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

by John Baxter

  “But I really appreciate your time, John,” he told me. “And I’d like to give you a gift.”

  As I looked around his threadbare home, preparing diplomatically to refuse, he read my mind.

  “I don’t mean money. I mean a post-hypnotic gift. Think of the three things that have given you the greatest pleasure in life. Then, as you name each, I’ll squeeze your left wrist. And from now on, every time you squeeze that wrist, you’ll re-experience the same pleasure.”

  My choices, nominated while I was still in a trance, astonished me. Not great sex, wild music, drug highs, or roller-coaster rides—just the solitary pleasures of someone who, though usually surrounded by people, felt himself alone.

  The first was the pleasure of getting up before the sun, and sitting down in the pre-dawn silence with a cup of coffee to start writing.

  The second was the memory of a song, “Finishing the Hat”, from Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. While the painter Georges Seurat works on his great canvas Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte, exulting in his ability to render in tiny points of colour the reality of something as prosaic as a hat, his exasperated mistress is lured away to America by a baker who, though no Seurat, can give her the love and attention she needs. Its relevance to my own situation was obvious.

  When he asked for my third choice, my response, again, astonished me. And again, it was connected with Paris.

  In a memory so vivid that I felt I’d been physically transported back ten years and across the world, I was standing with Marie-Dominique, the French girl I’d met at the college in Virginia and who had so surprisingly suggested a new way of serving asparagus. Much later, we’d enjoyed a romance, and though it had been over for some years, we’d remained friends.

  In my memory, it was a winter’s day and we were standing on the edge of the sprawling flea market of Clignancourt, on the outskirts of Paris. We were eating thin French fries with mustard out of a cone of paper. I could taste the salt and oil, see the wind ruffling the fur collar of her coat, feel the cold through my feet. Emotions too complex to analyse lifted me like a wave.

  Driving back home in a daze, I rang her in Paris. Wouldn’t she like to visit me in Los Angeles? Not long after, she did.

  From the moment she got off the plane, we both sensed a fundamental change in our relationship. Like a bottle of wine that only comes into its best after it’s had time to breathe, our love was ready to drink.

  For the next ten days, we barely spent a minute apart. And in the quiet times, almost without discussing it, we became aware that this part of our lives was coming to a close. We would return to Paris, set up a home, marry, have children.

  Within three weeks, to the astonishment of my friends, I’d emptied my apartment, disposed of my possessions, and booked a flight to Paris, a city where I’d never lived, in a country where I knew nobody, and whose language I couldn’t speak. I was fifty, Marie-Dominique ten years younger, and nobody believed it would last a fortnight, if indeed it survived as far as the airport.

  12

  Apples

  Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.

  —THE SONG OF SOLOMON 2:5

  Unless the questioner is also in the same business, anyone a writer meets socially will eventually ask the same three questions.

  The first is “Do you write under your own name?” I take this to mean “I’ve never heard of you”. Another author, spikier than me, always responds, “Name some writers, and I’ll tell you if I’m one of them.” Invariably, the questioner can’t name any, except Dickens, Shakespeare, and Candy Whatsername, the chick who wrote My Ten Best World Cup Blow-Jobs.

  The meaning of the second question—“Do you make a living at it?”—is also transparent. It can mean only one thing: “If this clown can succeed as a writer, how could I fail?”

  Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, once noticed, while buying a hot dog, that the vendor was an old classmate from high school.

  “So whattaya doin’ now, Artie?” the man inquired once he’d introduced himself.

  Miller explained he’d become a playwright, and a fairly successful one.

  “Playwriting,” said the hot-dog man. “Yeah. I shoulda gone inta that.”

  Neither of these two questions, however, is quite as irritating as the third, which is “Where do you get your ideas?”

  Why irritating? Because most of us don’t know where our ideas come from. If we did, we’d spend less time staring at the wall, or surfing the net, or watching lunchtime TV with the excuse that we’re resting our eyes or waiting to digest our lunch. The real truth about an idea is, we wake up in the morning, and there it is, like a baby left on our doorstep.

