Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  We drank. “I like to start off my day with a glass of champagne,” M. Point said. “I like to wind it up with champagne, too. To be frank, I also like a glass or two in between. It may not be the universal medicine for every disease, as my friends the champagne people in Reims and Épernay so often tell me, but it does you less harm than any other liquid. Pierre—our sommelier—and Mme. Point and I go to the champagne district every year to buy. And, of course, to Burgundy, too. Last week, we visited a great friend, the Marquise de la Tourette, the proprietor of one of the great Hermitage vineyards.” M. Point filled the glasses again. “Ah, quelle grande dame! She won’t sell her wines in the commercial market. You have to be her friend, and you must literally force her into selling the stuff. She is over eighty, and every day she walks from her château to the church and back. Permit me to drink the health of the Marquise de la Tourette!”

  While we were solemnly drinking the health of the Marquise, a man wearing a beret and the light-blue overalls and apron that are the uniform of France’s winegrowers and sommeliers came in. He had a shriveled face that looked as though it had been chiseled out of a piece of seasoned wood.

  “Ah, Pierre,” said M. Point. “Monsieur, this is Pierre Chauvon, our sommelier and a great connoisseur of that ever-new miracle, wine.”

  The old man scratched his head under his beret with his left hand as he gave me his right. “Allons, allons, Chef!” he said, embarrassed but quite pleased. “You know a lot about wines yourself, and Mme. Point knows even more. Ah, I assure you, Monsieur,” he said to me, “Madame is épatante. She is très, très forte. When we go to the vineyards and taste the wines, the winegrowers always look at her first. She’s better than I am, and I certainly know my business.” He smiled, revealing a few side teeth and almost none in the front. “Unfortunately, Madame always gets hungry around noon, and once you’ve eaten, your taste and judgment aren’t reliable anymore. I don’t eat when we’re out. Mustn’t make a mistake, eh, Chef?”

  “Everybody calls me ‘Chef ’ here,” M. Point explained to me. “Never ‘Patron.’ They just won’t forget that I used to be my own chef in the kitchen. Now I merely supervise things there, and my wife takes care of the clients in the dining room. Well, Pierre, why don’t we show our friend the cellar? Nothing to be ashamed of, is it?”

  M. Point led the way out into the hall, around a few corners, and down a stairway into a big, brightly lighted wine cellar with earthen walls. It was cool, and the dirt floor was as clean as much sweeping could make it. All along the walls were shelves on which bottles were stacked horizontally. Tacked to the lower-left-hand corner of each shelf was a small label giving the place of origin and the vintage of the wine. In the center of the room was a table covered with baskets of fresh fruit—enormous pears, Calville apples, lush peaches, and aromatic fraises de bois. A roster of the wines in the cellar hung on one wall. It listed 219 names, in four columns. Glancing at random down the second column, I saw Richebourg ’42, Romanée-Conti ’35, Corton Charlemagne ’38, Les Grands Echézeaux ’42, Hermitage ’98, Romanée-Conti ’43, La Tache ’43, Hermitage la Cour Blanche ’06, Clos de Vougeot ’37, Vosne-Romanée ’93, Corton Charlemagne ’42, La Tache ’37, Romanée St. Vivant ’40, Pouilly ’40, Montrachet ’29, Richebourg ’29, Chambolle Musigny ’21, Hermitage Blanc ’70, Marc de Bourgogne ’29, and Vire Chapitre ’26.

  “What a mess!” said M. Point, waving at the chart. “We’ve always mixed them up—don’t know why. Anyway, it’s not a bad selection. We have all the great vintage years of Château d’ Yquem, back to 1908, and a lot of the fine years of Château Margaux and Château Lafite-Rothschild. You can see we’re crowded in here. I had to rent a place down the street for Pierre to keep his champagnes in.”

  He pointed to a section of the shelves at my right. “How do you like our cognacs?” They were impressive—cobweb-covered bottles of eighty-year-old Otard and hors-d’âge Camus, along with batteries of gin, Scotch, aperitifs, and liqueurs. M. Point slapped his stomach. “Before the war, I refused to serve cocktails. Now they bring their own bottles if I don’t serve them. My God, after a couple of those concoctions your palate can’t distinguish an 1899 Château Mouton-Rothschild from 1949 fountain-pen ink! What’s that you have, Pierre?”

