Dirt

by Bill Buford

  They all then crowded into the locker space and changed; by the time I had tied my shoes, they were gone. I was still the last one out.

  My mind, for whatever reasons, appeared to be host to infinitesimal, barely detectable, micro bad habits. What exactly was happening when I was taking off my clothes? Did my brain go skitty when other brains went straight? I could only imagine what a slow-motion video would reveal, my head bobbing this way and that as I noted the light from a window, the color red, remembered a childhood tricycle.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, exactly forty-five minutes into cooking my shit potatoes (at 200 degrees Celsius, on the “steam setting”) Christophe peered inside the glass window of the oven and opened the door.

  “They’re done,” he said.

  I poked a potato with the point of a small knife.

  “No,” I said.

  “No?” He scrunched up his eyebrows. The eyebrows said: “WTF? You’re telling me ‘No’!” He reminded me that the potatoes are only briefly done and thereafter ruined.

  He returned ten minutes later.

  “They’re done. Take them out.”

  I poked. “No.”

  “I am hungry. You are going to serve mush.”

  “I don’t think they’re ready.”

  He stared at me. He went back to his cutting board.

  I wasn’t meaning to be confrontational—I didn’t have the confidence. I was trying to arrive at a potato that I wanted to eat: à la vapeur, steamed, yes, and therefore not browned, but just a little bit crusty.

  The meal was on time—how could it not be, when much of it had been prepared the day before? The principal ingredient was fish—cod, with white sauce, my first sauce in a week, a perfectly ordinary but surprisingly delicious beurre blanc (the fatty, rich sauce with the lean protein)—but for me nothing mattered more than the potatoes. Every one of them—all 250—were eaten.

  Afterward, I was in the back, cleaning up, the frenzied period just before the lunch service. (Yes, I was doing le personnel, but I still had my day job.) Christophe walked by. He appeared to have sought me out.

  “The potatoes were good.”

  It was my first praise. I was surprised by it, that Christophe could call my potatoes “shit” one day and “good” the next.

  Just before the evening service, Viannay sought me out. Next week, he said, why not an American meal cooked by an American? Why not burgers?

  * * *

  —

  I made fifty burgers: buns, red onions, tomato slices, and lettuce, a mayonnaise that I’d made by hand (surprisingly yummy) as well as a ketchup that I’d also made (utterly inedible). The fries were double-dipped: three minutes in hot fat, followed by five minutes in very hot fat, marred marginally by Florian’s determination to crank up the heat on the first round. (He’d got crazy out-of-control excited about the prospect of fries.)

  I had scored a case of Coca-Cola: in bottles. They went mainly undrunk, even if briefly scrutinized—kitchen people regarding the bottles as though they were test tubes of pesticide, their faces conveying confusion over why anyone would ingest a sweet liquid with a savory food.

  Everyone ate, including people who normally didn’t show up for the 11:00 a.m. lunch, including Viannay, and the sommelier, and the woman upstairs who did the photocopying. Several ate standing up. Among the many French rules is that eating is always done at the table. But these were burgers, and burgers were not French, and there was for everyone an undisguised thrill about eating like Americans. It was among the most blissed-out meals I have ever had a role in preparing.

  “Good lunch,” Christophe said, the second praise in two days.

  Maybe this is all going to work out after all, I thought. But then, just as I’d had the thought, I dismissed it. Out of superstition, fearing bad luck.

  * * *

  —

  I was carrying the pots, pans, and tools that I would need for le personnel, all of it tottering on a cutting board, and greeted my garde-manger colleague.

  “Bonjour, Florian.”

  “Putain,” he said. He was crouched over a knife, his big lanky frame curled up like a congested question mark. He looked up at me. His face said, “How dare you interrupt me?”

  After lunch, I re-joined garde-manger. I needed plastic wrap. It was on a shelf just behind the slicer.

  “Florian,” I asked, “would you excuse me?” I needed to get around him.

  “Putain.” He didn’t move.

