The Perfect Meal

by John Baxter

  A modern recipe book would explain how to make purée of partridge, game stock, and quenelles, and the correct way to handle truffles. Escoffier does, but not in the same chapter and often with even more remote subsections, variations, and exceptions. He was writing for professional cooks, who would have learned these techniques during years of apprenticeship and needed only reminding. But to the modern cook, accustomed to convenient, accessible directions and precise measurements, the book is infuriatingly obscure.

  American writer Harry Mathews mocked it in his parody Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double). Supposedly giving the recipe for “an old French regional dish,” Mathews concedes that the preparation “demands some patience, but you will be abundantly rewarded for your pains.” We are then deluged with detail.

  All bones must be removed. If you leave this to the butcher, have him save them for the deglazing sauce. The fell or filament must be kept intact, or the flesh may crumble. Set the boned forequarter on the kitchen table. Do not slice off the purple inspection stamps but scour them with a brush dipped in a weak solution of lye. The meat will need all the protection it can get. Rinse and dry. Marinate the lamb in a mixture of 2 qts of white wine, 2 qts of olive oil, the juice of 16 lemons, salt, pepper, 16 crushed garlic cloves, 10 coarsely chopped yellow onions, basil, rosemary, melilot, ginger, allspice, and a handful of juniper berries. The juniper adds a pungent, authentic note.

  Toward the end, Matthews spares a thought for the cook. “Do not be upset if you yourself have lost all desire to eat. This is a normal, salutary condition. Your satisfaction will have been in the doing, not in the thing done.” Escoffier must often have felt the same way as he sat down to his own dinner, probably too tired to face anything more complicated than a boiled egg.

  My own copy of Le Guide Culinaire once belonged to Alexandre Gastaud, chef at New York’s Knickerbocker Hotel and later of the Waldorf-Astoria. He’d worked at the Ritz-Carlton in London, where Escoffier inscribed the book “à mon cher ami A. Gastaud, sympathique souvenir.”

  They met again when Escoffier visited New York in 1930 for the opening of the Hotel Pierre—an event important enough to rate a report in the New York Times.

  HONORS PRINCE OF CHEFS.

  The Knickerbocker Chef Names a Dish for Escoffier.

  To commemorate the recent visit of M. Escoffier, prince of chefs, A. Gastaud, chef of the Hotel Knickerbocker, has been toiling on a new dish, which shall bear the name of the noted cook. After three weeks of experimenting and study, Gastaud has evolved Guinea Hen à la Escoffier. He believes the new dish is worthy of the renowned chef after whom it is named.

  (If you’d like to try cooking Guinea Hen à la Escoffier, Gastaud’s recipe—not a very difficult one—appears at the back of this book.)

  Gastaud, like Marcel Proust, can claim to have inspired literature, though it was a fame he might have preferred to avoid. When he took over the $28 million Waldorf-Astoria hotel in 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, poet Langston Hughes protested at such luxury coexisting with soup kitchens. His poem “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria” borrowed lines from an ad in Vanity Fair that explained “the famous Oscar Tschirky is in charge of banqueting. Alexandre Gastaud is chef.”

  Take a room at the new Waldorf, you down-and-outers-sleepers in charity’s flop-houses where God pulls a long face, and you have to pray to get a bed.

  They serve swell board at the Waldorf-Astoria. Look at the menu, will you:

  gumbo creole

  crabmeat in cassolette

  boiled brisket of beef

  small onions in cream

  watercress salad

  peach melba

  Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.

  Back home after talking to Boris, I took down my copy of Le Guide Culinaire. It contained directions for making crèmes, purées, potages, and consommés—but no soupe à l’oignon. I located it eventually, among the garbures—thick soups, full of vegetables, pieces of meat, and even bread, either mashed into the soup or toasted and floated on top. “To be served in a restaurant,” Escoffier suggested, “the garbure à l’oignon is given a gratin, either on the surface or in the soup itself. This ‘Garbure à la Cooper’ is described elsewhere.”

  I turned to “Garbure-Cooper”—and there it was, the soupe à l’oignon I knew. Escoffier summarizes it with his usual brevity.

