30 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
“When they announce boarding group three, we charge.”• •
in my body. Giving shape to food, turn-
ing it into something artful, was an es-
cape, and the kitchen became a labora-
tory in which I could lose myself in
experimentation.
And I had so much to learn. Cook-
ing was not just a skill but a practice
with a remarkable history, requiring ab-
solute devotion. My parents encour-
aged my ambition, buying me equip-
ment, taking me to restaurants, and
coming home with menus signed by
chefs I followed in the food press. I read
everything I could find on pioneers of
the “New American cuisine,” such as
Jeremiah Tower, the brilliant, bitchy
Harvard-educated architect who cre-
ated Stars, a dazzling brasserie in San
Francisco; and Alice Waters, the owner
of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, where
Towers had got his start before the two
became bitter enemies over who had
invented the Chez Panisse style. Once,
I got to dine at the Campton Place
Hotel, in San Francisco, where Brad-
ley Ogden was developing a style based
on local ingredients and regional reci-
pes. “You seem to have a deep appreci-
ation and dedication for this business,
but don’t take it too seriously,” Ogden
wrote afterward. Good advice that I
wasn’t ready to hear; wasn’t taking it se-
riously the whole point?
Besides, my real heroes weren’t
American but French: Paul Bocuse, the
visionary of Lyon; the formidably ar-
ticulate Joël Robuchon; the Troisgros
brothers, renowned for their salmon
with sorrel sauce; Michel Guérard, the
inventor of cuisine minceur, a low-calo-
rie version of nouvelle cuisine. I was
fascinated by Bernard Loiseau, the
moody creator of cuisine à l ’eau, a style
built around water-based sauces. (Helater killed himself, fearing that he was
about to lose his third Michelin star.)
But the chef who most seized my imag-
ination was Alain Senderens, a bearded,
bespectacled intellectual who looked
more like a post-structuralist theorist
or a Kabbalah scholar than like a cook.
At L’Archestrate, in Paris, he made dar-
ing adaptations of recipes he excavated
from ancient Roman cookbooks, and
shocked the culinary establishment with
wonderfully mad flavor combinations,
like lobster with vanilla sauce.
I was in awe of Senderens. Not that
I’d ever tasted his food—I hadn’t even
been to Paris—but merely to read about
Senderens was to know that he was a
genius. I discovered him thanks to my
favorite food critics, Henri Gault and
Christian Millau, who ran an opinion-
ated, witty, literary rival to the staid Mi-
chelin Guide. They declared Senderens
“the Picasso of French cooking.” He was
certainly my Picasso, a bold and uncom-
promising revolutionary who’d rein-
vented the language of food.
My own cooking was more cau-
tious. I was attached to traditional forms
and intent on pleasing. I recently un-
earthed the menu for a dinner party I
catered when I was maybe fourteen.
The dishes—“Fricassée of Mussels with
Yellow Pepper Cream and Spinach” or
“Summer Fruits with a Sabayon Sauce
Flavored with Framboise”—show that
I was more interested in absorbing the
great tradition of French cooking than
in disrupting it. How could I break with
a tradition if I hadn’t properly learned
its techniques? Boning poultry, cutting
perfect julienned carrots, peeling and
dicing a tomato unblemished by skin
or seeds, making a lumpless roux for
béchamel, caramelizing onions with-
out burning them, whisking pieces of
butter into a wine reduction without
curdling the sauce: such skills had to
become second nature, like tying one’s
shoes or swimming breaststroke.
These are physical as much as intel-
lectual forms of knowledge. How do
you know that a steak, or a piece of
salmon, has been cooked to your liking?
Not by a timer, or even by looking, but
by the feel of its flesh when you press
it, and the indentation left by your finger.
I began to keep a food diary, charting
my progress and recording my inner-
most thoughts about cooking. I was in-