Gwyneth Paltrow: Beauty and the Feast

The first thing I noticed as I entered Gwyneth Paltrow's apartment in downtown Manhattan was. . . . But wait, let me begin at the beginning.

One day a few months ago, I was told that Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow had written a cookbook, and I was asked if I would like to write about it. After all, food is my field. Eating is my business. The idea was that I would spend some time cooking with Paltrow. As you might imagine, this could be a perilous assignment. If I discovered that Paltrow's cooking was all pretense or, even worse, not very good to eat, I'd be trapped. She was scheduled for the August cover. Nobody would care to read a story disclosing that Gwyneth Paltrow is a bad cook. I would need to lie. But in sharp contrast to my everyday behavior, I never lie in my writing, and I certainly wouldn't want to start now. The whole idea was impossibly risky.

And yet, ignoring the alarms that clanged within my skull, I said yes. I jumped at it. I have had a hopeless crush on Paltrow since her earliest movies, and her amazing performance in Shakespeare in Love sealed the deal. Paltrow lives in London with her husband, the British rock star Chris Martin, and their two children. Communicating through several intermediaries, we chose May 1 as the day we'd cook together in Manhattan, when she'd be passing through from California. Then, in April, Paltrow's culinary assistant, Julia Turshen, brought me a copy of the cookbook in manuscript form, 85 xeroxed pages of 144 neatly formatted recipes. It is scheduled for publication in April 2011, and its title is My Father's Daughter.

(Paltrow's father, who contributed the Jewish half of her genetic makeup, was the late Bruce Paltrow, who grew up in Great Neck on Long Island, attended Tulane University, and became a Hollywood producer and director, largely in television. Paltrow was exceptionally close to her father, and his death from cancer in 2002 was one of her life's greatest traumas. Paltrow's mother is the noted and beautiful actress Blythe Danner, whose family were Quakers in Pennsylvania.)

I opened the manuscript with apprehensive fingers. Have you ever read Paltrow's newsletter, titled “Goop”? (Back issues are collected on the “Goop” Web site.) The first newsletter I stumbled upon had recipes for kale juice, kale soup, skinless chicken breasts, and lots of liquids and powders to aid in your detox program. A terrible chill passed through my body. If her cookbook were written along the same lines, my appraisal of it would crackle with satire and ridicule. But that issue of “Goop” was all about Paltrow's painful training for Iron Man 2. She apparently cooks and eats liberally between movies and special events, whereupon she detoxifies and exercises in an extreme fashion. Another back issue had a section about cooking for the Passover holiday, with heaps of praise for Claudia Roden's groundbreaking The Book of Jewish Food (Knopf, 1996). And I discovered that My Father's Daughter is nearly free from food phobias and from an exaggerated concern for health (with the possible exception of Paltrow's notion that gluten, as in wheat, is bad for you). One of Paltrow's favorite foods is French fries; she gives an oven-baked recipe and a deep-fried recipe—which she sensibly admits tastes much better because it's fried. She loves pizza. She also loves foods that people generally consider healthful. Her recipes reflect the kind of cooking that Paltrow prepares for her family most nights when she and her husband stay home.

My next step was to make a transatlantic phone call so that we could choose dishes we would cook together. Paltrow immediately put me at ease. We talked about her favorite recipes, about restaurants and food shops and where they make the best lobster rolls and, it goes without saying, the best pizza. We spoke for nearly an hour, and it went without the slightest hitch, partly because I felt I had the home-court advantage. Our conversation was not much different from what it would have been if Gwyneth were a longtime food friend, except that Gwyneth is nicer than most of my food friends.

Gwyneth let me choose most of the recipes—gazpacho, corn chowder, chicken and dumplings, and Bruce Paltrow's World Famous Pancakes. I toyed with cooking her ten-hour chicken and her crispy potato-and-garlic cake. But we didn't have ten hours to spend on chicken. The potato cake is meant to replicate the immortal version at the restaurant L'Ami Louis in Paris, one of her late father's favorite places in the world to dine. But it's not the real thing; Gwyneth also has her doubts.

As I began to tell you, the first thing I noticed in Gwyneth's apartment was how sharp her knives are. Laser sharp. And how skillfully she uses them. Her knife skills put mine to shame.

More accurately, the first thing I noticed was how beautiful and clean her kitchen is, all white and filled with enviable appliances, including a dedicated deep-fat fryer. Gwyneth admitted to being a neat freak, as her father was. She also seems to be in control of her time, scheduling every hour closely, with precise awareness of how long things take, including cooking.

