by Gael Greene
The tame old-world edible feel-good stirred up by the two Parma-born partners, Gino Robusti and Bruno Caravaggi, bred intense fidelity from Quo Vadis loyalists, I learned. There were the musical Italians—Tebaldi, Corelli, Tucci. On the day of an opera performance, Cesare Siepi would put away a dozen and a half oysters. Quo Vadis habitués were likely to witness such affectionate reunions as Gen. George C. Kenney embracing Mrs. Douglas MacArthur at a table with Eddie Rickenbacker, John Paul Getty and a scion not talking much, and Baron Rothschild rinsing his hands with water from a goblet. The house was known for a few Belgian and Italian signature dishes—the eel in green sauce, a heroic bollito misto (boiled meats with a spunky salsa verde and candied mustard fruits)—and for subdued classics like bay scallops meunière or a wholesome calf’s liver with bacon, nutritional sanity for the Geritol set, sexagenarian capitalists, and aging warriors.
Gino and Bruno danced their pas de deux for Craig now in the antimacassar parlor elegance of chintz and crystal and clichéd bronzes on marble pedestals below the fabulous painted palazzo ceiling. I was wowed by the fondue Bruxelloise—deep-fried batter-wrapped pockets of creamy cheese, sprinkled with a shock of fried parsley. But I noticed that Craig seemed seriously disturbed by his anguille au vert—eel poached in white wine and mulched in fresh herbs. “It needs salt,” he said. I tasted. Indeed. When Craig grabbed a salt shaker and corrected the lapse, I could see both owners go white.
A shallow copper cocotte of kidneys Bercy was presented for Craig’s nod, sauceboat alongside.
“Enough,” Craig said as Gino dished them out. “Enough. No, that’s too much.” He frowned. And to me: “So gross.”
Too much? Gross? I never knew there could be anything like too much. Too much was always just barely enough for me. But Craig ate very sparingly—savoring each morsel if it were properly seasoned and skillfully cooked. And the kidneys were splendid that day. He closed his eyes and smiled beatifically. He nibbled and sipped his wine, leaving a third of the kidneys on his plate, as if he was actually full. Full, that was another new concept for me. Life was never about full. It was about “Oh my god, how delicious this is.” I would soon realize it was drinking that gave Craig his neat little potbelly. He loved his martinis, fine wine in beautiful crystal, and, oh, those margaritas (only fresh-squeezed lime would do for his perfect margarita). I wrote down the recipe, looking forward to thrilling my friends at my next brunch with the perfect margarita.
Look’s photographer and I drove out to Craig’s weekend house on Long Island to shoot him and onetime Pavillon chef Pierre Franey preparing a recipe for their Sunday Times magazine column. I was beside myself with anticipation—Craig Claiborne and the great Pavillon chef cooking for me. Craig lived in a modest two-story prefab that he’d bought from a catalog and parked alongside a modest pool with great views of Gardiner’s Bay in the Springs, that low-frills exurb of East Hampton where so many painters worked, not far from where Jackson Pollock was buried.
As a devotee of what soup opera got covered in the very staid New York Times, I knew Pierre Franey had stunned Manhattan’s close-knit colony of Gallic expatriates by quitting the mythic Le Pavillon (the ultimate great restaurant of its time). He’d felt slighted by Soulé and left for Howard Johnson’s and more money, where, Craig reported to me, he was contentedly upgrading the canned gravy and stews, and was the genius behind HoJo’s ginger ice cream. Was Howard Johnson’s coffee ice cream uniquely brilliant? It was, I learned, because Pierre had insisted they use espresso coffee. Indeed, Claiborne-Franey recipes occasionally might call for a can of Howard Johnson’s gravy, a veritable sauce espagnole by any other name.
Pierre had been the invisible eminence in Craig’s recipes for a long while and ultimately came to share the byline on their Sunday column. On this afternoon, he bustled about Craig’s open kitchen—a sturdy, suntanned Frenchman, fiftyish and sexy, with emphatic black brows and that flirtatious manner that seems to run in French genes. His intimates and maybe the world knew that Craig was gay, and everyone not in their immediate circle of intimates wondered if Pierre was gay, too. It was clear to me that Craig adored him. Pierre stabbed some lobsters, flamed them in cognac, and began to create a soufflé Plaza Athénée—the classic layering of lobster and grated Gruyère with cream and whipped egg whites that would balloon in the oven and brown into a glorious cloud.
