Dirt

by Bill Buford

  LINE COOK

  You learn to cook at the meat station by doing it. There is no further instruction. “You must cook and be seen to be cooking,” Mathieu Kergourlay told me, in a whisper. Kergourlay was the number-three cook in the kitchen. I was standing between him and Chern.

  “I just jump in?” I asked.

  “Yes. Jump in. Now.”

  So I did. I jumped in: with sweetbreads, as it happens, ris de veau, which was the first ticket item.

  “Remember. You are being watched.”

  I nodded. Viannay and Christophe were both standing nearby.

  “You will always be watched. Nothing you do will go unnoticed.”

  I seasoned the sweetbreads, put a sauté pan on the flattop, and added butter.

  Viannay instantly called out from across the kitchen, “Tu les fais rissoler”—You cook them rissoler. “Do you know what rissoler means?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?” He looked doubtful. “Most Americans don’t.”

  In fact, I did know what it meant—rissoler, to cook in a way that allows you to sauté and baste at the same time. I’d learned it with Chef Le Cossec. (It could be said that I’d watched it being done more than done it. To be strictly accurate, it could be said that, on balance, Viannay’s doubts were warranted.)

  The butter in my pan went instantly brown.

  “It’s too hot. Show him, Mathieu.”

  Kergourlay poured off the pan, gave it a wipe, set it back down, this time near the edge of the flattop, and added a wallop of butter.

  You need plenty of fat, because it is what you spoon over the protein, the basting action. (It is drained off when you’re done.) You can use butter or oil, or both butter and oil, but butter has the advantage of alerting you when the pan is getting too hot by changing color—it is like a temperature alarm. You then pour it out and start over. You don’t want the pan too hot; it upsets the equilibrium of the technique, cooking from below and above. In fact, it is the same temperature, more or less, at which you cook an omelet. You want, as Le Cossec said, to hear the butter singing.

  The whole time, spooning, spooning, spooning.

  The spooning is easier when you tip the pan toward you, letting the fat pool up along the rim. Spooning, spooning, spooning, or, in my case, splattering, spraying, splashing, and every now and then spooning, which, surprisingly, seems to be only marginally less efficient than everyone else’s efforts except that impressive quantities of fat land outside the pan. You can always tell when I’ve been doing rissoler, because the kitchen floor shines.

  In itself, rissoler seems to mark a simple difference between the French kitchen and the Italian, where meat is either cooked hot or braised slowly in a liquid. Rissoler is somewhere in between.

  Once the sweetbreads are golden and puffy, they go into the oven for five minutes, and finished in a new pan, and new quantity of butter. Chern prepared the garnish, a mound of sweet peas and fava beans. Kergourlay finished the sauce, veal stock reduced so much as to be almost spicy. It had thick, savory black intensity. The sweetbreads, however, were like air.

  I reflected on the exchange that I’d had with Viannay. I had seen that he was looking at me. I expected a protest, an objection to my audacity, asking by what arrogance I had planted myself on the line during service. But his remarks were matter-of-fact—most Americans don’t know how to sauté with a spoon. No one was doubting my competence.

  The mornings, Kergourlay told me, would now consist of both prepping the lunch service and making le personnel.

  “Really?” It was inconceivable that I could do both.

  “Really.”

  It seemed like two jobs. I involuntarily took a breath, as though about to dive into a very deep body of water.

  And then: “Turnips. Do them.”

  “No, Florian, I don’t want to do your turnips.”

  “Do my turnips.”

  * * *

  —

  They were white baby turnips that needed to be “turned,” the French trick of rotating a vegetable in your hand, both peeling and shaping it with tiny knife-flicks, transforming it, in the case of the baby turnips, into a Christmas ornament. It was round and white, with a green stem at the top. I knew how to turn turnips. But I didn’t want to turn Florian’s.

  The next day it was asparagus again.

  Florian was in the front kitchen, at his fish station, and I happened to be in the back, in garde-manger, preparing le personnel.

