Remembrance of Things Paris

by Gourmet Magazine Editors

  The first time I was brought to lunch was in the spring of 1947. It was a splendid year with lovely weather, and though there still was hardship—although nothing, they say, like 1919—there was lots of gaiety.

  She opened the door herself. I was a little taken aback by the Dantesque profile on the very small, thin hunched figure. She was wearing an apron and the tan leather sandals that she had custom-made. “Oh, dear,” she said, “the lunch will be late. I should have gotten up at five instead of six.”

  I laughed nervously, assuming it was a pleasantry, not realizing that she meant it. She had been to Les Halles herself to choose the eel that she was serving in a sauce verte.

  I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know how to look, and I ate too much of the first course, which was a spaghetti au gratin, golden rich and sticky with cheese. When it came a second time, I thought it was the main course and helped myself again. Whenever you had lunch at Alice’s, you automatically canceled all plans for dinner.

  Later, much later, she confessed to me that each time Thornton Wilder came—and she adored Wilder—she felt she was walking on eggs because he was so fin. That comforted me a little. And though I had the opportunity to see her many times over the years and I loved her, I never got over feeling a clod, fearful of making some observation she would dismiss as banal.

  The apartment was unlike anything I had ever seen before. The salon was paneled in white. “After white,” she explained, “all colors are vulgar.” The sun streamed through long French windows. Basket, the royal white poodle who appears in the paintings by Marie Laurencin and Dora Maar, raced up and down the flat roof that formed his private terrace. The flowers were set in vases of romantic, unexpected shapes. Usually, Alice B. Toklas sat deep in her armchair, quite likely to be dressed in a suit of Irish tweed made for her by Pierre Balmain, a tremendous oval of yellow diamonds on her forefinger.

  Much of the furniture in the room was dark and massive. Later, I realized it was magnificent.

  “Buy your antiques well,” she said, “and they will always go up in value.”

  The hexagonal dark-oak table nearly filled the tiny dining room. The chairs were so high, she always used a footstool. There was a huge cupboard which she said was rare American Federal. An eagle was sculpted atop the pediment.

  The salon was divided in half by a long Italian Renaissance table, which Gertrude Stein had bought in Florence for a good price because in those years it was not in fashion. The table was a worktable, laden with piles of letters, memorabilia, a few books that had come in the recent post, an opulent bouquet of flowers. On the far side was a brown satin horsehair couch, a companion armchair, a tufted brown satin side chair.

  “We had our bottoms measured before they were made,” explained Miss Toklas.

  I recall a small occasional table inlaid with French Revolutionary symbols like the Phrygian bonnet, and a collection of silver miniatures of furniture and windmills on another table. My taste, which had been formed in White Plains, New York, didn’t know what to make of stiff Mallorquin dolls made of shells, a reclining baby Saint John resting his head on a skull, the faience jars, the pedestaled silver ashtray lifted by a handle in the form of a cherub. But now, if I were to have a covetous dream, this might be the interior.

  “Much has been repaired,” she explained. “If it had been in perfect condition, we would never have been able to afford it.”

  This lesson has remained with me. Today I look at a green Ming vase with a partial oxblood glaze that I bought in Macao a few years ago. The imperfect side faces the wall. The visible good side provides me with enormous pleasure.

  In the apartment on the rue Christine the corridor and the bedroom were lined with a blue paper patterned with large white pigeons. Curiously, there were no books visible except on the worktable or the night table. Apparently, it was a conviction. Books were for reading, not for decoration.

  But there were pictures, mounting the walls two, three, five deep, even covering the mirrors. One afternoon tea when Alice went to the kitchen (a miserable, ill-equipped kitchen by House & Garden standards), I counted thirty-seven Picassos on the salon walls. There were trees and rocks of a green period I had never seen before. There was his first cubist painting, a village in Spain of only seven (or was it nine?) buildings, which gave the impression of a huddled metropolis. There was a rose-colored painting, a full-length nude that suggested a Chinese lady. There was an adolescent nude holding a basket of flowers (certainly the most touching of all Picassos of the early years in Paris).

