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

by John Baxter

  On its river side, the town faces the watery front yard of the Charente estuary, scattered with low-lying offshore islands—Île d’Aix, Île de Ré, Île d’Oléron, Île Madame. Stone forts dating from the eighteenth century armour the shores that look out to the Atlantic, an architecture reflected in the villas that line the seafronts and nearby coastlines. Retired navy men, unable to imagine a life that didn’t always turn its eyes oceanward, had crowned them with as many rooftop lookouts and widow’s walks as the houses of Nantucket.

  And also like New England, this is seafood country. Along the shores of the estuary, stilted fish houses, called carrelets, dangle wide square nets above the shallows. When the tide surges in over the mudflats, they’re lowered to trap the shrimp that scramble in to feed. Children love being taken to Île d’Aix on the little ferry, where one can do the same but on a smaller scale. Wading ankle-deep into the milky water with hand nets, they sieve up shrimp so small and soft-shelled they can be boiled and eaten whole.

  Above all, this is France’s capital of oysters. They thrive in the cold tidal brine. At maturity, the growers transfer them to shallow ponds of fresh water where they lie for months, purging salt and ingesting a local microbe that turns their flesh a faint, translucent green—the signature of the most fancied of all French oysters, the Charentais claire.

  “What about oysters to start Christmas dinner?” I suggested that winter, the morning after our langoustine supper.

  “Oysters?” Marie-Do said. “Not foie gras?”

  “We have that every year.” I played my trump card. “And oysters are traditional.”

  You never go far wrong in France appealing to history and the patrimoine. And traditionally, every Christmas dinner did begin with oysters—usually accompanied, oddly, by a side dish of small fried pork sausages. I always found this inexplicable, since the greasy, salty sausages had nothing in common with shellfish. With just as little logic, French restaurants serve oysters with a dish of red-wine vinegar and chopped shallots, guaranteed to destroy the taste as surely as the horseradish-and-ketchup “cocktail sauce” of American seafood restaurants.

  “I don’t think the fish market is open,” Marie-Do said.

  It wasn’t. I’d walked past that morning. In the summer, the Napoleonic stone barn of a building overflowed with vendors selling fresh oysters and mussels, clams, sea urchins, sea snails, and hillocks of shrimp and langoustine—either cooked or alive and squirming, next to sluggish lobsters and crabs. On lazy days, we’d choose a plateful of shellfish at one of the stands and have it served under the verandah outside, with a bottle of the tart local aligote carried over from the Café des Marées opposite.

  If one wanted fish for dinner, we could choose from a score of varieties, any one of which a poissonnier would fillet to order. Since most of his clients were city people who didn’t cook, he’d throw in a quick lesson on how to prepare it—whether needed or not.

  I was resigned to these conversations—about the colin, for instance, a local favourite.

  “Ah, a very pretty fish,” he would say, stroking the grey leathery skin of this actually quite repulsive creature. “Now, you know, the correct way to cook the colin …”

  “With the tail in the mouth,” I said.

  “… is with its tail in its mouth,” he continued, “like this.”

  He started to bend its long cylindrical body into a hoop.

  “Poached,” I said. “In court-bouillon.”

  “Then you make a court-bouillon,” he went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, “with white wine, water, salt, and some fresh herbs. I like cerfeuil myself …”

  “Cerfeuil!” said his wife, pausing in wrapping a darne of salmon. “Why would Monsieur use cerfeuil? A leaf of laurier, a brin of persil plat …”

  “I like basilic myself,” interjected the woman buying the salmon.

  All three of us turned to stare at her, then, eyebrows raised, at each other. Basil? In court-bouillon? Bizarre.

  He finished wrapping the colin and passed it to me.

  “It’s very good lukewarm,” he confided, “with boiled potatoes and mayonnaise”—just the way I intended to serve it. Leaning closer, and with a glance to make sure his wife couldn’t hear, he said, “Really, cerfeuil is the thing. Believe me. Try it. Tell me if I’m not right.”

