A Paris Christmas

by Baxter, John

  I should have listened to M. Mortier’s cooking advice—though it probably didn’t cover this problem. I turned over his carcass and peered into the interior, not yet packed with stuffing. But I was disappointed: there was no solution written on the inside, a porcine mode d’emploi, or user’s guide.

  Only one solution presented itself.

  Whom can we ring up?

  We had a history of Christmas-morning phone calls. One year, I’d made fruit mince tarts, which, though they tasted fine, lacked the satisfying crunch I remembered from childhood—a deficiency we narrowed down to the lack of the translucent glaze that my father used to coat the marinated raisins and candied peel.

  As it was still early evening in Australia, I’d rung my father in Sydney.

  “OK,” he said when I explained the problem, “take some icing sugar …”

  He spent ten expensive long-distance minutes walking me through the technique of glazing mince tarts. It made each of them worth about $25. But they were delicious.

  “Ring up whom, exactly?” Marie-Dominique asked.

  “Where’s Jean-Pierre at the moment?”

  “Jean-Pierre? At home, I expect.”

  “Do you have his number?”

  “Yes. Why? He can’t boil an egg. Marie-Christine does all the cooking.”

  “But he’s a surgeon.”

  “So?”

  “This is a surgical problem.”

  Fortunately, Jean-Pierre was already out of bed. No parent sleeps in on Christmas morning.

  “OK, I get it,” he said before I’d half-explained my problem. “Do you have a scalpel—I mean, a sharp knife? Not one of those Psycho things. Something about the length of a table knife but with a good point.”

  He stopped, and said off-phone, “Not now, darling. Daddy’s working. I’ll show you how to put it together in a minute.”

  Back on line, he continued, “Got it? Right. Turn the patient … er, pig over. See where the large vertebrae at the front change size and become the smaller ones of the spine? Push the point of the knife in behind the last of the big ones, and separate it from the first of the smaller.”

  I did. The point went in with surprising ease.

  “Yes.”

  “Keep cutting until you’re through the cartilage. You’ll feel the lessening of pressure. Then take out the knife, and break the spine.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t admit this to anyone else, but in the operating room we just put the patient over the edge of the table and give him a whack.”

  I placed Pascal’s back against the edge of the work surface—Sorry about this, old chap—braced the head end with one hand and pushed down with the other. There was the kind of crack one never wants to hear from one’s own body. Abruptly, his formerly pliable body sagged.

  Turning him over and looking inside, I saw the spinal column visibly gaping at the point where I’d inserted the knife. It created a hinge. If I cut through the flesh between two of the ribs on either side, he would fold back on himself, snout almost touching his tail—a perfect size for the oven.

  “You’re a genius,” I said.

  “Congratulations,” Jean-Pierre said. “You’ve just performed intervertebral separation of the lumbar spine. Without anaesthesia, admittedly, and without a medical licence, but still, a considerable achievement. My fee for assisting at a procedure like this would be five thousand euros, but it’s Christmas, so let’s make it three thousand. My bill will be in the mail. Now if you excuse me, I have to help my five-year-old assemble her SuperHetrodyne TV Learning System. Nothing I do seems to make it work.”

  This was something I knew about.

  “I’ll give you a diagnosis for free. Batteries aren’t included.”

  “What do you mean there are no batteries? There must be batteries!”

  “None. Believe me. There never are with that sort of toy.”

  “Really? But that’s absurd! What am I supposed to do, on Christmas Day?”

  At last! The line I’d been waiting all my life to say to a doctor. “Take two aspirin,” I said, “and call me in the morning.”

  • • •

  I rubbed the dark and fragrant skin of the now hairpin-shaped Pascal inside and outside with olive oil, and arranged him on the oven’s rack, with a deep baking dish on the shelf below to catch the fat and drippings. He would roast more evenly that way.

  “What about the stuffing?” Marie-Do asked.

  “No problem. We’ll cook it separately.”

