The Perfect Meal (24 page)

Plentiful graft was already built into the hotel system. In addition to the usual bribes from grocers, butchers, and linen laundries, champagne companies kicked back a small sum for every cork that proved a bottle had been drunk. Not content, Escoffier and Ritz had started the Ritz Hotel Development Company, which sold supplies to the Savoy at inflated prices.

When the hotel audited the accounts, Ritz couldn’t explain what had become of £11,000 in wine—worth twenty times that sum in today’s money. It was probably diverted, via the Ritz Hotel Development Company, to the cellars of the new Paris hotel. Escoffier also agreed he owed the Savoy £8,000 but claimed he could only pay £500, the rest presumably having been spirited across the Channel. In March 1897 he and Ritz were dismissed, along with their supply manager and kitchen staff. At first, the sixteen cooks refused to leave and resisted with carving knives until the police arrived to march them out. Escoffier managed to blame the scandal on British obtuseness.

We had saved the Savoy from bankruptcy, brought it to the summit of glory, and given its shareholders the satisfaction they merited. It would have been possible for these gentlemen to solve their differences in everyone’s interest and without anyone losing face. They would have none of it.

Once the Ritz opened in Paris, the Ritz Hotel Development Company switched to recruiting kitchen staff for other hotels and handling supplies. The partners also had their revenge on the Savoy when the owners of London’s new Carlton Hotel hired them to run it. Known as the Ritz-Carlton, their new venture creamed off most of the Savoy’s society business.

All this unpleasantness didn’t mar Escoffier’s legend. Rather, it became part of it. “Don’t let his manners fool you,” murmured people on the inside. “The old fox is smarter than he looks. He really put it over those
rosbifs
.”

F
ew people have influenced the way we eat more than Escoffier. During the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, he was called up as part of the reserve and put in charge of cooking for the officers of the Second Division headquarters at Metz, the most easterly city in France, next to the German border.

Watching the army at work convinced him that his profession could benefit from military discipline. A kitchen should be staffed like an army unit, with a
brigade de cuisine
, commanded by a chief, or
chef
, at the head of a group of professionals chosen for their individual skills: a
saucier
for sauces, a
rôtisseur
for meats, a
patissier
for pastry. After the war,
chef
became the accepted term for a supervisory cook, and the system of kitchen management Escoffier pioneered remains much the same today.

Escoffier insisted on uniform dress in his kitchens: the now-standard white jacket, trousers, and apron, and the high white cap, or toque, to keep sweat and hair out of the food. He also told his staff to trim their hair and shave off their mustaches, but at this, they drew the line. Half his cooks at the Savoy were French and half Italian. Each regarded a mustache as a sign of status, something that Ritz and Escoffier, both mustachioed, should have understood. Among cooks, a mustache also signified their superiority over waiters and other lower orders, who always shaved. When British writer George Orwell worked as a dishwasher in a Paris hotel during the late 1920s, the
chef du personnel
was scandalized by his facial hair. “
Nom de Dieu!
Who ever heard of a
plongeur
with a mustache?” Orwell had to shave or be fired.

Cooks were also notorious drunks, claiming wine was needed to replace sweat lost at the stove. Escoffier, who never drank or smoked, introduced a healthier substitute: barley water. An energy drink since ancient times—made by boiling grain, straining off the liquid, and flavoring it with lemon—it’s still provided to players at tennis tournaments such as Wimbledon. Escoffier placed crocks of it in all his kitchens.

Feeding starving soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War, 1870

Once in total control of a hotel restaurant and able to employ as many waiters as he needed, he also abandoned
service française
, with a dozen dishes placed on the table at the same time. Instead, he introduced
service à la Russe
, in which each diner simultaneously received an identical dish.

The same rational approach inspired his book
Le Guide Culinaire
. Helped by dozens of chefs, he rounded up details of every dish in French cuisine, arranged them under categories, and described how each should be prepared. With its help, any kitchen could re-create even the most obscure regional specialty.

But the
Guide
is no recipe book. It’s a manual. Take, for instance, his entry for a game soup,
Potage Gentilhomme
. Over decades of bad memories and cut corners, it had degenerated into a potato soup with carrots in a chicken bouillon.
Le Guide Culinaire
put it back on track.

Three liters of puree of partridge with lentils, a decaliter of essence of partridge, a decaliter of flaming cognac, the juice of half a lemon, and eight decaliters of high-quality reduced stock made from feathered game. For the garnish: little quenelles of partridge in the form of pearls, and truffles of the same shape. Two spoonsful to each person.

A modern recipe book would explain how to make purée of partridge, game stock, and quenelles, and the correct way to handle truffles. Escoffier does, but not in the same chapter and often with even more remote subsections, variations, and exceptions. He was writing for professional cooks, who would have learned these techniques during years of apprenticeship and needed only reminding. But to the modern cook, accustomed to convenient, accessible directions and precise measurements, the book is infuriatingly obscure.

American writer Harry Mathews mocked it in his parody
Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)
. Supposedly giving the recipe for “an old French regional dish,” Mathews concedes that the preparation “demands some patience, but you will be abundantly rewarded for your pains.” We are then deluged with detail.

