Issue Ten

    Look at the large black and white photograph that hangs above his post in the kitchen.  Daniel Boulud is sitting on a suitcase in the middle of a street holding a goose.  He is clad in a formal black overcoat, black fedora and dress shoes.  Daniel Boulud, his body slightly twisted toward the camera, stares back directly at the observer defiantly.  He hugs the goose around her breast.  The goose stares up towards the heavens.  Their two bodies subtly curl with and over each other.  Daniel Boulud seems to be saying that this goose and her fate lie squarely with him.  He will protect her from the outside and from the hideous mediocrity of the world.  If and when he sacrifices her, she will be given up to a higher state of being.  The goose seems to know that she is literally in expert hands, and she relinquishes all control to the master.  The suitcases belie the fact that her future is not necessarily the pot.  Perhaps Daniel Boulud has just rescued the goose from the farm. Perhaps, indeed, he is saving himself too.  They are certainly leaving somewhere, together.  They are on their way. This goose will not, Daniel Boulud proclaims, be slaughtered for an ordinary, greasy meal.  The goose is meant for finer stuff.   So, the goose and he, for now, are friends, en voyage.

    First, I left home at 14, and I went to Lyon, Daniel Boulud says, I wanted to work in the very best restaurant.  Because I was born and raised on a farm and farm work is very hard and every time there was holiday time, summertime, Easter, fall, there was always a lot of farm work to do...I didn’t like the isolation of being on the field, for me, it was not me ...so I was spending most of my time at home with my grandmother and my mother.  I liked it much more.  They would spend the whole day cooking and preparing all kinds of food and for me it was much more interesting.
    Daniel Boulud rearranges the contents of a passing plate.  He thinks of the German poet, Rilke, whose book Letters to a Young Poet, inspired his own, Letters to a Young Chef.  Rilke advised: “ I know of no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer whether you must create.  Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it.  Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist.  Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.”
    And when I decided that I wanted to be a chef, my parents put me in a hotel school, like a cooking school, but the cooking school was very bad, and so that’s when I decided I wanted to do an apprenticeship, and a friend of mine knew a lot of chefs and the best chefs were in the region of Lyon.  And so I started in Lyon in one of the two-star restaurants there and from there I witnessed the greatest chefs in the world because Lyon was such a Mecca for chefs.  And every morning in the market I would go with my boss to pick up the crates and all that, and all the big shots would be there and I really felt that there was a wonderful community and a camaraderie and a brotherhood and I found a business where it took a lot of effort to give pleasure, and giving pleasure was very rewarding.  My boss was doing the state hall parties, so I was cooking for presidents, I was cooking for ministers, and that’s exciting when they give you a government pass to be able to get to your kitchen in order to cook.
    Heraclitus, as Aristotle retells the story, kneels by the bank of a river contemplating whether he could ever step in the same river twice.  And then it occurs to him that since the only constant was change he could never even step in the river once.  And yet there was this nagging something that was constant, that was not flux, that was transcendent, something that tasted good despite the chaotic variety of the river and its banks.
    Daniel Boulud, sees change, celebrates change, breathes in the fumes of change and blows them back out again refined with a trace of French taste.  Like a good postmodernist, he is seriously whimsical, but like a good modernist, he holds fast to the pole of stability that threads through the torrents.  Again, Rilke, guides us: “But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.”
    So I arrive in Washington DC in 1980 and there was something happening in this country.  From what I witnessed when I arrived here was that French cuisine in French restaurants was very boring and very predictable and very old fashioned and it was almost 20 years behind and was not really very French.  They were doing the same menu as the generation of chefs who came to America in the 50s and 60s.  They established what a French restaurant was and from there, there was no evolution.  But in France, there was nouvelle cuisine and there was a revolution in cooking and this new guard was really making amazing progress but here, here in America, there was kind of the old guard stuck in their ideology, and often chefs and cooks could go from one French restaurant to another and really be operational very quickly because the menu was very predictable.  Every restaurant served the same vinaigrette.  After working in France with the most creative chefs, it was interesting to do things here in America that had never been experienced here. 
    French cuisine had existed for three or four hundred years.  As long as we had kings, we had great foods.  Once the kings gave up the throne, the restaurants started.
