From The Archive: Adam Gopnik

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1:08Xfinity. Imagine that. Adam Gopnik is a close friend and my guest on this episode from the Archive, recorded last December. This gives me the chance to tell you all that Adam will be playing in his own very funny and touching one-man show, Adam Gopnik's New York, at Lincoln Center from October 17th through the 26th. You can find tickets online at adamgopniknewyork.com. I'm coming from London, so I'll see you there.

1:43In the 34 years that Adam Gopnik and I have been friends, we have lived in the same city, Paris, where he wrote his beautiful book Paris to the Moon. We have loved and then lost our best friend, the art historian and curator, Kirk Varnadeau. We've taken care of each other's children as if they were our own and sung show tunes together from every Broadway musical because we know all the lyrics. Most of all, we have never stopped cooking, eating, and talking about our passion for food. We may be separated by an ocean, but we are always minutes and inches away. All the while, Adam leads a terrific life in writing, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of nine books of non-fiction, fiction, and memoir.

2:28Next year, he will perform his one-man show, Talk Therapy, in New York City. Adam is here now with me in London. In four days, he's eaten in the River Cafe four times. This morning, we sang You've Got to Be Taught from South Pacific, rainbow connection from the Muppets, and I've never been in love before from Guys and Dolls. Tonight, after seeing Giant at the Royal Court, we will go home and cook tomato pasta, my definition of a good friend. Thank you, Ruthie. So, Adam, you've chosen the recipe, and it was from the very first cookbook we ever did, the River Cafe cookbook, and the recipe you chose was penne with quick sausage sauce.

3:10Would you like to read it? I would love to read it, And I should add that this is part of a diptych, as art historians would say, with a penny with a slow sausage sauce. So that is why it's quick. 250 grams of penny regatta, two tablespoons of olive oil, two red onions, peeled and chopped, five sausages, meat crumbled, half a tablespoon of fresh rosemary, two small dried chilies, 800 grams of peeled plum tomatoes, 150 milliliters of cream, and 120 grams of parmesan, freshly grated. You heat the olive oil in the saucepan, and you fry the onion lightly. You add the sausage, rosemary, bay leaves, and chili all together, frying them over a high heat, stirring to mash the sausages.

3:56You remove all but one tablespoon of the fat and continue to cook for 20 minutes. Add the tomatoes, stir, and return to the boil, then remove from the heat. Cook the penne in boiling salted water, then drain and add directly to the sauce. Stir the cream into the sauce with the penne and half the parmesan, and then you serve the pasta with the remaining parmesan grated on top. When I asked you for a recipe that you'd like to read on Ruthie's Table 4, you immediately said, I know exactly what I want to do. I want to do the penne with quick sausage sauce. And I was wondering why. Well, because it was 1994.

4:36We had just moved to Paris. My wife, Martha, and our little son, Luke, had just moved to Paris then. And we got your book. And by the strangest kind of syncopated cooking beat, I started cooking your food in our Parisian kitchen, although I had been raised on French food. And there was something about the logic and grammar of this recipe that was inspiring and explained so much. In other words, you were taking the pungent things, the sweet onions and then the pungent sausages and the hot pepper, which I had never cooked with before, the dried parakeet peppers, and making all of that. Then you were reducing it with the wine and then adding the tomatoes.

5:21And that basic pattern, right, you have, and it can be anchovies and garlic. So get the flavor into the sauce before you add the tomatoes. Then cook it down with wine until it's almost dry, and then adding tomatoes and then doing that. How many times in a lifetime do we do that? And that basic grammar, the savory flavors, the wine reduction, the addition of tomato or cream or whatever it might be, is somehow so fundamental. It was like this for me was a foundational recipe. Once I knew how to do this, I felt that I could do almost anything. So that's why I love it so much, even though, to be honest with you, I probably couldn't, so to speak, sell it at my dining table today because the ladies I cook for, Martha and Olivia, are both pescatarians at this point.

6:10so I couldn't Do you ever have it make it for yourself? I always make it for myself when I'm alone I either make this or the Amatriciana Yeah Can you get the Luganega sausages in New York? You can get good sausages or good sausages You can get good Italian sausages in New York but those are when I'm home alone that's what I make for myself So you've written just written a brilliant piece about the election you've written about the politics of our country you've written about Paris you've written and yet You are uniquely interested, I think, in writing and writing about food. And so food comes into your musical.

6:47I mean, there aren't very many musicals about a restaurant. There aren't very many articles in The New Yorker. Well, now there are a few more about food. Tell us about one of your books that you've written of where food has come into your book. I wrote an entire book just about the philosophy of eating called The Table Comes First, which was a title that was given to me by our friend Fergus of St. John because we were having elevenses once and he said he was genuinely perturbed he said, there's this young couple I know and they're just getting married and they want to buy a bed he said, don't they know the table comes first?

