The Perfect Meal (23 page)

I might have walked right past except for the music drifting out its door—an old Tina Turner number, but sung in French. Glancing in, I saw Boris at the back, near the door to the kitchen. Above him, a large painted board announced “Vérigood.”

“
Vérigood?
” I said as I sat down.

He didn’t look up. “Jean-Christophe is a bit unconventional.”

Confirming this, the music tape segued from “Nutbush City Limits” to the Flower Duet from
Lakmé
.

In these tiny establishments, it’s easy to feel one has stepped into a film from the 1940s, one of those dramas about a middle-aged train driver or cinema projectionist driven to murder by his love for a randy and restless woman.
Manon Lescaut
meets
La Bête Humaine
.

The clients here were perfect casting. Who was the killer? Probably the middle-aged man sitting in silence at one of the tables on the sidewalk. And his victim? Obviously the woman opposite him. Clearly their marriage was as flat as the half-drunk glasses of Stella Artois on the table between them.

At the bar, a tall man paged through the left-wing daily
Liberation
. In the film, he would be the world-weary cop who solves the case. Two stools along, a thin woman of what the French call “a certain age,” with a mass of black frizzy hair, drank a dusky glass of Pernod, and offered her bony profile to be admired. Too old and severe for the femme fatale, she could be the malicious neighbor forced by a shady past to inform on the killer.

“What can I bring you, m’sieur?”

The man I’d last noticed reading
Liberation
was now standing by our table, holding a bottle of wine.

“Meet Jean-Christophe,” Boris said. “This is his place.”

We shook hands. I pointed to the sign.

“Why ‘Vérigood.’”

“Because
is
very good.”

“What is?”

“His
boeuf bourguignon
,” Boris said.

“Best in Paris,” said Jean-Christophe. “Fifteen hours the cooking.”

He poured half a glass of red for Boris and looked at me.

“He’s Australian,” Boris said.

“Ah!” He topped up my glass, looked at the bottle, still half full, and left it on the table. “Then I bring another,” he said. “Or maybe two?”

The music tape switched to a reedy, wailing tenor, singing in what sounded like Arabic.

“How
is
the beef?” I asked Boris when he’d gone

He shrugged. “I like it. Make up your own mind.”

It reminded me why I was here. “I told you I was thinking of doing
soupe à l’oignon
?”

“Brave man.”

“Why? How hard can it be? Every café serves
soupe à l’oignon
. I’ve even done it with a stock cube.”

Without turning his head, Boris said, “Jean-Christophe, do you have a beef stock cube?”

Jean-Christophe’s head emerged from below the bar, where he was sorting bottles.

“Why I would want such a thing?”

“Find one, could you?”

To my surprise, he came round the bar, walked out the front door, and crossed the road to the little market opposite.

Boris asked, “Do you remember how Giotto proved his mastery?”

“Something about a circle?”

“Yes. When the Pope asked for proof of his skill, he just took a brush and drew a perfect circle, freehand.”

“And cooking
soupe à l’oignon
is the perfect circle?”

“Some might say so. Close, anyway. Do you have a
Guide Culinaire
?”

“The Escoffier? You know I do. A first edition. Inscribed.”

“But have you read it?”

“Nobody
reads
Escoffier. It’s like a Windows manual. I’ve
consulted
it.”

Published in 1903,
Le Guide Culinaire
of Georges-Auguste Escoffier has never been out of print. Its eight hundred closely printed pages summarize the wealth of French cuisine, but also its complexity. If you want to know how to skin, cook, and remove the meat from a calf’s head, purée a sea urchin, make
cailles
(quail)
Richelieu
, cook red cabbage in the Flemish style, or prepare a jellied dessert called My Queen, it will tell you—though in a quirky and obtuse manner that’s peculiarly Escoffier and uniquely French.

Jean-Christophe returned and dropped an orange-and-yellow box on the table.