  GARBURE-COOPER. A soup of onions immersed in a white consommé. The onions are well fried in butter. Pass them through a chinois and press down well. Pour the soup into deep bowls, garnish with rounds of bread, cover the surface abundantly with cheese, arroser with melted butter and grill till browned.

  Who was “Cooper”? I never found out. A chinois (a Chinese) is a flattened conical strainer, named for its resemblance to an East Asian “patty hat.” But arroser means “to drench,” as with a hose. Should I really drench the cheese with melted butter? And how did I make “a white consommé”? Belatedly I followed Boris’s advice and turned to page one, chapter one. And there it was: directions for making a white consommé for ten people. About half that should be enough. Mentally halving the ingredients, I took a pen and pad, and began a lengthy shopping list.

  Used to my odd requests, the butcher in the Marché Saint-Germain still looked puzzled.

  “Bones? No meat? Just bones?”

  “They’re for a bouillon.”

  “How much did you say?”

  “Three kilos?”

  “Three kilos!”

  He shook his right hand vigorously, as if he’d touched something hot. Uniquely French, the gesture signifies shock, respect, or admiration. The price paid for a new car, how badly someone broke a leg, or a well-filled pair of jeans can all inspire this gestural “Ow!” I responded with a shrug. Often with the French, words just get in the way.

  The next day, he handed over a lumpy seven-pound sack. I reached for my wallet. He shook his head. “Cadeau,” he said. A gift.

  Following Escoffier’s directions, I set the oven to 150 degrees centigrade, put the bones in a baking dish, added a chopped onion and some garlic cloves, and left them to roast for three hours. They emerged beaded with fat forced out of the marrow by the sustained heat. More fat pooled in the bottom of the dish, flavored by the caramelized garlic and onions.

  “How many kilos of bones?”

  I poured both into a bowl and transferred the bones to my biggest pot. In with them went three carrots, a couple of parsnips, three onions, two sticks of celery, three leeks, a bay leaf, parsley stalks, peppercorns, a handful of sea salt, and seven liters of water, enough to fill the pot to the brim. Bringing the mixture to a boil, I reduced the heat to a simmer, skimmed the froth that rose to the surface, and replaced the lid. I’d already spent half a day reading directions and shopping for ingredients. Just another five hours of cooking, and I could start really making the soup.

  Eighteen

  First Catch Your Market

  . . . the markets with their pyramids of fruit, the turns of the seasons, the sides of beef hanging from the hooks, the hill of spices, and the towers of bottles and preserves, all of the flavors and colors, all the smells and all the stuff, the tide of voices—water, metal, wood, clay—the bustle, the haggling, and contriving as old as time.

  Octavio Paz, I Speak of the City

  Soupe à l’oignon became famous as the meal of workers at Paris’s meat and produce market, Les Halles. Since opening in 1183, the complex grew until it sprawled across twenty-five acres of the Right Bank. In 1850, Baron Haussmann, as part of redesigning Paris, brought it up-to-date. To replace the jumble of sheds, he had Victor Baltard design ten glass-sided pavilions with metal roofs supported on delicate cast-iron columns—the halles, or halls, that gave the market its name. These survived until its demolition in 1971, when, scandalously, most were sold as scrap iron to the Japanese at a knockdown price.

  Almost everything eaten in Paris passed through Les
Halles, brought in overnight by horse and cart from outlying farms and abattoirs, or by train from farther away; the market had its own siding. A suburban farmer would load his wagon in the dark, climb onto the seat, and nudge his old horse in the direction of the city’s distant glow. Émile Zola’s novel The Belly of Paris opens with a description of what followed:

  In the silence of a deserted avenue, wagons stuffed with produce made their way towards Paris, their thudding wheels rhythmically echoing off the houses sleeping behind the rows of elm trees meandering on either side of the road. At the pont de Neuilly, a cart full of cabbages and another full of peas met up with eight carts of turnips and carrots coming in from Nanterre. The horses, their heads bent low, led themselves with their lazy, steady pace, a bit slowed by the slight uphill climb. Up on the carts, lying on their stomachs in the vegetables, wrapped in their black-and-grey striped wool coats, the drivers slept with the reins in their fists.

