by John Baxter
It soon became clear that I had stumbled on a great secret. Forget those stories about Tatar warriors. Steak tartare came to France with entirely different foreign invaders: the Yanks who flooded into Paris in 1917 as soldiers and returned a few years later as tourists. Steak tartare was just a burger and fries, with the ingredients rearranged to suit French taste.
I could almost reconstruct the moment of invention: 1919. Two Americans in a Montparnasse bistro, probably drunk, are trying to explain to a waiter that they want a hamburger—something which, although it was invented in Chicago in 1904, was totally unknown everywhere else. They probably described the ingredients—minced beef, with onion and a pickle—and were astonished when he returned with all these, just differently arranged.
“No, no, we said rare, not raw . . .”
And meanwhile, in the kitchen, the chef is tasting it and saying, “Y’know, these Americans are crazy, but this isn’t half bad . . .”
As I was musing on this, Marie-Dominique materialized behind me.
“So . . . are you going to include a tartare in your feast?”
I slammed the Escoffier shut.
“Er . . . haven’t decided.”
But I had, really. There would be no tartare at my table. If it ever got around that I’d exposed this French classic as an American invention, what restaurant would ever serve me again?
Fifteen
First Catch Your Hare
Hare à la Royale at Montparnasse, roast piglet at the Odéon, comfits in the Saint-Michel square . . . Such dishes may not be exclusive to the Left Bank, but here they had their origin and can be savored in surroundings conducive to indolent enjoyment.
Paris Rive Gauche, Official Guide of the Chamber of Commerce of the Left Bank of Paris, 1957/58
Occasionally, heading out of Paris to a far corner of France, I wondered if I was neglecting my home city. Shouldn’t any banquet taking place in Paris include at least one dish that was unique to Paris?
Immediately a problem presented itself. There aren’t any.
When I ate lampreys in Bergerac, bouillabaisse in Sète, moules in Fouras, or socca in Antibes, I had been, in the fashionable term, a locavore. The ingredients had come from within a few kilometers of, if not from, the actual neighborhood.
But nobody grew much in Paris anymore.
In 1780, 1,600 varieties of fruit, flower, and plant were found in the Paris area, including 104 types of fungi. Individual villages on the outskirts were famous for their produce: Argenteuil for asparagus, Montreuil for peaches, Montmorency for cherries, Vaugirard for strawberries, Saint-Germain for peas, Clamart for artichokes. Each morning, in season, supplies of all these arrived at Les Halles, making it possible to prepare dishes with a distinctive local character.
Cherry picking at Montmorency
Those orchards and farms are gone, engulfed by apartment buildings and autoroutes. In Britain, local councils divide waste ground into allotments where people can cultivate their own vegetables. This has kept alive a tradition of home-grown produce. But Paris has no such program. A few tiny vineyards survive in Montmartre, Belleville, and in what used to be Vaugirard, where, significantly, the vines are part of a park for children. Any examples of cultivation are as exotic as camels or polar bears to modern Parisians, who bring their children on Sunday afternoons to stare and wonder.
Admittedly, white button mushrooms were called champignons de Paris and ordinary boiled ham jambon de Paris, but neither was particularly Parisian. Escoffier listed a few dishes as à la Parisienne, including a rice pilaf with chicken, but since his recipes for pilaf à la Grecque . . . Orientale, and . . . Turque used the same ingredients, give or take a pinch of saffron, powdered ginger, or a few raisins, the label hardly seemed earned.
In her French Regional Cooking, Anne Willan suggests potage St. Germain and canard Montmorency as Paris specialties. The potage, a soup containing green peas and shredded lettuce, might have begun life in the fields of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pré, which once occupied a large portion of the Left Bank, but peas and lettuce grow everywhere, and it could just as easily have been invented in Lyon or Lille. Canard Montmorency, a dish of duck breast, used the sour cherries for which Montmorency used to be famous, but the village was fifteen kilometers outside the city, and so hardly Parisian. In an early version of pick-your-own, people would travel there on weekends, hire a cherry tree for the day, and pig out. Ironically, not a single cherry tree remains there.
