The Table Comes First

AFTER THE napkin has been unfolded and the menu scrutinized and the choices made, what is there to do but talk? The test of a good meal is the loft of the talk around the table, the way that it rises with the heat of conversation and debate. “I dogmatize and am refuted,” Dr. Johnson said of this, “and in this cycle find my delight.” And what better thing to talk about than… food, and all its meanings. Each time we do, we talk about more. “In every home I’ve ever known / the living room’s a tomb,” the little bit of rhyming runs. “In every home I’ve ever known, the dining room’s the room.”

10. In Vino Veritas?

SOMEWHERE in the middle pages of 1984, Winston Smith is being inducted into the shadowy and, as it turns out, nonexistent “Brotherhood” of resistance to Big Brother, and, to celebrate, the Inner Party member O’Brien pours him a glass of wine. Winston has never had wine before, but he has read about it, and he is desperately excited to try it, since he expects it to taste like blackberry jam and to be instantly intoxicating. Instead, of course, the wine tastes the way wine tastes the first time you taste it—a bit acidic and bitter—and a single sip, or glass, isn’t intoxicating at all. The intensity of this experience as a model of disappointment was significant enough for Orwell that he inserted it in his dystopia right there among all the greater horrors—as though the future weren’t bad enough, that whole wine thing will go on, too.

Sixty years later, we live in a wine world where, for the first time, there are wines that do taste like blackberry jam and are instantly intoxicating, or nearly so—I mean all the wines of the “Southern” regions, the New Zealand Pinot Noirs and California Zinfandels and Australian Shirazes—and a literature has grown up to try to sort them out in relation to the tastes of the Old World. “Wine,” Saul Steinberg once said, “is the only thing that makes us happy as adults for no reason.” Wine books, on the other hand, find a hundred ways of making us unhappy for lots of reasons. The space between what the wine writers say and what the wine novice tastes is a standard subject of satire. (The best was written, exactly contemporary with Orwell, by Stephen Potter in the “Winemanship” section of his peerless Lifemanship books.)

Some of the weakness of wine-writing is complex. Being an expert on wine and writing about it is what the English call “naff,” embarrassing and uncool, while being a nonexpert on wine and writing about it anyway sounds merely boozy. No subject produces a literature so anxious, expressed not so much in its grandiosity as in its defensive jokiness and regular-guydom. A book on wine will always begin with the assurance that it is not like all those other books on wine, even though all those other books on wine begin by saying that they’re not like those other books on wine, either.

Running through most of the best wine writing of the past decade, though, is one story, a common time frame and a central fable. The time frame is the past thirty years, and the central fable is the defeat of the French tyranny over wine values, first by American wines, then by American experts, and then by the world at large. And what one sees, again and again, in book after book that tells the tale of the French decline and the American—and more latterly the Australian—rise, are all the pieces of a first-class Henry James comedy about the brutality of New World innocence, the helplessness of Old World sophistication, and the need for intoxicants that are always called by some other name and claimed for some other purpose.

The story always opens in the early 1970s, when the cult of claret—well-aged Bordeaux wine—was locked in place, especially in England, which dominated the wine trade as the Germans had earlier dominated the champagne trade. Bordeaux produced hard, tannic wines that often took a decade to be good to drink. (Then they were really good to drink.) Even when they weren’t good, though, everyone went on drinking them, because they were claret. The best wines, if far from cheap, were available, not collector’s items: anyone with a taste for wine could expect to drink Château Margaux or Château Cheval Blanc more than once in a lifetime, and the lesser grands crus were there for everyday drinking. The preeminence of French wines was simply taken for granted, like the skills of Jewish internists. Within Bordeaux, the classification of 1855—which had fixed the vineyards in a hierarchy of first-, second-, and third-growth classes—still hummed along, dominating everything.

Into this story come two new forces: Japanese money and American numbers. In the mid-seventies, the Japanese developed a taste for expensive French wine, and for buying the big names. This vastly expanded the market and seemed to justify investment in higher yields: more grapes, and more land. But this meant that the lower reaches of second- and third-growth wine were now all that most Americans could drink, though in a less equable and accepting mood. In 1976, in Paris, an American Cabernet beat the French Bordeaux in a blind tasting. This was not quite the event that it has since come to seem. To the French winemakers, it was more like an American loss to the Lithuanians in basketball—wrong game at the wrong time—but it did mark a trembling of the earth beneath their feet.

More significant, a lawyer named Robert Parker, from the suburbs of Baltimore, began to mimeograph, and then publish, his own newsletter, The Wine Advocate, listing all the châteaux and grading them on a hundred-point system. His virtues were limited: he was a very ordinary writer with few pretensions to the grace notes of French, or even English, wine writing. What he brought to the table was what Americans always bring: encyclopedic ambitions and a universal numerical system. Not since Bernard Berenson made his lists of true and false Italian pictures had an American expert on the arts so fundamentally changed the economics of European culture. As with Berenson, what mattered was not so much that the list was right—who could tell for sure?—as that the list existed.

In retrospect, it seems that Parker was doing to wine what Bill James was doing to baseball in the same years, and in the same way. Both Parker and James began, in the late seventies, as unknown amateurs with privately printed newsletters, rapidly found a hungry and enthusiastic audience, and by the mid-eighties had become the reigning authorities among people impatient with the old wisdoms. Both were uncannily successful because they were apostles of a radical American empiricism—an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you. James was weakly predictive, but brilliantly analytic: his explanations of why things had happened were mesmerizing and convincing, but his guesses about what would happen next were often wrong. (His system had the Brewers winning the ’82 series.) Parker was weakly analytic but brilliantly predictive; he could never really explain why wines tasted good, but he claimed that the ’82 vintage was going to be great, and it was.

The difference was that Parker’s game had always belonged to the French. And from the French point of view he was poison. Like all Henry James heroes, Parker was a true American innocent, meaning only to help and purify his European friends. The wines that receive the most consistent and adulatory praise in his system are the conventional favorites of conventional French taste: Château Margaux and, Burgundy, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. No one could have been more single-mindedly rapturous about Château d’Yquem. In France, though, the greatness of those wines was accepted not as effort well rewarded but as the natural order of life. There had to be not-so-good wines below to have great wines above; the hierarchy was part of the pleasure. Parker assumed that if some wines were not as good as others it was because some winemakers were not doing as good a job.

Although, in a defensive move, the French government gave him the Légion d’Honneur—he cried when he received it—his Francophilia did him no good with the French; the vintners set dogs on him. In a Henry James story, he would marry a French comtesse with a fading château, and have to decide whether to be true to his system by rating her wines properly or be true to her and lie. (In the James story, he would lie, and suffer.) Without intending to, he was wrecking the second rank. He was able to do this because, for the first time, there was a solid second rank of claret-style wine in the world, and it wasn’t the second growths of Bordeaux.

One common complaint has been that Parker’s idea of good was too narrow. People who know wines now disparage Parker for preferring “flavor bombs,” big wines that are exploding with fruit and alcohol, and which showed up better in tastings—with the not very convincing implication that there is something second-rate about liking such blackberry-jam wines. But the essential “character” of many of the wines that he ruled out was the quality of not being very good.

Meanwhile, beginning in the 1980s, there was more good wine around than ever before, and most of it was coming, as it still does, from the then-underexploited warm-weather vineyards of other continents. It is hard to find a less than delicious bottle of Australian Syrah or South African Cabernet or California Zinfandel, or, these days, New Zealand Pinot Noir. Even southern Italy, and Sicily in particular, began to fall into line. Mouton Cadet, the old standard Bordeaux plonk, has almost disappeared from dinner tables.

In this way, Parker’s achievement wasn’t so much to Americanize French wine as to southernize northern palates—to favor the fruitier and more forward wines common to South Africa and California and Australia over the drier and more astringent tastes of young Bordeaux and old Burgundy. He liked wines that tasted good. His favorite French wines, the ones he loves from the heart (“This is the kind of wine I would drink if I were not always tasting,” he once wrote plaintively, apropos of a simple Guigal Côtes du Rhône), are southern, too, from the Rhône Valley. An “educated” palate may seek to explain why this is a limiting taste, but is unlikely to win over the Winston Smiths. It is a little like the educated eye trying to explain why Poussin is better than Rubens; people may listen, but they look at those thighs, and doubt.

Once Parker had established his reputation, the French had to decide whether to fight or to change, and they changed. William Echikson’s heroes, in his book Noble Rot—the story of the ins and outs of the family who own Château d’Yquem but more broadly about post–Parker Bordeaux—are the garagistes and “right bankers,” the winemakers from the wrong bank of the Gironde, who, one by one, are either taking control of old estates or making their own wine in the backyard. Following his heroes from château to château, Echikson gives a strong hint throughout that making good wine is more like making good peanut butter than it is like writing great poetry. Low yields (meaning not too many grapes per hectare), sweet fruit allowed to ripen as long as possible (there is always pressure on growers to harvest early, because of the threat of a late rain or an early frost), no stems, minimal “handling”—the formula is pretty simple. Wine is good grape juice gone bad, and, as many of the new French winemakers seem to suggest under their breath, there is something to be said for the Australian system where grapes are collected from around the country, sorted through, and fermented in great big well-controlled vats, and terroir be damned.

Yet the reader, even one with Parkerized tastes, may, on reflection, find the French objections to Parker’s lists and numbers more complicated than many of the critics allow. The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers. Everyone agrees that Parker is, on his own terms, a completely honest scorer; but by scoring he intends to serve the consumer, and makes the wine drinker into one. What consumers want is reliable beverage products, and, once wine is a reliable beverage product, it isn’t quite wine.

