Dirt

by Bill Buford

  “Wheat germ.”

  I wanted to take some home. “You’ll have to refrigerate it. It is like flour but more extreme. It has fat, which spoils rapidly.”

  “You rarely get a good baguette in France,” he said. We were in his office. He’d asked his assistant to get him an example. He wanted to show me the air pockets, small and uniform, that you get in a good crumb. “The best French baguettes are now made in Algiers or Morocco, using fresh flour from the wheat of small farms where it has been grown in the same way for millennia.”

  What do small farms have? I asked.

  Here, in France, they are often the only farms with a soil that hasn’t been ruined.

  He described conventional flour production, like the massive farms in the French breadbasket or the American Midwest. Some use a plant called “dwarf wheat,” short roots, voracious thirst, fast-growing, planted in soils that are so manipulated they could have been created in a chemistry lab. It is then milled in quantities so vast that the wheat—which is a plant, after all—goes to starch. It is not refrigerated. Its sell-by date is completely wrong. It has no food value.

  “The bread that you make from it has the texture and the smell of bread. But it doesn’t have the taste, the goût.” He tore off another piece of the baguette and looked at it approvingly.

  “In the country, we don’t change as fast as people in the city,” Degrange said. “For us, the meal is still very important. We don’t ‘snack,’ ” he said, using the English word. “What I learned from my father and grandfather is what they learned from their fathers and grandfathers before them. There is a handing off between generations.” The word he used was transmettre. Le goût et les valeurs sont transmis. Flavor and value: Those are the qualities that are transmitted. Only in France would “flavor” and “value” have the same moral weight.

  In a very simple respect, Degrange completed my French education. I had come here to learn many things—to cook, Frenchness, history, the role of the Italians—but I knew that my education began with taste. I had come here to discover what food should taste like. And I had. What I hadn’t realized until now was that I had discovered it very early on, in Bob’s bread.

  Degrange gave me a ten-kilo bag of his flour. A gift. I would add it to my carry-on along with my 1.5-kilo boule. But what would I do once I used it up? Return here for more? Or give up bread?

  I said goodbye, an affectionate embrace, feeling an unexpected closeness to this man I had reached by pressing a button on an intercom only a few hours ago, who instantly knew what I was talking about and who recognized that very few people would, and who then succeeded in putting a word to something that I had been learning since I arrived. Goût.

  * * *

  —

  At dawn, on my way to the airport, I stopped at the Boulangerie Vincent. There were no lights on inside, just the red glow from the oven. I picked up the boule I had reserved. It was hot to the touch and irresistibly fragrant.

  In New York City, I cut a few thick slices and put out some butter.

  “I think you will like this,” I said.

  Frederick picked up a slice and sniffed it and sniffed it again and then slammed it into his face, inhaling deeply. “It’s like Bob’s.”

  George ate a slice and asked for another, and added butter.

  When the loaf was done, I made more from the ten-kilo bag. It was good—not as good as the boule from the Boulangerie Vincent—but still good. It had flavor and fruit and complexity and a feeling of nutritiousness. A month later, it was gone, and I stopped making bread.

  “I’ll pick some up the next time we’re over.”

  There is a Curnonsky quote. “La cuisine, c’est quand les choses ont le goût de ce qu’elles sont.” Cooking is when things taste like what they are. I wonder if a modern version might be: Cooking is when things have a flavor that few of us know anymore?

  Among the many things we learned in France is a simple one, an appreciation of the taste of food that hasn’t been ruined by industrial tricks, chemicals, manufactured aromas, pesticides, sugar, the conveyor belt of manipulated protein or starch or sweet goops that are hardened or toasted or coated and wrapped and distributed, the panoply of efficiencies that characterize the making of mass-marketed alimentary products just about everywhere, but nowhere more pervasively and menacingly than in the United States.

  We learned the taste of good food. That comes from a place, as it has for thousands of years, from a soil that is a testament to its ancient history. Good food tastes of itself.

