Secret Ingredients (56 page)

“In the split second you saw that bag of Moustique’s, Schneider,” he queried, “did any thought occur to you?”

“Why, yes,” I said, surprised. “I remember thinking there was only one shop in Europe that handles cheesecloth of that type—Arthur Maggot’s Sons, in the West India Dock Road. But I still can’t fathom why we’ve spent three hours casing it.”

“No particular reason,” he rejoined. “It’s just the kind of patient, plodding labor the public never gives one credit for in this profession. Come on, let’s move in.”

Bartholomew Maggot shrugged his vulpine shoulders irascibly and, applying a pinch of Copenhagen snuff to his nostril, opened the cash register and sneezed into it. A half hour’s questioning had merely aggravated his normally waspish temper, and it was dishearteningly plain that we had reached an impasse. Rentschler, notwithstanding, refused to yield.

“This man who asked you to appraise his cheesecloth bag yesterday,” he persisted. “You say he was hooded and smelled of attar of roses, but surely you must have noticed something unusual about him.”

“No, sir, I did not,” growled the draper. “Wait a bit, though, there
was
something. His lapel had a few grains of rice powder on it—the sort those French music-hall artistes wear.”

“You’ve a sharp pair of eyes in your head, Maggot,” complimented the inspector. “It’s a pity we don’t know where they came from.”

“Why, this one came from Harrod’s,” explained Maggot, removing it. “It’s glass, as you see, and has a little Union Jack in it. The other—”

“No, no, the grains,” Rentschler interrupted testily. “Haven’t you any idea which music hall uses that type of powder?”

“Let me see,” said Maggot slowly. “The cove was carrying a theatrical valise with the name of Pierre Moustique, Bobino Theatre, Rue de la Gaité, Paris, France, painted on it in white letters, but I didn’t really pay much mind.”

“Humph,” muttered Rentschler. His quick, deductive mind had caught something of importance in the other’s words. “A very good evening to you, Mr. Maggot, and now, Schneider, to Paris
en grand vitesse.
Are you hungry? I think I can promise a ragout spiced with melodrama and served piping hot.” I have often thought the world lost a major poet when Colin Rentschler joined the New York Health Department.

The mingled scent of caporal, cheap perfume, and garlic hung like a pall over the motley audience jamming the stalls of the Bobino, the Left Bank’s most popular vaudeville. A succession of weight-lifters, trained dogs, diseuses, and trick cyclists had displayed their enchantments, and now, as the curtain rose on the final turn and M. l’Inconnu, the masked juggler, strode into the glare of the footlights, my heart began beating like a trip hammer. Those delicate, saurian hands, the heavy odor of attar of roses—I racked my memory vainly, trying to recollect where I had met them before. A buzz of excited speculation rose from the patrons surrounding us; rumor ran rife that l’Inconnu was an unfrocked chef from New York, a quondam Turkish police official, a recent arrival from Limehouse, but none knew for sure. Yet some sixth sense told me that Rentschler, his hawk’s profile taut in the darkness beside me, was close to the answer.

“Messieurs et dames!”
The guttural voice of Pierre Moustique suddenly set my every nerve atingle. “I now attempt a feat to dizzy the imagination, keeping
trois boules
[three balls] suspended in the air simultaneously!” From the depths of his cape, he brought forth a green cheesecloth bag and spun three mothballs into swift rotating motion.

Rentschler sprang up with a choked cry. “
Gobe-mouche
that I am! Blockhead!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you see, Schneider? That’s why the hollandaise laid those diners low—he used that very bag to squeeze the sauce, indifferent to the fact that it had contained mothballs! Seal the exits! Stop that man!” But it was too late; with a snarled imprecation, Moustique sprang toward the wings. In the shrill hubbub that ensued, I inexplicably found myself dancing a java with a comely grisette; then Rentschler, flinging people aside like ninepins, was pulling me through a skylight and we were hurtling across the rooftops after our quarry. In reality, my associate explained as we hurtled, Moustique had left the Bobino in a cab, but protocol precluded our following him in any such mundane fashion.

