The Perfect Meal

by John Baxter

  What else do the stupid leave? Quite a lot, as it happens, particularly when the animal is a cow or pig. The shrewd country housekeeper cooks almost every part, including liver, kidney, brains, bone marrow, and tongue. The hog is a particularly rich source. After the tender parts have been eaten fresh, the remaining joints are cured with salt and sugar, or air-dried to become ham or bacon. Smaller pieces of meat are minced with the fat to make sausages, the intestines providing casings. Ears can be boiled until soft and gelatinous, then either sliced and fried crisp as an addition to salads, or split, stuffed, and served with sauce gribiche, a mixture of pickles and capers in a cream thickened with hard-boiled eggs. The boast of Chicago meat-packers “We use everything except the squeal” was learned from the French pork butcher.

  Other animals produce just as rich a harvest. Veal bones, called os à moelle (marrow bones), are sawed into rounds and baked. Then the marrow is spooned onto toast and sprinkled with fleur de sel, the dust-fine “flower of the salt” skimmed from the topmost layer of the pans where seawater is evaporated. Ris de veau, or sweetbreads, the sheep’s thymus gland, are a gourmet treat when sautéed with walnuts. So is a whole veal kidney in mustard sauce.

  Tripe, the stomach lining of a cow, is popular in Normandy, where they prepare it in a brown savory sauce. In Lyon, France’s capital of good eating, it appears in a dish called tablier de sapeur—sapper’s apron. Sappers were the military engineers who tunneled under enemy fortifications to plant explosives. They wore protective aprons of cowhide as thick as the slabs of tripe used in this dish, which are marinated, stewed, then breaded and fried.

  Admittedly, there are some things even the French won’t eat.

  The Roman relished dormice cooked with honey and poppy seeds, but though French fields swarm with the little rascals, no restaurateur has yet been tempted. Another Roman delicacy, testicles, doesn’t appear on many menus either, at least in Europe, though it’s worth watching the documentary Long Way Round, which follows actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman on their motorcycle circumnavigation of the world, to see their faces when, invited to dinner in a Mongolian yurt, they are confronted with a bubbling cauldron of balls.

  Some times are so hard, however, that the old rules no longer apply. For a period in 1870 and 1871, even wealthy Parisians would have relished a fat dormouse and eaten testicles with appetite. They did devour horse, dog, rat, cat, yak, bear, and elephant. What drove them to this extreme? And how did chefs make such animals edible? The answers constitute one of the most curious stories in the history of cookery.

  At times, as I planned my feast and scoured the country for ingredients, I was made aware, by surprising acts of generosity, that many of the French gourmets to whom I spoke regarded the project as more than just an intellectual exercise. To them, I was reaffirming an ancient and honorable tradition.

  Celebrating an occasion with a banquet is deeply established in the French character. Until the 1920s, it was usual to hold a banquet to celebrate a child’s first communion or confirmation, as well as a wedding or engagement. A feast might also be staged for political reasons—to celebrate a military victory, or the anniversary of one, or as a tribute to a military or political leader on his retirement.

  Very occasionally, patriots chose to display, by means of a repas, the superiority of their national way of life. One such meal—perhaps the most famous in French history—took place in 1871, after the nation’s worst military defeat.

  In July 1870, a festering rivalry between Emperor Napoleon III and the kingdom of Prussia erupted into war. Sadly for France, the emperor, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, had inherited none of his uncle’s military genius. The army of Prussia, efficiently commanded and well armed, overran the French in its first battle and took Napoleon prisoner. While he haggled over the terms of surrender, the Prussians besieged Paris.

  The siege lasted five months, during which no person or animal could get into or out of the city. As artillery battered the outskirts, foreign journalists kept their readers up-to-date by photographically reducing their reports onto microfilm. These were loaded into hot-air balloons launched from the heights of Montmartre. Winds carried the Montgolfiers, as they were known, south to Tours and Poitiers, where the letters were retrieved, restored to readable size, and posted.

  For a while, the army also tried homing pigeons, until the Prussians brought in hawks to take them down. But the greatest threat to the birds came not from Prussians but hungry Parisians. “It’s impossible to find beef or mutton without queueing at the market,” complained the abbot of Saint-André, vicar of Saint- Augustin, who obviously liked his food, “and the butchers cheat us by raising prices.”

