Here, however, I must recall a bitter memory.
One day I found myself seated at the dinner table next to the lovely Mme. M … d, and I was silently congratulating myself on such a delightful accident when she turned suddenly to me and said, “To your health!” At once I began a compliment to her in my prettiest phrases; but I never finished it, for the little flirt had already turned to the man on her left, with another toast. They clicked glasses, and this abrupt desertion seemed to me a real betrayal, and one that made a scar in my heart which many years have not healed over.
Women Are Gourmandes
The leanings of the fair sex toward gourmandism are in a way instinctive, for it is basically favorable to their beauty.
A series of precise and exhaustive observations has proved beyond doubt that a tempting diet, dainty and well prepared, holds off for a long time the exterior signs of old age.
It adds brilliancy to the eyes, freshness to the skin, and more firmness to all the muscles; and just as it is certain, in physiology, that it is the sagging of these muscles which causes wrinkles, beauty’s fiercest enemy, so it is equally correct to say that, other things being equal, the ladies who know how to eat are comparatively ten years younger than those to whom this science is a stranger.
Painters and sculptors have long recognized this truth, and they never portray subjects who, through choice or duty, practice abstinence, such as anchorites or misers, without giving them the pallor of illness, the wasted scrawniness of poverty, and the deep wrinkles of enfeebled senility.
—from The Physiology of Taste, 1825,
translated from the French by M.F.K. Fisher
GRIMOD DE LA REYNIÈRE ON WHY BLONDES GO BETTER THAN BRUNETTES WITH FOOD
With a few exceptions, fair skin denotes a distinguished lineage, a delicate mind, and a soft and fine skin (a characteristic much admired by connoisseurs, for being as sensitive in the dark as in light). Normally it is a sign of softness, and of all the pleasing qualities of the fair sex. A blonde seems humbly to beseech your heart, while a brunette tends to ravish it. There is no question that people prefer to receive prayers than orders.
Whether you think this analogy is fair or not, a meal of blonde food is in every way superior to a meal of brunette food. Any cook can easily do an acceptable job on the latter, but the former can only be realized by a first-rate cook.
—from Manuel des Amphitryons, 1808,
translated from the French by Mark Kurlansky
M.F.K. FISHER ON BACHELOR COOKING
B is for bachelors … and the wonderful dinners they pull out of their cupboards with such dining-room aplomb and kitchen chaos.
Their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman. Few of them at any age will consciously ponder on the aphrodisiac qualities of the dishes they serve forth, but subconsciously they use what tricks they have to make their little banquets, whether intimate or merely convivial, lead as subtly as possible to the hoped-for bedding down.
Soft lights, plenty of tipples (from champagne to straight rye), and if possible a little music, are the timeworn props in any such entertainment, on no matter what financial level the host is operating. Some men head for the back booth at the corner pub and play the juke-box, with overtones of medium-rare steak and French-fried potatoes. Others are forced to fall back on the soft-footed alcoholic ministrations of a Filipino houseboy, muted Stan Kenton on the super-Capehart, and a little supper beginning with caviar malossol on ice and ending with a soufflé au kirschwasser d’Alsace.
The bachelors I’m considering at this moment are at neither end of the gastronomical scale. They are the men between twenty-five and fifty who if they have been married are temporarily out of it and are therefore triply conscious of both their heaven-sent freedom and their domestic clumsiness. They are in the middle brackets, financially if not emotionally. They have been around and know the niceties or amenities or whatever they choose to call the tricks of a well-set table and a well-poured glass, and yet they have neither the tastes nor the pocketbooks to indulge in signing endless chits at Mike Romanoff’s or “21.”
In other words, they like to give a little dinner now and again in the far from circumspect intimacy of their apartments, which more often than not consist of a studio-living-room with either a disguised letdown bed or a tiny bedroom, a bath, and a stuffy closet called the kitchen.
