Buckley - Eating with Peter: a Gastronomic Journey

Copyright 2018 by Susan Washburn Buckley

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Names: Buckley, Susan Washburn, author.

Title: Eating with Peter : a gastronomic journey : stories & recipes / by Susan Buckley ; illustrations by Dana Catharine.

Description: New York : Arcade Publishing, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017052457 (print) | LCCN 2017056339 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628728767 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628728750 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Gastronomy. | Buckley, Susan Washburn--Travel. | Buckley, Susan Washburn--Family. | Authors--United States--Biography. | International cooking. | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX631 (ebook) | LCC TX631 .B83 2018 (print) | DDC 641.01/3--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052457

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Printed in China

Grateful acknowledgment is made for the following excerpts:

from les recettes originales de Jean et Pierre Troisgros, Cuisiniers Roanne (Editions Robert Laffont, 1977)

from Feasts for All Seasons by Roy Andries de Groot (Penguin Random House 1966)

For Peter, of course

And for David, Annabel, and Michael, who had to put up with us

Contents

Introduction

There are many people like other people, but there was no one like Peter Buckley.

Simon Michael Bessie, publisher

B eing married to Peter Buckley was not always easyliving with larger-than-life personalities seldom isbut it was never boring. After Peter departed this mortal coil in 1997, our eye doctor mused one day: I miss Mr. Buckley, he said. You know, when he came into the office, it was like being at a play. You never knew what was going to happen next!

For twenty-five years I shared my life with this fascinating, lovable, brilliant, funny, sweet, outsized, outspoken, outrageous, and sometimes impossible man. And for all of those years, food played a big rolefinding it, cooking it, eating it, reading about it, writing about it, traveling for it.

As in all lives and all marriages, there were good times and hard times. This book is about the good times, when eating with Peter was always an adventure.

IN THE BEGINNING

O nce, as a child, I made the startling announcement that I wanted to be either a foreign correspondent or a missionary when I grew up. Aspirations to be a glamorous journalist made perfect sense, but a missionary? Why on earth would I have wanted to be a missionary? Clearly, travel was the operative theme.

Travel! In the world I inhabited in the 1950s, going to Europe for the summer was a new and enticing opportunity. Every summer my mothers teacher friends in New Jersey took off to explore Western Europe. But my mother and I were committed to going back to the small town in Louisiana where wed both grown up. That had its own deep appeal, but it wasnt the romantic world I envisioned as a teenager. An omnivorous reader, I wanted to be an archeologist uncovering Mayan ruins or Schliemann at Troy. By the time I was in college, I wanted to go to Paris in the twenties, to Saint Petersburg and the court of Nicolas and Alexandra, to Venice with Henry James.

In the summer of 1963, a newly minted Middlebury graduate, I went to Europe at last. Having grown up in Southwest Louisiana, where delicious food was central to life, I was a good eater, but food was not my holy grail on that trip. It was all about the past. Id spent four years reading the canon of English literature and studying European history. It was Tennyson, not truffles, that I was after.

Before I finally took off, however, my mother insisted that I learn how to do something with my new degree in English literature. So, she enrolled me in the Radcliffe Summer Secretarial course, designed to give young ladies the skills they would need (typing, something arcane called speed writing, and general office skills that would make up for our majoring in English, art history, and other unemployable subjects). It is hard to imagine now that Radcliffe would have thought it appropriate to teach a few hundred girls how to type faster so they could get jobs, but that was the world of 1963just before it was turned on its ear. It might have been 1963, but the Sixties hadnt started yet in my universe.

At last, on a late summer day, I flew to Europe on an eighteen-hour, transatlantic flight on Icelandic Airlines, the successor to the student ships of the past. Excited but nervous, I landed in Luxembourg (Icelandics only European destination), on my way to Paris to meet three friends who had been traveling all summer. (Their mothers did not make them go to Radcliffe.) In short order, I was installed in a European hotel from another century, rococo and very grand.

I am sure I didnt wear a hat to dinner but Ill bet I carried gloves. After making my way to the enormous dining room, which resembled something out of The Merry Widow , I soon found myself faced with a waiter in formal dress, looking like no other waiter I had ever encounteredand speaking French, a language I yearned to speak but was appallingly unable to even after years of high school and college classes. I smiled shyly and looked down at the menu. Quickly I spotted the word entre. Ah, the main course, I thought, like the good American that I am. I figured out the listing for smoked trout and ordered that. Did I not want something more, the waiter inquired? Non, merci , I answered, trying to look very confident. Shortly, the bemused man arrived with a very small piece of smoked trout on a very large plate.

Not until later would I realize that entre in French meant your entrance to the meal, what I would have called an appetizer. I was far too proud to admit my mistake, however. Given the years of eating with Peter that were to comethe meals savored at farmhouse tables and three-star restaurants, the markets and kitchens and menus exploredmy very first meal in Europe was ironically unsatisfying.

The next morning, still hungry, I took the train to Paris, where Michele and Charlotte and Penny swept me up in the end of their summer-long trip. As we careened around in our tiny Volkswagen Beetle, there it wasParis, the real live, truly Paris. Paris, my dream of what Europe was supposed to look and feel like. En route to a hotel where our room was almost out of our budgetfive dollars a day just for the room at a time when Europe on $5 a Day was the guide for all young travelers!I kept up a steady stream of squeals and sighs, for Paris looked just the way Paris had looked in my dreams. It was gray and beautiful and of course unlike anything I had ever experienced before, with its wide boulevards and Belle poque buildings. Did I really see a man on a bike with a baguette under his arm, or was I just imagining that Doisneau photograph? And all of those small children speaking French so skillfully! How did they do it?