THE PASTA STATION; IN THE KITCHEN
By BILL BUFORD
The first time I
ate a homemade soft, filled pasta in
I ate two pastas
that day. The more memorable was giant pillowy
ravioli, distinguished by their thin, floppy lightness. They had been dressed
with butter and honey, and filled with pumpkin, so that you experienced an
unexpected taste explosion when you bit into one. The pumpkin, roasted and
mixed with parmigiano
cheese, was like a mouthful of autumn: the equivalent of waking up and finding
that the leaves on the trees outside your window had changed color. The dish
was called tortelli di zucca. (Zucca means
"pumpkin.") In English, you see the word "ravioli" more
than you see "tortelli"; in
The Maestro's
account is at the heart of
The Maestro was
also a native of
Halfway
through, the style changes. "O immortal gods," Platina suddenly declares, in the middle of describing how
to make a blancmange. "What a cook you bestowed in my friend Martino of
Como!" He then goes on to extoll Maestro
Martino's eloquence on the subject of cooking, and to insist that, in the
Maestro, we are witnessing a representative of the future: an advocate of the
"modern cooking school," where food is subjected to "the keenest
of discussions" and its preparation treated with profound seriousness. The
rest of the book is given over to the Maestro's recipes, told, noticeably, in a
different voice--the Maestro's, I suspect. In hanging around a chef's kitchen
just long enough to steal his recipes, Platina is
also illustrating an early example of a modern practice (recipe theft), and
when, four hundred and sixty-four years later, a manuscript, written in
Italian, of the Maestro's recipes was discovered in a bookshop by an American
food writer (an English translation will appear next year), it became obvious
just how extensively Platina had plagiarized the
Maestro, deviating from his recipes only in error (leaving out an essential
ingredient, say) or to add one of his Pliny-like medical observations, as in
his addendum to a recipe for boiled cannabis meatballs (offa
cannabina), a dish "to be fled from, for it
nourishes badly, arouses squeamishness, generates pain in the stomach and
intestines, and dulls the eyes." There are a few other cannabis recipes,
too, evoking fifteenth-century stoners loitering in the Vatican Library.
The Maestro was
a gifted chef, with considerable flair. When he prepares blancmange, for
instance (a sweet, meaty white sauce made from minced capon breast and almond
milk), he suggests dividing the sauce in two and adding egg yolk and saffron to
one part, so you can then serve the two sauces together, a swirl of white and
bright yellow. For more color, you might sprinkle red pomegranate seeds on top.
On occasion, the Maestro's flashiness is too much for Platina.
He dismisses the Maestro's eggs roasted on a spit, for instance, as a
"stupid concoction, one of the absurdities and games of cooks." (The
Maestro delicately pokes a needle through the shell of a raw egg and suspends
it over the fire, turning it gently, until the egg is ready to eat.) There is
also the Maestro's use of meat to fill his torte, which was controversial,
French, and inexcusably pretentious: typical, Platina
says, of "this pampered" age of ours.
For Platina, there was already an established way of doing
things. Your torte and your tortelli were filled not
with meat but with vegetables bound by fat or butter, eggs, and cheese. And, to
be fair to the Maestro, most of his recipes are the established
ones--established, that is, in 1465--and include many vegetable-filled torte
and tortelli. The Maestro's torta
di zucca, for instance,
calls for grating the pumpkin, boiling it in milk, and then mixing it with parmigiano, plus a little ginger,
cinnamon, and saffron--the familiar Christmassy spices of the Renaissance.
Traditional then, and traditional still: this (minus the Renaissance
flavorings) is almost the same filling that was served to me by Miriam at Trattoria la Buca in her tortelli di zucca.
In fact, the impression you draw from the Maestro's recipes--and the almost
eerie delight you get from reading them today--is not only of difference
(exotic spices; fascination with sugar; the use of a pot suspended over a fire,
because there was no oven) but of continuity: you picture the Maestro's hands
preparing food (kneading the pasta dough, letting it rest, making a broth with
bones from the capon, cooking the pasta in it, removing it to another pan,
dressing it with melted butter and cheese) according to a set of rules that had
already been highly codified, for who knows how long. Before Platina, no one had been there to write them down.
My lunch at La Buca was, in this respect, representative: versions of
every dish I ate there can be found in Platina's
book. The tripe: from the Maestro, I learned that the trick is to cook it twice
(Miriam's trick as well), not to use salt during the first cooking (which makes
it tough), and to add a pork bone ("It will be tastier"); then to
remove the tripe from the pan, cut it into pieces, add mint, sage, and salt,
cook it again (this makes it tender), and serve it with cheese on top. I ate
eel. (I returned to La Buca in the evening, and there
were people who had driven miles for the eel.) For the Maestro, there were two
preparations: on a spit (skinned, gutted, cut into large pieces skewered with a
leaf of sage between them); and braised (which was Miriam's preparation, too).
The frogs' legs (rolled in grain, then fried in olive oil) were cooked, more or
less, the same way by both the Maestro and Miriam (she used bread crumbs
instead), but the Maestro's more colorful presentation, with a salsa verde (salsa viridi) and fennel
pollen (feniculi floribus)--yellow-green
fennel pollen on the bright-green sauce--was distinguished by what I now
recognize to be his greater visual confidence.
