My Life in France Read online

  But I was bothered by my lack of emotional and intellectual development. I was not as quick and confident and verbally adept as I aspired to be. This was obvious the night we had dinner with our American friends Winnie and Ed Riley. Winnie was a naturally warm person; Ed was ruggedly attractive, a successful businessman who held strong conservative opinions. When we got into a discussion about the global economy, I got my foot in my backside and ended up feeling confused and defensive. Under pressure from Ed, my “positions” on important questions—Is the Marshall Plan effectively reviving France? Should there be a European Union? Will socialism take hold in Britain?—were revealed to be emotions masquerading as ideas. This would not do!

  Upon reflection, I decided I had three main weaknesses: I was confused (evidenced by a lack of facts, an inability to coordinate my thoughts, and an inability to verbalize my ideas); I had a lack of confidence, which caused me to back down from forcefully stated positions; and I was overly emotional at the expense of careful, “scientific” thought. I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.

  ONE DAY, my sister and I were practicing how to sound French on the telephone so that no one could tell it was us. Dort held her nose with thumb and forefinger pinched over the nostrils, and in a very high, shrill voice said, “Oui, oui, J’ÉCOUTE!,” just as Parisiennes always did. Minette, who was sleeping on a flowerpot, suddenly shot up, pounced onto Dort’s lap, and gave her hand a little love-bite. We thought this was great, so I gave it a try—“Oui, oui, J’ÉCOUTE!”—and it had the same thrilling effect on Mini. This led to more laughter and “J’ÉCOUTE!”s and love-bites. Our high notes must have plucked a mysterious feline chord of amorous response.

  Dort had quickly made friends in the expat community, and had landed a job in the business office of the American Club Theatre of Paris. It was an amateur troupe, run by a tough woman from New York. They performed at the Théâtre Monceau, which held about 150 people. The actors were a high-strung and emotional lot, and Dort faced a good deal of strain and long, poorly paid hours. Paul did not love the troupe, because its members liked to show up at Roo de Loo late at night, make noise, and drink rivers of our booze.

  But Dort continued to amuse and amaze us. One evening, her friend Annie arrived at our apartment looking flustered. “I was on the metro, and a man pinched me on the derrière,” she said. “I didn’t know how to react. What would you do?”

  “I’d say, ‘PardonNEZ, m’sieur!’ ” offered Paul.

  “I’d kick him in the balls,” cracked Annie’s boyfriend, Peter.

  Dort chimed in: “I’d say, ‘Pardonnez, m’sieur,’ and then kick him in the balls!”

  One day, my sister was driving through the Place de la Concorde in her Citroën when a Frenchman rammed her bumper. It wasn’t much of a bump, and the man sped off without bothering to see if he’d done any damage. Dort was enraged by the man’s callous insensitivity. Lights flashing, horn tooting, engine revving, and tires squealing, she gave chase. Finally, about ten blocks later, she managed to corner the man in front of a flic (a cop). Standing up through the Citroën’s open sunroof, my six-foot-three-inch, red-cheeked sister pointed a long, trembling finger at the perpetrator and with maximum indignation yelled: “Ce merde-monsieur a justement craché dans ma derrière!” Her intended meaning is obvious, but what she said was: “This shit-man just spat out into my butt!”

  PAUL LOVED WINE, but as a poor artist in the 1920s he had not been able to afford the good stuff. Now he had discovered the wine merchant Nicolas, who had access to an unusually broad and deep selection of vintages, some of which had been buried during the war, hidden from the hated boches. Nicolas had posted a sign in his shop that sternly warned: “Because of the rarity of the wines on this list we’ll accept orders only for immediate use and not for stocking a cave. We will reduce orders we think are excessive.” Nicolas rated his vintages from “very good” (such as a 1926 bottle of Clos-Haut-Peyraguey, for four hundred francs) to “great” (a 1928 bottle of La Mission Haut-Brion, for six hundred francs) to “very great” (a 1929 bottle of Chambertin Clos de Bèze, for seven hundred francs). I was amused by Nicolas’s further notes on “exceptional bottles” (an 1899 Château La Lagune, for eight hundred francs) and bouteilles prestigieuses (an 1870 Mouton Rothschild, for fifteen hundred francs). Nicolas himself would deliver the better bottles in a warmed basket one hour before serving time.

