A Chef in the Anthropocene

   On cold gray winter mornings, I open my eyes and try to guess the time from the light coming through the bay window in my bedroom. Cloud cover can complicate the assessment, because on days with almost no sun, it can be difficult to tell the difference between the moments just after sunrise and the middle of the morning. No doubt that the state of my mind also matters. Last night, I drank a few ounces of scotch, and ate too much pasta for dinner, and watched an unsettling film before warming up in the shower and climbing into bed. I didn’t sleep well, and I was hardly interested to play my guessing game when the light finally arrived, preferring instead to keep my eyes closed, hoping to wander into an early morning dream. The pasta had been very good, perhaps the best I had made all season. But even well-cooked pasta, draped in a delicately-scented and delicious Bolognese sauce made with tomatoes from my own garden, can be too salty and too rich to be a friendly dinner. The quiet of these country nights has asked, among other things, that I start to consider exactly what I eat, and when, to achieve the most peace during the night.

It is hard to overstate how stark a contrast there has been between thoughts like these and the ones that occupied me during the mad rush to taste that characterized my twenty years of working as a chef and sommelier in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In those days, not so long ago, I often went to bed with a stomach filled with pasta, and just as often, quite a quantity of Tuscan red wine to go with it. For a few years after my restaurant opened, a bunch of us would close the restaurant at 10:30 or 11pm, and promptly make tracks to the neighborhood bar and grill for a regular bacchanal of a dinner. Four or five of us would bring three bottles along; usually a white and two reds. And sure, we would agree as we sat down, why not, let’s start with a round of Sazerac cocktails. After a night hosting guests and serving food, nobody could resist the siren call, and vaporous, anisette currents of a lithe little aperitif.

We love the deep-fried smelt, with aioli for dipping, and the chicory salad with roasted cauliflower, garlic croutons, pimentòn and shards of Pecorino. The restaurant is almost full. I can taste that chicory salad already. Full of delicate Castelfranco leaves, the textures of the cauliflower and croutons, the spicy saltiness of those shards of cheese dusted with red pepper; it is a perfect intersection of classical European food and fresh California cuisine. I’m suddenly ravenously hungry. I’ll ask the sommelier if she can open that Chablis. I cannot wait to taste this wine, my first sip of any of Vincent Dauvissat’s 2008 wines. I reach out for the bottle, glistening in the middle of the table, just now the perfect temperature, twenty minutes after we grabbed it from the refrigerator on our way out the door. Didn’t that salad used to have oro blanco grapefruit in it? Am I just imagining that because I’m thinking about the Chablis? I could live through a hundred years of winters in San Francisco and never fail to be shocked by the transcendent quality of great, peak-of-season oro blanco.

Fritz and David saw us come in, and as the salad arrives Fritz is standing next to me, and complimenting our restaurant, and telling me to relax, Obama is going to win reelection. I am perennially worried about the rise of the right wing, and even a Mitt Romney administration has me feeling edgy. Anyway the first splash of Dauvissat is in my glass now, and Fritz is definitely free, I think, to step away and carry on with his journey to the bathroom. I raise the glass to my nose and inhale the wave of olfactory transport that emanates from quintessential Chablis, the veins of citrus pith and the radio frequency of wet limestone. Lately, I’ve noticed, I seem to be taking a minute or two to just smell the wine before I taste it. I pick up the glass and bring it to my nose, smell, and put it back on the table. It is amazing to think of how deliberate and incremental my sensorial appreciations have become, how much this aspect of life seems to have slowed down for me.

