White Truffles in Winter

by N. M. Kelby

  For example, if your brother-in-law is an expert fisherman and gives you more sole than you can sell each week, then you should create a dish such as Filets de Soles Rachel. Named after the well-known Swiss-born tragedienne, this dish has been a remarkable success, a dish that will stand the test of time. It is the most simple of preparations. Place one tablespoon of fish forcemeat—a combination of raw chopped fish, herbs and stale bread mixed with cream and egg—and four slices of truffles on a fillet. Fold. Poach. Drape with white wine sauce. Garnish with one tablespoon each of finely chopped truffles and asparagus tips. Serve.

  Mademoiselle Rachel has such a triumphant story. She came from being a child singing in the streets of Paris to being the Divine Sarah of her day. She was heroic and so a waiter can expound upon her story so elegantly, plates will fly out the kitchen.

  This is crucial. No matter how a plate came to be named, the end result is that it must sell.

  This is why there are hundreds of dishes named after Sarah Bernhardt. In fact, if you add pureed foie gras to the Rachel then you have Filets de Soles Sarah Bernhardt, a convenience which, on a slow night, allows the waiter to paint a long and poetic story about the two actresses and their mutual love of sole and how that created a bond between them. This, of course, is not true. It is unclear if they ever met. No matter. You must do what you need to do. Sole is not a fish that keeps well.

  Impossible stories—they are the key to all good restaurants.

  “How is the sole tonight?”

  “Glorious as Mademoiselle Rachel herself was. Divine as Bernhardt. Just taken from the last boat moments ago.”

  It could be frozen; it makes no difference. The diner will think it fresh, glorious. He pays for the story. If the story is told well, with imagination and conviction and the right amount of ego and embroidery, then it is true enough. And something that is true enough is all anyone can ever ask for.

  When naming a dish after someone your goal should be to create an opportunity for a story that would fill the American showman Phineas Barnum with professional envy. He was an unparalleled promoter, unrepentant liar and public dreamer—a man with a chef’s heart.

  However, one must understand that there are serious considerations in this grave undertaking.

  First, not everyone is pleased by having a dish named after them. Carpaccio was given the name after the painter Vittore Carpaccio, because of a striking similarity of the color of the thinly sliced raw beef to the red paint he was known for. By the time the dish was named he was dead, so it made no difference.

  On the other hand, Crêpes Suzette was actually an accident, and then an international incident. Its creation is claimed by a then-fourteen-year-old assistant waiter, Henri Charpentier, who was preparing a dessert for King Edward, who at the time was the Prince of Wales, and his companion du jour, Suzette. The waiter wrote in his memoir, Life à la Henri, “It was quite by accident as I worked in front of a chafing dish that the cordials caught fire. I thought it was ruined. The Prince and his friends were waiting. How could I begin all over? I tasted it. It was, I thought, the most delicious melody of sweet flavors I had ever tasted . . . ”

  Nonsense.

  He then claims that he at that very moment decided to name the dish after the Prince, which given the feminine nature of crêpes would have been indiscreet, at best. The boy would have been fired on the spot. But he goes on to turn the story in his favor.

  “ ‘Will you,’ said His Majesty, ‘change it to Crêpes Suzette’? Thus was born and baptized this confection, one taste of which, I really believe, would reform a cannibal into a civilized gentleman. The next day I received a present from the Prince, a jeweled ring, a panama hat and a cane.”

  It is a very nice story, is it not? I especially like the promise that it will “reform a cannibal into a civilized gentleman.” Such flourish. Can you not hear this story being told and retold by waiters all across the world? Still, I doubt it is true. The incident happened in 1895 at Café de Paris, right here in Monte Carlo. I know from experience that it is not the type of establishment where an assistant waiter serves a prince.

  It makes no matter. This dish will probably not outlive Suzette or me.

