So I was defrocked, denuded of power, of test kitchen, of company American Express card. Defooded.So I was defrocked, denuded of power, of test kitchen, of company American Express card. Defooded.
Relief swept over me. I would never have to take food seriously again. I was out of that fat-slick cage for good. Relief at this realization helped to counter the painful truth that I’d been given the boot. Such complete failure, total rejection—I couldn’t believe it had happened to me. But then I quickly did come to believe it—on that first Monday when I looked around after breakfast and wondered what to do with the rest of the day.
I’d always wanted to work from home, but this fantasy had included a full-time salary, benefits and an expense account from a major publication. Now I had the dream but nothing to support it or the nonworking wife and two children at St. Ann’s School, at the other end of Brooklyn Heights from our comfortable duplex. Fortunately, the apartment, with a garden and a small office for me, cost almost nothing.
I would still have panicked if it hadn’t been for the advance for Great Recipes from The New York Times, half of it still untouched in the bank and the other half owed after publication later in the year. My Times severance would cover the summer, which we spent in our country place near Oneonta in central New York.
While Margaret prepared mentally for her first year at NYU law school in the fall, which she paid for with a federally guaranteed loan and which also had the side benefit of getting us all health insurance, I put out feelers for jobs in mainstream journalism and filled the weeks until my thirty-second birthday with writing a novel.
It was a short novel, eventually titled Native Intelligence, about a Peace Corps volunteer who flips out in a remote tribal village and dies. It evolved out of an anecdote I’d heard from my sister, Ada Jo Mann, who had been a Peace Corps volunteer with her husband, Tom, in Chad. The other impetus was a Quechua-English dictionary that my friend Peter Quint had brought me from a trip to Peru. I used it as the basis of the fake language in the novel.
Every morning I would retreat to the typewriter and bat out three thousand words, no more, no less. At the end of thirty days, I was done.
Never since have I been able to work with such discipline or so effectively. The shock of being fired overwhelmed any inhibitions I might have had about trying my hand at fiction. Also, I knew by mid-July that I’d be working as a fill-in writer at Time starting in August. My Harvard classmate Lance Morrow, a fixture there and a gifted essayist, had found me a spot in the non-news “back of the book.” I would have preferred to return to Newsweek, but the editor, Osborn Elliott, wouldn’t have me, because I’d made too much of a pest of myself as an anti-war activist for his taste. Thirty years later, by which time he’d decided I’d put away childish things as an arts editor at the Wall Street Journal, he joked across a dinner table about how when I’d worked for him, I’d been “a Communist.”
I liked Time. For several weeks, I reported to the senior editor in charge of the non-arts half of the back of the book, a sardonic mensch called Leon Jaroff. He was a talented science writer, and he had me writing about psychology and sex. The tone was serious, the standards high—much higher than my prejudiced image of Brand X, as we at Newsweek had referred to our senior rival in the newsweekly world.
At a certain point, I got transferred to the cultural side and wrote about television for Chris Porterfield, another smart gent. But the high point of my brief sojourn at the magazine was the cover story I wrote about plastic surgery under another enlightened senior editor, Larry Barrett.
The plastic surgery cover project had been knocking around for a while before it landed on me. If I recall correctly, there were already two full drafts that had failed to get into the magazine. One important problem had been the difficulty of finding an appropriate color picture to put on the cover that would exemplify the phenomenon of facial reconstruction without looking ghastly or ridiculous. Clearly shots of medically necessary plastic surgery—rebuilt elephant men and the like—were nonstarters. Cosmetic surgery could provide either images of successful procedures, which would have looked like any other pretty face, or unsuccessful operations—say, nose jobs with cavernous nostrils—which would have undermined the seriousness of the cover essay envisaged by the top editor, Henry Anatole Grunwald. (We met more as equals much later on, when, retired and half-blind from macular degeneration, he submitted to me, at the Journal, occasional columns on the decline of culture and civility.)
Henry was a phenomenon in American journalism, a polyglot and polymath, the son of a leading lyricist of Viennese operettas. The family had fled Hitler and settled in New York in 1940, when Henry was eighteen, too old to lose his accent but quick to find a toehold at Time as a copyboy while still a student at NYU.
Although I had little contact with Mr. Grunwald that summer and fall, I got the impression that he was taking an interest in me. The regular change in my assignments, if nothing else, suggested that somebody on high was trying me out. The plastic surgery cover was pretty clearly meant to be my final exam, after which I might well be put on staff as a permanent employee.
I sensed this, but I found it difficult to take the project seriously. For me, plastic surgery was mostly a source of jokes about nose jobs and Brazilian babes who’d had their belly buttons removed. But Time had amassed a huge file that supported the theory that plastic surgery was a major social trend in America and therefore a topic worthy of the spotlight and the sanctification of a Time cover. I read and reread the files Larry Barrett had given me. Suppressing my misgivings, I had begun to write the article when Barrett told me about a piece of “luck.” A potential cover picture was available. Elizabeth Taylor had made a film in which her character underwent plastic surgery. Paramount was offering us access to stills from Ash Wednesday, and I was going to fly out to Los Angeles to screen the film.
I did so the next day, catching an early plane and returning the same night on a redeye. In between, I cabbed to an office in Beverly Hills, where Bob Evans, already a Hollywood legend before he produced Chinatown, received me in his capacity as head of production for the studio. We were alone across a desk whose most memorable furnishing was a clear Plexiglas box filled with hundred-dollar bills.
After the briefest of chats, Evans led me through a door into an elegant little screening room. He left and the dreadful melodrama began. It was about a fiftyish wife who gets a full-body makeover on the q.t. in Switzerland so she can win back a wandering spouse—and combines the surgery with an affair of her own with Helmut Berger.
I sat through the thing, taking notes. Then I flew home, rewriting the lead of my cover story on the plane.
I sent a new draft to Barrett, who was not excited by it. Well, neither was I. But I could tell that the project was too important to get spiked. Mr. Grunwald was very committed. Then fate intervened.
A still from Ash Wednesday was selected, showing Taylor looking perfect, postop, in a hospital gown. But then Liz was hospitalized, for a malady by now long forgotten among the more than seventy other hospitalizations in her career. Time couldn’t put a picture of Taylor on its cover playing a plastic surgery patient in the same week she’d turned into a real patient. The story was killed. My career at Time survived this reverse, but I was still not on the masthead by December, when I felt obliged to take a leave from the magazine in order to go on an eighteen-city book tour to promote Great Recipes from The New York Times. Before I left, I requested a meeting with Mr. Grunwald. I wanted him to evaluate my work for him so far. It was, he said, glib. But he’d be glad to see me in January.
Herb Nagourney went all out for my book. He sent me everywhere during the three weeks before Christmas 1973. I cooked Chinese tea-smoked duck on the hot plates of television morning shows all over the country. I took a twenty-mile cab ride to a snowbound suburban FM station outside Cleveland. I met dozens of food editors and got so bleary from the routine of daily flights and nonstop appointments that one morning in Seattle I convinced myself that a reporter with a French last name really was French; I proceeded to address her in her “native” language for five minutes before abruptly excusing myself to make a flight to Portland.
In Miami, a perky radio show hostess alleged that one of the recipes in the press release that had come with her review copy had a mistake in it. I was horrified to see that she was right. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to look at the text of the recipe as it appeared in the book. It was correct. I was happy, but I was also impressed with this eagle-eyed woman who had detected a problem no one else in a dozen and a half cities had noticed. Sally Jessy Raphael eventually rocketed out of Key Biscayne to syndicated national talk shows on radio and television.
All in all, I had a great time promoting Great Recipes, but, despite a first printing of twenty thousand copies and my best efforts, the book didn’t sell. So when I got home, I felt a bit sheepish handing in my expense sheets to Herb Nagourney. He merely shrugged and gave me the good news about the $75,000 book-club sale he’d just made to the Literary Guild. I would keep the lion’s share of that—enough for the Sokolov family to live on for two years. I still felt bad about the failure of Great Recipes in bookstores.
After a year or so, however, I began to suspect that something good was happening with my book. Royalty checks kept coming in every six months, generated by sales of a reprint edition issued under the Evergreen imprint by an outfit called Barre Publishing. Given the low royalty rate for reprint editions, I ought to have calculated that my royalty checks implied brisk sales. I should have connected those numbers with occasional reports I got from friends about having seen my book for sale on remainder tables in bookstores, with an attractive blue cover. (The original Quadrangle edition had a garish, multicolored jacket.)
In 1983, a decade after Great Recipes was published, I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair, in an elevator at the swank InterContinental hotel, going to breakfast, when a man I didn’t recognize greeted me by name and offered me a ride to the fairgrounds in his rented BMW.
“I hope you’re satisfied with the way we’ve been selling your book,” he said. I assured him I was very happy, but I actually had no idea which of my books he was talking about (there were three by then). At the fair, after making some discreet inquiries, I learned that my new best friend was Alan Mirken, the president of Crown Publishing, which owned Barre.
Even then, I didn’t bother to get sales figures. But the truth will out. One day I got a call from a young man at Times Books, as Quadrangle had been renamed. “I’ve been assigned to do sales histories of all the books we’ve published since the Times acquired Quadrangle, and I’m happy to tell you that, although we never were able to move more than seventy-five hundred books, the Literary Guild and Barre between them have sold one hundred and ninety-two thousand copies.”
I thanked him, reflecting that if his firm had sold 192,000 copies of my book at the original royalty rate of 15 percent on the jacket price of $9.95, I would not have spent the past decade grinding out freelance pieces for the likes of the University of Pennsylvania alumni magazine. I was still glad to hear how well I’d been doing behind my own back. But it was the book-club sale twenty years earlier that had mattered more. It set me free to be a writer on my own and to take advantage of some proposals that had come my way at about the same time.
During a book tour stopover for Great Recipes in Chicago, I’d run into Dick Takeuchi at the Sun-Times. He was the editor of their Sunday magazine, Midwest, and he needed a weekly food columnist.
More intriguing than that, I’d had a phone message from Alan Ternes, the editor of Natural History magazine, the monthly publication of the American Museum of Natural History. He, too, needed a food columnist, because so many of the museum’s disciplines touched on food, including anthropology, botany and zoology.
I was good enough at math to count up the fees these two recurring assignments would bring in. They added up to a modest but secure income.
I called Time and said I wasn’t coming back.
At home in Brooklyn Heights, I set up an office on the second floor of our duplex apartment. Over the next five years, I typed my columns (the Midwest gig evaporated after a couple of years but other columns took its place; I stayed with Natural History for twenty years) in this small room off an air shaft. When it came time to fill out the questionnaire from St. Ann’s School for its parents’ directory, in the space for “father’s place of business” I put “upstairs in front,” which made my dark, cramped office sound like a picturesque perch overlooking historic brownstones. The school left my “place of business” blank.
I was a very busy boy, juggling topical food columns for Midwest (one urged President Gerald Ford to emphasize his native Michigan regional cuisine at White House dinners: Great Lakes whitefish; Door County, Wisconsin, cherry pies; and Vernors ginger ale from Detroit) with book reviews for the Sunday edition of the New York Times (where I evolved into a once-a-month contributor to the “Nonfiction in Brief” section) and more ambitious features for glossies like the American Express magazine Travel + Leisure.
