Eating (13 page)

Roy’s favorite tuna salad may not have strained the resources of the “21” kitchen, but at the far more ambitious Le Cirque, where Roy was also a favorite customer, a can of tuna must have been kept on its elegant shelf awaiting him, or perhaps the chef ruined a fine piece of fresh tuna by dicing and poaching it, mixing it
with mayonnaise, some celery, and onion, and running it for a few seconds through the food processor. I never cooked for Roy, but had I done so I would have opened a ten-ounce jar of Italian tuna, processed it quickly with a spoonful of mayonnaise, some onion, celery, and sherry vinegar and served it with a few capers and a trimmed romaine heart dressed in black pepper and olive oil.

When I joined Random House in 1958, the offices were in the old Villard Mansion, the last such nineteenth-century palace left standing on Madison Avenue, in midtown, and now part of the Palace Hotel. My office was a former bedroom on the second floor with a balcony overlooking the courtyard. The place was charming, with creaking parquet floors and worn carpets, where authors might drop in for a chat unannounced or end a drunken night on one’s office couch. At first there was more than enough space for our small staff. But as the book business expanded and came to rely increasingly on best-sellers, rather than publishers’ accumulated backlists, requiring firms to risk ever more capital to acquire the rights to potentially popular properties, the smaller firms had no choice but to merge with the larger ones. Random House, having acquired Pantheon and then Knopf, had outgrown its old building, and moved with its acquisitions into a glass box on Third Avenue at Fiftieth Street, a few steps west of Lutèce,
New York’s perennially best-in-class French restaurant until its great chef, André Soltner, retired in 1994.

André was from Alsace, and his superb cuisine, service, and ambience reflected his origins. The décor was appropriately luxe but understated for a three-star restaurant: the long garden room, under its barrel-vaulted glass ceiling with its banks of flowers, was springlike throughout the year. The formal rooms on the second floor were in the correct Parisian high style. But the cuisine—celestial home cooking—owed more to André’s Alsatian childhood than to Paris. Lutèce was, of course, expensive, and I dined there at Random’s expense only on the most important occasions. One such time was the publication day of Elaine Pagels’s now classic
Gnostic Gospels,
still in print after thirty years. To celebrate, I ordered a Corton-Charlemagne, shipped by Louis Latour. I forget the year, but the wine was an unforgettable Chardonnay, like one’s first La Tâche of a great year, or the great Conte deVogüé Bonnes-Mares of 1970 that I drank one night at the Connaught in London. What I noticed first was Elaine’s look of shocked surprise. Then I tasted the wine and understood what had happened. Wine experts use the word “complex,” but the actual experience was a melody, a fleeting musical phrase that rose and fell and rose again and slowly drifted away.

One day Jackie Onassis called me to ask if she could take me to lunch at Lutèce. We met a week or so later, on a fine early-spring day. My friend Pete Hamill, who had once taken Jackie out, said it was like “taking King
Kong to the beach.” Jackie was one of those personages whom you do not accompany to a museum lest the visitors forget to look at the pictures. She didn’t flaunt her celebrity but accepted it in good humor as the price to pay for being herself. We took a table upstairs, in one of the small rooms, and ordered shad roe, the first of the season. She asked if there was a job for her at Random House. She wanted to be an editor. She was obviously serious, and would attract interesting authors to the house. She knew everybody, read widely, and had excellent taste. I also knew that she could pick up within a few weeks the rudiments of the job. The rest takes a lifetime, but the rudiments would get her started. However, there was a problem. Entry-level editorial jobs were scarce and much in demand. The young assistants at Random, some of whom were excellent editorial prospects, had been waiting for such an opening for months—in some cases years—and were in the meantime performing routine tasks, hoping to be chosen. I told Jackie that I believed she would take the job seriously, be a good colleague, and learn the ropes easily. But I also told her that we would have to create an opening for her, and this might not be fair to the assistants. Before I could ask her to let me talk it over with my colleagues, she said that she understood my problem and didn’t want to impose. I was grateful for her tactfulness but regretted the outcome. Eventually, she took a job at Doubleday, where she signed a number of interesting authors and worked until her final illness. I have
wished ever since that she could have joined us at Random House.

Like everything else at Lutèce, André’s shad roe was superb and easy to prepare, provided you treated it with care. Shad are available only in early spring as they move up the East Coast to spawn.

