Dirt

by Bill Buford

  “Le feuilletage of number twenty-one had un soufflé très beau,” Lacombe said—a beautiful puffiness—and he stretched out the vowels in beau like a poem.

  “No,” said Têtedoie, “it was too big.”

  “And the sauce,” Lacombe continued, with provocative obliviousness, “was ravissante”—ravishing.

  “Ravissante? Really, Jean-Pierre? It completely lacked personality.” (And there was that—how do you give your sauce personality?)

  The longer the judging went on the more obvious that the argument between Lacombe and Têtedoie was about something other than the dishes. Was it because Lacombe wasn’t an MOF? He was soft to the touch, rather frumpy to look at, almost cuddly. (Was he just a little vain? His hair appeared to be dyed blond.) He could also seem like a sack in his chair. He was a sloucher.

  Têtedoie, twelve years younger, was trim, with indefatigable posture, closely cropped silver hair, and fine features. He was the human equivalent of a perfectly pressed shirt. The look wasn’t military. It was steel. His executive chef had just won the honor of representing France at the next Bocuse d’Or, and the honor was as much Têtedoie’s as the candidate’s. Têtedoie seemed to be grooming himself to be the future of Lyonnais cooking, and the future was one of discipline and rigueur. It was exacting. No contestants got a perfect score, although a few would have had Têtedoie not been there, holding up a standard that his colleagues found uncomfortably high. No MOF candidate from Dardilly would advance to the final. And what do I know? Maybe that was correct.

  “Number twenty-two?” Jaloux asked.

  “Absenté.” Absenté wasn’t a no-show. It was an effective no-show: late.

  “Number twenty-three?”

  “Absenté.”

  “Number twenty-four?”

  “Absenté.”

  “Number twenty-five?”

  “Catastrophic,” Têtedoie said.

  The session wrapped up. I put my notebook away, thanked the judges (Jaloux looking sheepish and embarrassed), and made my way to the exit. The administrators saw me and realized that I had been there all along—in their agitation they had forgotten me—and that I had just come from the judging alcove. I had been sitting in on the judging! “Mon Dieu!” the wife declared. “But at least you weren’t taking notes.”

  The next morning, I contacted Têtedoie and asked if I could see him.

  * * *

  —

  We met at the bar of the Restaurant Christian Têtedoie, midway up the steep hill of Fourvière, on a windy, idiosyncratic ancient road—stone walls, monasteries, and Renaissance buildings. The restaurant was a modern structure, rather appealingly at odds with everything around it, with glass and right angles, a twelve-foot-long banner congratulating Têtedoie’s executive chef, and a panoramic, limitless-seeming view of the city below.

  The MOF had intrigued me, I explained, by its insistence that French food had to be made perfectly. “The dishes are not in themselves necessarily so difficult?”

  “No, they’re not. But they are very difficult to make perfectly.”

  “They are also very French.”

  “Very.”

  I asked why, during the judging session, he insisted on lowering the scores of his colleagues.

  He seemed pleased that I’d noticed. “My colleagues were too generous.”

  What was going on between him and Jean-Paul Lacombe?

  Têtedoie again seemed pleased. “It was nothing personal. Jean-Paul is a very good bistro chef. But an MOF is cooking at the highest possible level. It can never be merely ‘good.’ ”

  I described how I had been practicing the duck with turnips, and the pie. “Could I cook it for you? Would you judge my dish with all the intensity of judgment that you brought to the judging session?”

  And he agreed.

  I left, exhilarated and frightened. The dish was like an act of graduation. I then learned that every one of my friends had failed: Christophe, and Frédéric, and the two chefs from Boulud’s kitchen—everyone. None would advance to the finals.

  * * *

  —

  My challenge was that fondant quality.

  I looked at Escoffier again and found two recipes that seemed helpful. One was a civet de lièvre à la française. Lièvre is hare. Civet is a way of cooking it: by marinating it in wine, braising the meat in the marinade, and then mixing the marinade with the animal’s blood to make a sauce. It is rich and profoundly French. The preparation wasn’t so different from what I had already been doing (minus the blood): I was cooking a tough meat in a lovely sauce until it was tender and highly flavored; i.e., as a ragoût (or ragù).

