The Table Comes First

THE SAVORY, serious part of the meal is over, and the talk is settling, and then—what happens? The sweet comes out, which some of the diners (the women, as it happens, most often) refuse to eat, and others relish. And there is a last drink, perhaps, and at home people begin to look at their watches (and the hosts longingly at the door), while in the restaurant the weary waiters begin to stack tables and pointedly if politely ask if you will be wanting anything more. At that moment, the bill to pay, the thanks to be offered (“It was absolutely wonderful!”—the degree of hysterical affirmation usually in direct reverse proportion to the degree of pleasure really taken), some sense of summary, of finish, even, perhaps, of a moral, is sought by those who came to the table. They want, it seems, something to take home….

15. Paris at Last

I WORRY about French food in the new age of spices and world cooking, as one might worry about English damp in the age of global warming, or about Canadian civility under the stress of imported talk radio. Something that one just took for granted as a fixed feature of the world suddenly seems fragile and fugitive, even ailing—even, perhaps, on its way out.

Having written about the crisis in French food early on, I suppose I always secretly assumed that French cooking would snap right out of it, the way that North American ice hockey did under the stress of Russian competition. The internal resources of France for cooking were so deep-seated, so powerfully entrenched, so much a part of the logic and wit of French life, that the narrowness and stultified repetition that had overcome so much French cooking seemed sure to end simply with a renewed act of will. Since no one can be more willful than a French chef, it seemed to me merely a matter of time and timing before the inevitable opening-out would take place. A new Robuchon, a next generation Ducasse would seize, say, on North African spices as Carême had once seized on the herbs of Provence—and French cooking would be reborn.

Yet though I would still rather eat in Paris than anywhere else in the world—eating, once again, is a social act before it is a purely sensory one; it calls on our moral taste more than our measuring tongue, and my own moral taste still leads me back inexorably to the wit and intelligence of French civilization—I recognize that the rebirth has not happened, that the crisis I identified, only half-playfully, a decade or more ago is more entrenched now than it was then, and that fewer and fewer people who care about cooking now think of France as first among all others.

And still we go on searching for signs of life. New generations of bistros open, and though they seem more tense than tempting—the demands of French labor laws often lead to the smaller restaurants’ being staffed by an overstressed spouse and an overworked staff—I try them, and cheer. New geniuses are announced and sometimes even new guides are published, and of all of these the most “mediatized,” as the French say, and at the same time the most puzzling, is certainly the food guide published by the group that calls itself, with deliberate insolence, Le Fooding. (The insolence lies in using an English word.)

I suppose I would have an easier time deciding if Le Fooding is going to be able to accomplish all that it has set out to accomplish—which is nothing less than to do the whole of the job that needs to be done, to save the preeminence of French cuisine from going the way of the Roman Empire, the five-act tragedy, and the ocean liner—if I had an easier time defining what it is and what its principles at bottom truly are. That it is a phenomenon is beyond dispute, its success having reached the point where the French daily Figaro announced, last summer, that French food is now divided into two families, each with its own public and cultural identity: “On the one side, Michelin, with its century of cultural expertise; on the other the Fooding guide, born ten years ago in an attempt to break the codes and finally offer real change to a gastronomy that its authors judge to be outdated.”

Yet what, exactly, the new family stands for can be hard to say. At some moments, Le Fooding seems earnest, in the manner of the slow-food movement; at others, it is merely festive, a good-time gang; at still others, it appears determined to wrench the entire culture of good food in France from its historic place, on the nationalist right, to a new home, in the libertarian center. To spend a few months studying its founders and their ideas is to get pretty much the same feeling you get when, studying French history, you have to take up the story of Jansenism at Port-Royal in the seventeenth century: all you can really figure out is that it’s important, that it’s a heresy, and that it’s hard to follow.

The Fooding restaurant guide is the most obvious of the group’s activities. Since its founding, in 2000, by Alexandre Cammas and Emmanuel Rubin, two gastronomic journalists exasperated by the conformity and conservatism of French food culture, Le Fooding has published, from its Right Bank offices, a handsome, atypically larksome, and unusually honest annual encyclopedia of the restaurants and bistros of both Paris and the provinces. (The guide boasts on its cover that its writers pay their own checks and can prove it—not a thing universally true of French food guides.) But the guide is, in a sense, merely the word, not the act, of the enterprise. The movement, which has been reinforced over the years by a constantly changing team of other Fooding-istes, also sponsors mass picnics—“Foodings”!—at which three-star French chefs, long separated from their diners by a kitchen door and centuries of decorum, offer good food in casual, high-spirited settings. These Foodings take place all over France; the atmosphere is somewhere between a buffet dinner and the Woodstock festival.

Le Fooding is in part a move to épater la bourgeoisie—it was at a Fooding event that the young chef Petter Nilsson famously assembled a plate of vegetables that symbolized the world’s religions, with a giant frite in the shape of a cross on top—but it has also been accused, by left-wing journalists, of representing the bourgeoisie; the populist left-wing magazine Marianne charged that it was a kind of cosmopolitan fifth column in the continuing modern assault on French values, and Emmanuel Rubin left the movement last year, disillusioned by what he considered its loss of moral mission.

I first heard about Le Fooding in an e-mail from Raphaël Glucksmann, the filmmaker and human-rights activist (and the son of the philosopher André Glucksmann). “For once, I’m not writing on behalf of the Chechens, the Rwandans, or the Georgians,” he explained cheerfully, and then urged me to meet with his friend Zoé Reyners, who was coming to New York as a kind of avant-garde of the Fooding movement here. Zoé turned out to be an exquisite, nervous blonde in white linen, with a distinct resemblance to the young Brigitte Fossey, and she explained that Le Fooding was planning to come to New York for its first American event, a marriage of art, food, and festival that would be called Le Fooding d’Amour and would take place on the grounds of P.S. 1 in Queens, creating a kind of Lafayette-Washington moment. The best of the new generation of French chefs were flying in to meet the best of the new generation of Americans and cook alongside them. She gave me a copy of the latest Fooding guide, which was illustrated by the young cartoonists who bring so much life these days to French journalism. The cover showed King Kong ripping the dome from a Haussmannian restaurant palace with a look of utter satisfaction as he eats the bourgeois diners inside with an enormous silver spoon. The tone of the reviewing had a jocose quality quite new in France: the section on three-star-style temples was called “Fais-Moi Mal!”—literally, “Make Me Ache!” or, idiomatically, “Hurt Me!” Zoé asked if I’d like to meet Alexandre Cammas, who was arriving in New York the following month for an extended reconnaissance of the new world. “He will be taking a house in Brooklyn, with his family, in order to lay the groundwork for American Fooding,” she said.

I met Alexandre, with Zoé, in Bryant Park; he turned out to be the Danton of the Fooding movement, one of those passionately articulate young Frenchmen who speak with the relentless eloquence of French letters and philosophy, answering each rhetorical question as they raise it. “Fooding?” he said. “I was writing for the magazine Nova, and I needed a rhyme for the title of a piece.” We had now settled on a bench. “I intended the word as a mélange of ‘food’ and ‘feeling’—and I like the provocation of using an English word within the context of French cuisine,” he explained. “I was already a food writer—I had been at Libération for a while—and this was in 1999, a time when restaurants in France were already beginning to move, to change. There was a new element of design, a new element of casual yet serious food. The old choice between la cuisine de bistrot and la grande cuisine française was ending.

“I wasn’t, in the beginning, trying to do anything except characterize a little phenomenon—but I found it growing, in response to a new need.” He cleared his throat and leaned forward, like one who needs to resolve complexities that his innocent listener hasn’t even grasped yet. “What does it mean, the Fooding movement?” he went on. “Food and feeling—that’s the heart of it. But with what practical effect? ‘Feeling’ in the sense that we mean to be part of le goût de son temps—the taste of one’s time, though ‘taste’ in English is too weak a word. ‘Fooding’ means to eat and drink with feeling—to recognize that one eats with the nose, the eyes, and the mouth, with everything that makes us human! At the time we began, French culinary journalism was narrowly focused on the cooking of the kidneys, the tenderness of the poularde. What was on the plate was all that counted! But who lives that way? Who eats that way? We wanted cooks who cooked with the whole of their selves and souls, not technicians of the table. French cuisine was caught in a museum culture: the dictatorship of a fossilized idea of gastronomy. And this dictatorship has been enforced by tourism: you have tourists packing in to experience gastronomy in a kind of perpetual museum of edification. We wanted to be outside that, sur le pont, on the bridge, in front, defining everything that is new. We wanted to escape foie gras, volaille de Bresse, all the clichés.”

He caught himself, bad-mouthing foie gras being a bit like bad-mouthing the Communion wafer: “Not that we have anything against it—we adore foie gras, and who doesn’t love poulet de Bresse? But all this style that had been mechanically copied over and over—it’s not living cuisine. In a living cuisine, things move and mix together, and that’s what makes the cuisine of tomorrow. The classic French cuisine was dying. Everyone knew it outside of France, but it had to be said within. And it had to be said with joy—not as something to mourn but as something to celebrate, the beginning of a new taste of one’s time.”

Alexandre and Zoé went on to explain that the movement first made its mark with the publication of the guide, which immediately became notorious for ignoring some great names, like the restaurateur Guy Savoy, and honoring such masters as Alain Ducasse for their casual fusion places rather than for their grand restaurants. “We left out Guy Savoy not because he is not a fine cook but because he was adding nothing new,” Alexandre explained. “We want food to be a series of provocations, not mechanical pleasures. Food must belong to its time.”

I asked Zoé and Alexandre whom they would include on their list of Fooding chefs in Paris, and wondered if I might have lunch at a Fooding restaurant with a Fooding guru the next time I was over. Zoé mentioned a few places, including Stéphane Jégo’s L’Ami Jean, a small Basque bistro in the Seventh Arrondissement; Yves Camdeborde’s Le Comptoir, a twenty-seat dining room in the Hôtel Relais Saint-Germain; and Bruno Doucet’s La Régalade, a bistro out near the Porte de Châtillon.

Both Zoé and Alexandre had the warm glow of revolutionary sectarians in their eyes, and, having shared their fond exasperation with the stasis of French cooking, I was inspired. At the same time, their desire for a head-to-toe, well-articulated renewal of French cuisine, complete with a guide and an advance guard of agitators, seemed a peculiarly calculated way of achieving increased spontaneity. The systematic, thought-through approach to a renaissance in casualness might itself be a symptom of the problem, it occurred to me, as though they were saying to one another, If only we could persuade our countrymen to stop being so entirely French, we could persuade them to be entirely French.

When I next got to Paris, later that summer, I realized that I had heard some of this before: American critics had been complaining for a while that French cooking, which had led the world in the idea that food might be art, had become stereotyped, unreal, and remote from life, and the complaint had at moments echoed in France. I had been one of these critics, and not the quietest or most decorous, voicing the complaint myself at length in an essay back in the nineties, to the anger of some in France and the pained acceptance of many others. (The critic Michael Steinberger had more recently gotten a good book out of the same theme.)

The grounds of the complaint, as I had made it once, and others since, wasn’t just against French food, which was still as good as ever, but against the stasis in French cooking. Italian cooking, in particular, had established itself as the base, the longed-for country, the dominant style. In England, Italy had cleared all before it, become what France had been a century before, when Elizabeth Pennell took the greatness of French cooking for granted, and spaghetti had been sneaked in as a strange exotic possibility. Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray had, at the River Café in London, created a kind of satellite version of Italy which some of us thought as good as anything in the Old Country. More important, they had made Italian cooking—expressed strictly in English, without any of the patina of the moda antico—the natural language of the English cook. In America, Italian cooking, under the more temperamental presence of Marcella Hazan, still had something Old World to it, was “spoken” with an accent—Italian restaurants still had Italian waiters—but it was what men with expense accounts wanted for lunch and what women with children cooked for dinner. The grammar of French cooking itself—a lump of protein sautéed in a pan, the pan cleansed by a liquid, the liquid reduced to a sauce—which had been so radically new only a century before, now seemed tired on your plate and lethal to your heart. In its place, a variety of techniques, some old and Asian, some new and Catalonian, had taken their place: the grilled fish with a relish, the sweet-savory quick cook and slow simmer, based on curries and stir-fries, had become dominant. A kind of West Coast offense (short gains with quick slants) had taken over cooking—lots of small, intensely flavored plates instead of one big rich main. We live in a tapas civilization—quick-hitting bursts of information and gossip and malice—and a veal chop with butter and mustard sauce or a filet of beef with pastry and peppercorns suddenly seemed as dated as the four-hundred-page novel brooding on a single woman’s plight.

As always in life, you voice a complaint against your beloved only to regret it later. “A Lover’s Complaint” is the title of the first love poem, not the last. In New York, the empire of the French restaurant, which in my first years there had stretched from Le Lavandou, on East Sixty-first Street, to Le Périgord, on East Fifty-second, one long imperial highway stretching across the Upper East Side, had been reduced to a single restaurant. On birthdays we went to La Grenouille for the old food—cheese soufflés and Dover sole with white sauce and filet of beef with those green peppercorns—and cherished the last refuge of the red banquette and the towering bouquet. There was still good brasserie food around—the simple country-based food that had itself been fast food in France a century before, grilled chicken and choucroute, which is just franks and beans. That you could find all over. But I longed for another kind of French meal: that veal chop with mustard sauce, a purée of endives and a small potato gratin, a sharp salad with a smooth and tangy goat cheese and then a bright and supple apricot soufflé. A foie de veau with raisins and mustard-tarragon butter, and an endive salad and île flottante and profiteroles. Lobster à l’Américaine, sole à la neige, poulet à la normande. You didn’t find them much even in Paris, for while there might be stasis in French food, it was stasis that had frozen the high end and the lower end while leaving out the middle. The cuisine bourgeois was passing even as the old bourgeois themselves were. City food for city people. Food for twilight times. You couldn’t find that anymore.

