Daniel Boulud doesn’t know it, of course he cannot know it, but when he presented his dish, during the third lesson at Identità New York at Eataly’s Scuola, with Massimo Bottura about to follow him, I skipped a heartbeat: “The theme assigned to us was the egg, and so I went back to some good old fashion cooking, a French classic, to make this a precious moment”. Few could imagine what this could have been, since on the counter there were chicken, cooked ham, various eggs, foie gras, white and black truffle (“It comes from Italy. When the truffle is black, it could be French too, but the white one is only Italian”), many vegetables, already cleaned and cut, a warm stock and gelatine sheets...
Daniel was extremely nice, brilliant and assertive: “This is the Oeuf en gelée, with foie gras and black truffle. It seems foie gras was introduced in France by Caterina de’ Medici in the 16th century, so thank you Italy. Anyway, a dish with egg and chicken. We don’t care now who was born first, whether the egg or the hen, what we’re interested in is that they end up in the same dish and are fine together”.
Egg in gelatine by Daniel Boulud at Identità New York 2013
At this point, some memories linked to a song written in 1972 by
Paul Simon,
Mother and child reunion, the first successful reggae composed and sung by a white man outside of Jamaica, come to my mind. A lively music, that slowly moves feet and legs, though it is extremely sad: “No I would not give you false hope / On this strange and mournful day / But the mother and child reunion /Is only a motion away”. Away in the sense that it is impossible because
Simon sings the suffering of being apart and the title is perfect. It was inspired by a dish in a local Chinese restaurant in New York that still exists, namely
456 Restaurant, in Chinatown. It was made with chicken and egg, the former seen as the mother, the latter as the son who find themselves together only when they are dead, so they never know they are.
Let’s go back to the lesson. Thanks to the presence of
Mario Batali,
Boulud and
Bottura’s duet was full of smiles and bickering whenever it was possible. It was the perfect comedy that began when
Boulod cut the vegetables: “I’m preparing a brunoise, you see? Two or three millimetres per side, Italians don’t do it because it takes too long”. Bottura is ready: “We prefer to dedicate that time to making love”.
Boulud continues: “This is why the Italian chef arrives three hours late to the kitchen”.
Massimo Bottura and Alba’s White Truffle at Identità New York 2013
Meanwhile, the egg is formed in some moulds that remind one of the hard boiled eggs coloured at Easter. Applauses and smiles follow and are later amplified by
Bottura with a journey around a potato cooked under salt, a tuber that wanted to become a truffle. The chef from Modena paired it with a sort of neutral zabaglione, made precious by white truffle. The American audience went wild.
It will then be the turn of some special spaghetti, the stripes recalling the shape of trenette, obtained with a potato fixed with a punch, moved with a crank handle. They were boiled and then seasoned with a stock made with prosciutto and pancetta, and salt for the Carbonara and Cacio & Pepe pasta. An idea that is a thousand times better eaten than said.
The bottom line of
Massimo’s lesson: “Not all potatoes in the world can grow so much they become a truffle, and not even a
Batali or a
Boulud. Dreaming is good and beautiful but sooner or later you need to understand if you’ll be a potato or a truffle, since it could be better for you to be a valuable potato and nothing more than that”.
