Dirt

by Bill Buford

  “Merci, Chef.”

  Across the aisle was Les Volailles Clugnet, a bird vendor. The proprietor (“Bonjour, Pierre”), on seeing Bocuse, handed over a white bird unsolicited. Bocuse seized it between his two large hands and slapped it around, firmly but with affection, as though the puppy of a favorite hunting dog.

  “The best chicken is the white breed from Bresse,” Bocuse said. “Tout le monde le sait.” Everyone knows this.

  He handed it to me. It was heavy. Full. The French don’t gut birds until they sell them. (This keeps them longer. It now seems wrongheaded that, in the interests of “hygiene,” the USDA insists on evisceration.)

  I held on to the chicken and looked at it politely. Bocuse riffed quietly on its features, the red wattle draped across my thumb, the white feathers, the dangling blue feet, and the many qualities that make the poulet de Bresse a rare and scrumptious creature.

  Viannay whispered: “Les Volailles Clugnet. Do you understand? The only place.”

  “Oui, Chef.”

  Then, like that, bang: Bocuse said goodbye.

  Leaving already? It was—I can’t deny it—a moment of shocking disappointment. So soon? After such a long wait? I hadn’t even asked a question. (Then again, who could blame him? Why hang out with a guy who never talks?)

  “À tout à l’heure,” he said.

  “Merci, Chef.”

  I thought: À tout à l’heure? Really? See you soon?

  We made our way back to the parking lot, but paused first at a charcuterie stand. “Do you know Bobosse? You should know Bobosse. It is the only place for andouillettes.”

  Viannay said, “Let’s go for a drive.”

  * * *

  —

  He drove me back to the Saône, traversing our quartier in the first arrondissement, and headed upstream. This part of the river, zigzagging in the direction of Beaujolais, is outside the city, but very much its folkloric heart.

  The drive was slow and pretty: the river on our left; steep hills, almost mountains, on the right; and the foliage, dense and out of control, everywhere, like a rain forest. I hadn’t been here yet and felt transported to another country. The buildings were few, but crumbling-grand. Many had been church properties, seized during the French Revolution: monasteries, a convent, Île Barbe in its entirety—a fifth-century abbey built on a rock formation in the Saône.

  An estate appeared on our right, reminiscent of an Augustan English country house. “Ombrosa.”

  So that is Ombrosa.

  It is a bilingual school, suggested for our children before we got here. It has a privileged, leafy tranquillity. We couldn’t have afforded it. Besides, I liked where we had ended up.

  We crossed a bridge (the Pont Paul Bocuse) and drove briefly downriver to a flat building with an old clock tower. Viannay pushed on the front door, which was unlocked, and led the way inside, turning on lights as he went, a long hall.

  The building, originally a monastery property, was called L’Abbaye de Paul Bocuse. Our footsteps echoed. Viannay was mute but amused. It felt like trespassing. Then, entering a large bright dining room, I got the point: I had been secreted into an enormous Bocuse confection.

  The dining room had a name (Le Grand Limonaire), a stage, a floor-to-ceiling “Orgue Gaudin” (a mechanical pneumatic organ), and a chorus of marionette cancan dancers. Viannay flicked a switch and music started, and a version of Paul Bocuse as a life-sized doll conducted it with a wooden spoon. Limonaire is “hurdy-gurdy.” Viannay flicked another switch and many limonaires all kicked in at once. The room dazzled, literally, with shiny kitsch and was red, green, and gold, like an enormous candy cane. It was confusing to look at because there was so much to look at—it was crammed with stuff—including the space above our heads, which was crowded with low-hanging ornate chandeliers.

  “It seats four hundred,” Viannay said.

  It was a private dining room, but more public than private, and promised not just dinner but time travel: to a late-night all-night Toulouse-Lautrec France where everyone was expected to behave badly.

  Viannay suggested that we get back in the car.

  I paused, taking in the preposterous venue. You don’t walk into it and think: I have arrived at a solemn temple of high gastronomy. You think: Party!

