Reinhart's Women (11 page)

Reinhart had to assent. “Nor does that stuff contain any goose liver, though it’s called ‘Strasbourg.’ It’s pork liver, as you can read on the can, and it tastes mostly of tin, for my money. You know you can make a marvelous pork-liver
pâté
at home. The labor takes two minutes or so with a food processor or blender, and it’s dirt cheap.”

DePau’s nostrils arched ever higher above his lip. “Sounds really awful!” It could have been predicted that he was one of those people. He was about to stride away, but checked himself. “You’re not going to make a bad smell, are you?”

Reinhart gestured. “This is supposed to be ‘gourmet’ food.”

“That’s why I asked the question,” said DePau. “I’ll tell you frankly.”

Reinhart smiled. “I think I know what you mean, and you’re not wrong. For that matter, nobody’s ever
wrong
when it comes to speaking of their tastes in food. That’s private business if there ever was any. But life really can be enhanced if one expands one’s palate, and then there’s always the question of nourishment.”

“Can’t be much of that in garlic salt,” said DePau. He was anxious to get away, and food was not the sort of subject that could be argued about. It was not simply that any strife, however mild, had a negative effect on the appetite. Food was a great positive, yea-saying force, the ultimate source of vitality—until a phase of the cycle was completed and oneself became food for the worms. It is only through food that we survive, and we die when we are fed on too heartily by microbes, or by the crab named cancer who eats us alive. In the emotional realm there is no more eloquent metaphor, lovers feed on one another, and passion is devouring. A philosopher lives on food for thought. One is what one eats, and eats what one is. Jews and Muslims, old adversaries, are old comrades in abstaining from pork, and Christians are exhorted to eat the flesh and blood of their god. Everybody eats to live, but not everyone who lives to eat is a glutton or, still less, overweight. The world’s foremost gastronome, M. Robert Courtine, of Paris, France, who eats two multi-course meals per day, with the appropriate wines, is of a modest weight for his height and furthermore has not exceeded it in twenty years.

DePau loped to the end of the aisle and disappeared. Reinhart had no great expectation of making an epicure of the man, but he would have liked to disabuse him of the opinion that the miserable products on these “gourmet” shelves were in any degree whatever gourmet sans inverted commas. But the word itself had long since become flabby and useless for any service: a hot dog became “gourmet” if treated with anything other than mustard, e.g., tartar sauce, and in fact the term was applied in general to the use of any condiment beyond salt, pepper, and the standard American ketchup. On the lowest levels of gastronomic journalism, that printed on the sides of boxes and cans, the addition of Worcestershire sauce was usually sufficient to gourmetize any dish.

Reinhart returned to his portable kitchen. He had yet to don his apron and the billowing chef’s hat which Grace Greenwood had insisted he wear. In France a cook worked for years to earn the
toque blanche.
But Reinhart had not forgotten that the members of the American Expeditionary Force were qualified, by the mere fact of their arrival in Europe, to display more decorations than any of their allies who had been fighting for four years. Furthermore the white bonnet had been Grace’s only prima facie requirement. He had been on his own as to which of the “gourmet” products distributed by Epicon he would choose for demonstration, and he was not limited to the selection currently offered at the Glenwood Top Shop. There was a much more generous inventory from which he could choose, and supplies of the appropriate products were available from a local warehouse.

After some deliberation Reinhart had chosen crepes Suzette: a name known to all as the quintessence of Gourmetism, a dish that was simplicity itself to prepare, and a demonstration that could be given a dramatic character, for attracting an audience was the purpose of his job. The particular stimulus for his choice was an Epicon-distributed product called Mon Paris Instant Crepe Suzette Mix: a package containing two envelopes, the larger of which held sufficient powder, when added to a cup of milk, to make a dozen six-inch dessert crepes; the orange-colored dust in the smaller envelope when mashed into softened butter became the sauce in which the crepes were to be bathed.