  So please don’t ask me why, one morning in Sydney in 1966, I woke with the urge to write a science fiction story about an apple.

  Not just any old apple, either. The size of a mountain, this one loomed alone and enigmatic on a featureless plain. A whole community lived in its shadow, the inhabitants quarrying its flesh, tunnelling ever deeper into its bulk, always alert for the murderous creatures, a mutant cross-breeding of man and moth, that infested the empty chambers among the seeds of the core.

  “This is a pretty weird story,” my editor in London said. And then that inevitable question. “Where did you get the idea?”

  I could have attributed inspiration to Ayers Rock, the red stone monolith, called Uluru by the tribal people, which looms above the dead-flat desert of northern Australia. But this comparison only came to me when the story was half-done.

  A psychiatrist friend suggested a source for the apple’s resident predators. The mothlike female humanoid lurking within the apple, who killed in order to lay her eggs in the corpses of her victims, bore a certain resemblance to my first wife, from whom I was tortuously separating. I could see some sense in that too.

  But the real truth was too prosaic to be explained.

  I just like apples.

  I consume at least four a day. I regularly cook with them: apple crumble, caramelised tarte Tatin, baked apples, cored and stuffed with marmalade, not to mention the stewed apple the French call compote. Since coming to France, I’d also learned to use them as a vegetable, dicing and dry-frying them to complement boudin veal sausage or preserved duck: confit de canard.

  From the start, I knew our Christmas porker must have some apple accompaniment. Apple and pork are a perfect match. The tartness of the fruit cuts the greasiness of the meat’s fat and lifts the blandness of the lean. But I detested the sugary mush that passes for apple sauce in Anglo-Saxon countries. The best pork deserved the best apple. I just had to decide what it would be.

  Of the better apples, my favourites were English. I’d discovered them in my first year there, when my friend Monica and I lived on a shoestring in a tiny unheated cottage on the former estate of Randolph Churchill, son of Sir Winston, at the foot of Cemetery Lane in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt. It had been lent to us by the Australian writer Randolph Stow, who was spending six months as a writer-in-residence in Scandinavia. His generosity was fortuitous, since we were flat broke, with no prospect of employment until I could finish a book and Monica could find a job as schoolteacher.

  Ours was the classic situation of “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate”. Fishpond Cottage was almost painfully picturesque but situated in one of the worst frost-spots in East Anglia, and completely without heating. We kept the open fire in the living room burning day and night and, since we couldn’t afford to buy firewood, fed it with fallen branches gathered along the roadside.

  Apple orchards surrounded the village, and we routinely raided them for windfalls. The local slang for this was scrumping. The potent cider home-brewed from such freebies is still called scrumpy.

  Those apples were either Bramleys or Cox’s Orange Pippins—emblematic, to my mind, of the two social strands of East Bergholt. The Cox, small, sharp, acid, crunchy, had the f
lashiness of the London yuppies who kept cottages there as weekenders. They drove too fast along our narrow lanes—“more Volvos on these roads today,” complained one local, “than squashed hedgehogs”—and parked three-deep around the grocery in nearby Dedham, which boasted of being the Fortnum and Mason of East Anglia.

  Randolph Churchill, who’d died the year before we arrived, had been the doyen of this group. A failed politician and erratic author, he grew up disastrously spoiled by his father, Winston, who actually declined a peerage since it would make Randolph a hereditary peer and thus ineligible to stand for parliament. As it turned out, Randolph lacked his father’s flair for politics and, after a patchy career, retired to East Bergholt to pursue a life as part-time writer and full-time drunk.

  As his inheritance trickled away, his accountant suggested some economies. He’d concede the need for a butler, maids, housekeeper, gardeners, even the cook—but was it really necessary to employ an additional chef just to bake pastry?

