-year student from Mexico, wanted to talk to me about the Medicis. He had written a paper for a theory class. The argument was a variation on the Catherine de’ Medici thesis. According to Chávez, it wasn’t Catherine who had influenced French cooking. It was her cousin, Marie de’ Medici, who sixty-seven years after Catherine arrived in France became the wife of Henri IV. It was a novel take, but not entirely without merit.

  Henri IV, from Béarn, at the heart of the kingd
om of Aragon in the French and Spanish Pyrenees, was mainly famous for his effort to end the sixteenth-century wars between the Catholics and the Protestants and for the abrupt end to his twenty-year reign, when he was stabbed in the ribs by a religious zealot. In matters culinary, he was famous for his love of pot-au-feu, which encouraged the acceptance of a simple dish—meats cooked in a pot over a low fire—at both grand and simple tables. (Italians, incidentally, have long claimed that the dish was theirs—in Italy it is called bollito misto, and, as it happens, there were Italians in Henri IV’s many kitchens.) Henri IV, “Le Béarn” as he was called, may have also inspired sauce Béarnaise—at least its name. And in matters of love, he was notorious for his sexual appetite, his impressive frequent-flyer account at several brothels, and his many, lavishly kept mistresses. Marie de’ Medici, apart from being the second Italian woman to marry a French king, hasn’t been dealt with sympathetically by history (“the fat banker’s daughter,” according to one mistress), but it is true that, like other Italians before her, she brought wealth and high culture to a France that was still lacking in both.

  Chávez’s paper was dismissed as a reckless piece of cultural propaganda. If he ever advanced the ideas in it again, he was told, he would be kicked out of the school.

  “Kicked out? Really?”

  “Really,” he said. He sent me a copy. It was like a samizdat text. “But don’t tell anyone.”

  Lyon has always had Italian connections—at least since the Romans first occupied it, in 43 B.C., named it Lugdunum, and made it their own—and has been a home to settlers from the Italian peninsula long before there was an “Italy” with modern fixed borders. Until the late sixteenth century, cities were still more important than states, and Lyon was among the most influential on the Continent, positioned at the confluence of two great rivers and between both Northern and Southern Europe and Eastern and Western capitals of commerce. (The loose idea of France, as it was then defined, ended on one bank of the Saône.)

  There was no denying that the Italians were, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Lyon, very prominent. Wealthy Italian families not only profited from the foires, the two-week-long goods fairs held every three months or so on a religious holiday, they effectively created them. They also opened the first bank in France, developed a facility for loaning capital and exchanging currencies, created the first stock market, and became so conspicuous, in their worldly success and influence, that, fearing local resentment and retaliation, they appear to have changed their Italian names to sound French. (The Gadagne family, one of Lyon’s most prominent, were Florentine exiles; their real name was Guadagni, which, in a coincidence of history, is derived from the Italian verb guadagnare—to earn or gain, with a sense of “rake it in.” Thomas Gadagne, the richest man in Lyon, was wealthier than the king, who was a major debtor of his.)

  The headquarters of the Italian banking operations, an august edifice with Roman columns in an open square (Place du Change), still stands, as do the homes of the Italians themselves, walled villas with courtyards, arches, statues, and other flourishes of the flourishing Renaissance. Viewed from the hills, its red terra-cotta tile roofs just below, the quartier Vieux Lyon (Old Lyon), could be mistaken for one in Florence.

  At it happens, it was in Lyon that Marie de’ Medici met Henri IV. (He missed the wedding in Florence, which was conducted by proxy.) And as it happens, their “second wedding” was also conducted in Lyon. And Marie de’ Medici, a generous cultural patron, who, like many of the Italians in France, missed the food of her homeland and, as it happens, also employed Italian chefs in her kitchens.

  Lyon, I was coming to believe, really was where you might see evidence of the Italian influence on French cooking, if such influence had actually existed. Did it? I didn’t know. And it was, in any case, a long time ago. What was intriguing was the eccentric defensiveness that I kept witnessing, which seemed to betray chauvinism and—what?—fear, maybe? Would you really kick out a student because he was investigating the influence of a Medici queen? Was there that much at stake? Could an instructor be so naïve as to believe that the French had invented ravioli? Maybe it was just an enduring resentment: After, all, how could Italian cooking, which is rustic peasant food, have anything to do with French cuisine, which is civilization itself?