Demanding absolute excellence on an unchanging universal numerical scale is not, after all, our usual measure of sensual engagement. A man who makes love to fifty-some women and then publishes a list in which each one gets a numerical grade would not be called a lady’s man. He would be called a cad. And that, more or less, is how a good many Frenchmen think of Parker: they don’t doubt his credentials; they question his character. A real man likes moles and frailties; a real man marries his wine, as he marries his wife, and sees her through the thin spots. Being impatient with the tannins in a Margaux is like being impatient with the lines on your wife’s face. They are what makes it a marriage rather than a paid assignation.

For one of the defining characteristics of many French terroirs is not to make very good wine. To alter that is to put them in the beverage business. No one says this, exactly—but when you are handed a glass of thin and astringent country wine in France and asked to admire it for its character, there is a reasonable point in which its character does consist in its having some. The French connoisseur believes that, with his glass of turpentiney Gascon wine, he is in a truer relation to history and reality than the American searching for his jammy high-scorers. I wouldn’t actually drink like this, but I understand it.

Of course, if the ladies were offering their favors at forty dollars a go, it would seem fair for somebody to grade them, and that is, more or less, what Parker’s defenders say: a product that is being bought and sold should be subject to the market discipline of all other things that are bought and sold, and all the guff about earth and history and ineffable singularity is just a way of avoiding giving the customer what he ought to get for his money.

Well, what does make wine taste bad or good? Is there really a standard, or a way to agree on one? Within the heart of every wine drinker there is the suspicion that no one really knows. I was once at a dinner in Paris, seated by a big “name” in wine tasting, and, along about the third bottle, she leaned in and announced, half gaily and half conspiratorially, “You know, it’s really all about the same.” Of course, she didn’t actually believe that—but I also had the sense that in another way she did believe it, that she was confiding something significant about her own profession. She didn’t mean that it all tastes the same—obviously, it doesn’t—but that, stripped away from its elaborate rituals, the distinctions that her livelihood depends on would be a lot muddier and mixed up.

The French cognitive psychologist Frédéric Brochet has done pioneering, if disconcerting, work on this subject. It was Brochet who first discovered that if you simply put red food coloring in white wine even experienced drinkers can’t tell it from red wine. What we see shapes what we smell. But his work goes further than that. In another study, he offered, at a week’s interval to a constant group, the same mediocre wine, first labeling it a vin de table and then as a grand cru. Predictably, the subjects’ tasting notes conformed more closely to the label than to what was “really” there. Nor did anyone seem to detect that it was the same wine with a new label. Once again, the frame frames. We lean on what we see, what we read, to create a context for what we think we taste and smell.

Nor does “expertise” seem to alter this effect very profoundly. Studying tasting notes from forty-four professionals at a wine exposition, Brochet discovered that “when a taster experiences a particular wine, the words they use to describe it are those that they link to this sort of wine.” That is, even the expert tastes what he expects to taste, and says what he has said before. If you called the last Côtes du Rhône “rich and peppery,” then that is what you will say about the next one; the words make the wine before the wine produces the words. What’s more, and it’s a slightly scary thought, Brochet showed that when you look at MRIs of the brains of wine connoisseurs who use different pet phrases to describe their wines, different areas of the brain light up—they are actually experiencing different things. To the degree that any “fakery” is going on, it is entirely sincere self-delusion.

According to scientists who study smell and taste, that’s just the beginning: the duplicity reaches from the organizing mind deep into the experiencing senses themselves. Rachel Herz, a professor of psychology at Brown, conducts research into the effects of “frames”—context—on the perception of smells. (Wine tasters are “noses” first of all.) Smells, she reports, “are so malleable when it comes to verbal context that when reasonable verbal information is available it will override and even replace the olfactory information.” The effect is pronounced when the smells are, in some way, ambiguous—tell people that they’re smelling vomit, and they’ll smell vomit; tell them that the same smell is Parmesan cheese, and they’ll smell Parmesan cheese. With wine, the most basic verbal categories (it comes from France, it comes from America, it’s cheap, it’s expensive) seem to be able to throw even an educated nose off track. The illusions, Herz suggests, “work the way, in a familiar illusion, arrowheads either going in or feathering out extend or shorten straight lines. Word labels on smells are the same kind of context effect, and these context effects are markedly more powerful with nose sensations than they are with other kinds.”

To make things worse, the nose turns out to have the shortest memory of all the sense organs. A simple experiment, Herz suggests, shows just how powerful nose amnesia is: Think of a familiar tune—say, “Yesterday.” Now think of a familiar picture—say, the Mona Lisa. Now think of the smell of a tuna-fish sandwich. You can do the last, of course, but where the other sensory memories are strong, clear, and sharp, the tuna-fish sandwich smell is general and vague. What the nose knows, in effect, is not much, and that soon forgotten. (Wine lovers protest violently when they are told this, but their protest, from the academic point of view, is a bit like the protest of eyewitnesses who are sure they saw what they say they saw, even if they didn’t.) Yet to accept this is not to say that the elaborate language of wine evaluation is necessarily or even remotely phony. It is exactly because smells are so labile and hard to grasp that they need more help from words than other sensations. When it comes to wine, we are all like early-Alzheimer’s patients who have to be coaxed into memory and appreciation. (“Remember, Dad—that’s the woman we saw on the beach at Wellfleet.” “Oh, yes! Her.”)

The real question is not whether wine snobs and wine writers are big phonies but whether they are any bigger phonies than, say, book reviewers or art critics. For with those things, too, context effects are overwhelming. All description is impressionistic, and all impressions are interpretive. Colors and shapes don’t emerge from pictures in neat packages to strike the eye, either, any more than plots and themes come direct to the mind from the pages of books. Everything is framed by something. Once again, the essential dialogue between the frame of our expectations and the experience of our senses is not the thing to be defeated when we talk about our hungers, but the thing to be celebrated: it is what gives shape to our sensorium.

It is perfectly possible—in fact, almost certainly true—that given the wrong frame, or no frame at all, all of our responses to wine would vanish into one big buzzing confusion. If all the grape juice in Bordeaux or Napa were poured into vats, without labels or corkscrews or prior knowledge, it really might all taste the same. Anyway, no elaborate rhetoric of compliments is meant to be “accurate”; it is meant to be complimentary. When Shakespeare compares his lover to a summer’s day, he doesn’t really mean that she (or he) is like a summer’s day in that she is hotter in the middle and cooler at the ends—though, then again, he might. Wine writing is of the same type: a series of elaborately plausible compliments paid to wines. When the French wine writer Eric Glatre declares, say, that in the aroma of a bottle of Krug “intense empyreumatic fragrances of toasted milk bread, fresh butter, café au lait, and afterthoughts of linden join in a harmonious chorus with generous notes of acacia honey, mocha, and vanilla,” he is suggesting that, of all the analogies out there, this might be one that expands our minds, opens our horizons, delights our imaginations. He is offering a metaphor, not an account book.

In this way, the intersection of French sensibility and modern science suggests not so much the limits of Parker as the limits of naïve American empiricism: numbers and honesty and transparency only get you so far in the world. Our experiences of everything are too mediated—by contexts and intentions and likeness—to be summed up in a number. It is exactly the disputable quality of the compliments we pay to wine that makes them touch the lower edge of art. Once again, De gustibus solum est disputandum. Only matters of taste are worth arguing over.

Between the rhetorical and the real lies ritual. And wine is a ritual thing before it is any other kind of thing. The history of wine provides the not surprising but always reassuring news that there is, from the very beginning of viniculture, no sorting out the need for intoxication from the necessity of ritual, the desire to drink from the debt to structure. The story of wine seems to begin someplace out in the “Transcaucasus”—today’s Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—when the first Vitis viniferas grapes got grown. The astonishing thing about wines is that they are like dogs: there is endless apparent variety we can squeeze from what is, in the end, one species. Had Darwin been a wine-drinker, instead of an English port man, he might have chosen to use the varieties of wine, shaped by man from one unchanging grape into a thousand terroirs, to make his point about variation produced under selective pressure. (Actually, Darwin did do important work in the history of wine, and not just because he was one of the first Englishmen to taste New Zealand reds. He made the essential point that the grapevine will produce tendrils, to climb with, or grapes, to reproduce with, and that this is a vestige of the vine’s ancient forest habitat, where it could “choose” either to climb higher to reach sunlight, or stop where it was and make fruit. And, not coincidentally, he helped save French wine. It was Darwinian evolutionary principles that helped French biologists discover, at the time of the great phyloxera crisis of the late nineteenth century, the one thing that might save French wine. They realized that, since the root louse causing the plague was American, the American vines on which it must once have lived must surely have evolved resistance to it—and it was the grafting of New World roots onto Old World vines that saved Burgundy and Bordeaux. Before Darwin, it seems likely that the last thing vintners would have done is go back to the same vines that had carried the plague to supply the cure.)

What we find in all the ancient wine cultures is not a slow growth from a disorganized Bacchanalia to an evolved ritual practice, from simple intoxication to information system. On the contrary, wine ritual and wine-drinking seem to have been inseparable from the very first. Wine, after all, though a natural product, isn’t a simple one: even the plainest garage wines demand a complex grasp of a multipart process; leave it in the vat and let it rot doesn’t work very well. You have to think it even as you drink it. So it’s no surprise that everywhere we turn, even in the most ancient wine writing, we find gods and demigods, vessels and special glasses—the absurd paraphernalia of the wine lover, with his tasting glasses and little fridge, stretches back to the beginning of time.

