Secret Ingredients Read online

  On the ghastly evening I speak of—a beautiful one in June—I perceived no change in the undistinguished exterior of Mme. G.’s restaurant. The name—something like Prospéria—was the same, and since the plate-glass windows were backed with scrim, it was impossible to see inside. Nor, indeed, did I notice any difference when I first entered. The bar, the tables, the banquettes covered with leatherette, the simple décor of mirrors and pink-marble slabs were the same. The premises had been a business employees’ bar-and-café before Mme. G., succeeding a long string of obscure proprietors, made it illustrious. She had changed the fare and the clientele but not the cadre. There are hundreds of identical fronts and interiors in Paris, turned out by some mass producer in the late twenties. I might have been warned by the fact that the room was empty, but it was only eight o’clock and still light outdoors. I had come unusually early because I was so hungry. A man whom I did not recognize came to meet me, rubbing his hands and hailing me as an old acquaintance. I thought he might be a waiter who had served me. (The waiters, as I have said, were not the marked personalities of the place.) He had me at a table before I sensed the trap.

  “Madame goes well?” I asked politely.

  “No, Madame is lightly ill,” he said, with what I now realize was a guilty air.

  He presented me with a carte du jour written in the familiar purple ink on the familiar wide sheet of paper with the name and telephone number of the restaurant at the top. The content of the menu, however, had become Italianized, the spelling had deteriorated, and the prices had diminished to a point where it would be a miracle if the food continued distinguished.

  “Madame still conducts the restaurant?” I asked sharply.

  I could now see that he was a Piedmontese of the most evasive description. From rubbing his hands he had switched to twisting them.

  “Not exactly,” he said, “but we make the same cuisine.”

  I could not descry anything in the smudged ink but misspelled noodles and unorthographical “escaloppinis” Italians writing French by ear produce a regression to an unknown ancestor of both languages.

  “Try us,” my man pleaded, and, like a fool, I did. I was hungry. Forty minutes later, I stamped out into the street as purple as an aubergine with rage. The minestrone had been cabbage scraps in greasy water. I had chosen côtes d’agneau as the safest item in the mediocre catalogue that the Prospéria’s prospectus of bliss had turned into overnight. They had been cut from a tired Alpine billy goat and seared in machine oil, and the haricots verts with which they were served resembled decomposed whiskers from a theatrical-costume beard.

  “The same cuisine?” I thundered as I flung my money on the falsified addition that I was too angry to verify. “You take me for a jackass!”

  I am sure that as soon as I turned my back the scoundrel nodded. The restaurant has changed hands at least once since then.

  In the morning, I telephoned Mirande. He confirmed the disaster. Mme. G., ill, had closed the restaurant. Worse, she had sold the lease and the goodwill, and had definitely retired.

  “What is the matter with her?” I asked, in a tone appropriate to fatal disease.

  “I think it was trying to read Simone de Beauvoir,” he said. “A syncope.”

  Mme. G. still lives, but Mirande is dead. When I met him in Paris the following November, his appearance gave no hint of decline. It was the season for his sable-lined overcoat à l’impresario, and a hat that was a furry cross between a porkpie and a homburg. Since the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin no longer existed, I had invited him to lunch with me at a very small place called the Gratin Dauphinois, on the Rue Chabanais, directly across from the building that once housed the most celebrated sporting house in Paris. The Rue Chabanais is a short street that runs from the Square Louvois to the Rue des Petits Champs—perhaps a hundred yards—but before the reform wave stimulated by a municipal councillor named Marthe Richard at the end of the Second World War, the name Chabanais had a cachet all its own. Mme. Richard will go down in history as the Carry Nation of sex. Now the house is closed, and the premises are devoted to some low commercial purpose. The walls of the midget Gratin Dauphinois are hung with cartoons that have a nostalgic reference to the past glories of the street.

  Mirande, when he arrived, crackled with jokes about the locale. He taunted me with being a criminal who haunts the scene of his misdeeds. The fare at the Gratin is robust, as it is in Dauphiné, but it did not daunt Mirande. The wine card, similarly, is limited to the strong, rough wines of Arbois and the like, with a couple of Burgundies for clients who want to show off. There are no clarets; the proprietor hasn’t heard of them. There are, of course, a few champagnes, for wedding parties or anniversaries, so Mirande, with Burgundies discounseled by his doctor, decided on champagne throughout the meal. This was a drôle combination with the mountain food, but I had forgotten about the lack of claret when I invited him.

