Steal the Menu

by Raymond Sokolov

  Since we were entirely unobservant at home, dietary rules played no part in what we ate. My father was the only one of us with any trace of the shtetl, and he was an unhesitating adventurer at table. So my mother had a free hand to broaden her horizons as a cook, a project she conducted with help from Gourmet magazine.

  I never ventured into her kitchen, except after dinner to dry dishes on the maid’s night out. It was Mother who boiled the artichokes and deep-fried the eggplant slices, trimmed the sweetbreads and whisked together the hollandaise for the asparagus.

  Wine did not appear in our house until I was in high school, a bottle of pinkish Almaden, which loitered half-drunk in the refrigerator for many days. You may take this as a vestige of Jewish tradition if you like. I was in college when my father told me he had just seen his first alcoholic Jewish patient.

  Mother kept active in the kitchen well into her eighties, always picking up new recipes. (The spicy pecans of her invention coincided with the craze for Asian fusion in the 1980s world-at-large.)

  When I left home for two years of boarding at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, a half-hour drive north of our last house inside the city of Detroit proper, I had been exposed, without realizing it, to a fairly broad spectrum of foods and food ideas, and I was inclined by my home training to opt for novel things to eat when they were on offer. Cranbrook, an architecturally magnificent complex built for a Detroit newspaper millionaire by the Finnish genius Eliel Saarinen, taught me many things—Latin poetry, English hymns, French-kissing—but it was an interruption of my alimentary education.

  School food is school food is school food. I do, however, remember with affection a dessert we called anti-gravity pudding, because you could invert the dish and its contents would not fall onto the table. Cranbrook also taught me how to clear the entire service for a table of twelve on a single tray without dropping a glass or a saucer on the endless walk to the kitchen, past twenty-four tables of malicious teenage boys hoping you would lose control of your cargo. The trick was to load the tray on a sideboard so that most of the weight was piled on one side. Then you knelt beside it, slid the heavy side over your shoulder and stood up, very carefully. With practice, the tray could then be held with one hand, on the underweighted outer side, while the free hand swung smugly at one’s waist.

  It is also true that I learned to appreciate rum before graduation, but I don’t count that as the beginning of real connoisseurship in the beverage department. Especially since my coindulger and I consumed the stuff with Coke and then got sick in a YMCA room far from school.

  I didn’t learn much about food at Harvard, either. My college diet consisted of more school food punctuated with cheap eats at restaurants in Cambridge and Boston. To be fair, you could, and I did, try whale steak at Chez Dreyfus. Chez Jean on Shepard Street introduced me to rillettes and other traditional French bistro food. There was gussied-up New England fare at Locke-Ober. But like a whole generation of future American food lovers, I discovered the gastronomic me on $5 a day (and often less) bumming around Europe after freshman year, in the summer of 1960.

  Armed with $1,000 from savings and gifts, I joined an unofficial student invasion of the Old World, which had still not entirely rebounded from two world wars and an intervening economic collapse. This meant that dollar-holding ephebes like me could afford to eat every night in charming Left Bank bistros like Julien et Petit or La Chaumière. And if you were actually me, an inchoate food obsessive smothered by thirteen years of anti-gastronomic formal schooling, you devoured not only the artichaut à la barigoule (including the fonds, which you saw French diners at nearby tables extracting from the leaves and broth) but the concept of an orderly food heritage—a cuisine. After a summer of assiduously feeding off menus written in a language as traditional as the Homeric Greek I’d just learned to read at Harvard, I had signed on, without consciously knowing it, to a lifetime of passionate interest in filling my mouth and brain with as much of this previously undreamed of culinary material as my late start and physical distance from the source would allow.

  The strong dollar also bought cheap travel, first by air and then by rail, to every other corner of Europe my meager cognitive map of the continent suggested as a destination. The Eurail Pass was my carte blanche to Spain, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy and even Greece. In only thirteen weeks, I chugged through a kaleidoscope of European capitals and second cities, spending the days in museums and the evenings at restaurants that functioned as survey courses in European cooking.

