CAKES, CARBONARA, HOMEMADE PIZZA
He had never considered cooking as a possible profession. Nowadays, everyone talks about the little boy who used to hang around in front of the saucepans at mealtimes, standing on tiptoes, nose in the casserole dish, eyes riveted to the oven window, finger dipping into the cream—What are we eating? What’s that? They like to remember the skinny, studious kid who, having been given a book of cake recipes while still in elementary school, spent the next few months making one every day when he got home from school, the way other kids might go to their bedroom to construct worlds out of Lego, or organize cosmic robot battles, or play PlayStation, or draw soccer players, or read a comic book. These are the anecdotes that build a legend, that help to create a logic along the lines of “Even when he was very young…” Because, in truth, all that stuff about a calling, a voice whispering in the ear, a passion drawing the body forward in a firm straight line … there was none of that back then. I searched for some trace of it in his notebooks, his drawings, the letters he wrote to his grandmother at Christmas, but I didn’t find any at all. At seven years old he wanted to be a circus clown. At fifteen he wanted to be rich, dreamed of bundles of cash, a classy international-playboy lifestyle—though he probably said this mostly to annoy his parents, a talented bohemian couple for whom this money obsession was just a phase, an awkward adolescent stage: they reacted with shrugs and wry smiles.
Mauro grows up in Seine-Saint-Denis in a family of artists—jack-of-all-trades father, sculptor mother, a younger sister. In Aulnay-sous-Bois, the couple found more than a place to live; they found a space in which they could create.
It’s true, they’re not rolling in money. Yet there is never any compromise in what is served at the family dinner table. The meals are delicious and varied; they don’t eat just anything. Nor do they eat any old way: the plates are flower patterned, the glasses tulip shaped, the cloth napkins rolled inside boxwood rings. What is at play during mealtimes is conceived as a relationship with one’s body and an engagement with the world; the idea of self-awareness, or, in other words, what distinguishes humans from animals—Mauro’s father, Jacques, recalls in his tenor voice that German has two verbs for “eat”: essen (for humans) and fressen (for animals).
From the maternal—Italian—side of the family, the commensal culture of togetherness around a table brings a ritual aspect to each daily meal that is respected by all. What it also brings, alongside Anna—the adventurous, refined mother—is the sudden appearance of a grandmother, maker of legendary meals and walking repository of Tuscan cuisine, her recipes taken from the famous Talismano della felicità. From this point on, when the child enters the kitchen and ties a dish towel around his waist, he is under the dual influence of these almost polar opposites; or rather, as with all cooks, his odyssey is catalyzed by the continual friction between creativity and tradition, innovation and custom, surprise and simplicity.
To start with, though, the idea of creativity is dominant. That comes first, for the child, probably from seeing his mother, day after day, practice adapting and enhancing what she has at hand; seeing her use her resourcefulness and ingenuity to defy the constraints of tight purse strings. In other words, Mauro is taught the infinite variations to be drawn from simple, cheap products, with meat only once a week, and never a trip to a restaurant.
From the beginning, Mauro enters the kitchen as if he were entering a magical sphere, part playground and part laboratory. There, he employs fire and water, commands machines and robots, and soon he has mastered several metamorphoses: melting and crystallizing, evaporating and boiling; the passage from solid to liquid, from hot to cold, from white to black (and vice versa), from raw to cooked. The kitchen is the theater of the world’s transformation. In this way, cooking quickly becomes something more than a game with fixed rules; it is an object lesson, a chemical and sensory adventure.
So Mauro is ten years old when he starts on the cakes. Each evening, he throws his schoolbag across his bedroom and enters the kitchen. At that time of day he is alone in the house, master of all he surveys. He probes the cupboards, makes an inventory of the fridge, then opens the cookbook and chooses a recipe that corresponds to the ingredients at his disposal, which he places on the table so that he can see them all readily. Next, he reads the recipe and visualizes the process. Soon he is pouring, breaking, weighing, beating, crushing, heating, measuring, decanting, manipulating, kneading, cutting, peeling, cooking, arranging, mixing, mimicking adult gestures. Soon he is making food for his family.
Because, right away, cooking entails other people; it entails the presence of others contained within the cake like the genie in the lamp. Because the preparation of a dish immediately calls for a set table, another guest, language, emotions, and every theatrical element of a meal, from the presentation of the dish to the remarks it provokes—the digestive rumblings of guests with full mouths and wide-open eyes. This is precisely where the pleasure lies for Mauro, who, as he becomes an adolescent, is known among his friends as the chef the way others take on the roles of the looker, the grease monkey, the geek, the brawler, the panty dropper, the athlete, or the joker of the gang—the gang in question being six boys who hang out together for seven years, through middle school and high school, without ever growing apart. I’ve never cooked just for myself—and he hands me a plate of octopus à la plancha.