    And during this history, there has always been change.  Escoffier, in the 30s, 40s, 50s, the one who created the Ritz, and the Savoy, and the Cote D’Azure, redefined classical French cuisine, and codified it, and then everybody was kind of tired of it by the 60s.  The new generation started–chefs who wanted to be creative–young chefs, and chefs who started to travel more, and go to Asia and go to America and go everywhere, and start to be inspired.  Yes, a lot of mistakes were done.  There were a lot of stupid things like making fish with raspberry and trying any combination of flavor or texture just for the sake of being different.
    But also a lot of good things were done.
    Faulkner said: The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.  Daniel Boulud knows that the revolution must continue against the backbone of discipline and good sense.  He must continue to push outward to create an inclusive vision.
    We are writing a book right now called Global Braising, and global braising is an adventure for me because besides French cooking I know a lot of other cuisines, but I’m not a specialist in Indian cooking, in South American cooking, or Chinese or Asian.  In every culture there is, though, slow braising because in the old countries there are the lesser cuts of meat, not everyone eats fine meats like filet mignon, so you’ve got to braise the lesser meats, you’ve got to cook them slowly, you got to chop them, you got to dice them.  I need to know all about the different spices; I need to know all about the different curries, the way they are made and the balance of the spices.  In the end, I clean it up a little bit.  I refine it.  I degrease it because sometimes these meats are very greasy, and I balance the spice out so a person like you can try the recipe and you’re not going to have your mouth on fire, and you’re not going to have your stomach hurting.
    From the glass perch of Daniel Boulud’s office, high above his kitchen, the chatter of his fellow diners fading in the distance, the writer, for just a minute, watches the chef, who is mystically still and wide-awake as a Buddhist monk, amidst a swarm of sous-chefs and assistants.  He resembles a priest, clad in white, at his altar.  His arms fold in, then his hands outstretch.  As the flock in the restaurant prepares for perfection, the spirit takes hold through a mixture of patience and ritual and incantations of mystical texts.  Communion, is, when you get right down to it, really a recipe.  Eating has always been a spiritual act.
    It certainly affects you.  It is something you cannot relieve yourself from.  For me spirituality is such a wide range of things and you’ve got to learn, you’ve got to learn every use of it.  It’s the communication with what you do and how you feel connected with the work you do.  Let us talk about the trinity of heat.  Young chefs must understand that it is going to be a very long process to master the heat, and to understand the possibility of it, which is endless.  If cooking is a religion then heat is the most important thing.
    And if heat is the religion of food,  then wine is the mystical dimension of cooking.  For me there is nothing more supportive to good food than wine.   Wine is even older than food.  I don’t know what wine came first, or if good food came first, but definitely what I feel is mystical about wine is how wine evolves from the grape to the service of it.  Wine has so much personality, and so much of its personality comes from the personality who made the wine.   It is very hard to understand why within the same square mile you have five different vineyards ...or ...you have one vineyard and ten different winemakers inside and they’ll make different wine.  And the wine grew under the same sun over the same soil.  It is certainly the mind of the wine maker, the knowledge, the talent ...but maybe it’s the soil, maybe it’s the sun because the grapes got an extra half-hour of exposure.
    I think that’s always strange ...
    And the writer drifts further away from his friends and his family, and thinks that the “strangeness” of wine is a matter of the combination of connections whose random nature produces a perfection.  Daniel whispers to him:
    You can open ten different bottles of wine and none of the wine will taste the same five years later ...ten years later ...and so the mistake is where the answer is.   The mistake is to think that you can really nail it and capture it and believe that you can do it.  It’s not possible to do that.   I have a lot of admiration for winemakers when they do it artistically.
    The writer’s bow tie is crooked by now.  He, once again, fantasizes about perfection, or the illusion of perfection, which so eludes him everyday, but which here, in this skybox, high above this gleaming, stainless steel kitchen seems so attainable, so ordinary, so expected.
    Perfection is the biggest pain because perfection is in the details.  Perfection is the effort you put into those details.  It’s the consistency.  It’s the relationship with suppliers, it’s the relationship with the people who work with you; it’s the relationship with the service people.  Everyone is part of the equation of perfection.  It is very hard to put all that together.  Perfection is like the Rubrics Cube, where you have to turn it so many times to lock it in and one square is always left over.  Perfection in a restaurant is very subjective because if you have a bad day I can do everything I can to make you feel better, but if at the end of the day I have done everything I can I might not make you feel that it was the perfect meal.  So we are dealing with people with a lot of sensibility.