  The sommelier was examining a small bottle of the sort in which winegrowers send samples to merchants and restaurateurs. “The new Moulin-à-Vent,” he said.

  “We buy many wines by the barrel—la pièce,” M. Point said, “and Pierre ‘works’ the wine, draining it from one barrel into another three times a year. The dregs remain in the old barrel. Pierre knows what he’s doing. He wouldn’t make a soutirage—as the process is called—while a south wind is blowing. The wind must be from the north. Right, Pierre?”

  “Bien sûr, Chef. I make three soutirages a year—in January, March, and September. Each barrel of Burgundy contains 225 liters, and each barrel of Beaujolais 218 liters. When the wine is ready, I bottle it myself in my workroom. I’ve always done it. Had my own bistro in Lyon and would go to Burgundy three times a year to buy wines. Those were nice times, before my wife—” He stopped and scratched his chin. “Ah, why warm up those old stories? I’m happy here now. I’m sixty-seven, and I hope to stay here until I die.”

  “Allons, allons, Pierre!” M. Point cried, and his high-pitched voice almost cracked. “What kind of talk is that? Go on, tell me how the wine is.”

  Pierre uncorked the sample bottle and took a big mouthful of the wine. He let it roll over and under his tongue, closed his eyes, and made a gargling sound. Then he spat on the floor. “It’ll be all right in three years,” he said with authority.

  “Good!” M. Point took my arm. “Let’s go up to the kitchen and give some thought to your lunch.”

  The kitchen was large and cheery, with a white-tiled floor and walls. Copper pots hung from hooks on the ceiling, and silver trays were stacked on broad white tables. The ranges and slicing machines were so highly polished that they looked brand-new. M. Point told me that coal was used to cook everything except pastry, which was baked in an electric oven. At the rear of the kitchen were four refrigerators. Through their glass doors I could see hors d’oeuvres and butter in the first, rows of dressed chickens in the second, fillets of beef and veal tenderloins in the third, and potatoes, bunches of white asparagus, and other vegetables in the fourth. The room was a busy place. Cooks and apprentices were washing vegetables, cutting meat, mixing sauces, and doing various other chores, but there was a total absence of haste or nervousness.

  A plump and elegant gray-mustached man in a spotless chef ’s outfit joined us and was introduced to me as M. Paul Mercier, the chef de cuisine. “Do you like chicken, Monsieur?” he asked me. He picked one up from a nearby table. “All of ours come from the region of Bresse, the best in France for poultry. Each is tagged with a silver label and a serial number. We store them in the refrigerator for four or five days after getting them, but we don’t freeze them. They do a lot of freezing in America, don’t they?”

  “Malheureux, malheureux!” M. Point exclaimed, clasping his hands in deep unhappiness. “Of course they do a lot of freezing. It’s such a hot country they have to, I am told. But you can’t expect to get a good piece of chicken from a freezer. Here we keep everything just above the freezing point.” As he talked, his eyes roved over the kitchen, taking note of every bit of activity. “The main thing about cooking is to see to it that only the very best ingredients are used, and used as they should be. When you are interested in la grande cuisine, you can’t think of money, or you are licked from the start. And you have to go out yourself and get the ingredients. At six o’clock this morning, M. Mercier himself went to Lyon to buy the very freshest strawberries and asparagus he could find in the markets. And butter, naturally. How can anybody expect to cook well without using the finest butter? Du beurre, du beurre, du beurre, I keep telling my men—that’s the secret of good cooking. And time, lots of time.”

  I noticed that the bust
le in the kitchen had subsided and that most of the undercooks were listening to M. Point with hushed attention. M. Point solemnly raised his right hand and proclaimed, “La grande cuisine doesn’t wait for the client. It is the client who must wait for la grande cuisine.” He stopped and looked around the kitchen. “Allons, mes enfants!” he said, clapping his hands. “Let us go back to work.” Ushering me through a doorway, he took me into a small courtyard. “I want to show you our aquarium,” he said. The aquarium consisted of two square tanks. In one I saw a couple of dozen brook trout swimming around, and in the other a number of crayfish. The water in each tank was kept fresh by a flowing faucet. M. Mercier joined us. “Are we going to serve Monsieur a trout?” he asked. “Au bleu, perhaps?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” M. Point said. He turned to me. “So often our clients ask for what they call ‘difficult’ things, with long and fancy names. People don’t know that the most difficult and also the best dishes are the simple ones. What did you cook for your family on your last day off, Paul?”

