The Man Who Ate Everything (39 page)

Triglia di scoglio (tria):
red mullet, called
rouget de roche
in France; larger and more deeply colored than the
triaglia difango (rouget bar-bet),
sometimes called
barban
in Venetian

Uove di seppie (latticini):
egg sacs of female cuttlefish

Vongole (bibarase):
small clams, one and a half inches
across, round, with a zigzag shell pattern reminiscent of Native American pottery; wonderfully tender and sweet; sometimes , called
vongole gialla .

ydngole veraci (caparozzoli):
clams, a bit larger and more ypoblong than
vongole,
with f
ine lines in both directions on the shell; the muscle has two little horns like the U.S. steamer clam; more highly prized than
vongole,
but this is a competition among minuscule culinary Olympians; known as
palourde
in France

August 1989

Autkor’s Note:

Da Fiore is still the best fish restaurant in Venice, especially good at lunchtime. Barbacani has changed hands and is, according to Victor and Marcella, no longer worth trying. Marcella’s fourth book,
The Essentials of Italian Cooking,
was published by Knopf in 1993. Indispensable and fundamental, it combines her first two books, adding fifty new recipes and improving several of the old ones.

It was one of the last sessions of the 1988 installment of the Oxford Food Symposium, and Lourdes March was conducting a seminar on paella, which means both the wide shallow pan and also the food you cook in it. (Lourdes wrote
El libra de la paella y de los arroces,
published in Madrid in 1985, and has been collaborating on a book about olives and olive oil with Alicia Rios.) She began with the history and etymology of paella and its symbolism as “an ancestral rite of the cyclical fecundation of the earth performed away from the kitchen and thus away from the feminine hand.” Then she attacked false paellas and their jumble of ingredients that “have nothing to do with the well-balanced and true formula,” which she proceeded to reveal.

The real Valencian paella is a traditional lunch for workers in the vineyards. There are four rules for making one. It must be cooked outdoors, by a man or men, over a fire of vine cuttings and citrus wood. It must contain chicken and rabbit (no lobsters crawling all about). The grains of rice must be three millimeters long, like the arborio rice you use in risotto. And you must add either twelve snails or two sprigs of rosemary, but not both.

The rest of us were skeptical on several points. Few of us had ever met a paella we’d liked. And how can two sprigs of rosemary substitute for twelve snails? we asked, thinking that Lourdes, who is just now learning English, must have confused “or” with
“and,” or “snails” with “rosemary,” or something like that.
as
would often be the case over the next few hours, Lourdes humbled the skeptics among us. In Valencia, when you catch snails for your paella, you feed them rosemary for a few days, both to purge them and to give them flavor. Herbs from the sunburned gardens of Spain are so intense that twelve snails contribute all the rosemary flavor you need.

Why bother with vine cuttings and citrus wood? Lourdes explained that as the cooking liquid evaporates from the wide surface of the pan, it mixes with the smoke and then condenses back, bestowing an indispensable flavor to the dish. Vine cuttings and orangewood have a high acid content, which creates a hotter fire. Their smoke contributes an aroma absolutely required in all the true Valencian paella.

Paul Levy, a transplanted American who is food and wine editor of the London
Observer,
author of the very funny
Out to Lunch
(Harper & Row), and one of the pillars of the British food world, lives in a seventeenth-century farmhouse ten miles northwest of Oxford, with his wife, Penny, who edits art books, and their two daughters. When the symposium was over, Paul and Penny invited ten of us back to their farm to join Lourdes and Alicia in adapting their ancestral rite of cyclical fecundation to the Oxfordshire terrain. Paul had a good supply of plump corn-fed chickens, but the only rabbit in sight was Leonard Woolf, a family pet. When Penny defended Leonard Woolf against our offers to dress him for the pot, Lourdes settled for Paul’s frozen pigeons. Paul had neither collected snails from his garden nor gorged them on herbs, so Lourdes sent one of us off to pluck some branches from Paul’s pungent rosemary patch.

