A Cook's Tour (39 page)

     Then I opened up the
New York Times
and saw that Keller is planning a French Laundry in New York, that he’s moving in across the street from Jean-Georges, down a ways from Ducasse, and realized I’d learned nothing at all.

     ‘Unfinished business in New York,’ said my chef buddies as we sat around a table at a Lower East Side joint.

     ‘Rakel didn’t make it,’ said one friend, regarding Keller’s failed venture in Manhattan many years ago. ‘It was great – but the people weren’t ready for it.’

     ‘Jesus,’ I sputtered, ‘Keller coming to New York . . . That’s an act of aggression! That’s like Wyatt Earp coming to town. Everybody’s gonna be gunning for him. Who wants that kind of pressure? He’s already got it all. New Yorkers go to him! Why come here and have to put up with all the nonsense?’

     Needless to say, when the new place opens its doors, every chef, critic, food writer, serious eater, and casual foodie in the city will have been hyperventilating for weeks. To say the restaurant will be ‘eagerly anticipated’ would be an egregious understatement. I cannot even imagine what will happen. I’m afraid. I’m afraid he’ll fail (if that should happen, it would be for reasons having nothing to do with food, of course). But more, I’m afraid he’ll succeed. I like the idea of having to travel to experience a French Laundry meal. The journey is part of the experience – or was for me – an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent, and the otherness of everything Keller. I liked looking out the window and seeing hills and countryside. I don’t know if I want to be able just to pick up the phone, make a reservation, and, sooner or later, simply hop in a cab and zip down to Columbus Circle. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca. That experience, like the French Laundry, should be a pilgrimage. Not that that will slow me down in the slightest when the new place opens its doors. See you there.

Haggis Rules

‘We’re number two—behind Tonga,’ said Simon, talking about Scotland’s position on the scoreboard recording the incidence of heart disease worldwide. ‘We’ve got to get that sorted out. Where is Tonga anyway? I’ve got to go there!’

     The Scottish, Simon tells me, will deep-fry anything. To prove his point, he was taking me to a chip shop for some ‘suppers.’ We were decidedly not in Edinburgh. ‘Too European . . . too . . . English,’ sneered Simon. They put brown sauce on their fish and chips there, Simon revealed, an outraged look on his face just from remembering the brown home-brewed Kitchen Bouquet or GravyMaster concoction.

     ‘Brown sauce on fish and chips? No, no, no, no, no,’ said Simon. It’s malt vinegar all the way, and plenty of salt for Simon, a proud Glaswegian with a typically sardonic sense of humor. He’d been feeding me Guinness all day and showing me around Glasgow, and now it was time, he said, to visit a proper ‘chippie.’ We ate the traditional fish and chips first, a batter-dipped and deep-fried filet of cod – or more and more frequently, now that the cod population is in decline, haddock – usually served in either a paper cone or a plastic to-go container. ‘You got to get a good bit of salt on it,’ said Simon, following a very healthy sprinkling with a long squirt of malt vinegar. ‘I could eat bloody Elvis – if you put enough vinegar on him . . . S’ magic.’ The fish was great, the chips, as everywhere in the UK, were needlessly substandard, limp and soggy. Few chip shop owners bother to blanch their fries in low-temperature oil before frying, so they are never, ever crisp. The appropriate beverage for this kind of on-the-run Glaswegian repast, said Simon gravely, is Irn-Bru, the popular caffeine-jacked orange-tinted soft drink.

     We were not really here to do the fish and chip thing. The real wonders, the full potential of the Scottish chip shop, lay somewhere deeper: deep-fried haggis with curry sauce. The crispy cigar-shaped tube of sheep guts and oatmeal (more on that later) was wonderful – the perfect late-night munchie food after a long session drinking Red Bull and vodka, pints of heavy, or Buckfast (a cheap screw-top wine: the Ripple of Scotland). The ‘king rib’ – whatever that might be – was delicious, though its actual relationship to ribs seemed in doubt. Prefried orders of haggis, meat pies, sausages, and fish filets were crowded next to one another under bulb-lighted glass, ready to be snapped up by hungry drinkers.

     Everything, everything at the chip shop, went into the same hot oil. Carlo, the counterman, unwrapped a Mars bar, dunked it in the universal batter, and dropped it into the oil. When it floated, golden brown, on the surface, he removed it, sprinkled a little powdered sugar on it, and handed it over.

     ‘Careful,’ said Simon. ‘Inside, it’s bloody napalm.’

