The Mind of a Chef (2012) s04e04 Episode Script
Hunger
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Support your PBS station.
Well before we can remember being alive, we are hungry.
And when we arrive, the hunger persists.
Hunger can mean many different things: need, desire, longing, ambition.
For chef Gabrielle Hamilton, hunger has played a pivotal role in shaping who she is as a person and as a chef, beginning at age 13, when she was left alone to rummage through what was left in the pantry in order to feed herself, to her early days living in New York's Hell's Kitchen, when a can of sardines with crackers or an egg and cheese sandwich from the local bodega was considered a major meal.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
It's so good to be classic and not trendy.
Oh man, we are making some food here now.
The first word that comes is profoundly alone.
Alone in the house.
In the kitchen.
Alone in the night.
Alone in the garden trying to pick the Japanese beetles off the lettuce, because I think I know what I'm doing.
But I'm young.
Facing this freezer, this refrigerator, or the pantry.
I remember this urgent scramble, like scouring your mind.
Can you put chicken in the pan if it's frozen? Ah, and do I put butter in now? There's perfect hunger and then there's ugly hunger.
I mean, hunger can get big and small.
You know when you didn't pay attention because you didn't know you had to? I was trying to cook like, "God, I'm sure I've seen my mother use this pan for this thing.
" We had canned products, so she was not a preserver type of person.
She was French.
So in the pantry, it's like, is that a can of snails? Okay, that's canned mackerel.
Well, let's open it up.
The signature dish of Prune restaurant.
It's very simple and it has a lot of freight.
This has been on the menu since we opened, and it's been in my life since I was born.
Canned sardines is the snack, the sustenance, of my entire life, from digging around in a pantry, looking for something to eat, to surviving in New York City on a jar of change, and these were 35 cents at the store.
These are beautiful, beautiful sardines from Morocco.
Boneless, skinless, in pretty decent olive oil.
People don't come to a restaurant for you to open a can, but this is one of those plates that I want verbatim.
I don't want to interpret it or gourmet it up or fake it.
Mustard on the plate.
Wait for it, the cornichons are going to go next.
This is just very true.
And you can see it's not that attractive.
Which is sort of pretty much the theme of everything I've made here.
I just can't help it.
It is what it is and I believe in it, and it's so unexpected, but for some reason, canned sardines speaks for a lot of people.
Who knew? But there are many people who have told me that they have canned sardine memories.
I want you to have the real food, the way it was.
This is the story of, "I need something to eat.
"And I don't have any money.
And this tastes really good.
" The finishing touch, the sprig of parsley.
And it's a big sprig, because after you eat the canned sardine and you have fish breath, you want to chew on the stem, and it completely keeps you fresh for your date.
My canned masterpiece.
I'm tired, do we get a break? I mean, that was a really complicated dish.
It's very hot in New York summer, in that very old school way where we don't have air conditioning.
You maybe have screens in the windows and the grit is everywhere.
I'm living on almost the West Side Highway.
A lot of heavy commercial traffic going in and out of the Lincoln Tunnel.
Prostitutes are working the tunnel, and I guess the avenue, too.
The first time I saw it, I was mind-blown.
There's a guy alone in a Buick, polo shirt, creased khaki pant kind of business dude.
And at the traffic light, up she pops, and the door opens, and out she gets.
I was just like, oh ho ho! Even though I feel very jaded and smoking and so cool, but I was only 16.
And I guess it was very different in New York at the time, like it was a very much hang out on the side of the highway and wave and wear nothing.
They would get coffee and water and orangeade, and they would sit on the stoop.
I mean, I can just remember arriving to the stoop with my egg on a roll and my New York Times, whatever I'm reading, and they are like laying out the baby wipe.
Or, a coffee napkin, for her bare ass, and she's going to sit on it.
These ladies were very comfortable and convivial, and sweet, actually.
Solicitous and almost maternal.
Not wanting to be in the way or cause any trouble, and I just sat with them.
But I was hell-bent on acting like I knew what was happening.
It just fed and led to this urgent need to be very grown up, very fast, and to know everything.
And I didn't know.
And really, I was like shaking and starving and hustling hard to "Yeah, I got this, I'm cool, I got it.
