The Perfect Meal (28 page)

Country towns don’t differ much. In Australia we’d looked forward just as much to the annual agricultural show, with its stalls of produce, its displays of prize-winning homemade jams and lopsided cakes, but above all its traveling carnival. I paid sixpence to gape at the fetus of a two-headed calf floating in its jar of yellow fluid, and stared, flushed, at the wobbling white belly of a middle-aged lady as she performed a sketchy approximation of the
danse du ventre
to lure our fathers and uncles into the sexier show that was “all happening on the inside.”

“What they need is a midway,” I said to Chris. “A Ghost Train and a hoochy-coochy show. They’d liven up the place.”

He pointed toward the gate. “Maybe this is it.”

A dozen aged ladies and gentlemen in traditional Catalan dress of drab black—the women with lace caps, the men with red hats—were clustered around a harmonium. As it wheezed into life, they began to harmonize, more or less, in almost toneless unison. We were being treated to a performance of what passed in this region for Christmas carols.

“Catalan music tends to be monotonous,” Chris said apologetically.

Just then, they hit a particularly sour note. The geese honked in approval. The singers glared but droned on. Chris and I both started to laugh. Surrealism was building up around us, like a drift of invisible snow. I looked up at the battlements, where it would not have surprised me to see Catherine Millet wearing nothing but Wellington boots and gardening gloves. Instead, I saw a man in white peering down. Could that be an admiral’s uniform? Had the great Catalan returned—to commune with the shades of lost anchovies perhaps, and to visit his ant, or in the hope of another transcendental experience on the train?
Ola
, Don Salvador!

Twenty

First Catch Your
Noisette

I like my coffee!

Like my coffee sweet and hot.

Won’t let nobody meddle

With my coffee pot.

Old blues

C
offee coffee coffee. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Nescafé at dawn, drunk from a mug with a silly design; half milk, and the sugar barely dissolved, but most of it gulped in a swallow, fuel for a morning’s work. Or a
crème
in the café on the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain, seething milk poured into an inky
express
, black and white turning beige; water into wine.

Later in the day,
café allongé
—stretched coffee, with extra hot water instead of milk, for a cuppa Java just like they make Back Home. Or my preference,
noisette
—a modest
express
compromised by a dash of milk, the soiled dove of coffees that Italians call
macchiato
, or “stained.” Not forgetting the classic
express
, sipped standing at the zinc on a rainy afternoon, the Tour Eiffel a high ghost in the overcast, my neighbor companionably pushing the sugar along the bar, then returning to his dog-eared copy of Boris Vian.

The international language of coffee. Coffee in Indian and Chinese restaurants, so vile it must be revenge for the Raj or the Opium Wars. Dutch coffee,
Douwe Egberts
, so mellow and milky you want to glug it, cup after cup. Turkish coffee—powder, sugar, water; black, gluey, gritty, a liquid confection. Ah, but then the espresso of Italy, Cadillac of coffees.
No, not Cadillac. Porsche
. Brown-black ichor under
crema
thick enough to support the pyramid of sugar from the paper tube for twothreefour
five!
seconds before it’s swallowed down. Coffee not so much drunk as inhaled. And the caffeine kick, shivering down your nerves, making your ears sing.

And what about American coffee? The frowns when, on my first stateside visit, I asked for “white coffee.” The kindly explanation: “Ah, you mean ‘coffee regular.’” Equal confusion from a French waiter at the concept of “iced coffee.” Ice and coffee? An unimaginable perversion at that time, but now an omnipresent banality, thanks to Starbucks and its Iced Frappuccino, a cappuccino drugged with vanilla, hazelnut, caramel—coffee in drag, too timid to come out of the closet as what it really is: a milkshake.

And Irish coffee now. Saints preserve us! A different thing entirely. Coffee, sugar, and whiskey, with a dog collar of barely pourable cream. The eighth sacrament, potent enough to raise the dead. So transcendental you’d swear it was invented in the Vatican. In fact, someone at Shannon Airport thought it up to revive passengers stumbling off the first unpressurized, unheated transatlantic flights. The four food groups in a glass—sugar, caffeine, alcohol, fat—served warm to speed their progress into chilled bodies yearning for resurrection.

Coffee coffee coffee. No such thing as a bad cup; just some cups less good.

Always, of course, excepting decaf. Decaf—the essence of disappointment. The fumbled pass that loses the game; the ball that rims the hole but doesn’t
quite
drop; the orgasm you just
know
was faked; the mystery you realize on page ten that you’ve already read. Like crawling into an unmade bed; not finding the matching sock; ordering “no pineapple” on your pizza but getting it just the same. Decaf’s the coffee That Couldn’t, the coffee of What Might Have Been, of Not Really Our Sort of Thing. Decaf? I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Paris street vendor of coffee and hot milk, 1880s

This time Boris met me in La Rhumerie. Something between café, restaurant, and bar, its West Indian bungalow look suggests it should be by a beach in Barbados. Instead, it sits at the busy intersection where rue du Four splits off from boulevard Saint-Germain. On a warm Saturday afternoon, this is one of the Left Bank’s most fashionable spots, a vantage for people-watching second to none. This wet Wednesday morning in February, however, we were almost alone.

“What are you reading?”

He held up the white-covered oblong paperback:
789 Néologisms de Jacques Lacan
.

“How is it?”

“Gripping. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.”

“I’m working on coffee,” I told him.

“Why?”

“Well, by tradition . . .”

