by Gael Greene
I cooked following the catechism of Craig Claiborne. I whisked yolks into zabaglione in my copper bowl and whipped the cream over icy water, per the counsel of Julia Child. I conquered my fear of dough with six lessons from the English cooking teacher Dione Lucas in a studio above her shop, Once Upon an Egg, later O’Neal’s. I mastered boning a duck without breaking its skin, stuffing it with assorted ground meats, and baking it in a pastry blanket. Helping Dione stretch my twelve inches of strudel dough till it overhung a six-foot table and you could see through it was thrilling. That she sent her nylon stockings to the laundry and they came back ironed was impressive, too. I never did either at home.
Our friends were possessed early foodies, too. When I recognized the dark-haired woman buying a boodle of serious cheeses at Fauchon in Paris as a woman I’d met at a Burgundy Society Tastevin dinner in New York, and then ran into her twice again in the next four days—at the legendary shop selling copper pots and pans in Les Halles and at dinner on the Côte d’Azur—we both took it as a message from the fates. Naomi* and I are still soul mates, now forty years later. It was she who persuaded an uncle in the cheese business to create American crème fraîche with instructions she brought home from France. For neophytes with only a vague notion of what crème fraîche might be and what it was doing in the supermarket dairy case, there was a little folder of Naomi’s recipes glued to the container top. The only drawback for me was my insider knowledge, aware from the beginning that the divine ooze was 87 percent butterfat. Even before cholesterol entered the axis of evil, that struck me as dangerous.
As the avant-garde of the gluttony to come, we did dinner parties, my foodie friends and I, wowing one another with whole ducks boned and stuffed, and pistachio-studded pork terrines, devoting long hours to reproducing all the moussemerizing, béarnaising, and vinaigretting we picked up in many rounds of cooking classes and gourmand travel.
We cheerfully commited to shopping that took days and military discipline to organize. Since Don worked mostly nights at the Post, he was free to chauffeur me around town in our little red Volkswagen to gather the best ingredients. There was no Fairway then, and Eli was probably still teething on a bagel from the family grocery, Zabar’s, which had not yet gone global. We had to cross town to Cheese of All Nations, hit the Village for bread at Zito’s on Bleecker Street, double-park outside the Nevada Meat Market for quality veal or lamb, and stop at Esposito’s on Ninth Avenue to buy the best ground pork for the pistachio-studded terrine. Don got a shop foreman at the Post to cut a lead weight that fit precisely inside my terrine mold to compress my classic pâtés. He immediately had a vision of my dropping the weight on my foot and made me promise never to weight my terrine unless he was home. Great editors are like that—always anticipating the worst.
I bought my battery of knives from the notoriously terrible-tempered Fred Bridge, famous for snarling at innocents who dared ask uninformed questions in his mythic kitchen-supply bazaar. I tamed his savage bark by buying oeuf en gelée molds, and expensive truffle cutters (as yet unused), as well as springform pans, charlotte molds, and tart pans with removable bottoms (which I did use). I baked an exquisite, terrifyingly complex poire bourdaloue from Time-Life’s Classic French Cookbook. It knocked everyone out, and then I quite sensibly decided I never had to do that again.
The oenophilic competition of our men grew heated even as our cellars and wine closets were required to grow cool. Don’s boyhood friend, Jules the ophthalmologist (who had directed us to La Pyramide), put down seven hundred bottles of the ’61 vintage in a humidity-controlled storeroom. Once Jules explained what that meant, Don and I, cellarless but determined to hold our own, found cases of France’s most celebrated Bordeaux at Macy’s wine shop and brought home Château Margaux, Lafite, and Mouton Rothschild at $225 a case. That was a wanton extravagance then, but they were the only names we knew.
The two of us tried to recapture the rapture of France in Manhattan at restaurants like the Veau d’Or and Café Chauveron. We psyched ourselves to feel comfortable in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons and braved the Coach House, where the proprietor, Leon Lianides, could look right through you if he was in one of his moods, which he clearly never was when favorites like Craig Claiborne and James Beard were lapping up the tripe in avgolemono soup, followed by the fabulous lamb steak with its kidney still attached. Even the great French chef Jean Troisgros was dazzled, we were told, by Maryland lump crabmeat rolled inside Hormel prosciutto, thick Madeira-haunted black bean soup, native sirloin paved in pepper, Comice pears with American cheese, and pecan pie. Troisgros left carrying two iron baking molds and the recipe for the Coach House’s grainy little logs of corn bread.
