by Ann Mah
When the Great Depression caused Burgundy’s wine trade to stagnate in the 1930s, two enterprising Côte de Nuits winemakers had the bright idea of starting a wine club inspired by the Bacchic societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They founded the Confrérie in 1934, adopting a motto—“Jamais en vain, toujours en vin” (Never in vain, always in wine)—and shared their finest vintages with friends and strangers, hoping to spread the word about Burgundy and thus encourage international wine sales.
In 1944 the Confrérie established the Château du Clos de Vougeot as their headquarters, restoring it and in fact improving upon its former austerity, creating luxurious banquet rooms where monks had once lived in spartan simplicity. (In the monks’ former dining room, re-created as part of the château’s museum, long wooden tables, benches, and a pulpit hinted at their austere lifestyle; one brother would read passages from the Bible as the others ate gruel in enforced silence.) Today the Confrérie is an international organization, with chapters on five continents. Members gather at the château sixteen times a year for chapitre banquets. Dress is usually black tie, and around their necks members wear a small, shallow silver cup dangling from a wide striped ribbon. This is the tastevin (pronounced “tat-van”), which, as its name implies, was once used to sample wine.
Burgundy wine and diplomacy share a long history, dating at least to the fourteenth century when the duc de Bourgogne (and Pinot Noir fanatic) Philippe le Hardi carried casks of the wine in all his convoys throughout France and Flanders, using it to spread festive cheer at banquets and smooth his path at the negotiating table. Burgundy wine was also used to curry favor (or to bribe), as with Jean de Bussières, the abbot of the Abbaye de Cîteaux, who in 1359 sent thirty barrels of Clos de Vougeot to Pope Gregory XI. Four years later de Bussières was ordained a cardinal.
Thomas Jefferson, too, knew the political significance of wine. Though he had enjoyed the occasional tipple of Madeira or port as a young man, he gave up the two when he renounced British colonial rule, rejecting the Englishman’s culture of fortified wines and long-winded toasts. “The taste of this country [was] artificially created by our long restraint under the English government to the strong wines of Portugal and Spain,” he wrote. For the rest of his life, he sipped and served the lighter wines of France and Italy and hoped his fellow Americans would follow suit.
By now Chef Walch had launched into a discussion of boeuf bourguignon, musing over its global appeal. Perhaps the dish could be considered another ambassador, made with the two products that best illustrate Burgundy: wine and beef.
“I make mine with beef cheeks,” he said, adding with a spark of defiance, as only a classically trained French chef could, “The recipe has to live! It’s a form of globalization on the plate.”
I considered his words later that evening, as I sat down in a lively Beaune bistro, to a menu bourguignon. The dishes sounded classic, but they were modern interpretations, simplified and fresh. Instead of snails nestled into crocks of garlic butter, there was a garlicky green parsley soup garnished with escargots curled like seared shrimp. Instead of mini-gougères on a plate, there was a puffed gougère soufflé, a crisp-shelled marvel that shattered to reveal steamy, cheese-scented layers. Instead of boeuf bourguignon fortified with bacon and mushrooms, there was a fine stew sparked with the tang of ginger and orange peel, its meat shredding under the gentle pressure of my fork, its sauce a marriage of bright wine and deep, beefy redolence.
I used every scrap of bread and mashed potato to sponge up the sauce. I licked my knife to capture every last vestige of that sauce. If I’d been alone, I might have licked my plate. It haunted me, the sauce, with something richer and more profound than its dark depths. If wine is a Burgundian diplomat, I thought, perhaps boeuf bourguignon is like a diplomatic marriage, two successful, independent entities joined together, more powerful united than apart, at its base a simple, rustic recipe—and yet one that is constantly adapting, modernizing, and being reinterpreted.
Boeuf à la Bourguignonne
Olivier Walch, the head chef at the Château du Clos de Vougeot, gave me rough instructions for his boeuf bourguignon, and I turned them into the recipe below. Rather than boeuf bourguignon, this is beef cooked in the Burgundian style—because I believe you should be able to use any kind of red wine.
