The Perfect Meal

by John Baxter

  Rule one of brocantes, particularly if one is a foreigner, is to hide your interest. Spotting a dusty plastic sandwich bag filled with old documents, I dropped it into the top dish and held them out to the bored young man drowsing in the hot morning sun.

  “Combien?” I asked.

  He stared blankly at my finds, then craned to look over the heads of the crowd. Obviously this wasn’t his stall. But his boss, like every other exposant, was trolling for bargains in the stock of his competitors.

  Finally he said, “Um, dix?”

  Was that ten for each item or for the lot? I didn’t let him think about it. He stared for a moment at the ten-euro note I shoved in his hand, then made that half shrug that only the French have mastered. Ten euros for some old dishes and a few papers? It sounded fair—and it was too hot to haggle.

  Back home, I wiped the dust off one of the dishes, arranged three crimson Jonathan apples on it, and placed it on the dining room table, where it caught the sun slanting through the wooden shutters. Beat that, Henri Matisse.

  Almost as an afterthought, I emptied out the documents. Most were menus: a dozen or more, all from around 1911 or 1912, the majority for private dinners to celebrate a first communion, a retirement, or a wedding.

  A few were meticulously hand-lettered. One could imagine the steel-nib pen dipped in a ceramic inkpot. Nothing else could achieve the rich downward curve of the S in Salade or that tail, called a serif, on the P of Poulet—a trick of penmanship and printing seen only in cultures where the eye, untrained in reading, needs to be led. Others were formally printed on heavy stock, with a flowery heading, the word Menu flanked by game birds, lobsters, fish, flowers, and fruit. And rightly so, since what these ancient cards trumpeted most flagrantly was not only tradition and ritual but excess.

  One card, headed simply “15 April 1912”—almost exactly a century ago—outlined a formal lunch.

  This was the kind of meal UNESCO had in mind. But where were such meals made today? These were truly “lost” dishes. For the modern cook, even the culinary language would be baffling.

  To deserve the description Royale, for example, a dish required a rich additional ingredient, making it “fit for a king.” But it’s been many years since any chef made a serious effort to achieve regal status for his work, and the few attempts have been dismal. In 1953 a competition for a new dish to mark the crowning of Queen Elizabeth produced Coronation Chicken, a lumpy mixture of chopped chicken in curry-flavored mayonnaise. No sooner was the recipe published than someone pointed out an embarrassing resemblance to the Jubilee Chicken created for George V’s Golden Jubilee in 1935, also using curry mayonnaise. Obviously news of neither dish reached the people charged with creating something for the 2012 Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth, since they came up with . . . yes, chopped chicken in spicy mayonnaise.

  Making Consommé à la Royale in 1912, the chef would have beaten eggs with cream, poured the mixture into molds, poached it, then cut the omelette-like solid into strips. Placing a few of these in a soup bowl with thin slices of chicken breast, mushroom, and truffle, he’d have ladled hot chicken consommé on top. Not something to be knocked up in a few minutes for unexpected guests.

  For Noix de Marcassin Sauce Chasseur, filets from a young boar, or marcassin, were sautéed in butter, then served in a sauce of white wine, butter, and herbs. To create a buisson, or bush, of écrivisses, the chef arranged shelled crayfish in a pyramid, on a base of champagne aspic. For Soufflé de Volaille Talleyrand, chicken breasts were pounded into a paste and folded into the egg mixture before the soufflé went into the oven.

  In 1912 even a modest provincial restaurant might have handled such a meal, with a little advance notice. But we live in an era when an average restaurant has two or three cooks rather than ten, and one of those an apprentice. Technology takes up the slack. In the wholesale supermarkets that ring Paris, reserved for the trade, the chefs of Paris’s best restaurants trundle six-wheeled steel platforms rather than shopping carts, and arrive at the checkouts with sacks of frozen frites, five-portion cans of confit de canard, and cartons of ready-to-reheat chicken à la crème, boeuf bourguignon, and blanquette de veau. In 2011, two thirds of French restaurants admitted to using plats en kit—precooked meals bought canned, frozen, or as boil-in-a-bag portions.