As for Lievre à la Royale, the hare dish that the Left Bank Chamber of Commerce suggested was everyday eating in Montparnasse, I suspect this was a practical joke, on a level with sending the new apprentice to buy a can of striped paint or a left-handed screwdriver.
Cooking hare is a tortuous business, starting with securing the animal itself. When Isabella Beeton published her Book of Household Management in 1861, she wisely began her recipe for Jugged Hare, “First catch your hare.” This is good advice. The hare is wily, agile, and may be killed only in season. Since its blood plays an important part in the cooking, it can’t be bought already butchered but must be shot with precision or, more often, snared, and the blood drained while still fresh. At the end of the nineteenth century, hunters were known to travel as far as 120 miles to the fields around Tours and spend a week finding a prime specimen.
Once the hare had hung long enough for the meat to rot into a suitable state of gaminess, the cook could get to work. Jointing the animal, he sautéed the pieces in goose fat and bacon, then braised them in two bottles of red wine, with twenty cloves of garlic and forty shallots—so finely chopped, dictated the standard recipe, “as to attain as near as possible an almost molecular state.” Once the meat was sufficiently tender that it needed only a spoon to eat it, the blood, along with two glasses of cognac, was mixed into the cooking juices to create the sauce. Not a dish likely to turn up on the menu of a mom-and-pop café in Bohemian Montparnasse.
Just as I was about to abandon hope of finding a uniquely Parisian dish, a casual aside by Anne Willan caught my eye: “The onion soup and grilled pig’s feet of the brasseries of Les Halles,” she wrote, “have become an institution.”
Of course! What was I thinking of? What dishes were more typical of Paris than these? I’d dallied with pigs’ feet in the past and never found their cooking worth the tiny amount of gelatinous meat they yielded. But soupe à l’oignon was classic, a dish not only of culinary importance but one with a role in the cultural, artistic, and literary traditions of the nation. And it was specifically and typically Parisian—even wedded to a precise district: the streets around the old produce market of Les Halles.
So far, I hadn’t tried cooking any of the dishes I’d imagined for my repas, but now I was inspired. I would make my own onion soup.
Yes, I was that dumb.
Sixteen
First Catch Your Bouillon
Beautiful soup! Who cares for fish, game or any other dish? Who would not give all else for two pennyworth of beautiful soup?
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
One should never eat soup on Sunday. Not in a Paris restaurant, anyway.
In fact, try not to eat out on Sunday in Paris at all.
Markets shut at noon on Sunday and don’t reopen until Tuesday morning. Most small restaurants also close. If larger places remain open, it’s seldom with a chef in attendance—just a skeleton staff and a menu of dishes prepared ahead of time, ready for the microwave.
That’s not a problem with boeuf bourguignon or cassoulet, which can taste even better a day or two after they’re made. But fishing boats don’t put to sea on weekends, so your sole meunière will have last seen the ocean three days before—something all the butter and lemon juice in the world can’t disguise. As for oysters, the man who opens them also takes the weekend off, leaving a few dozen in the refrigerator. By the time they reach you, they’ll be shriveled, dry, and gamy.
And let’s not even think about desserts: Crème brûlée, i
ts sugar crust sticky after days in the fridge, île flottante with the crème anglaise developing that nasty custard skin, and a gâteau chocolat of stale cake layered with cream gone hard as butter in the fridge.
Even against these odds, however, I wouldn’t have thought one could make a mess of onion soup.
One minute we were sitting with our feet up, enjoying our Sunday morning croissants and coffee, and contemplating a leisurely visit to a brocante. An hour later we were organizing a birthday dinner for fourteen on behalf of some friends who’d just flown in from New York on the spur of the moment and wanted to celebrate an anniversary. We don’t even own fourteen chairs, so squeezing everyone around our dining table wasn’t an option. Also, because the new arrivals were starry-eyed about “traditional Paris restaurants,” we decided, foolishly, to eat out.
The few smaller establishments that did open on Sunday couldn’t manage such a large party, so we compromised on a place known for period design rather than good food. The visitors loved its art nouveau décor, with the polished brass and varnished wood paneling. But we should have been warned by the many empty tables and the waiters loitering at the rear. Sunday evening was, for them and for the restaurant, the low point of the week. They looked as displeased with our invasion as with that of the Nazis in 1940.