  Earlier, I’d mixed the soft American (ssshhh!) bread crumbs with chopped apple, celery—including some of its leaves—fresh sage and marjoram, onions, and seasonings, including a few flakes of dried chilli. Oiling a sheet of foil, I shaped the stuffing into a cylinder, leaving it to be put in the oven for the last hour of cooking.

  With Pascal safely roasting, we could peel the potatoes and drop them into salted cold water for later parboiling. Nothing guarantees a crunchy exterior more than five minutes of boiling before they go into the oven.

  “Potatoes and pork,” Marie-Do said. “Is that enough?”

  “With oysters, cheese, pears, and dessert? Should be. You think we need another vegetable?”

  “Well, Jean-Paul’s teeth … He can’t chew very well.”

  “I thought he and Françoise …”

  “No, they’ll be here. Word has got around that you’re preparing something special.”

  “What do we have?”

  Except for what we’d brought from Paris, my mother-in-law’s fridge and cupboards were mostly bare. She spent less time here in winter and didn’t stock up. In the vegetable crisper, however, a dozen deprived-looking carrots huddled.

  Carrot pudding!

  I peeled the carrots, boiled them soft, and put them in the food processor—called a robot by the French, who hate using anyone else’s word for an appliance—with an egg, some flour, cumin and cinnamon, salt and pepper. Into the mix also went a tub of cottage cheese, about to pass its sell-by date, which I found lurking at the back of the fridge. Whizzing them up produced an orange-coloured purée, which I piled into a buttered dish. It could go into the oven at the same time as the potatoes and stuffing.

  “Where did you find that recipe?” Marie-Do asked.

  “I didn’t. I ate it once somewhere and figured out what it contained. Works with sweet potatoes too. Probably parsnips as well.” In my mind, I sent a silent prayer to the shade of Philip Harben.

  In the oven, Pascal had begun to look less raw, though he still had two hours or more to go. Knocking the top off a bottle of Guinness stout, I poured it, foaming, over him. The malt flavour and the sugar would cling to the skin, while the liquid vaporised, keeping the meat moist.

  Next, we unwrapped the Vacherin, chosen by the fromager at Barthelemy to be à point for today’s meal. The upper crust, smooth and firm when immature, had rippled into deep corrugations, spongy to the touch. At room temperature, the cheese underneath would be so deliquescent that, without the wooden surround, it would ooze into a puddle.

  Peeling the Passe Crassane pears that went with it could wait until the last minute.

  Which left dessert.

  “You still won’t tell me what you’re making?” Marie-Do asked.

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “Surprises are an enthusiasm of young societies,” she said pedantically. “The French don’t care for them.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you.”

  I explained about the fruits brûlés.

  “There’s a price for this information,” I said. “You have to help with the fruit.”

  For half an hour we peeled and diced mangos, kiwis, and bananas, added strawberries, passion-fruit pulp, and grated lime rind, all of which went in the fridge, along with the Clochard apples for the compote, peeled, cut in eighths, and floating in water to stop them going brown.

  Outside, it was turning into the bright, clear winter day of a Christmas card, the sky a cloudless blue, a
gainst which the bare trees appeared pasted, sharp as cutouts. Smoke curled from the chimney of the house next door, occupied by Françoise and Jean-Paul.

  In our house, Claudine and the other family members remained asleep, or at least in bed. Louise and her cousin Alice were awake, however, and gossiping. I could hear the jangle of pop music from the room they shared.

  Christmas was coming along just fine.

  24

  Simple Gifts

  And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  By noon of Christmas day, the house had come to life. Louise and Alice, after having looted the refrigerator of juice and Evian—drinking both out of the bottle, naturally, and leaving the fridge door open—had retreated to the clothing-scattered cave of their bedroom for more gossip and even louder music.

  The rest of the family wandered down, exchanged cheek kisses and “Bonne fête”s, poured coffee from the electric percolator—the house’s lone concession to American technology—and took it, with some crispbread, to the salon, where they sat and looked out on the garden in morning sunshine.

