How to Cook Like a Man (15 page)

Pause.

“… andthena
giiivve
…”

Pause.

“We devil the kidneys … usually,” he said. “In well-seasoned
flour … It's my birthday breakfast. It sets you up very
very
well. And I believe it's that
squeak
that acts as a sort of …
Cupid
to me. Like brains, it's a textural experience.”

“Brains, right. Okay, so why don't we talk about brains. What culinary potential do you see bound up in a brain?”

“Well, we poach them very gently, separate the lobes, and then … we bread and fry them. You get this
crunch
and then this rich, creamy give and …
gna!
”

“Gna?” It appeared to be a moan of delight.

“Maybe a green sauce, cornichons, capers … it's sort of the
Gna!
Theory of Brains, so … that you have a couple of bites and it's
so
delicious and it's so rich and you sort of …
gna!
In fact, there's some …”

Long pause, twitching.

“… story …”

Even longer pause, and even more twitching.

“Someone said, oh, I can't remember, ‘… all those memories!' “

“In a brain?”

“Ah!” He smiled. “There we go. But look, there's one thing … sometimes it's sort of entertainment for City boys in here. ‘Who's going to eat the most scary thing on the menu!' And that gives you the wrong … Nothing's scary. It's all delicious.”

Flying home, back to Liz and the girls, I felt that he was right: everything I'd eaten, in both of his restaurants, was indeed delicious. I even tried to emulate him, for a little while. Certain ingredients made that easy: my gigantic grassfed cow's heart, for example, looked and tasted much like the ox heart at St. John, and I loved eating it. To this day, it's a favorite dish of mine. But soon I felt a very different thought overtaking me, especially when I looked through my livers and my kidneys from those grown-up
cows and pigs, in my freezer: Fergus used none of these things. He cooked all the parts of animals, yes, but he didn't cook all the parts of any one animal. Duck hearts, sure, but not chicken hearts; ox hearts, but only from a single farm in Ireland; adult pig hearts, never, although sometimes the heart of a suckling pig; marrow bones, indeed, but only from calves, and therefore never from the same adult cattle providing the hearts or the big sides of beef, and therefore also imported from Denmark, given that England no longer had much of a veal industry at all. And so on: calf liver, but not cow liver; lamb's brains, but not pig's brains. Fergus was indeed masterful with unusual proteins, but his real gift—the quiet, unsung source of his power, I decided—lay rather in the clarity with which he'd realized his own idiosyncratic vision. Organs and extremities contributed to that vision, but not as ends in themselves. They were ingredients, rather, props in the generation of an alternate reality, a parallel universe in which British history had taken a slightly different turn about a century back, arriving at a slightly different present tense in which small English farms coexisted with the monstrous modern London, creek and hedge-row still teemed with squirrels to braise and eels to bake. Which was nice and everything, but applicable to Northern California only as an abstract example, not a concrete map for how to eat, or to feed one's family.

Back before we got married, Liz and I presented her sister, Debbie, with a birthday present of Thomas Keller's
The French Laundry Cookbook
. Neither Keller's name nor his three-Michelin-star restaurant meant a thing to me at the time. Judy suggested the present; Liz purchased it; I paid little attention; and I knew scarcely more about Keller when Jon, the liquor exec from the Menu Period, gave me Keller's second cookbook as a gift. Named for the casual bistro Keller had opened just down the road from the French Laundry,
Bouchon
struck me initially as a cookbook not to use but to set on the coffee table, telling guests that you'd been to the mountaintop. (An ancient genre, according to Jane Kramer, who reports seeing sixteenth-century versions, at the home of the French-cookbook historians Mary and Philip Hyman, of what the Hymans called the “here's what's happening at the table where you'll never be allowed to sit” cookbooks.) I felt a little stunned, too, by Keller's utter lack of even the slightest nod toward Chez Panisse in
Bouchon
. No mention of Alice, nor of the hallowed California principles of seasonality, locality, and sustainability. I found myself thinking, in a grouchy mood,
Who do you think you are!? Don't you know Queen Alice reigns in these parts?
Flipping through
The French Laundry
, as I did at Debbie's house one evening, only worsened my outrage: in a reference to a French
chef working in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s, Keller described him as the first chef in America to seek out fine produce from local farmers. It was like Keller imagined himself working not in the California that Alice built—not in a bountiful landscape full of boutique bakers and specialty farmers eager to sell him great ingredients—but in some timeless, placeless hautecuisine tradition reaching back through his own mentor, Roland Henin (currently the head chef of the Yosemite National Park concessions, in a truly weird tangling of destinies), to every great French chef who had ever lived.

