How to Cook Like a Man (24 page)

“Listen carefully,” he said, with an affectionate, teasing smile. The rhythm of his own basting—of his own spoon, clanking with each scoop of butter—had a distinctly faster and far more macho rhythm, almost like insistent knocking on a door.

“So what are you doing this weekend, anyway?” Keller asked me.

Right on the tip of my tongue was “Not much, want to get a beer?” But I said, “Nothing really, just hanging out.”

I realized that we would soon part ways for good, and I wasn't quite certain that I'd gotten what I'd come for. So I said,
“Hey, can I ask you one last thing? I'd love your advice on where exactly I should go next, in my cooking. I mean, I've really cooked almost everything from
Bouchon
and
Ad Hoc at Home
. So maybe
The French Laundry Cookbook
next? I feel pretty ready for that.”

In hindsight, I can see that I badly wanted Keller to say, “Absolutely, Daniel. Having watched you work in my very own kitchens, I can see that you've mastered the basics and you're ready for the next level. Onward, my son! Onward to greatness!”

But Keller thought about the question, doing me the honor of taking it seriously. Then he said, “You know what I think? I think you ought to just stick with the kind of food we've been doing together.”

I felt stung, of course, taking this to mean that he didn't think I was ready for the French Laundry, that I ought to stick with the basics a little longer. At first, I ignored the advice. I found myself thinking about our Fernand Point exchange, and Keller's remark about how a recipe “becomes yours,” allowing you to test yourself against it. As I understood this, Keller meant that a cook never quite absorbs a hyper-detailed recipe—having to return, always, to the book, and to the precise measurements. In that way, a cook never broke the recipe addiction, never trusted himself to create. Recipes like Point's, on the other hand, functioned more like a friendly voice saying, “Hey, why don't you slice up a few truffles and serve them with a piece of foie?”

That wasn't a recipe, see, that was a suggestion. Following it required filling in so many details that the finished product wouldn't be Point's in any meaningful sense; it would be yours. You'd also remember it—not as a recipe to look up, but as a move you'd once made, and could easily make again. I'm not drawn to poached eggs in aspic, and I knew I'd have to sell my old truck to
buy a meaningful number of Périgord truffles, what with all my Oregon truffles long gone. So I devised a solution of my own: creating, for my own use, the
French Laundry Cookbook
that Keller had wanted to write in the first place. Keller, then, could become my own Fernand Point. Starting with a dish called Clam Chowder, I first followed every instruction, nose in the book. Then, a few days later, I made it again, but this time from handwritten notes I'd made in the spirit of Point: “Sweat open some clams in white wine and herbs, incorporate the juice into a cream sauce, spoon a little sauce onto each serving plate, and top with a panfried cod cake, then a piece of sautéed cod filet, and, finally, a ‘chowder' made from the reserved clams.” After making this dish a few times, I threw away even my handwritten notes. That's when the dish became my own—not because I could make it from memory, but simply because I knew how to sweat open shellfish, make a cream sauce, fry some fish cakes, and sauté filets, and I could now try this with any fish combination that struck my fancy.

Looking for another French Laundry recipe to master, however, two things happened: first, I discovered a small essay in which Keller described precisely the chicken-trussing method he'd taken all that time to teach me, complete with the slip knot. Learning that very technique, it turned out, had served as a critical turning point in Keller's own apprenticeship. It had also become a key metaphor in his vision of the culinary craft—exemplifying the foundational skills upon which all fine cooking depended. Perhaps I could tell myself that Keller, in passing this knot along to me, had paid me the only compliment that made any real sense: acknowledging my authentic desire to begin the real journey of the cook.

The second thing that happened, when I went looking for another French Laundry recipe, was that I couldn't settle on one
I wanted to prepare three times in a single week, with Liz for my only audience. Liz herself had no problem with it: I'd gotten my cooking so controlled, after those visits with Keller, that I no longer made much of a mess. Liz and the girls even enjoyed those meals, excessive as they were, for weeknight meals at home. My resistance to moving forward, I concluded, had to be coming from within, which made me rethink Keller's parting advice. Perhaps he hadn't really meant that I was unprepared to learn fine-dining cuisine; perhaps he simply knew that fine-dining cuisine didn't make much aesthetic sense for the daily life of a young family. The food I'd cooked with Keller—Ad Hoc food, in essence, the food I already knew how to make—very much did.

