Dirt

“My approach, I explained to the chief executive of the French Culinary Institute, was to find a venue, make mistakes, be laughed at, and debased, and then either surmount or fail. My plan...was to start out in a good French kitchen here in the United States (‘But which one?' I mused), and follow that with three months in Paris.
‘Three months?' she asked.
‘Three months.'
She said nothing, as if pretending to reflect on my plan. She asked, ‘Do you know Daniel Boulud?'
‘Yes.' Boulud is America's most successful French chef....
‘He grew up near Lyon,' Hamilton said.
‘Yes, I'd heard that....'
‘Some say that it is the “gastronomical capital of the world.”‘
‘Yes, I had heard that, too.' She could have been talking to my toddlers.
‘The training, the discipline, the rigor,' Hamilton drew the word out, slowly, like a nail. ‘For two years, Daniel cut carrots.'
I nodded. ‘Carrots,' I said, ‘are very important.'
Hamilton sighed. ‘You say you want to work in France for three months.' She illustrated the number with her fingers. ‘And what do you think you will learn?'
I wasn't about to answer.
‘I will tell you what you will learn. Nothing.'“

Bill Buford expands upon his plan. He goes to work for a good French kitchen in the US. He moves to Lyon. He goes to culinary school. He works in a good French restaurant in Lyon. With him come his wife and two young boys. They stay longer, much longer than three months. And Buford learns French cooking.

There are many parts of this story that fascinated me.

Bill Buford and his wife reflect upon lunches in the boys' school, a typical French public school: “There they eat their food in silence. This is to encourage them to think about what they're eating. They are served each course at a table by women who know how much the children want. They are not obliged to finish their food. But if they don't, they don't get the next course....'America seems so far away.'“

What makes the food of France so good? Buford explores that. He draws on a film, Natural Resistance, in which a winemaker compares two vineyards, across from each other, in Italy. One is a tidy vineyard, and the other is “a tumble of weeds and grasses.” Then he looks at the soils of the two. His is a rich combination of “roots, straw, much of it decomposing, mulch, worms.” The other is gray, compacted, resembling cement, with nothing alive in it. It's that rich soil that makes the ingredients of the complex flavors of the food. A revelation.

And some of the ideas Buford takes on are so deep they could take a lifetime to investigate: “...actually the secret code of French cooking—it's flair—seems always to involve getting two incompatible elements to live with each other.” Whoa. Are we just talking about French cooking here?

The brutality of working in a French kitchen is almost beyond the sensibilities of this gentle American reader. There is no tolerance of mistakes. Bullying, both verbal and physical, is rampant. Yet, Buford tells us, he never learned more, so quickly. What does a person do with that knowledge?

Dirt is for anyone with a keen interest in France or French cooking or, perhaps, the world.