The Perfect Meal (2 page)

“I know what you mean,” I said. “With that décor, you expect something . . . imperial.”

A vision rose of a meal appropriate to such architecture. It was straight out of a Hollywood epic such as
Ben-Hur
or
Gladiator
. Dressed in togas, we and the other customers reclined on couches, nibbling bunches of grapes. Lightly dressed concubines danced among us. And in the background, a team of sweating slaves turned a spit on which roasted an entire ox.

But who cooked on that scale anymore? What had happened to the robust country dishes of fifty years ago, before the advent of nouvelle cuisine and food designed not to satisfy hunger but to show off the imagination of the chef? Did they still exist? Or were they, as I suspected, lost forever, the secret of their making having died with the last country chef who still remembered the recipe handed down to him or her through generations. Even if someone still knew how to prepare them, where would they find the ingredients? Modern markets stocked only what they could pile high and sell fast.

Specifically, did anyone still really roast an ox?

Two

First Catch Your Menu

In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.

Julia Child

A
nglo-Saxon countries accept that fantasies conceived over dinner evaporate before the next morning’s coffee, passing, like New Year’s resolutions, from the world of What If to that of If Only.

Fortunately, the French keep a little ajar the door into that universe of tantalizing alternatives. They speak of actions being
envisagées
—not ruled out, not impossible, perhaps not likely to happen in the immediate future, but contemplated; envisaged.

Then there’s
l’esprit d’escalier
—“the inspiration of the staircase.” These are the thoughts that occur as you descend the stairs after a dinner party; the riposte that would have reduced a bore to incoherence; the compliment that, had you thought of it at the time, would have caused your partner to slip you her phone number under the table. Rather than waste such fertile second thoughts, French literature invented the
pensée
, strictly speaking a collection of thoughts, aphorisms, anecdotes, and reflections, but actually a means of putting on paper all those zingers that would otherwise have faded into the air.

All the same, my idea of a fabulous banquet, like any product of late-night indigestion and the gleam of the moon on the Seine, might have dissipated in the same way, except for a report in the next day’s issue of
Le Monde
. The intergovernmental committee of UNESCO had declared the formal French dinner, or
repas
, an element of humanity’s “intangible cultural heritage.”

Two years before, President Nicolas Sarkozy had announced at an agricultural fair that French cuisine was the best in the world and should be acknowledged as such. It’s the kind of thing politicians say to placate a powerful lobby, and in France few carry more weight than agribusiness.

But apparently the European Institute of History and Culture of Food, a uniquely French institution (try to conceive an American version), had been busy lobbying behind the scenes. Meeting in Nairobi, a twenty-four-member panel from UNESCO considered forty-seven nominations but singled out the “gastronomic meal of the French” as worthy of preservation, not just for the edification of the French—who needed no convincing—but also for the good of the human race.

UNESCO laid down rules to define the classic
repas
—something no French authority had ever dared do, knowing it would immediately be attacked by every other French authority in the world of food.

The gastronomic meal should respect a fixed structure, commencing with an apéritif (drinks before the meal) and ending with liqueurs, containing in between at least four successive courses, namely a starter, fish and/or meat with vegetables, cheese and dessert. Individuals called gastronomes who possess deep knowledge of the tradition and preserve its memory watch over the living practice of the rites, thus contributing to their oral and/or written transmission, in particular to younger generations.

To share such a meal with family and friends did more than satisfy hunger. It was, decreed the committee, “a social practice designed to celebrate the most important moments in the lives of individuals and groups.”

To me, it seemed a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. Who ate like this anymore, least of all in the big cities of France? A feast of eight to ten courses, with wine, for anything up to twenty people, would cost a fortune, even at home. In a restaurant, the cost would be dizzying, even assuming the chef and serving staff were equal to the challenge. Restaurants no longer catered for large parties; their ovens were too small to roast a whole sucking pig, a haunch of venison, a side of beef. Most relied on microwaves or resorted to warming up precooked dishes bought in cans or boil-in-a-bag portions.

Then there were the foibles of the diners to be considered: no fat, no sugar, no salt. Vegetarian, vegan, kosher, halal.. . . The modern chef faced a minefield, which he was happy to avoid by cooking only those dishes that risked giving no offense. The difficult disappeared.

F
ollowing the announcement, a certain amount of muttering was heard in the cooking communities of other countries. Weren’t the culinary traditions of Germany, Britain, even America, also worth celebrating?

French cooks grudgingly conceded that perhaps the banquets of America’s Thanksgiving or the British Christmas were not without their pleasures. Between France and Germany, however, too much bad blood existed for the latter’s cooking ever to be taken seriously.

