Eating (8 page)

In Paris, we lived in a vast, gloomy apartment at 35 rue de la Faisanderie, off Avenue Foch, looked after by an ancient housekeeper who replied to our infrequent requests,
“J’ vais au cimetière.”
Someone had told us that the Grand Véfour, in the Palais Royal, was the best restaurant in Paris, so almost every day Barbara and I went there for lunch or dinner or both. With American money, everything was cheap, even the best three-star restaurants. On the ship we had drunk La Tâche for five dollars a bottle. The Grand Véfour, which had
opened in 1784 as Café de Chartres, is still the most beautiful dining room in Paris, with its gilt mirrors and red velvet upholstery. The menu was classic: quenelles de brochet, sole Véronique, coulibiac Colette (named for the great writer, who lived in the Palais Royal and took her meals occasionally in the Grand Véfour, but whom we never had the good fortune to see). One day at lunch, we were each offered an ortolan, the tiny bunting that is fattened and roasted to be swallowed whole, a delicacy in southwestern France since before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. These birds were then and may still be an endangered species, and could not be served legally, but we had become regulars, and this illicit treat was the manager’s way of welcoming us.

When we tired of the Grand Véfour, we tried more modest places: Lapérouse, with its
cabinets particuliers,
and Chez Allard, in the Sixth, with its rustic menu. It was there that I first had braised duck with olives, one of the few Parisian dishes of the expiring Escoffier period not covered with béchamel or espagnole in various forms. For years I served my version of this classic dish at home in New York, and occasionally still do.

From Paris we flew to Berlin, which by then had begun to dig itself out of its wartime rubble. Bricks from ruined buildings were piled neatly along the Kurfürstendamm. The cabarets were open all night. But politically Berlin seemed to be digging itself back in, for the Cold War had begun, and Berlin, deep within the Soviet sector, was its central front. The best bookstore
with fine editions of Russian classics was in the Soviet zone, and so was the best restaurant. It served thick soups, black bread, sausages, and fried potatoes in many versions. For years I kept the menu in my desk. In the United States there were no collected editions of our classic writers, an omission which, at the suggestion of Edmund Wilson, I would eventually correct. Some writers whom we met in the American zone who were working for the CIA warned us to avoid the Russian zone. The Cold War ground rules had yet to be clarified, and there was talk of kidnappings. We ignored this advice and returned often for soup and sausages, reluctant to admit that, with the war so recently ended, we were preparing to go at it again. In Berlin, amid our Cold War friends, Korea was no longer an anomaly. War now seemed routine, accompanied by the ideological quarrels in the intellectual journals that I now found it obligatory to read, and which would soon convince me that warfare, both cold and hot, is our normal state, and peace an aberration.

We were happy to leave this bleak city still largely in ruins and drift off to Italy for a few weeks. We had been away too long and were ready to think about going home. I wondered whether I still had a job after my long absence.

We arranged passage on the
Andrea Doria
from Naples. In the Azores, the cheerful little ship became fogbound. We arrived in port a day late. Our waiter, whose glasses had broken during the crossing and hung
lopsided across his Roman nose, explained that because of the delay we had run out of pasta. On deck as we approached our pier, an Italian father was holding his two small sons in his arms, pointing to the Manhattan skyline, and shouting,
“Fantastico, bambini, fantastico.”
Despite the warlike rumblings in Berlin, this was how it seemed to us, too, in the early spring of 1954. In my absence, the paperback series I had launched had gone from triumph to triumph. I was welcomed back, enthusiastically.

Barbara and I were relieved to be back in our Greenwich Village garret, which after our month in Paris seemed to us more than ever like a set from
La Bohème
with its skylight and fireplace, its old brick walls, crooked floor, and window boxes filled with geraniums in spring. We had spent the last three months in hotels and restaurants and other people’s dining rooms. I was eager to cook at home, but not like our favorite Grand Véfour with its Escoffier menu. It was obvious to us that the mood had shifted. In the Paris bookshops, stacks of Samuel Beckett’s plays were piled up everywhere, and there was an existentialist on every street corner. In London, still aching from the war,
The Waste Land
was on everyone’s lips, with intimations of
A Clockwork Orange
just ahead. Inevitably, an “existential” cuisine was not far off. It would take many forms, from the Zen bakeries of San Francisco to the innovations of
la nou-velle cuisine
with its deconstruction of culinary metaphysics. It was in this spirit that I began to reproduce
some of the simpler dishes we had encountered on our trip. Chez Allard’s wonderfully simple braised duck with olives became a favorite.