  We ordered a couple of dozen escargots en pots de chambre to begin with. These are snails baked and served, for the client’s convenience, in individual earthenware crocks, instead of being forced back into shells. The snail, of course, has to be taken out of his shell to be prepared for cooking. The shell he is forced back into may not be his own. There is thus not even a sentimental justification for his reincarceration. The frankness of the service en pot does not improve the preparation of the snail, nor does it detract from it, but it does facilitate and accelerate his consumption. (The notion that the shell proves the snail’s authenticity, like the head left on a woodcock, is invalid, as even a suburban housewife knows nowadays; you can buy a tin of snail shells in a supermarket and fill them with a mixture of nutted cream cheese and chopped olives.)

  Mirande finished his dozen first, meticulously swabbing out the garlicky butter in each pot with a bit of bread that was fitted to the bore of the crock as precisely as a bullet to a rifle barrel. Tearing bread like that takes practice. We had emptied the first bottle of champagne when he placed his right hand delicately on the point of his waistcoat farthest removed from his spinal column.

  “Liebling,” he said, “I am not well.”

  It was like the moment when I first saw Joe Louis draped on the ropes. A great pity filled my heart. “Maître,” I said, “I will take you home.”

  The dismayed patronne waved to her husband in the kitchen (he could see her through the opening he pushed the dishes through) to suspend the preparation of the gendarme de Morteau—the great smoked sausage in its tough skin—that we had proposed to follow the snails with. (“Short and broad in shape, it is made of pure pork and…is likely to be accompanied…by hot potato salad.”—Root, page 217.) We had decided to substitute for the pommes à l’huile the gratin dauphinois itself. (“Thinly sliced potatoes are moistened with boiled milk and beaten egg, seasoned with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and mixed with grated cheese, of the Gruyère type. The potatoes are then put into an earthenware dish which has been rubbed with garlic and then buttered, spotted with little dabs of butter, and sprinkled with more grated cheese. It is then cooked slowly in not too hot an oven.”—Root, page 228.) After that, we were going to have a fowl in cream with morilles—wild black mushrooms of the mountains. We abandoned all.

  I led Mirande into the street and hailed a taxi.

  “I am not well, Liebling,” he said. “I grow old.”

  He lived far from the restaurant, beyond the Place de l’Etoile, in the Paris of the successful. From time to time on our way, he would say, “It is nothing. You must excuse me. I am not well.”

  The apartment house in which he and Mme. B. lived resembled one of the chic modern museums of the quarter, with entrance gained through a maze of garden patches sheathed in glass. Successive metal grilles swung open before us as I pushed buttons that Mirande indicated—in these modern palaces there are no visible flunkies—until we reached an elevator that smoothly shot us upward to his apartment, which was rather larger in area than the Square Louvois. The décor, with basalt columns and floo
rs covered with the skins of jumbo Siberian tigers—a special strain force-fed to supply old-style movie stars—reminded me of the sets for Belphégor, a French serial of silent days that I enjoyed when I was a student at the Sorbonne in 1926. (It was, I think, about an ancient Egyptian high priest who came to life and set up bachelor quarters in Paris in the style of the Temple of Karnak.) Three or four maids rushed to relieve Mirande of his sable-lined coat, his hat, and his cane, topped with the horn of an albino chamois. I helped him to a divan on which two Theda Baras could have defended their honor simultaneously against two villains of the silents without either couple’s getting in the other’s way. Most of the horizontal surfaces in the room were covered with sculpture and most of the vertical ones with large paintings. In pain though he was, Mirande called my attention to these works of art.

  “All the sculptures are by Renoir,” he said. “It was his hobby. And all the paintings are by Maillol. It was his hobby. If it were the other way around, I would be one of the richest chaps in France. Both men were my friends. But then one doesn’t give one’s friends one’s bread and butter. And, after all, it’s less banal as it is.”

  After a minute, he asked me to help him to his bedroom, which was in a wing of the apartment all his own. When we got there, one of the maids came in and took his shoes off.

  “I am in good hands now, Liebling,” he said. “Farewell until next time. It is nothing.”

