by John Baxter
I could have served the jellied bouillon as it was, cold, chopped up, garnished with shreds of raw vegetable and a scattering of fresh chopped herbs. But having come this far, I wasn’t about to shy at the last fence.
Setting the pot on low heat, I watched the jelly dissolve into a swirling yellow consommé, shimmering with the little fat that remained. I checked the clock: 9:00 a.m. There was now a real possibility we might have soupe à l’oignon for lunch.
I ran half a kilo of white onions through the food processor, filling a bowl with the transparent slices. Melting half that amount of sweet butter in one of my Le Creuset cast-iron orange-enameled cocottes, the Porsches of kitchen tools, I added the onion, with a spoonful of sugar to hasten caramelization. After forty minutes on low heat, it was a deep gold. I drained off the excess butter, poured in a glass of cognac, let the alcohol vaporize, then stirred in a large spoonful of flour. Butter and flour combined to create the roux on which any sauce or thick soup is founded.
Once it browned, I trickled in the bouillon, stirring to prevent lumps. The clear broth became an opaque but still golden soup that showed plenty of onions when stirred but wasn’t, like some café versions, clogged with them.
While it simmered, I put a dozen pieces of three-day-old bread into a low oven to crisp. Old bread is another of those ingredients that “the stupid leave.” To use fresh bread in onion soup is inviting disaster. The underside goes to mush while the upper surface bonds with the cheese to become yellow leather.
It was time for the last touches: a handful of Gruyère stirred into the pot, followed by a raw onion grated fine. Unlike some suggested additions—an egg beaten with port is surely the worst—the cheese and onion would remind the palate of the essential ingredients that cooking had transformed. I ladled the soup into deep bowls, floated a slice of the dried bread on each, moistened (but not “drenched”) with butter drained from the onion. Heaping grated Gruyère liberally on top, I placed the bowls under the grill, though not so close that the cheese would burn before it melted.
The aroma of toasting cheese, one of the most seductive in the world, filled the kitchen. As the cheese began to brown, I removed the bowls and placed them on a tray. At this moment in a French household, one called “À table!”—to the table. But for once, I reverted to my Anglo-Saxon roots and announced, “Soup’s on!”
Was it worth the effort? Well, everyone loved it. Marie-Dominique, Louise, and I devoured two big bowls each, down to the last drop of the three liters I’d made.
Did it taste better than the version at Au Pied de Cochon? Deliciously so. There was a depth to the flavor that made each spoonful an experience. If you could chew a liquid, that is what we did.
But for all its flavor, there was something absurd about having spent two days making it. For two days, I’d lived like a sous chef of a century before, baking, boiling, filtering, skimming, falling into bed to rise the next morning and start again. Because I’d chosen to do so, it was fun. But if I had no choice? There were more fulfilling ways to spend one’s time.
No cook is so foolish that he won’t use a packaged product if he can’t tell the result from fresh. Robert Carrier, the British celebrity food writer of the 1970s and author of Great Dishes of the World, insisted that canned pineapple juice was indistinguishable in texture and flavor from the fresh-crushed fruit. Unless you can cook green peas within a few hours of picking, the frozen product is far superior, since freezing preserves the sugars that otherwise turn to starch. Alice B. Toklas, the most traditional of cooks, was a late but enthusiastic convert to American cake mixes, albeit with “improvements.” She gave Betty Crocker pound cake a frosting made with the whiskey liqueur Drambuie.
In Escoffier’s memoirs, I’d discovered an obscure detail of his military service. As the Prussians besieged Metz, he scoured the town for supplies. After corralling a flock of chickens, geese, ducks, and turkeys, he managed to grab a sheep and a goat, twenty kilos of salt, and four large jars of plum jam, which served as a sweetener when sugar disappeared.
Since 1795 the French army had been trying to perfect some way of preserving food for military use, but until then had succeeded only with glass jars. Escoffier found that the Prussians ate canned products developed by the chemist and pioneering nutritionist Baron Justus von Liebig. He seized all he could find, including sardines and tuna fish in oil—“a fortunate inspiration,” he wrote, “that caused no complaints from my officers, as they ended up being the best served of all the chiefs of staff.” When the war ended, he encouraged the development of canning and routinely used canned and bottled food in his hotels and restaurants.
