A Paris Christmas

by Baxter, John

  Winter didn’t diminish the order or curb its discipline, but I liked it better. Among the books I’d devoured during those long waits for my parents outside Australian pubs had been Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Repeated reading etched certain passages on my memory: his description of an English winter landscape, for example; it echoed the one through which we drove:

  It was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead, when he slipped out of the warm parlour into the open air. The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off…. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple.

  Despite the weather, plenty of other people were on the road, probably, like us, stocking up for Christmas. But, to our surprise, few of the small vineyards had opened up their tasting centres. Even in the large villages like Pauillac and Saint-Estèphe, where we were used to visiting half a dozen vineyards and sampling the latest product, gates were locked, with the same bleak message: FERMETURE ANNUELLE—“annual closing”.

  We both knew why. The French wine business had taken a battering as supply exceeded demand. Ironically, the primary villain was Australia, which flooded the world’s markets with wine that, in addition to being highly drinkable and superbly made, was also far cheaper. More embarrassing still, in blindfold tastings, French wines were bested by Australian, New Zealand, South African, and even—the shame of it!—American vintages. The result was a glut, a “wine lake” that threatened to inundate the country through which we drove. No wonder the vineyards had closed.

  Superficially, things seemed to improve as we approached Bordeaux. On the outskirts, every third building was a wine merchant, offering free tastings, vineyard tours, home delivery—anything, so long as you spent some money.

  One shop in particular, in a converted Gothic chapel, was doing enormous business, to judge from the cars and tour buses parked outside. On impulse, we pulled in.

  The interior was a triumph of marketing. Indirect lighting, and benches and tables worn smooth with centuries of use, created an atmosphere of intimacy and antiquity. The table running down the centre of the shop came from some monastic refectory, though the monks had never seen it as it was now, dense with wine bottles and half-filled glasses.

  Everywhere one looked, signs in English and German advertised drinkable collectibles: crystal flutes for champagne, silver coolers, rustic corkscrews made from lengths of gnarled grapevine. A new baby in the family? Why not give a bottle of this year’s wine? By the time the child was twenty, it could be worth a fortune. A late Christmas gift? Grab a bottle of champagne—pre-boxed and pre-wrapped (which conveniently disguised just what you were buying).

  But the place obviously gave people what they wanted. At the cash desk, the owner was busy shuffling credit cards and stuffing bottles into plastic bags. All around, we saw only happy, flushed faces.

  We took a glass—also plastic—and helped ourselves from the nearest bottle. One mouthful was enough. What he was selling at château-bottled prices was the most ordinaire of vins, no better than you could buy at the fournisseur in Fouras, who would fill our litre plastic Evian bottle from stainless-steel barrels marked ROUGE, BLANC, and ROSÉ.

  We searched for the crachoir—or spit bucket—that indispensable adjunct to all wine tasting. There wasn’t one. No wonder everyone looked cheerful. They were swallowing the stuff. And after two or three glasses of even the worst wine, anything tastes good.

  Across the crowd of happily tipsy clients, I met the eye of the proprietor. He smiled ruefully and half-shrugged. Business is business, my friend. We all have to eat.

  I found the toilet and spat into the sink. Generations of my Australian drinking forebears groaned in their graves at the waste, but I felt no guilt. However marginal my status, I was a Frenchman now.

  We drove back to Fouras in gloom. Instead of a dozen bottles of wine, the minimum we’d need for Christmas, our trunk contained four—all we’d been able to find of the 1998 and 2001 vintages widely considered the best.

  “We can always find wine,” Marie-Do said consolingly. And she was right, of course. A shop in one of the national chains, like Nicolas, would sell us enough good wine for our dinner. But when twenty glasses are being filled and refilled, it helps that each bottle is the same. And the chances of our finding any sort of good wine in that quantity looked increasingly remote.

  The return ferry trip across the grey waters of the Gironde, whipped into whitecaps by a freshening gale off the Atlantic, did nothing to improve my mood. Not even a dinner of grilled lobster on a cliff overlooking the river at Royan’s premiere seafood restaurant, Le Cardinal des Mers (the Cardinal of the Seas—the nickname for that crimson and magisterial creature), could dispel my gloom. Even as I washed down a butter-drenched gobbet of tender lobster with a glass of crisp Pouilly-Fuissé, I could feel our Christmas dinner slipping out of control.

