by Peter Mayle
One trip is all it will take to make you start juggling your disposable income to pay for further expeditions, until the day comes when you will be ready to enjoy the ultimate refinement: taking your stretch for a walk.
A stroll of two or three blocks on a fine spring evening, the great black beast crawling obediently to heel, the bar stocked and waiting, the chauffeur alert to your beckoning finger, a ripple of envy through less fortunate pedestrians marking your progress—now, there’s a way to work up an appetite for dinner.
3
The Most Costly Passion of All
Unless you happen to live in one of those delightfully backward Latin countries where husbands are encouraged to form liaisons with other women instead of loitering round the house and watching TV, the mistress is forbidden fruit. She is a threat to the fabric of polite society, a wrecker of homes and a walking distraction to men who should be keeping their eye on the corporate ball. She wears black underwear. She takes long, scented baths. She sneers at housework. She is either feared or envied, or both, by fifty percent of the married population of America. She is illicit.
It is this, more than anything else, that keeps the mistress in business, despite high running costs and savage increases in the size of the Ultimate Fine if dalliance is followed by divorce. (A process that our lawyer friend describes as working out who gets custody of the money.) If mistresses were socially acceptable, they would lose much of their appeal; it is the whiff of sin and the fear of discovery that sharpen the pleasure, make parting such sweet sorrow, and enable a man to contemplate his American Express bills with a secret smile.
We shall return to those bills later, but for those of you who are about to invest in a mistress, it should be said that the costs are not just financial. Who can put a price on the emotional wear and tear caused by whispering the wrong name into the wrong ear at the wrong time? The desperate attempts to remove the lingering traces of Chanel No. 5 from a suit that is supposed to have spent the evening at a sales conference? The thrill of horror as someone vaguely known and dimly seen waves at the two of you in a restaurant that nobody goes to? The sprint for the mailbox to collect incriminating evidence before it falls into the wrong hands? The verbal acrobatics required to cover up those deadly slips of the tongue? The marvels of contorted invention that have to be produced to explain why you didn’t call to say you weren’t getting back from the office until 3 a.m.?
In fact, these daily jolts of intrigue and adrenalin are meat and drink to the mistress addict. A woman is just a woman, but a mistress is an exercise in tightrope walking and ingenuity as much as a source of physical excitement. The mind loves the whole naughty business as much as the body. Which is just as well, because in simple cash terms a mistress will cost only marginally less than a forty-five-foot yacht or a promising racehorse.
There are five major areas of expenditure that prospective cads should expect. The amounts allocated to each will vary according to whim of mistress, degree of guilt, logistical complications, and credit limit, so it is difficult to be precise about the bottom-line figure. However, you can be sure that it will be much more than the number you first thought of, divided more or less as follows:
Tokens of affection
“How do I love thee?” Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote. “Let me count the ways.” But that was in the good old pre-inflationary days when you could not only count the ways, but afford to pay for them as well. Not anymore. Modern society offers limitless opportunities to blow your salary, and your mistress will be happy to guide you through them. They range from a modest bouquet of roses that have been reared on a mulch of banknotes to ludicrously expensive scraps of silk masquerading as underwear, and onwards and upwards to Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels and floor-length sable coats, until you arrive, if your passion and resources can run to it, at the most acceptable trinket of all: the love nest. Nothing brings the bloom to a mistress’s cheek like real estate, preferably in a high-rent district and (for discretion’s sake, of course) with her name on the lease.
Remodelling expenses
Men with newly acquired mistresses frequently undergo a transformation almost as startling as the frog-into-handsome-prince routine. They go on diets. They buy dashing ties and bottom-hugging Italian suits. They have their hair styled. They seriously consider trading in the station wagon for something low and aerodynamic and dangerous-looking. They change their no-nonsense aftershave for a musk-based lounge-lizard concoction that retails for three figures an ounce. They leave for the office dressed for romance.
This does not pass unnoticed. Our man may think his explanations are plausible, but he’s kidding himself. His secretary will know almost instantly what’s going on, but at least (assuming he’s not a complete scoundrel) he won’t be sharing a bed with her. His wife is a different matter. She trusts him. She wants to believe he’s working late, and as his excuses become more and more flimsy, he becomes more and more guilty, leading directly to the next expense.
Remorse gifts
Wives of men with mistresses often find themselves on the receiving end of unsolicited and puzzling gifts. Benign neglect suddenly changes to husbandly concern. Health, leisure activities, and relatives are the favourite topics, but it doesn’t matter which of these scams the husband chooses; the end result is the same—an offer of an all-expense-paid trip to somewhere far away.
Thus it happens that the bewildered wife is packed off to the health spa at Eugenie-Les-Bains, to a hang gliding course in the Andes or to visit an aunt in upstate Alaska. Needless to say, the husband is unable to go with her due to his obligations—pressure of work being one, and a long-standing promise to take his sweetie to Palm Springs being the other.
Provisions
Mistresses do not eat at Burger Barn. They do not drink beer. And after a while, even the most extravagant picnics in hotel rooms and apartments lose their novelty. There comes a time when a mistress insists on going out to eat, and this creates its own problems.