From the beginning, wine and wine culture has been a halfway house between the sacramental and the social. In Neolithic cultures there are already inscriptions and decorations on wine vessels. As the scholar Patrick McGovern tells us, at the end of Old Kingdom Egypt, around 2200 B.C., there is already a system of “AOC,” appellation contrôlée, designations of the kind that France arrived at only in the nineteenth century: wines in mortuary tablets seem to be grouped around the names of well-known wineries in the Nile Delta. They are called Northern wine, abesh wine, and sunu wine. In New Kingdom pottery inscriptions, referred to as ostraca and dated to around 1350 B.C., wines are rated as “genuine,” “good,” “very good,” and even “very, very good”—a blunter and more useful system, in its way, than the French “Grand Cru Classé” and our own regional markings. “Wine snobbery” of this sort, a compulsive need to rate and class and compare, far from being a late invention, seems inseparable from the activity itself. It is as if from the start wine-drinkers grasped that without a mental frame of comparison, without words to structure tastes, the pleasures of wine drinking would be lessened. Egyptian wine-drinkers wanted to know if they were drinking abesh or sunu, and they wanted to know if it was merely genuine or very good—and doubtless they then turned toward each other in profile and said, “They’re calling this abesh ‘very, very good’—but then, Parker always overrates abesh.”

The question about such judgments, mixing snobbishness and sense, is not whether they exist—they exist in the minds of the people who feel them; that’s enough—but what they are about. For the true wine snob, they are about the ability to make them, and this is just sad. For the French wine critic—a generalized type, but one who exists—they are about the ability to make a map inside your mind: to taste tastes and see places. For the American wine critic, they are about the ability to offer consumers a quality beverage. What they rarely seem to be about is drinking wine. Paul Draper, the great winemaker from Ridge Vineyards in California, has had the honesty to say that he wishes there were more drinkers in the wine world and less tasting. He means by this not that more people should get drunk, but that more people should accept the totality of the experience of wine as it really is, instead of amputating one bit of the whole activity and fetishizing it.

Remarkably, nowhere in wine writing, including Parker’s, would a Martian learn that the first reason people drink wine is to get drunk. To read wine writing, one would think that wine is simply another luxury food, like smoked salmon or caviar or chocolate; the one idea that is banished is that it is a powerful drug, which can wash away, in a few minutes, the ability to discriminate at all. The end of food writing is to turn eating into a metaphor for wanting, of all kinds. The end of wine writing is to turn drinking into a metaphor for judging. Since we know that this is false, we feel the falsity, and the pathos of the falsity.

For it is not wine that makes us happy for no reason; it is alcohol that makes us happy for no reason. Wine is what gives us a reason to let alcohol make us happy without one. It’s the ritual context that civilizes the simple need. Yet there is still a strong taboo in place among even the ritzier reaches of wine writing about addressing this untroubling truth. It is true, of course, that the professional wine-taster tastes and spits. And I am told that there are wine-tasters who are allergic to alcohol. But the specialized bits of the activity would not exist without the totality of the larger truth: if wine were just better-tasting grape juice, we wouldn’t have the books or the background or the bards.

Our experience is whole. We can take one moment, the mouth moment, from the whole experience, but we would not relish the moment if we did not keep the whole experience in mind. If we were not warmed by wine, we would not take the trouble to categorize its tastes. (And even if we didn’t others would do it for us; there’s a social dimension to wine, a division of labor, à la Adam Smith, in which the tasters do some of the work, and the drinkers do the rest; if there were no drinkers, there would be no tastings for the tasters.) Men like to look at nude pictures of pretty women—or perhaps that should be, at pretty pictures of nude women—without necessarily having (or feigning to have) sex with them. But it is only the wider experience of sex that lends the pictures their punch and their point.

The strident denials on the part of the wine connoisseurs that their experience has anything to do with that other experience of getting tipsy reminds one of nothing so much as the earnest insistence, on the part of Victorian aesthetes, that the nude in art had nothing whatever to do with sex, and that if it did “it was bad morals and bad art.” To which Kenneth Clark replied, mischievously, in his great book The Nude, that if the nude in art didn’t have some relation to sexual desire, then it was bad morals and bad art. This doesn’t mean that Clark wanted to make love to the Venus de Milo (though given what we know of his avid sex life, maybe he did). It just means that the idealizations and the “aesthetic” pleasures, the gentle flow of curves and breasts and rear, in the Venus is an extended, heightened, crystallized form of desire—desire transformed into art, but still desire at, er, bottom.

The wine expert can create a new space, between intoxication and discrimination, and then perform in it—just as the fun of being a connoisseur of the classical nude, à la Rubens and Titian, is to play in the space between the erotic and the pornographic. But the hunger for the comfort drug lies at the root of one activity, as the hunger for the human body lies at the root of the other. The reproductive instinct is at the start, though by no means always at the finish, of our love lives. Divorcing sex from reproduction in everything we write about it—if only to counsel birth control—would not strike us as elegant; it would strike us as unreal. And the same is true of wine. If wine did not warm, we would not want it.

The mixed-up sensations of wine do not make a case for the superfluity of wine writing; it is the case for its necessity. Without wine lore and wine tasting and wine talk and wine labels and, yes, wine writing and rating—the whole elaborate idea of wine—we would still get drunk, but we would be merely drunk. The language of wine appreciation is there not because wine is such a special, subtle challenge to our discernment but because without the elaborate language—without the idea of wine, held up and regularly polished—it would all be about the same, or taste that way. Wine talk and wine ceremony are not simply snobbish distractions that lead us away from the real experience; they are part of what lets the experience happen. Once again, our contexts and our convictions are in constant play. We believe in the virtue of some kinds of wine, we bounce with joy at the tastes of others—our tastes and our temperaments debate even as they dance.

To turn wine away from happiness is the drinker’s sin, as turning food from gusto is the eater’s. A good fruity bottle of a Santa Barbara Pinot Noir, with a pretty label and a decent story, makes us happy, and happier than that we don’t really deserve to be. In that Henry James story, of course, the innocent empirical American’s reward and punishment would come when he marries that comtesse and retires to her château, where they spend the rest of their lives drinking nothing but water, for their health.

11. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Potatoes, Steak, Air

Dear Eliza:

I notice that, in your essay on the perfect dinner, you dish-drop pommes soufflées. Of all the dishes that are out there, and that I dream of making, pommes soufflées is perhaps the first on the list. The dish was popular already in your time, which is why you refer to it—that might have been its heyday, actually: potatoes are sliced about a quarter of an inch thick, then twice deep-fried. The first time preps them at a lower heat, the second time—done right, done fully, done with luck—the potatoes blister and then blossom, popping up and filling with air, so that they are delicate little balloons of potato and salt and the lingering taste of the oil they were cooked in. They are, if not the immortality of potatoes, as cheese is said to be the immortality of milk, then at least the elegance of potatoes. Parmentier, the great French agronomist who brought the potato to Paris, thought of it as a plebeian dish, and we eat it mostly in that manner, mashed or roasted or boiled. But the fried potato, absurdly ubiquitous as it now is, once was the royalty of the line, and the pomme soufflé, if you can find it, keeps some savor of that stature.

They don’t seem to make them anywhere in New York these days, though I have read that they were still available in the fancy places in New Orleans until recently, along with crêpes suzettes and flambéed duck and all the other ancient dishes of the old theatrical cuisine. I think the only one I have ever eaten in New York was a one-off. I was in a burger-and-lobster sort of place along Second Avenue, thirty years ago, when the eastern avenues of Manhattan were lined with glass cafés and the phrases “singles bars” and “brunch” still resonated. Ordering sautéed potatoes, I saw that one had swelled and risen, just like a pomme soufflé. It must have fallen into the oil twice, by chance, and inflated by accident. It was, exactly, a “hopeful monster,” of the kind that evolutionary biologists, Stephen Jay Gould prominent among them, were talking about in those days—the one lucky potato slice dropped by accident twice in the ever-hotter oil, suddenly inflated and ballooned.

It was evidence, though, that they can be made. So the other night, following a recipe in one of the old, sixties-era French cookbooks I like to collect, I neatly peeled some firm russets—the books emphasize that you can’t use new potatoes, or baking potatoes that have gone too soft—and then sliced them into what I measured as a template of three-eighths of an inch. Then I poured canola oil into two Dutch ovens, took out the candy/frying thermometer, and turned on our (unfortunately electric, and slow-responding) stove. I decided to serve them, for safety, with one of the meals that I knew in advance the children would love: a rib steak done with a red wine and shallot sauce—sauce Bordelaise, as it’s called in the old recipe books, a classic three-step sauce: shallots, red wine, veal stock. I made the steak with my “consciousness raised,” as people used to say, to the ambiguities of meat-eating. And yet… hunger rose.

It is surely somewhere here that the real difficulty about the whole vexed meat-eating question lies. Not how we think abstractly about the rights of meat-eating, but how we actually feel when we eat meat. In that most evil of all films, the Goebbels-produced Nazi-era “documentary” The Eternal Jew, there’s a bizarre, interminable sequence—obscenely heralded by a title page warning off “sensitive German viewers”—of kosher butchery, taken during the Polish invasion, in which a cow, its throat cut, is bled to death, poor beast, and the indifference of the bearded Jewish butchers to the suffering is a sign of their evil indecency. Because they are cruel to animals (let us bracket, both on the page, and in our minds, whether kosher butchery is truly crueler than any other kind) we can be cruel to them: they don’t have the same feelings as the rest of us, either of empathy or of sensitivity. Exterminating them is not like exterminating people; it is like exterminating rats.

Of course, vegetarians are not Nazis—but there is a sense in which sensitivity to animals has nothing at all to do with any other ethical acquisition. People have, historically, as often used cruelty to animals as a justification for being cruel to people as they have as a reason for not being cruel to anything. See how they treat their horses, was one cry of the Mongols about their enemies. The path from sensitivity to the suffering of animals to sensitivity to the suffering of humans is, as a matter of plain fact, far from open or easy.

