Secret Ingredients (14 page)

Since we work in close quarters, and so many blunt and sharp objects are at hand, you’d think that cooks would kill one another with regularity. I’ve seen guys duking it out in the waiter station over who gets a table for six. I’ve seen a chef clamp his teeth on a waiter’s nose. And I’ve seen plates thrown—I’ve even thrown a few myself—but I’ve never heard of one cook jamming a boning knife into another cook’s rib cage or braining him with a meat mallet. Line cooking, done well, is a dance—a high-speed, Balanchine collaboration.

I used to be a terror toward my floor staff, particularly in the final months of my last restaurant. But not anymore. Recently, my career has taken an eerily appropriate turn: these days, I’m the
chef de cuisine
of a much loved, old-school French brasserie/bistro where the customers eat their meat rare, vegetarians are scarce, and every part of the animal—hooves, snout, cheeks, skin, and organs—is avidly and appreciatively prepared and consumed. Cassoulet, pigs’ feet, tripe, and charcuterie sell like crazy. We thicken many sauces with foie gras and pork blood, and proudly hurl around spoonfuls of duck fat and butter, and thick hunks of country bacon. I made a traditional French pot-au-feu a few weeks ago, and some of my French colleagues—hardened veterans of the business all—came into my kitchen to watch the first order go out. As they gazed upon the intimidating heap of short ribs, oxtail, beef shoulder, cabbage, turnips, carrots, and potatoes, the expressions on their faces were those of religious supplicants. I have come home.

1999

“I'll have the dog’s breakfast, please.”

A REALLY BIG LUNCH

JIM HARRISON

O
n our frequent American road trips, my friend Guy de la Valdène has invariably said at lunch, “These French fries are filthy,” but he always eats them anyway, and some of mine, too. Another friend, the painter Russell Chatham, likes to remind me that we pioneered the idea of ordering multiple entrées in restaurants back in the seventies—the theory being that if you order several entrées you can then avoid the terrible disappointment of having ordered the wrong thing while others at the table have inevitably ordered the right thing. The results can’t have been all that bad, since both of us are still more or less alive, though neither of us owns any spandex.

Is there an interior logic to overeating, or does gluttony, like sex, wander around in a messy void, utterly resistant to our attempts to make sense of it? Not very deep within us, the hungry heart howls, “Supersize me.” When I was a boy, in northern Michigan, feeding my grandfather’s pigs, I was amazed at their capacity. Before I was caught in the act and chided by my elders, I had empirically determined that the appetite of pigs was limitless. As I dawdled in the barnyard, the animals gazed at me as fondly as many of us do at great chefs. Life is brutishly short and we wish to eat well, and for this we must generally travel to large cities, or, better yet, to France.

Never before have the American people had their noses so deeply in one another’s business. If I announce that I and eleven other diners shared a thirty-seven-course lunch that likely cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon, those of a critical nature will let their minds run in tiny, aghast circles of condemnation. My response to them is that none of us twelve disciples of gourmandise wanted a new Volvo. We wanted only lunch, and since lunch lasted approximately eleven hours we saved money by not having to buy dinner. The defense rests.

Some would also think it excessive to travel all the way from Montana to Marc Meneau’s L’Espérance, in Burgundy, for lunch, but I don’t. Although there are signs of a culinary revolution in the United States, this much-bandied renaissance is for people in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago. When traveling across America over the past forty years, I’ve repeatedly sought extreme unction of a sort while in the midst of digestive death in the parking lots of restaurants. I’ve found it best, in these situations, to get some distance—to drive for a while, pull over, take a walk, fall to my knees, and pray for better food in the future.

I suspect that it’s inappropriate to strand myself on a high horse when it comes to what people eat. We have proved ourselves inept fools on so many mortal fronts—from our utter disregard of the natural world to our notions of ethnic virtue to the hellish marriage of politics and war—that perhaps we should be allowed to pick at garbage like happy crows. When I was growing up in the Calvinist Midwest, the assumption that we eat to live, not live to eat, was part of the Gospels. (With the exception, of course, of holiday feasts. Certain women were famous for their pie-making abilities, while certain men, like my father, were admired for being able to barbecue two hundred chickens at once for a church picnic.) I recall that working in the fields for ten hours a day required an ample breakfast and three big sandwiches for lunch. At the time, I don’t think I believed I was all that different from the other farm animals.