  Anything from the menu of 1912 that can’t be cooked in a microwave or under a grill has disappeared. As soufflés must be made on the spot, Soufflé de Volaille Talleyrand would appear only in the rare restaurants that specialize in them. But frozen or canned artichoke hearts have saved Fonds d’Artichauts à l’Italienne, and Caneton Nantais Cresson may survive, because every joint of the duck is available precooked, complete with sauce. Just add some sprigs of fresh watercress and serve.

  Markets, too, have been transformed. Of my local shopping streets, rue de Buci and rue de Seine, a visitor of the 1950s wrote that they were:

  always buzzing, lined with vegetable pushcarts both sides, meat and fish stores behind them, invariably thronged with shoppers. Walking through it, one was knocked over by the stench of rotten cabbage leaves, fresh turnips, raw tripe, steers’ red blood. Early morning, and the fire hydrants spurting, turned on by the street cleaners; the murky waters rolling over the ancient cobblestones; up wafting the odor of stale wine, Gauloises butts, spermatozoa, Lysol; running a few blocks down to the Quai des Grands-Augustins and the Seine, flowing soft and serene as an angel’s sigh.

  He wouldn’t recognize them now. The fishmongers and cheese sellers have long gone. One forlorn relic remains. Next to the Hotel Louisiane, over a permanently shuttered shop front, black tiles on a blue background spell out the word Poissonerie. The blue is the color of the Greek flag; the color James Joyce dictated for the cover of the first edition of Ulysses, published just a few blocks away, at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. Joyce walked down this street a hundred times. Did he look up one day, see the tiles, and make a mental note? The lightning of inspiration can strike anywhere.

  That phantom fish shop will never reopen, nor will rue Buci ever again stink from stale wine and semen. The space belongs to Italian gelato parlors, chocolatiers, wine merchants, shops selling organic cosmetics, and, of course, cafés, which each year extend their wooden platforms a little farther into the street, the better to squeeze in more tables.

  As for pushcarts, they would impede the view of the tourists who sip their cafés crèmes at those tables. Occasionally a street vendor of the old school reappears for a morning, like a ghost of another era. Once it was a car from the 1920s, lacquered a funereal black, with a gleaming brass hood ornament and wheel hubs, and the back half-converted to hold tubs of homemade ice cream.

  The ice cream seller

  Also, periodically, the sidewalk in front of the butcher is colonized by two dour men selling wrinkled dry sausage; wheels of hard cheese with thick, gnarled rind; and wind-dried hams from the mountainous and heavily forested part of central France known as the Auvergne. Though the sellers’ wide-brimmed black hats and black cotton smocks look a little like fancy dress, they are authentic enough, as are their products. Taking American visitors on a stroll one Saturday, I paused by their stall to enumerate the ingredients of their salami-like saucissons secs: “saucisson d’sanglier . . . sausage of wild boar; saucisson de noix . . . sausage with walnuts; saucisson d’âne . . .” I paused, glancing at my friends. Would they want to know that the next sausage was made from donkey meat? Probably not.

  Long after that dinner at the Grand Palais, memories of it continued to circulate in my mind.

  Of course, one couldn’t actually duplicate the Roman feast I’d visualized. Who, for instance, any longer roasted oxen? Did oxen even exist? An ox was what Americans call a steer, a castrated bull. In Europe and Asia, the castration made them more tractable to pull a cart or a plough, neither much used these days.

  Was there, somewhere in France, even a vestige of the food culture represented by that classical architecture and by the menu of 1912? If
so, where was it hiding? Might there even be, in some remote corner of the country, an ox waiting to be roasted and the people who knew how to perform this medieval rite?

  It would be fun to find out: to create, even in imagination, the kind of feast UNESCO decided was typical of French cuisine. But I needed an inspiration, a spark, a guide.

  Fortunately, I had Boris.

  Three

  First Catch Your Mentor

  I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.

  Gertrude Stein

  In a movie of the 1980s—title forgotten, if ever known—a woman, chef in a rural restaurant somewhere in the south of France, has just prepared lunch for twenty obviously important men.

  They praise her skill, particularly the main dish. Such a sauce! Never have they eaten better. She has exceeded herself.