Not long ago, I had coffee with Benedict Beauge, a French writer who occupied the necessary ground between history and food writing. “We no longer have a crisis of French food,” he said with the bright gloom, the Epicurean skepticism, of the French food lover. “Now we have a crisis of the French restaurant.” He meant, I discovered, that the best new cooks in France—Guy Martin at Le Grand Véfour, Passard, Pierre Gagnaire at his own restaurant—were as good as anyone, having absorbed the lessons of the Spanish with a greater aplomb, but their places were still rooted in the old Michelin system: three-star temples, fit for a voyage. There was a kind of permanent misfit between the cooking talent and the culinary temple. The idea of “worth a voyage” expresses its nineteenth-century nature. We now think of food being worth a revelation. And revelations, we know, happen in eccentric places, caves and chapels.

I was moved enough by memories of the old classic New York French restaurants—all those stuffed chicken breasts and tiny copper serving pots, all those waiters, by turns obsequious and imperious, all that puff pastry and red velvet upholstery—that I thought to salute them, or elegize them internally, at least, by being present for the last lunch at La Côte Basque. The classic, famous old restaurant was closing on March 7, 2004, as its chef-proprietor, Jean-Jacques Rachou, neared seventy. Along with the deaths of Lutèce and Gage & Tollner, the event marked the end of something or other, at a time of who knows what—but it needed to be observed.

The Côte Basque that ended was not the Côte Basque that began. That one, familiar to readers of Truman Capote (who set a gossipy story there), was actually one block over, east of Fifth Avenue, in the space that became a Disney Store. The entire operation—the tables, the banquettes, and the murals of the Basque coast by Bernard Lamotte that gave the place its name—was dislodged in 1995, and replanted more or less successfully in the new space farther west.

Historians, or, at least, chroniclers of the New York restaurant world, will also recall that the original Côte Basque was intended, rather defiantly, not to be what it ended up being—a temple of haute cuisine. It was Henri Soulé’s second restaurant, the “relaxed,” ostensibly bistro-ish alternative to his Le Pavillon, which was itself a relic of the 1939 World’s Fair. As Joseph Wechsberg explained in The New Yorker some forty years ago, the Pavillon was the first restaurant in New York to be emphatically and uncompromisingly major—three-star cooking, as they did it in Paris—and La Côte Basque was the first to be major in a minor way. (Reading Wechsberg now, one is struck by how tired the food sounds, much of it made earlier in the day and presented as a buffet froid, to be admired as people entered the restaurant.) La Côte Basque, however, became the fashionable place, on the universal principle that whatever is defined in advance as exclusive is uninteresting, while whatever is defined in advance as informal can have an overlay of exclusivity bestowed upon it. La Côte Basque, which stumbled after Soulé’ death, was revived in the early eighties by Jean-Jacques Rachou, who had earlier created what was for a spell one of the best places in New York, Le Lavandou. Rachou was the master of a brief rococo interregnum. (This had to be a food-magazine cover line back then: “The Rococo Interregnum.”) His chicken was still stuffed; his fish still imported; and if he met a tournedos he greeted it with a slice of foie gras and a truffle sauce. He was mostly famous for the free-form inventiveness of his plates, which often looked, one critic wrote, if memory serves, “like the flags of some effete nation.” The style had its moment, and the restaurant got a cheerful second life, which is now over. There is a second life for institutions when people in their twenties arrive; and another second life when people in their fifties return—the second sort of second life was the kind that La Côte Basque had.

And yet, looking around the room at the red-faced and the silver-haired, the soon-to-be-thrombotic and the recently revalved, the women who still tied their scarves to their bags in the manner of Babe Paley, and men who still dressed in trim gray suits in the manner of her husband, one realized that it was the restaurant’s thorough and even comic Frenchness that had made it so entirely New York. The banquettes, the lovely red-and-white-striped awning above the bar, the flow of penguined waiters, and above all those murals, showing Basque harbor scenes—no truly French place could be so resolutely French, any more than a truly New York restaurant would ever do itself up in pigeons and water towers. The colors, the open brushwork, and the sea beyond—all of which were intended, in 1962, to make you feel as if you had been transported to southwest France in 1905—now made you feel, one last time, as if you had been transported to New York in 1962. The Gotham Bar and Grill could be anywhere; La Côte Basque could only be in New York City.

And the food? It was okay, yet weirdly disconnected. What I had wanted, but not what I had dreamed of. Things were roasted crisp and sautéed crisper, the truffles were black and the Madeira sauce gleaming, and it was all done with the rich and, if truth be told, slightly sick-making flavor of the old-style cooking, of the kind Levin and Tynan had known. Had our palate changed, or had the cooking changed? More the first than the second, surely. The cobbler must stick to his last, but the chef must stick to his customers, and one generation’s delights are the next generation’s curiosities. At lunch, someone said, apropos of Capote, that taste is the last thing that passes after talent is gone—it is the most mysterious of gifts, the one thing that lasts, and yet the one that always changes. It seemed a sufficiently elegiac thought to take back home, along with the memory of lunch.

So France is gone, France has fled, what was once an empire is like Byzantium just before the Turks won for good—merely a citadel. Yet the Italian empire exists and flourishes. Why the New World over the Old World is easy to understand. But why Italy over France? Perhaps because what Italy represents in the American, or at least the New York mind, is the easy Old World. Olive trees and cheap red wine, pasta and garlic, tomatoes cooked down and cheese scraped off—it all feels accessible, where French cooking, even as it dates, has some evident degree of difficulty about it. The simple acts of French country food—separating eggs, making crème anglaise, beating egg whites, reducing sauces, making liaisons of a sauce and a thickener, even one as plain as flour and butter—are hard or, anyway, harder. Even the peasant dishes can wear you out; even cassoulet is complicated. There was a time, now passed, when the difficulty was itself an attraction. “Mastering” the art of French cooking was the point, and mastery is something different from merely making. We make Italian food; we master French. (And we muddle through with American and Greek and the rest.) We like results.

But there is also something ever more insular about French cooking itself, and that can’t be denied. To read, for instance, the most ambitious recent books about French food is to note a puzzling inability to see beyond France, even in defense or counterattack. Cooking: The Quintessential Art, for instance, by Hervé This and Pierre Gagnaire, is an attempt to revive the old eighteenth-century form of a romantic educational dialogue, in this case between two characters called Jean and Hélène, who flirt, in a cerebral way, as they talk about the meanings of food. The principle of “natural” tastes is explored and rejected, narrative in cooking is considered (“I’m not always sure how to ‘read’—that is, eat—dishes that consist of several elements,” Jean confesses), and the complexities of color and taste laid out (we describe red wine with dark adjectives; white with lighter ones).

But though the wonderfully named This advertises himself, not without reason, as one of the founders of molecular cuisine—he is, in fact, the first, or among the first, to use the term, and his discoveries include the Tesla-like use of an electrical field to smoke salmon—the national question is never raised anywhere in their book. Ferran Adrià and his brother Albert of elBulli, the prime Spanish magicians, if not the first inventors, of molecular cuisine, make no appearance in the book at all, as exemplars or enemies, and Gagnaire—a great cook, to be sure—is uncritically accepted as defining the totality of the new cooking. The dominance of French cooking is simply asserted; the references to history are all narrowly French—Carême and Curnonsky—and even the world’s sense that French cooking is in crisis cannot penetrate the small hard shell of complacency. It reminds the reader of the statues in the Luxembourg Gardens, where Branly’s pedestal advertises him as the inventor of radio, and Lamarck’s as the father of evolution. Neither claim is entirely false, but both are a bit enclosed.

I had a doubled sense of this when I went to an epic French dinner in the company of Beauge. The Beard Foundation in New York had assembled three of the great chefs of France to cook together a single celebratory dinner. The three were Joël Robuchon, Alain Ducasse, and Guy Savoy—but it was well understood by all involved that, as fine a cook and restaurateur as Savoy is, he was very much a kind of Jordan placed between the Egypt of Ducasse and the Israel of Robuchon. Two grand masters of French cooking, the greatest since the heyday of Paul Bocuse, they were legendary for having, if not disdain, then at least a glossy indifference toward each other—not so much diva-ish as duke-like in its rivalry. Beauge is a self-conscious follower of Brillat-Savarin, about whom he has written the entry in the soon-to-appear revised encyclopedia of French food, and whom he recognizes, as not enough do, as the great liberal of gastronomy—the man who carved a progressive path. We agreed that one problem in French food, buried for a long time, to be sure, was the rich but reactionary tradition of Grimod de La Reynière. It made French cooking narrowly French, denying its mixed-up cosmopolitan basis, and turned France toward undue navel gazing. We are paying the price for the national narcissism now, which is, always, not the end of fascination with oneself, but the growing indifference of everyone else.

The lineup of wines was excellent, and we began with a Robuchon dish: potatoes with white truffle. We tasted it.

“Yes, this is delicious. But”—Benedict’s brow furrowed—“how could it not be delicious? If we are to root for white truffles and boiled potatoes?…” We stopped for a pull on a glass of Riesling. Benedict, in a red tie (I had gone tieless, as a little gesture of independence, I suppose), looked at my collar gravely. “I did not know the codes,” he said, “or what degree of idiosyncrasy one could show without spilling over into impertinence.”

Not long before, Guy Savoy had said, “There is no way that this dinner could happen in Paris. There is no way.” The implication was, it didn’t need to be said, that in Paris the competitive pressures would have just been too intense. “Ducasse is an emperor, a CEO of cuisine—omnipresent, omnismart, all-seeing… Robuchon is a man of the kitchen, a man devoted to technique and style. They have no rivalry, merely a division of labors,” one of their supporters who had come from France announced. This view of the two of them is not entirely wrong—it has been a long time since either has been cooking in a kitchen every night—but it does not, perhaps, define the other problem, which is that in Paris they are “marques,” brands, before they are cooks, and the difficulty in bringing them together is less the difficulty of having two sopranos singing side by side than it is the difficulty of making a blend of Pepsi and Coke, or, if that is too plebeian, of Chanel No. 5 and Lanvin’s Arpège. You could do it, of course, but it would not exactly be an advance, or an adventure, just an oddity of the evening. Each has a style so distinct that they can only be left alone.

The next plate was by Guy Savoy, one of his classics: an artichoke soup with black truffle and a brioche. (I was so hungry that I ate the brioche first.) “This is a classic plate,” Benedict said seriously. “But it is not quite as perfect as it is at his place, where the quality of the bouillon is better. Still—it is beyond complaint.” And it was, too: pungent and rich by turns. However, we had had two plates, and one turned on white truffles and the next on black, and though doubtless Ferran Adrià and René Redzepi use truffles when they want to, in neither’s cooking is the truffle ever the point, the climax, the concluding phrase.

All the wines—save one good Oregon Pinot Noir—were French, and they kept the evening going. “Except explain to me,” Benedict said, “why in America I am always served red wines that are ten degrees too hot, and white wines that are ten degrees too cold?” It was true: red wines, even Burgundies, in America tend not to be served at cave temperatures but at room temperatures, and they get soupy and too obviously alcoholic tasting, instead of being neatly gripped by the proper bouquet of smoke and dried fruits, in the process. “It is part of the predicament—the meaning of room temperature has changed so much from the nineteenth century,” he commented. We agreed that we liked our champagne, at least nonvintage champagne, very cold indeed, and we began to talk about the best champagnes we had drunk.

Benedict furrowed his brow again. “Well, a great Salon. Or perhaps a Winston Churchill Pol Roger.” This was the great prime minister’s favorite, and, despite the recent vintage of its name, it really is great. (Though, to be sure, most of the grandes marques of champagne—Dom Pérignon and Grand Siècle and so on—despite the antiqued bottles they often come in, are actually quite new, in the wine scheme of things, usually dating from after the Second World War.)

“I recall,” he said, “I recall a plate that one of the Troisgros brothers prepared for me once to go along with a bottle of the Churchill cuvée. He took a plate of scallops, coquilles Saint-Jacques, and then minced them, and turned them into a gently adhering ball, with raw black truffles adhering to the outside!” His excitement was manifest and contagious; he turned toward me as he spoke. “Then he poured a boiling, a truly boiling, reduction of asparagus! My God! It was served with a white Hermitage. My God! Perhaps it was the single best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

He shook his head, and I sensed the mix of remembered delight, nostalgia, and continuing sense of impasse that such memories would set off in a great French eater in this day. It was great, it was simple—too simple, probably, to be kept on a three-star menu—and it… led nowhere. It was an announcement about ingredients, produce, more than it was a new idea about cooking. Delicious, but not driven. It wasn’t that it was too simple to be praised; it’s that it was too elemental to become essential. Boiling broth and raw scallops was, in the day of complex illusionistic desserts and freeze-dried foams, like a beautiful tune played on a recorder: it might be more beautiful than anything made in an Auto-Tune mix, but you couldn’t really call it modern.

There was a fancy, heavy grilled aubergine by Ducasse, which seemed to both of us typical of Ducasse’s cooking: complex in statement and lacking in point. The main course, prepared—“prepared,” of course, more by decree than work—by the New York interloper Jean-Georges Vongerichten, was a rack of lamb with a hyper-hot sweet-and-sour Chinese glaze. We agreed that it was good, but so essentially Asian that it didn’t point a new way as much as surrender the field.

“There are no new restaurateurs in Paris,” Benedict concluded gloomily. “We have star chefs in three-star temples, each sunning himself in the light of his own name—but it is a food spectacle, not a food culture.” Not a food scene, I thought, and I explained to him what I meant, a little laboriously. “No real magazines, no real food plates… no wonder the next generation looks outside France for the future.” He shrugged. “Did I tell you about the butter I had in Montenegro? Serbian butter!”

