The Perfect Meal (22 page)

That’s not a problem with
boeuf bourguignon
or cassoulet, which can taste even better a day or two after they’re made. But fishing boats don’t put to sea on weekends, so your
sole meunière
will have last seen the ocean three days before—something all the butter and lemon juice in the world can’t disguise. As for oysters, the man who opens them also takes the weekend off, leaving a few dozen in the refrigerator. By the time they reach you, they’ll be shriveled, dry, and gamy.

And let’s not even think about desserts:
Crème brûlée
, its sugar crust sticky after days in the fridge,
île flottante
with the
crème anglaise
developing that nasty custard skin, and a
gâteau chocolat
of stale cake layered with cream gone hard as butter in the fridge.

Even against these odds, however, I wouldn’t have thought one could make a mess of onion soup.

O
ne minute we were sitting with our feet up, enjoying our Sunday morning croissants and coffee, and contemplating a leisurely visit to a
brocante
. An hour later we were organizing a birthday dinner for fourteen on behalf of some friends who’d just flown in from New York on the spur of the moment and wanted to celebrate an anniversary. We don’t even own fourteen chairs, so squeezing everyone around our dining table wasn’t an option. Also, because the new arrivals were starry-eyed about “traditional Paris restaurants,” we decided, foolishly, to eat out.

The few smaller establishments that did open on Sunday couldn’t manage such a large party, so we compromised on a place known for period design rather than good food. The visitors loved its art nouveau décor, with the polished brass and varnished wood paneling. But we should have been warned by the many empty tables and the waiters loitering at the rear. Sunday evening was, for them and for the restaurant, the low point of the week. They looked as displeased with our invasion as with that of the Nazis in 1940.

Rather than taking orders for aperitifs, our waiter simply inquired, “Champagne for everyone?,” and turned to go. He was visibly annoyed when we called him back. With no barman on duty, he had to mix the drinks himself. His Kirs were 99 percent wine with only a dash of syrup, and he interpreted “dry martini” as Martini Bianco on the rocks.

Meanwhile, we contemplated the menus. Bound in grease-spotted red velour, they were long on illustrations of cancan girls and gentlemen in handlebar mustaches, but short on actual food. I recognized the old standbys:
salades composées
,
soupe au poisson
,
soupe à l’oignon
, and a
soupe du jour
. Then
confit de canard
,
boeuf bourguignon
,
coq au vin
—surely all canned or boil-in-the-bag.

When I asked about the
soupe du jour
, the waiter disappeared for five minutes, to return with the news, not unexpected, that it was
potage printanier
. Supposedly made from spring vegetables, this is the gentile version of Jewish carrot soup: in Yiddish,
tzimmes
. To make a new dish, runs kitchen wisdom, just combine all your leftovers, heat, and stir well.
Tzimmes
embodies this rule so perfectly that the word also describes any deal tossed together with too many variables and not enough forethought. “A prolonged procedure,” says one definition, “an involved business; trouble.”

In 1962, Eugène Ionesco contributed a script to a movie called
The Seven Deadly Sins
. He chose to illustrate “anger” through the medium of
potage printanier
. All over France, husbands lose their temper at yet again being served the same soup for Sunday lunch, and, moreover, finding a fly in it. Thousands of domestic arguments escalate into nuclear war and the end of the world. Nobody in France thought this was extreme. Many were surprised it hadn’t happened already.

O
n that Sunday night, Marie-Dominique and a few others ordered
soupe à l’oignon
. It seemed a safe, if cliché, choice. One just ladled onion broth into a bowl, floated a piece of toast on top, sprinkled grated Gruyère, and browned it under the grill. What could go wrong?

The soups arrived with their cheese almost bubbling yet not brown—a sure sign they were only seconds out of the microwave. Marie-Dominique poked hers with her spoon. The yellow surface resisted like plastic. And when she lifted the spoon, the cheese came with it, stuck to the spoon as if with Krazy Glue. So did a slab of sodden bread as thick as a hamburger bun. Underneath, where there should have been soup, the bowl was almost dry. Sitting in the fridge for so long, the liquid had been completely soaked up by the bread.

She called after the departing waiter, “
M’sieur, s’il vous plait
, where is my soup?”

He swung back to the table. “Zis is your soup, madame,” he said loftily in English. “
Soupe à l’oignon Française
. Is in zer French style.”

Trying to pass off a dud dish as “the way it’s served in France”? To a Frenchwoman, and a Parisienne at that? And with as sacred a dish as
soupe à l’oignon
? He should have cut his throat right then.

O
ver the centuries, soup in France has accumulated a body of myth, tradition, and lore. One speaks of it in the same respectful, capitalized way as The Nation, The Heavens, The Earth. It’s not “soup” but
La Soupe
: symbolic, metaphoric, sacramental.

The respect is understandable. Mankind emerged from an oceanic soup. As babies, we grow in an amniotic soup within our mother’s bodies, and once born, we are fed on soup. Soup sustains and consoles the destitute, the ill, the desperate. It has entered the language at every level. To indicate that dinner’s ready, we say “Soup’s on!,” while to give universal offense one “spits in the soup.” At its best, soup is warmth, reassurance, sustenance. Soup is Home. It is Faith, Hope, and Charity. It may even be God.

