The Perfect Meal (7 page)

Mixing caviar with fruit sounded like the worst waste since Jermaine Jackson, brother of Michael, while staying in a Swiss hotel, doused a bowl of Beluga with ketchup. However, a little research unmasked American Golden Dessert caviar as something much less precious. It came from the whitefish, a cousin of the salmon, common in the Great Lakes. Retailing at eighteen dollars an ounce, whitefish eggs are fat and pink, like those of the salmon, and share the look, though not the taste, of Sterlet. Once you wash off the mucus-like goo that coats them, they’re as bland as the roe of the sea toad.

A
t one time, caviar was as common a component of a great meal as foie gras. Escoffier served it liberally, always Golden Sterlet. What a coup if I could somehow find any kind of caviar for my dinner, however imaginary.

The week I started my quest to create the perfect banquet, Boris had chosen to hang out at Café au Chai de l’Abbaye, on rue Buci. He was in a booth at the back, and reading, or affecting to read—he took no interest in recent news—a copy of
Le Monde
. While he was reading, I peered more closely at the headlines:

PRESIDENT DE GAULLE

ANNOUNCES REFERENDUM

795 arrests, and 456 injured in overnight rioting.

The paper was dated May 24, 1968.

I glanced around the café. “Did the
soixante-huitards
meet here?”

It wasn’t impossible. The Chai has a long political tradition. During the 1930s, it was a favorite with the émigrés who lived in rented rooms along rue Jacob. Many were on the run from informers and assassins sent by Franco, Stalin, or the secret police of half a dozen Balkan monarchies. A big mirror on the rear wall reflects the whole café and the sidewalk outside. If you sit in the rear booth, with your back to the door, you can see everyone in the mirror, but unless you move your head slightly, to show your reflection, you’re invisible. Boris obviously knew this, since he had chosen just this spot in which to sit.

“I heard this story . . .” I began.

“I hate stories.”

Ignoring him, I went on: “A Russian princess in the 1920s is driving through Charente—”

“Oh, the fisherman and the sturgeon.”

“Yes. What do you think?”

“Probably true.”

“Really? We’re talking about the same one? A Russian princess just happens to be driving across a river in France when a fisherman hooks a sturgeon—?”

“—and to her horror, he rips out the insides, including the caviar, and throws them away. You doubt it?”

“Well, it’s a bit coincidental.”

“The unlikely is almost always true. Nobody has taken the trouble to make it plausible. It’s the obvious you need to worry about. Anyway, I’m told they even kept the princess’s parasol. It’s in the local museum.”

“But . . . sturgeon in France?”

“There are sturgeon all over the world, or used to be. I expect the river was the Gironde. Lots of sturgeon there. And Russians settled in that region after the revolution—those that got out with any money. It reminded them of the Black Sea.”

“And French sturgeon really produced caviar?”

“Why not? French and Russian cows both make milk. Why shouldn’t French and Russian sturgeon make caviar?”

“Then why isn’t it sold?”

“What makes you think it isn’t?”

“Have you ever tasted it?”

“Of course. So have you, probably. When French growers first started producing, all the snob restaurateurs turned up their noses. So they routed their product through a cannery in Odessa. Once it had Cyrillic on the lid, the
grosses têtes
couldn’t get enough.”

L
ater that summer, Marie-Dominique and I went in search of French caviar along the lazy rivers of Charente.

Even with directions, the fishery took some finding—probably by intention. For more than an hour, we cruised narrow country lanes where two cars could barely pass and the trees arched over the road, a tunnel of green that protected us from the worst of the southern sun. The voice on the GPS unit seldom let up.
In two hundred meters, turn left, then right. At the roundabout, take the second exit . . .

Our route dwindled down to a rutted dirt lane running parallel to a narrow river—the Isle, which flowed eventually into the Dordogne. After a kilometer, it petered out in a potholed dirt parking lot. A big nineteenth-century house filled the space between us and the river. Opposite was a more recent and nondescript two-story brick building. Only a small printed sign on its front door, “No Caviar for Sale,” told us we’d arrived.

B
oris was right. French caviar did exist, but only just. By the time the French realized the commercial potential of sturgeon, the Gironde was the sole river that still had a population. Growers imported Russian sturgeon and bred them with the local fish. Now there were fisheries scattered around southwest France and northern Spain, producing about fifty tons of caviar a year.

“There’s not a lot going on at the moment,” said the manager as he showed us around the building. “It isn’t the season. They grow through the summer, and we harvest between October and April.”

Occasionally, women passed us, dressed like lab technicians in white coats and plastic hair caps. They regarded us without warmth. Freeloaders must be an occupational hazard.

“You’ll want to see them,” said the manager, and led us out into the sun.

The ponds, more than twenty, each as shallow as a children’s wading pool, filled the space between the road and the river. The bottoms of most were painted blue or white, though a few were black, making it hard to see the sturgeon that swam sinuously, dark-backed and velvety.

I reached down toward the cool water, then pulled my hand back.

“They don’t bite,” said the manager. “No teeth. They’re bottom-feeders. Not like salmon. More like sharks. No real skeletons. Their bones are . . .” He made a flexing motion with his hands, as if bending an invisible rubber hose back and forth. Never use words when a gesture will do.

We walked between the ponds in the hot sun, sweating, longing to join the sturgeon in the cool water that gushed, purified, from the river just beyond the trees. Their numbers were uncountable: scores in each pond, the size of big salmon, gliding and slithering. Young men patrolled, scooping pellets from large bins and scattering them across the water.