Craig stationed himself on a stool at the counter in front of his portable typewriter, counting the eggs as they cracked and occasionally grabbing Pierre’s hand so he could measure how much flour or how much salt the chef was about to toss into the bowl.
As dinnertime neared, Craig began pouring Dom Pérignon into Baccarat crystal flutes for all of us. Still freshly hatched and an ingenue in the world of the grape, I was not used to drinking from a flute. The fragile crystal in my bridal trousseau included saucer goblets for champagne. (I’d grown up with the myth that a perfect breast would fit into a champagne goblet, and mine were embarrassingly Burgundy balloons. Certainly the flute banished that conundrum.)
Betty Franey arrived with the three little Franeys. I figured they were all haute chowhounds. “Oh, if only,” she said. Jacques, at five, would eat only canned SpaghettiOs and hot dogs, she confided. She flashed me a quick glance of the Entenmann’s chocolate cake hidden in her bag for the kids’ dessert. “Don’t let Craig know,” she whispered. “He’d have a fit.” I didn’t see what the children did with their soufflé. Maybe they didn’t get any. Maybe they hid it under a leaf of lettuce. There were two billowing, glazed, picture-perfect poufs—one for the five of them, one for me and the photographer—each bite a savory surprise, every mouthful different: a fragrant fluff cloaking a chunk of lobster, an ooze of cheese-scented cream, or a pungent patch sporting a crunch of crusted Parmesan. It was as complex as T. S. Eliot on the plate.
After dinner, Craig was still pouring, cognac and brandy now. He played recordings of Broadway musicals from a huge collection of everything I’d ever heard of, played them loud, and when West Side Story began, he had to dance. “Maria. Maria, Maria.” He knelt at my feet, acting it out. He danced with me and then he danced off alone. And when he tumbled down the spiral staircase, blood running from a cut on his head, he laughed as if delighted. He’d drunk enough to blur the pain.
We left for the long drive home. I felt flushed and manic. My heart was racing. I was high on soufflé and champagne in Baccarat crystal and my glimpse into this rarefied world. Only later did I learn that Craig had spent the next few hours in the emergency room. My profile ran in Look that August, just weeks before Clay Felker summoned me.
10
THE INSATIABLE CRITIC
THE GROUND FLOOR IS ABOVE ALL APPROPRIATELY GRAND,” I WROTE IN A piece called “Paley’s Preserve,” my first review in the infant New York, November 11, 1968. “It is slick, rich, calculated, spare, intimidating. It is Contemporary Wasp. You would hate to break open a roll for fear it would scatter unprogrammed crumbs. It is understatedly snob. There is no Bronx phone directory. Manhattan, of course. Brooklyn, yes. Even Queens. But no Bronx. You sense this slight to the Bronx is no accident. Nothing here is accident. Armies of interior designers have measured, computed, engineered. Even the sugar bowl is part of the statement. Granite plays against rosewood. . . . Shiny black matchbooks wear stark portraits by Irving Penn of nuts and clams. The quarter-round molding that borders the powder room carpet is gold . . . but not just plain gold . . . Florentine gold.
“The Ground Floor is a perfect room to end an affair in. The tables are far enough apart to announce the break in a firm voice, and the ambiance is stern enough to discourage sloppy emotionalism. Not many Beautiful People get this far west before curtain time. There is no one o’clock flutter of Dr. Laszlo’s ‘girls.’* Even Babe Paley (the boss’s goddess wife) is less than prudently faithful. But Leonard Lyons* moves through the grill, antennae clicking off the celebrities du jour—actor Donald Pleasance, a famous author drinking breakfast, Barbara Walters, Johnny Carson, Jock
Whitney. And good grief! Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, tieless, unjacketed, grizzled grey locks to his shoulder, Ben Franklin specs . . . the oldest hippie in the world.”
As a coda, I ended my dissection of the Ground Floor with a nod to CBS boss Paley’s more folksy canteen, a regal let-them-eat-franks gesture, the snack bar in Paley Park on Fifty-third just east of Fifth, “an unequivocal triumph since they turned the waterfall on. . . . Here you can start the affair you will end at the Ground Floor,” I wrote, “over franks and Coke, root beer or Fresca served in lettuce green paper cups. Ambiance: urban stunted nature with an assist from neighboring incinerators and traffic fumes. But a joy nevertheless.”
