The Perfect Meal (5 page)

One lone attempt at an ethnic Aussie brew dates back to World War II. Troops stranded in the green hell of New Guinea invented Jungle Juice. A pumpkin was hollowed out and the cavity filled with dried fruit, sugar, and water. The pumpkin was then hung from a tree to ferment. As the rind rotted through, a murky fluid leaked out. The amount of alcohol varied, as did the flavor. I once asked a veteran what it tasted like.

“We didn’t give a fuck about the taste,” he said curtly. “Only the effect.”

B
oris was right to suggest Karl as an authority on alcohol, since he’d made its appreciation his life’s work. His capacity was titanic. To accept an invitation for a drink at his apartment above Place de Châtelet was to invite oblivion. One of his mojitos turned my legs to rubber, and his martinis were so close to pure gin I suspected he followed the legendary advice of just bending over the glass and whispering, “Vermouth.”

But the Karl who opened the door the day I arrived to see him was barely recognizable. Where was the portly personage I’d helped down the stairs after our last party? He’d lost at least fifty pounds, and his trousers, showing just a suspicion of flare, suggested he’d resuscitated clothes that had been hanging in his closet since the seventies.

“What happened to you?”

He had the grace to look embarrassed. “I went on the wagon, dear boy. It was my liver,” he explained as he led me into his living room. “My doctor said it belonged in the
Guinness Book of World Records
.”

I’d barely sat down before he went on. “But I haven’t offered you a drink. No reason why you should give it up just because I have.”

“No, please,” I said. “This is a scholarly visit.”

But abruptly there was a glass in my hand: the stemmed tapered tulip, customarily reserved for sherry, that the English call a schooner and the Spanish a
copita
. This one didn’t contain sherry, but something the color of weak tea. I sipped and gasped.

“What the hell is this?”

“Maple syrup schnapps. A friend in Toronto brews it himself. I’ve never tried it, but I was curious.” He looked at my glass, a little wistfully. “What’s it like?“

“Well, as the Germans say, ‘also works in your cigarette lighter.’”

“Yes, I fancied it might be a bit robust. But drink up, my dear chap. And tell me about this scholarly query.”

As I explained my project, I braced myself for the onslaught. Karl was one of those people who, if you inquire, “How much is two and two?,” is likely to reply, “Now, that’s a very interesting question. Take the Assyrians . . .”

As expected, the request for suggestions of obscure but tasty aperitifs opened the floodgates.

“Well, you would need to begin with the Italians. The French imported the habit from Italy in the nineteenth century. Italians love their home brews. Wormwood, caraway, anise . . . If you can soak it in wine with a bit of sugar, and the result doesn’t send you blind, you’ve got an aperitif.”

He had a thought. “Or you can use alcohol instead of wine In that case, they call it rosolio.” His eyes went nostalgic again. “Not a bad drop, rosolio.”

I had less happy memories. Once, at the end of a dinner in Florence, our hostess announced that two other guests, a plump couple from the alpine north, had brought some homemade liqueur. The bottle, tall and conical, its exterior molded in a relief of fronds, flowers, and fruit, was a masterpiece, complementing the lustrous golden liquor swirling inside. Reverently, a servant decanted a few spoonsful into enameled thimbles of glass, fragile as eggshells.

“
La signora e il signore
,” explained our hostess, who refused a glass, I noticed, “own the world’s largest plantations of”—she didn’t need to finish; I could smell it—“licorice,” she concluded.

I took a sip anyway. The nectar of the gods tasted like cough medicine.

“No, not rosolio,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”

“Very well. Leaving aside Italy for a moment, let’s concentrate on France. Well, I hate to say it, but the obvious choice is Kir.”

He was right. Kir, a flute of white wine sweetened with a shot of fruit syrup, usually
crème de cassis
, made from blackcurrants, had insinuated itself into the drink menus of the world, and in a surprisingly short time. Though it sounds like it should have been around for centuries, it doesn’t appear in any book of cocktail recipes until the 1950s.

Félix Kir was a priest, a leader in the anti-Nazi Resistance, mayor of Dijon from 1945 to his death in 1968, and a pioneer in “twinning” towns. Thanks to him, Dijon was linked with Cluj in Romania, Dallas in the United States, Mainz in Germany, Bialystock and Opole in Poland, Pécs in Hungary, Reggio Emilia in Italy, Skopje in Macedonia, Volgograd in Soviet Russia, and York in Great Britain. Scarcely a week went by without a deputation from one of them paying a visit. Facing yet another reception, Kir saw he could encourage both local winemakers and the bottlers of
crème de cassis
if he mixed their products in a single drink.

Kir comes close to being the perfect aperitif. It’s alcoholic, but only mildly. It has an element of the soft drink, but the wine adds a touch of sophistication. Best of all for the French, the many different styles of Kir provide an opportunity for the individual to display discrimination, knowledge, or intelligence—in other words, to show off.