Abe Rosenthal would have been proud of my ability to multitask. I will never forget the day I’d complained to him about being overworked and not being able to get going on long-range, non-deadline pieces.
“When I was a correspondent in India,” he said, “I bought a notebook. Every time I heard something interesting, I’d start a new page about that subject in my notebook. When I learned something else about it, I’d add that to the appropriate page. Eventually, when enough material had accumulated on a page, I’d write an article. By the time my stint in India came to an end, I had ninety-three active pages in that notebook.”
The thought of that notebook made me ill, but the lesson sank in. If he could turn his life into a journalism-generating machine, just by keeping track of it, so could I. The key for me, since I didn’t have the constantly gaping maw of a newspaper waiting for my articles, was to arrange a set of reliable outlets in the form of regular columns. At the peak of my seven years of freelancing, which lasted until 1981, I was writing four monthly columns, with a book project simmering away on the side. The first of these, my novel Native Intelligence, was sold to Harper & Row in 1974, just as I was embarking on my new life of self-employment.
With that book off my desk, but still in the center of thinking about where my real future might lie—could I hope to write more fiction? was the rest of my ceaseless “typing” just piecework to support my new role as a literary artist?—I turned with reluctance to grinding through the intricate recipe testing and historical research for the book on classic French sauces I’d naively signed up to do for Knopf while still feeling buoyant and invincible in my catbird seat at the Times.
I’d been attracted to the project because it was a very good idea. I’d seen that the most elaborate and formal part of haute cuisine was organized into families of sauces based on a small number of highly refined and versatile basic, or mother, sauces from which the others derived. In a three-star kitchen, a saucier and his team would produce these intense essences, laboriously, day after day. Their rich tastes then gave the sauces derived from them a glorious profundity, which was one of the main things that separated a grande luxe establishment from a bistro. Bistros also offered diners tasty sauces, but nothing like what bathed the food at one of Michelin’s three-star temples.
So the great sauces had always been beyond the reach of even most professionals in perfectly respectable French restaurant kitchens. It took an American amateur to see that those ethereal mother sauces (and all their progeny) could actually be made with relative ease by any home cook. Yes, a mother sauce was a big job, but once you had it, you could just freeze it in small quantities and melt it down at leisure. Voilà!
I thought the book would set me up as an expert on the most rarefied corner of French cooking. As Simone Beck, one of Julia Child’s French collaborators on Mastering the Art of French Cooking, said later, no one, not even in France, had written anything like it. No one would be able to challenge my credentials in the kitchen ever after. Besides, I would be embarking on a great adventure, skimming my stockpot until its contents reduced to liquid gold. I would be democratizing the last bastion of professional cooking, and I could serve delicious three-star meals at home as easily as broiling a steak.
But now that contract hung over me, eating up my time, forcing me to spend money I didn’t have on luxury ingredients for testing fancy classic recipes. I also had to buy the basic tools for making sauce bases in quantity, including an eighty-quart cast-aluminum stockpot, a butcher’s cleaver and a fine-mesh chinois strainer.
I needed them in order to produce an industrial quantity of demi-glace, the sauce mère, or mother sauce, which is the basis of all the other brown sauces in the traditional French repertoire. There is also a mother white sauce and a mother fish sauce, but demi-glace is the Everest of the mother sauces. It keeps the cook at the stove for many hours, skimming and watching it reduce to a fraction of its original volume. So the efficient method was to produce demi-glace in the largest possible quantity feasible by a single person in a home kitchen.
In traditional French haute cuisine restaurants, where this mother system evolved in the eighteenth century, larger staffs working for coolie wages could be deployed on such tasks. Antonin Carême, the most important chef of the early nineteenth century, perfected the original system in the kitchens of George IV, Talleyrand, Czar Alexander I and James de Rothschild, with huge staffs and princely budgets. Now home cooks could play his game, because they had freezer compartments.
My idea was to match up the assembly-line efficiency of the old sauce system with the preservation magic of the deep freeze. The recipe I developed for brown sauce stretched over six pages in twenty-six terse steps and required the better part of two days to complete. But once she had it, the home cook could blithely pour its five quarts of liquid mahogany into ice cube pans, freeze them and, the next morning, pop the cubes into plastic bags and keep them frozen in modular quantity, ready to be melted down almost instantaneously and then beefed up swiftly with other ingredients to make a classic sauce such as a bordelaise (demi-glace enhanced with a red-wine reduction and cubes of poached marrow).
Except for the ice cube stage, this was exactly how Carême and his culinary progeny operated. In The Saucier’s Apprentice, I gave directions for twenty-five brown sauces, following recipes for their most unremittingly orthodox versions in the Larousse gastronomique. These “small or compound” brown sauces fitted neatly into a family tree, ranging from africaine to poivrade, plus two game sauces descended from sauce poivrade, which constituted a third generation, demi-glace’s grandchildren. Similar families of plain, chicken and fish veloutés gave up their secrets in similar genealogies, as did the béchamels and the emulsified sauces, hollandaise and its cousins, the béarnaise group and the mayonnaise clan.
In this heady company, a sauce duxelles, sounding like the everyday mushroom mixture, and sauce bigarade, in name the orange sauce that has congealed around ten thousand bistro ducks, were elevated into the glistening and deep-voiced “gravies” that convert routine food ideas into great dishes in the classic style. Demi-glace was the reason.
To make it, I started with thirteen pounds of beef shin and thirteen pounds of veal shank on bones cut in three-inch lengths by a successfully cajoled butcher. But it was my job to strip the meat off the bones and cut it into two-inch cubes, which were strenuously browned in step 9. As for the bones, I put on goggles, stood the bones on end on a board, split them with a heavy cleaver and then splintered them further to offer the largest possible surface area for browning in the oven and for the subsequent extraction of their flavor during many hours of simmering in my very large pot.
It was large enough to hold a small child and straddled all four burners of my ancient gas range. When fully loaded with bones and meat and water, it could not be lifted. This pot took forty-five minutes to come to a boil. The heat it gave off blistered the Formica of the stovetop’s backsplash.
While I waited, I picked bone splinters out of my clothes, and hoped I’d be done with this mess of a project before I went broke. I’d agreed to a mingy advance (half of which I wouldn’t see until I handed in the finished manuscript) when I was earning a good wage at the Times and figured I could afford to do something I really wanted to do, for the joy of it. Now the joy part was muffled by night after night of testing elaborate dishes I’d picked from classic sources to go with the sauces.
The chapter on fish sauces was the roughest patch. For the mother fish sauce, I called a retailer in the old Fulton Fish Market and ordered twenty-five pounds of heads and bones.
“Are you a mink breeder?” he asked.
It sounded like a better career path than the one I’d taken. My sons have not forgotten those weeks of fish dinners, night after night.
The Saucier’s Apprentice has never gone out of print, since 1976. The twentieth printing came in the mail in 2011. Students in professional cooking schools get it assigned for class. To me, it means more now as an early example of my future as a food historian. In addition to the utterly orthodox sauce recipes, the book starts with a historiographical essay on the French cookbook legacy, and it is filled with lovingly gathered tidbits from the food scene of the Parisian Gilded Age. I even invented a period dish to go with sauce bordelaise, because the obvious choice from the classic repertoire, tournedos Rossini, required fresh foie gras, which was then unavailable in the United States.
Since the composer Rossini may have actually invented the dish, I thought I could appropriately name my filet mignon recipe after another luminary of his world. Tournedos Rachel honors the great French actress, born Elisa Felix (1820–1858), by garnishing the steak with artichoke bottoms and marrow instead of the foie gras and the unaffordable black truffles of the original.*
So some of the recipes in The Saucier’s Apprentice were original, but even they were modest variations on haute cuisine standards, and the core of the book, the sauce recipes themselves, were as traditional as I could make them.
Ironically, I was devoting myself in Brooklyn in 1974 to a primer for the most conservative and elite possible form of French cooking, whereas in France, young chefs were turning their backs on Escoffier, and I had been the first English-speaking journalist to herald their revolution in 1972. But I had signed my contract before I’d encountered the nouvelle cuisine in France. So I soldiered on. Moreover, I believed that it was simply too early for an outsider to be writing about the radical upheaval going on in France. The burgeoning practical food historian in me was confident of the need for an analytical, reliable account of the central dogma of haute cuisine, its sauces.
It turned out to be laughable that I was worried about being overtaken by history. The original breakthroughs in French kitchens around 1970 did eventually spread around the world and provoke similar reforms and deconstructions of traditional cuisines, from Peru to the Philippines. Certainly, by the 1990s, the revolution I happened on chez Bocuse and Guérard had so completely prevailed that the term “nouvelle cuisine,” coined by its first and foremost promoters, Henri Gault and Christian Millau, in their influential French restaurant guide, had acquired a period patina.
When I used it as a shorthand way of tagging the food at an inventive California restaurant in a letter to M. F. K. Fisher shortly before her death in 1992, the ever-acute chronicler of foodways from Sonoma to Dijon replied, “Nouvelle cuisine? Isn’t it just the way we eat now?”
Yes, but along the way to that knowing dismissal lay twenty years of misunderstanding about nouvelle cuisine and its ripple effect in professional kitchens around the globe. The chefs marched ahead with an instinctive grasp of the dynamic process they were caught up in, even as it swept them forward. But all around them was confusion. Especially in North America, where the terms of the debate were fundamentally garbled in translation, the new cooking got hijacked by publicists and trend-riding journalists who floated various semitruths that gelled into orthodox explanations of complex change at the top of the food world.
Without meaning to mystify, two restaurateurs deeply devoted to the French past had completely bamboozled the public about its future.
Michel Guérard, the most gifted of the leaders of the nouvelle cuisine, wrote a best-selling diet book, Cuisine minceur, published in the United States in 1976. After his epoch-making Le Pot au Feu had been razed to widen a street, Guérard had followed his wife to a palatial spa in southwest France owned by her father. Guérard offered spa clients a modern, nouvelle cuisine–informed menu of slimming dishes, while serving regular gastronomes a calorie-insensitive carte of grand and brilliant creations that eventually appeared in his masterwork, the far less popular but far more important Cuisine gourmande (1977 in France, 1978 in English translation).
Guérard was undoubtedly sincere in believing that the lighter, less baroque dishes he served his fat-obsessed guests at Eugénieles-Bains would make them thinner without depriving them of the delights of great cooking. He had clearly been won over to a fervor for health by his new wife, a lifelong purveyor of healthy regimens who said in an interview shortly after her marriage to Guérard, “We will not grow old and fat together.”
Guérard, who had lost a lot of weight under pressure from his wife, found a way of linking their spa menus to his premarital work at Le Pot au Feu, which, along with many other innovations, replaced the flour-thickened brown sauces of yore with flourless and highly reduced jus. And in press accounts that accompanied Cuisine minceur, the notion of flourless sauces adopted from nouvelle cuisine as the central instruments of Guérard’s diet program crowded out nuance and contributed to the widespread and mostly ineradicable misconception that nouvelle cuisine itself was a dietary program, a three-star method for taking off pounds.
Although the new sauces were indeed flourless, it had never been the case that the great kitchens of France, under Carême or Escoffier or Point, bathed food in gluey brown gravies. It was true that the demi-glace of Escoffier incorporated a very small amount of flour in the form of roux, flour browned in butter before it was whisked into a sauce. But this did not thicken a demi-glace in anything like the crude way that flour thickened the gravy on a hot turkey sandwich in school cafeterias and greasy spoons all over America in that era.