  The second recipe was rabbit (hare’s smaller, leaner cousin). It also called for Calvados, the brandy made in Normandy from apples (an appleness intensified), and was treated like a ragù—“traités en ragoût” (slow braising, rich liquid, sauce, etc.).

  I thought: I was right! Ragoût! Or ragù. They were basically the same process.

  I also thought: Calvados! Of course! No mention of it in the MOF instructions, which gave me pause. Then again, there was no mention of not using it. But, if you’re prepared to accept it, why stop there? Cider → Calvados → apple-cider vinegar (why not?) → quince, the medieval apple-pear fruit = appleness very, very intensified (and damn it, my sauce was going to have an absolutely outsized personality).

  I got to work: boning the thighs, making a Calvados-and-apple-cider-vinegar marinade, browning, then adding my jus, another splash of Calvados (pourquoi pas?), not enough to submerge the meat, more a puddle than a pond, and then spooning the liquid on top, not long, about thirty minutes, enough to render it soft. And the result?

  Much better than last time. It was less mush and more identifiably meat (you would never put it atop a plate of spaghetti). But, surprisingly, it was disappointingly dry. It was actually very dry. In fact, it was like cardboard.

  It was an example of what I now think of as the Boeuf Bourguignon Paradox: how, when you braise a meat (in liquid) it comes out being the opposite of wet. It tastes dehydrated. It can be an issue with coq au vin (braised in a bottle of red wine). The fix is fat (which is to say that what is missing after a long braise is fat, and its absence creates the sensation of dryness). Julia Child understood: She famously proposed cooking boeuf bourguignon with lardons—small rectangles of poitrine, the French equivalent of pancetta—i.e., bacon.

  But in Lyon, they don’t use poitrine, usually sold as an industrialized pre-cubed product in a stiff plastic container. They use a very animal, sweaty, and slightly smelly flap of couenne. Even for boeuf bourguignon, our local butcher told me, you use couenne. “It’s the real thing.” (He also recommended not using stewing beef—shoulder, leg, butt—but the animal’s cheeks, heavily worked muscles, needing more time to melt the collagen, and more expensive, but much higher and longer in flavor. And he was right! It is now the only way I make it.)

  Couenne (pronounced “coo-en”) is a layer of fine fat just under the outer lining of a pig’s skin. You clean it by dropping it briefly in boiling water, then add it to the bottom of your casserole pot, and let it melt into your meat as you cook it. Couenne replaces what the wine is boiling away. It creates a meat that glistens. The recipes in my 1894 edition of Le Pot au feu call so often for couenne that, like salt and pepper, it is rarely listed among the ingredients: It’s assumed that you have some. In Lyon, you can get couenne at every butcher shop, at the Sunday farmers’ market, and at Monoprix, the chain supermarket. It makes braised dishes work. A “pub” behind our home, just up the hill from the boys’ school, was called La Couenne. It was such an insider foodie reference that, on seeing the sign, I fell in love with Lyon all over again. (Can you imagine a midtown bar called The Stomach Lining?)

  I tried other tricks. There was so much liquid that I risked making
a roux to thicken it. (Equal parts flour and butter—just a little, twenty-five grams of each, whisked aggressively over a low flame until it turns blond-brown.) Most nineteenth-century recipes call for roux. Most late-twentieth-century recipes banish it. The Gault & Millau Nouvelle Cuisine editors condemned it: Why use flour to thicken a sauce when you can reduce it instead and intensify the flavor? If you mention roux to chefs today, they imitate the sounds of sticky mastication, imagining a gooey, dry dough adhering to the roof of the mouth. But I was making a pie filling, not a sauce, and I had a lot of liquid that just was calling out for some bouncy fondant-like thickening.

