Dirt

by Bill Buford

  Meanwhile, I was jumping up and down in my seat. I was very excited. I knew the answer! At least in relation to the vinaigrette! It was on the other side of the Alps, in Italy, a tract about salads, but I couldn’t remember the name of the author, except that it was a quirky name, something like “happiness.”

  Grieco, for his part, was also jumping up and down, but he knew the name and had downloaded a text on his phone. The author was Costanzo Felici.

  “Yes,” I blurted out. I couldn’t help it. “Felici! That’s the guy!”

  Grieco continued. “Costanzo Felici was a medical doctor and a naturalist in the village of Piobbico.” Piobbico is east of Florence and almost to the Adriatic. “He had published tracts on aspects of natural history: the olive tree, the mushroom, the wolf, an agrarian calendar.” Grieco, who was sixty-six and had a silver goatee and wore round scholarly spectacles halfway down the bridge of his nose, had the manner of a man accustomed to having to speak softly in libraries. Tomasik, half his age, was robustly broad-chested, and youthfully confident. Grieco treated him with careful respect.

  Felici fell into a correspondence with one of the great botanists of the time, Ulisse Aldrovandi, at the University of Bologna. Aldrovandi asked Felici to describe the vegetables that were being eaten in his village, especially the salads and herbs, and how they were prepared: something like a field report. They were done in one way, Felici wrote: con olio, aceto, sale, e pepe. With oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper.

  After Felici’s death, his letters to Aldrovandi were published as a book. Grieco read a few sentences aloud, a reference to how the Italians had been regarded by the French, as indiscriminate salad eaters: “il cibo dell’insalate—così dette volgarmente, cibo quasi proprio (dicono gl’oltramontani) de’ Italiani ghiotti quali hanno tolta la vivanda agl’animali bruti che si magnano l’herbe crude—.”

  I had come upon the passage before, in 2003, in a cultural history of Italian cooking by Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari that would be my introduction to the beauty and high achievement of the Italian Renaissance kitchen. The text is now quite famous, if only for its droll wit, including the word, oltramontani, to describe the French: i.e., the people from the other side of the mountains. Those people think we are the crude ones—they think we are the gluttons (ghiotti)—because we take raw grass out of the mouths of brute animals and eat it instead of them!

  The French, Felici was saying, don’t get it. They are the ghiotti, meat-eaters only, who don’t understand the appeal of salad and vegetables, earth’s bounty, the expression of its seasons. Felici wasn’t to know that it would be only a matter of time.

  * * *

  —

  Is there a paper trail that we can follow that illustrates how the Italians taught the French how to make and dress a salad?

  Probably not.

  But there is a footpath, seldom mentioned by historians, a mountain trail, and the traffic on it, in food and people and ideas, was steady and busy. It is pre-Roman. It is as old as walking. It begins in Susa, the town the Romans called Segusio, on the northwestern edge of the Italian peninsula, passes through the mountains, and emerges in Le Planay, a village where the French established an early customhouse. It wasn’t the only way between Italy and France, but, in the early 1500s, had become popular enough for the king to see a tax-collecting revenue opportunity. In exchange for paying duties, traders were promised protection on the trail from thieves.

  What attracted the Italian traders? The foires, those quarterly markets in Lyon, only recently re-established, and this transalpine trail, sometimes called le chemin du Piémont, led directly to them. Many of the products sold there (spices, silks, mortadella, the suddenly popular “fromage de Milan”—i.e., Parmigiano) were Italian; most of the bankers, importers, and wholesalers (Gadagne, Capponi, Manelli, Grimaldi, Sauli, Johanno, Bonvisi, and Cenami) were of Italian descent. The foires made Lyon prosperous. They also made it into a culinary hothouse; they helped create the cuisine that was developing there.