  I telephoned the next noon, and he said that his doctor, who was a fool, insisted that he was ill.

  Again I left Paris, and when I returned, late the following January, I neglected Mirande. A Father William is a comforting companion for the middle-aged—he reminds you that the best is yet to be and that there’s a dance in the old dame yet—but a sick old man is discouraging. My conscience stirred when I read in a gossip column in France-Dimanche that Toto Mirande was convalescing nicely and was devouring caviar at a great rate—with champagne, of course. (I had never thought of Mirande as Toto, which is baby slang for “little kid,” but from then on I never referred to him in any other way; I didn’t want anybody to think I wasn’t in the know.) So the next day I sent him a pound of fresh caviar from Kaspia, in the Place de la Madeleine. It was the kind of medication I approved of.

  I received a note from Mirande by tube next morning, reproaching me for spoiling him. He was going better, he wrote, and would telephone in a day or two to make an appointment for a return bout. When he called, he said that the idiotic doctor would not yet permit him to go out to a restaurant, and he invited me, instead, to a family dinner at Mme. B.’s. “Only a few old friends, and not the cuisine I hope to give you at Maxim’s next time,” he said. “But one makes out.”

  On the appointed evening, I arrived early—or on time, which amounts to the same thing—chez Mme. B.; you take taxis when you can get them in Paris at the rush hours. The handsome quarter overlooking the Seine above the Trocadéro is so dull that when my taxi deposited me before my host’s door, I had no inclination to stroll to kill time. It is like Park Avenue or the near North Side of Chicago. So I was the first or second guest to arrive, and Mme. B.’s fourteen-year-old daughter, by a past marriage, received me in the Belphégor room, apologizing because her mother was still with Toto—she called him that. She need not have told me, for at that moment I heard Madame, who is famous for her determined voice, storming at an unmistakable someone: “You go too far, Toto. It’s disgusting. People all over Paris are kind enough to send you caviar, and because you call it monotonous, you throw it at the maid! If you think servants are easy to come by…”

  When they entered the room a few minutes later, my old friend was all smiles. “How did you know I adore caviar to such a point?” he asked me. But I was worried because of what I had heard; the Mirande I remembered would never have been irritated by the obligation to eat a few extra kilos of fresh caviar. The little girl, who hoped I had not heard, embraced Toto. “Don’t be angry with Maman!” she implored him. It was a gathering so familial that it recalled the home scenes in Gigi.

  My fellow guests included the youngish new wife of an old former premier, who was unavoidably detained in Lille at a congress of the party he now headed; it mustered four deputies, of whom two formed a Left Wing and two a Right Wing. (“If they had elected a fifth at the last election, or if, by good luck, one had been defeated, they could afford the luxury of a Center,” Mirande told me in identifying the lady. “C’est malheureux, a party without a Center. It limits the possibilities of maneuver.”) There was also an amiable couple in their advanced sixties or beginning seventies, of whom the husband was the grand manitou of Veuve Clicquot champagne. Mirande introduced them by their right name, which I forget, and during the rest of the evening addressed them as M. and Mme. Clicquot. There was a forceful, black-haired man from the Midi, in the youth of middle age—square-shouldered, stocky, decisive, blatantly virile—who, I was told, managed Mme. B.’s vinicultural enterprises in Provence. There were two guests of less decided individuality, whom I barely remember, and filling out the party were the young girl—shy, carefully unsophisticated, and unadorned—Mme. B., Mirande, and me. Mme. B. had a strong triangular face on a strong triangular base—a strong chin, high cheekbones, and a wide, strong jaw, but full of stormy good nature. She was a woman who, if she had been a man, would have wanted to be called Honest John. She had a high color and an iron handgrip, and repeatedly affirmed that there was no affectation about her, that she was sans façon, that she called her shots as she saw them. “I won’t apologize,” she said to me. “I know you’re a great feeder, like Toto here, but I won’t offer you the sort of menu he used to get in that restaurant you know of, where he ruined his plumbing. Oh, that woman! I used to be so jealous. I can offer only a simple home dinner.” And she waved us toward a marble table about twenty-two feet long. Unfortunately for me, she meant it. The dinner began with a kidney-and-mushroom mince served in a giant popover—the kind of thing you might get at a literary hotel in New York. The inner side of the pastry had the feeling of a baby’s palm, in the true tearoom tradition.

