Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  And I fear me one ten-pound loss would only arouse the craving for another,

  So it wouldn’t do any good for ladies to get their ambition and look like somebody’s fourteen-year-old brother,

  Because, having accomplished this with ease,

  They would next want to look like somebody’s fourteen-year-old brother in the final stages of some obscure disease,

  And the more success you have the more you want to get of it,

  So then their goal would be to look like somebody’s fourteen-year-old brother’s ghost, or rather not the ghost itself, which is fairly solid, but a silhouette of it,

  So I think it is very nice for ladies to be lithe and lissome,

  But not so much so that you cut yourself if you happen to embrace or kissome.

  1935

  QUICK, HAMMACHER, MY STOMACHER!

  OGDEN NASH

  Man is a glutton.

  He will eat too much even though there be nothing to eat too much of but parsnips or mutton.

  He will deprecate his paunch

  And immediately afterward reach for another jowl or haunch.

  People don’t have to be Cassandras or Catos

  To know what will happen to their paunches if they combine hot biscuits and strawberry shortcake and French-fried potatoes,

  Yet no sooner has a man achieved a one-pound loss

  Than he gains two through the application to an old, familiar dish of a new, irresistible sauce.

  Thus cooks aggravate men’s gluttony

  With capers and hollandaise and chutney.

  They can take seaweed or pemmican

  And do things to it in a ramekin.

  Give them a manatee that has perished of exposure

  And they will whip you up a casserole of ambrosia,

  Which is why a man who digs his grave with his teeth’s idea of life beyond the grave is definite—

  There’s a divine chef in it.

  Men are gluttons,

  And everybody knows it except tailors, who don’t leave room enough at the edge to move over the buttons.

  1948

  “Something this big.”

  NESSELRODE TO JEOPARDY

  S. J. PERELMAN

  CITY CRACKS DOWN ON RESTAURANTS IN HOLLANDAISE SAUCE CLEAN-UP

  “The sauce is loaded with dynamite when carelessly prepared,” a Health Department spokesman declared yesterday. “It has become one of the bureau’s worst headaches….”

  Many temperamental chefs, it was learned, resent the Health Department’s infringement on their culinary art. One chef, for example, refused to tell an inspector how he made the sauce because it was a “secret technique” that he had learned in France.

  Several weeks later, five persons contracted food poisoning at the restaurant because of the hollandaise. The Health Department then demanded to know the chef ’s secret and found that his technique consisted of straining the sauce through a cheesecloth bag that must be squeezed with the hands.

  —The Times

  Whenever I turn over the whole grotesque affair in my mind, trying to rationalize the baffling complex of events that overtook me on the French Riviera this autumn, I always ask myself the same questions. What would have happened if Destiny, unpredictable jade, had drawn my laggard feet to some hotel other than the Villa Heliotrope? What if Anglo-Saxon shyness had sealed Colin Rentschler’s lips and he had not impulsively come to the aid of a fellow American in hazard? Would I ever have met that elegant assassin, Colonel Firdausi, of the Turkish secret police, or cowered in the hold of a rusty Greek steamer bound for the Piraeus, or given chase at midnight to a music-hall juggler over the roofs of Montparnasse? In short, why should I, timid recluse, have been wantonly singled out for a supporting role in a nightmare as fantastic as the riddle of the cheesecloth bag, a problem to shame the wildest conceits of an Eric Ambler or a Carol Reed? And why—except that it is highly traditional—do I ask these questions all over again when I should be getting on with my story?

  To begin at the beginning, I’d been down at Fez, in North Africa, all summer, working on a book of favorite recipes of famous people like Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, and Speed Lamkin, and my nerves were at sixes and sevens. I felt completely drained, used up; I’d pretty well exhausted my emotional bank balance doing the necessary research, and I knew it was touch and go unless I immured myself in some quiet pied-à-terre where I could slough off superficialities and organize my material. I shan’t burden you with tedious autobiographical details, but perhaps I ought to explain that my people (poor bourgeois dears) left me a goodish bit of money. Praise be to Allah—and the automobile wax my father invented—I don’t have to fret excessively about the sordid aspects of life, and hence I’ve applied myself to living graciously, which I do think is all that matters, really. I mean I sometimes wonder if a properly chilled Gibson or a superb coq au vin isn’t basically more important than these grubby wars and revolutions everyone’s being so hopelessly neurotic about. Not that money’s actually vital to my existence, mind you; one art I’ve mastered is how to make do with the absolute minimum. Given fair seats at the ballet, half a dozen friends with country houses from whom I can scrounge weekends, a few custom-tailored suits, some decent hand-lasted shoes—it’s a weakness, I know, but I’m fixated on good leather—and three months a year at Montreux or Bordighera, and I can live in a hole in the wall at the Crillon and rub along on a gigot and a crisp salad.

