A Paris Christmas: An improbable tale of good food and true love

by John Baxter

  For years before moving to France, I battled, without conspicuous success, against our Australian family Christmas. But whatever inroads I made—sneaking in a capon or goose, for instance, instead of the dry, tasteless turkey—the pudding stood foursquare and impregnable, a fortification behind which my parents could retreat, confident no culinary artillery would make a dent.

  During the 1970s, living in England, I succumbed at last, and decided to make my own. Extracting the recipe from my mother, I corralled the ingredients—far easier in London, I thought smugly, than in rural Australia—and boiled up a single example, which I hung behind the shower curtain in my minuscule bathroom. Returning from a trip a few days before Christmas, I checked—to find it invaded by blue-grey mould. Dumping the musty failure in the garbage, I bought a ready-made one at Harrod’s.

  A decade later, returning to Australia with Marie-Dominique, I once again shared Christmas dinner with my parents. Wandering into the bathroom, I studied the puddings dangling from the shower rail—all plump, fragrant, and free of mould. Had my mother omitted some crucial ingredient from the recipe she sent me? Or did the desiccated Australian air act as a fungicide? Maybe if I’d exposed mine to the BBC broadcast of a cricket Test match, or read aloud a few verses of The Man from Snowy River?

  I never discovered her secret, since at that moment my father called from the living room, “That wine of yours is still in the garage.”

  “What wine?”

  “Don’t you remember? Before you left, you gave me some wine to look after.”

  I thought back ten years. In those days, I’d been a partner in a syndicate that bought up the cellars of bankrupt restaurants and hotels. We split the profits, with the bonus of a few choice bottles kept back for our own use. Such a deal had been closed just before I left for England, and I vaguely remembered asking my father to mind my allocation—a little like asking a rabbit to guard the lettuce patch.

  “I thought you’d have drunk it,” I said.

  “No fear! It’s still out there.”

  Rummaging in the depths of the garage, we unearthed the now-rotted cardboard carton, with its bottles fortunately intact. I carried them into the light.

  In 1969, these wines had been respectable. Ten years had turned them into classics. And, paradoxically, the dark and damp under abandoned tents and unused sporting equipment at the back of a garage provided the ideal environment for their preservation.

  There was a half-bottle of French Sauternes—not Château d’Yquem but, from the honeyed richness of the colour, a delight all the same, particularly accompanying a slice of foie gras. Then a respectable château-bottled Pomerol of 1968, an Echezaux Burgundy of 1966, and an Alsatian Spatlese Riesling that, while past its best, was probably still drinkable.

  And the last.

  Hardly believing my luck, I carried it with reverence into the kitchen and wiped the dust and cobwebs from its plain beige label.

  “That’s not a Grange?” said my brother-in-law incredulously.

  It was indeed a 1962 bottle of Penfolds Grange Hermitage, the most valued of all Australian reds, the shiraz that, in the opinion of Robert Parker, a fanatic for French vintages, “replaced Bordeaux’s Pétrus as the world’s most exotic and concentrated wine”.

  Bottles of Grange changed hands for hundreds, even thousands of dollars. Their owners treated them like pedigreed animals. Penfolds maintained a clinic that would advise on, sample, and, if necessary, recork your bottle.

  A phone call to an oenophile friend established that the 1962 Grange was worth about AU$1,000 at auction—and in a restaurant, double or triple that.

  “If you want to sell it,” he said, trying to keep the hunger out of his voice, “I wouldn’t mind giving myself a little late Christmas present.”

  We sat around the kitchen and contemplated this windfall.

  Of course I should sell it—not only because of its monetary value but because such a wine simply didn’t belong in the context of an Australian Christmas lunch. It cried out for linen and silver and fumed oak, not paper napkins and Formica; for rare beef and gratin dauphinois, not battery turkey and roasted spuds; not the squawk of currawongs and a whiff of a bushfire wafting through the window, but the strains of Benjamin Britten on the evening air, and the smoke from a good cigar.

