Dirt

by Bill Buford

  COOKING IN A PIG’S BLADDER

  At the market, Fernand Point told us, “I am not difficult. I am happy with the best.”

  CROQUE-EN-BOUCHE BY FANNY DESCHAMPS (1976), TRANSLATED BY JESSICA GREEN

  VIENNE, RHÔNE-ALPES. In a reasonable approximation of Fernand Point’s original and outrageously luxurious recipe, Henriroux makes his poulet en vessie by first loading up both bird and bladder with luxury ingredients: truffles, foie gras, a couple shots of a good Cognac, and a glass of Condrieu, whose golden grapes can be seen growing on the other side of the Rhône. (Point also added Madeira and Champagne, of course, being a lover of the beverage.) The preparation is another illustration of the Lyonnais high-low thing: the rustic bladder, the flashy ingredients.

  Then you truss it, which struck me as highly unnecessary.

  I appreciate the virtues of trussing, which tucks in the extremities, wings and legs, and keeps them from cooking faster than the rest of the chicken. It also makes for a more attractive presentation, a poultry parcel rather than wings splayed out like a pair of wonky boomerangs. But I’ve never been entirely clear about the textbook trussing method, and was reassured when, later, in Boulud’s kitchen (trussing birds), Jean-François Bruel, Boulud’s top chef, also didn’t know and wasn’t bothered that he didn’t. He had his own way—until he was stopped mid-truss by his boss.

  “Non!” Boulud said. “That’s not how it is done! What’s wrong with you?”

  In fact, there are two official trussing methodologies—one involves the trussing needle’s poking into the chicken; the other, no poking—but I couldn’t keep them straight, and I persist in stabbing my way through just about everything, sometimes two or three times, with double loops and extra knots.

  But a chicken in a vessie? Didn’t the vessie do whatever a needle and string were meant to accomplish, and keep the extremities tucked in and the poultry package tidy?

  The vessie, when it is rehydrated (you buy dried vessies at a butcher shop—they look like Frisbees), has the features of a small rubber sock, and appears too small to put a whole chicken in. It’s also thick and opaque. With a faucet running, you stretch it, first with your fist, rotating gently, being careful not to tear the mouth. The chicken has to go through the mouth. Melted butter on the chicken’s skin helps. You hold it firm with a rubber glove, and eventually you get it in there, not with a sense of “plop,” just “whew.”

  You tie the bird shut. A double knot doesn’t work. You need to tie it up as though it were a balloon, very simply, tucking it into its own loop, so the increasing pressure tightens it.

  To cook, you bring a pot of water to a simmer, slide your chicken-filled vessie across the surface, and start ladling. The ladling has the effect of heating the bladder from above as well as below. This also keeps it moist. If it dries out, it explodes. Some chefs use a pot of chicken broth, which is a waste, because none of it is getting inside the vessie. For very good reasons bladders are not normally porous.

  After a few minutes, the bladder expands, slowly at first, but then quickly, becoming suddenly and alarmingly very big. You ladle, ladle, ladle, starting to worry. After twenty minutes, the vessie is transformed: No longer thick and opaque, it has the appearance of a beautifully golden, nearly translucent beach ball that some maniac is still insisting on pumping more air into. Also, you can see the chicken!

  I was stunned by the sight. It seemed so foreign, to find a globe so large in the kitchen and with a bird inside, that I spontaneously declared, “Man, imagine how much pee that thing must hold!”

  Five or ten minutes later (ladling! ladling! ladling!), the bladder is at its maximum expansion. It is a test of your preparation. If you made the mistake of using a double knot, it will slowly start to loosen, and there will be nothing you can do to stop the mouth’s opening, and the foie and Cognac will pour out in a cloud of brown sludge. Likewise, alas, if you failed to truss the bird, you will witness—through the now very capacious transparent golden membrane—the extremities slowly opening up in the perpendicular. There will be nothing you can do to stop them until they puncture the vessie. Once again, the Cognac, the foie, and brown polluting ooze.

  Now I truss.