  Later I traveled to Susa and learned the route has been protected by a customs pact for much longer than I had known. It is commemorated by a stone arch at the start of the trail, agreed between Caesar Augustus and the Celtic tribes of the Alps under King Cottius. The town no longer figures in guidebooks (with the construction of the Fréjus Tunnel, Susa is almost always bypassed), and since the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the borders have been effectively dissolved, but for me it was an unexpected miracle—to stand there, in front of the portal through which so much has passed, back and forth: hunter-gatherers, soldiers, salt, Hannibal with his elephants, black pepper, the Apostle Paul, Julius Caesar en route to conquering Gaul, Charles VIII hoping to conquer Italy, François Premier (twice), Rabelais, Montaigne, Leonardo da Vinci, manuscripts, merchants, popes, eighteen centuries of monks, religious pilgrims, Charlemagne, Italian bankers, the Renaissance, the history of Europe, and, possibly, a salad dressing.

  And, thus, this word “vinaigrette”: I think of it like a crustacean’s home, the shell. When its inhabitant dies, another creature moves in. Or like the peasant homes that you see on le chemin du Piémont, built from the stones of older homes that have been abandoned. Vinaigrette worked for a medieval stew. But it is a curiosity of history that when people stopped making the stew there was this great word that an oil-and-vinegar dressing could move into.

  Foods are always crossing the globe. The pig, at the heart of the Italian and French diet, came from China. Turkeys, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, and chocolates came from the Native Americans in the New World. The quenelle, famous as a Lyonnais food, came from the Austrian Knödel.

  But vinaigrette: This is of a different order. It is not an ingredient. It is a preparation. It is an idea, a way of eating.

  I would rarely meet a French person who believed that the Italians had anything to do with the development of French cuisine. A phrase I would hear often was the lack of “preuves incontestables d’Italienités”—the incontestable proof of anything Italian in what became French food.

  The evolution of the word “vinaigrette” is not an incontestable proof. But it invites one to consider the limitations that inhibit scholarly investigation. Culinary historians tend to work in the language of their specialization and rarely venture out of it—the Italians rarely speaking to the French, the French not going out of their way to speak to the Italians—none of which is surprising except that, in food matters, the two cultures are complexly connected. Jacqueline Boucher, a professor of sixteenth-century Lyonnais history, has written the excellent Présence Italienne à Lyon à la Renaissance (The Italian Presence in Lyon During the Renaissance). In her (admittedly abridged) bibliography, she lists forty-six works: Forty-two of them are in French, two in English, and one in Italian, a genealogy of the Gadagne banking family. How, I can’t help myself from asking, can one write about the Italians without reading what they had to say in their own words? In our time in France, I attended a number of Renaissance food conferences, fascinated by what there was to learn, and, each time, was warned by an organizer: “Watch the Italians and the French—they won’t want to have anything to do with each other.” That big mountain range separating the two countries appears to be much more than a matter of geology.

  That big mountain range itself is also misunderstood, informed by an anachronistic view that, in medieval and Renaissance Europe, a boat was more reliable than travel by foot or by animal, especially if it involved crossing the Alps, which was obviously too arduous for normal people to cross.

  Well, it wasn’t, and it isn’t. And, in an era without reliable meteorological forecasting, it was much less dangerous.

  I wanted to replicate that crossing, climbing up the steep side, with my young boys: to make the point that if they could do it—in, admittedly, the summer, the most favorable season for an Alpine crossing—so could cooks, artists, poets, architects, prin
cesses, monks with their knowledge of bread and sausage making, painters, and the whole long train of the Italian Renaissance. The trail, I knew, wasn’t in good shape. In 1803, Napoleon changed the route (he found a wider passage, suitable for his armies, that commenced in Lanslebourg, the next town up the valley from Le Planay, and that survives as a paved road, the D1006). After two hundred years, the original path is scarcely well maintained. We stayed at Lavis Trafford, the chambre d’hôte built on the premises of the original customhouse, and we tried the trail when the boys were five. In the morning, they walked a mile to the trailhead. There was a sign invoking the centuries of history that had made the ascent. The boys read it and said, “Nah.” They were already exhausted.