A restaurant has to be safe to be suitable. How can you enjoy the touch of a silken knee under the table when you’re half expecting to bump into your next-door neighbours? You are therefore limited to restaurants that the people you know never visit, and for a very good reason: they can’t afford to.
As you look down the menu and blink in disbelief at asparagus that is priced by the inch and at £30 lamb chops, you recall a charming compliment paid to you by your companion: she loves your carefree attitude with money. Fiscal restraint is out of the question, and to make sure you don’t escape for less than £150, here comes that smirking bastard with the wine list.
Experienced wine waiters can recognise a clandestine couple from a distance of twelve feet. The subtler operators will hand you the wine list open at the champagne page. The hustlers will suggest it—not to you, but to her—confident in the knowledge that mistresses can’t resist champagne.
Add to that the Grand Marnier soufflé, the 1929 cognac, and the double-digit tip (generous to the last, and you might want to come back) and you have a bill suitable for framing.
Transportation
Mistresses don’t have cars because they don’t need them. Public transportation is something they once read about in the paper. Your car is too risky and occupies attentions that are better directed elsewhere. Taxis are dirty, driven by garrulous maniacs and generally unromantic. You have no real choice but the limousine.
It all mounts up.
4
The Best First Course
Christmas in Cavaillon, my home town in Provence, is a nightmare for anyone on a diet. Elsewhere in the world, shoppers are growing frantic in their search for the perfect gift, but not here. Here they’re looking, slowly and carefully and with frequent stops for refreshment, for the perfect meal. The question at this time of year is not whether ‘tis better to give than to receive. The question is: What’s for dinner on Christmas Eve?
Men in long rubber aprons stand behind their sidewalk stalls arranging monumental
displays of oysters and scallops and écrevisses. Every family cook in town is collecting the ingredients for the traditional thirteen desserts. Along with the baguettes, half a yard long and still warm from the oven, the bakeries are selling bottles of champagne. Carcasses of deer and wild boar hang outside the butchers’ shops. There are mushrooms from the mountains, more cheeses than you can count, the occasional rich and heady whiff of fresh truffles. And there is foie gras.
I took my place in the line waiting to be served in Monsieur Faubrejon’s shop and enjoyed the view: venerable bottles of calvados shoulder to shoulder with even older bottles of cognac and Armagnac, buckets of cool Normandy cream, sides of smoked salmon, pots of chestnut purée, and jars of caviar. This man does not concern himself with the quick lunch trade or the normal staples of everyday eating; he is there to service discriminating gluttons, or, as we prefer to be called, gourmets.
Monsieur Faubrejon has contacts in the Périgord region who supply him with foie gras and, on his advice, I had ordered well in advance. Foie gras at Christmastime disappears faster than snow in a heat wave.
My turn came, and Monsieur Faubrejon ducked through the door to his storeroom. Behind me, the waiting housewives snorted and jostled with impatience.
“Voila.” He wrapped up a thick glass jar, about the size of a large coffee mug, containing three quarters of a pound of foie gras. The price was 380 francs, or just under £40. Now this, despite the fact that foie gras is to ordinary liver pâté what a racehorse is to a donkey, is a considerable amount to lay out on what is, after all, just a first course. Has the world gone mad? Why is it so expensive? Why does it exist at all?
To give credit where it is due, we must go back more than 2,000 years to the Romans, who in those days were the undisputed gourmet champions of Europe. They discovered that by force-feeding a goose with figs, they were able to effect a delicious transformation in the taste and texture of the goose’s liver, as well as its dimensions. If enough figs were thrust down the poor creature’s gullet, the liver would expand to three or four times its normal size, developing a flavour so rich and yet so delicate that Epicurus himself would have gone weak at the knees with pleasure.
The French have never been slow to recognize a good thing when they eat it, and they adopted the idea with enormous enthusiasm, substituting maize for figs and expanding their liver-fattening operations to include ducks as well as geese. Foie gras is now generally considered to be a French delicacy, although other countries do produce it.
But the richest, smoothest and best foie gras comes from two areas in France: Gascony in the southwest and Alsace in the northeast, and the reason it costs so much can be understood when you think of the time the producers put in and the skill (they would undoubtedly call it an art) involved in creating the perfect over-developed liver.
The original owner of the liver, whether a goose or a duck, has to be fattened to maturity by hand, coaxed into overeating and generally treated like a heavyweight in serious training so that it reaches its peak around October or November. By this time, the liver will weigh several pounds. It will vary in colour from pale pink-ivory to a deep yellow, and it will be so rich that if it’s not correctly cooked it will dissolve into liquid fat while the cook dissolves into tears. Even if it’s heated only a few moments at above ninety degrees centigrade, all is lost, the foie gras just melts away.
Here in France, if you have the contacts and the necessary reckless optimism, you can buy raw foie gras and cook it yourself. The raw price is lower, and you can spend the difference on truffles, which you cut into slivers and add to the liver with a glass of cognac. I tried it once. It was a nerve-racking experience, rather like cooking money, but I had beginner’s luck, and it tasted wonderful.