The little fried fish are here. The aioli on the side is lemon and roasted garlic; still more Chablisienne serendipity. Everyone wants cheeseburgers, all with Gruyère and cooked medium-rare. Fritz comes back from the bathroom and asks whether any of us has been to the Jasper Johns show at the MOMA. Fritz met him once in a restaurant in New York. Fritz wants to know how the Dauvissat is. More Matisse than Jasper Johns, I say. He laughs, and we agree: if there is a glass of white wine on a table in a Matisse painting, it is Vincent Dauvissat Chablis. Fritz proposes: Dauvissat is to Matisse what Raveneau is to Picasso. Our second bottle, an Oregonian Pinot Noir from 1994, is now being poured into our glasses. “I’ve heard it said,” I say, changing the subject, “Pinot Noir from Oregon is redolent of black fruits, while California Pinot Noir more often exhibits red fruit qualities.”

The next morning, after a hard night’s sleep, I think I could have skipped the cheeseburger. I make a pot of coffee, which I drink black, especially when there’s some dairy or a lot of fat somewhere else in my breakfast. If you’re drinking coffee with custard, my logic goes, you don’t need cream in the coffee. Caitlin and I have a running conversation about this. Sometimes, I make buttery, soft scrambled eggs for us in the morning, and I spoon them into a bowl, which I then put on the table next to a few pieces of toast. She sees them and goes into the kitchen for butter; because, she says, toast should always have butter. “Honey,” I say, “if you knew how much butter is already in the eggs.” “Irrelevant,” she says, helping herself to a spoonful of eggs and buttering a piece of toast. We all have our orthodoxies, I mutter. A major aesthetic question hangs in the balance here. We have to agree: there is something like a Platonic ideal of a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, which has a deliciously proportionate number of grams of toast, eggs, butter, salt. She doesn’t want to hear it. She won’t be eating any dry toast, and she doesn’t care if my eggs are the second coming of Ryan Gosling in a summer rainstorm. There’s some butter on the counter next to the toaster, I tell her. We prefer to leave the butter out. We have differences here and there, Cait and I, but at least we’re on the same page with regard to the perils of trying to navigate through a domestic partnership in a house where the butter is refrigerated.

I have a morning tasting appointment at the restaurant, and Nick arrives with two bags full of bottles; six reds, five whites, and a sparkling wine. He puts them all on the table, a kind and expeditious gesture. Sales people sometimes pull one bottle at a time from their bags, pouring one taste at a time, which has the effect of holding the client taster hostage. This buyer doesn’t have time today to sit and listen to all the stories. If I decide to buy the wine, I’ll want to know everything about how the winery was founded in just the right spot, after some rich guy left his career as an aerospace executive and bought the property, right where the Sidewinder Creek meets the base of the hills, right where the view is so majestic. I guess there must be some buyers who have inclinations that are opposite from mine. Maybe there are some buyers who just want to hear the story, and by the time they raise the glass to their lips, they hardly care what the wine tastes like.

I could spend the rest of my life, I think, sitting and listening to these pitches, even when I don’t care for the wine at all. Nick’s first pour is a sparkling dry Riesling from Mendocino, which is obviously too cold, just from the look of how hard it’s sweating as it sits on the table. It’s a careless mistake to leave bottles in too much contact with ice packs, which renders them odorless and very nearly flavorless too. I’ll mention it once to a sales rep but not a second time. I may or may not buy the wine, but I’m not the bottle temperature police. Even at the right temperature, this first wine, an insipid little sparkler “birthed in the salty mist of the California coast,” is not going to mix well with the toothpaste that was the last thing I put in my mouth before I left the house. I get up and go into the kitchen in search of something to neutralize my compromised palate: a piece of bread with butter or some soft cow’s milk cheese, maybe a few toasted almonds without too much salt. Maybe what I really need is a cold shower. Maybe a week in a monastery.

* * *

As it turns out, if what you pine for is quiet and solitude, the slippery slide of sensory stimulation wiped clean as a slab of cold marble, you just might get it. After more than twenty years of living in cities, usually within walking distance of the restaurants and cafés of a bevy of talented culinary professionals, I moved to the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, where it can be hard to find so much as a delicious bowl of soup in a café on a cold winter day. I desired some years ago to open and operate a restaurant in the country, and a project materialized. My romantic relationship ended before I packed my things—I moved to a desolate spot as a single person. Suddenly I found myself with every barren minute of lifeless asceticism that I had ever imagined, and a few more for good measure, just to be sure the patient was really dead.

