Steal the Menu (18 page)

After the Yale wedding, I looked at my library of nouvelle cuisine cookbooks and menus with this in mind and found abundant examples of this metaphorical principle at work. Paging through
The Nouvelle Cuisine of Jean and Pierre Troisgros
, I noticed a vegetable terrine that was a playful nonmeat copy of a traditional meat terrine and a recipe for oysters with periwinkles—that is, shellfish topped with shellfish. Obviously not every nouvelle cuisine dish is a straightforward culinary pun or play on a figure of culinary speech, but almost invariably the memorable recipes start from a witty reinterpretation of a standard dish. It is this “literary” aspect that saves nouvelle cuisine from being merely a collection of outrageous novelties. The greatest failures of modern cooking have always been those entirely new dishes, concocted with no reference to the past. Its greatest triumphs have sprung from tradition seen through a glass brightly.

The other crucial feature of nouvelle cuisine—its studied and original arrangements of food on individual plates—is also a clever reaction to French tradition in the kitchen and at the dining table. The haute cuisine of my grandparents’ time
^§
called for
edible designs to be executed on serving platters, which were then dismantled onto individual plates without much attention to “design.” The original logic of the dish on the serving platter had been lost. This method of getting food to the table was called Russian service. Whether truly Russian or not, it emerged as a radical dining reform in the nineteenth century, quickly triumphed and held sway in luxury establishments right into the 1970s.

Russian service depended very heavily on the labor of waiters. In establishments that practiced this method to its fullest, meals were served on a platter, banquet-style, even if the diner was eating alone and had ordered something that could just as easily have been put intact on a plate in the kitchen and brought right to the table. Instead,
sole meunière
would be presented in a serving dish, finished with the canonical sizzle on a tableside hot plate (
réchaud
), then transferred to the plate at a buffet or rolling table near the dining table.

Anyone over the age of fifty will have no trouble recalling such meals. Russian service may have reached its perigee with dishes that were flamed tableside. Waiters turned into Prometheus, bringing fire to cognac and ladling the resulting vaporous blue-haloed liquid over steaks and, most dramatically, crêpes Suzette.
^‖

It took most of the rest of the century for Russian service to sweep away its predecessor, French service. Gone, finally, were the simultaneous profusion of dishes, the architectural table decoration
and the sculptural set pieces (
pièces montées
) that had marked the grandiose age of Carême. Russian service, championed in the 1860s by the influential chef Félix Urbain Dubois, allowed people to eat one dish per course. As a result, chefs turned to perfecting each individual dish instead of concentrating on an array of dishes. This led to platters bristling with ancillary garnishes. But in less than a century, dissatisfaction with these baroque arrays led to a further reduction in the scale of food presentation. Nouvelle cuisine restricted itself to the individual plate.

This reduction of the field of display—from table (medieval/French service) to platter (Russian service: later nineteenth century to 1965) to plate (1965 through the present)—followed along with a historical change in dining habits, from the self-service smorgasbord-like public dining of the late medieval and early modern eras to a waiter-finished, à la carte–style restaurant world to the kitchen-plated style of contemporary, post-nouvelle dining.

This evolution of presentation corresponded to an overall shift in restaurant staffing, from the servitors of French service—the waiters who cooked tableside, who had evolved from the footmen who set out the food and carved the meat for the medieval table—to the servers with cooking skills of Russian service to the nouvelle cuisine’s noncooking, unskilled plate distributors.

Fluctuations in the cost of labor and the levels of skill available in those three periods played an important role in determining how food was brought to diners. Very cheap labor in the late medieval and early modern era made it possible to staff noble and nouveau riche dining rooms with hordes of footmen, most of them unskilled except perhaps at carving large pieces of meat. In the post-1900 world of rising literacy within the urban working class, overall wages rose, but semiskilled waiters could take pressure off the kitchen staff and do double duty as food deliverers. After World War II, the cost of labor rose again. Chefs streamlined their
kitchen procedures, via the less laborious style of the “lighter” dishes of nouvelle cuisine, and eliminated the need for waiters with culinary skills by handing off completely plated individual dishes to unskilled waiters in the kitchen.

