SEPTEMBER 2005
I read cookbooks. I am addicted to them. I keep a pile on the floor of my study in New York, knowing that if I manage to write a couple of decent pages I can treat myself to a $4.50 Chinese lunch special in the company of Richard Olney or Jasper White or Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, thinking of all the succulent things I would cook for dinner if I didn’t have to go back to work in the afternoon. I keep another pile on my bedside table, knowing that if I wake in the middle of the night I can pick one up and drift off into a soothing dream of Joël Robuchon’s mashed potatoes or Claudia Roden’s pumpkin dumplings or Marcella Hazan’s red-and-green polenta torta, with a layer of onions, pine nuts, and ground pork between the spinach and the tomato. In my kitchen dreams, there are no crises. My books preclude them. The leg of lamb is never withering in the oven, waiting for a late guest. The chicken pot pie never collapses under the tug of its own crust. And I have sous-chefs—I think of them as husbands—standing quietly behind me, ready to shuck the oysters, stir the cornmeal, pit the olives, pound the pesto, grind the achiote, whisk the sabayon, or at a nod, fly to my side, like angels, bearing sieves and spoons and spatulas, Thai fish pastes and fresh banana leaves and rare Indonesian spices and thick French pots so well calibrated that the butter browns without turning into cinders. My own husband, who is an anthropologist, finds my passion for cookbooks peculiar, something on the order of my addiction to thrillers and crossword puzzles. When we were first married, he would leave a copy of the Tractatus on my pillow, hoping that Wittgenstein would cure me. But Wittgenstein, of course, kept me up worrying about reality. My cookbooks are more like the lipsticks I used to buy as a tenth grader in a Quaker school where not even hair ribbons or colored shoelaces were permitted. They promise to transform me.
Some fifteen hundred cookbooks are published in America each year, and Americans buy them by the millions—no one knows exactly how many. Barbara Haber, who was the curator of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard for thirty years—and in the process invented the history of women and food—once told me that the sales figures for cookbooks are one of the real mysteries of the publishing business, perhaps because small presses with a cookbook or two in their catalogues don’t always report those figures separately. But one thing seems clear: the only people who can touch us, when it comes to writing and buying cookbooks, are the British, and they are only just beginning to catch up. Until a few years ago, not even the French were much interested in cookbooks. The great professional chefs inherited the old French classics, but a Parisian bride, say, could expect to find one good copy of Escoffier, from a godmother or an aunt, among the wedding presents (brides in the South got La Cuisinière Provençale, known in France as “that yellow book” because of its shiny yellow cover). And for her kitchen, that amounted to the canon. Italians rarely admitted to buying cookbooks or, for that matter, to consulting the classics that were their—and their mothers’ and grandmothers’—wedding presents. Those books had names like Il Talismano della Felicità or La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene, which was written in the 1890s, and includes, in its section on dolci, a recipe for a Roman pudding said to be as “seignorial” in its pleasures as the puddings from Turin or Florence. (I think of those books as Italian versions of the Christian-housewife marriage manuals that used to advise women to greet their husband at the door at night wearing a black lace teddy and carrying a shaker of cold martinis.)
But Americans have been buying cookbooks since the eighteenth century, and by now it seems as if half the people who ever read one eventually write their own. There are more new cookbooks in my local Barnes & Noble than there are new biographies or novels. There are 17,000 cookbooks listed on Amazon.com; 16,000 cookbooks in Barbara Haber’s archives; and at least 10,000 in the splendid collection at the New York Academy of Medicine. More to the point, there are 12,000 titles (not counting the used books) in stock right now at my favorite bookstore—the small scholarly warren on the upper reaches of Lexington Avenue called Kitchen Arts & Letters. It has to be said that Kitchen Arts’s cookbooks go back to a facsimile of a Mesopotamian cookbook in cuneiform on clay, and that Nach Waxman, who owns the store, is more likely to be reading up on the sixteenth-century Hindu shastra called the Supa Shastra, which “treats of the arts of cookery and the properties of food,” than settling into an armchair with the new Batali. In fact, his perennial bestseller isn’t even a cookbook; it is a book called On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee, which involves a lot of biology and chemistry, and not a single recipe.
