The Perfect Meal (3 page)

One card, headed simply “15 April 1912”—almost exactly a century ago—outlined a formal lunch.

This was the kind of meal UNESCO had in mind. But where were such meals made today? These were truly “lost” dishes. For the modern cook, even the culinary language would be baffling.

To deserve the description
Royale
, for example, a dish required a rich additional ingredient, making it “fit for a king.” But it’s been many years since any chef made a serious effort to achieve regal status for his work, and the few attempts have been dismal. In 1953 a competition for a new dish to mark the crowning of Queen Elizabeth produced Coronation Chicken, a lumpy mixture of chopped chicken in curry-flavored mayonnaise. No sooner was the recipe published than someone pointed out an embarrassing resemblance to the Jubilee Chicken created for George V’s Golden Jubilee in 1935, also using curry mayonnaise. Obviously news of neither dish reached the people charged with creating something for the 2012 Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth, since they came up with . . . yes, chopped chicken in spicy mayonnaise.

Making
Consommé à la Royale
in 1912, the chef would have beaten eggs with cream, poured the mixture into molds, poached it, then cut the omelette-like solid into strips. Placing a few of these in a soup bowl with thin slices of chicken breast, mushroom, and truffle, he’d have ladled hot chicken consommé on top. Not something to be knocked up in a few minutes for unexpected guests.

For
Noix de Marcassin Sauce Chasseur
, filets from a young boar, or
marcassin
, were sautéed in butter, then served in a sauce of white wine, butter, and herbs. To create a
buisson
, or bush, of
écrivisses
, the chef arranged shelled crayfish in a pyramid, on a base of champagne aspic. For
Soufflé de Volaille Talleyrand
, chicken breasts were pounded into a paste and folded into the egg mixture before the soufflé went into the oven.

In 1912 even a modest provincial restaurant might have handled such a meal, with a little advance notice. But we live in an era when an average restaurant has two or three cooks rather than ten, and one of those an apprentice. Technology takes up the slack. In the wholesale supermarkets that ring Paris, reserved for the trade, the chefs of Paris’s best restaurants trundle six-wheeled steel platforms rather than shopping carts, and arrive at the checkouts with sacks of frozen
frites
, five-portion cans of
confit de canard
, and cartons of ready-to-reheat
chicken à la crème
,
boeuf bourguignon
, and
blanquette de veau
. In 2011, two thirds of French restaurants admitted to using
plats en kit
—precooked meals bought canned, frozen, or as boil-in-a-bag portions.

Anything from the menu of 1912 that can’t be cooked in a microwave or under a grill has disappeared. As soufflés must be made on the spot,
Soufflé de Volaille Talleyrand
would appear only in the rare restaurants that specialize in them. But frozen or canned artichoke hearts have saved
Fonds d’Artichauts à l’Italienne
, and
Caneton Nantais Cresson
may survive, because every joint of the duck is available precooked, complete with sauce. Just add some sprigs of fresh watercress and serve.

M
arkets, too, have been transformed. Of my local shopping streets, rue de Buci and rue de Seine, a visitor of the 1950s wrote that they were:

always buzzing, lined with vegetable pushcarts both sides, meat and fish stores behind them, invariably thronged with shoppers. Walking through it, one was knocked over by the stench of rotten cabbage leaves, fresh turnips, raw tripe, steers’ red blood. Early morning, and the fire hydrants spurting, turned on by the street cleaners; the murky waters rolling over the ancient cobblestones; up wafting the odor of stale wine, Gauloises butts, spermatozoa, Lysol; running a few blocks down to the Quai des Grands-Augustins and the Seine, flowing soft and serene as an angel’s sigh.

He wouldn’t recognize them now. The fishmongers and cheese sellers have long gone. One forlorn relic remains. Next to the Hotel Louisiane, over a permanently shuttered shop front, black tiles on a blue background spell out the word
Poissonerie
. The blue is the color of the Greek flag; the color James Joyce dictated for the cover of the first edition of
Ulysses
, published just a few blocks away, at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. Joyce walked down this street a hundred times. Did he look up one day, see the tiles, and make a mental note? The lightning of inspiration can strike anywhere.

That phantom fish shop will never reopen, nor will rue Buci ever again stink from stale wine and semen. The space belongs to Italian gelato parlors,
chocolatiers
, wine merchants, shops selling organic cosmetics, and, of course, cafés, which each year extend their wooden platforms a little farther into the street, the better to squeeze in more tables.

As for pushcarts, they would impede the view of the tourists who sip their
cafés crèmes
at those tables. Occasionally a street vendor of the old school reappears for a morning, like a ghost of another era. Once it was a car from the 1920s, lacquered a funereal black, with a gleaming brass hood ornament and wheel hubs, and the back half-converted to hold tubs of homemade ice cream.

