Through the Children's Gate (25 page)

Olivia still hopes to have him to herself someday. As I work late at night in the “study” (an old hallway, an Aalto screen), I keep near the “nursery” (an ancient pantry, a glass-brick wall), I can hear her shift into pre-sleep, still muttering to herself. She is still trying to reach her closest friend. “Ravioli? Ravioli?” she moans as she turns over into her pillow and clutches her blanket, and then she whispers, almost to herself, “Tell him call me. Tell him call me when he comes home.”

I
enjoy the company of cooks. I admire them because they are hard workers, and because they make delicious things. But, more than that, I like to contemplate the way they have to think in order to make the things they make. They are the last artists among us who still live in the daily presence of patronage. In the two centuries since the Romantic revolution, the arts have, one by one, been Byronized, set free from the necessity of pleasing an audience—a process that began with the poets and painters and took in the architects and novelists and has swept up, most recently, the rock musicians and shoe designers. All have taught themselves that they are there to instruct and puzzle an audience, not to please it.

But although cooks are a source of romance, they are not themselves Romantic. They practice their art the way all art was practiced until the nineteenth century, as a job done to order for rich people who treat you as something between the court jester and the butler. Cooks can be temperamental—cooks are
supposed
to be temperamental—but temperament is the Byronism of the dependent; children, courtesans, and cooks all have it. What cooks have in place of freedom is what all artists had back before they were released from the condition of flunkydom: a weary, careful dignity, a secretive sense of craft, and the comforting knowledge of belonging to a guild.

I also enjoy the company of cooks because I have always wanted to be one. A surprising number of writers I know, apart from the bitter ones who dream about being publishers, share this fantasy. Words and food are bound together in some inexplicable way, a peculiar communion
that lends grace and mystery to what otherwise would seem to be a simple exchange of gluttony for publicity.

Overt collaborations between writers and cooks, however, are rare, and I was therefore happy and surprised last March when two cooks whose company I enjoy a lot asked if I would, so to speak, write them a meal. The two cooks were Dan Barber, of Blue Hill, in Greenwich Village, and Peter Hoffman, of Savoy, in Soho. It was Peter who called me first and asked if I would be interested in organizing a
jeu de cuisine,
a cooking game. The game, he said, had been invented by Robert Courtine, who, under the name of La Reynière, was the gastronomic columnist of
Le Monde
for many years. (He had been a full-fledged collaborator with Vichy during the war; afterward, he became a reactionary of the table and flourished.) In the early seventies, when nouvelle cuisine was just appearing, Courtine chose a list of ingredients from the Paris markets and then had five cooks prepare a menu from them. Peter told me that five young New York chefs had agreed to cook for a week from a list of ingredients of my choosing from the farmers’ market in Union Square. The cooks would use the foods I chose in whatever way they wanted, with whatever else they wanted to add. (It wouldn't be a competition, he said, in the tone in which extremely competitive people say those words.) I agreed, of course, although I later explained to him and Dan Barber that they would have to be responsible for my education: I had to confess that I had never visited the green market. They seemed unsurprised by this information; whatever they were coming to me for, it wasn't expertise.

I have known Peter since 1990, when he opened Savoy, a lovely, neighborly restaurant, with a golden-lit Arts and Crafts–style room, all blond wood and copper mesh and candlelight and welcome, eclectic food. Dan Barber was a more recent friend. A year ago, I wandered into Blue Hill, which he oversees with his fellow chef Mike Anthony, expecting the kind of well-meaning meal you get from a young guy who has cooked for a couple of years in France; and instead, I ate as good a meal as any I have had outside the three-star places in Paris. Describing food is difficult, not because we can't capture in words things that are sensual—we do fine with painting and pubic hair—but because memorable description depends on startling metaphors, and
startling metaphors depend on a willingness to be startled. Nobody did much with landscape, either, until it suddenly became respectable to compare a Swiss mountain to the whole of human destiny. We don't allow that freedom when it comes to what's on our plates. If someone wrote, for instance, that Dan Barber's foie gras with ground coffee beans is at once as inevitable as a tide and as astonishing as a wave, the reader's first response would be to think, quite rightly, that it is not at all. (And yet it is.) People used to feel this way about metaphors for sex—the English still do. They have just gotten over Evelyn Waugh writing “I was made free of her narrow loins.” But we all still resist “I was made free of his thick loin chops.”

