A Paris Christmas

by Baxter, John

  Roast pork without crackling doesn’t bear thinking about. When Charles Lamb wrote his essay “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” in 1823, he gave crackling a long and sensuous paragraph all to itself:

  There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well called—the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance—with the adhesive oleaginous—O call it not fat—but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it—the tender blossoming of fat—fat cropped in the bud—taken in the shoot—in the first innocence—the cream and quintessence of the child-pig’s yet pure food—the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna—or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or common substance.

  Over the years in France, I’d repeatedly confronted the crackling issue, starting the year I arrived. The butcher on rue de Seine, just around the corner from our apartment, stared when I raised the possibility of a rack of pork chops with the skin still on.

  He indicated the neat rolls of deboned pork loin, parcelled in their added coats of fat. “Pork doesn’t have skin.”

  “All animals have skin, Monsieur,” I said.

  “Yes, all right. Pigs do have skin. But our pork doesn’t.”

  “I see that. Can I order some?”

  “Pig skin?” He raised his eyebrows. What sort of a specimen of an idiot was this?

  “Not just skin. A piece of pork with the skin still on it. It’s for a porc rôti a l’anglaise, avec …”

  I groped for the French word for “crackling.” “Crunch” was craquer, so “crunchy” should be craquant.

  “… peau craquante …” I began.

  “Peau craquante!?” he hooted. “Quelle histoire!!”

  I’d forgotten craquant can also mean “sexy”. Marilyn Monroe was craquante—a woman so irresistible she broke you in pieces.

  Retreating from the counter, he engaged his boss and the boss’s wife in muttered conversation. You could imagine what was being said. To the French, England is synonymous with depravity. The Hellfire Club, Aleister Crowley, Jack the Ripper, the Spice Girls …

  Occasionally, they glanced in my direction, alert for the facial tics or dribble of drool that would confirm their worst suspicions.

  Finally he returned. “Thursday,” he said. Then, looking over my shoulder, “Next?”

  On Thursday, the young butcher wasn’t there, but I spotted his boss.

  “Ah oui,” he said, “le porcelet.”

  He went back to the chill room and returned with a carcass the size of a small calf, which he dumped on the block with a thump that shook the shop. By porcine standards, it probably counted as a piglet, but to me it looked enormous. It did, however, still have its skin.

  “Now,” he demanded, “what is it exactly that you want?”

  I sensed he would not be surprised if I said, “Just put a rose in its mouth and douse it with Chanel No. 5. My mistress and a couple of friends are waiting in the limousine outside. The donkey will be along later.”

  Instead, I stabbed a finger at the forequarter. “Ce morceau là. Entier—avec la peau.”

  He rolled his eyes at his wife. Skin on pork! What next? No wonder their cows are mad.

  But I watched him with a sense of triumph. Each stroke of his cleaver was a blow struck for Anglo-Saxon cuisine. For good sense in the preparation of meat. For crackling.

  Encounters like this are a pitfall of cooking in France. Over generations, the chef has become elevated into a figure of power, even myth. The traditional chef’s costume of toque and tablier is French, as are the tools of the trade: the Sabatier knives, the copper sauté pans, the ferocious professional stoves, hot as forges, at which the junior chefs sweat and labour while the chef marches up and down the line, tasting, rejecting, bullying. The French expect a chef to be tyrannical—an invitation that cooks everywhere have been delighted to accept. A chain of London restaurants used to display prominently in its front windows a cartoon of a furious chef booting a patron into the street. As he does so, one waiter explains to another, “He tried to add salt.”

  In Dublin, I sometimes ate at a restaurant where the chef/owner, though Irish, had trained in France and behaved accordingly. He kept his Rolls-Royce ostentatiously parked outside and declined to put prices on his menu. Any attempt, however justified, to interfere in his running of the restaurant would bring him, red-faced, from the kitchen. On one occasion, a client complained he’d been slightly overcharged. The chef stormed out, snatched the bill, did a quick calculation, then said, “You’re right. The addition is incorrect. Please accept tonight’s meal with my apologies …”

  He crumpled the bill and dropped it to the floor.

  “… but,” he continued evenly, “I never want to see you in my restaurant again.”

  Outside France, the media have gone some way to humanising chefs. TV in particular has transformed them into larky performers. British and American TV chefs joke, advise, promote, confess, even indulge in the odd food-fight. Never in France, however, where it would be professional and social suicide for any of them to climb down from the pedestals to which they’ve been elevated by Michelin or Gault Millau. TV invariably shows them in freshly starched whites, magisterially at work in their professional kitchens, while the reporter stands by in awe, watching the magic being worked.

  This has created an adversarial relationship between cuisine and the French media. One programme sends an undercover investigator into fashionable restaurants armed with a miniature camera inside his shirt, which gives a fork’s-eye view of the service and the meal while the reporter murmurs a bite-by-bite commentary.

