Eating (5 page)

I was intrigued by this assignment, and as I wondered
how to approach it, I remembered that the late food writer M. F. K. Fisher had in her twenties written bravely about food during a similarly grim period, midway through the 1930s in Europe, when the so-called civilized world was working itself up once again into a paroxysm of self-destruction and she was caught in the gathering chaos. So I thought it might interest readers of the
Times
on the first anniversary of 9/11 to learn how Fisher confronted her own world as it prepared to destroy itself. The volume called
The Gastronomical Me,
in which she collected her culinary reminiscences during these years, is preceded by this little prayer borrowed from a man named J. T. Pettee: “Pray for peace and grace and spiritual food, for wisdom and guidance, for all these are good, but don’t forget the potatoes.”

In 1936, Fisher was living in Dijon. She had tired of her professor husband and dreaded the prospect of afternoons back in the United States in a brown satin dress nibbling marshmallow salad with other faculty wives. She had, moreover, fallen head over heels in love with a man named Dillwyn Parrish, an American writer and artist. In her book she discreetly calls him Chexbres, Basque for “goat,” revealing his actual identity only much later, in a memoir toward the end of her life. From Dijon they came to earth in Vevey, where they rebuilt an old farmhouse, from whose terrace they had a clear view across Lake Geneva to the mountains. But “when the terrace was too cool or breezy we set a long
French table in front of the open French windows and if the Lake seemed too wide and the Alps too high we could look into the great mirror opposite and make them more remote, less questioning of us.” This is the essential Fisher, for whom the Alps must accommodate her when she and her lover sit down to lunch.

Their house had red tile floors, gardens, and good food. “In the summer there were always a lot of people: Vevey was on the road to almost any place in Europe and Le Paquis was such a pleasant little stop,” she wrote, referring to their house. “Sometimes there were complications, political, national, religious, even racial but in general we managed to segregate the more violent prejudices. Once Chexbres had taken three socialists who were on their way to join the Spanish Loyalists to Cully for filet of perch while I served supper at Le Paquis to several charming but rabid Fascists from Rome, one of them a priest and all of them convinced that Communists were their personal as well as national enemies.”

But it is not the twittering fascists who hold the reader’s attention: it is the unseen Loyalist volunteers eating perch with Chexbres on their way to fight and perhaps be killed by fascists in Spain, a prospect that Fisher leaves to the reader’s imagination. Earlier in that terrible year of Depression and war, she, her mother, and Chexbres had returned to Europe on the German vessel
Hansa,
“a tidy, plump little ship.” “There was something comfortable about her, and at the same time subtly coarse and vulgar,” an ugliness that was “part of
what is happening now in the world … while men stunt their souls,” Fisher wrote presciently in 1937, when few could yet grasp the unspeakable ugliness to come even as the men stood up in the ship’s dining room “and lifted their glasses to the picture of Hitler at one end of the room.” At night in her “clean and cozy” stateroom with “light shining on the cherry-satin feather-puff and the gleaming sheets,” she would lock the door against evil and “the sickness and terror of the
Hansa’s
homeland.” She wrote, “There was always a little silver tray in my cabin at night: thin sandwiches of rare beef, a pepper mill, a tiny bottle of cold champagne.” In the morning, she would meet Chexbres for a twelve o’clock beer in the bar, and so they fell in love.

The most poignant of Fisher’s memories of this period begins with sentences worthy of Isak Dinesen which could not have been written better by Hemingway that year. “There was a train, not a particularly good one, that stopped at Vevey about ten in the morning on the way to Italy. Chexbres and I used to take it to Milano. It had a restaurant car, an old-fashioned one with the agreeable austerity of a third-class station café about it: brown wooden walls and seats, bare tables unless you ordered the highest-priced lunch, and a few faded advertisements for Aspirina Bayer and
‘Visitez le Maroc’
permanently crooked above the windows. There was one table, next to the galley, where the cooks and waiters sat. In the morning they would be talking and sorting greens for salad and cutting the tops off radishes.”

