I approach food writing with caution, if not dread. Too often a writer’s musings about the culinary arts turn out unappetizingly precious or pretentious. Restaurant reviewers have to work hard to avoid saying pretty much the same thing about this week’s carbonnara as they remarked of last week’s polenta. The sappiness and off-putting wordplay can be compounded when foodies get all confessional, presuming the stories of their lives and of their transcendent "passion for food" are necessarily interesting to their readers, but also sufficient to sustain a literary text. I briefly went off on a related tangent in a recent comment here. There’s no need to persist with the complaint, and I’d rather highlight an exception or two to the rule.
First, there’s the sublime Elizabeth
David, who knew both how to write and how to write cookbooks.
Take a look at that first Google Books result, French
Provincial Cooking. Just try to locate where David’s poised
and informative writing ends and the mere recipe begins. And yet it’s very easy to cook with David’s guidance. For comparison, take Judy Rodgers, whose Zuni Cafe
Cookbook is fair as cookbooks go, unbearable as a text.
Unfortunately, everything is on the Internet except passages from Rodgers, and I don’t have a
copy at hand, so you’ll have to infer from this favorable review of the
book in Publishers Weekly, according to which
Rodgers "cooks like a dream and writes like one, too." Yet shortly the
reviewer adds, "In stunning detail, she explains how to salt a cod and
cure a rabbit and brine a fowl and stuff a sausage. One would not be
surprised to turn a page and find a description of how to slaughter a
sheep." Stunning, indeed, and more likely nightmare than dream. The review also manages to quote a telling
bit of Rodgers’ rhetorical tenor: "Unlike many chefs who style
themselves as creative forces, Rodgers has a deep sense of how, as she
puts it, ‘the simplest dish can recall a community of ideas and
people.’" Please pass the Maalox.
A few weekends ago, a friend mentioned a piece by John McPhee—he couldn’t recall either
the title or where it appeared—about an anonymous restaurant in New
York, outside Manhattan, and the couple who run it. His
enthusiasm for the essay prompted me to find and read it. A little
online nosing around uncovered "Brigade de Cuisine," which was written
for New Yorker in 1979, and has been collected in
the author’s Giving Good Weight. I now share my
friend’s fondness for the piece. It is good food writing in both
senses, namely, writing about good food and good writing about food. This is due to McPhee’s adeptness at letting the couple speak for themselves, but also to his measured mingling of non-culinary themes—the couple’s marriage, their biographies, their business acumen—with the more purely culinary ones.
I am encouraged right away when McPhee reports that his pseudonymous protagonist,
Otto, while seeking a recipe for sea-urchin roe, "turns to Elizabeth
David, there being no culinary writer for whom he has more respect."
The identities of Otto, Anne (his wife and the restaurant’s pastry chef), and the restaurant itself are left undisclosed, because they are already at capacity, that is, the two are at their own personal (mental and physical) capacity, since the only other staff are the local part-time youthful wait staff. They neither need nor desire the celebrity that would
ensue from a feature in New Yorker. Instead, McPhee details the idiosyncrasies of the charismatic
restaurateurs, their skills at
improvisation, and their obsessive devotion to customers and craft. For example, we learn that in lieu of
parchment Otto uses narrow bags from liquor stores when he prepares a
dish en papillote, and that the master chef is also a fan of
junk food:
He will go big distances for a McDonald’s Egg
McMuffin. "It’s a triumph," he explains. "It’s inspired. With melted
cheese instead of hollandaise, it is eggs Benedict for the masses. I
don’t know why it wasn’t thought of long ago." If you ask for a doggie
bag in Otto’s dining room, your pheasant Souvaroff or your grilled
squid rings in aïoli sauce are returned to the table in a polystyrene
container that first held an Egg McMuffin.
In this fashion, McPhee hopes to celebrate Otto and Anne’s formidable talents without relying too much on the pompous, overwrought mythologizing that motivates lesser "food writers." Not too much. The piece, after all, begins with a count in reverse order of McPhee’s top five best meals, numbers five through three having been at Otto’s, and then:
When things come up so well, culinary superlatives are hard to resist, and the best and second-best meals I have ever had anywhere (including the starry citadels of rural and metropolitan France) were also under that roof—emanations of flavor expressed in pork and coriander, hazelnut breadings, smoked-roe mousses, and aïoli. The list of occasions could go deeper, and if it were complete enough it might number twenty or thirty before the scene would shift—perhaps to the fields of Les Baux or the streets of Lyons.
In 1979 McPhee reported the place was preparing a move not too far away. I wonder if "Otto" and "Anne" are still at it, almost thirty years on, in their new digs. I doubt it. I also wonder whether the true identities have ever been revealed.
Accidental Blogger 
5 responses to ““Brigade de Cuisine” (Dean)”
Dean, what a great post! I agree with you that Elizabeth David was matchless and that the Zuni Cafe cookbook has some useful recipes, but makes a poor read. More fun just to go there!