Every man I know who cooks seriously owns McGee, but I am less interested in how things work than in how they taste and whether they taste perfect. And never mind the theories that would have me the victim of some late-capitalist delusion that it’s possible—indeed, my American birthright—to put a purchase on perfection, or even of some embarrassing religion of self-improvement. It is my theory that American women started reading cookbooks because they had left their mothers behind in Europe and never “received” the wisdom that is said to be passed spontaneously from generation to generation, like the gift of prophecy, in the family kitchen. My mother could not cook. She had no interest in cooking, making her about as helpful for my culinary purposes as a mother I would have had to cross the Atlantic to ask, say, if it was all right to substitute Port for Madeira in the sauce for ham on a bed of spinach. Nor could my grandmother cook. I set up housekeeping without benefit of one of those frayed looseleaf notebooks or little black file boxes filled with cards that grandmothers supposedly gave to mothers and mothers copied for their daughters. What’s more, I had married a graduate student—which is to say that we had no money for the Cordon Bleu. I learned to cook from cookbooks.
I bought my first cookbook during a year and a half of fieldwork in Morocco, mainly because I needed a recipe for ras el hanout, the spice mixture I use in couscous, that wasn’t like my friends’ recipes—laced with hashish. (This was the late sixties.) My next cookbooks were the two volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, written by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and (for the first volume) Louisette Bertholle, but quickly known to the world of would-be sixties and seventies cooks as Julia. And the first important dinner I made from them was beef Wellington. This took me two and a half days, owing, among other things, to the fact that my kitchen was so small then that I had to scrub the hall floor in order to roll out the dough for the pain brioché after each rising. (There were two.) I made the beef Wellington for my husband in an effort to dazzle, or perhaps to convince him that despite all evidence to the contrary, I was a doting, domestic sort of person, a woman who squeezed oranges in the morning and wrote discreetly in the afternoon while the foie gras softened and the dough rose. (About twenty years later, he said, “I was just wondering, why don’t we have beef Wellington anymore?”)
It wasn’t long before I persuaded my mother that I could not survive without the Larousse Gastronomique for Christmas, and talked my aunt Beatrice—who was just learning to cook herself and fed us chicken with rosemary and crème fraîche every Sunday—into handing over her new Gourmet cookbooks, two massive volumes in grainy brown bindings that turned out to be as grave and useless as a Britannica yearbook. I don’t remember ever opening the Larousse, but I did make a sweet-potato-and-walnut casserole from one of those old Gourmets and never consulted them again. My addiction to cookbooks properly began a few years later, when I made a pilgrimage to Vienne to eat at Fernand Point’s restaurant, La Pyramide. Point was the greatest French chef of his generation, and his widow had kept the restaurant open in tribute to what he had always referred to, modestly, as “ma gastronomie.” He had written one cookbook, and that of course became the title. The book, which I bought that night, was short, gracious, and taught me two extremely important things about cooking. The first was how much I didn’t know—nap your lobster with a sauce à l’américaine, it said, but what was a sauce à l’américaine, and how did you make it, and was it really American? (Or was it Breton?) The second was not to be frightened of what I didn’t know, because if making a sauce à l’américaine was so simple that, from the point of view of Fernand Point, it didn’t even merit a recipe, then surely I could make one. Not exactly. It took me seven years and, of course, a cookbook. The book was The Saucier’s Apprentice, the author was Raymond Sokolov, and the recipes were so satisfyingly complex that even Simone Beck, a notorious French snob when it came to Americans cooking, had been forced to admit, “This would be a useful book even in France.” I made the sauce in two days of hard labor, preceded by a day of collecting veal and chicken bones from half a dozen butchers and calling neighbors who might be willing to drop by and kill an angry lobster with a chopping knife. But it was a sauce worthy of Fernand Point, and I had been determined to produce one. By now I own more than a hundred cookbooks, and I am determined one day to turn a few plump oysters and some tapioca poached in cream, buried in sabayon, and topped with caviar into a dish worthy of Thomas Keller, whose French Laundry Cookbook actually tells you how to do this if you happen to have six hands.
