The Perfect Meal (4 page)

Everyone, that is, but Boris. He got an empty plate.

Was this an insult, to emphasize that he hadn’t paid? In that case, my plate should have been empty, too. Whatever the reason, he made no comment, just picked up his knife and fork and started to eat an imaginary meal.

The imitation was perfect. He cut and chewed nonexistent salmon, took sips of invisible wine, mopped up illusory sauce with a phantom scrap of bread. Once, he even asked a neighbor to pass the salt. The people on either side simply didn’t notice the empty plate or, if they did notice, just didn’t believe their eyes.

As everyone finished, he, too, put down his knife and fork and for the first time met my eyes across the table.

Leaning forward, he murmured, “Diet.”

I
might have forgotten all about Boris if I hadn’t, by chance, run into him again a few weeks later. A friend who knew the more obscure byways of literary Paris had once taken me to a little restaurant tucked away in the maze of streets in the tenth arrondissement around the Gare de l’Est. It’s called La Chandelle Verte—The Green Candle. In other respects ordinary, it’s a place of pilgrimage for admirers of Alfred Jarry, author of the absurdist classics
Ubu
and
Ubu Roi
. (Ubu’s preferred expletive was “
De par ma chandelle verte!
”—By my green candle!) Jarry memorabilia decorates the walls, and the café frequently figures in events staged by those hard-core Jarryists, the College of Pataphysics.

Boris was studying a portable chess set. There was no sign of a plate.

Wondering if he would remember, I asked, “Still on that diet?”

It took him a second to recognize me. When he did, he just nodded to the opposite chair. I sat down.

“Who’s winning?”

His game hadn’t progressed far. In fact, not a single piece had moved.

“Too soon to tell.”

As the waiter approached, Boris said, without looking up, “He’ll have the cabbage soup.”

We sat in silence till the soup arrived. To cook a good cabbage soup is a challenge. I expected the conventional gray sludge with the consistency of wallpaper paste. This was different. Potatoes had gone into it, cubed, with the skins still on. White beans, garlic, and onion enlivened a robust stock. There was cabbage, of course, but not too much. The cook had peeled off the tough outer leaves and used only the heart, which ran through the broth in crunchy shreds. The combination was delicious.

By the time I was mopping up the last drops of the soup, the chess game had advanced. A white and a black pawn faced each other on K4.

“Do you recommend a dessert?” I asked.

“The
Gâteau Normand au Calvados
isn’t bad.”

I looked at the menu. “I don’t see it.”

“Oh, they don’t do it here. But they make a good one at the Café Croissant.”

Feeling the ground slipping away ever so slightly beneath my feet, I asked, “In the second? Where Jean Juarès was assassinated?”

He looked up. Was there a little respect in his expression? I probably imagined it.

“That’s one distinction of the place, I suppose,” he said. “Personally, I go there for the gâteau. They bake on Thursdays.”

Taking this for an invitation, I turned up the following Thursday just before lunch. In 1914, a fanatic with the theatrically appropriate name of Raoul Villain shot socialist politician Jean Juarès here. In those days, the Café Croissant had special police permission to stay open all night for the benefit of journalists who had to keep late hours. Juarès and his friends were celebrating having stopped the government from introducing a compulsory three-year military service. Villain, a right-wing militarist, leaned through a window from the street and killed Jaurès with a single shot. A wall plaque commemorates the fact, and Boris was sitting below it. This time he wasn’t playing chess with himself but doing a crossword puzzle. Or at least thinking about it, since, though he held a sharpened pencil, he hadn’t filled in a single square. I couldn’t read a word of the paper. It appeared to be in Cyrillic.

The plate in front of him held a slice of moist-looking cake.

“That will be the
Gâteau Normand au Calvados
?” I asked as I reached for the menu.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “This was the last piece.” He pushed his plate toward me. “I saved it for you.”

It was moist, crusted with coarse sugar, wedges of apple baked in, the whole thing fragrant with apple brandy.

As I ate, he studied the crossword. “‘Vampiric member of the family Petromyzontid,’” he said. “Seven letters.”

“Lamprey?”

“I believe you’re right. Thank you.” But he didn’t write it down.

There is a book to be written about my assignations with Boris, always at cafés that had a claim on immortality or notoriety. Usually some writer had worked there, or an artist had made it his favorite subject. Occasionally a building of historical importance, since demolished, once occupied the site.

Visitors to Paris assume cafés are places to drink coffee and perhaps to eat, but to Parisians that’s only a small part of their significance. Herbert Lottman, who analyzed Parisian expatriate life more acutely than almost anyone else, knew their importance.

One could not only meet friends in a café but conduct business there, spend half a day writing letters, or even a book. One needed no invitation to strike up a conversation with a stranger at a neighboring table, and an appointment in a café often replaced an invitation home. It kept home inviolate, and if home was a garret, all the more reason.

A traditional café of the 1890s. The waiter carries the day’s newspaper, provided free to clients but attached to a wooden rod to prevent stealing.

Boris never invited me to his home. For all I knew, it could be a seventh-floor
chambre de bonne
in the funky nineteenth arrondissement or a
maison particulière
in snobbish Neuilly. If he had a family, he never spoke of them. In the same way, even though we met in dozens of cafés, I almost never saw him eat, except, occasionally, a slice of
pain Poilâne
, the wholemeal sourdough bread that was one of the few modern products for which he had any respect.

As well as being chapels to his love of food, restaurants were also classrooms. Boris would order
poulet chasseur
on my behalf, then, with surgical skill, dissect a joint to demonstrate the elasticity of the tendons that showed this to be not some pathetic battery bird but an authentic
poulet de Bresse
that had been allowed to eat and reach maturity in the open air.