Von Liebig also invented a meat extract and a powdered bouillon that could be reconstituted with hot water. Undoubtedly, Escoffier knew these products. It’s even conceivable he employed them in the field and during the siege. Could it be that the greatest chef of his day, the man who literally wrote the book on haute cuisine, used . . . stock cubes?
Nineteen
First Catch Your Anchovy
How delicious, to a schoolboy’s healthy appetite, sixty years ago, was the potted meat at breakfast in my grandmother’s old Wiltshire home. Neat little white pots, with a crust of yellow butter suggesting the spicy treat beneath, beef, ham, or tongue, handiwork of the second or third kitchen maid . . .
“A. Potter,” in Pottery: Home Made Potted Foods, Meat and Fish Pastes, Savoury Butters and others. The Wine and Food Society, London, 1946
It’s easy, in planning a great meal, to forget the importance of detail. After the table had been set for a banquet in an aristocratic home, the butler would tour it with a measuring stick, checking that the knives, forks and spoons, glasses, and plates were all precisely equidistant from one another; that the napkins were correctly and consistently folded; that no smudge marred a wineglass.
On the few occasions when I saw this process in action, I was reminded of the care with which the priest aligned the objects on the altar before Mass. More than the devil was in the details; there was a touch of sanctity as well. Respecting precision and ritual is a sort of reverence.
In the 1970s, when I lived in a village in the English county of Suffolk, I timed my trips to London to catch the 4:00 p.m. train home—the only service that offered afternoon tea.
British Rail provided a special dining carriage for the purpose—one of the last, to judge from the bald spots on its plush seats, the chips along the edges of the varnished tabletops, and the brass fittings blurred from decades of rubbing. Even the waiter’s high-cut white linen jacket, known as a “bum-freezer,” was threadbare at the edges from too much starching and ironing. When the old carriage was shunted off to oblivion, the tradition of afternoon tea would expire with it, replaced by a bleak standup snack bar. This made it even more important to enjoy the experience while we could.
In more gracious times, tea was less a meal than a ritual, almost a sacrament. One “took” tea, as a Catholic “takes” communion or a nun “takes the veil.”
On the 4:00 p.m., conventions were strictly observed. A few minutes before departure, the lone waiter came through and asked each passenger, “Are you taking tea?” Those who answered no were politely ordered out. We who remained received a thick china cup, saucer, and plate, and a spoon—all decades old and dulled by long service. A jug of milk and a bowl of sugar were placed on each table. Just as the train glided out of the station, the waiter passed down the car with a giant metal teapot, filling our cups.
Then came the treats.
First, a basket of buttered bread, wholemeal and white, sliced diagonally, crusts still attached. We took one of each; two of the same color implied ungentlemanly excess. When slices of fruitcake followed, those who’d chosen bread and butter usually declined, saving their appetite for the next course: tea cakes. These sweet rolls were sliced in two, toasted, and buttered. The sugar-crusted tops were tastier than the bottoms, but everyone dutifully took one of each.
Finally, the waiter returned with a b
asket of sandwiches.
How to describe British sandwiches?
Somewhere in Whitehall there is probably a manual, dating back to Queen Victoria, that defines the rules for preparing a sandwich—known, despite the bread being invariably square, as a “round.”
A round of sandwiches consists of two slices of soft white bread, crusts trimmed off. A scraping of butter prevents the bread from becoming soggy from the filling, which is usually cucumber, peeled but not seeded, sliced paper-thin, patted dry on a linen tea towel, then dusted with white pepper. Cucumber sandwiches are the test of a tea. Cooks in the best houses cut them in “fingers,” each a perfect mouthful. In 1948, Queen Mary invited film director Terence Young to Buckingham Palace to discuss his cryptic first film, Corridor of Mirrors. Young didn’t remember much of the conversation but never forgot the refreshments. “Those cucumber sandwiches! My dear chap! Thin as razor blades.”
