The Perfect Meal

by John Baxter

  It surprised me how serious an interest Louise took in the house. Confident I knew everything of importance about Proust, I’d refused the sheaf of documentation offered by the gardienne, but she’d accepted one. She referred to it as we walked around, quoting what Proust wrote about the wallpaper, a painting, the orangerie, no bigger than one of the bedrooms, at the bottom of the small garden. Louise had grown up with Proust and “done” him at school. As part of her patrimoine—her cultural heritage—he was worthy of respect, like Balzac, Zola, Gide.

  My appreciation was different. I was a fan. For me, the visit was sacramental, akin to taking the waters at Lourdes. It was enough for me to sniff the air, smell the dust, stand in the little garden and look up at the windows through which he’d gazed a century and a half ago. He had been here.

  In Proust’s kitchen

  The monument at Illiers, with pigeon

  Louise

  Just as we stepped out onto the street again, the blind in the window of the patisserie rattled up and a girl turned the sign on the door from “Fermé” to “Ouvert.”

  They sold madeleines—not as Tante Léonie had bought them but prepacked in polythene. We bought half a dozen bags—gifts for the family, souvenirs. I waited until we got on the train before I opened one and took a nibble. If I expected the same revelation as Proust, I was disappointed. Not bad but a bit dry. And, I suspected, made with plain flour, with no powdered almonds. Maybe with some lime-flower tea . . .

  I held out the bag to Louise, curled up again with her coat, half asleep.

  “Want one?”

  She opened one eye. “No, thanks. I’m on a diet.”

  She started to nod off again, then thought of something.

  “By the way, did you know it wasn’t originally a madeleine he dipped in the tea?”

  “Not a madeleine? Of course it was a madeleine!” I reached for my Kindle and proof.

  “In the book, he made it a madeleine,” she said, “but in Contre Saint-Beuve he describes what really happened.”

  She shuffled the papers given her at the house and read out a passage from Proust’s earlier book, regarded as a dry run for his masterpiece.

  The other night, when I came in, frozen from the snow, and not having got warm again, since I was writing by lamplight in my bedroom, my old cook suggested making me a cup of tea, which I never drink. And by chance, she brought with it some slices of pain grillé. I dipped the pain grillé into the cup of tea, and the moment I put it in my mouth I had the sensation of smelling geraniums, orange blossom, and a sensation of extraordinary light, of happiness.

  “Pain grillé? Proust’s madeleine was . . . a piece of toast?”

  “Apparently.” She saw my disappointment. “The idea’s the same.”

  “Yes. I suppose so.”

  But a small light had just gone out. Once again, Proust was proved right. Nothing lasted. Though time could be briefly retrieved in memory, it inevitably passed. And if the instant of insight can change one’s life, another instant can change it back.

  At the end of Du côté de chez Swann, the narrator tries to retrieve memories of Swann and his wife by returning to the streets where they once lived. But though the buildings and the people look more or less the same, time has changed both them and the older Proust who observes them.

  The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment, and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

  Oh, well—as Marie-Antoinette might have said, “Let them eat toast.”

  Seven

  First Catch Your Fungus

  The waitress said, “We have a wonderful sandwich of grilled Portabellas with Asiago on country bread dressed with extra virgin olive oil and served with a julienne of jicama and blood orange.”

  “What’s a portabella?,” Shirley said to me.

  “A big mushroom,” I said.

  She looked at the waitress and frowned. “A mushroom sandwich?”

  From Chance by Robert B. Parker

  In all my agonizing over the ingredients of my banquet, one emerged as essential. No great dinner could be complete without the unique taste of truffle.

  Between 2004 and 2005, I spent a lot of time in Italy, hired by an American company to create the plots, character outlines, general background, and, in time, write some of the screenplay for a TV drama series about that great fourteenth-century outpouring of creativity known as the Renaissance. Though the project was doomed from the start, it was an exhilarating if troubling task. To visit men and women descended from the families that employed Leonardo and Raphael, to handle actual letters written by Lorenzo de’ Medici, to stroll after closing time through the empty galleries of the Pitti Palace, alone with the work of Botticelli and Tiepolo, was worth more than any salary I was paid—when it was paid, that is.

