Secret Ingredients Page 8

  By 1939, the country coyness of the auberges and relais, with their pastiche medieval décors and their menus edited with fake-archaic whimsey—the equivalent of “ye” and “shoppe”—had even invaded the capital. “Humectez vos gousiers avec les bons vins du noble pays du patron en actendant les chatouille-gencives du Maistre Queux,” a Paris restaurant menu was likely to read, in place of the 1926–27 “Vins en carafe—rouge ou blanc, 50 centimes. Saucissons d’ail, 50 centimes. Sardines…” The new baby-talk Rabelais was about as appetizing as, and on a level with, some of our own bill-of-fare prose: “Irrigate the li’l ol’ red lane with some of our prime drinkin’ whiskey and branch water while the Chef Supreme rustles up an Infra-Red Popover Salad Bowl.”

  The Rue Sainte-Anne is a medium-long street, narrow and totally without distinction, that begins near the Rue de Rivoli end of the Avenue de l’Opéra and runs north toward the Grands Boulevards; it roughly parallels the Rue de Richelieu, at a remove of a couple of squalid blocks, but it has no Comédie Française to illustrate its beginning and no Bibliothèque Nationale to lend dignity to its middle. A block or two before it reaches the Boulevards, it takes the name of the Rue de Gramont. It is lined with uninviting hotels, cobbler’s shops, neighborhood hairdressers, and establishments that sell the drab sundries of wholesale businesses—wooden buttons and hat blocks, patterns for dresses, office supplies—and with restaurants that feed office workers at noon. Among all the restaurants, there is frequently a good one, but it never lasts long. The Rue Sainte-Anne is the kind of street that seems to attract independent spirits. A talented cook who opens there is an Expressionist; he feels no need of a public. In 1927, one such cook had been a man named Maillabuau. He practiced his art behind a dour street façade (he was a horseplayer, and a losing one), but his restaurant, despite its threadbare aspect, was listed right behind the peloton de tête of the Guide du Gourmand à Paris. In 1939, on my first evening in wartime Paris, I headed straight for Maillabuau’s, but it had disappeared; I walked the length of the Rue Sainte-Anne twice to make sure. Yielding to hunger, I entered another restaurant, of the same unpromising aspect—a storefront muffled in curtains against air raids but extruding a finger of light to show that it was open for business. (Everybody in France, at that stage, waged a war of small compromises.) A shabby exterior is no guarantee of good food—perhaps more often it is the contrary—but I was too hungry by then to leave the neighborhood. Nor were the streets hospitable in the dimout. There were no cruising taxis.

  Thus it was that I stumbled into the family circle of M. Louis Bouillon, a native of Bourg-en-Bresse, which is the eating-poultry capital of France and in the home province of the great Brillat-Savarin, who was born in Belley. M. Bouillon was a small man with bright, liquid eyes, a long nose, like a woodcock’s, and a limp, drooping mustache that looked as if it had been steamed over cook pots until it was permanently of the consistency of spinach. When I entered, he was sitting with his elbows on a table and his head in his hands, contemplating a tumbler of marc de Bourgogne as if trying to read the fate of France in an ink pool. Around the table, with newspapers and coffee, were seated Mme. Bouillon; Marie-Louise, the waitress; the Bouillons’ daughter, Dominique, a handsome girl of eighteen; and their son, not yet called up for service. (I did not know their individual identities yet, but I soon learned them.) Mme. Bouillon brightened, and Marie-Louise rose and came to meet me. “Sit where you wish, Monsieur,” she said. “You have your choice.”