" I'm going to do the best I can to be exactly like the deli man would do.
The only difference is you can feel pretty good eating this bacon, these eggs, this cheese.
The ingredients are good.
It's really a grab-and-go thing.
New York style, slung out by your deli man in four minutes while you get your coffee at the deli on your way to work.
And I'm going to toast my roll.
So it's your whole breakfast, but instead of sitting down and eating it civilized like on a plate, it's ready to roll for you.
I'm going to really splurge and have a two-egg egg on a roll.
I like the egg-to-bread ratio better with two.
This excellent bacon that I've been eating, pretty much every day for 15 years and still have not tired of.
I like my yolk runny.
Let the egg set, and then drape the cheese over top and melt it.
I'm not a big lunch eater, so I really like breakfast foods all the time.
Egg and cheese up onto the "sally.
" Let that melt a little bit.
Butter my toasted roll with this sweet butter.
In real deli man style, they would have put oleo or margarine and then laid this down on the griddle and gotten nice and gross.
I'm going to stop there.
I just want the cheese to melt, not really separate.
I want it to just kind of drape, mm-hmm-hmm! Often the biggest meal of my day.
Would take it wrapped in aluminum foil and go sit on my stoop in the sweltering summer heat, hanging out with the prostitutes.
I'm sure I was smoking like a total pro at that point.
Acting way cool.
As a result, I was introduced to the fantastic egg on a roll.
A really tasty thing to eat.
Where are we? We're at the local bodega.
Hello.
- Hello, how are you? We're going to have an egg on a roll.
Uh-huh, I want to taste your eggs on the roll.
One with cheese Can you shup up a little bit the bacon and put a little bit in it? The yolk runny, butter, salt, and pepper, please, thank you.
I'm going to see if this bodega has the hallmarks, which is a Cafe Bustelo coffee.
Oh yeah, really? Where? Okay, look, perfect! Cafe Bustelo? In the little screw espresso pot on the back burner In the '80s, you remember about Bustelo coffee? Of course it's terrible.
Well, it's popular, that's for sure.
It tasted good at the time.
And then what else? There's cat food, there's Marcal toilet paper, like, whew, the roughest stuff.
A very curated deli experience.
The toilet paper is up there.
Okay, good, so this is the cheapest toilet paper.
I never wiped myself on such a cheap paper.
I'm glad you're willing to slum it down here.
Yeah, no, no, absolutely.
I'm going to get a beer for us.
Maybe a Dominican beer or something? Ah, allora, a Presidente.
Voilà .
That's what I would have done at my 16-year-old self.
Oh, yeah, we gotta take this one.
When I retire, I'll open a bodega, I like that.
Yeah, are you buying? - Yeah.
Thank you very much, sir.
So this would be a summer night activity.
Come here and drink, or yeah.
Just take a minute and sit on your stoop.
What I want to know is, why did you come to New York? I graduated high school a little early, skipped a couple of grades.
And I moved here to go to NYU.
- Oh.
I didn't quite make it through the NYU plan! But when I got here, I just lived in this crappy building in Hell's Kitchen, and I would sit on the stoop and have my egg on a roll from the deli downstairs, that I paid for with my stack of dimes and my one nickel, and he often gave it to me for free, because he was very thoughtful.
And do you think the egg on a roll we have today is just like the same? It is! I really survived on this when I got here, literally.
I mean, it could sometimes have been the only actual, if you want to call it a meal, of a day.
Yeah, I've never had an egg on a roll.
Mmm I mean, this is a pretty good egg on a roll.
Good job, huh? Yeah! I like your kind of picnic.
You got to know your neighbors, watch them passing by.
Mmm, it's good.
This is going to give you some serious flashback.
Many things would give me flashback, but not an egg on a roll.
It's such a New York thing, it's like if I were taking you to Lyon and we'll go to that particular place to get a bowl of tripe.
Daniel, he is the crème de la crme.
He is certainly in an elite class of chefs in the city.
Tripe remind me of Lyon, when I was a young kid, and the restaurant was next to a tripier, the store where they were only doing tripe and anything coming out of the guts.
Were that place where they were cleaning it, cooking it, brushing it.
It's a beautiful, humble piece of meat.