No American or British eater would eat with such philosophical aplomb, with such innocent, unwatchful enthusiasm or with such an unfussy, reliable, vigilant feeling for all the details, long ago acquired—the temperature of a wine, the taste of a butter, the placement of a plate. It was not the dreary fussing to get it “right” of the anxious new eater—that nose-sniffing, brow-creasing, glass-swirling show—but a wry French sense of order and irony. French civilization has a taste for excessive order, and then an ironic sense about its own taste. (Italians have the ironic sense and Germans the excessive order, but neither has both together.)

French food persisted as a civilization after it was finished as a form. I loved the civilization so much that I would take it, so to speak, on an empty plate. But I would rather have the form and the civilization to go with it, and don’t see why we can’t. But Benedict knew that Brillat-Savarin’s tradition was being endangered by its own heirs, and when he talked about the best butter, he talked about a table in Montenegro. Without his saying so, it was plain to me, by the lift of an eyebrow and a benevolent shrug of the shoulder, that he regarded the Fooding folks as a bit silly and self-promoting—but it was also plain (by the droop of the eye and a sigh of the mind) that he knew that what they said was mostly true.

The ongoing insularity of French food, however defensive it may make a Francophile, is the real target of the Fooding movement. Their program is largely negative; what we don’t want is more of this, or This. What they do want is… whatever else there may be.

Doing some research in the French papers, I discovered the same puzzlement that I had had about Le Fooding. One magazine interviewer commented to Cammas and Rubin, “I don’t see what, exactly, in Le Fooding is revolutionary or even original—you’re searching for good little restaurants that aren’t too expensive. Where’s the novelty in that?” For that matter, a similar complaint about the conservatism of French cooking was at the heart of the nouvelle-cuisine revolution back in the seventies; its version of the Fooding guide was the Gault Millau guide of Henri Gault and Christian Millau.

Nor were the cooks who were being touted by Le Fooding for challenging the paradigm in any real way revolutionary. Le Comptoir, La Régalade—perfectly nice places, but not wildly imaginative. And, anyway, it seemed to me, back in Paris for July, that the new crisis in cooking looked about the same as the old—wonderful food, wonderful rooms, all passé by New York or London standards—and, surely, if the same crisis continues for decades it is no longer a crisis but merely a condition. It was a cheering thought. The real absence in France was not of good food but of what might be called think food—places like elBulli, or like Fergus Henderson’s St. John, where the food is devoted to an idea, whether of molecular transformations or of whole-beast eating. And, past a certain point, I realized that the absence of think food was not an absence that truly, in my heart, I regretted. Not everything has to evolve. There are enough ideas in life without having them all on your plate.

Nonetheless, I decided to continue my research. Another member of the Fooding team, Marine Bidaud, met me for lunch at L’Ami Jean, on a quiet side street near the Eiffel Tower. Where Zoé had been an embodiment of fifties French beauty, elegant and tense, Marine was more in the line of the young Bardot. She coolly explained that her values derived from her upbringing in the South of France, where her family still gathered around the table, and that she loved L’Ami Jean because it put her in mind of that tradition. She turned out to be an ex–art historian, who had done research on, among other things, Courbet’s great gynecological picture The Origin of the World. I picked at the charcuterie as we spoke. (I mention the glamour of the Fooding officials only because it is so atypical of the old French dispensation. Gourmands in the past were always middle-aged men with napkins tucked under their chins, or perhaps insolent thirty-somethings, like Gault and Millau, and never beautiful young women—or men either, for that matter. I pressed Alexandre about the astonishing glamour of the Fooding-istes, and he admitted that it was somewhat purposeful to have a staff that gave eating a more alluring aura than was always the norm in France.)

Stéphane Jégo, the chef at L’Ami Jean, had a black eye that day—the prize of a rugby fight—but his food was wonderful, varied and intelligent, and full of southwestern folk charm: slow-cooked veal shin, tender without being mushy and comforting without being dull; the usual foie gras, but here more buttery than bland; and the best rice-pudding dessert I have ever had, complete with black-cherry confit. I hadn’t had a better meal in Paris in a long time. But was it a new frontier? Could you build a revolution on rice pudding, even great rice pudding? “We need to change, we need to move,” Marine said, but the movement seemed to be movement within the same familiar thing.

Change we can eat… The Western world has been filled with food-reform movements in the past twenty years. Slow food, the Edible Schoolyard, the various vegetarian and ethical movements sprung by the likes of Peter Singer—in no other time would a highly regarded young novelist like Jonathan Safran Foer view a book about the anti–animal eating movement as a necessary extension of his oeuvre, the way a novelist in the sixties might have felt obliged to write a book about the antiwar movement. This proves, depending on your point of view, either that the reform of food has become essential to the reform of life or that, failing in the reform of life, we reform our food instead. Yet all these movements—vegan and whole beast, localist and seasonalist—share a sense that the industrialized, Americanized food economy is destructive of small-scale, European, traditional, farm-based eating.

What distinguishes Le Fooding, I was beginning to understand, was that it is, in effect, against an overly European, tradition-minded approach to food. Slow is the last thing it wants French cooking to be, French cooking being slow enough already. The goal of the Fooding movement is to break down French snobbery, in the form of its hidebound, hypersensitive discrimination, while the goal of the slow-food movement, though not put quite this way, is to build up American hidebound hyperdiscrimination. Fooding is a form of culinary futurism: it wants the table to move as fast as modern life. (And, indeed, the Italian futurists were obsessed with food, and wrote their own cookbook.) The Fooding guide is open to pizzerias; Alexandre says that it is even open to fast food, in the right time and the right place. Although McDonald’s and the like are not included in the guide, Alexandre has admitted to a certain affection for the Chipotle Mexican Grill, and can recall a welcome meal at a McDonald’s in the Carpathian Mountains.

When I pressed Alexandre about the difference between the nouvelle-cuisine revolution in the seventies and the Fooding revolution, he had no difficulty defining it. “Nouvelle cuisine manifested itself in terms of rules,” he said. “Its practitioners rejected the old rules but had rules of their own: instead of too much butter, no butter at all. They replaced the norms with other norms. We’re for liberty, for the end of categories—a good meal is a rich experience, of any sort. They said no butter. We say no rules! No rules save excellence.” He looked grave. “And another thing. Nouvelle cuisine was largely cut off from the changes in the society going on around it. It was a palace revolution. We want a cuisine of this time that is in harmony with this time. The philosophy of food in France has always bent toward the right, sometimes the extreme right—Christian Millau and Henri Gault both came from right-wing backgrounds. I find that the posture of Le Fooding can be replayed in politics, but in a different key. Not Sarkozy, but Cohn-Bendit. A new openness. An end to false boundaries between peoples, as between brasseries, bistros, grand restaurants, and the like. All that matters is talent.”

In America and England, you are what you think about eating. Tell me where you stand on Michelle Obama’s organic White House garden and (with the exception of a handful of “Crunchy Cons” and another handful of grumpy left-wing nostalgists for whiskey and cigarettes) I can tell what the rest of your politics are. People who are in favor of a new approach to food—even if that approach involves a return to heritage breeds and discarded farming methods—are in favor of a new approach to social life. But in France the philosophy of food does not break on such neat party lines. In France, the diehards for the traditional national cuisine tend to write for leftish magazines and newspapers, like Marianne and Libération, while those most open to innovation from the exotic tend to be found in the pages of the center-right Le Point and Le Figaro. An organic garden at the Elysée Palace might be a sign of surging nationalism, or of pluralist internationalism… it would be hard to know which in advance. Alexandre, who says that he now regrets his vote for the centrist François Bayrou in the last presidential election, cannot, as a rule, count on a reliable base of supporters, which may be why Le Fooding constantly needs to whip up new enthusiasts at its events. The politics of food in France cut haphazardly and unpredictably across party lines and allegiances; tell me what you think about eating, and I will tell you only that you are French.

And yet there was enough intuitive enthusiasm to bring a handful of those new-old French cooks to P.S. 1, for Le Fooding d’Amour. Organized by a new executive at Le Fooding named Anna Polonsky, a young Anouk Aimée as rendered by Modigliani, it had induced Yves Camdeborde and Stéphane Jégo, the twin princes of the French movement, to make the trip, and several fashionable New York cooks—among them Lee Hanson, of Minetta Tavern, and David Chang, of Momofuku—came, too. There was a belly dancer, and wandering musicians, and long lines at the food tables; Stéphane Jégo’s slow-cooked lamb, braised for twenty-four hours, was, like his Paris veal shin, particularly memorable, as, in another way, were the mini burgers from Minetta.

I sought out Yves Camdeborde, and he spoke intently about his commitment to Fooding as a movement. “If we don’t do this, we’re against the wall,” he began. “The Michelin Guide approach is dead. I worked at the grandes maisons, at the Crillon. They look at the rug, and they measure the chandeliers. We’ll go right into a wall if we continue this way. What can it mean? Two stars? Three stars? Who cares?” His tone was not angry, or indignant. He simply looked over at the tables of the American chefs, passing out mini burgers as lines grew ever longer. “It’s more than a bistro movement. People say, Bistro, bistro, bistro. But what I do is not bistro—it’s aubergiste.” He looked at me keenly, to make sure I followed the distinction: an auberge is a rural inn. “I’m a kind of urban aubergiste. It’s a cuisine of complexity and high quality—high cooking without pretension. Slow food—slow food is about defending the traditions, the terroirs, the quality of products. It’s about producers. This movement is about consumers: about remaking the clientele. It’s a way of increasing the spontaneity of things.”

As Camdeborde said that, I suddenly saw the right analogy: Le Fooding was to cooking what the New Wave was to French cinema. The hidden goal was to Americanize French food without becoming American, just as the New Wave, back in the fifties and sixties, was about taking in Hollywood virtues without being Hollywoodized—taking in some of the energy and optimism and informality that the French still associate with American movies while reimagining them as something distinctly French. It had a similar cast of characters, with Cammas as André Bazin, the propagandist; Rubin as the anathematized Eric Rohmer; Jégo as Truffaut, the humanist-revolutionary; and Camdeborde as Godard, the serious radical. Like the New Wave filmmakers, these chefs had a vague sense of what they wanted, combined with a vigorous determination to achieve it, whatever the hell it was. Both were movements to remake French audiences in the light of American attitudes—to refashion their expectations as much as to create a new kind of object. The idea was that we had to change taste in order to change art. Appreciating old movies in a new way was as much a part of the legacy of the New Wave as making new ones. Eating with a new attitude was as important to Le Fooding as actually eating something new. The creative act in cooking was to change the style of criticism.

The morning after the Fooding event in Queens, I submitted this analogy to Alexandre during a walk, and he allowed that there might be something in it. He was shining with delight at the success of the launch, and was already making plans for new campaigns in France and America. He told me that he had begun work on a bande dessinée—France is a place where the adult comic book is a major vehicle for communicating information and emotion—that would expose the history of clandestine right-wing propaganda in French food writing. (It’s true that French food writing has tended to be reactionary; the most famous French food writer of the past century, Robert Courtine, was revealed to have been an active anti-Semitic collaborator with the Vichy regime.) Alexandre goes further. Even Brillat-Savarin’s far more liberal and famous definition of gastronomy’s aim—to regulate and fix limits for appetite—is, he thinks, touched by a panicky need for control. “Think how we would feel if we used the same words for the study of sex!” he exclaimed. “To regulate and fix the limits of it! Our role is to work against that tradition: to open minds, to reveal history, to change views. It should be a movement of the young.”

The most recent Fooding guide is in a way the most provocative. Nearly all the Michelin three-star restaurants have been dropped completely, there are passages in English, and, most important, a couple of new chefs have been identified who can fairly be called revolutionary: Adeline Grattard, of Yam’Tcha, on the Rue Sauval, who has invented a Sino-French fusion cuisine rooted largely in steaming and teas; and, still more revolutionary, Gregory Marchand, a young Frenchman who trained in New York and London—an unthinkable notion twenty years ago—and whose restaurant, on the Rue du Nil, is actually called Frenchie. The next Fooding event in New York, promised for September, would be, instead of once again a Franco-American conversation, a match, even a confrontation, between San Francisco and New York chefs. “We don’t want to be narrowly identified as a ‘Franco-Français’ movement, just bringing French chefs to America,” Anna confided recently. “Then we might as well be part of the French cultural ministry.”

Alexandre is particularly glad to be coming back to New York. “I grew up watching American movies,” he said the morning after the Fooding event in Queens. “America still feels so young to me. I love New York. I still see things like Momofuku that are entirely of New York. Can we make that kind of place in France?” He mused for a moment, and then brightened.

“Do you know a film I love?” he asked. “Tarzan’s New York Adventure. Do you know it? With Johnny Weissmuller? And that scene when he leaps from the Brooklyn Bridge?” His hand moved through the air, Tarzan jumping from the bridge. “I love that moment. It’s an important moment for me. It seems so, so romantic.”

16. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Salmon, Broccoli, Repentance

Dear Mrs. Pennell:

Tonight I shall make my repentance meal, my remorse meal: salmon and broccoli with brown rice. It’s the one meal I do when I am feeling guilty about all else I’ve been doing. For of course, despite all my brave talk about the relativity of taste, for all that I can reference the whirligig of fashion and the inevitability of alterations in likings, the truth is that I am as much a captive of my time’s tastes and taboos as anyone. I make cream sauces, but I feel rotten about them afterward. Guilt rises in my craw as I contemplate a beefsteak, whatever brave things I may say about the scavenger ethic, and so I believe in the holy-healthy trinity of wild salmon and organic broccoli and brown rice. It is a plate that tastes like forgotten virtue. It is the right dinner for a moment of shame.

And all this remorse, this penitence, this doubt, is directed, or occasioned, anyway, by what now seems to be my misguided romance with you, Elizabeth. The bad habit of the strategist is to go one bridge too far, and the worst vice of the overeducated is to read one book too many. It is a form of hubris: wiser to find something good, enjoy it, and not contaminate it by searching too much further. Do not discover Carlyle’s politics, or Scott Fitzgerald’s parenting, or Philip Larkin’s taste in porn. It will screw you up to no good purpose, and diminish the writer without adding to your understanding. I know this, and should have quit while I was ahead.

