C is for cautious …
… the kind of dinner at which there is an undercurrent of earnest timidity, of well-meant and badly directed eagerness to do well, and absolutely no true feeling for what can best be described as Fun at Table.
A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet: he has no need for it, being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom. He not only knows from everything admirable he has read that he will not like Irish whisky with pineapple chilled in honey and vermouth, or a vintage Chambertin with poached lake perch; every taste bud on both his actual and his spiritual palates wilts in revulsion at such thought. He does not serve these or similar combinations, not because he has been told, but because he knows.
But there are some would-be gastronomers who can live only by the book. Most of them are happily unconscious of their basic loss. Many of them acquire a basic knowledge of the pleasures of the table which is often astonishingly broad, and which gives them countless fine moments of generosity and well-being: what is much better in life than to be hospitable and to know by your guests' faces that you have proved a noble host indeed?
But then again there are some men who never, in a century of Sundays, can hide their underlying confusion and caution. They subscribe to GOURMET and its satellites and even submit incredibly complicated recipes to the subeditors, which are discreetly rearranged before publication. They belong to local food-and-wine groups or their reasonable facsimiles, and bring back packages of musty filé powder from New Orleans, and order snails (packed as a special inducement with the shells wrapped separately) from a former maître d'hôtel who lives next to the airport in Lisbon. They have Grossman's Guide on their shelves, and Saintsbury and Schoonmaker, and they serve the proper wines at the proper times and temperatures. They know Escoffier's basic sauces. Their dinners march formally from start to end, with a fillip of savory if they are Anglophilic enough …
And over everything, over all the thought and the earnest planning, lies a weight of uncomfortable caution. It is invisible, of course, and cannot even be identified except by the gastronomically wary, but it shows with damning clearness in the polite faces of the guests, and in the genteelly labored tempo of the conversation, and above all in the well-bred avoidance of any direct mention of the pleasures of the table.
The guests eat well and drink like kings, and make their separate ways unsatisfied … and the tired host lies puzzled on his bed, unable to tell himself why he has had no fun, no fun at all, in spite of the thought and effort that went into his little celebration. Why do other people give such amusing dinner parties, he wondered … I tried, and did just what they all do …
That is the thing: the cautious diner's need to follow, to rely on other people's plans. That is what spreads such faint but inescapable vapors of timidity and insecurity over his fine plates and glasses and whatever lies upon and in them. He does not trust himself, more often than not with some justification!
The modern art of dining has settled upon a basically sound pattern in the last hundred years or less, so that in an instinctive progression of textures and flavors a good classical meal goes from hors d'oeuvres through soup and fish and meat and cheese to the final “sweet conceits” of some dessert designed to amuse, rather than excite, appetites already more than satisfied. Anyone who wishes may follow this traditional pattern, and his success will be the greater if he is willing to admit, as are present-day princes of gastronomy, that they may occasionally slip into an heretical habit which must be corrected. A delightful example of this was the decision, made in Paris late in 1947 at the Third International Congress of Gastronomy, that foie gras must henceforth be served in its proper place at the beginning of a meal, and not later with the salad as has increasingly become the custom! It shows no caution, no lack of self-assurance, to lean on this classical schedule, for it is the most natural one in modern living.
Damning timidity, which can dampen any fine gastronomical fires at table, arises, I suppose, from the fact that the cautious host is incapable of enjoying himself. I know one nationally famous “gourmet” who has absolutely no innate good taste, whose meals are incredibly and coarsely and vulgarly overelaborate and rich, but who presents them with such contagious high spirits and delight that they are unfailingly delightful.
I also know at least four people who have plenty of money for the more Lucullan tidbits of cookery, as well as a devouring desire to be good hosts, whose banquets are dreaded and, more often than not, bluntly shunned. I sit through them now and then because I admire the dogged earnestness of their amphytrions (and love that Oxford-donnish term as well!). Always I wish desperately, compassionately, that my host could summon enough gastronomical courage to turn his back on rote and plan a meal dictated by no matter what faint glimmer of appetite within him, rather than by the borrowed rules of other men.
