PART FOUR
Chefs, Cooks, and Tools of the Trade
THE ACCOMPLISHED cook and food writer Betty Fussell has told the tale of how she once bought a bag of live eels in New York’s Chinatown, carried them home on the subway, and proceeded to try to kill them in her kitchen. Cleaver whacks and mallet slams didn’t work, but then she discovered a solution in The Encyclopedia of Fish Cookery, which advised throwing them in a container of coarse kosher salt. It did the job, but skinning was yet to come, followed by severing the heads, slitting the muscular body with poultry shears, and plunging them into a final bath of vinegar and white wine. Now that is a “kitchen practice” in spades.
Not all the selections in this chapter are so laborious or terrifying. But like the famous first direction for Brunswick Stew—“Take a squirrel”—many of the essays and poems we include involve transformation, sometimes brute, sometimes sweet, from raw ingredient to wondrous food. The subject matter ought to be familiar to most readers, since we’ve all, or almost all, had a bout with a burner. Even when the writers of our excerpts are professional chefs or restaurateurs we can imagine ourselves at least momentarily in their place; indeed, many of us would give our favorite chef’s knife to work for an hour at the stovetop of a three-star Michelin, under the tutelage of a master. When Gabrielle Hamilton tells us what Sunday brunch is like at Prune, her East Village hot spot, we more or less know what she’s talking about. And when Adrian Searle gives us the inside skinny on Ferran Adrià’s elBulli “workshop,” though molecular gastronomy may be as remote from our experience as a medieval alchemist’s lab, we more or less know what he’s talking about. Bill Buford, a well-known food writer whose work appears elsewhere in this volume, came close to a Walter Mitty moment when he not only apprenticed at superstar restaurateur Mario Batali’s Italian spot Babbo, but also went to Italy to learn butchering from a Tuscan master butcher, working for an entire year just to get one hind quarter of a pig exactly right. As with so much writing of this kind, for a certain reader such pieces represent kitchen practice fantasies, culinary wish fulfillments.
But technique is not the only ingredient in these texts. Several authors either castigate or celebrate specific instruments of the kitchen or the table. Thus John Thorne has nothing but hostility toward the microwave, decrying its perversely unnatural mode of cooking food from the inside out. Even the hallowed food processor, however convenient, feels to him like a machine designed to distance the user from the food itself, an interloper imposing itself between hand and ingredient. At the same time, Bee Wilson, a food historian, sings the praises of the cleaver, celebrating its versatility as a utensil in Chinese cookery. Meanwhile, Norbert Elias, a distinguished sociologist of culture, speaks of the role of the fork in the civilizing process; it’s fascinating to learn that before what we define as conventional table cutlery people used their hands to eat but often carried a knife with them and employed it, uncleansed, to spear anything on a plate.
Anthony Bourdain, thanks to his TV programs, has gained fame as a remarkably traveled, endlessly adventurous eater, a man of gusto and exuberance at the table. Almost equally well known is his insider dope about kitchens and their practices (he began his food life as a cook), especially the stinging critique of unsavory ways that he mounted in his best-selling Kitchen Confidential. It’s helpful to know that Tuesday is the best night to eat out, but it’s amusing and possibly shocking to learn that behind that suggestion lies a whole litany of menu booby-traps awaiting a customer foolish enough to venture into a restaurant on Monday night, when terrible leftovers are inevitable. There are other kitchen horrors: ever do the rounds with a health inspector? Roger Porter did, and you’ll learn of an inspector playing hardball—destructively dumping a quart of Windex into a pot of soup because it wasn’t sufficiently cooled down overnight and he thought it might breed a host of deadly bacilli. Then there’s a whole subgenre of tales by writers who disguise themselves as diners or workers in restaurants. Of course such reviewers as Ruth Reichl are known for their crafty camouflages, but the food writer James Villas once pretended to be a waiter and produced an essay describing the guff he had to take from surly customers, along the way singing the praises of unheralded workers in restaurant kitchens, from sous-chefs to dishwashers.
Many writers love to describe the process of cooking—that tale of metamorphosis with its gratifying results. Some poets—like Nancy Willard in “How to Stuff a Pepper”—use the transformative power of language as a parallel to what a cook does in the pot, showing how the ordinary (words, ingredients) become the extraordinary (the completed poem, the finished dish). Like good poetry, good cooking seems a balance between convention and individual talent, accepted rules and the imaginative breaking of rules. The making of a lyric and the making of a soufflé are analogous acts.
Inevitably taking us back to Betty Fussell’s eel slaughter, the poet William Dickey writes: “We must eat to live, and we must kill to eat. / The serious cook will always face this problem.” And on that note, the great companion to Gertrude Stein and author of the famous Alice B. Toklas Cook Book considers that when the cook has to dispatch her own food, all kitchens are what she calls crime scenes. A chapter from her book, titled “Murder in the Kitchen,” is a record of Toklas’s kitchen killings: a carp annihilated with a knife plunged in its vertebral column, a pigeon smothered when Toklas pressed on its fragile windpipe, a duck murdered in some unspeakable way. Such crime victims have little to do with the supermarket’s frozen salmon steaks or plastic-wrapped birds, antiseptically laid out on beds of Styrofoam.
IN WHAT SOMEONE has called “one of the most successful marriages of the twentieth century,” the slight, practical-minded San-Francisco-born Alice B. Toklas was “wifey” and the imperious, Oakland-born Gertrude Stein was “hubby.” They met and joined their lives in Paris, in 1906, settling in the rue de Fleurus apartment where Stein had been living with her brother, Leo, an address that had already become a Modernist Destination. But theirs was a rather conventional living arrangement. Stein, by mutual consent, was the “genius”; Toklas was the cook, embroiderer, and entertainer of visiting wives, whose eminent husbands supposedly came just to see Stein. But in fact the duo were loving partners, and when Stein died Toklas declared that “I am just a memory of her.” Nevertheless, to make money she struck out on her own with the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, a compendium of recipes and recollections that has become as popular as the best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—a memoir Stein claimed to have ghostwritten for her (although to this day some critics continue to argue that Toklas wrote that book herself too).
from The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book:
Murder in the Kitchen
COOK-BOOKS HAVE ALWAYS intrigued and seduced me. When I was still a dilettante in the kitchen they held my attention, even the dull ones, from cover to cover, the way crime and murder stories did Gertrude Stein.
When we first began reading Dashiell Hammett, Gertrude Stein remarked that it was his modern note to have disposed of his victims before the story commenced. Goodness knows how many were required to follow as the result of the first crime. And so it is in the kitchen. Murder and sudden death seem as unnatural there as they should be anywhere else. They can’t, they can never become acceptable facts. Food is far too pleasant to combine with horror. All the same, facts, even distasteful facts, must be accepted and we shall see how, before any story of cooking begins, crime is inevitable. That is why cooking is not an entirely agreeable pastime. There is too much that must happen in advance of the actual cooking. This doesn’t of course apply to food that emerges stainless from deep freeze. But the marketing and cooking I know are French and it was in France, where freezing units are unknown, that in due course I graduated at the stove.
In earlier days, memories of which are scattered among my chapters, if indulgent friends on this or that Sunday evening or party occasion said that the cooking I produced wasn’t bad, it neither beguiled nor flattered me into liking or wanting to do it. The only way to learn to cook is to cook, and for me, as for so many others, it suddenly and unexpectedly became a disagreeable necessity to have to do it when war came and Occupation followed. It was in those conditions of rationing and shortage that I learned not only to cook seriously but to buy food in a restricted market and not to take too much time in doing it, since there were so many more important and more amusing things to do. It was at this time, then, that murder in the kitchen began.
The first victim was a lively carp brought to the kitchen in a covered basket from which nothing could escape. The fish man who sold me the carp said he had no time to kill, scale or clean it, nor would he tell me with which of these horrible necessities one began. It wasn’t difficult to know which was the most repellent. So quickly to the murder and have it over with. On the docks of Puget Sound I had seen fishermen grasp the tail of a huge salmon and lifting it high bring it down on the dock with enough force to kill it. Obviously I was not a fisherman nor was the kitchen table a dock. Should I not dispatch my first victim with a blow on the head from a heavy mallet? After an appraising glance at the lively fish it was evident he would escape attempts aimed at his head. A heavy sharp knife came to my mind as the classic, the perfect choice, so grasping, with my left hand well covered with a dishcloth, for the teeth might be sharp, the lower jaw of the carp, and the knife in my right, I carefully, deliberately found the base of its vertebral column and plunged the knife in. I let go my grasp and looked to see what had happened. Horror of horrors. The carp was dead, killed, assassinated, murdered in the first, second and third degree. Limp, I fell into a chair, with my hands still unwashed reached for a cigarette, lighted it, and waited for the police to come and take me into custody. After a second cigarette my courage returned and I went to prepare poor Mr Carp for the table.
It was in the market of Palma de Mallorca that our French cook tried to teach me to murder by smothering. There is no reason why this crime should have been committed publicly or that I should have been expected to participate. Jeanne was just showing off. When the crowd of market women who had gathered about her began screaming and gesticulating, I retreated. When we met later to drive back in the carry-all filled with our marketing to Terreno where we had a villa I refused to sympathise with Jeanne. She said the Mallorcans were bloodthirsty, didn’t they go to bullfights and pay an advanced price for the meat of the beasts they had seen killed in the ring, didn’t they prefer to chop off the heads of innocent pigeons instead of humanely smothering them which was the way to prevent all fowl from bleeding to death and so make them fuller and tastier. Had she not tried to explain this to them, to teach them, to show them how an intelligent humane person went about killing pigeons, but no they didn’t want to learn, they preferred their own brutal ways. At lunch when she served the pigeons Jeanne discreetly said nothing. Discussing food which she enjoyed above everything had been discouraged at table. But her fine black eyes were eloquent. If the small-sized pigeons the island produced had not achieved jumbo size, squabs they unquestionably were, and larger and more succulent squabs than those we had eaten at the excellent restaurant at Palma.
Later we went back to Paris and then there was war and after a lifetime there was peace. One day passing the concierge’s loge he called me and said he had something someone had left for us. He said he would bring it to me, which he did and which I wished he hadn’t when I saw what it was, a crate of six white pigeons and a note from a friend saying she had nothing better to offer us from her home in the country, ending with But as Alice is clever she will make something delicious of them. It is certainly a mistake to allow a reputation for cleverness to be born and spread by loving friends. It is so cheaply acquired and so dearly paid for. Six white pigeons to be smothered, to be plucked, to be cleaned and all this to be accomplished before Gertrude Stein returned for she didn’t like to see work being done. If only I had the courage the two hours before her return would easily suffice. A large cup of strong black coffee would help. This was before a lovely Brazilian told me that in her country a large cup of black coffee was always served before going to bed to ensure a good night’s rest. Not yet having acquired this knowledge the black coffee made me lively and courageous. I carefully found the spot on poor innocent Dove’s throat where I was to press and pressed. The realization had never come to me before that one saw with one’s fingertips as well as one’s eyes. It was a most unpleasant experience, though as I laid out one by one the sweet young corpses there was no denying one could become accustomed to murdering. . . .
The next murder was not of my doing. During six months which we spent in the country we raised Barbary ducks. They are larger than ordinary ducks and are famous for the size of their livers. They do not quack and are not friendly. Down in the Ain everyone shoots. Many of the farmers go off to work in the fields with a gun slung over a shoulder and not infrequently return with a bird or two.
Occasionally a farmer would sell us a pheasant or a partridge. An English friend staying with us, astonished to find farmers shooting, remarked, When everyone shoots no one shoots. Our nearest neighbour had a so-called bird dog, mongrel she certainly was, ruby coat like an Irish setter but her head was flat, her paws too large, her tail too short. We would see Diane on the road, she was not sympathetic. The large iron portals at Bilignin were sometimes left open when Gertrude Stein took the car out for a short while, and one morning Diane, finding them open, came into the court and saw the last of our Barbary ducks, Blanchette, because she was blue-black. Perhaps innocently perhaps not, opinion was divided later, she began to chase Blanchette. She would come running at the poor bewildered duck from a distance, charge upon her, retreat and recommence. The cook, having seen from the kitchen window what was happening, hastened out. The poor duck was on her back and Diane was madly barking and running about. By the time I got to the court the cook was tenderly carrying a limp Blanchette in her arms to the kitchen. Having chased Diane out of the court, I closed the portals and returned to my work in the vegetable garden supposing the episode to be over. Not at all. Presently the cook appeared, her face whiter than her apron. Madame, she said, poor Blanchette is no more. That wretched dog frightened her to death. Her heart was beating so furiously I saw there was but one thing to do. I gave her three tablespoonfuls of eau-de-vie, that will give her a good flavour. And then I killed her. How does Madame wish her to be cooked. Surprised at the turn the affair had taken, I answered feebly, With orange sauce.
THE AUTHOR OF the massive treatise titled The Civilizing Process was one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Elias studied medicine and philosophy before turning to sociology. He was deeply involved in the German Zionist movement but fled to Paris after the Nazis gained ascendancy, then settled in London, where, ironically, he was detained for nearly a year in internment camps because he was a German “alien.” Eventually, after many difficulties, Elias gained a series of teaching positions both in England (at the University of Leicester) and in Africa (at the University of Ghana), while continuing to draft his magnum opus. That work—one among eighteen volumes that marked his extraordinarily productive and brilliant career—traced the metamorphosis of European courtly culture into the early modern bourgeois society whose table manners he discusses in our selection here.
from The Civilizing Process:
On the Use of the Fork at Table
WHAT IS THE real use of the fork? It serves to lift food that has been cut up to the mouth. Why do we need a fork for this? Why do we not use our fingers? Because it is “cannibal,” as the “Man in the Club-Window,” the anonymous author of The Habits of Good Society, said in 1859. Why is it “cannibal” to eat with one’s fingers? That is not a question; it is self-evidently cannibal, barbaric, uncivilized or whatever else it is called.
But that is precisely the question. Why is it more civilized to eat with a fork?
