by Craig Boreth
While the game connoisseur would demand that woodcock be prepared without being drawn (with the intestines still in the cavity), it may be difficult to find woodcock these days that are not drawn. Frederic and Catherine no doubt enjoy their birds accompanied with a sauce flavored with the bird’s intestines mixed with foie gras. The following recipe assumes that your birds have been drawn. If you are unable to find woodcock, you may substitute another dark-meat game bird, such as hazel grouse or snipe (2 snipes for each woodcock).
4 SERVINGS
4 woodcocks
½ lemon, cut into 4 wedges
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
8 slices bacon
4 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon Dijonstyle mustard
¼ cup Armagnac (or other fine brandy)
Preheat the oven to 400° F.
Rub the inside of each bird with a piece of lemon and season inside with a pinch of salt, and outside with a pinch of salt and pepper. Set aside.
Place the bacon in a large skillet and cook over medium heat. When the bacon is browned and plenty of fat is rendered, remove the bacon from the pan and set aside. Add the butter to the skillet and heat until it begins to foam. Truss the legs of the birds, place in the skillet, and brown on all sides, 5 to 8 minutes. Remove the skillet from the heat and transfer the birds to a roasting pan. Roast the birds for 10 to 15 minutes, basting frequently with the bacon fat. The birds are done when the juices run clear where the leg meets the body when the skin is cut.
Transfer the birds to a plate and remove the trussing. Place the skillet on the stove over medium heat. Stir the mustard into the leftover juices in the skillet. Place the birds and bacon back into the skillet and add the Armagnac. Heat briefly and ignite the brandy on the edge of the skillet. Use care doing so and keep your face a safe distance from the skillet. When the flames die, transfer the birds and bacon to a warm serving platter. Pour the juices from the skillet over the birds and serve.
Soufflé Potatoes
The accidental invention of this dish dates back to the inaugural run of the first French railway in 1837 from Paris to Saint-Germain. The menu for the celebratory banquet included the requisite fillet of steak and fried potatoes. Setting a foreboding precedent, the official train carrying King Louis-Philippe and his queen was, of course, delayed. The cook therefore removed his frying potatoes from the oil and let them cool. When the train finally arrived, the chef courageously replaced the potatoes in the hot oil, not knowing what gastronomic aberration might result. What did result were these delicate and puffy chips, which have remained a dinnertime treat ever since.7
2 SERVINGS
2 cups vegetable oil, or enough to deep-fry
2 large potatoes
Salt
Pour the oil into an 8- or 9-inch skillet or into a deep fryer and heat over medium-high heat. Peel the potatoes, then wash and pat dry. Cut the potatoes into slices, just less than ¼ inch thick. Wash and dry the slices. When the oil has warmed to approximately 300° F (150° C), place the potatoes in the oil. This will take a few batches. When the slices float to the surface, remove them and drain on paper towels or on a brown paper bag. Allow the slices to cool completely.
When the potatoes have cooled, reheat the oil to 350° F (180° C). Return the potatoes to the oil and fry until they are puffed up and lightly browned. Drain the potatoes, sprinkle with salt, and serve on a warm platter.
Purée de Marron (Chestnut Purée)
4 TO 6 SERVINGS
1 pound chestnuts, unshelled
¼ rib celery
1½–2 cups chicken stock
2 tablespoons butter
¼ cup heavy cream
Freshly ground white pepper
Pinch of salt, depending on saltiness of stock (optional)
To shell the chestnuts, cut a groove about inch deep on the rounded side of the shells. Drop chestnuts into a pot of boiling water. Return water to boil and cook for about 5 minutes. Remove from heat. Take a few nuts at a time and remove the shells and the skins. If the nuts don’t peel easily, return them to the pot and soak for a bit longer.
In a medium saucepan, combine the peeled chestnuts, celery, and chicken stock just to cover. More stock may be necessary if chestnuts are dry. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer until stock is absorbed and chestnuts are completely tender, 30 to 40 minutes. Put the mixture through a food mill, mash with a fork, or purée in a food processor. Transfer to a clean saucepan. Add the butter and stir until thoroughly mixed. Place the pan over medium heat and add the cream, pepper, and salt. Stirring constantly, bring the purée to a boil. Add more cream or milk to obtain desired consistency.