The second thing I noticed was that Gwyneth is considerably more beautiful in the flesh than in pictures. She's an ectomorph (in the language of anthropometrics). You might call her “gangling”—stretched out, a bit taller and svelter and better muscled than you would think, especially in the crucial upper-arm area. She doesn't look gangling in pictures. She has fine genes, good bones. Gwyneth has at least one personal trainer, works out for two hours a day, and owns a piece of the gym near her downtown Manhattan apartment. (Her business partner is Tracy Anderson, who appears in a Goop video.)

For the record, I should mention that Gwyneth was wearing jeans and a blue shirt with a white collar. Her jeans were pierced with more slits and slashes than any I've ever seen. But as the fabric itself was dark blue, I reasoned that the slits and slashes must have been administered intentionally and by artifice, perhaps by lasers and at a great price—though I'll admit that if I'm an expert in anything, it is not in the field of women's clothing. Despite my ignorance, I was able to notice that Gwyneth's jeans fit so loosely that they tended to slip down several inches below her waist, revealing an enviably flat stomach. Gwyneth is 37.

Only after an hour had passed did I notice the sharpness of her knives. I was impressed. Gwyneth sharpens her knives by hand, using a MinoSharp, a contraption that you fill with water before pulling the blade between two submerged ceramic wedges. I've never gotten the hang of that little device. Later she told me about her outdoor pizza ovens, one in each of her backyards in London and on Long Island, and I took her ownership of two of them as the mark of her seriousness as a cook.

When I arrived at Gwyneth's apartment (somewhat late, as is my habit—though it was totally the taxi driver's fault), she had begun the chicken with dumplings by browning a disjointed (organic) chicken in a white enameled iron pot. Then she flooded the fowl with vegetable stock. “That's going to be yum,” she said. Gwyneth makes her own stock about once a month. “It makes such a huge difference in the food,” she preached. I haven't made my own stock on a regular schedule for several years. But Gwyneth does have skilled kitchen helpers.

Meanwhile, Gwyneth assigned me to cut the kernels from the eight ears of corn I had brought, a job I executed with high skill and great dispatch. Most of the time, however, my work did not reflect either skill or dispatch. I would begin some task, start chatting with Gwyneth, become distracted, and then let her finish it, which she did with the concentration and speed of a home cook getting dinner ready for her family. I was able to distract her, however, with the large, brilliantly green-blue, nubbly emu egg my wife had bought at the Union Square Greenmarket.

She prepared two versions of the corn chowder, one with bacon for me and one without bacon for her. When we came to the gazpacho, I requested that instead of using a blender as her recipe requires (Gwyneth owns the powerful Vita-Mix, another index of seriousness, which turns tomatoes, onions, and peppers into a mushy foam), we should cut all the vegetables into tiny, regular cubes and float them in a vinegary tomato broth—my preferred form for post-Columbian gazpachos. (Before Cortés or Columbus brought the tomato from the New World to Spain, gazpacho was a garlic, bread, olive-oil, and fresh-almond soup.) Gwyneth protested that we wouldn't have time for this, but I insisted, and she was right. We ate the chicken together and the corn chowder, and some of the gazpacho vegetables, and they were all delicious. She sent me home with a container of her father's pancake batter and an ounce or two of good caviar. As it turned out, Bruce Paltrow's famous pancakes were simultaneously sweet and tangy with buttermilk, and later, when I thinned the batter, as Gwyneth had suggested, it produced some fine blinis that paired nicely with the caviar (although by now everybody should know that good caviar should be eaten straight, on a non-reactive spoon, with blinis and melted butter reserved for wrapping around salmon or trout roe or pressed black caviar).

Gwyneth and I agreed to get together two more times. (I was surprised that she was willing to devote so much time to my little project.) Three weeks later, when I was scheduled to pass through London on my way home from a trip to Denmark, we would play with her pizza oven. Five weeks later, when Vogue would spend two days taking pictures of Gwyneth in New York, I would ask any questions that remained.

I arrived in London on the first beautiful day of the spring. I stayed at the Westbury Mayfair (quite excellent and previously unknown to me) and took a taxi to Gwyneth's house in a section of North London known for its successful psychoanalysts, artists, writers, and intellectuals. I brought with me several loaves of special bread from Copenhagen. Gwyneth was delighted.

Gwyneth and Chris own two adjoining houses and three backyards. They bought the first house from Kate Winslet; it has the kitchen and the backyard where the wood-burning oven stands. (Later they bought the house to the left, and finally the ground floor of the house to the right, which earned them the garden. They seem to believe that extra backyards make good neighbors.) It was a lovely afternoon that culminated in the return of Gwyneth's two children from wherever British children go on sunny Thursday mornings in the spring. The logs in the brick oven had been ignited before I arrived and were blazing as Gwyneth got the pizza dough ready. She is extremely adept at kneading, which she accomplished on a table in the garden; then she formed the pizza crust (with what seemed to me to be some difficulty because the dough was not as stretchy as you'd expect after all that kneading), topped it, and slid it into the oven, where it joined a butterflied chicken that, on a lark, Gwyneth had already sandwiched between two heavy enameled iron pans—her version of pollo al mattone, the Italian (probably Etruscan) chicken under a brick. Two or three pizzas later, we sat at a long wooden table in the garden with Gwyneth's children and enjoyed slices of her pizza, glasses of wine, and the crispest roast chicken you can imagine.

