The Table Comes First

by Adam Gopnik

  We approached the zone, the perfect moment of stiff-but-not-too-stiff peaks. (“DO NOT UNDERBEAT / DO NOT OVERBEAT!”) I beat. He waited. I beat some more. He nodded—go on. I went on, far longer than I usually would, and then he tapped my shoulder. There! That was it. The zone was there: not the gauzy, moist shiny area where I used to stop but a step above.

  “I remember how there was one kid at Le Cirque back when who just did this,” Yosses said. “Starting around five-thirty, he had the bouilli or the soufflé base, and he beat egg whites all night.”

  As we put the soufflés in the oven, he said, “Fifteen minutes,” and when fifteen minutes had passed he held his hand above them, to measure the heat rising, as much as the texture firming, and nodded one last time.

  They were perfect. The apricot intensity shone; the egg whites’ neutrality and airiness softened and lifted it; the hotness gave an edge of taste delight that is always allied to danger, even tiny danger. A thousand small adjustments turn rules into skills, and then three smaller ones turn real skills into art. With Yosses’s help, I had taken something elaborate and made it something that seemed elemental. The primate instinct—get sweets at any price—had been turned into this polished performance. The virginal egg whites, the electric storm that whitened them and made them stiff: the perfect zone was drier and older than I had imagined. You could beat them more and they would be better.

  The quest I had undertaken showed, at least, that whatever makes us age, it is not the sugar that we eat. It is the years that are passing. The older we get, the harder we work at everything, even our pleasures. We have to follow the recipes more precisely, put in a sixteenth of an inch of water, if only because we notice our failures more. And yet in return we can sense at last what the pleasures truly are, and where they come from. The fictions that force the feelings become ever dearer to our lives the more fictional we know them to be. Dessert is completely inessential to life; we can do without it; sugar blew in on a bad wind from the Caribbean not so long ago, and we can do without it. And yet it is completely at the center of life, complex and rich enough to make something that touches the edge of art, or at least of stage magic. You never need to eat it; you never miss a chance. It sits as a joke on a primate trait—the chimps that kept after sweetness all the time, like the ones that hungered for sex all the time, ended up making more of themselves than the next bunch of apes—and yet it makes this apricot soufflé, smelling like the kitchen you grew up in. It is the most particular thing; it is the most abstract and conceptual thing. A line of verse enters your head: “Though life is fading / love resists / though sweets are ending / sweet persists.” Sweetness exists outside its objects, as Shakespeare’s favorite adjective, as an idea of the best thing on the table, which, to fully get, we have first to give up.

  Ferran’s question is still the one that counts: how do we finish the meal? But then, how do we finish anything? At least I know now that if we beat hard enough, and long enough, and do both more than we ever thought we would have to, we might yet arrive at a lighter end.

  18. LAST E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL

  Dear E.P.:

  I want to tell you, finally, about something that happened last summer. Yes, I have gone back to writing to you, my imaginary confidante, whatever you may have thought of Russian Jews on Locust Street in Philadelphia. You were wrong about them, but you were right to be a feminist food critic at a time when no other existed, and to demand that our ancestors be right about everything in advance is as mad as hoping that our descendants will think us right about everything in retrospect. Life is too short, and the room too empty, if we fail to forgive our predecessors everything short of the unforgivable. (What is unforgivable? Ah! That I shall save for another book.) There’s no winning. But there is trying.

  And there is dining. I had been haunted enough by Jacques Decour and his last letter, that the obvious thought occurred even to me. We were going back to Paris for a July visit, and I wondered if perhaps the auberge that he mentioned—the Auberge des IV Pavés du Roy, whose menu he wanted to leave for his girlfriend—might have left a trace, however remote, on the world’s store of information. There must be somewhere in some obscure corner of the scholarly Web a reference to the auberge, I thought. After all, I had found traces of the Omelet King—even the Omelet King’s royal omelet pan!

