The Perfect Meal

by John Baxter

  In ten minutes, we arrived at the Mediterranean.

  “It’s quieter than I remember,” Chris said, looking round the empty quayside.

  On one side of the pretty bay, a tower straight out of a pirate fantasy commanded an ocean that, except for a few wavelets rippling on the pebble beach, was motionless. On the opposite point hulked a crumbling stone fortress, the Château Royal, looking as ominous as the Spanish Inquisition. No colorful catalans were pulled up on the shingle. As for the local wine industry, interest seemed to end in a couple of cafés, where locals huddled over a pichet and studied the lottery results.

  A chat with the desk clerk at our hotel brought us up-to-date. In the last three years, Collioure had declined. At one time, Perpignan looked to become the major center of the region, but interest now flowed inexorably across the border to Barcelona, the undisputed magnet for tourism and commerce.

  At the same time, the European Union cut the number of days Collioure’s anchovy fleet could fish. But the real problem was the anchovies themselves. Some years, they swarmed just offshore. Lately, however, they’d shunned French waters for those of North Africa, so that any fish eaten next year would be mostly Algerian.

  Of the once-thriving fleet, only a few boats remained, and a single cannery, run by the Desclaux family since 1903. We wandered uphill to its headquarters through the empty town, past blocks of holiday apartments with every shutter wound down tight. Cafés, restaurants, even pharmacies were closed for the winter, their furniture locked inside behind windows grilled with steel.

  Madame Desclaux greeted us warmly in the chilly but meticulously clean white-tiled shop, and led us around the large room next door, kept up as a museum of the trade. In the summer, women gave demonstrations here of how they tore the fish apart with the only instruments sufficiently delicate to tease out those tiny bones: their fingers. But with no anchovies to dissect, we could only ponder the waist-high wooden barrels where filleted fish matured.

  We watched a video of Collioure’s once-great days and mused on the rows of vividly pictorial but now rusting cans, souvenirs of packers who’d gone out of business. François, madame’s husband, appeared in faded denim overalls to guide us through his gallery of anchovy art. The paintings, showing the shingle beach crowded with catalans, were mostly amateur, but he did own one work by the most notorious Catalan of them all, a tiny and puzzling drawing of an ant, flamboyantly signed “Dalí.” An ant? Not so strange, Christopher explained. To Dalí, ants signified death and decay. As a child, he’d come across a dead bat crawling with ants and been traumatized. Maybe the ant was his wry comment on the decline of Collioure.

  Browsing through this mausoleum of the anchovy industry, I could only think: If only garum were still in vogue.

  Hardly anyone in Collioure would know of garum, but in the ancient world, this corner of the Mediterranean was a center for its manufacture. This all-purpose essence was a vital ingredient in Greek and Roman cuisine. Rich in proteins, minerals, amino acids, vitamin B, and a natural form of the flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate, garum was the universal elixir. It gave savor to meat and fish dishes, and even desserts. It could be mixed with wine or water, both for refreshment and as a medicine. Users swore it cured dysentery, diarrhea, constipation, and ulcers. It also removed freckles, body hair, and even healed dog bites.

  Improbably, garum was made by mixing fish guts or whole small fish with salt, packing the mixture into vats and leaving them in the open for weeks. The stink of a garum factory must have been toxic, yet the liquid that rose to the top of the vats after a few months was clear, golden, fragrant, and salty/sweet. Worcestershire sauce, Gentleman’s Relish, Vegemite, and the Vietnamese fish sauce Nuoc Mam, essential to many Asian dishes, all descend from garum.

  The Spanish variety, fermented in the blazing Catalan sun, was particularly prized. At one time, it was shipped in thousands of spindle-shaped clay amphorae from ports such as Collioure to every corner of the Roman Empire. And who could say it wouldn’t find a new market today? Part snake oil, part ketchup, part kitchen cleanser; organic, vegetarian, gluten- and GM-free, it was the perfect twenty-first-century product. A Thousand Household Uses. All Natural Ingredients. No Home Should Be Without It. But no doubt a hundred European Union regulations existed to make its manufacture illegal, if not criminal.