  There had been a scare at the very beginning of the war, and a great many people had left Paris, expecting it to be bombarded. They had not yet quite decided to come back—it was in the first week of October 1939—and business was, in consequence, dead. I have seldom been so welcome anywhere, or got so quickly acquainted. And I had fallen luckily. M. Bouillon was a great cook. His son was in apprenticeship at the Café de Paris, one of the few remaining big classic restaurants. His daughter, that paragon, could make a soufflé Grand Marnier that stood up on a flat plate. M. Bouillon told me that he had only recently taken over the restaurant. The rickety cane chairs and oak sideboard looked bad enough to have come from Maillabuau’s dispersal sale. But there was food. “The markets are full,” M. Bouillon said. “Game, shellfish—everything you can think of. It’s customers that lack.” I forget what I had at that first meal—a steak marchand de vin, or a civet of hare, perhaps, before the soufflé, which I ordered to see Dominique do her trick. Then I settled down to drinking with M. Bouillon. He was sombre at first. What kind of a war was this, he wanted to know. When would we go out and give them a crack on the snout? In his war, the horizon-blue war, the Boche had come as far as the Marne and been stopped within six weeks of the beginning. That put people in the proper cadence. This war set one’s nerves on edge. It was the British, he felt sure, who were responsible for the delay; they were perhaps negotiating with Fritz. A war that could not make up its mind had a funereal effect on commerce. The Americans were different from the English, but they weren’t in the war. M. Bouillon and I grew sentimental, optimistic, bellicose, and, finally, maudlin. I had a hard time finding my way home, although my hotel, the Louvois, was only 150 yards away—a straight line with one turn to the right.

  After that, M. Bouillon’s restaurant became my advanced field headquarters while I vainly tried to get an ordre de mission to go to the front, where nothing was happening anyway. Conditions rapidly simulated normal. The Parisians came back. An ill-founded feeling of satisfaction succeeded the alarm and puzzlement of the first days; the Allies might not be hurting the Nazis, but at least the Nazis weren’t hurting the Allies. There was a growing public hunch that the “real” war would never begin. Often, M. Bouillon took me with him on his buying trips to Les Halles, so I could see that the Germans weren’t starving Paris. On these trips, we would carry a number of baskets and, as we filled one after another with oysters, artichokes, or pheasants, we would leave them at a series of bars, in each of which we had one or two Calvas. The new Calvados sold at the market bars was like a stab with a penknife, and at some bars we would drink Pouilly-Fumé by the glass for a change of pace. The markets were overflowing; I recall that there was fruit from Mussolini’s Italy and fine poultry from Prince Paul’s Yugoslavia. M. Bouillon drew my attention to the chickens, which he said were as handsome as those of Bresse but inferior in flavor. There was transport, apparently, for everything but war materials. (I drew the wrong conclusion, naturally; if there was transport for the superfluous, I inferred, the essential must already have been taken care of.) The Bouillon theory was that when we had completed our round of Les Halles, we would circle back on our course to pick up the baskets, with a courtesy round at each port of call, and thus avoid a lot of useless toting. It worked all right when we could remember the bars where we had left the various things, but sometimes we couldn’t, and on such occasions M. Bouillon would cry that restauration was a cursed métier, and that if the government would permit, he would take up his old Lebel rifle and leave for the front. But they would have to let him wear horizon blue; he could not stand the sight of khaki, because it reminded him of the English.

  Of all the dishes that M. Bouillon made for me, I remember with most affection a salmis of woodcock in Armagnac with which I astounded a French friend—a champagne man—whom I entertained in the little restaurant. I’m sure that it was the best I’ve had in my life, and M. Bouillon could do almost as well with a partridge, a beef stew, or a blood pudding with mashed potatoes. My Frenchman, as a partner in a good firm of champagne-makers, had to get around to an enormous number of restaurants in a normal year, so when he acknowledged M. Bouillon’s greatness, I felt the same gratification that I felt much later when Spink’s, of London, authenticated a coin of Hadrian, minted at Gaza, that I had bought from an Arab in Gaza itself. M. Bouillon was my discovery, and the enjoyment of a woodcock signed “Bouillon” was an irreplaceable privilege.

  Like most fine cooks, M. Bouillon flew into rages and wept easily; the heat of kitchens per
haps affects cooks’ tear ducts as well as their tempers. Whenever we returned to the restaurant from Les Halles minus some item that M. Bouillon had paid for and that Madame had already inscribed on the menu, there would be a scene, but on the whole the Bouillons were a happy family—Madame and the children respected Monsieur as a great artist, though the son and daughter may have thought that he carried temperament a bit far. It was an ideal family unit to assure the future of a small restaurant; unfortunately, the war wiped it out. When the fighting began in earnest, in May 1940, the customers again left Paris. The son was mobilized, and the rest of the family went away to work in the canteen of a munitions factory. When I reentered Paris at the Liberation, in 1944, I looked them up and found that they had returned to the quarter but that they no longer had the restaurant. To conduct a restaurant successfully under the Occupation had called for a gift of connivance that poor M. Bouillon didn’t have. Since August 1944, I have lost sight of them.