I cooked for myself in my new kitchen, and I could muster a little magic on my own behalf in rare moments of solitary inspiration. But after a while, even perfectly seasoned soft-scrambled eggs, with fresh corn tortillas and strong coffee, can start to seem a little mundane. The more I sank into my morning, noon, and night domestic habits, with hardly as much as the occasional pleasant surprise of decent takeout food, the more I realized how much I had relied on all of the external gustatory stimulations of my previous boulevard life. I had depended on them to spin my gears, to keep my taste buds alert, to keep my mind alive. Sometimes, in my California salad days, I felt the effects of drinking too much, here and there a bit of indigestion. But mostly, the ubiquity of delicious foods and beverages, of so many great tastes and flavors, seemed only to make so many moments sweeter, almost candied, in their richness and their chock-a-block variation.

In the midst of my recent oatmeal breakfasts alone, just as pronounced an impression was my growing appreciation for everything I left behind. Warm nights in San Francisco, with cold bottles of wine sweating on tables next to gorgeous platters of food, continue to float through my consciousness like they were walks on the moon. In the time since I tasted and drank great wine somewhat regularly, I have only been more humbled by the memories of the experiences, more certain of the benefits they offered me personally, as well as my urban neighbors. Communities which are graced with an abundance of opportunities to smell and taste; to hear, see, and feel wonderful new things, are incomparably better off for those sensory surprises. These things help guard against despondency, and also against easy consensus. They tend, mostly, to keep us on our toes, more aware than we would otherwise be, buzzing from possibility.

All of this was explained to me, and well, by the Canadian writer Michael Ignatieff, over the winter, when I read the essay he wrote for the first issue of Liberties magazine, called “Liberalism in the Anthropocene.” In it, Ignatieff says that the only way out of the joint crises of climate change and rising authoritarianism is to lean into what it means to be a progressive, to not stop moving, tasting and buying; to bore a hole with a consumerist laser straight through whatever is backward. He writes, “People want pleasure, cars, goods, vacations; they derive comfort and consolation from possessions. They are willing to spend money, lots of it, in pointless but amiable sociability in restaurants, bars, cafés, and holidays on far-away beaches. All this is not decadent, it is human.”

I am reminded of the famous Mark Twain quote about the civilizing effects of travel, which felt ever-more poignant in the months following the Covid pandemic. We experienced a year or two, plucked from the freneticism of early twenty-first century life, and all of the technology and rampant consumerism to which we were accustomed, when an enormous percentage of people all over the world did not travel at all. Most of the people around the world, for long stretches of time, were mostly curled up inside. Myriad fears and anxieties were tucked away with them, festering like grudges. People may look back at the pandemic, and the fetid right-wing detritus that floated to the surface around the world in those months, as only coincidentally concurrent, but it is already clear that the two were hand in hand. The pandemic and all of the sequestration was a powerful cause, and the animosity and fear that can come from cloistering have been consequences from which we are still trying to extricate ourselves.

The past several months have been full of travel for me, more than any other time in my life. And I think I’ve seen Mark Twain sitting in more than one reception area in a hotel lobby, arms folded and smiling, listening to the way people soften as they try to carry on a conversation with someone who doesn’t speak their language. Through our appetites to explore, and to know more about what is going on with other people; to know a little about what people are doing, hearing, eating, experiencing, buying for themselves, populations of the world have been reconnecting with lots of others. Does all of the present travel and going out to restaurants, sitting in public spaces and listening to music together, finally douse all of the anxiety that bubbled up while the world was quiet? No. Of course the challenges we face are still here, and will be here tomorrow. But it is impossible to walk the streets and not feel people cooling off, moving around without masks, smiling at each other now and then.