It is the summer of 1939. Everyone knows that war is now inevitable. Chexbres had been gassed in the 1914 war and is dying. A leg has been amputated. Soon the other will have to go, Fisher coolly, lovingly reports. They have returned to Vevey for the last time and are now on their way to Milano. The waiters in the restaurant car, the old one with the patched jacket and the young one who had been trimming radishes, had grown fond of Fisher and her lover on previous trips. They try to hide their dismay at Chexbres’s condition, but their solicitude betrays them as they hustle him and Fisher into the restaurant car early to spare them the company of the “Strength-through-Joyers”—coarse German tourists—who have squeezed into their compartment. When lunch is over, and the train is stopped at the border much longer than usual, the waiters invent pretexts to keep them at the table lest they discover the reason for the delay. A prisoner who had been taken aboard in chains that morning and led past their table in the restaurant car by two fascist agents has committed suicide by smashing the vestibule glass at the far end of the restaurant car and slitting his throat on the broken pane. The lovers know nothing of this, but when the train moves on into Italy at last, and they return to their compartment, they notice the broken pane and a dampness on the vestibule floor that had not been there before and they remember the man in chains being taken back to Italy.

That winter, their lives “had ended … with Chexbres’
illness. And when we got word that we should go back to our old home in Switzerland and save what we could …we went, not so much for salvage, because possessions had no meaning any more to us, but because we were helpless to do anything else. We returned to the life that had been so real like fog, or smoke, caught in a current of air. We were very live ghosts, and drank and ate and saw and felt and made love better than ever before, with an intensity that seemed to detach us utterly from life.”

By “life” she meant the life around them, for people “that summer, were laughing and singing and drinking wine in a kind of catalepsy, or like cancerous patients made happy with a magic combination of opiate before going into the operating theatre. We had finished with all that business, and they had it still to go through.”

When I wrote about Fisher for the
Times,
its food page consisted of several introductory paragraphs and a few recipes, conventionally formatted. Had Fisher described some of the meals that she and Chexbres enjoyed, I would have tried to reconstruct them for the
Times
’s readers, but she didn’t. Instead, I described the first lunch I managed to put together after 9/11, when, after two weeks confined to the wounded city with the smell of fire and death still clinging to our neighborhood, a mile or so north of where the Twin Towers had stood, it was time to drive out to Sag Harbor. I did so in low spirits, for the United States had been hurt and the new
administration was untried. Judy, a foreign correspondent with years of experience in the Middle East, knew at once that the attack was the work of Islamic terrorists linked to those who had tried unsuccessfully to destroy the Towers eight years previously. The media were comparing the new attack to Pearl Harbor. But this seemed wrong. Japan had been a powerful nation. For FDR in 1941, war was the only possible response. But Osama bin Laden, who had by now emerged as the likely mastermind, was a gangster, a fanatic with religious pretensions, as Judy, who had been the first journalist to write about him at length, had written in the
Times.
As I drove out to Long Island that day, I wondered whether the shoot-from-the-hip Texan in the White House who had failed to anticipate the World Trade Center disaster—which, in retrospect, should have been foreseen—would be competent to prevent further attacks.

The Twin Towers had formed the backdrop to the cityscape that I see from my terrace, and though I found them intrusive and ugly as architecture, on foggy nights they glowed pleasantly, like candles through the mist. On that awful late-summer morning, under clear skies, I watched them burn, and for days we wore gauze masks when we went out. Those who could, left town. When I paid my weekly visit a few days later to Russ & Daughters, the century-old appetizer shop on Houston Street, I had to pass through a police checkpoint on my way home, where the officers, respectful of my age, did not bother to inspect my package of smoked salmon and
herring. Instead, they offered to carry my bundle. The attack had rattled our confidence but made us a community. The streets were nearly empty that week and the next, except for police and street cleaners and heavy trucks rumbling north with debris. Our firehouse on Lafayette Street was banked with flowers and photographs of the men who had died, men whom I recognized and whose job had been to save our lives. I assumed that Bin Laden and his gang would be quickly captured. It never entered my mind that a year later he would still be at large while the United States would be at war with Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attack.