I feel a certain affinity for Thomas Keller, despite the fact that he is the best chef in America (his “oysters and pearls” and his parsnip soup are hands down the best things I have ever eaten) and has real sous-chefs, and I am merely one of the two best cooks—my friend Juliet Taylor is the other—on the fourth floor of a Central Park West apartment house. We share a weakness for lobster rolls, Reuben sandwiches, hamburger joints, and Fernand Point. “So genuine, so generous, so hospitable” is the way Keller describes Ma Gastronomie, which he first read at the age of twenty, working for a classical French chef at a Narragansett beach club whose members, if my childhood memories serve, usually sat down to dinner three sheets to the wind and unlikely to taste the difference between a homemade demiglace and a can of College Inn. I met Keller in May at his New York restaurant, Per Se, toward the beginning of what I am reluctant to call research. I wanted to talk to cooks who read cookbooks all the time, and to cooks who hated cookbooks, or claimed to. I had already discovered that a couple I know in Los Angeles read cookbooks aloud to each other in bed, as part of what could be called their amatory ritual; and that another couple, in Berlin, nearly divorced over an argument about which cookbooks to pack for a year in Cambridge; and that a friend in New York got headaches just by looking at the teaspoon measurements for thyme and garlic in a coq au vin. I had learned that some of my friends cooked only from recipes they had clipped from magazines and newspapers, and wouldn’t touch cookbooks, and that others cooked only from hardcover books and wouldn’t even touch a paperback, let alone a page torn from the Wednesday food supplement of the Times. Now I wanted to know if the people who cooked for a living and whose food I loved read cookbooks. Keller reads them as well as writes them. He had just bought three new cookbooks on the day we talked, and he keeps the classics in his restaurant kitchens, “for sous-chefs looking for inspiration.” Not many of the great chefs admit to buying three cookbooks on their way to work, especially other chefs’ cookbooks.
Keller began cooking mainly because his mother—who ran restaurants but whose culinary genes started and stopped at “spaghetti and onions tossed with cottage cheese”—handed him an apron when her cook got sick. (A few days later, I was pleased to learn that the mother of Judith Jones, the Knopf editor who had brought me Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, and Irene Kuo, was no better at the stove than mine or Keller’s; she owned one copy of Fannie Farmer, and had a bluestocking’s horror of garlic.) Keller had never really read a cookbook before he drove to Narragansett, hoping to find a job that would float him through a season of America’s Cup partying in Newport. He met his mentor, Roland Henin, on Narragansett Beach, and he says that what he admired most about Henin then was less his stock reductions than the fact that “he was six foot four, French, in his thirties, and had a great-looking girlfriend and his own jeep.”
Jacques Lameloise, the Burgundian chef, tells a French provincial version of the same story. He started cooking only because his older brother, who was expected to take over the family restaurant and its three Michelin stars, got smart and went off to college and was soon running a business of seven hundred people. Jacques, however, hated school. What he liked was hanging around Chagny and playing soccer, and so, faute de mieux, the family consigned him to its famous kitchen. “At first I cooked like I played foot,” he told me when I stopped at Lameloise, in June, to pick up his cookbook and treat myself to his poitrine de pigeonneau rôtie à l’émiettée de truffes, parmentier de béatilles—something I wouldn’t dream of attempting myself, though of course I have the recipe. “There was no sacred flame. It was simply a matter of learning that if you’re going to cook, it’s better to love cooking and to cook well. This idea of genius is overblown.” Lameloise rarely admits to reading cookbooks. Why would I do that? was the look he gave me when I asked. “What I adore is simple things,” he said. “For lunch at home, I will make a lobster salad, then frog’s legs, sautéed the way my father made them, then a côte de boeuf, then a crème caramel. Simple!”
When I saw Frank Stitt, the Birmingham restaurateur who wrote the wonderful cookbook Southern Table, he told me that his recipe for squab—my favorite, with grits and a bourbon red-eye gravy—was “inspired” by eating at local diners where tired truckers would stop for a wake-up meal drenched in ham fat and coffee dregs. “It’s the playful takeoffs I do best,” he said when I told him how much I loved that recipe, if not those last few minutes at the stove, known in the trade as “the assembly,” when everything is supposed to come together. Stitt’s first good cookbook was Richard Olney’s Simple French Food, and he bought it while he was studying philosophy at Berkeley and volunteering in Alice Waters’s kitchen at Chez Panisse. A few days later, he bought his second Olney, and after that it seemed quite reasonable to call his parents in Birmingham to say he was quitting school in the second semester of his senior year to cook. Eventually he went to Provence to work with Olney, who was famously misogynistic and fired Stitt after his girlfriend “started dropping in with a suitcase.” Today Stitt reads food histories and old cookbooks. Charleston Receipts. The old Delmonico’s cookbook. Compilations of New Orleans recipes from the nineteenth century. Not that he keeps them at his restaurants, though he will sometimes cut out a picture from one of Alain Ducasse’s cookbooks—“things like how to cut a lemon”—and show it to his staff. “Remember, most of my staff have never eaten in a great restaurant,” he told me. “So I’m more like a coach to them, or a team leader. I go to the market, see the food, and I click in. The dish comes to me, like a thought to an idiot savant, and I show them how to make it. I am totally unlike, say, Ferran Adrià at elBulli”—Adrià being the Spanish chef with the gadget that turns everything to foam, and whose own cookbook, which comes with a CD, will set you back $350, plus the price of a laptop for the kitchen.