“
Bouillon gout BOEUF
” was lettered on it in yellow, next to a cartoon of a bull. Below were photos of a large brown onion and a bunch of fresh herbs, both beaded with morning dew. The words
riche en gout
—rich in flavor—ran vertically down the pack.

“Read the ingredients,” Boris said. “If you can find them.”

The list appeared in minuscule lettering on the end of the pack.

“‘Salt,’” I read. “‘Malt extract; flavor extenders; sodium glutamate, guynamate, and inosanate; sunflower oil; corn-based flavorings, including beef, sugar, onion, parsley; extracts of pepper, clove, celery, bay, and thyme; caramel (sugar and water); vegetable fibers. May contain traces of milk and egg.’”

“Notice that there’s no actual beef,” Boris said. “It doesn’t even promise beef—just the taste of beef. And it fails even to deliver that.” He snorted. “Read Escoffier. Chapter one, page one. Then we can talk.”

Before I left, I tried Jean-Christophe’s
boeuf bourguignon
. Instead of the usual stringy meat swimming in watery gravy, with boiled potatoes and carrots, it arrived in a dark heap, barely moist, with no accompaniment beyond a bed of homemade mashed potatoes. The meat fell apart under the fork, tender and succulent. In a word,
vérigood
. Fifteen hours of cooking hadn’t been wasted.

In his oblique way, Boris was giving me a lesson. Good cooking permits no short cuts. To be worthy of creating, even in imagination, a truly great meal, I must prove myself competent in the skills of the master cook. I would never be Escoffier, but I could aspire to be a menial sous chef, the most junior member of the
brigade de cuisine
, the apprentice charged with the dull but crucial task of preparing
bouillon
. Having achieved that goal, he might consider me worthy to move on to greater things—even to the roasting of that elusive ox.

Seventeen

First Catch Your Chef

A very strong will, sustained by a glass of excellent champagne.

Sarah Bernhardt’s formula for “unfailing vitality,” as confided to Georges-Auguste Escoffier

T
he French like a little rogue in their cultural heroes, so it was predictable that Georges-Auguste Escoffier, who transformed the art of cooking, should be a thief and embezzler, just like his friend and partner, the hotelier César Ritz.

Ritz, cold-eyed and expressionless, with a nattily waxed black mustache, had a face that belonged on a “Wanted” poster. But Escoffier embodied that most flattering of adjectives:
suave
. His silver hair and mustache, his impeccable suits, his gleaming shoes with their built-up heels and discreet elevator insoles to increase his height, combined in a vision of sleek and peerless probity.

Georges-Auguste Escoffier

In 1888, Richard D’Oyly Carte, the entrepreneur who used the profits from producing Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas to build the Savoy Hotel on London’s Strand, invited Ritz to become its manager and Escoffier the
chef de cuisine
. Leading what they called “a little army of hotel men,” the two invaded England.

London’s gourmets soon learned that the Savoy could offer dishes not available anywhere else. Escoffier imported
ortolans
and truffles from France, golden Sterlet caviar from Russia, and would send word to a favored client when the first asparagus of the season arrived from Provence. It soon became fashionable among society families to give their household servants a night off once a week and hold a dinner party in the Savoy’s lofty dining room and grill, overlooking the Thames.

Like Vatel and many others before him, Escoffier recognized the value of showmanship. He staged dinners to order, often on themes proposed by the host. American food writer Julian Street explained the right way to go about dining out.

One should go in advance to the restaurant of one’s choice, consult the proprietor or the head waiter, select one’s dishes, and then obtain the advice of the wine waiter . . . Never ask members of your party to order for themselves. A scattering of varied orders disorganizes the kitchen and the service, and destroys the suavity of the meal. Let the same courses be served to all, as you would if you were entertaining in your own home.

To clients who paid him this compliment, Escoffier gave good value. For a woman’s birthday, he created a menu in which the first letters of the dishes spelled out her name, Marguerite: M
ousseline au Crevettes Roses
, A
mourettes au Consommé
, R
ougets en Papillotes
. . . Asked for an exceptional dish, he dreamed up Nymphs in the Dawn: frogs’ legs tinted pink and embedded with fresh tarragon and chervil in clear champagne jelly to suggest river sprites hiding among water plants.