  Seafood lovers are legion, and passionate. The British actor Paul Freeman told me about the time he arrived in nearby La Rochelle on the morning of New Year’s Day 1981, urgently summoned by Steven Spielberg to play Belloq, the cunning French archaeologist in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He was met by the production manager, who explained that Steve was on location in the old German submarine pens at La Pallice and couldn’t see him immediately.

  Freeman, noticing that a harbourside restaurant was offering a fourteen-course seafood lunch, took a table and waited for the dishes to arrive.

  “We commenced,” he recalled, “with a superlative amuse-bouche of pâté de saumon on toast points …”

  Oléron oysters followed, then langoustines with mayonnaise. He was sucking the juice out of their heads when the assistant director arrived: Spielberg had returned to his hotel and was available to see him.

  “Before the soupe au poisson?” said Freeman. “Unthinkable.”

  An hour later, the assistant returned, now somewhat agitated, just as course number nine, a fragrant and deliquescent Époisses, was placed before Freeman, with a glass of muscadet.

  “Steve says …”

  “Sit down,” said Freeman. “Try this cheese.”

  The assistant knew when he was licked. Freeman was still there, lingering over a Calvados, as the sun set behind the towers flanking the harbour entrance.

  About the same time, but on the other side of the world, Italian critic and novelist Umberto Eco made it a condition of attending a conference in Australia that they give him a week’s holiday on the Great Barrier Reef. His hosts complied by booking him into the luxury Heron Island resort.

  Descending in his shorts late in the morning, the tubby Eco, no respecter of mealtimes, asked if there was any chance of some oysters. The concierge directed his attention to the buffet, being piled with seafood in expectation of lunch.

  “But if you want some right away …”

  He returned, not with a plate, as Eco expected, but a small hammer.

  “Just walk along there a bit, mate,” he said, pointing to the nearby shore. “The rocks are thick with ’em.”

  Eco spent a happy hour harvesting and enjoying on the spot the freshest oysters he would ever eat.

  Both Freeman and Eco shared the conviction of many of us, that work is all very well, but that something in the seasonality of seafood, its essentiality of freshness, demands our instant attention. The translucency of an oyster’s flesh, the gleam of a fish’s eye, and the sheen of its skin are imperatives that transcend the banality of existence, imposing a duty of relish which we, as creatures of the sea ourselves, who still weep and sweat salt, ignore at our peril. “Sometimes I dream of the seafood of Marseilles,” says the Water Rat in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, “and wake up crying.”

  A few years ago, Marie-Do directed a documentary about oysters for National Geographic, most of it shot around Charente. If we needed oysters for Christmas dinner, obviously she was the expert.

  “There’s only one place to go,” she said. “If I can just remember how to get there …”

  We drove out of Fouras, following the coast toward the open Atlantic. A sharp wind blew off the ocean as we headed southwest. The road ran dead straight alongside a canal, once busy with barge traffic, now largely unused, its lock houses crumbling, the water filmed with algae. Herons stared from the roadside, and on dark ponds, pairs of swans floated in a hopeless beauty. In East Anglia, they called this fen country. If we turned off, we’d be bogged to the axles within a hundred metres.

  Crossing the river Seudre, we ignored the shallow white arc of the new bridge linking the mainland to the fashionab
le holiday island of Île de Ré, and turned south, away from the more popular oyster towns of Oléron and Marennes, following instead the wide river upstream to the village of La Tremblade.

  La Tremblade was no tourist haven. A director shooting a horror film about monsters from the deep could well have set his opening sequence here. Tumbledown clapboard restaurants and the stalls of oyster merchants straggled along a stretch of potholed road beside a silent inlet lined with makeshift jetties. On the opposite shore stood a line of fishing cabins, a few of them brightly painted and trim, but most sagging with age. At the oyster stalls, sellers in heavy ankle-length rubber aprons stared, expressionless, as we idled by, and dragged on their cigarettes.