We gathered round as Lourdes and Alicia meticulously leveled Paul’s U.S.-made barbecue grill so that the oil and broth would lie perfectly even in the pan and lit the fire of vines and apricot branches and, finally, in a desperate act, an old crate. For the next two hours they composed the paella, continually dispatching the rest of us on vital errands to other parts of the garden and the farmhouse. First the fowl were browned on all sides in olive oil. Green beans and chopped tomatoes were added and sauteed for a few minutes, then the heat was reduced. To say that the heat was reduced is to summarize a complex process in which Lourdes made the rest of us reach into the dense billows of smoke engulfing the paella, the grill, and most of Lourdes to pull out and somehow dispose of huge bundles of flaming wood. Tedious micromanagement of the fire continued throughout the endless hours of cooking. My slacks and jacket lost their perfume of Valencia-on-Thames only after two dry cleanings back home in New York, where you regulate your cooking fire by turning a knob.

Paprika, some broad white beans in their cooking liquid, and additional water now went into the pan. Lourdes had brought the dried beans from Spain, and Alicia had boiled them indoors before the fire was started. Lourdes and Alicia called them limas, but nobody else agreed. We argued aimlessly about whether they were really dried favas, butter beans, or broad beans, until Lourdes silenced us all with their Latin classification,
Phaseolus lunatus,
which Paul nicely translated as “moon beans.” When I returned to the hotel that night and opened the
Oxford Book of Food Plants,
I realized that Lourdes had tricked us, because
Phaseolus lunatus
covers all the eligible candidates.

After an hour, when the chicken and pigeon were tender, Lourdes and Alicia added the two sprigs of rosemary, some powdered saffron, and a little salt, mixed them around, and removed about two cups of the dark broth, so that the remaining liquid came just to the handle rivets on the inside walls of the paella. All paellas are manufactured so that the rivets tell you how much broth to use for cooking the rice, which will soon resemble nothing more than a crusty, russet risotto. Vine cuttings were added to enrage the fire, and a kilogram of rice sprinkled evenly over the surface of the broth. After ten minutes of vigorous cooking the fire was damped, and the simmering continued for another ten minutes until the rice was just al dente. All the while, reserved broth was added in small doses as the rice swelled.

All of us were ravenous, but Lourdes let the deep reddish-brown paella stand for five minutes as the grains of rice absorbed more flavor and loosened from one another. Our conversation which had degenerated into a cross-cultural comparison of methods for cooking udders among the English, Romans, Mexicans, and Yemenite Jews (who on top of everything else need to make them kosher), ceased as soon as we began to share the true Valencian paella. The rice lining the bottom of the pan was browned and crusty; the meat was tender and deeply flavored. Everything was imbued with the smoke of vines and fruitwood and the aroma of rosemary, and the
Phaseoli lunati
were, well, incomparable.

Max Lake, an Australian doctor turned wine maker, broke out a case of his best Australian red, and when no more than half of it had been drunk, one of the British writers among us revealed that, at the age of sixteen on a vacation in the south of Spain, she had been courted by El Cordobes, the greatest bullfighter who ever lived.

November 1988

Raymond’s taxi clattered through the humid night, carrying me from the Memphis International Airport to the East Memphis Hilton.

“I am a firm believer that the sauce and the slaw have a great bearing on the matter,” Raymond was saying.

“Granted,” I replied, “but a mere sauce or garnish can never alter the greatness, or lack thereof, of a slab of ribs.” I had discovered in only a few deft questions that Raymond was a Memphis native and an expert in eating barbecue; the topic for our half-hour ride was set. Raymond nodded. Momentarily we were in complete agreement about barbecue.

Whenever I travel to the South, the first thing I do is visit the best barbecue place between the airport and my hotel. An hour or two later I visit the best barbecue place between my hotel and dinner. In Memphis, making these choices is not easy. The metropolitan Memphis yellow pages list sixty-one barbecue restaurants; in truth, there are probably more than two hundred.

