4. The new chefs are not systematically modernist. They know of the dangers threatening products—fish and crustaceans especially, as soon as they are chilled, whether they be raw or cooked.
Unlike the old school that served you a cluster of frozen shrimp and soles Dugléré dried on ice, the new chefs use a refrigerator delicately.
5. However, they do not let out the cry of raped virgins on the subject of every piece of equipment for cooking or preserving or cleaning that offers them avant-garde techniques. Their stoves are new (and clean) and have easy temperature control. There are hot counters for their dishes. They work in a climate that is not stiflingly hot, without unbearable smells, in a well-lit and ample space. They use mixers and ice cream makers and automatic rotisseries and peelers and trash bailers.…
6. They have banished from their cooking the so-called culinary principle (actually just a sorry way of preserving) that calls for game (and certain domestic meat that is passed off for game) to be marinated in oil, alcohol, wine, or spices for days, not to mention the horrible practice of hanging meat (Curnonsky’s contemporaries prepared rotten birds). The new chefs serve game cured but fresh, and the spices designed to conceal the shameful rot are gone.
7. Little by little, the new chefs recognize the pretension, the inanity, the mediocrity of rich and heavy sauces. Those terrible brown and white sauces, espagnoles, perigueux, financières, the grand veneur, béchamel, mornay that have murdered many a liver and covered up so much tasteless meat. Those beef reductions, red wine, madeira, blood, roux, gelatine, flour, cheese, and starch are no longer carved in stone. The chefs go gently with stocks, cream, butter, pure juice, eggs, truffle, lemon, fresh herbs, and pepper and cherish light sauces, sauces that blend, that exalt, and leave the spirit light and the stomach comfortable.
8. They do not ignore dieting. Without bowing to the inconsistencies of men in a hurry and women health food followers, they have discovered the grace of light food, of clever salads, of fresh vegetables simply cut, of rare meat. The steak at Troisgros is less fattening than macrobiotic soup. And tomatoes are no longer peeled just for the taste but for the good of the stomach.
9. They have also understood the danger of gaudy presentations, wastefulness, which the venerable Carême made fashionable 150 years ago. They still like to embellish, but they know the limits and don’t pass them, and have discovered the aesthetics of simplicity.
10. Finally. They invent. It is said that since the nineteenth century everything has been tried and created, all the tools, cooking, combinations. Well, that isn’t true. (Sixty years ago, Jules Maincave, ingenious inventor, imagined replacing vinaigrette with a mixture of pork juice and rum, married the chicken to the lily of the valley, veal with absinth.…) There remain millions of dishes to invent, and probably hundreds to revive.
—from Le nouveau guide Gault-Millau, no. 54, October 1973,
translated from the French by Mark Kurlansky
LUDWIG BEMELMANS ON BEING A GOURMET
There is a lot of talk about the gourmet these days and about the rules and the art of eating—in fact, several magazines are devoted to this subject. Any restaurant that would try to satisfy the true gourmet would be bankrupt in a matter of weeks. The popular concept of the gourmet is that of a seal-like, happy creature of Gargantuan appetite, who sticks a napkin inside his collar, dunks bread into the sauces and throws on the floor plates that are not properly heated. His nourishment is catalogued as caviar, pâté de foie gras, truffles, pheasant and crêpes Suzette. He drinks only the proper wine, but on closing his eyes and rinsing it in and out through his teeth he is able to tell you not only the age of the wine but also the number on the barrel in which it has been aged. He is thought of as a middle-aged man (never a woman), portly and jolly, given to reciting toasts that are spiked with French terms. His extravagant dinners take on the aspect of an eating contest rather than a good meal.
Actually, the true gourmet, like the true artist, is one of the un-happiest creatures existent. His trouble comes from so seldom finding what he constantly seeks: perfection.
