A Healthy Place to Die

by Peter King

  “You’d be tough to work for, Axel.”

  He shook his head firmly. “I don’t think so. I demand a lot, sure. But I am fair—and I don’t ask anyone in my kitchen to work harder than me.”

  “I’m sure of that,” I told him. “I’ll have to try one of your cruise ships.”

  Until this moment, I had only my own experiences of the food at the spa on which to base any judgment. Axel’s wider experience was now suggesting that it varied in quality. A further viewpoint on Leighton Vance’s cooking would be interesting. When I left Axel Vorstahl, I looked for Michel Leblanc but could not see him in any of the obvious places. I was near the spa kitchens so I thought, why not give another look?

  As I approached, I could hear raised voices from inside. Some sous-chef getting hauled over the coals for not beating the eggs enough maybe. Then a door slammed, and the great khan of the kitchen himself came stalking out. He didn’t look to be in an approachable mood, so I didn’t approach him. He was storming straight ahead and didn’t see me, so I waited till he was out of sight and then entered.

  Cleaning up after lunch was well under way and a pastry chef was already rolling out sheets of dough for the evening desserts. Mallory was there, and when I walked over to her a couple of tears were trickling down her cheeks. She quickly rubbed her eyes. “Pepper,” she explained with a rueful little smile.

  She was putting bones, skin, and trimmings of fish into a large saucepan. She poured in white wine and some water, then a bouquet garni and some salt. She set it over low heat. “A fumet,” she explained. “It will be used for a sauce tonight. There will be a mousseline de poisson, and the fumet will be the base of the sauce.” She seemed glad to have someone to talk to, so I pointed to the three impressive pieces of meat on the bench by her side. “It looks like you’re serving leg of lamb too.”

  “Yes. We have several haute cuisine dishes, but Leighton likes to include one or two that are more country style as balance.”

  I looked at the bowls of freshly chopped carrots, onions, and celery, the jar of Provençal herbs, and the basket of spinach flanked by a bottle of Madeira wine. “So you’re going to prepare leg of lamb à la bourgeoise. I guess it’s too soon to take the cream out of the refrigerator. Are you going to bone the lamb?”

  “No. Oh, we do when we serve it in the elegant style, but for this peasant way, we don’t.”

  “A lot of peasants wish they ate this well,” I told her.

  She was cleaning up as she worked, making sure that all traces of fish were removed, as it has a very pervasive odor. I was looking around the kitchen, but I knew I was not likely to see any telltale signs that would confirm or deny Axel Vorstahl’s criticisms.

  It might have been because she thought that I was going to ask her questions that she didn’t want to answer, but I had the distinct impression that she spoke only to head me off. “We’re cooking some German and Austrian dishes tonight,” she said brightly.

  “Halve hahn?” I asked. Translated literally, it means “half a hen,” but it is a popular local dish in the region of Cologne, and when you order it you get a snack consisting of a hard roll, a slice of cheese, butter, and a glass of beer.

  “Oh, we can do better than that,” she smiled.

  We discussed German cooking. “In many spas,” Mallory said, “German cooking is kept to a minimum as it has the reputation of being heavy and fattening. Here, as you have found, we do not make a fetish of diet. Several German dishes are very popular, so we cook them. We avoid most of the ingredients that are high in calories or fats or cholesterol but without affecting the taste.”

  “Many Swiss enjoy German cooking, don’t they?”

  “Certainly, Switzerland consists mostly of people of German origin and with German names and habits. Naturally, they enjoy German food, and all the traditional favorites are cooked in homes and in restaurants.”

  She was surprisingly knowledgeable, and we talked about German cooking for some time. When she began to get that nervous glance in the direction of the door that meant she was afraid that Leighton might return and find her talking to me, I said, “I’d better go. Your husband doesn’t like you chatting with the guests, does he?”

  “He doesn’t like people in his kitchen,” she said.

  “Lots of secrets to guard?”