In Sag Harbor, near the eastern end of Long Island, a hundred miles or so from lower Manhattan, the Atlantic breeze was, as always after the long drive from the city, crisp and clean and exciting to breathe. I hadn’t cooked since the eleventh and looked forward to feeding some friends who were coming down from Connecticut to stay with us for the weekend. So, before we turned off the highway toward Sag Harbor, I stopped at the Seafood Shop in the village of Wainscott to see what I could find for their lunch. What I found were some fillets of striped bass caught that morning, oysters from Fishers Island, and a bunch of cilantro. I also bought a two-pound lobster, a dozen hot-dog rolls—top-sliced, not side-sliced—and celery. Whatever else I needed was at home. Then we drove over to the airport to await our friends.

I opened two dozen oysters and served them with a half-glass of malt vinegar to which I added some chopped shallot and cracked black pepper. I also shucked another dozen oysters and dredged them in fine cornstarch mixed with a little Wondra flour, shook off the excess, and fried them in olive oil for no more than two minutes, until they were crisp and light brown, then served them on oyster shells into which I had spooned a dab of homemade mayonnaise thinned with lemon juice, a hint of hot sauce, and a sprinkling of minced chives from the garden.

I also made a warm salad. I discarded the skin from a pound and a half of wild (not farmed) striped-bass fillet, cut the fish into one-inch cubes, removing the few small bones that remained, and dropped the cubed bass into a four-quart pot of gently boiling salted water, to which I had added a cup of white wine and half a lemon. I poached the fish just long enough so that I could break the cubes apart with a fork to the consistency of lump crabmeat. Timing here is crucial: Bass dries out quickly in poaching liquid. On the other hand, the bass has to be cooked through. So be careful. After about four or five minutes, I tested the bass with a small knife, and it was ready. I drained the cubes, dropped them into a colander, and broke them up. A few pieces were raw at the center, and I returned them to the pot for another minute. With the fish still warm in the colander, I napped it lightly with extra-virgin olive oil, lemon juice,
and sea salt, and turned it all gently with a wooden spoon while continuing to let it drain. Then I tossed the warm bass with its dressing in a bowl with a good handful of chopped cilantro and tasted it for balance, adding whatever seemed necessary. I served this at once with a few Niçoise olives and a Pouilly-Fumé. Check the salad for salt before you serve it, taking care not to add too much. You might serve the salad with a few trimmed and quartered hearts of romaine, tossed in extra-virgin oil and showered with fresh-ground black pepper.

I had already poached and chilled the two-pound lobster and removed the meat from the tail and claws, which I cut into roughly half-inch cubes. I mixed it with Hellmann’s mayonnaise for the authentic Maine-coast lobster-shack taste, and two stalks of celery chopped not too fine so as to lose its crunch and sweetness but not so large as to distract from the lobster meat. Then I covered the bowl and left it in the refrigerator to chill.

After I had served the warm bass salad and removed the yellow plates with the blue fleur-de-lis that my son, Jacob, and his wife, Susie, had sent from California, I melted two tablespoons or so of butter in an iron skillet large enough to hold four top-sliced hot-dog rolls. When the butter stopped bubbling, I added the rolls and cooked them until they had browned slightly—barely a minute on each side—being careful not to let them burn in the hot butter. Then, holding each hot roll in a kitchen towel with one hand and a pair of tongs in the other, I piled the chilled salad into the
hot rolls almost to overflowing, sprinkling the tops with a pinch of paprika. Lobster rolls have lately become popular in New York restaurants, but they are not always successful. Too often the meat is cut or even ground into small dice or shreds, resulting in a watery, flavorless salad served at room temperature or, in one egregious case, served warm, whereas the classic preparation calls for substantial, slightly chilled chunks, too large to leak and become watery, contrasting with the warm roll, whose toasted sweetness combines wonderfully with the different sweetness of the chilled lobster in its Hellmann’s dressing.