  “Is it one of these?” I asked, nodding toward the ramshackle stalls.

  “Here? Oh, no.”

  She stopped the car, got out, and carried on an animated conversation with one of the sellers.

  Returning, she nodded toward the flats between us and the Seudre. “They say back over there.”

  For half an hour, we bumped along rutted roads, past piles of rusted machinery overgrown with weeds, and dank black ponds that looked sure to harbour at least a couple of the “floaters” habitually dredged out of similar waters in TV forensic shows like CSI. Any habitation where we might have asked for directions was always on the other side of a canal or, if on our side, barred and bolted.

  By four p.m., night was coming down. Just as we were losing hope, a gleaming black SUV cruised across the middle distance, bumping along the hump between two canals. Among the battered Nissan pickups favoured by the locals, it stood out like Gwyneth Paltrow in a tribe of African bushmen.

  We reversed and set out in pursuit. The road had no name, just a sign, VOIE PRIVÉE, and the symbol for a dead end. But at the point where the canal met the Seudre at an ancient rusted lock, we found an unexpectedly modern building. The 4×4 stood outside, next to a line of Mercedes, Volvos, BMWs, and a semitrailer in the process of being loaded. As we parked, a Porsche purred up. This had to be The Place.

  Inside, it buzzed with noise and activity. In one half of the shed, behind heavy plastic curtains, men and women in ankle-length aprons and wellington boots shovelled oysters into long revolving metal drums gushing with water. This cleaned off any weeds or mud. Others sorted and graded the oysters, and packed them into the traditional lidded baskets, woven from wide, paper-thin strips of white wood. On our side of the curtain, filled baskets were piled head-high, tied, labelled, and awaiting shipment. I browsed the addresses. Some of the finest restaurants in the country jostled with some of the best addresses: Cap Ferrat, Neuilly, Deauville.

  “Do you see the Elysée there?” Marie-Do asked.

  The Elysée Palace on the rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré is the official residence of the president of the French republic.

  “They don’t advertise it,” she said, “but these people have supplied the last three presidents.”

  The expensive cars lined up along the muddy, rutted, unmarked lane said so much about the French. No fuss, no publicity. Just that ability to find their way to the best.

  We left with seven dozen of the same oysters which, two days later, would grace the highest table in the nation. Our Christmas lunch was off to a good start.

  9

  Thank Heaven for Little Girls

  Every little breeze Seems to whisper “Louise”.

  —LEO ROBIN

  At the beginning of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the old general who hires Philip Marlowe to rescue his wilful daughters from the results of their wild lives reflects that “a man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets”.

  His words returned to me as, a year after arriving in Paris, I climbed the steps of an imposing nineteenth-century clinic in suburban Paris with a pregnant Marie-Dominique. I was a few years shy of fifty-four, but otherwise …

  The events that followed are still vivid. It helps that we have the whole thing on video. Recording births was a profitable sideline of our Vietnamese anaesthetist.

  It was he who advised us not to let our baby be born on the date preferred by our obstetrician.

  “This place will be deserted,” he confided.

  “Some kind of conference?” Marie-Dominique asked.

  “What conference? It’s Yom Kippur. And I wouldn’t recommend the first weekend in November either. It’s the start of the ski season.”

  I thought he was joking. “That matters?”

  He looked at me pityingly. Obviously, I was new to France. “It does if you don’t want your baby delivered by the gardener.”

  I’m not sure I would have gone to the trouble of preparing this Christmas dinner and others like it if it weren’t for Louise and her cousins. And not only in the narrow sense of needing to provide an event to mark the season, and a frame for the giving of the gifts they expect. Christmas affirms family and tradition, neither of which held much importance for me until I came to France. Now, as I became enmeshed in an elaborate network of homes, ceremonies, and rites of passage, they filled my world.

