French Officers Mess Recipes
Croque Madame—Serves 4
Ingredients
Dry—3 tbsps all-purpose flour, ¼ tsp salt, ⅛ tsp black pepper, ⅛ tsp freshly grated nutmeg, 3½ oz (1⅓ cps) coarsely grated Gruyère cheese, 8 slices firm white sandwich bread, ½ lb thinly sliced high quality cooked ham, 4 lg eggs. Liquid—5 tbsps unsalted butter, 2 cps whole milk, 4 tsps Dijon mustard
Preparation
Sauce:
Melt 3 tbsps butter in a 1–1½-qt heavy saucepan over moderately low heat, then whisk in flour and cook roux, whisking, 3 mins. Whisk in milk and bring to a boil, whisking constantly. Reduce heat and simmer, whisking occasionally, 5 min. Whisk in salt, pepper, nutmeg, and ⅓ cup cheese until cheese is melted. Remove from heat and cover surface directly with a sheet of wax paper.
Sandwiches:
-Spread 1½ tbsps sauce evenly over each of 4 slices of bread, then sprinkle evenly with remaining cheese~¼ cp per slice. Spread mustard evenly on remaining 4 bread slices and top with ham, dividing it evenly, then invert onto cheese-topped bread to form sandwiches.
-Lightly oil a 15- by 10-inch shallow baking pan.
-Melt 1 tbsp butter in a 12-in. nonstick skillet over moderately low heat, then cook sandwiches, turning over once until golden, 3–4 min. total. Remove from heat and transfer sandwiches to baking pan, then wipe out skillet with paper towels.
-Preheat broiler. Top each sandwich with ⅓ cp sauce, spreading evenly. Broil sandwiches 4–5 inches from heat until sauce is bubbling and golden in spots, 2–3 mins. Turn off broiler and transfer pan to lower third of oven to keep sandwiches warm.
-Heat remaining tbsp butter in nonstick skillet over moderate heat until foam subsides, then crack eggs into skillet and season to taste with salt and pepper. Fry eggs, covered, until whites are just set and yolks are still runny~3 mins. Top each sandwich with a fried egg and serve immediately.
Note: The egg yolks in this recipe will not be fully cooked, which may be of concern if salmonella is a problem in your area. You can use pasteurized eggs (in the shell) or cook eggs until yolks are set, but while safer, the runny eggs are better.
Terrine pâté de Foie Gras—Serves 10
Ingredients
-1½, lb. fresh duck foie gras, ⅓ cup good-quality sauternes, sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, 1 finely chopped black truffle.
Preparation
Prepare foie gras:
First, allow chilled foie gras to warm up so that it’s tender and manageable because cold liver is brittle, and its veins harder to locate and remove intact. Pull any bits of translucent membrane from the surface and separate the two lobes using a knife to sever any connecting veins. Inspect the folds for patches of bitter green bile that could mar the terrine and extract them with a knife.
Second, clean and devein. For a smooth terrine, you must remove the thick, branched main vein that runs through the center of each lobe. Dig into the middle of each lobe with a paring knife, catch the vein under its tip, and pull it out.
Third, soak deveined foie gras pieces overnight in ice water to draw out any excess blood.
Fourth, the next day, break the liver into pieces and marinate it for 2 hrs in sauternes.
Fifth, cook the foie gras in a bain-marie. Considerable fat will be rendered. This fat is precious, both for flavoring and preserving the terrine. Save excess fat and refrigerate. To store terrine, pour melted fat over foie gras to seal it.
-Place foie gras in a medium bowl, break into even pieces, and add sauternes. Season with salt and pepper and allow to marinate 2 hours.
-Preheat oven to 400° F. Remove foie gras from marinade; press into a 2½-cup terrine, leaving a bit of space at top. Place terrine on 3 folded-over paper towels in the bottom of a deep skillet, and fill skillet with hot water to reach halfway up sides of terrine. Cook until internal temperature of foie gras reaches 115° F on a meat thermometer~30 mins. Pour off fat and reserve. Cool terrine.