Our little dog, Butterscotch, lives for steak. It is the beginning and end of pleasure for her. Her nose quivers, her whole small fluffy body shakes, gripped by a primal hunger so intense that she can barely contain it. She smells steak and she does a sit, does another sit, tightening the first one—falls to the floor in a “down” and then does a head-down and a spin and a shake; her whole repertory of tricks, just to show how much she wants it and how eager she is to do anything she needs to do to get it. We slice it fine for her, and then watch her inhale it—well, she is a carnivore, a little wolf, not by sentiment but by genetics: isn’t her hunger for meat some sign that eating it is, not compulsory certainly, but hard to call evil in any recognizable sense? An appetite implanted so deep in our natures seems less of a sin and more of a scar—something that we just have, as part of living in the world we live in with the heritage we share, and that we can only improve by being certain that we are not cruel in its pursuit.

I don’t know; I shudder at the verdict of our descendants even as I recognize the carnivorousness of our animal natures. And I go on eating, and serving, steak.

In slicing the pommes soufflées, and readying the two Dutch ovens for their brief role as frying pots, I am aware that there is an element, what I believe could be called a “stark” element, of show, of carnival barkerishness, in the dish. This used to be part of the business of the chef—public amazement—which was then judged vulgar and largely banished. Or rather expelled to another world, to the nightly ribbon of spectacle. I wonder what you would make of cooks on cable television? What would you think—cook after cook, traveling and arguing and competing, making part of the public show things that were kept in the sanctity of the kitchen? Now, I am aware that for all that we have in common, you depended on servants a bit more than your writing quite likes to show. And nowhere more than in the pommes soufflées business—let’s be candid, your airily summoning up a plate of them does not mean that you are about to go off to the kitchen, Elizabeth, and make them. It means either that your cook has been busy or that you are imagining them, as eaten in Paris. One thing that separates our time from yours most firmly: there are no cooks outside the kitchen in yours. You mention famous chefs from time to time, but they belong to the distant and remote past.

So I wonder how you would feel about our cable carnival of cooking? Every night, there are competitions, tours, chef against chef, young cook against old cook—thirty minutes head-to-head. We are supposed to be disapproving, of course, and to see this as a degradation of the art. And the idea of food shows on television is a paradox that Chesterton could not have imagined: food watched, food that no one can taste or smell or eat. To be honest, while my taste for recipe books is insatiable, my appetite for cable cooking shows is very limited. The ideas take so long to blossom, the preparations so long to prepare, that I get impatient.

But there’s nothing really offensive or “off” about it: it celebrates, in however debased and diminished a form, an idea of expertise, of craft, which is the one thing that is vanishing from our world. Mario and the Iron Chefs are there because they have finish—they’re good at what they do, rather than being freakishly who they are. Being good at what you do is so odd and rare a thing in life now that just showing someone being good at something is enough to hold several million people. Even the contest shows make at least a pretense at excellence: the viewer can’t taste the food but Padma can, and the alarming sternness of the judgment at least simulates, pantomimes, the idea of something being at stake in the act of craft. (One can’t imagine a Top Artist show because the standards of what is considered art and poetry are by now so essentially whimsical or arbitrary that no one could agree: being good at rhyme or drawing has only a tangential relation to being famous for being a poet or an artist.) At least, when a chef makes something, she is making something. It’s either tasty or it isn’t, and the taste rises from the practical mastery of a craft. This is surely the reason that people respond with such excitement even to things that seem to me tedious, like Dancing with the Stars or American Idol—the “cruelty” to the contestants isn’t cruelty at all; it may be the only time many people in the audience have seen a craft standard enforced with craft severity: there really is and isn’t a right way to tango, as there is a right way and wrong way to make pommes soufflées.

Oh, yes, the pommes soufflées. Well, I did them, ever so carefully, slicing and prefrying and then true frying… and they failed, totally and utterly. Not a single blossom or blister or even a hint of puffing and expanding. Obviously I had the width wrong, or the heat wrong, or the order wrong. There is a reason that French restaurants don’t do them; they’re too much trouble for too little reward. The reward is just the look, the puff, the hot air inside—the potato is still the same.

The infusion of air is always a sign of elegance, in your day as in ours. How many things in the kitchen involve simply beating in air: meringues, whipped cream, pommes soufflées, soufflés themselves. It is, perhaps, no accident that we call a book cover’s blurb a “puff.” We condemn hot air even as we eat it. Air is the forgotten medium of cooking.

Did I say they all failed? In truth, there was a single pomme soufflé—one slice had popped and blossomed amid the rest that had decided to remain potato chips. I looked at it and put it aside, and then fed it to the little dog.

Very best,

Adam

12. What Do We Write About When We Write About Food?

RECENTLY, THERE WAS an exchange in the pages of The Times Literary Supplement about the presence, and the propriety, of recipes in novels, and I intend to settle the questions that have arisen there in the American way, right now, and for good. There are four kinds of food in books: food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it; food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are; food that an author cooks for characters in order to eat it with them; and, last (and most recent), food that an author cooks for characters but actually serves to the reader.

Most books that have food in them, including the classic nineteenth-century novels, have the first kind of food. In one Trollope novel after another, three meals a day, the parsons and politicians eat chops or steaks or mutton, but the dishes are essentially interchangeable, mere stops on the ribbon of narrative, signs of life and social transactions rather than specific pleasures: “Mr. Peregrine greatly enjoyed his chop” or “For Dr. Patterson, even the usual satisfaction he took in his beefsteak and porter was somewhat diminished by this thought”—such food provides space for a moment of reflection. The dishes are the foam peanuts in the packaging of classic narrative. There are moments in Trollope when what a character drinks matters—claret good or bad, porter or port—but his food is, in every sense, at the service of his story.

Next come the writers who dish up very particular food to their characters to show who they are. Proust is the second kind of writer, and Henry James is, too. Proust seems so full of food—crushed strawberries and madeleines, tisanes and champagne—that entire recipe books have been extracted from his texts. But he’s not a greedy writer; that his people are eating lobster or veal matters to who they are and how they feel about who they are, but we are not meant to leave the page hungry. Proust will say that someone is eating a meal of gigot with sauce béarnaise, but he seldom says that the character had a delicious meal of gigot with sauce béarnaise—although he will extend his adjectives to the weather, or the view. He uses food as a sign of something else. (It’s what social novelists, even mystically minded ones, always do: J. D. Salinger doesn’t like food, either, but the fact that his characters are eating snails or Swiss-cheese sandwiches tells so much about them that it must be noted, and felt, like every other detail.)

The third kind of writer is so greedy that he goes on at length about the things his characters are eating, or are about to eat—serving it in front of us and then snatching it from our mouths. Ian Fleming is obsessed with food; gluttony, even more than lust, is the electric current of his hero’s adventures. Newcomers to James Bond, imagining him to be the roughneck he has once again become in movies, will be startled to see how much time he spends in Casino Royale and the other early Bonds giving advice to his girls and his spy superiors on what to eat, with the author hovering over his shoulder as he examines the menu: the problem with caviar, Bond announces, is getting enough toast (not true); English cooking is the best in the world when it’s good (certainly not true then); and rosé champagne goes perfectly with stone crabs (very true). His creator, one feels as the excitement builds, is not just itemizing the food, waiter-like, but actually sitting at the table and sharing it with him.

The fourth kind of writer, ever more numerous, presents on the page not just the result but the whole process—not just what people eat but how they make it, exactly how much garlic is chopped, and how, and when it is placed in the pan. Sometimes entire recipes are included in the text, a practice that links Kurt Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, novels about the inadvertent mayhem that a man can inflict on a woman; in Heartburn, the recipes serve both as a joke about what a food writer writing a novel would write and as a joke on novel-writing itself by someone who anticipates that she will not be treated as a “real” novelist. These days, we have long cooking sequences in Ian McEwan; endless recipes in James Hamilton-Paterson; menus analyzed at length in John Lanchester; and detailed culinary scenes involving Robert B. Parker’s bruiser of a detective, Spenser. Cooking is to our literature what sex was to the writing of the sixties and seventies, the thing worth stopping the story for to share, so to speak, with the reader.

Not long ago, I attempted to mimic some cooking as it is done in a number of relatively recent novels. I began, foolishly, with several recipes from Günter Grass’s Nobel Prize–provoking The Flounder, the epic allegory of German history told through the endlessly repeated parable of an evil fish, a gullible man, a virtuous woman, and a lot of potatoes. The talking Flounder, being both the evil daemon and the central consciousness of the piece, has a natural class interest in flounders’ not being eaten, so there is a shortage of fish recipes in The Flounder. (I was tempted by a detailed description of how to make stewed tripe, but who in my gang would eat stewed tripe?) There is one nice moment, though, when the eternal talking Flounder, who “knew all the recipes that had been used for cooking his fellows,” mentions simmering the fish with white wine and capers. Well, from his mouth to our plate: I did just that, with a nice filet from the Citarella market, and, as suggested, added some sorrel. Then, learning in a later section what could be done with potatoes and mustard—the potato, with its false promise of cheap nutrition for all, is, I suppose, meant to represent the false hope of the Enlightenment in Germany, but the mustard surely could represent the saving genius of the Bavarian rococo—I made a gratin with mustard to accompany it. It was fine, though it reminded me of why it is that, at a moment when Spanish cooking is everywhere sanctified and even English cooking, for the first time, canonized, not many people are making a case that German cooking is much more than fish and potatoes and sauerbraten. Eating Günter Grass’s flounder was actually like reading one of his novels: nutritious, but a little pale and starchy.

