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.
“Usually when you go out to dinner, the social event revolves around the people you are eating with and not the people who prepared the food. Soon after we started going there, he appeared by our table and wanted to know how something was—a shrimp al pesto he was trying for the first time. We have been there about once a month for nine years and he has never disappointed us.”
“He’s better than any restaurant I’ve eaten in in New York.”
“He’s a shy, compulsive, neurotic artist.”
“He could never expand. He is a legitimate perfectionist who would find anyone else’s work inferior to his own. No one would meet his standards. He doesn’t meet his standards. Sometimes when I try to compliment him he refuses the compliment.”
“I see him as one of the last of the great individualists, very happy in his kitchen, with his illegal plants out back. If he were to become prominent, his individualism would be damaged, and he knows that.”
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.”
Otto stepped outdoors, where he set the unbeaked octopus on a wide wooden plank. “Otto,” he repeated, with savor. And he picked up an apple bough, a heavy stick about as long as his arm, and began to club the flesh of the octopus. “Otto,” he said again, moving from one tentacle to the next. “I like that very much.” Smash. “You do this to break down the fibres.” Steadily, he pounded on. In time, he said, “Max is a good name, too—a sort of no-nonsense, straightforward name. Otto sounds humorless, and I don’t think I’m humorless.”
“Fine, Max. I’ll call you Max.”
“I like the way Max looks,” he said. “It looks wonderful written on paper. You have the imagery of ‘maximum,’ too. And all the Maximilians.” He struck the octopus another blow with the apple bough. “However,” he went on, “I prefer Otto. Otto is autocratic. One word leads to another.”
He carried the octopus inside. He said he has a cousin in the Florida Keys who puts octopuses in his driveway and then drives over them. “It’s just to break down the fibres. I don’t know what happens. I just know that it works.” He went into the restaurant bar and took down from a wall an August Sander photograph of an anonymous German chef, a heavy man in a white coat of laboratory length over pin-striped trousers and highly polished shoes. The subject’s ears were small, the head a large and almost perfect sphere. On the upper lip, an aggressive mustache was concentrated like a grenade. The man was almost browless, his neck was too thick to permit a double chin, and his tiny black eyes—perhaps by the impertinence of the photographer—were opened wide. In his hammy hands were a bowl and a wooden-handled whip. “This pig-faced guy is a real Otto,” said the chef. “When our customers ask who that is in the picture we say he is our founder.”
As we returned to the kitchen, I thought about the chef’s actual name, which, like the man’s demeanor, like the man himself in nearly all his moods, is gentle and unaggressive—an all but dulcet name, ameliorative and smooth, a name like Randal or Malcolm or Neal or Duncan or Hugh or Alan or John. For all that, if he wished to call himself Otto, Otto he would be.
Anne said, “He is less pompous than when I met him.”
“Never let it boil,” said Otto, lowering the octopus in to a pot. “It mustn’t boil. It should just simmer.”
Nine o’clock in a spring morning and with a big square-headed mallet he is pounding a loin of pork. He has been up for three hours and has made school lunches for the two of his children who are still at home, boned some chicken, peeled potatoes, peeled onions, chopped shallots, shucked mussels, made coffee, swept the kitchen, made stock with the head of a twenty-pound grouper, and emptied outside a pail of scraps for the geese. His way of making coffee is to line a colander with a linen napkin and drip the coffee through the napkin. He ate a breakfast of leftovers—gâteau Saint-Honoré, Nesselrode cream-rum-chestnut mousse. He said, “I always eat dessert for breakfast. That’s the only time I like it. For the rest of the day, if I’m working, I don’t eat. It’s wonderful not to eat if you’re in a hurry. It speeds you up.”
Anne works late and sleeps late. Otto goes to bed when his cooking is done and is up, much of the year, before dawn. Even at 6 a.m., he is so pressed with things to do that he often feels there is no time to shave. Into the school lunches today went small pork cutlets. He said, “I really don’t believe in letting children eat the food served at school. Hot dogs. Baloney. Filth like that.” His children carry roast chicken, veal, various forms of fish instead. At home, at the inn, they cook their own meals and eat more or less at random. The family business being what it is, the family almost never sits down at a table together. Sometimes the children, with friends, have dinner in the restaurant. Otto says, “They dress as if they’re going to a disco, contemptibly wearing their collars outside their jackets, which is worse than wearing a blazer patch.” He charges them half price.
The pork loin flattens, becomes like a crêpe. He dips the mallet in water. “All the cookbooks tell you to pound meat between pieces of waxed paper,” he remarks. “And that is sheer nonsense.” He is preparing a dish he recently invented, involving a mutation of a favored marinade. Long ago he learned to soak boned chicken breasts in yogurt and lemon juice with green peppercorns, salt, garlic, and the seeds and leaves of coriander, all of which led to a flavor so appealing to him that what he calls chicken coriander settled deep into his repertory. In a general way, he has what he describes as “a predilection for stuffing, for things with surprises inside,” and so, eventually, he found himself wondering, “Maybe you could translate a marinade into a stuffing. You could pound a pork loin thin and fold it like an envelope over a mixture of cream cheese, fresh coriander leaves, lemon juice, and green peppercorns. Then you’d chill it, and set it, and later bread it. Sauté it a bit, then bake it. It should have a beguiling taste.”
Picking up a knife now, he extends his fingers beyond the handle to pinch the blade. He rocks his wrist, and condenses a pile of parsley. There are calluses on his fingers where they pinch the blade. “The great thing is the mise en place,” he says. “You get your things together. You get ready to cook. You chop your parsley, peel your onions, do shallots, make the hollandaise, make demi-glace sauce, and so forth.” He does most of this in the center of the room, a step from the stove, at a long, narrow table that sags like a hammock. He works on two slabs of butcher block, and around them accumulate small tubs, bowls, and jars full of herbs and herb butters, stocks and sauces, grated cheeses. A bottle of applejack stands nearby for use in pâtés, and a No. 10 can full of kosher salt, which he dips into all day and tosses about by hand. Everything he measures he measures only with his eyes. How does he know how much to use? “I just know what is going to make things taste good,” he says.
“Even with garlic, for example?”
“In garlicky dishes, you can hardly use too much—as long as you don’t burn it.” He nibbles some parsley, wipes the block. On his shoulder is a hand towel, and with it he polishes his working surfaces as if he were polishing cars. He wipes the edge of the stove. He wipes the lips of pots. After he sautés something, he wipes out the interior of the pan. All day long the cloth keeps coming off the shoulder—or out of a rear pocket when it has migrated there—and as it grows foul it is frequently replaced. Like a quarterback, a golfer, a dentist, he would be unnerved without his towel.
When he finishes a patch of work—stops pounding loin of pork, completes a forcemeat for quenelles—he neatly puts the product away. Moving on to some new material, he carries it to a working surface, and cuts or separates or pours out just what he needs, and then returns the matrix—to the refrigerator, or wherever it came from—before he begins the new preparation. If he did not do this, he would risk chaos. His day will grow in frenzy and may eventually come a bit unstuck, but even in the whirl of the height of the evening he never fails to replace a source before he works on the substance.
He has a Vulcan gas stove with two ovens, a broiler, and six burners. Every time he turns it on he has to use a match. He keeps matches in a McDonald’s French-fry packet nailed to a post. He saves the wooden sticks to use again as tapers. “We’re really cheap,” he confesses. “We wash our Reynolds Wrap and use it again.”
His evolving salad dressing is stored in whiskey bottles and is topped up a few times a week with oil, egg yolk, wine, tarragon, marjoram, chervil, salt, pepper, chives, garlic, parsley, onions, scallion tops, vinegar, mustard seed—and almost anything but sugar. The thought of sugar in salad dressing disgusts him, although he knows it will sell salad dressing. He blends in some lightly boiled potatoes. They homogenize the dressing, he says, emulsify it, hold it together.
There is no top on the blender. Otto and Anne cover it with their hands—sometimes with a napkin. The blender is old and bandaged with tape. They have a KitchenAid mixer. “It’s the worst-engineered thing I’ve ever seen. It spits ingredients into the air.” To facilitate their preparations they have no other appliances. There is not even an electric dishwasher, just a three-tub stainless deep sink where Anne washes dishes in the dead of night, except on weekends, when a high-school student comes in to help. Three plugs stop the sink. A sign on the wall above says, “hang plugs here. this is a prophylaxis against dementia nervosa. please!” No rotisserie. No microwave. No Cuisinart in any form. “We’re not anti-technology. We’re just anti-junk,” said Otto one morning. “There’s no reason to be anti all ‘labor-saving’ things—just from sheer perversity to be against them—but, as it happens, there is nothing a Cuisinart can do that I can’t do as quickly. And after using a Cuisinart I would have to clean it. Steak tartare cut with a knife has a better texture than it does if it comes out of a Cuisinart. The Germans call it Schabefleisch. For that matter, it is easier to cut hamburger meat than to make it in any kind of machine. If you grind it, you then have to clean the grinder.” I asked him to make me a hamburger. He removed from the refrigerator the hundredth part of a ton of beef, sliced off a portion, put the rest of the meat back in the cooler, and returned to his working block, where his wrist began to flutter heavily, and in thirty seconds he had disassembled the chunk of beef and rearranged it as an oval patty. He ate some of the meat as he worked. Fast as it all happened, the cutting was done in three phases. He began with a one-handed rocking motion, and then held down the point of the knife with his left hand while pumping the handle with his right. He ended with a chopping motion, as if the knife were a hatchet. As he made the patty, he did not compact it crudely in his hands like a snowball. He tapped it together with the flat of the knife. The knife was Swiss (hachoir size), the blade vanadium stainless steel. “It’s a lot of bull not to use stainless,” he said. “If you know how to sharpen a knife, you can sharpen a stainless knife. You can’t use a carbon knife to cut anything that has acid in it. If you cut anything acid with a carbon knife, it develops big black splotches. The splotches flavor the food.” From under the stove he pulled a damaged iron skillet. Something that looked like a large bite was missing from the rim. He cooked the hamburger, turning it, touching it, turning it again and again, using the knife as a spatula. One morning he made fresh pork sausage for me the same way—mixing into the patty the salt, thyme, pepper, and coriander that are the essences of the flavor of sausage. The awakening aroma was vigorous and new. He tasted the raw pork as he went along. He said sausagemakers do that routinely. He observed that if one does need to make use of a meat grinder it is a good idea to put chunks of the meat into a freezer for twenty minutes beforehand. This in some way—he has no idea why—greatly reduces the stringiness that will often clog a grinder.
The kitchen has the dimensions of a fair-sized living room, and the refrigerator is a multi-doored affair that fills one end from wall to wall. The kitchen at a New York frog pond would not be half as large. (A frog pond, in Otto’s vernacular, is any French restaurant, but particularly the finest and Frenchest of the supraduodenal boutiques.) Otto much admires André Soltner, chef of Lutèce, for removing (after he took over the ownership of the restaurant) some of his dining space in order to expand the kitchen. In Otto’s kitchen, there is room for an old brass-studded leather Spanish chair. There is a television set, a big Grundig Majestic radio. On spacious high shelves are the chef’s unending agents of flavor—his angelica seeds, his sorrel jam, his twenty-seven-dollar pelures de truffes, his valerian root, his Ann Page filberts, his Sun-Maid currants, and a thousand other things. Holding a deep, half-filled pan below my nose, he says, “This is rendered beef fat. We render all our pork and beef fat. It is extraordinarily unhealthy, but smell it. It smells of roast beef. Cooked in this, French-fried potatoes taste nutty and have a thick crust. The Belgians do all their frites like that. You can burn yourself badly, of course. I wouldn’t want a large deep-fat fryer here. I’m too accident-prone. I burn myself all the time. The awful thing about burning is that you always burn yourself on a useful part of the hand.” On a windowsill in the kitchen he grows Aloe vera, and tends it with affection, a handsome plant with its lanceolate, serrate, basal leaves. When he burns himself, he takes a leaf of aloe and slices it from the side, as if he were filleting a sman green fish. He presses the leaf’s interior against the burn, and holds it there with a bandage. “That takes the burn right away.”
Outside, in his kitchen garden, Otto grows asparagus, eggplant, chili peppers, bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, spinach, zucchini, and chard. He also grows chervil, fennel, parsley, horseradish, basil, chives, marjoram, arugula, and tarragon, among other herbs. He freezes his herbs, he dries his herbs, and he aspirates the “h.” He knows how to pronounce “Hertford” “Hereford” “Hampshire” and “herbs.” He went to school in Oxford. Chervil, he says, is as potent to smoke as marijuana. “Black agaric is growing by the house, but I have not yet plucked up the courage to eat it. I grow my own garlic because the aroma is so much stronger when fresh. Garlic, fresh, throws a long cast through the kitchen.”
The garden is not much affected by the shade of a condemned elm, where morels grow. Seashells in deep profusion—clam shells, oyster shells, conch shells, mussel shells—make tabby of the surrounding ground. Hold a conch to your ear. You can almost hear the sea. There are dogwoods, maples, white and Scotch pines, junipers, and dying apple trees beside the long drive that leads to the front door. The building is tall and proportional, not offensively ungainly, three stories, white, with many windows and a red tin roof. It glows at night at the end of its lane, and in daylight stands aloof in a field of tall grass, which is silvery brown after an autumn frost—fox grass. The place was a commune once, a boarding house, a summer hotel. There were two red barns. The communists burned up one for firewood. Otto’s geese nest in the other. When Otto and I went in there once, he said, “It’s a myth that geese are so dangerous. They don’t bite hard.” Wanting to show me some eggs in an embankment of down, he shoved aside a nesting goose. She struck, ineffectively, at the tough skin of his hand. I thought I’d like to see what that felt like, so I extended a hand of my own toward the head of the goose. She struck and struck again. She savaged my hand. She raised a pulpy red welt. Otto’s geese patrol the grounds. Sixteen of them march up and down the driveway. “Geese once protected the Roman capitol,” he says. “If something alarms these, they will make a commotion. But not during working hours.” He used to kill and serve his domestic geese, but the flock has grown too old. He raised ducks and chickens, too. “Eating grubs and insects, the odd bit of corn, they tasted infinitely better.” But he gave that up in surrender to the pressures on his time. He cautions you to beware the dog. Oh, no, not Zulu—not the shaggy black fun-loving Tibetan mastiff. Beware Fofa, the bitter little brown-and-white spaniel with beagley undertones—Fofa, half cocked, with the soprano bark and the heavy bite.
