* * *
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One night, Jessica was wakened by the sound of boys’ giggling. She had put them into their cribs two hours before. She peeked past the bedroom door and saw them in the living room, pulling books off the shelves. They had learned how to climb out of their cribs, an unnerving milestone. She called me in Washington. I didn’t hear the ring.
Showing no affect (it is what the experts say to do), she duly picked up each boy as though a kitten—no eye contact, no verbal acknowledgment—and returned them to their cribs, ho hum, and went back to bed. They climbed out. She put them back. They climbed out. After the routine had been repeated fifty times, she phoned me.
No answer.
After another fifty episodes (which seems improbable, but she assures me that she returned them to their cribs more than a hundred times), she tried my phone one more time, gave up, and went to sleep. She later found the boys sitting cross-legged with the fridge and freezer doors opened, white handprints everywhere. On the floor were butter, milk, orange juice, broken eggs, and ice cream, which they were eating from the carton with their hands. Frederick had chocolate syrup in his hair.
I showed up on the Friday evening. Jessica and I spoke in the morning. “This is not working,” she said.
“I understand,” I said, but I was back in Washington on the Monday.
* * *
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AT THE FISH STATION, I DID PROTEINS. No one on the line—and we were all Americans—ever thought, Hey, I am a French cook. The skate took more or less the same savvy skill set that you would use to make a cup of tea: i.e., add hot water.
Skate is like mini-stingray with maxi-big bones that, in France, is served with a brown-butter-and-caper sauce: not complicated to make, but not one that David trusted any of his cooks either to know or recognize the taste of. “Their mouths have been ruined by sugar.” So David made the sauce—always. He also boned the fish, then slipped it into a sack, poured in his sauce, vacuum-sealed it, and froze it. When the order came through, the fish went into a water bath for twenty minutes (controlled temperature, nothing to think about) and, when “fired” was removed from its sack. You didn’t have to know what you were doing. You didn’t have to know it was fish.
The striped bass: grilled skin-down until crispy, five minutes, and then finished by a minute on the fleshy side. The exotically oily sablefish: four minutes in a 500-degree oven, boned with a pair of fish pliers, painted with a soy-and-sake glaze, and then (when fired) sizzled in the salamander until it bubbled blackly.
Soft-shell crabs were the exception, arriving daily in a box, alive, with eyes, lined up in rows on a straw bed, each no bigger than a child’s fist, ocean-wet, stirring slightly, and smelling of barnacles and anchors. They were also fun to eat, crustaceans that you could pop into your mouth and munch on in their entirety, claws, shell, everything.
They are a specialty of the Chesapeake Bay, but not a unique breed. What is unique is the breeding. Crabs shed shells and regrow them. They molt. Chesapeake Native Americans discovered that if you pull a mid-molting crab out into the air, the shell never hardens. It is, therefore, delightfully crispy when sautéed. Richard’s were especially crispy, because they were deep-fried, after being filled with a mix of mayonnaise and crabmeat, an unconventional touch, stuffing a baby with the meat of the adult—basically, with what the little soft-shells would have grown up to be had their adolescence not been abbreviated.
“The mayonnaise is for the acidity,” David told me during a lesson on crab prep. He searched for an example I might understand. “Think fish and chips. The English splash them with vinegar. Fat loves acidity.” (David, I have to observe affectionately, had an inexpressibly charming, sweet way of conveying the utter awe he felt in the face of my culinary stupidity.)
To do crabs, you need only a pair of heavy-duty clippers and a metal bowl. With your left hand, you pick up the critter from just behind the claws; with your right, you snip off its head from just behind the eyes, which makes a light plonk when it hits the bowl. The now wide-open carcass is impressively roomy, especially after a little squeeze, which, when you think about it, makes perfect sense. A crab’s new shell is like buying a coat for a fast-growing child—you want something the little guy will grow into. Of course Richard would make use of this space! It was as much a feature of a soft-shell’s uniqueness as its paper-thin housing. A crab filled with mayonnaise? It was like a fried seafood sandwich. Why hadn’t more restaurants stolen the idea?
To fry, you dip the crabs in a batter made of two parts pastry flour (low-protein, fluffy), one part corn flour (for mouth feel), a bottle of sparkling water (the effervescence of which mysteriously survives the frying), and an elusive ingredient called “curry love.” The term was used by a line cook, Gervais Achstetter, who shouted, “Chef, the crabs need a little more curry love.”
“Gervais, be careful, please,” David said. “There is a journalist in the house.”
Curry love, once it was finally accepted that the journalist wasn’t going away anytime soon, turned out to be food coloring. Its use in savory dishes is universally forbidden, although for no reason that entirely makes sense, since it is tolerated in the pastry kitchen, which, in essential philosophic ways, Richard never left. A lot of Richard’s dishes had a little extra love. The bright green of the “basil oil”? Or the ratatouille, its vibrant saffron-red? Or the deep, deep purple-red of the “wine sauce” that went with a steak?
I later asked Richard straight-out—“Do you use food coloring?” We were having lunch. It was mischievous of me. He didn’t know that I knew. He paused, trying to read me.
“No,” he said. “Never. Beet juice, of course. But not food coloring.”
I repeated the exchange years later to Daniel Boulud—the brazen audacity of it—and he said, “Huh.”
When I later found myself in Boulud’s kitchen, and was on my own, downstairs, among the prep cooks, I fell into admiring the deep, egg-yolky tortellini that the pasta guy was making, and after asking if I could see the recipe discovered that, oh my, it included yellow food coloring.
Spoiler alert number three: I would end up cooking with Daniel Boulud.
* * *
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One weekend, flipping through a magazine, Richard had come upon a picture of a flowering plant in a glass vase. The vase made him stop. He closed his eyes and visualized the possibility of a salad that looked like a gift from the florist, with “soil layers” below and leaves and edible flowers on top. By the time he got to the restaurant on Monday morning, he couldn’t wait to get started. He had already grabbed a sheet of paper and was drawing what it might look like: on the bottom, the “dirt” (eggplant, sautéed with shallots in olive oil and finished in the oven to a sweet paste); on top, jellied tomato water; and in between a fluffy yogurt—“Not sweet, Americans always want sweet, but savory, seasoned with cumin” (a low-note heat, North African, earthy)—whipped by a technique that he had learned from Lenôtre.