Remembrance of Things Paris
Page 16
There are three principal varieties of French oysters: the belon, the marenne, and the portugaise. The greenish marenne and the grayish belon are both flat. The greenish portugaise nestles in a deep baroque shell. The first two are considered as being of equal rank. “The portugaise,”
said the headwaiter, “is not of the same class. A mink coat and a muskrat coat are both fur coats but they are not quite the same.”
Still, the portugaise is not bad. It is pretty good, in fact, but it suffers from a very old prejudice. A Portuguese ship in the 1860s was forced by a storm to jettison its cargo of Portuguese oysters in the Gironde estuary. The French culture of the variety started with this accidental beginning. The portugaise became so plentiful that until the First World War well-to-do French families ordered those oysters only for their servants.
During the 1922–23 oyster famine, the one French oyster to resist the mysterious plague was the despised portugaise. During that hard year, Prunier put portugaises into fattening beds to refine them. They became acceptable to the restaurant’s fashionable clientele, who did not wish to be completely deprived of oysters, but the old prejudice never quite died away.
The belon and the marenne are minkier in price. Preference usually depends quite simply on whether you like your mink dark or light. However, since the former hails from Brittany and the marenne comes from the Charente-Maritime, there may be taste fluctuations depending upon weather conditions in the two regions.
Prunier serves four each of the three varieties on the plate it likes to call le plateau vivant. The large oval platter also includes a selection of sea urchins, raw mussels, and giant shrimps, and two varieties of clams—all fresh with the taste of the sea. The sea urchins, oursins, are presented in their spiky cups to be scooped out with a spoon. These are always from Atlantic waters and far sweeter than their counterparts dredged up from the Mediterranean.
The platter is accompanied by thin slices of buttered brown bread and wedges of lemon. I do not believe a plump belon should have its flavor masked with anything more than a few drops of lemon juice. For those who believe differently, the house has developed an oyster sauce concocted of its own wine vinegar and sharpened with minced gray shallots. The gray shallot is rare and refined, and Prunier is rightly proud of the sauce.
When Alfred Prunier first founded his bistro in 1872, the house offered nothing but oysters, snails, grills, and pieds de mouton poulette (sheep’s trotters with sauce poulette). As late as the 1880s, the rule still held that no customer would be served unless he ordered oysters.
The rigid rules were given a body blow in the 1890s by a wealthy Bostonian who shocked Alfred Prunier by telling him he ought to cook oysters. The Bostonian, in turn, was even more shocked when he learned that Prunier didn’t know oysters could be cooked.
The American was a rugged individualist of his time. He insisted that Prunier take him to the kitchen, where he prepared an oyster pan stew. The Frenchman was converted and immediately added the newfangled dish from abroad to his menu. The now famous tournedos Boston, a tournedos with a sauce of cooked oysters, is another Prunier memorial to the Massachusetts gourmet.
During the first decade of this century, Alfred’s son, the dynamic Émile, developed Prunier into a restaurant celebrated for its fish and other seafood, as well as for its oysters.
Sea perch à l’angevine is one of the hundreds of fish recipes that enhance the international reputation of Prunier. The fish is opened, the backbone removed, and the interior seasoned with salt, pepper, and minced savory. The stuffing includes equal quantities of spinach and sorrel, cooked, ground, and combined with melted butter, salt, pepper, chives, and fresh bread crumbs. Once stuffed with this mixture, the perch is baked for thirty to forty minutes, basted occasionally with butter. The sauce is made by cooking chopped shallots in dry white wine over high heat. When the liquid has been reduced by one fourth, the heat is lowered, a spoonful of heavy cream added, and a goodly amount of butter introduced bit by bit. Pepper and salt are added; the sauce is brought to the first suggestion of a boil and served in a sauceboat.
Homard au Champagne is lobster at its most luxurious. A live lobster weighing a scant pound and a half is cut into slices an inch thick. After the slices have been browned in butter and seasoned with salt and pepper, half a bottle of very dry Champagne and a little fish stock are poured in, and a whole truffle is added. The pan is covered and the lobster cooked gently for twenty minutes. Then it is removed and shelled, and the meat and truffle are sliced thin and placed in a warmed, covered dish.