  She returns to the kitchen, where the pot remains on the stove. For a long moment she stares at it. Then, ladling out a few spoonsful into a dish, she carries it to the back door. Sitting on the steps outside, an old man in an open shirt and ragged trousers is peeling potatoes. She holds out the dish.

  “Would you mind tasting this?”

  Dropping the last potato into a bucket of water, he wipes his hands on his trousers. Taking the dish and spoon, he tastes. He ponders, but not for long.

  “What wine did you use?” he asks.

  Instantly, the cook slumps. “I knew it! All the ’49 had gone, so I had to use some of the ’50.”

  He hands back the dish. “Ah, well, there you are, then,” he says sympathetically, but with an edge of reproof. No need to rub in the fact that, by the harsh standards only they share, she has failed.

  I saw this film years ago, but nothing has shaken my awe for the conviction at its heart: that there are people of such discrimination that they have forgotten more than you and I will ever know about how things should taste, smell, and look.

  I once spent a week in Australia with David Hoffman, historian of fast food and author of the definitive text The Joy of Pigging Out. The subject so preoccupied David that he once changed apartments to be nearer a tiny west Los Angeles café called the Apple Pan, which served superlative burgers and apple pie.

  During his Australian visit, he sampled numerous dishes but seldom more than a mouthful of any one. In the whole vast continent, only one taste caught his attention: Peppermint Crisp, a chocolate-coated green mint candy bar that, like Proust’s madeleine, revived memories of a childhood treat. “I’m taking back a bagful,” he told me. “Just simple mint honeycomb dipped in chocolate, but I love them. The true essence of good food is that it brings back the taste of childhood. And these are just like the mint candies my mother used to dole out on special occasions.”

  I’d been in France ten years before I met another of these gifted individuals, and it took a further five to become . . . well, I won’t say “friendly with”: a better expression would be “tolerated by.” But at least we were on sufficiently good terms to share the occasional meal, and for me to provide an audience as he delivered his jaded commentary on the decline of food not only in France but around the world.

  I’ll call him “Boris” because he reminds me of Boris Lermontov, the ballet impresario in the film The Red Shoes. He even looks a little like Anton Walbrook, the suave Austrian who plays Lermontov. Both are pale, as if they shun sunlight. Both have thick, dark mustaches and full heads of hair, in each case a little too long. Their pouchy, skeptical eyes mirror a dry humor just this side of bitterness.

  Anton Walbrook

  Boris and I were first thrown together at one of those fund-raising banquets for a worthy expatriate cause. Had either of us been paying, we would not have attended. I’d been invited as the Token Writer. As for Boris . . . well, who knew? He may have known something incriminating about the event’s organizer. It was equally possible he’d seen the well-dressed crowd outside and simply strolled in.

  Dinner was the cliché salmon with dill sauce, broccoli and new potatoes, all in boil-in-the-bag portions from some industrial restaurant supplier. Everyone got the same thing.

  Everyone, that is, but Boris. He got an empty plate.

  Was this an insult, to emphasize that he hadn’t paid? In that case, my plate should have been empty, too. Whatever the reason, he made no comment, just picked up his knife and fork and started to eat an imaginary meal.

  The imitation was perfect. He cut and chewed nonexistent salmon, took sips of invisible wine, mopped up illusory sauce with a phantom scrap of bread. Once, he even asked a neighbor to pass the salt. The people on either side simply didn’t notice the empty plate or, if they did notice, just didn’t believe their eyes.

  As everyone finished, he, too, put down his knife and fork and for the first time met my eyes across the table.

  Leaning forward, he murmured, “Diet.”

  I might have forgotten all about Boris if I hadn’t, by chance, run into him again a few weeks later. A friend who knew the more obscure byways of literary Paris had once taken me to a little restaurant tucked away in the maze of streets in the tenth arrondissement around the Gare de l’Est. It’s called La Chandelle Verte—The Green Candle. In other respects ordinary, it’s a place of pilgrimage for admirers of Alfred Jarry, author of the absurdist classics Ubu and Ubu Roi. (Ubu’s preferred expletive was “De par ma chandelle verte!”—By my green candle!) Jarry memorabilia decorates the walls, and the café frequently figures in events staged by those hard-core Jarryists, the College of Pataphysics.