“Because it is unhygienic to eat with one’s fingers.” That sounds convincing. To our sensibility it is unhygienic if different people put their fingers into the same dish, because there is a danger of contracting disease through contact with others. Each of us seems to fear that the others are diseased.
But this explanation is not entirely satisfactory. Nowadays we do not eat from common dishes. Everyone puts food into their mouth from their own plate. To pick it up from one’s own plate with one’s fingers cannot be more “unhygienic” than to put cake, bread, chocolate or anything else into one’s mouth with one’s own fingers.
So why does one really need a fork? Why is it “barbaric” and “uncivilized” to put food into one’s mouth by hand from one’s own plate? Because it is distasteful to dirty one’s fingers, or at least to be seen in society with dirty fingers. The suppression of eating by hand from one’s own plate has very little to do with the danger of illness, the so-called “rational” explanation. In observing our feelings towards the fork ritual, we can see with particular clarity that the first authority in our decision between whether behaviour at table is “civilized” or “uncivilized” is our feeling of distaste. The fork is nothing other than the embodiment of a specific standard of emotions and a specific level of revulsion. Behind the change in eating techniques between the Middle Ages and modern times appears the same process that emerged in the analysis of other incarnations of this kind: a change in the economy of drives and emotions.
Modes of behaviour which in the Middle Ages were not felt to be in the least distasteful have increasingly become surrounded by feelings of distaste. The standard of delicacy finds expression in corresponding social prohibitions. These taboos, so far as can be ascertained, are nothing other than ritualized or institutionalized feelings of displeasure, distaste, disgust, fear or shame, feelings which have been socially nurtured under quite specific conditions and which are constantly reproduced, not solely but mainly because they have become institutionally firmly embedded in a particular ritual, in particular forms of conduct.
The examples show—certainly only in a narrow cross-section and in the relatively randomly selected statements of individuals—how, in a phase of development in which the use of the fork was not yet taken for granted, the feeling of distaste that first formed within a narrow circle was slowly extended. “It is very impolite,” says Courtin in 1672, “to touch anything greasy, a sauce or syrup, etc., with your fingers, apart from the fact that it obliges you to commit two or three more improper acts. One is to wipe your hand frequently on your serviette and to soil it like a kitchen cloth, so that those who see you wipe your mouth with it feel nauseated. Another is to wipe your fingers on your bread, which again is very improper. [N.B. The French terms propre and malpropre used by Courtin and explained in one of his chapters coincide less with the German terms for clean and unclean (sauber and unsauber) than with the word frequently used earlier, “proper.”] The third is to lick them, which is the height of impropriety.”
The Civilité of 1729 by La Salle, which transmitted the behaviour of the upper class to broader circles, says on one page: “When the fingers are very greasy, wipe them first on a piece of bread.” This shows how far from general acceptance, even at this time, was the standard of delicacy that Courtin had already represented decades earlier. On the other hand, La Salle took over fairly literally Courtin’s precept that “Bienséance does not permit anything greasy, a sauce or a syrup, to be touched with the fingers.” And, exactly like Courtin, he mentioned among the ensuing incivilités wiping the hands on bread and licking the fingers, as well as soiling the napkin.
It can be seen that manners were here still in the process of formation. The new standard did not appear suddenly. Certain forms of behaviour were placed under prohibition, not because they were unhealthy but because they led to an offensive sight and disagreeable associations; shame at offering such a spectacle, originally absent, and fear of arousing such associations were gradually spread from the standard setting circles to larger circles by numerous authorities and institutions. However, once such feelings had been aroused and firmly established in society by means of certain rituals like that involving the fork, they were constantly reproduced so long as the structure of human relations was not fundamentally altered. The older generation, for whom such a standard of conduct is accepted as a matter of course, urges the children, who do not come into the world already equipped with these feelings and this standard, to control themselves more or less rigorously in accordance with it, and to restrain their drives and inclinations. If children tried to touch something sticky, wet or greasy with their fingers they were told, “You must not do that, people do not do things like that.” And the displeasure towards such conduct which is thus aroused by the adult finally arises through habit, without being induced by another person.
To a large extent, however, the conduct and drives of the child are forced even without words into the same mould and in the same direction by the fact that a particular use of knife and fork, for example, is completely established in adult society—that is, by the example of the surrounding world. Since the pressure or coercion of individual adults is allied to the pressure and example of the whole surrounding world, most children, as they grow up, forget or repress relatively early the fact that their feelings of shame and embarrassment, of pleasure and displeasure, were moulded into conformity with a certain standard by external pressure and compulsion. All this appears to them as highly personal, something “inside,” implanted in them by nature. While it is still directly visible in the writings of Courtin and La Salle that adults, too, were at first dissuaded from eating with their fingers by consideration for each other, by “politeness,” to spare others a distasteful spectacle and themselves the shame of being seen with soiled hands, later it became more and more an inner automatism, the imprint of society on the inner self, the superego, that forbade the individual to eat in any other way than with a fork. The social standard to which the individual was first made to conform from outside by external restraint is finally reproduced more or less smoothly within him or her, through a self-restraint which operates to a certain degree even against his or her conscious wishes.
Thus the socio-historical process of centuries, in the course of which the standard of what is felt to be shameful and offensive has been slowly raised, is reenacted in abbreviated form in the life of the individual human being. If one wished to express recurrent processes of this kind in the form of laws, one could speak, as a parallel to the laws of biogenesis, of a fundamental law of sociogenesis and psychogenesis.
AN INVETERATE TRAVELER and a subtle, elegant poet, Bishop was raised for some years by grandparents in Nova Scotia after her father died and her mother became mentally ill, then moved to the home of other relatives in Massachusetts. As a child she suffered from asthma and was rarely able to attend school, though she read voraciously. Later, after graduating from Vassar, she formed strong friendships with a number of her most famous literary contemporaries, in particular Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Throughout much of her life, an inheritance gave her the option of living where she wished, so for fifteen years she settled in Brazil, involved in a passionate romantic relationship with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Always scrupulously detailed and brilliantly versified, Bishop’s poetry can be incisive, speculative, and sometimes—as in our selection here—charmingly playful. “Lines Written in the Fannie Farmer Cookbook” was really inscribed in a cookbook owned by Bishop’s longtime friend, the poet Frank Bidart, who, along with her final partner, Alice Methfessel, became one of her literary executors.
Lines Written in the Fannie Farmer Cookbook
You won’t become a gourmet* cook
By studying our Fannie’s book—
Her thoughts on Food & Keeping House
Are scarcely those of Lévi-Strauss.
Nevertheless, you’ll find, Frank dear,
The basic elements** are here.
And if a problem should arise:
The Soufflé fall before your eyes,
Or strange things happen to the Rice
—You know I love to give advice.
Elizabeth
Christmas, 1971
P.S. Fannie should not be underrated;
She has become sophisticated.
She’s picked up many gourmet* tricks
Since the edition of ’96.
Elizabeth Bishop
* Forbidden word
** Forbidden phrase
STONE BEGAN HER career as a poet of youthful delight and verve, but her outlook darkened after the suicide of her beloved second husband, the writer Walter Stone. Left indigent with three young daughters to raise, she traveled from campus to campus for short-term teaching jobs, an itinerant academic, while remaining relatively obscure. Yet her often elegiac, sometimes sardonic, always brilliant verse gained an increasing circle of admirers. At the age of seventy-five, when most professors retire, Stone became a tenured member of the faculty at SUNY-Binghamton, and in her eighties and nineties she began winning major prizes. “Vegetables II” reveals her at her wistful yet comic best, meditating on the kitchen as a “cutting room” where “I go . . . / To eat of death.”
Saturated in the room
The ravaged curry and white wine
Tilt on the sink.
Tomatoes in plastic bag
Send up odors of resentment,
Rotting quietly.
It is the cutting room, the kitchen,
Where I go like an addict
To eat of death.
The eggplant is silent.
We put our heads together.
You are so smooth and cool and purple,
I say, Which of us will it be?
THE AUTHOR OF fifteen volumes of verse, Dickey spent many years teaching at San Francisco State after studying at Reed College, Harvard University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A poet of steely wit and dazzle, he recalled with delight his days with undergraduate and graduate colleagues from Gary Snyder to W. D. Snodgrass. “Killing to Eat” characteristically mingles a seemingly casual culinary reference to Julia Child with a serious meditation on the food chain of which we all are part as eaters who are sooner or later destined to be eaten. Dickey died of HIV-related problems just a few years after retiring from San Francisco State University.
The serious cook really must face up to the task personally . . .
Using a sharp knife or lobster shears, cut straight down 1/2 inch into the back of the lobster, at the point where tail and chest join, thus severing the spinal cord and killing the lobster instantly.
JULIA CHILD AND SIMONE BECK,
MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING, II
In the kitchen sink, two dozen astonished crayfish
crawl over each other to claw at the stainless steel.
I am a serious cook, and I will kill them.
Preparing a bath of vinegar, vegetables, spices,
I bring it to a boil and plunge them in.
They die instantly. They oblige me
by turning, in three minutes, pure Chinese red.
Later that night I wake, half out of dream,
and reach for the bedside glass that has my Sign,
the Archer, on it. Bewildered, I seem to see
not the Sign but one of the crayfish, resurrected,
climbing the inside of my glass to get in touch.
In the backyard of the house on Nelson Street
there was a chopping block and a Boy Scout hatchet
for killing the Sunday chickens. The hen picked up
out of her flock, the accurate glittering blow.
I watched one of them cut up. Inside, for tomorrow,
a completed egg, then one that was not quite finished,
then a dozen others, smaller to microscopic,
crowding her oviduct.
In our Zodiac there is no Sign
of Hen, or Cow, or Pig. It is full of hunters.
Orion stalks our sky with his Dogs, his Bears.
Underneath them scrabbles the eater, Cancer.
Could there be a kitchen Zodiac, in which
the Sign of the virgin Egg, the reclusive Lobster,
climb up the sky? Where we locate north
by looking for the constellation of the Bruised Calf?
where, after we have uneasily crossed the equator
the constellation of the Southern Fish is rising?
We wake from that dream sweating, nothing resolved.
The galaxy is the shape of an eating mouth.
The Wolf salivates in the vacuum, the Snake engorges.
We must eat to live, and we must kill to eat.
The serious cook will always face this problem.
A MEDIEVALIST, SCIENCE fiction writer, and poet, Gilbert has translated major books from the old French of Chrétien de Troyes (Erec and Enide) and Marie de France (The Lays and Other Works). Her writings have appeared in a range of publications, including The New Yorker and Fantasy and Science Fiction. The “Cook-Songs” we reprint here are drawn from a fabulous tale of the planet “Musaeus,” whose inhabitants broadcast strange poems into outer space. Even while they satirize the recipe form with wit and grace, they suggest exotically appetizing extraplanetary edibles.
Two Cook-Songs from the Planet Musaeus on the Same Subject, by Rival Poets
(1)
some wips: they will transport you.
In a pot I’ll put
pittakaskadiblia; slibs, littacocks, lopples,
lorrops, hibbles, and the pips
of koffatids. Lattapurns
are good too, and chittabubs,
and fillakeens, if you like those.
I use korrafits, though coarse spirits don’t like them,
bibberits, rissits, kukkadiffilits,
gillabits, timmabiberits and other tidbits,
bilps, bitterpips and stemmerits,
and pripples—pits, pulp and skin.
Stewed for long hours, they lie
finally, seething in a hot
sweet paste. Wips! Wonderful
wips! No one in this world
makes wips like mine. Ho,
I have done it.
(2)
Ho, I am going to make
small wips to excite you. Chittabubs,
lopsided and brown, sleepy features in corners,
I’ll use, and fillakeens,
like heavy flowers; hibbles, like pale creatures
caught in cold seas. Landed, they smell
strangely of sweet roots dug from the loonth,
stored long in sunlight. Dubs also make
a sweet, sleepy taste. Lattapurns,
long dried, and hung in branches,
lorrops and korrafits, all the little fruits
called pittakaskadibblia. Then bibberits
and rissits, bitterpips and stemmerits,
pripples and bilps, pippakiperits and fips—
warm wines, green teas, spices for your delight!
All sizzle in my wips, the best
you’ll ever have. Ho,
I have done it.
COEDITOR OF THIS volume, an english professor at Reed College and scholar of autobiography by day and restaurant critic and food writer by night, Porter has written on food matters in Portland, Oregon, for the past twenty-five years, and was nominated by the James Beard Foundation for its annual award in restaurant reviewing. One of Porter’s favorite assignments was distinctly “back of the house,” in all its grittiness. Here, reporting on the job of a restaurant health inspector, he comes to realize that even one degree of temperature too high in a restaurant’s walk-in cooler is no laughing matter. In the mind of a beady-eyed, computer-assisted examiner, a casual, let alone deliberate slip-up is in danger of producing nothing less than the bubonic plague. Whether Porter is doing a “working” dinner or not, he doesn’t normally concentrate on matters of sanitation, but his report will inevitably make you worry—for better or worse—about those nasty microbes.
In Search of Filth: A Day in the Life of a Restaurant Health Inspector
I AM SPENDING the morning with a restaurant health inspector for Multnomah County, Oregon. We are at a well-known downtown Portland restaurant where Randy Howarth, a bureaucrat with a human face, has been in place for an hour, peering under storage shelves, checking the garbage cans, and measuring the temperature of the water in the dishwaters. He has scrutinized the floors, looked suspiciously at bottles of toxic chemicals, and felt the wrappings of storage containers to monitor for cross-contamination. He has noted the cleanliness of the workers’ clothing, inspected the restrooms, and like a stern camp counselor, made sure there is no litter, that soiled linen is out of sight, and the stockpot handles are well scrubbed. Happily the ventilation is adequate, the walls are free of grease, and there’s no evidence of insects, rodents, cats, or turtles. All seems well. Then disaster!