I wish we had something like that here.
And I was like 14, 15.
And passing in front of that store and hated the store, because it smelled like.
You were the stagiaire in the restaurant, and you had the lowest rung on the totem pole, and you had to go to the market and schlep all the things back to the restaurant.
You said you at least enjoyed sitting to have the breakfast bowl of tripe in the market.
Absolutely, and tripe is often symbolic with where the truck driver goes and have a bowl of tripe.
Where the workers go.
So here I like to cut them totally uneven because I really don't care.
What I want is just good pieces.
Do you cook tripe at Prune? Yes, and I was going to refer to the smell as well, because when we do the blanching, we have to do it in the day when we're closed, so that the smell doesn't permeate the restaurant, yeah.
Okay, let's do some vegetables.
So, everything is roughly chopped, like you are the only one in the kitchen.
Carrots, always good.
There are a couple of experiences with Daniel that I've had lately where I just am more and more enamored with his work ethic.
He's a worker.
And did you actually find this delicious as a 15-year-old or was it all there was? I was just invited to sit down and have tripe to eat with the boss.
But the honor was not in the dish but in the being invited? - Very much.
That's coriander? Yeah, a little bit of black pepper, fennel seeds Espelette? - Espelette, yeah, red pepper.
A little spicy.
And then I always put a cow feet in the tripe, very important.
To me, tripe in France is about wasting nothing, and the pleasure of sharing a great moment together around very humble food.
Oh, look how it's become creamy! Yeah, I just put the white wine inside, yeah.
Voilà , now we're going to put that in the oven.
Cook for three hours.
I definitely believe we all go through a difficult and insecure time in life.
Unknown.
The way I arrived in New York, I felt lucky because I was taken care of right away.
Yeah.
- And I think this city, if you're not well taken care of, it can be rough for sure.
He's alive and curious, bringing all of his internal demand for perfection and excellence, regardless of the idiom.
There is nothing worse than being lost, without ambition, without direction, without a set sense of why you are doing it.
I'm interested in what's still to come.
I don't want to be the same.
I'm ready to shed an old self in a way Really, you want to? Well, I'm only here once, I think, unless you're into the reincarnation, and not just in the kitchen, but do you want to hear yourself tell the same joke, or don't you find yourself doing something way too familiar even for yourself? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, I hate it.
And think, hey, I'm still I have time.
Every day I'm screaming I want to change things, I want to change personal things.
About your own self? - Yeah, about my own self.
He's going to be here for a long time, and he's going to endure.
That's my first egg on the roll.
Yeah, we're just having a little And my first meditation on the stoop.
Is it? Oh! I'm so glad that I could bring this to you! So we have a little reciprocal thing here.
Absolutely.
That's so good.
Obviously, we are one million percent different, and he's so uptown, and I'm so downtown, but I would like to endure.
Look at that.
Oh, nice.
It's transformed.
Smells good.
The magic of tripe is to have a little bit of funky The barnyard in it? Yeah, the barnyard flavor.
And I want to cut the skin off the cow.
For all that gelatin.
- Yes.
Cut it in small pieces Throw it back inside.
Not only this has nourished the preparation by taking the sauce but really flavored, also.
And of course, it makes sense that these go together.
They're from the same animal.
Completely.
Well, it's finished.
Yeah, that looks very good.
Because, in Lyon, we don't fuss it up, we just serve it just like that.
Here we are back by this little street next to the market in Lyon.
Bon appétit.
Ah, thank you.
Mmm - Mmm Right? It's a little spicy, it's a little tangy, it's a little chewy.
Oh, the acid came from the tomato.
Mm-hmm, white wine and tomato.
It's tasty.
Huh, I tell you, it's as funky as it was when I had it when I was 15.
You find something, a bone? That's the only bone.
That's good luck, actually.
I live for the bone.
This is my kind of breakfast, right here.
That's my breakfast tomorrow.
That is very tasty.
Love it.
13-year-old me, hmm Ironically, I wasn't so afraid about what I was going to eat.
The things that were concerning me at the time was the house with no parents and realizing that there was no shampoo.
I was turning adolescent.
How am I going to wash my hair? I want to buy Farrah Fawcett shampoo.