  The chicken, once you open up the bladder tableside to share fully its emancipated aromatics, is overwhelmingly sensual—in the sense of all your senses being activated: the steam, the meat, the rich flavors of the Rhône. The embellishments—truffles, foie, wine—render a dish that is smooshy and rich. I can see why Henriroux tried to dissuade me from it. It is not light. But what a celebration of pleasure!

  After my session, I lingered.

  Point died here at La Pyramide, at the end of winter in 1955, at the age of fifty-eight. The restaurant, remarkably, continued as though Point had never left, owing to the care of his widow, “Mado,” who directed operations, her husband seeming to whisper in her ear.

  The kitchen still looked as it did when he was alive. It has since been renovated, but I was there before the upgrade: cracked white tile walls, blocky wood-frame windows circa 1930, elementary four-legged worktops, like a spare table at your grandparents’. It was premodern prewar dowdy. I had expected a narrow space, cramped and dark, where two people passed each other with difficulty. But the actual kitchen was roomy and light, and I was able to picture Point moving around in it. It was a professional establishment, but also like the generous kitchen of a family home in the country.

  I stood still and tried imagining the food then being made here, so exceptional that it led people to believe that Lyon, and the region around it, was the world’s gastronomic capital. French cuisine was then held in such esteem that, if the best cooking in the country was found here, then it was, therefore, the best food in the world. (That had been the premise of Curnonsky’s 1935 Lyon, capitale mondiale de la gastronomie.) And maybe it was. Young Paul Bocuse came here to work after four years at La Mère Brazier. Young Alain Chapel trained here before taking over his father’s inn in the Dombes. The Troisgros brothers trained here before taking over their family restaurant in Roanne, sixty miles to the northwest. These then young cooks were members of the first generation of nouvelle-cuisine chefs. Their approach—it could almost be called an “ideology”—was said to have been fashioned by Point. What did he teach them?

  I reread Point’s book while sitting in an alcove of the restaurant, a museum of Point artifacts. The recipes are brazenly laconic. Commentators cite the understatement as proof that Point was writing for professionals and didn’t need to spell out the how-to. A recipe for tête de veau à la tortue, a veal’s head done in the shape of a tortoise, was no more than a short paragraph. Normally the preparation is immensely complicated. What Point did describe—a strong herb infusion, a cup of Madeira added to the sauce, a garnishing of olives and rooster kidneys and combs—were his unique embellishments. Otherwise, everything was according to the règle—the rule. And that phrase—selon les règles—might be the proverbial window into Point’s culinary soul.

  It was a modest epiphany. Selon les règles—not many phrases are more French. Everyone working for Point knew the classics, just as I had, by now, learned many of them. Actually, the word “classics” isn’t accurate. They knew the repertoire. They knew the way dishes were made. Such was their training. Point’s recipes describe only the deviations: the subtle ways in which the received dishes were, in Point’s hands, made differently. Thus, his role as the godfather of nouvelle cuisine: He didn’t just perpetuate the old dishes; he was provoked by them; he made them better. It didn’t take much, but nothing he did was entirely conventional. Michel Richard had once told me that the secret to Point was not in what he said. And in that secret was a definition of nouvelle cuisine: not new for the sake of the new, but the old—the French “repertoire”—rendered a little bit new. After all, in an orthodoxy, even the smallest deviations are acts of rebellion.

  LESS
ONS IN PASTA MAKING

  You are told by Lyonnais that they are used to appearing cold—to strangers, foreigners, visitors, you. They don’t care whether they know you or not. You won’t understand them. You won’t get their city and will be put off by its gritty darkness, the sewage smells, the graffiti, the cobblestone streets with their broken stones, its low cloud of melancholy. You will dismiss its people. “Buttoned up,” “reserved.” True, the city conveys the impression of nights at bouchons and restaurants—and the Lyonnais, in mirthful jollity, can be found there on weekends (not talking to you), dining with focus and Rabelaisian determination, because they regard being fed and waited on as high privileges and will deny themselves nothing: wine, three courses, dessert, cheese, a glass of high-alcohol Chartreuse. Normally, the Lyonnais are eating at home, which you won’t know, because they don’t invite you. (Henri Béraud wrote in 1944: “Lyon does not host grand dinners. What am I saying? They host no dinners at all.”) You will see them, returning from markets on the quai with their vegetables and chickens, and smell their meals being cooked when you pass by their apartments, the broths, the sauces, and, in the summer, their windows open, hear the sounds of their dinner. But you won’t eat with them.

