by Idwal Jones
I wrenched myself away to the kitchen, for I had the dessert to make. Pierre followed me, and his voice was husky with admiration.
“There’s a healthy one. Elle a de l’estomac.”
The peaches I had already got ready. They were Lord Palmerstons, early to ripen, and extremely good this season. Pêches Giulia I have made a few times since, in souvenir of a happy night ten years ago, but I have not been able to improve upon it. It is rich, but there are dinners that will be faulty if they have not a rich conclusion.
You split firm peaches and stone them. The centers you fill with this mixture: a little of the pulp, some macaroons, sugar, grated citron peel, and liqueur, and a dash of almond extract. Fit the halves together again, moisten with wine, whiten with castor sugar, and stay them in the oven until they glaze.
Give each of them a base of shortbread moistened with a few drops of red wine.
Now for the Zabaglione, its sauce, a fair dessert in itself. Since you have the peach, you will need but half a dessert portion. This is the formula for ten. (I made it ten, because there was Pierre.)
Fifteen egg yolks, fifteen half egg-shells of sherry, five tablespoonfuls of sugar. Warm the sherry very slightly, below steaming point, in a round-bottom saucepan. Beat yolk and sugar to a batter, flavor with a dash of rose, vanilla, almond extracts, and a pinch of grated fresh orange peel. Sink the sherry saucepan into a larger that contains boiling water, pour the batter into the wine, set over a fire, and beat. You keep beating until it thickens, lower the heat, and keep on until the Zabaglione expands into airy yellow velvet. (Remove at the right instant, or you are undone.) Spoon over the peaches, and hasten it to the table.
That was the dessert.
“Merci,” said Giulia.
—
“A Russian I once knew also had a triumph with a dish,” began Jules. “One great triumph. His name I have forgotten.”
“Bulgakov,” said Pierre. “Otto Bulgakov.”
We lighted cigars and sipped the rice sake that Pom-Pom warmed for us at the spirit lamp. Freda, with elbows on the table, pillowed her chin in her hands to listen, and the emerald blinked into my eyes, which was her intention.
“Otto was chef to a Grand Duke, and accompanied him on a voyage to India. They journeyed to the interior, beyond the Deccan, and, after riding through leagues of swamps in howdahs, upon elephants with silver chains to their tusks—which the Indian Prince had sent to convey them—they reached the heart of the old Mogul Empire. The Grand Duke must have had some motive for his expedition. Science, perhaps; or diplomacy. The Prince, an independent ruler, had no very great love for the British. He preferred Slavs.
“They arrived. They stayed two months in the Mogul palace. It was large and mouldering, full of clocks, red plush, greyhounds, and shabby Bavarian furniture. The banyan trees about it were crowded with monkeys. The Grand Duke changed his uniform twice a day. There was banquet after banquet held in his honor; all the native rulers attended; there was much talk on science, or perhaps diplomacy. Otto was no Talleyrand. So he spent most of the time, when he wasn’t fishing for carp, in the kitchen.
“The old chef was a phenomenon. He was ninety, wore a turban with a plume on it, and carried a saber. The last of a great line of Mogul chefs whose office was hereditary in this feudal domain. A civilized race, you understand, these Moguls. Cookery is a religion with them, higher than any other art.
“He drank water, this chef, and lived on nothing but corn wafers, baked for him by his own retainer. Anchorites have saved their souls on that diet. This old gaillard saved his taste buds. His masterpiece was a curry of goslings. It had ghee, coconut milk, green bananas, ginger, fifty condiments and herbs. The intelligence of a great artist played over all this intricacy, and gave it cohesion and a bewildering charm. It was fabulous. At the very scent of it, Otto felt crude; at the very first taste, he was caught up to Heaven.
“He had the temper of a warrior, this Mogul super-Carême. Woe to his assistants if they were clumsy! He whacked them with the flat of his German-silver saber. The backs of even his best chefs were scarred like an old saddle. To Otto he was immensely courteous, treated him with every consideration as an equal, and told all there was to know about this curry. He was in no jeopardy—Europe did not exist for him.
“The Grand Duke left, perhaps no wiser in science or diplomacy. Otto was the gainer by a set of the Moglai herbs that went into that gosling curry; for the old warrior had spent a whole evening in the garden with him, picking them. Thirty of them would have baffled any botanist, let alone any chef, in Europe.