  Paul admired such attention to detail. An inveterate organizer himself, he used Nicolas’s lists as a model to draw up his own elaborate charts of wines, their vintages, and costs, which he and his friends would study for hours.

  BY THE END OF November, I was shocked to realize that I’d already been at the Cordon Bleu for seven weeks. I had been having such fun that it had whizzed by in what felt like a matter of days. By this point, I could whip up a pretty good piecrust and was able to make a whole pizza—from a mound of dry flour to hot-out-of-the-oven pie—in thirty minutes flat. But the more you learn the more you realize you don’t know, and I felt I had just gotten my foot in the kitchen door. What a tragedy it would have been had I stuck to my original six-week class plan. I’d have learned practically nothing at all.

  One of the best lessons I absorbed there was how to do things simply. Take roast veal, for example. Under the tutelage of Chef Bugnard, I simply salt-and-peppered the veal, wrapped it in a thin salt-pork blanket, added julienned carrots and onions to the pan with a tablespoon of butter on top, and basted it as it roasted in the oven. It couldn’t have been simpler. When the veal was done, I’d degrease the juices, add a bit of stock, a dollop of butter, and a tiny bit of water, and reduce for a few minutes; then I’d strain the sauce and pour it over the meat. The result: an absolutely sublime meal.

  It gave me a great sense of accomplishment to have learned exactly how to cook such a savory dish, and to be able to replicate it exactly the way I liked, every time, without having to consult a book or think too much.

  Chef Bugnard was a wonder with sauces, and one of my favorite lessons was his sole à la normande. Put a half-pound of sole fillets in a buttered pan, place the fish’s bones on top, sprinkle with salt and pepper and minced shallots. Fill the pan with liquid just covering the fillets: half white wine, half water, plus mussel and oyster juices. Poach. When the fillets are done, keep them warm while you make a roux of butter and flour. Add half of the cooking juices and heat. Take the remaining cooking juices and reduce to almost nothing, about a third of a cup. Add the reduced liquid to the roux and stir over heat. Then comes Bugnard’s touch of genius: remove the pan from the fire and stir in one cup of cream and three egg yolks; then work in a mere three-quarters of a pound of butter. I had never heard of stirring egg yolks into such a common sauce, but what a rich difference they made.

  Oh, crise de foie, that French sole was so delicious!

  ONCE A WEEK, most quartiers in Paris lost their power for a few hours. Paul and I were lucky enough to live next to the Chambre des Députés, and so were spared the blackouts by some kind of special political dispensation. But on most Wednesdays, there was no electricity in the Cordon Bleu’s quarter. These powerless Wednesdays forced Chef Bugnard to be creative with our classtime. Often he’d take us to the market, an experience that was worthy of a graduate degree unto itself.

  Indeed, shopping for food in Paris was a life-changing experience for me. It was through daily excursions to my local marketplace on la Rue de Bourgogne, or to the bigger one on la Rue Cler, or, best of all, into the organized chaos of Les Halles—the famous marketplace in central Paris—that I learned one of the most important lessons of my life: the value of les human relations.

  The French are very sensitive to personal dynamics, and they believe that you must earn your rewards. If a tourist enters a food stall thinking he’s going to be cheated, the salesman will sense this and obligingly cheat him. But if a Frenchman senses that a visitor is delighted to be in his store, and takes a genuine interest in what is for sale, then he’ll ju
st open up like a flower. The Parisian grocers insisted that I interact with them personally: if I wasn’t willing to take the time to get to know them and their wares, then I would not go home with the freshest legumes or cuts of meat in my basket. They certainly made me work for my supper—but, oh, what suppers!

  One Wednesday, Chef Bugnard took us to Les Halles in search of provisions for upcoming classes: liver, chickens, beef, vegetables, and candied violets. We made our way through a wonderful hodgepodge of buildings, each filled with food stalls and purveyors of cooking equipment. You could find virtually anything under the sun there. As we dodged around freshly killed rabbits and pig trotters, or large men unpacking crates of glistening blue-black mussels and hearty women shouting about their wonderful champignons, I avidly jotted down notes about who carried what and where they were located, worried that I’d never be able to find them again in the raucous maze.