  But if living in Europe had taught me anything, it was the pointlessness of straining to attain someone else’s standards. It was not only our right but our duty to take pleasure gratefully when and wherever it was offered.

  “It should breathe a bit,” I said, reaching for the corkscrew.

  The wine was sublime, an explosion on the palate, with, as the Japanese say, a tail that went right down the throat. Each sip recalled something said by the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert but adopted as a motto by Gerald and Sara Murphy, friends of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and the inspiration for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night: “Living well is the best revenge.”

  And here’s a funny thing: it went particularly well with Christmas pudding.

  5

  The Food of Love

  There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection is the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.

  —JUDITH MARTIN

  Cooking for myself began as a means of survival.

  Living alone as a young man in Sydney during the early 1960s was an incentive to learn at least the rudiments of cuisine, and I could soon assemble a serviceable three-course dinner. Though none of my “signature dishes” would excite comment today, all were remote from standard Aussie fare, which embodied one simple rule: on finding any raw meat or vegetable, plunge it immediately into boiling salt water and hold down the lid until it ceased to struggle.

  My roast shoulder of lamb was pink in the centre, spiked with garlic and scattered with fresh rosemary. I served it with steamed asparagus and hollandaise sauce, or an Italian potato salad with dried herbs and sweet onions, dressed not with the standard store-bought mayonnaise but with olive oil—in those days an ingredient so exotic that no markets stocked it. The most convenient source was pharmacies, where it was sold as a treatment for dry scalp and removing ear wax.

  This salad was the first recipe I ever learned. I was ten and living in an inner-city suburb just being colonised by the first Italians to make the long journey from war-ruined Europe to a new life on the other side of the world. One of the single-storey Victorian terraced houses opposite housed such a family, dominated by a young but determined mother who spent most of her time in the kitchen. None of them spoke English, but I struck up a friendship with one of the boys, on the strength of which I was invited to eat lunch.

  I’ve forgotten nothing about that meal. Who could? If this was what Venusians ate, it could not have been more alien and exotic. There was spaghetti—a dish I knew only as it came in a Heinz can, cooked to mush and doused in tomato sauce. This was fresh from the pot, and chewy, baptised with oil and garlic, and a pungent grated cheese that smelled like sick but tasted sublime. Their homemade bread wasn’t spongy and white but crusty, dusted with flour, and delicious if you dipped it, as my hostess demonstrated, in olive oil and salt.

  As for that extraordinary dish of lukewarm boiled potatoes, raw onion, herbs, oil, and vinegar, I made a pig of myself, and was back the next day in hopes of more. Instead, my friend’s mother—whose name I never learned but always referred to as “Mary Over the Road”—gave me the greatest gift one can confer on any lover of food: she showed me how to make it.

  Cooking for women began as an economy—who could afford a good restaurant for every date?—but the reaction of the first few girlfriends for whom I prepared a meal alerted
me to the possibilities.

  “You really made this yourself?” they’d say, leaning in the kitchen doorway, glass of wine in hand, surreptitiously glancing around for frozen-food packs or Tupperware containers that might suggest I’d smuggled in dishes prepared by my mother.

  “Sure.”

  At this point, I’d splash some wine into the hot pan, dissolving the juices in preparation for a sauce. If you tilted the pan with one hand and tipped the bottle with the other, using your thumb as a stopper, it not only looked casually expert but resulted in a hiss of steam, a puff of blue flame—and, with luck, a squeal from your date.

  Theatrics kept them amused, and it helped that the food tasted good, but neither counted for as much as the fact that I’d cooked for them. Educated to serve men—this was long before “Ms.” came into use or a single bra was burned—they found it disturbingly satisfying to be served by one. For every woman mesmerised by a sportsman flexing his bicep and saying “Feel that”, a dozen yearned to be cosseted, entertained—and fed.