Zabaglione
4 SERVINGS
4 egg yolks
1 egg white
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup dry white wine
½ cup kümmel (or kirsch)
In the top part of a double boiler, combine the egg yolks, egg white, and sugar. Whisk until thickened and light yellow. In the bottom of the double boiler, bring a few inches of water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Place the top of the boiler over the water and continue whisking until foamy. Slowly add wine and liqueur. Whisk until the mixture is foamy and bubbling and begins to stick to the whisk. Remove from the heat. Serve immediately in dessert glasses.
Note: It is essential to continue whisking while the mixture is over the heat. If the mixture sticks to the pan or the yolks begin to coagulate, remove immediately from the heat and whisk vigorously. Zabaglione must be thick and frothy.
Having brought Frederic and Catherine safely along the shores of Lake Maggiore to Switzerland—she is pregnant and he has escaped from the war—Hemingway was left alone to toil with the ending of his novel. During the novel’s closing drama, Catherine struggles in labor all day long, as Frederic is sent away from the hospital three times to eat. These attempts at meals stand in stark contrast to the idyllic splendor of their feast together in Milan. Hemingway’s taste for using food to illuminate the tenor of a scene, its fertile passion or its hollow fear, is exemplified by the final tragic passages of A Farewell to Arms.
BREAK FAST
Catherine goes into labor in the darkness of early morning. At the hospital, she sends Frederic away to have breakfast. As the light of day slowly emerges, he goes to a cafe to eat:
I walked down the empty street to the cafe. There was a light in the window. I went in and stood at the zinc bar and an old man served me a glass of white wine and a brioche. The brioche was yesterday’s. I dipped it in the wine and then drank a glass of coffee.8
Brioche
There is considerable variety to this traditional French pastry made from yeast dough augmented with eggs and butter. The most common forms are the Parisienne and the Nanterre. The Parisienne, or tête, consists of a smaller ball of dough placed atop a larger one in a fluted mold. The Nanterre is loafshaped, made by placing large balls of dough in a loaf pan, creating a knobby effect. This recipe, adapted from Linda Dannenberg’s book Paris Boulangerie-Pâtisserie makes two marvelous loaves of brioche or two large Parisiennes. The Parisiennes (even yesterday’s) are fine for Frederic’s breakfast, while the Nanterres will accommodate the red raspberry preserve that David and Catherine Bourne spread on their brioche in the opening pages of The Garden of Eden.
2 LARGE PARISIENNES
2 tablespoons lukewarm water
2 tablespoons dry yeast
4 cups all-purpose flour
¾ cup milk
2 large eggs
1½ teaspoons vanilla sugar, or 1½ teaspoon sugar and ¾ teaspoon vanilla extract
1½ teaspoons salt
½ cup unsalted butter, softened
¼ cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar
For the glaze
1 large egg, well beaten
1½ tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Pour the water into a small glass, sprinkle on the yeast, and set aside for about 10 minutes. At that time, place the
flour in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a dough hook or on a flat work surface.
In a small saucepan, slowly heat the milk until lukewarm.
Form a well in the middle of the flour and pour in the yeast, milk, eggs, vanilla sugar, and salt. Mix the dough together on low speed, or with your fingers, until smooth.
In a separate bowl, combine the butter and sugar and stir until pale and smooth. If you have been working by hand, move the dough to a large buttered mixing bowl. Add the butter-sugar mixture, very little at a time, pinching the dough together and stretching the dough up from the bottom of the bowl with each addition. When all of the butter and sugar is incorporated, the dough should be sticky and elastic. Form the dough into a ball. Cover the bowl with a damp towel and let dough rise for about 2 hours, or until doubled in size. At that time, punch the dough down, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight.
The next day, remove the dough from the refrigerator and let stand for 1 hour. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface.
