How to Cook Like a Man (22 page)

“For Chrissake, Jon, do you mind?”

Fortunately, Doug was asleep. Sitting next to me at our table, but asleep nonetheless.

As I began carving the steaks, a deep weariness settling over my bones, I found my thoughts drifting to ipecac, that vomit-triggering medication so beloved by adolescent ballerinas. I began also to visualize a very private and very nicely scented toilet in some remote desert spa, followed by a Zen wheatgrass enema tenderly delivered by a smooth-skinned young woman with a foreign accent. And I might have drifted away altogether if my father-in-law hadn't snapped me back.

“What'd you say?” I asked, because I hadn't heard properly.

“Australian Wagyu,” he muttered, chewing something.

“Yeah?”

“It's the …”

“What's that, Doug? What'd you say?”

It was no use; he'd fallen back to sleep, leaving Jon and myself to confront the problem with two pounds of world-class filet—namely that, no matter how much meat you've already eaten, it's
still two pounds of world-class filet. It turns out that it is physiologically impossible
not
to eat two pounds of world-class filet, when they're juicy hot on a plate below your nose. So we did, every bite, and most of the sides, and even though I felt certain I was killing myself, I was still shoving wild mushrooms and spinach soufflé into my mouth when we waddled off toward the Last Supper at Mario Batali's Carnevino, our ninth and final restaurant.

Like the decaying salon of somebody's aristocratic Italian great-grandfather's dusty and ancient castle, Carnevino had an inexplicably gaudy and massive gold-painted statue of a bull near the front door. Then our waiter, apologizing for the fact that the 36-ounce rib eye would take forty-five minutes to cook, absolutely insisted we share a little salad, just to tide us over.

“Oh, no!” I shouted. “I mean, totally unnecessary.”

Jon: “Yeah, we're good.”

Waiter: “Don't worry about a thing. You're going to love it.”

As if awaiting our execution, we sat in fading silence until the salad arrived. Without meaning to, I served myself exactly one leaf. The leaf sat alone on my plate as I stared at it and grew desperate at the very idea of consuming it. So I cut my one leaf in half and then folded the smaller half onto my fork and exercised fierce willpower in bringing it to my mouth. And then, inexplicably, we began to order more. A plate of beef carpaccio emerged, accompanied by warm lardo crostini: thin-sliced raw beef, in other words, with cured pork fat on toast. Steak tartare followed, with enoki mushrooms planted as if the fungus had sprouted directly from the raw meat—a somewhat dubious aesthetic implication—and there was an element of thrill in how much I liked this stuff. And how much of it I actually wanted to eat.

Thrill turned to giddiness when that rib eye arrived—it was
about the size and heft of your average garden-path flagstone—on its own cutting board, perched on a cart alongside our table.

“So, how much do you guys know about aging?” asked the chef, Zach Allen.

In truth, we'd gotten quite an introduction, because every Vegas restaurant was making a big deal about it—claiming, by and large, that their beef went through about three weeks of “wet aging,” in which it sat around inside vacuum-sealed plastic bags, and another three weeks of “dry aging,” meaning the meat hung in the dry air of a cold meat locker. The idea behind aging is that once an animal dies, naturally occurring muscle enzymes begin assaulting and destroying other cells, breaking long, flavorless molecules into shorter, tastier bits, and also dissolving some of the connective tissue between the muscle fibers, tenderizing the meat. Dry-aged meat also dehydrates over time, concentrating its remaining flavor but causing about a 20 percent loss of product, both because of moisture loss and because the exterior becomes so rotten and mold-covered that much of it has to be cut off and thrown away. For obvious reasons, supermarket beef and even most meat at butcher shops is never aged at all: nobody wants to lose poundage in a dry-aging process, and even wet aging requires you to tie up inventory and pay power bills while the meat sits around in some refrigerated warehouse. And even high-end Vegas steak houses generally buy meat that has only been wet-aged long enough to start that enzyme work without losing weight, and dry-aged only long enough to capture that concentrated flavor.

But at Carnevino, we learned, they were doing the things the hard way.

“See, the cattle are slaughtered on a Monday morning,” Chef Allen told us. “We have a USDA inspection, and the very next
guy to touch the beef is our guy, and he'll stamp it with our brand. Then it comes to us on Thursday night and never goes into a cryo-pack. It goes instead into a thousand-pound box called a combo that we keep at thirty-five degrees with eighty-five percent humidity, and with a lot of air movement. There are a few other tricks, too, but the main thing is that we can now age our meat for a hundred and twenty-four days.”

Four months?

“That meat you're about to eat, that's how old it is.”