  “It is savory but healthy,” Madame said firmly, setting an example by taking a large second helping before starting the dish on its second round. Mirande regarded the untouched doughy fabric on his plate with diaphanously veiled horror, but he had an excuse in the state of his health. “It’s still a little rich for me, darling,” he murmured. The others, including me, delivered salvos of compliments. I do not squander my moral courage on minor crises. M. Clicquot said, “Impossible to obtain anything like this chez Lapérouse!” Mme. Clicquot said, “Not even at the Tour d’Argent!”

  “And what do you think of my little wine?” Mme. B. asked M. Clicquot. “I’m so anxious for your professional opinion—as a rival producer, you know.”

  The wine was a thin rosé in an Art Nouveau bottle with a label that was a triumph of lithography; it had spires and monks and troubadours and blondes in wimples on it, and the name of the cru was spelled out in letters with Gothic curlicues and pennons. The name was something like Château Guillaume d’Aquitaine, grand vin.

  “What a madly gay little wine, my dear!” M. Clicquot said, repressing, but not soon enough, a grimace of pain.

  “One would say a Tavel of a good year,” I cried, “if one were a complete bloody fool.” I did not say the second clause aloud.

  My old friend looked at me with new respect. He was discovering in me a capacity for hypocrisy that he had never credited me with before.

  The main course was a shoulder of mutton with white beans—the poor relation of a gigot, and an excellent dish in its way, when not too dry. This was.

  For the second wine, the man from the Midi proudly produced a red, in a bottle without a label, which he offered to M. Clicquot with the air of a tomcat bringing a field mouse to its master’s feet. “Tell me what you think of this,” he said as he filled the champagne-man’s glass.

  M. Clicquot—a veteran of such challenges, I could well imagine—held
the glass against the light, dramatically inhaled the bouquet, and then drank, after a slight stiffening of the features that indicated to me that he knew what he was in for. Having emptied half the glass, he deliberated.

  “It has a lovely color,” he said.

  “But what is it? What is it?” the man from the Midi insisted.

  “There are things about it that remind me of a Beaujolais,” M. Clicquot said (he must have meant that it was wet), “but on the whole I should compare it to a Bordeaux” (without doubt unfavorably).

  Mme. B.’s agent was beside himself with triumph. “Not one or the other!” he crowed. “It’s from the domaine—the Château Guillaume d’Aquitaine!”

  The admirable M. Clicquot professed astonishment, and I, when I had emptied a glass, said that there would be a vast market for the wine in America if it could be properly presented. “Unfortunately,” I said, “the cost of advertising…” and I rolled my eyes skyward.

  “Ah, yes,” Mme. B. cried sadly. “The cost of advertising!”

  I caught Mirande looking at me again, and thought of the Pétrus and the Cheval Blanc of our last meal together chez Mme. G. He drank a glass of the red. After all, he wasn’t going to die of thirst.

  For dessert, we had a simple fruit tart with milk—just the thing for an invalid’s stomach, although Mirande didn’t eat it.

  M. Clicquot retrieved the evening, oenologically, by producing two bottles of a wine “impossible to find in the cellars of any restaurant in France”—Veuve Clicquot ’19. There is at present a great to-do among wine merchants in France and the United States about young wines, and an accompanying tendency to cry down the “legend” of the old. For that matter, hardware clerks, when you ask for a can opener with a wooden handle that is thick enough to give a grip and long enough for leverage, try to sell you complicated mechanical folderols, and, when you go on insisting, tell you that effectual things are out of fashion. The motivation in both cases is the same—simple greed. To deal in wines of varied ages requires judgment, the sum of experience and flair. It involves the risk of money, because every lot of wine, like every human being, has a life span, and it is this that the good vintner must estimate. His object should be to sell his wine at its moment of maximum value—to the drinker as well as the merchant. The vintner who handles only young wines is like an insurance company that will write policies only on children; the unqualified dealer wants to risk nothing and at the same time wants to avoid tying up his money. The client misled by brochures warning him off clarets and champagnes that are over ten years old and assuring him that Beaujolais should be drunk green will miss the major pleasures of wine drinking. To deal wisely in wines and merely to sell them are things as different as being an expert in ancient coins and selling Indian-head pennies over a souvenir counter.