Dirt

by Bill Buford

  He was still trying to get back. He had promised Gregory Stawowy, a former chef at Daniel in New York, that they would open a restaurant together. I visited potential sites with them. A brasserie opposite the Pont La Feuillée, the gateway into the raucous Vieux Lyon. (“Too much like a pub.”) A sixteenth-century mansion and library on the Saône, one of the properties of the ancien régime that the city of Lyon would assume ownership of and was now trying to exploit. (“Too grand and commanding,” and Boulud shuddered at the prospect of having to work again with the city’s property people.) But there was a bouchon, La Voûte Chez Léa (built on the perimeter of a former monastery, in the original arch or voûte, and opened by Mère Léa in 1943), that appealed: not too big, but historic, with at least a partial view of the river, and, with its mère connections, expressive of good, basic Lyonnais cooking. He submitted a bid, 350,000 euros, and then returned to New York. But he was being played. The guy conducting the sale didn’t know Boulud (“A Lyonnais in New York?”) and had always intended to sell the property to Christian Têtedoie, one of the city’s rising stars; he had needed someone to up the price with a bid.

  It wasn’t so easy being a Lyonnais in New York. I puzzled the prospect afterward, Boulud and Stawowy, and it was hard not to wonder at the psychological complexity of their partnership, the younger chef trying to complete what the younger Boulud had longed to do.

  Boulud, when in town, always saw me. It was a privilege.

  It was also true that Boulud had in me someone that he had never known before. For more than thirty years, he has been telling Americans about Lyon, the gastronomic heart of French cooking, and no one was interested. The food was meant to be heavy, they told him. The Lyonnais are famously unfriendly, they said. And it’s a city. Its outer boroughs, les banlieues, were ugly and industrial. It’s not Provence. It’s not the Côte d’Azur. And now, in me, seemingly out of nowhere, he had someone who seemed to get it, or was at least putting in the time, and who had moved here with his family and seemed prepared to stay as long as it took to understand the place.

  He kept a respectful distance, as though an intervention might impugn my apparent intention to make my way on my own, which, of course, only appeared to be my intention because, alas, I did have to make my way on my own—with the help of my linguistically gifted and supremely organized better half. Boulud became the person who filled in the gaps.

  Boulud saw Bocuse every time he came to the city—it was a promise to himself to do so—and often called me at the last minute. “Come quick, I’m at Bernachon”—the pâtisserie and salon de thé owned by Bocuse’s daughter and son-in-law, on the Cours Franklin Roosevelt, in the sixth arrondissement—and I would rush over, half dressed, sometimes with the twins, and arrive either just in time to say hello or a little too late. One extremely rainy Saturday evening, a monsoonlike summer deluge, Boulud called—I hadn’t known that he was in the city. “Come quick, you must meet Pierre Orsi.” Orsi, who had started in Bocuse’s kitchen, was one of the grandees of the city. That night, I didn’t make it, but I would meet him later, once again with Boulud, a long, digressive evening in the back—chef gossip, Bocuse stories, dishes. Orsi was among the gentlest people I’ve met in the kitchen.

  Boulud and I are the same age, but he had been in the city when he was a teenager and learned a Lyon that few of us have any chance of knowing.

  He was uncomprehending that I didn’t know how to mount écrevisses. Écrevisses—“crayfish” or “crawfish” (if, like me, you’re from Louisiana), a ubiquitous dish adornment in Boulud’s time and you prepared them by hooking their tails underneath their jaws as if they were sitting in a chair.

  I had to tell him: “Daniel, times change. No one pokes a crayfish on a toothpick into their food. It isn’t done.”

  “C’est vrai? Non, ce n’est pas possible!”

  Or that I didn’t know how to turn a mushroom, a particularly challenging way of carving the cap so that it looks like a finely ribbed miniature parasol for fleas. “What do they teach you at L’Institut Bocuse?” he asked.

  Me (again): “Well, they didn’t teach turning mushrooms, because no one does that anymore.”

  He shook his head. He didn’t believe me. In his eyes, I hadn’t been fully trained.

  Once, he alluded to Route Nationale Sept—the National Route 7. I didn’t know the reference.

  He was horrified.

