A Philosopher in the Kitchen

John McPhee, who turned ninety earlier this month, began his career at The New Yorker, in 1963, with an account of his time at Cambridge University. For his second piece, he profiled Bill Bradley, then a college athlete whose rigorous, precise approach to the game of basketball has always reminded me of McPhee’s mode of reporting. At the time, Bradley, a banker’s son from Missouri, was scoring points for Princeton game after game, from every possible angle. He would often make blind passes or shoot without any conceivable view of the hoop—something unusual in those days. When McPhee asked how he accomplished these feats, Bradley replied that you need to have “a sense of where you are,” an instinct born of work, of constant practice.

This month, on the occasion of John’s birthday, we celebrate his extraordinary and ongoing career at The New Yorker, beginning with the Bradley Profile. Food is occasionally at the delicious center of a McPhee piece, and, in 1979, he wrote “A Philosopher in the Kitchen,” about a cook in an obscure restaurant who had thoroughly dazzled him. Known for his books on the natural world, including “Coming into the Country,” his masterpiece about Alaska, McPhee also wrote for the magazine, in 1988, about society’s attempt to “control” nature, in “Los Angeles Against the Mountains.” For a peek at John’s relationship with his editors over the years, enjoy his short, hilarious “Editors & Publisher.” These four pieces provide only a hint of John’s astonishing collection of work, his range and his passions, but they do give a taste of his inimitable prose. And we bet that after reading, or re-reading, them, you will go on reading from there. For a peek at John’s relationship with his editors over the years, enjoy his short, hilarious “Editors & Publisher.” These four pieces provide only a hint of John’s astonishing collection of work, his range and his passions, but they do give a taste of his inimitable prose. And we bet that after reading, or re-reading, them, you will go on reading from there.

 ~ David Remnick, New Yorker | Sunday Reading: The World of John McPhee

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A Philosopher in the Kitchen - Brigade de Cuisine

The fifth-best meal I have ever sat down to was at a sort of farmhouse-inn that is neither farm nor inn, in the region of New York City. The fourth-best was at the same place—on a winter evening when the Eiswein afterward was good by the fire and the snow had not stopped falling for the day. The third-best meal I’ve ever had was centered upon some smoked whiting and pale mustard sauce followed by a saltimbocca, at the same place, on a night when the air of summer was oppressive with humidity but the interior of the old building was cool and musty under a slowly turning paddle fan. When things come up so well, culinary superlatives are hard to resist, and the best and second-best meals I have ever had anywhere (including the starry citadels of rural and metropolitan France) were also under that roof—emanations of flavor expressed in pork and coriander, hazelnut breadings, smoked-roe mousses, and aïoli. The list of occasions could go deeper, and if it were complete enough it might number twenty or thirty before the scene would shift—perhaps to the fields of Les Baux or the streets of Lyons. The cook who has been responsible for such pleasure on this side of the Atlantic was trained on the other side, in kitchens in various places on the Continent, notably in Switzerland, and including Spain, where he grew up in a lavish and celebrated Andalusian hotel that was managed by his father. His father was Austrian, but his mother was English, and so, from the age of eight, he was sent to be educated in Great Britain. As a result, he is in manner, speech, and appearance irremediably English. He has an Oxbridge accent and a Debrettian flourish of names—not one of which he will allow me to divulge. His customers tend to become his friends, and I had been a friend of his for something like five years before I thought to ask him if I could sit in his kitchen and take notes. He said it would be all right, but with the condition that I not—in any piece of writing—use the name of the restaurant, or his name, or the nickname of his wife, Anne, who is not known as Anne and is always called by her nickname. We further agreed that I would not even mention the state in which they live and work, or describe in much detail the land and waterscapes around them, let alone record what is written over the door of the nearest post office, which is, as it happens, more than five miles and less than a hundred from the triangle formed by La Grenouille, Lutèce, and Le Cygne.

The man’s right knee is callused from kneeling before his stove. He would like to see his work described. He would like to be known for what he does, but in this time, in this country, his position is awkward, for he prefers being a person to becoming a personality; his wish to be acknowledged is exceeded by his wish not to be celebrated, and he could savor recognition only if he could have it without publicity. He works alone, with Anne (who makes desserts and serves as hostess, bartender, sommelière). In a great restaurant of Europe, the team in the kitchen will be led by the gros bonnet, and under him a saucier, an entremettier, a potagiste, a rôtisseur, a grillardin, a friturier, a garde-manger, and any number of commis running around with important missions, urgent things to do. Here—with Anne excepted, as la pátissière-en-chef—this one man is in himself the entire brigade de cuisine. It is his nature not just to prefer but to need to work alone, and he knows that if his property were invaded and his doors were crowded up with people who had read of him in some enamelled magazine he could not properly feed them all. “There is no way to get qualified help,” he explains. “You’d have to import kids from Switzerland. If you did, you’d lose control. The quality would go down the drain.” In the haute cuisine restaurants of New York, kitchens are often small, and, typically, “five ill-educated people will be working there under extreme pressure, and they don’t get along,” he says. “Working alone, you don’t have interaction with other people. This is a form of luxury.”

