Dirt

by Bill Buford

  Unfortunately, as beautiful as my shallots were to look at—small, perfectly formed, crisply purplish—they took nearly an hour to complete. Though I didn’t know a lot yet, I knew that an hour to cut up some shallots was an unforgivably long time.

  I put a saucepan on the flattop to heat. What I didn’t know was the flattop’s temperature. It was correct that I should now be getting to know the kitchen’s fundamental heating instruments—the ovens, the burners, how long it takes to boil a liquid, and the flattop. I felt confident in wanting to be here. It was right that I had asked Viannay.

  I tossed in my butter and shallots—to sweat them. The point is to reduce the shallots’ raw intensity. You want them still white, maybe a little creamy. Brown is bitter. White, creamy shallots, halfway between uncooked and cooked, constitute one of the fundamental flavors of French food.

  But oh dear. Something was wrong. There was an alarming hissing sound, and smoke.

  “Merde,” Christophe said.

  “You’re going to burn them,” Viannay said.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “You have five seconds.” Christophe was unquestionably delighted.

  What could I do? Was I going to have to do my shallots all over again? I took the pan off the heat.

  “That’s a start,” Viannay said, slowly. I looked up, needing direction. Viannay was studying me and my steaming pot with what I can only describe as “clinical calm.” “You need to reduce the heat by adding something to the pan,” he said. “It’s too early for the wine. More butter. But quickly—”

  I grabbed some butter and dropped it into the pot, and swirled. I scooped up another spoonful. I was about to scoop up another—

  “Stop,” Christophe shouted. “You’re going to give us heart attacks” (a peculiar fear, I felt, given that another half-kilo was yet to be added).

  I added the wine. I reduced it. And I then added that half-kilo of butter, whisking it in bit by bit until it emulsified with the by then very concentrated wine (it was smooth and velvety, like a purple fabric). Mathieu Kergourlay came over to taste it.

  “Pas mal.” He added salt and pepper. He tasted it. He added red-wine vinegar. He tasted it. He turned and removed a jar of mustard from a shelf and added a spoonful. “But only a spoonful. Très chère.”

  (Mustard? Expensive?)

  He whisked, tasted, added another vinegar splash, whisked, and tasted. It was ready.

  He gave me a spoon. It wasn’t what I expected. It didn’t taste of butter. There was fat, obviously, but it was textural (a rather luscious roundness), and fruit (from the wine), and an appealingly bitter acidity (from the shallots, the vinegar, the mustard). The sauce hit so many happy spots on my tongue that it didn’t matter if it was healthy or not. It was delicious. It was a meal, except that it wasn’t. You wouldn’t want to drink a mug of it, but a spoonful or two dribbled across some chunks of pork belly (sautéed with potatoes and onions) was a definite package-enhancer.

  Except that the package was late.

  At ten-fifty-five, Christophe, seeing that lunch wouldn’t be on time, reached down into a lowboy and pulled out a tuna steak, sautéed it, and took it to a table to eat it by himself. I finished up the lunch, intermittently catching sight of Christophe through the small window in the swinging door between the kitchen and the bar. I had failed.

  But I wasn’t fired. It seemed that I was being given a second chance. Tomorrow I’d get a frickin’ cutting board.

  * * *

  —

  But I didn’t. I was late.

  I woke up thinking, Whatever you do, arrive on time—and then didn’t. Viannay was right: I did have a problem with tardiness or focus or a vaguely ADHD organizational dysfunction. All week long, I was late. To be fair, the lunches themselves were never very late; they were just always a little late, and everyone, except Christophe, was only a little bit unhappy. Circa 10:55 a.m., Christophe was apoplectic.

  Friday, I was really late. Fridays, it turns out, are leftover days. Before, when I was mere eater rather than the lunch maker, I hadn’t noticed. Christophe must have assumed that no member of his kitchen could be so clueless as not to recognize a leftover. Or maybe (likely) he was just perverse. I hung around, waiting for him to tell me what the day’s ingredient was going to be, the morning getting later and later, until, finally, I asked and was informed that there wasn’t one. Go to the walk-in, Christophe said. “There you’ll figure out what we’re eating.”