     Mmmm. I like grease. I like chocolate. And I like sugar. After addressing any concerns about potential mandibular or maxillary facial damage by allowing the thing to cool down a bit, Simon sawed off a half and presented it to me. It was still tongue-searingly hot – and not bad at all. Simon flashed me an evil smile and enjoyed telling me what was next. ‘Deep-fried pizza?’ I said, ‘Oh . . . I don’t know . . . That’s maybe . . . I don’t know, it seems somehow . . . unnatural.’ I had a hard time believing that anyone would even consider such an atrocity. Sure enough, Carlo took a cold slice of premade frozen pizza, dipped it cheese side down into the batter, and dropped it into the all-purpose trough of grease.

     ‘Not bad,’ I said.

     ‘Wait a minute,’ said Simon as I made to leave. ‘There’s this one thingy we have to try.’ He told a skeptical-looking Carlo to drop a pickled egg into the batter. We were breaking new culinary ground.

     ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t . . . know about this.’

     ‘This is where my granny would go “Holy Mary, mother of God,”’ said Simon, taking a bite and handing me the rest. It was edible. I think one’s enjoyment of the chip shop’s more esoteric delights has a direct relationship to the amount of alcohol consumed prior to eating. Hot, salty, crunchy, and portable, the previously awful-sounding collection of greasy delights can become a Garden of Eden of heart-clogging goodness when you’re in a drunken stupor, hungering for fried snacks. At that precise moment, nothing could taste better.

     Glasgow has a working-class vibe and the familiar feel of parts of Brooklyn or the Bronx. In many ways, it’s the antidote to everywhere else in the world, a city filled with gruff, no-bullshit, often very funny citizens with impenetrable but beautiful accents. On my way into town on the train, I fell asleep near a large group of Glaswegian football fans. When I woke, for a few disconcerting minutes, I thought, listening to the people talking and shouting around me, that I’d somehow stayed on the train too long, maybe slipped across the sea to Lithuania or Latvia or Finland. Only the repeated exclamations of ‘Fook!’ and ‘Shite’ brought me back to the correct time and place. (Note to travelers: Your choice of football team is an important one in Glasgow. Generally speaking, it’s a Catholic versus Protestant thing, I think. Aligning yourself with one team over the other is a ‘once in, never out’ lifelong commitment. They take their footie seriously around these parts. It’s a good idea to sound out one’s friends carefully before saying what might well be the wrong thing.)

     Edinburgh is, in my opinion, one of the most strikingly beautiful cities in the world. There’s a castle sitting on top of a big rock promontory right in the middle of town. The place drips with history, a crowded tangle of cobblestone streets, ancient buildings, beautiful monuments, none of which weigh the town down. It’s got good pubs, and bright, shrewd, very sophisticated, and often lavishly educated folks. I love it there (though I feel more at home in Glasgow).

     This is mean of me, because I’m not going to give you its name – and I’m certainly not gonna tell you where it is – or next time I go, there’ll be a bunch of ‘bloody Yanks’ at the bar – but a friend of mine took me to his local awhile back, on a narrow cobblestone street in Edinburgh. My friend writes very fine novels set in the city, and his fictional hero, a mildly alcoholic civil servant, hangs out at this very real pub – in between murders. If there is a perfect place in the world to drink beer, this is it. It’s a modest, unassuming corner pub with a small sign and smoked windows. One can’t see the interior from the street. Just inside the door are an ancient small bar, weathered wood floors, hand-pumped beers and ales, a few middle-aged geezers drinking pints and chatting with the bartender. In a back room, there are a few tables and an electric fire in the hearth, some fading football posters on the walls. It is a place of perfect stillness and calm, the first sip of ale inspiring feelings of near-transcendental serenity. This was it, the perfect refuge from the modern world, and all its worries. Within moments of hanging my coat on a well-worn hook and sitting down, I turned to my friend and said, ‘I’m never leaving.’ I know it’s terribly unfair of me to be so coy about the place. But don’t worry, Scotland is loaded with great pubs – and I’m sure I’m overromanticizing. I do that a lot.

     For Simon, it’s love/hate with Edinburgh. He was not happy that I’d be having my first real haggis experience there. But he’d found us a very decent place on Edinburgh’s High Street, just down from the castle, and he assured me that even though we were in (to his mind) the second-best city, the chef here knew what he was doing.

