A Cook's Tour (40 page)

     Things really were different here. I don’t know any rich people in America who count among their employees not just cooks and servers and housekeepers but also gamekeepers and foresters. I don’t know any wealthy American families that can point to a magnificent forest of tall trees and deep gorges and rushing freshwater streams and say, ‘My great-great-great-great grandfather planted that forest.’ It was breathtakingly beautiful. From my big brass bed, I could see mile after mile of checkerboard-patterned grouse moor, the scrub and heather burned down in carefully controlled alternating square sections to provide optimum living conditions for the much-sought-after grouse. Pheasants wandered carefree just outside my door. Roe deer kept the underbrush to a minimum in the thick forest. Wild salmon literally leapt from crystal-clear streams. For mile after mile, an entire interlocking ecosystem was maintained – and had been maintained for hundreds of years – on the sprawling, seemingly never-ending grounds running all the way to the sea. Roddy, the gamekeeper, took me salmon fishing, and he showed me, as best he could, how to cast a line. I reeled it in across fewer than two feet of quick-moving water, hoping that a salmon would become enticed by the fly. The salmon were jumping out of the water, looking me right in the eye only a few feet away, but proved immune to temptation. Nothing like being proven – again and again – to be more stupid than a fish. But I didn’t care. To stand at the edge of a Highland stream, casting across the water, reeling in, then moving slowly downstream on a brisk, clean, late-spring morning, had a hypnotic effect. I didn’t mind if I caught anything or not. Fortunately, Ruth, the chef at the lodge, had a good supply of wild salmon on hand, so I wouldn’t miss eating some.

     I’d agreed – once again for purposes of television entertainment – to go rabbit shooting with Roddy. The plan was to bag a few rabbits, take them back to Ruth at the lodge, and have her make us a traditional poacher’s stew of rabbit, venison, and cabbage, cooked in red wine and stock. Though by now I was reasonably comfortable firing automatic and semiautomatic rifles, handguns, and grenade launchers, given my Cambodian adventures, I had never in my life fired a shotgun. Nor had I ever fired a weapon at a living, breathing, fast-moving target. I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport – would never do it and don’t like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it’s fine. Still, I only agreed to take part in the senseless hunt because I was certain that I’d be hopelessly inept at shooting any rabbits, that I was sure to come up empty. I counted on Roddy, the seasoned professional, to provide enough bunny rabbits for the following day’s lunch.

     I don’t know what happened. With my shotgun broken over my arm – so as not to shoot any of the TV crew or gamekeepers should I stumble into a pothole on the rough terrain – and the safety on, I spied a rabbit racing for cover about sixty to eighty feet in front of me. I quickly had to snap the gun closed, raise it, click off the safety, aim, and then fire – all this at a speedy, barely visible little critter that was running and leaping across his own turf.
Bam!
Very little kick. To my shock and no small amount of dismay, I’d blown the spine out of something that had once looked very much like Bugs.

     ‘Well shot, sir,’ said an assistant gamekeeper, retrieving the limp, still-warm corpse. Holding my prey, I couldn’t resist the need to pet it, so cuddly and adorable; my voice actually cracked a little when I talked to the camera.

     After each shot, I’d break my smoking weapon and an assistant would remove the shell and replace it. I saw a movement to my left, swung the barrel around, rapping Chris’s camera in the process, and bagged another one tearing along a wall a long ways off. Jesus! I was a murder machine! Now I had two sweet-faced little bunny wabbits on my conscience . . . This was not right. But, God help me, I was having fun. Another few hours and I’d be signing up for grouse season.

     Back at the lodge, Ruth prepared an amazing packed lunch of rabbit and venison stew, nettle soup, slices of air-dried beef, Scottish cheeses, and homemade breads. Then all of us, Chef Ruth, Gloria, the mad and wonderful Glaswegian housekeeper, an assistant gamekeeper, and the crew headed out over the moors to a fishing shack by the edge of a stream. Ruth set up a buffet on a picnic table inside and we helped ourselves, then sat down on the porch and devoured the fruits of the not-so-great white hunter’s toil.

