The Table Comes First

THE TWO pillars of modern eating are the restaurant and the recipe book. The restaurant is the place where all eating out takes place; the recipe is the thing with which all home cooking starts. Both are modern. Until the nineteenth century, big books of recipes did not exist, and there was no place to go and eat in exchange for money that was like the places we go now.

The restaurant was once a place for men, a place where men ate, held court, cooked, boasted and swaggered, and wooed women. The recipe book was traditionally “feminine”: the kitchen was the place where women cooked, supervised, gave orders, made brownies, to steady and domesticate men. In the myth-world of the nineteenth century, the restaurant existed to coax women into having sex; the recipe book to coax men into staying home.

These two poles are, blessedly, switching (moms now eat out as commonly as dads make supper), but the double pillars—less like pillars, perhaps, than like the two steeples of Chartres, parts of the same church but unlike each other—remain. To grasp the play of the table, and its politics, let us begin with those two supporting R’s, before proceeding to treat the rituals of taste, which they both support. Begin, then, at the moment when we go to the fancy place for dinner and sit down, nerves alight, or else the moment when we come home and smell what’s cooking. Both are moments of arrival, of expectation, overseen by history. We have gone out for lunch or come home for dinner, and now we start….

1. Who Made the Restaurant?

A RESTAURANT is a place where you go to eat. You usually arrive in the early afternoon or the middle of the evening, and are taken to a table of your own in a room, usually on the ground floor of a city building in a space leased by a cook and made to look like a dining room. There are plush chairs and benches, and often mirrors. Someone, a professional go-between, often dressed in a parody of evening wear, whatever the hour, brings you a card that lists the things the cook is ready to cook, and how much it will cost to get him to cook them for you. You study this card—usually a list with decorations, sometimes bound in a leather pseudobook—and say what you’ll have, and then the go-between goes into another room, the kitchen, which you can’t see or hear or probably even smell. After a wait, the go-between brings the food you asked for. Very often, you will start with soup before having some grilled or roasted meat, followed by a sweet, almost always something made with sugar, a pudding or cake, rather than something naturally sweet, such as a plain piece of fruit. You are expected to have tea or coffee afterward, and then a bill is brought to your table. Prices are never mentioned out loud, and you pay whatever the card said you would. The place isn’t a whorehouse or anything like it, but often you take someone there because you would like to have sex with them afterward, and sometimes you do, although, if you do, you go and do it somewhere else.

All the details, from soup to sex, of this setup, which by now seems as normal as eating itself, as obvious as breathing, can be found in more or less the same form from Sydney to San Francisco. And all of them—waiters, menus, tables, mirrors, closed kitchen, seduction, and silences, even the little table in the corner, tout compris—were thought up in Paris during a twenty-five year period right before the French Revolution and in the twenty or so years after. When you consider that eating is one of the few things that humans did even before they were people, it seems strange that restaurants should be so recent, but they are—as though the idea of having sex in beds had been discovered in Berlin during the winter of 1857, and then word got around.

There were places where you could go and pay for a meal before there were restaurants, of course: the tavern, the cook-shop, the inn, the table d’hôte, the traiteur, or cook-caterer. The tavern as it evolved throughout Europe in the later part of the eighteenth century had many of the essential emotional traits of the modern restaurant. But the restaurant, with its special rituals and its particular look, began at one time and in one place.

The restaurant was known at once to be a modern and amazing thing. The great gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin marveled in 1825 that now “any man with three or four pistoles in his purse, can immediately, infallibly, and simply for the asking procure all the pleasures of which taste is susceptible.” Yet how resilient, many-sided, adaptable, this new thing turned out to be, defying the rule that a picnic is made for one lawn and no other! If the restaurant is not the most original of modern instances and institutions, it is surely the most tenacious. It is the primal scene of modern life. Most modern urban people mark their lives by their moments in cafés and restaurants, just as ancient people marked their time on earth by visits to the local oracle, or medieval people by pilgrimages: we are courted, spurned, recruited, hired, fired, lured to a new job, or released from an old one at a table while a waiter hovers nearby. There are few marriages that did not begin at dinner at a table leased for the evening, and few divorces that did not first show signs of approaching doom in a sigh of resentment or an eye roll of exasperation in a similar setting. (“Can’t you just make up your mind and stick with it?/Why do you always overtip?”… The “forever” sentiments of anniversary dinners out not rarely sugar over the approaching “no-mores” of domestic life.)

I love restaurants. I love them even though, after many years as a reporter spent being fully disillusioned about their behind-the-scenes—having labored once or twice in their kitchens and befriended their owners—I am aware of how brutal the work is, how long the hours are, and how, aside from the ventures of a handful of those entrepreneurs essentially indifferent to the food they serve, how tiny is the hope of profit. “Sale métier,” the cooks and waiters alike mutter in Ludwig Bemelmans’s memoirs of restaurant life in prewar Europe—“Filthy occupation”—and the muttering goes on still. Yet when I think of happy moments, I think of eating out.

Though they sometimes witness the ends of our love lives, restaurants have a ring of hope about them, a note of innocent celebration that makes them the right background for seduction. The man who asks the girl to dinner is not, after all, actually suggesting sex except by the airiest remote inference; he is pretending to be a better man than that: let’s meet, talk, try. The restaurant offers the hope of happiness that gives greedy sex the look of lighthearted love, and, in the erotic sphere as much as the eating sphere, turns raw hunger into formal appetite. The restaurant offers not seduction but what precedes seduction, the false promise of pure motives.

I am, doubtless, prejudiced by particular experience. On my tenth birthday, I took the Moloznik boys from across the street to see a double feature of the first two James Bond films, this at a blissful time when the second run of movies in theaters was still a regular event, so that one had the pleasure of reseeing a good thing in the velvet padding of the cinema—not on the sofa, as we do now—with its thrilling moments in the dark: the trickle of sweet, forbidden Coke through a straw, and the chewy, burnt, semipainful edges of caramels. My parents were blackmailed into taking all three boys out to dinner at a Howard Johnson’s on, as I recall, City Line Avenue in Philadelphia.

Howard Johnson’s is gone now, reduced to a handful of sad motels. But in its day it had something grand about it. There was the electric sign outside, in green and orange, showing, in rapidly animated yet obviously distinct action—you could see the unlit armature of the next moment of movement waiting just beyond the neon figure that was lit, an endlessly repeating flip book of colored light—simple Simon and the Pieman enacting a brief drama of supplication and supply; one took eternally, the other fed over and over again, on the sign above City Line Avenue.

I sensed then that the sign, though meant as a come-on, was one of those strange, dense referents that used to be part of the pool of myths of ordinary people. Simon, as I recall, had the bent-kneed neediness of a Maxfield Parrish illustration, which, combined with the zigzagged lettering, made the sign, in retrospect, a kind of Saturday Evening Post cover come to life, or at least to electricity. (It was similar in spirit to, though far more pop in form than, the mural of Old King Cole in New York’s St. Regis Hotel, a stylized comment on a nursery rhyme assumed to be known to everyone.) The sign’s whimsical high voltage—the elaborate fable electrically enacted simply to signal “Eat!”—was conducted into the HoJo’s interior as well, where the color scheme of blue and orange seeped even onto the margins of the many-paged menu. Its dishes were familiar from the highway to New York: the rubbery fried clams, the 3-D burger, the mint-chip ice cream, minted with green food coloring. The burger that I had that evening had the delectable aroma, now vanished from the world, of the griddles of my childhood, something buttery, and of the soda fountain. The possibility of choice, the splendor of existence, was all present.

It was not the deliciousness of the food—my mother made better burgers—but the overcharge of optimism that made the meal matter. Its excellence involved the removal of the obvious signs of labor, which even then I took to be a benevolent fiction, for the better food at home was benign good fortune but effortful. You had to have my mom to eat really well, but anyone could come here and share. It was a moment of transformation, liftoff, of anonymity transmuted into intimacy without the obligation of gratitude: you told the menu-bearing woman at the cash register “Four for dinner,” and suddenly, inexplicably, you were in a booth, and there was dinner for four! This sense of being in the unimaginable right place with exactly the right company in the most welcoming of rooms attended by the most considerate of servers—whistling while they worked and candidly eyeing the reward—was a blessing felt there and sought ever since.

As museums cross, or so Updike tells us, with the mystique of women, restaurants cross in memory with the optimism of childhood, with birthdays, promises, quiet, and the guilty desires of childhood, too: special treatment, special favors. The Cardinal, who never arrives, who sweeps you up into his carriage saying, “Child, you please me,” becomes the maître d’ who says, “Ah, sir, we’re so glad to see you!” Some note of gaiety, of excess, of potential, lingers even at the most pedestrian lunch counter. (I have never looked at the Edward Hopper study of loneliness without thinking happily about how cozy the combination of diner chili and lemon meringue pie must be that late at night.)

Years went by—and here one must imagine calendar pages blowing and stock shots of jets crossing the Atlantic—and I found myself in Paris, just at a moment when the Grand Véfour had changed hands from Raymond Olivier’s to the great cook Guy Martin’s. Jet-lagged in the golden light of the Palais Royal, I recognized instantly the same sweet charge, the sibling resemblance to City Line Avenue and the Howard Johnson’s of my tenth birthday. The enameled nymphs and goddesses, the mirrors, the red velvet couches—it was, for all the Palais Royal sophistication, this resemblance that made it moving: the experience of overcharge, of more than was necessary, of décor and joy, and sobriety of eating. Both were places of possibility, the illusion of potentials: we shall be blessed, and know that we are.

Even purely “social” restaurants, where dramas of snobbery play out, can be turned to such pleasure. In my misspent editorial youth, I used to take two gifted, hard-drinking writers, Mordecai Richler and Wilfrid Sheed, to lunch once a month at the Four Seasons in the Seagram’s building. While Tina Brown and Helen Gurley Brown dined on water and lettuce, my two authors would let themselves go on shrimp with chipotle sausage, linguine alle vongole, crab cakes… and a bottle of red wine and a bottle of white (and too many Cognacs at the end; it was the last decade of hard-drinking writerliness, the last gasps of literary alcoholism that Sheed wrote about movingly and bravely in his In Love with Daylight). While Anna and Helen and the rest sipped and barely munched, the maître d’ would wheel out a kind of chocolate bombe, for the express and sole purpose of having them squeal with indignant denial of interest. But the writers would demand a piece, and then another, with whipped cream (or “crème fraîche,” as the arc had bent again toward France).

The restaurant, whether in its most abstract, ritzy form or at its most elemental, can always be diverted back toward a primal magic, a mood of mischief, stolen pleasures, a retreat from the world, a boat on the ocean—years later, having ice cream aboard a cruise ship in a storm, I would find that sense of stolen kisses, of clandestine joy, instantaneously renewed. That is what the restaurant promises, and how its prosaic purpose—cooked food exchanged for money—passes into the poetic, which explains why when the young man, from Balzac to Scott Fitzgerald, comes to the city, the first thing he seeks out is the place to eat that he has read about.

Who invented the restaurant? How did it begin? How did it happen that the long history of paying for food in a setting so singular became such a resilient institution—so resilient that a single restaurant, like Gundel in Budapest, could survive wars and revolutions, communists and the new economy, only to end much as it began? How did restaurants happen, and why did they happen first, or best, in Paris?

Until recently, most cooking history was pop history, filled with canned “Eureka!” moments and arch legend-making. (“The great chef Dunand found himself after the battle with nothing but crayfish, chicken, some eggs, and a couple of tomatoes. What, he wondered, could he make from such a motley assortment of ingredients? A moment’s thought, a minute’s chopping, and an hour later, on the Emperor’s table, chicken Marengo was born,” etc.) The birth of the restaurant had its myth-made tang, too. The old, potent, and long-standing story was that it was the French Revolution that had made the restaurant: After the revolution, the cooks of the French aristocrats were out of work, since they no longer had any mouths to feed. With nowhere to go but the streets, they opened cafés and started selling in public what before you could get only in private. Willy-nilly, the modern restaurant came into existence. A little later, a few high chefs, the great pastry architect Antonin Carême among them, made up a “grammar” of French cooking; that is, they wrote down recipes. Together, the dining room on the street and the recipe book in the kitchen made a new place. The aristocrats lost their heads; their cooks lost their jobs and found a new way to make a living in a democratic world.

A clutch of scholars, many of them, interestingly, women, have in the past decade or so proved the expelled-from-Eden myth all wrong. (Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Rebecca Spang, and Rosemary Trubek have all figured in this work, and so has the British historian Giles Macdonogh.) The invention of the restaurant, it turns out, predates the revolution by at least twenty years, and chefs being out of work had nothing to do with it. (The nobles’ cooks were more like head butlers than like chefs in any case, and most stayed loyal to their old bosses after the fighting started.) The old story goes that the essential ways of cooking and practice already existed behind château doors but were democratized when chefs entered the ungilded world. But in truth the cooking they did wasn’t anything like the new cooking of the restaurants. Carême, though a great figure in his way, as a writer and provider, belongs more truly to the history of catering.

So then why did it happen? The birth was philosophical, before it was circumstantial; men’s minds changed before their palates. It was a threefold affair. There were intellectual causes for the spread of the restaurant (reasons of the mind), commercial causes (reasons of merchandising), and sentimental causes (reasons of morality). All of them, of course, were, as real reasons must be, intertwined and interlarded. The reasons of the mind have to do with a new cult of health and simplicity; the reasons of merchandising have to do with a new site of commerce, the Palais Royal, and the birth of the modern street store there; the reasons of morality have to do with a breakdown of a neat caste hierarchy already long under way before the revolution—the neat thing about the restaurant was that anyone with a sou to pay can buy his meal. Along with the new social model came a new belief that appetite, the animal part of man, could be refined and civilized but need not in the end be remade. Brillat-Savarin thought that the purpose of dining well was to turn mere needs into desires, animal appetite into educated taste. But he didn’t think that appetites ought to be “purified” or “reformed.” There is no Year Zero at the table. The pig persists in spite of every effort to give him wings.

The restaurant, it turns out, was a thing to eat before it was a place to go. “Restaurant,” appearing around 1750, was the new name for bouillon, a chicken or beef broth. At that time, if you wanted to eat out in Paris you had to go to a table d’hôte. This was a big public table where you took what was being served, a little like a tavern or an eating house in London. As you ate, you were expected to talk and joke and kid around with the other people at the table, including the host. (You can still eat in a modernized, à la carte version of this style at a few places in Paris: Polidor, the crémerie on the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, has a menu, but it has large common tables, one or two daily plats, and individual napkin drawers.) This could be fun, but if the guy next to you at the table d’hôte was drunk and beery you were stuck, and if you were in the mood for chicken and only veal roast was being served you were stuck, too. If you were a woman, you couldn’t go at all.

People who didn’t like the tables d’hôte because of the company started to say that they didn’t like them because they made you sick when you ate there. This was doubtless not true, or not true often, but it didn’t matter. Health scares usually are haloed by habit. Every panic has its profit-seeker, though, and someone was around to exploit this one; in the same spirit in which egg-white omelets and frozen-yogurt stands appeared in New York a couple of decades ago, places appeared in Paris offering healthy broth cooked in clean kettles—restaurants.

The soup gave its name to the shop. The restaurant started offering a whole range of health food, in an entirely new type of place. The hero of this invention, if not quite singular enough to deserve the name of inventor, was an amazing character named Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau. Chantoiseau was a philosophical entrepreneur of the kind who seem to have filled Paris right before the revolution, and might even have prevented it had they been given enough room to act. He started off as a financier, with a hard-to-follow but interesting scheme to float the calamitous French national debt, essentially by letting merchants of luxury goods print their own money. When nobody went for it, he put together the first almanac of artisans, inventors, and luxury merchants—the first real guidebook to the good life—and shrewdly listed himself as the first “restaurateur.”