  “Bill!” He had to shout for me to hear him—there was a wall between us. “Do my asparagus.” I heard him. So, too, did the rest of the kitchen, as well as anyone walking by on the sidewalk outside.

  “I can’t. I’m pitting cherries.” I, too, had to shout.

  “And after?” Après.

  “I’m peeling potatoes. For le personnel.”

  “Et après?”

  “I’m boiling the potatoes.”

  “Et après?”

  “Florian, this is ridiculous. I’m making le personnel.” Sylvain was standing next to me. He had stopped what he was doing to take in the exchange. For all I knew, everyone else was as well.

  “Et après?” Florian said.

  “After I make the staff meal?”

  “Oui.”

  “Well, then, like you, I’ll be eating it.”

  “Et après?”

  “I am preparing for the lunch service.”

  “Good. Do my asparagus first.”

  “You want me to do your asparagus before I start setting up for lunch?”

  “Yes. Do my asparagus.”

  I wondered: Was Florian showing off? Proving that he had me at his beck and call?

  Sylvain turned to me. “You have to go in there and hit him.”

  “Florian?”

  “Yes. You have to hit him.”

  “Really?” Sylvain was an authority in the kitchen. A guy in charge had just told me to walk into the adjoining room and hit a person there.

  “Yes,” Sylvain said. He was firm. “Now. Go and hit him.” Sylvain was angry. He made a fist and smacked it into his palm. “Like that. Hard. Knock him down.”

  “I can do that?”

  “Yes.”

  The situation was suddenly rather complex.

  “I mean, it’s allowed—for me, to hit him?”

  “Yes. Please. Hit. Him. Now.”

  This was really quite a lot to think about, the implications flipping through my mind fast.

  For instance: Wasn’t Sylvain Florian’s godfather? Hadn’t he known him since he was a baby?

  And: I liked Sylvain’s anger. It was akin to having a friend backing me up.

  And: Was it possible that, though everyone in the kitchen had been silent, they had in fact registered that Florian had become a certified basket-case bully?

  And: Where do I hit him? Do I march over to the fish station, and then—what exactly?—roar?

  I have hit people (twice?), but not for a long time, and only when there was an issue, and have come to believe that, in general, hitting anyone, including those who deserve to be hit, wasn’t a sensible practice.

  “Hit him, please.”

  I had another thought. My book, this book. I had a book to write. I wondered: Would this be good for the book, my hitting Florian, if I ended up hitting him? Yes, absolutely. The incident would be what we in the trade call “good copy.”

  Okay, I said. I’ll hit him.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t hit him.

  It wasn’t that I decided not to hit him. It was more that I decided to hit him later. There was another issue. When I pictured how the exchange would play out, my walking big-chested to the fish station, my arms swinging slig
htly, taking him by surprise (I hoped), and quickly smacking him (maybe a head butt—since he was so tall?), I came to suspect that someone (me, perhaps?) might get hurt.

  Frankly, I didn’t like where I found myself. I didn’t like that Florian had put me there: that, by crossing a line of acceptable behavior, over and over, he had made me, and the others around me, believe that I had no recourse, that I, too, should cross a line of acceptable behavior, I should hit him.

  I didn’t want to hit him. I didn’t like that I was expected to.

  What I hadn’t realized was that, by then, Florian had become wacko. He had always been unstable—jabbering, mumbling, hyperventilating, chest-clutching—but, without my knowing it, he had been getting wobblier by the day. Chern told me that he and Florian had been working through the afternoon together, skipping la pause, in order to get through all the items in their prep (and doing, therefore, a seventeen-hour day without a break).

  “In the beginning, I helped him finish his purée de pommes de terre, so that we could get out and have something to eat before the service. But after a while I was always helping him. I wasn’t finishing the purée de pommes de terre. I was making it.”

  It was the pressure, Chern said. “He kept saying, ‘le stress, le stress.’ ”

  Normally, the more often you do a task the faster you get. “Florian got slower,” Chern said.

