Secret Ingredients (15 page)

Meneau came out of the kitchen; his only advice was
“Courage”
(or “coo-rahj,” as my phrase book likes to say). We began with a girlish delicacy—a clear soup made from poultry, diced vegetables, and crayfish—followed by tartines of foie gras, truffles, and lard. The next soup was a velvety cream of squab with cucumbers, served with cock-crest fritters. Then there was a soothing crayfish bisque, and I began to wonder how long we would be pursuing the soup motif.

But, oddly, I felt squeamish about the first of the hors d’oeuvres—oysters and cream of Camembert on toast, which proved to be the only course I couldn’t eat. (We all have our own food phobias, and a mixture of pungent cheese and oysters makes my little tummy recoil.) Next came a chilled jellied loaf of poultry on sorrel cream, followed by a private joke on me—fresh Baltic herring with mayonnaise. (According to my late mother, I was wild about herring from the age of two. Her family was Swedish, and the fish was a staple.) I loved the tart of calf ’s brains with shelled peas but was not terribly fond of the omelette with sea urchin, a dish that Louis XV liked to prepare for himself—though it was certainly better than the cottage cheese with ketchup that Richard Nixon favored as a snack. (There is a well-founded rumor that George W. Bush nibbles on bologna with marshmallow bonbons.) A fillet of sole with champagne sauce accompanied by monkfish livers was wonderful, as was the roasted pike spiked with parsley. I did pause to consider whether all of these hors d’oeuvres might dampen my appetite for the main courses. The wine steward noted my unrest, and a quick goblet of Montrachet tickled my enthusiasm upward. There were only two pure-blood Americans at the table, Peter Lewis and I, and we had agreed not to shame our own holy empire.

We headed into the “second service” without an appropriate break—say, a five-mile march through the mountains and an eight-hour nap. The courses, naturally, became more substantial. First came an oven-glazed brill served with fennel cream, anchovies, and roasted currants, then a stew of suckling pig that had been slow-cooked in a red-wine sauce thickened with its own blood, onions, and bacon. I leaped forward from this into a warm terrine of hare with preserved plums, and a poached eel with chicken wing tips and testicles in a pool of tarragon butter. But I only picked at my glazed partridge breasts, which were followed by a savory of eggs poached in Chimay ale, and then a mille-feuille of puff pastry sandwiched with sardines and leeks.

Now it was halftime, though there were no prancing cheerleaders. The menu advised us to “languish” in the salon and nibble on ravioli with carrots and cumin and thick slices of “noirs eggs of puff pastry with squab hearts.” Instead, I went outside, where the grass was wet and my feet seemed to sink in even farther than usual. In the walled herb garden, I began to reflect that this kind of eating might not be a wise choice in the late autumn of my life. Perhaps I should fax the menu to my cardiologist in the States before proceeding? I soon realized that this was one of the ten million insincere impulses I’ve had in my life. I began to walk faster for a dozen yards and almost jumped a creek, but then thought better of it.

The “third service” loaded even bigger guns, or so it seemed, with its concentration on denser, heavier specialties that tried the patience of my long-fled appetite. From Massialot, we were offered a “light” stew of veal breast in a purée of ham and oysters in a pastry-covered casserole, and a not-so-light gratin of beef cheeks. La Varenne’s gray squab was boned, stuffed with sweetbreads, squab livers, and scallions, and spit-roasted. It was the Prince des Dombes who said, “Nothing arouses me but taste” (“
Je ne me pique que de goût”
). He would have been a disappointing match for a vigorous girl. You can imagine her hanging a rope ladder from her tower bedroom for knights-errant—or, better yet, woodchoppers and stable hands—to climb, while the prince aroused himself in the kitchen. From his files, we had wild duck with black olives and orange zest, a
buisson
(bush) of crayfish with little slabs of grilled goose liver, a terrine of the tips of calves’ ears, hare cooked in port wine inside a calf ’s bladder, crispy breaded asparagus, a sponge cake with fruit preserves, and cucumbers stewed in wine.

It was consoling to begin winding down with a swirl of turnips in sweetened wine, radishes preserved in vinegar, a warm salad with almonds, cream of grilled pistachios, meringues, macaroons, and chocolate cigarettes. These were simple warm-ups to the medley of desserts served to us in the salon: a rosette of almond milk with almonds; a soft cheese of fresh cream with quince jelly; rice whipped with sweetened egg whites and lemon peel; a grand ring-shaped cake, a savarin, flamed with Old Havana rum and served with preserved pineapple; little molds of various ice creams; and a “towering structure of every fruit imaginable in every manner imaginable.”

