The Perfect Meal

by John Baxter

  We walked between the ponds in the hot sun, sweating, longing to join the sturgeon in the cool water that gushed, purified, from the river just beyond the trees. Their numbers were uncountable: scores in each pond, the size of big salmon, gliding and slithering. Young men patrolled, scooping pellets from large bins and scattering them across the water.

  Facts flowed from the manager like water from the river. These fish were young, these older; these were males, so of no use except for their meat (very tasty; marinated in yogurt, then barbecued—some Russian visitors had cooked it for him). These were females, though two years away from producing a worthwhile quantity of eggs. And one pond held Sterlet, imported from Siberia as an experiment. If they thrived, the company might soon be selling the Golden caviar currently hogged by commissars and imams.

  “Do you like caviar yourself?” I asked.

  He looked incredulous. “Of course.”

  “How do you eat it? With vodka and blinis?”

  “No. Dry champagne and a little black pepper.”

  I recognized the hunger in his tone. We faced each other like two men over the table at a buffet supper, united only by appetite. It wasn’t death that was the Great Leveler but Food.

  “And how much do you produce?”

  “Altogether? In a good year? About six tons.”

  All these creatures, sacrificed for just six tons. I thought of the female sturgeon in the scrap of film, struggling in the Caspian mud. Hundreds of thousands of lives snuffed out for the 450 tons once eaten in a single year. How to weigh that against our delight as we relished Beluga in the Paris candlelight? Or did it add to the savor that each pearl was a tiny death?

  I would like to say it put me off caviar for life. But within twenty-four hours, I was lifting a spoon heaped with Beluga, ready to see if it really tasted better with black pepper and champagne than with vodka.

  Somewhere in my notes was the fishery’s price list. They sell their best caviar for €1,614.60 a kilo: roughly $2,000. Four ounces is 113 grams, so my can from 1990 would now cost me about $130—about $20 for each teaspoonful.

  Was there any better appetizer than caviar with which to begin my imaginary banquet?

  I couldn’t think of one.

  Was it worth the fortune it would cost?

  I engulfed the delicious mouthful.

  Yes.

  Definitely yes.

  Six

  First Catch Your Madeleine

  Let them eat cake!

  Attributed, erroneously, to Marie-Antoinette

  Within a few weeks of vowing to create the ideal banquet, using the “lost” dishes of France, the sheer size of the task dawned on me.

  Leaving aside the major problem of finding an ox and the people to both roast and eat it, I needed to choose the number, variety, and style of the other dishes, the wine and other accompaniments, and—this being a French banquet—the underlying philosophy of the meal. I feared that, in an appropriately culinary metaphor, I had bitten off more than I could chew.

  On the principle that, to untangle a can of worms, one begins with a single worm, I began with a part of the meal I knew I could handle. As my guests sipped their Kir, one should them offer an amuse guele—a nibble. And what could be better than a petit four—a little cake? I even knew which cake it should be—a madeleine.

  As my father was a pastry cook, the aroma of fresh-baked cake permeated my childhood. I grew up around dark, moist fruitcake; cupcakes topped with frosting and colored sprinkles; and bouncy sponges, split and sandwiched back together with whipped cream and strawberry jam.

  In particular, I remember his towering wedding cakes, battleships of the baker’s art, triple- and occasionally quadruple-decked, armored in marble-white marzipan. Swags of royal icing draped every side. I can see my father’s sure hand painstakingly looping sugary strands from cones of parchment paper, pinning the end of each swoop with a tiny silver sphere called a cachou.

  I assumed, when I moved to Paris, that, in this capital of patisserie, cakes would be even more popular. Not so. While the French enjoy fruit tarts and pastries, they view cake with skepticism. The standard item of patisserie has a creamy filling, enclosed in a stiff pastry case. Or it could be a tart, filled either with the sticky lemon sauce that I grew up calling “lemon curd,” or with pieces of fruit thickly glazed with sugar syrup and firmly bedded in crème patisserie, a thick custard that keeps the fruit in place. Individual pastries enclose soft mousse in choux pastry or seal it firmly under a chocolate shell.

  Cake, when it appears, is rigorously segregated. In supermarkets, fruitcake is packaged as cake Anglaise—cake English style. Sponge is unknown, and pound cake exists only as quatre quatre—four by four—made with equal quantities of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. For weddings, most couples opt for a pièce montée, a tall cone of profiteroles (bubbles of cream-filled pastry lacquered with a caramel or chocolate glaze). We had one for our own wedding.

  Why don’t the French like cake? Mainly it’s the crumbs. In Regency England, the worst social disaster that could befall a snuff-sniffing man of fashion was to drip brown snot onto his snowy white cravat. Imagine, then, the embarrassment of a French courtesan who, glancing down, finds her lover, while browsing her décolletage, sporting a mustache flecked with reminders of afternoon tea.

  To solve this problem, the French developed their own versions of cake: dense, moist, chewy, and, above all, crumb-free. Among French tea-time nibbles, the most popular are the financier, the macaron, the cannelé, and the madeleine. The cannelé—pluglike, rubbery, dark brown—is grooved down the sides: cannelé means “channeled.” The oblong financier is named for its resemblance to a gold bar. The macaron looks like a miniature hamburger, its halves joined by a layer of confiture. Most elegant of all, the plump, round madeleine is baked in a mold that gives it the fluted shape of a scallop shell.