Outside France, the chances of being offered raw foie gras are practically nonexistent, and so it will come to you, already prepared, in long cans or in glass preserving jars, sometimes plain and sometimes studded with black nuggets of truffle. But be warned. Not all of it will be as French as the packaging would have you believe. Communist entrepreneurs have infiltrated the fattened-liver business, and foie gras has been slipping through the Iron Curtain to be canned and labelled in France. To be sure of getting the right stuff, check the label; if it’s a little vague about the country of origin, it’s possible that the contents, while still good, won’t be French.
When you are sufficiently recovered from the shock of the price (a glass of champagne always helps to settle the nerves), you can decide how you are going to eat your fois gras. Whether you choose goose or duck is a matter of personal preference. Duck is slightly less expensive and slightly less rich, although our local connoisseur insists that it has more finesse. I think he means he can eat more of it without feeling ill.
For fois gras purists, there is only one approved method of serving and eating, which is as follows. Put the entire block of foie gras within easy reach in front of your plate. Next to it should be a glass of hot water for your knife; a warm blade makes a cleaner cut when you’re slicing. Next to that, some thin pieces of dry toast, to provide transport to the mouth and a contrast in texture. And, finally, you will need an understanding dinner companion who will not interfere with the magic of the moment by talking. Conversation can come later, when your mouth has nothing better to do, but for those all too few minutes that it takes to eat what good luck and a good duck have put before you, quiet concentration adds to the pleasure. The only totally reliable way of silencing a roomful of Frenchmen is to serve them foie gras. The hush is instant.
For those like myself who are not quite so strict about how they take their foie gras, it is a versatile delicacy, and any reasonable cook can use it to make simple dishes taste good enough to render a mother-in-law temporarily speechless with admiration. Cut into cubes and warmed, it can elevate a plate of spaghetti into pasta ecstasy. With rice, you have risotto deluxe. With crisp fried potato slices, with cabbage, with artichoke bottoms, with scrambled eggs, tucked into the middle of a baked potato—with any fairly bland base, a little foie gras is more than worth its weight in flavour.
My own favourite is the warm salad, which I could happily eat two or three times a week until forced to stop by death or bankruptcy. To make it, prepare a green salad with an unobtrusive dressing: nothing fancy, just olive oil and the minimum of wine vinegar. Thinly slice your foie gras, and heat it in a sauté pan that has been brushed with clarified butter. Watch it like a hawk. When you see the first signs of liquid fat, add the foie gras and the fat to the salad and that rich and habit-forming juice are enough to make a man turn his face away forever from Thousand Island dressing.
We come now to a question that is discussed in French cafés almost as often and as dogmatically as sports or politics or the true age of Brigitte Bardot, and that is the perfect liquid accompaniment. There is no single universally approved wine to drink with foie gras. If you’re in Alsace, you will be given the local Riesling, in Gascony a sweet sauternes. Some people swear by champagne, or one of those fat white burgundies. There is a small but noisy lobby in favour of a Côte Rôtie from the Rhône, but the last and most expensive word comes from my friend the local connoisseur.
He is a man whose liver must be in the same condition as that of a well-stuffed goose, having spent his entire adult life trying to strain the limits of self-indulgence to bursting point. He eats like two men and drinks like three, on the assumption that heaven may be as health conscious as California and so one had better make the most of being on earth. When I asked him what he would drink with foie gras, he didn’t even pause to think.
“A bottle of Château d’Yquem,” he said, “preferably a 1955 or a 1958. If you can find it, I shall be pleased to come and help you deal with it.”
Fortunately, I didn’t find it. I did, however, find that any Château d’Yquem that is ready for drinking will cost at least £60 a bottle, so I am now looking for venture capital to invest in a case or two to see if my friend is right. When I have completed my resea
rch, I shall report back. Bon appétit and Merry Christmas.
5
I’ll Be Suing You
It is normally my pleasant duty to report on the little extravagances that make life worth living and a dollar worth earning—the civilised rewards available to anyone with a healthy streak of self-indulgence and a good credit rating. This month, however, we shall be looking at one expensive habit—alas, becoming more widespread every day—that offers no enjoyment of any kind to the millions of poor wretches who are forced to pay for it. In theory, it is the pursuit of justice. In practice, it consists of handing over large sums of money to the kind of people you wouldn’t want to meet in your neighbourhood bar.
There is something horribly wrong with a world in which there are more lawyers than good chefs, and yet every year the law schools unleash a further plague of them, letting them loose on the streets to jabber about malpractice, malfeasance, alimony, palimony, torts, and suits and God knows what else, causing dread and apprehension in the hearts of simple, honest citizens like you and me. Indeed, there are several office buildings in mid-town Manhattan (lawyers have a liking for choice real estate) where you risk an injunction merely by stepping on someone’s foot in a crowded elevator. The foot turns out to be attached to a pillar of the legal profession, and before you know it you’re facing charges of attempted grievous bodily harm as defined in and pursuant to the case of Schulz v. Donoghue, 1923.