-Cut a piece of cardboard to fit inside top of terrine and wrap it in plastic wrap. Gently press cardboard onto foie gras; weight with a small can for 1 hr. Remove can and cardboard, return reserved fat to terrine, cover, and refrigerate 1–2 days.
-To unmold, dip terrine in a bowl of warm water for 30 secs, run a knife along edges, and invert onto a plate. (Reserve fat in terrine.) Serve thinly sliced, garnished with truffle, if desired. If covered in reserved fat leftovers, the foie gras will keep if refrigerated for 1 wk.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Schlosskirche [Palace Church], Ellingen, Bavaria, August 19, 1954
Three of the six trucks of the ODESSA convoy parked in separate groves of trees in parks near the Schlosskirche while it was still dark, but only after a three-pass reconnoitering operation per Michaele’s orders. Michaele and Jacob Bunnemann turned off the headlights of their truck and inched through the opaque darkness of the starless night past the front of the Schlosskirche and drove to the abandoned parking lot in the back. The church had been condemned as unsafe by the Nazis and later by the Americans and was declared off-limits to all personnel. In 1943, Antoine Duvalier and Michaele Dupont had been instrumental in that declaration and for providing security to keep citizens and military members away. The Allies inherited the partially demolished old building and let it go to ruin, never questioning the veracity or necessity of the prohibition.
Michaele strained his eyes and reaffirmed that the fine old church was still looking seedy and had not been repaired from its war damage. The barriers he and Antoine had placed there in the early forties were still in place and had not been disturbed. The German signs were still posted around the building, “Zutritt verboten!” [Entry forbidden—Keep out!] He tried not to get his hopes up too high, but this was the Holy Grail. It had to be; he and his men had suffered too much for it not to be. In a matter of days, he and his ODESSA companions would either be fabulously wealthy; or they would be in prison or dead.
To the uninformed—including Jacob and his ODESSA assistants—there were no safe or even possible entrances. Rubble-jammed doorways and the windows were boarded shut. The rear wall of the church near the entrance had crumbled, with the ceiling of the first floor collapsed over it so that tons of bomb-destroyed construction materials put up an impassable barrier. Michaele led Jacob to an old well on the northwest side of the churchyard, and the two of them pried off a wood plank cover hidden beneath undergrowth and trash. Michaele shined his flashlight briefly down into the well and was pleased to find it empty and to have the ladders he and Antoine had placed there in 1943 still in place.
“Let’s have a quick look, Jacob. I’ll go first and you shine the light, then you come down; and I’ll shine the light for you. Make it quick.”
The ladders were sturdy, and descent was easy. Both men stood in utter darkness at the bottom for a few moments. Then Michaele flashed his light around in a circle and revealed a tunnel intersecting at right angles to the vertical shaft of the well.
“This way,” he said.
The air was dank and dusty, but the going was easy because down there they could use their flashlights without fear of detection from above. About fifty yards from the vertical shaft, they came to a heavy set of wooden doors which were bolted and secured with two large locks holding a heavy iron bar in place across the two doors.
“Uh-oh,” Jacob said with discouragement in his voice.
“Watch,” Michaele said.
He walked to one side of the tunnel where a wooden box covered with dust sat. They pried open the lid. The box was full of dusty spikes, bolts, nuts, and assorted other metal pieces. Anyone looking into the box would have presumed that nothing there would be of help in opening the door. Certainly there was no key. Jacob looked into the box soberly.
“Help me move it,” Michaele ordered.
The two men struggled to move the heavy box a couple of feet away. The floor of the tunnel was extremely dusty, and only drag marks from the moving of the box showed any alteration in the
dust cover. Jacob was becoming more dubious by the minute. Michaele was becoming increasingly enthusiastic.
Michaele ran his hand around in the dust where the box had been sitting. He found a minor depression in the floor and wiped the dust away from around it. Jacob’s flashlight revealed a circular cut in the floor and a metal plate the same color as the dust and the nearby concrete floor. He pushed his finger into the depression and pulled up a metal ring about the size of a Deutschemark coin. He pulled on it. For a few minutes nothing happened, and Michaele strained harder.