  I had gone to France to learn basics. The basics of its kitchen. The basics of place, and what grows here and what doesn’t grow there. I wanted to get as close to my sources as possible, where the words come from, how we arrive at flavor. I wanted to re-examine my assumptions about the kitchen, to restart my education, to get as elemental and as primary as possible. Heat. Water. Labor. Place. And its dirt.

  EPILOGUE

  Just About Everybody Dies

  Augusto, my Institut Bocuse Brazilian friend (the “assembler” of the witheringly reconstructed prosciutto-and-zucchini starter), now has a restaurant called, suitably enough, Augusto! It is in the heart of Lyon, occupying the premises of a former mère bouchon (the kitchen in the back, near the toilet, as per normal), where he makes Italian food. It was on the cover of a Lyonnais magazine. Every table was taken, with people waiting out front, when I discovered him in the back, sleep-deprived, buzzing with adrenaline, a single Institut Bocuse stagiaire as a deputy. “Augusto!” I declared. “This was your dream! How many people realize their dreams?” (Then, in 2019, he realized his dream two-fold and opened a second, Brazilian restaurant, Doppio Augusto.)

  * * *

  —

  Mathieu Kergourlay (“Young Mathieu”) now has a sprawling piece of paradise called, suitably enough, the Restaurant et Hôtel Mathieu Kergourlay—a château with rooms and a flashy haute-cuisine dining room, amid one thousand acres, most of it a protected forest, near the coast of Brittany. Once he completed his training in Lyon, he returned to his birthplace, got married, had children, earned a Michelin star, and was now an officially recognized kickass grand chef in the making—and had a trophy to prove it, awarded by Gault & Millau as a “Grand de Demain.”

  * * *

  —

  Hwei Gan Chern (aka Jackie Chan) moved to Burgundy and opened a restaurant. He called his, curiously, Le Parapluie (The Umbrella). He didn’t know what the word meant when he first heard it, but liked its sound (“I thought it was beautiful”), and promised himself that it would be the name of his first restaurant. In Burgundy, he had a following for his style. It was an inverted East-West approach: not Indonesian dishes with French techniques, but French dishes with Asian assumptions—less salt, less fat, more vegetables, and an absolute, no-compromise commitment to seasonality. Le Parapluie is witty and anarchically understated, like its owner.

  * * *

  —

  Even unsmiling Christophe Hubert has a successful restaurant—or did, at least, for a while. He persuaded two people from La Mère Brazier to join him (the restaurant’s best cook and best waiter), gave Viannay no notice (“I have never,” Viannay said, “in all my years in the kitchen, been treated with such disrespect”), and, with 10,000 euros, opened a big-windowed establishment with an unencumbered view of a massive concrete parking garage. It was redeemed by the joyful, enthusiastic greeter, table seater, wine pourer, and omnipresent front-of-house person (Ewa, the dark-haired smiling woman I had once seen outside the Scottish pub in Christophe’s company—i.e., now his wife). He called the restaurant L’Effervescence, a perfectly good name for anyone except the chef running it. The food was superb—easily on the level of La Mère Brazier—but the restaurant wasn’t getting diners, and, after a hard year, was about to close (his staff agreed to miss a paycheck; Christophe prepared for bankruptcy), when Gault & Millau awarded
it eighteen out of a possible twenty points, honored him with a “Jeune Talent” trophy (Young Talent), and welcomed him into the pantheon of Lyonnais greats. The Michelin Guide followed and gave Christophe a star. I was rapturous in my pride. “Christophe! You did it, and you are now very, very busy!” I cried out when I visited him during his prep, and then photographed and videoed him, and, making fun of his earnestness, almost provoked a smile, until, finally, he cried out, “Billou, stop. I don’t do photos.”

  The couple had a child, a joyful expression of their success, and Ewa remained at the front of the house. She had a second child, also joyful but more challenging, and, although Ewa tried to carry on, it was too much, two infants at once, and she left. And in her absence…

  I ate there on my own one evening. The food was as good as ever. The atmosphere? Maybe not so effervescent. The waiters were men, and dour, like walking echo chambers of their boss, like-minded missionaries of solemnity. Their manner had a message: “Here, your plate, it’s art.” There was no one to distract me from the massive concrete parking lot. And, like that, the restaurant was over. Gone. And Christophe?