In the walk-in cooler, a five-gallon plastic drum of yesterday’s clam chowder sits, awaiting the lunch service. Howarth whips out a battery of thermometers he always carries with him, and plunges one into the thick mass. 54 degrees—14 over the required maximum temperature—and thus a breeding ground for bacteria. Howarth senses danger: “It’s got to go,” he announces to the chef, who looks crestfallen. “But the soup is my pride and joy,” he moans; “it’s even better the second day, and besides, there’s a hundred bucks worth in that container.” Howarth hauls the drum up to the counter. He is firm: “Dispose of it.” Meanwhile he goes off for further inspection: refuse disposal, hand-washing practices, utensil sanitizing. A half-hour later the offending soup remains, but Howarth is not a man to play softball. He picks up a quart of Windex and unceremoniously dumps the entire bottle of the ammonia-laden cleaner into the potage. “Just for insurance.”
These days an inspector’s job is part dispensing old-time homilies, part employing high-tech apparatus (with his laptop he can compare the results of previous visits). If he finds a can of WD-40 used to oil a bread mixer near some tomatoes, he will deliver an earnest lecture on the subject of proper storage. Too much grease on the counter, and he will sound like a matron out of Godey’s Lady’s Book. There are 100 pages in the Oregon Food Sanitation Rules book, and the regulations govern not only restaurants but food carts, and vending machines. Howarth can quote Food Sanitation Rule 333-156-240, with its instructions regarding the separation of food and toxic materials, though (unless pushed) he is less the enforcing martinet than a gentle figure concerned for both the restaurant’s reputation and the public weal. If he finds significant violations, the restaurant receives a return visit in two weeks. If things are not sufficiently attended to, the inspector has the power to shut down the place on the spot.
Inspectors give no pre-visit warnings, and they have carte blanche to go everywhere and look at everything. He begins the tour by washing his hands at the kitchen sink, a practice he repeats, like a uniformed Lady Macbeth, a hundred times a day. He then prowls around a walk-in freezer, tests the waster in the dishwasher with little papers that indicate the levels of disinfectant, noses around the soft drink nozzles (“These fellows look real nice”), measures the space between floor and storage racks (6 inches minimum), and delights in the fact that all the cooks are wearing their hats. He tells me that food must be covered especially well under a fan, where dirt particles can be blown in on the ingredients; that mollusk and crustacean shells may not be reused, however cleanly scrubbed; that the food must be thawed in a microwave, refrigerator, or under running water but never at room temperature. He notes, with a touch of sadness, that a piece of Provimi veal on the counter lies perilously close to a turkey breast. Entering the dining room (it’s mid-morning and there are no customers), like a detective hunting for clues he picks up some silverware and scans it for dried-on tomato stains. And like a diamond merchant examining the facets of a stone, he holds a goblet of cut crystal to the light.
Howarth prints out his report for the anxious chef. Six months ago the place was only marginally in compliance, and were it to receive a score of less than 70 at this inspection, a notice would be posted at the entrance stating that it had “failed to comply with acceptable sanitation standards,” a virtual death blow to business. But Howarth tells the chef, who stands by like a chastened pupil, that the restaurant has barely squeaked by, and as the inspector leaves to discernible sighs of relief, he promises ominously to return sometime by year’s end.
Although Howarth’s specialty is food service, he is not restricted to restaurants, of which there are more than two thousand in the Portland area. He is also responsible for snack bars, cafés, theater concession stands, school kitchens, daycare facilities, park picnic sites, and farmers’ markets. One of his colleagues has a sub-specialty in bed and breakfasts.
All the inspection records are public, so if your favorite eatery hasn’t been up to snuff recently—and as a result you haven’t been either—it’s possible to check the files to see if there’s any danger of salmonella, staphylococcus, or hepatitis. The latter is a restaurant’s greatest health hazard; in Portland alone a dozen restaurants are under surveillance for this health problem.
The next place we visit is a mom-and-pop Vietnamese restaurant, the kind of small joint you’d think might be at risk. But the opposite is true at this spotless spot. It has but one tiny violation: not enough paper towels accessible at the food handlers’ sinks. Howarth glows with satisfaction throughout the visit. The ice is well stored, the glassware gleams, the leftovers are covered to the max. It’s a family business: Grandfather peels carrots, Grandmother chops peppers, Nephew sizzles oil on a meticulously clean stove. Perhaps because each family member has a personal stake in things, cleanliness is not a matter of adherence to regulations but of simple pride. Howard pastes up the sticker of approval as everyone gathers and beams.
I begin to look at things with a different eye. Suddenly the floor underneath the refrigerator seems as important as a rack of lamb, the “potable water system anti-back flow production procedures” as crucial as the burnt sugar topping on a crème brûlée. But the dangers of excessive self-consciousness are present as well. If you think too much about all that can and does go amiss—or read your Anthony Bourdain—you’ll become a neurotic foodaphobe; imagine Woody Allen as a health inspector and you’ll get the picture. As one chef told me, “If the regulations were applied strictly by the book, 99 percent of all restaurants wouldn’t last a day.”
A PROLIFIC, PRIZE-WINNING author of children’s books, Willard is also a novelist, poet, and essayist. On the creative writing faculty at Vassar for many years, she has also illustrated many of her fantastic tales, and is known for the verve with which she illuminates the extraordinary aspects of the seemingly ordinary. Explaining the dedication to “magic” that shapes her work, she has observed that “most of us grow up and put magic away with other childish things. But I think we can all remember a time when magic was as real to us as science, and the things we couldn’t see were as important as the things we could.” The enchanting insights of her poetic recipe for “How to Stuff a Pepper” arise from such magic-making.
Now, said the cook, I will teach you
how to stuff a pepper with rice.
Take your pepper green, and gently,
for peppers are shy. No matter which side
you approach, it’s always the backside.
Perched on her green buttocks, the pepper sleeps.
In its silk tights, it dreams
of somersaults and parsley,
of the days when the sexes were one.
Slash open the sleeve
as if you were cutting into a paper lantern,
and enter a moon, spilled like a melon,
a fever of pearls,
a conversation of glaciers.
It is a temple built to the worship
of morning light.
I have sat under the great globe
of seeds on the roof of that chamber,
too dazzled to gather the taste I came for.
I have taken the pepper in hand,
smooth and blind, a runt in the rich
evolution of roses and ferns.
You say I have not yet taught you
to stuff a pepper?
Cooking takes time.
Next time we’ll consider the rice.
THORNE IS ONE of America’s more unheralded but astute food writers, who established his reputation with a dogged insistence on honest, straightforward recipes. He is the author of an acclaimed food newsletter “Simple Cooking,” along with numerous books, including Serious Pig and Mouth Wide Open. Armed with a weather eye for the bogus, the self-righteous, and the pretentious, and committed to a simple lifestyle in Maine, Thorne takes positions contrary to those of many celebrity chefs. Here he questions the importance of the food processor and the microwave, exposing what he considers their irrelevance to genuine cooking and arguing that they distance the cook from hands-on involvement with food. He regards the microwave oven as especially perverse because it cooks foods from the inside out rather than, as traditional fire-based methods do, from the outside in.
from The Outlaw Cook: Cuisine Mécanique
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED the food processor and the microwave oven in the mid-1970s. This didn’t happen on the same day or even in the same week or month, but it did happen in close enough proximity to my own newly acquired self-identity as a food enthusiast for the two machines to become forever firmly linked in my mind. At the time, of course, I didn’t think of them as twins, or even near relations, although they were impressive in the same way. Both were on the breaking edge of cooking technology; both were designed to make work shorter and easier. Even so, to me—and to others as well—they initially appeared, as kitchen appliances, exactly opposite in virtu. While one was opening whole new culinary horizons, the other was fast becoming the boon tool of the I-hate-to-cook crowd, a hyped-up gadget that did things incredibly fast at the cost of not doing them well.
Upwardly mobile nouveau cuisinier that I was quickly becoming, there was simply no question in my mind as to which was which—even though I knew the attraction I felt for the food processor was not universally shared. Debates about its merits still raged in the food magazines, fueled by complaints from those of the culinary old guard who had so far refused to join the stampede.
Not me. I read their opinions with interest, but distantly. I knew that no matter how convincing the case against the machine might be, I had to have one. All it had taken was a department-store demonstration: the moment I saw that ball of brioche dough take form and leap up onto the whirring blades, I knew, for me, cooking would never be the same. I couldn’t afford an actual Cuisinart—not everyone gets a Volvo in life—but I did purchase their own short-lived bargain-basement brand, the quite adequate Omnichef.
If you were there then, you’ll remember the feeling. The food processor was different from other appliances: it compelled belief. Supper guests actually came into the kitchen after dinner to feed it carrots. It was the next best thing to having Paul Bocuse himself come out with the coffee for introductions and acclaim.
As time went on, most serious cooks gave in and got one; the scoffing now came from somewhere else. The food processor has found such a secure place in our kitchen that it seems hard to believe that fifteen years ago it was the same sort of contempt-generating machine that, until very recently, the microwave oven was for us. Cultural critics of the time coined the phrase “Cuisinart liberal” to convey what was wrong with suburbanite reformers: they adopted all the correct positions without having to pay any of the requisite dues.
They were wrong—cultural critics always are—but they do know how to hurt. The phrase stung because we already knew that our culinary titularies—Elizabeth David, Diana Kennedy, Jane Grigson—didn’t own Cuisinarts. Nor did we want them to. The thought of hearing the machine’s high-pitched keening in Richard Olney’s Provençal kitchen would have filled most of us with genuine grief.
The truth was that we felt that we had come too late to pay our dues. We were only just discovering true French cuisine at the very moment it had started to fade away. Now that its ingredients were available and gifted cooks were coming back home to explain it, few of us could imagine devoting ourselves to the time-consuming, meticulous preparation it demanded. Many of us were, after all, young professionals whose careers were just then getting into gear.
If the food processor had not been right there, we might have paused, might have asked how the French themselves were managing this. We knew that food and its preparation played a different role in their lives than it did in ours, but our understanding of this was, for all our enthusiasm, essentially shallow.
For centuries, they had been on to a good thing, and now—almost too late—we were being let in on it. At last, what they could buy, we could buy; what they could do, we could, too—but only because of this machine. What luck for us it was the very same one that, in Roy Andries de Groot’s words, had in France “already brought about the major gastronomic revolution of the past twenty years,” the style of cooking that was becoming known as nouvelle cuisine.
If Carl Sontheimer, the entrepreneur who adapted and marketed the machine in America, is a genius, it is for knowing that the time was ripe for this machine and exactly which cooks it was ripe for: those of us who took our cooking seriously. Other manufacturers copied the machine but missed the mark. They colored it pink, softened its formidable lines, and advertised it as another kitchen work-saver, a kind of turbo-blender.
In truth, the food processor is a work-maker. The sort of things you are drawn to do with it you wouldn’t even think of trying without it: shredding your own rillettes, sieving your own quenelles, hand-mounting your own mayonnaise.
If you had no interest in that sort of thing, a food processor was a mistaken purchase. The Dad who bought one as a surprise for Mom to help her out with the kitchen chores was in for a rude surprise: if Mom didn’t own at least one French cookbook, she most likely put the machine away under the counter after the first exploratory spin.
But to the fledgling serious cook, the Cuisinart, dressed in its spotless kitchen whites, presented itself not only as a tool of professional chefs (which it was) but as a professionalizing one, the one essential shortcut to chefdom. We had only to follow instructions to be jumped straight from commis to gros bonnet . . . at least in our own kitchen. Or so we thought. . . .
The food processor is not an electric knife (which had already been invented, only to prove itself nothing much) but a cutting machine. It pushes the cook’s hands aside, for it works far too quickly for the body to directly control it. Our responses are simply not fast enough; we learn to count seconds instead.
Set the steel blade in place, fill the container with basil, pine nuts, garlic, and chunks of Parmesan, and switch the motor on. The machine begins to sauce the ingredients so immediately that they seem to flow together; for its operator, there is a genuine sensual delight in the way, so quickly, so smoothly, it pulps the basil, grinds the cheese, and, as the olive oil starts dribbling down the feeding tube, plumps it all into a thick and unctuous cream.
Sensual it truly is, but it is the sensuality of observing, not participating. The food processor does not enhance the cook’s experience. Instead, that work is divided between the mind, which directs it, and the machine, which performs it. The body’s part is reduced to setting out and—mostly—cleaning up afterward.
In short, no matter what the mind learns, the hand remains as ignorant as ever. And as time passes, the ease by which the machine accomplishes its tasks makes the hands seem awkward when we do put them to use. Anyone who has tried to make pesto in a mortar and pestle after years of concocting it in a food processor knows that the experience can quickly turn into one of helpless frustration. The body just does not know how to go about it: the pestle feels clumsy and ineffectual in the hand, and as the minutes tick by and the contents of the mortar refuse to meld into a sauce, one feels increasingly foolish. Although one knows, from having read books, that this is how it was always done, it doesn’t feel right. It simply takes too long.
No other kitchen appliance makes the body feel so impotent because no other dissolves away so much hands-on kitchen work. A blender may whir at an equally incomprehensible speed, but it remains a gadget, its niche in our cooking small. The food processor, on the other hand, is capable of assuming almost the entire repertoire of kitchen prep.
The cost of this usurpation was not only the loss of kitchen work by which the body had formerly refreshed itself, exercising genuinely demanding skills and shaping work to the tempo of personal rhythms. There were two other unexpected consequences.
The first was that, by strength of example, the food processor began to corrode the meaning of all kitchen work. This was true not only of the homes that already had a food processor, for once a kind of kitchen work becomes identified as a tiresome chore by enough cooks, it begins to lie heavy and sullen in the hands of all of them. What could not now be done effortlessly, cleanly, perfectly, became by comparison drudgery, all the more susceptible to replacement by some other, cleverer machine.
The second consequence was one to which we nouveaux cuisiniers were especially vulnerable. The product of a wealthy, acquisitive culture that could pick the ingredients of its meals almost at will, we had now been given a machine that allowed us to prepare an almost unlimited number of complex dishes without any kind of physical restraint.