A supper of two or three ample and savorous courses, with two honest wines to be honestly enjoyed, would do more to kill caution in a good host's soul than all the elaborate menus indelibly engraved in gourmets' history books because of their extravagance and preciosity. I have never met anyone who dined with George Saintsbury, but I am confident that one of his meals could be duplicated, except of course for the same years of the wines, by almost any eager would-be gourmet with enough money, and that it would be a ghastly ordeal for everyone concerned if it were not served with the good Professor's zest, his joy of living … and eating and drinking and talking in good company.
Here is a dinner served by him in Edinburgh at the end of the last century, which has at worst a horrid fascination to the modern and emasculated palate, but which could be and almost assuredly was enjoyable, because the host was not a cautious man:
Clear soup and then filets of whiting with a sherry (Dos Cortados, 1873); calf's head à la Terrapin and then oysters en caisses with Château La Frette, 1865; then, in proper succession, an aspic of tunny, braised beef, roast guinea fowl, apricots in jelly, velvet cream, anchovies Zadioff, and ices, accompanied by Champagne Giesler 1889, Château Margaux 1870, a La Tâche Burgundy of 1886, and an 1870 port.
This menu is impossible except in its correct classical pattern, and purely in theory, to almost any of today's gastronomical children … but it has a kind of dashing enthusiasm about it. It was not a cautious dinner! It was fun!
D is for dining out…
…. and its amenities.
A great deal has been written about the amenities of dining, pure and simple, but few writers have seen fit to comment, no matter how gastronomically, on the very important modern problem of going to a public place to eat, with “agreeable good manners” and with or without other people.
I had a happy beginning in this neglected art and much abused privilege, one that has sheathed it in unfading pleasure for me when it is well done. When I was no more than five or so, my father and mother began to prepare my spirits for Easter, or Christmas, or a birthday, and when the festival rolled around, there was I, waiting to greet it in my wide hat with ribbons, on the pink velvet seat of the region's best restaurant.
At first it was called Marcel's, I believe. By now Hollywood and its New York refugees have widened the choice if not the choiceness, and there are several eating houses within a hundred miles of me which I am delighted to be seen in. I have friends who feel the same way. The problem, given that situation, is how most smoothly to combine our presences at the same public table.
I admit that I am prejudiced about it. I seldom dine out, and because of my early conditioning to the sweet illusion of permanent celebration, of “party” and festivity on every such occasion, I feel automatically that any invitation means sure excitement, that it will be an event, whether it brings me a rained-on hamburger in a drive-in or chicken Jerusalem at Perino's. The trouble is, I am afraid, that I expect the people I dine with to feel the same muted but omnipresent delight as my own.
They seldom do. They more often than not “eat out” several times each week. They have business luncheons: in a small town, service clubs and Chamber of Commerce meetings and so on, and in a city, conferences with colleagues they must quickly dominate. In both cases, no matter what type of food they are served, they are tense, wary … and gastronomically bored to the point of coma. As for their dinners, those, too, are at best a frank mixture of business and pleasure. The attitude seems to be that all humans must eat and all humans must make money in order to eat, and therefore the two things might as well be combined.
The result of this is a common sight in any restaurant from the Black Kat on South Main to Mike Romanoff's on Rodeo Drive: carefully dressed women being very polite to other carefully dressed women while their male companions walk in invisible circles around one another, sniffing out the chances of everything from laying a new plastic tile floor in the bathroom to trading top stars for two hundred grand.
Such luncheons and dinners are why, fairly obviously, successful people have gastric ulcers. They are why I, on the other hand, may be less successful but have never been menaced by that dreadful burning thing which is laughingly called occupational but which is more likely to be known in the future as merely twentieth century: I refuse, almost categorically, to dine out. I refuse to have my child-dreams of fun and excitement turned into a routine and ungracious feeding, to the tune of wifely chitchat and the clink of unmade dollars.
Now and then I have weakened, of course, being humanly susceptible to skillful blarney.