The roe are rather rich, and a single pair (the roe come in two banana-shaped lobes connected by a thin membrane) per serving are quite enough. If the roe are large, a single lobe is plenty. André prepared a sorrel sauce, the classic accompaniment. Sorrel first appears in the garden in early spring, when the shad are running. First wash a pound of sorrel and cut it in julienne strips. Warm it in a pot with some butter, and when the water from the sorrel has evaporated, add a pinch of sugar and a half-cup of heavy cream. When the sauce thickens a bit, take it off the stove. Then, with a very sharp knife, delicately separate the two lobes of the roe, being careful not to penetrate the egg sac. This will make it easier to turn the lobes as you brown them gently in butter. André dipped the roe in milk and dusted it in flour before adding it to the pan. I omit this step, but in either case sauté the roe over a medium flame—too much heat will generate steam and burst the sac—until lightly browned. Then, with a spatula in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, carefully turn the lobe over and brown the other side, about three to six minutes per side, depending upon size. Do not overcook! The roe should be a little pink at the center.
Set the roe on a platter and nap it with the sauce. Serve it with a lemon wedge, a few boiled and buttered potatoes, and a good Alsatian wine.

Inevitably, my interest in cooking led me to publish cookbooks, mostly by master chefs and bakers whose techniques I was eager to learn. These books sold well year after year, and some, like Alice Waters’s
Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook,
became widely influential classics. A few professional chefs know how to adapt their recipes to domestic kitchens, which are unlikely to have on hand a gallon of veal stock, and even less likely to have reduced it to two cups of glace. But most chefs depend upon skilled cookbook writers to adapt and test their dishes, and these books usually lack personality. Not Alice Waters, however, whose vivid
Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook
was the first of many books by great chefs that I published. Alice was as meticulous an author as she was a chef, and a joy—if a demanding joy—to work with. With Alice, everything had to be just so: the jacket design, the typography, the binding, to say nothing of the writing itself. If she hadn’t become a chef, she might have become a fine book designer, another craft in which style, precision, and taste are essential.

I did not seek Alice out. In the early eighties, she was a celebrity in the Bay Area, but her renown had
not yet reached the East Coast. I met her by accident, and reluctantly. In the spring of 1979, I was in San Francisco and had made a dinner date with my friend Bob Scheer, a writer at the time for the
Los Angeles Times,
who had run unsuccessfully for Congress the year before. Alice had been Bob’s campaign manager, and he suggested we go to her restaurant in Berkeley for dinner. “You’ll like it,” he said. I resisted. I still thought of Berkeley as a scruffy academic town of hippies, Hare Krishnas, and macrobiotic cafés. I wanted a nonideological dinner in San Francisco. Bob insisted. I submitted. We crossed the bay to Chez Panisse. I knew from the moment I sat down that I was about to be dazzled.

For dinner I ordered bouillabaisse, which turned out to be a silken fugue of textures and tastes whose clarity and honesty were poetry in a pot. I remember mumbling something to Bob that if Emily Dickinson owned a restaurant it would be Chez Panisse. Bob introduced me to Alice. I had not offered to publish a cookbook since the Uncle Tai mess, but I was besotted, and when Alice joined us at our table I proposed a contract then and there. I knew the book would become a classic. Moreover, I wanted her bouillabaisse recipe and hoped she would include it. She did:
Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook,
if you have a copy. This wonderful recipe appears in a section called “Uncomplicated Menus,” an optimistic placement.

Her bouillabaisse for eight to ten fills three pages,
beginning with a marinade, then a rather complicated fumet, which becomes an even more splendid broth and a brilliant rouille.
First she fillets and marinates eight pounds of firm, white, nonoily fish—halibut, striped bass, sea bass, snapper, etc.—in pieces of various lengths about an inch thick, in a half-cup of extra-virgin olive oil, two cups of dry white wine, two sprigs each of aromatic thyme and fennel tops, six parsley sprigs, three peeled garlic cloves, two tablespoons of Pernod, and a pinch of saffron, for an hour or so. She places in a separate bowl three and a half dozen littleneck clams and a dozen and a half Prince Edward Island mussels.