For the same reason, we were equally enticed by any and all new recipes that came our way. The less that cooking comes from hands-on kitchen experience, the harder it is for a cook to gauge the desirability of a newly encountered dish. A cook who makes all chicken broth from scratch will cast a more discriminating eye on a recipe that calls for it than the cook who pours it from the can. The cook who does all her own cutting, chopping, and sieving immediately knows the appropriateness of a new recipe: it must fit the hands.
On the contrary, freed of the necessity of such choices, our only way of judging a dish’s rightness was becoming the wanton appreciation of the tongue and the riot of culinary fad. Appetite has always had a hard time saying no; it needs guidance we were no longer in a position to provide.
None of this, of course, was the food processor’s fault. But just as the automobile changed the landscape of America in ways that no one had expected or prepared for, the food processor shifted the nature of culinary reality . . . more slowly for the culture at large, but almost immediately in the microculture that was beginning to take food seriously. As it proliferated, it began raising the stakes for all, even for those who did not yet possess one. And it is this effect—in an equally unexpected way—that we have just begun to experience with the microwave.
UNLIKE the food processor, the microwave has no French ancestry, or even—until relatively recently—any influential food-world friends. It lacks the assertively simple high-tech styling and the haute-cuisine associations that might have provided it with Cuisinart-like cachet. In fact, with its buttons, buzzers, and revolving carousels, the microwave, from the very start, has seemed irredeemably prole—right down to the reason for owning one. For no matter the culinary arguments voiced in its favor, the only truly compelling reason to own a microwave is still the first: it is the best medium yet devised for the almost instant reheating of cooked food.
Even so, what made the microwave seem irresistible to its original purchasers is not all that different from what made the food processor seem so desirable to us. Both fed a fantasy of participating in a cuisine whose rationale had already evaporated, no matter how delicious its dishes. For the first microwave owners, however, that cuisine was the familiar American supper. With its assistance, a family could dispense with a regular cook and even a common dinnertime—and still sit down to the familiar trinity of meat, starch, and vegetable, courtesy of Swanson’s LeMenu, served piping hot on a premium plastic plate—no more the TV-dinner tripart, tinfoil, cafeteria-style serving tray.
The price was the same: the cook was obliged to surrender involvement for convenience. Microwave energy offers no equivalent experience to replace our intuitive understanding of heat; indeed, the body’s inability to respond or protect itself means the cooking food must be locked away out of reach. Because microwaves cook food from the inside out, they are unable to provide us with any of radiant heat’s familiar, helpful clues. As with the Cuisinart, the cook must count seconds instead.
Food processor, microwave oven . . . the one speeds preparation by removing it from human hands and human time; the other does the same to the actual process of cooking. As the food processor devours the experience of knife and cutting board, whisk and bowl, the other eats away at an even more primal experience: the putting of food to fire.
That we nouveaux cuisiniers originally missed the connection is not surprising; we put a very different weight on the meaning of the two types of experience. Our inspiration was, after all, the chef; if there was any experience in cooking that remained crucial to us, it was dexterity before the flame.
What we never expected was that as kitchen experience in its entirety became progressively devalued, the aura that still clung to the stove would also necessarily fade. Unnoticed by us, the image of the chef before his range, sweat dripping down his face as hot fat shimmered in his sauté pan, was undergoing as radical a change for microwave users as the role of scullion had for us.
As more and more cooks began to learn how to use their microwave, the conventional oven was progressively being found too hot, too time-consuming, too wasteful of energy, and, above, all, too greasy . . . literally, but figuratively, too, for the description began to embrace as well the meals that it was used to prepare.
Unlike traditional cuisines, recipe-based cooking has never allowed the home cook to shape a meal by reworking the same dish from day to day in response to what her family needs to eat—adding or eliminating meat, throwing in a smaller or larger proportion of chopped greens or a larger or smaller handful of rice. The amounts and the ingredients of recipe dishes are already determined forever by someone else who knows none of the eaters—or their needs or appetites.
There is something relentless about recipes in this regard: they create a condition not unlike the air temperature in a large office building, where it is always too hot in the winter and too cold in the summer—but if no one is really happy, neither can anyone complain. Recipe cooking likewise gives us too much; whether in the guise of fattening us up or slimming us down, somehow things are always being waved in front of our mouths. This is the purpose of recipes, after all: to arouse appetite. Like central heating, food writing’s only task is to make us “comfortable”: it might be establishing a climate of self-indulgence or self-denial, but it is still busy making us feel hungry—the only question being what we are to become hungry for.
So far as reheating was concerned, of course, no food writing was needed to get microwave owners to turn the appetite thermostat up. Because of its original audience, much of pre-packaged microwave food was already laden with calories. Turning the thermostat down, however, was quite another matter. Microwave cooking, because it required that all recipes be recast for its peculiar way of heating, offered a glorious opportunity for cookbook writers to play not only on their readers’ increasingly compulsive need for cooking to be made easy, but also upon their terror of fat.
The microwave’s chief handicap—that it cooks best what is best cooked inside out—suddenly became a plus. No need to apologize that it can’t crisp the fat when there’s no fat to crisp—especially when you can harp on the fact that it can steam broccoli in its own moisture to tender doneness before the exterior has a chance to dry out—with not a calorie added or a vitamin lost.
“An odd thing happened a few years ago as I began to cook a great deal in the microwave oven,” writes Barbara Kafka in the introduction to her Microwave Gourmet Healthstyle Cookbook. “It was less hard to lose weight when it started to go up, and it was easier to keep it off. . . . After a while, I figured it out. The microwave oven doesn’t need fat to cook.”
Neither, of course, do many conventional cooking techniques, and those that do don’t always add that many calories to the completed dish. But such language sells microwaves—just as it once sold food processors. As Henri Gault (of Le Nouveau Guide de Gault-Millau) told Roy Andries de Groot in Revolutionizing French Cooking: “Our French Robot Coupe [the original Cuisinart] . . . is a precious tool for the easy preparation of the new low-fat, low-starch, low-sugar, yet high-pleasure cuisine. With it, you can emulsify and thicken the sauces . . . with no use whatsoever of butter or flour.” All you need is the machine—and some new recipes. . . .
Once, not so long ago, we were allowed some of the evening to cook supper. Even in the seventies, when Pierre Franey began his “60-Minute Gourmet” column for The New York Times, to make a complete dinner within an hour seemed quite a feat. Now it seems an extravagance. Today, twenty minutes is more like it: hence the Times’s food editor Marian Burros’s column, “20-Minute Menus.” Corby Kummer’s five-minute fish bake will soon be eating into that.
The reason we still believe we possess this free time is that we have been persuaded to externalize the experience of cooking into a series of unwanted chores. Whatever the user of the microwave is doing with his or her freed-up time, it is obviously not cooking—and to that very limited extent, he or she has been set free. But for what?
To understand what has really happened to us, imagine attempting to reverse the process. Imagine wanting to take a whole afternoon to leisurely prepare supper—without food processor, microwave oven, or cookbook. To live, after all, is to experience things, and every time we mince an onion, lower the flame under a simmering pot, shape the idea and substance of a meal, we actually gain rather than lose lived time. Such minutes are not only full and rich in themselves, but they brush a lasting patina of lived experience onto our memory.
THE ART CRITIC for The Guardian, Searle was trained as a painter and has also published widely in other papers and journals on contemporary aesthetic trends. Currently a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art in London, he has taught at numerous other institutions and curated a number of important exhibitions. His essay on Ferran Adrià’s atelier was written in connection with elBulli’s selection as a part of the major German art show documenta, although Adrià himself was ambivalent about his role in the project. He has been called “the Dalì of the kitchen,” but he noted bemusedly that “artists all over battle all their lives to receive an invitation to display their work at documenta and now I, a cook, am asked to go along!”
A Visit to Ferran Adrià’s Workshop
SCHLLURK. I AM testing an experimental snack, which fills a clear plastic tube roughly the size of a cigarette. This has been presented to me on a transparent plastic cushion filled with blue anti-freeze gel. The goo in the tube makes a satisfying, noisy slurp as I syphon it up, and whatever it is floods my mouth in a nice, gloopy jet. It’s caviar lubricated with egg yolk, and maybe something else, but I can’t tell what.
This is cyberfood, an astronaut’s snack, part “menu degustation,” part kiddy food for adults. It comes along with a cocktail in the form of a solid, perfect cube of translucent jelly; plastic slurpies of consommé or mousse, savoury lollipops and little sweeties in cellophane. All of this is still at the R&D stage, and I’m in the lab in Barcelona with the backroom boys, who are working on the new dishes for Ferran Adrià, Spain’s—and possibly the world’s—most innovative chef.
Are we ever entirely adult when we eat? Etiquette guards us against our infantile instincts. Cutlery, the stately procession of plates and glasses, the authority of the table-setting and the muted atmosphere all suppress our more animal urges. But when dishes come looking like this, and when each new dish invites you to use your hands and your mouth, your ears and your nose in a new way, it is difficult to know quite how to proceed. Things snap, slurp, come as a wisp of smoke or a cloud of foam. Things that should be hot come cold; liquids arrive as solids or as a kind of plasma; a succession of dishes appear which challenge manners. And why are they waving a canister of CO2 gas back there in the kitchen?
I am in elBullitaller, Adrià’s “workshop” off the Rambla in Barcelona, where Adrià, his brother Albert—who works on the desserts—and a team of talented young chefs develop new dishes for the season at elBulli, Adrià’s world-famous restaurant, up the coast near Roses, north of Girona. With its three Michelin stars, elBulli is hard to get to, harder still to get a table at. More than half the bookings have already been made for the six-month season ahead. It isn’t far from elBulli, either by boat or up the winding mountain road, to the village of Cadaqués, where Picasso invented Cubism, and where Salvador Dalí lived. Adrià has been dubbed the Dalí of the kitchen, though Dalí’s alarming personal habits (not now, thanks, not while I’m eating) should warn you off such comparisons, such hyperbole.
Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptual art, was a frequent summer visitor to Cadaqués. Once, he described painting not as something visual, but as “olfactory,” an art of smells: of oil, resins, varnish and turpentine. If a painter works in a perfumed cloud, Adrià invites you to eat it, drink it, sniff it and smoke it. Adrià has also described his cooking as conceptual. He is trying all sorts of new, techno things this season: atomizer sprays to sweeten or salt your food at the table, and while you’re at it, how about spray-on sauces and aerosols of wine or chocolate? He has been working, too, with an odour expert, who has created scents which perfume a little menu to accompany a couple of new dishes. Not so much to scratch’n’ sniff, but to be transported as you eat. Oriol Castro, one of the team of talented young chefs who work with Adrià, waves a spray-can around the workshop. One squirt and it turns the space into a conceptual forest—suddenly I smell leaf-mould, lichen, moss, wild fungi. Pffft, and another squirt takes me to the coast—the smells of seaweed, ozone and iodine, wet rocks. These memorious fragrances could be gimmicky and annoying. Instead, they’re magical. This is a landscape in a can.
For all the effort and backroom stuff, Adrià is remarkably open about his experiments. His kitchen is an open, collaborative venture. I go through the daily notebooks, like artist’s daybooks, with great little drawings, handwritten reflections and diagrams. Here’s a Russian salad in the shape of a minimalist grid. A cornet, like a tiny ice-cream cone, comes topped with a cloud of parmesan-tasting froth. The same course is repeated in different forms: served first hot, then cold, first solid, then as liquid. The entry for January 12, for example, has seventeen or eighteen preparations listed, annotated with copious notes and little drawings. The notebooks are deconstructivist manuals, in which the familiar is taken in unexpected directions. It evidences a truly creative process.
Isn’t it all a bit complicated? I asked. There’s no opposition between simple or complicated, Adrià said, there’s only good and bad. Bread is complicated. And gastronomy is not the same thing as hunger. Adrià said he didn’t discover his mouth till he was twenty, and then, like a kid, he couldn’t stop asking why all the time, why food had to be the way it is. Adrià says he is interested in the evolution of his restaurant, rather than having a style. This is the same for artists, surely—the best evolve, leaving their followers to turn their advances into style. This is the difference between innovators like Braque and Picasso, and the later cubists. When the imitators start to take risks, things can go horribly wrong.
But Adrià is the master of such things, because he recognizes the difference between good and bad. Nowadays, we are apt to forget that good and bad exist in art. You can kill a chicken in the name of art, but only if it is edible. “There are limits,” he reminds me—“Have you seen the movie Hannibal,” he asks, “with that brain-scooping bit at the end?” Eugh. “It is all,” he insists, “a question of harmony.”
I came to Adrià’s lab expecting the most subtle combinations and rarest ingredients, the real outer limit of the comestible. Where’s that oyster, caviar and foie gras dish he’s been working on, where’s my Daiquiri, made with almond milk and a hot spume of truffles? But the subject for today’s experiment was pork scratchings.
We go to the market, the vast cast-iron Boqueria on the Rambla, to shop. It is the nearest place I know, outside of Hieronymus Bosch, to a Garden of Earthly Delights. It is the best food market I know, anywhere. It leaves you in despair of Britain, the rubbish we fill our trolleys with, the desultory selections, the mean-looking, fluorescent-lit pap in the supermarkets. So what do we buy? A kilo of ham fat (not just any old fat, it must be said), white and glistening in a vacuum pack. Back at base we render the fat in the microwave, crisp the gleaming rind, and produce lots of liquid. We try the scratchings with tofu; we try them with little home-made sesame snaps (but one seed deep, perfectly made, in the lightest web of caramel). We try the pork with whatever is lying about.
In the end, the rendered liquid is whisked up with water, producing a thick froth. We have this insubstantial nimbus with fresh peas, a fried egg. What could be more conventional than ham and peas, ham ’n’ eggs? Yet, the peas disappearing in the fog, the egg shining through the cloud like the sun, look beautiful. And yes, the froth tastes sweetly of ham.
