Secret Ingredients Read online

  Whenever I think back to that lunch, I feel contentedly well fed; the memory of it alone seems almost enough to sustain life. The next course was truite au porto, which, the headwaiter told me, had been prepared by M. Point himself: brook trout boiled in water to which vinegar, pepper, salt, and bay leaf had been added, and then skinned, split in half, and filled with a ragout of truffles, mushrooms, and vegetables. With it came a sauce made of butter, cream, and port wine. It was a masterpiece; I was by then entirely willing to take the word of my friends in Paris that Fernand Point is today France’s greatest chef. The trout was followed by a breast of guinea hen with morels, in an egg sauce; a splendid Pont-l’Evêque; strawberry ice cream, made of fraises de bois that had been picked the day before; and an array of pâtisserie. M. Point had chosen as a wine for the guinea hen a rich, full-bodied Château Lafite-Rothschild ’24. And at the end of the meal, with my coffee, there was a Grande Fine Champagne ’04, the taste of which I still remember vividly.

  Later, M. Point sat down at my table. The smell of good coffee and good cigars and the sound of soft, relaxed conversation drifted through the room. M. Point acknowledged my praises with the casual air of a seasoned virtuoso who had expected nothing else. “We always strive for near-perfection,” he said. The inevitable bottle of champagne in its ice bucket was whisked up to the table by the headwaiter, and two glasses were filled. “Of course, I know that there is no such thing as perfection. But I always try to make every meal”—he closed his eyes, searching for the right words—“une petite merveille. Now, you won’t believe it, but I gave a lot of thought to your lunch. I said to myself, ‘Maybe he should have a sole aux nouilles instead of the truite au porto.’ I decided against it. It might have been too much, and I don’t want my clients to eat too much. Only in bad restaurants is one urged to order a lot. Enfin, you are satisfied.”

  I said he could probably make a fortune if he opened a restaurant in Paris. He nodded glumly. “My friends have been telling me that for years. But why should I leave? I belong here. My men like to work for me. We have thirteen men here in the dining room, and eight cooks and two pâtissiers, under Paul Mercier, in the kitchen. Many of them have been with me for over ten years, and some have been here a lot longer than that. They don’t quit, as they do in Paris. Look at Vincent, here. He’s been with me for twenty years—or is it twenty-one, Vincent?”

  The headwaiter filled the glasses again and gave the champagne bottle a twirl as he replaced it in its bucket. “Twenty-one, Chef,” he said.

  “You can’t get rid of them,” said M. Point. “I could throw Vincent out the door and he would come right back in through the window. No, mon cher ami. Point stays at the Pyramide.” He lifted his glass. “Let us drink to the Pyramide!”

  “To the Pyramide!” I said.

  We drank a considerable number of toasts afterward—to France; to the United States; to Escoffier; to Dom Pérignon, who put the bubbles in champagne; and to the memorable day when M. Point prepared his first truite au porto—and it was with a feeling of light-headedness and supreme contentment that, late in the afternoon, I paid my bill (which came to no more than the price of a good meal in a good restaurant in New York), bid farewell to M. Point, and went out into the garden. It had rained again, but now the sun was shining. The earth had a strong smell of mushrooms and flowers. I headed back to my hotel. At the corner of the Cours Président Wilson, I ran smack into M. Lecutiez. He was talking to an unworldly-looking patriarch, who I presumed was the oldest of the three archeologists, but M. Lecutiez introduced him to me as l’homme mûr, the mature man. He said goodbye to his colleague and seized my arm with great enthusiasm. “I’ve been waiting for you!” he said, waving his pipe happily. “We’ve got lots of things to do. We still have time to climb at least three of Vienne’s seven hills.”

  I said that he must excuse me, because I was hardly able to make the Grand Hôtel du Nord, having just had lunch at M. Point’s.

  “M. Point has a very interesting place,” M. Lecutiez said.

  “Interesting?” I said. “They say it’s the best restaurant in this country. It’s the most remarkable—”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that,” M. Lecutiez broke in. “I don’t give a damn about the restaurant. I care only for antiquities, you know, and M. Point has plenty of them buried under his place. When they landscaped his garden ten years ago, they came across a couple of first-class Roman sculptures. I wish we could take over M. Point’s place and start digging in earnest. I’ll bet there are any number of marvelous relics under his wine cellar.”

  1949

  “I’d like to tell you about our specials this evening.”

  A GOOD APPETITE

  A. J. LIEBLING

  The Proust madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton’s apple or Watt’s steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book. This is capable of expression by the formula TMB, for Taste > Memory > Book. Some time ago, when I began to read a book called The Food of France, by Waverley Root, I had an inverse experience: BMT, for Book > Memory > Taste. Happily, the tastes that The Food of France re-created for me—small birds, stewed rabbit, stuffed tripe, Côte Rôtie, and Tavel—were more robust than that of the madeleine, which Larousse defines as “a light cake made with sugar, flour, lemon juice, brandy, and eggs.” (The quantity of brandy in a madeleine would not furnish a gnat with an alcohol rub.) In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.