  This, without our even realizing it, had been our Lyon, too.

  The breakthrough was a long time coming. What’s more, that breakthrough, our first Lyonnais invitation, wasn’t a conventional invitation. It was an invitation in reverse: Our Lyonnais friends—and, yes, they are our friends (now)—didn’t invite us into their home; they invited themselves into ours.

  We were having a meal at the Bouchon des Filles, on a busy Thursday night, and Isabelle announced that she and her co-owner, Laura, were coming to our apartment for dinner. (I thought: I’m not understanding, but this sounds complicated.)

  “Laura and I agree that you are going to make pasta for us,” she clarified.

  “I am?”

  “Yes. It is time we understood pasta. You are going to teach us. Are you available next Friday?”

  “Uh…” I looked to Jessica.

  She shrugged: Why not?

  Isabelle later confirmed that their significant others would be coming as well: Gérard (Laura’s) and Yves (Isabelle’s).

  On Monday, Isabelle phoned to confirm that the bouchon’s business manager was coming, too. “We can’t have a pasta dinner without her.”

  Of course, I said.

  On Tuesday, Isabelle told us that two others were coming, Sonia Ezgulian (author, restaurateur, culinary consultant) and her husband, Emmanuel. In the event, ten people gathered around our IKEA-purchased dining-room table, including Stephen, who succeeded in putting the lads so soundly asleep (shortly after an antipasto and a pasta) that they wouldn’t wake once in what would turn out to be the loudest night of our stay, so far, in our apartment.

  I prepared five pasta courses—dried, handmade, filled (two different ravioli), and baked. Jessica lined up bottles of wine, including (to get everyone into the Italian spirit) two double magnums of a Morellino di Scansano, a Sangiovese from Tuscany’s western coast, and assumed that everyone would drink, on average, about a bottle each, which seemed wholly contrary to our experience of the Lyonnais. (Except at mâchons, they are otherwise uncompromisingly moderate drinkers, and their moderation had long perplexed us—was it because they had grown up drinking so much great wine that another bottle of it was, you know, ho-hum? Was it a fear of drunkenness?) After an initial apéro of bubbles followed by a couple bottles of a light white to go with the first pasta (a linguine alle vongole), our guests started in on the Sangiovese and, without our noticing, finished both double magnums just after the second course. Whoa!

  Other wines were found, the meal proceeded, and, true to my assignment, I explained how the dishes were made—the “soul” of the Italian ragù, of tortellini—but no one seemed particularly interested until I produced a plate of duck ravioli. The filling was a tight, almost dry ragù that I made by slow-braising the birds’ thighs, dressed with an intense cherry-and-veal-and-duck-carcass sauce, another variation of the one I had learned at La Mère Brazier. Isabelle, skeptical that such food could be made by hand, insisted that I take her to the kitchen for proof (which, frankly, was a delightful challenge).

  The room got warmer, especially for the cook, running in and out with each new course, plates carted back, washed quickly, returned, and the loud talk louder—chatter, clatter, patter about food and farms and dishes and who was opening the next place and who was about to close—and we adjourned to the living room and opened the doors onto our little balcony—the moon full, the river shimmeringly still—and I recognized, among everyone, a happy conversational buzz that, showing no prospect of diminishing, might carry us along for hours, when I looked at my watch. It was 4:00 a.m. Damn! In the morning (which of course it was already) we were intending to return to Lavis Trafford, that former customhouse in the Alps. I then did something that, militating against every code of being a host, I have never done: I told everyone they had to go home, and, I am grateful to report, they did.

  What had happened?

