In the publishing business, many chef's books begin as what editors call “confetti”. That is: the chef gathers up all his bits and bobs and notes and hands them to an editor, and it is the editor who makes the book.
Dan Barber is the chef at Blue Hill in Manhattan, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, in upstate New York. His book, The Third Plate contains 15 end pages of referenced “Notes”, ranging from Aldo Leopold's 1935 essay Wilderness to the paper Relationship between yield and mineral nutrient content in historical and modern spring wheat cultivars, by Kevin M. Murphy, Philip G. Reeves, and Stephen S. Jones from Euphytica 163, issue 3 (October 2008).
The Notes are followed by three dense pages of “Further Reading”, and run from Lady Eve Balfour's 1943 book, The Living Soil to Norman Wirzba's The future of culture, community, and the land.
Phew! “The Third Plate” is not confetti. “The Third Plate” is a tour-de-force.
The book is simple – chef Barber looks at soil and carrots and whatnot; he looks at foie gras and ham; he looks at fish; he looks at wheat. But the simplicity of the concept is underlaid by the most intricate and involved appreciation of the subject he is looking at.
It begins early on with a madeleine moment, as Barber eats a slice of rhubarb cake made with whole wheat Frederick flour. From then on, he is on the hunt for foods that astonish him with their complexity, purity and resonance. Best of all, however, is the fact that Barber writes like a novelist, researches like a journalist, and annotates like a professor. This trinity of strengths means that The Third Plate is a thrilling read, as we follow the author as he tries to tease out what he needs to know about wheat, or tomatoes, or mullet, whatever. He is as intellectually hungry as he is culinarily hungry, so he can compare an edge zone – an ecotone – with the pass in a professional kitchen, or discuss how the ecologist David Wolfe can describe we humans as “subterranean-impaired.”
All the time he is looking for the connectedness of things – food, grains, culture, animals, eco-systems, terroir, soil, sea – and his book brilliantly relates the truth of a remark he quotes from the soil biologist Elaine Ingham: “It's not all that simple to have something that tastes really good.”
A tour-de-force.
The Third Plate, by Dan Barber (The Penguin Press)