  Loaded with samples of Desclaux products, and in desperate need of a drink, Chris and I stopped at our hotel to drop off our souvenirs.

  “Have you visited the Christmas fair yet?” the desk clerk asked. “You must go to the fair. It’s in the château.”

  With nothing much else to do till supper, we climbed into the crumbling pile of the Château Royal. Repeatedly rebuilt and refortified, this horrid pile had known nothing but grief since Wamba the Visigoth laid siege to it in 673. Most recently, it had imprisoned refugees from the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s and opponents of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime during World War II. Today, it’s a training center for commandos. One could see why. In its niches, oubliettes, and staircases, winding, narrow, and unlit, you’d never notice the man in the ski mask until he slit your throat.

  Determined not to be dispirited by the air of medieval menace, the locals had drenched the château in Christmas cheer. Former torture chambers and dungeons became brightly lit boutiques where vendors urged us to sample foie gras, gingerbread, honey, jam, and cheese—though nothing, oddly, related to anchovies. Larger chambers had become bars, with barrels instead of tables, and shelves piled with bottles. At last we could taste the elusive local wine—most of it, however, made over the border in Spain. Fortunately, the merchants followed a generous Spanish tradition. None of the bottles clustered on the barrelheads had corks, and the pouring girls could barely wait to refill our glasses.

  We reeled out into the ancient courtyard, overlooked by battlements. Adding to the medieval atmosphere, a gaggle of geese milled around, honking hoarsely. Two saddled donkeys drowsed near the wall, ready to give rides to children. Just as a doubtful little boy was being placed on its back, one of these animals defecated explosively. The child wailed in panic as glossy lumps tumbled from under the animal’s tail, an introduction to the equine digestive system that probably scarred him for life.

  Geographically we might still be in France, but everything around us smelled of Spain. Though the plains and windmills of La Mancha were hundreds of kilometers south, Don Quixote could well have come clacking into the courtyard on his bony Rocinante with Sancho trailing behind. To the deluded Don, the château would be a palace and its shoppers a crowd of beautiful women and handsome men in opulent court dress. Perhaps that’s how it also looked to the people climbing the narrow stone staircases, peering into brightly lit shops. They were having a wonderful time.

  Country towns don’t differ much. In Australia we’d looked forward just as much to the annual agricultural show, with its stalls of produce, its displays of prize-winning homemade jams and lopsided cakes, but above all its traveling carnival. I paid sixpence to gape at the fetus of a two-headed calf floating in its jar of yellow fluid, and stared, flushed, at the wobbling white belly of a middle-aged lady as she performed a sketchy approximation of the danse du ventre to lure our fathers and uncles into the sexier show that was “all happening on the inside.”

  “What they need is a midway,” I said to Chris. “A Ghost Train and a hoochy-coochy show. They’d liven up the place.”

  He pointed toward the gate. “Maybe this is it.”

  A dozen aged ladies and gentlemen in traditional Catalan dress of drab black—the women with lace caps, the men with red hats—were clustered around a harmonium. As it wheezed into life, they began to harmonize, more or less, in almost toneless unison. We were being treated to a performance of what passed in this region for Christmas carols.

  “Catalan music tends to be monotonous,” Chris said apologetically.

  Just then, they hit a particularly sour note. The geese honked in approval. The singers glared but droned on. Chri
s and I both started to laugh. Surrealism was building up around us, like a drift of invisible snow. I looked up at the battlements, where it would not have surprised me to see Catherine Millet wearing nothing but Wellington boots and gardening gloves. Instead, I saw a man in white peering down. Could that be an admiral’s uniform? Had the great Catalan returned—to commune with the shades of lost anchovies perhaps, and to visit his ant, or in the hope of another transcendental experience on the train? Ola, Don Salvador!

  Twenty

  First Catch Your Noisette

  I like my coffee!

  Like my coffee sweet and hot.

  Won’t let nobody meddle

  With my coffee pot.