To be a gourmet you must start early, as you must begin riding early to be a good horseman. You must live in France; your father must have been a gourmet. Nothing in life must interest you but your stomach. With hands trembling, you must approach the meal about which you have worried all day and risk dying of a stroke if it isn’t perfect.
The last time I was at the Ritz in Paris I noticed a novice waiter, called a piccolo, standing in the dining room. He was about fourteen years old, with a student’s pale face. Every so often he hid behind a marble column while he popped into his mouth, one by one, strawberries that he had swiped from the breakfast buffet. The captain on duty surprised him in the act and pulled him into the room, holding him gingerly by one ear. There in front of the buffet he delivered a long lecture, the gist of which was that the good things displayed there were only for the distinguished guests of the house. The captain, seeing that I had observed the scene, came to the table. “Very good boy, otherwise,” he said. “He will be all right once he gets the hang of things.” The boy, he explained, was the son of the owner of a tavern in Rouen; this man had a brother who was a maître d’hôtel at the Tour d’Argent, the famous Paris restaurant. When the boy was born, his father had written his brother to reserve for the boy a place as an apprentice, and because Monsieur the Maître d’Hôtel of the Tour d’Argent was a great friend of Monsieur the Maître d’Hôtel of the Ritz, the fortunate connection had been made, and the boy was thus in line for a fine career—after several years’ apprenticeship. His counterpart below stairs, the one who becomes an apprentice in the kitchen, starts with peeling potatoes and scrubbing. In this climate the gourmet can survive. The climate of democracy is fatal to him.
At one time the gourmet had a chance in America. A horde of European chefs, maîtres d’hôtel, managers, waiters and cooks came to America.
Walking off the boats, they went straight to the newly erected large hotels, some of which, for several years, matched the standards of the European hotel de grand luxe.
One of the greatest hotels and restaurants of that time was the old Knickerbocker, owned and managed by a man named Regan, who walked through his hotel with two detectives because he was afraid that some foreign waiter might knife him. A complaint from a customer, in these days, was followed by immediate discharge.
When employees of the old Waldorf reported sick, they actually had to be in bed, for it was Mr. Boldt’s habit to send detectives to their homes to check up.
As for hiring new help—that was no problem for management; outside the doors of every New York employment office were long lines of job seekers, each with a dossier of references from the best European houses.
As immigration became restricted, trained hotel personnel became fewer. Now virtually all of the old-timers have disappeared. Replacing them, particularly those employed in the kitchen, is one of the great problems of hotel keeping, for Americans don’t like to be cooks.
Hotel managers tell you Americans make poor cooks. They say they lack the—“I don’t know what.” By the same rule it is said that no American makes a good musician or painter, but he does—once he is interested.
The fault is that no one has taken the trouble to make the profession of cooking attractive to young Americans—to inform them that being a good chef is one of the most satisfying, honored and remunerative callings. Another deterrent, perhaps, is the costume. The chef’s traditional white hat, jacket and apron probably seem like sissy stuff to the prospective kitchen candidate.
America is a land of healthy appetites. It is not in the American character to live in order to eat. Rather, the reverse is true. Many try, but just as Americans don’t make good gigolos, neither do they make good gourmets.
The desperate rituals of the various food fraternities and gourmet clubs are as authentic as the war dances Indians stage for tourists at Western railroad depots. The food served at the dinners of the socie
ties is relatively good, as banquets go. The trouble with these affairs is not so much the cooking as the commercial note that is injected throughout the meal. You are accosted by salesmen for newly invented salad dressings, deep-frying fats or starchless spaghetti. These fellows are followed by liquor and champagne salesmen who creep around the table taking orders.
Such get-togethers fail to do anything for the cause, mainly because no good chef can prepare a truly superb meal for more than a dozen people.
Occasionally I am looked upon as a gourmet and when I go out with friends, they say, “Oh, let him order—he knows everything about food and wine.”
