Insatiable

by Gael Greene

  I had continued to see Jean whenever we were on the same continent. I am not sure what Jean Troisgros and I were all about. He was single. I was single. We ate. We made love. We talked about food. We had dinner with mutual friends who spoke French and amused him while I sat there, sometimes a bit sappy, admiring his face, the big dark eyes almost bruised in golden skin. Most especially, I loved his hands, huge hands with perfectly formed fingers . . . as if sculpted by a master. (Look at the hands of the older chefs, chefs who have actually cooked for years, hands plunging into boiling water, moving hot pots. They are often giant hands, swollen by heat, with muscular fingers.) Jean was not much taller than I—we were probably the same height in my lowish ankle-strap wedgies—and his arms and legs were like steel.

  Jean was only in his early fifties then, but with his mustache and beard almost completely white, he seemed older, and he struck me as almost fatherly in his thoughtful, caring, protective ways. But he was a desirable widower, after all, and eventually there was a special woman back in Roanne, as friends who did the circuit two or three times a year made sure that I knew. Jean never spoke of her. Indeed, I do not remember Jean ever speaking of himself, or family, or feelings, or of his son Georges, a journeyman at Regine’s on Park Avenue, who was lean and had a full black beard, and would later become a stalwart visible through the pass-through to the kitchen at Lutèce.

  Jean spoke little English. My French was never good enough to follow a whipsaw conversation among Frenchmen, never good enough to say anything particularly deep or poetic or funny. As a seventeen-year-old in Paris, I’d mastered the uvular r—I loved that uvular r—so I sounded like I spoke French, and people would chatter back at me till my brain glazed. I never thought Jean was the man for my life or I for his. But between the hurricanes of emotion that seemed epidemic in my new singlehood, he was occasionally there, solid, straightforward, and calm.

  Jean was the strong, silent type—he’d spent most of his life in a kitchen, as French chefs did until Paul Bocuse started jetting around the world in 1973, taking his kitchen pals along with him, and making a splash by cooking brilliantly publicized dinners. The kitchen was where most chefs were planted—not exactly fertile ground for intellectual insights or social repartee. When the press quoted Bocuse, it was usually when he had said something bluntly outrageous, blindingly chauvinist, or hopelessly misogynist. And he was the spokesman for his tribe. Jean was reserved, even shy.

  I remember telling Jean that the notoriously restless Paul was losing credibility with the food press and the growing ranks of gourmand travelers because he was almost never in his restaurant at Collonges, especially by the time he, Roger Vergé, and the celebrated pâtissier Gaston Lenôtre opened the Three French Chefs restaurant at Disney’s Epcot Center in Orlando. Bocuse had left two wives behind in Lyon, one official wife, the elegant and patrician-looking Ramonde, who ran the restaurant, later with their grown daughter by her side, and the other, unofficial “wife,” mother of his son.*

  “The person who cooks when I am here is the same person who cooks when I am not here,” Bocuse responded to the critics. I’d eaten an astonishing meal when neither Bocuse nor his trusted chef stand-in, Roger Jaloux, were in the kitchen. But pilgrims from abroad making that long and costly trek were less likely to drop to their knees over the pastry-wrapped loup de mer with scales incised in the dough, and the chef’s inimitable floating island, when they didn’t spy that famous eagle profile under the grand toque stalking the room.

  Jean defended Bocuse. “If I were going to have my last meal, I would choose Paul to cook it,” he told me.

  The bills for the wanton luxury and drama at High Tree Farms had left Billy Cross and Michael James broke, but by the time Jean was booked to cook, they had found sheltering arms and a properly plump budget for their cooking extravaganza at the Robert Mondavi winery. “I like the idea of linking the wines of California with the cuisine of France,” Mondavi said as he launched The Mondavi Wine Country Cooking School. Jean and I would live in the winery guesthouse, a sprawling A-frame, its vast glass facade looking out on row after row of the vineyard that surrounded it.

  I managed to get a column ahead at the magazine and flew out from New York with Jean. We spent the night at the Stanford Court so he could supervise the shopping the next morning. He almost provoked a riot in the supermarket when he bit into a daikon radish and, rejecting it, tossed it back onto the produce pile. Jean wanted fish. Where would he find fish fresh enough? Michael James took us to Chinatown. Jean stroked a few likely specimens, looked them in the eye, lifted their gills. He’d never seen sand dabs before. He had to try them. It wasn’t even whole fish that he bought finally, but some very ordinary, schlumpy-looking fillets of red snapper. I was certain he was courting disaster. Fillets would never last. Jean instructed the fishmonger to put everything on crushed ice and into the trunk for the drive north to the Mondavi winery. To keep those fragile fillets fresh-smelling, he stored them in metal bins on ice in the fridge—frigid but not frozen under wet dish towels that he would change twice a day. Jean barely had time to unpack what he’d brought: a bathing suit, his tennis racket, a two-hundred-dollar can of black truffles, and ten quarts of essence of veal bones (reduced to a demiglace by his son Georges).

  The communicants, nested in inns and lodges nearby, arrived for lunch. They came from Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Kankakee, Illinois, wearing dungarees and major jewels. They were sybarites and everyday gourmands, professional cooking teachers, food writers, and unabashed chef groupies, as well as Augustin Paege (the eccentricly quotable Bulgarian who’d been our unctuous host at the upstate Box Tree Inn) and an amateur cook and food lover who introduced himself as Joel. That was Joel Grey, fresh from winning an Oscar for Cabaret. An architect from San Francisco carried his own chef’s knife in a leather hip holster. The wife of a doctor (who also built racing boats) wore surgeon’s whites and a 12.5-karat emerald.

  With his smile and four English phrases—“Thank you,” “Hello,” “I love you,” “More butter”—Jean instantly won them over.

  Midway through class that first evening, swiftly slivering cucumbers into crisp, perfect matchsticks, Jean was already communicating easily with the vivid gestures of his kitchen technique. But he was worried about the flour, remarkably different from flour in France. How would he adjust to make his pastry? And what about the butter? he wondered.

  Michael tapped the bricks of butter on the counter. “You don’t know what it took to find this quality of butter,” he said.

  Some of the students managed to gulp down their first kidney ever that evening. Dazzled by the posh of the table—waiters in black tie, orchids in glass bricks, cabbage in clay pots at lunch, a parade of crystal goblets by candlelight—a real estate and insurance salesman announced he would leave the business world and open an inn.

  “You have to watch everything Jean does,” he confided to me. “You have to be here to see him spear a garlic clove with a fork and use it to stir the spinach.”

  The class seemed enthralled even with such basics as peeling Swiss chard. “What do we do with the chard remains?” someone punned.

  After breakfast each day, we raced off to vineyard tastings. Lunch looped into afternoon haze and often more vineyard visits. At Domaine Chandon, where Moët & Chandon was bottling its pioneer Franco-American sparkling wine to go on sale that December, Jean slashed a champagne bottle open with a knife as if it were a sword and poured aperitifs for the class. At Heitz Vineyard, Jack Heitz waited till everyone had arrived to open a bottle of his rare and legendary Martha’s Vineyard cabernet.

  “You wouldn’t open it ahead to let it breathe?” I asked. Breathing was a sacred ritual among the serious winos I knew.

  “No,” Heitz said. “I want you to experience that first taste, and then we can all see how it evolves in the air.” That first sip was so complex and powerful, I had to lean against the wall to think about it. (And I went home a convert, astonishing friends and frustrating sommel
iers for the rest of my life by not letting them open a young red till we were ready to drink it.)

  Jean would disappear for a few rounds of tennis between winery marathons. One afternoon, half the class got lost on the road to Mayacamas Vineyards. Jean disappeared into the brush and plucked wild plums, lest someone starve between breakfast croissant and lunch.

  When the class gathered in the Mondavi winery kitchen at five o’clock to cook dinner, a few imprudent drinkers who couldn’t bring themselves to spit expensive Chardonnays came staggering in late. By that time, Jean’s lightning-swift knife had chopped turnips, carrots, shallots, kiwis, and grapefruit skin. Jean was a surgeon dissecting the baron of lamb, an alchemist elevating humble Swiss chard to buttery sainthood, and a puzzled man trying to skin an American fish of unknown ancestry.

