The Perfect Meal

by John Baxter

  A cart was parked half outside the market. Within a metal hood about the size of the brick ovens used to cook pizza, flames roared from a liquid gas cylinder. Watched by his wife, standing behind a table, the socca man poured thin batter onto a wide metal dish attached to a long handle and slipped it in under the flames. The upper surface began to bubble and brown.

  “What’s in it?”

  Madame pointed to a sign hanging on a column.

  SOCCA. Farine de Pois Chiche.

  Huile d’Olive. Eau. Sel. 3 Euros.

  The man slid the pancake onto a square of foil. The top was brown, the underside pale. Madame dusted it with pepper and slashed it into finger-food-size pieces.

  I picked one up—it was almost too hot to touch—and munched.

  “Wonderful!”

  Chickpea flour, olive oil, water, and salt, with a bite of white pepper: Who could have imagined such simple ingredients could taste so good?

  “You find socca all along this side of the Mediterranean,” Charles said. “I’m surprised you never had it before.”

  So was I. But would it have tasted the same in Paris or London or New York, or even here, during festival time? Probably not. This was something to be eaten with cold stone underfoot, the mistral whipping up dust, and market people crying the merits of their cheese and fish. When time grinds away all of lesser value, this is what remains. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

  Saint-Éxupéry said that.

  Fourteen

  First Catch Your Burger

  VINCENT: You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris? They call it a Royale with Cheese.

  JULES: What do they call a Whopper?

  VINCENT: I didn’t go into Burger King.

  Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction

  Whatever other ingredients might make up my banquet, it hardly needed emphasizing that the most important dish, the centerpiece, must involve beef.

  Veal is the meat of the bourgeoisie, but it’s beef they eat for pleasure. For proof, look no further than a recent French TV commercial. A family of horned, black-faced, but otherwise well-dressed, upper-middle-class demons is grilling steaks on an indoor barbecue. With a burst of heavenly music, servants open the double doors to admit their dinner guests: a band of angels preceded by . . . well, he’s wearing a tennis sweater, not a robe, but the crosier he carries and the saintly smile on his bearded face leave little doubt about his—or should that be His?—identity. While angels and devils canoodle and steaks sizzle, the visitor drools over thick slices of pink and tender beef. Yes, friends, it’s official: Jesus likes it rare. The ad closes on him dancing with his diabolical opposite number, and the slogan “Le Boeuf. Le Gout d’Etre Ensemble.”—“Beef: The Taste of Togetherness.”

  A butcher explains to the bull that he is dying in a good cause

  Meanwhile, news of my interest in attending an ox roast was spreading, though often transformed in the process. A few people thought we were looking for a live animal to cook and offered suitable beasts at markdown prices. Plenty of amateur farmers living on the outskirts of Paris owned cows that, bought in a spasm of enthusiasm—“Imagine, our own fresh milk and cream!”—were eating them into bankruptcy. Their readiness to sacrifice Daisy for cash reminded me of a story that circulated when Australian director George Miller was putting together Mad Max II, aka The Road Warrior. Since Mel Gibson’s Max walks with a limp, Miller thought the character should be accompanied by an equally handicapped dog called Trike, possibly missing an entire leg. A call went out for such an animal—withdrawn after some of the trainers they approached eyed their pack thoughtfully and asked, “How soon would you need it?”

  Vegetarianism may have made slight inroads into France, but, at most, a fingernail’s grip has grown to a toehold. The soul of any meal remains a joint, filet, or fowl. It arrives at the table in aristocratic solitude, deferentially accompanied by its sauce on the side. Vegetables, if served at all, are smuggled in. Many restaurants don’t even identify them, indicating only that the dish is garni—garnished. If you ask a waiter about vegetables, he’s likely to stare as if you’ve inquired where he buys his aprons. There is even a theory that learning how to cook meat sparked the birth of civilization. Raw vegetables and meat are hard to chew and difficult to digest. Boiling and roasting softened them. It also encouraged early man to gather round the communal fire and share a meal, the first step in creating a culture.