For Parisiennes, divide the dough in two. Cut one-third off each half of the dough. Quickly form the larger pieces into balls and drop into large, buttered brioche molds. Form the smaller pieces into pear-shaped balls. Make a small indentation in the center of the larger balls and place the smaller balls on top, pointed side down, pinching around the edges to seal the seam between the pieces. Cover and let rise another 2 hours, or until doubled in size. Preheat the oven to 350° F. Using wet scissors, make some small incisions in the base of the dough from the edges toward the crown. Lightly brush the dough with the beaten egg. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or until golden brown. Brush the brioche with the melted butter and let cool on a wire rack.
LUNCH
After breakfast, Frederic walks back to the hospital, stopping to root through a trash can to find something for a scavenging dog, but finds nothing but a gravelike pile of coffee grounds and dead flowers. At the hospital, Catherine has been moved to the delivery room and remains in labor into the early afternoon. At two o’clock, Frederick again leaves the hospital and returns to the same cafe for lunch:
At two o’clock I went out and had lunch. There were a few men in the cafe sitting with coffee and glasses of kirsch or marc on the tables. I sat down at the table. “Can I eat?” I asked the waiter.
“It is past time for lunch.”
“Isn’t there anything for all hours?”
“You can have choucroute.”
“Give me choucroute and beer.”
“A demi or a bock?”
“A light demi.”
The waiter brought a dish of sauerkraut with a slice of ham over the top and a sausage buried in the hot wine-soaked cabbage. I ate it and drank the beer.9
Choucroute Garni (Garnished Sauerkraut)
4 SERVINGS
4 cups fresh sauerkraut, or 1 2-pound can
8 slices lean smoked bacon
12 juniper berries
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
Dash of salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 medium onion
1 whole clove
1 cup water
2 cups dry white wine, such as Riesling or other Alsatian wine
4 garlic sausages, or other high-quality sausage
2 slices cooked smoked ham
Preheat the oven to 325° F
Strain and rinse the sauerkraut thoroughly with cold water. Place the bacon slices in a large heavy casserole. Cook over medium heat until a film of fat covers the bottom. Add half the sauerkraut. Slightly crush the juniper berries in a mortar and mix together with the caraway seeds, salt, and pepper, then add the mixture to the sauerkraut. Stick the onion with the clove and place it in the middle of the casserole. Add the remaining sauerkraut. Pour the water and wine over the sauerkraut. Cover the casserole and bake for 1½ hours.
Remove the casserole from the oven and, if the sauerkraut is too dry, add a little more water. Bury the sausages in the sauerkraut and place the slices of ham on top. Cover and bake for another 30 minutes.
Serve with large glasses of cold beer. Frederic orders a “demi,” which is a half-liter glass.
DINNER
As the tragedy of Catherine’s delivery unfolds, Frederic is sent to the cafe once again. This time it is brightly lit and crowded inside. Dinner, as with the two previous meals, consists of leftovers. This final meal at the cafe near the hospital, with the strange taste of eggs and beer, and the unfriendly clientele, sets the tone for Frederic’s hurried return to Catherine. “Suddenly I knew I had to get back.”10 Hemingway has taken us through this ordeal, a day on the clock but the suffering of a lifetime, and engaged us through the otherwise benign act of eating. As Linda Underhill and Jeanne Nakjavani wrote in “Food for Fiction”:
As a result of this kind of specific detail, food and drink in Hemingway’s fiction become, at moments of crisis in the story, a code to signify the mood, lending truth to the setting, and representing adventure.11
Across the River and into the Trees
Other than a few brief visits in the 1920s, Hemingway would not return to Italy until 1948. He had seen three more wars firsthand, and the initial romance of that first war seemed immeasurably distant. When he returned to the location of his wounding in 1922, newly married and living in Paris, he learned a hard lesson: “Chasing yesterdays is a bum show,” he wrote in the Toronto Daily Star, “and if you want to prove it, go back to your old front.”12 And even with this knowledge and nearly 50 years old, he bent down to bury a 1,000-lire note in a small hole beside the very crater where he was first struck down.
Hemingway returned to Italy a celebrity, the single bestselling author in Italy since World War II. He would no longer be staying in hotels across from train stations without any luggage, but at the Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice and Locando Cipriani in Torcello, traveling with 14 pieces of luggage. He was the aging veteran of his war and his art, looking in mirrors and denying the truth. His book began as a story about duck hunting, but soon it too began chasing yesterdays.
