no. 72: purees of many colors

We finally got round to sorting out our cookbook shelves last weekend. Our unpacking was freeform when we moved in three years ago, and the disarray felt like a chip in my knife. Re-shelving everything gave me a good long look at my past sins – we have four shelves of restaurant cookbooks, including one labeled “obnoxious American fine dining” (our labels are invisible to the naked eye). 

The kind of food we thought we had to know about 10 or 15 years ago feels turgid and same-y now. The plates are still beautiful, but instead of seeing the difference between Daniel Humm and Christopher Kostow, I see the monotony. Page after page of ingredients tweezed into place, sculpted by selection, reduced until they’re tight. White space around everything. As a collection, they’re about nothing so much as the importance of form – it’s not the medium that’s the message but the aesthetic, which is one of heavily rehearsed spontaneity, things belabored into perfection.

I’m only faintly ashamed of having been into this stuff, though the cultural baggage fine dining carries has proven more durable than its intellectual interest – more durable in some cases than its sensual pleasures. These delusions feel necessary, in the same way graduation ceremonies are needed in kindergarten today. You have to tell people what ambition should be. It’s obvious that this food is serious, a heedless outpouring of resources and effort and craft. It’s obvious that there’s money and regard in it.  

The obviousness is key. Fine dining can be beatified with a camera, in a way that food like this can’t:

This was the best damn thing I ate the last time we were in Paris. Pigeon from Brittany, its giblets in black pudding, and polenta, at Amarante. It was astonishing; a reminder that meat is a luxury, that even livestock once came from the wild, that the bird had and needed a liver and a gizzard and a heart. We had five dishes in two courses, and everything looked like dirt on slabs, except the vegetables, which were green, and the interior of the meat, which was every shade of peony. Our meal was entirely free of sculptural vegetables, powders, things poured table-side, granitas, or quenelles. The only smears were on the chef’s apron. 

Amarante doesn’t have a cookbook. It has twenty seats and a staff of three: the chef (who is also the reservationist, and so must respond to texts from unknown numbers), the waiter, and the plongeur. Nothing about it is photogenic, not its ambush on an un-manicured side street, not the dull room growing duller with age, and especially not the food, however profound it may be. But this kind of food takes a lifetime to cook. It takes desire and madness and drive – it takes, in short, ambition. 

It’s hard to grasp this, because most restaurant cookbooks make ambition look like a brigade in matching aprons with purees of many colors. A cookbook goes round the world and back again while a restaurant like this sits quietly on its street. You can’t order the pigeon to go. The ambition that leads here is a fairy door kind of ambition, which you can only experience in the right place and the right light, which extends beyond the printing press and into evanescence.

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You may have noticed that Let Them Eat Cake has developed an icon, an innocent slice come to a violent end, butter and vanilla and blood. This bit of haunting is courtesy of my dear friend Chloe Feldman Emison, illustrator and purveyor of extraordinary forms. If you’ve stuck with me this long, you might be the slightly twisted sort who’d enjoy her portfolio.