A Big and Empty Place

NEW YORK AND FRANCE 1976 to 1983

“I come from the Southwest, which is a big and empty place—very few people and lots of land. And we’re not on the main route to anywhere. What most people, and this includes the French, know about my region is that it’s the land of Armagnac and foie gras. So we have a long way to go to make our regional cooking better known.”

—André Daguin in an interview by Paula Wolfert, Bon Appétit, June 1979

IF PAULA’S MEMORIES of her first marriage were buried in the dark and her recollections of Couscous dimly lit by a kind of sunrise, the time she spent on The Cooking of South-West France sparkled in the glorious morning sun. She confidently recalled her numerous research trips to France, nineteen magazine articles, and countless teaching tours from that period. Unlike Couscous, which she pulled off in eighteen months, she invested five years writing South-West France, from 1978 to 1983. This chapter only confounds because there are too many good stories to tell. It seems impossible that one person lived through all of them.

The fact that one cookbook writer contributed two such disparate books, Couscous and South-West France, to the American canon seems equally improbable. Where Couscous brought Moroccan classics to the English-speaking world, South-West France celebrated avant-garde innovations alongside such lesser-known regional French staples as duck confit and cassoulet. Among food insiders, the latter volume established Paula as a culinary legend.

South-West France acquired a cult following among a certain type of home cook willing to chase down rare Tarbais beans for a proper cassoulet. More important, a new generation of chefs admired her book for its rare depth and scholarly approach. (In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the career of chef gained more respect. In 1977, the US Department of Labor reclassified the post as “professional” rather than “domestic.”) Many of these young chefs had trained in classic French technique and found the subject relatable. Indeed, French food was so dominant in the United States when Paula’s book appeared that it felt to many chefs like another “room in the attic,” as Alice Waters put it—like one of those dreams in which you find a wing of your house that you never knew existed but that somehow feels familiar, as though it’s been there all along.

When the book was released in 1983, it also legitimized a nascent restaurant trend in regional cooking. “The byword of the food scene these days is regional, and the trend is by no means confined to these shores,” wrote Donna Warner in a 1984 review of the book in Metropolitan Home. “Just as black-eye peas and Smithfield ham have shaken up dandified American palates, so has the robust ‘peasant cooking’ of Southwest France redefined the haute sensibilities of French cuisine.” One regional pioneer, groundbreaking Florida chef Norman Van Aken, dedicated two full pages to South-West France in his memoir, describing how he cooked through the book in the winter of 1985 with his young line cook, rising star Charlie Trotter. “Perhaps more than any other cookbook at that time it was Paula Wolfert’s The Cooking of South-West France that caused us the most study,” he wrote. “The book was dense with information and we pored over it like Talmudic scholars.”

The book even presaged a 2000s movement in nose-to-tail and root-to-stalk cooking championed by London chef Fergus Henderson, who chose Paula’s cassoulet as his favorite recipe of all time in 2006.

So how did Paula get from Morocco to Gascony, from the classic to the cutting edge? She didn’t do it overnight. She could not have gained the necessary access to the best southwestern French kitchens as a mere Moroccan cooking expert from Brooklyn—even one with her considerable charms. She first needed to become a professional food writer, with a major platform from which she could promote those French chefs in the United States. She would also need to reacclimate to restaurant kitchens after twenty years away—and deal with her aversion to chef’s knives.

From 1976 to 1978, Paula underwent a Paula-esque culinary boot camp—unplanned, immersive, and wildly adventuresome—to establish herself as an internationally regarded restaurant consultant, food reporter, and cooking teacher. It all started in the Philippines.

When Paula and Bill moved back to New York from Tangier in the summer of 1976, Paula tried to calm her fears about her uncertain future by keeping a beatnik mind, open to opportunity. The food scene was improving, especially when New York’s first “Greenmarket” opened that year—a place she could buy food directly from farmers, as in Tangier. She and Bill quickly reconnected with New York magazine critic Gael Greene, who made them a regular part of her reviewing nights out. Through Greene, they experienced the city’s exciting, growing restaurant scene.

Although most observers did not recognize it at the time, the country stood at the cusp of a food revolution—of a nationwide explosion of interest in cooking, marked by a flood of new restaurants, cookbooks, cooking schools, even new American wines. In 1976, New York’s restaurant scene had grown, but the city was very much in thrall to nouvelle cuisine, a French trend in elemental cooking and lightened sauces like beurre blanc that Paula found ridiculous. She viewed the Gallic import as novelty for novelty’s sake, as a movement devoid of tradition or much flavor. But she knew that if she wanted to bring something fresh to the table, she would have to steer clear of nouvelle cuisine.