Behind the inn are a can-and-bottle dump, rusting fragments of dead machinery, lengths of snow fencing, an automobile radiator, used lumber, two iron bathtubs, three mattresses, a rubble of used cinder blocks. There is little time to tidy what the dark paints out. The chef, who is not always ebullient, does not seem to care much anyway. “One of my great disadvantages is that I grew up in Spain in a luxury hotel with lots of servants,” he will say. “I’ll never be able to live as well as that, no matter how much money I make. It sort of crushes one’s ambitions.” He lives where sewer lines run up against winter wheatland and arms of forest interrupt the march of towns. There are heavy concentrations of wild deer. A man up the road sells mutton to hunters to take home as venison. On Otto’s property, a clear stream flows into a good-sized pond. Water falls over its dam. He makes quenelles sometimes with pickerel from the pond. He makes quenelles, too, with whiting and other ocean fish and with a combination of shrimp and veal. “The veal binds them together and makes them very fluffy. My quenelles are much better than any quenelles you actually get anywhere. I don’t know why. My quenelles have spring.” To drink the pond or to share with the geese the scraps of Otto’s profession, raccoons appear, and skunks, opossums—every creature of the woods, including one whose name would blow all this away. Otto will kill such creatures only to eat them. He has a Havahart trap in which he catches skunks. He takes the trap down the road to where some “perfectly contemptible” neighbors live, and releases the skunks there. He and Anne pick blueberries and wild grapes. They gather dandelions for salads, and blackberries for cobblers and pies. He has cooked, and served to customers, stinging nettles and the fiddleheads of ferns. He gathers sheep sorrel for soups and salads. He once served creamed cardoons. In a lake not far away, he dives for crayfish, collecting them from under boulders and ledges. “The sauces you can make with their heads are unbelievable.” He has shot and served rabbits and squirrels (Brunswick stew). He shot a raccoon and attempted a sort of coon au vin but considered the dish a failure. Sometimes there are wood ducks and wild geese in the pond. Over the land at dusk, woodcocks swoop and plummet, sometimes into the oven. Otto eats thrushes and blackbirds (“Delicious”) but does not serve them. He would like to raise and serve kid, but he could not bring himself to kill one. He feels it would be “like killing a kitten.” And, for all his youth in Spanish kitchens, he says he could not bring himself to take the life of a suckling pig. When, however, the odd pheasant happens through his fields of grass, he is not the least bit reluctant to go through the steps necessary to roast it for twenty minutes and then flame it with cognac and put out the fire with madeira. Disjointed, the pheasant next enters a heavy clay crock and is covered over with slices of goose liver and peelings of truffle. “Then I nap it with a fairly strong game gravy, really a demi-glace of game, made with rabbits. I hang them a bit, let them get a little high.” He adds more sliced goose liver and truffles; then he covers the crock with its heavy lid and glues it down tight with a dough of egg white, water, and flour. He sets the pot in a bain-marie, and puts the whole rig into a very hot oven—for less than half an hour. The contents are ready when the dough turns brown. Pheasant Souvaroff. It was in the “Spezialrezepte der Französische Küche,” one of his textbooks when he was in Basel.
Otto routinely dusts meat with white pepper “to lock in the freshness.” Its taste seems unaffected. “It loses nothing,” he says. “Bacteria don’t like to eat their way through pepper any more than you would.” Since he told me that, I have gone off on canoe trips with the meat in my pack basket dusted with pepper. The meat lasts for days. Otto doesn’t camp. He once came down with pneumonia after sleeping a night on the ground.
When he makes béarnaise, he uses green peppercorns, preferring the stronger taste. When he makes bordelaise, he uses pork rinds, boiled until tender, in preference to marrow. He does almost everything, as he phrases it, “à ma façon.” As a result of a tale often told by English friends of his parents, he is a particular admirer of a parvenu member of the peerage whose eccentric and umbrageous reputation had caused his applications to be rejected by any number of London and provincial clubs. At the helm of a yacht, he appeared one year at the Royal Regatta flying a pennant lettered “mobyc,” which, he was by no means reluctant to explain, was the simple heraldry of My Own Bloody Yacht Club. “I do things mobw—my own bloody way,” says Otto. “I should write that—or ‘à ma façon’—on the menu after every dish.”
The unfortunate peer. He may never have tasted English marrowbones roasted after being sealed with flour. “A very clubby thing they are, marrowbones, done that way,” says Otto. “The ends are closed hermetically, with dough. When the bone is roasted, you remove the crust and eat the marrow with a spoon. They serve that at the best clubs—of which I also am not a member.”
In his affection for marrowbones, he collects veal shanks—slowly, one at a time as they arrest his eye—and they pile up like cordwood in the freezer for about three months. He pan-fries them in butter and olive oil. He sautés his bouquet garni. He then braises the lot in stock, tomato purée, herbs, and wine. And when he has the sauce in place and the bones on plates and ready to serve, he dusts them with fine-chopped lemon peel, parsley, and garlic. “It’s called gremolata,” he says, “and that is what makes the osso bucco explode.” Not absolutely everything is, or needs to be, à ma façon. That one, unaltered, is from the “Joy of Cooking.”
In a roasting pan with hickory chips he is smoking shad roe. He will make a shad-roe mousse. “But it’s not really a mousse. It’s more like a butter. A form of pâté.” He is struggling to name it because he has not made it before. He buys his hickory chips at the sporting goods store—three dollars a pound—if he is pressed. He knows a carpenter, some distance away, who gives them to him for nothing. He smokes shrimp, trout, turkey breasts, and whiting, and turns pork loin into Canadian bacon. After twenty minutes with the chips, seven fresh rainbow trout will come out of the pan at what he considers acceptable (and I find remarkable) levels of taste and texture. He prefers the trout he smokes outside. He has a semi-dugout igloo made of earth and block, full of tunnels and traps, in which he cold-smokes trout for twenty-four hours. The wood is from his dying apple trees. He gets up to tend the smoker two or three times in the night. The principal difference between the twenty minutes inside and the twenty-four hours outside is that the resulting flesh is not opaque, it is translucent. When he smokes salmon out there, it takes thirty-six hours. He sometimes gives his Saturday-night ducks a little outdoor smoke before he roasts them in the oven. “If I ever perfect cold-smoking,” he says, “I’m going to smoke swordfish. It is fantastic. It turns pink, like a rose.”
He rocks a knife through some scallions, hauls a grouper out of storage and begins to reduce it to fillets. He eats some scallions and, slipping a hand into the refrigerator, pops a couple of shrimp and two or three fresh scallops. “Fresh scallops stink like boiling cabbage for a while,” he remarks. “These no longer stink. They breathe. They freshen themselves and come clean. Here are some I put away last night in lime juice with pepper flakes and red onion. Try one. Beautiful, isn’t it? Seviche. I just make stuff and keep making stuff through the day until I’ve got enough. Then I sit down and write it out.”
Anne enters the room, her first appearance of the morning—hunting shirt, dungarees, long hair akimbo. “Every spring I go mad. I am subject to the same swirling forces that pull the crocuses out of the ground,” she reveals. “It is because I retain fluids.”
Her husband seems to agree. He says, “She is subject to the same forces that govern the tides.” The forces have spread her hair to form a spectacular golden afro, beaming outward from a physiognomic sun. She removes Otto’s hat. It has become too grubby for her to look at in this part of the morning. He makes no struggle, but he is not completely assembled without his terry-cloth hat. He never eats aspirin. If he has a headache, he fills a plastic Baggie with ice, places it on his head, and pulls down around his temples the brim of his terry-cloth hat. Anne has much to do. She will make a mocha meringue. Then a gâteau victoire au chocolat. But for the moment she is only holding her head. She says, “I can’t do anything until my head is clear.”
I ask how long that might be, and she says, “It’s almost clear.”
Anne is Latvian and was six when she left the country. Her American-accented English contains no trace of those six years (that I, at any rate, can discern). Her predominant memories of Riga are of food-wide bowls full of caviar, mountained platters of crayfish, smoked lampreys served under crystal chandeliers at banquets in her home. In an album is a photograph of Anne’s mother all in white satin among sprays of lilies and roses bending attentively toward a hunting-covered drape-folded canopied bassinet—the day of the christening of Anna Rozmarja. Anna Rozmarja Grauds.
Otto sums it up. “They were rich,” he says. “I mean, they were rich rich.”
“When I was a little girl, I was swathed in ermine and mink. I don’t have a need for it now. It’s been done.”
“Her family had flocks of money, many ships. It was one of the First Families of Latvia, which is like being one of the First Families of Scranton.”
“When the Germans took over the house, they allowed us to live on the top floor.”
Words rise quickly in Anne’s mind, but in speaking them she often hesitates and stumbles, and most of what she says comes slowly. “When the Russians were after us, we had to hide in the country. I remember the cows and the river and the food. Latvia is rich in milk and cheese and eggs. Even in the war no one was hungry. When we were escaping, we stayed at a farm where there were hams and wheels of cheese and things.”
“Was that far from Riga?”
“In LLLatvia, nnnnnnothing is far from Riga.”
Tilsit was not far from Riga, and Tilsit was not even in Latvia. Otto’s grandfather was an architect in Tilsit. One day, the architect saw an advertisement in a newspaper in which sums of money were mentioned in connection with the connubial availability of a young woman in Salzburg. “Her brother placed the ad, and this chap came down from Tilsit and married her,” Otto recounts. “It was the only way she could attract a man. She was quite plain.”
“She was a handsome woman,” Anne informs him.
Otto says, “She was about as handsome as Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a violent Nazi, that grandmother.”
Her husband, at any rate, was excoriated by his family for “promiscuous marrying into the proletariat.” Her son, Otto’s father, went to Gymnasium in Salzburg and was later trained in hotels in Berlin and Munich. By 1936, when he was asked to be manager of the Reina Cristina, in Algeciras, he had been married, in England. The Mediterranean and Iberian Hotels Company, Ltd., an English concern, wanted someone they could trust who could also get on with the Germans. Otto’s father carried a German passport during the Second World War.
Otto was born in Buckinghamshire, in July, 1938, and was taken home on a Japanese ship. Food was scarce in Spain for many years thereafter—to the ends of, and beyond, two wars. Gypsies, near starving, came to the hotel, asked for food, performed circus stunts as a way of paying, and then ate less than they were given. Asked why they would ignore food set before them, they said that if they ate a great deal they would soon be hungrier than they would be if they ate little. When Otto was nine, he discovered a boy in a persimmon tree on the hotel grounds stealing fruit. Otto happened to be carrying an air rifle. Pointing it, he ordered the boy to descend. On the ground, the boy “broke for it,” and began to climb a garden wall. Otto threw a brick and knocked him down. Proudly, he reported the achievement to his parents. His father cracked him over the head. Otto saw the boy as a thief; his father saw the boy as someone so hungry that he had to steal—and therefore it was proper to let him steal.
“You must remember,” Anne will say of her husband, “that he learned early what food really is. He knows what it is to be without it. He has a grasp of the sanctity of food. That is his base. He finds delight just in seeing his ingredients. He goes on to luxury after that. Remember, too, that he ate awful meals endlessly—for years. He was in school in England after the war.”
Tutored from the age of three, Otto was sent to Britain a year after the German surrender—to Tre-Arddur House School, on Tre-Arddur Bay, in North Wales, a place that, according to him, “specialized in ridding industrialists’ sons of their accents, boys from Yorkshire and Lancashire.” Otto spoke Spanish, French, and German, and virtually no English, so he had several accents that were targeted for destruction, too. He was called Dago or Greaser, because he came from “Franco Spain.” When he was caught in this or that misdemeanor, the headmaster, gnashing craggily, told him not to “use your Spanish tricks” at Tre-Arddur. “My character was deformed there.” Otto’s tone is more factual than bitter. “I was a happy kid before then, and I became a morose loner. Eventually, when I was invited to join things, I realized I no longer needed to join.” The headmaster whipped the boy for his miserable handwriting. On the rugger field, the headmaster caned anyone who funked a tackle. “We won a lot of rugger matches. I was a hooker—in, you know, the center of the scrum.” The Tre-Arddur year had its fine moments. The assistant headmaster fished in Scotland and brought back enough salmon to feed everyone in school.
Otto lived for the long vacs in Spain, for the big sardines on sticks over beach fires, the limpets, the wild asparagus, the fishing, and the catch of red mullet baked on fig leaves and tile. The Reina Cristina was lush beyond thought with its fountains and pools under bougainvillea, its date palms and tangerines, its Islamic arcades and English gardens. “You would have to be a Saudi sheikh to live that life again.” English colonials, Andalusians, Murcians, titled and rich, “the whole of the south of Spain knew each other very well, they were very cliquey, and when they came to Gibraltar to clothe their women in English finery they stayed at the Reina Cristina.” Above them all stood Otto’s father, six feet five inches, thin and regal, actually a dominant figure among the sherry people and the rest of his distinguished guests. Guy Williams (Williams & Humbert), the Gonzalezes, the Palominos, the Osbornes, the Domecqs. “My father was, you know, amigo íntimo with all of them.” Having four hundred employees, he was as well a figure of first importance in back-street Algeciras. He and a cork company were the principal employers in the town. He had his standards. He never hired a former altar boy. He felt that altar boys were contaminated by priests. He was scrupulously sensitive to the needs and natures of his staff. When Otto called the chef’s son a mariquita azúcar, his father made him write a calligraphically perfect note of apology. On a tour of countries to the north, the family went out of its way to stop in Lourdes, because the Reina Cristina’s housekeeper had mentioned that she would like some holy water with which to cure her black dog, which had come down with terminal mange. Approaching home through dry hundred-degree heat on the brown plains of the Iberian plateau, Otto and his younger brother suffered so with thirst that they drank the holy water. Their father filled the bottle from a tap, gave it to the housekeeper, and the dog was cured. The boys were thrashed about once a week—their mother’s riding crop, their father’s hand. There was no cruelty in it, merely custom. Otto calls his parents “permissive,” and cites his father’s reaction to his experiments with hash. Otto had an underwater-diving companion named Pepe el Moro who would sniff kif before diving in order to clear his sinuses and increase the depth of the dives. Otto sniffed, too. When his father learned that his son was using narcotics, he said only, “Stop that. It’s unhealthy.” When the cuadrillas were in town, the great matadors stayed at the Reina Cristina. Otto as a child knew Belmonte, and later Litri, Ordoñez, Miguelín. Their craft so appealed to him that he knew every moment of their ritual, from the praying in the chapel to the profiling over the sword. In the album is a snapshot of Otto with Ernest Hemingway on the veranda outside the Cristina’s bar. Otto marvels at “the incredible patience” Hemingway displayed toward “a callow youth” in his teens. Otto’s family had a farm in the mountains with an irrigation system that he still thinks of as nothing less than lyrical—its pools and rivulets descending among terraced beds of kitchen plants. His father also managed the Hotel Reina Victoria, in Ronda. Otto would go there on horseback, the more to be involved in the beautiful country—the Serranía de Ronda—and he paid for all his needs with Chesterfield cigarettes. He went slowly when he went back to school.