  The baba, soaked in syrup or rum, might drip but will never crumble. Nor is there much risk of fallout from the beignet, a twist of deep-fried dough, the ancestor of the doughnut. The cannelé contains double amounts of sugar and eggs, plus a dousing of rum. As for the madeleine, financier, and macaron, part of the flour is replaced by ground almonds. In each case, the result is the same: no crumbs.

  And if you remark that some French cakes and buns, in particular the croissant, still crumble, any expert will explain that it’s your fault for not eating them correctly. If you watch a French person eating a croissant, you will notice that, before tearing off a morsel, they hold it well away from their bodies, letting the crumbs fall on the floor rather than on their clothes.

  After that . . . well, I’ll let the American journalist Robert Forrest Wilson explain:

  The croissant is of a crisp, flaky texture, and if one attempts to eat it dry, it explodes into flying fragments at every bite. It is, however, not eaten dry—it is dipped into coffee. It is not only good form in Paris to dip one’s croissant but practically necessary. It is a bun specialized for dipping.

  Since 1924, when that was written, the croissant has undergone even further refinement in the interest of avoiding crumbs. The fashionable choice in breakfast breads these days is a croissant filled with a paste of . . . yes, that’s right: almonds.

  I once tried to persuade my father to widen his horizons by baking some madeleines for the shop. He was busy making Lamingtons, an Australian favorite, beloved of pastry cooks, as they use up stale pound cake. Cut into blocks, the cake is dunked in chocolate syrup and then rolled in desiccated coconut.

  “What’s a madeleine?” he said. “I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Here’s the recipe.” I showed him the passage laboriously translated from the Larousse Gastronomique.

  He wiped his hands on his apron and took the slip of paper but read only as far as the ingredients.

  “Ground almonds! You know what they cost? You want me to go broke?”

  After I moved to Paris, I made a point of sampling every kind of French pastry. Some took a litt
le more effort than others. Maybe it was my Catholic upbringing, but I always felt furtive biting into the caramel-frosted cream-filled puff known as the pette de nonne—nun’s fart.

  A Nun’s Fart

  But I was soon converted to the moist, lemony financier; and as for macarons, vividly colored, and flavored with lemon, raspberry, chocolate, caramel, or passion fruit, I had to agree with the cook who wrote, “Ils sont irrésistibles, avec leur petite coque craquante et leur intérieur fondant”—“They are irresistible, with their little crunchy shell and their melting interior.”

  Above all, I remained steadfast in my devotion to the madeleine, though not solely for culinary reasons. How many cakes could be said to have inspired a literary masterpiece?

  Late in the summer, I asked Louise, “Would you like to take a trip to Illiers?”

  “Of course. Love to.”

  A year earlier, such a question would have earned a glare and a muttered “I’m busy.” But whatever demon seizes children at fifteen, transforming them overnight into sullen monsters, had just as suddenly relinquished her, leaving behind a sunny and bright young woman.

  She even crawled out of bed at 7:00 a.m. for the two-hour train trip. We were early enough at Gare Montparnasse to snatch some coffee in a deserted café and share a blueberry muffin, fending off a trio of bold sparrows—piafs in French slang—that scavenged crumbs right off the table. In tribute to their size and fearlessness, Edith Gassion, a small and feisty street singer of the 1930s, with a poignantly piercing voice, rechristened herself Edith Piaf—although her choice was ironic: sparrows can’t sing.

  An hour later, our TGV was gliding across the plains of La Beauce—the Bread Basket. The Beauce is Kansas with a French accent. A few weeks before, we’d have looked out on amber waves of grain. Now the fields were stubble, their wheat stored in the silos that, as in Kansas, loomed next to every station. Over the landscape lay the lassitude that follows the harvest. Slowing into towns, we glimpsed empty streets, shuttered houses, shops with blinds drawn, and dogs drowsing under chestnut trees.

  Switching on my Kindle tablet, I clicked to the text downloaded the night before: Du côté de Chez Swann (Swann’s Way), the first volume of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

  “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure . . .”—“For a long time, I used to go to bed early . . .”

  I first read those lines as a teenager, in the stifling heat of an Australian country town, hunched over the book on a verandah with the rush rush of cicadas in my ears and the fronds of a pepper tree rattling on the tin roof.

  Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book.

  I knew that feeling! Drowsing over a book, I’d wake with a start, thinking I was still reading—then realize I’d invented that next part in my sleep, the writer in me taking over like an automatic pilot in an aircraft.

  I held out the Kindle to Louise. “I downloaded Du Côté de Chez Swann, if you want to read about Illiers.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “We did it at school.” Making a pillow of her coat, she folded her arms and closed her eyes. “Wake me when we get there.”

  At Chartres, we transferred to a two-carriage train with cars hardly larger than those of the Paris Metro. Three girls boarded at the last minute, hauling bicycles. Otherwise, we were the only passengers. And once we left the station, the rusted rails running alongside showed that only a single line was in use. We were truly leaving civilization behind.