  These movements mostly passed me by. I was more interested in getting people out from underfoot. A cook must control his space totally, from the state of the floor to the sharpness of his knives. Years of working in tiny kitchens had instilled the habit of cleaning up as I went along. Any dirty dish or utensil instantly went into the dishwasher, which hadn’t stopped running since eight a.m.

  In the oven, Pascal was looking good. Two more bottles of Guinness, as well as frequent basting and turning, had created a deep brown exterior, glistening with fat, and in a few places starting to bubble in the telltale texture of crackling. Cooking had also shrunk him, the hairpin shape relaxing into a curve, which, I was confident, would straighten out for serving.

  I plopped my parboiled potatoes into the baking pan, now an inch deep in fat, with a lower stratum of meat juices that would provide the foundation of our gravy. The roll of stuffing and the carrot pudding went on the shelf below. Almost everything was now well on its way, except the dessert—which, if all went well, I would complete at the table, in flames.

  What seemed only a few minutes after they got up, the family was filing past the kitchen door, fully dressed.

  “We’re going to mass,” Marie-Dominique said. “Back soon.”

  The cook was blessed by being given a free pass to avoid mass. Not that the modern French service, through which most priests cantered in less than twenty minutes, approached the torment of masses during my childhood. Those dragged on more than an hour and were celebrated in Latin, punctuated with a sermon, collections, and a shuffling procession of communicants, all to music of droning tedium.

  Alone in the house, and waiting for the potatoes to boil, I walked into the living room.

  I’d already opened six bottles of our newly acquired Margaux and placed them on the stone mantel above the open fire. Now I poured half a glass and gave the wine a serious tasting. It didn’t disappoint.

  I hadn’t always liked wine. Good wine demands education. In George Orwell’s dystopic 1984, Winston Smith, a rebel in a world dominated by tyrannical Big Brother, encounters a secret society that claims to protect a few surviving pleasures. One of these is wine, and for the first time Smith is able to taste something that years of imagination have invested with a mystical value. But the wine, which he imagines would taste sweet, like blackberry jam, and give an instant rush of alcohol, does neither, and he doesn’t even finish the glass.

  People drinking wine for the first time often react in the same way. I did myself. Red wine in particular is tart and doesn’t satisfy your thirst. The tannin can even leave the tongue and mouth feeling dry and slightly puckered. Nor is there an instant rush of alcohol.

  All the same, you finish the glass, and maybe take a second. And stealthily the effect takes hold. The food you eat begins to taste better, as if the wine has alerted your palate to new flavours. Cheese, for instance, takes on an entirely different character when drunk with a glass of Bordeaux, and yet another with a sweet wine like port.

  Before long, the drinker becomes more adventurous. You could guess that pheasant or partridge would taste better washed down with Burgundy, but lobster? And who first discovered that sweet cold Sauternes bonds magically with foie gras? Or an astringent sherry is the perfect accompaniment to thin slices of salty dried ham?

  Winston Smith’s error was in stopping too soon. One glass just won’t do it. But a thousand is never enough.

  Now that the house was empty, I brought down my own presents, distributing them among the piles, each arranged around a shoe belonging to the recipient—a vestige of the tradition in which a clog was placed by the chimney to receive what in those days would have been a single emblematic gift.

  The lavishness of our modern Christmas obscures how minor a role gifts traditionally played in the celebration. In Dickens’s day, food and good works mattered far more. Scrooge, when he sees the error of his ways, doesn’t buy presents but gives money to a charity that helps the poor and sends a turkey to his clerk Bob Cratchit, whose wages he raises and family he helps.

