Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (7 page)

BOOK: Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin
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“I’m about to have dinner at Chez Helène,” I said.

“Dr. Seligmann just told me today that you weighed a hundred and eighty pounds when you were in his office last week,” Alice said. “That’s terrible!”

“There must be something wrong with this connection,” I said. “I could swear I just told you that I was about to have dinner at Chez Helène.”

“You’re going to have to go on a diet. This is serious.”

It occurred to me that a man telephoning his wife from a soul-food restaurant could, on the excuse of trying to provide some authentic
atmosphere, say something like “Watch yo’ mouth, woman!” Instead, I said, “I think there might be a better time to talk about this, Alice.” Toward the end of the second or third term of the Caroline Kennedy administration was the sort of time I had in mind.

“Well, we can talk about it when you get home,” Alice said. “Have a nice dinner.”

I did. It is a measure of my devotion to Alice that I forgave her, even though my second order of fried chicken was ruined by the realization that I had forgotten to tell her I had actually weighed only 166. I always allow fourteen pounds for clothes.

1978

What Happened to Brie and Chablis?

What happened to Brie and Chablis?

Both Brie and Chablis used to be

The sort of thing everyone ate

When goat cheese and Napa Merlot

Weren’t purchased by those in the know,

And monkfish was thought of as bait.

And why did authorities ban

From restaurants all coq au vin?

And then disappeared sole meunière,

Then banished, with little ado,

Beef Wellington—Stroganoff, too.

Then canceled the chocolate éclair.

Then hollandaise sauce got the boot,

And kiwis stopped being the fruit

That every chef loved to include.

Like quiches, or coquilles St. Jacques,

They turned into something to mock—

The fruit that all chic chefs eschewed.

You miss, let’s say, trout amandine?

Take hope from some menus I’ve seen:

Fondue has been spotted of late

And—yes, to my near disbelief—

Tartare not from tuna but beef.

They all may return. Just you wait.

2003

Chicken à la King

Americans have a strong vision of the Midwest. It includes mother in the kitchen baking bread or putting up vegetables from the garden. As it happens, my own mother for thirty years served her family nothing but leftovers. I was out of college before I begin to think: leftover from what? We have a team of anthropologists in there now looking for the original meal. But in general, mother in the kitchen baking bread or putting up vegetables from the garden. Fields of wheat and corn and soybeans across the prairie, with great storage silos visible on the horizon. The Kiwanis meeting at a café on Main Street every Wednesday at eleven-thirty for lunch—chicken à la king.

At least it used to be chicken à la king. A few years ago, I realized that chicken à la king had disappeared. This country was once awash in chicken à la king. I used to go to a lot of Kiwanis meetings as a reporter—so many, in fact, that I knew all the words to the Kiwanis song, “Oh I’d Rather Be a Kiwanian than in Any Other Club”—and we always had chicken à la king. In fact, I even made up a verse of the song about it: There’s nothing can defeat us / whatever life may
bring / cause we can go and eat us / some chicken à la king / oh, I’d rather be a Kiwanian than in any other club.

And it wasn’t just a Kiwanis dish. Chicken à la king was a multiregional, multi-class dish. On the north shore of Long Island, old-money society people used to eat chicken à la king at their parties. I know some of you are wondering how I would know what old-money society people ate at their parties. Well, it happened that I went to Yale at a time when old-money society people were thick on the ground. Most of them had three last names. My roommate was named Thatcher Baxter Hatcher. They never actually used those names, of course; they all had nicknames, like Mutt and Pudge and Chip. My roommate was known as Tush—Tush Hatcher.

And Tush took me along to some coming-out parties at some of those fancy clubs. The food was awful. It was at that time, in fact, that I realized that when it comes to food in clubs in this country, the tastiness of the food is in inverse proportion to the exclusivity of the club. If you’re someplace and the hors d’oeuvres come around and it’s a piece of Velveeta cheese on a slice of day-old Wonder bread, with the crusts cut off, you’re in a fancy joint. I finally figured out the reason that these people serve food that tastes like balsa wood: They associate garlic and spices and schmaltz with just the sort of people they’re trying to keep out of the club.

Anyway, very late in the evening at these parties, they’d serve what they called supper—although this was a full eight hours after people at home had had their supper. (In Kansas City, we generally try to get everyone fed before dark.) These snotty-looking waiters would come out bearing great silver bowls, and in the bowls: chicken à la king. Not as tasty as Kiwanis Club chicken à la king, but still chicken à la king.

