Dirt

by Bill Buford

  A chef or just an obsessive?

  Where is he from? There are chicken recipes but no duck—or none that he was able to get around to writing. There is fish sauce—a “Normande,” the very one that was made for the boys at their school canteen, with fish stock, oyster juice, and double cream—but no fish preparation. (So maybe not from the sea?) There is a cassoulet from the southwest, and a cervelas de Strasbourg from Alsace, in the northeast. But there are enough recipes from Brittany to make me think: Maybe from there?

  The last pages are uncomfortably compelling.

  They are different in look. The ornate script of the beginning (the author has a knack for starting each paragraph with an orthographic flourish) has disappeared. The writing doesn’t get sloppy, but it gets small, compressed. There is so much he wants to say but he has only sixty-eight pages, and he wants to get all of French cooking into them, to make a record, get it written down. It is who he is. It is Frenchness. But he doesn’t finish: three empty pages in the “Sauce” section, six in a section called “Cuisine,” twelve in “Fruit,” probably representing a whole food group to be addressed later. Twenty-three pages are blank.

  Recettes is urgent. French food is on the verge of being erased. It can’t be. It is too important. Food—la cuisine—is no longer the obsession of an aristocratic butterfly, but everyone, peasant and gourmand. It needs to be preserved, like civility, like dignity, like the table, like a shelter that protects us from the ugliness just outside our front door—the crudeness, cruelty, selfishness, the incomprehensible injustice. Cuisine, the author of Recettes recognizes, protects us in our humanity.

  What a thing French food has become since La Varenne. And how radiant and sad and beautiful.

  * * *

  —

  L’ÉCOLE DE ROBERT DOISNEAU. George and Frederick had entered what we called “the big boys’ school,” a different building, no longer “pre-K.” Their first day was like a parade, everyone aware of the rite of passage the school represented, the students and parents arriving at pretty much the same time, exuberantly festive. The children all had new school backpacks, so outsized that the bottom of the frame bounced again their calves. They were little people about to become a little less little. Jessica knew what the “big boys’ school” represented. I was unprepared for the pathos of it. The boys were no longer toddlers. The morning was magic to witness, all the more so because—well, it was France.

  The boys had learned to read and write. They were taught to connect the letters in their words, each character crafted and uniform, and to adhere to a ruler’s straight line. They had homework. They were learning their numbers, French numbers.

  For our part, we carried on, with the difference that the time we had once regarded as “research” was now our lives: our lives in Lyon. Jessica, accredited now with a WSET diploma, set out to become a Master of Wine, a many-year undertaking, widely regarded as among the most difficult credentials in a world of I’m-tougher-than-you credentials. I carried on doing stints in kitchens, to learn a dish or a preparation. I studied the archives. I wrote.

  One day, the boys were at the sink, in front of a mirror, with a comb, a brush, a running faucet, and hair gel. George, in bossy mode, had taken charge, telling Frederick what to do, how to wet his hair, smooth it out, and apply massive quantities of goop with a comb. Frederick, in resister mode, ignored the comb and picked up a brush. Jessica joined the audience. I began videoing.

  They are speaking to each other in French, completely self-absorbed with their images in the mirror. Jessica puts a question to them, in English. They switch languages, but their first thoughts come out wrong and have to be corrected. “La prochaine…” George says, and stops. “Next time…” But then he forgets what he was going to say or can’t translate the thought. Their English is word by word.

  The boys have been away from New York longer than the time they lived there. I urge them to write to their grandmothers in the wonderful script, and they try, but they don’t know how to write in English. I try to teach them words, but they find it too difficult.

  “We need to return to the United States,” Jessica says. “We don’t want to, but we do.”

  I ponder the proposition.

  I suggest the local bilingual schools.

  They are not properly bilingual, Jessica says. With English classes taught by a French person? They are also private. And even if we could afford them, which we can’t, there will be no Muslims, no Gypsies, blacks, Moroccans, Algerians, Croatians, all the rough and tumble that make the boys’ school like life, a real Lyonnais life.

  But they are too young to give up their French. They are seven. The magic age is said to be nine: If children can keep up two languages until then, they are likely to remain bilingual until adulthood. I don’t want them to lose what our adventure has given them.

  In Manhattan, there is a famous “lycée.” Jessica sends an application to the headmistress; Daniel Boulud, whose daughter attended it, writes a letter in support of the boys. We never get a reply.

  I mention beginning an application for French citizenship.

  “Really?”

  Without my knowing, Jessica has already approached an admissions officer at a bilingual school that has opened in our absence, L’École Internationale de New York (EINY for short), which, astonishingly, is only a block from our New York City apartment. Again without my knowing, Jessica (not exactly “clandestinely,” but not necessarily not “clandestinely”) submits the boys’ academic records, and learns that, with their French education, they could be admitted—if only there were room. They are put on a waiting list.

  “They can’t attend a public school,” she says suddenly. “They can’t read or write in English.”