  Gifts were symbolic—sometimes just an imported orange or clementine, luxuries in midwinter. British comic books of the 1950s, like the Beano and Chatterbox, often showed Christmas stockings containing a pineapple. In Australia, where we were knee-deep in tropical fruit, any kid given a pineapple for Christmas would take it as a dire insult. Not so in Europe. In France, fresh pineapples didn’t appear until the 1960s, when they began to trickle in from Africa, often brought by Senegalese émigrés who sold them from blankets spread on the Paris pavements.

  Simple gifts … but the modern Christmas had all but removed simplicity from the process.

  It’s not that there was anything in particular wrong with the commercialising of Christmas. Any pretext for being kind and loving to those around us can’t be bad—and how better to show that kindness and love than by lavishing them with gifts?

  I even enjoyed the game of deciding on gifts sufficiently munificent and at the same time so unexpected that they would assert themselves in the flood of soaps, perfumes, scarves, ties, diaries, and assorted gadgetry.

  This year, I believed I’d chosen well. Every husband keeps his conjugal radar tuned through December to those little hints that wives drop. But, as John Updike remarked, “an expected gift is not worth giving”. So one needed to be just as attentive to any spontaneous expressions of enthusiasm that might suggest a more surprising present.

  This was why Marie-Do would receive a GPS satellite location unit for her car. She’d noticed one in a taxi, and the driver, as we paused at a light, had been only too glad to lecture us, not only on its usefulness in navigating around Paris but—and this was the clincher—its deeper significance in a philosophical appreciation of the glories of France.

  “You will observe, chère Madame,” he said, “that this particular machine even shows those streets where trees line the route.”

  The traffic light was green now. A chorus of honks began behind us.

  “As you can imagine,” he continued, oblivious, “I often used to regard a drive in the country with my wife as a chore. But I think it was Monet who commented, ‘The clear French landscape is as pure as a verse of Racine.’”

  “Wasn’t it Cézanne?” I said.

  “Really? I was sure …”

  Behind us, a furious voice yelled, “For God’s sake, get ON!”

  After this, I felt fairly safe in choosing a similar unit as a gift. On the other hand, one could never be entirely sure. All sorts of implicit rules govern the giving of gifts in France—like that prohibition of bringing food and wine to a dinner party. Early in our relationship, I suggested to Marie-Do that we give her mother a Waterpik—one of those toothbrushes that operate with high-pressure water.

  “Oh, no,” she said instantly. “That would not be convenable.”


  “Convenable? Appropriate? How ‘not appropriate’?”

  “Well, it’s too … intimate.”

  “But what about those silk pyjamas we bought for her birthday? They’re pretty intimate, surely?”

  She looked at me in genuine surprise. “Pyjamas? Oh, no. Not at all.”

  It came down, as it turned out, to a question of bodily functions. Clothing, even underwear, was permissible, as were perfumes, creams, soaps, and cosmetics, because they were used only on the outside. With anything that trespassed inside the body, you were on dangerous ground.

  The standard prohibition on bringing gifts of food and wine didn’t apply at Christmas, which was just as well for my in-laws. They knew that, when it came to a present for me, they could always fall back on some rare delicacy. From the look of the parcels already clustered around my shoe, I’d be receiving the usual assortment of exotic edibles acquired on holidays at the ends of the earth. (“Oh, look! Jellied yak testicles. I’d get that for John.”)

  But even in the area of kitchen-alia, pitfalls existed. While people had presented me with enough ladles, forks, pots, and corkscrews to furnish a dozen kitchens, I never once received a knife. I commented on this once to Marie-Do.

  “Naturally. Nobody would ever give you a knife.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s bad luck.”

  “A kitchen knife? I’ve got a dozen. What’s bad luck about that?”

  “Well, it just is. It’s thought that it might cut the link between friends.”

  It was useless to argue this on grounds of logic. The French are rational people. Unfortunately, this means that once they embrace a crackpot idea, it assumes the same status as incontrovertible fact. (Later, I found that this custom is even followed in other parts of the world, including the United States, where it’s permissible to accept the knife if you offer the giver a coin in return—which, to me, simply adds another layer of irrationality.)