It was Chantoiseau’s establishment, on the Rue Saint-Honoré, that turned the restaurant from a place where you went to get well into a place where you went to have a good time. Chantoiseau’s restaurant and the others like it that soon clustered around the Palais Royal became places where you could go when you wanted to and eat what you wanted to eat, choosing from a limited but reasonably long list of dishes, sit at your own table with your own friends, and tell yourself you were doing it for your health. Doctors even let women go to restaurants. This was, perhaps, the single greatest revolution the restaurant wrought: under the pretext of health, women could come alone to an open social theater.

One by one, all the other things we associate with restaurants—menus, uniformed waiters, mirrored walls—were established, all with an eye to creating a public place that felt like home, and if not your home then the home of somebody richer, with better servants. “Some twenty years after they were first established, restaurants no longer specialized in providing delicately healthful soups to a genteelly weak-chested clientele but in catering to individual tastes. While the traiteur fed large groups, the restaurateur offered single servings and small, intimate tables,” the historian Rebecca Spang writes. As Diderot noted, writing of Roze’s restaurant, ‘Everybody eats alone there….’ ” The restaurateur invited his guest to sit at his or her own table, to consult his or her own needs and desires, to concentrate on that most fleeting sense: taste.

The restaurant soon sprouted a larger halo of virtue. New restaurants were made under the influence of or, at least, alert to the talk of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s cult of nature, of sincerity and simplicity, which, ironically, affected aristocrats as much as radicals—so that its greatest monuments are the Petit Trianon for Marie Antoinette (who was handed her head) and the Cult of the Supreme Being, the religion invented by Robespierre (who handed it to her). In his New Heloise, Rousseau sentimentally imagines a peasant harvest of the wine grapes. “You cannot conceive with what zeal, with what gaiety, it all is done; we sing, we laugh all day, and work has never gone better. All live in the greatest familiarity, everyone equal and no one overlooked…. One eats with appetite the peasant soup, a little raw and rude, but good, healthy and filled with fine vegetables!”

So it was that on a smaller, edible scale, the new cooking of the restaurant, far from offering fancy dishes you couldn’t have at home, offered plain food that you couldn’t forage for yourself, raw and rude but good and healthy. Jean François Vacossin, the second restaurateur in France, promised “Breton porridge, orange-flower-flavored rice creams, semolina, fresh eggs… fruits in season, preserves from the most famous manufacturers, fresh butter and cream cheese.” This nouvelle cuisine, as it was called, was hard to define, but everybody agreed that the food was simpler than the old food, was good for you, and was eaten only by the best people—as nouvelle cuisine always is. In a document dated to 1739, the “Letter of an English Pastry maker to a new French cook”—the Englishman(!) already summons the French cook back to primal simplicity. We greedy eaters are always being summoned back to primal simplicity, as women in vogue are always being called back to classic fashion. (No one recalls that five years ago the shorter skirt was classic, too.)

Voltaire—not surprisingly, given the Rousseauian rhetoric of the restaurant—thought the whole thing was nuts, and said so. His diatribe against the new cooking, which some academics have insisted on interpreting as an allegorical protest against Communion, now appears to have been actually a diatribe against the new cooking. “I swear that my stomach cannot bear the new cooking. I cannot bear sweetbreads swimming in a salty sauce nor a hash composed of turkey, hare and rabbit, that dreams of being mistaken for a single meat. I don’t like either pigeon in the frog style”—that is, flattened and deboned. “When it comes to cooks, I wouldn’t know how to bear the essence of ham, nor the excess of morels, mushrooms, peppers and muscade, with which they cover meats healthy in themselves.”

It might seem odd that what was meant to be romantically “simple” appeared to a jaundiced Enlightenment eye as needlessly complex—the morels and mushrooms doubtless were defended as striking that healthy country note—until one recalls that this is a standard event in the history of cookery: one need only remember the complaints about small fussy things centered in large empty plates to see that the same thing happened with the last burst of “new cooking,” back in the 1970s. What looks like nature renewed to the new cook’s eye always tastes like contrivance in the old diner’s mouth.

There are no “Eureka!” moments in cooking. The real pattern of change that brought about the restaurant revolution looks less neatly segmented than the myths. The difference between Russian and French service; the communal habit of a coup de milieu; the mixing of fish and meats; the division of the meal into three courses; the sequencing of wine—far from being attached to a single moment of discovery and a clear sequence of customs, each of these new things arrives, and fades, and reappears, and, in the way of the world, becomes the norm before it is ever the oddity. Some things that seem traditional are very new. The order of wines, sparkling to white to red to brown, and the idea that wines should match the dishes, is a twentieth-century invention. Some that seem to be modern (the division of the meal into three courses—small treat, meat, and sweet—for instance) date to the sixteenth century. (The evolutionary basis of the sweet as coda is argued to be part of our ape heritage; they end with bananas, too.)

For a new thing to take, it needs a new soil, a new kind of city, a new place for it to happen. The restaurant, whether as a health bar, or as an outgrowth of the café, may have had no special moment of creation, but it did have its primal savannah. It turns out that, with eerie exactitude, we can localize the field of invention of the restaurant to one small place, still with us: it all happened in and around the Palais Royal.

Every tourist in Paris knows the Palais Royal as it is today: its great formal garden girded by long allées of plane trees, where neatly dressed functionaries crisscross en route to and from the Ministry of Culture, as in the great Cartier-Bresson photograph—with the placid arcades on all four sides filled by strange antique shops that sell old clothes and French medals. (Now newly invaded, sadly, by chic fashion boutiques.) Colette lived there, and photographs of her mad hair and wise face at her window are part of the Palais’s legend.

But its note of elegant retreat and quiet mystery is a new one. The Palais Royal of the late eighteenth century was the shopping center of the Lumières, the first modern mall. The private property of Philippe, the duc d’Orléans, who was “the first prince of the blood,” one of the richest men in Europe, he was an enlightened aristocrat who invented radical chic, in the end paying for it with his life. Known by the slightly used-car-salesman moniker of Philippe Egalité—Equality Phil—he was the prince of the hopeful prerevolutionary period when radical political philosophy took its inspiration from an idea of “English” free-market enterprise: the monopoly in bits and pieces of trade held by aristocrats was one of the complaints against them. It was very much as part of his egalitarianism, not as a piece of hypocrisy against it, that Philippe decided to rent the four great arcades of his palace to merchants: to modistes, tailor shops, bookstores, but above all to new places to eat and drink. Under Philippe’s protection, the Palais Royal became a petri dish of edible ideas, mutating and multiplying and then being devoured.

Although Chantoiseau’s first true restaurant was just around the corner on the Rue St.-Honoré, it was in the Palais Royal that the café and the restaurant flourished, and then, cross-fertilized by strange twistings of hunger and commerce, evolved into the thing we know now. All of the first great generation of restaurants—Véry, Méot, Beauvilliers, which were perhaps the most famous, if not the best, of the new places—found a home there. It is hard, walking through the Palais Royal today, to re-create what it must have been like in 1780: the noise, of course, and the sense of bustle, and the constant clandestine conspiracies and argument. We would have been shocked by their dirt, and delighted by their debate.

The revolution, far from sparking this change, actually dampened it briefly. Even as restaurants prospered in the Palais, the Jacobins of the Terror became suspicious of them—not because they were linked to the old kind of ostentation but because they were linked to the wrong kind of simplicity, had a tang of Petit Trianon fresh-butter-and-cheese nouvelle wholesomeness about them. The revolution, in its most radical moments, encouraged “grands couverts,” instead—the tables d’hôte of the Reign of Terror, where people sat at long tables, sharing the food and telling each other loudly what a good time we are having, Citizen, never mind the produce! Philippe himself, who had patronized the early restaurant, paid with his life during the Terror, as a victim of the Jacobins who regarded his revolutionary fervor as mere ambition. “Champagne is the poison of the people,” Robespierre announced, turning down an invitation to dinner. Blood was the people’s liquor.

Yet, though the revolution did not create the restaurant, in the end it could not stop its growth. The revolution was the lightning that struck the primal soup already in place and helped a new form of life to emerge. “If the French revolution had a detrimental effect on almost all the arts,” the gastronome Alexandre Grimod de La Reynière would write, and no fan of the revolutionary politics, he, “that was not the case with cooking; far from having suffered as a result, it has the Revolution to thank for its rapid progress and motive force.” The fifty years between 1780 and the revolution of 1830, when the world that we think of now as Parisian came into being—the soft-power civilization whose authority the great gastronome and liberal Brillat-Savarin tried to trace when he published The Physiology of Taste in 1825—were when it all happened, and it nearly all happened in the Palais Royal, “this lewd hanger, brazenly tweeting with some mad gaiety,” as Balzac called it. By 1805, there were fifteen restaurants and twenty cafés under the arcades; the most famous of the cafés, the Café de Foy, occupied no fewer than seven full arcade arches. The Foy was at number 59, the Beaujolais Theater at number 13, the Café Corazza at 12, and at number 80 was the Café Chartres, which persists to this day, largely unchanged, as the Grand Véfour. My intimations of origins were not false; the sun-flooded room with the dainty enameled nymphs really was the savannah from which Restaurant Man emerged.

Though Beauvilliers was the most famous of the first-generation restaurants, Véry, run by two brothers of that name, was perhaps the first “three-star” restaurant recognized as supreme—the undisputed top temple, first in a line that would pass through Maxim’s and end in its classic form at the Tour d’Argent. Though the Véry brothers’ first place was in the Palais Royal, they soon had an offshoot in the Tuileries, lodged in a specially designed, self-contained neoclassical temple on the Terrace des Feuillants. (Alain Dutournier’s contemporary Carré des Feuillants, off the Rue de Rivoli, is named in its honor.)

Theater lovers put themselves to sleep at night imagining the performances from the past that they would love to have seen: Richard Burbage, say, in the original Hamlet, or David Garrick in the eighteenth-century production. People who love to eat lull themselves thinking about the places where they wish they could have eaten. What would be the five restaurants that a greedy eater would most want to have dined at, but that no longer exist even in ghost form? Maybe the Café Foyot in the nineteenth century, when côtes de veau Foyot had just been invented; Prosper de Montagne, the first of the luxury bistros of the 1920s; or Pyramide in its heyday in the 1950s, with Fernand Point at the stove; or maybe Michel Guérard’s original Pot-au-Feu in the 1970s. (A list to which now will be added, as it closes, Ferran Adrià’ elBulli, in Catalonia.) But certainly Véry in its little temple should be very high on the list of restaurants to dream of.

And, just as the theater lover hesitates, worrying what Garrick or Burbage would have really been like in Hamlet—embarrassingly broad? surprisingly subtle?—greedy eaters worry whether they would have relished or been bemused by a Véry meal. What would we have eaten there? The menus that survive from its contemporaries (I know of none from Véry itself) alternate between dishes that one might make tonight—beef braised in Madeira, garnished with vegetables; grain-fed chicken with crayfish butter—and others that seem to belong to a weird remote past: a sauté of lark filets; filet of partridge in aspic with almond milk and rusks. Doubtless this duality is what we would register at a David Garrick performance, too: if we could go back to any past, we would surely be struck by how past it seems, its best fruits inevitably seeming dried, as seeds of the present we know now. An eighteenth-century Shakespeare performance would surely swing between recognizably sublime moments and weirdly remote rhetorical flourishes; even watching films of early-twentieth-century acting we rock uneasily between Madeira-braised beef and sautéed lark. So, surely, dinner at Véry. We would have been struck, for one thing, by how odd their drinking habits were, with sweet wines offered throughout the meal—sherries and ports. The familiar wet progression—starting with champagne, and then a bottle of white wine, on to red wine, then liqueurs and brandies, ending with a sweet wine—is a late invention, and largely English.

Though something like familiar “French cuisine” would have been found, life in the lewd hanger was, above all, mixed up. And it was the mixing-up in the kitchens, as much as the screwing in the apartments above, that made it lewd. The restaurants at the Palais Royal were, as often as not, what we would now call “ethnic,” not narrowly “French.” The cuisine of the Palais Royal was open. Things poured in. “Wines have been imported from all over the world,” Brillat-Savarin tells us proudly—not a boast that a French food writer would be inclined to make two centuries later—and “French cookery has annexed dishes of foreign extraction, such as curry and the beefsteak and relishes, such as caviar and soy.”

At least two of the most famous and admired restaurants in the Palais Royal were proudly “Provençal”: Les Trois Frères Provençaux—actually run by three brothers from Provence (Maneille, Trouin, and Simon)—and the Boeuf à la Mode, founded by two brothers from Marseille. Both flourished at a time when Provence was as exotic as the Maghreb is now, when familiar dishes such as braised beef and bouillabaisse were what tagines and couscous seem today. That Provence could have contributed to the lewd hanger’s cosmopolitanism, achieved by métissage, strange mixing, shows you how sedate a world the Palais restaurants were shaking up. That braised beef with poached vegetables, still the best of company dishes, should ever have been considered “à la mode,” much less exotic! The secret to its dazzle, then as now, was to add a calf’s foot in the braising liquid, to make it gelatinous. (I remember the odd pride with which my favorite Parisian butcher would include the foot, somehow so white and forlorn, with the roast when you told him what you wanted to make.)

The cosmopolitan current did not flow from Provence alone; when Brillat-Savarin said that a Paris meal could be a cosmopolitan whole, he meant that everything was there. Everyone talked about how many kinds of food you could find—the cuisine of the provinces, of course, Béarn, and the southwest and Burgundy, which kept some of their character as little countries right up to the coming of the railroads and the highways. But still more the cooking and goods of Africa, and America and Asia. “French cooking” was a composite disguised as a whole, an airborne and seaborne thing recast as a shoot from the soil.

Another change that the new restaurants imposed in the 1790s was the abandonment of French or banquet service for what the French themselves called Russian service, which is just what we today think gives order to a meal: instead of a lot of dishes placed nobly on a table with servants to serve them—Carême’s idea of dinner—dishes would come one after another, in an order chosen by the host and his chef. The loss in architectural splendor and arrangement of the kind Carême made great was compensated for by a gain in freedom: once every diner was brought his own dish, soon every diner could choose his own dish.

The passage from French to Russian service turns out, the historian Jean-Louis Flandrin reports, to be a lot more complex than it seems. It took place over time, and, indeed, probably seemed less marked when you experienced it than when you read about it. It is sometimes said that, in the grand French service, the diner’s place at the table determined what he ate: if you were seated down by the beets, beets is all you got. (I have been to New York dinner parties where, seated down among the lesser notables, this was true: you ate what was nearest, and what was nearest was a sign of who you really were.) But in the novels and histories from the period that is not the way people eat at all; what later historians overlook is the superabundance of footmen, ready to help you get the bits you wanted from the other end. One of the hardest things for modern people to keep in mind is the difference between a servant-scarce and a servant-rich environment. Whether the service at the table was Russian service or French service, it was servant service. “It makes a servantless New Yorker sore, to think that Mozart had to bare his head,” Auden wrote once. “But Mozart never had to make his bed.” Servants are to history what dark matter is to the universe: the omnipresent thing that affects everything but that no one quite sees. But surely the change to Russian service was driven, just a little, by fear of footmen, too. “The presence of valets at table is the greatest scourge that can be inflicted on a meal. Their eyes avidly devouring all the dishes, their ears mopping all the opinions, and their tongues always ready to denounce their masters,” the lawyer-turned-bon-vivant Grimod wrote. Even if the threat of betrayal was made melodramatic, the problem was probably really there.

It took time to turn this mixed-up menu into a single ordered enterprise. If the story of the transition from French to Russian service is cloudy, the idea of “French cooking” is truly foggy. Though the idea of “French cuisine” as a systematic enterprise with a single starting point and a neat underlying grammar would spread out to take over the world, French restaurant cooking in 1810 was really a jumble of country food, health food, city food, old chefs from fancy families, and cheap food for hungry people. Only in reading about it later did anyone think of it as old, fixed, and neat as a pin.

