The Perfect Meal

by John Baxter

  Eating an ortolan

  To this day, the mystique of the ortolan survives, even though it’s now a protected species. As part of a final banquet, shared with forty friends shortly before his death in 1996, former French president François Mitterrand, long ill with cancer, asked for and was served ortolans. The banquet looked back to the days when rarity in what one ate was not only the tastiest sauce but also the best medicine. For Mitterand, in life a figure of almost kingly gravitas and dignity, there was magic in this final feast, each dish an implied appeal for a few more months of existence. One of his guests wrote:

  He’d eaten oysters and foie gras and capon—all in copious quantities—the succulent, tender, sweet tastes flooding his parched mouth. And then there was the meal’s ultimate course: a small, yellow-throated songbird that was illegal to eat. Rare and seductive, the ortolan supposedly represented the French soul. And this old man, this ravenous president, had taken it whole—wings, feet, liver, heart. Swallowed it, bones and all. Consumed it beneath a white cloth so that God Himself couldn’t witness the barbaric act.

  Struggling to manage the vast estate of the Prince de Condé, Vatel had no time to cook. Though he’s credited with inventing the mixture of whipped cream, sugar, and vanilla known as crème Chantilly, this existed before his time. He was more a banquet manager, dealing with tradesmen, arranging the entertainment, fretting over seating plans, keeping enemies apart, making sure discarded mistresses were not placed next to their replacements. He also had to ensure that guests were seated in strict order of precedence, with the noblest closest to the king. This rule persisted into the twentieth century and was overturned only by King Edward VII after the youngest son of a duke was given a better place at his table than Arthur Balfour—a commoner but also prime minister.

  We’re used to each guest at a banquet receiving an identical portion of the same dish at the same moment, but until the early nineteenth century this system, known as Russian service, existed only at the court of the czars, who had an unlimited supply of servants. At a czarist banquet, it wasn’t unusual for two hundred footmen to serve—one for each guest. Other countries used the less-labor-intensive French service. Diners were presented with successive “avalanches” of food: first a dozen soups, followed by a dozen meat dishes, then a dozen desserts. All the dishes of a “service” arrived at the same time. Guests helped themselves. When they’d had enough, the majordomo signaled “the remove.” Servants cleared the table, and another dozen dishes arrived. Anything not eaten was devoured by the kitchen staff or estate workers. The system was conspicuously wasteful, but that was the point. It showed that the host was too rich to care.

  Well into the fourteenth century, glasses were too rare and fragile for each guest to have one. A thirsty diner called for a servant, who brought a glass of wine. After he’d drunk, the servant took the glass, rinsed it, and waited for another summons. Nor did diners use flatware. Jean Anouilh in his play Becket shows Thomas à Becket introducing his friend King Henry II to a new Italian invention, the fork.

  “It’s for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth,” Becket explains. “It saves you dirtying your fingers.”

  “But then you dirty the fork,” says the king.

  “Yes, but you can wash it.”

  “You can wash your fingers,” says Henry. “I don’t see the point.”

  Initially, forks at table made people nervous. They reminded them of how devils in medieval paintings tormented the damned with pitchforks. A few utensils were provided to transfer food to the plate. After that, everybody used their fingers, which demanded relays of napkins. A typical inventory of a seventeenth-century household lists only eighteen forks but six hundred linen napkins. This aristocratic habit of eating with fingers survives in the French custom of tearing bread rather than cutting it, and using pieces to mop up a sauce.

  Author Julian Fellowes spotted a related error in a script for the TV series Downton Abbey, set in a British stately home at the time of World War I. “We had a scene in which [Lady] Sybil baked a cake for the first time as a surprise for her mother,” recalled the producer. “We shot the cake on the table with plates, forks and napkins. Julian was very upset about this. He said the upper classes would eat with their fingers. He was right.” But the reshot scene, though historically authentic, looked so odd to modern eyes that it was never aired.