I have eaten many meals prepared and served in such surroundings. I am perhaps fortunate to be able to say that I have always enjoyed them—and perhaps even more fortunate to be able to say that I enjoyed them because of my acquired knowledge of the basic rules of seduction. I assumed that I had been invited for either a direct or an indirect approach. I judged as best I could which one was being contemplated, let my host know of my own foreknowledge, and then sat back to have as much pleasure as possible.
I almost always found that since my host knew I was aware of the situation, he was more relaxed and philosophical about its very improbable outcome and could listen to the phonograph records and savor his cautiously concocted Martini with more inner calm. And I almost always ate and drank well, finding that any man who knows that a woman will behave in her cups, whether of consommé double or of double Scotch, is resigned happily to a good dinner; in fact, given the choice between it and a rousing tumble in the hay, he will inevitably choose the first, being convinced that the latter can perforce be found elsewhere.
The drinks offered to me were easy ones, dictated by my statements made early in the game (I never bothered to hint but always said plainly, in self-protection, that I liked very dry Gibsons with good ale to follow, or dry sherry with good wine: safe but happy, that was my motto). I was given some beautiful liquids: really old Scotch, Swiss Dézelay light as mountain water, proud vintage Burgundies, countless bottles of champagne, all good too, and what fine cognacs! Only once did a professional bachelor ever offer me a glass of sweet liqueur. I never saw him again, feeling that his perceptions were too dull for me to exhaust myself, if after even the short time needed to win my acceptance of his dinner invitation he had not guessed my tastes that far.
The dishes I have eaten at such tables-for-two range from homegrown snails in home-made butter to pompano flown in from the Gulf of Mexico with slivered macadamias from Maui—or is it Oahu? I have found that most bachelors like the exotic, at least culinarily speaking: they would rather fuss around with a complex recipe for Le Hochepot de Queue de Boeuf than with a simple one called Stewed Ox-tail, even if both come from André Simon’s Concise Encyclopædia of Gastronomy.
They are snobs in that they prefer to keep Escoffier on the front of the shelf and hide Mrs. Kander’s Settlement Cook Book.
They are experts at the casual: they may quit the office early and make a murderous sacrifice of pay, but when you arrive the apartment is pleasantly odorous, glasses and a perfectly frosted shaker or a bottle await you. Your host looks not even faintly harried or stove-bound. His upper lip is unbedewed and his eye is flatteringly wolfish.
Tact and honest common sense forbid any woman’s penetrating with mistaken kindliness into the kitchen: motherliness is unthinkable in such a situation, and romance would wither on the culinary threshold and be buried forever beneath its confusion of used pots and spoons.
Instead the time has come for ancient and always interesting blandishments, of course in proper proportions. The Bachelor Spirit unfolds like a hungry sea anemone. The possible object of his affections feels cozily desired. The drink is good. He pops discreetly in and out of his gastronomical workshop, where he brews his sly receipts, his digestive attacks upon the fortress of her virtue. She represses her natural curiosity, and if she is at all experienced in such wars she knows fairly well that she will have a patterned meal which has already been indicated by his ordering in restaurants. More often than not it will be some kind of chicken, elaborately disguised with everything from Australian pine-n
uts to herbs grown by the landlady’s daughter.
One highly expert bachelor-cook in my immediate circle swears by a recipe for breasts of young chicken, poached that morning or the night before, and covered with a dramatic and very lemony sauce made at the last minute in a chafing dish. This combines all the tricks of seeming nonchalance, carefully casual presentation, and attention-getting.
With it he serves chilled asparagus tips in his own version of vinaigrette sauce and little hot rolls. For dessert he has what is also his own version of riz à l’Impératrice, which he is convinced all women love because he himself secretly dotes on it—and it can be made the day before, though not too successfully.
This meal lends itself almost treacherously to the wiles of alcohol: anything from a light lager to a Moët et Chandon of a great year is beautiful with it, and can be well bolstered with the preprandial drinks which any bachelor doles out with at least one ear on the Shakespearean dictum that they may double desire and halve the pursuit thereof.
The most successful bachelor dinner I was ever plied with, or perhaps it would be more genteel to say served, was also thoroughly horrible.