Dan is not merely an aspirant to intellect but a real-live émigré from academe. In 1991 he had been waiting to go to China on a Fluorite in political science when his grant program was canceled, and he set off instead to a job at a bakery. “Dan has this whole right-brain, left-brain thing going, which is rare for one of us,” another cook said. There was something almost Salingeresque about him. He grew up on the Upper East Side—a Dalton lifer, kindergarten through high school; he cooked for his father after his mother died—and the way he generally looks and talks (acerbic, observant, self-critical), added to the natural diffidence of chefs, puts one in mind of the way Zooey Glass would have, had he chosen cooking over acting.

The three other chefs were to be Philippe Bertineau, of Payard Pâtisserie & Bistro, on the Upper East Side; Sara Jenkins, of Patio Dining, in the East Village; and Romy Dorotan, of Cendrillon, in Soho—one French cook, three Americans, and a Filipino. All of them did most of the shopping for their kitchens at the farmers’ market in Union Square, and all of them were, directly or indirectly, sons and daughters of Alice Waters, the Jeanne d'arc of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, who brought to America the doctrine of the seasonal, the organic, and the sincere. The doctrine includes the belief that all shopping, if humanly possible, should be done at a farmers’ market, that small producers are better than large, and that the cook should decide only after seeing what's in the market what he or she wants to cook that night.

When I got home and told my family that I had been specially
selected as the point man for a demonstration of the virtues of the seasonal and the natural, of farmers’ goods and nature's bounty, they were unimpressed.

“Will it be like
Iron Chef?”
my son, Luke, asked. He has become a great fan of the bizarre Japanese cooking competition that is broadcast on the Food Network every Friday night. On this program, two grim-faced chefs have an hour in which to cook a four-, five-, or even six-course meal, built around a single ingredient chosen by the host—a strange, melodramatic figure in black, who spits out Japanese. The special ingredient rises from beneath the floor, like the Phantom of the Opera's organ, in dark expressionist lighting.

“You'll be the guy in the black leather pants,” Luke said, and barked “Tuna!” in a mock Japanese accent.

“No, I won't,” I said. “This is not going to be a competition. Just an exhibition. Like the Dodo's race in
Alices Adventures in Wonderland.
All must have prizes.”

A
fter years of Paris markets, with their abundance and bad faith—the Marché Biologique, the organic market on the Boulevard Raspail, sells a lot of terrific produce, but I have always doubted that pineapples are actually being grown organically on the Île-de-France—I confess that I found the pickings at the Union Square green market on a spring morning a little scrappy. The rules of the market insist that only a narrow band of local farmers can participate, and this limits your choices, especially between seasons.

“There's a lot of ramps and some good rhubarb” was the kind of cheering but not exactly inspiring summation you would hear on an April morning. “And some nice storage potatoes and some, uh, storage apples.” (I didn't even know what ramps were, though I quickly learned: They are small wild leeks, which have suddenly become fashionable. Why this should be is hard to say, the appeal of a wild leek not being so great that it makes you regret that leeks were ever tamed.) In truth, the chefs, too, found the market disappointing on most mornings, and that, I realized, was exactly what appealed to them. Instead of ranging through the market like cooks in a television commercial—
squeezing an apple, smelling a ramp, feeling up a chicken—they tended to go where they knew they wanted to go, seeing at a glance if what they were looking for was there, and then quietly taking as much of it as they could get. They didn't taste much, because experience with the vendor and the look of the item told them what it would taste like. Expertise, I was reminded, isn't seeing all there is. Expertise is knowing what you're looking for.

And knowing what you're looking at. Peter could station himself in front of a fruit and give you twenty minutes on its pedigree and possibilities, like an Icelander telling you her family history. Once we stopped in front of a crate of strawberries at the stall of Franca Tantillo, one of the more vivid farmers at the market. “These are the only good strawberries,” Peter said. “Franca and the people at Fantasy Fruit are the only two people who are growing those strawberries right now. They're day-neutral, which means they completely ignore the usual Circadian cycle. They continue to flower even though the day is getting shorter.” I tasted a couple. They were nothing like the familiar American Driscoll's strawberries—bright red outsides and hard white mealy insides. Instead, they were sublime tiny berries with the fragrance of a French
fraise des bois,
perfumed and intensely sweet.

On another visit, we stopped at a table of desultory-looking green leaves, the kind of things you cut off the ends of leeks before you put them in a soup. It was a cold and rainy morning, and there didn't look like much that was worth taking the subway for.