Having been born in Europe and lived in hotels most of my life, I do know how to read a menu and can usually tell a poor restaurant by instinct. As for being a gourmet, I disqualify in every respect. I eat too much, drink too much and love company at the table. I use the menu without attention to rules. The geography of my stomach is antigourmet in the extreme. For example, I long for a small shack along the Danube, at the side of the old stone bridge in Regensburg, Bavaria. There, over an open fire, in a kitchen two hundred years old and by a secret recipe kept in the family, sausages the size of a small finger are broiled.
They are served on a bed of sauerkraut, with the same brown beer my grandfather brewed. On a good day, I can eat a dozen of these for my second breakfast, around ten in the morning, and drink two quarts of that beer.
I remember with sadness an old fisherman in Miami on whose boat I worked long ago. There was a shack there, also on a pier, where we sold the fish. But we always kept one for ourselves, which we cooked in the shack. No fish has ever been better.
In the whole world there are no better lobsters than those that come from Maine. There are no better steaks anywhere than in America. I often go to the seafood bar on the lower level of the Grand Central Station in New York to eat a clam pan roast. For Italian food I like Angelo’s in Mulberry Street, or Tony’s San Marino in East 53rd Street; for fish, Sweet’s Restaurant near the fish market in downtown New York. The best German food is served by Luchow’s, whose proprietor tries to keep the specialties of the house as authentically indigestible as they must be. The sauerbraten and potato pancakes there are superb, the red cabbage and lentil soup expertly cooked. Geese, venison and Hasenpfeffer are done as if Herr Walterspiel himself were at the oven, and you leave satisfied. If a prize were given for the treatment of beer, then it would go to this place. The pipes are kept clean, it’s not too cold and there is enough of it drawn so that it is always fresh.
—from La Bonne Table, 1964
A. J. LIEBLING ON BOXING AWAY GLUTTONY
In 1926, though, I had another route to keeping my weight within bounds. I liked to box, and I had an illusion that if I boxed a lot, I could eat and drink a great deal and even stay up late with the girls. The exercise would burn all that out. I was too young to know that if you do those three things often you will feel with increasing infrequency like boxing, and boxing is no fun unless you feel like it. This is because boxing makes you want to eat, but eating does not make you want to box. I had not yet heard the great Sam Langford say: “You can sweat out beer and you can sweat out whiskey, but you can’t sweat out women.” Sam had never had to contend with my toughest opponent of all, sheer gluttony.
—from Between Meals, 1959
CHAPTER TWO
Food and Sex
Food and sex are inevitably linked because they are the two great physical pleasures that writers most want to write about. A. J. Liebling once complained that the perfect specimens of female anatomy, all the perfect parts, were never found together on the same woman: “So just as in a restaurant, you had to pick a modest but satisfying agenda.” However, he gallantly cautioned, “It was trickier than that because a woman, unlike a navarin de mouton, has a mind.” Men, when not in mixed company, often start by talking about food and end up talking about sex. I can only suppose that the same is true of women. What has changed is that until the twentieth century, only men put these thoughts in print.
—M.K.
JOHN ASH ON M.F.K. FISHER’S WARM SANDWICH
Mostly remembered today for the beauty of her prose, in her lifetime M.F.K. Fisher was known to be a seductively attractive woman. John Ash, a California chef and food commentator, only knew her when she was fairly elderly, but he still recalls her as stunningly beautiful.
—M.K.
Usually when I visited Mary Frances I brought lunch, but on one particular day she said she would fix lunch for us. I arrived in the morning and, as we chatted, she took a loaf of good local crusty French bread, split it in half lengthwise and proceeded to slather both sides with a good amount of homemade mayonnaise and coarse Dijon mustard. She then proceeded to layer on slices of a tasty smoked ham; thick slices of a creamy jack cheese from Ig Vella, whose cheese company was and still is in nearby Sonoma; and topped it all with some leaves of spicy arugula.