Finally, the round metal plate pulled out of its depression in the floor to reveal a shallow pocket. Jacob’s flashlight caught the glint of two large brass keys. Michaele took them out and walked to the locks on the door. Despite the years that had passed since the last time the locks had been opened, they gave easily. He lifted the heavy iron bar that had been holding the double doors fixed in place and pulled the doors open. Both men shined their lights into the cavernous basement storage room of the Schlosskirche, and then were transfixed by what they saw.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Schlosskirche [Palace Church], Ellingen, Bavaria, August 19 to September 14, 1954
Jacob was a man of forty-five years of age who had led a prosaic life, which—aside from his period of service during World War II—was spent scratching out a living as a farmer. In all of his life he had never seen more than a thousand Deutschmarks together all at once. But now, sitting before him was a stupendous and brilliant gleaming treasure. There were a dozen pallets loaded twenty rows high with gold ingots, huge ornate paintings of religious figures in heavy gold frames, boxes full of jewelry and gold and silver artefacts—candelabras, statuary, and platters—and open trunks full of diamonds and other precious stones. This was the riches a Kaiser would covet and men would kill for.
Michaele’s mind began to review his plan for moving the massive fortune out of the church basement without attracting the wrong kind of attention. He already had a good working estimate of the combined value of what he and Jacob were gazing at.
Jacob snapped out of his reverie. “How in the world do we get all of this out of here and to where we can store it without getting caught?”
“Antoine and I have a plan. We built a means to get it out way back in ‘43 when we hid it here. We need to get back out of here and explain to the rest of the men what we need to do. Let’s move quickly before it gets light outside.”
For two days the men rested up in a house Jacob had rented several months earlier for use in this endeavor, although he had had no idea at the time why he had been ordered by Antoine to rent the place. They spent their time understanding Michaele’s elaborate plan and working out how to carry it out. It was audacious–just audacious enough that it might work–they all decided. The extent of the treasure—as described by the awestruck Jacob—would cloud anyone’s mind enough to ignore the obvious risks. Michaele assured them that it was going to work.
To get the plan ready to proceed, two men drove the trucks to a commercial vehicle painting company and had them altered to look like city maintenance trucks. They purchased lumbar and heavy tools and arranged to rent a backhoe and a heavy WWII tractor with a large snow removal blade. Two men returned to ODESSA headquarters and had regulation-appearing Ellingen City maintenance workmen’s uniforms and caps and two Ellingen municipal police uniforms made. They purchased a large mess tent for use as an enclosure. Michaele and Jacob had large signs printed which read: “Achtung: Abbruch und Wiederaufbau im in Fortschritt. Behalten Heraus!” [Attention: Demolition and Reconstruction in Progress. Keep Out!] and heavy rope with signs that read: “Extreme Gefahr. Das Gebäude Baustelle Nähern Sie sich Nicht!” [Extreme Danger. Do Not Approach the Building Construction Site.] attached to the rope at intervals. The ODESSA volunteers were very efficient; and the organization had a large contingent of willing workers; so, the preparations were completed in twelve days.
On the last day in August, the work crew gathered en masse at the Schlosskirche and set out to cordon off the church grounds. The four large trucks and the heavy equipment pulled into the area behind the church immediately adjacent to where the subterranean tunnel was located. Two dozen workmen appeared and began to demolish the rear of the church building, making sure to leave structural supports in place. The large tractor with its heavy steel blade began to remove the mass of debris blocking the rear entry to the church building proper. When that was done, the large tent was placed near the entrance and the backhoe was put into use to dig a deep wide hole all the way down to the bottom of the church’s old rock foundation. The hole was wide enough to accommodate the trucks. A team of construction workers built a truck ramp with a solid concrete foundation reinforced with steel struts—enough to bear a massive weight.
Two weeks later when the job was finished, the ODESSA crew boss was assured by Jacob that the men would all be paid in due time—and not a very long due time. As the real project for which Michaele, Jacob, and their men had come to Ellingen to accomplish began, only the original truck drivers and their coworkers remained for the work. A total of ten men would be the only ones to know the incredible secret. The ODESSA men knew better than to ask unnecessary questions.