Rather than taking orders for aperitifs, our waiter simply inquired, “Champagne for everyone?,” and turned to go. He was visibly annoyed when we called him back. With no barman on duty, he had to mix the drinks himself. His Kirs were 99 percent wine with only a dash of syrup, and he interpreted “dry martini” as Martini Bianco on the rocks.
Meanwhile, we contemplated the menus. Bound in grease-spotted red velour, they were long on illustrations of cancan girls and gentlemen in handlebar mustaches, but short on actual food. I recognized the old standbys: salades composées, soupe au poisson, soupe à l’oignon, and a soupe du jour. Then confit de canard, boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin—surely all canned or boil-in-the-bag.
When I asked about the soupe du jour, the waiter disappeared for five minutes, to return with the news, not unexpected, that it was potage printanier. Supposedly made from spring vegetables, this is the gentile version of Jewish carrot soup: in Yiddish, tzimmes. To make a new dish, runs kitchen wisdom, just combine all your leftovers, heat, and stir well. Tzimmes embodies this rule so perfectly that the word also describes any deal tossed together with too many variables and not enough forethought. “A prolonged procedure,” says one definition, “an involved business; trouble.”
In 1962, Eugène Ionesco contributed a script to a movie called The Seven Deadly Sins. He chose to illustrate “anger” through the medium of potage printanier. All over France, husbands lose their temper at yet again being served the same soup for Sunday lunch, and, moreover, finding a fly in it. Thousands of domestic arguments escalate into nuclear war and the end of the world. Nobody in France thought this was extreme. Many were surprised it hadn’t happened already.
On that Sunday night, Marie-Dominique and a few others ordered soupe à l’oignon. It seemed a safe, if cliché, choice. One just ladled onion broth into a bowl, floated a piece of toast on top, sprinkled grated Gruyère, and browned it under the grill. What could go wrong?
The soups arrived with their cheese almost bubbling yet not brown—a sure sign they were only seconds out of the microwave. Marie-Dominique poked hers with her spoon. The yellow surface resisted like plastic. And when she lifted the spoon, the cheese came with it, stuck to the spoon as if with Krazy Glue. So did a slab of sodden bread as thick as a hamburger bun. Underneath, where there should have been soup, the bowl was almost dry. Sitting in the fridge for so long, the liquid had been completely soaked up by the bread.
She called after the departing waiter, “M’sieur, s’il vous plait, where is my soup?”
He swung back to the table. “Zis is your soup, madame,” he said loftily in English. “Soupe à l’oignon Française. Is in zer French style.”
Trying to pass off a dud dish as “the way it’s served in France”? To a Frenchwoman, and a Parisienne at that? And with as sacred a dish as soupe à l’oignon? He should have cut his throat right then.
Over the centuries, soup in France has accumulated a body of myth, tradition, and lore. One speaks of it in the same respectful, capitalized way as The Nation, The Heavens, The Earth. It’s not “soup” but La Soupe: symbolic, metaphoric, sacramental.
The respect is understandable. Mankind emerged from an oceanic soup. As babies, we grow in an amniotic soup within our mother’s bodies, and once born, we are fed on soup. Soup sustains and consoles the destitute, the ill, the desperate. It has entered the language at every level. To indicate that dinner’s ready, we say “Soup’s on!,” while to give universal offense one “spits in the soup.” At its best, soup is warmth, reassurance, sustenance. Soup is Home. It is Faith, Hope, and Charity. It may even be God.
At the core of soup is broth, the essence of meat, vegetables, and spices, suffused through water, which the French call bouillon. For centuries, the French, Italians, Portuguese, and British have regarded it as both food and medicine. The word restaurant derives from an innkeeper in the 1700s who offered soup in order to restaurer, or restore, his clients. In 1750, John Huxham’s An Essay on Fevers recommended chicken broth to rebalance the “humors.”
As he traveled through France in 1765, the English novelist Tobias Smollett, suffering from tuberculosis, was constantly offered bouillon, though he doubted it did him any good.
