Dirt

by Bill Buford

  * * *

  —

  I had some bad experiences with the artichoke soup that accompanied an artichoke-and-foie-gras starter. You make the soup by cutting off the choke bottoms, half-submerging them in chicken stock, salt, and pepper, and slowly cooking the liquid to a thick green cream. During service, the soup was kept warm in a pot on a high shelf in a corner directly over the kitchen kettle. The kettle was where bones are browned, and stocks made; it was the shape of a child’s coffin, and was always in use, bubbling away, generating steamy heat. The challenge was transporting the thick green cream from that pot—hot corner, large outsized ladle, duck-bone vapor in your face—into a small white porcelain cup, without sloshing.

  If you sloshed, you smudged. If you smudged, the smudge didn’t slide back down into the soup. It clung greenly and incriminatingly to the insides of the cup.

  Garde-manger was connected to the main kitchen by a speaker and was largely out of view, and since Christophe rarely saw what we were up to, Florian had come up with a trick for removing the soup smudges by wetting his forefinger in his mouth and giving the inside of the cup a wipe. I don’t know why—even though my self-image is Pigpen with chocolate sauce down his front—I couldn’t bring myself to do the same. If I sloshed, I poured the soup back into the pot, got a new cup, and tried again. (Really: Would you want a soup cup that had been saliva-cleaned?)

  Garde-manger’s dishes had their own pass, a worktop on wheels, positioned next to the main pass (the garde-manger dishes were never assembled by the chef; they were delivered up, at speed, and whisked into the dining room). On the worktop were an olive-oil bottle and a bowl of sea salt, for finishing the artichoke soup: You dressed it at the last moment with six salt crystals and three drops of olive oil.

  Once, I added a fourth drop.

  I stared at it. No question. There were four drops.

  It was busy. A table for six was waiting. I had a choice: take the cup back to the garde-manger room and redo it (and incur Christophe’s wrath) or leave it (and maybe incur it). What would you do? You would do what I did. You leave the cup. It was only a drop.

  It was early days, and this was the first time I was the recipient of Christophe’s particularly personalized wrath. (The second time was when, for reasons I still don’t understand, I left at the pass a soup that had only two drops.) When Christophe is disappointed, he uses the word franchement—frankly—in a series. As in, “Frankly, I can’t believe you can be so stupid. Frankly, I don’t know why you are here. Frankly, I don’t know how you ever imagined that you were competent enough to work in a kitchen. Frankly, I cannot stand to look at you.” Franchement.

  He was a dickhead.

  * * *

  —

  One night, Sylvain invited me to do plating at the pass with him. It was a generous gesture, one he could make because of his position in the hierarchy. But I didn’t understand why I would be tolerated by others. More perplexing, I don’t know why I said yes.

  The kitchen, once you’re there, in mid-service, between the ovens, was immediately much hotter than garde-manger. It was like jumping into too-hot water. Your body wants to jump right out again. The pores on my skin dilated in response, and my arms beaded up wetly. It was bright, the lighting, the heat lamps.

  Viannay was doing meat. He never wore a toque and his long hair kept falling into his face and having to be tossed out of the way. Also the loose, open sleeves of his chef’s jacket draped flamboyantly, swinging within millimeters of the food, but were never soiled. It was like a dare. It hadn’t occurred to me how much he liked the pass—the heat lamps could have been spotlights—but, being always in the back, I rarely saw him onstage.

  Christophe was doing fish. I would be taking his place, Sylvain told me, and he urged me to study the line. (Christophe clearly didn’t understand why I was at the pass, and was demonstrably irritated that I was anywhere near him.)

  One dish was filets de dorade de ligne—sea bream—that was served with vegetables, grilled spider crab, and a sweet-and-sour sauce. A cook prepared the dorade and passed it down the line on a platter. Another cook sautéed the vegetables, grilled the crab, and poured out a quantity of the sauce, which were added to the platter and passed to Christophe, who assembled everything on a plate: no hands, all spoons, the vegetables arranged just so, the sauce spooned atop lightly, like a dew or a spray: i.e., barely. Every dish had its embellishment.

