Secret Ingredients Read online

  Despite these convictions of mine about wine, I should never have tried a thirty-seven-year-old champagne on the recommendation of a lesser authority than the blessed M. Clicquot. It is the oldest by far that I have ever drunk. (H. Warner Allen, in The Wines of France, published circa 1924, which is my personal wine bible, says, “In the matter of age, champagne is a capricious wine. As a general rule, it has passed its best between fifteen and twenty, yet a bottle thirty years old may prove excellent, though all its fellows may be quite undrinkable.” He cites Saintsbury’s note that “a Perrier Jouet of 1857 was still majestical in 1884,” adding, “And all wine-drinkers know of such amazing discoveries.” Mr. Root, whose book is not a foolish panegyric of everything French, is hard on champagne, in my opinion. He falls into a critical error more common among writers less intelligent: he attacks it for not being something else. Because its excellences are not those of Burgundy or Bordeaux, he underrates the peculiar qualities it does not share with them, as one who would chide Dickens for not being Stendhal, or Marciano for not being Benny Leonard.)

  The Veuve Clicquot ’19 was tart without brashness—a refined but effective understatement of younger champagnes, which run too much to rhetoric, at best. Even so, the force was all there, to judge from the two glasses that were a shade more than my share. The wine still had a discrete cordon—the ring of bubbles that forms inside the glass—and it had developed the color known as “partridge eye.” I have never seen a partridge’s eye, because the bird, unlike woodcock, is served without the head, but the color the term indicates is that of serous blood or a maple leaf on the turn.

  “How nice it was, life in 1919, eh, M. Clicquot?” Mirande said as he sipped his second glass.

  After we had finished M. Clicquot’s offering, we played a game called lying poker for table stakes, each player being allowed a capital of five hundred francs, not to be replenished under any circumstances. When Mme. B. had won everybody’s five hundred francs, the party broke up. Mirande promised me that he would be up and about soon, and would show me how men reveled in the heroic days of la belle époque, but I had a feeling that the bell was cracked.

  I left Paris and came back to it seven times during the next year, but never saw him. Once, being in his quarter in the company of a remarkably pretty woman, I called him up, simply because I knew he would like to look at her, but he was too tired. I forget when I last talked to him on the telephone. During the next winter, while I was away in Egypt or Jordan or someplace where French papers don’t circulate, he died, and I did not learn of it until I returned to Europe.

  When Mirande first faltered, in the Rue Chabanais, I had failed to correlate cause and effect. I had even felt a certain selfish alarm. If eating well was beginning to affect Mirande at eighty, I thought, I had better begin taking in sail. After all, I was only thirty years his junior. But after the dinner at Mme. B.’s, and in the light of subsequent reflection, I saw that what had undermined his constitution was Mme. G.’s defection from the restaurant business. For years, he had been able to escape Mme. B.’s solicitude for his health by lunching and dining in the restaurant of Mme. G., the sight of whom Mme. B. could not support. Entranced by Mme. G.’s magnificent food, he had continued to live “like a cock in a pie”—eating as well, and very nearly as much, as when he was thirty. The organs of the interior—never very intelligent, in spite of what the psychosomatic quacks say—received each day the amount of pleasure to which they were accustomed, and never marked the passage of time; it was the indispensable roadwork of the prizefighter. When Mme. G., good soul, retired, moderation began its fatal inroads on his resistance. My old friend’s appetite, insufficiently stimulated, started to loaf—the insidious result, no doubt, of the advice of the doctor whose existence he had revealed to me by that slip of the tongue about why he no longer drank Burgundy. Mirande commenced, perhaps, by omitting the fish course after the oysters, or the oysters before the fish, then began neglecting his cheeses and skipping the second bottle of wine on odd Wednesdays. What he called his pipes (“ma tuyauterie”), being insufficiently exercised, lost their tone, like the leg muscles of a retired champion. When, in his kindly effort to please me, he challenged the escargots en pots de chambre, he was like an old fighter who tries a comeback without training for it. That, however, was only the revelation of the rot that had already taken place. What always happens happened. The damage was done, but it could so easily have been averted had he been warned against the fatal trap of abstinence.

  1959

  “Do you want to be vaguely dissatisfied with Italian or Korean?”

  THE AFTERGLOW

  A. J. LIEBLING

  When I returned to Paris in the fall of 1939, after an absence of twelve years, I noticed a decline in the serious quality of restaurants that could not be blamed on a war then one month old. The decline, I later learned, had been going on even in the twenties, when I made my first studies in eating, but I had had no standard of comparison then; what I had taken for a Golden Age was in fact Late Silver. Like me, Waverley Root, author of a recent book called The Food of France, made his first soundings in the subject in 1927, both of us being unaware that the watershed was behind us and that we were on a long, historic downslope. Enough of the glory remained to furnish us with memories by which to judge the punier times ahead, though; the food of France in 1926–27 still constituted the greatest corpus of culinary thought and practice anywhere. The only touted challenger for the lead then was China, and the only touts were people who wanted to let you know they had been there. When you got these Orientalized fines gueules to a table where they had to use a knife and fork instead of chopsticks, they could not tell the difference between a Western sandwich and a darne de saumon froid sauce verte. In most cases, their sole preparation for gourmandizing had been a diet of institutional macaroni in a Midwestern seminary for medical missionaries, and any pasture the Lord led them to was bound to be better.

