Heat (16 page)

Dyslexia—the term is derived from the Greek to describe a difficulty with words—is a neurological disorder that disrupts the brain’s ability to process language. Like most dyslexics, Marco responds best to information in a nonwritten form. He can spend an hour reading a page of
The Times
and remember nothing. “But if you read it aloud, I can recite it word for word.” In a dyslexic, the brain’s abnormalities at processing visual information often develop into unlikely strengths. Marco has an exceptional sense of proportion. “Those disco balls—no one believed they’d come through the door and they started to take down the frames, but I knew there was a millimeter to spare.” He also has a knack for numbers (“It comes from the other side of the brain”) and an uncanny visual sense. White has a photographic memory for dishes and, according to Crompton-Batt, an ability to recall every plate served to him in the last twenty years.

I found myself thinking of the way Marco insists on the visual in food preparations—there is a history of diners who have known that he was in the kitchen because the composition of their plates was so uniquely expressive—along with the quirkier moments when he’d been stopped by something he’d seen: sunrises and sunsets and the changing light. A butcher’s shop in the hunting season was “a work of conceptual art—hares, rabbits, pheasants, each with their own markings and colorings, hanging on a rail in the window.” In talking about his first job, working alongside the butcher, he described the older man’s knife skills in exhilaratingly precise detail. “I love the way he opens a piece of meat up with his hands, using his palms and fingers, the whole thing so effortless, and how he then rides the knife through, as though it’s a part of his hand. Forget the knife. It’s like this. These are your fingertips, right? They just glide through. The knife is just an extension of your fingertips.
That’s
knife discipline.
That’s
what it’s all about. And I used to stand next to this old boy—I was sixteen, and he was in his fifties—and watch him, until finally I’d learned enough that I was told I could do the turkey legs, to bone them and take out the sinews. It was my first important job, and I’d learned how to do it from hours of watching. Then I tied the legs—to get used to working with string—massaging the meat first, to even it out. It was so difficult in the beginning, you’re so uncoordinated, until it becomes natural, as if someone has programmed your fingers.”

When Marco talked like this, I thought, You’re a freak. You’re not seeing the same world I see. He’s like the tall guy in school, who, because of his height, can play basketball better than anyone else. Marco has, in effect, an exaggerated facility to survive in a kitchen. At some point, Marco learned he had this gift but kept it to himself. “Early on, I realized I had a photographic memory for food but wouldn’t tell the chef. I’d be at a new job, working on starters, say, but was always watching and memorizing the other stations so that when I was moved to one I knew exactly what to do. They all thought I was a genius.”

Marco’s genius might be nothing more than an exaggerated variation of Mario’s “kitchen awareness,” but it made me realize how this visual facility was not one I had developed, probably because I’m a word guy—most of us are—and for most of my life the learning I’ve done has been through language. Most metropolitan professions are language-driven—urban, deductive, dominated by thought, reading, abstraction, from the moment you wake and wonder how you should dress for the day and read a weather report to find out. Until now, everything I had known about cooking was from books. A different process was at work when I found myself in a kitchen for twelve hours. I wasn’t reading; to an extent, I wasn’t thinking. I watched and imitated. The process seems more typical of how a child’s brain works than an adult’s. It was like learning to throw a ball. For instance, how to bone a leg of lamb. Now I have a picture of Memo’s working down the thigh bone with his knife. Or how to tie a piece of meat: there’s a brain image. How to use a plastic squirter bottle to create a circle of green dots on your plate (with olive oil) or a dark one (with
vin cotto
) or a rich brown one (with a porcini reduction). How to know that your vegetables are caramelized, that your fennel is braised, that your dandelions, although floppy like a washcloth, are ready. How to recognize that a branzino is cooked because you can smell its skin turning crispy. How to toss a pan so that everything in it turns over. How to toss it so that only the things on the outer rim turn over—like ravioli, which need to be coated with butter, but gently so they don’t break. How to compose a plate, how to use asymmetrical items with a sense of symmetry. How, in effect, to learn like a child.

The masochist in me regrets I never worked in Marco’s kitchens. He’s moved on. He has since sold both 50 St James and Drones, perhaps having discovered there’s more money in real estate than in cooking. But in the end I learned some things (over and above the most obvious one, which is that chefs are some of the world’s nuttiest people). I learned how much I had to learn.