I lied about my age and I got maybe a busser job? He took me off the busser floor, because I was not cut out, I didn't know how to pour the water, I didn't know how to stand, I didn't know how to carry my body, and took me back into the dish pit.
Oh, I know just what that is! I've been washing dishes for my whole life.
We were definitely given chores.
And then it just goes from there.
Peeling the potatoes.
The salad station.
Hot line.
And then you're at Prune.
These are fresh sardines from Maine.
They're quite big.
Not everybody's fish, for sure.
Yeah, it's dark and oily.
It has personality.
I'm going to fry some almonds in grapeseed oil.
I want them to get golden and fragrant.
Mmm, that smells really good.
Poach my sardines in the hot oil, 90 seconds, like a hot, hot bath.
The flesh went from that kidney red to pretty opaque.
I want to mix olive oil in here, too, for the marinade.
Aleppo pepper not that hot, more sweet.
Some thyme.
A little salt.
Parsley leaves.
Some sherry vinegar.
It tastes like the toasted almonds, and it tastes a little bit like the fish, so it has a lot of flavor.
It's room temperature, it's not hot, soaking in the marinade.
So I'm going to build this puppy.
The bread is day-old, thinly sliced, and toasted on both sides.
Because I want it to absorb the marinade.
Mmm, nice and ripe.
Going to put a little squeeze of lemon on there.
Some of this healthy red onion in a little under and over if you don't mind.
I'm just going to make it pretty luscious.
God, I wish I could talk "lush-ush.
" The mint really brightens things up.
And at the end, the stems from the parsley leaves.
Nice, crunchy pop.
This is the marinated fresh sardine sandwich.
To be rendered deeply vulnerable makes you a better person, frankly.
Wider, opener, to all the sensations.
If I now think about hunger and ambition, my natural response to real hunger is to go slack.
And I accept whatever's coming.
Hunger can make you kind of fluid, almost? But you have to stay very steadfast to survive.
And this slack-taut tension between hunger and drive or ambition is very valuable.
If I started to really fight and get stereotypically hungry, like avaricious, that kind of hunger, I don't know if I would have gotten any of these beautiful things that I have gotten.
Support your PBS station.
Well before we can remember being alive, we are hungry.
And when we arrive, the hunger persists.
Hunger can mean many different things: need, desire, longing, ambition.
For chef Gabrielle Hamilton, hunger has played a pivotal role in shaping who she is as a person and as a chef, beginning at age 13, when she was left alone to rummage through what was left in the pantry in order to feed herself, to her early days living in New York's Hell's Kitchen, when a can of sardines with crackers or an egg and cheese sandwich from the local bodega was considered a major meal.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
It's so good to be classic and not trendy.
Oh man, we are making some food here now.
The first word that comes is profoundly alone.
Alone in the house.
In the kitchen.
Alone in the night.
Alone in the garden trying to pick the Japanese beetles off the lettuce, because I think I know what I'm doing.
But I'm young.
Facing this freezer, this refrigerator, or the pantry.
I remember this urgent scramble, like scouring your mind.
Can you put chicken in the pan if it's frozen? Ah, and do I put butter in now? There's perfect hunger and then there's ugly hunger.
I mean, hunger can get big and small.
You know when you didn't pay attention because you didn't know you had to? I was trying to cook like, "God, I'm sure I've seen my mother use this pan for this thing.
" We had canned products, so she was not a preserver type of person.
She was French.
So in the pantry, it's like, is that a can of snails? Okay, that's canned mackerel.
Well, let's open it up.
The signature dish of Prune restaurant.
It's very simple and it has a lot of freight.
This has been on the menu since we opened, and it's been in my life since I was born.
Canned sardines is the snack, the sustenance, of my entire life, from digging around in a pantry, looking for something to eat, to surviving in New York City on a jar of change, and these were 35 cents at the store.
These are beautiful, beautiful sardines from Morocco.
Boneless, skinless, in pretty decent olive oil.
People don't come to a restaurant for you to open a can, but this is one of those plates that I want verbatim.
I don't want to interpret it or gourmet it up or fake it.
Mustard on the plate.
Wait for it, the cornichons are going to go next.
This is just very true.
And you can see it's not that attractive.