  The Louis XV chairs had tapestries designed by Picasso, a present because one day she said she felt like doing some needlepoint.

  It was astonishing to me that all the paintings, the incomparable Juan Grises, the Picabias, the Picassos, the Dora Maars were without frames, the canvases held taut by simple, narrow wood moldings.

  Several years ago, while Miss Toklas was away on a visit to Rome, the paintings were removed from the rue Christine. When someone commiserated about the accusing vacant patches on the walls, she merely said, “It makes no difference. My eyesight is failing. Besides, I have them all here,” and she pointed to her forehead.

  Now all this may seem a long way from boeuf bourguignon and Singapore ice cream, but in Miss Toklas’s apartment the food always fitted into the surroundings and the company. In its preparation, she was always painstakingly finicky about every detail. It was part of the old-fashioned scheme that decreed that an educated lady penned a Spencerian hand and embroidered an invisible seam.

  Once she spent a summer month with me in the country because I had a spare bedroom with two windows for cross-ventilation, an indispensable requirement. Occasionally, when we had company, she would move into the kitchen, employing me as a tweeny. She once gave me some celery “to string.” After ten minutes, I handed it back satisfied I had removed every fiber. She simply returned it, saying tersely, “I said string it.”

  She made an incomparable apple pie, setting whole poached apples into a puff paste crust, causing one of the guests to remark, “How is it that I never eat like this in restaurants?”

  Alice B. Toklas’s childhood and her first lessons in the culinary arts occurred in San Francisco, which she left in 1907. In her memories, California was a glamorous place where everyone who was at all brought up knew how to whack off the top of a Champagne bottle at the neck. “You had to know for picnics.” There were many French people in San Francisco, and she always claimed that France was a bit of a letdown because no one was as marvelously French as those people she knew in San Francisco.

  “After their parties, the maids would sweep up, keeping a sharp eye for the diamonds,” she reminisced.

  Her first party meal was prepared in San Francisco when she was seventeen. It was a lunch of game for her father and a group of his friends. The cayenne was forgotten at the appropriate moment but tardily served a few minutes later. Her father’s cold comment afterward always stayed with her. “Don’t apologize. There should be no occasion for apology.”

  In her fluent French—tinged with a strong American accent of which she was proud—Miss Toklas expressed her own decisive views. She was a sharp opponent of “the whole school of economizing time, advertising quick ways to glamorous food. If you want to be a good cook, you should go at it as a daily pleasure. And if you don’t have time, you should be a Sunday cook like a Sunday painter, who makes nice little pictures for himself and his friends.”

  She objected to everybody’s trying to become a short-order cook. “When everybody cooks, there is no cooking. Cooking, like any art, is not for the millions.

  “It is as though there has been a shock of discovery and women have plunged in too deeply. They feel they must try everything, and then add little fancies—spices, condiments, and a drop of wine to anything,” she said.

  Yet her own little grace note was to add a careful drop of Drambuie to whipped cream.

  “At the same time most women today cheat in cooking. I c
all using ready-made tins cheating. They substitute cornstarch and flour instead of thickening with eggs and butter. They put gelatin in their puddings. You should never economize in the kitchen. Once the menu is established, the materials should be the very best. American women won’t buy butter, but they will buy expensive tins.”

  There was no stint in her nature. Once, Dorothy Schiff, publisher of the New York Post, had taken another woman to lunch at La Tour d’Argent. Mrs. Schiff was shocked recalling the price, and added, “We didn’t even have dessert.”

  When she heard about it, Miss Toklas was enchanted. “If that’s all it costs,” she said to me, “let’s go there for lunch tomorrow.” We had a spectacular time, although I really don’t like that over-celebrated pressed duck.

  Attitude and principle played a big part in her approach to food, as they did to any other creative aspect of her life. A young American journalist who fancied himself the possessor of a keen palate invited her to a restaurant that he had discovered in the neighborhood of the Bourse. He was very pleased with it, but wanted her approval. Midway through the meal, she shook her head negatively. It seemed like a judgment of Madame Lafarge.

  “What’s wrong?” asked the young man defensively.

  “They put too much on the plate at one time,” she said, indicating that the restaurant had offended all sensibilities except that of gourmandise.