In fact, according to one theory, that’s why some people from that background talk without opening up their mouths, in that marvelous way. The theory is that the glop that chicken à la king floats around in—particularly when it’s allowed to react chemically with silver, particularly when the silver has been in the family for five or six generations—causes the teeth to bond together.

Of course, they still talk that way, and chicken à la king has disappeared.
I think about that a lot, particularly when I’m back in the Midwest and I’m driving through those fields, with the silos miles away on the horizon, and I think, “What do we really know about what’s in those silos?” Maybe a lot of things that seemed to be everywhere and suddenly disappeared are stored in there. Maybe there are silos full of Nehru jackets and silos full of CB radios and silos full of beef Stroganoff. And way out there somewhere, dozens and dozens of silos full of chicken à la king.

1985

Missing Links

Of all the things I’ve eaten in the Cajun parishes of Louisiana—an array of foodstuffs which has been characterized as somewhere between extensive and deplorable—I yearn most often for boudin. When people in Breaux Bridge or Opelousas or Jeanerette talk about boudin (pronounced “boo-DAN”), they mean a soft, spicy mixture of rice and pork and liver and seasoning, which is squeezed hot into the mouth from a sausage casing, usually in the parking lot of a grocery store and preferably while leaning against a pickup. (
Boudin
means blood sausage to the French, most of whom would probably line up for immigration visas if they ever tasted the Cajun version.) I figure that about 80 percent of the boudin purchased in Louisiana is consumed before the purchaser has left the parking lot, and most of the rest of it is polished off in the car. In other words, Cajun boudin not only doesn’t get outside the state; it usually doesn’t even get home. For Americans who haven’t been to South Louisiana, boudin remains as foreign as
gado-gado
or
cheb;
for them, the word “Cajun” on a menu is simply a synonym for burnt fish or too much pepper. When I am daydreaming of boudin, it sometimes occurs to me that of all the indignities the Acadians of Louisiana have had visited upon them—being booted out of Nova Scotia, being ridiculed as rubes and swamp
rats by neighboring Anglophones for a couple of centuries, being punished for speaking their own language in the school yard—nothing has been as deeply insulting as what restaurants outside south Louisiana present as Cajun food.

The scarcity of boudin in the rest of the country makes it all the more pleasurable to have a Louisiana friend who likes to travel and occasionally carries along an ice chest full of local ingredients, just in case. I happen to have such a friend in James Edmunds, of New Iberia, Louisiana. Over the past twenty years or so, James’s visits to New York have regularly included the ritualistic unpacking of an ice chest on my kitchen table. His custom has been to bring the ice chest if he plans to cook a meal during the visit—crawfish étouffée, for instance, or gumbo, or his signature shrimp stew. On those trips, the ice chest would also hold some boudin. I was so eager to get my hands on the boudin that I often ate it right in the kitchen, as soon as we heated it through, rather than trying to make the experience more authentic by searching for something appropriate to lean against. In Lower Manhattan, after all, it could take a while to find a pickup truck.

Then there came the day when I was sentenced to what I think of as medium-security cholesterol prison. (Once the cholesterol penal system was concessioned out to the manufacturers of statin drugs, medium-security cholesterol prison came to mean that the inmate could eat the occasional bit of bacon from the plate of a generous luncheon companion but could not order his own BLT.) James stopped bringing boudin, the warders having summarily dismissed my argument that the kind I particularly like—Cajun boudin varies greatly from maker to maker—was mostly just rice anyway.

I did not despair. James is inventive, and he’s flexible. Several years ago, he decided that an architect friend of his who lives just outside New Iberia made the best crawfish étouffée in the area, and, like one of those research-and-development hot shots who are always interested in ways of improving the product, he took the trouble to look into the recipe, which had been handed down to the architect by forebears of unadulterated Cajunness. James was prepared for the possibility that one of the secret ingredients of the architect’s blissful étouffée was, say, some herb available only at certain times of year in
the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin Spillway. As it turned out, one of the secret ingredients was Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. (Although crawfish étouffée, which means smothered crawfish, is one of the best-known Cajun dishes, it emerged only in the fifties, when a lot of people assumed that just about any recipe was enhanced by a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup.) During ensuing étouffée preparations in New York, there would come a moment when James said, in his soft south Louisiana accent, “I think this might be a good time for certain sensitive people to leave the kitchen for just a little while.” Then we’d hear the whine of the can opener, followed by an unmistakable
glub-glub-glub
.