  15

  Does Madame Burn?

  I prefer to regard a dessert as I would imagine the perfect woman: subtle, a little bittersweet, not blowsy and extrovert. Delicately made up, not highly rouged. Holding back, not exposing everything, and, of course, with a flavour that lasts.

  —GRAHAM KERR

  As the child of a baker and pastry cook, I grew up with desserts and their mythology.

  Long before I came to France, I knew that François Vatel had been the first to whisk sugar and vanilla into cream, naming it crème Chantilly after the château of his master, the Prince de Condé, and that Stéphanie and Caroline Tatin, French innkeeper sisters during the early nineteenth century, stumbled on tarte Tatin because they had no oven and had to cook their apple tart on top of the stove, which caramelised the fruit. (Neither tale was quite true, but never mind; they sounded right.)

  According to my father, however, it was Australia and not France that led the world in pastry. It was Australian chefs, after all, who invented two of the most famous of all desserts: the Pavlova, in honour of Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, and peach Melba, named for the Melbourne-born soprano Nellie Melba. (There was even an attempt in the 1960s to create another, in honour of Marlene Dietrich, who was on tour. The chef in a big hotel created the Madame Marlene, based on blue ice cream inspired by her most famous role, as Lola Lola in The Blue Angel. A sample was presented to her at a press conference. She accepted it in chill silence and placed it on the floor untasted. Nobody ever referred to it again.)

  It would have depressed my father considerably to discover, as I did much later, that the legends of the Pavlova and the peach Melba were false. The Pavlova was created in our part of the world—not in Australia but in New Zealand.

  As for Melba, she was born Helen Porter Mitchell in Melbourne and adopted the city’s name as her own, but the food items that immortalised her, Melba toast and peach Melba, were invented in Europe. Melba toast was created in 1897, when the singer, the kind of fussy eater one wouldn’t want as a dinner guest, claimed not to be able to choke down anything as robust as a sandwich. To make bread more digestible, a chef at the Ritz Hotel in Paris toasted a slice, cut it to half-thickness, and toasted it again.

  Credit for the more famous peach Melba goes to Auguste Escoffier, chef at London’s Savoy Hotel in the 1890s. Notwithstanding numerous later concoctions of poached fruit, his peach Melba contained no peaches. According to tradition, the nervous Nellie liked ice cream but feared it might harm her vocal cords. Hearing this, Escoffier whipped up a sauce coloured with raspberries and redcurrant jelly, and thickened with cornstarch. A scoop of ice cream masked with this gloop resembled a ripe peach, and permitted Melba to scoff all she wanted without risk of chilling her tubes.

  An even more melodramatic rumour about her culinary tastes has attached itself to Melba. Supposed
ly, she believed that her throat could only be opened to its most mellifluous if, just before each performance, she lubricated her vocal cords by fellating someone. Nobody has corroborated this tale, and I tend to doubt it. Imagine the logistics. How could she be sure of having an obligingly erect male always on hand? And imagine the union problems: the theatre is one of the most rigidly organised industries in the world. Was this a job for the Oral and General Workers or the Shirt Lifters and Allied Trades? Or did it count as a performance and thus involve the actors’ union, Equity? It was enough to make any honest unionists down their tools.

  Despite their traditional association with pastry, the French aren’t great eaters of desserts. Since fewer and fewer people cook, particularly in the cities—it’s easier to buy food ready-made from a traiteur—the standard dinner-party dessert is a gâteau or fruit tart, shop-bought, sliced at the table, and served as a preview to coffee, if not actually with it. Rather than the culmination of a meal, it’s regarded as a footnote.

  But I never gave up on desserts. If anything, I tried to make them at least as important as any other course. Peach Melba held no appeal. However, I did once make Pavlovas for a French Christmas dinner, baking my own meringue shells and filling them with crème Chantilly, passion-fruit pulp, fresh mango, and strawberries. They were a big success, particularly with the kids, who made up half the company that year. For another meal, I did strawberry Bavaroise, a trembling tower of gelatined pink cream netted with trickles of melted chocolate, and for two consecutive years apple crumble—a rare example of a transfer from British cuisine that became a staple of French menus.