  In the event, I did plate a couple of dishes, although I am not sure what I learned, because I was so worried that I would dribble erratically that, in the actual act, I tried to think of nothing. With effort, I can picture my hands, or a spoon, or the peripheries—like Christophe, whom I couldn’t see but heard, hyperventilating.

  I then returned to garde-manger and got shit from everyone there. Just who did I think I was?

  Klaus, a Dutch stagiaire nearing the end of his stint, was in the back doing prep and openly jealous.

  “I was never allowed to stand by the pass,” he said, “even though that was why I came to Lyon—to watch Mathieu Viannay plate.” He asked me, with ferocity, “Have you studied his travers de porc?”

  The dish was pork ribs with a citrus glaze. It was among the dishes I’d been taught at L’Institut Bocuse. Viannay’s version was a puzzle of shapes. The pork, its ribs removed, was a perfect rectangle. A foie-gras bonbon, served with it, a perfect cylinder. Yes, I’d seen it, but, no, I hadn’t analyzed it.

  “You should be more attentive,” Klaus said. “Viannay’s plates could be paintings.”

  Klaus was still agitated the next morning. He had almost completed his stage and would be returning to Holland and still couldn’t believe that I had been allowed into the front kitchen.

  “In Amsterdam,” he said, “no one makes sauces. You buy them from a wholesaler. There are green sauces, brown sauces, white sauces, and red sauces. But you never know what they are. Here they make every sauce themselves. Have you tasted the veal stock? It takes two days.”

  Klaus confided in a whisper, “I’m keeping a notebook of Viannay’s sauces.” Then he got worried: “You won’t tell, will you?”

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Viannay sought me out.

  I was in the back. He leaned in close, elbow on the counter, face-to-face, a private conversation in a public space.

  He asked me a question.

  I didn’t quite hear it. I apologized and asked him to repeat it.

  He did.

  I caught a phrase: “combien de temps encore.” I apologized again. Could he, possibly, say it one more time?

  He did.

  My distress must have been manifest.

  He tried a different syntax: “Tu restes ici encore combien de temps?”

  (Meanwhile, a little voice in my head was hectoring: Why can’t you understand this guy? You understand others. Is it because you’re afraid?)

  Sylvain jumped in.

  “Combien de temps,” he said to me, very slowly. “Tu veux rester combien de temps encore?”

  Oh! Je reste combien de temps? How much longer do I want to stay?

  Oui!

  You mean I can stay? As long as I want?

  Oui!

  I’d actually forgotten that I’d been given seventeen days. “Well, damn, forever? I mean, toujours?”

  * * *

  —

  Saturdays weren’t merely “days off.” They were better than a birthday, better than Christmas, and with many more gifts. Saturdays were light and sky and spring and the river and children and a wife and family and clean sheets and lazy cups of coffee and bare feet. On one, I was preparing strawberries for breakfast (prepping them as I had been taught, washing before hulling, then hulling them deeply with the point of a knife to remove the less flavorful pulp), and thought, Oh, what the hell, and dusted them with sugar.


  The boys appeared, and Frederick declared: “George, look, fraises au sucre!”

  Of course, this is what they were, strawberries (fraises) in sugar (au sucre), but the way he identified the preparation, in French, seemed to locate it in their school canteen, where they would have first eaten it. In Lyon, I hadn’t yet served them strawberries.

  Another Saturday, an omelet, as I had learned to make it, and young Frederick observed: “I didn’t know you knew how to make une omelette, Dada.”

  I stared at him, unpacking the assumptions implicit in his observation: that he had already been introduced to omelets (they eat omelets for lunch?); that he knew omelets as a French food and only in their French version (a thin-skinned, rolled, soft-in-the-middle preparation—preferably nature, without anything inside, and pronounced “une omelette,” coming down hard on the two “t”s); that he was surprised, therefore, that I, his father, the American in the family, would know both the food and how to make it; and that, like many fathers of French children, I was called “Dada.”