  By mid-August, three weeks before the Lyon school semester resumes, the admissions officer contacts Jessica, whereupon she informs me (defiantly, definitively) that we are returning to America. (“We are? How did that happen?”)

  And so, like that, we prepare to go back. It is so fast that we don’t have time to say goodbye to anyone. It is so fast that we don’t have time to move our belongings. It is so fast that we are suddenly leaving for the airport, on the last Tuesday in August, for a first day of school two days later (owing to the perversity of a school that observed the French calendar—it was la rentrée!—and not the American one, which began after Labor Day).

  I take a last picture of the boys in our apartment at five in the morning, our long hallway with its brightly waxed wood floors, the heavy front door, Frederick’s arm thrown over his brother’s shoulders, both of them in shorts and sweatshirts, the weather fair but brisk. The boys look as hopeful as Christmas Eve. When we arrive at JFK, it is muggy, filthy, brown-sky August hot, which feels completely right.

  The return occurs so impetuously and so lightly that it has an airy inconsequence.

  On the boys’ first morning, before their first day of their new school, they pause in front of our New York building, under the prototype Manhattan awning, their hair newly trimmed and washed, their ties bulkily knotted by their father, the beginning of a new morning ritual, gray slacks, the navy-blue blazers each with a single gold button, and a new generation of massively oversized book bags. They are little French guys, skinny, with elfin waists, delicate shoulders, thin arms, good posture, and an ability to look directly into the eyes of the adults who speak to them. On the first day of their new American life, they are neither apprehensive nor hopeful: They are confident. At L’École Robert Doisneau, the boys were the celebrated New-Yorkais. Now they are New Yorkers in New York.

  I pick them up. They say little. Once home, and in view of their mother, they drop their book bags, as if on cue, and—their ties undone, their shirts untucked—collapse into heaps, and wail.

  * * *

  —

  Their school should have been a soft re-entry. It was French, small classes, goo
d teachers, near our home. But now I wonder if it was too similar to where they had been before. A normal American public school, in all its radical differences, would have been easier because the boys would have shown up there with no expectation of its being like anything else they had known.

  They had issues with the food. At the school, the “chefs” didn’t wear toques, George complained at dinner. Also, they didn’t cook, he said.

  “They use a microwave,” Frederick explained. The expressions of both boys conveyed utter astonishment that a microwaver would ever have the audacity to call him- or herself a chef.

  Was the food French? American?

  They didn’t know. They knew only that it was nothing like what they ate in Lyon. (They also didn’t know that what they ate in Lyon was among the unique culinary experiences on the planet.)

  In New York, they discovered pizza by the slice, Shake Shack cheeseburgers, and chocolate-chip cookies, but were perplexed by how they were eaten.

  On their first Friday night back, George and Frederick met up with twin boys their own age for a night of watching movies together, a cinematic playdate with new friends. Their parents had once stopped in Lyon to see us on their way back from a Provençal holiday. But when our boys showed up at their West Village home, the twin hosts, under the supervision of an indifferent nanny, had already eaten. A leftover pizza was on a counter, grease showing through the cardboard. George and Frederick looked baffled, climbed awkwardly onto kitchen stools, and ate by themselves.

  “That’s not dinner!” Frederick told me when I picked them up.

  I perversely enjoyed the clear-eyed purity of his initial shock and felt that I was lucky to have witnessed it, for all the evening’s distress.

  Their New York classmates were mainly Parisians. George and Frederick had never met Parisians before. They didn’t like them. Their pronunciation was different, their words were slangy. “They’re all white,” George said. They were rich, or seemed to be. One was driven to school in an Uber; one came from a family with airplanes. Lyon—its motley, improvised population, the pervasive smell of meals being cooked at home, the open-window sounds of families finishing dinner—seemed exotic and far away.

  A senior teacher assessed the boys’ command of English. I was invited to join. Each was asked to read a page aloud, the teacher confident that the talkative verbal children of verbal literary American parents wouldn’t have a problem. The boys looked up blankly. They understood nothing. The look was painful to witness. It was a rebuke in the making: By insisting they go as native as possible, and keeping their French intact long enough to retain it for what I had hoped would be the rest of their lives, had I handicapped their education?

  They were assigned to an English-as-a-second-language class and every day called out of their 10:00 a.m. English “Humanities” to attend it. George took to English quickly and after ten weeks returned to English “Humanities.” Frederick had gone deep into French. One late-spring Saturday, well into Frederick’s second semester, I sat with him in a park, helping him with his homework, a simple English-language children’s book that he was meant to read aloud. The effort made him cry. After two paragraphs, he was exhausted.

  I had a new fear: not that Frederick would need a long time to learn English, but that he would never learn it properly. He beat his head with his book.

  Recently, he told us—at a family dinner—that he’d had so much instruction outside of his normal English “Humanities” that he missed learning crucial bits of knowledge and was still lacking them, like certain multiplication tables or even the basic calendar. He didn’t know what came after August. (George, skeptical, asked him in French, “Donc, qu’est-ce que c’est que le mois après août?” “Septembre,” Frederick answered reflexively.)