  We returned when they were seven. Encouraged by Marc Broyer, the Lavis Trafford proprietor, who mischievously described the walk as a “stroll” that wouldn’t “take more than an hour,” the boys and I, dressed in shorts and sandals (I never thought that they would actually reach the top), completed the hike. It took four hours. It wasn’t that far—four miles?—but was steep, and the trail was washed out and rocky (George twisted an ankle, Frederick, terrified of bees, was stung), and we ran out of drinking water before the last challenging ascent. Meanwhile, both boys were being covertly coerced by their father, who promised them that, if they completed the walk, the event would be recorded with their names (George Ely Buford and Frederick Hawkins Buford) in the book he was writing. They considered the offer and concluded, okay, they would press on. When we reached the top, there was running water, a restaurant, and a paved road. But that didn’t matter. Four years later, aged eleven, they did the hike again!

  * * *

  —

  VITERBO, ITALY. Our family was traveling to a medieval walled town in Lazio, to attend a weeklong conference on food, wine, and olive oil. Viannay had approved my going, but the others in the kitchen, on hearing about it two days before I departed, were outraged. You don’t take holidays unless the restaurant tells you to take one, and the restaurant permits them only when it closes—in August, and between Christmas and New Year—because there is no backup, and if you’re not there someone else has to do what you do. For two days, I heard different renditions, varying in their degree of sarcasm and venom, of “Bonnes vacances, putain.”

  The Viterbo event was an alumni event, organized by Jessica, for a program called School Year Abroad, SYA. It was open to former students who had spent a year in a non-English-speaking country to learn its language. (Jessica, at sixteen, had lived in Rennes, in Brittany.) For most alumni, the year abroad had been a life changer. The conceit of this event was that the alumni would reconnect to that early life-changing experience not by the conventional totems of high culture, but by food and drink and by talking about both. The speakers my wife invited included Ruth Reichl, Harold McGee, Thomas Keller, Dan Barber, among others, and me.

  Me?

  Well, yes, she would invite me. I was her husband. But the effect of the prospect surprised me. I experienced it as a groggy piece of mental awakening. I was a writer, or, for twenty-three years, a literary editor. Without my realizing it, I had stopped thinking of myself as a literary anything. I was a kitchen guy in mid-training.

  In New York, my profession had been my identity, confirmed pretty much all the time, in the day-to-day routine of appointments, meetings, parties, and social blah-blah. In Lyon, I didn’t have those social confirmations. Neither did Jessica and the boys. Our identities weren’t “stripped”; it was more that, without external reminders, they started to dissolve. In their school, the boys were still local celebrities, the New-Yorkais, but they were losing memories of their American home. They couldn’t remember what our apartment looked like. After two years, their French was better than their English.

  In Viterbo, we stayed in a modern hotel, together in a largish bedroom, and were ridiculously happy. Whatever was lost between my wife and me was gained in an intimacy among the four of us. We slept to the sounds of children sleeping. The arrangement—something like camping with room service—would become the model of our future travel in France. In the morning, my wife left early, and the children and I had breakfast. I was reconnecting with my paternity.

  In the afternoon, I met up with Dan Barber, who had shown up clandestinely, stealing an Italian getaway with his girlfriend, Aria Sloss. His kitchen didn’t know he was away.

  I hadn’t seen Barber since the white truffle supper at Dorothy’s.

  He asked me what I had been up to, and I said that I was doing a stage and cooking le personnel—nothing else, but I must have betrayed something in my face.

  “Oh, I am so sorry,” he said. The apology was solicitous and unexpected. I thought I might cry.

  Barber’s time in France turned out not to be so straightforward after all.

  He had worked in two places, he said. The first had been Michel Rostang’s. Barber spoke French, and was given a position on the line, because Rostang liked him, but Rostang was rarely in the kitchen, and the others, especially those who wanted to work on the line, made Barber suffer.