Everything was carried out, as well as in, by a real expert, a man then married for the fifth time who had interspersed his connubial adventures with rich periods of technical celibacy. The cocktails were delicately suited to my own tastes rather than his, and I sipped a glass of Tio Pepe, properly chilled. The table, set in a candle-lit patio, was laid in the best sense of the word “nicely,” with silver and china and Swedish glass which I had long admired. The wine was a last bottle of Chianti, “ ’stra vecchio.”
We ate thin strips of veal that had been dipped in an artful mixture of grated parmigiano and crumbs, with one of the bachelor’s favorite tricks to accompany it, buttered thin noodles gratinés with extra-thin and almond-brown toasted noodles on top. There was a green salad.
The night was full of stars, and so seemed my eager host’s brown eyes, and the whole thing was ghastly for two reasons: he had forgotten to take the weather into his menu planning, so that we were faced with a rich, hot, basically heavy meal on one of the worst summer nights in local history, and I was at the queasiest possible moment of pregnancy.
Of course the main mistake was in his trying to entertain a woman in that condition as if she were still seduceable and/or he still a bachelor: we had already been married several months.
—from An Alphabet for Gourmets, 1949
CHAPTER THREE
Memorable Meals
EATING AT CAB CALLOWAY’S
Everybody Eats When They Come to My House
Have a banana, Hannah,
Try the salami, Tommy,
Give with the gravy, Davy,
Everybody eats when they come to my house!
Try a tomato, Plato,
Here’s cacciatore, Dorie,
Taste the baloney, Tony,
Everybody eats when they come to my house!
I fix your favorite dishes,
Hopin’ this good food fills ya!
Work my hands to the bone in the kitchen alone,
You better eat if it kills ya!
Pass me a pancake, Mandrake,
Have an hors-d’oeuvre-y, Irvy,
Look in the fendel, Mendel,
Everybody eats when they come to my house!
Hannah! Davy! Tommy! Dora! Mandrake!
Everybody eats when they come to my house!
Pastafazoola, Talullah!
Oh, do have a bagel, Fagel,
Now, don’t be so bashful, Nashville,
Everybody eats when they come to my house!
Hey, this is a party, Marty
Here, you get the cherry, Jerry,
Now, look, don’t be so picky, Micky,
’Cause everybody eats when they come to my house!
All of my friends are welcome,
Don’t make me coax you, moax you,
Eat the tables, the chairs, the napkins, who cares?
You gotta eat if it chokes you!
Oh, do have a knish, Nishia,
Pass me the latke, Macky,
Chile con carne for Barney,
Everybody eats when they come to my house!
Face! Buster! Chair! Chops! Fump!
Everybody eats when they come to my house!
Everybody eats when they come to my house!
—1948
MARTIAL’S DINNER INVITATION
Marcus Valerius Martialis, commonly known as Martial, was born in A.D. 40 in Spain. He moved to Rome at the age of twenty-three and spent the next thirty-five years there, among all classes of Romans, observing and wryly commenting on Roman life, one of the first poets of urbanism. He died in A.D. 104 in Spain.
—M.K.
Toranius, if the prospect of a cheerless, solitary dinner
Bores you, eat with me—and get thinner.
If you like appetite-whetters,
There’ll be cheap Cappadocian lettuce,
Pungent leeks, and tunny-fish
Nestling in sliced eggs. Next, a black earthenware dish
(Watch out—a finger-scorcher!) of broccoli just taken
From its cool bed, pale beans with pink bacon,
And a sausage sitting in the centre
Of a snow-white pudding of polenta.
If you want to try a dessert, I can offer you raisins (my own),
Pears (from Syria), and hot chestnuts (grown
In Naples, city of learning)
Roasted in a slow-burning
Fire. As for the wine, by drinking it you’ll commend it.
When this great feast has ended,
If, as he well might,
Bacchus stirs up a second appetite,
You’ll be reinforced by choice Picenian olives fresh from the trees,
Warm lupins and hot chick-peas.