The sandwiches on the 4:00 p.m. from Liverpool Street, though not up to Buckingham Palace standard, were respectably thin. Fillings never varied: cucumber of course, cress, egg salad, and anchovy paste. They arrived cut diagonally into quarters. It was understood that each of us should take four quarters, one of each filling. So imagine my astonishment when, one afternoon, as the basket was passed, the passenger opposite, a complete stranger, said, “Ah! Fish paste! My favorite”—and helped himself to four quarters of fish paste!
Time froze. My neighbor, also a stranger, turned toward me just as I turned toward him. Our eyes met. Our eyebrows raised in unison. Well!
That’s when I realized I was turning into an Englishman.
Secretly, I sympathized with our greedy companion. Because I, too, liked anchovy paste.
Americans grew up on sandwiches spread with peanut butter and jam. This mixture was unknown in Europe or its colonies. Very occasionally, we got sugar sandwiches—white bread and butter scattered with sugar or, on special occasions, with multicolor nonpareils: what Americans call “sprinkles” but which we knew as “hundreds-and-thousands.”
Mostly, however, our sandwiches were filled with savory pastes of ham, fish, shrimp, processed cheese, or occasionally a black goo, extracted from yeast, called Marmite in Britain and Vegemite in Australia. Although Vegemite resembled axle grease and was so salty it made you salivate like a bloodhound, it sizzled with vitamin B and so was a fixture of many Australian tables, next to the pepper and salt.
These days, anchovy paste comes in tubes, but I remember it in small glass jars molded vaguely in the form of a barrel, with a brassy metal lid. I liked the paste spread on buttered toast, particularly the fingers—known in Britain as “soldiers”—that I dipped into boiled eggs.
Anchovy paste in Australia, where the anchovy itself was unknown, followed the fashion to imitate things British—which, by definition, were superior to anything we might have produced. In this case, the model was “potted meats”: cooked meat or fish pounded to a paste with pepper, salt, and herbs, then pressed into small china pots and covered with melted butter to keep the contents fresh.
When I moved to Britain, I looked for anchovy paste but quickly found a better alternative. In 1828 a resourceful grocer named John Osborn developed a paste specifically for military officers overseas. Hard, salty, and spicy, it came in a white porcelain pot that evoked homemade potted meats. On the lid, black letters spelled out the trade name: Patum Peperium. Though this sounds like it should be Latin for “peppery paste,” the words mean nothing in any known language. In any event, the product was better known under its nom de guerre “The Gentleman’s Relish.”
I bought my first pot at London’s best grocers, Fortnum and Mason. In those days, its salesmen still wore tail coats and striped trousers, like ushers at a fashionable wedding. All the same, one of them accepted my money without asking for proof that I was a gentleman, and I left with the slightly furtive sense of having Got Away with something.
After that, Patum Peperium was always on the table. I spread it on toast, stirred it into stews, and used it in cocktail snacks. For a pre-dinner canapés at my banquet, I couldn’t imagine anything tastier than squares of toast spread with Gentleman’s Relish and topped with a quail’s egg, hard-boiled and sliced in half. The New Yorker, famous for its fact checking, recently called Gentleman’s Relish “a lip-puckering anchovy paste made from a secret recipe in a factory in Elsenham, England.” Not so, I’m afraid. In this era of free information, the formula is available online (and in the recipe section at the rear of this book).
My weakness for anchovy paste helps explain why my friend Christopher and I were standing on the railway station at Perpignan, in the deep southwest of France, reading the words Centre de l’Universe painted in large white letters on the platform.
On the wall overhead, a photograph showed surrealist painter Salvador Dalí striding down this very platform with Gala, his wife, on their way from Spain to Paris with a cargo of fresh insanity. Though he never commanded so much as a canoe, Dalí wore the all-white uniform of an admiral of the Spanish navy, a privilege conferred on him by General Franco, Spain’s fascist head of state, whom he extravagantly admired.
Dalí claimed that, while changing trains at Perpignan on September 19, 1963, he experienced “a sort of cosmic ecstasy,” with powerful sexual overtones. Scholars speculate that this must have been a prodigious erection, followed perhaps by a spontaneous orgasm. In his autobiography, Dalí wasn’t that specific.
