Dirt

by Bill Buford

  It seems that Hortense had fetched the wrong pot for Sylvain. There must have been more to it than a simple pot, but the pot, in its wrongness, became the proverbial trigger. Hortense, frightened, took cover behind a cooking island: a flattop stacked high with, as it happens, many pots. Sylvain strode up to it, pulled his arm back, and swept all the pots onto the floor. They made a cascading crashing sound—tops, a sauté pan, casseroles, everything stainless steel, very loud, and very bright, the metal under the kitchen lights—and all of it tumbling thunderously around Hortense. It was so unexpected and loud that, for a moment, I thought a structure had collapsed. Hortense hugged herself. She seemed to be trying to be small. She looked—her face, the flat-out terror in it—as though she was about to be killed.

  Sylvain, hyperventilating, having crossed some line, now even more furious, picked up a pot and hurled it at Hortense. He missed. It clanged against an oven door. He picked up another and threw it. This missed, too. He picked up a third, a fourth, a fifth—fast, fast, fast—and missed each time. He seemed not to be trying to hit Hortense, only to scare her, although I’m not sure that Hortense was comforted by the distinction or even if, in the circumstances, it had occurred to her. For instance, it is not my belief that, amid all this banging and crashing, Hortense was thinking: Oh yes, these pots flying in my direction, they’re not actually going to strike me in the head. No, I’m safe. It’s just poor Sylvain I’m worried about—how he really needs to make noise.

  Christophe, like the rest of us, watched until Sylvain was done. Then he got back to work.

  There was another outburst. This one also involved a new stagiaire, a fifteen-year-old from a lycée, whom I called “Little Matty,” since he was the third Mathieu in the kitchen. Owing to his age, his stint was limited: no longer than ten weeks, no later than 10:00 p.m. He’d had a rough start, and was treated badly, and the bad treatment was making him aggressive in turn. (He was like a petri dish of the workplace’s toxins: He had arrived innocent, got roundly abused, and was now trying to find his place as an abuser.) He said something, a nasty tone, about how the sink had not been properly cleaned by the last person who used it, and was instantly airborne.

  Sylvain lifted Matty by the throat, pinned him against a refrigerator door, feet dangling in the air, raised his fist—it seemed to be the size of a melon—and cocked his arm like a tightly compressed spring. I stared at Matty’s face, his now big eyes, his delicate features, his small straight nose: about to be crushed.

  Sylvain tightened his grip. “I hate you. I want to hit you in the face. I really need to hit you in the face.” The two of them remained poised there, Little Matty and Sylvain with his big arm.

  “Why?” Little Matty asked, high-pitched, uncomprehending. “Why do you want to hit me in the face?”

  It was a reasonable question and showed, on Matty’s part, an impressive clarity of mind.

  Sylvain paused and, for a flicker of a moment, seemed confused. “I don’t know why. I don’t like the way you look.”

  “I’m sorry.” Je suis désolé.

  Sylvain stared into Matty’s unsatisfactory face, breathing hard, wanting the pleasure of hitting him, and didn’t hit him. He dropped him.

  Christophe, standing off to the side, talking to the pastry chef, had paused. Once Matty had crumpled, a heap at Sylvain’s feet, Christophe resumed his conversation.

  I wonder now: Why didn’t I intervene?

  By the end of the week, Sylvain had another outburst.

  The artichokes had just been delivered and were by the service door, and were of two sizes, medium and very large. The medium-sized chokes were for the soup. Would I mind breaking off the stems? Sylvain asked. He regarded me now as a member of the meat station.

  I was grateful for the courtesy.

  There were three crates. I got through them. Then I don’t know what happened—I fell into the rhythm of the labor and got lost, or I disappeared into the reverie of being by an open door, or my brain did that Zen walkabout thing—because I proceeded to stem the large artichokes as well. The very big artichokes were not for soup. These were prized. They were to be carved carefully as the centerpiece of a starter.

  Sylvain checked in on me. He stared in silent astonishment. Then he picked up each artichoke and hurled it into a wall. I was in a corner, between the door and the artichoke boxes. I was trapped. The display was for me.

