The Perfect Meal

by John Baxter

  Because of this, nearby streets are well supplied with bars into which parched and weary strangers can retreat for a reviving beer. Le Mine au Poivre was just such a place: a shady retreat to escape from the heat, catch your breath, enjoy a drink, and maybe a snack.

  I might have walked right past except for the music drifting out its door—an old Tina Turner number, but sung in French. Glancing in, I saw Boris at the back, near the door to the kitchen. Above him, a large painted board announced “Vérigood.”

  “Vérigood?” I said as I sat down.

  He didn’t look up. “Jean-Christophe is a bit unconventional.”

  Confirming this, the music tape segued from “Nutbush City Limits” to the Flower Duet from Lakmé.

  In these tiny establishments, it’s easy to feel one has stepped into a film from the 1940s, one of those dramas about a middle-aged train driver or cinema projectionist driven to murder by his love for a randy and restless woman. Manon Lescaut meets La Bête Humaine.

  The clients here were perfect casting. Who was the killer? Probably the middle-aged man sitting in silence at one of the tables on the sidewalk. And his victim? Obviously the woman opposite him. Clearly their marriage was as flat as the half-drunk glasses of Stella Artois on the table between them.

  At the bar, a tall man paged through the left-wing daily Liberation. In the film, he would be the world-weary cop who solves the case. Two stools along, a thin woman of what the French call “a certain age,” with a mass of black frizzy hair, drank a dusky glass of Pernod, and offered her bony profile to be admired. Too old and severe for the femme fatale, she could be the malicious neighbor forced by a shady past to inform on the killer.

  “What can I bring you, m’sieur?”

  The man I’d last noticed reading Liberation was now standing by our table, holding a bottle of wine.

  “Meet Jean-Christophe,” Boris said. “This is his place.”

  We shook hands. I pointed to the sign.

  “Why ‘Vérigood.’”

  “Because is very good.”

  “What is?”

  “His boeuf bourguignon,” Boris said.

  “Best in Paris,” said Jean-Christophe. “Fifteen hours the cooking.”

  He poured half a glass of red for Boris and looked at me.

  “He’s Australian,” Boris said.

  “Ah!” He topped up my glass, looked at the bottle, still half full, and left it on the table. “Then I bring another,” he said. “Or maybe two?”

  The music tape switched to a reedy, wailing tenor, singing in what sounded like Arabic.

  “How is the beef?” I asked Boris when he’d gone

  He shrugged. “I like it. Make up your own mind.”

  It reminded me why I was here. “I told you I was thinking of doing soupe à l’oignon?”

  “Brave man.”

  “Why? How hard can it be? Every café serves soupe à l’oignon. I’ve even done it with a stock cube.”

  Without turning his head, Boris said, “Jean-Christophe, do you have a beef stock cube?”

  Jean-Christophe’s head emerged from below the bar, where he was sorting bottles.

  “Why I would want such a thing?”

  “Find one, could you?”

  To my surprise, he came round the bar, walked out the front door, and crossed the road to the little market opposite.

  Boris asked, “Do you remember how Giotto proved his mastery?”

  “Something about a circle?”

  “Yes. When the Pope asked for proof of his skill, he just took a brush and drew a perfect circle, freehand.”

  “And cooking soupe à l’oignon is the perfect circle?”

  “Some might say so. Close, anyway. Do you have a Guide Culinaire?”

  “The Escoffier? You know I do. A first edition. Inscribed.”

  “But have you read it?”

  “Nobody reads Escoffier. It’s like a Windows manual. I’ve consulted it.”

  Published in 1903, Le Guide Culinaire of Georges-Auguste Escoffier has never been out of print. Its eight hundred closely printed pages summarize the wealth of French cuisine, but also its complexity. If you want to know how to skin, cook, and remove the meat from a calf’s head, purée a sea urchin, make cailles (quail) Richelieu, cook red cabbage in the Flemish style, or prepare a jellied dessert called My Queen, it will tell you—though in a quirky and obtuse manner that’s peculiarly Escoffier and uniquely French.

  Jean-Christophe returned and dropped an orange-and-yellow box on the table.

