Dirt

by Bill Buford

  Anne-Sophie, understandably reluctant to follow her father, Jacques, into the profession—the kitchen, in the Pic family, was a place of great drama—went abroad and trained in business management, but in 1992 had an awakening—she was twenty-two—and returned to Valence to be taught by her father to be a chef. She adored him. She was in the kitchen, three months later, when Jacques, after a particularly arduous day, had an aneurysm and died at the stove, fifty-nine years old.

  The brigade, all men, all “French-trained,” had been employed at Pic for at least ten years. They regarded Anne-Sophie as a child. You don’t start training at twenty-two. “The cooks wouldn’t even consider the possibility that I should be there,” she recalls in an interview. “I didn’t have the courage to fight back. I became the receptionist.” Her older brother, Alain, was made chef. For two years, she kept the books and saw that the restaurant was again in debt. Then it lost its third star.

  There was a showdown. The grandfather was cited; their father invoked. The son lost, quit, and moved to Grenoble. He has been acknowledged since, but not often. In family histories, and on the restaurant’s Web site (at least at the moment), he appears to have been excised. (One entry describes Jacques Pic as having only one child, his daughter.) Anne-Sophie Pic, without formal training, entered the kitchen and faced the same brigade. But she was stronger now (“Je suis plus forte”). “I am a woman, self-taught, the daughter of the patron who is no longer there. I am proprietor and apprentice.”

  Anne-Sophie was different from her male culinary peers, it seemed to me, when I first met her in Lyon, two years after she earned her third star (because she did, finally, ten years after taking over the kitchen, earn back the star that her brother had lost). She was spontaneous, easy in her skin, without any of the alpha-male social armor that most chefs wear in public. She didn’t cross her arms across her chest. She read books. She liked words. Her accounts of her father, and the life she had growing up with him and her mother, read like poetry. She could be witty. She was savvy, quick, modern. She was then thirty-nine, with straight dark hair, a tailored chef’s jacket, diminutive in stature, and an aw-shucks manner. She was a mother. Her son was the same age as our boys. We talked about children and food.

  The following year, Jessica and I spent a weekend at her establishment, still built right up against Route Nationale 7. She was, to see her in the dining room, the same person I had met before, a recognizable high-achieving type, urbane, self-deprecating. You could imagine her running—well, just about anything.

  But she was different in the kitchen.

  I had made an effort to see her there, crossed a courtyard, and stopped. In the design of the place, the kitchen was visible from outside, and Pic appeared as a soundless, angry figure on view through a window the size of a village cinema screen. She was red-faced and, from the muscles in her throat, shouting, her posture erect, her arms and hands gesticulating indignation and fury. The members of her brigade, who in normal circumstances would have towered over her, drooped their heads in self-abasement. As the verbal drubbing went on, they seemed to droop more deeply. Pic is among the most articulate and civilized chefs I’ve met. Her kitchen persona was unexpected. In the restaurant, an hour later, she would resume her identity as an affable host. But I was glad to have seen the uncensored kitchen persona. It was reaffirming.

  Pic describes her cooking as the food of emotion. It is exhilarating to eat because it is flawless. (It is also pricey—more expensive when we ate there than at Paul Bocuse’s Auberge.) It is precise. The composition of the plates, the temperature of the food, the textures, the come-hither appeal: perfection. The emotions expressed in it must be many: longing, sadness, tenderness, loss. There is also rage. A rage against mortality. A rage against injustice, her fuck-up charming grandfather, a father’s genius that has gone largely unnoticed, her brother and his entitlement. A rage against the kitchen and its knee-jerk prejudices. A rage that helped make her a grand chef.

  * * *

  —

  One summer, on our way to Italy on a family trip, we stopped en route at an Alain Ducasse establishment in the Provençal Alps, near Verdon, the natural regional park. We were hungry—too late for lunch—and were greeted with a picnic on an outside table near the kitchen. A delivery arrived, meanwhile: crates of vegetable-patch-warm tomatoes, carefully arranged top side down, irregular, striped, ill-shaped, flagrantly evocative of a southern-French summer. We were surrounded by flowers and bees. Jessica and I had a glass of white wine. It was bucolic.