But it was that reflex confusion, between a subtle difference in the practice of top-level French chefs and the blatant viscosity of an American “classic” brown sauce, that misled U.S. readers of reviews and other accounts in the press of Cuisine minceur.† Since virtually none of them had ever eaten a nouvelle cuisine meal, it was easy for them to conclude that Guérard and his confreres had given up their bad old ways and converted to a fancy form of nutritional sanctimony.
Anyone who actually read Cuisine minceur could not have put much stock in this (so to speak). In fact, it now seems totally incredible that diet-obsessed Americans would have taken Cuisine minceur seriously as a guide to weight reduction. No nutritional breakdown of any dish is offered. Calories are neither counted nor even mentioned, except in the titles of recipes like “low-calorie mayonnaise,” which is still caloric enough for Guérard to advise using it sparingly. The first half of the book is a thoroughly conventional set of basic cooking instructions hardly different from what could have been found in any French culinary primer.
It is true that the preponderance of recipes that fill the second half of the book are on the lean and mean side. Sautéeing is suppressed in favor of poaching, but the poaching is done in chicken stock instead of water. Yes, the desserts are very fruit forward. Guérard recommends artificial sweetener to replace sugar. He chooses a soufflé that depends entirely on egg whites. But he just can’t resist including directions for cream puff dough—yielding only enough pâte à choux for an individual portion.
To be fair, someone who turned to Cuisine minceur after a misspent life of three-martini meals, burgers and French fries, and apple pie à la mode would almost certainly lose weight if she stuck to Guérard’s recipes religiously and gave up, as he demands, all alcohol. But Cuisine minceur is not a dietary method, and its recipes were not invented from the ground up to combine nutritional sobriety with gustatory interest. They are, almost all of them, standard dishes selected from the French repertory because they are low in fat, flour and sugar. Their real interest, however, is in their relationship to Guérard’s overall practice as the most innovative of all the nouvelle cuisine chefs.
As in his nutritionally unbridled Cuisine gourmande, Guérard applies his culinary intelligence to vegetables. I mean he purees all manner of vegetables not normally treated that way, ending up with sharply focused flavors and pools of brilliant natural colors to brighten plated entrées. These purees of watercress and beets and spinach and green beans stood in, with daring minimalism, for the fussy garnishes of the Escoffier platter.
In Cuisine minceur, they are every bit as dramatic as they are in Cuisine gourmande, and Guérard could present them simply as low-calorie side dishes. But you can see still his “gourmande” intelligence at work in the recipe for watercress puree II, which includes lemon juice and a bit of crème fraîche for a slightly grander, more unctuous effect. (The same dish would appear in Cuisine gourmande a year later, with some butter and a far greater quantity of crème fraîche.)
These purees were called purées mousses in the original French, which carries nuances lost in the plainer English “puree,” meaning something blenderized to perfect smoothness. In everyday French, though, purée (all by itself) could mean mashed potatoes (as would mousseline). So to my ear, the ever-metaphorical Guérard wanted his French readers to think of his Technicolor vegetable purees as glamorous cousins of mashed potatoes. Which, of course, they are.
Elsewhere in Cuisine minceur, he retreats even further from the diet book mode and into the improvisational full sun of nouvelle cuisine with a dish originally called gratin de pommes du pays de Caux. In Narcisse Chamberlain’s English translation, this comes out as Normandy fruit and artichoke gratiné, which is perhaps too helpful. Guérard’s title leaves out the artichoke as well as the fresh apricots, which are all parcooked and then baked in a custard. Undoubtedly, Guérard meant to surprise and amuse French readers (and the guests they served) with the unmentioned (and hitherto uncombined) ingredients.
When served, they would have been invisible or at least unrecognizable in the custard, until their tastes gave them away. They also added two extra textures—one more solid (the artichoke), the other softer (the apricot)—to that of the pure apple people were expecting to find in a dish they could see was not a gratin, because it had no layer of melted cheese on top. This “gratin” looked, in fact, like the rustic custard or fruit dessert called clafoutis.
What is “minceur” about this “gratin”? Guérard specifies nonfat dry milk—but also lists two whole eggs for the custard.
In Cuisine gourmande, the full panoply of Guérard’s genius was on display: an entire chapter of foie gras recipes; a metaphorical carnival of frogs’ leg Napoleons; a seafood stew (navarin) steamed over seaweed; beef cheeks à l’orange; beef in the manner of fish (filet de boeuf en poisson). This last dish involved butterflying an entire beef tenderloin, inserting truffle slices all over its interior to resemble fish scales, closing it up for roasting, then reopening it on a serving platter and putting a puff pastry fish head and fish tail at either end, to make a faux fish. There was also a sauce, truffle juice thickened with over a half pound (250 grams) of butter. Here was the real Guérard, a more fully achieved version of the genius of Le Pot au Feu. It was this Guérard who earned three stars in Michelin‡ in 1977 and won the general agreement of the cognoscenti that he was the outstanding French chef of his generation.
After Cuisine gourmande and cookbooks from other nouvelle cuisine chefs began appearing in English, American chefs and wannabes read those books and soon found ways to infiltrate their authors’ kitchens in France, returning home to establish beachheads of modern innovation.
David Bouley prepared for his career as a New York star chef by enrolling in the Sorbonne and then “studying” at the feet of five of the new wave’s A team: Paul Bocuse, Joël Robuchon, Roger Vergé, Frédy Girardet and the patissier Gaston Lenôtre. Returning home, he worked at top established restaurants until surfacing in Tribeca’s first serious restaurant, Montrachet, in 1985, and then opening Bouley in 1987.
In a less obvious trajectory from French training to his own temple of post-nouvelle cuisine, Thomas Keller first knocked around the American restaurant world. Then he fetched up at a French-owned country inn in the woodsy hinterland of Catskill, New York. La Rive was a treasure of traditional French cooking for anyone who could find it. I remember it well, a rustic piece of France in the Hudson Valley. But I had no idea that an American was behind the scenes, imbibing tradition from his strict employers, René and Paulette Macary. Keller spent three years there, experimenting on his own with smoking and other old-fashioned farmhouse techniques. He wallowed in organ meats and might have continued on this path to retro, down-home aubergisme, if he had been able to buy La Rive. When he couldn’t pry it loose from its owners, he decamped for France in 1983 and went straight to the top of the Parisian food scene, cooking in the most celebrated of traditional kitchens at Taillevent and at the cleverest of second-generation modern restaurants, Guy Savoy.
At the back, Thomas Keller at La Rive, near Catskill, New York, ca. 1981, with his employers, René and Paulette Macary, and the rest of the staff of this very French country inn (illustration credit 4.1)
Back in New York, he practiced traditional French elegance at La Reserve and then spent time at the city’s main colony of nouvellisme, Raphael. In 1987, Keller, like Bouley, moved downtown, where he showed his radical colors at Rakel, whose menu mixed French technique with native ingredients such as the jalapeño pepper. Rakel closed at the end of the eighties and Keller spent some years in the wilderness before ascending to the summit of the U.S. restaurant world in the undeniably French but thoroughly modern and original French Laundry, in the wine village of Yountville, California, in 1994.
So nouvelle cuisine eventually trickled across the Atlantic. Before long, it was taken for granted by a new generation of American chefs trained by those who had apprenticed in France. They and their customers had gotten the message, but I felt the message itself had never been properly articulated. In my Natural History column and elsewhere, I set out to tell its complex story and to “deconstruct” its essence.
On the technical level, all the original chefs in the movement agreed that flour-thickened sauces were an abomination, but their preference for sauces built around heavily reduced stocks or stocks thickened with cream or egg yolks or hollandaise sauce did not amount to a revolution. Neither did the new emphasis on fresh ingredients, al dente vegetables, and raw fish and meat. lt was this ingredient-centered, health-conscious side of early nouvelle cuisine that understandably misled people into thinking that Guérard, Bocuse et al. were a bunch of health-food enthusiasts with good knife skills. Bocuse encouraged this confusion when he said his innovations were aimed at the new gourmet, a hypothetical diner consumed with a passion for great food but preoccupied as well with staying trim.
This was undoubtedly a shrewd insight into the upscale clientele of three-star restaurants, but even a cursory glance at the ingredients actually served up by Bocuse and the other Young Turks should have convinced us all that the dietary claims blandly proffered in interviews by Bocuse and Alain Senderens, of L’Archestrate in Paris, were a soufflé of rationalization.
For a larger version of this menu, click here.
An embarrassment of choices at the French Laundry, in Yountville, California. Will it be a tasting of classics like oysters and pearls or foie gras from the meat dégustation menu, or more intensely original treatments of peas and beets on the vegetarian roster? We ordered both in 2004. (illustration credit 4.2)
Guérard was an even greater, if sincere, contributor to the miasma of hygiene that befogged nouvelle cuisine in its period of maximum press attention.
Hidden behind this screen of contradictions and opportunistic rhetoric, nouvelle cuisine was actually something radically new that had sprung right out of the social fabric of postwar France. Young chefs had eliminated the formally garnished banquet platters of Escoffier (which were themselves simplifications of the grandly sculptural cuisine inherited from Carême and other classical nineteenth-century practitioners). In this cleansing of the repertory, these chefs were following not only the relatively inconspicuous and mild reforms of Escoffier but also the more trenchant and simplifying example of their mentor Fernand Point. They were, in fact, picking up a thread first spun in the period between the wars when the influential gastronomic writer Curnonsky had directed the attention of chefs like Point to the treasures of French regional cooking. In a series of blue booklets aimed at the new breed of gastronomically inclined motorists, Curnonsky not only recorded these local dishes but also insisted that they should reflect their ingredients, should not disguise the taste of the things from which they were cooked. Today this may seem like an obvious principle, but the extremely complex recipes of nineteenth-century haute cuisine were edible fantasies remote from the raw materials of the larder.
And so, when Paul Bocuse prided himself on his cuisine du marché (market cooking) and took reporters like me with him to the market in Lyon to hunt for the best raw materials available on a particular day, he was showing his commitment to ingredients, to their intrinsic taste and quality, and to the resources of his own region. And by the time Bocuse and the other Young Turks had achieved national and international fame, they had gone further than Point.
By the mid-seventies, I had eaten in most of their restaurants. On a meal-by-meal basis, no clear picture of a unified direction had emerged. What, if anything, was the connection between Bocuse’s gargantuan sea bass en croûte with a sauce Choron (béarnaise with tomato puree) and the black, unglamorous, juniper-infused thrush pâté at Troisgros?
Then I happened to compare the pictures in Point’s posthumous Ma gastronomie (1969) with those in Guérard’s Cuisine gourmande and still other photographs in Jean and Pierre Troisgros’s Cuisiniers à Roanne (1977). Point’s food looks radically simple alongside the platters depicted in the Larousse gastronomique, with their garnishes of turned vegetables and pastry boatlets, but with Point we are still in the world of the banquet, the world of the platter on which a suckling pig or a whole tart is presented to a tableful of people or a large family assembled for a dramatic occasion.
The younger chefs selected photographs of individual plates, with the food on them arranged meticulously to make a visual effect on its own. In their book, the brothers Troisgros credit their father as the source of the “custom of both presentation and service on each guest’s individual plate—very large plates, which we were the first to use.”