  Boris was studying a portable chess set. There was no sign of a plate.

  Wondering if he would remember, I asked, “Still on that diet?”

  It took him a second to recognize me. When he did, he just nodded to the opposite chair. I sat down.

  “Who’s winning?”

  His game hadn’t progressed far. In fact, not a single piece had moved.

  “Too soon to tell.”

  As the waiter approached, Boris said, without looking up, “He’ll have the cabbage soup.”

  We sat in silence till the soup arrived. To cook a good cabbage soup is a challenge. I expected the conventional gray sludge with the consistency of wallpaper paste. This was different. Potatoes had gone into it, cubed, with the skins still on. White beans, garlic, and onion enlivened a robust stock. There was cabbage, of course, but not too much. The cook had peeled off the tough outer leaves and used only the heart, which ran through the broth in crunchy shreds. The combination was delicious.

  By the time I was mopping up the last drops of the soup, the chess game had advanced. A white and a black pawn faced each other on K4.

  “Do you recommend a dessert?” I asked.

  “The Gâteau Normand au Calvados isn’t bad.”

  I looked at the menu. “I don’t see it.”

  “Oh, they don’t do it here. But they make a good one at the Café Croissant.”

  Feeling the ground slipping away ever so slightly beneath my feet, I asked, “In the second? Where Jean Juarès was assassinated?”

  He looked up. Was there a little respect in his expression? I probably imagined it.

  “That’s one distinction of the place, I suppose,” he said. “Personally, I go there for the gâteau. They bake on Thursdays.”

  Taking this for an invitation, I turned up the following Thursday just before lunch. In 1914, a fanatic with the theatrically appropriate name of Raoul Villain shot socialist politician Jean Juarès here. In those days, the Café Croissant had special police permission to stay open all night for the benefit of journalists who had to keep late hours. Juarès and his friends were celebrating having stopped the government from introducing a compulsory three-year military service. Villain, a right-wing militarist, leaned through a window from the street and killed Jaurès with a single shot. A wall plaque commemorates the fact, and Boris was sitting below it. This time he wasn’t playing chess with himself but doing a crossword puzzle. Or at least thinking about it, since, tho
ugh he held a sharpened pencil, he hadn’t filled in a single square. I couldn’t read a word of the paper. It appeared to be in Cyrillic.

  The plate in front of him held a slice of moist-looking cake.

  “That will be the Gâteau Normand au Calvados?” I asked as I reached for the menu.

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “This was the last piece.” He pushed his plate toward me. “I saved it for you.”

  It was moist, crusted with coarse sugar, wedges of apple baked in, the whole thing fragrant with apple brandy.

  As I ate, he studied the crossword. “‘Vampiric member of the family Petromyzontid,’” he said. “Seven letters.”

  “Lamprey?”

  “I believe you’re right. Thank you.” But he didn’t write it down.

  There is a book to be written about my assignations with Boris, always at cafés that had a claim on immortality or notoriety. Usually some writer had worked there, or an artist had made it his favorite subject. Occasionally a building of historical importance, since demolished, once occupied the site.

  Visitors to Paris assume cafés are places to drink coffee and perhaps to eat, but to Parisians that’s only a small part of their significance. Herbert Lottman, who analyzed Parisian expatriate life more acutely than almost anyone else, knew their importance.

  One could not only meet friends in a café but conduct business there, spend half a day writing letters, or even a book. One needed no invitation to strike up a conversation with a stranger at a neighboring table, and an appointment in a café often replaced an invitation home. It kept home inviolate, and if home was a garret, all the more reason.

  A traditional café of the 1890s. The waiter carries the day’s newspaper, provided free to clients but attached to a wooden rod to prevent stealing.

  Boris never invited me to his home. For all I knew, it could be a seventh-floor chambre de bonne in the funky nineteenth arrondissement or a maison particulière in snobbish Neuilly. If he had a family, he never spoke of them. In the same way, even though we met in dozens of cafés, I almost never saw him eat, except, occasionally, a slice of pain Poilâne, the wholemeal sourdough bread that was one of the few modern products for which he had any respect.