  Then crack from the kitchen: “Putain!” Another crack. “Qu’est-ce que vous faites? Eh?”

  The boys laughed covertly. To this day, they have not, within my hearing, said putain.

  The kitchen roar continued, anger, fury, another crack (“Mais vous faites chier”—What you are doing is shit), culminating in a withering piece of name calling. “Vous êtes des crapauds. Vous comprenez quoi? Des crapauds. Putains.” (You are toads. Do you understand? Toads. Putains.)

  In the male culture of the kitchen, there are few put-downs worse than being called a toad by your kickass woman chef. It was too much; the boys erupted with laughter. The chef was Julie Chaix.

  The women now running French kitchens seem tougher than the men. You know what they’ve been through to get there. If you let them down, they will humble you. They will call you a toad. But they won’t throw pots at your head, or pinion you to a wall, or whisper pornography into your ear.

  Why hadn’t I intervened?

  It could be said that no one was seriously hurt. No blood, nothing broken.

  But it couldn’t be said that people weren’t damaged, their persons, their sense of themselves. Little Mathieu. I witnessed how, day by day, he was changed from a hopeful child to a nasty, snarling bully-in-training.

  Hortense…

  I am, by training, a journalist, and journalists report stories, not change them. But by then my journalist credentials had come to seem irrelevant. At Michel Richard’s, everyone knew who I was. At La Mère Brazier, I became a member of a kitchen staff. I had crossed over, but, in the crossing, I appear to have left my conscience behind. In real life, I would have intervened. At the very least, I would have said, Stop! Arrête! A shy, modestly built woman in the kitchen where I was working, almost within my reach, was dodging pots being hurled at her head. I didn’t step in. I didn’t say, Arrête! I looked around, and found whoever was in charge, and looked into their faces for an instruction, and found nothing. Was I trying to learn the way? Understand the code? Or maybe I was just afraid.

  SMALL BROWN COWS ON HIGH GREEN MOUNTAINS

  Bruno did not like to think about practical problems. He never talked to me about debts, bills, taxes, mortgage rates. He preferred to talk about his dreams, or the physical intimacy he felt when milking, or the mystery of the rennet.

  “Rennet is a little piece of a calf’s stomach,” he explained. “Imagine the part that enables a calf to digest its mother’s milk. We take it and use it to make cheese. It’s right to do so, don’t you think? It is also terrible. But without this piece of stomach the cheese wouldn’t form.”

  “I wonder who first discovered it,” I said.

  “It must have been the wild man.”

  “The wild man?”

  “An ancient who lived in the woods. Long hair, beard, covered in leaves. Every so often, he appeared in the villages, and although people feared him they always put something out for him to eat to thank him for having shown them how to use rennet.”

  PAOLO COGNETTI, LE OTTO MONTAGNE (2016)

  PRALOGNAN-LA-VANOISE, HAUTE-SAVOIE. It is still before dawn. I am a guest in a mountain chalet, nearly seven thousand feet above sea level, isolated, no trees, on the edge of a protected national park through which you would have to walk a long way to see another habitation. I have been dressed in white boots and rain
gear, as though ready for a deluge. I am in a room that is pristine and rectangular. It has white walls, a red floor, and a heavy copper cauldron hanging from three black chains that have been filled with seven hundred liters of warm milk. I am about to witness one of the oldest and most miraculous acts of the already very old and very miraculous molecular process known as fermentation: the one or two minutes it takes to convert that milk into cheese.

  Bob used to add a piece of dough from the night before, which housed all the yeasts he needed to make a whole shift’s worth of baguettes. Here they use last night’s milky, almost cheesy mixture (le lait de la veille). “It is called lactosérum,” one of my hosts, Claude Glise, tells me. He fills up a bucket and pours it into the cauldron. The white liquid, the white overalls, the pail—he could be a housepainter. “What is lactosérum in English?”