Once an important interviewer arranged what he artfully called on the telephone a “little dinner” for me: he wanted a story and thought it might be fun if we … I was apparently bored enough with being alone to leap like a hungry trout to his fly of flattery. I primed myself happily … and waited for almost an hour after the time I'd been told I'd be called for …
The man finally arrived, tired, pale, freshly shaven but withal unkempt, and with a sidelong glint in his eye that had nothing to do with my irresistibility but was pure nervous dyspepsia. His wife, deep in mink, was bored but willing, calloused by now to one more business evening. I said ho-hum to myself, settled into the Cadillac convertible, and thought, Well, at least he's ordered a good dinner somewhere.
He shot the car irritably into high and asked, “Where'll we eat tonight?”
I had a clear and weary vision of all the other nights he had to do this, all the other authoresses he had to feed. I said nothing, feeling rebuffed and weary myself. His wife dutifully suggested a few places. Then I threw a fine conversational monkey wrench into things by saying in mild but firm self-preservation, “How about a drive-in? I absolutely refuse to stand in line, any place.”
There was cold silence: I was plainly being either very rude or embarrassingly whimsical. I sat mum: I was pretty sure that we could walk right in to a good table at one place where the highly successful owner had known me since I was a small child … but what would that do to the already tottering morale of my host, who had just damned the chop house to his wife as prejudiced, unfair, and completely snooty? Yes, I sat mum.
We finally drove gratingly to a bad but popular restaurant, and because by now it was inconveniently late, we got a table and sat down. The interviewer was bleached with weariness and nerves.
“I suppose you girls want something to drink?” he asked flatly. His wife looked at him with a too-familiar glance of timidity and scorn and said, “Well, it doesn't matter really … I mean … well, maybe Miss Fisher …” I thought, I have been dragged here on very false pretenses and I owe it to my ideals, if not to my digestion, to make the best of it, so I said, “Thanks very much. Yes. This place has some good sherry.” (I would have lapped up a double Gibson with glee at that dismal point. I knew they, too, were good there … but I was by then in a haughty mood and did not wish to feel much better for fear that forgiveness would mellowly set in.)
The sherry finally came. The menu cards finally came. The man who had mentioned a “little dinner” for me looked up at his eager, striving, unhappy little bundle of mink and at me, his evening's assignment, and said, “Well, what'll-it-be-I'll-take-a-hamburger-de-luxe.” His wife said quickly, “I will, too.” I was tempted to order breast of pheasant Souvaroff or the immediate equivalent. I would be damned if I'd order hamburger de luxe. Finally, calm as cheesecake and very angry, I asked for a bowl of split pea soup.
The food came. We ate. The man got a little color in his cheeks. He began asking his skillful professional questions of me. I recognized what I must always have known, that I was business he had to take care of and that he figured he might as well get rid of it while he ate, since he had to do both anyway. What misery! What waste and mistakenness! O horror! (The interview, when it saw daylight, did me or him no good.)
The opposite of this ugly tale is one of the time I took a Very Important Person to dinner in Hollywood. He had often entertained me with lavish simplicity in his home, in various glamorous groups around the electrically shaken cocktails, the electrically lighted swimming pool, and the electrically rotated spit. I thought it would be a compliment to him to cook dinner for him myself, as soon as I got a place to cook it in. But no: I was tipped off with elaborate tact by his wife, his secretary, and the secretary of his immediate superior in the studio, that he felt badly, in fact terribly, that I had not “entertained” him. All right, I said, all right, forgetting my disappointment in a deliberate campaign to do the thing as much as possible as I think it should be done, if someone willy-nilly is my guest in a public eating place.
I telephoned the restaurant the day before we were to go there and asked for a table which was in line with my friend's local importance … that is, one of the first five in a place which takes care of the fifty top characters in town. That obviated what is always a kind of shuffling ignominy of standing in line, no matter how diplomatically the line may be spread through the bar and so on by a good headwaiter.
Then I ordered the meal, to be served to four people. It was dictated by what I could remember of my honored guest's tastes, as it would have been in my home. He boasted of being a meat-and-potato boy, a hater of “fancy sauces,” a lover of Scotch in moderation, and a shunner of anything but chilled pink wine. Very well: smoked salmon, a small rack of lamb, potatoes Anna, Belgian endive salad, and a tray of Langlois Blue, Rouge et Noir Camembert, Wisconsin Swiss, and Teleme Jack cheese. Scotch or sherry first, and then Louis Martini's Gamay Rosé. It was not my idea of a perfect meal … but it could be eaten with no pain, and the chef had an angel at his elbow.