Roman emperors would have long since crammed entire living peacocks down their throats, hoping to purge. High Seas pirates could easily have abandoned us to a lifeboat without oars or food in the South Pacific only to hear that we'd washed ashore a month later in Tasmania, insisting to befuddled locals that we craved only a light salad. Our caloric needs hadn't just been met, they'd been eliminated into the foreseeable future. And yet, because I'm not a quitter and also because I didn't want to hurt Chef Allen's feelings, I lifted my steak knife one last time, reached deep for strength, and carved off just one itty-bitty teeny-tiny bite. Placing that morsel on my tired-out tongue, and summoning the will to chew—and wishing also that Chef Allen would scram so that I could spit it out—I felt a confusion creeping into my mouth. Chewing a little longer, and readying my wineglass to receive my ejected cud, I meditated a moment and then located the source of my perplexity: this meat tasted like no other in Vegas. So, instead of spitting it out, I washed it down with a sip of Cabernet and carved off another bite.

Gamy and nutty, in an old-world, Roquefort-cheese kind of way, Batali's magnificently rotten beef wasn't just delicious, it was sensational. Jon and my father-in-law, working on their own big
mouthfuls, were both looking at me now, smiles breaking across their nodding faces so that even at this absurdly late hour, when a solitary leaf of lettuce had almost been the straw to make these three camels projectile-vomit, we dug in yet again, calling to the waiter for, yes, even more wine.

Every student—or at least every insecure student, like myself—needs a master, a gatekeeper to answer that all-important question, “Am I any good at this?” Sometimes our gatekeeper appears in one of the obvious guises: my father, for example, teaching me to climb safely, and then authorizing me to climb alone; or my graduate-school adviser, signing off on my doctoral thesis. At other times, after studying something privately in the messy imperfection of daily adult life, we have to foist the gatekeeping job onto unwitting victims, like I did with Thomas Keller. Not initially, of course: after the
Bouchon
tragedies, I forgot about Keller for several years. He only came back onto my radar when I happened to read Michael Ruhlman's memoir
The Making of a Chef
, in which Ruhlman claims to have gone to culinary school for method, not recipes, because “recipes were a dime a dozen.” Having thereby devalued the only culinary currency I'd ever hoarded, Ruhlman said he'd wanted to learn, instead, “the classical preparation of stock, the foundation, the bedrock of classical cookery. If you didn't know how to make a great stock, if you didn't even know what a great stock tasted like, you were doomed to mediocrity in the kitchen, at best, and at worst, ignorant foolishness.” Given that I'd never even thought to taste one of my own stocks in isolation, and that I'd certainly never tasted a professional's stock, I faced
now the very real possibility that I suffered from both mediocrity
and
ignorant foolishness. Nor did it help when Ruhlman went on to say, “If I didn't know how sauce Robert worked—perhaps the oldest sauce still in use—if I didn't know the qualities and behavior of a demi-glace, the queen mother of French sauces, then truly I knew nothing.”

I didn't have the slightest clue what sauce Robert even was, and for about ten seconds I contemplated going to culinary school myself, just to rectify the problem. Once that delusion faded—kids, money, the fact that I would've hated culinary school, even if I'd gone as a young bachelor—I figured that I should at least try mastering the aforementioned techniques at home. I bought a 20-quart pot, a fine-mesh conical strainer, a mountain of veal bones, and the Culinary Institute of America's gargantuan student textbook,
The Professional Chef
. Then I roasted bones and simmered bones and skimmed stocks and tasted stocks and, finally, froze stocks. Just for comparison, I made the veal stock from
The French Laundry Cookbook
, too, a wildly expensive and time-consuming process that produced both a magically concentrated elixir and the curious discovery that this Ruhlman character was listed in the book's credits, doubtless as the hired-gun writer. When I was done with all this veal stock, I bought Raymond Sokolov's
The Saucier's Apprentice: A Modern Guide to Classic French Sauces for the Home
, along with James Peterson's encyclopedic
Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making
, and I got to work on that sauce Robert. But then I hit yet another roadblock: neither Liz nor I actually wanted to eat proteins with classical French sauces every night. It felt like a ludicrous way to live, and I was done with the idea of my cooking as, to quote Liz's favorite term from the period, “arts and crafts.” I needed my cooking to produce food that our family would enjoy eating.

