Choice Cuts

by Mark Kurlansky

  I glanced victoriously across the room at the cat, whose eyes seemed closed.

  II

  Several minutes passed. I was really very hungry.

  The door banged open, and my girl came in again, less discreet this time. She hurried toward me.

  “Madame, the wine! Before Monsieur Paul can go on—” Her eyes watched my face, which I perversely kept rather glum.

  “I think,” I said ponderously, daring her to interrupt me, “I think that today, since I am in Burgundy and about to eat a trout,” and here I hoped she noticed that I did not mention hors d’oeuvres, “I think I shall drink a bottle of Chablis 1929—not Chablis Village 1929.”

  For a second her whole face blazed with joy, and then subsided into a trained mask. I knew that I had chosen well, had somehow satisfied her in a secret and incomprehensible way. She nodded politely and scuttled off, only for another second glancing impatiently at me as I called after her, “Well cooled, please, but not iced.”

  I’m a fool, I thought, to order a whole bottle. I’m a fool, here all alone and with more miles to walk before I reach Avallon and my fresh clothes and a bed. Then I smiled at myself and leaned back in my solid wide-seated chair, looking obliquely at the prints of Gibson girls, English tavern scenes, and hideous countrysides that hung on the papered walls. The room was warm; I could hear my companion cat purring under the ferns.

  The girl rushed in, with flat baking dishes piled up her arms on napkins, like the plates of a Japanese juggler. She slid them off neatly in two rows on to the table, where they lay steaming up at me, darkly and infinitely appetizing.

  “Mon Dieu! All for me?” I peered at her. She nodded, her discretion quite gone now and a look of ecstatic worry on her pale face and eyes and lips.

  There were at least eight dishes. I felt almost embarrassed, and sat for a minute looking weakly at the fork and spoon in my hand.

  “Perhaps Madame would care to start with the pickled herring? It is not like any other. Monsieur Paul prepares it himself, in his own vinegar and wines. It is very good.”

  I dug out two or three brown filets from the dish, and tasted. They were truly unlike any others, truly the best I had ever eaten, mild, pungent, meaty as fresh nuts.

  I realized the maid had stopped breathing, and looked up at her. She was watching me, or rather a gastronomic X-ray of the herring inside me, with a hypnotized glaze in her eyes.

  “Madame is pleased?” she whispered softly.

  I said I was. She sighed, and pushed a sizzling plate of broiled endive toward me, and disappeared.

  I had put a few dull green lentils on my plate, lentils scattered with minced fresh herbs and probably marinated in tarragon vinegar and walnut oil, when she came into the dining room again with the bottle of Chablis in a wine basket.

  “Madame should be eating the little baked onions while they are hot,” she remarked over her shoulder as she held the bottle in a napkin and uncorked it. I obeyed meekly, and while I watched her I ate several more than I had meant to. They were delicious, simmered first in strong meat broth, I think, and then drained and broiled with olive oil and new-ground pepper.

  I was fascinated by her method of uncorking a vintage wine. Instead of the Burgundian procedure of infinite and often exaggerated precautions against touching or tipping or jarring the bottle, she handled it quite nonchalantly, and seemed to be careful only to keep her hands from the cool bottle itself, holding it sometimes by the basket and sometimes in a napkin. The cork was very tight, and I thought for a minute that she would break it. So did she; her face grew tense, and did not loosen until she had slowly worked out the cork and wiped the lip. Then she poured an inch of wine in a glass, turned her back to me like a priest taking Communion, and drank it down. Finally some was poured for me, and she stood with the bottle in her hand and her full lips drooping until I nodded a satisfied yes. Then she pushed another of the plates toward me, and almost rushed from the room.

  I ate slowly, knowing that I should not be as hungry as I ought to be for the trout, but knowing too that I had never tasted such delicate savory morsels. Some were hot, some cold. The wine was light and cool. The room, warm and agreeably empty under the rushing sound of the stream, became smaller as I grew used to it.

  My girl hurried in again, with another row of plates up one arm, and a large bucket dragging at the other. She slid the plates deftly on to the table, and drew a deep breath as she let the bucket down against the table leg.

