But many of the gains of the new feminism seemed equivocal to women like me, and despite the commands of young warriors, few of us moved into full-time careers. Yes, we were increasingly restless in our kitchens, and many of us tried to parlay our voluntary services into paid ones. But we didn’t want to be liberated forcibly, any more than the hookers on Forty-second Street wanted to be liberated by flying wedges of affluent Women Against Pornography. I was glad for the new doors opened by affirmative action, but I found it impossible to shut them firmly behind me. I had invested too much in my decades of caretaking, which despite its frustrations had meaning to me. I couldn’t simply exchange one role for another, so like countless other women I took on both, doing double the work in the same amount of time.
We were showing signs of battle fatigue as the conflicts of the era raged on, not only between generations and genders but on the home front. Paul and I decided to throw a Come-as-You-Were-in-World War II costume party as a kind of declaration of truce in the midst of Watergate and Cambodia and a War gone Bad. But our costumes revealed how far apart we’d been even in the Good War. Some arrived in bobby sox and swing skirts, others in Boy Scout shorts. One came in a diaper. Those who couldn’t squeeze into their old uniforms rented new ones. One slender matron came in the Wave uniform she’d donned at eighteen, an older man in the German uniform he’d worn as a Romanian spy for British Intelligence. Discovery was not in the unmasking but in the cover-up.
Our staged entertainment was the Andrews Sisters, mimed by a pair of actress friends and me, who donned snoods to sing “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy,” karaoke style, with “Apple Blossom Time” for an encore. Dinner was a canteen buffet: Vienna sausages stuck on toothpicks in a head of cabbage; shit on a shingle (creamed dried beef on toast); Spam grilled, fried, and baked with pineapple slices in brown sugar and cloves; Jell-O with canned fruit stuck in it; a serve-yourself bar with big bottles of cheap rye and gin. We jitterbugged to “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and danced close to “Sunrise Serenade” and crashed like a ’Nam helicopter as fisticuffs broke out in the kitchen. Uniforms renewed old enmities. An ex-Army sergeant took a swing at an ex-major, who returned the favor, until their wives got them outside and into their suburban station wagons and home.
Paul had worn his old Army lieutenant’s uniform. I had made my Uncle Sam costume of red satin tailcoat and navy blue pants to simulate one I’d worn in junior high for a wartime musical pageant. When the last guest left, we looked at each other in our crumpled costumes, a parody of our wartime selves, and sighed. In a matter of seconds, we collapsed in fatigue like individual soufflés. So much work to be done.
The fun not only had gone out of our parties, it had gone out of real life. More and more our Entertainments rang as hollow as the voice of Richard Nixon and as false as the windows with geranium-filled window boxes that city officials had painted on the walls of crumbling slums. For a decade we’d concocted a living theater in the kitchen of our dreams, but now the fabric of our vision was melting into thin, thin air.
To Sea in a Sieve
In the churning bowels of the Liberté, wedged like a double-decker sandwich in upper and lower bunks in a stateroom so narrow you had to turn sideways to get to the head, we were rocked to sleep by the boom of propellers. While the wake streamed forever behind us, time stood still. For six blissful days we were nowhere, doing nothing. We were at sea.
From the first transatlantic trip Paul and I took in steerage in 1953 to our last in first class in 1976, ours was a shipboard romance. Life at sea was life stripped to the basics—food, booze, sex, books, sea, air, sun. The class-stacked decks, the regimented schedule, the rows of allocated deck chairs, the assigned places at dinner—being at sea had the satisfying order of limited choice, like a prix fixe menu in which you could choose soup or salad, meat or fish, but not the number or order of courses.
Luckily, our most intense period of travel coincided with the golden age of the transatlantic liner after the war. Ships were icons of national glory—the Liberté, the France, the United States, the Queen Elizabeth, the Michelangelo, the Leonardo, the Staatendam, the Rotterdam—the roster like an elaborate costume party that allowed you to choose country, class, and cuisine. The French provided the best food in all classes, and were the most egalitarian about loopholes and gangways for interclass minglings. So whenever possible we went French.