It is always at Perpignan station, when Gala is making arrangements for the paintings to follow us by train, that I have my most unique ideas. It is the arrival at Perpignan station that marks an absolute mental ejaculation which then reaches its greatest and most sublime speculative height. On this 19th of September, I had a kind of ecstasy that was cosmogonic and even stronger than preceding ones. I had an exact vision of the constitution of the universe.
He incorporated his vision into a 1965 canvas called Mystique de la gare de Perpignan, which shows him blown literally sky-high by the force of his revelation. The French railway system, not to be outdone, commemorated the event by painting “Centre de l’Universe” on its platform. I can’t quite see this happening at Grand Central or Charing Cross.
This far southwest in France, so close to the Spanish border, erotic arousal comes with the territory, particularly if it involves the railways. In August 1999, art historian Catherine Millet toured the area with her husband, the novelist Jacques Henric. Mainly she wanted to visit the grave of Walter Benjamin, who wrote the influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and committed suicide here in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis.
In addition to being a respected writer on art and editor of an influential monthly, Millet was, as she had just revealed in her bestseller La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M., a tireless sexual athlete and a regular on the Parisian group-sex circuit. She also enjoyed exposing herself nude in the open air and being photographed doing so. At Walter Benjamin’s grave, she posed naked while Henric photographed her. They then went to the Port-Bou railway station, where, as the Barcelona express roared through, she stood with her dress wide open to show the speeding and no doubt incredulous passengers that she was wearing nothing else. Once again, Henric captured the moment.
Millet’s sexual games are harmless, and indeed, like the lady herself, rather charming, as well as being witty comments on the way in which photography changed the nature of art, which is what Benjamin dealt with in his essay. Nudity, real or reproduced, as a means of communication among intellectuals isn’t uncommon in modern French culture. Ned Rorem introduced himself to fellow composer (and fellow gay man) Benjamin Britten by mailing him a seminude self-portrait. Once this got around, people who wished to meet Rorem, including women, sent him similar photographs of themselves, until he was forced to remove his address from the phone book. On another occasion, the countess Marie-Laure de Noailles, patroness of Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, and Rorem, wished to show her disapproval of the fiancée chosen by one of her proteg
ées. Quietly leaving the salon of her mansion on Place des États-Unis, she reappeared a few moments later in the doorway naked, posed there for a moment, then disappeared again, to return fully clothed. “I just wanted you to know,” she told the bemused couple, “what a real Frenchwoman looked like.”
Had any intellectual passing through Perpignan that morning offered a repeat of the countess’s gesture or Millet’s exposure, Christopher and I would probably have missed it. We were too busy sprinting across four platforms to board the slow train for a thirty-minute trip to the port of Collioure, center of France’s anchovy industry.
Christopher once lived near there and had happy memories of its hospitality, its wine, its cuisine, and, of course, its anchovies. But as I clambered onto the train, the absurdity of the expedition struck me. To travel seven hours across France to discover the source of anchovy paste? Wasn’t this as strange as dressing as an admiral or exposing oneself to a train full of tourists? It seems that the region of Catalonia, which encompasses cities such as Barcelona on the Spanish side of the border and Collioure and Perpignan on the French side, induces excesses of this sort.
Collioure came well recommended. Mark Kurlansky in his history Salt described it as a busy community where the locals, from May to October, set out daily in vividly painted boats, called catalans, to fish for anchovies, which they filleted by hand and salted down in wooden casks. The rest of the year was spent raising grapes for wine and awaiting the moment when the anchovies arrived serenely at maturity.
This Friday in December, however, Collioure had an air of lassitude, even despair. With no cabs at the railway station, we trundled our bags downhill toward the town center. On the way, we passed the bullring. Just some bleachers enclosed in a flimsy metal screen, it hardly deserved the name. In any event, it was now closed indefinitely, since the Catalonian government had just banned the corrida—not out of compassion for the animals but as a gesture to the increasingly vociferous animal-rights lobby. Beyond, the main route into town was ripped up for resurfacing and the laying of new sewer pipes. We had to pick our way among bulldozers and trench diggers. Nevertheless, though it was only midday, not a single worker was in sight nor would there be any until Monday.