A Paris Christmas

by Baxter, John

  I was mulling this over when a car pulled into the drive. The family was back from church. Time to return to the kitchen, to Pascal, and to the gift I was offering to my family—dinner.

  25

  Getting It Together

  God is in the details.

  —LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE

  It was time to set the table—fortunately another job from which the chef was excused.

  Various thumps and rumbles from upstairs signalled that an extra leaf for the dining-room table was being manoeuvred out of the combined spare bedroom and storeroom at the far end of the house and down the narrow stairs.

  The Christmas tablecloth was extracted from the linen press. Marie-Do and I bought it at a brocante somewhere in the Dordogne, under a baking midsummer sun. I vividly recalled the sweat trickling down my spine as I bargained over the three-metre length of heavy linen, hand-embroidered at its four corners with the intricate initials of the wealthy local bourgeois.

  A few stains from its earlier use had given me some negotiating room with the seller.

  “But look, cher Monsieur,” I protested, “at this appalling damage. I’ll never get that out.” (While knowing very well that modern dry cleaning would remove almost anything.)

  We settled on ten euros, and I lugged away, for the cost of a sandwich and a beer, a length of linen redolent of turtle soup, grouse, baron of beef, sauce Béarnaise, Burgundy, cognac, and Havana cigars—a relic of the days of great dinners, which, just for today, had been restored, for a single meal, to its rightful place.

  The silverware was my mother-in-law’s, inherited from her mother on the day of her wedding. Now she supervised as her daughters and granddaughters set it out. Occasionally, she’d swoop on a fork or a glass, tut-tut at its cleanliness, or lack of it, and put it aside.

  Once the table was arranged to her satisfaction, she set the girls to distributing the traditional “nibbles”. Ritual dictated these as well. Small bowls were filled with the mixed nuts, sultanas, and raisins called mendiants—beggars—because their brown and beige colours echoed those of the robes worn by the orders of monks, like Franciscans and Capuchins, who relied on charity. Another dish held Algerian dates— not the dattes confites I knew from my childhood, moist and gluey with sugar, but dried dates, their flesh mildly sweet and floury inside a papery skin, and still attached to the stalk.

  Dates attached to the stalk presumably taste no different from those sold loose, but stalks and stems preoccupy the French at Christmas. Late in December, markets flood with small, hard, acid clementines from Corsica. Picked before fully ripe, each bears a cluster of dark leaves. Marie-Dominique would have us trudging from one fruitière to the next until she found fruit with the most securely attached stems and leaves. As with most French Christmas rituals, one assumes a religious reason. A reminder of the olive branch brought back by the dove to reassure Noah that the flood was receding? Or comfort to a medieval society that, however bitter the winter, summer and the harvest would return? Nobody seems to know.

  Back in the kitchen, I began to marshal my serving platters. None was as elegant as the porcelain and crystal now laid on the table, but each was just as precious to me.

  Fortunately, almost nothing usable is ever thrown out in France. Every weekend when the weather allows, brocantes—sometimes called grands balais, big sweep-outs, or vides greniers, attic-emptiers—appear all over France, on city streets, in village squares, in fields and car parks.

  Some sellers are professionals touting overpriced and dubious antiques, but the majority are amateurs who scour house sales and auctions for their stock. And no stall, however small, lacks a few items of kitchenware. No wooden spoon is too worn, no pot too dented, no grater too rusted, no fork too bent.

  One has only to pick up a knife worn to the sharpness and thinness of a razor blade or heft a fish kettle whose interior is encrusted with generations of court-bouillon to feel an instant affinity with the people who used it before. When the household goods of the great cook Elizabeth David went for auction in 1992, a few wooden spoons in an earthenware jar sold for 300 pounds. A colander went for 320 pounds, and her ancient wooden kitchen table, where she wrote her books, like the elegantly simple French Provincial Cooking, fetched 1,100 pounds.