And by ordering in advance I avoided another horrible barrier to decent dining out: the confusion that inevitably follows the first showing of menu cards to more than two people at once.
The waiter waits. The diners ponder, stutter, variously flaunting their ignorances or their pretensions to knowledge. They mutter and murmur into the air, assuming godlike clarity of hearing on the part of the poor harried servant and disregarding entirely the fact that they are guests at a table. The men usually blurt some stock familiar order. Women hum, sip their cocktails, and change their minds at least twice after the waiter has scrawled on his pad. There is a general feeling of chaos, and nobody seems to realize that if the same human beings were invited to any normal home they would not dream of giving their orders thus confusedly and arbitrarily, that the hostess would not dare leave her guests thus tenderly exposed. No … a good meal, inside or outside the private circle, should be ordered in advance (or at least ordered with great firmness by the host at table, in a restaurant), to avoid this distressful welter of words and then its usual result of unrelated odors, plates, servings, when a group has gone helter-skelter through a menu card.
The third thing I did was to see the headwaiter and tip him. And since I knew the restaurant and the good relations therein between the various professional levels, I left another tip with him for the man who would take care of us, come eight o'clock.
The final step: I arranged that the bill would be mailed to me. There are few things more boringly painful about public dining, to my mind, than the obligatory plunging and grabbing and arguing that is taken as a matter of course at the end of such a meal as I planned. If men are present they look on it as an insult to their virility to let a woman pay. If women are eating together, they simply outshriek one another, and the noisiest bears off the check in expensive but curiously rewarding triumph. I feel rebuffed, when I have invited anyone of no matter what sex to dine with me, to have the bill snatched gallantly from me, just as I would feel insulted if after dinner in my home a guest slipped a bill under his plate for the food I had used.
So … I finally walked out of the restaurant feeling that I had done everything I could to assure my friend of a meal which I could have given him for one-fourth the cost and about one-eighth the bother at home, but which he would, because of his peculiar importance in a very peculiar industry, enjoy a hundred times as much because it was in that peculiar town's smartest eating place.
Everything went beautifully. The table was the right one, the Scotch was from the proper bottle, the waiter scudded on velvet, other Very Important People nodded and smiled … and then the slices of salmon were so thin, and the wine came, and the rack of lamb, a masterpiece, with the headwaiter cool as a surgeon above it.…
My guest turned to me, for the first of many times that night, saying, “Do you know, in my whole life nobody has ever ordered a meal just for me?”
“Nonsense,” I said, thinking of all the dinners that people had served him, people who for one reason or another wanted to please him … as I did.
“No,” he said, by the end of the evening tearfully, “no, never! And I hate menus. I hate them. I go to places where they know what I want, just so I don't have to look at menus. If I pretend to look, I have something memorized to say. If my doctor has told me to eat tomatoes, I say, ‘A fresh tomato omelette’ … something like that to make them pay a little attention to me. Now and then I get peeved at all the French, and I say, ‘spécialité de la maison’ … how's my accent? But, do you know, this is the first time anyone ever seemed to realize that I hate menus and having to order and … Do you know, this is just like a party!”
It would be easy here for me to indicate that at this somewhat maudlin point my guest slid under the table. He did not. It was a good evening, with good talk, even in Hollywood where the fact that we were enjoying ourselves in public proved us embarrassingly out of line. It had about it something, no matter how faint, of the festive ease, the latent excitement, of my childhood celebrations … a reward to me for having observed, no matter why, the basic principles of decent dining out. I had treated my guest as much as possible as if he were in my home. And “miracles occurred….”
E is for exquisite…
… and its gastronomical connotations, at least for me.
I hasten to admit that I am deliberately incorrect, in the strict dictionary sense. I have shifted the meaning of the word from its right one as a noun (A man who is an exquisite is a foppish dandy, say), to a distorted one as an adjective: exquisite in its modern usage means keen, intense, consummate, but in my private wordbook it has taken on overtones of preciosity, even of decadence.