Great masters are not meant to offer small plates. My eye fell next on School Days, one of Robert B. Parker’s excellent Spenser mysteries. Where John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, Spenser’s daddy in the genre, would occasionally throw an inch-thick T-bone on the grill of The Busted Flush, Spenser produces entire dishes, and we read about them bit by bit. (Nero Wolfe had a personal chef, and ate a lot, but it was mostly in the “the great detective dined on quenelles de brochet” line.) In School Days, Spenser, with his beloved Susan away at a psych seminar, and only the dog for company, makes a dish of cranberry beans, diced steak, and fresh corn, dressed with olive oil and cider vinegar.

The beans alone establish Spenser’s credibility as a cook. “I shelled the beans from their long, red-and-cream pods and dropped them in boiling water and turned down the heat and let them simmer,” he tells us. A devotion to shell beans, I have noticed, divides even amateur cooks from noncooks more absolutely than any other food, and they are, into the bargain, a perfect model of writing. Like sentences, shell beans are a great deal more trouble to produce than anyone who isn’t producing them knows. You have to shell the beans, slipping open the pods with your thumbnail and then tugging the beautiful little prismatic buttons from their moorings—a process that, like writing, always takes much longer than you think it will. And then even the best shell beans, cleaned and simmered, are like sentences in that nobody actually appreciates them as much as they deserve to be appreciated. Shell beans are several steps more delicious, lighter and finer, than dried beans, let alone canned beans; but the sad truth is that nobody really cares beans about beans, and not many eaters can tell the fresh kind from the dried, or even the canned.

I carried on with the recipe: Spenser takes a small steak from the refrigerator and dices it, sautés it, and then mixes it with the beans and some corn. I did this, and, honestly, I don’t think it’s a good idea. Maybe I didn’t do it right—there is a certain lack of specificity about what kind of steak he’s using and just how long he keeps it in the pan—but I found that my steak dried out when it was diced and cooked, and, anyway, didn’t have enough salty punch to play off against the floury blandness of the beans. Sausage, not steak, is what’s called for here. As for the corn, well, even off-season corn is pretty tasty mixed with oil and vinegar, and makes a good combo with the shell beans. It’s a nice dish, worth interrupting the murders for.

Still, you have to wonder how well the food fits in the book. The purpose of the scene, after all, is not to teach a recipe but to paint a mood—to show the lonely Spenser as somehow more modern, broader in interests and resources, than lonely city detectives in fiction often are. Down these mean streets walks a man with a recipe in his head. What the reader recalls, though, is not the setting but the dish. Should the food come off the page onto the plate quite so readily, overwhelming the atmosphere, and does this indicate that there is something subtly off, nonfunctional, about the presence of elaborate food-making in fiction?

Rising to a higher level of culinary ambition, I went on to make, the following night, a fish-stew recipe, a kind of English bouillabaisse, from Ian McEwan’s superb Saturday: Henry Perowne, the central character, a neurosurgeon, cooks this elaborate dish as he watches “monstrous and spectacular scenes” on television. Henry, though confessedly inexpert, is a convincing home cook; he admits that he belongs to the chuck-it-in school, the hearty school of throwing ingredients together in a pot—he likes the “relative imprecision and lack of discipline.” In the passage I was following, he makes a tomato-and-fish stock for his stew, and, at the same time, starts prepping the rest. He “empties several dried red chillies from a pot and crushes them between his hands and lets the flakes fall with their seeds into the onions and garlic,” before adding “pinches of saffron, some bay leaves, orange-peel gratings, oregano, five anchovy fillets, two tins of peeled tomatoes.” Then he takes some mussels from a string bag, throws those, with the skeletons of three skates, into a stockpot, and tips some Sancerre into the tomato sauce. Meanwhile, he readies monkfish, slicing tails into chunks, a few more mussels, and, finally, some clams and prawns. All the while, he is watching on the mostly muted television the run-up to the Iraq war—marchers in London, Colin Powell at the U.N.—and brooding on life in our time.

McEwan is obviously painting a picture of l’homme bourgeois as he is today, his hands filled with fish, his mind with intimations of terror. (McEwan really is serving this dish to his readers; a revised version of the recipe is right there on his Web site.) It’s a tribute to McEwan’s powers of persuasion that the scene would never work that way in reality. You can’t idly make a bouillabaisse while you brood on modern life any more than you can idly make a cassoulet; these are nerve-wracking concoctions. The mussels, which Henry drops into his stock straight from a string bag, need at a minimum to be spray-washed, and probably cleaned and checked for those obscene little beards they have. European mussels have fewer of these, it’s true—more like soul patches. (Later on, Henry scrubs the mussels, but he seems to be doing it absentmindedly, and you can’t do it absentmindedly.) The fish needs to be taken from its wrappings and washed; and then how fine do you chop the garlic, and are you sure the alcohol has boiled off from the wine? The “orange-peel gratings” are a story in themselves, since all the experts insist that you avoid getting any white pith in with them, and this is about as difficult as writing a villanelle. (It doesn’t actually matter much, but they say that it does.) Worse than that, having crushed a “handful” of those little dried peppers between your fingers means that you have to wash your hands instantly, with soap, since nothing is more common among home cooks like Henry than wiping a tear from your eye while chopping the onions, your hand still contaminated by hot pepper, with horrific results.

While you are doing all this, I was reminded as I did it, you are thinking about the bouillabaisse, not about life in our time. Or, rather, you are not thinking about the bouillabaisse, or about anything: you are making the bouillabaisse. And here, I suspect, lies the difficulty with using cooking as the stock for the stream-of-consciousness stew. It is that the act of cooking is an escape from consciousness—the nearest thing that the nonspiritual modern man and woman have to Zen meditation; its effect is to reduce us to a state of absolute awareness, where we are here now of necessity. You can’t cook with the news on and still listen to it, any more than you can write with the news on and still listen to it. You can cook with music, or talk radio, on, and drift in and out. What you can’t do is think and cook, because cooking takes the place of thought. (You can daydream and cook, but you can’t advance a chain of sustained reflections.)

The recipes in these books are not, of course, meant to be cooked; they have literary purposes, and one of them is to represent the background of thought. Every age finds an activity that can take place while a character is meditating; the activity surrounds and halos the meditation. In Victorian fiction, it is walking; the character takes a long walk from Little Tipping to Old Stornsbury and, on the way, decides to propose, convert, escape, or run for office. But the walk as meditational setting and backdrop came to an end with Joyce and Woolf, who made whole walking books. In recent American fiction, driving was recessive enough to do the job; in Updike and Ann Beattie, characters in cars are always doing the kind of thinking that Pip and Phineas Finn used to do on walks. Driving and walking, however, do seem to be natural “background” actions. But you cannot have characters thinking while cooking; the activity is not a place for thought but in place of thought.

We need these devices in books, because we do not, in life, think our thoughts over time. Since our real mental life is made in tiny flashes in the midst of our routines, we have to stretch it out, taffy-like, in literature to cover a span of time worthy of it. If we accurately represented our mental life as it takes place—sudden impulses on the way to the washroom, a spasm of neurons unleashed over coffee—no one would believe it. Consciousness is not a stream but a still lock that suddenly drops into little waterfalls. The lengthy descriptions of cooking that we find in modern literature are a way of artfully representing, rather than actually reproducing, our mental life—a modeled illusion, rather than a snapshot of the thing.

So no matter how much cooking a novel contains, in the end it goes back to being a book, as all books will. Even cookbooks are finally more book than they are cook, and, more and more, we know it: for every novel that contains a recipe, there is now a recipe book meant to be read as a novel. When we read, in the great French chef Alain Ducasse’s recent Culinary Encyclopedia, a recipe for Colonna-bacon-barded thrush breasts, with giblet canapés, on a porcini-mushroom marmalade, we know that we are not seriously expected to cook this; rather, we are to admire, over and over, the literary skill, the metaphysical poetry, required to bring these improbable things together. You and I are not about to cook thrush breasts with a porcini-mushroom marmalade—Alain Ducasse is not about to cook them, either—any more than we are about to throw ourselves under the train with Anna or sleep with Madame Bovary.

The secret consolation may be that it works the other way around as well. The space between imaginary food in books and real food is the space where reading happens. The people we encounter in novels are ultimately mere recipes, too—so many eyes, so many bright teeth, so many repeated tics and characterizing mannerisms—and we accept that we cannot perfectly reproduce them, either. Our mental picture of Henry Perowne, like our mental picture of Lady Glencora Palliser, is as hard-won as the bouillabaisse from Saturday, as vague in critical aspects and as likely to vary from maker to maker, from reader to reader. (The characters in Flaubert are like the recipes in Escoffier; we are surprised to see how much is left out.) We read about Cabourg in Proust, and are unprepared for what we find when we actually get there. The act of reading is always a matter of a task begun as much as of a message understood, something that begins on a flat surface, counter or page, and then gets stirred and chopped and blended until what we make, in the end, is a dish, or story, all our own.

13. What Do We Imagine When We Imagine Food?

THERE ARE two schools of good writing about food: the mock-epic and the mystical microcosmic. The mock-epic (A. J. Liebling, Calvin Trillin, the French writer Robert Courtine, and any good restaurant critic) is essentially comic and treats the small ambitions of the greedy eater as though they were big and noble, spoofing the idea of the heroic while raising the minor subject to at least temporary greatness. The mystical microcosmic, of which Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth Pennell are the masters, is the more modern school, essentially poetic, and turns every remembered recipe into a meditation on hunger and the transience of its fulfillment.

The two styles can’t be mixed. If we are reading, say, about Liebling’s quest for the secret of how rascasse are used in bouillabaisse, we don’t want to be stopped to consider the melancholy lives of the remote fishermen who seek them out. And if we are reading David’s or Fisher’s sad thoughts on the love that got away or the plate that time forgot, we would hate to find, on the next page, the writer handing out peppy stars in modish kitchens. (The same thing is true of sportswriting: we go to it for either W. C. Heinz’s tears or Jim Murray’s jokes, Gary Smith’s epics or Roy Blount Jr.’ yarns, which suggests that, with the minor arts, our approach is classical and depends on unity of tone.)