What she did then was mysterious, at least for the moment. She took this big old sandwich and wrapped it tightly in several layers of plastic wrap. I confess I thought she maybe was getting a little “forgetful.” She then pronounced “… lunch will be ready in an hour” and then gave me the wrapped sandwich and instructed me to sit on it! We continued to chat even though I was a little distracted by my “cushion.” In about an hour she said “lunch is ready” and instructed me to stand up. She unwrapped the loaf, which was now highly compressed and warm from my body heat. She sliced it into nice little finger sandwiches, and served it with some little cornichon pickles on the side and a glass of nice Sonoma Pinot Noir, as I recall. She remarked that this sandwich had many attributes. Not only was it delicious, but it was also a wonderful tool to use with overactive children to get them to sit still and in one place for a little while. I’m not sure if I fell into that category or not, but I’ve never forgotten that great lady or her sandwich!
—from a personal communication with Mark Kurlansky, 1999
M.F.K. FISHER ON THE VIRILITY OF TURKISH DESSERTS
Sabri, the homesick Turkish lawyer, invited us for tea. We drank too much of it, and ate, ravenously or discreetly, according to our nationalities, at a large cake like a macaroon. Sabri had made it, and he told us how.
“Cook finest vermicelli thoroughly,” he instructed, a cold polite smile on his face and his eyes very warm and melancholy. “Then when it is done spread it in a large shallow baking-dish and drip honey and sweet oil upon it until the dish brims.
“Throw slivers of pistachio nuts upon it, as many as you like—I like very many. And then bake it slowly. It will shrivel down to a brown crusty cake with a moist inside, like the one you did not eat much of.”
“Sabri, it’s—we——”
“I know. It’s too sweet for you, eh, Al?”
“Yes. It makes every tooth in my head quiver like a stricken doe.”
Sabri almost smiled.
“For myself,” he remarked, distantly, “it is barely sweet. And these icings and bonbons you eat! They are tasteless as dust to a Turk.
“Of course, in our world, the Near East, we like anything with starch in it, too. There is a good reason.” He looked glumly and perhaps a little maliciously at me.
“Yes, a very good reason—for us, that is. We Easterners eat viscous, sticky foods to make ourselves more virile!
“Perhaps that’s what ails us,” he added, austerely. Then he grinned, and broke the last chunk of cake in his fat, too-sensitive hands. “Young men try to increase what they have; old men look for what they’ve passed by—but is it only in Turkey?”
—from The Art of Eating, 1937
EMILE ROUMER ON PEASANT LOVE
Emile Roumer was born in Haiti in 1908. Educated in France, he wrote poetry in French from 1930 to 1935, and then stopped writing entirely.
—M.K.
The Peasant Declares His Love
High-yellow of my heart, with breasts like tangerines,
you taste better to me than eggplant stuffed with c
rab,
you are the tripe in my pepper-pot,
the dumpling in my peas, my tea of aromatic herbs.
You are the corned beef whose customhouse is my heart,
my mush with syrup that trickles down the throat.
You are a steaming dish, mushrooms cooked with rice,
crisp potato fries, and little fish fried brown.…
My hankering for love follows you wherever you go.
Your bottom is a basket full of fruits and meat.
—Translated from the French by John Peale Bishop, c.1930
BRILLAT-SAVARIN ON WOMEN GOURMETS
Gourmandism is far from unbecoming to the ladies: it agrees with the delicacy of their organs, and acts as compensation for certain pleasures which they must deny themselves, and certain ills to which nature seems to have condemned them.
Nothing is more agreeable to look at than a pretty gourmande in full battle-dress: her napkin is tucked in most sensibly; one of her hands lies on the table; the other carries elegantly carved little morsels to her mouth, or perhaps a partridge wing on which she nibbles; her eyes shine, her lips are soft and moist, her conversation is pleasant, and all her gestures are full of grace; she does not hide that vein of coquetry which women show in everything they do. With so much in her favor, she is utterly irresistible, and Cato the Censor himself would be moved by her.
Anecdote
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