     It was sensational. Sitting there watching cattle graze on a hillside across the water, listening to Gloria tell Glaswegian jokes, drinking red wine and watching the tall grass and heather move in the wind, I could hardly imagine a better setting for an afternoon meal. I did, however, begin to fear for my own safety. When this stuff hit the airwaves, when the PETA folks got a load of this, I could be looking at serious trouble. I don’t want any vegan terrorists throwing blood on me – particularly not if I’m wearing an expensive jacket. Hopefully, my potential adversaries don’t get enough animal protein to pose any real threat to my health or wardrobe. But I can’t be sure, can I? Maybe I should buy a Taser.

Very, Very Strong

It’s back to my Saigon routine: Mornings at the market, 555 cigarettes and 333 beer. I’m holed up at the Continental (where I should have stayed all along), just across the street from Givral’s pastry shop and the old Théâtre Municipal. Faded photographs of the hotel hang in frames on the walls surrounding the Orchid Garden bar in the courtyard. They date back to the 1880s, depicting straw-hatted French generals, white-suited colonists, satraps, and rickshaws. A much larger, later photograph, dated 1975, shows NVA soldiers resting out in front of the hotel. Across the square is the Caravelle, where journalists, spooks, and MACV brass once watched from the top-floor bar as B-52 strikes and airborne Gatling guns carved up the countryside beyond the city. Graham Greene stayed here. His character Fowler used to drink at the café downstairs, the Continental Shelf, where
le tout
Saigon used to gather each evening to drink and gossip.

     I think I’ve gone bamboo, as they used to say about British military advisers who’d stayed too long in this part of the world. I’ve gone goofy on Vietnam, fallen hopelessly, helplessly in love with the place. I’m now accustomed to bowls of spicy
pho
for breakfast, strong cups of iced expresso over crushed ice with condensed milk at Trung Nguyen (sort of a Vietnamese version of Starbucks – only better), lunch at the
coms
, cheap eateries where I’d have bowls of rice with fish, chicken, or meat. I’ve come to rely on the smells of jasmine, frangipani, the durian and fish-sauce aromas at the markets, the constant buzzing and rumbling from the motos. I have a hard time letting any of the
don gah
pass me by – women carrying portable kitchens on yokes across their shoulders, serving bowls of soup or noodles that are always fresh. Everything is beautiful. Everyone is nice. Everything tastes good.

     Linh has changed since introducing me to Madame Ngoc. A few weeks ago, he was all nerves and suspicion. When I told him, before leaving for Nha Trang, that Philippe might be swinging through town, maybe joining us in Can Tho, he’d stiffened at the prospect of an unannounced and unanticipated new arrival. He’d have to talk to the People’s Committee, he said. People were watching us, he insisted, independently reporting on our activity. This addition to our party was an unexpected and potentially difficult development. Who was this Philippe? What were his intentions? Was he also a journalist? Was he a French or American citizen? During drinks at the roof bar of the garish Rex, when I left to go to the bathroom, Linh followed me, making an elaborate show of washing his hands while watching in the mirror to make sure I wasn’t emptying a dead drop or whispering into a satellite communicator.

     But since Nha Trang, he’s been relaxed, and since he introduced me to Madame Ngoc, he’s become an absolute pussycat.

     Madame Ngoc is a force of nature. The relationship between the matronly middle-aged restaurant owner, dripping in jade and jewelry, smelling of French perfume, always smartly dressed in well-tailored businesslike Western attire, and Linh, the young translator and Communist functionary, is a mysterious one. When he first took me to her restaurant, Com Nieu Saigon, I couldn’t figure out why he was so solicitous of her. At first blush, they couldn’t seem more different: the cold, efficient Hanoi boy and the warm but mercurial Saigonese woman. Yet Linh never lights a cigarette without first lighting one for her. He pulls out her chair for her. He hangs on her every word, anticipates her needs. When she narrows her eyes, looks around the room, clearly desirous of something, Linh goes on full alert. But then so does everybody else. She may be a tiny Vietnamese version of a yenta, but underneath her soft features and almost overbearingly generous nature it’s pure steel. She teases him relentlessly. She scolds, pokes, dotes on him, calls him ‘Little Brother’. It is, I finally figured out after a few visits, love.