  The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a prizefighter’s hours on the road. (I have read that the late French professional gourmand Maurice Curnonsky ate but one meal a day—dinner. But that was late in his life, and I have always suspected his attainments anyway; so many mediocre witticisms are attributed to him that he could not have had much time for eating.) A good appetite gives an eater room to turn around in. For example, a nonprofessional eater I know went to the Restaurant Pierre, in the Place Gaillon, a couple of years ago, his mind set on a sensibly light meal: a dozen, or possibly eighteen, oysters, and a thick chunk of steak topped with beef marrow, which M. Pierre calls a “Délice de la Villette”—the equivalent of a “Stockyard’s Delight.” But as he arrived, he heard M. Pierre say to his headwaiter, “Here comes Monsieur L. Those two portions of cassoulet that are left—put them aside for him.” A cassoulet is a substantial dish, of a complexity precluding its discussion here. (Mr. Root devotes three pages to the great controversy over what it should contain.) M. Pierre is the most amiable of restaurateurs, who prides himself on knowing in advance what his friends will like. A client of limited appetite would be obliged either to forgo his steak or to hurt M. Pierre’s feelings. Monsieur L., however, was in no difficulty. He ate the two cassoulets, as was his normal practice; if he had consumed only one, his host would have feared that it wasn’t up to standard. He then enjoyed his steak. The oysters offered no problem, since they present no bulk.

  In the heroic age before the First World War, there were men and women who ate, in addition to a whacking lunch and a glorious dinner, a voluminous souper after the theatre or the other amusements of the evening. I have known some of the survivors, octogenarians of unblemished appetite and unfailing good humor—spry, wry, and free of the ulcers that come from worrying about a balanced diet—but they have had no emulators in France since the doctors there discovered the existence of the human liver. From t
hat time on, French life has been built to an increasing extent around that organ, and a niggling caution has replaced the old recklessness; the liver was the seat of the Maginot mentality. One of the last of the great around-the-clock gastronomes of France was Yves Mirande, a small, merry author of farces and musical-comedy books. In 1955, Mirande celebrated his eightieth birthday with a speech before the curtain of the Théâtre Antoine, in the management of which he was associated with Mme. B., a protégée of his, forty years younger than himself. But the theatre was only half of his life. In addition, M. Mirande was an unofficial director of a restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, which he had founded for another protégée, also forty years younger than himself; this was Mme. G., a Gasconne and a magnificent cook. In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, M. Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot—and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. “And while I think of it,” I once heard him say, “we haven’t had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace—no more ’34s and hardly any ’37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.”

  M. Mirande had to his credit a hundred produced plays, including a number of great Paris hits, but he had just written his first book for print, so he said “my publisher” in a special mock-impressive tone. “An informal sketch for my definitive autobiography,” he would say of this production. The informal sketch, which I cherish, begins with the most important decision in Mirande’s life. He was almost seventeen and living in the small Breton port of Lannion—his offstage family name was Le Querrec—when his father, a retired naval officer, said to him, “It is time to decide your future career. Which will it be, the Navy or the Church?” No other choice was conceivable in Lannion. At dawn, Yves ran away to Paris. There, he had read a thousand times, all the famous wits and cocottes frequented the tables in front of the Café Napolitain, on the Boulevard des Capucines. He presented himself at the café at nine the next morning—late in the day for Lannion—and found that the place had not yet opened. Soon he became a newspaperman. It was a newspaper era as cynically animated as the corresponding period of the Bennett-Pulitzer-Hearst competition in New York, and in his second or third job he worked for a press lord who was as notional and niggardly as most press lords are; the publisher insisted that his reporters be well turned out, but did not pay them salaries that permitted cab fares when it rained. Mirande lived near the fashionable Montmartre cemetery and solved his rainy-day pants-crease problem by crashing funeral parties as they broke up and riding, gratis, in the carriages returning to the center of town. Early in his career, he became personal secretary to Clemenceau and then to Briand, but the gay theatre attracted him more than politics, and he made the second great decision of his life after one of his political patrons had caused him to be appointed sous-préfet in a provincial city. A sous-préfet is the administrator of one of the districts into which each of the ninety départements of France is divided, and a young sous-préfet is often headed for a precocious rise to high positions of state. Mirande, attired in the magnificent uniform that was then de rigueur, went to his “capital,” spent one night there, and then ran off to Paris again to direct a one-act farce. Nevertheless, his connections with the serious world remained cordial. In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, he introduced me to Colette, by that time a national glory of letters.