Paula soon met restaurant consultant George Lang, who quickly got Paula her first gigs. An early American restaurant consultant, Lang had been hired by the prestigious Manila Hotel in the Philippines to do something innovative: to serve authentic Filipino dishes in a five-star hotel setting. Lang prided himself on his eye for fresh talent. For the hotel, he had hired a dynamic team of young German chefs, but they needed help immersing themselves in authentic Filipino recipes. Lang had read Couscous and had seen that Paula had a unique ability to imbed herself in a foreign culture and understand its flavors, no matter how exotic.

With a team of German chefs in the Philippines

“George Lang said, ‘Anybody who could write a book on Morocco like that could go to another country and learn the food really fast—I need you to go to the Philippines,’” Paula recalled. “So Bill takes care of my kids and I go off.”

Working alongside Lang’s chefs that summer, Paula proved that the methodology she had perfected with her party boxes and Couscous was portable—even into the kitchen of a five-star restaurant in Southeast Asia. She visited Manila home cooks and food markets and learned how to work with such ingredients as coconut milk and hearts of palm to elevate classics like lumpia—the Filipino spring roll—all with characteristic moxie.

About his time in Manila, in his memoirs Lang wrote, “One day, during one of the annual monsoon floods, I found her in the test kitchen standing up to her knees in water. She had just gone on cooking through the deluge.”

Back in New York, Lang opened more doors for Paula. At his landmark restaurant Café des Artistes, he asked her to write down his chef’s recipes for a potential cookbook. He also hired Paula to record the French fermentation methods at a Lower East Side bakery, where she kept baker’s hours (midnight to dawn) in order to take meticulous notes. In the late 1970s, when Bloomingdale’s invited French culinary legends such as Michel Guérard and Gaston Lenôtre to give classes, Lang recruited Paula to translate. In the process, she befriended many of the chefs.

Paula’s teaching career also took off in late 1976, when she received a call from Anne Otterson, another Couscous fan. Otterson, who helped run the cooking school at The Perfect Pan, a cookware store in Mission Hills, California, invited Paula to teach her first of several Moroccan classes in January 1977. The Perfect Pan was one of dozens of new venues opening across the country that catered to the general growing interest in cooking. The classes got started, Paula remembered, “because women would get together to teach one another Julia Child recipes. All over America people were teaching Julia. But I guess that got old, so they moved on to other books.”

Among the biggest stars on the circuit were Jacques Pépin and Marcella Hazan, both of whom made regular appearances at The Perfect Pan. Otterson was so impressed with Paula’s debut Morocco classes that she raved about them to Pépin, who soon shared his list of cooking schools with Paula. With their help, Paula booked her first national teaching tour.

Both national magazines, such as Bon Appétit, left, and local newspapers, such as Michigan’s Oakland Press, right, struggled to capture the energy and excitement of Paula’s cooking classes.

“That’s what friends are for,” Pépin said of his generosity. “I knew Anne well. I did the same for Marcella. I always admired Paula.”

Starting in 1977 and continuing for the next decade, Paula taught classes in twenty to forty cities a year—often in four or five annual tours of roughly a half dozen cities each.

It’s easy to understand why she generated such demand. Her classes typically followed the same format: over three hours, she pulled off what she and Jaidi (and a few assistants) did in five—prepared an entire Moroccan meal, including salads, a tagine, and a couscous or bastilla—all the while sharing mesmerizing stories of Moroccan adventures, cooking pointers, and bawdy jokes. Her appearances quickly became news around the country, in cities big and small. From New York to Milwaukee and Phoenix, food editors struggled to find the right words to describe these electric performances. Part preacher, part scholar, part magician, part circus clown, she defied categorization.

“When Paula Wolfert blew into town last week, the spices almost flew off the shelves, the green peppers nearly burst under the broiler, the fresh coriander shook like it had the chills, and the chickens almost got out of the pot and cackled,” panted Michigan’s Oakland Press. In The Atlantic, food writer Corby Kummer called her a “virtuoso teacher” whose “gestures and expressions are too good to miss.” He added, “The cook has to be a cross between a stand-up comic and a professor. Wolfert, a self-described show-off as well as a food scholar… can galvanize an audience.”

