Cooking with Susan Sontag (and Thomas Keller)
On dreaming of Brussels sprouts and transforming stuff into things.
“The trick with Brussels sprouts,” my interlocutor confided, a gleam of discovery in her eye, “is to . . .”
The alarm went off and I never discovered what Susan Sontag was about to tell me about how to cook this once underestimated, but now ubiquitous, member of the mustard family. Why the formidable critic and novelist was discussing vegetables, or what she was doing in my dream, for that matter, I have no idea. It’s been a long time since I picked up one of her books, and, although I used to see her routinely prowling the opera racks in the Tower Records store on lower Broadway when we lived in Manhattan, I have had no concourse with her, real or imaginary, in years. Still, there she was, leaning over to converse with me as I sat at a table in an empty restaurant; in the background, the staff was scurrying about getting ready for service — lunch service, I would guess, since the room was filled with daylight. Sontag expressed delight at the pageant of pants we were witness to: the checkered uniforms of the cooks, the white utilitarian trousers of the dishwashers and other help, the black slacks of the waiters and waitresses. Then came — and went — the Brussels sprouts.
The fact that food was on my sleeping mind, however, is no surprise. My wife, Margot, is a world-class cook, and a baker of extraordinary ambition and ability, and much of our personal and social lives revolve around the pleasures of the table. Generally, I bring the appetite, but I do find cooking enjoyable myself (albeit at a significantly lesser performance level). For me, the collection of ingredients and the preparation of patient dishes offers a welcome respite from literary labors; the rondure of onions and the sharp action of chopping, the palpable presence of a cut of meat to be trimmed, the visual metamorphosis of oil and vinegar beat in a bowl, the surface allures and hidden secrets of produce — all occupy hand and eye with a certainty that words seldom provide the unstinting reader and writer. “The absence of stuff,” Adam Gopnik once wrote in a winning disquisition on how the kitchen can provide a refuge for bookish types, “may be what makes writing so depressing and cooking so inviting to the writer. (To the yuppie-family-guy writer anyway. It used to be not cooking but its happy, feckless near relation drinking that writers looked forward to at twilight. Perhaps for the same reason; it gives you something to do with your hands at six o’clock other than typing.) Writing,” unlike cooking, Gopnik continues, “isn’t the transformation of stuff into things. It is just the transformation of symbols into other symbols . . .”
The transformative genius of kitchen science is also celebrated in Thomas Keller’s sumptuous French Laundry Cookbook, nowhere more explicitly than on the page devoted to “The Importance of Offal.” “It’s easy to cook a filet mignon,” Keller asserts, “or to sauté a piece of trout, serve it with brown butter à la meunière, and call yourself a chef. But that’s not really cooking. That’s heating. Preparing tripe, however, is a transcendental act: to take what is normally thrown away and, with skill and knowledge, turn it into something exquisite.”
Tripe is the lining of a cow’s stomach, and eating it is a developed taste, one that I formed around my grandmother’s table eating her heirloom treatment, in which strips of the honeycomb-like organ are stewed in a slow-cooked tomato sauce that reduces to an unctuous and spicy condiment. Keller’s more elegant, somewhat more elaborate (while still fundamentally simple) preparation, which I’ve executed with absorption on several occasions, involves soaking the tripe for a long time, scraping and cleaning it, cutting it into fairly large pieces (certainly compared to my grandmother’s), then cooking it gently for six hours in a packed pot between layers of sliced onions, carrots, and turnips, doused with a benediction of wine and stock. The resulting dish is tender and delicious, almost delicate in texture and flavor, and I mean to tell Ms. Sontag about it the next time I see her.
