P is for peas …
… naturally! … and for a few reasons why the best peas I ever ate in my life were, in truth, the best peas I ever ate in my life.
Every good cook, from Fannie Farmer Escoffier, agrees on three things about these delicate messengers to our palates from the kind Earth-mother: they must be very green, they must be freshly gathered, and they must be shelled at the very last second of the very last minute.
My peas, that is, the ones that reached an almost unbelievable summit of perfection for me and can most probably never happen quite so fortunately again, met these three gastronomical requirements to a point of near-ridiculous exactitude. It is possible, however, that even this technical impeccability would not have been enough without the mysterious blending, that one time, of weather, place, other hungers than my own. After all, I can compare bliss with near bliss, for I have often, blessed me, eaten superlative green peas.
Once my grandmother ran out into her garden, filled her apron with the fattest pods, sat rocking jerkily with a kind of nervous merriment for a very few minutes as she shelled them, and, before we knew it, had put down upon the white-covered table a round dish of peas in cream. We ate them with our spoons, something we never could have done at home! Perhaps that added to their fragile, poignant flavor…but not much: they were truly good.
And then one time in Paris, in June (What a hackneyed but wonderful combination of the somewhat overrated time-and-place motif!), I lunched at Foyot’s, and in the dim room where hothouse roses stood on all the tables in a month when roses climbed crazily outside on every trellis, I watched the headwaiter, as skilled as a magician, dry peas over a flame in a generous pan, add what looked like an equal weight of butter that almost visibly sent out a cloud of sweet-smelling hay and meadow air, and then swirl the whole.
At the end he did a showy trick, more to amuse himself than me, but I sat open-mouthed at it and can still see the the arc of little green vegetables flow up into the air and then fall, with a satisfying shush, back into the pan some three or four feet below and at least a yard from where they took off. I gasped, the headwaiter bowed faintly but with pride…and then we went about the comparatively mundane procedure of serving, tasting, and eating.
Those petits pois au beurre were, like my grandmother’s à la crème mode d’lowa, good, very good. They made me think of paraphrasing Sydney Smith’s remark about strawberries and saying, “Doubtless God could have made a better green pea, but doubtless he never did.”
That was, however, before the year I started out, on a spring date set by strict local custom, to grow peas in a steep terraced garden in the vineyards between Montreux and Vevey, on the Lake of Geneva.
The weather seemed perfect for planting by May Day, and I had the earth ready, the dry peas ready, the poles ready to set up. But Otto and Jules, my mentors, said NO so sternly that I promised to wait until May fifteenth, which could easily be labeled Pea-planting Day in Swiss almanacs. They were right, of course: we had a cold snap that would have blackened any sprout, about May tenth. As I remember, the moon, its rising, and a dash of hailstones came into the picture too…
And then on May fifteenth, a balmy sweet day if ever I saw one, my seeds went into the warm, welcoming earth, and I could agree with an old gardening manual which said understandingly, “Perhaps no vegetable is set out in greater expectancy…for the early planting fever is impatient.”
A week later I put in another row, and so on for a month, and they did as they were meant to, which is one of the most satisfying things that can possibly happen to a gardener, whether greenhorn and eager or professional and weatherworn.
Then came the day with stars on it: time for what my grandmother would have called “the first mess of peas.”
The house at Le Pâquis was still abuilding, shapes of rooms there but no roof, no windows, trestles everywhere on the wide terrace high above the lake, the ancient apple tree heavy laden with button-sized green fruit, plums coloring on the branches at the far end near the little meadow, set so surprisingly among the vineyards, that gave the place its name.
We put a clean cloth, red and white, over one of the carpenters’ tables, and kicked wood-curls aside for our feet, under the chairs brought up from the apartment in Vevey. I set our tumblers, plates, silver, smooth unironed napkins sweet from the meadow grass where they had dried.
“While some of us started to bend over the dwarf-pea bushes and toss the crisp pods into baskets, others built a hearth from stones and a couple of roof-tiles lying loose and made a lively little fire. I had a big kettle with spring water in the bottom of it, just off simmering, and salt and pepper and a pat of fine butter to hand. Then I put the bottles of Dezelay in the fountain, just under the timeless spurt of icy mountain water, and ran down to be the liaison between the harvesters and my mother, who sat shelling from the basket on her lap into the pot between her feet, as intent and nimble as a lace-maker.
I dashed up and down the steep terraces with the baskets, and my mother would groan and then hum happily when another one appeared, and below I could hear my father and our friends cursing just as happily at their wry backs and their aching thighs, while the peas came off their stems and into the baskets with a small sound audible in that still, high air, so many hundred feet above the distant and completely silent Leman. It was suddenly almost twilight. The last sunlight on the Dents du Midi was fire-rosy, with immeasurable coldness in it.