Not every class on these tours went flawlessly; Paula had a few memorable misadventures. Self-conscious all of her life about her stubbornly short, brittle fingernails, in Houston she took the suggestion of her host and had false nails applied before her class. Paula regretted that decision one city later, in Arizona, when the nails popped off in the middle of a couscous steaming demonstration.

But by 1977, she had a much bigger problem. Moroccan food wasn’t like Italian, where the appetite for the cuisine in America appeared to be as bottomless as the repertoire itself. “Marcella could go two or three times a year to each place,” Paula said about her teaching colleague, Italian food expert Marcella Hazan. “With Moroccan, once you learned your couscous, your tagine, people didn’t want much more.” To maintain her pace, Paula would need fresh material.

Her teaching tours and restaurant consulting gave her the confidence to begin making inroads as a food journalist into the intimidating world of New York food media. Although still gossipy, it had grown considerably and now included bright new writers she had never heard of, such as Vogue contributor Barbara Kafka, New York Daily News food editor Arthur Schwartz, and Town & Country food editor and columnist James Villas. They worked in the wake of Gael Greene, who had transformed food writing with her brash, brassy New York magazine restaurant reviews—herself inspired by late-1960s New Journalists like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. (“In a town where snob, snoot and snub flower in perpetual renaissance, Lafayette is the ‘most,’” Greene wrote in a 1970 review titled “Lafayette, We Are Leaving,” excoriating a pretentious French restaurant in her typical irreverence.) “We were always causing trouble,” Villas recalled.

Their outrageousness belied their accomplishments, however. Villas had a PhD in romance languages and comparative literature. Kafka had previously enrolled in a doctoral program to become a poet. Paula was well aware she had no degrees. She would have to bring her A game.

“In the late seventies, the food writers were the kings and queens,” Paula said. “The chefs have since pushed us aside—and rightly so—we didn’t do anything compared to what chefs do. But it was a time, like in the poetry world, where you had to fight for position, especially in New York, since the stakes were so small.”

Couscous and Mediterranean Cooking both gave her entrée. Starting with a genteel, even timid essay on basil for a 1977 issue of New Times, by the end of that year Paula had written features for New York magazine and Bon Appétit. Her first big splash appeared in New York in December 1977, when she and Bill published an exposé called “A Delicious Little Recipe Scandal,” in which they revealed that cookbook author Lady Pamela Harlech had plagiarized over 160 recipes from Gourmet.

Paula’s writing—and endearing backstory—won her notice. Schwartz told me, “Her book had a great story attached to it: This Jewish girl from Brooklyn runs away to Tangier as a teenager with this asshole who then leaves her with two children and she’s got to support herself? Who hobnobs with such great people in Morocco? She got great press.”

Her palate also won her admirers. “I made pasta for her once using Trapani salt from Sicily,” Schwartz recalled. “She asked, ‘What kind of salt do you use?’ I thought, ‘My God, how can she detect the salt just from the pasta water?’”

“I don’t think I have met anyone with Paula’s palate, before or since,” agreed Ruth Reichl, who befriended Paula in the mid-1980s when Reichl was a food writer for the Los Angeles Times. “She could just identify anything. It blew me away.” For her palate—and her gift of gab—James Villas gave her the nickname La Bouche. Paula soon joined a a tight circle—some on the outside called it a clique—with Schwartz, Villas, Kafka, and other writers. Their home base was a chic Upper West Side restaurant called Le Plaisir. Like all of her favorite spots, Paula found adventure there.

And yet Paula remained so uncomfortable with competition that she attributed her success to superstition. One night in late 1977, George Lang invited her to a dinner to announce his new restaurant, Hungaria. At dessert, he served a strudel holding a lucky Hungarian gold coin, announcing that whoever found the coin would be guest of honor on Hungaria’s opening night. Paula pulled out the coin. For for the next half-decade, she credited it with all of her good luck.

Paula’s new friend Barbara Kafka inadvertently helped her overcome her fear of knives and got her fresh material for her cooking classes when she invited her to become a contributor to Cooking. Later renamed The Pleasures of Cooking, the new monthly magazine was launched by the Cuisinart company and edited by Kafka. Paula joined the ranks of contributors like Pépin and Madhur Jaffrey. As Paula recalled, they each got early models of the Cuisinart to develop recipes.