  I stared at the shelves, trying to determine what was a leftover, and then wondering what I was going to do with it that would feed thirty people. This is Hell, I thought. It was the first day when, after I prepared the lunch (I don’t know how late, I’ve repressed the time, just as I have no idea what I made), I didn’t eat it. I ran upstairs to the bathroom, took off my chef’s jacket, and wrung it out. The sweat filled the sink. I stood there, half undressed, trying to cool.

  On Monday, however, there was a remarkable turn of events: Christophe ate with us. Lunch was served at 11:00 a.m. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, it was also served at 11:00 a.m. (Friday was late again—it was now fully established as the worst day of my week—and Christophe resumed dining on his own.)

  The modest achievement was effected by my taking what would turn out to be an unacceptable shortcut. I didn’t do a sauce. I’d intended to, at least on the Monday. The principal ingredient was skirt steak. Christophe presented it to me like a clue in a quiz, followed by what I now recognized to be the usual catechism. How will I cook it? (In sauté pans, several at once.) With what? (Une purée de pommes de terre—buttery mashed potatoes.) And? (Asparagus.) How? (In the oven, roasted.) And? (A salad with anchovies.) And the sauce? “Beurre rouge,” I said, thinking, steak + red wine = eternal combo, etc. It wasn’t a complicated meal.

  I got to work. I cut up shallots, sweated them and added the wine. I set the meat out to bring it to room temperature, and seasoned it. It was the potatoes that subverted my schedule. Despite Ansel’s whiz-kid potato tutorial, and the fact that I had been practicing at home, when it came to my going live with forty kilos of tubers, I lost my nerve; I didn’t think I would yet be fast enough with a knife, and resorted to the old practice of the peeler. In fact, the peeler really is slow, and, if you’re still using one, you should give it up. It is also maiming. The more I fell behind, the greater the pressure I felt to go faster, and the more I maimed myself. It was an angle problem—a big elliptical root vegetable in one hand, the T-shaped peeler in the other, and, if you’re trying to move at speed, you can’t reliably get your knuckles out of the way of that wide, badass razorlike blade as it comes sliding around the potato’s southern hemisphere. Nicked knuckles weren’t a big deal—you didn’t stop to bandage them up—but they slowed you down: the shredded skin, and a bleating imperative from your brain, which I was unable to override, to stop hurting yourself.

  Finally, the potatoes peeled, I filled a fifty-liter container with water to store them, put it on a shelf in the chambre froide, cleaned up my workstation, and went looking for a tamis.

  A tamis is a sieve that looks like an Indian drum, round with a wooden frame. In pastry, it is a flour sifter. In the kitchen, it is a vegetable smoosher. You press boiled potatoes through the mesh, and a light, creamy starch streams out the other side, which you then mix with half its weight in butter (i.e., twenty kilos of butter). Chef Joël Robuchon made his purée de pommes de terre this way at his 1980s Paris restaurant Jamin, and ever since there has been a debate about the butter percentage, because most healthy people find the proposition of mashed potatoes made half of butter to be morally unacceptable. In this debate, I am now a witness for the defense and can attest that, in fact, yes, you can make potatoes with 50 percent butter. Just don’t think about it. It’s vegetable dessert.

  The tamis, however, was not to be found. I checked with the dishwas
her, the pastry chef, Florian in garde-manger, Christophe. Nowhere.

  “Not important,” Christophe said. “Do them à la rustique.” Smashed.

  “Of course,” I said and returned to the chambre froide. The potatoes were gone. I rechecked my station: not there. I returned to the kitchen. Not there. I asked Florian if he had seen them.

  “I took them,” he said.

  “You took them?”

  “I needed them.”

  Wow.