The clock struck nine-thirty as Raymond exited from the expressway and headed down Poplar. Time was running out. If I acted fast, I could cover two restaurants before closing time. But which to choose?

I had not come to Memphis merely to engage in some shabby and dissolute eating binge. This year, no doubt in recompense for
a noble deed I had committed in a former life, I was invited to be a judge at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest! When the call from Memphis came, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. But even before my plane landed the awful responsibility began to press painfully upon my brain Memphis is the pork-barbecue capital of the world, and the Memphis barbecue cooking contest is the preeminent barbecue event in the known universe. The 1990
Guinness Book of World Records
deems it the largest. But when lovers of barbecue call the Memphis contest simply the Big One, they are referring to its moral and aesthetic authority as much as to its size. Would I be up to the job?

I decided to stifle these solemn thoughts until the next morning, or at least until after I had eaten a couple of dinners. Raymond’s thoughts were as follows: The best barbecue he had ever eaten was in Terre Haute, Indiana, eight hours and a stiff cab fare away, both of which I considered for fifteen seconds longer than I should have. His Memphis favorite is Jim Neely’s Interstate on South Third, at the opposite edge of town from my hotel, closely followed by the world-famous trio of Leonard’s, Gorky’s, and Charlie Vergos’s Rendezvous. In the black neighborhoods of south Memphis, Raymond directed me to the tender and juicy ribs at Hawkins Grill, in the 1200 block of McLemore, and Al’s Tasty Burger Inn, at McLemore and College. Raymond recommended that if I managed to eat my way through all of these, I try the Raines Haven Rib House on East Range Road, the Commissary in Germantown, and Brown’s Barbecue, just down from Neely’s Interstate on South Third.

Raymond’s palate turned out to be as discriminating as any, at least judging from the two handfuls of barbecue restaurants I was able to try. In both sandwich and rib, Neely’s Interstate Bar-B-Que Restaurant serves the best commercial product I had ever tasted. (Notice that real barbecue lovers often refer to their favorite food as “product.”) And by the time I had left Memphis four days and four hundred ribs later, I had added several of his
other picks to my permanent list of barbecue shrines. In the meantime, I collected another ten places to visit when the opportunity arises—among them Cozy Corner, Payne’s, Gridley’s, and the Bar-B-Q Shop Restaurant, all in Memphis—plus others from human settlements too distant for this visit: Bozo’s in Mason and Bar-ba-rosa’s in Millington (both Tennessee), L. C. Murry’s BBQ in De Vails Bluff and Freddie’s B-B-Q in Stuttgart (both Arkansas), the universally revered Dreamland Bar-B-Q Drive Inn of Jerusalem Heights, just outside Tuscaloosa in Alabama, and Freddie’s, a little beer joint sixty-five miles from Little Rock. This last suggestion emerged from an exhaustive conversation with Jerry (J-R) Roach, who runs the School of Southern Barbecue and whose J-R Enterprises makes championship barbecue cookers. “The best sandwich I’ve ever put in my mouth,” he had confided. Now that I have returned from Memphis, I leave a light suitcase packed and ready, just in case the chance to fly to Stuttgart or Jerusalem Heights unexpectedly presents itself.

My official duties commenced early on Thursday morning, when I and twenty-five others reported to the crumbling old New Daisy Theater on Beale Street for a grueling day of instruction in judging barbecue according to Memphis rules. The Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest has three main divisions—Ribs, Shoulder, and Whole Hog. When I was asked to serve as a judge, I had signed up for Ribs, because I felt thoroughly unqualified to judge the other two. Ribs, I figured, was easy. Volunteering for Whole Hog would have been the height of irresponsibility.

Before flying down to Memphis, I knew four things about real southern barbecue: (1) the origin of the word, (2) the dramatic difference between grilling meat and cooking barbecue,
(3) the happy chaos of barbecue styles around the South, and
(4) how much I love to eat any style of real barbecue.