     What is haggis, anyway? For one thing, it’s the punch line to a thousand jokes in America. The Thing Never to Be Eaten Under Any Circumstances . . . What Groundskeeper Willie eats . . . It does sound terrifying to the uninitiated: a hot gooey mix of sheep’s ‘pluck’ (the whole esophagus, lungs, liver, and heart, yanked out in one go, then finely ground), oatmeal, onions, and black pepper. This filling is cooked inside a sheep’s stomach (which you don’t eat) and then steamed slowly, covered in the oven, then served with ‘neeps and tatties’ – mashed turnip and potato. As with so many dishes, it originated with the leftovers of the rich landowners – turned into a proud classic by an enterprising and desperate peasantry.

     A kilted bagpiper’s performance preceded the arrival of dinner. (With his graying handlebar mustache, he looked suspiciously like the original ‘Leather Guy’ in the Village People.) Another few seconds of screeching pipes and I’d be reaching into my pocket for a hundred-pound note – just to make him go away. I may love Scotland, but the sound of bagpipes is as alluring as a dentist’s drill hitting nerve. Fortunately, our haggis soon arrived, a big plump flesh-colored steaming balloon, tied at both ends and rupturing slightly in the middle, ground meat and oat mixture spilling out like a slowly erupting volcano. As I quietly struggled for words to describe its somehow violent-looking appearance, the fully costumed piper did me one better, yanking a sharp, menacing-looking dirk out of his scabbard, approaching the near-to-bursting membrane, and swinging right in to Robert Burns’s ‘Address to the Haggis.’ I couldn’t follow too many of the words, though I did catch the phrases ‘gushing entrails’ and ‘a wondrous, glorious sack,’ and then the piper slit the stomach fully open with his blade and retreated, leaving us to enjoy our guts.

     After one mouthful, I couldn’t disagree with Scotland’s greatest poet. It was glorious. Haggis rules! Peppery, hot, meaty – it didn’t taste of anything you might expect in a dish cooked in stomach. Not really tasting organlike at all, no bitter livery taste, no chewy mysterious bits, no wet-dog taste of tripe. It was in no way offensive to even the most pedestrian American tastes, but subtle and rich in a
boudin noir
sort of a way. If you can handle
boudin noir
or black pudding, or even sautéed calf’s liver, you will love haggis. The mashed tatties and neeps provided a perfect counter to the hearty, peppery, oniony, oat flavor. The shepherd’s pie in your old high school cafeteria was far more challenging to the palate. If haggis, right out of the oven, didn’t look the way it did, we might all be eating it in America. They’d be serving it from street stands in New York, fried and battered with curry sauce. High-end restaurants would be making ‘haggis sauce’ and ‘
feuilleté
of baby bok choy, Yukon Gold potato, and haggis with a whiskey sauce,’ and stuffing it into metal rings, decorating it with squeeze-bottle designs.

     Scotland has far more to offer hungry pilgrims than grease and guts, however delightful they might be. The Scottish are going through the same foodie gold rush as elsewhere in the UK and Ireland (and Australia) – and, as elsewhere, they are rediscovering what was good all along about their country. The seafood is unbelievable. In Leith, the old waterfront on the firth outside Edinburgh, there are a number of modest-looking seafood joints serving absolutely smashingly good scallops, salmon, mussels, trout, oysters, and other fish from the North Sea, the Atlantic, and Scotland’s many rivers, lochs, and streams. At the most ramshackle, touristy-looking seafood barn, where you’d expect, at best, to get a decent piece of deep-fried or plain broiled fish, they’re piling tasty little stacks of fresh fish on piles of tasty indigenous vegetables – the technique as good as almost anywhere in New York or London, and the raw ingredients frequently better.

     Scottish beef is justifiably famous. And Scottish game – venison, grouse, pheasant, wild hare, and rabbit – is perhaps the best in the world. I capped off my Scottish wanderings outside of Inverness, in the Highlands, on the 25,000-acre estate of the Cawdor family. For a guy like me, it’s hard to fathom how the rich and the upper classes really live – especially when you’re talking about the UK. For Americans, the aristocracy means any talented hustler who’s got more than four cars and a beachfront pile in the Hamptons. In Scotland, I found out, it means something very, very different. The rich talk differently. They all seem to know one another. And in the case of the Cawdors, and Colin, the seventh earl of Cawdor, they tend to go back a ways. His family have been living on this particular Rhode Island-sized expanse of grouse moors, salmon streams, farmland, and forest since the late thirteenth century. There’s a castle in the middle, a structure referred to significantly, if inaccurately, as the residence of ‘Macbeth, the soon-to-be thane of Cawdor.’ The Cawdors were kind enough to let me stay at their Drynachan Lodge, a hunting, shooting, and fishing retreat on their property, where I’d come to eat wild salmon and to try, halfheartedly at first, to kill a helpless little bunny rabbit or two.