The sauce is made by straining the cooking liquid, reducing it, and adding a cup of heavy cream before heating. It is not allowed to boil, but is thickened and bound with egg yolks. This sauce goes over the lobster and truffle already dressed on the platter, just before being served.
This dish, cautions Prunier, cannot wait. But then, who, when faced with it, would want to tarry?
Six years ago, during the Floralies—the international flower show held in Paris—the committee asked a few leading restaurants to prepare dishes with a floral touch. Prunier accommodatingly dreamed up a mullet into which a note of jasmine had been introduced. The result was so delicate and exotic it might have been born of a couplet in a Chinese poem.
Prunier has one of the most renowned wine cellars of the city, built up lovingly by the family over the years. Many a bottle in the cave survived the great Seine flood of 1910, when the river turned the Place de la Concorde into a lake and lapped up the rue Royale almost to the steps of the church of the Madeleine.
The Prunier cellars, being in this area, quite naturally were flooded too. With characteristic aplomb the house took care of the emergency. Every morning and evening, the cellarmen stepped into square French dustbins and paddled through the watery vaults to fish from the racks for the bottles requested by the sommeliers in the dining rooms upstairs.
September 1965
LUCAS-CARTON
Naomi Barry
When a Frenchman wants to visit the last authentic vestige of the Paris of Les Grands Boulevards, he goes to a restaurant at the corner of the rue Royale and the boulevard Malesherbes called Lucas-Carton. Here the old traditions that made France great have never been interrupted. The splendid era is still a breathing reality. Every dish is prepared in the classical manner, without skimping or shortcut. The atmosphere is cushioned with inbred courtesy and solicitude. Even the fresh-cheeked, beardless busboys seem to have been born to the house.
Like a venerable bank, Lucas-Carton isn’t really noticed as one goes by. It has been there too long—for more than a century.
The glass revolving doors lead to an interior so purely 1900 that one must have been delivered by fiacre, and surely the horse-drawn omnibus must still be operating between the Madeleine and the Bastille. The walls are paneled in blond sycamore and sculpted in free-flowing motifs of leaves and thistles. Carved female heads smile from the center of light fixtures curved in flower shapes. Between the arches are rust-vermilion porcelain cachepots planted with greens. The pots were specially made to harmonize in color with the plush velvet banquettes by the Vase Étrusque, a shop across the street where upper-bourgeois Paris families for years have bought their important wedding presents.
The Beaux-Arts administration has wanted to class the restaurant as one of the finest remaining examples of the art nouveau style. Monsieur Alex, who is the soul and the dynamo of the enterprise, as well as its proprietor, refused the honor, saying “The place would no longer have belonged to us.”
The jet set—the swinging set—rarely comes here. But the serious gourmets are present, the ones who seem to have developed their taste buds in a school of the 1890s. On Sundays the important old families lunch here with their grown children. Various missions of the French government use Lucas-Carton practically as an official dining outpost. Even Winston Churchill and Konrad Adenauer were guests at intimate dinners here arranged by the Protocol.
There are seven private dinin
g rooms upstairs where old-fashioned methods of discretion set the tone. The rooms can be approached by a side staircase leading from the passage de la Madeleine. A foot placed on the first step sets off a warning bell that rings upstairs. Whenever guests include political figures, waiters are changed with each course to eliminate the possibility of following a conversation. It all has the lovely seriousness of a spy story in the days before wiretapping. Any waiter observed to have carelessly forgotten to shut one of the double doors is fired on the spot.
In a country where closing days, closing weeks, closing months are the rule, the luxurious Lucas-Carton is a startling exception. It is open every day of the week for lunch and dinner, every month of the year. The explanation is weighty with dignity. Says Monsieur Alex, “These days, a big businessman or a diplomat finds himself in Berlin today, in Washington tomorrow. He says to his colleague, ‘Let us meet in Paris at Carton on the twenty-third.’ He has no doubt in his mind when he makes the date. He knows Carton will be there ready to serve him.”