  We drove back past the bridge to the main Bocuse restaurant, L’Auberge. The word normally means “inn.” Bocuse’s “inn” is a massive three-story box of a mansion that he also calls home (the restaurant is on the ground floor) and looks like an outsized birthday present for giants: improbably square, with red shutters and green walls, decorated with eight-foot-high paintings of food, including of course poulet de Bresse, and the name PAUL BOCUSE built across the roof all in caps. The man from the Ivory Coast—the livery suit, the top hat—was the same front-door opener who had welcomed Bob and his Cuban wife.

  Outside was a “rue des grands chefs”—a passage of culinary murals, arranged like windows, each a glimpse into one of the great kitchens in French history. It started in the nineteenth century. It ended with Bocuse. (Bocuse’s view of history might be described as greatness improving on greatness, culminating with him. Modesty wasn’t a feature of a Bocuse worldview.)

  I stared at the first panel. It portrayed Antonin Carême in a kitchen, looking like Byron, dressed not in a chef’s jacket but in a robe, the “inventor” of “grande cuisine”—the guy whence the whole shebang started—leaning on the windowsill, looking contemplatively into the middle distance. (In the background, Napoleon and Josephine rush in to grab a bite to eat.) Was Carême a Bocuse model?

  We know that Carême came from a large family. What we don’t know is when he was born (probably 1784) and if he was one of fifteen children or of twenty-five. At the age of eight (or twelve—our source for Carême is Carême), he was abandoned at a tavern door and taken in by the patron. (Probably true.) At seventeen (or sixteen), he was accepted as an apprentice at the most renowned pâtisserie in Paris. In no time (or, at most, four years), he came to be regarded, especially by Carême himself, as the greatest pastry chef since the discovery of sugar. By then, he was cooking everything, savory and sweet, but always flamboyantly, mainly banquets, and mainly for princes and heads of state, including the slimeball Talleyrand. (Talleyrand was Napoleon’s foreign minister; he conducted diplomacy over dinners made by Carême, his young employee, whom he had famously instructed never to repeat a meal.)

  Carême and sugar: the foundations of French cooking. You hear it often: Pastry chefs have driven French cooking. The Italianists, who now probably included me, recognize that the Italians taught the French grande cuisine. But it was sugar, and the scientific kitchen that could make things with it, that may have been the basis for what French cuisine would become.

  What intrigued me in the mural was the tool in Carême’s hand. It was a quill.

  Carême is the most important chef in French culinary history because he wrote books. He was the poet of the French kitchen. You can’t taste his meals today, but from his writing you can get enough instruction to imagine what they might have been like to eat, and maybe, in theory, make approximate versions of them (as long as you prefer wood to gas, have no electricity, pluck your own birds, churn your own butter, and have commis, apprentices, servants, and other members of elevated slave labor housed in a bungalow nearby).

  I had begun reading Carême and found the sentences, even in my rudimentary French, to be vivid and accessible nearly two centuries after Carême wrote them—except, I learned only recently, Carême didn’t write them. Carême, the first historian of French cooking, wrote nothing. He probably couldn’t write, at least not well. (He was taught how to read in the pastry kitchen at sixteen.) But he was savvy enough to recognize the value of the written “performance.” He was living in a time when food described on a page was as important as what was served
on a plate. Kitchen books mattered, they made reputations, and Carême “wrote” several of them, but none more influential than his magnum opus: the five-volume, fifteen-hundred-plus-page Art of French Cooking in the Nineteenth Century, one of the most ambitious projects in the history of cooking, marred modestly by the fact that Carême died (aged forty-eight, maybe) after completing volume 3. He wrote the last two volumes posthumously.

  Carême was both a master impresario and a master self-mythologizer, a larger-than-life commando of le spectacle, unmatched in the magical relationship between self-invention and self-promotion until—well, who? There hasn’t been anyone else in the world of the kitchen, I was thinking, not on Carême’s scale, until, possibly, Paul Bocuse—when, unannounced, Bocuse himself silently padded up from behind and appeared alongside me. I jumped.

