The Table Comes First

AFTER WE ARRIVE, at the restaurant or at home, we have to choose what we want to eat. At the restaurant, it’s simple: we scan the menu and decide. But at home we choose first, shopping and deciding. And at that dangerous place, the friend’s house, we have to pray that they have chosen, and chosen well. (And we pray, too, that they will have finished cooking before we arrive, so that the horrible hour in the kitchen, as they fuss and mix, is one that we are spared. Even with a glass of wine in hand, it is hard to watch another cook—and when they have the food still in plastic wrap… it’s too much.)

Fish or chicken? Red meat or none? Vegetables boiled or braised? And what to drink, and how much should we care? If arriving is a story of hope, offered and deferred, choosing is always comparative. Behind every choice we make is another choice rejected. What shall it be? And when shall we get it?

4. How Does Taste Happen?

DE GUSTIBUS non disputandum est: There’s no disputing taste. This is surely one of the most familiar Latin tags or mottos left to us, one of only maybe two that we still know and grasp. We hear it and we think we recognize its truth; it enjoins a shrug of acceptance in place of a futile argument: you like it your way and I like it mine…. You may say potato and I may say potahto, but if you like tomatoes and I like potatoes? Nothing to do but walk away.

But of course, the next thing that strikes us is that taste is all we do dispute. We dispute our taste in music. Who do you like better, Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell? You do? You can’t! Why? Every bookstore assumed—or assumes—disputes about taste. Those music lovers do nothing except dispute: Which do you prefer, the Beatles or the Stones? Blur or Oasis? Dixieland or bebop? To tell a fifteen-year-old boy or girl that it’s all just a question of taste is infuriating, not helpful. Of course it’s a question of taste—the question is, whose taste is right?

This distance between the pat certainty of the slogan and its obvious untruth reminds me of something my grandfather once said. He arrived in what he always called “this country” from the Old Country when he was twelve, and his English was accentless but still spoken at the slight puzzled remove of the second-language speaker. As a very old man he once confided to me that there was a single phrase in English that he could not understand: “What do they mean when they say that you can’t have your cake and eat it, too?” he asked me, bewildered. What else were you supposed to do with your cake? Having it and eating it were parts of one description, a single act. There is nothing else to do with your cake. Like the claim about cake, the claim about taste seems like a falsehood parading as a fatuity.

When it comes to food, taste disputes can be intense, even wild. Meat-eaters against vegans, the locavore against the supermarket patron, or even just those who like the pallid look and squishy finish of meat boiled in vacuum bags against those who live in cast-iron pans. But when it comes to the kind of taste that people who care about taste care most about, the disputes are both more immediate and more peculiar. For we mean by “taste” both small taste—the flavor of what we put in our mouths—and big taste, the way we decorate our walls and clothing and lives. There is mouth taste, how it feels when you eat it—is it salty or sweet or bitter or buttery or somewhere in between, with all the fine gradations of lime and lemon and vinegar that mark out the general category of “sour.” But then there is what we might call “moral taste”—the place of the food we eat within an epoch’s style or our own self-image.

We could simply call these two “flavor” and “fashion,” and that wouldn’t be all wrong. But “flavor” and “fashion” miss the depth of the commitment that we make to our food tastes. In religious matters, we see this all the time. The Orthodox Jew likes the flavor of brisket during the Seder, but his liking it is something more than fashion. It is a moral taste—in his eyes, eating brisket is an ethical position. But this is just as true of seemingly smaller affections. I like the mouth taste of Dan Barber’s food, but my liking to eat at his restaurant at the Stone Barns organic farm is something more than fashion. It is a moral taste, in the sense that I’m proud to be seen there, and like to pretend to participate in the project of sustainable produce and heritage breeds.

Of course, “moral taste” of this kind is in our era highly moralized: we think we’re helping the planet by eating at Dan Barber’s. But in every epoch, mouth taste leads to moral taste—the two are linked, and it is those links that drive our diets. My parents, mere college professors, in their youth went to Paris every year and ate at the new palaces of nouvelle cuisine, at Michel Guérard’s or Alain Dutournier’s old Au Trou Gascon. It was in the days before eating became so intensely “ethicalized,” and so questions of where the lamb was born and how much the duck suffered to give up its liver were very secondary. I doubt that anyone even asked them. But the choice of France, and French cooking, involved many other self-defining positions. It was a moral taste, as it had been for every American gourmand from Fisher to Liebling. It meant choosing to make much of food as a humane activity, which in turn meant choosing Paris over Prussia, pleasure over austerity, extravagant expenditure in the interest of materialism over middle-class thrift, the indulgence of appetite over the suppression of hunger. It was tied to attitudes about sex, travel, God, life… in all those ways, the mouth taste for Dutournier’s cassoulet was part of a moral taste for what the cassoulet so beautifully—and beanfully—meant.

Or take a touching moment from Craig Claiborne’s Time-Life volume Classic French Cooking, from the mid-sixties, where he talks about visiting young friends in Mamaroneck, New York, who had taken on the true faith of haute cuisine: “If they have hamburgers, they serve hamburgers au poivre flambés au cognac. If they have veal it is served with fines herbes.” They make consommé Celestine and sole Marguery and for dessert serve a soufflé Rothschild, and somebody lights a Gauloise and, Claiborne writes, “for one haunting moment I felt as if I were in the South of France.” This strikes us as overwrought, but choosing that imaginative Francophile life at that time, too easily nostalgized now, of processed cheese and Corfam shoes was a hard choice, a real choice, a good choice. Moral choices look silly only after others have made them for our benefit.

We have mouth taste and moral taste—and, as Charlie the Tuna long ago discovered, though intricately related they are not quite the same. “Charlie, StarKist don’t want tunas with good taste, StarKist wants tunas that taste good,” the small wise fish used to explain to the big cartoon tuna, who tried to show the StarKist company, in a series of mid-sixties ads, that he had good taste by wearing berets, hanging abstract art on his wall, and so on, in order—according to the weird convention by which cartoon animals want to be killed and eaten—to convince StarKist that he tasted good. “Guys with good taste always go places no one ever heard of.”

About mouth taste we know a lot, chiefly how susceptible it is to framing effects. The order in which a thing is introduced, information about its origin—wines labeled “California” always taste better than wines said to come from the Dakotas—the context in which it’s taken, what comes before, what comes after… all of this changes our perceptions. Some of these effects—the way that water tastes sweet after eating an artichoke—are purely physiological and well understood. Others, like the ways that labels affect our tastes in wine, are more cagily social. But they are all framing effects in which what we sense on our tongues is secondary to what we believe in our heads.

We know now, for instance, that, in addition to the taste buds in our mouth, we have still more taste buds of another kind in our gut, which cannily regulate and oversee our desires, too, making sure that we eat not just what our tongues like but what our livers need. And we know, too, how much we depend on a kind of eternal game of truth or dare with our brains and their chemistry: we eat capsicum peppers, for instance, only because we know that our brain will superproduce opiates to make up for the burn on our tongue. If it didn’t, then chili or curry would be literally unbearable. Whole civilizations every night are head-faking their nervous systems. We learn to use our sensory ability to sense rot in order to relish controlled rotting, as in cheese and truffles and Madirans. We are not slot machines of taste, passively registering information as it arrives on our palate, but poker players, bluffing out our own neurons.

But Charlie the Tuna often was not so wrong. Good taste always starts with tasting good. Moral taste is often an expanded metaphor rising from mouth taste. If metaphors of sight are our pet metaphors of abstract intelligence—our kids are bright, or dim (well, not ours), our vision of the future is clear or cloudy, our problems are well-illuminated or dimly understood—then metaphors of taste are our favorites for intuitive sensual experience. The tongue terms speak to the immediate sensual shock: the girl’s or boy’s manner is so sweet or too bitter, too saccharine or too sour.

The curious thing is that as mouth taste changes, so does moral taste, and on the same cyclical, revolutionary principles. Even in—particularly in—a stable and prosperous middle class, tastes in food, and in dining, change with remarkable speed. When I was a boy, a book called Masterpieces of French Cuisine, complete with recipes taken from every three-star palace in France, was among my favorite reading: its cover shows a three-star chef in chef’s whites, gesturing haughtily toward the masterpieces contained inside—what now looks like twelve gratin dishes of indistinguishable brown sludge—while inside the recipes from the great chefs of France seem almost unmakeable, not to say indigestible. It’s a rule. The good food of twenty-five years ago always looks unhealthy; the good food of fifty years ago always looks unappetizing; and the good food of a hundred years ago always looks inedible. Knowledge progresses, but cooking does not, or only in partial ways. Diet is always the site of ritual convincing itself that it is reason.

The cycles of mouth taste and moral taste are still more evident at greater distance. We know that a century ago the taste for the nonseasonal and exotic defined a sophisticated eater; the man who could get strawberries in December and poulet de Bresse on Madison Avenue was the man with taste. Now the same enlightened diner is defined by his rejection of the remote and out-of-season; he’s the man who refuses strawberries in December, and wants his chicken grown and strangled in his own basement. Diet changes all the time, and the top diets change as often as the top chef.

Consider the place of seasonality in dining out. In Balzac’s Lost Illusions, Lucien, after blowing his money on a first-night dinner at the Palais Royal, has to start eating in a Left Bank bistro. Flicoteaux, the cantine that poor Lucien is forced to patronize, has only local and seasonal produce. Balzac describes in great detail how the owner, M. Flicoteaux himself, keeps down prices by shopping only for what’s just off the farms, only cabbage in cabbage season and turnips in turnip time and so on—and describes just as well the shame and suffering that the diners feel in having to eat in so peasantlike a manner right in the middle of Paris. It is part of their sad fate as poets that they have to eat there. Part of the price of poverty was seasonal eating. Now, of course, we pay three hundred dollars prix fixe at Alain Passard’s, only a few streets away, to have a single plate of sliced tomatoes—though strictly in tomato season.

These changes not only involve what gives us pleasure—or what we say gives us pleasure—but our whole idea of what pleasure is. Take an instance of the vagaries of taste even nearer, and odder. Read two great British journalists of the 1960s and 1970s, Bernard Levin and Kenneth Tynan. No one did more to break down British puritan injunctions against eating as a humane act, and a kind of art. They were both utterly devoted to great food, which they identified, as most educated people did at that time, with Continental three-star cooking. Their diaries and journals testify to their enraptured love for great French food—and to the constant feelings of sickness and indigestion that all that cream- and butter-based cooking costs them. Yet for Levin and Tynan feeling ill after you ate was not a hint that something might be wrong with the way you’d eaten. It was proof that you had really eaten well. (I well recall my own culinary mentor, Eugenio Donato, a professor of comparative literature, taking pills to stave off a crise de foie before he sat down to eat six courses.) This cruel eating even had its tragic side. I once told one of A. J. Liebling’s friends how keenly I admired Liebling’s food writing, and he shook his head with sorrow. “I can’t read Joe on food,” he said, “because I watched him eat himself to death.” Eating himself to death may have been neurotic, but it was Liebling’s conscious neurosis, chosen to make a point. Anyone could diet; it took a real man to die of gout.

This may astound us only a generation later—but the first thing we know about pleasure is that it is intricately tied to perversity. Our own absurd perversities in eating are hidden from us by the fog of our own epoch—it is, after all, always our own epoch that is foggiest to us; the past presents itself with crystal clarity—and as I trudge once more to the farmers’ market for hard-neck garlic, I can only imagine the bafflement of my grandchildren. Or think again of salt! We have replaced the ordinary small salt that served our mothers so well with gray and orange and crystal salt, of the kind that one used to find only on soft pretzels. Can we not hear the first faint titters of posterity at that choice?

And we know that such changes in taste are tied to social changes, to questions of class and rank and caste. Who is likelier to eat today the diet of the American farmer or the Russian peasant of the Old Country—brown bread and freshly grown local vegetables, free-range chicken and raw-milk cheese—the farmer’s great-grandchildren, or the professor of comparative literature at the nearby liberal-arts college? All taste is relative in the sense that it is historical, specific, and context-bound. One of the most piquant details in the Twilight saga, as any father of a prepubescent girl can tell you, is that the good vampires of the Cullen Clan refer to their voracious consumption of fresh animal blood as “vegetarianism”—and though I suppose some indignant vegetarian has objected, no one within the confines of the series ever disputes the designation. In comparison with the other vampire’s diet of hot human flesh, killing wild deer with your bare hands and sucking their life out is morally equivalent to eating lentils and greens. Even what you call a vegetable finally depends on the ferocity of your taste for blood.

So it is not simply that tastes, mouth taste and moral taste, change. It is that they change in absolute ways—not incrementally, as we drift toward taking two lumps of sugar in our coffee instead of three, but entirely and radically, and in ways that almost always involve treating as beatific what has been before rejected as base. And they change cyclically—if not predictably, then certainly not haphazardly. That’s why we have movements and patterns and periods in the history of cooking. It’s why we have a history of culture. Taste is all that we dispute.

Well, okay. But they were wrong, and we are… right! The cost of transporting strawberries in winter from the warm climate to the cool is bad for the fruit and worse for the planet; the poets eating cabbage from Les Halles were luckier than the ones eating imported lobster, a little later on, at Lapérouse. The old taste was bad, artificial, and mistaken, and the new taste is good, natural, and logical. The seasonal is preferable to the remote and exotic for reasons we can enumerate; Tynan and Levin were foolish Englishmen torturing themselves for no reason at all. We now eat the right way—we even have books telling us what the right way is to eat!—with the right balance of healthy organic vegetables and the right suspicion of too much butter and cream covering up the vegetable’s natural taste, and the right concerns about keeping our planet and our palate in balance….

No doubt. Very probably so. But it requires arrogance in the face of history to imagine that history has stopped with us. The terrible condescension of posterity is a thing we should avoid, since we are surely those to be condescended to next. Don’t misunderstand! I am as partisan about these tastes as anyone else: I evict presweetened food from my children’s larder as sternly as Carrie Nation evicted sinners from a saloon; I would, if my children asked to go to McDonald’s, say, in the immortal words of Alice Waters, that I would prefer not to get involved in that kind of activity. But I also recognize that these are the tastes of my caste and class and kind, and no likelier to last forever than those of any other, older caste and class and kind.

Presented with these two truths—the never-ending whirligig of taste and our own certainty that our tastes are best and surest—we usually try to escape the contradiction by escaping the problem of taste completely, insisting that we can root our judgment in something that transcends mere fashion. We try to root our tastes in an idea of progress, or in an appeal to nature. We think, Tastes may be trends, but trends trend toward truth. Or else we think, Well, our mothers knew what they wanted, but we know what Mother Nature wants. How well have these efforts worked over time to solve the problem of taste?

Before modern times, taste in food particularly was enforced by the two greatest of enforcers: faith and famine, and their not-so-nice foster parent, fear. Dietary restrictions are a big part of most religious practice; kosher and halal rules are the most famous of these, and though various attempts have been made to justify them on rational grounds—pigs eat too much, or are too expensive, or too likely to make you sick when you eat them—few anthropologists take this seriously now. There are too many rules and subrules, covering too many improbable beasts and circumstances. Even the rabbis and mullahs admit now that the purpose of food laws is to create a form of symbolic solidarity that keeps a tribe or faith together. There is nothing so powerful to keep you eating with your family on this side of the river as disgust at what the people on the other side think tastes good.

Faith shapes food, and so does famine. As we’ve seen, the first birth of “gastronomy” is inseparable from the end of the constant fear of famine that had been part of the European, and particularly the French, condition almost from the beginning of time. Many forces played a role in this transformation, not least new methods of transport that brought food into Paris more efficiently—Les Halles was not then a site of nostalgia but a hub for distribution—and of course new foodstuffs. People who like eating should praise Antoine Parmentier, the father of the French potato, every day. (In a sense, given the ubiquity of the French fry in the world, we do.) It isn’t an accident that the one exceptional famine in the West after 1800 was the potato famine in Ireland. With the end of famine in Europe as an immediate, nonpolitical threat—famines afterward would be the work of wars or sieges—came the possibility of a free play of taste. We can say “You are what you eat” only when we have some minimal choice about what we’re eating.

With the coming of modernity—which of course came at different times for different reasons, but which we can fairly associate with the growth of science, with its search for truth, and the growth of merchant-economies, with their faith in trade—taste in general and mouth taste in particular had to find another source than faith on which to rest its principles. The 1755 “Essay on Taste” by Montesquieu is the last, classic statement of the traditional, authoritarian view of taste. Taste is produced by education, and the people who have education learn to be tasteful. The best way to be tasteful yourself is to imitate the good taste of your social superiors. (Yet no good thinker thinks just one way. Montesquieu, though he assumes a ladder of taste, also invents the idea of the “je ne sais quoi”—the idea that there is as much delight in disorder as in order.)

It was the great Scottish philosopher of the Enlightenment David Hume, in his 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” who first articulated as a consistent view the notion that taste doesn’t depend on the spell of authority, but on the slow acquisition of ideas. Though everyone can see that tastes change, Hume was one of the first to insist that this is the central truth about them:

The great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under every one’s observation. Men of the most confined knowledge are able to remark a difference of taste in the narrow circle of their acquaintance, even where the persons have been educated under the same government, and have early imbibed the same prejudices. But those, who can enlarge their view to contemplate distant nations and remote ages, are still more surprised at the great inconsistence and contrariety. We are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our own taste and apprehension: But soon find the epithet of reproach retorted on us. And the highest arrogance and self-conceit is at last startled, on observing an equal assurance on all sides, and scruples, amidst such a contest of sentiment, to pronounce positively in its own favour.

So how could you make distinctions? Hume thought that you could do it by learning to make ever more minute judgments. “It is acknowledged to be the perfection of every sense or faculty, to perceive with exactness its most minute objects, and allow nothing to escape its notice and observation,” he said. “The smaller the objects are, which become sensible to the eye, the finer is that organ, and the more elaborate its make and composition.” Practice makes perfect—and what is interesting is that Hume assumes that the best theater of taste is the mouth and the table (though he was born a Scot eating Scottish food, he lived in France as a young man, which may explain it):

A good palate is not tried by strong flavours; but by a mixture of small ingredients, where we are still sensible of each part, notwithstanding its minuteness and its confusion with the rest…. A very delicate palate, on many occasions, may be a great inconvenience both to a man himself and to his friends: But a delicate taste of wit or beauty must always be a desirable quality; because it is the source of all the finest and most innocent enjoyments, of which human nature is susceptible…. But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty…. The mist dissipates, which seemed formerly to hang over the object: the organ acquires greater perfection in its operations; and can pronounce, without danger of mistake, concerning the merits of every performance.

Hume’s idea is simple: sensitivity is what counts, and our palates get sensitive by experience. The longer you stand on tiptoe, the easier it is to dance. All taste is acquired taste. Practice makes almost perfect, and practice plus instruction makes as perfect as we can get. A developed palate is more reliable than an instinctive one.