All bones must be removed. If you leave this to the butcher, have him save them for the deglazing sauce. The fell or filament must be kept intact, or the flesh may crumble. Set the boned forequarter on the kitchen table. Do not slice off the purple inspection stamps but scour them with a brush dipped in a weak solution of lye. The meat will need all the protection it can get. Rinse and dry. Marinate the lamb in a mixture of 2 qts of white wine, 2 qts of olive oil, the juice of 16 lemons, salt, pepper, 16 crushed garlic cloves, 10 coarsely chopped yellow onions, basil, rosemary, melilot, ginger, allspice, and a handful of juniper berries. The juniper adds a pungent, authentic note.

Toward the end, Matthews spares a thought for the cook. “Do not be upset if you yourself have lost all desire to eat. This is a normal, salutary condition. Your satisfaction will have been in the doing, not in the thing done.” Escoffier must often have felt the same way as he sat down to his own dinner, probably too tired to face anything more complicated than a boiled egg.

M
y own copy of
Le Guide Culinaire
once belonged to Alexandre Gastaud, chef at New York’s Knickerbocker Hotel and later of the Waldorf-Astoria. He’d worked at the Ritz-Carlton in London, where Escoffier inscribed the book “
à mon cher ami A. Gastaud, sympathique souvenir
.”

They met again when Escoffier visited New York in 1930 for the opening of the Hotel Pierre—an event important enough to rate a report in the
New York Times
.

HONORS PRINCE OF CHEFS.

The Knickerbocker Chef Names a Dish for Escoffier.

To commemorate the recent visit of M. Escoffier, prince of chefs, A. Gastaud, chef of the Hotel Knickerbocker, has been toiling on a new dish, which shall bear the name of the noted cook. After three weeks of experimenting and study, Gastaud has evolved Guinea Hen à la Escoffier. He believes the new dish is worthy of the renowned chef after whom it is named.

(If you’d like to try cooking Guinea Hen à la Escoffier, Gastaud’s recipe—not a very difficult one—appears at the back of this book.)

Gastaud, like Marcel Proust, can claim to have inspired literature, though it was a fame he might have preferred to avoid. When he took over the $28 million Waldorf-Astoria hotel in 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, poet Langston Hughes protested at such luxury coexisting with soup kitchens. His poem “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria” borrowed lines from an ad in
Vanity Fair
that explained “the famous Oscar Tschirky is in charge of banqueting. Alexandre Gastaud is chef.”

Take a room at the new Waldorf, you down-and-outers-sleepers in charity’s flop-houses where God pulls a long face, and you have to pray to get a bed.

They serve swell board at the Waldorf-Astoria. Look at the menu, will you:

gumbo creole

crabmeat in cassolette

boiled brisket of beef

small onions in cream

watercress salad

peach melba

Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.

B
ack home after talking to Boris, I took down my copy of
Le Guide Culinaire
. It contained directions for making crèmes, purées, potages, and consommés—but no
soupe à l’oignon
. I located it eventually, among the
garbures
—thick soups, full of vegetables, pieces of meat, and even bread, either mashed into the soup or toasted and floated on top. “To be served in a restaurant,” Escoffier suggested, “the
garbure à l’oignon
is given a gratin, either on the surface or in the soup itself. This ‘
Garbure à la Cooper
’ is described elsewhere.”

I turned to “Garbure-Cooper”—and there it was, the
soupe à l’oignon
I knew. Escoffier summarizes it with his usual brevity.

GARBURE-COOPER. A soup of onions immersed in a white consommé. The onions are well fried in butter. Pass them through a
chinois
and press down well. Pour the soup into deep bowls, garnish with rounds of bread, cover the surface abundantly with cheese
, arroser
with melted butter and grill till browned
.

Who was “Cooper”? I never found out. A
chinois
(a Chinese) is a flattened conical strainer, named for its resemblance to an East Asian “patty hat.” But
arroser
means “to drench,” as with a hose. Should I really
drench
the cheese with melted butter? And how did I make “a white consommé”? Belatedly I followed Boris’s advice and turned to page one, chapter one. And there it was: directions for making a white consommé for ten people. About half that should be enough. Mentally halving the ingredients, I took a pen and pad, and began a lengthy shopping list.

U
sed to my odd requests, the butcher in the Marché Saint-Germain still looked puzzled.

“Bones? No meat? Just bones?”

“They’re for a bouillon.”

“How much did you say?”

“Three kilos?”

“Three kilos!”

He shook his right hand vigorously, as if he’d touched something hot. Uniquely French, the gesture signifies shock, respect, or admiration. The price paid for a new car, how badly someone broke a leg, or a well-filled pair of jeans can all inspire this gestural “Ow!” I responded with a shrug. Often with the French, words just get in the way.

The next day, he handed over a lumpy seven-pound sack. I reached for my wallet. He shook his head. “
Cadeau
,” he said. A gift.

Following Escoffier’s directions, I set the oven to 150 degrees centigrade, put the bones in a baking dish, added a chopped onion and some garlic cloves, and left them to roast for three hours. They emerged beaded with fat forced out of the marrow by the sustained heat. More fat pooled in the bottom of the dish, flavored by the caramelized garlic and onions.