W is for wanton …
… and the great difference between the way a man eats and has his lady love eat, when he plans to lead her to the nearest couch, and the way a woman will feed a man for the same end.
A man is much more straightforward, usually. He believes with the unreasoning intuition of a cat or a wolf that he must be strong for the fray and that strength comes from meat: he orders rare steak, with plenty of potatoes alongside, and perhaps a pastry afterwards. He may have heard that oysters or a glass of port work aphrodisiacal wonders, more on himself than on the little woman, or, in an unusual attempt at subtlety augmented by something he vaguely remembers from an old movie, he may provide a glass or two of champagne. But in general, his gastronomical as well as alcoholic approach to the delights of love is an uncomplicated one which has almost nothing to do with the pleasurable preparation of his companion.
A woman contemplating seduction, on the other hand, is wanton.
A wanton woman, according to the dictionary, is unchaste, licentious, and lewd. This definition obviously applies to her moral rather than her culinary side. Considered solely in connection with the pleasures of the table, a wanton woman is one who with cunning and deliberation prepares a meal which will draw another person to her. The reasons she does so may be anything from political to polite, but her basic acknowledgment that sexual play can be a sure aftermath of gastronomical bliss dictates the game, from the first invitation to the final mouthful of ginger omelette.
It is an age-long rumor, apparently fairly well founded, that the great procuresses and madams have always been the great teachers, as well, in “la cuisine d’amour.” Such proficient pupils as Du Barry and the Countess of Louveciennes bear out this titillating theory, and recipes ascribed to both of them are reprinted annually in various underhand publications dedicated to the somewhat dubious encouragement of libertinage.
Most of the culinary secrets told in them, at a high price and “in plain wrappers for mailing,” lean heavily on the timeworn knowledge that dishes made with a great deal of mustard and paprika and other heating spices and ones based on the generous use of shrimp and other highly phosphorous fish are usually exciting to both human sexes, but particularly to the male. Sometimes a more complicated significance, straight from Freud, is given to recipes thought of long before his day. The dish of eel innocently prepared for a gathering of good pastors by a former brothel cook, which Brillat-Savarin describes so lightly in his Physiology of Taste, is a perfect example of this: there is a phallic tightness about the whole thing, visual as well as spiritual, which has more to do with the structure of the fish than the possible presence of a mysterious and exotic spice.
In general, however, the great courtesans have paid less attention to the Freudian appearance of their kitchens’ masterpieces, from what I can gather, than to the temperaments of the men they have willed to please. They have studied the appetites of their prey.
This is, in a way, a paraphrase of the old saying, “First catch your hare, then cook him”: wolf or even goose can be substituted for the little wild rabbit. Once caught, a human male is studied by the huntress as deeply as if he were a diamond. She looks at his ear lobes and his finger-nails, before and after he has eaten of rare beef…and if the former are plump and ruddy and the latter rosy pink, she knows his glands to be both satisfied and active. She analyzes his motor reflexes after he has downed a fair portion of jugged venison…and if, instead of showing a pleasurable skittishness, he yawns and puffs and blinks, she nevermore serves that gamy dish. She notes coldly, calculatingly, his reactions to wine and ale and heavy spirits, as well as to fruits, eggs, cucumbers, and such…she learns his dietetic tolerance, in short, and his rare metabolism, and his tendencies toward gastric as well as emotional indigestion. And all this happens whether she be a designing farm girl in Arkansas or a slim, worldly beauty on the Cap d’Antibes.
Now I myself am neither of these. I have met a few famous madams, but for one reason or another have never discussed the gastronomy of love with them. I have read a great many books. I have watched a great many people, and fed them, too. And here is how I would go about it, as of today, if I wanted to ensnare an average man and lead him, with proper discretion, to the marriage bed. (I say average. The truth is that I do not know a really average man, gastronomically or otherwise. A further complication is that I would quite probably be uninterested in one if ever I met him…)
Given the fact that I have found a male of about my own age, healthy, not too nervous, fairly literate, in other words one I would like to have cleave unto me for reasons of pleasure if not reproduction: I would soon discover his likes (first catch your wolf…), and more gradually his dislikes, the deepseated kind based on the fact that his grandmother made him eat cold turkey one day when it thundered, and his father once called stuffed goose neck rattlesnake meat, and that sort of thing.