But the most enduring new idea about taste in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was the romantic move away from acquired taste and toward an idea of authentic taste—a move that we associate with Hume’s great friend, rival, and, eventually, enemy, the philosopher, novelist, and essayist Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Though Rousseau’s ideas were not, as is always the case, all his own—others had them before him, and some that we associate with his name were never actually articulated by him—the great change in taste that made the peasant’s brown bread as attractive as the prince’s brioche is tied to things Rousseau asserts in his novels and philosophical books.

Rousseau thinks that taste is not taken from authority, or acquired by educated palates; he thinks that true taste, authentic taste, is derived, somehow, from nature. Rousseau insists that brioche taste is the taste of a corrupt and decadent upper class; if we return to natural man, the noble savage, the virtuous peasant, we find a taste in constant harmony with nature. In a famous letter to Jean d’Alembert he rejects with disgust Hume’s love of small discriminations as the basis of good taste. “And what at bottom is this so vaunted ‘taste’?” Rousseau asks. “The art of knowing little things. In truth, when one has something so great as liberty worth knowing, all the rest is quite puerile.” And in Emile, Jean-Jacques teaches his student to feel nothing, but to “fix his affections and his tastes, to hasten to be sure and that he does not search in luxury to find means that he can find best very near to him. Good taste [is] defined very simply as that which pleases or displeases the greatest number.” Rousseau loves to describe the joys of a harvest, the pleasures of the vineyard, the superiority of the terroir to the city. True taste is popular, near at hand, not the delicate acquired taste of the educated.

Yet this idea of a natural and simple eternal taste, waiting to be found if we could just discard our pretensions, produced, in its own era, very different practices. The natural was as complicated a concept as the acquired. Rousseau’s first great public disciple was the Queen herself, Marie Antoinette; his second Robespierre, and his third the man who invented the restaurant, Chantoiseau. Each possessed an idea of simple naturalness, and they gave us in turn the symbol of elite cluelessness, the “rustic village” on the grounds of the Petit Trianon; the symbol of popular terror, the guillotine; and the symbol of common pleasure, the restaurant.

Marie Antoinette built her Petit Hameau in homage to the new cult of simplicity. The Hameau was the first boutique farm where agriculture could be practiced in an ideal and deliberately “antiquated” form and a circle of the rich could restore their inner balance by milking cows and growing carrots. This was mocked at the time, of course, in exactly the same way that the same kind of activity is mocked now: when we insist on an organic garden at the White House or, as many cooks do now, run an organic hothouse attached to an expensive restaurant, we can expect to see it sneered at as a mere plaything of bored privilege.

Yet there is little doubt that Marie Antoinette was perfectly sincere in her beliefs, and that the movement toward terroir and fresh produce had a lot to do with what she did. (To deepen the irony of her infatuation, perhaps the most famous culinary imperative—her alleged cry of “Let them eat cake!”—actually comes from Rousseau’s Confessions, where he uses it ironically in reference to an “ancient princess.” The connection of Marie and Jean-Jacques ended by connecting her to a cry of indifference that, whatever other crimes she was guilty of, was none of hers.)

The man who took off Marie’s head shared many of her tastes. Maximilien Robespierre, the maker of the Reign of Terror, also took his ideas about religion, rectitude, and dining from Rousseau. But where Marie Antoinette had taken the lesson that simple pleasures are natural to life, Robespierre took the related lesson that austere pleasures are necessary for virtue. In an especially creepy note, he had the keepers of the plain rooming house that he lived in prepare for him, night after night, as he came home from the killings, a meatless diet of strawberry jam and white bread. It was left to his great rival Georges Danton to be the fresser of the French Revolution—and for his sins he lost his head, too.

But there was also a more enduring relation between Rousseau’s ideas and our own food life. As we’ve seen, Chantoiseau took up the new cult of self-conscious health to make the restorative bouillon that lent its name to that new institution, the restaurant. And the kind of “sentimentality” that Rousseau loved played its role, too: the idea of the restaurant as a public place where women could come for their health without having their morality impugned allowed for a whole new ritual of courtship and sublimated sex. (The appeal to self-improvement is always an acceptable cover for sex; that’s why they call them health clubs.)

So from this same simple turn toward brown bread, toward the terroir and the authentic, we get radically unlike results: the move among the upper classes toward boutique farming, among the radicals the move away from delectation toward delicacy, and among the middle classes the invention of the most durable of all “bourgeois” institutions, the restaurant. Whatever simple pleasures may be, they aren’t simple.

Taste in the Enlightenment belonged to philosophy. In the nineteenth century, the study of taste turned to evolutionary theory and to economics. The idea of the authentic has always been haunted by the possibility that what we call authentic is arbitrary, and in the nineteenth century this instinct was given systematic form by the economist who could be called the Darwin of taste. His name was Thorstein Veblen, and he was a professor who came to fame in 1899 with the book The Theory of the Leisure Class. The most original, if the most discouraging, thinker about taste of modern times, Veblen, a passionate Darwinian, must have been well aware of Darwin’s writings on that subspecies of natural selection Darwin called “sexual selection,” in which Darwin was trying to create a kind of natural science of taste.

What Darwin had noticed was the seemingly perverse elements of sexual display in animals, which seemed to contradict “natural” principles of the efficient use of resources. You might think that animals that used resources most sparingly would live longest and have the most offspring. But in fact, far from existing in a state of parsimonious, peasant-like simplicity which only human artifice and pride disturbed, the state of nature looked more like the rococo interiors at the Nymphenburg Palace than the peasant hut. Peacocks and elks and many other species in the wild indulge in expensive displays of needless plumage and endless antlers: they strut up and down in the lek, to display how much they have to waste. They make themselves as conspicuous as possible in order to show off their goods and get a mate. Showing off, not simplicity, is the rule of nature.

Veblen came from a Norwegian farm family and grew up in Minnesota; a little Norwegian goes a long way toward making you reluctant to put on any kind of display. Inspired in part by Franz Boas’s insight that anthropology could explain economics, Veblen began The Theory of the Leisure Class with a myth. He imagined that money trouble had begun way back, with the transfer from a state of “peaceable savagery” to one of “predatory barbarism.” The peaceable savage was a creature of material appetites who was satisfied when he was satiated. This natural state was superseded by the coming of the predatory barbarian, a category that for Veblen includes the Kwakiutl warrior, the medieval feudalist, and, in America, the businessman—anyone who lived off the labor of others.

The distinguishing characteristic of predatory-barbarian society is a ruling class that doesn’t do physical labor—a leisure class. (Even a banker who goes to the office every day is, in Veblen’s scheme, a member of the leisure class.) In tribal and feudal societies, he argues, the leisure class had certain occupations—making war, exploiting vast tracts of land, running slave plantations—that gave it prowess and status: its members could fight, and actually owned other people. With the growth of modern industrial society, only the outward show remained, and it became a powerful symbol. In Veblen’s scheme, the Ralph Lauren effect is universal: even when membership in the leisure class no longer depends on being able to ride horses and own land, it is still symbolized by polo and ranches. “Manners are symbolical and conventionalized survivals representing former acts of dominance,” he writes. “In large part they are an expression of the relation of status—a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other.”

The rules of this “symbolic pantomime” became Veblen’s subject. It was founded on the practice of “invidious comparison.” For preindustrial predatory barbarians, it was pretty clear who stood where: you just counted slaves and acres. For industrial society, though, there is no obvious way to rate predatory barbarians except to see where they shop and what they buy. Since you can’t count the slaves or acres of the stranger on Madison Avenue, the only way to know where he stands is to see how much he pays for his cappuccino. In today’s terms, if he goes to Three Guys he pays three dollars, and if he goes to the E.A.T. café he pays six. Some would rather pay the six and buy the status. Veblen called this urge to show off your status by spending your money “conspicuous consumption.”

And yet Veblen saw that, even among the very rich, conspicuous consumption was usually complicated, involving a tension between the need to display money and the need to be seen to display old money. “Archaic simplicity” had to be evoked in order to demonstrate the age and solidity of your “industrial exemption”—your freedom from the necessity of working with your hands. Conspicuous consumption had to combine “a studious exhibition of expensiveness with a make-believe of simplicity.”

Veblen’s point is not that we want to separate ourselves from others by showing off while spending a lot of money on big consumer goods: the guy with the giant house in the Hamptons is, to the true uppers, an embarrassment. The point of conspicuous consumption is not that it is more consumption but that it is conspicuous—that is, clearly distinguished from its surroundings, which are the status-manners of the vulgar middles. We want to separate ourselves from the bourgeoisie, and the leisure class does this by taking on the manners of the other exempted people, the peasant or criminal classes. The privileged classes, and their professional attendees, will always struggle to make their true status and income clear by differentiating themselves from the middles. (Already, in 1899, Veblen pointed out that the fashion for candlelight dinners was pure invidiousness; nobody thought candles were romantic until they were archaic.)

Veblen’s analysis of taste can be vulgarized, most often in a broad, crude, or merely snide way. But it isn’t hard to see how arresting a true Veblenian account of food taste in our time might be. In an era of plenty, when we can’t distinguish ourselves by eating more—when obesity has become a sign of the lower-middle classes, not the high uppers—we eat local and seasonal produce in order to annex the exemption of the few surviving peasants. Whole Foods has grown, on Veblenian principles, as more of the professionals and upper-middles try for the same status symbols—and come under suspicion from the true uppers as mere fakery, a counterfeit of “our” beliefs.

Similarly, a Veblenian account of taste can explain apparent oddities: for instance, the question that I raised at the very beginning of this book, and that is the seemingly contradictory trends that have grown up among taste-setters in our own age: the taste for molecular gastronomy, and for slow, peasant food. What they have in common is that they are hard to take part in if you are on a middle income. When Calvin Trillin made fun of the “Maison de la Casa House” restaurant, the typical Continental cuisine spot in Cincinnati or Akron—with its stuff-stuff with heavy cooking—he was noticing, with his matchless eye for the details of American life, that what had been a high cuisine restricted to a handful of people with access to New York or Paris was now a common ideal of the middle classes—which meant that it would now have to be rejected quickly and completely by the uppers and the pros. And so we came to the end of even real French cooking, to the French restaurant, with its velvet banquettes, to the disappearance of all those “Le” and “La” restaurants in New York; no more Le Cygne, La Caravelle, or Le Lavandou. They’ve been replaced by single words and numbers—Basil, Butter, Cilantro—which suggest the elemental ingredient derived pseudo-peasant style.

The molecular—or “techno-emotional”—cuisine depends on resources for travel, and on machinery for making, that are also outside the range of all the middles; the localist cuisine depends on resources that take more organization, and more time, than money, but the two are the same in many ways. It would be no surprise to the Veblenian that the new “best restaurant,” taking the place of all those old French temples, is René Redzepi’s Noma, in Copenhagen, which combines extreme localism with high molecularism, a double whammy of Veblenian achievement: René stores vintage carrots for years—the ultimate peasant tribute—but also manufactures potato chips that taste like chocolate and raw soil that tastes like caviar and so on. You win the triple: you get to eat local, you get to eat high, and you have to go to Denmark to do it.

For Veblen, it’s all status and symbol; it isn’t possible to have an authentic response to food, much less an altruistic one. We are social creatures driven to confer status on ourselves. Every taste choice we make is a status choice in a not-very-hard-to-see-through disguise.

Veblen’s theory was that there were large areas of real life that defy free-market theories, and that what we call taste is like the antigravity mineral in Avatar, the thing that makes it all float up. There are antigravity zones made by the acceleration of taste, where we pay more to get less and the rain falls up and the grass grows high in winter.

Yet the most influential American economist of taste in the century since Veblen was writing has been the University of Chicago professor Gary Becker, who in 1992 won the Nobel Prize in economics, for his studies of taste, time, and money—in fact, the paper he cowrote, called simply “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum,” is one of the most cited papers in the literature. In it, Becker insists, a little shockingly, that there is no such thing as taste, and that all tastes are all the same. By this he means not that they never change but that, from the point of view of an economic model, they can all be mapped in the same way. Where earlier economists would say that changing tastes violated or overthrew classical laws of supply and demand, Becker insists that that’s not so: it doesn’t matter what it is you want, the ends of wanting are all alike. People make rational decisions to invest in what they like and what gives them pleasure; the mistake is thinking of the product and not the entire social process.

Why, Becker asks, if you have two restaurants across the street from each other, serving comparable food, do the normal rules of economics not apply? Why doesn’t the one with the long line each night expand its premises, or raise its prices? Why doesn’t the restaurant across the street lower its prices? Veblen’s answer is that we have been coerced by capitalism into imagining that people will envy us if we are standing in the right line. Becker’s answer is, in plain English, that the line is what we’re paying for. It is the sum of the experience, which is the experience of standing in a line with people. The presence of other people makes the product more desirable. This explains why crowded restaurants don’t expand, and why, in New York, they often set up obstacles—private numbers, snooty young women maître d’s—designed to drive away customers. Knowing that the chances of staying in fashion are very slim, the best strategy is to milk as much money as you can from the intimidated consumer now. Keeping customers out is a very good short-term strategy for making a profit, so long as you can keep the other customers coming in.

Or take that E.A.T. cappuccino; the Veblenian explanation is that it’s an irrational perversity imposed by status overriding economic sense. Becker’s explanation is that the six-dollar cappuccino is good economic sense. The price is a rational price given that what you’re paying for is the social interaction—and though this sounds like the same thing said in a different way, it is different inasmuch as Veblen thinks the cycles of taste are silly and to be escaped from, if you can, and Becker thinks that they are part of the rational logic of markets. Seemingly irrational phenomena of mere taste are actually completely rational phenomena of utility. The cappuccino is correctly priced, in its own weird way. Veblen thinks that people adopt silly tastes because they’re driven to do it by capitalism; Becker thinks they do it because the market frees us to be honest in our likes and dislikes, and then reveals them as they really are. What we call educating our tastes is merely maximizing our utilities, and all utilities look about the same seen from a sufficient distance. All rat races look the same to everyone but the rats who are running in them.

Now, in real life we don’t live within one model of taste, but many. We may each be, by turns, Montesquieu and Rousseau and Veblen and Becker at a single dinner. Many of my friends who run restaurants race through these roles every day: in their role as cooks they are Rousseauian optimists, in their view of their customers Veblenian cynics, and in their view of their business partners Beckerian realists. They want their food to be authentic and pure and natural; they know their customers will come only if they think it’s hot and hip; and they recognize that the best way to persuade clients that it’s hot and hip is to have someone else say it is. They want to serve the best steak they can but they know they’re selling the sizzle; they want the sizzle to last as long as it can by making people hear it.

Though the thinkers are various, and the views complex, the common point is simple: wherever we stand, we cannot escape the cycles of symbolic social life—whether they are driven by invidious comparison, self-interest, imitation, or utility. They may derive from our desire to keep up with the Joneses, or from our urge to find out what it is the Joneses are keeping up with themselves—in every case, the romantic idea of true taste as a thing revealed after false taste and fashion has been stripped away fails. What we find when we look at taste—from the viewpoint of sociologists, psychologists, economists, and novelists alike—is a system of imbalances, asymmetries, persistent illusions, turning cycles, tail-biting serpents, deferred self-interests, not just wheels instead of ladders but gyrating spirals instead of simple wheels. None of us can escape the web of competitive, cyclical, counterintuitive, imitative relations that shape the social role of taste. There is no privileged space from which we can look down and say, Your tastes are trends, my tastes are truths. All taste effects depend on contexts. The smell in our nose changes the taste in our mouth, and the length of the line outside the restaurant changes our view of the taste of the food we’re waiting for, and even how much we’ll spend to eat it. We are what we eat? Probably closer to the truth to say that we eat what we are: the total self we bring to the table shapes the way we choose, and even how we chew. Our morals and our manners together drive our molars.

There is no true or “natural” taste outside the circles of social ritual. You, me, the guy at McDonald’s, the kosher butcher down the street, and the evangelical vegetarian actress on television, the locavore and the mad seasonalist and the organic shopper and the crazed carnivore—we are all part of an inescapable network of social relations that shape our tastes in ways small and large. Our circumstances whisper in our ear what we ought to eat and what we ought to like and why we ought to like it. To insist that ours is true simplicity, true taste, that we at last know the right way to eat, is to lobby for an exemption from history that history will not provide. It is even to imagine that we can escape the effects of living among our own kind—our humanity. That was Rousseau’s mistake, and Robespierre’s sin.

Yet I know from long and sometimes painful experience that this truth often goes down very badly, or is taken to mean that all our tastes are just delusions. Take, for instance, the obvious smaller truth about the social texture of taste—the experimental truth that wine tasting is a social ritual as much as it is an objective rating. We know that the taste of wine is heavily dependent on all kinds of social cues—the order of glasses, color, place, expectations, labels… even experts do no better than random chance in determining between a glass of white and a glass of red in a blindfold test. We see “Rousseau effects” in the trend toward organic and biodynamic wine (biodynamic viticulture combines organic treatment of the vineyard with a spiritual aspect), which must taste better; we see Veblenian effects in wine tasting (the bottle of Cristal or Pétrus has become marked as nouveau riche, so better buy the biodynamic ones); we see Beckerian effects (the price is justified by our chance to take part in the community); and so on.

Doesn’t this mean that you’re saying that it’s all phony? That it’s a fraud or a fake? Just the opposite; what it shows is that the experience of taste is like all of our other experiences of meaning, produced by complicated frames and interactions and effects and all the richer for it. Wine writing or tasting is no more fraudulent than music criticism or art appreciation, which are also crucially dependent on context and expectations, on social context at least as constricting as those that govern mouth taste. All the things that make us human—the nature of our social lives, our taste for competitions and our capacity for learning new games—make the distinction between acquired taste and authentic taste, trendy taste and true taste, meaningless in any discussion about real life.

Yet, just because they can be partly explained as conspicuous display doesn’t mean that our tastes are without value, meaning, importance, or integrity. The naïve naturist believes that insistently asserting the sincerity of her values places them outside the realm of mere style; the naïve Veblenian believes that having shown that a thing has an element of style is enough to empty it of any sincerity at all.

In truth, much, perhaps most, of the good in our lives comes from recognizing the fragile and temporary basis of what we choose to do, and then doing it anyway. We don’t have to believe in natural or absolute grammar to believe in beautiful sentences. We don’t have to believe in natural monogamy to work at a happy marriage. All the good stuff is at once universal and overwhelming, and local, tempered by taste, finely articulated to the place and moment. When we have a child in a foreign country, it is all foreign and all child. When we have an omelet in Spain, it is all Spain and all omelet. When we eat beautifully in 2011, we are both free diners and prisoners of the table of our time.

So the choice between an authority to tell us what we ought to eat and the anarchy of warring fashions is a false one. Between authority and anarchy falls argument, and though arguments aren’t always better for being ended, they’re always better for being addressed. What “De gustibus…” really means is not that taste is not disputable but that it’s not decidable—if you don’t like Brussels sprouts, I can argue you into trying them but I can’t argue you into liking them. But that’s an argument worth having. We have it every time I put them on the table.