Is this not the way big change often happens in all the arts? A composite, hybrid, open-ended, and eclectic thing, is soon treated as though it were a closed grammar, systematic and finished, only to be revealed later to have been a splendid mess all along. (Jackson Pollock’s spatters and pourings only latterly assume the utter precision and harmony we are directed to observe in them; the chaos one beholds on first glance is not entirely or even mostly an illusion. It was part of the intention.) It is the job of artists, including cooks and painters, to make whatever they can of whatever matter lies at hand. Then it is the job of critics to pretend that what looks like chaos is really closed order. (Clement Greenberg, the American art critic, had to take Pollock’s spatters and pourings, applied intuitively, and make them look like a logical culmination of everything that had ever happened in painting.) And then it falls to scholars later on to show that what looks closed was really just as chaotic as it first seemed: that American painting, or French cooking, is a mix of sixteen different things and eighteen different impulses, and anyway, was not the same in 1808 as it was in 1819. (This gives generations of critics and scholars work and keeps us off the streets, leaving the next generation of cooks and artists to do their work in relative peace.)

Yet the story of the birth of the French restaurant cannot be well told without the twin story of its Sancho Panza, the French café. The history of the café and the restaurant are no less intertwined than the history of the bed and the table; both entanglements represent a passage subtle and not always easily traced, then or now. In the best study of that history, From Taverns to Bistros: The History of Cafés, a French scholar named Luc Bihl-Willette identifies at least six distinct features that separated the restaurant from the café, though some seem more metaphysical than concrete.

It does seem sure that the modern café was born by government decree. One of the first laws made by the National Assembly after the revolution was one passed in 1789 that simply made it legal to sell coffee and wine and spirits in the same place—for the first time a drinking shop, where alcohol was sold, could be a place where other things to ingest were sold as well. We have been conditioned by Edmund Burke and his followers to think of the French Revolution as only a scary, top-heavy Utopian folly, and forget that it had its libertarian aspects, too. For the moderate Girondins, economic liberty was a crucial part of revolutionary liberty; Adam Smith was a new god France should worship. Monopoly was the enemy. Where, before the revolution, the selling and serving of food was bound around by archaic rites and privileges—only certain guilds could make breads; others pastries; still others sell tea and coffee; these aristocrats had the monopoly on salt, those on molasses—the revolution deregulated all that, and allowed, with modest momentousness, the neighborhood café, and, soon, the ordinary restaurant, to sell spirits and caffeine at the same place and time.

This helped the restaurant to become what it was and is. First, of course, by encouraging the entrepreneur, but also by mixing up the goods, and particularly by mixing up the two liquids of coffee and wine. For modern restaurant cooking is first and foremost a boat that, as in a Saul Steinberg drawing, steams its way downriver from the thousand dreamy islands of alcohol to the wide beckoning current of caffeine, from the stress-busting drink to the reawakening demitasse. A modern French meal not including both (even if the caffeine sometimes takes the degenerate form of tea, and the alcohol of spirits) is impossible to imagine. Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners. A modern meal is a drama unfolding between the Opening Drink and the Concluding Coffee, with the several acts passing between the libations.

And, without strong coffee and red wine, it isn’t possible to have good restaurants. Though it is hard to tell the restaurant from the café in following the restaurant’s semi-occult history, a case can be made that the café was the more original of the two inventions, or at least the more singular: around 1900, there were thirty thousand cafés in Paris, and fewer than six thousand in London—and it is hard to know how many of those in London were true cafés, and how many mere tea shops. On the other hand, when it came to the “drinking shops,” early bars, there was one for each one thousand potential drinkers in London, eleven to one thousand in Paris. The café was a civilizing institution, whose name guaranteed, or suggested, a genuine ward against alcoholism. The grand café of the Paris boulevards, like the proper restaurant, was always a source of wonder to English people, as it was to Americans.

Yet though joined at the hip, the temperamental difference between the two was real. The restaurant belongs to its cook. You come to eat, and though, as Brillat-Savarin saw, anyone can eat there, still you come to eat. Four pistoles are not nothing. The café, though, belongs to its habitués, and pleasure can be rented for the price of a coffee. We do not all feel equally at home within it; the newcomer to the quartier gets uneasy looks from the chess players at their usual table. But at the ritzy restaurant the awkwardness of the nouveau riche who has money in his pocket though not yet the rules of conduct graven in his heart is part of the comedy (and pathos) of urban modernity. (In Chaplin’s early masterpiece The Immigrant, Charlie as a recently arrived Jew knows some of the rules of the new American grand café—that you applaud when the music ends—but not others that don’t apply back where he comes from: for instance, that you should not ever, under any circumstances, eat with your knife.)

That the double presence of coffee and wine is necessary to “force” the restaurant, as the seeded underbrush is necessary to force the trees, is made plain when you see what happens in places—Ireland and England—where you drink your drink in one place and take your coffee in another: it’s a recipe for alcoholism, bad coffee, and a weak restaurant culture. (It was only after the proliferation of the espresso bar and the wine bar that London cooking began, thirty years ago, to become first rate.)

French cooking was made not merely in the space between caffeine and alcohol but in the simultaneous presence of both, thus blending, in sequence, the two drugs by which modern people shape their lives. Good food takes place in the head space between them. Most modern people use these drugs in some guise at one dose or another, but some of the primacy of Paris as a restaurant town surely has to do with its first having perfected the proportions and the form of each one. Modern life is regulated by these drugs, morning to night—one speeding us up, and one slowing us down. (The rock-and-roll-age equivalents, cocaine and pot, do the same work for another generation—do it more hysterically, but do the same work.) The British variants, tea and whisky or beer, are separated, by tradition and perhaps by necessity, in space and time: the four o’clock tearoom and the ten o’clock pub. (In the American diner, the two shaping drugs are caffeine and sugar—a cup of joe and a piece of pie.)

The decree of 1789 not only provided the French restaurant meal its fluids; it gave it its form. It was then that the system of alcohol began—fortified wines began to be drunk at the end of meals rather than right through. The wine began to be rated, blossoming into the greatest triumph of the French genius for systematization, the classification of Bordeaux in 1855. None of this happened quickly. The evidence for the introduction of the trou normand, the shot of spirits in between courses, for instance, is very shaky until our own time. But everyone noted that it was a new thing in France to drink sweetened coffee at night, at the end of meals, as a stimulant and digestif.

Alcohol, as Malcolm Gladwell has reminded us, is above all a myopic drug: it forces the imbiber’s attention ever more narrowly upon what’s in front of him. It closes us off and isolates us, that’s its odd charm. (And its special danger. You can see only the boy or girl in front of you—but not the truck bearing down on the side road.) A little glass of wine, and all there is in the world is the date and the table—or often, in lonely moments, the bar and the bartender—but the world and its stresses flee for a moment into a vague blur of the background.

Caffeine, on the other hand, is a far-sighted drug. Several sips of café noir and the sipper feels charged up, the corners of the café gleam, and we look around the room, ready to take on the world again. We read while we drink coffee, romance while we drink wine. Coffee, one might say, is a flow drink, wine a focus drink. Focused, we can let our attention wander; feeling in the flow, we can happily try to focus once again. By a familiar mental or merely chemical trick, we dose ourselves with one drug to get our brains to produce the opposite effect: our tongues burn intolerably as we eat capsaicin, which is the hotness in hot peppers, and so the brain overproduces its own opiates, to compensate. The pleasure of spicy food is a trick we play on our inner junkie. Wine, though clinically a depressant, forces us to feel happy for no reason; as we sink, we search for pleasure. Coffee, though a stimulant that should propel us out of our seat, lets us concentrate more fiercely on the task at hand. (Good writers have often been drunks, but none has written well while drunk; the drinking is an escape from the pressing pain of concentration—awareness—fueled by coffee through the working day.) Wine takes us from the world, and coffee restores us to it again. In between, we eat.

A restaurant meal, in 1789 as now, is really a short sonata in head fuels. Without the drinks, we could hardly find our hungers. Wine “depresses” and narrows the buzzing room until we feel happily alone, on our own little island. Without it, a restaurant can feel as unbearably crowded as a subway car. After the meal (then as now richer in a restaurant than at our own home, and more lulling in its fullness and richness), coffee reawakens us to the world—the room’s walls press outward again. If there is a tiny bit of salt in the coffee—an old French trick—the enhancement is even greater. The walls recede, the door opens, and the night beckons us on.

The café and restaurant have their interplay in history, but they also had one that went on every night. In Henry Murger’s mid-century Scènes de la Vie de Bohème—the novel that gave us La Bohème, and which is also the best memorial of ordinary food life in early-nineteenth-century France—the “Bohemians,” artists and writers, all go out to dinner after the hero, Rodolphe, suddenly comes into money. Significantly, they go to one of those “exotic” Provençal restaurants, this one on the Rue Dauphine, “well known for its aioli and for the literary tastes of its waiters,” but eat there only moderately, since they have plans for a late supper, too. Only after their restaurant dinner do they go to their pet café, the Café Momus, where “from that day the establishment became uninhabitable for the rest of the patrons.” There, they have coffee and liqueurs. The restaurant belongs to food, and to its waiters; the café to caffeine, and to its patrons. The two together, like scrub oak and driftwood in a beach resort, make the landscape of the modern food town.

Brillat-Savarin saw this—that coffee, once a breakfast drink alone, had, in the era of the restaurant, come into general use “after dinner as an exhilarating tonic.” Grimod, too, recognized the essential alliance of the two elements. “It would now be unthinkable to invite guests to the simplest of meals were there not two or three liquors flanking the coffee pot,” he said. In the café first, and in the restaurant later, the marriage of the two true fuels was made, and modern life began.

Beyond all this—beyond even the life of the lewd hanger, the marriage of the two modern drugs, the merging of faraway cooking styles into one idea of “French food,” beyond the spirits flanking the coffeepot and the advent of the Opening Drink and the Concluding Coffee—there was a world of writing and thought in Paris then that made the new thing, the restaurant, happen. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, in a path-making article on the invention of gastronomy in nineteenth-century France, borrows the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of a social “field” as the unit of social life to explain why Paris became the place where dining first happened.

This idea of a social “field” seems opaque until one sees that it is not really far from what we already call in common speech “a scene.” There is, for instance, a fine French bakery in the little American seaside town where I am writing this, started there by a couple of émigré Frenchmen, but there is no food scene. The shop will live and die, thrive or fail, together with the two Frenchmen who planted it. A bakery in New York, on the other hand, will be replaced by another, perhaps a better one. Or we might say, “There are a couple of good rep cinemas in Philadelphia, but there’s really no movie scene,” meaning a crowd of critics, commentators, loyal fans. There can be good basketball players in a city and no basketball “culture,” no scene, and a good jazz scene in places that few jazz players actually come from. A field is really just the fancy name for a scene. The scene most often conjures up the object of its desires. In London in the 1970s, for instance, good writing about food happened before the food did: a scene emerged before there was a subject. There were places to eat all throughout Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. There had to be. But there was a restaurant scene in Paris alone.

One thing that makes culinary history, the story of how people used to make and eat food, different from other kinds of stories about the past is that it has as its object something that still goes on every day for everyone—eating is the great democratic equalizer, like breathing, more even than sex is—and at the same time it also goes on particularly, in weird or expensive ways, for a handful of people. It is as if in the history of culture everyone in every city in every age were painting three pictures a day: separating common history from “art history” would then become very hard. They were eating just as often, cooking and spicing their meals just as precisely to the tastes of the people about to eat, in Bulgaria in 1790 as they were in Paris. But in Paris, and only in Paris, was there yet a real food scene—a mass of critics, diners, chefs, and above all writers who were talking and writing about food in new ways. They didn’t eat more in Paris. They couldn’t. But they did talk about it more than they did in other places, and then wrote about the things they said.

This may seem to make more of the role of writers than one should. What do you mean… they wrote their food? But it happens all the time. Studying the growth of American baseball at the beginning of the twentieth century, the great sabermetrician Bill James once pointed out that you can’t really separate what Christy Mathewson and Ty Cobb were doing from what Grantland Rice and Ring Lardner were publishing. The growth of the sports page made the growth of sports possible; the baseball writers made what we think of as baseball. We sense that the two are different and we should, since what the cook or the first baseman does is harder than what critics and columnists do. But you need both to get high-order accomplishment. It was the scene that gave birth to the restaurant, as much as the restaurant that gave birth to the scene. It takes a scene to make a world.

What made the food scene spring up in Paris? What made the writers critique food instead of love or life or pure reason? Older histories, as we’ve seen, tend to put the “creative” moment a little too late, and say that chefs were pushed out from the aristocratic houses as the mouths they fed were lost along with the heads around them, and, desperate to make a living, they opened restaurants. But no one, however desperate, starts a business without perceiving an unmet demand; a place to sell food for money would never have opened if the interest wasn’t there to start.

Historians now tend to put their finger on a few linked causes for the new “field.” First, and most important, though easy to forget, was the end of famine in France. We take the fact of plenty now so much for granted that the press of scarcity can strike us as charming, or even, at times, enviable: how they must have enjoyed having strawberries only in season, a steak once a month. And if they missed a season or couldn’t get a steak, all the more relish when they finally had it! In truth, starvation was, through the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, a constant fear, a yearly specter in Europe. As Ferguson writes, “Cyclical famines had ravaged the continent for centuries.” New methods of farming; new means of distribution, instanced by the growth of central city markets; and, above all, the end of the feudal order, with its monopolies of grain and other goods, resulted (in most places, at most times, for most people) in, at last, enough to eat throughout Europe. The first need for those who want to reflect on the meaning of lunch is the certainty of having dinner. Though there were periods of hunger through the revolution, they were only periods. There were still famines, during the Terror, but people thought of them as discrete crises because they didn’t happen all the time. Bad and cruel things still happened, but France, at least, was now a country of relative plenty.

Scarcity creates sanctions; abundance encourages altruism. When your plate is empty, you are inclined to see eaters as sinners; when your plate is full, gluttony looks fine. In a Catholic country like France, the new plenty helped promote a more relaxed idea of pleasure. The second change, linked to the end of famine, was that enjoying food for its own sake came to be regarded not as an instance of gluttony but a virtue of its own. So the sudden release from the bonds of guilt creates an exhalation of pleasure. “Luxury” suddenly looks like life. Voltaire wrote a poem about this change called “The Man of the World,” in which he tries to show that everything once called superfluous can be seen as truly needed. Once we accept more than subsistence living, which needs are on the money, which over the top? The pace of freedom quickened, so that by the time that Eugène Sue’s novel The Seven Deadly Sins appeared, in 1848, he could argue that the “sins” are not deadly at all, that they are in truth blessings—and gourmandise one of the best among them. All the people in Sue’s imaginary family are in the food business—butcher, baker, fishmonger, food importer—and they all come together in the end to celebrate the good things that come from a life devoted to what would have once been called gluttony. From seeing the table as the enemy of virtue to pressing the glutton button at will—few alterations in human consciousness have been larger, or taken place over less time. It was a world changing its mind, as much as cooks changing places, that made Paris the capital of food, and caused the invention of the thing that we call French cooking.

There was still another distinction in the Parisian instance, this one built into the fact of food. Citing classical models had long been the best way to affirm the importance of a new thing. But everyone could sense that the way that Romans and Greeks ate, at least as recorded in their literature, was no way anyone wanted to eat now. The food of the ancient Romans—swans stuffed with live larks, and then refunded in a vomitorium—already seemed too odd to imitate.