  Among my friends, however, the use of cooking for seduction was heretical. They could only imagine food having an erotic effect if it contained some proven aphrodisiac, like the legendary cantharides or Spanish fly. Other ingredients reputed to improve potency were oysters, asparagus, liquorice, and celery. According to the banned Kama Sutra, ill-translated copies of which, greasy and stained, circulated clandestinely, the problem at its most extreme responded to goats’ testicles boiled in milk—now there’s a Breakfast of Champions—while men in more dire need could turn to desiccated tiger penis and powdered rhinoceros horn.

  The man who lifted the curse of campiness from cooking was Graham Kerr, the first celebrity chef to appear on Australian TV. He popularised that wine-in-the-pan manoeuvre, and regular Aussies were reassured about the sexual orientation of cooks by his claim that any dish, from chicken soup to cornflakes, could be improved by “a short slurp of sherry.” Since an ability to hold your liquor was sure proof of masculinity, anyone who drank like Kerr had to be an authentic male. (Too authentic, perhaps, since in later years he confessed to longtime alcoholism.)

  Though Kerr taught me how to look like a cook, my first real culinary teacher was British chef Philip Harben. The Penguin paperback of his cookbook became my key to the world of cuisine. Small, bearded, intense, Harben wrote about cooking with the passion of a true believer. In addition to being an historian of food—one of his specialities was to prepare a banquet in the style of the Tudors—he was a physicist of cuisine, a kitchen chemist.

  Rather than dictating recipes, he explained how food worked. Why does flour thicken a sauce? What makes oil and egg yolk blend into mayonnaise? Why does heat make meat brown? His answers raised such related questions—crucial to the true cook—as “What if you don’t have any flour?” and “What if your mayonnaise separates?” Thanks to him, I can open the kitchen cupboard in a strange apartment, take a packet or two, and, with the help of an egg and a lemon, assemble a dinner.

  He taught that fresh sweetcorn improved if boiled for only a minute or two rather than the half-hour usually advised, and is even better if you sugar the water rather than salt it. Frozen peas, which are chilled before their sugars can turn to starch, are more tender than any but the freshest of store-bought peas—and, moreover, benefit from being cooked without water, in a closed pan, in their own steam, with nothing but some butter and a sprig of fresh mint.

  As for meat, long cooking doesn’t tenderise flesh but shrinks it, forcing out the juices, creating the “tough-as-old-boots beefsteak” familiar to me since childhood. Good beef is more tender the less it is cooked and can even, suggested Harben, be eaten raw—an unimaginable heresy in Australia, where everyone I knew shrank from any sign of pinkness in meat and greeted the presence of natural juices with a shudder and the cry “Ugh! Blood!”

  Not surprisingly, food first brought me together with my future wife, Marie-Dominique.

  It was 1974. I was a visiting professor at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, and she a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, spending a “gap” year in the United States while she decided what to do with her life.

  I was smitten the first instant I met her, but any designs I might have had were frustrated by a looming boyfriend from Chicago for whom she showed an incomprehensible preference. Once he’d gone, I made it my business to get to know her. Finding that we shared an enthusiasm for certain French films, I invited her around for dinner and a movie.

  She ate my lamb without comment, and liked my asparagus well enough, but inquired, “You always serve it with hollandaise?”

  “Sometimes with melted butter.”

  “Have you tried it with a vinaigrette?”

  “You mean cold, like a salad?”

  “No, tiède … lukewarm. As an entrée.”

  Occasionally, women disliked what I cooked, but having one discuss the ingredients and offer suggestions was a new experience—and not, I was surprised to find, disagreeable. Clearly there was something about Frenchwomen—or this particular Frenchwoman?—that couldn’t be discovered by the simple expedient of cooking them a meal.

  The next time she came to lunch, I served asparagus again, this time with a vinaigrette.

  “It is quite good.” Her tone suggested it wasn’t that good. “Do you ever put egg in your vinaigrette?”

  “Hard-boiled?”

  “Let me show you.”

  Taking the bowl of French dressing, she went into the kitchen, cracked an egg, separated the yolk, and dropped it into the oil and vinegar.