When tested by Reinhart in his home kitchen, the mixture had yielded rubbery pancakes on the one hand, and on the other, a sauce the predominant flavor of which was markedly chemical, though it was obviously intended to be orange. He prepared several batches of crepes and a number of bowls of sauce, each with another variation of the recipe as given—more or less milk, sometimes thinned with water; a greater or lesser proportion of butter in the sauce—but no effort could alter the truth that the product was simply inferior as food and at $4.75 a swindle as an item of trade, since aside from the chemicals the packages contained respectively only flour and sugar.

At an earlier time of life Reinhart would probably have presented these bald facts to the appropriate authority, but he was by now sufficiently seasoned to understand that a person like Grace Greenwood had not attained her success in the food business by a devotion to the principles of either nutrition or serious gastronomy. What he determined to do then was to make his own mixture, from the authentic materials, of course, the juice and peel of fresh oranges, orange liqueur, and cognac.

But was this not as unscrupulous as what he would replace? For the only point of the demonstrations was to sell Epicon products, and in fact he was not to be alone in the public phase of the project, but rather to be accompanied by a pitchwoman named Helen Clayton, who while he cooked would give the spiel and then, after the audience had tasted the product, then and there sell packages of Instant Crepe Suzette Mix from an adjoining table.

The answer to the foregoing question was surely Yes, if having tasted one of Reinhart’s authentic crepes, some naïve housewife bought the wretched powdered product and assumed that from it she could reproduce the model. But there was still another way to look at this situation: wasn’t it quite as likely that, incensed by the difference between the real and the bogus, she would, in this era of the aggressive consumer, return the mix with a complaint? And could not the result of enough of such incidents be that Epicon would cease to distribute the offending product?

...Actually, Reinhart had no serious hope that the right thing would be done by anybody else but himself—which was the real reason why he must prepare good crepes Suzette.

Getting the equipment and supplies together had taken a good week despite Grace’s efficiency and authority. The project was the least among her many, Epicon’s major business being in popular junk foods with no claim to being gourmet: various sliced or minced-and-reconstituted deep-fried substances, potato, banana, corn, etc.; powdered soups, puddings, dips; aerosol-canned cheese; tinned meat spreads, stuffed olives, pretzels, relishes, crackers, all manner of munchies, yummies, and tummy-stuffers, comprising most of the joke-provender extant in the Western world, made available, presumably, for the people who lived to eat, rather than those who ate to live, for it did not pretend to offer nourishment.

But a more obvious cause of delay was a general disinclination on the part of all male employees beneath the executive level to work with more than a fraction of the dispatch of the typical practitioner, in whichever job, of a decade earlier, the last time Reinhart had exposed himself to anything that could be called business. Furthermore, this persistent delay as practiced by all functionaries was apparently so firmly established by now as to rouse no ire from the victim, evoke no regret from the perpetrator, and indeed not even stir any wonderment. A kind of half-paralysis, with no political significance, seemed to have claimed the American work force. But he had himself been a downright dropout for more than ten years, and it certainly was easier to get back into a system that was forgiving.

Now back at his demonstration-kitchen, Reinhart assembled the raw materials for a batch of crepes sucrées: flour, eggs, butter, sugar. His colleague, Helen Clayton, was once again rearranging her pitchwoman’s table. She was a robust woman in what might be as late as her early forties or as early as the late thirties, with sandy-red hair, pale skin, and a self-possessed, even slightly hostile manner.

Earlier in his life this was the type of woman who would have caused him most discomfiture, and perhaps he would naïvely have believed her seemingly otherwise unmotivated resentment to be caused by a lesbian leaning. But now it seemed likely that matters of relative power, not sex, were in question. Which of them was to be boss? It would be difficult for him to reassure her without being despised for his pains.

When Helen had restacked her little boxes of Instant Crepe Suzette Mix he asked: “How should we go about this?”

She raised her eyes but not her face. “Huh?”

“You’re the professional at demonstrations, aren’t you? I’m a raw recruit.” He spoke with a certain breeziness of voice: obsequiousness would not be the note to strike.

She was no warmer as yet. “How long will it take you to make those things?”

“A few minutes, once the batter’s ready and the skillet’s hot. I mean the crepes themselves. Then to sauce them, only a minute or so more.”