  Old blues

  Coffee coffee coffee. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Nescafé at dawn, drunk from a mug with a silly design; half milk, and the sugar barely dissolved, but most of it gulped in a swallow, fuel for a morning’s work. Or a crème in the café on the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain, seething milk poured into an inky express, black and white turning beige; water into wine.

  Later in the day, café allongé—stretched coffee, with extra hot water instead of milk, for a cuppa Java just like they make Back Home. Or my preference, noisette—a modest express compromised by a dash of milk, the soiled dove of coffees that Italians call macchiato, or “stained.” Not forgetting the classic express, sipped standing at the zinc on a rainy afternoon, the Tour Eiffel a high ghost in the overcast, my neighbor companionably pushing the sugar along the bar, then returning to his dog-eared copy of Boris Vian.

  The international language of coffee. Coffee in Indian and Chinese restaurants, so vile it must be revenge for the Raj or the Opium Wars. Dutch coffee, Douwe Egberts, so mellow and milky you want to glug it, cup after cup. Turkish coffee—powder, sugar, water; black, gluey, gritty, a liquid confection. Ah, but then the espresso of Italy, Cadillac of coffees. No, not Cadillac. Porsche. Brown-black ichor under crema thick enough to support the pyramid of sugar from the paper tube for twothreefourfive! seconds before it’s swallowed down. Coffee not so much drunk as inhaled. And the caffeine kick, shivering down your nerves, making your ears sing.

  And what about American coffee? The frowns when, on my first stateside visit, I asked for “white coffee.” The kindly explanation: “Ah, you mean ‘coffee regular.’” Equal confusion from a French waiter at the concept of “iced coffee.” Ice and coffee? An unimaginable perversion at that time, but now an omnipresent banality, thanks to Starbucks and its Iced Frappuccino, a cappuccino drugged with vanilla, hazelnut, caramel—coffee in drag, too timid to come out of the closet as what it really is: a milkshake.

  And Irish coffee now. Saints preserve us! A different thing entirely. Coffee, sugar, and whiskey, with a dog collar of barely pourable cream. The eighth sacrament, potent enough to raise the dead. So transcendental you’d swear it was invented in the Vatican. In fact, someone at Shannon Airport thought it up to revive passengers stumbling off the first unpressurized, unheated transatlantic flights. The four food groups in a glass—sugar, caffeine, alcohol, fat—served warm to speed their progress into chilled bodies yearning for resurrection.

  Coffee coffee coffee. No such thing as a bad cup; just some cups less good.

  Always, of course, excepting decaf. Decaf—the essence of disappointment. The fumbled pass that loses the game; the ball that rims the hole but doesn’t quite drop; the orgasm you just know was faked; the mystery you realize on page ten that you’ve already read. Like crawling into an unmade bed; not finding the matching sock; ordering “no pineapple” on your pizza but getting it just the same. Decaf’s the coffee That Couldn’t, the coffee of What Might Have Been, of Not Really Our Sort of Thing. Decaf? I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

  Paris street vendor of coffee and hot milk, 1880s

  This time Boris met me in La Rhumerie. Something between café, restaurant, and bar, its West Indian bungalow look suggests it should be by a beach in Barbados. Instead, it sits at the busy intersection where rue du Four splits off from boulevard Saint-Germain. On a warm Saturday afternoon, this is one of the Left Bank’s most fashionable spots, a vantage for people-watching second to none. This wet Wednesday morning in February, however, we were almost alone.

  “What are you reading?”

  He held up the white-covered oblong paperback: 789 Néologisms de Jacques Lacan.

  “How is it?”

  “Gripping. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.”

  “I’m working on coffee,” I told him.

  “Why?”

  “Well, by tradition . . .”

  “You don’t really think some person went round at the end of a big dinner with a cafetière?” He put a finger into the book to mark his place. “You’ve been to French dinners. If it’s in a restaurant, the waiters have gone home; all but the two stuck with clearing your table and giving you l’addition. If the meal is in someone’s apartment, nobody’s anxious to drink black coffee at midnight, always assuming the host can be bothered to make it. Out of eight guests, at least one will be half-asleep in an armchair. Another will have gone home early, pleading a migraine but actually to watch Mad Men. Three more will be drunk, two of them arguing politics, and at least one couple will be on the balcony, either snarling at each other—that’s if they’re married—or exchanging phone numbers if they aren’t. Or even if they are.”