  Eventually we arrived at Dehillerin. I was thunderstruck. Dehillerin was the kitchen-equipment store of all time, a restaurant-supply house stuffed with an infinite number of wondrous gadgets, tools, implements, and gewgaws—big shiny copper kettles, turbotières, fish and chicken poachers, eccentrically shaped frying pans, tiny wooden spoons and enormous mixing paddles, elephant-sized salad baskets, all shapes and sizes of knives, choppers, molds, platters, whisks, basins, butter spreaders, and mastodon mashers.

  Seeing the gleam of obsession in my eyes, Chef Bugnard took me aside and introduced me to the owner, Monsieur Dehillerin. I asked him all sorts of questions, and we quickly became friends. He even lent me money once, when I had run out of francs shopping at Les Halles and the banks were all closed. He knew I’d repay him, as I was one of his steadiest customers. I had become a knife freak, a frying-pan freak, a gadget freak—and, especially, a copper freak!

  “ALL SORTS OF délices are spouting out of [Julia’s] finger ends like sparks out of a pinwheel,” Paul enthused to Charlie. “The other night, for guests, she tried out a dessert she’d seen demonstrated . . . a sort of French-style brown betty . . . which turned out very well.”

  In spite of my good notices, I remained a long way from being a maître de cuisine. This was made plain the day I invited my friend Winnie for lunch, and managed to serve her the most vile eggs Florentine one could imagine outside of England. I suppose I had gotten a little too self-confident for my own good: rather than measure out the flour, I had guessed at the proportions, and the result was a goopy sauce Mornay. Unable to find spinach at the market, I’d bought chicory instead; it, too, was horrid. We ate the lunch with painful politeness and avoided discussing its taste. I made sure not to apologize for it. This was a rule of mine.

  I don’t believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make. When one’s hostess starts in with self-deprecations such as “Oh, I don’t know how to cook . . . ,” or “Poor little me . . . ,” or “This may taste awful . . . ,” it is so dreadful to have to reassure her that everything is delicious and fine, whether it is or not. Besides, such admissions only draw attention to one’s shortcomings (or self-perceived shortcomings), and make the other person think, “Yes, you’re right, this really is an awful meal!” Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew, or the lettuce has frozen, or the cake has collapsed—eh bien, tant pis!

  Usually one’s cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile, as my ersatz eggs Florentine surely were, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile—and learn from her mistakes.

  III. THE MAD SCIENTIST

  IN LATE 1949, the newspapers informed us that something called “television” was sweeping the States like a hailstorm. People across the country, the papers said, were building “TV rumpus-rooms,” complete with built-in bars and plastic stools, in order to sit around for hours watching this magical new box. There were even said to be televisions in buses and on streetcars, and TV advertising in all the subways. It was hard to imagine. There was no TV that we knew of in Paris—we were finding it hard enough to find some decent music on the radio (most of the stations played contemporary stuff, which sounded like music to set the mood on the moors for The Hound of the Baskervilles).

  When we read an article about the horrifying effects of TV on American home life, we asked Charlie and Freddie if they had bought a television set yet—they hadn’t—or if they knew anyone who had—no, again. Did our nieces and nephew feel left out of the gang for not having such a machine? “No . . . for the moment.”

  IT WAS MID-DECEMBER when Paul wrote his twin:

  The sight of Julie in front of her stove full of boiling, frying and simmering foods has the same fascination for me as watching a kettle-drummer at the Symphony. (If I don’t sit and watch I never see Julie.) . . . Imagine this in your mind’s eye: Julie, with a blue denim apron on, a dish towel stuck under her belt, a spoon in each hand, stirring two pots at the same time. Warning bells are sounding off like signals from the podium, and a garlic-flavored steam fills the air with an odoriferous leitmotif. The oven door opens and shuts so fast you hardly notice the deft thrust of a spoon as she dips into a casserole and up to her mouth for a taste-check like a perfectly timed double-beat on the drums. She stands there surrounded by a battery of instruments with an air of authority and confidence. . . .

  She’s becoming an expert plucker, skinner and boner. It’s a wonderful sight to see her pulling all the guts out of a chicken through a tiny hole in its neck and then, from the same little orifice, loosening the skin from the flesh in order to put in an array of leopard-spots made of truffles. Or to watch her remove all the bones from a goose without tearing the skin. And you ought to see [her] skin a wild hare—you’d swear she’d just been Comin’ Round the Mountain with Her Bowie Knife in Hand.