  “Whey.” As in the nursery rhyme, with the spider and Little Miss Muffet. It is something like “cheese water.”

  “The présure,” he explains, “is in the lactosérum. What is your word for présure?”

  Présure describes an enzyme generated by the lining of the animal’s stomach. French makes the distinction between the enzyme and the lining. In English, both are interchangeably described as “rennet.” It is what nursing ruminants—calves, kids, does, antelopes, etc.—produce to help them digest their mother’s milk. Humans have similar enzymes, principally lactose; it is what adults sometimes lose the ability to make, and then develop lactose intolerance.

  Glise stirs his cauldron for a minute, maybe two. I’m asking him questions and don’t notice what has happened: that his white liquid is thicker. The change is so quick as to make me doubt that it occurred. But in the next instant, it is even thicker. It isn’t cheese, at least not recognizably so, but is no longer milk. It is more like yogurt. I want to drag my finger through it, which Glise seems to intuit. He picks up a wide-mouth trowel, fills it up thickly, and rolls the liquid out in slow waves. The sound is like syrup splashing.

  “This is fromage blanc.” The milk is starting to curdle. In the nursery rhyme, Miss Muffet is eating not just “whey” but “curds and whey.” It now occurs to me that she is eating fromage blanc.

  It is the simplest cheese you can get: the first expression of milk plus rennet. Uncooked, unaged, scarcely firmed up, undoctored. In Lyon, you hope to eat it when it’s fresh, fresh, fresh—just from the mountains. It is served at the end of a bouchon meal. It was Rabelais’s favorite. He ate it with cream. Others add sugar or jam. At their school, our boys eat it plain.

  A “mountain chalet,” I should clarify, isn’t grand. It is often just a hut. It doesn’t have Wi-Fi, and rarely has electricity or gas, unless you bring it up by the canister. Glise’s place—with bedrooms, a kitchen, a cave to store wheels of cheese—is unusually large, and in the summer is where he lives with his wife, Caroline, and their two children. Claude and Caroline make Beaufort, the hard, “cooked” mountain cheese, something like a Gruyère. In the extensive literature about Beaufort, you will read that its peasant-family proprietors—and today there are eighteen—have been making the cheese for many centuries, passing on the know-how from generation to generation. The Glise family is an exception. Claude and Caroline were professionals with city jobs, which they abandoned to move to the mountains. I think of them as nouveaux paysans—not pejoratively. In fact, happily, there seem to be more nouveaux paysans every year in France, charismatic fanatics, all of them, and culinary heroes, like Bob.

  The Glises make other cheeses—reblochon (raw), tomme, sérac (the French ricotta, which is double-cooked)—but their most prized is a Beaufort called Chalet d’Alpage. It is the rarest (I have never seen it outside of France), the most expensive (but, oh my, is it worth the expense), and the most elegantly delicious. Like other Alpine summer cheeses, it is made from the milk of cows that have fed exclusively on wild grasses in the high mountains. A Chalet d’Alpage is not just of the high mountains, but among the highest.

  I get a sense of just how high. After the milking, which was done long before the sun comes up, some of Glise’s animals disappeared. He was not in the least worried, and so I was not worried, but I’m curious, and by the morning twilight start looking for them. When I finally spot them, they are the smallest of small brown flecks on a high vast green slope, the muffled ring of their bells seeming like an echo that has lost its way, and at an altitude that I discover to be nearly twelve thousand feet.

  The cows remain here in the high mountains—they have to remain here; it’s one of the rules—for a biblical-sounding hundred days. There are other rules, enough that it can seem that making a Beaufort d’Alpage is almost a pagan rite, including that the cheese must be made in situ—in the field or pasture or on the mountaintop where the cows were milked—and in great haste. No one else rushes as frantically from cows to cauldron (Claude hurled his milk containers into a pickup truck, sped down the steep slope, and then literally ran into his cheese-making facility), owing to the belief that you need to convert the milk to cheese at the veritable body temperature of the cow (which, frankly, is impossible unless you’re milking in your living room) or else risk losing some of its delicate flavors.

