by Idwal Jones
History, perhaps, does not record another such instance of persons so illustrious in the fields of diplomacy, the arts, and pure learning gathering underground to dine on primordial viands, nor to dine anywhere with such anticipation, zest, and urbane hilarity. The musk ox yielded to the tooth, and the soufflé of cormorant eggs—cormorants are still extant, but look as if they ought to be extinct, and the zoo had been kind enough to supply us with some eggs of this fowl—went down gullets as smoothly as the oil flowed down Aaron’s beard. No diner writhed on the floor in attitudes worthy of Dante. And there was cognac—a great plenty of cognac.
The dinner was high in merit, considering the obstacles, but far higher in singularity. Fire thrummed on the hearth, and on the spit a haunch of musk ox revolved slowly, François basting it with ladles of sour cream. He had marinated it two days and nights. The immensity of that haunch which had propelled the beast over pastures when Europe was a tundra fresh from the receding ice cap was enough to inspire the diners with awe, with the most oppressive feelings of antiquity. It did, until the post-prandial champagne was poured out, to go along with the wafers of smoked Arctic dolphin on thin rice cakes.
The Palmyran rice, brought in by the old Academician, had resembled nothing so much as buckshot. We had ground it up with the fossil moss, a vegetable like hard coral, steeped it a fortnight in hot water, and made batter cakes. We had much left for a soufflé made with the beaten whites of cormorant eggs.
François carved the haunch with a sword-shaped blade, from which the slices fell, handsome and succulent, as dark as the red Argentine beef, onto plates so hot that the plates sputtered with the juice. The Duc di Valmonte, hero of a dozen banquets almost as epochal, sat as if hypnotized.
From stone jugs the waiters poured out a wine tinctured with the enamel dissolved in spirits, brought safely in Melun-Perret’s plane from Sofia. It had a taste of museums, naturally.
Then followed quenelles of musk-ox liver à la maréchale, with Finnish cucumbers, aromatic as smelts, ripened in the long midnight sun. Then a salad of sea moss, cockles, and roe—all from the Arctic. Then a dessert of sherbet, made of a large chunk of fossil ice, as old as the musk ox itself, and coal-black. I had rendered it to powder and whipped it up with lime juice and syrup. Very handsome it looked under the soft lights.
Our sommelier brought in jeroboams of Perrier-Jouet, that poured out flashing amber and green, like the fountains at Versailles. Musicians came in to play flutes, bassoons, and hautboys—archaic, distant music, yet fanciful and gay.
The crowds outside the Faisan d’Or were enormous, for the journals had lifted interest still higher; and there were searchlights and an ambulance, sent down by the Excelsior newspaper, which had first claim to reports of disaster. Behind the rope in the cellar were spectators and reporters. Flashlights blinked every second, and the place filled with smoke. The Academicians, clutching at their throats, coughed and wheezed. Pierre, to save us from asphyxiation, dashed in with electric fans. Newsreel cameras whirred. Journalists climbed over the rope to interview Georges Melun-Perret, who, instead, led them to speak with Mayor Lambert, sitting at the head of the table, though his lapel was bare of decoration. They scribbled endless notes.
After that, speeches: first Mayor Lambert, then the Minister of Instruction. Then the fragile-ivory old Academician, with fingers plunging into his snuffbox, gave a speech, and it was the oddest of all.
“Fellow citizens,” he began, “the Pleistocene was an intractable age. I assume that was the era of which we have been the guests.
“Of all its fauna the musk ox was the most admirable. One can only regret that it was overwhelmed by avalanches. I hope that explorers, instead of hunting in the boreal regions for beds of coal, or future airplane fields, will discover deep strata of musk oxen, inexhaustible mines of beef, enough to keep man well fed for twenty generations!
“As an archaeologist I should like to praise tonight’s particular haunch. It proves that the bovine species was even before the dawn of antiquity perfect; that it had attained perfection when mankind was indistinguishable from orangutans. Man’s defects are a scandal of the globe. Theologians have little good to say of him. Perhaps, through wars, he is headed for extinction. But—but—one good thing must be said for this grotesque but often well-meaning biped: he invented wine!
“Messieurs!” He lifted his glass. “To Noah, who first planted the grape!”