  In 1671, Condé completed a major restoration of Chantilly. To celebrate, he invited the thirty-three-year-old King Louis XIV to inspect and approve the improvements. It was a shrewd move. Though Condé was an important general of the royal armies and a major contributor to the state expenses, Louis still bore a grudge against his cousin for plotting to push him off the throne when he became king at the age of five. Condé hoped the visit might restore to him the king’s esteem, since Louis loved to see people grovel. “There was nothing he liked so much as flattery,” wrote the Duc de Saint Simon, “or, to put it more plainly, adulation. The coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it.”

  Louis took the bait and sent a courtier to Chantilly to finalize the arrangements for his visit there.

  “His majesty doesn’t want a fuss,” the courtier told Condé. “He just desires some quiet days in the country with a few old and close friends.”

  But Condé knew the king. “I assume this means his highness will expect food and entertainment of a lavishness to rival the Rome of the caesars.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And how many ‘old and close friends’ may we expect?”

  “A mere handful. No more than five or six hundred.”

  By Louis’s standards, this was modest. His court at Versailles numbered three thousand people, six hundred of them courtesans, a polite name for mistresses and party girls.

  Condé informed Vatel that he would need to cater three consecutive royal banquets, with lavish shows to follow. No feast was complete without a two-hour spectacle of music, dance, theatrical illusions, and fireworks. These were particularly important when entertaining Louis, who fancied himself a dancer. He performed in masques at Versailles and surrounded himself with artists such as the playwright Molière and the composer Lully. It was at Versailles that Lully, beating time with a heavy staff, brought it down on his foot and died of blood poisoning—a rare case of a conductor killed in the line of duty.

  The royal visit would cost Condé 50,000 écus—well into the millions of modern dollars. However, it was money worth spending if, when Louis left, he’d entrusted Condé with a role in the financial management of France, with all its opportunities for graft.

  Louis and his retinue arrived on a Thursday, were welcomed by the prince, and shown around the estate. After picnicking in a field of daffodils (planted for the occasion), they mounted up and went in search of game. The hunt continued even after sunset, the king pursuing a stag by moonlight. After this, they returned to the château and sat down to turtle soup, chicken à la crème, fried trout, and roast pheasant, followed by a show culminating in fireworks.

  But for Vatel, the evening ended in despair. More people than expected turned up to dinner, and there weren’t enough pheasants to go round all twenty-five tables. One table complained of getting none and being fobbed off with chicken. Then the weather turned, dampening the fireworks meant to be the climax of the evening.

  “My head is spinning,” a near-hysterical Vatel told de Gourville. “I haven’t slept in twelve nights. And now this terrible thing happens.”

  Worse was to come. No Catholic ate meat on Friday, so every dish for the second banquet had to be fish or vegetables. The menu probably resembled this one, served to Louis XV in 1757.

  First Service. Two soups, one a puree of lentils, the other of shredded lettuce.

  Eight hors d’oeuvres: A galantine of sorrel; white beans Breton style; herrings, both fresh and salted, in mustard sauce; grilled mackerel with herb butter; an omelette with croûtons; salt cod in cream sauce; noodles.

  Second Service: Four large en
trées: Pike Polish style; baked salmon; carp in court bouillon; trout à la Chambord—baked, stuffed and served with a sauce of truffles and oysters.

  Four Medium Entrées: Soles with fresh herbs; grilled trout with a sauce of capers and gherkins; perch in Sauce Hollandaise; lotte German style; skate in black butter, and grilled salmon.

  Third Service: Eight dishes of baked or fried fish: fried filets of pike; sole and lemon soles; fried lotte; trout, and salmon tails. Four salads.

  Fourth Service: Eight hot vegetable dishes: Cauliflower with parmesan; mushrooms baked with anchovies; a vegetable stew; fried artichokes; green beans; cabbage, and spinach.

  Four cold dishes: Crayfish, arranged in a pyramid, known as buisson or “bush”; a “Bavarian cake” or Bavarois, based on a jellied mousse of fruit; a poupelin, an early version of the Swiss roll, and brioches.

  The estate could provide pike, trout, and other freshwater fish, but saltwater fish and seafood had to come from the Atlantic coast, more than a hundred miles away. At the nearest port, Boulogne-sur-Mer, the previous day’s catch had left at dawn, packed in ice and seaweed, and loaded into four-horse carts, each hauling 3.5 tons. Fresh horses waited every ten miles along the route. Even then, the trip over unpaved roads and partly at night would take twenty-four hours.