  It was in 1939, too, that I was first introduced to M. Pierre and his establishment on the Place Gaillon. (The fact that the restaurant is not on the Rue Sainte-Anne but some two hundred meters from that street of transition perhaps accounts for the fact that M. Pierre is still in business.) It is my favorite middle-sized restaurant; the cuisine has a robust, classic clarity, like a boxing style based on the straight left. Everything is done the way it says in the book, without neologisms or deviations. The matériel is of the best, the service is deft, and the prices are rather stiff. M. Pierre has the appearance of a distinguished sinner in a René Clair movie; in 1939 he had prematurely white hair (to which his age now entitles him), a high complexion, and an upright backbone. His elegance was acquired not at the Quai d’Orsay but in the métier in which he made his debut, at fourteen. Our first bond was my discovery that he is a Norman, and from the proper part of Normandy—he is from Avranches, across from Mont-Saint-Michel—and, consequently, an amateur of Calvados, which, to my taste, is the best alcohol in the world. He sometimes spends weekends calling on peasants in his automobile and trying to wheedle from them a few bottles or—wild dream—a small keg of the veritable elixir of Eden. (Every Norman knows that the apple of the Bible is symbolic; it stands for the distilled cider that will turn the head of any woman.) Good Calvados is never sold legally. The tax leaves a taste that the Norman finds intolerable, like the stuff that wives put in whiskey to cure alcoholics. And only a few of Pierre’s clients know what they are drinking from his precious bottles; not everybody has had the advantage of a good early soaking in the blessed liquid. Millions of Frenchmen are obtuse enough to prefer cognac, and of late a lot have switched to Scotch.

  Even in 1939, Pierre, master of the whole classic repertoire of cooking, admitted that the elaborate numbers in it were no longer in demand. At noon, his restaurant sometimes had the aspect of what Americans were just beginning to call a steak house. “Only twenty-five percent of my customers order a plat du jour,” he said to me one day. “The rest take grilled things. It’s the doctors, you know. People think only of the liver and the figure. The stomach is forgotten.” He tried his best to modify the rigors of this cowboy diet—like a modiste adding a button or a ribbon to soften what the fashion writers call a stark line—by offering superb steak au poivre, steak Diane, steak maison (with a sauce made on a white-wine base), and steak marchand de vin (red-wine ditto), but a growing number of customers kept demanding their steak nature. “Oysters and a steak, a bit of langouste and a mixed grill, a salade niçoise and a lamb chop—it’s to die of monotony,” Pierre said. “If it were not for you and a few like you, I’d drop the cassoulet on Tuesday—it’s a loser.”

  The trend has continued since. One evening in 1956, I entered M. Pierre’s honest, soothing precincts. The headwaiter—old, gentle, dignified, with the face of a scholarly marquis—led me into the largest room, and in passing I observed a group of six (doubtless three couples) around a table at which a waiter was serving a magnificent plate côte de boeuf, while a colleague, following in his wake with the casserole from which the meat had been recovered, ladled onto each plate the leeks, the carrots, the onions, and the broth to which the beef had given its essential tone. The men, I could see, had acquired their jowls, their plump hands, and their globular outlines, uninterrupted by necks—as well as their happy faces—in an age before the doctors had spread the infection of fear; the wives had won their husbands’ love, and learned to feel secure in it, before the emergence of the woman with a flat basic figure, on which she simulates a pectoral bulge when Balenciaga’s designs call for it, and a caudal swelling when fashion goes into reverse.

  When I arrived at my table, I did not even look at the carte du jour; my nose was full of the delectable steam of the boiled beef. I said, “For me, a dozen pleines mers”—oysters that are a specialty of Pierre’s écailleurs, the men who stand out in the cold and open them—“and the plate côte.”

  An expression of sorrow elongated the old-ivory face of the maître d’hôtel. “I am desolated, M. Liebling,” he said, “but the boiled beef is not on the menu. It was prepared sur commande—the party over there ordered it two days in advance.”

