by John Baxter
As well as being chapels to his love of food, restaurants were also classrooms. Boris would order poulet chasseur on my behalf, then, with surgical skill, dissect a joint to demonstrate the elasticity of the tendons that showed this to be not some pathetic battery bird but an authentic poulet de Bresse that had been allowed to eat and reach maturity in the open air.
A spoonful of mashed potato sparked a dissertation on the cooking and preparation of the purée that Marcel Proust fed to the musicians of the Poulet String Quartet when he summoned them to his apartment at 2:00 a.m. to play César Franck and stir his memories. It came from the kitchens of the Ritz Hotel, directed by the great Escoffier.
Boris was so eloquent on the subject that I looked up the recipe, Pommes de Terre à la Crème, in Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire. It specifies Vitelotte or new kidney potatoes. They must be boiled in their skins, peeled immediately—a miserable chore for some sous-chef—then sliced and put into a pan with boiling cream. When the potatoes are soft and the cream reduced, the mixture is whipped with a hand whisk and “finished” with yet more cream. No wonder the musicians wiped their plates.
Boris could speak of food with the passion of a lover. But like the old man on the back steps in my film, he’d eat no more than a spoonful. Was he like those tasters of wine, tea, or coffee who need only a tiny amount to gauge quality? Or did he rather resemble Casanova in old age, having enjoyed so many beautiful women that perfection bored him, and he could be aroused only by the ugly and grotesque? Either way, Boris lived in the same belief that food wasn’t about appetite but appreciation. In every respect, he qualified for the term used by UNESCO to define a person who maintained the quality of food for its own sake. Fine shades of meaning separate the terms for connoisseurs of food. A gourmet enjoys food and eats well, but not to excess. A gourmand loves food so much that he gorges himself; he’s a glutton. But a gastronome is someone for whom the study of food and the maintenance of its excellence means infinitely more than the satisfaction of mere appetite. He doesn’t so much enjoy or love food as revere it—and one does not eat what one reveres.
In The Red Shoes, Lermontov declines to watch Vicky Page dance at a musical evening thrown by her mother. Ballet, he tells her, is his religion. “And one doesn’t really care to see one’s religion practiced”—he makes a contemptuous gesture that encompasses the gaudy décor and chattering guests—“in an atmosphere such as this.” Boris the gastronome was no different. To celebrate food in a public restaurant would have been, to him, like munching a hot dog in church. And I mean a hot dog with everything.
I hesitated for a few weeks before I told Boris about my project. We were in the courtyard of the Grande Mosquée de Paris. He drank mint tea, which I never liked, while I nibbled on one of those nut cookies called ma’amoul. I felt like Burton on his secret pilgrimage to Mecca, an unbeliever enjoying the pleasures of Islam.
I explained what I had in mind.
“I don’t like your chances of finding anyone to roast an ox.”
“I only want to see if these dishes still exist. It isn’t a real dinner. It’s a dinner of the mind. I thought you’d approve.”
“You’ve had worse ideas,” he conceded.
“You’ll help me out, then? Advise me?”
“As long as I don’t have to eat any of these things.”
“No risk. I promise. So . . . where would you begin?”
“As it says, a meal begins with an apéritif.”
“But which one?”
“What about your friend Karl?” he said. “I’d ask him.”
Karl was another expatriate writer and a famous drinker. But . . . Boris and Karl acquainted? I didn’t know that. Though now I came to think of it, they’d both been at that dinner where Boris ate his invisible meal. Was there a covert association of such men, meeting in out-of-the-way cafés for the same ambiguous exchanges that passed between Boris and me? Was I just one cog in a vast conspiracy? Paranoid fantasies ran through my head. There was that feeling again, of things slipping out of control.
Four
First Catch Your Tipple
“By the way, this café we are nearing is reputed to have the worst anisette in Paris. Shall we try it?”
We did, and it was unspeakable.
S. J. Perelman, The Saucier’s Apprentice
All over the world, waiters automatically ask if you want a drink before your meal, something to sharpen the appetite: an apéritif—from the Latin aperitīvus, “to open.” But only in France is that question pregnant with social significance.