Facts flowed from the manager like water from the river. These fish were young, these older; these were males, so of no use except for their meat (very tasty; marinated in yogurt, then barbecued—some Russian visitors had cooked it for him). These were females, though two years away from producing a worthwhile quantity of eggs. And one pond held Sterlet, imported from Siberia as an experiment. If they thrived, the company might soon be selling the Golden caviar currently hogged by commissars and imams.

“Do you like caviar yourself?” I asked.

He looked incredulous. “Of course.”

“How do you eat it? With vodka and blinis?”

“No. Dry champagne and a little black pepper.”

I recognized the hunger in his tone. We faced each other like two men over the table at a buffet supper, united only by appetite. It wasn’t death that was the Great Leveler but Food.

“And how much do you produce?”

“Altogether? In a good year? About six tons.”

All these creatures, sacrificed for just six tons. I thought of the female sturgeon in the scrap of film, struggling in the Caspian mud. Hundreds of thousands of lives snuffed out for the 450 tons once eaten in a single year. How to weigh that against our delight as we relished Beluga in the Paris candlelight? Or did it add to the savor that each pearl was a tiny death?

I would like to say it put me off caviar for life. But within twenty-four hours, I was lifting a spoon heaped with Beluga, ready to see if it really tasted better with black pepper and champagne than with vodka.

Somewhere in my notes was the fishery’s price list. They sell their best caviar for €1,614.60 a kilo: roughly $2,000. Four ounces is 113 grams, so my can from 1990 would now cost me about $130—about $20 for each teaspoonful.

Was there any better appetizer than caviar with which to begin my imaginary banquet?

I couldn’t think of one.

Was it worth the fortune it would cost?

I engulfed the delicious mouthful.

Yes.

Definitely
yes.

Six

First Catch Your Madeleine

Let them eat cake!

Attributed, erroneously, to Marie-Antoinette

W
ithin a few weeks of vowing to create the ideal banquet, using the “lost” dishes of France, the sheer size of the task dawned on me.

Leaving aside the major problem of finding an ox and the people to both roast and eat it, I needed to choose the number, variety, and style of the other dishes, the wine and other accompaniments, and—this being a French banquet—the underlying philosophy of the meal. I feared that, in an appropriately culinary metaphor, I had bitten off more than I could chew.

On the principle that, to untangle a can of worms, one begins with a single worm, I began with a part of the meal I knew I could handle. As my guests sipped their Kir, one should them offer an
amuse guele
—a nibble. And what could be better than a petit four—a little cake? I even knew which cake it should be—a madeleine.

As my father was a pastry cook, the aroma of fresh-baked cake permeated my childhood. I grew up around dark, moist fruitcake; cupcakes topped with frosting and colored sprinkles; and bouncy sponges, split and sandwiched back together with whipped cream and strawberry jam.

In particular, I remember his towering wedding cakes, battleships of the baker’s art, triple- and occasionally quadruple-decked, armored in marble-white marzipan. Swags of royal icing draped every side. I can see my father’s sure hand painstakingly looping sugary strands from cones of parchment paper, pinning the end of each swoop with a tiny silver sphere called a cachou.

I assumed, when I moved to Paris, that, in this capital of patisserie, cakes would be even more popular. Not so. While the French enjoy fruit tarts and pastries, they view cake with skepticism. The standard item of
patisserie
has a creamy filling, enclosed in a stiff pastry case. Or it could be a tart, filled either with the sticky lemon sauce that I grew up calling “lemon curd,” or with pieces of fruit thickly glazed with sugar syrup and firmly bedded in
crème patisserie
, a thick custard that keeps the fruit in place. Individual pastries enclose soft mousse in
choux
pastry or seal it firmly under a chocolate shell.

Cake, when it appears, is rigorously segregated. In supermarkets, fruitcake is packaged as
cake Anglaise
—cake English style. Sponge is unknown, and pound cake exists only as
quatre quatre
—four by four—made with equal quantities of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. For weddings, most couples opt for a
pièce montée
, a tall cone of profiteroles (bubbles of cream-filled pastry lacquered with a caramel or chocolate glaze). We had one for our own wedding.

Why don’t the French like cake? Mainly it’s the crumbs. In Regency England, the worst social disaster that could befall a snuff-sniffing man of fashion was to drip brown snot onto his snowy white cravat. Imagine, then, the embarrassment of a French courtesan who, glancing down, finds her lover, while browsing her décolletage, sporting a mustache flecked with reminders of afternoon tea.

To solve this problem, the French developed their own versions of cake: dense, moist, chewy, and, above all, crumb-free. Among French tea-time nibbles, the most popular are the
financier
, the
macaron
, the
cannelé
, and the madeleine. The
cannelé
—pluglike, rubbery, dark brown—is grooved down the sides:
cannelé
means “channeled.” The oblong
financier
is named for its resemblance to a gold bar. The
macaron
looks like a miniature hamburger, its halves joined by a layer of confiture. Most elegant of all, the plump, round madeleine is baked in a mold that gives it the fluted shape of a scallop shell.

The baba, soaked in syrup or rum, might drip but will never crumble. Nor is there much risk of fallout from the beignet, a twist of deep-fried dough, the ancestor of the doughnut. The
cannelé
contains double amounts of sugar and eggs, plus a dousing of rum. As for the madeleine,
financier
, and
macaron
, part of the flour is replaced by ground almonds. In each case, the result is the same: no crumbs.

And if you remark that some French cakes and buns, in particular the croissant, still crumble, any expert will explain that it’s your fault for not eating them correctly. If you watch a French person eating a croissant, you will notice that, before tearing off a morsel, they hold it well away from their bodies, letting the crumbs fall on the floor rather than on their clothes.