During this remarkable hour of perfection, a critical voice sounded in my head: Why isn't the pizza crust chewy? Why is it so white and so weak? Before leaving, I investigated the container of flour and found that it was milled for pasta, which requires a lower-protein flour than pizza or bread. My taxi arrived just in time for Gwyneth to telephone her shrink in Los Angeles for her scheduled appointment. As we stood at the door, her two children arrived to say goodbye. Once outside I asked Gwyneth whether she had put her kids up to that. Of course, she replied; it's important for them to learn good manners. I was touched nonetheless. We parted with the expectation that we'd have our final meeting at the photo shoot in Manhattan and probably speak on the phone in between.

Which we did. Things had gone so smoothly between Gwyneth and me that I thought I had a journalistic obligation to shake things up, to peer behind what seemed to me an impossibly perfect life, and so, despite the strong affection I had developed for Gwyneth, I wanted to ask her some rude questions. After discussing the family's new dog, a Maltese the children wanted to name Daffodil (the downside being that the dog's likely nickname would be Daffy), and several gastronomic matters, I warned Gwyneth that I might ask a few questions she might find unpleasant, but that she wouldn't have to answer any of them. I remembered interviews from fifteen years ago, probably in Vogue, of several supermodels, and recalled a few of the questions. Had she ever had plastic surgery? Would she rather have somebody else's body? Did she hate any part of her own, the way Nora Ephron had written about how much she hated her own neck?

There was a brief pause. Gwyneth said, “I'll have to give that a little thought.” Her voice had changed. It was as though a cloud had passed over the sun.

At that moment, Gwyneth's children and their caretaker burst in, and her attention shifted. They had given their tiny new dog a bath outside, and now it was shivering uncontrollably. I suggested that they hug it tight and begged off the telephone. It was the last time I spoke with Gwyneth.

Two days before the photo shoot, I began preparing. I already had a list of questions—about where her father had grown up; about her brother, Jake; her trainer, Tracy Anderson; about the flour she had used in her pizza dough; about where her recipe for the crunchy potato cake had come from. I had tried several more of Gwyneth's recipes, her ten-hour chicken (a major success), her roasted cauliflower (which would have been absolutely scrumptious if I hadn't burned some of the florets), and her “perfect roasted Chinese duck” (mine was far from perfect). I had asked Gwyneth's excellent assistant Kevin Keating if I could bring some food, and he was enthusiastic. Gwyneth loves great cheese, and so I assembled a generous collection; there is little really good bread in London, and so I baked my best round crusty loaf. And, in case I changed my mind at the last minute, I tentatively arranged for the delivery of what I think is the best dim sum in Manhattan. This is another of Gwyneth's favorite foods.

On the morning of the shoot, I was told that, given the size of the set, only a small group could attend and the shoot was now closed. As I knew the set was vast, I was sure that I had offended Gwyneth. I was disconsolate. I never really cared about which part of her body she hates most. So I sent her a large bouquet of costly peonies. She replied with two E-mails assuring me that I hadn't offended her and wondering how I could have ruined her “perfect” duck recipe.

The recipes in My Father's Daughter come from Gwyneth's family, from simple restaurant dishes she's liked, and occasionally from cookbooks—sources that make up the repertory of nearly every home cook. But her father's cooking plays the leading role. Long after I was given the manuscript, Kevin sent me a copy of her moving introduction, and this answered many of my questions:

“I always feel closest to my father, who was the love of my life until his death in 2002, when I am in the kitchen. I can still hear him over my shoulder, heckling me, telling me to be careful with my knife, moaning with pleasure over a bite of something in only the way a Jew from Long Island can, his shoulders doing most of the talking. I will never forget how concentrated he looked in the kitchen. . . . It was as if the deliciousness of the food would convey the love he felt in direct proportion. . . . Health food was never really on the agenda, it was about fun and deliciousness and togetherness. . . . The most striking aspect about his cooking was how much joy he derived from feeding people that he loved. I mean, genuine, bursting happiness. . . . This book is meant to channel the ethos of my father by sharing the greatest gifts that he imparted to me. Invest in what's real. Clean as you go. Drink while you cook. Make it fun. It doesn't have to be complicated. It will be what it will be.”