  Randolph was appalled. “May’nt a man have a biscuit?” he bleated.

  If Randolph embodied the Cox’s Pippin, the other local apple, the Bramley, large and knobbly, found its human counterpart in Bob Peartree, the amiable handyman we inherited with the cottage, who could be found most afternoons digging at the bottom of the garden or, a little later, dispensing rural wisdom in The Beehive pub.

  Bob showed us how to preserve the Bramleys, which, in the season, covered a big tree in our garden. Wrapping each in newspaper, we laid them out, slightly apart, in our little attic. Separated like this, in the cool and dark, with the newspaper conserving the ethylene gas that ripened and preserved them, they survived for months, their starches transmuting into sugar, their water evaporating, so that, by early spring, the skin of the survivors had wrinkled like the faces of old men. Bitten into, the fruit was densely sweet, with an aroma close to perfume.

  After a lifetime of munching, topped with this hands-on education in the English countryside, I thought I knew apples—until, one day in Paris a few years ago, our friend Victor, a journalist based in the south, came to stay overnight after a day attending a round of promotional events.

  He arrived loaded with giveaways: soaps, shampoos and fragrances, teas, and, of more interest to me, a sack of assorted apples from the French Association of Apple Growers, which had helpfully labelled each one with the variety’s name.

  I already knew the flaccid Golden Delicious, the slick, enameled Granny Smith, the streaked red Reinette, and the Californian glow of the Pink Lady. But there were a few I’d never seen before—not surprising, since, according to the press handout, the total of all surviving varieties of apple ran into thousands.

  Out of curiosity, I tried a Golden Delicious. To my astonishment, it had real flavour.

  “Well, do you wonder?” Victor said. “They probably sorted through hundreds to find these. Nothing but the best for the press.”

  “I wish you could buy them this good in shops.”

  “I’m sure you can,” he said, “at Fauchon or Hediard”—the Paris equivalents of Harrod’s or Fortnum and Mason.

  • • •

  Standing in the icy market hall in Fouras that winter morning, thinking about the right apple to accompany our pig for Christmas dinner, I wished we had a guide from the French Association of Apple Growers.

  As it turned out, there was someone nearby almost as good. Madame Clastres and Bob Peartree would have made a perfect couple. Both were large and a little lopsided, like Bramley apples, but full of humour and good sense.

  Every day of the year, Madame opened her little stall in the market, a squared-off U-shape just big enough for her to stand in, and to reach the contents of each pannier or box without walking a step. Almost everything came from her garden and orchard; the eggs were from her hens, and any leftover fruit went into the jams that she made herself.

  In season, nobody stocked more succulent tomatoes. A supermarket buyer would have turned up his nose at their knobbiness, their folds, their little patches of unripened green, but they remain, particularly when dressed with oil, salt, lemon juice, and Madame’s pungent basil and garlic, the most delicious I’ve ever eaten.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here, Madame,” I said.

  She shrugged. “One must eat.”

  Did she mean her or us? Not that it made much difference.

  “Madame,” I said. “An apple … for cooking …”

  She didn’t hesitate. From under the counter, she lifted a small box of muddy yellow-brown fruit, flattened, skin spotted with the brown specks one associated with blight or insect damage. If I’d seen such apples lying on the ground of an orchard, I wouldn’t have bothered picking them up.

  “Clochards,” she said.

  In French slang, clochard means “tramp”. In the days when Les Halles, Paris’s biggest wholesale produce market, still dominated the centre of the city, the sounding of a bell—or cloche—signified that trading was over for the day. Hearing it, the homeless hovering outside surged in to scavenge discarded and overripe fruit and vegetables, stale bread, unsold meat.

  Certainly the Clochard deserved its name. If ever an apple looked like a bum, this was it.

  “And you recommend them—for a compote, say?”

  “For any dish. Try them.” She filled a bag. “If you don’t agree, bring them back.”