11

I
WENT TO
I
TALY,
where,during my first lunch, I ate a homemade pasta, and my life, in a small but enduring way, was never the same.

I was on a brief culinary tour of the Po River valley—much of my itinerary proposed by Mario—but, at the suggestion of a friend, had made a detour to visit Zibello, about twenty miles from Parma. This was the livestock heartland of Italy. (All day, and everywhere, there was a pervasive porcine smell and invisible particles of something I didn’t want to think about clinging to my hair and clothes.) The pasta was prepared by Miriam Leonardi, the fifth woman in successive generations to be running the Trattoria La Buca. Miriam, as she insisted upon being addressed, ran the trattoria in the Italian style of you-don’t-cut-an-onion-until-the-dish-has-been-ordered and, after each course, waddled out and asked me what I wanted next. She had just turned sixty-two. She wore a tight-fitting, white chef’s cap—more scarf than hat—and had dark eyebrows and a big, hooked masculine nose. She was a little over five feet, with a wide girth, and, moving slowly with her legs apart, had an overwhelming sense of ease and confidence: she has, after all, been making this walk from her kitchen to one of her tables and back again for forty-five years.

My friend had mentioned several dishes in addition to the pastas: eel, frog legs, tripe, and
culatello,
a specialty of the village. Culo means “ass.” Culatello translates loosely as “buttness” and is made from the hindquarters of a pig—boned, stuffed into a bladder, cured, and hung for two years in the damp local cellars. The method is deemed unmodern by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and culatello is forbidden in America. The friend who recommended Miriam’s now has developed such cravings for it that he imports her culatello illegally.

I had a plate of it, served with shavings of butter on top. It was a deep red brown, with a light, soft fluffiness—no obvious fat, although obviously fatty—and a piggy intensity I’d never tasted before. Afterwards, Miriam invited me to see her operation, a
cantina
just behind the kitchen where I counted the culatelli, a hundred rows of ten, hanging from the cantina’s rafters and being refrigerated by nothing more than the breezes off the Po. I breathed in deeply, wanting to enjoy the romance of what Miriam referred to as the
profumo profondo della mia carne,
the perfume of her meat, and concluded, after identifying the dank smell of aging animal and the ammonia sharpness of the mold adhering to a thousand pig bladders, that the perfume was probably an acquired taste. I mentioned I was trying to cure meats myself, under the instruction of Mario Batali (as it happened, Miriam’s daughter, who will be the sixth woman to run the trattoria, had eaten at Babbo on a recent trip to New York, objecting only to the tripe, which didn’t “stink enough”). For the rest of the afternoon Miriam kept referring to Mario, “the famous New York chef,” and cackling. “He probably uses a refrigerator, he’s so smart,” she said and laughed uproariously. “What I prepare in my kitchen,” she said, by way of definitive explanation, “is what my grandmother taught me. She cooked what her grandmother taught her. And she cooked what her grandmother taught her. You think I’m interested in a famous New York chef?” She said “New York” as though it were a bad taste in the mouth.

I then ate two pastas. One was tortellini, small, complicated knots of dough with a mysterious meaty stuffing. The other was giant pillowy ravioli, distinguished by their thin, floppy lightness. I’d never had anything like them. They were dressed with butter and honey and filled with pumpkin, so that when you bit into one you experienced an unexpected taste explosion. The pumpkin, roasted and mixed with parmigiano cheese, was like a mouthful of autumn: the equivalent of waking up and finding the leaves on the trees outside your window had changed color. The dish was called
tortelli di zucca
(
zucca
means “squash”) and was so memorable it provoked me to find out where it came from.

Outside of Italy, you see “ravioli” more than “tortelli,” but the two words seem to have been used interchangeably for centuries. Technically, ravioli are what goes inside (it’s still possible to get
ravioli nudi
—naked ravioli—which look like little balls of filling, as though the chef that day had run out of flour), and tortelli are the casing. Tortelli are the diminutive of
torte
—small torts or tarts—and a torta is one of the oldest food preparations on the Italian peninsula. In the Middle Ages, the word described nothing more than a container of dough with something inside, probably more like a savory pie or tart than a pasta, although it appears to have meant both a savory pie and a pasta. Recipes for making it appear in the
Liber de coquina,
the first known Italian cookbook, written at the end of the thirteenth century. (Miriam’s other pasta, the tortellini, are much smaller—they’re the diminutive of tortelli—and date from a later time, probably the early Renaissance, a specialty of Bologna. According to the most common story of their origins, they were invented by a clever baker to look like the navel of a married woman he was having an affair with—done with such verisimilitude that the likeness was identified by the unhappy husband.)

