by Idwal Jones
My uncle drank precisely three times at a dinner—before it, during, and after. He drank a bottleful each time. If by accident he exceeded the limit, then, as if not to offend the rule of Democritus—of whom he could never have heard—who forbade us to stay at four as an unlucky number, he went on, if the company was good, to five or six.
Dosso regarded the ceiling tenderly.
“Abel, perhaps—a little coffee, ha?”
He bruised orange peel, spices, and sugar in a bowl, poured on cognac and set it ablaze. My uncle extinguished it with ink-black coffee, and the cups were ladled full. We all four lighted cheroots, our mood being too profound for the triviality of cigarettes. The Baroness seemed wholly asleep, but her fingers were awake, and deftly flicked the band off her cheroot. Talk oozed out in drowsy rills, agreeable to listen to, and profitable to the spirit.
“Monday,” said Dosso, “there’ll be a Ventadour steer, fattened on heath, at the abattoir. I’ll fetch you a steak as big around as this table.” He held out his fist. “And that thick. We’ll grill it in an armour of rock salt, and break it off with a mallet. At my place.”
All eyes gleamed through the murk of repletion. If bodies were rendered dull, brains were clear enough to cope with the pure aesthetic idea.
“That goose,” my uncle breathed suddenly. “Whose goose it was, I don’t know. I’ll find out from the gendarmes in the morning. So fat it was, perhaps Mère Peyrault of Sospel was the owner. I’ll send her a box of nougats. Two boxes.”
“Three,” murmured Dosso. “Geese are up a little, I think. Or perhaps down. I don’t know.”
The Baroness folded her jewelled fingers on her lap and talked in slow competence, words releasing themselves with each puff from her cheroot.
“Those tangerines,” she was saying. “Where else can such ripen, but in the hot afternoons of the Midi? I am very fond of them. Enormously. I like best those from around Hyères.
“I was there one summer, long ago, having the soup at that little restaurant with the palms in front. All at once, I became aware that a change had come over the soup, after ten years. I called over the proprietor.
“ ‘My compliments,’ I told him. ‘You have a new cook. She is an artist. Such a delicate, ethereal flavor—of—is it citron, or what?’
“ ‘But no, madame,’ he said. ‘The same cook—the same soup, I assure you. Still, it is a flattery.’ He bowed, and left.”
“Perhaps Madame la Baronne was in love again,” boomed my uncle.
“Not that time,” drowsed the Baroness, unperturbed. “I had all my senses about me. I turned. And there, next to me, was the mayor, reading a journal propped before him on the table, and eating his dessert. Tangerines. Little ones, that he broke open one by one and munched, peel and all. The voluptuary! In breaking they yielded their oil in a fine vapor. A distillation as far-reaching as ether. They scented his whiskers, in which the ribbons of his pince-nez were caught; they scented the air; they had scented my potage.”
“It was deliberate,” grumbled Dosso. “He was in love with you, and wished to foster your happiness.”
“Regardless,” she went on. “It is my custom now never to take potage without first rubbing my thumb with a tangerine.”
My uncle waddled paunchily to bring over the demijohn. It was rough native wine, as honest as sunlight, and with no more pretensions than himself.
—
I learned from him there is much nonsense about wine. Wine is not a thing to be talked about merely, or to sell, or for littérateurs to rouse envy and dismay by rattling off a litany of strange and purple nomenclature; but something to enjoy and pour down your throat, with the least ado possible, as if it were fully worthy of you. And the best wine for a man is that grown in his own vineyard or his neighbor’s, the blood of his own native soil.
Wine should not be sent away like an unwanted child. Travel ruins wine as it does men. Something of their native virtue and bloom and rootedness goes out of them. Wine, like man, is a living entity, and most congruous where it was bred. It should stay at home.…
—
“Three pounds of nougat,” my uncle repeated. “The goose was worth it.”
“Four,” said Dosso, wiping a trickle of wine from his chin.
The Baroness groped for her cheroot as she awoke. She regarded me with a faint smile on her handsome, thoughtful face, and gave two nods of decision, as if she had not been sleeping all the while but cogitating.
“That,” she said, “was a Sauce Sicilienne, was it not?”
“Yes, madame.”
“It was faultless. It enhanced to an extraordinary degree the quality of a roast bird that was in itself perfect.”
