by Idwal Jones
“She has taste, all the same,” returned Jules.
—
Jules was preparing the dinner. The viands for M. Melun-Perret were “de qualité et de choix.” He was to dine alone tonight. He wished no distraction. Already, in the small Louis XIV chamber, with its thick Chinese carpet, a Gobelin, two Fragonards, and a Corot on the walls, he was sipping his Amontillado. Urbain himself had arranged the settings. M. Melun-Perret, whose midriff was one of the buttresses of the Faisan d’Or, he regarded with a high, if apprehensive, esteem. Even the mountains, the Persian saying goes, are afraid of a rich man.
Under the table was a tabouret for Monsieur’s gouty foot. The scentless Dijon roses in a bowl were beaded with dew. In the crate burned a fire of pine cones. On the buffet stood the uncorked magnum of Chambertin, ruby-glowing, its soul expanding in the soft warmth of the room after the chill and long fatigue in the cellar. The air was filled with the etherealized bouquet of peaches and violets. Near the door a bottle of Rauenthaler, wired, resting on a shattered glacier, was as white as a polar bear.
And there was Pierre, of course. Pierre was the ugliest waiter at the Faisan d’Or, and the finest in all Paris. He was like a caricature by Daumier: squat, with bulging pale eyes, warts, and the bald, up-thrust head of a toad. It was hypnotic to watch him conjure bread, butter, and silver out of the air, and he laid one under a spell as if a tincture of grace were in him. He was reverent before the food and wine. Like Paracelsus, he knew that “he who eats but a crust of bread is communicating in the elements of all the starry heavens.”
No, there was no other waiter for M. Melun-Perret but Pierre, nor any other chef but Jules. They had ministered to him for twenty years.
The dinner was perfect. It was served late, for the guest had prepared for it first by hearing an opera. I helped Jules. We sent up the consommé. Then a baked pike à la Genoise.
After that a pair of langoustes from some Devonshire cove. Jules had boiled them; he cut up the meat, stirred it into thick velouté sauce with the pounded coral, a spoonful of meat extract, seasonings, chives, sherry, a half cupful of grated Parmesan, some sherry, and sliced truffle. It was the veritable black truffle with veinings of white. With this mixture he filled the shells, baked them a while in the oven, then coated them with buttered crumbs which he browned with a red-hot salamander.
Finally a Grand Marnier soufflé was put into the oven. Jules spoke for the first time.
“I am the guest of Monsieur tonight, and I beg you will do me the honor to dine with me.”
Pierre, who had been scampering up and down the stairs, bowed us to a table set in a little arbor outside. He whipped the consommé to us; then, after the correct space, the pike and the langouste. Our courses synchronized with those upstairs. So did the wine-drinking; our part of the Chambertin and so forth coming down in a silver carafe. Pierre was in two places at once.
Jules had roasted the ptarmigans in a copper reverberator, shielding them the first half hour with vine leaves. The skin was like brown-glazed paper. There was bread sauce, a simple gravy, a dish of Flemish asparagus. Pierre carved, and served Monsieur upstairs and the gentlemen in the arbor.
He oozed in, rubbing his hands.
“He is charmed. And he begs you to pay particular attention to the second joint.”
Pierre mixed the salad. The romaine and cress he doused with walnut oil chilled to an emulsion, turning it with wooden forks so that the bruises showed on the green in dark lines. He poured on the souring of wine vinegar and the juice of young grapes, seasoned with shallots, pepper and salt, a squeeze of anchovy, and a pinch of mustard. At the Faisan d’Or the salad was in wedlock with the roast.
Pierre himself ate only bread. He was an anchorite whilst serving distinguished foods. He ate large quantities of hard bread, with not a twinge of the cheek muscles to betray him, and only a minute twitch of the epiglottis to show it had gone down. But, unseen, he managed to engulf gills of brandy. He was a drunkard, and he was very drunk now, but only Jules guessed it, by the whiteness of Pierre’s thumbnails as he gripped each plate. He came in with two quarter-pound truffles vaporous in snowy napkins.
“Truffes sous la cendre!” said Jules in mock surprise, leaning back in his chair. “Fi donc, le coquin!” he murmured as he put a glass to his lips.
“No?” asked Pierre.
“After the ptarmigan, no. Into the ash can with them.”
“Exactly, Monsieur Jules.”
