As such rituals were left behind, the past in which they had occurred took on a certain luminosity, creating an indefinable, bucolic image of the nation that the French warm to easily. Because the theme of the evening and the names involved brought it into graspable focus, the dinner had garnered a lot of media attention, including a crew from France 3 television.
From one point of view, the unapologetic promotional goals of the evening had already been achieved. But the charged atmosphere constituted the total opposite of what cooking can mean, and that tension seemed particularly acute for Darroze's chef, Jean-Marie Baudic. A veteran of Pierre Gagnaire's restaurant, he was about to open a restaurant of his own in his native Brittany. This was clearly the meal against which whoever succeeded him would be measured. For Baudic, the dinner was a succession of tiny details he carried in his head, and not one of them was going to get lost.
In between herding his blue-aproned corps from one task to the next, he prepared one dish for which he took a special responsibility: poached salt cod that would be served with cockles, the gooseneck barnacles, the chorizo from Basque pigs, and piquillos in cast-iron casseroles. His job now was to prepare the poaching oil. In a large copper sautoir he heated about three inches of olive oil, enough to brown a few handfuls of garlic slivers. This was simply to perfume. When it had cooled a little, he threw in bay leaves and sprigs of thyme, which would infuse the cooling oil for the rest of the afternoon. The morue—lovely thick, white fillets—was from Martín Berasategui, the Michelin three-star chef near San Sebastián. "I'll poach it slowly," Baudic said, his hands moving gently, like a conductor leading an orchestra through the most pianissimo of passages. "Just on trays above the stove, until it's all infused and the fish is à la nacre."
The term describes the color of mother-of-pearl. It is precisely the color that perfectly cooked salt cod should be, and in using it Baudic touched both on the infinitesimal gradations of temperature on which great cooking depends and on the central paradox of the evening: Nothing may be as timeless as French culture, but nothing is as time-dependent as French cuisine. As a cook, he had his priorities right. Later that night, evoking the eternal glories of poplar-lined roads would be of no use if this beautiful cod wasn't served pearly white.
By 6 P.M., the kitchen was working at a quickened pace, and faces became slightly drawn. The sommeliers had whole cases of various white wines opened on the kitchen counter. They tasted each bottle to see if it was corked, using ice buckets as spittoons. Cooks did what cooks always do before big events—they ran the execution of dishes through their heads and stashed towels. Baudic looked approvingly at a metal tub filled with pigeon blood, made from the liquefied hearts and livers. The deep color would be good for the final sauce. "The pigeons were strangled," he said, playfully testing the limits of a visitor's curiosity. "It means their organs stay filled with blood."
Darroze's parents had arrived. Her mother had been set up in the dining room with an iron and the long white aprons with seven blue stripes (representing the seven provinces of the Basque country) that the cooks would don at the end of the meal. She ironed them while trading salty stories with Daguin. In a suit and tie, Francis Darroze waited in his daughter's cubbyhole office and reminisced a little. He remembered doing the tasting rounds with Frank Schoonmaker, and he remembered, laughing, how his father got ortolans past U.S. customs for Henri Soulé to serve at Le Pavillon. Then he looked at the cooks working. "I don't come into the kitchen often anymore," he said. "One feels powerless." He shrugged. "Eh bien, one cooks at home."
But the emotion reached its most affecting point when a portrait was taken. Daguin and Darroze were able to get close against their fathers, and Pic had brought a portrait of her father to be part of the picture. Perhaps it was the proximity—for what cook's child has not smelled the perspiration coming through their parent's vest, sensed the exhaustion when they are brought up onto their laps—but though she tried not to, she stepped away crying. She composed herself. She sat back down and held the portrait. André Daguin reached over, brushing her cheek paternally, and said what one who has kept an inn for seven generations says to one who's the fourth generation of hers. "How was your season?" She knew he was saying, "We're with you." And she smiled, and the shot was taken.
It might be said that when the evening was at its most impossible moment—when the emotions of cooking seemed like something that should never have been touched, that they should never even be spoken about, that one should simply cook and get it right and shut up—it was saved by what threatened to doom it. While the picture was being taken, Baudic had given his troops last-minute instructions. Some went down to the first-floor dining room to send out the hors d'oeuvres. Among them was escaoutoun, a sort of corn gruel that was topped with a slice of sautéed cèpe and served in Chinese soupspoons. The moment those cèpes hit the duck fat in the hot pans, a perfumed link with the past was forged.
What followed was a dinner that never succumbed to mimicry and never became contrived, because each woman was true to her own culinary vision. For Anne-Sophie Pic, it was the laserlike precision with which she laid lozenges of tomato aspic over marinated tuna and roasted off firm, plump langoustines on a plancha, coupling them with a chutney of Rhône Valley peaches. For Ariane Daguin, it was her American foie gras. She separated the lobes into dented roasting trays, salted and roasted them off, then plated them sliced with caramelized figs and a sauce au Jurançon. Hélène Darroze changed into a pair of Le Coq Sportif white aikido shoes that completed the jai alai look of her white outfit. Her cooking style pushes her native Landes down through Gascony, into the Basque country, and far into Spain, like a spindle that draws thread onto itself.
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