By now we have all encountered the nouvelle cuisine plate and its studied placement of sliced vegetables, arranged in circular or other geometric patterns. While it would be wrong to dispute that this new mode of decoration arose in France and quite naturally from trends emerging over decades, it is also the case that the full efflorescence of nouvelle cuisine was, to an important extent, an exotic bloom fertilized by new ideas, aesthetic and culinary, that traveled to France from abroad, in particular from Japan, and took root in traditionally xenophobic soil.
In the postwar era, exotic ingredients—the avocado, the mango and, before all others, the kiwi—arrived in France by jet. Meanwhile, French people traveled outside the mother country in unprecedented numbers. Bocuse himself jetted off so often to Japan that diners complained that the master was rarely at his own stove. Senderens abandoned his research in premodern French recipes to study Japanese cuisine.
The flow of ideas from Japan to France brought a highly developed food aesthetic—one based on delicate visual effects and achieved most often on individual plates—to young French chefs already predisposed to paint with food on the circular field of a plate. Nouvelle cuisine rapidly evolved into a feast for the eyes, à la japonaise. It also incorporated some of the basic ideas of Japanese cuisine itself, notably a predilection for raw ingredients, which fulfilled Curnonsky’s notion of ingredient purity to perfection. A slice of raw scallop tasted, by definition, of nothing but the scallop itself.
The global success of this new mode of cooking is a fact of contemporary life, reinvigorating national and regional food traditions. It is to this global yet regional school of cookery that we in America now owe the so-called new American cuisine, which combines French principles of food preparation, Japanese plate decoration and regional, folkloric American ingredients.
On wings of chic, I wrote in Natural History, the new gospel soared over oceans and continents. Japanese chefs trained in France reigned supreme in Manhattan. Homegrown cooks learned the lessons of the day and presented sophisticated diners from coast to coast with morels foraged in Michigan woods and hitherto neglected sea urchin gonads from Pacific waters. Aided by food processors, modish restaurants offered julienned vegetables of every hue with each floridly designed entrée. Following the lead of their French mentors, they were open to ideas from cooking traditions around the world, mixing all the great ethnic and national dishes in a mishmash of eclecticism that is every bit as intricate in its way as were the now-abandoned platters of yesteryear.
Even this superficial analysis of nouvelle cuisine would have surprised most of its happiest consumers, but there was more to this global movement in the kitchen than unfamiliar ingredients and painterly plates. Considered historically, nouvelle cuisine, as I argued almost thirty years ago, had deep roots in European gastrolinguistic tradition and was the logical conclusion of centuries of change in the way food was brought to the table and served to individual diners.
I thought about these matters first during a wedding in New Haven, in 1985, when I meditated briefly in a small church about deconstruction (then the latest fad in French literary analysis, which had captured the energies of the Yale English department) and its relation to trends in food. Almost all of the original claims made about and for the nouvelle cuisine had turned out to be exercises in public relations, but everyone who had experienced the food itself knew that it had a coherence, a recognizable cluster of characteristics. It was a style.
But it was a sly style, one whose true nature had barely ever been discussed by its practitioners. They were not shy, but the language they used was almost an ideal text for deconstruction because it was so purely metaphorical. I was using language here in a broad sense to include both chefs’ words—their menu language and their recipes—as well as their dishes.
The world of nouvelle cuisine, I argued in Natural History, is a forest of symbols and allusions that the knowledgeable diner can “read” and decode, much as a literary deconstructionist might decode the figurative code of a poem. Classic cuisine was also a code, literally, couched in the language of menus and cookbooks. Dishes were identified with terms such as “Montmorency” and “Paloise,” words that in ordinary speech refer to people and places but that in the world of traditional haute cuisine denoted, respectively, a roast duck sauced with cherries and a béarnaise sauce made with mint instead of tarragon. In most cases these chefs’ terms were a pure code without even a tangential connection to their names’ everyday referent. Espagnole sauce was in no way Spanish. The old culinary language simply gave names to dishes that honored people and places and rarely offered the uninitiated any direct information about the dish they were going to get.
The leaders of nouvelle cuisine were all trained in this nomenclatural code. They knew exactly what garnishes and sauce went with sole à la normande. The sole, poached in fish and mushroom stock, was surrounded by poached mussels and shrimp with a line of four poached oysters and four fluted mushroom caps alternating down its center. All of this was coated with sauce normande, an elaborate concoction of fish stock, mushroom and mussel cooking liquids, egg yolks and cream, and then additionally garnished with six truffle slices and six croutons cut in lozenges alternating around the perimeter of the sole. Four gudgeons, the freshwater fish Gobio gobio, fried at the last minute and themselves decorated with paper sleeves, were arranged on the platter with four medium crayfish. All the elements were compulsory; not until 1912 did Escoffier finally concede, in parentheses, that the truffles were optional.
The names of traditional haute cuisine dishes were, although sonorous, primarily useful as shorthand devices. They performed a real service for waiters, who did not have to memorize and then rattle off the four canonical garnishes associated with rôti de veau Maubeuge. Haute cuisine lingo saved everyone the bother we now endure from waiters who do not benefit from a convenient code and have to tell you that tonight’s special is moose haunch with wild rice balls, broiled shiitake mushrooms and a partridge in a pear mousse. Wouldn’t it be easier if that particular collection of foods were always identified as moose Mamaroneck?
Yes, it would be simple, but the culinary world we live in is an unsettled place. You can almost count on not getting moose with the same accompanying side dishes on another night in another restaurant (or often not even in the same restaurant).
But in the world set down in Escoffier’s Guide culinaire, chefs did repeat the official garnish combinations. Over the 150 years that stretched from the time of Carême, in the early nineteenth century, until the dawn of nouvelle cuisine, French chefs refined a closed system of dishes whose basic unit was a serving platter dominated by a main food item—say, a roast—tricked out with its prescribed garnishes. Nouvelle cuisine not only abandoned the old culinary code and its heraldic certainties of garniture and presentation, it also abandoned platter service itself and substituted for it an equally intricate method of service based on individual plates arranged in the kitchen and then brought out to diners.
These attacks on the structure and meaning of the old style of dining are the truly revolutionary part of nouvelle cuisine, but the threat to the old order was masked in many ways. Nouvelle cuisine was marketed as the cuisine of modern slim people who valued fresh food or food presented with streamlined simplicity and provocative ingredients. All those elements were present and important, but they fronted for the real revolution, which transformed the old code by repurposing it as material for a most elaborate system of culinary parody, punning and metaphor.
Nouvelle cuisine looks at Escoffier through the wrong end of the telescope. It puts ironic quotation marks around Carême and sets the old code in italics so that the old words mean something else, are metaphors for new ideas for which no names previously existed.
In the dawn of the nouvelle era, gastronomic pilgrims trekked to dismal Roanne, near Lyon, to eat chez Troisgros, where they were served the great prix fixe menu of the postwar period: that deceptively dull-looking black-gray thrush pâté flavored with juniper berries, then thin slices of salmon in sorrel sauce, followed by local Charolais beef in an intense but transparently clear brown sauce and, finally, many, many desserts.
I ate this meal in 1969, the same year the term la nouvelle cuisine was coined by Gault and Millau to describe the food on the maiden flight of the supersonic jet passenger plane the Concorde.
The Troigros brothers’ chaste dishes embodied the key elements of the mature movement. The salmon dish, especially, was a sign of things to come. The sauce was pulled together quickly, without flour for thickening, from a highly reduced fish stock, crème fraîche and sorrel. The taste was extraordinary, as was that of the salmon, almost Japanese in its near rawness. And what might be called the design of the dish emphasized lightness with its unnaturally thin pieces of fish.
These were the things that caught my eye in 1969 in that poky little dining room near the Roanne rail station. But the most important feature of the dish was the name on the menu. If the salmon had been cooked until it flaked and if the sauce had been thick and conventional, this dish would still have been a symbol of revolt because of its witty name: escalopes de saumon. The Troisgros brothers were serving salmon scaloppine. They had transferred (metaphorized) a classic (foreign) food idea onto a surprising and provocative new form. The sharp-eyed diner would notice that the chef had cut the salmon into thin flat slices, or scallops, and then had pounded them thinner, just as an Italian chef would have pounded veal scallops, except that the Italian would have pounded the veal because he wanted to make it tender as well as attractively thin. Pounding salmon will indeed change its texture in a minor way, but the main gain was conceptual. The thin salmon pieces were mock scaloppine. They were delicious, but they were also witty.
After the Yale wedding, I looked at my library of nouvelle cuisine cookbooks and menus with this in mind and found abundant examples of this metaphorical principle at work. Paging through The Nouvelle Cuisine of Jean and Pierre Troisgros, I noticed a vegetable terrine that was a playful nonmeat copy of a traditional meat terrine and a recipe for oysters with periwinkles—that is, shellfish topped with shellfish. Obviously not every nouvelle cuisine dish is a straightforward culinary pun or play on a figure of culinary speech, but almost invariably the memorable recipes start from a witty reinterpretation of a standard dish. It is this “literary” aspect that saves nouvelle cuisine from being merely a collection of outrageous novelties. The greatest failures of modern cooking have always been those entirely new dishes, concocted with no reference to the past. Its greatest triumphs have sprung from tradition seen through a glass brightly.
The other crucial feature of nouvelle cuisine—its studied and original arrangements of food on individual plates—is also a clever reaction to French tradition in the kitchen and at the dining table. The haute cuisine of my grandparents’ time§ called for edible designs to be executed on serving platters, which were then dismantled onto individual plates without much attention to “design.” The original logic of the dish on the serving platter had been lost. This method of getting food to the table was called Russian service. Whether truly Russian or not, it emerged as a radical dining reform in the nineteenth century, quickly triumphed and held sway in luxury establishments right into the 1970s.
Russian service depended very heavily on the labor of waiters. In establishments that practiced this method to its fullest, meals were served on a platter, banquet-style, even if the diner was eating alone and had ordered something that could just as easily have been put intact on a plate in the kitchen and brought right to the table. Instead, sole meunière would be presented in a serving dish, finished with the canonical sizzle on a tableside hot plate (réchaud), then transferred to the plate at a buffet or rolling table near the dining table.
Anyone over the age of fifty will have no trouble recalling such meals. Russian service may have reached its perigee with dishes that were flamed tableside. Waiters turned into Prometheus, bringing fire to cognac and ladling the resulting vaporous blue-haloed liquid over steaks and, most dramatically, crêpes Suzette.‖
It took most of the rest of the century for Russian service to sweep away its predecessor, French service. Gone, finally, were the simultaneous profusion of dishes, the architectural table decoration and the sculptural set pieces (pièces montées) that had marked the grandiose age of Carême. Russian service, championed in the 1860s by the influential chef Félix Urbain Dubois, allowed people to eat one dish per course. As a result, chefs turned to perfecting each individual dish instead of concentrating on an array of dishes. This led to platters bristling with ancillary garnishes. But in less than a century, dissatisfaction with these baroque arrays led to a further reduction in the scale of food presentation. Nouvelle cuisine restricted itself to the individual plate.
