The Art of Writing, and then some

[Fat Guy]

James, I've thorgoughly enjoyed your book reviews in The Art of Eating, and was wondering if you had any reflections to offer on what as a general matter you, as an experienced professional craftsman and keen observer of culinary publishing find most valuable in food books. Or you may wish to discuss what you find least valuable. If you have a few recommendations for my summer reading list, I'm listening as well.

And, in terms of a few specific things I've been looking into lately, what books would you acquire in order to get the best instruction for making 1) terrines, 2) sausages, and 3) smoked fish. I'd prefer English, but if the best is not available in English I can handle the truth.

[Beau Bazou]

Dear Fat Guy,

Sorry for the complete change of subject, but is that an English Bulldog in your very-small-and-hard-on-my-eyes picture?

I've had bulldogs all my life and just wanted to say hello from one bull-lover to another. My current bulldog, Chester, is of course the best-looking and smartest bulldog that has ever (or will ever have) lived. Not that I'm prejudiced or anything.......

Bryan Tremblay

Knowlton, Qc

[Fat Guy]

Yes that's my bulldog, Momo. I'll send you a larger photo.

[James MacGuire]

Dear Fat Guy,

Anyone who works with Ed Behr turns into a better writer. I do my best, but it was daunting to be taken to task by John Thorne.........

Time and budget considerations have always kept me from looking into every book I find interesting, and I must miss a bunch of good prospects each year.

When I began cooking, nothing was weighed or measured in the main kitchen except the rice and stock ( water?) for a pilaff ( 1:1.5 with Uncle Ben's), or perhaps the rule of thumb kind of thing where it was known that one particular pot, filled to the handles' rivets, would be enough soup for lunch.

Things were different when I got into the pastry department, of course, and apart from the exact, scaled recipes, Yvon Dauchot the Belgian pastry chef for whom I worked, also took the time to explain as best he could the hows and whys of things. A few months later, when I arrived at the Culinary Institute of America ( then in New Haven,Ct), I still had so much to learn that I sniggered condescendingly at a student who walked around with a thermometer. He should see me now.....

It was a huge revelation, when I spent a bit of time in some good French kitchens, to see the guys on the fish station at Haeberlin, who spent half their lives making fish mousselines ( for the Salmon Haeberlin and the mousseline stuffed with a frog leg ragout) using a scale, and Jean Delaveyne and Barrier, who both knew lots about pastry and charcuterie, also had exact formulas, scales, and thermometers. I have worked this way ever since because it is faster than hemming and hawing, makes inexperienced employees useful much more quickly, and the whole idea of a system is somehow reassuring. I don't think that it infringes upon self expression ( there's still plenty of room, and in any case, Jean Delaveyne used to say:. " La cuisine n'est pas un art; c'est un metier qui flirt avec les arts"), for there are still too many things which have to be done by feel and with the tastebuds ( seasoning a salad with salt, pepper, oil, and vinegar can be right up there in the challange hit parade ). Too absolute a dependence upon thermometers can backfire: I still shudder when I remember the raw veal we almost served one night because the thermometer was on the fritz...

A more systematic approach to formulas allows the possibility of analysing them, thereby really finding-out how they work. There used to be a pastry book called La Patisserie Moderne by Darenne and Duval, which these days is pretty useless but 30 years ago was the Escoffier of the bake shop. Various recipes for brioche or sweet pie pastry were given, from "ordinaire" through " Surfine", for the same 500g of flour, and I laughed when I saw the butter jump in increments from 200g to 400g. All of a sudden I realised that if Bernachon's croissants were better than those of the Lyon Sofitel ( which in the late 1970's was a good outfit), a comparative glance at the recipes might reveal why. Professional bread and charcuterie texts most often list recipes based upon a kilogram of flour or of sausage meat, inviting such analysis. I have since become a big recipe writer and note taker ( French professionals call recipes " fiches techniques" ) and my older notebooks have had many changes, first written on the page with a question mark and later confirmed with an "o.k." ( at times long sreies of each ), and in at least one case, that of the terrine de canard recipe which Barrier learned when he was 13 ( he has just celebrated his 88th birthday), after many changes which took me further and further on a tangent, I have come back to the original.

I don't have many pastry books on my shelves, having amassed most of the recipes I use "on the job", but one could do worse than look into works by people like Pierre Herme, in particular a book put out by Larousse some years ago called Les Desserts, because it is more general, a mix of the classics and more modern things. I confess to being something of a fuddy duddy on the pastry side, unashamed of sticking with the classics. Those with more modern leanings should bear im mind that outfits such as Valrhona chocolate produce new recipes each season and hold seminars with demenstrators such as the excellent Meilleut Ouvrier De France, patrick Chevallot (with whom I share the odd fuddy duddy dessert when he's in town...).

I have read all of Calvel many times, not only Le Gout du Pain ( The Taste Of Bread in English), but his articles, La Boulangerie Moderne, and Le Pain, #1140 in the useful Que-Sais-Je? series ( these last two are out of print). Hubert Chiron and Philippe Roussel ( who replaced Professor Calvel as bread teacher at ENSMIC) have published an extremely important ( not too scary ) technical book which Ron Wirtz and I would be eager to translate ( The title and publisher are under my bio). Jeffrey's book will be an important addition to these.