Over on the bench, the lads are composing a small dish with all the finesse of someone building a micro-processor by hand. On a little bite-sized plinth of solidified, gelatinized water, they arrange three, fingernail-sized blobs. The first is a concentrated island of Thai ingredients, the second a miniaturized Japan, the third a précis of Mexican cooking. With each mouthful, you savour an entire culinary tradition. Adrià swallows Thailand whole, with a fresh oyster on the side. I follow, quickly mopping up Japan and Mexico, each in turn with an oyster. It isn’t so much that the flavours of each country are intense and perfectly balanced, so much as the sudden swerve from one compound of flavours and textures to another disorientates the palette. The sliver of jalapeño chili in the Mexican island of creamed maize, like a mariachi band, blasts through the afterburn of the tiny Mount Fuji of wasabi in Japan. The bones behind my ears begin to sing. The whole thing took fifteen minutes to prepare, a moment to eat, and now I’m drooling as I write about it.
Adrià has the Catalan love of details, and of extremes, but his cooking is also founded in humour and a deep respect for Mediterranean tradition dependent on its local cuisines. The new Basque cooking—exemplified by Arzak—retains the robustness which the climate demands, and the tradition of the tapa, of the montadito, is as much an influence as nouvelle cuisine.
It is also a question of dialogues, and openness, rather than hidden kitchens and secret ingredients. elBullitaller remains open to visitors. On my visit, a young chef from the Basque country drops by to say hello. A guy in the corner videos the day’s experiments. I’m invited to join meetings, to hang around with a beer, stick my finger in things and have a good sniff about. He gives me a list of his favourite chefs; I give him one of favourite artists. Adrià hangs around in the kitchen. There’s constant talk and rifling through a library of cookbooks, and checking out other restaurants. Dishes are scrutinised, notes taken at the table. There is a sense of collaboration, and openness, within the gastronomic community. Like celebrity chefs here, Adrià has branched out into books, recipe manuals for ten-minute cooking at home. TV programmes and an up-market private catering division. He jets off to cook for euro-ministers and royalty. He’s raking it in. Yet Adrià reminds us of Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between the raw and the cooked, of what it means to be civilised; and the difference between style and innovation, the good and the bad.
POET, PLAYWRIGHT, FICTION writer, and journalist Patricia Smith has earned numerous awards and honors for her lively and enlivening work, including four Poetry Slam contests and a nomination for the National Book Award, among other achievements. Currently a professor of English at CUNY/College of Staten Island, Smith was born in Chicago, and her poignant memories of her father’s death in that city from a seemingly random gunshot haunts the evocative recipe for “hot water cornbread” that she offers in “When the Burning Begins.” As much a formula for poetry as it is an elegy for a dead parent, Smith’s poem has a title that is itself ambiguous: does the corn bread get cooked “when the burning” in the cast iron pan “begins,” or does the poem come to life when the burning of grief and rage starts up? Either way, the corn bread itself—a savory, sensual dish central to southern, especially African-American culture and analogous to the “bakes” of Barbados (see our selections from Frederick Douglass and Austin Clarke in this volume)—is here heated with meaning.
for Otis Douglas Smith, my father
The recipe for hot water cornbread is simple:
Cornmeal, hot water. Mix till sluggish,
then dollop in a sizzling skillet.
When you smell the burning begin, flip it.
When you smell the burning begin again,
dump it onto a plate. You’ve got to wait
for the burning and get it just right.
Before the bread cools down,
smear it with sweet salted butter
and smash it with your fingers,
crumple it up in a bowl
of collard greens or buttermilk,
forget that I’m telling you it’s the first thing
I ever cooked, that my daddy was laughing
and breathing and no bullet in his head
when he taught me.
Mix it till it looks like quicksand, he’d say.
Till it moves like a slow song sounds.
We’d sit there in the kitchen, licking our fingers
and laughing at my mother,
who was probably scrubbing something with bleach,
or watching Bonanza,
or thinking how stupid it was to be burning
that nasty old bread in that cast iron skillet.
When I told her that I’d made my first-ever pan
of hot water cornbread, and that my daddy
had branded it glorious, she sniffed and kept
mopping the floor over and over in the same place.
So here’s how you do it:
You take out a bowl, like the one
we had with blue flowers and only one crack,
you put the cornmeal in it.
Then you turn on the hot water and you let it run
while you tell the story about the boy
who kissed your cheek after school
or about how you really want to be a reporter
instead of a teacher or nurse like Mama said,
and the water keeps running while Daddy says
You will be a wonderful writer
and you will be famous someday and when
you get famous, if I wrote you a letter and
sent you some money; would you write about me?
and he is laughing and breathing and no bullet
in his head. So you let the water run into this mix
till it moves like mud moves at the bottom of a river,
which is another thing Daddy said, and even though
I’d never even seen a river,
I knew exactly what he meant.
Then you turn the fire way up under the skillet,
and you pour in this mix
that moves like mud moves at the bottom of a river,
like quicksand, like slow song sounds.
That stuff pops something awful when it first hits
that blazing skillet, and sometimes Daddy and I
would dance to those angry pop sounds,
he’d let me rest my feet on top of his
while we waltzed around the kitchen
and my mother huffed and puffed
on the other side of the door. When you are famous,
Daddy asks me, will you write about dancing
in the kitchen with your father?
I say everything I write will be about you,
then you will be famous too. And we dip and swirl
and spin, but then he stops.
And sniffs the air.
The thing you have to remember
about hot water cornbread
is to wait for the burning
so you know when to flip it, and then again
so you know when it’s crusty and done.
Then eat it the way we did,
with our fingers,
our feet still tingling from dancing.
But remember that sometimes the burning
takes such a long time,
and in that time,
sometimes,
poems are born.
THE NOTORIOUS BAD boy of the food world, Bourdain is a chef, prolific writer about food explorations around the world, and a TV personality, with a consuming passion for food wherever he finds it. Famous for his exposé of the dark side of kitchen practice in Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Bourdain is as likely to write about the drug culture at professional stoves (as a young man he did a considerable amount of restaurant cooking high on heroin, cocaine, and LSD) as about restaurants’ use of near-rotting leftovers in a Sunday brunch. His writing is full of verve, highly opinionated judgments, and personal revelations no less frank than his unmasking of restaurant conventions. Known for his food sensationalism, Bourdain has consumed ant eggs, seal eyeballs, and the still-beating heart of a cobra on camera, while also declaring chicken nuggets the worst meal of his life, right up there with Namibian warthog rectum. But sometimes his writing has sweetness, joy, and communal spirit: for nothing makes him happier than sharing a meal that turns strangers into friends, whether in the Mekong Delta or San Sebastián.
from Kitchen Confidential:
From Our Kitchen to Your Table
I SAW A sign the other day outside one of those Chinese-Japanese hybrids that are beginning to pop up around town, advertising “Discount Sushi.” I can’t imagine a better example of Things to Be Wary Of in the food department than bargain sushi. Yet the place had customers. I wonder, had the sign said “Cheap Sushi” or “Old Sushi,” if they’d still have eaten there.
Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way. The more exotic the food, the more adventurous the serious eater, the higher the likelihood of later discomfort. I’m not going to deny myself the pleasures of morcilla sausage, or sashimi or even ropa vieja at the local Cuban joint just because sometimes I feel bad a few hours after I’ve eaten them.
But there are some general principles I adhere to, things I’ve seen over the years that remain in my mind and have altered my eating habits. I may be perfectly willing to try the grilled lobster at an open-air barbecue shack in the Caribbean, where the refrigeration is dubious and I can see with my own eyes the flies buzzing around the grill (I mean, how often am I in the Caribbean? I want to make the most of it!), but on home turf, with the daily business of eating in restaurants, there are some definite dos and don’ts I’ve chosen to live by.
I never order fish on Monday, unless I’m eating at Le Bernardin—a four-star restaurant where I know they are buying their fish directly from the source. I know how old most seafood is on Monday—about four to five days old!
You walk into a nice two-star place in Tribeca on a sleepy Monday evening and you see they’re running a delicious-sounding special of Yellowfin Tuna, Braised Fennel, Confit Tomatoes and a Saffron Sauce. Why not go for it? Here are the two words that should leap out at you when you navigate the menu: “Monday” and “Special.”
Here’s how it works: The chef of this fine restaurant orders his fish on Thursday for delivery Friday morning. He’s ordering a pretty good amount of it, too, as he’s not getting another delivery until Monday morning. All right, some seafood purveyors make Saturday deliveries, but the market is closed Friday night. It’s the same fish from Thursday! The chef is hoping to sell the bulk of that fish—your tuna—on Friday and Saturday nights, when he assumes it will be busy. He’s assuming also that if he has a little left on Sunday, he can unload the rest of it then, as seafood salad for brunch, or as a special. Monday? It’s merchandizing night, when whatever is left over from the weekend is used up, and hopefully sold for money. Terrible, you say? Why doesn’t he throw the left-over tuna out? The guy can get deliveries on Monday, right? Sure, he can . . . but what is preventing his seafood purveyor from thinking exactly the same way? The seafood vendor is emptying out his refrigerator, too! But the Fulton Street fish market is open on Monday morning, you say!! He can get fresh! I’ve been to the Fulton Street market at three o’clock on Monday morning, friends, and believe me, it does not inspire confidence. Chances are good that that tuna you’re thinking of ordering on Monday night has been kicking around in the restaurant’s reach-ins, already cut and held with the mise-en-place on line, commingling with the chicken and the salmon and the lamb chops for four days, the reach-in doors swinging open every few seconds as the line cooks plunge their fists in, blindly feeling around for what they need. These are not optimum refrigeration conditions.
This is why you don’t see a lot of codfish or other perishable items as a Sunday or Monday night special—they’re not sturdy enough. The chef knows. He anticipates the likelihood that he might still have some fish lying around on Monday morning—and he’d like to get money for it without poisoning his customers.
Seafood is a tricky business. Red snapper may cost a chef only $4.95 a pound, but that price includes the bones, the head, the scales and all the stuff that gets cut and thrown away. By the time it’s cut, the actual cost of each piece of cleaned fillet costs the chef more than twice that amount, and he’d greatly prefer to sell it than toss it in the garbage. If it still smells okay on Monday night—you’re eating it.
I don’t eat mussels in restaurants unless I know the chef personally, or have seen, with my own eyes, how they store and hold their mussels for service. I love mussels. But in my experience, most cooks are less than scrupulous in their handling of them. More often than not, mussels are allowed to wallow in their own foul-smelling piss in the bottom of a reach-in. Some restaurants, I’m sure, have special containers, with convenient slotted bins, which allow the mussels to drain while being held—and maybe, just maybe, the cooks at these places pick carefully through every order, mussel by mussel, making sure that every one is healthy and alive before throwing them into a pot. I haven’t worked in too many places like that. Mussels are too easy. Line cooks consider mussels a gift; they take two minutes to cook, a few seconds to dump in a bowl, and ba-da-bing, one more customer taken care of—now they can concentrate on slicing the damn duck breast. I have had, at a very good Paris brasserie, the misfortune to eat a single bad mussel, one treacherous little guy hidden among an otherwise impeccable group. It slammed me shut like a book, sent me crawling to the bathroom shitting like a mink, clutching my stomach and projectile vomiting. I prayed that night. For many hours. And, as you might assume, I’m the worst kind of atheist. Fortunately, the French have liberal policies on doctor’s house calls and affordable health care. But I do not care to repeat that experience. No thank you on the mussels. If I’m hungry for mussels, I’ll pick the good-looking ones out of your order.
How about seafood on Sunday? Well . . . sometimes, but never if it’s an obvious attempt to offload aging stuff, like seafood salad vinaigrette or seafood frittata, on a brunch menu. Brunch menus are an open invitation to the cost-conscious chef, a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday nights or for the scraps generated in the normal course of business. You see a fish that would be much better served by quick grilling with a slice of lemon, suddenly all dressed up with vinaigrette? For en vinaigrette on the menu, read “preserved” or “disguised.”
While we’re on brunch, how about hollandaise sauce? Not for me. Bacteria love hollandaise. And hollandaise, that delicate emulsion of egg yolks and clarified butter, must be held at a temperature not too hot nor too cold, lest it break when spooned over your poached eggs. Unfortunately, this lukewarm holding temperature is also the favorite environment for bacteria to copulate and reproduce in. Nobody I know has ever made hollandaise to order. Most likely, the stuff on your eggs was made hours ago and held on station. Equally disturbing is the likelihood that the butter used in the hollandaise is melted table butter, heated, clarified and strained to get out all the bread crumbs and cigarette butts. Butter is expensive, you know. Hollandaise is a veritable petri dish of biohazards. And how long has that Canadian bacon been aging in the walk-in anyway? Remember, brunch is served only once a week—on the weekends. Buzzword here, “Brunch Menu.” Translation? “Old, nasty odds and ends, and twelve dollars for two eggs with a free Bloody Mary.” One other point about brunch. Cooks hate brunch. A wise chef will deploy his best line cooks on Friday and Saturday nights; he’ll be reluctant to schedule those same cooks early Sunday morning, especially since they probably went out after work Saturday and got hammered until the wee hours. Worse, brunch is demoralizing to the serious line cook. Nothing makes an aspiring Escoffier feel more like an army commissary cook, or Mel from Mel’s Diner, than having to slop out eggs over easy with bacon and eggs Benedict for the Sunday brunch crowd. Brunch is punishment block for the “B” Team cooks, or where the farm team of recent dishwashers learn their chops. Most chefs are off on Sundays, too, so supervision is at a minimum. Consider that before ordering the seafood frittata.
I will eat bread in restaurants. Even if I know it’s probably been recycled off someone else’s table. The reuse of bread is an industry-wide practice. I saw a recent new exposé, hidden camera and all, where the anchor was shocked . . . shocked to see unused bread returned to the kitchen and then sent right back onto the floor. Bullshit. I’m sure that some restaurants explicitly instruct their Bengali busboys to throw out all that unused bread—which amounts to about 50 percent—and maybe some places actually do it. But when it’s busy, and the busboy is crumbing tables, emptying ashtrays, refilling water glasses, making espresso and cappuccino, hustling dirty dishes to the dishwasher, and he sees a basket full of untouched bread, most times he’s going to use it. This is a fact of life. This doesn’t bother me and shouldn’t surprise you. Okay, maybe once in a while some tubercular hillbilly has been coughing and spraying in the general direction of that bread basket, or some tourist who’s just returned from a walking tour of the wetlands of West Africa sneezes—you might find that prospect upsetting. But you might just as well avoid air travel, or subways, equally dodgy environments for airborne transmission of disease. Eat the bread.
