“Tubes are very important in Michel’s cooking,” David Deshaies said. David was the hooligan on the train. He was the executive chef.
By now, I knew enough to know that “tubes” probably didn’t figure among the classic techniques.
We roasted five dozen red peppers, peeled them, and laid them out, still warm, on long sheets of plastic film, which David then bombed with aggressive clouds of Knox gelatin—quickly before the peppers cooled. Arranged thus, they looked like a thick, undulating red carpet, which he then tried to roll up, peppers squeezing out the sides of the film, and looking like three-foot-long, squishy burritos. There was obviously no tidy way. He kept having to push the red-pepper slop back inside until, finally, he succeeded enough to be able to tie up one end with string. After tying up the other end, he picked up his massive tubular confection and whipped it around his head like a lasso—the image, which was actually rather alarming, was of a cowboy twirling a very long pastrami. But it was beautiful when done: very red, very symmetrical, very shiny, like a primary-colored sausage stuffed to a degree less than bursting.
“Okay,” he said. “Your turn.”
“We” made ten—David made nine, and I made one (it takes a while to lasso with confidence)—whereupon I was told to hang them in the “tube walk-in.”
It was a freezer. Tubes hung from ceiling hooks as though in a butcher shop, except that they were pastel green, Easter yellow, white, pink, a few robust reds, and purples. They could have been frozen party balloons. The longest was five feet. The white one, a three-footer, was the eel.
You have never seen anything like them. No one has seen anything like them, because outside of Richard’s kitchens you will find them nowhere. There were tubes for blini batter, uncooked bacon, coconut, beet, various fish, and a dough for club sandwiches. There were really a lot of tubes.
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Strangely, it never occurred to me that Richard didn’t make sense, that I should do something else. He was in Washington, D.C. I was in New York, an inexperienced father of twin toddlers. What do I do? Leave my family? Also I wanted basics. Richard was obviously “anti-basic.” He was also anti-obvious and subversive at every chance. His approach (more accurately described as his “anti-approach”) was to surprise the diner at every chance. He was an entertainer. His promise: to leave you delighted and pleasured. No, this wasn’t what I had in mind, but I couldn’t resist him.
He was educated in the classics, and many mornings I would find him at the chef’s table reading one, especially Ali Bab’s Gastronomique Pratique, a work largely unknown in the English-speaking world but a bible for many French chefs in the early twentieth century, published in 1907, 637 pages of detailed, practical explanations of the dishes of the French repertoire. But Richard never made a thing from it. Nothing.
Why do you read it? I asked.
“To be provoked. People think I have such original ideas, but I don’t, not really, they start with something I’ve read.”
No, Richard was not the obvious chef to teach a novice French cuisine. But pass this up? Not a chance.
Besides, he knew everyone: He would find a place for me in France.
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Citronelle was in the basement of an old hotel, the Latham, a 140-room, not-too-pricey Georgetown property that, despite its condition (it showed an alarming tendency to tilt), had actually seen worse days. (Movie buffs might recognize it as the seedy hideout that shelters young Julia Roberts in The Pelican Brief.) Once Mel Davis, Richard’s PR person and deputy, negotiated a weekly friends-of-the-family rate for a room, I was resolved: I would come down to Washington, domestic urgencies permitting, on Sunday evening and return on Friday. (Those domestic urgencies weren’t always permitting, because any arrangement that resulted in Jessica’s being the unprotected parent of twin toddlers would turn out not to be such a happy one.)
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RATATOUILLE. It was the next preparation that I learned, and I loved making it. It was served cold, with just-fried, hot-to-the-touch soft-shell crab. It seemed so radically basic—and, well, not.
According to David, my instructor, it is the taste of a French summer, because it is made with ingredients that every French household grows in its garden plot: eggplant, peppers, zucchini, onions, and tomatoes (plus garlic), in roughly equal quantities (except the garlic). Each ingredient is cut up chunky. “We once made a nouvelle-cuisine version, with small and perfect cubes,” Richard said, watching us from the chef’s table, “but it was too fancy. It’s a rustic dish and should always be one.”
The most important lesson: that each ingredient should be cooked separately. The onions are sautéed in olive oil. Then the zucchini (lightly); and finally the eggplants, but quickly and in a nonstick pan (no oil, because eggplant is an olive-oil sponge). The peppers are oven-roasted; then the tomatoes, but, according to the particularly French insistence of needing to remove the skin first. (“The French never eat it, because the skin comes out in your poop,” Richard told me confidently. “Really?” I asked, skeptical. “Really,” he said.)
You remove it by dropping each tomato into a bowl of just-boiled water, transferring it quickly to icy water, and peeling while it is in a state of shock. You then cut the naked tomatoes into quarters, scoop out the liquid and the wet, jellylike seeds, and drop them into a sieve atop a bowl. (This will be for later—for tomato water. By the end of your session, there ought to be a formidably goopy pile drip-dripping into a bright-red pond.) You then arrange the quarters—they look like red flower petals—on a baking sheet, paint with olive oil, sprinkle salt and sugar atop, and cook at a low heat for ninety minutes, until they’re plump and swollen. They are the jammiest of the jammy ingredients.
Only then does Richard mix the ingredients together—in a pot, with shots of red-wine vinegar (an unusual addition, a bright, slightly racy acidity to balance the dish’s summer sweetness)—and heats them gently for a short time. The practice—each vegetable cooked separately—is said to produce a more animated jumble of flavors than if everything had been plopped in at the same time. I didn’t think further on it, except to recognize that it had been a long time since I had prepared a ratatouille and that I liked this one so much that I would make it every summer, without fail, thereafter. (“Vegetable jam” is how David describes ratatouille: “My mother made it on Sundays and served it with roast chicken, and we ate it cold for the rest of the week.”) It was only on serving the dish to friends (who were excited by the result) that I learned that most people don’t bother cooking the ingredients separately, and many didn’t know it was a possibility. Even the most recent and generally pretty impressive edition of Joy of Cooking tells you to heap all your vegetables into a pot, give it a stir, cover, and cook, which put me in mind of that last ratatouille I’d made ten years before, inspired by the languidly lazy, self-consciously I-am-literary prose of M.F.K. Fisher, who had learned her preparation, in France, from “a large strong woman” who came from “an island off Spain.” This, too, was a dump-and-stir preparation that was then stewed for five to six hours. It tasted of mush. (Julia Child’s ratatouille is about half onboard and honors the basic practice—“each element is cooked separately”—but then, curiously, does some of the ingredients together.)