Let’s face it,
It’s a poor sort of dinner; yet, if you deign to grace it,
You’ll neither say nor hear
One word that’s not sincere,
You can lounge at ease in your place,
Wearing your own face,
You won’t have to listen while your host reads aloud from some thick book
Or be forced to look
At girls from that sink, Cadiz, prancing
Through the interminable writhings of professional belly-dancing.
Instead, Condylus, my little slave,
Will pipe to us—something not too rustic, nor yet too grave.
Well, that’s the ‘banquet’. I shall invite
Claudia to sit on my left. Who would you like on my right?
—from Epigrams, first century A.D.,
translated from the Latin by James Michie
HERODOTUS ON EGYPTIAN DINING
Herodotus, considered the first historian, was a Greek born in 484 B.C. His principal subject was the enmity between East and West and he wrote of these cultures, especially Egypt, in great detail. He is thought to have visited Egypt about 460 B.C., but beyond that little is known of the date of this manuscript.
—M.K.
Among the Egyptians themselves, those who dwell in the cultivated country are the most careful of all men to preserve the memory of the past, and none whom I have questioned have so many chronicles. I will now speak of the manner of life which they use. For three following days in every month they purge themselves, pursuing after health by means of emetics and drenches; for they think it is from the food which they eat that all sicknesses come to men. Even without this, the Egyptians are the healthiest of all men, next to the Libyans; the reason of which to my thinking is that the climate in all seasons is the same; for change is the great cause of men’s falling sick, more especially changes of seasons. They eat bread, making loaves which they call “cyllestis”* of coarse grain. For wine, they use a drink made of barley; for they have no vines in their country. They eat fish uncooked, either dried in the sun or preserved with brine. Quails and ducks and small birds are salted and e
aten raw; all other kinds of birds, as well as fish (except those that the Egyptians hold sacred) are eaten roast and boiled.
At rich men’s banquets, after dinner a man carries round a wooden image of a corpse in a coffin, painted and carved in exact imitation, a cubit or two cubits long. This he shows to each of the company, saying “Drink and make merry, but look on this; for such shalt thou be when thou art dead.” Such is the custom at their drinking-bouts.
—from The Persian Wars, fifth century B.C.,
translated from the Greek by A. D. Godley
PLUTARCH ON LUCULLUS DINING WITH HIMSELF
For the administration of public affairs has, like other things, its proper term, and statesmen, as well as wrestlers, will break down when strength and youth fail. But Crassus and Pompey, on the other hand, laughed to see Lucullus abandoning himself to pleasure and expense, as if luxurious living were not a thing that as little became his years as government of affairs at home or of an army abroad.
And, indeed, Lucullus’s life, like the Old Comedy, presents us at the commencement with acts of policy and of war, at the end offering nothing but good eating and drinking, feastings, and revellings, and mere play. For I give no higher name to his sumptuous buildings, porticos, and baths, still less to his paintings and sculptures, and all his industry about these curiosities, which he collected with vast expense, lavishly bestowing all the wealth and treasure which he got in the war upon them, insomuch that even now, with all the advance of luxury, the Lucullean gardens are counted the noblest the emperor has. Tubero the stoic, when he saw his buildings at Naples, where he suspended the hills upon vast tunnels, brought in the sea for moats and fish-ponds round his house, and built pleasure-houses in the waters, called him Xerxes in a gown. He had also fine seats in Tusculum, belvederes, and large open balconies for men’s apartments, and porticos to walk in, where Pompey coming to see him, blamed him for making a house which would be pleasant in summer, but uninhabitable in winter; whom he answered with a smile, “You think me, then, less provident than cranes and storks, not to change my home with the season.” When a prætor, with great expense and pains, was preparing a spectacle for the people, and asked him to lend him some purple robes for the performers in a chorus, he told him he would go home and see, and if he had got any, would let him have them; and the next day asking how many he wanted, and being told that a hundred would suffice, bade him to take twice as many: on which the poet Horace observes, that a house is but a poor one where the valuables unseen and unthought of do not exceed all those that meet the eye.
Choice Cuts Page 6