Secret Ingredients (59 page)

SMALL PLATES

“May I suggest, sir, that you brace yourself for a disappointment.”

BOCK

WILLIAM SHAWN

S
hortly, now, pictures of goats will be hung up in the drinking places and bock beer will make its traditional spring appearance for the first time in fourteen years. It used to be a common saying that bock and the circus arrived together, but the circus doesn’t come until April 6 or thereabouts this year and the date for bock is March 25. The brewers have an agreement not to release it earlier than that, and if you get any before then somebody is fudging. As in the old days, they’ve calculated to brew just enough to last two weeks. And as in the old days, the custom is being kept up for sentimental reasons, to stimulate business at a slack time, and to give the drinkers something to talk about. Originally, bock was logical, though. That was in the old, old days. Before modern refrigeration, beer couldn’t be brewed in the summer, so the first appearance of the winter’s brew, usually some time in May, was always celebrated in Germany with beer festivals, and bock was the choice and special brew made for the occasion. It was and is a lager of extra strength which has been aged longer and which is richer in malt extract and hence darker than light beer but lighter than dark. The bock these days could be put out any time the brewers agreed upon, but they’ve set upon March 25.

Practically everybody knows that
Bock
means “goat” in German, but nobody seems to know how the brew got the name of bock. There are many legends. One is that two rival German brewers agreed to drink it out one night to see whose beer was the stronger. After several hours, one of them had to go out for a breath of air, and got bowled over by a goat. The brewer inside saw him fall and yelled “I win!” The other explained that it was a goat, and the name stuck. Another is that at the ancient beer festivals, there was a ritual which required that the guests be butted in the leathern breeches as they stood up to toast their host. Mr. Mülhäuser,
Braumeister
at Ruppert’s, thinks the name is derived from
Einbeck,
or
Ainpock,
which was a famous brew of the eleventh century, and which was emulated in the sixteenth century by Duke William V of Bavaria when he started a
Brauhaus
for his own ducal beer. Mr. Mülhäuser thinks the name started then.

The old-time posters used to get pretty fanciful about their goats. They were pictured as drinking, dancing, walking arm-in-arm, and drawing a wagon made from a beer keg, surmounted by a lovely lady. Of the new posters, we are told that Trommer’s will probably be most like the old ones. It’s going to be done in four colors, showing a gnome on a goat which is hurdling a keg. Piel’s will have a gnome, too, riding a bucking goat and holding up a stein. Schaefer’s—who, by the way, claim an American bock-making record of ninety-two years, except for the prohibition interlude—will have just the head of a goat, smiling. The brewers are a little worried over the state ruling that their names, strictly, can’t appear on their posters when they’re displayed in places that serve hard liquor as well as beer, but some of them will probably take a chance.

1934

“More, please. Americans overeat, and, by God, I'm an American!”

DIAT

GEOFFREY T. HELLMAN

I
n an article on a visit we made to the Ritz a few weeks ago, we noted that Louis Diat, the head chef, was so wrought up about the forthcoming demise of that institution that Mr. Stack, its president, counseled us not to disturb him. Among other things, we wanted to ask him about the invention of vichyssoise, of which, as we mentioned, he was the originator. We let the matter slide until the other day, and then phoned Mr. Stack to see how the land lay. He told us to come on over and take a chance. This we did, and in a small office near the kitchen we found the celebrated chef, a mustached man of sixty-five with curly gray hair and large, black, bushy eyebrows, seated at an old roll-top desk. He received us cordially enough, but he was unmistakably downcast. We brought up vichyssoise at once, and he told us about its birth. “In the summer of 1917, when I had been at the Ritz seven years,” he said, “I reflected upon the potato-and-leek soup of my childhood, which my mother and grandmother used to make. I recalled how, during the summer, my older brother and I used to cool it off by pouring in cold milk, and how delicious it was. I resolved to make something of the sort for the patrons of the Ritz.” Diat worked out a soup involving a potato-and-leek purée strained twice to make it extra smooth, heavy cream, and, on the surface, a sprinkling of finely chopped chives. He named it
crème vichyssoise glacée,
after Vichy, then famous only as a spa, which is not far from his home town, Montmarault. Charles M. Schwab, dining in the Ritz Roof Garden, ordered it the first day it was on the menu, and asked for a second helping. Diat put it on the menu every evening that summer, and every summer thereafter. He took it off during the cold weather, but the hotel got so many requests for it in all temperatures, and at lunch as well as dinner, that in 1923 he put it on a year-round lunch-and-dinner basis, where it has remained ever since. “Mrs. Sara Delano Roosevelt, the President’s mother, who had had it here, once called me up at five in the afternoon and asked me to send eight portions to her house,” Mr. Diat told us. “I sent her two quarts and gave her the recipe, which I have since published in
Cooking à la Ritz.
” Diat has also written
French Cooking for Americans
and has just finished a third book,
Sauces: French and Famous.
The Ritz printed its menus in French until 1930, when the Hotel Association of New York City, of which it is a member, suggested that its restaurant business, then suffering from the depression, might pick up if it switched to English. It switched, and Mr. Diat’s soup, in its fourteenth year, became “cream vichyssoise glacée,” a kind of compromise.

