Acquired Tastes

by Peter Mayle

  The best way to eat caviar is the simplest way: straight. If you’re going to eat it from a plate, chill the plate. If you’re going to eat it from the container, put the can or jar in a bed of crushed ice. Thin toast with unsalted butter, blinis, or a drop or two of lemon juice are optional, but there are no options when it comes to the method of transport that will take the caviar on the last leg of its journey into your mouth. It has to be a spoon.

  You will see people—very often the same people who smother their caviar with irrelevancies like chopped onion and egg—using a knife to grind the mixture onto a piece of toast as though they were making a peanut butter sandwich. They are vandals. The whole point of caviar, the reason it is so difficult and expensive to process and ship, is that the eggs must arrive in your mouth unbroken. Only then, as you crush them between your tongue and your palate, do you experience that tiny savoury explosion that all the fuss is about. If the eggs have already been broken by the pressure of a knife, the high point of a mouthful of caviar has taken place on the toast instead of on your tongue. So it has to be a spoon.

  Caviar addicts will debate the respective merits of spoons with the passion that is common to many participants in life’s arcane little rituals. Strangely enough, the spoon that all fortunate babies have in their mouths at birth—the silver spoon—is one to avoid, as it can impart a slightly metallic taste. Otherwise, take your pick: gold, ivory, wood, mother-of-pearl, horn or—my favourites—those short plastic spoons you can get in handfuls from the deli. They are easy to manage, they are soft and have no sharp edges that might puncture the eggs; they are functional, hygienic and disposable. They have no after taste, and they are often free. I recommend them.

  Your final decision is where and when to spoil yourself, and here you will begin to appreciate one of the less obvious virtues of caviar. It is, in the best sense of the word, a convenience food. You can eat it in bed without having to go through any dangerous contortions with knife and fork. You can eat it in the back of your limousine as you come home from the office (a one-ounce jar, consumed slowly, as it should be, with pauses for drink and contemplation, will last you from Wall Street to Park Avenue). You can eat it sitting on the floor in front of a log fire, or while relaxing in a warm bath. It doesn’t need an elaborate table setting or a thousand-dollar dinner jacket. Caviar does itself justice without any trimmings.

  It is a food for good times and bad times, a reward for triumphs and a consolation for disasters. It will taste wonderful on the day you make your first million, and maybe even better as a final defiant gesture before bankruptcy; at the beginning of a love affair, or at the end. There is always an excuse for caviar, and if you can’t immediately think of one, you can eat it simply for reasons of health. There is a rumour that caviar is good for you.

  At seventy-four calories an ounce, it would cost you tens of thousands of dollars before you started putting on weight. Caviar is reputed to be an aphrodisiac, a remedy for hangovers and a restorative for overtaxed livers. It contains forty-seven minerals and vitamins, and the female sturgeon’s only mistake in producing an otherwise faultless delicacy is that the sodium count is a little high. But what the hell. Nobody’s perfect.

  13

  The Perfect Second Home

  I used to see him all over the world, and I envied him. He would turn up in Geneva and Nassau, in Nice and Ibiza, always recognisable, even though I only ever caught a glimpse of him, and usually from a distance. I never met him; our paths crossed only at airports. But I could pick him out from fifty yards away, and from among hundreds of other travellers. While the rest of us were struggling with ungainly bundles of vacation paraphernalia—the ski boots, the tennis racquets, the fishing rods, the scuba-diving equipment, the overstuffed carry-on bags—and waiting to claim our freshly mutilated suitcases, I would see him strolling through customs with nothing more to weigh him down than a magazine and a couple of books. He didn’t need anything else. It was all waiting for him there, in his ski lodge or beach house. He was the man with the second home.