"I am not
creative," Miriam said at one point. "That's not what I do. What I do
is what has been handed down to me. For ten generations--and maybe longer, I
can't tell, there are no records--we've been cooking for people who weren't
hungry." Her ancestors, she believes, learned the traditions of food
preparation in the kitchens of the local nobles, in the heart of the Po Valley.
The Maestro's first kitchens--those of the nobles of
When I returned
to
I approached
Mario Batali, the Babbo
chef, the star of the Food Network's "Molto
Mario," and the genius behind some of the best pasta in New York (after
all, even Miriam's daughter had found it edible).
"Mario,"
I said, "I want to work the pasta station at Babbo."
"You can't
do it," he said. "Look at you. You physically can't do it. You're in
your forties. You're too old. You have to be in your twenties. It's too
fast--you no longer have the mind for it." (And this same mind, thus
warned, sank momentarily into a Shakespearean despair, recognizing the limits
of mortality and despondently surveying the many things in life that were now,
owing to age, definitively beyond its capacities, like higher mathematics or
the infinitesimal subtleties of molecular biology, until I stopped myself. The
issue was boiling a piece of food in hot water--how difficult was that going to
be?) And Mario relented. (Which wasn't the same as his agreeing: his last words
were "O.K. I warned you"--not exactly an enthusiastic endorsement.)
At Babbo, a dish of fresh pasta was conceived in two stages:
the pasta itself was made during the day, and then the preparation (the cooking
and the saucing) was done, to order, in the evening. To make the pasta, two
machines were used: one, which mixed large quantities of flour and eggs, made
the dough, and the other rolled it out into long sheets. The pasta was then cut
up or filled, depending on what you were making, and divided into serving-size
portions, and each portion was put into a plastic bag and frozen. (In my head,
I imagined Miriam's voice: "Mario Batali is so
clever he even owns a freezer!")
To start, Mario
thought it might be a good idea if I tried my hand at Stage One--making some
pasta--and teamed me with Alejandro, who was then the daytime pasta guy. Our
first task was making many hundreds of orecchiette.
"Orecchiette" is a diminutive of orecchio, which means "ear," and it is regarded
as one of the easiest pastas to make. The dough consists of flour and water
(the flour is semolina, a cruder flour than the all-purpose stuff found in an
American kitchen), and you roll it out by hand until it looks like a white
tube. You then chop the tube into bite-size segments and crush each segment on
a ridged piece of wood with your thumb, and, like a child's magic trick, the
pasta changes shape under the pressure: when you remove it, it has ridges
underneath and, on top, it's shaped like an ear (unless it was one that I had
to peel off my thumb that first day, in which case the ridges looked like a
tic-tac-toe board, because I invariably had to do the thing twice, and wasn't
able to line it up correctly the second time, and the ear was all large and
distorted, a floppy flap of dough, more like a cartoon elephant's ear than a
normal ear, because my hands had got so clammy from the anxiety of finally making
pasta that it wouldn't come off my thumb). At the end of the session, Alejandro
showed Mario examples of what I'd produced--mine were fatter than normal orecchiette, not squished enough, and verging on mutant--to
see if they should be served that night or thrown away. Mario examined them,
sighed, and said, "Oh, they're O.K.," and then chuckled in a way that
meant, "Bill, this is one of the easiest things in the kitchen to make,
and yet--"
There are about
forty ears in a serving--each one crushed by some guy's thumb--and eventually I
mastered the squishing technique. I also discovered that, after you've made the
first two thousand or so, your mind wanders: you think about everything,
anything, whatever, nothing. (Such moments illustrate
what is referred to as the Zen of making pasta, which is also a way of saying
that making pasta can be very, very boring.) I was rather earnest during this
phase, so I found that when my mind wandered it tended not to stray too far
from the matter at hand. Why, I asked myself, would anyone want to eat a thing
that looks like a squashed ear (yet, evidently, people have been doing it for
hundreds of years)? So I studied each pasta and
thought hard about its shape. The explanation I came up with involved belly
buttons. As with belly buttons, there are two kinds of pasta: innies and outies. The innies, like ravioli and tortelli,
are designed to surprise you with goodies inside: you bite in and discover a
juicy something previously hidden from view. The outies
are designed to "hold on" to the goodies from the outside. People
like to eat orecchiette because they retain a tiny
cup of sauce in their "ear," I decided, while ingeniously holding on
to a little more on the bottom, along the ridges.
I made other
pastas. I was being educated in texture: how you handle a long sheet of pasta
like a piece of fabric, how it interacts with the air, the ways you can stretch
it and the ways you can't. I made black pasta by adding squid ink to the mix,
and gnocchi from big white
Around half of
the Babbo pastas were stuffed. Four of them were
called ravioli and filled with cow brains, fennel and potato ("fenpot"), goose liver, or beef cheeks (the house
specialty). Then, there were the pyramids, filled with whatever meaty thing was
at hand, and the lune, filled with butternut squash,
a cousin of Miriam's tortelli di
zucca (Babbo's version was
cut into circles, like la luna); mezzelune,
with dried cod inside, and so named because they were cut to look like
half-moons; and "love letters," filled with sweet peas and mint
leaves (the name, like the pasta, was a poeticized mutation of a smaller pasta
called francobolli, or "postage stamps"),
which were air-mail-sticker-size rectangles, with zigzaggy
ends.