  When I found out what it was, I, too, was horrified, although I also discovered a good reason for my not immediately knowing it, since it no longer exists. (Again the time warp.)

  For centuries, the route (small, rural, rarely paved—originally a Roman road, when Lyon had been the capital of Gaul, then a royal one in the sixteenth century) was the principal way to reach the Mediterranean from the north. It gets its name from being among a dozen established routes, radiating from the capital and leading to a frontier. (La Route Nationale Cinq, for instance, leads to the Alps.) “La Sept” leads you down the country’s eastern corridor, passing near many of the principal winemaking regions of the southeast, and has come to represent the core of French cuisine, if only because, in the eternal way of things, when there is good wine, there is usually good food.

  But since the 1970s, the “RN7”—the universally recognized shorthand—has been slowly supplanted by what would become a massive motorway, the A7: a six-to-eight-lane monstrosity locally called L’Autoroute du Soleil that, at the height of summer (“Alert rouge!”), becomes a bumper-to-bumper parade of campers and station wagons with bicycles on top, rear windows obscured by beach balls, umbrellas, children’s paraphernalia, and leading to everyone’s beach-holiday fantasy. You can still follow the National Route 7 by superimposing an old map on a modern one, and will discover an ancient, simple two-lane road, sometimes framed by historic plane trees, and sometimes with only the occasional edifice—a café, a village bistro, a post office, a winemaker, a home—built right up to the edge of the road, as it would have been from a time when transport was done by animals. Many of the restaurants—and it breaks the heart to see how many small family restaurants are still there (just)—hark back to the nineteenth century.

  For Anne-Sophie Pic, born in 1969, the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of a line of venerable chefs (including André Pic, who is celebrated in Curnonsky’s Lyon: The Gastronomic Capital of the World), La Sept has an aura of magic. Her family’s restaurant was in Valence, about sixty-five miles south of Lyon, and is, like all the old establishments, built on the route’s very edge. In her view, La Sept was the foundation of French cuisine, la véritable épine dorsale, its spine. Her father, Jacques Pic (born in 1932), was a member of the nouvelle cuisine generation, which was mainly scattered along the National Route 7. “They were musketeers. In pictures, you always see Pierre Troisgros, Paul Bocuse, and my father together. Alain Chapel is there too, as well as Roger Vergé.”

  * * *

  —

  On one of Boulud’s Lyon visits, he asked Viannay if he could take Jessica and me to lunch at Alain Chapel’s restaurant in the Dombes: not, technically, on the old RN7, but an established detour from it. (I had thought, No chance, Viannay won’t agree—and then was surprised by Boulud’s sway. He asked; it happened.) It was the first of what would be many culinary forays, in which Boulud tried to share with me his fragile, just-on-the-verge-of-disappearing Lyon.

  The trip taught me the Dombes. It is said that if you don’t know the Dombes you don’t understand Lyon.

  The Dombes is a sunken plateau, a geological peculiarity, situated between two mountain ridges, the Alps and the high hills of Beaujolais, and less a valley than a vast spongy footprint. On a map, the Dombes looks like the bayou—fifty miles of ponds and streams—except the bayou is at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and the Dombes is near nothing. It could be a dinosaurs’ playground. The land is half water, largely untamed, and empty. The
wild foods that you eat in Lyon come from the Dombes: ducks, geese, wild pigs, brochet, frogs, hare, crayfish, trout, woodcocks, deer, rabbits, and freshwater eels. The farm that Mère Brazier grew up on is in the Dombes. It is also where Alain Chapel—regarded by many as the greatest chef of his generation (born in 1937)—grew up, an intuitive swamp-botanist, observing it like a scientist in training.

  Chapel was insistent, obsessed, introverted, mercurial, troubled, bighearted, and a genius. He was bookish, an unusual quality in a chef, a scholar of French cuisine, with a legendary library; he spoke rarely, walked the Dombes with his dog daily, listened to Schubert obsessively, loved to join hunts but never shot a gun, was full of rage that he vented privately (and then personally repaired the doors that had splintered in its expression), and ran a kitchen that was like a Carthusian monastery in its tranquil, silent intensity. He wrote one book, La Cuisine, c’est beaucoup plus que des recettes (Cooking Is Much More Than Recipes), 510 pages, a polemic and a poem and, despite its title, a give-it-all-away collection of groundbreaking preparations. He extracted small livers from an improbable bog creature called a “freshwater monkfish.” He juiced the farmers’ first lettuce of the season and cooked his spring peas in this liquid. When, on a trip to Provence, he discovered wild thyme, he imagined not cooking with it, but raising rabbits on it, and then cooking them. His food was regional in the extreme.