  Paul took to calling the kitchen my “alchemist’s aerie,” and me “Jackdaw Julie,” after the slightly mad bird that collects every kind of stick, trinket, tidbit, and fluff to outfit its nest with. The fact is, I had been making regular raiding trips to Dehillerin to stock up on all manner of culinary tools and machines. Now our kitchen had enough knives to fill a pirate ship. We had copper vessels, terra-cotta vessels, tin vessels, enamel vessels, crockery and porcelain vessels. We had measuring rods, scales, thermometers, timing clocks, openers, bottles, boxes, bags, weights, graters, rolling pins, marble slabs, and fancy extruders. On one side of the kitchen, standing in a row like fat soldiers, were seven Ali Baba–type oil jars filled with basic reductions. On the other side were measurers—for a liter, demiliter, quarter-liter, deciliters, and demideciliters—hanging from hooks. Tucked all round were my specialty tools: a copper sugar-boiler; long needles for larding roasts; an oval tortoise-shelled implement used to scrape a tamis; a conical sieve called a chinois; little frying pans used only for crêpes; tart rings; stirring paddles carved from maplewood; and numerous heavy copper pot-lids with long iron handles. My kitchen positively gleamed with gadgets. But I never seemed to have quite enough.

  One Sunday we went to the Marché aux Puces, the famous flea market on the outer fringes of Paris, in search of something special: a large mortar and pestle used in the preparation of those lovely, light quenelles de brochet (a labor-intensive dish made by filleting fish, grinding it up in the big mortar, forcing it through a tamis sieve, and then beating in cream over a bowl of ice). The Marché aux Puces was a vast, sprawling market where one could buy just about anything. After several hours of hunting through obscure alleys between packing-box houses in remote corners, I managed by some special chien-de-cuisine instinct to run the coveted items to earth. The mortar was made of dark-gray marble, and was about the size and weight of a baptismal font. The pestle looked like a primeval cudgel made from a hacked-off crab-tree limb. One look at it, and I knew there was no question: I just had to have that set. Paul looked at me as if I were crazy. But he knew when I was fixated on something special, and with a shrug and a smile, he pulled out his wallet. Then he took a deep breath, crouched down, and, using every bit o
f strength and ingenuity, hefted my prize to his shoulder. Staggering back to the Flash with trembling knee and aching lung, he wended his way for miles through the market’s narrow, crowded, flea-bitten passageways. As he eased the mega-mortar and pestle into the car, the old Flash positively slumped and wheezed.

  Paul was justly proud of his “slave labor,” and, a week later, he was rewarded by my first-ever quenelles de brochet—delicate, pillowy-light spoonfuls of puréed pike that had been poached in a seasoned broth. Served with a good cream sauce, it was a triumph. In spite of his careful attention to diet, Paul slurped the quenelles up hungrily.

  I was really getting into the swing of things now. Over a period of six weeks, I made: terrine de lapin de garenne, quiche Lorraine, galantine de volaille, gnocchi à la Florentine, vol-au-vent financière, choucroute garni à l’Alsacienne, crème Chantilly, charlotte de pommes, soufflé Grand Marnier, risotto aux fruits de mer, coquilles Saint-Jacques, merlan en lorgnette, rouget au safron, poulet sauce Marengo, canard à l’orange, and turbot farci braisé au champagne.

  Whew!

  Paul’s favorite belt was an old leather job that he’d picked up in Asia during the war. In August it was notched at the number-two hole, and he weighed an all-time high of 190 pounds. With great difficulty he forced himself to cut down on his carbohydrates and, most significantly, on his alcohol intake. He also started attending exercise classes, where he’d throw heavy medicine balls around with men half his age. By December, the belt notched right into the number-five hole, indicating a new svelteness of 170 pounds. I admired his self-discipline. Yet, in spite of his robustness, Paul was often plagued by poor health. Some of his problems, such as his sensitive stomach, were the result of amoebic dysentery from the war; others were the result of his jumpy nerves. (His brother never had a physical exam, because he figured Paul would take care of all the worry and ailments; indeed, Charlie hardly ever got sick.)