* * *

The train to Walthamstow Central, the terminal stop on London Underground’s Victoria line, is so hot that it could be a different sort of terminal for me. It’s September but the weather has been blisteringly warm in London for the past week. I have been reacquainting with the city for the first time in decades, since I visited my college girlfriend who was abroad for a semester, almost thirty years ago. I have walked around these last few days slack-jawed, not because of the heat but because I forgot, or never knew, how beautiful and varied a city it is. On one forty-five minute walk, between Westminster Abbey and theaters, with modern architecture, and restaurants with every regional style of food known to man, London has felt like the capital of the world.

A few things London does not have in abundance are air conditioning, good refrigerators and ice. In the middle of a very bustling mid-afternoon Picadilly Circus yesterday, I saw a café manager take pains to explain to a group of perspiring diners that he was sorry that his beverage cooler was not running colder, and doubly so that the café’s ice machines were maxed out and not allowing him to distribute any ice to the hot and thirsty crowds. Much of the great London subway system, also, was never equipped with air conditioning, and there is something about an unbearable train ride on a viciously hot day that adds a bit of rather overt climate change reckoning to an otherwise carefree vacation. The world is not ready to cope with rising temperatures and the growing preponderance of natural disasters: a reality sufficiently grim to color the outlook of even the most sanguine traveler.

My destination in Walthamstow is the William Morris Gallery, the one-time home of the great Victorian craftsman and cultural theorist, which has now been converted into a museum. I am checking in on one of the intellectual figures whose writings influenced me the most when I was a student. Morris, along with Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, among other Victorians, was the first thinker to impel me to consider the idea of craft, and the way small everyday decisions affect the fabric of who we are, and the world in which we live. They were figures who pleaded that every choice could be made with taste, considerate of different aspects and effects, or without very much of it. They were the figures who made me crave, every day, as a regular aspect of my work, the making of small aesthetic and even moral judgments and decisions.

The kind young woman behind the counter at the gallery’s café seems to sense that I am in need of some refreshment, perhaps surmises that I endured an arduous train trip followed by a twenty-minute walk in the heat, through the empty, ramshackle streets of Walthamstow. She doesn’t presently have any ice, she tells me without being asked, but when it arrives she’ll be happy to locate me in the café so that she can hand off a few cubes. It is a rare and special quality for a counter clerk to be both kind and industrious on behalf of a customer. How easy it is to just move through one’s day taking orders and making change; and yet, this woman woke up with a vow to be alert, to do conscious things, to dedicate herself to the betterment of her very immediate café community.

There are many things I didn’t know about William Morris; most things in fact. I was reminded that he was a champion of the laborer, and espoused the belief that everyone has a right to do good, satisfying work. He was a great naturalist, who found so much fascination in trees and birds that his magnificently detailed designs and prints became the work with which he is most often associated, well over a century after his death. He was someone who believed so fervently in beauty that he was prepared to engage in politics for most of his life, in addition to his prolific career as a craftsman, in order to defend it, and to insist on its primacy.

The grounds outside the café, where people are braving the heat with their refreshments, or sitting on a bench and reading a book, are pleasant and understated. On the edge of Lloyd Park, they were a favorite place for Morris to amble when he was young, among the trees and along a shaded moat. I’m sitting at a table, and taken with the surroundings, which are beautiful and also quite a switch from any view where I live, more than 3,000 miles away. Nor do I find, it occurs to me, very much of William Morris or his ideas in modern-day America. Quite the contrary, I believe. It’s hard to imagine anything less respectful of proportion, less reflective of beauty, than grocery stores full of two-pound boxes of diabetic breakfast cereal, and department store shelves full of disposable goods.

The troubling thing about Michael Ignatieff’s calculation, in the essay about liberalism and the anthropocene, is that he gets half of it right; he is catastrophically wrong about the rest. He couldn’t be more correct than to say that people must exercise their minds and open themselves to what is not familiar in order to live in a civil society. He is right to suggest that the consumption of goods and services, along with their costs, like those incurred by travel, play a key part in our collective ability to grow and evolve. This marketplace mantra has been so imbued in the consciousness of multiple generations of Americans, in my own youth championed by the political class led by Bill and Hillary Clinton, that it feels like second nature. “Progressives” like the Clintons and Ignatieff have been so keen on progress, that if burning two or three times as much oil as the planet’s atmosphere can handle is necessary to keep the economy thundering and liberals electable, then so be it.