His mother’s parents lived in Oxford, and he moved on from Tre-Arddur to St. Edward’s because St. Edward’s was there. It was a distinguished public school, distinguished for having been repugnant to young Laurence Olivier some decades before. Otto was hungry there, not caring for the food. With his air rifle, he killed sparrows and thrushes in his grandparents’ garden and roasted them on spits over open fires. In his form, he won the St. Edward’s general-knowledge prize in all the years he was there. He was very fond of his grandparents. His grandfather was J. O. Boving, an engineer known for a proposal to harness the Severn bore. He gave his grandson a copy of the Boving family tree, which is fruited, for the most part, with farmers. Its mighty trunk, emerging from the soil, has cracked to pieces a Corinthian temple, thus implying the family’s durability relative to the artifacts of the earth. Anne, absorbed, now looks up from the picture. She says, “Most of my family should hang from a tree.”
She pours cream from a cup into a bowl, and the cream is so thick that it clings to the cupside like mayonnaise. In bottles, it will not pour at all. To have such cream, she drives many miles each week to a farm in another state. Between layers of pecan cake, she is about to establish three concentric circles of royale chocolate and whipped cream. She has turned to this project after finishing another, in which a layer of meringued hazelnut was covered with a second story of hazelnut Bavarian cream that was in turn covered, top and sides, by a half-inch layer of chocolate cake that had been formed upon an overturned pie plate. Atop this structure was a penthouse confected of chocolate, butter, egg yolks, and brandy. “It looks simple, but it takes so bloody long,” she said as she finished. “To admit you eat something like that, these days, is almost like confessing to incest. I was a size twelve before I met Otto. Now I’m size eighteen.” Her height saves her. One might well say that she is grand, but she could not be described as fat. Her husband, for his part, works sixteen hours a day, is in constant motion, professes to eat almost nothing, and should be quite slim. By his account, “a couple of cucumbers” is about all he consumes in a day. Somehow, though, he has acquired at least twenty-five pounds that he would like to do without.
Now and again, he will stop to hold a pastry sleeve for her or hammer a dented cake pan back into form, but in the main they work separately, and rapidly, at spaced stations of the table, he slicing some salmon, completing a brioche to enclose it, she making puff paste, or a cake from yogurt cheese. (It takes a couple of days to drip, through cloth, the whey out of a gallon of yogurt. The yield is a quart of cheese.) She makes two, three, four, even five new desserts in a day. A light almond dacquoise is—as much as anything—the standard, the set piece, from which her work takes off on its travels through the stars. The dacquoise resembles cake and puts up a slight crunchy resistance before it effects a melting disappearance between tongue and palate and a swift transduction through the bloodstream to alight in the brain as a poem.
Otto licks shad-roe pâté from a rubber scraper, wipes clean his working surfaces, and carries to the refrigerator a sour-cream aggregate of curried Moroccan lentils, tasting a spoonful as he puts them away. He leaves the kitchen. Time to drive who knows how many miles for supermarket shopping. Behind the wheel and rolling north, he says, “Supermarkets occasionally have fresher stuff than you can buy anywhere else.” He is more or less forced to shop retail anyway. He feeds two hundred people a week, not enough to warrant wholesale buying if he is going to offer a virtually different menu every night—if he is going to shop, as he does, opportunistically, and “just make things,” willy-nilly, through a free-lance working day. If he happens to see scallops the size of filets mignons, he will take them home, grill them, and serve them under sauce béarnaise. He knows a certain ShopRite that is “wonderful for brains, sweetbreads, and chicken,” and the Grand Unions of his region are supplied now and then with amazingly fine beef. He reads the ads. He makes his rounds. He walks through a supermarket, sees some good shell steaks on display, and tosses fifty pounds of them in small packages into his cart. He drives eighty miles for Westphalian ham. He drives an upper-middle-aged eight-cylinder Dodge, a car so overpowered it is no good on ice. The family call it their “off-the-road vehicle.” They had a Volkswagen bus once. Otto is a competent driver but easily bored and tending toward sleep. One day, with him snoozing and safely belted, the bus rolled over three times and spilled green crawling lobsters onto the road. To avoid the irritation of a summons, Otto gave the lobsters to the cops. On the dashboard of the Dodge now are two plastic packets of malt vinegar from Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips. “I like junk food,” Otto declares. “Treacher’s chips are awful. They don’t seem real. They seem to be made of mashed potatoes. But the fish is good. Actually, it is great.”
“Define ‘great.’ ”
“Specifically, the batter is delicious and the fish is acceptable. The fish is white and moist. It has no flaw. The batter is very clever. Water, flour, baking powder, a bit of cornmeal—we think it’s like a churro batter. The texture is just wonderful—crunchy and crisp. You don’t concentrate on taste but on texture. What a horrible thing to say about food! They have plastic packets of sauce tartare there, too. You suck it out. It’s degenerate.” He will go big distances for a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin. “It’s a triumph,” he explains. “It’s inspired. With melted cheese instead of hollandaise, it is eggs Benedict for the masses. I don’t know why it wasn’t thought of long ago.” If you ask for a doggie bag in Otto’s dining room, your pheasant Souvaroff or your grilled squid rings in aïoli sauce are returned to the table in a polystyrene container that first held an Egg McMuffin. (Otto is generous to a fault, and the unwary amateur can eat his way into a stupor.) His professed affection for junk food is pretty much used up on Arthur Treacher and the Egg McMuffin. Other examples are few and faint. “I’ve had a Big Mac. Over the years, I’ve had a Big Mac four times. Once, when I was quite hungry, it was good.” He enjoys the sort of anisette Italian sausages that are sold in hard rolls from old white vans. He has never crossed the threshold of a Colonel Sanders. Fried chicken is one of his favorite things on earth. He soaks lean chicken overnight in milk, and fries it in pure raging lard.
Soft drinks?
He shakes his head, but reconsiders. “Oh,” he says, “I’ll drink a Tab if I have a headache.”
Coffee?
“No. Very little. Six or seven cups a day, no more. And twenty cups of tea.” He also guzzles vichy by the quart.
Beer?
“Only on Saturday night. A six-pack, after work.”
Wine?
“When we go out. Not Often at home.”
Booze?
“I’ve been known to drink four or five pink gins. Gin and Angostura. If it weren’t for my work, I could drink all the time. You simply can’t cook and drink. You cut yourself and burn yourself. You lose your edge. You can’t do it and drink. Impossible.”
“Faulkner drank. One of his relatives is supposed to have asked him, ‘Bill, are you drunk when you write those stories?’ And Faulkner said, ‘Not always.’ ”
“Oh,” says Otto, “Evelyn Waugh has a very good line on drinking. One evening during the war, his commanding general said to him, ‘Waugh, you’re making a spectacle of yourself. I must ask you to stop.’ And Waugh—he was the rich man’s John O’Hara—he said, ‘Surely, sir, you can’t expect me to change the habits of a lifetime to accommodate your whim.’ ”
Once, when we were out on the road like this, Otto said he often wished he could keep on going—to destinations more exotic than the Grand Union. He was not altogether content with this region. He had dreams of San Antonio. He thought about Key West. He said he felt a need for “new momentum,” felt “imprisoned in the economics” of the present inn. Waitresses had netted as much from the business as he and Anne combined. In a year, several thousand dollars were going for heat alone, and even more to insure the ungainly wooden building. After he had paid the oil company and the insurance company, what was left was less than he could earn by doing unskilled labor. He said that in Algeciras there was one fire engine and it performed two functions. It put out fires in the cork factory and it watered the ring at corridas. Homes and restaurants did not burn. They were made of fieldstone and mortar. Otto would like to construct a new building half underground, heated and powered by the sun, and with such a high percentage of masonry in its materials that it would be virtually fireproof—a restaurant where heating bills and fire insurance are covered by hors d’oeuvres.
At an A. & P. he picks up bibb and ruby lettuce, at the ShopRite potatoes and brains. “The A. & P. have wonderful produce. Sometimes. And they always have bibb lettuce.” The next stop is in a mall parking lot, between a Rite Aid Pharmacy and a K Mart, in the shadow of a Great American. “The fruit in here is terrible,” says Otto as he picks out the Great American’s six best pears. Moving his cart along, he collects five pounds of bean curd, some bean sprouts, and a couple of dozen Japanese midget eggplants. “Bean curd is the cow of the Orient,” he says. “It has many of the same nutrients as milk. Look there. Eggroll wrappers. When you can buy bean curd and eggroll wrappers in a supermarket in a town like this there’s some sort of quiet revolution going on.” He sees and excitedly handles five packages of lovely big leeks. “Hey, I’m glad I came! I’ll make leeks vinaigrette, certainly, and leek soup. When the Welsh come to play rugger at Twickenham, they have leeks in their lapels. If you cut off the roots of leeks and plant them, they grow. That will appeal to your Scottish sense of thrift.” Scallions. Onions. Outsize artichokes. Endive. Escarole: “It’s slippery. It’s meaty. It’s got everything!” Parsley root: “Hey, great! Here, eat one. I put it in with parsley for flavoring, but mainly I just eat it raw, eat it all myself. It’s too good for the customers.” A parsley root in its appearance suggests a stunted and misshapen albino carrot. It has the texture of an apple and the taste of parsley. “It’s good sliced in soup. Or grated in a salad.” He takes a bottle of ReaLemon from a shelf, saying, “Ever smelled this? It smells like skunk.” By a forest of bottles of Frothee creamy head for cocktails, he stops, picks one up, and reads the label, finding there a form of glycol that he identifies as a substance used in brake fluids. Two pounds of bacon. Thirteen and a half pounds of fresh ham. Seven and a half pounds of veal. Veal kidneys. Veal hearts. Eleven half pound packages of sweetbreads go into the cart. There is a gap in the tilting mirrors behind the meat, and a butcher’s startled face is framed there. “That’s all the sweetbreads we have,” he says. “That’s all there is.”
That may be all there is in this tank town. It hardly bothers Otto. For all his rampant eclecticism—and the wide demands of his French-based, Continentally expanded, and sometimes Asian varietal fare—he knows where the resources of his trade are virtually unlimited. Mondays, when the inn is dark, he leaves his Herman boots in his bedroom—his terry-cloth hat, his seamsplit dungarees—and in a dark-blue suit like a Barclays banker he heads for New York City. “In a few square blocks of this town are more consumer goods than in the whole of Soviet Russia,” he remarked one time as he walked up Ninth Avenue and into the Salumeria Manganaro, where he bought a pound of taleggio (“It’s like a soft fontina”) and was pleased to find white truffles. “They’re from Piedmont. Grate them on pasta and they make it explode.” At Fresh Fish (498 Ninth), he bought river shrimp from Bangladesh weighing up to a quarter of a pound each. He bought sausage flavored with provolone and parsley at Giovanni Esposito (500), and at Bosco Brothers (520) he stopped to admire but not to purchase a pyramid of pigs’ testicles, which he said were delicious in salad. “Texas strawberries, you know. They’re wonderful. They’re every bit as good as sweetbreads. Boil them tender. Dry them. Dredge them in flour. Pan-fry them.” At Simitsis International Groceries & Meat (529), he bought a big hunk of citron in a room full of open bins of loose pasta, of big bags and buckets full of nuts and peppers, of great open cannisters of spices and sacks full of cornmeal, hominy grits, new pink beans, pigeon peas, split peas, red lentils, semolina, fava beans, buckwheat kasha, pearl barley, Roman beans, mung beans. “This place is fabulous. If I had a restaurant in New York—oh, boy! New York has everything you could possibly want in food. If you look hard enough, you’ll find it all.” At Citarella (2135 Broadway, at Seventy-fifth), he admired but did not buy a twenty-pound skate. He had walked the thirty-five blocks from Simitsis to Citarella. He prefers to walk when he’s in town. I have seen him on the street with a full side of smoked salmon, wrapped in a towel, tied to a suitcase like a tennis racquet. If Anne is with him, he rides. “You poach skate and serve it with capers and black butter,” he said. “It’s a wonderful fish, completely underrated. I shot a big electric one in the Caymans.” Citarella had flounder roe for eighty-five cents a pound. “You pay four dollars a pound for shad roe,” said Otto. “Flounder roe is every bit as good. Shad roe has the name.” He stopped for tea, ordering two cups, which he drank simultaneously. At Zabar’s (Eightieth and Broadway), he bought thin slices of white-and-burgundy Volpi ham. “It’s from St. Louis and it’s as good as the best jamón serrano.” At Japanese Food Land (Ninety-ninth and Broadway), he bought a couple of pounds of bean threads and four ounces of black fungus. On the sidewalks and having a snack, he ate twelve dried bananas. “That’s, actually, nothing,” he remarked. “I once et thirty-six sparrows in a bar in Spain. Gorriones, you know—spitted and roasted.”
He tried to prove to himself not long ago that with United States ingredients he could duplicate the taste of chorizo, a hard Spanish sausage. He had to throw a good part of it away, because he failed to pack it tight enough and “fur grew inside.” Casa Moneo, on Fourteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth, “is the best place for chorizos,” he says. “They’re made in Newark. They’re as good as you can get in Spain.”