  The same impulse undermined an attempt to create a French version of Ready Steady Cook, the BBC show in which two rival chefs are given bags of miscellaneous ingredients and challenged to produce a meal in twenty minutes. Not only were serious French chefs uninterested in appearing; the producers also regarded the programme as a chance to mock the pretensions of those who did. They confronted them with largely uncookable ingredients, like a bag of potato chips, an orange, a pig’s foot, and a head of garlic. While the cooks struggled to create a meal from these unpromising materials, a perky host circulated among the studio audience, asking them how they thought the competitors were doing.

  Aware of our potential problems in getting a suitable piglet for Christmas, Marie-Dominique and I walked next day through an almost empty Fouras to les halles.

  In summer, the high-roofed glass-and-steel building roared with shoppers and the shouts of merchants selling bread, cheese, meat, fruit, vegetables, wine, honey, spices—the cornucopia of French produce. Through July and August, just outside the wide-open back door leading to the car park, a local fisherman cooked saffron-yellow paella in a broad pan over charcoal, tossing in whatever was best from that day’s catch—shrimp, crab, langouste—and ladling it into tinfoil dishes for people who couldn’t be bothered to cook lunch.

  But this was winter, and the halles opened its doors only in the morning, for locals. Three lone sellers had come in that day. One was the largest of the fruit-and-vegetable merchants, with a basic stock of winter cabbage, potatoes, and turnips, and some imported fruit, mostly shipped from Rungis, the central market outside Paris, and priced accordingly.

  The other two, fortunately, were people from whom we preferred to buy, even in summer. Madame Clastres rented a small corner stall to sell the produce of her own garden, and M. Mortier, a jovial man with a belly and bushy moustache like Balzac, wasn’t simply the only one of the market’s three butchers to open in winter, but the best of them at any time. Even on an icy day like this, a queue had formed at his counter—mainly because of his tendency to chat. Each man got a joke, each woman a comment on her hat or dress, each mother a compliment about her child, and everyone the inevitable advice on how to cook what they bought.

 
; “And now, jeune homme,” he said when it came to my turn. It was a standard gambit, even, as now, when the person was at least ten years younger than me.

  “Could you get me a porcelet de lait in time for Christmas?”

  “Monsieur, you know I stand ready to move heaven and earth to please you. Accept my assurance on that. However, at this late date …” He pursed his lips. “Just a moment.”

  He grabbed the phone and made a quick call.

  “Should be no problem,” he said, slamming it down after a brief conversation. “Can you wait till Sunday?”

  That left me just two days to build my Christmas dinner. It was cutting it fine. But did I have a choice?

  “Yes. Perfect. But one thing …”

  “Oui? J’écoute.”

  “It must have its skin.”

  “Its skin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Monsieur …”

  He cocked his head. I steeled myself for the inevitable argument.

  “… of course it will have its skin,” he continued. “Who of us does not? Reassure yourself that your piglet will be as well dressed as if by the best tailor in London.”

  Turning into profile, he made the fluttering hand gestures up and down his body, gestures of a tailor showing off the cut of a suit—or a torero admiring his traje de luces in a full-length mirror. Unself-consciously sexual, almost feminine, they pointed to the reason for M. Mortier’s success. We were none of us customers so much as subjects of seduction.

  He winked, as if he knew I’d seen through him.

  “Until Sunday …” he said.

  I’d turned away and taken a couple of steps when he called after me: “… when I will also explain to you exactly how it should be cooked.”

  11

  All in the Mind

  We know what we are, but not what we may be.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  In his memoirs, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, president of France from 1974 to 1981, recalled his first encounter with Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister. They met in her suite at the Crillon, Paris’s best hotel—obviously so, since General Bogislav von Studnitz, commander of the first German troops to enter the city in 1940, chose to make his headquarters there during the occupation.

  Mrs. Thatcher, not for nothing known as the Iron Lady, was all business and, without preamble, launched into a vigorous attack on exchange rates between the pound and the franc.

  Giscard d’Estaing listened but not too attentively.

  Before him stretched the place de la Concorde, the plaza where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette lost their heads—as, in another sense, had Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron a century and a half later, dancing a moonlit pas de deux around its fountains in the movie An American in Paris.

  Seeing Concorde spread out in the spring sunshine reminded him of the hundreds—even thousands?—of couples who had looked on that view after a night of sexual abandon. Why, he himself …

  A realisation struck him, and he stared around the suite, recognising it for the first time.

  Interrupting the prime minister in full flight, he explained something extraordinary. Not only had he spent his own wedding night in the Crillon, but he had spent it in this very suite.

  Mrs. Thatcher politely heard him out, then, when he was done, returned to her complaint about the value of the franc. At that moment, Giscard d’Estaing realised what sort of woman he was dealing with: a political animal, so focused that she was immune even to the potent romantic influence of Paris.

  One can only think: how sad. “When a man is tired of London,” remarked Samuel Johnson, “he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” It can be said equally of Paris that not to have seen it through the eyes of love is not to know it at all.

  I would have loved Paris no matter when I encountered it; if, for instance, I’d been taken there as a child: attended the Guignol puppet shows in the Luxembourg Gardens, ridden the manège in the Tuileries, and grabbed for the tassel that in France replaces the brass ring of American carousels.