Now, however, I found myself a little intrigued: Keller was almost the perfect anti-Alice, the ideal post-Fergus. If Alice had embodied the maternal home-cooking lineage through which I'd gotten started, and if Fergus dominated a more experimental approach for which I simply did not have either the adventurous palate or the catholic audience, perhaps I could see Keller as the embodiment of the great chef-driven lineage running directly from Temples of Gastronomy like Paris's Taillevent to the New York restaurants of Alain Ducasse and Daniel Boulud, and straight on up to the French Laundry. Perhaps I could see Keller, in other words, as my link to an unassailably classic tradition, the study of which might qualify as unassailably meaningful. As for Bouchon itself, it did feel a bit like Manhattan's Balthazar or Pastis, a perfect Hollywood-worthy replica of a Lyon bistro, plopped into a different world—perhaps even more so in that Bouchon's world was Keller's hometown, the sleepy agricultural village of Yountville. And the food: Blanquette de Veau; Poule au Pot; Steak Frites; Quiche Lorraine; bistro classics presented in rigorous homage to an urban French restaurant form; the Napa Valley, a coincidental backdrop.

Soon, however, I found myself seduced by the photographs in
Bouchon
, the restaurant elegance of the food and the casual professionalism of this Keller guy and his gorgeous girlfriend, shown relaxing over red wine and mussels, within Keller's own place of business. Not one Chez Panisse cookbook, I realized, offered a single photograph of the restaurant, a chef, or even a plated Chez Panisse meal. Not one, in nine books. Everything about their conception seemed to encourage one's own imagination. Meditating on such images now, in
Bouchon
, I sought out and found similar ones in
The French Laundry
, over at Debbie's house—slightly out of focus, shot from eye level in a blur, as if to simulate being in the French Laundry kitchen, during service. The whole idea was to fuel the consumer's love affair with restaurants and professional chefs, and with remarkable speed those photographs ushered me toward what Nicholas Lemann has called toque envy: hoping that I might become “practically indistinguishable from a real chef, except that—really just a tiny difference—you would be cooking at home instead of at a restaurant.” Lemann pins me like a lepidopterist's butterfly when he writes that “chef has become, to a certain type of urban adult, what astronaut is to a seven-year-old boy—the standard fantasy occupation.”
Bouchon
didn't just offer photographs, either; it offered magically precise instructions for the simplest of salads, explaining every nuance of every step and technique required to get bistro-level results. I began to think that, even if we weren't going to have huge dinner parties anymore, perhaps Liz would let me try to impress her parents, the greatest restaurant-goers I knew. They'd gotten me started in the first place, I'd come a long way, they'd actually been to Bouchon, and yet I hadn't cooked for them once, ever.

Doug and Judy had moved to California by this point: sold their Massachusetts home, rented a San Francisco pied-à-terre, and bought a golf-resort condo in the Napa Valley. We'd since
eaten Judy's great cooking at both of these places—San Francisco and Napa—and Doug had treated us all to many restaurant meals. So I suggested hosting them.

Liz agreed, several weeks passed, and nothing happened.

I suggested it again.

Liz agreed, and several more weeks passed, and nothing happened.

So I asked: Baby, what gives? They don't want to eat with us? They don't believe I can cook?

Liz claimed to have no idea what I was talking about.

“Well, just tell me what exactly happens when you invite them.”

“I don't,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don't really want my parents here for dinner.”

“I ask you to invite them, and you just don't?”

“I'd be too tense.”

“About what, the messy kitchen?”

“Maybe.”

Or the house. “It's the fucking house, isn't it?”

Playing with fire, now: Liz had been freaking out about living space, all four of us crammed into 750 square feet, and she'd gotten this idea that we should convert her downstairs office into a new parental bedroom, getting us a little nighttime privacy and allowing each of our daughters to have a separate room. My own office could then become Liz's office, and I could move my desk maybe into the basement, over between the two water heaters, by the gas furnace. She had a point; we did have a tiny place, and we did have growing children, and it really was stupid having our single biggest room occupied only by Liz's tiny desk and laptop. New challenges looming, in other words; family needs going in
new directions, well beyond that old “somebody cooks dinner while somebody changes the diapers” formulation. But I told Liz that, piss-filled Mason jars notwithstanding (she'd found a half-f one next to her computer keyboard, remnant of the sleep I was still getting in her office), we still had a palace by the standards of 99.9 percent of humanity. Liz replied that A) she wasn't interested in 99.9 percent of humanity, and B) she didn't think hoping for a grand total of 1,250 square feet to raise a family in made her a spoiled bitch. I pointed out that I would never, ever call her such a thing, and that I was pretty sure that Buddhism (or Hinduism, I didn't know which) taught that all suffering came from desire, and that Liz could liberate
me
from all
my
suffering by letting go of
her
desire for another room. Liz then demonstrated, convincingly, that we spent more on wine and groceries every month than on our mortgage, and that I might therefore want to hold fire on desire-equals-suffering.

