It was consoling to begin winding down with a swirl of turnips in sweetened wine, radishes preserved in vinegar, a warm salad with almonds, cream of grilled pistachios, meringues, macaroons, and chocolate cigarettes. These were simple warmups to the medley of desserts served to us in the salon: a rosette of almond milk with almonds; a soft cheese of fresh cream with quince jelly; rice whipped with sweetened egg whites and lemon peel; a grand ring-shaped cake, a savarin, flamed with Old Havana rum and served with preserved pineapple; little molds of various ice creams; and a “towering structure of every fruit imaginable in every manner imaginable.”
Sad to say, my notes from the meal are blurred and smeared by the cooked exudates of flora and fauna and the wines that rained down on us as if from the world’s best garden sprinkler. Reading through the veil of grease, I see that my favorites among the wines served were Chablis Les Clos, Montrachet 1989, Volnay-Champans 1969, Château Latour 1989, and Cote Rotie. Of course, any fool would love these great wines as he felt his wallet vaporize.
There. Time to do dishes. As Diderot I said of a lunch at the fabulously wealthy Baron of Holbach’s home, “After lunch, one takes a little walk, or one digests, if it’s even possible.” Night had long since fallen, and I reflected that lunch had taken the same amount of time as a Varig flight from New York to Sao Paulo.
In the salon, my fellow-diners were yawning rather than gasping or sobbing. Was this another example of the banality of evil: a grievous sin committed—in this case, gluttony—and no one squirming with guilt? I have noticed that Frenchmen are far less susceptible to heart disease, in part because they don’t seem to experience the stress of self-doubt or regret. My mother, a Swedish Lutheran, liked to ask her five children, “What have you accomplished today?” If I’d told her, “I have eaten thirty-seven courses and drunk thirteen wines,” I would have been cast into outer darkness. But then this was the Iron Mom, who also said, with a tiny smile, in reference to my life’s work, “You’ve made quite a living out of your fibs.”
At midnight, while sipping a paltry brandy from the nineteen-twenties and smoking a Havana Churchill, I reflected that this was not the time to ponder eternal values. I was sitting next to Gerard, who was cherubically discussing the historical subtleties of certain courses. In a way, we were forensic anthropologists, doing arduous historical field work. How could we possibly understand the present without knowing what certain of our ancestors had consumed? Marc Meneau, his lovely wife, Francoise, and thirty-nine members of his staff had led us on a sombre and all-consuming journey into the past.
At dawn or a few hours thereafter, I felt relieved, on stepping out of the bath tub, that I hadn’t fallen on a hard surface and broken open like an overly mature muskmelon.
No question looms larger on a daily basis for many of us than “What’s for lunch?” and, when that has been resolved, “What’s for dinner?” There have been mutterings that the whole food thing has gone too far in America, but I think not. Good food is a benign weapon against the sodden way we live.
By the time I reached Paris the next afternoon and took a three-hour stroll, I was feeling a little peckish. I’d heard that certain quarrels had already arisen over our lunch, and I felt lucky that my capacity for the French language was limited to understanding only the gist of conversations sort of the way the aver-age American comprehends our government. On the phone, the natives were restless to the point of “scandal,” and from the tornado of rumors (everyone knows that men, not women, are the masters of gossip) I learned that many had found both the food and the service disappointing, the lack of “theatre” sad. (As for myself, I couldn’t make a judgment. I once helped to cook a whole steer and a barrel of corn for a picnic in Michigan and have eaten many ten-course dinners, but our French lunch had left those occasions in the numbered dust.) The most interesting rumor I heard was that the tab for the lunch had been picked up by a Louisiana billionaire, who couldn’t attend because a pelican had been sucked into an engine of his Gulf-stream. This detail was so extraordinary that it seemed likely to be true.
That last evening in Paris, before my flight and the tonic Chicago-style hot dog that awaited me at O’Hare, Peter and I dined at Thoumieux, my old standby restaurant, near the Invalides. We had a simple Gigondas, and I ordered two vegetable courses, then relented at the last moment and added a duck confit. Long flights are physically exhausting, and good nutrition lays the foundation of life. On Air France, I was sunk in profound thought, or so I felt at the time. Like sex, bathing, sleeping, and drinking, the effects of food don’t last. The patterns are repeated but finite. Life is a near-death experience, and our devious minds will do anything to make it interesting. ♦
Dining and Cooking