“He’s heading for the Ritz,” panted the inspector. “A group of asparagus connoisseurs are holding their annual feed there tonight, which the columns of
Le Figaro
have been full of it for a week. Superfluous to add that if this blackguard, who is cooking for them under a nom de plume, compounds his lethal dressing, why the poor bastards will be stretched out in windrows. I’ve a pretty—good—hunch, though,” he panted on, clearing the Rue du Cherche-Midi with a bound, “that we’re about to tie a kink in his mayonnaise whip.”

Well, we didn’t. Two minutes afterward, Rentschler tripped over a loose gargoyle and dashed out his brains in the Quai Voltaire. I pressed on to the Ritz, but I must have crept in through the wrong dormer, because I wound up at a too, too marvelous gala at the Vicomtesse de Noailles’. Edith and Osbert and Sacheverell were there, and they gave me a simply divine recipe for my book. It’s called Continental Upside-down Chowchow, and here’s what you do. You take a double handful of exotic locales…

1951

“Believe me, if there are any compliments I'll pass them on to you.”

EAT, DRINK, AND BE MERRY

PETER DE VRIES

E
arly last winter, I tipped the scales at 200 pounds, whereas the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company prefers something in the neighborhood of 180 for men of my height and frame. Friends implored me to delete the difference, citing the connection between weight and longevity, and recommending various diets for soundness of body and length of days. However, though persuaded to reduce, I decided to give other methods, such as massage, a try first. To this end I permitted myself to be methodically flailed at weekly intervals by a giant Swede. I lost no weight, but the strenuousness of the Swede’s exertions suggested it might be otherwise with him. After two months, during which my body underwent no change whatever except to turn the color of eggplant, I took up walking.

I went for brisk hikes about the Connecticut countryside, where I live, armed with a stick to fend off the numerous dogs in whom apparently boiled an accumulated resentment toward a man remembered as someone barreling down the road in a Pontiac to their constant peril. I got more exercise out of swinging the cane than out of walking—the first day or two, one mongrel in particular followed me all over the blasted heath—but my exertions were as fruitless as the Swede’s.

I did extract from these all-weather rambles a certain lyric sustenance. I had a sense that, for housewives glancing from their cottage windows and for passing motorists, I pulled the whole scene together by offering to the eye that solitary figure for which all landscapes cry; of representing, as I strode cross-lots or climbed a stile, abiding values. Superimposed on this was another, terribly peculiar sensation. I had the conviction that I was losing girth, not at the waist but around my head. I wore on these expeditions a gray Homburg, relatively new, the only hat in my possession. Because my head is narrow, a hat that fits in terms of front and back is often loose enough at the sides for me to insert two fingers there, so that every hat I have owned has been both large and small for me. This Homburg seemed, on the moors, to grow roomier with every step I took. Since, like its predecessors, it was a doubtful fit to begin with, and since it was my wont to swing along at a brisk gait, each jar of my heels brought the hat a little farther down on my head, the way you bring an axe head down on its helve by pounding the end of the handle on a stump. On certain days I would arrive home with the hat resting on my ears, an effect that made for poor visibility and once almost cost me my life, when I started to cross a road in the dusk and was narrowly missed by a motorist who had not yet turned his lights on.

That was the day on which I had fixed to weigh myself. It had been two weeks since I began the walks, and I had refrained from checking. I gingerly boarded the bathroom scales and looked. There was some change but not much: I had gained four pounds.

The reason was not hard to find. I returned from these excursions ravenous, and as a result (taking the fueling of a furnace as a metaphor for caloric consumption) I had been shoveling it in as fast as I had been burning it up—or, rather, a little faster.

At about this time there fell into my hands a document containing some computations made by Dr. L. H. Newburgh, of the medical school of the University of Michigan, who has done work in the metabolism of obesity. A man weighing 250 pounds, he writes, “will have to climb twenty flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread.” A horizontal walk of a mile will reduce the man’s weight “only 12
¹
/2 grams (less than
¹
/2 ounce). He must walk 36 miles to rid himself of one pound of adipose tissue—how disappointing!”

On the basis of Dr. Newburgh’s findings, I figured that the only way for me to make appreciable inroads on myself by walking would be to commute on foot between Westport and New York City, a discipline almost certain to be neutralized by Gargantuan snacks at Norwalk, Port Chester, and most other points along the way.

The inevitable remained.