The rub, the glacier-sized chicken presently coming home to roost, is that the big shopping spree—the plastics, the manufacturing, the whimsical air travel and celebration of indiscriminate consumption, are all part of the development that has landed us in so much ecological trouble. Most of the people who were born to middle or upper class homes around the middle of the twentieth century, especially in the United States, were reared with the certainly of infinite abundance. Most of my parents’ generation, until just the last decade or so, could not even imagine the possibility of any real, imminent, climate trouble. The terrifying future we now face is a direct result of not just their personal behavior, and the habits which were conferred upon their children, but also of patterns in education, the arts, and public policies that hardly anticipated or even considered the idea that we should reconsider anything, from eating red meat to flying to Amsterdam for the weekend.

It continues to be the case that we celebrate every trip that anyone takes to anywhere for any reason. A favored summer pastime in the United States is to share stories about how many frequent flier miles we racked up, and which far-flung places we got to, if only because they were far away. The origins of things we buy and the means of production are of precious little concern. As a child, I knew nothing about where my jeans came from, or my sneakers, or anything I owned; to say nothing of the bread I ate or the juice I drank.

Westerners have had a mostly uninterrupted run on retail for the better part of a century, and it seems clear now that nothing but lean wallets or a lack of product availability will alter the course of this luxury liner. Whether or not we find ourselves in increasingly dire situations, like a multi-year pandemic instigated by the spread of a virus widely attributed to climate change, remains to be seen. But it seems to me that in any case, it would be fine if the trouble we are likely facing is met with rising tastes and appreciations for the smaller details in life, like the flavor of the tomatoes grown by your neighbor, or a chair made by a local woodworker, or the uncommon brio of a certain grade school teacher. Not everything needs to be fast, and new, and worldly. There are pleasures in this life, after all, which don’t have price tags.

* * *

I take the ground meat out of the refrigerator at least thirty minutes before I begin to make the mixture for the meatballs. I could use a machine, a mixer, to mix the beef and pork and a half-dozen or so other ingredients which are my favorites to include in my meatball recipe. But I actually prefer to mix everything in the bowl by hand, and it can be painful to handle very cold meat for several minutes, so I let the meat come up to temperature before I start the process. The reason I prefer to make the mixture by hand is probably that I feel as though it sharpens my engagement with the various ingredients, and makes me more cognizant of how much I am adding of each of them. Something about actually handling the Dijon mustard and the chopped pine nuts with my hands offers me a better sense of whether I have added them in pleasant proportions.

There are two main reasons that I am as careful as I am with the meatball mixture. The first is that I grew up with a father who was a man of practice. He was a musician and a dentist, and from a young age, because of his influence, I thought about the idea of doing something repeatedly in order to improve. In my twenties, without having devoted myself to any one thing, I came to feel that a life without a primary practice hardly seemed worth living. I was horrified by the idea that I could grow old without ever having fully given myself to at least one exercise or enterprise. Conversely, I thought, how joyous it would be, if one were lucky enough to live a long life, imbued by regular and repeated interfaces with the same craft. It felt late to me, when I did land in cooking school when I was thirty-two, to begin what became a lifelong dive into the craft of making and serving food.

The second reason I am careful with meatballs is an offhand, morning smoke-break utterance made by a handsome and pot-bellied Austrian culinary instructor named Johannes Oberbichler. Chef Oberbichler supervised the final three months of the culinary program I attended in Vancouver, Canada. As such, he managed my class of twelve students as we assumed temporary proprietorship in the kitchen of the school’s restaurant, which was open to the public. The twelve of us still-rather amateur cooks arrived early in the morning to tackle Chef’s to-do list, and to write the daily menus. When lunchtime arrived, business people and other urbanites streamed through the doors for a two or three-course meal. Chef Hannes, as he was known to his adoring colleagues and students, was a cool customer, extremely kind and generous, and very likely a superb cook.