7:23they're having a bed but no table and I thought, oh what a beautiful thought the table comes first it's the altar and the raft of human existence so for me My fascination with food, I think, comes from two sharply opposed places. On the one hand, just pure greed. I love to eat. It's funny that greed comes into food. I have a friend who had a nanny, and she overheard her child who said, I'd want a biscuit. She'd eaten like five biscuits. And she heard the nanny saying, you know, you're a greedy little girl. And she fired her. She fired her right on the spot. She said, you know what? I don't want somebody telling my child that because they're hungry they want more food, that they're greedy.

8:06And for me, as an American, and maybe that's something different, is that greediness always meant that you want more money. So I think it's interesting, the idea of sort of greedy being involved in describing food. Well, one of the ways in which French culinary culture is superior to any other is, you know, you use the word gourmand to mean greedy. And when you say, il est gourmand, you mean, oh, he really loves to eat. And the French word gourmet, which Americans and Brits have adapted, French folks don't really use very much. You wouldn't say somebody's a gourmet unless they were an American.

8:37But gourmand, though it means greedy in that sense, is a totally positive benediction to say, oh, elle est tellement gourmand. It means really loves food. So that's one part of my fascination with food. I can't remember many musicals that I've seen. They have restaurant scenes. I've interviewed actors who actually had to cook on stage or eat on stage or food is a part of the drama, but you've actually created a musical about a restaurant called Our Table. Can you tell me about it? I'd love to. I wrote it with the great Broadway composer David Shire, and it was inspired not so much by my book about cooking, but out of a piece I wrote right after 9-11 about a cook's contest.

9:23And I was inspired by the two chefs particularly, Peter Hoffman, who ran a beautiful little restaurant with his wife called Savoy, and David Waltuck, who also ran a beautiful, originally very small restaurant with his wife called Chanterelle. and the way that they poured themselves into these restaurants, that they poured all of their soul and their selves into these restaurants. But, of course, they were up against the inexorable constraints of New York City real estate, which basically says, if you've had a successful 10-year run, we're going to quadruple your income. And so I got to thinking about that.

9:58And Peter had been at cooking school with Tony Bourdain. And they were dear friends, but they defined totally opposite ends of the cooking experience. Peter, an idealist, making his perfect food every night for a small clientele, Tony Bourdain, on television. So I wondered, what would happen if Tony Bourdain came back to rescue Peter's kitchen? And let's imagine that he had had an affair with Peter's wife 20 years before, and they didn't know about it. And so that was the premise of our table. But what I particularly wanted to do was write about the sort of micro mechanics of a restaurant, which I observed from watching you and from watching other friends.

10:39I think that chefs are the last true artists of the old-fashioned kind, right? Because they're simultaneously trying to be inventive, artistic. They have a high standard. But at the same time, they live to please the way Shakespeare lived to please. You can't say, though a poet can say, well, if you don't like it, tough, right? Chefs are both artists in their inventiveness and artisans in their commitment to a craft that has to please. So I wanted to articulate that, but also capture not the kind of the splendid and extravagant gestures of a kitchen, which you often see on television, but all the tiny little...

11:19You said to me once, Ruthie, it's one of my favorite sayings, and I put it into the show, every table is a world, and that's what a true restaurateur understands. Every table is something is going on and that a great host has to recognize. So I wrote a song with David Shire called Chopping Onions, Folding Napkins, in which the husband, who's the chef, is in the kitchen chopping onions. And his wife, who runs the front of the house, is in the dining room folding napkins, getting ready for the service. And at the same time, they're having a fight about her old boyfriend. And of all the things I've ever written, I love the micro drama of that because it struck me as true.

12:00We can listen to this on Spotify. On Spotify, our table. I narrate it, and we have a wonderful cast, Melissa Erico, Andy Taylor, Constantine Maroulis. And it's a show about a restaurant and infidelity. Infidelity is probably more interesting. I'm insulted by that. Nothing more interesting than a restaurant. I just wanted to write about the restaurant, but the director kept saying, no, no, no, we need lovers and we need old things. What about food is seduction? My wife seduced me with a bottle of champagne when I was about 19. She chased me around the Christmas tree with a bottle of Bums Extra Dry.

12:39So we kind of got that done. Of course, it is seduction always. I loved... Do you remember the first meal you cooked for Martha? For Martha? Oh, my gosh, yes. I cooked her a quiche because I was learning to bake for my mom. That was in your mother's kitchen. In my mother's kitchen. Her recipe? Her recipe. But in the years since, Martha has one favorite meal, which I cook her whenever I want to please her, seduce more than please. And that is something I learned to do in France, which is a good roast chicken, a poulet de presse in France, with carrots with cumin and orange potatoes roasted under the chicken and a broccoli puree and then a caramelized garlic sauce, you know.