  “This was where I used to hang out,” Boulud said, speaking about when he was working nearby, at Georges Blanc in 1973, and had a car. “On my way home.” Everyone knew that Chapel, in the village of Mionnay (the population then fewer than four hundred people), was at the epicenter of what was going to happen next in French food. Boulud knew the cooks, and often stopped here for the atmosphere of promise, the feverish feeling of the kitchen, the perfect food, when Chapel was only in his early thirties and everything seemed possible. Boulud’s eyes came alive at the recollection. His eyes asked: Do you know enough to know how exciting that time was?

  And then, in 1990, Chapel died, “crise cardiaque,” at fifty-two, the same age when his father had died, also of a crise cardiaque.

  Daniel would introduce me to others. Each visit was a little bit like Christmas: Régis Marcon, the three-star chef, MOF, and master mushroom forager, in the mountains above Condrieu; Michel Bras, a high priest of the kitchen, in the treeless foothills in Laguiole, the Auvergne; Michel Guérard (three-star chef and an MOF), in Gascony, who was the most naturally inventive chef I would meet in France (he opened Le Pot-au-Feu in 1965, in an unglamorous, rough suburb of Paris, where he tweaked and twisted and improvised on the French classics, making them better, lighter, more fun, and became the embodiment of the nouvelle-cuisine mantra, “Make it new”). After Gascony, Boulud and I made our way back to Lyon, and he made a proposal.

  He was completing a cookbook, which he thought of as his take on French cuisine, but something was missing that he believed the two of us could provide. He was wondering if we might cook together in New York, side by side, making the dozen or so preparations that he regarded as essential to his formation as a chef. These dozen or so dishes were, in some elusively poetic way, iconic for him. They had made him a chef. It would take time to assemble. It was a wonderful prospect, and I agreed to join him.

  By the time I flew over, I had been away three years. New York was disconcertingly familiar, its conveniences, its deliveries, its bright winter blue, the English language, which seemed soft and easy. I stared at people’s mouths when they spoke. I was lost in our small apartment. Where did we keep the plates? How did we make our coffee? I retrieved my knife bag, and reported to Daniel’s very French, very Lyonnais kitchen, where I was, to my surprise, instantly at ease.

  The roster of dishes was high and low, haute and farmhouse, and therefore very Lyonnais: veal head (rustic) but done in the shape of a tortoise (haute); a roast chicken (farmhouse basic) but completely boned and reconstructed so that it could be eaten by the slice (haute, and very flash). A leg of pork cooked in hay (what, frankly, could be more peasant?); a turbot done as a soufflé. I was intrigued by Chartreuse, a dish that Boulud said had somehow got lost and dropped after the nouvelle-cuisine revolution. (It was a Carême specialty, inspired by the non-meat-eating Chartreuse monks, a game dish with the game hidden inside of what looks like a vegetable birthday cake.) Or a coulibiac, an import from Russia in the nineteenth century, when the Russians and the French were culinary cousins.

  My account of the dishes appears in Daniel: My French Cuisine, and I won’t describe them. But there are two that warrant attention because they would occur later, in Lyon, in a conversation that would be illuminating for both Boulud and me, although in different ways: the “ham in hay” and the flashy boned chicken, called a volaille à Noelle.

  Boulud first ate the ham in hay at the Auberge de Paul Bocuse, when he was seventeen years old and had just completed a short stint there. Boulud had no idea that you could cook with hay: “It was what we fed the animals.” In the confusion, and excitement, of finding it on his plate in a three-Michelin-star restaurant, he betrayed his divided upbringing: His rustic had been really rustic (except for the electricity in his home and the use of petroleum-powered engines in the farm vehicles, he could have walked out of the nineteenth century). His idea of travel was going to a country fair to sell garlic. But his “haute” was very haute. At Nandron, he learned to make foods that, in the eyes of his family, could have come from Mars. Daniel’s grandmother, who made the meals chez Boulud, had never served Martian food.