I was just growing desperate over this realization, and I was ready to give up on ever finding a trustworthy path toward becoming like Ruhlman and Keller, when Ruhlman himself lit my way home. In his second cooking memoir,
The Soul of a Chef
, Ruhlman describes the borderline-crazy testing process chefs go through in order to become something called a Certified Master Chef, or CMC. But he also describes Keller himself as the living embodiment of what that test strives to codify: total, unequivocal mastery of contemporary fine-dining cuisine, a kind of seventeenth-reincarnation of the Chefy Lama whose divine soul has remained perfectly intact through some unbroken chain of being that included Escoffier and even Carême himself. I learned, for example, that Keller had neither formal training nor extended mentoring, but he'd fallen in love with the simple trick of making hollandaise at a Florida yacht club, as a young cook. Over time, that love had blossomed into a broader passion for technique, a life-sustaining joy-in-process. Keller had preserved this joy right through his early career and into the very layout of the famous French Laundry kitchen: windows onto a garden, clean carpeting, soft music, a staff so calmly competent they moved in a kind of serene dance, never hurrying. Cooking well, as Keller described it, was “simply a matter of caring.” Understand the method, and then execute. This attitude extended even to the smallest details: Keller apparently stored asparagus upright in water, to keep it fresh, green, and unblemished; he packed fish on ice in precisely the body position in which those fish had once swum the seas. Most of all, Keller worked “as if wanting to extend each task rather than finish it … wiping down his entire station after storing what he'd just prepared. He worked very clean so that as he began each preparation, it seemed to be the first of the day.” Excellence doesn't begin with the plate, Keller told Ruhlman, “it
begins when you wake up. It's got to be a philosophy. You have to be determined, determined to do it every day. If you're going to have a clean plate, you've got to have a clean oil bottle.”

I was already quivering with the implied promise of self-transformation—
model your every waking second after my own example, and you, too, can begin the long, quiet march toward the Chefisattva state from which I currently experience Eternal Peace, Wisdom, and Badass Culinary Chops
—when a minor detail in Keller's self-description caught my notice. He tells Ruhlman that he prefers to be seen not as a celebrity chef so much as a “Buddhist monk in search of perfection,” and I could suddenly hear my own father saying this very phrase, a wry, playful tone in his voice. I even recalled a story my father had told while standing dumbfounded inside my demolished home, during the remodel. He'd never swung a hammer in his life, never had the slightest interest, so he'd been horrified by my tangle of extension cords and the piles of shattered plaster on the ruined floors and the dust covering everything, raising very real questions about how his own son could've fallen so far from the tree as to enjoy such misery. But then my father had reached deep to say something kind. He'd offered a story about a “Japanese Zen carpenter,” by which he meant not that the carpenter himself was Japanese, but that this man had studied “Japanese Zen carpentry,” whatever that was, in Japan. (Zen was ubiquitous in Dad's tales, along with gypsies; Buddhism and flamenco being the yin and yang of essential manhood, for my father.) My father said he'd noticed this carpenter working away on an empty Berkeley lot. The heart of the story lay in the man's having taken advance delivery of all the lumber he'd need for the entire house. For weeks, he'd had done nothing but measure and cut every board for the entire building, piling them in tidy stacks according to the order in which he'd need them. Then my father's
Japanese Zen carpenter put away his saw, took out his hammer, and assembled an elegant home.

As nice as all this was, however—as nice as it felt to fall in love with a fantasy version of this Keller guy—I couldn't exactly see how to emulate his perfection. Flipping through
Bouchon
, once again, I wondered if I should just suck it up and make all those frog's legs and rabbit terrines—all the super-Frenchy stuff I'd previously skipped, in deference to Liz. The food in
The French Laundry Cookbook
looked almost comically difficult, but perhaps I would have to go there someday, too. Salvation came in the very next Keller/Ruhlman cookbook production,
Ad Hoc at Home: Family-Style Recipes
, which happened to be published that very autumn. Replacing Keller's upscale French food with the Americana served at his casual restaurant,
Ad Hoc at Home
offered the perfect fusion of super-chefy excellence with food my family would actually enjoy, such as buttermilk fried chicken, prime rib, hamburgers, and iceberg salad with blue cheese. Keller himself appeared, throughout, in photographs showing him in casual street clothes instead of chef's whites—your new best friend in the everyday American kitchen. Whatever cynicism I might have felt toward this overt rebranding, it all vaporized when I read Keller's opening anecdote about how his father, in the last years of his life, had come to live in a small cottage next door to the French Laundry. Largely by chance, Keller says, he had the honor of cooking what turned out to be his father's final meal. Keller then offers instructions for replicating the menu: grilled chicken with bottled barbecue sauce; mashed potatoes; collard greens; strawberries and whipped cream with store-bought shortcakes. “I am unspeakably grateful to have made it—that dinner remains important to me,” Keller writes, recalling also the food shared by grieving friends and family afterward. “Whether it's a sad or
difficult time, whether it's an ordinary-seeming day, or whether it's a time of celebration, our lives are enriched when we share meals together,” he says. “And that's what the food in this book is all about.”