Postage
stamps, little moons, half-moons, and belly buttons. I feel compelled to
pause for a moment and ask: What other culture has a tradition of serving up
its national cuisine in the form of little toys? There seems never to have been
a time when Italians weren't playing with their food. (When you make tortelli, one of Italy's oldest cookbooks says, at the
beginning of the fourteenth century--and with such unrestrained glee that you're
left to conclude that this food-as-a-plaything situation has been a feature of
the Italian meal for a very long time--you can shape the dough into
"horseshoes or brooches or rings, the letters of the alphabet, or any
animal you can imagine.") Is the secret appeal of pasta, the world's
greatest comfort food, in its evocation of childhood? Must an Italian dinner
always include a version of animal crackers?
Pasta continued
to intimidate me. If I couldn't recognize all these shapes, how would I ever
learn to make and cook them? I now realize that even Italians don't know them:
even if you grow up eating bow ties and guitar strings and pens, you never
learn all the pastas, because there are too many--hundreds, according to the
curator of the Museo Nazionale
delle Paste Alimentari,
Italy's national pasta museum, in Rome, where you can lose yourself for several
hours marvelling at hundreds of years of food toys,
exhibited like so many different butterflies in a lepidopterist's collection.
But there is a basic pasta vocabulary--that's what most Italians master--that
allows them to interpret all the variations they encounter for the rest of
their lives. ("Oh, I get it, it's like penne, but gigantic, and with
ridges.") And, if nothing else, I remained determined to learn the
vocabulary.
When I was
finally allowed to work at the pasta station in the evening, I discovered a
cheat sheet taped to the wall. Everyone, I learned, needs a cheat sheet in the
first weeks (there were more than twenty pasta dishes, a mixture of "fresca," fresh, and dried), and with this one--a page
of once yellow blue-lined legal paper, rendered into a greasy transparency by
some wild olive-oil moment--I was relieved to see that my predecessor had also
been clueless and that the ingredients for preparing each dish were written out
with a blunt pencil, along with some diagrams in the margins: two concentric
circles to illustrate the hollow bucatini, for
instance (buco means "hole"; bucatini means "things with little holes"); a
flattish oblong to represent the linguine (lingua means "tongue," and
linguine means "little tongues"); a small box to depict the chitarre (the pasta was thick and rough, like the bass
strings of a guitar). Most of the names were misspelled, phonetic
approximations: "ork" was orecchiette--no person, learning the station, would have
known the word "orecchiette," and, besides,
it was never used. What you heard was "ork,"
and you didn't see a written version, because, unlike every other station in
the kitchen, where ticker-tape printouts were tacked up along the edge of a
shelf, just above eye level, to remind you what you had next, this one had no
place to stick the little slips of paper, which would have wilted in the steam
and fallen off. Besides, the orders came so fast (everyone orders pasta) that
you had no choice but to keep them in your head, however they happened to be
spelled when you put them there.
What a pasta is served with is a wholly different branch of
philosophy. At Babbo, five of the twenty or so pastas
were served with a ragu. The Italian ragu and the French ragout are more or less the same thing;
in any language, the process (I now know) involves taking a piece of meat and,
as it was described in the vernacular of the kitchen, cooking the shit out of
the fucker. The term is one of many at the heart of a centuries-long debate
between advocates of French cooking and advocates of Italian, in the we-were-there-first stakes. The rivalry, felt more
acutely by the Italians, who believe that they are seen by the French as a
tribe of amusing primitives, might be summarized thus. In the history of modern
European cooking, the Italian peninsula was the first territory to establish a
sophisticated "high" cuisine, in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, in tandem with so many other creative flourishings
of the Renaissance, and appeared principally on the tables of the wealthy in
Milan, Florence, and Naples; then, the Italians claimed, their great secrets
were packed up and transported over the Alps by Catherine de' Medici when, in
1553, she married the man who eventually became Henry II of France.
Afterward,
France underwent its own cooking renaissance, culminating in the post-ancien regime Olympian dining events of Antonin
Careme (with his elaborate aspics, his all-day
sauces, and his extravagantly embellished architectural desserts), while the
Italians, having decided that the New World fruit known to us as the tomato
wasn't poisonous after all, and even had promise as a sauce, sank into a
two-hundred-and-fifty-year culinary depression, and, in outright violation of
their territorial and chauvinistic character, started imitating the French. All
those "alla" constructions, for instance,
that you see attached to dishes--risotto alla milanese, pollo alla cacciatora, bucatini all'amatriciana--are the
Italian equivalent of the French a la, and arose out of a panicky effort to
sound more sophisticated. Words changed: potacchio,
meaning a thick soup, comes from the French potage; al cartoccio,
a way of cooking something in a paper envelope, became in papigliote,
after the French en papillotte; and a sugo became a ragu.
In 1903, the now
very grand French cuisine was codified encyclopedically in Auguste
Escoffier's "Guide Culinaire,"
which remains the seminal text of the "classical" approach. The
seminal text in Italian cooking, "La Scienza in Cucina e l'Arte di Mangiar Bene"
("The Science of Cookery and the Art of Eating Well"), was written
around the same time, and was a collection of home recipes gathered over a
lifetime by a rich textile merchant named Pellegrino Artusi.
Like Escoffier's book in
Fundamentally, a
ragu is an equation involving a solid (meat) and a
liquid (broth or wine), plus a slow heat, until you reach a result that is
neither solid nor liquid. The most famous ragu is a
Bolognese, although there is (also famously) not one Bolognese but many.