Nothing is easier than braising a duck and serving it with olives. You will need a heavy nonreactive Dutch oven, preferably porcelain over cast iron, a three-and-a-half-to-four-pound Pekin duck, a little oil for browning the duck, thyme and rosemary for stuffing, assorted vegetables, a half-bottle of Pinot Noir, port, arrowroot to thicken the braising liquid, a little Cognac, and some pitted picholine or similar olives. Dry the duck with paper towels, and with a hair dryer if you happen to have one. Remove the loose fat from neck and tail, prick the skin all over with a fork, and season the inside with salt and pepper, then stuff the duck with a few branches of rosemary and thyme. The skin should be very dry in order to brown evenly. Remove and save the wings. Heat a little oil or rendered duck fat in the Dutch oven, and brown the duck, breast side down at first, then the back and sides. When the duck is nicely browned, lift it from the cocotte, set it aside, and pour off all but a few tablespoons of fat. Toss in the duck neck, wings, and giblets (but not the liver), an onion studded with a few cloves, two medium carrots, chopped, and two stalks of celery, diced, the juice and zest of half a lemon, and two or three bay leaves. Brown the giblets and wings and caramelize the vegetables in the duck fat left in the pot. Then blend a tablespoon of arrowroot or Wondra instant-blending flour into the vegetables to make a roux, and cook
for a minute or so. Heat and add to the pot two cups of rich chicken or duck stock with a cup of port and three cups of Pinot Noir or similar robust red wine. Turn the flame to high and reduce the wines and stock by a third. The liquid should not cover the duck when you return it to the cocotte, breast side down, resting on the wings, which serve as a kind of couch. Add a good pinch of sea salt. Cover the cocotte with plastic wrap, place the lid on top, and braise the duck slowly in a 325-degree oven for about an hour, checking occasionally that the breast isn’t scorched, until the leg meat is firm and the breast runs yellow when pierced. Strain the stock, discard the wings and giblets, and press the vegetables to extract the liquid. Pour the liquid into a clear glass container. Let it cool, and spoon off as much fat as possible. Or use a fat separator with a spout at the bottom and pour off the clear liquid. Better yet, chill the liquid for an hour or so, until the fat congeals enough to be spooned completely away. Reduce the stock to the consistency of light cream. If it’s too thick, thin it with a little chicken or duck stock. If it’s too thin, boil it down more. Add to the stock a handful of pitted picholine or similar green or black pitted olives. Heat a half-cup of cognac, add it to the stock, and flame it. When the duck is cool enough to handle, remove the breast meat with the grain in long, rather thin slices. Remove the legs at the joint and trim them neatly, removing any loose fat. Then arrange the legs with the sliced breast meat nicely on a warm platter. Nap with the warm sauce and olives, and serve. A Lynch-Bages from a good year would be just right, or a fine American Pinot Noir.

Autumn rutabaga—peeled, hacked in chunks, and boiled until tender, then puréed with butter and a little salt in a food processor—would be a perfect accompaniment;or, more elegantly, pass the softened rutabaga through a food mill, then add butter and salt. Grilled Treviso radicchio or endive, a lightly curried cauliflower purée, or turnips in wedges braised in duck fat are also fine accompaniments.

Save the duck fat, which is said to be less harmful than other animal fats. Add a tablespoon of duck fat to a pound of lean chuck to make a poor man’s version of Daniel Boulud’s hamburgers with foie gras.

There are many kinds of ducks, and many ways to prepare them. My favorite is the magret or boned breast of the Moulard, a large duck bred from a Pekin female and a male Muscovy and raised for its fattened liver. Magret de Moulard can be found in high-quality markets or ordered directly from dartagnan.com, which sells magret as a by-product of its foie-gras business.

Each half-breast weighs about a pound and serves two. You will need a cast-iron or heavy steel skillet, and a very sharp knife to score the skin through the fat but not into the meat in the finest cross-hatch you can manage. Lay the breast skin side down in the hot skillet, and reduce the heat so as to render the fat slowly without overcooking the meat, which must be served pink and warm: no more than 125 degrees on an instant-read thermometer, or even less, according to taste. Above all, do not overcook the magret.
Pour off and save the fat as it accumulates: use it to braise a few turnips in three-quarter-inch dice. In about ten minutes, nearly all the duck fat will have been rendered. Then turn the breast over and sear the other side over high heat for a few minutes, until the meat feels firm to the touch. Keep the magret warm under a kitchen towel or in a barely warm oven.

Meanwhile, prepare Colonel Hawker’s Sauce.

Colonel Hawker is said to have been Wellington’s fowling officer in the Peninsula Campaign of 1809. My late dear friend, great editor, wise counselor, and fine cook, Angus Cameron, gave me this recipe years ago, and I have used it often for duck both tame and wild, venison, wild boar, and so on.