“You don’t really think some person went round at the end of a big dinner with a
cafetière
?” He put a finger into the book to mark his place. “You’ve been to French dinners. If it’s in a restaurant, the waiters have gone home; all but the two stuck with clearing your table and giving you
l’addition
. If the meal is in someone’s apartment, nobody’s anxious to drink black coffee at midnight, always assuming the host can be bothered to make it. Out of eight guests, at least one will be half-asleep in an armchair. Another will have gone home early, pleading a migraine but actually to watch
Mad Men
. Three more will be drunk, two of them arguing politics, and at least one couple will be on the balcony, either snarling at each other—that’s if they’re married—or exchanging phone numbers if they aren’t. Or even if they are.”

I went home and looked it up. As always, he was right. Coffee was not necessarily part of the classic
repas
. In chateaus and stately homes, guests left the dining room after dessert and “went through” to the drawing room. Sometimes the hostess led only the female guests while the men stayed behind to smoke cigars, drink port (always passing the decanter to the left, even if it had to go all the way round the table to reach you), and either assassinate the reputations of absent friends or tell dirty jokes. Either way, coffee didn’t play a role.

Nor was coffee part of a big restaurant dinner. Some sample menus in Escoffier’s
Le Guide Culinaire
end with
café Turc
(Turkish coffee) or
café double
(like an
express
, in a small cup, the so-called demitasse). More often, however, he served liqueurs, port or brandy, with
mignardises
,
friandises
, or petit fours: tiny cakes, biscuits, candied fruits, or chocolates—the idea lately revived by some restaurants as
café gourmand
(an
express
with a plate of sugary nibbles).

T
he first people to add milk to coffee were seventeenth-century monks in Vienna who found the Turkish brew too strong and mixed it with cream and honey. It took time for the custom to spread. Coffee was too precious to dilute, although it wasn’t uncommon to “improve” or “correct” it with a dash of cognac. “Coffee without brandy,” decreed Samuel Beckett, “is like sex without love.”

Café au lait became popular in western Europe when women, barred from the coffeehouses of London and the cafés of the Continent, brewed it at home and, as the Viennese monks had done, softened its taste. Because women liked it this way, coffee with milk came to be regarded as effeminate. By the middle of the nineteenth century, French cafés, if asked, would serve it, though purists complained it attracted women into what had been a male culture.

During the siege of Paris in 1871, the abbot of Saint-André noticed that the shortage of both milk and coffee was affecting what he called “the
café au lait
people,” who loitered, gossiping and flirting, in the cafés along the new boulevards created by Baron Haussmann. “They believed there was no more coffee to be had,” he said with satisfaction, “so they made do with something else, which doesn’t appear to have done them any harm.” When coffee was scarce, people drank hot milk in the morning. Once coffee returned, a mixture of hot milk and coffee,
café crème
, became the standard breakfast drink. The French still see it that way: one never drinks
café crème
after midday any more than we eat cornflakes.

The Italian espresso invasion briefly overran France in the 1950s. Cafés bought espresso machines but used them to make the same coffee they’d always brewed. The steam tap heated the milk but not so energetically as to produce a serious froth. An Italian hoping for an authentic cappuccino in France is doomed to a long search.

In one of those oddities that make sense only in France, some cafés, beginning during the Nazi occupation, offered a choice of coffee in a cup or a thick, squat glass. This fad, probably due to a shortage of imported china, might have caught on had the tastemakers taken it up. In her 1943 novel
L’Invitée
, Simone de Beauvoir describes the moment when this change in taste and practice could have taken place. A woman and two men in a café—based, at a guess, on de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus—debate whether coffee cools more quickly in cup or glass. One man argues that the surface of evaporation is greater in a glass; the other insists porcelain is a better insulator. “It was amusing when they debated physics like this,” reflects the woman. “Usually they had no idea what they were talking about.” Eventually, with a combination of contempt and affection, she settles the argument. “They cool at exactly the same rate,” she decrees—and, with this literary shrug, severs a thread in the fabric of culture. Coffee in a glass would never be
in
.

W
hen did I first taste coffee? I was about eight, and a precocious reader. The building that contained my father’s bakery and our apartment also housed a lending library. By jiggling a connecting door, I was able to slip in after hours and browse the dark book-lined rooms, dipping into volumes that my parents, had they known the contents, would have snatched from my hands.

Along with other puzzling activities, people in these books drank coffee. Our family never did—only tea. Coffee was thought of as too powerful. People who drank tea so strong that a spoon stood up straight in it would grimace at black coffee. All the same, I demanded that my curiosity be satisfied.

Instant coffee had been around since 1938 but not in Australia. Instead, my mother borrowed a flat-sided black bottle from a shelf in my father’s bakehouse. I’d seen him use it to flavor the coffee frosting on
éclairs
. On its label, a Scots military officer in full kilt took his ease before a tent while a turbaned Sikh respectfully served him afternoon coffee—made, it was implied, from the contents of this bottle, called Camp Coffee.

Camp hardly deserved the definition, since only 4 percent was coffee. The rest was water, sugar, and an extract from the chicory plant, whose bulbous roots, dried and pulverized, resemble coffee, though minus the caffeine. In hard times, chicory was often added to stretch the precious beans.

During the wartime shortage of coffee, essences such as Camp had flourished. Those who had known the real thing became nostalgic, even slightly manic, for the lost hit of real caffeine. In 1947, Ian Fleming, not yet creator of James Bond, wrote an article for the literary magazine
Horizon
about the joys of relocating from postwar Britain to Jamaica, where he’d just bought a house. He particularly praised the island’s Blue Mountain coffee.