Which is sort of pretty much the theme of everything I've made here.
I just can't help it.
It is what it is and I believe in it, and it's so unexpected, but for some reason, canned sardines speaks for a lot of people.
Who knew? But there are many people who have told me that they have canned sardine memories.
I want you to have the real food, the way it was.
This is the story of, "I need something to eat.
"And I don't have any money.
And this tastes really good.
" The finishing touch, the sprig of parsley.
And it's a big sprig, because after you eat the canned sardine and you have fish breath, you want to chew on the stem, and it completely keeps you fresh for your date.
My canned masterpiece.
I'm tired, do we get a break? I mean, that was a really complicated dish.
It's very hot in New York summer, in that very old school way where we don't have air conditioning.
You maybe have screens in the windows and the grit is everywhere.
I'm living on almost the West Side Highway.
A lot of heavy commercial traffic going in and out of the Lincoln Tunnel.
Prostitutes are working the tunnel, and I guess the avenue, too.
The first time I saw it, I was mind-blown.
There's a guy alone in a Buick, polo shirt, creased khaki pant kind of business dude.
And at the traffic light, up she pops, and the door opens, and out she gets.
I was just like, oh ho ho! Even though I feel very jaded and smoking and so cool, but I was only 16.
And I guess it was very different in New York at the time, like it was a very much hang out on the side of the highway and wave and wear nothing.
They would get coffee and water and orangeade, and they would sit on the stoop.
I mean, I can just remember arriving to the stoop with my egg on a roll and my New York Times, whatever I'm reading, and they are like laying out the baby wipe.
Or, a coffee napkin, for her bare ass, and she's going to sit on it.
These ladies were very comfortable and convivial, and sweet, actually.
Solicitous and almost maternal.
Not wanting to be in the way or cause any trouble, and I just sat with them.
But I was hell-bent on acting like I knew what was happening.
It just fed and led to this urgent need to be very grown up, very fast, and to know everything.
And I didn't know.
And really, I was like shaking and starving and hustling hard to "Yeah, I got this, I'm cool, I got it.
" I'm going to do the best I can to be exactly like the deli man would do.
The only difference is you can feel pretty good eating this bacon, these eggs, this cheese.
The ingredients are good.
It's really a grab-and-go thing.
New York style, slung out by your deli man in four minutes while you get your coffee at the deli on your way to work.
And I'm going to toast my roll.
So it's your whole breakfast, but instead of sitting down and eating it civilized like on a plate, it's ready to roll for you.
I'm going to really splurge and have a two-egg egg on a roll.
I like the egg-to-bread ratio better with two.
This excellent bacon that I've been eating, pretty much every day for 15 years and still have not tired of.
I like my yolk runny.
Let the egg set, and then drape the cheese over top and melt it.
I'm not a big lunch eater, so I really like breakfast foods all the time.
Egg and cheese up onto the "sally.
" Let that melt a little bit.
Butter my toasted roll with this sweet butter.
In real deli man style, they would have put oleo or margarine and then laid this down on the griddle and gotten nice and gross.
I'm going to stop there.
I just want the cheese to melt, not really separate.
I want it to just kind of drape, mm-hmm-hmm! Often the biggest meal of my day.
Would take it wrapped in aluminum foil and go sit on my stoop in the sweltering summer heat, hanging out with the prostitutes.
I'm sure I was smoking like a total pro at that point.
Acting way cool.
As a result, I was introduced to the fantastic egg on a roll.
A really tasty thing to eat.
Where are we? We're at the local bodega.
Hello.
- Hello, how are you? We're going to have an egg on a roll.
Uh-huh, I want to taste your eggs on the roll.
One with cheese Can you shup up a little bit the bacon and put a little bit in it? The yolk runny, butter, salt, and pepper, please, thank you.
I'm going to see if this bodega has the hallmarks, which is a Cafe Bustelo coffee.
Oh yeah, really? Where? Okay, look, perfect! Cafe Bustelo? In the little screw espresso pot on the back burner In the '80s, you remember about Bustelo coffee? Of course it's terrible.
Well, it's popular, that's for sure.
It tasted good at the time.
And then what else? There's cat food, there's Marcal toilet paper, like, whew, the roughest stuff.