  We appeared to have done something almost inadvertently meaningful. We had played host to Lyonnais chefs and restaurateurs and fed them generously. For the duration of a nine-hour meal, we had made our table a happy place to be. In some fundamental way, we had demonstrated that, in feeding Lyonnais friends in your home, you cannot do too much. For them and you, there are few greater privileges. You cannot expend too much effort, splurge too generously, aspire too ambitiously to make the occasion a unique event. And we had confirmed for our guests, therefore—our now formally recognized friends—that we shared their commitment, almost like an ideology, to the culture of the table.

  It wasn’t the most ambitious meal I cooked. After all, pasta hadn’t been high on the list of French dishes that I was skilling myself to nail. But it was the most consequential. It became a “founding dinner” for what would become a round-robin of festive meals at each other’s homes, a kind of informal dining club—a Lyonnais practice dating from the nineteenth century. Ours continues to this day. The meal changed our relationship to the city.

  * * *

  —

  In all this, there was also the overwhelming fact of the filles. I would like to say that, during our time in Lyon, we would see the gender balance in the kitchen readjust itself, and that the filles were somehow at the forefront of those doing the readjustment. But it’s not really accurate. They were at the forefront of its being challenged. As backward as the kitchens in the United States or Britain might seem, they were rarely as outright Stone Age as the French. Even the mère tradition was less forward-thinking than it seemed to be. Yes, the chef was a woman, but with the understanding that she wasn’t a grand chef. She was making local dishes—what she learned at home—while the man was often in the front of the house, the money guy, running operations. (Brazier was a complex exception.)

  Isabelle and Laura met while working as waitresses at Café des Fédérations, owned by Yves, the man who is now Isabelle’s partner. The café wasn’t actually a café but an authentic museum-piece bouchon (pig paraphernalia, black-and-white photos of eating and drinking and picking grapes, an authentic pre–World War I stand-up toilet right by the kitchen). The café’s approach to service, which depended on sassy waitresses, was flippant, back-talking, flirtatious, and always on the verge of being out of control, and informed by an implicit understanding that no one there talked about boyfriends or girlfriends, husbands or wives, or children, because its fundamental philosophy was that you were there to have a good time and behave just a little bit badly, and that nothing else mattered. For the filles, the time came when they thought: We could do this better. The bouchon they opened was a modest but conscious act of rebellion. The Bouchon des Filles is not merely a mère restaurant. It is one run by the daughters who know better. Their restaurant, its
name, its practices, in a food city with a long history of women in the kitchen, was more than a witty conceit. It was a declaration of purpose.

  * * *

  —

  In Lyon, the model is Anne-Sophie Pic. At L’Institut Bocuse, women students of a certain status (competent, ambitious, talented) longed to work for her. She was who they wanted to be. And everyone knew her story.

  It starts in 1889, in a village in the Cévennes Mountains near Saint-Péray (seventy-five miles south of Lyon, where Bob’s favorite white wine comes from), where the great-grandmother (Sophie) opened a mère café-restaurant, l’Auberge du Pin (“Pin” is pine). It ends, more than a hundred years later, after near financial ruin, a tragic death, banishment of a sibling, and a daughter heroically vindicated. Few stories illustrate the plight of women chefs in France with more pathos.

  André Pic, the son of the great-grandmother, is a chef whom Curnonsky celebrated with a special enthusiasm (“PIN! PIC! Remember those two syllables!”) and awarded the family restaurant three Michelin stars in 1935. André then moved it out of the mountains and into the city of Valence, on that still narrow stretch of the Route Nationale 7. But André, a charmer, was a financial incompetent, and in 1946, a Michelin star was taken away, among the few times in the Guide’s history that a three-star establishment had been diminished. He pressed on, stubbornly refusing to yield his position to anyone else, notably his son Jacques, who left home and learned his culinary skills elsewhere. André grew so obese he couldn’t climb the stairs to go to bed (an elevator was installed) or stand at the pass (and a platform was built so he could taste dishes). He lost another star, and the restaurant was on the verge of bankruptcy, when in 1956, Jacques returned, and slowly and respectfully took over the kitchen, and directed the family’s business out of debt. It took him seventeen years to earn back the restaurant’s three stars and establish financial stability.