We went to El Parador because Craig wrote that he loved the margaritas and guacamole. And in between these exercises in excess, we ate simply and cheaply at Oscar’s King of the Sea, at King Wu in Chinatown, where Don’s friends had thrown his bachelor party, and at our favorite Shanghai local on Broadway at 103rd Street, where we inevitably had the pressed duck—a lushly crusted dish I haven’t seen anywhere for decades. We haunted movie revival houses, hating the dip in the middle of the Thalia but driven there by our hunger for movies. But mostly, I cooked. I crisped soft-shell crabs and deglazed the pan with a splash of white wine or shook bay scallops in a bag of bread crumbs and then sautéed them in butter. Sour cream made anything taste better. I invented fabulous frittatas, those layered Italian omelettes, using a week’s worth of leftovers from the fridge. And I indulged Don with bananas flambé and crème caramel. We were trim and young. No one had ever heard of cholesterol. Detroit was rocked by riots, in which forty-three died. Away on our honeymoon, we missed the October demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the Pentagon. Home again, we were the Bonnie and Clyde of West End Avenue, with our gourmand swagger. We were so in love.
8
HOW I BECAME HENRI SOULÉ’S DARLING
AFTER A TIME, IT BECAME CLEAR THAT I WAS AVOIDING CARNAL KNOWLEDGE of Craig’s favorite, Le Pavillon, creation of the quintessential Henri Soulé. I just didn’t have the courage to walk up unknown and unrecommended to the legendary martinet at his podium as he rationed out the royal banquettes at Le Pavillon. I knew from reading Women’s Wear Daily and Wechsberg’s Dining at the Pavillon how his glance could turn a poseur to fleur de sel. And the two of us—thanks to Don’s boyish look and my bargain-basement Ohrbach’s couture—were clearly not to the Pavillon born, unlike Jack Kennedy (who got his milk served in an ice bucket). I did not want to be hustled off to the dark nethers of Soulé’s Siberia and be fed last week’s lamb chops. It would have helped if we could have been introduced by a regular, someone to vouch for us in our untitled, un-best-dressed, un-Dun & Bradstreet shabbiness. But there was no one.
Finally, I realized the way to reach Monsieur Soulé was through my typewriter. I had started freelancing so that our fancy eating would be tax-deductible. I proposed a story to Ladies’ Home Journal: “A Week in the Kitchen of the Pavillon.” Henri Soulé, a flirtatious five-foot-five cube of amiability, was willing. Pouting and posing, an owl who saw himself as an osprey, he instructed his chef, Clément Grangier, to suffer me in the kitchen below for as long as required. I arrived each morning in my tennis shoes, was taught how to flute a mushroom, watched chef Grangier whisk butter to order for a fussy habitué, marveled at the saucier’s iron right forearm, and took lessons in quenelles de brochet—the delicate whipped pike and cream dumplings that were my favorite dish.
One Friday, Soulé invited me to lunch with him at 3:00 PM. “Say you want les tripes à la mode de Caen,” he commanded. “It’s forbidden by my doctor. That damn Grangier won’t even serve it to me.” He instructed chef Grangier to hand-chop his usual hamburger. When our food had been dished up from the copper casseroles, and the captain and waiter had backed away in respectful obeisance, Soulé switched plates, generously alloting me a plop of tripe alongside my burger.
I stared at the tripe, a scary nest of anatomical parts in a muddy sau
ce. It would be a while before my aversion to tripe would evolve into a passion for tripe in all its guises. I didn’t have a lot of aversions in the dawn of my gourmand life, but enough that I felt I would have to conquer them. Beets made me gag. I didn’t eat olives. I hadn’t yet fallen in love with oysters. The worship of caviar escaped me. I had acquired an unDetroiterly passion for sweetbreads but had not mastered brains. I speared the tiniest nubbin of tripe on my fork, doused it heavily with sauce, and swallowed it whole. “Hmmm,” I said.
Soulé looked up, fork balanced en route to his mouth. “So you are writing about the secrets of Le Pavillon. You won’t find the secret of Le Pavillon in the kitchen,” he said. “The secret of Le Pavillon . . . c’est moi.” He puffed up his pouter-pigeon chest. “Le Pavillon, c’est moi.”