  “You have some mustard?”

  I silently handed her the Grey Poupon. She spooned some into the mixture and whisked it for a few seconds. My watery-looking mixture of oil, vinegar, and salt was transformed into a creamy golden emulsion.

  “Taste.”

  She dipped her forefinger into it and held it up. I licked it.

  The dressing tasted delicious.

  So did her finger.

  We didn’t marry for another fifteen years, but our courtship began with that finger and that vinaigrette.

  6

  The Servant Problem

  Pas devant les domestiques! (Not in front of the servants)

  —TRADITIONAL FRENCH EXHORTATION

  On a chill morning the week before Christmas 2007, Marie-Do and I drove out of rue de l’Odéon and headed south for the périphérique, the ring road that circles Paris. Five hours later, we arrived at our summer house in Fouras on the Atlantic coast.

  Business took us there, and, for me, at the very worst time, since I should have been shopping for the ingredients to create my Christmas banquet.

  A gust from the ocean cuffed the car as we circled the small square and parked under the spreading lime trees flanking the front gate. The leaves that in summer dappled coins of sunlight on the pavement were now fallen and dead. Others had gathered in sodden drifts on the terrace under our grape arbour, leaving the vines, stripped of greenery, looking as shrunken, brown, and contorted as the arms of old men.

  Marie-Dominique’s grandparents left her the house, their retirement home, in their will. Built at the end of the nineteenth century, it stood in a small walled garden dominated by an ancient pear tree. In one corner, a pavilion, little more than a chill stone shed with a tiled roof, recalled the days before refrigerators, when game could hang for days until properly rotted, and apples mellowed in the cool dark.

  The house preserved for her all the memories and certainties of childhood, which had ended abruptly when she was nine, and her father, deported to Germany during the war as slave labour, died of the tuberculosis he contracted there. As a young journalist, she’d lived in a tiny one-room studio in Paris, spending every franc she could afford on replacing Fouras’s crumbling roof and searching out antique furniture and linen appropriate to the year it was built.

  For each summer of my eighteen years in France, we’d come here in mid-July, only departing, and then reluctantly, in the last days of August. M
y memories of the house were a compendium of sunlight and heat, of hours spent reading in a deckchair under the big poirier, a glass of Campari and orange juice at hand, the only interruption a thud as one of the small, hard, inedible pears hit the ground.

  But now, instead of the sounds of summer—chattering kids passing on their way to the beach, vans with loudspeakers bawling a summons to the night’s Guignol or marche de nuit—there was only a drone of wind. It carried the tang of salt, and a sense of limitless grey water rolling under a sullen sky.

  A few years before, the same wind swept across France in a gale that ripped off roofs and chimneys, uprooted trees, and overturned cars. Sylvie, our Fouras housekeeper for years, rousted her handyman boyfriend out of bed at two a.m. to repair the roof and forestall further damage. Unfortunately for us, she subsequently decided to retire. Since then, we’d grappled with a series of gardiennes, none of whom registered above “adequate” on the competence scale. Looking for Mary Poppins, we invariably got Mrs. Doubtfire.

  Sylvie, though no longer a candidate, regarded it as her duty to vet her replacements. Of the latest, so new we knew her only as Madame Becker, she said, “She seems all right. If she’d get out of those stilettos.”

  Imagining someone vacuuming in stiletto heels gave a new and piquant perspective to the concept of housework, but that was before I met Madame Becker. Her high heels proved to be the most exciting thing about her, with some heavily lacquered red hair running a close second. In her forties, and apparently widowed, she was another of those people who, displaced from the city by bad luck or worse judgment, end up in a seaside town. With no other work available, they accept jobs far below their social or intellectual level. We were used to child-minders with half a college degree who’d been left stranded here by a runaway boyfriend and a baby, or women who retired with a husband, only to have him decamp or drop dead, leaving them with a big house and only a small annuity on which to maintain it and themselves.