I divide my cookbooks into two categories: the ones I’m not worried about getting dirty—about spilling sauce or spattering fat on the best pages—and the ones like Keller’s, which I tend to think of as coffee-table books, not only because of their size and their gloss and their four-color illustrations but because they seem to have replaced art books as the status offerings you find casually stacked in front of the couch in Manhattan living rooms. I don’t keep cookbooks in the living room, but I treat them cautiously, like a new silk shirt that hangs in the closet for a month before I give in, risk the inevitable spot, and actually put it on. It took me at least a month, more like two, to move Keller onto my kitchen counter, ready for its first splotch and for the careless company of the books I think of as my workhorse cookbooks—homely, tattered affairs with awkward drawings of hands folding ravioli and boning capons.
In Paris this summer, I visited the French-cookbook historians Mary and Philip Hyman, who were hard at work on an Oxford Companion to French Food, and learned that there was nothing new about coffee-table cookbooks. The Hymans had shown me a few of the sixteenth-century workhorses from their collection—recipes lifted from the court classics and sold by street peddlers as soon as there were customers literate enough to read them—and those books were plain little things, like penny dreadfuls, no bigger than four or five inches, that could be carried home in a pocket or a small purse. Then they showed me the books they called the “here’s what’s happening at the table where you’ll never be allowed to sit” cookbooks—the ones that probably never saw a kitchen and lived in the libraries of the new rich, gold-tooled and bound in Moroccan leather, alongside the Virgil and the Voltaire and the folders of Veronese prints and the first editions of Diderot’s encyclopedia. There was Taillevent’s Le Viandier, written in the fourteenth century for Charles V and considered by the French to be the first major cookbook in Europe since Apicius; and La Varenne’s seventeenth-century Le Cuisinier François, which according to the Hymans marked the beginning of modern cooking; and Vincent La Chapelle’s eighteenth-century Le Cuisinier Moderne, in five volumes, written with a certain amount of borrowing from other chefs and filled with engravings of spectacular serving dishes and foldouts of table settings for a hundred guests.
There wasn’t a woman among the writing royal chefs, which may be why none of their books looked used. But by the nineteenth century, when many of those chefs had been reduced to opening restaurants or cooking family dinners in the kitchens of the bourgeoisie, some of them looked to the future and took to writing profitable, practical cookbooks—cookbooks for housewives—although their shame was such that they often published under women’s names. Hence the irresistible Tabitha Tickletooth, an “Englishwoman” whose book was published under the title The Dinner Question, or How to Dine Well and Economically. (“Economically” was not a word likely to burnish the reputation of a male chef de cuisine, moonlighting from a precarious job at an English castle.) The women who actually did write cookbooks then were not important chefs. I like to think of those women as more like me: women who read cookbooks and learned to cook that way. The Americans among them often simply collected recipes from European books and translated them, adding a bit of cautionary down-home commentary. I own a tiny edition of Miss Leslie’s Domestic French Cookery, which was published in Philadelphia in 1832 and stayed in print for the next quarter century, and which I cherish for its recipe for oyster stuffing and its maidenly shudder at the voluptuary French practice of fattening geese.
Authentic American cooking, in all its regional variety and ethnic influences, really came into its own when women’s groups—book clubs, church groups, suffrage groups, daughters-of-this-or-that groups—started putting together “community cookbooks.” Community cookbooks are a purely American phenomenon. They began to appear during the Civil War, written by housewives, North and South, who contributed their best and hitherto secret recipes, published them locally on a shoestring, and sold them to raise money for the hometown troops. And they outlasted the war by at least a century, because for one thing, everyone covets a recipe so good that generations of your neighbor’s family have refused to share it, and because for another, they carried the imprimatur of charity and were considered a respectable womanly pursuit—not likely to produce a bonneted Martha Stewart, abandoning hearth and husband for fame and fortune in the big city. (I like to think that Miss Leslie, whose name was Eliza Leslie, assumed her literary “Miss” in order to reassure her readers that she was not sitting at a desk, neglecting some man’s hard-earned household.) Community cookbooks still account for about half the American cookbooks published, though the ones you find in bookstores now are mainly regional or ethnic cookbooks, not charity books, and the women who put them together, and even the women who contribute recipes, usually want to make a few dollars for themselves. And why not? Charity aside, Mrs. Clarence W. Miles, who contributed “tomatoes brown” to the cookbook Maryland’s Way—tomatoes brown are tomatoes stewed for hours in brown sugar, and they make a gooey treat—deserved to be collecting royalties.