Ernest arrived in Genoa in the fall of 1948, at the same port from which he had limped home, an injured and changed young man, in 1918. Hemingway spent the next few months exploring the northern Italian countryside, visiting his old front and enjoying his star status in “the magical city of Venice.”13 In December, on a hunting trip, Ernest met Adriana Ivancich, an 18-year-old Italian beauty descended from a long line of aristocratic Venetians. It was not long before Ernest was calling her “daughter.” She was the same age as Hemingway when he was wounded by the riverbank in Fossalta.
Throughout this trip to Italy, Hemingway was looking back over 30 years. He saw his own experiences of the war mingle with those he created in A Farewell to Arms, and he saw Adriana, the figure of beauty and youth, enticingly close. As Carlos Baker wrote of this experience, the “past and present, the imagination and the reality, contended within him for mastery.”14 The only way he could wrest control again was to write. In the early spring of 1949, Hemingway began Across the River and into the Trees, the story of an old, embittered military man and his love for a very young, very beautiful Venetian countess.
Colonel Richard Cantwell, a composite of real-life military men, is primarily as Hemingway imagined himself had he become a professional warrior rather than a writer. Renata, the countess, is clearly based on Adriana. The details of their relationship, like Frederic and Catherine’s, was a wishful fiction. The essence was true—the battle-weary veteran seeking to recapture his youth in the eyes and heart of a beautiful young woman. Ernest was well aware that the name Renata—which he had taken from role model Gabriele d’Annunzio’s book Notturno15—translated as “reborn.”
The Colonel’s battles are elsewhere as he and Renata share Venice together. Whether hunting near Torcello in the Venetian Lagoon, dining at the Gritti Palace Hotel, or drinking martinis at Harry’s Bar, Hemingway’s story is a “prose poem essentially devoid of action but rich in meditative discourse … on the c
ourage and equanimity, toughness and resilience, the interconnectedness and distance of youth and old age.”16 As we saw when the war raged in A Farewell to Arms, the food and drink that Cantwell and Renata share reflect their indulgent passion. They feast, and Venice is alive.
HARRY’S BAR
Then he was pulling open the door of Harry’s bar and was inside and he had made it again, and was at home.17
Guiseppe Cipriani began his career at age 14 in a pastry shop in Verona. Like Hemingway, he enthusiastically went to war in 1918. Fortunately for Guiseppe, the armistice was signed and the fighting stopped on the eve of his departure for the front lines. Upon his return he began working as a waiter, eventually settling in Venice. He recognized in himself the essential traits of a restaurateur: a passion for food, a love of people, and a desire to bring the two together to create a truly enjoyable dining experience.
In 1927, Guiseppe became the barman at the Hotel Europa-Britannia because the owner recognized that he “had a way with the customers.”18 The following summer he met an American student named Harry Pickering, who came to Italy with his aunt to cure his alcoholism but ended up spending most of his time in the Europa bar. When Harry’s money ran out, Guiseppe lent him 10,000 lire. Harry promptly left. He returned months later, carrying Guiseppe’s money and another 40,000 lire with which they could open a bar together. On May 13, 1931, they opened Harry’s Bar. For the complete story of this legendary Venice landmark, read Arrigo Cipriani’s marvelous book, Harry’s Bar (Arcade, 1996).
Hemingway discovered Guiseppe Cipriani’s bar and restaurant in 1949 and quickly became its most famous regular customer. He and Cipriani became fast friends, and Guiseppe’s son, Arrigo, who now runs Harry’s, remembers that Heming-way was the first customer with whom his father drank.
As much as Ernest enjoyed the interior of Harry’s (see The Montgomery, page 189), he loved the excellent duck hunting near the island of Torcello in the lagoon. Hemingway resided at the Cipriani’s guesthouse on the island and took several wintertime hunting trips to the surrounding marshes and canals. In 1935, he had written an article for Esquire magazine that explained his passion for hunting these beautiful and spirited birds. The behavior and the calls of some seemed designed to aid the hunter, while he found that those that were harder to hear were better to eat: