Heat (21 page)

I got a sense of what those evenings might have been like when, seven years later, I joined Mario at the same round table along with a few friends. The occasion was a visit to town by the novelist Jim Harrison, a self-described “food lunatic.” Between Batali and Harrison, there was considerable admiration, and the exchanges between them constituted the table’s entertainment. For Mario, Harrison was the Homer, the Michelangelo, the Lamborghini, the Willie Mays, the Secretariat, the Jimi Hendrix of food intellectuals: “an expert, a hunter, an eater, a stalker, a rabid mongrel and a drinker, not afraid to get excited about the kind of nuts a particular partridge must have eaten this morning to taste so damned good for lunch.” Harrison, more modestly, described Batali as spiritual kin of some kind. “Probably from another life,” he said, in his gruff, barely audible, I’ve-lived-through-so-much-I’m-surprised-I’m-alive voice. Mario clarified: “From the other life of pigs.” They’re both big men. Together, they occupied a lot of the round table—a semicircle, in fact, so much larger than normal people that they could have been walk-on parts in a medieval play about the deadly sins (all seven).

The first magnum of white wine arrived, and Mario reminded Harrison that they’d drunk twenty-eight bottles when they’d last met.

“There were other people,” Harrison protested unconvincingly.

“They weren’t drinking,” Mario corrected.

He ordered starters off the top of his head, eighteen of them, including two dozen oysters, which Harrison couldn’t touch, having just returned from Normandy, where he’d tested a view of the nineteenth-century food writer Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin that grand meals had once begun by guests’ eating a gross of oysters each (a gross is a hundred and forty-four oysters). Brillat-Savarin had confirmed the plausibility of the practice by weighing an oyster’s meat, plus juices, which came out to less than ten grams. A gross, therefore, would be about a kilo and a half, or around three pounds. Three pounds of raw mollusks minus the shells seems like a lot, but Harrison was persuaded, and one evening he started dinner with a hundred and forty-four oysters.

He sighed. He could not recommend the practice.

A second magnum arrived, along with the first dishes. Fried oysters (to contrast with the raw ones); some salty sweetbreads, a Proustian trigger for Harrison involving a first girlfriend, aged fourteen; fried scampi; giant prawns grilled in their shells; barbecued spare ribs; and a sawed-up beef bone, roasted until the marrow was crispy and served with an oxtail marmalade.

A third magnum arrived. Harrison checked Mario’s pulse (“Aah, you’re still living”) and made a toast. “Here’s to us, Mario.”

“And fuck the rest of the world,” Mario answered.

Around midnight and our fifth magnum, the restaurant got busy, and because there was no other place to go, most of the crowd gathered round the bar, which was adjacent to our table. Soon strangers—but jolly friendly strangers—joined us (our sixth magnum), warmly, drunkenly welcomed, finding chairs to squeeze in with, including a Russian prostitute with very blond hair and an impenetrable accent. More magnums followed. Eventually, Mario led Harrison to a party celebrating the filming of something, the Russian prostitute inviting much of bleached Central Europe along with her, the evening coming to an early-morning close with a spot of improvised karaoke at the Half King bar, which had been recently opened by the writer Sebastian Junger. (I have the end of the evening on report. I had an office job then, still got up in the mornings, and went home early at one-thirty.)

When Jonathan Lynne read the
Observer
article, he thought: Wow!
This
is what the Food Network needs. “It was like bands hanging out late on a Saturday night in Seattle. Or artists in a bar downtown. A closely knit relationship of creative beings: that’s what I wanted the Food Network to foster, that’s what I wanted to see on television.” Lynne views chefs as “artists, like painters,” and talks energetically about their “original vision,” their “personal aesthetic.” He is by no means the first non-chef to see chefs in this way, and ever since Apicius’s
De re coquinaria
was translated as
L’arte culinaria,
both Italians and French have described what great chefs do with a metaphysical sense of hyperbole: no mean bunch of skills but a Da Vinci–like achievement.

Lynne phoned Batali, asked him if he wanted to be a TV star, and was invited to lunch: tortelloni with sage and butter, served with wilted endives, Lynne remembers precisely. (Batali remembers only the breathless enthusiasm of a stranger, interrupting his morning prep.) Six months later, on January 8, 1996, the Food Network launched
Molto Mario,
and three weeks after that the line of people waiting to get a table at Pó stretched to Bleecker Street, half a block away.