“These are scapes,” Peter said. “And to understand what they are, you gotta understand the truth about garlic. There are two major groupings of garlic: hard neck and soft neck.” We were examining the hard neck. It looked like garlic with a leek stalk. “Hard-neck garlic grows a flower stalk that pulls energy away from the bulb. So you have to cut the flower off each plant, which takes forever, and only a handful of farmers are willing to do it—they cut off the flower stalks and we call them garlic scapes. Real hard-neck garlic came from Central Asia, and it requires a cold winter to get that juicy, full, pungent garlickness. We have a very Central Asian–, Afghanistan-garlic-type winter here.” I tasted a scape. It had a sharp and intense garlic flavor and a green, leafy undertone.

“You know, we have to put up with certain frustrations,” Peter went on as we tramped through the market. “But that's part of the whole expression. What produces great taste? One thing.
Stress.
French winemakers are always pushing the limit of viability. You can't really grow grapes in Champagne because it's too damn cold, and you can't really grow grapes in Châteauneuf-du-Pape because there's no soil there, but you force the vines to adapt to the environment and search for nutrients, and where the season is short enough and you have to crop close enough, you get terrific flavor. What drives great taste in the field is stress.”

“Thanks, Peter,” Dan said dryly. “I'm going to tell that to everybody in the kitchen tonight.”

One morning as Dan and Peter and I walked around the market, I complained about how little meat was on offer. “Well, for the best veal, you have to meet Amy, this woman upstate,” Dan said. “You know, most veal is white, and it's sort of awful and immoral how they raise it, because they want white meat. But she has a dairy farm, and instead of getting rid of the male calves, she just, well, she brings them up like her own children.” Dan's eyes glowed. “They're grass-fed, and she lets them run as free as you or I. It's a hard sell for a restaurant, because it's a reddish meat and customers expect white, but it's absolutely delicious, and she's a completely admirable person. I mean, she's amazing, the way she treats them. She really brings them up like her own children.”

“She brings them up like her own children until they're nine months old and she slaughters them,” Peter said equably.

I soon became a convert to the limited palette and small victories of the green market. I started coming home with a satchel filled with New York City produce: scrappy, hard-necked, stressed-out.

“We're going to have greens with scapes and ramps,” I announced.

“Can't we just have chicken fingers?” Luke asked.

“Scapes and greens and ramps: It sounds like a Ted Hughes poem,” my wife said dubiously.

* * *

O
ver a few dinners and many post-market breakfasts, I came to know the chefs involved in the game, and thought that I had begun to glimpse something about their curious mix of entrepreneurial savvy, high principle, sensual engineering, and mordant despair. There was, for instance, a story Dan Barber loved to tell about the moment he thought he had identified the
Times
food critic William Grimes incognito in his restaurant.

“So by this point, I know, I mean
I know,
that this is Grimes. I mean, it's obvious, he's coming in night after night, he's trying different bits of the menu, very professional—it's obvious that the guy is a food critic, and I see him and I sort of recognize him.” A visit from Grimes determines a restaurant's mood, because a Grimes review will determine its future. Dan Barber paused, and there was a quick, is-this-okay-in-front-of-a-civilian? glance between him and the other chefs before he went on. “We even put it out over the credit-card line. That's this informal system a couple of chefs have where they fax the fake credit-card names of the
Times
critic to all the other restaurants.” He shrugged. “So the very next day, Grimes actually calls from the
Times
and asks for a wine list. Now, this guy, let's call him Mr. Hudsucker, had taken a menu with him—but not a wine list! So, I mean, now we're getting obvious.” He went on, “That Friday, a ‘Diner's Journal’ article comes out that lists all the dishes Mr. Hudsucker ate at the bar! So, okay, the next week H. M. Hudsucker makes another reservation, and we flip over backward for him, creating all these tasting menus, and the servers going through hula hoops. You have to be careful about that stuff, of course, because it's like the Enigma secret—you want to use it, but you don't want it to be obvious you've broken the code. Anyway, finally, someone comes into the kitchen and I say, ‘That's Grimes!’ and he says, ‘No, it isn't. I know Grimes, and that's not Grimes.’ And I say, ‘That's not Grimes? Then who the hell is that?’ Later, a waiter went over without my knowing it and said, ‘You seem so,
uh, passionate
about food, Mr. Hudsucker, are you in the business?’ And he said, ‘What business?’ And the server said the food business. And Mr. Hudsucker said, ‘The food business? I'm in the insurance business. I just like it here.’