Helen winced. “You don’t have a stack already made?”

“I thought of doing that,” said Reinhart. “But the Suzetting isn’t all that much, just swishing them around in the sauce a moment or two and then folding them in quarters. Of course the flaming adds drama. But I thought the demonstration would have more interest if I started from scratch, more or less. Crepe batter has to rest awhile under refrigeration to be at its best: what I will mix here I won’t use immediately. What I
will
use I prepared last night at home: it’s in the portable fridge there.” The latter was the standard plastic-walled device for picnics. Its interior held two gallons of the batter, surrounded by ice cubes. This was enough for two hundred crepes, surely a sufficient number to get them through a routine morning. By the afternoon the batter he had mixed in the demonstration would have rested sufficiently to be used.

“The thing to remember,” Helen said, “is that we’re here to move the product, not to give free cooking lessons or free food. Be careful about kids: they’re a pain in the ass. They’ll want sample after sample, and some of the smaller ones might try to help themselves to things they’re not supposed to have, and for God’s sake don’t let anything dangerous get out of your close vicinity: knives and hot things. Keep ’em away from those burners! That’s the bad news. But the good news is that if they like a product, kids will make their parents buy it, so you’ve got to remember that and put up with them. This time of day you’ll have the very little tots who pull things off the shelves and screech incessantly. But they like sweet stuff, so make those crepes as sweet as possible, with extra-heavy fillings of jam.” Naturally she pronounced the essential word to rhyme with “grape.”

He answered in good humor: “These are crepes Suzette, and they aren’t made with jam. Most of their flavor comes from the hot sauce that they will be inundated in. It’s quite sweet and rich, with lots of sugar, though, and butter and orange juice—”

Helen peered at his work-table, and then at him. “You’re not going to use the packaged sauce mix?”

“Uh, no.”

Her eyes were fixed on his mouth. Her own lips were threatening to—yes, definitely, to smile. “You’ve got a lot of nerve.”

Now he smiled in return. “You disapprove?”

She laughed outright. “It’s not my affair, is it?”

But why was it so funny? Finally he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Helen. She lifted one of the little boxes of instant mix and snorted. “Have you tried these?”

“Yes.”

She protruded her lips and pronounced, silently:
Sh-it?

He nodded. “I suppose I’m being dishonest—?”

“Not unless we
say
you’re using the mix,” Helen said quickly. “But look, this can be to our advantage. You show the real way to make the sauce. The crepes will be terrific, and those are the ones they’ll taste samples of, right? Then I’ll say something like, ‘Well, that’s the long way. If you want to do it the short way, here’s the instant mix!’”

She had lost her coolness. They were co-conspirators now. She was really quite a nice-looking woman, tall and full-bosomed, and not wearing, he was happy to note, a pungent scent which could be deleterious to good cuisine, distracting or confusing the olfactory sense.

“Yes, I guess that’s fair enough,” said he. “Makes me feel better anyway. I hate to be dishonest about food, but on the other hand I don’t like the idea of cooking anything that’s lousy, merely so as to be honest.”

Helen shrugged and said, with a pout: “I’ll tell you, I myself don’t care. I like simple food. Anything fancy makes me sick to the stomach.”

He raised his hands at the wrists, signifying that he would not have her shot, though privately he believed the statement insensitive in view of his profession; but then it was humanity’s way to suspend the rules of courtesy when speaking of food or art.

The big clock over the fresh produce department was not so large that it could be seen across the vast distance that separated him from it, and he wore no watch. Helen, when applied to, told him it was a minute or so to nine. He took the white bonnet from the bottom shelf of his work-table. It was in a collapsed state. He shook it, inflating its flatness. He put on an apron, the strings of which crossed in back and came around to be tied in front.

Helen was looking at him in what appeared to be approval. “Gee,” she said. “Remind me to get some recipes from you.” Obviously the costume had transformed him in her eyes. He realized that Grace had been right to insist upon his wearing it.

“Do you like to cook?”

“Hate it,” said Helen. “That’s why I wanted you to show me some shortcuts.”