It’s a long road from a childhood in rural Michigan to being the sort of man who gets invited to a thirty-seven-course lunch. But, above all, a gourmand is one who is able to keep eating when no longer hungry, and a gourmand without a rich sense of the comic is a pathetic piggy, indeed. Once, at Taillevent, in Paris (a restaurant that is always referred to as a “temple of gastronomy”), I had the uncomfortable sense that I was in a funeral parlor. I heard no laughter except from my own table. And when I wanted a taste of Calvados as an entremets the waiter actually told me that I’d have to be patient until after the cheese course, an hour distant. Luckily, an intemperate French count who was at my table told the waiter to bring my Calvados immediately or he would slap his face; at those prices, you don’t want to be schooled. Haute cuisine has rules for those who love rules. Those rules have, for the most part, driven me into the arms of bistros. If I were given the dreary six months to live, I’d head at once to Lyon and make my way from bistro to bistro in a big stroller pushed by a vegetarian.

The thirty-seven-course lunch, which was held on November 17 of last year, was based on recipes by the great cooks and food writers of the past (among them Le Maréchal de Richelieu, Nicolas de Bonnefons, Pierre de Lune, Massialot, La Varenne, Marin, Grimod de La Reynière, Brillat-Savarin, Mercier, La Chapelle, Menon, and Carême), and drawn from seventeen cookbooks published between 1654 and 1823. It was food with a precise and determinable history. My host for the lunch was Gérard Oberlé, a man of unquestionable genius, whom I had met a decade earlier at a wine-and-book festival near Saumur, on the Loire. I don’t recall seeing any books at the three-day party, where I was a wine judge, along with Alain Robbe-Grillet and Gérard Depardieu. (None of us was particularly startled when we were told that the wines had been “prejudged” and were there for decoration only.) Early one morning, I discovered Oberlé eating a sturdy platter of charcuterie on the patio of the château where we were staying. It took me a number of years to uncover all the aspects of his character—as if I were peeling the laminae from a giant Bermuda onion (which Gérard somewhat physically resembles, but then so does the Buddha). Gérard is a book collector and a dealer in illuminated manuscripts, a musicologist with a weekly program on Radio France, a novelist and an essayist, an “expert of experts” dealing with insurance fraud (assessing the actual value of private libraries destroyed by fire), a countertenor who once sang Purcell’s “Come Ye Sons of Art” while woodcock hunting in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a student of the history of French food who has produced a couple of what he calls “two-kilo” bibliographies on the subject, a wine and salami scholar, a former officer in a society for the protection of the integrity of fromages de tête (headcheese), a culinary eccentric, and a grand cook. Once, in Cancale, on the Brittany coast, where we were eating the rare and enormous seventy-year-old oysters known as
pieds de cheval
(horse’s feet), he remarked, “These would be difficult to eat in a car.”

Soon after I met Gérard, I visited his manor, in Burgundy, where he prepared a particularly interesting dish of ancient origin—a torte of fifty baby pigs’ noses. “Really a simple dish,” he said. As he explained it, you soak the pigs’ noses overnight in clear water, then simmer them for about two hours in red wine, herbs, and garlic. Later, you add potatoes and bake the dish with the upturned noses forming a delightful mosaic on the surface. Such dishes are usually only for the extremely curious or those with an agricultural background. I recall both of my grandmothers boiling pigs’ heads with herbs and onions to make a headcheese, for which the especially toothsome cheek, tongue, and neck meat was extracted, covered with the cooking liquid, and gelatinized in a glass dish.

By the time I met Gérard, I had already been exposed to excesses of every sort, including those of the film industry, and I had known a number of big eaters, myself included. But I had never met a truly refined big eater. Not long afterward, Gérard threw a dinner with fifty courses. Why? Because it was his fiftieth birthday. Why else? When I first read the menu, it seemed incomprehensible to me, though there was an interior logic—the meal was designed after one described in Petronius’s
Satyricon.