By then I would know what he thought he admired and what he really did. If he fancied himself as a bored diner-out, I would gradually tease and excite him by bewilderment and serve him what he thought he hated, in a quiet, lonely room. If he thought he could not possibly eat anything with onion in it, I would prove my own control of the situation without his knowing it and prepare a few artful dishes to lead him to realize that he loved what he most abhorred. If he hated company, I would insinuate two or three or even five arresting characters into his prandial pattern.
In other words, I would quarrel with him, on a celestially gentle plane.
I would placate his early inhibitions and flatter his later ones, and in the end I would have educated him without pain to the point where some such menu as the following would culminate in the flowering of mutual desire, whether social, financial, or impurely intramural:
Good Scotch and water for him, and a very dry Martini for me…
A hot soup made of equal parts of clam juice, chicken broth, and dry white wine, heated just to the simmer.
A light curry of shrimp or crayfish tails. The fish must be peeled raw, soaked in rich milk, and drained, and the sauce must be made of this milk, and the fish poached for at best six minutes in the delicately flavored liquid. This is a reliable trick.
Rice for the curry, and a bland green salad…that is, with a plain French dressing containing more than its fair share of oil.
A dessert based on chilled cooked fruits, with a seemingly innocent sauce made of honey, whole cinnamon, and brandy poured over and around them at boiling point and allowed to chill.
By preference I would serve a moderately dry champagne, from the curry on through the last course. To most men, this wine has a hundred naughty connotations, and it is least dangerous in the Shakespearean sense of doubling their desire and halving the pursuit thereof. If I had no champagne, I would produce a bottle of some chilled light wine. I would later serve hot black coffee in great moderation lest, to put it bluntly, it dampen the fire with cold reason.
Thus, depending on the man, the surroundings, and the general conditions of light and shade, I would go about my business…in a time-honored gastronomical fashion which indeed has much of the wanton and therefore unchaste about it, more in the telling than in the dreamed performance, but which still need not be either lewd or licentious, at least in one woman’s lexicon.
X is for xanthippe…
…and the sure way any shrewish woman can put poison in the pot for her mate, whether or no he be as wise as Socrates and must call her Xanthippean or merely Sarah-Jane-ish or Francescan, routinely vituperative, or just undergoing “one of her bad days.”
Probably no strychnine has sent as many husbands into their graves as mealtime scolding has, and nothing driven more men into the arms of other women than the sound of a shrill whine at table. Xanthippe’s skill at being ill-tempered is largely legendary, and I do not know how much of her nastiness took place over the daily food she served forth to Socrates, but I am convinced that there is no better culture for the quick growth of the germs of marital loathings than the family board. Even the bed must cede position to it, for nighttime and the occasional surcease of physical fatigue and languor can temper mean words there.
Brillat-Savarin has said as much and most straightforwardly. But each man has the right to add his own version of it, and as a two-time widow, both grass and sod, I can vouch for the fact that every man who ever confided to me, as all men eventually will to a seemingly lone woman, that he has not been well understood by his wife, has in the end confessed that try as he would to come home patient and kind for dinner, Sarah-Jane or Frances would serve it forth to him with such a mish-mosh of scowls and scoldings that he must, to save himself, flee from her.
There are, of course, two sides to this problem as to all, and I can and do understand Xanthippe’s. The main thing to do, in my way of thinking, is to strike an amicable if not truly easy relationship, with full admission that the husband may be basically weary of his wife and the wife fed to the teeth with him. I know several such arrangements, questionably right from a moral point of view (or sentimental!) and made for a hundred reasons from the most venal to the vaguest, but if they be done intelligently, they can and do succeed.
