A Cook's Tour (7 page)

     At 5:30 a.m., Chris and I set out on an oyster boat with Dominique and Jerome, two local
pêcheur des huîtres
. Their vessel was not the quaint
pinasse
of my childhood. Those days, Dominique explained, were long gone. What
pinasses
remained were used principally as pleasure boats, or to ferry tourists around on day trips and picnics. This craft was a long, flat beast without gunwales – more suitable for loading sacks of oysters – a winch, and an aft wheelhouse.

     It was pitch-black on the bay when we set out, Chris and I clinging to the edges of the wheelhouse, Dominique piloting, Jérôme navigating. We putt-putted cautiously out to the middle of the bay, the sun slowly beginning to announce itself, the sky turning purple and black, shot through with hues of gold.

     Things had changed on the bay since we’d last floated out with our neighbor Monsieur Saint-Jour to visit his tiny oyster park in 1966. Back then, we’d waited until the tide ran out and the boat came to rest on the bay floor, surrounded by a crude hand-constructed stockade that delineated his property. Oysters then were strewn directly on the bottom, raked, picked over, and sorted on site.

     A few years ago, said Dominique, the oysters died – all of them. The bay was reseeded with ‘Japanese’ seedlings, which took to the water well. This was not the first time this had happened. Originally, oysters had naturally occurred on the region’s beds. When they’d gone, ‘Portuguese’ oysters spilled during a wreck had been encouraged, successfully, to proliferate. In 1970, those had mysteriously died off. Things were better now. In fact, young oysters from here were now exported to Brittany and elsewhere, as conditions were particularly favorable for them here. The number of independent oyster fishermen like my old neighbor had shrunk considerably, though, with only a few larger outfits working in much more spread-out areas. The dreaded European Union regulations – which have been wiping out artisans and independents across the Continent – make it much more difficult for small one- or two-boat partnerships to survive.

     The oyster parks looked different, too. It is no longer necessary to allow the tide to completely recede. Oysters are kept sorted by size and age in mesh sacks of varying gauge, on raised platforms, just beneath the water’s surface. The sacks allow water and nutrients to flow through the oysters, while keeping most predators out. Raised from the seabed and restrained in bags, the oysters are less likely to experience breakage or damage, though an astonishing 25 to 30 per cent will be eventually discarded as unsuitable.

     Dominique pulled the boat alongside a few hundred feet of racks, and immediately the two men suited up in hip waders and dropped into the frigid water. They worked in shirtsleeves and rubber gloves (which filled with water right away), seemingly impervious to the cold. While they loaded heavy, dripping sacks of jagged shellfish onto the deck, they smoked and chatted casually, in no apparent hurry to finish their work and leave the water. The oysters they were loading were still young. They’d be taken back to their shack on shore, sorted again, rebagged, and returned to the water the next day.

     Chris and I huddled under thick waterproofs, two layers of sweaters, scarves, and long underwear while the two fishermen prattled on happily about food: lamprey bordelaise (not in season), entrecôte bordelaise (always in season – though the bone marrow for the sauce was increasingly difficult to get and had to be purchased in Holland because of mad cow disease). They talked also of foie gras, and their preferences in oysters. Jérôme had a relative in San Francisco and had tried West Coast oysters there, but he hadn’t thought much of them.

     They hauled wet bags on deck for about an hour, stacked them neatly, then showed us where the seedlings were raised nearby. This process had not changed at all. Oyster larvae, before their shells fully develop, are at their most vulnerable. Ages ago, fishermen found that the oyster larvae would cling comfortably to the curved surfaces of terra-cotta roof tiles (after a process of whitewashing and sanding them), adhering themselves to the insides. The tiles could be stacked and restacked easily, and then, at the appropriate time, scraped free.

     Oysters, by the way, are bisexual in ways undreamed of by career-minded actors. They actually change sex from year to year. If you were to tell an oyster ‘Go fuck yourself,’ it would probably not be offended. The males of a particular year spew their reproductive juices into the water in a generalized, omnidirectional way – a ubiquitously impregnating cloud that fertilizes whatever’s female that year. Picture the swimming pool at Plato’s Retreat back in the 1970s. That fat guy at the other end of the pool with the gold chains and the back hair? He’s getting you pregnant. Or maybe it’s the Guccione look-alike by the diving board. No way of knowing.