By the 1980s, this historic shift was complete. Diners had blithely accepted the new style, as if pictorial plating of slimmed-down, ironically deconstructed variations on traditional recipes was the normal thing to expect in serious, up-to-date restaurants. So was the increasingly exotic and cosmopolitan sourcing of ingredients, methods and recipes. But the diet-food tag persisted, and the chastely plated dishes featured in nouvelle cuisine–inspired restaurants left many diners who were accustomed to larger portions feeling as if they’d been subjected to a prettified form of a weight-loss regimen.

The emblematic American restaurant of that moment, Chez Panisse, was transforming itself from an outpost of simple French cooking in northern California into the sanctuary of locavore vegetable purity it continues to be today.

Chez, as its Berkeley habitués call it, was anything but a healthy, up-from-the-soil, hyper-Californian shrine in its formative era. The mother of it all, Alice Waters, evolved out of the political radicalism on the Berkeley campus into a food activist during a study year in France in 1964. A dinner in Brittany converted her forever to the simple beauties of French food. “I’ve remembered this dinner a thousand times,” she told John Whiting in 2002.
^a
“The chef, a woman, announced the menu, cured ham and melon, trout with almonds, and raspberry tart. The trout had just come from the stream and the raspberries from the garden. It was the immediacy that made those dishes so special.”

Back in Berkeley, Waters began seriously cooking French food
at home. In 1971, with financial backing from friends, she took over a Craftsman-style house and began serving family-style meals to the public. The name of the place also reflected her passion for French provincial culture. Panisse is a character in the trilogy of 1930s films based on plays by Marcel Pagnol about lower-class life in the port of Marseilles. Panisse is also the name of the chickpea-dough fritters typical of the Mediterranean coast of France from Marseilles to Nice.

So the roots of Waters’s new restaurant were blatantly French, but her particular connection with French cuisine involved a vivid, if romanticized, vision of its connection to extremely local food sources. One may reasonably wonder if those primordial trout had actually been hooked on a fly the morning before she ate one. The norm, at any rate, even for very meticulous, family-run restaurants, would have been a tank or a pond supplied by a commercial
fournisseur
.

This is not to malign the freshness of the trout, only to cast doubt on the accuracy of Waters’s tourist-eye romanticism. Paul Bocuse exploited a similar credulity in journalists like me. We usually did not stop to ask ourselves how it was that sea bass had turned up in the fresh waters of Lyon’s twin rivers, the Rhône and the Saône.

At any rate, there can be no doubt that Waters impelled her new restaurant in a direction known much later as locavore. If her dwarf vegetables actually came from a farm near San Diego, hundreds of miles away, they were still native Californian. Her berries were foraged not far from Berkeley, by a tetchy fellow who wrote me a menacing letter when I quoted Alice describing the scratches he endured in order to bring her wild berries.

And as the daily set menus at Chez Panisse turned increasingly eclectic under a regularly changing cast of chefs, the emphasis on local, hands-on, nontoxic ingredients became the restaurant’s
central enduring theme. Chez Panisse began as a clever pastiche of meridional French home cooking that branched out into other kinds of simple food. It was and is a form of
auberge
, an inn with a table d’hôte. Hooray for all that, but even forty years ago, when a diverse nouvelle American cuisine was emerging all over the country, Chez Panisse wasn’t serving it.

To do that, you had to know what traditional American cooking had been. You had to be interested in making modern versions of authentic survivals of regional cooking that had first evolved in pioneer days, during those creative moments of scarcity when settlers arrived in unfamiliar wilderness and were forced to produce hybrid meals, using the unfamiliar foods they found to make improvised versions of the recipes they had brought in their heads. In the Southeast, for example, slaves adapted the West African technique of deep-frying flour-coated foods to local ingredients and invented southern fried chicken and hush puppies. Because cornmeal was abundant, they substituted it for the native African black-eyed-pea flour they knew from home. Food historians of transatlantic black foodways, including Jessica Harris, documented this process. In the later 1970s, I began to hunt for authentic, specific regional dishes produced by the collision of immigrant pioneers with American conditions of pioneer days—a colonial form of unconscious nouvellization.

