My Life in France Page 13

  We experimented with recipes, tools, and ingredients, and made several useful discoveries. In working on piecrusts, for instance, we had tested French versus American ingredients. To our horror, we discovered that French flour has more body than its U.S. counterpart, and that the French needed a third less fat to make a nice crumbly crust. Why was this? I wanted to know. We supposed that, in order for U.S. flour to last forever on supermarket shelves, it must have been subjected to chemical processes that removed its fats. The French flour, in contrast, was left in its natural state, although it would go “off” more quickly and become maggoty. In order to make our French recipe work for an American audience, we tested different proportions of flour-to-butter, flour-to-margarine (a substance I abhorred and referred to as “that other spread”), and flour-to-Crisco; then we tasted the crusts hot and cold. Based on our experiments, we adjusted our ratios. It was labor-intensive, but a thoroughly satisfying learning process.

  Simca was full of inventive ideas for hors d’oeuvres and cakes and pastries, and made delicious things with sugar, egg whites, and powdered almonds. The latter was one of those ingredients I didn’t think were widely available in America. To find out, I wrote Freddie and asked what she could find in her local supermarket. She reported back that, although powdered almonds were not available in her rural corner of Pennsylvania, they might be available in cities like Manhattan or Chicago. This sort of on-the-ground reporting from my belle soeur in the U.S.A. was extremely helpful. She also sent me pictures of the different cuts of meat from her butcher shop, and a set of American measuring cups. In fits and starts, we were making progress!

  In the meantime, I had been working on my “hen scratches”—my collection of recipes. I was amazed to learn, upon close inspection, how inexact many of the recipes in well-regarded books were, and how painfully exact ours must be to be worth anything at all. Each recipe took hours of work, but I was finally getting them into order. Through trial-and-error, for instance, I deduced exactly how much gelatin must go into exactly how much liquid per exactly how much mayonnaise so one can make pretty mayo curlicues on a fish dish.

  My friends thought I was insane to be spending so much time on such details. But I found the process of getting recipes into scientific workability absolutely fascinating.

  Louisette did not devote as much time as Simca and I did to culinary exactness, but she seemed to know everyone. At one point, she had us over for lunch with Irma Rombauer, author of the Joy of Cooking, who was vacationing in Paris. I had always adored “Mrs. Joy’s” book, and liked that her personality shone clearly through its pages. In person, she turned out to be a very likable seventy-year-old Midwestern housewife type. She took great interest in our Trois Gourmandes project and told us all about her book. Joy was aimed at neither the wealthy nor the poor, she explained, but at the middle masses, who did most of their own cooking. Understanding how important time was around the house, she had concentrated on dishes that were not too fancy and didn’t require hours of preparation. She added that she’d had troubles with her publisher: when she wanted to include a detailed index, they refused; plus, she claimed, she’d been weaseled out of the royalties for something like fifty thousand copies of her book. Publishing, it seemed, was a difficult business.

  VI. LE PRINCE

  ONE DAY LOUISETTE took Simca and me to meet the celebrated gastronome Curnonsky. He was about seventy-nine years old, rotund, with twinkling blue eyes, triple chins, and an eagle beak. His ego was enormous, but so were his charm and the breadth of his knowledge. Curnonsky was most famous for his twenty-eight-volume encyclopedia of France’s regional foods, but he had also founded the Académie des Gastronomes in 1928, and was editor of the French cooking magazine Cuisine et Vins de France.

  His real name was Maurice-Edmond Saillant. As a twenty-year-old reporter, Saillant, even then a gourmet, was sent by his newspaper on a routine assignment to cover a feast of Russian royalty in Paris. (All things Russian were very à la mode at the time.) He wrote a magnificent article, but his editor balked at his rather pedestrian byline: “After all, Monsieur Saillant, you are an unknown reporter. If we use your real name, who will ever read this? It’s really a pity you aren’t a Russian noble.”

  “That’s simple to fix,” replied Saillant. “I’ll sign it ‘Prince Curnonsky.’ ” And he did. He had cleverly created this vaguely Russian-sounding nom de plume from the Latin words Cur non and the English “sky” (“Why not sky?”).