A few years after my sentence was imposed, James and I were talking on the telephone about an imminent New York visit that was to include the preparation of one of his dinner specialties, and he told me not to worry about the problem of items rattling around in his ice chest. I told him that I actually hadn’t given that problem much thought, what with global warming and nuclear proliferation and all. As if he hadn’t heard me, he went on to say that he’d stopped the rattling with what he called packing boudin.

“Packing boudin?”

“That’s right,” James said.

I thought about that for a moment or two. “Well, it’s got bubble wrap beat,” I finally said. “And we wouldn’t have to worry about adding to this country’s solid-waste-disposal problem. Except for the casing.” The habit of tossing aside the casing of a spent link of boudin is so ingrained in some parts of Louisiana that there is a bumper sticker reading
CAUTION: DRIVER EATING BOUDIN
—a way of warning the cars that follow about the possibility of their windshields being splattered with what appear to be odd-looking insects. From that visit on, I took charge of packing boudin disposal whenever James was carrying his ice chest, and I tried not to dwell on my disappointment when he wasn’t.

Not long ago, I got a call from James before a business trip to New York that was not scheduled to include the preparation of a Louisiana meal—that is, a trip that would ordinarily not include boudin. He asked if he could store a turducken in my freezer for a couple of days; he was making a delivery for a friend.

I hesitated. A turducken is made by deboning a chicken and a duck and a turkey, stuffing the chicken with stuffing, stuffing the stuffed chicken into a similarly stuffed duck, and stuffing all of that, along with a third kind of stuffing, into the turkey. The result cannot be criticized for lacking complexity, and it presents a challenge to the holiday carver almost precisely as daunting as meat loaf. Or, I wondered, is the duck stuffed into the chicken rather than the chicken stuffed into the duck? While I was trying to remember that, James apparently took my hesitation as an indication that I was reluctant to take on the storage job. I suppose there are people who would rather not have a turducken in their freezer, on the grounds that it goes against the laws of nature.

“There’d be rental boudin involved, of course,” James said.

“Fair’s fair,” I said.

2002

Goldberg as Artifact

I was not surprised to hear that the Smithsonian Institution had expressed an interest in the neon sign on Fats Goldberg’s pizza parlor. I have always thought of Fats himself as an American artifact, although he is ordinarily regarded as a medical wonder rather than a piece of Americana. What brings doctors around to the pizza parlor occasionally to have a stare at Fats and poke him around a bit is not merely that he once lost some 160 pounds—no trivial matter in itself, being a weight equivalent to all of Rocky Graziano in his prime—but that he has succeeded for seventeen years in not gaining it back. Apparently, keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist. Convinced that remaining a stick figure is the only alternative to becoming a second mountain of flesh, Fats has sentenced himself to a permanent diet broken only by semiannual eating binges in Kansas City and a system of
treats on Mondays and Thursdays that reminds many New Yorkers of alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations.

Because Fats is now exceptionally skinny, most people call him Larry instead of Fats. (Nobody, as far as I know, has ever called him Mr. Goldberg.) Having known Fats in Kansas City long before he let his Graziano slip away from him, though, I have difficulty thinking of him as anything but a fatty. He has even more difficulty than I do. He is, he cheerfully admits, as obsessed with food now as he ever was. (Fats cheerfully admits everything, which is one reason no one has ever thought of calling him Mr. Goldberg.) One of his doctors has told him that most of the successfully reformed fatties seem to involve themselves in food-related businesses. Still, Fats is restless being a pizza baron. “You can’t schlepp pizzas all your life,” he often tells me. He is constantly phoning for my reaction to the schemes he thinks up for new lines of work. His schemes are almost invariably concerned with food and are invariably among the worst ideas in the history of commerce. I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that Fats may be like one of those novelists whom publishers speak of as having only one book in them. My usual response to hearing one of his new business ideas—a scheme to produce an edible diet book, for instance—is to say, “Fat Person, there are worse things than schlepping pizzas.”

BOOK: Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin
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