  “If God had meant a fish to be skinned, he would have given it a zipper,” a West Coast restaurant critic observed.

  The class punster couldn’t resist. “This is a zipless fluke.”

  “All it takes to be a restaurant critic in Portland is being able to tell which frozen cheesecake is Sara Lee,” the Oregon reviewer had lamented, confessing how he envied me the richness of my bailiwick.

  Joel Grey’s face was radiant as he mastered the art of disjointing a chicken. “You must do it in one blow of the knife,” Jean commanded. “Two will disjoint your fingers. If you cut yourself”—he looked up from slivering turnips—“be sure to leave the blood for the sauce.”

  I watched Jean wrestle a twenty-five-pound mattress of puff pastry into submission for the evening’s dessert. Surely it had been years since he’d had to knead and roll and turn his own dough. Back home in Roanne, that was a job for the pastry team. Watching him in the kitchen was like watching Nureyev, I thought, or an Olympic slalom champion. A master of his métier performing was incredibly sexy. And it was not just me who found his cooking erotic. I noticed a few of the women gasping for breath, and I thought, Yes, yes, yes.

  Indeed, most of us were so gaga, we missed picking up the real secret of the haunting fish sauce. Jean would shoo us off to the dining room as he and Michael and our friend from New York, Naomi Linden, plated the food. Jean always did my plate himself, Naomi told me later. He would select what he considered the most beautiful fillet, the most perfectly rare breast of pigeon, ladle the sauce in a precise geometric swirl, wipe the edge of the plate, and instruct a waiter to carry it directly to me. That’s how Naomi discovered the fish sauce’s crucial ingredient, never revealed to the class.

  “It’s the veal demiglace he stirs into it,” she confided to me later. “I caught him doing it and he made me promise to keep it a secret, just for myself. But of course I am sharing it with you.”

  Jean was a model of discretion in class, relaxed and proper. At night, he was comfortable and affectionate in the big bed we shared on the open balcony overlooking the soaring living-dining space below. Our friends Naomi and Greg Linden remained invisible in their bedroom. Sometimes the morning light pouring in would wake us. Sometimes it was the bustle of the staff setting up breakfast on the table below, shushing one another not to disturb our sleep. Jean would wake as men often do, primed for making love. And I would climb on top, riding to my own rhythm, my arm pressed against my mouth so no telltale cries could escape. Once my breathing returned to normal, I would call out over the balcony rail, “Good morning, everyone.”

  Those muffled moments felt naughty and delicious, almost as naughty and delicious as raspberry pie for breakfast. It wasn’t rich enough merely to have fresh raspberries in an era before berries might arrive in the market more or less ripe from somewhere around the globe every day of the year. But to have them for breakfast on pastry cream in an exquisite tart shell baked by Margaret Fox, the woman who ran the Café Beaujolais down the road, that was paradise. Some mornings when the sun had time to dry the dew, the table was set outside and we sat surrounded by grapevines, picking raspberries off the last of the tart.

  While we sailed along in the kitchen—with Jean sprinkling flour on everything, including a few irreverent students, and improvising a new dish using the basket of figs that had just arrived—Billy’s serving crew created new fantasies at the table. Why were they all so good-looking? I marveled. He had selected them, male starlets, surfers, and runway models, as if he were casting a beach flick. One noon, the table held hundreds of shiny red peppers. That night, branches of orchids bisected the crossed tables as local VIPs joined us. Another day, roses and tulips bloomed in a hundred tiny Asian vases, one to a vase. Or sweeping branches of fruit blossoms in tall weighted glass bricks might stand dipping low to the corners of the table. Live crayfish in laboratory beakers provoked manic delight and outrage. (By evening they were dead, having given their ultimate gift to Jean’s cassolette de queues d’écrevisse.) And always candlelight. Nothing but candlelight. The Mondavi dining room’s famous glass ceiling above was cranked open to let in the sun at lunch and to reveal the full moon at dinner.