The reason I advocate this tacit admission of extramural satisfactions and intramural tolerance is that people must eat. It is true that they must also make love and in order to do so must in one way or another make money. But the most important of these functions, to my mind, is the eating. Neither of the others can be done well without it: an impoverished man is hungry, and a hungry man, as too many dictators have proved, is not a reproductive and perforce sexually keen fellow. That is why I think that food is the most important of our three basic needs, and why I so deplore its poisoning, its deadly contamination, by anything as vicious as bad temper.
Socrates escaped from Xanthippe in ways impossible to modern man, no matter how philosophical. Today a lesser thinker must hide in his Third Avenue pub and snatch a tough steak and worse potatoes to nourish him if he cannot bear to go home and face the sour woman he is commanded by law to live with. Indigestion is the inevitable aftermath, not so much from the rank victuals he has stowed away as from his basic sorrow that he and she have come to such a pass.
But if he does go home, his stomach will curse even louder, thanks to the acids of anger and hatred that he can counteract in the pub with aloneness and a couple of short ryes. He sighs, gulps, and looks over the bar at his own mirrored face, bitterly thankful that he does not see there the pinched, ruined beauty of his woman who forced him here.
And she? Women have more ways than men for lone survival, so Xanthippe may drink too much, or exhaust herself in a whirl of club meetings with her like, or sit weeping and moaning in a darkened movie house. She may long for her husband…
…and then when he does come home, heavy with fatigue and forced joviality, she forgets her longing and slaps ill-cooked food upon the table, a kind of visual proof of her boredom at his dullness and her hatred of his dwindled lust, which she, poor soul, was genteelly raised to mistake for love. She may even try hard to be patient and not to mind when, in subconscious pain at the sight of her sharp face, he hides from her with a spread-out sheet of news about pugilists and midget-auto racers. She may hope that he will notice the sherry she has poured over his canned peach.
But he reads on, with the instinct of a cornered road pretending courage, and in desperation the woman, who has sworn not to do it again, begins to talk. The rest is too familiar, a pattern used tastelessly by comic-strip writers, modern literary giants, and psychiatrists: she whangs, he scowls back, suddenly the food in their bellies feels intolerably sour and dreadful, he returns in a furious rush to his pub and she to her bitter, teary pillow, and finally they end, according to accidents of time and place and money, in the relative asylums of death, insanity, hypochondria, or the law courts.
A good answer to this Xanthippean formula, in my mind, must start practically with the cradle. A child, male or female, who has been raised to eat in peace and has never gulped to the tune of scolding or anger, stands a better chance of knowing the pleasures of the table when he is full grown than one who has listened with fright and final callousness to endless bitter arguments and rows, who has bolted his food to escape them, who has at last come to think them a part of family existence and to expect, with a horrible resignation, that his wife will turn out to be the same noisy, bickering shrew his mother was at mealtime.
I think that it is a good thing, for many reasons, to have children eat at least half their meals at their own table, at the hours best suited to them, and removed from sight or sound of older people whose natural conversation would be as boring to the young ones as theirs would be to their elders.
But if, as was true when I was little, the children must have dinner with their parents, some such rule as the one my family followed should be law: business was never mentioned in any way, nor were money problems, nor grown-up worries. And if any of us children had grouses to air, or peeves, we did it earlier or later, but never at the table. There we were expected to eat nicely and to converse with possible dullness but no rancor, and being expected to, we did…or else were excused from the room.
My father, because of the endless evening meetings he had to go to as a small-town newspaper editor, had to dine early, and my mother, dependent on unskilled help, could not arrange separate dinners at differing hours for us children and for herself and him, but I have often thought it a pity that they must refrain from any of the rich, quiet talk that a husband and wife should indulge in over their evening meal, in order to reach us children one more rudiment of decent living. The only place where they could converse properly was in bed, and I can remember hearing their low voices going on and on, long after most of the house slept.