  I mimed having to reach over his shoulders.

  “Putain.” He edged sideways, blocking me completely. I found some in the pastry kitchen.

  Later, on my way back to the dishwasher to retrieve a whisk, Florian veered out of his way and stepped hard on my foot.

  It was a Thursday. The cooks were different on Thursdays. Everyone was cheerful on Monday, but rapidly—by Tuesday afternoon, in fact—most people sank below their best. They deteriorated on Wednesdays. Thursdays, when most of the accidents happened, could be outright dangerous. Just about everyone was a different person on Thursday. It was the hours. But it was unusual for Florian.

  The next day, a Friday, I was about to prep the asparagus for garde-manger and headed to the walk-in to retrieve it. The asparagus were kept upright, bound in rubber bands, the stalks half submerged, in a plastic orange crate with a snap-on lid. It was heavy because of the slopping weight of the liquid. Florian stepped in front of me.

  “Arrête!” he said loudly. Stop! He pushed me aside forcibly with the flat of his hand. Several people were in the back, and they stopped what they were doing.

  “Hortense, attention,” he declared, summoning her in a big voice. “Bill is struggling. He is old. Old people are weak. Bill is weak. Bill cannot lift heavy things. We need to help him.

  “Attention, Hortense,” Florian continued, boomingly. “Le français de Bill, c’est de la merde.” Bill’s French is shit. “Il faut speak him English. D’accord?”

  Florian went to lift the crate, but in his flamboyant haste he got a bad angle, the water inside slopped, and the crate swung up against a door and crushed his fingers. Later, I saw him discreetly sucking on his knuckles, which were bleeding.

  What had happened to the guy who had cheered when he successfully sliced a shallot? Who had been open about his failures in the kitchen and his difficulty working under stress? I could see why Christophe liked him. I had liked him, too.

  In two days, the nineteen-year-old I regarded as a friend had turned into Darth Vader.

  * * *

  —

  At the start of the dinner service, Sylvain phoned. He wasn’t coming in. His wife was in the hospital, giving birth to their first child. In France, a husband is entitled to two weeks’ paternity leave.

  I was helping on the prep. Moments after the phone call, Florian told me to stand in the corner.

  It wasn’t actually a corner. It was the step by the door, the one where the consultant had placed himself to see why garde-manger wasn’t working. It was out of the way but with a view. In my particular case, I would be out of the way and in view. It was the culinary equivalent of being put in the stocks. Such was the vantage place of the step that I would be seen from two kitchens at once: garde-manger and the main kitchen, including the pass, where Christophe stood.

  I stared at the step and thought: I’m not going to stand there.

  Florian was watching me while working, flicking his head up (as though on a pivot) and then down. “Stand on the step,” he said. He was on his own tonight. It was a big night. I didn’t move.

  “Stand on the step.”

  “No, I’m not going to stand on the step. I’m here to help. You don’t have Michael. You don’t have Sylvain—”

  “Trop de stress. You m
ake my hands shake. It doesn’t matter. I don’t have to explain. Stand on the step.”

  “No. Viannay won’t like this.” In the petty battle of tiny wills, I had just lost. I could have been saying, “You’d better behave, or I’ll tell Teacher.” I had no idea what Viannay would or wouldn’t like, which is immaterial, since he hadn’t appeared yet.

  “Stand on the step.”

  Florian stared at me. I stared at Florian.

  What would you do? I stood on the step.

  Christophe, at the pass, saw me and didn’t understand, and then seemed to get it. Then maybe I got it, too. Had Christophe become Florian’s coach? (“Take charge, young man. Show that you’re a chef!”) It was a curious place to find myself, still being loathed by the guy who ran the kitchen and being bullied by a high-strung nineteen-year-old in what was probably his very first power moment.