  Ingredients are always crucial. While Dear Bertie loved the crêpes, his association with such a feminine creation would have been inappropriate. You can also go wrong if your ingredients are too humble. For example, King George V loved the American Philadelphia brand cream cheese, but you cannot create a dish of cream cheese in honor of a king. It would be rude. So change the name. Say the cheese came from a remote island off the coast of Iceland—no one travels there or cares to. It will make it seem quite exotic.

  You would be surprised at how many names you can give such a lowly ingredient and when properly named how much you can charge for it.

  The basis of our profession is two parts skill, one part ingredient and one part legerdemain, the “lightness of hand.” The English call it “sleight of hand.” If you do not understand that, you have no place in the kitchen.

  I was once asked what I thought of the suicide of François Vatel, who impaled himself on his sword because a shipment of sole did not arrive in time for a banquet in honor of Louis XIV at Château de Chantilly. There were reported to be two thousand hungry guests. It was a problem. Yes. And yet, the moment of his defeat was also the moment of his greatest triumph. It was on that very same night that he created crème chantilly, which is now used in éclairs, cream puffs and pastry all over the world. Defeat, and yet triumph. And yet he killed himself.

  And so what can a reasonable person think about such a sinful and untidy act?

  One can only come to the conclusion that Vatel was not such a great chef. He had no understanding of the lightness of hand. I, however, am a master of legerdemain. No fish? That is not a problem. I have taken the tender white meat of chickens—very young chickens—and made fillet of sole with it on numerous occasions.

  It is simple. You crush their flesh with a pestle, add breadcrumbs, fresh cream, egg white and salt. Pass it through a fine sieve, shape into convincing fillets, dip in beaten egg, coat with breadcrumbs, sauté until brown in clarified butter, serve with anchovy butter spiced with paprika and a garnish of a single truffle slice, more butter and chicken fat. Filets de Soles Monseigneur. No one ever knew the difference.

  And so, if you can take the Philadelphia cream cheese and call it something else, let us say, for example, “fromage frais,” “spécialité fromagère,” “fromage à la crème” and say that it comes from a French patriot on a tiny family farm off the coast of Iceland who sings “La Marseillaise” every morning to his cows as he milks them—“Ye sons of France, awake to glory!”—how can they resist?

  Another very good example is “Jésus de Lyon” (or “de Morteau” in Franche-Comté), a sausage cured in a beef bung cap that gives it a pear shape that is alleged to resemble baby Jesus. Out of respect for the name of Christ, Jésus de Morteau is spelled Jésu by Mortuaciens and generally smoked. Jesus is quite a popular fellow with my people and has many small sausages named after him in the Basque and Savoy regions. However, since Christ was born a Jew in a pig-less culinary culture, I doubt very much if he would approve this bounty of saucissons and yet, it matters not. They fly off the shelves, especially at Easter.

  Guilt does wonders for the appetite.

  WHEN THEY WERE FIRST MARRIED, DELPHINE HAD taken to telling strangers that her sons were actually princes. It was understandable. She, Escoffier, and their boys, Paul and Daniel, traveled to Switzerland in the summer and back to Monte Carlo for winter season. She met the same mothers and their children every year, but they were families of rank and privilege. When they asked, she had to tell them something. “My husband’s the cook,” would not do.

  In the summer, at the Hôtel National in Lucerne, a castle set against the lush and ancient lake, the young boys and thei
r mother would spend the day swimming or hiking in the wildflower mountains, or shopping in the marketplace alongside movie stars and kings. They were tan and fat.

  At night, when the boys were asleep, Escoffier would bring her “gifts,” which they would eat together on the tiny balcony overlooking the moonlit lake. Each plate was an intricate jewel—Filets de soles cardinal, sole and whiting mousse stuffed into crayfish shells and sauced with cream, cognac and crayfish tails, or Noisettes d’Agneau, tournedos of lamb on artichoke bottoms napped with a Madeira-scented béchamel. They would eat and plan books they never had time to write together and vacations they never seemed to be able to take.