Bouillon is a universal remedy among the good people of France; insomuch, that they have no idea of any person’s dying, after having swallowed un bon bouillon. One of the English gentlemen who were robbed and murdered about thirty years ago between Calais and Boulogne, being brought to the post-house of Boulogne with some signs of life, this remedy was immediately administered. “What surprises me greatly,” said the post-master, “I made an excellent bouillon, and poured it down his throat with my own hands, and yet he did not recover.”
Sometimes, though, broth worked wonders. In 1672, in Saint-Didier, near Avignon, the crowd halted the hanging of one Pierre du Fort when the public executioner bungled the job. After seeing the hangman and his girlfriend swinging on the hapless Pierre’s legs in the hope of strangling him, the spectators decided he’d suffered enough. They cut him down and carried him to a monastery, where he was given wine and “each Saturday, bouillon made with meat,” a treatment on which he made a full recovery, presumably to rob and murder again.
Every country has a different way of losing its temper in a restaurant. Britons and Americans shout, pound the table, fling down napkins, and demand to See the Manager. Think of Jack Nicholson raging at a waitress about a chicken salad sandwich in the film Five Easy Pieces. Chinese and Japanese sit silent, with bowed heads, waiting for the offender to acknowledge his error and make amends. Italians have been known to weep and Spaniards to challenge waiters to a fight. Germans, coldly rational, collect names, writing them in their Persönliches gastronomisches schwarzbuch, or personal gastronomic black book, a small diary kept exclusively for this purpose, I’m told.
The French insult. Reflecting the fact that France is still at heart rural, its slang contains numerous references to animals and plants, ideal for berating restaurant staff. Vache (cow) predominates. “La vache!” expresses anger or dismay. Symbols of stupidity include cornichon (pickle), citrouille (pumpkin), and navet (turnip). Each gains force when prefixed by “Espèce d’une . . .”—“a prime example of . . .”
It was bad luck for the waiter that day that one of our French friends, Jean-Marc, was a master of invective. In an insistently menacing tone, he began by suggesting the man resembled the andouille—a sausage made of pigs’ intestines, including the rectum. He went on to compare him to a root vegetable customarily fed to livestock, and was just rolling out one of his favorites—“Vous avez le cerveau d’une baguette fromage” (“You have the brain of a cheese sandwich”)—when the manager, summoned fr
om his comfortable office where he was probably watching the football replay on TV, arrived to calm things down.
“You have the brains of a moldy rutabaga!”
Recognizing a disaster in the making, he distributed champagne and foie gras to all and tore up our bill. We last saw our waiter slinking out the door in street clothes, having been sent home early, if not actually fired. He was lucky. Men have been strung up from lampposts for lesser sins than interfering with onion soup.
Once I thought of cooking soupe à l’oignon, the idea took hold. Of course, onion soup was far too robust to begin a dinner of the kind I visualized. It was a meal in itself. The bouillon at the start of a great meal should be, at most, a consommé—light, thin, transparent, stimulating the appetite rather than satisfying it. But since a bowl of asparagus soup had suggested the idea for the banquet, to prepare soupe à la oignon embodied a certain poetic rightness.
All the same, I discussed it with Boris first.
He proposed we meet in a restaurant I’d never heard of, called Le Mine au Poivre—The Pepper Mine. It was on rue Montcalm, in the eighteenth, one of the narrow streets that run downhill from the walled sprawl of the Cimetière Montmartre.
Some people visit the cemetery to lay flowers on the tomb of their aunt, but most are tourists, seeking its many celebrity graves: that of Nijinsky, with its morose statue of the dancer slumped in his Petrushka costume; of Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, the only tomb in the world decorated with a facsimile of that instrument; or the resting place of Marie Duplessis, original Lady of the Camellias, inspiration of Camille and of Violetta in La Traviata. As she died young and destitute, a lover paid for her tomb in a sheltered spot in the lee of low wall. The sun falls lightly on her sandstone crypt, which, in the season, is often decorated with fresh camellias.
Like a gated community of the prosperous departed, the cemetery has only one entrance, and that on the uphill side. Most days, the streets around contain a steady flow of hot and exasperated tourists and mourners who, having got off the bus at the downhill end, must trudge around the entire circumference to get in.