  “I thought you were at Les Halles,” I said idiotically, since, obviously, there was no reason for him not to be here: “Here” was his home.

  I tried to catch Viannay’s eye. How did he pull this off—with less than a day’s notice, getting me the guy no one else could reach? I was grateful. I was impressed. And I was also aware, or at least strongly suspected, that it had been Viannay’s intention to impress me. The undisguised show-offy clout of it all. He may not have been from Lyon, but he was very secure in his place in it. He was a member of the “club.”

  Bocuse, meanwhile, was looking at a mural—the one devoted to Mère Brazier, appositely enough.

  She was in the foreground, stately and authoritative and square-shouldered. Gaston, Brazier’s long-suffering son, was in the back, mixing something in a bowl and looking, somehow, not quite like her offspring: head down, fearful, the tentative eyebrows of a dog who knows that he is about to be kicked again. (Off to the side was the legendary Mère Fillioux, Brazier’s former boss, rounder, softer, more maternal, doing that wizard thing of boning a chicken with a spoon.)

  “What was Brazier like?” I asked Bocuse.

  “You know, her cooking was simple,” he said, understanding my question to refer to her kitchen and not her person. “It was based on the good products that you find here. We are fortunate.” (Nous sommes heureux—and he made a sweeping gesture with his hand.) Bocuse was deliberate in his sentences and had a quiet way of uttering them. “The fish, the birds, the pigs. But, frankly, they weren’t sophisticated, her dishes.” This wasn’t a slur, just a fact. “It was country cooking. The food was good, but it was about the ingredients.”

  “Ingredients?”

  Ingredients? This is how Italians talk.

  “The rivers and lakes, the swamps of the Dombes, the mountains. That’s where our food comes from. It’s like nowhere else.”

  “Brazier screamed at her staff,” Viannay added. “She didn’t care if anyone was listening. She beat her son in front of the diners. Her kitchen was her home. No one was going to stop her from being herself.”

  Bocuse nodded, but the nod seemed to be a courtesy. Implicit in it was, for me, a modest realization. Viannay was repeating what others had said. He hadn’t been there. Bocuse had been.

  * * *

  —

  We made to return to La Mère Brazier. I had a proposal. I wasn’t sure when I would be alone with Viannay again.

  I had been at the restaurant for four months, in the back, preparing amuse-bouches, searching for perfect salad leaves, making starters. I could be counted on. Viannay had no reason to change the arrangement. But I needed to change it. I wanted to be moved into the kitchen.

  I wanted to work on the line, and I was going to ask him to put me there.

  My nervousness surprised me. I reflected: Whatever I do now, including nothing, will have a consequence.

  What if Viannay says yes and I end up suffering an even longer catalogue of humiliating and spectacular failures?

  I stalled. I said nothing. The idea of not asking was appealing. I could always ask later.

  “Chef, I was wondering if you would consider a request.”

  “Of course.” (He sounded so friendly.)

  “I want to work on the line.”

  There was an audible intake of breath—ouch!—and a long pause. During it, I wondered: I have been deluded, haven’t I?

  “You’re a good cook,” he said.

  “Thank you.” This was cheering.

  “But you’re always late.” This was true.

  “And slow,” I said.

  “Late,” he corrected. “Frankly, I worry about your punctuality.”

  He was looking for a parking place and not finding one.

  “You will have to prove that you can make food and not be late making it. I will ask Christophe if you can cook le personnel.”

  The staff meal: cooking French food for French cooks. It was an intimidating prospect. It frightened me. It excited me.

  “I would be honored.”

  There was another intake of breath. “You must never be late. If the meal is not ready at eleven o’clock, the staff doesn’t eat.”

  “I understand.”

  “Okay. I will ask Christophe. Christophe will have to approve.”

  This seemed unlikely. Christophe couldn’t really approve of my being moved to the kitchen, because, fundamentally, he disapproved of my being in the restaurant. I could easily imagine Christophe’s response: “This is a joke, right? No, please. Tell me you’re not serious.”