The two styles, as we’ve seen, lie all the way back there, in the two first food writers. Brillat-Savarin was the founder of the microcosmic school, and his genius lay in his smiling sincerity; His contemporary Grimod created the mock-epic; his genius lay in his bitter wit. Since their day those two styles have dominated the world of food. (Bitter wit is more fun than smiling sincerity, but hard to build a world on.)

So when we read books about food we struggle to decide which school we’re reading. In The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine, Rudolph Chelminski’s biography of the doomed three-star chef Bernard Loiseau, for instance, the story of Loiseau’s restless search for a way to transform cauliflower from a discouraging vegetable into a radiant side dish by caramelizing it, we smile at first, thinking ourselves in the presence of the old mock-epic. It is, after all, only caramelized cauliflower. As the search picks up momentum and intensity, however, and we learn how Loiseau began to blanch and strain and purée, we start to succumb to the grandeur of the quest and think the story is microcosmic. Why should the search for caramelized cauliflower be any less significant than Ad Reinhardt’s search for the pure-black painting, or John Cage’s for pure silence? But then when we read that Loiseau committed suicide after his caramelized cauliflower failed to impress his critics, we rebel again, in shock. It was, after all, only caramelized cauliflower.

Loiseau seems likely to become a mordant icon of the eternal war between critics and cooks. He has a moving story to tell, with universal implications: the downfall of the artist through perfectionism and paranoia. Loiseau suffered throughout his life from a too-late-identified bipolar disorder, a syndrome that ought to be known by its old French name, folie circulaire. It’s a syndrome that can strike truck drivers and Zen monks as easily as cooks, so any general principles should be taken with caution. Still, Loiseau, if not typical, is in many ways exemplary of the chef’s dilemma.

Loiseau was a member of perhaps the last generation of artists who were true to an ideal and a practice that had begun in the nineteenth century. He learned to cook as an intern in the kitchen of the Frères Troisgros, near Lyon, where he mastered the terrifying discipline by chopping onions and filleting fish for twelve hours a day; he even learned to kill frogs by slapping their heads casually against the kitchen table. The Troisgros kitchen opened every door in those days, and in the early seventies Loiseau, with almost no other apprenticeship, made a name for himself doing simple country cooking at a glorified bistro just outside Paris. He was financed by a shrewd promoter named Claude Verger, who saw that elemental food could be popular and still presented to the critics as something new: a variant of nouvelle cuisine.

That it was simple and not genuinely new does not mean that it was without value; no one had been cooking that way with passion or conviction for a while. Calling plain cooking high cooking was in itself a radical act. Loiseau became a star, and, with money advanced by Verger, he bought La Côte d’Or, a famous old restaurant in the Burgundy town of Saulieu. In the dense, deep-eating days of gratins and casseroles, the place had once held three stars in the Michelin Red Guide; by sheer effort, Loiseau built it back up, and the reader cheers with him when he finally gets his three stars, in 1991.

The trouble was that there was no reason to go to Saulieu except to eat, and this made Loiseau particularly, even uniquely, vulnerable to the Guide and its system of stars and inspectors. The Guide no longer had an easy or organic relation to French cooking. The Red Guide grew up with the automobile, and with the idea of the long journey away from Paris that required several stops for lunches and dinners. By the 1980s, though, the new autoroutes and the high-speed trains (and the planes, racing over) had reduced the need for road stops. The Michelin inspectors, gloomy middle-aged men eating alone, used to be indistinguishable from the other gloomy middle-aged men eating alone, and their stars were a kind of summary of the opinions of all those tired traveling professionals. Now all that’s left of this once self-evident system is the inspectors, dining alone and passing out stars. People do not drive by the restaurant and stop to eat; they drive to the restaurant and stop for a three-star meal. To be a destination is a difficult trade: it is nice to run a place where the food, in the famous phrase, is worth a journey; hard to keep it going when the only reason anyone makes the journey is to eat the food.

Loiseau was terrified of losing his stars, particularly when François Simon, of Le Figaro, hinted that La Côte d’Or was on its way down. The chef may have been paranoid in this, but he was hardly alone. All artists in all fields despise all critics all the time. (They may like the individual critic, but they despise his conviction that he has a right to criticize.) Still, there are levels of loathing, as there are circles in Hell. Writers at least recognize that the critic is a writer, and shares a table, if not an agent. Magicians, on the extreme edge, despair of those outside their circle ever knowing the difference between a trick that anyone can buy for six dollars and sleight of hand that only two people have learned in six years. Chefs are close to magicians in their certainty that their critics cannot tell the difference between something that takes time, thought, and talent and something that dazzles only by surprise, perversity, and snob appeal. But, even more than magicians, chefs depend on the good opinion of those whose opinions they cannot think are worth having—and the nature of Loiseau’s cooking left him open to the exhaustion of critics.

Chelminski points out that food critics are even more inclined than other kinds to fatigue. Most food critics are sick of eating rich, expensive food and will do almost anything to have something new; a perfectly prepared veal chop (one of Loiseau’s elemental specialties) first gets a smile, and then a yawn. But Loiseau, his biographer admits, was at an edge of simplicity so extreme that it hinted at innocence. (Chelminski suggests that Loiseau’s training was short on fundamentals; he was notorious among his staff for being unable to make even basic sauces.) Famous for the purity of his approach, Loiseau deglazed his pans with water instead of wine or even stock. It was admirably minimal, but it also tended to be oddly ascetic and depressing; the elemental and the elegant are sisters, but not twins. Loiseau had no hesitation about publishing a recipe for John Dory served with a purée made of boiled celery. (It seems so simple that one is convinced that it must be mysteriously great; I have made it, and it tastes like fish with boiled celery purée.)

Loiseau, it now seems, thrived briefly at a short, fundamentalist moment in the history of cooking, just between the Protestant Reformation of nouvelle cuisine and the rococo Counter-Reformation of today’s cuisine tendance (“trendy cooking,” though “speculative cooking” might be a better name), the kind of ostrich-tongue-with-rutabaga-foam-and-Jurassic-salt-on-a-stick cooking that unites Ferran Adrià, of elBulli; the Californian Thomas Keller, of the French Laundry; and New York’s own Wylie Dufresne, of wd-50.

Yet Loiseau is hard not to love. He was, like everyone, a casualty of history and his own demons; but he was also, as Chelminski insists, a perfectionist, for whom the disapproval of a single diner was almost impossible to accept, which is what makes his story heartbreaking and instantly understandable. “Why didn’t he like it?” he would moan inconsolably when one of a hundred diners sent a dish back unfinished. The chef’s life is a long struggle with the reality that tastes differ, and tastes change. The mutability of taste is a truth chefs live with every night.

And the Loiseau example suggests that the divide between the mock-epic and the microcosmic schools expresses an even simpler divide between the way critics and cooks experience food. The diner experiences it as a form of comedy and the cook experiences it as a form of work. (The cook’s recompense for not having fun—for those hours and hours of life spent chopping onions—is a sense of soul and of significance.) One goes for pleasure and believes in his right to mock and have fun; the other cooks in desperate exhaustion and believes in his right to a livelihood.

Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, a memoir of her time in the hottest of critical hot seats in America, that of restaurant critic of The New York Times, tells the story from the other side of the mirror. Her book would make a terrific romantic comedy, if Lubitsch or Billy Wilder were alive or if Nora Ephron wanted to make it. Reichl, in order to conceal her identity from the restaurant people who were desperate for her good opinion, dined in disguise throughout her five years at the Times, not merely wearing wigs and dark glasses but actually creating and inhabiting whole alternative characters: a chorine called Chloe, a sad Glass Menagerie–type lady called Molly, and even a motherly type, homey and sensible. A Method critic, she came to live these characters: they wrote the reviews. In the movie of her life, of course, the hard-eating, Falstaffian R. W. Apple, Jr., character would hate her in her fussy office identity as a “nouvelle” eater, and fall for her in one of her disguises in the restaurant. (There is even a wisecracking, snooty but winning friend—obviously the Stockard Channing role—who has to be converted to the merits of sushi.)

What makes Reichl’s book genuinely touching is that—in a plangent complication—she sees herself first of all as a cook, and seems to identify secretly with her targets. Compelled by admirable maternal instincts, within a two-career marriage, to take her son from one overpriced, overwrought restaurant meal to another, she convincingly suggests that the restaurant critic’s life is an ordeal; the recipes she inserts in the text (leg of lamb, matzo brei) seem to be intended as oases of sense in the midst of all this madness, and as signs of her real identity, as a cook.

At the same time, the book is wonderfully revealing about the double consciousness of the critic. Although pain-giving herself (and she likes to read “delightful” pans of restaurants), she is sensitive about criticism of her own criticism, and spends time collating phone messages for and against, walking the streets with anxiety when her first review comes out as she waits to hear what the bosses think. (Critics never allow these two parts of their brain to communicate, or stop to think that the pain you take, as the Beatles might say, is equal to the pain you make.) The back-and-forth between the soulful stuff that she writes about her family and the sometimes surprisingly catty stuff that she writes about her working life (she is not particularly kind about her editors at the Times) is conscious, certainly, but also deeply felt. You think, She really didn’t like the gig.

There is a moment when, after she reviews Le Cirque, she walks back to her childhood neighborhood, reconnecting with what actually made food into a significant thing for her. She clearly feels that there is something ignoble, or at least remote from her original infatuation, in sending expense-account diners off to this or that French temple. This is the lesson critics learn the hard way, and we are as relieved as she is when she is at last set free and gets a job as editor of the magazine Gourmet. She is tired, we know, of eating in disguise, when what she really wants is to be cooking for her family out in the open.