  One of the women brought a copy of Blue Skies, No Candy along for me to sign. “Would you read aloud to the group after lunch?” she asked.

  “Oh yes,” several others chimed in. “Read to us.”

  I leafed through the book, looking for a section that would stand on its own . . . something funny perhaps, something food-related. I looked out at their smiling faces, at what I guessed to be a rather conservative posse, the upper-crust blondes and a few blue-haired ladies. I needed to find a scene that didn’t take place in bed, that didn’t rely on my heroine’s graphic stream of conscience and all those four-letter words. Funny, isn’t it? I found it easy enough to write them, hard to read them out loud.

  I started to read. I was pleased at a laugh and then another. But my eye, darting ahead, could see on the next page, just a few paragraphs away, the word pussy . . . oh dear. What could I do? I lightly slipped it right into my reading. They gasped. I went on. Oh dear. One woman held her head in her hands. Another giggled nervously. I felt myself flush. Thank heaven I was almost finished. I saw the chapter ending just ahead. I closed the book and looked up with a silly grin on my face. They cheered. And the bluest of the blue-haired ladies toasted me with the dregs of her Chardonnay.

  I was actually grateful that Jean’s English was limited. He smiled and toasted, too. That evening, one of the staff brought in a trunk of Moroccan jewelry for sale. Everyone gathered around. Naomi Linden found a necklace she loved. I tried on a silver necklace with coral beads set around a medallion.

  “C’est un cadeau pour toi,” said Jean. “A gift for you.”

  I was touched by his sweetness, the romantic gesture. By that time, I guess anyone who cared enough to notice knew something was going on. Indeed, the Mondavi winery was full of unresolved romantic intrigue that fall. Margrit Biever, Mondavi’s gracious Belgian public-relations woman, had apparently not yet left her husband. I remember meeting him at one of our dinners. But not long after, she would become Mrs. Robert Mondavi.

  I don’t think I articulated it at the time even in my own thoughts, but what drew me to Jean was that he was a man, a grown-up man. He was the manliest man I’d known—straight, basic, seemingly uncomplicated. He cooked. He loved to cook. He loved that Michelin admired the Troisgros cooking. He played between meals. The other men in my life, wonderful, maddening men, had been overgrown boys, babies, neurotic, wounded, driven, uncertain. Not Jean. Not the Jean he showed to me.

  When his son Georges married a daughter of the Poujol restaurant family in New York, Jean’s American friends were invited to the wedding, but I was not. His Roanne woman, officially now his fiancée, had asked him not to invite me.

  “But how can he give in to her?” I wailed to Naomi. “And the least he could do is call and tell me himself,” I said. “I would forgive him if he called.”

  “But he can’t call,” Naomi said. “He wouldn’t know what to say to you. He’s a simple person. He can’t do it any other way.”

  I knew Naomi was right. He wouldn’
t know what to say. And he couldn’t handle my tears. It was easier just to pretend everything was all right. But I was hurt. I never saw Jean again. I did not visit Roanne in the years before he died from a heart attack on the tennis court at just fifty-six.

  I think of him often, that playful athletic man, dead so young. Whenever I read something about the tradition of the Troisgros restaurant that neglects to mention him, deliberately I believe, as if he never existed, I am furious, and then sad. It seems as if the surviving brother, Pierre, or his wife, Olympe, fear that to credit Jean might dilute the triumph of their son Michel, who, on his own now, has kept the family’s three stars.

  Sometimes I try to re-create the fig dish Jean invented in the Mondavi kitchen. He squeezed the juice of grapefruits, oranges, and lemons into a pot, added cabernet—reduced, reduced, reduced—spilled in some sugar, and cooked the figs just a little. Spooning the tart syrup over the fruit, he ladled it into a big tureen. “These are figs Candy Blue,” he said.

  Jean Troisgros’s Figs Candy Blue

  2 medium-size lemons

  1/2 bottle full-bodied red wine (Jean used a Mondavi cabernet sauvignon; I use a Côtes du Rhone)

  3/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice

  Scant 1/2 cup sugar

  8 or 10 cloves tied in cheesecloth