WHAT'S COOKIN'?

posted by James Reel

After many failed efforts, I have given up trying to get dinner or lunch reservations at The French Laundry. I became interested in that fabled California restaurant after reading about it and its owner-chef, Thomas Keller, in Michael Ruhlman’s book The Soul of a Chef. The restaurant is always pretty fully booked. It takes reservations two months in advance, to the day; on September 26, you can try to get a reservation for November 26. To do so, you call a phone number the moment the reservation line opens, and encounter a busy signal. You keep trying for about 50 minutes. When you finally get through, the reservationist sadly informs you that no tables are available on that date—especially for a party of four, rather than two. The only other way in is through Open Table, but the French Laundry makes available only one table at lunch and one at dinner, each at a quarter-hour time not included in Open Table’s drop-down list, and whoever can figure out how to make that system work has already done so the second the reservation becomes available, if then.

Or maybe I’m just not calling from a sufficiently fashionable area code.

And no, I can’t settle for a spot on the restaurant’s standby list. I can’t travel from Tucson, Arizona to Yountville, California on the spur of the moment, especially considering my various professional entanglements, not to mention the schedules of my potential California dining companions, who have jobs and childcare complications. So I’ll just have to go elsewhere to spend the $240 that the French Laundry charges per person.

It all started about eight years ago when Ruhlman himself sent me a copy of Soul of a Chef after stumbling upon an online essay I’d written that, after some meandering, becomes a review of one of his earlier books. For old times’ sake, here’s that essay, which is otherwise no longer available.

If writers were vessels, journalists would be plastic milk jugs; they carry their product from source to consumer without flavoring it. And like plastic jugs, journalists are regarded as interchangeable, recyclable and ultimately expendable. The latter, particularly, when they begin to take on the tainted smell of what they convey.

Poets and fiction writers, on the other hand, are vessels intended for museum display. Think of a novelist as an ancient vase with an enticing surface texture, an intricate narrative decorative pattern and, of course, a prominent lip. (Also, like the sort of Greek amphora that tapers nearly to a point at the bottom, some novelists have trouble standing up by themselves.)

Poets and fiction writers interest us because they bring us mundane details of life and feeling and thought in an artful way. Journalists interest us only insofar as we may find their topics compelling.

But journalism can be crossbred with creative writing. Some 30 years ago there arose something called “new journalism.” It's a way of telling a non-fiction story using the techniques of a storyteller, not a newspaperman.

A traditional journalist disappears entirely from the report. Journalists write around their presence with awkward locutions:

“Asked how the budget shortfall will affect city services, the Mayor said...” (Who is asking?)

“Redford greeted a visitor with a shyness that could be mistaken for indifference.” (What visitor, eh?)

Traditional journalism is supposed to filter out the writer's bias and keep the reporting objective. How journalistic objectivity is doomed from the beginning is a topic for another day; what interests me now is when the "me" can legitimately enter journalism.

“New journalists” like Tom Wolfe and David Halberstam, and novelists-turned-reporters like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, don't feign objectivity. They have a point of view, an agenda, a passion, and it's right out front. Partisans all, they want to recruit you to their side, and they do it with bold prose and no footnotes. Still, they generally refrain from casting themselves as characters in the story. They report what the legitimate participants have told them, and don't dirty their own hands. Wolfe may hate most modern architecture, but he doesn't try to get a more interesting book out of the topic by dynamiting buildings.

At times, though, the best way to report on a process, a community or a lifestyle is to become a participant. George Plimpton wrote one of the first, great books of participatory journalism in the 1960s: Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback. At age 36, Plimpton—co-founder of the hoity-toity Paris Review—joined the Detroit Lions as a rookie quarterback-wannabe. He survived a month of pre-season training and barely emerged from a public game with his dignity intact.

Plimpton could have stayed off the field, and merely interviewed professional athletes about their work. But, as post-game coverage on TV proves, getting jocks to talk may hold interest as an investigation into Neanderthal linguistics, but it doesn't tell much of a story. Besides, what's most attractive about Paper Lion is Plimpton's own adventure; he is a Walter Mitty whose fantasy has come true—and now he has to measure up. As an outsider stumbling in—as somebody who doesn't have to take the whole thing so damn seriously—Plimpton can see things that the pros ignore. And he sees things the way we might if we amateurs had a chance to go prancing around a field with all those men in tight pants, shoulder pads and smeared mascara.

Now, participatory journalism shouldn't be confused with gonzo journalism, a practice invented by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Sent by a sports magazine to cover a free-for-all bike race in Nevada, Thompson wound up instead writing about himself. Under the pseudonym of Raoul Duke (the inspiration for the Uncle Duke character in Doonesbury), Thompson tools around with his Samoan attorney, one Dr. Gonzo, in a convertible fully equipped with "two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls." Obviously, emerging with his dignity intact is not an option.