  Actually her appetite and capacity were astonishing for such a tiny creature. “I can eat more than you at any single meal,” she said to me, “but it adds up to less in a day because I have only fruit for supper.”

  Largesse was a principle but each plate had to be a delicate presentation. When a fourth or fifth cup was poured from the elaborate silver teapot, it was never, “Have another cup of tea,” but always, “Have a cup of tea,” as if it were the very first.

  She was extremely French in her treatment of guests. Potluck even for close friends was absolutely alien to her.

  At Bilignin, in southeast France, where she and Gertrude Stein spent the summers between the two wars, she grew Saint-Antoine strawberries.

  “They were a little bigger than les fraises des quatre saisons, and they grew on a stronger plant, straight up. They were more delicate in flavor and full of juice. It took an hour to gather a small basket, enough for a man’s breakfast. Of course I picked them. Who else? By the time everybody got up, my breakfast was long past.”

  I recalled a cheese that seemed familiar, but so vaguely that I was moved to ask her about it.

  “It’s a West Coast recipe,” she replied. “Begin with an excellent Camembert soaked for twenty-four hours in a good white wine. Scrape away the crust. Mash the cheese with a cup of softened butter. Use a wooden spoon; a metal spoon leaves its own taste. Reshape the mixture and place for one hour in the refrigerator. Remove before hardened, roll in finely crushed nuts, and set back in the refrigerator until firm enough to hold its shape.”

  The result—a velvet texture and a tantalizing taste.

  For holidays, she would give sweetmeats. These were dates that she had pitted, filled with a walnut and a butter cream, and then powdered with confectioners’ sugar. They were set on some sort of carefully chosen plate or dish which you were happy to keep as a treasured memento.

  The dates were a trademark, like the little mushroom sandwiches that were a specialty at teatime. The mushrooms were cooked in butter with lemon juice. After eight minutes of cooking, they were removed from the heat, chopped, and then pounded into a paste in a mortar. Salt, pepper, a pinch of cayenne, and an equal volume of butter were thoroughly amalgamated with them.

  “I’d like to write a millinery book,” she said to me one day. “I have a very strong feeling about hats. I know a lot about them and I have had some hats which should have gone under glass. Millinery is quite a lot like cooking. It should be approached with the same care, taste, and imagination.” Miss Toklas’s hats were as unique in their way as those of Queen Mary. They were made for her by a modiste of the Place Vendôme, and the trimmings were worth a fortune.

  The millinery book never came into being. But I’m glad the lady who didn’t write The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas nonetheless managed to leave The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book.

  August 1967

  NOËLÀ PARIS

  Judith and Evan Jones

  Rue Vaneau is not one of those Left Bank streets that are stuccoed with the imprints of celebrated Americans, nor does it teem with young people tempted to become expatriates. It stretches a few blocks from the métro station Vaneau on the rue de Sèvres northward to the rue de Grenelle and is lined with apartments of diplomats and affluent Paris folk as well as with an occasional nineteenth-century residence hiding behind a gated wall.

  Long ago when we rented the attic of a carriage house just inside a wide iron gate, one of us each morning would preface breakfast with a quick jaunt around the corner to pick up freshly baked croissants or brioches in the rue de Babylone. This street, running toward the Invalides to the west, was our neighborhood marketplace, and close to the bistro on one side was the butcher and a cheesemonger who taught us the meaning of such fragrant words as Livarot, Gaperon, and chabichou. A few doors from the pâtisserie was the Jardin de Babylone—a dimly lighted space pungent with the smell of damp leaves, where we bought vegetables and other groceries.

  Not much had changed when we returned last December to rue Vaneau. We were again in the quartier we loved, the heart of the Seventh Arrondissement, or Palais Bourbon district, and we seemed to be turning back the clock to a time that might have become no more than a packet of faded letters home or a scrapbook of snapshots.