  Scarcely a decade goes by without some scandal connected with beef. Invariably, the French come out winners. The last crisis was the outbreak in Britain of “mad cow” disease in the late 1990s, which led to the European Union’s banning the importation of British meat. When asked how bovine spongiform encephalopathy could have stopped magically at the English Channel and not affected their herds, French farmers simply stared at the sky and hummed the “Marseillaise” under their breath. Rumors that infected animals may have been quietly buried at midnight or fed into abattoir furnaces faded away for lack of hard evidence.

  The scandal over BSE was as nothing, however, compared to the battle over the introduction into France of the hamburger. On cold winter nights, fast-food entrepreneurs gather their children round their knees and tell them horror stories of what happened in the 1970s when American burger companies, including the mighty McDonald’s, tried and, initially, failed to crack the French market.

  The hero of that fight was Raymond Dayan, a businessman from North Africa who started as an interior decorator in the United States. While redesigning the home of McDonald’s owner Ray Kroc, he persuaded Kroc to assign him the McDonald’s franchise for Chicago’s North Side. He did so well that he turned his eyes to France, where the company had already attempted to build a chain but had given up in defeat. McDo—as the French call it—gave Dayan a thirty-year license to introduce the Big Mac to France. How poorly they rated his chances is reflected in the terms. Most franchisees paid up to 12 percent of their income to the parent company. Dayan was obligated to remit a mere 1 percent.

  Dayan thought he knew why McDonald’s had flopped. The company didn’t understand how finicky the French were about beef. Not only were its skinny fries an insult to the nation that invented pommes frites, but McDo burgers were too fatty for their taste.

  He started by changing recipes, even though, strictly speaking, this breached the terms of his franchise. As well as thickening his fries, making the beef patties leaner, adding more mustard to the salad dressing, and selling beer and Evian instead of shakes, Dayan accepted that the French hate standing in line. In the United States, customers queued in orderly fashion. A line in Paris, on the other hand, resembled, as one American wrote, “a triangle, with the base at the place where business is being conducted.” A new system of tapes, cords, and “Next client, please” kept his customers in order.

  But the real inspiration was in changing the clientele, A burger, fries, and a Coke may be the favorite meal of the U.S. working man, but for the French it was as exotic as chocolate-coated octopus. “You don’t find any blue-collar workers or peasants in fast-food restaurants in France,” explained the head of a rival chain. “For them, being in a fast-food restaurant is a little like being on the moon.”

  McDo had placed its restaurants in industrial districts, near railway stations and factories. Dayan moved them to the snobby boulevards such as the Champs-Élysées, next to first-run cinemas and establishments such as Le Drug Store, where trendsetters and tastemakers hung out. Le Drug Store had already proved its influence by introducing the American concept of the mixed salad. This might combine ham, cheese, croutons, nuts, egg, and even foie gras with its lettuce, all accompanied by a thick, sweet sauce the menu insisted on calling “French dressing,” even though it resembled no vinaigrette ever seen in France. As nobody since the time of the emperor Charlemagne had made a salad except with greens, dressed with a little oil, lemon juice, and salt, the effect was revelator
y.

  To complete his triumph, Dayan renamed the sacred Big Mac, calling it the Royal Cheese. By 1976, to the chagrin of the home company, he had fourteen restaurants and was coining money. After repeated attempts to buy him out, McDonald’s sued, claiming he had breached the rule that a customer passing under the golden arches anywhere in the world would find a product identical to the one he ate back home. “Dayan cooked his hamburger patties 180 degrees too high,” charged the company. “French fries 50 degrees too high; fish 55 degrees too high; and apple pie 67 degrees too high.” As well, they accused him of bad sanitation. Obviously unaware of the leisurely behavior of French waiters, they also complained that “customers waited for service for more than three minutes!”

  McDonald’s won. Dayan relinquished the franchise and changed the name of his chain to O’Kitch. It was swiftly swallowed up by his rivals. But Ronald McDonald had learned his lesson. Today, although the external trappings may be the same all over the world, the product is customized to fit often inexplicable local taste. Businesses flourish and fail, lawsuits are lost or won, but meat goes on.