What the arguments do show is something deeper, and vital—that behind nearly all taste squabbles are value disputes. All morals manifest themselves as manners, and all manners have a moral locked inside. We know the values that we want to uphold on the “green” side of the fence: community, tradition, care, sustainability, and pleasure above all else. But on the “industrialized” side there are values, too: efficiency, prosperity, ease of choice, and abundance. This is a case where the seeming “left” is entirely conservative, while the industrial and populist right, as happens so often in the capitalist regime, is essentially progressive—say good-bye to the family farm, the slow-cooked chicken, and in exchange you get, or hope to get, what we have not had ever before on this planet: cheap meat for everyone. Organic, local, slow—if this is what we want, it is, the counterargument goes, the best way to go hungry. There is the silent spring of industrialized agriculture, but there is also the long silent summer of natural starvation.

On the other hand, or in the other fork, there is the truth that the diet of grease and sugar and salt, produced by reducing living things to machines, creates the overfed, glazed, and ill American majority. The argument is that cheap meat for all will end with no cheap meat for anyone; the argument in return is that the threat of no cheap meat means that we must find ways to make more. The animal Auschwitz meets the silent clearing of the Congo. That there are no simple solutions to be had does not mean that there are no good arguments to be made. All good arguments have no end, only provisional settlements.

One thing is for sure: these questions won’t be solved by a nostalgic appeal to nature. The appeal to nature is always a false appeal. Every appeal to nature or the natural way or the way we were meant to do it has always failed in the history of human thought and action. If anything is natural, it is the flight from nature. If anything is genetic, it is the willingness to be fascinated by the elaborate, the deceptive, and the deliberately overcharged. Birds in the lek were Barcelona chefs long before there was a Barcelona. If anything is efficient, it is waste. The peacock’s tail, which does nothing except show the peahen how much he has to throw away, is as good a model for a natural life, or diet, as the happy Paleolithic eater sharing the healthy diet.

There is no right way to eat, spell, get dressed, wear clothes, make love, listen to music, drink wine, raise children, because there is no natural way to do any of these things. Every attempt to say what nature wants us to do turns out to be what someone thinks we ought to. There may be nature-based explanations for why some ways are taken more frequently than others, but they fail at the moment of specific choice, and the specific choice is all that counts: we can explain why people like music, but we cannot explain why some prefer Barry Manilow to Mozart. That lies beyond reason.

Nature does, and makes us do, many good things and many horrible things. Nature gives us the bounty of the fields; it also offers the slavery of agriculture, and the cruelty of animal slaughter. Nature lets worms eat other animals alive from the inside out. As John Stuart Mill said, what matters is not to discover what nature does, but what it is good to do. (In any case, we generally argue that the tastes we already have are the ones that will save the world to come: people who believe that the answer is to reduce consumption don’t much like the culture of consumption in the first place—they’re already living in Vermont.)

This isn’t a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of devoted detachment. Let me now offer the secret of life—or, rather, what James Taylor calls, in his fine song of that name, the secret o’ life. The secret of life is having enough intellectual detachment from our tastes to see their absurdity, while taking enough emotional fulfillment from them to grasp their necessity. We are absurd followers of the fashions of a time and place and class; we are also wise worshippers of ideas. We need not flee manners to embrace morals. The morals are the manners in more complicated form. If we lack the proper distance from our tastes, we can’t see things as they are; if we lack the emotional attachment to them, we see things merely as they are. With mouth taste as with moral taste, we cannot escape a frame of ritualized context; but with mouth taste as with moral taste, the frame is what contains the feeling, and leads the eye. (Wallace Stevens put it nicely: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”)

I spend, for instance, a large portion of every day of my life worrying about the shape of sentences. Semicolon or period? Replace a polysyllabic word with a monosyllable for drop-shot effect, or replace a monosyllable with a polysyllable for ironic overcharge? And I patiently follow the rules of English grammar. “That” or “which”? Where’s the antecedent? What’s the rule here? I believe in the one right sentence, in the one way to write, just as passionately as anyone can believe in the one right meal. Yet my mom, as it happens, is a linguist, and when she wasn’t teaching me how to cook she taught me the one hard truth: there is no natural grammar, no “right way” to write. She taught me that rules and practices and usage change all the time, and dramatically, and that “prescriptivism” in language is as bogus a concept in linguistics as green cheese is in astronomy. There is no grammar of the gods, just as there is no timeless taste.

So why do we stick to the rules? We dutifully follow the rules of grammar not because the rules are right, or fixed, but to show to others our love of language and our regard for a tradition. It’s a signal, not a slavish act. The green eater, in her secret heart, is doing the same thing: not eating what she should, but eating in a way that shows who she is. By eating the “right way,” we communicate to the other people at the table our passion for food and our willingness to look a little foolish in showing it. Obvious fictions often have important moral points—that’s why Jesus, that apostle of the open table, always spoke in parables. You needn’t prove to me that this grass-fed veal is healthier for me; you need say merely, the grass-fed veal symbolizes the kind of world I want to live in, and the meat from the industrial abattoir does not. It’s a symbol not of a natural order but of a community of belief.

So perhaps we’re now in a better state to say what we mean when we talk about taste. By “taste” we mean the social customs and practices that let us negotiate between our fashions and our values. A taste is more durable than a fashion, more mutable than a value. Taste is an argument compressed into an instruction. It is complicated, ironic knowledge turned into a choice on a menu. The idea that on one hand there are mere fashions and on the other hand enduring values is false. The best way to get people to change their values is by first changing their fashions, and it takes a new taste to do that. We show people that organic apples taste better, and we hope that the values of sustainability and true food will penetrate; we want people not to bait bears or hold cockfights, and we make it unfashionable before we can make it immoral. The fashionable chef knows to serve wild salmon; the one with values knows why wild salmon is better than farmed; the one with taste knows that if you are serving wild salmon you ought to serve it with rhubarb and organic quinoa to make a proper meal. In life, as on the plate, there is a constant interchange between fashion and value, between “surface” and “substance”—and taste is what carries the charge between them. That’s why it’s never at rest.

There were, I wrote, two famous Latin tags that everyone knew. The other, of course, is what was once the national motto: e pluribus unum. Out of many, one. It is a supremely democratic slogan, since it does not pretend that the one that is made loses its plurality, but speaks to the closest thing we have to a secular miracle: that we do pull along, most of the time, and that we can manage.

What isn’t well known is that it is a culinary metaphor. It comes from a recipe for salad dressing—or so you’ll be told if you pursue it—taken from a Latin poem called “Moretum,” long attributed, probably wrongly, to Virgil. Actually, it’s a recipe for pesto: a peasant cook is pestling together cheese, garlic, and herbs and oil. When it all comes together, well, e pluribus unum.

Now, as anyone who makes pesto knows (I make mine with lime; I’ll give you the recipe), what makes it interesting is that unlike a hollandaise or a crème anglaise, it’s just like in the poem—it takes on a composite character different from its starting elements, but the elements remain alive within the mix. The cheese and basil and garlic all come together, and yet they all remain distinct. Choosing this for their motto, the founders chose well, and with good taste: pesto is a model for a composite country.

And for a civilized one. For what, after all, is the purpose of this peasant poem? To show how complex, how far from simple, the simple life is. The poem shows that each time we cook we enact the means by which life is lived: through blending, unstable compromise, uncertain joining together of unlikely opposites. It is exactly against the idealized vision of the Georgics and pastorals of Virgil, where the shepherds live in ideal leisure. The peasants in “Moretum” are not blissfully enjoying the fruits of nature. They are at work, and their work, even making a salad dressing, costs them tears, takes time, and is the result of a thousand small decisions—tastings, in the literal and most exalted sense—that produce an eerie impression of unity.

Not from many things one fixed thing, but from many things one thing that—if you just work it hard with a pestle—holds together well enough and long enough to taste good. The truth of all of us who live in our kitchens, whether as pros or dads and moms, is that we know the place of taste as a set of steps, not a series of diktats—an ongoing permanent negotiation between values and fashions, between fundamentally different views of what we want from life and what the plenty of nature can give us, where the child who hates broccoli meets the parent who fears malnutrition and where our belief in saving the planet meets the reality of the half-hour deadline. And where every time we make a plate of pesto we are wowed all over again by the sheer complicated weight of tradition, knack, and knowledge it demands—the way that principles of practice as old as the Roman empire meet particulars of practice as fresh as today’s basil and the price of pine nuts. We have our orders, like classicists; go to the market for organic basil, like Rousseauians—want to show our diners that it’s real pesto, not from a jar, so we add a ragged leaf or two, like Veblenians; and we recognize that we are investing not just in the scrumptiousness of the dish but in a set of values about jarlessness for our kids, and hope it pays off later on when in our toothless age they will invite us over for a jarless dinner.

Chop wood. Carry water. Bake your cake. Then you have it. Then you eat it. The only thing to do with a cake is eat it. The submission to sequence is the source of the sublime. Taste is only “the art of knowing little things.” That’s what makes it big. In republics as in the kitchen, it’s the little things, respected for themselves rather than puréed into sameness, that make the finest sauces. Taste begins at the door, and ends in our dreams. It is not on our tongues, or in our hearts, or in our minds or our social roles, but everywhere at once. Taste is choice. Taste is labor. Taste is work. And taste is everywhere and results from everything. Taste is the totality of our lives. No surprise, surely. That taste is not a set of principles to be applied by rote but a daily negotiation among practices, prices, promises, and possibilities is what even the most peasantlike home cook knows. It’s the working chef’s wisdom. They should teach it to philosophers.

5. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Lamb, Saffron, Cinnamon

Dear Eliza:

My goodness, are we still alive—or, in your case, comfortably dead—after all that argument! Lime pesto, I promised at the end, and so now I shall present it. It is part of the summer run of things, something to serve with grilled food. I love to grill, and the grill is the one part of cooking that I think opened up most since your time. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think that there was any real grilling going on in your day. Beautiful pictures of picnics abound, of course, but I think they were all sandwich-and-cold-chicken affairs. I suspect that the central summer sight of our day—the middle-aged man surrounded by smoke—was completely unknown in yours.

Anyway, here it is. I like to serve it with grilled salmon. It’s simple. In a blender—yes, yes, I know that you should do this all by hand, with a mortar and pestle, with virtuous small steps, but, well, really—you take a nicely scissored mix of the three summer herbs, basil, mint, and cilantro, and add some chopped garlic, about one clove, and lots of fresh lime juice. No other sour thing—fresh lime juice, at least two and perhaps three limes’ worth. Then you take half a cup of pine nuts—yes, you can use walnuts, although it really isn’t as good, but I don’t think you have to toast the pine nuts for it to work out well—and whiz them together, and slowly stream in about three-quarters of a cup of good olive oil. Then you grate in as much Parmesan as you think right, grating it over the blender and mixing it in with a wooden spoon. Salt a bit if you like. It’s brighter and somehow cleaner tasting than other pesto. Is there anything made with lime that doesn’t taste good? Perhaps it’s the history of scurvy, buried in our blood, that calls for citrus?

The more I learn about you the more extraordinary you seem, and the more weirdly parallel our lives become, despite the century and sex that separates us. You come, it turns out, from Philadelphia, or were born there, as was I, and kept such an affection for it throughout your wanderings to Paris and London that it’s said you wrote a book about it! There’s a Philadelphia flavor to your work. You spent your best working years in London, but then returning home to America, you came to New York, and died in Brooklyn Heights, the most London-like part of New York, perhaps—certainly now, with its color-named streets and leafy rows of brownstones. So your triangle, the tripod on which you stand to eat—Philadelphian by birth, Francophile by choice, and New Yorker by default—are all mine, too, or nearly so. And then I like that you call cooking “cookery”—“Writing articles on cookery led me to buying books on cookery, also to receiving them for review.” As “Tigger” robs “tiger” of its teeth, and “Tyger” in Blake adds to it its mystical ferocity, the word “cookery” turns cooking from a pastime or chore to a craft: “He was wise in the ways of cookery,” something they teach at Hogwarts.

I like your Francophilia, too, and that you lived in exile for so long. Greedy people who care about what you call “cookery in a philosophical frame” care most if they are partly exiles, permanent expatriates. The home diner knows what he likes; one of the reasons for the efflorescence of French writing on food, back when, and its partial absence now, is the effort of definition—Who are we? What shall we eat? You disapprove of Brillat-Savarin, as a bit of a tourist trap: I think this is a good judgment, in its way. Certainly Grimod’s was the wittier pen. When I’m eating, or shopping, I carry on a conversation with you, trying to see if, by explaining what’s different from our time to yours, I can explain to myself what really counts. I imagine calling you, spiritlike, from a kind of Limbo renamed, say, Gumbo, and explaining more to you of how eating has changed since last you ate.

Spices—now they’ve changed. The strong ones are back in favor. In lots of ways, the revolutions of the nineteenth century—the restaurant revolution, the recipe book revolution—all turn around a revolution in spices and spicing, a tsunami in whose wake you still rock, but which has now, so to speak, rocked back. Throughout the medieval and early-Renaissance period, and of course going further back into the Roman, sweet and strong spices were the staff of life, the way food was, the way food tasted. Some spices were so strong that we have lost track of them today, so that they live on only in strange bestiaries. There are spices that have just vanished. We read about the lost spices of antiquity with the same wonder that occultists feel when they read about the (supposedly) sunken islands. Silphium, the legendary root spice that the Greeks used as easily as we use nutmeg, disappeared sometime in the first century A.D., and hasn’t been seen since, losing for us an entire range of flavors, a whole scale in the kitchen’s music. (Though if it’s true, as legend also has it, that the nearest thing to it is that other strange and smelly spice, asafetida, or hing, then it may be very well lost.) In any case, we’ll never taste the Roman delicacy of sea squirt and silphium. And what of balsam of Mecca, and what of tejpat? Both savory spices, once loved, now lost or cast aside. Thinking of them makes our regular diet of salt and pepper and the same six green herbs seem as limited as those pallid white marble neoclassical statues, compared with the polychrome and bronze surfaces that were the true marvels of antique art.

The reform against sweet and savory spices—the banishment of cloves, the expulsion of cinnamon to a slightly disreputable, confined life in the dessert menu and the holiday punch bowl—was one of the rocks on which French cuisine, to which you so emotionally and naturally pledged yourself, was built. The great codifying chef Carême substituted the green plants for the brown spices, tarragon in reduced stock with cream for cloves in simmered red wine with cinnamon, and a new taste was made, one that lasted longer than most. The perceived virtues of the new green cooking—green in this herb- and plant-based way—probably had something to do with a kind of weird reorganization of taste: you had meat here, vegetables there, and you put them together on a single plate. There’s certainly nothing grander, is there, than the moment of the garnish, when a simple pot roast of chuck becomes a boeuf à la mode—when all the sparkling green peas and bright orange carrots gather around it, the sauce gleaming with the gelatinous shimmer of calf’s foot? Clarity, freshness, intensity of natural flavor instead of its concealment by spice—all of those virtues, more than the supposed ones of cream and butter, were part of the French revolution in cooking when it first happened. Food had been muddy as a city river; now, suddenly, it ran clear as a Swiss lake.

But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? There was a kind of maturity of taste in play. Kids like sweet tastes. To banish sweet and strong spices was to end the childhood of cooking. And primitive people, earth’s children in the eighteenth-century view, were thought to like strong flavors. Transcending our urge to eat sweet and spicy things was a way to transcend our infantile, barbarian past. Sweet and sour and spicy, molasses and lime and chili—all those were just too easy. Grown-up taste, studied taste, was subtler than that. You write about it quite directly, referring to your collection of cookbooks, and how the cooks of old practiced by “adding such a wholesale mixture of cloying sweets and rank spices that, as I read, I can but wonder if in the old days meat and poultry were not apt to be tainted and the cook’s art needed to disguise the fact. These were the horrors from which the French delivered the world.”

But now, you see, the horrors have returned. The notion that spices were once heaped on tainted meat now seems false; at least, so the new culinary historians say. There’s no evidence that meat was more tainted then than now; it’s just another case where we regulate our prejudices in the model of our tastes—where we pretend our prejudices are the truth of healthy eating. People ate spicy food then because they liked the way it tasted. Now, you see, Elizabeth, people who think about food think the green herb and thick cream and white pepper and melted cheese taste which seemed so sophisticated to your time is itself infantile. It’s too easy, too, well, bourgeois. So the old brown spices your time banished to the nursery return in my day to the main table—but under another guise, as the banished so often do when they return, and that is as dashing foreigners. Tastes that were routine in premodern days, nutmeg and cardamom and molasses, are back, but as emissaries of the Great Khan. Returned under the demand for exotica, returned in the guise of travel.

The pair of old spices I find irresistible is saffron and cinnamon. I don’t think that there can be anything—rice, chicken stew, flank-steak braise, even a tuna in tomato sauce—that isn’t better for having a touch of saffron and cinnamon. How did they come home? By way of North Africa, of course, where they were never lost. So I take lamb—I like gigot for roasting, of course, but lamb shoulder braises best. And here’s the thing: with this dish, with the dark, dense spices, it doesn’t really matter if you brown the lamb first or not. I know, that doesn’t make sense—it violates the cook’s first law, that browning at length is the key to “caramelizing” and to making things tender. We have a mental image, I think, that sounds right: the brown crust “seals in” juiciness. Of course, anyone who actually braises and stews stuff knows that juiciness isn’t sealed in. It leaks out, right out into the bouillon, which is why the bouillon tastes so good. Reducing the bouillon is what makes the thing great. It’s simply the taste of the browning we like best, and, if your nose and mouth have enough else to occupy them, it doesn’t matter. So you… just throw the things together. Two to three pounds of lamb chunks, and an onion, peeled but not chopped, and the holy trinity of cilantro, basil, and mint tied together—if it gets loose you have to strain it afterward, which is just a small step, but still—and a fresh fragrant stick of cinnamon, broken in two, with each half stuck in on either side of the lamb chunks.

Yes, yes, I know: there are many different kinds of cinnamon. There is the true cinnamon of Sri Lanka, the strong Saigon cinnamon, and a kind of strange Chinese relation, cassia. I like to go down to Kalustyan’s on Lexington Avenue and shop for spices, make notes on the varieties and verities. Now that all the record stores are closed, and the bookstores are closing—oh God, you caught only the very beginnings of the record industry, and can’t imagine the glory of the record store at its height!—the spice stores are the last browsing places left. If we were truly virtuous, we would smell and taste each kind, and note the differences—I’m sure they exist—and do a cinnamon tasting, as, at the fancy places now, they do tastings of red volcanic salt against black basalt salt, or whatever.