I was overwhelmed. Never before had Madame la Baronne, in our hearing, commended a dish, however much it had pleased her.
“You must go to the great kitchens and begin your training to be a chef de cuisine. I will give you letters.”
“But the Piccolo is waiting.”
Said my uncle: “Damn the Piccolo!”
Destiny itself had spoken with a tone unmistakable in its finality.
“We will celebrate with steaks on Monday,” said Dosso.
My uncle nodded. “I will make it four pounds of nougat after all,” he said.
II
THE GENTLEMAN UPSTAIRS
The Faisan d’Or had been a priory once, then the palace of a silversmith, then a college for the military. Its salons were echoes of Versailles. The kitchen was distinguished: a vast chancel, the granite walls begrimed with smoke from ten thousand lordly feasts, the aisle a channel of blue haze through which the cooks and apprentices moved like sacristans and acolytes. From the ranges, charcoal gridirons, and rows of copper pots, burnished like altar vessels, incense lifted to the soot-hung louvre overhead.
Here, great chefs had plied their art with cumulative renown for many decades until, through whim, they retired at seventy-five or eighty. Age is little perceived by those who dwell amid pomp and the changeless memorials of eternity. The sacerdotal environment fosters length of years. As a kitchen it was old when Catherine de’ Medici, with her retinue of chefs, adepts in pastry, architects in sugar, and vintners, came into Paris—an invasion as epochal as the entry of the Normans into England and the Moguls into Delhi. In retrospect, so few invasions, if naught is destroyed, are to be deplored by the thoughtful. Catherine destroyed nothing. Her cooks worked a catalysis. Instantly, from a noble and existent base of culture, the cuisine of France, her lasting glory, sprang into flower.
Here Richelieu had visited, to watch the beating of a mayonnaise. Over by the high, tinted oriel window, the thoughtful Vatel had stood, brow on hand, meditating before he launched into a delighted world the sauce which, under the name of Sauce Colbert, has ever since been allied with turbot. Under a stag’s head on the wall hung a painting, dark as if under a patina of meat glaze, of Béchamel, the inventor of the white sauce that bears his name—one of the enduring souvenirs of Louis XIV’s moderately sunny reign.
It was into this cultural heritage that I was pitched, to be deafened by shouts and roasted by the heat of a range as I stirred a large pot with a paddle. For days I did nothing but stir that pot. It held gallons and gallons of stock to be boiled down thick, as a base for Sauce Espagnol. There were four of us sauce apprentices, under the eye of Jules, a little man with rakish toque and a waxed mustache, eternally on the trot, like a fox terrier. Jules, though of no rank in the Faisan d’Or’s hierarchy of chefs, was the master of sauces, and monitor of the workers at the ranges. He reminded me of a dog I had once owned.
“Hello,” he would say, stopping in his trot. “Now, what was that—hein?”
He would sniff, weave back through a tangle of scents, and, as if by feeling along an invisible thread, arrive at a pot that was boiling away like a geyser.
“Stock for velouté, eh?” He would sniff again. “A few more carrots, little one. Just a handful.”
Then he would trot off again, adjusting a gas
cock here and there, turning around the handle of a pan, jabbing a finger into a pot, to give it a lick with the verdict of a nod or a grunt. He was amiable and kind-hearted, this little Provençal, so lost and homesick in Paris that he hardly ever went out evenings, save to talk with friends once a week or so at a café in the Rue de Bac. He slept on a couch in the office, and there passed his spare time, reading papers, smoking temperately, and playing chess by himself. He warmed to me at once as a fellow provincial.
“Look at this!” He unscrewed the top of a brass cartridge and held it to my nose. It was saffron, with an aroma so pungent it froze my olfactory nerves. “Smell! Smell that!”
“Very strong.” I could say no more.
“And good!” He stowed his treasure with a wink. “From my home in St.-Rémy! Only one garden grows such a saffron. Not a word to a soul. Not even to Urbain!”