Even so long ago I used to think how dull it must be for my father to come home after the paper was off the presses and well onto the streets, to find my mother deep in the unavoidable and noisy routine of getting four or five children washed and brushed and ready to be fed, with never a chance to sit down together and breathe…
Perhaps that is why, now in my own life, I think the quiet drink I have before dinner with my husband, after the children have been tucked away, is one of the pleasantest moments in all the 1,440. It makes the meal which follows seem more peaceful, more delicious. Physically it smoothes out wrinkles of fatigue and worry in both of us, which could, especially if we had been conditioned differently by wrangling parents, lead us inevitably into the Xanthippean tragedy of nagging and bitterness and anger. And that—I know because I have seen it happen—would be the world’s surest way to send my husband from my table and my life…an ugly prospect indeed, and one rightly to be avoided like the poison it would take to do it, brewed to the tune of a woman’s shrewish voice and served, quick death to love, at the family table.
Y is for yak…
…and the steaks that may possibly be carved, now and then, by hungry visitors to the plateaus of Tibet, if they can sneak one of the great black oxen far enough from its native owners…as well as other peculiar steaks, stews, and soups which have nourished men, for one reason and another, within my own knowledge.
To be truthful, I have never met anyone who would admit to tasting yak. Perhaps these bisonlike beasts are too valuable as vehicles to end in the pot. Perhaps there are religious scruples against devouring them, as with the sacred cows of India. Perhaps it is simply that I do not move among the yak-minded, gastronomically.
But whale, now: I can discuss whale, at least vicariously enjoyed. I was married for a time to a man whose father, a most respectable Presbyterian minister, once spent a large chunk of the weekly budget on a whale steak and brought it home gleefully, a refugee from respectability for that one day. Who can know how many memories of unutterably dull prayer meetings the exotic slab of meal wiped from his mind? It may well have been opium, moonlight, orchids to his otherwise staid soul.
Whatever the meandrous escapism of his purchase, it threw his harried wife and his four habitually hungry children into a pit of depression. They had no idea how to cook it and stood looking helplessly at it, wishing it were a good, honest pot roast.
What finally happened to it completed the dismal picture; it was treated as if it were indeed chuck beef, and the minister, his wife, and the four children ladled off cup after cup of blubber oil, which rose high in the pan for hours while they waited, futilely, for the meat to grow tender enough to eat.
It was possibly the first, and certainly the last, attempt the minister made to flee from his proper routine of prayers and pot roasts, pot roasts and prayers.
There is a creature something like whale, for he lives in the cold northern waters as whales often do, and something like an elephant, for he has two ivory tusks, one of which grows long and curved and handsome. He is called a narwahl, and although fewer men tasted him than either whale or elephant, his skin is reported to be delicious, crisp as celery and tasting of nuts and mushrooms…and looking like half-inch-
thick linoleum, which for me, at least, would prove an esthetic handicap.
As for elephant meat, many human beings have enjoyed it, mostly in jungles but also, it is admitted, within walking distance of the local zoo. One man I know, who was the most skilled butcher in his district, had a standing agreement with the zoological gardens near him that he might do a bit of subrosa carving in case of “accident” to any of the more exotic guests, and he assured me over several bottles of Tavel that elephant trunk is one of the most succulent meats ever swallowed (except perhaps crocodile).
Certainly some such menu of the Siege of Paris in 1870 as the one which can now be seen at Voisin, in New York, is ample proof of the gruesome legend that Castor and Pollux, the two elephants of the zoo, ended nobly in the soup kettle, after everyone in the city who could afford to had sampled them.
The Voisin menu, to celebrate Christmas on the ninety-ninth day of the Siege, is an unpleasantly fascinating example of what people will eat if they are hungry enough. Besides the consomme d’elephant, it boasts stuffed donkey head, roasted camel, kangaroo stew, rack of bear, leg of wolf, cat garnished with rats, and antelope pie…a far cry from the first timid use of anything extraordinary chez Voisin, when Bellenger consulted with his chef and grudgingly devised a menu around the meat course of saddle of spaniel!
The degree of exoticism is dictated by both time and place, of course. One winter in Strasbourg I ate wild boar as if it were commonplace beef, but in southern California I would feel strange indeed to find it set before me. And when I was a child I dried kelp leaves over our evening beach fires and ate them happily, quite unconscious of the fact that probably nowhere else but along the shores of northern Japan were children doing likewise, and all because my Aunt Gwen had been a child there herself and was now helping to raise me in the only pattern she knew.
