When, on your way south from Paris, you take the ferry at St. André-de-Cubzac, with the warped and rusted skeleton of the once-celebrated road bridge down in the Dordogne River on your left (by courtesy of the Germans), and the spidery outline of Monsieur Eiffel's great viaduct oceanwards on your right (by courtesy of a German mine which failed to explode), you are already in the Bordeaux country. If it happens to be a late September afternoon, hazy and calm, with a gray sky with a few patches of pale sunshine, you will see the Bordeaux country at its best, wistful and graceful and old-fashioned, like an eighteenth-century print.
With its cobbled quays and its formal gardens, its long, low, windowless buildings (the chais of its great wine merchants), and its old, elaborate houses, spacious, high-ceilinged, and cool behind their gray façades, the city of Bordeaux has something of this same remote eighteenth-century charm. It is slow and easy-going, as befits an inland seaport with a wide, slow-moving river at its doorstep.
Bordeaux's river, the Garonne, joins the Dordogne a few miles north of the city, to form the broad tidal estuary of the Gironde. These navigable rivers and the proximity of the ocean have made Bordeaux's history and molded its whole character.
A hundred and fifty years ago the great Bordeaux clarets were still almost unknown in Paris; but they had already been famous for centuries in England and in Scandinavia and in the cities of the Hanseatic League, and they were even being shipped in considerable quantities to the United States. In the names of a score of châteaux—Talbot, Brown-Cantenac, Boyd-Cantenac, Lynch-Bages, Léoville-Barton, Smith-Haut-Lafite—there are reminders of the fact that Guyenne was once a British province, that the “wine-fleet,” plying between Bordeaux and London, consisted of over a hundred and forty vessels as long ago as 1350, of the fact that a British monarch—Edward II—once ordered a thousand barrels of “good Gascon wine” for his coronation.
In its quiet way, Bordeaux, before the war, was one of the most international of French cities. The sons of its mercantile families (most of which had intermarried) spoke English, and often German and Spanish and one of the Scandinavian languages as well. They had their wine-producing châteaux up in the Médoc, their summer villas at the nearby beach of Arcachon, their town houses in Bordeaux. They knew how to live, and the cuisine in their favorite Bordeaux restaurants was one of the best in France.
Like most regional cuisines, that of Bordeaux is based on the gastronomic resources of its own countryside. Traditionally, this is the province of cèpes, those magnificent and delicate mushrooms, thick as a steak, which we in America rarely see except en conserve. It is the home of steak marchand de vin, which anyone can make who has shallots and parsley and butter and a little sound claret; the home of rougets, those little delectable red mullets, caught in the Gironde off Royan—but for these you will have to go to Bordeaux, to La Mère Catherine, or Dubern, or the Chapon Fin, or the Château Trompette. There are oysters from Arcachon and Marennes, moules from Chatelaillon, fresh sole from the Atlantic, and the famous incomparable mutton from the salt meadows of the Pointe de Grave. For those whose tastes run to rarer dishes there is lamprey, one of the strangest of fishes, traditionally served with red wine, not white; in September there are even ortolans, those tiny succulent birds no larger than a man's thumb, which have been famous among gourmets for two thousand years.
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