  “The slugs are very good tonight.”

  As beef, chicken, and lamb disappeared, the government, ignoring the decree of Pope Gregory III that it was a “filthy and abominable custom,” urged Parisians to eat horse. By chance, boucheries chevalines (horse butchers) had appeared for the first time in France just a few years before, signifying their presence, then as now, by a gilded horse’s head above their door. Parisians ate seventy thousand horses during the siege. Even the emperor succumbed. Two thoroughbreds, a gift from Czar Alexander II, provided a number of meals for the imperial court.

  Once all the horses were used up, it was the turn of Paris’s estimated twenty-five thousand cats, followed by dogs, then rats. Rat meat was lean, and a little tasteless, but perfectly edible if well seasoned. The poor already considered it a delicacy, as did sailors, who fattened rats with biscuit crumbs as an alternative to salt pork and beef. Rat sellers set up in the streets. Cheekily dressed as butchers, they offered to skin and joint the animal to your requirements.

  The abbot of Saint-André listed some of the new dishes on offer:

  Terrine of rat and donkey meat

  Rats in champagne

  Stewed rat with Sauce Robert [chestnuts, onion, and white wine]

  Roasted leg of dog, flanked by baby rats

  Young donkey (claiming to be veal)

  Dogs’ brains (much appreciated)

  Dogs’ livers grilled with herb butter

  Sliced saddle of cat with mayonnaise

  Cat stewed with mushrooms

  Consommé of horse with millet

  Dog cutlets with green peas

  For those with a sweet tooth, there were begonias in syrup and plum pudding made with fat from the marrow of horse bones.

  During the siege, no restaurant worked more strenuously to maintain standards than Voisin. Though the lace-curtained windows of the little establishment at 261 rue St. Honoré suggested a simple café, its food and wine were famous, and famously expensive. Its waiters included César Ritz, later the business partner of chef Georges-Auguste Escoffier and manager of London’s Savoy Hotel, then of the Paris establishment that still bears his name.

  Voisin prided itself on defending classic French cuisine against foreign fads. M. Bellanger, the headwaiter, indignantly refused an Englishman who demanded a pudding at Christmas, and was just as short with an American woman who requested simply a salad. That incident probably inspired the scene in the film Ninotchka, where Soviet commissar Greta Garbo asks a restaurateur for raw vegetables. “Madame,” he says stiffly, “this is a restaurant, not a meadow.”

  Voisin’s chef in 1870 was Alexandre-Étienne Choron. Only thirty-two, he came from northern France, so was no stranger to unpromising ingredients. The specialty of his hometown, Caen, was tripes à la Caen (tripe in a savory meat sauce), traditionally served on a metal dish suspended above hot coals.

  Choron knew his clientele would expect more than horse, cat, or rat. In December, his patience was rewarded when the zoo, the Jardin d’Acclimatation, announced it could no longer feed its animals and reluctantly offered them for sale as livestock.

  Paris butchers snapped up deer, antelopes, and even bear, all known to be edible. Imaginatively, M. Deboos of the Boucherie Anglaise on boulevard Haussmann bought a yak. Under all that hair, it was, after all,
just a kind of buffalo and could pass for beef. At the end of December, he also paid 27,000 francs for two elephants, Castor and Pollux. Not sure how to slaughter them, he hired a sharpshooter named De Vismes to kill them with 33-millimeter steel-tipped explosive bullets.

  Killing the zoo animals, 1871

  The gourmet community was soon alive with discussion about the relative merits of the various animals as meat. One of the trapped foreign journalists, Thomas Gibson Bowles, wrote that he’d eaten camel, antelope, dog, donkey, mule, and elephant, and of those, he liked elephant the least. Another commentator, Henry Labouchère, reported, “Yesterday, I had a slice of Pollux for dinner. It was tough, coarse and oily. I do not recommend English families to eat elephant as long as they can get beef or mutton.” He probably ate the inferior meat from the body of the elephant, which Deboos sold for ten to fourteen francs a pound. More discriminating chefs, including Choron, had already snapped up the tender trunks at three or four times that price.