Liz doesn't like a fight. She's strong. She's proud. But she's a peacemaker, and she cares for me the best she can, so she found a compromise, threw me a bone: she got her mother to let me cook dinner at the Napa place.
Bouchon
's Roast Chicken with Summer Squash and Tomatoes (
Poulet Rôti aux Courgettes et Tomates Persillées
), sounded easy enough, and it really wasn't a bad choice, but I didn't read the recipe until midday of the dinner in question, well after buying all the ingredients. Sitting in Judy's immaculate white Napa kitchen, with only six hours to go, I noticed that right there, within the ingredients list, Keller called not just for “two chickens,” but for “two 2¼to 2½ pound chickens, brined for 6 hours as directed on page 192 and drained.” Everything still could've turned out fine if I'd recognized that—even in the narrowest definition of my own self-interest—the next little step in my private pursuit of technical improvement was far less important than
delivering a safe, simple, no-fuss family meal, on time and with minimal domestic disruption. In other words, I could've chosen not to brine, but then I wouldn't have learned the primary restaurant-chef lesson I thought Keller was offering to teach here, so I flipped to page 192 and saw not only crystal-clear instructions for immersing the birds in the brine, but a note that, for the brine itself, I'd have to turn to page 325, where the masterful brine recipe began, disappointingly, as follows: “It is a good idea to make this brine a day ahead and refrigerate it. Don't add meat to warm brine and don't leave it in brine longer than the specified time or it may become too salty.”

I hadn't even begun, and I was two days behind. But I was also stunned by how much this
Bouchon
book had to teach, far more than any Chez Panisse book even attempted. And so, badly wanting to be man enough for
Bouchon
, I rummaged around in poor Judy's beloved cabinets until I found a large pot to hold a gallon of water, a cup of salt, a dollop of honey, a dozen bay leaves, a half cup of garlic cloves, two tablespoons of black peppercorns, a few rosemary sprigs and a bunch of thyme, and some grated lemon zest. Then I waited anxiously while this took twenty minutes to boil, and only after it boiled did I wonder how the hell I was going to chill it fast enough to get the birds in. The only solution I could see at the time was to pull everything out of Judy's well-stocked freezer—party ice, frozen peas, Ben & Jerry's, frozen waffles—and shove them into Ziploc bags dug from a drawer and then immerse all those bags in the chicken brine, to cool it down. I still have no idea why I thought that was acceptable behavior, without permission, in my mother-in-law's kitchen, but I did. Nor did I see a problem with clearing stuff from Judy's fridge to make room for the big brining pot, once I'd added the chickens. So I did that, too, and then I up and left the house for several
hours, off to the golf-resort spa—Jacuzzi, steam, magazine in the sunshine, thinking I'd pull together dinner at the last minute. When I returned at four thirty, still with a couple of hours before dinner, Doug and Judy were entertaining three surprise visitors: the adult daughter of a dearly missed Massachusetts couple, this daughter's husband, and their baby. Judy felt awful that she'd double-booked her afternoon, arranging to play golf with some new California acquaintances. But Liz reassured her mother that we'd look after the Massachusetts couple, and that we could all have dinner together later. Judy left; and I went to look at the chicken, finding a surprise: Judy had taken her frozen goods out of my brine pot and put them all back in her freezer, so as not to ruin them. She'd also put my brining chickens out on the back porch in the ninety-degree sunshine, to make room for her milk, eggs, and butter to go back into the refrigerator. A quiet desperation overtook me. Feeling punked, humiliated, but still focused on triumph, I took the milk, eggs, and butter back
out
of Judy's fridge, and put the chicken back
in
Judy's fridge, and made a mess chopping all the herbs and vegetables for the zucchini and tomato sides. Then, sometime around five o'clock, I felt seized by the need to leave that mess in place and go buy some running shoes.