  That the humble glory of the classic French kitchen should have to be ordered two days in advance in one of the best restaurants in Paris is evidence of how far la cuisine française has slipped in the direction of short-order cooking. Beef boiled in its bouillon was the one thing that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the development of true restaurants, the traveler was sure of finding at the lowliest inn, where the “eternal pot,” drawn upon and replenished but never emptied, bubbled on the low fire that was never allowed to die. “Soup [the pot-au-feu] is at the base of the French national diet, and the experience of centuries has inevitably brought it to its perfection,” the divine Brillat-Savarin once wrote.

  “If there is any left over,” the maître d’hôtel told me, looking toward the table of the happy six, “I will be glad to bring it to you. But I strongly doubt there will be.”

  And now one final instance of lost love on the Rue Sainte-Anne. In June of 1955, I discovered a small establishment there, completely without charm and crowded at noon with employees of neighboring business houses, which posted prices so low that I knew the fare could not be out of the ordinary, though it must have been good value to attract so many people. In the evening, however, when the quarter was quiet and customers few, the proprietor, I learned, could perform marvels. He was a Greek, born in Cairo, who had served his apprenticeship in the kitchens of Shepheard’s Hotel and then worked in good restaurants in France before the First World War. Enlisting in the French army, he had won naturalization, he said, and after the war he had worked in most of the good kitchens that he had not been in earlier. On sampling his work, I gave his story full credence, although it was not apparent to me why he had not risen higher in his profession. His explanation was that he had always been an independent soul—une forte tête—and had preferred to launch out for himself. He had mounted small restaurants in Paris, in Le Havre, in Granville—a little bit of everywhere. He liked to be his own boss. An imposing man, he must have measured six feet eight inches from the soles of his shoes to the top of the chef ’s toque that he always wore—one of the starched kind, shaped like an Orthodox priest’s hat. He had a face that a primitive Greek sculptor might have intended for either a satyr or a god—terra-cotta red under an iron-gray thatch. His hands were as big and as strong as a stonecutter’s, and his manner in the kitchen was irascible and commanding. He could be observed in the opening in the top half of the kitchen door, through which he thrust the steaming plats when they were ready to serve—and also often thrust his head, toque first, to bellow at the waitress when she did not come quickly to retrieve the evening masterpieces he extended. He would have to duck, naturally, to get the toque through. The round white top would appear in the aperture first, like a circular white cloud, and then, as he moved his neck to the vertical, his face would shine out like the sun—round, radian
t, terrible—to transfix the waitress. The girl, bearing the deliciously heavy trays to table, would murmur, to excuse him, “By day, you know, he isn’t at all like that. What he cooks for the day customers doesn’t excite him—and then it must be said that he hasn’t the same quantity of cognac in him, either. The level mounts.” The Greek must have been in his middle sixties; his wife, an attractive Frenchwoman some twenty years younger, minded the bar and the cash and the social relations of the establishment; she, too, was fond of brandy. He could produce an astonishing langouste à l’américaine and a faultless pilaf to accompany it; I have never known a man who could work with such equal mastery in the two idioms, classic and Levantine.

  The preeminent feature of any kind of lobster prepared à l’américaine is the sauce, which, according to The Food of France, contains white wine, cognac, fish bouillon, garlic, tomatoes, a number of herbs, the juices of the lobster itself, and the oil in which the lobster has been cooked before immersion in the liquid. (I have never personally inquired into the mysteries of its fabrication; I am content to love a masterpiece of painting without asking how the artist mixed his colors.) Early in his great work, Root disposes magisterially of the chauvinistic legend, invented by followers of Charles Maurras, that lobster à l’américaine should be called à l’armoricaine (from “Armorica,” the ancient name for Brittany), simply because there are lobsters (langoustes as well as homards) on the coast of Brittany. “The purists,” he says, employing a typically mild designation for these idiots, “do not seem to have been gastronomes, however, or they might have looked at the dish itself, which is obviously not Breton but Provençal, the lobster being cooked in oil and accompanied lavishly with tomatoes—and, indeed, until the middle of the nineteenth century, virtually the same dish was known as homard à la provençale. The most reasonable explanation for this name seems to be the one which ascribes it to a now vanished Parisian restaurant called the Américain, which is supposed to have made a specialty of it.”