(Gianni Valdiserri, who, with his wife, Betta, taught Mario how to make pasta at their restaurant
in the mountains not far from
A Bolognese,
made with a medieval kitchen's quirky sense of ostentation and flavorings, is
unusually complicated. There are at least two meats (beef and pork, although
local variations can insist on veal instead of beef, and prosciutto
instead of pork, and sometimes prosciutto, pancetta,
sausage, and pork, not to mention chicken livers) and three liquids (milk,
wine, and broth), and either tomatoes (if your family recipe is modern) or no
tomatoes (if the family recipe is older than Columbus), plus whatever else your
great-great-great-great-grandmother said was essential. (The only meat in
Miriam's, for instance, is sausage, cooked slowly with butter and oil, plus her own homemade tomato sauce, and the slightest hint of
garlic: one clove, removed before the cooking is completed.) In any variation,
however, the result has a texture characteristic of all ragus:
a crumbly stickiness (that condition of being neither solid nor liquid, the
meat having broken down into little bits, the liquid having almost entirely
evaporated). Other ragus--sausage, rabbit, wild boar,
hare, lamb--are more straightforward (meat, finely chopped-up vegetables,
broth, a bottle of wine), but, whatever the ingredients, the result is the
same, something that will stick to the surface of pasta, more dry than wet, a
dressing more than a sauce, or, as Mario describes it, a "condiment,"
a term he uses regularly to emphasize that what a pasta is served with is--like
ketchup and mustard on your hot dog--never more important than the pasta
itself. (And yet it's still very important: Gianni speaks of the erotics of a new ragu as it
cooks, filling up the house with its perfume, with a promise of an appetite
that will later be satisfied. Actually, what he said was that the cooking of a
fresh ragu "mi fa libidine"--gives him a hard-on--and until he can eat
some he walks around in a condition of high arousal.)
The Bolognese ragu made at Babbo was served
with pappardelle, a long, flat noodle, which Gianni
and Betta ate when they had dinner there on their
first trip to New York, in 1998--Betta noting,
dismissively, that the pappardelle was made
"with a machine." (Mario had told me of long trips he used to take
with Gianni in search of some meal of indisputable regional authenticity--the
perfect tortelli filled with autumn pumpkin in
Mantua, say; an hour and a half's drive--only to have one bite, recognize that
the pasta had been made by a machine rather than by hand, and walk out, dealing
with their hunger by grabbing emergency panini in a
bar on the drive back home.)
None of this,
frankly, meant a lot to me at the pasta station. What mattered was that pappardelle was the easiest order ("Pap!") to
prepare, if only because so much of the dish had been sorted out ahead of time
and there wasn't a lot that could go wrong. I put two scoops of the ragu in a pan and added water, a dollop of uncooked
tomatoes, and some butter--that was it. When the dish was done, I sprinkled on
cheese and parsley (referred to as "chiff,"
for chiffonnade, to describe the feathery way it had
been chopped). In fact, all the ragu dishes were
fairly straightforward. The gnocchi ("Ox!") was served with an oxtail
ragu (like a stringy beef stew), the love letters
("Love!") with a lamb-sausage ragu, the orecchiette ("Ork!")
with a pork-sausage ragu plus a tongful
of broccoli rabe. The problem was in the variations.
For instance, to rehydrate the oxtail ragu, you added water and a half scoop of uncooked
tomatoes--just as you did with the Bolognese--but no butter. Also, although you
sprinkled cheese and parsley on at the end, the parsley was whole leaves,
rather than the chopped-up feathery kind. Why? I didn't know why. I still don't
know why. To fuck with my head--that's why. And to the lamb-sausage ragu that went with the love letters you added a little
water and butter, just like the Bolognese, but no tomato, and then you finished
it with cheese, like most of the others, but then mint leaves rather than
parsley--after all, the love letters were stuffed with mint and peas. What
didn't make sense was the red-chili flakes: you were
meant to add these, too. Can you imagine--chili flakes and love letters?
"There's no
chili in your love letters," Frankie Langello
said. Frankie was the sous-chef at the time. He had
tasted the ragu after the dish was plated, but he
allowed a runner to carry it into the dining room anyway, because it was going
out with three other dishes, and there was no time to prepare a new one without
holding up the whole table. But he wasn't happy. "How could you fucking
forget the chili--again?"
(The kitchen
counted on the pasta station's running smoothly, and there wasn't the luxury of
having a journalist-tourist, infatuated with the mystique of what he kept
referring to as "pasta fresca," unless he
was never going to make a mistake. It was an attitude thing. "Did I just
burn you?" Frankie asked one night when he was standing next to me, sauteeing a pan of soft-shell crabs, which swell up in the
heat until they explode, hurling water and hot oil in unpredictable directions.
And, before I could formulate a witty reply, he interrupted me.
"Good," he said, and then emptied the leftover oil in his frying pan
with such violent recklessness that it splattered on the floor, all over the pasta
station, and on me, burning me again.)
Even so, I was
learning, even if my education seemed now to consist of lessons in what went
with what. For instance, a filled pasta was rarely combined with a ragu, because the pasta itself was a vehicle for ragu (in the belly-button dichotomy, it was an innie); what you put on the outside, therefore, to dress
it, was very simple--usually some kind of butter sauce. When Mario was in the
kitchen, he called for small amounts of butter in the butter sauces and was
always telling the guy at the pasta station to use less. When Mario was not in
the kitchen, Andy Nusser, then the executive chef, called for immoderate quantities and was always
telling the pasta guy to use more. Once, I protested, until Mark Barrett (the
real pasta guy and my coach) shushed me. "Never challenge the person in
charge, especially when he's wrong," he said, "or else he'll make
your life hell, your night long, and your station miserable. He'll start piling
on more orders than you can do. He'll find fault with everything. He'll make
you redo dishes that you cooked perfectly the first time."