  The cows themselves are curiosities: only one of two breeds, either a Tarine or an Abondance. The names are meaningless until you discover that they are both quasi-worshipped and unique: small, with oversized lungs and muscular legs, and a striking capacity to eat on pastures verging on the perpendicular (a perplexing sight, to see an animal situated thus, at a right angle, grazing). They must be milked twice a day, in the dark early morning and the early evening. I tried the milking myself and, to the astonishment of my hosts, failed to persuade an udder to relinquish so much as a drop. (I also learned that each cow has a name, and comes when called, except Minette, who is mischievous and is always trying to get back into the milking trailer for a second round of reward pellets, and whom Claude asked me to chase away, and I failed at that, too, my useless two-legged milking stool still strapped to my waist, and he had to intervene and clap his hands threateningly.)

  It is extreme, this Alpage cheese, which is why I came. I found myself wondering: How can you not love the French? Really. No irony. How can you not love a people who, isolated, in a field or a stable or a vineyard, far from normal society, no one looking, left to their own devices, obsess over their food or drink, worry it, and strive for an expression of purity that would be not just baffling but incomprehensible to their agricultural counterparts just about everywhere else in the world?

  * * *

  —

  The fromage blanc, meanwhile, can now be made into a Beaufort by a simple process: by turning up the heat a further twenty degrees Celsius, and not via the agency of a device that has a knob. Here at seven thousand feet we stack up wood for a fire.

  I pitch in, feeling awkward, an interloper in somebody else’s efficient twice-daily routine, and fetch sticks from outside to stack underneath the cauldron. They light quickly. Claude stirs and rakes his thickening mush, trying to stay out of the way of the smoke. He finishes by submerging a large square of the appositely named “cheesecloth” beneath his floating curds and lifts them out by the cloth’s four corners, water draining through, hundreds of gallons of it, sloppily, splashingly everywhere. Thus, the rain gear.

  Afterward, Claude offers me a bowl of still-warm milk.

  I go outside and find a flat boulder to sit on. It is adjacent to a sluicing stream and on the edge of a long green meadow. The green is very bright. The sky, too, has a peculiarly deep blue, as if outer space were showing through. Is it the thinness of the air? The open long-distance pastures without landmarks? Everything around me looks magnified, especially the sun and its dangerous-seeming Alpine light. The fast stream sounds like water shouting.

  I have never drunk milk from a cow that has just been milked. Will it make me sick? I stare at it. Will it taste green?

/>   Glise told me that there are sixty varieties of wild grasses growing here, in a single square meter. “Là!” he said, pointing to wherever we then happened to be standing. “Les herbes sauvages.” These grasses, he said, are why he brings his cows here.

  At my feet, there is an impressively knee-high flourishing: yellow flowers crammed up against white ones, pink, then red, then an outbreak of tall furry stalky things. Are there really sixty varieties? It seems possible, except that the “grass” looks like leaves, not grass, and the leaves are all different shapes. One might be wild arugula. What a thought: that the taste of Beaufort, among the most French of French cheeses, le prince du fromage, is derived from a diet of Italian salads that cows spend a whole summer eating.

  This space, “là,” crowded and without a pattern, seems like a botany lesson in hyper-growth: Take a patch of ground, deprive it of light, bury it in snow, and then—finally, now—expose it to the extremes of an extreme high season. I have seen this before. It is a feature of both high mountains and high latitudes, where plants, as the earth tilts into the direction of the full-on sun, pass from germination to flowering to fruit in what can seem like hours. Extreme seasonalities, like the tropics, produce extreme foods. But the high-altitude flavors that you find here—in the proliferation of wild berries (straw-, black-, rasp-, blue-, cloud-, cow-, bear-), or the herbs and flowers, like my favorite génépi (genepì in Italian), one of the principal aromatics in Chartreuse, culled only in August and only at ten thousand feet and only for a single week—have an airy gentleness. They have qualities that are more subtle than what our conventional flavor vocabulary describes. They seem, somehow, to express “sunshine” and “gratitude.”