  Well, the Auberge des IV Pavés du Roy turns out to have a whole Web page, a menu, a brief history—the works. You can read the menu, the dishes, and see pictures of the place! It turned out to still exist at 55 Avenue du Manet, in Montigny-le-Bretonneux, a small town about an hour outside Paris, not too far from Versailles. Not a well-known small town, or a picturesque one, just a small suburban town. It must be the place—how many Auberges des IV Pavés du Roy could there be? So we made a date to go out on a beautiful July Thursday; I discouraged the kids, but they wanted to get out of Paris and the heat, or wanted to be near us, or maybe they were actually interested.

  It was a nice place, a very nice place, in that half-in-the-country, half-not-in-the-country way of French inns. It was an old-fashioned stuccoed auberge, with a cast-iron sign hanging out front and a pretty garden in the back, and a children’s play set near the garden. The cook was the husband, and the very harried but trying-hard hostess was his wife. There was some kind of local event going on when we arrived, and, puzzled to have taken a reservation all the way from Paris—we had called the day before to confirm and ask the way—Madame had a table for us in the garden. We sat and waited, at first a bit awkwardly—what were we doing here, after all?—and then comfortably, as the commis, right out of Marcel Pagnol, brought us bread, which reassured the children, and then Sancerre rouge, nicely cold, which reassured the parents. Then the menus came, and you know how it is when menus come, Elizabeth, it is hard to stay awkward—the act of ordering, choosing, is itself so touched by hope. I doubt that anyone can completely despair when menus appear. (In movies and television shows, when they want to create a mood of absolute alienation they always set the thing in a cafeteria.)

  So we ordered and then we talked, naturally enough, about the Resistance. Luke, now sixteen, asked me if “in the big picture” the Resistance had made any difference. I tried to explain that it all depends what you mean by difference. No, they hadn’t really done much, spending a lot of time on guard against one another’s betrayals and fighting among themselves, socialists against Christian Gaullists and communists, who were courageous but committed to Stalin, against everyone else. And they were the victims of horrible retaliation by the Germans, satanic cruelty even in a relatively placid occupation zone like France. So, no, they hadn’t really made much of a difference to the outcome of the war.

  But in another way they had made all the difference. They had saved the honor of France, which was not just an abstraction but a living reality; you could hold your head up after the war and say, Some people didn’t submit, and that was true, too. They had acted with so much courage—courage for its own sake, courage because you could be courageous and couldn’t live with yourself without it—that they had supplied a kind of moral pattern for the rest of the century. Their fiction had become a feeling. Any country that could produce men and women as brave as Jacques Decour didn’t have to feel lost, or ashamed of itself. So it depends what you mean by difference, I said, and then I realized that it didn’t depend on what you meant by difference so much as on what you thought the big picture was.

  Then, at Olivia’s insistence, I narrated, rather lamely, a history of the French Revolution, getting half of it wrong, but the essential point—that what started in glory ended in chaos, and what began in a declaration of all the rights of man ended in a denial of every one; but that the articulation of what was right was either no help at all or a constant source of hope—was there. It depends on how you see it. Brillat-Savarin’s eternal point was that at some level it didn’t matter, that the hubbub of the Palais Royal created a series of values—of which the restaurant we were sitting in now was
a modest but real microcosm—that endured whatever squalid mess the politicians made of things, and that that was the right point to make.

  How was the food? The food was fine. Sixty years ago it would have seemed very good. Seventy years ago, Decour’s time, it would have seemed like the best food in the world. We had filets of beef with green peppercorn sauce, and sautéed potatoes—they used to do pommes soufflées at these places, but no more, I know why—and green beans. The desserts were really good: Luke said that the profiteroles were the best he had ever had, and he is one who has eaten many profiteroles. I had an old classic, apple sorbet doused with Calvados, the kind of thing that is so hard to find these days. It was the kind of lunch Liebling writes about longingly from his New York of Schrafft’s and Longchamps and chicken à la king and pot pie (not that these are not good things in their way), and with the tastes of Barcelona still sharp on my lips—gingered scampi and smoked eel and brains—I knew that it was old-fashioned. Still, it was the fashion that I, too, had loved of old.