He also buys chorizos at La Marqueta—a series of concession stalls housed below the railroad tracks on Park Avenue in Spanish Harlem. Chorizos. Jamón serrano. Giant green bananas—four for a dollar. Dried Irish moss. Linseed. Custard apples. “When they’re very ripe they get slightly fermented. Mmm.” He will buy a couple of pounds of ginger, a bunch of fresh coriander, a couple of pounds of unbleached, unpolished rice—letting go the dried crayfish and the green peanuts, the Congo oil and the pots of rue, letting go the various essences, which are in bottles labelled in Spanish: Essence of Disinvolvement, Essence of Envy and Hate. Breadfruit. Loin goat chops. “ohio state university” shopping bags. “Goat is milk-white when it’s young. I don’t want to get into an argument with these people, but that is not kid, it’s lamb.” Seeing a tray of pigs’ tongues, he calls them “beautiful.” And high-piled pigs’ ears: “You slice them thin.”
He drops in at the Bridge Kitchenware Corporation, 212 East Fifty-second Street, nods at Fred Bridge, and says, “I’m looking for a whip for crème fouettée. I have never seen one in America that’s any good.” Bridge hasn’t either. Bridge has overcome the problem, however, by having a supply of stainless ones made for him in France. Otto looks over several as if he were choosing a new squash racquet. “Perfect,” he says, eventually, to Bridge. “Very beautiful. Flexible.” He buys a quenelle scoop. Rummaging in the back of the store, he picks up a tin sieve. A clerk frankly tells him not to take it because it is no good. “That’s why I want it,” he says. “I’ve never seen one that was any good. The best of them won’t last six months.” He asks for parchment paper. To “make stuff en papillote,” he sometimes uses, instead of parchment, narrow bags from liquor stores. “Tied at each end and oiled, they are perfect en papillote bags, as long as the paper has not been recycled. You can’t make things en papillote in recycled paper because of the chemicals involved. Some restaurants use aluminum foil for en papillote. Contemptible.”
He has lieutenants—certain fish merchants from his general neighborhood—who shop for him at the Fulton Market. But often enough he goes there himself, his body, at 4 a.m., feeling what he calls the resaca—“when the tide goes out and leaves the dry sand.” He loves this world of rubber boots and bonfires, wet pavement and cracked ice, and just to enter it—to catch the bright eye of a fresh red snapper—is enough to cause his tides to rise. “There is no soul behind that eye,” he says. “That is why shooting fish is such fun.” Under the great illuminated sheds he checks everything (every aisle, bin, and stall), moving among the hills of porgies and the swordfish laid out like logs of copper beech, the sudden liveliness in his own eyes tempered only by the contrast he feels between the nonchalance of this New York scene and the careful constructions of the Algeciras wholesale fish market, where “they display the food with a lot more love.”
“You never know what is going to be good. You have to look at everything,” he says, and he looks at bushels of mussels, a ton of squid, bay scallops still in their shells. “Make sure they’re not Maine mussels,” he remarks, almost to himself. “If they are, forget it. I’ve had Maine mussels in Le Cygne. They’re awfully tough. You just want the big squid. The New Jersey squid.” He looks at a crate of lobsters. They are dragons—up into their salad years—and three of them fill the crate, their heads seeming to rest on claws the size of pillows. “People think they’re dragons because they look like dragons, but they’re called that because they are caught in dragnets,” he says, picking one up and turning it over, then the second, and the third. The third lobster has many hundreds of green pellets clinging like burrs to its ventral plates. “Eggs. They’re better than caviar,” says Otto. “They’re so crunchy and so fresh-tasting—with lemon juice, and just enough bland vegetable oil to make them shine. You remove them from the lobster with a comb.”
Baskets of urchins disappoint him. “See all the white spots? The freckles? See how the spines are flat? If the spines are standing, the creature is very much alive.” For many months, he and his legates have been on the watch for urchins that are up to his standards. They must be very much alive because their roe, which is what he wants, is so rich and fragile that it soon goes bad.
He views with equal scorn a table of thin fresh herrings. He serves herring fillets in February, and this is not February. “That’s the only time of year when we can get big fat herrings. They’re sensational then, maybe a day or two out of the sea. You have et bottled herring, have you? Awful. Herring, or salmon, in sour cream. They don’t use crème fraîche. They use a sauce with dubious taste but with better keeping qualities.” Otto never prepares herring the same way twice, but his goal is the same if his ingredients are not. He uses, say, vinegar and dill with peppercorns and onions, and his goal is to give the herring “a taste so clean it’s lovely.”
He feels the flanks of sand eels, each no longer than a pencil. “You dredge them with flour, drop them into deep fat, and eat them like French fries.” And he presses the columnar flank of a swordfish, pleased to have it back in the market. He quotes Ted Williams. It is Williams’ opinion that the surest way to save the Atlantic salmon is to declare the species full of mercury and spread the false word. “Swordfish is a bummer in the freezer,” Otto says. “But there are all sorts of fish you can freeze. Shrimp are better frozen properly on a ship than carried for days to market unfrozen. In properly frozen shrimp there’s never a hint of ammonia. Scallops freeze well, too—and crabmeat, octopus, striped bass, flounder, conch, tilefish, grouper. Red snapper frozen is no good. It gets watery, waterlogged. A soft-fleshed fish like a sea trout is no good frozen. Freezing tuna or bluefish precipitates the oily taste. No frozen fish is better than fresh, but well-frozen fish is better than fish a week old.”
Groupers—weighing thirty, forty pounds—face him in a row, like used cars. “You can split those big heads,” he says. “Dredge them in flour and pan-fry them. Then you just pick at them—take the cheeks, the tongue.”
There are conger eels the size of big Southern rattlesnakes. “With those I make jellied eel, cooked first with parsley, white wine, and onions. Almost no one orders it. I eat it myself.”
As he quits the market, he ritually buys a pile of smoked chub, their skins loose and golden. “Smoked chub are so good,” he says. “They just melt like butter. You can eat half a dozen quite happily on the way home in the car.”
Lunchtime in the kitchen and Otto, who never eats a meal when working, offers me an artichoke and some veal with wild mushrooms and Portuguese sauce. “The best veal is not young but nearest to beef,” he says, malleting and dusting the slice before him. “Heavy veal—older veal—is easier to work with, and it looks healthier. Do you know what Provimi is? It’s an artificial milk feeding that more or less bleaches veal on the hoof. Keeps it from turning pink. Ugh.” He has been trimming romaine and chicory, and he puts the trimmings into a pot and steams them until they collapse. With a sprinkling of parmesan, they whet the palate. “I never throw anything away,” he says, “unless it’s been paid for.” He picks up a handful of hot greens and shoves them into his mouth.
“English people are less conscious of utensils than Americans are,” says Anne.
He replies, “That is because you can’t buy your hands.”
“ ‘Eating food with a knife and fork is like making love through an interpreter,’ ” she goes on. “Somebody wrote that. I can’t remember who.”
Lunches have been good in the kitchen—Otto’s fast foods, in his fashion, selected not to slow up his routine.
Veal and Westphalian ham dusted with marjoram and wrapped around big fried croutons. He pan-fries them on a skewer and deglazes the juices with wine to make a full-bodied, gelatinous gravy.
Sautéed squares of lemon sole, with Swiss chard and anchovies which he tosses in a frying pan, holding the handle with both hands as he flings the chard and anchovies into the air.
Smoked whiting, seviche, cucumbers, and Vouvray.
Octopus al amarillo, with saffron, onions, potato, parsley, garlic, and wine—a peasant Spanish dish he has been eating all his life. “It’s the sort of thing the maids would make at home for me after I’d been clamming, or caught an octopus or an eel or any fish with firm flesh.”
Fried bread with tomato, garlic, and oil. “It’s working-class food. The Spanish servants made that for me, too. It was comparable to a white child’s being fed by slaves in the South. I learned from the Spaniards to stay away from expensive oil. It is said that the finest olive oil has the lightest color, and that is as great a myth as the maple-syrup myth. Dark, Grade B maple syrup has more flavor than Grade A. This is good green oil. Expensive oil is jejune and very pale.”
He made a crêpe one day, filling it with spinach and shrimp. “You can put anything in a crêpe and sell it,” he confided.
I asked if he had eaten at La Crêpe. “Once,” he said.
“And how was it?”
“We liked the cider.”
One noon he handed me a very large bean curd grilled like a steak and standing in a soy-based sauce with ginger, vinegar, and scallions; another noon, shad roe. Cooks vulcanize shad roe. This, however, was light and springy and all but underdone. “Why not undercook everything?” Otto said. “That way, if you need to you can cook it some more.”
Directly from the sea I brought some mackerel one day, and we built an applewood fire outside. For the occasion, he quickly assembled a small cinder-block fireplace, and at the finish he kicked the hot blocks apart so he could get the mackerel right down on the fire and “burn” it, giving it what he called “a good Spanish smell”—the smell of wood smoke in broiled flesh.
Alex comes into the kitchen now, home from school under a tumble of hair—amazingly tall for an eighth-grader and as mature in manner as appearance. He moves lightly through the room on big feet, amusement indelible in the corners of his mouth. “Jesus saves,” he remarks. His father’s look suggests approaching aircraft. His father is preparing leeks. Alex circles the kitchen, and, as he goes out, says, “Moses invests.” Anne was divorced. The three older children are hers. Alex is theirs. For his most recent birthday he was given raw fish and a Roman coin—mackerel sushi, octopus sushi, fluke sushi, shrimp sushi, and salmon sushi, followed by a boiled lobster. “Lobster is delicious raw but not for a little boy,” says Otto. Two boys and two (college) girls—they work for their parents from time to time as waiters. When Alex was learning to take orders, a customer—an old family friend—asked him for a chocolate-covered frog. Intently, the grandson of the late distinguished manager of the Reina Cristina of Andalusia wrote down, “1 chocolate frog.” He thought it was a drink.
Otto puts away his marinating leeks, makes some wine-butter-cream-and-parsley sauce, tastes the sauce, and tosses a lump of crabmeat to the cat. Alex returns to the kitchen and pours himself some milk. His father, putting the sauce away, tells him, “If Moses had brains, he would have landed in Saudi Arabia.”
Fish man calls—one of the emissaries to the Fulton Market—giving news that electrifies Otto. Anne is in another room. After putting down the phone, he shouts exultantly to her, “I’ve got sea urchins from Maine! Greg says they’re perfect. We’ll eat them raw.” It would appear that the sea urchins are too good for the customers. “If they’re truly fresh, they should be eaten raw,” he goes on. “On the other hand, I could make a fish ragout with urchin-roe sauce. I’ve never tried that. The roe is pungent stuff, but a little of it would make the ragout sauce subtle—with cream, butter, fish fumet, and reduced white wine.” His mind keeps turning, pausing over this or that possibility, and in his generosity he is obviously expanding his thoughts to include the clientele. “Perhaps I’ll take some urchin egg and spread it on fish and broil it. It gives a lobster taste. Yes. Also, I’ll make an urchin mayonnaise.” He has not seen the creatures yet. He may be forging ahead of himself. While he stands here and plans and dreams, what if their spines are falling like pick-up-sticks? He answers the question with a rattling-fast trip in the Dodge, and when he comes back he is carrying a basket of Strongylocentrotus drobachiensis in the flush of life, spotless, glistening, their spines erect—tiny little porcupines frightened green. Anne and Otto begin to crack them open and remove with spoons the golden-orange ovaries and testes collectively known as roe. The open urchins are passed like cups of wine. The roe looks and tastes something like scrambled egg, but no comparison with another food can really suggest the flavor. It is the flavor of sea-urchin roe, light and pleasantly aromatic, with the freshness of a whitecap on the sea. Anne, removing it, says, “This is a religious experience.” And, since one does not gorge on urchin roe, they turn soon from feeding themselves to filling a jar for use with dinner.
From a high shelf at one end of the kitchen, where cookbooks and culled magazines run fifteen feet from wall to wall, Otto pulls his copy of the “Joy of Cooking.” He looks in it to see what it has to say about sea-urchin roe, and is surprised to find no recipe. So he turns to Elizabeth David, there being no culinary writer for whom he has more respect, and also to A. J. McClane’s “Encyclopedia of Fish Cookery.” The “Joy of Cooking” is rumpled, swollen, split, bent, frayed, and bandaged, its evident employment matched on the bookshelf only by Auguste Escoffier’s “Le Guide Culinaire,” which belonged to Otto’s father and in appearance is even more exhausted. “You cannot live without the ‘Joy of Cooking,’ ” Anne remarks. “It is not great and complex, but it is diverse and basic. It is a book that will translate other books. We have fifty books and more, but if we have a problem we go to the ‘Joy of Cooking.’ ”
“There is nothing fake or pretentious in it,” her husband says.
“It is America’s touchstone.”
“It tells you how to skin a squirrel.”
“Beyond the basic information, basic recipes, you might be surprised how much it includes. It tells you everything from how to poach eggs to how to prepare a raccoon.”
“It is very good on bread, and even has a breakdown on grains.”
“It tells you how to make a Sacher torte.”
“It tells you how to do live snails, how to build a smoker, how to cook octopus, how to prepare a possum, how to make rouille sauce. Put rouille sauce in bouillabaisse and it explodes. Rouille sauce is not in Larousse. But you’ll find it in the ‘Joy of Cooking.’ ”
Otto reaches for his Pellaprat—Henri-Paul Pellaprat, “Modern French Culinary Art”—and it comes off the shelf in half volumes. During a marital-professional fracas, Anne once took hold of the Pellaprat and Otto did, too, and each tugged in a warlike direction. The Pellaprat, in its photographic and textual elegance, deals with the roe of the sturgeon and the roe of the shad but not with the roe of the urchin. Otto flips randomly at the book and lays it open to page 291, where there is a color photograph of Russian coulibiac of salmon, incorporating sturgeon marrow with egg and salmon, en brioche—a sort of czarist eggroll, this one pictured with generous slices off the loaf, latticed trimmings crusty brown. “Mine does not look as good as that, but it tastes better,” he says. One of the books that have been with him since his days as a cook-apprentice is Gringoire and Saulnier’s “Le Répertoire de la Cuisine,” which is a work analogous to the “World Bibliography of Bibliographies.” It is, in effect, a menu of menus—listing, for example, three hundred ways to do sole. Humbling even to someone with a continually changing repertory of six hundred dishes, it is a catalogue of everything that God’s personal chef might be expected to know.