And that was the toast. The Academician sat down heavily. He smiled blissfully into space. He was really very drunk.
We heard much about the Pleistocene the next day, and several days after—perhaps too much. Enough Academicians, gourmets, scientists, and deputies to consume a herd of musk oxen were irritated at having been overlooked. The papers broke out in dithyrambs on the banquet, and printed every detail and speech. The Faisan d’Or might have been the only restaurant in Paris, in the world, and François the chef of the age. You saw him in the newsreels; you heard him on the radio; he was notorious. The Club des Cent, that premier gastronomic council, gave him a luncheon in the Faubourg St. Honoré. As for Mayor Lambert, both the Candide and the Nouvelles Littéraires declared that a ribbon must be bestowed upon him at once.
Patronage at the Faisan d’Or doubled overnight. It increased as the week went on. Then Monsieur Paul came back suddenly from his English tour, stalked through the kitchen to his office, and called me in.
“I fail, Monsieur Gallois,” he said coldly, dashing his hand on a pile of newspapers spread out on his desk, “I fail to understand the meaning of all this.”
He turned over one cartoon after another. There was François grilling steaks for Stone Age men shivering amid icebergs. There was François shaking hands with senators—and with the immortal Escoffier himself, an honor reserved for generals, statesmen, and ruling heads.
“And this—and this!”
Monsieur Paul looked up at me with the hurt and reproachful eyes of a spaniel that had been treated harshly.
“Monsieur,” I said, “I began it for the good of the Faisan d’Or. In a way, it was a jest that paid, and I am sorry if—”
“Ring the bell for François!”
I did. As François moved in, with his slow, barge-like gait, wiping his hands upon his apron, I withdrew and closed the door. His summoning was indicative of Monsieur Paul’s sharp displeasure. I looked about me, but saw that no one else in the kitchen was aware trouble was afoot, for they were all intent on their tasks.
Through the garden door, which was ajar, I saw Jules kneeling amid his pots of tarragon and coriander and basil. Beyond his herbs he strayed rarely. For this close with its heap of rocks, vestiges of a Cistercian chapel, grown over with fennel and basil, and the small lodge where he had his room, he had a monkish attachment. He found in it a permanence and an enfolding, warm content that armored him against the harsh, outside world. He saw me through the herbs, and he shook his head sorrowfully.
“Ah, Jean-Marie,” he might have said, “you will be going back to your nougats.”
François was still in the office, and his measured rumbling went through the kitchen like thunder. He was resigning. In his demissory address, his arm going up and down, he was giving each sentence the weight, the edge of an artist as matchless in invective as in the roasting of meats. He spoke with deliberation in a French that was as bookish as a speech at the Academy. At intervals he gave his deep chest a thump like the impact of a battering ram. He had, he said, created history. And it was true. Habitués of the Faisan d’Or measured history, not by battles and reigns, but by dinners, banquets, and the triumphs of its artists in the kitchen.
“And now, Monsieur Paul, personally—”
Both François’ arms went up into the air, and vibrated. He threw aside declamation, and went in for pure feeling, unpacking his heart in a bayou Creole with the miasma of Africa upon it. His language would have frozen the scalp of a drill sergeant. In the garden Jules put hands over his ears. The Singhalese leaned his broom against t
he wall and shook with unaffected terror. Monsieur Paul—we could see him through the glass partition—bowed over the desk, covering his face. François emerged. The door clicked behind him. He adjusted his neckcloth, gave it a light pat, and strode off. Clear it was from his swagger and the rake of his bonnet over an eyebrow, that for this phoenix, this paragon of chefs, there was no more room at the Faisan d’Or.
His Pleistocene laurels still fresh, François betook himself to the Roi Nantois, and instantly was accorded a rank as high as Monsieur Paul’s. Fortunate was the Roi Nantois, fortunate, too, its shareholders as well as its patrons, for it was soon to be emblazoned in the Guide Michelin with the rating of three stars. Perhaps I should add, with such tincture of modesty as might seem fit, that on the day after François’ arrival I was myself installed there as master saucier, and supervisor of the roasts and fish.