While Carême looks back to classical architectural models for his grand pièces montées, his ideas about the food itself are empirical, practical, and inductive—thought from the bottom up rather than imposed from a noble past. His cookbook begins with the pot-au-feu—the simple braised beef that is still one of the best good things in the French kitchen—which he recognizes as the source of stocks, and he treats it to a chemical analysis. What remained of “Roman” spices—that heady, intoxicating play of ginger and pepper and cinnamon—was banished, too, and replaced by “no high spiced sauces, no dark brown gravies… every meat presented its own natural aroma, every vegetable its own shade of verdure.” Whatever eating was to be, we were going to have to make it up. The scene was probably more open for innovation in cooking than in almost any other field. There are times in the history of culture when the “minor” arts lead the major; the Dutch designer Rietveld’s chairs were “abstract” studies in primary colors before Mondrian learned from him and made it art. Cooking was the first of the modern arts to do entirely without classical sanction and the first to claim it modeled itself on nature alone—and, to a reasonable degree, it actually did so. At Carême’s table you could eat chicken with chervil even before, at Corot’s easel, you could see Italy as it was.

Morals change, then meals; desires drive our diets. Of all the new jobs that the new scene made, the most potent was that of the chronicler of changing desires, the pro food writer—the “gastronomic journalist.” The emergence of journalists, with their natural affinity for eating, was one of the events of the day. Journalists, Grimod de La Reynière tells us, are all big eaters and drinkers: “recognizable by their apoplectic throats, their bushy mustaches, and their puffy bibulous visages.”

It was Brillat-Savarin, the wandering French food lover and exile of the mixed-up Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period, long resident in the newborn United States, who wrote the first great book about taste and why it matters, that famous 1825 Physiology of Taste. Brillat-Savarin’s book was, or seemed to be, one of the first rule books, the first attempts to put “gastronomy”—the word he made famous—on a semiscientific basis: to make the serious study of cooking and eating one more of the Enlightenment’s subjects, to be pinned in an encyclopedia. Yet though his tone was mock-scientific, his purpose was humane—he was an expatriate essayist, poor guy—and his theme was simple. For Brillat-Savarin, gastronomy is the great adventure of desire. Its subject is simple: the table is the place where a need becomes a want. Something we have to do—eat—becomes something we care to do—dine—and then something we care to do becomes something we try to do with grace. Eating together is the civilizing act. We take urges, and tame them into tastes.

Brillat-Savarin wasn’t really writing an encyclopedia of sensations; he was writing a book on the reach of pleasures. We chew with our molars, but eat with our minds. “The pleasure of the table is a reflected sensation, originating in various facts, places, things and persons [taking in] all the modifications of society which extreme sociability has introduced among us: love, friendship, business, speculation, power, ambition, and intrigue, all enhance conviviality.” His allied subject was sex, which also began with a gasp and was tamed into a game. “I observe with pride, that gourmandise and coquettery, the two great modifications which society has effected in our imperious wants, are both of French origin,” he wrote. Flirtation, like good cooking, was the way impulse submitted to social discipline—manners.

Brillat-Savarin became an exile because he had been a political radical: he was a member of the revolutionary National Assembly, a Jacobin, not a lovable old duffer with a few sweet epigrams about food, but a leading voice for liberty. Yet his passion was for the politics of pleasure as Voltaire had proposed them, not the politics of purity as Robespierre and the radicals perverted them. Eating was, for Brillat-Savarin, what fighting wasn’t: mixed, mongrelized, common, and all to the good. What sped him into exile was a horror at the Utopian politics of Robespierre, the man who liked only soft and simple food, and who thought that champagne was the poison of the people’s liberty. The sansculottes came for him, and wrote a death warrant.

Brillat-Savarin fled France, penniless, in 1792, and it was then that his wanderings took him to America, where he lived and taught French and the violin to American girls in Boston and Philadelphia and New York. He played first violin in a park orchestra. (And loved the good matter, if not the then-inadequate finish, of our East Coast plenty: oysters, shad roe, and scallops.) He went back to France in 1797, with the Terror past, to work as a judge and legal theorist, but the epiphany for Brillat-Savarin as an eater occurred in 1816 when, with France as defeated as any country could be, English and German victors poured into Paris and were converted (and fleeced) by the cultural force of French food and flirtation. He realized—and this was not the last time people would see this in France; the same would follow the even more bitter defeat of the Franco-Prussian War—that the soft power of food and free love (or love for hire) could be more powerful than the steel power of armies.

To understand why gourmands could be more potent than generals became his purpose. His Physiology of Taste is not a study of an old man’s pleasures; it is a plea for the systematic study of that soft power. Brillat-Savarin’s idea that besoins—needs, wants—become demands and desires was made political through the civilizing act of the table. His program for soft power was based in what he called “social gourmandise”—what we might now call altruistic greed, or, better, unselfish gluttony. Brillat-Savarin’s ideal eater was not the gourmet—the fussbudget with a napkin—but the gourmand, the greedy guy with a date. “Gourmand,” though a word everyone knows, is a hard word to translate. Literally a glutton—but “glutton” in English has overtones of loutishness that the French word doesn’t have. To be gourmand is not just to be greedy for whatever it is they put in front of you but alive with appetite for the special thing you want. To be a gourmand is not to be a gourmet; you’re not finicky. But it is to want the good things in life. It can also be, as Brillat-Savarin recognizes, a perversity: something we have to do cut off from its proper place, and made into a fetish, a wanting. We can’t care too much about dining, but we can care too much about food. The sin isn’t loving the flesh; it’s losing our minds in loving the flesh. A moment of mindful appreciation comes between the observation and the act. Eating well is purely animal if it doesn’t become a way to think about appetite itself.

Brillat-Savarin was not just a good eater; he was, in every sense, a liberal eater. It was Brillat-Savarin who inspired the first century of food writing in French and English both. (M.F.K. Fisher’s translation of Brillat-Savarin is one of the monuments of the movement.) The tone of food writing remained most often his tone of mock-epic appreciation and semisatirical systemization, systematic but self-mocking, too. His approach—eating for pleasure and writing about what the food was like while meditating on its place in a big picture of life—is still the one that draws us closest to the real meaning of our appetites.

If Brillat-Savarin was the first philosopher of eating as a humanistic act, he was also, as Alexandre Dumas the elder remarked a little disparagingly, “a man of theory,” who hovered above and around the table and never, as Dumas scoffed, offered an actual recipe. His great rival and bookend, Grimod La Reynière, as he was known—I’ve already had to quote from him at length, as any fan or student of the period must—was a man born to pen and paper, who sat right at it.

Born in November of 1758, Grimod de La Reynière was the son of a kind of borderline aristocrat, a tax collector whose license to tax on behalf of the King was usually turned into a habit of stealing on behalf of himself. Grimod had a hideous birth defect; both of his arms were missing hands, and ended, like the lobster-boy’s in a sideshow, in strange fleshy pincers. His shame-filled parents, at a time when birth defects were still seen as signs from God, put about the bizarre story that the boy had been dropped in a pigpen, and that the swine had devoured his hands. (The effect of this lie on a boy who grew up with a special—vengeful?—love for bacon is hard to know for sure, but it’s easy to imagine morbidly.)

Grimod in any case soon had prosthetic hands and the deformity, as deformity so often does, had only a passing effect on his life: he liked to tease people by putting his wooden hands on a hot stove, leading his friends to do the same, thinking that it wasn’t. Like Brillat-Savarin, he had a bad revolution. (Though perhaps only bad people had good ones.) Starting out as a kind of libertine democrat—“I was a Republican when there was some glory in being one,” he said later, mostly truthfully—just before the revolution he had been, ironically, sent into exile by his rich and well-connected uncle, Malsherbes, as punishment for a series of sophomoric literary scandals. This meant that Grimod sat out most of the revolution in the little southern town of Béziers, where he ate well—“rabbits fed on scented herbs, quails as fat as chickens, aubergines, heaven-sent melons, muscat grapes, and Roquefort cheese fit for a non-dethroned King”—he said, with a wince of irony, and found his vocation writing about it. As word of the bloodletting spread to him—his own uncle was one of Robespierre’s prime victims—food also became a retreat from reality: “I would die of despair if I were not rescued by my good appetite,” he wrote back. Eating was then, as it is now, self-medication, a therapy of the panicked.

It was after the end of the Terror and his return to Paris that he became both a passionate reactionary—“Never did fanaticism produce a thousandth part of the evils which incredulity causes today,” he said—and the inventor of the first regular food journalist’s magazine, the Almanach des Gourmands, which first appeared in 1803. The magazine, though a bit chaotic, included blind tastings, articles on foods, and a restaurant guide. Grimod himself was a star, with his picture—overweight, sweaty looking, and a little undignified—in the first issue.

He was a greedy guy, who used his new fame to sponsor eating clubs, where the best of the new restaurants would send free food in exchange for a certificate of approval to put in their windows, and where he could invite the starlets of the day to dine with him. (Though he had a way with those wooden hands he seems, unsurprisingly, to have boasted of his skill at cunnilingus.) The idea of the French journalist as a man in search of free meals and free company and free chatte, too—which Balzac mocks, and which persists into our own day, when the Parisian food critic who pays the bill is a rare bird indeed—was already part of Grimod’s persona, and his self-invention.

What distinguishes Grimod de La Reynière from the artisanal sound of all prior food writing, even Brillat-Savarin’s, is his taste for aphorism, for summing up a sensual moment in abstract mots. The writer searches for a pregnant phrase to sum up a pleasure just past. Grimod is a first-rate epigram-maker, and still apt today. There is, for instance, his line that “the three things to avoid at the table are ‘a little wine which I bought from the grocer,’ a dinner ‘just among a few friends,’ and amateur musicians.” Or he can be neatly compact, as when he writes, “A gourmand should respect his teeth as an author his talent.” (It need be noted that it was only in the Second Empire, when a Philadelphia dentist visited France and befriended the Empress, that anything like decent dentistry came to Paris.)

Yet there is a tongue-in-cheek, self-mocking tone to his work, and to French food writing of the period generally, which academics often miss. We have often heard these days about the difference between sincerity (saying what you truly think) and authenticity (being who you really are). There is as big a difference, though, between being sincere and being in earnest. Both Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de La Reynière are entirely sincere in their passion for eating, as they are in their small discriminations, their appetite for order and system. They love food. They really do. But they are never completely in earnest, always kidding about their subject even as they celebrate it, and Grimod’s aphorisms are always to be taken as an instance of the mock-heroic. (With the understanding that mock-heroic is different from the ironic: the ironic says, “I don’t really mean this”; the mock-heroic says, “I mean what I say, but I know that saying so has its absurd aspects.”)

Brillat-Savarin and Grimod don’t entirely mean what they write, but then they sort of do. When de La Reynière says that “lunch is the meal of friendship, dinner of etiquette, and tea of children; supper alone belongs to love,” he is both summing up the new pecking order of meals (under which, for instance, there really were two kinds of déjeuners—one a true lunch, the other, petit déjeuner, a “little lunch,” or breakfast, a separate meal of chocolate or coffee and bread) and using the Enlightenment turn of mind, with its love of oversimple summary and a neat schedule of emotions, against itself, to mock its own proprieties. It’s a joke, but not just a joke. Grimod is smiling, but he’s not kidding. Or when he writes that “all the other people of Europe theorize and argue; only the Frenchman knows how to talk,” he is in part paying a patriotic compliment to his own people, but also recognizing, as Brillat-Savarin had before him, that the table was the one place where French superiority could still assert itself. It’s a loser’s boast. Even Brillat-Savarin’s most famous mot, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,” is a jest as much as a judgment, not meant to be taken entirely seriously—a prejudice dressed up as an absolute.

“Playful” is an ugly word in English, since it suggests the opposite of true play: tyrannical teachers, brutish coaches, sadistic bosses, all like to think of themselves as “playful.” So one pauses before saying that the writing of Brillat-Savarin and Grimod is “playful.” But “ludic,” an older and odder word, suits the gastronomes well; they are aware of the absurd aspects of their enterprise even as they undertake it. When Brillat-Savarin writes of his “Dynamometer,” which registers where on the social ladder you belong according to how you choose to eat, or ranks gourmands according to many classes—from the first level, at which you eat truffled turkey, to the fourth, where presumably it’s pot-au-feu right down the line—using “gastronomic tests,” there’s a smile on his prose. He’s kidding around about the French mania for systematization, while taking part in it at the same time. (This tone has its American equivalent later in the nineteenth century; when Melville and Twain write about the confidence man as the most representative and greatest American figure, they really mean it and they don’t. As con men in America, so cooks in France; they really are admired, but admiring them is also a way of making fun of the people, generals and statesmen, whom you are supposed to admire more.)

This double-talk, kidding the new powers by praising the lower arts, is present in most of Grimod de La Reynière’s best lines about food. When he writes, for instance, that “the cook looks death in the eye more often than the soldier,” he means it—to be a cook is to see a lot of carnage and to know how to evaluate it, to know when to hang the carcass and when to slice it up at once—but he is also suggesting that the soldier’s courage is hardly more useful than the cook’s. Or when he writes beautifully that “the pig is the encyclopedic animal”—meaning that it includes everything from lowly feet to all-purpose bacon and tender filet—he is both offering a lovely summary and joking about those other “encyclopedic animals” the high-minded philosophes attend. There’s your encyclopedia, on four trotters. We miss something essential about the birth of food writing if we miss this tone of sober counter-Enlightenment clowning, its tongue-in-cheek parody of the age’s pieties, a new tone sobered by experience and made lighter by life. There is a noisy form of quietism in Grimod, a lip-smacking form of life doubting. Nothing works out the way you think it will; you might as well eat. This note of bitter, brilliant, defeated glamour exudes from his work.

For where Brillat-Savarin’s liberalism is central to his idea of good eating, Grimod’s reactionary politics is key to the passion of his gourmandise. When Grimod writes that a gourmand’s first duty “is to sample everything and have an aversion to nothing,” he is proposing a kind of table-based extension of Voltaire’s great comment, upon being asked to return a second time to a male bordello, “Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.” But we can recognize the chastened wisdom of the postrevolutionary period, too. Loss, defeat—first the moral defeat of hope in the Terror, then the practical defeat of the French by the Germans and English—are the emotional keys to the growth of the food scene in Paris. The thought that we have our greatest triumphs at the table implies that we have been defeated on the field. No successful militaristic nation has ever cared too much about eating. Robespierre and Napoléon, who brought disorder, fear, and eventual defeat to France, were both ascetics. Thinking too hard, trying too hard, can lead to terror and war; thinking alternately with eating is a saner plan. We can organize and systematize all we like about eating—but in the end the animal will return. Whatever we say about food today, we will be hungry again tomorrow.

The Paris food scene, the first “culinary field,” is in this way partly an extension of “the habit of cultural explanation,” an incursion of intellect into an area previously thought to be the simple province of Nature. But the food writers never forget that natural appetite persists in the face of all systems. Brillat-Savarin, the disillusioned liberal, remains a man of the Enlightenment, bringing order to the table; Grimod, the reactionary, is very much a man of the counter-Enlightenment, seeking in abiding pleasures salvation from all those scary absolutes. But both know better than to plan a perfect meal.

Brillat-Savarin and Grimod divide between them the empire of food; they are the two working philosophers of taste who invented its literary form, and almost all food writing since has taken as its mask either Brillat’s warm ironic smile or Grimod’s brilliant epigrammatic grimace. Yet they have much in common, too. The soft snap and crackle of long-braised rueful wisdom in the work of Brillat-Savarin and Grimod is very different from the racket of arriviste learning. The table’s intuitions always trump its new rules. Food writing was born in the wake of the revolution and the Terror, and one hears in its corridors and back hallways the sigh of those who stayed alive, returned from exile and panic, and are now grateful for the smallest of pleasures. It’s an animal truth—the pig’s truth at Christmas, the turkey’s the day after Thanksgiving—and more welcome for that: the wisdom of those who survive is that survival is itself a kind of wisdom.