  In theory, the second home makes sense. It is always available. It is in a desirable part of the world, where real estate prices should appreciate steadily over the years. Lying in the sun or swooping down the piste, you can tell yourself that you’ve made a prudent investment. Sitting on your asset, you could even argue that its increasing value is effectively giving you free vacations. And there are fringe benefits: the knowledge that you can take off at a moment’s notice with just your passport, the feeling that you are not a mere gawping visitor but a kind of honorary native, the unworthy but pleasing tingle of status that is conferred by mentioning your little place in Antigua or Val d’Isére. Not for you the twenty-one-day all-inclusive package that the rest of humanity has to endure. You are the man apart, the man with a foreign front-door key.

  That’s how it used to seem to me, and when I started to meet people who had second homes, I would ask them to tell me how wonderful it all was. I became the vicarious owner, at one time or another of a house in Jamaica’s Port Antonio, an apartment in Gstaad, a studio in Paris, a farmhouse in Tuscany, and a boat in Key West. The collected wisdom and experience of the various proprietors saved me a fortune and cured me forever. I don’t want to own a second home. I haven’t got the stamina.

  To start with, there are the simple things, like books and music and clothes. Where are you going to keep them—in your home, or in your home away from home? Or are you going to duplicate everything? If you don’t, one of the immutable laws of nature will come into play, and you will find that the books you really want to read, the records you want to listen to, the old and well-loved silk shirts—they’re all thousands of miles away. It’s a small problem, nothing that money and a Teutonic flair for detailed organisation can’t overcome, but that’s only the beginning.

  Assuming that you will want to escape for a few carefree days in your second home whenever you feel like it, you won’t rent it out. Consequently, it will remain empty for weeks or months on end, and so the first few days of every visit will be spent getting supplies in, attending to minor repairs and generally making the place comfortable in time for your departure. That’s if you’re lucky. It can be much worse.

  My friends with the Tuscan farmhouse arrived one year for their rural Christmas idyll to find the driveway to their house sealed off. A local peasant had decided that it crossed a small part of his land and had blocked it with chains and concrete. It was a 300-yard walk through the mud up to the house, and waiting in the mailbox was notification of the lawsuit that the peasant was bringing against them.

  The owner of the studio in Paris went over for a week in the spring with the girl of his dreams and, for one horrible moment, thought that someone had died in the bathroom. It was worse. A pipe had burst, and the waste from the upstairs apartment had been building up for weeks all over the floor. He was never again able to feel that old sweet nostalgia for April in Paris without thinking of plumbing.

  Over in Jamaica, our man in Port Antonio discovered that his house wasn’t as empty as he had thought. A family of bush rats—quite a large family, from the sound of it—had moved in and made themselves thoroughly at home. The bush rat is not a fussy eater and, if undisturbed, will experiment with all kinds of new tastes. In this case, the menu had included rattan furniture, soap, candles, rugs and half a mattress.

  Of course, you will say, all these surprises can be avoided by hiring a caretaker, some trusty soul who will look after your second home as if it were his own. Alas, he may become so attached to it that he will bring a moving van and take all the contents to where he can keep a closer eye on them, as happened to some friends in Spain. But most caretakers won’t go that far. I’m told that they are usually quite happy to drop by every day to take care of what’s left of the liquor supply and make long distance phone calls.

  I am not by nature a pessimist, but after listening to stories like these I found that my enthusiasm for owning a second home had been repla
ced by relief that my problems didn’t include bush rats and larcenous caretakers. I was, however, still enthusiastic about the idea of having somewhere else to go every year. Pot luck vacations didn’t appeal to me. Nor did time sharing. And I have never liked imposing myself on friends for extended stays (‘Fish and guests smell at three days old’ is a Danish proverb that puts it succinctly). What I wanted were the advantages of a second home—the familiar, but different surroundings—without any of the horrors of ownership or the chores of the part-time proprietor. I think I’ve found the answer, although it will be another year or two before I know for sure. In the meantime, research and field tests continue.