This ill will went back to the middle of the nineteenth century, before the states of the future Germany were united. When Prussia and France went to war in 1870, the man who would become France’s greatest chef, Georges-Auguste Escoffier, was called up, was captured, and endured almost a year of misery in a German prison camp, existing on undercooked beans and lentils, wormy pork, and rotten potatoes. He emerged with a loathing of German food.

In 1913, Kaiser Wilhelm II asked him to organize a lunch for 146 people on the liner
Imperator
as it launched a transatlantic service from Hamburg to New York. In his memoirs, Escoffier doesn’t hide his bitterness at the way he was treated by the Kaiser. First, he had to convince Wilhelm’s staff that his imprisonment wouldn’t tempt him to poison the Kaiser. They still demanded a German version of the menu, so that each dish could be checked. It included a
Mousse d’Écrevisse
—a chilled mold of crayfish.
Mousse
, however, can also mean “cabin boy,” and the translator demanded indignantly if the chef really believed Germans were sufficiently monstrous to devour the crew.

The day after the dinner, the Kaiser sent for Escoffier and reportedly told him, “I am the Emperor of Germany, but you are the Emperor of Chefs.” Although this was the most famous compliment he ever received, Escoffier doesn’t mention it in his memoirs, making only the terse comment “Hardly one year after this brilliant reception, Germany declared war on France. On November 1, 1914, my son Daniel, lieutenant in the 363rd Alpine Regiment, was hit full in the face by a Prussian bullet and died instantly, leaving his four children for me to bring up.”

T
he Sunday after our dinner at the Minipalais, I spent the morning at a
brocante
in Montmartre.

Brocante
—derivation unknown, or at least much wrangled over—can mean either the secondhand goods sold in a market or the market itself, or even a shop that stocks such things.
Brocantes
and
vide-greniers
are a feature of French life—increasingly so as the French realize the value of recycling.

In Paris, the year-round markets at Porte de Vanves and Porte Clignancourt are cornucopias of junk that contain the occasional treasure. As the weather warms, others erupt all over France, invading public squares, school parking lots, suburban streets. Outside Paris, they often sprout in a field or around the village football pitch.

Brocanteurs

In this case, the stalls straggled down the tree-shaded central island of rue de Rochechouart, in the north of Paris, on the slopes of Montmartre. As I browsed those set out under the trees, a stream of tourists bubbled up from the Envers metro station, paled at the slope confronting them, and, hitching their backpacks higher on their shoulders like weary mountaineers, began the final ascent to the mushroom-gray domes of the cathedral of Sacré-Coeur crouched on the summit.

My eye was caught by a pile of heavy earthenware dishes sitting on the pavement, half-hidden in crumpled newspaper. Their gray-white surfaces were crazed with
craquelure
, the web of tiny cracks that indicate age, while the underside of each had been glazed a lustrous black in the style the French call, with typical directness,
cul noir
—“black ass.” Similar lead-glazed dishes and pots exist in Mexico, Japan, and Poland, some dating back to the eighteenth century, but these were almost certainly made in Brittany late in the nineteenth. I’d seen similar plates in antique stores, displayed in glass cases, with prices to match.

Rule one of
brocantes
, particularly if one is a foreigner, is to hide your interest. Spotting a dusty plastic sandwich bag filled with old documents, I dropped it into the top dish and held them out to the bored young man drowsing in the hot morning sun.

“
Combien?
” I asked.

He stared blankly at my finds, then craned to look over the heads of the crowd. Obviously this wasn’t his stall. But his boss, like every other
exposant
, was trolling for bargains in the stock of his competitors.

Finally he said, “Um,
dix
?”

Was that ten for each item or for the lot? I didn’t let him think about it. He stared for a moment at the ten-euro note I shoved in his hand, then made that half shrug that only the French have mastered. Ten euros for some old dishes and a few papers? It sounded fair—and it was too hot to haggle.

B
ack home, I wiped the dust off one of the dishes, arranged three crimson Jonathan apples on it, and placed it on the dining room table, where it caught the sun slanting through the wooden shutters. Beat that, Henri Matisse.

Almost as an afterthought, I emptied out the documents. Most were menus: a dozen or more, all from around 1911 or 1912, the majority for private dinners to celebrate a first communion, a retirement, or a wedding.

A few were meticulously hand-lettered. One could imagine the steel-nib pen dipped in a ceramic inkpot. Nothing else could achieve the rich downward curve of the
S
in
Salade
or that tail, called a serif, on the
P
of
Poulet
—a trick of penmanship and printing seen only in cultures where the eye, untrained in reading, needs to be led. Others were formally printed on heavy stock, with a flowery heading, the word
Menu
flanked by game birds, lobsters, fish, flowers, and fruit. And rightly so, since what these ancient cards trumpeted most flagrantly was not only tradition and ritual but excess.