This tone, and this kind of food writing, seems uniformly easy to like. Still, we should also see that while Brillat-Savarin’s writing on food is reformist and optimistic, Grimod’s, for all its genius, is a counsel of defeatism and despair, and was seen that way at the time: the Almanach des Gourmands soon had a rejoinder published by an angry liberal: The Almanach of Starvation. In Grimod’s celebration of eating, there are the first intimations of the cordoning off of the French palate—the emergence of the idéologie française, the myth of a douce France, safeguarded from outside influence and living on its own bounty and beauty, that would do so much harm to the Republic. Not by accident does Grimod’s brilliant grimacing take the very same tone as that of Robert Courtine, the famous twentieth-century food critic who took over Grimod’s pen name, La Reynière, and wrote for decades in Le Monde with the same wincing high style. Only after his death did the eminent newspaper discover, or reveal, that Courtine had been a virulent anti-Semite and an extreme right-wing Vichyiste. The turn to the table can be made as often in bitterness as in benevolence.

Indeed, among the real La Reynière’s circle, a reactionary countermyth soon sprang up, romanticizing French food. Instead of being the work of métissage, mixed-up influences and urban crossbreedings, French cooking was said to be quite simply the cooking of the noble French peasant and the simple French provinces brought to the tables of the city. This attempt to make the cooking that had grown up in Paris look as though it had always been stewing in the same pious pot would have its bad effect on French cuisine.

The culinary historians who have written the new history of the restaurant are mostly what might be called “sizzlists.” They think the atmosphere, the sizzle, around the steak is more important to its aura than the steak itself. Most of the new culinary historians practice “niche” history, and, like the best of such books, theirs are rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories about the making of familiar things. They also practice what you might call the new secret-code school of history—history that claims that some familiar thing, like a pair of pants, which is supposed to do one thing (say, cover your legs) is really there to do another (say, show off the insecure double nature of bourgeois masculinity).

The trouble with this kind of reading—and one of the more obvious banalities of seeing everything as a social construction, the ultimate postmodern vice—is that it vastly underestimates the difficulty of doing things, as opposed to thinking about them. It implies that ideas are hard, while pants (or soup) are easy. In fact, it is as hard to make good chicken soup as it is to make a reason that it is good for you, and the technical history of cooking is, after all, not a tourist trap for historians but a necessary subject.

The historian Amy Trubek has pointed out, rightly, that one of the most momentous changes that the restaurant brought to French cooking was simply the invention of stock. While the drinkable restaurants became restaurants in our sense, they also became stocks, and the use of stocks, as Trubek points out, is what distinguishes French cooking from all other kinds. You could simmer some bones and vegetables in a pot full of water, cook it down and reserve the liquid. Add something else and finally you would have a dish that tasted both like the stuff you simmered and the something else you bathed in it. (This is different from putting a sauce on pasta, or adding chutney to a curry, where the idea is that the main thing and the sauce are nothing alike.) This way of enriching and layering flavors seems obvious once you think of it, and, once it was thought of, the range of fine shadings became so vast that by the 1820s, French cooking had built its whole “grammar” upon this way of relating each thing on the plate to every other.

Grammars are easier to teach than accents, as every Berlitz instructor knows, and because French cooking had a grammar, within fifty years it was the only kind of cooking rich people wanted. The restaurant was, among other things, the potential originator of sauces, and it was sauces that became the glory of the new cooking. Whether for the goose or the gander the sauce was the thing even more than the thing being sauced.

With the end of the revolution, and the restoration of the monarchy, the restaurant got a new life, as the bourgeois palace par excellence. It moved for good from the complicated, “semipublic” space, the Palais Royal world, of before the revolution to the “semiprivate” space that it has been since. The restaurant in later nineteenth-century Paris was a place that only seemed to offer a public experience; in fact, you were having a private, anonymous experience. You were out and about, in society, yes, but without being social. So it is that restaurants became, in Rebecca Spang’s words, “places of daydream and fantasy.”

Should we believe that there is no substance in cooking beyond the economy of signs passed for a price? When we sit down to that dinner on those red velvet banquettes, are we taking part in the overture of pleasure, or are we just paying to play out a fantasy: a brief impersonation of power, in a rented theater of false possibilities? There is an impulse among historians, who like narrow, punitive moralities, to divide the new republic of eating in two, and imagine the café as the good popular institution that the working classes found for themselves, while the restaurant is the bourgeoisie’s spiderweb where working-class girls go to be seduced and working-class boys go to wait on tables. It is part of the cynicism of such historians to say that the bourgeoisie merely replaced the old aristocracy as masters of the table. The merchant with his three chins took the place of the count with his three mistresses (and pet dogs waiting to be fed). The locale changed, but the relation between shearer and shorn didn’t.

But this is to understate the degree to which the restaurant, no less than the café, really was a popular invention. Republicans and reactionaries alike found what they needed in the restaurant. Brillat-Savarin and La Reynière—a singed victim of the revolution’s excess—are both categorical about this: the free market in food meant that for the first time someone could get rich by cooking good food for many people, who had the choice to go eat elsewhere. Choice was limited by money, of course, but there was, for the first time in history, choice. Brillat-Savarin writes in wonder about the sudden democratic spread of restaurants meant chiefly for the poor, and of how they raised the possibilities of eating as pleasure even for the impoverished.

This larger argument about the meaning of the café and the restaurant reflects one of the few academic-seeming arguments that all thinking people ought to care about: the one between the mid-twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault and his disciples and the still-living German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and his, about the real meaning of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Was the Enlightenment really that, a progression toward a more humane and just world, as Habermas would have it? Or was it just an effort to answer with absolutes questions that could only be settled for a moment, a con game designed to empower a new class by pretending that they had special access to certain new knowledge, as Foucault insists?

Do the café and the restaurant represent a class prison—or are they revolutionary cells with coffee on the boil? Many of the new historians of cooking come down very hard on the restaurant as a typical lair of bourgeois trickery. The Enlightenment promises freedom and everywhere is forging chains; the essence of the restaurant racket is that the diners are shut off from the hot and messy kitchen, where the real work, and exploitation, goes on. Sale métier, indeed. The restaurant acts as though it is all-welcoming and anyone can come in, and then hands you the check that far from everyone can pay—consider it a form of “culinary imperialism.” But if “imperialism” has any meaning at all, it is surely that the imperialized are getting something they don’t want; in the restaurant they get something they do want, so much so that they are willing to pay people they don’t much like for it. The spread of French cooking is not an example of cultural imperialism. It is an example of culture.

Jürgen Habermas’s view seems to come down on the side of the new republic of eating. Habermas has famously argued that the rise of cafés and clubs and the like in the Enlightenment helped create “social capital”—what’s sometimes called civil society—by fostering the practice of arguing in small groups over tables. Where the Foucauldians suggest that the real purpose of the restaurant was to distract you from social life by lulling you into an effete reverie about taste—man was born to eat with his fellows, and everywhere you see him dining alone—Habermas sees it more hopefully: even if you were only arguing about pleasures, you were developing the habit of argument, exchange. Meal by meal and game by game and cup of coffee by cup of coffee, people got the knack of thinking for themselves.

At the ideal Habermasian table, it seems, everyone would argue about what to have, and there would be a vote on it, and everyone would emerge a better citizen. (I have eaten with Germans like that.) The political scientist Robert Putnam has become famous in America for making a similar point: social capital is made up of bowling leagues and glee clubs and 4-H groups, and what’s lost when these groups are lost can’t be made up by the semiprivate realm of fast-food joints or video arcades.

Surely a wiser point, though—one neither too German in its earnestness nor too unreal in its gloom—is that we build as much social capital, civic good, from semiprivate places as we do from public ones. There are many collegial institutions—the bowling league, the gardening club, the scout troop, the block party—that are obviously virtuous, and then there are some, like the restaurant, that may not be quite so wholesome but are benevolent all the same, in that they extend the blessings of freedom to letting you order what you choose. After all, the other exemplary nineteenth-century public place where you could go whenever you liked but couldn’t talk to the person beside you was a library. Our sense of liberty begins not with the freedom to argue but with the freedom not to have to argue—to do what we like, whenever we like to do it, without having to make an articulate case one way or another. This is why teenagers, despite their privileges, feel so un-free. They are stuck in Habermasian society, always obliged to make the case for their pleasures.

Loneliness is not the “price” of liberty but part of the profit we take from it. The restaurant’s moral glory, like that of the library and the department store—another nineteenth-century bourgeois invention—is its semiprivate state, for semi-ness is the special half-tint of bourgeois societies. The bowling league has been replaced not by solitary bowling but, more decisively, by the gym, another classic semiprivate place: on the bike you read your newspaper as you pedal in a long row of solitudes.

In the same way, at the restaurant on Third Avenue now as at the Palais Royal then, our joys intersect with those of others only at odd angles. My tenth birthday, though it passed so gloriously in the Howard Johnson’s, passed unmarked by anyone but my three friends, my parents, and me and left only a memory. My first lunch in the Palais Royal was another lunch service among ten thousand at the Grand Véfour, and no one else who was there will think of it again at all.

That is not our sadness, except in the sense that all that passes makes us sad. It is also part of what makes a thing good. Happiness may come at us face-to-face, but joy always comes at us at an angle. We are used to the arrival; for a man it’s when your wife, the perfect girl, comes back from powdering her nose, and you first catch sight of her out of the corner of your eye. The pleasures of the restaurant are occluded, sudden, haphazard in this way. You’re eating at this table, and you listen to that one. You’re watching one woman, or man, and spy from the corner of your eye another. The taste of your dinner mingles, or used to, with the aroma of your neighbor’s cigar. Places of hope, restaurants and cafés are also places of reassuring mystery, and the mystery reassures because, in reminding us of lives and appetites beyond our own, they remind us of worlds we have yet to enter.

As with most interesting inventions of bourgeois culture, restaurant-going is cushioned on the surface, angular and dramatic just beneath. It is a study in tensions and role-playing. To visit Le Grand Véfour, the one restaurant that remains intact and has been in business continuously since Roze de Chantoiseau’s day, is to instantly take part in a drama that has gone on so long because its point is so unsettled. The maître d’ is both servant, having to wait, and master, being empowered to choose and offer. The customer is both aristocrat for an hour and anxious suitor. Even the closed kitchen, while it distances the work, increases the mystique. If the dimwitted diner doesn’t know what goes on back there, it is still the case that the ultimate compliment to the savvy diner is to be invited into the kitchen. We eat out to find out who we are, and part of who we are is who we pretend to be, and whom we elect to pay for our pretense.

The roles we play are part of the people we are. All democratic society may or may not begin in small communities, but all civility depends on little lies. The restaurant is our classroom for what Dr. Johnson called “fictitious benevolence,” and teaches its first lesson: as important as finding people you have things in common with is learning to live in pleasure alongside people with whom you don’t. This may be why, though there’s a new “new cooking” every few years, the institution of the restaurant has shown itself so resilient, so durable, so amazingly the same across time and tears. The waiter now introduces himself by name, and he may have changed his tux for an Agnès B. collarless shirt, but he still comes and goes and rarely mentions money. We might gag on what was served at Chantoiseau’s restaurant, we might not be able to find our idea of a good meal at Véry’s little temple, but, seeing the pantomime of waiters and menus and mirrors and erotic murmur, we would know at once just where we were. Home, Robert Frost wrote, is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. A restaurant is a place where, when you go there, they not only have to take you in but have to act as though they were glad to see you. In cities of strangers, this pretense can be very dear.

2. What’s the Recipe?

A MAN AND A WOMAN lie in bed at night in the short hour between kid sleep and parent sleep, turning down page corners as they read. She is leafing through a fashion magazine, he through a cookbook. Why they read these things mystifies even the readers. The closet and the cupboard are both about as full as they’re going to get, and though we can credit the magazine reader with at least wanting to know what is in fashion when she sees it, what can the recipe reader possibly be reading for? The shelf of cookbooks long ago overflowed, so that the sad relations and failed hopes (Monet’s Table, A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews) now are stacked horizontally, high up. The things he knows how to make that are actually in demand are as fixed as any cocktail-lounge pianist’s set list, and for a clientele of children every bit as devoted to the old favorites as the barflies around that piano: make Parmesan-crusted chicken—the “Feelings” of food—every night and they would be delighted. Though a dinner party looms, and with it the possibility of a new thing made and added to the repertoire, the truth is that, on the night, the amateur cook falls back, like the amateur actor, on the set recitation. It’s going to be lamb tagine or the roasted chicken thing with preserved lemons, and there’s no helping it…. Yet the new cookbooks continue to show up in bed, and the corners still go down.

Vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns about the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. When I was in my early teens, the sick yearning for sweets that adolescents suffer often drove me, in afternoons taken off from school, to bake, which, miraculously, meant just doing what the books said and hoping to get the promised yield. I followed the recipes as closely as I could: dense Boston cream pie, Rigó Jansci slices, Sacher torte with apricot jam between the layers. The potential miracle of the cookbook was immediately apparent: you start with a feeling of greed, find a list of rules, assemble a bunch of ingredients, and then you have something to be greedy about. In cooking you begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of the appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.

Yet, if the first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets. It is partly that the steps between—the melted chocolate’s gleam, the chastened, improved look of the egg yolks mixed with sugar—are often more satisfying than the finished cake. But the trouble also lies in the same good words that got you going. How do you know when a thing “just begins to boil”? How can you be sure that the milk has scalded but not burned? Or touch something too hot to touch, or tell firm peaks from stiff peaks? Define “chopped”? In those days I was illicitly baking in the afternoons, I was learning main-course cooking at night without recipes from my mother, a scientist by day, who had long been off-book, as they say in the theater. She would show, not tell: how you softened the onions, made them golden, browned them. This practice got you deeper than the words ever could.

Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit faith that if I know how it is done I can show you how to do it. The premise of the recipe book is that these two things are naturally balanced; the secret of the recipe book is that they’re not. The space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how actually to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense. What kids make depends on what moms—or, now, dads—know: skills, implicit knowledge, inherited craft, buried assumptions, finger know-how that no recipe can sum up. The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by demonstration, a knack posing as a knowledge. We say, “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How exactly do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!” the honest answer is “Be me!” “What’s the recipe?” you ask the weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look, since the recipe is the totality of the activity, the real work. The recipe is to spend your life cooking.

What is this thing, the recipe? Where did it come from, and how does it work? As the cookbooks keep coming, and we continue to turn down their pages—The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook, The Adaptable Feast, the ones with disingenuously plain names, like How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking (a good one, in fact, by Michael Psilakis), and the ones with elaborately nostalgic premises, like Dining on the B & O: Recipes and Sidelights from a Bygone Age—we begin to ask, What? Why? Patterns emerge. Changes over time. Once-familiar things depart from their pages silently, like Minerva’s owls. “Yield,” for instance, a word that appeared at the top of every recipe in every cookbook that my mother owned—“Yield: six portions,” or twelve, or twenty—is gone. Maybe it seemed too cold, too technical. In any case, the recipe no longer yields; it merely serves. “Makes six servings” or “Serves four to six as an appetizer” is all you get.

Other good things go. Clarified butter (melted butter with the milk solids skimmed and strained) has vanished—Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, once used it like holy water—while emulsified butter (melted butter with a little water whisked in), thanks to Thomas Keller’s sponsorship, plays an ever-larger role. The cult of the cooking vessel—the wok, the tagine, the Dutch oven, the smoker, the hibachi, the Tibetan kiln, or the Inuit ice oven, or whatever—seems to be over. Paula Wolfert may have a book devoted to clay-pot cooking, but it feels too ambitious in advance; we have tried too many other modish pots, and know that, like Elvis’s and Michael Jackson’s chimps, after their hour is done they will live out their years forgotten and alone; they’ll end up on the floor of the closet, alongside the fondue forks and the spice grinder and the George Foreman grill. Even the imagery of cooking has changed. Sometime in the past decade or so, the actual eating line was breached. Now the cooking magazines and the cookbooks are filled with half-devoured dishes and cut-open vegetables. Michael Psilakis’s fine Greek cookbook devotes an entire page to a downbeat still-life of torn-off artichoke leaves lying in a pile; the point is not to entice the eater but to ennoble the effort.