I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn’t a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like. Bathrooms are relatively easy to clean. Kitchens are not. In fact, if you see the chef sitting unshaven at the bar, with a dirty apron on, one finger halfway up his nose, you can assume he’s not handling your food any better behind closed doors. Your waiter looks like he just woke up under a bridge? If management allows him to wander out on the floor looking like that, God knows what they’re doing to your shrimp!
“Beef Parmentier”? “Shepherd’s pie”? “Chili special”? Sounds like leftovers to me. How about swordfish? I like it fine. But my seafood purveyor, when he goes out to dinner, won’t eat it. He’s seen too many of those three-foot-long parasitic worms that riddle the fish’s flesh. You see a few of these babies—and we all do—and you won’t be tucking into swordfish anytime soon.
Chilean sea bass? Trendy. Expensive. More than likely frozen. This came as a surprise to me when I visited the market recently. Apparently the great majority of the stuff arrives frozen solid, still on the bone. In fact, as I said earlier, the whole Fulton Street market is not an inspiring sight. Fish is left to sit, un-iced, in leaking crates, in the middle of August, right out in the open. What isn’t bought early is sold for cheap later. At 7:00 a.m. the Korean and Chinese buyers, who’ve been sitting in local bars waiting for the market to be near closing, swoop down on the overextended fish-monger and buy up what’s left at rock-bottom prices. The next folks to arrive will be the cat-food people. Think about that when you see the “Discount Sushi” sign.
“Saving for well-done” is a time-honored tradition dating back to cuisine’s earliest days: meat and fish cost money. Every piece of cut, fabricated food must, ideally, be sold for three or even four times its cost in order for the chef to make his “food cost percent.” So what happens when the chef finds a tough, slightly skanky end-cut of sirloin that’s been pushed repeatedly to the back of the pile? He can throw it out, but that’s a total loss, representing a three-fold loss of what it cost him per pound. He can feed it to the family, which is the same as throwing it out. Or he can “save for well-done”—serve it to some rube who prefers to eat his meat or fish incinerated into a flavorless, leathery hunk of carbon, who won’t be able to tell if what he’s eating is food or flotsam. Ordinarily, a proud chef would hate this customer, hold him in contempt for destroying his fine food. But not in this case. The dumb bastard is paying for the privilege of eating his garbage! What’s not to like?
Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I’ll accommodate them, I’ll rummage around for something to feed them, for a “vegetarian plate,” if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine. . . .
Pigs are filthy animals, say some, when explaining why they deny themselves the delights of pork. Maybe they should visit a chicken ranch. America’s favorite menu item is also the most likely to make you ill. Commercially available chickens, for the most part (we’re not talking about kosher and expensive free-range birds), are loaded with salmonella. Chickens are dirty. They eat their own feces, are kept packed close together like in a rush-hour subway and when handled in a restaurant situation are most likely to infect other foods or cross-contaminate them. And chicken is boring. Chefs see it as a menu item for people who don’t know what they want to eat.
Shrimp? All right, if it looks fresh, smells fresh and the restaurant is busy, guaranteeing turnover of product on a regular basis. But shrimp toast? I’ll pass. I walk into a restaurant with a mostly empty dining room, and an unhappy-looking owner staring out the window? I’m not ordering shrimp.
This principle applies to anything on a menu, actually, especially something esoteric and adventurous like, say, bouillabaisse. If a restaurant is known for steak, and doesn’t seem to be doing much business, how long do you think those few orders of clams and mussels and lobster and fish have been sitting in the refrigerator, waiting for someone like you to order them? The key is rotation. If the restaurant is busy, and you see bouillabaisse flying out the kitchen doors every few minutes, then it’s probably a good bet. But a big and varied menu in a slow, half-empty place? Those less popular items like broiled mackerel and calf liver are kept moldering in a dark corner of the reach-in because they look good on the menu. You might not actually want to eat them. Look at your waiter’s face. He knows. It’s another reason to be polite to your waiter: he could save your life with a raised eyebrow or a sigh. If he likes you, maybe he’ll stop you from ordering a piece of fish he knows is going to hurt you. On the other hand, maybe the chef has ordered him, under pain of death, to move that codfish before it begins to really reek. Observe the body language and take note.
Watchwords for fine dining? Tuesday through Saturday. Busy. Turnover. Rotation. Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best nights to order fish in New York. The food that comes in Tuesday is fresh, the station prep is new, and the chef is well rested after a Sunday or a Monday off. It’s the real start of the new week, when you’ve got the goodwill of the kitchen on your side. Fridays and Saturdays, the food is fresh, but it’s busy, so the chef and cooks can’t pay as much attention to your food as they—and you—might like. And weekend diners are universally viewed with suspicion, even contempt, by both cooks and waiters alike; they’re the slackjaws, the rubes, the out-of-towners, the well-done-eating, undertipping, bridge-and-tunnel pretheater hordes, in to see Cats or Les Miz and never to return. Weekday diners, on the other hand, are the home team—potential regulars, whom all concerned want to make happy. Rested and ready after a day off, the chef is going to put his best foot forward on Tuesday; he’s got his best-quality product coming in and he’s had a day or two to think of creative things to do with it. He wants you to be happy on Tuesday night. On Saturday, he’s thinking more about turning over tables and getting through the rush. . . .
Do all these horrifying assertions frighten you? Should you stop eating out? Wipe yourself down with antiseptic towelettes every time you pass a restaurant? No way. Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride. Sure, it’s a “play you pay” sort of an adventure, but you knew that already, every time you ever ordered a taco or a dirty-water hot dog. If you’re willing to risk some slight lower GI distress for one of those Italian sweet sausages at the street fair, or for a slice of pizza you just know has been sitting on the board for an hour or two, why not take a chance on the good stuff? All the great developments of classical cuisine, the first guys to eat sweetbreads, to try unpasteurized Stilton, to discover that snails actually taste good with enough garlic butter, these were daredevils, innovators and desperados. I don’t know who figured out that if you crammed rich food into a goose long enough for its liver to balloon up to more than its normal body weight you’d get something as good as foie gras—I believe it was those kooky Romans—but I’m very grateful for their efforts. Popping raw fish into your face, especially in prerefrigeration days, might have seemed like sheer madness to some, but it turned out to be a pretty good idea. They say that Rasputin used to eat a little arsenic with breakfast every day, building up resistance for the day that an enemy might poison him, and that sounds like good sense to me. Judging from accounts of his death, the Mad Monk wasn’t fazed at all by the stuff; it took repeated beatings, a couple of bullets and a long fall off a bridge into a frozen river to finish the job. Perhaps we, as serious diners, should emulate his example. We are, after all, citizens of the world—a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafés and McDonald’s? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, Señor Tamale Stand Owner, Sushi-chef-san, Monsieur Bucket-head. What’s that feathered game bird hanging on the porch, getting riper by the day, the body nearly ready to drop off? I want some.
I have no wish to die, nor do I have some unhealthy fondness for dysentery. If I know you’re storing your squid at room temperature next to a cat box, I’ll get my squid down the street, thank you very much. I will continue to do my seafood eating on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, because I know better, because I can wait. But if I have one chance at a full-blown dinner of blowfish gizzard—even if I have not been properly introduced to the chef—and I’m in a strange, Far Eastern city and my plane leaves tomorrow? I’m going for it. You only go around once.
HAMILTON IS THE celebrated author of Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, one of the most popular recent food memoirs. She is also the owner and chef of Prune, a small American restaurant in New York’s East Village. Her gastronomic vision excludes conceptual or intellectual food, extolling instead “the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things one craves when one is actually hungry.” Hamilton won James Beard awards in 2011 as Best Chef in New York City and in 2012 for the memoir, in which she describes her difficult and often humiliating early life in a series of unrewarding catering and small restaurant jobs and details the rigors of work as a professional chef while raising two children. Our selection describes the frenetic Sunday brunch at Prune, where impatient diners, spilled pancake batter, and other distractions make kitchen life a headache.
from Blood, Bones & Butter: The Brunch Rush
SUNDAY BRUNCH IS like the Indy 500 of services at Prune. There is a roaring thunderous stampede every forty minutes as hordes of hungry, angry, mag-wheeled, tricked-out customers line up at the door, scrape the chairs back, take their seats, blow through their steak and eggs. The line is two-full seatings long at nine-thirty even though we don’t open the doors until ten. They are waiting for the go flag. Some have physically harmed the hostess as they sprint to get a table. I once worked the host shift on a Sunday brunch at thirty-eight weeks pregnant—and even my huge belly, my chronic shortness of breath, and my clear proprietary aura (you can just tell when I am in the room that I am not an employee; I exude ownership), even that did not stop the stampede that is Sunday brunch. . . .
That heat in the egg station at brunch has a formidable physical presence. It moves about, undulating, coming at you in waves, some of them, like when you open the oven door, smacking you forcefully enough to tighten the skin on your face and make your eyes swell shut slightly.
Much has been written about facing the shocking heat of a restaurant’s set of burners, and in spite of what it may reveal about me, I am the only one I know who likes it. I always feel like I am a contender in a nicely matched bout every time we meet—especially every Sunday—when I enter that station at seven-thirty in the morning and begin my setup. Every time I step in front of those ten burners, in that egregiously tight space, less than twelve inches between the wall I am backed up against and the burning stovetop in front of me, I feel like we are two small-time boxers—me and the heat—meeting in the center of the ring to tap gloves. The fight begins with a little slap, totally manageable, when I put that first large pot of water on to boil, and then increases in ferocity from there when the large cast-iron skillet starts to vaguely shimmer and smoke and sputter, magnifying the already immense power of my opponent—inching up the temperature—as I start to render the pancetta for the carbonara. When the pig urine stench of that excellent pancetta hits me in the nose I am red-eyed and snotty—your nose runs in the heat and in the cold equally as it attempts to regulate your body temperature—and it’s only eight o’clock in the morning. That your eyes are already a little swollen and your nose is running and your skin is tight on your face gives you a Raging Bull kind of feeling—which gets me immediately in the right mindset. The whole crew feels it—that tension before a fight. The customers lined up outside before we have even turned on the lights and had our family meal, the total knowledge of what we know is coming—the relentless, nonstop five-hour beating—and we practically huddle up, poised for the bell, we are scared even, saying in psyched but tense tones, “Here we go!” as Julie unlocks the door and they flood in, scraping the chairs, and that milk foamer on the espresso machine rages its monster roar, and we stand motionless in the kitchen, looking out onto the floor, waiting for the panic of tickets, tickets, tickets.
It’s important not to go down early in your shift. And there are things that will bring you down: You start your first ticket of the day and by accident you tip a full gallon of pancake batter over in your reach-in—both wasting a product you desperately need and now creating a jam in your reach-in because you can’t work with pancake batter all over everything. The expediter does not stop calling out tickets just because you have a mess in your station. The orders, all of them at least in part your responsibility because every dish at brunch comes with eggs, keep pouring in while you hustle to get that glop cleaned up and your station back on track. The circumstances won’t change. You are always, always going to face forces that can bring you to your knees. No matter how well set up you are, how early you came in, how tight and awesome your mise en place is, there will be days, forces, events that just conspire to fuck you and the struggle to stay up—to not sink down into the blackest, meanest hole—to stay psychologically up and committed to the fight, is the hardest, by far, part of the day. The heat, the crush of customers, the special orders and sauces on sides, the blood-sugar crises—none of it is as difficult as the struggle to stay in the game, once you have suffered a setback like dropping a full quart of ranchero sauce, which has cracked open and exploded in your station all over your clogs and the oven doors.
I like to swear the dirtiest, most vulgar swear words I can think of to get me through it. It can be very Tourette’s Syndrome back there when I am working that egg station and the expediter has failed to tell me about a sauce on the side or a well-done poached. I always, to be sure, take the moment to apologize to everyone around me, to promise them that I am not serious, that nothing is personal—but then I rip it out, jaw tight, and spewing combinations of the word fuck that even David Mamet has not thought to put together. I have fired people who can’t suffer their setbacks and petty failures. If they go down early and spend the rest of their five-hour shift that way, it threatens to sink the whole boat and that can’t happen just because you burned your first omelette and had to refire it. You’ve got to get your GI Jane on.
From too many years of going all day without eating—that freakish thing about restaurant work: Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink—I have blood-sugar issues. And they can feel serious. There are a couple of points in that shift—every single time I work it—that I legitimately fear that the entire brunch service will come to a screeching halt if I don’t get some orange juice, iced Ovaltine, and a full quart of ice cold Coca-Cola down my throat in seconds, and in that particular order. In a generous light, I am that boxer in his corner, his trainer squirting Gatorade indiscriminately at his face while the boxer keeps his mouth open like a gasping fish, hoping for the jet stream to get to his throat. But I can, in a less generous light, feel like a dirty glue huffer—shoving my head discreetly and desperately into my cool reach-in—sucking, and I mean sucking, down a quart of chocolatey, malty, milky Ovaltine over a quart of ice—like an addict puts that paper bag of paint fumes over his nose and mouth and pulls that shit into his body with a terrifying force—made more terrifying by the utter calm and clarity and complacency that overtakes you once your hit kicks in and reaches the right places. The Coca-Cola so tannic and sweet and achingly cold that it makes my eyes tear up. And then brunch is back on track.