  “Your trout, Madame,” she said excitedly. I looked down at the gleam of the fish curving through its limited water. “But first a good slice of Monsieur Paul’s pâté. Oh yes, oh yes, you will be very sorry if you miss this. It is rich, but appetizing, and not at all too heavy. Just this one morsel!”

  And willy-nilly I accepted the large gouge she dug from a terrine. I prayed for ten normal appetites and thought with amused nostalgia of my usual lunch of cold milk and fruit as I broke off a crust of bread and patted it smooth with the paste. Then I forgot everything but the exciting faint decadent flavor in my mouth.

  I beamed up at the girl. She nodded, but from habit asked if I was satisfied. I beamed again, and asked, simply to please her, “Is there not a faint hint of marc, or perhaps cognac?”

  “Marc, Madame!” And she awarded me the proud look of a teacher whose pupil has showed unexpected intelligence. “Monsieur Paul, after he has taken equal parts of goose breast and the finest pork, and broken a certain number of egg yolks into them, and ground them very, very fine, cooks all with seasoning for some three hours. But,” she pushed her face nearer, and looked with ferocious gloating at the pâté inside me, her eyes like X-rays, “he never stops stirring it! Figure to yourself the work of it—stir, stir, never stopping!

  “Then he grinds in a suspicion of nutmeg, and then adds, very thoroughly, a glass of marc for each hundred grams of pâté. And is Madame not pleased?”

  Again I agreed, rather timidly, that Madame was much pleased, that Madame had never, indeed, tasted such an unctuous and exciting pâté. The girl wet her lips delicately, and then started as if she had been pin-struck.

  “But the trout! My God, the trout!” She grabbed the bucket, and her voice grew higher and more rushed.

  “Here is the trout, Madame. You are to eat it au bleu, and you should never do so if you had not seen it alive. For if the trout were dead when it was plunged into the court bouillon it would not turn blue. So, naturally, it must be living.”

  I knew all this, more or less, but I was fascinated by her absorption in the momentary problem. I felt quite ignorant, and asked her with sincerity, “What about the trout? Do you take out its guts before or after?”

  “Oh, the trout!” She sounded scornful. “Any trout is glad, truly glad, to be prepared by Monsieur Paul. His little gills are pinched, with one flash of the knife he is empty, and then he curls in agony in the bouillon and all is over. And it is the curl you must judge, Madame. A false truite au bleu cannot curl.”

  She panted triumph at me, and hurried out with the bucket.

  III

  She is a funny one, I thought, and for not more than two or three minutes I drank wine and mused over her. Then she darted in, with the trout correctly blue and agonizingly curled on a platter, and on her crooked arm a plate of tiny boiled potatoes and a bowl.

  When I had been served and had cut off her anxious breathings with an assurance that the fish was the best I had ever tasted, she peered again at me and at the sauce in the bowl. I obediently put some of it on the potatoes: no fool I, to ruin truite au bleu with a hot concoction! There was more silence.

  “Ah!” she sighed at last. “I knew Madame would feel thus! Is it not the most beautiful sauce in the world with the flesh of a trout?”

  I nodded incredulous agreement.

  “Would you like to know how it is done?”

  I remembered all the legends of chefs who guarded favorite recipes with their very lives, and murmured yes.

  She wore the ex
alted look of a believer describing a miracle at Lourdes as she told me, in a rush, how Monsieur Paul threw chopped chives into hot sweet butter and then poured the butter off, how he added another nut of butter and a tablespoonful of thick cream for each person, stirred the mixture for a few minutes over a slow fire, and then rushed it to the table.

  “So simple?” I asked softly, watching her lighted eyes and the tender lustful lines of her strange mouth.

  “So simple, Madame! But,” she shrugged, “you know, with a master—”

  —from The Gastronomical Me, 1943

  JAMES BEARD ON MEIER & FRANK’S IN PORTLAND

  James Beard was born in Portland, Oregon, at the turn of the last century. An enormous man, his dream was to be an opera singer. His long career in food was marked by his love of an audience, but also by an unpretentious gift for words. No one ever explained a dish better.