A butter sauce
is an emulsion. "Emulsion" was another term that I only incompletely
understood, although I knew enough to know that I was creating one when I added
butter to broth to make a meat sauce at home. In the French cookbooks, this was
a tricky moment, and great stress was put on everything being exactly right
(the broth very hot, the butter very chilled and cut into very small bits, to
be incorporated, one by one, into the broth with very steady whisking). The
fear was that the emulsion might "break up" (whatever that meant).
It's different in the restaurant: there you seem to be doing so many things, one after the other, that the thought never occurs
to you that one might be trickier than another.
This is what
happens. You're told to prepare an order of tortelloni
("Tort!"). You drop eight pieces into a basket bobbing in boiling
water. Fresh pasta is less fussy than dried, and the cooking objective is
different: you want a food that's soft and yielding rather than one that
resists your bite. (The tortelloni take three minutes
to cook, but you can leave them in the water for much longer.)
To prepare your
sauce, you take a pan (from a stack on a shelf above your head), scoop out a
quantity of butter (from a metal container against the wall), and plop it in.
(At the station, your space is organized to reduce motion; your hope is never
to move your feet.) You then tilt the pan over the pasta water so that you can
splash some of the hot water into it, using your tongs. This is something of a
finesse movement: dipping the trowel part of the tongs into the boiling water
and then flicking it with your wrist so that the water lands in the pan and not
on your forearm--which, of course, is where mine regularly arrived (causing it
to swell immediately with red welts), unless I missed altogether. I got Mark
more than once, startling him every time. (I practiced the flick movement at
home until I realized that a big pot of boiling water atop a kitchen burner is
really quite tall. It comes up to your chest--a restaurant pasta cooker is
around waist level--which makes it much more difficult to splash water into
your pan with tongs: the angles are all wrong and, unless you're eight feet
tall or normally cook standing on a stool, it's almost impossible to get the
pan in the line of the hot-water trajectory. The result was a very wet kitchen.
Eventually, I realized that I didn't need to do the tong-flick at home--why not
use a spoon?--although it was such a graceful, professional
I-know-what-I'm-doing trick that I was reluctant to give it up.)
Next, you add a
simple flavor: orange zest for the tortelloni. (For
the lune, you add five sage leaves; for the mezzelune, five scallions--the idea is a strong herby or
citrus flavor.) You take the pan, which now looks pretty disgusting--a pool of
cloudy pasta water, a big lump of butter melting along the rim, and some
desiccated orangey twigs--and put it on the flat top (a flat piece of steel on top
of full-blast burners) and swirl it. You check the basket: a few tortelloni have risen. You swirl the pan again. With the
heat and the movement, the contents are changing: they have become a uniformly
colored yellow-orange liquid (yellowish from the butter, orange-ish from the zest), although more soup than sauce. You
check your basket: all the tortelloni are floating.
You swirl your pan again--almost ready, looking like a
custard. But then there are three more orders, and by the time you get
back to your pan, thirty seconds later, the liquid is mottled--still a sauce,
but a diseased one, very ugly, not something you want to eat. You fix it by
giving your pan another tong-flick of water (or, perhaps, a few tong-flicks,
until one lands) and return it to the flat top; with
one swirl, the mottled texture melts away. You can now remove the pasta basket
and tip the tortelloni into the pan. All the splashy
water has made the sauce soupy again, so you give the pan a swirl, and then
another, until it "tightens" up. You're looking for the moment when
the sauce streaks across the surface of the pan, which is when it will stick to
the pasta.
This is an
emulsion: an agreement between two unlike elements (butter and water), achieved
by heat and motion. If you get it slightly wrong--as when the sauce starts to
dry out (destroying the balance between the fat and the water)--the unlike
elements pull apart, just as they did when they were first plopped in the pan:
that's a broken sauce. Sometimes, during slow moments, or when I was waiting
for a basket of pasta to cook, I deliberately let my sauce break up and get
ugly, so that I could witness its snapping back into condition with a small
flick of water. It was like an animated chemistry lesson.
Once, I was
caught in mid-reverie. I was making a mushroom sauce that illustrated two
things that were characteristic of the station: how to use heat and how to stop
it. Like most sauces, this one was prepared in two stages and used only a few
ingredients: mushrooms (yellowfoots, although almost
any wild mushroom would work); some fresh thyme leaves; a finely chopped
shallot; a little butter. To begin, you needed lots of heat. You put your pan
on the flat top until it got really hot, until it darkened, and then you
splashed it with olive oil--the pan went very smoky very quickly--followed by
your mushrooms. And then: nothing. You didn't move the pan until, two, three
minutes later, you detected the sweet woodsmoke smell of the mushrooms caramelizing. You picked
up the pan and peeked at them: the mushrooms had a crunchy, sugary crust--not
burned but on the verge of burning. You then sprinkled the pan with the
shallots and the thyme, held it until they reacted to the high heat, and then shovelled in enough pasta water to stop the cooking: two,
three, four tongfuls, until the pan hissed, steamed,
and finally went quiet. That was Stage One: from high heat to no heat. Stage
Two was when the order was fired. You retrieved the pan and made an emulsion:
the butter, the swirling-swirling routine until the mushroom water became a
sauce, sticky enough to adhere to a pasta--pappardelle, normally, but it could be tagliatelle
or linguine or even a piece of grilled meat, like a steak. The reverie occurred
at the end of Stage One, when I lifted the pan off the flat top and sprinkled
it with the thyme. It had become my favorite moment. For a few seconds, nothing
happened: the leaves were on the hot metal of the pan, taking in the heat.