This is not to say that Gérard concentrates on the arcane and the frivolous. In my dozen or so visits to his home, I’ve experienced many French standards, in versions better than any I’d had before. You know you are not in a restaurant when you enter Gérard’s kitchen and notice a wooden bowl with a kilo of black truffles waiting to be added to your all-time favorite dish,
poulet demi-deuil,
or “chicken in half-mourning.” The dead fowl has been honored by so many truffle slices, slid under its skin, that it appears to be wearing black (not to mention the large truffle stuffed in the bird’s cavity, to comfort its inner chicken). When I said, “Gérard, you shouldn’t have,” he replied, “I’m a bachelor. I have no heirs.”

Over the years, on my visits to France, Guy de la Valdène, Gérard, and I had discussed the possibilities for a “theme” meal, and we had read the menus of several that Gérard had already given. At a certain point, it began to seem entirely reasonable to plan a lunch that began with twenty-four courses and then urged itself upward. And no restaurant was more logical a location than L’Espérance, in the village of Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay, a scant hour and a half from Gérard’s home, in the Morvan. Of all the great chefs in France, Marc Meneau, a very tall man who looms above his employees as did de Gaulle above his citizenry, is one of the least aggressive, apparently devoid of any interest in becoming a public figure. His restaurant, long a required destination for gourmands, is pure country French, elegantly set in a grand garden, with nothing whatsoever in its décor to intimidate the customer. (And it would soon regain the third Michelin star that it had lost in 1999.)

Gérard had known Meneau for years, and with Guy and me safely at home in the United States he proceeded to plan the feast, using his improbable library as the source. Having once sat in on an after-lunch confab on the
vrai ancien coq au vin
(reduce seven liters of Merlot down to one, whisk in the rooster blood, et cetera), I can only imagine the countless hours of discussion that ensued between Gérard and Meneau.

When the morning of the event finally arrived, I wasn’t particularly hungry. This didn’t alarm me—many professional athletes before a big game feel that they would prefer to spend the day with their Tinkertoys or in the arms of Lucrezia Borgia. I had already been off my diet for two weeks, touring the French countryside with Guy and Peter Lewis, a Seattle restaurateur. Everywhere we went, we ate the best food available, with the excuse, not totally accurate, that we’d worked hard, saved our pennies, and had it coming. (The novelist Tom McGuane once noted that in the course of thirty-five years of correspondence between us I had lost a total of eighteen hundred pounds—so I was really “getting down there.”)

The day dawned cool and misty. There was a certain anxiety in the air at the manor, with Gérard watching to make sure that I didn’t partake of the breakfast that I thought I needed. All I wanted was a simple slab of the game pâté from the evening before, but when I tried to sneak into the kitchen from the outside pantry door he was there in front of the fridge like a three-hundred-pound albino cat.

I’ve always felt that there is no lovelier village in France than Vézelay, and no lovelier religious building than its cathedral on the hill, the Madeleine of Vézelay. I’m not Catholic, but I’ve lit candles in that church in prayer for troubled friends, and it has always worked. At least, they’re all still showing vital signs. But I had no time to run up the steep hill and light a candle for my own digestion. The twelve of us sat down at noon. To my left was the vintner Didier Dagueneau, whose exquisite Pouilly-Fumé we had been drinking since our initial Krug Grande Cuvée. The first time I met Didier, I was startled by his appearance, which is that of a Minnesotan pulp cutter. During the winter downtime at his vineyard, in Pouilly, he travels far north, toward the Arctic, to run the dozens of sled dogs that he owns and whose racket irritates his neighbors. To my right was Gilles Brézol, Gérard’s business partner and a man of sophisticated intelligence, who taught French for a year in Alabama and Nevada during the civil-rights upheaval. I’ve had dozens of meals with Gilles, who eats as much as I do but remains irritatingly slender. In fact, in this group of mostly book collectors and journalists sworn to secrecy, no one was technically obese. Although the lunch had originally been planned for eleven, a twelfth guest, a beautifully tailored, elderly French gentleman, unknown to all of us, had been invited by Meneau, in accordance with the superstitious notion that any large group should include a stranger, who might very well be an angel in disguise.