“Time, gentlemen, time,” my mother called, in an unrehearsed and astonishing imitation of a Cornish barmaid.
They came in grateful hurry up the steep paths, almost nothing now in their baskets and looks of smug success upon their faces. We raced through the rest of the shelling, and then while we ate rolled prosciutto and drank Swiss bitters or brandy-and-soda or sherry, according to our habits, I dashed like an eighteenth-century courier on a secret mission of utmost military importance, the pot cautiously braced in front of me, to the little hearth.
I stirred up the fire. When the scant half inch of water boiled, I tossed in the peas, a good six quarts or more, and slapped on the heavy lid as if a devil might get out. The minute steam showed, I shook the whole like ma. Someone brought me a curl of thin pink ham and a glass of wine cold from the fountain. I shook the pot again, revivified if that were any more possible.
I looked up at the terrace, a shambles of sawed beams, cement-mixers, and empty sardine tins from the workmen’s lunches. There sat most of the people in the world I loved, in a thin light that was pink with alpenglow, blue with a veil of pine smoke from the hearth Their voices sang with a certain remoteness into the clear air, and suddenly from across the curve of the Lower Corniche a cow in Monsieur Rogivue’s orchard moved her head among the meadow flowers and shook her bell into a slow, melodious counterpoint, a kind of hymn. My father lifted up his head at the sweet sound and then his fists all stained with green-pea juice, and said passionately, “God, but I feel good!” And I felt near to tears.
Tile peas were done then, or perhaps they had been so a few seconds earlier because of my familial preoccupation. I whipped off the lid, after one more shake. I threw in the big pat of butter, which had a bas-relief of William Tell upon it. I shook in salt, ground in pepper, and then swirled the pot over the low flames until Tell had disappeared, no more. Then I ran like hell, up the path lined with candytuft and pinks, past the fountain where bottles shone promisingly through the crystal water, to the table.
Small brown roasted chickens lay on every plate, the best ones 1 have ever known, roasted for me that afternoon by Madame Doellenbach of the Vieux Vevey and not chilled since, but cooled in their own intangibly delicate juices. There was a salad of mountain lettuces. There was honest bread. There was plenty of limpid wine, the kind Brillat-Savarin said was like rock-water, tempting enough to make a hydrophobic drink. Later there was cheese, an Emmenthaler and a smuggled Reblochon...
…and later still we walked dreamily away, along the Upper Corniche to a cafe terrace where we sat watching fireworks far across the Lake at Evian, and drinking café noir and a very fine fine.
But the thing that really mattered, that piped the high, unforgettable tune of perfection, was the peas, which came from their hot pot onto our thick china plates in a cloud, a kind of miasma, of everything that anyone could ever want from them, even in a dream. I thought three basic requisites, according to Fannie Farmer and Escoffier…and again I thought of Sydney Smith, who once said that his idea of heaven (and a cleric!) was pâté de foie gras to he sound of trumpets. Mine, that night and this night, too, is fresh green garden peas, picked and shelled by my friends, to the sound of a cowbell…
Q is for quantity…
…and for the Case of the Hindu Eggs, as well as the case of some people, many of them gastronomical as well as human, who honestly believe that if a recipe calls for two cups of butter it will be twice as good if they use four.
If a classic recipe asks for one teaspoon of bechamel or one teaspoon of soy sauce, these mistaken searchers for the jewel of perfection will double the dose, and in doing so wreck themselves. The ones who thus continue assaulting the palates of their intimates deserve, rather than mercy, a good stiff lecture on the pleasures of the table as opposed to wounds of an outraged tongue, and if that fails, they should be quite bluntly crossed off the gastronomical list.
There is no hope for a cook who will not learn his own as well as other gourmet’s limitations, and a man who has one good bechamel by rote, one good minestrone, or one good Yat Gai Mein, and then goes on to make impossible ones because of his lack of balance, of perspective, and of plain common sense and modesty is, to be blunt again, past recall.
Of course it must be added here that many a clumsy amateur who early believed in all good faith that enough of a good thing could never be too much, has later turned into a chef of subtlety and breeding, just as many a man who later learned to judge the points of a setter has, in his first dog-days, his own early puppyhood, picked out a male hound because he was big, or a bitch for her pretty eyes. It takes some people a long time to realize that there are rules which have filtered into our life-patterns in a near perfect state…just as it takes other people to act as a kind of yeast, forever questioning these rules or others like them, in rich rebellion.
Gastronomical precepts are perhaps among the most delicate ones in the modern arts. They must, in the main, be followed before they can be broken: that is, I can do something with five given ingredients that Escoffier perhaps never dreamed of, but in order to do it well I must follow his basic rules for white stock, glaze, and poaching, which he and all his kind perfected in a grueling devotion to their métier.
