A Cook's Tour (5 page)

                                             
He kicked and he struggled

                                             
Sprayed blood in my eye

     Looking around the barn, the old man continued playing, throwing it out to the crowd:

                                             
I’m needing some help here

                                             
I can’t do it again

                                             
Will one of you bastards

                                             
Step right on in

     At which point, one of his helpers indeed chimed right in with:

                                             
This beast was a pisser

                                             
A pig with some guts

                                             
When Luis stabbed him

                                             
He kicked me right in the nuts

     This went on for quite a while, accompanied by much eating and drinking. I tried to eat lightly – a difficult thing to do in Portugal.

     A few hours later, we gathered around two large tables in the farmhouse for a hearty lunch of
caldo verde
, kale soup. Very different from the chunky soup studded with potatoes, kale, beans, and sausage that I remember from my early days on Cape Cod. ‘That’s Azores people’s food,’ said José. This was a smoother concoction of chorizo-flavored kale, potato, and stock, the potatoes cooked to the point of near emulsification with the finely chiffonaded kale. No discernible chunks and a subtler flavor.

     There must have been thirty assorted family members, friends, farmhands, and neighbors crowded into the stone-walled room. Every few minutes, as if summoned by some telepathic signal, others arrived: the family priest, the mayor of the town, children, many bearing more food – pastries,
aguardente
(brandy), loaves of mealy, heavy, brown, delicious Portuguese bread. We ate slices of grilled heart and liver, a gratin of potato and
bacalhau
, the grilled and sliced tenderloin of our victim, and sautéed
grelos
(a broccoli rabe-like green vegetable), all accompanied by wine, wine, and more wine, José’s father’s red joining the weaker
vinho verde
and a local
aguardente
so powerful, it was like drinking rocket fuel. This was followed by an incredibly tasty flan made with sugar, egg yolks, and rendered pork fat, and a spongy orange cake. I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas – fat, drugged, and completely out of it.

     At the tables, the locals, having yet to finish this meal, were already planning the next one. The Portuguese, if you haven’t gathered this already, like to eat. They like it a lot. ‘You can see why we don’t really eat breakfast in Portugal,’ joked José. The word
svelte
does not come to mind a lot when in Portugal, either as a description or as a desirable goal. One is not shy about second helpings.

     A few hours later, at José’s parents’ house, I was already well into dinner, the other guests yet more members of the Meirelles’s extended family. We started off with freshly toasted almonds from the farm, pickled pearl onions, fried baby sardines, marinated olives and pickles, then moved quickly on to
rojões e papas de sarrabulho
– an amazing soup of bread, stock, fresh cumin, bits of pork, and blood. The blood had been simmered earlier at the farm, until it formed a congealed cake, somewhat like
boudin
, grainy and pudding-textured. Whisked into the soup, it was fabulous. I knew now why José had always insisted on thickening coq au vin with fresh pork blood. We had pork confit with potatoes. We ate
alheiras
(a lightly smoked pork sausage) followed by
bucho recheado
. I was loving this, although hoping for the assistance of a gurney to get me back to my bed when it was all over.

     We got together again the next day for lunch back at the farm. But first, there was work to be done. The pig was cut down, the legs put aside for cured hams. We rubbed them with sea salt, pepper, and garlic, then packed them into a crate in the larder, buried in more salt. The center-cut
poitrine
was laid on top of the salt for a lighter cure. The hams would be removed in a month, then hung, smoked, and dried. Meat was cut large for one kind of chorizo, small for another, then left to hang in the smokehouse. As we broke down the pig, José’s mother hovered, selecting the cuts she’d need for lunch.

     Lunch was
cozido
, a sort of Portuguese version of pot-au-feu: boiled cabbage, carrots, turnips, and confited head, snout, and feet. José made sure I got a hefty portion of each part – and I’ve got to say, pork fat never tasted so good. As is customary, the double-starch rule was disregarded. Both rice and potatoes appeared as sides. Dessert was something called ‘bacon from heaven,’ made, unsurprisingly, of yet more egg yolks, along with sugar and ground almonds. I felt as if I were going to explode. When I was invited to kick around the old bladder ball by the farmhand’s kids, they scored off me at will. I could barely move.