Jacob warned the mayor and police chief in advance that they would be employing explosives on the first of September. Michaele was an explosives expert, and he set the charges to make a precise opening in the foundation wall so that the contents of the basement could be removed with ease, but not so large that the explosion required to create the opening would raise eyebrows. The plan was unfolding so openly that no eyebrows had been raised yet. It was a Bavarian city where the officials and the populace were used to avoiding questions or intrusions.
The explosions created a jagged hole which the men trimmed to avoid damage to the contents as they were moved to the trucks. Heavy mine trolleys were chained to the trucks and pulled out of the hole at the rear of the church in a test which was completely satisfactory. The next day, the workers were permitted to enter the chamber where the Nazi treasure had rested for the past thirteen years. After the first intense reaction to that magnificent hoard of valuables passed, the men began to ask how Michaele had managed to accumulate the treasure and get it to the church without attracting attention.
Knowing that he was among former SS men who did not blanch at the details of what Hitler’s elite corps had done since the 1930s, Michaele felt that he owed them a real answer.
“The expropriation of the enemies’ riches which could later easily have been used to attack the Third Reich began in the late 1930s when the untermenshen, Juden, and other undesirables were dealt with. Their funds and treasures were moved into safekeeping in the Reich. In 1940, the ERR [Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete (the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories)] was formed to bring German efficiency and effectiveness into dealing with the large volume of captured resources. The first operating unit, the western branch for France, Belgium, and the Netherlands—called the Dienststelle Westen [Western Agency]—was located in Paris after the surrender and establishment of the armistice between Germany and France on June the twenty-second.
“Antoine Duvalier and I helped form a division of French soldiers to help our German counterparts stave off the Bolsheviks and the undesirables who planned to destroy civilization. Some of us were assigned to head up the French division of the Dienststelle with orders to collect the materials and to secure them. Early on, Schloss Neuschwanstein was chosen as headquarters of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, and our division had the honor to keep the secrets, transport the gold, currency, and degenerate art to the Schloss for safekeeping. It soon became apparent that the Schloss was neither large enough, secure enough, nor secret enough, to be the appropriate location for what we had collected.
“Antoine suggested to Reichsleiter Rosenberg that it was necessary to disperse the treasure in order to keep it secure, with the aim of transferring it all b
ack to the Vaterland once we had vanquished the so-called Allies who perpetrated that wicked war on the innocent German nation. It was our destiny. I have to say now that it is our destiny and our responsibility to use the treasure to fund the new Fourth Reich which will come. God wills it!
“In addition to gold, silver and currency, cultural items of great significance were confiscated—some quite bulky, including paintings, ceramics, books, and religious treasures. That necessitated considerable planning and work. Sonderkommando Kuensberg created 1,050 repositories in Germany and Austria by the end of the Great War, and Antoine and I were his executives.”
Realizing that he had allowed his emotions to cloud his thinking, Michaele returned to the direct information that he wished the men to know and to understand, “Sonderkommando [Concentration camp inmate enforcer] Führer Kuensberg ordered us to move the divided treasure troves to their hiding places, including the one here in the Schlosskirche Ellingen. In addition, Antoine and I had direct responsibility to maintain the safekeeping of the Nazi Raubgold [lit. “Stolen Gold”]. We supervised the transfer of gold and other assets such as fine art to Swiss and overseas banks in return for them providing the currency that funded our glorious war effort. It is ironic that some of those banks are located in the United States, and some are even owned by the Jüdisch untermenschen. The Americans, British, French, and lesser ‘Allies’ do not know the half of the extent of the secret account numbers. Only Antoine and I know them all and can obtain the money in a heartbeat as soon as we can break free of their illegal imprisonment of our soldiers. Even without factoring in the interest earned by those funds, Antoine and I can put our hands on over half a billion dollars in gold and other precious metals, jewels, and currency already in safekeeping in Switzersand to be put to use by the ODESSA.”
“Where did the money come from during the war, Michaele?” asked Jacob.
The Charlemagne Murders Page 24