In May of 1965, Soulé announced he would reopen La Côte Basque, which he had sold in a fit of pique to a confrere who, alas, simply wasn’t making a go of it. There was talk of bankruptcy. To recover the unpaid debt, Soulé would have to repossess and run it himself. He had always thought of La Côte Basque as “Le Pavillon for the poor. A place for a man to bring his mistress while he comes with his wife to Le Pavillon.”
Don had left the Post by then and was happier than he had ever been, caught up in the excitement of the Herald Tribune, where he edited Jimmy Breslin and a young red-haired southern fellow named Tom Wolfe, whose prose had a way of ricocheting out of control. I’d quit the Post at Don’s urging to work full-time on a novel that grew so thorny and dense, I was finally forced to abandon it. I needed my freelancing for magazines more than ever to justify my existence and help finance our gourmandlich wanderings. Don encouraged me to offer the Soulé story to Clay Felker, an editor at New York, the Trib’s Sunday magazine. Clay, and Shelly Zelaznick, orchestrating amazing flights of unleashed journalism, had everyone talking. My docudrama of the countdown to the celebrity-riddled opening lunch was important; Soulé told me later, “The Ladies’ Home Journal is okay, but the Trib . . . that means something to Soulé. Now you must come often. You and your husband. This is your home.”
He lighted up a cigar. I lighted up a cigar. We puffed away.
About that cigar: After five sessions with the hypnotist, I had stopped smoking on New Year’s Eve. Ten days later, Don bought me an exquisite tortoiseshell and ivory cigarette holder he’d found in a small antiques shop. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I wanted desperately not to smoke again. “You didn’t notice I’m not smoking?” I asked.
“You can smoke little cigars,” Don suggested. “You don’t inhale cigars.” He had begun smoking long, thin cigars for the gestures, I thought, and the worldly ceremony. He brought home a small box of pencil-thin Schimmelpennicks, that just fit into the delicate holder.
When Soulé lighted a cigar after our next lunch, I pulled out my little box of small Dutch cigars, slipped one into the mother-of-pearl mouth of my holder, and let Soulé light it. He was delighted.
“I love a woman who smokes cigars,” he had said. He insisted I let him fill my purse with small Cuban cigars whenever I came to Le Pavillon. A small stockpile of these hoarded Cubanos found their way to Don’s humidor. I never really liked that awful cigar taste in my mouth. I gave them up after a few months because I didn’t want to smell like my uncle Max.
I loved those gossipy lunches, the unfolding intrigue of the food establishment, Monsieur Soulé’s indiscreet confessions. The lies certain people told to get a reservation when Soulé insisted he was booked. The cosmetic titan who would stop short and refuse to budge if Soulé tried to lead him to a table beyond a certain line in the carpet. The great beauty who had so much to say to her walker and nothing to say to her husband. That’s how it was in the fall of 1968, when Felker beckoned me to the new New York. I had one foot in my kitchen and a finger already in the Manhattan dining stew. So maybe Clay’s casting was prophetic. I might not know enough to criticize anyone’s rack of lamb or floating island in New York magazine, but I definitely had the requisite hunger.
9
WHEN CRAIG CLAIBORNE WAS GOD AND KING
CRAIG CLAIBORNE WAS A GOD, MY HERO, MY IDOL. EVEN NON-FOOD-obsessed New Yorkers looked to his Friday restaurant review in the New York Times as gospel. Don would go out to pick up the early edition of Friday’s Times at eleven o’clock on Thursday night and drop into his big green club chair to study what news had been deemed fit to print by the competition.
I sat on the floor at Don’s feet—we were always in the same few square feet of space in those early days. (Actually, I liked typing on the floor, my old Royal upright sitting on an atlas, my legs folded Indian-style.) Never mind the headlines, for years I had turned immediately to see what Craig loved or hated. I would give anything, I often thought, to live his life, being paid to eat, being sent overseas with unlimited funds to explore exotic cuisines. I lived his life vicariously through his writing. Craig was always going off to France. He was among the first to hit the dumpling parlors of Beijing when Nixon opened China. He even braved Vietnam during the war, oblivious to politics, properly focused on what to eat on the lemongrass trail.
Restaurant criticism was not the raucous gang bang it has become. There were not swarms of critical gullets in media yet to be invented. And Zagat had not marshaled amateur critics and built their bleats and raves into a media empire. Every New Yorker over the age of six did not consider him or herself a restaurant critic as we do today. True, James Beard had a syndicated food column. There was Clementine Paddleford writing about food in the Herald Tribune. And the Post had a pathetic column lauding restaurants that advertised in its pages.