This reduction of the field of display—from table (medieval/French service) to platter (Russian service: later nineteenth century to 1965) to plate (1965 through the present)—followed along with a historical change in dining habits, from the self-service smorgasbord-like public dining of the late medieval and early modern eras to a waiter-finished, à la carte–style restaurant world to the kitchen-plated style of contemporary, post-nouvelle dining.
This evolution of presentation corresponded to an overall shift in restaurant staffing, from the servitors of French service—the waiters who cooked tableside, who had evolved from the footmen who set out the food and carved the meat for the medieval table—to the servers with cooking skills of Russian service to the nouvelle cuisine’s noncooking, unskilled plate distributors.
Fluctuations in the cost of labor and the levels of skill available in those three periods played an important role in determining how food was brought to diners. Very cheap labor in the late medieval and early modern era made it possible to staff noble and nouveau riche dining rooms with hordes of footmen, most of them unskilled except perhaps at carving large pieces of meat. In the post-1900 world of rising literacy within the urban working class, overall wages rose, but semiskilled waiters could take pressure off the kitchen staff and do double duty as food deliverers. After World War II, the cost of labor rose again. Chefs streamlined their kitchen procedures, via the less laborious style of the “lighter” dishes of nouvelle cuisine, and eliminated the need for waiters with culinary skills by handing off completely plated individual dishes to unskilled waiters in the kitchen.
By the 1980s, this historic shift was complete. Diners had blithely accepted the new style, as if pictorial plating of slimmed-down, ironically deconstructed variations on traditional recipes was the normal thing to expect in serious, up-to-date restaurants. So was the increasingly exotic and cosmopolitan sourcing of ingredients, methods and recipes. But the diet-food tag persisted, and the chastely plated dishes featured in nouvelle cuisine–inspired restaurants left many diners who were accustomed to larger portions feeling as if they’d been subjected to a prettified form of a weight-loss regimen.
The emblematic American restaurant of that moment, Chez Panisse, was transforming itself from an outpost of simple French cooking in northern California into the sanctuary of locavore vegetable purity it continues to be today.
Chez, as its Berkeley habitués call it, was anything but a healthy, up-from-the-soil, hyper-Californian shrine in its formative era. The mother of it all, Alice Waters, evolved out of the political radicalism on the Berkeley campus into a food activist during a study year in France in 1964. A dinner in Brittany converted her forever to the simple beauties of French food. “I’ve remembered this dinner a thousand times,” she told John Whiting in 2002.a “The chef, a woman, announced the menu, cured ham and melon, trout with almonds, and raspberry tart. The trout had just come from the stream and the raspberries from the garden. It was the immediacy that made those dishes so special.”
Back in Berkeley, Waters began seriously cooking French food at home. In 1971, with financial backing from friends, she took over a Craftsman-style house and began serving family-style meals to the public. The name of the place also reflected her passion for French provincial culture. Panisse is a character in the trilogy of 1930s films based on plays by Marcel Pagnol about lower-class life in the port of Marseilles. Panisse is also the name of the chickpea-dough fritters typical of the Mediterranean coast of France from Marseilles to Nice.
So the roots of Waters’s new restaurant were blatantly French, but her particular connection with French cuisine involved a vivid, if romanticized, vision of its connection to extremely local food sources. One may reasonably wonder if those primordial trout had actually been hooked on a fly the morning before she ate one. The norm, at any rate, even for very meticulous, family-run restaurants, would have been a tank or a pond supplied by a commercial fournisseur.
This is not to malign the freshness of the trout, only to cast doubt on the accuracy of Waters’s tourist-eye romanticism. Paul Bocuse exploited a similar credulity in journalists like me. We usually did not stop to ask ourselves how it was that sea bass had turned up in the fresh waters of Lyon’s twin rivers, the Rhône and the Saône.
At any rate, there can be no doubt that Waters impelled her new restaurant in a direction known much later as locavore. If her dwarf vegetables actually came from a farm near San Diego, hundreds of miles away, they were still native Californian. Her berries were foraged not far from Berkeley, by a tetchy fellow who wrote me a menacing letter when I quoted Alice describing the scratches he endured in order to bring her wild berries.
And as the daily set menus at Chez Panisse turned increasingly eclectic under a regularly changing cast of chefs, the emphasis on local, hands-on, nontoxic ingredients became the restaurant’s central enduring theme. Chez Panisse began as a clever pastiche of meridional French home cooking that branched out into other kinds of simple food. It was and is a form of auberge, an inn with a table d’hôte. Hooray for all that, but even forty years ago, when a diverse nouvelle American cuisine was emerging all over the country, Chez Panisse wasn’t serving it.
To do that, you had to know what traditional American cooking had been. You had to be interested in making modern versions of authentic survivals of regional cooking that had first evolved in pioneer days, during those creative moments of scarcity when settlers arrived in unfamiliar wilderness and were forced to produce hybrid meals, using the unfamiliar foods they found to make improvised versions of the recipes they had brought in their heads. In the Southeast, for example, slaves adapted the West African technique of deep-frying flour-coated foods to local ingredients and invented southern fried chicken and hush puppies. Because cornmeal was abundant, they substituted it for the native African black-eyed-pea flour they knew from home. Food historians of transatlantic black foodways, including Jessica Harris, documented this process. In the later 1970s, I began to hunt for authentic, specific regional dishes produced by the collision of immigrant pioneers with American conditions of pioneer days—a colonial form of unconscious nouvellization.
Adjustments frontier cooks made to foods they knew from their home countries in order to adapt them to culinary possibilities in a newfound land generated the diverse set of regional specialties that flourished all over America before the homogenizing effects of interstate highways and a system of increasingly anonymous food supply pushed these local cuisines into darkness and disuse. Yes, there were bodacious survivals, especially in economic backwaters like Cajun Louisiana and hispanophone New Mexico. But even in these places, much of what the casual visitor could run up against was adulterated and for show, at fairs and other commercialized focuses of regional self-celebration and hokum.
Over the course of time, I would write about these and other matters for Natural History. But when I was hired in 1974 by Alan Ternes, all he told me was that my column should “reflect the various fields in which the Museum of Natural History intersected with what people ate.” And he wanted me to attach a germane recipe to each column.
I’d started out thinking that for a magazine celebrated as the vehicle for Margaret Mead’s anthropology, I should try to consider cuisine as a facet of ethnography. This turned out to be a wide-open field, since anthropologists had by and large ignored what the people they studied ate. Even anthropologists who specialized in material culture had concerned themselves with tools and boats, or with tattoos and metalwork, but they’d largely left the business of writing down recipes from authentic ethnic cooks to nonacademic cookbook authors, and there were few enough of them venturing into the unplumbed outback of the vanishing preliterate world.
There was one shining exception to this, the very eminent French cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. His deep analysis of the mythology of the Bororo culture of central Brazil centered on the symbolism of the edible. Lévi-Strauss’s monumental Mythologiques ranged much further than that, but its first volume, The Raw and the Cooked, had appeared in English not long before (1969), and the rest of the tetralogy was not completely anglicized until 1981.
Highly theoretical, yet dazzlingly gymnastic, this was a way of talking about food that I hoped to imitate in my column. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss had already influenced the treatment of primitive language and myth and culture in my novel Native Intelligence (1975), which reworked some of the traditional Amazonian stories Lévi-Strauss had found recorded in the Enciclopédia Boróro, a compendium compiled by Salesian missionaries to the Amazon and then deconstructed by Lévi-Strauss into a gastrocosmology.
So it was a natural step for me to infiltrate heavy doses of symbolic anthropology into my two-thousand-word essays on food in Natural History. This Lévi-Strauss Lite phase came to an abrupt halt when Ternes spiked my column on the meaning of blood in world cuisine, which included references to blood in the Eucharist as well as to the initiation ceremony of the Hell’s Angels, in which the novitiate consumed the menstrual blood of his moll directly from the source, in front of the assembled Angels.
Alan did print my deliberately provocative column on cannibalism, but it strained his patience. I surveyed the entire ethnographic literature on cannibalism with the goal of determining which cuts were preferred on gustatory grounds.b For an illustration, I pointed the magazine’s art department to the iconic image of cannibalism, an engraving purportedly based on an actual sighting by the artist of a missionary being cooked in a pot by savages somewhere in deepest Amazonia. And, for the obligatory recipe, I adapted the haute cuisine dish pain de cervelle, a sort of calf’s-brain pudding or loaf, but with the ingredient line altered to read “1½ pounds brains of any higher mammal.”
Carol Breslin, who handled my Natural History copy with intelligence and courtesy for twenty years (I must have seemed like a cream puff compared to her husband, Herbert, the hilariously undiplomatic manager of Luciano Pavarotti), revealed to me that, because I had stepped over the line this time into real anthropology, she’d felt compelled to procure a professional reading. The referee she chose loathed the column.
At the time, there was a fashionable theory going around that cannibalism was largely a xenophobic construct of European interlopers into exotic cultures and that where it had occurred, it was a reasonable response to desperate shortages of animal protein in the diet, not much different from the behavior of the modern cannibals who had eaten other passengers’ flesh after their plane crashed in a remote part of the Andes. My reader, a proponent of this materialist, proto-Marxist explanation of tribal cannibalism, covered the margins of my galleys with testy dismissals of my “naive” repetitions of faulty anecdotes about pervasive ritual cannibalism and the chop-licking consumption of defeated neighbors, all drawn from academic journals. But he reached his highest point of dudgeon over the recipe. “I doubt,” he thundered inaudibly, “that the author could distinguish the brain of a human from that of a large lizard.”
Carol showed me these fulminations with high humor. The column appeared intact, although, mysteriously, many copies lacked the illustration. But then, at lunch, Ternes said, over coffee: “Why don’t you drop the anthropology. It’s not a real science. Try plants instead. That’s what most food is, anyway.”
Alan was always right.
I didn’t know the first thing about botany. Nevertheless, edible plants, their origins, their lore, the incredible ingenuity with which cooks had exploited them—such questions kept me happily occupied over many years. My lack of training in the field was never a real hindrance. The nontechnical material was so rich, and so easily available, that after locating reliable sources, I found it a simple matter to assemble compilations of information about the horticultural conquest of the world by edible flora: by Indian mangoes tended in pots on shipboard until they could be safely naturalized in the Americas or by the many and surprising uses of the invaluable New World cassava plant—toasted grits (farofa) in the Brazilian national dish feijoada, bread I saw made on open fires in the Caribbean, as well as tapioca Mom had served in pudding.
Every year, I made a summer trip to the Caribbean to investigate yet another exotic plant. Natural History sold travel ads to the islands for a fall issue, and I provided editorial matter to go with them, columns based on sweaty summer interviews with taro gardeners in Monserrat and a lady in Santo Domingo who concocted jelly from the pendulous fruit of the cashew (the more familiar nut, as I pointed out, is a dead ringer for the seed concealed in the pit of the mango, which, like the cashew, is a member of the Anacardiaceae family, as is poison ivy).
I saw these fruits during the summer of 1992, as the guest of the government of the Dominican Republic, a repressive pseudo-democracy run by Joaquín Balaguer, who had gained power as a puppet of the murderous dictator Rafael Trujillo. But I was very happy to cross paths with the amiable Henri Gault, he of the Gault-Millau guide, an avatar of Jean Gabin in his craggy looks and bluff manner.