  * * *

  —

  I was in the Zone Culinaire, watching a class through a glass partition. They were being examined. I hadn’t really been examined. It seemed not to be a feature of the program that Madame Chabert had designed for me.

  The students were from the first year, and I recognized them as the ones I had cooked with, including shy Marjorie and silent Hortense. They were making omelets.

  A student presented his omelet. The instructor poked it and shook his head. He didn’t bother to taste it; he tipped it into the trash. An omelet wants to be soft in the middle, pillowy to the touch. It should have bounce. This one was hard.

  I was joined by a member of the faculty, Hervé Raphanel. I had been introduced to him before. He watched with me.

  The next student’s omelet was too big: big in the sense of too much volume. The instructor remonstrated him. It was like watching a movie without sound. His gestures said: “Why did you use a whisk?” Un fouet. “I told you a fork.”

  The class was kitchen basics. A whisk aerates the protein. It is what you use to make a soufflé or a meringue. An omelet gets its tenderness by being mixed, not whipped. You want the egg whites quiet and small.

  The omelet was thrown away.

  “How old do you think those students are?” Raphanel asked.

  “Actually, I know,” I said. “Most are nineteen. Two of them might be twenty.” It was an unusually young class. Half the students at l’institut come from abroad, and most of them were older, career changers.

  “Exactly,” Raphanel said. “They are twenty years old. When I was twenty, I had already earned my first Michelin star.” He reflected. “And they’ll be twenty-two when they graduate? By then, I had my second Michelin star.” The tone wasn’t boastful. It was one of exasperation.

  Another student presented her omelet. This one was too runny; it was seeping out at the ends. The instructor re-enacted pressing the back of a fork on the eggs in the pan. When the tines leave an impression, your omelet is ready to be rolled. Not before. The instructor wiggled his finger side to side—no, no.

  “Look at how those students are standing. They are so removed from the food, pushing it around at arm’s length. Where’s the love?” L’amour—où est-il? Raphanel sighed. “They should be breathing in their ingredients.” He simulated dipping into a plate and inhaling the aromatics. “A chef needs to be transported by his food. If they don’t have that love now…”

  The next day, I learned about a new class, and exams, demanding exams, daily exams, with a full day of them at the end, were an essential feature. I wanted in.

  * * *

  —

  Willy Johnson had been talking about it in the bar. Willy was the other American at l’institut. My pastry chef used to run out into the foyer and shout for Willy whenever I did something that the chef ascribed to my not being able to follow his French. Willy was twenty-nine, sandy hair, lightly freckled face, with something of a West Coast surfer’s manner. He also spoke good French and was working as a private chef in the affluent homes in the hills above Lyon.

  “The class,” Willy said, “is fish.” Just that. “Fish.” It had been offered once before, in January. “It is brutal. It is also the most expensive class in the school—three thousand dollars. It uses more fish than you’ve seen in your life. There is no teaching assistant.”

  And the teacher?

  “Éric Cros, a fanatic.”

  I knew him. He gave the impression of living in the present tense and of always being out of breath. He was exhausting to look at.

  I found him and asked i
f I could speak to him.

  “You have five seconds,” he said.

  “May I join your class?”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  —

  FISH. Two years before, Cros had been teaching “modernist gastronomy,” but was alarmed by his students. They didn’t know the basics. How can you be experimental if you don’t know the basics? He dropped modernist cuisine and started a new class. Fish was the vehicle. Cros was on a mission. Time-honored techniques were no longer being passed on and were in danger of disappearing: The issue was urgent.

  Cros had five assumptions that amounted to a philosophy.

  You learn the old stuff before you try the new stuff.

  You learn the old stuff in order to do the new stuff.

  The old stuff is not easy.

  You are not yet good enough to be creative: Don’t even think about it or you’ll be punished.

  A recipe is only an introduction. It is the beginning of your relationship with the dish. (After Cros demonstrated one—quickly, breathlessly, talking so fast that he stopped to wash his face to cool down—he left. He didn’t want your questions. He might not return for an hour. There was plenty of fish. If you failed, you tried again.)

  “You can make fun of him,” Willy told me, “but he changes lives. The people who take his course? They are different at the end. You don’t know how lucky you are to be admitted.”

  I thought: I know friends who would fly to Lyon tomorrow, and pay much more than 3,000 euros, to get this kind of instruction.

  I thought: This is why I’ve come to France.