The French believe there are some things one doesn’t drink before eating. But they don’t tell you what these might be. As a rule, no drink menu is offered until the wine list appears. Clients are expected to express their preference in aperitifs without guidance and, in doing so, to reveal their knowledge and experience or lack of it.
Coffee and tea, for instance, are never drunk at the beginning of a meal, only at its end. Beer, juice, and sodas are for the beach, not the dinner table. On the other hand, if you order a whiskey or martini, you risk being pigeonholed as an alcoholic. And to request “just a glass of water” is almost the worst choice of all, since it’s seen as evading the question. Naturally, water will be provided. But what do you want to drink?
Ian Fleming, preoccupied, as always, with lifestyle, included some advice in For Your Eyes Only.
James Bond had his first drink of the evening at Fouquet’s. It was not a solid drink. One cannot drink seriously in French cafés. Out of doors on a pavement in the sun is no place for vodka or whisky or gin. No, in cafés you have to drink the least offensive of the musical comedy drinks that go with them, and Bond always had the same thing—an Americano—Bitter Campari, Cinzano, a large slice of lemon peel and soda. For the soda he always specified Perrier, for in his opinion expensive soda water was the cheapest way to improve a poor drink.
Being Australian puts me in an awkward position when it comes to choosing an apéritif, since, unlike countries as diverse as Patagonia and Finland, Australia had no distinctive national tipple. Gullet-numbing iced lager satisfies 99 percent of the population, leaving a fragile but discriminating fraction to enjoy the country’s excellent wines. When I was a boy, wine was drunk only in gloomy and sinister wooden-floored bars called “wine lodges,” where shabby men and women sipped the day away on sweet sherry and port. It wasn’t until German and Austrian winemakers emigrated in the 1940s that we learned how to make wine and to appreciate it.
One lone attempt at an ethnic Aussie brew dates back to World War II. Troops stranded in the green hell of New Guinea invented Jungle Juice. A pumpkin was hollowed out and the cavity filled with dried fruit, sugar, and water. The pumpkin was then hung from a tree to ferment. As the rind rotted through, a murky fluid leaked out. The amount of alcohol varied, as did the flavor. I once asked a veteran what it tasted like.
“We didn’t give a fuck about the taste,” he said curtly. “Only the effect.”
Boris was right to suggest Karl as an authority on alcohol, since he’d made its appreciation his life’s work. His capacity was titanic. To accept an invitation for a drink at his apartment above Place de Châtelet was to invite oblivion. One of his mojitos turned my legs to rubber, and his martinis were so close to pure gin I suspected he followed the legendary advice of just bending over the glass and whispering, “Vermouth.”
But the Karl who opened the door the day I arrived to see him was barely recognizable. Where was the portly personage I’d helped down the stairs after our last party? He’d lost at least fifty pounds, and his trousers, showing just a suspicion of flare, suggested he’d resuscitated clothes that had been hanging in his closet since the seventies.
“What happened to you?”
He had the grace to look embarrassed. “I went on the wagon, dear boy. It was my liver,” he explained as he led me into his living room. “My doctor said it belonged in the Guinness Book of World Records.”
I’d barely sat
down before he went on. “But I haven’t offered you a drink. No reason why you should give it up just because I have.”
“No, please,” I said. “This is a scholarly visit.”
But abruptly there was a glass in my hand: the stemmed tapered tulip, customarily reserved for sherry, that the English call a schooner and the Spanish a copita. This one didn’t contain sherry, but something the color of weak tea. I sipped and gasped.
“What the hell is this?”
“Maple syrup schnapps. A friend in Toronto brews it himself. I’ve never tried it, but I was curious.” He looked at my glass, a little wistfully. “What’s it like?“
“Well, as the Germans say, ‘also works in your cigarette lighter.’”
“Yes, I fancied it might be a bit robust. But drink up, my dear chap. And tell me about this scholarly query.”