A spoonful of mashed potato sparked a dissertation on the cooking and preparation of the purée that Marcel Proust fed to the musicians of the Poulet String Quartet when he summoned them to his apartment at 2:00 a.m. to play César Franck and stir his memories. It came from the kitchens of the Ritz Hotel, directed by the great Escoffier.

Boris was so eloquent on the subject that I looked up the recipe,
Pommes de Terre à la Crème
, in Escoffier’s
Le Guide Culinaire
. It specifies Vitelotte or new kidney potatoes. They must be boiled in their skins, peeled immediately—a miserable chore for some
sous-chef
—then sliced and put into a pan with boiling cream. When the potatoes are soft and the cream reduced, the mixture is whipped with a hand whisk and “finished” with yet more cream. No wonder the musicians wiped their plates.

Boris could speak of food with the passion of a lover. But like the old man on the back steps in my film, he’d eat no more than a spoonful. Was he like those tasters of wine, tea, or coffee who need only a tiny amount to gauge quality? Or did he rather resemble Casanova in old age, having enjoyed so many beautiful women that perfection bored him, and he could be aroused only by the ugly and grotesque? Either way, Boris lived in the same belief that food wasn’t about appetite but appreciation. In every respect, he qualified for the term used by UNESCO to define a person who maintained the quality of food for its own sake. Fine shades of meaning separate the terms for connoisseurs of food. A
gourmet
enjoys food and eats well, but not to excess. A
gourmand
loves food so much that he gorges himself; he’s a glutton. But a
gastronome
is someone for whom the study of food and the maintenance of its excellence means infinitely more than the satisfaction of mere appetite. He doesn’t so much enjoy or love food as revere it—and one does not eat what one reveres.

In
The Red Shoes
, Lermontov declines to watch Vicky Page dance at a musical evening thrown by her mother. Ballet, he tells her, is his religion. “And one doesn’t really care to see one’s religion practiced”—he makes a contemptuous gesture that encompasses the gaudy décor and chattering guests—“in an atmosphere such as this.” Boris the gastronome was no different. To celebrate food in a public restaurant would have been, to him, like munching a hot dog in church. And I mean a hot dog with
everything
.

I
hesitated for a few weeks before I told Boris about my project. We were in the courtyard of the Grande Mosquée de Paris. He drank mint tea, which I never liked, while I nibbled on one of those nut cookies called
ma’amoul
. I felt like Burton on his secret pilgrimage to Mecca, an unbeliever enjoying the pleasures of Islam.

I explained what I had in mind.

“I don’t like your chances of finding anyone to roast an ox.”

“I only want to see if these dishes still exist. It isn’t a real dinner. It’s a dinner of the mind. I thought you’d approve.”

“You’ve had worse ideas,” he conceded.

“You’ll help me out, then? Advise me?”

“As long as I don’t have to eat any of these things.”

“No risk. I promise. So . . . where would you begin?”

“As it says, a meal begins with an apéritif.”

“But which one?”

“What about your friend Karl?” he said. “I’d ask him.”

Karl was another expatriate writer and a famous drinker. But . . . Boris and Karl acquainted? I didn’t know that. Though now I came to think of it, they’d both been at that dinner where Boris ate his invisible meal. Was there a covert association of such men, meeting in out-of-the-way cafés for the same ambiguous exchanges that passed between Boris and me? Was I just one cog in a vast conspiracy? Paranoid fantasies ran through my head. There was that feeling again, of things slipping out of control.

Four

First Catch Your Tipple

“By the way, this café we are nearing is reputed to have the worst anisette in Paris. Shall we try it?”

We did, and it was unspeakable.

S. J. Perelman,
The Saucier’s Apprentice

A
ll over the world, waiters automatically ask if you want a drink before your meal, something to sharpen the appetite: an
apéritif
—from the Latin
aperitīvus
, “to open.” But only in France is that question pregnant with social significance.

The French believe there are some things one doesn’t drink before eating. But they don’t tell you what these might be. As a rule, no drink menu is offered until the wine list appears. Clients are expected to express their preference in aperitifs without guidance and, in doing so, to reveal their knowledge and experience or lack of it.

Coffee and tea, for instance, are never drunk at the beginning of a meal, only at its end. Beer, juice, and sodas are for the beach, not the dinner table. On the other hand, if you order a whiskey or martini, you risk being pigeonholed as an alcoholic. And to request “just a glass of water” is almost the worst choice of all, since it’s seen as evading the question. Naturally, water will be provided. But what do you want to
drink
?

Ian Fleming, preoccupied, as always, with lifestyle, included some advice in
For Your Eyes Only
.

James Bond had his first drink of the evening at Fouquet’s. It was not a solid drink. One cannot drink seriously in French cafés. Out of doors on a pavement in the sun is no place for vodka or whisky or gin. No, in cafés you have to drink the least offensive of the musical comedy drinks that go with them, and Bond always had the same thing—an Americano—Bitter Campari, Cinzano, a large slice of lemon peel and soda. For the soda he always specified Perrier, for in his opinion expensive soda water was the cheapest way to improve a poor drink.

Being Australian puts me in an awkward position when it comes to choosing an
apéritif
, since, unlike countries as diverse as Patagonia and Finland, Australia had no distinctive national tipple. Gullet-numbing iced lager satisfies 99 percent of the population, leaving a fragile but discriminating fraction to enjoy the country’s excellent wines. When I was a boy, wine was drunk only in gloomy and sinister wooden-floored bars called “wine lodges,” where shabby men and women sipped the day away on sweet sherry and port. It wasn’t until German and Austrian winemakers emigrated in the 1940s that we learned how to make wine and to appreciate it.