The Perfect Meal (9 page)

In Proust’s kitchen

The monument at Illiers, with pigeon

Louise

Just as we stepped out onto the street again, the blind in the window of the patisserie rattled up and a girl turned the sign on the door from “
Fermé
” to “
Ouvert
.”

They sold madeleines—not as Tante Léonie had bought them but prepacked in polythene. We bought half a dozen bags—gifts for the family, souvenirs. I waited until we got on the train before I opened one and took a nibble. If I expected the same revelation as Proust, I was disappointed. Not bad but a bit dry. And, I suspected, made with plain flour, with no powdered almonds. Maybe with some lime-flower tea . . .

I held out the bag to Louise, curled up again with her coat, half asleep.

“Want one?”

She opened one eye. “No, thanks. I’m on a diet.”

She started to nod off again, then thought of something.

“By the way, did you know it wasn’t originally a madeleine he dipped in the tea?”

“Not a madeleine? Of course it was a madeleine!” I reached for my Kindle and proof.

“In the book, he
made
it a madeleine,” she said, “but in
Contre Saint-Beuve
he describes what really happened.”

She shuffled the papers given her at the house and read out a passage from Proust’s earlier book, regarded as a dry run for his masterpiece.

The other night, when I came in, frozen from the snow, and not having got warm again, since I was writing by lamplight in my bedroom, my old cook suggested making me a cup of tea, which I never drink. And by chance, she brought with it some slices of pain grillé. I dipped the pain grillé into the cup of tea, and the moment I put it in my mouth I had the sensation of smelling geraniums, orange blossom, and a sensation of extraordinary light, of happiness.

“
Pain grillé
? Proust’s madeleine was . . . a piece of toast?”

“Apparently.” She saw my disappointment. “The idea’s the same.”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

But a small light had just gone out. Once again, Proust was proved right. Nothing lasted. Though time could be briefly retrieved in memory, it inevitably passed. And if the instant of insight can change one’s life, another instant can change it back.

At the end of
Du côté de chez Swann
, the narrator tries to retrieve memories of Swann and his wife by returning to the streets where they once lived. But though the buildings and the people look more or less the same, time has changed both them and the older Proust who observes them.

The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment, and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

Oh, well—as Marie-Antoinette might have said, “Let them eat toast.”

Seven

First Catch Your Fungus

The waitress said, “We have a wonderful sandwich of grilled Portabellas with Asiago on country bread dressed with extra virgin olive oil and served with a julienne of jicama and blood orange.”

“What’s a portabella?,” Shirley said to me.

“A big mushroom,” I said.

She looked at the waitress and frowned. “A mushroom sandwich?”

From
Chance
by Robert B. Parker

I
n all my agonizing over the ingredients of my banquet, one emerged as essential. No great dinner could be complete without the unique taste of truffle.

Between 2004 and 2005, I spent a lot of time in Italy, hired by an American company to create the plots, character outlines, general background, and, in time, write some of the screenplay for a TV drama series about that great fourteenth-century outpouring of creativity known as the Renaissance. Though the project was doomed from the start, it was an exhilarating if troubling task. To visit men and women descended from the families that employed Leonardo and Raphael, to handle actual letters written by Lorenzo de’ Medici, to stroll after closing time through the empty galleries of the Pitti Palace, alone with the work of Botticelli and Tiepolo, was worth more than any salary I was paid—when it
was
paid, that is.

I never got used to the modern-day aristocrats who often neither knew of nor cared about their heritage nor preserved it. One couple brought in an expensively bound family history published years before but obviously never opened—except, they discovered to their embarrassment, by their children, who’d used some blank pages to scribble in crayon. Another duke demanded testily, “Why do people make such a fuss about this Machiavelli fellow? He was just a secretary to one of my ancestors.”

Occasionally, good taste and intelligence prevailed. As we left one palazzo, our hostess paused by a glass cabinet filled with tiny figurines and
objets d’art
.

“A few of our family treasures,” she said (as if her entire house didn’t deserve that description). She opened the door of the case and lifted out a fragile object.

“As you enjoy cooking, John, you might find this interesting.”