Serves 4
2 to 2½ pounds beef cheeks or chuck roast, trimmed of fat and cut into 2½- to 3-inch chunks
1 onion, peeled and chopped into 1-inch pieces
2 carrots, peeled and chopped into 1-inch pieces
1 leek, trimmed and chopped into 1-inch pieces
1 sprig thyme
2 bay leaves
3 or 4 juniper berries
2 whole cloves
2 or 3 whole black peppercorns
One 750-milliliter bottle full-bodied wine, such as a sturdy Pinot Noir, Côtes du Rhône, or similar
3 to 4 tablespoons neutral-flavored vegetable oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 quart meat stock (or water)
2 tablespoons Cognac or brandy
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
Garniture
¼ pound bacon, cut into ¼-inch matchsticks, or lardons
1 pound fresh button mushrooms
18 to 24 pearl onions
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Marinating the meat
In a large bowl, combine the beef, onion, carrots, and leek. Add the thyme, bay leaves, juniper berries, cloves, and black peppercorns. Pour over the red wine, making sure everything is submerged. Cover and refrigerate overnight, or for at least 3 hours.
Browning and stewing the meat
Remove the beef and vegetables from the marinade. Reserve the liquid. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large frying pan over moderate heat. Meanwhile, dry the beef thoroughly with paper towels and season it with salt and freshly ground pepper. When the oil shimmers, arrange the beef chunks in the pan in a single layer, taking care not to overcrowd the pan (you will probably need to do this in two batches). Brown the chunks, turning them so that they are golden and crusted on all sides, adding another tablespoon of oil if necessary. Remove them from the pan and place them directly into a wide-mouthed 6-quart casserole or Dutch oven. When all the beef chunks are browned, heat another tablespoon of oil and sauté the vegetables until softened, wilted, and almost golden, about 10 minutes. Remove them to the casserole with the beef. Deglaze the frying pan with 1 cup or so of the stock or use water, scraping up the browned bits.
Over moderate heat, sprinkle the Cognac over the meat and vegetables, and set it aflame with a match, gently shaking the casserole until the alcohol burns off. Stir in the flour and toss lightly so that it coats everything. Stir in the deglazing liquid, the wine from the marinade, the garlic, and enough stock or water to barely cover the meat. Bring to a simmer and cook, partially covered, until a fork easily pierces the meat, 2½ to 3 hours.
Finishing the sauce
When the meat is done, remove the casserole from the stove top. With tongs or a slotted spoon, remove the beef chunks. Strain the remaining liquid through a sieve set over a bowl, pressing on the vegetables to collect all the juices. Return the liquid to the casserole. Discard the vegetables. If the sauce appears too thin, boil it rapidly until it reduces slightly, about 10 minutes.
Preparing the garniture
In a saucepan, blanch the matchsticks or lardons of bacon (this makes them less greasy). Clean and quarter the mushrooms. Blanch and peel the onions. In a frying pan over medium heat, brown the lardons until they are lightly golden (but not crisp) and the fat has rendered. Remove them from the pan and, in the remaining bacon fat, sauté the mushrooms until they begin to release their juices; season with salt and freshly ground pepper an
d remove from the pan. Heat the tablespoon of oil and sauté the onions, turning them so that they brown on as many sides as possible. Add ½ cup of stock or water, season again, bring to a boil, cover, and cook until the onions are tender, about 10 minutes.
Return the meat to the casserole and stir in the bacon-mushroom-onion garniture. Bring the stew to a quiet simmer. Taste the sauce and adjust the seasonings. Serve with buttered noodles or small boiled potatoes.
Chapter 10
Aveyron / Aligot
The thing about time is that it trickles by if you’re watching it, each second as slow and wearing as the drip from a tap. I had kept a vigilant eye on the clock for nearly twelve months, and now that it was almost over, I hoped it would pick up speed, succumb to gravity. But time being time, it continued at its own stately pace while I counted, with increasing impatience, the remaining weeks, days, and minutes until May 1, when my husband would come home.