  However, what I really enjoyed was setting things on fire.

  Chefs, like magicians, are ambivalent about ostentation. Audiences enjoy seeing a woman sawed in half, but the professional is more impressed by some elegant sleight of hand, or the disappearance that takes place on the bare and well-lighted stage with the magician in shirtsleeves.

  Professional cooks applauded the clever haute-cuisine forgery perpetrated by Los Angeles restaurateurs Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, who took that supermarket cliché, the Hostess Cupcake, and wittily created a skilful imitation using only the best ingredients: rich French quatre-quarts cake, pépites of Swiss chocolate, crème pâtissière. It was a kitchen card trick, executed with offhand expertise. Likewise, it’s a sign of culinary sophistication to have made a pilgrimage to Alain Passard’s tiny but elegant restaurant L’Arpège in rue de Grenelle for his Tomate aux douze saveurs, a dessert improbably based on a tomato. He poaches it for hours in a syrup flavoured with twelve spices, then serves it in a puddle of its own varnish-colored syrup, with a scoop of white ice cream that looks like it should be vanilla but is instead, disconcertingly, anise.

  But while serious cooks respect such improbable desserts, they shy away from the more theatrical old favourites. Few serve the baked Alaska—called by the French omelette norvégienne—in which a log of ice cream is coated in soft meringue, baked just long enough to brown the exterior, and served topped with a half-eggshell filled with flaming brandy. As for the classic crêpes Suzette—thin pancakes sautéed at the table with flaming brandy and Grand Marnier—most chefs regard the dish as a parlour trick, and delegate a waiter to warm the sauce over an alcohol flame and ignite the brandy. The few Paris restaurants that keep the dish on their menus are those that most cater to the tourist trade, like the Montparnasse café La Coupole—where also, significantly, anyone who orders a birthday cake has it served at the table with a fizzing sparkler stuck in the middle. The lights are lowered and the whole serving staff assembles around the table to sing “Joyeux anniversaire” while the spirits of Vatel, Carême, and Escoffier groan in their graves.

  Not me, however. I enjoyed this conjunction of food and flame. Watching the sparks fountain up into the darkened restaurant, it was easy to imagine oneself hunkered down around the tribal campfire, gnawing on a haunch of woolly mammoth, seignant, and likely as not with the wool still on it.

  Something about fire reignites our atavistic instincts. I never forgot the excitement in a woman’s eyes when, in my bachelor days, I’d splashed wine into a pan and the alcohol flamed up, nor the moment when, as I sat with my beautiful teenage soon-to-be wife in the soft Mexican night on a balcony above the bay of Acapulco, the maître d’ ignited a ladle of cognac and poured a flaming blue cascade into our café Valentino.

  Such theatricality is part of the joy of cooking. Without it, my Christmas dinner wouldn’t be complete. The British realised that when they decreed the Christmas pudding should be brought to the table doused in flaming brandy. Lots of brandy, however, is needed to achieve a respectable flame, and there’s a temptation to accelerate the process. Jeremy Clarkson has confessed that, as a boy, impatient with the wavering flame created by the brandy, he’d added a few spoonfuls of gasoline.

  Jazz saxophonist Lester Young, famous for his idiosyncratic style of speech, would inquire about the culinary skills of a friend’s wife by asking, “Does Madame burn?”

  So, what could I burn?

  I had the answer the moment I opened my kitchen cupboard and saw my latest toy, a butane gas torch. So far, I’d used it only to brown the cheese on a gratin and crisp up the sugar crust on a crème brûlée. But why stop there? In London, at the restaurant of the great Elizabeth David, I’d once eaten a succulent variation on the crème brûlée, made with fresh fruit. Perfect for our dinner. Mentally, I pencilled in the last item on our Christmas menu:

  Fruits exotiques brûlés à la façon de Elizabeth David.

