The Perfect Meal (13 page)

Despite Vatel’s death, the banquets of Friday and Saturday went ahead and were a great success. As the king and his friends caroused, servants quietly buried Vatel on the estate. Louis apparently knew nothing of Vatel’s death until after the dinner. By then, he’d decided to give his cousin another chance.

But this brought “Monsieur le Prince” no enduring good fortune. As Condé had no legitimate children, on his death the title passed to another branch of the family. In the Revolution, mobs destroyed the great château at Chantilly. The Condés had already sold their Paris estates, and in 1790 his townhouse was demolished and the splendid garden cleared to make way for a theater. New streets appeared, including one leading from the Seine to the square in front of the theater. Called rue de l’Odéon, it was the first in Paris to have a sidewalk.

It’s also the street on which we live.

On either side, streets called rue de Condé and rue Monsieur le Prince remind us that this was once the property of Le Grand Condé.

But what about Vatel? Well, he, too, has a monument—of sorts.

On rue Lobineau, a few minutes’ walk from our front door, stands the tiniest restaurant in Paris. It seats a dozen people only. The menu is simple. So is the wine list. It takes no reservations, accepts no credit cards. It is the very model of the modest Paris eating place. It’s called Le Petit Vatel—The Little Vatel.

Ten

First Catch Your Rascasse

Last night we had a bouillabaisse which I couldn’t touch because of the terror in its preparation. The secret is to throw live sea creatures into a boiling pot. And we saw a lobster who, while turning red in his death, reached out a claw to snatch and gobble a dying crab. Thus in this hot stew of the near-dead and burning, one expiring fish swallows another expiring fish while the cook sprinkles saffron onto the squirming.

Ned Rorem,
The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem

A
sk any lovers of Italian food about their favourite movie scene, and at least half of them will quote the moment in
The Godfather
when fat Clemenza gives Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone his recipe for spaghetti sauce. Some can even repeat it from memory, and in the grating accents of actor Richard Castellano too.

Heh, come over here, kid, learn something. You never know, you might have to cook for twenty guys someday. You see, you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it, ya make sure it doesn’t stick. You get it to a boil. You shove in all your sausage and your meatballs, heh? . . . And a little bit o’ wine. An’ a little bit o’ sugar, and that’s my trick.

Some dishes lend themselves to feeding a crowd. Spaghetti with meat sauce is one of them.

Another is bouillabaisse.

Would bouillabaisse suit my banquet? Few fish dishes were as classic, as dramatic, yet as neglected by modern chefs. At the very least, it deserved an audition.

I
can remember the moment I began to brood about bouillabaisse.

It was 1970; my first winter in Europe. My companion, Angela, and I had just survived the thirty-day sea voyage from Australia and were living in a village in the east of England. She had become a substitute teacher in the local school system, and I was working on a book.

Looking out through the misted kitchen window of our cottage, across the barren fields, clammy with fog, and listening to the
caw-caw
of crows roosting on the bare branches of the elm trees, all dead of the parasite known as Dutch elm disease, I understood why the collective noun for a gathering of these grim black birds was a
murder
. A flock of sheep. A school of fish. A murder of crows. Yes, it really fitted my mood.

Why had I ever left the sunny south? I needed something to remind me of warmer places. A mango, perhaps, or a papaya. But could either be found within fifty miles? Certainly not in our village shop, where any fruit more exotic than an apple existed only in a can.

Later that week, our luck appeared to change. We were invited to dine with a local painter and his wife.

“I cooked a favorite of ours,” said our hostess. “Bouillabaisse.”

Bouillabaisse! I’d never eaten it, but the name alone was enough. The most vivid of Mediterranean seafood dishes—shrimp, crab, lobster, in a rich fish stew flavored with tomato and olive oil, colored with saffron, perfumed with garlic, pepper, and laurel. The writer Alfred Capus defined it perfectly: “Bouillabaisse is fish plus sun.”

My elation survived until our hostess plunked down a tureen of gray-white soup. Pallid lumps jutted above the surface like torpedoed ships poised over a watery grave. My face betrayed my dismay.

“It’s
North Sea
Bouillabaisse, of course,” she said. “My mother’s recipe, actually. From the war, when you could get only local white fish.”

Apparently the Nazis had blocked all imports of garlic, bay leaves, and tomatoes as well, since only leeks and potatoes accompanied the slabs of what I recognized as dogfish, optimistically rechristened “rock salmon.” As a treat, I was given the head. Depositing this ghastly object on my plate, the host said jovially, “Good eating there.” As it glared up at me, I understood the real meaning of the expression “to give someone the fish eye.”

Puttering back home in our unheated Volkswagen Beetle, I asked Angela, “Do you suppose we could manage a holiday sometime?”

“To where?”

I looked out at the dark woods, rimed with frost. “Somewhere warm.”

She frowned. “Maybe . . . in the school vacation . . . if someone shared expenses . . .”

Which is how, a couple of months later, our Beetle came bumping down the car ferry ramp at Calais, headed for the Riviera. In the backseat, providing the extra money that made the trip possible, was Cyril.

Cyrils in England are as plentiful as gray squirrels. They may even be the dominant male type. Many, like ours, were teachers. He taught in the same school as Angela and lived in the next village, in a cottage he shared for years with his mother, who had just died. Balding, short, and expressionless, he wore the Cyril Uniform: fisherman’s sweater, brown corduroy trousers, suede desert boots. For formal occasions, he added a tweed jacket, elbows leather-reinforced.