  The regimen fabricated by Mirande’s culinary protégée, Mme. G., maintained him en pleine forme. When I first met him, in the restaurant during the summer of the Liberation, he was a sprightly sixty-nine. In the spring of 1955, when we renewed a friendship that had begun in admiration of each other’s appetite, he was as good as ever. On the occasion of our reunion, we began with a truite au bleu—a live trout simply done to death in hot water, like a Roman emperor in his bath. It was served up doused with enough melted butter to thrombose a regiment of Paul Dudley Whites, and accompanied, as was right, by an Alsatian wine—a Lacrimae Sanctae Odiliae, which once contributed slightly to my education. Long ago, when I was very young, I took out a woman in Strasbourg, and, wishing to impress her with my knowledge of local customs, ordered a bottle of Ste. Odile. I was making the same mistake as if I had taken out a girl in Boston and offered her baked beans. “How quaint!” the woman in Strasbourg said. “I haven’t drunk that for years.” She excused herself to go to the telephone, and never came back.

  After the trout, Mirande and I had two meat courses, since we could not decide in advance which we preferred. We had a magnificent daube provençale, because we were faithful to la cuisine bourgeoise, and then pintadous—young guinea hens, simply and tenderly roasted—with the first asparagus of the year, to show our fidelity to la cuisine classique. We had clarets with both courses—a Pétrus with the daube, a Cheval Blanc with the guineas. Mirande said that his doctor had discounseled Burgundies. It was the first time in our acquaintance that I had heard him admit he had a doctor, but I was reassured when he drank a bottle and a half of Krug after luncheon. We had three bottles between us—one to our loves, one to our countries, and one for symmetry, the last being on the house.

  Mirande was a small, alert man with the face of a Celtic terrier—salient eyebrows and an upturned nose. He looked like an intelligent Lloyd George. That summer, in association with Mme. B., his theatrical protégée, he planned to produce a new play of Sartre’s. His mind kept young by the theatre of Mme. B., his metabolism protected by the restaurant of Mme. G., Mirande seemed fortified against all eventualities for at least another twenty years. Then, perhaps, he would have to recruit new protégées. The Sunday following our reunion, I encountered him at Longchamp, a racecourse where the restaurant does not face the horses, and diners can keep first things first. There he sat, radiant, surrounded by celebrities and champagne buckets, sending out a relay team of commissionaires to bet for him on the successive tips that the proprietors of stables were ravished to furnish him between races. He was the embodiment of a happy man. (I myself had a nice thing at 27 to 1.)

  The first alteration in Mirande’s fortunes affected me so directly that I did not at once sense its gravity for him. Six weeks later, I was again in Paris. (That year, I was shuttling frequently between there and London.) I was alone on the evening I arrived, and looked forward to a pleasant dinner at Mme. G.’s, which was within two hundred meters of the hotel, in the Square Louvois, where I always stop. Madame’s was more than a place to eat, although one ate superbly there. Arriving, I would have a bit of talk with the proprietress, then with the waitresses—Germaine and Lucienne—who had composed the original staff. Waiters had been added as the house prospered, but they were of less marked personality. Madame was a bosomy woman—voluble, tawny, with a big nose and lank black hair—who made one think of a Saracen. (The Saracens reached Gascony in the eighth century.) Her conversation was a chronicle of letters and the theatre—as good as a subscription to Figaro Littéraire, but more advanced. It was somewhere between the avant-garde and the main body, but within hailing distance of both and enriched with the names of the great people who had been in recently—M. Cocteau, Gene Kelly, la Comtesse de Vogüé. It was always well to give an appearance of listening, lest she someday fail to save for you the last order of larks en brochette and bestow them on a more attentive customer. With Germaine and Lucienne, whom I had known when we were all younger, in 1939, the year of the drôle
de guerre, flirtation was now perfunctory, but the carte du jour was still the serious topic—for example, how the fat Belgian industrialist from Tournai had reacted to the caille vendangeuse, or quail potted with fresh grapes. “You know the man,” Germaine would say. “If it isn’t dazzling, he takes only two portions. But when he has three, then you can say to yourself…” She and Lucienne looked alike—compact little women, with high foreheads and cheekbones and solid, muscular legs, who walked like chasseurs à pied, 130 steps to the minute. In 1939, and again in 1944, Germaine had been a brunette and Lucienne a blonde, but in 1955 Germaine had become a blonde, too, and I found it hard to tell them apart.

  Among my fellow customers at Mme. G.’s I was always likely to see some friend out of the past. It is a risk to make an engagement for an entire evening with somebody you haven’t seen for years. This is particularly true in France now. The almost embarrassingly pro-American acquaintance of the Liberation may be by now a Communist Party–line hack; the idealistic young Resistance journalist may have become an editorial writer for the reactionary newspaper of a textile magnate. The Vichy apologist you met in Washington in 1941, who called de Gaulle a traitor and the creation of the British Intelligence Service, may now tell you that the general is the best thing ever, while the fellow you knew as a de Gaulle aide in London may now compare him to Sulla destroying the Roman Republic. As for the women, who is to say which of them has resisted the years? But in a good restaurant that all have frequented, you are likely to meet any of them again, for good restaurants are not so many nowadays that a Frenchman will permanently desert one—unless, of course, he is broke, and in that case it would depress you to learn of his misfortunes. If you happen to encounter your old friends when they are already established at their tables, you have the opportunity to greet them cordially and to size them up. If you still like them, you can make a further engagement.