Secret Ingredients (9 page)

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, radiant, 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.”

In general, the Bretons practice only one method of preparing their lobsters, true or spiny—boiling them in sea water, which is fine if what you want to taste is lobster. In lobster
à l’américaine,
on the other hand, the sauce, which cannot be produced without the lobster, is the justification of the indignity inflicted on him. If the strength of this dish, then, lies in the sauce (as I deem indisputable), its weakness, from a non-French point of view, lies in the necessity of mopping up the sauce with at least three linear meters of bread. Bread is a good medium for carrying gravy as far as the face, but it is a diluent, not an added magnificence; it stands to the sauce of lobster
à l’américaine
in the same relationship as soda to Scotch. But a good pilaf—each grain of rice developed separately in broth to the size of a pistachio kernel—is a fine thing in its own right. Heaped on the plate and receiving the sauce
à l’américaine
as the waitress serves the lobster, the grains drink it up as avidly as nymphs quenching their thirst. The grains do not lose form or identity, although they take on a bit of
rondeur.
Mere rice cooked any old way won’t do the trick; it turns to wallpaperer’s paste. The French in general are almost as bad with rice as the Chinese, who are the very worst. The Armenians, Greeks, and Turks are the best with it. The conjunction of my Greek cook’s
langouste
and his pilaf was a cultural milestone, like the wedding of the oyster and the lemon.

At the end of July, six weeks and several dozen
langoustes
after making the Greek’s acquaintance, I left Paris. I came back in November, arriving at the Hôtel Louvois on a chill evening. I left my bags unopened and hurried through the chill to the little shrine I had discovered.
Langouste
was too much to hope for at that season, but the Greek also made an excellent couscous—a warming dish on a cold night, because of the fiery sauce you tip into the broth—and he was sure to have that on the bill. The aspect of the restaurant had not changed. There were still paper tablecloths, a zinc bar, a lettered sign on the window proclaiming
GRANDE SPÉCIALITÉ DE COUSCOUS.
But the faces—one behind the bar and the other framed in the kitchen window—were not the same. They were amiable faces, man and wife, but amiability is no substitute for genius. I ordered couscous, but it was a mere cream of wheat with hot sauce and a garniture of overcooked fowl—a
couscous de Paris,
not of North Africa, where the Greek had learned to make his. I had a drink with the new
patron
and his wife when I had finished. They were younger than their predecessors, and said that they knew and admired them. They would “maintain the same formula,” they promised. But restaurants don’t run by formula. The Greek had sold out to them, they told me, because he and his wife had quarreled.

“Why did they quarrel?” I asked.

“Because of their art,” the new woman said, and smiled fondly at her husband, as if to assure him that nothing so trivial would come between them.

In 1927, the crepuscular quality of French cooking was not discernible to Root and me, because the decline was not evident at the levels at which we ate. (We ate independently, for we did not know each other then. Root was a copyreader on the Paris edition of the Chicago
Tribune,
earning fifteen dollars a week, and I was a combination Sorbonne student and remittance man, living on my father’s monthly bounty.) The cheap and medium-priced restaurants that we patronized held good; slimming and other eccentricities affected only the upper strata, and only the rich had automobiles. Motoring and eating were still separate departments. Root, remaining in France during the dozen years that followed, was perhaps less aware than I of what my lamented Dublin friend Arthur McWeeney would have called the “disimprovement” of French cooking. The experiences of an individual do not follow precisely the descending curve of a culture. A man as wily as Root—gastronomically speaking—might eat so well every day that he would be insensible to the decreasing number of good restaurants. The number was still high then—and is even now, although, naturally, there are fewer today, and the best aren’t as good as the best used to be, or the next-to-best as good as the next-to-best used to be, and so on down the line. Good bottles, however, persist, especially among the classified growths of the Bordelais. The proprietor of a legally delimited vineyard, constrained to produce his wine on the same few acres every year, cannot change his ingredients to fit deteriorating public taste. Good year, bad year, the character of his wine, if not its quality, remains constant, and the ratio of good and bad years is about the same every century. (The quantity of bad wine sold annually in France has certainly increased, but that is another matter; it is sold under labels of vague or purely humorous significance, or
en carafe
as something it isn’t.) When the maligned Second Empire delimited and classified the vineyards of Médoc in 1855, it furnished French culture with a factor of stability, such as it furnished Paris when it made a park of the Bois de Boulogne. Both were ramparts against encroachment. Wine drinking is more subjective than horse racing and nearly as subjective as love, but the gamble is less; you get something for your money no matter what you pick.