Like many other culture-starved academics who swarmed the lower decks when travel was cheap, we were looking for a foster country and were torn between England and France. On that first trip, I’d stayed up all night to watch dawn green England’s sceptered isle, but my heart was captured at midday by the sunshine of southern France, dappled by plane trees in orderly rows, smelling of wild rosemary and thyme. England was Puritan America intensified by caste warfare, but France, or at least Provence, was California with a sense of history—and a history of the senses. Over the years, we would dip into England for literary duty, then run over to France for food and fun.
Paul found satisfaction in critiquing each product, each meal, each chef, each restaurant, according to the categories of excellence established by the red Michelin Guide, our vade mecum compass and bible. My pleasure was in the hunt, in tracking each comestible to its farmer, fisher, baker, winemaker, goatherd, poultry breeder, truffle hunter, butcher, oysterman, cheesemaker, all those dedicated craftsmen whose work empowered the artists in the kitchen to perform for an audience who understood their art. It thrilled me to uncover layer by layer the world they shared, a bread-and-butter world that at the same time tuned the spheres.
We were united in our quest for the Perfect Chicken, which we first ate at the three-star restaurant of La Mère Brazier, nestled in a suburb of Lyons. We’d sought her out because I’d read in Elizabeth David about her volaille demi-deuil, a pure white chicken with slices of black truffle showing under the skin of the breast to create a “chicken in half-mourning.” Brazier had inherited the dish and the little kitchen knife of Mère Fillioux, not the actual knife but the skill of carving with it, a knife so famous in the 1920s that when Mère Fillioux wouldn’t sell it to a pair of metonymy-minded Americans, they stole it from her. With this four-inch knife, Fillioux had carved half a million chickens at the tables of her customers during her thirty-year reign as the mother of la cuisine de la mère, and after her Mère Brazier had done the same.
I still have the notes I took after we’d sampled Mère Brazier’s chicken, served simply in a bouillon with pickles, poached carrots, and coarse salt. I’m amazed how clearly we spelled out our differences at the beginning of our quest:
P: Disappointing because not exciting, not dramatic.
B: Lovely because pure, like a perfect pot-au-feu, which couldn’t be served in anything less than a three-star restaurant because it’s so simple.
P: You go to a three-star as you go to a whorehouse, for a little excitement. There’s little enough drama in life, one shouldn’t waste the opportunity at a great restaurant to exploit brilliance, drama, theatricality.
Mère Brazier granted me—brusquely, but also graciously considering my wretched French—my first interview. Posing as a journalist, I asked where she bought her chickens, the famous poulardes de Bresse. She gave me the name of the farm in the Saône Valley before lamenting, “Ce n’est plus pareil”—“It’s just not the same anymore,” her elegy for the snowy birds of yesteryear.
But I’d never eaten its like before, so what for her was evidence of Spenglerian decline was for me an epiphany. As I interviewed hundreds of artisans over the next decade in my struggles to become a journalist for real, I learned that her lament was a set lyric piece, a chanson pastorale, formulated by Villon centuries before. But all this poetry, all this art, all this passion—over a chicken? How French! How magnificent! How absurd! That’s why we were here, to wallow in this emotionally mind-blowing culture that linked gut to brain, art to science, passion and pleasure to ordinary daily life.
If France was about food, Engla
nd was about drink, and travel was a way to get both without having to spend time in your own kitchen. The Way In, as the sign in Harrods used to say, was the Way Out. England was not only about drink but about getting drunk, in highly codified ways, in order to bridge the moat between Below Stairs and Above Stairs. Everything below the neck, for starters, was Below Stairs, an area of embarrassment and shame, to be kept out of sight like a basement loo. Everything that mattered was Above Stairs, beginning with the head. Above Stairs, wit and malice glittered, especially when stimulated by strong drink.
We’d spent a year in London in the early sixties, renting an eighteenth-century town house from a pseudo Polish countess (real Polish, pseudo countess) at Trevor Square in Knightsbridge, a classy address where our local grocery store was the Food Halls of Harrods. The house was a period classic with one room per floor, connected by narrow stairs: dining room on the first, parlor on the second, master bedroom on the third, second bedroom on the fourth, kitchen and maid’s room in the dark, dank, chilblain-inducing basement.