  In the winter, back in Monte Carlo, in the early morning, Escoffier would kiss his sleeping family, make a pot of strong coffee, and walk from La Villa Fernand to his offices at the Grand Hôtel to decide what Queen Victoria would have for dinner, and later, after the boys were in bed and the hotel dining room was closed, he would meet Delphine for drinks in the casino, and sometimes in a private room with Prince Edward himself.

  It was not the life of a cook.

  And so London was unexpected.

  “Why can’t you just go for the summer season?”

  “Ritz says we shall be ambassadors for France.”

  “We shall be miserable.”

  “Ritz is brilliant.”

  “Ritz is deranged; an obsessive perfectionist. He will be miserable, too. London is filled with the English.”

  “But you love the Queen. And the Prince.”

  “Those two are the least English of the lot.”

  “Echenard has agreed to join us.”

  “He’s leaving Monte Carlo, and the Grand, with you?”

  “He will be maître d’hôtel for us. He knows London.”

  “Then he cannot be happy.”

  “If you love me, you will come.”

  “If you love me, you will not go.”

  But Escoffier had no choice. There had never been a hotel like The Savoy before. Owned by producer Richard D’Oyly Carte, and built though the success of the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership, particularly The Mikado, it was the most modern building in the world.

  The previous top hotel in London was entirely lit by gaslight and offered only four communal bathrooms for five hundred guestrooms and none for their restaurant at all. The Savoy, however, offered electric lights, telephones and private bathrooms lavishly appointed in marble with hot and cold running water.

  The food, however, was horrible, and so no one cared. The Savoy was on the brink of bankruptcy when Ritz was given full control. His first act was to fire most of the staff—a detail he forgot to share with Escoffier.

  The chef arrived in London on a Sunday. “Drive to the Strand entrance, but do not venture to travel into the courtyard, the hill alongside is very steep,” he told the cabman the directions that Ritz had given him, but unfortunately the man did not speak French and was traveling too fast. His horse slid the last ten yards. Escoffier hit his head. His bags tumbled into the courtyard. The driver demanded a sizeable tip.

  It was not an auspicious start.

  The day was dark and very damp. The cold made Escoffier’s bones ache. The bump on his head was throbbing. He had brought too many bags with him. There were no doormen waiting as one would expect. The hotel seemed deserted. Ritz knew when he was to arrive, had promised to meet him, but was nowhere to be found. However, Monsieur Echenard was sitting in the lobby looking pale.

  “A rather unpleasant situation has unfolded,” he said.

  When Escoffier entered his new kitchen, the most modern kitchen in the world—it had electricity, its own ice room, windows to let in fresh air and light and hot and cold running water—it was in ruins. The previous manager and his staff were not pleased with their firing. Every window was shattered; crows picked their way through quail’s eggs and duck liver; black starlings hissed and hummed, drunk on rotted cherries and overripe plums. Dogs ran wild as wolves chewing their way through the chicken cages, the long-dead birds uncaring.

  Every glass, plate and bowl had been broken. The stoves had been dismantled and piled in a heap. The doors of the ovens were missing. Milk and cream covered the floors. Lobsters and langoustines were left to die in heaps of decaying fish. Sides of beef and racks of veal were charred, left in the ashes of coke fires, but no wood or coal was anywhere to be found. Not even a grain of salt remained.

  “It’s Sunday,” Echenard said. “All the stores in England are closed. Impossible to buy a thing.”

  They were scheduled to open for breakfast the next morning.

  “And Ritz?”

  “He says he has all the confidence in the world in you. He and his wife are upstairs settling in.”

  Escoffier and Echenard and the handful of staff who had remained worked through the night. Louis Peyre, an old friend who ran kitchens for the Charing Cross Hotel, was roused from his sickbed and cheerfully supplied enough basic food and cookware so The Savoy could reopen the next day.

  “The English are a very good people,” Escoffier later wrote Delphine. “Welcoming.”

  She did not respond.

  The next morning, a traditional English breakfast, miraculously, was served. It was the full “fry-up” with poached eggs, crisp browned potatoes, blood pudding, sausage, pink bacon, baked beans, mushrooms and broiled tomatoes. There was fried bread served with lemon curd and blackberry preserves. The juice was freshly squeezed from Spanish blood oranges.