  Early risers in Paris were used to convoys of such carts clopping across the Seine toward the market, their drivers still asleep.

  Off-loaded into the pavilions, sorted, priced, and put on display, the produce and meat flowed out again in the barrows and baskets of hoteliers, restaurateurs, shopkeepers, and housewives. Even the authors of the 1931 Guide des Plaisirs à Paris, written for French visitors rather than foreign tourists, recommended a visit. In a way that is typically Gallic, it pictured the market as something inspiring, a living exhibition of France’s natural wealth, its patrimoine.

  You’ll see the whole range of colors, from the somber green of vegetables to the garish red of bloody meat, the heaps of baskets, big and small, and the handcarts, pushed around by strapping lads not afraid of their weighty loads.

  Les Halles at 7 a.m., 1910s

  These porters, called forts—“strongs”—earned their license by showing they could muscle 440 pounds, the weight of two grown men, on a wooden hand truck. For a few weeks in 1928, George Orwell tried it but didn’t have the strength, so he quit to become a hotel plongeur, or “diver”—slang for dishwasher. Forts in the meat market were expected to carry the carcass of a whole pig or sheep balanced on their heads. An American visitor wrote, “Never shall I forget the sight of three huge meat-handlers, their long white aprons and turbaned heads smeared with blood, standing like three murderers out of a melodrama of the Middle Ages, and amiably discussing politics.”

  As well as thirteen thousand regular employees, Les Halles supported a dozen smaller communities, including the urban poor. They crowded around the outskirts until the bell, or cloche, rang at 8:00 a.m., signaling the end of trading. Then they poured in, scavenging bruised fruit, discarded vegetables, and scraps of meat. Even today, the French still call the homeless clochards—bell people.

  Other appetites were also catered for. Rent-by-the-hour hôtels de passe filled the surrounding streets where, day and night, prostitutes loitered, ready to satisfy any forts with energy to spare. As a little girl, my mother-in-law, being rushed past such a group by her nanny, asked why these brightly dressed women were standing in such numbers. Improvising quickly, the nanny said, “They’re engaged girls, waiting for their fiancés to finish work.”

  The “fiancés,” called “mecs” from maquereaux, or mackerel—their tight flashy suits resembled the shiny striped skin of that fish—hung out in nearby basement bars, from where they could keep an eye on their girls and collect their takings. The same places were patronized by apaches, named from the Native Americans brought to Paris in Wild West shows. The 1950s musical and film Irma la Douce, set in the nonexistent rue Casanova, sweetens and romanticizes a sordid and dangerous milieu.

  Among the pimps’ dives, the “most poisonous of all,” in the words of American writer Julian Street, was the Caveau des Innocents at 15 rue des Innocents—today ironically the headquarters of the Lancia Motor Club. “It consisted of a vaulted cellar with a doorway so low that one had to stoop on entering, and a series of narrow little rooms in which congregated many desperate characters.” The piano player was a bossu, or hunchback. Waiters and musicians in such places were often physically handicapped. Afflictions that might disconcert clients in respectable establishments were welcomed by criminals. Rubbing the back of a bossu was believed to bring luck, particularly to gamblers; sufferers from the condition loitered near casinos, charging for the service.

  Le Caveau des Innocents

  In 1910, dancer Maurice Mouvet was taken to the Innocents by a friend. “It was lighted by green and red lights,” he recalled. “They were oil lamps, and their smoke-covered shades leered down from the walls with a baleful glare. There was sand on the filthy floor and rough deal tables about the room. At these tables, groups of apaches were playing poker with their knives open on the table beside them.”

  During the evening, a mec grabbed one of the poules, or chicks, and performed a variation on the Rough Dance, a country romp in which a couple playfully bumped and jostled one another. At the Innocents, the dance became more like a brawl, the girl begging for her man’s attention, he shoving her away, even throwing her to the floor, only to have her crawl back and clutch his leg adoringly. Impressed, Mouvet paid the man to teach him the steps and created the Apache Dance, which became a feature of night club shows around the world.