You see, I found the book you wrote upon your return to Philadelphia in 1904. It was full of life. Like me, you have and keep a warm appreciation of the beauty of old Philadelphia—its grid, so neatly laid out in inward-looking streets and squares with none of the relentlessness (nor the dynamism) of New York’s less perfectly ordered plan. The Schuylkill city’s spaciousness, its slight air of eighteenth-century clarity and red-brick virtue. You love all that, too, and I read all that with pleasure.

And then I found within your book a line of stark, vigorous bigotry directed not just at the undeserving but at—well, directly at me, or, rather, at my not-so-distant great-grandparents, who were among the Russian Jews who had since your youth taken over the center city of Philadelphia. And what possessed you was not mere social bigotry, but real animus. “I cannot understand, and no one can explain to me, why the Russian Jew has been allowed to push his way in [to the city],” you write. “I have heard all about his virtues; nobody need remind me of them; I know that he is carrying off everything at the University so that rich Jews can begin to think in turn that they should in return make it a gift or a bequest, as no rich Jew has yet, I believe. I know that the young Philadelphian must give up his sports and his gaieties if he is to compete with the young Russian Jew who never allows himself any recreation on the road to success—I might add the fact that the Russian Jew has mastered, in a very short time, the possibilities of bankruptcy and arson.”

What particularly offends you is the presence of Russian Jews, like my great-grandparents, on the legendary inner, tree-named streets of the city, Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine. “The tragedy is that the Russian Jew should have descended upon just this section, should now, not so much dispute it with him [the old Philadelphians] as oust him from it—the Russian Jew, a Jew by religion but not by race, who has been found impossible in every country on the continent of Europe onto which he has drifted, so impossible that when that country is Holland that the Jews who have been there for centuries collect among themselves the money to send him post-haste on to England and America….” More, and then more, the old and usual ugliness, and with the usual much-rehearsed and patently insincere exceptions: The old, original Jews of Philadelphia were all right in their place.

This is, of course, in one way the standard anti-Semitism of your place and time and circumstance. Henry James shared it, and for the same reasons, and expressed it in almost exactly the same way: the Jews who had filled the Lower East Side seemed to him as remote from his ideas of Americanness as the Russian Jews on Spruce Street seem to you. I know that. I can tell myself what is true, that this bigotry was the bigotry of your people and your time, to be found in Henry Adams, too, and for the same reason: like Henry James, he had grown up in one America, and found himself in what seemed to be another one, very different and disconcerting. These are the standard-issue attitudes of the Old Americans of the East Coast cities confronted with the new immigrants, and they go on to this day, when the Old Americans are often the descendants of the original obnoxious immigrants.

Still, I take this to heart. My great-grandparents moved around town, as it happens, but we ended up on Locust Street—just a few blocks away from Chestnut and right by Walnut, and I spent my quite “assimilated” but still distinctly literary-Jewish-intellectual boyhood riding and racing on Spruce and Pine. So I felt, reading these words by you, as blue and betrayed as if I had found my wife in flagrante with another man—and a young, blond SS officer at that. And I have since discovered, what is harder to accept, that this was not a passing bigotry in an otherwise openminded life, but a recurrent theme of yours: your husband, Joseph Pennell, in particular, was an obsessed anti-Semite in a time not short on them, who wrote and illustrated a long book about the hideousness of Russian Jews, serialized, bizarrely, in The Pall Mall Gazette.

We have, of course, been here before. My beloved Chesterton had a true program (a word that sits in sinister poise with “pogrom”) for Jewish expulsion from England. With an effort of will, one can see, if not sympathize with, the shock of Old Americans at the newcomers—a prejudice not entirely unknown to the Jews who, having been here for a century, now see their “own” neighborhoods and landmarks disappear under the pressure of Muslims and West Indians. But there it is. You hate my kind, in the place where my kind went, in exactly the street where not just my kind but my family lived.

Can we eat in peace knowing you despised my grandparents? Must I put a stopper on our relations? Should I end these e-mails, this imaginary conversation? One part of me thinks I should: the only meal I truly regret in my life was a tray of hors d’oeuvres passed around at (the very elderly and deaf) Diana Mitford’s place when she came back to an apartment in Paris from her long life with Oswald Mosley in Versailles. I plead ignorance—her children were lovely people, and my friends, and I did not know then just how Hitlerite she had been, or I would have stayed away. One of the strange sad truths about the gastronomic tradition since Grimod is that good food writing has always bent right, and often toward the extreme right. One had already gone through this pain with Robert Courtine, the great food writer of Le Monde, when it was revealed after his death that he was not merely an anti-Semite but an active collaborationist—and that this might have been so, must have been so, one sees retrospectively in the contempt for all but France and anything but French cooking that runs through his work.

In a way, a bitter way, I should be grateful for this discovery, for it raises the central point of these pages, the key issue, the one big thing too easily avoided: how much can the table truly reconcile—how sweetly can, or should, the rituals of social life reconcile us to our opposites? It is sentimental, surely, to pretend that the ugliness of life escapes the table; we rightly condemn the French intellectuals and artists who made too easy a social peace with their occupiers. But is it unrealistic to wish that some reconciliation of opposites might yet take place there? It’s a hope, at least. Very different people do dine together, or try to. We think about Dr. Johnson, greatest of religious conservatives, reconciled over a good dinner in 1776 with John Wilkes, greatest of libertine libertarians, through the good offices of James Boswell, and we recognize that some of the sanity of British political life, compared with French, is owed to such primal acts of sociability. We can’t wish away differences, but we can hope for an end to hostilities. Disdain for others is part of life; learning to dissimulate it through manners is as good a cure as we can hope for. While we wait for the reign of Universal Love, we can at least share the premise of the Common Table.

After all, the good angel I have on my other hand, Jacques Decour—whose letter began this book—was, for all his heroism, a committed and unrepentant communist, which means, in plain French, a Stalinist, albeit one of enormous courage and humanity. And now, on my other, an anti-Semite… upend the table or keep it set and hope for pleasure to uplift our hearts? We write glossily of the continuities of the table, but this is the perpetual fragility of its concord, which breaks on bigotries and false beliefs that can’t be wished away.

But that they can’t be wished away doesn’t mean that they might not yet be reconciled. Good things do happen when people sit down for dinner. That’s itself a faith. Obviously, we don’t want to sit down to dinner with Nazis, and we rightly condemn those French artists who did. But we do want to sit down to dinner with people before they become Nazis, if it might help keep them from becoming so. It is not wrong to hope that the revelation of a common human touch, a common taste, shared and relished, can become itself an argument for humanity. We disapprove, and rightly, of those who sat down with their occupiers, but we smile, and often, at the countless travelers’ tales of violence averted by bread and salt and beer.

The answer, I think, is that there isn’t one. We try to reconcile as many kinds as we can, and when we can’t, we can’t. We tolerate all that’s tolerable, eat with whom we can, draw lines as we have to, accept as much as we’re able. Liberal tolerance is an injunction urging efforts, not an instruction manual making rules. It says, Do your best with as many as you can until the very last moment when you can’t anymore. And how will you know when you can’t? Why, by the feeling in your stomach.

So I quoted Auden, back at the beginning of this book, in the epigraph I intended only as a benediction. Now, under the pressure of finding out some more of who you really were, or thought, Mrs. Pennell, I think harder, and now I’m inclined to believe that Auden thought the mouth and eyes were hostile because the mouth always seeks pleasure and the eyes always make judgments. Reconciling the two, our molars and our morals, is what a great meal does—but it can only do it for a moment. Then we are back in the real world of mixed emotions and dubious alliances, where those who share our pleasures are rarely those who please our minds. Brillat-Savarin, whom you called the Master, thought that the rituals of the French table were soft power for decent liberals like himself, but though soft power is power it is still always soft. Would you have taken the trouble, seen a wiser way, with better company and a larger view? I don’t know. But, having summoned you back to life I am surely allowed to hope you would have. I wish I could have tried.

Wild salmon, broccoli, and brown rice. Delicious without being indulgent, good to eat while having some tang of austerity, of firm assertion, about it, I shall make this meal tonight. Cleansing, somehow. A kosher meal, come to think of it!—though, given your obsessions, this is a thought that probably occurred to you before it occurred to me. Come over in spirit and I will cook you all of these things. Salmon, and broccoli purée and perhaps lentils and brown rice, the simple penitent foods. I cannot exactly forgive you. But I can still feed you. Four minutes on one side, three on the other. Salmon should be done in a cast-iron pan. Broccoli is best steamed for eight minutes. Brown rice just takes time.

A Gopnik, of Locust Street

17. Endings

JUST A YEAR AGO, I gave up sweets. I was in a restaurant in San Francisco, and, for the first time that I can recall, when the waiter said, “Dessert?,” in that conspiratorial, perky way they have, I said… nothing. And then the next night, at another place, I did it again.

The usual reasons that move men and women as they age moved me: I was self-conscious about gaining weight, crossing into the world where you slowly become doughier and wake up as a middle-aged man with a paunch. (“I looked in the mirror,” a woman novelist-friend said not long ago, “and saw that I was … stout. Like a character in Trollope: ‘She was a stout, upright lady in the prime of life…. ’ ”) It is true, of course, that the paunch was once a hard-sought ornament of abundance, rather than a flying buttress of overindulgence—the stout lady or gentleman was once the only steady lady or gentleman—but though that time might be one to envy, still we live in this time and not some other. So I decided to stop eating desserts, to see if that would help. Like all diets, both the reducing kind and the religious kind, mine had an element of logic (lose those calories neatly, and at once!) and an element of magic, too (give up the thing you like best and you will appease the gods of aging).

I love desserts. I think of my mother and I taste desserts. My mother, though a scientist with an academic career, made her own desserts every night of my childhood: lemon tart, chocolate cake, wonderful coffee custard with bittersweet chocolate hardened like a winter lake on top, and hot apple pie with light custard sauce. I am aware that pies and cakes and cupcakes are the more usual thing to love from Mom’s kitchen. But she was a Francophile, and made soufflés, and those I loved best of all. Yet they were the one dessert of hers that I couldn’t make for my own children. When I left home, she gave me a self-published recipe book that included her formula for apricot and Grand-Marnier soufflés. I had followed it dutifully over the years, and never gotten it quite right. There was a moment when you were supposed to know that the egg whites were beaten—a zone with danger and failure on either side. “DO NOT OVERBEAT / DO NOT UNDERBEAT!” she had written in the recipe, and once again the written orders hurt as much as helped. Although I had seen the proper moment, the true loft, countless times, the presence of the words somehow froze the operation, made the right state of beaten egg whites an unobtainable condition. I could never find the zone.

Sugar flows through every modern life, and body, with a fluidity that would have shocked our sugar-starved ancestors, and so we withdraw from it with the same difficulty that we withdraw from the other shapers of our senses, alcohol and caffeine. For the first time in my life I knew what a craving was, understood the otherwise puzzling condition of friends who had passed through AA or through crack addiction, and whose frailties I respected but whose needs I could never before quite conceptualize, internalize: what was it that could lead people to act in a way so plainly not in their own self-interest? Having seen what the bottle or the pipe does to you, why not just give up the bottle or the pipe? The answer, I now saw, is that the craving isn’t a war inside you, as in those old quarrels between the devil and the angel, the kind that used to perch on Sylvester’s shoulders as he decided whether it was wrong or right to try to eat Tweetie. No, it was more of an urge to surrender to some other self-willed person who lives inside you, controls your steps, and just wants in the worst way. I would wake up at night and, unself-willed, wander toward the freezer and the ice cream—the state of hunger for something isn’t the state of deciding to have, but lies outside decision, lies outside your self, even, exists as a kind of magnetic impulse to which one need only surrender. Hunger is a field that draws you forward and that you enter simply by choosing not to resist. If it were up to me, the addict says, I’d stop. And we shake our head at his rationalization—but it isn’t up to him. A habit is not a gleeful preference of something bad for you to something good for you; it is an attraction that draws you toward something that feels neither good nor bad, but only necessary. (Which is why, I suppose, addicts only get better in the company of others. They bond together to try to build a passive force field greater than that other force field, which brought them there.)

The curious thing was that, while it was hard to do without sweets at home, it wasn’t nearly as hard when we went out to eat, and especially not when we went out to eat fancy food. It was as if the dessert chefs had given up on dessert, too, and produced something else in its place. At even a moderately upscale establishment, you would invariably get what I had come to think of as the Portman Plaza plate, since it so closely resembled the model that a developer would have proposed for the center of a crime-racked mid-sized city in the seventies: three upright cylinders—small towers of something wrapped in something—with the tops sliced at an angle; a crumbly landscape of some kind; and a reflecting pool running around the edge. The plate would be advertised as, let’s say, a chocolate-peanut-butter mousse cake with walnut-balsamic crumble and a sesame sorbet with Concord-grape foam. But the effect was always the same: not enough of a cakey cylindrical thing, too much of a crumbly thing, far too much of a gelatinous thing, and an irrelevance of an off-key runny thing. Without surrendering sugar, dessert had surrendered all its familiar forms—the cake, the soufflé, the pudding—as the avant-garde novel had surrendered narrative, character, and moral. Losing our faith in art is, in a secular culture, what losing our faith in God was to a religious one; God only knows what losing our faith in desserts must be.

