Steal the Menu (5 page)

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 the 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.

For Brower, as for those early editors of Homer who clustered at the great library of Alexandria, a text was an enclosed, fixed object inviting purification and explication, not subjective reaction. Brower was himself not much given to subjectivity. The one overt expression of strong feeling I ever witnessed from him was therefore a real shocker. The week the television quiz show scandal broke around the Columbia English teacher Charles Van Doren in the fall of 1959, Brower walked into our small “section” class of Hum 6 (Harvard attempted to counter the formality of large lecture courses like Hum 6 with regular sections that permitted students to discuss the course material with a faculty member, usually a teaching assistant, but my great good luck had been to land in Ben Brower’s own section) looking troubled. “What do you think of this Van Doren business?” he asked the class. There were various reactions, which eventually petered out. We were waiting to hear from Brower. He looked at the back of the little room, over our heads, and said, “If it were me, I would kill myself.” Then he
directed our attention to a passage from the book we were reading closely together, E. M. Forster’s
Where Angels Fear to Tread
.

During senior year, I met with Brower nearly every week in the grand study-library that was his office in Adams House, the undergraduate residence where he was master. We talked of many things besides my thesis on
The Odyssey
, which he read with the same scrupulous attention he gave to all texts. It was a terrifying scrutiny—which, since he undoubtedly applied the same high standards to his own writing, explained in some measure why his scholarly output had been limited over the years, limited but diamond hard and exemplifying authority.

What I remember most clearly from those meetings was something Brower said about Greek composition, probably in reaction to my complaining about Greek K, which I found a dry exercise in turning English paragraphs into pastiches of Plato’s Greek. Following the custom of centuries of students in this deliberately uncreative discipline, we were constrained to use only the exact vocabulary, grammatical constructions and syntax that Plato himself, the acknowledged master and model of classic Greek prose, had used.

Brower defended precisely what I deplored: “What would it mean to improvise an ancient Greek sentence? Greek is not an ongoing enterprise. It is only what the ancient Greeks wrote. The sole reason to compose sentences in Greek today is to revive, as best we can, their language, so that we can feel it as our own. That—in theory, at any rate—makes us better readers of Plato.” There was no arguing with that. There was never any arguing with Reuben Arthur Brower, gentle man, with adamantine soul.

The lesson took. So when I thought about classic French food, another seemingly finite body of received culture, it was natural for me to think of it as I had been trained to think about dead languages. This was not a good analogy. As I soon realized, the
most cursory look at early French cookbooks revealed a universe of cooking far removed from the haute cuisine system that grew up in the nineteenth century and that we had inherited in the form codified by Escoffier, a system that would shortly dissolve into a kaleidoscope of new, shimmering ideas before our dazzled eyes.

Even regional “cuisines” turned out to have histories. The “classic” dish of the Auvergne, in central France, the puree of potatoes and cheese called
aligot
, could not have been older than the introduction of potatoes into France from the Andes after Columbus. According to one theory, it was “originally” made with bread instead of potatoes, by monks who gave it to pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. Similarly, in Spain, gazpacho in its present tomato-based form could not have been cooked before the sixteenth century and probably emerged much later. Cervantes’s gazpacho is not ours.

Pizza has a history, too. Of course, everything has a history. But that is not what was in my mind in the 1960s when I was discovering the food of Europe and the rest of the world. The historical attitude would come later. And I was also not describing the reality of my experience as an eater in those years when I maintained that my ecstatic gorging was some sort of cold-blooded investigation of a vast archaeological museum of human food culture.

In fact, I was just eating whatever piqued my interest, in restaurant after restaurant, country after country, region after region—and trying to taste as many dishes as I possibly could. I’m sure I never gave a thought, in the summer of 1960, my first time in Europe, to cuisines as calcified legacies. I was, of course, eating my way through the cuisines of Europe, but unsystematically, happily devouring the menu at hand.

My approach, instinctive, rabid and utterly natural, had much in common with language learning. As a matter of fact, I was operating
in the same indiscriminate, sopping-up mode with French that summer, taking in every new word that came along, looking each one up obsessively in the dictionary, forcing myself to check every word I didn’t know in the paperback of Dumas’s
La dame aux camélias
I’d bought from a
bouquiniste
on the Quai Voltaire near my
hôtel garni
, thus acquiring a large vocabulary for discussing tuberculosis and coughing.

In restaurants, I acquired a huge new vocabulary of dishes,
andouillette, marcassin, cou d’oie farci aux lentilles, râble de lièvre—
none of which I had eaten before, or even known about in English; nor would I see them in America for decades. These dishes were a bit like the words for tubercular conditions in Dumas: not likely to be useful in my daily life in the States but part, nevertheless, of a growing collection of factoids that entered my consciousness, my self.

Obviously, my food experiences contributed more than lexical entries to my memory of those meals. I tasted every one of those dishes with gusto and could still give you a vivid account of the flavors and textures in many of them. But those sensations—the ugly technical term for them is organoleptic—were not the important ones. For me, they never have been of primary importance, except at the time I was experiencing them. What mattered most was the dish, in all its aspects.

Take
sole meunière
. Yes, I love this flat white fish’s tender, smooth flesh and the way its mildness is set off by the lightly browned butter and the acid of the lemon juice it’s cooked in. Because I have eaten the dish many times, I’m able, as a critic, to judge a restaurant’s specific presentation, comparing it against others from my past. But even that kind of judgment rests primarily on my sense of what defines the dish, of what might be called its Platonic form in my mind.