At the time, my research was informal and limited because, although I was learning Italian (I’d been dutifully attending a two-hour Saturday-morning class at the Scuola Italiana in Greenwich Village, conjugating my verbs with flash cards on the subway), I couldn’t read it, and most of the early Italian food books haven’t been translated into English, except for one, possibly the most important, certainly the most illuminating. (Like Miriam’s pasta, this, too, changed my life in another one of those small but enduring ways.) The text, written in Latin, was inspired by a fifteenth-century chef known as Maestro Martino and was called
De honesta voluptate et valitudine,
“On honest pleasures and good health.” Tellingly, it had been translated into English only recently, even though, since its publication in the fifteenth century, it had rapidly appeared in almost every other European language and become one of the Continent’s first international best sellers. It was also the most influential book on cooking for two centuries.

The author was not a chef but a librarian at the Vatican, a Lombard known as Platina, a scholar, a humanist (his other works include a biography of the popes, a treatise on war and one on peace, one on love and one against it), and an eater. In 1463, a year after he arrived in Rome, at the age of forty-one, he was invited by Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan, a legendary gourmand, to escape a hot summer in the city and go to the cardinal’s hilltop retreat in Albano, southeast of Rome. Maestro Martino was the cardinal’s cook.

The Maestro, born near Lake Como, was also a native of Lombardy and, like Platina, had only just arrived in Rome (from Milan, where the chef had cooked for the nobles of the city). The two men, probably the same age, established an immediate rapport. For Martino, Platina appears to have been one of the first non-chefs to appreciate a great chef’s talents. For Platina, the Maestro’s preparations were a revelation—the first time he’d witnessed cooking as “art”—and he spent the summer at the Maestro’s side, learning everything he could of this new discipline. His informal study represents, in effect, the first known example of “kitchen trailing” (the lingo for a newcomer following a chef to learn his approach).

The book Platina then wrote is really two books. One is a humanist treatise on nutrition and living well, written in the style of Pliny’s
Natural History
as a succession of numbered paragraphs (on sleep or salt or figs), each one ending with a salutary observation: that five almonds eaten before drinking protect you from getting drunk; that an occasional portion of porcupine meat reduces bed-wetting; or that “the testicles of younger animals are considered better for you than those of old animals,” except the testicles of roosters, whose testicles are good for you regardless of the age of the bird, especially if served alongside calves’ feet and spices, in the Roman style. Then, halfway through, Platina’s style changes radically. “Oh, immortal gods,” he declares, in the middle of describing a white sauce. “What a cook you bestowed in my friend Martino of Como!” He goes on to extol the Maestro’s eloquence and to insist that, in his cooking, we are witnessing the future: an example of the “modern cooking school,” where ingredients are taken seriously and subjected to “the keenest of discussion.” The rest of the book is given over to the Maestro’s recipes, told in a noticeably different voice—the Maestro’s, I suspect. In hanging around a chef’s kitchen just long enough to steal his recipes, Platina is also illustrating an early example of a modern practice (recipe theft), and, when, four hundred and sixty-four years later, a manuscript of the Maestro’s recipes, written in fifteenth-century Italian, was discovered in a bookshop by an American food writer, it became obvious just how extensively Platina had plagiarized his teacher, deviating from his recipes only in error (leaving out an essential ingredient, say) or to add one of his Pliny-like medical observations, as in his addendum to the Maestro’s recipe for boiled cannabis meatballs
(offa cannabina),
a dish “to be fled from, for it nourishes badly, arouses squeamishness, generates pain in the stomach and intestines, and dulls the eyes.” (There are several cannabis recipes, a dissonant detail for the modern reader, evoking what would seem to be an anachronistic picture of fifteenth-century stoners loitering in the Vatican Library.)