What amazes me, from this era of patisseries, is the magical power of the cookbook. As if the cake resulted from the recipe, as if it came out of language the way it comes out of the oven when the cooking time is over. So that the more experienced he becomes, the more his vocabulary is enriched, incorporating the words of gastronomy. Following a recipe means matching sensory perceptions to verbs and nouns—and, for example, learning to distinguish what is diced from what is minced, and what is minced from what is chopped; learning to specify the different actions of boiling, broiling, poaching, grilling, sautéing, roasting, baking, reducing; learning to connect the array of colors, textures, and flavors to their infinitely nuanced counterparts in the culinary lexicon. Mauro acquires this language like a foreign tongue through a series of charlottes, babas, floating islands, marble cakes, cheesecakes, lemon meringue pies, bread puddings, macarons, pistachio financiers, Bavarian creams, crème brûlées, petits gâteaux, clafoutis, tiramisus, reines de saba, and other balthazars.
At the same time, Mauro trains his senses and is soon able to estimate by sight the capacity of a thimble, a teaspoon, a pinch of salt; he is able to gauge the volume and mass represented by 250 grams of flour and 50 grams of butter; knows how to adjust temperatures and cooking times, how to date an egg, a crème, an apple. Little by little, his sensations become more precise; at each stage of the preparation, they are mobilized as one, coalesced into a single movement, as if the boy himself were becoming unified; it’s synesthesia, a feast, and now he can cook by ear as well as with his nose, hands, mouth, and eyes. His body exists more and more; it becomes the measure of the world.
As he grows older, the desire to amaze the adults at the family table—parents of friends—gradually lessens. Mauro has better things to do, teenage kicks to get, and the floor of home burns his feet. If he continues his incursions into the kitchen now, it is for his friends, and because it’s better, cheaper. All the same, he does have principles: junk food is a form of violence perpetrated against the poor; the mass-produced ready-meal a sign of the solitude of urban existence. A thirteen-year-old ideologue, Mauro warns the gang: frozen pizzas are crap, and so is McDonald’s. The friends say okay while patting their pockets and wonder out loud what could possibly beat the Big Mac Meal for less than seven euros? Me! Mauro jumps up.
Now on Saturday evenings, when Mauro and his five amigos turn up at the house in Aulnay, he immediately starts cooking, because the pure immanence of adolescent sloth—which is charming but also, let’s be perfectly honest, pretty exhausting—requires its quota of slow sugar and its dose of calcium.
During those years, the Aulnay Six fuel up on “homemade” pizza, spaghetti carbonara, potatoes sautéed with shallots, chocolate mousse, crêpes suzette. It’s all right, guys, it’s not expensive. That’s what Mauro tells them when they come to veg out at his house on weekends or after school and slump on couches while passing around a pot into which each of them chucks three or four euros—not including the Cokes, the beers, the smokes. They moan, they joke, and finally they devour what’s put in front of them, silent except for the little sounds of swallowing. It’s fit for a king.
After that, Mauro is responsible for the fueling of the troops before trips. Stocking up, doing the food shopping, I’ve always loved that, he tells me as he pushes a cart down the various aisles of the giant supermarket near Porte de Bagnolet, where I accompany him one morning: five thousand square feet, and he knows every inch of it. Unlike those—me included—who return every week to their local grocery store and scan the same rows of the same products, which they will buy in the same quantity, Mauro likes to move around, to explore, to amble. He is not numbed by the infinite variety of each type of food, by the packets of cereal in identical formats, by the multitude of butters—salted, unsalted, slightly salted, grass fed, cultured, clarified, clotted, organic, homemade, goat or sheep, packaged on butter dishes or in plastic tubs or simply wrapped up in greaseproof aluminum foil. On the contrary, he seems happy to have this multiplicity of choices. Soon, he slows down in front of the condiment aisle, picks up a jar of tomato sauce from the twenty or so on display, and holds it to the light, observing its color, reading the label—I watch him do this, waiting for him to speak—then he turns toward me and declares: Tonight, we’re going to innovate! He knows everything there is to know about cookies, oil, rice, and is even capable of telling me the best brand of pasta to buy, depending on whether you’re cooking a bolognese (Barilla) or an arrabbiata (Panzani). I ask him if he figured out the menus in advance before a week’s vacation in a rented apartment with his gang when he was fifteen, and he nods: Of course, you have to have a menu, otherwise you’re just messing around … And anyway, it’s what I like to do, composing.