  Emile Zola christened Les Halles “le ventre de Paris”—“the belly of Paris.” That belly needed feeding—the task of such all-night cafés as Au Chien qui Fume (The Smoking Dog), Au Père Tranquille (The Quiet Father), and Au Pied de Cochon (The Pig Foot)—au in this case signifying “at the sign of.”

  Socialites often joined the crowd at the end of a long night, slumming or looking for “a bit of rough.” The Guide des Plaisirs warned that the locals might not be as naïve as they looked. “The regulars here will sometimes ambush susceptible strangers on the stairs, persuade them to buy them dinner, then disappear at the end of the meal.”

  “The crowd is extremely mixed,” it continued, “and very amusing. A woman in a chic evening dress will sit next to a working girl en cheveux.” En cheveux—“bareheaded”—was a slur: no respectable woman appeared in public without a hat, even around Les Halles. Visiting Montmartre, not regarded as particularly genteel, a British writer noticed that his lady companion “attracted more attention than she liked, for she was hatless and in evening dress, and all the others of her sex we saw were largely covered. In Paris, of an evening, two cherries and a piece of velvet are sufficient headgear, but [wearing] no headgear, except at the Opera, is looked upon as odd.”

  Au Chien qui Fume enforced no dress code. It was too busy, even in the small hours. “At 3 a.m.,” explained the Guide des Plaisirs, “the ground floor, the small dining rooms on the first floor and the private rooms are all filled with people eating supper.” According to Julian Street, “The crowds stayed until morning, dancing, singing the latest ribald songs, occasionally breaking chairs and bottles, and sometimes shedding blood.” All this was tolerated as good for business. Burly waiters kept order, and if the occasional pickpocket or whore slipped by, that just added to the atmosphere.

  At these cafés, almost everyone ate what New Yorker magazine correspondent Janet Flanner called “the rich, brunette onion soup.” Nothing fought off a hangover better, or more effectively revived the libido. It was never off the menu. Even when the cook had gone home, an apprentice could fill a bowl from the pot simmering at the back of the stove, float a slab of oven-dried bread on top, cover it in grated cheese, and brown it under the grill.

  Onion Soup outside Les Halles, 1889

  Some improved the soup with “a hair of the dog” by following the custom of chabrot—pouring red wine into the dregs to swill out the last scraps of bread and onion. Practiced since childhood, chabrot turned many young Frenchmen into alcoholics, the painter Maurice Utrillo among them. Others claimed that wine, like soup, was good for the health. According to an old rhyme, “Après la soupe un coup de vin / C’est un écu de moins au médecin”—A glass of wine after the soup
means one less coin for the doctor.

  In 1971, Les Halles relocated in a characterless but healthier complex at Rungis. The redevelopers created a park covering an ugly multilevel shopping mall and railway interchange. The prostitutes moved a few blocks east, to rue St. Denis, and most of the restaurants closed. Of the few that remain, some still serve onion soup, but the spirit of Les Halles didn’t survive demolition—except, briefly, in one form. While it was still a building site, flowers and vegetables sprouted from the ripped-up earth. Many varieties hadn’t been cultivated in an age. They sprang from seeds scattered over centuries—ghosts of the old market, clinging defiantly to life.

  Around 10:00 p.m., it was time to take the bouillon off the heat. It wasn’t white—more a pale gold—but Escoffier used “white” to distinguish it from the essences that provided a base for rich daubes, or stews, of wild boar or hare, in which the blood of the animal blended with the bouillon.

  I dredged out and discarded the bones and vegetables. Their flavor remained in the broth, which I poured through a deep colander lined with a wet tea towel. Though it had looked clear, the straining had left a thick residue. After that, the soup, reduced now to three liters from the original five, went into the fridge, and I went to bed.

  The next morning, a layer of hard white fat covered the bowl, like ice on a pond. Under it, the natural gelatin of the bones had turned the stock to a golden jelly. I broke up the fat and added it to what I’d extracted during baking. This “dripping” was an indispensable ingredient for greasing a côte du boeuf or creating perfect roast potatoes, crunchy outside but with interiors of the consistency the French call fondant—melting. How right country cooks had been to save such by-products. Sot-l’y-laisse—the stupid leave them.