Adjustments frontier cooks made to foods they knew from their home countries in order to adapt them to culinary possibilities in a newfound land generated the diverse set of regional specialties that flourished all over America before the homogenizing effects of interstate highways and a system of increasingly anonymous food supply pushed these local cuisines into darkness and disuse. Yes, there were bodacious survivals, especially in economic backwaters like Cajun Louisiana and hispanophone New Mexico. But even in these places, much of what the casual visitor could run up against
was adulterated and for show, at fairs and other commercialized focuses of regional self-celebration and hokum.

Over the course of time, I would write about these and other matters for
Natural History
. But when I was hired in 1974 by Alan Ternes, all he told me was that my column should “reflect the various fields in which the Museum of Natural History intersected with what people ate.” And he wanted me to attach a germane recipe to each column.

I’d started out thinking that for a magazine celebrated as the vehicle for Margaret Mead’s anthropology, I should try to consider cuisine as a facet of ethnography. This turned out to be a wide-open field, since anthropologists had by and large ignored what the people they studied ate. Even anthropologists who specialized in material culture had concerned themselves with tools and boats, or with tattoos and metalwork, but they’d largely left the business of writing down recipes from authentic ethnic cooks to nonacademic cookbook authors, and there were few enough of them venturing into the unplumbed outback of the vanishing preliterate world.

There was one shining exception to this, the very eminent French cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. His deep analysis of the mythology of the Bororo culture of central Brazil centered on the symbolism of the edible. Lévi-Strauss’s monumental
Mythologiques
ranged much further than that, but its first volume,
The Raw and the Cooked
, had appeared in English not long before (1969), and the rest of the tetralogy was not completely anglicized until 1981.

Highly theoretical, yet dazzlingly gymnastic, this was a way of talking about food that I hoped to imitate in my column. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss had already influenced the treatment of primitive language and myth and culture in my novel
Native Intelligence
(1975), which reworked some of the traditional Amazonian stories Lévi-Strauss had found recorded in the
Enciclopédia Boróro
, a compendium
compiled by Salesian missionaries to the Amazon and then deconstructed by Lévi-Strauss into a gastrocosmology.

So it was a natural step for me to infiltrate heavy doses of symbolic anthropology into my two-thousand-word essays on food in
Natural History
. This Lévi-Strauss Lite phase came to an abrupt halt when Ternes spiked my column on the meaning of blood in world cuisine, which included references to blood in the Eucharist as well as to the initiation ceremony of the Hell’s Angels, in which the novitiate consumed the menstrual blood of his moll directly from the source, in front of the assembled Angels.

Alan did print my deliberately provocative column on cannibalism, but it strained his patience. I surveyed the entire ethnographic literature on cannibalism with the goal of determining which cuts were preferred on gustatory grounds.
^b
For an illustration, I pointed the magazine’s art department to the iconic image of cannibalism, an engraving purportedly based on an actual sighting by the artist of a missionary being cooked in a pot by savages somewhere in deepest Amazonia. And, for the obligatory recipe, I adapted the haute cuisine dish
pain de cervelle
, a sort of calf’s-brain pudding or loaf, but with the ingredient line altered to read “1½ pounds brains of any higher mammal.”

Carol Breslin, who handled my
Natural History
copy with intelligence and courtesy for twenty years (I must have seemed like a cream puff compared to her husband, Herbert, the hilariously undiplomatic manager of Luciano Pavarotti), revealed to me that, because I had stepped over the line this time into real anthropology, she’d felt compelled to procure a professional reading. The referee she chose loathed the column.

At the time, there was a fashionable theory going around that cannibalism was largely a xenophobic construct of European interlopers
into exotic cultures and that where it had occurred, it was a reasonable response to desperate shortages of animal protein in the diet, not much different from the behavior of the modern cannibals who had eaten other passengers’ flesh after their plane crashed in a remote part of the Andes. My reader, a proponent of this materialist, proto-Marxist explanation of tribal cannibalism, covered the margins of my galleys with testy dismissals of my “naive” repetitions of faulty anecdotes about pervasive ritual cannibalism and the chop-licking consumption of defeated neighbors, all drawn from academic journals. But he reached his highest point of dudgeon over the recipe. “I doubt,” he thundered inaudibly, “that the author could distinguish the brain of a human from that of a large lizard.”