None but myself knew the clue to the grandeur of his Sauce Jules, with its base of game and Espagnol, mélange of claret, mace, thyme, bitter orange, and a whiff of that hidden garden at St.-Rémy. He exulted in the possession of a secret that was inviolably his, that pampered his one grain of egoism. The little Provençal had something wrong with his luck. He had energy, a nose of phenomenal delicacy, a repertory of four hundred sauces and a hundred garnishes that he could mix instantly without looking into his vade mecum, but he had not the political instinct. In any profession it is not often the virtuoso but always the arriviste, the wire puller, who attains to high post and wealth. He was a fanatic collector of herbs—sweet Cicely, flag, burnet, cumin, from the Rhine, which he grew outside, below Vatel’s window, and a hundred more herbs that lay in envelopes in his cabinet. Epicures like Melun-Perret, the financier, and the Duca di Valmonte, were the gainers by his mania.
Jules was redolent. The petals in that brass cartridge had sent forth an essence that permeated, radium-like, his entire frame. I was conscious of that perfume at the end of my first week. Another poke in my ribs, a chuckle, and I knew Jules was behind me.
“Sssss!” A whisper prefaced all his remarks. “I think—yes, by Heaven, I’ll make a saucier of you!”
So for another month I piously stirred the pot of Espagnol stock, but I knew what was in it. I threw into it lumps of beef, ham, and veal, fried brown with the hammered bones; roast-fowl carcasses, tomatoes, turnips, onions, carrots, bay leaves, pepper, and all-spice; celery, thyme, marjoram and savory, chervil—and a pinch of the Savoy coriander, a little refinement of Jules’—and kept it at a simmer for a day. After an integration with sherry, it was passed through a hair sieve. And there was the Espagnol pot!
“Voilà!” Jules would say. “A springboard, a mother of fancies!”
Just as at Beynac’s academy the old lecturer used to declare that the skull was a basal form in art. Draw or model the skull to perfection, and what more can you be taught? The countless expressions of the portraitist you may then lay on at your whim. And this pot was the skull in our cuisine.
Under Jules’ tutelage I forayed from the Espagnol pot to such modifications of it as the Chevreuil, Tortue, Genoise, Colbert, and Béyrout, and the marvelous Regency. The good Jules, how patient he was! How wise in his calling! His sensory equipment was flawless. He could tell by the aroma of a roasting joint how much longer it should tarry in the oven. Thrusting his hand into the oven, he could tell with the accuracy of a thermometer the degree of heat, by the sharpness of the pain at the base of the fingernails.
After I had mastered the Espagnol and its variants, I was coached through the velouté and the Béchamel. Then I came to the end of my probationary three months and was summoned to the presence of Monsieur Paul, the chef des cuisines. I trembled. Jules gave me a cuff on the ear.
“Go!” he said sharply.
The hand that pushed me through the door of the sanctum was his. For the first time I beheld the illustrious, the fabled Paul Watier, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. My feelings were those of an apprentice verger gazing upon the Pope. Monsieur Paul rarely moved into the kitchen. His eyes and ears, a telepathic sense, and the whispers of his lieutenants acquainted him with all that transpired in that outer world, as if the wall between his long mahogany desk and the battery of ranges were of glass.
“Gallois?” he asked in a crisp, melodious voice, holding a letter before him.
“Yes, Monsieur.”
“Ah!”
He gave me a flashing glance, no longer than a second, then turned sideways, resting his chin upon his hand, and read the letter over again, reverently.
His toque was extraordinarily high, white and starched, ironed by the most skillful of blanchisseuses. The whiteness of his coat and full, knotted neckband emphasized the pallor of his rounded, dimpled countenance and the luster of his limpid brown eyes. It was the face of the pure intellectual, but the firmness of the lower lip, though it was moist and cherry-red, the lip of the gourmet, betokened decision. He had the nervous hands of a violinist, rather small, and his carriage, as he sat upright in his chair, his pose, and exalted smooth brow reminded me of the statue of the poet Théodore de Banville in a leafy corner of the Rue Vaugirard. Monsieur Paul had erudition in his craft and a knowledge of art and the classics. His endowment was an exquisite palate, curious yet austere, and so edged that it could cleave through a strange dish and its complexities to the intent of the chef, as swiftly as a yataghan to the heart of a melon.
His antecedents were worthy of his lofty post, for he had served his apprenticeship at Prunier’s, and had been coached by his father, a maître d’hôtel at the old Restaurant Noel-Peters, and a novice there before the Franco-Prussian War when Homard à l’Américaine was introduced.