I have always believed, perhaps too optimistically, that I would like to taste everything once, never from such hunger as made friends of mine in France in 1942 eat guinea pig ragout, but from pure gourmandism. The first time I ever felt this compulsion of gastronomical curiosity over instinct was when I was about fourteen and was confronted with my first shrimp. (I do not understand how it took me that long to meet one; perhaps my grandmother’s rigid Midwestern ideas of what was fit and proper to put on the table kept me from that pleasure.)
I was immediately repelled by what now delights me, and the little curled pink things, lying in whorls upon the mayonnaise, with snow packed around the bowl as only Victor Hugo could do it so long ago in hot Los Angeles, seemed horrible to me. Then I looked about the airy, charming room, with the canaries singing in their golden cages and soft lights glowing behind their incredibly fancy chiffon shades, and I recognized the fact that I was facing a test: I must eat at least one shrimp, and then die or be sick.
It was the first of uncountable more, from many a bay and stream, of every color from dank gray to rose, every size from bee to field mouse. Once I saw a corpse fished from a Louisiana bayou, and it was three times its size forthe shrimp sucking at it…and another time I saw a corpse, off Brittany, stripped by lobster claws…and still I think without any qualm at all that shrimp, and all their cousins, make some of the sweetest things in this world to put between my teeth.
The next hardest test I passed, at table, was my first oyster, an overlarge and rather metallic one, in the dining room of the St. Francis in San Francisco, a few years after the shrimp.
I found it dangerously disgusting for several minutes, but since that memorable day I have eaten oysters whenever I could, including one very bad one in Berne which, my husband told me, would prove to have been all right if I did not die within six hours. I did not, although the last hour had me waiting with ill-concealed anxiety, my eyes on the clock and one hand lying expectantly upon the bedside bell.
I later learned, from no less an authority than Henri Charpenrier, that the best thing to do if and when a bad oyster has been swallowed is drink generously of coarse red wine, whose tannic content will counteract the acid in the rotting mollusk. I have never had a chance to prove this, I add almost regretfully….
Imagination tells me that probably the hardest test I could face would be to eat live maggots which had lived in cheese, like the dish Charles Reader wrote of in The Cloister and the Hearth. But I am quite sure I would try, without too much squeamishness, the white termites in Africa, which one should snap at skillfully before they bite the tongue, and which, more than one gastronomer reports, taste very much like pineapple. For some reason the thought of them does not repel me nor, at least theoretically, does the story of the tiny live fish which are swallowed by some South Sea tribes during feasts, to jump around in their stomachs and make room for more food.
As for roasted locusts, strung on twigs over a fire and basted with camel butter, I think they sound very good indeed, since I react well, gastronomically, to things that are crisp and not sweet and might find them almost as irresistible as my peak in this category, the potato chips in the bar of the Lausanne-Palace, which were hideous to any kitchen purists, tasting one time of chicken fat, another time of lake perch, but so fresh and so crisp and so salty that ten years after I last ate one I can enjoy it still, and will ten years from his present enjoyment….
I have found that people, when questioned about the strangest things they ever ate, are vague, and I myself am so. One man to whom livers and lights are anathema will say that the worst experience he ever had was finding himself halfway through a grilled kidney before he realized what he was eating. Another will go dreamily into the story of the time William Seabrook picked up what is presumedly an oxtail bone and announced to his well-fed guests that was the best human coccyx he had been able to buy for a long time. Personally, I can murmur no such ghoulish titillations at the proper or improper moments…but although none of my acquaintances has eaten yak, one man I know who later became a bishop told me, long ago, of the time he went to a high, savage Oriental village and was served, by the head man, a stew of what he knew at a glance was boiled newborn baby. The Christian pretended to eat it, feeling souls at stake, and later confessed he was not overly relieved to learn that it was little monkeys, not babies, he had nibbled at.
So…limited as I am to shrimp, oysters, and wild boars, I still do talk with people, now and then, who have known stranger flavors…monkey and crocodile, the ordinary whale, the extraordinary innard of a calf….