  Beef had to feature somewhere in my imaginary banquet, but its very popularity caused problems. No beef dish was truly uncommon, so there was nothing new to discover. The grilled entrecôte, or faux filet, was a cliché of lunch menus, and for dinner, larger places usually featured, as a dish for two, the piece of filet known as a Chateaubriand and the classic côte de boeuf, or rib roast. Once you got into boiled or braised beef, you could take your pick from among a dozen dishes: boeuf bourguignon, boeuf en daube, pot-au-feu . . .

  Then Marie-Dominique asked, “What about a tartare?”

  “A tartare of what?”

  Lately, the term had been stretched to include chopped raw tuna, salmon, even tomato. A Japanese restaurant in New York served what one reviewer called “a so-called tartare, consisting of edamame [soybean pods] chopped with shiso [an herb] and citrus.” But Marie-Dominique, like any good Frenchwoman, scorned such perversions.

  “Boeuf, naturalement.”

  Nothing brings meat eaters closer to the pure enjoyment of flesh than the classic steak tartare. This is beef naked, raw, and unashamed. A piece of lean steak is chopped finely—ideally with two sharp knives—given a minimum of seasoning, and served with, at most, a little salad and a few frites.

  Or at least that’s how it should be.

  Unfortunately, the average restaurant buys its tartare prechopped in vacuum-packed single servings of about 200 grams, or half a pound. Others use fresh meat but mince it, a process that, if you believe the experts, tears the beef, stretching and tangling its fibers. Everyone agrees that the worst option is the food processor. Beef that’s been through a robot, as the French call a processor, emerges as a pink paste, juiceless, bland, and inedible.

  Even restaurants that respect tartare feel a need to improve it. They bring the meat to you as a patty, surrounded by small heaps of chopped onion, parsley, pickled cucumber, and capers, with a raw egg yolk squatting on top. The waiter asks if you wish it préparée—prepared. If you do, he disappears, to return with all the additions mixed in, and carrying bottles of Worcestershire sauce, mustard, ketchup, and Tabasco, in case you feel it needs even more.

  M. F. K. Fisher, while agreeing the dish was “slightly barbaric” and that many Americans would find it inedible, stood up for the pure and unadulterated tartare. The chopped beef, in her opinion, should contain no more than fresh herbs, an egg yolk, salt, pepper, and a little olive oil. “Keep it from the eager exhibitionism of the waiter,” she urged—still good advice.

  I’d never thought of including a tartare in my feast. Like all those other beef dishes, it was too familiar. But I really knew nothing about it. In what region had it developed? Was it even traditional? Did Rabelais sit down to a tartare? Did Toulouse-Lautrec?

  “I might consider it, I suppose. Why?”

  Marie-Dominique plunked down the week’s Nouvelle Observateur, open at the restaurant page.

  “Because this establishment is supposed to be”—she read over my shoulder—“‘the nirvana of tartare.’”

  If you’re used to the chilly, knowing tone of The New Yorker’s restaurant reviews, French food writing can startle with its undisguised greed. This notice throbbed with appetite.

  Imagine this tartare. A hefty serving of 350 grams (“We do not weigh it, monsieur!”), prepared with delicacy and elegance, which is to say finely but not copiously seasoned, with whole capers in sufficiently small numbers to avoid acidity. This is the art of seasoning; to avoid the “big guns” but add it by the millimeter and leave the meat enough time to recover. It arrives accompanied by frites to die for—large, irregular, crunchy, and melting at the same time—and a salad of young greens, fresh and peppery, with nothing but a little oil. And the chopping? I know what you think, purists of the steak tartare. I see you already climbing onto the cooking pot and raising your forks to heaven; “It’s not a real tartare unless you chop it with knives!” You’re wrong. Pleasure and taste can hide anywhere, and here, believe me, they jump in your face, knives or no knives.

  “It does sound interesting,” I conceded.

  “So I thought.” Marie-Dominique looked at the clock. “I believe today you are taking me to lunch.”