After St. Edward’s, Otto went to hotel schools in Germany and Switzerland and worked for a time in Madrid. He says his father had brainwashed him into wanting to become a hotel manager, but after a brief education in accounting and reception, and even briefer experiences with electricians and plumbers, he could see that his interests were wholly in the kitchen. In the kitchen of the Euler, in Basel, he was systematically taught every aspect of cooking in a basic procedure that lasted a year. Given two kilos of butter, twenty-four egg yolks, and “a wire whisk the size of a ball bat,” he attempted to create a pond of hollandaise. It curdled. Conversely, he was told to make eighty omelettes one at a time. In that way, he would learn. Augean jobs were deliberately assigned to him, tasks of almost unhearable tedium—immense bales of spinach to trim alone—in the expectation that he would muster a chef’s endurance or quit. He went to school in Lausanne as well, and worked at Vittel, in the Vosges, and at the Ritz in Madrid, where he was used most often as a bartender because he was multilingual. In the restaurants there, he developed a sense that staff should dine well. “The help should always eat what the guests eat. If they don’t, they’ll steal off the plates. When I worked in Madrid, we were always stealing off the plates. What was meant to be four slices was two when it got to the table.” Subsequently, he cooked at the Reina Cristina and also worked as a waiter at the Rock Hotel, in Gibraltar. He was fired from that job after the headwaiter, responding to a bell for ice, found him enjoying a drink with Margaret Leighton and Laurence Harvey. Otto may wash his aluminum foil, but he has a prodigal’s sense of the highest, best uses of money. At a ship chandler’s in Gibraltar, he would buy a couple of pounds of caviar—at thirty dollars a pound—and go off with friends and “just eat it.”
His father was dying, and Otto was helping him with his last project, the development of a small restaurant overlooking the Bay of Gibraltar. After the funeral, in 1959, he went to England. He had received a call-up notice, and he cooked for a time at a Wimpy Bar in Oxford before reporting to Perth, in Scotland, for training with the Black Watch. He became a commissioned officer in counterintelligence, functioning mainly from Berlin. “I wouldn’t have minded staying in the Army, to tell you the truth. I had a wonderful time in the Army. I liked the power of leadership. I found it intoxicating.”
“Then why did you come out?”
“I didn’t have an independent income.”
Finca el Bornizo, his family’s place in the mountains, had been remodelled as a small resort that could handle twenty guests. Otto cooked for them. In winter, the only vegetables available to him were chard, carrots, and celery. He had to serve chard, carrots, and celery twice a day and be extremely inventive. For a short time, he sold real estate on the east coast near Valencia, and there developed his knowledge of paella and his regard for parellada, for huge roasted scallions, for toasted-hazelnut sauce. His love of mussels dates from that experience, too—an affection that has been enriched in the United States by the high cost of clams. Returning to Andalusia, he met a Latvian named Gunars J. Grauds, who had spent enough time in America to imagine the vast fortune that might come to the developer of a chain of Spanish motels. His loss leader was the Rio Grande, at Kilometre 116 on the road from Algeciras to Málaga, and Otto cooked for him there. Otto thought that Gunars’ wife bore an extremely close resemblance to Rita Hayworth—and that, specifically, is why he took the job. When Gunars’ sister appeared in the country, Otto forgot Rita Hayworth.
Set into the wall above the fireplace in their American farmhouse-inn is an enamelled Spanish tile on which appears St. Paul’s cryptic advice “Mejor es casarse que abrasarse” (“It is better to marry than to burn”). The fireplace is in the room where the customers sit and have their apéritifs while they wait for a message from the kitchen that it is time to go to table for dinner. I remember from the first moment I walked into it the compact and offhand rural European character and feeling of that room. With its nonchalant miscellany of detail, it was beyond the margins of formal design, but it was too pleasurable merely to have been flung together and too thematic not to imply a tale. There was a pair of bullfight prints—one called “La Lidia” and the other a depiction of a desencajonamiento—and protruding sharp-horned from the wall between these pictures was the head of a fighting bull. The animal had been raised on the dehesa of Pepe Alvarez and killed in the ring with a sword. Crossed Spanish swords had been hung above the fire. All around the room were wrought-iron Spanish sconces with small amber bulbs. There was a three-hundred-year-old map of the Danube, a two-hundred-year-old map of “Magna Britannia.” There were hand-carved cabinets. There were tall wicker chairs, Queen Anne chairs, and Spanish brass-studded leather chairs in groups on a red tile floor. I eventually learned that many of these things had come down through the chef’s family—to America from England via Spain. There were heavy red curtains on brass rods. The ceiling slanted upward in the mansard manner, with boards of tongue and groove. The silent paddle fan hung down between exposed checked beams. Staring back at the bull were the small glass eyes of a taxidermal fox—just its head and neck, on a plaque—and near it were photographs made in Alaska of dog foxes and vixens. A poster in one corner said “Extinct Is Forever” and presented line drawings of vanished creatures, each with the approximate year of its demise—quagga (1883), Cape lion (1860), northern kit fox (1938).
Summoned to dinner, one moved through a dark drafty hall decorated with a cigarette machine, coat hooks, two watercolors of foxes by Ralph Thompson, and plaster-cast reproductions of six Manhattan gargoyles. The dining room, curtained red, suggested a small loft held up by hand-hewn posts and beams, and was lined with starburst sconces around heavy tables of Spanish walnut, with woven placemats and fresh flowers. The floor sloped remarkably enough to rip one’s sober balance, and the direction in which it sloped was toward the kitchen. A glass of wine needed to be chocked or it would slide off a table and crash. At one end of the room was a Flemish oak chest seven feet tall with insets of ebony. On its top were an empty magnum of Château Margaux, a copper cask that had once held the chef’s father’s preferred sherries, and (a taxidermal masterpiece) a whole red fox. The great chest, like so much else in these rooms which had come down from forebears, helped produce a sense of generations, a deep familial atmosphere. Yet there was nothing, of course, nothing whatsoever, that had come from Latvia.
Anne’s father, owner of ships, was also the captain of a ship, and when he was ordered to leave his country he stayed on his ship. Russians boarded the ship and took him away. The family heard later that he had died in a Soviet hospital. Anne says, though, that “people from Latvia who died in Russia did not die in hospitals.” As a child, hidden in the countryside, she was told never to say her name to anyone. “Don’t say your name or they’ll come and get you.” She was not to play with other children. If anyone were to ask if her family owned property, she must remember to say no. To this day, she recoils inwardly when someone asks her name. When she goes to town to shop, there are implications of poverty in her clothes. “It’s because they’ll come and get me,” she says, and then adds, “I don’t really believe that. Things are not quite that bad. I’m odd, but I’m not crazy. Nothing bad ever happened to me. I was just a normal refugee. But as a result of it all you know forever that everything that is peaceful and beautiful and runs on time isn’t there. What is there—just lurking there—is disorder.”
By November, 1944, the Germans had been driven into the west of the country and the Russians were assuming control. It was a time for attempting to escape. Against a red night sky, an ambulance moved Anne, her mother, her grandmother, and others from one farm to another and to the coast. A dory took some twenty people to a fishing boat. Anne wore a green taffeta dress. Gold coins had been stitched into her underwear. The family had more to their name than a few gold coins—if they could get to it. They had funds in a bank in England, a ship or two in America. A German submarine surfaced in the night and approached the fishing boat. In their panic, the party heaved chests of silver into the Baltic. The Germans let them go. Off Gotland, a man went ashore in a barrel and arranged for the group to stay in the refugee center there. They spent Christmas in Gotland, and what Anne remembers primarily is the smell of ginger cookies. “All my life, I’ve been obsessed with food.” After Christmas, they crossed to the Swedish mainland. They spent a year there, in “this fairyland of food, of open sandwiches and the smell of baking in the air.” Age seven, she moved to England. Postwar England. “Watered-down oatmeal. Baked beans and spaghetti on toast. I threw up. There was one egg a week. I lived on Ovaltine.” For all the drama of her escape from Latvia, the war did not make its deepest impression on her until it was over and she was in England, where she saw, for example, pictures of a bombed-out school, walls half gone, hallways in rubble, coatracks “with all the little coats hanging there.” She lived in the Dominions Hotel looking out on Hyde Park, and watched from her window “English ladies walking their Pekinese” when she was not “chained to a little desk,” learning English from a tutor. She could read and write Latvian. She was forced to learn English in one year. “I was taught English mercilessly. A child is not a person in England. ‘You will learn English,’ they said. ‘You will learn English.’ ” She learned. She learned to stammer.
Like so many people with similar obstructions, she has a beautifully textured sense of language. She is not just at home in English. She is in vigorous charge of the language that stops her tongue. She will have difficulty trusting a recipe that says that something should be “thinly sliced” or “coarsely chopped” or that egg whites should be “stiffly beaten.”
There was a family ship that had sought asylum in the West and had been in the service of the United States government when it was torpedoed and sunk by the Germans. Insurance money came out of it like bubbles. That money made it possible for Anne and her mother to move to America. She had two older brothers. In the war, Gunars had been in the Wehrmacht and Vilnis in the United States Army. Anne was educated in New York, Pennsylvania, and Switzerland, and grew to be a tall and arrestingly attractive woman. In 1956, she married a career officer in the American paratroops. Separating from him in the nineteen-sixties, she moved with her children to Spain. Gunars was there, building a sort of Andalusian Howard Johnson’s at Kilometre 116 on the road from Algeciras to Málaga. She was a more than able cook, and as a gesture of affection soon after she arrived she began making Latvian borscht for her brother. The gros bonnet of the motel came walking into the kitchen. He grasped at once what was happening and began to offer what she recalls as “cryptic criticisms.” He was English, and polished, and not unpleasantly arrogant, a Harrovian sort of Lady Margaret Boat Club chap with a lyrical sense of flavor, a man with a dulcet name and a generally analogous manner who wished he had been christened Otto. He said, “You’re using beef and you should be using duck bones. That’s not proper at all.”
“We began arguing,” Anne says, finishing the story. “We began arguing, and have been arguing ever since.”
He, at the moment, is assembling the mise en place for his paella and she is making trifle—slices of génoise with fresh peaches, fresh sliced strawberries, sherry, blackberry brandy, apple wine, and custard cream. They came to live in the United States, she says, because she chose it as the country where her children should be educated.
Otto says, “I think that was a mistake.”
He had motives of his own. He was prepared to leave Spain, in no small part because he felt that anything he might accomplish would be done with his father’s reputation behind him. His affection for his father notwithstanding, he had no desire to become that sort of alloy. New Mexico seemed the obvious place to go, and they went there, and took an extensive look, and found it “ugly” and “not remotely Spanish—it would take five years to get to love it.” So they settled in Daily News country and became professional partners, with the understanding that he is el mandamás—he who gives orders.
“I can cook every bit as well as he can, but I couldn’t make so many meals under pressure,” she says. “I can make elaborate seafood mousses and sauces, but I complete one item in four hours. His ability to juggle things in his head in the course of an evening is amazing, and that is the difference between a chef and a cook. He makes appetizers, entrées, more appetizers—overlapping in time—and he keeps it all in order for as many as fifty-five people, and brings it all off by himself. You have to have that before everything else. Being a good chef is functionally less aesthetic than mechanical. You either have the aesthetic or you don’t. Then, you have to have the timing—the actual feeling of what needs more cooking and what needs less cooking, varying times for each type of fish, and so forth. If he is cooking eight different things, and each takes a different amount of time, he has all that, always, ordered in his head.”
“Women do not make good chefs because you have to juggle too much in your head,” Otto adds. Anne abruptly looks up from her work and regards him as if he had just sprinkled powdered cloves over a pike mousse. “A person who is easily rattled can’t do it,” he goes on. “You’ve got to be unflappable.”
I nibble some smoked whiting and return my gaze from Otto to Anne.
“Careful,” she tells him. “You’re on dangerous ground.” To accommodate the paella, he lifts from a shelf a huge iron skillet, diameter of a manhole cover, and says, “Women are not cooks for the same reason they’re not backhoe operators. Imagine a woman trying to lift this. On a Saturday night I lose five pounds.”
“Careful!” Anne repeats. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Certainly I know what I’m saying. A third reason women aren’t chefs is that kitchen workers, by and large, are Nazis. Super rednecks. They were taken out of school at fourteen. They have no ethical sense or standards. They’re the sort of people who would not tolerate working for a woman.”
“We are both extremely opinionated,” Anne says.
Otto may be el mandamás, but their relationship is complicated by marriage, and, as he describes it, “in her role as wife she does not give unquestioning obedience.” When their opinions collide, she has been known to pick up a wine glass, hold its stem between two fingers high above the tile floor, and open the fingers. She has picked up water glasses and sent them smashing into the kitchen wall. He once threw a shot glass that hit her toe. It has been my inadvertent role, in my visits over the past year, to suppress to some extent these customary events. Thus I have altered, in however minor a measure, the routines I have come to observe. As his usual day accelerates toward dinnertime, the chef’s working rhythms become increasingly intense, increasingly kinetic, and finally all but automatic. His experience becomes his action. He just cruises, functioning by conditioned response. “You cook unconsciously,” he says. “You know what you’re going to do and you do it. When problems come along, your brain spits out the answer.” With a working, eating journalist sitting on a stool not far from the stove—pecking facts, pecking bits of salmon cured in salt and saltpetre with dill and sour cream—the chef is more or less obliged to think and to answer questions, with the result that he stops to consider what he is doing, and this makes the doing all the more difficult, as if he were a surgeon on television tying knots with one hand. His volatility is inhibited, too. On days when I am here, I am some sort of weather front that holds back the buildup of his afternoon storm. At least that is what Anne tells me. And he nods, and grins. It’s true. In the presence of the media he throws fewer bottles and glasses. The sin, stink, and brimstone go out of his language. I have not once seen him crack an egg over Anne’s head, as he confesses to doing from time to time. Nor have I seen her heaving duck scraps on the floor. “Duck scraps” is their term for the garbage they save for the geese. In crescendo situations, she will dump duck scraps on the kitchen floor, then clean them up, feeling better. “Communication, relationships, interaction, baloney,” Anne says. “You only live with yourself. You are only in your own head. You govern your reactions to others. Throwing things, breaking things, you are keeping your own house in order.”