A very curated deli experience.
The toilet paper is up there.
Okay, good, so this is the cheapest toilet paper.
I never wiped myself on such a cheap paper.
I'm glad you're willing to slum it down here.
Yeah, no, no, absolutely.
I'm going to get a beer for us.
Maybe a Dominican beer or something? Ah, allora, a Presidente.
Voilà .
That's what I would have done at my 16-year-old self.
Oh, yeah, we gotta take this one.
When I retire, I'll open a bodega, I like that.
Yeah, are you buying? - Yeah.
Thank you very much, sir.
So this would be a summer night activity.
Come here and drink, or yeah.
Just take a minute and sit on your stoop.
What I want to know is, why did you come to New York? I graduated high school a little early, skipped a couple of grades.
And I moved here to go to NYU.
- Oh.
I didn't quite make it through the NYU plan! But when I got here, I just lived in this crappy building in Hell's Kitchen, and I would sit on the stoop and have my egg on a roll from the deli downstairs, that I paid for with my stack of dimes and my one nickel, and he often gave it to me for free, because he was very thoughtful.
And do you think the egg on a roll we have today is just like the same? It is! I really survived on this when I got here, literally.
I mean, it could sometimes have been the only actual, if you want to call it a meal, of a day.
Yeah, I've never had an egg on a roll.
Mmm I mean, this is a pretty good egg on a roll.
Good job, huh? Yeah! I like your kind of picnic.
You got to know your neighbors, watch them passing by.
Mmm, it's good.
This is going to give you some serious flashback.
Many things would give me flashback, but not an egg on a roll.
It's such a New York thing, it's like if I were taking you to Lyon and we'll go to that particular place to get a bowl of tripe.
Daniel, he is the crème de la crme.
He is certainly in an elite class of chefs in the city.
Tripe remind me of Lyon, when I was a young kid, and the restaurant was next to a tripier, the store where they were only doing tripe and anything coming out of the guts.
Were that place where they were cleaning it, cooking it, brushing it.
It's a beautiful, humble piece of meat.
I wish we had something like that here.
And I was like 14, 15.
And passing in front of that store and hated the store, because it smelled like.
You were the stagiaire in the restaurant, and you had the lowest rung on the totem pole, and you had to go to the market and schlep all the things back to the restaurant.
You said you at least enjoyed sitting to have the breakfast bowl of tripe in the market.
Absolutely, and tripe is often symbolic with where the truck driver goes and have a bowl of tripe.
Where the workers go.
So here I like to cut them totally uneven because I really don't care.
What I want is just good pieces.
Do you cook tripe at Prune? Yes, and I was going to refer to the smell as well, because when we do the blanching, we have to do it in the day when we're closed, so that the smell doesn't permeate the restaurant, yeah.
Okay, let's do some vegetables.
So, everything is roughly chopped, like you are the only one in the kitchen.
Carrots, always good.
There are a couple of experiences with Daniel that I've had lately where I just am more and more enamored with his work ethic.
He's a worker.
And did you actually find this delicious as a 15-year-old or was it all there was? I was just invited to sit down and have tripe to eat with the boss.
But the honor was not in the dish but in the being invited? - Very much.
That's coriander? Yeah, a little bit of black pepper, fennel seeds Espelette? - Espelette, yeah, red pepper.
A little spicy.
And then I always put a cow feet in the tripe, very important.
To me, tripe in France is about wasting nothing, and the pleasure of sharing a great moment together around very humble food.
Oh, look how it's become creamy! Yeah, I just put the white wine inside, yeah.
Voilà , now we're going to put that in the oven.
Cook for three hours.
I definitely believe we all go through a difficult and insecure time in life.
Unknown.
The way I arrived in New York, I felt lucky because I was taken care of right away.
Yeah.
- And I think this city, if you're not well taken care of, it can be rough for sure.
He's alive and curious, bringing all of his internal demand for perfection and excellence, regardless of the idiom.
There is nothing worse than being lost, without ambition, without direction, without a set sense of why you are doing it.
I'm interested in what's still to come.
I don't want to be the same.