Then, one by one, they swelled, barely perceptibly, and exploded, a string of
tiny explosions, like minuscule pieces of herby popcorn. And with each pop
there was an aromatic eruption of thyme. I closed my eyes and put my face into
the pan, breathing in the exploding herb leaves. I don't know how long I stood
there. "What the fuck are you doing?" I opened my eyes. It was
Frankie. "What the fuck are you doing?" He was standing inches from
my face. The others were staring at me, and I pictured how I must have looked.
"I like the smell of the popping thyme," I said weakly. I was expecting
scorn, or a string of profanities, mockery at the very least. Instead, Frankie
seemed surprised by my reply and didn't know quite what to say. His face became
soft and puppy-dog-like. "Oh, well, then," he said, finally.
"That's all right." I think he was embarrassed.
In all these
dishes was an ingredient that you can't get at home: the restaurant's pasta
water. At the start of the evening, it was perfectly clear (you could see
through it to the shiny bottom of the pasta maker) and very salty. ("Like
the sea," Mario always said, and then reminded you to keep dipping your
finger into the boiling water, tasting it and adjusting it, tasting and
adjusting, until it evoked a childhood memory of your first trip to the beach,
but I never mastered the quick-dip or, for that matter, thought of my
childhood--only that I'd just burned my finger again.) Midway through the
service, the shiny bottom of the pasta cooker disappeared. This was the cloudy
phase, and about two hours before the muddy one, when the water ceased being
normal water and became, instead, an increasingly thick vehicle for soluble
starch: yucky-sounding (and yucky-looking), but actually rather
miraculous--when the water reached this condition, it behaved like a sauce
thickener, binding the elements (and, in effect, flavoring the pasta with the
flavor of itself). Even so, there was no escaping that the water the pasta was
cooked in at the end of the night was very different from what it had been at,
say, six o'clock. Just how different was evident when you finally had to clean
the "bitch," as the pasta cooker was called--my task, and an
indication of my position in the hierarchy. (Later, it slipped out that, when I
wasn't there, I was known as the "kitchen bitch." Nice touch, I
thought, as I mulled over the relationship between my status and my
end-of-the-day responsibility: the kitchen bitch, cleaning the kitchen's
bitch.)
For all that, it
was a pretty straightforward contraption. After you removed the pasta baskets,
it was just two sinks in a metal stand, and a large, gas-fired heating element.
The difficulty was in what you found at the bottom--normally, a richly layered
expression of the restaurant's archeology, composed of, say, goat cheese
(because the tortelloni were always leaking), butternut
squash (because the lune always lost a little as
well), and tiny bits of everything else, including, occasionally, shellfish
(where did they swim in from?). Also, the cooker was always hot--furnace hot.
Even when the heating element was turned off, it remained very hot, and the
green abrasive "scrubby" that you used steamed on contact, softened
slowly, and eventually started to cook, like a piece of plastic ravioli. (It's
not that you get hot, cleaning the bitch; you just don't cool down. You're
already very hot, and have been very hot for many hours. I have never been so
hot. It would take hours before my body temperature started to drop, and even
at four or five in the morning, when I finally went to bed, I continued to
radiate heat, my insides a meaty something still cooking, my mind unable to
stop the recurrent thought that this was my life: I'd become a sausage.)
Why don't more
people use pasta water at home? Sometimes I thought it should be bottled,
because there is no way that your home water could ever achieve the starchy
viscosity of a restaurant's. (It would be cheap--being liquidy
leftovers--and the jar should be very large, probably darkly tinted, like a
wine bottle, because there would be no reward in looking too closely at what
was floating inside.)
The thought also
made me curious about the moment in the history of American cooking when
efficiency won out over taste and, instead of using a pair of tongs, and
pulling the spaghetti straight out of the pot, people started using a colander
(an evil instrument) and letting all that dense, murky rich "water"
rush down the drain. The practice is described in the original, 1931 edition of
"The Joy of Cooking," in its "Rules for Boiling Spaghetti,
Macaroni, Creamettes and Noodles," along with
the even more alarming one of taking your colander full of spaghetti (rather
mushy, since you've boiled it for an hour), or macaroni (easy to chew, after
being boiled for twenty minutes), or creamettes (no
longer a supermarket item, alas, but once the essential ingredient in a baked creamette loaf), and rinsing the pasta in cold water--oh,
heresy of heresies--just to make sure that there is nothing clinging to it. I
hold the author responsible for the many plates of sauce-heavy spaghetti that,
as a feature of my own American childhood, were prepared by my mother, who was
born two years after the cookbook was published. To be fair to both my mother
and the author, a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce remains for me an eternal
comfort food, even if the meal was not about the pasta. Still, the cultural
disregard for the noodle contributed to my ignorance of it. It also contributed
to my prejudice about dried pasta, a prejudice that I finally overcame in the Babbo kitchen, in an epiphany of sorts.