     Dinner was a casserole of tripe and beans. Ordinarily, I don’t like tripe much. I think it smells like wet sheepdog. But José’s mother’s version, spicy, heavily jacked with fresh cumin, was delicious. I mopped up every bite, José demonstrating the Portuguese way to crumble that thick country bread onto the plate, add a little olive oil, and smash every vestige of remaining sauce and scrap into a tasty, greasy, wonderful paste before shoveling it into your mouth.

     I learned a lot about my boss in Portugal, and I had some really good meals. I learned, for the first time, that I could indeed look my food in the eyes before eating it – and I came away from the experience, I hope, with considerably more respect for what we call ‘the ingredient.’ I am more confirmed than ever in my love for pork, pork fat, and cured pork. And I am less likely to waste it. That’s something I owe the pig for. I know now what a pork chop costs in terms of the living, breathing thing that was killed to supply it. I learned to really enjoy tripe – and that there is no part of the animal’s anatomy with which I’m uncomfortable – though I don’t think I’ll be kicking bladder around Riverside Park anytime in the near future. I learned that in José’s Portugal, they never stray far from what they’ve always known to be good. It’s been over a century since anyone needed to cure codfish in salt, for instance, but they still love it. Because it’s good. If you joke with José, and say, ‘José! It’s all pork,
bacalhau
, pork,
bacalhau
, egg yolks, pork – and more
bacalhau
,’ he’ll probably raise an eyebrow, smile, and say, ‘Yes? So? What’s wrong with that?’

     Portugal was the beginning, where I began to notice the things that were missing from the average American dining experience. The large groups of people who ate together. The family element. The seemingly casual cruelty that comes with living close to your food. The fierce resistance to change – if change comes at the expense of traditionally valued dishes. I’d see this again and again, in other countries far from Portugal.

     And I’d seen an animal die. It changed me. I didn’t feel good about it. It was, in fact, unpleasant in the extreme. I felt guilty, a little bit ashamed. I felt bad for that pig, imagining his panic, pain, and fear. But he’d tasted delicious. We’d wasted maybe eight ounces of his total weight.

     It would be easier next time.

Back to the Beach

My younger brother, Chris, is about as different from me as anyone can be. While I’ve spent my whole life living a hand-to-mouth existence, paycheck to paycheck, letting the good times roll, not giving a fuck, a rapidly aging, now-aged hipster, Chris has always been the responsible one, the good son. He never smoked weed. He certainly never did drugs. His hair was never, ever too long or too short for the times. He graduated from an Ivy League school – probably (if I know him) with distinction. I’ve never seen him roaring or staggering drunk. He saved, and continues to save, his money, never having wasted it on a fast car or a loose woman or (as in my case) some cool-looking high-tech surveillance equipment, which looked good in the catalog when under the influence. He owns a house in Westchester, has a beautiful wife and two adorable, bright, and well-behaved children. If he doesn’t drive a Volvo, he probably should. His job, as best as I can understand it, is as a currency specialist for a bank; I think what he does is fly around and advise various South American, European, and Asian investors when to drop dollars and buy yen, when to trade deutsche marks for baht or dong or drachmas. If there’s an evil streak in there, I have yet to find it. And I’ve been looking my entire life.

     Chris has no particular reason to love me. I bullied him without mercy as a child, tried, in a fit of jealous rage, to bludgeon him to death as an infant (fortunately for us both, my chosen instrument was a balloon), blamed him constantly for crimes of which I was invariably the true perpetrator, then stood by and listened gleefully as he was spanked and interrogated. He was forced to watch the endlessly unfolding psychodrama at the dinner table when I’d show up late, stoned, belligerent, a miserable, sullen, angry older brother with shoulder-length hair and a bad attitude, who thought Abbie Hoffman and Eldridge Cleaver had it about right – that my parents were fascist tools, instruments of the imperialist jackboot, that their love was what was holding me back from all those psychedelic drugs, free love, and hippie-chick pussy I should have been getting had I not been twelve years old and living at home. The fights, the screaming matches, the loud torments of my painful and pain-inducing early adolescence – he saw it all. And it probably screwed him up good. On the plus side, however, I had taught the little bastard to read by the time he was in kindergarten. And I did keep my mouth shut when he finally decided he’d had enough and coshed me over the head with a pig-iron window counterweight.