  —M.K.

  The second great Portland restaurant, which still exists in different and more elaborate form, is located in Meier & Frank’s department store, run by the two families since the early 1850s. It is a landmark and has a personality unlike that of any other store in America. My father’s family traded there in bartering days. Mother had one of the lowest account numbers on the books and felt as much at home there as she did in her own house.

  The restaurant began as a novelty and became for a long time the best eating place in all of Portland. It was as hard to get a table there as it is now at “21” in New York. The men’s grill has some regulars who have been going there for thirty and forty years or more—every day! This year Meier & Frank opened another fine restaurant in their new shopping-center store, which serves dinner and has a bar, grill and dining room.

  One of the best chefs I ever knew was the chef at Meier & Frank’s for a number of years, Don Daniels. He was paid extremely well for a chef by those days’ standards and was worth it, for he produced food of rare quality—veal birds with a rich, creamy sauce, flavored with dill or tarragon; a beautiful salmi of duckling; and a remarkably good salmon soufflé with a hollandaise sauce. And he did superb clams, shipped from Seaside and Gearhart as fast as possible, which were sautéed meunière or with parsley butter and served with an excellent tartar sauce.

  Don also served good caviar and wonderful salads, among them one which included chicken, walnuts and his own mayonnaise. His curry of crab was unforgettable, as was his little boned squab with a rice stuffing. Desserts were beyond belief. His Frankco is still one of the greatest frozen desserts ever created. It is made with the heaviest cream possible, whipped and then frozen at a very low temperature. Then it is scooped out in jagged crystalline portions. In my day, this came in maple, cognac, lemon and strawberry, according to the season, and it is still a major attraction at Meier & Frank’s. Don also made rich home-style coffeecakes with almond toppings and streusel, using butter by the ton. And there was a remarkable black bottom pie. It had a crumb crust and was really two different types of Bavarian cream on a chocolate base. If you cared for that sort of dessert, then it was your dish and a sublime one.

  This man was unique, and fortunately the Meiers and Franks understood his genius. He had a true sense of the seasonal aspect of menu building and was one of the first restaurant men to feature seasonal foods when they were at their height. He had an established clientele who wanted the best and paid for it, and he ran the restaurant according to his own gastronomic pleasure. (They are the same ideas, on a smaller scale, which Joseph Baum applied so successfully to the Four Seasons.) I am glad I knew this man and grateful that, for a period of time, I could eat in his restaurant four or five times a week.

  —from Delights & Prejudices, 1964

  LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI’S CAFÉ

  Recipe for Happiness in Karbaraovsk or anyplace

  One good boulevard with trees

  with one grand café in sun

  with strong black coffee in very small cups

  One not necessarily very beautiful man

  or woman who loves you

  One fine day

  —1972

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Markets

  ÉMILE ZOLA ON THE TRIPERIE AT LES HALLES

  A triperie is a place where not only tripe but all kinds of offal are prepared and sold.

  —M.K.

  He first met claude lantier in the triperie. They had been going there every day, drawn by the taste of blood, the cruelty of street urchins amused by the sight of severed heads. A rust-colored stream ran around the pavilion. They dipped the tips of their shoes in it and made dams with leaves, which caused little bloody puddles. They were fascinated by the arrival of cartloads of offal, which stank even after thorough washings. They watched the unloading of bundles of sheep’s feet, which were piled on the ground like dirty paving stones; huge stiff tongues still bleeding where they had been ripped from the throat; and beef hearts, like huge church bells, unmounted and silent. But what most made them shudder with pleasure were the big baskets, dripping in blood, filled with sheep heads, their greasy horns and black muzzles and strips of woolly skin left hanging from bleeding flesh. They looked at these bloody hampers and imagined guillotines lobbing off countless heads and throwing them in baskets.