The occasion was
an impromptu late-night family meal--two family meals, actually. The first
featured a big platter of linguine alle vongole (linguine with clams), which Mark was making for
the runners and dishwashers (each one took a plate of the pasta and put a bowl
on top to keep it warm, and then hid it behind a pot or underneath a towel--too
busy finishing up to eat the food now, but too mistrustful of others to leave
it out). The second meal was one that I was preparing, a bowl of steamed
cockles, for the restaurant manager and the wine steward (the executives in
charge that particular night and entitled, by virtue of their positions, to be
served at a table out front).
I'd become
curious about the difference between clams and cockles. In practice, the two
names are often used interchangeably; at Babbo, they
were interchangeable, because they were the same shellfish (and came neither
from the
I had another
realization that night, which arose from my noticing that, when it gets late,
the cooking that matters is for the staff, and not for
the diners who have just straggled in. Around midnight, the kitchen was
something of a demilitarized zone, meant to be closed but still serving food,
owing to the insistence of John Mainieri, the maitre
d', who sometimes accepted late seatings and was
openly loathed by some members of the kitchen staff as a result: they hissed at
his appearance, whistled, and erupted in a braying chorus of posh-sounding
"Hallo!"s. (A distressing thing to witness,
not least because I was fond of John.) In general, it is often possible to
argue your way into a restaurant just as the kitchen is closing. But I urge
you, the next time you find yourself in that position, trying to persuade a
maitre d' to accommodate you--bowing abjectly and apologizing, citing the
traffic, the crowds, a fluent stream of obsequious servility, maybe even a
crisp banknote in the man's palm--to recognize that the members of the kitchen
know you're there. They are waiting for your order, huddled around the
ticker-tape machine, counting the seconds until it appears, and heaping
imprecations on your head because you cannot make up your mind. They are
speculating--will it be something light, a single course, perhaps? (That's what
I would order, someone says, and everyone else loudly agrees.) Will I be able
to drain the pasta machine? Will the grill guy be able to turn off the burners?
Or will the diners--and the late ones are usually referred to simply as
"those fuckers"--be so clueless as to order the five-course tasting
menu? It happens, and the response of the kitchen--a bellowing roar of disgust--is
so loud that everyone in the restaurant must hear it. By now the kitchen is
different. At eleven, beer is allowed, and, for nearly an hour, the cooks have
been drinking. The senior figures have disappeared: Andy is downstairs doing
something with a computer; Frankie is doing something in the walk-in. No one is
in charge. The people remaining are tired and dirty. The floors are greasy and
wet--this is when the walk-in door swings open, and someone is suddenly
airborne. The pasta machine is so thick and crud-filled that the water has
turned purple and is starting to foam. Do you need more details? Let me
rephrase the question: Do you think, if your meal is
the last order received by the kitchen, that it has been cooked with love?
But then--in the
rush to clean up,the washing, scrubbing, mopping; the
search for one-quart containers (why are there never enough one-quart
containers?); the crash of a falling tray; the speed with which you clear away
the food at your station, wrapping up some, throwing away most, including the
ingredients needed to cook that tardy, last remaining order (sorry, Jack,
that's what you get for showing up so late); the trash talk about the maitre
d', who has returned to see if there's a family meal; the persistent hunger of
the dishwashers (they have nothing at home); the late-night, slightly blurry,
slightly drunken frenzy of a kitchen closing up, wanting to be done, wanting to
get out--amid all this, I suddenly got the point of pasta with clams.
This is what
happened: Mark, having cooked up a large quantity of linguine for its
regulation six minutes and thirty seconds, emptied it into a pan of New Zealand
cockle-clams, sloppily dripping lots of that starchy water on them in the
process, a big wet heap of pasta on top of several dozen shellfish; he swirled
the pan, gave it a little flip, swirled it again, and then left it alone so
that it could cook, bubbling away, for another half minute. (This was curious,
I thought, watching him--you don't normally leave a pan of pasta on the flat
top.) Then he took a strand and tasted it. He gave me one. It was not what I
expected. It was no longer linguine, exactly; it had changed color and texture
and become something else. I tasted it again. This, I thought, is the
equivalent of soaking bread in gravy, except it wasn't bread but pasta, and not
gravy but a highly flavored sauce. But what was the sauce? I looked at the pan:
the cockle-clams had been all closed up a few minutes earlier, and as they
cooked their shells opened, and as they opened they released the juices
inside--lots of juices. That's what I was tasting in
this strand of linguine: an ocean pungency. ("It's about the sauce, not
the little snot of meat in the shell," Mario told me later. "No one
is interested in the little snot of meat!")
What I had
learned in an Italian kitchen was that a meal is about the pasta, not the
sauce. But here, in tasting this strand of linguine, I was discovering that it
wasn't about either the pasta or the sauce; it was about both, about the
interaction between a pasta and a sauce, the
result--this new thing, this highly flavored noodle--evocative of a childhood
trip to the sea.