  I never got used to the modern-day aristocrats who often neither knew of nor cared about their heritage nor preserved it. One couple brought in an expensively bound family history published years before but obviously never opened—except, they discovered to their embarrassment, by their children, who’d used some blank pages to scribble in crayon. Another duke demanded testily, “Why do people make such a fuss about this Machiavelli fellow? He was just a secretary to one of my ancestors.”

  Occasionally, good taste and intelligence prevailed. As we left one palazzo, our hostess paused by a glass cabinet filled with tiny figurines and objets d’art.

  “A few of our family treasures,” she said (as if her entire house didn’t deserve that description). She opened the door of the case and lifted out a fragile object.

  “As you enjoy cooking, John, you might find this interesting.”

  I recognized a mandoline. Chefs use them to slice vegetables or cheese. A panel of wood or plastic is supported at a forty-five-degree angle on metal struts. As you slide something down the panel, a raised blade cuts uniform slices that fall through a slot to a plate below.

  Most mandolines are solid and robust—they need to be—but this one was so tiny it could sit on her open palm. A delicate filigree of metal supported a slide made of some pale, yellowing material that wasn’t wood.

  “Silver,” she said, “and ivory. Early nineteenth century.”

  “Is it a toy?” asked our producer. “For a doll’s house?”

  Meeting my eye, the contessa turned down one corner of her mouth. How can you work with such people?

  “No,” I said, answering for her. “I believe it’s for truffles.”

  Few people hold up their end of a cocktail party conversation when the subject turns to fungi. The moment I ask if they prefer French girolles to the larger but, in my opinion, less tasty Romanian variety, they glimpse friends on the other side of the room whom they just must talk to.

  A Scots traveler named John Lauder, who visited France in 1665, was disgusted by the very idea of eating mushrooms. “It astonished me that the French find them so delicious. They gather them at night in the most sordid and damp places. They cook them in a terrine with butter, vinegar, salt and spices. If you have them grilled, you can imagine you are biting into the tenderest meat. But I was so biased that I couldn’t eat them.”

  For years, I agreed. My region of Australia knew only one variety. Large, flat, gray-white on top and pink underneath, they appeared after rain in paddocks where animals had manured the ground. Without being precious about it, I hesitated to throw a lip over anything that could trace its ancestry so directly to cow shit.

  If that hadn’t prejudiced me, the standard cooking method would have. Everyone fried them, sliced, in butter. This caused the juices to
ooze out in a liquid the color of boiled newsprint. Canned mushrooms looked exactly the same, right down to the monochrome slime, flatteringly described as “butter sauce.” This convinced cooks of my parents’ generation that they’d hit on the perfect recipe. Raised on canned food, they believed that the factory-made project represented the yardstick of perfection. The greatest achievement of a cook was to create something indistinguishable from the same product as canned by Crosse and Blackwell or packaged by Sara Lee. “It’s as good as a bought one,” they said in satisfaction, delighted that their mushy, overcooked spaghetti looked just like the product as canned by Heinz. Traditionally, stewed mushrooms were served with steak. As the horrid gray mixture was ladled on, it mixed in a particularly unpleasant way with the meat juice. This topped my list of culinary Bad Sights until my first encounter with carpetbag steak. For this Aussie favorite, a pocket was cut in a double-thick slice of rump and filled with raw oysters. As you sliced the meat, the oysters dribbled out. I had to wait for the film Alien to see anything quite that nasty.

  Britain proved no better than Australia at exploring the possibilities of fungi. Though mushrooms flourished in their fields and forests, the British shared John Lauder’s suspicion about anything gathered in damp and sordid places. They solved the problem by creating the button mushroom. Smooth, white, and rubbery, the button is factory farmed—and, unfortunately, near tasteless. But at least you know where it’s been.