  “Bouillon gout BOEUF” was lettered on it in yellow, next to a cartoon of a bull. Below were photos of a large brown onion and a bunch of fresh herbs, both beaded with morning dew. The words riche en gout—rich in flavor—ran vertically down the pack.

  “Read the ingredients,” Boris said. “If you can find them.”

  The list appeared in minuscule lettering on the end of the pack.

  “‘Salt,’” I read. “‘Malt extract; flavor extenders; sodium glutamate, guynamate, and inosanate; sunflower oil; corn-based flavorings, including beef, sugar, onion, parsley; extracts of pepper, clove, celery, bay, and thyme; caramel (sugar and water); vegetable fibers. May contain traces of milk and egg.’”

  “Notice that there’s no actual beef,” Boris said. “It doesn’t even promise beef—just the taste of beef. And it fails even to deliver that.” He snorted. “Read Escoffier. Chapter one, page one. Then we can talk.”

  Before I left, I tried Jean-Christophe’s boeuf bourguignon. Instead of the usual stringy meat swimming in watery gravy, with boiled potatoes and carrots, it arrived in a dark heap, barely moist, with no accompaniment beyond a bed of homemade mashed potatoes. The meat fell apart under the fork, tender and succulent. In a word, vérigood. Fifteen hours of cooking hadn’t been wasted.

  In his oblique way, Boris was giving me a lesson. Good cooking permits no short cuts. To be worthy of creating, even in imagination, a truly great meal, I must prove myself competent in the skills of the master cook. I would never be Escoffier, but I could aspire to be a menial sous chef, the most junior member of the brigade de cuisine, the apprentice charged with the dull but crucial task of preparing bouillon. Having achieved that goal, he might consider me worthy to move on to greater things—even to the roasting of that elusive ox.

  Seventeen

  First Catch Your Chef

  A very strong will, sustained by a glass of excellent champagne.

  Sarah Bernhardt’s formula for “unfailing vitality,” as confided to Georges-Auguste Escoffier

  The French like a little rogue in their cultural heroes, so it was predictable that Georges-Auguste Escoffier, who transformed the art of cooking, should be a thief and embezzler, just like his friend and partner, the hotelier César Ritz.

  Ritz, cold-eyed and expressionless, with a nattily waxed black mustache, had a face that belonged on a “Wanted” poster. But Escoffier embodied that most flattering of adjectives: suave. His silver hair and mustache, his impeccable suits, his gleaming shoes with their built-up heels and discreet elevator insoles to increase his height, combined in a vision of sleek and peerless probity.

  Georges-Auguste Escoffier

  In 1888, Richard D’Oyly Carte, the entrepreneur who used the profits from producing Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas to build the Savoy Hotel on London’s Strand, invited Ritz to become its manager and Escoffier the chef de cuisine. Leading what they called “a little army of hotel men,” the two invaded England.

  London’s gourmets soon learned that the Savoy could offer dishes not available anywhere else. Escoffier imported ortolans and truffles from France, golden Sterlet caviar from Russia, and would send word to a favored client when the first asparagus of the season arrived from Provence. It soon became fashionable among society families to give their household servants a night off once a week and hold a dinner party in the Savoy’s lofty dining room and grill, overlooking the Thames.

  Like Vatel and many others before him,
Escoffier recognized the value of showmanship. He staged dinners to order, often on themes proposed by the host. American food writer Julian Street explained the right way to go about dining out.

  One should go in advance to the restaurant of one’s choice, consult the proprietor or the head waiter, select one’s dishes, and then obtain the advice of the wine waiter . . . Never ask members of your party to order for themselves. A scattering of varied orders disorganizes the kitchen and the service, and destroys the suavity of the meal. Let the same courses be served to all, as you would if you were entertaining in your own home.

  To clients who paid him this compliment, Escoffier gave good value. For a woman’s birthday, he created a menu in which the first letters of the dishes spelled out her name, Marguerite: Mousseline au Crevettes Roses, Amourettes au Consommé, Rougets en Papillotes . . . Asked for an exceptional dish, he dreamed up Nymphs in the Dawn: frogs’ legs tinted pink and embedded with fresh tarragon and chervil in clear champagne jelly to suggest river sprites hiding among water plants.