  On an early August evening, I boarded not the Orient Express but a by-blow named the Simplon-Orient Express, because it passed through the Simplon Tunnel from Switzerland to Italy and then continued on through Yugoslavia to Athens. After four dismal, sooty, hungry nights on the train, I was back in my element, imbibing the food of Greece—the plethora of mezes, the lamb in all forms and, outstandingly, the supernal melons in the garden at the Byzantine monastery of Hosios Loukas in Boeotia.

  Later that summer came the raspberries in Venice and Florence and Rome, lamponi, served with cultured, vaguely sour, thick cream or with sugar, but never both, unless you asked nicely.

  So by the end of that thirteen-week sojourn in Europe, I had seen the Mona Lisa and the caryatids at the Erechtheum, St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Rembrandts in Amsterdam. But what had been planned as a cultural “grand tour” on a student budget had turned into a voyage of gastronomic discovery, a self-taught survey course on the cuisines of Europe, with cultural landmarks crammed in between meals.

  The most important research project came almost at the end of the “course.” I went to Maxim’s in Paris. It had three stars in Michelin, but an eighteen-year-old American with $20 could eat there as if he were King Farouk. I ordered caneton aux pêches, duckling with peaches, not oranges. The menu said the dish came right out of Escoffier. Now, I thought, I was in touch with the highest and best a person could experience, a variation on a great French dish by the greatest of chefs; classic. And like those other classic monuments of European culture, from Aeschylus to the mansarded roofs of the Louvre, this culinary monument, and all the hundreds of classic dishes I’d met with, were part of a tradition that had gelled for the ages.

  And you could eat it. Again and again.

  With cuisine, as with classical literature, you had a fixed text, or at least an archetypal recipe to which all those dishes I was eating arguably pointed back, just as the surviving manuscripts of Catullus and Plato, altered by scribal recopying over the centuries, had a common ancestor. From this premise arose the concept of culinary authenticity, of getting things right in the kitchen, reproducing the foods of France or Italy just as innocents abroad like me and thousands of other young American travelers experienced them on their home grounds, guided by experts like Julia Child or Marcella Hazan, meticulously faithful to tradition. But as a firmer sense of the history of cuisines came over me, I slowly came to see that the food I’d eaten in contemporary Europe had evolved throughout the modern period. Certainly the food of Europe before Columbus, tomatoless and potatoless, was nothing like the European food universe we knew, with its salades de tomates, potages Parmentier, and on and on and on. You couldn’t even push back the dawn of authenticity as far as 1850, once you began looking at cookbooks and other documentation of food eaten in the nineteenth century and comparing it with the food of our day. This turned out to be true even for societies assumed to be glacially traditional, such as China and India.

  But in the summer of 1960, it was bliss to believe that the cuisines I had been informally studying on a shoestring in restaurants all over western Europe were as immutable as the conjugation of Latin verbs.

  I walked back from Maxim’s to my Left Bank fleabag, stopping at a café for a game of pinball (le flipper). By then I knew the drill. First you asked the cashier for change—de la monnaie, if from a five-franc note; more often, you exchanged a franc coin for five twenty-centime pieces, cinq pièces de vingt, worth about four U.S. cents eac
h, enough for five games (parties). Then you wormed your way next to the crowd of spectators around the Gottlieb pinball machine and plunked a coin down on the glass, asserting your right to play next.

  One night I surpassed myself, flipping and nudging my way to a celestial score worth three free games. A tall North African had been watching me.

  “Pas mauvais, monsieur,” he said. It was late. I had an early train to England and my flight home. I waved off the compliment and walked out, leaving the man to play my parties gratuites.

  Two years passed. I studied more Greek and Latin. I spent another summer in Europe, three months filled with more classic meals, of which the highlight was a lunch with my parents and sister at France’s most important and historically pivotal restaurant, La Pyramide, in Vienne, on the Rhône south of Lyon. The food world knew this elegant, three-star establishment as Chez Point, or simply Point. Its founder, Fernand Point, had died in 1955, but his wife, Mado, kept the place going without any decline that a naive twenty-year-old could perceive.