“Only two weeks left? That went by so fast!” said an acquaintance when I ran into her in the embassy’s mail room. I smiled and nodded, because for her the time probably had gone quickly, enrobed as she was in her own routine of métro-boulot-dodo. My year, however, had been counted out in Calvin’s morning e-mails and our evening Skype sessions, in giant pots of soup portioned into weeknight meals, in the books I read while eating dinner, in walks taken on Sunday afternoons. It had been a productive, carefully structured, often solitary year, a year that had allowed me to create something unexpected: my Paris—not Calvin’s Paris or our Paris but mine, one of new friends and cobblestoned street shortcuts and pastry-shop discoveries of my very own, one for me to share with my husband once he returned. For the rest of my life, I would, I knew, remember my experiences in Paris, drawing upon them like a long, cool drink of water, as we moved through our other posts.
But a fast year? No, it had not been fast.
It is perhaps the fate of those left behind, this slow seep of time. Penelope knew it as she waited twenty years for Odysseus to return, weaving his shroud by day and unraveling it by night in order to foil her would-be suitors.
The spouses of thousands of deployed soldiers endure it, single-handedly juggling jobs and family, all the while keeping one wary ear cocked for the ring of the phone, praying it won’t be that call bringing unbearable news.
Other diplomats’ wives experienced it, like Abigail Adams, who spent most of her married life separated from her “dearest friend,” as she and her husband, John Adams, addressed each other in their letters. While he traveled as a circuit judge, served as a delegate to the Continental Congress, and lived overseas as an envoy to England, France, and the Netherlands, she toiled in colonial New England with little hired help, planting and harvesting the crops, managing her husband’s finances, raising their four children. She spent months without hearing from her distant husband, the silence as much a product of his self-indulgence as of the unreliable mail service and his fear that spies would intercept his messages. And when John did write, he scolded his fretful wife for her complaints: “For God’s sake never reproach me again with not writing. . . . You know not—you feel not—the dangers that surround me, nor those that may be brought upon our Country.” And yet can you blame Abigail for worrying? Given the disease and danger that haunted the era, she probably feared that the silence meant he was dead.
Abigail spent most of her life dreaming about a stable family existence, hoping that every time John ended a post, his return home would be permanent. But as one more appointment turned into another, then another, then another, it became obvious that John was unable to deny the call to public service. Abigail feared that they had spent the best years of their lives miserably separated. “Who shall give me back Time? Who shall compensate to me those years I cannot recall?” she wrote in a letter to him. “How dearly have I paid for a titled Husband; should I wish you less wise that I might enjoy more happiness?”
In 1784, her children mostly grown and her father recently deceased, Abigail overcame her dread of ocean travel and joined John in Europe, where he was serving as an envoy. After thirteen years of “widowhood”—as Abigail referred to John’s long absences—the couple finally reunited, moving from Paris to London to the Hague as John fulfilled his diplomatic duties. They returned to the United States in 1788, installing themselves in their new farm, Peacefield, in Quincy, Massachusetts. Abigail hoped, of course, it would be their final move. She was wrong. It would be more than twelve years before they returned home permanently—and only after John had served two terms as vice president and one as president of the United States.
Abigail had sacrificed decades of family life—a sacrifice she believed was her patriotic duty, her personal offering to a country she loved—but she had not surrendered the years willingly. In her letters to John, her resentment toward his ambition glows like a searing cattle brand. “Do you not sometimes sigh for such a Seclusion—publick peace and domestick happiness?” she wrote to him in 1781. “I know the voice of Fame to be a mere weathercock, unstable as Water and fleeting as a Shadow.” Abigail’s domestic happiness didn’t arrive until 1802, when she was fifty-eight and it lasted only sixteen years, until her death in 1818. John’s career—more illustrious than either of them could have imagined when they married—had offered Abigail an uncommon, well-traveled, often lonely life, a life colored by her husband’s absences and her resulting strength and ingenuity, a life enriched by an economic and intellectual independence unheard of for most women of the era. Even so, you get the feeling she would have traded it all for a few acres of rural farmland and a pot of Yankee beans, had it meant spending more time with her husband. But for better or for worse, that was not her choice to make.