T
HE EARLY SHOWS,
done on the cheap (face front to a camera, cooking on an electric oven because there was no gas), were crude but dominated by a remarkably familiar core repertoire, as though everything Mario subsequently did had been in place from the start: Swiss chard ravioli (grandmother’s recipe again); cioppino, the cheap-o soup made with nothin’-o; orecchiette—Mario pretending to roll them out, when most had been made by a clueless prep kitchen, the orecchiette so large and deformed that they ballooned like bath toys when dropped into boiling water (“Oh, dear,” Mario whispered, “this ear looks like it might have been Doctor Spock’s”). But amid the predictable awkwardnesses, what is mainly conveyed is a passionate sense of mission. Mario, having just returned from Italy, has learned something few people knew: that traditional Italian cooking is different from what you think—simpler than you supposed—but its simplicity still has to be learned, and he is going to show you how.

I sat in on several “flights”—episode tapings—of a later version of the show. It was now presented in front of three friends on stools, being cooked for—a privilege, obviously, although a problematic one owing to a number of factors, including the hour. Guests were picked up before seven a.m. and had their first plate of food an hour later, while they were longing for another cup of coffee. One morning, it was gnocchi with braised cuttlefish. (“After making a little slit with our knife, the bone slides out like a guitar pick, and then you pull out the guts—oh, look,” Mario says, his fingers enveloped in inky intestines, “this is exactly what the little guy had for lunch yesterday.”) Two more meals follow, one after another, with a fourth just after lunch (who needs lunch?). When the shows air, you can tell where the guests are on the schedule, according to the expressions on their faces—zeal or a satiated glaze. “C’mon, guys,
buon appetito,
” Mario says, urging them at least to pretend to eat, strands of pasta coagulating on their plates, the gluten cooling to a waxy sheen, this being the twelfth helping one guest has had that morning.

The expectation is that the guests will put a question to their host when his fast-forward speech allows: this is the short, quick song they’re expected to sing for their breakfast-supper. It isn’t easy—each show is only twenty-five minutes long, organized around the three acts of an Italian meal, antipasto, pasta, and secondo—and both the explanatory patter and the cooking are done at sprint speed. It’s really a theatrical kitchen monologue, delivered with such dispatch and such an unpredictable miscellany of references that few guests are confident enough to interrupt, not least because they’re not always following what’s being said in the first place. And besides, what are you going to ask that’s
so
interesting?

For instance, in passing, Mario mentions that sardines, owing to their thin skin, should be covered with bread crumbs if cooked over a high heat (and you think, Hey, he’s right, the skin is pretty thin); when, with no logic you’ve noticed, he tells you that celery is the unsung hero of Roman cooking (and you take that in, trying to recall the last time a stalk performed a heroic role); and then he hands everyone a ball of potato-and-flour dough and tells them to roll it out like a broomstick to make gnocchi, adding that, in preparing this at home, you’ll want to use a starchy, not a waxy, potato (“Like an Idaho?” a guy on the last stool manages to get in). “Like an Idaho,” Mario replies instantaneously, and continues, “And you’ll want to mix it with just so much flour” (“How much flour?” the same guy asks, clearly on a roll), “Well, as much as it takes,” Mario replies, citing his grandmother (being, in this, wholly genuine but wholly unhelpful), and sweeps up the lumpy examples of everyone’s efforts, drops them into a pot of water that was boiling without your knowing it was there, and tells you that the lumpies will be fully cooked
not
when they float to the top, as most people incorrectly believe (have you held such a belief?), but only when “they’re aggressively trying to get out of the pot” (whereupon everyone lifts up slightly from their stools, hoping to get a glimpse of what gnocchi look like when they’re behaving like lobsters thrashing for their survival), when inexplicably Mario’s voice goes all baritone and, like the master-of-ceremonies at a boxing match (“Ladies and Gentlemen!”), he introduces a piece of parmigiano as “the undisputed king of cheeses!” (And you think of that, too—can he possibly be right, that parmigiano deserves such a regal distinction?) In fact, it wouldn’t hurt to ask him about the parmigiano because fourteen minutes have passed and you haven’t said a word. When? What? Mario is plating the gnocchi, when he interrupts himself to assume yet another persona. (Go on, your brain is saying, this is your chance!) “In Italian cooking,” he intones, inexplicably behaving like Socrates, “your dish should look as though it has fallen from the wings of a poet” (Whoa! Do you ask him about
that
—what food looks like when it’s dropped from such a height?) “and not as though it had been made by nine French guys who were all beaten when they were children.”

