A chef prefers customers that keep him on his toes. You ignore the customer who orders steak well-done or the person who asks for chicken. People who don’t know what they’re eating order chicken at Italian restaurants. Those who eat well-done steak don’t appreciate the taste of meat. Gourmets want something that’s not on the menu. They eat only plump Cornish hens or castrated roosters or the choice parts of a whole roasted duck. They want swan, as if it’s the eighteenth century. They understand that taste is triggered by the sense of touch, through the lips, and they want to have a mouth longer than the beak of a crane, to enjoy the ecstasy of food sliding down to their intestines. Cesare Ripa’s Crapula satirizes the fat stomachs and crane necks of extreme pleasure seekers. Food lovers ignore even death threats when it comes to something they want to eat. The possibility of death is why gourmets love blowfish. If you put a thin piece of blowfish—sliced so thin that the cook’s fingerprint is visible—in your mouth, your lips redden and heat up and tremble from the fear and excitement of death. Your spirits rise and saliva pools in your mouth. Finally a childlike smile spreads across your face.
The obsession over food is tenacious. The eighteenth-century writer Nicholas-Thomas Barthe, who wrote Les Fausses Infidélités, had the habit of eating everything on the table. Barthe did not have good eyesight and was fearful that he wouldn’t be able to see all the food and might miss some of it. He would hound his servants, asking, Have I eaten this? Have I eaten that? He died from indigestion. King Darius, who liked beef, put up curtains to hide from the others as he ate an entire cow. Balzac, a coffee addict, drank forty to fifty cups a day and died of gastritis. The philosopher Democritus, upon realizing that his life was coming to an end, deprived himself each day of one food until there was only a jar of honey left. He stuck his nose in the jar and smelled the honey, and as soon as the jar was taken away, he died, at the age of 109.
President Mitterand had the most extreme obsession with ortolan, a bird on the verge of extinction and illegal to eat. In 1995, knowing he didn’t have much time left before he died of cancer, Mitterand invited friends to a New Year’s Eve dinner. The main course was ortolan. This bird, which signifies purity and the love of Jesus, was considered the best dish in the world, and after it’s roasted in the oven you put the entire thing in your mouth, on your tongue, when it’s still very hot. You enjoy the feeling of the fat spilling down your throat, and as it cools, you start crunching on the bird’s head and the crunch rings in your ears rhythmically. That night, Mitterand broke the tradition of eating only one bird per person and ate two. The next day he couldn’t keep anything down and soon passed away—ortolan became his last supper.
The worst kind of gourmet is the one who tries to fulfill his perverse sexual desires with food. Such people do not truly love food. True gourmets understand that the mingling of curiosity and fear produces a heightened joy. They try to taste the new and revere beauty and deliciousness. Great chefs exist behind such gourmets.
“So what did you tell him?”
“That I’d just stay at Nove.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want anything more.”
“That’s an odd way to say it. Just say you like Nove.”
“Yeah, I want to stay there.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think that was the right thing to do?” I ask.
“I do.”
“You know, to Chef.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t say anything.”
“I think that would be best.”
“The rainy season has been going on for so long.”
“It’ll be over soon.”
“After the peak season, how about we go somewhere for a few days?”
“…Sure.”
“Where should we go?” Mun-ju goes into the bathroom, yawning. From my dresser, I take out a cotton T-shirt and pajama pants for Mun-ju and place them on the table. I pick up the heavy bag she’d flung onto the floor. The July edition of Wine & Food is sticking out. She said it was about Italy. I flip through the pages. The days when I worked from morning to night for eleven months at Nove and then took the last month off to wander through Italy eating and learning feels like a dream. My hand pauses from flipping the pages. I turn a few back.
A familiar face.
People I know.
I hear water running in the bathroom.
On the “Special Interview” page, a man and a woman sit on a long U-shaped butcher block, wearing matching white shirts and jeans and bright smiles. Their arms are around each other’s shoulders and their feet may be swinging.
I know them. I can’t really read the title.
I think it says Lee Se-yeon’s new cooking class and maybe also a modern kitchen built by the young architect Han Seok-ju. The magazine is snatched out of my hands.
Mun-ju, what is this? I ask silently. Mun-ju’s eyes waver uncertainly like someone caught trying to hide something, welling with tears. No, no. I shake my head. Don’t cry, just tell me. Tell me the truth. I don’t want to be the last to know. Tell me, Mun-ju.
Silence doesn’t flow, it spreads. Like the rings in a pond when you throw a rock, it gets bigger and bigger and finally ripples throughout all of space. And it skims the body like a spasm.
CHAPTER 28
IT’S NOT EMBARRASSING to be injured in the kitchen, but cutting your finger is not a good way to start your morning. I slit the first section of my pinky as I cut up a chicken. I don’t even remember sharpening the knife. I brush over the blade. It’s dull. In a chaotic kitchen where many people have to work together, bumping into each other, you have to keep your knife a little dull, unlike in your home kitchen. If the knife is too sharp you can seriously injure yourself if you don’t pay attention for a split second. You don’t really need a sharp knife unless you have to handle poultry or do delicate work with vegetables. I’m embarrassed, not that I cut my hand in the kitchen in front of everyone, but that I was hurt by such a dull blade.
You work with fire and knives in the kitchen, where small and large dangers lurk. The ideal place to hide a destructive instinct. I’m engulfed by this unstable urge as I watch red blood dripping onto the cutting board, feeling joy as if a frustration has disappeared. Or relief that this has stopped a bigger calamity. If there’s no possibility of danger, I might not feel tense when I hold a knife.
Instead of bandaging my finger, I put it in my mouth. A metallic tang spreads in my mouth as if I licked steel. Maybe I should keep my knife sharper so I would use it more carefully and thoughtfully. I start grinding it on the sharpening stone in the corner of the table. When I’m very busy and I don’t have time to hone the knife, I just rub it against a sharpening steel a few times. But it’s always best to use a sharpening stone. Although it’s quicker to use the sharpening steel, the blade goes bad quickly.
My workstation has stainless-steel containers holding salt and whole pepper and pasta sauce and olive oil and various herbs and chopped parsley and red and white wines and diced tomato and butter and brandy, along with long chopsticks and ladles and tongs and large spoons and pans and pots. Typical items for a workstation. But the knife is indispensable. If you have to get one thing as a cook, it must be a good chef’s knife. A good knife is more important than your passion for cooking. If you have a good knife in your hand, you have an automatic desire to cook. Every cook has at least one knife that is his own. For a Western cook, a knife is his third arm, as is a ladle for a Chinese chef. In truth, knife skills get the cook noticed.