  His signature color was pink. Many of his dishes were colored and flavored with dark red Rozen paprika from Hungary, which used only the outer flesh and skin of the pepper. He would have been the perfect chef to orchestrate one of the dinners held by the notorious Paris courtesan Cora Pearl. After dancing nude on orchids, she had herself served up on an enormous platter as the main dish, nestling on flowers and wearing nothing but a pink sauce.

  This was a little too louche for Escoffier, but in October 1895 he did agree to a special request that let him run riot with red food.

  A group of young English gamblers had won 350,000 francs at Monte Carlo by betting on red and the number nine at roulette. Regulars at the Savoy, they asked Escoffier to stage a dinner celebrating their luck.

  Everything was red and gold. The table was decorated with petals of red roses. The menus were red. The chairs were red, and had the lucky winning number 9 stuck on them. The banquet room was decorated with palm trees to evoke the Riviera, and these were strung with red light bulbs.

  Only red wine was served, and every one of the nine courses featured at least one red dish. Red smoked salmon with caviar was followed by red snapper, lamb cooked pink, with tomatoes and red beans, a chicken with red lettuce salad, asparagus in a pink sauce called Coucher de Soleil sur un Beau Soir d’Été (Sunset on a Beautiful Summer Evening), foie gras in a paprika-colored jelly, concluding with an ice sculpture of the mountain behind Monte Carlo, lit with red lights, and with a nest of red autumn leaves supporting a bowl of mousse de Curacao covered in strawberries.

  Escoffier loved to show off, particularly to celebrities. He designed two dishes for the Australian-born opera diva Nellie Melba. Nervously preoccupied with her throat, she feared ordinary toast might scratch it, while ice cream, her favorite dessert, could chill her vocal cords. He ordered slices of toast cut in half horizontally, then re-toasted, to make ultra-thin Melba Toast, and invented a dish of fresh peaches on vanilla ice cream, coated in raspberry purée, which he called Peach Melba.

  While he was chef at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, the soprano Adelina Patti often stayed there. A Swiss couple named Jungbluth owned the Grand, and when Patti, perhaps overwhelmed by the richness of Escoffier’s menus, asked what he cooked for the Jungbluths, they invited her to lunch.

  Escoffier had planned a simple Alsatian pot-au-feu of boiled beef and salt pork with carrots, potatoes, and cabbage. But his pride wouldn’t allow him to present anything so everyday to the great Patti. “In view of the occasion,” he wrote, “I thought I would be forgiven for expanding on this ‘simple family meal.’”

  Lunch began with the pot-au-feu served traditionally, starting with a soup made from the broth, followed by the meat and vegetables, with horseradish sauce. After that, however, he pulled out all the stops.

  I served an excellent Bresse chicken that I threaded with strips of pork fat and roasted on an open spit, and also a mixed salad of chicory leaves and beets. Next, a magnificent parfait de foie gras appeared on the table, made up of a mixture of Alsatian foie gras and Périgord truffles. I completed this exceptional family meal with an orange mousse surrounded by strawberries macerated in Curacao.

  After that, the soprano might have felt she needed to cut down on eating, but there Escoffier was no help. To one hostess who fretted about her weight, he proposed a “Diet Dinner”: caviar, shrimp, oysters, turtle soup, sole, trout, a champagne sorbet, asparagus, ending with a paprika soufflé and pears in port.

  Though César Ritz managed the Savoy until 1897, he was seldom there. Instead, he buzzed around Europe and the Mediterranean, consulting for other hotels and supervising the new Ritz, then being built on Place Vendôme in Paris. “When in London you are hardly ever in the hotel except to eat and sleep,” complained the Savoy owners. “You have latterly been simply using The Savoy as a place to live in, a pied-à-terre, an office, from which to carry on your other schemes and as a lever to float a number of other projects in which the Savoy has no interest whatever.”

  Plentiful graft was already built into the hotel system. In addition to the usual bribes from grocers, butchers, and linen laundries, champagne companies kicked back a small sum for every cork that proved a bottle had been drunk. Not content, Escoffier and Ritz had started the Ritz Hotel Development Company, which sold supplies to the Savoy at inflated prices.