  I felt that I knew Sylvain enough to know what was going on in his mind: namely, that each artichoke being smashed against the wall wasn’t an artichoke. Each one was my head. Sylvain was hurling my head against the white tile wall, making a splattery green spray.

  In his defense (and I like Sylvain and am happy to defend him, even if he was momentarily overcome by an urge to obliterate my head), he had plenty to be frustrated about. Some of his frustrations arose out of the restaurant’s not-ever-quite-clear use of stagiaires. Viannay liked them because he didn’t have to pay them or, at least, have to pay them much. (Most stagiaires get a weekly stipend, except, of course, yours truly.) For my part, I was happy to be one because I now regard the arrangement—cooks in training exchanging their labor to work in a celebrated restaurant—as the best way to learn French cuisine. Sylvain, for his part, didn’t want a stagiaire at all: Couldn’t he at least have a trained cook he could count on?

  Then there was Florian. What did he want from a stagiaire, now that he had been promoted to a line cook? Evidently, a slave or an elf or a small animal he could kick every now and then. It was, I hasten to add, a perfectly comprehensible need, and it might, one day, make Florian, who had obviously been abused and humiliated in his time, into a better cook and—who knows?—maybe a loving human being. Because the fact is that Florian, even though he was now at the fish station, was in my face more than ever.

  The next morning, he dropped a sack of potatoes on my worktop, the moment the staff lunch was done. “Peel them.”

  It was for his purée: the fish station’s responsibility.

  “Asparagus,” he said, before I had completed the potatoes, dragging over the large plastic orange-crate. “Clean them.”

  I could see what Florian was doing. What I couldn’t figure out was how to stop him. I hadn’t been bullied since fourth grade and had developed strategies for never getting bullied again: charm, wit, jokes, and then—and only if every tactic of good humor had failed—outright evasion. But it wasn’t easy. The kitchen is a small space.

  “Carrots. Peel them.”

  * * *

  —

  ONE DAY—and I remember the date, July 14, Bastille Day (when, unlike most restaurants in Lyon, we were open)—I saw something in Christophe that seemed to enlarge my understanding of him. It didn’t make me like him, but I felt a quality verging on respect.

  The occasion was a sauce. Christophe had ordered chipolatas for le personnel, 180 of them. They are a long and skinny sausagelike entity, gnarly and fatty, with bits of bone and cartilage that get stuck between your teeth while you eat them, and smell like roadkill on a hot day. They are disgusting. The Lyonnais loved them.

  I resolved to roast them in the oven (sautéing would pollute the kitchen; the sausages also exude a black glue that is difficult to scrub off the pans). For the sides: boiled potatoes, smashed with butter and salt, and red onions, sliced thin, braised with red-wine vinegar (like a relish, with a bracing acidic bite: very good, I hoped, with bad fat).

  Christophe interrupted me. He wanted to know what I was preparing for a sauce.

  “For chipolatas?” I asked.

  “There is a sauce.” He told me to go upstairs for a bottle of Port.

  I followed his instructions. Shallots, a little butter, a whole bottle of Port, reduce. It was purple and rich and smelled of plums and of a place that wasn’t here.

  I got on with the rest of the meal, checking every now
and then on the Port, until it was about an inch deep.

  “Monter,” he said. Build it with butter.

  I thought: A beurre rouge with Port. I built it, whisking, whisking, whisking.

  I checked on the sausages. They were done (i.e., they looked like Halloween, bony fingers retrieved, scorched, from a fire). I covered them with foil, and put them on a high shelf.

  I returned to my sauce.

  “Three slices of prosciutto,” Christophe said. He had a stash in a lowboy.

  “Three?”

  “Taste,” Christophe said.

  I added salt and pepper.

  I tasted the sauce again.

  “Vinegar?” I said.

  He took a jar off a shelf and handed it to me.

  “Moût de raisin,” he said.

  “As in wine?” Moût is grape must, the skins that remain after fermentation and can be distilled afterward into a spirit, like grappa (in Italy) or marc (in Burgundy). Or made, evidently, into mustard. I opened the jar. The moût mustard was black and grainy; dense, like tiny caviar.

  I added two spoonfuls.

  “Taste.”

  The sauce now had bite. I liked it. I added more pepper.