Of the many lessons he imparted over the course of our short, three-month run together, the one I remember most was about resisting fads and shortcuts in cooking. “Let me tell you something, Mathieu,” he said with a grin, in his Austrian accent, puffing on a cigarette, looking out at the boats in the harbor. “It is much harder to make a delicious meatloaf than it is to cook a steak.” For a lifelong resident of a country where steakhouses somewhat vastly outnumber restaurants that specialize in meatloaf, the remark was an epiphany. It’s easy to sprinkle salt and pepper on a slab of meat and slide it into a pan or onto a grill. It’s quite a bit more challenging to consider proportions, and the way the flavors of different ingredients will play with each other. Charting a culinary course means, to one degree or another, opening one’s self to a potentially infinite number of choices.

The ingredients of choice in my meatball mix, more focused than ever after years of practice, are: salt and pepper, scrambled egg (one egg for every pound of meat), a couple of tablespoons of finely chopped parsley, about a quarter-cup of strong Dijon mustard, at least a half-cup of finely grated Parmesan cheese, and then the two most important ones, a couple of tablespoons of chopped raisins, and something like a generous quarter-cup of very finely chopped pine nuts, so fine that they resemble a purée, achieved with a knife rather than a food processor. A food processor will tend to extract the oil from the nuts, and will turn them into a mash, like a paste. We want them in tiny pieces, but not pulverized so that they become sticky, because of course we want them to disperse evenly in the meat mixture. For years I didn’t chop the pine nuts finely enough; some of them were actually left whole. This often caused them, when the meatballs were being lightly fried in some oil, when the big bits of pine nut were on the exterior of the ball, to exit the meatball entirely. By the end of a session, my frying pans were graveyards of burned, abandoned pine nuts.

In fact there is no end to the number of questionable-to-poor decisions I have made in the kitchen over the years. I have added salt when a recipe called for sugar, I have overcooked and undercooked meat, pasta, vegetables and baked items almost as many times as I have wrapped an apron around my waist. The good news is that I have tried to be as conscious of the mistakes as possible over the years, to open myself to them as fully as I presently could, so that, perhaps, I would be less likely to repeat them. My taste in food and wine and other things, to the degree that something so ephemeral exists, has been hewn from all of these experiences. All of the successes and failures have coalesced over the years, joined by the attentive witnessing of efforts undertaken by others, to form something like a taste compass, for use in applications as diverse as making breakfast and voting in elections.

It may sometimes seem to us that we are on more stable ground when we take fewer risks, and when we engage with fewer choices. We might, for utterly understandable reasons, ask for steak at the meat counter, rather than face the current state of our pantry, the ingredients that may or may not be there, the work of making decisions. And yet, as I write, in an age of suddenly ubiquitous floods and wildfires, there cannot be any confusion about the urgency of the need for a recalibration of our tastes and decisions. So many of us have lived most or all of our lives amidst material indulgences which might, in short order, come to seem completely unsustainable, and perhaps even extraneous to our own satisfaction or happiness. The writing is on the wall: our tastes and our propensity to reconsider them have never been so exposed or consequential. It seems now that our willingness to engage first with causes and effects, and finally to make smart assessments and derive sound conclusions, is a bare necessity not just of progress but of mere subsistence.

I press the meat out to the edges of the bowl to start the mixing process, because creating an even, relatively thin layer around the bottom gives me a better sense of how much salt to use, as though I was seasoning a filet. I try to remind myself, as I add the other ingredients, and watch their colors blend as I knead the mix together with my hands, that past proficiency is no guarantee of present or future success. I aspire to diligence and good taste as I move through the process, until it’s time to set the table, and listen to my guests talk about their worries and their triumphs.