  Is it possible that Florian’s asparagus demands were convoluted calls for help?

  * * *

  —

  After the lunch service, on the day when I’d been instructed to hit Florian, I joined an artichoke-trimming circle, all the cooks including Christophe pitching in to help Sylvain get through a stack of boxes. Florian then appeared just as I was finishing an artichoke heart, which I showed Christophe for approval and dropped into a bowl of acidulated water.

  Florian grabbed a choke, whipped through it at an ostentatious speed, his knife flashing, and tossed it into the bowl like a basketball shot. It made a splash. In an unspoken way, it seemed that the display was for me—putting me in my place. Or at least that was how I had understood it. I had asked for Christophe’s approval; Florian hadn’t.

  He picked up another choke.

  “Qu’est-ce que tu fais?” Christophe asked. What are you doing?

  “I am turning an artichoke.”

  “Show me what you just did.”

  Florian pulled it out of the bowl.

  “This,” Christophe said, holding up the hastily completed and (to be fair) slightly lopsided carving job, “is unacceptable.” He threw it in the trash. “Do it again.”

  Florian dropped the choke that he’d started on and walked off, muttering that he had better things to do. (The behavior was not necessarily unacceptable—preparing artichokes was optional and verging on a social event—but the episode created a bad feeling. For my part, a voice began chanting quietly in my head, “Na-na a boo-boo.”)

  Florian was again corrected by Christophe, just before the evening service, another hastily completed task.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. I am not going to do it again.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Florian undid his apron and threw it to the floor. “Casse-toi!” he said, which might be loosely translated as “Get the fuck out of my face.”

  He walked out. And like that: Florian was gone.

  He returned to the restaurant once more, to collect his paycheck (greeting no one, rushing past the kitchen and up the stairs two steps at a time). Some time later, his mother called.

  “Florian?” Christophe said in exaggerated bafflement. “Oh, pardon, madame. Yes, Florian. Now I remember. No, he hasn’t been here since he walked out before the dinner service two weeks ago.”

  For me, life without a taunting nineteen-year-old was liberating. Without my knowing, I had been walking around, in effect, with a wedge of glass jabbing into the bottom of my foot. Now it was gone.

  It was curious, I thought, reflecting on the episode, that Florian had been tolerated. Except that it wasn’t curious. It was a feature of the kitchen. What was curious was the kitchen. The only thing that mattered was that meals were made on time and well. Everything else was left to the cooks to sort out among themselves. Christophe missed none of it. He also did nothing about it.

  The consequence, for me, was to consolidate my position. I had not only survived being hazed, but I had survived the hazer.

  The first night without Florian, Étienne, a new hire, only his second day at the restaurant, stepped up and took over his station, and was given a cheer at the end of the service.

  * * *

  —

  The meat station became surprisingly tranquil—without Florian in the kitchen, it was bound to be—but the tranquillity was principally owing to what it was: in effect, its Frenchness. It could be fast and rude and rough—you could count on the adrenaline rush—but it also had an overriding sense of order. It was less physical than brainy. You had to concentrate.

  Most of the cooking you did before the service. What you did then, mainly, was assemble it, and the assembly often required all three of us working together. A duck dish was like a puzzle: the stem of a Swiss chard that had been poached midday to serve as a platter to place the breast on; or the thigh, boned to look like a savory popsicle, the meat crunched up at the end, that had been cooked confit in the morning; or the rich purple cherry sauce, prepared the day before; or a potato plank “Maxim,” named after the legendary Parisian restaurant, made by yours truly while preparing le personnel.

  The results were modest works of culinary beauty.

  The soul of the kitchen: birds. We did snails, frog legs, crunchy pig ears, bone marrow, pork, sweetbreads, and beef. I put lobsters asleep by petting them behind the head: after four strokes, the claws drooped; two more, they drooped more deeply; two more, they were out and were slid, comatose, into a hot oven. (They figured in a version of surf and turf.) But we were in Lyon, and Lyon was about birds, especially the famous ones from Bresse.