  When lunch was ending with those good profiteroles and an extra glass of Calvados—Martha gave me the are-you-really-sure-about-that? look that I think they hand out, secretly, on the wedding day, to big eaters’ spouses—we explained why we had come, and Madame explained that yes, it was the same place, and yet it wasn’t the same place. That is, it was the same place—it had been the Auberge des IV Pavés du Roy for a half century, one could see the photographs of the old place inside—but when they had expanded the highway back in the early seventies, they had had to move it back some ways from the road. So though the same it was different and (one hoped) even better. They did have beautiful black-and-white photographs up inside, of the place as it had been back in the thirties. It had been very chic then for people to come out from Paris. Madame shrugged. (Here is one of those photographs, the auberge just as it was when Jacques Decour came here.)

  In a way it was truer to the spirit of the adventure—righter—that it be the same and different, too. Food, after all, can’t be held in place. But the front is the same, and the place is, more or less, the same, and the town is the same, and the arrangement, tables inside, tables out in the garden, is the same.

  Then Madame said, with real eagerness, “Did you find us on the Internet?” I could see that she hoped we did, with visions of Americans surfing the Web to this spot and crowding in for lunch. Martha told her the long story, eagerly—about Jacques Decour and the last letter and our search for him. It was well told, as by one oiled—not indecorously, just a little productively—by more red Sancerre than she is used to.

  “Ah. So you didn’t find us on the Internet,” Madame said at last, disappointed a little. A lot. But then, being polite, she said she’d like a copy of whatever it is I was writing, which she shall have, whether she really wanted it or not.

  I reread Decour’s last letter when we got home to Paris, and realized then that I had missed something essential. In a way, as Huck Finn would say, I missed the whole blame point, missed it a thousand miles. Decour was a communist, a Marxist, and buried in the letter is the clear cool claim that he is talking about food because he refuses to talk about God. Vous savez que je m’attendais depuis deux mois à ce qui m’arrive ce matin, aussi ai-je eu le temps de m’y préparer, mais comme je n’ai pas de religion, je n’ai pas sombré dans la méditation de la mort; je me considère un peu comme une feuille qui tombe de l’arbre pour faire du terreau. La qualité du terreau dépendra de celle des feuilles. “You know that I’ve been waiting for two months for what’s going to happen to me this morning, and that I have had time to prepare myself, but, as I have no religion, I have not fallen into a meditation on death; I consider myself a little as a leaf who falls from the tree to make the soil. The quality of the soil depends on that of the leaves.” It is a nonbeliever’s claim, quietly defiant. As I have no religion, I don’t think of death. The questions of food rise from that context.

  Faith in history, not to mention in the Utopian state, has vanished, in various ways, noisy and silent, but the relation between the end of faith in Heaven and the assertion of faith in something else has not. The continuity of life is won in the face of time and tragedy, and the rituals of an inn in the country is one of the places that we locate it. We find it here. I don’t believe in a good God, and I don’t believe, as Decour must have, in History. But I believe in the inn of the four seasons: that Decour went there with the girl he loved, that he left her the menu when he knew the Nazis were going to kill him, that it has moved, and not moved, been rebuilt and is still the same, so that we can eat there now. They could walk in now, and be happy again in the garden. It would all be different but they would still be at home. We walked under the sign, and contemplated the connections. He had thought about that in his last moments. That the table came last to mind is another way in which the table always comes first.

  Did I tell you that I found a photograph of him? Here he is. He looks terrifically elegant, doesn’t he? Oddly humorous, and he seems to be making a joke with his fork above those two bowls. What’s he doing, exactly? I think he may have a little bit of pasta in one bowl, and the sauce in the other—a French manner of eating pasta that I’ve often noticed, more controlled and precise than the Italian way. He’s certainly engaged in a small, sweet joke about eating, whatever the joke may be. I look at the picture often, and wonder. In his three-piece suit and neat parted hair, who could imagine that he would choose the fate he chose, and try to keep the pleasures of the table present in his mind even as he did? In any case there he is, and there we are, and whatever connection there may be, straight or crooked, occult or true, it passed across and around a table. For people who believe in this life alone, trying to decide how best to live, questions of food will always be of great importance.