It occurs to me now, sitting in a farmhouse in Umbria, surrounded by thirty new cookbooks recommended by my daughter—a screenwriter and fellow cookbook addict—and wondering when to start dinner, that there is a strong connection between women who write and women who cook and who love recipes. This is something anyone who has read To the Lighthouse knows. It is impossible to follow Mrs. Ramsay through her vegetable garden and into the kitchen for that long braising of the boeuf en daube and doubt that Virginia Woolf read cookbooks, though she was too crafty to say so. It is, however, possible to sit through twenty or thirty of Trollope’s Sunday dinners and never know how the roast got to the table. Henry James never taught me how the Florentines made pasta, Proust never taught me how the cooks in Combray made madeleines, and I don’t remember that Flaubert even mentioned what Emma Bovary made for the doctor on the maid’s day off, let alone how she cooked it. I know how Hemingway grilled the fish he caught, but nothing about how he sauced them or what he did for dessert. I do, however, know what Rachel Samstat cooked in Nora Ephron’s roman à clef Heartburn, because the novel is full of recipes, surely making it the only saga to emerge from Deep Throat Washington whose revelations involve a stove. The list is long. Patrizia Chen’s lovely Italian memoir Rosemary and Bitter Oranges sent me straight to the kitchen with recipes for Livornese fish soup and lemon tea cake. Even Frances Mayes—whose ubiquitous memoir Under the Tuscan Sun has two chapters of recipes—started cooking as a young poet, which may account for some of the poetic license in those recipes; I have yet to read a real Tuscan cookbook or enter a Tuscan kitchen where the olive oil was so often replaced by butter and heavy cream.
Maybe I am an anxious cook, like the woman who famously botched a recipe for “green onions” that she had taken so literally as to throw away all the white parts of her scallions. Not only do I keep buying cookbooks, I usually cook with three or four of them on my kitchen counter, open to different recipes for the same dish. But that is nothing compared with my psychoanalyst friend J. J. Dayle, who cooks from more than two hundred cookbooks, subscribes to (among other things) Cook’s Illustrated, Saveur, and The Rosengarten Report, and stocks forty kinds of sea salt in his kitchen. J. J. Dayle is not his real name, but it’s the name he is planning to use when he writes his cookbook, so that his patients won’t associate their gentle shrink with the man who refers to a great therapy as “like a great dish—something you know, in the first five minutes, where it’s going.” J.J. once drove down the Mediterranean coast sampling the fish soup in every town, and he describes his own bouillabaisse by crying, “I am Samson Agonistes with my soups! God damn it, I have to wrestle them to the floor.”
I was quite comforted by J.J.’s quest for the perfect fish soup. It reminded me of my quest for the perfect sauce à l’américaine. Usually I try to avoid quests. Like most cookbook addicts, I buy a book, read it, and if I’m lucky, find a couple of recipes that sound right, and forget the rest. I can always locate those recipes, because my books fall open to the pages I cook from most, and after ten or twenty years they even fall apart at those pages—which I find convenient. My old Joy of Cooking is split at the Bulgarian cucumber soup and again at the fruit preserves; my Craig Claiborne at the Yorkshire pudding; my Silver Palate at the salmon mousse; my “Julia” at the choucroute garnie; my Madhur Jaffrey at the shrimp curry with the best spices. This is something I wait for—the spine of my first River Café cookbook is just beginning to go, at the zucchini soup and at the penne alla carbonara—the way I wait for splotches. (My latest splotches are on the Circassian chicken in Roden’s Picnic and on the boneless chicken breasts with lemon and capers in Southern Table.) But certain recipes elude me, and I go on quests. A few weeks ago, I almost went on a quest for calamari sauce. I had stopped at a small restaurant on the Lago di Garda called Nuovo Ponte, eaten a wonderfully inky pasta with calamari sauce, and asked the chef, Fiorenzo Andreoli, for the recipe. He wasn’t at all surprised. He had once spent two years in San Francisco, working for an old friend with an Italian restaurant, and he said that the thing he remembered most—the one thing that always made him smile when he met an American—was how everyone in the kitchen besides himself and his friend “cooked with his nose in a cookbook.” He told me that his calamari sauce “just came to me when I started cooking, because this is how calamari sauce is made on the Lago di Garda.” A little aglio, a little olio, a little basilico, he said, when I asked if he couldn’t be more precise.
