The Residents Website continues to present book reviews by one of our own, Hope Cooke.
Recent acquisitions of the KoH library include DIRT: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking by Bill Buford, Alfred A. Knopf 2020
Readers looking for atmosphere, a whiff of romance or the picturesque, even of landscape pure and simple, will not find it here. You would not know that Lyon, set on two rivers, the Saone and the Rhone, is a world heritage site famed for its architecture—particularly its ‘traboules’, covered passageways some dating to the fourth century when they served as shortcuts to the Roman built aqueduct and eminently from the 15th century when they served the same purpose for the town’s silk workers (Lyon, the first French city to weave the luxury fabric after it arrived from Italy - it is close to the Alpine border - via the Arabs and Chinese). So powerful had the Lyonnais silk workers become by the 18th century that it was they who forced Marie Antoinette to revert to the material after she and her female court affected simple muslin (the ‘dairy maid period’) hastening her reputation as a spendthrift, contributing not just to her and Louis XVI’s downfall but also to their beheading in 1793. There is only a short bow near the end of DIRT to Lyon in WWII that neglects to mention the role these same traboules (over 500, many alas now closed to tourists) played in the war’s most dramatic street fighting; local knowledge of the winding alleys critical to the Resistance’s success over the German occupiers; or Lyon’s location as a vital node of control. There is also no glossy paean rhapsodizing about Lyon as the long-term gastronomic capital of the western world. (Though there is awed homage to its expat chefs, Daniel Boulud and Michel Richard, whom Buford gets to know.)
What you will get in DIRT is a portrait so passionate it feels drawn in blood, of Buford’s apprenticeship in learning the art of French cookery, a dedication so entire it transforms this brilliant polymath, demanding man (reader beware, he treats his wife, a well-known wine critic and their endlessly adaptable twin children pretty much like baggage in their five year sojourn here) into a servant of culinary science, a shriven monk in the master’s kitchen he serves. BUT, the subjugation in the holy cause, like the books title, “Dirt”, Buford’s muscular American word for ‘terroir’, is actually the essence, the root of transmission of an authentic and glorious flowering-- the classic local cuisine. By book’s end Buford’s radiant devotion results in savory –oddly homey sounding delights, among them duck braised in a veil of brown butter and local cider sauce. Yet again (he has done this before both in learning Italian cooking from scratch and becoming an insider American scholar at an exclusive Oxford College) Buford has mastered another field through brutal immersion, gone from consummate neophyte to consummate master.
Witnessing this process is rather like watching a very slow daube simmer for hours on the back of the stove. The long book, while punchily written (Buford was editor of the exalted literary magazine Granta and fiction editor at the New Yorker), is somewhat tedious albeit fragrant before it ‘comes together’ at the end. My advice: skim the middle from time to time.
THREE STARS