Z is for zakuski…
…and for a few reasons for my thinking a discussion of hors-d’oeuvre is as good a way to end an alphabet as they themselves are to begin a banquet.
The main trouble with them, almost a legendary one, is that if they are enjoyed to the hilt, the meal that follows is, can be, and usually must be more or less ignored…except by real trenchermen, that is. The variety, the tempting high, spicy smells, the clashing flavors, all lead even jaded appetites to a surfeit that destroys what is to follow, no mater how simple or how Lucullan.
Gastronomically, this may well be thought a pity, at least by the sad hosts have commanded a feast thoughtfully and then found their fine balanced courses almost painfully ignored by their surfeited guests. Even so, it is fun now and then to roam uninhibited and unhurried through a smörgåsbord, a buffet russe, hors-d’oeuvre variés, however it may be called. Myself, I like the name zakuski, although I don’t know why, for I have never had them in the classical way, countless bowls and dishes and platters set out upon a long table, to be tasted as and how I wished and swept down with frequent little glasses of vodka.
The nearest I came to that was when I used to go to a small cellar restaurant behind the Russian Church in Paris, after the Sunday morning services. I always stopped in the bar and drank one or two vodkas and ate pressed caviar, the black at about eight francs if it had been a flush week, the red at five francs….
And I felt much too shy to go into the next room where everyone standing around the long table was speaking Russian, with a liveliness that to me still seems part of the zakuski ritual. I remember how thin most of the people looked, and how handsome; that was not long after Paris filled with refugees from the Revolution, and although I was innocent of the average American awe at having princes for taxi drivers, I could not help admiring the way most of the people in the cafe cellar held their heads.
I do not know quite how they paid for the things they nibbled so avidly and gaily, whether there was a flat fee for this little postchurchly spree, or whether some sharp-eyed waiter totted up their various mouthfuls. As I say, I was too timid and out of my lingual element to investigate and instead stayed in the bar, absorbing by a kind of gastronomical osmosis the high good spirits in the other room.
My time was far from wasted, though: I learned the lasting delight of pressed caviar, which I found to be best when it was most removed from freshness…when, in fact, the barman hacked it off the mother lump as if it were a piece of rubber, and it had to be chewed and mumbled over in the mouth. Then it went down in a kind of gush of pureness, caviar in essence.
One day I staggered into the bar, dizzy from the most beautiful a cappella singing I had ever heard in my life or in my dreams, and the barman, who by that time recognized me, put down before me on the counter a tough slab of the red and a little brimming glass, and for an instant I felt very lonely and wished that I might be in the other room, where people milled merrily after the strain of standing and kneeling and then standing all morning. But next me I suddenly saw a big man, drinking vodka from a water tumbler, and he, too, was eating red pressed caviar, holding it like a slice of bread in his hand, and joking with the barman…and something about the vibrations in his voice made me know that it was Boris Chaliapin who spoke, and that it had been he, no other in the world, who sang in church that morning with the other choristers.
I must have looked the way I felt, awestruck and flabbergasted and naive, for the barman said something and they both glanced at me and smiled, and then Chaliapin clicked his glass against mine and said, “Santé!”, and they went on talking in Russian.
It was a strange moment in my life, as strong and good as the taste of caviar on my tongue, and the bite of vodka in my throat. I walked straight out, past the door of the other room, where the gaiety and the countless zakuski no longer lured. Everything was in shadow beside the almost brutal glare of the voice that had so uplifted me in church, and then had said “Santé!” to me. Even now I blink a little, spiritually, thinking of it.
Caviar, of course, is only one zakuska. Personally, I think it is the best one and would willingly forego almost any other gastronomical delight for it…enough of it, which I have never had, even though once I slowly and happily ate a pound of it by myself, over a day or so in time and unlimited distances in voluptuous space. It has for many centuries been thought the most luxurious of all hors-d’oeuvre, too good for ordinary diners or dinners. Even Shakespeare used it as a simile; “Caviare to the general…” he wrote in Hamlet about a play which pleased not the million…and indeed it is reported that British soldiers stationed on the Caspian Sea after one of the last wars complained angrily about being fed too much of “this ‘ere fish jam.”