I'm ready to shed an old self in a way Really, you want to? Well, I'm only here once, I think, unless you're into the reincarnation, and not just in the kitchen, but do you want to hear yourself tell the same joke, or don't you find yourself doing something way too familiar even for yourself? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, I hate it.
And think, hey, I'm still I have time.
Every day I'm screaming I want to change things, I want to change personal things.
About your own self? - Yeah, about my own self.
He's going to be here for a long time, and he's going to endure.
That's my first egg on the roll.
Yeah, we're just having a little And my first meditation on the stoop.
Is it? Oh! I'm so glad that I could bring this to you! So we have a little reciprocal thing here.
Absolutely.
That's so good.
Obviously, we are one million percent different, and he's so uptown, and I'm so downtown, but I would like to endure.
Look at that.
Oh, nice.
It's transformed.
Smells good.
The magic of tripe is to have a little bit of funky The barnyard in it? Yeah, the barnyard flavor.
And I want to cut the skin off the cow.
For all that gelatin.
- Yes.
Cut it in small pieces Throw it back inside.
Not only this has nourished the preparation by taking the sauce but really flavored, also.
And of course, it makes sense that these go together.
They're from the same animal.
Completely.
Well, it's finished.
Yeah, that looks very good.
Because, in Lyon, we don't fuss it up, we just serve it just like that.
Here we are back by this little street next to the market in Lyon.
Bon appétit.
Ah, thank you.
Mmm - Mmm Right? It's a little spicy, it's a little tangy, it's a little chewy.
Oh, the acid came from the tomato.
Mm-hmm, white wine and tomato.
It's tasty.
Huh, I tell you, it's as funky as it was when I had it when I was 15.
You find something, a bone? That's the only bone.
That's good luck, actually.
I live for the bone.
This is my kind of breakfast, right here.
That's my breakfast tomorrow.
That is very tasty.
Love it.
13-year-old me, hmm Ironically, I wasn't so afraid about what I was going to eat.
The things that were concerning me at the time was the house with no parents and realizing that there was no shampoo.
I was turning adolescent.
How am I going to wash my hair? I want to buy Farrah Fawcett shampoo.
I lied about my age and I got maybe a busser job? He took me off the busser floor, because I was not cut out, I didn't know how to pour the water, I didn't know how to stand, I didn't know how to carry my body, and took me back into the dish pit.
Oh, I know just what that is! I've been washing dishes for my whole life.
We were definitely given chores.
And then it just goes from there.
Peeling the potatoes.
The salad station.
Hot line.
And then you're at Prune.
These are fresh sardines from Maine.
They're quite big.
Not everybody's fish, for sure.
Yeah, it's dark and oily.
It has personality.
I'm going to fry some almonds in grapeseed oil.
I want them to get golden and fragrant.
Mmm, that smells really good.
Poach my sardines in the hot oil, 90 seconds, like a hot, hot bath.
The flesh went from that kidney red to pretty opaque.
I want to mix olive oil in here, too, for the marinade.
Aleppo pepper not that hot, more sweet.
Some thyme.
A little salt.
Parsley leaves.
Some sherry vinegar.
It tastes like the toasted almonds, and it tastes a little bit like the fish, so it has a lot of flavor.
It's room temperature, it's not hot, soaking in the marinade.
So I'm going to build this puppy.
The bread is day-old, thinly sliced, and toasted on both sides.
Because I want it to absorb the marinade.
Mmm, nice and ripe.
Going to put a little squeeze of lemon on there.
Some of this healthy red onion in a little under and over if you don't mind.
I'm just going to make it pretty luscious.
God, I wish I could talk "lush-ush.
" The mint really brightens things up.
And at the end, the stems from the parsley leaves.
Nice, crunchy pop.
This is the marinated fresh sardine sandwich.
To be rendered deeply vulnerable makes you a better person, frankly.
Wider, opener, to all the sensations.
If I now think about hunger and ambition, my natural response to real hunger is to go slack.
And I accept whatever's coming.
Hunger can make you kind of fluid, almost? But you have to stay very steadfast to survive.
And this slack-taut tension between hunger and drive or ambition is very valuable.
If I started to really fight and get stereotypically hungry, like avaricious, that kind of hunger, I don't know if I would have gotten any of these beautiful things that I have gotten.