“It was a triumphal return for Otto Bulgakov. He contrived that curry in Moscow, London, Monaco, and Sofia. The Société des Gastronomes awarded him the Cordon Bleu; the Worshipful Guild of Vintners, the gold medal; the Alleanza Epicurea, the sash and medal with two clasps.
“Few chefs had been so signally honored. Otto declined Escoffier’s post at the Negresco, and prepared the curry for an assemblage of five Maharajahs and twenty leading epicures in Nice. It was a little short of perfection this time. Before the Société des Gastronomes he tried again to recoup. The master encountered more than failure this time. It was a debacle. Since the Grand Duke was angry, Otto had to resign his post. The unhappy man, after two years, had run out of herbs. He wrote to India, spoke with herbalists, consuls, and import merchants. He found no help. He plagued the curator of the Jardin des Plantes, who was helpless in the matter. Otto bought a garden and planted seeds, haunted drug shops and Indian restaurants.
“This was ruin. He had but one chance left. Borrowing money, he voyaged to India, and tracked overland to the principality. For three weeks at Agra he was detained by police, who took him for somebody bent on mischief. ‘Bulgakov’ was hardly the name for a traveler desirous of avoiding suspicion. Released, he found his way to the palace. A month too late, for the old man had been buried, and all his herbal knowledge with him.
“Consular authorities shipped him home. Things went from bad to worse. Urbain gave him a little work to do, but Bulgakov had neither sorcery nor spirits left. Later he washed dishes at the Café Biard, and at nights he mooned about in herb shops, talking to himself. He was found one day, floating in the Seine. A man ruined by a dish.”
Pom-Pom brought coffee to the women, who had retired to the music room, and drew the curtain so they would not be disturbed. In the kitchen the concierge’s daughter washed the plates. Our room, as we sat before the window, looking at the fog, the cloud wrack, and the chimney pots, was a whirlpool of smoke. After a dinner of excellence, and the warm sake, the talk was mild and philosophical. To the chefs, closed in by their sedentary art, the world was a spectacle of which they could have but an intermittent glimpse. Not men, but growing things pleased them, and nature—rivers, cattle grazing knee-deep in herbage, birds in the park, the rows of opened crates of legumes, shallots, lettuce, and marrows before the shops in the shadow of St. Mathurin. Their eyes had been well-pleased. The orderly march of the seasons gratified them, and the affairs of men, whose quirks had irritated them in the kitchen, they could now consider bemused; they had slacked the bow for the night.
With Pierre, it was the reverse. He had been constrained to listen all day, repressed, to a hundred opinions, all at variance with his own. Today, for three hours, he had waited upon a deputy, a Bourse chairman, and a foreign minister, who had argued and banged the table from the hors d’oeuvres to the cognac. Unawares, they had been waited upon by a pent-up volcano.
It cracked now, with a hot lava flow of vituperation.
“Imbeciles! Swine! Conservatives!”
His porphyry jaw bulged out like a ram, bluer and more pugnaciously as the evening advanced. But Jules could always stave off a full eruption.
“A little of that arrack, Pierre.” Or, “Mr. Pom-Pom will take a cigar, I think.”
“Oh, pardon, pardon!”
—
It was school for me. Twenty such evenings made an academic course in philosophy; for
here were two artists and an observer of behavior who, in the main, were wise, and content to play a subordinate part in life, and content with their callings. They talked well, and with shrewdness, for they talked about individuals. Who talks of men in general, talks of nobody. And there was Pom-Pom, with his chrysanthemum tumble of hair, goggles, childlike manner, and delicate sympathy, who was one of us, and a pet of the house. He was an anarchist. Only an unworldly soul could be so old-fashioned. He opposed everything on principle. Pom-Pom contra mundum. His ideas astonished and delighted everyone; his talk convinced no one.
“E simpatico,” General Padiglione, the old Royalist, used to say, in approval.
—
At midnight we took Freda and her aunt home in a taxicab. Then Pom-Pom and I struck out on foot into the mist, for I had decided to accompany him to his rooms in the deplorable Quarter of La Villette, behind the slaughterhouses. We prowled thus because we had not a franc between us this night, and with nobody about we could talk English as loudly as we wished.
