The Perfect Meal (17 page)

You have to try impaling meat to realize how long swords are. With most of the meat used up, mine was still only half full. I removed the lamb, now looking a bit bedraggled, and started over, alternating with pieces of onion, green pepper, mushrooms, tomatoes, and squares of bacon.

These filled the sword up satisfactorily, but as I carried it to the barbecue that night, one couldn’t escape the alarming realization that it weighed a ton.

As we maneuvered the clumsy object onto the grill, Angela asked, “Are you quite sure about this?”

“Why not? In America, restaurants serve it all the time.”

“If you say so.”

The meat sizzled satisfactorily as it hit the hot metal. I looked across the lawn to our guests, on the patio. Well into the third bottle of red, they took little interest in what was happening at the barbecue. This was just as well, since, when I tried to turn the sword, the meat stuck to the grill. More alarmingly, the hilt was almost too hot to touch.

I raced back to the kitchen looking for something to insulate my hand. Angela called after me, “I wouldn’t leave it too long.” The tomatoes and mushrooms, now cooked through, were softening, while the meat was still half raw.

Two pot holders protected my hands while I lifted the sword off the flames. As I held out the now-drooping blade, its original bend accentuated by the weight of the meat, Angela doused the length of it with brandy. A better cognac would have burned with more discretion, but rather than waste my Courvoisier, I’d bought the fearsome local spirit, Château Tanunda, advertised as “A True Blue Australian Brew.” Its fumes alone would stun a wombat. These rose into the evening air, making my head swim. Angela struck a match and touched it to the kebab. Blue flames raced up and down the blade. In the dusk, it was very effective.

“Coming through!” I called. “Clear the way!”

Raising the sword into the vertical, as I’d seen in magazine illustrations, I headed toward our guests. They looked up with expectation, which turned quickly to alarm. They tell me I was a frightening sight, advancing out of the darkness, holding aloft an object wreathed in blue flames that didn’t so much flicker as roar, lighting up not only our garden but those of the houses on either side.

Exclamations of panic came from next door as the brandy, burning like petrol, began to cook the meat all over again, spitting drops of burning fat. In a bushfire, gum trees exploded in a similar crown of fire as the eucalyptus oil in the leaves vaporized and ignited. Our friends had seen this on TV but never in a suburban backyard. Even on this miniature scale, it was alarming. Instinctively, they shrank back.

Meanwhile, hot juice and alcohol trickled down the sword, spilled over the hilt, and soaked the pot holders. They started to smolder, then ignited with a whoosh . . .

I
still don’t know what went wrong,” I said the next morning as I tossed the charred pot holders into the garbage, followed by my shirt with the burned cuffs.

“I think I do.” Angela was studying the Pump Room advertisements. “This sword isn’t the same as yours.”

She was right. In the one carried by the waiter, the cuplike guard, meant to protect the fencer’s hand in a fight, faced upward. Now I looked more closely, I saw that these were not authentic swords but large skewers made to resemble them. Any juices or brandy trickling down the blade were caught and held in the cup. I’d bet, too, that some sort of insulation prevented heat from traveling from the blade to the hilt.

Just then, the phone rang. It was one of our guests.

“Best bloody barbie any of us can remember,” he said. “That sword! Fuckin’ incredible! Never seen anything like it. Can we borrow it? We want to do the same thing at our place next week.”

A
ll this came back to me as I mulled over a suggestion made at a dinner party for some friends from Charente. Marie-Dominique’s family originated in this region on the Atlantic coast, which produces most of the shellfish for France. The walled garden of our summer house, in the fishing town of Fouras, had been the setting for some mammoth seafood feasts.

“If you’re looking for forgotten culinary experiences,” said one of our guests, “what about an
éclade
? I can’t remember the last time anyone held one.”

“And no wonder,” said his wife. “When you tried it, you almost set fire to our roof.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” I said. Not noticing Marie-Dominique’s warning glance, I continued, rashly, “You’re right—it’s a dying tradition. I’ve always wanted to do one. And you’re all invited.”

When the last guest left, Marie-Dominique said, “You really intend to do an
éclade
?”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s dangerous, difficult, time-consuming, dirty—and you’ve always told me you don’t like
moules
.”

She was partly right about the
moules
. After the big, meaty, green-lipped mussels of the warm Pacific, it’s hard to relish the small black-shelled variety that’s almost the only kind available in France. Called
bouchots
, they’re grown on logs driven into cold estuarine water at the tide line, mostly along the coast of the English Channel and the North Sea.

The French, however, don’t share my dislike. A 2011 survey revealed that
moules frites
(stewed mussels with a side order of fries) was the nation’s second most popular dish, preceded only by
magret de canard
(grilled duck breast) and followed by another interloper, North African couscous.

The surprise at this fact was general, and a little embarrassed, on the same scale as that in Britain when it was found that the favorite national nosh was no longer roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but the Indian dish chicken tikka masala, made from cubes of chicken roasted in a tandoor, or clay oven, and served in a creamy curry sauce.

Even worse, mussels, historically, are a favorite dish of the Belgians, whom the French consider to be irredeemably dumb. Calling action movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme “The Muscles from Brussels” was not only a neat pun, but an implied suggestion that, being Belgian, he isn’t too bright.

Mussels would never have figured on such a list ten years ago, in part because they are a chore to prepare. They’re more shell than flesh, so it takes a bucket to make a meal. One has to remove any with broken shells, rip off the “beards” with which the mussels moor themselves to the rocks, scrape away the sea slime and tiny limpets, then soak them two or three times in freshwater to rinse out salt and sand. Who but the Belgians, imply the French, could be bothered?