Chop three shallots coarsely, and sauté them in a tablespoon of duck fat or butter or a combination of the two. When the shallots have softened, add a tablespoon or so of arrowroot to make a roux, and cook for a minute or two. Add a cup of warm veal and duck demi-glace, which you can also order from D’Artagnan; a tablespoon each of Harvey Sauce and Mushroom Ketchup, nineteenth-century English condiments that you can order from the British Shoppe (1-800-842-6674) or thebritishshoppe.com (or substitute Worcestershire); juice of one lemon; four whole cloves; one teaspoon ground mace; and a half-teaspoon of cayenne. Reduce this slowly to about half its volume, then pour in a glass of good but not great port, and reduce again by half. Strain out the vegetables
and spices, and boil down to thicken slightly if necessary. Cut the duck breast on the bias across the grain about a quarter-inch thick, or more or less as you like, fan it out nicely, and nap with the sauce. Serve with braised or sautéed turnip or puréed celeriac and a mélange of wild mushrooms.

T
he joys no less than the agonies of childhood become the substructures of maturity. I remember long summer excursions a lifetime ago with my cousins to the lobster pound at Pemaquid Point, on the Maine coast, where, in a pine grove on a headland above a pounding sea, at tables of varnished pine, we ate lobster from steaming kettles of seawater; preceded by buckets of soft-shell steamer clams, which we dipped in mugs of clam broth to wash away the sand and then in drawn butter, in which we also dipped our lobster chunks. In winter there were lunches at Locke-Ober in Boston with my father, who referred familiarly to the grand old restaurant, with its dark paneling and gleaming silver, as Frank Locke’s, insider’s lingo of the previous century, and introduced me—I could have been no more than twelve—to the great Washington Street merchants, plump, red-faced, in their gray double-breasted suits,
sipping their scotch and sodas at the other tables. There, in this dining room for men only, our lobster Savannah was served under silver domes by immaculate Irish waiters with thinning white hair and long white aprons who spooned hash-brown potatoes in cream into side dishes. Then around the corner to Summer Street, where at Bailey’s we stood amid the damp furs of Christmas shoppers at the marble counter where other pink-faced men in spotless white aprons topped conical scoops of rich vanilla ice cream in hammered-silver stemware with hot fudge, marshmallow, and pecans, so generously applied as to spill over into the saucer, a Bailey’s tradition.

In a recipe that I contributed to the
New York Times Magazine
a few years ago, I described my surprise when I was preparing to grill a dozen or so lobsters, those companions of my childhood, in my Sag Harbor kitchen. This meant killing them first by plunging a stiff boning knife into the shell just behind the eyes, drawing the knife forward to split the head, and then reversing the blade to bisect the entire creature from head to tail. I had piled the lobsters on a counter next to the sink and, with no more consideration for their feelings than if I were opening an oyster or peeling a potato, reached for the first victim and split it in two. To my surprise, the other lobsters raised their claws in horror at what I had done and scuttled en masse backward. Some fell to the floor, others into the sink. I was faced with a dilemma, for it was plain that lobsters were not at all unfeeling like the
potato, but kindred souls who dreaded violent death as much as you or I do.

I wish I could say that I snipped the rubber bands from the claws of the survivors, took them down to the bay, and let them go. Instead, I gathered them up and killed each one out of sight of the others. It was late. Guests were on their way, including my neighbor Craig Claiborne, the
New York Times
food writer, whom I had invited to try my new lobster recipe, and I had nothing else on hand except a shoulder of lamb, and no time to marinate and braise it. Moreover, to spare a lobster by eating a lamb was morally absurd. Though I offered this argument in my article, readers were offended and accused me of being as cold-blooded as the lobster itself. Nevertheless, my moral logic is correct—killing a lobster is no more brutal than eating a lamb killed by someone else. We are omnivorous: facing starvation, as our remote ancestors must have done much of the time, we will eat almost anything, including one another. In times of famine we still do. According to the anthropologist Marvin Harris, citing Cortés’s diarist, Bernal Diaz, the protein-starved Aztecs fattened their captives in cages and delivered them to priests to be butchered. Atop a pyramid, the priest removed the living heart while his assistants threw the arms and legs to the bottom, where they were boiled and served with
moli
sauce. Cortés himself witnessed an Aztec man eating a cooked baby for breakfast. Harris, who, like Freud, believes that our strongest taboos reflect our greatest
temptations—we do not taboo putting our hand in the fire—conjectures that we taboo cannibalism not from high-mindedness but lest we be eaten ourselves. My friend Patrick O’Connell, the great chef/proprietor of the Inn at Little Washington, agrees. When I suggested some years ago that cooking for others is a gratuitous act of generosity, he said no: we feed others so that they won’t eat us.