The Perfect Meal (21 page)

The reviewer didn’t exaggerate when he described the location of the tartare restaurant as “a little lost corner of the
quatorzième
.” Though the fourteenth arrondissement boasts the great cafés of Montparnasse, La Coupole, La Dôme, La Rotonde, and Le Select, it’s dominated by the cemetery, the sprawl of the railway terminus, and the looming black horror of Paris’s only skyscraper, the Tour de Montparnasse. Surrounding them is a maze of narrow one-way streets that can have you chasing your tail for hours.

Normally, one wouldn’t have looked at the restaurant twice. Small and modern, it occupied a shop front on a corner of an otherwise unremarkable street. But inside, all sense of the present evaporated. Despite some updating, it still retained an original terrazzo floor and the custom of chalking up the menu on a board. The dishes, too, were classic:
boudin noir
,
blanquette
, fish soup . . . and steak tartare.

Certain words signify an establishment that respects traditional dishes and methods.
Maison
is one. It means something has been made “in house” and is likely a specialty of the chef.
Artisanal
signifies something created by hand, not in a factory. And
à l’ancienne
means it’s in the old style, just the way mother or—even better—grandmother used to make it.

This place delivered all three. The bread wasn’t the ubiquitous sliced baguette but chunks of Poilâne’s wholemeal sourdough, solid and elastic, with a crust that fought your teeth. The house wine came in a clear glass bottle with a heavy base, the kind you see in movies from the 1930s, where one thug is usually smashing it over the head of another.

Our tartares arrived
préparées
, with salad and
frites
all on the same plate. I tried a
frite
. Thick-cut, well browned but not crisp, it was happily remote from the shriveled slivers served at burger joints.

The tartare itself was just as uncompromising. In my first forkful, I tasted finely chopped onion and whole capers, but aside from the egg yolk, salt, and pepper, nothing else. The satisfaction of pure beef was unimpaired. Everything was
comme il faut—
the way it should be.

The review had promised that the restaurant’s tartare would “tickle our carnivore pleasure.” It did that. But where was the rarity that would justify including it in my banquet? Perhaps, in some remote corner of the country, there existed a variation that no longer appeared in Paris restaurants, but I had no idea what it could be. In fact, my ignorance of the tartare was profound.

I began my research on the Internet. One site claimed the dish got its name from the Tatars, who invaded Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Supposedly they gnawed raw meat as they rode, too busy looting and pillaging to stop and cook. Another authority agreed Tatars were mixed up in it somewhere but suggested that warriors put meat under their saddle in the morning so that the pounding of the day’s riding, plus the effect of the animal’s sweat, would tenderize it by nightfall. I didn’t care to think how this made it taste, but it called to mind another favorite of these people, a drink called
kumis
, made from fermented mare’s milk. I once met a man who’d drunk it. What was it like? “Well,” he said. “At first, it’s like thin yogurt. Then you get this alcoholic rush—and, immediately after, an awful aftertaste of horseshit.”

A third theory claimed tartare got its name because it was originally served with sauce tartare, made from mayonnaise mixed with chopped onion, capers, and pickles. This surprised me. Sauce tartare usually accompanies fish, not meat. But was it just coincidence that sauce tartare and steak tartare shared some ingredients: pickles, capers, onion?

I dug further, looking for the ur-recipe that marked the birthplace of this icon of French cuisine. It didn’t take long. The dish appeared for the first time in the 1921 edition of Escoffier’s
Le Guide Culinaire
. Back then it wasn’t called steak tartare but
steak à l’Americaine
—steak American-style.

It soon became clear that I had stumbled on a great secret. Forget those stories about Tatar warriors. Steak tartare came to France with entirely different foreign invaders: the Yanks who flooded into Paris in 1917 as soldiers and returned a few years later as tourists. Steak tartare was just a burger and fries, with the ingredients rearranged to suit French taste.

I could almost reconstruct the moment of invention: 1919. Two Americans in a Montparnasse bistro, probably drunk, are trying to explain to a waiter that they want a hamburger—something which, although it was invented in Chicago in 1904, was totally unknown everywhere else. They probably described the ingredients—minced beef, with onion and a pickle—and were astonished when he returned with all these, just differently arranged.

“No, no, we said rare, not raw . . .”

And meanwhile, in the kitchen, the chef is tasting it and saying, “Y’know, these Americans are crazy, but this isn’t half bad . . .”

As I was musing on this, Marie-Dominique materialized behind me.

“So . . . are you going to include a tartare in your feast?”

I slammed the Escoffier shut.

“Er . . . haven’t decided.”

But I had, really. There would be no tartare at my table. If it ever got around that I’d exposed this French classic as an American invention, what restaurant would ever serve me again?

Fifteen

First Catch Your Hare

Hare à la Royale at Montparnasse, roast piglet at the Odéon, comfits in the Saint-Michel square . . . Such dishes may not be exclusive to the Left Bank, but here they had their origin and can be savored in surroundings conducive to indolent enjoyment.

Paris Rive Gauche
, Official Guide of the Chamber of Commerce of the Left Bank of Paris, 1957/58

O
ccasionally, heading out of Paris to a far corner of France, I wondered if I was neglecting my home city. Shouldn’t any banquet taking place in Paris include at least one dish that was unique to Paris?