I discovered evidence of recent Lebanese influence on Dominican foodways in a neighborhood near the hotel, where a sign in front of a house advertised quipe, a Hispanic version of kibbeh, the pounded raw lamb–bulgur delicacy of Lebanon.
I spent my last night in the Dominican Republic playing blackjack in the hotel’s dark and deserted casino. Sitting next to me at the table, not gambling, was the California wine writer Robert Finigan, who distracted me from my losses with a story from his former career as a management consultant in Japan, where he had learned to speak the language fluently.
One night in midwinter, he found himself in Wakkanai, the northernmost city in Japan, which, with an annual snowfall that can reach 250 inches, is among the snowiest populated places on earth. Finigan trudged through the snow to dinner in a nearby restaurant, empty except for a table occupied by an elderly couple in traditional garb. From across the dining room, they appeared to be greatly enjoying their meal.
Finigan called over a waiter and said in Japanese, “I’ll have exactly what they’re having.” Minutes later he was startled by loud shrieks. He looked up from the book he’d been reading and saw the Japanese couple fighting to keep the waiter from taking away their plates and bringing them to him.
By 1992 I had long since established myself as an essayist on edible plants in Natural History. I often received letters from real botanists all over the world, asking for reprints of my columns. Usually, they addressed me as Dr. Sokolov. I really was operating in a serious academic context, as a kind of functioning botanist, and I came to see that I had a specialty. I was what was called an economic botanist; I studied plants in human affairs. There was even a publication in “my” field, the Journal of Economic Botany.
One day, I found a complete run of it in the stacks of the library at the American Museum of Natural History, where my connection to the museum’s magazine gave me a plenipotentiary ID card. I was an “outside contractor” and could enter the museum and all its most guarded places at any hour. I rarely went to that library, since the museum had ceded the acquisition of books on plants to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Yet I particularly loved to poke in when the public couldn’t, strolling early in the morning through the Andean dioramas, alone with the pumas and guanacos, the recorded noises of their snuffling and amorous crashes against each other incessantly looped and relooped, an eerie mammalian aria da capo, da capo.
Sometimes I continued upstairs, where there was a Xerox machine I could use for free in the library stacks, which, for a time, had plastic sheeting over a whole section, to protect the books from a leak in the roof. The reference room was presided over by a fierce woman of Middle European background whose desk was covered with flowering plants I could not have identified if asked. When I admired them, she responded fiercely, with an unleavened accent, “They say I can make a pencil bloom.”
Then, just as I was settling into my role as the Linnaeus of comestible roots and leaves, Alan uprooted me from the soft bed of economic botany and sent me on the road, like one of those potted mangoes, to hunt down American regional foods, old-fashioned dishes threatened with extinction, like the black-footed ferret. I would spend two years doing it.
We both assumed that corporate agriculture, Big Ag, and all the other soul-crushing juggernauts of modern American life were smothering the last vital signs of regional food. But in almost every case, we found a dynamic revival of foodways, a supposedly vanished dish or abandoned ingredient that ought to have died out from neglect.
I say “we” because I had a partner in those travels, Adelaide de Menil, a photographer who worked much harder than I did, lugging equipment and getting down in the dirt to capture the morels in Michigan and roughing it in the Colorado high desert north of Rifle to record a sheep drive.
When we started out, I thought the way to find endangered foods was to flip through sources like my former colleague Jean Hewitt’s The New York Times Heritage Cookbook and then make a blizzard of phone calls to the region, to find practitioners of the vanishing dish and set up appointments with them. This turned out to be a waste of everybody’s time. There were sources you could find that way, but precisely because you could connect with a Pennsylvania Dutch flannel-cake vendor from your desk in New York, it almost guaranteed that she was an inauthentic exploiter of a pioneer dish whose only nexus to its colorful past was cash.
We quickly learned that winging it was the surest way to find the folks we wanted to find. Most of them did not advertise in the Yellow Pages or feel comfortable making appointments. Since a great many of them were either active farmers or close to the land, on arrival we would check in first with the local county agent. These emissaries of the federal Department of Agriculture know everything about their bailiwick. They know who grows what crops and, through their work with families in the still great 4-H program, they know who cooks seriously in the old way, or who continues to cultivate crops or grow fruit that’s too old-fashioned and unsalable even to get mentioned in the Ag Department’s statistical publications.
After a while, we would just fly in to a place known, or usually formerly known, for a regional food and drift around the landscape until we found someone eager to cook it for us or show us his carefully tended plants.
These were not media-savvy people, but once we found them, they invariably turned out to be great interviewees, because we were often the first people who’d ever asked them about a passion that filled them with joy—and gave them an outlet for a missionary zeal for keeping alive a message that had all but lost its original audience.
Helen Sekaquaptewa, the mother of the Hopi tribal chairman, queenly at the wheel of a brand-new pickup, took me to her ranch house in New Oraibi, Arizona, to show me how to make pö-vö-pi-ki, or blue marbles, an “easy” Hopi breakfast dish. She stirred together a straightforward dough of blue cornmeal and boiling water and rolled it into small blue orbs, which she then poached. Getting the texture right is a matter of exquisite knack, a tour de main she learned as a girl in a traditional household.
Part of that same training taught Mrs. Sekaquaptewa how to make piki, the apex of Hopi blue-corn cookery. She told me how, having returned from a missionary school in 1910, she learned to make a stone piki griddle, starting with a granite slab and polishing it smooth, by hand, with pebbles. She also ground blue corn into flour, working it between two stones, one held in the hand, until she produced a very fine blue flour, much finer than the meal for sale in a nearby grocery.
“We have electric mills now,” she told me. “It was hard work in my time, with stones, but good exercise. No one had a big stomach.”
But the Hopi ritual calendar had kept piki alive among the eight thousand ethnic Hopis—that and their isolation in the high mesas of northeastern Arizona. I saw this in action at the Niman dance. Kachina dancers at Shungopavi, on Second Mesa, moved slowly with the precision of Rockettes, chanting, elaborately masked and feathered, sashed and buskined, consecrating the ground of the plaza with cornmeal, while an eagle chained to a nearby rooftop flapped its wings. When the kachina dancers disappeared into underground kivas, Hopi children passed out rolls of crisp blue paper-thin piki, translucent sheets of blue cornmeal that had started out as a film of dough on a stone griddle.
For me, piki was the most unadulterated example of all threatened American regional foods, enmeshed in the same civilization that had invented it centuries before Columbus. That culture had survived under constant threat, first from the Hopis’ Navajo neighbors, then from white settlers, and, by the time I came to their mesa villages, from electric flour mills and supermarket blue cornmeal. But piki, because of the difficulty of making it, would never be the centerpiece of a Hopi-themed fast-food chain.
You might think that other First American foods would be just as difficult to assimilate into the American way of life, but the recent history of Navajo fry bread teaches a different lesson, as I learned in Salt Lake City. I hadn’t intended to investigate Navajo food in the capital of Mormonism. Indeed, I went to some trouble to get invited to lunch at the official cafeteria in the headquarters of the Church of Latter-day Saints in the Lion House, once the home of the early Mormon leader Brigham Young.
In Lion House Recipes, the cookbook I acquired there, I found almost no purely local dishes, just an unreconstructed expression of mainstream middle-American food: Jell-O salad, pies, meats and potatoes. The sole exception was the anomalous Utah scone, a deep-fried bread fashioned from a sweet yeast dough cut in two-inch squares. They were nothing like the muffiny scones of Britain, which are usually baked and never deep-fried.
It was not hard to sample homegrown scones in Salt Lake City. Usually served with butter and honey, they popped up on breakfast menus and at a fast-food chain called Sconecutter. But where did they come from? They had clearly not arrived with the Mormon emigration. No, these New World scones reminded me of puffy deep-fried Navajo fry bread and even more of New Mexican sopaipillas, which are similar to fry bread but are also usually served with honey, like the Utah scones.
Lacking any hard evidence for their origin, I speculated in Natural History that the archetype for all these fried breads was a sopaipilla documented by Diana Kennedy, the English-born authority on Mexican food, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which shares a border with New Mexico. This primordial sopaipilla lacked yeast, a sign of its earliness. Mormon women, I argued, likely adopted this bread and assimilated it to their baking style with yeast and other raising agents, sugar and eggs, and further appropriated it with an English name.
I backed into yet another Anglo variation on First American food traditions at a convention of wild-rice growers in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Wild rice, which is not a rice but a native grass that springs up in northern lakes, used to be very expensive because it had to be hand-harvested in the immemorial method devised by Ojibwas, who would bend it over a canoe with a paddle and whack it until the seeds fell into the hull.
That picturesque harvesting method was about to disappear almost completely. Horticulturists had finally succeeded in hybridizing a nonshattering variety of wild rice that could be grown in paddies and harvested by combines, just like real rice and other grains. As excited lecturers pointed out at the Grand Rapids conference, wild rice had until then been left genetically unaltered by human ingenuity. Its seeds, maturing at different rates, would then fall off the seed heads into the lakes where the plants were growing, and therefore couldn’t be harvested all at once. The Ojibwa method accommodated this naturally erratic biology: paddlers knocked down the mature seeds, which were about to fall of their own biological momentum into the lake. The unripe seeds clung to their grass tops and continued maturing. Paddlers had to keep returning for them until they had whacked down the whole crop.
The jubilant horticulturists at Grand Rapids had searched and found strains of wild rice that didn’t shatter, didn’t drop their seeds whenever they separately ripened. The nonshattering seeds clung to the plant so that they could all be harvested in one sweep. This made it possible to collect them like wheat or sorghum seeds.
Prescientific grain farmers had gone through a similar process of selection with rice and wheat and all the other grains in the dawn of human life, making way for an efficient harvest, the single most basic requirement of agriculture and for the settled form of life we call civilization. Now modern science had performed the same miracle with wild rice.
Not long after that meeting, commercial wild-rice paddies were established in California. The retail price of Zizania aquatica plummeted. Wild rice’s future as a normal grain was secure, and only hobbyists and Ojibwa traditionalists continued to gather it in canoes.
By that point in my travels as an inquiring gastroethnographer, I had begun to assume that there would always be surviving examples of a regional food in its historic home, but that I would always be surprised by those foods when I actually saw them in situ. The facts on the ground were almost never what you’d expected as you’d boarded the plane.
In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the seemingly simple pasty, a meat pie brought there originally by Cornish settlers, was a focus of melting-pot controversy. The descendants of miners from Cornwall argued among themselves about whether an authentic pasty had to contain rutabaga, or if the chopped meat was un-Cornish without pork, or how fine to chop that meat. Some folks pulled the crust up from both sides and crimped it together at the top; others pulled it over from one side. These were good-natured arguments among kin. But a preponderance of pasty-proud Cornish-Americans around the pasty mecca of Marquette did not take kindly to late-coming Finnish immigrants and their descendants, who had adopted the pasty as their own in the Upper Peninsula and “mongrelized” it, or so it was said, with features of meat pies they remembered from Finland.
Hunting down the Key lime in south Florida, we drove from Miami to Key West, through a fog of disinformation propagated by hucksters for the indigenous Key lime pie. Very few producing trees of this small, spherical, green-skinned citrus fruit had survived the hurricane of 1926, none of them in commercial groves. And the groves had never been replanted.
