BILLI BI

My new book, THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WAY WE EAT: CRAIG CLAIBORNE AND THE AMERICAN FOOD RENAISSANCE, will be out in early May, and so this seems like a good time to wake up my long-sleeping blog.  I’ll be posting several times a week now.

I’m already at work on what I’m pretty sure will be that book’s successor, Craig Claiborne’s Greatest Hits.  Since Craig published about twenty books and literally thousands of recipes, deciding on a hundred or so greatest hits is something of a challenge.  Ultimately it has to come down to my own choices, my own favorites.  I’m now cooking my way through them—finding errors sometimes in the originals, realizing that I have access to ingredients now that Craig didn’t thirty or forty years ago, and sometimes seeing that classic perfection is just that.

One of the great classics of the once-great Paris restaurant Maxim’s is a mussel soup called Billi Bi, which has the particular distinction of having no mussels in it.  Nevertheless, as Craig wrote in the original New York Times Cook Book, it “may well by the most elegant and delicious soup ever created.  It may be served hot or cold.  This is the recipe of Pierre Franey, one of this nation’s greatest chefs.”  Until 1960 Pierre was the chef of Le Pavillon, the best French restaurant in the United States, and thereafter was Craig’s professional partner for twenty-eight years.

The main idea is to create an intense mussel-flavored broth.  For four people, Pierre steamed two pounds of mussels with shallots, onions, parsley, pepper, a little cayenne, a little butter, half a bay leaf, a smidgen of thyme, and a cup of white wine.  He also added salt, but you need to go easy there, because mussels usually have quite a bit of their own.  I would suggest that you use a pretty good wine, because it is a significant contributor to the flavor.

In 1961, when The New York Times Cook Book was published, mussels were amazingly cheap, but they were also unbelievably onerous to clean—they came with scraggy, shaggy beards attached, and the beards were often clogged with sand and various little sea critters.  “Certain restaurants,” Craig wrote, “place them in the electric machine that is used for removing potato skins, but such equipment is rare, of course, in the private home.”  Rare, Craig? 

He recommended going at the shells with a plastic mesh scrubbing ball and then soaking them in fresh water for at least an hour so that they would expel whatever sand remained inside.  Mussels these days—one of the few examples of virtuous aquaculture—nearly always come beardless and sand-free.

Shallots were nearly impossible to find, even in New York.  Most home cooks, in fact, didn’t know the difference between shallots and scallions, and they probably made do with the latter.

So you steam the mussels and then strain the broth through cheesecloth.  You bring the broth to a boil and combine it with two cups of cream.  Pierre, with his classical training and no fear of cholesterol, then thickened it with a lightly beaten egg yolk—and sometimes went even further, stirring in two tablespoons of hollandaise.  Billi Bi was not a soup for the faint (or sclerotic) of heart.  Craig said you could serve it hot or cold, but I think hot is much better.

(With the strained-out mussels you can make a nice salad the next day with a simple vinaigrette, or, because mussels reheat quite satisfactorily, a delicious pasta—spaghetti or linguine—with olive oil, garlic, parsley, and a little tomato.)

The thing that you’ve got to be sure of when you make your Billi Bi is the intensity of the broth.  Once upon a dreadful time, not long ago, with seven people coming for dinner, I doubled the recipe, and, having had perfect success previously with Pierre’s proportions, I just went ahead and poured in a quart of cream.  Big mistake.  What I got tasted like straight cream with only the faintest hint of mussels.

My solution was to unshell all the already cooked mussels and simmer them for half an hour in a small amount of water, which gave me a very intense broth—just enough to bring the soup up to precisely right.  Partly because I was serving steak with sauce Béarnaise for the next course, I decided to forego the thickening with egg yolks, and I don’t think that hurt the billi bi at all.  It was plenty rich.

Speaking of rich.  The leading legend of the origin of Billi Bi, completely unverifiable, is that it was named by Louis Barthe, the chef at Maxim’s (the Maxim's, in Paris) in the early 1900s, for his spectacularly wealthy regular customer, the American tin-plating magnate William B. (Billy B.) Leeds Sr., who spent a lot of time in Paris in the first decade of the century and died there in 1908.  His son, William B. Leeds Jr., was married to the exiled Princess Xenia of Russia and spent most of his time in Paris in 1922 and 1923.  So the soup’s eponym could have been either of them.

