Spitz - The sauciers apprentice: one long strange trip through the great cooking schools of Europe

One Long Strange Trip through the Great Cooking Schools of Europe

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York London

Copyright 2008 by Bob Spitz

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spitz, Bob.
The sauciers apprentice : one long strange trip through the great
cooking schools of Europe / Bob Spitz.1st ed.
p. cm.

ISBN: 978-0-393-11399-0

1. Gastronomy. 2. Cookery, European. 3. Cooking schoolsEurope. I. Title.
TX641.S72 2008
641'.013dc22

2008001331

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
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FOR

BECKY AIKMAN,

WHO BRINGS ALL THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS

I ts a wonder any of us survived those Friday-night dinners.

They were heated, impromptu little affairs, or at least they had begun that way in the days before the Great Odyssey. Each week Id invite a revolving gang of friends over, scrape together a couple of dishes using whatever looked harmless in the fridge, and by ten oclock, with enough wine to pickle a Welsh pony, the atmosphere in my cluttered, steam-filled kitchen seemed perfectly combustible. It was a weatherbeaten little room, dark and stuffy, with a wall of tatty window screens that looked out over a stream. But it was cheerful while we were in it. Warmed by trembling candlelight, we squeezed around a badly stained pine farmhouse table that made no concession for elbows. There was a lot to be said for the informality of it. Everyone pitched in, keeping the traffic flow moving between the stove and the seats. No one minded the rattle and clash. Plates were passed with reckless abandon; I worried about midair collisions, and there were always a few near misses. Otherwise, we ate with a desperate greedy desire, jabbering like magpies late into the night.

The worlds woes were solved over those mealscapital punishment, the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Clarence Thomas, you name it; we put the entire Cabinet to shame. The next item on our agenda was the Democratic malaise when one night someone, I think it was Craig, made the mistake of saying, Boy, the food was good. Which, somehow, got scrambled in my brain and translated as: Youre a great cook. And nothing was ever the same.

Thereafter, by Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest, Id have planned a menu with all the trappings of a state dinner: three courses minimum, plus a cheese platter followed by dessert. A selection of wines was handpicked like pearls to match each dish. Everything elseassisted suicide, the Kurds, even that years Oscar racepaled in importance. Those dinners took over my life. Thursdays were spent behind the wheel of my car, scouring the county for groceries and fresh herbs; Fridays, I remained imprisoned in the kitchen, where, by noon, the countertops resembled a grisly forensic lab. Tension would always mount as I raced to finish preparations so that by the time my guests arrived, Id have grown manic. Who cares about stem-cell research? Id screech, scooping up a trail of loose saffron threads as if they were cocaine. Taste the fucking flageolets!

Things had spun out of control.

Of course, my hysteria shouldnt have surprised anyone whod come within a mile of me. For several months, Id been storming around in a cloud of rage, like a bee-stung character in one of those Warner Bros. cartoons. You could almost see the funnel of agitation swirling around me. My closest friends feared I was coming apart at the seams. The causes for my behavior were clear enough. In a relatively short span of time, Id finished a difficult eight-year book project, a biography of the Beatles, that had left me nearly destitute. To make matters worse, I had fled New York City, which had captivated me like a lover for thirty years. I turned fifty (if only on paper). A fourteen-year marriage ground to an end and lapsed into a bitter divorce, after which I became embroiled in a relationship with a womanbut I am getting ahead of my story.

To escape the constant upheaval, I took refuge in the kitchen. Somehow, amid the knives and icepicks, I felt safe there. Comforted by the awful hush of groceries, I attempted to work out my frustrations, chopping, dicing, slicing, and grinding with the kind of vigor one devotes to, say, global jihad . And I muttered as I worked, providing a demonic counterpoint to the physical assault. The blade of a chefs knife on wood sounded the backbeat, accompanied by fragments of lyric she coulda smiled now and thengave me a hugit wouldnta killed her that facilitated those purple moods. If art indeed imitated life, then I was doing to pork loins and veal scallops what fate was doing to me.

The dinners themselves, however, gave me something to grab hold of. Nothing else mattered in those precious hours as I labored over a symphony of splattering pots. There was always some clumsy but extravagant concoction in the works: lamb shanks lacquered with a luxuriant pinot-noir sauce bursting with black currants; or sea bass wrapped in prosciutto atop a puddle of salsa verde . Id clipped the recipes from high-gloss magazines whose pictures had seduced me into believing that any healthy biped could follow the instructions and reproduce to perfection a dish that had probably taken a squadron of cooks and food stylists weeks, if not months, to develop. Yet, on the page, at least to me, the creation looked about as demanding as a paint-by-numbers panel. After all, what was so difficult about melting a few spoonfuls of butter, sauting shallots, adding a bouquet of fresh herbs, and deglazing a pan with chicken stock or Cognac? It didnt take a rodeo star to roll and tie a roast. Or a surgeon to bone a sea bass. There was nothing a bedraggled and broke, ex-metropolitan, middle-aged, divorced, pussy-whipped writer couldnt pull off in the kitchen if he followed directions.

L ong before it served to mask my rage, cooking had sustained me. From the age of ten, I was hooked. I took over the family kitchen and tested recipes, mixing ingredients like a mad chemist, and blew up many a chicken potpie. No doubt some of the things I cooked might have qualified as weapons of mass destruction. But I learned how to make veal scallopine, and there was a recipe for steak au poivre Id personalized by adding Cognac and Worcestershire sauce to the pan drippings. For the longest time I served my family something called Chicken Divine, which I got off a Campbells soup label. As preparations go, it was childs play: two tablespoons of Dijon mustard and a can of Cream of Mushroom soup slathered over chicken breasts, the top dusted with a mixture of grated Cheddar and bread crumbs. There was nothing to it, no skillful chopping or herbal infusions, but in those days we served it to company as if presenting a foie gras .