When I hear of a gourmet with exquisite taste I assume, perhaps too hastily and perhaps very wrongly, that there is something exaggeratedly elaborate, and even languidly perverted, about his gourmandism. I do not think simply of an exquisitely laid table and an exquisite meal. Instead I see his silver carved in subtly erotic patterns, and his courses following one upon another in a cabalistic design, half pain, half pleasure. I take it for granted, in spite of my good sense, that rare volumes on witchcraft have equal place with Escoffier in his kitchen library, and I have read into his basic recipe for meat stock a dozen deviously significant ingredients.
Such deliberate romanticism on my part can most easily be dismissed as wishful thinking by an amateur cook who scrambles eggs very well but only reads, these days, about filets de soles Polignac and pâté de foie truffé en brioche. Or perhaps it is Freudian: subconsciously I would murder, or even seduce, by means of cookery, and therefore I ascribe such potentialities to someone I envy for his culinary freedom! Whatever the reason, I continue to see the word exquisite ringed about with subtle vapors of perversion, in my private lexicon of gastronomy.
Most of the great historical and literary gourmets, in this sense of being exquisite, have had unlimited money, like Des Esseintes in Huysmans' Against the Grain. The very fact that they can command no matter what incredible delicacy adds to their satiety, and that in turn gives just the fillip of distortion to their appetites, which satisfies my own definition, if not Webster's, of their exquisiteness.
Huysmans' sad young man, for instance: his “farewell dinner to a temporarily dead virility,” as the invitations shaped like bereavement notices called it, was a masterpiece of jaded extravagance. He needed to be a millionaire, as well as a determined exquisite, to serve in a black-draped room lighted by green flames, attended by nude black virgins wearing silver slippers and stockings trimmed with dripping tears, a dinner beginning with blackest caviar and ending with blackheart cherries. He needed to be at least a demimillionaire to fill his fountain with ink for that one dubious feast, and line his ash-covered paths with cemetery pine trees.
He needed, above all, to be sublimely indifferent to the taint of vulgarity … for his earnest efforts at eccentricity were indeed vulgar, and ridiculous, too, in a basically shameful and extravagant way. All that saved them from oblivion, so that we still read about them, was his dignified disregard of anything but his own kind of pleasure.
It is the same with some of the dishes we still read about with a strange fascination, cooked for the most dissipated of the Romans, two thousand years or so ago. Doubtless many of those men tried to astound their sycophants by serving whole platters of the tongues of little birds that had been trained to talk before they went into the pot. We do not remember their names, nor anything more than their vulgarly idiotic waste. But what if one of those epicures, greatly in love with a proud lady named Livia, had taught a thousand birds to sing her name, Livia, Livia, to the moment of most perfect diction, and then had served forth to the lady a fine pie of their tongues, split, honied, and impaled on twigs of myrrh? Then, I think, that fat lover would still be known to us for what he was, an exquisite … silly perhaps, extravagant certainly, but with his own dignity about him.
I remember deciding once, long ago and I believe after reading Ellwanger's Pleasures of the Table for the first time, that the most exquisite dish I had ever heard of was a salad of satin-white endive with large, heavily scented Parma violets scattered through it. It meant everything subtle and intense and esthetically significant in my private gastronomy, just as, a few years earlier, a brown-skinned lover with a turquoise set in one ear lobe was my adolescent epitome of dreamed passion. It is a misfortune, perhaps, that not many months ago the salad that had been a symbol was set before me in a bowl.
The fact that it was not very good was relatively unimportant: the dressing was light to the point of being innocuous and unable to stand up under the perfumed assault of the blossoms. The thing that disappointed me in it, finally and forever, was that it was not served exquisitely, and by an exquisite, with an exquisite disregard of the vulgar.
Instead, it was concocted and presented with both affectation and awkwardness and, at best, an attempt at the insidious decadence which is a prerequisite of my definition. It became suddenly ridiculous.
I blushed for my long dream of it and felt a hollowness … for where again will I know so certainly that such-and-such a dish is it? What will it be? Expense is not enough, for sure, and no intricate silverware, no ritual of serving and compounding, can guarantee the magic. There must, for me at least, be a faint nebular madness, dignified no matter how deliberate, to a dinner that is exquisite….