Finally, there’s a break (Whew!), and you can relax, except that Mario, pent up by the effort to present a wholesome version of himself, lets loose with everything he’s kept contained, an anarchic spilling out of naughtiness, involving whatever food item is to hand: like an artichoke (“Because it gives me so much wood”) or cobra meat (“because it gives me
even more
wood than an artichoke,
big
wood, strong-like-a-tree wood,” whereupon he embraces two female prep cooks bearishly and invites them to imagine they’re in a post-cobra-eating circle, “
deeply
satisfied”). There’s dancing, butt slapping, kissing, and extra meaning found in ponytails (“At least I know what to do with mine, baby”) or Mario’s shirt (which an assistant makes the mistake of observing is too stiff) or tomatoes, which a set manager refreshes with a water gun (“You, my lovely,” Mario says, in his deep bedroom voice, “can spray my tomatoes anytime”). “Why am I not offended?” the set manager asks. “Why is that not a lawsuit?” retorts a guest. “Why can’t we show
this
on television?” asks another—when the show’s jaunty sing-songy theme song starts and, as though splashed with cold water, Mario assumes his television persona, never deviating from it until the next break, by which time you still haven’t said a word.

“I keep telling him to slow down,” the director, Jerry Liddell, told me. “He’s got plenty of time.”

I was watching another flight of shows in Liddell’s control room. He could have been producing a sporting event—no retakes, the camera choices made on the spot.

“Cooking is about transformation,” Liddell said. “You take a number of ingredients, and they become something else. That’s Mario’s show. That’s the narrative. For most of us, how a bunch of ingredients will behave together is completely unpredictable. Even here, in the control room, watching the show on the monitors, menus in hand, even
we
don’t know what’s going to happen next. That’s the appeal of a live program like this—Mario’s knowing the result and our trying to follow him.” Even so, the effect of so many transformations, rendered at such speed, can be dizzying. “There is no question you learn something, but it’s coming at you so fast it’s almost too much: it’s right on the verge.”

B
UT WHAT
do you learn? To find out, I recorded nine months of shows and watched the videos, one after another (a visual diet analogous to eating a gross of oysters, and, like Jim Harrison, I wouldn’t recommend it). There were recurrent lessons. “At home, you rarely get the depth of flavor that you find in a restaurant,” Mario said on his first show, browning mushrooms in a ferociously hot pan, “because home cooks are not prepared to take the risks of professional chefs, who push their pans right to the edge. They want it
browner
than you’ll ever do at home,
darker, hotter.
” He has been repeating the lesson ever since. It’s why he lets his olive oil heat to the smoking point, which provokes the most frequently asked question—” Are you supposed to do that? Aren’t you burning it?”—and one that, in ten years, he has never answered (the result is often a pan’s bursting into flames, flamboyantly, just before a break). There is the pasta-water-in-your-sauce lesson, along with the your-sauce-is-only-a-condiment (heard on the first show and many times thereafter). There are pithy platitudes (“Squid—thirty seconds or thirty minutes: in between they’re rubber bands”). There is an unsung cut of meat, the shoulder, invariably lamb, which, for all its historical neglect, has lyrical qualities that Mario has been singing for many years.

Then, midway through my stack, I remembered the first time I watched Mario on television, November 1st, 1996, when I made a preparation he’d demonstrated on the show, an
arancina,
a deep-fried risotto-rice ball stuffed with tomato sauce and smoke-dried fish. I went to the Food Network’s Web site and printed out the recipe, because I happened to have a smoke-dried sablefish in my refrigerator (and had no idea why or what in the world I was going to do with it). I made two hefty arancine for a Sunday lunch, deep-frying them in two liters of my local deli’s olive oil. Later, on a visit to Porretta Terme, I spotted crispy little arancine in the shop windows there and understood what the word meant. An
arancia
is an orange;
arancina,
a little orange, a fair description of Porretta’s tangerine-sized rice balls. Mine had been neither tangerines nor oranges. Mine could have been carved out and put on the porch with a candle inside at the end of October.