Vichyssoise is only one of several hundred dishes Diat has originated. These include Chicken Gloria Swanson (sautéed chicken cooked in white wine and cream, served with creamed mushrooms and sliced cooked tomatoes, and garnished with rice and truffles); Breast of Guinea Hen Jefferson (guinea hen with ham, creamed tomatoes,
beignets
of wild rice, and a whiskey sauce); Lobster Albert (stuffed lobster gratiné, with mushrooms and a sauce half American, half
bonne femme
); Lobster Washington (like Newburg, but cooked with whiskey instead of sherry); Fillet of Sole Lincoln (cooked with oysters, shrimps, and sauce
bonne femme
); Pears Mary Garden (stewed pears with raspberry ice and raspberry sauce); Pears Geraldine Farrar (ditto with orange ice and apricot sauce); and Coeur Flottant Grace Moore (a vanilla-and-chocolate-mousse concoction). “I named the guinea-hen dish, which includes tomatoes, after Jefferson because around the end of the eighteenth century, when Americans still thought tomatoes were poison, Jefferson, who had eaten them in France, recommended them, and they were then adopted here,” Mr. Diat said. “New desserts I generally named after our lady customers—the way to pay tribute to a lady is to make a special sweet for her. Lobster Albert I named after Albert Keller, the late president of the Ritz. Mr. Keller treated me like a brother. Of the eighty men on my kitchen staff, he knew fifty by name. When we buried him, eleven years ago, I said to myself, ‘We are burying the Ritz.’”

Mr. Diat, whose father owned a shoe store, owes a great deal more than vichyssoise to his mother and grandmother—such as the correct way to prepare onion soup and potatoes
paysanne.
At the age of eight, he was getting up early to make soup before starting off to school. From his mother, he learned how to cook tarts, and from his grandmother how to broil chicken over charcoal, slowly. “They are very particular in the country in France,” he said. At fourteen, he was apprenticed to the chef of a pastry shop in Moulins, near Vichy. At eighteen, after tours of duty at the Hotels Bristol and du Rhin, in Paris, he became
chef potager
at the Paris Ritz. At twenty-one, he became assistant to the head sauce cook of the London Ritz. He has been chef of the Carlton House since the day it opened, October 23, 1910, and of the Ritz since the day
it
opened, seven and a half weeks later. Until six months ago, when his doctor told him to take it easy, he worked fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and spent seven or eight hours at the hotel on Sunday, his day off. From 1916 to 1929, he lived in New Rochelle, with his wife and daughter, and in that period he used to come in on Sunday morning, return home for lunch, and then make another trip to the city, so that he would be on the job at dinnertime. From 1929 until last January, his home was on Central Park West, and commuting was out, but now he’s back in an apartment in Hartsdale, with his wife. His daughter some years ago married George J. Lawrence, a junior officer of the Bowery Savings Bank. Currently, Mr. Diat gets the 7:27 out of Hartsdale every weekday morning, and arrives at his office about 8:15. He then spends an hour and a half on the telephone, placing orders for supplies with a dozen or more food dealers, and the rest of the morning touring the kitchen, giving his assistants an occasional word of advice or a helping hand, conferring with the banquet manager and the headwaiters, and correcting the proofs of the next day’s menus. Afternoons, he mostly sticks to his desk and writes. He has assembled eighty pages of notes on the Paris, London, and New York Ritzes for a projected article or book; he hasn’t decided which it will be. He has a brother seventeen years his junior, who is chef of the Hotel Plaza-Athénée, in Paris. His older brother, Jules, the one with whom he cooled his mother’s and grandmother’s potato soup, is dead. Jules, who was a teacher, had a son who was active in the French underground and died at Belsen. “My nephew was a very good
saucier,
” Mr. Diat told us. “He was
chef saucier
of the French Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. The Boches killed him. He was a lovely fellow.”

A waiter came in with Mr. Diat’s lunch—lamb, rice, cauliflower, cottage cheese, stewed peaches—and he advised us that his eating habits, apart from tasting new dishes of his invention, are simple and have always been: a roll and a cup of coffee for breakfast; lunch about as we saw it; clear soup, green salad, and compote of fruit for dinner. We rose to go, and he put a hand on our arm. “I am not of the school of Escoffier,” he said, “but of the schools of M. Jules Tissier, of the Bristol, in Paris; of M. Georges Gimon, of the Paris Ritz; and of M. Emile Malley, of the London Ritz. I remember the day I came to America. It was October 8, 1910. There was a nice blue sky. Everything was so nice that I applied for citizenship the first week of November. But today! When we lost Mr. Keller, and then Robert Walton Goelet, we lost the Ritz. I will compare a hotel with a man. A man is in the prime of life, in full vigor, at forty. So is a hotel, or should be. You know, if I am heartbroken today, it is because everything has gone wrong. I explained my grief to the Honorable William Waldorf Astor—he came to my office to see me when he was over here from England and looked into the Astor Estate’s disposition of the Ritz—and he was so upset he almost fell out of his chair. I have been invited to go to the new Carlton House as supervising chef, but I don’t know. I will go away for at least six months, either to California or to France, to forget about the Ritz. I don’t want to be in New York when they break this place up. When Queen Marie of Romania came here for a supper party in the Oval Room, she said, ‘Oh, it is like my palace!’”

1950

“What wine goes best with vodka?”