With their own torn leaves and unyielding pages, the newer cookbooks show two overt passions: one is for simplicity, the other is for salt. The chef’s cookbook from the fancy place has been superseded by the chef’s cookbook from the fancy place without the fancy-place food. David Waltuck, of the ever-to-be-mourned Chanterelle, started this trend with his Staff Meals from Chanterelle, and now we have Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home, and, from Mark Peel, of the Los Angeles hot spot Campanile, New Classic Family Dinners. (“Every single recipe was tested in Peel’s own home kitchen—where he has only one strainer, just like the rest of us, and no kitchen staff to clean up after him.”) Simplicity’s appeal as a religion is inherent. But the trend is in part also a reaction to the cult of complexity of the Ferran Adrià school of molecular cooks, with their cucumber foam and powdered octopus. Reformations make counterreformations as surely as right makes left; every time someone whitewashes a church in Germany, someone else paints angels on a ceiling in Rome.

But simplicity remains the most complicated of all concepts. In one month we may stumble over six simple recipes for a ragout or Bolognese—plain spaghetti sauce, as it used to be known, when there was only one kind—with chicken livers or without, diced chuck roast or hamburger, white wine or red. Yet all movements in cooking believe themselves to be movements toward greater simplicity. (Even the molecular gastronomes believe that they are truly elemental, breaking things down to the atomic level.)

Simplicity is the style, but salt is the ornamental element—the idea of tasting flights of salt being a self-satirizing notion that Swift himself couldn’t have come up with. The insistence on the many kinds of salt—not merely sea salt and table salt but hand-harvested fleur de sel, Himalayan red salt, and Hawaiian pink salt—is everywhere, and touching, because, honestly, it all tastes like salt. And now everyone brines. Brining, the habit of dunking meat in salty water for a bath of a day or so, seems to have first reappeared out of the koshering past in Cook’s Illustrated, sometime in the early nineties, as a way of dealing with the dry flesh of the modern turkey, and then spread like ocean water in a tsunami, until now both Keller and Peel are keen to brine everything: pork roasts, chicken breasts, shrimp, duck.

Although brining is defended with elaborate claims to tenderness, what it really does is make food taste salty; we’re doing what our peasant ancestors did, making meat into ham. All primates like the taste of salt; that’s a feature, not a bug. Salted food demands a salty sweet. I read that in Spain recently one connoisseur had “a chocolate ganache coated in bread floating in a small pool of olive oil with fleur de sel sprinkled on it,” while we can now make pecan-and-salt caramel-cheesecake chocolate mousse with olive oil, and flaky-salt sticky peanut cookie bars for ourselves.

The salt fetish has, I think, a deeper and more psychological cause, too: we want to bond with the pro cooks. Most of what a pro cook has to his advantage comes down to the same advantages that Caribbean sugarcane planters used to have: high heat and lots of willing slaves. (The slaves seem happy, anyway, until they escape and write that testimonal, or start that cooking blog.) But the pro cook also tends to salt a lot more than feels right to an amateur home cook; both the late Bernard Loiseau and the Boston cook Barbara Lynch have confessed that hyperseasoning, and, in particular, high salting, is a big part of what makes pro cooks’ food taste like pro cooks’ food. The poor home cook, with no hope of an eight-hundred-degree brick oven, and lucky if he can indenture a ten-year-old into peeling carrots, can still salt hard—and so salt, its varieties and use, becomes a luxury replacement, a sign of seriousness even when you don’t have the real tools of seriousness at hand.

The desire to bond with the restaurant recipe book is a form of its own now. No one really believes, or believes deeply, that it is possible to cook at home in the way that we eat at restaurants. When we buy Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook—though I will admit that his short ribs are a steady thing—on the whole we grasp not only that you can’t do it, but that there is something gauche in even trying. It is a form of pretense, with a gauzy mask over your own features. You’re not Thomas Keller or Gordon Ramsay, or whoever else. So what’s the use? To read them is to grasp not a dish you’ll make, but a new sequence of possibility: we read a long recipe and take from it a single feature—a new way of reducing onions, the idea of mixing cubed potatoes with the green beans, a gesture rather than a gestalt—just as the woman in bed beside you reading Elle, though she will never buy anything she sees, finds new matches, current cuts, ways of rearranging. We read epics, and end with a single spice. One elegant idea—beurre monté, say (butter whipped with water)—sustains a hundred pages of perusing.

What the restaurant cookbook never delivers is a way to replicate the restaurant experience. Like the “home version” of the game show presented to departing contestants on the game shows of my childhood—The Match Game, or Hollywood Squares—the home version of a restaurant cannot even vaguely approximate the applauded version, whose whole point, after all, was that it was not taking place at home. Even Gene Rayburn and Paul Lynde had their unique quiddity, their aura of celebrity not reproducible by your sister, or even by your ambiguous uncle. There is no true home version of Password, and there is no way to put Balthazar between hard covers, The Balthazar Cookbook notwithstanding. The home games’ made-up celebrities—Harry Holsum; Stella Starlit; Slick Nick; Susie Slurp; Tim Type; Alice Actress—were mocking you, in effect, for imagining that you could reproduce the thrill of the show at home. When it comes to Thomas Keller or Ferran Adrià, we are all Susie Slurp, each one a Harry Holsum.

Yet the urge to meld identities with the pros is tied to a desire to get something out of a cookbook besides another recipe. For beneath these conscious enthusiasms lies a deep new uncertainty that complicates the traditional relationship between the recipe book and its reader. In this, the Great Age of Disaggregation, all the old forms are being smashed apart and looted like piñatas at a birthday party. The cookbook isn’t spared. The Internet has broken what once seemed like the natural membrane of recipes, just as it has ruptured the newspaper’s old containment of news stories. You can find pretty much any recipe you want online now. If you need a recipe for mustard-shallot sauce or boeuf à la mode, you enter a few search terms, and there it is.

So the old question “What’s the recipe for?” gives way to “What’s the cookbook for?,” and this existential crisis has moved the cookbook, like everything else these days, toward the memoir, the confessional, the recipe as self-revelation. Barbara Lynch’s preface to her Stir sounds like the opening lines of Goodfellas: “We were poor, fiercely Irish, and extremely loyal…. The older boys I knew grew up to be policemen, politicians, and criminals (often a mix of the three)…. If I ever had thoughts at all as to what I might be when I grew up, they were modest ones. I might have pictured myself running a bar (in Southie) or maybe opening a sub shop (in Southie). But having a restaurant of my own on Beacon Hill? No way. In fact, if a fortune-teller had told me at fourteen what good things were in store for me, I would have laughed in her face and told her where she could shove such bullshit…. I marvel that any of us made it out of there without winding up in jail or the morgue.” Michael Psilakis, in How to Roast a Lamb, includes his own childhood traumas: “As I sat on top of the lamb, watching it struggle to free itself, as if in slow motion my father came up behind me, reached down over my right shoulder with a hunting knife, grabbed the lamb’s head and ears, and, in one swift motion, slit the lamb’s throat…. Blood shot out of the lamb like water from a high-pressure hose.” You never had a moment like that with Julia Child or Joseph Wechsberg.

The pull toward storytelling is perhaps more than a reaction to the crisis in book publishing or even to our personality-driven culture. It may well be a clue to the origins of the form. Recipes, like cave paintings, are seen only in their maturity, when they astonish us by their confident finish. Less perfect earlier versions are wiped away like the early drafts scrawled on the cave wall. We see a mystical liturgical whole and miss the background of trial and error. For centuries, cooks must have passed down “receipts” to other cooks. They appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in a compressed language—very much like the “fake books” that jazz musicians compiled raggedly over the first half of the last century, with chords and melodies scribbled in—just enough to tell someone already expert how to do the tricky turns.

The true cookbook—the kind this lonesome bedtime page-turner hungers for today—only appeared very late, in the nineteenth century. Like so many things that seem part of a semieternal order of eating—the soup starter, the white wines before red—the recipe book is younger than the novel, more dewy-eyed than the end of slavery. In its first blush the cookbook was not for the professional but for the home cook, and it was less a matter of self-help than business management. Modern cookbooks were meant not to teach women how to cook but to teach women how to teach other women how to cook. Part of the apparatus of the domestic chatelaine, cookbooks like Mrs. Beeton’s famous tome of the 1860s allowed one to instruct the female servants, unlettered girls, in the preparation of standard dishes. Taking charge of all things domestic certainly bound women to the home, but there was something emancipating about it. The cooking woman was also a managing woman, a woman who ran things, not a doll but a doer.

“Men are now so well served out of doors,—at their clubs, well ordered taverns and dining houses, that in order to compete with the attractions of these places, a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practice of cookery,” one cookbook author wrote. The erotic message—the mistress needs to compete—is buried but implicit. It was the same message that was still being impressed on women as late as the early sixties—please him at home and he won’t go wandering. (Think of the Burt Bacharach and Hal David song “Wives and Lovers”; by the end of the decade the same great team had composed “I Say a Little Prayer” in a very different spirit.) By then, too, the middle-class woman had a more robust role model and manual than Mrs. Beeton: Julia Child was calling cooking an art and calling women to mastery of it, in a world once again mostly without servants.

It is easy to mock the Victorian books and ideas now, when we are safely out from under their weight, but one need only read the sections on Dora, David Copperfield’s “child-wife” in Dickens’s novel, to see how much infantilism was expected of, or forced on, young women, and how much the mastery of a kitchen supplied a woman’s only shot at mastery of her own life. (When David remarries after Dora’s death, his wholly admirable second wife, Agnes, is rather a send-up of a Mrs. Beeton’s reader come to life, running her household like a cavalry regiment.) To women free from the household, Mrs. Beeton looks repressive; to women enslaved to domestic helplessness, she must have seemed like a great emancipator.

Yet beneath the neatly ordered and bureaucratized recipe regimens, the rumble of real life, and of women’s lives, could still just be heard. As it grows, the recipe book is always reaching back toward the hearth, toward telling a story; then it bends again toward being usefully businesslike. Cookbook manuscripts appear throughout the nineteenth century, just as family cookbooks exist to this day. (My mother’s Your Favorite Dishes and Then Some, distributed to her children, contained all those brownie, Danish, and apple pie recipes I tried to make, mostly in vain, as well as anecdotes, tales, advice, the voice of lived experience.) Despite the cleaning and pressing undertaken to turn talk into type for America’s first cookbooks, the real sounds of real women, who talked, cooked, read, and made love as parts of one whole and sensual being, could not help being heard.

The most original, and until our own day probably the best of all these attempts to blend the narrative and the instructive, was the work of the now-forgotten English writer Elizabeth Pennell, whose revival we owe to the historian Talia Schaffer. Pennell was the first to see the cookbook as a literary form—a thing worth saving and collecting, analyzing and writing for its own sweet or savory sake. Pennell was one of those rare astonishments, a person genuinely “out of time.” She would have been right at home in the 1980s, far more than she was in the 1890s: the Nigella Lawson of the Age of Whistler, or the Padma Lakshmi of Oscar Wilde’s set. She was many things—an English aesthete, who wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, and one of the first feminists who was not a bluestocking. “Gluttony is ranked among the deadly sins; it should be honored among the cardinal virtues” is the arresting first line of her 1896 Diary of a Greedy Woman. Her portraits show her as handsome, as the time would have had it, rather than really pretty—a slight offprint of the Getty Girl type. She affirms women as gluttons, creatures of the flesh; and the erotic—indeed, oral-erotic—content of her book is so evident as almost to embarrass the modern reader. “Accept the gospel of good living and the sexual problem will be solved,” she says, in one of the bluntest and most magical sentences of the late nineteenth century. Her self-declaration as a “Greedy Woman”—not a dainty epicurean damsel, not a loving wife and mother providing for her wee mouths, but a woman with an appetite on her and a hunger in her—is one of the most charming, and yet truly “radical,” self-fashionings of the era.

Yet her diary is a cookbook—of a kind that wouldn’t reappear until our own time, a first-person account of how to eat by cooking things. She recommends wine for breakfast—she is a partisan of Graves particularly, finding Pinot Noir too heavy, a judgment leading one to think that the clarets of our great-great-grandfathers’ days were much less fruit-forward than the ones we know—to be followed by Cognac but no sweet. She calls the British sandwich “grim and gruesome” (which, until around 1980, it invariably was). Her ideal dinner is eerily contemporary, very much like one at Chez Panisse: a filet of beef with mushrooms but only market-fresh ones, pommes soufflées, no dessert, but a Port Salut cheese, and a single tangerine, the whole thing washed down with a good bottle of Burgundy.

Yet all of this is couched not, as a man’s writing might be, as detached “Epicurean” revelry but, as even an aesthetic woman’s must be, as spurs to shopping and cooking. Her greed is productive. Her recipes are makeable, but they are also offered as prose poems (even those of us allergic to the prose poem can like these)—for example, on turbot au gratin:

In Turbot gratin, the ecstatic possibilities are by no means limited. In a chaste silver dish, make a pretty wall of potatoes, which have been beaten to flour, enlivened with pepper and salt, enriched with butter and cream—cream thick and fresh and adorable—seasoned with Parmesan cheese and left on the stove for ten minutes, no more nor less; then let the wall enclose pieces of turbot, already cooked and in pieces, of melted butter and of cream, with a fair covering of breadcrumbs; and rely upon a quick [i.e., broiler hot] oven to complete the masterpiece.

Elizabeth Pennell had extremely, almost scarily, good taste: she loved Burgundy, Cognac, strong coffee; she wanted simple food that wasn’t too simple—roasted spring chicken, a ragout of mushrooms—and subscribed to the enduring truth that “the secret of good cooking lies in the discreet and sympathetic treatment of the onion.” “And after,” she adds, “if you still hanker for the roast beef of old England, then go and gorge yourself at the nearest restaurant.” She wants you to accompany this with a good Beaune, and then with coffee, “a mix of Mocha and Mysore.” “Forgo feminine liqueurs, but rely on cognac,” the “immortal liquid,” and then “lean back and smoke in silence, unless speech, exchanged with the one kind spirit, may be golden and perfect as the dinner.”

The Pennells must have had a very good sex life.

Elizabeth Pennell was brave and eerily modern. She recommended salad as a meal, while deploring the “salad cream” that was still an alarming feature of British meals just a generation ago. She loved Italian food, long before her postwar heir Elizabeth David, and put it on the same level as the French. Pasta she especially adored—she calls it, generically, “macaroni,” and introduces her readers to the delights of spaghetti, the “smaller daintier variety” of macaroni—in exactly the tones that a contemporary writer would introduce them to traghetti or chitarra or some other obscure and newly trendy noodle. (She has the sense to insist that the best way to eat it is cooked al dente and served with grated Parmesan and butter.)

I feel about Pennell as A. J. Liebling felt about Pierce Egan, his favorite chronicler of early-nineteenth-century prizefighting: that here at last is a friend at court, a source of wisdom, an ally. One of the hard-to-tell truths about even the best food writing before our time is that we often have to learn to read past the food, which we don’t quite “get,” on our way to the hunger, which we do. Almost all descriptions of dinners past reveal something weird and Martian in the choices—you bounce along happily enough with Brillat-Savarin or even La Reynière eating truffled turkey, and then suddenly you have long inscrutable stretches of boiled lamb and larks on brochettes and sweet Sauternes served with boiled salmon in anchovy cream. But there is nothing on Pennell’s menus that is not delicious, like the menus themselves. Where, reading old recipe books, you usually say, “Huh?” as often as “Ummm,” with Pennell it’s all just right. Her ideal dinner is indeed ideal: onion soup soubise (with cream), tournedos with wild mushrooms, and a winter root salad—carrots and cauliflower with a vinaigrette—followed by a single ripe tangerine, all served with a good Beaune, very strong coffee (that preferred Mocha and Mysore blend), and a glass of Chartreuse after.