  But, evidently, Christophe agreed.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, a Thursday, I went to the main kitchen and reported for duty.

  Christophe blew me away with his hand.

  “Yes, yes, Mathieu told me. I am not happy. You will start when I am ready for you to start.”

  I returned to garde-manger.

  On the Friday, I popped my head into the main kitchen, and Christophe wouldn’t look at me.

  On the Monday, I didn’t bother—I went directly to garde-manger—and was then summoned. Christophe didn’t greet me. He studied my person, up and down, my eagerness. He looked at me, without question, with contempt. He expected me to fail.

  “Pork belly,” he said.

  “Pork belly?”

  “Yes. In the walk-in.” La chambre froide.

  I thought: I have just been told to make pork belly for thirty people?

  “You’ll find onions upstairs.”

  “Onions.”

  “And potatoes.”

  “Potatoes.”

  “And your sauce?” Christophe asked.

  “My sauce?”

  “Yes. What is your sauce?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “What sauce will you make with pork belly?”

  I turned uncomprehendingly to Mathieu Kergourlay, who ran the meat station.

  He tried to be helpful. “What would you make at home?” À la maison?

  I wondered: What sauce do I make at home when I’m serving pork belly?

  “Oh, maybe something with a meat stock,” I said, “a fond.” I did make sauces sometimes, usually based on a stock—chicken, fish, the bones of whatever meat I was serving—and then reducing it down and adding wine. I read it somewhere: Elizabeth David? A British newspaper column? But I was stalling. I was really thinking: (1) I have never cooked pork belly at home, and (2), if I did, I wouldn’t make a sauce.

  “No,” Christophe said. “The fonds are expensive.” Trop chers. The stocks—and all of them made in the kitchen (veal, chicken, duck, fish, lobster)—were too precious for a staff lunch.

  “What about a beurre rouge?” Mathieu Kergourlay proposed.

  Yes, I thought. I should know how to make that. I know how to make a beurre blanc. I’d done it at L’Institut Bocuse. But how exactly? I wasn’t panicking, but my Institut Bocuse d
atabase was suddenly uncomfortably inaccessible.

  “You don’t know how to make a beurre rouge?”

  “No, I do. I just may not have made it yet. That is, I’ve made the white one, the blanc, but don’t remember if I ever got around to doing the red.”

  Later that morning, Viannay reminded me that the salad needed a vinaigrette. I didn’t know that I had to make one.

  “Yes, you have to make the vinaigrette.”

  A reflective pause.

  “And how exactly do you make a vinaigrette?” I asked.

  “You don’t know how to make a vinaigrette?” Christophe looked at Viannay, with a heavily inflected expression of incomprehension. And, yes, again, I basically knew how to make a vinaigrette, I’d made it, just not often. Besides, weren’t there twenty different kinds? I had no idea what was made here and what everyone expected. (At home—“à la maison,” as Mathieu Kergourlay refers to it—our salads are dressed with olive oil, lemon, and salt. Basta.)

  “Two parts oil, one part vinegar, plus mustard,” Viannay said. “And salt and pepper.”

  To make a beurre rouge, Young Mathieu explained, you chop up shallots fine (émincer), sweat them in butter (suer), don’t let them brown, add a liter of red wine, reduce slowly until it’s a syrup, and build it back up (monter) by whisking in a half-kilo of butter, bit by bit.

  “At that point, I’ll help you.”

  My shallots, I am pleased to report, were excellent. I sliced them on a cutting board that I had to borrow from another cook (because I had shown up after eight—not a lot after eight, but a definitive five minutes after eight—and by then there were no boards left), and I eventually found a makeshift worktop (i.e., I balanced my board above a trash can, because, by then, all the counter space had been taken). The counter-space scarcity I understood—the kitchen was cramped. But why weren’t there more cutting boards? Every day started with twelve people fighting for ten boards. They are not expensive. (Why? Because everyone then knows who the late guy is—the moron who spends the first hour of his morning trying to persuade someone to lend him a board.)