Sad to say, my notes from the meal are blurred and smeared by the cooked exudates of flora and fauna and the wines that rained down on us as if from the world’s best garden sprinkler. Reading through the veil of grease, I see that my favorites among the wines served were Chablis Les Clos, Montrachet 1989, Volnay-Champans 1969, Château Latour 1989, and Côte Rôtie. Of course, any fool would love these great wines as he felt his wallet vaporize.

There. Time to do dishes. As Diderot said of a lunch at the fabulously wealthy Baron of Holbach’s home, “After lunch, one takes a little walk, or one digests, if it’s even possible.” Night had long since fallen, and I reflected that lunch had taken the same amount of time as a Varig flight from New York to São Paulo.

In the salon, my fellow diners were yawning rather than gasping or sobbing. Was this another example of the banality of evil: a grievous sin committed—in this case, gluttony—and no one squirming with guilt? I have noticed that Frenchmen are far less susceptible to heart disease, in part because they don’t seem to experience the stress of self-doubt or regret. My mother, a Swedish Lutheran, liked to ask her five children, “What have you accomplished today?” If I’d told her, “I have eaten thirty-seven courses and drunk thirteen wines,” I would have been cast into outer darkness. But then this was the Iron Mom, who also said, with a tiny smile, in reference to my life’s work, “You’ve made quite a living out of your fibs.”

At midnight, while sipping a paltry brandy from the 1920s and smoking a Havana Churchill, I reflected that this was not the time to ponder eternal values. I was sitting next to Gérard, who was cherubically discussing the historical subtleties of certain courses. In a way, we were forensic anthropologists, doing arduous historical fieldwork. How could we possibly understand the present without knowing what certain of our ancestors had consumed? Marc Meneau, his lovely wife, Françoise, and thirty-nine members of his staff had led us on a sombre and all-consuming journey into the past.

At dawn or a few hours thereafter, I felt relieved, on stepping out of the bathtub, that I hadn’t fallen on a hard surface and broken open like an overly mature muskmelon.

No question looms larger on a daily basis for many of us than “What’s for lunch?” and, when that has been resolved, “What’s for dinner?” There have been mutterings that the whole food thing has gone too far in America, but I think not. Good food is a benign weapon against the sodden way we live.

By the time I reached Paris the next afternoon and took a three-hour stroll, I was feeling a little peckish. I’d heard that certain quarrels had already arisen over our lunch, and I felt lucky that my capacity for the French language was limited to understanding only the gist of conversations—sort of the way the average American comprehends our government. On the phone, the natives were restless to the point of “scandal,” and from the tornado of rumors (everyone knows that men, not women, are the masters of gossip) I learned that many had found both the food and the service disappointing, the lack of “theatre” sad. (As for myself, I couldn’t make a judgment. I once helped to cook a whole steer and a barrel of corn for a picnic in Michigan and have eaten many ten-course dinners, but our French lunch had left those occasions in the numbered dust.) The most interesting rumor I heard was that the tab for the lunch had been picked up by a Louisiana billionaire, who couldn’t attend because a pelican had been sucked into an engine of his Gulfstream. This detail was so extraordinary that it seemed likely to be true.

That last evening in Paris, before my flight and the tonic Chicago-style hot dog that awaited me at O’Hare, Peter and I dined at Thoumieux, my old standby restaurant, near the Invalides. We had a simple Gigondas, and I ordered two vegetable courses, then relented at the last moment and added a duck confit. Long flights are physically exhausting, and good nutrition lays the foundation of life. On Air France, I was sunk in profound thought, or so I felt at the time. Like sex, bathing, sleeping, and drinking, the effects of food don’t last. The patterns are repeated but finite. Life is a near-death experience, and our devious minds will do anything to make it interesting.

2004

EATING IN

“It’s better than my mother’s cooking but not as good as my first wife’s.”

“I think we overordered.”

THE SECRET INGREDIENT

M.F.K. FISHER

I
t is common in small communities, especially if they are far from large towns, for one person or another to become known for a special power. A man may have some control over sick frightened animals, which gradually extends to his own friends and is interpreted as miraculous or divine healing. A woman may be of a hypersensitive nature, which with time develops into an intuitive “clairvoyance” about other people’s dreams and hopes. In the same way, there are men and women who have a special nose for mushrooms, or an inimitable hand with pastry and jellies. At present, I myself, living less than a hundred miles from a big city and with about two thousand other townspeople, do not know of any local witches or warlocks, but there are several people who seem to have an uncanny power over food. They manage to keep to themselves whatever it is that makes their creations subtly and definitely better than any attempts to approximate them. They are even willing to make knaves and clowns of themselves to protect their recipes.