Reading Pennell’s recipes makes you think of what you’d want your last meal to be. Mine is probably roast chicken with lemon, cubed potatoes, cooked with a white wine reduction of the jus from the chicken—this poses a danger since the cubed potatoes will absorb the juices, so I might do a gratin instead—and then mustard cream sauce, broccoli purée with crème fraîche, carrot circles with cumin and orange. An apricot soufflé for dessert, and for wine a rosé champagne to start, then a great Burgundy—a Vosne-Romanée or a Vougeot or Volnay—concluding with a glass of Calvados. Alternative menu: Filet of beef with béarnaise sauce and plenty of shallots and wild mushrooms; pommes soufflées; green beans with more shallots; and a tarte tatin and a glass of Calvados to end. Chocolate pot-au-crème for dessert. A stronger wine to drink, like a California Syrah. Or, not to be too finicky: a well-brined pork chop—you can keep the filet, which is too vapid—with gray shallots and white wine mustard sauce, and roasted carrots and brussels sprouts with balsamic vinegar and bacon, and a tarte tatin with (again) a glass of Calvados for dessert (some things are not negotiable). But as I order these perfect suppers, I remember that the best meal our family ever shared was in fact a milk-fed leg of lamb, a gigot, from the Pyrenees, with a Beaune wine, and a purée of potatoes and green beans, I think; the sauce was a magical, improvised combination of a garlic cream and the white wine reduction from the lamb drippings that I’ve never quite been able to re-create. (And what was dessert that night? I think we had French strawberries, and then took the children out for ice cream.)

Yes, I digress. Elizabeth Pennell is the rare kind of food writer who makes you digress, turn from analytic scrutiny to ardent fantasy.

Pennell’s recipes are all usable still, and her advice on seasonal dining is the best before Richard Olney. (She likes only light desserts, and insists on steak with shallots and chicken with mushrooms. I spent a weekend cooking from her diary, and it was all good, and the sequence of dishes impeccable.) A defining and presciently original aspect of all her work: she assumes that the reader is the cook, and also the shopper. The “Ladies, bless ’em” tone of much wine and food writing of the period is alien to her; that cozy clubby sound of George Saintsbury, for instance, for whom good wine and food is an extension of the college high table into private life is not hers. She writes of markets and stoves as one who knows, not as one who urges someone else on, and she assumes, with a minimum of melodrama, that woman is equal to man as a subject of the sensual life—so much that it still startles to read her easy use of “she” in this connection. She breezily assumes sexual equality, and her proof of it is the common pleasure men and women take from eating and drinking: “Love may grow bitter before cheese loses its savour,” she counsels. “Therefore the wise, who value the pleasures of the table above tender dalliance, put their faith in strong limburger or fragrant Brie rather than in empty kisses. If only this lesson of wisdom could be mastered by all men and women, how much less cruel life might be!”

However new her sentiments, she is still writing in the form of the cookbook, reproducing, in her own English aesthetic, Chelsea-and-Whistler way, the mock-epic microcosmic sound of the first great generation of food writers, of Brillat-Savarin and Grimod. I have called their tone the tone of accepted defeat, the deep wisdom of loss, and Pennell, though writing from the triumphant seat of Victorian Britain, duly partakes of this tone, though she adapts it for the same reason that moves all English (and American) food writers until our own day: the assumption is that the good food is all over there, across the Channel, and that we over here can get to it only on holiday and in memory. Her cookbooks are an anthology of evocations: breakfasts by the Loire, supper in Naples, a bouillabaisse from Marseille, or a dish of simple pasta from outside Rome. “In a dish of macaroni lies all of Italy for the woman with eyes to see or a heart to feel… olive clad slopes and lonely stone palms; the gleam of sunlit rivers winding with reeds and the slim tall poplars; the friendly wayside trattoria and the pleasant refrain of the beaming cameriere, ‘Subito, Signora, ecco!’—a refrain ceaseless as the buzzing of the bees among the clover.” Thinking of “the creamy subtle little Suisse cheese” recalls “a vision of Paris, radiant in Maytime, the long avenues and boulevards all white and pink with blossoming horse chestnuts, the air heavy laden with the fragrance of flowers; a vision of the accustomed corner in the old restaurant looking out towards the Seine and of the paternal waiter holding the fresh Suisse on a dainty green leaf. Life holds few such thrilling interludes.” (Proust’s famous use of food to evoke memory is perhaps the least original thing in that most original of writers: it was a commonplace of the fin-de-siècle aesthete. The genius of Proust was to substitute time for place: he didn’t eat his crushed strawberries, as Elizabeth Pennell and every other aesthete did, to recall his time in Paris. Already there, he used them to recall his lost youth spent nowhere else. It is the homeboy’s advantage.) She laments the philistine North she calls her home, even as her heart inclines toward the Elysian fields. Her advocacy of strong drink and stronger coffee, in a nation of tea-drinkers, is amazing, and she writes, all too accurately, that “over the barbarous depths into which the soul of the inspiriting berry has been dragged in unhappy Albion, it is kinder to draw a veil.” (It would be another half century at least before Ian Fleming could, in Goldfinger, have James Bond, another Francophile gourmand, but a man with a license to kill, denounce tea with similar disdain, as a “cup of mud.”)

As every Canadian knows, there are no springs so sweet as those that come a week too soon, and then fade back into winter. The delight in sharing recipes that Pennell’s writing stirs was ended by a frost of educational necessities; the budding possibilities of the personal cookbook were nipped by the need to teach. The form would break in two: food writing, the cookbook improper, an offshoot essentially of travel literature, as in M.F.K. Fisher, preserved some of Elizabeth’s tone: meanwhile, the cookbook proper evolved into something big and impressive, and took on the coloring of the books of authority. The standard kitchen bible, the book you turn to most often, has evolved from dictionary to encyclopedia, from anthology to grammar—a discernible progression if you compare the classics of the past century: Escoffier’s culinary dictionary, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins’s The New Basics, and Mark Bittman’s recently revised How to Cook Everything.

Escoffier was pure dictionary: quick reminders to clarify a point or make a variation eloquent. He lists every recipe for tournedos and the medley of variations. His entries are summaries, aide-mémoires for cooks who know how to make a thing already and need only be reminded what’s in it. (Is a béarnaise sauce tarragon leaves and stems, or just leaves?) This was the way all cooks cooked once. (In the old, railroad B & O cookbook, one finds this recipe for short ribs: “Put short ribs in a saucepan with one quart of nice stock, with one onion cut fine, steam until nice and tender. Place in roasting pan and put in oven until they are nice and brown.” That’s it. Everything else is commentary.)

In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, as in Waverley Root’s The Food of France, which came out at around the same time, the age of elliptical assumption is over, and the turn is toward the encyclopedic: here’s everything—all ye know on earth and all ye need to know—on a particular kind of cooking, which you can master by reading this book. Things are explained, but as in an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. The abundance and depth of information are scaled to the importance of each particular thing. Julia gives you not every recipe for tournedos, but only the recipes that count. Marcella Hazan would, later on, do the same kind of thing for Italian food. In this way cooking became not a sequence or catalogue of discrete moves that you used as you liked; it was a discipline with its own wholeness, a wholeness you mastered.

You wouldn’t have wanted to bother mastering the art of French cooking unless you believed that it was an art uniquely worth mastering. When people did “master” it, they realized that it wasn’t—that no one style of cooking is really adequate to the variety of our appetites. So the cookbook as anthology arrived, open to many sources, from American Thanksgiving dinner and Jewish brisket through Italian pasta and French Stroganoff—most successfully in the New Basics cookbook, which was the standard for the just-previous generation. The anthology cookbooks assumed curiosity about styles and a certainty about methods. In The New Basics, the tone is chatty, informal, taking for granted that the readers—still women, mostly—know the old basics: what should be in the kitchen, what kinds of appliances to use, how to handle a knife.

It was the dawn of a new answer to the question “What’s a cookbook for?” The anthology cookbooks left behind the now stodgy-seeming encyclopedia and led toward what might be called grammatical grounding: the idea that what the cookbook should supply is the rules, the deep structure—a fixed, underlying technical grammar that enables you to use all the recipes you find, in this book or in others. This grammatical turn is clear in the popular “Best Recipe” series of Cook’s Illustrated, and in The Cook’s Bible of its editor, Christopher Kimball, in which recipes begin with a long disquisition on various approaches, ending with the best (and so brining was born), as well as in Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking, with the allusion to Strunk and White’s usage guide, and, most of all, in Bittman’s indispensable new classic How to Cook Everything, which, though claiming “minimalism” of style, is maximalist in purpose—not a collection of recipes for all occasions but a set of techniques for all time.

The cookbooks of the confessional turn suggest that we are all in this together; cookbooks of the grammatical turn assume that you don’t know how to do the simple things, but that the simple things, once mastered, will enable you to do it all. Bittman assumes that you have no idea how to chop an onion or boil a potato, much less how chopping differs from slicing or dicing. Each basic step is tenderly detailed. How to Boil Water: “Put water in a pot (usually to about two-thirds full), and turn the heat to high.” How to Slice with a Knife: “You still press down, just with a little more precision, and cut into thick or thin slices of fairly uniform size.” To sauté: “Put a large skillet on the stove and add the butter or oil. Turn the heat to medium-high. When the butter bubbles or the oil shimmers, add the food you want to sauté.” Measuring dry ingredients, you are told to “scoop them up or use a spoon to put them in the cup.” And that “much of cooking is about heat.”

This all feels masculine in tone—not too many pretty side drawings, a car manual’s systematic progression from recipe to recipe—and seems written with an eye to male readers who are either starting to cook for friends or are just married and learning that if you don’t cook she’s not about to. The old New Basics, one recalls nostalgically, was exclamatory and feminine. “The celebration continues,” reads a blurb, and inside the authors “indulge” and “savor” and “delight”; a warm chicken salad is “perfection when dressed in even more lemon,” another chicken salad is “lush and abundant.” The authors’ perpetual “we” (“We like all our holidays accompanied with a bit of the bubbly”), though meant, in part, to suggest a merry partnership, was generous and inclusive, a “we” that honest-to-God extended to all of their readers.

Bittman never gushes but always gathers up: he has seven ways to vary a chicken kebab; eighteen ideas for pizza toppings; and, best of all, an “infinite number of ways to customize” mashed potatoes. He is cautious, and even skeptical; while Rosso and Lukins “love” and “crave” their filet of beef, to all of animal flesh Bittman allows no more than “Meat is filling and requires little work to prepare. It’s relatively inexpensive and an excellent source of many nutrients. And most people like it.” Most people like it! Rosso and Lukins would have tossed out any recipe, much less an entire food group, of which no more than that could be said. Lamb is a thing they “fall in love with again every season of the year,” and of pork they know that it is “divinely succulent.” Bittman thinks that most people like it. His tone is that of Ed Harris in Apollo 13: Let’s work the problem, people. Want to thicken a sauce? Well, try Plan A: cook it down. Copy that, Houston. Plan A ineffective? Try Plan B: add roux. This progressive pattern appeals to men. The implication, slightly illusory, is that there’s a neat set of steps from each point to the next, as in a Bill Walsh pass pattern: each pattern on the tree proceeds logically and the quarterback just has to look a little farther upfield.

Grammars teach foreign tongues, and the advantage of Bittman’s approach is that it can teach you how to cook. But is working through a grammar book really a way to learn cooking, let alone to speak French? Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dialogue of generations, the commonality of the family recipe—that makes cooking something more than just assembling calories and nutrients? It’s as if someone wrote a book called How to Play Catch. (“Open your glove so that it faces the person throwing you the ball. As the ball arrives, squeeze the glove shut.”) What it would tell you is not that we have figured out how to play catch but that we must now live in a culture without dads. In a world denuded of living examples, we end up with the guy who insists on making Malaysian shrimp one night and penne all’amatriciana the next; it isn’t about anything except having learned how it’s done. Your grandmother’s pound cake may have been like concrete, but it was about a whole history and view of life; it got that tough for a reason.

The metaphor of the cookbook was long the pet metaphor of the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his assault on the futility of thinking that something learned by rote was as good as something learned by ritual. Oakeshott’s much repeated point was that one could no more learn how to make good government from a set of rules than one could learn how to bake a cake by reading recipe books. The cookbook, like a national constitution, was only the residue of a practice. Even the most grammatical of cookbooks dies without living cooks to illuminate its principles. Unsupported by your mom, the cookbook is the model of empty knowledge.

That’s true, and yet the real surprise of the cookbook, as of the constitution, is that it sometimes yields something better in the space between what’s promised and what’s made. You can follow the recipe for something exotic—green curry or paella—and though what you end up with would shock the natives, it may be just as good as or even better than the thing intended. Before I learned that green curries were soupy, I made them creamy, which actually is nicer. In politics, too, where the unwritten British constitution has been turned into a recipe—like the constitutions of Canada and Australia—the condensation of practices into rules can make for a rainfall of better practices; the Canadian constitution, for instance, wanting to keep the bicameral vibe of a House of Lords without having a landed gentry, turned it into a senate of distinguished citizens by appointment, an idea that might rebound toward the mother country as a model for the new House of Lords. Between the rule and the meal intervenes the ritual, and the ritual of the recipe is like the ritual of the law; the reason the judge sits high up, in a robe, is not that it makes a difference to the case but that it makes a difference to the clients. The recipe is, in this way, our richest instance of the force and the power of abstract rules. All messages change as they’re re-sent, but messages not sent never get received. Life is like green curry.

However we prefer our cookbooks—as grammar or encyclopedia, as storehouses of craft or illusions of knowledge—one can’t read them in bed for many years without feeling that there is a conspiracy between readers and writers to obscure the ultimate point. A kind of primal scene of eating hovers over every cookbook, just as a primal scene of sex lurks behind every love story. In cooking, the primal scene, or substance, is salt, sugar, and fat held in maximum solution with starch; add protein as necessary, and finish with caffeine (coffee or chocolate) as desired. That’s what, suitably disguised in some decent dimension of dress-up, we always end up making. We make béarnaise sauce by whisking a stick of melted butter into a couple of eggs, and, now that we no longer make béarnaise sauce, we make salsa verde by beating a cup of olive oil into a fistful of anchovies. The herbs change; the hope does not.

Mark Peel, in his Campanile cookbook, comes near to giving the game away: “We chefs all lie about our mashed potatoes,” he admits. “We don’t tell you we’ve used 1½ pounds of cream and butter with 1¾ pounds of potatoes. You don’t need to know.” (Joël Robuchon, the king of his generation of French cooks, first became famous for a purée that had an even higher proportion of butter beaten into starch.) After reading hundreds of cookbooks, you may have the feeling that every recipe, every cookbook, is an attempt to get you to attain this ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state without having to face it head-on, just as every love poem is an attempt to maneuver a girl or a boy into bed by talking as fast, and as eloquently, as possible about something else. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate” is the poetic equivalent of simmering the garlic with ginger and Sauternes before you put the cream in; the end is the cream, but you carefully simmer the garlic.

Yet, though the end of the poem may be to get the dish in bed, its entertainment lies in how many steps it takes to get there. Though the end is salt, sugar, and fat in high solution, the entertainment lies in how we get there, too. It is not as if anyone thinks the story would be improved if Jane Austen described Darcy and Elizabeth actually screwing—not because these things violate the conventions but because they are so obviously the point that it is embarrassing to see them spelled out. We elide them not because we don’t want to know but because we know already. Salt, sweet, fat, and starch, caffeine, alcohol—we juggle these simple things in endless rounds, just as we juggle our limbs and other simple things night after night (if we’re lucky) out of a conviction that while the substance of the exertion sustains life, it is the variety that keeps life interesting. The truth that variety is the spice of life carries within it the implicit recognition that monotony is the daily meal.