I can update you a tiny bit about Otto and Anne. Shortly after McPhee’s profile of Otto came out in The New Yorker, Mimi Sheraton, then writing for The New York Times, set about discovering his identity and the location. It was if I recall the Bull’s Head Tavern, in rural Pennsylvania, a little over two hours’ drive from NYC. Wowed, like all foodies of the era, by what McPhee had written, Sheraton hastened to dine there several times to take its measure before reviewing it. She was agreeably impressed by the best things she ate, but opined that the least accomplished dishes she sampled fell well below what a great restaurant would be content to serve, even on a bad night. Of course everyone was a little disgusted with her — me included. I preferred operating under the spell cast by McPhee’s prose, but in the culinary arts as in other arts, extraordinary dedication on the part of the artist and a strong mystique are no guarantee of an experience of greatness. Deep readers figured McPhee was a cultist of Otto & Co., absolutely subject to that mystique, and that the experiential is anyhow an entirely subjective affair. Otto and Anne would be in their late 60’s now, an age by which everyone has left the professional kitchen.
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Very interesting, Dean. Trust Elatia to shed some light on the mystery.
I have to confess that I don’t read cook books or food writings for their literary appeal. But now I am encouraged to check out Elizabeth David, perhaps something I will read as well as feel motivated to cook from.
I am amused by Dean’s withering take on the purple prose of foodie writers. But knowing that Dean is also a curmudgeon of sorts, should I take his critique with a pinch of salt? Or perhaps not – I did take a peek at the sample of pompous, overwrought mythologizing that he has linked to.
A recent piece of restaurant reporting in which I found evidence of unnecessary “mythologizing” was this one in the Village Voice. – Robert Sietsema’s review of a Sri Lankan restaurant in NYC. The title of the review sent up several red flags but the description of the food and the flavor is not bad. Not being an expert on Sri Lankan cuisine, I can’t point to any factual faux pas. But the following paragraph caught my attention, if only for the carelessly pompous way in which the author threw it in.
“The name, Nirvana, as well as the presence of pork and a predilection for vegetarian dishes, should tip you to its Buddhist leanings. Nevertheless, any Sri Lankan restaurant in New York must produce food to please the followers of all four religions, and Nirvana is no exception.”
I had a short email exchange with Anna on this piece. I wrote:
“I am not terribly familiar with Sri Lankan food except for some isolated meat curries which very much resemble Keralite and Tamil (south Indian) cooking. But did the reviewer have to make gratuitous references to “faith” in his review? Except for the ban on pork for Muslims and beef for Hindus, most foods in south Asia are specific to a region rather than religion. It may come as a surprise to some that Buddhists, the adherents of a totally non-violent religion, are some of the biggest meat eaters in Asia – no ban on eating virtually anything that moves! Even monks eat meat although they will not slaughter an animal for food.”
And for the record, the name Nirvana is not a sure fire tip of the Buddhist leanings of an eatery. An excellent north Indian restaurant in Houston sports the same name. The owner is a Pakistani American.
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I am so grateful for Elatia’s contribution, the solution to the mystery of Otto and Anne’s restaurant and her take on foodie experience. I also agree that visiting Zuni Cafe is more fun any day than reading about it. Her remarks about myth versus reality of restaurant reputation reminds me of the early days of Patina, Joachim Splichal’s much mythologized venue in Los Angeles, since moved from its nondescript Melrose Avenue digs to the gaudy Gehry Disney Hall downtown. I first dined there shortly after it opened and became an immediate fan. Friends, however, were less spellbound. I returned several times to observe that what my friends perceived as server “snootiness” was, as far as I was concerned, an entirely appropriate distance maintained by the staff. The food was always superb and, what’s more, amusing, Splichal having made a pact with the potato to improve its denigrated lot. So, for instance, in lieu of pasta in a tiny “lasagna,” he used thinly shaved spuds.
Ruchira, you’ve nailed a culprit. The VV review is a perfect instance of the kind of writing I deplore. In addition to the corny “faith” conceit, there’s Sri Lankan tea “steeped in legend”—why, oh, why?!
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I don’t want to continue to pick on Bruni, but…yes, I do. This glimpse of superstar (but perhaps outmoded) Thomas Keller’s recent joint has just appeared. I suspect Bruni is right about it being “schtick-y,” but what’s with the rave over decent fried chicken? And what’s the big deal with serving red wine in tumblers? And there he goes looking for a transcendent bean salad. I imagine restaurant reviewing must be one of the worst jobs on the planet. Bruni can’t possibly think of anything new to say about what is plainly a restaurant with little new to offer. In denial of that dose of reality, he aimlessly trains his focus on trivial incidentals. A laboratory for fried chicken! Somebody needs to make him a nice home-cooked meal!
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something’s gotta give – her beach house indeed. we’ve had a beach house and its really something special. we sold it and now when we take a vacation we do all the arrangments through our agent. beach house!
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