The Perfect Meal (15 page)

A chicken became a challenge: What part of it
couldn’t
be used? By pounding the breast meat into paillards; stewing the legs, thighs, and wings in red wine for coq au vin; and using the bones for soup, a bird could be stretched for three meals, whereas, roasted, it did for only one.

She reserved the livers until she had enough for a terrine. The heart and other edible organs, after being boiled in the stock, were preserved in the skimmed fat. Called
gésiers
, these meaty lumps made a tasty addition to salads. So did the tender “oysters” on either side of the backbone. There’s a sneer of peasant superiority in the traditional name for these nuggets:
sot-l’y-laisse
—literally “the stupid leave them.”

No matter how provident, one part of the chicken she might have hesitated to use was the feet. In her second book of recipes,
Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present
, Gertrude Stein’s companion Alice B. Toklas included Chicken Stuffed with Seafood. It begins, “This recipe calls for a fine chicken with all accessories, including neck, liver, gizzard, tips of wings, and feet.” The editor suggested that “and feet” be dropped. Toklas responded, “If you have not the habit of seeing and using the feet, do not be discouraged but do as all continentals do; remember that gelatine is made from feet.” Not only did Toklas insist that the feet be included. She described in detail how to remove the claws and skin before they went into the pot.

What else do the stupid leave? Quite a lot, as it happens, particularly when the animal is a cow or pig. The shrewd country housekeeper cooks almost every part, including liver, kidney, brains, bone marrow, and tongue. The hog is a particularly rich source. After the tender parts have been eaten fresh, the remaining joints are cured with salt and sugar, or air-dried to become ham or bacon. Smaller pieces of meat are minced with the fat to make sausages, the intestines providing casings. Ears can be boiled until soft and gelatinous, then either sliced and fried crisp as an addition to salads, or split, stuffed, and served with
sauce gribiche
, a mixture of pickles and capers in a cream thickened with hard-boiled eggs. The boast of Chicago meat-packers “We use everything except the squeal” was learned from the French pork butcher.

Other animals produce just as rich a harvest. Veal bones, called
os à moelle
(marrow bones), are sawed into rounds and baked. Then the marrow is spooned onto toast and sprinkled with
fleur de sel
, the dust-fine “flower of the salt” skimmed from the topmost layer of the pans where seawater is evaporated.
Ris de veau
, or sweetbreads, the sheep’s thymus gland, are a gourmet treat when sautéed with walnuts. So is a whole veal kidney in mustard sauce.

Tripe, the stomach lining of a cow, is popular in Normandy, where they prepare it in a brown savory sauce. In Lyon, France’s capital of good eating, it appears in a dish called
tablier de sapeur
—sapper’s apron. Sappers were the military engineers who tunneled under enemy fortifications to plant explosives. They wore protective aprons of cowhide as thick as the slabs of tripe used in this dish, which are marinated, stewed, then breaded and fried.

Admittedly, there are some things even the French won’t eat.

The Roman relished dormice cooked with honey and poppy seeds, but though French fields swarm with the little rascals, no restaurateur has yet been tempted. Another Roman delicacy, testicles, doesn’t appear on many menus either, at least in Europe, though it’s worth watching the documentary
Long Way Round
, which follows actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman on their motorcycle circumnavigation of the world, to see their faces when, invited to dinner in a Mongolian yurt, they are confronted with a bubbling cauldron of balls.

Some times are so hard, however, that the old rules no longer apply. For a period in 1870 and 1871, even wealthy Parisians would have relished a fat dormouse and eaten testicles with appetite. They
did
devour horse, dog, rat, cat, yak, bear, and elephant. What drove them to this extreme? And how did chefs make such animals edible? The answers constitute one of the most curious stories in the history of cookery.

A
t times, as I planned my feast and scoured the country for ingredients, I was made aware, by surprising acts of generosity, that many of the French gourmets to whom I spoke regarded the project as more than just an intellectual exercise. To them, I was reaffirming an ancient and honorable tradition.

Celebrating an occasion with a banquet is deeply established in the French character. Until the 1920s, it was usual to hold a banquet to celebrate a child’s first communion or confirmation, as well as a wedding or engagement. A feast might also be staged for political reasons—to celebrate a military victory, or the anniversary of one, or as a tribute to a military or political leader on his retirement.

Very occasionally, patriots chose to display, by means of a
repas
, the superiority of their national way of life. One such meal—perhaps the most famous in French history—took place in 1871, after the nation’s worst military defeat.

In July 1870, a festering rivalry between Emperor Napoleon III and the kingdom of Prussia erupted into war. Sadly for France, the emperor, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, had inherited none of his uncle’s military genius. The army of Prussia, efficiently commanded and well armed, overran the French in its first battle and took Napoleon prisoner. While he haggled over the terms of surrender, the Prussians besieged Paris.

The siege lasted five months, during which no person or animal could get into or out of the city. As artillery battered the outskirts, foreign journalists kept their readers up-to-date by photographically reducing their reports onto microfilm. These were loaded into hot-air balloons launched from the heights of Montmartre. Winds carried the Montgolfiers, as they were known, south to Tours and Poitiers, where the letters were retrieved, restored to readable size, and posted.