I understood, of course. For a gourmand the truffles were permissible. Jules desired to cherish recollection of that ptarmigan. It had come from the moors of the cool Hebrides, where it had fattened on gorse buds and myrtle shoots, its diurnal life a miracle because of the eagles wheeling overhead.
“Monsieur commends the soufflé. He sends you his compliments.”
Jules declined the soufflé. I followed his example.
“Apples,” said Jules, “and a piece of cheese.”
Pierre looked at him with respect, and brought them. The apples were Rembrandtesque, brown-red and flushed gold, for they were the Orléans Reinette. My teeth crashed into one, as through flesh, or sweet, crisp marrow, with an upsurge of cold, tangy ichor that, like a blast on a horn, aroused heroic, ancestral memories.
“His first,” whispered Jules. “His first Reinette!”
“This now, for the next bite,” said Pierre, holding out to me a sliver of cheese. It was Double Gloucester. “Alternate!”
Pierre must have been blind-drunk. I thought I heard him giggle. “What would Madame la Baronne think if he didn’t alternate bites! Hein? She wouldn’t give him another letter!”
My private affairs must have been discussed from scullery to roof of the Faisan d’Or. A secret could no more be kept here than in a nunnery. But I cared nothing, rejoicing to see in the basket three more of the Orléans Reinettes. Coffee came. Later a motorcar chugged away from the porte-cochere. Pierre rejoined us, pulling off his jacket, collar, and tie.
“He’ll be here in the autumn again. More ptarmigans.”
“The dinner,” said Jules, “was a success. M. Melun-Perret is admirable company.”
Pierre tipped brandy into our glasses. His glass was a bombe that held half a pint, and he sluiced it about, inhaling the odor with closed eyes. We didn’t want so much. After all, we had dined.
Pierre refilled his bombe, but his hands trembled in most perilous fashion. He could not jeopardize that cognac, a Barbezieuc of 1815, fully a liqueur. He wound a napkin about his left hand, which held the glass, looped it about his neck, and pulled the other end down with his right, hauling the Barbezieuc to his mouth in a series of reverent jerks.
“Salut! A long life to M. Melun-Perret!”
We drank twice to the health of our patron.
“A remarkable man,” I said to Jules. “You have dined with him often?”
“Indeed! Forty times, at least.”
“What does he look like?”
“That I don’t know. I never saw him. I have never had occasion, my dear young sir, to climb the stairs. Your health! And to the next ptarmigan!”
III
IN PETIT-MONTROUGE
I became a pupil in two academies. One was Beynac’s atelier near St. Sulpice, where I studied modelling, the casting of bells and temples of Cybèle, with garlands and flights of doves, all executed in the best Demerara sugar. The other was Monsieur Paul’s office with its wall of books.
There I plodded through Grimaud de la Reyniére and the Almanach des Gourmands, the Roman Cuisine of Apicius, and Traube on the Gastronomy of the Ancient Greeks. Monsieur Paul’s copy of Dumas’ cookery book was inscribed to Victor Hugo, then an exile in the Patmos of the Jerseys. A fat ledger in calf was the holograph work of the great Vitry, chef of the Rocher de Cancale—even more renowned in fiction, for there Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempre supped with Coralie, and the ill-fated Rastignac dined alone.
My English I improved by reading the severe Mrs. Beeton’s Household Management, the pag
es given to Sussex folk cookery soiled and dog’s-eared. This British lady was less, I think, an artist than a social philosopher and moralist. She lauded a “Useful Soup for Benevolent Purposes” made of oxcheek and turnips. It affected me like a whiff of chill fog from the Thames. So did her discourse on suet pudding with the note:
“When there is a joint roasting, this suet pudding in a long shape may be boiled and cut into slices a few minutes before dinner is served, then browned in dripping.… Where there is a large family of children it is a most economical plan to serve up the pudding before the meat, as in this case the consumption of the latter article will be much smaller than it otherwise would be.”
One can understand the incursion of British youth into Gaul, their haunted and anemic look—a flight from suet.
But the folklore was sound, and the steel-plate engravings of banquet dishes and the footnotes on turbot, or whatever else was “notably esteemed by the Romans,” contributed to my learning. I am yet doubtful what learning is. You haven’t it if you have just learned some fact or opinion, by ear, or by looking into a book. If, by sheer luck, you remember it five or ten years after, and can quote it, it is possible you may be indeed learned.