  Raising Louise had been as much an education for us as for her. If there are advantages to becoming a father in middle age, they lie in the area of knowing when to shut up. My parents kept telling me I “should be outside on a nice day like this” and “why don’t you get some exercise?” So staying inside with a book became an act of rebellion. In passing, it made me a writer, not to mention the only Australian who never learned to swim.

  By seven, however, Louise—admittedly helped by the fact that most French children spend the two-month summer break at the beach—was an excellent swimmer (and, these days, windsurfer). A few years ago, a friend in Sydney lent us her town house. The roof of the high-rise opposite featured a long, narrow pool where Louise and her mother swam every day. As Marie-Dominique ploughed her laps, Louise swam effortlessly beside her, dipping occasionally below the surface to mirror her movements under water, then rising, easy as a seal, to match her, stroke for stroke. As it never had to me, the great Australian luxury, to be comfortable in one’s body, had come to her as a birthright.

  Aside from the usual domestic disciplines (“Will you please clean up your room!”), we’d seldom told Louise she had to do anything. What she learned from us, she learned by observation. Which is why, almost from the cradle, she ate what we ate. It accustomed her not only to French and Australian dishes but Indian, Chinese, Thai, and Mexican as well.

  At seven, she was already accompanying us to restaurants, where she would order an artichoke vinaigrette and, though her eyes were more or less at the level of her plate, carefully disassemble the vegetable, leaf by leaf, dipping each into the sauce, nibbling off the flesh, and placing it carefully to one side.

  This so astonished one American couple that they came over to our table to comment.

  “I never saw anything like it in my life,” said the man. “That little girl …”

  Louise looked up at them with polite incomprehension. How else did one eat an artichoke?

  At times, her sophistication in food startled even the French. One mother of a school friend, returning her after a visit, said, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to give Louise the lunch she was hoping for. I asked what she’d like, and she said ‘a crab soufflé’.”

  10

  A Dissertation on Roast Pig

  This little piggy went to market.

  This little piggy stayed home.

  This little piggy had roast beef.

  But this little piggy had none.

  And this little piggy went wee-wee-wee-wee

  All the way home.

  —TRADITIONAL RHYME

  We stored our oysters in the chill stone pavilion in the corner of the garden in Fouras. As the temperature in there never climbed above five degrees, they’d keep as fresh as in any refrigerator, weeping away their excess water in the cold and dark, each salt tear making them that much more succulent.

  Having settled th
e first course didn’t reduce concern about the menu. It just left more time to fret about the rest—the wine, the cheese, the bread, the side dishes, and of course the dessert and the roast.

  Next morning, as the sun came up grudgingly on another blustery day, I sat in the kitchen over coffee and jotted down notes.

  Choosing the meat was always the biggest problem.

  Turkey was a cliché.

  Goose was delicious, but some people found it too greasy.

  Capon, while large, plump, and juicy, was often tasteless.

  Pintade, served at my first French Christmas dinner, had more flavour than any of them; guinea fowl die if raised like chickens in cramped sheds, so every bird is truly free-range. But they’re small, which would mean cooking two or three together, and the oven at Richebourg wasn’t large.

  Well, what law said it had to be a bird? I could choose some other meat.

  Not lamb—the gigot d’agneau was the standard French Sunday joint. Nothing could make it fit a festive occasion.

  Beef was a possibility—but why not pork?

  A ham? This was a bridge too far: dangerously radical and American for a French Christmas.

  However… roast suckling pig with crackling… apple sauce… baked potatoes… I could almost taste it.

  Even as I thought of this, I knew there would be problems.

  In shopping for meat, the French, ignoring the fact that flavour resides mostly in the fat, overwhelmingly prefer the leanest filet de boeuf or côte d’agneau, from which every fraction of fat has been sliced. Such cuts, lacking fatty lubrication, contract during roasting to juiceless slabs, so butchers wrap them in a thin sheet of pork fat, trussed with string, which you remove before carving.