     Loaded up with about two thousand pounds of young oysters, we headed back to port, Dominique and Jérôme smoking roll-ups and still talking about food. Back at their shack, the two men demonstrated their oyster-scrubbing apparatus, which blasted off the outer silt and dirt, the automated sorting equipment – a multilayered array of large-gauge strainers that bounced back and forth over a conveyor belt, accompanied by unbelievable noise and vibration, as it shook the oysters through. There was a storage and cleaning pool, where the oysters were soaked in clean, strained bay water – nutrients still intact but dirt and silt strained away – useful for leeching out internal impurities. The day’s work done, we retired to their shack for a tasting of their wares, a few dozen fresh Arcachon oysters and a bottle of dry white Bordeaux. It was eight o’clock in the morning.

     In a previous book, I have described my first oyster on Monsieur Saint-Jour’s
pinasse
as a seminal experience. I’ve never forgotten that moment: that big, scary, ugly shell in my neighbor’s knobby hand, the way he popped it open for me, still-dripping from the bay, the way its pale blue-gray flesh caught the light, pulsated, the mother-of-pearl-like interior of the shell like a jewel box – promising adventure, freedom, sex, as-yet-unencountered joys.

     I’d hoped that all that would come rushing back when I slurped down one of Dominique and Jérôme’s finest. I knew I was trying too hard. I knew I was forcing things. It was as ludicrous as buying your girlfriend not only flowers, jewelry, perfume, and candy but also the bathing suit Ursula Andress wore in
Dr. No
, then plainly stating you expect the best sex of your life. Doubtful in the extreme that events will live up to your expectations. I don’t know whether I really expected to swoon, fall to the floor, start weeping with joy, or what. No, I do know. I expected the perfect damn meal. I’d thought for sure that this would be it. But did my first oyster fresh from the
bassin
in thirty-four years do it for me? Did it transport me immediately to some culinary version of Elysian Fields, as I’d hoped? Was it the perfect meal I’d so hoped to find?

     Nope. Not really. It’s no reflection on the oysters, which tasted much as I remembered them, briny, not too cold (oysters should not, by the way – contrary to conventional wisdom in the States – be buried in ice for hours and served chilled to frigid temperatures; it may make opening them easier for the shucker, but it diminishes the flavor). They were very fine oysters. Maybe even the best. My brother, just as before, was by my side. I’d re-created, as best I could, all the factors present in my youth. But once again, I felt restrained from pure enjoyment. Something was still missing. This was not what I was there for, I realized. This whole enterprise was a sham – the search for ‘the perfect meal.’ That’s not what I’d been looking for at the water’s edge in Arcachon, in La Teste’s empty streets, in the overgrown garden at number 5, rue Jules Favre, or atop a windy sand dune in January.

     My father was, to me, a man of mystery. He probably would have been pleased to hear that, as he considered himself, I think, a simple, uncomplicated sort of a guy. Though warm, sentimental, and passionate about things like literature, art, movies, and especially music, his appreciations ran deep, so deep that what I always suspected was his true nature, that of a secretly disappointed romantic, was nearly out of sight. A shy man with few friends, uncomfortable with confrontation and with large groups, a man who dreaded tie and jacket, unpretentious, amused by hypocrisy, affectation, with a sharp sense for the absurd and ironic, he took a childlike joy in simple things. He was a sucker for films about French schoolkids – the films
The 400 Blows
and
Zéro de Conduite
resonate particularly in my memory. The mischievous, borderline-delinquent children in both films were as close as I ever got to imagining my father as a kid. Despite the fact that he was raised by his widowed French mother in the very neighborhood where I now live, I know almost nothing about his life there. I can’t picture him playing with friends in Riverside Park, just outside my window, as he surely must have. I can’t picture him emerging from the apartment on Claremont with a stack of schoolbooks under one arm. I can’t see him at private school in jacket and tie. I do have one of his old schoolbooks from the time:
Émil et les Détectives
, in French, with his doodlings of goofy Nazis and Stuka dive-bombers in the margins. He used to read to me from that book – the English version – as he read from
The Wind in the Willows, Dr. Dolittle
, and
Winnie the Pooh
. And I remember how he’d do the voices of Toad, Eeyore, and Piglet.