  I peeled a new batch. I didn’t have time to peel a new batch, I still had to cook them, another forty kilos, frantic now, knuckle chunks flying in all directions. I heated up the sauté pans, hot, hot, hot, and threw the steaks on them, dropped the potatoes into a massive marmite, highest flame setting (“Boil, baby, boil”), made a vinaigrette, rushed back to the steaks, flipped them…

  “Vite!” Fast! Christophe was in a fury. It was ten-forty-five. “Vite! Vite! Vite!”

  “Vite!” Mathieu joined in. “This is not difficult. Vite!”

  I was sweating. My arms were glistening. My hands were wet. I was talking to myself. “Don’t be late.”

  “Vite!”

  “Don’t be late, don’t be late.”

  “Vite!”

  The sauce? The sauce! I checked it. The reduction was complete. It was a beautiful, deep midnight black-red, and deliciously viscous, but I hadn’t mounted the butter. I hadn’t even started. I looked at the butter. Question: Mount sauce with butter and be late? Or jettison butter and be on time? I killed it. Like that: gone. When I thought no one was looking, I poured shallots and wine down the drain. (This was naïve: Someone was always looking.)

  When I set out the food, I declared that I’d made the steaks “Tuscan-style,” with sea salt, olive oil, and wedges of lemon.

  In France, no one dresses a steak with lemon.

  Vlad picked one up. Vlad was a Russian émigré. He had been studying English from American hip-hop songs. “What fuck this?” he asked. “I no fucking eat no fucking lemon,” he said, and then he threw a wedge at me. “Fuck you, muttafucka!”

  But it was on time. Everyone served themselves, and went out into the bar area to eat it, and I stayed behind to clean up, and found the missing tamis—at Florian’s station, hidden underneath a counter.

  * * *

  —

  The following week I was summoned by Viannay.

  “Christophe tells me that you are serving le personnel without a sauce.”

  It was true. I apologized.

  Viannay confirmed that I knew that I was meant to make a sauce, that it was one of my obligations in producing le personnel. “My staff needs a sauce,” he said. “It’s possible that you don’t understand the seriousness. Le personnel is an important part of their day.” Viannay wasn’t angry. On the contrary, he was patiently pedagogical. He was teaching me a principle about French food. “For me,” he said, “le personnel is a contract with my staff. If they don’t have a sauce, it’s as though I am taking money out of their pockets. D’accord?”

  “Oui, Chef. D’accord.”

  “There must always be a sauce.”

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile, Ansel the asshole was right. I wasn’t going to use a peeler again. The next potatoes were à la vapeur. Christophe’s directive. It was what he wanted to eat.

  “How many will you need?” he asked. The quiz show.

  “Sixty?” I was thinking two per person.

  “Ha!” More bark than laugh. “Sixty?” He sneered. I was so utterly ignorant. “Two hundred fifty.” He repeated the number slowly—“You…will…need…two…hundred…and…fifty.”

  Two hundred fifty? That is a lot of potatoes. It was an important instruction.

  A potato à la vapeur is roasted in steam. It is also called an English potato—pomme de terre à l’anglaise—for no reason that I’ve been able to figure out except that, just after the brilliant food scientist Antoine Parmentier proved to the French in 1772, that the potato was edible and they instantly came up with two hundred ways of cooking it, the English borrowed the one called à la vapeur, because it was awfully good with roast beef, and made it their own.

  To make, the PDTs are skinned and trimmed to the same weight (fifty grams), length (six centimeters), and shape, what is called bombées—ballooned, bulging in the middle. And they are to be “turned”—seven “planks,” just as I had been taught by Ansel the Asshole. The ends are flat, not rounded.

  It was a risk—the number of potatoes, the 11:00 a.m. have-it-on-the-table deadline—but, for me, one that I calculatedly wanted to be taking. My potatoes à la vapeur represented a modest rite of passage, my finally graduating to the knife.