  Garde-manger fell behind. Tables hadn’t received their amuse-bouches, starters weren’t plated. Florian made to slice a serving of pâté-en-croûte. So much work went into making it—the flaky pastry, everything on the verge of falling apart but somehow staying together—and it was so precious (the foie gras, the meat jelly, the poulet de Bresse) that you must never be caught cutting it badly. Florian got it wrong. He grabbed his heart. He threw away the failure quickly before anyone else saw. He tried again. He failed. He hit his hand. He tried again. He slammed his hand on the counter. He tried again, and this time got it right.

  Viannay arrived.

  Viannay saw me and called from across the kitchen. “Bill, what are you doing?”

  “I am standing on the step.”

  He could see that I was standing on the step.

  I nodded toward Florian. “He told me to.”

  “Please, bring the amuse-bouches to the pass.” Waiters were standing around, fiddly, nervous. Garde-manger was deeply in the weeds.

  “Oui, Chef.”

  I stepped down and put eight amuse-bouches on a small tray.

  Florian, hunched over, his back to me, turned. “No, you are not to take those to the pass.”

  Well, whatever. I picked up the tray, took it into the kitchen, and set it down. The waiters made to pick up the dishes, but were stopped by Florian (“No, do not touch them!”). He came running after flailingly—his hands in the air like flags—pushed me out of the way, grabbed the tray, and returned to the garde-manger kitchen, where he removed the eight dishes, put them on a new tray, and rushed back to the pass.

  Viannay made a modest Oh-I-get-it nod of the head. He moved on. He wasn’t going to intervene. (He wasn’t?)

  Was there a code that I didn’t know? Christophe had done nothing, even though the station was badly behind. But neither had Viannay, who arrived when it was overwhelmed. Did the code have a name? Fights happen. People get pushed around. And top guys don’t intervene?

  I was still on the step when Johann, the remaining Johann, stopped en route to the kitchen, and said, “You are on the step.”

  “Yes, I am on the step.”

  I proposed to Florian that I go to the very back, near the sink, and help out there.

  “That is an excellent idea.”

  In the back, I did whatever was needed. It was Friday night, and everyone was running out of stuff.

  Chern, working the meat station, rushed back.

  “Persil ciselé, s’il te plaît.” Parsley sliced longways, like chisels. “Quick, quick. Thank you.”

  He returned. “Petits pois. I’m out.”

  Fava beans, lemon zests, feuilles. (Always feuilles.)

  Over the loudspeaker, Christophe was barking; garde-manger was still overwhelmed. I should do something. But how?

  Without my noticing, the barking stopped. Once again, I’d got lost in the revelry of my urgent-but-not-so-very-urgent duties, the Zen of the repeated tasks, and eventually realized that I hadn’t heard a bark for some time. The kitchen was still under pressure. New orders were being called out, but Christophe was no longer haranguing. I’ll pop my head into garde-manger, I decided, and walked over, and discovered Viannay himself doing the starters, with Florian and Hortense standing behind. He was such an unexpected figure—I’d seen him in this confined, narrow kitchen only once before—that it took me a moment to adjust to the reality of his presence, the hair, the MOF white jacket, his stubble. I had no idea that he knew how to make the garde-manger dishes. He was moving with impressive speed.

  “There you are,” he whispered. It was the white anger. He had gone wolverine. “Where have you been? How could you have not known what was going on? You, you—” He hissed at me incomprehensibly.

  He finished his plating and handed it to Hortense.

  I stood there, stupid, too late, embarrassed, debating what I should have done.

  Viannay paused and wiped his hands. “You say you want to work on the line. You can’t work on the line. You don’t get it. You will never work on the line. Never.” Jamais.

  Florian had a peculiar expression, not gloating, not quite smiling, more like a smile suppressed. He was exaggeratedly calm.

  Johann was standing nearby.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “He said ‘never.’ Did you hear that—you will never work on the line?”

  “Yes.”

  When I got home, I went to kiss Jessica good night and sat on the edge of the bed. It was true, I seemed not to be getting it. Suddenly it was all very difficult. I paused. Viannay had said that I would never work on the line. Never.