  Buttons also exist in France, where they’re called, in a snub to the British and others, champignons de Paris. Every French kitchen has a few small cans, stored next to similar cans of corn niblets. Add a can of corn and one of mushrooms to a bag of lettuce hearts, toss in a few strips of ham and gruyere, and you have a dinner salad. Mix them with eggs for a quiche. Good on pasta, good on pizza, good in chicken stew. One size fits all.

  I much preferred the “wood mushrooms” that appeared in the market for a few weeks each August. Fluted golden girolles; black trompettes de mort; the small and pallid pied bleu, dead white except for the slightly sinister blue tinge at the foot of the stem; pale, chewy pleurotes, aka oyster mushrooms; and tastiest of all, the fragrant, meaty porcini, or cèpes—all shared an air of wildness. Misshapen, speckled with dirt and straw, and even, in the case of cèpes, showing signs of nibbling by insects, these uncouth country cousins seemed to mock the well-bred buttons. In letting them into the house, you took your safety in your own hands. No wonder the Spanish called them la burla de la naturaleza—nature’s bad joke.

  Few mushrooms have a strong flavor. On holiday in the Dordogne, after a day foraging in the woods, I ran our finds past the local pharmacist. After examining each one, he placed three to one side.

  “So these are poisonous,” I said, cautiously poking one of the three.

  “No,” said the pharmacist. “These are the edible ones.”

  “Then these”—I indicated the brimming basket—“are all toxic?”

  “No, they’re harmless. You could eat them. They just don’t taste of anything.”

  This is true of most fungi. The art of cooking them is to maximize what little flavor they have. My best mushroom recipe came about by accident. Trying to duplicate a ragoût forestier we’d eaten in a country restaurant, I fried some girolles and cèpes in butter with salt, pepper, and crushed garlic.

  Initially, the result was disappointing. As the juices ran together, it formed the same gluey sauce I hated in Australian mushrooms. Fortunately, a phone call distracted me. I turned down the heat to answer it. When I returned, most of the liquid had boiled away, allowing the butter absorbed by the mushrooms to run back out into the pan, leaving the mushrooms coated with a savory glaze that concentrated their forest flavors. A handful of chopped parsley and some fresh black pepper turned the dish into a perfect accompaniment for grilled meat. It was also delicious folded into an omelette, while the same recipe using girolles alone gave flavor and contrast to steamed or grilled fish.

  I might have remained constant to the rough fellowship of champignons forestiers had it not been for my trips to Italy for the TV series.

  In Florence, the production manager and his assistant met me off the overnight train. At 10:00 a.m., it was too late for breakfast, too early for lunch, but, this being Italy, also far too early to start work.

  “You like tartufo?” the assistant asked.

  The only “tartufo” I knew was a frozen dessert, a ball of vanilla ice cream encrusted with chocolate sprinkles. Did the Italians really eat ice cream for morning tea? Well, when in Rome (or at least Florence), do as the Romans do.

  “Of course,” I lied.

  But Procacci, the shop on via de Tornabuoni to which they took me, was no ice-cream parlor. All varnished wood, terrazzo floor, and display cases of curved glass, it hovered between café and upmarket cake shop. As we sat down at a tiny table, the production assistant brought us a plate of bite-size buns.

  “Panini tartufati,” she said.

  So tartufo was Italian for “truffle.” That chocolate-coated ice cream had been a clumsy attempt to duplicate the look of a truffe noire.

  I bit into the soft white bread, spread with butter creamed with white truffles, and was instantly seduced. When Marie-Dominique joined me on the project, Procacci became our favorite Florentine hangout. On the night train back to Paris, we habitually took the same picnic supper—a dozen of its panini tartufati, with a bottle of champagne. The meal always ended with mild dissatisfaction. Next time, we told ourselves, we’d buy an extra half-dozen, and really gorge. We were converts to the creed of Colette: “If I can’t have too many truffles,” she said, “I don’t want any at all.”