  Hortense appeared with a salad. Outside, in the bar, waiters were setting the tables. It was ten-thirty-five.

  Christophe looked in a drawer and pulled out a wedge of duck demi-glace, a verboten wobbly (“trop cher!”)—a meat stock reduced until it is a brick of gelatin and flavor. (In such moments, everyone in the kitchen makes “whoopee” noises.) A demi-glace, added to whatever you’ve been fussing with, instantly intensifies everything: more body, a richness that is both fruity and savory, a meatiness that doesn’t taste of meat.

  The result was like an edible liquid expression of purple velvet: sweet because of the Port, and faintly (but only faintly) meaty, maybe because of the prosciutto, or the demi-glace, or both. The shallots and the mustard added sharpness. But the sauce also had a textural quality that I hadn’t expected, like a fabric, and was pleasing to look at.

  On the weekend, I tried chipolatas on the boys.

  I happened to have a leftover sauce, which I’d frozen, no idea what. I smelled. Maybe chicken? The demi-glace Christophe gave me was whatever he’d had on hand. What the hell? I tossed it in.

  The boys liked the dinner. They didn’t stand up and sing “La Marseillaise.” But they did say “yum” and finished their food, each one scraping up the leftover Port deliciousness with a fork.

  Before bed, I browsed a copy of Escoffier. I had assumed that Christophe had made the sauce up, except that he seemed to be adhering so faithfully to an itinerary, one item after another, as if it were a known thing. It was the prosciutto slices that seemed so eccentric. I found it, not exactly as we did it, but among several salty-sweet preparations.

  I had a glimpse of Christophe’s basic mental kitchen database, and of the thousands of sauces that could be found in it. He’d plucked this one out of his head because he knew that a sweet-savory thing would go with a salty, disgusting one. I was impressed by the command. It seemed both old-fashioned and rather profound.

  * * *

  —

  After lunch, Christophe and I were changing out of our kitchen clothes together. He alluded to having seen me several weeks before with my children—“a father with his boys,” he said. It was the first personal thing he had said to me that hadn’t been done with mocking irony. I wondered: Can I trust what I’m hearing?

  We chatted, which was also novel. I mentioned the lycée student, Little Mathieu. He had completed his ten-week stage. (He had also complained to his teacher, a big no-no, and, worse, the teacher had phoned Viannay, who then took the boy, looking very solemn, out into the courtyard—we were all watching from the kitchen—and seemed to give him a lecture on la rigueur, as well as on the basic axiom that what goes on in the kitchen stays there.)

  Christophe’s face looked stricken. “Ah, petit Mathieu,” he said. “That was a mistake, bringing in someone so young.” He paused, seeming to reflect on the error of having agreed to take him on. “I regret it.”

  It was a complex confession. Christophe wasn’t necessarily objecting to what went on in the kitchen—which seemed like a given—but that Little Mathieu had been too young to be subjected to it.

  In the days after, my 11:00 a.m. staff meals seemed, somehow, not to matter so much. I continued to make them but they were no longer a test. Without my entirely knowing how, I was sliding into becoming a member of the line.

  NO FOOD ROAD MORE IMPORTANT

  In summer, I can’t sleep, my head full of the voices of guests dining under the linden trees in the garden. What magic. It’s the middle of the 1970s: Charlie Chaplin comes to dinner, as do Serge Gainsbourg, Jean Piat, many others. The tablecloths, the carts—everything is sumptuous, like a fairy tale. Planted on my balcony, I see Jane Birkin’s bare feet, the elegance of the guests, the exuberance of the artists. People stop to see us because they’re on the way to the Côte d’Azur on the Route Nationale 7. Salvador Dalí is often here. (There he is, drawing little things for my brother, as Dalí’s wife keeps a watchful eye.) When there are violent storms, the wind lays waste to everything on the terrace. The guests, with their napkins on their heads, protect their skirts and suits and retreat into the restaurant. They have to be reseated, the cooking stops, everything has to be redone. There are howls. So gigantically stressful. I feel sorry for everyone, but no one panics. Service gives rhythm to our life. I wait for the guests to leave, swinging in the garden amid the smells of wet earth and thyme.