A rebuttal to this hidebound theory could be that gastronomical accidents often give birth to beauty: a chef forgets the fried potatoes, pops them out and then into the fat, and has pommessoufflées! Another cook adds a raw yolk quickly to a portion of scrambled eggs when be finds it is to serve two people instead of one, and has a new nutlike flavor on his conscience and his reputation. There are uncountable anecdotes of such chance discoveries. Basically they have nothing to do with the fact that certain rules must be followed in order to reach certain results, in the sublime chemistry of food. They must, as Brillat-Savarin pointed out in his quasi-solemn little lecture on the art of frying, spring from a knowledge of natural laws.
My own rude forcing in the school of obedience to them came, perhaps fortunately for myself and certainly with great good luck for my intimates, when I was about nine.
I had already learned to follow recipes and could, I say now with a somewhat smug astonishment, make pan gravy, blancmange, jelly roll, and suchlike requisites to my maternal grandmother’s diet, and a few stolen delicacies like mayonnaise which we ate hungrily when she went away to religious conventions. I felt at home in the kitchen, at least on the cook’s day off, and could poach eggs with the best of them, atiptoe on a needlepoint footstool beside the gas range.
But there was, as always, a salutary comeuppance, one time when my father and mother went away for a Sunday and I was appointed to have a nice little supper ready for their return, I read a recipe in one of the smudged kitchen stand-bys. “Hindu Eggs,” it said, and it was not the exotic title but the fact that curry powder came into the ingredients that decided me. The procedure was simple, quite within my skills, and as I boiled eggs and made a cream sauce I thought happily of that half teaspoon of curry, and of all the other delicious curried dishes of lamb and chicken that we had sneaked when Grandmother was, as she was that very day, in Long Beach or Asbury Park.
The eggs peeled miraculously smooth. The sauce was a bland velvet cream. The casserole was buttered. And then I chose destruction. In a voluptuous maze of wanting to see again upon my parents’ faces the pleasure they always showed when we sneaked a curry, and in my own sensual need for more spice, more excitement than Grandmother would allow us in our daily food, I put in three tablespoons of the nice yellowish-brownish powder.
The rest of the story is obvious to any cook, no matter how amateur, but it conditioned at least four people, including me, to look up and murmur “Hindu Eggs!” whenever ignorance or stupidity shows in the seasoning of a dish.
It is fortunate that an obedience to the laws of nature is quite often an inherent thing in a good cook. I know at least one woman who could not possibly say why she adds ice-water rather than tap-water to her superlative pastry. She can neither read nor write and indeed can hardly talk, and if she is asked, will say grudgingly, “Kinda makes it set right…” She knows what all good cooks do, but not why.
Anyone, though, who wants to make pastry, or any other prerequisite of gourmandism, can comfort himself with the certainty that if he is not born with this inarticulate knowledge, he can acquire it. He can read, try, observe, think. He can, after a period of trial and inevitable error somewhat like learning to skate, turn out a pie as good as my dumb friend’s…or maybe better. He may be like another chef I know, a dentist, who for his own amusement has translated every one of his heavenly recipes into purely chemical terms and formulae, a form of occupational whimsy far beyond most people, or he may be content, as am I, to leave them “1 c. milk, 3 t. flour” and so on. But if he is honest, he will not tamper with the basic rules.
Myself, I have read so many recipes in the past thirty years or so, for both love and hunger, that I can and usually do recognize the good ones from the bad at a glance. What is more, I have followed so many of them, both actually and in my culinary brain, that I unconsciously reword and reorganize most of them, and am rebuffed and made suspicious by anything clumsy in them.
And one thing I do, always and every time, is to wonder about the pepper in a new recipe. Me, I like pepper. Me, I find that almost every professional rule puts in about one half the pepper I want. On the other hand, most amateur recipes call for too much. Always and every time, therefore, my pepper-conscious mind (or palate?) questions the seasoning of what I want to make, and with one eye on what I already know about cooking and the other on what I think I know about the people who will eat my food, I alter the indicated proportions…as far as pepper goes, that is.
Much further than that I do not stray, at least in the basic amounts of fat and flour, flour and liquid, liquid and temperature, and so on. I have learned in my own laborious workshop the culinary laws of nature, and by now can fairly well adjust them to the stove at my command, the weather and passions at whose command I am…
I know enough, in other words, not to double the lemon juice in a hollandaise sauce—it will be too sour and it will probably curdle and it will , in short, be a flop. I know it won’t help at all to make a custard of whipping cream instead of milk—it will flop. I know a salad won’t be twice as good if I put in two tins of anchovy filets instead of one. It, and the salt-killed lettuce in it, will flop, and dismally.