That was my debut, complete with the addictive ellipses, the verbal “ahem” copy editors decided to tolerate. The various attempts by CBS and William Paley to warm up the calculated cool at the Ground Floor belatedly might not have seemed all that important in the context of war and assassination and social upheaval spotlighted up front in New York. But the magazine had already connected with committed media watchers and powermongers, raising political antennae all the way to the White House. Now they would notice that New York had a restaurant critic. Some food-world professionals were dubious, even bitchy, asking where Clay had dug me up. But he seemed pleased. It was his idea to dub the column “The Insatiable Critic.” I wasn’t sure that I liked the rubric at first. Insatiable? I was not insatiable. Was he suggesting I might be a nymphomaniac? I knew I was sufficiently satiable for polite company. Finally, I decided the title was ambiguous and provocative without being specifically damning. And Don just laughed.
Plum Rum Conserve
I put up this conserve as a Christmas gift for friends.
1 1/2 cups white raisins
1 1/4 cups currants
2/3 cup rum (preferably dark rum)
3 medium seedless oranges
6 cups sugar
3 lbs. cherry or prune plums
Steep raisins and currants in rum for several hours, turning occasionally.
Peel oranges, removing the white membrane, and dice pulp.
Boil orange rind until tender. Remove all the white part from the rind and then julienne the zest into one-inch slivers. Sprinkle with 1/2 cup of the sugar.
Pit and dice the cherries or plums. Combine with rum-steeped fruit, orange pulp, and the rest of the sugar. Cover this mixture and the orange rind, and let both sit overnight in the refrigerator.
Combine the fruit mixture and the orange rind the next day in a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil. Cook 30 minutes or until thickened, stirring frequently.
Pour into 6-oz. jars that have been sterilized by submerging in boiling water. Stir to release air bubbles. If you have no patience for paraffin, store in the fridge and tell your lucky friends to refrigerate your gift at once.
Makes 10 to 12 jars.
11
PLANTING THE SEEDS OF SENSUALITY
I WAS A DECADE AHEAD OF AMERICA’S SENSUALITY EXPLOSION IN THE fifties and leaped into the foodie vanguard in the sixties. I didn’t know much, but I already knew Vienne was not Vienna, and there were six flavors of mustard from Fauchon aging in my fridge, when everyone else stocked feeble ballpark yellow. I would not have predicted that in a few years great armies of New Yorkers would be trotting off to France carrying New York, determined to order the dishes I loved in Lyon and Mougins, or that the young and affluent New Yorker would soon be as obsessed with cooking and great dining as I. Nor did I foresee that by the eighties, half of them would want to own restaurants and everyone would be trying to outdo Jane Fonda at high-impact aerobics. I am not a futurist. I almost never recognize a trend until it starts annoying me—like confectioner’s sugar on the cuff of my best silk shirt from the pastry chef’s compulsive sprinkling. (I am especially vexed when the totally clueless powder the paper doily under the ice-cream-sundae dish.)
In just a few years, with New Yorkers in the vanguard, Americans would move on from tuna melts and well-done prime rib to quiche lorraine, tarte tatin, and sole Véronique. It would take only a few years more to advance from croque monsieur to mousse of pigeon, sole ballotine en brioche, and noisette de chevreuil grand veneur with, of course, quixotic counterculture brown rice deviations and tofu breaks. And then quickly in the sybaritic seventies, the nouvelle cuisine would unleash duck with raspberry vinegar, an ocean of beurre blanc, haricots verts lashed together with scallion ribbon. And out in California, an Austrian import, Wolfgang Puck, would lead us to new frontiers with heart-shaped smoked salmon-crème fraîche pizza. And Alice Waters would discover the rapture of a fresh baby string bean.
Yes, the ease of travel—new cheap transatlantic flights—took us to France, and Julia Child translated French food for dummies here. But the mouth revolution could never have happened quite so quickly or with such passionate gusto except for sex.
The sexual revolution had begun, untethering Americans from prim constraints. Even those not necessarily inspired to indulge in free-range sexual high jinks could not help becoming more aware of their senses and their bodies and the quality, if not the quantity, of their orgasms, thanks to film, fashion, disco dancing, and the feminine mystique.