Jean-Claude Frentz has written many charcuterie books, the most immediately useful being Le Compagnon Charcutier. Other charcuterie books tend to be more industrial, or at any rate, no longer very artisanal in terms of additives and approach. . Frentz's explanations are accessible to people who lack a background in chemistry or microbiology, and he has a feeling for traditional preparations. A greatly expanded version of an earlier collective work, L'Encyclopedie De La Charcuterie will be out soon ( same publisher as the Roussel-Chiron. Jean-Claude is the editor of the series)

Soon, I began to have a good time with all of these things and began looking into less useful ( in a true sense ) gems such as The Making Of Farmstead Goat Cheeses by Jean-Claude Le Jaouen ( I read it in French, but it was published here by Cheesemakers' Journal ISBN 0-9607404-3-0) , which one can read for pure pleasure, and also works on regional French cuisine which have their rewards but tend to be bare bones in fine cooking terms, and annoyingly vague in the weights and measures department. Invariably, my favorites have been those titles which are completely on top of things technically, but transcend their professional textbook status because they are works of love. Many great English speaking writers on French food who come to mind when one thinks of good writing and diligent research, they are geared toward people at home ( that said, whatever its category, I do think that Patrick Rance's French Cheese deserves extra special mention). Perhaps more technically-oriented books exist in English than I suspect ( and I confess that I haven't looked into the English language charcutery book which mr Thorne mentioned in his letter to The Art Of Eating ) but my fear, alas, is that even those professionals who would be capable of writing more specialised books for the benefit of people in the trade are forced by commercial considerations and worries of maintaining celebrity status to look to the mass market . How can our professionals be professionals if by default they are all learning the trade in cookbooks? What the world doesn't need is another celebrity chef cookbook, books whose authors (and their agents ) probably wish would self-destruct as soon as it's time for the inevitable later reincarnation of virtually the same book. Thank god there are a few people around with deeper thoughts and feelings, and the desire to share them. I liked Gagnaire, but had to struggle mightily to write it up in The Art Of Eating, and perhaps gushed excessively about the Zuni book, but that is the way I felt. Christian Delouvrier's book, Mastering Simplicity, My Life In The Kitchen, was a near miss. The recipes are extremely well thought-out, so that cooks get recipes that work but also a clear picture of his take on things, but was less moved by the autobiographical sections, which seemed an account of a gloriously uneventful ,very happy childhood followed by a career consisting of success upon success ( p 68: " fortunately I did well, and passed with flying colors") though the problem might be that he truly IS humble and was unwilling to jump unselfconsciously onto the celebrity bandwagon ( simplicite in French means humility. Is he trying to master both?).

Anyway, I have gone on for too long. Not being a celebrity, I won't be writing any celebrity cookbooks, but if Ed Behr suggests another review, I'll do my best. My book suggestions to you are merely what have suited me within my narrow speciality. Scales, exact recipes and methods, and the desire to truly understand how things work might, hopefully, be of more general benefit, even for people at home ( in how many home kitchens have I seen professional stoves, copper pots, and every concieveable kitchen gadget except an inexpensive scale ?)

I have had a great time with this Q+A so far, and hope it goes on for a time because Jeffrey Hamelman and Hubert Chiron might soon have a few comments of their own.

My best to you,

James

[Fat Guy]

James, thanks so much for your thorough and informative answer. I think I speak for all eGulleters when I say I've been thrilled with the depth and care with which you've answered every question in this Q&A session. I feel a bit bad, looking over the whole package thus far, that we pitched you as "Master Baker James MacGuire" because I think you have so much interesting commentary within you on so many issues having nothing to do with baking. You have, as they'd say in opera, an incredible range. I imagine you don't sleep much.

I'm glad you mentioned Delouvrier's book. I've been carrying around a feeling of guilt for the past few months on account of my failure to get behind this book and spread the word. I agree it is a flawed volume in many ways, but it is one of the better, as you say, near misses of recent times. Like you, Delouvrier makes no compromises. When I got the book, it was December and one of eGullet's managers, "Dave the Cook," was coming up to New York City from Atlanta to cook New Year's Eve dinner with me. We had 40 people to feed, and given the bizarre circles we inhabit about 30 of them were in the category of people who could go to a restaurant like Lespinasse or French Laundry or Passe Partout and say "That was a decent meal; here's what was good and here's what was bad about it."

We settled on Delouvrier's cassoulet recipe as the core dish for the evening. Dave, my brother-in-law Michael (who interestingly is a cop with an interest in fine dining; the other week he and I went to Ducasse and I wondered if he was the first customer ever to dine there wearing a firearm), and I spent the better part of two days working through the recipe, which begins with the deadpan, "This recipe is quite long but it is very straightforward." It prompted me to say out loud to nobody in particular, as kids do these days, "Whatever!" In any event, it was a deeply enjoyable recipe to follow and, in the end, to eat. So for that reason, and others (I have long felt that Christian is the most underrated of the "four-star chefs," because his contributions to cuisine are introverted and based on refinement of classic recipes, techniques, and ideas, in contrast to the more identifiably creative efforts of someone like Jean-Georges Vongerichten), I felt badly that the book entered the marketplace without much notice and was quickly moved off the front burner. For what it's worth, I'd have done a lot more advocacy for it had I not been preoccupied with my own manuscript. In part it was an impossible book to market, however, because of the closing of Lespinasse and the collapse of the Terre and Restaurant Delouvrier projects. Nobody knew when the book came out that Christian was soon to be Ducasse's man in New York. He was instead a chef without a restaurant. The photographs in the book situate it in the defunct Lespinasse. The marketing propaganda situates Christian in two restaurants that never opened. It was a mess, which is too bad because the book itself is quite good.

James, thanks again for participating in this memorable Q&A. I hope you know that you are always welcome to chime in here on eGullet, on any of our forums, after the Q&A is over. We hope to see you around, and please do let us know as soon as you have news of your next steps.

Warm regards.