His signature color was pink. Many of his dishes were colored and flavored with dark red Rozen paprika from Hungary, which used only the outer flesh and skin of the pepper. He would have been the perfect chef to orchestrate one of the dinners held by the notorious Paris courtesan Cora Pearl. After dancing nude on orchids, she had herself served up on an enormous platter as the main dish, nestling on flowers and wearing nothing but a pink sauce.

This was a little too louche for Escoffier, but in October 1895 he did agree to a special request that let him run riot with red food.

A group of young English gamblers had won 350,000 francs at Monte Carlo by betting on red and the number nine at roulette. Regulars at the Savoy, they asked Escoffier to stage a dinner celebrating their luck.

Everything was red and gold. The table was decorated with petals of red roses. The menus were red. The chairs were red, and had the lucky winning number 9 stuck on them. The banquet room was decorated with palm trees to evoke the Riviera, and these were strung with red light bulbs.

Only red wine was served, and every one of the nine courses featured at least one red dish. Red smoked salmon with caviar was followed by red snapper, lamb cooked pink, with tomatoes and red beans, a chicken with red lettuce salad, asparagus in a pink sauce called
Coucher de Soleil sur un Beau Soir d’Été
(Sunset on a Beautiful Summer Evening), foie gras in a paprika-colored jelly, concluding with an ice sculpture of the mountain behind Monte Carlo, lit with red lights, and with a nest of red autumn leaves supporting a bowl of
mousse de Curacao
covered in strawberries.

Escoffier loved to show off, particularly to celebrities. He designed two dishes for the Australian-born opera diva Nellie Melba. Nervously preoccupied with her throat, she feared ordinary toast might scratch it, while ice cream, her favorite dessert, could chill her vocal cords. He ordered slices of toast cut in half horizontally, then re-toasted, to make ultra-thin Melba Toast, and invented a dish of fresh peaches on vanilla ice cream, coated in raspberry purée, which he called Peach Melba.

While he was chef at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, the soprano Adelina Patti often stayed there. A Swiss couple named Jungbluth owned the Grand, and when Patti, perhaps overwhelmed by the richness of Escoffier’s menus, asked what he cooked for the Jungbluths, they invited her to lunch.

Escoffier had planned a simple Alsatian
pot-au-feu
of boiled beef and salt pork with carrots, potatoes, and cabbage. But his pride wouldn’t allow him to present anything so everyday to the great Patti. “In view of the occasion,” he wrote, “I thought I would be forgiven for expanding on this ‘simple family meal.’”

Lunch began with the
pot-au-feu
served traditionally, starting with a soup made from the broth, followed by the meat and vegetables, with horseradish sauce. After that, however, he pulled out all the stops.

I served an excellent Bresse chicken that I threaded with strips of pork fat and roasted on an open spit, and also a mixed salad of chicory leaves and beets. Next, a magnificent parfait de foie gras appeared on the table, made up of a mixture of Alsatian foie gras and Périgord truffles. I completed this exceptional family meal with an orange mousse surrounded by strawberries macerated in Curacao.

After that, the soprano might have felt she needed to cut down on eating, but there Escoffier was no help. To one hostess who fretted about her weight, he proposed a “Diet Dinner”: caviar, shrimp, oysters, turtle soup, sole, trout, a champagne sorbet, asparagus, ending with a paprika soufflé and pears in port.

Though César Ritz managed the Savoy until 1897, he was seldom there. Instead, he buzzed around Europe and the Mediterranean, consulting for other hotels and supervising the new Ritz, then being built on Place Vendôme in Paris. “When in London you are hardly ever in the hotel except to eat and sleep,” complained the Savoy owners. “You have latterly been simply using The Savoy as a place to live in, a pied-à-terre, an office, from which to carry on your other schemes and as a lever to float a number of other projects in which the Savoy has no interest whatever.”