As for Mayor Lambert, the upshot of the musk-ox feast was that he was invited to deliver five lectures on the Stone Age, and in the spring was given his decoration.
France honors those who in the fields of learning and the arts heap further luster upon her national glory. She seizes upon them with jealous possession. “France,” says Balzac, “drinks the brains of men as savagely as she once chopped off their heads.”
Perhaps, in the Golden Age to come, France may even honor a chef.…
XII
FROM OVERSEAS
The fortunes of a great restaurant are no less variable than those of men, of empires, or of wine, whose glory depends on the vintage, a chance matter of bacteria and sunlight. The heyday of the Roi Nantois coincided with the regime of François. Its income rose with its prestige. In the same year the Club des Cent and the Saintsbury Club of London dined under our roof, and there were minor affairs, like banquets to kings and envoys, beyond count. Pierre joined us, bringing along our friend the sommelier and his cabinet of peach-stone nudities. The Faisan d’Or was undamaged by these and other forays on its personnel; for several remarkable men breathed in its kitchen still, and tradition is fruitful of talent.
None of these, perhaps, not even Jules, was greater than our swart Anteus from the bayous. His technique was masterful and original. His most intricate dishes appeared simple. In taste he was inclusive. He was like the philosopher who all his life moved zealously from one position to another in his quest for the eternal truth, and found it in tolerance. For the old schools and the masters like Francatelli, Soyer, and Escoffier, he had that extreme reverence which in the artist is so often allied with a limitless and gentle skepticism.
“Perhaps,” he would say, twirling a saucepan over the flame, “the truth is elsewhere. What do I know? We shall assume that this will be damned good.”
One saying of his, which I find in my notebook, should be chiselled in immemorial bronze: “Underseasoning is the subtlest emphasis. But not all dishes deserve to be subtle.”
He may have had in mind his Sauce Béarnaise, nutty and buttery, with its surprising and exquisite second and third responses on the palate, like colors on tempering steel. And his sauce for barbecued mutton, with its raucous, torchlight, wild grandeur, inspired by some childhood memory of a picnic in the bayous. He ranged far. Who will forget his variant of Shrimps à la Mirabeau, a dish that secured New Orleans firmly in the affectionate regard of himself and his patrons? The Roi Nantois became, though honestly French, a clearinghouse of wonders. François held that a true racial dish should effect an instant rapport between the eater and the land of its origin. I have often wondered about this. Would a bite into an Esterhazy steak give one as vivid an insight into Hungary as two chapters of Maurus Jokai? Or a plate of haggis transpose one as instantly into the Highlands as a spring of music on bagpipes? Eaters capable of such experience with each champ of the jaws are as rare as true mystics.
He drifted into the kitchen of the Roi Nantois occasionally, this elderly, large, gruffish man in tweeds, Casson, the friend of François, with his nose like a strawberry dipping into a creamy mustache. A friend of the house, he had always dined there. He had been in Paris so long that he felt he had never lived elsewhere, and we were surprised when we learned he was an Englishman, though his mother was French.
But once he talked of his boyhood in Sussex, of a meat pudding he had in a farmhouse, spooned out to him. Sometimes the aroma and texture of it came back to him like some insistent dream. Perhaps it was a dream. But Sussex was unexcelled for its boiled puddings.
“It is, they say,” François murmured. “What do I know?”
The second, or perhaps the third, year, François found himself in England. The house dispatched him there indulgently, to look at game, the Downland sheep, and other very English things, drink ale, eat tarts, and shake hands with officials in travel bureaus. Parisian chefs are as much at home in England as English acrobats are in France.
“This Sussex, is it near by?”
It was, they told him, and a pleasant county it was. And as for the puddings—well, he could eat his way through Pevensey, Bognor, and so forth, and find out for himself. So he went, and in a hamlet near Lewes, at an old coaching inn, one market day when the place was full of drovers, a pudding came before him, a sine qua non of puddings, steaming like Vesuvius. The exile in tweeds was right. It was more than half a dream. The inn had been making it for two hundred and seventy years.
“It’s nowt a recipe,” said the woman doggedly. “It’s a boiling in the wash-house copper. You light the coals at six, and boil ’un until noon.”