13:29And I know that that will always work.

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14:23That's why over 200 ,000 happy customers have made the switch. Upgrade your space today. Visit washablesofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. You said that you were raised on French food. Where were you born and what did you... I was born in Philadelphia because my parents were graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. And my mother, who's an extraordinary woman... So they were young. They were young and they came from very simple backgrounds. My grandparents were immigrants. From where?

15:02On my father's side from Russia. They were Russian Jews. And on my mother's side from the Levant. They were Sephardic Jews on that side. They had been all around from Hebron to Baghdad and beyond. The previous generation were actually in Lisbon. My grandmother, who I knew very well, was born in Lisbon. In any case, truly, they were wandering Jews, and that's the background. But my mom, who was an extraordinarily gifted woman, in the manner of so many women of her generation, latched on to French cooking. And it was fascinating because she was getting her PhD. She had six children in linguistics, in linguistics and formal logic.

15:45She was one of the early students of or researchers in artificial languages and in computer translation, the stuff that you get now on Google in a minute. She spent a long time working on that side of things and then eventually became very well known for her work in the genetics of language. but she discovered one of the first chromosomes that directly affect the way we form sentences. In any case, in addition to that, she was a passionate nightly cook, and like so many women of her generation, she discovered Julia Child and French cooking in the mid-'60s. Explain who Julia Child is. I guess we should.

16:22In fact, I did a little piece not long ago, a long piece actually for The New Yorker, about Judith Jones, who was Julia Child's editor, who discovered her, really out of a slush pile of a rejected book and saw that it could be something great. Julia Child was the American doyenne of French cooking. Wrote, had a TV series called The French Chef. Like all people who are good on television, her great gift was complete unselfconsciousness. She was sloppy and great, and she had a beautiful high voice, didn't she? Educated. Dropped a chicken famously. She was such a kind of total change to what the American cook, domestic cook was like.

17:00The Betty Crocker cook. Yes, exactly, too. Now chop the radishes. And now here's the joe. It's on the floor. Now we pick it back up. And it was wonderful. And it liberated an entire generation. And my mom is a perfectionist. And she just became a great French cook. And when I say great, I mean all the things that we would never even do now, like beef wellington, you know, or a coia vaca of salmon, or tournée de Rossini, you know, all of those things that belong to the past of French cooking now, she did. And her great triumph was a Grand Marnier Soufflé, which to this day I would still say is the single, I will put a special golden border around the lemon tart and chocolate nemesis here at the River Cafe, but was spectacular.

17:46And during the pandemic, when Martha and I were alone, as all of us were, I set myself the task of mastering my mother's Grand Marnier Soufflé. Do you have her recipe? I have her recipe. Did she write it down for you? She wrote it down for me, but it's a somewhat metaphysical recipe because the key moment in it is, she says, beat the egg whites until they are not truly stiff and yet not entirely soft, which is a metaphysical zone to try and arrive at, right? And over time, I just did it by trial and error. And she had one very smart, you know, what they call in French an astuce, a hint, which is to have the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit and then turn it down once the souffle is in.

18:28And astonishingly, it makes for a much better loft on it. But my mama cooked every night for her six children and husband, and she loved to shop down in Montreal. We moved to Montreal when I was 11 because my parents got jobs at McGill University, as I say. And, you know, I have nothing but memories of her cooking all the time. And on my 13th birthday, she knew how much I loved to eat because I was the kid in the family who was always greediest of all. And she said, what's your favorite thing for dinner? And I said, beef stroganoff, because it really was my favorite thing at that point. She said, you're going to make it for your own birthday dinner.

19:08And she showed me each step along the way, sautéing the peppers and the onions and then the beef, then making the sauce with stock and tomato paste and sour cream. And the sheer magic of that transformation, The movement from raw to cooked and then from raw to cooked to delicious was overwhelming for me. But was that a rare occasion then to bring her children into the kitchen? No, we were in there all the time. The only problem was my mother is, bless her, an extremely impatient woman, which is one reason why she got those things done. And so she would always yell at you, not in an angry way, but you know how that is.

19:50We all do it in the kitchen. I need the salt. No, I need it now. And as a consequence, very few people could quite take the emotional heat in her kitchen. And I inherited all of her impatience. And as a consequence, everyone of my immediate family have tried to be my sous chef, and they've all quit. They've all walked out. I get it. What about your father? Did he cook? No, my dad didn't cook at all, but he loved my mother's cooking. So you grew up in this house of six children. and your parents, who seemed incredibly dynamic and interesting, and mealtimes were all of you, eight of you, sat down every night?