Our Siamese had one talent requisite for the perfect gastronome—the gift of patient immobility. He was a connoisseur of rice. The hours we spent over various bowls of the grain in the Asiatic eating houses scattered in La Villette and the musty streets near the Sorbonne! We had pulao with shrimps at Banderji’s, in Calcutta style; and Michigomi rice with tiny eels, knotted and baked in custard, at Mme. Kato’s, where the poor Siamese students lived. Best of all, he liked the kome, which he cooked over the single flame in his room. Rice that he took from a withe-bound pail, washed six times, brought to a boil in its own weight of cold water, and simmered under cover for twenty minutes, holding a watch to his eyes. It emerged fluffy, dry, the grains separate. He ate it with a dash of shoyu sauce, or straight from the pot, as colorless as snow—and, to me, as tasteless. To me, rice plain is as utterly meaningless as one note touched on a keyboard. Perhaps an exquisite ear could resolve the note into many separate vibrations, exult in them all, and bind them in a unity. Pom-Pom could pitch twenty grains of rice, with a whir of chopsticks, into his mouth, then lay his chopsticks down and blink in a grateful daze. Racial memories would flood his being: his childhood, the paddy-fields, the songs of his playmates, paper lanterns dangling in the mist. In the beginning was rice. He was a wanderer who had long ago severed his ties, through a passion for personal freedom. But, I fancied, he was not as completely cut off as he thought. A mouthful of rice, and the past was with him again, and he was close to the spiritual resources that may be tapped therein.
A man’s best teachers often stand outside his field. From Pom-Pom I learned, apart from rice, much that was good. He was a fin gourmet because gastronomy, like every other art, made life vivid. And for the same reason he was a philosophical anarchist. Anarchists are not the worst company in the world. Pom-Pom carried not a bomb but a red sash about his middle, to proclaim his absence of political faith and to hold up his corduroys.
Outwardly, he was a Bohemian, in panoply of mane, velvet hat, and cloak. A few of the instructors at Beynac’s were good specimens of this genus, as if Murger himself had designed them. He was desperately poor. When he sold a picture he was rich. In between periods of such splendor he froze in his attic—a large one, though—and dined on a plate of rice and a nip of tea.
Pom-Pom had the aspect of a highly groomed little idol; he was a devoted slave to his friends, and he spoke perfect English, mixed with slang, for he had stayed three or four years in London, leaving it after he had got into trouble through his anti-militarism.
“Dammit, Jean-Marie,” he said to me once, “I want to move out of my diggings, but I can’t!”
This seemed hardly possible, for he was always moving, flitting like a bird from twig to twig.
“It’s this way. There’s a pair of bloody aristocrats staying with me. They’re related to the husband of a second cousin of mine, who married a Japanese; and since they look upon me as a kind of relative, they’ve moved in. One’s a banker, and collects fourteenth-century maps and Arab sextants; the other is a tinned-crab and lacquer nabob, and madly buys stone angels. Tons of them, positively tons! I’m crowded out. We sleep on the floor. There isn’t enough room to cook rice.
“They’re millionaires, and they’re turned Bohemian. When they’re not buying things, they’re at the cafés, looking happy-go-lucky and drinking with models. But we get along. On the basis of art. They have an unbounded, fanatic respect for it, I assure you!”
Pom-Pom’s father, though a prince in a land where princes were thicker than temple bells, was one of the richest of men, so I learned from Freda. But Pom-Pom cared nothing for wealth. When landscapes didn’t sell, he chipped tombstones, or helped as a clerk at the bookstalls along the Seine. Sometimes he marched with the Salvation Army band, playing a trumpet. Single-handed, he defied in London the Japanese Navy. It was a gunboat anchored out in the Thames; no visitors were permitted aboard, and none within fifty yards. Pom-Pom went out in a rowboat, with his trumpet and a cluster of balloons, and played a tune from The Mikado. All on deck took it in the nature of a compliment. The captain and officers beamed; all hands came to the rail and smiled. Then Pom-Pom let go his balloons, which rose, spread apart, and allowed a streamer to dangle down. It bore ideographs that read: “Fellow anarchists, hail! Down with all Governments!”