Russ Meyer’s abundantly breasted beauties found an audience at the drive-in. Sexual candor from Ken Russell and Roman Polanski, and in films like The Damned and The Night Porter, was available at the nearest cinema art house. Adventurers in porno chic would file two by two into Manhattan’s Majestic Theater to see Deep Throat. As boring as it was with its endless in and out, certainly it offered new angles of masterly fellatio for budding sensualists in 1972. Behind the Green Door, Inside Marilyn Chambers, The Devil in Miss Jones, The Opening of Misty Beethoven explored the sexuality of women, with varying degrees of male chauvinism or moral rectitude, but they did seem to confirm that women were sexual, too.
The Feminine Mystique and the women’s movement were not just about jobs and equal pay. They encouraged the cry for equal orgasms. Make that better and more orgasms. Maybe I would split the check with my date, or grab the door and open it myself. That meant I could sit on top and find my G-spot even if he couldn’t. The best-selling Sensuous Woman with her aerated whipped cream and the endlessly quoted Total Woman greeting her guy naked at the door and swathed in plastic wrap might not have been universal role models, but we knew they were out there. You might decide, Yes, I will try whipped cream, or think, No, I’ll have my foreplay pure.
Fashion peeled away layers in the sixties. Girdles went, along with little white gloves. Bras went, too. Men’s hair got longer and skirts got short. Hot pants, rear cleavage-baring minis, Rudi Gernreich’s breast-baring monokini, sheer, see-through, clinging jersey, skintight tank tops. Dancing, the flaunting of movement, and the anything-goes nightlife of the seventies. All just another kick in the ass to gentility.
Sniffing, tasting, touching, skin, fingertips—the Me Generation was absorbed in itself. First the twist and later disco with its throbbing heartbeat and transporting rush added to the body worship and self-awareness. Marijuana for those who inhaled intensified the senses. LSD took the senses to another dimension. When Grace Slick sang the refrain to “White Rabbit,” “Feed your head,” didn’t it follow that rum raisin ice cream or chocolate truffles could be my drugs of choice?
Francesco Scavullo’s photograph of the bare-breasted Contessa Cristina Paolozzi in Harper’s Bazaar became infamous. And Vogue dared Helmut Newton’s sadomasochistic, Sapphic, Peeping Tom intimations, “without which the story of fashion couldn’t be told,” the New York Times observed recently. Tina and Michael Chow in a bondage pose. Lisa Taylor with her legs spread wide, eyeing a topless model in American Vogue, “epoch-defining,” as the Times put it. Offended readers canceled their subscriptions, but, too late, they’d seen it, and for the rest of us, a frisson of sexual danger lingered in the expanding awareness of what sex could be. The naked but airbrushed girl next door in Playboy and the vixen exposing her prettily manicured bush and pink-petal pussy in P
enthouse provided shock therapy, even a challenge.
With a constant media barrage and swinging sex clubs just down the street, even prudes and late bloomers couldn’t help but get in touch with their senses (or, at the least, be appalled by the idea of it). As I often observed when interviewers questioned the metaphors of ecstasy I used in my reviews: “The same sense that registers pleasure at the table measures the delights in bed: the eye, the nose, the mouth, the skin, the ear that records a whimper of joy or a crunch of a superior pomme frite.” Budding sybarites were getting my drift. A little high-risk adventure in food did not demand a major rebellion. Moving from smoked salmon to gravlax to tuna sushi did not demand leaping off an erotic cliff.
But in 1968, the sexual and gender upheaval was far ahead of what was about to evolve at the table. There were no American star chefs in 1968. The chef of New York’s standout American restaurant, the Four Seasons, was Swiss. Nobody knew the names of the black chefs who turned out the refined striped bass in its saintly broth and the celebrated chicken potpie at the Coach House on Waverly Place. Parsley was the fresh herb of winter. There were no free-range chickens, no such botanical as a baby vegetable (except small peas in cans). Vinegars did not come in thirty-three flavors. Olive oil didn’t need to be chaste. No one cared, because most of us gourmands and everyone French cooked in butter. No one had ever heard of tiramisú or zinfandel. Salsa had not yet triumphed. There were no Thai restaurants, no Vietnamese. Mexico was underdeveloped, pretty much the exclusive turf of El Parador and Casa Moneo, an early emporium on Fourteenth Street for south-of-the-border ingredients. In the great restaurants—and they were usually French—fish was striped bass, salmon, or sole (real sole from Dover or flounder blithely billed as sole), and possibly trout. Dessert was not crème brûlée, it was crème caramel, chocolate mousse, and, my favorite, vanilla ice cream with candied chestnuts scooped from the jar.