  The hay recipe wasn’t a Bocuse invention. It appears in country cookbooks and publications from the eighteenth century, a genuine farm preparation in which “hay” is used like an herb, an aromatic to cook the ham in. In Boulud’s re-creation, he made a hay brine and soaked the ham overnight in it. He used a penetration-and-probe device to pump more brine into the meat’s tissue. He wove tightly wound hay cords around the leg.

  The two of us smelled like a stall, and had to change clothes after the morning prep. When the ham was done, we pried off a pastry cap and breathed in the results. Had the hayness dissipated? Maybe, but it was what it was, and we were happy.

  The volaille à Noelle is based on the conceit of a bird, entirely boned, that has been refilled with vegetables and truffles and the meat, and that is then, in effect, reinflated to look like the real bird. You eat it by the slice.

  It was my new skill: turning a chicken inside out and removing everything except the beak and feet.

  The preparation was the creation of Joannès Nandron—aka Nandron, Sr., the father of the father-and-son team—and since he never wrote a cookbook, the instruction was more than a little vague. Also, by the time that Boulud was there, aged fourteen, the old guy had effectively retired (and, according to Boulud, was usually drunk). Asparagus made an appearance, Boulud remembered, and the chicken stuffing was prepared as a mousse. There is also a video, Nandron, Sr.’s only television appearance, that had been retrieved by the Musées Gadagne for a gastronomic exhibit. (It depicts a rotund, impatient man of zero charisma, a round face, and a short-haired caterpillar mustache, who is bored and imperious, and possibly drunk, tossing together a dish that he has made a thousand times, stuffing a saggy bird with a mousse that looks like slop, some carrots, a fistful of peas, and gobs of butter.) For this dish, Boulud was pretty much on his own. The result was crisp and golden on the outside, a piece of art within: a miracle to behold. The bird was also, alas—which I say trepidatiously, if only because I now regard Daniel Boulud as my unofficial mentor—a little disappointing, dry mainly, and evidence, yet again, at how such dishes are not recipes but lifelong relationships. (I also wonder if there was something to Nandron, Sr.’s drunken preparation, with its fistfuls of dairy fat, to give the filling an unctuous richness that it might need.)

  * * *

  —

  QUENELLES. They were not on the Mère Brazier menu. But
a quenelle was such a fundamentally Lyonnais dish, and Brazier’s version had been so famous, that you had to wonder: Why wasn’t Viannay making one?

  I asked a chef to teach me how to make them, one of my new friends, Alain Vigneron, at Café Comptoir Abel, a bouchon farther down the quai from our home, a bus ride. It is an arcane, dark, elaborately shuttered structure, embedded in a stone arch of a ninth-century monastery, and with rooms like an old English pub: low-ceilinged, a fireplace in each, history nailed into every wall space, no two rooms alike. As an eating establishment, it dates from at least 1726, and quite possibly earlier. I spent Saturdays there. The quenelle recipe was a theft. It was Mère Brazier’s secret. (Brazier did grant interviews to Roger Moreau, a food journalist who produced a 1977 book based on them called Les Secrets de la Mère Brazier. But the quenelle recipe that you find inside is a blah-blah filler text, because obviously Moreau could not not have a quenelle entry, but it is nothing like what she served.)

  The real recipe was smuggled out of her kitchen when it was being run by her son, Gaston.

  “All of Lyon knows that Gaston was abused by his mother,” Abel’s chef, Alain Vigneron, told me, as if in explanation when I asked how he came by the recipe. “All of Lyon knows how he was crushed by her”—he pressed his toe into the floor and swiveled it—“like a bug.” (Gaston was a man, his daughter Jacotte remembers, who wanted only to please but, in his dealings with his famous mother, managed only to infuriate. He became her sous-chef, and still he provoked her, his attentive presence, his respect, his number-two-ness.) Whatever the source, and Viannay later confirmed for me that the recipe was indeed the real one, Vigneron—early fifties, sturdily built, a head of brown hair, a soft, tolerant face, born in Lyon and cooking at Abel for four decades—appears to be the only one in the city still making the dish as la mère made it eighty years ago.