  We didn’t cook them as one might at home. We didn’t think of them as one might at home, because we never cooked one bird: We cooked two. In the kitchen, all birds are two birds, white meat and dark meat. One is cooked quickly (the breast); the other needs long and slow (the legs). One tastes of nothing if cooked too long; the other, impossible to chew if cooked too fast. The simplest fix: Remove the breasts, snap the thighs off, and cook each separately. The suprême is the breast poached in chicken stock, heated in a sauté pan, and served with a creamy beurre blanc enhanced by a splash of white Port (a Viannay secret that is transformative, rendering the already rich confection into an ethereal-tasting mouth luxury). The leftover thighs: any number of ways, as long as they are not rushed, like those that I helped Sylvain make on my first day, the “brownie tray” with foie gras and a meat-jelly glaze.

  “Roasted” poulet de Bresse demi-deuil is also two birds. Actually, it is a trick of presentation to make it seem as though it were one. It also isn’t roasted.

  It is poached in chicken stock, with black truffles under the skin (the widow in mourning, etc.), until the breasts are almost cooked. The bird is then put in a “roasting pot,” presented to the table, and whisked back to the kitchen for a rushed piece of culinary surgery. First, the breast is removed: sautéed, sauced, plated, and returned to the dining room. Then the legs (which are almost raw) are removed, popped back into the “roasting pot,” and carry on being cooked with some extra fat. When they are finally tender and juicy, they are reproposed to diners as a final course, served on a salad.

  Evidently, Mère Fillioux, the greatest of the mère chefs, didn’t treat birds’ legs and breasts differently. Like Viannay, she poached them in chicken stock—the more birds in her pot (kept only hot e
nough to raise a ghostly vapor across its surface), the richer the stock. Unlike Viannay, she appears then to have left the birds there until both “meats,” breasts and legs, were inexpressibly tender. Thus, her table trick of carving with a spoon. In effect, Mère Fillioux—bless her—reconciled a bird’s eternal contradiction by pretending there wasn’t one, and, with all respect for the great chef’s achievement, I must nonetheless declare that, as delicious as those thighs must have tasted, the breasts had to be ruined. Breasts don’t like a long, slow cook: It soaks out their flavor. They tasted of nothing.

  LA SAUCE BÉARNAISE

  CONDRIEU, RHÔNE-ALPES. This town of four thousand people, across the Rhône from Vienne and La Pyramide and a little farther downriver, is famous for its lusciously floral white wine and the local Viognier grape that it is made from. One Saturday evening, the boys’ favorite sitter, Stephen, having agreed at the last minute to babysit the boys, Jessica and I stopped at a hotel and restaurant there, on the very banks of the Rhône, Le Beau Rivage, no plan, no reservation, and found what we had been seeing at every other place we had tried since driving out of Lyon. The place was raucously full. (What we had actually discovered was that the prewar French summer practice of following the old National Route 7 from Paris to the south, stopping at hotel-restaurants en route, was very much alive.) We studied the dining room—there appeared to be only one table available—when a maître d’ greeted us and asked if we were staying at the hotel, and, by now hungry and distressed, we abandoned scruples and said yes, of course (and, alas, displaced a couple who showed up twenty minutes later). We ordered a bottle of the local wine (well, two bottles, actually—a Condrieu, from the hills directly behind us, and a Côte Rôtie, from the very steep hills three miles upriver), and ate a surprising meal, the highlight of which was a massive turbot, the flat, shellfish-munching bottom-feeder (with its eyes floating arbitrarily on one side of its scaly, weird head—a special category of marine delicacy, fabulously ugly and fabulously delicious), carved tableside on a trolley and served with a fluffy Béarnaise. It wasn’t dribbled atop or poured over; it seemed to settle alongside like a perfumed mysterious fog.