The little officers were galvanized. A bosun yelled an order that turned the crew rightabout-face. The streamer marred the air for an hour, drifted to the mast, and stuck there like a moth, until it was furiously hacked down and pitched into the waves, where it bobbed defiance until dusk.
This exploit, on top of others fully as undiplomatic, made it hot for him in certain quarters. His allowance was cut off, and Pom-Pom without regret shifted his milieu from London to Montparnasse.
V
THE DURUY MASK
It was an August night. The roasting shields drummed with heat; the air was in layers of blue vapor, denser at the ranges where grease sputtered, fluids hissed and bubbled, and spilled foods carbonized in a blink of dark smoke. Five banquets were afoot, and there was the regular clientele to be served and, above all, to be kept patient. The chefs had been irascible all evening, but had now passed from excitement to a state resembling trance, the apprentices capering about them like extras in a ballet. Monsieur Paul weaved calmly through a delirium of pans, whisked trays, vapors and voices—turning a spoon here, jogging a casserole there, pushing back another to lower heat, dipping a finger into a mayonnaise, flicking a gout of Espagnol from a pot to his mouth.
“Look,” said Rémy, driving an elbow into my ribs. “They’ve come!”
The brass-studded door had been thrown open.
“The Council of Brillat!”
There stood seven men in the formality of sash and rosette. Two would have been blinding enough—but seven! For an instant paralysis seized upon the chefs and their apprentices. It was as if among a band of monks at their devotions the Pope and six cardinals of eminence had suddenly appeared.
Urbain, waving to right and left with slow, grandiose movements, murmured the names of the chefs. Monsieur Paul, a cloud of gleaming starch, hurried over, confused and delighted, adjusting his kerchief and toque.
“The Council of Brillat,” whispered Rémy. “And that’s the president, Gaspard Duruy—the grand cochon!”
I peered through the steam. Who had not heard of Duruy—president of three gastronomic clubs, founder of the august Council of Brillat, wine taster and sybarite, editor of Le Monde Culinaire? He was dark-purple, breezily jovial, corpulent, with the jaws of a gorilla, and a monocle. Secretly he was a wine agent. He wrote a monthly causerie, after making the rounds of the five or six restaurants he favored with his patronage. Some of these, to the fury of their cellarmen, thus found it advisable to buy fluids of his recommendation, which they sold off at a loss to near-by cafés, or marked for use in the kitchens.
Urbain disliked and half feared him. He would have preferred to see in the Faisan d’Or a mob of Ba
shi-Bazouks than one Duruy.
But how widely Duruy was hated I never guessed until weeks later.
Rémy whispered the other names. The thin gentleman with face like alabaster was Monsieur di Valmonte, brain surgeon, violinist, author of a notable work, La Cuisine Aphrodisiaque chez les Romains. Then there was the swarthy Don Vicente Gonzalez of the Argentine Opera, wide at the cheekbones, known affectionately to the chefs as “El Indio.”
(Don Vicente and I were to become the closest of friends, and I cherish his volume of memoirs, so honest that it was devoid of a single name in the theater or politics. He had several mistresses, whose noses were Grecian, who were never too young, and whose eye hollows were like volcanoes in quiescence.)
The advent of the Council was no surprise, after the first stir; the kitchen was prepared for the honor. Fresh linen had been distributed; the hanging rows of copper pots and cauldrons, like tympani, shone with the luster of gold. The seven men stood around, watching, smiling graciously. Monsieur Paul and di Valmonte were deep in converse. It was indeed an impressive occasion—the century dinner of Brillat-Savarin himself! The menu was a composition of Duruy’s. It was tacked on the pillar near me, and I have written it down:
Whitstable oysters
Potage Crécy
Carpe Miroir à la Chambord
Truite garnie, sauce Genoise
Caneton de Rouen en chemise
Petits pois à la Française
Artichauts à l’Escoffier
Pommes rondantes
Salade Marigny
Bombe glacée
Bonbonnière de petits fours
A modest dinner—but the Council cultivated simplicity at times!
Monsieur Paul called me over and introduced me to di Valmonte, who displayed to me a basket of shrimps nesting in frozen seaweed. Duruy, cigar in mouth, looked on with something between contempt and irritation.
“You perceive these?” asked the surgeon. “You recognize them?”