  “He has disappeared,” Viannay told me when I asked about his former executive chef, and then smiled.

  * * *

  —

  The others? I couldn’t keep up with all of them. Frédéric did a stint in Japan, and was now the chef of a bistro on the Place Carnot in Lyon.

  I asked Chern. Was Florian still in a kitchen? Or Michael, the garde-manger cook who disappeared after crashing a car with his girlfriend? Or Ansel the asshole?

  “I have no idea,” Chern said, “but you’re right about Ansel. He is an asshole.”

  Sylvain Jacquenod, such a compelling study in focus and discipline and frustration, had landed in a happy place. He had been invited to quit Bocuse’s Brasserie du Nord and be the chef of L’Argot, a new enterprise in Lyon—part eatery, part butcher shop. On an outstandingly busy Saturday night, we ate steaks that Sylvain selected and cooked for us. He was a chef at last, and every time someone addressed him as such (“Chef! Chef!”), his chest seemed to swell perceptibly with pride. His picture was published in Le Progrès, and his achievements were written up in local food guides. His gigantic smile was once again wholly and radiantly intact. (Viannay, characteristically Viannay, offered his characteristic summary: “Sylvain has found his level. He is at last content.”)

  Hortense? She completed her education at L’Institut Bocuse, graduated, and left cooking. She is now a fashion executive, married, and lives in Paris. Should she have been a cook? Was she, like Chern, developing her own style? She was intelligent, brave, shy, and ambitious, and her cooking spirit had been crushed. She had been the only woman in an enterprise made famous by one of the most flamboyant women chefs in the history of France. She had been there just as the French kitchen was only beginning to change.

  * * *

  —

  Lyon was also changing.

  Our local bistro, Potager, was bought by a couple of restaurateurs from Panama for 1 million euros. Owners Franck and Mai Delhoum then opened two new restaurants around the city. In Lyon, their success was celebrated with uninhibited joy.

  Our friend Yves Rivoiron (the partner of Isabelle of Bouchon des Filles) sold his historic restaurant, Café des Fédérations. He bought a boat and was last sighted at a harbor somewhere on the Mediterranean. His son, whom we had only recently met at one of our annual fêtes, was now the chef of a popular anti-establishment restaurant in the antiestablishment city of Barcelona.

  Jean-Paul Lacombe sold Léon de Lyon—in his family since before he was born—to a television comedian, the sum not disclosed, but said to be a lot of money. Lacombe and his wife appear to be committed to traveling around the world many times.

  One of our first Lyonnais friends, the American musician Jenny Gilbert, sold her noodle restaurant.

  Lyon had always been a city where anyone could open an eatery. You needed a space, gas, and (usually) electricity. Rent was almost a negligible item on the bottom line, and small, idiosyncratically creative places proliferated. It hadn’t been a city where restaurants were bought and sold for speculation or profit. We couldn’t deny it: The word had got out. Lyon had felt like our secret—a historic gastronomic epicenter that, since World War II, seemed to have been neglected by the commercial rest-of-the-world, but it was no longer so private or so secret.

  * * *

  —

  In New York City, Michel Richard became a neighbor! After more than fifteen years in Washington, he was now, suddenly, at the age of sixty-five, in Manhattan! He accepted a grand, high-paying position as the chef overseeing the restaurant, bistro, and pâtisserie at the Palace Hotel, perhaps the grandest address in New York.

  Manhattan was where his American life had begun, in 1974, as the head of Gaston Lenôtre’s first foreign venture, the Château France, on Fifty-Ninth Street. When, one year later, Lenôtre was forced to close, Richard accepted the first job that he was offered (in faraway Santa Fe) and left New York with a vow that he would one day return. But he didn’t. And now: Voilà! He was back. It was a tremendous moment in Richard’s career.

  I was thrilled to witness it. Richard had given me my beginning. And now: maybe my ending?