For a start, it’s considered chic to ask for
Kir royal
, made with champagne rather than still wine. Even more obscurely, you can request
Kir cardinal
, which uses red wine, not white. But to see a waiter really baffled, demand a
Kir communard
. It’s the same as a
cardinal
but is named in honor of the anarchists of the Commune who briefly controlled Paris in 1871 and were, as you can explain to your impressed friends, Reds.

Then there’s the syrup. Traditionally, it’s cassis. But you can request
Kir framboise
, with raspberry liqueur, or
Kir pêche
, which produces a pretty golden drink—though, like most things made with peach, it is a trifle insipid. My favorite was invented by Florian, a boutique maker of jams and candies with a tiny factory wedged into a canyon next to a roaring stream below the Provençal town of Vence. Want to see a wine waiter lost for words? Ask for a
Kir royal aux pétales de rose Florian
. The barman hasn’t heard of it? Then, of course, you can explain how it’s made, which will make you the focus of attention among not only your dinner companions but the entire restaurant.
^*

When you ask what syrups are available, the waiter will nominate three or four, but almost never
mure
—blackberry. Edith Wharton spelled out the reason in her little book
French Ways and Their Meaning
, published in 1919.

Take care! Don’t eat blackberries! Don’t you know they’ll give you the fever? Throughout the length and breadth of France, the most fruit-loving and fruit-cultivating of countries, the same queer conviction prevails, and year after year the great natural crop of blackberries, nowhere better and more abundant, is abandoned to birds and insects because in some remote and perhaps prehistoric past an ancient Gaul once decreed that “blackberries give the fever.”

Aside from this obscure passage, I’ve never found a single reference to this prejudice. But it’s undeniable that, across the Channel, blackberries are gathered wild, made into jams, and baked into tarts. Yet they hardly ever appear in French markets. And nobody wants to serve a blackberry Kir.

Why? Perhaps because 1919 was the year of the influenza pandemic that killed between twenty and forty million people—the “fever” everyone so rightly feared. Before they learned the infection was worldwide, people in France blamed the recently ended war—specifically noxious vapors from the polluted battlefields and the buried dead. Such vapors would naturally rise in a warm, damp, misty month such as October, which is also the time when blackberries sometimes develop a toxic mold called
Botryotinia
. In that atmosphere, a few cases of blackberry poisoning, or even rumors of them, would have been enough. And after almost a century, some vestige of the belief persists.

I
like Kir,” I said to Karl, “but it’s a bit . . .”

“Middle class? Know just what you mean, my boy. Next thing, they’ll be selling it at McDonald’s. But what about pineau? I’d have thought it would be your first choice, your wife being from Charente.”

He was right. Pineau, made with juice from the first pressing of the grapes, mixed with cognac, is a favorite in the region where Marie-Dominique’s family originated. It’s drunk at almost every formal meal—a good reason to avoid it for my imaginary banquet.

“I was hoping for something more adventurous.”

As expected, Karl took this as a challenge. “Adventure? Well, if you want adventure . . .”

Throwing open his drink cabinet, he revealed four shelves with bottles at least five deep. If Ali Baba had been an alcoholic, this would have been his treasure cave.

“What about pastis, Picon, sambuca, arak, or even the real stuff: absinthe?”

“I don’t like anise.”

“But, my boy, you haven’t tasted this.” He flourished a bottle with a garish label in Spanish. “Anis Najar, made only in Arequipa, Peru. Forty-six percent alcohol—same as vodka. Or this . . .” He hauled out another bottle. “Chinchón.
Seventy percent
alcohol. With this, I wonder the Spanish haven’t put a man on Mars.” More bottles. “Mustn’t forget Scandinavia. Aquavit? Lovely stuff. Swedish schnapps.” He held up a murky flagon with a handwritten label. “This is Finnish.
Lapin Eukon Lemmenjuom
. Translates literally as . . . um, ‘Lappish Hag’s Love Potion,’ apparently. Brewed from blueberries. Not sure where I got it, but has to be powerful. You know the Finns. Born with hollow legs.”

A
n hour later, stepping out, unsteadily, into boulevard de Sébastapol, I had to clutch the doorframe as the floodlit Tour St.-Jacques reeled against the night sky.

I’d meant to ask Karl how he knew Boris. But such mundane questions dissolved in the haze of alcohol. My banquet was well and truly launched. Karl had convinced me that to give my guests anything but the mildest of aperitifs was to invite disaster and place them in the state in which I had found myself. They could all have classic Kir, and lump it. All I needed now was something to feed them. And, of course, an ox.

Five

First Catch Your Sturgeon

On the other side of my plate was a smaller plate, on which was heaped a blackish substance which I did not then know to be caviare. I was ignorant of what was to be done with it but firmly determined not to let it enter my mouth.

Marcel Proust,
À La Recherche du Temps Perdu

A
t the start of a love affair, the bed becomes a raft of pleasure, adrift on an ocean of expectations. Midnight discoveries and drowsy revelations at dawn are the common currencies of discourse.