  Once, George, sitting by himself, pulled out a school photograph of his class at the Robert Doisneau. He had brought it back in his backpack. He stared at it intensely and touched the picture of each one of his classmates with a finger. The rims of his eyes welled up; I couldn’t resist trying to get a snapshot, a first experience of loss and longing, and slyly took a shot from what felt like an inconspicuous distance.

  George spotted me. He was embarrassed. He asked why I would do that, take a picture of him like that, when he was sad. He was cross, and was justified in being cross. I couldn’t justify taking the photo.

  But he didn’t put the picture away, and when he glanced at it again, it immediately seized all of his attention, and he carried on staring at it, openly, without inhibition, oblivious of me, and I did, I admit, get a few more pictures.

  * * *

  —

  LAC DU BOURGET. I returned to France on my own for a week. I hadn’t done fish. I hadn’t done the lake. I wanted to spend some days on Lac du Bourget, the largest lake in France, and the place where most of the fish that we eat in Lyon come from.

  I had a contact, a fisherman, and a chef who promised to introduce me. Jessica arranged a place for me to stay. It was called La Source, a farmhouse made into a restaurant with rooms run by a husband-and-wife team, atop a wooded river valley that fed into the lake. The husband was a member of “the Maîtres Restaurateurs”—a chefs’ collective that adheres to a code of self-sufficiency and making as much food “in-house” as possible. We discovered it by chance, on a road trip in the Loire Valley, with boys who had got hungry after an extended vineyard visit. We had stopped at the first eatery we saw, a restaurant on the Île Brochard, where the butter was churned by hand, the bread baked in-house, and the ice cream made from scratch daily. The Maîtres de Cuisine are masters of the foods that most kitchens buy already made. For us, they were much more than restaurants. They were “old-school” culinary schoolhouses, and we sought them out.

  When I sat down to dinner at La Source, where I was the only diner, the evening was crisp and autumnal. By the time I retired to my room, I was also the hotel’s only guest. I opened my windows and saw nothing. Between the end of my meal and my walk upstairs, a fog from the lake had rolled up the valley and had encircled the hotel and was so thick that I couldn’t see the ground below. The isolation—the hotel situated at the end of a three-mile road, with no neighbors, no nothing—was exhilarating.

  * * *

  —

  I got up at six. The husband, Éric Jacquet, was already in the kitchen, making my breakfast. He seemed a not unfamiliar type: fifty, a military haircut, studiously unsmiling, wary. He wasn’t unwelcoming—after all, he had been up before dawn to look after me—but he wasn’t an obvious ambassador of the evidently overrated practice of French hospitality.

  He put items out on the table, retreated to the other side of the room, and, leaning against a doorframe, told me what he had prepared: bread (which he had made), butter (which he had churned), jam (“groseille et framboise sauvage”—red currant and wild raspberry—“which I canned in August”), a pear drink (“I juiced it this morning”), and an egg.

  I asked (I couldn’t help myself), “Did you make the egg?”

  He crossed his arms against his chest. “No,” he said.

  “No. Of course not.” I began eating. He watched. (In the quiet breakfast room, just Monsieur Jacquet and me, the sounds of my mastication seemed to echo loudly in the cavern of my cranium.)

  “Where are you from?” Jacquet asked.

  I swallowed. “The United States.”

  “Yes, I know that. But your French—?”

  “Oh. Lyon. We lived in Lyon for the last five years.”

  “I thought so. It’s your accent.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I hate the Lyonnais.”

  Lyon is the administrative head of a region to whom the Savoyards pay taxes. The Savoyards are famously proud. “Why should I pay taxes to Lyon?” he asked. “What does Lyon know about Savoie?”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” I said. I had, I admit, never on
ce thought why the Savoyards should pay taxes to Lyon.

  Savoy, an Alpine kingdom since the early eleventh century, was annexed to France in 1860—which, in relative historical terms, could seem like yesterday—and the good Savoyards are still very grumpy about the situation. You see signs demanding independence, and trees and stones are painted with the Savoyard flag, a white cross on a red background. I liked the sight of the flags, their ideological belligerence, and, it was true, Savoy didn’t seem like France. It also didn’t seem like Italy. It had a charismatic premodernity.

  “My wife thinks I’m Savoyard,” I said, upbeat, positive.

  Jacquet said nothing.

  “And, according to my grandfather, there is a one-in-five-billion chance that our family comes from Savoie.”

  Jacquet, arms still crossed, still leaning against the door, had, I now recognized, the polemic manner of someone on a mission. That is what I was recognizing. A quality of purposefulness, the uncompromising kind.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  I explained that I had long been intrigued by the lake and especially its fish, which no one outside this part of Europe ever has a chance to taste and which are among the fundamental elements in the Lyonnais menu.

  He stared at me.

  “And,” I continued, “I’d really like to go out with a fisherman. I have a name.”

  “Who?”

  Olivier Parpillon, a friend of a friend.

  “I know Olivier. Everyone knows him. He won’t take you.”