But the
moule
invasion had been taking place for some time, creeping across Picardy as the German armies advanced in 1914, bearing down on Paris, and just as scantly noticed by Parisians, who, except when planning their August holidays, took little interest in life outside the
périphérique
.

Farming mussels

Once they looked around, Parisians realized the pesky black mollusks were everywhere. Oven-ready trays of
moules
“stuffed” with bread crumbs and swimming in butter had become a feature in supermarkets and as starters in restaurants. At the annual Grande Braderie, France’s biggest flea market, held on the first weekend of September in Lille, a little over a hundred kilometers from Brussels, it became customary to pig out on mussels and fries, washed down with beer. Five hundred tons of mussels were consumed over the Braderie weekend, and thirty tons of fries. Drifts of shells build up waist-high in the city squares, monuments to appetite, and also advertisements for restaurants, who competed to have the largest heaps.

Moules
, it seems, share a characteristic with foods as different as spareribs and truffles. If you haven’t eaten too many, you haven’t eaten enough. They also appeal to what the French call
nostalgie de la boue
—the urge occasionally to play in the mud. Even among today’s sophisticated holiday makers, eating
moules frites
with their fingers gives a sense of slumming. Esplanades along the Channel coast are thick with trippers strolling in the sun with cardboard dishes of
moules frites
. They have even adopted the Belgian method of eating them using a set of shells as pincers to pluck out the meat, which makes the
moules
perfect finger food.

The cutting edge of the
moule
invasion was Léon de Bruxelles. Opened in 1867, Léon Van Lancker’s Brussels restaurant featured
moules special
, with
frites
and beer. In 1989 his grandson Rudy brought Léon to Paris. Today, there are sixty-one branches of Léon de Bruxelles across France, selling eight tons of mussels a day. You can have them cooked traditionally in white wine, or with Roquefort cheese, Madras curry sauce, and in the style of Provence, the Ardennes, or Dijon. But even Léon doesn’t have the courage to offer them Charentaise style,
éclate
—exploded.

That rash act was left to me.

G
athering your own ingredients for a dish is one of the hallmarks of the true cook. The supermarket is no substitute for a street merchant, who lets you pick and prod, and, in France at least, will lecture on the best methods of preparing what you buy. How much more exciting, then, to search for food in the wild, to hunt and gather, and to sever with your own hands the mystical link between an object and the earth in which it has grown.

Or so I told myself when, late one autumn, I crawled on hands and knees, cursing under my breath, through a forest on the edge of the Atlantic and—avoiding centipedes, wood lice, and those areas around the trees watered and fertilized by local dogs—scrabbled up handfuls of the dry pine needles that carpeted the ground, which I then stuffed into hundred-liter black plastic garbage bags.

Whose dumb idea had it been to stage an
éclade
? Had I really been so stupid?

When I got back to Fouras with two bulging bags, our garden was seething with activity. Paper plates and napkins, jugs of wine, and baskets of sliced baguette covered the big table under the grape arbor. Nearby, a garbage can stood ready to receive the shells.

In the center of the garden, well away from the trees and anything that might catch fire, we’d assembled the antique table-tennis table that usually sat in the laundry room, gathering dust and cobwebs. On top sat a slab of wood about the area of a coffee table. In the center were hammered four three-inch nails, about an inch apart.

Marie-Dominique and her sister tottered out of the house with a galvanized metal bath brimming with gleaming mussels. A
fournisseur
in the fish market offered, for a small premium, to deliver them cleaned and ready to cook. He used a sort of washing machine to scrub off the worst incrustations, but as a precaution, we’d put them to soak a second time—just as well, since, when we dredged them out, a thin layer of sand remained in the bottom of the bath.

“What now?”

Marie-Dominique took a mussel and leaned it, hinge uppermost, against one nail. She continued until she had a square, then looked at us expectantly.

“Well, come on.”

It took the three of us almost an hour to cover the wood with a carpet of gleaming mussels. By then, the guests were arriving. They paused by the table to admire our work. A few tried to help, but it required a sure hand to place the mussels so that they stood upright. If one toppled, a dozen others might also go, like dominoes. Seeing it was not as much fun as it looked, they drifted toward the wine.

The soft summer night descends with stately deliberation on the coast of Charente, so it was almost ten before we opened the bags of pine needles. In handfuls, we laid them evenly on top of the mussels.

When they were a foot deep, I asked, “Isn’t that enough?”

Marie-Dominique shook her head. We kept on until both bags were empty and the pile of needles resembled a miniature haystack.

“Come on everyone,” she called. “We’re ready.”

Glasses in hand, our guests clustered around.

Although the
éclade
is complex in preparation and, with luck, spectacular in effect, the theory behind it is simple. Fishermen of a century before improvised the dish as a way to cook
moules
quickly without utensils. They peeled a slab of bark from a cork tree, piled it with mussels, added pine needles, then lit it. The needles burned quickly and intensely, leaving a layer of ash, which they blew away to reveal the mussels burst open by the steam of their juices, with the bonus of a resinous tang from the pine.

As our guests stood well back, Marie-Do, her sister, and I stationed ourselves at the corners of the table. At a nod, we each struck a match and touched it to the needles.

It happened so quickly that, later, nobody could agree on what had gone wrong. Marie-Dominique insisted the mussels were too small. I was sure we’d used too many needles. The summer had been exceptionally dry, making them unusually inflammable. Whatever the reason, the needles acted like the brandy on my disastrous sword kebab. A plume of flame shot into the air, sending our guests recoiling and squealing. One bumped a corner of the table, and the heap of burning needles slowly began to topple. Sparks whirled up, threatening to carry the fire into our neighbors’ gardens.