Occasionally the storms of the kitchen roll on into the evening. Once, in a real line squall, Anne shouted into Otto’s face: “Will . . . you . . . calm . . . down! The . . . customers . . . will . . . hear . . . you!”
Otto thundered back: “I don’t give a bloody damn what the customers hear!”
The door to the kitchen swung open. “I heard that,” said a customer, poking his head a short way into the room.
Anne’s mother lived with them for a time. One day she was present when they were fighting in the kitchen. Anne told her to leave. She refused, saying, “I want to watch the divorce.” Anne filled a pitcher with water and advised her mother that she would pour it all over her if she did not go to her room. Mother stayed put. Anne upended the pitcher.
There is nothing Anne and Otto will agree about more readily than that the tensions of the kitchen are mere blips in their routine—unavoidable, and possibly important. More than once they have ended up together on the kitchen floor, hugging their Tibetan mastiff. Take hold of his paw and he moans.
Nap time and, before retiring, Otto runs down to the nearest Grand Union for his last-minute shopping, saying, as the electric eyes recognize him, “This is a terrifically expensive store. You only buy the minimum.” With a list in his hand, he buys lemons, strawberries, apples, walnuts, romaine, parmesan, chocolate, and chicory. As he hurries past the meat, his eye is stopped by twelve pounds of irresistible rib-eye beef, and he puts that in his cart, too. “It’s on the menu for those wretched people who live in developments up the road,” he says. “I’ll make a bordelaise.”
Otto the Neighbor contributes his share of covered dishes to the suppers of churches he does not attend, but he sees very little of the people who live around him, in part because he prefers it that way and in part because he works so much that he has no time to repair his rail fences let alone put his foot up and talk. Neighbors for the most part ignore him and he ignores them, except when young Almquist from up the road comes through on his snowmobile and Otto outshouts the thing for making shrapnel of his nap. After working nine hours or so, he needs serenity and rest to get himself ready for the payoff zone of his day. Often he doesn’t sleep but just reads for two hours in bed—books somewhat more than periodicals, fiction more than fact. (He reads after work each night until he falls asleep.) His other diversions are few, and are analogously solo. When he skin-dives, he likes to go alone. He describes squash as “a good game—you can play it alone.” But he seldom plays games. His two primary diversions are reading and restaurants. “He eats as well as he cooks,” Anne says. “I love to eat out with him.” Anyone would. Anyone who could recognize him on a city sidewalk—with his Savile Row look and his carelessly flying hair—would do well to drop all other plans and shadow him whither he goes. Say he happens to be walking along Madison Avenue in the general purlieu of Altman’s. Stay back. Be polite. Respect his treasured privacy. Stay across the street if possible, but by all means keep him in sight. Stand by as he browses windows and goes into wet-suit stores. When he comes out, and crosses Thirty-fourth Street, make the light if he goes into, say, Salta in Bocca, linger two minutes outside. Now go in, too. With luck, you will be seated at a table near him. Listen. Watch. At any rate, contrive to learn what he orders. He orders spiedino. You order spiedino—slivers of prosciutto cotto and mozzarella with capers in anchovy sauce in a casing of sautéed fragrant bread. He orders a bottle of Verdicchio. You order a bottle of Verdicchio. He orders paglia e fieno, a green-and-white straw-and-hay pasta in a silky butter-cream-and-parmesan sauce. Precisely what you wanted for lunch.
Otto, on such occasions, picks up ideas. He duplicates at home what he eats in town. Coming upon a dish he has never seen, he pulls it apart and looks it over. “Sometimes you say, ‘Ah, I can duplicate that.’ Other times you know you’d never be able to do it. There are flavors that are hard to decipher. It’s easier, of course, to tell what’s in something raw than in something cooked. I cribbed pork hocks from the Veau d’Or—you know, pieds de porc. Pieds de porc are usually in vinaigrette sauce, but these were slightly crisp on top and saturated with a gravy that made your lips stick together. It was a strong gravy. It had a good sharp mustardy taste—a very rich demi-glace sauce with a lot of good French mustard in it. We serve that every so often.”
“What do you call it on your menu?”
“Braised pig’s knuckles.”
At Kitcho, on Forty-sixth Street, he first ate soba—cold green Japanese buckwheat noodles dipped in sauce. He went home, got out his buckwheat, and made soba. Many years ago, after a visit to Charley O’s, on Forty-eighth Street, he Xeroxed their soused shrimp—cooking shrimp in pickling spice and then making a marinade of the sauce they were cooked in, adding onion, garlic, and sherry. He likes to go to The Siamese Garden, on Fifty-third Street, where he regards the clientele as “seedy State Department types—you half expect a hand grenade to come rolling your way.” He once tried a shrimp roll there that created effects he found agreeable and novel, so he pulled the thing apart, went home, and made something almost identical, using Chinese cabbage, ginger, onion, Alaska midget shrimp, lemon grass, and fermented-fishhead sauce. Impressed by a chef at Peng’s, on Forty-fourth Street, who turned chopped shrimp into spheres of flavor and air, Otto bought a basket of quahogs at the Fulton Market, took them home, ground them up, combined them with flour and beaten egg white, a touch of hot sauce, vinegar, onion powder, salt, and pepper, and dropped the mixture by the spoonful into hot olive oil. The spoonfuls bloomed. He serves them as “clam puffs.” Otto’s appreciation of Japanese food is enhanced in the American milieu, because in a general way he thinks that our Japanese restaurants are “straightforward—their materials are obviously fresh,” and he cannot say as much for the commercial conveyance of some other national cuisines. To illustrate, he flips open Chef magazine and quickly finds an ad for Trufflettes. “The unique artificial truffle with real truffle flavor keeps indefinitely under refrigeration,” says the text. “Perfect for decoration. Won’t melt even if boiled. Perfect black inside and out.” Tossing aside the magazine, Otto says, “That’s what almost the whole food industry is—what can be got away with rather than what can be done. That’s why we go to Japanese restaurants.”
Otto is the wave of the past. This is the age of the microwave and the mass-produced entrée, and while he is working at his daily preparations the chefs of other inns are watching the clock in their morning classes in college. Under the stately shade of credit cards, freezer-bodied “reefer” trucks pull up at country inns with chicken Kiev, veal cordon bleu, crêpes à la reine, and rock-frozen “Cornish” hens stuffed with a mixture of wild rice and mushrooms soaked in cognac. Such deliveries, of course, are made in cities, too—clams Casino by the case, crab imperial, coquilles Saint-Jacques, crêpes de la mer, crêpes cannelloni, quiche Lorraine, filets of beef Wellington. Otto has often heard that the best maker of instant entrées is Idle Wild Farm, of Pomfret Center, Connecticut, a division of Idle Wild Foods, of Worcester, Massachusetts. Driving through northeastern Connecticut one time, I stopped in at Idle Wild Farm to watch its cooks at work. There was no identifying sign, no proclamation of the marvel of the presence of such an operation in the oak-and-maple countryside thirty miles west of Providence. Set back from a narrow tertiary road was a ranch house that had been converted to an office, and attached to it was a spread-out mustard-colored building—not Gulden’s yellow, it should be said, but Dijon gold. The kitchen inside was vast and immaculate, windowless, brightly illuminated in close approximation to daylight. Cooks, assemblers—two hundred in all—were working there. Down the center of the room ran a broad conveyor belt on which completed products—chicken breasts cordon bleu, shrimp-lobster-and-crabmeat Newburg—moved slowly toward, and ultimately disappeared within, a horizontal stainless-steel cylinder that was aswirl in cold fog and resembled an Atlas missile. This was Cryotransfer 36 II. In the course of a day, it takes in some five to ten thousand appetizers and entrées, sprays them with liquid nitrogen at three hundred and twenty degrees below zero, and, seven minutes later, emits from its far end food so frozen it could scratch granite. A succession of living goldfish once went into Cryotransfer 36 II. They came out resembling jewelry. Only the big ones died. When a fishbowl filled with water restored them to room temperature, the little ones swam as before. Coming in from either side to the central conveyor were twenty-five tributary conveyors, each attended by a team in blue, preparing a different item. There was a manicotti conveyor, a chicken-breast-cordon-bleu conveyor, a beef-Wellington conveyor. The cooking teams were under instructions to stop and wash their hands every hour. The room had been disinfected with chlorine. There was food for hospitals and airlines as well as for couples in candlelight, and beside one of the tributary conveyors sat a young woman making omelettes. With an ice-cream scoop she reached into a large steel tub that contained thawed whole eggs that had been mixed with carrageenan to become a bright-yellow custard. The carrageenan would help the omelettes stand up. After lifting a scoopful of the egg mixture some twelve to fourteen inches above the moving conveyor belt, the young woman rolled her wrist. Splat, the yellow custard landed on the belt and spread out much like a flapjack, its dimensions programmed exactly by the height of the free fall, the density of the egg custard, and the volume of the scoop. Metronomically the cook repeated the process, and in rows of three the yellow discs moved away from her and into an infrared oven. She smiled. There is no cafeteria at Idle Wild Farm. The cooks eat lunch from vending machines, or they bring brown bags. Emerging from the oven, the omelettes were not permitted to go on to the central conveyor. Cryotransfer 36 II would shatter them like glass. With other delicate products—crêpes cannelloni, crêpes de la mer—they went to a room where air was gently circulating at twenty below zero.
Beside another tributary conveyor, a woman held a pair of scissors in one hand while she weighed breasts of chicken with the other. The breasts were boned, skinned, and glistening—material clean enough and fresh enough to be eaten raw—and they weighed more or less five ounces apiece. More or less was not the way of this kitchen. The chicken in an Idle Wild Farm chicken breast cordon bleu must weigh precisely five ounces. The scissors took care of that. Add a little, snip a little, from chicken to chicken. Add pre-portioned ham and cheese. There was a separate cook for each addition, and an automatic shower of egg batter, and a machine to coat the product with breading. Another scale weighed the assembled breast—seven ounces.
This was the farm where a retired promoter named Jacques Makowsky crossed Cornish gamecocks with Plymouth Rock chickens to develop what he decided to call the Rock Cornish Game Hen. Makowsky is gone and so are the chickens. The farm buys them from Maine to Delmarva and in upstate New York. The old “kill line” is now the Formula Room, where spices and sauces are mixed in tubs, but the senior entrée on Idle Wild’s list is still the Rock Cornish hen stuffed with wild rice. The general manager now is Dieter H. Buehler, Chevalier du Tastevin, who, in the thirteen years before he came to Connecticut, fed a hundred and fifty million meals to the passengers of Trans World Airlines, as its dining director. His degree is from Cornell. His memberships include the Beefeater Club and the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs. Tall and polished, amiable, verbal, in a pin-striped shirt and a striped tie, he walked through the kitchen like an executive seraph walking on a cloud, for he was knee-deep in drifting mists of nitrogen as he said that by 1982 the typical American family would be eating fifty per cent of its meals in restaurants of one type or another, and cooks were simply not going to exist to handle this demand. It was the mission of Idle Wild Farm to usher the world appropriately into the era of “the kitchenless kitchen.”
I had told him something about Otto. “For how many years will that sort of person be around?” he said. “With changing life styles, who wants to spend his life in a kitchen? Who wants to work in a kitchen fifteen hours a day and seven days a week? We are filling a need. We are here to improve the quality of the existence of people like your friend, to help them not to have to work fifteen hours a day but still maintain a high standard in their operations, with food they are proud to serve.”
After such advances in the art, the French could not be far behind. And, indeed, there is a new shop in Paris called the Comptoir Gourmand, where the celebrated chef Michel Guérard—who has earned three Michelin stars at his restaurant in Gascony—sells frozen entrees for six or eight dollars a brick: trout-with-mushrooms poached and frozen, fish terrine with watercress sauce, cryogenic calf’s-tongue pot-au-feu.
“At Idle Wild Farm, we do things in small batches, with a lot of love and care and special handling,” Buehler went on. “In the more modern restaurants, there are minimal kitchen facilities. Menus are limited. They run a broiler and they roast prime ribs, but the staff is basically unskilled. The staff is college kids. Don’t ask a college kid to do a cordon bleu. We help the operator to better utilize his time, and with our appetizers and entrées there is never a disaster on a chef’s bad night.”
The big reefers that go out from Idle Wild Farm are headed for regional distributors, such as Berkshire Frosted Foods, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Pocono Produce, in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania; Smith, Richardson & Conroy, in Miami; and A. Peltz & Sons, in New York City. From the distributors, restaurants order Kievs for their customers and lasagna to feed the help. One can buy Idle Wild products retail at Hammacher Schlemmer, on Fifty-seventh Street, thickly packed in dry ice. The instructions are abecedarian. Anyone who knows how to tell time can turn out veal cordon bleu or crêpes à la reine. There is no “slack.” The product goes directly from the freezer to the oven—so many minutes at four hundred degrees. There are adjusted instructions for conventional ovens, convection ovens, microwave ovens, infrared ovens, deep fryers. “One thing that holds us apart from other people is that we can make anything at all on a custom-processed basis,” Buehler said. “There’s a fifty-case minimum—two thousand pieces. That’s a production run.”