  They followed the baskets to the bottom of the cellar, watching them glide along the rails laid over the steps, and listening to the wheezing cry made by the casters as the wagons went down. Below was exquisite horror. They entered into the scent of death, walked between dark, cloudy puddles sometimes appearing to be lit by glowing purple eyes. The floor felt sticky on the soles of their shoes as they splashed through, revolted and yet entranced by this horrifying muck. The gas jets had low flames like the batting lid of a bloodshot eye. Near the water taps, in the pale light that came through the grates, they came to the chopping blocks. Mesmerized, they watched the butchers, their aprons stiffened with gore, smashing sheep heads with mallets. They lingered for hours until all the baskets were empty, held by the crack of bones, until the last tongue was torn out, the last brain knocked loose by blows to the skull. Sometimes a worker walked behind them, hosing down the cellar floor, water bursting out with the roar of an open floodgate. But although the flood was so powerful that it wore away at the floor, it did not have the power to remove either the stain or the stench of blood.

  Robert Doisneau, Untitled (Robert Doisneau/Rapho)

  —from The Belly of Paris, 1873,

  translated from the French by Mark Kurlansky

  EDNA FERBER ON A CHICAGO MARKET WINDOW

  Just off State Street there is a fruiterer and importer who ought to be arrested for cruelty. His window is the most fascinating and the most heartless in Chicago. A line of open-mouthed, wide-eyed gazers is always to be found before it. Despair, wonder, envy, and rebellion smolder in the eyes of those gazers. No shop window show should be so diabolically set forth as to arouse such sensations in the breast of the beholder. It is a work of art, that window; a breeder of anarchism, a destroyer of contentment, a second feast of Tantalus. It boasts peaches, dewy and golden, when peaches have no right to be; plethoric, purple bunches of English hothouse grapes are there to taunt the ten-dollar-a-week clerk whose sick wife should be in the hospital; strawberries glow therein when shortcake is a last summer’s memory, and forced cucumbers remind us that we are taking ours in the form of dill pickles. There is, perhaps, a choice head of cauliflower, so exquisite in its ivory and green perfection as to be fit for a bride’s bouquet; there are apples so flawless that if the garden of Eden grew any as perfect it is small wonder that Eve fell for them. There are fresh mushrooms, and jumbo cocoanuts, and green almonds; costly things in beds of cotton nestle next to strange and marvelous things in tissue wrappings. Oh, that window is no place for the hungry, the dissatisfied, or the man out of a job. When the air is filled with snow there is that in the sight of muskmelons which incites crime.

  —from Maymeys from Cuba, 1912

  CLAUDE MCKAY ON A FRUIT STAND IN HARLEM

  In
1890, Claude McKay was born in a thatch-roofed house in the lush green slopes of central Jamaica. In 1912, he came to America to attend an agricultural college in Kansas. His plan was to learn modern farming techniques and return to Jamaica. But two years later he had left school. Although he became one of the leading voices in the Harlem Renaissance, renowned for both novels and poetry, a part of him always remembered that verdant, red-soiled farmland he had left behind.

  —M.K.

  The Tropics in New York

  Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,

  Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,

  And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,

  Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,

  Set in the window, bringing memories

  Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,

  And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies

  In benediction over nun-like hills.

  My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;

  A wave of longing through my body swept,

  And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,

  I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

  —1930

  SAMUEL CHAMBERLAIN ON THE FISH MARKET IN MARBLEHEAD, MASS.

  Samuel Chamberlain, author and illustrator of almost fifty books on gastronomic subjects, wrote Clémentine in the Kitchen about the experiences of his family’s Burgundian cook when they took her with them to America at the outbreak of World War II.

  —M.K.

  But one local institution in marblehead was pitched precisely to Clémentine’s old-world viewpoint—the fish store of Mr. Job Stacy. Repeated coats of white paint, inside and out, could not disguise the antiquity of Stacy’s Fish Shop, installed in a low frame building that resembled a pure Cape Cod cottage. Back in the 1870s, Job’s grandfather had cut a many-paned shop window in the street façade of the house and established the business. Job and his brothers (who do most of the fishing) inherited it as a matter of course. Job takes charge of the shop, and his brothers, who are distinctly less personable and given to Saturday night bacchanals, preside at the picturesque old fishermen’s shanty at the water’s edge, where the nets, lobster pots, and Newbury-port rum are stored.