  Anyhow, I’d finally fetched up at the Villa Heliotrope, a modest little establishment on the Estérel coast west of Cannes, and everything was proving utterly ideal. The cuisine wasn’t too repugnant, and if Madame la Patronne occasionally used overmuch musk on her embonpoint, she at least rationed it in her seasoning. Well, one evening I came in to dinner with a truly pagan appetite. (Ardent sun-worshipper that I am, I’d spent the entire day on the plage, baking a glorious golden brown.) I had just dispatched Madame’s creditable rôti and was attacking the dessert when the chap at the next table cleared his throat.

  “Easy does it,” he said abruptly. “I wouldn’t bolt that Nesselrode if I were you.”

  “Why the devil not?” I snapped, glaring around at him. Bolting’s sort of a sacrament with me, I suppose, and I didn’t much fancy the high-handed line he’d taken.

  “Because it’s lumpy,” he said. “They forgot to strain it.” I tasted a soupçon and found he was right. I turned back for another look at my neighbor. His lean, dark face showed good bone structure, and there was something about his trench coat and the gravy on his hat that bespoke the inspector of a metropolitan health department.

  “Look here,” I said, mystified. “You knew that pudding was lumpy?”

  “It’s my business to know things like that, friend,” he said with an opaque smile. As he rose and passed me, a card fluttered down beside my plate. It bore the legend COLIN RENTSCHLER, and, below, INSPECTOR, NEW YORK HEALTH DEPARTMENT. I was pretty thoughtful the rest of the meal. Something curious was shaping up, and while I’m not especially intuitive, I felt Colin Rentschler might have some connection with it.

  I was seated on the terrace that evening, sipping a final pousse-café before turning in, when his loose-jointed figure settled into the adjoining chair. After a rather watchful silence, he made some inconsequential remark about the ecru-colored sky’s portending the advent of the mistral, the dry northerly wind characteristic of Provence. “Odd ecru-colored sky, that,” he observed. “Shouldn’t wonder if it portends the advent of the mistral, the dry northerly wind characteristic of Provence.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Sinister shade, isn’t it? It reminds me of—well, of hollandaise sauce that’s gone a trifle bad.”

  I heard the sharp, sudden intake of his breath, followed by a little click as he expelled it. When he spoke again, it was in a tight, strangled whisper that put shudders up my spine. “Then you know,” he said. He glanced quickly over his shoulder and leaned forward, his eyes merciless as snails. “Listen.
Pierre Moustique has been seen in Istanbul.”

  “Good God!” I murmured. Like everyone else, of course, I knew that New York gourmets were in a grip of terror due to a wave of hollandaise poisoning, and that Moustique, the chef who had betrayed his secret technique of squeezing the sauce through a cheesecloth bag with his bare hands, had escaped to Canada in a hamper of towels, but in the shimmering heat of Morocco I had lost touch with later developments, and my allusion to the evening sky had been made in all innocence. Before I could extricate myself, nonetheless, Fate, in the guise of a health inspector, had altered my future with a single decisive stroke.

  “It’s incredible”—Rentschler shrugged—“but then so is life. Last Thursday afternoon, Anna Popescu, a Moldavian seamstress in the Kadikoy quarter of Istanbul bearing a Nansen passport, reported that a chef closely resembling Moustique had approached her to repair a rent in a cheesecloth bag, offering ninety piastres. When she hesitated, he fled.” His harsh voice stabbed at me, insistent as the cicadas in the Mediterranean night. “Schneider, until we can lay Moustique by the heels and analyze that bag which its poisoned meshes spell finis for unwary epicures, death will lurk in every frond of broccoli. I have two tickets on the morning plane for Istanbul. Are you the man to share a desperate adventure?”