Sometimes, at the height of an evening there are two customers in his dining room. His capacity is fifty-five, and he draws that number from time to time, but more often he will cook for less than forty. His work is never static. Shopping locally to see what is available today, reading, testing, adding to or subtracting from a basic repertory of roughly six hundred appetizers and entrées, he waits until three in the afternoon to write out what he will offer at night—three because he needs a little time to run to the store for whatever he may have forgotten. He has never stuffed a mushroom the same way twice. Like a pot-au-feu, his salad dressing alters slightly from day to day. There is a couple who have routinely come to his dining room twice a week for many years—they have spent more than fifteen thousand dollars there—and in all that time he has never failed to have on his menu at least one dish they have not been offered before. “I don’t know if they’re aware of this,” he has told me. “We owe it to them, because of the frequency of their visits. They keep us on our toes.”

In the evening, when his dining room is filling and he is busy in the rhythm of his work, he will (apparently unconsciously) say aloud over the food, and repeat, the names of the people for whom he is cooking. A bridge-toll collector. A plumber. A city school-teacher. A state senator—who comes from another state. With light-edged contempt, he refers to his neighborhood as Daily News country. There are two or three mobsters among his clientele. They are fat, he reports, and they order their vegetables “family style.” There is a couple who regularly drive a hundred and twenty miles for dinner and drive home again the same night. There is a nurse from Bellevue who goes berserk in the presence of Anne’s meringue tortes and ultra-chocolate steamed mousse cakes, orders every dessert available, and has to be carted back to Bellevue. There is an international tennis star who parks his car so close against the front door that everyone else has to sidle around it. Inside, only the proprietors seem to know who the tennis star is. The center of attention, and the subject of a good deal of table talk, is the unseen man in the kitchen. (...)

In part, the philosophy of this kitchen rests on deep resources of eggs, cream, and butter, shinbone marrow, boiled pig skins, and polysaturated pâtés of rich country meat. “Deny yourself nothing!” is the motto of one of the regulars of the dining room, who is trim and fit and—although he is executive vice-president in charge of public information at one of the modern giants of the so-called media—regards his relationship with the chef as a deep and sacred secret. “The place is not chic,” he goes on. “It is no Southampton-type oasis. The people there are nondescript. In fact, that place is the only realizable fantasy I have ever had. The fantasy is that there exists a small restaurant in the sticks, with marvellous food, run by civilized, funny, delightful people who have read every book and seen every movie and become your good friends—and almost no one else knows about them. I used to fantasize such people. Now I know them. They exist. And the last thing in the world they would want is fame that is associated with hype and overpublicity. They are educated, sensitive, intelligent. Their art is what comes out of the kitchen. I’m sure he wants his work appreciated, but he doesn’t want visitors coming to his hideaway for purposes of seeing the freak—the guy out in the woods who is making three-star meals. He would like to be appreciated for the right reasons—like an author who wants to be writing instead of going on TV talk shows. He is delighted when someone finds him, but wary, too. I think one proof of his sincerity is that he could raise his prices but he doesn’t. He could advertise, but he doesn’t. Somehow, that would be making too much of a commercial venture out of his work. It is inconceivable to imagine how his business could be run to make less money.”

The chef is an athletically proportioned man of middle height—a swimmer, a spear fisherman. One day when he was thirteen he was picking apples in a tree between North Oxford and St. Giles and he fell out of the tree onto a bamboo garden stake. It impaled his cheek at the left corner of his mouth. His good looks are enhanced, if anything, by the scar that remains from this accident. He has dark hair, quick brown eyes, and a swiftly rising laugh. Anne is tall, finely featured, attractive, and blond. Each has eaten a little too well, but neither is falling-down fat. They work too hard. She works in a long ponytail, a cotton plaid shirt, unfaded dungarees, he in old shirts with the sleeves rolled up, rips and holes across the chest. His trousers are generally worn through at the knees. There are patches, sutures of heavy thread. His Herman boots are old and furred and breaking down. He pulls out a handkerchief and it is full of holes. “I don’t mind spending money on something that is going to be eventually refundable,” he explains. “A house, for example. But not a handkerchief.” Most of the time, he cooks under a blue terry-cloth sailor hat, the brim of which is drawn down, like his hair, over his ears.

He was working with a Fulton Market octopus one morning, removing its beak, when he happened to remark on his affection for the name Otto.

“I like Otto,” he said. “I think Otto is a sensational name. It’s a name you would have to live up to, a challenging name. It suggests aloneness. It suggests bullheaded, Prussian, inflexible pomposity. Someone called Otto would be at least slightly pompous. Intolerant. Impatient. Otto.”

Anne said, “He has written his autobiography in that name.”

“I like Otto,” he said again. “Why don’t you call me Otto?”

I said, “Fine, Otto. I’ll call you Otto.”

by John McPhee, New Yorker |  Read more:

Images: Saul Steinberg, Untitled, 1979 and Bryan Anselm / Redux