I moan at the thought and wonder if they would have liked any better the lowest form of it, a futile imitation called peasant caviar, made of baked eggplant and various seasonings. I myself think it utterly delicious, no matter how far removed from what it tries to imitate, and would gladly eat it, spread thick and cold upon black bread, every summer noontime of my life. It is another zakuska, seen more upon poor sideboards than rich ones, of course.
Then there are all the pickled mushrooms and tomatoes and eggplants, usually flavored with dill in one degree or another…and the pickled smelts and boned pickled anchovies, the smoked salmon and sturgeon, the little fried or poached cheese pats called tvorojniki, the pirojki stuffed with a dozen things like game, fish, cheese, cabbage, mushrooms…and bowls of mushrooms in sour cream…and of course the vodka, which with tequila is the most appetizing firewater in the world, I think—although I learned from one of Arnold Bennett’s books to find good dry gin a fortunate substitute for either of them.
That, all that and much more, too, will make an honest side table of zakuski. Anything that follows is incidental, obviously…although at Eastertime, in Russian households all over the world and of whatever political hue, it is obligatory to stay upright, if not completely sober, for the main table of baked ham and ducks and suckling pigs, and the high koulitch and the cone-shaped pashka, and the painted eggs all nested in their grass and blossoms.
A man I know who was a boy in St. Petersburg has told me that never in his life, nowhere else in the world, has he seen such Gargantuan, near-insane gourmandizing as at his home, on Easter, when he was about twelve. He cannot forget it, nor how the still merry people fell back like walruses into their chairs, after the gentlemen had visited several other houses for a nibble of the special zakuski and a nip of vodka, and then had met with their women and children at his parents’ house for the rest of the traditional celebration. He shakes his head now, with a half-incredulous, half-envious look in his eyes that says, too recognizably—There were giants in those days.
I have never seen such a rite, raised as I was prosaically, if with less digestive danger, in a small California town, but I remember the first time I ever went to the Brasserie Universelle in Paris, which was notable then for its hors-d’oeuvre varies, a great favorite with provincials like me. I was young and hungry, with a commensurate capacity and sturdy bodily functions. I had never beheld so many tempting dishes in my life, and the waiters who came in a seemingly endless procession, bringing hot, cold, spiced, bland, scarlet, green, black things to set before me, apparently enjoyed my naive pleasure.
“Hold back,” one would advise tensely. “Wait! There will soon come a truffled pâté one must taste!”
Or another would say, “Now just a tiny little morsel of this, it is not too distinguished, to save place for the cèpes which are next!”
And so it went, I sitting back in happy helplessness, like a queen ant being nourished by her husbands, feeling myself grow great with sensuality.
As I remember, this happened several times, only by virtue of my youth and general good health, and at the end of each meal I toyed languidly with a coupe Jacques. I could face neither the hors-d’oeuvre nor the dessert today, but it is somehow pleasant and reassuring to feel that I was not always thus ascetic…and also that I have known more exciting things than the tray of canapés which is considered the American equivalent of zakuski, in whatever language it is said.
What emasculation they have undergone, these pretty and minuscular appetizers! What a far cry, no matter how artfully made and served, they are from the generous bowls and tubs and boats of a buffet russe, a smörgåsbord, a table of hors-d’oeuvre variés! And for that matter, how far from the straightforward and tonic thrust of vodka or aquavit is the genteel stimulation of no matter how fine a Sidecar or Manhattan, the vulgar wallop of even the best Martini!
I cannot ponder upon a Gargantuan Easter in St. Petersburg, but I can succor my hungry memory with thought of pâté and mushrooms and suchlike in an upstairs restaurant in Paris…and perhaps better than any of this with thoughts of the simplest zakuska ever eaten, when Boris Chaliapin are it too, and touched his tumbler to my little glass.…
What better way could there be, to begin a meal or end an alphabet?