At the core of soup is broth, the essence of meat, vegetables, and spices, suffused through water, which the French call bouillon. For centuries, the French, Italians, Portuguese, and British have regarded it as both food and medicine. The word
restaurant
derives from an innkeeper in the 1700s who offered soup in order to
restaurer
, or restore, his clients. In 1750, John Huxham’s
An Essay on Fevers
recommended chicken broth to rebalance the “humors.”

As he traveled through France in 1765, the English novelist Tobias Smollett, suffering from tuberculosis, was constantly offered bouillon, though he doubted it did him any good.

Bouillon is a universal remedy among the good people of France; insomuch, that they have no idea of any person’s dying, after having swallowed un bon bouillon. One of the English gentlemen who were robbed and murdered about thirty years ago between Calais and Boulogne, being brought to the post-house of Boulogne with some signs of life, this remedy was immediately administered. “What surprises me greatly,” said the post-master, “I made an excellent bouillon, and poured it down his throat with my own hands, and yet he did not recover.”

Sometimes, though, broth worked wonders. In 1672, in Saint-Didier, near Avignon, the crowd halted the hanging of one Pierre du Fort when the public executioner bungled the job. After seeing the hangman and his girlfriend swinging on the hapless Pierre’s legs in the hope of strangling him, the spectators decided he’d suffered enough. They cut him down and carried him to a monastery, where he was given wine and “each Saturday, bouillon made with meat,” a treatment on which he made a full recovery, presumably to rob and murder again.

E
very country has a different way of losing its temper in a restaurant. Britons and Americans shout, pound the table, fling down napkins, and demand to See the Manager. Think of Jack Nicholson raging at a waitress about a chicken salad sandwich in the film
Five Easy Pieces
. Chinese and Japanese sit silent, with bowed heads, waiting for the offender to acknowledge his error and make amends. Italians have been known to weep and Spaniards to challenge waiters to a fight. Germans, coldly rational, collect names, writing them in their
Persönliches gastronomisches schwarzbuch
, or personal gastronomic black book, a small diary kept exclusively for this purpose, I’m told.

The French insult. Reflecting the fact that France is still at heart rural, its slang contains numerous references to animals and plants, ideal for berating restaurant staff.
Vache
(cow) predominates. “
La vache!
” expresses anger or dismay. Symbols of stupidity include
cornichon
(pickle),
citrouille
(pumpkin), and
navet
(turnip). Each gains force when prefixed by “
Espèce d’une . . 
.”—“a prime example of . . .”

It was bad luck for the waiter that day that one of our French friends, Jean-Marc, was a master of invective. In an insistently menacing tone, he began by suggesting the man resembled the
andouille
—a sausage made of pigs’ intestines, including the rectum. He went on to compare him to a root vegetable customarily fed to livestock, and was just rolling out one of his favorites—“
Vous avez le cerveau d’une baguette fromage
” (“You have the brain of a cheese sandwich”)—when the manager, summoned from his comfortable office where he was probably watching the football replay on TV, arrived to calm things down.

“You have the brains of a moldy rutabaga!”

Recognizing a disaster in the making, he distributed champagne and foie gras to all and tore up our bill. We last saw our waiter slinking out the door in street clothes, having been sent home early, if not actually fired. He was lucky. Men have been strung up from lampposts for lesser sins than interfering with onion soup.

O
nce I thought of cooking
soupe à l’oignon
, the idea took hold. Of course, onion soup was far too robust to begin a dinner of the kind I visualized. It was a meal in itself. The bouillon at the start of a great meal should be, at most, a consommé—light, thin, transparent, stimulating the appetite rather than satisfying it. But since a bowl of asparagus soup had suggested the idea for the banquet, to prepare
soupe à la oignon
embodied a certain poetic rightness.

All the same, I discussed it with Boris first.

He proposed we meet in a restaurant I’d never heard of, called Le Mine au Poivre—The Pepper Mine. It was on rue Montcalm, in the eighteenth, one of the narrow streets that run downhill from the walled sprawl of the Cimetière Montmartre.

Some people visit the cemetery to lay flowers on the tomb of their aunt, but most are tourists, seeking its many celebrity graves: that of Nijinsky, with its morose statue of the dancer slumped in his
Petrushka
costume; of Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, the only tomb in the world decorated with a facsimile of that instrument; or the resting place of Marie Duplessis, original Lady of the Camellias, inspiration of
Camille
and of Violetta in
La Traviata
. As she died young and destitute, a lover paid for her tomb in a sheltered spot in the lee of low wall. The sun falls lightly on her sandstone crypt, which, in the season, is often decorated with fresh camellias.

Like a gated community of the prosperous departed, the cemetery has only one entrance, and that on the uphill side. Most days, the streets around contain a steady flow of hot and exasperated tourists and mourners who, having got off the bus at the downhill end, must trudge around the entire circumference to get in.

Because of this, nearby streets are well supplied with bars into which parched and weary strangers can retreat for a reviving beer. Le Mine au Poivre was just such a place: a shady retreat to escape from the heat, catch your breath, enjoy a drink, and maybe a snack.