  That night, back in Paris, none of us were really hungry—I can’t eat more than one real French meal a day, who can?—but by ten-thirty or so, still bright in the Palais Royal, where we were, luckily, blessedly, staying in a friend’s beautiful apartment, I did a quick dish of spicy rice and beans, a dish that the children love, and that Martha and I associate with one of the worst nights of our life, and then with its happy ending—a night when Luke was desperately sick with what turned out to be salmonella, food poisoning, and we had carried him to Necker, the children’s hospital, and they had made the diagnosis and had prescribed drugs for it. We had gotten him home—I had raced to an all-night pharmacy on Montparnasse, I think it was, and then given it to him and—miracle!—he seemed almost instantly better. We tucked him in, and, after a day’s pain, we realized suddenly that we were hungry. And I made rice and spicy beans, and we were happy.

  I looked out on the beautiful placid gardens, where the great comic adventure of the restaurant had begun two centuries before, when Chantoiseau had opened his little bouillon parlor and Brillat-Savarin had praised it, and where so many pilgrims had come since to have dinner and find love, or something.

  What is it that we want from eating? Comfort? Absolutely. A symbol of love shared? For sure. But above all, food matters for us as a daily symbol of the sacred, which means for secular people that it is a kind of sacred-in-itself. Questions of food are all just questions of living refracted outward, like the imaginary mountains explorers see in the Arctic, projections forward of their own ice-breaking boats. The plate of rice and beans, the dumbest thing I do, is also the most blessed, since it sums up in a single spicy point a whole story of our lives, and the intersection of others. We can have our cake and eat it, too, if we are willing to see that the point of having cake is to eat it and accept that then it will be gone. The secret of life is detachment and attachment in equal measure, the cake devoured but still held in our mind.

  We are, after all, animals who experience our lives as if we were gods. We eat, burp, grow, shit. And yet we construct from the brutal sensory necessities a shape and a history and a purpose to life; we sit down and choose from the menu. The truth is that we have a hard time treating cooki
ng as an art because it is so easy for us to experience it as a miracle. Dinner is often our brush with Olympus. The gods sat down to dinner twice a day, even though they would live forever if they never ate again.

  We eat like animals and dine like… well, like demigods at least, minor local deities of minor local shrines. And we have a tragic dimension dignified enough for deities, too, since our animal nature assures that we will not be animals forever. Our knowledge of mortality is the overwhelming fact of our life. We seek for some kind of comfort and escape from that terror, and none is better than the apparent continuities and the small miracle of eating: you always do this. You were starving, and now you’re not. In the most beautiful of psalms, the shadow of death, whose valley we all walk through, is met by a spread table. It isn’t an accident that Jesus’ most original act was at a table, too, which seemed so shocking to a peasant honor society, where values depended on clean and unclean. Jesus would eat with anybody, whores and tax collectors, Gentiles and tribesmen. What did he eat? We can’t be sure, but we know he liked wine enough to make a lot. He ate what he liked where he liked with whom he liked, at a table open to all.

  That was what Decour had really meant, I think, by “questions of food” in his letter, and that was why he thought of them at the very end: it was the closest he could come, as close as he needed to come, to an idea of the sacred. We have trouble thinking that food is art, but no trouble at all imagining that it might be divine. We doubt that Ferran Adrià is as good as Picasso, but accept that wine might be made the blood of God. Our difficulty with the idea of food as a fine art is not that we have trouble elevating it that high; it is that we have difficulty in making it descend that low. We may not share the particular sacredness of the particular table—but no one has any difficulty with the concept: water into wine and wine into blood? Oh, yes, I get that. Saffron rice and honey and you become a man? How else? What you eat is how you please omniscient power? It’s obvious, isn’t it? There are many metaphysical ideas that bewilder even the metaphysicians; the idea that food is the material of faith is not one of them.