Anyway, you let the lamb very gently braise for about two hours, until it’s tender. I bought one of those elegant Chinese-hat tagines, and it works well, but no better than a normal Dutch oven. (The high-steepled shape is meant to draw up and reuse moisture in a North African climate where water is scarce, but the key to a good tagine, to a good stew, is always to use less liquid than the recipe says, and make the oven or burner heat even lower than it suggests. Simmer and braise, never stew and boil.) Then—this is ridiculously simple—you boil down the liquid, add a teaspoonful of honey, some prunes (“dried plums,”) or the apricots in water, and at last the little saffron stems. They’re not really stems at all, they’re threads. It’s intoxicating—sweet and spicy, meaty and fruity. Kids love it and adults, when you add harissa paste to it, they die. It’s never missed for me. And yet it’s the kind of taste that was banned for so long, as sex outside of marriage was banned for so long.

What’s lost, of course, is rigor: the sense that we are doing right by eating well. We show our maturity by rejecting the easy pleasures of obvious mouth tastes as cloying and too rich, and transmute the judgment into a moral taste by insisting that the limited flavor of a few herbs is morally superior to the wide-open spaces of many spices. Moral taste works by rejecting a delicious tagine as slack. Of course this lamb tastes good! I hear you cry, newly awakened out there in Gumbo. How could it not? But the taste is not a taste coaxed and respected and teased out of a natural thing; it is an infantile taste imposed on something, indifferent to that something’s subtleties. Anything would taste good dipped in honey and saffron and cinnamon and fruit. That isn’t cooking, that’s just … eating, eating as “primitives” do, as children do, even, perhaps, as animals do. You write about this with indignation and intelligence, describing bad hosts.

In excess they would emulate the banquets of the ancients, though they are too refined by far to revive the old vomitories—the indispensable antidote. Before dinner is half over, palates are jaded. “Fine shades” can no more be appreciated, every new course awakens fear of the morrow’s indigestion. Art despises show, it disdains rivalry, and it knows not excess. A Velázquez or a Whistler never overloads his canvas for the sake of the gorgeous detail. To the artist in words, superfluous ornament is the unpardonable sin. And so with the lords of Gasterea, the tenth and fairest of the muses. Better by far Omar Khayyam’s jug of wine and loaf of bread, if both be good. Neat in mind the master’s model luncheon and its success. No menu could have been simpler; none more delicious. The table was laid for three, a goodly number, for all the slurs cast upon it. At each plate were “two dozen oysters with a bright golden lemon”; at each end of the table stood a bottle of Sauterne, carefully wiped all except the cork… after the oysters roasted kidneys were served; next truffled foie gras, then the famous fondue, fruit followed and coffee; and last two liqueurs, “One a spirit, to clear, and the other an oil, to soothe.” Be not content to read, but go and do likewise.

The “master” you refer to, by the way, is, as I finally figured out, Brillat-Savarin—odd for you to honor him so, since you have the right literary prejudice in favor of Grimod, though perhaps your politics got the better of your taste. What are your politics, by the way? Are they bien-pensant liberal-socialist, like Brillat-Savarin’s and your friend Oscar Wilde’s? Or do they turn, as your beloved Whistler’s did, a touch toward the irascible right? I wonder…

Well, you knew that all tastes are compressed arguments, arguments reduced to sensual instructions, moral cases made by pointing at the menu. And the taste argument you’re making is plain enough. Saffron and cinnamon, you think, are to taste as gold thread and lapis lazuli are to the eye—of course they delight and entice, but they are a cheap form of seduction, compared with the solidity of massive form, compared with the ability to paint one gray sky as it is.

Yet look at the luncheon you point to as the model! And consider the complexity of it—sweet white wine with oysters (that would seem to us now as cloying as honey with lamb seems to you), where we could drink only a flinty Chablis or a brut champagne. So once again the march of progress becomes the circle of argument, and we are drawn back into the past to find that it was more advanced than we are. History comes back to bite itself on the tail, and all we can hope is that the tail is well seasoned. Saffron and cinnamon always delight. That, your time says back, is just what’s wrong with them. And to that we have no answer.

In any case, those are my four secret, or at least semisacramental, ingredients: bacon and anchovies, saffron and cinnamon. And do try the lamb; it’s best with couscous and a red wine from the region, something that the three kings would have drunk: a Château Musar from Lebanon, or, though it’s from a different continent, an Australian Shiraz, which at least has a name that sounds of the region. Shiraz could have been the name of a Fourth Wise Man, now forgotten, who made the first spice-giving journey. In eating much depends on names.

Ever,

A.G.

6. Meat or Vegetables?

ON AN OVERCAST, gray-to-white London summer morning, the British chef Fergus Henderson is standing and staring reverently at the edge of Smithfield, the great meat market in the East End. If it is still reasonably early by restaurant standards, it is late in the day by those of a wholesale market; though Smithfield, an arcaded nineteenth-century affair of bright-painted cast-iron arches and venders’ stalls, is beginning to close for the day, it still hums with a sense of sociable business ritual. Wholesalers in straw hats pack up their bacon and chops and trotters, some in Cryovac, some in shiny brown butcher paper. Henderson’s relationship to Smithfield these days is largely spiritual—he gets most of the meat for his nearby restaurant, St. John, from private country suppliers and small boutique slaughterhouses—but it is still an enchanted place for him. “It’s a bit of a closed society, with its own customs and traditions,” he says. “And it represents a certain tradition that began before pink-in-plastic.” (“Pink-in-plastic” is Henderson’s dismissive name for supermarket meat.) “For centuries, using the whole beast was the common sense of the market. Embrace your carcass and you’ll be richer and happier.”

Fergus Henderson is a man in love with meat. He even looks like an English butcher. His face is florid, with the raspberry blush that one associates with the kind of all-right-then-dearie butcher who might appear in a Boulting Brothers comedy of the fifties. Since he opened St. John, in 1994, he has become famous for his devotion to the odd bits of ordinary animals. Ox tongue and tripe, lambs’ brains and pigs’ heads, stuffed lambs’ hearts and rolled pigs’ spleen: St. John has returned them to the repertory of the world’s “high” cooking, while Henderson’s book Nose to Tail Eating—which for a long time had to be bought in the United States on a gray market of second-hand copies, where prices could sometimes reach a hundred dollars—has become the Ulysses of the whole food–Slow Food movement, a plea for the fullness of life that begins with a man eating innards. (It has at last been published in America, under the slightly cosmeticized name of The Whole Beast.)

Henderson starts walking the block and a half back to his restaurant. “The squirrels, I suppose,” he says, after a moment’s pause. He has been asked if any particular adventures in heterodoxy caused comment in London. “Squirrel is delicious—like an oily wild rabbit. We had some that had been trapped by keepers in the country, and I decided to do a whole plate of them. Re-create the forest floor: wilted greens, to suggest the bosky woods they come from. Rather poetic, the whole thing. But somehow serving squirrels created quite a stir.”

St. John, a converted nineteenth-century smokehouse, has two rooms: a twenty-foot-high sky-lit, cathedral-ceilinged front room, where the bar and bakery are, and the dining room, just beyond. The dining room is large and whitewashed; a row of knobs and hooks for coats goes around the room, giving it the air of an eighteenth-century eating house or tavern, though the open space is unlike any actual eighteenth-century tavern—it’s more Saatchi collection than Cheshire cheese, a hint, perhaps, that archaism and modernism are in more complicated relation here than is evident at first glimpse, or smell. The kitchen seems to be visible from the dining room, but, as Henderson says, “It’s a very tricky kind of openness. You can’t actually see inside. It’s the Mount Fuji principle borrowed from Japanese prints. You should never see the whole of Mount Fuji, you know.” Henderson shows off the restaurant’s tiny, cool larder. Inside a steel drawer, a suckling piglet lies waiting to be eaten, its feet curled up comfortably, its eyes closed, its face smiling. It has been specially ordered, and will be roasted and served later that week, nose to tail.

Over Hobbit-like elevenses (seed cake and Madeira), Henderson begins to talk about the ascent that has turned him, at forty-two, into a public figure widely viewed in his homeland as a cross between Jamie Oliver and Sweeney Todd—an image that he sustains with a complex and comic irony. “Isn’t the approach to lunch the most wonderful time of day?” he asks. “Lunch is a choice, a decision of a sort. At dinner one must eat, but at lunch one chooses to eat well. There’s a certain excitement in lunch.” An assistant brings him the day’s menu, and he looks it over. Though he no longer works in the kitchen, he still oversees each day’s choices. Today’s menu, written a little defiantly in nothing but English (only “crème fraîche,” an adopted phrase, breaks the Anglo-Saxon attitude), is a calm, squirrelless document: there is to be middle white—a kind of northern pig—and also deep-fried tripe, veal-tail broth, deviled kidneys, and ox heart with beetroot and pickled walnut. The desserts are English, too, or Englishy—Eccles cake and Lancashire cheese, and even something called Eton Mess, which some people have suggested is not food at all but a succinct explanation of the sex lives of many British politicians.

In spite of his matey, Ealing Studios manner, Henderson is actually a former architect, with almost no formal training as a chef. “My mum was a good cook and my dad was a big eater,” he recalls, “and both of them were architects”—well-known second-generation modernists, in fact. “I trained as an architect, but I found lunch in architectural offices discouraging. People ate at their desks. Then, with a friend, I began doing big peasant dishes over in a restaurant in Covent Garden when it was closed. We did cassoulet or pot-au-feu and would have forty or fifty people come and sit at a common table. That led to my finding work as a chef, even though I didn’t have the training. I became the cook in a couple of places—I was lucky not to have to work for other people—and then I met my business partners. We found this place, and I began cooking here. We opened, got warm reviews, and, very quickly, turned the corner. I don’t know what that corner was, but we turned it.” (Henderson opened St. John at the height of the “mad-cow” disease scare, which made him modify his menu slightly; to this day, lambs’ and calves’ brains are out.)

Henderson had always liked innards, but it was only as he began to cook that he came to recognize the absurdity of our usual meat-eating, which clings to a few square feet of animal muscle near the skeleton, as timorous natives might cling to a few miles of coast on an island while avoiding the volcanic mountains inland. “There were all these wonderful, splendid bits of the animal being wasted, thrown out, while we were eating nothing but the filet,” he said, pronouncing “filet” in the English manner, with a hard last consonant. “It seemed positively insulting to the animal that one had raised to treat it with such contempt. So many wonders there. Spleen! Spleen is a very fine, perfectly framed organ. In fact, your spleen swells when you’re in love! How can you resist an organ that does that?”

He believes not only that animals should be made happy by being raised well, slaughtered humanely, and eaten entirely but that you can taste the emotional state of the animal on your plate. He senses this with hares. “Rabbits, when they’re wild, have a very different temperament, which is expressed in their muscles. Welsh rabbits used to have a certain… tension. You could taste their tension. Now we’ve been using more relaxed Yorkshire rabbits, which are splendid in their way, but not as tense and interesting as the Welsh rabbits.”

Henderson’s devotion to the bits of the animal that other people tend to throw away or make faces at is partly a revivalist aesthetic, a tribute to peasant traditions, but it is closer to certain weird outer ends of conceptual installation than to anything nostalgic. The more time one spends with him, the more inclined one is to think that certain of his American devotees can miss an edge of irony and po-faced British wit in his approach. This is not to say that he doesn’t think that noses and tails and heads and spleens are good to eat—he does think that, absolutely—but he also thinks that the idea that noses and tails and heads and spleens might be good to eat would be interesting even if they weren’t as good to eat as they are. He grasps that even sincere gestures in the kitchen become social symbols on the plate—that the idea of eating rolled spleen and pig’s tail has resonances and challenges apart from the taste of rolled spleen and pig’s tail in the mouth. He is, as an ironist, close to the artist Damien Hirst, an inventor who plays on the line between display and disgust, and yet Henderson steps soberly over that line to the constant edge of delight.

Henderson’s attitude toward the Englishness of his food is complex. Despite that menu written almost entirely in English, and English English, at that—no ricotta ravioli, no noisettes—the wine list is exclusively French. (“Of course, there’s the Aquitaine connection,” he says.) Yet when pressed for his influences he cites the Italian Marcella Hazan, and his favorite experience of eating is the walk in Paris through the Palais Royal toward the Grand Véfour on a sunny afternoon. The book that lurks behind his approach is Elisabeth Luard’s Sacred Food, an eccentric polemic for a kind of universal home cooking, a transformational grammar of whole beasts and comforting puddings, rooted in the conviction that a restoration of this kind of cooking, in each of its regional guises, is essential to the recovery of a whole civilization.

The most famous dish that Henderson has created is a study in the invention of English tradition through multicultural wit: a salad of bone marrow, parsley, and capers, which, though it seems today to be as rural and English as Eccles cake, occurred to him a decade ago after watching a French film, La Grande Bouffe. “It has that scene where the man delights in marrow bones,” he recalls. “And a friend had come in and all I had left were the marrow bones and the parsley and some capers. I thought that they would make a splendid marriage. I love the idea of food in which you participate. The singe is very important, getting the right singe on the bones. And the parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass. We discipline the parsley, so that it’s chopped, yet still parsley. And capers are so important. They’re the ‘Nyeh!’ factor in the dish.” He makes a kind of complaining, whinnying noise. “You always need a little ‘Nyeh!’ on the plate. Pickled walnuts do the same thing for ox heart.”

He sighs and looks over at the kitchen. “I wish I could stay in the kitchen through the service, but I’m not really trustworthy with this ropy left side of mine,” he says. For the past few years, Henderson has been struggling with Parkinson’s disease, which courses through his body like a lightning storm in summer, sending his left arm and hand into paroxysms of uncontrolled movement. He is neither melodramatic about it nor showily brave. “It was a bad day,” he says of the moment he learned from his doctors about the disease. “My hand had been moving steadily to my chest, John Wayne in a Western movie, and I thought, How odd! And then it turned out to be this.

“I sat down and had a good lunch and felt somewhat better.” His wife, Margot, and his three children, he says, have come to accept his “ropiness.” (Later that year he had experimental surgery to place electrodes in his brain to try to control it.) “Disgust is always rooted in a perception of asymmetry,” he says suddenly. “Geometry cures it. Take the haggis, for instance. It’s made of sheep’s stomach and sheep’s lights, but people will eat it because it’s comfortably round. Sausages have always been allowed in, because of their shape. People are somehow reassured.”

Disgust, the psychologist Paul Rozin has suggested, may be a kind of optimal strategy for solving what he calls the “omnivore’s dilemma”: animals that can eat everything have to be especially cautious about what parts of other animals they eat. The default assumption seems to be that all animals are disgusting, and we have to learn an item-by-item list of what’s acceptable. In this way, we enclose our children in our own double wrapping, composed of both common sense and collective neurosis. Yet it is also obviously true that the mind overgeneralizes its fear of the unshaped, and knows it. So along with the “Don’t eat it!” impulse comes a “Dare you to eat it!” impulse, and it is between these two impulses that Henderson dances.

By now, lunch has progressed through many meats, with various quick detours into the vegetable world—St. John serves leaves, and even excels at them—and there is the promise of an unequaled dark-chocolate ice cream ahead. Henderson finishes off his ox heart with pickled walnuts. “The heart is the most expressive muscle in any animal,” he says as he cleans his plate. “It’s amazing, a muscle that works so endlessly and tirelessly to keep us alive. And yet it emerges tender and distinctive. Each animal heart is resonant with its animal. Ox heart has an honest beefy quality, lamb’s heart rubs up against you. Each heart tastes like the animal that depended on it.”

In Henderson’s own heart there is, one senses, a harmony between man and his food that comes from eating all of the animal there is to eat, a mysticism rooted in fatality and the fact of our being, head to toe, animals, too. We are all meat, trembling and fresh, dying and spasming, and we enter into our humanity, as we leave it, by way of our animalness. We are beasts eating beasts, and the real bestiality, he suggests, lies in avoiding the truth of it. “Taste that!” he says, pressing a bit of fatty middle white on the visitor from New York. “It comes from a happy pig. You can taste the difference. People eat meat. You can be an unhappy carnivore, and eat pink-in-plastic, or a wise carnivore and eat the animal with care and respect. To eat the whole beast is to accept existence. Embrace your carcass! It’s simply common sense.”

On a hot, white-and-gold French summer afternoon, Alain Passard is standing in his kitchen garden on the grounds of the Château du Gros Chesnay, in Fillé-sur-Sarthe, about two hundred kilometers southwest of Paris, near the racing town of Le Mans. A few years ago, Passard, the owner and chef of the restaurant L’Arpège, on the Rue de Varenne, in Paris, which since 1996 has had three stars in the Michelin Red Guide, bought the château in order to create a potager, an organic vegetable garden. He bought it through a uniquely French practice, in which a younger person buys the property of an older one while the old person is still alive. This gives the older person a cash infusion, and the new buyer gets at least a little use of the property while he or she waits to get it all. The practice can create a situation as intensely delicate as a Roman imperial adoption, since the buyer becomes nearly a son or daughter of the house as he begins to occupy it, or bits of it, while, by ancient French cynical conviction, the sudden onset of money combined with the power of spite extends the life of the older person out to the demoralizing edge of immortality.

Passard, fortunately, had bought the place from Mme Baccarach, an impeccable French grande dame whose family has owned the château for centuries but who, as it happens, lived for thirty years in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and with whom he has a perfect long-term relationship: she loves to mind the house while he is content to work the grounds. While Madame prepares a table in the dining room, he begins the tour of the potager, with one of his gardeners, Mohamadou, a severe Frenchman of African origin.

“It is an organic garden but not merely an organic garden,” Mohamadou says. “It’s a vegetable garden controlled by the beasts. Do you know a garden only by its sights and smells? No. You know it, too, by its sounds. Listen!” The New Yorkers visiting cock their heads in the gasping heat and hear the sounds of birds flying to nests specially provided for them in the orchard; the distant croaking of frogs in the pond that Passard has had dug in order to have natural predators for crop-eating insects; and, off in the further distance, a lovely, slightly ominous buzz of bees. The garden has a set of wood-frame hives; the bees make honey for the restaurant. “Those are the sounds of a true garden,” Mohamadou says. “We’re bringing the birds back, and vipers to eat the mice, and frogs to eat the bugs…. It’s a balance.”

Alain Passard is a man in love with vegetables. For most of his career, though an infinitely inventive cook, he was famous for his roasts: particularly roasts of veal and lamb, cooked for six or seven hours sur la plaque, on the stove. Then, in 2000, he startled his diners, and his staff, by announcing that he would no longer cook red meat in his restaurant, and that he might phase out animal protein entirely. Today, though he will still throw a few moules or langoustines into his dishes, and there is usually fowl available for the incorrigible, the menu he prefers is made entirely of vegetables.

His garden in Sarthe is a showpiece of “permaculture,” a system of intensive small-plot rotation that is intended to preserve the energies and resources of the soil. All the planting, for instance, is prepared traditionally, by horse-drawn plow, in order to prevent the soil from being torn up too deeply, as happens with tractors.

Mohamadou looks at Passard. “I saw you on television, chef,” he says. “I approved of what you said about the single gesture.” On a television program the night before, exploring the new, rococo cooking of the Spanish chefs, Passard had said that a single gesture on a plate was the right direction for the future of cooking, that one properly sliced tomato was a higher accomplishment than a tomato confit, that to get the single gesture right was harder than to make a set of gestures on the plate.