  The canteen menu was posted each week outside the school’s entrance: three courses, plus a produit laitier, a milk product—yogurt or cheese. There were no repeats, a feature so radical that I am compelled to repeat it: No menu was ever served twice during the entire school year. (Jessica, who had become a member of a parent-teacher executive committee, discovered that, at strategic intervals, certain foods are repeated—turnips, kale, beets—to help children become familiar with them.)

  The first course would be a salad—say, grated carrots with a vinaigrette, George’s current favorite (“Carottes râpées!”), which he asked his mother to make for dinner. The second, the plat principal, might be a poulet with a sauce grand-mère (made from broth that the chicken had been cooked in). There was a cooked vegetable (maybe Swiss chard in a béchamel sauce), and a fruit or dessert. The boys’ favorite had been moelleux au chocolat, hard on the outside, like a brownie, and soft in the middle, with a warm chocolate meltingness.

  L’École Robert Doisneau was an underfunded, overcrowded public school. It had roof leaks, an asphalt playground that was breaking up and weeds growing through the cracks. In its confidence that eating could be taught, it wasn’t exceptional. Daniel Boulud grew up on a farm, never ate in a restaurant or bought food in a store until he was fourteen. But he had been thoroughly trained in French cuisine: by his farmer family, of course, but mainly by the school canteen. Every French member of the Mère Brazier brigade had grown up the same. The food our boys ate made them different from their parents.

  Another Saturday, after I had put the boys to bed (the only night I could), Jessica and I were having a simple meal—leftover chicken, a salad, a bottle of Beaujolais.

  Jessica asked me, “Did you know that the boys get a grade for how they eat and behave at the canteen?”

  There they eat their food in silence. This is to encourage them to think about what they’re eating. They are served each course at a table by women who know how much the children want. They are not obliged to finish their food. But if they don’t, they don’t get the next course.

  Jessica refilled our glasses. “America seems so far away.”

  It was true. We never thought about “home.”

  “No one who visits France knows it in the way that we are starting to understand Lyon,” she said. She paused, taking the measure of the idea that was forming, wanting to articulate it, the relationship of food—to what?—to everything? “People don’t do what we do.” She was excited. Her eyes glistened. “I don’t even know how to describe it—this whatever it is, this place we find ourselves, the culture, our home, our place in it. It just seems very big.”

  * * *

  —

  A FARM NEAR MORNANT, TWENTY-FIVE MILES SOUTH OF LYON. Our family was invited by Ludovic Curabet to attend a tasting of the charcuterie that he had prepared from “my” pig. Had we been à la campagne yet? No.

  We stopped to pick up bread from Bob, who was fast-talking on a busy Saturday morning, excited to share his latest new loaf, one that had been inspired by our friendship, a mix of American and French flours—a hard durum wheat from South Dakota with a soft white from the Auvergne. (“It just needs a name,” Bob said. “Lafayette?”) When we told him where we were headed, he asked us to bring back a saucisson, and filled up a four-foot paper sack with the loaves of his repertoire.

  Ludovic was waiting for us, along with two other families. A table, white butcher paper on top, had been placed on the gravelly hilltop crest. Ludovic put out variously proportioned but consistently tubular expressions of pig—only one large piece (known as a Jésus), otherwise small saucissons, no two the same size, each tied capriciously by a string, but no jambon, the French answer to prosciutto, because the leg needs a year to age, and no belly cuts, the poitrine, which would have to hang for another three months in Ludovic’s cellar. There were two cheeses—a Brillat-Savarin, the creamy raw cheese from nearby Burgundy and named after the writer, and a Comté, a hard variety from the Jura, at the foot of the Alps—and bottles of a no-label red. He had also bought what appeared to be forty kilos of cherries—four crates, in any case, of Burlats.