  Chinese haute cuisine is unlikely to improve under the austere regime of Mao. The food of France, although it has gone off disastrously, is still the best there is. But we are headed for a gastronomic Dark Time, such as followed the breakup of classical civilization, and nobody younger than Root, who is fifty-six, can remember the twilight. My lamented mentor Yves Mirande, the author of a hundred successful farces and one of the last great gastronomes of France, could remember the full glow of the sun, before the First World War. “After the First War, everything had already changed,” Mirande wrote me in 1952, when he was seventy-seven. “The mentality of today began to show the tip of its ear.” One thing that changed early was the position of the women he called les courtisanes de marque—the famous women of the town—and this had a prodigious, if indirect, effect upon the sumptuary arts. “Yes, Paris was radiant, elegant, and refined,” Mirande wrote of his heaven before 1914. “In the world and in the half-world, feasts followed upon feasts, wild nights upon vertiginous suppers. It was the courtesans’ grande époque. Innocent of preoccupation with the future, they had no trace of a desire to build up an income for old age. They were gamblers, beautiful gamblers, with a certain natural distinction in their ways and a je ne sais quoi of good breeding—the bonnet thrown over the windmill, but without falling into vulgarity or coarseness. They had a tone—a tone as distinct from the society woman’s as from the fancy girl’s. All the successful demimondaines ordered their clothes from the great couturiers. Their carriages were splendid, better turned out for a drive in the Bois than those of duchesses and ambassadors.” Moreover, these town toasts ate magnificently, and boasted of the quality of the meals their admirers provided for them. It was the age not only of the dazzling public supper but of the cabinet particulier, where even a bourgeois seduction was preceded by an eleven-course meal. With these altruistic sensualists, a menu of superior imagination could prove more effective than a gift of Suez shares; besides, the ladies’ hosts had the pleasure of sharing the meals they had to pay for. The courtisanes de marque were substantial in a Ve
nus de Milo–y, just short of billowy way. Waists and ankles tapered, but their owners provided a lot for them to taper from. Eating was a soin de beauté that the girls enjoyed.

  The successful Frenchman of the early 1900s was fat; it was the evidence of his success, an economic caste mark. To be thin at thirty was a handicap in the world of affairs, the equivalent in our culture of driving a year-before-last automobile shorter than a Coast Guard cutter. It indicated that one had never been in a position to eat one’s fill. Caricature accents but does not reverse reality, and I cherish a special twenty-four-page number of L’Assiette au Beurre, a journal of savage caricature, printed in 1902 and devoted to le singe, which was, and is, argot for “the employer.” Every successful singe in the issue—rapacious, lecherous, murderous—is fat. The only unfat singe is the one on the last page—an obviously unsuccessful pimp who is beating up a thin girl, clearly not a courtisane de marque.

  By 1927, however, the celebrated belles, amateur and professional, had become even more skeletal than they are today. Lady Diana Manners and Rosamond Pinchot, the international beauties paired in Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle, for example, were as leggy and flat as a pair of handsome young giraffes. It was no longer any use taking a woman to a great restaurant except to show her off. She would not eat, and, out of ill temper disguised as solicitude for her escort’s health, she would put him off his feed as well. The chic restaurants of Paris—which were none of my or Root’s concern at the moment—were already beginning their transition from shrines of dégustation to showcases for the flapper figure. The men, too, had turned to the mortification of the flesh, though less drastically. Without exception, the chaps who emerged from the trenches at the end of the war had lost weight, and at such a time everyone wants to resemble a hero. Of the victorious commanders, only Joffre and Sarrail had figures like Napoleon’s, and they had not been conspicuously successful. Foch and Pétain were ramrods, like Pershing. Also, le sport, which before the war had been considered a form of eccentricity, was now taken seriously. When Lacoste, Cochet, and Borotra beat the United States for the Davis Cup that very spring, the sensation was greater than when Lindbergh completed his transatlantic flight. There was also a wave of that endemic European malady americo-mimesis; the attack in the twenties is often forgotten by contemporary Europeans in their rage against the bigger one now in progress. The infection then was carried by jazz and by American silent moving pictures, which had nearly wiped out European films. (The injection of the human voice into movies and the resultant language barrier gave the foreign cinema a decade of reprieve.) And, finally, there was the legend of the Perpetual Boom. America, it appeared, was the country that had discovered an infallible system for beating the races. This made Americans, in the abstract, as unpopular as we eventually became in the forties, but it also spurred imitative identification. The silent-film comedian Harold Lloyd, who played go-getting young-businessman types, energetic to the point of acrobacy, was the pattern-symbol of the Frenchman disgusted with old methods. Even a dilettante can still spot Frenchmen of that vintage by their tortoise-shell glasses and their briskness. (Jacques Soustelle is a classic specimen.) Their costume has become fixed, like the Sikh’s turban. The crash of 1929 discredited the original motivation of the mimesis, but the Frenchman trapped by habit behind his tortoise-shells had forgotten why he put them on.