One might assume that a traditionalist like Paula would eschew such a modern convenience. But the Cuisinart changed everything. When it was introduced in 1973 as the home version of a new French restaurant appliance called the Robot Coupe, it could have been tailored for Paula’s vision problems. Its safety guards protected someone who lacked depth perception and was prone to cut him- or herself.

Outfitted with a machine with reliably sharp blades and a dough attachment, Paula finally felt fully equipped to tackle restaurant-grade recipes. With assignments from Cooking, she mastered French classics she had avoided because they involved too much handwork, like brioche, puff pastry, and phyllo dough. Through months of hard work, she developed unparalleled recipes for all of them tailored for the Cuisinart. For years to come, Cuisinart founder Carl Sontheimer sent new models of his machine to Paula from time to time.

Another great innovation, the word processor, helped Paula with a different challenge caused by her vision problems: organizing her thoughts on paper. Paula spent $4,000 (about $14,500 in today’s dollars) to purchase a Lexoriter from Otterson’s husband, who helmed the Lexor Corporation, an early computer company. Paula loved how it let her cut and paste paragraphs and put her on the on the technological cutting edge. “The only other people I heard of who had the Lexoriter were Julia Child and George Lucas. I was glad to be with them,” she said.

In 1978, she convinced a publisher to give her a contract for a cookbook called Wrapped in Pastry and started teaching brioche and strudel classes around the country. But still she had a problem.

“I wasn’t all that excited about that book because there were no stories behind the recipes,” she said. “Wrapped in Pastry was not a world, just a bunch of procedures. Once I got the first six or seven recipes down, I didn’t give a shit.”

But her luck, pluck, Le Plaisir contacts, and lousy book idea all got Paula back to France, where she finally discovered the Southwest.

First, her pastry interests (and charms) won her a free trip to Paris. After she translated for pastry genius Gaston Lenôtre during his visit to Bloomingdale’s, he invited her to study puff pastry and brioche at his acclaimed cooking school outside the city.

In those days, airlines and hotels were generous with free tickets and housing for food writers with assignments. For example, TWA was eager to promote its new direct 747 flights from New York to Paris. She secured her TWA ticket (and a free room at the Paris Hilton) when she successfully pitched a story on Lenôtre’s school to Le Plaisir regulars Michael and Ariane Batterberry. That year, in 1978, the couple founded The International Review of Food and Wine, now known simply as Food & Wine. They were eager to hire smart new voices. “While you’re in France,” she remembered Michael Batterberry asking her, “why don’t you go down to Southwest France to do a story on cassoulet?”

Between teaching appearances, Paula began to research the pork, poultry, and bean stew. In the pages of The Food of France by Waverly Root, among other sources, she learned about the longstanding rivalries over who made the best version among southwestern French villages with fairytale names like Castelnaudary, Carcassonne, and Toulouse. Back at Le Plaisir, she bumped into another regular named Roger Yaseen, head of the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, a prestigious international dining society, who often traveled to dine in France. She shared the news of her cassoulet assignment and asked if he knew anything about the dish. As luck would have it, that evening he was dining with Ariane Daguin, the teenage daughter of André Daguin, a star chef of Southwest France.

“That night was my first introduction to the foodie world of New York City,” Ariane Daguin told me. “Paula mentioned she was working on an article about cassoulet. She was talking about the cassoulets of Castelnaudary, and I said, ‘No no, there’s much more to it than that. Let me send you to my family in Gascony.’”

“I hadn’t even been planning to go to Gascony before they suggested it, because Waverly Root never mentioned it as a place for cassoulet,” Paula said. “So I wrote to André Daguin. And he said, ‘I don’t make one cassoulet. I make three.’”

In 1978, André Daguin was forty-three, three years older than Paula, and brimming with ambition. He had two Michelin stars for Hôtel de France, his restaurant and inn located in the Gascon town of Auch. He had inherited the hotel from his father, and his grandfather had cooked there in the 1880s.

Like many of his contemporaries, Daguin modernized French classics according to the precepts of nouvelle cuisine. But crucially, his innovations were grounded in place and history. He updated his region’s iconic dishes, such as cassoulet, limiting himself to local ingredients: duck, Armagnac, prunes. He was the first chef to serve duck breasts like steak, seared medium-rare, and he invented prune and Armagnac ice cream, a whimsical play on a traditional Gascon after-dinner snack (recipe, here). Sharing Paula’s love of technology smartly applied, he was also the first chef to use liquid nitrogen to freeze ice cream, preparing his signature dessert in dramatic fashion in the restaurant dining room.