  Even the best chefs use truffles sparingly, mostly because of their price. Black or white, they sell for around $100 an ounce. The cost reflects the fact that, unlike most mushrooms, they can’t be cultivated. They grow wild, and only around the roots of oaks—a tree less common in France than Britain. Lately, some French cultivators have tried “farming” truffles, planting an oak grove, fertilizing the roots with spores, and waiting a year in the hope of a crop. For the time being, however, most trufflers hunt them with animals.

  Our feeble sense of smell can’t detect them underground, but badgers, boars, certain dogs, and a particular kind of fly have no such problem. Hunters train dogs to scent the truffle and hope to get there before the hound has rooted it out and wolfed it down for itself. Some tried to train pigs to do the same job, but after a few fingers were lost tussling with voracious porkers, dogs became more popular.

  For a few weeks one autumn, the most expensive fruit and vegetable seller in the Marché Saint-Germain displayed a sealed jar next to the cash register. Inside, resting on rice, to absorb the moisture, sat three black truffles.

  “How much?” I asked, trying not to salivate.

  “Three hundred and fifty euros a kilo,” said the owner. I decided to sleep on it.

  By chance, the following weekend took us into Périgord, not far from Carpentras, France’s truffle capital. In a small town, we browsed the weekly produce market, thinly supplied as the last green vegetables and summer fruits disappeared in the autumn chill.

  In Australian country towns, the railway station or town hall often carries prominently the date 1888. Building something new in the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, her fiftieth year on the throne, had been a way of Australians reminding themselves they were really still British.

  But my maternal grandparents were Swedish and German, so my cultural roots were partly in continental Europe, not Britain. In coming to Europe, I felt for the first time that not only the people but the landscape and buildings were speaking “my” language. Over the cultural abyss between Australia and the rest of the world, I sensed an invisible bridge linking me to the knowledge Europeans acquire at birth.

  Still a stranger, even after twenty years in France, I walked that bridge gingerly, trying not to look down into the depths of my ignorance. It was easier in the countryside, in villages, a
nd particularly in churches. A compact chapel of the Middle Ages, set on a headland above the Atlantic, with a vineyard on one side and a graveyard on the other, offered more evidence of my place in the world than the most elaborate cathedral of red sandstone baking in the Australian sun.

  For the first time, I felt an affinity with not only the Catholicism in which I was raised but the earlier faiths on which it rested: the rituals of earth magic, of sacrifice and divination that, oddly, resonated at times with those of the Australian aboriginals. The gods never move as far away from one another as we move away from them.

  All this crossed my mind in that market. The last seller in line offered the least stock. His table was small and almost bare: just an ancient brass scale, with tiny iron weights, and a few flat metal dishes. Why did he appear so familiar—alone, dignified, and erect behind his table? Of course. He was the image of a figure from the tarot, Le Bateleur—the Magician. Always shown at a table, he displays symbols of three tarot suits—cups, coins, and swords—while holding a rod to signify the fourth, wands, the source of the stage illusionist’s magic wand.

  Each small dish on his table held a single gnarled black nugget.

  Truffles.

  I pointed to one the size of a golf ball and asked the price. Solemnly he weighed it on his scale.

  “Seize euros.”

  Sixteen euros? Ridiculously cheap. I reached into my pocket, aware that an ancient tradition was being reaffirmed.

  The truffle is the plutonium of vegetation, humming with its own kind of radioactivity. Place a truffle next to butter, in a bottle of oil, or in a bowl of eggs, and its taste invades them all, enriching and perfuming.

  My truffle lasted for months. One piece, slivered, went into a bottle of oil, not olive—the fruitiness of which can fight the truffle’s flavor—but the less assertive grape-seed. I placed another piece in a crock of unsalted butter, well sealed to stop the flavor from penetrating to every corner of the refrigerator. The rest went into a screw-topped jar with a dozen eggs. Few breakfasts are more delicious than two truffled eggs, soft-boiled, with toast spread with truffled butter.