No, what Thompson produced is memoir, not journalism. A fine line separates the two, though, and a better example of how to tread it is Michael Ruhlman's The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America.

Ruhlman, a writer, talked his way into the nation's haughtiest and most influential cooking school, taking classes and suffering through this expensive culinary boot camp right along with regular students. In the interest of deadlines, he claims, Ruhlman didn't complete the two-year program. But in the CIA's training kitchens he had to hold the same high standards as everyone else—people who, upon graduation, weren't assured of a restaurant job, let alone a book contract.

Now, Ruhlman could have gone in as a straight journalist, audited a few classes, interviewed a lot of students and faculty. And he did this. But interviews and distanced observation could not have given him the insights into what it means to be a CIA student and what it means to be a cook that he gained by actually cutting himself, burning himself, getting himself yelled at by instructors and enduring the high pressures of professional kitchen performance.

The book isn't perfect. Ruhlman slings kitchen slang and culinary French around like pizza dough, mystifying readers who spend their time in the “front of the house,” not back at the stoves. And, as a writer, Ruhlman is very good at describing kitchen action and explicating culinary philosophy, but he fails to write with all five senses at the alert. This is especially disappointing, given his reasons for going to the CIA in the first place:

I was never one to get all goosey about recipes. Recipes were a dime a dozen. You could follow them for a hundred years and never learn to cook. I was after method; I wanted the physical experience of doing it, knowing what the food should look like, sound like, smell like, feel like while it cooked.

Aside from remarking a couple of times that his pocket thermometer read upwards of 120 degrees when he was at his grill station, Ruhlman doesn't give us the sound, smell and feel of working in a kitchen.

But a good human story culminates in a personal transformation, and that's what we do get from Ruhlman's book. He didn't undertake this project lightly, as he makes clear in the beginning:

I rented our home in Cleveland, moved virtually everything we owned into my father's house and transported my wife (a photographer who had paying clients in the city we were leaving), our daughter (not yet ambulatory) and myself 500 miles to a one-bedroom garret above a garage in Tivoli, N.Y., a Hudson River Valley town with a one-to-one human-cow ratio. I had done all of this, I eventually realized, in order to learn how to make a superlative brown veal stock.

Ruhlman understood that cooking can be an art, and he wanted to know if he could be that sort of artist. Gradually he learns that he can hold his own—but as a cook, one who broils and sautées and juliennes, not as a baker of bread.

“The differences between cooking and baking were so deep, so acute—and I was so unprepared for them—that the work of this kitchen confounded me,” he writes of his tenure in the “Bread Baking/Pastry Skills Development” course. “I didn't get it, couldn't get it. It was not in my nature.” He continues:

As in all matters of food, there was an intellectual and spiritual correlative. I'd already discovered that I was (a) cook. I could know what cooking was, fully, in my bones. Cooks, I had learned, came to cooking not to fulfill a desire, but rather, by chance, to fulfill something already in their nature. The same, I believe, was true of bakers. ... Because I was a cook or, rather, had 'the cook' in my nature (I did not presume to call myself a cook), I could not fully comprehend baking. Baking was a sphere of knowledge and experience—as cooking was such a sphere—that I could not enter, could only observe from without, even though I was, like everyone, baking the bread, stretching the dough in my hands to gauge if it had been mixed enough, had developed the necessary gluten network; I had scraped down my bench, had put boiling hot water into the giant Hobart oblique mixer, and covered it with plastic wrap to steam off the dough, and then cleaned it; I'd pounded the baguettes into tight rolls with the heel of my hand, and lengthened them with strong, gentle palms in hopeful imitation of Chef Coppedge. I'd scored and stippled the loaves with knives and my fingers and brushed them with oil and sprinkled them with salt and shot the loaves into the oven and watched the loaves puff, suddenly—an effect called oven spring, the yeast becoming hyperactive from the heat just before death; and I'd cooled the loaves and eaten the bread and swept the hearthstone with a long mop heavy with vinegar and water. But I was not a baker and I would not then, not ever, understand the true nature of bread or the nature of bakers.

An “objective” journalist monitoring a class could not have written that paragraph. Without the personal experience of stretching, scraping, pounding, stippling, eating and sweeping, Ruhlman could not have achieved his own little epiphany—and we would not be made to understand so well that we each, like Ruhlman, may have a calling, but it's a specific, consuming, jealous calling that accommodates few other endeavors.

Good participatory journalists like Ruhlman are neither plastic jugs nor Grecian urns. They are the oak barrels in which certain wines are aged. The wine—the information—they hold for us begins with its own qualities, its own truths. By the time it reaches us it has been not transformed but enhanced. Participatory journalism at least flavors a good story; at its peak, it can make the ordinary seem unique.