Leafing through books at the neighborhood cookbook store, I slowly became aware that our dessert modernism sprang from somewhere else, and had a more revolutionary purpose than I knew—that the Portman plates were to a European movement what the Portman Towers had been to the Bauhaus, the American domestication of something austere and rigorous. Here in New York, the true, uncompromised revolution was limited to a handful of places, and I went to one of them, Wylie Dufresne’s wd-50. I broke my sweet fast, and had a full roster of the pastry chef’s delicious devisings: cheesecake with dried pineapple, pineapple purée, and pineapple tuiles; lemongrass mousse with lemongrass foam. The chef, Alex Stupak, turned out to be an intense intellectual, clear and dry in his judgments.

“I happen not to like sweets,” he said as we sat down after dinner and he began to explain his work. “It’s an idiosyncrasy of mine. I decided to become a pastry chef because it gave me autonomy. Whether you think your desserts are manipulated or not, they are! When you’re conceptualizing an entrée, a protein, you generally expect to get a piece of that thing intact. In pastry, it doesn’t occur. Pastry is the closest that a human being can get to creating a new food. A savory chef will look at puff pastry not as a combination of ingredients but as an ingredient in itself. Pastry is infinitely exciting, because it’s less about showing the greatness of nature, and more about transmitting taste and flavor. Desserts are naturally denatured food.” He looked at me sternly. “Birthday cake is the most denatured thing on earth.”

When I asked him who had influenced him, his eyes, which had been narrow slits of purpose, suddenly shone bright. “I admire Albert Adrià more than any other cook in the world,” he said.

Everywhere I went, I heard similar talk of Albert, his brother Ferran, and other Catalan dessert wizards. Dan Barber, of the restaurant Blue Hill, spoke reverently of Jordi Roca, whose restaurant, run with his two brothers and situated not far from the Adriàs’ elBulli, had recently been voted one of the five best in the world; on a visit to New York, René Redzepi, whose restaurant, Noma, in Copenhagen, had in the same poll been named the best restaurant in the world, spoke of both Adrià and Roca with the same quiet awe.

In search of the truth about the new sweets, I even went to the White House, whose pastry chef, Bill Yosses, I had been made to understand, was the Great Still Center of the American dessert. Yosses turned out to be a smiling, vaguely seraphic presence—at one point, he neatly, calmly distinguished caramel, mere burnt sugar, from butterscotch, brown sugar mixed with butter, for the benefit of his sous-chefs.

“Dessert is aspirational,” Yosses said, laying out his philosophy. “It’s the one part of the meal you don’t have to eat. It’s the purest part of the meal: the art part. But it’s also the greediest part, the eat-it-in-a-closet part. We don’t have to have it, and we do. When I was a kid, I would stuff my face with éclairs. I still would, I guess…” His voice trailed off. “The real question is this,” he said. “How did this thing, this spice, sugar, become a staple? How did something that ought to be like saffron, a rare thing to add, become the thing we build on? How did a whole way of cooking creep up from sweetness? Why do we use it to end the meal? Those are the big questions.” I asked if I should go to Spain. He gave a Yoda-ish smile, and said, “Oh, yes. That’s a trip you ought to take.” When I consulted Dan Barber again, he was still more emphatic. “Go there!” he said. “That’s where it’s all happening. Go!” And so I went.

On the plane over, I felt like Alec Guinness or Michael Caine in a Cold War spy movie of the somber, le Carré or Len Deighton kind: a black-and-white film, with a jazz score and a grimly ambiguous ending. I was crossing the salt-caramel curtain, and no turning back.

When I got to Barcelona, there was, just as there ought to be in such a movie, a cool, efficient beauty, in a black frock and a sports car, waiting for me. This was Lisa Abend, an American writer who lives in Spain, and who was to be my companion in Barcelona. She had spent the past season observing the innards at elBulli, while writing a book about the Oompa-Loompas of the operation.

It was twilight, and we sped through the dark, narrow streets of the Old City on the way to our first stop, the Espai Sucre. This “Sweet Space” was, Lisa explained, a working research laboratory and school, where new desserts are regularly conceived and experiments made, with the results exhibited, and eaten, at a nearby restaurant. As we drove, the almost kinetic energy of the Catalan capital was evident, as it had been the last time I was there, twenty years before. At the time, the only dessert seemed to be flan, with a distinct salty taste that I associated with the local café con leche. I asked what had happened in the twenty years since.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research, and it really seems to be the case that the legend is the truth,” Lisa said. “Twenty years ago, the Adrià brothers took over a struggling French restaurant up in Roses, and in the nineties they began to collaborate with a chemist here at the university. And, being isolated and inexperienced, they began to do new things. It really did come from two intense brothers who didn’t care what the rules were supposed to be.”

We pulled up in the darkness to a modern glass storefront amid the medieval buildings and parked on the sidewalk. Inside, Jordi Butrón, the chief scientist-cook of the research center, greeted us solemnly and led us into his classroom. On the blackboard behind his head was a series of abstruse-looking diagrams. With a close-shaved beard and mustache, he had more the look of a severe French sociologist than of a happy Spanish cook. I explained that I was on a quest to find out what desserts really were and where they were going. He held up a hand and began to speak, in rapid, accented French.

“In retrospect, they’re disgusting, many of the things we used to do—too much fat and too much sugar, and a series of clichés taught while being rationalized,” he said. “The key thing now for a cook is to develop a library of flavors that you can recall. If I say to you, ‘Apple and cinnamon,’ you would click in immediately. ‘Yes, apple! Yes, cinnamon!’ The library of your mind contains that. But what if I say ‘Apple, asafetida’? Nothing! You have nothing stored there.” He added slyly, “Now, this is a benefit to the chef, because if I do apple and cinnamon and you don’t like it you think there’s something wrong with me, but if I do apple and asafetida and you don’t like it there’s something wrong with you.” He laughed briefly, professionally. “The development of a pastry chef is not the development of techniques. It is the slow, careful development of a catalogue of savors and flavors, which you can develop the way you develop muscles. There is a logic in every dessert worth eating. Consider the logic of white peach and rich cheese. We must be conditioned not by sight but only by flavor, the tongue, the nose, and the feel in the mouth.” He went on placidly, “It is to avoid these errors that we do so much of our teaching and learning blindfolded.”

“Blindfolded!” I said, wondering if I had misunderstood. We had been struggling with each other’s French.

“Yes, blindfolded,” he repeated. He went to a drawer and took out a handful of silken eye masks, which he threw on the desk. “It is important to be able to work with the sensations of the nose and mouth alone, so we spend hours in the dark, tasting. Of course, appearance matters, but it is the last part of the equation. Taste, taste, taste—that is what matters. So I keep people blindfolded for much of the work, which is devoted to the marriages of taste.”

Then he opened the door to an immense, pristine kitchen, dominated by a great length of polished black stone. Here, he said, “as many as fourteen young chefs can work, blindfolded, to discover the taste and enlarge their flavor libraries.”

I noticed various pieces of space-age-looking machinery littering the beautiful, dark kitchen, and I asked how the new technology contributed to his work.

“It is useful as tools,” he said crisply. “If I want to capture the flavor of a raspberry meringue, I use a powdered egg white, and then I have a true raspberry in the form of a meringue, instead of a super-sweet meringue overwhelming raspberries.” He shrugged. “Nothing we do with new equipment does more than allow us to reinsert flavors.”

We sat down for dinner in the nearby restaurant, and had a meal of five courses, all sweet, or at least sweetish, yet all beginning with a savory theme. First, there was cucumber-ginger-pineapple-tarragon sherbet, then olive-oil cake with San Simón cheese and a perfect white-peach sorbet. “The combination is a classic conception of the savory kitchen: cheese and olive oil,” Jordi observed. Then came a cake made with stout, beets, cherries, and Idiazábal cheese, too various to make much sense. Then a green-apple granita with bay leaf, as fresh and acid as a winter morning, and, finally, truffle-hazelnut-toast cream pudding. The genius showed in the details: a curry-and-salt cookie, thrown in as an extra but a study in itself. There was something perfectly modulated in the transition from savory herbs (tarragon and bay) and savory tastes (salt and curry, particularly) into sweet dishes.

“This is kind of amazing,” I said to Lisa, as I scraped the plate of truffle-toast pudding and grabbed another curry-and-salt biscuit. Lisa gave me a seraphic, you-ain’t-seen-nothing-yet smile, and said, “You’ll meet Albert tomorrow.”

I sat in my little hotel room in Barcelona, jet-lagged and sugar-satiated, and read about the history of sugar. Primates, I learned, love sweets for reasons that are simple enough to explain: sweetness is the natural sign of ripeness, and the best assurance, especially when balanced with just enough acids, that the thing you’re eating is good to eat.

Yet the picture is more complex. The primate’s instinct for sugar is particular, adjustable, and sometimes seasonal. The lesser mouse lemur of Madagascar, a gourmand among monkeys, raises its threshold during the rainy season so that, when sugars are less abundant, it requires less sweetness. Yet this may be why the lesser mouse lemur has always remained so deeply lesser. Our nearest relations among the primates, particularly chimps, have a “supra threshold”: they love sweets and will practically die to get them—and this, the theory goes, is one of the things that make them forage over extremely large territories, outside the forest. They strolled on all fours, then walked, then ran, just to have dessert.

As both the anthropologist Sidney Mintz and the historian Jean-Louis Flandrin have documented, it was only recently that the instinct for devouring sweets met the availability of abundant sugar. In pre-Crusades medieval European diets, only honey and fruit and other “natural” sweeteners were available, and they were mostly used in savory dishes. For centuries, sugar was a spice as rare as myrrh and as precious as saffron: an expensive extra used to give food taste and color. Or, rather, to take away color. The whiteness of refined sugar, as of salt, was very much part of its mystique, and one of the things that led people to think it must be a medicine. Combinations of white foods, before the days of scientific medicine, were always seen as curative (As indeed they remain—consider the futile ingestion of milk as a cure for ulcers, a sitcom staple even of my childhood.)

Only in the Renaissance did sugar slowly, through the New World, become widely current. “Sweet” became one of Shakespeare’s favorite adjectives: it appears seventy-two times in the sonnets alone, and the first writer who mentions them refers to his “sugar’d sonnets.” Sweet for Shakespeare means neither sexy nor virtuous but some new thing in between: irresistible, enticing, dear, tender. When Touchstone, in As You Like It, says that pairing beauty with honesty is as foolish as making honey a sauce to sugar, he is making more than just a joke. Styles of sweetness are being distinguished even as virtues are, and they are in sufficient abundance to make available a joke on doubling them. A mouth taste was quickly becoming a moral taste. Just as the inner life is being sorted out in Shakespeare’s time, so is the sweet life. Fine distinctions between similar states of burnt sugar, between caramel and butterscotch, had just opened up. (A feeling surrounds a flavor when it becomes widespread enough. No one yet quite talks about the umami of a marriage, or the hint of soy when we see our in-laws—but we all talk easily about our saccharine sisters and our vinegary in-laws and our hot-pepper neighbors, even about Nabokov’s garlicky puns.)

Then, in the late seventeenth century, the price of sugar plummeted, never to recover, largely as a consequence of that hideous invention the West Indies sugar plantation. “I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe, but I know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world,” a solitary and bitter French humanitarian wrote in 1773: Africa and America are, of course, those two regions, the one where the slaves came from, the other where the slaves were brought. It was the growth of the plantation system in the West Indies that turned sugar from a spice into a table commonplace. Sugar would help fuel the Industrial Revolution—and the irony is that the sugar plantations were the place where something like the first “factory” system was put to work. Because sugarcane rots so quickly, the sugar farm had to become one of the first models of “industrial” production: cutting, curing, and refining all had to take place within a single space, organized as a single brutally efficient system, a kind of Black Mass anticipation of the assembly line.

The cheap-sugar revolution took different paths in different places. In England, sugar combined with tea became the staple drink of the masses. In France, though, the sudden plantation-driven dive in the price of sugar produced something else quite new: it marked the birth of the pastry chef, the coming of dessert-as-we-know-it, the opening path toward the patisserie. It was as though the whole of the table had been tipped, and sugar and sweetness ran out of the meal and down into its ending. Medieval cookery burnt down, and what rose in the ashes was a piecrust.

The French food historian Jean-Louis Flandrin shows, with a care for detail that borders on the obsessive, how the percentages of sugar used in the courses of the ordinary French meal, as recorded in recipe books and food guides, changed in every decade of the seventeenth century and then got fixed at the end. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, while the use of sweetened dishes of meat and fruit radically declined—by more than eighty percent in the fifteenth century alone—egg and dairy products married to sugar more than tripled. “The eighteenth century menus no longer show any sweet or sugared dishes except as entremets and desserts,” Flandrin writes. The “caramel curtain,” with some dishes seasoned by salt and others by sugar, had descended. In France, a full-blown dessert cuisine emerged, with the pastry chef as its hero. Soufflés rose; egg whites lifted up; aerated egg yolks combined; chocolate was blended with butter and sugar to make buttercream; and egg yolks were kept from cooking while allowed to thicken.

So dessert as we know it is a modern invention, about as old as the steam engine and the telegraph. The surest sign of something truly new is the instant amnesia it creates about the old. French travelers, beginning in the late seventeenth century, were now puzzled and bewildered by the presence of sweet fruits with savory courses in “southern” countries, though all the evidence suggests that it had not been long since they had had them, too. Even Montaigne in the late sixteenth century, traveling south, was puzzled to find fruits always served with roasts—though Montaigne’s mom (or, okay, Montaigne’s mom’s cook) in Bordeaux must have served little else.

Why a true pastry dessert cuisine happened in France in a way that it did not happen elsewhere is a bit of a puzzle. Certainly, the prominence of French pastry was so great that, by the end of the nineteenth century, even the most mundane mid-American city prided itself on having a patisserie in the French style—in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, for instance, the middle-American Realtor hero makes a trip to the one French bakery in the town of Zenith to marvel at the “refinement that inheres in whites of eggs.” But why did it only happen there? There is a first-mover cycle, of course. France having one pastry chef soon had more of them for the same reason that Facebook flourished while Campusbook did not; a network makes its own nodes, and one great baker trains fifty more. Climate has something to do with it. Anyone who has lived through a damp English winter will know that tea is indispensable, while anyone who has lived through a keen but not humid French one will know that chocolate and cake are welcome.