  Descending from his apartments at 4:00 a.m. on Friday, Vatel had to step over his exhausted staff asleep along the corridors and in the kitchens. At Chantilly, a separate building housed senior servants, but valets, who might be needed at any time, slept in dressing rooms or closets next to their master’s apartment. The lowliest slept in the corridors, on the floor, the boards straw-strewn because it was customary to empty chamber pots into the corridor.

  At sunrise, an apprentice carried two baskets of fish into the kitchens—probably the freshwater catch from the estate’s ponds.

  Vatel, hysterical with fatigue, demanded, “Is that all?”

  When the flustered boy told him nothing else had arrived, Vatel began to rave. De Gourville was sent for and tried to calm him. Even if the fish from Boulogne-sur-Mer had been put on the road at dawn the previous day, it couldn’t possibly get there so soon.

  But Vatel was beyond reason. “I will not survive this disgrace,” he told de Gourville. “My honor and reputation are lost.”

  Running to his rooms, he wedged the hilt of his sword into the gap between the door and jamb, placed the point against his chest, and thrust himself onto the blade. On the third try, it pierced his heart.

  Madame de Sévigné, one of the king’s retinue, and a famous tattletale, rushed off a letter to a friend:

  Vatel, the great Vatel, Monsieur Fouquet’s major domo, who at the moment was serving the Prince of Condé in that capacity, seeing that this morning at eight o’clock the fish had not arrived, and not being able to bear the dishonor by which he thought he was about to be struck—in one word, he stabbed himself. They sent for Monsieur le Prince, who is in utter despair. Monsieur le Duc [de Gourville] burst into tears. You can imagine the disorder which such a terrible accident caused at this fête. And imagine that just as he was dying, the fish arrived. That’s all I know at the moment; I think you’ll agree that it’s enough. I have no doubt but that the confusion was great; it’s an annoying thing at a party which cost 50,000 écus.

  Most annoying, particularly for poor Vatel. But would anyone kill himself over fish? For many years, the Sévigné letter was the only evidence of Vatel’s suicide, and thus a little suspect. Since then, however, other sources have been found to corroborate the story. Explaining them is more difficult. In the film Vatel, screenwriter Tom Stoppard offered one theory. Vatel, played by a lumbering Gérard Depardieu, twenty years older than the real Vatel and at least twice his size, is shown romancing one of Louis’s courtesans. When he runs on his sword, it’s not over fish but in despair at their hopeless love.

  Despite Vatel’s death, the banquets of Friday and Saturday went ahead and were a great success. As the king and his friends caroused, servants quietly buried Vatel on the estate. Louis apparently knew nothing of Vatel’s death until after the dinner. By then, he’d decided to give his cousin another chance.

  But this brought “Monsieur le Prince” no enduring good fortune. As Condé had no legitimate children, on his death the title passed to another branch of the family. In the Revolution, mobs destroyed the great château at Chantilly. The Condés had already sold their Paris estates, and in 1790 his townhouse was demolished and the splendid garden cleared to make way for a theater. New streets appeared, including one leading from the Seine to the square in front of the theater. Called rue de l’Odéon, it was the first in Paris to have a sidewalk.

  It’s also the street on which we live.

  On either side, streets called rue de Condé and rue Monsieur le Prince remind us that this was once the property of Le Grand Condé.

  But what about Vatel? Well, he, too, has a monument—of sorts.

  On rue Lobineau, a few minutes’ walk from our front door, stands the tiniest restaurant in Paris. It seats a dozen people only. The menu is simple. So is the wine list. It takes no reservations, accepts no credit cards. It is the very model of the modest Paris eating place. It’s called Le Petit Vatel—The Little Vatel.

  Ten

  First Catch Your Rascasse

  Last night we had a bouillabaisse which I couldn’t touch because of the terror in its preparation. The secret is to throw live sea creatures into a boiling pot. And we saw a lobster who, while turning red in his death, reached out a claw to snatch and gobble a dying crab. Thus in this hot stew of the near-dead and burning, one expiring fish swallows another expiring fish while the cook sprinkles saffron onto the squirming.