During the eighth round, close to three o’clock, I get dizzy stupid. I don’t even know what I’m cooking. By which I mean, I know what each individual item in front of me is, but I don’t know what I’m cooking in the larger picture. Is this the eggs Benedict that picks up with the salmon omelette? Or is this the benny that picks up with oatmeal and lamb sausage? This may seem inane to anyone on the outside, but in my industry, which benny is which matters. You don’t just cook food indiscriminately, without phrases, without groupings, and carelessly shove it all to the pass to let the expediter sort out. You have to time your food, according to a system, so that you don’t produce a benny that sits in the window waiting for five minutes for a lamb sausage from the guy working the grill station. Five minutes in the life of a cooked egg, unlike a nicely resting piece of meat, is the difference between excellent and bullshit. At three o’clock, with the last pummeling of tickets on the board, I need to be told over and over by the expediter, and probably much to his irritation, which benny is this particular benny. I know all of the strategies and I use them—repeating back the ticket after it’s called—“echoing” the expediter, and constantly talking in minutes and seconds with my fellow line cooks:
“I’m two out on benny/carbonara.”
“Thirty seconds on huevos/pancake.”
“Selling benny/oyster!” We break it down to each other from minutes to seconds to sold! But invariably all I can see by the last round through my red, swollen eyes is the pan and the egg in front of me. I’m just punching and hoping I land one on the guy’s jaw.
A BRITISH FOOD writer, Wilson came to the subject in an unorthodox way, getting a Ph.D. with a dissertation on French utopian socialism and studying the history of political thought. She has written books on honeybees, and on ways food producers have mislabeled, contaminated, even poisoned the foods they sell. In Consider the Fork she considers how and why we use pots and pans, measuring implements, plates, and other objects we take for granted in the kitchen and on the dining room table. Our selection on knives shows her characteristic blend of history, anthropology, and science. She’s particularly informative about the Chinese tou, or cleaver, from a Western viewpoint an unexpectedly versatile instrument.
KITCHENS ARE PLACES of violence. People get burned, scarred, frozen, and above all, cut. After the mandolin incident, I booked myself into a knife skills course, in a shiny new cooking school on the outskirts of town. Most of the men in the course had been given their enrollment as a present by wives and girlfriends, the assumption being that knives are the sort of thing men have fun with, like train sets or drills. They approached the chopping board with a slight swagger. The women stood more diffidently at first. We had without exception signed up for it ourselves, either as a treat (like yoga) or to get over some terror or anxiety around blades (like a self-defense class). I hoped it would teach me how to dice like a samurai, hack like a butcher, and annihilate an onion at ten paces like the chefs on TV. In fact, most of the course was about safety: how to hold vegetables in a clawlike grip with our thumbs tucked under, keeping knuckles always against the body of the knife so that we couldn’t inadvertently baton our thumbs along with our carrots; how to steady the chopping board with a damp cloth; how to store our knives in a magnetic strip or in a plastic sheath. Our terror, it seemed, was justified. The teacher—a capable Swedish woman—warned us of the horrible accidents that ensue when sharp knives are carelessly left in a bowl of sudsy dishwashing detergent. You forget the knives are there, plunge your hand in, and slowly the water turns red, like a scene from Jaws.
Culinary knives have always been just a step away from weapons. These are tools designed to break, disfigure, and mutilate, even if all you are cutting is a carrot. Unlike lions, we lack the ability to tear meat from a carcass with our bare teeth; so we invented cutting tools to do the job for us. The knife is the oldest tool in the cook’s armory, older than the management of fire by somewhere between 1 million and 2 million years, depending on which anthropologist you believe. Cutting with some implement or other is the most basic way of processing food. Knives do some of the work that feeble human teeth cannot. The earliest examples of stone cutting tools date back 2.6 million years to Ethiopia, where excavations have found both sharpened rocks and bones with cut-marks on them, indicating that raw meat was being hacked from the bone. Already, there was some sophistication in the knife skills on display. Stone Age humans fashioned numerous different cutting devices to suit their needs: archaeologists have identified simple sharp choppers, scrapers (both heavy duty and light duty), and hammerstones and spheroids for beating food. Even at this early stage, man was not randomly slashing at his food but making careful decisions about which cuts to make with which tools.
Unlike cooking, toolmaking is not an exclusively human activity. Chimpanzees and bonobos (another type of ape) have shown themselves capable of hammering rocks against other rocks to make sharp implements. Chimps can use stones to crack nuts and twigs to scoop fruit from a husk. Apes have also hammered stone flakes, but there is no evidence that they passed down toolmaking skills from one individual to another, as hominids did. Moreover, primates seem to be less sensitive to raw materials used than their human counterparts. Right from the beginning, hominid toolmakers were intensely interested in finding the best rocks for cutting, rather than just the most convenient, and were prepared to travel to get them. Which rock would make the sharpest flake? Stone Age toolmakers experimented with granite and quartz, obsidian and flint. Knife manufacturers still search for the best materials for a sharp blade; the difference is that the art of metallurgy, from the Bronze Age onward, has vastly expanded our options. From bronze to iron; from iron to steel; from steel to carbon steel, high-carbon steel, and stainless steel; and on to fancy titanium and laminates. You can now spend vast sums on a Japanese chef’s knife, handmade by a master cutler from molybdenum-vanadium-enriched steel. Such a knife can perform feats that would have amazed Stone Age man, swooshing through a pumpkin’s hard skin as if it were a soft pear.
In my experience, when you ask chefs what their favorite kitchen gadget is, nine times out of ten, they will say a knife. They say it slightly impatiently, because it’s just so obvious: the foundation of every great meal is accurate cutting. A chef without a knife would be like a hairdresser without scissors. Knife work—more than the application of heat—is simply what chefs do: using a sharp edge to convert ingredients into something you can cook with. Different chefs go for different knives: a curved scimitar; a straight French “blooding” knife, designed for use by horsemeat butchers; a pointy German slicer; a cleaver. I met one chef who said he used a large serrated bread knife for absolutely everything. He liked the fact that he didn’t have to sharpen it. Others favor tiny parers that dissect food with needle-sharp accuracy. Most rely on the classic chef’s knife, either nine-inch or ten-inch, because it’s about the right size to cover most needs: long enough for jointing, small enough for filleting. A good chef steels his or her knives several times in a single shift, drawing the blade swiftly to and fro at a 20° angle, to ensure the knife never loses its bite.
The story of knives and food is not only about cutting tools getting ever sharper and stronger, however. It is also about how we manage the alarming violence of these utensils. Our Stone Age ancestors took the materials at their disposal and—so far as we can surmise—made them as sharp as possible. But as the technology of knife making developed through iron and steel, the sharpest knife became something casually lethal. The primary function of a knife is to cut; but the secondary question has always been how to tame the knife’s cutting power. The Chinese did it by confining their knife work to the kitchen, reducing food to bite-sized pieces with a massive cleaverlike instrument, out of sight. Europeans did it, first, by creating elaborate rules about the use of the knife at the table—the subtext of all table manners is the fear that the man next to you may pull his knife on you—and second, by inventing “table knives” so blunt and feeble that you would struggle to use them to cut people instead of food.
THERE is a peculiar joy in holding a knife that feels just right for your hand and marveling as it dices an onion, almost without effort on your part. During the knife-skills course, our teacher showed us how to joint a chicken. When separating the legs from the thighs, you look for two little mountain tops; on hitting the right spot, the knife goes through like silk. This only works, however, when the knife is sharp enough to begin with.
Chefs always say that the safest knife is the sharpest one (which is true until you actually have an accident). Among domestic cooks, though, knowledge of how to keep a knife sharp has become a private passion rather than a universal skill. The travelling Victorian knife grinder, who could sharpen a set of knives in a matter of minutes—in exchange for whatever you could pay him, pennies or even a pint of ale—is long gone. He has been replaced by eager knife enthusiasts, who grind their knives not as a job or even out of necessity but for the sheer satisfaction of it, swapping tips in online knife forums. Opinion differs as to which sharpening device is best for achieving the perfect edge, whether a Japanese water stone, a traditional whetstone, an Arkansas stone, or a synthetic aluminium oxide stone. (I know of no real knife enthusiast who would favor the electric sharpener, which is generally excoriated for aggressively oversharpening, and hence ruining, good knives.)
Whichever tool is chosen, the basic principle is always the same. You sharpen a knife by grinding off some of the metal, starting with a coarse abrasive and moving to a finer one until you have the required sharpness. In addition, you may wish to steel your blade each time you use it, running it along a steel rod a few times to realign the edge. Steeling can keep a sharp knife sharp, but it cannot make a blunt knife sharp in the first place. What does it mean for a knife to be sharp? It is a question of angle. You get a sharp edge when two surfaces—known as bevels—come together at a thin V-shaped angle. If you could take a cross section through a sharp knife, you would see that the typical angle for a Western kitchen knife is around 20°, or one-eighteenth of a circle. European knives are generally double-beveled, that is, sharpened on both sides of the blade, resulting in a total angle of 40°. Every time you use your knife, a little of the edge wears away, and the angle is gradually lost. Sharpeners renew the edge by grinding bits of the metal away from both sides of the V to restore the original angle. With heavy use and excessive grinding, the blade gradually diminishes.
In an ideal universe, a knife would be able to achieve an angle of zero—representing infinite sharpness. But some concessions have to be made to reality. Thin-angled knives cut better—like razors—but if they are too thin, they will be too fragile to withstand the act of chopping, which rather defeats the purpose. Whereas Western kitchen knives sharpen at an angle of around 20°, Japanese ones, which are thinner, can sharpen at around 15°. This is one of the reasons so many chefs prefer Japanese knives.
There is much that the community of knife enthusiasts disagree upon. Is the best knife large? There’s a theory that heavier knives do more of the work for you. Or small? There’s another theory that heavy knives make your muscles ache. Are you better off with a flat edge or a curved one? The enthusiasts also disagree on the best way to test the sharpness of an edge to see if it “bites.” Should you use your thumb—thus flaunting how at-one you are with the metal—or is it better to cut into a random vegetable or a ballpoint pen? There’s a joke about a man who tested his blade using his tongue: sharp blades taste like metal; really sharp blades taste like blood.
What unites knife enthusiasts is the shared knowledge that having a sharp knife, and mastery of it, is the greatest power you will ever feel in a kitchen.
Shamefully late in my cooking life, I have discovered why most chefs think the knife is the one indispensable tool. You no longer feel anxious around onions or bagels. You look at food and see that you can cut it down to any size you want. Your cooking takes on a new refinement. An accurately chopped onion—tiny dice, with no errant larger chunks—lends a suave luxury to a risotto, because the onion and the grains of rice meld harmoniously. A sharp bread knife creates the possibility of elegantly thin toast. Become the boss of a sharp knife, and you are the boss of the whole kitchen.
This shouldn’t really come as a revelation. But proficiency with a knife is now a minority enthusiasm. Even many otherwise accomplished cooks have a rack stocked with dull knives. I know, because I used to be one of them. You can survive perfectly well in the modern kitchen without any survivalist knife skills. When something needs to be really finely chopped or shredded, a food processor will pick up the slack. We are not in the Stone Age (as much as some of the knife enthusiasts would like us to be). Our food system enables us to feed ourselves even when we lack the most rudimentary cutting abilities, never mind the ability to make our own slicing tools. Bread comes pre-sliced, and vegetables can be bought pre-diced. Once, though, effective handling of a knife was a more basic and necessary skill than either reading or writing.
IN medieval and Renaissance Europe, you carried your own knife everywhere with you and brought it out at mealtimes when you needed to. Almost everyone had a personal eating knife in a sheath dangling from a belt. The knife at a man’s girdle could equally well be used for chopping food or defending himself against enemies. Your knife was as much a garment—like a wristwatch now—as a tool. A knife was a universal possession, often your most treasured one. Like a wizard’s wand in Harry Potter, the knife was tailored to its owner. Knife handles were made of brass, ivory, rock crystal, glass, and shell; of amber, agate, mother of pearl, or tortoiseshell. They might be carved or engraved with images of babies, apostles, flowers, peasants, feathers, or doves. You would no more eat with another person’s knife than you would brush your teeth today with a stranger’s toothbrush. You wore your knife so habitually that—as with a watch—you might start to regard it as a part of yourself and forget it was there. A sixth-century text (St. Benedict’s Rule) reminded monks to detach their knives from their belts before they went to bed, so they didn’t cut themselves in the night.
There was a serious danger of this because knives then, with their daggerlike shape, really were sharp. They needed to be, because they might be called upon to tackle everything from rubbery cheese to a crusty loaf. Aside from clothes, a knife was the one possession every adult needed. It has been often assumed, wrongly, that knives, as violent objects, were exclusively masculine. But women wore them, too. A painting from 1640 by H. H. Kluber depicts a rich Swiss family, preparing to eat a meal of meat, bread, and apples. The daughters of the family have flowers in their hair, and dangling from their red dresses are silvery knives, attached to silken ropes tied around their waists. With a knife this close to your body at all times, you would have been very familiar with its construction.
Sharp knives have a certain anatomy. At the tip of the blade is the point, the spikiest part, good for skewering or piercing. You might use a knife’s point to slash pastry, flick seeds from a lemon half, or spear a boiled potato to check if it is done. The main body of the blade—the lower cutting edge—is known as the belly, or the curve. This is the part of a knife that does most of the work, from shredding greens into a fine tangle to slicing meat thinly. Turn it on its side and you can use it to pulverize garlic to a paste with coarse salt: good-bye, garlic press! The opposite end of the blade from the belly, logically enough, is the spine, the blunt top edge that does no cutting but adds weight and balance. The thick, sharp part of the blade next to the handle is the heel, good for hefty chopping of hard things like nuts and cabbages. The blade then gives way to the tang, the piece of metal hidden inside the handle that joins the knife and its handle together. A tang may be partial—if it only extends partway into the handle—or it may be full. In many high-end Japanese knives now, there is no tang, the whole knife, handle and all, being formed from a single piece of steel. Where the handle meets the blade is called the return. At the bottom of the handle is the butt—the very end of the knife.
When you start to love knives, you come to appreciate everything from the quality of the rivets on the handle to the line of the heel. These are now fairly arcane thrills, but once, they belonged to everyone. A good knife was an object of pride. As you took it from your waist, the familiar handle, worn and polished from use, would ease nicely into your hand as you sliced your bread, speared your meat, or pared your apple. You knew the value of a sharp knife, because without it you would find it so much harder to eat much of what was on the table. And you knew that sharpness meant steel, which by the sixteenth century was already the metal most valued by knife makers.