  I picked up my glass and, twirling the stem meditatively, swallowed it in a single gulp. A mad, foolhardy errand, I thought, and still the challenge to gamble for consummate stakes awoke a tocsin in my blood. I spat out a spicule of glass, arose, and extended my hand. “Done and done, Rentschler,” I said coolly. “I’ve always taken my liquor mixed and my peril neat, and I see no reason to switch now. Next stop, the Golden Horn!”

  Colonel Firdausi, deputy director of the Turkish secret police, hoisted a polished cordovan boot to the edge of his desk and, extracting the monocle from his eye, carefully scraped a bit of shish kebab from the sole. As he dusted his delicate, saurian hands with a handkerchief strongly redolent of attar of roses, motes of halvah danced in the slanting beam of sunlight above his head.

  “This is a very interesting tale you tell me, gentlemen,” he said with a smile. Colonel Firdausi’s smile could have refrigerated a whole chain of Turkish frozen-food stores. “But I do not see precisely why you come to me. Surely you do not imply Pierre Moustique is still in Istanbul?”

  “I imply that and more.” Rentschler’s left forefinger traced what was seemingly an idle pattern on the dusty arm of his chair, and then I realized with a start that he was scribbling a message to me. “Watch this man’s mouth,” it read, in Italian. “It is willful, sensual, that of a sybarite who will not cavil at resorting to violence if he is bilked.” My colleague chuckled thinly, his steady gaze meeting Firdausi’s square. “I imply, my dear Colonel, that he is in this selfsame room at the moment.”

  “You cease to amuse me, Monsieur.” The Turkish official rapped the bell before him peremptorily. “The interview is ended. My secretary—”

  “One second,” cut in Rentschler. “Have you ever heard of the Club Libido, in Pera? No? Allow me to refresh your memory. The principal chanteuse at the Libido is Marie Farkas, a naturalized Transylvanian traveling under a League of Nations passport.”

  “Neither you nor Marie could possibly hope to surprise me,” returned Firdausi icily. “I have been sleeping with the lady fifteen years.”

  “And therefore enjoy considerable seniority over me,” admitted Rentschler. “Nevertheless, she has been fickle enough to confide that on your last two nuptial flights you wore a chef ’s cap, with the name of Pierre Moustique inscribed on the headband in indelible pencil.”

  “Inconstancy, thy name is woman,” reflected Firdausi. “Ah, well, there is no use dissembling with such adversaries.” Reaching into his tunic, he withdrew a green cheesecloth bag and tossed it pettishly on the blotter. “Is this what you are looking for?” As Rentschler’s hand shot forward, it struck the ice-blue barrel of the colonel’s automatic. “Tchk, tchk, impetuous boy,” chided Firdausi. “Be so good, both of you, as to lace your fingers over your heads. Thank you. Now, Messieurs, exposition is wearisome, so I will be succinct.”

  “I will be succincter,” Rentschler put in. “The real Colonel Firdausi is reposing at this instant in the Bosporus, in a burlap sack weighted with stale nougat. You are about to bind us back to back in a similar pouch and deposit us alongside him, as a warning to meddlers not to interfere in matters that do not concern them. Need I point out, though, Moustique, that you cannot possibly hope to get away with it?”

  “Of course not,” agreed the other, withdrawing from his tunic a capacious burlap sack. “Still, in the brisk interplay of Near Eastern intrigue, these little—ah—involutions are mandatory. Au ’voir, gentlemen.”

  Forty-five minutes later, trussed up in the sack, we were jolting in a dray over the cobblestones fringing the waterside. Despite our extreme discomfort and the danger confronting us, however, my companion exhibited no hint of the disquiet that pervaded me. Listening to his tranquil comparison of the respective merits of the pickles obtainable at Lindy’s and the Russian Tea Room, one might easily have imagined him in his own club. At length, my endurance crumbled.

  “Dash it all, man!” I burst forth. “Here’s one pickle your precious department won’t get us out of!”

  “No, but Victor Hugo will,” he said evenly. “I take it you’ve read Les Misérables?”

  “This is hardly the time for a literary quiz,” I interjected.