  Why are the best restaurants always the hardest to find? Some lurk behind unmarked doors, in obscure streets where, in normal circumstances, you wouldn’t go unarmed. Many don’t take reservations or, if they do, impose them with a strictness worthy of a house of detention. Ma Maison, once the most fashionable eating place in Los Angeles, didn’t list its telephone number. Hours of opening vary perversely for such establishments. They shut their doors without notice for a month of renovations, or take a week’s holiday to attend some family celebration, or for even more improbable reasons. (This isn’t confined to restaurants. When our daughter was about to be born, the clinic rejected our suggested date. “It’s the start of the ski season,” explained the receptionist. When I asked, “Does that matter?,” she said, straight-faced, “Only if you don’t want your child delivered by the gardener.”)

  The reviewer didn’t exaggerate when he described the location of the tartare restaurant as “a little lost corner of the quatorzième.” Though the fourteenth arrondissement boasts the great cafés of Montparnasse, La Coupole, La Dôme, La Rotonde, and Le Select, it’s dominated by the cemetery, the sprawl of the railway terminus, and the looming black horror of Paris’s only skyscraper, the Tour de Montparnasse. Surrounding them is a maze of narrow one-way streets that can have you chasing your tail for hours.

  Normally, one wouldn’t have looked at the restaurant twice. Small and modern, it occupied a shop front on a corner of an otherwise unremarkable street. But inside, all sense of the present evaporated. Despite some updating, it still retained an original terrazzo floor and the custom of chalking up the menu on a board. The dishes, too, were classic: boudin noir, blanquette, fish soup . . . and steak tartare.

  Certain words signify an establishment that respects traditional dishes and methods. Maison is one. It means something has been made “in house” and is likely a specialty of the chef. Artisanal signifies something created by hand, not in a factory. And à l’ancienne means it’s in the old style, just the way mother or—even better—grandmother used to make it.

  This place delivered all three. The bread wasn’t the ubiquitous sliced baguette but chunks of Poilâne’s wholemeal sourdough, solid and elastic, with a crust that fought your teeth. The house wine came in a clear glass bottle with a heavy base, the kind you see in movies from the 1930s, where one thug is usually smashing it over the head of another.

  Our tartares arrived préparées, with salad and frites all on the same plate. I tried a frite. Thick-cut, well browned but not crisp, it was happily remote from the shriveled slivers served at burger joints.

  The tartare itself was just as uncompromising. In my first forkful, I tasted finely chopped onion and whole capers, but aside from the eg
g yolk, salt, and pepper, nothing else. The satisfaction of pure beef was unimpaired. Everything was comme il faut—the way it should be.

  The review had promised that the restaurant’s tartare would “tickle our carnivore pleasure.” It did that. But where was the rarity that would justify including it in my banquet? Perhaps, in some remote corner of the country, there existed a variation that no longer appeared in Paris restaurants, but I had no idea what it could be. In fact, my ignorance of the tartare was profound.

  I began my research on the Internet. One site claimed the dish got its name from the Tatars, who invaded Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Supposedly they gnawed raw meat as they rode, too busy looting and pillaging to stop and cook. Another authority agreed Tatars were mixed up in it somewhere but suggested that warriors put meat under their saddle in the morning so that the pounding of the day’s riding, plus the effect of the animal’s sweat, would tenderize it by nightfall. I didn’t care to think how this made it taste, but it called to mind another favorite of these people, a drink called kumis, made from fermented mare’s milk. I once met a man who’d drunk it. What was it like? “Well,” he said. “At first, it’s like thin yogurt. Then you get this alcoholic rush—and, immediately after, an awful aftertaste of horseshit.”

  A third theory claimed tartare got its name because it was originally served with sauce tartare, made from mayonnaise mixed with chopped onion, capers, and pickles. This surprised me. Sauce tartare usually accompanies fish, not meat. But was it just coincidence that sauce tartare and steak tartare shared some ingredients: pickles, capers, onion?

  I dug further, looking for the ur-recipe that marked the birthplace of this icon of French cuisine. It didn’t take long. The dish appeared for the first time in the 1921 edition of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire. Back then it wasn’t called steak tartare but steak à l’Americaine—steak American-style.