EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL
A Memoir With Recipes
By Phyllis Grant
256 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.
Culinary memoirs tend to follow templates — the life-altering bite; the singed forearms at the hands of a tyrannical kitchen overlord — so to find one with a truly distinct perspective is thrilling.
In epigrammatic, nearly poetic diction, Grant, a ballet dancer turned pastry chef turned damn fine writer, reminds us of how transformative the junctures where food and life collide can be. A teenage afternoon is perfumed with dreams of kissing Han Solo and thick slices of sourdough toast dripping with butter and homemade apricot jam; a love of croissants becomes the dagger of an eating disorder in the hands of a dance instructor critical of her weight; a love affair is admitted in the willingness to spend a week’s worth of food money on butternut squash and sage ravioli; the fierceness of her love for a newborn is recognized in the appetite for ice cream that follows a difficult birth.
“I know I am pregnant again when I find myself in the anchovy aisle, tracing my fingers along the tins,” she writes, and in that juxtaposition of destiny and canned fish is something that all of us, regardless of our reproductive history, implicitly understand.
From an awkward adolescence to a beloved relative’s death, and encompassing professional defeats, romantic vicissitudes, and the joys and alienations of marriage and motherhood, Grant’s is a life recalled as we all recall them: in who we were with and what we ate. But distinguished by her keen attention to the sublime detail and a voice as eviscerating as it is lyrical (plus a handful of recipes tucked in at the end), those moments become transcendent.
DIRT
Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking
By Bill Buford
414 pp. Knopf. $28.95.
In “Heat,” his first book about food, Buford — a writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Among the Thugs” — embarked on a yeoman’s journey that took him from Mario Batali’s kitchen in New York to the chilly walk-in of a Dante-spouting Tuscan butcher in an effort to learn to cook Italian cuisine.
It was so persuasive an achievement that now, when he turns his attention to France, it’s a bit hard to believe that the author is anywhere near as clueless as he presents himself. But once you get past that initial suspension of disbelief, this book may well be an even greater pleasure than its predecessor.
Moving himself, his wife and their two young boys to Lyon, Buford sets out, with characteristically self-deprecating humor, not merely to learn the techniques of French cuisine, but to understand its essence. The quest will see him consuming with Rabelaisian enthusiasm the region’s cheeses and quenelles and poulets en vessie, and playing bemused supplicant and interrogator to a cadre of beatified chefs, including — holiest of holies — Paul Bocuse himself. But most enjoyable (for us, if not for him) are the apprenticeships in which he sets out to master the five mother sauces, bake the perfect baguette and construct the same misleadingly named “duck pie” by which one year’s candidates for the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (a kind of culinary knighthood) were judged. Along the way he tangles with the bêtes noires of every Anglophone in France — the language, the bureaucracy, the arrogance — and embarks, to the great nationalistic dismay of all around him, on a quixotic investigation to prove an Italian origin theory for pot au feu and other French classics. The book’s dust jacket breathlessly proclaims it as “the definitive account of one of the world’s great culinary cultures,” but “Dirt” is something better: a delightful, highly idiosyncratic exploration of how, as Buford puts it, “a dish is arrived at not by following a set of instructions but by discovering everything about it: the behavior of its ingredients, its history and a quality that some chefs think of as its soul.”
REBEL CHEF
In Search of What Matters
By Dominique Crenn with Emma Brockes
244 pp. Penguin Press. $28.
“I’m French, so I already know how to cook.”
Buford would appreciate such Gallic confidence, but so, apparently, did Jeremiah Tower, the chef of San Francisco’s Stars, which was one of the most exciting restaurants in America when Crenn applied for a job there. Despite her utter lack of professional training, she got it, launching a career that would culminate 20-odd years later with her own San Francisco restaurant, Atelier Crenn, where she won first two and then three Michelin stars for dishes that were inspired by childhood holidays in Brittany.
But the story here is less about food than about Crenn’s confidence: where it came from and what it has allowed her to achieve. Adopted from an orphanage when she was a year old, the future chef grew up in a loving family but with a strong sense that she didn’t quite fit in. The feeling left her free, she writes, to reinvent herself, leaving hidebound France for the United States when she was in her 20s, and pursuing an unconventional path to culinary stardom that included a stint at the helm of an all-women’s kitchen in Indonesia and a winning turn on “Iron Chef.”
By the end of this cleanly written (thanks to her co-author Brockes) and satisfying work, Crenn has confronted various obstacles, gender discrimination and health problems among them, to win a place in the pantheon of French chefs — on her own terms.