  “Cherries are the fruit of here,” he explained. “They are in season now. Do you understand? They are at their best at this very minute of this very Saturday.” Lyon has many varieties, appearing over the course of the late spring and into the summer, and starting with the Burlat, the first to ripen and the juiciest and sweetest of them all. Cherries were harbingers of spring. They seemed to have the same flavor and sweet-and-acidic spectrum as the Syrah grape, also the pride of the area, its northernmost home (and where scientists now believe that it may have been “conceived,” the issue of two grapes from the Alps and the Ardèche). Charcuterie—made from a local pig—goes exceptionally well with both the local wine and the local cherries.

  I surveyed the table, which seemed fragrant with possibilities and connections. Aged meats are among the earth’s mystery food preparations. They seem primordial, more ancient than history, and, since they are not cooked but dry out and ferment, according to what is available (the weather, the ocean, smoke, the sun, salt, yeasts in the humid air), they can seem as fundamental as nature.

  For the boys, it was their first taste of home-cured French pig. “Mmm,” Frederick said (and then noticed the breadbasket, lost interest in meat, and walked off with a baguette). George, the curious carnivore, took a bite and then promptly stacked slices in his palm.

  I picked a floppy example, the size of a pancake, from the peculiarly named Jésus, the casing of which was the large intestines, four inches across. The slice felt wet. I rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger. It was squishy. It was very dark red.

  Was it a failed cure? Or, being so big, had it just needed more time to age? It clearly wasn’t ready. It was probably only for display. I hesitated—for reasons of mouth feel, if not hygiene, you really want your saucisson to be dry, not wet—and noticed that people were staring at me. I obviously couldn’t not eat my piece of Jésus.

  I popped the whole thing in.

  “Mmm,” I said loudly, and added, “C’est très bon, non?” People chuckled, and I exhaled the proverbial sigh of relief, while also struggling: The piece was too big to swallow.

  “Très, très bon,” I repeated, my mouth full. I was looking for a way to spit it out without being noticed. I was also in denial: that my brain was refusing, probably for reasons of politesse, to accept a message that my mouth was sending. The issue was the taste, one that might take my getting used to. The Lyonnais, it appeared, like to know that their pigs were unequivocally of a farm and a place. They liked them wildy and stinky and very piggy.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward, we lingered languidly. The day had been gray when we started out, and rainy on the road. But the rain hadn’t reached the farm. The boys were in the grass on the edg
e of a wheat field. The sun was out.

  There were sheep, unshorn puffballs, like enormous mobile comforters. The boys, urban lads since birth, had never seen an animal close-up and went straight for them. The sheep ran.

  Frederick asked the sheep if they would come back, please.

  The sheep returned.

  George joined him, approaching on tiptoes. The boys then talked to the sheep, making hand gestures and mime as though in a game of charades, and the animals gathered round and watched the boys closely and appeared to be listening. One allowed one of the boys to climb on top. There was a lot of laughing.

  I put Frederick on my shoulders.

  “Let’s walk.” I hadn’t strolled down a hill of wheat before.

  We proceeded slowly, the four of us. It was more amble than walk, no destination other than a vague descent. High clouds, blue sky, a warm late afternoon. Jessica was in a summer dress. The boys and I were in shorts. Jessica took off her shoes. The wheat came up to our waist. We didn’t talk.

  I reflected. We had never been so relaxed. It was seven months since we had arrived. Were we actually having a bucolic moment?

  We hadn’t come to Lyon for the bucolic. We weren’t here for the cantaloupes, or the violet asparagus, or the lavender, or the peaches of the farmers somewhere farther south. We hadn’t come for the south.

  Nevertheless, our day had been pretty jolly, at least according to the basic agrarian, stick-close-to-nature benign view of the universe. The pork: cured by hand. The bread: made by Bob. The cherries: sold from stands outside the orchards where they were picked. The wine: bought by the barrel from a vigneron and bottled in the farmer’s cellar. And now this wheat field beckoning from below, with its undulating summer grasses.