  It was lovely, though not exactly the breakfast that Escoffier had in mind. There were no croissants or brioches. No cheese. The only fruit was juice. Café au lait was not offered, but tea and milk were served. Still, it was a solid success although he knew that if The Savoy was to win over the elite of English society, he couldn’t give them what they could eat in Charing Cross.

  That first morning, Escoffier walked through the dining room stopping at the tables that Echenard said he needed to, kissing hands and nodding. He spoke no English, although people often spoke to him, and so he replied in French and even though they did not understand a word he said they found him to be witty.

  Prix-fixe, he thought.

  At the Grand Hôtel, he and Echenard had realized that their English clients didn’t speak French well enough to order without assistance. Some were even intimidated. But walking through the dining room that first morning, Escoffier knew that if he offered a fixed price menu that contained most of the items à la carte, he could feel free to create dining experiences that the English would embrace. And didn’t need to pronounce.

  “Each menu will be a new adventure,” he told Echenard—and it was.

  With wall panels painted by Whistler, rose silk–shaded chandeliers and diners starched and scented, elegant in their formal clothes, Escoffier found himself profoundly inspired. He spent hours crafting dish after dish, polishing them like jewels: Filets de sole Coquelin, Homard aux feux eternels, Volaille à la Derby, Chaud-Froid Jeannette, named after the North Pole expedition ship Jeannette, and for the Prince of Wales, Dear Bertie, Cuisses de Nymphe Aurore, less poetically known as frogs’ legs (although cuisses is, in fact, the word for thighs. Escoffier was often quick to point out that Nymphe Aurore did not mean frog, either).

  When a white-tied waiter bearing a silver-domed plate presented Tournedos Rossini, a perfect filet mignon topped with a slice of pâté de foie gras draped with Périgueux sauce made from Maderia and truffles, to Rossini, its namesake, the famed Italian composer, it made every newspaper in the world. Elegant and corpulent, guided by the love of food, not music, Rossini was quoted as saying, “I know of no more admirable occupation than eating. Appetite is for the stomach what love is for the heart,” and then made his way through twenty plates of the dish. Suddenly there were barely enough cattle in Scotland to fill the public’s need.

  �
�Fantasy certainly sells,” Escoffier said.

  Nothing proved to be impossible at The Savoy. A patron’s desire for dinner in a Japanese garden was made possible by completely transplanting the courtyard. For a green and white banquet, fruit trees, still bearing fruit, were trimmed to become tables with glass tops and each chair was a softly sculpted bush. And when a millionaire decided that he wanted to dine in Venice, the gardens were flooded, and diners were set along an improvised canal so that the maestro Caruso could serenade from a gondola.

  The kitchen was massive with a brigade of fifty men. Although Escoffier refused to learn English, most spoke no French, and so together they built a language on gesture, intuition and culinary skill with bits of French, English, Polish, Italian and Chinese thrown into the mix.

  The Savoy quickly became a rousing success and yet every night Escoffier found himself alone.

  “Please,” he wrote Delphine. At first he tried to visit Monte Carlo at least once a month, but it was difficult to get away.

  “She will come around,” Ritz told him. But she did not. They began to argue every visit.

  “The very thought of London makes me ill,” she said. “Every morning I rise and cannot eat, or drink.”

  “How can a city make a person ill?”

  “There is no sea. The people are pasty.”

  “The people are kind. The city is exciting.”

  “There are no taxes in Monte Carlo. You cannot lose your residency.”

  “Two houses are too expensive to maintain.”

  After a time, Escoffier began to wonder if his wife didn’t join him because of Sarah. The actress spent a great deal of time in London. It would be awkward for the two to meet. Delphine knew that he and Sarah had been lovers and did not seem pleased that they had remained close through the years. In fact, when he defended Sarah against accusations of immorality, it truly seemed to annoy his wife.