I have known one of these passionate cooks, and for many years—Bertie Bastalizzo. By now she is retired from her own kitchen: she married a man even more ancient than she who fell in love with her food and holds her and it for himself alone, to our hungry chagrin. While she was practicing on her own, I did my best in both overt and underhanded ways to learn her secret ingredients, but I remain foiled.

She had been very lonely after her first husband died, and to keep herself from the river she began to cook about three dishes for local families smart enough to recognize her superiority. The routine of ordering and then fetching one of her preparations was rigid, and involved appointments, reservations, and occasional frustrations if Bertie’s schedule was full. She was very fussy about the kind of dishes her creations were to be served in, and several of us invested in large, handsome pottery baking dishes, which sit on our shelves unused since that old robber stole Bertie from us. We knew her instructions about how long to let the food “rest” before serving it, what temperature to let it rest in, and even what to do with it once it was at its peak of restedness. In fact, she dictated everything but our actual digestion, serene in her power over our palates, for she and we knew, with conditioned fatalism, that never again would we taste the likes of her delicate little dumplings of herbs and chicken, her flat tarts of thin noodles and mushrooms, her feathery mixtures of
capellini d’angelo
and a kind of pesto, which was, naturally, “secret.”

One summer, I spent several weeks flattering her into letting my younger daughter, who had all the makings of a good cook as well as a private investigator, act as her kitchen helper. I kept notes unashamedly on the reports of this sorceress’s apprentice, but any results I produced were nondescript. Something was simply
not there,
and neither my accomplice nor I could guess what.

Much later, Bertie offered blandly—as if to punish me for my obvious breach of trust—to write her recipe for the dumplings. I felt humbled and grateful, as if a small halo had suddenly been awarded me in spite of my sins. I have kept her large piece of pink butcher paper to remind me of these mixed emotions, for its scrawl is unintelligible to me—cryptic, completely meaningless. It lists ingredients that are never mentioned again. It notes measurements ranging from “some” to a monstrous “10
¹
/2 pounds” (of salt!). Perhaps Bertie believed that she was giving me her true recipe. Perhaps I cannot translate it because her own English was too limited to write it. Perhaps she was simply having some fun.

I still like her and regret that since she succumbed to a second love we no longer taste her beautiful dishes. But part of me rebels at her seeming trickery. Her scribbled directive is one more exhibit in my private Hall of Gastronomical Ill Fame, for I really cannot believe that a good cook will distort a prideful recipe. I continue this stubborn and obviously naïve faith in the face of many more such pitiable little tricks, and prefer to console myself by thinking back on the wonderful odorous kitchen I would go to when it was time to pick up one of Bertie’s mammoth casseroles.

This was a ritual, as well as a pleasurable ordeal, for I must be there exactly when I had been told to, or a little before, and on each of countless times I was instructed in how long to let the dish rest and was quizzed sternly about what else would be served with it. If Bertie approved, occasionally she gave me a jar of her fresh pickled zucchini as a tacit benediction. And always, as if she could not bring herself to let one more creation leave her own familiar kitchen for a stranger’s, I must sit down and consume a beaker of one of the worst drinks I can remember in a long life of polite subjection to them. It was kept in a half-gallon jug in the icebox, and drunk straight, from cottage-cheese glasses with daisies on them. The recipe, always reverently accredited to the deceased Mr. Bastalizzo: pour one pint from a full jug of dark sweet vermouth made by a local vintner, add one pint of bourbon whiskey, shake a little now and then, and enjoy. Simple, near lethal, and challenging!

One time, there was some delay in getting the dish from Bertie’s hands into mine; she ran out of aluminum foil to cover it and had to find a new roll. It was much like the way a mother will nearly miss the train that is to take her tender child to camp. I drank
two
tumblers of her husband’s brew, and with the flash courage of unexpected inebriation I asked my friend point-blank if she had really meant ten and a half pounds of salt. She simply cackled, like a tipsy old Mona Lisa. I reeled carefully to my car, my arms filled with another example of her culinary mystique.

We are so conditioned to the threat of the Secret Ingredient, and the acceptance of trickery, that even honesty has become suspect when we are brash enough to ask for recipes. My own mother always disclosed calmly her “secret” in making the best mustard pickles in the world, but almost nobody believed her, simply because she
told
it. She made the pickles according to a fairly standard recipe, almost measure for measure like many I have read,
but
she added to it one nine-ounce jar of Crosse & Blackwell’s Chow Chow. There was no substitute, she said, and it was the honest truth, as anyone could prove by trying. Here, because it seems the right place, is her method:

EDITH’S MUSTARD PICKLES

1 quart very small cucumbers, whole.