But some of it had to do, surely, with the social organization of French life. One need not be too stern-minded a believer in a single national character to spy in sweets a pattern typical of the French Enlightenment: not so much the English urge to explanation and empirical instance but the French urge to divide, analyze, separate, articulate. The same process that divvied up good old curiosity into separate new “disciplines” divvied up dinner—psychology here and philosophy there and physiology down the hall, where once there was only natural philosophy sitting on the buffet, saying, Help yourself! Take the honey entirely away from the braised lamb and relocate it completely in the newly baked cake. Now you got your sugar hit only when dinner ended, with alcohol and then tobacco smoke to wreathe it round.

Reading the primatologists and the anthropologists, I got the sense that the double life of sweets ever since the sugar revolution—as a thing we universally crave, and as a highly specific, French-derived cooking culture—has led to a strange fight between disciplines. The primatologists insist that we eat sugar because our genes scream for it, while their humanist colleagues insist that sugar is above all a cultural symbol—we eat as many sweets as we can in order to emulate the rich, who usually get to eat more. This is, of course, a little like the argument that the average man wants to make love to supermodels in order to be like rock stars and quarterbacks. (We do want to be like rock stars and quarterbacks, but this is because we envy them their girlfriends.) A power relationship and a primate past are both alive in us at once; the symbolic power relationships are an intrinsic part of the primate past. (Something can express a biological imperative and still be a symbolic ornament; the ruffle that your aunt puts on the toilet base is there to decorate, not disable, the toilet.)

Once again, an artifact and an appetite are not opposites to be reconciled but the same drive seen at different moments in its history. The lesser mouse lemur would doubtless devour a crème caramel and a butterscotch pudding indifferently; it takes a pastry chef trained in France to state the difference. The artifact gives the appetite shape; the appetite makes the artifact shine.

The next morning, I met Albert Adrià at the workshop that the Adrià brothers keep in the old quarter of Barcelona. In jeans and a work shirt, Albert had the stocky, proletarian look of a young Braque or Léger. He is a classic younger brother—earnest, hardworking, self-critical—and he explained the rise of the Barcelona dessert as a series of accidents disciplined by labor.

“Postres?” he asked. “Why me for postres? First, because the pastry chef left. I had just finished moving through all the other stations, and I was due to be at the dessert. And I also have a severe allergy to shellfish, which limits my movement. But the real reason was that pastry seemed much more interesting—a world without limits. Meat cook? Fish cook? What are you going to do with it? And also there was a lot more to learn in pastry—just the techniques! My question was, Why can’t you serve main dishes that are sweet, and why can’t you have savory tastes during the dessert time period?”

I asked when the new style had first appeared. He furrowed his brow, trying to recollect something that had clearly not been the result of a deliberate plan. “It was an accident of the kitchen, really. I suppose we first made an ice cream with saffron in 1985. My first step is, I have to draw it. I have to sketch it, get it down on paper, and then do the explanatory texts.” He began to draw on paper. “This one I wanted to take up, this dirt—one of my most famous desserts involved dirt. A sweetened illusion. The idea came when it was winter at elBulli and I was going up the hill to get my car, and stuff was falling down, and I thought, Shit, that’s good! I can use that! It’s a dirt road, and, in the course of the fall, I noticed not only how the leaves changed color but also how they changed the color of the ground.” The dessert, as it was eventually plated, included cherry sorbet, salted honey yogurt, frozen chocolate powder, and spice bread, all evoking one fall moment: a dessert of frozen time.

Struggling to find words for his inventions, he began to speak about his most recent work: two desserts for the 2010 Cook It Raw conference, in Lapland, which would emphasize low-energy techniques, uncooked food. “Elemental, elemental,” he said. “That’s what I want. The really new idea I have for Lapland is—you see, I was thinking, if you were thirsty there you would eat the snow or the ice, and if you’re hungry you’re going to kill the reindeer. So: blood! The most basic thing is to drink the reindeer’s blood and eat the snow. So we made sweet snow and sweet blood. The key for the blood is your belief that it is. It looks like real blood only at a temperature of forty degrees—it’s a beet-and-orange reduction, and the texture, I promise, is exactly the same as blood. So we’re not telling people that it’s not real blood. It’s meant to be provocative. But it’s very delicious.”

“Is there anything that didn’t work out?” I asked. “Something that you tried and failed at?”

“A lot,” he said. “One of the first things that Ferran asked me to do was create hot ice cream.”

Hot ice cream! He nodded gloomily. “You would look at it—ice cream—and then you would taste it, and it would be hot. Every year I thought I had it! But I never had it. What we discovered was to use an ice-cream machine but invert it, so that it was pumping in hot air, and to use gelatin to get the form. That was as close as we could get. It’s still this idea that we have.” He shook his head. “A sort of dream. I have a lot of them.”

By now, the story of elBulli has become part of modern cooking lore: how the combination of science and culinary curiosity created a real revolution in cooking, with high-tech equipment borrowed from the mass-produced-food industry for the purpose of wild, semisurrealist picture-making. And how, at the height of this fame, Ferran announced that he would close the restaurant in 2012 and devote himself to “a foundation for pure research in cooking.” (What admirers of elBulli often forget to tell you is that it is a very hard place to get to. You weave your way there on narrow, winding cliff roads along the Spanish coast. The terror of the ascent surely adds to the delight of the arrival.)

If Albert is a Braque—a stolid man with a poetic imagination—Ferran is very much a Picasso, a grand maître who knows it. Like every first-rate artist, he has the kind of immense egomania that is oddly impersonal: his greatness is so uncontroversial to him that it is an act of generosity to try to limit it in words and dates. There is a certain kind of artistic egotism that is enveloping rather than narrowing: less “All I care about is my work” than “If you only cared about my work as much as I do, you would be as routinely elated as I am.”

I asked dutiful questions about the history, and the future, of desserts, and Ferran responded instantly, in Spanish, not with the guarded caution of his younger brother or the academic certainty of Jordi Butrón but with eager, nodding, flowing eloquence. His guttural, consonant-driven Catalan accent made everything he said sound as though he were murmuring a list of Jewish holidays. “Let us go all the way back to Carême and then come forward to us! Hmm. The problem! The problem! The phrase ‘molecular gastronomy’ I don’t like. ‘Techno-emotional’? I’m not crazy about it, but let’s use it. Now let’s look at the history of desserts.”

He called for paper and pen from one of his countless earnest, eager apprentices, and began to draw floridly and actively, making swooping charts of the history of cuisine, filled with Venn-diagram-like circles enclosing famous names and long arcs and arrows connecting one significant moment with the next. He drew as he talked—I realized that he was the inventor of the Barcelona diagram—and soon turned to sketching boxes and vectors on a large sheet of white paper.

“Carême, you see, was a pastry chef,” he said. “Everybody thinks of him as a cook, but he was actually a pastry chef. Sugar?” He took two for his coffee. “He was the best pastry chef in France. Now, come to our own time, who’s the great innovator?” Dramatic pause. “Michel Guérard!” He trumped with the name of the chef best known as a father of nouvelle cuisine, in the 1970s. “And he was a pastry chef, too. Very interesting that two revolutionaries have been pastry chefs. Whatever they’ve tried to do, they’ve tried this symbiosis of the savory world and the sweet. Escoffier, more than being a cook, was a codifier. I don’t know why it played out this way, but it did. Since then, Gaston Lenôtre and Pierre Hermé. And, after that, nothing, really. It’s been consolidated, but nothing very new came out of it in France. Why did Michel Guérard begin this revolution? Because he was a pastry chef, and the pastry chef was the second-class citizen of the kitchen. He did it to show ‘I am a cook.’ It’s the thinking of a pastry chef that initiated the revolution of nouvelle cuisine!” He looked at me keenly, to see if I was following.

He was, in truth, speaking so quickly, and mentioning so many names and concepts, that I was a bit confused by the argument—until I looked down at the paper where he had been drawing the complex flowchart of French dessert-making. The point it conveyed was simple: there had really been just two hinge points in French cooking—Carême’s early-nineteenth-century revolution, and Michel Guérard’s twentieth-century one—and both had come from pastry cooks escaping the limits of pastry. Pastry-makers were natural magicians, and magic in cooking would always come from them.

“So, now, here’s elBulli!” He drew some more. Then he called for one of the many illustrated books that document the ascension of elBulli, and flipped through its pages for examples. “We started taking things from the sweet world and moving them to the savory: a sorbet, or a savory ice cream,” he said. “One early savory ice cream was a Parmesan ice cream, in 1994. It extends an incredible dialogue between me and Albert. One of the important themes for us was about construction: how do you construct a dessert? This opened us up to the whole question of tiramisu—opened an incredible world to us. Deconstruction began here. Black Forest cake. This is mythical.”

He also had a trait I’d noticed in other big artists, and that was the urge to emphasize, a little perversely, the mere pragmatic, working logic of what he’d done. (Back in the seventies in SoHo, Donald Judd and Carl Andre would always shrug and talk about materials found on Canal Street, as though you, too, would have thought of minimalism, given their circumstances and rent.)

“Certain things that we’ve been using that came from the world of magic—anybody could use these and take them,” he said expansively. “What distinguishes us from nouvelle cuisine is that we’re deliberately provocative. For a while we were playing with this idea of provoking ‘outside the plate.’ Cuisine is this multisensual experience—so we made a balloon, and put in the balloon the scent of an orange, broke it, and you would have this dish of orange underneath. We had a plate of mushrooms, and they would spray a pint of forest scent on it! We did a lot like this. Liquid nitrogen in the dining room so you’d see the smoke. And for a while this theatricality was getting away from us. It was driving the customers crazy! Doing it is easy—whether you do it well or not. Or we’d blindfold you. We have fifty thousand of these kinds of ideas. But we just thought, No, this isn’t your path.”

Turning the pages of the book while drawing rapid diagrams and speaking in even more rapid Spanish, Ferran went on to explain that the true point of the deconstructed dessert was to create a kind of analytic Cubism of the pastry plate. It wasn’t an intrinsic part of Black Forest cake’s nature that made you want to break it down into bits but that, if you’re possessed by the urge to break things down into bits, it’s more obvious that you’re doing it when you do it to a Black Forest cake. The Cubists used guitars and tables, ordinary still-life objects, for the same reason: you knew what a guitar or a table looked like, and so could see when it didn’t look that way. Once the fracture was achieved and accepted, you could move on to your own mythology. “If we make a curry ice cream, and you put mushrooms there, and eel—strange!” he said. “But if you put chicken stock, and coconut, then it’s curry.”

Were we, I asked, on the verge of entirely breaking down the line between sweet and savory?

He looked at me with delighted triumph. “It can’t be that an American is asking me that!” he said. “A hamburger with ketchup and Coca-Cola? That’s the most intense symbiosis of sweet and savory imaginable. It’s your cultural theme.”

As Lisa and I approached the door, Ferran grabbed the pages of diagrams and handed them to me for further study. He continued brooding on the subject of dessert, explaining that for him the big question was not that of sweet and savory but that of sequence. “What matters is how we end the meal. With a surprise? A flourish? Reassurance? That’s the big question about dessert: how do we close out dinner? How do we finish the meal?”

He had a pensive look, and I couldn’t help asking him about Albert’s unmade dream. His face came alive again. “You mean hot ice cream? Yes. Yes! But… it’s hard! Ice cream is ice cream because it’s cold. But gelatin is the same way: gelatin used to be both gelatin and cold. There must be some way. We’ll solve it. We will.” Then he signed the historical diagrams in caps, FERRAN ADRIÀ.

Dinner at elBulli that night surpassed expectations, and really did earn for Adrià the role or title of artist: craft can make the difficult seem easy, but art alone makes the excessive seem elemental. What sounds crazily complex and over the top on paper—say, goat-brain tartar with eel—seems delicious and even obvious on the plate. Instead of the sudden drop-off between the savories and the sweets, there was a slowly shading spectrum, over twenty-five or thirty small dishes, from savory to sweet, with the two intermingled. Carême’s great artificial act, the one with which French cuisine began—the grassy herbs to one side for the meats; the piquant spices off to the other for the sweets—was broken, and everything was mixed again. There was flash-fried shrimp with cayenne pepper infused and a spun-sugar design above; Iberian smoked ham with a ginger-caramel reduction—and then that Parmesan ice cream with chervil and freeze-dried wild strawberries.

Two dishes stood out as models of sweet and savory so simply mixed they became a new kind of cooking: a dish of wild strawberries presented in a bouillon of wild hare—the joke, of course, as the server explained, is that the hares in the wild eat wild strawberries (though not, he hastened to add, these particular ones), so we taste them twice—and a plate of scampi infused with sweet ginger with sesame seeds beneath. Where dinner at, say, Thomas Keller’s Per Se can be like a day at the library under the supervision of a monk, dinner at elBulli really is like a visit to Willy Wonka’s candy factory. A sense of fun pervades the place. It is happy food—the one true “dessert” is a “frozen pond,” which is simply a sheet of hyper-hard ice infused with mint. The “molecular” label doesn’t capture the sense of play, extended into the sober domain of fancy food, that gives the place its savor. The illustrated recipe books, no matter how lavishly published, reveal little, because, as with all magicians, the “gimmicks” are cheap and readily available, and break down into foams and powders and frozen shells. Guile and mischief, more than molecular logic, is the guiding principle.

The test of a meal is the talk it makes, hot air rising from the diners, and the room mostly hummed. It was sad to think that there would be only another few hundred days of this, but wise in another way: Alain Senderens, Alain Dutournier, both of them provocateurs and originators in their day, declined into gentle excellence. Now, no one will be able to shake his head and say, elBulli isn’t what it used to be—which means that it will become, in memory, by a fixed rule of recall even better than it was.