     There were, I guess, at least some good memories of growing up with Tony, and I think our summers in France as kids might have provided some of them. Each of us had been, for most of those times, the only English-speaking company the other had had. We hung out together, explored the little town of La Teste, spent hours playing army with little green plastic men in the back garden of my aunt’s house there. We traded
bandes dessinées
, Tintins, Lucky Lukes, and Asterixes, played with firecrackers, and, when really bored, ganged up on my poor mother. Surprisingly or not, over the years we’ve become very close. When I suggested a trip together down memory lane, Chris didn’t hesitate.

     ‘Let’s do it,’ he said. It was probably the most madcap thing he’s ever done.

     The idea was to leave our loved ones behind and, just the two of us, reexperience the France of our youth. We’d visit the house in La Teste. We’d eat in all the same places in town, and in neighboring Arcachon. We’d go out at the crack of dawn to the oyster parks in the
bassin
where I’d enjoyed my first all-important oyster and had my first real food-related epiphany. (Chris actually ate and liked the tasty bivalves now.) We’d climb the dune of Pyla again, gorge on sugary pastries (without having to ask permission), drink as much Bordeaux as we pleased, buy lots and lots of firecrackers and throw them into the German blockhouses we’d played in as kids at the beach. Who could hinder our good time now? Who could stop us?

     We’d gorge on
saucisson à l’ail, soupe de poisson
, big bowls of hot chocolate with buttery baguettes – and we’d drink as many Kronenbourgs and La Belles and Stellas as we damned well pleased. I was forty-four; Chris was forty-one. We were grown-ups now: a respected currency analyst and a best-selling author. Our mother was in New York and had decades ago given up trying to correct our behavior. Our father, though never really a disciplinarian, had died back in the eighties. We could do whatever we wanted. We were free to act like children again. It was the perfect way and the perfect place, I thought, to look for the perfect meal, in our old stomping grounds near the beaches of southwest France.

     We met in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Chris coming from Switzerland, I from Portugal. Together, we drove in a rented car to Arcachon, stopping only for
gaufres
, the hot waffles covered with powdered sugar, which we’d gotten as a postbeach treat as kids. We could eat as many as we wanted now. It’s mostly flatland in the southwest – mile after mile of pine trees, planted over a century ago to dry up the mosquito-infested marshes and to keep the long strip of seaside dunes from burying the interior in sand. There’s not a lot to look at, but we were happy enough recognizing the familiar names on the signs, smelling French diesel fuel again, getting closer and closer to a place we hadn’t been to together in over twenty-eight years.

     It was night when we arrived in Arcachon, the summer resort town next door to the tiny oyster village of La Teste-de-Buch. It was January, about as off-season as off-season can be: cold, windy, with a constant drizzle of penetrating, bone-chilling rain. When considering the heady, sentimental, exciting implications of recapturing the past, I’d overlooked such earthly matters as temperature and precipitation – and the fact that we’d very likely be freezing our asses off in a boarded-up ghost town. We checked into a dark, drafty clapboard and chintz House of Horrors hotel on the water, an insane tchotchke-filled barn, decorated with Art Deco stained glass, fake Tiffany lamps, Austro-Hungarian figurines, moldy carpets, rococo furniture, and absolutely no other guests. Picture Norman Bates operating a ‘romantic getaway’ in the Catskills, off an old, no-longer-used highway, and you’ll get the idea.
Depressing
is not sufficient to describe it. Outside my window, beyond a concrete patio and a pool filled with floating clumps of dead leaves, the Bay of Biscay lay flat and gray, a few fishing boats scudding along its surface, the beach empty except for a few gulls, the lights of Cap Ferret winking in the black distance across the water.