The ice cream seller

Also, periodically, the sidewalk in front of the butcher is colonized by two dour men selling wrinkled dry sausage; wheels of hard cheese with thick, gnarled rind; and wind-dried hams from the mountainous and heavily forested part of central France known as the Auvergne. Though the sellers’ wide-brimmed black hats and black cotton smocks look a little like fancy dress, they are authentic enough, as are their products. Taking American visitors on a stroll one Saturday, I paused by their stall to enumerate the ingredients of their salami-like
saucissons secs
: “
saucisson d’sanglier
. . . sausage of wild boar;
saucisson de noix
. . . sausage with walnuts;
saucisson d’âne
. . .” I paused, glancing at my friends. Would they want to know that the next sausage was made from donkey meat? Probably not.

L
ong after that dinner at the Grand Palais, memories of it continued to circulate in my mind.

Of course, one couldn’t actually duplicate the Roman feast I’d visualized. Who, for instance, any longer roasted oxen? Did oxen even exist? An ox was what Americans call a steer, a castrated bull. In Europe and Asia, the castration made them more tractable to pull a cart or a plough, neither much used these days.

Was there, somewhere in France, even a vestige of the food culture represented by that classical architecture and by the menu of 1912? If so, where was it hiding? Might there even be, in some remote corner of the country, an ox waiting to be roasted and the people who knew how to perform this medieval rite?

It would be fun to find out: to create, even in imagination, the kind of feast UNESCO decided was typical of French cuisine. But I needed an inspiration, a spark, a guide.

Fortunately, I had Boris.

Three

First Catch Your Mentor

I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.

Gertrude Stein

I
n a movie of the 1980s—title forgotten, if ever known—a woman, chef in a rural restaurant somewhere in the south of France, has just prepared lunch for twenty obviously important men.

They praise her skill, particularly the main dish. Such a sauce! Never have they eaten better. She has exceeded herself.

She returns to the kitchen, where the pot remains on the stove. For a long moment she stares at it. Then, ladling out a few spoonsful into a dish, she carries it to the back door. Sitting on the steps outside, an old man in an open shirt and ragged trousers is peeling potatoes. She holds out the dish.

“Would you mind tasting this?”

Dropping the last potato into a bucket of water, he wipes his hands on his trousers. Taking the dish and spoon, he tastes. He ponders, but not for long.

“What wine did you use?” he asks.

Instantly, the cook slumps. “I knew it! All the ’49 had gone, so I had to use some of the ’50.”

He hands back the dish. “Ah, well, there you are, then,” he says sympathetically, but with an edge of reproof. No need to rub in the fact that, by the harsh standards only they share, she has failed.

I saw this film years ago, but nothing has shaken my awe for the conviction at its heart: that there are people of such discrimination that they have forgotten more than you and I will ever know about how things should taste, smell, and look.

I once spent a week in Australia with David Hoffman, historian of fast food and author of the definitive text
The Joy of Pigging Out
. The subject so preoccupied David that he once changed apartments to be nearer a tiny west Los Angeles café called the Apple Pan, which served superlative burgers and apple pie.

During his Australian visit, he sampled numerous dishes but seldom more than a mouthful of any one. In the whole vast continent, only one taste caught his attention: Peppermint Crisp, a chocolate-coated green mint candy bar that, like Proust’s madeleine, revived memories of a childhood treat. “I’m taking back a bagful,” he told me. “Just simple mint honeycomb dipped in chocolate, but I love them. The true essence of good food is that it brings back the taste of childhood. And these are just like the mint candies my mother used to dole out on special occasions.”

I’d been in France ten years before I met another of these gifted individuals, and it took a further five to become . . . well, I won’t say “friendly with”: a better expression would be “tolerated by.” But at least we were on sufficiently good terms to share the occasional meal, and for me to provide an audience as he delivered his jaded commentary on the decline of food not only in France but around the world.

I’ll call him “Boris” because he reminds me of Boris Lermontov, the ballet impresario in the film
The Red Shoes
. He even looks a little like Anton Walbrook, the suave Austrian who plays Lermontov. Both are pale, as if they shun sunlight. Both have thick, dark mustaches and full heads of hair, in each case a little too long. Their pouchy, skeptical eyes mirror a dry humor just this side of bitterness.

Anton Walbrook

Boris and I were first thrown together at one of those fund-raising banquets for a worthy expatriate cause. Had either of us been paying, we would not have attended. I’d been invited as the Token Writer. As for Boris . . . well, who knew? He may have known something incriminating about the event’s organizer. It was equally possible he’d seen the well-dressed crowd outside and simply strolled in.

Dinner was the cliché salmon with dill sauce, broccoli and new potatoes, all in boil-in-the-bag portions from some industrial restaurant supplier. Everyone got the same thing.