  They had, I reflected, as I made my way through a first batch, an unnatural natural beauty (a thing from nature rendered with a symmetry that you will never find there): the planks, the creamy yellow color, the visual harmony of each one looking exactly like the others. I was at the sink by the chambre froide, away from the urgencies of the main kitchen, my back to all of it, water dribbling from a faucet with the acoustic comfort of a stream, and the almost musical rhythm that you can sometimes find in a repeated task—the Zen of it.

  I reflected on how the PDTs à la vapeur were tricky to cook (fat in the middle, narrow at the ends), reached doneness slowly, arrived at it briefly, and thereafter deteriorated to mush, and I made a mental note to be attentive when I cooked them.

  I wondered: Why do the French make so many different kinds of potatoes? They can be done as batons, straw, matchsticks, hair, hazelnuts, waffles, and mushrooms, as well as your basic “French fry” (mignonette).

  I wondered: Was it because when they were finally deemed edible—thanks to Parmentier—they were served not boiled in a bowl for a peasant to slurp up, but instantly incorporated into a highly developed cuisine? By then, there were a hundred ways to cook an egg. Why not two hundred ways to cook a potato?

  I wondered: Had anyone else had this thought?

  Today, I wonder, horrified: How could my mind have drifted so far from the kitchen?

  I had been at the sink for a long time before an alarm was raised. There was no longer time to cook the potatoes. Mathieu Kergourlay put a pot of water on the stove. Menu change: pasta (without a sauce; just pasta, because there wasn’t any time for a sauce). I began cleaning up frantically, to get out of the sink and back into the kitchen, peels and bits of potato everywhere, when Christophe began pacing behind me. He had come to rant.

  “Your potatoes are shit,” he said, and walked to the end of the passage.

  “They are pommes de terre de merde,” he said, returning.

  “We do not eat shit potatoes.” He walked back again.

  “Bill should take his shit potatoes home. Who knows what he was doing for an hour? He was making shit potatoes for himself. He should feed his children his shit potatoes. The shit potatoes are for la maison de Bill.”

  I didn’t take the potatoes home. I stored them in two very large containers of water and put them in a corner of the walk-in, behind the cream, in the hope that Florian wouldn’t find them. According to the leftover rules of the kitchen, one night of potatoes, in water, was okay. Two: never. I continued to think about my shit potatoes on my walk home that night: What was wrong with my brain?

  * * *

  —

  Also—and this seemed telling—I was among the last ones to change into his cooking clothes in the morning. But I was always the last one, without fail, in the evening.

  It got so bad that, toward the end of service, I started loitering by the stairway. I wiped a counter, I rewiped it. I wiped it again. I couldn’t go up until Christophe gave the signal. He grunted, finally. I bolted. I was the first up. But then, for no reason that I understood, I was still the last to leave.r />
  I began stashing my clothes in a corner of the pantry so that they would be ready to change into, and I wouldn’t have to jostle by the lockers. Once again, the loitering, the signal, my bounding up the steps, except that this time I was focused and found my stash, set out my street clothes on a chair, whipped off my clogs, socks, pants, jacket, shirt, and was standing stripped down to my boxer shorts, just as the others reached the top of the stairs.

  They were confused.

  Why was I in the pantry without any clothes on?

  Then Frédéric declared, “Look at how much weight he’s lost!” He walked over and poked my stomach with his finger.

  Attention! La panse de Bill! “Bill’s paunch. It’s not the paunch he had when he started.” He poked again. He nodded approval.

  Sylvain joined him. He, too, poked my paunch.

  “You’ve lost weight!”

  “A lot of weight,” Frédéric added. He poked me again, tickled by his findings. “It’s still soft, but not as soft as it used to be.”

  “In the beginning, you were big,” and Sylvain did a Santa Claus pantomime, holding his belly in two hands. (The others nodded sagely.) “Now, Frédéric is right, you look okay.” Sylvain straightened himself upright, stomach in, chin out, shoulders back, his military display. “You look like a chef.”

  I was frantically trying to get a leg into my trousers and failing.

  “It’s the hours, no, Bill? The work. The manly work.” Sylvain was unable to hide his pride. “La rigueur.”