We were joined by Jacques Noé, Idle Wild’s executive chef, who spends most of his time working out new dishes. Noé was born in Asnières, one bend down the river from Paris, and he worked in Parisian restaurants and was trained in kitchens in France and Switzerland. He has been in America more than twenty years, mainly in Boston, working in restaurants and as a teacher in a cooking school. Handsome and blue-eyed, with a light-brown mustache, he spoke with the sort of suave French voice that, in English, seems to be emerging from a purring cat. That morning, as it happened, he had been working on a coulibiac of ocean bass, which was not a true coulibiac, he explained, because the recipe called for phyllo dough instead of a brioche. In fact, he was testing the recipe with scrod. He had a sample ready for submission to a customer. With few exceptions, he hastened to say, the dishes prepared at Idle Wild Farm do not deviate from the descriptions one can read of those dishes in “Larousse Gastronomique.” We stopped to observe a team assembling individual filets of beef Wellington. The puff pastry was in squares like handkerchiefs. In tall racks beside the conveyor were thick slices of filet mignon charred and appetizing as a result of a trip through the “automatic searer.” Actually, they were raw within and frozen solid. Freezing the meat beforehand prevents blood from leaking out during the assembly process. In Larousse you would hardly expect to find something called Wellington, and indeed you do not, but, Noé explained, it is orthodox to accompany the meat either with some liver pâté or with duxelles (“a kind of mushroom hash”). “Liver pâté in this country is not very well accepted,” he said, and therefore an ounce of duxelles was being placed on each filet. To absorb moisture during thaw, bread crumbs were sprinkled on the meat, too, and then it was turned over while the puff pastry was folded around it in a manner known as butcher wrap. So that steam would escape during cooking, it was one woman’s job to poke a hole in the pastry with her pinky. Next came a wash of egg and milk in vital proportions, for the egg and milk would help the puff pastry become a rich and ceramic brown. If the proportions were awry, the crust could go black before the beef inside had thawed. “We save labor, save time in the kitchen,” said the chef. “What we make for restaurants we send out of here raw and ready for people to put in the oven. We don’t save a lot of time if we cook it for them.” The act of removing a frozen entrée from a freezer and putting it into an oven is known as “restoration.”
“Do you miss working in restaurants?” I asked him.
“Oh, yes. Yes.”
“Why?”
“I miss the excitement. I don’t miss the six days a week and the long hours and the holidays. They were not my holidays. But I miss . . . In a restaurant, you never know what to expect. I miss the pressure, the challenge. I love a big crisis.”
When I described to Otto that visit in Connecticut, he said, “Those people are pandering to chefless kitchens. Eventually, American restaurants will buy almost all of their materials that way, and they will be limited to a set number of dishes. On the other hand, a frozen entrée, well made, gives people a hint of what could be possible. It’s something like what Maurice Girodias, of the Olympia Press, said about pornography: ‘It gets people to read who otherwise wouldn’t read.’ ”
He paused. His thought shifted. “The chefs at the big frog ponds have more than enough pride not to use something they haven’t had a hand in,” he continued. “They want their signature on the dish. But they’re not above compromise. They’re not above using frozen turbot and frozen Dover sole. Dover sole comes into this country frozen, and anyone who says it isn’t frozen is a liar. The frog-pond restaurants always have it.” His expressions of contempt for this ethnic group should not be misinterpreted as distaste for French cuisine. It is, rather, distaste for the manner in which French cuisine is sometimes derived in America. He once found ice crystals in his meat at La Caravelle. He is not shy to spend his minimum wages in the ne-plus-expense-account restaurants of the city, and when he is in one his nostrils filter out the scent of money. The prices don’t ruin his dinner. Nor do prices create in him, as they seem to in some people, a favorable prejudice. Milieus, for the most part, don’t interest him, either. His concentration is on the table. Waiters are contemptible until they prove that they are not. “The less the waiter can afford the meal, the more hostile he’s going to be.” Otto once tried to correct a captain’s pronunciation of “Montrachet.” He said, “Both ‘t’s are silent.”
The captain said, “No. One pronounces the first ‘t.’ ”
“Are you French-Canadian?” said Otto.
He regards restaurant owners generally as “a shabby lot.” They overcook their country inns in order to collect fire insurance—that sort of shabbiness—and, in the city, “if Jackie Onassis is coming they bump you.” He calls that “shameful,” and says, “A reservation is a contract.” He admires The Four Seasons—the splendiferous show aside—because he thinks The Four Seasons does things well “and in an enlightened, honest fashion.” With his shoes off under the table there, he is clearly relaxed and happy, addressing his pike-and-salmon pâté, his sweetbreads-and-spinach, his asparagus maltaise. In Lutèce, he keeps his shoes on, out of respect, perhaps, for the proprietor-chef but scarcely for the elegance of the clientele and least of all for the funereal snobs with pencils and pads who carry the food from the kitchen. There is a man seated at the next table in bulging dungarees. Otto likes very much the mousseline de brochet et écrevisses. “It’s hard work,” he says. “Hard to keep hot. Hard to serve. The pike has to be boned. Then it’s thrown in with eggs and cream and condiments and bread panada in a Robot Coupe—a commercial Cuisinart.” He tastes from other plates on his table—a bit of pâté en croûte et terrines (“it’s O.K.—just O.K.”), and pèlerines à la méridionale (“Very good, not overcooked—al dente”). He is not awed by André Soltner, in the kitchen—at least not to the extent that he has been awed by Japanese. “The turbot is delicious, very fresh, perfectly cooked,” he says of another of Soltner’s entrées—turbot de Dieppe poché, hollandaise. “My guess is it was frozen, which is the only kind you can buy, unless it is flown over. It’s probably Holland turbot—three dollars a pound with the head on, and the head is a third of the fish. No doubt it swam past Dieppe. Turbot is easy to cook. You can’t make much of a mistake.” Lutèce’s sole farcie Elzévir, on the other hand, does not seem to him very fresh. “It isn’t pristine,” he says. “It has a fishy taste. Oh, yes it’s Dover sole. It has the firm texture. You can do things with it you can’t do with American flounder. Stuff it. Roll it. Make paupiettes. Dover sole is crunchy. It has a bite to it. This sole was frozen, like the turbot, I think.” He examines Lutèce’s coquelet à la crème aux morilles. “It’s juicy and good,” he says. “It isn’t squab. It’s Cornish hen, you know—Frank Perdue. There has been a certain sacrifice here of quality for volume. Prices are higher. Rents are higher. I mean, the guy’s a businessman.” And what man of business would not have on his menu ris de veau financière? Sampling, Otto finds its pastry light and crisp but the sauce too reduced and not distinguished. “If you et it, your beard and your mustache would congeal together,” he says to me. “The sweetbreads themselves are white. No fibre. Delicious. There should be truffles in the financière garnish. Financière means money, riches. We could do without the olives. A financière garnish has ground mushrooms, kidneys, cockscombs, and small chicken-forcemeat quenelles. Do you see any cockscombs? If you can make something better than the correct way—I mean, objectively better—then go ahead and do it. But be careful if you’re a French restaurant in New York and are charging a fortune. If you’re supposed to have truffles or morels or cockscombs and you cheat—that’s reprehensible. We’ll let him off on the cockscombs, but he could have gone to a kosher butcher. His prices are not chicken feed. When he is asking two or three hundred dollars to give four people their dinner, he should go by the book. Right?”
The customers are unaware of Otto’s bell. It rings in the kitchen when they step on a mat in the vestibule, and it produces in him a sense of dimming houselights, a conditioned adrenal twitch. Just by the way they trip the bell, they sometimes tell him who they are. The tennis star is on the list tonight (a long-footed, insistent ring) and the bridge-toll collector (brief and unassuming) and the couple who come here twice a week (a mixed staccato). “We’ll have forty people—some nice people, quite a few decent people,” Otto says. He reserves his compliments for less than half his clientele. “Many people who eat here seem to appreciate it,” he continues. “They’re thankful. And they are what has kept me going. Thirty per cent are excellent eaters. Ten per cent are fun to talk to. Five per cent know about food and really enjoy it. To them we can sell pretty much anything, because there is some trust. I’ve served cod-roe salad with roundels of roe. The people who tried it loved it, but in general it didn’t go. It was just too unfamiliar. Remember, however, what P. Lorillard said: ‘The quickest way to failure is to try to please everybody.’ ”
He is cooking a steak for Anne. She battles anemia—and prepares for her evenings—with thick shells of sirloin. He has trimmed off a slice or two for himself, raw, and another for Mercedes, the cat. “All I’ve had to eat today is some tea and a bit of cucumber,” he claims. “It’s wonderful not to eat if you’re in a hurry. It speeds you up.” His way of not eating comes to roughly eight thousand calories a day. The steak is searing in a ribbed iron skillet. How can he tell, without cutting in, just when the colors are what he wants inside?
“Just by touching it,” he says. “You can tell exactly.” He quarters some scallops and splits the long legs of Alaskan crabs—last-minute preparations. “The customers are sometimes afraid to order steak because they think they should have something fancier,” he goes on. “So I tart it up with bordelaise. Or béarnaise. That way, it’s got a bit of sophistication. If they want it ‘well done,’ I’m pretty uncompromising. I just don’t do it ‘well done.’ To cook it that way is such a shame.”
The ovens are set at four hundred degrees, where they will stay unless he becomes unusually busy, in which case he needs four-fifty. Anne, dressed for business, wears a white-and-black polka-dot jacket over a floor-length black dress. Her hair is swept back and knotted in a bun. She says of her husband, “He is safe in here doing the work he loves, here in the purity of his little inner sanctum. To me it is a different operation. I’m up front with the people. I have to listen to urologists and bulldozer operators telling me things about food. After eleven years, your opinion of the public is low. I used to think anyone eating reasonably well-prepared food will know he’s eating it, but I move through the dining room sometimes and it’s depressing. For some people, we could just as well open a can. They are so used to artificial flavors that when you give them actual food they don’t know what it is. They look at fresh whipped cream with suspicion.”
Otto says, “The only kind they’ve seen has come out of an aerosol can. To show them what it actually is, I go into the dining room and whip the cream there.”
People ask for ketchup, and they put it on fillet of sole Florentine, on scallops in garlic butter.
“They ask, ‘What’s fresh this evening?’ or ‘Are these good?’ ”
“If it wasn’t good, we wouldn’t serve it. They complain that veal chops are tough, because they’ve never had good, firm veal. They want to know if the wines are good. We chose them.”
“A great many people think anyone who owns a restaurant is crooked. So their attitude is that we are dishonest and are trying to put something over on them and they have to be very swift in order to catch us. They’ve read somewhere that manta rays are cut up and sold as scallops. So they ask us if our scallops are ray.”
A woman once asked for Chivas on the rocks. Anne went into the pantry and poured Chivas on the rocks, and when time came to ask about another, the woman said, “Not here.”
“Why?”
“That was not Chivas.”
“Oh, but it was. We don’t do that sort of thing.”
“A restaurant can’t stay in business if it doesn’t cheat.”
“You get out of here!” Anne screamed. “You get out of here and you never come back!”
The woman ran for her car. “I was shaking,” Anne recalls. “I shook for a couple of days. I have a rule of thumb. Never trust anyone who drives a Cadillac.”
There is a printed menu—a short list of items that do not require long preparation, are always on hand, and “don’t scare people,” such as grilled rib-eye steak, grilled lamb kidneys and sausage, shrimp in ajillo sauce, and émincé of veal zurichois—sautéed veal strips with wine, cream, and scallions. There are three soups, home-smoked trout, snails, marinated mushrooms. “People want a menu in their hands,” Otto says. “They want to eat boring things. They actually want to eat stodgy stuff. Marinated mushrooms, you know, are for nowhere people. I serve baked potatoes so often because I’m tired of people saying I’m too cheap to serve them. They bitch if you give them something else.” He makes Swedish-fried potatoes, which are cut in ganglion strings and cooked in very hot fat, where they enmesh in a filament mass that comes up golden and crisp. Yet the nurdier clients want foil. They don’t want golden-brown Brillo pads. “They want potatoes cooked in an oven in foil,” Otto says. “If the potatoes are in foil, that’s gourmet.”
“When did you last serve a potato in aluminum foil?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
“They’re not baked potatoes. They’re steamed. Mind you, if the customers were uniformly objectionable there would be no joy at all. Many of our customers are open-minded people. We have served octopus and snails successfully since the day we started. There is, in fact, less Mickey Mouse about Americans than anyone else I’ve ever dealt with—French, German, Spanish, English. Basically, the Americans are more secure.”
Tina, his waitress, arrives—trim, dark-haired, petite. She studies Otto’s written list of extras and asks him to explain what she doesn’t understand—as does Cam, his waiter, young and Filmland handsome, with a cadet’s vertical spine, and bright-blond hair. Cam is in high school and is Anne’s son.
The bell sounds, long in the foot, and sounds soon again, sporadic and sharp. Otto’s working surfaces are as clean and prepared as athletic fields, surrounded by the mise en place. He takes his towel from his shoulder and nervously wipes them cleaner. He has regained his blue terry-cloth hat. It sits on the back of his head. His sleeves are rolled. Tina goes out with the list.
Half a dozen customers are waiting in the wicker chairs under the head of the fighting bull and the chart of the endangered species. Some are looking at the printed menu. Some have not picked it up. She greets the first group and reads the list. “These are tonight’s extras,” she says. “For appetizers:
And the entrees:
Someone in the party says, “Imagine all that out here in the sticks!”
The host, an old customer from the Upper West Side, says, “This is not the sticks. This is the apex of the civilized world.”
Tina, in response to questions, explains “oursinade,” “coulibiac,” and “à la poulette,” and reads out the list again. Otto has learned never to write “marjoram” on his extras list. People hear it as “margarine.” Oleomarjoram. When he made sweetbreads with veal-forcemeat quenelles, various customers said the horsemeat was very good, and Otto has never used the word “forcemeat” on his extras list again.
Tina returns to the kitchen. “One clam, one coulibiac, one octopus, one mousse, two pork loins, one osso, one grouper,” she says, presenting the order also in writing.
More footsteps on the bell. From my stool near the stove, I say to the chef, “Good luck.”
He says, “I’ll go into the chapel and pray.”
He has dripped melted butter through a hole in the roof of the golden-brown coulibiac. Now he cuts an inch-thick slice. The interior is white and yellow and reddish-orange. “I’ll make a lot of money out of this one,” he says. “The materials, per serving, are not expensive. The more work you do, the more money you make. There’s no profit in a shrimp cocktail.”
Moving rapidly from worktable to stove to refrigerator, he shelves the coulibiac, shoves clams into an oven, and fetches a bowl of octopus. He eats some octopus. “Crunchy,” he says. “That’s how it should be. If you cook octopus until it’s tender, all the buds come off. I’ve never made it this way before. This is based on a picadillo salad, which is as andaluz as gazpacho. You see? Here is a completely new dish, and they go along with it.” He serves it on a bed of romaine with light tartar sauce, which he made when he got up from his nap.