  “But it was nothing but battered pots and pans!” said an incredulous friend of the sale, “and a few sticks of pine furniture. Not even oak!” I didn’t try to explain. I’m not sure I understood it myself.

  To serve the potatoes, I’d chosen one of my own kitchen treasures, a deep, oval platter with a surface so irregular that it was clearly moulded by hand. Long before I acquired it, bakings by the hundred had glazed the exterior a glossy black, while the interior had modulated into the greeny yellow of old bronze. A short crack in one edge merely added to its allure, though it had counted sufficiently with the brocanteuse to say, “Oh, it’s broken—so, say, a euro?” It would have been a bargain at fifty.

  A dish for Pascal posed more problems. There simply wasn’t one large enough, and I shrank from carving him in the kitchen and serving him in slices. Had we been in Paris, I might have borrowed one from an obliging restaurateur. They were still used by a few restaurants and big hotels that followed the tradition of displaying the dishes of the evening to guests as they enjoyed an aperitif in the bar. Waiters would carry in a side of lamb, a piglet, even a giant lobster, feelers weaving feebly, and parade it around the room before exiting to the kitchen. I’d been in one Irish restaurant where, as a whole gleaming salmon disappeared out the door, a guest who’d downed one cocktail too many yelled, “Hey, if nobody else wants it, I’ll have it!”

  A century ago, such dishes had been common. According to legend, Parisian courtesan Cora Pearl presented herself nude at a banquet for her admirers on such a dish, with a judiciously placed spray of parsley, and, some say, a delicate pink sauce. As late as 1959, surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim climaxed a feast by serving a nude girl on such a platter. More recently still, rock star Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, titillated guests at his very gay parties by offering a nude boy squirming in a dish of raw liver.

  Lacking the resources of Cora or Meret or Freddie, I was forced to improvise. From the same back room at the top of the house where the table leaf reposed between festivities, I unearthed a slab of cork bark almost a metre long. Peeled whole from the tree, it was apparently a long-forgotten souvenir of some long-ago Provençal holiday. Scoured of decades of dust and cobwebs, and lined with multiple layers of aluminium foil, it made a natural dish.

  When I showed it to my mother-in-law, she blinked.

  “Goodness,” she said. “I’d forgotten I had that.”

  I was sufficiently superstitious to believe that it hadn’t really been forgotten at all. It had just been waiting.

  26

  à table!

  Soup’s on!

  —TRADITIONAL CALL TO EAT

  And now the guests were starting to gather.

  Too busy to take much notice, I shook their hands as each was ushered into the kitchen, then whisked out before they could do much damage.

  About half had figured in our lives at some time or other, either from asking a favour or granting one. In France, your first recourse when you need something isn’t to the Yellow Pages of the telephone directory but to your list of family and friends. A cousin had found a priest to marry us and christen Louise. Others recommended plumbers, carpenters, lawyers, and undertakers, pulled strings to speed visa applications, “fixed” banking problems, while we, in turn, did the same, as well as advising on the disposal of rare books and satisfying the curiosity of cousins who wanted to become writers or enter the film business. Anyone who wanted something written or read in English also came to me, so I found myself advising a pretty young relative applying for a job in America that saying she was “broad-minded and ready for anything” probably didn’t convey the message she intended.

  Some of the guests tonight had been at that first dinner so long ag
o. I couldn’t mistake, for instance, the Falstaffian figure of my cousin by marriage Pierre-Michel, who was always trying to recruit us in dubious investment deals involving Luxembourg banks.

  Then there was Jean-Paul, my adoptive uncle, whose acceptance of my anecdote about George Johnston’s boozy tour of France had signalled acceptance into the clan. Now in his late eighties, he was descending into the physical and mental wilderness of senility. The neat blue suit of that first dinner had given way to a baggy sweater, crumpled corduroy trousers, and bedroom slippers. His wife, Françoise, manoeuvred him into his rightful seat at the head of the table, from which he looked around with the contentment of someone who lived in the perpetual present, with no memories to haunt him and no fears of what the future held. Ironically, he probably saw me now as he had at that first dinner. I recognised the politely puzzled smile and the raised eyebrows that signalled, as they had then, “Who the hell is this?”