François bought tawny port for the landlord and the vicar in the parlor, double-ale for the gaffers in the taproom, and gin for the lady in the wash house. He praised everything from the steeple of the church to the interesting tavern kittens. Obduracy gave way before his charm, and erelong the recipe, older than Cromwell, almost as old as the Magna Charta, and piously withheld from the American tourists, was in his head. So were the fumes of the port. He walked down the road in the April sunshine. How enchanting was rural England, quite up to Dickens! He smiled hazily at the succulent lambs capering in the meadows, and inhaled the fresh, wild tang of mint. The larks were melodious. He toppled blissfully asleep into the ditch.
When he awoke he was in an immensely soft bed, waited upon by an apple-cheeked nurse. For two days they detained him in the hospital. Because he had stolen the recipe of the village pudding? He was wary, but he signed a harmless paper, got a three-pound check, and was solicitously set free. Some charabanc had broken a wheel on the road, upset, and spilled its passengers on top of him in the ditch, and he had been gathered up as good as dead.
It is not everybody’s dish, King Hal’s rump steak and kidney pudding, as François named it. It is opulent, Saxon, and baronial, and must be approached in no careless mood. François assembled it before our eyes in the kitchen, and, with the exile in tweeds and Georges, there we dined at midnight, five of us.
Sussex may frown at my disclosure, but the Roi Nantois will be indulgent. François mixed a pound of flour with half its quantity in finely ground suet, a large teaspoonful of baking powder, as much chopped parsley, and seasoning of salt and black pepper. Making a thick paste with water, he lined a bowl and kept aside enough for the lid. Within he placed two pounds of rump steak and as much of beef kidney, cut into shavings. Then a dozen oysters, a half pound of field mushrooms, five split hardboiled eggs. Then seasonings, a tablespoonful of parsley, a chopped onion, whole black peppers, half a dozen cloves, a pinch of mace. Then a cupful of claret, a dash of Worcestershire, and enough hot water to fill up to the brim. The paste lid, moistened at the edge, goes on. Then the bowl is capped with a sheet of parchment. A cloth is tied on under the rim, the corners knotted together on top, and the pudding is plunged into boiling water, to simmer without let-up for about five hours, never less than four.
The Roi Nantois improved on Sussex, as you may perceive, and to hunt for its equal in England would be useless. The kidney is more salient; the paste can induce no torpor, however genial; the inclusion of the wine and
spices give it the warmth and glow of a yuletide fire.
The general run of our patrons knew it not. Nor did the British tourists who thought that, being in France, they ought to have a mousse of something. All except a group of six or seven: a bishop, a retired admiral, and their quiet friends, bull-doggy, gray men, who dined on it twice a year, making a night of it. They brought nobody else. They smoked briars and sipped hot gin and water, and talked with a faraway look in their eyes, as of men who guard a secret. They lived on the Riviera, I think, but the Roi Nantois was for them forever a part of England.
—
Casson, my friend in tweeds, leaned back and lighted his charred briar. His gruffness had vanished with the soup; and we had dined well, as we always did at Chez Raban, on trout, a ragout of hare, and a salad. He glanced through the shadows, and as he puffed he gave a nod here and there, benignly. A huge drayman, his red moon of a face divided by a black mustache bent over his plate, his temples veined in strong-jawed athleticism, his cheeks and eyes bulging, responded with a wave of his knife. He was eating with a slow, gloating, and healthy voracity. It was a wonder he saw Casson or anything else save the viands before him.
Chez Raban was a hangout of draymen, of vegetable buyers, and of wine coopers, stained and perfumed like their own casks. It was the least cleanly restaurant near the Botanical Gardens; its clientele was male, and dined in shirt sleeves; its cookery, for the charge, highly commendable. Two girls waited on the tables. Raban, a little mummy of a fellow, toiled at a stove against the wall, his fingers darting with airy swiftness. They moved over saucepans, they hovered over the steams and heats, and, truth ascertained, they withdrew, delicately, like butterflies recoiling as from the tangibility of brick, or an iron wall. Those fingers were Raban’s antennae.
“Damn!” snorted Casson. “I can’t see a thing from here—not a bloody thing!” He peered across the room over his glasses. “Merciful heavens!” Then, “Raban!” he called out, irritably.