20:25It was part of the beauty of my upbringing. It's something I took with me and have been probably unduly religious about with my own family. We always had dinner together, and dinner was always delicious, and it was always a debating society, and it was always a community, and there were always politics being played out, older children, younger children, middle children. The middle children, now I'll say bitterly that the older children, my sister Allison and myself, were competing for my father's attention. But whatever was going on at the table, it was always going on. And that sense that the dinner table is the altar and sacrament of family life is something that I've taken forward with me into my own existence, to my children's enormous frustration, because they became accustomed at 8.15 a.m.

21:15as they were leaving for school, bleary-eyed, exhausted, barely able to keep themselves together. I'd say, what would you like for dinner tonight? Would you like the salmon with lentils, or I can do a roast chicken? Duh. I'd say, but I just need to know so I can go shop for it. And then they'd say, salmon, salmon, I'm doing it. Growing up in a family where meals were taken together, where your mother made beef wellington, Do you remember leaving the comfort of home when you went to McGill and being exposed to a completely different world? What was that like? McGill was home, so it was a half a lot of way.

21:53I was going to ask you, did you stay home? Martha, my wife, and I were both at McGill together, but it's a Canadian thing. You don't go away to school, you go nearby. But when we moved to New York in the summer of 1980, we had just graduated and we got on a bus that said New York City, like in a 40s musical. And my dad saw us off. He thought it was a mad adventure. We were going to go live in New York. And he said to me, as I got on the bus, he said, just remember when you get to New York, never underestimate the other person's insecurities. As a general piece of advice. As a general rule, piece of advice.

22:29And it's the best advice I've ever gotten. He didn't advise you where to eat. I thought you might say, don't forget to go to Luigi's. The thing that inspired me when we got to New York was a writer, actually, it was Calvin Trillin. Yes. Bless him. Of course. And he wrote beautifully about sort of folk dining in New York, Russ and Daughters, the great smoked fish emporium, the local Italian restaurants. But I arrived in New York, and I had to cook. We had a tiny basement apartment. It was nine feet by 11. No one believes this when I tell it, but we lived there for three years, the size of this table.

23:03It's about the size of this room. Yes. Oh, my God, this room would have been a mansion. No, it's half the size of this room. Yeah, nine feet. It's half the size of this room. I did a one-man show once where I came out cold and laid down in blue tape a 9 by 11 rectangle. Then I exited. I came back on and said, this is the room my wife and I lived in for three years when we came to New York. But I was determined to do nothing but the best cooking. So we had this tiny little stove in an unventilated 9 by 11 room. And I would do not, you know, heat and serve things. I would do tuna au poivre or a whole roast chicken in this tiny oven, and the whole room would fill with smoke, right?

23:45So you'd open the one window we had, and the smoke would pour out onto the pavement of 87th Street. And you were a student at NYU. At the Institute of Fine Arts. So you knew you wanted to be an art historian? Did you study art? I did. I studied art history, and I was accepted to a Ph.D. program at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. but for me that was just a mask. It was a beard. I wanted to be a writer, an essayist and a songwriter. Those were the two things I wanted, but it was a way of getting to New York. I had a fellowship to go to NYU, but then my first day, my first fall at NYU at the Institute where I intended just to pass through and kind of wave quickly on my way to the New Yorker, actually, I met Kirk Varnedot, who was, for both of us, a best friend, who was the most inspired, I get for a client thinking of it now, a teacher who has ever lived.

24:41He was a great art historian, became the chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art eventually. And he was such an inspiring teacher and mentor and model that it became a kind of diversion in my life for the next 10 years that I actually did my degrees in art history and we ended up doing a big show together at the Museum of Modern Art. Do you remember eating with him? Oh, my God. Kirk loved, as you know, loved good food, and he loved French culture, not just French cuisine, but French culture. And it was the first time in my life we would go out for dinner, and we were kids living in a basement, and Kirk was a young professor.

25:17It wasn't that he had a lot of money or anything, and he had just gotten married to Ellen Zimmerman, his extraordinary artist wife. And we would go out for dinner and have a bottle of white wine, champagne to start, bottle of white wine, bottle of red wine, something afterwards. Did you eat anything? It sounds like you just had a bottle of white wine, a bottle of red wine. Well, we would go, you know, we would really, we would eat well. And there was a restaurant in Washington, D.C. that we went to once called Le Pavillon, like the old French place in New York. And that Kirk loved, he loved the intensity of that.

25:53He loved the expansiveness of it. He loved everything that a great French meal stood for as a piece of the history of the pluralism of pleasures and so on. And among the happiest days of my life, in which I believe you participated too, is that when we lived in France, we had a tradition that whenever Kirk and Ellen were there, that we would have a cathedral and a lunch, and we'd go up to Reims or Chartres, and then spend the morning touring the cathedral. Richard was with us, I think. Yes, we went to Chartres. To Chartres, exactly. And Kirk would descant brilliantly and unforgettably about the facade and the sculpture and the changes and the meanings and the possibilities.