The normal,
Italian preparation of linguine alle vongole, I have since discovered, is simpler than what is
done at Babbo. ("Italians," Mario says,
"won't fuck with their fish: there are restaurants that won't use lemon
because they think it's excessive.") Mario's partner, Joe Bastianich, pointed out to me that the restaurant uses a
few tricks (perhaps refinements?) that you'd never find in
(When a cookbook
is prepared, a tester comes to the kitchen, picks up all the ingredients needed
to make a dish, and takes them away to translate them into quantities that
people at home might recognize. In the foodie
publishing world of magazines and books, these testers--who have very white
kitchens, with carefully calibrated ovens and computerized weighing
devices--are the despots of the written recipe. But I've never been entirely
persuaded by the reliability of the translation: either the quantities in the
restaurant original are so large that they don't seem right when they're shrunk
down--lamb shanks for thirty-four just doesn't look the same when it's done for
two; the chemistry is different, the sauce less rich in the reduced version--or
the quantities in the original are so small that they don't seem accurate when
they're given a specific measurement. Some of the preparations in the Babbo cookbook look unfamiliar to me. For instance, do you
really believe that the linguine with eels takes four garlic cloves, that the
lobster spaghettini takes two, and that the chitarre takes three? No. It's the same for each: a small
pinch. And what happened to the red onions, a feature of the lobster spag--a medium pinch--but not mentioned. Were there no red
onions the day the tester arrived? Even so, Mario is the author of the
translated quantities in the Babbo cookbook, and I
consult it constantly: just that sometimes it seems like a Borges version of
the place I worked.)
The downside of
the restaurant approach to doing measurements by hand is that, by the end of
the evening, your fingertips are stained with the heady perfumes of some of the
earth's most powerful aromatics, and you can do nothing to eliminate them. You
wash your hands. You soak them in hot water. You shower, and then scrub your
hands again. Even the next day, they stink of raw onion and garlic and pork
fat, and, convinced that everyone around you is picking up the smell, you ram them into your pockets, maniacally rubbing
your fingers against each other and feeling a little like an
obsessive-compulsive Lady Macbeth. (At home, the rule was that, when working
the pasta station, I slept with my head at the foot of the bed, while my wife
slept in the normal position, an arrangement designed to prevent the recurrence
of an earlier mishap, when one of my hands flopped across her face and woke her
with a revolting start.)
If you're making
linguine with clams at home, you should begin by roasting (small pinches of)
the garlic and chili flakes and (medium pinches of) the onion and pancetta in a
hot pan with olive oil. Hot oil accelerates the process, and the moment the
garlic, chili, onion, and pancetta are soft, you pour the oil away (holding
back the contents of the pan with your tongs) and add a slap of butter and a
splash of white wine, which stops the cooking. This is Stage One--and you are
left with the familiar messy, buttery mush--but already you've added two things
that you'd never see in Italy: butter (because it creates an emulsion, but
seafood with butter--or cheese, or cream, or any other dairy ingredient--is
unusual, if not verging on outright culinary blasphemy) and pancetta, because,
according to Mario, pork and shellfish are one of those eternal combinations
that you see in many places--in Portugal, for instance, in ameijoas
na cataplana (clams and
ham); or in Spain, in a paella (which often includes chorizo and scallops); or
in the United States, in the Italian-American clams casino--even if none of
those places happen to be in Italy. In Stage Two, you drop the pasta in the
water, then take your messy buttery pan, fill it with a big handful of clams
(enough to cover its bottom), and put it on the highest possible flame, the
objective being to cook them very fast--they'll start opening after three or
four minutes.
As the shells
open, you give the pan a swirl, mixing their juices with the buttery porky
white-wine emulsion, and pull out the pasta with your tongs--all that starchy
pasta water is still a good thing--give it another swirl, flip it, swirl it
again, to insure that the pasta is covered by the sauce. If it is looking too
dry, you add a splash of pasta water; if too wet, pour some of the liquid out,
and then let the thing cook away, for another half minute or so, swirling,
swirling, until the sauce starts streaking across the bottom of the pan. At the
end, you splash it with fresh olive oil and sprinkle it with parsley: dinner.
After I'd worked
the pasta station, I was still not satisfied. I knew that a true pasta fresca is made by hand: rolled out by a specially designed
wooden rolling pin (called a matterello) on an old piece
of board, the older and more battered the better. The idea was wood on wood,
for extra, ineffable layers of texture and "mouth feel."
I phoned Miriam.
I asked if I could work in her kitchen.
"Certo," she said. "Phone me when you are next in
This was
difficult. I was thinking not of one afternoon but, you know: a week. Or two weeks. Maybe a month.
She panicked.
"What? A month? I would never let a stranger in
my kitchen for so long a time. An afternoon. O.K., maybe a day. But a month.
And, besides, what do you think I can teach you?" she asked, repeating her
motto. "I am not an original cook."
I mentioned the
mysteries of pasta fresca, the labors of wood on
wood, the elusive know-how of getting the texture, and the thinness of the
sheets, just right.
"What in
the world are you talking about?" she said. "I have old arms. My old
arms cannot do this kind of thing anymore." Besides, she added, she
couldn't get a pastina anymore.
This was not a
term I knew.
A pastina, she explained, was one of the local women who made
pasta. That was their job: every day, to roll out the sheets. "I always
used to be able to get a pastina. No one does that
sort of thing anymore. They're far too busy. Modern life.
I use a machine. I make the dough by hand, and I cut by hand. But I use the
machine to roll out the sheets."
A
machine? Miriam, my romantic defender of the old, centuries-long,
traditional ways of cooking, the living embodiment of Maestro Martino, uses a
machine? Maybe, I thought, there was a lesson in that, too.