  The idea is simple, and it works like this: With a map of the world in one hand and list of your leisure preferences in the other, pick a spot that has the basic facilities you want—tennis, windsurfing, girls, whatever it is that will sustain your interest in the years to come. The next essential is the matter of creature comforts, and now that the tentacles of civilisation are so widespread, these are not as difficult to find as you might think. Whether your idea of heaven is skiing in Australia or salmon fishing in the Scottish Highlands, you can be sure that someone has got there ahead of you and opened a luxury hotel. Go and stay in it.

  On your first visit, look the place over with the eye of a prospective investor rather than a transient guest. If you like what you see, and you think that you will continue to like it, make yourself known to the manager and tell him that you intend to become his most faithful and regular client. Have him show you a selection of the best rooms and suites. Choose one, and ask him to give you a price based on a series of guaranteed reservations spread over the next three to five years. He may or may not offer you a deal, but that hardly matters to a man of your means, because what you will gain by this arrangement is more important than a few dollars’ discount; what you will gain is special treatment.

  First of all, you will be known, unlike the multitudes of other guests who pass through the hotel each year. With some early and judicious tipping, you will not only be known but deeply loved. Your suite will always be ready for you, your little idiosyncrasies will be catered to, your mail will be held for you, the barman will know what you like to drink, your place by the pool and in the restaurant will be assured—you will, in other words, be spoiled. There is only one slight inconvenience to be dealt with, and that is your vacation equipment. It is tiresome and unnecessary to keep coming and going laden down with skis or spear-fishing guns or mountaineering boots. How much simpler life would be if they were kept at the hotel. And while you’re at it, why not leave a selection of clothes there as well? Your new friend, the manager, will be happy to perform this small service for such a valued and consistent guest, and then your bag-carrying days will be over. You will be travelling light, just like the man I used to envy.

  Once this has been arranged, you will have achieved the perfect second home. It will be familiar and extremely comfortable. You won’t be involved in any of the dreary operational details like making beds or shopping for groceries. You will be immune from ghastly surprises. Friends can come and stay without disturbing you in any way (they won’t mind having accommodations slightly inferior to yours as long as you entertain them in your suite occasionally), and your vacations will be what they should be—that is, a considerable improvement on real life.

  The cost of having a second home with a staff of 150 and all the small attentions a modest man could want will vary enormously, depending on the number of visits each year and the distance from your principal home. It will either be expensive, or very expensive, and will certainly not be less than £200 a day, although against this you can obviously offset the cost of a normal vacation. But that’s almost incidental. The real question is whether it makes sense to toss your money around in this delightful fashion instead of buying a place of your own, and here I can only offer my own experience and conclusions.

  I live in southern France, and go to London or Paris several times a year. At one time I thought about buying an apartment in London—nothing palatial, just a humble place where I could keep my suits and lay my head for two or three weeks a year. But after a morning with real estate agents, I gave up, because the initial cost of a small apartment in a pleasant area of central London is now around £120,000. On top of that, there are the annual property taxes, the building maintenance charges and the household costs, all of which add up to maybe £5,000 a year.

  For £5,000, I can stay in one of my favourite hotels, the Connaught, for two or three weeks a year. I can leave my shoes to be shined every night while I sleep, I can eat in the best hotel restaurant in London, I can have chambermaids and bartenders and concierges dancing attendance, and my tailor is just across the street. If I were to spend the price of an apartment—£120,000—on these excursions, I could stay at the Connaught every year for the next twenty-five years. With a bit of luck, I might even manage to die there after a particularly good dinner, content in the knowledge that my corpse would be disposed of in a discreet and tasteful manner. The service there is marvellous.

  14

  The True Cigar

  Smoking is now considered to be such a noxious and antisocial habit that anyone who has a good word to say about tobacco risks being beaten round the ears with a rolled up copy of the latest surgeon general’s report. The cigarette has been condemned as a villain. To a certain extent, its longer, fatter, deep-brown cousin has also been brushed by the same tar, and this is unfair. Smoking a cigar is altogether different from dragging on a cigarette: the smoke is not inhaled, and therefore the body is not affected in the same way; the absorption of nicotine and other substances is infinitely less. Yet the enjoyment, for the man who knows how to treat a cigar, is infinitely greater. It is the difference between a sandwich at your desk and lunch at Lutéce.