This devotional attitude toward service is an integral part of the grand style. It befits a house that was chosen by the French government to prepare and orchestrate the state dinner given in the Galerie des Glaces of the Château of Versailles on July 21, 1938, for their Britannic majesties, George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
Now the younger gastronomes are finding Lucas-Carton, and I couldn’t be more delighted. Henri Gault and Christian Millau, the two Paris journalists who have been rediscovering the city for their fellow citizens, gave Lucas-Carton their ultimate rating for classical cuisine, décor, and treatment of the public.
On November 4, 1965, the publishing firm of Julliard decided to hold a dinner that would be the acme of French gastronomy for Gault and Millau’s Guide de Paris. The locale chosen was Lucas-Carton. Monsieur Alex regards the Julliard evening as the restaurant’s most ambitious effort since George and Elizabeth.
Not long ago two successful young French journalists, a Paris decorator, and I decided to make it a foursome at Carton for a special dish of lark stuffed with foie gras. It was an evening of that kind of mood.
On each table, there were roses in sterling silver bowls and vases. I noticed a waiter deftly prepare a finger bowl. He poured hot water from a pitcher into a silver porringer and added a few rose petals. The remembrance of such things past made me happy.
Another waiter slipped a small round stool under my feet. It was a tapestry velvet stool somewhat worn by generations of slippers—silk, satin, and fine kid. It was an infinitesimal attention but it made me feel cosseted and precious. Monsieur Alex commented offhandedly that thoughtfulness had always been a sign of a great house in La Vieille France.
As we mused over the menu, which is printed on a very large, single sheet of cardboard, the maître d’hôtel gave us suggestions by performing a subdued ballet of presentation. He held before us a bowl of rare morels, black and convoluted as brains. Then he whirled out a dish of girolles.
“Look at them. Beautiful, non? They are the first to appear in Paris. You can still smell on them the fresh good earth of Périgord.” He tempted and excited our admiration by wafting before us the darkly golden mushrooms exuding their fragrant damp, and we were encouraged to try a small dish of them in butter as an entr’acte to our order.
It is a principle at Lucas-Carton to treat each guest to a loving display of the food stars of the day as they appear on the market. There is a special sensory delight in living seasonally, and the superb primary materials make of the year a colorful kaleidoscope. Spring offers delicate young string beans, almost as fine as blades of grass; early peaches blushing with pride; strawberries gloating with the promise of the juice locked within. Autumn is hardly less bountiful: September inaugurates the hunt with wild quail; October brings hares, pheasants, woodcocks, partridges. These are the months of the oysters—the plump belons and the greenish marennes.
“Ah, France is a rich country,” sighs Monsieur Alex. “Only the French do not realize what they have.”
The dining-room display of the first of the season’s products is theater, and meant to be. However, there is a second reason for showing the customer the treasures culled that day in Les Halles. To see beforehand what is to go into the pot will spare one any surprises.
Serious gastronomes are unashamed to come here and dine alone. Not long ago, a gentleman who seemed to be in his late seventies arrived unaccompanied. “He ordered a beautiful meal and an important bottle of wine,” recounted Monsieur Alex. “At the end he called me over. ‘Perfect. Nothing has changed. I have not been here in fifty years.’ He had come on a pilgrimage. He left like a jaunty young man, with a cigar in his mouth.”
Sometimes women come here alone too. Frequently a concierge from one of the big hotels will telephone, saying he is sending over an unescorted woman. “She is sure of a welcome,” says Monsieur Alex. “In some establishments she will be neglected. Here we treat her with double courtesy because she is alone.”
Alex Allégrier is a boss of the old school. “In life you get nothing without effort. I must show the example. My staff are my children. They will do anything for me. But they know I will do anything for them.”