  Some animals defied even Choron’s expertise. The zoo offered a hippopotamus at 80,000 francs but found no takers. Who knew if the blubbery beast was even edible? Lions and tigers were also left alone. Nobody wanted the job of killing them. There was a particular revulsion, too, against monkeys. Because Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859 and the theory of evolution was gaining acceptance, eating monkeys might have seemed like cannibalism, although, ironically, soldiers in the trenches during World War I sarcastically referred to canned beef as “monkey.”

  Elephant, bear, camel, kangaroo, antelope, wolf, cat, and rat all figured in a legendary midnight Christmas dinner offered by Voisin in December 1870. This was the menu:

  STARTERS

  Butter, radishes, stuffed Donkey’s head, sardines

  SOUPS

  Purée of Red Beans with croutons

  Elephant Consommé

  ENTREES

  Fried baby catfish. Roasted camel English style

  Kangaroo Stew

  Bear chops with pepper sauce

  ROASTS

  Haunch of wolf with venison sauce

  Cat, flanked by Rats

  Watercress salad

  Antelope Terrine with truffles

  Cèpes mushrooms Bordelaise style

  Green peas with butter

  SWEETS

  Rice pudding with preserves

  DESSERT

  Gruyère cheese

  With these exotic dishes, the restaurant offered Mouton-Rothschild 1846, Romanée-Conti 1858, Château Palmer 1864, and, as a digestif, Grand Porto 1827—wines sufficiently fine to make even rat palatable.

  Choron’s skill backfired on him. His clients developed a taste for elephant. After Christmas, Voisin bought the animal of the Botanical Garden for fifteen francs a pound. Elephant trunk in sauce chasseur and Éléphant bourguignon went on the menu. Even the blood wasn’t wasted. Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his diary on New Year’s Eve 1870. “Tonight, at the famous Chez Voisin, I found elephant black pudding and I dined”—presumably with pleasure.

  Fortunately for any surviving animals, at the end of January 1871, Napoleon capitulated and abandoned his throne. The government and army, in disorder, had fled from what they feared could be a hand-to-hand battle for Paris against the vastly more competent Prussian troops. However, after an orderly victory parade through the conquered city, the Prussians returned home, leaving Paris in the hands of its dazed but elated citizens. In the power vacuum that followed, the more radical Parisians, particularly those who lived in Montmartre, seized the city and proclaimed the Commune—an anarchist community, with total equality for all.

  The changed diet forced on Parisians by the siege played a small but decisive role in the political ferment. Once it became acceptable to eat horse, plentiful in a culture where horses hauled almost every load and provided the main means of transport, a rich source of protein was suddenly available to the poor. This brought greater energy and stamina, better health, and the spirit of revolution.

  Imagery of the siege even celebrated the importance of horse meat. An allegorical engraving shows Paris as a defiant woman, sword in hand, with the city burning behind her, while, in the sky, hawks attack a pigeon. She’s supporting a shield with eight symbols of the siege: a flaming torch, a balloon, a pigeon, a sword, a set of manacles, an artillery shell, the Croix de Genève (or Red Cross, founded only seven years earlier), and a horse’s head. A caption lets the horse itself explain, acquiescing in its own sacrifice. “I have been besieged in Paris, and have fed it.”

  It’s very French that one of the events most remembered about the siege of Paris was the night the patrons of Voisin ate camel, wolf, and elephant. The Voisin banquet was not simply a culinary event but a social and political one. Significantly, the menu is headed “99th Day of the Siege.” It made the point that Paris remained defiant.

  Much as I admired the French, both for their patriotism and their culinary skill, I couldn’t help being a little suspicious about this famous feast. Given that the meal was, in part, an act of propaganda, how seriously should we take the menu? Did they eat what was claimed?

  Some dishes sound authentic. A stew of kangaroo is one of the few ways to eat this muscular animal. The tail makes a tasty soup, and the rump is as good as venison, but the remaining meat is so tough it’s usually ground up for pet food.