And at the elBulli table, I began to see at last why the slow-food movement and techno-emotional cooking, though seemingly based on different premises—one reactionary and anti-technology, the other all technology and naïve futurism—have lived together at our mental table, as a combined part of the moral taste of our time, so easily. The Hestias of the Hearth, following Alice Waters, and the Willy Wonkas of the Chemistry Set, following the Adriàs, were really united in another way, both allied as makers of true slow food. In a world given over to all forms of speed—speed-of-light communication in every sphere, where anything you write electronically is available everywhere on the planet immediately—the commitment to taking time is itself a commitment to a coherent set of values. You could go to Per Se, or you could eat at Chez Panisse, but in either case what you’re doing is going to eat. You’re not going to eat on your way somewhere else, or before some other thing, or hoping to get done in time for Dancing with the Stars. You’re going to eat, in a world where you mostly eat to go.

The common shape of time was the same, and the real end of dinner is to articulate time. (Or, when it’s bad, to announce new kinds of tedium.) The point of eating is to slow down life long enough to promote what Brillat-Savarin called, with simple charm, good cheer. It doesn’t just take time, but makes time—carves out evenings, memories. That’s what Darwin meant when he said that we recall good dinners as happy days, wrapped like flies in a spider’s web by the silk of memory. Good dinners become happy days. Both Willy and the Hestias do that with splendor and certainty, in a time when no one else does it quite so much. They ask for your attention, not just for your appetite.

A meal at elBulli showed that the French line setting off savory from sweet could be entirely bypassed, like other French defensive lines in history, by mechanical ingenuity, speed, and superior strategic thinking. But I was still interested in desserts as such, pure desserts, desserts that always ended sweetly. And so the next morning Lisa and I traveled to meet with the young Mozart of pastry, Jordi Roca, at the restaurant he runs with his brothers, in Girona, in northeast Catalonia, about an hour from elBulli.

Where elBulli is old-fashioned and even a little run-down, as though to frame the hypermodernity of its plates all the more sharply, El Celler de Can Roca, to give the full name of the Roca brothers’ three-star place, is of exquisitely contemporary design, with small groves of poplar trees contained within the zigzagged green-glass walls of the restaurant proper. A long, low-lying wine cellar sits just across an allée of trees from the restaurant, and in it the sommelier, Josep Roca, the second brother—the oldest brother, Joan, is in the kitchen—keeps his wines in tenderly nourishing musical environments, playing recorded melodies in the caves: Bach for the champagne, romantic cello music for the Burgundys, and local guitar music for the Spanish wines.

Jordi, the baby brother, is still young-looking—startlingly so—at thirty-two. Dreamy of visage and gentle of voice, he came out of the kitchen before lunch, tentative and eager and even a little wide-eyed in his chef whites, to talk about his dessert work. He had inherited the pastry station, he admitted, because it was the younger brother’s station, but he thought that there was room to grow there. “Desserts in Catalonia don’t have the weight of the past,” he explained, in the French he had learned during several stages. “We had crema Catalana. A cake or two or three. So we felt free to invent and compete.”

After an apprenticeship at elBulli, he realized that his preoccupation was with scent. “That was something that hadn’t really been realized enough in desserts, I thought: the power of aromas. We had this new machine that could extract essential oils, and I began to play with it. I began making perfumed desserts.” He laughed. “I went to Sephora and found the most wonderful aromas in all the women’s perfumes. And I started making desserts built around their smells. Calvin Klein–like aromas. I wanted to make something as wonderful to taste as Chanel perfume was to smell. For me, that’s where all that new chemistry and equipment helps. We have the machine to extract essential oils. Another just for smokes. Working with smokes and smells, this has a—fragile aspect? Sense memory extends to the heart of who we are. I think that there’s a freedom there, for a certain delicacy.” He shrugged. “You’ll see,” he said.

Did he have a dream dessert that he had tried and failed to perfect? He nodded. “Yes, there’s one I’m working on. I haven’t really… perfected it yet. You see, I’m a big fan of F. C. Barcelona”—the soccer team—“and I wanted to make a dessert that would re-create the emotions Lionel Messi feels when he scores a goal.” Messi is the great Argentine striker who stars for Barcelona. “I feel I’m close. Could I try it out on you at the end of lunch?”

The desserts came around. And here was the real thing, here were true desserts: not dancing nimbly on the edge between sweet and salty, like Albert Adrià’, but plain old-fashioned sweets touched by the invention and audacity of a liberated imagination. There was watermelon rind with bitter almonds and tarragon; a hot lemon-mint eucalyptus liquid that, as it was poured, solidified into a small, sweet iceberg. Then lemon custard and granita, with the floral scents in a small cup alongside: you eat and smell by turns. Lemon zest, pure distilled mint flowers. And then an apricot ice-cream bombe with a spun-sugar shell, apricot foam inside, and an apricot sabayon inside that.

Finally, the server arrives with the Messi dessert, as Jordi fusses anxiously in the background. He presents half of a soccer ball, covered with artificial grass; the smell of grass perfumes the air. On the “grass” is a kind of delicately balanced, S-shaped, transparent plastic teeter-totter with three small meringues on it, and a larger white-chocolate soccer ball balancing them on a protruding platform at the very end. A white candy netting lies on the grass near the white-chocolate ball.

Then, with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile, the server puts a small MP3 player with a speaker on the table. He turns it on and nods.

An announcer’s voice, excited and frantic, explodes. Messi is on the move. “Messi turns and spins!” the announcer cries, and the roar of the crowd at the Bernabéu Stadium, in Madrid, fills the table. The server nods, eyes intent. At the signal, you eat the first meringue.

“Messi is alone on goal!” the announcer cries. Another nod, you eat the next scented meringue. “Messi shoots!” A third nod, you eat the last meringue, and, as you do, the entire plastic S-curve, now unbalanced, flips up and over, like a spring, and the white-chocolate soccer ball at the end is released and propelled into the air, high above the white candy netting.

“MESSI! GOOOOOAL!” The announcer’s voice reaches a hysterical peak and, as it does, the white-chocolate soccer ball drops, strikes, and breaks through the candy netting into the goal beneath it, and, as the ball hits the bottom of a little pit below, a fierce jet of passion-fruit cream and powdered mint leaves is released into your mouth, with a trail of small chocolate pop rocks rising in its wake. Then the passion-fruit cream settles, and you eat it all, with the white-chocolate ball, now broken, in bits within it.

You feel… something of what Messi must feel: first, the overwhelming presence of the grass beneath his feet (he’s a short player); then the tentative elegance of acquired skill, represented by the stepladder of the perfumed meringues; and, finally, the infantile joy, the childlike release, of scoring, represented by the passion-fruit cream and the candy-store pop rocks. I saw Jordi watching us from the kitchen entrance. He had the anxious-shading-into-delighted look that marks the artist.

In those le Carré and Deighton thrillers, the things the antihero learns on the other side of the curtain tend to be brooded on stoically rather than applied with spirit. What you saw on the other side of the curtain stays there. What I learned in Barcelona was that genius can produce what it chooses—but not much of it was really applicable to the table I sit at or the kitchen I cook in. It wasn’t just that you can’t do this at home; it’s that home is the last place you were ever meant to do this. The earlier great changes in cooking were a kind of baroque template, suitable for simplification—you made haute cuisine with cream and butter, nouvelle cuisine by leaving them out—but “techno-emotional” cooking was created only for the three-star stage. It was pure performance, cabaret cooking, the table as stadium show. As often happens with the avant-gardists, by advancing the form they had only deepened the crisis. There was nothing that you could do with what I had learned, other than serve cake and ice cream while the soccer game was on, which we knew how to do already.

And yet something, at least, came out of the quest. I invited Bill Yosses, the White House chef, over for dinner, and laid a small trap for him: I was going to make my mother’s apricot soufflé, and see if I could achieve the zone. Over dinner, we talked desserts some more: the mysteries of plating, the needs of family life.

Then I led him into the kitchen, showed him the apricot-purée base, the transparent egg whites in the unlined copper bowl, the five soufflé dishes waiting to be buttered. He murmured instruction. “Butter around the outer edge, too,” he urged. “All the way around the outer rim like this. Make a small space—climb up to grow up. And then put the dishes in water: not a bain-marie or anything deep, just a shallow tray of water. You don’t want to lower the temperature too much.”

He watched as I beat the egg whites and they thickened and turned opaque. “Do you know why you use unlined copper?” he asked. “It’s for the static electricity. A small electrical storm going off in the bowl.” An act of God, making clouds of white.

We approached the zone, the perfect moment of stiff-but-not-too-stiff peaks. (“DO NOT UNDERBEAT / DO NOT OVERBEAT!”) I beat. He waited. I beat some more. He nodded—go on. I went on, far longer than I usually would, and then he tapped my shoulder. There! That was it. The zone was there: not the gauzy, moist shiny area where I used to stop but a step above.

“I remember how there was one kid at Le Cirque back when who just did this,” Yosses said. “Starting around five-thirty, he had the bouilli or the soufflé base, and he beat egg whites all night.”

As we put the soufflés in the oven, he said, “Fifteen minutes,” and when fifteen minutes had passed he held his hand above them, to measure the heat rising, as much as the texture firming, and nodded one last time.

They were perfect. The apricot intensity shone; the egg whites’ neutrality and airiness softened and lifted it; the hotness gave an edge of taste delight that is always allied to danger, even tiny danger. A thousand small adjustments turn rules into skills, and then three smaller ones turn real skills into art. With Yosses’s help, I had taken something elaborate and made it something that seemed elemental. The primate instinct—get sweets at any price—had been turned into this polished performance. The virginal egg whites, the electric storm that whitened them and made them stiff: the perfect zone was drier and older than I had imagined. You could beat them more and they would be better.

The quest I had undertaken showed, at least, that whatever makes us age, it is not the sugar that we eat. It is the years that are passing. The older we get, the harder we work at everything, even our pleasures. We have to follow the recipes more precisely, put in a sixteenth of an inch of water, if only because we notice our failures more. And yet in return we can sense at last what the pleasures truly are, and where they come from. The fictions that force the feelings become ever dearer to our lives the more fictional we know them to be. Dessert is completely inessential to life; we can do without it; sugar blew in on a bad wind from the Caribbean not so long ago, and we can do without it. And yet it is completely at the center of life, complex and rich enough to make something that touches the edge of art, or at least of stage magic. You never need to eat it; you never miss a chance. It sits as a joke on a primate trait—the chimps that kept after sweetness all the time, like the ones that hungered for sex all the time, ended up making more of themselves than the next bunch of apes—and yet it makes this apricot soufflé, smelling like the kitchen you grew up in. It is the most particular thing; it is the most abstract and conceptual thing. A line of verse enters your head: “Though life is fading / love resists / though sweets are ending / sweet persists.” Sweetness exists outside its objects, as Shakespeare’s favorite adjective, as an idea of the best thing on the table, which, to fully get, we have first to give up.

Ferran’s question is still the one that counts: how do we finish the meal? But then, how do we finish anything? At least I know now that if we beat hard enough, and long enough, and do both more than we ever thought we would have to, we might yet arrive at a lighter end.

18. LAST E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL

Dear E.P.:

I want to tell you, finally, about something that happened last summer. Yes, I have gone back to writing to you, my imaginary confidante, whatever you may have thought of Russian Jews on Locust Street in Philadelphia. You were wrong about them, but you were right to be a feminist food critic at a time when no other existed, and to demand that our ancestors be right about everything in advance is as mad as hoping that our descendants will think us right about everything in retrospect. Life is too short, and the room too empty, if we fail to forgive our predecessors everything short of the unforgivable. (What is unforgivable? Ah! That I shall save for another book.) There’s no winning. But there is trying.

And there is dining. I had been haunted enough by Jacques Decour and his last letter, that the obvious thought occurred even to me. We were going back to Paris for a July visit, and I wondered if perhaps the auberge that he mentioned—the Auberge des IV Pavés du Roy, whose menu he wanted to leave for his girlfriend—might have left a trace, however remote, on the world’s store of information. There must be somewhere in some obscure corner of the scholarly Web a reference to the auberge, I thought. After all, I had found traces of the Omelet King—even the Omelet King’s royal omelet pan!

Well, the Auberge des IV Pavés du Roy turns out to have a whole Web page, a menu, a brief history—the works. You can read the menu, the dishes, and see pictures of the place! It turned out to still exist at 55 Avenue du Manet, in Montigny-le-Bretonneux, a small town about an hour outside Paris, not too far from Versailles. Not a well-known small town, or a picturesque one, just a small suburban town. It must be the place—how many Auberges des IV Pavés du Roy could there be? So we made a date to go out on a beautiful July Thursday; I discouraged the kids, but they wanted to get out of Paris and the heat, or wanted to be near us, or maybe they were actually interested.

It was a nice place, a very nice place, in that half-in-the-country, half-not-in-the-country way of French inns. It was an old-fashioned stuccoed auberge, with a cast-iron sign hanging out front and a pretty garden in the back, and a children’s play set near the garden. The cook was the husband, and the very harried but trying-hard hostess was his wife. There was some kind of local event going on when we arrived, and, puzzled to have taken a reservation all the way from Paris—we had called the day before to confirm and ask the way—Madame had a table for us in the garden. We sat and waited, at first a bit awkwardly—what were we doing here, after all?—and then comfortably, as the commis, right out of Marcel Pagnol, brought us bread, which reassured the children, and then Sancerre rouge, nicely cold, which reassured the parents. Then the menus came, and you know how it is when menus come, Elizabeth, it is hard to stay awkward—the act of ordering, choosing, is itself so touched by hope. I doubt that anyone can completely despair when menus appear. (In movies and television shows, when they want to create a mood of absolute alienation they always set the thing in a cafeteria.)