As I explained my project, I braced myself for the onslaught. Karl was one of those people who, if you inquire, “How much is two and two?,” is likely to reply, “Now, that’s a very interesting question. Take the Assyrians . . .”
As expected, the request for suggestions of obscure but tasty aperitifs opened the floodgates.
“Well, you would need to begin with the Italians. The French imported the habit from Italy in the nineteenth century. Italians love their home brews. Wormwood, caraway, anise . . . If you can soak it in wine with a bit of sugar, and the result doesn’t send you blind, you’ve got an aperitif.”
He had a thought. “Or you can use alcohol instead of wine In that case, they call it rosolio.” His eyes went nostalgic again. “Not a bad drop, rosolio.”
I had less happy memories. Once, at the end of a dinner in Florence, our hostess announced that two other guests, a plump couple from the alpine north, had brought some homemade liqueur. The bottle, tall and conical, its exterior molded in a relief of fronds, flowers, and fruit, was a masterpiece, complementing the lustrous golden liquor swirling inside. Reverently, a servant decanted a few spoonsful into enameled thimbles of glass, fragile as eggshells.
“La signora e il signore,” explained our hostess, who refused a glass, I noticed, “own the world’s largest plantations of”—she didn’t need to finish; I could smell it—“licorice,” she concluded.
I took a sip anyway. The nectar of the gods tasted like cough medicine.
“No, not rosolio,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”
“Very well. Leaving aside Italy for a moment, let’s concentrate on France. Well, I hate to say it, but the obvious choice is Kir.”
He was right. Kir, a flute of white wine sweetened with a shot of fruit syrup, usually crème de cassis, made from blackcurrants, had insinuated itself into the drink menus of the world, and in a surprisingly short time. Though it sounds like it should have been around for centuries, it doesn’t appear in any book of cocktail recipes until the 1950s.
Félix Kir was a priest, a leader in the anti-Nazi Resistance, mayor of Dijon from 1945 to his death in 1968, and a pioneer in “twinning” towns. Thanks to him, Dijon was linked with Cluj in Romania, Dallas in the United States, Mainz in Germany, Bialystock and Opole in Poland, Pécs in Hungary, Reggio Emilia in Italy, Skopje in Macedonia, Volgograd in Soviet Russia, and York in Great Britain. Scarcely a week went by without a deputation from one of them paying a visit. Facing yet another reception, Kir saw he could encourage both local winemakers and the bottlers of crème de cassis if he mixed their products in a single drink.
Kir comes close to being the perfect aperitif. It’s alcoholic, but only mildly. It has an element of the soft drink, but the wine adds a touch of sophistication. Best of all for the French, the many different styles of Kir provide an opportunity for the individual to display discrimination, knowledge, or intelligence—in other words, to show off.
For a start, it’s considered chic to ask for Kir royal, made with champagne rather than still wine. Even more obscurely, you can request Kir cardinal, which uses red wine, not white. But to see a waiter really baffled, demand a Kir communard. It’s the same as a cardinal but is named in honor of the anarchists of the Commune who briefly controlled Paris in 1871 and were, as you can explain to your impressed friends, Reds.
Then there’s the syrup. Traditionally, it’s cassis. But you can request Kir framboise, with raspberry liqueur, or Kir pêche, which produces a pretty golden drink—though, like most things made with peach, it is a trifle insipid. My favorite was invented by Florian, a boutique maker of jams and candies with a tiny factory wedged into a canyon next to a roaring stream below the Provençal town of Vence. Want to see a wine waiter lost for words? Ask for a Kir royal aux pétales de rose Florian. The barman hasn’t heard of it? Then, of course, you can explain how it’s made, which will make you the focus of attention among not only your dinner companions but the entire restaurant.*
When you ask what syrups are available, the waiter will nominate three or four, but almost never mure—blackberry. Edith Wharton spelled out the reason in her little book French Ways and Their Meaning, published in 1919.