  “You will recall,” said Rentschler imperturbably, “that at an equally crucial pass Jean Valjean confounded Papa Thenardier and his gang by sawing through his bonds with a watch spring concealed in a penny. Tug manfully at your wrists.” I complied, and, to my stupefaction, found myself liberated. The next thing I knew, Rentschler and I were racing through a maze of warehouses and cranes; I remember a ship’s gangway clangorous with roustabouts shifting cargo, a lightning descent into a labyrinth of hatches, and, over the bellow of the siren, my colleague’s unruffled explanation that we were stowaways aboard the Thessalonian Schizophrene, bound for the Piraeus and Trieste. Actually, we never went to either; a few hours later, Rentschler nudged me and we stole back on land. The whole thing had been a clever feint, for, as he pointed out, nobody was chasing us and there was no reason to slip out of the country illicitly. That night, seated in the aircraft droning toward London, I dully wondered what fresh complications lay in wait for us. But Fate and the stewardess, a shapely Philadelphian named Dougherty traveling under a nylon bust support, gave me back only an inscrutable smile.

  Thin fingers of fog drifted across the West India Dock Road, tracing an eerie filigree across the street lamp under which Rentschler and I stood shivering in our mackintoshes. From time to time, almond-eyed devotees of the poppy, furtively hugging poppy-seed rolls, slid past us in their bast shoes, bent on heaven knows what baleful missions. For more than three hours, we had been breathlessly watching the draper’s shop across the way, and I still had no clue as to why. Rentschler, shrewd judge of human foibles that he was, must have sensed my perplexity, for at last he broke silence.

  “In the split second you saw that bag of Moustique’s, Schneider,” he queried, “did any thought occur to you?”

  “Why, yes,” I said, surprised. “I remember thinking there was only one shop in Europe that handles cheesecloth of that type—Arthur Maggot’s Sons, in the West India Dock Road. But I still can’t fathom why we’ve spent three hours casing it.”

  “No particular reason,” he rejoined. “It’s just the kind of patient, plodding labor the public never gives one credit for in this profession. Come on, let’s move in.”

  Bartholomew Maggot shrugged his vulpine shoulders irascibly and, applying a pinch of Copenhagen snuff to his nostril, opened the cash register and sneezed into it. A half hour’s questioning had merely aggravated his normally waspish temper, and it was dishearteningly plain that we had reached an impasse. Rentschler, notwithstanding, refused to yield.

  �
��This man who asked you to appraise his cheesecloth bag yesterday,” he persisted. “You say he was hooded and smelled of attar of roses, but surely you must have noticed something unusual about him.”

  “No, sir, I did not,” growled the draper. “Wait a bit, though, there was something. His lapel had a few grains of rice powder on it—the sort those French music-hall artistes wear.”

  “You’ve a sharp pair of eyes in your head, Maggot,” complimented the inspector. “It’s a pity we don’t know where they came from.”

  “Why, this one came from Harrod’s,” explained Maggot, removing it. “It’s glass, as you see, and has a little Union Jack in it. The other—”

  “No, no, the grains,” Rentschler interrupted testily. “Haven’t you any idea which music hall uses that type of powder?”

  “Let me see,” said Maggot slowly. “The cove was carrying a theatrical valise with the name of Pierre Moustique, Bobino Theatre, Rue de la Gaité, Paris, France, painted on it in white letters, but I didn’t really pay much mind.”

  “Humph,” muttered Rentschler. His quick, deductive mind had caught something of importance in the other’s words. “A very good evening to you, Mr. Maggot, and now, Schneider, to Paris en grand vitesse. Are you hungry? I think I can promise a ragout spiced with melodrama and served piping hot.” I have often thought the world lost a major poet when Colin Rentschler joined the New York Health Department.

  The mingled scent of caporal, cheap perfume, and garlic hung like a pall over the motley audience jamming the stalls of the Bobino, the Left Bank’s most popular vaudeville. A succession of weight-lifters, trained dogs, diseuses, and trick cyclists had displayed their enchantments, and now, as the curtain rose on the final turn and M. l’Inconnu, the masked juggler, strode into the glare of the footlights, my heart began beating like a trip hammer. Those delicate, saurian hands, the heavy odor of attar of roses—I racked my memory vainly, trying to recollect where I had met them before. A buzz of excited speculation rose from the patrons surrounding us; rumor ran rife that l’Inconnu was an unfrocked chef from New York, a quondam Turkish police official, a recent arrival from Limehouse, but none knew for sure. Yet some sixth sense told me that Rentschler, his hawk’s profile taut in the darkness beside me, was close to the answer.