  I was also unaware, as I suspect were most of the guests filling the sunny terrasse of Point in late July 1962, that Chef Point’s legacy of light sauces and uncluttered plates would live on in the kitchens of his former apprentices, Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers and virtually every other future star of the nouvelle cuisine. What struck me was the foie gras en brioche. I had eaten pâté de foie gras before, usually an inert pink spread scooped out of a can. But inside this flawless brioche, the Point kitchen had inserted fresh unadulterated foie gras. On the plate was a deceptively unimposing round slice of liver surrounded by a golden ring of bread. The taste caught me by surprise. This, I saw, was the real thing, the rich and refined goose liver that all the fuss was about.

  Fernand Point, 1947: He purified the language of the French kitchen and passed on his leaner cuisine to the young chefs who then created nouvelle cuisine. (illustration credit 1.1)

  I can’t recall the rest of the meal, only the very end, when my father discovered that his wallet was missing. He thought he must have left it in the car. I was sent out on a search mission. There it was on the driver’s seat, unmolested.

  Pierre (standing) and Jean Troisgros. In the pokey cattle town of Roanne, these former Point acolytes served the most radical and witty menu of the postwar period. (illustration credit 1.2)

  If I hadn’t been so anxious about the wallet, I might have looked up the street and seen the Gallo-Roman pyramid (really an obelisk) that gave the restaurant its name.

  By legend, Point had once tried to resolve an argument between two customers right there where our car was parked. He’d persuaded two men who were fighting over the lunch bill to take their loud dispute outside and decide the matter by racing on foot to the pyramid. The winning runner would pay the bill.

  Point was the starter. Off the men ran. And ran and ran and ran, until they disappeared into the afternoon.

  Back in Cambridge, I found senior year an abrupt culinary letdown but a big step up in the interpersonal relations department. By Labor Day I was married, and with the marriage came a kitchen. Mostly, my wife did the cooking, without any expectation that I would help out except with the dishes. But I did get my hand in, crucially, in the summer of 1964, in the easy weeks between my Fulbright year of reading classical greats at Wadham College, Oxford, and the onset of classics graduate school back at Harvard.

  Our apartment was in student housing, across Kirkland Street from the home of Julia Child. I saw the already legendary Julia from time to time in the neighborhood. We even shared a butcher, Jack Savenor, a genial sort eventually accused of overstating the weight of his meat.

  Julia and I didn’t meet then, but I had her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volume one. And I had the time to try its most challenging recipe, cassoulet, the Provençal bean stew with its numerous meats. In following through with more determination than finesse every one of its densely hortatory six pages, Margaret and I joined an avant-garde of ambitious home cooks whisking their way to authenticity with Julia as their chef.

  Oh, yes, that cassoulet was a delicious success, and its combination of deliciousness and technical perfection, made possible by a recipe with consummate completeness and authoritative manner, reinforced my belief that great food was food prepared in the most traditionally accurate manner, with no crass substitutions like dried mushroom soup as a sauce base or inert mayonnaise spooned out of a bottle, and, on a higher plane, no deviations from tradition.

  Long before the political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared that history had come to an end, every serious disciple of Julia’s already had concluded (actually, without any specific instruction on this point from Mrs. Child) that the history of food had ground to a halt at some point before World War II. Culinary classics were a heritage we could study, but neither we nor the great chefs of Europe, who had learned the classic repertoire during long authoritarian apprenticeships, were going to tamper with the treasures in this edible museum.

  Julia Child and her Cambridge butcher, Jack Savenor, 1966. I bought meat there when I was a Harvard graduate student in 1965, but I was too shy to introduce myself to my favorite cookbook author. (illustration credit 1.3)

  There was, for example, only one basic way to assemble a roast of veal Prince Orloff. Julia’s recipe starts with a reference to the master recipe earlier in the book for casserole-roasted veal. For veal Orloff the finished roast is sliced and then reassembled after being coated with a mixture of two sauces: soubise (pureed onions and rice) and duxelles (minced mushrooms). The reassembled roast is then coated with a third sauce: Mornay, which is a béchamel, or white sauce, thickened with cream and then flavored with grated Swiss cheese.