  “It is a very competitive trade,” she said defensively. “He’s not paranoid about it, he just likes to think of this kitchen as his private domain.”

  “He wants to make sure he keeps up his high standards,” I suggested.

  “Yes. He is very guarded with respect to his reputation.”

  I wondered what Axel Vorstahl would respond to that, then took my leave, telling her I was looking forward to making a German selection that night.

  “Fast food has a bad name,” Brad Thompson declared. “I want to change that. There’s nothing wrong with food just because it doesn’t take three hours to bake. Fast food can be good food—it just doesn’t take as long to bring it to the point where you can’t wait to put it into your mouth.”

  It was the afternoon session, and again there was a packed house. How many were pro and how many con remained to be seen.

  “Do I need to define ‘fast food’?” Brad looked around his audience. His good-natured face and easy manner got him off to a good start. “I will anyway—the fast foods that we know best are hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizzas. Hamburgers and hot dogs are of German origin, and pizza is, of course, Italian.

  “But lots of other countries have fast foods. In England they have fish and chips and Cornish pasties; in Belgium, they have fries—or ‘frites.’ We call them French fries, which makes the Belgians mad because they thought of them first. In the Middle East they have pita and kebabs; in Spain they have their tapas; Indonesia has satays, and Mexico has tacos and burritos.”

  He was about to continue but a raised hand stopped him. “What about fried chicken?”

  Brad nodded amiably. “A good question. We think of the gentleman from Kentucky immediately, don’t we? Colonel Sanders.”

  The same questioner asked, “Was his business really based on a secret recipe?”

  “Colonel Sanders himself once said that the seasoning of the batter coating was the secret but added that it did not contain any unusual ingredients. He said that ‘the herbs and spices stand on everybody’s shelf.’

  “That caused a lot of controversy,” Brad continued, “between the franchisees and the Kentucky Fried Chicken management. Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s—often believed to have secrets of their own in the fast-food market—said that Kentucky Fried’s licensees had to pay four or five times the price of the seasonings simply because they were obliged to buy from them.”

  “Somebody must know,” argued another. “Surely the Colonel obtained a patent?”

  “He did,” said Brad, fielding balls from all directions. “It was for the process only and did not mention seasoning.”

  “Hasn’t anybody had the batter coating analyzed?” came another question.

  “Yes. It revealed only four constituents—to the surprise of all concerned. They were flour, MSG, salt, and pepper.”

  “No exotic spices?” said a disappointed voice.

  “Nothing else at all.”

  A temporary hush settled. Everyone had wanted a secret to be revealed.

  Brad resumed his theme. “Young children, teenagers, and adults all love fast foods. The tempo of life today is geared to foods that don’t take long to prepare or to eat. We are a lot less formal than we used to be. Sitting at a table with seven or eight knives, forks, and spoons, wondering which to use and going through five or six courses—no, that’s not the way we want to eat as we enter the twenty-first century.”

  As Brad continued, more questions arose. Oriana Frascati was in the audience for this session, and she apparently felt it was her duty to her Italian background to say, “The pizza should get more credit as the ideal fast food. Tell us about its many virtues.”
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  There were laughs at this, but Brad was equal to the occasion.

  “It’s hard to beat as a fast food, I agree. Okay, the basic pizza was known as ‘marinara’—or ‘sailor style’—and it was so called because it was one of the staple foods on board the ships of the Neapolitan navy. Those were the days when Naples ruled the Mediterranean. The pizza marinara was made from only four ingredients: tomato, olive oil, garlic, and oregano—”

  “No cheese?” asked an incredulous voice.

  “Cheese wouldn’t keep on a long voyage,” explained Brad. I was pleased to learn that he had an interest in the history of the pizza and went further than merely knowing how to bake one. “In the city of Naples—still considered the birthplace of pizza—cheese was used, and it was mozzarella, made from buffalo milk. Other areas of Italy developed their own variations. In Rome they used onions instead of tomatoes; in Liguria, they used both.”