  The “prince’s” article was read by le tout Paris. “Who is this fabulous Curnonsky who knows so much about our cuisine?” everyone wondered.

  Les Trois Gourmandes having dinner with Curnonsky

  By the time the truth leaked out, several months and several more articles later, Curnonsky was established. And he’d written—and eaten and drunk—off his reputation ever since.

  The day we met him, Curnonsky greeted us at four in the afternoon in his apartment, dressed in a billowing nightshirt and red bathrobe. He was eating a boiled egg. As usual, he would go out to tea, or for a cocktail, a bit later. Come evening, his biggest decision would be which invitation to accept, as there were always more offers than he could accept. After an enormous meal at one or another of Paris’s best restaurants, followed by the theater or music or the latest nightclub (always at someone else’s expense), he’d retire by 4:00 a.m.

  Simca and I immediately fell for him. He struck me as a character out of a novel, or from another century. I couldn’t imagine a person like le prince coming from anywhere but France.

  DORTIE WROTE TO SAY she was pregnant, and described herself as “fat and helpless.” I was so happy for her now that she was a full-fledged woman, with a breast-full of milk. Ivan had quit the government, and they had moved to San Francisco, where he was learning the clothing trade at Garfinkel’s department store.

  Friday, August 15, 1952, was Assumption Day: not only a national holiday but the very nadir of la morte-saison in Paris. Paul telephoned nine different restaurants in an attempt to secure a table for my fortieth birthday, but not one of them was open. We finally ate lunch at the Hôtel Ritz, which was fine. That afternoon, we walked over to the Île Saint-Louis, to visit Abe and Rosemary Manell, some friends from the Foreign Service. Abe was a natural politician, loud and quick-minded, and knew all the embassy gossip. Rosie was a large, blonde Californian painter, an Earth Mother type, and we became fast friends. They had wonderful views of Paris from their apartment. Paul was so smitten he’d return to make sketches and take photos of the canted, tiled rooftops in preparation for a series of paintings.

  That evening we had a second fancy meal in celebration of my fortieth, at the three-star Lapérouse. We arranged to sit in a back room with seven tables, so as to have some (but not too many) other people to look at. Because of the season, and the prices, every table was occupied by Americans. Paul and I began our meal with sole aux délices (sole in a wondrous cream sauce with truffles) and half a bottle of Chablis. Then we had roast duck with a not-too-heavy sauce and a bottle of Chambertin ’26. Then cheese, coffee, and raspberry liqueur. It was delicious and expert and pleasant. Despite my advancing age, I still had an appetite!

  I gave my first solo cooking lesson, on pâte feuilletée (puff pastry), to Solange Reveillon, a Parisienne friend. Though I’d made pâte feuilletée many times, I did it again before Solange arrived, in order to think deeply about what I was going to say and do. The lesson went well, and we filled the pâtes with mushrooms and cream sauce and ate them for lunch. It was such fun! And I learned so much by teaching. I would have gladly paid Solange for the chance to teach pâte feuilletée, rather than vice versa.

  Later, I critiqued my teaching technique. When people pay good money for a class they expect skillful professionalism, and I decided that, though the cooking we’d done was fine, my presentation had not been very clear. I lacked experience and self-confidence. Paul, who had taught school for seventeen years, reminded me that when teaching one must be willing to “play
God” for a bit—in other words, to be an authority. I knew he was right, but I have never liked dogmatism. I was more inclined to tell my students what I don’t know, or that there are so many other ways of doing things, and admit that I am aware of only a few of the possibilities. Ah me, there was still so much to learn, and cooking was only half of it. I felt I’d have to teach at least a hundred classes before I really knew what I was doing.

  OUR TENANTS had moved out of our Olive Avenue house in Washington, and the real-estate agent wanted to know if he should rent it again. We didn’t have an answer. Nor did anyone else in the U.S. government, apparently. It was maddening. Paul and I didn’t want to change our life pattern, nor did we fancy standing in the middle of the prairie with no options at all. So he began to agitate quietly behind the scenes. “I understand how government works,” Paul wrote his twin. “To the boys in Washington . . . I am just a body. If there is a slot in Rome, or Singapore, my body could be plunked there—or Zamboanga.”