Immediately a problem presented itself. There aren’t any.

When I ate lampreys in Bergerac, bouillabaisse in Sète,
moules
in Fouras, or
socca
in Antibes, I had been, in the fashionable term, a locavore. The ingredients had come from within a few kilometers of, if not from, the actual neighborhood.

But nobody grew much in Paris anymore.

In 1780, 1,600 varieties of fruit, flower, and plant were found in the Paris area, including 104 types of fungi. Individual villages on the outskirts were famous for their produce: Argenteuil for asparagus, Montreuil for peaches, Montmorency for cherries, Vaugirard for strawberries, Saint-Germain for peas, Clamart for artichokes. Each morning, in season, supplies of all these arrived at Les Halles, making it possible to prepare dishes with a distinctive local character.

Cherry picking at Montmorency

Those orchards and farms are gone, engulfed by apartment buildings and autoroutes. In Britain, local councils divide waste ground into allotments where people can cultivate their own vegetables. This has kept alive a tradition of home-grown produce. But Paris has no such program. A few tiny vineyards survive in Montmartre, Belleville, and in what used to be Vaugirard, where, significantly, the vines are part of a park for children. Any examples of cultivation are as exotic as camels or polar bears to modern Parisians, who bring their children on Sunday afternoons to stare and wonder.

Admittedly, white button mushrooms were called
champignons de Paris
and ordinary boiled ham
jambon de Paris
, but neither was particularly Parisian. Escoffier listed a few dishes as
à la Parisienne
, including a rice pilaf with chicken, but since his recipes for
pilaf à la Grecque . . . Orientale
, and . . .
Turque
used the same ingredients, give or take a pinch of saffron, powdered ginger, or a few raisins, the label hardly seemed earned.

In her
French Regional Cooking
, Anne Willan suggests potage St. Germain and
canard
Montmorency as Paris specialties. The potage, a soup containing green peas and shredded lettuce, might have begun life in the fields of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pré, which once occupied a large portion of the Left Bank, but peas and lettuce grow everywhere, and it could just as easily have been invented in Lyon or Lille.
Canard
Montmorency, a dish of duck breast, used the sour cherries for which Montmorency used to be famous, but the village was fifteen kilometers outside the city, and so hardly Parisian. In an early version of pick-your-own, people would travel there on weekends, hire a cherry tree for the day, and pig out. Ironically, not a single cherry tree remains there.

As for
Lievre à la Royale
, the hare dish that the Left Bank Chamber of Commerce suggested was everyday eating in Montparnasse, I suspect this was a practical joke, on a level with sending the new apprentice to buy a can of striped paint or a left-handed screwdriver.

Cooking hare is a tortuous business, starting with securing the animal itself. When Isabella Beeton published her
Book of Household Management
in 1861, she wisely began her recipe for Jugged Hare, “First catch your hare.” This is good advice. The hare is wily, agile, and may be killed only in season. Since its blood plays an important part in the cooking, it can’t be bought already butchered but must be shot with precision or, more often, snared, and the blood drained while still fresh. At the end of the nineteenth century, hunters were known to travel as far as 120 miles to the fields around Tours and spend a week finding a prime specimen.

Once the hare had hung long enough for the meat to rot into a suitable state of gaminess, the cook could get to work. Jointing the animal, he sautéed the pieces in goose fat and bacon, then braised them in two bottles of red wine, with twenty cloves of garlic and forty shallots—so finely chopped, dictated the standard recipe, “as to attain as near as possible an almost molecular state.” Once the meat was sufficiently tender that it needed only a spoon to eat it, the blood, along with two glasses of cognac, was mixed into the cooking juices to create the sauce. Not a dish likely to turn up on the menu of a mom-and-pop café in Bohemian Montparnasse.

Just as I was about to abandon hope of finding a uniquely Parisian dish, a casual aside by Anne Willan caught my eye: “The onion soup and grilled pig’s feet of the brasseries of Les Halles,” she wrote, “have become an institution.”

Of course! What was I thinking of? What dishes were more typical of Paris than these? I’d dallied with pigs’ feet in the past and never found their cooking worth the tiny amount of gelatinous meat they yielded. But
soupe à l’oignon
was classic, a dish not only of culinary importance but one with a role in the cultural, artistic, and literary traditions of the nation. And it was specifically and typically Parisian—even wedded to a precise district: the streets around the old produce market of Les Halles.

So far, I hadn’t tried cooking any of the dishes I’d imagined for my
repas
, but now I was inspired. I would make my own onion soup.

Yes, I was that dumb.

Sixteen

First Catch Your Bouillon

Beautiful soup! Who cares for fish, game or any other dish? Who would not give all else for two pennyworth of beautiful soup?

Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

O
ne should never eat soup on Sunday. Not in a Paris restaurant, anyway.

In fact, try not to eat out on Sunday in Paris at all.

Markets shut at noon on Sunday and don’t reopen until Tuesday morning. Most small restaurants also close. If larger places remain open, it’s seldom with a chef in attendance—just a skeleton staff and a menu of dishes prepared ahead of time, ready for the microwave.