     ‘Next time! You bring cookies. Chocolate!’ says Madame Ngoc, pleased by my gift of flowers but preferring other things. ‘Chris! Lydia! You happy? I love you . . .’ she says, giving them both a big hug and a kiss. ‘You too thin!’ she says to Chris, who has never fully recovered from his crab in Nha Trang. ‘Too thin! I think you sick.’ She snaps her fingers, and across the room an assistant manager and a waiter rush over to serve her. She barks at them in Vietnamese, and a few moments later, the manager returns with packages of vitamins, Maalox, and herb tea. ‘Tony, Chris, Lydia,’ she says, looking worried. ‘You must be very careful.’ We each receive an identical package and a stern admonition to eat more carefully when outside of Saigon. A few days ago, it was bags of Vietnamese coffee (she’d heard me raving about how good it was here). When Lydia commented earlier on the toy dogs with bobbing heads on the dashboard of Madame Ngoc’s chauffeured car, she’d presented each of us with a set later in the evening. We all love Madame Ngoc, and we think she loves us, too.

     ‘I give my heart. Make people happy,’ she says warmly, before snapping her head to the right and fixing a waiter with a brief look of withering scorn. Beers arrive at our table. Ashtrays are emptied. At Madame Ngoc’s restaurant, people are happy. The clean white room is packed with Vietnamese families. Tables of eight, ten, twelve, fifteen people tear into food all around us, with new guests arriving every minute. They drive right through the dining room, three and four to a motorbike, then into the backyard parking area. Napkins are popping everywhere from their packets. Every few minutes, a clay pot shatters loudly on the floor and a sizzling-hot rice cake goes flying through the air. The colors on the plates at every table are electric, psychedelic, positively radiating bright reds, greens, yellows, and browns; and it smells good: lemongrass, lobster, fish sauce, fresh basil and mint.

     Com Nieu Saigon is the slickest, smartest, sharpest restaurant operation I’ve seen in a long, long time. Madame Ngoc, a tiny little middle-aged woman, divorced, living – as she is all too willing to tell you – all alone, runs it like a well-drilled battleship. Every table, every corner, every crevice of latticework in the open-air dining room is clean, tight, and squared away. Underneath the broken crockery, even the floor is spotless. The cooks, the waiters, and the managers move like a highly motivated – even terrorized – dance troupe. It does not do, I have long since gathered, to disappoint Madame Ngoc.

     She’s figured out how to run a successful restaurant in a Communist country. Com Nieu is a loud, casual, comfortable family place with a distinctive gimmick. Madame Ngoc, reading up on Vietnamese culinary history, found a traditional preparation for rice baked in clay pots. The drill at Com Nieu is that when you order a rice side, a waiter retrieves it from the kitchen, smashes the crockery with a mallet, the pieces falling to the floor, then hurls the sizzling-hot rice cake across the dining room, over the heads of the customers, to another waiter, who catches the cake on a plate, flips it, sends it up in the air a few more times like a juggler, then cuts it into portions tableside, dressing it with fish sauce, peppers, sesame, and chives. The room resounds with the noise of breaking and broken crockery. Every few minutes, searingly hot disks of rice go sailing by my ear. It’s a tightly controlled riot of food, folks, and fun, kids standing on their chairs, their moms feeding them, granddad and sons tearing apart lobsters, crabs, and giant prawns, grandmas and dads smoking between courses, everyone chattering, eating, loudly and visibly enjoying themselves.

     Who is Madame Ngoc? As she tells you, she’s just a lone hardworking woman, unlucky in love, who loves cookies, chocolate, stuffed animals (which she collects) and continental buffets in large Western hotels. (She took us as her guest to one of the bigger, newer ones – absolutely giddy around all those chafing dishes of French and Italian food, the cake stands of Austrian pastries and French petits fours.) She is driven everywhere in a new luxury sedan. When it rains, someone is waiting curbside with an umbrella. When she decides – at 10:30 at night – that she wants us all to have our picture taken together, she snaps her fingers, barks a few orders, and a frightened-looking photographer arrives in a full sweat only a few minutes later, an old Nikon and flash rig around his neck. Com Nieu is jammed full every night – as is her other restaurant, a Chinese-themed place down the street. And Madame Ngoc is at one or both, reigning over her devoted staff and adoring public for most of her waking hours.

     ‘I so tired. Very hard work. Very tired. Sometime I don’t want to come. I want to stay in bed. Sleep. But no can. Always watching . . .’ She feigns a deeply suspicious inspection of her rushing staff. ‘I go to fish market to surprise. Maybe somebody steal from me. I must find out. I say, “How much for crab today? How much yesterday? How many pounds you sell me yesterday?” I must look. Careful.’ She points to her eye, signifying eternal vigilance. At the arrival of a large party by the front entrance, she jumps up out of her seat and approaches them, all smiles.