  That night, I pan-fried two pork chops in a little butter, peeled and sliced one of the apples, scattered the pieces over and around the pork, reduced the heat almost to nothing, and put on a lid.

  When I lifted it twenty minutes later, a wave of steam carried the odours of fruit and meat through the house. Cooked in their own juices, the chops were succulent and tender. The pieces of apple, far from turning to mush, were translucent and intact. Better still, heat at the bottom of the pan had caramelised their sugar, turning the lower surfaces a rich brown.

  Lifting the chops onto a plate, I surrounded them with the apple pieces, deglazed the pan with a little Calvados, tossed in a pinch of salt, and poured the sauce over the dish.

  It was the kind of simple cooking France has made its own: local ingredients, bought fresh, prepared quickly and simply, and served with care.

  “Some wine?” Marie-Do said.

  “You mean Courtepaille left any?” That “broken” case of Margaux still rankled.

  “A couple of bottles. Not enough for Christmas, though.”

  As we sat down to côtes de porc sauté au Calvados, avec compote de pommes Clochard—a miniature of the dish I would serve the family in a few days—I felt the familiar anxiety re-establish itself.

  This was Friday morning. By the following Tuesday, I would be in the kitchen in Richebourg, as an estimated eighteen people gathered for dinner.

  Would the piglet really arrive as promised?

  What about a dessert?

  And then there was the tricky question of the right wine …

  As I said, chefs worry. It’s one reason for that business’s high turnover. According to legend, François Vatel, chef to the Prince de Condé at the time of Louis XIV, greeted news that the seafood had not arrived for a Friday banquet by going home and running on his sword.

  Maybe that was a little extreme. But I knew how he felt.

  13

  Cheese

  The cheese stands alone!

  —FINAL LINE OF THE CHILDREN’S RHYME “THE FARMER IN THE DELL”

  “As we have to wait another two days for our piglet,” I suggested to Marie-Dominique over breakfast the day after our visit to the butcher, “we could pick up the cheese.”

  Even as I said it, I recognized I’d made an error.

  The French approach cheese with the reverence the Spanish accord the corrida, Americans baseball, and the English their tea. It is not to be “picked up,” or grabbed, snatched, or scored, nibbled, scarfed, or snacked on.

  At no social occasion in France will you encounter those clichés of Anglo-Saxon party food, the nut-encrusted cheese ba
ll, the cheddar cube on a toothpick, or the deposit of Philadephia on a cracker.

  Nor, at the opposite end of the spectrum, would any chef confront diners with something I once saw served at a Hollywood press reception—an entire wheel of Brie, sliced horizontally, stuffed with fresh raspberries, then baked. Even to lay eyes on this oozing horror was to feel one’s fillings twinge and one’s arteries begin to clog.

  Cheese to the French is an absolute, an axiom of cuisine. Correctly experiencing its pleasures requires education, discrimination, even love. Knowing when and where to eat it, how, with whom, and in what quantity are matters of gravity, worth a lifetime of effort.

  At any business lunch in France, serious discussion doesn’t take place until the end of the meal—“between the pear and the cheese”. Shrewd observers can tell a lot about a person from the way he handles cheese. Deals have failed because someone ate the Époisses before the Brie or gobbled all the blue part of the Roquefort while leaving the less tasty white.

  It’s just another damning piece of evidence against what the French call la perfide Albion—perfidious England—that the British, confronted with a wheel of Stilton, their equivalent of Roquefort, slice off the top rind and spoon out the blue heart, leaving latecomers to struggle along with what remains. Worse, they sometimes times pour a glass of port into the hollow, rendering it a soggy mush. Quelle cochonnerie! Nor does it surprise them that James Joyce, however long he lived in France, should always have scorned its most nationalist of foods. “A corpse is meat gone bad,” he sneered. “Well and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk.” They forgive him a lot on account of his genius, but not that.