  “I am familiar with the dynamic,” I said.

  “The second restaurant was rougher. It was in Provence.”

  “Where?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “What is it called?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Oh, come on. I won’t tell.”

  “No. It’s famous. The chef was a maniac,” Barber went on. “If we were slow, he closed the windows, locked the doors, shut off the air-conditioning, and made us work in the heat. It was summer in the south of France. It was one of the hottest summers on record.”

  “Two thousand three?” It was the summer when we were in Italy, and hundreds died in their apartments. I had heard of the no-A/C treatment.

  “I used to get hit.”

  I couldn’t imagine Barber’s being hit.

  “A lot. If I was slow. Or for no reason.” He put a hand to his cheek. “I always had a big swollen knot here.” He chuckled. Barber is long-limbed, bespectacled, and helplessly intellectual. The French kitchen types are brawny and big-armed and can be as stupid as a fence. His laughter about his time with them was self-deprecating and winning.

  “One day, shortly after I started, the maître d’ came into the back and said, ‘I smell something. Is anyone else picking up the smell?’ No one said anything. He returned to the front of the house.

  “The next day, he wandered back into the kitchen. ‘I smell it again. Really, no one else is smelling it?’ He went back to the front of the house.

  “The next day, he returned. ‘I’ve got it. It’s the smell of a Jew.’ ”

  “You won’t tell me the name of the restaurant?”

  “No.”

  I was humbled by Barber. He had said that French kitchen training was invaluable, and that you could always spot the young cooks who had it. It was a complex message.

  At La Mère Brazier, no one had been hit.

  * * *

  —

  When I got back to La Mère Brazier, the banter resumed. (“Did you enjoy your vacances, putain?”) But there was also a noticeable difference, an animation, a new energy. In the small, intensely felt, emotionally exaggerated place known as the kitchen, there had been changes in the duties of the members of the brigade.

  First, Florian would no longer be at garde-manger. He had been promoted. He was going to become a line cook, doing fish, and work alongside Frédéric. Christophe had come through for him. Florian set up his mise-en-place at his new station. He was physically changed, taller, no longer stooped. For the whole day, he smiled.

  Second, I was told that I, too, had been promoted, although it would take me two weeks to realize that I had been. I would continue to make le personnel, and I liked learning that, in my absence, it had been cooked by Chern and Florian, tra
ding off, and everyone was still complaining about what they had to eat. But now I was to report, officially, to the meat station. No one said I would be cooking on the line, and after being savaged by a Viannay who had gone wolverine on me, I didn’t even ask. In fact, that was exactly the prospect—if I showed that I was ready, if I then proved that I could do it.

  Sylvain, too, had a new job—and this was the most radical news. He would be running garde-manger. It was now his responsibility with a much reduced staff; one person, in fact: Hortense.

  Sylvain told me that when Christophe informed him of the change he closed his eyes and asked him to repeat it. His body shuddered. It was, for him, a clear demotion. He had started at garde-manger. He had then been promoted to sous-chef. People referred to him as le cuisinier, the guy who made the kitchen work. To go from the pass, at the front, plating the food, to garde-manger in the back: How could it not be a disappointment?

  He rearranged his demeanor. “I’ll use it to perfect my pâté-en-croûte,” he said. He smiled the giant Sylvain smile. “I’ll practice for the coupe.”

  The coupe—the cup—is held in Tain, the winemaking village between Lyon and Valence, to honor what is judged to be the world’s best pâté-en-croûte. Makers—officially from “all over the world,” but effectively from “all over France” (because where else would they come from?) and mainly from the Rhône Valley—convene and produce the most aesthetically thunderous expressions of meat inside of a piece of dough that you will ever see in your life. Sylvain was determined to compete. He was determined to win. It would be his ticket to whatever was next in his life.

  * * *

  —

  One morning, early, just after eight, Hortense rushed into the front kitchen. Sylvain marched in right after her, in long, purposeful strides. He was wild with anger.