  As for the rest, the family of my brother-in-law, Jean-Marie, was easy to spot: they were all huge. Anyone standing a head taller than the rest had to be a Glenisson. My own family, the Montels, were mostly distinguished by a prominent nose. The plump lady with the aristocratic beak, who’d embraced me so warmly, had to be Martine, my cousin by marriage. This was confirmed when she was joined by someone I knew better than any of them—her husband, Philippe, who, in middle age, had courageously abandoned his practice as a doctor to enter the church as a deacon. We’d attended his induction in Notre-Dame, held after hours, when the cathedral was closed to the public. In all that enormous space, there were just the twenty new deacons in their purple robes, the bishop and priests in charge of the ritual, and a few dozen invited guests. Its vast and cavernous dark engulfed us, a reminder, if one were needed, that the Church in France still retained its ancient ability to subdue and overawe.

  My experience of most of my relations had been amiable. I would have been happier without the presence of a prune-faced cousin named Natalie and her cowed husband, Aristide, who trailed her like a poodle. But I looked for, and was happy not to find, the black sheep of the clan, like Nicolas, the schizophrenic cousin who threw his furniture out the window, and Simon, who invariably got drunk and groped the girls.

  Marie-Do looked around the kitchen door.

  “Can we start?”

  I surveyed the state of dinner like a general surveying his forces before he issued the command “Charge!” Over the years, one develops a sense of timing, which ensures that everything arrives at the table at just the right state of cooking. I did a quick review.

  Pascal? Crackling was forming satisfactorily, and a fork stuck deep into his haunch showed juices running clear, indicating that he was cooked right to the bone. Time, in fact, to remove him from the oven and let him “rest.” Ten or fifteen minutes cooling would draw those juices back into the fibres, tenderising and lubricating the meat.

  Potatoes? Golden and crusty on the outside, which meant, I knew, that their interiors were perfectly cooked. Time to take them out and arrange them on my precious earthenware platter.

  Carrot pudding? Slightly risen in the dish, its coppery surface was pricked with points of deep brown where the sugar had caramelised. That too could come out of the oven and be allowed to cool. If anything, the flavour would improve.

  “Yes. Serve the oysters.”

  This still left me at least ten minutes before I needed to sit down for the first course. Places had to be chosen, and the ritual observed, as far as possible, of alternating men and women, and, ideally, not letting couples sit together. There would be people who didn’t want to be too close to the fire, and others who claimed to feel a draught. People had to be separated from their aperitif glasses—which reminded me that my own glass of pineau still sat, undrunk, on the kitchen counter. I hastily downed it, remembering my first cautious sip eighteen years before.

  I lifted out the baking pan and examined the deep fat. There was no smell of burning, no black specks in the clear golden liquid, meaning I’d judged the oven temperature well, and the fat, once filtered, cooled, and congealed, could be used for many meals to come. Smeared on any cut of meat before roasting, it would provide better lubrication than those slices of raw lard preferred by French butchers. Potatoes, parsnips, and pumpkin would take on added flavour if roasted in it. It was ideal for preserving pork crackling or the liver and innards of a chicken, which the French call gésiers, and which add variety to a winter salad. And mixing it with shredded spiced pork created the delicious spread known as rillettes.

  A preoccupation with cholesterol had made beef and pork fat politically unacceptable almost everywhere, but the French still respected the savour of good pork or beef fat, and I was proud to go along with them.

  “Dripping”, as it used to be called, had been a venerable and valuable element of the Anglo-Saxon diet for millennia. Pancake batter poured into bubbling hot fat puffed up and browned into Yorkshire pudding, absorbing the flavours of the meat and helping it go further. Spread on bread, it became “bread and dripping”, a favourite snack of the prewar British working class. Dripping was an invaluable ingredient of the best pastry, the crispest French fries. During World War II, under a programme called Fat for Britain, we more fortunate colonials were even asked to save our dripping and send it in jars to our deprived cousins in Britain. (We assumed they were grateful, though it’s not something every person would be glad to receive in the mail.)

