The Perfect Meal (11 page)

Sadly, Bill died young, so I never had a chance to ask whether, in his search for new tastes, he’d sampled lampreys. But it was the thought of perhaps outdoing a master that lured me into the quest.

“Assuming I wanted to eat lampreys,” I asked Marie-Dominique, “where would I start looking?”

“Nicole might know.”

I should have thought of Nicole myself. A doctor in Bordeaux, she and her husband had a farm in nearby Bergerac, where they grew their own produce. An orchard furnished peaches, pears, and miniature green apples, tiny as plums and just as juicy, which we ate straight off the tree, still warm from the sun.

Bordelais cooking is notoriously rich. The first time I visited Nicole, she unsealed a murky liter jar of
cèpes
mushrooms, preserved in duck fat—a gift, she explained, from a grateful patient. On subsequent trips, we enjoyed the contents of similar jars, most of which would have rated a skull and crossbones on any calorie chart.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, in response to my query, she said, “In fact, one of my patients prepares
lamproies
. Let me see what I can arrange.”

A
few months later found us driving through the valley of the Dordogne. Vineyards dipped in and out of sight on either side of the narrow, twisting road. For a couple of kilometers, we were stuck behind a cart loaded with gnarled vines, evidently grubbed out at the end of their useful life. I felt we’d slipped back a century, even two. If a man in a red velvet surcoat and plumed hat had leaped his horse across the road in front of us and galloped into the woods, we would scarcely have raised an eyebrow.

On our way, we stopped at the Saturday market in Bergerac. A tall church dominated the square. The stone of its spire had just been cleaned, but they hadn’t got around to the side walls, which remained black with age, as if, like the produce sold in their shadow, they had just emerged from the earth.

The farther one penetrates into France, the darker the produce becomes. Along its coasts, food has the glint and shimmer of sun and sea. Even to the landlocked east, on the German border, the Alsatians pickle white cabbage in white wine to make
choucroute—
sauerkraut. But strike inland and the colors deepen and the aromas become more pungent; cheese from Roquefort, prunes from Agen, goose liver from Bordeaux, and black truffles from Périgord.

Almost as common as vineyards around Bergerac are orchards of nut trees. I’d once passed a boozy evening in the courtyard of a nearby château, sampling the owner’s homemade digestifs, including an inky variation on the Italian
nocino
, made by macerating walnuts in alcohol. Nobody in Bergerac market offered this funereal tipple, but many had pressed their own oil, which they’d decanted into whatever was handy. We bought golden hazelnut oil in a potbellied bottle that previously held Orangina. As the farmer’s wife put our purchases into a plastic bag, she added some scoops of fresh walnut kernels. We nibbled them as we strolled. They were soft, almost juicy; nothing like the parched versions doled out in glassine bags by supermarkets.

After the fruit and vegetables of Paris markets, chosen more for appearance than taste, there was a perverse pleasure in loading up on knobby tomatoes, ripely oozing black figs, and dusty skeins of onions and garlic. No bloodhound was needed to trail us from Bergerac market to Nicole’s hilltop farmhouse. Odors of figs, garlic, and hazelnut oil floated in our wake.

Nicole looked over our purchases with resignation. Obviously, we were not the first guests to arrive with more produce than they could possibly eat.

“I thought we’d have the
lamproies
for a starter,” she said, “followed by some
brochettes de canard
.” From among our purchases, she selected the figs. “These will go with the duck very well.”

“Can I see the . . . er . . .?”

“Certainly.”

The liter jar of lampreys looked identical to the one from which I’d eaten
cèpes
years before. The contents were, if anything, even murkier, resembling those organs pickled in formaldehyde and kept in hospital labs to illustrate some particularly loathsome disease.

“She braises them in red wine, with pieces of leek,” Nicole explained, “and thickens the sauce with—”

“—the blood. Yes. I remember.”

My distaste obviously showed.

“If you’d rather,” she said, “we could have something different.”

“No, of course not.” Appetite didn’t come into it. Honor was at stake.

For an hour or two before dinner, we sat under the huge tree that shaded the lawn in front of the house. Nicole passed around a plate of tiny tarts, each with a piece of foie gras and a dab of homemade green tomato chutney. Her husband kept our glasses filled with chilled Monbazillac, for which Bergerac is famous. Why should a sweet, cold white wine such as Monbazillac, Gewurtztraminer, a Botrytis Riesling, or—best of all—Sauternes, marry so perfectly with goose liver? It’s just another of those mysteries that make eating in France such a delight.

But when the last drop was drunk, the last tart eaten, and the sun had sunk below the hills, we trooped inside to face the fish that killed a king.

I
t was a memorable meal that didn’t end until around midnight. With the duck brochettes, Nicole used our figs, quartered and sautéed in butter with spices. Her dessert, even more satisfying, was a variant on tiramisù: a layer of biscuit crumbs, another of fresh berries, topped with a mixture of mascarpone cheese, yogurt, and crème fraîche, beaten with sugar and the grated zest and juice of a lemon.

And the lampreys?

The dark, velvety sauce was so seductive that one quickly forgot blood was its primary constituent. As for the fish itself, its pale pink flesh resembled salmon but with a more delicate texture, closer to sardines. One could see why medieval cooks prepared it with sugar and spice, as the Danes do herring. It needed the lift.

