eetSmakelijk

The best meal I have ever been served was at Bo Innovation in downtown Hong Kong last week. Pictures will be up soon. Check it out:

http://www.boinnovation.com/html/index.php

One of the things that anyone who
has ever taken a hand to sauce-
makíng wants to watch ‘1s someone who
really knows how to make a sauce bear-
naise, the classic French sauce of butter
and white wine and tarragon and eggs. It
is the perfect embodiment of all that
French cooking can be-not the bang-
ing together of opposites, as in Asian
sweet-and-sour cooking, but the unificatíon

of seeming enemies: at once tart
(white wine and Vinegar), sweet ‘1n spirit
(the licorice-like tarragon), and unctuous

(it is an emulsificatíon). (It also has
literary vibrations. It is what the tough
but tender Tiffany Case prepares for
James Bond, in the kitchens of the
Queen Elizabeth liner, in “Diamonds
Are Forever.”)

So when André Soltner, the great chef who for thirty-four years presided
over Lutèce, the redoubt of haute cuisine
in New York, recently decided to come
out of retìrement, at the age of eighty, to
prepare a banquet ‘1n the lost grand man-
ner, it seemed a good time to go to see ‘1t

done right. The dinner will be held on

April 16th, as part ofa fund-raiser for the
University Settlement, but before Solt-
ner returned to lepz’ano, as French cooks
call their stoves, he had decided to Warm
up with some amateurs, rather as Wayne
Gretzky, back for an old-timers7 game,
might decide to take a skate outdoors
and shoot a few at a teen-age goalie.

Soltner, despite his fìfty-plus-year
residency in New York (or, perhaps, be-
cause of it), is an almost too perfect Gal-
lie type. He has two expressions, one
ñxed, hyperalert, and a little cautious,
and the other relaxed and serenely beam-
ing. Teaching a ham-handed student to
make a sauce, he freely chides, corrects,
tut-tuts, and, once in a While, steps back
and shakes his head at the mystery ofìn-
eptítude. But he is also gentle, and con-
ducts an intelligent, murmured mono-
logue as he chops and Whísks and kneads,
reflecting on the enormous changes that
cooking in New York has undergone
since he first set up shop.

“The molecular cuisine has some
good things about it,” he said, “but l-I
count my cooking by the looks of satisfaction

on the faces of the people who
have eaten my food. I don’t Want them to
be impressed; I want them to be pleased.”
Asked about the current manía for the
local and the seasonal, Soltner said,

“Chefs don’t really go to the market, you
know. lt’s a bit of a myth. You can’t re-
ally be at your station all day and all night
and then get up early enough to get to
the market in time to get anything good.”

He started the sauce. “You can never
really use fewer than three eggs for this,”
he said. “If you use two, it Won’t catch.
But  we need to chop the shallots.”
Soltner looked at the way the Would-be
apprentices hand was wrapped around
the little pink bulbs. “You7ll cut your
fingers off that Way,” he said dryly. Then
he showed the right way: your knuckles
folded in over the bulb, and loosely la-
bile, ready to roll, the knife then taking
little swípes at the shallots, as your
knuckles recede like a collapsing Con-
federate line, Soltneŕs hands seem to
Work independent of his consciousness:
even as he is gaily demonstrating how to
chop, his hands are thriftily sweeping up
Whatever scraps of fish or dough might
be left on l(he counter.

Asked how much Wine and how
much vinegar ought to go into the sauce-
pan, the chef said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter
how much. Not a bit. Because you’re
going to reduce it down to a dry state
anyway. Just reduce it away, and the
Havor will reside in the shallots. It was
such an elegant, rather Zen way of look-
ing at the issue-whatever you put in you
would take out, leaving only the residue
of taste.

He reduced the shallots and vine-
gar and Wine in a flash, over very high
heat. Then he constructed a makeshift
baìn-marie- a little double boiler-and
broke the eggs quickly, slipping the
whites away from the yolks over a bowl.
With the water bubbling below the
saucepan, he began to whisk the yolks
and the wìne-and-vinegar-flavored
shallots together. After a couple of rnin-
utes, the eggs solidified, having cooked
magically without scrambling. Then he
began to beat in small slabs of cold but-
ter, rather than the Clarified butter that
some recipes demand. Using small, de-
cisive Hicks of his Whisk, he emulsi-
 the butter, added with an absent-
minded hand the chopped tarragon,
and … there it was. As with most skills,
the process turned out to be a mixture of
tactical impatience laid over decades of
strategic patience: it had taken Soltner
years to master the moves that let you
separate an egg without thought, mince

a shallot without looking. He could do
it twice as fast because he had done it a
thousand times slowly. The sauce béat-
naise was not only perfect; miraculously,
‘1t lasted into the night, which, normally,
it never does. The old sauce turns out to
be the best sauce, the Old dance ofmas-
tery the best dance-at least, when a
master leads.

- Adam Gopnik, published in “The New Yorker”