  Julia spent a total of three detailed pages on this, but the professional chef’s manual Le repertoire de la cuisine of Théodore Gringoire and Louis Saulnier (1914), a shorthand aide-mémoire based on Escoffier’s Le guide culinaire (1903), which was still very much in use in later-twentieth-century French restaurant kitchens, dispatched the dish in four lines. But Gringoire and Saulnier prescribed intercalating the sauced slices with black truffle slices, and you were also sent scurrying to the specifications for garniture Orloff, a bevy of four intricate side dishes to be arrayed around the roast. Change any of this and you might as well have tried to pass off a cat as a dog.

  What now sounds like stultifying fidelity to a tradition dating back not to the time of Vercingetorix, after all, but merely to the nineteenth century (to some point between 1856, when Czar Alexander II made Alexei Fedorovitch Orloff a prince in gratitude for his services as a diplomat in France, and Orloff’s death, in 1862, when a celebrated French chef working in the princely kitchen in St. Petersburg invented veal Orloff) was universally accepted as the primordial state of French cuisine, immutable and for the ages. Perhaps no one ever said such a thing, but that is my point. Questions of historical change simply didn’t come up. When they did, the notion of tradition and authenticity as granitic, almost prehistoric, unraveled and evolved into a more dynamic view of the origins of the cuisines we know.

  I will confess that the prelapsarian, ahistorical point of view appealed to me. The idea that the world’s greatest systems of cooking had not and would not be turned inside out by modernism, as literature and painting had been, attracted me just as strongly as the forever inviolable and unevolving literatures of antiquity had pulled me in.

  Plato and truite meunière were both classics, in basically the same sense.

  That is what I would have said if you had asked me about it back then. Anything worth calling a cuisine was as solid as a sedimentary rock built up over generations and centuries through the accretion of human experience in one culture over time. Of course, I wasn’t stopping to think about all the constant change that had led to the supposedly granitic cuisines in existence circa 1970—the New World ingredients so seamlessly absorbed, the hundreds of dishes invented and published by nineteenth-century chefs like Antonin Carême. Perhaps because th
e previous sixty years in cooking had been stalled and kept from evolving by two world wars, an intervening depression and a slow recovery after the fall of Hitler, food history did seem to have ground to a halt. It was easy to believe that we had received a complete and unchanging constellation of recipes and foodways in the form of a cuisine, French or Italian and so on, that had its variations, as, say, ancient Greek had dialects, but the inherited aggregate, whether the Greek in dictionaries and in the surviving texts or French cooking in cookbooks or in surviving practice, was a finite system.

  I fell into this way of thinking in Greek K, Harvard’s class in advanced Greek composition, and I imbibed it at the feet of my undergraduate thesis advisor, the ascetic apostle of “slow reading,” Reuben Arthur Brower.

  Ben Brower had been my unofficial intellectual guru since freshman year. He was the senior faculty presence in Humanities 6, one of the general education courses you could choose from to satisfy a requirement Harvard created after World War II, to make sure that students didn’t emerge from the increasingly specialized world of undergraduate instruction without a broad sense of civilization, especially Western civilization. Hum 6 tackled this job by teaching a method of literary criticism spun off from the rigorously ahistorical and objective method of reading sometimes called the New Criticism. Less dogmatic and radically skeptical than the French deconstructionism that did its best to kill the enjoyment of literature for a generation of student victims in the 1980s, Brower’s version of New Criticism was really an invitation to pay close attention to the text you were reading. For a classicist—and Brower himself had started out as a classicist—Hum 6 wasn’t all that different in approach from the philological analysis of Greek and Latin that scholars had been practicing since Hellenistic times.