  Abe Manell, a bureaucratic operator par excellence, said he’d try to pull strings so that Paul could take over Abe’s previous job as public-affairs officer (PAO) in Marseille. “That’s the best job in France!” Abe declared. “You should snap it up in a minute.” A PAO was a number-two man to the consul general in a place like Marseille. The PAO was a jack-of-all-diplomatic-trades: a public-relations man (who promoted the U.S.A. and French-U.S. relations), a political officer (who sized up Communist influence), a cultural impresario (who acquired American movies and books that local residents might like, worked with educational exchanges, spoke to the press, and arranged sporting events), and diplomatic factotum (who made speeches, laid wreaths, unveiled statues, arranged dances for U.S. Navy sailors, etc.).

  “Well,” we said to each other, “Marseille is our second-favorite city in France. If we get the PAO offer, why not give it a whirl?”

  Feeling a premonitory sadness at leaving Paris, we walked up to the edge of Montmartre to see a movie. Afterward, we wandered over to the Restaurant des Artistes. We arrived late, and as there were no other clients we had a sort of family get-together with Monsieur Caillon, his daughter, and Roger the waiter. We all sat around a big table and chatted in a very familiar way. After that, we walked down the hill and home through streets wet with the rain that had fallen while we were inside. The lamplit city glittered in its puddles, and Notre Dame loomed out of the mist, giving our nerves a twinge. When you know your time in a place is running out, you try to fix such moments in your mind’s eye.

  VII. OPERATIONAL PROOF

  AT NINE O’CLOCK on the night of August 25, 1952, all the bells of Paris began banging and clanging and tintinnabulating at once. It was a remembrance of the Liberation of Paris on that day in 1944. Anyone who had heard the carillon then and heard it now must have had chills running up and down the spine.

  A few days later, Simca and Louisette got word that Helmut Ripperger, the freelance editor hired by Ives Washburn to shape their cookbook for the U.S. market, had upped and quit, leaving his work only partly done. My colleagues were distressed, and told me the history of their book. They had started working together in 1948. Once Ives Washburn agreed to take them on, in 1951, the “food adviser” Helmut Ripperger was hired at sixty dollars a week to produce a little booklet, based on their work, as a teaser. Called What’s Cooking in France, by Bertholle, Beck, and Ripperger, it looked fairly attractive, and the introduction and bridge passages were charming, but the recipes were not very professional. It was sixty-three pages long, contained fifty recipes, and, priced at $1.25, only sold about two thousand copies. Simca and Louisette were angry that they hadn’t even been shown a proof before it was published, and felt embarrassed by it. Now Ripperger had thrown in the towel—or had the towel thrown at him—and disappeared without finishing work on the “big” book.

  My disheartened friends now faced the daunting job of finishing their work without a real understanding of how to write for the American market. As we talked it over, they almost shyly asked if I might, perhaps, be willing to help them finish their book.

  “I would be delighted to!” I answered, almost before the question was out of their mouths. And so our collaboration began.

  I FIRST READ their nearly six-hundred-page manuscript in early September 1952. Its problems and its potential immediately jumped out at me.

  Simca and Louisette had created a big jumble of recipes, like any other cookbook. Their language wasn’t “American.” Most of the directions struck me as needlessly complicated where they should be clear and concise. And the overall conception of the book was not well suited for the American home kitchen. In fact, I didn’t like it at all. On the other hand, I wasn’t aware of any book that explained la cuisine bourgeoise the way this one did.

  The more I thought about it, the more this project fired my imagination. After all, the lessons embedded in these recipes were a logical extension of the material we used in our classes. I liked to strip everything down to the bones; with a bit of work, I thought this book could do that, too, only on a much more comprehensive scale. I had come to cooking late in life, and knew from firsthand experience how frustrating it could be to try to learn from badly written recipes. I was determined that our cookbook would be clear and informative and accurate, just as our teaching strove to be.