Cyril and I distrusted each other on sight. That I was an arrogant Australian and he a snobbish Englishman was reason enough, but he also fancied Angela and couldn’t imagine what she saw in me. As Jane Austen wrote in
Pride and Prejudice
, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” and Cyril made no secret of the fact that with his mother gone and the cottage empty, he had marriage in mind. He assessed every eligible woman as a potential partner, but with so little finesse that most reacted like antelopes in a wildlife documentary when they sense a leopard on the prowl. Cyril wasn’t discouraged. If anything, rejection made him only more determined.

He kept this up even as we drove across France, but he met his match in Arles. On the Sunday we arrived, local craftspeople had spread their creations on the ground around a small square with a central fountain. Among them, an uncombed but pretty young woman in worn jeans and a tatty sweater sat on a blanket with some pieces of handmade jewelry arranged around her bare feet.

Cyril strolled by, came back for a closer look, then cautiously approached and squatted down, supposedly to examine her trinkets but actually to admire her close-to. As he did so, she met his eyes and, without changing her expression, bared her teeth and growled softly, like a Doberman ready to go for his throat. Cyril recoiled, over-balanced, and sat down hard. After that, a French wife was crossed off his shopping list.

We reached the Mediterranean near the port of Sète, where we’d rented a tiny house in the village of Bouzigues. It was my introduction to La France Profonde—Deep France. Few tourists came here. The locals farmed oysters and mussels and produced a vinegary rosé that telegraphed its unpopularity by being available only in half bottles.

Each morning, at least one housewife walked down our street carrying a large thick casserole dish.

“Cassoulet,” Cyril explained when I commented on this. “They take it to the baker while the bread oven is still hot. He lets them leave it there all day. The slow cooking gives the perfect blend of flavors.”

Even imparting such harmless information, he managed to suggest I was an idiot. I didn’t make it worse by confessing I had no idea what he was talking about, never, as far as I knew anyway, having eaten cassoulet or even seen it.

A split was inevitable. When it came, the cause was food. To save money, we’d agreed to eat at home as much as possible. And since neither Cyril nor Angela liked to cook, the job fell to me. I used fresh local produce, in particular the meaty mussels, which I cooked
marinière
, with white wine. But when I suggested this for dinner one night, Cyril balked.

“Can’t we have something else?”

“What’s wrong with mussels?”

“I just don’t like them.”

Nor, it seemed, anything else I cooked.

The dining table became an armed camp, with me preparing the meals for Angela and myself while Cyril made his own. As we explored the local specialties, he stuck to English comfort food: white bread, mashed potatoes, and sausages, with liberal quantities of ketchup.

Angela and I broke into our cash reserves to try cassoulet at the local restaurant. At last I understood what Cyril had explained to me. He was right about the slow cooking. This traditional dish of white haricots with salt pork, Toulouse sausage, and preserved duck—the origin, it’s said, of Boston baked beans—needed hours of slow baking to blend its flavors and create the unctuous sauce. It would never taste better to me than on that first encounter.

In the hope of repairing the rift between Cyril and me, Angela brought the three of us together for a final dinner in Sète before we headed back to England. On our last Sunday, we drove into town, following the wide canals along which the fishing boats carried their catch to sell at the quayside.

Despite heavy American bombing during World War II, Sète retained the charm celebrated by its two most famous sons, the poet Paul Valéry and singer-songwriter Georges Brassens. That afternoon, we paid our respects to both.

Valéry is buried in the marine cemetery, a forest of white tombs spreading down a hillside to the Mediterranean. Imagining himself spending eternity in the presence of all this sea and sky, he had felt both subdued and elated.

Beautiful sky, true sky, look how I’ve been changed.

After so much pride, after so much strange

Idleness, now full of strength,

I abandon myself to this brilliant space.

The graves of Valéry and Brassens could hardly be more different. While Valéry has the ocean, Brassens is buried, as he wished, in the “poor” section, without a view but instead in a grave shaded by pines, and more easily found by those who loved his music. His hopes for the afterlife have a refreshing simplicity. He put one of them into a song.

And when, using my grave as a pillow,

A beach girl lies on me, taking a nap

In a swimsuit that’s barely there,

I ask Christ in advance for forgiveness

If the shadow of my cross creeps over her.

For a spot of posthumous bliss.

After our visits, we walked along the stone-edged harbor, where fishing boats docked to unload. I’d never seen so many restaurants in the same place—all, of course, advertising “
le vrai Bouillabaisse
.”

Mediterranean fishermen invented bouillabaisse to use up the spiky, bony, ugly fish left over after the more glamorous stuff had been sold. In Provençal,
bouiabaisso
or
bolhabaissa
means “boil on a low heat,” emphasizing that the secret of any fish dish is not to cook it too long. The first cooks to develop the dish, sometime in the nineteenth century in the fishing ports along the Mediterranean, had some Italian or Greek blood, They sautéed onions, garlic, tomatoes, and celery with lots of olive oil, added a few liters of white wine, brought it to a rolling boil, then tossed in shrimp, crab, and lobster with plenty of saffron to give color and body to the soup. Once the soup had attained a silky consistency and a golden sheen, they threw in the fish, including heads, and let it simmer for a few minutes on low heat.