And in the kitchen I had Jules and Guido.
“Castor and Pollux,” Monsieur Paul used to say of them proudly. He was accurate as well as poetic.
With the help of these twin stars he could outride any storm and tack the Faisan d’Or through any contingency: a banquet for a thousand World War medallists; a dinner for a society of Latin scholars who desired fare of the Antonines; a quiet repast for a Moslem envoy and his new little friend from the chorus of the Moulin Rouge.
Just as all sailing ships used to have their Russian Finn or Lapp, so all kitchens of the first grandeur have their Italian maestro. Even if they had not that monument to her, the Luxembourg, the French could not have forgotten Catherine de’ Medici. Guido was from Venice. Venetians make good artists, spies, and historians; Casanova was all three. Guido knew all that was whispered in the Faisan d’Or. He knew about my letter from the Baroness, and knew the given names of Urbain’s secret mistresses. Further, he was a geographer, and so learned in the arcana of foods that if you mentioned any point on this revolving globe he could tell you whatever it produced edible, and how much it was entitled to respect.
Still, he was pragmatic. I was with him at the soups these days. He kept ten separate cauldrons of stock on the range. He could tell each by the aroma of the steam it cast up. As he tended them he sang with tenor gusto and a lacerating throb: “Zuppa! Ma che bella zuppa! Minestra e risi e bisi!”
When orders came in, he capered from one pot to another, dipping his ladle into the stocks of chicken, beef, mutton, game, fish, turtle, and legumes. Ah, the furious swiftness of our Italian maestro, his flood of awful mediaeval profanity, oaths curling his lips, eyes shining with the gleam of a serpent’s! He worked best after he had cursed and lashed himself into a rage. Never did he look into a book; he kept in his head the formulas of twice a hundred soups.
One day Pierre dashed in, eyes bulging out like doorknobs, thrust at him his toad-like head, and yammered: “Hang yourself now! It’s the General Rossier. He wants Potage à la Bagration!”
Guido gave a snort. “That cochon? No!”
Pierre clasped his hands and wrung them supplicatingly, with a low cry of agony. A handsome tip was at stake, and the reputation of the Faisan d’Or.
“What brandy are they drinking tonight?” asked Guido.
“A Picquepoul, 1875,” said Pierre.
“How good that must taste!” Guido patted his shoulder. “What would I not give for a tiny drop! Courage, Pierre! I’ll see what I can do about that potage!”
Pierre scampered off.
The maestro’s hands worked in a blur. He brought to a boil equal parts of court-bouillon and white consommé. In a little pan he sautéd a handful of chopped vegetables and sorrel with crayfish tails and bits of turbot. With four egg yolks he beat up a cupful of cream with a pinch of curry. At his nod I mixed all together, poured them into a silver tureen, and garnished it with croutons and a scattering of chervil just as Pierre returned with a glass of the Picquepoul.
“There you are, crapaud!” said Guido. “Your health!” He sipped the brandy. “Ha! My compliments to the General. Tell him to ask for a real zuppa next time.”
As Pierre trod off as on a cloud, Guido winked and gave the brandy to me.
“After all, we should have some other reward than mere glory.”
I gulped the Picquepoul, which blazed down to my toes and set them afire.
“Good?”
“Yes,” I said.
He sipped a spoonful of hot coffee. Before a meal he never drank spirits, and my surmise was that tonight he was going out to dine, preferring, like most chefs, to dine elsewhere than in the scene of his labors. Usually he chose some small Italian café that nobody else had ever heard of. Give him a platter of entangled maccheroni, and he was blissful.
Guido was also adept in wares and delicacies, and the steward consulted with him before buying them in any quantity. He had also the key to the storeroom which ran the length of the cellar, its quasi-obscurity, as of a mausoleum—indeed, it had once quartered the coffins of priors, abbots, and a king or two—broken here and there by cobwebbed lamps.
He had a special room off this dungeon, redolent of mustard, truffles, jambons, gingerbread, and smoked meats and fish. From the beams hung strings of fig peckers, Corsican garlic, smoked plover, and wood fungus. An inky smell came from kegs of Czech-dried mushrooms. There were biscuits from England and certain hamlets in Brittany; boars’ heads from Troyes, jellies from Rouen and Tasmania, mortadelle from Lyons; blocks of cheese, with more chabichou, or Poitiers goat cheese, than in any shop in the world; all manner of Russian, German, and Spanish delicacies, Madras chutneys, chocolates from Perugia and Genoa.