But: Waverly Root, in his Paris Dining Guide of 1969, wrote of Maxim’s Billi Bi that he “ran into blank incomprehension there when [he] tried to delve into the origin of a specialty in which the house takes particular pride.”  Root nevertheless asserted that “actually it was invented at Maxim’s,” and went on to say—without citing any authority whatever—that it was “named for an American bon vivant, William B. Beebe, whose friends called him Billy B.”

But but but: In Chez Maxim’s: Secrets and Recipes from the World’s Most Famous Restaurant, Presented by the Countess of Toulouse-Lautrec, published in 1962, that estimable noblewoman wrote that

It was Louis Barthe, the former chef at Maxim’s, who told me the story behind the Potage Billy By.  In 1925, he was working in the kitchen at Ciro’s, a restaurant in Deauville known for a special mussels dish with a particularly succulent juice.  One day a very good customer, Mr. William Brand, decided to invite some American friends to Ciro’s.  Mussels are generally eaten with the fingers in France, using one double shell as tongs to scoop the meat out of the others.  As Mr. Brand wanted to spare his friends this delicate operation, he requested that the juice be served without the mussels.  It was such a success that during the days that followed each of his guests returned separately and ordered the “Potage Billy Brand.”  For the sake of discretion, it was placed to the menu as Potage Billy B., and thus was born the Potage Billy By which has since become a classic of the French culinary tradition.

So who the hell knows.

CULINARY TIME TRAVEL

Research for my biography of Craig Claiborne, if I’m really going to have a feel for the world he knew, entails quite a bit of cooking—cooking the food that Craig knew and loved.

His tastes were wide-ranging. He was the first to bring authentic regional Italian cooking to this country: He introduced an unknown housewife named Marcella Hazan to the American public. He co-wrote (with Virginia Lee) the first American cookbook of genuine Chinese cuisine. Before Craig, the only Americans who had ever heard of the food of Sichuan were those of Chinese heritage. Vietnamese, Indian, Brazilian, and a dozen more—they were either unfamiliar or entirely unknown before Craig Claiborne wrote about them in the New York Times.

The way he did it, most of the time, would be to write features about experts raised in the particular traditions, like Marcella. They would come to his house and cook, and he would take meticulous notes. For all but his earliest years at the paper, the translation of those notes into recipes manageable in a home kitchen was mainly the work of Pierre Franey, a French chef who had been trained in the pure classic tradition but who could cook absolutely anything, and beautifully. It took Craig years of struggle to persuade the Times to give Pierre a co-byline, and even then it always read, “by Craig Claiborne [then a second line in a smaller font] with Pierre Franey.”

Because Craig was gay, a lot of people just assumed that he and Pierre were a couple, which drove Pierre and his wife and his three kids nuts. But they were a great team nonetheless, and although they enjoyed their adventures in the foods of the world, Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey considered traditional French cuisine to stand above all others.

And so that’s what I’ve been cooking. It is not easy to do. I started learning it—from Julia Volume One and the New York Times Cookbook (by C. Claiborne)—forty years ago, and I am still very far from mastering the art. But I dare say that a great many young tatted, shaved, and hardwared chefs who pride themselves on dazzling the palates of San Franciscans and New Yorkers couldn’t do a much better sole in white wine with mushrooms than...well, okay, maybe they could do it as well as I can, but they’d never try. Too boring. Too tame.

Of course they couldn’t really taste it. Their own palates have long since been bludgeoned into near-insensibility by overdoses of salt, capsaicin, and other toxins otherwise useful when modestly used.

They can throw together fried pig’s ears and peach confit, pasta with cockscombs and barely dead crustaceans, they can build towers of color, layers of ooze and crunch, shocks of habañero in smears of maple syrup, and maybe you’ll still taste whatever the dish is allegedly about—was it duck, was it fish?—but let ’em try sole with white wine and mushrooms and get it just right.

I got it just right the first time. I’m not bragging; I was lucky. Then there was the second time, to be described in due course. A dish like this is so sensitive to even the smallest errors. There is nowhere to hide. You can’t amp it up with fennel pollen and asparagus foam.