Reichl, after all her experience, compares the restaurant world of New York to a theater, with the diners and critics merely players in it. But everything can be described in terms of performance and theatricality; all the world’s a stage. Surely it is identity politics, rather than just playacting, that is at stake in costly dining out. All those people waiting in line at Le Cirque are not waiting for their selves to be lost or exchanged; they are waiting to be affirmed, even enhanced, and they do it even at the risk of humiliation. Not “Enter and become another!” but “You belong here” is what we want the maître d’ to tell us. (And the illusion that we want the chef to give us is not “I work for you” but “I feed you from love.”)

This affirmation, it seems, is easier to get than we might think. Steven A. Shaw is identified by his publishers as a former attorney who began a second career as a food and restaurant critic in 1997. He has a book called Turning the Tables: Restaurants from the Inside Out, which attempts to show you how not to be intimidated or overwhelmed when dining out: he wants you to be an expert at eating in restaurants, even as the author is an expert on eating in restaurants. This seems a queer expertise, a self-evident specialization, but he does give much sound, neighborly advice on getting reservations (just humble yourself to the person who answers the phone, and someday the table, like your prince, will come) and some sane if fairly obvious counsel: “Understanding one’s own preferences and needs, as well as those of your dining companions, is foundational to making good restaurant choices.”

He is briskly tough, though, and quite courageous in his assaults on the Times’ reviewing. The whole elaborate, boastful rigmarole of disinterestedness and disguise celebrated in Reichl’s book he sees not as honest but as ignorant and provincial, common sense clouded over by fear—as though restaurants were there to scam you. He insists that the food in the kitchen is, of necessity, the food that gets served to everyone, critic or yokel (and the few exceptions are those restaurants where contempt for the paying customers is apparently part of the charm, as at Le Cirque). There is no more need for the elaborate masks of the restaurant critic than there is for the art critic Robert Hughes to go to a museum in a Groucho Marx nose and glasses. A good critic can’t be fooled. The best that the critic can hope for is to be treated as a friend of the house, but all you have to do to become a friend of the house, Shaw says, is to be one. Restaurants are businesses before they are anything else. Dine twice a week at Le Bernardin, the thought is, and you will magically have the table you want at Le Bernardin. This is only partly true; the known critic gets sent out far more plates and extras and desserts than you or I do, and often far more than he knows what to do with. (I once ate with a very fine chef who had the habit of sending out extra plates to friends at his own place. When the chef at the place where we were eating kept sending out extra plates to him, he said, finally, “You know, it never occurred to me before how annoying this is. You’re forcing people to eat things they weren’t in the mood for and then to make a big show of appreciating them.”)

Shaw, it emerges, is a rare thing, a food writer who identifies not with cook or critic but with the restaurant owner, whose struggles and exasperations he admires and sympathizes with. (Please call to cancel that reservation, he urges.) He wishes that restaurant critics, instead of skulking around cross-dressing and pretending to be called Marmeluke, would, like critics in other fields, be “champions of excellence who promote the best… while exposing the worst.” But, of course, all those other critics, though rarely dressed up in wigs and makeup (or dressed at all, for that matter), are notoriously irascible, tendentious, bad-tempered observers who like nothing more than settling old scores, indulging eccentric prejudices, and using someone else’s table or text as an occasion to riff on their own obsessions. Critics cannot be made responsible any more than chefs can be made calm; it is the occupational disease. The real use for the food critic’s disguises, anyway, one suspects, is not as a form of espionage but as a form of armor: it is not we who are protected from getting a false impression but the critic who is protected from violating the most primal of all taboos—being publicly ungrateful to someone who has shared his food with you. (If it wasn’t really you, then you weren’t really ungrateful.)

From these practical essentials, it is a pleasure to move to the world of encyclopedic knowledge. The encyclopedia form, of brief and then longer bursts of pure weird data, only just touched by the spry hand of commentary, is irresistible, and alphabetical organization, being both hyperorderly and completely random, is irresistible, too. In the extraordinary new Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, edited by Andrew F. Smith, the dour history of Pizza Hut abides near the basic conundrum of Plates, which nestles beside the joys of Plums, while a neat, disabused bit on the Politics of Food in America gives way to the fun of Pomegranates and Popcorn, before the social historian resumes his seat with a history of Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits. Anyone who can put it down is unburdened by curiosity about anything. Through its countless entries, two stories emerge. First, of the overwhelming abundance of the American larder, and how capitalism has struggled to enlarge and exploit it, and, second, of how the Protestant tradition of making people feel guilty about eating well—expressed in fad diets, health scares, and so on—has been balanced by the Protestant tradition of making people feel guilty for not eating well, expressed in cooking lessons, recipe books, and the growth of a huge industry of food writing meant for home cooks. One has only to compare Ducasse’s Culinary Encyclopedia to see what can be made elsewhere of the same idea. Ducasse’s encyclopedia consists not of entries on food but of pictures of and recipes for good things to eat. Under “P,” we get a picture of simmered suckling-pig chops and feet with porcini-mushroom polenta in a sage sauce, and the recipe. Even for a good cook the dishes are essentially unrealizable, but that does not alter their encyclopedic significance: images of Heaven are painted to encourage you to go there, not to help you build it in your backyard. At the opposite pole lies Denise Gigante’s Taste: A Literary History, which takes food and eating as a metaphor for Western experience. Gigante’s is the kind of book that one can mock with ease and imitate at peril: “If we approach Wordsworth’s concept of feeding through the mechanics of assimilation, as described in Romantic Naturphilosophie, we find that the feeding mind naturally exists in a precarious state of tension with its own abjected matter,” and so on. But it makes an arresting point: the model of food as a metaphor for pleasure is balanced uneasily between the mouth and the anus, between taste that urges us on and the excrement (“abjected matter”) that food becomes. The larger argument is that the bourgeois age of the restaurant was born of (or accompanied by; it is sometimes hard to be sure which) an aesthetic shift, vast in scope and incarnated by the poets, in which the old attempt to banish excrement from the discourse of appetite by emphasizing the purity of the eater was overtaken by an aesthetic in which the reality of digestion was accepted and made part of the acceptable way in which people thought and talked about life. Appetite need be neither indulged nor suppressed—it could be modified, by that very thing called “taste.” Gigante has a nice section on Charles Lamb in which she shows how, in his famous essay on roasted pig, he invented a comic but still largely melancholic, elegiac tone with which to write about eating.

Gigante is surely right that eating, along with seeing, provides the most universal of all metaphors of value: along with the sensations of light and dark, which properly belong to painting, the perception of sweet and bitter is the most natural of all natural metaphors. The metaphors of taste are so basic that they imbue and infiltrate our entire experience, and we no longer think of them as metaphors.

With no other crafted thing is the line between sensation and meaning quite so quickly crossed, quite so easily extended from something felt to something known, as with food. The tongue has no sooner said “Sweet” than the heart says “Home!” All art, it has been said, aspires to the condition of music. But we want some of our art to aspire to the condition of background music. What makes Mozart, Vivaldi, the Beatles, essential to our lives? Is it the hours we spend with scores on our knees, listening in the dark? Or the hours and hours and hours we spend with them just on, wrapped around our lives—giving them some emotion to organize that they, miraculously, do? What makes van Gogh’s stars and cypresses or Botticelli’s faces so dear to our existence: the minutes we spend footsore, staring at them on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, or the glimpses on posters and in books and postcards that fill the corners of our eyes and lives? Good cooking is beloved because, when it is good enough, it gives more immediate pleasure and then recedes more rapidly, more gracefully, into the metaphoric middle distance than any other cultural thing, letting us arrange our lives, at least for one night, around it. The metaphors of food are so closely tied to our sensations that they must be elevated to ring out. That would explain why good food writing, by cook or critic, has been so expansive in theme. This largeness of vision (“I write of hunger,” Fisher said flatly, when tasked with writing about food) seems to have become harder to achieve, perhaps because the subject has become so specialized.

There is too much food in most food writing now—too much food and too little that goes further. When Liebling and Fisher wrote, they gestured from plate and glass to something bigger, outside the dining room—to France, or to appetite itself—and the gesture carried instantly, because there was little else in the room to absorb it. These days, the old twin circles (the family around the table, the cosmos beyond) have been supplemented by so many other circles of attitude that the writer points from the plate to—another writer. Like so many other subjects, food writing is constricted within these ever-tighter circles of opinion, when what we want from it is ever-broadening metaphors of common life. Metaphor is social and shares the table with the objects it intertwines and the attitudes it reconciles. Opinion, like the Michelin inspector, dines alone.

14. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Rice, Milk, Sugar

Dear Liz:

All these recipes! All this time. I was feeling a bit, well, unmanned, reduced, by the practice of writing down recipes, no matter how delicious they might seem or how much one could defend the practice—insufficiently testicular, to use the word with which Lane Coutell offends Franny Glass in Franny and Zooey—and so I bought Keith Richards’ autobiography, wittily entitled Life, to read. I am a keen Stones fan, who begins each day with a piece of “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out,” but… could I explain British R & B to you, Elizabeth, modern woman you may be, but still a woman of the nineteenth century? A defining feature of my time, and your adopted country, it seems to escape prediction and explanation. You see, Elizabeth, in about fifty years, poorer English boys from the London suburbs—the ones with the lunatic asylums—will listen to recordings of American Negroes, and try to imitate them as closely as they can, and these imitations, heavily amplified, will become the most popular music in the world. And then they will move right around the corner from you; Keith’s home, through his druggy London years, will be in Cheyne Walk, the very heart of the Chelsea-Whistler country!