I felt a deep, spiritual connection to Craig—fussy, uptight southerner that he seemed to be, he was unabashedly passionate about food. Before Julia, and even after, I used his first New York Times Cookbook. His recipes were so modest and plain and undemanding, rarely more than half a page in the book or a paragraph on the Times food page, unlike Julia’s meticulous, detailed, hand-holding gastrotherapy.
Cooking his recipes was as close as I could get to Craig. His boeuf bourguignon, redolent with red wine and caramelized shallots, was a guaranteed triumph. Redolent was a Craig word. And the shallot to me was a new, sophisticated onion, unheard of in my mom’s primitive Detroit pantry.
Once when the sour cream curdled in a baked zucchini recipe clipped from the Times and followed religiously, I dialed the newspaper and asked for counsel. I was stunned when he took the call. Himself. Craig Claiborne, with that Mississippi drawl. “Sour cream will break up if the temperature is too high,” he said. Of course. How naïve could I be? In my haste, I’d turned the flame too high. My respect for Craig, the New York Times, and sour cream swelled like a popover.
I was a stalker. Not literally (although it might have been a kick going through Craig’s garbage), but I did follow in his footsteps, trailing his stars. I was nervous stepping into Pearl’s, the midtown den where the smartly dressed Pearl Wong ruled haughtily over her loyal clan of Time, Inc., and Seventh Avenue pets (some of them her financial backers). Word had it that she was a master of snobbery, as arrogant as any French restaurateur. But Craig loved chef Lum’s mythic lemon chicken and yook soong, the chicken-water chestnut-red pepper mix to eat wrapped in iceberg lettuce leaves. So I went early one day all by myself, before the lunch wave hit, Craig’s review in hand. The maître d’ looked as if he wanted to refuse me a table. I berated myself for not spending more money on shoes. But since the room was an empty sea of white, I got a tight little two-top table and ordered everything Craig had singled out for praise in his review—all the spicy, peppery, gingery, chili-detonated stir-fries he loved.
“Very spicy,” the waiter warned as he took my order.
“I like spicy. Give me Craig Claiborne spicy,” I said. I dropped a chopstick load of Szechuan beef with bits of tree ear and lotus root into my mouth and gasped. Oh yes. It was spicy. The shrimp was a killer, too. I choked and sneezed and coughed, tears running down my face.
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��Something wrong, lady?” the maître d’ asked.
“No,” I said, wiping my cheeks and my forehead. “It’s wonderful. It’s perfect.”
I had to find a way to meet Craig. I was more than just a fan, after all. I was a writer. I would write a profile of the great Times critic. How could Claiborne resist? I pitched the idea to an editor at Look magazine and he gave his blessings. Craig seemed amused, even pleased, by the idea of a profile in Look. He agreed I should start by coming along on a reviewing lunch to see how he did it. We met downtown in the Village at a funky little Spanish restaurant. Craig was fussy and proper and very southern, just like he sounded in the Times, scolding the waiter in his soft, rolling drawl because the plates weren’t warmed.
I tried not to seem gauche. “Oh yes,” I said, feeling the plate with the back of my hand as if it were a loved one’s fevered brow. We were the only customers in this little joint with its one waiter. I am sure he had never heard of warming plates, but he warmed them.
I was deeply impressed by Craig’s seriousness. He told me how he had suffered that week, agonizing over the stars he awarded—very rarely four, but sometimes three, many twos, and often one. “I was up all night, tossing and turning, trying to decide if I’d given the Gaiety Delicatessen three stars instead of two because [his bosses] Abe Rosenthal and Arthur [Gelb] like the Gaiety. Or does the place deserve it?” He crinkled his nose as if to say, Silly, isn’t it? All that fuss over a deli. But I could hear the anguish in his voice.
Craig thought it was important for me to see the yin and yang of his territory as a critic. He’d long ago given three stars to Quo Vadis, a clubby, upper-crust spot in the Continental style, and he thought I should taste its superior food. There was much racing about with platters of the daily specials to tempt him. At his side on the banquette, I basked in the aura of such unctuous ooze. Would Mr. Claiborne like that sautéed in butter? No butter. Olive oil? A new oil has just arrived from Tuscany, smuggled in by a cousin. (No one spoke of virgins or extra-virgins in those simpler, less promiscuous times.) A little puddle was poured so Craig could taste. He ignored it.