1 quart large cucumbers, sliced.

1 quart green tomatoes, sliced.

1 quart small white onions, peeled.

1 large cauliflower in small flowerlets.

1 pint green string beans, 2 inches long (cut).

4 green peppers in 1-inch cubes.

4 quarts water.

2 cups salt.

1 cup flour.

6 tablespoons Colman’s mustard (dry).

1 tablespoon turmeric.

1 cup sugar.

Vinegar.

1 9-ounce bottle Crosse & Blackwell’s Chow Chow.

Let vegetables stand overnight in brine of water and salt. Heat to scalding point and drain. Make smooth paste of flour, mustard, turmeric, sugar, and enough vinegar to make 2 quarts. Cook in double boiler until thick. Add Chow Chow. Mix with vegetables. Heat through, and bottle.

And here, almost in refutation of my mother’s candor, is the best version I have yet evolved from Bertie’s directions for her pickled zucchini:

8–12 medium zucchini.

1 cup vinegar.

1 cup brown sugar.

4 cloves garlic.

1 cup chopped parsley.

1 tablespoon oregano.

1 tablespoon salt.

1 teaspoon pepper.

Leave zucchini whole, or slice thickly, lengthwise. Brown gently in olive oil. Pack vertically in jars. In same oily skillet, boil vinegar and sugar. Add rest of ingredients, boil gently 5 minutes, and pour over zucchini to cover. Add more oil on top if needed to make
¹
/4-inch cover. Keep in icebox. Serve drained and cold for antipasto or with cold meats.

Needless to say, this translation is
not
exactly right, but its result is a fresh, delicious hors d’oeuvre in the summer, kept for even a week or so in the icebox, and made if possible from vegetables fresh from the vine and preferably not more than four inches long. (It is also very good with any kind of supper entrée, hot or cold.) I honestly have no idea what the Secret Ingredient might be, but charity will excuse my obtuseness, perhaps, if I give one short example of Bertie’s prose, found under my door apropos of a later rendezvous for ten dozen of her mystery dumplings: “Please If you fene time, cools me up abaut 5 pm clook up.” Add measurements to this, and you have an undecipherable code!

People like Bertie—and even my honest mother—are increasingly rare, and I have a dismal feeling that they may soon disappear completely. It is not so much a question of their supplies as it is of their own unquestioning demand for quality. The things they used in their recipes were not hard to grow, or buy, and while they bowed to seasonal riches and made pickles when the vegetables were at their best, because that is the way they had to, we can buy zucchini and beans and even green tomatoes the year around in the supermarkets. We can assemble everything even cryptic directions call for, from vinegar to turmeric and, with a little effort, Crosse & Blackwell’s Chow Chow (and none other!). But do we? Why bother? Why clutter the icebox with a couple of jars of chilled zucchini? Who wants a dozen bottles of mustard pickles sitting around? Who has the time, when you come right down to it, to
fuss
with such maneuvers? So-and-so is almost as good, and a lot less trouble.

There was an interesting proof of this conjecture lately in our town, when the second of two birthday parties was given for an honorable lady of ninety-eight. Ten years before, when we celebrated her comparatively youthful anniversary, we did special honor to her by blackmailing another friend of almost the same age to make hundreds of her famous sand tarts to eat with the punch. They were delicate thin little wafers, light and crisp and not the classical sand tart at all, and for decades her recipe for them was her sternly guarded secret. Perhaps it was age that softened her pride, for when I discreetly and admiringly asked if perhaps a hint of old-fashioned lemon extract might be the Secret Ingredient, she gave me a pleased nod—and later the recipe! On it she wrote at the end, “…and
¹
/4 teaspoon of???”—our private joke.

So the ten years passed, and when the time came to deputize a few of us to supply soppets for the ninety-eighth-birthday punch, I proudly produced the famous sand-tart recipe, feeling sure that the old lady who had not been able to reach that age would never begrudge it in honor of the one who had. But nobody had time enough to follow it—or, rather, it was mutually and immediately vetoed in favor of a wonderful new trick (just as good!) that involved packaged mixes of both cake and custard, frozen lemon juice, and sweet sherry. “Really fun to make…so quick and easy…and all you do is
slice
it.”

That is the end of the story. Or is it? Where are the witches of yesteryear, the strange old women with their dogged involvement, their loyalty to true flavor and changeless quality? If at times they protected their “secrets” to the point of knavery, at least they had the courage to stay passionate about it. Perhaps that was the Secret Ingredient: the blind strength of timeless passion.

1968