John Baxter - The Perfect Meal: In Search of the Lost Tastes of France

For Marie-Dominique and Louise, who taught me that cooking is all about love, and for Georges Auguste Escoffier, who kept the faith

Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are .

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, French gastronome

Contents

Ive taken to cooking and listening to Wagner, both of which frighten me to death.

Nol Coward, diary entry, Sunday, February 19, 1956

I t all began with the pansy in my soup.

Rick Gekoski was in town, so we went out to dinner. Rick deals in rare books, but only the rarest. Hes sold first editions of Lolita to rock stars, bought J. R. R. Tolkiens bathrobe, and so charmed Graham Greene that the great writer let him purchase the library in his Antibes apartment. In between, hes written a few books and chaired the panel presenting the Booker Prize, Britains most prestigious literary award.

After the Greene deal, the two men shared an aperitif in the caf below Greenes home.

Yknow, said Greene, if I hadnt been a writer, Id have liked to do what you dobe a bookseller.

For a man who could excite the envy of a literary giant, no ordinary meal would suffice.

Have you eaten at the Grand Palais? I asked Rick.

You mean that block-long example of Belle poque bad taste just off the Champs-lyses? he asked. Ive attended art fairs and book fairs there. Im told it also hosts automobile shows, horse shows, and I believe once accommodated a trade show for manufacturers of farm machinery. But eaten there? Never.

A new experience, then.

In 1993 the Grand Palais shut down for renovations. Fragments of the 8,500-ton glass-and-steel roof showed an alarming tendency to fall on unsuspecting heads. To keep the building at least partly alive, the terrace along one side became the Minipalais restaurant, with triple-Michelin-star chef Eric Frechon in charge. Id enjoyed some pleasant meals there, as much for the setting as the food. I hoped Rick might be impressed.

The following evening, we mounted the wide steps at the corner of avenue Winston Churchill.

The Grand Palais is the kind of building that takes the eye. More vast than an aircraft hangar, it soared above our heads. Along one side, the 65-foot-high columns of the terrace dwindled into the dusk. The marble-floored foyer would have done credit to an imperial embassy. Even Rick conceded a respectful Humph.

While we waited to be seated, I looked across the avenue at the statue of Britains wartime prime minister after whom it was named. Churchill leaned on his stick and glared, as if remembering his problems with Charles de Gaulle when the Free French government in exile fled to London in 1940.

Anyone who knew the eating habits of the two men could have foreseen they would never get on. Churchill was a drinker, de Gaulle an eater, or at least someone who embraced the philosophy of Devour, or be devoured. Metaphors about food pepper his writings. Dismissing the idea of a Communist France, he inquired, How can any one party govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese? (In fact, there are more like 350.) Asked about his literary influences, de Gaulle scorned the suggestion that any other mind might affect his thinking. A lion is made up of the lambs hes digested. But in Churchill, as gifted a writer, orator, and statesman as he, hed met another lion, and the two men snarled over the future of Europe like two males over the same kill.

The waitress led us into the dining room, quarried from the Palaiss mezzanine, and tried to seat us at one of its tables.

I asked for a table on the terrace, I said.

She gave one of the moues for which the French mouth is uniquely constructed.

Mes excuses, monsieur . Were you actually guaranteed a table on the terrace?

Well... no...

Her shoulders started to rise in that other French specialty, the shrug that indicates powerlessness in the face of overwhelming contrary circumstances. (Interestingly, there is no single French word for shrug. Asked to define it, a French person will just... well, shrug.)

After dinner, Rick interjected, I intend to enjoy a cigar.

Dipping into an inside pocket, he extracted an aluminum tube the length of a torpedo. The family that would have been seated next to us leaned away collectively. They knew the smoke generated by a weed that size could entirely obscure their dessert.

I will see what I can do, the waitress said hurriedly.

Two minutes later we were seated on the terrace, under those soaring columns, looking out on the gathering darkness and the Seine flowing in stately complacency beneath the Pont Alexandre III. In 1919 a triumphant General Pershing, on horseback, led American troops on a victory parade along the avenue below us while cheering Parisians crowded the space where we sat and flung flowers. We were in the presence of history.

British soldiers parade past the Grand Palais, 1916

So... Rick pocketed his cigar and reached for the carte. Hows the food here?

Twenty minutes later, my first course arrived.

Marooned in the middle of an otherwise empty soup plate was a small mound of something green and granularpeas mashed with mint, I later discovered. It supported two tiny slices of white asparagus, so thin I could have read Le Monde through themand the small print at that.

I ordered the cold asparagus soup.

This will be the asparagus soup, msieur, said the waiter.

He returned with an aluminum CO bottle, from which he squirted white froth around the peas. A few seconds later, he was back with a jug from which he poured a milky liquidthe first thing to resemble soup.

Voil, msieur. Votre Soupe dasperge Blanche, Mousseline de Petit Pois la Menthe Frache. Bon apptit .

Belatedly, I noticed the finishing touch on top of the peas and asparagus.

It was a tiny pansy.

Theres a pansy in my soup.

C lose to midnight, we strolled across the bridge in the soft Paris night. I thought I could still smell Ricks cigar, which, when he did fire it up over coffee and calvados, was only one of many being enjoyed on the terrace. Their smoke rose into the shadows at the top of the treelike columns. Statues looked down in approval. For a moment, surrounded by the architecture of a heroic age, we had felt ourselves, if not gods, then at least priests of some hallowed rite, celebrating the joys of food and drink.

If it hadnt been for that pansy.

A place like that... Rick said as we walked.

He looked back over his shoulder at the line of columns marching in majesty toward the Champs-lyses.

Not that the food wasnt good...

And it had been good. Just a bit... well, precious.

The ingredients and dishes were, on paper at least, traditional: pork belly, snails, even a burger. But the pork, instead of arriving rich and fat, sizzling from the barbecue, proved to be a severe oblong, glossy and sharp-edged. Posed on a heap of boiled potatoes lightly crushed with grain mustard, it resembled Noahs ark aground on Mount Ararat. For Escargots dans Leur Tomate Cerise Gratins au Beurre dAmande , a dozen snails were embedded, for no very good reason, in individual cherry tomatoes, and the whole dish was covered in a gratin of butter and powdered almonds. Least likely of all, the burger was a nugget of duck breast in a tiny bun, topped with foie gras and drizzled with truffle juice. At the sight of it, Ronald McDonald would have fainted dead away .

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