So Root the individual was eating voraciously and perceptively, and with total recall, all during that twelve-year interval, and laying the basis for his masterpiece. (I don’t think he will ever write a book on the food of Britain. In his monumental treatise, he says, “I used to think…that the English cook the way they do because, through sheer technical deficiency, they had not been able to master the art of cooking. I have discovered to my stupefaction that the English cook that way because that is the way they like it.”) Root and I met in the winter of 1939–40, during the
drôle de guerre,
and we shared some good meals; then for a month, between May 10, when the Germans invaded the Low Countries, and June 11, when the French government quit Paris, we had more pressing preoccupations. (I still remember with gratitude, though, a meal of fresh brook trout and still champagne taken at Saint-Dizier, behind the crumbling front; a good meal in troubled times is always that much salvaged from disaster.) When the government pulled out, Root invited me to accompany him in pursuit of it in a small French automobile. “Maybe we can find some good regional food on the way,” he said. I left France for the United States eleven days later; Root, with his French wife and their infant daughter, followed in a month. He returned to France when the war was over, and has spent most of his time there since.
The Food of France
is a monument to his affection for a country as well as for its art.

The originality of Root’s approach to his subject is based on two propositions. The first is that regions compel the nature of the foods produced in them, which is only partly and sketchily true, and, by extension, that the characters of the foods, the wines, and the inhabitants of any one region interact and correspond, which makes for good anecdote but is pure whimsey. (De Gaulle has not a poor mind, although his province, Flanders, has a relatively poor and restricted cuisine; Camus’s mind is balanced, not overseasoned like the food of his native Algeria; Mauriac’s is thin and astringent, not voluptuous like his native
cuisine bordelaise,
which he adores.) Root’s erudition is superior everywhere but at its best south of the Loire. Alsace and Normandy haven’t his heart, although he tries to be fair, and he doesn’t perform a sufficient obeisance to Anjou; on Provence, Nice, and the Central Plateau he is superb, and in his attack on the cooking of the Lyonnais heroic. Still, to call the cuisine of Alsace an offshoot of German cooking, as he does, is as unfair as it would be to dismiss French culture as an offshoot of Roman civilization. A lot has happened since the shooting in both cases.

In Provence, though, where he has sunned his well-covered bones during much of the past decade, Root is without peer:

The grease in which the food of a country is cooked is the ultimate shaper of its whole cuisine. The olive is thus the creator of the cooking of Provence. A local saying points this up. “A fish,” it runs, “is an animal that is found alive in water and dead in oil.”…Garlic may not belong to Provence alone, but at least it gets special recognition there. It has even been called “the truffle of Provence.” A third element must be noted as particularly typical of Provençal cooking—the tomato, which manages to get into almost everything…. The rabbits of this area hardly need herbs; having fed all their lives on thyme, they have inbred seasoning…. Artichokes…are ubiquitous in the region…. In the Vaucluse area you may be surprised if you order something listed on the bill of fare as
asperge vauclusienne,
for it is a joking name in the tradition of Scotch woodcock or prairie oysters, and what you will get is not asparagus at all but artichoke. It will be a very festive artichoke, however, stuffed with chopped ham and highly seasoned with a mixture of those herbs that seem to develop particular pungency in the dry, hilly terrain of upper Provence.