Steal the Menu (15 page)

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.