There are numerous diets currently being recommended, published, and discussed. One is the familiar du Pont executives’ diet, which I tried first. Its motif is meat. For lunch the first day, I had a pair of lamb chops with accessories too dismal to mention. For dinner, I had a plank steak. Steaks and chops two or even three times a day are, in addition to an ideal way of sustaining the requisite high protein intake, a neat formula for bankruptcy, unless you happen to be a du Pont executive. I realized, as the long, carnivorous days went by, that I was eating myself and my family into destitution, and switched to another feeding plan.

This one permitted me, implacably, for breakfast half a grapefruit, one boiled egg, and black coffee. To eat that at 7
A.M.
and practice rigid self-denial until lunch at one o’clock is to engage in what theologians call mortification of the flesh. Noon, in fact, often found me close to that crystalline fatigue in which the early Christian anchorites are said to have had their visions. I carried in my wallet a checklist of low-calorie foods with which to assuage the worst pangs of my hunger. An item on the list was tangerines. I once ate seven at a sitting, pips and all. Another was cottage cheese, of which I sometimes devoured an entire container. One Saturday, my wife returned from shopping to find me hunched over an eighteen-ounce jar of it, a flying spoon in my hand.

“What are you gorging yourself for?” she asked.

“I’m on a diet,” I said. “You know that.”

It is possible to rationalize having dinner at someone else’s home as a legitimate holiday from one’s diet. My wife and I had a dinner invitation for Saturday of my second week on the more plebeian regimen. My wife caught a heavy cold on Friday, and Saturday morning I heard her canceling the engagement by phone. I rushed up and wrested the instrument from her grasp. “I’ll be there,” I told the hostess. “I won’t
hear
of upsetting your plans any more than necessary!”

The hostess told me to come at “sevenish.”

“Sevenish, then,” I said, hanging up.

I was at her door at six-twenty, slavering. She served fish, roast duck and red cabbage, candied yams, tossed salad, and cherries jubilee, all of which I had the courtesy to eat without demurrer.

It takes only one good table bacchanal to undo a whole week’s calorie budgeting. Since all this dieting was going on during the winter, when we were receiving or giving hospitality every Saturday or Sunday evening, I found myself faced with continuing complications. (I felt it as ungracious to diet before guests as before hosts.) I began a third diet without wholly abandoning the other, then still another while retaining features of its predecessors. Soon I had three or four diets going simultaneously, and became bewildered and discouraged. I weighed 205, then 207. I resolved that when the winter was over, I would buckle down in earnest. But once the round of al-fresco summer gaieties was under way, I was, far from mortifying my flesh, mortified by it. A British acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen for several years greeted me on a recent visit with “Getting a bit thick in the flitch, aren’t you, old man?”

The phrase “thick in the flitch” plunged me into a depression that lasted for weeks. It was, indeed, one of those periods of gloom when a man seeks relief in every anodyne—the pleasures of reading, companionship, and certainly food and drink. And it was in this interval that I came across a magazine article setting forth a viewpoint new to me on excess weight. The article was entitled “Obesity: Its Emotional Causes.” It was written by the head of a Midwestern clinic who has done a great deal of research in the field and who claims that food is an escape for people who are emotionally upset. I at once took inventory of myself along the lines the author laid down. The only thing I could find that was upsetting me was my physical condition—my excess weight. It followed that I was eating too much because I was overweight.

The sinister hopelessness of this dilemma convinced me that it must be absurd, but I was presently routed from that refuge by the recollection of a parallel case I know of involving a man who is given to a kindred indulgence—that of the bottle. Chief among the “realities” to which he is unable to face up is the realization of the wasted, bibulous years behind him. Hence he has reached a point where it is, in large measure, liquor that is driving him to drink. He is living to a ripe old age in this vicious circle, too. My own circle, it seemed to me, was equally vicious. Or was it, I wondered. Was “vicious” quite the right word for it?

Well, come to think of it, maybe not. When all is said and done, what is there like a good dinner, prefaced by a few cocktails, washed down with a properly chilled wine, and topped off with a cup of well-brewed coffee and a spot of brandy, to assuage life’s pains, obscure its vanities, and make one forget, for an hour, the melancholy of expanding girth? The answer is, nothing. Friends are, of course, another major ameliorative, and I can only regret that mine continue to talk about diet in the way they do, with a lot of scientific jargon and in a sort of Oxford Group testimonial fashion. It’s a subject on which my own words carry, as the months go by, less and less weight.

1952