Anthony Bourdain's introduction to
My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals
, a coffee table book edited by Melanie Dunea, argues that chefs, “more often than not, have dined widely and well. They know what a fresh white truffle tastes like. The finest beluga, for them, holds no mystery. Three-hundred-dollar-a-pound otoro tuna and the most unctuous cuts of Kobe beef are, to them, nothing new.” As a result, Bourdain writes, when chefs play that parlor game known as My Last Supper, kicking around visions of what they'd want to eat before facing the firing squad, “we seem to crave reminders of simpler, harder times. A crust of bread and butter … poor-people food.” Crusty bread does appear with impressive frequency in the fifty meals that follow, but so do all of the aforementioned luxury foods. Beluga and other caviars, for example, make Thomas Keller's list (a half kilo of osetra), Martin Picard's (a whole kilo), Jacques Pépin's (an even ton), and also the lists of Hélène Darroze, Guillaume Brahimi, Anita Lo, and Charlie Trotter. Keller and Lo both like the sound of a little otoro, and truffles appear on the lists of Pépin, Eric Ripert, Darroze, Picard, Masa Takayama, Gary Danko, Jonathan Waxman, Scott Conant, Angela Hartnett, and Paul Kahan. Foie gras, that other marquee luxury food, pops up on the death-meal lists of
Darroze, Brahimi, Conant, Lo, and Picard, and as for Bourdain's reminders of “simpler, harder times,” Jean-Georges Vongerichten wants “a royal banquet at the Grand Palace in Bangkok” in the company of the king of Thailand, while Mario Batali self-prescribes eight or ten seafood courses at an outdoor trattoria on Italy's Amalfi coast, in the humble company of international TV star Bourdain and Hollywood screenwriter and novelist Jim Harrison (as well as Batali's whole family, to be fair), plus live music from both an REM-U2 combo and a John McLaughlin–Paco de Lucía reunion. Bourdain's own last meal revolves around Fergus's signature starter, the one I'd eaten at St. John, in London: “Roast bone marrow with parsley and caper salad, with a few toasted slices of baguette and some good sea salt.” You can't argue with the poverty associations there: Paleolithic campsites bristle with cracked marrow bones, including Neanderthal bones, early evidence of that eternal human impulse to eat the competition. But Bourdain wants this dish prepared by Ripert, Batali, Gordon Ramsay, and Fergus himself, right at St. John, a star-chef quartet inside the world's coolest restaurant, putting a distinctly non-poor-people spin on things.

No fault of Bourdain's: he was being kind, writing a characteristically brilliant introduction to somebody else's book, and he doubtless meant only to help when he posed for the book's photographer stark naked and smoking a cigarette, showing off his lean physique (truly impressive, and not just for a chain-smoking ex-junkie) while holding a cow's raw femur bone upright in front of his groin, like a twenty-pound erection, a great visual joke about the admittedly massive girth and heft of his own culinary cock deriving in large part from his personal outrageousness. Once again, to be fair: Bourdain cops to a certain discomfort with the photograph, offering that “I do always joke that (as some comedian
once suggested) ‘I want to leave this world as I entered it: naked, screaming, and covered with blood,' but … it's probably not wise to make career decisions after four shots of tequila.” Also, if there is one predominant theme in these fifty final meals, it's a theme Bourdain would doubtless include, were he to write that introduction now, after his late-in-the-game marriage and the birth of his own first child: the near-universal desire to spend one's final moments among family and friends. True, Dan Barber—like the prekid Bourdain himself—pictures dining alone, and several other chefs lean heavily toward the company of dead people and complete strangers, like Charlie Trotter's yearning to spend that ultimate hour with Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Bukowski, Henry Miller, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thomspon, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, a dinner crew he'd have more luck assembling shortly after that final meal, upon his presumed arrival in heaven, or at least in the outer circles of hell, where Dante himself described meeting many cultural luminaries. (Ditto for Marcus Samuelsson's guest list of Martin Luther King Jr., the food-hating Gandhi, and nobody else; and also for Martin Picard's sole invitee, Jesus Christ, whom Picard claims to want not because the opportunity to feed Christ at such a critical juncture might tilt His judgment, but because Jesus “is used to having a last meal,” the Lord's life, being, apparently, a kind of divine Groundhog Day.) By and large, though, everybody wants precisely what I would want: wife, parents, siblings, dear friends, children, even if some chefs yearn like Gabrielle Hamilton to send the children to bed early, after dinner, letting them “fall deeply asleep so that I could eat quietly, contemplatively, and pretend that I was a single, younger person without intense, bone-crushing responsibilities …
sans
employees, children, or saggy boobs.”