The contrast between Above Stairs and Below was as great as the English could make it. The heating system was equally English, a curious amalgam of coal and gas, which provided hot water for six-foot bathtubs but no heat for radiators. We kept warm by living under the comforters in our layered bedrooms, grown-ups in the middle, little Sam in the basement below us, Tucky in the bedroom above us. When we all came down with what was called in London the Hong Kong Flu, and no doubt in Hong Kong the London Flu, we communicated by rapping on our radiators since all three layers of us were too sick to move. This was the flu that ended at last my struggle with tobacco. I vowed, Dear Lord, if You let me live through this, I promise never to abuse my lungs again. I made no promise about my liver.
The subterranean kitchen was built for dwarves. Its only window was a narrow pane of glass at eye level with the narrow strip of grass in a backyard just big enough for a coal bin. The kitchen was underequipped for anything but boiling water for tea. It had an electric teakettle, a brown china pot, a quilted tea cozy, and two kinds of sieve, a fine-meshed strainer with a silver rim for formal service at the parlor tea table and a hinged pair of perforated metal spoons to contain loose tea leaves when you made a single cup for yourself. Tea bags had not yet displaced the rituals of a proper cup of tea.
A staircase not quite as wide as my hips connected the kitchen to the dining room above. So did a dumbwaiter. A buzzer concealed beneath the rug at the head of the dining-room table summoned the kitchen dwarves to haul and serve. The dining room sported a showy chinoiserie highboy lacquered in the same shade of red as the walls, on which a skilled Italian sometime in the nineteenth century had painted murals of Venice à la Canaletto. He had also painted Venetian scenes on the table itself, along with the dining chairs, in turquoise and red and gold. In such a setting food was superfluous, even counterproductive, as I discovered when I actually tried to use the table as a table. Our landlady instructed me: Cover the table first with boards encased in quilted padding, then with a thick undercloth, and finally with a tablecloth. The pains we took scarcely mattered in the end. Our landlady had a fifty-page inventory of the goods and chattels in her showpiece and, on completion of our tenure, found some way to charge us for every one of them.
If our countess thought we were American scum loaded with money that was her birthright, not ours, a few English literary folk decided we were socially acceptable and that was enough. We were acceptable because, as Americans, we were hors de combat. We could be oil riggers from Texas or sharecroppers from Arkansas, as long as we were not coal miners from Manchester or shopkeepers from Brighton. Like licensed clowns, we didn’t count any more than food counted in the Great Game of Snobs. The English rules for this game were as baffling in their minutiae as pub hours and the distinctions between saloons and public bars, but we were off the board and therefore warmly received.
Over the years, we’d become closer to Kingsley Amis and his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard. We became semi-permanent houseguests at Lemmons, the expansive Georgian house outside London that Jane had restored single-handedly, with much patience and thousands of pounds, to something of its former splendor. In marrying her, Kingsley had married Up. Where Jane ruled, the rules were absolute. She didn’t speak to Paul for two days because he didn’t listen when she warned him not to pass the bottle of port to his left and not to lift it from the table. She persuaded Kingsley to have his shirts made at Turnbull and Asser and his suits tailored on Savile Row. She completed his transformation from Angry Young Man to Colonel Blimp and later to Thatcherite Conservative. But she could not, no matter how she needled, wheedled, or slaved to feed guests at the great round table in their country house kitchen, alter his mind about food.
At Lemmons, Jane cooked and Kingsley drank. Houseguests like us served as spectators and buffers in kitchen wars that made our own seem placid. No matter whether Jane served a blanquette de veau from Escoffier or a steak and kidney pie from Mrs. Beeton—equally delicious, because Jane was that rare thing in an Englishwoman of her class, an excellent cook—Kingsley’s bottle of HP Sauce was always by his side and used at full tilt. Each had met his match in the other, and their battle of wills, played out in restaurants, tavernas, pubs, salons, kitchens, bedrooms, and baths, sustained them for years.