So unless you knew someone with a backyard tree, the Key lime pie you were eating in Islamorada or Key Largo or anywhere else in this country, we established, had been made with the juice of the Tahiti or Bearss lime, the lemonlike citrus hybrid (sold green to make it easy for shoppers to distinguish it from true lemons) that is the lime of commerce in the United States.
When you squeeze a lime for a lime rickey or cut a section of a lime for a gin and tonic, it is a Tahiti lime—and, in the terms used by botanists and ordinary people outside this country, it is not a lime at all. The lime we call Key is the lime everyone else on the planet calls a lime, and it is also tastier and limier than the Tahiti.
Key lime pies containing Tahiti juice are, as I demonstrated in a side-by-side bake-off with a genuine Key lime pie, far less deliciously tangy than the real thing. And that real thing, the all-but-vanished Key lime, was in fact, further research showed, not in the remotest danger of disappearing from the planet. Indeed, it was flourishing from Mexico to Asia. Truth to tell, in most places not corrupted by marketing of faux Key lime pies and juice or of Tahiti limes, C. aurantifolia is the only known lime.
Such botanically wrong mislabeling is not exactly criminal, but it is as rife as shoplifting, and I did my best in Natural History to correct the misnomers that filled supermarket aisles.
Don’t get me started about the yam, a large African root vegetable with white flesh, completely unrelated to and unlike the sweet potato, a usually yellow-fleshed Andean native often served on Thanksgiving tables as candied yams.
Similar confusion has helped keep Americans from enjoying one of the great native fruits, the small delectable persimmon that grows on big, hardwood trees of the ebony family from Florida and Texas to Central Park. But a blitzkrieg of marketing has filled market shelves with big sloppy Japanese kaki persimmons, while our superior American persimmons fall to the ground unattended and go smash.
I went to Brown County in southern Indiana, hard by the hamlet of Gnaw Bone, having been alerted to the presence thereabouts of Diospyros virginiana by those fellow stalkers of regional American specialties, Jane and Michael Stern. I roamed until I found the orange fruitlets, some already fallen, others pluckable from low branches, in an abandoned field—abandoned, that is, except by a feral dog, who bit me for intruding on his turf. I even was able to buy the misnamed, brownie-like persimmon pudding, for which Gnaw Bone is modestly renowned.
The renown would be much greater if misinformation—really plain old bad science masquerading as folk wisdom—had not kept this fine fruit from finding a market. It is simply not true that the native persimmon remains unacceptably astringent until the first frost, by which time many of the fruits have fallen from the tree, bruised themselves, rotted or been eaten by quadrupedal scavengers or frugivorous birds. Biology has also been, for the fruit of D. virginiana, a hampering destiny. The little orange orbs are overly endowed with seeds. The galumphing, often seedless kaki is much easier to eat.
Misnomer and its evil cousin fraud have also undercut the careers of two celebrated hunters’ ragouts, Brunswick stew and burgoo. I was able to run down a 1907 recipe for Brunswick stew that allegedly preserved a dish invented by a black servant, Jimmy Matthews, on a hunting expedition into the woods of Brunswick County, Virginia, in 1828. Matthews served his white masters a squirrel stew. The heirloom recipe is clear on this point.
But you will basically never get squirrel in Brunswick stew today unless you shoot the squirrels yourself. The same is true of burgoo, an Ohio River valley specialty, whose name, derived from “bulgur,” was originally applied to porridge by sailors who had encountered bulgur on shore leave in the Levant. In Kentucky and southern Indiana and Illinois on the other bank of the Ohio, burgoo once contained squirrel, but hasn’t for many decades.
I tasted the peppery meat (chicken and beef) soup in the plain-faced river town of Owensboro, Kentucky, where serendipity led me to Hardman’s, a very unpretentious restaurant at which burgoo is a sideline. At Hardman’s, as at fifteen other places in a city then claiming fifty thousand inhabitants, mutton barbecue was the draw. Two dressed ewes hung in a cold storage locker in back. The ewes were stand-ins for the bison that had led the menu at Catholic parish barbecues in the region in the nineteenth century. When they ran out, the organizers of Owensboro fund-raising barbecues substituted old ewes, whose flesh is thought to stand up as nicely to open flame as the flesh of American buffalo.
The only other time I’d eaten mutton was as a Times reporter in the cell block at the Brooklyn House of Detention. The slow-cooked, smoky mutton in Owensboro was a huge improvement, although the little restaurant was really a dump, with piles of old newspapers filling a couple of the ten or twelve seats. The dead ewes in the cooler added an eldritch touch, as did a third ovine sizzling away in an open fire, which the place’s sole employee kept under control with a garden hose. A defunct Philco twelve-inch television from the Eisenhower era watched over the scene like an evil eye, lacking only a test pattern or an episode of Kukla, Fran and Ollie or Captain Video to complete the time warp.
Seedy mise-en-scènes were often a backdrop to research into regional American foods. What was the nadir of these expeditions to the hinterland?
It was the coat closet (officially the evidence locker) in the grim stone jail in Franklin County, Virginia, where I tasted seized moonshine from repurposed plastic soda bottles at the invitation of Sheriff W. Q. Overton. Franklin was said to be the leading bastion, and one of the last, of untaxed hooch distillation in America.
On the basis of this dégustation, I opined that moonshine was a first cousin of grappa, then beginning its rise to chic, with the same distinctive sour flavor, the result of a similarly thrifty, rustic style of production. Unlike manufacturers of politer forms of distilled spirits, grappa makers and moonshiners did not throw out the initial spurt from the still (“the first puke,” in Appalachian argot). This contains aldehydes, chemical components of alcohol that give both drinks, as well as their French (marc) and Spanish (orujo) cousins, their defining taste (“sourheads”).
But moonshine got no respect, while grappa and marc graced fancy menus in Europe and increasingly in the United States.c I lamented this state of affairs and called for a national movement to encourage the legal manufacture and sale of moonshine. I also, unwisely, quoted a local newspaper editor who’d accused the publisher of a rival paper of fronting for the moonshine interests. Perhaps under the influence of the homemade booze in the jailhouse, I’d neglected to give the accused publisher a chance to defend himself. He, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia, sued me and Natural History for libel. The magazine, which carried no libel insurance, settled the case by paying a modest sum to the ex-prosecutor and persuading me (with the threat of leaving me to defend myself in a Virginia court) to sign a humiliating and false retraction published in Natural History.
I may have reached an even lower point as Natural History’s plant sleuth at the sloshed, sunbaked chili cook-off in the Texas ghost town of Terlingua, near a desolate stretch of the Rio Grande, where Texas Rangers waited for the drunk, self-appointed saviors of the U.S.-Mexican border’s signature dish to weave into the night and fail a Breathalyzer test.d
A tall Humpty Dumpty kept flashing his Vietnamese driver’s license to catch my attention long enough to try to sell me a box of his own commercial chili mix. And then there was the young man in a T-shirt that promoted a regional dish that had hopped the river from Mexico. The illustration made no sense until you read the caption under it on the shirt: “If God didn’t want Man to eat pussies, why did he make them look so much like tacos?” While noncooking young women competed in a wet T-shirt contest and some young men took their pants off for a hairy leg competition, other very serious chiliheads stirred their pots. I watched the chili cooks closely and ended up admiring their dogmatic efforts to preserve the purity of a popular but often misunderstood regional dish. Texas chili, by the rules of the cook-off and according to the universal belief of Texas chiliastes, may contain no vegetable other than the onion. This exclusionary principle focuses the dish on its essential ingredient—beef—and segregates it from other regional chilis, such as New Mexico’s, which contain beans.
So the wild, red-faced revelers at Terlingua, like the downmarket mutton-barbecuing Catholics in Kentucky and the Dogpatch, Virginia, moonshiners, were doing their part to uphold honorable food traditions, even if it meant risking trouble with the law in locations you wouldn’t want your daughter to visit. I quite enjoyed the seediness and kept out of trouble with the law, although I was anxious about that libel retraction in Natural History, since it appeared soon after I had been hired to create a daily Leisure and Arts page for the Wall Street Journal.
Apparently, none of my new colleagues at the Journal read Natural History, or cared about the retraction if they did notice it. For the next nineteen years (1983–2002), I ran an eclectic page with articles that ranged over pretty much anything that wasn’t economic or political news.
For twelve of those years, until I retired from Natural History in 1994, I continued to write that magazine’s food column. At the Journal, I made it a practice not to write about food, thinking that it was wiser to keep my arts journalism as separate as possible from my lingering career in food. I was concerned about diluting my authority as a cultural editor with a confusing presence in the paper as a food writer.
This policy, it seems, was not important to anyone but me. My boss, Robert L. Bartley, the neoconservative editor of the Journal, who ran the paper’s three opinion pages (the editorial page, the oped page, and my page), never complained about my outside food column or the cookbooks I wrote while working for him. In fact, I think it increased my value in his eyes that I had a separate identity outside his world.
The Natural History column got written on weekends, and it continued to evolve in new directions through the 1980s and early 1990s, until I decided I’d done whatever I had it in me to do with it. I wouldn’t have been able to put a succinct label on what I’d been doing, until the summer of 1981. That July, I flew to England to participate in the first public meeting of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, a weekend conclave of food historians, journalists, cooks and foodies from Britain and the rest of the world. I didn’t know it then, but I would continue going to the Symposium almost every year thereafter, presenting papers, making friends and shaping this new intellectual force in the world of food as it shaped me.
In Oxford, for the first time, I found colleagues with a passion for studying food—and I found myself.
The Symposium had started out as a series of seminars on the “impact of science on the kitchen” at St. Antony’s College, a relative upstart in Oxford founded in 1950 up the Woodstock Road from the medieval center of the university. The Symposium’s original subject derived from the research of a highly unusual fellow, in both senses of the word. Alan Davidson, a retired British diplomat who had invented the field of gastroichthyology with practical guides to the seafood of the Mediterranean and Asia (including Laotian Fish and Fish Cookery), was the Alistair Horne Fellow at St. Antony’s for the academic year 1978–79.
Davidson’s sponsor in this unorthodox intrusion upon the college’s normal diet of graduate research in the social sciences and international relations was Theodore Zeldin, a social historian of France. Davidson was not only intellectually eccentric in his focus on food but eccentric in the normal way, given to turquoise vintage sports jackets, an antique Bentley, Laotian string bracelets and the American screwball comedies of his youth, with which he was utterly besotted.
From their start in May 1979, the seminars attracted a diverse group of “students,” from the physicist Nicholas Kurti to Britain’s leading food writer, the literate and opinionated (“I hate people who eat duck at lunch”) Elizabeth David.
Although the first series of symposia stuck to their technical subject—investigating the work of eminent food scientists of the past; Count Rumford, the inventor of the modern oven; and Justus von Liebig, the father of the bouillon cube—these were not conventional academic sessions. Word spread quickly. People who had theretofore pursued their interest in food history on their own now found a meeting place and flocked to it: restaurateurs, cooking teachers, food-oriented antiquarian booksellers, gastronomes—among them American expats and Dutch intellectuals.
The unexpected demand for places, and for continuing the program beyond Davidson’s fellowship year, persuaded Zeldin and Davidson to create an annual symposium at St. Antony’s that could welcome a sizable crowd.