“I believe it,” Passard says. “I believe it utterly. One sincere action from the garden is worth six skilled actions in the kitchen. When I’m in my kitchen, I shut my eyes and think that I’m here.” He points all around. “And, by seeing myself here, I see what I want to do with the gardens.” Passard is a handsome man, light on his feet, younger-looking than his fifty-odd years, with a French schoolboy’s face: hair en brosse, expression intensely earnest and open. “The other day I made a plate of tomatoes—just these tomatoes, sliced the right thickness, salted, and with a dab of balsamic. It was perfect.” The gardener nods seriously. “Of course, one gesture on the plate demands a thousand acts here in the garden,” he says, and Passard nods in response.

Passard offers a comprehensive embrace, taking in the garden and the frogs and the birds and the budding vegetables. “I chose this place for many reasons,” he says as he walks through vine-covered trellises. Off in the distance, golden cattle low. “It was important to be here in the Sarthe, in part because the soil is promising, neither too sickly rich nor too poor, and in part because it gave us excellent access to the TGV”—the high-speed train. “That means we can pick vegetables at seven in the morning and have them in the kitchen to start making lunch at ten-thirty, and on the diner’s plate at noon.” He shakes a finger beside his nose, impressed by the efficiency of his own system. “They don’t have to be refrigerated for their journey and they lose nothing, or nearly nothing. This fall, we’re going to start selling what we don’t use for the restaurant at a little counter at the Grande Epicerie at the Bon Marché, so that people who can’t eat at the restaurant can still have an experience of true garden vegetables.”

Passard continues his tour. “It’s an experimental garden, too. We’re trying to revive some of the great heirloom varieties of tomatoes and potatoes. We’re trying to see what might happen. The beet, for instance, has never been completely appreciated.” He leans down and gently brushes the dirt from a fat, dark beet. “We’re raising larger, richer beets, and they have a potential that is vast! Enormous!” The new beets have inspired Passard to make an imposing plat in his kitchen: the beet is cooked in a crust of gros sel, as duck and lamb have been for centuries, and then the crust is broken with a flourish and the beet is delicately sliced and served, with a light jus, as the main course.

For lunch, in the château, Passard prepares a few single-gesture plates from the garden outside: tomatoes, potatoes, and a fine Comté cheese and a bit of country bread from his city restaurant, with a red wine from the Gascogne country, on a table that Madame has set beautifully with old china and etched glass and white linen.

“It was many things,” he explains earnestly to Madame B. and his visitors, talking of his conversion experience, five years earlier. “There was the fear of B.S.E. [mad-cow disease]. And for years I had been seeing new dimensions in vegetables when I cooked: green beans with peaches and almonds. Seeing them, but not seeing them all. But, especially, it was because I no longer wanted to be in a daily relationship with the corpse of an animal. I had a moment when I took a roast out into the dining room, and the reality struck me that every day I was struggling to have a creative relationship with a corpse, a dead animal! And I could feel inside me the weight and the sadness of the cuisine animale. And since then—gone! All the terrible nervousness and bad temper that are so much part of the burden of being a chef: that was gone with the old cooking. I entered into a new relation to my art, but also to my life. Everyone in the kitchen commented on it. And the lightness of what I was doing began to enter my body and my entire existence, and it entered into the existence of the kitchen. Digestively, yes, of course, but also spiritually, a new lightness of step and spirit that entered my life. It was like a light that I saw, and a door that I walked through. One day, I found myself regarding a carrot in a different light, and I saw the cuisine végétale ahead of me through an open door.”

“Of course, we have always had many beautiful vegetables here in France, as they do in America,” Madame B. says, in the classic style in which mannerly French people search for polite consensus while still speaking the truth. “But in America vegetables were always horribly overcooked. There would be this, and then that, with special utensils to fish them out.”

“There have been great vegetable dishes in France,” Passard says. “But no great vegetable chefs.”

“Very true!” Madame says. “Not before you, monsieur.”

Alain and Fergus represent the two extreme poles of the great meat-eating debate that divides our day: at one end, no meat at all, no daily relation with a dead carcass; on the other end, the whole of the whole beast the whole of the time. Taste, we’ve said, is an argument compressed to an instruction—so what exactly must the no-meat-evers be arguing?

The most impassioned and eloquent, if at times chaotic—the better to press home the urgency—anticarnivore polemic is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. Foer is not afraid to use big words when talking about dead birds. We are, he says, “making war” on seafood. The intensity of the language may make us doubt as much as assent. After all, we wonder, have cats really declared war on mice? Have foxes made war on chickens? Predation is surely different in kind from persecution. This doesn’t justify its cruelties, but it does point toward its complexities. Nature, we may think, isn’t “cruel,” since cruelty depends on understanding. But then, nature certainly isn’t kind. Foer’s arguments ultimately depend on the likeness of animal feeling to human feeling, and how great we think that likeness really is. “KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum of suffering in the world more than any other in history,” he writes. The complaint is easily made that this kind of thinking projects human feelings onto animals, while ignoring the actual sufferings of humans. The suffering of shrimp is a metaphysical question; that of the Sudanese is not.

What are the best arguments to be made for not eating dead animals? The arguments seem to come in three tiers. The first argument is that killing animals for food causes pain, and that we have no right to inflict pain on another living creature just because it can’t speak out or fight back. We shouldn’t cause pain to weak or mentally slow members of our own species, and to cause pain to nonhuman creatures because they cannot speak or even reason is no better. Yet this argument leaves us with at least the exit of painless slaughter: if we kill kindly, and somehow without warning or notice, so that the animal knows no panic or fear, then can we kill to eat?

This in turn leads to a second, fiercer argument: that the act of animal slaughter is essentially cruel: no living thing wants anything but life, on pretty much any terms it can get it, and to execute inarticulate and helpless animals for our pleasure because they can’t speak, organize, or struggle is finally as cruel as executing babies would be because they can’t speak or struggle. That we enjoy eating them is neither here nor there; we might enjoy eating babies or chimps if we tried them, too. The attempt to justify murder by insisting that the soon-to-be-dead don’t know that they will die, or that they do die without pain, is no better, the argument goes, and finally no different in moral kind, than the attempts by the SS to anesthetize or justify their own atrocities by insisting that they were being kind to the Jews by telling them that they were going to the showers: such kindness exists only in the minds of the killer. (I’m not proposing, or endorsing, this analogy, only saying that it is one, very often prompting the use of the term “animal Auschwitz” to refer to particular farms or, indeed, the whole meat industry. Google it!)

The third argument is that we shouldn’t eat dead animals even if they are painlessly slaughtered and go to their death without fear because raising animals for food on big industrial farms is itself cruel and, by its nature, resistant to change. This argument is more utilitarian than moral. The meat industry, with its vast inefficiencies, its reliance on antibiotics and other drugs, and its hideous distortion of sustainable agricultural practices, is inherently destructive, wasteful, and polluting. Even if animal killing could be justified on moral grounds, meat-eating can’t be: it is a luxury that no one who cares about the future of the planet can indulge. Even eating locally raised, grass-fed, “sustainable” animal meat makes at best a marginal difference. To this argument add another, still utilitarian but more selfish, that meat-eating is violently unhealthy for humans in its current everyday form, involving a kind of self-injection with all the dreck we feed to animals. It would be better to eat grass-fed beef, but we would still be eating more fat and protein than nature ever meant us to.

The arguments from suffering seem serious; those from inefficiency and disease much less so, since these are all things that could be remedied, and, if they were, would leave you with the same sad pig. Foer, to his credit, embraces and investigates humane farming methods with considerable respect; he rejects them, though, as an excuse for meat-eating, and finds that his revulsion is not ended by the kinder practice of a Niman Ranch—to him, eating meat is always degrading to people and inherently cruel to animals. He makes a distinction, crucial to his view, between those who care about “animal welfare” and those who care about “animal rights.” The animal-welfare movement—insisting on more space in chicken batteries, more room for animals to roam, more humane slaughtering—is merely alleviative. It eases pain without ending killing. Animal rights are more substantial than that: if we accept that animal rights exist, then we can’t morally “make war” on tuna or conduct a “daily massacre” of cows, any more than we would make a genocidal war on or conduct a daily massacre of people. That we treated them “humanely” before the killing started wouldn’t alter the crime. Murder is murder.

And the arguments for eating meat? Perhaps typically, the arguments for doing something that we already all (or nearly all) do, which ought to be weighty and well made, given that they govern our behavior, barely exist. We don’t make arguments for things we do anyway; we only make arguments to stop ourselves from doing them. Proslavery arguments appeared in the American South not in advance of but only in reaction to abolitionism. Women’s inferiority was so self-evident even to our great-great-grandfathers (if not their wives) that they had only a handful of old saws and religious injunctions to point to to justify it; it took John Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor to end it with a fiendishly well-formed case. We don’t need an argument to eat cheeseburgers until we stop eating them.

The taste for meat-eating being so intuitive, or seeming so, we make a new argument for it just by doing it again. And so the new anger at animal-eating has been countered by a new gusto in meat-choosing, evidenced in the work of Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali and Henderson, which has produced a practice of aggressively celebrating strange or special meats—face bacon and braised spleen, cuts of Spanish black-footed pigs and French blue-footed chickens—in order, in effect, both to defend the carnivore and insist that he is more than just a dumb consumer of those dead carcasses, that there is honor among butchers, too. There are mere meat-eaters, and savvy carnivores, and canny ones compliment their meat by eating it properly. (Remember when Hemingway used to write that way about hunting and fishing? The animal liked to be killed by someone as impressive as Hemingway was.)

Yet we can find, or make, several good, articulate arguments for meat-eating. Animals raised for slaughter are an intrinsic part of the cycle of all traditional agriculture—for feed, manure, to trim the grass. It isn’t realistic to think of sustainable agriculture without the interaction of animal and vegetable, and to keep the animals only as mowing machines without using them as protein is wasteful and unreal. An ideal sustainable cycle in farming, though very different from the one we see in practice now, would still be ineluctably carnivorous.

Second, animals raised to be slaughtered are in a real sense meant to be eaten: we can demand kindness and consideration for goats, sheep, and calves, but they exist at all only for the table, and to stop eating them is not to give them or their descendants a better life; it is to give them no hope of life at all. The analogy with slaves dies right there (the argument goes): the emancipated slave goes on to make his own life, however hard; the emancipated animal, with a few feral exceptions, is in every sense a dead end. There would be very few pigs at all if we did not eat pork chops.

Third, eating animals is, however hedged the concept may be, and however many qualifications we wreathe around its middle, natural to humans, as it is indeed natural in the rest of creation. Big fish eat little fish; lions eat gazelles; humans eat pigs. I have written such harsh things in this book about the appeal to nature that to insert it here even as a plausible hypothesis seems rank hypocrisy in search of a hamburger. Yet arguments from nature that say we ought to do something—eat one way rather than another—are different from those that warn how hard it is to stop ourselves from doing something that our bodies are designed to do. We can eat the way we choose—but we can’t choose not to eat. We can’t not have sex—at least not as a society—nor not shit. Is meat-eating perhaps one of those necessities, sad or sublime, take your pick, in which it is frivolous to insist on abolition when the best that can be hoped for is improvement?

Yes, of course, “Nature” does many cruel things that we no longer do. But there is a difference between improving on nature by eliminating its cruelties, and defying nature by ignoring its needs. Evangelical vegetarianism, on this view, is closer to the Shaker prohibition on sex than it is to the abolitionist war on slavery: it does not ask us to be better than we have been. It asks us to be other than we are. That our grandparents ate steaks is not in itself, perhaps, an argument for our eating cheeseburgers—our grandparents also took, or were, slaves. But that all human beings in all contexts since even before there were human beings have eaten some kind of meat in some kind of circumstance provides, if not grounds to foreclose the debate, at least some kind of sanction from the sweep of time. (There are, after all, very good arguments against having sex, too, and lots of people who don’t. We still regard the attempt to make that practice universal not just as likely to fail but as completely unrealistic. That there are now no Shakers left to shake is itself an argument against Shakerism.)

One of the better arguments I have come across for ethical meat-eating comes, of all places—or perhaps, given his gifts, not so surprisingly—in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, that odd and beautiful amalgam of fantasy, sentiment, and somber Victorian moralism. Carroll’s argument derives from the argument over vivisection. Carroll’s German professor, clearly speaking for the author, submits that while we have absolute mastery over nature, and therefore the right to eat or experiment on animals, the right brings with it an equally absolute responsibility to refrain from giving them pain: the exquisite ethical dilemma, as with most of them, is to exercise the right while honoring the responsibility, which is always, and in every ethical case, much harder than it looks. (Carroll, good Christian clergyman, took it for granted that that “mastery” was a gift from God; even if we imagine it only to be a long-term accident of history, the case still holds.)

The very strongest argument I have found for animal-eating is based on what always comes back to haunt us in every dilemma in life, and cooking, and that is the nature of mortality. All animals die. The choice for a pig is not between painful death and perpetual life, but between one death and some other. If we ate only animals that died naturally, then could there be any rational objection to our eating them—to eating their flesh in celebration of their life rather than burying it to rot or merely burning it? Could we rationally object if, after we died, presumably at the end of as long and rich life as we could have, people ate us? (Surely not. Indeed, some of us are “eaten,” consumed, in the form of eye and liver transplants and so on, and many regard this as a great good.

So if we could engineer a pig to die naturally at, say, prime eating age—would it be wrong to eat him then? What difference would there be between the first case, the pig scavenged, and that of the pig killed kindly—or perhaps in this thought experiment, by the action of his own genes—after a happy life? (Obviously, we would want him to die painlessly, which nature does not assure at all.) All animals die, and mostly quite young. What’s the morally relevant distinction between “road kill” and animals slaughtered humanely? The length of time they have been given to live? Well, by “old age” we surely don’t mean a number—it varies too much—but a general condition. When we say that someone has died of old age we mean as painlessly and peacefully as possible after a productive life. Natural death, after all, is a complicated concept: we could easily imagine that pig designed to die at a moment of maximum succulence by the action of its own genes. The two cases seem indistinguishable—and so we realize that our real complaint is not against inevitable death, but against avoidable pain. (Curiously, if you think about it, what this proposes as a kind of moral ideal is not slaughter but scavenging. We see the carrion-eaters gathered around the dead zebra with a revulsion so deep, pit-deep, that we use the very names—vultures and jackals—in ways that we rarely use those of other predators. We find it far worse to be a vulture or jackal than a lion or tiger; there are few stuffed vultures in children’s cribs. But on this view their carnivorism is more moral than the other kind, and the closer we replicate it, the better we are.)

The point isn’t that we should breed animals in this way (though perhaps we could) or that we should wait for lambs to die in motorcycle accidents before we eat them. It is that once we accept the principle of animal scavenging, it becomes plain that the real issue isn’t eating animals but the way in which animals live and die—it becomes plain that “animal welfare” isn’t some secondary, ameliorative concern, but actually the big one. In this case, animal welfare and animal rights collapse into one another: if we can create a condition in which animals live peacefully and die painlessly and then are eaten it is hard to see how anyone can object, any more than we object to the consumed carcass of the road-killed deer or to our own decomposition. It is then incumbent on us to see that animals die as naturally as possible—I will not put scare quotes on “naturally” here, since we have to accept that, in the case of animals-to-be-eaten, that which is natural is that which already has been intricately wrought, and by us—and as painlessly as possible. But if we do, then the difference between the animal dead of old age and the animal dead of induced old age is so minimal as to be meaningless, and we can eat them with joy and respect. (This position, or one like it, is Fergus’s intuitive case.) Joy in the mourning, one might say. This argument for animal-eating rests on a recognition of our common mortality, just as the argument against cruelty rests on our common capacity to suffer. The recognition that all animals die leads us to the recognition that it is not wrong to eat them when they do, and so the question turns to how and why and in what way they die. We have thus won ourselves the right to eat meat if we respect the responsibility to be kind.

What would the rational vegetarian say to this? I think she would answer that no one actually dies of old age by being stunned and slaughtered; the old-age analogy is the truly abstract one. And then, at a deeper level, that the very act of making subjects with feelings into objects to eat is degrading for the eater and the eaten alike. Foer, for instance, is particularly repelled—I share his repulsion, merely reading it—when he, bravely and correctly, visits a slaughterhouse and sees a pig’s face casually split in two: it seems worse than the death itself, since it shows such contempt for the intelligence of the animal, so evident in its eyes and mouth and brain. It is turning a living thing into a commodity that is the real offense of the abattoir. Raising a living thing as an object to be mutilated is the moral wrong, and engaging in an elaborate pretense of “natural scavenging” can’t alter it.

Like most of us, I suppose, I find myself swinging back and forth among these various cases while still eating steak. There are moments when I am fairly sure that “veal chop” will sound to our descendants as brutal and as barbarian a phrase as “public hanging” does to us. That we can live so easily in the presence of calf-slaughter will be as baffling to them as it is to us that Adam Smith and David Hume and Dr. Johnson could live so easily a few hundred yards away from the gallows at Tyburn, where teenage boys were hanged for petty theft.

There are other moments when the space between my appetite for meat and the arguments against it seems to be in itself an argument for eating it: an appetite this strong, this old, and this natural cannot be immoral, or, if it is, then existence itself must be in some sense immoral. Whoever made us, or whatever historical process produced us, meat-eating was part of it. (Then I think again of the vampires in Twilight and hear them argue that, after all, they were made to drink human blood.)

In any case, and for the time being, at least we can see this: that the new enthusiasm for “whole-beast” eating, with its various tributaries in Spanish pigs, blood sausage, face bacon, and so on, is, effectively, an attempt to argue for carnivorism by making it the opposite of “pink-in-plastic.” It is a new form of Hemingway’s argument for hunting: killing is honorable so long as hunting is hard. Eating meat is good so long as it is urgent. Fergus Henderson’s cuisine, in a kind of weird, conceptual way, involves a form of animal-eating so demanding that it is on the edge of becoming a paradoxical variant of vegetarianism. Fergus believes that if we are to ask of animals (who are raised to be slaughtered, and will die in any case) that they give up their lives for our food, then we must not treat their gift lightly, or with the indifference we give to mere commodities. To eat another animal is a high calling, and we need to honor its sacrifice by eating it all—eyes and tails, brains and spleen, calves’ feet and squirrel liver. Only in that way can we recognize the enormity of the act, and turn it into something—half folk sacred; half Damien Hirst occult—that honors our own shared animalness. Embrace your carcass. If you aren’t prepared to eat hearts and hooves, then you aren’t fit to be a carnivore. One might even argue that the man who eats the whole beast, and the man who eats no beasts, are engaged in the same kind of ethical inquiry. But one would probably not argue this way if one were a pig.