Today he is sixty-four years old and a wealthy man. Yet four mornings a week he is at Les Halles at five o’clock making sure his merchandise is the best the market has to offer. His wife comes along to pay the bills, thus saving time.
She is a chic and handsome woman, well-dressed, well-coiffed, wearing a few discreet jewels as she sits behind the imposing cash desk in the main dining room of the restaurant. She is the daughter of Francis Carton. Despite the fact that she was the boss’s daughter, she was working at the same cash desk back in 1924 when young Alex Allégrier came as the new maître d’hôtel.
He was fresh back from London, where he had been a butler for the Baron d’Erlanger and had had free run of the house. “You can touch everything but the chambermaid.” One day the baroness called him. “ It is not right for a young man never to go out. Don’t you have enough money?” He assured her he had ample funds, but the baron and his wife continued to display concern. The following Sunday, consequently, he betook himself, impeccably dressed, to the Savoy, where he treated himself to a meal of the finest dishes and wine. After a very long lunch, and still alone, he returned to the Erlanger residence. The next morning the baron called him in. “Alex, you conducted yourself with the dignity and decorum befitting a butler of the Baron d’Erlanger.”
He had been watched all the time.
After dinner, Monsieur Alex took us down into his cellar. He loves to invite guests to descend for a little Champagne, a glass of marc.
The rue Royale is a short street leading from the Madeleine to the Place de la Concorde, and no street could be more aptly named. Its underground is a royal way of wine housing the cellars of Maxim’s, Fauchon, and Lucas-Carton. It is an awesome collection, representing an incalculable fortune.
In 1938 Monsieur Alex, sensing the impending war, walled up a section of his cellar, hiding behind it the finest bottles in his collection. Now he likes to show the marks of the wall that protected his treasures.
There are four hidden entrances providing access to the restaurant, three of them through the cellars. One is half a dozen doors away. It is beautifully Hitchcock.
On the wall of one of the private dining rooms is the menu, most modestly framed, of the great state dinner for the British sovereigns in 1938. This meal was the apogee of the restaurant’s entire career, which dates back well over a century.
A great menu is like a page of history. This one has the added touch of magic that comes from pageantry and pomp, extravagance and audacity, and culinary genius. Just to read it is to tingle the buds of taste.
Monsieur Alex relived it with relish as he described the great day. “There were three hundred guests and three hundred waiters to serve them. Actually fifty of them were police dressed as waiters. Supers. Extras. No one suspected they were guards. We had ninety
cooks working in the kitchen.” He made the appropriate comments and footnotes as he read the menu from the wall.
Perles Fraîches de Sterlet
(“Fresh gray caviar from Iran”)
Melon Frappé
(“The chilled melon had been worked into little balls resembling hazelnuts.”
Sherry Mackenzie Amontillado Grande Réserve
Délices du Lac d’Annecy à la Nantua
(“That is the omble-chevalier from the Lake of Annecy.
It took three thousand crayfish to prepare the sauce.”)
Chevalier-Montrachet 1926
Mignonnettes d’Agneau Trianon
(“Medallions of lamb fillet garnished with artichoke bottoms and tiny fresh vegetables.”)
Magnum de Château La Mission-Haut-Brion 1920
Timbales de Cailles Farcies à la Talleyrand
(“Wild quail stuffed with foie gras and truffles.” When I pointed out to
Monsieur Alex that he had already told me that wild quail is available in
France only in September and this dinner was served in July, he replied,
“But this was an affair of state. The British government cooperated with us
and arranged to fly quail in from Egypt.”)
Hospices de Beaune cuvée Charlotte Dumay 1915
Aiguillette de Caneton Rouennais à la Montmorency
(“Rouen duckling with Montmorency cherries.”)
Salade gauloise
(“A touch of olive oil. Cockscombs. Gaulois, you know.”)
Magnum Château Mouton-Rothschild 1918
(“It is not true!” I exclaimed. We were not much more than halfway
down the list. “That is the reason,” he said, “for the …”)
Granité au Lanson 1921