  Rat is still a delicacy in China, where it was sampled during the 1990s by British TV chef Keith Floyd. He found it “not in any way repugnant. It tasted similar to duck.” Floyd, who specialized in demonstrating exotic dishes in remote places, also roasted a leg of bear for a series about cooking next to the Arctic Circle. In cooking his Bear Chops with Pepper Sauce, Choron probably followed a similar recipe to Lloyd’s, larding the meat with slivers of bacon and inserting pieces of garlic. It tasted, Floyd said, like the best roast pork.

  But not even Floyd would have suggested roasting the notoriously tough camel, or serving wolf at all. Modern food writer M. F. K. Fisher published a book called How to Cook a Wolf, but in her case, the wolf was metaphorical—a symbol for hunger. She never suggested eating one, although during the time she lived in France, she did develop a taste for pâté made from lark, the songbird whose tongues had been a delicacy at medieval tables.

  As for the rest of the Voisin menu, Stuffed Donkey’s Head sounds dubious, particularly since it appears, incongruously, among the starters, next to sardines and radishes with butter, both traditional pre-dinner savories. A donkey’s head has little edible meat, so the head was probably papier-mâché, perhaps borrowed from a theatrical warehouse, which would have kept it in stock for productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Cat Flanked by Rats also sounds suspicious. No chef would place such an unappetizing oddity next to Antelope Terrine with Truffles, clearly a dish of distinction. On the other hand, it would not be beyond the skill of Voisin’s kitchen to create a cat and rats in aspic, or in shortcrust, enclosing a pâté en croûte.

  To have staged such a patriotic event made Voisin more famous than ever. It even opened a branch in New York. Until the original closed in 1930, its customers included kings and princes, as well as the greats of politics and the arts. It no longer served elephant and camel, but “if the owner looks upon you with eyes of favour,” wrote one client, “you will be presented by him with a little pink card, folded in two, on which is the menu of a dinner given at Voisin’s on Christmas Day 1870.”

  Choron himself lived until 1924, content to coast on his reputation. Aside from the 1870 dinner, he’s best known for sauce Choron, a mayonnaise flavored with tomato and tarragon, which, according to rumor, he invented by accident when he spilled tomato purée into some Béarnaise sauce. About any fakery connected with his famous banquet, however, he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.

  Twelve

  First Catch Fire

  The story of barbecue is the story of America: settlers arrive on great unspoiled continent, discover wondrous riches, set them on fir
e and eat them.

  Vince Staten, in Real Barbecue

  As Vatel and Choron realized, a formal dinner must be both a meal and a show. At the banquets they supervised, a dish’s appearance meant as much as, if not more than, how it tasted. From Roman times, cooks were valued for their ability to create a meal that was also a spectacle. If my repas was to be a true success, it must be at least partly a piece of theatre.

  Trimalchio, the party-giver of Petronius’s Satyricon, mixed food and theatricals on a grand scale. At the feast Petronius describes, a huge pig is carried in.

  One and all, we expressed our admiration. Presently, Trimalchio, staring harder and harder, exclaimed “What! It’s been cooked with its guts still inside? Call the cook.”

  The cook came and stood by the table, looking crestfallen and saying he had clean forgot.

  “What? Forgotten?” cried Trimalchio. “Strip him!” he ordered, reaching for his whip.

  We all began to intercede for him, saying, “Accidents will happen. Forgive him this once.”

  Trimalchio, a smile breaking over his face, told the cook, “Well, as you have such a bad memory, gut the beast now, where we can all see.”

  With trembling hand, the cook slashed open the animal’s belly. Out tumbled quantities of sausages and black puddings made from the pig’s organs and entrails. At this, all the servants applauded like one man. The cook was rewarded with a goblet of wine and a silver wreath.

  Medieval chefs had to be able to present a cooked swan or peacock in its plumage, and build fragile palaces of spun sugar. Some dishes were no more than party tricks; a huge pie, carried to the table by a team of servants, might prove to be filled with live birds that flew out as it was cut, or a turkey would be stuffed with a chicken, the chicken with a guinea hen, the guinea hen with a spatchcock, the spatchcock with a quail, and so on, down to an ortolan, the smallest edible bird, the size of one’s thumb.