  I kept browsing through Du Côté de Chez Swann, losing myself in its long, unwinding sentences.

  The French, initially, didn’t get Proust. One editor grumbled, “I just don’t understand why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he rolls about in bed before he goes to sleep.” Publishers doubted anyone could recall every detail of events that took place thirty years ago and scoffed even more when Proust explained the prosaic event that unlocked this ability: the taste of tea into which he’d dunked a few crumbs from a madeleine.

  I skimmed through the text to that passage.

  And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.

  Was it my childhood as a baker’s son that made this image so poignant? I looked at Louise, drowsing opposite. Already an accomplished cook, she was particularly skillful with pastry and cakes. Maybe there really were things that “ran in the family.”

  Two hours after leaving Paris, our little train subsided to an exhausted halt at Illiers. We climbed out into the sun. There wasn’t even a platform—just a stretch of asphalt and the unmanned station. Across the tracks, beyond a field of weeds, some derelict brick buildings slumped, apparently held up by the vines that wreathed them. The flat crack of a shotgun carried across the fields: hunters out for rabbits in the stubble. Otherwise, there was no sound at all.

  We walked through the deserted station into the sunny square in front.

  In 1971, the locals thought enough of Proust to rename the town Illiers/Combray, incorporating his fictional name for the community, but after that, their enthusiasm waned. A statue might have been asking too much, but they could at least have erected a sign: “Hometown of Marcel Proust.”

  Instead, the square was dominated by an obelisk commemorating the dead of the 1914–18 war. Perched on the top, a bronze rooster, the coq Gallois, symbolized France’s cocky fighting spirit. It was a silent statement of relative values. Literature was all very well, it told us, but national pride, what the French called la gloire (glory) came first.

  Heavy chains attached to empty shell casings fenced off the memorial. On one of these, facing the monument, perched the only living thing in sight, a gray pigeon. It didn’t fly off as we approached. Rather, it appeared to be in rapt contemplation of the rooster on top of the obelisk.

  “Maybe it lost someone,” Louise said. “One of those pigeons that carried messages.”

  A single tree-lined avenue out of the square suggested a route into town, so we took it. When I looked back, the pigeon still hadn’t moved.

  Thirty minutes later, at a table on the deserted central square, Louise sipped an eau à la menthe and I drank a beer. We had seemed to be the only strangers in town until an English family colonized the next table. After ordering a single coffee, mother, father, and both children disappeared, one after the other, into the dark interior.

  “That toilet must be the most popular spot in town,” I said.

  “At least it’s open.”

  Illiers certainly presented no threat to Disneyland. Everything except the café and the church was shut. This included the sparse one-room visitors’ center, where a stony-faced lady handed us a map, and the former home of Proust’s great-aunt, now a museum. We’d arrived there at midday, to be told by the lone gardienne that it was about to close for lunch.

  “When do you reopen?”

  “Two thirty,” she said, with a look that suggested I’d asked a silly question.

  Two and a half hours for lunch? This was so excessive that I recognized the statement of principles behind it. This Marcel Proust was only a writer, people! Nobody really important. Opposite, a bakery advertised itself as “where Tante Léonie bought her madeleines.” It, too, was closed, with blinds pulled down and no suggestion they would ever rise again.

  “To live in Combray,” Proust wrote, “was a trifle depressing.” I
could see why. As Luke Skywalker complains of his home planet in Star Wars, “If there is a bright center to the universe, this is the place furthest from it.”

  For two hours, we explored anyway. Illiers had been modestly prosperous once, but those days were gone. Shutters had been up for decades at the bains-douches municipaux, where, in the days before home plumbing, one could take a weekly bath. Nor were there any women at the public laundry where wives and housekeepers once knelt around the communal pond, gossiping as they pounded their clothes clean.

  At 2:30 sharp, the gardienne at the house of Tante Léonie, more cheerful after her lunch, unlocked its black metal gates.

  The little house had barely changed since Proust lived here between the ages of six and nine, at the end of the 1870s. In the kitchen, simple country pots and pans covered the table. Climbing the narrow, winding wooden stairs, we dipped our heads to pass through low doors, smiled at the narrow beds, the flowered wallpaper, the faded oil paintings—all just as Proust describes. Only the attic was different. It now contained a photo gallery of Marcel’s family and friends, a menagerie of bushy beards, extravagant hats, and men in stiff collars glaring at the camera. If you smiled in those days of long exposures, it tended to come out as a ghastly grin.

  Finally, we stepped into Léonie’s bedroom. On the table next to her bed, in a glass case, like holy relics, sat a white ceramic teapot; a cup, saucer, and spoon; a dish of dried lime leaves; a bottle of Vichy-Célestins mineral water; and a delicately fluted madeleine.

  As I stood in reverent contemplation, Louise pointed to the mineral water.

  “Vichy-Célestins. The kind mamine likes.”

  She was right. Her grandmother—my mother-in-law, Claudine—shared an older person’s preference for fizzy mineral water. And both slept in almost identical beds, in the Second Empire style, with the same scroll-backed wooden headboards.