Guido was eclectic in his tastes. He could afford to be, so wide was his renown as a connoisseur of these viands “in the raw,” as one might say. Dijon mustard he bowed to, but he best liked that from Orleans. His cockscombs he imported from Minorca, which breeds a finely crested variety of hen. They came brined in a vat. At the Faisan d’Or they were served in Sauce Éliogabale, a variant of the Financière, in puff paste.
Heliogabalus, by all accounts, was a nuisance in his day; and not much good of him can be said now, but his habits provided much talk, and he invented vol-au-vent à la financière. The learned Doctor Ellwanger believed fully in this claim. Chroniclers more skeptical think his cooks invented it, and that he killed them to assume their glory. The invention was startling enough to make him cut short his campaign in Syria and turn back for a triumphal entry into Rome. He passed through Palmyra on the way, in a chariot drawn by naked women, surrounded by courtesans, musickers, and buffoons, wearing the crown of the sun god, accompanied by historiographers to describe his genius and his orgies, and followed by his hundred cooks.
A trifle excessive, we might say. Still, if it was for the vol-au-vent—
Guido prided himself only on his skill with maccheroni. He had all manner of pastes in an alcove of this stronghold, sent to him from every corner of Italy. Rubbing his hands and smiling, he would nod at the packages with the air of a curator of State jewels.
“Nous Italiens—we have a paste culture, you understand? Just as the Mexicans have a corn culture, and the Cossacks and Mongols a horse culture.”
For paste in its varied forms he had a delight. Here were little wafers, fiori, sea shells, cocked hats, butterflies, Cupid’s bows, ribbons, wheels, ties, and confetti—the hollow kinds, the tubini, canelloni, gnocchi; the solid kinds, as large as a pencil, as fine as hair or moss, Genoese orecchi, or “priests’ ears”; vermicelli that ran fifteen pounds to the mile.
Guido lived in a house near the Bastille, where he had a suite of three or four rooms. It was a kind of asylum for exiles—a dreary place, no more home-like than a museum, and his parlor, full of mirr
ors, horsehair couches, velvet portiers, and tall vases, all extremely ugly. He was hospitable, and often he had as many as five or six guests at a time. One night a week he cooked up a dinner for them in his kitchen, always some paste dish. If the oldest guest were a Sicilian, the dish would be served with almonds, chopped fennel, and sardines. If a Sardinian, it would be the tape-like fettucine with pine nuts, as Guido had cooked it at the Suora Nina near the Trevi Palace. He was a sound judge of any endeavor in the field of paste, and loved the dish when it had the briny smack of anchovies or of the vongola, that tiny shellfish like a snail.
Connoisseurship exacts too often its penalty. Savors pall, the taste buds dull, the palate grows as indurated as the sole of an old boot or the conscience of a judge. Guido feared it. He judged the perfection of his soups by the twitch of his nose in the steam.
He was protected also by a childlike gift of wonder. This drew him nearly every night into some remote quarter, in quest of surprises. He knew all the bistros at Clichy where red-sashed navvies engulfed their ragouts. For months he made a pilgrimage to the Annamese colony in Grenelle, where he had surrendered himself to a beef-and-veal soup. It was tinctured with a few drops of nuoc-man, a briny exudation of decaying fish, mellowed for years in a jar.
One afternoon he waylaid me in the kitchen.
“Tonight you come with me. We shall dine. A paste!” His eyes rolled like a conspirator’s, and his whisper was almost inaudible. “Not a word to anyone, you understand. We shall have with us—guess whom? M’sieu Melun-Perret!”
I think I was too stupefied to do more than nod, and gulp, “Where?”
“Chiusi’s.”
That evening, wearing our best clothes, we rode out in a bus to Petit-Montrouge. Even in spring and bright sunlight, that district is less than cheerful, but this night the squalor of the street into which we turned was heart-lowering. The air was like a cold poultice. The shops were hung with castoff hats, clothing, and boots, soggy in the drip from the eaves.
“Ah, but Chiusi’s,” murmured Guido, consoling himself. “Durum wheat paste, cooked al dente. And a buttery tomato sauce as they have in Calabria. I haven’t been there in five months. We shall, therefore, approach it as a novelty.