Oh. Rather like… rather like minstrel music? I hear you ask. Well, yes and no, I reply—yes, in that they’re imitating the sound, no, because it’s serious and sexual and admiring. Anyway, I keep an electric guitar tuned to an “open G,” Keith’s favorite, and strum through it, searching for those voicings, the dumb revelation that most of what seems mysterious and beautiful—from Stones riffs to béarnaise sauce—is just a matter of breaking it down and learning the technique. The tuning matters even more than the technique, and I wonder if that isn’t true of cooking as well. The tuning is just the base of what you do—the eggs you buy, the fishmonger, the thing itself—and with every good cook I’ve known, the sound is like that: a good tuning and a resonant drone, a fine fish and a favorite spice.

In any case, I thought to myself, well, Keith Richards, there’s the man, be more like him; utterly forgiven, no matter what he says or does—women are all bitches, and gay people are poofters, and no one is indignant or offended, because we all make up the rules by which we are to be judged in advance. Declare yourself irresponsible when you begin to act, and all will be forgiven when you are. In this case, the book, crafted as a celebration of living on the edge, is in fact on every page a testimonial to the privileges of money and fame. Each time poor Keith is about to be arrested for drug possession (of which he is, like it or not, always guilty), he is saved by a lawyer or hyperwealthy fan (or the father of a groupie) who intervenes on his behalf. … Well, okay. He’s still a wonderful guitarist. (The funniest and most telling remark in the book concerns his bandmate Ronnie Wood. After detailing Wood’s many long periods of crack addiction, and his many efforts in rehab to get free from them, Keith concludes, “To be honest, it didn’t make much difference. He was about the same both ways.” Thus the epitaph on all artistic addictions.)

But after all the heroin and the cocaine and the general sense of a man nodding off in space, what really gets Keith alight, what does he end up caring about most? Yes, he devotes a few glancing evocative paragraphs to guitar playing, the technique of the blues, a few words to warn against freebasing. But what is the one thing that he offers in carefully itemized detail? The one thing that he offers with real zing and passion? His recipes!

His favorite food! His own ways of making shepherd’s pie and bangers and mash—which he reproduces right there in the book alongside his tales of scoring heroin on the Riviera. How you should get bangers made fresh—presumably a challenge in Connecticut, where he lives, though God knows there’s probably a chic pork store in Greenwich by now—and then, interesting point, this, that you should put the sausages cold into the frying pan, and then slowly turn up the heat. Rather an English approach, but still, okay, and there’s something nice about the way he implies his mashed potatoes but doesn’t feel it necessary to explain his mashed potatoes. His shepherd’s pie, ground meat and more of those mashed potatoes, sounds very good—and, as a true food lover will, he insists that the key moment is the moment when you plunge the knife into the shepherd’s pie. The aroma, not the dish, fulfills the appetite. So the attempt to run away from food to something more obviously male, rock and roll, leads us inevitably and inescapably … back to food. If Keith writes down recipes for his readers, we can all write down recipes. And with it share the strong, intelligent realization that it is the first cut of the shepherd’s pie that makes the pie—that is the point of the pie.

And then—there is a connection here, trust me—the point that Keith makes about his distinctive open-G tuning is that it’s a drone tuning, a folk tuning—that one steady note, the G, buzzing in the background even as the rest of the chords mark the changes. (And he makes the musically alert point that Vivaldi and Mozart write this way, too, in reverse, with the steady unchanging note up in the treble.) Would you agree with me that the folk tuning of food, the open-G tuning, is rice pudding? Everywhere you go in the food world, there is a rice pudding playing somewhere in the background, droning a little sweet and nubbly number behind everything more ambitious that goes on. If you go out for Indian food, you can rely on a rice pudding; if you go for Italian, or Greek, there is at least a pudding made with rice. In every culture and every country, as Elisabeth Luard’s lovely book Sacred Food demonstrates, some mix of rice and milk (or coconut milk) and vanilla (or cardamom) and sugar (or honey) is the drone sound of the table. And this sweet, this pudding, is almost always part of rites of passage, of weddings and christenings and funerals, gifts to the gods and rites of the elders. There seems to be something close to a natural magnetism between rice and ritual, most familiar to us in the habit of throwing rice at weddings (and leading to Woody Allen’s perfect one-liner about the wedding where the bride was pregnant and everyone threw puffed rice). And what’s more, just as Keith says about open-G tuning—that it lets you add stray extra notes to the chords, so that in every G there’s a touch of A; in every B dominant seventh, a little hint of E minor—is true of pudding-making, too. A certain sloppy elegance is necessary in both rock guitar and rice desserts.

I make three rice puddings, and each one has a savor and meaning particular to itself. The first and in some ways the simplest, and in some ways my favorite, is the baked-custard rice pudding my mother used to make. I’m not sure where she learned it—and I know that I could answer that question with a phone call, but somehow making that phone call turns recollection into an interview—but it’s simple and perfect. You take two cups of cooked rice, left over from the night before, most often (and I often don’t oversalt the rice so that it works for the next-day pudding), put it in an ovenproof dish, and then make a simple custard alongside—say, six cups of milk, five eggs, two-thirds of a cup of sugar—which you beat together and heat until it’s almost scalded but not yet thickened. Then you just pour it over the rice, add some black raisins, and bake for about an hour at around 350°. Oh, and sprinkle some cinnamon on top when you put it in. You take it out when a knife comes out almost dry. (Almost dry—it’s one of those cooking terms, like “about to boil,” that are unknowable regions that everyone is thought to know.) The thing that I think is nicest about this pudding is what the kids don’t like: the rice and raisins settle down sweetly on the bottom of the pudding cup, while the rich but simple custard sits on top. It’s really a two-layer pudding, a sort of wholesome pousse-café. I love this effect, but it is, I will admit, antipudding in conception, since a platonic pudding is one in which everything is evenly mixed. For children, the promise of a pudding is that there will be no unpleasant surprises.

So the second pudding I make, most often with Olivia, is one that solves this problem by mixing things all together and smooth. I add Indian spices, too. You just make your rice on the stovetop with coconut milk instead of water, and then you make a simple crème anglaise, a stovetop custard: six egg yolks, four cups of milk, into which you place four to eight crushed cardamom pods. You mix the coconut rice into the cardamom custard, sprinkle on cinnamon, and let it cool.

My trouble with this one is that whenever I make a crème anglaise it never gets quite custardy enough. My friend Peter Hoffman suggested working with a candy thermometer, so that I’ll know when it’s at 165°. That helps, though not always and not enough. The curdles come. So I add to the custard… a bit of liquefied cornstarch. That always works. Cornstarch and gelatin, the two thickeners of an earlier age, have more going for them than we quite allow. Cornstarch is also, along with Karo syrup and condensed milk, one of the three bashful but beautiful sweet ingredients. What can improve on a pecan pie made with Karo dark syrup, or on a chocolate fudge sauce made with its lighter brother? And is there anything better than a key lime pie made with condensed milk and a graham-cracker crust? And a butterscotch pudding made with cornstarch and burnt brown sugar has a depth of flavor that few Sauternes can equal. Sweet is simple, emotionally and practically.

More than any dessert I know—more than any soufflé, or molten cake—this rice pudding seems to delight the crowds, and what’s more, it appears to be sophisticated work. I suppose the blend of cardamom and coconut gives a misleading impression of premeditation. (Obviously, this would not be the case in India.)

My third rice pudding hails from Paris, and is a variant of the riz au lait that is such a standard dessert there. It isn’t quite like Greek-coffee-shop rice pudding, that New York staple, which is just a mix of rice and milk and sugar and vanilla, with, let it be said, cornstarch added. This one does something a little more ingenious than most recipes, which are really just marriages of milk and rice cooked slowly so that the rice soaks up the milk and the natural starch in the rice does the work of thickening. In this one, you make that kind of riz au lait—you know, Elizabeth, it’s so simple that it’s embarrassing to recipetize it; you just make sweet milky rice by simmering them together. The only trick is not to let it get too dry. Then you beat by hand a cup and a half of cream till it’s whipped but not quite in that stiff form, and you blend the sweet rice in with the whipped cream and then—this is important—pour it into a narrowish mold and let it refrigerate for quite a while, so that it stiffens up even more.

And once again, it suggests the magic of rice pudding: it overwhelms people, delights them, makes them smile and feel part of some peasant ritual, some rite of passage, even if the ceremony is only a midweek dinner. This is especially true if you serve either the Indian or the French rice pudding with little pots of extras: cherry jam, or dried apricots poached in white wine, something nice. It gives the whole thing a sense of unearned splendor, like listening to Keith play the opening riff of “Start Me Up” and then realizing that it’s just a bar chord and a simple minor seventh shape, up and down the neck of the guitar, simplicity itself, with the recklessness of true simplicity.

Why does rice pudding, in any of its forms, have this ritual resonance? The answer, I think, lies simply in the slowness of its achievement. Eggs are little miracles; one minute slime, the next a meal. Meats are primal. But a rice pudding develops in slow and gradual stages—not even stages, phases, a slow and gradual field, passing from inedible hard grains and unpalatable raw eggs and milk to some combined, involved, semisoupy, semicereal, sweet and starchy but both at once delight. Rice pudding is like life: it’s hard at first, gradually thickens, and ends well enough to make you wish you could have it again. No wonder we use it to mark life passages.

Yet I know, know deep down, that Keith would like these puddings. And your friend Whistler? Ah, Whistler would best like the baked one my mother does, which would remind him of his student days at West Point, of his youth in America, of his mother, too—who, we know, sits in her chair, patiently, while her brilliant boy paints her portrait, and thinks of what she will cook for him when he is done at last.

All best,

Adam