When it came time to repay their generosity with a dinner party at Trevor Square, I was up a creek. We’d hired a daily to do the housekeeping, Phoebe from South Africa, who was small enough to inhabit the kitchen but was not a cook. How to cook and serve a dinner party in that house without dwarves or Phoebe was a problem without a solution, but with typical American bravado I blundered ahead. My first mistake was to attempt a classic English menu. From Harrods I bought canned turtle soup of high quality, to be spiked with sherry. From Cobb, the best butcher in Knightsbridge, I bought a saddle of lamb with the kidneys attached. For the rest, I would make scalloped potatoes and fresh peas, with an English trifle for dessert. The beginning and end were simple enough. It was the middle that would require cooking in the underground cavern in an oven that, I discovered too late, never got above 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Result? The potatoes were glue, the peas bullets, and the lamb was half raw and half scorched from my attempt to fry it on top of the stove.
Serving was even more challenging. We were eight at table, dressed in formal suits and long gowns. Ignoring the useless buzzer at my feet, I would run downstairs, throw food in the dumbwaiter, work the pulley, dash back upstairs, tripping over my skirt, and serve. When it came to the saddle, all I had to carve with was one stubby knife with a dull blade. I was whacking away at the backbone when the entire roast slid off the platter and onto my neighbor’s lap. With impeccable English courtesy, he asked if he might help me carve. Fortunately by this time even the cooked parts of the lamb were cold, so at least my grease-stained guest was not burned. The party ended with port and brandy in the parlor upstairs, where the hostess drank far more than was good for her and suffered heartburn once the guests were gone. If this had happened in France, like Vatel I would have thrown myself on the stubby blade of my sword.
For over a decade we shuttled between England and France, but as the children grew we went to France more often, for beach time at Collioure or Bandol, and finally, in 1965, to live for a year in Cimiez, a residential district above Nice where Queen Victoria had come to visit and Matisse to live. The Greeks had established a beachhead at Nice, naming it Nikea, two hundred years before Christ. The Romans had left the ruins of an arena behind. Nice was now a big city, part Old Town, part New Town, part Italian, part Provençal, part English, clustered around eighteenth-century arcades in deep burgundy and baroque Edwardian hotels in white, fronting the long promenade along the Baie des Anges built by English as the Promenade des Anglais. It was the right place for Anglo-Francophiliacs.
The Old Town I called Black Nice, for its winding dark streets thronged with dark Mediterranean people, shops with bloodied carcasses in the windo
ws, bars full of smoke and cognac, the Chapel of the Black Penitents opening suddenly on the brilliant colors of the Flower Market. I took notes on where to get what. The best vegetables were sold by a man and wife at their stand opposite the clock tower of the Lycée. The best fish was sold by the man with the high forehead and big teeth. The best charcuterie was the one that sold stuffed pork every Saturday at the far corner of the Flower Market. If you knew where to ask, you could have brandade de morue delivered to your kitchen door every Friday. Salt cod pureed with heavy cream and olive oil was once a Catholic Lenten dish, but I overcame native prejudice.
On the borders of Old Town was the weekly market, set up along the quais of the river Paillon, always a mob scene among the pyramids of lemons and eggplants and melons, braids of garlic and baskets of fish, with business conducted so frenetically in Provençal slang that my kitchen French was useless. I had to point to an enormous wheel of the local cornmeal pancake sold by the buxom Niçoise on a street corner and hold out coins to buy a slice.
New Town, or White Nice, glittered with light and air, with solid bourgeois couples walking their dogs along the promenade, ignoring the matronly transvestite in pearls and basic black who sat on the same bench every afternoon in the Jardin du Roi Albert Premier. Both towns came together in the Place Masséna at Carnival time in February, when for a full two weeks the place went berserk. Cavalcades of ladies and gents in eighteenth-century costume riding white horses were followed by men walking inside giant puppets, les grosses têtes of papiermâché shaped like giant chickens or leeks twenty or thirty feet tall. Floats enacted grotesque scenes of fantasy or political satire involving the caricatured heads of Kennedy, Khrushchev, and De Gaulle. A Rabelaisian Lord of Misrule presided over all, amidst waves of confetti the crowds threw with such vigor that you had to wear dark glasses to protect against blinding. We deployed gentler weaponry in the Battle of the Flowers, hurling carnations and marguerites at the pretty girls on pretty floats of flowers, so finely wrought they made the Pasadena Rose Parade look tacky. Nice knew how to throw a party, and we felt right at home.
My Kitchen Wars Page 16