On the other hand I can, and do, double the butter or chicken fat when I make kasha, and treble the wine in aspic, and cut the cooking time in half for almost any fish…all those are personal tricks which time has verified for my own taste, once I admit, as heaven knows I do, that I must first obey what the great cooks have found out for me
What Brillat-Savarin said in 1825 about frying is still true, because it is based on nature’s laws, and the same holds for a master like Escoffier on sauces and roasting, for any thoughtful cook, derivative or not, who bows to law and does not wildly say, “Twice as much butter, or garlic, or zubzubzub must be twice as good…If a pinch of nutmeg picks up this dish of spinach, two pinches…” and so on.
We who must eat such well-meant messes can do no better than refuse them, and then beseech all such misguided cooks to stop and consider, to ponder on the reasons as well as the results, and to decide for themselves and also for our stomachs’ sakes to follow the rules based on common sense and experience, the rules set down by great chefs, whatever their sex and in whichever of these last two centuries they have worked.
We must hold out the torch to these taste-blinded friends of ours and promise them that they too can throw away few, if not all, of their gastronomical hearing-aids…they too, once they have learned how to walk among the pots and pipkins, can add saffron where Escoffier said thyme, or put kirsch instead of maraschino into a soufflé…once they have rightly learned what saffron tastes like, and what a soufflé is…
R is for romantic…
…and for a few of the reasons why gastronomy is and always has been connected with its sister art of love.
Or perhaps instead of reasons, which everyone who understands anything about digestion and its good and bad endocrinological effects will already know, I should discuss here, with brief discretion, a few direct results of the play of the five senses, properly stimulated by food, upon human passion. The surest way, if not the best, is to look backward…
Passion, here at least, means the height of emotional play between the two sexes, not the lasting fire I felt for my father once when I was about seven and we ate peach pie together under a canyon oak…not the equally lasting fire I felt for a mammoth woman who brought milk-toast to me once in the dusk when I was seventeen and very sick…not the almost searing gratitude I felt for my mother when she soothed me with buttered carrots and a secret piece of divinity fudge, once when 1 had done wrong and was in Coventry…and not the high note of confidence between two human beings that I felt once on a frozen hillside in France, when a bitter old general broke his bread in two and gave me half.
This other kind of passion that I speak of, romantic if ever such brutal thing could be so deemed, is one of sex, of the come-and-go, the preening and the prancing, and the final triumph or defeat, of two people who know enough, subconsciously or not, to woo with food as well as flattery.
The first time I remember recognizing the new weapon, I was about eight, I think. There was a boy named Red, immortal on all my spiritual calendars, a tall, scoffing, sneering, dashing fellow perhaps six months older than was I, a fellow of withdrawals, mockery, and pain. I mocked back at him, inadequately, filled with a curious tremor.
He followed me home every afternoon from school, a good half block behind, and over the giggles of my retinue of girl friends came his insults and lewd asides to a train of knee-britched sycophants. We must have looked very strange to the relics of the Quaker settlers of our little town, who pulled aside their parlor curtains at our noise, but if our pipings were still audible to their ancient ears they would not have felt too shocked, for as I recall it all we said, in a thousand significantly differing tones was, Oh yeah? Huh! Oh yeah?
My friends gave me advice, as doubtless Red’s gave him, and our daily marriage-march continued until February fourteenth, that year, without much variation. Then Red presented me with the biggest, fanciest, and most expensive Valentine in the class box. We knew, because it still said 50c on the back, in a spidery whisper of extravagance marked down thoughtfully in indelible pencil by the bookstore man, and left carefully unsmeared by my canny lover.
I stalked on sneeringly every afternoon, virginal before my train of damsels, the knights behind, hawking and nudging.
I was won, though, being but human and having, at eight as now, a belly below my heart. Red, through what advice I can never know, a few days later slipped into my desk the first nickel candybar I had ever seen.
It was a clumsy lump of very good chocolate and “fondant,” with a preserved cherry in the middle, all wrapped up in a piece of paper that, immediately upon being touched, sent off waves of red and gilt stain. It was, to me, not only the ultimate expression of masculine devotion but pure gastronomical delight, in a household where Grandmother disapproved of candy, not because of tooth decay or indigestion, but because children liked it and children should perforce not have anything they liked.
I sniffed happily at the Cherriswete a few times, and then gave each girl in my retinue a crumb, in payment for her loyalty. Then I took it home, showed it to my little sister, spun it a few times past her nose to torture her, and divided it with her, since even though young and savage we really loved each other.
My heart was full. I knew at last that I loved Red as well. I was his, to steal a phrase. We belonged together, a male and female who understood the gastronomical urge.
I never saw him again, since his father was transferred by the Standard Oil from Brea to Shanghai that week end, but he has had much more influence on me with that one Cherriswete than most men could have in twenty years of champagne and lark tongues. Sometimes I wonder if he is still tall, freckled, and irreverent…and if he remembers how well to woo a woman. Often I thank him for having, no matter how accidentally, taught me to realize the almost vascular connection between love and lobster pâté, between eating and romance…