John McPhee's "Brigade de Cuisine" Retitled

Saul Steinberg, illustration for John McPhee's "Brigade de Cuisine"

I’m curious why newyorker.com changed the title of John McPhee’s classic “Brigade de Cuisine” (The New Yorker, February 19, 1979) to “A Philosopher in the Kitchen.” The original title perfectly encapsulates the piece’s main theme – the art of an extraordinary chef who does the work of an “entire brigade de cuisine.” The new title seems to express a different theme – the chef’s metaphysical approach to cooking. Except that in the case of this particular chef, when he’s really cruising, he doesn’t so much think as act by conditioned response (“ ‘You cook unconsciously,’ he says. ‘You know what you’re going to do and you do it. When problems come along, your brain spits out the answer’ ”). So much for metaphysics. This isn’t a think piece; the best parts describe action. For example: 

A quarter to eight, and the china is rattling. Pot lids are spinning on the floor. The oven is up to four-fifty. Otto is moving so fast his work has become a collage of itself, as—all in a minute—he pours out lime juice, eats a handful of seviche, tosses veal into a skillet, and hunts through wild mushrooms for deposits of grit. Chaos cannot get at him in the depths of composition. Those are finished compositions going out through the door—the mottled brown envelopes of pork loin, the drape-fold saucing of the poached quenelles. He is not only cooking. He works on all the levels of the kitchen. He sections the bread. He cuts and apportions desserts. He slices open the baked potatoes. “See. They are nice and flowery,” he says.

“Brigade de Cuisine” is exactly the right title for this bravura piece. It’s the title McPhee gave it when he first published it. It’s the title he used when he collected it in Giving Good Weight (1979). It’s the title its been known by for forty years. “A Philosopher in the Kitchen” – come on! Save that for a piece about Wittgenstein helping his mom make apple strudel. 

May 26, 2014 Issue

Notes on this week's issue:

1. I suppose the use of a 1950s Saul Steinberg baseball drawing for a cover on this week’s issue is meant as a homage to Steinberg, creator of perhaps The New Yorker’s most famous cover – the 1976 view of the world westward from Ninth Avenue. But the grayish, crudely sketched baseball cover, which shows a catcher crouched in front of an umpire, each with a masked head that looks like the caged top of a lighthouse, strikes me as somewhat dismal. For a much sunnier, more vivid, natural rendition of the summer game, see Richard Merkin’s great April 5, 1993 New Yorker cover, titled “The Changing of the Guard in the House That Ruth Built.”

2. Richard Brody’s syntax is delicious. Thought, in his pieces, flows in jazzy runs of blended description and perception joined with the adroit use of dashes, semi-colons, and brackets. This week’s GOAT contains three excellent examples:

With the bright colors of new urban landscapes (built up in the wake of wartime destruction) and the brazen clash of calmly assertive compositions, Ozu captures the ordinary desolation at the natural heart of things – and contemplates his own place on the edge of the precipice.

The cast and crew of a politicized costume drama are holed up in a Spanish villa while awaiting their star, their equipment, and their money; meanwhile, they drink joylessly and engage in provocative sexual escapades, subtly Machiavellian manipulations, and cruel displays of power that threaten the film with emotional sabotage.

The druggy and drunken parties, games of truth or dare, casual sex, and violent amusements are recklessness-by-number; the catalogue of petty derelictions and frustrated yearnings is anchored by no inner world, framed by no context, and there’s nothing distinctive in the twenty-six-year-old Gila Coppola’s direction.

3. Adam Gopnik has a piece in this week’s issue. But I didn’t read it. I’m boycotting his work in protest against his appallingly wrong-headed characterization of Duke Ellington’s compositional process as “theft” ("Two Bands," The New Yorker, December 23 & 30, 2013).