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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
I enjoy the company of cooks. I admire them because they are hard workers, and because they make delicious things. But, more than that, I like to contemplate the way they have to think in order to make the things they make. They are the last artists among us who still live in the daily presence of patronage. In the two centuries since the Romantic revolution, the arts have, one by one, been Byronized, set free from the necessity of pleasing an audience--a process that began with the poets and painters and took in the architects and novelists and has swept up, most recently, the rock musicians and shoe designers. All have taught themselves that they are there to instruct and puzzle an audience, not to please it.
But although cooks are a source of romance, they are not themselves Romantic. They practice their art the way all art was practiced until the nineteenth century, as a job done to order for rich people who treat you as something between the court jester and the butler. Cooks can be temperamental--cooks are supposed to be temperamental--but temperament is the Byronism of the dependent; children, courtesans, and cooks all have it. What cooks have in place of freedom is what all artists had back before they were released from the condition of flunkydom: a weary, careful dignity, a secretive sense of craft, and the comforting knowledge of belonging to a guild.
I also enjoy the company of cooks because I have always wanted to be one. A surprising number of writers I know, apart from the bitter ones who dream about being publishers, share this fantasy. Words and food are bound together in some inexplicable way, a peculiar communion that lends grace and mystery to what otherwise would seem to be a simple exchange of gluttony for publicity.
Overt collaborations between writers and cooks, however, are rare, and I was therefore happy and surprised last March when two cooks whose company I enjoy a lot asked if I would, so to speak, write them a meal. The two cooks were Dan Barber, of Blue Hill, in Greenwich Village, and Peter Hoffman, of Savoy, in SoHo. It was Peter who called me first, and asked if I would be interested in organizing a jeu de cuisine, a cooking game. The game, he said, had been invented by Robert Courtine, who, under the name of La Reyniere, was the gastronomic columnist of Le Monde for many years. (He had been a full-fledged collaborator with Vichy during the war; afterward, he became a reactionary of the table, and flourished.) In the early seventies, when nouvelle cuisine was just appearing, Courtine chose a list of ingredients from the Paris markets, and then had five cooks prepare a menu from them. Peter told me that five young New York chefs had agreed to cook for a week from a list of ingredients of my choosing from the farmers' market in Union Square. The cooks would use the foods I chose in whatever way they wanted, with whatever else they wanted to add. (It wouldn't be a competition, he said, in the tone in which extremely competitive people say those words.) I agreed, of course, although I later explained to him and Dan Barber that they would have to be responsible for my education: I had to confess that I had never visited the green market. They seemed unsurprised by this information; whatever they were coming to me for, it wasn't expertise.
I have known Peter since 1990, when he opened Savoy, a lovely, neighborly restaurant, with a golden-lit Arts and Crafts-style room, all blond wood and copper mesh and candlelight and welcome, eclectic food. Dan Barber was a more recent friend. A year ago, I wandered into Blue Hill, which he oversees with his fellow-chef Mike Anthony, expecting the kind of well-meaning meal you get from a young guy who has cooked for a couple of years in France, and instead ate as good a meal as any I have had outside the three-star places in Paris. Describing food is difficult, not because we can't capture in words things that are sensual--we do fine with painting and pubic hair--but because memorable description depends on startling metaphors, and startling metaphors depend on a willingness to be startled. Nobody did much with landscape, either, until it suddenly became respectable to compare a Swiss mountain to the whole of human destiny. We don't allow that freedom when it comes to what's on our plates. If someone wrote, for instance, that Dan Barber's foie gras with ground coffee beans is at once as inevitable as a tide and as astonishing as a wave, the reader's first response would be to think, quite rightly, that it is not, at all. (And yet it is.) People used to feel this way about metaphors for sex--the English still do. They have just got over Evelyn Waugh writing "I was made...
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