  The school principal whom I had encountered before spoke up. She seemed to be at least as interested in food as in education. “For us cooking dummies, it would be more helpful if you told us about the dough. Isn’t that more critical? Seems to me anybody can put what they want on it after that, and it’ll cook in the same time it takes the dough to bake.”

  “Makes sense,” nodded Brad. “Originally, flour, water, and yeast formed the dough. Yeast had already been developed centuries earlier for beer making, so although many other kinds of yeast are available to us today, it was beer yeast that was first used for pizza dough.”

  “Today,” the principal called out in the tone she must have found highly effective in her job. “How do we make pizza dough today?”

  “There are lots of ways—”

  “Tell us one,” came the insistent interruption. “The best one.”

  Brad was doing a masterly job of not losing his cool. “Sure. Mix whole wheat flour, a little salt, and a little bicarbonate of soda. Make a well in the center and put in some yogurt, water, and olive oil. Mix into a dough and knead it on a floured board.” He paused and his silence said, “How’s that for brevity and simplicity?”

  Inevitably, further questions took him into the realms of variables, but he had done a fine job of sticking with the essentials, and he got a big round of applause when he concluded.

  I made my way to one of the public phones and dialed the number I had noted from the issue of Good Food magazine. I was offered several numerical options by the electronic operator, but I opted for the ‘stay on the line’ contact and got a real live person. She had a pleasant female voice.

  “I want to speak to Kathleen Evans,” I said.

  “Who’s calling please?”

  “It’s Thomas Mann,” I said, giving the first name that came into my head. He had written about a spa and it was in either Germany or German-speaking Switzerland.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Mann, she isn’t here,” the operator said. “Can someone else help you?”

  “I really need to speak to her. I have some information she is waiting for, so if she has told you she doesn’t want to be disturbed, I can assure you that she would want to be. She is very anxious to hear this.”

  “I understand, but she is not here—truly she isn’t.”

  “She’s in the office somewhere, though, isn’t she? I know she was at that conference in Switzerland, but she’s back now. She told me she was leaving the conference early.”

  “Well, she’s not back here yet,” she said hesitantly.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes. I tried her at home too and she wasn’t there.”

  As I paused to think, she asked, “Can someone else help you?

  “Yes,” I said, “put me through to Janet Hargrave.”

  “I’m sorry, she’s not here either.”

  “Can you tell me where I can reach her?”

  “I’m—er, not sure—”

  “She’s there, though, isn’t she?”

  “No, she isn’t.” The girl was beginning to wilt a little between her excessive use of negatives and steering an uncertain path between loyalty and lying.

  “She said something about going to Switzerland too,” I said. “She can’t have left already?”

  “She left yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? That was sudden, wasn’t it?”

  She saw a way to put an end to all these questions and took it.

  “Yes, it was sudden. It surprised us all.”

  I thanked her and hung up. So Kathleen hadn’t been seen since … well, since I saw her in the Seaweed Forest. As for the story about flying back—if that were true, she had not been to her office or her home. So where was she? I had a chilly feeling about that all over again.

  Janet Hargrave knew more than she was telling me, that was plain. Of course, there was no reason she should confide in me. Still, she had evidently flown here for some reason connected with Kathleen, and it sounded as though it had been a hasty decision on Janet’s part.

  If Janet was looking for Kathleen, she really wanted to find her—flying to Switzerland at short notice betrayed unmistakable urgency. What could Janet learn here? I wondered. Whatever it was, she would have a hard time finding it, or so I was guessing. That meant that she might clutch at any straw, ready to accept any help she could get.

  Even from me …

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE SWISS ARE NOT cocktail drinkers. As most of the guests at the spa were not Swiss, that factor did not necessarily apply so perhaps there was something about the Alpine air that turned the taste buds in another direction, away from alcohol. The fact remained that cocktail drinking before dinner was not a heavily attended function.

  I remarked on this to Gunther Probst, who was the other one in the lounge. He was drinking Scotch on the rocks, and I was having a vodka gimlet—I only drink when I’m on a job.