Another question rises to the mind and mouth of a greedy man or woman: can a plate of vegetables really be enough to support a whole high style of fancy food? Like all classically trained French chefs, Passard has the sensitive, quick-turning eyes of one who learned at an early age, and from tough masters, that the world is not always easily at your service. (Passard apprenticed as a chef when he was fourteen, and subsequently worked for Gaston Boyer in Reims and, most important, for Alain Senderens at the old L’Archestrate, whose premises L’Arpège now occupies.) He therefore takes his preeminence as a chef seriously, but almost egolessly: that he has something special to contribute to French cooking is a fact independent of his desires, not so much an accomplishment as a grace. “It is the good fortune of vegetables to have at last found a great chef at the height of his powers to explore them,” he says. He isn’t being immodest, just truthful.

A typical cuisine végétale menu at his restaurant these days might include a tomato gazpacho with mustard ice cream (Passard makes the mustard himself); a gratin of white Cévennes onions with black pepper and baby lettuce; a langoustine bisque with a speck-scented cream; a consommé of cucumber with ravioli stuffed with lemongrass; a light soup of mussels with yellow flowers, ginger, and coriander (“The cuisine of flowers has hardly been touched, even by me,” he said later); and a plate of summer root vegetables—carrots and new potatoes and small golden beets—dusted with couscous. For dessert, he offers a chocolate-and-avocado soufflé, the dark chocolate swirled into the rich and slightly eggy avocado, and a simple black-currant sorbet, made from black currants that were just in season in Sarthe.

In his new style, Passard has achieved a level of cooking that surpasses even his earlier excellence, a fact that can be acknowledged even by those who think it prudent to eat an entire côte de boeuf the night before having lunch at his place. If some people will never quite get his cooking, his stature in France is indisputable, and with good reason. Cooking is both an expression of the essence of the ingredient and an attempt to turn it into something else; it’s both melodic and harmonic. The old French cooking was all harmony, with the chicken breast or the sole treated as the bass note, and everything coming from what went on top. The new cooking, which has spread from America and Australia out into the world, is almost purely melodic: the unadorned perfect thing, singing the song of itself. Passard is among the few to cook both ways at once; one is intensely aware of the thing on the plate, and intensely aware of the mind of the chef that gets it there. The very best of what Passard is doing—say, the cucumber broth with herb ravioli—is as straightforward as a vegetable garden and as complex as the system that makes it run. (And not cheap, either, of course. Lunch costs a couple hundred dollars per person—not surprising, given that the beet on your plate took the TGV to Paris that morning.)

He sharply distinguishes his cuisine végétale from vegetarian cooking. He is not a fan of raw vegetables, or of a health-conscious cuisine. “The real malady and unhappiness of vegetables has always been the vegetarian restaurant,” he says. He sees cooking vegetables as an aesthetic challenge before anything else. “The white of chicken, or even a filet of fish, cooking these things can be taught. But sautéing white onions, or a pan of turnips—that calls on every bit of the wisdom and knowledge and skill that a chef has accumulated in his training. Everyone in the kitchen has to pay attention in a new way. My team is alert and awake now in a way that it could never be before.”

Passard’s sense of purpose is undiluted by irony; if the objects of his cooking are beets and roots and tomatoes, the subject of his cooking is France. It is the French cooking tradition, the great tradition that began after the French Revolution, that he embodies. When, at L’Arpège, the single beet comes out of its crust of salt, or the cauliflower emerges from under a silver bell, where once there had been a rack of lamb, there is no conscious parody, but there is certainly an element of play, of a quiet joke—not at the expense of the old grand style but about the wit required to continue it by other means.

Cooking, we are told, ought to be a sensible craft, a peacemaking practice, a human act of reconciliation and repetition, like gardening or popular song, rather than a place for experiment and extravagant imagination. Yet there is another kind of cooking, whose point is to press borders, turn corners, suggest extremes—extremes not merely of possible palates we might possess but of possible positions we might yet take. It is in these extremes, Carême’s edifice-building or Escoffier’s encyclopedism, that cooking touches the edge of something more. Both Henderson and Passard speak in conversation the language of realism: of the sensible, the healthy, the logical, the natural. But one feels in both, finally, an adherence less to a moral logic than to an aesthetic illogic: Passard was once Henderson, Henderson could easily become Passard; their real morality is neither that of evangelical vegans nor beautiful beast-eaters but simply that of the extreme case taken seriously. So perhaps one may be forgiven if one feels, in their single-mindedness, not common sense at all but something of that appetite for perversity which is at the root, and forces the flowers, of art.

7. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Chicken, Pudding, Dogs

Dear Elizabeth:

I have read and reread your chapter on the perfect dinner many times. And I like it. How hard we have to work to make perfection, and yet when it happens, the truth is that it falls on us like grace. For instance, I made the best meal of my life tonight, and it happened more or less by chance and is unlikely ever to get made again, or not so well. Grace just falls on the head of us amateur cooks sometimes—like anvils on the head of silent-movie comedians: for no reason, life’s like that—after absenting itself for months. I think it’s true of all committed ham-handed, clumsy cooks that the best meals we make are never the meals we serve to guests. We struggle with something fancy and tricky—chicken with roasted lemons, or a poached leg of lamb with whisky-mint sauce, or the like—and it all comes out okay, but we’re worn out and the guests are oppressed by the fanciness of it all. Then, over twenty-five minutes, with the radio playing Christmas songs, we hit gold. Tonight, I made one of my set-piece meals: fresh tuna au poivre, with basmati rice and green beans—an ordinary weekday dinner, but a happy night, Christmas week, best week of the year, time to open a bottle of champagne and enjoy. And… everything worked. Every night I struggle with rice—how to do it in that nice pilaf way, where you cook the rice in spices and hot olive oil for a few minutes before you add the water, which boils furiously as you add it, and then simmer it. I’ve tried all kinds of spices: cinnamon, of course, and cardamom and a Cajun mix and whole cumin and Chinese five-spice mix… it’s all okay, and I always add turmeric, partly from superstition—it’s supposed to be the ultimate anti-inflammatory, all-purpose, Alzheimer’s-stopping miracle spice—and partly from cosmetic scruples: it does add a lovely yellow tone to the rice.

Tonight, I don’t know why, I reached in and decided to toast together turmeric and not spicy but sweet curry and black, African cardamom, the musky, dense, mysterious primitive relation to bright, intelligent Indian cardamom. African cardamom is to Indian cardamom, which I love, as a tribal nail fetish is to a lecture by Krishnamurti: one is lethal, the other lilting. It was perfect, the best rice I’d ever done, and I added frozen baby peas at the last minute, which added color and green meaning. The tuna I did four minutes on one side, three on the other, which I find, don’t you, is almost always the perfect balance for any protein thing without a bone you have to cook?—and did it with a dense coating of hashed black and pink peppercorns in oil. The sauce was a quick reduction with cooking brandy and then supermarket veal stock—though you could have used plain bouillon from a cube, it would have been just as good, and half a cup of crème fraîche. The beans I just steamed for eight minutes, which brings out their beany taste, with fresh ginger grated over them. It was all good food—the cardamom spoke to the fresh ginger, the crème fraîche negotiated with the black pepper, the yellow and soft-green rice stood nicely against the brown and pink tuna. It was nearly perfect, the children liked it, in the absentminded way children like things—only grown-ups say “Oooh!”; children say “Oh!” and then it’s all gone.

For dessert we had butterscotch pudding, which Olivia and I had made earlier in the day in honor of her new Havanese puppy, whose name is Butterscotch. Nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be more quietly demanding: just as the key with a good penne all’amatriciana is the fusion of pancetta and onion, so the key to a really good butterscotch pudding is burning the one and a half cups of sugar to caramel without scorching it, so that it has a deep, residual flavor, without an unpleasant burned taste. But once that is done, the only other trick is adding the milk and melted butter soon but not too soon: you want it to bubble with the super-hot sugar, but not explode out of the pan, as has happened to Olivia and me before. Then it’s just egg yolks mixed with cornstarch and whipped with a whisk until it boils and thickens. The cornstarch is key—a humble, forgotten thing that creates pudding as efficiently, though with far less diva-like self-dramatization, as egg whites create soufflés. Then you chill the pudding, and serve it with freshly whipped cream. Nobody doesn’t like it; it is the ideal recipe to represent a small, sweet, happy dog; you can’t help but like it, you can’t resist it, it makes no demands on your mind, only on your heart.

Having a dog in the kitchen, by the way, is the best way to understand what it really is to be a person in the kitchen, don’t you think? The key to dogginess is that dogs are pure creatures of sensation. By that I mean that they absorb life as vast, intriguing, and vaguely replicable clouds of stuff, endlessly interesting—smells and places and actions and times and above all foods—without breaking it down into neat causal sequences of act and effect. Every dog delights in food, but no dog could cook dinner, which depends on remembering which comes first, the caramel or the cornstarch. When Butterscotch sees me come home with bags from the grocery store, she leaps with joy as her memory tells her that something good will happen, that there is some vague connection between this thing and the tastes she loves and needs. But what the sequence is, where it starts and where it ends, obviously baffles her, just as she knows that some cloud-nexus of taking elevators and putting on leashes and making phone calls produces a chance to play with Lily, the Havanese upstairs. But exactly how this works eludes her: some days when she hears the name Lily she rushes to the door, sometimes to her leash, sometimes goes to the elevator and sometimes to the door on our floor that corresponds to the door on the eighth floor where Lily lives. It is a joy, obviously, to live life in this way: her head is, in every sense, in the clouds. The life of pure appetite and affections, where Butterscotch resides, is obviously a happy one, free not just of intimations of mortality but of any intimations at all: it is all just stuff rolling at you, some predictably nice, some usually nasty, all rolled up in a big ball that you can eat or push or chew to pieces, as the occasion demands.

Our life, in contrast, is not really that life of the appetites but the life of desire, a different thing, as Brillat-Savarin understood. Concepts come between our hungers and our pleasures. Our desires make us scrutinize the sequences of life to find out their small conceptual secrets: what comes first, the butter or the scotch, the caramel or the cause? The cause, it is the cause, my soul… our life is spent breaking and making codes, cooking being one of them. For animals, there are no codes, because there are no causes—codes are possible only because we know about intentions and disguises, smiles and masks—there is only sensation and the scary, the delicious and the disgusting, which comes at you as it will. The “second mirror” of self-consciousness, the mirror we have that faces the mirror in our mind and lets us see ourselves as we think, is not in the mind of the dog. They see, they sense, they live. We cook in order to reenter the world of pure sensation, but we only do it by stringing concepts and causes together in the form of steps and spices: first this, then that, and then more. The state in which Butterscotch lives naturally, where tastes just fall out of the sky, in a happy, humming paradise of sensation—we have to sneak up on that state from behind, with the help of a glass of cold champagne and a handful of cardamom. Butterscotch is joyful but never surprised by joy, as we are, we creatures of codes and plans, who are shocked when everything comes together, because we know how hard it is to get the sequence right, and how lucky we are when we do.

We follow codes and plans, and, sometimes, invent them. You recall, back when I first wrote to you, that I mentioned that I had invented one new thing in cooking? Well, I have, truly, though it is a bit of a Blotting Paper Pudding. I think every home cook has one Blotting Paper Pudding, don’t you? By Blotting Paper Pudding I refer, of course, to the White Knight’s recipe in Alice, which, you will recall, was the cleverest thing he had ever invented, and which he thought up during the meat course in time for the dessert course. The pudding was never actually made, as he explains—and yet it was a very clever pudding to invent. “It began with blotting paper,” the Knight tells Alice, and then gunpowder and sealing wax were part of the recipe, too, all mixed in. All of us amateur cooks invent things in our heads as we go about following the rules we find, and we are sure that they are clever, but it is probably just as well that they never get made.

My first Blotting Paper Pudding was an actual pudding, or a sort of pudding, anyway. One week, when we were children, my older sister and I, having been somehow delegated the week’s worth of desserts, made Jell-O one night (the box, hot water, mix and refrigerate), then Jell-O pudding the next (the box, warm milk, stir and refrigerate), then Jell-O again the night after (I see green—could it be lime?), and then pudding again, and then on the last decided to combine our genius and make a mixed Jell-O and Jell-O pudding, with results you can imagine.

Since then, my best Blotting Paper Pudding has been an idea I’ve had for a new kind of béarnaise sauce, one that would be made just like a normal béarnaise sauce—tarragon, shallots, white wine, and vinegar reduced to nothing, then emulsified with egg yolks and butter—only with the wonderful Thai mix of herbs in place of tarragon: cilantro, mint, and basil. I think of this sauce all the time, because I love that trio, and because it has such a beautiful inner logic to it. It should be excellent with salmon, for instance, or with chicken, and perhaps with lamb, too. (Mint béarnaise already exists, though I’ve never tried it.) It has logic, fusion, and a certain originality to it, and I will confess that there were moments in the past when I talked about it with other people as though I’d actually made it when what I really meant was that I had invented it, and intended to make it soon. Sometimes purely intellectual acts can feel so present that we confuse them with sensual ones, though this leads us down long ramps of the Internet where we should not go.

And then, just the other night, I made it at last, and it was fine, very good, call it Bangkok béarnaise—catchy name, too. I have never been to Bangkok, I probably will never go to Bangkok, and though I may get to the Béarn someday, I haven’t actually been there, either. But now I had invented and made a sauce that combined the herbs of one with the style of the other, and put it on grilled salmon. If I ever open a restaurant, in another life, it will be a specialty of the house, and meanwhile I will casually yawn and mention it if I have the chance. Bangkok béarnaise, my one true thing. The White Knight would be proud.

Yet, as I suspect the Knight intuited, it was, on the whole, more fun to have invented, and imagined, than it was to eat. Not that it wasn’t good—but thinking about food, though never as satisfying as eating it, is often just as interesting. Just as we have to read past certain classic texts, we eat past certain new recipes, registering the excellence of the idea as much as the deliciousness of the dish. Parsnip steaks and eggplant desserts, turkey tartar and duck confit sorbet—these things are excellent, but they are excellent as my Bangkok béarnaise is excellent. They are Blotting Paper Puddings.

This is a term, I think, that can be extended far beyond the confines of the kitchen: there are Blotting Paper Puddings in many walks of life. Most of these new Brooklyn-incubated speculative novels, six hundred pages long, strike me as Blotting Paper Puddings: I don’t believe most of them will ever be read, but who can deny that they were very clever puddings to invent? All political platforms are Blotting Paper Puddings: they will never be cooked, but they, too, were very nice to contemplate.

For the first time, though, I find myself eating Blotting Paper Puddings in place of real puddings. When you go out to eat dessert, you find yourself not with a cake or pie or real pudding, but with some strange collision of unlike parts—mousses and gels and foams and vertical biscuits. But then, nothing is the subject of as much mockery as innovative cooking. I suppose in a sense all avant-garde activity is a set subject for satire—the all-black painting, the silent concerto—but they tend to take on aggressively a little bit of the aura of avant-garde purpose; you have to be a bit of a dope to make fun of John Cage. Yet the intuition that originality in food will run in narrower paths than originality in any other art is not false—and is, in truth, one of the things that make cooking other, though not lesser, as an art. We dream of making Bangkok béarnaise, and end up making Blotting Paper Pudding. Then we find out that Bangkok béarnaise is Blotting Paper Pudding, and we turn back to the Jell-O box.

While we are on the subject of simple classics, I suppose I should say something about roast chicken. Was there a cult of roast chicken in your day? I don’t see it in your pages. Perhaps it was still a luxury dish, not easily set apart from all the other ones. But in ours a whole cult of roast chicken has grown up, a literature in which roasting a chicken right becomes identical with acting virtuously. Well—as Humpty Dumpty says, when it comes to reciting poetry, I can do it as well as other folks. “It needn’t come to that,” Alice says, hurrying to stop him from starting, but she can’t. When it comes to roasting chicken, I can do it as well as other folks—and I shall not be stopped, either, any more than Humpty could.

I do roast chicken three basic ways, and I do them often because both children treat roast chicken as the default birthday and holiday meal—or, perhaps, being pestered to say what they want, think of roast chicken in lieu of anything better. Though I’m a crazed briner, salt water and juniper and sugar dripping from my roast pork and Christmas turkey like the weird encrusted stuff in Pirates of the Caribbean, I find that for a normal chicken, brining merely “koshers” it without actually enriching it. So I don’t bother.

My basic roast chicken is like everyone else’s, though simpler: the lemon-up-the-bum chicken beloved of British cooks. (Martha hates it when I say lemon-up-the-bum chicken, though, as she hates when people say a pregnant woman has a “bump.”) The one trick is to use a very hot oven: 400° is good, but 425°, if you watch the skin and cover it with parchment or foil to keep it from burning toward the end, is still better. The one biggest difference between pro kitchens and home kitchens, truly, is the heat they can muster in their ovens and ranges. If there is a single kitchen secret that I have learned from hanging out with real cooks, it is that the real cooks either go very hot or surprisingly cold: they roast at 400°, 450°, or even higher, and they braise at 275°, 250°, or even lower. They can do this because they have time—time to braise, space to take the bird out and let it rest after it roasts. “Three seventy-five is death,” Dan Barber told me once, meaning that in that homey zone where almost every roasting or baking recipe takes place, birds dry out and become dull. So I roast in a very hot oven. Simple chicken is best with a small, blue-foot-type bird; I learned to do it with the poulet de Bresse of France, but since you can’t get them here—someone in Quebec was breeding them, and shipping them to Fairway, but then they were stopped, perhaps by a sudden explosive descent of French paratroopers protecting the name—I use the little D’Artagnan birds, which are excellent. The nice thing about this chicken is what you can do all around it: put it in a cast-iron pan to roast with a little film of olive oil on the base, and you can put in cubed potatoes, whole shallots, cloves of garlic (late in the process so they don’t burn), and everything comes out lovely. You can’t really do a sauce from the drippings, if you fill the pan with extras, but my kids love a simple mustard–crème fraîche–white wine sauce with chicken anyway. (You just don’t mention the white wine.) Make carrots with cumin and orange juice on the side, which is easy but tastes hard, and a broccoli–crème fraîche purée; the colors, bright orange, pale green, brown-chicken-skin caramel, are lovely together. Feed to teddy bear. Of course, cooking for children is not simply a matter of pressing the right button and getting the right response; children like what they like and they can’t be persuaded to like what they don’t like. We drag our educated palates behind us like Marley’s ghost drags his chains. What children like is various. But it’s what they like.

The second method I use—and this would work well on a rotisserie; in fact is made for one—is the method they use in Paris. This involves no lemon—stuffing for a chicken is like hoop earrings with a black dress, I always think, too much, though Martha sighs at both thoughts with desire—again very high heat, but lots of duck or goose fat and salt slathered on the chicken before you roast it. You can use butter, but the duck or goose fat (which you can buy packaged these days from various places) gives it a luxurious wow! quality that is much prized. The trick, though, is to keep the secret ingredient secret from the diners, lest you run into this kind of conversation:

CHILD DINER-TO-BE: What are you making for dinner, Dad?

DAD-COOK: Roast chicken! Your favorite!