  “The boys and I had dinner at Potager,” Jessica said. “I told Franck what you were going through. He said, ‘Tell Bill to come work for us.’ You should consider the invitation.”

  UNEXPECTED MYSTERIES IN A VINAIGRETTE

  RENAISSANCE SOCIETY OF AMERICA CONFERENCE. The cultural magnificence of the vinaigrette was revealed to me in a paper read by Timothy Tomasik, an accomplished scholar of sixteenth-century French food, basically 1530 to 1560, during the height of the foires of Lyon and right around the time that the grand councillors of the city hosted their Swiss counterparts. The event, held on a rainy Saturday morning in Manhattan, was moderated by Allen Grieco, a research associate at the Villa i Tatti in Florence, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies. (Spoiler alert number five: We did visit New York City—twice; in fact, we would eventually return.) Tomasik’s paper was on the history of the word “vinaigrette.”

  Since the withering humiliation of my having to ask how to make a vinaigrette, I had become a student of it and its many variations and its importance to the French kitchen (acid! wine! balance!). But the history? I had read Pasteur, but Pasteur was nineteenth century. Tomasik, then a friend (we met at another Renaissance food conference), was going to go deep into the word’s very origins. I showed up jumping-in-my-seat excited, and was shocked, genuinely, to see that only six other people were in the audience in a room that accommodated two hundred. On a Saturday! New York is a big city. Where were everyone?

  Tomasik’s lecture was an effort to solve a puzzle. The modern sense of the word “vinaigrette” was first published in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française in 1694, which describes it as “a type of cold sauce,” une sorte de sauce froide, that is made “with vinegar, oil, salt, pepper, parsley, and chives.” Since then, there have been variations on the essential formula, but the French Academy’s remains the best definition.

  But before 1694, it was a meaty sauce. The word first appears in the fourteenth century, in Taillevent’s Le Viandier, one of the earliest surviving French cookbooks. It is perhaps less French than medieval, illustrated by his instructions for making “une vinaigrette,” for which you start with a pig’s spleen, brown it on a spit, chop it up, add it to a pot with blood, broth, ginger, a pepperlike spice, saffron, wine, and vinegar (finally), and the
n boil. “It should be brown.”

  A sheep-based vinaigrette calls for the head, stomach, and feet. A cow vinaigrette insists on using all four stomachs.

  During the Q&A, Tomasik, disarming in his honesty, admitted that his paper (“A Vinaigrette by Any Other Name”) was a work-in-progress.

  He had begun, Tomasik said, with what seemed like a straightforward problem of lexicography. In early French history, “vinaigrette” meant something that seemed appropriate for the food eaten at the time—basically, pot-in-a-hearth cooking. By the late seventeenth century, the word had come to mean something completely different, but was also completely appropriate for the food of its time: a light dressing for comparably lightly cooked vegetables, like haricots verts or artichokes. What he couldn’t find was when the word changed. He had charted its usage in books published in 1536, 1539, 1542, 1547, and 1552. He expected to find something in the subsequent one hundred years, but hadn’t yet. He had the aw-shucks manner of the good student who had shown up to class with an essential problem in his homework not quite solved but one that he would sort out shortly.

  I thought: Not a chance.

  Those one hundred years: They represent the dark tunnel in French cooking. At one end, you find the food that you can cook in your fireplace; at the other the end, on or around 1651, when Le Cuisinier françois was published, a radical festival of ostentation and expertise. The book was written by a François Pierre de La Varenne. Though the title is probably a play on words (i.e., either The Cook François or The French Cook), there is no ambiguity in how it was understood and translated. It was a declaration of nationalist cuisine. Le Cuisinier françois said, “This is our food. It is our culture.” In the approximately four-hundred-year span of recipes, manuscripts, translations, and culinary publications of any kind in French, no text had so forthrightly proclaimed its Frenchness. After Le Cuisinier françois, French cuisine was established.

  But, in the eyes of many, there is virtually no record of what had been going on to effect the change. Something was happening, obviously (nothing comes from nothing), but who knew what it was?