Adam Gopnik - The Table Comes First

So I decided instead to just plop them on the lamb and see what happens. It turns out that they make a wonderful goo, and you pour off the fat, and pour in some white wine—I used flat champagne, since there was some left over—and cook it down, and it was great, the bacon crumbled over the lamb and the sauce pungent with the anchovies. Served with a simple buttery purée and buttered green beans with ginger, which should have been better. (I have only one killer vegetable side in my repertoire, a Brussels sprouts thing—and you know what, it has bacon in it. Oh, well.)

So here, in Pennell form, is my recipe for leg of lamb with bacon and anchovies, the Salt-Lover’s Delight: You take a good grass-fed leg of lamb, about four or five pounds, and liberally salt it. Then you put it in a roasting pan that won’t burn too much, and put garlic cloves and olive oil in the pan. Then you roast it for half an hour to forty minutes in a very hot oven—around 400°; though if you go up to 425° it will brown nicely, even if the garlic may scorch. Then, pull out the pan and lay four or five rashers of very thick-cut bacon right across the top of the gigot, and a nice handful of prepared white anchovies on top of the bacon. You can do it the other way round, and it’s just as good, maybe better: anchovies first, bacon on top. I haven’t tried this with the canned or jarred anchovies, and am sure that they won’t be as good as the white ones, since they never are—but since the anchovies melt anyway, I bet it won’t matter, much.

Then roast the lamb again at 400° or slightly less, depending on your oven, for another fifteen to twenty minutes, until the bacon is nicely browned and the anchovies have started to fall off and dissolve. Then take the leg out and make sure it’s done as you like it—lamb is difficult, because it tends to stay bloody and mildly unappealing even to lovers of rare meat in the middle while the outer parts are well done; there’s nothing to be done about this: it’s lamb and you live with it. ( Cook’s Illustrated has a fussy, promising thing where you turn the lamb over and about with paper towels in the middle and trim and cut it in half, and if you can do all this and want to, more power to you. I just slice some well-done bits, some pinker bits, and give the semiraw stuff in the middle to the dog.)

Meanwhile, put the lamb on a plate and pour off all the fat from the pan; there’ll be burned bits of garlic and lamb there, but that’s okay. Pour in, oh, a cup of white wine or flat champagne, whatever you have—wine in the sauce all comes out more or less the same—and scrape and cook down; it should be a jus , not a thickened sauce. So cook it down to make the flavor intense, but not to thicken it too much. Then slice the lamb, crumble some of the bacon on it—put a whole rasher on, if you like—along with some of the burned anchovies, and pour lots of the pungent wine and drippings on it. Lots. Serve with a purée of potatoes without too much complexity, just potatoes, cream, and butter and salt (but for once not too much, since the meat will satisfy the salt-hunger). And green beans with sweetly caramelized shallots, better than gingered ones, I think. See if it isn’t the best gigot you’ve ever had, with the gamy lamb and the salt-bitter anchovies and sweetish pork and smoke of the bacon and the good winy-salty juice on it. Good food. No more than that. Can we ask for more? Did you? When a secret ingredient is laid out flat on the dish and then transported to the top of the finished food, is it still a secret?

All best,

A.G.

AFTER WE ARRIVE, at the restaurant or at home, we have to choose what we want to eat. At the restaurant, it’s simple: we scan the menu and decide. But at home we choose first, shopping and deciding. And at that dangerous place, the friend’s house, we have to pray that they have chosen, and chosen well. (And we pray, too, that they will have finished cooking before we arrive, so that the horrible hour in the kitchen, as they fuss and mix, is one that we are spared. Even with a glass of wine in hand, it is hard to watch another cook—and when they have the food still in plastic wrap… it’s too much.)

Fish or chicken? Red meat or none? Vegetables boiled or braised? And what to drink, and how much should we care? If arriving is a story of hope, offered and deferred, choosing is always comparative. Behind every choice we make is another choice rejected. What shall it be? And when shall we get it?

DE GUSTIBUS non disputandum est: There’s no disputing taste. This is surely one of the most familiar Latin tags or mottos left to us, one of only maybe two that we still know and grasp. We hear it and we think we recognize its truth; it enjoins a shrug of acceptance in place of a futile argument: you like it your way and I like it mine…. You may say potato and I may say potahto, but if you like tomatoes and I like potatoes? Nothing to do but walk away.

But of course, the next thing that strikes us is that taste is all we do dispute. We dispute our taste in music. Who do you like better, Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell? You do? You can’t! Why? Every bookstore assumed—or assumes—disputes about taste. Those music lovers do nothing except dispute: Which do you prefer, the Beatles or the Stones? Blur or Oasis? Dixieland or bebop? To tell a fifteen-year-old boy or girl that it’s all just a question of taste is infuriating , not helpful. Of course it’s a question of taste—the question is, whose taste is right?

This distance between the pat certainty of the slogan and its obvious untruth reminds me of something my grandfather once said. He arrived in what he always called “this country” from the Old Country when he was twelve, and his English was accentless but still spoken at the slight puzzled remove of the second-language speaker. As a very old man he once confided to me that there was a single phrase in English that he could not understand: “What do they mean when they say that you can’t have your cake and eat it, too?” he asked me, bewildered. What else were you supposed to do with your cake? Having it and eating it were parts of one description, a single act. There is nothing else to do with your cake. Like the claim about cake, the claim about taste seems like a falsehood parading as a fatuity.

When it comes to food, taste disputes can be intense, even wild. Meat-eaters against vegans, the locavore against the supermarket patron, or even just those who like the pallid look and squishy finish of meat boiled in vacuum bags against those who live in cast-iron pans. But when it comes to the kind of taste that people who care about taste care most about, the disputes are both more immediate and more peculiar. For we mean by “taste” both small taste—the flavor of what we put in our mouths—and big taste, the way we decorate our walls and clothing and lives. There is mouth taste, how it feels when you eat it—is it salty or sweet or bitter or buttery or somewhere in between, with all the fine gradations of lime and lemon and vinegar that mark out the general category of “sour.” But then there is what we might call “moral taste”—the place of the food we eat within an epoch’s style or our own self-image.

We could simply call these two “flavor” and “fashion,” and that wouldn’t be all wrong. But “flavor” and “fashion” miss the depth of the commitment that we make to our food tastes. In religious matters, we see this all the time. The Orthodox Jew likes the flavor of brisket during the Seder, but his liking it is something more than fashion. It is a moral taste—in his eyes, eating brisket is an ethical position. But this is just as true of seemingly smaller affections. I like the mouth taste of Dan Barber’s food, but my liking to eat at his restaurant at the Stone Barns organic farm is something more than fashion. It is a moral taste, in the sense that I’m proud to be seen there, and like to pretend to participate in the project of sustainable produce and heritage breeds.