  16

  Bread

  Our lives shall not be sweated

  From birth until life closes;

  Hearts starve as well as bodies;

  Bread and roses, bread and roses!

  —JAMES OPPENHEIM

  It was the summer of 1970, a few months after I’d stepped off the boat at Southampton. I was only a month away from Australia and still as ignorant of things European as it was possible to be.

  My friend Monica and I were headed for the Venice Film Festival, which I’d persuaded, with some trifling misrepresentation involving headed stationery from my former employer, the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit, to grant me journalistic credentials. Too poor to fly from London to Venice, we bought a Volkswagen Beetle and a tent, and plotted a route overland across Belgium, France, Germany, and Switzerland into Italy.

  The evening of our third day on the road, we arrived at Mulhouse, near the point where the frontiers of France, Germany, and Switzerland intersect, and found our way to the campsite. It stood on the outskirts of town, in a park cut by neat canals lined with young trees. Order and good design were everywhere evident—even more so the following day, when a van drove up in the misty morning, loaded with urns of hot coffee and wooden trays of cakes and rolls.

  Waiting in line, I stared at the items on sale, recognising none of them. Where were the square white loaves of Australia, their crusts soft and pale, barely tanned by the oven? The squashy dinner rolls dusted with flour? The Lamingtons, cubes of cake soaked in chocolate syrup and rolled in desiccated coconut? The cupcakes topped with vanilla icing and sprinkles? In their place were baguettes and rolls baked a shiny varnish brown. I recognised the curved ones as croissants—but what about these others, just as brown but more square and fat?

  I could have asked the vendor, but the people behind me in line seemed unlikely to delay their breakfasts while he furthered my education. Instead, I took a chance and bought a selection on the “one of them and one of those” principle, carrying them back to our tent, where Monica, with the skill of long experience (having, among other adventures, crossed Iran on a motorbike), was brewing tea over a gas stove.

  A few minutes later, I bit into a roll and experienced one of the shocks of my eating life. Running through its centre was a seam of bitter chocolate. Proust can keep his madeleine. To relive those days of European innocence and the sense of a whole continent lying before me, waiting to be claimed, I
need only munch on a fresh pain au chocolat. The audacious combination of bread and chocolate—that could only be French.

  Now, more than thirty years later, I rose on the morning of Sunday before Christmas, before the sun was up, and battled an Arctic wind up boulevard de Deux Ports to the centre of Fouras. Every house I passed was sealed for the winter, the shutters closed and barred. On the town’s sole shopping street, the grocery, pharmacy, and maison de la presse were just as dark.

  Only one shop showed a light—the baker’s. The French could dispense with their newspapers, their groceries, their medication, even their wine, but neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night is permitted to deny them a warm baguette.

  It’s customary to praise French bread. Even more than cheese and wine, bread represents something central to the French personality. One of the greatest compliments is to say of someone, “He is like good bread.” To deny the people bread or undermine its worth is to strike at the very heart of the nation. Until the Industrial Revolution, uprisings in Europe always began in the summer after a poor harvest. As the price of bread rose, the proletariat either raided the granaries or mobbed the palace. When Parisians marched to Versailles in 1789, the spark that ignited the French Revolution, the issue was bread. As they walked, their chant was “We’re going to see the baker, the baker’s wife, and the little baker’s boy”.

  If the sans-culottes expected their rulers to understand their problems, they were complaining to the wrong place. Aristocrats didn’t eat much bread and, when they did, preferred soft white rolls or milk-and egg-rich brioche, closer to cake. So it’s entirely possible that Marie-Antoinette, not understanding the need of the poor for something simply to fill their bellies, could have imagined they were complaining of a shortage of breakfast baked goods and suggested, “S’ils n’ont plus de pain, qu’ils mangent de la brioche.” (“If they have no bread, then let them eat cake!”) In point of historical fact, she never made the remark. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with whom the story originated, only ever attributed it to “a great princess”, and probably meant an Italian lady of an earlier century. Marie-Antoinette was only ten years of age when he cited it, and still at home in Austria. But as far as the revolutionaries who executed Marie-Antoinette were concerned, if she didn’t say “Let them eat cake”, she should have.