It was morning in Paris. In the cafés there was the hiss of milk being steamed for petits crèmes. By the Sèvres-Babylone métro entrance, in the 6th arrondissement, a city worker, in green uniform, hosed down the pavement, and two exquisitely dressed school-going children turned to wave to Maman, who was standing on the balcony of their apartment. Close by, where the Rue d'Assas meets the Rue du Cherche-Midi, in the second-floor kitchen of Restaurant Hélène Darroze, three chefs—Ariane Daguin, Anne-Sophie Pic, and Hélène Darroze, the restaurant's owner—gathered to prepare a dinner that would stand as a testament to the two separate major influences on their careers.
The first was the culinary custom of the Mères Cuisinières. In a profoundly late-19th- and early-20th-century tradition, women, often working at coal-burning stoves, usually a long way from Paris, introduced a simmered, domestic note into the rigors of French gastronomy. By remaining at the family restaurant for their entire careers, these women came to define the very place in which they labored, just as Mère Blanc did for the tiny hamlet of Vonnas, in the Bresse.
Juxtaposed with this continuity, the trajectories that had brought two of these three chefs and businesswomen to Darroze's kitchen seemed like a study in contrasts. Mère Blanc, after all, never traveled to Paris with three assistants and two huge blue ice chests on the upper deck of the TGV. Mère Brazier never tipped a porter in Newark Airport to carry her 78-pound Styrofoam container of foie gras. And Mère Adrienne surely never welcomed anyone to her Montmartre restaurant wearing deck shoes and a valentine Swatch, and carrying a red cellphone that played Vivaldi when it rang.
The second major influence brought matters closer to home. The three women, ranging in age from 33 to 44, were all daughters of famed chefs, and the dinner, to which leading gastronomes, selected purveyors, château owners, journalists, and Mère Brazier's granddaughter Jacotte had been invited, was also intended to be a tip of the toque to their fathers. The legacy of the Mères may have been elusive, but this one was concrete. Culinary traditions are passed on from generation to generation, though here there was a twist. Neither André Daguin nor Francis Darroze, who would be guests at the dinner, nor Jacques Pic, who died in 1992, had encouraged their daughters to pursue a career in cooking. But they had. When you're a cook's child, you get restaurants through the pores. You live by the tempo of a kitchen without being in one—the hour you play with your parent is between lunch and dinner, and the grazing good-night kiss that shouldn't wake you comes at midnight. These women had gone out into the world, into different fields of study, only to find that their passion lay, as it had for their fathers, at the professional stove.
So there was both a maternal and a paternal side to the evening. Together, they represented a formidable undertaking. If the three women seemed somewhat sanguine, it may have been that as the daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters of chefs, they understood that, in cooking, the greatest acknowledgment is getting a dish right. The three chefs, together with the assembled brigade, were intent on doing just that.
The kitchen itself was set up in the traditional French way, around a stove where cooks have visual contact with one another at all times. Just now, though, they had their backs to it as they worked. A young Greek helped Daguin stuff prunes marinated in Armagnac with foie gras mousse; Keren, from Jerusalem, cleaned gooseneck barnacles; and Sarah, from Poitiers, cut the chorizo made by Pierre Oteiza from free-range pigs that roam the Basque country eating chestnuts. The newest arrival cooked spinach for the staff lunch, nervously lifting it with a spider into a bath of ice water; a much more assured young man, who would soon be leaving for Michel Rostang's restaurant on Anguilla, seared pigeons that had been marinated in olive oil and piments d'Espelette on an old freestanding grill.
This magnificent piece of equipment, with twin flues and the manufacturer's name embossed on its shutters, had been brought up from the Darroze restaurant in the Landes when it closed in 1999. "In winter there, it's dead these days," Hélène Darroze said as she tried to explain the closing of a restaurant that had been owned by the same family for generations. With its burning coals, the grill seemed a monument to a France that no longer existed, for it conjured a time when restaurants depended, not on seasonal visits from international gastronomes, but on the itineraries of the traveling salesmen known as VRPs.
These salesmen (voyageurs représentants placiers) headed out on Monday morning and returned home on Friday night. The prestige of the restaurants that lined the roads they traveled are proof of the quality they expected. Hostellerie de la Poste, Hôtel de la Côte d'Or, and Lameloise lined Route Nationale 6; Point and Pic took care of Route Nationale 7. As Ariane Daguin spread foie gras mousse over cured duck breast, she recalled the bargains they expected, and how they played one restaurant against the other. "The salesmen would say, 'Hey, the coffee is included chez Daguin,' or 'At Darroze, they give you the Armagnac.' "
Those were the days when Daguin's grandmother took over the central courtyard of the Hôtel de France once a year. She would set up pans and cauldrons, and all the local farmers would bring their cèpes. The farmers would sell them, and the grandmother spent the day sautéing and putting them up in Mason jars to use until cèpe season came around again.
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.
While Darroze expedited, Baudic made sure that the dishes went out as she wanted them to. This was the moment for the salt cod. He ladled the oil over the portioned pieces and watched while they cooked in the trays. Around him, his team moved as one, rocking the casseroles back and forth on the stovetop to open the cockles. Then a piece of cod was placed in among the barnacles, piquillos, and chorizo. The last thing Baudic did before closing the lids was to add some of the cooking oil, which was now infused with cod juices. Darroze's other main course was the pigeons, which were finished over the coals of the old grill. At the same time, a small metal funnel with a long handle was heated in the embers, and at the last moment a cook crammed back fat into it so that it sizzled and melted over the pigeons. They were served with a quick-sautéed ragout of cogollos (lettuce hearts) and bellota ham from southwest Spain, and accompanied by an '82 Lynch-Bages.
There was no stopping now; it was on to the cheeses, Picodons and Basque brebis, with a confiture of black cherries from Marie Quatrehomme, followed by desserts—a croustade with roasted Mirabelle plums and prune Armagnac ice cream from Daguin, transparent layers of cooked sugar over fraises de bois from Pic, and chocolate café liégeois in brandy snifters from Darroze, whose father dug deep into the legendary family vaults for a 1936 Armagnac.
Then it was time to honor the cooks. The clean aprons were brought out and placed on the long kitchen counter, and Baudic wanted everyone to also wear a neckerchief in the traditional chef's way. Only a few knew how to tie them, but that didn't matter: The values that had been transmitted in this kitchen tonight went deeper than that. And then Benoît, the pâtissier, remembered the apprentice who was frying the beignets that were served with the coffee and truffles, and he called down on the speakerphone for him to get his butt up there, and Pic found her patent leather shoes. Gathered together, their achievement became clear. They had defied the constraints of the present, run out along the razor's edge of sentiment, and cooked their way to the little France, to what is known as le pays, an area that can encompass the distance between two village steeples, a place where an old farmer with a frayed checked shirt buttoned all the way to the top might be called Père, and where a woman who keeps a restaurant might be called Mère. It was twelve-thirty, and Paris was dark. They filed out toward the applause and their aprons were perfectly pressed.
D'ARTAGNAN
152 East 46th Street, New York (212-687-0300)
Pic
285 Avenue Victor Hugo, Valence (04-75-44-15-32)
RESTAURANT HÉLÈNE DARROZE
4 Rue d'Assas, 6th, Paris (01-42-22-00-11)