Every writer that ever wrote about seeing Paris for the first time always starts, I believe, by stating that the horse chestnut trees were in blossom, and the Rue la Huchette was a Renoir-green, and how nice it was to hear words like derrière, cochon, voyou and Vive l'Amérique et le chauffage central…. The first time I saw Paris I was five years old and Mama and Gramp were with me and all I remember is eating a poison-pink ice and getting a belly-ache and sleeping it off in a big room that in later years I seem to remember as being as big as the basilica of Sacré-Coeur above Montmartre.
The last time I was in Paris was in 1941, and I'm not going to write about that, as I wrote a book about it called, The Sound of an American. … But in the middle twenties I was seventeen years old and an art student, living near the Place des Vosges, and the world was made for art. My Harvard French helped out with the Petit Journal; and I could drink down my pinard with the best of them at the little zinc bar smelling of stale glasses and shout “Vive la France, et les pommes de terre frites!” when I sold a drawing to a magazine.
I was living then on the top floor of a decaying old castle, in a wonderful studio with an iron stove that had a half mile of pipe before it found its way out under the roof. I shared this huge space with a Pole named Rifkinoff, who painted flowers and who earned a living playing bridge with rich Germans. “Rich Germans,” he used to say. “Whatever you take away from them, it is for their own good. They lack feeling to spend money for the right things.”
Rifkinoff was very honest and a very good cook, and he would do his marketing at the pushcarts on the Rue Zacharie and come home and cook and meal that would melt the marrow of a French landlady. “Food, you understand, is something only the human race has learned to enjoy. Can a pig bake a pie or a horse stew a rabbit, or an elephant beat up a sauce?”
“No, Rifkinoff,” I would say.
Rifkinoff would nod and rub garlic on French bread and put it into our little oven to heat up. “But of course not. That is why we are above animals, and you and I are artists. It is up to us. Etre ou non être? Dormir, rêver, peutêtre.”
“Who said that?” I would ask … for my French still had holes in it you could throw Balzac through.
“Shakespeare—great Saxon author—but his mother was Polish.” I didn't say anything, because I had found in the six months I had shared the studio with Rifkinoff that Goya, George Washington, J. D. Rockefeller, and Greta Garbo had Polish mothers…
One of Rifkinoff's best dishes was Tribute to Renoir—a dish the great artist is said to have invented in his youth when the going was tough and no one wanted his wonderful paintings. Here is Rif's version of Tribute to Renoir.
From the corner eat shop he would bring home two pounds of boiled beef. This he would chop in a wooden bowl (he didn't believe in grinding) until it was smooth. Then he would add a half pint of red wine, salt, red pepper, and cinnamon to taste. He would shape this into cakes the size of ash trays and put a rim of bacon on each patty. A shake of nutmeg was then added and he would brown the patties until they were the color of rich old masters—that perfect tobacco brown that only good cooks get. He served this on slices of eggplant browned in flour and butter, and flavored with very small bits of thyme.
“Well?” Rif would ask after my second helping.
“Is it the red wine, or the last dusting of nutmeg?”
“Try it again and see.”
And I would. It was a game I could keep up for some time. But after a while we would run out of Tribute to Renoir. When the drawing market was bad we had it often. Last week I saw it on a menu at four dollars a plate … it was called Royal Ménagère … and was not as good as Rif's dish.
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