“I have here a letter from Madame la Baronne. A friend, it is evident, of M. Gustave Urbain, our proprietor. It is an honor, I assure you. Madame enjoys high esteem at the Faisan d’Or.”
“Monsieur, if you will kindly allow me to say so, I have often heard Madame speak of the Faisan d’Or with admiration.”
A flush swept over the ivory pallor of his cheeks. He was touched and deeply gratified. He waved his hand as if modestly diverting the compliment to the house.
“The Faisan d’Or appreciates it—” And then he spoke of other palates of the first rank—Ali Bab, Prosper Montagné, Cournonsky, Bichet-Lévy, chairman of the Réunion des Gastronomes, the adventurous young Paul Reboux, and a dozen other names.
“Madame says—” the letter again crackled, the five lavender sheets of expensive paper, scrawled over loosely at the rate of ten words to the page—“Madame says you achieved something—in the way of a Sauce Sicilienne that she seemingly approves.
“In which case, you will be taken off the sauces as a finished student. You are now, M’sieu, promoted to the vegetables!”
He pressed a button on his desk. Jules appeared at the first tinkle, his eyes snapping.
“Your pupil goes to the legumes, Monsieur Jules. At your recommendation and that of Madame la Baronne. I think you recall her.”
“Very well, sir.”
“I think Madame was here last five—or was it six—”
“If I may be permitted, sir, it was the autumn of the year in which Monsieur Melun-Perret abandoned Sauce Batalane for Sauce à la Périgeux with his stuffed legs of partridge. That was four years ago, with your pardon, sir.”
Monsieur Paul inclined his high bonnet graciously, thought a moment, then pulled a gourd from the drawer of his desk—a little gourd painted with crude Indian designs. He rattled it delicately at his ear.
“Peppercorns, Monsieur Jules, from Guatemala. This came just in time. I believe that Monsieur Melun-Perret dines tonight, and on ptarmigan? Good! The maître d’hôtel will grind it at his table.”
Jules bowed, with a tiny sniff of delight. Monsieur Paul smiled wanly, and went on, “Yes, tonight ptarmigan, à la Duchesse, glazed.” A shade of reproach, or perhaps insinuation, had crept into his voice, and his large brown eyes rested indulgently on Jules, as he remarked softly, “It is a cat’s age, a c
at’s age, since I have tasted ptarmigan.”
“With the bird Monsieur Melun-Perret will have flageolets and pommes Sarah Bernhardt,” Jules said imperturbably. “And Chambertin, 1911.”
He opened the gourd, rubbed a peppercorn between his thumb and finger, and sniffed the aroma. His eyelids fluttered. “Good,” he remarked, and with a bow he left the room.
Monsieur Paul rubbed his chin briskly, and felt with delicacy to find the balance of his incredible high bonnet.
“Gallois,” he said, “you are accepted. And now a word or two for your benefit, young man. You have embarked upon an art that exacts of its devotees the utmost diligence, studious application, a large share of intellect, and the happiest co-ordination of eye and hand.”
He stared sternly at me, and I tried not to gulp like a yokel at my tight throat.
“You will matriculate from vegetables, Gallois. Then you will be advanced to fish. I congratulate you in advance: fish is primordial, and a challenge to the artist. Anaximander the wise Greek ascribed a fish origin to man—and yet how few of us can rise to cope worthily with this interesting animal! And none may, Gallois, except those who have passed through the anteroom of the master saucier. Matelote, Vénétienne, Allemande for the carp; à la Turque, Horly, Cardinal, Aurora, Portugaise for flounders, plaice, and so forth.
“And, remember!” He lifted a finger. “Always at the Faisan d’Or the strictest sobriety and punctuality!”
I returned to the kitchen. Two score of faces turned upon me like moons. Even the scullions paused, with dripping hands lifted above the suds. Jules walked down with me proudly. He presented me to the trim, saturnine Guido, the vegetable chef.
“Monsieur Gallois, who will assist you. A friend of Monsieur Urbain.” (This was true only in a one-sided epistolary sense, for the Baroness’ letter had been sent to the proprietor, whom I had not seen.) “And a friend of Madame la Baronne.”
Guido bit into an asparagus and shrugged.
“Quella grande bagascia! That harlot!”