I recognized a mandoline. Chefs use them to slice vegetables or cheese. A panel of wood or plastic is supported at a forty-five-degree angle on metal struts. As you slide something down the panel, a raised blade cuts uniform slices that fall through a slot to a plate below.

Most mandolines are solid and robust—they need to be—but this one was so tiny it could sit on her open palm. A delicate filigree of metal supported a slide made of some pale, yellowing material that wasn’t wood.

“Silver,” she said, “and ivory. Early nineteenth century.”

“Is it a toy?” asked our producer. “For a doll’s house?”

Meeting my eye, the contessa turned down one corner of her mouth.
How can you work with such people?

“No,” I said, answering for her. “I believe it’s for truffles.”

Few people hold up their end of a cocktail party conversation when the subject turns to fungi. The moment I ask if they prefer French girolles to the larger but, in my opinion, less tasty Romanian variety, they glimpse friends on the other side of the room whom they just
must
talk to.

A Scots traveler named John Lauder, who visited France in 1665, was disgusted by the very idea of eating mushrooms. “It astonished me that the French find them so delicious. They gather them at night in the most sordid and damp places. They cook them in a terrine with butter, vinegar, salt and spices. If you have them grilled, you can imagine you are biting into the tenderest meat. But I was so biased that I couldn’t eat them.”

For years, I agreed. My region of Australia knew only one variety. Large, flat, gray-white on top and pink underneath, they appeared after rain in paddocks where animals had manured the ground. Without being precious about it, I hesitated to throw a lip over anything that could trace its ancestry so directly to cow shit.

If that hadn’t prejudiced me, the standard cooking method would have. Everyone fried them, sliced, in butter. This caused the juices to ooze out in a liquid the color of boiled newsprint. Canned mushrooms looked exactly the same, right down to the monochrome slime, flatteringly described as “butter sauce.” This convinced cooks of my parents’ generation that they’d hit on the perfect recipe. Raised on canned food, they believed that the factory-made project represented the yardstick of perfection. The greatest achievement of a cook was to create something indistinguishable from the same product as canned by Crosse and Blackwell or packaged by Sara Lee. “It’s as good as a bought one,” they said in satisfaction, delighted that their mushy, overcooked spaghetti looked just like the product as canned by Heinz. Traditionally, stewed mushrooms were served with steak. As the horrid gray mixture was ladled on, it mixed in a particularly unpleasant way with the meat juice. This topped my list of culinary Bad Sights until my first encounter with carpetbag steak. For this Aussie favorite, a pocket was cut in a double-thick slice of rump and filled with raw oysters. As you sliced the meat, the oysters dribbled out. I had to wait for the film
Alien
to see anything quite that nasty.

Britain proved no better than Australia at exploring the possibilities of fungi. Though mushrooms flourished in their fields and forests, the British shared John Lauder’s suspicion about anything gathered in damp and sordid places. They solved the problem by creating the button mushroom. Smooth, white, and rubbery, the button is factory farmed—and, unfortunately, near tasteless. But at least you know where it’s been.

Buttons also exist in France, where they’re called, in a snub to the British and others,
champignons de Paris
. Every French kitchen has a few small cans, stored next to similar cans of corn niblets. Add a can of corn and one of mushrooms to a bag of lettuce hearts, toss in a few strips of ham and gruyere, and you have a dinner salad. Mix them with eggs for a quiche. Good on pasta, good on pizza, good in chicken stew. One size fits all.

I much preferred the “wood mushrooms” that appeared in the market for a few weeks each August. Fluted golden girolles; black
trompettes de mort
; the small and pallid
pied bleu
, dead white except for the slightly sinister blue tinge at the foot of the stem; pale, chewy pleurotes, aka oyster mushrooms; and tastiest of all, the fragrant, meaty porcini, or
cèpes
—all shared an air of wildness. Misshapen, speckled with dirt and straw, and even, in the case of
cèpes
, showing signs of nibbling by insects, these uncouth country cousins seemed to mock the well-bred buttons. In letting them into the house, you took your safety in your own hands. No wonder the Spanish called them
la burla de la naturaleza
—nature’s bad joke.