But something for a king to die over? Not really. If I’d been investigating the demise of Henry I, I’d have put some hard questions to the court apothecary.

But as a constituent for my banquet? I thought I could do better.

Nine

First Catch Your King

“A gold service looks very well,” said the Countess sadly, “but it allows the food to unfortunately grow cold. I never use mine in my house save when I entertain His Imperial Majesty. As that is the case in most houses, I doubt if His Imperial Majesty ever has a hot meal.”

C. S. Forester,
The Commodore

B
ack in Paris, I brought Boris up to date on my progress.

He didn’t seem impressed.

“So, thus far, you’ve chosen the aperitif . . .”

“Yes.”

“. . . and a madeleine to nibble. Is that it?”

“I found someone who knows how to cook lampreys.” I didn’t admit that I hadn’t liked lamprey meat enough to want it for my feast.

“It’s not much, is it?” Boris said.

“It’s early days,” I protested.

“Not so early as you think. You can’t leave things to the last minute. Remember what happened to Vatel.”

I left the café in an even more morose state of mind than usual. Boris was right. I needed to plan much more thoroughly if the banquet was to be a success, if only in my own mind. One didn’t want to suffer the dreadful fate of poor François Vatel.. . .

In St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, a circle of black marble set into the floor beneath the center of the dome bears an inscription in Latin.

SUBTUS CONDITUR HUIUS ECCLESIÆ ET VRBIS CONDITOR CHRISTOPHORUS WREN, QUI VIXIT ANNOS ULTRA NONAGINTA, NON SIBI SED BONO PUBLICO. LECTOR SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE Obijt XXV Feb: An˚: MDCCXXIII Æt: XCI.

Or, for those not forced to study Latin in adolescence, “Here in its foundations lies the architect of this church and city, Christopher Wren, who lived beyond ninety years, not for his own profit but for the public good. Reader, if you seek his monument—look around you. Died 25 Feb. 1723, age 91.”

“If you seek his monument, look around you” is something most of us would like to have on our graves. To leave the world better than we found it: What greater satisfaction could there be? But occasionally the statement signifies defeat, not success. The Roman orator Tacitus cursed military commanders who boasted of having pacified a region. “They make a desert,” he said, “and call it ‘peace.’”

It was the fate of one of the most celebrated chefs of the seventeenth century to be remembered for an apparent kitchen disaster and his tragicomic end. I’m reminded of his fate every day, since I live in the middle of it. If you seek the monument to François Vatel, our street would be a good place to start.

Vatel and his son

Fritz Karl Watel was born in Paris in 1631, a poor boy of Swiss parents who Frenchified his name to François Vatel. That’s about all we know of his personal life. The few portraits show a proud but melancholy man with dark hair falling in ringlets to his shoulders. His professional credentials are better known. While still in his thirties, he took over household organization for Nicolas Fouquet, financial manager of King Louis XIV, and after that became
contrôleur général de la bouche
—literally, controller-general of the mouth—to one of the most powerful men in France, the Prince de Condé.

Condé, as first cousin to the king and a prince of royal blood, was entitled to be addressed as “Monsieur le Prince” (Mister Prince) but preferred to be known as Le Grand Condé—the Great Condé. In his château at Chantilly, fifty kilometers north of Paris, he lived on a scale lavish even by seventeenth-century standards. One way of keeping score in those days was the number of courtiers you could afford to support. Chantilly housed more than a thousand, all of whom had to be fed. This was Vatel’s job, in collaboration with the duke’s estate manager and friend, Jean de Gourville.

Half the servants at a palace such as that at Chantilly did nothing but prepare and serve food. Hundreds chopped, ground, minced, and pounded nuts, grains, and spices; picked and peeled vegetables; plucked birds; cleaned fish; and slaughtered, skinned, and butchered animals. Others tended the gardens, orchards, and livestock; maintained the ponds and streams that provided fish; and kept the forest stocked with pheasant, rabbits, hares, and deer, since royalty loved to hunt.

There were numerous pitfalls to cooking for the aristocracy. Royalty believed that some substances were nobler than others, and that the quality of nobility could be absorbed. Renaissance doctors treated the wounds of the rich and mighty with pulverized precious stones. In their last illnesses, Lorenzo de’Medici was dosed with powdered pearls, and Pope Julius II was fed liquefied gold.

This belief extended to food. To be noble, one must consume only that which was also noble, rare, and ethereal. The nobility shunned vegetables that grew in the earth, such as carrots and turnips, and meat from any animal that grazed. Meals were based on fruit, flowers, and creatures that floated or flew, the rarer the better.

They would eat farmyard birds such as chicken or duck in a pinch but preferred those that roamed wild—pheasant, partridge, and quail—or exotic birds such as lark, whose song made them rarer still. Some chefs discarded every part of the lark except the tongue, which they cooked in honey. Swan and peacock also appeared often at royal tables, usually decorated with their own plumage artfully arranged over the roasted bird.

For rarity, however, no bird trumped a tiny member of the bunting family, the ortolan. Hardly bigger than a thumb, they were too small to hunt and had to be caught in special traps. Kept alive until the last minute, they were drowned in Armagnac, plucked, sautéed, and served in individual lidded pots called
cassolettes
, which could hold only one or two birds. One ate them whole, including legs, bones, and intestines (although the more fastidious left the head). Their aroma was so delectable that, before opening the
cassolette
, diners draped napkins over their heads, conserving every whiff.