"A train moves toward Berlin. It speeds through wide-open spaces, past smoking fields. It’s fall. Sitting in a second-class car, head leaning against the window, is a slender young man, about twenty years old, traveling light, a book in his hands; I am sitting on the bench facing him. I decipher the title on the book’s cover—La cuisine de référence, the famous French handbook for culinary professionals—and see the three stylized chef’s hats drawn against a red, white, and blue background, then I sit up and lean forward, propelling myself into the book’s pages with their rows of illustrations and italicized captions, step-by-step photographs that feature no human face or mouth, only torsos and hands: precise hands with clean, neatly trimmed fingernails; hands holding metal, glass, or plastic utensils; hands plunged inside containers, hands wielding blades, each hand captured in an action."