All appetites have their illusions, which are part of their pleasure. That’s why the husband turns those pages in bed. The truth is that we don’t passively peruse the pictures and leap to the results; we actively read the lines and internally act out the jobs. The woman who reads the fashion magazines isn’t passively imagining the state of having; she’s actively imagining the act of shopping. (And distantly imagining the act of wearing.) She turns down pages not because she wants merely to look again but because, for that moment, she really intends to buy that—for a decisive imagined moment she did buy it, even if she knows she never will. Reading recipe books is an active practice, too, even if all the action takes place in your mind. We reanimate our passions by imagining the possibilities, and the act of wanting ends up mattering more than the fact of getting. It’s not the false hope that a dish will turn out right that makes us go on with our reading but our contented resignation to the knowledge that it won’t ever, quite.

The desire to go on desiring, the wanting to want, is what makes you turn the pages—all the while aware that the next Boston cream pie, the sweet-salty-fatty-starchy thing you will turn out tomorrow, will be neither more nor less unsatisfying than last night’s was. When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven’t been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven’t yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that’s the game.

3. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Anchovies, Bacon, Lamb

Dear Elizabeth Pennell:

Or Liz, if I may. The thrill of coming across someone in another time whose take on the world resembles your own—not in the big things, which are common enough to be shared, but in the small ones—is enormous. We all expect people in the past to love their children, seek a better world—but we are stunned when they prefer a Volnay to Château Pétrus, or roast chicken to veal saddle. We expect nineteenth-century people to be noble, but not to be nice, exactly—we sometimes expect them to fight for women’s rights and envision the democratic age, but we also expect them to like saddle of veal and old port.

So, coming upon you and your work while reading about recipes gives me the sense of a friend at court: greedy, Francophile (but with enough Italy in you to make you introduce pasta to your readers), and aesthetic. And then, more selfishly, you gave me a form. I had wanted to write recipes for this book—what is the point of writing a book about food if you cannot put in the ways to make the food you like best?—but realized that it was an inappropriate idea. A wildly inappropriate idea, actually. Quite apart from the question of compromising the dignity of the essayist, full of wise saw and modern instance, by perkily telling you how to make rice pudding, there was the obvious truth that any recipes I have, apart from one, are not really my recipes, but other people’s that I happen to like or cook a lot.

Yes, of course, everybody’s recipe is someone else’s recipe, with the exception of those few rare new things that someone really did invent. (I’ve invented one, sort of.) But there is a recipe that has, so to speak, through suffering become yours, unlike those that you have simply copied out of a book. We recognize the concept of sweat equity in recipe writing: if you have labored nightly over a stove in a restaurant kitchen cooking the thing, then you can write it down, even if its origins lie ultimately not in your own mind but in someone else’s cooking. But if you have merely written down what someone else wrote down first, having cooked it in the meanwhile, it isn’t yours. In your beautiful book, though, you offered both the method and the object. The method, which you invented, of turning every recipe into a little story, a bit of narrative, shows that recipes need not be neat tables of chemical interactions but short stories of mixed emotions: what I did that day, and why I did it.

And then I liked the idea of our conversation, however much it might be a dialogue des morts. You were the woman who, in the nineteenth century, without a vote or often a voice, save for a small one in the Pall Mall Gazette, had the nerve to call herself not a housewife or a domestic philosopher but a Greedy Woman—not cooking for her children or organizing her household but eating for the thrill of it. I loved that. And here was I, another writer in a weekly magazine, doing the reverse in a way, eating for pleasure but also cooking for a family… a kind of dialogue of amateurs, with the understanding that your announcing yourself as an eater first of all was as weird then—“subversive” would be the academic word, but the wrong one—as my announcing myself a cook first of all is now. The man in an apron is as typical, and yet as awkward, as wistfully underexpressed, an invention at the beginning of the twenty-first century as the woman with a napkin tucked under her chin was at the end of the nineteenth. I eat from greed! was your brave announcement. I cook from need! is my far less nervy but equally awkward one. The man in the apron, the woman with the napkin—you see them everywhere but they rarely speak for themselves. So let me write to you, and if the exchange of recipes is notional, or imaginary, well, recipes from the dead are the sum total of what civilization is.

Did they have “secret ingredients” in your day? When I was a child, secret ingredients were everywhere. Colonel Sanders had a secret recipe; the recipe for Coke and Pepsi were murmured over; one had orange zest and one had lemon. (Or so they said: I grabbed only the most surreptitious sips and clandestine snacking of either, with my mother. Save, now that I think of it, for a brief, six-month phase when my family lived in your town, London, where we got KFC chicken on several occasions. My mother’s rules of engagement were somehow suspended in a place which, in those days, had only dank Maltese burgers and murky vindaloos for takeout.)

But even beyond that, there were cooking secrets. People, chefs, on television, the Galloping Gourmet for one, winked, hard, at the camera, when people asked about them. I recall reading a piece in Time magazine when I was about eight, about a man who made omelets at parties. Chic people in New York had this guy in a tux over to make omelets—with sour cream, as I recall. It was a big thing. And when asked—I know that memory plays tricks, but I recall this with indecent clarity—he said that his secret ingredient was Tabasco sauce, and he added more the later it got and the drunker the guests got. I think the word “drunk” wasn’t in there, but that was the sense. The excitement I felt then, at the idea of someday landing at such a party, where, holding your drink and smirking in your dinner jacket, you would nonchalantly order an omelet, as James Bond himself might order an omelet! “One. With sour cream. Oh—and double the Tabasco. Your… secret ingredient? Poured by hand, please.” (I wrote a spy novel of my own in that period, called “To Be or Not To Be,” my first extended work—come to think of it, I haven’t written anything as continuously extended since—in which, varying the shaken-not-stirred martini formula, I gave the rather Bond-like hero a notable weakness for cream doughnuts.)

My God, the perpetual miracle of modernity! Mostly as a joke, I just now Googled “Time magazine man who makes omelets at parties”—and there he is! Rudolph Stanish was his name, and just as I thought—though I was a little older than I recalled—there was a Time piece about him, and a memorial Web page as well. According to the Web page,

he had worked as a chef for Mrs. Twombly (Cornelius Vanderbilt’s sister), and Joseph Donon, who trained with the famous French chef Escoffier. He also accompanied wealthy families to Europe as their chef, making twenty-six crossings, and broadening his skills with each trip. In the 1960s, Stanish became head chef of the Goldman Sachs lunchroom in New York City, and the “personal supper chef” for the Paul Mellon family. He became renowned for the personalized omelets he served at his employers’ late night parties. In 1968, a Time Magazine article on his expertise propelled his fame as “The Omelet King.” Stanish designed an omelet pan that was produced by Club Aluminum, and published a popular booklet of his omelet recipes. He had the honor of preparing the Inaugural breakfast for John F. Kennedy. Much in demand for his legendary omelet parties he traveled extensively to execute many celebrity entertainments. He continued to perform his omelet skills at many charity benefits until his death in 2008.

And there it is, dug in a micro-moment out of the Time archives. Except for dessert omelets, he adds one special ingredient: Tabasco sauce. “The later the night and the more the drinking, says Stanish, the more Tabasco.” So the word “drunk” was not there, but the word “drinking” was!

I should confess, right here, as I am about to offer recipes in the guise, or at least the form, of letters to you, that I have no business doing this, in addition to the no-business-doing-it reasons outlined above, because there are certain standard, anyone-can-do-it things that I cannot do. These include:

A decent salad dressing.

A good crème anglaise (they never thicken enough; I think I am too frightened of turning up the heat high enough).

Anything to do with a “salt crust.” Every book I have tells you how to form a paste of water and salt and build it over the fish or duck and then crack the baked crust and, for some reason, whatever is inside comes out succulent. I have tried, and I have failed, building little white igloos that collapse inward like sad snowmen, oversalting beyond all hope.

Omelets.

So, King Omelet II I am unlikely to become. I could be Mr. Scrambled Eggs, actually, since I do have a perfect recipe for those. I got it from Gérard Boyer, the great chef at Les Crayères, up in the champagne country in France. It was my friend the art historian Kirk Varnedoe’s fiftieth birthday—he hadn’t yet fallen ill, as he would a year later, with colon cancer, though I know now that the cancer was already eating its way silently inside him—and we all went to Reims to celebrate. “Lunch and a cathedral” used to be our motto; we did the cathedral first, usually, though it fit the rhythm less well. We did Chartres, Rouen, Amiens, and then Reims, most beautiful of all, with its lacy façade and smiling angels… then at lunch, the one thing we saw on the menu for my son, Luke, all of eighteen months old, was scrambled eggs and caviar, and we asked, as courteously as we could, if he might have just the scrambled eggs. Of course, the waiter said. And he brought back, twenty minutes later, a plate of scrambled eggs so creamy and bright yellow and gleaming that Luke devoured them in three minutes, the first plate of grown-up food that he had ever eaten—and perhaps to this day has ever eaten—without caution and doubt inflecting his bites. My wife, Martha, almost wept for joy, since at that point—despite his being a robust baby, costaud, as the French say—she was still chasing him from room to room with a jar of puréed coings, which he sort of liked, even though she did not know what coings were. (They’re quinces.)

When Boyer came to make his rounds, as chefs once did, at the end of lunch, I told Luke that that was the cook who had made his eggs, and he rose in his high chair and applauded. I asked Boyer how he had made the eggs and he told me, and I have made them ever since. All you do is place a big noisette of butter in a pan—Boyer did them in a bain-marie, a double boiler, but I have found this not necessary if you work carefully on a low heat—and let the butter dissolve, and then mix in three well-beaten eggs. You stir and stir, relentlessly but lightly, until they begin to form into curds, custardy curds, not fluffy American ones, and then, at just the right moment, when they are still just too wet to eat, you put another noisette of butter on top to polish and veneer them. Then you sprinkle gray sea salt, if you have it—that was Boyer’s grave, noncaviar touch—and any salt you have if you don’t. With brioche toast, they’re wonderful. From that day to this it is Luke’s default dish, the one thing he will eat when he’s tired or out late or worn out by life. “Can you make me French eggs, Dad?” he says, and I do.

So… I might become the Scrambler in the Rye. But I do, nonetheless, have a secret ingredient, or two of them, and they are anchovies and bacon. Garlic, Tabasco, Asian fish sauce, white truffle oil—all have their place as semisecret additives. But I find that I can add anchovies and bacon to pretty much anything, and it tastes better. Though not both at once, of course. Anchovies blended with garlic in a cooked-down tomato sauce; anchovies added to a paella. Bacon or bacon chunks, lardons in French, added to boeuf bourguignon or pot-au-feu or any kind of pot roast, actually, turns it from a faded thing into a bright and homey and countryish one.

“All you’re really doing is adding salt!” an unknown voice says, apropos the two ingredients. The salt thing again. Has it occurred to you, Elizabeth, as it has to me, that this “all you’re really doing” is the constant plaint against the chef, the one thing people say to cooks and greedy people that they won’t say to anyone else? “All you’re really doing is beating in fat,” they say when you blend in the melted butter. “All you’re really doing is adding fat to starch,” they say when you do pommes frites, which is true, but so what?

“All you’re actually doing is putting a pungent protein on a neutral starch,” and that’s true, too, of almost everything. In fact, that is the human meal, the one true meal. A neutral starch (pasta or rice or pizza dough), a pungent protein (curry or a tomato reduction or fish scraps in fermented sauce), and that is what perhaps six billion of the earth’s seven will eat tonight! A pungent protein piled upon a neutral starch; a neutral starch awaiting its pungent protein, male and female, which is which? (And yet all that can be said about anything that we do is that it’s “all you’re really doing.” All you’re really doing is explaining what that passage means, Dr. Johnson! All you’re really doing is putting sticky colors on a canvas, Mr. Titian! All you’re really doing is seeing that every line has the same sound at the end, Mr. Pope! Everything we do is all we’re really doing—all tasks in the end are simple, repetitive, easily broken into parts, and all we’re really doing is all that can be done.)

Bacon is chic again, alas, and this makes me reluctant to write more about it. Face bacon, side bacon, even tail bacon, I suppose—the bits and pieces of smoked pig have become cool. “Alas,” because I have always loved bacon, and think that bacon is better as a guilty pleasure than as a fetishized fashion. Anchovies, though, seem to have resisted becoming fashionable. What could ever be more clearly the opposite of any idea of chic than an anchovy? So let it be said only that they come in two kinds—the gray greasy ones in the bottle and the lovely flat white ones you get at an Italian deli. I’ve always liked leg of lamb better than any other cut of meat, and so the idea of putting the three together was irresistible: bacon and anchovies on the lamb. There are ancient recipes in France for making little slits in the gigot, and then inserting the anchovies before you roast it, and I’ve tried them. But they salt the exterior without giving the punch and surprise that you want.

So I decided instead to just plop them on the lamb and see what happens. It turns out that they make a wonderful goo, and you pour off the fat, and pour in some white wine—I used flat champagne, since there was some left over—and cook it down, and it was great, the bacon crumbled over the lamb and the sauce pungent with the anchovies. Served with a simple buttery purée and buttered green beans with ginger, which should have been better. (I have only one killer vegetable side in my repertoire, a Brussels sprouts thing—and you know what, it has bacon in it. Oh, well.)

So here, in Pennell form, is my recipe for leg of lamb with bacon and anchovies, the Salt-Lover’s Delight: You take a good grass-fed leg of lamb, about four or five pounds, and liberally salt it. Then you put it in a roasting pan that won’t burn too much, and put garlic cloves and olive oil in the pan. Then you roast it for half an hour to forty minutes in a very hot oven—around 400°; though if you go up to 425° it will brown nicely, even if the garlic may scorch. Then, pull out the pan and lay four or five rashers of very thick-cut bacon right across the top of the gigot, and a nice handful of prepared white anchovies on top of the bacon. You can do it the other way round, and it’s just as good, maybe better: anchovies first, bacon on top. I haven’t tried this with the canned or jarred anchovies, and am sure that they won’t be as good as the white ones, since they never are—but since the anchovies melt anyway, I bet it won’t matter, much.

Then roast the lamb again at 400° or slightly less, depending on your oven, for another fifteen to twenty minutes, until the bacon is nicely browned and the anchovies have started to fall off and dissolve. Then take the leg out and make sure it’s done as you like it—lamb is difficult, because it tends to stay bloody and mildly unappealing even to lovers of rare meat in the middle while the outer parts are well done; there’s nothing to be done about this: it’s lamb and you live with it. (Cook’s Illustrated has a fussy, promising thing where you turn the lamb over and about with paper towels in the middle and trim and cut it in half, and if you can do all this and want to, more power to you. I just slice some well-done bits, some pinker bits, and give the semiraw stuff in the middle to the dog.)

Meanwhile, put the lamb on a plate and pour off all the fat from the pan; there’ll be burned bits of garlic and lamb there, but that’s okay. Pour in, oh, a cup of white wine or flat champagne, whatever you have—wine in the sauce all comes out more or less the same—and scrape and cook down; it should be a jus, not a thickened sauce. So cook it down to make the flavor intense, but not to thicken it too much. Then slice the lamb, crumble some of the bacon on it—put a whole rasher on, if you like—along with some of the burned anchovies, and pour lots of the pungent wine and drippings on it. Lots. Serve with a purée of potatoes without too much complexity, just potatoes, cream, and butter and salt (but for once not too much, since the meat will satisfy the salt-hunger). And green beans with sweetly caramelized shallots, better than gingered ones, I think. See if it isn’t the best gigot you’ve ever had, with the gamy lamb and the salt-bitter anchovies and sweetish pork and smoke of the bacon and the good winy-salty juice on it. Good food. No more than that. Can we ask for more? Did you? When a secret ingredient is laid out flat on the dish and then transported to the top of the finished food, is it still a secret?

All best,

A.G.