  A “job” meaning an investigation. … Well, this hadn’t started out that way, but if it wasn’t an investigation now, it was a darn close facsimile.

  “South Germans prefer a spritzer before a meal,” he commented.

  “It’s a pleasant drink,” I conceded. “Hock and seltzer water. The extra kick in a cocktail that comes from a higher alcohol content, though—it is refreshing.”

  “It helps the mental processes, I always say.”

  “In need of some stimulation, are you?”

  He held up his glass and looked through the amber liquid pensively. “This isn’t going to be as easy as I thought.”

  “Putting food recipes on disks?”

  “People are doing that already, I know. I planned on going a couple of stages further.”

  “Leighton Vance can help you there,” I said. I display a touch of adolescent malice when provoked, and I hadn’t liked the way Mallory had wiped away tears when I had almost interrupted a scene of domestic conflict in the kitchen. If I could divert Vance into other areas of activity, he would have less time to cause distress to Mallory. I resolutely ignored the voice that was whispering, “None of your business.”

  But Probst shook his head. “He can’t.”

  “Can’t—or won’t?”

  “Says he’s too busy.”

  “He does have a very busy kitchen to run. This place is full right now. You can see his point of view.” I was trying to be reasonable.

  “The best people to help you are those who are the busiest.”

  “Maybe it says that on page three of some millionaire industrialist’s best-selling memoir,” I said. “I’ve had a lot of help from busy people myself, but I get a rejection once in a while. A high-quality kitchen is a place where you can expect such a rejection—there’s an awful lot to think about and keep track of.”

  “I suppose,” Probst admitted. “I guess I just like to be rejected a little more graciously.”

  “Ah,” I said, “grace! Now that’s another matter.”

  We both laughed and had another drink. Elaine Dunbar came in, wearing light gray slacks and a gray jacket of light wool with a silky weave i
n it.

  “Haven’t seen you in these last sessions,” I told her.

  She ordered a Campari and soda. “I’ve attended a couple,” she said. “Must have been different ones.”

  “Could be,” I agreed. “Hope you’re finding them more rewarding than Gunther here.”

  She raised an eyebrow, and Gunther repeated his problem.

  “Our chef’s uncooperative, is he?” she said. “I’m going to be approaching him in the very near future. Maybe I’ll get more out of him.” She sounded as if she relished the prospect of a reluctant witness.

  Brad Thompson came in then and asked for a double martini. He was followed closely by Oriana Frascati, who wanted only a glass of mineral water. The conversation fragmented from that point on, and we went into dinner.

  Bearing in mind Mallory Vance’s promise of German dishes, I scanned the menu. Sure enough, Leighton was offering several. Konigsberger klopse was there and so was wiener rostbraten. The latter is a dish I often cook myself at home. It was Cole Porter’s favorite, and it is one of mine too. It is simple, in fact deceptively so, and requires close timing. In addition, Leighton was offering kalbfleischvogeln, veal birds with the unexpected anchovies; rehrucken, loin of venison; and spaetzle, Germany’s answer to pasta. I chose the wiener rostbraten, always hoping that another chef will cook it better and I can find out how. It was not as good as mine but partly redeemed by the Bordeaux that I had with it. This was the Fleur-Cardinale, whose producers are now buying up vineyards in the Napa Valley, where they intend to make an American Bordeaux that is just as good as its French progenitor.

  The next morning, Michel Leblanc led the parade with a class in bread baking. Caroline told us in her introduction that this was one of the cooking subjects that had been most requested. It seemed that so many cooks, confident in other areas, felt that their bread was not the superior product they wanted it to be. Good bread was not enough—they wanted to bake great bread. So here was Michel Leblanc to teach us how.

  “Most of us don’t like the bread we buy,” he began. “Steam baked, precut, plastic wrapped—modern bread typifies the mechanical approach, the output of a production line, all the non-human approaches to food that we are now finding undesirable and unacceptable.”