So we ordered and then we talked, naturally enough, about the Resistance. Luke, now sixteen, asked me if “in the big picture” the Resistance had made any difference. I tried to explain that it all depends what you mean by difference. No, they hadn’t really done much, spending a lot of time on guard against one another’s betrayals and fighting among themselves, socialists against Christian Gaullists and communists, who were courageous but committed to Stalin, against everyone else. And they were the victims of horrible retaliation by the Germans, satanic cruelty even in a relatively placid occupation zone like France. So, no, they hadn’t really made much of a difference to the outcome of the war.

But in another way they had made all the difference. They had saved the honor of France, which was not just an abstraction but a living reality; you could hold your head up after the war and say, Some people didn’t submit, and that was true, too. They had acted with so much courage—courage for its own sake, courage because you could be courageous and couldn’t live with yourself without it—that they had supplied a kind of moral pattern for the rest of the century. Their fiction had become a feeling. Any country that could produce men and women as brave as Jacques Decour didn’t have to feel lost, or ashamed of itself. So it depends what you mean by difference, I said, and then I realized that it didn’t depend on what you meant by difference so much as on what you thought the big picture was.

Then, at Olivia’s insistence, I narrated, rather lamely, a history of the French Revolution, getting half of it wrong, but the essential point—that what started in glory ended in chaos, and what began in a declaration of all the rights of man ended in a denial of every one; but that the articulation of what was right was either no help at all or a constant source of hope—was there. It depends on how you see it. Brillat-Savarin’s eternal point was that at some level it didn’t matter, that the hubbub of the Palais Royal created a series of values—of which the restaurant we were sitting in now was a modest but real microcosm—that endured whatever squalid mess the politicians made of things, and that that was the right point to make.

How was the food? The food was fine. Sixty years ago it would have seemed very good. Seventy years ago, Decour’s time, it would have seemed like the best food in the world. We had filets of beef with green peppercorn sauce, and sautéed potatoes—they used to do pommes soufflées at these places, but no more, I know why—and green beans. The desserts were really good: Luke said that the profiteroles were the best he had ever had, and he is one who has eaten many profiteroles. I had an old classic, apple sorbet doused with Calvados, the kind of thing that is so hard to find these days. It was the kind of lunch Liebling writes about longingly from his New York of Schrafft’s and Longchamps and chicken à la king and pot pie (not that these are not good things in their way), and with the tastes of Barcelona still sharp on my lips—gingered scampi and smoked eel and brains—I knew that it was old-fashioned. Still, it was the fashion that I, too, had loved of old.

When lunch was ending with those good profiteroles and an extra glass of Calvados—Martha gave me the are-you-really-sure-about-that? look that I think they hand out, secretly, on the wedding day, to big eaters’ spouses—we explained why we had come, and Madame explained that yes, it was the same place, and yet it wasn’t the same place. That is, it was the same place—it had been the Auberge des IV Pavés du Roy for a half century, one could see the photographs of the old place inside—but when they had expanded the highway back in the early seventies, they had had to move it back some ways from the road. So though the same it was different and (one hoped) even better. They did have beautiful black-and-white photographs up inside, of the place as it had been back in the thirties. It had been very chic then for people to come out from Paris. Madame shrugged. (Here is one of those photographs, the auberge just as it was when Jacques Decour came here.)

In a way it was truer to the spirit of the adventure—righter—that it be the same and different, too. Food, after all, can’t be held in place. But the front is the same, and the place is, more or less, the same, and the town is the same, and the arrangement, tables inside, tables out in the garden, is the same.

Then Madame said, with real eagerness, “Did you find us on the Internet?” I could see that she hoped we did, with visions of Americans surfing the Web to this spot and crowding in for lunch. Martha told her the long story, eagerly—about Jacques Decour and the last letter and our search for him. It was well told, as by one oiled—not indecorously, just a little productively—by more red Sancerre than she is used to.

“Ah. So you didn’t find us on the Internet,” Madame said at last, disappointed a little. A lot. But then, being polite, she said she’d like a copy of whatever it is I was writing, which she shall have, whether she really wanted it or not.

I reread Decour’s last letter when we got home to Paris, and realized then that I had missed something essential. In a way, as Huck Finn would say, I missed the whole blame point, missed it a thousand miles. Decour was a communist, a Marxist, and buried in the letter is the clear cool claim that he is talking about food because he refuses to talk about God. Vous savez que je m’attendais depuis deux mois à ce qui m’arrive ce matin, aussi ai-je eu le temps de m’y préparer, mais comme je n’ai pas de religion, je n’ai pas sombré dans la méditation de la mort; je me considère un peu comme une feuille qui tombe de l’arbre pour faire du terreau. La qualité du terreau dépendra de celle des feuilles. “You know that I’ve been waiting for two months for what’s going to happen to me this morning, and that I have had time to prepare myself, but, as I have no religion, I have not fallen into a meditation on death; I consider myself a little as a leaf who falls from the tree to make the soil. The quality of the soil depends on that of the leaves.” It is a nonbeliever’s claim, quietly defiant. As I have no religion, I don’t think of death. The questions of food rise from that context.

Faith in history, not to mention in the Utopian state, has vanished, in various ways, noisy and silent, but the relation between the end of faith in Heaven and the assertion of faith in something else has not. The continuity of life is won in the face of time and tragedy, and the rituals of an inn in the country is one of the places that we locate it. We find it here. I don’t believe in a good God, and I don’t believe, as Decour must have, in History. But I believe in the inn of the four seasons: that Decour went there with the girl he loved, that he left her the menu when he knew the Nazis were going to kill him, that it has moved, and not moved, been rebuilt and is still the same, so that we can eat there now. They could walk in now, and be happy again in the garden. It would all be different but they would still be at home. We walked under the sign, and contemplated the connections. He had thought about that in his last moments. That the table came last to mind is another way in which the table always comes first.

Did I tell you that I found a photograph of him? Here he is. He looks terrifically elegant, doesn’t he? Oddly humorous, and he seems to be making a joke with his fork above those two bowls. What’s he doing, exactly? I think he may have a little bit of pasta in one bowl, and the sauce in the other—a French manner of eating pasta that I’ve often noticed, more controlled and precise than the Italian way. He’s certainly engaged in a small, sweet joke about eating, whatever the joke may be. I look at the picture often, and wonder. In his three-piece suit and neat parted hair, who could imagine that he would choose the fate he chose, and try to keep the pleasures of the table present in his mind even as he did? In any case there he is, and there we are, and whatever connection there may be, straight or crooked, occult or true, it passed across and around a table. For people who believe in this life alone, trying to decide how best to live, questions of food will always be of great importance.

That night, back in Paris, none of us were really hungry—I can’t eat more than one real French meal a day, who can?—but by ten-thirty or so, still bright in the Palais Royal, where we were, luckily, blessedly, staying in a friend’s beautiful apartment, I did a quick dish of spicy rice and beans, a dish that the children love, and that Martha and I associate with one of the worst nights of our life, and then with its happy ending—a night when Luke was desperately sick with what turned out to be salmonella, food poisoning, and we had carried him to Necker, the children’s hospital, and they had made the diagnosis and had prescribed drugs for it. We had gotten him home—I had raced to an all-night pharmacy on Montparnasse, I think it was, and then given it to him and—miracle!—he seemed almost instantly better. We tucked him in, and, after a day’s pain, we realized suddenly that we were hungry. And I made rice and spicy beans, and we were happy.

I looked out on the beautiful placid gardens, where the great comic adventure of the restaurant had begun two centuries before, when Chantoiseau had opened his little bouillon parlor and Brillat-Savarin had praised it, and where so many pilgrims had come since to have dinner and find love, or something.

What is it that we want from eating? Comfort? Absolutely. A symbol of love shared? For sure. But above all, food matters for us as a daily symbol of the sacred, which means for secular people that it is a kind of sacred-in-itself. Questions of food are all just questions of living refracted outward, like the imaginary mountains explorers see in the Arctic, projections forward of their own ice-breaking boats. The plate of rice and beans, the dumbest thing I do, is also the most blessed, since it sums up in a single spicy point a whole story of our lives, and the intersection of others. We can have our cake and eat it, too, if we are willing to see that the point of having cake is to eat it and accept that then it will be gone. The secret of life is detachment and attachment in equal measure, the cake devoured but still held in our mind.

We are, after all, animals who experience our lives as if we were gods. We eat, burp, grow, shit. And yet we construct from the brutal sensory necessities a shape and a history and a purpose to life; we sit down and choose from the menu. The truth is that we have a hard time treating cooking as an art because it is so easy for us to experience it as a miracle. Dinner is often our brush with Olympus. The gods sat down to dinner twice a day, even though they would live forever if they never ate again.

We eat like animals and dine like… well, like demigods at least, minor local deities of minor local shrines. And we have a tragic dimension dignified enough for deities, too, since our animal nature assures that we will not be animals forever. Our knowledge of mortality is the overwhelming fact of our life. We seek for some kind of comfort and escape from that terror, and none is better than the apparent continuities and the small miracle of eating: you always do this. You were starving, and now you’re not. In the most beautiful of psalms, the shadow of death, whose valley we all walk through, is met by a spread table. It isn’t an accident that Jesus’ most original act was at a table, too, which seemed so shocking to a peasant honor society, where values depended on clean and unclean. Jesus would eat with anybody, whores and tax collectors, Gentiles and tribesmen. What did he eat? We can’t be sure, but we know he liked wine enough to make a lot. He ate what he liked where he liked with whom he liked, at a table open to all.

That was what Decour had really meant, I think, by “questions of food” in his letter, and that was why he thought of them at the very end: it was the closest he could come, as close as he needed to come, to an idea of the sacred. We have trouble thinking that food is art, but no trouble at all imagining that it might be divine. We doubt that Ferran Adrià is as good as Picasso, but accept that wine might be made the blood of God. Our difficulty with the idea of food as a fine art is not that we have trouble elevating it that high; it is that we have difficulty in making it descend that low. We may not share the particular sacredness of the particular table—but no one has any difficulty with the concept: water into wine and wine into blood? Oh, yes, I get that. Saffron rice and honey and you become a man? How else? What you eat is how you please omniscient power? It’s obvious, isn’t it? There are many metaphysical ideas that bewilder even the metaphysicians; the idea that food is the material of faith is not one of them.

Cooking is the faith that raw ingredients can be conjured into a nightly miracle. The oldest of all recorded stories is the story of Enkidu from the epic of Gilgamesh, and it is a story of the divine power of food and sex and wine to make us human. Enkidu, a kind of wild, uncivilized ape-man, is saved by a prostitute, a member of the oldest profession, or priesthood. “Nothing does Enkidu know of eating bread / and to drink strong drink he has not been taught,” she says. And then “the whore opened her mouth, saying to Enkidu, ‘Eat the bread, O Enkidu, it is the staff of life; drink the strong drink, it is the custom of the land.’ Enkidu ate bread until he was sated: Of the strong drink he drank seven goblets. His soul felt free and happy, his heart rejoiced, and his face shone… he anointed himself with oil and at that moment became a human being.”

Eat the bread, O Enkidu, drink the strong drink. Without fixed faith, we still take hold of food, but we take it where we find it. Where other times and other tribes have leaped from wine to God, those of us who no longer have a credible idea of the sacred reach to the thing itself; the pleasure alone becomes the point, and its accompaniments—family, an idea of France or Italy, the table of life—become too big to lose. It is not that God is in the details, but that our ability to grasp and discriminate the details gives us something to put in place of God; not that this dish is sacred, but that an idea of the sacred remains somehow residual in the dish.

And so, a short cooking credo, in honor of Enkidu and the whore:

The four essential savory secrets: anchovies, bacon, cinnamon, saffron. (Add a can of tomatoes, a humble chunk of protein, a neutral starch, and there isn’t much else you need.)

The five humble helpers: frozen peas, canned beans, Karo syrup, packaged gelatin, powdered cornstarch.

The three miraculous drugs: sugar, caffeine, and spirits.

The three basic principles. First, the rule of triple action: take something to eat, do something to it, do something else to it, but for God’s sake don’t do something else after that, or if you do, it had better be really worth doing. Then, the rule of four and three: almost everything (salmon, chicken breasts, fish steaks, beef steaks, mushrooms, grilled bread) tastes best if it is sautéed for four hot minutes on one side and then three slightly cooler on the other. Third, the truth of oven extremes: there is no golden mean behind the oven door: let your oven be very hot or rather cool, but never in between.

And, finally, the truth of taste: taste is a fiction, shaped by a time. But the fiction is not the barrier to the feeling. It’s what gives the feeling force. We make up our tastes as we make up our pesto, and it is the making-it-up that makes it matter.

I get blue sometimes, Elizabeth, when I think of the people I’ve loved who are gone—it gets me blue to think that you are dead now. I always get impatient, despairing, when people say that the dead are alive in spirit, or are alive in us. They aren’t. The best I can do is to think that they are sleeping off their jet lag in the next bedroom, like furious children giving in at last, but they don’t want to be in that room. They’re angry as hell, because they want to be sitting right here at this table with the rest of us and the best we can do is to have the grace to be furious on their behalf. I am furious on yours. Because I think you would like this rice, these beans, these spices, and see the joke of having them—you a Francophone and English aesthete both—having this dinner at the end of this day, marked by a lunch in the country.

How did I make them? Well, you take onion and turmeric and mix them… oh, it’s too long to tell, and right in the middle of the recipe is a can of beans, which you open—a tin, as you would have said, which you open with a tin-opener—and while one of the smaller secrets of cooking is that canned beans, drained and salted, are really indistinguishable from slow-cooked beans you do yourself (you know my quixotic views on shell beans), still, do we really want a can of beans being opened and drained in this last, ever-more-elegiac paragraph? Besides, spicy rice and beans is one of those things you have to do mostly by feel and look. More by the spirit than the letter, God knows. I’ll show you when I see you.