Fergus, likely one of the few chefs in
My Last Supper
to have
properly contemplated the end—having stared down the gun barrel of major brain surgery—envisions a particularly beautiful and believable summer Saturday's luncheon, at home with his family, apartment windows open to the London street noises and “many platters of sea urchins washed down with Muscadet.” Cigarettes play a prominent role—why not?—as do cheese, ice cream, and drunken dancing. “That should help soften the blow,” Fergus says, capturing what I consider the essence of the exercise. The blow to which Fergus refers, I believe, is not so much the death blow itself—the bullet, the guillotine—but the blow of knowledge, the awareness of the end growing nigh. That knowledge is always with us, every day of our adult lives, flickering in and out of consciousness. Fantasizing about a final meal, therefore—menu, companions—amounts to thinking through our views on what softens the whole of the earthly passage, asking ourselves what matters most, and whether or not food even plays a meaningful role.

So here's my own dream of that Last Supper—or, rather, here's a representative supper, in the everyday flow of this family's changing life. Summer's cold and foggy in San Francisco, so I'm thinking about mid-September, when it always warms up a little. Audrey's six, a big first-grader. Hannah's nine, a third-grader, and I pick them both up at school, drive them home, and watch them run out the back door, down the steps I built. We've cut holes in our backyard fence, joining our little postage-stamp property to the neighbors on two sides. We share chickens with one of those neighbors, an ace rose gardener named Katy: the coop on our side of the fence the chicken run on hers, so the birds can move around during the day. But this time the girls slip into the other adjacent yard, climbing onto a big trampoline belonging to
a seven-year-old boy named Cuya. I can hear them jumping and laughing and chattering with Cuya while I tie on my apron and whip up a little dinner.

We've finally stopped having separate meals for kids and grown-ups, and Liz now demands that the girls taste at least a little bit of everything Dad makes. The experiment shows promise. First time out, I made things easy by cooking my current goto version of that old Odd Nights Pasta, based on the Garden Tomato and Garlic Pasta from
Chez Panisse Vegetables—
the one where you just heat up the olive oil with all that chopped garlic and then toss in the chopped fresh tomatoes and cook them until they relax. Ignazio, my recipe-hating Italian buddy, started cooking from
Vegetables
recently, and even he thinks Alice is onto something with that approach. I pushed the envelope a little on our second night of insisting the whole family eat the same meal, at the same time: I fried up a little squid, served it with a garlic mayonnaise. I watched with amazed eyes while Hannah actually ate a few rings, stomaching a food that, along with everything else from the sea, she'd always considered a vile form of poison inexplicably inflicted upon her by an otherwise trustworthy father. But Audrey, exploiting her sister's squeamishness, had gone nuts gobbling all the squid tentacles and telling Daddy that calamari was her new favorite food. So tonight, for Joint Family Dinner Number Three, with the girls on that trampoline and Liz out jogging, I'm trying to build on my success with a meal that falls somewhere in between. My thought is to light charcoal on the back porch, grill up a chicken—store-bought, of course, as I'm not allowed to eat the flesh of our own birds, only their eggs. But I've learned this trick of cutting out a chicken's backbone, spreading the body open flat, and then stuffing a little garlic-herb butter
under the skin. Then you make slits in the skin at the base of each breast and tuck the drumstick ends into those slits to create a nice tight little package for the grill.

Liz gets home about the time the bird goes over the coals. She's showering while I'm making Caesar dressing and frying bits of bread for croutons. Then Liz opens a beer, sets the table, and calls the girls. What happens next only matters because it's happening to me: Hannah does her usual deal of demanding breast meat, Audrey takes a leg to have fun gnawing at a bone, they both load up on those croutons at the expense of the lettuce, and they happily eat the whole meal, with at least an outward appearance of gusto. It all tastes good to me, too, and somehow I start telling the girls that I cooked pretty differently before I got married, how I had this burrito system where I'd always keep black beans, brown rice, salsa, and guacamole in the fridge, along with big whole-wheat tortillas, so I could whip up a monster bellyful at a moment's notice.