For the fumet, she cleans the fish bones, leaving no blood or gills (my fish market sells the fillets already boned, but supplies the bones and heads on demand), coarsely chops two carrots, a leek, a medium onion, two tomatoes, six mushrooms, and two garlic cloves, and cooks them with the bones in olive oil for ten minutes in a twelve-quart stockpot. Then she adds a bouquet garni of parsley sprigs, fennel seed, bay leaf, dried tarragon and thyme, a dozen peppercorns, and six coriander seeds; two cups of dry white wine;six mussels;six clams;the peel of a small orange (the pith removed); two tablespoons of Pernod; and a pinch each of saffron and cayenne. She simmers this for thirty minutes, skimming it often, lets it stand off the heat for fifteen minutes, and strains it, discarding the vegetables, shells, and bones. Meanwhile, she makes the rouille. She blackens a red bell pepper over an open flame
and peels it, roasts and seeds a ripe tomato, and softens a slice of good Italian bread, crusts removed, in a quarter-cup of fumet with a pinch each of saffron and cayenne. She then beats three egg yolks into this mixture and slowly adds a cup and a half of olive oil to make a mayonnaise. She makes a purée of the peppers and tomato in a mortar and adds it to the rouille, which she adjusts with salt, pepper, cayenne, and saffron to taste. While this is happening, she rubs two dozen thin slices of baguette with garlic and oil and browns them in a 400-degree oven.

Then she makes the broth. In a quarter-cup of olive oil she sautés the white parts of two leeks, diced, and two medium onions, diced, with a large very ripe tomato, seeded and peeled, and adds a bay leaf, a pinch of saffron, the rest of the fumet, three cloves of garlic, minced, a sprig each of fennel and parsley, the peel without pith of half an orange, a cup each of white wine and Pernod, a pinch of saffron, and salt and pepper to taste. She brings this to a simmer, adds the mussels and clams till they open, and then the fish for a total of four minutes, or just until the fish are tender. Now she adjusts the seasoning as necessary with Pernod, cayenne, saffron, and so on. She serves the broth with the fish and shellfish in wide bowls garnished with the rouille and crouton. If you have the ingredients at hand, this is not nearly as complicated as it sounds. I usually shop in the morning for the fish and whatever else I don’t already have, and put the dish together one step at a time throughout the afternoon, with long intervals of reading, gardening, or doing nothing.

Alice came to the table—a glowing half-pint, as she seemed in those days, with a huge smile—but I also sensed a wariness: the principled Berkeley purist, aglow with organic purity, girding herself against the corporate publisher from New York. Over soufflés and coffee, we agreed on terms that I wrote out on a scrap of paper. When I asked Bob Scheer about this recently, he said I might have used a paper napkin, but paper napkins were not Alice’s style. Two years later, we published
Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook,
its handsome design supervised by Alice as meticulously as she plated her entrées. Her professionalism made her a joy to work with. With this book and those that followed, Alice redefined American culinary culture, French-inspired but based on fine local ingredients from artisanal producers with straightforward preparation and fine presentation.

We became and remain friends. On a summer weekend a few years later, she visited me in Sag Harbor, carrying a large transparent plastic box neatly filled with rows of peeled red, yellow, and green bell peppers in oil. She had been invited to Craig Claiborne’s grand summer lunch party, to which each guest was asked to bring a dish. Since she could not safely have checked the peppers through to New York from San Francisco, she must have carried them on her lap all the way east, an indelible image of Alice in my mental scrapbook.

Craig Claiborne, the late food editor and restaurant critic of
The New York Times,
lived in East Hampton in a house that consisted almost entirely of a single large
room with a restaurant kitchen at one end that opened onto a vast dining area—in effect, a private restaurant. Craig’s bedroom was a cubicle behind a flush door at the far end of the dining room, and there were similar cubicles in the basement for his overnight guests. Craig liked to entertain, and twice a year he invited his favorite chefs, food writers, and friends to his house for large parties. His house was deep in a scrub-pine forest, and on New Year’s Eve, his guests in formal clothes, and the chefs in toques bearing pots of cassoulet from their New York restaurants, made their way through the snow to be greeted by Craig in his blue-and-white-striped apron offering Dom Pérignon and Krug at the kitchen door. The deeper the snow and the colder the night, the more cheery the party became as Craig’s guests settled gradually into a champagne buzz over their caviar, cassoulet, roast goose, and soufflés. By midnight, most of us were too far gone to drive home, but somehow we managed. I checked the
East Hampton Star
later that week to see which of us had landed in jail the next morning, but no one had.