  Stage designer Jo Mielziner, who created the décor for the 1949 Broadway productions of Death of a Salesman and South Pacific, had told me how he enjoyed just such a childhood. Each afternoon his mother took him walking through Paris with one simple instruction: “Just look.” Only when he returned home was Jo permitted to write down or draw what he’d seen. “It freed my imagination,” he recalled half a century later, the memory still vivid. “It made me really see the world.”

  Not so lucky as Mielziner, I first came to Paris as an adult, in 1970, a new arrival from Australia, poor and ignorant. With my girlfriend of the time, I checked into one of the cheap hotels that, in those days, one could still find in the crowded lanes of the old Latin Quarter, huddling to the Seine, just across the river from Notre-Dame. We looked around the seedy room with its twanging bed, the threadbare carpet, the cigarette-scarred furniture, listened to the rumble of conversation in the café downstairs, and could only think, “How romantic!” What we’d have rejected as squalor in Sydney or New York became aphrodisiac in Paris.

  But even as we strolled around the city in the early spring afternoon, relishing the way the golden-green foliage had begun to appear on the chestnut trees of the tiny hidden wedge of place Dauphine, which surrealist André Breton had perceptively christened le sexe de Paris—the city’s pubic triangle—we both sensed that this would be our last visit together. Paris changes you, alerts you to new experiences, new relationships waiting just around the next corner. Alan Jay Lerner expressed it well in his script for An American in Paris. “It never lets you forget anything,” Gene Kelly says of the city. “It’s too real and too beautiful. It reaches in and opens you wide, and you stay that way.”

  It’s easy to think that one’s romantic experience is unique, but Margaret Thatcher was almost alone in not falling under the spell of Paris. In 1965 Woody Allen made his first trip to France as writer on the comedy What’s New Pussycat?. When he and the film’s director, Clive Donner, both fell for the same girl and she couldn’t choose between them, the crew, with her agreement, proposed a competition. Whoever produced the most impressive gift would share her bed. Donner purchased a gigantic box of chocolates, but Woody—astonished, one senses, at his audacity in even imagining he could win—trumped that with a real American jukebox. In the end, she stood him up for someone she’d just met that day—but if Paris could transform so dry a stick as Woody Allen, it could transform anyone.

  Romance played a crucial role in making Paris my permanent home.

  Living in Los Angeles in 1989, on the rebound from my separation from Joyce, I’d become friendly with Suzy, a woman in movie management, whose longtime lover, an irascible filmmaker and addict, had recently died. Though he’d treated her with casual contempt in life, she felt bereft without him.

  “If only I could be sure that we would be reunited, someday,” she sighed, “I think I could go on.”

  Being Jewish, and thus with no expectation of an afterlife, she was presented with a complex challenge. As a practical executive, however, she put this concept into preproduction and, with me as company, began to audition systems of belief. If one promised reunion with her demon lover after death, she was ready to convert.

  We visited card readers and mediums, and a spiritist church in Encino, but none of them offered the reassurance she needed. The last candidate, who lived in the remote suburb of Commerce, needed subjects to be hypnotised as part of some ill-defined project. Suzy didn’t feel like surrendering control of her mind unless somebody she trusted had done so before, so she dispatched me into that wilderness of twenty-four-hour poker clubs and used-car lots to check him out.

  Joe was a young psychologist who, it turned out, believed we’ve all lived before, in other bodies. As part of his work at a mental hospital, he used hypnosis a lot and was convinced that, in a trance, people might reveal those other lives.

  Once I understood what he was looking for, I
explained frankly that any belief I might have had in this phenomenon had been extinguished by the regiments of cocktail waitresses and bus drivers claiming to be reincarnations of Napoleon, Cleopatra, and the Queen of Sheba.

  “How come,” I asked, “mediums always make contact with someone’s dead child or their aunt Rose, but never Napoleon or Cleopatra? Yet it’s the souls of the Napoleons and Cleopatras that always transmigrate. And why no villains? Did you ever hear of anyone claiming to channel Bluebeard or Hitler?”

  “That’s an interesting point,” he said soothingly, no doubt in the same tone he used with patients who believed their minds were controlled by Neptunians, which is why they had to wear this tinfoil hat.

  “Have you found anyone who did actually remember Christ?” I pressed.

  “Not so far. One subject did remember being in heaven though.”

  “You’re joking!”

  He handed me a sheaf of handwritten pages, a transcript of her reminiscences. I skimmed the adolescently unformed handwriting.

  “… green lawns … white robes … big houses where we slept together … learning from the Elders …”

  “This isn’t heaven,” I said. “It’s college. I used to teach on a campus just like this.”

  “That’s one point of view,” Joe said mildly. “But as long as you’re here, why not give it a try?”

  I proved to be the perfect subject for hypnosis, able to drift into a trance almost at will—something on which my teachers at school had often commented. Along the way, I did re-experience some startling memories that I’d suppressed. However, Joe never pushed me back any earlier than age nine, let alone into a previous existence. After half a dozen visits, it became clear that I wasn’t what he needed.