  By one of those extraordinary coincidences that offer no explanation, a rental agency, Paris Accueil, had made available a studio directly across the street from the gate behind which we had lived. We could step out each morning, just as we used to do, to buy the still-warm breakfast croissants around the corner. From the studio’s upper level we could see, across rue Vaneau, the roofline of the familiar small garret poking over the wall. The neighborhood, which had dimmed for us with time, reasserted itself. Almost at once we felt at home again on the Left Bank, as eager for Christmas to come to Paris as when we had lived there on a leaner budget, though the lack of affluence hadn’t seemed to matter: As is often said of the French themselves, no matter how strapped, we were never too poor to eat well.

  In our early days we had observed the advent of Christmas as the French do, quite by chance having our first Paris lunch together in a restaurant that offered the seasonal treat of boudins blancs. We knew nothing then of the traditions nor even the mysterious ingredients of the white sausages that were served so commonly as a holiday specialty. These pale meaty sausages, we learned from the waiter, were actually studded with truffles; their delicate interior was composed of puréed chicken breast, sweetbreads, bread crumbs, and seasonings, in the manner of Avranches.

  To learn what Christmas meant to the French in that time of recovery after the war was to observe the women who stood in line in worn-out carpet slippers to buy boudins blancs and other such delicacies for their families, to see them spending what seemed like large sums for the best of pâtés and pastries … and to listen one day to the delighted cries of customers in a boulangerie when one of them broke into a baguette and discovered it was made of pure white flour instead of the coarse, dark, “inferior” grain imposed on them by war austerities.

  To mark our return engagement on the rue Vaneau, nothing would do so well for a festive first meal as boudins blancs, and it was Monsieur Barbet of the Jardin de Babylone who stood on the sidewalk outside his shop to point to the charcuterie where the classic white sausages were, as he said, plus beaux. He seemed to understand our yearning for all that was needed to relive Christmas memories.

  We brought the boudins back to rue Vaneau and steamed them in a little water before lightly browning them to serve with a crunchy baguette (alas, more airy and bland than in the old days), a Côtes du Rhône, and
a salad, put together at the Jardin, of mâche (lamb’s lettuce), endive, radicchio, and chicory. We also brought back from Monsieur a four-foot sapin du Canada in a planting pot, and with the tinselly trimmings we found for the evergreen tree we began to feel infused with the spirit that Paris and its own magic bring to Christmas.

  On the walk back from rue de Babylone we recalled things we had learned there when young. There we had first encountered the whiskery celery root knobs we soon transformed into céleri rémoulade. There we caught on to the knack of choosing handfuls of endive to braise in lemon-accented chicken stock. And just a few more steps from the Jardin was the boucherie where the butcher and his wife, we remembered, had taken pains to offer a basic culinary tip: It is proper fat that produces good pommes frites, they told us as they spooned into a container just the right proportions of rendered beef suet and pork fat.

  The passage of time hadn’t blunted the exhilaration we felt at the prospect of cooking again in Paris. Steps from our rented studio led down into a pristinely white cave with crusty plaster walls and a long galley furnished with modern kitchen equipment. There were tile floors and a round open fireplace under the low arched ceilings; a narrow refectory table, softly patinaed, turned the space of the cave into a handsome dining room.

  As we made our way from the studio to the rue de Bellechasse, where a Santa Claus sat amid tins of tea in the window of the Tanrade confiserie, then zigzagged toward the ancient, angling streets near the Place Saint-Sulpice, we found it easy to believe that the French derive more pleasure from holiday food shopping than from hunting down Christmas gifts. We shared the spirit of the holiday, just as we had years before, joining hundreds of discriminating shoppers standing in line for the makings of family feasts. At Poilâne, on rue du Cherche-Midi, the line of patient, gossiping men and women waiting for “the best bread in Paris” stretched all the way to the corner. The narrow window at Au Bel Viander, just off the carrefour du Croix-Rouge, was filled with two feathered birds so lifelike that they served as implied proof of the freshness of the shop’s meat, untouched by automation. A few streets on were small carved statues of the Wise Men gathered around the Mother and Child, replacing the usual objets d’art in the window of G. Thulier. At the Maison de Poupée, the puppetmaker’s near the Jardin du Luxembourg, a grandparently couple stood hand in hand, awed by the marionettes poised for Christmas entertainments, while eager householders of all ages clustered in nearby food shop doorways.