The stuffed clams are not ground up, as stuffed clams almost always are. Nor are they served in shells. They are whole, and collected in a ramekin, and submerged in a matrix consisting of onions, bread crumbs, garlic, marjoram, olive oil, butter, a drop of hot sauce, and some chopped curly lettuce, “which is very stringy, gives it consistency, puts some weave into it.” He started cooking clams in this fashion as a way of using up old bread. His bread contains a thirteen-to-one ratio of unbleached flour to rye, and when it is old it is durable. It makes what he calls “good tough bread crumbs that hold up.” When it is fresh, its aroma alone would melt butter. He does not make it every day because he and Anne eat so much of it they endanger their health. Other days, they give their customers commercial French bread they themselves scarcely touch.
He removes from the oven a ramekin of clams, gouges one out with a finger, and offers it to me. It is light and springy and aburst with flavor. “I think they’re the best stuffed clams around,” he says, sculpting over the cavity he has made in the dish and putting it back in the oven so the heat will erase his theft. With reference to the people who are waiting for the clams, he says to Tina, “They can go in now,” and she goes out to shepherd them to their seats. He builds on a plate a buttery mound of shad-roe pâté mousse, garnishes it with a bit of cress, and puts it on a tray with the octopus, the salmon, and the clams, saying, “I think that people should eat at my convenience, not that I should cook at their convenience. Pour savoir manger, il faut savoir attendre. If people have any common sense, they will subordinate themselves to the cook’s wishes. In any event, here, they go into the dining room when I am ready.” The four appetizers on the tray are as attractive to the eye as they are to the nose and will be to the palate. They are informal, a little offhand, arranged with enough artistry to imply care but not so much as to suggest that the care was squandered on cosmetics. A year or so ago, on the first evening I spent with Otto in his kitchen, he turned to me at this moment and said, “I want to make a point. There is something that happens to food when it goes from the kitchen to the dining room. It looks better in there, because it is in a dining room. A metamorphosis takes place.”
The second order has come in, and the assembly of its appetizers will coincide with the timing of the first entrees. The bell rings. The pattern of the night compounds. Grouper fillet, in a skin of flour, is searing in a skillet. He flips it, flips it back. He turns things in skillets not once but many times. He is using a knife as a spatula. He is not contemptuous of spatulas. A knife is more often in his hand. He lacks time to switch instruments. He is a chef, not a dentist. He removes the skillet from the flame. He brushes the grouper with a purée of urchin roe, oil, and fish fumet, and he sets the pan in the oven.
“How long are you going to leave that in there?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea. Until it’s cooked. Five minutes probably. More or less.”
Tina enters, saying, “Octopus, mussels, onion soup.” Anne is behind her, saying, “The Siegels are ready when you are.” She has a small silver frog in her hand, a gift from a customer. There are other presents as well—a bottle of Château Haut-Brion, fifty-six ounces of caviar, an authentic Habana cigar. Otto rolls the cigar in Saran Wrap and stores it in the cooler. He will smoke anything. There are customers who have brought him joints. The presents tonight have such loft because his people have discovered what many of them feared—that Otto is selling the inn. In a short time, he and Anne will be gone. After eleven years, they have sought and found release from the heating-oil company they have in effect been working for, the insurance company that has collected their rewards. Their buyer and successor is an experienced New York waiter.
Seven-fifteen, and before the chef now are five sets of orders. Seventeen appetizers. Seventeen entrées. The Vulcan seems to be functioning on its own. Below the high blue flames of six surface burners, there is a shutting and opening, opening and shutting, slamming percussion of doors, with sudden veils of escaping steam and puffs of brown cloud. “It’s the pork loin. It’s got to be a little burnt to taste right.” Of some grouper in the other oven the reverse is true—in its fragile urchin purée. He pulls it out and looks it over, touches it, smells it. “Delicate,” he says. “It almost smells like egg.” The surface of the fish is mustard brown. He has opened the door a dozen times to watch that color develop. We sample the grouper before letting it go to the customer. The sea-urchin flavor seems to me to be the sort that is so modest you have to chase after it. Otto has his own vocabulary. With apparent pleasure, he compares the flavor to iodine.
He continuously touches and tastes the food. He pinches it. He taps it. He licks and nibbles it. He tastes every part of every dish as he puts it together and the whole when it is done. He wipes and wipes again the front edge of the stove, wipes his block surfaces, washes his hands. He moves about his kitchen with athletic stamina. When the pressure is highest, he runs. “It’s like having a hobby that pays you,” he says. “I actually enjoy this, thank God.”
“Two quenelles, one seviche, conch chowder, two paellas, two ossos.”
A quarter to eight, and the china is rattling. Pot lids are spinning on the floor. The oven is up to four-fifty. Otto is moving so fast his work has become a collage of itself, as—all in a minute—he pours out lime juice, eats a handful of seviche, tosses veal into a skillet, and hunts through wild mushrooms for deposits of grit. Chaos cannot get at him in the depths of composition. Those are finished compositions going out through the door—the mottled brown envelopes of pork loin, the drape-fold saucing of the poached quenelles. He is not only cooking. He works on all the levels of the kitchen. He sections the bread. He cuts and apportions desserts. He slices open the baked potatoes. “See. They are nice and flowery,” he says. “Conservatives order baked potatoes. Liberals ask for rice.” He smacks his forehead. “Oh, Christ Almighty, I forgot the rice.” Moving to correct one error, he makes another. He nicks a mocha meringue. Anne, passing through, stops to help. She shaves chocolate above the meringue, and the dark concealing snow drifts over the field of beige. “The most important thing to learn is how to rescue,” she says.
“The most important thing to learn is to go slowly,” says Otto. “There is a wonderful Spanish expression: ‘Dress slowly. We’re in a hurry.’ If you remember that, you slow up, and you make less mistakes.”
“Do you serve mistakes?”
“I’m not going to eat my errors, not if they taste good. An error that tastes good is a ‘classic mistake.’ A ‘classic mistake’ is a discovery. That’s how I learned to put sapsago cheese into al-pesto sauce. I put it in by mistake.” Sapsago is a green Swiss that smells like a farm. It is good for grating, “for flavoring anything,” he says. “Quiche. Vegetable soup.”
“Where do you get it?”
“Macy’s.”
Unless someone specifically asks for vegetables, he serves none with entrées. “I generally have, if nothing else, carrots, celery, Brussels sprouts, and artichoke hearts around, and I often have ratatouille as an appetizer, but I’m damned if I’m going to give away vegetables when people just leave them on the table. If they want vegetables, all they have to do is order them.”
Someone asks for sour cream, and, as it happens, there is none in the house. Otto somehow feels he should have it, and so, for a single customer, he takes time to pour fresh thick cream into a bowl and whip it with a whisk, adding salt and vinegar. As the mixture stiffens, it takes on with remarkable exactness the texture of sour cream. He cuts up a scallion, mixes it in, and serves this patrician substitute to the unsuspecting stranger.
He licks his thumbs. “Wild mushrooms give veal sauce a meaty flavor,” he says, finishing an osso bucco. He walks to the sink with an iron skillet, eating the remainder of the sauce. The predominant color of the osso bucco is cordovan, and it is pearled with shining marrow.
He cuts raw pork and eats some, too. He tosses a piece to Mercedes. “This cat eats more in a day than the average Indian eats in a year,” he says. The cat nonetheless is skinny and sour. Otto himself eats so much meat that he occasionally turns vegetarian to give himself a cure. He doesn’t work in June, and just by taking it easy he loses thirty pounds.
Otto’s broiler has at times failed him, and on these occasions, to help finish certain dishes, he has used a propane torch. Crossing the ocean long ago on the S.S. Constitution, he saw baked Alaska beautifully browned, and he wondered how that was done. He went to the galley, where a chef was “baking” the meringue by playing over its surface the flame of a portable torch. “That was my first acquaintance with American know-how, which seems to be declining,” he remarks, tossing pork-cutlet gravy in a big iron skillet with such vigor that it spills into a surface burner and flames leap two feet high. “Ever see a gas-stove repairman? They have no eyebrows.”
Eight-twenty-five, and six are waiting, in the thirteenth hour of his working day. He apologizes for the canned mushrooms that are now going into the pork loin, and adds that he had canned mushrooms in a salad once at Lutèce. He puts herb butter into godets with mussels, and, arranging two plates of scallops al pesto, eats a generous fraction of the scallops. “O.K. O.K. Small and springy.”
Anne enters. “Mr. Almquist says we have been good neighbors and wants us to know he will miss us,” she tells him.
“I wish I could return the compliment,” says Otto.
He bites one end of a huge boiled leek. Its center shoots out the other end. He drops a little saffron in the blender, adds water, and lets the mixture churn for many minutes as the color changes, grows, from flax to jonquil to canary to high lemon chrome. He mixes it with chicken stock and undercooked rice. A purist would do a whole paella at once, but Otto thinks rice comes up too crunchy that way and the puristas can go back to La Costa Brava. In a big iron skillet in sizzling oil, he half cooks scallops, mussels, shrimps, and floured grouper. In a pot with stock, he has tomatoes, bell peppers, peas, and bites of crab. Bringing the pot to a boil, he empties it into the skillet, and puts the skillet in the oven. Five minutes go by. “I forgot garlic!” he cries out, and rapidly dices a dozen fresh buds that throw a long cast through the room. “This you can do something about,” he says, opening the oven and tossing in the garlic. “What’s awful is when you forget to put sugar in the caramel custard.” The chef is not inherently impressed with paellas, retaining in his prejudice an Andalusian coolness to this triumph of Valencian peasants. So he overcompensates. Arranging the mussels like symmetrical black petals against a field that is pink, red, yellow, and orange, he achieves a paella that is beautiful to see. “Kitchens in New York are so small they could not possibly cook to order many things on a busy night,” he remarks, eating what is left of the rice in the pan.
Anne comes in again. “The Hubers are ready when you are,” she says, also informing him that to keep herself going she will need some mashed potatoes. He mashes her potatoes. She takes away with her as well a ball of butter that is equal in volume to an Acushnet Titleist. Otto glances significantly at the butter. Retreating toward the pantry, she says over her shoulder, “I weigh less than two hundred pounds.”
Searing grouper, he brushes it with urchin roe while ambidextrously reaching into an adjacent skillet to turn over a steak without the help of a utensil. He presses the steak with his fingers. He kicks the mastiff out of the kitchen. A third iron skillet stands empty over high blue flame. To see where the heat is, he places the palm of his hand flat on the bottom of the pan. He is in no great hurry to pull the hand away. “You never know where the hot areas are,” he says. “They’re never in the same place. They move around the pan.” After melting butter, he sets a floured breast of chicken in the hot part of the pan.
Tina requests rice, which is being finished in the broiler. Otto reaches in and rests a hand on the rice. He says it is almost ready. Some years ago, he had a waitress who regularly wore miniskirts. He would ask her to stand on high stools to reach for out-of-the-way spice. “It’s O.K. now,” he tells Tina. “Take the Hubers in.”
Tripping over a pan that he left on the floor, he spills a large quantity of al-pesto sauce (butter, olive oil, parmesan, sapsago, and hazelnuts), and as he cleans it up he synopsizes aloud the plot of a novel in which a pet dog becomes a woman’s lover and later causes an accident fatal to her husband.
Tina comes back to the kitchen, saying, “The Hubers would like to take a minute longer.” Otto gives this some thought, and he consents.
Otto is asleep now. He drank some beer and made his bows and smoked his gift cigar, and then he took his leave, soon after work. With many of his customers, his appearance at their table at the end of their meal has become routine to the point of obligation. He seems not to mind. In all other ways he may avoid the light, but in these moments he seeks—and he says it in so many words—evidence that he has made people happy. Those customers he looks upon with favor he thinks of also as friends, and he will even invite them to “come around on Sunday” for lunch when the restaurant is dark. He is confident that he can go almost anywhere in the region and the sort of business he wants will follow. “And why wouldn’t it?” he says. “All my friends will know where I am.” He seems equally secure in his chosen anonymity, feeling certain that—far from being likely to betray him—his friends will see themselves as his cabal.
He accepted the compliments of the tennis star tonight (smoked shad-roe pâté mousse, paella à la marinera). The tennis star brought him poinsettias. In 1973, the tennis star bet Otto a bottle of Dom Pérignon that Bobby Riggs would “beat the ass off that broad.” When Billie Jean King was gelding Riggs, she was winning champagne for Otto. He talked Roman coins tonight with a man who comes regularly from a town seventy miles to the west (quenelles of veal and shrimps, breaded pork loin coriander). Otto advised him to read Robert Graves’ translation of Suetonius. The customer had the book in his car. There was an Austrian—a stranger to the Inn—who fought with the British at Tobruk (Russian coulibiac of salmon, osso bucco). Grateful for his praise, Otto joked with him in German.
Now the inn is quiet, Anne up and working while her family sleeps. She says she believes in guardian angels. She says her good luck is so pervasive that she pulls into gas stations and has flat tires there. She had luck today. When the sea urchins came, she had made enough trifle and baked enough cake to cover her desserts. She works on urchins now—cracking, scooping, separating out the roe. The column of gold is rising in the jar. She says of their move to another place that they are not going far, not far from New York, no telling where. “He has to feel comfortable. I trust in his paranoia to tell us where to go. What is certain is that we’ll be between nowhere and noplace, and things will be the same. For all those people who want flames and white gloves, there will be no flames or white gloves. What we have is simple food. Simple food if it is good is great. If you understand that, you understand him.”
Her hair has come out of its knot, and a long strand crosses one eye. She puts down her work, dries her hands, and runs them backward from her temples. She speaks on, slowly. “You may have grasped this, but I don’t know him very well. If you’re close to a screen you can’t see through it. He doesn’t know me, either. We’re just together. People are unknowable. They show you what they want you to see. He is a very honest person. Basically. In his bones. And that is what the food is all about. He is so good with flavor because he looks for arrows to point to the essence of the material. His tastes are very fresh and bouncy. He has honor, idealism, a lack of guile. I don’t know how he puts them together. I don’t know his likes and dislikes. I can’t even buy him a birthday present. He has intelligence. He has education. He has character. He has integrity. He applies all these to this manual task. His hands follow what he is.” ♦
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