  When the hotel audited the accounts, Ritz couldn’t explain what had become of £11,000 in wine—worth twenty times that sum in today’s money. It was probably diverted, via the Ritz Hotel Development Company, to the cellars of the new Paris hotel. Escoffier also agreed he owed the Savoy £8,000 but claimed he could only pay £500, the rest presumably having been spirited across the Channel. In March 1897 he and Ritz were dismissed, along with their supply manager and kitchen staff. At first, the sixteen cooks refused to leave and resisted with carving knives until the police arrived to march them out. Escoffier managed to blame the scandal on British obtuseness.

  We had saved the Savoy from bankruptcy, brought it to the summit of glory, and given its shareholders the satisfaction they merited. It would have been possible for these gentlemen to solve their differences in everyone’s interest and without anyone losing face. They would have none of it.

  Once the Ritz opened in Paris, the Ritz Hotel Development Company switched to recruiting kitchen staff for other hotels and handling supplies. The partners also had their revenge on the Savoy when the owners of London’s new Carlton Hotel hired them to run it. Known as the Ritz-Carlton, their new venture creamed off most of the Savoy’s society business.

  All this unpleasantness didn’t mar Escoffier’s legend. Rather, it became part of it. “Don’t let his manners fool you,” murmured people on the inside. “The old fox is smarter than he looks. He really put it over those rosbifs.”

  Few people have influenced the way we eat more than Escoffier. During the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, he was called up as part of the reserve and put in charge of cooking for the officers of the Second Division headquarters at Metz, the most easterly city in France, next to the German border.

  Watching the army at work convinced him that his profession could benefit from military discipline. A kitchen should be staffed like an army unit, with a brigade de cuisine, commanded by a chief, or chef, at the head of a group of professionals chosen for their individual skills: a saucier for sauces, a rôtisseur for meats, a patissier for pastry. After the war, chef became the accepted term for a supervisory cook, and the system of kitchen management Escoffier pioneered remains much the same today.

  Escoffier insisted on uniform dress in his kitchens: the now-standard white jacket, trousers, and apron, and the high white cap, or toque, to keep sweat and hair out of the food. He also told his staff to trim their hair and shave off their mustaches, but at this, they drew the line. Half his cooks at the Savoy were French and half Italian. Each regarded a mustache as a sign of status, something that Ritz and Escoffier, both mustachioed, should have
understood. Among cooks, a mustache also signified their superiority over waiters and other lower orders, who always shaved. When British writer George Orwell worked as a dishwasher in a Paris hotel during the late 1920s, the chef du personnel was scandalized by his facial hair. “Nom de Dieu! Who ever heard of a plongeur with a mustache?” Orwell had to shave or be fired.

  Cooks were also notorious drunks, claiming wine was needed to replace sweat lost at the stove. Escoffier, who never drank or smoked, introduced a healthier substitute: barley water. An energy drink since ancient times—made by boiling grain, straining off the liquid, and flavoring it with lemon—it’s still provided to players at tennis tournaments such as Wimbledon. Escoffier placed crocks of it in all his kitchens.

  Feeding starving soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War, 1870

  Once in total control of a hotel restaurant and able to employ as many waiters as he needed, he also abandoned service française, with a dozen dishes placed on the table at the same time. Instead, he introduced service à la Russe, in which each diner simultaneously received an identical dish.

  The same rational approach inspired his book Le Guide Culinaire. Helped by dozens of chefs, he rounded up details of every dish in French cuisine, arranged them under categories, and described how each should be prepared. With its help, any kitchen could re-create even the most obscure regional specialty.

  But the Guide is no recipe book. It’s a manual. Take, for instance, his entry for a game soup, Potage Gentilhomme. Over decades of bad memories and cut corners, it had degenerated into a potato soup with carrots in a chicken bouillon. Le Guide Culinaire put it back on track.

  Three liters of puree of partridge with lentils, a decaliter of essence of partridge, a decaliter of flaming cognac, the juice of half a lemon, and eight decaliters of high-quality reduced stock made from feathered game. For the garnish: little quenelles of partridge in the form of pearls, and truffles of the same shape. Two spoonsful to each person.