  Of course, it has to be a true cigar. We are not concerned here with those small mud-coloured tubes wrapped in recycled paper, coated with syrup and tipped with a plastic appendage. These may be called cigars, but they bear little resemblance to the real thing, and we shall leave them in decent obscurity, where they belong, on the candy-store shelf.

  Good cigars come from several parts of the world. Brazil, Mexico, Jamaica, and Holland, for example, all produce a respectable selection, varying in length and strength from the little Dutch Schimmelpennincks to the more impressively sized Jamaican Macanudos. But as worthy and well made as these undoubtedly are, there is no real argument about where the best cigars come from, and that is Cuba—home of the puro. The writer Bernard Wolfe has described the whole island as a natural humidor; no other place on earth possesses that special and precise combination of soil, sun, wind and water that is so perfectly suited to the cultivation of tobacco. And that is why no other place on earth breeds a cigar that looks, feels, smells, and tastes as satisfying as a genuine Havana. Unfortunately, that holdover from the JFK days, the ban on Cuban trade, has rendered Havanas hard to come by in the United States—you’ll have to leave the country to buy them legally; but it’s a worthwhile excursion.

  Even before you come to grips with the cigar itself, there are small pleasures to be enjoyed, starting with the box—an ornately decorated yet functional relic from the days before the invention of plastic. A true cigar box is made from cedarwood, which allows the tobacco to breathe and to continue maturing. It is sealed with what looks like a high-denomination bank note (the export warranty of the respective government), and it is often covered with the kind of baroque graphic art that conjures up thoughts of brandy and boudoirs: curlicues, gold embossing, vignettes of white-bosomed ladies and bewhiskered gentlemen, florid typography—everything, in fact, that nineteenth-century pop artists could lay their hands on.

  When you open the box, your nose is treated to a classic aroma, a bouquet that deserves a few quiet moments of appreciation before you proceed any further. It is a particularly masculine scent, and men have been known to line their clothes closets with the thin leaves of cedarwood that
separate the fat rows of cigars. (The thought of walking around smelling like a human corona may not appeal to all of us, but there are, God knows, worse things to smell of, as anyone who has been ambushed and sprayed on his way through the cosmetics department at Bloomingdale’s will confirm.)

  Now we come to the cigars, looking as prosperous and well filled as a group of investment bankers after a killing. This is the beginning of what should be at least forty-five minutes of unhurried enjoyment. Cigars should never be rushed, or puffed absentmindedly while you’re doing deals on the phone. The more attention you give them, the more pleasure they will give you, so if you don’t have a quiet hour or so, save the cigar until later. The leisurely ceremonial of preparing and smoking one of nature’s minor triumphs is worth the investment in time.

  A knowledgeable smoker will always inspect his cigar before committing himself. This is not an affectation; good cigars are made by human hands, which are fallible, and are sometimes stored in unsuitable conditions, which can be fatal. A cigar in its prime will feel firm as you roll it between thumb and index finger, and slightly elastic as you squeeze it. Brittle cigars will not taste good, and should be put aside for less discriminating smokers, such as politicians.

  If the cigar pleases your eye, your nose and your fingers, the next step is to make an incision in the wrapper at the head so that the smoke can be drawn through. Surgical techniques vary from smoker to smoker. Rambo, should he ever do anything as un-American as smoke a Cuban cigar, would probably bite off the end. More delicate souls will use a cigar cutter or even a sharp fingernail to make a small opening. The cut should be clean, and not too deep; if you stab a cigar in the head with a penknife or a toothpick, you will create a funnel, which results in a hot, bitter smoke.