  ANNE-SOPHIE PIC, TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY CLIO DOYLE

  Daniel Boulud came to Lyon just about every two months, and each time he seemed completely different from the person I’d once known in New York. There, he had been as hard and as assertive as the city. In Lyon, he was a pet puppy: soft, empathetic, sometimes self-doubting, solicitous, humble, introspective, and uninhibitedly honest. It would take me a full year to feel brazen enough to ask him about the change. We had eaten lunch at Potager, and afterward I drove him to Les Halles to pick up fish to cook for his parents in the evening, “because they are farmers and never eat it.” They lived in the village of Saint-Pierre-de-Chandieu, twenty miles southeast of Lyon, amid pastures and vegetable fields. Just as he was getting out of the car, I put the question to him—Do you know how different you are when you’re here?

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You do?” I was surprised. (I’m not sure why: that my perception had turned out to be sound, or that he was so aware of it?)

  “Yes, yes, I know I’m different, but I’ve never known the words to describe how or why.”

  He had in his face, at that moment, a purity of expression that was rare to see in an adult. He was here, in his home, with his mother and father, his siblings, his nieces and nephews, his chef buddies, and would be spending the night in the farmhouse where he had been born (and where his father and grandfather had been born) and that had been owned by his family for at least 180 years, and nothing else—no restaurant enterprise, business prospect, banquet, urgent phone call, no piece of New York business—was going to complicate what lay ahead of him, the simple prospect of making food for his parents at their kitchen table and making them happy. He seemed whole.

  Boulud began his career when he was fourteen, a difficult adolescent (“a handful for my parents”), made restless by school and bored by the farm (“He was allergic to hay,” his mother, Marie, told me—“how can you be a farm boy and allergic to hay?”). He declared, suddenly, that he wanted to be a chef, even though he was unclear about what a chef did. He had never been inside a restaurant. He had never been to a grocery store. He had never eaten store-bought food. Everything came from the farm: milk, wine, cheese, vinegar, vegetables, salads, bread, pickled vegetables, pickled
meat, cured meat, nothing frozen, plus chickens and ducks and the fatty bacon served cold at breakfast.

  His parents tried to help, but they didn’t go to restaurants, either, so they called in a neighbor, referred to by the Bouluds as “the countess.” “Countess Volpi,” as she called herself, was fond of Daniel. She also ate in restaurants and knew the chefs who ran them. She was a wealthy young widow who had moved to Lyon from Paris—single, modern, with long platinum hair, an American car (a Mustang convertible), an affluent surgeon as a lover—and she took up the young Boulud’s cause. She phoned every three-star establishment she knew, summoning the chef by name and asking if anyone needed a stagiaire (Bocuse, La Mère Brazier, La Pyramide—nothing). She got lucky with Nandron, a family establishment, father and son, in Lyon, on the Rhône River, that made grand, elaborate nineteenth-century French dishes at a time (1969, just before the advent of nouvelle cuisine) when they would be among the last to prepare them. Boulud knew Lyon only as the city where he helped out at his father’s farm stand on Saturdays. Now he was, in effect, moving there. He found a room in an uncle’s home in the city, and disappeared into the kitchen just after his fourteenth birthday. He would emerge later to take up employment elsewhere—Georges Blanc and Paul Bocuse—and, at eighteen, would leave Lyon forever.

  Boulud’s Lyon started in a kitchen and ended in one. It was, for him, a time-warp city, the most intense four years of his youth, most of it spent indoors, and then he was gone—the south (with Roger Vergé); the southwest (with Michel Guérard); Denmark; Washington, D.C.; New York. Sometimes it seemed that he was trying to retrieve what he missed or, at least, a version of what his life might have been if he hadn’t left.

  In 1989, he almost succeeded. He resolved to return to Lyon and open a restaurant there. He had a newborn and wanted to raise her in Lyon, had been worn out by New York, power and business and money, and missed his home city, the enduring appeal of a place where nothing was more important than your next meal. He scouted venues, met with city officials (“Grand Lyon,” as the city’s administration calls itself, owned and still owns a portfolio of beautiful historic properties), but couldn’t raise the money. People were confused by him, Boulud told me, this guy who said he was Lyonnais—but, then, why was he living in New York?