  Ned Rorem, The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem

  Ask any lovers of Italian food about their favourite movie scene, and at least half of them will quote the moment in The Godfather when fat Clemenza gives Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone his recipe for spaghetti sauce. Some can even repeat it from memory, and in the grating accents of actor Richard Castellano too.

  Heh, come over here, kid, learn something. You never know, you might have to cook for twenty guys someday. You see, you start out with a little bit of oil. Then you fry some garlic. Then you throw in some tomatoes, tomato paste, you fry it, ya make sure it doesn’t stick. You get it to a boil. You shove in all your sausage and your meatballs, heh? . . . And a little bit o’ wine. An’ a little bit o’ sugar, and that’s my trick.

  Some dishes lend themselves to feeding a crowd. Spaghetti with meat sauce is one of them.

  Another is bouillabaisse.

  Would bouillabaisse suit my banquet? Few fish dishes were as classic, as dramatic, yet as neglected by modern chefs. At the very least, it deserved an audition.

  I can remember the moment I began to brood about bouillabaisse.

  It was 1970; my first winter in Europe. My companion, Angela, and I had just survived the thirty-day sea voyage from Australia and were living in a village in the east of England. She had become a substitute teacher in the local school system, and I was working on a book.

  Looking out through the misted kitchen window of our cottage, across the barren fields, clammy with fog, and listening to the caw-caw of crows roosting on the bare branches of the elm trees, all dead of the parasite known as Dutch elm disease, I understood why the collective noun for a gathering of these grim black birds was a murder. A flock of sheep. A school of fish. A murder of crows. Yes, it really fitted my mood.

  Why had I ever left the sunny south? I needed something to remind me of warmer places. A mango, perhaps, or a papaya. But could either be found within fifty miles? Certainly not in our village shop, where any fruit more exotic than an apple existed only in a can.

  Later that week, our luck appeared to change. We were invited to dine with a local painter and his wife.

  “I cooked a favorite of ours,” said our hostess. “Bouillabaisse.”

  Bouillabaisse! I’d never eaten it, but the name alone was enough
. The most vivid of Mediterranean seafood dishes—shrimp, crab, lobster, in a rich fish stew flavored with tomato and olive oil, colored with saffron, perfumed with garlic, pepper, and laurel. The writer Alfred Capus defined it perfectly: “Bouillabaisse is fish plus sun.”

  My elation survived until our hostess plunked down a tureen of gray-white soup. Pallid lumps jutted above the surface like torpedoed ships poised over a watery grave. My face betrayed my dismay.

  “It’s North Sea Bouillabaisse, of course,” she said. “My mother’s recipe, actually. From the war, when you could get only local white fish.”

  Apparently the Nazis had blocked all imports of garlic, bay leaves, and tomatoes as well, since only leeks and potatoes accompanied the slabs of what I recognized as dogfish, optimistically rechristened “rock salmon.” As a treat, I was given the head. Depositing this ghastly object on my plate, the host said jovially, “Good eating there.” As it glared up at me, I understood the real meaning of the expression “to give someone the fish eye.”

  Puttering back home in our unheated Volkswagen Beetle, I asked Angela, “Do you suppose we could manage a holiday sometime?”

  “To where?”

  I looked out at the dark woods, rimed with frost. “Somewhere warm.”

  She frowned. “Maybe . . . in the school vacation . . . if someone shared expenses . . .”

  Which is how, a couple of months later, our Beetle came bumping down the car ferry ramp at Calais, headed for the Riviera. In the backseat, providing the extra money that made the trip possible, was Cyril.

  Cyrils in England are as plentiful as gray squirrels. They may even be the dominant male type. Many, like ours, were teachers. He taught in the same school as Angela and lived in the next village, in a cottage he shared for years with his mother, who had just died. Balding, short, and expressionless, he wore the Cyril Uniform: fisherman’s sweater, brown corduroy trousers, suede desert boots. For formal occasions, he added a tweed jacket, elbows leather-reinforced.