Take care! Don’t eat blackberries! Don’t you know they’ll give you the fever? Throughout the length and breadth of France, the most fruit-loving and fruit-cultivating of countries, the same queer conviction prevails, and year after year the great natural crop of blackberries, nowhere better and more abundant, is abandoned to birds and insects because in some remote and perhaps prehistoric past an ancient Gaul once decreed that “blackberries give the fever.”
Aside from this obscure passage, I’ve never found a single reference to this prejudice. But it’s undeniable that, across the Channel, blackberries are gathered wild, made into jams, and baked into tarts. Yet they hardly ever appear in French markets. And nobody wants to serve a blackberry Kir.
Why? Perhaps because 1919 was the year of the influenza pandemic that killed between twenty and forty million people—the “fever” everyone so rightly feared. Before they learned the infection was worldwide, people in France blamed the recently ended war—specifically noxious vapors from the polluted battlefields and the buried dead. Such vapors would naturally rise in a warm, damp, misty month such as October, which is also the time when blackberries sometimes develop a toxic mold called Botryotinia. In that atmosphere, a few cases of blackberry poisoning, or even rumors of them, would have been enough. And after almost a century, some vestige of the belief persists.
I like Kir,” I said to Karl, “but it’s a bit . . .”
“Middle class? Know just what you mean, my boy. Next thing, they’ll be selling it at McDonald’s. But what about pineau? I’d have thought it would be your first choice, your wife being from Charente.”
He was right. Pineau, made with juice from the first pressing of the grapes, mixed with cognac, is a favorite in the region where Marie-Dominique’s family originated. It’s drunk at almost every formal meal—a good reason to avoid it for my imaginary banquet.
“I was hoping for something more adventurous.”
As expected, Karl took this as a challenge. “Adventure? Well, if you want adventure . . .”
Throwing open his drink cabinet, he revealed four shelves with bottles at least five deep. If Ali Baba had been an alcoholic, this would have been his treasure cave.
“What about pastis, Picon, sambuca, arak, or even the real stuff: absinthe?”
“I don’t like anise.”
“But, my boy, you haven’t tasted this.” He flourished a bottle with a garish label in Spanish. “Anis Najar, made only in Arequipa, Peru. Forty-six percent alcohol—same as vodka. Or this . . .” He hauled out another bottle. “Chinchón. Seventy percent alcohol. With this, I wonder the Spanish haven’t put a man on Mars.” More bottles. “Mustn’t forget Scandinavia. Aquavit? Lovely stuff. Swedish schnapps.” He held up a murky flagon with a handwritten label. “This is Finnish. Lapin Eukon Lemmenjuom. Translates literally as . . . um, ‘Lappish Hag’s Love Potion,’ apparently. Brewed from blueberries. Not sure where I got it, but has to be powerful. You know the Finns. Born
with hollow legs.”
An hour later, stepping out, unsteadily, into boulevard de Sébastapol, I had to clutch the doorframe as the floodlit Tour St.-Jacques reeled against the night sky.
I’d meant to ask Karl how he knew Boris. But such mundane questions dissolved in the haze of alcohol. My banquet was well and truly launched. Karl had convinced me that to give my guests anything but the mildest of aperitifs was to invite disaster and place them in the state in which I had found myself. They could all have classic Kir, and lump it. All I needed now was something to feed them. And, of course, an ox.
Five
First Catch Your Sturgeon
On the other side of my plate was a smaller plate, on which was heaped a blackish substance which I did not then know to be caviare. I was ignorant of what was to be done with it but firmly determined not to let it enter my mouth.
Marcel Proust, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu
At the start of a love affair, the bed becomes a raft of pleasure, adrift on an ocean of expectations. Midnight discoveries and drowsy revelations at dawn are the common currencies of discourse.
At such a time, in the depths of our first passion, Marie-Dominique murmured, “I have a secret.”
Could there be yet more to discover from this sorceress to whom I was so completely in thrall?
“Tell me.”
She wriggled closer. “I will whisper it.”
She brought her mouth close to my ear. “I love . . .”
I held my breath. What erotic revelation hovered on those delicious lips?
“No, I adore . . .”
Yes? Yes?