CDTB: Oh, good. (Long pause) What’s that white stuff you’re putting on the chicken, Dad?

DC: Oh, it’s duck fat, baby. It makes it delicious.

CDTB: (Deeply suspicious) What do you mean, duck fat? How do they get fat from the duck? It’s, like, wool from a sheep?

DC: (Honesty is the best policy—or maybe sadism is the best entertainment) Not exactly. When they slaughter the duck and filet its breast and so on, they squeeze all the fat out of it and refrigerate it so it can congeal.

CDTB: (Long pained pause) You’re really going to eat that?

DC: We all are.

CDTB: Not me. Can I have my slice without the duck fat? Luke! Daddy’s putting dead duck fat on the chicken!

And so on.

I might add that CDTB is sometimes MDTB—Mom Diner-to-Be. So keep the kitchen door shut, roast for an hour, and they will love it. If you do this in a pan, and pour off just enough of the fat in the pan to keep it from being too greasy, the browned bits and the duck-fat renderings just dissolved in a bit of pure water, nothing more, make a wonderful simple sauce. This is great with potatoes also sautéed in duck fat and then roasted in the oven. (A light meal? Well, no, not exactly. But a good one, and who goes to roast chicken on a diet anyway?) It’s particularly delicious with a Rhône Valley red, for some reason—I suppose pepper and fat make a nice team-up. I always think of this as bistro chicken; the first kind somehow for me is farm chicken.

My third method is to make a paste out of mustard, olive oil, tarragon, and—secret ingredient—just a touch of soy sauce. I slip my fingers beneath the skin of the bird, beginning at the base and moving toward the breast, slowly working it loose from the raw meat, gradually slipping back down toward the thighs to open the skin there as well. Then I dip my fingers in the paste and slowly rub it in the space between the raw flesh and the loosened skin. This needs to roast in a slightly “slower” oven—400°, not 425°—so the paste doesn’t burn. It makes for a wonderful chicken, especially if you keep some of the paste aside to use as a condiment. Serve with a purée of potatoes, very simple with cream and butter, so that the mustard-soy-tarragon flavors dominate. Great with a good Pinot Noir, the velvet of the wine melting into the silk of the mustard paste.

And then, let us not forget poulet crapaudine—the chicken split down its back and done facedown in one iron skillet while being pressed down from above by another iron skillet with a brick or something else heavy in it. “Chicken under a brick,” as the Italians call it. It’s nice to bread-crumb the breast first. Also very good with a shallot–white wine–mustard sauce, and curiously nice with a rosé wine. The children love this, as they love chicken pot pie, and I have a theory that it is the names, as much as anything, that move them—a “pot pie,” “cooked under a brick,” a vocabulary of hide-and-seek, and things buried beneath things, that appeals to them. Tastes that hide under bricks, in pots and pies, in crusts and gratiné; things that are scalloped and mashed and made cheesy. Delicious words all start with s, just as funny words all end in k. Scalloped potatoes, steak with sauce, salmon, syllabub, sassafras, saffron, salsa, and salads; though the ch and k sounds have their little charm (chocolate, chicken), it is the s’s that carry the day. Seared sole; sautéed sole; filets with oysters.

The sounds of words, the roar of language, comes between us and the sensations that dogs enjoy. Butterscotch does not care, or know, what her chicken is called. But the concepts have their own pleasures. The hint of the plural, present in all s words, suggests plenty, and the hiss of the s suggests insinuation and promise. “Sweetbreads,” as a word for glands, proves this—as does its French equivalent, ris de veau. And the soluble s sound raises brains in France from oddity to delicacy—cervelles. “Ice cream” is another instance where it is buried as a soft c but sings the same way. The whispering sounds of secrecy and succulence combined. Henry James said that the most beautiful words of the nineteenth century were “summer afternoon”; the loveliest words of the kitchen are surely “ice-cream sundae.” They breathe between their teeth but do so sibilantly, like smiling sinners, not like serpents.

All best,

Adam

8. Near or Far?

TWELVE-THIRTY on a beautiful summer day, and the chicken committee of the City Chicken Project is meeting at the Garden of Happiness, in the Crotona neighborhood of the Bronx. The chicken committee is devoted to the proliferation of egg-laying chickens in the outer boroughs, giving hens to people and having them raise the birds in community gardens and eat and even sell the eggs (“passing on the gift,” as this is called in the project), and thereby gain experience of chickens, eggs, and community—or fowl, food, and fellowship, as one of the more alliterative-minded organizers has said. It is the pet program of Just Food, a small organization that is administered by a startlingly young-looking woman named Jacquie Berger, who is silently monitoring the proceedings.

The Garden of Happiness is a sunny community garden with vegetable plots, a chicken coop, a corrugated-tin shed, and a few chairs beneath a grape arbor, where the chicken committee is meeting. The chicken committee is a lot more committee than chicken, its deliberations filled with references to “existing chicken situations” and “pursuit of newer egg opportunities,” and the slightly skeptical neighborhood people have to be gently won over by the carefully beaming professionals. They provide the nudging, let’s-get-back-on-track counsel that community chicken organizers have to give potentially disorganized community chicken-carers.

“It’s, like, a long questionnaire, you know?” one of the neighborhood people says, about a form to be handed out to potential chicken-carers.

“Well, don’t you think that someone who isn’t prepared to fill out a few questions isn’t—don’t you have to question their commitment to caring for a chicken over the winter?”

“Yeah, I guess so. But it’s a long thing. All these questions.”

The Garden of Happiness has the semimagical ability, common to any place in the city with trees and plants and animals, to secede from its environment and become what most of the world is, a bit out in the country somewhere. A hen in the coop starts clucking. A scruffy pit bull in a neighboring yard begins to growl and then bark. Undiscouraged, the hen goes on clucking, and a second hen joins her. Together they drown out the dog. The sun shines down through the arbor on the chicken committee, and the animal sounds drown out its complicated pleadings.

I had come to the Garden of Happiness not only to see a New York City chicken committee in operation but also to get myself a chicken to roast. This was why, a few moments later, I was trying to arrange, privately, for a hit on a fowl. Getting a chicken that has been raised and slaughtered in New York City is harder than it might seem, with laws and bylaws entangling the transaction: I wanted to eat a chicken that had been raised in the city, and insiders who cannot be named said that, though the City Chickens are raised strictly for their eggs, in private a poultry whacking could be arranged, for a price. I had been set up with a chicken keeper I’ll call Freddie.

“Looks like you’ve got, you know, chickens,” I said, sidling up to him in what I imagined to be the best Washington Square marijuana-buying manner, as we stared at his coop.

“Yeah.” Long pause.

Euphemism, I saw, would get you only so far in the poultry-whacking game. “I was wondering if maybe, on Friday or Saturday, you could get me a chicken,” I said. “You know. The kind that people can eat.” I tried to give the words a Sopranos-like significance.

“Yeah, I understand,” Freddie said, not making eye contact. Another long silence.

“So.” I took a deep breath. “So, uh, you think there’ll be a chicken?”

After another pause, he said, with exactly the kind of ominous serenity you want in a hit man, “Why not? Come on Saturday. You be there. There’ll be a chicken.”

I felt unreasonably pleased with myself; the chicken was going to be hit, and I would pay for the action.

I was arranging to kill a Bronx chicken as part of a project that I had begun a month or so before—to spend a week eating only food grown or raised within the five boroughs of New York City. “Localism” is a movement that has rules, Web pages, and books devoted to it. Its central idea is that one should try to eat only things grown within a narrow “foodshed” around one’s own home, and in the past decade localism has been the subject of a couple of folksy, how-we-did-it books, records of how their authors nailed down their diet to the local goods: Plenty, by Alisa Smith and J. B. Mackinnon, which recounts the authors’ yearlong experience of eating only from a foodshed around their Vancouver home, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, which tells of a similar dogmatic diet, undertaken for a year around Kingsolver’s house in southwest Virginia.

The point of localism is to encourage sustainable agriculture by eating things that nearby friends and farmers grow or raise and that don’t have to be shipped halfway around the world, guzzling fossil fuel, to get to your table. The rules generally involve eating within a radius of a hundred or sometimes three hundred miles, and are undertaken in places, like Berkeley and the Pacific Northwest, that have a lot of nice produce and plump animals within their circles.

You go local in Berkeley, you’re gonna eat. I had been curious to see what might happen if you tried to squeeze food out of what looked mostly like bricks and steel girders and shoes in trees. I wanted to do it partly to see if it could be done (like an episode of what would be called on ESPN “X-treme Localism”), partly as a way of exploring the economics and aesthetics of localism more generally, and partly to see if perhaps the implicit antiurban prejudices lurking in the localist movement could be leached away by some city-bred purposefulness. If you can eat that way here, you can do it anywhere.

I enlisted Gabrielle Langholtz, then of the Greenmarket, a young woman of awe-inspiring purposefulness, and she at once came up with a list of possibilities: vegetables from farms in Staten Island and Brooklyn, honey from rooftops, and eggs seemed plausible, too. It was the other proteins, she noted, that would be the problem, and this had led me to the chicken committee.

We began with honey. David Graves is a keeper of rooftop beehives in New York City, tending fifteen hives and colonies around town. His rooftop honey is one of the ornaments of the Greenmarkets, and so he is a walking human-interest story, who trails his news clips behind him as bees do their sun dance. We were looking at a rooftop vegetable garden, on the eastern fringe of SoHo, that belonged to the film producer Chris Goode and his wife, Lisa. The garden, which stretches across the entire rooftop, just under the watchful gaze of the clock on the old Police Building (which stopped a couple of months earlier, one of its faces at 3:40, the other at 4:35), grows tomatoes and basil and zucchini and squash and green beans and watermelon—enough for a SoHo sect of survivalists. It also hosts one of Dave’s beehives.

“It could be a little strange if the bees swarmed,” Dave admitted. I had asked if his bees ever alarmed anyone. “I mean, that could be a little unnerving to people on a city street. It’s not dangerous at all, but it would look like hell—a bunch of bees swarming around a stoplight.”

Bees, Dave explained, fly two to three miles each day in search of nectar and then return to the hive. In New York, they favor the nectar of ginkgo, sumac, linden, a tree called Chinese Scholar, and Japanese knotweed. New York honeybees live for around forty-five days, and their queen for two or three years. “New York honeybees have the same life span as other honeybees, but they work longer hours,” he said. “You can get between sixty and a hundred and forty pounds of honey per season from one rooftop hive. My record is a hundred and forty, from a hive on the Upper West Side.”

The beehive sits at the center of the roof. Dave opened it, cautiously, and we looked in together. It was like looking down into a New York office building from above: several thousand bad-tempered coworkers racing around and muttering. Dave tasted the honey. “That’s linden,” he said. It was New York honey: strong, spicy, and extremely sweet. He looked slightly abashed. “I didn’t use to like the taste of it. And it’s definitely not the Berkshires.”

There was a time, not so long ago, when New York City was far more self-sufficient in food. As Marc Linder and Lawrence S. Zacharias document in their fascinating book Of Cabbages and Kings County, Brooklyn not only was the breadbasket of the city, well into the late nineteenth century, but also made a quick, successful agricultural right turn, replacing grain with intensive vegetable and fruit cultivation. It was only with the coming of the truck farms in New Jersey and other points west, in the early twentieth century, that New York became largely dependent on imports; in recent years, thirty percent of our fruits and vegetables have come all the way from California.

New York’s abundance lingers on as rumor and memory, but the city’s ground is intrinsically fertile, and I decided next to get a sense of the natural wealth of New York by eating things that are growing here by accident. “Why don’t you try foraging Central Park with ‘Wildman’ Steve Brill?” Gabrielle suggested. Steve, she explained, could point to everything savage that there was to eat in the city. I was taken with the idea of using the Park as a kitchen garden, like those country friends who scamper into the yard for fresh-cut basil.

A Sunday or two later, I found myself, with my children, following Steve on one of his encyclopedic tours of New York’s edible nature. The children had been ornery when I announced my local eating plan.

“I’ll eat New York food,” Olivia, who was then seven, said. “But pigeons I will not eat. Squirrels I will not eat.”

“Squirrels make a very delicious dish, called Brunswick stew,” I offered. “And pigeons are squab. You see them on the best menus.”

“Anything city-colored, that looks like it could actually live in New York, is being thrown out,” said Luke, who was twelve. “Gray things. Brown things. We don’t eat anything that blends in with the sidewalk. It needs to stand out from its surroundings.” The strictures seemed daunting but the possibilities fresh.

“Now, this is wood sorrel,” Brill was saying, bending over a little patch of weeds at the edge of the path that led toward the Park entrance at West 107th Street. “These are completely delicious! They taste just like lemonade!”

Everyone knelt down to taste them. A few meditative moments, ready to spit it out. Then: “Hey, this is good! It does taste like lemonade.”

Wildman Steve Brill looked pleased, but unsurprised. He has had the fortitude to eat out of the Park for decades. Mushrooms and black cherries, field garlic and sassafras—he can construct entire meals around things he finds growing ferally near West Seventy-second Street. He is known for his Smokey Bear hat, his baggy pants, his borscht belt jokes.

“This is lamb’s-quarter,” Steve was saying, clearing a path to what, to the unknowing eye, looked just like the desultory weeds where the softball ends up after the fat kid with glasses you’ve stowed in right field watches it go by. Lamb’s-quarter turned out to be a matte-green plant with arrow-shaped leaves.

“But now you have to be careful,” he went on. “You see this?” He picked through the underbrush and found, alongside the lamb’s-quarter, another, equally agreeable-looking weed. He held it up. “This is white snakeroot,” he explained. “White snakeroot is completely poisonous. In the early days of the country, cows would eat it and it would get into their milk, creating what’s called milk sickness. A fatal disease. Who knows how this changed American history?” No hands went up. “Abraham Lincoln, that’s how. Abraham Lincoln’s mother died of milk sickness caused by this very root. So you have to be careful to distinguish between lamb’s-quarter, which is good, and white snakeroot, which, if you eat it…” He paused and then played Chopin’s Funeral March on an improvised kazoo made of his lips and his right hand.

The children looked dubiously at the plastic bags they carried, stuffed with wood sorrel and lamb’s-quarter. New York kids, they had learned the logic of safe and shaky blocks, but the logic of poisonous plants alongside wholesome ones was outside their experience.

Wildman Steve Brill went on to show us an almost unbelievable variety of edibles in Central Park: purslane leaves, the Asiatic dayflower (“tastes like string beans”), poor man’s pepper (“tastes like radish”), sassafras (“tastes like root beer—you can actually make root beer out of it!”), field garlic, even a kind of “artist’s mushroom,” which you can’t eat but makes a wonderful sketchbook if scratched on.

“We should ask him what pigeon tastes like,” Olivia said darkly. “He looks like a pigeon-eater.”

“He’d probably say it tastes like chicken,” Luke told her. “That’s what they always say.”

Finally, it was time for a lunch break, and Steve and his dutiful followers settled down on the rocks and the lawn near the 107th Street entrance to eat what they had gathered plus a few slices of healthy-looking whole-grain bread. Luke stood up. He pointed with the urgency of a shipwrecked sailor spotting a sail. Just visible at the edge of the Park was a sign reading “West Side Deli.” The Deli in the Distance! While our wholesome fellow-scavengers were looking elsewhere, we sneaked out of the Park and returned to hide in a small copse, so that the kids could gorge on a turkey hero with mayonnaise and potato chips and Snapple drinks. Then they returned to the group, a smear of orange around the mouth the only sign of their impiety.

Localism is a movement made of pieties. The cult of seasonality was a taste that evolved into a politics; localism is essentially a politics attempting to create a taste. It is built on the conviction that the industrial economics of food growing and delivery are bad for us and bad for the planet, but it also has an implicit moralistic attitude that prefers small country patches over big urban deserts.

It is possible to have localism without nostalgia, though, and Gabrielle urged me to look into the tilapia-farming program at Brooklyn College. I took the subway out and met with Martin Schreibman, a biologist who has helped pioneer an ambitious project to create an enclosed system of fish farming, which could serve as a model for urban aquaculture in the future. If the ethic of the pure localist is in part reactionary, Schreibman’s is scientific-minded, with Lex Luthor–like overtones: he dreams of giant translucent fish tanks surrounding our cities, where we would breed our own dinner in a ring of virtuous water.

“The demand for sustainable protein is the demand of this century,” Schreibman told me. “Somehow we’re going to have to produce enough protein to feed our population, and we’ll have to do it in urban locales, because the costs of transportation are going to become prohibitive.” He has spent most of his life at Brooklyn College, beginning as a student, in the fifties. He had been interested in problems of endocrinology and had started using fish as genetic models (“Rats are just terrible to work with,” he said, a New Yorker’s reaction), and then he had become as interested in the problems presented by raising fish as in doing the experiments the fish were being raised for.

“Tilapia is one of the easiest fish to raise,” he explained. “It’s an ancient, ancient fish—it’s the fish eaten at the Last Supper. It’s a warm-water fish, and it’s not carnivorous, so you don’t get the problems of input that you do with, say, salmon.” As critics of the aquaculture industry never tire of pointing out, far more fish-mass has to go into feeding a farmed salmon than you get from the salmon itself. “The green revolution presented problems,” he said. “Hey, we’re still dealing with the mishegas presented by the Industrial Revolution! That doesn’t mean we should reverse the Industrial Revolution, since it was a solution to the problems of poverty that preceded it. Does the blue revolution”—addressing global water issues—“present problems? You bet it does! Does that mean we should give up on it? Of course not.” Schreibman has a vision, oft-repeated in his writings, of reviving the dying cities of New York State by making them centers of aquaculture, so that Rochester tilapia would be a government-certified item, like Bresse chickens, but he has had a frustrating time getting the state government to adopt it.

“Meanwhile, we’re getting flooded with Chinese aquaculture, and we have no idea what the fish are fed or what conditions they’re raised in,” he said. “This”—he made a gesture taking in the farmed fish—“is going to happen, and it’s going to happen quickly. The question is if it’s going to happen here, and happen in a way that we can oversee and control.”

Schreibman showed me around the Brooklyn College fish farm, which feels, well, very basement: high windows and humid air and the whiz-kid sense of somebody’s science-fair project percolating downstairs, below the kitchen. There is a Rube Goldbergian series of barrels and pipes, which bring the water into the fish tanks and cycle it back out again into shallow basins, where it gets used to grow plants, which can, in turn, be used to feed the fish—or us. There are even some related projects, where “ornamental” fish, seahorses and clownfish, are being raised. The tilapia swim in dense, dim schools within their barrels—oddly ominous shapes in the green water, the future in fish. Schreibman gave me a few filets for the urban table.