  The turnips also added a fluffy fondant feel, because I cooked them dusted with flour and finished with a ladle of my duck-stock-cider jus. It was another Escoffier preparation (who knew that old geezer had so many good tips?) and, on tasting a bite straight from the pan, I was surprised by its radical sweetness. I had cooked new spring turnips at La Mère Brazier, but they were always what I expected them to be, fibrous, watery, little flavor. They tasted healthy more than fun. But here the sauté pan had converted the starches. And the result wasn’t just sweet: It was the tuber equivalent of a fruit. Even today, when duck is prepared in many exotically competitive variations—topped by the bright tart Griotte cherries you get only in August, or by wild mountain blueberries marinated in a Savoyard syrup of génépi flowers—you will, in France, still find it served up with turnips. The combination, as old as the farm, has a rustic harmony, fat and sweet, bird and earth, that works.

  One weekend in Mâcon, Jessica had shared a photo with her WSET candidate friends that featured yours truly at the end of a bouchon meal being embraced by three visiting American-based chefs—Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller, and Jérôme Bocuse, the son of Monsieur Paul. Olivier, Swiss French but living in London, was astonished.

  “Damn,” he said, “look who your husband is surrounded by. When are we coming for dinner?” When they all then had passed their final exams and she earned her diploma, it was settled: I would cook my MOF dish for them to celebrate; they would represent my first trial.

  And then there was Bob. Duck pie didn’t sound like an example of grand cuisine, but if it was what the MOF organizers had deemed to be worthy of preparing, then it was likely to be grand enough for Bob. He would be next.

  Meanwhile, I prepared three rehearsal pieces in anticipation of my first trial. Each time, I couldn’t stop myself from admiring the simple fact of what I’d done: a pie that was crispy and golden and smelled of butter and braised duck and autumnal apple cider. It was a preposterously beautiful piece of work. Damn, I made that. Hot diggity dog.

  * * *

  —

  I would like to believe that my determination to identify the engine, the heart, the starting point of the French kitchen—that moment that engendered a powerful culinary culture—would have kept me returning to La Varenne and made me a student of his book, looking for the meals that changed everything. In fact, what made me pick up his books were the words ragoût and ragù. My understanding of ragù hadn’t been quite the same as what a French cook meant by ragoût. When I cooked my duck as a ragù, it was delicious mush. When I cooked it gently, spooning my duck stock over it, heating from below and above, aiming not for an Italian sauce (a sugo), but for something like a sauced tenderness, then I could see that I was doing something different, which I believed, possibly, was a ragoût. The uncertainty is because the word “ragoût” has been peculiarly elusive. It is not much used today, but for nearly three centuries, from 1651 to around the 1930s, it was so common as to be rarely if ever defined. After a fairly comprehensive search of nearly three centuries of cookbooks and culinary dictionaries, I couldn’t find an author or a chef who defined what “ragoût” meant. It was always assumed that the reader knew. (Finally, I did find a definition, a contemporary one, in my Institut Bocuse textbook, which does indeed describe a ragoût as being cooked from above and below and by spooning the sauce over. The idea is that the sauce flavors the meat, and the meat flavors the sauce, or what my textbook describes, dubiously, as “the phenomenon of osmosis.”)

  It also seems likely that the word’s first appearance in print, as it applied to food, was in La Varenne. I needed, urgently, to return to the Château Cormatin. I had been looking for the wrong treasure.

  * * *

  —

  It was La Varenne’s boss who was important, the employer, du Blé. Without him, there would have been no cookbook. (After all, La Varenne was in du Blé’s employment; he didn’t call his agent in Paris and ask him to fix up a book deal.)

  There was a painting of du Blé on a mantelpiece in a room somewhere. A library? A study? I hadn’t paid it much attention. It was a guy in armor. Now I realized he was the clue.

  We returned and were directed to what today would be called a living room, a sprawling theatrical space for receiving guests, and the painting was so prominent that I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it before: a straightforward simple oval, with a depiction of its subject from the waist up, a young man in black armor, with a red sash across his chest, a knight’s helmet in his left hand, and the crenellated neckwear that I associate with Elizabethan England. (“Completely out of date,” observed the scholar Jessica. “The French were so far behind the rest of Europe.”)

  I had got the marquis wrong.