     He was in the army as a young man, as a supply sergeant in postwar Germany – about which I also know nothing, only that it seems to have left him with a lifelong appreciation of ‘funny’ German accents and a suspicion that behind every German accent lurks a terrible wartime secret. He found Mel Brooks’s take on Germans entirely in keeping with his own, but his laughter masked, I always suspected, some deeper bitterness and cynicism. He saw something ugly yet fascinating there, I’m sure. He loved, in later years, bleak, multilayered espionage thrillers like those of John Le Carré and Len Deighton, adored films like
The Man Inside
,
The Third Man
,
Funeral in Berlin
, and thought
Dr. Strangelove
was the funniest movie ever made.

     I guess I knew him best from what seemed to make him happiest: lying on the couch on his days off, reading Jean Larteguy in French, endless John D. MacDonald novels – adventure stories, usually romantic, a little bit sad, set in faraway climes; watching a new Kubrick film; listening to a new record on his giant JBL studio monitors; fiddling with the dials on his old Marantz radio; or sitting on the beach at Cap Ferret during the two or three weeks he could get away from his job at Columbia Records and join us in France. Eating
saucisson à l’ail
between crusty French bread, sipping
vin ordinaire
in his white terry-cloth shirt and boxer-style swimming trunks, wiggling his toes in the sand, he always looked most completely at ease. He’d charge into the rough surf with me or Chris on his shoulders and try to scare us about the incoming breakers.

     Back then, when we’d become bored with the beach blanket and our Tintins and our sandy sandwiches and Vittel, Chris and I would rush off to explore the dunes of Cap Ferret. We’d build forts out of the plentiful driftwood on the wild, usually deserted stretch of beach, play in the massive poured-concrete blockhouses the Germans had left behind, exploring the spider holes, the tunnels that often extended underground from the central gun emplacements. We’d play army – on a real battlefield – hunting the dead Nazis rumored to be still decomposing under the sand, and hurl firecrackers down ventilation pipes and into crumbling, sand-filled stairwells. It was a paradise for kids; scores of ominous gray piles loomed up out of the sand in the vast, barren dunes, set back from the water’s edge to provide interlocking fields of fire, overlooking that wild and magnificent surf and a beach that seemed to extend forever.

     I had the brilliant idea that Chris and I should rent motor scooters and retrace the long drive from Arcachon, through La Teste and Gujan-Mestras, all the way around the bay to Cap Ferret. We’d made the trek many times as a family, first in the old Rover sedan, later in rented Simcas and Renaults. It would be, I thought, more tactile and immediate on scooters. We would be able to smell the air, get a better view of the towns as we passed through, unobstructed by dashboards or windows. That it was freezing cold and drizzling made no impression on me, caught up as I was in reverie. We dressed for the weather as best we could, packed the traditional Bourdain family lunch of
saucissons
, stinky cheese, baguettes from the La Teste
boulangerie
, Vittel, and a bottle of Bordeaux red, and set out for the beach. Chris crashed his scooter straight out of the hotel parking lot, smacking a street sign and falling over, skinning a significant portion of his shoulder and back. But he clambered gamely back on his bike and soldiered on – good sense having long ago been dispensed with by both of us.

     It was cold – extremity-numbing cold. My bike could speed along at a good clip (I’m bigger – I got the good one), but Chris’s bike putted along at twenty-five miles an hour, slowing our progress considerably. Our helmets were too tight. In our zeal to recapture the past, we hadn’t really checked them for fit beyond a cursory look. My head soon felt like I had a drill bit lodged behind my right eye. The rain whipped and lashed our faces, even at our reduced speed, and soaked us to an ambient, dispiriting damp.