  “A choucroute,” M. Mercier said.

  “There you are. Here is a great chef, who can cook a chicken in champagne with truffles the like of which has never before been tasted, and what does he cook for himself at home? A choucroute—cabbage, delicious soft ham, Alsatian sausage, and very young potatoes—and what could be better?” He swallowed, and I found myself swallowing, too. My stomach was gnawing. “But it takes experience. What looks easier to make than a sauce béarnaise? Butter, egg yolks, chopped shallots—nothing to it, is there? But years of practice are needed before you can do it right. Forget to watch it for a single instant and it’s gone, finished, lost. Everybody thinks he can fry eggs, and I suppose anybody can, but to fry them so they are soft and mellow throughout, not burned on the bottom and raw on top—that is art, my friend. Isn’t that right, Paul?”

  “Absolutely,” said M. Mercier.

  “Absolutely. Now, Monsieur, let us return to the salon and think seriously about your lunch.”

  In the hall, we encountered a slim, middle-aged, efficient-looking woman in a gray tailored suit who was carrying an order pad under her arm. M. Point introduced her to me as his wife, Marie-Louise. She smiled at me briefly and then whispered in M. Point’s ear. “Madame who?” he said. “No, no. Tell her we have no table. I don’t want her. She smokes before dessert. The last time she was here, she even smoked after the hors d’oeuvres.” He escorted me into his salon. The magnum was empty, and he called loudly for another. It was quickly brought in an ice bucket by a frightened young waiter. M. Point watched the youth sternly as he worked out the cork and stopped the flow of foam by pressing a silver spoon over the mouth of the bottle. “A little trick,” M. Point said. “Metal will stop the flow. Don’t pour yet, Marcel. Always leave the bottle open in the ice bucket for a few minutes.” A drop of champagne had spilled on the tabletop, and the waiter, before leaving, carefully wiped it away with his napkin. M. Point nodded in approval. “So many otherwise good restaurants in France don’t teach their personnel the importance of the attention to detail that makes for flawless service,” he said. I saw Mme. Point greeting four guests, and a waiter or two scurrying by in the hall. In a minute, a boy in a white apron put his head in the door and said that a M. Godet was calling from Lyon about a reservation, and would M. Point—For some reason, this seemed to infuriate M. Point. He shooed the boy away, went to the door, and announced down the hall in a loud voice that he was about to have a glass of champagne and that he would be grateful if the world would leave him in peace for a few minutes. Then he shut the door, came back, and sat down.

  “Too many people,” he said. “Vienne is halfway between Paris and the Riviera, and everybody wants to stop over to break the monotony of the trip. Not many Vienne people come here; most of my clients are from the outside world. It’s been that way ever since I opened the restaurant, twenty-six years ago, when I was twenty-six years old.” He poured us each a glass of champagne and looked thoughtfully into his. “I was born near here, and I always wanted to cook. My father was a chef. A very good chef. He made me start from the beginning—washing dishes, waiting on tables, peeling potatoes. It’s quite important to peel them right, believe me. Then I learned to cook vegetables and make soups and things like that, and after that I went to Paris. Remember Foyot’s? Ah, they had a great saucier! He taught me a lot. And for a long time I worked at the Hôtel Bristol. I came back home in 1923 and bought this place with my savings. It was just a shack and a few trees then. In time, Father and I added the second floor and a new kitchen, the wine cellar, and the terrace. We had the garden landscaped and bought the adjoining lot. Father died a few years ago. All this time I was doing the cuisine myself, always learning, always trying to improve a little, always eating well. You’ve got to love to eat well if you want to cook well. Whenever I stop at a restaurant while traveling, I go and look at the chef. If he’s a thin fellow, I don’t eat there. I’ve learned much about cooking, but I still have far to go.”