  On paper, and in the long salutation that La Varenne addresses to him in his introduction (“The High and Mighty Lord, My Lord Louis Chalon du Blé, Counselor of the King in his Privy State Councils, Knight of his Orders,” etc.), he had assumed a vague form in my mind, a type, something like a country squire as depicted by Henry Fielding: entitled, pompous, a grandee, much older-seeming than his age, whatever it might be. But du Blé had been a man-child when the portrait was painted. He is young, with fair skin, shoulder-length red hair, soft pink lips—“dashing” in the clichéd use of the word—not more than twenty-five years old, and probably younger, possibly a teenager, because (I finally appreciated) he was really very young. He was clearly La Varenne’s junior.

  Du Blé was born on Christmas Day, 1619. He entered battle, having just been made commander of his first regiment, at the age of nineteen. From the internal references in the introduction, he was around twenty when he hired La Varenne. He was thirty when La Varenne finished Le Cuisinier françois. Du Blé, I would discover, very close to power, was the youthful future of France at a time when France was thinking constantly about what it meant to be French. And food interested him—we know this because La Varenne tells us that it did. Du Blé taught him a technique that would become the centerpiece of La Varenne’s cooking. It is the first thing he mentions in the introduction, once he gets through the routine throat-clearing “your humble servant” gratitude-speak:

  In the ten full years that I was in your employment, I discovered in your home the secret of preparing meats finely.

  I’ay trouué dans vostre Maison par un employ de dix ans entiers le Secret d’apre∫ter delicatement les Viandes.

  Until that moment, before La Varenne, meat, broadly speaking, was cooked in one of two ways: as a braise or by direct heat (grilled or by rotisserie), which contracts the tissue and makes for toughness. It is the same in Italy—brasato or alla griglia. One is stewed; the other, various stages of being torched.

  What La Varenne appears to be referring to is cooking meat as a ragoût. (Seventeenth-century French is different from the modern language, and Viandes did not necessarily mean “meat,” and delicatement was more like “finely” or “carefully.” But Viandes in Le Cuisinier françois very clearly has the sense it does today, and even delicatement seems to be pretty close to our “delicately.”)

  A ragoût, I was discovering in my own ad-hoc implementation of it, is a mode in between brasato and alla griglia; the meat is cooked gently, carefully, from below and above.

  Ragoût is an early-seventeenth-c
entury word. It first appears in print to describe an exuberant play or an exciting painting or a flamboyant piece of text—with some extra quality that wakes up the audience member or art appreciator or reader. Ragoût is goût exaggerated (the prefix ra- is an intensifier), and goût is an essential word in both the French language and the French kitchen. It means “taste” or “pleasure” or “flavor.” La Varenne is the first to apply the word ragoût to food—in print, and with a specific sense. My suspicion is that he wasn’t, however, the first to use it. Why? Because he never tells you what it means.

  Ragoûts abound throughout Le Cuisinier françois. There are, by my casual count, considerably more than two hundred. If you read the chapter about what to cook on the battlefield (sixty-three ragoûts), you will learn, if you have been lucky enough to secure a cow while otherwise engaged in armed combat, the different ways to prepare each cut. Like the shoulder, which you can roast. Or prepare as a ragoût. Or the breast, which you can stuff, roll, and cook as a roast. Or chop up and cook as a fricassee. Or do as a ragoût. The tongue: You can marinate it. Or do it as a ragoût. The head: Many possibilities. Or as a ragoût.

  Where would La Varenne have first heard the word? From other cooks, his professional colleagues, the very ones he addresses as his readers. And, thanks to du Blé: It was “le secret” to cooking meat tenderly. He had picked up what was going on in the French kitchen because he had been uniquely positioned to be eating the best of it. Du Blé, in Paris, between battles, lived in a rarefied circle. In his introduction, La Varenne mentions cooking for members of it, and dares to say (“J’o∫e dire,” in the Middle French type) that he carried out his job with enough flair to win high praise (“grande approbation”) from the guests who gathered round his employer’s table: princesses, grand marshals of France, and an “infinity of people” of noble standing. It was a formidable crowd. France was in a sustained period of reforming itself: politics, warfare, culture, the language, the arts, and the kitchen. In its way, the period was akin to what northern Italy had been undergoing in the early days of its Renaissance. And in La Varenne’s text we have this new happy word, ragoût, a glimpse, perhaps of what was going on during this undocumented period before French cooking became so uniquely itself.