* * *
* * *
On April 29, I flew to Washington, D.C., to give a bookstore talk about my novel, which had been published a few months earlier. Afterward some friends and I ate dan dan noodles and fish poached in spiced oil at a Sichuan restaurant on K Street, and then we went home and I lay on their pullout couch, wide awake the entire night.
Early the next morning, I took a taxi to the airport, watching from the backseat as the sky slowly brightened from dawn into daylight. I checked in for my flight and waited in line for security, tapping my left foot, trying to peer around the crowd to see what was taking so long?! Couldn’t that businessman start taking off his shoes sooner? Why hadn’t that college student unwrapped her laptop before sending it through the X-ray machine? And how on earth could that woman forget to empty her pockets before passing through the metal detector?
Once clear of security, I re-dressed, reshod, and repacked before taking off through the terminal. I began to count the gate numbers, pausing to consult the boarding pass clutched in my hand—27, 28 . . . 29. I turned off the path and into the waiting area, which at seven o’clock was already full of business travelers, their faces lit by the cold glow of their cell-phone screens. Was he there? I quickly scanned the crowd. No, no, no. I took a step back. His trajectory had been complicated—Baghdad, Amman, Frankfurt, D.C.—there had been a lot of variables. Maybe he had missed one flight and, as a result, all the rest.
And then, in the corner, I saw him. His back was toward me, but I knew him from the shape of his head, the color of his hair, like chestnut honey. I ran over to him, and my bag dropped at his feet, and he sprang up when he saw me, and suddenly we were hugging before we’d even had a chance to say hello. I pressed my face into his chest, and his shirt smelled faintly soapy, even after so many hours of travel, and when we kissed, his cheeks felt scratchy and familiar, and as we hugged, I felt droopy with relief, and love, and gratitude. We were together, and the glow of fluorescent lights had never been so beautiful, the crackly boarding announcements had never sounded more musical, the aroma of stale coffee had never smelled sweeter. His assignment in Iraq was over.
A few minutes later, we flew to New York, rented a car, and drove to the Hudson River Valley. There, in a strid
ent burst of spring, we celebrated the wedding of two beloved friends amid more friends, a heartfelt weekend strewn with tears that had as much to do with our collective joy as it did with the high pollen count. We drank sparkling wine and ate carrot wedding cake, and Calvin chatted with the bride’s new in-laws, and I joined the bride herself on the dance floor, and . . . well, life pretty much went on again as ordinary. Except not quite. Because after a year apart, being together would never truly feel ordinary again.
* * *
* * *
Back in Paris, we settled into our apartment, together enfin. Calvin started working again at the embassy, and I continued working at the American Library and writing my new novel. I bought a voluminous straw shopping basket, one that I could fill with vegetables from the outdoor market across the street. We watched Ernst Lubitsch films at the art-house cinema on Sunday afternoons and ate chic artichoke pizzas on Thursday evenings (well, I ate artichoke; Calvin ate ham and mushroom) and split raspberry financier cakes down the middle after dinner. We made lists of places to visit before we left Europe, and sometimes this led to talking about life after Paris, which always made us both a little blue.
“It’s going to be so hard to leave,” I said one afternoon as the golden late-summer sunshine played upon the marble mantelpiece of our apartment.
“I know,” Calvin agreed. I thought he’d change the subject or encourage me not to think about it, but instead he said, “We’ll come back one day.”
“When you retire?”
“Or sooner?”
“Well . . .” I took a deep breath and launched into the idea I’d been thinking about for a few weeks. “We’ve been saving money for a long time. Maybe we could buy a place here. Something small, where we could come on vacations. A pied-à-terre?”
“A foot on the ground.” Calvin smiled.