  Pouring off the fat from Pascal’s cooking left a molasses-thick residue of reduced juices in the pan. Placing it on a low flame, I waited for it to bubble, then splashed in another bottle of Guinness. What had been an unappetising sludge thinned to the consistency of varnish, then, with more stout, to an unctuous sauce of deep bronze, slick with fat, fragrant with the spices of the marinade. I tasted it, added a pinch of fleur de sel, and lowered the heat to drive off the last of the alcohol and dissolve any fragments of congealed juices that remained.

  Had I been wearing a chef’s toque and tablier, I could have removed them now. The dinner was all but complete. All that remained was the carving, the serving—mechanical work that could be done by anyone.

  Instead, I washed my hands and face at the sink, took a deep breath, and left the kitchen behind. Between one door and the next, I crossed the most crucial frontier in the world of food. I stepped through the kitchen door a cook—I entered the dining room an eater.

  27

  The Dinner

  Show me another pleasure like dinner which comes every day and lasts an hour.

  —CHARLES MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND

  Through hundreds of dinner parties, I’ve striven to find a metaphor that describes their special fascination.

  An invasion? Yes, in the sense that one must overcome the resistance of some people to dishes they don’t know, or don’t like, or to the people they’re forced to sit next to and to engage in often aimless conversation.

  A seduction? That too—as demonstrated in Isak Dinesen’s story Babette’s Feast, and Gabriel Axel’s film, where a French female chef, exiled to a remote Scandinavian religious community, repays them by cooking a sumptuous dinner. Initially, the richness of the food—turtle soup, quail served with caviar and cream in a sarcophagus of pastry—dismays her dour guests. Privately, they decide that, though they must eat so as not to hurt her feelings, they will resist enjoying it. But they underestimate her art, and before the last course they are transformed.

  A ritual? That most of all. There was enough religion in me to see all meals as sacramental, and this one especially. Religion was full of food: bread and wine, fish and fowl, flesh and blood. When Christ felt his time on earth was coming to an end, he summoned his disciples not to a sermon but to a supper.

  Serving six oysters to each of eighteen people is a logistical challenge, a juggling act involving wedges of lemon, the correct miniature forks, the circulation of sliced baguette, and the acceptance of praise for the succulence and freshness of M. Papin’s product.

  Or o
therwise.

  It was Marie-Do’s cousin Natalie—there’s one in every crowd—who raised a polite complaint that we hadn’t provided a dish of the detestable vinegar-and-shallot sauce. I feigned momentary deafness, and Marie-Do changed the subject by informing the table at large, “When we were in Australia, we had oysters quite often. But it’s incredible—the Australians remove them from the shell and wash them before putting them back.”

  There was a moment of appalled silence. Sluice out the delicious juices? The essence of the ocean that gives the oyster its special savor? You might as well deprive a nightingale of its song or a beautiful woman of her hair.

  “Unbelievable!”

  “A barbarism!”

  “What a country!”

  In the collective astonishment, the question of vinegar and onions was forgotten.

  As the emptied shells were gathered up, the bowls of sliced baguette replenished, glasses refilled, I ducked into the kitchen for the last few tasks of the meal.

  The roll of stuffing separated cleanly from the well-greased foil. I sliced it into rounds and arranged them, moistened with a little of the gravy, on a large platter with the carrot pudding at the centre.

  The potatoes, rounded down by initial boiling, had become crisp golden cannonballs of carbohydrate. Piled in my precious dish, they could have made a perfect illustration in any cookbook.

  Last of the side dishes was the apple compote. Baked slowly at the bottom of the oven in a covered dish with nothing more than a knob of salted butter, the Clochards had subsided into caramelised tenderness. Sweetness and tartness, salt and fragrance, combined in this best of all accompaniments.