As we got ready for our week, we had Greenmarket herbs growing on our windowsill; knew we could forage in the Park, and so had a source for homemade root beer; were pulling plenty of local honey; owned some tilapia. But we wanted produce from a real farm, too. So, on the Fourth of July, Gabrielle and I and the children went out to the two working farms that we had found within the city limits: Decker Farm, in Staten Island, and the Red Hook Community Farm, in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Decker, fifteen minutes across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge from midtown, is a small place, smelling of damp earth, that is farmed by a handful of Mexican émigrés who work in a pizza parlor nearby. The Mexicans discovered, upon arriving in Staten Island, that they missed farming—missed Mexican things like jalapeños and tomatillos and fresh cilantro. They work their plots on days off, nights, and weekends, and they loaded us down with poblanos and hot and sweet peppers. (The only farm-grown food used at the pizza place is basil.)

The Red Hook Community Farm, just around the corner from a new Fairway Market, is more socially ambitious. It is a three-acre urban farm reclaimed from an old asphalt playground, with soil piled high. It looks like a Bruce McCall drawing of a pastoralized New York, the asphalt playground with a farm just dropped on top, and a twenty-foot-tall chain-link fence running around it. Begun as a kind of reclamation project for young people, it has become a farm that supplies many of the local epicurean joints with arugula and collard greens. “Twenty teenagers work here each week for a ten-week session,” Ian Marvy, the farm’s director, said. “We sell to the community, and we also sell, at a good profit, to the restaurants that have come to Red Hook in the past few years. Farming in Brooklyn reconnects kids to the earth. We bring schoolkids here from all over the city for a day’s program. Most of them have no idea that vegetables come out of the ground.”

Ian went on, “We try to run the farm organically. Our compost is composed almost entirely of manure from the Bronx Zoo. We use the manure of herbivores, like zebras and elephants.”

I looked at him for a moment, wondering if this was an urban-farm poker-faced joke, but he assured me that it wasn’t. I asked if we could taste the elephant manure residually in the food.

“Yes, you can,” he said. “I mean, we have a dark chlorophyll flavor in all of our vegetables, and I really think that you can taste the concentration of nitrogen. It’s a New York taste.” I looked at the turnips with new respect. Along with turnips, we collected super-spicy arugula, squash, and green beans, and drove back home.

With the Red Hook and Decker Farm vegetables on hand, I decided to make Saturday dinner the centerpiece of our local-eating moment, featuring one blowout meal of good things from around the boroughs. But I was more determined than ever to collect that chicken, and, with my friend Peter Hoffman, the owner of Savoy and Back Forty, and a devotee of localism and seasonalism both, drove up to the Bronx to get it. We pulled up at the meeting spot I had chosen with Freddie, near the coop, and there he was.

“So, you got the chicken?” I said, looking up at the sky in my sunglasses.

“Yeah, I got the chicken. This one.” He pointed down at one of his handsome whites. The chickens pecked and clucked.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I was hoping you would, you know, make it ready for us to eat.”

For the first time, Freddie turned toward me. “You want me to kill it?” he said. “I don’t—I can’t kill my chickens! I raise ’em. I love ’em. I thought you wanted it—you said you wanted a chicken.” We looked at each other head-on. “It’s, like, all bloody and all, I don’t like to do that,” he said, with apology and annoyance mixed. Then a little anger crept in. “I thought you wanted a chicken. To raise! Not to kill!”

I withdrew with what dignity I could, and left, expelled from the Garden of Happiness. Peter and I drove over to Arthur Avenue, where venders make their own ricotta, and sausage hangs from the ceiling, and started to head home.

Just then, bombing down Third Avenue in the Bronx, we caught sight of the biggest, gaudiest, most alluring slaughterhouse either of us had ever seen. Musa’s, it was called, with a broad, wooden front painted rather in the manner of Haitian folk art. Lambs and goats gazed through wooden slats onto the sidewalk, where local children fed and petted them. A giant hand-painted “Lookee! Lookee!” sign pointed to the young animals, and a frieze of paintings above suggested all the kinds of animal you could have killed for your dinner.

We went inside. It wasn’t just a slaughterhouse but more like a pagan temple: the small animals awaiting sacrifice, calves and kids and lambs. We picked out a chicken from a coop crowded with whites and browns and reds. It was white-feathered, and protested briefly with a squawk as it was selected, weighed, and disappeared into the back room. The smells of a slaughterhouse—not horrible, really, just deep, a farm smell in the city—filled the air. A few minutes later, a bag came out, with the chicken, still warm, cut up inside. It wasn’t, of course, precisely the city chicken that I had hoped for. It was an upstate chicken, most likely, that had come to town just for the hell of it, but its life cycle—born elsewhere, arrived in hope, lived in cramped quarters, ended its New York existence violently and unexpectedly at the hands of someone with a fatal amount of money—seemed to make its life local enough to qualify. I took it home to roast.

Localism, like its companion, seasonalism, has become so much a part of the equipment of the conscientious eater that it is difficult to sort out its rights and wrongs with any kind of detachment. People get worked up about it. When I mentioned my local-eating escapade to some of my friends who are most attached to the slow-food movement, they were, I could sense, a little upset, even offended, at what they saw as the frivolity of the attempt. Localism’s no joke. I could see that they thought this, and though I certainly didn’t mean it as a jeer, I did mean it as a small joke, not at the expense of the values of the localists, which I share, but at the expense of some of its pieties.

It seemed to me that the real spirit of localism—the thing most worth taking from it—is the joke: the playful idea of the pleasure of adventure, the idea, at the heart of most aesthetic pleasures, that by narrowing down, closing up, the area of our inquiry, we can broaden out and open up the possibilities of our pleasures. We live in a food world where everything is possible—every day we see arriving at the supermarket green beans from Kenya and oranges from South Africa and chickens from God knows where. And where everything is possible, little registers. To return to a world of limited choices—these Brooklyn eggplants, this Staten Island pepper—was to once again force the flower of invention, to make the cook, even one of limited powers, think again, act more resourcefully, invent rather than merely imitate.

For the plain truth is that the ecological merits of localism are more disputable than its supporters allow. There is a sane set of counterarguments that insist that local eating only looks green. Critics point out that the “carbon equations” of local food eating, which insist that transportation costs are necessarily hugely wasteful, are dubious. In a now famous—or notorious—op-ed in The New York Times, the historian James E. McWilliams, who calls himself a lover of farmers’ markets and even a locavore, insisted that careful researchers, in peer-reviewed studies, “found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.”

Though some of this criticism sounds oddly strident, and suspiciously serves all too well the interests of the big industrialized agriculture, it does recall what have turned out to be persistent truths about prosperity. The central truth of our food-time is not that we have moved from efficiency to waste, but that we have moved from general famine to what is, in historical terms, abundance. What may really matter most for the world’s food efficiency is exactly the “division of labor” that Adam Smith in the eighteenth century rightly saw as the birthright of modernity, and the birthmark of increasing wealth. If some in New Zealand raise lambs, while others in New York eat them, the whole may be a far more efficient use of resources than if we tried to raise sheep on our fire escapes in holistic self-righteousness. It might look more efficient, but it would just be frivolous. Adam Smith’s central refutation of the “physiocrats” of France, who insisted that the wealth of a nation all derived from its farms, was to show that wealth derived from productivity alone, and that the division of labor into small component tasks, though it might seem ugly and inefficient—wouldn’t it be better to have one shed making pins than to divide the labor of pin-making across Europe?—was actually far more productive. It is still somehow counterintuitive to think that it is more efficient to divide food production into many sheds among many people, some very far removed, than to concentrate the work all in one place, but it is certainly so.

There is also, in some of the slow-food and localist rhetoric, in a fashion that also dates back to Adam Smith’s time, a kind of hovering puritanical-cum-Catholic suspicion of imported goods, and particularly imported food, as inherently decadent and wasteful. Smith used the example of wine to show that there was nothing effectively “decadent” about buying from abroad, any more than if Champagne were still part of Britain. (It is not an accident that Smith chose wine, since few of his British readers could imagine a life without it, and they all knew that it couldn’t be made on their island.) The consumer benefits most by buying goods from wherever they are most cheaply made. That principle holds even when the costs are counted in carbon miles. If Kenyan green beans take less total energy than Plattsburgh tomatoes, then we should revel in them no matter how far they have to travel.

And then, apart from the inevitable statistical tussles about exactly how much fuel is used for how much food, the one word that never occurs in the evocation of the lost world of small cities and nearby farms is “famine.” When it comes to local eating, we have been here before. Our peasant ancestors, who lived locally and ate seasonally from the fruit of their own vines and the meat of their own lambs, were hungry all the time. There is, in the localist, slow-food, seasonalist, and even organicist literature, a disturbing whiff of anticosmopolitanism, of the old reactionary-agrarian dream of giving up urban mongrelization for pure peasant life. It’s perhaps too little noted that while President Obama has become an apostle of localism right down to a vegetable garden in the backyard, the real epiphany of his fine first memoir occurs when he goes to Kenya in search of his roots on a plate, and discovers that there is no “authentic” African food—that it’s all a hybrid mix of seasonings and methods, of styles and influences and borrowed practices, some of them only half a century old, and all mixed up; the primeval pot is a naïf’s fantasy.

It is even perilously easy to construct a Veblenian explanation for the vogue for localism. Where a century ago all upwardly mobile people knew enough, and had enough resources, to get their hands on the most unseasonable foods from the most distant places, in order to distinguish themselves from the peasant past and the laboring masses, their descendants now distinguish themselves by hustling after a peasant diet.

The best argument for eating the local tomatoes instead of the African green beans is that they really do taste better. We hear a lot about the “fact/value” distinction: the famous philosophical idea that distinguishes “what is” from “what ought to be” and insists that no fact, no matter how strong, can determine our values. But we should perhaps pay as much attention to what we might call the “act/value” distinction—the distinction that makes us see that it is not necessary for a thing to make something else good happen in order to be good in itself. What if, after all, all our beliefs about sustainability and the planet and food turned out to be false, or redundant, or of very minor value? Would we then give up going to farmers’ markets and stewing organic lamb and all go out to Wendy’s? I think it would still be worth cooking slowly, shopping locally, using the whole beast, not because these are acts that will demonstrably do something good but because we believe these things are good in themselves. We like them now. They don’t ward off our later ills; they provide our present pleasures.

Or what if the truth was that we could take a single small green pill that would give us all the nutrition we need and help sustain the planet at the same time? Would we gladly give up dinner in order to take it? This idea isn’t a joke or even a far-fetched thought experiment: the best evidence of the moment is that an extremely low-calorie diet is by far the best “life extender” we know. How many of us take it up? Not many; the loss in the meaning of the table is too great. Like the pig, we’ll all die anyway.

The act/value distinction is a helpful one. It keeps us in the present tense. “It’s good for you because it tastes good,” though far from perfect, is generally stronger wisdom than its opposite, “It ought to taste good because it’s good for you.” Stronger because it appeals to an increase in joy, because it addresses the fact of appetite, stronger because it speaks to first principles of pleasure. The fragility of life means that our goal is not to extend it but to enjoy it, for the simple reason that we can’t really extend it and we know right now if we’re enjoying it. The fiercest arguments about ways of eating tend to be the hardest to settle, while the most “frivolous” ones are the most definitive. You should drink wine, eat chocolate, have dessert, fill your plate, even have that steak, because they fit your hunger. And you should eat locally because it connects you to your landscape, city-bred or countrified. We can at least be definitive about that—that a life lived with a face on our food is a richer life than one lived without it. We can have our cake and eat it, too, if you are willing to see that the only point of having cake is to eat it.

We can never know for sure what is cause and what’s just correlation—what’s merely the happenstance of simultaneous acts and what is the true order of virtuous succession. Perhaps red wine makes our hearts healthier; perhaps it is only that wealthier people with already healthy hearts are the kinds who choose to drink red wine. We don’t, or rarely, know for certain what makes things happen. We do know what things are like when we eat or touch or watch them now. The best argument against violent video games isn’t that it makes kids violent later; it’s that it shows kids violence now. It isn’t what it does; it’s what it is. We don’t know, for certain, what food will do. We do know what dinner is. That’s enough.

So I made our local dinner. Gabrielle, her boyfriend, Craig Haney, the Hoffmans, and our family gathered around the table. We had Bronx chicken with Staten Island peppers, sweet and hot, and rooftop basil; tilapia tagine; a big pot of green beans; turnip purée, redolent of elephant dung; super-spicy Brooklyn arugula salad. Aside from the spices and the olive oil—which we allowed ourselves under what the writer Bill McKibben first called a “Marco Polo exemption,” common to localism—everything in the dinner hailed from, or had at least seen its first or last days, within the city limits of New York. It was subway localism, short-term localism—a quick sprint, rather than the more dutiful long haul. But it could be done.

If there was something to be learned, it’s that the question of locality is one that can be either narrow and parched or broad and humanizing. As usual, the frivolous reason is the better reason, and the “better” reason looks a bit frivolous. To shorten the food chain is to pull it close, close enough to put that face on one’s food and a familiar place on one’s plate. To eat something local is to meet someone nearby. We had put the city, from Brooklyn ingenuity and Bronx Zoo manure to a slaughterhouse on 168th Street, on a plate, and eaten it up. The plates had stories, where they normally have only food.

The one thing that puzzled me was why Olivia, normally a major fresser, hadn’t eaten any of the chicken dish; it was a touch tough but, still, tasty. She had, instead of eating, done some highly skilled, three-card-monte-style food pushing around the plate. (Seven-year-olds know that you won’t get busted for food-pushing-on-the-plate, only for food-rejecting.) “I did try it,” she told me at last, the next day. “The problem was, it tasted just like pigeon.”

9. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Salt, Pork, Mustard

Dear Elizabeth:

Today I want to write to you about salt and family, perhaps not in that order. Of all the meals I make, the one I think the children like most is an odd one, not predictable: long-brined pork, served with Brussels sprouts braised in balsamic vinegar, which sweetens them, and mustard-shallot sauce: salt and pungent, mustard and brine. It isn’t what one thinks of as child-friendly food, necessarily, but there is something about the assembly of pungencies that appeals to them.

Was mustard as much a symbol of France to you as it is to me? Someone told me once that you could make anything taste French simply by slathering it in mustard, and, quick to believe, I began to do it. Salmon covered and broiled in old-fashioned whole-grain mustard; tuna in dry mustard mixed with water and honey; there was a broiling period in my life. I think of our first days—I mean, Martha’s and my first days—in our tiny, six-foot basement apartment, and I smell the smell of Paul Corcellet mustard sauce.

And when did brining start? In one way, of course, it started long ago; kosher folks and kosher butchers all salt-brine their food. My own cooking mother would have despised the idea, draining juicy blood and replacing it with desiccating salt. I first came across it where I think my generation did, in Cook’s Illustrated back in the early nineties, in a famous piece on roasting turkey. The brine solution to keeping turkey moist seemed absurd—we all believed in basting then. I would baste the turkey for hours and hours, with carefully composed solutions of tangerine juice and olive oil and cloves… all to absolutely no effect. The baster merely paints the skin of the bird, and whatever goes on underneath goes on.

So brining overtook basting—dunking our food instead of drawing on it. (If Roland Barthes were alive, he could get paragraphs—no, pages; no, pieces—out of that difference.) The turkey was the first to go, into kosher salt. The salt fetish is, as I’ve said, in part a reflection of our urge to turn ourselves into pro cooks—who salt their food with a heavier hand than we do—and partly an urge, I think, to restore, at least unconsciously, some of the old grandmotherly kitchen, where things brined and marinated and pickled and altered, while the family waited.

Family food, I suppose, is what I mean—brining is for family food. So, with family thoughts in mind, I approached the sauce. First you dice shallots. (And I hear my mother teaching me: first cut, slice; next cut, chop; next cut, dice.) Then—and this I think is so important; it’s the one thing I know to do that isn’t in all the books—you have to slowly sauté the shallots before you put them in the pan that you’ve cooked the meat in. If you put the shallots into the super-hot pan where you’ve sautéed the loin, the way it always says to do in the books, then all they do is scorch and remain slightly raw. If you cook them first for, say, eight or nine minutes, slowly, so that they’re already sweet and even slightly caramelized, and then put them in the pan where the meat cooked, you can cook them in that hot pan even more, till they’re really browned and nice, and then instantly deglaze the pan with the red or white wine. It makes a perfect shallot base. Then you cook the wine right down till it’s almost dry, and then you add about a cup of chicken stock. (I like the expensive but silky veal and chicken stocks that Eli Zabar sells in New York, but the truth is that any decent supermarket stock will do. I know there are people who make their own, and that’s admirable, but, as so often with cooking, the gain in delight is not truly worth the expense of labor.)

Anyway, you then cook it down till it’s the right sauce thickness. That’s tricky, you know: you want it not the least bit soupy, but on the other hand you don’t want just a glaze of shallots. You ought to stop it just half a minute before it’s right, as it will go on reducing a bit. Then you can add mustard. It’s nice to chop in some tarragon, or just brush in some thyme—you know the way, treating the thyme like a toothbrush, turning a couple of stems upside down and then pushing down with your thumb and forefinger in a circle, so that all the little leaves rain down into the dish. If you let a bare stick fall in, too, I don’t think it changes the flavor, and it looks kind of pretty and country that way.

So that’s the sauce. It interests me, you know, that it is another three-step process: wine, stock, and mustard. Or, to go with chicken or steak, just wine reduced, crème fraîche added and cooked down, mustard stirred in off heat. The rule of three seems to be the rule of cooking. There are some two-step dishes, and a few—a very few—worthwhile four and fives. But mostly, the good things to eat take three steps. Three steps to pan sauté: the sauté, the reduction, and the finish. Three steps to make a cake: the liquids, the butter, and the dries. Three steps to stew (brine, braise, reduce) and three to make a pasta sauce: the spice base, anchovies, and garlic; the tomatoes; the scissored-in herbs. Three steps to grill: the marinade, the grill, and the salsa. Even rice and beans…. The spice base there, too, then the rice, then the beans. Let us mark it down as another secret o’ life: the rule of three will always rule.

Is there a pattern of making here, more universal than it might at first seem? Jasper Johns once said, with the high, significant disingenuousness of faux-naïf genius, that the way to make art is to take something and do something to it and then do something else to it. And this is true—nine times out of ten, when art fails to satisfy, it is either because the artist has merely taken something and done something to it (as in illustration and bad conceptual art) or else because the artist has taken something and done something to it and then done something else and then done even more. The rule of three is the rule of life, even when cooking for four.

I suspect that this is so because the rule of three really expresses the three stages that are always at the base of any good thing we make, from soup to David Salle: there is first the raw thing, then there is the transformative act, and then there is the personal embroidery. The rule of three applies, because it captures an enduring truth of life, that, at best, people always have three terms to play with: what I take from nature, what I’ve learned from my tribe, what I do myself: nature, culture, me. Something borrowed, something done, something only I can do. Nature’s Way; Our Tribe’s Way; My Way. Or else History, My Time, My Talent. The chicken that grew on a farm upstate, the sauté pan I was given at our wedding, the sauce made just as I choose to make it. The fish from the cold ocean, the oven inherited from the previous tenants of this apartment, the lemon and olive oil I bought tonight to pour over the fish. The rule of three is the rule of making.

Yours,

Adam