Okay, here’s the dish. For two.

I got glistening-fresh filets of petrale sole from the San Francisco Fish Company, in the Ferry Building, where they sell nothing but the sustainable and best. I had always been rather a snob about Pacific flatfish—too flabby, too soft compared to Atlantic flounders, which in turn of course can’t hold a candle to Dover or Mediterranean sole—but petrale is great if you treat it like the delicate princess it is. Never has a foodstuff been worthier of the warning Don’t Fuck It Up.

Across the aisle is the mushroom place. I bought a couple of king trumpets, which really aren’t all that different from regular white mushrooms, just prettier and a little less earthy-tasting.

The most beautiful cooking vessel I own is an oval stainless-steel-lined copper...would you call it a dish?—I don’t think it’s a casserole, it’s too shallow—with handles at each end. Elizabeth gave it to me, and I remember absolutely swooning over it. In it I cooked some fine-chopped shallots in butter and then the mushrooms, sliced fine along the vertical axis. I poured in white wine—an unoaked nowhere-near-D.O.C. French chardonnay that we get cheap but is delicious—in about the amount I was guessing would come about halfway up the fish, and boiled off the alcohol.

I let that cool all the way down and then laid in the fish. I had to add a little more wine to get the level right. Fish stock would have been better. Then you do this cool French thing of cutting a piece of wax paper to fit, buttering it, and laying it over the top. Oh, and I had put some bits of butter on top of the fish as well. Tiny sprinkle of salt, no pepper.

You bring it to just short of a boil on top of the stove and then move it—gently, gently—into a 350-degree oven. After four and a half minutes I poked it with a knife and it was already just about done, but still nice and firm. Whew.

I have a big wide spatula that I almost never need to use, but for this it was perfect: I lifted the filets onto a warm plate and covered them with foil to keep warm, and they did not break, which for me with sole, I believe, was a first. Some of the mushrooms stuck to the fish, while most of them I just poured into a saucepan along with what turned out to be a ton of juice—I mean, maybe two cups? a lot more than I expected—which I proceeded to boil down as fast as I could to two or three tablespoons. To that I added crème fraîche, maybe a quarter of a cup, and it thickened up nicely. Tasted great. I mounted it with a tablespoon of butter just for the French hell of it, and it tasted even better.

Your sole doucement, doucement onto hot plates, sauce it up, sprinkle with a few snips of chive, and praise the Lord.

Then last night I did it again, except with a couple of shrimp chopped up and added at the very end. Well, I didn’t do it again—I tried to do it again, and I Fucked It Up.

I must have cooked the mushrooms too long, first of all, because they were meaty and tough. I put the oven on 400 instead of 350 and kept the fish in for five minutes instead of 4.5, and those two factors together made it soft and fall-aparty, no resistance to the tooth at all—yucko. The wine I used—some Argentinian torrontés-chardonnay blend—must have been too harsh, and I didn’t use enough cream, and I didn’t reduce it enough either, so the sauce was both too acidic and too thin. I could have corrected that, I suppose, but I forgot to even taste it. Also I didn’t add any butter.

I mean, everything was just this close to right, but the combination of those relatively small errors made what had been a truly sublime dish kind of a mess. Not bad, really, but precisely the kind of thing that gave old-fashioned French cooking a bad name back in the day.

Sorry, Craig.

CRAIG CLAIBORNE: DIGGING IN

A week and a bit ago, I spent eight days in New York and one in East Hampton, Long Island, where Craig (we're on first-name terms now) lived for most of his professional life. My mission was to interview some of the people who knew him best and who knew him as it were from different angles. It was an illuminating experience, and already, here only at the beginning of my research, I can see that he presented often dramatically varying versions of himself to different people. And so what is developing is, you might say, a sort of cubist portrait.