  In 1927, these changes were beginning to be reflected in the composition of the restaurant world. The 1925 edition of the Guide du Gourmand à Paris, a Baedeker for the aspiring eater, listed six restaurants as its “peloton de tête,” or leading platoon—Montagné, Larue, Foyot, Voisin, Paillard, and La Tour d’Argent, all “temples of gastronomy” for serious feeders. (Of the first five, all venerable, four ceased to exist even before the declaration of the Second World War. Larue maintained its majestic style through the winter of the drôle de guerre, 1939–40, but has disappeared since, to be replaced by an establishment called Queenie’s, whose name, as the French say, is a program. La Tour d’Argent, in order to continue, has gone in heavily for public relations, and floodlights itself at night, like a national monument. Such expedients may be justified as being necessary to survival, but they cast a shadow on the age that renders them necessary.) The specialties that the Guide listed as the glories of these great houses in their declining years were not of a sort to accord with low-calorie diets or with the new cult of the human liver. Before the First World War, the doctors of France had been a submissive and well-mannered breed, who recognized that their role was to facilitate gluttony, not discourage it. They returned to civilian life full of a new sense of authority, gained from the habit of amputation. Instead of continuing, as in the past, to alleviate indigestion, assuage dyspepsia, and solace attacks of gout, they proposed the amputation of three or four courses from their patients’ habitual repasts. Since the innovators were, as always, the doctors most in fashion, the first patients to be affected were the most fashionable—precisely those who patronized the most expensive restaurants. The Guide listed Montagné’s greatest attractions as “meats and fish under a crust of pastry; salmon, turbot, prepared à l’ancienne, in a sheath of dough; venerable Louis-Philippe brandy. And the coffee!!!” This is a catalogue of horrors for a man worried about his weight and works, but it was a program of delight for an eater of Mirande’s grande époque.

  The constant diminution of the public that was interested in flamboyant food ended the economic justification of the restaurants staffed to supply it; the new doctrines had the same effect on temples of gastronomy that the Reformation had on the demand for style-flamboyant cathedrals. At first, the disappearance of the expensive restaurants was not felt at the lower levels where Root and I reveled, but it slowly became evident, as the disappearance of the great opera houses would become evident in the standards of professional singing; with no Metropolitan to aspire to, the child soprano of Boulder, Colorado, would have no incentive to work on her scales. As a career for the artistically ambitious, cooking became less attractive just at the moment when alternative means of earning a living grew more numerous for the offspring of the proletariat. Child-labor laws and compulsory education were additional obstacles in the way of the early apprenticeship that forms great cooks. One of the last of the Fratellini family of clowns, an old man, made a television address in Paris a few years ago in which he blamed the same conjunction of circumstances for the dearth of good young circus clowns. “When I was a child, my father, bless him, broke my legs, so that I would walk comically, as a clown should,” the old man said. (I approximate his remarks from memory.) “Now there are people who would take a poor view of that sort of thing.” In another area of the arts, Rocky Marciano’s preceptor, Charlie Goldman, a septuagenarian, says that there will never again be great boxers, because such must begin their professional careers before the age of puberty, while they can keep their minds on their business. (Marciano, who began late, was a fighter, not a boxer, and fighting is more a knack than an art.) When Persian carpets were at their best, weavers began at the age of four and were master workmen at eleven.

  During the twenties and thirties, the proportion of French restaurants that called themselves auberges and relais increased, keeping pace with the motorization of the French gullet. They depended for their subsistence on Sunday and holiday drivers, who might never come over the road again, and the Guide Michelin, the organ of a manufacturer of automobile tires, ominously began to be the arbiter of where to dine—a depressing example of the subordination of art to business. By 1939, the shiny new “medieval” joints along the equally new highways had begun to supplant the old hotels, across the road from the railroad stations, that in the first quarter of the century had been the centers of good, solid provincial eating. The hotel proprietors’ living depended on the patronage of traveling salesmen, whose robust appetites and experienced palates had combined with their economical natures to maintain the standards of honest catering. But the drummers no longer moved by train, doing one large town or sma
ll city a day and staying overnight at the Hôtel du Commerce or the Lion d’Or. They were now motorized, and scooted about the highways in minute Citroëns and Arondes, managing to get home to their bases in the larger provincial cities at the day’s end. They lunched in a hurry—“like Americans”—and the rural hotels began to die. When the peasants, too, started to become motorized, the small towns themselves began to die. The small-town and small-city merchants had pushed a bill through the Chamber of Deputies prohibiting the great retail chains, like Monoprix, from opening stores in cities of less than ten thousand population, and one result was to accelerate the desertion of the small towns by shoppers; to get the variety and lower prices of the chain stores, they passed up the old centers altogether.