  If my co-authors agreed, not one of the recipes would stand as written. I’d turn this from a rewrite job into an entirely new book. I girded my loins, spit on the old Underwood, and began to type up my suggestions—clickety-clack—like a determined woodpecker.

  Part of my problem as a practical American was the deeply ingrained chauvinism and dogmatism in France, where cooking was considered a major art: if Montagne said such-and-such, then it was considered gospel, especially by the men’s gastronomical societies, which were made up of amateurs—and, my, how they loved to talk! The history of a dish, who said what about it and when, was terribly important to them. But, as Paul liked to say, “The word is not the thing” (one of his favorite utterances, borrowed from the semanticist Alfred Korzybski). As I worked on the manuscript, I reminded myself not to accept Simca and Louisette’s directions at face value. I subjected every recipe to what we called “the operational proof”: that is, it’s all theory until you see for yourself whether or not something works.

  I checked every recipe in the manuscript on the stove and on the page. I also investigated various old wives’ tales that weren’t in the regular cookbooks but that many people were “certain” were true. This took endless amounts of time.

  Working on soups, for instance, I made a soup a day chez Child. On the day for soupe aux choux, I consulted Simca’s recipe, as well as the established recipes of Montagne, Larousse, Ali-Bab, and Curnonsky. I read through them all, then made the soup three different ways—following two recipes exactly as written, and making one adaptation for the pressure cooker (the stinking, nasty, bloody pressure cooker—I hated it! It made everything taste nasty! But it was popular in U.S. households). At dinner, my guinea pig, Paul, complimented the three soupes aux choux, but I wasn’t satisfied. One of the secrets to make this dish work, I felt, was to make a vegetable-and-ham stock before the cabbage was put in; also, not to cook the cabbage too long, which gives it a sour taste. But should the cabbage be blanched? Should I use a different variety of cabbage? Would the pressure-cooked soup taste better if I used the infernal machine a shorter time?

  I had to iron out all of these questions of how and why and for what reason; otherwise, we’d end up with just an ordinary recipe—which was not the point of the book. I felt we should strive to show our readers how to make everything top-notch, and explain, if possible, why things work one way but not another. There should be no compromise!

  Wiping my hands on my apron, I scribbled my questions and corrections in the manuscript’s margins and pressed on. A pile of wrinkled and stained pages grew steadily on the counter next to my stove.

  As I went, I made some discoveries in measurement t
hat were every bit as important to me as a groupe Foçillon scholar’s unearthing of an ancient tomb was to him. In preparing béchamel (white sauce), for instance, French cookbooks give the proportions of butter to flour in grams. But American books instruct their readers to use, say, “a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of flour,” which gives you proportionally much more butter to flour than the French method. This realization forced us to rethink the recipe. In working up our own instructions for béchamel, we told our readers to use two tablespoons of butter and three tablespoons of flour for the roux. This may seem rather dry stuff to some, but to me it was a process of discovering an important and overlooked step, and then devising our own rationally thought-out solution. In short, a triumph!

  I HAD BEEN WRESTLING with the subject of butter in sauces when Paul took me to a little bistro way over on the Right Bank, off the Avenue Wagram, called Chez la Mère Michel. The house specialty was beurre blanc nantais, a wonder-sauce used on fish. It is a regional, not classical, recipe, and the leading French cookbooks, from Carème right up through Ali-Bab, Larousse Gastronomique, and Curnonsky, were all extremely vague on the subject. I could find no complete and clear description of how to make beurre blanc. So I decided to do a bit of investigative reporting.

  Walking into the restaurant, we met La Mère Michel herself: a small, white-haired, capable woman of about sixty-two. She had come to Paris from Nantes, on the Loire River, in 1911, she told us, and had started her restaurant fourteen years later. Her husband’s job was to eat, drink wine, and talk to the customers, and he was good at it. The little restaurant could only hold about twenty patrons, but it had survived quite nicely, largely on the strength of its beurre blanc—a thick, creamy sauce that is really nothing but warm butter held in suspension by an acidic flavor base of shallots, wine, vinegar, salt, and pepper. It is traditionally a sauce for fish, vegetables, or poached eggs; when served with pike, the dish is known as brochet au beurre blanc.