THE first metal knives were made of bronze during the Bronze Age (c. 3000–700 BC). They looked similar to modern knives in that as well as a cutting edge, they had a tang and bolster, onto which a handle could be fitted. But the cutting edge didn’t function well because bronze is a terrible material for blades, too soft to hold a really sharp edge. Proof that bronze does not make good knives is confirmed by the fact that during the Bronze Age, cutting devices continued to be made from stone, which was, in many respects, superior to the newfangled metal.
Iron made better knife metal than bronze. The Iron Age was the first great knife age, when the flint blades that had been in use since the time of the Oldowans finally vanished. As a harder metal, iron could be honed far sharper than bronze. It was a handy metal for forging large, heavy tools. Iron Age smiths made pretty decent axes. For knives, however, iron was not ideal. Although harder than bronze, iron rusts easily, making food taste bad. And iron knives still do not hold the sharpest of edges.
The great step forward was steel, which is still, in one form or other, the material from which almost all sharp knives are made, the exception being the new ceramic knives, which have been described as the biggest innovation in blade material for three millennia. Ceramic knives cut like a dream through soft fish fillets or yielding tomatoes but are far too fragile for heavy chopping. For a blade that is sharp, hard enough, and strong, nothing has yet supplanted steel, which can form and hold a sharp edge better than other metals.
Steel is no more than iron with a tiny proportion of added carbon: around 0.2 percent to 2 percent by weight. But that tiny bit makes all the difference. The carbon in steel is what makes it hard enough to hold a really sharp angle, but not so hard it can’t be sharpened. If too much carbon is added, the steel will be brittle and snap under pressure. For most food cutting, 0.75 percent carbon is right: this creates a “sheer steel” capable of being forged into chopping knives with a tough, sharp edge, easy to sharpen, without being easily breakable; the kind of knife that could cut almost anything.
By the eighteenth century, methods of making carbon steel had industrialized, and this marvelous substance was being used to make a range of increasingly specialized tools. The cutlery trade was no longer about making a daggerlike personal possession for a single individual. It was about making a range of knives for highly specific uses: filleting knives, paring knives, pastry knives, all from steel.
These specialized knives were both cause and consequence of European ways of dining. It has often been observed that the French haute cuisine that dominated wealthy European tastes from the eighteenth century on was a cuisine of sauces: béchamel, velouté, espagnole, allemande (the four mother sauces of Carême, later revised as the five mother sauces of Escoffier, who ditched the allemande and added hollandaise and tomato sauce). True, but it was no less a cuisine of specialist knives and precision cutting. The French were not the first to use particular knives for particular tasks. As with much of French cuisine, their multitude of knives can be traced to Italy in the sixteenth century. In 1570, Bartolomeo Scappi, Italian cook to the pope, had myriad kitchen weapons at his disposal: scimitars for dismembering, thick-bladed knives for battering, blunt-ended pasta knives, and cake knives, which were long, thin scrapers. Yet Scappi laid down no exact code about how to use these blades. “Then beat it with knives,” Scappi will say, or “cut into slices.” Again, he does not formally catalog different cutting techniques. It was the French who, with their passion for Cartesian exactness, made knife work into a system, a rule book, and a religion. The cutlery firm Sabatier first produced carbon steel knives in the town of Thiers in the early 1800s—around the time that gastronomy as a concept was invented, through the writings of Grimod de la Reynière and Joseph Berchoux and the cooking of Carême. The knives and the cuisine went hand in hand. Whereever French chefs traveled, they brought with them a series of strict cuts—mince, chiffonade, julienne—and the knives with which to make them.
French food, no matter how simple, has meticulous knife work behind it. A platter of raw oysters on the half shell at a Parisian restaurant doesn’t look like cooking at all, but what makes it a pleasure to eat, apart from freshness, is that someone has skillfully opened each mollusk with an oyster shucker, sliding the knife upward to cut the adductor muscle that holds the shell closed without smashing off any sharp pieces. As for the shallot vinegar with which the oyster are served, someone has had to work like crazy, cutting the shallot into brunoise: tiny 0.25 cm cubes. It is only this prepping that prevents the shallot from being too everwhelming against the bland, saline oysters.
The savory French steak that sits before you so invitingly—whether onglet, pavé, or entrecôte—is the result of French butchery using particular utensils: a massive cleaver for the most brutal bone-hacking work, a delicate butcher’s knife for seaming out the more elusive cuts, and perhaps a cutlet basher (batte à côtelettes) to flatten the meat a little before it is cooked. The classical French kitchen includes ham knives and cheese knives, knives for julienning, and beak-shaped knives for dealing with chestnuts.
Professional haute cuisine was founded on specialism. The great chef Escoffier, who laid the foundation for all modern French restaurant cooking, organized the kitchen into separate stations for sauces, meats, pastries. Each of these units had its own persnickety knives. In a kitchen organized on Escoffier principles, one person might be given the job of “turning” potatoes into perfect little spheres. For this task, he would use a tournet knife, a small parer with a blade like a bird’s beak. This curved blade would be awkward for cutting on a board—the angle is all wrong. Yet that arc is just right for swiping the skin off a handheld round object, following its contours to leave an aesthetically pleasing little globe. A garnish of turned vegetables—so pretty, so whimsical, so unmistakably French—is the direct result of a certain knife, wielded in a certain way, guided by a certain philosophy about what food should be.
Our food is shaped by knives. And our knives are fashioned by that mysterious combination of local resources, technological innovation, and cultural preferences that makes up a cuisine. The French way with knives is not the only way. In the case of China, an entire approach to eating and cooking was founded on a single knife, the tou, often referred to as the Chinese cleaver, perhaps the most fearsomely useful knife ever devised.
CUTTING devices divide up into those that have one function and one function only—the Gorgonzola cutter, the arrow-shaped crab knife, the pineapple-slicing device that spirals down into the yellow fruit, removing the woody core and leaving only perfect juicy rings—and those that can be pressed into service for countless jobs: the multitaskers. And not surprisingly, different cooking cultures have produces different multitasker knives.
The Inuit ulu, for example, is a fan-shaped blade (similar to an Italian mezzaluna) traditionally used by Eskimo women for anything from trimming a child’s hair to shaving blocks of ice, as well as chopping fish. The Japanese santoku is another multitasker, currently regarded as one of the most desirable all-purpose knives for the home kitchen. It is far lighter than a European chef’s knife, with a rounded tip, and often has oval dimples, called divots, along the blade. Santoku means “three uses,” so named because a santoku is equally good at cutting meat, chopping vegetables, and slicing fish.
Perhaps no knife is quite as multifunctional, nor quite as essential to an entire food culture, as the Chinese tou. This wondrous blade is often referred to as a “cleaver” because it has the same square-bladed hatchet shape as the cleaver that butchers use to hack through meat bones. The tou’s use, however, is that of an all-purpose kitchen knife (for once, “all-purpose” is no exaggeration). For E. N. Anderson, the anthropologist of China, the tou exemplifies the principle of “minimax”: maximum usage from minimum cost and effort. The idea is a frugal one: the best Chinese kitchen would extract the maximum cooking potential from the minimum number of utensils. The tou fits the bill. This big-bladed knife, writes Anderson, is useful for
splitting firewood, gutting and scaling fish, slicing vegetables, mincing meat, crushing garlic (with the dull side of the blade), cutting one’s nails, sharpening pencils, whittling new chopsticks, killing pigs, shaving (it is kept sharp enough, or supposedly is), and settling scores old and new with one’s enemies
What makes the tou still more versatile is the fact that—unlike the Inuit ulu—it gave rise to what is widely considered one of the world’s two greatest cuisines (the other being French). From ancient times, the great characteristic of Chinese cookery was the intermingling of flavors through fine chopping. The tou made this possible. During the Zhou dynasty (1045–256 BC), when iron was first introduced to China, the art of fine gastronomy was referred to as “k’o’peng,” namely, to “cut and cook.” It was said of the philosopher Confucius (who lived from 551–479 BC) that he would eat no meat that had not been properly cut. By around 200 BC, cookbooks were using many different words for cutting and mincing, suggesting a high level of knife skills (dao gong).
A typical tou has a blade of around 18 to 28 cm (7 to 11 inches) long. So far, very similar to a European chef’s knife. What’s dramatically different is the width of the blade: around 10 cm, or 4 inches, nearly twice as wide as the widest point on a chef’s knife. And the tou is the same width all the way along: no tapering, curving, or pointing. It’s a sizable rectangle of steel, but also surprisingly thin and light when you pick it up, much lighter than a French cleaver. It commands you to use it in a different way from a chef’s knife. Most European cutting uses a “locomotive” motion, rocking the knife back and forth, following the gradient of the blade. Because of its continuous flatness, a tou invites chopping with an up-down motion. The sound of knife work in a Chinese kitchen is louder and more percussive than in a French one: chop-chop-chop as opposed to tap-tap-tap. But this loudness does not reflect any crudeness of technique. With this single knife, Chinese cooks produce a far wider range of cutting shapes than the dicing, julienning, and so on produced by the many knives of French cuisine. A tou can create silken threads (8 cm long and very thin), silver-needle silken threads (even thinner), horse ears (3 cm slices cut on a steep angle), cubes, strips, and slices, to name but a few.
No single inventor set out to devise this exceptional knife, or if someone did, the name is lost. The tou—and the entire cuisine it made possible—was a product of circumstances. First, metal. Cast iron was discovered in China around 500 BC. It was cheaper to produce than bronze, which allowed for knives that were large hunks of metal with wooden handles. Above all, the tou was the product of a frugal peasant culture. A tou could reduce ingredients to small enough pieces that the flavors of all the ingredients in a dish melded together and the pieces would cook very quickly, probably over a portable brazier. It was a thrifty tool that could make the most of scarce fuel: cut everything small, cook it fast, waste nothing. As a piece of technology, it is much smarter than it first looks. In tandem with the wok, it works as a device for extracting the most flavor from the bare minimum of cooking energy. When highly chopped food is stir-fried, more of the surface area is exposed to the oil, becoming crispy-brown and delicious. As with all technology, there is a trade-off: the hard work and skill lavished on prepping the ingredients buys you lightning-fast cooking time. A whole, uncut chicken takes more than an hour to cook in the oven. Even a single chicken breast can take twenty minutes. But tou-chopped fragments of chicken can cook in five minutes or less; the time is in the chopping (though this, too, is speedy in the right hands; on YouTube you can watch chef Martin Yan breaking down a chicken in eighteen seconds). Chinese cuisine is extremely varied from region to region: the fiery heat of Sichuan; the black beans and seafood of the Cantonese. What unites Chinese cooks from distant areas is their knife skills and their attachment to this one knife.
The tou was at the heart of the way classical Chinese cooking was structured, and still is. Every meal must be balanced between fan—which normally means rice but can also apply to other grains or noodles—and ts’ai, the vegetables and meat dishes. The tou is a more essential component in this meal than any single ingredient, because it is the tou that cuts up the ts’ai and renders it in multiple different forms. There is an entire spectrum of cutting methods, with words to match. Take a carrot. Will you slice it vertically (qie) or horizontally (pian)? Or will you chop it (kan)? If so, what shape will you choose? Slivers (si), small cubes (ding), or chunks (kuai)? Whichever you adopt, you must stick to it exactly; a cook is judged by the precision of his or her knife strokes. There is a famous story about Lu Hsu, who was a prisoner under Emperor Ming. He was given a bowl of meat stew in his cell and knew at once that his mother had visited, for only she knew how to cut the meat in such perfect squares.
Tous look terrifying. Handled by the right person, however, these threatening blades are delicate instruments and can achieve the same precision in cutting that a French chef needs an array of specialist blades to achieve. In skilled hands, a tou can cut ginger as thin as parchment; it can dice vegetables so fine they resemble flying-fish roe. This one knife can prepare an entire banquet, from cutting fragile slivers of scallop and 5 cm lengths of green bean to carving cucumbers to look like lotus flowers.
The tou is more than a device for fine dining. In poorer times, expensive ingredients can easily be omitted, so long as the knife work and the flavoring remain constant. The tou created a remarkable unity across the classes in Chinese cuisine, in contrast to British cookery, where rich food and poor food tend to operate in opposing spheres (the rich had roast beef, eaten from a tablecloth; the poor had bread and cheese, eaten from hand to mouth). Poor cooks in China might have far less ts’ai—far less vegetables and meat—to work with than their rich counterparts; but whatever they have, they will treat just the same. It is the technique, above all, that makes a meal Chinese or not. The Chinese cook takes fish and fowl, vegetable and meat, in all their diverse shapes and renders them geometrically exact and bite-sized.
The tou’s greatest power is to save those eating from any knife work. Table knives are viewed as unnecessary and also slightly disgusting in China. To cut food at the table is regarded as a form of butchery. Once the tou has done its work, all the eater has to do is pick up the perfectly uniform morsels using chopsticks. The tou and the chopsticks work in perfect symbiosis: one chops, the other serves. Again, this is a more frugal way of doing things than the classical French approach, where, despite all that laborious slicing with diverse knives in the kitchen, still further knives are needed to eat the meal.
The tou and its uses represent a radically different and alien culture of knives from that of Europe (and thence, America). Where a Chinese master cook used one knife, his French equivalent used many, with widely differing functions: butcher’s knives and boning knives, fruit knives and fish knives. Nor was it just a question of implements. The tou stood for a whole way of life of cooking and eating, one completely removed from the courtly dining of Europe. There is a vast chasm between a dish of tiny dry-fried slivers of beef, celery, and ginger, done in the Sichuan style, seasoned with chili-bean paste and Shaoxing wine in a careful balance of flavors; and a French steak, bloodied and whole, supplied at the table with a sharp knife for cutting and mustard to add flavor, according to the whim of the diner. The two represent diverse worldviews. It is the gulf between a culture of chopping and one of carving.