For a while, the army also tried homing pigeons, until the Prussians brought in hawks to take them down. But the greatest threat to the birds came not from Prussians but hungry Parisians. “It’s impossible to find beef or mutton without queueing at the market,” complained the abbot of Saint-André, vicar of Saint- Augustin, who obviously liked his food, “and the butchers cheat us by raising prices.”

“The slugs are very good tonight.”

As beef, chicken, and lamb disappeared, the government, ignoring the decree of Pope Gregory III that it was a “filthy and abominable custom,” urged Parisians to eat horse. By chance,
boucheries chevalines
(horse butchers) had appeared for the first time in France just a few years before, signifying their presence, then as now, by a gilded horse’s head above their door. Parisians ate seventy thousand horses during the siege. Even the emperor succumbed. Two thoroughbreds, a gift from Czar Alexander II, provided a number of meals for the imperial court.

Once all the horses were used up, it was the turn of Paris’s estimated twenty-five thousand cats, followed by dogs, then rats. Rat meat was lean, and a little tasteless, but perfectly edible if well seasoned. The poor already considered it a delicacy, as did sailors, who fattened rats with biscuit crumbs as an alternative to salt pork and beef. Rat sellers set up in the streets. Cheekily dressed as butchers, they offered to skin and joint the animal to your requirements.

The abbot of Saint-André listed some of the new dishes on offer:

Terrine of rat and donkey meat

Rats in champagne

Stewed rat with Sauce Robert [chestnuts, onion, and white wine]

Roasted leg of dog, flanked by baby rats

Young donkey (claiming to be veal)

Dogs’ brains (much appreciated)

Dogs’ livers grilled with herb butter

Sliced saddle of cat with mayonnaise

Cat stewed with mushrooms

Consommé of horse with millet

Dog cutlets with green peas

For those with a sweet tooth, there were begonias in syrup and plum pudding made with fat from the marrow of horse bones.

D
uring the siege, no restaurant worked more strenuously to maintain standards than Voisin. Though the lace-curtained windows of the little establishment at 261 rue St. Honoré suggested a simple café, its food and wine were famous, and famously expensive. Its waiters included César Ritz, later the business partner of chef Georges-Auguste Escoffier and manager of London’s Savoy Hotel, then of the Paris establishment that still bears his name.

Voisin prided itself on defending classic French cuisine against foreign fads. M. Bellanger, the headwaiter, indignantly refused an Englishman who demanded a pudding at Christmas, and was just as short with an American woman who requested simply a salad. That incident probably inspired the scene in the film
Ninotchka
, where Soviet commissar Greta Garbo asks a restaurateur for raw vegetables. “Madame,” he says stiffly, “this is a restaurant, not a meadow.”

Voisin’s chef in 1870 was Alexandre-Étienne Choron. Only thirty-two, he came from northern France, so was no stranger to unpromising ingredients. The specialty of his hometown, Caen, was
tripes à la Caen
(tripe in a savory meat sauce), traditionally served on a metal dish suspended above hot coals.

Choron knew his clientele would expect more than horse, cat, or rat. In December, his patience was rewarded when the zoo, the Jardin d’Acclimatation, announced it could no longer feed its animals and reluctantly offered them for sale as livestock.

Paris butchers snapped up deer, antelopes, and even bear, all known to be edible. Imaginatively, M. Deboos of the Boucherie Anglaise on boulevard Haussmann bought a yak. Under all that hair, it was, after all, just a kind of buffalo and could pass for beef. At the end of December, he also paid 27,000 francs for two elephants, Castor and Pollux. Not sure how to slaughter them, he hired a sharpshooter named De Vismes to kill them with 33-millimeter steel-tipped explosive bullets.

Killing the zoo animals, 1871

The gourmet community was soon alive with discussion about the relative merits of the various animals as meat. One of the trapped foreign journalists, Thomas Gibson Bowles, wrote that he’d eaten camel, antelope, dog, donkey, mule, and elephant, and of those, he liked elephant the least. Another commentator, Henry Labouchère, reported, “Yesterday, I had a slice of Pollux for dinner. It was tough, coarse and oily. I do not recommend English families to eat elephant as long as they can get beef or mutton.” He probably ate the inferior meat from the body of the elephant, which Deboos sold for ten to fourteen francs a pound. More discriminating chefs, including Choron, had already snapped up the tender trunks at three or four times that price.

Some animals defied even Choron’s expertise. The zoo offered a hippopotamus at 80,000 francs but found no takers. Who knew if the blubbery beast was even edible? Lions and tigers were also left alone. Nobody wanted the job of killing them. There was a particular revulsion, too, against monkeys. Because Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
had been published in 1859 and the theory of evolution was gaining acceptance, eating monkeys might have seemed like cannibalism, although, ironically, soldiers in the trenches during World War I sarcastically referred to canned beef as “monkey.”

Elephant, bear, camel, kangaroo, antelope, wolf, cat, and rat all figured in a legendary midnight Christmas dinner offered by Voisin in December 1870. This was the menu:

S
TARTERS

Butter, radishes, stuffed Donkey’s head, sardines

S
OUPS

Purée of Red Beans with croutons

Elephant Consommé

E
NTREES

Fried baby catfish. Roasted camel English style

Kangaroo Stew

Bear chops with pepper sauce

R
OASTS

Haunch of wolf with venison sauce

Cat, flanked by Rats

Watercress salad

Antelope Terrine with truffles