The first of these meetings took place in 1981. Roughly 150 people attended, among them J. J. Flandrin, the doyen of French food historians; Rudolf Grewe, the editor of the first European cookbook, the fourteenth-century Catalan treatise I Sent Sovi; the food editor of the London Observer, Paul Levy; the Arabist and Rolling Stone writer Charles Perry; two American cookbook authors who had married rich and titled Englishmen;e a cookbook dealer; a cookbook shoplifter; experts on the cuisines of Sumatra, the Balkans, precolonial New Zealand; a colorful assortment of serious foodies;f and me.
I had persuaded Alan Ternes that I should cover the first international conference ever held in my “field.” He agreed and kept sending me right through the end of my column, fourteen years later. That first year, right away in the registration line, I knew I was among real colleagues for the first time. Up until then I had been working in a vacuum. Here was a room full of people who’d been doing the same thing in isolation from one another. Now we were a community, all in one place, chattering away. And the name for what we were chattering about came to be “food history.”
The topic of that intellectual love feast was National and Regional Styles of Cooking. And the papers were appropriately all over the map. Several were in French, among them Marie-Claude Mahias’s analysis of Jain meals in northern India. But the papers weren’t, and never have been, the only purpose of the Symposium, which is not a conventional academic meeting.
In the Symposium’s early years, there were no academic programs in food history or food studies. The whole idea of food history was a renegade notion, even a laughable notion in the hidebound world of university history departments. The professional scholars in attendance at that first symposium had not made their careers with their articles on food (with the exception of a few mainstream historians who had published or edited texts that happened to touch on food). The majority of the symposiasts were amateurs, serious intellectuals but amateurs nonetheless. In those days, no symposiast expected to advance an academic career with a paper she had submitted to this fledgling organization.
The structure of the meeting was deliberately informal. Papers were not read in their entirety—not read, in fact, at all but briefly summarized by their authors, usually in a panel with authors of essays with related subjects.
Plenary sessions in 1981 were even less structured. Basically, we sat in the dining room of St. Antony’s and tried out our ideas on one another. It reminded me of a freshman-year bull session, but these were adults who knew things. Maria Johnson knew everything about the intricacies of Balkan regional foods, as an emigrant fluent in all the many languages spoken in this literally Balkanized former Ottoman territory. Sarah Kelly, a San Franciscan transplanted to German-speaking Europe, had made an encyclopedic study of baking in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and shared it with us, analytically.
In the background, Alan Davidson and Theodore Zeldin hovered benignly. Neither of them ever gave a paper or joined in the discussions much. They were conducting a social experiment as well as a mildly subversive scholarly meeting. The Symposium had a deliberately unhierarchical, Summerhillian, sixtyish air of freedom and classlessness. Davidson and Zeldin were just Alan and Theodore. The Saturday lunch was a potluck affair, for which local symposiasts brought food from home and shared it in the most cosmopolitan display of exotic dishes anyone has ever seen under one roof. This lasted for years, until U.K. regulations about food served in public places snuffed it out. At the end of each year’s weekend, there was a plenary session in which suggestions from the floor for the next Symposium were discussed and put to a vote. And if Theodore did somehow manage to guide the ultimate choice of topic in a direction he favored, the process was still public and nominally democratic.
I liked this libertarian approach to the intellectual study of sensuality. It suited my situation as an intellectual operating outside academia. The Symposium, as deliberately uninstitutional as an institution could be, seemed almost tailor-made for me. It did not offer me a career path, as an academic department would have. It was more like a club, in which all the members shared my previously idiosyncratic passions and pursuits.
But it lasted for only one weekend, once a year. And during the next twenty years, I was only a part-timer in the food world. For those two decades, I worked for Dow Jones & Co. Before I joined its Wall Street Journal, in my first real job since I’d left the Times in 1973, I edited a dreadful Dow Jones magazine called Book Digest. It was a magazine I’d never even heard of, and my connection with it began, fittingly, with a phone call from a man I’d never heard of either.
Francis X. Dealy, Jr., a dramatically good-looking former ad salesman, ran the business side of Book Digest, which did its tacky best to copy the Reader’s Digest formula in the world of books. Basically, it ran excerpts of best sellers. I’m not sure I quite understood this, even after “Bud” Dealy tried to explain it to me. But I needed a job. I made an impressive enough living for a freelance journalist and writer of books, but that wasn’t saying much. And I had two children in an expensive private school in New York City. So I accepted Bud’s invitation to interview for the top editor’s job.
I was in the competition because Peter Kann, the anointed successor to Warren Phillips as the Dow Jones chairman, had known me at the Harvard Crimson in the early 1960s and was a fan of mine. Phillips and Kann were about to hire a woman from the staff of Ms. magazine, Ruth Sullivan, to run Book Digest. In a final interview, as Ruth told me years later, they asked her if she’d had any experience editing men. Why, yes, she replied, she had edited Ray Sokolov.
This was true. She had edited a short piece I’d written for Ms. on the French Jewish philosopher Simone Weil.
Kann perked up at the mention of my name. He told Bud Dealy to find me. Bud succeeded, and I was hired.
Life as an executive at a major media corporation was beautiful. My office, on a high floor of a classy building at Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, overlooked Bergdorf’s and offered an unobstructed view above Central Park all the way to the Metropolitan Museum. I had been able to handpick an intelligent and amenable staff. The work was incredibly simple.
Each month, I would scan the best-seller list and buy the rights to reprint a short excerpt from a mix of those and other current books. Technically, such rights are known as second serial rights. First serial rights give a magazine (a serial publication) the right to publish material from a book before it is published. The New Yorker buys first serial rights and pays plenty for them. Second serial rights allow a magazine to publish material from a book after it is published. This is not a lively marketplace, but we managed. The problem was to sell subscriptions to readers and to sell ads. Our readers tended to be women over fifty living in retirement communities, a highly undesirable demographic.
This was dispiriting, but the end came soon. By the beginning of the summer of 1982, Dow Jones had shut down the magazine and fired the entire staff, except me.
Peter Kann said to me cheerfully, “You’ve wrecked our magazine. Come downtown and see what you can do to our newspaper.” There ensued a kind of nirvana.
After some initial weeks with the Wall Street Journal news department, during which I wrote front-page features on the kiwi and tofu,g I moved upstairs to the neoconservative editorial page, where I’d been an occasional contributor of book reviews for years. Bob Bartley needed somebody to create a daily arts page, and he picked me.
I foresaw, correctly, that it would be easy and fun to fill a single page of the Journal every day by soliciting three to four pieces, mostly from freelances. New York was teeming with talented, lively cultural writers. Good ones needed only light editing. The less good ones I could edit without strain. In fact, I found it positively rejuvenating to rewrite a swatch of lame copy. It took me back to my twenties at Newsweek, when I often was assigned to take a file from a bureau reporter and, as we used to say, run it through my typewriter.
So life was a dream and stayed that way for me for nineteen years. All that time I worked at the same job, for the same intelligent boss. I disagreed with his political and economic views, but I could easily ignore his loony passion for supply-side economics, and he just as easily—actually, more easily—paid no attention to my views on classical music.
Also, the job came with an expense account. Like every other editor in town, I needed to meet with writers, and that is how I managed to stay current with the New York restaurant scene during the 1980s and 1990s. It was much better than being a restaurant critic. I ate only at good places, and I didn’t have to write reviews. For most of this period, I continued to think about food for my Natural History column, and I produced four cookbooks, while I watched the food trends of the 1970s explode into the glamour scene of star chefs and the TV food hysteria of today.
* I had in mind, as well, a fictional Rachel, a probably Jewish prostitute turned actress in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. That Rachel’s name is part of an elaborate tangle of references: to the biblical heroine and to the historical actress of the same name.
Proust linked the fictional Rachel with his own life and with the contemporary Parisian opera scene when he had her aristocratic lover, the character Robert de Saint-Loup, refer to her as “Rachel, quand du Seigneur” (Rachel, when from the Lord). This was the first line of the popular aria from Fromental Halévy’s opera La Juive (The Jewess).
This was not simply a throwaway cultural allusion for Proust. Halévy’s daughter Geneviève married the composer Georges Bizet. Their son, Jacques, was pursued amorously by Proust at the Lycée Condorcet. After Georges Bizet died, Geneviève Halévy Bizet married a Rothschild-connected banker named Émile Straus and presided over an elegant salon, at which Proust was a frequent guest. He used Madame Straus as one of the models for the duchesse de Guermantes, the aunt of Proust’s Rachel’s Saint-Loup in In Search of Lost Time.
† “It is Michel Guérard who is France’s true pioneer of low-fat, high-pleasure cuisine,” said Newsweek. “Joyful penitence for the overindulger,” declared Gael Greene in New York magazine. “An assault on the twin modern enemies of trenchermen: calories and cholesterol,” opined Joseph Wechsberg in the New Yorker.
‡ He had them still in 2011.
§ They never ate or heard about such fancy food, of course, but even their shtetl-Yiddish culinary vocabulary could reflect Escoffier’s jargon from time to time. My grandmother’s chopped-meat kutlett was a country cousin of côtelettes de veau Pojarski. Both of these patties were invigorated with chopped onion. Both emanated from the Russian empire. Pojarski, by legend, improvised the first of his eponymous patties for Czar Alexander I (who ruled from 1777 until 1825) out of veal, because he didn’t have any beef for the chops the autocrat was demanding. Evidently, Pojarski didn’t have veal chops either, but he ground up the meat he did have, perhaps veal shoulder, and then formed the chopped meat into the shape of a chop (côtelette or, literally, riblet). Grandma Mary knew nothing about any of this, had never heard of Pojarski and made no effort to shape her oniony beef kutletts (stressed on the last syllable) into chops.
‖ After Suzanne Reichenberg (1853–1924), a French actress whose stage name was Suzette. In 1897, she played a crêpe-making maid at the Comédie Française.
a http://www.whitings-writings.com/essays/chez_panisse.htm
b Fingers took the palm.
c Orujo never made much of a splash outside Spain, but it is well worth asking for in Spanish restaurants.
d This was developed by an Indiana policeman named Robert Borkenstein, later a professor at Indiana University. The Breathalyzer was preceded by Rolla Harger’s invention of the Drunkometer in 1931.
e Such unions inevitably remind me of the lead-in to the daytime U.S. radio soap opera Our Gal Sunday, which I listened to devotedly during many bedridden weeks with severe cases of all three traditional children’s diseases: “Once again, we present Our Gal Sunday, the story of an orphan girl named Sunday from the little mining town of Silver Creek, Colorado, who in young womanhood married England’s richest, most handsome lord, Lord Henry Brinthrope. The story that asks the question: Can this girl from the little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?” The answer, on air as in life, was: Not always. The theme song was “Red River Valley.”
f The term “foodie,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was coined by Gael Greene in New York magazine in 1980, but the Symposium’s Paul Levy and his coauthor, Ann Barr (also present at St. Antony’s in 1981 and later years), made it famous in The Official Foodie Handbook (1984).
g After the kiwi article appeared (the fruit is really the Chinese gooseberry, but because the first big crops came from New Zealand, it was branded after New Zealand’s mascot, the flightless bird called kiwi in Maori), I learned from a reader’s letter that “kiwi” was airline slang for a terminated flight attendant (wings clipped). And, as part of my research on tofu, I got a hilarious quotation from my friend Maddie Lee about tofu tempura: she called it “deep-fried nothing.”