    Perfection goes away and the next day you have to reassemble the pieces.  You know the grapefruit was a little acidic today, or it’s not from Florida and it changed the whole recipe.  There are so many things beyond our control that affect us and we have to put it back together every time.
    Rilke, the guide, says: “I know that it is important and full of new experience to come upon a work of one’s own again written in a strange hand.  Read the lines as though they were someone else’s, and you will feel deep within you how much they are your own.” The writer figures out what Daniel Boulud is really doing, standing so still at the counter of his chaotic kitchen.  He is creating recipes and everything that he does eventually drizzles onto the pages of the little notebook in his apron.
    Sometimes we work with a group of chefs and sometimes we throw ideas at each other.  So sometimes it is a group idea and sometimes it is myself.  I eat different things.  I travel.  I read.  In the middle of service, under the biggest pressure, I am more creative than spending three days trying to find something.  My best recipes come in the act of cooking.  It is a very striving way.  We try to be very well organized and communicate with the staff but we also cook freely and create dishes that are not on the menu, that were not even thought of an hour before or anything.  But suddenly somebody walks into the restaurant, he may be a famous chef, then you start to make a dish and that’s when we are under pressure to create a recipe.  Robert Parker used to come very often for lunch and he would bring 8 or 10 people, and I would make a 12 or 14 course meal, and every dish would be a beautiful work of art.  This is certainly not the lifestyle and time of today but for me, as a chef, it gives me so much pleasure to prepare this meal, and we will do a only a big roast and whole fish stock, and each takes so long to prepare because it is for a one of a kind experience, for a one of a kind party, for a one of a kind event and for me that certainly breaks the monotony of the everyday perfection.
    Perfection, again.  The writer is obsessed with visions of perfection.  But, for Daniel Boulud, perfection is his job.  Perfection is really only the vehicle he uses to drill down to his core values: creation, pleasure, generosity.  Like a compassionate monk, his open face seeks to give, and the writer, and the public, and his friends, are only too willing to take from him as much as possible.
    Perhaps, what Daniel Boulud seeks, more than anything, is peace.  He is alone, for once, say on a Sunday in his apartment.  It is late morning.  He is slightly hungry.  What would he make for himself?
    Oh, it would be simple.  Scrambled eggs and caviar.  If I am going to work hard, I’m going to eat some caviar.  Everybody thinks that scrambled eggs take two seconds.  Depending on how many eggs you make, it’s going to take you ten minutes.  You are going to cook them in such a slow process that the eggs are going to curdle so slow they will get creamy.  No milk.  No water.  Maybe a pinch of cold butter at the end, or crème fraiche.  Your eggs should not be runny but creamy.  You cannot afford to have the eggs curdle and stick to the pan so you’ve got to stir it carefully and watch it so carefully.  You cannot heat it too fast, and you cannot go too slow because it’s never going to pick up the creaminess.  You need a double boiler.  The pot should not touch the boiling water so that the eggs are cooked only by the steam. 
    You make the toast with homemade bread.  You cut it very thick.  You butter the bread first with a little bit of white truffle butter and then grill it very lightly on both sides.
    For your salad, you want to make sure the greens are crunchy.  There must be chew to your salad.  The ultimate dressing for me is one clove of garlic crushed with a fork and you make a paste of it with salt and pepper and then you add a tablespoon of Dijon mustard and a tablespoon of vinaigrette and olive oil and you mix it up.
    It will take you twenty minutes to cook four eggs but when you get to the end...
    Rilke says: “There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing.  Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening...”  He could have been commenting on Daniel’s scrambled eggs.
    After the last dinner of the night has been prepared and served, Daniel Boulud climbs the metal steps to his office to have dessert with his guests.  Tomorrow, a snowstorm is going to pound Manhattan.  He worries about how it will impact dinner.  ‘Worries” is the wrong word.  It is more like that he kneads-the restaurant, the table settings, the reservations, the service, the ingredients, the people, the other bistros in his universe, the infinite possibilities of taste combinations.  Like a baker massaging his dough, Daniel Boulud’s mind continually kneads the future and the past, the farm and the fields, the goose and the truffles, and the present dissolves.