Just to mention three of the people I talked with:

Arthur Gelb, now 87, was for many years the managing editor of the New York Times, and if ever there was a Grand Old Man of that Great Gray Lady, he's it. He started from almost nothing, a poor kid from the streets of the Bronx, and rose to what is of course one of the most powerful positions of influence in the world. (He tells his own story with vigor and wit in his memoir, "City Room"--a wonderful book redolent of cigarette smoke, strong whiskey, fedoras, all the classic appurtenances of the good old days of reporterdom; his is a story also of courage and integrity.) Gelb was CC's protector and defender at the Times. He created a wall of safety around Craig that meant, effectively, that the food editor and restaurant critic didn't really have a boss. He was free to write as he chose, travel where he chose, make a culinary star of whatever clever home cook he chose, condemn a restaurant as he saw fit (and a Claiborne condemnation could be a restaurant's death sentence). It was Gelb who saw to it that CC and his columns were treated, at the Times, with a seriousness and respect equal to that accorded the paper's critics of books, art, film, and the theatre.

Gelb is still a strong-willed, strongly opinionated powerhouse. He and his wife, Barbara, wrote a biography of Eugene O'Neill when they were quite young, and now they're writing another one. "Covering the same ground?" I asked, a little mystified. "With the benefit of improved perspective," he said, from a height (both figurative and literal; he's very tall).

Ed Giobbi is as diminutive as Gelb is towering. An artist by trade, a very good one indeed, he is also widely known as a brilliant cook; and has published several cookbooks. He was a friend of Craig's from way back and all the way to the end. Unlike many of the others in CC's orbit, Giobbi never wanted anything from him--they were simply friends. Like the truest of true friends, he saw Craig whole, and did not shrink from criticizing him. He struggled with Craig's tragic weaknesses--especially his drinking, which grew worse and worse as Craig grew older and sicker. He also had many funny stories to tell about Craig's less troubling weaknesses, most of them harmless enough to call mere eccentricities. The more we talked--and we talked for hours--the more eccentric I realized Craig Claiborne truly was. And the more intriguing this project became.

The richest interview of all was with Diane Franey, the daughter of the late Pierre Franey, who shared a byline with Craig Claiborne for many years. Pierre was not really a co-writer--he was French, for one thing, with an imperfect command of English--but he was certainly a co-creator of the many joyous occasions that formed the basis for the best of CC's writing about food and food people. Craig discovered Pierre in 1960, when he was chef at what was then indisputably the best restaurant in the United States, Le Pavillon. When the tyrannical owner of the restaurant demanded concessions from the kitchen staff, Pierre led the whole staff out on strike, Craig got wind of this unprecedented scandal, and the story got major play in the New York Times. Suddenly a new category of star had been born: the star chef, an idea that had never before existed in America. And Craig and Pierre became friends for life, and, before long, collaborators--Pierre at the stove, Craig at the typewriter.

What I had not known till meeting Diane was how Pierre's wife and children became Craig's family. For years Pierre worked with Craig without compensation--he literally refused to take money--and so Craig, in gratitude, would shower the whole Franey family with gifts. They often went on vacation together, all on Craig's dime. They were so comfortable together that even though Pierre and his wife Betty knew that Craig was gay, they had no problem with little Diane being Craig's roommate aboard ship or in a hotel (the children were too young to know what it even meant). (It was a source of some irritation through the years that people who knew that Craig was gay but didn't really know him or Pierre just assumed that they were a couple.)

Diane's mother died just a year or so ago, and she now lives in the house she grew up in, a short distance from Craig's East Hampton house. She was just a kid through some of the most important years of Craig's and Pierre's collaboration, but she has a most remarkable memory. She went to nearly every dinner party, knew the regulars, knew the food, knew her father and Craig inside and out. She also has an extraordinary collection of memorabilia, which I didn't have nearly enough time to go through with her. I'll be going back and setting aside much more time for that. One of the real treats of that trip to East Hampton was going with Diane to Craig's first beach house, where many of her fondest memories are set. It has been remodeled, but the dazzling view across Gardiner's Bay remains the same, and she could re-create in her mind where every piece of furniture, every pot and pan used to be. It was the first time she had been there in over forty years, and she was clearly moved.

I had a number of other conversations and will have many more. It is fascinating to see a person taking shape this way. When I have finished writing this book, I believe I will be the one person in the world who knows Craig Claiborne best, because I'll have seen him through so many eyes. And what a gratifying opportunity, and honor, it will be to share that portrait.