  I joined him, his assistant Mel, and his wife, Laurence, on day one. Laurence’s enthusiasm was innocent and guileless. “Today,” she said, “I’m going shopping downtown. By subway!”

  Mel would be interviewing PR firms “in my suite!”

  The kitchens would close for renovations—“according to my specifications,” Richard said; he paused, seeming to think about what those renovations might entail, and laughed. His affect was delicious.

  I then followed Richard into the “labo,” le laboratoire, the temperature-controlled pâtisserie-confection space, where, for two weeks, I watched his teaching his new American pastry chef all the basics—puff pastry, éclairs, pain au chocolat, pâte sable, croissants—each one tweaked, if not outright improvised on.

  Midway through the first day, I stepped back, enjoying the historical perspective—that every one of the recipes Richard was teaching had been unchanged for at least two hundred years until now improved by Richard—and declared, “Michel, these are brilliant innovations.” A thought occurred to me that now seems blaringly obvious. “You can’t make a food unless you change it, can you?”

  “No.”

  “As in ‘not at all,’ ” I continued. “If you can’t improve a recipe, you don’t touch it. It is boring. It is not your mission….”

  “I have to feel that I’m making it better.”

  “Even a basic butter pastry. A fundamental unit of the French kitchen. Unless you can make it better…”

  “I can’t make it.”

  I had never understood him so well. By going to Lyon and being trained there, by learning how it was done, whatever it happened to be, I was now able to recognize that Richard didn’t do it. He did his.

  We stepped out of the serene labo and got an ominous welcome to the rest of the kitchen. Loud music, different jumbly tunes at the same time; someone singing; someone whistling. A guy was pushing a trolley fast, and hadn’t seen Richard, or did and expected him to step aside, or didn’t care—he was just another chef (there had been many, many chefs)—and hit him from behind and swore at him afterward.

  “Hey, puto, get the fuck out of the way.”

  The restaurant was in a hotel, with a hotel union that had outlasted everyone who had worked there. The chef wasn’t in charge. Everyone knew he would end up being a visitor. And most important, he was not allowed to touch the food.

  Chef Alain Ducasse told me that he had tried to dissuade Richard: “ ‘Michel,’ I said, ‘you cannot take this job. You will have no control. You won’t be able to taste the food. Do not open in a New York hotel. You will live to regret it. Turn it down.’�
��”

  “ ‘But I can’t,’ ” Ducasse said Richard replied. “ ‘I need the money.’ ”

  I attended a dress-rehearsal dinner, “friends and family,” a week before the restaurant opened, in the most ornate room in Manhattan. I knew the dishes. I had made them—some, like the breadcrumbed fried chicken, I’d done at home. There were six courses. They were good. But—and there was no escaping the realization—they were merely “good.” Michel Richard’s dishes don’t work if they are good. They need to be perfect. They aspire to nothing less than spectacular.

  The New York Times rates restaurants with one to four stars. Richard got zero. The food, wrote the critic Pete Wells, was awful. “Was Mr. Richard not the chef I had thought? Were the ecstatic reviews, the five awards from the James Beard Foundation, the induction into the Maîtres Cuisiniers de France, all a mass delusion?” Wells ventured down to Washington to try the dishes at Central, Richard’s French-American bistro, where David was now in charge. There they were “terrific.” Was this “a symptom of the deal-making culture that afflicts the restaurant business”?

  Four months later, the restaurant closed. Richard returned to Washington.

  He was changed. The force that drove the man was gone. There were health issues; he had never taken care of himself. A doctor diagnosed diabetes (evident to everyone), obesity (ditto), heart disease (his two strokes), and dementia, which wasn’t evident, and those who know Richard believe that the idiosyncratic, unpredictable, highly distracted way that his brain routinely worked was mistaken for a disability. At a doctor’s suggestion, Laurence put Richard in an assisted-living facility. Then she filed for divorce. They argued over the value of the estate, most of it having been spent. They were still arguing when he was felled three years later by a stroke, his third, on a Saturday morning in August. He was sixty-eight.