  M. Point leaned back, reached into the drawer of a table behind him, and pulled out a leather-bound book with a gold inscription on its cover: F. POINT, LIVRE D’OR. “I started keeping this on the restaurant’s tenth anniversary, in September 1933,” he said. He handed it to me. On page one was a short note, “Quel excellent déjeuner!,” signed by the Aga Khan. “He really knows how to eat well,” M. Point said. A couple of pages on, the Fratellinis, France’s most famous clowns, had written “Today we have eaten at Lucullus’s,” and Colette had written “The trout was rosy, the wine was sparkling, the pâtisserie went straight to my heart—and I am trying to lose weight! This is definitely the last time I come here—on ne m’y reprendra pas!” Farther along there was an unfinished sentence by Léon Blum: “Si j’en trouve encore la force après un tel déjeuner…,” a drawing by Jean Cocteau, and an observation by Curnonsky (the nom de table of Maurice Edmond Sailland, who in 1925 was elected Prince of Gastronomes by a group of Paris newspapers): “Since cooking is without doubt the greatest art, I salute my dear Fernand Point as one of the greatest artists of our time!”

  Nothing was entered from January 1940 until September 2, 1944. On the latter date, someone had written “Premières Troupes Alliées—Merci 1000 Fois!” over an excited, illegible signature. Below was the exclamation “Vive la France!” and the signatures of, among others, the Abbé de Pélissier, F.F.I., and Lieutenant Colonel H. C. Lodge, Jr., and Carl F. Gooding, “American jeep driver.” Several pages beyond, I came upon a pasted-in letter, dated December 3, 1946, and typed on the stationery of the War Office (Room 900), Whitehall, London S.W. 1. It read “Mr. Fernand Point: I have the honor to inform you that His Majesty the King has approved the award to you of the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom, for your good services in France….”

  I asked M. Point about the letter. He shrugged and took the livre d’or away from me and threw it back into the drawer. “No time for that,” he said. “Time for lunch. If you will go into the dining room, I’ll step into the kitchen and see what can be done. I’ve thought it all out.”

  At the entrance to the dining room, I was taken in tow by a cheerful headwaiter, who led me to a table. Mme. Point came up with the order pad still under her arm. She gave me a long, speculative glance—the kind of glance that wives so often give their husbands’ drinking companions—and then she smiled and said that she hoped I would have a nice lunch. She went off, and I looked around the dining room. I had the feeling of being in a comfortable home in the country. The room wasn’t so small as to give one a sense of being cooped up with a lot of other people (there were perhaps fifteen or twenty other clients), and not so large as to give a feeling of mass production. There were pretty white curtains on all the windows, and on every table was a vase of fresh flowers. In the center of the room stood a long buffet covered with stacks of big, ivory-colored plates, piles of silver, and rows of glasses, and against one wall was a grandfather’s clock. When I opened my white napkin
of rough linen, it turned out to be almost the size of a small bedspread, and exhaled the fragrance of fresh air and of the grass on which it had been dried in the sun.

  A waiter placed one of the ivory-colored plates in front of me, and another waiter served me the first hors d’oeuvre, an excellent pâté campagne en croûte. French cooks are generally expert at baking an extremely light, buttery dough called croûte, but never before had I eaten croûte that almost dissolved in my mouth. When I had finished, the first waiter replaced my plate, fork, and knife with clean ones, and a third waiter served me a slice of foie gras naturel truffé embedded in a ring of crème de foie gras. The ritual of changing plates and silver was repeated after each hors d’oeuvre—hot sausage baked in a light pastry shell, accompanied by delicious sauce piquante; a pâte of pheasant; crackling hot cheese croissants; fresh asparagus (which M. Mercier must have bought in Lyon that morning), set off by a truly perfect hollandaise sauce. A bottle of wine—an elegant, airy Montrachet—was brought in an ice bucket; the waiter filled my glass half full and gave it a gentle swirl to spread the bouquet. It was a great show and a fine wine. The last hors d’oeuvre was followed in person by M. Point, who informed me that I had now completed the “overture.” “The overture merely indicates the themes that will turn up later,” he said. “A good meal must be as harmonious as a symphony and as well constructed as a good play. As it progresses, it should gain in intensity, with the wines getting older and more full-bodied.” Having delivered himself of this pronouncement, he returned to the kitchen.