I don’t usually cook from books in Italy; my garden tells me what to eat and the butcher tells me what he’s got, and I go from there. (Call it a vacation; to me, it’s cold turkey.) But this summer I packed up my new cookbooks and sent them off—and was quite lucky to receive them, inasmuch as they disappeared for ten days and had to be dug out of the customs shed at the Milan airport, where they were held for commercial duty on the ground (roughly translated) that “no one person has that many cookbooks.” I think it was also the exotic titles—Lulu’s Provençal Table, Couscous, Savoring the Spice Coast of India, The Key to Chinese Cooking, Hot Sour Salty Sweet. Italians have no interest in foreign food, and as for their own food—a lot of my new books were Italian—it is considered an insult not only to your mother’s kitchen but to your mother herself to suggest that anyone else’s mother may have cooked better.
In the event, it was impossible to find any of the things I needed to savor the coast of India or make a proper couscous (for one thing, Umbrians do not eat turnips) or to unlock the door to Chinese cooking. In Italy, it is even impossible to sit down to a Provençal table. The one time I tried—I served braised rabbit on a bed of noodles to some Roman neighbors—they said, “Pasta is for before the meat,” and scraped the noodles off their plates. (On their last visit, they arrived with a new black garbage pail as a house gift.) Italians today are arguably more broad-minded than they were in the fifteenth century, when a food-loving papal secretary named Bartolomeo Sacchi was thrown in jail by Pope Paul II as a “sectarian of Epicurus.” (Under a nicer pope and using the pseudonym Platina, he produced the legendary cookbook De Honesta Voluptate.) But they do not willingly eat anybody else’s food.
The quest I am on right now is for the perfect-au-feu—which is to say, a pot-au-feu as good as the one I ate this Easter in New York at the house of my friend Susannna Lea. Susanna is an English vegetarian who never cooks, so it stands to reason that she did not have a great recipe for pot-au-feu at her fingertips, or indeed any interest at all in pot-au-feu. But she is also a Paris literary agent married to a French writer, and having moved to New York last fall, they wanted to serve something ur-French at Easter to their American friends. Susanna’s pot-au-feu was in fact a kind of long-distance literary collaboration between three cookbooks she had bought for the occasion—Patricia Wells’s Bistro Cooking, Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook, and Guy Savoy’s Simple French Recipes for the Home Cook—and one of her Paris clients, a novelist named Marc Levy whose first book, a romance involving a lonely architect and a young woman in a coma, sold so many millions of copies that he went out and bought a six-burner Gaggenau stove and grill and a couple of Gaggenau ovens and started “reflecting,” as he told me himself a few months later, on reinventing pot-au-feu. His version takes at least two days, and he had walked Susanna through it by telephone, starting early on the morning of Good Friday and ending at noon on Sunday. It was very fussy. It involved not only hours of braising—not to mention steaming vegetables one by one over meat broth; poaching marrow bones wrapped in tinfoil; and making a vinaigrette with riced eggs and capers—but also a hunt for beef cheeks, which are not easy to come by if you live in New York, where the only people who sell them are wholesale butchers and you have to buy them in frozen blocks of thirty pounds. Susanna had to give up on beef cheeks, but even so, the work was worth it. I copied the recipe from the back of an old manuscript envelope by the phone on her kitchen counter. My quest began there.
I now own twenty-two recipes for pot-au-feu, if you count the Italian versions of bollito misto, and am halfway through the biography of a Paris film-world hostess whose own recipe was so renowned that the book is called Le Pot-au-Feu de Mary Meerson. What I am really doing is waiting for fall, because it is much too hot in Umbria to cook a pot-au-feu, and anyway, my butcher, who is hard put even to cut a chicken into four pieces, has never heard of anyone eating beef cheeks. He says it is “not Italian.” (He means not within shouting distance of his own shop.) So I am concentrating on calamari, and if I succeed tonight I will not look at another cookbook until I am back in New York making “oysters and pearls.” My husband has offered to do the cooking while I recover. He is (his word) an “instinctive” cook and claims that cookbooks are a waste of time. He goes to the fish store, picks what’s fresh, and makes it in fifteen minutes. It may be that the best recipe I ever got came from M. Picot, the patron of Le Voltaire, my favorite Paris restaurant. I was there in June, and ordered a sole meunière that was so buttery and delicious that I asked M. Picot how he did it. He smiled wisely and said, “Madame, il faut choisir le poisson.”