  I went home and looked it up. As always, he was right. Coffee was not necessarily part of the classic repas. In chateaus and stately homes, guests left the dining room after dessert and “went through” to the drawing room. Sometimes the hostess led only the female guests while the men stayed behind to smoke cigars, drink port (always passing the decanter to the left, even if it had to go all the way round the table to reach you), and either assassinate the reputations of absent friends or tell dirty jokes. Either way, coffee didn’t play a role.

  Nor was coffee part of a big restaurant dinner. Some sample menus in Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire end with café Turc (Turkish coffee) or café double (like an express, in a small cup, the so-called demitasse). More often, however, he served liqueurs, port or brandy, with mignardises, friandises, or petit fours: tiny cakes, biscuits, candied fruits, or chocolates—the idea lately revived by some restaurants as café gourmand (an express with a plate of sugary nibbles).

  The first people to add milk to coffee were seventeenth-century monks in Vienna who found the Turkish brew too strong and mixed it with cream and honey. It took time for the custom to spread. Coffee was too precious to dilute, although it wasn’t uncommon to “improve” or “correct” it with a dash of cognac. “Coffee without brandy,” decreed Samuel Beckett, “is like sex without love.”

  Café au lait became popular in western Europe when women, barred from the coffeehouses of London and the cafés of the Continent, brewed it at home and, as the Viennese monks had done, softened its taste. Because women liked it this way, coffee with milk came to be regarded as effeminate. By the middle of the nineteenth century, French cafés, if asked, would serve it, though purists complained it attracted women into what had been a male culture.

  During the siege of Paris in 1871, the abbot of Saint-André noticed that the shortage of both milk and coffee was affecting what he called “the café au lait people,” who loitered, gossiping and flirting, in the cafés along the new boulevards created by Baron Haussmann. “They believed there was no more coffee to be had,” he said with satisfaction, “so they made do with something else, which doesn’t appear to have done them any harm.” When coffee was scarce, people drank hot milk in the morning. Once coffee returned, a mixture of hot milk and coffee, café crème, became the standard breakfast drink. The French still see it that way: one never drinks café crème after midday any more than we eat cornflakes.

  The Italian espresso invasion briefly overran France in the 1950s. Cafés bought espresso machines but used them to make the same coffee they’d always brewed. The steam tap heated the milk but not so
energetically as to produce a serious froth. An Italian hoping for an authentic cappuccino in France is doomed to a long search.

  In one of those oddities that make sense only in France, some cafés, beginning during the Nazi occupation, offered a choice of coffee in a cup or a thick, squat glass. This fad, probably due to a shortage of imported china, might have caught on had the tastemakers taken it up. In her 1943 novel L’Invitée, Simone de Beauvoir describes the moment when this change in taste and practice could have taken place. A woman and two men in a café—based, at a guess, on de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus—debate whether coffee cools more quickly in cup or glass. One man argues that the surface of evaporation is greater in a glass; the other insists porcelain is a better insulator. “It was amusing when they debated physics like this,” reflects the woman. “Usually they had no idea what they were talking about.” Eventually, with a combination of contempt and affection, she settles the argument. “They cool at exactly the same rate,” she decrees—and, with this literary shrug, severs a thread in the fabric of culture. Coffee in a glass would never be in.

  When did I first taste coffee? I was about eight, and a precocious reader. The building that contained my father’s bakery and our apartment also housed a lending library. By jiggling a connecting door, I was able to slip in after hours and browse the dark book-lined rooms, dipping into volumes that my parents, had they known the contents, would have snatched from my hands.

  Along with other puzzling activities, people in these books drank coffee. Our family never did—only tea. Coffee was thought of as too powerful. People who drank tea so strong that a spoon stood up straight in it would grimace at black coffee. All the same, I demanded that my curiosity be satisfied.