Gramp used to say he'd done everything in life twice. But even he wasn't a cordon bleu. He didn't come right out and say it, but if you cornered him and asked, he'd have to admit it. Mama' Aunt Gussie was a cordon bleu, and that hurt Gramp. He didn't like Aunt Gussie, and to have her throwing out what she knew about Péplucement d'une anguille (how to undress an eel) was too much.
“Hell's high button shoes!” Gramp would shout. “To eat and eat well is enough; to go into the gruesome details of gullet-plucking and liver-tickling is too much!”
Aunt Gussie would sip her orange-flavored brandy and nod. “The ultimate in la haute cuisine is something only a true Frenchman knows.”
“Great jumping Balzac!“ Gramp would shout. “Get the woman out of here before I stew her in beef broth and cold cream! Don't say cordon bleu in my house. It's a dirty word from now on!”
“Easy. Gramp.“ Mama would say.” Aunt Gussie was never more than a demi-pensionnaire at the school.“
“Demi-what did you say?” But everyone knew he was going to be vulgar and left the room.
My Aunt Gussie was a very young girl around 1900, with lots of money because her husband had died. She dressed like they did in the road show of The Merry Widow and went to Paris to “see art and life,” as she put it. But when she found out the money left to her was in trust and all she got was, as she said, “money to ride the horse cars,” she enrolled in the famous cooking school the Gordon Bleu in Paris. She felt that if things got real bad. she could always open a railroad diner in West Elk, Oklahoma, where her late husband had done well in oil. The idea of good French cooking in a dog wagon in West Elk, Oklahoma, never seemed to bother Aunt Gussie. She learned how to make twenty sauces, how to cut a chicken seventeen ways, and could make a potato look like something else. She did make a dandy omelette; I do remember that.
In Paris, Aunt Gussie got her poignées, the knives and tools for cooking, a fouet (a kind of wire net for whipping), tamis strainers, and a frying pan (solid iron and charcoal-black). Aunt Gussie learned how to boil a sauce four days, how to pick the dropped food off the floor and laughingly call it a coup du ballet Parisien. how to suck burned fingers, and how to drown a duckling in wine. She got real good at sticking her thumbs in stuff to taste it. and her veau de blanquette is still remembered there—if they haven't changed cats. She always claimed she got B in croquettes. and there is a dish called endives Gertrude (Aunt Gussie' legal front name) in some rare. old. forgotten cookbook. But you could never miss the framed thing on the wall: Diplôme de Cuisine Bourgeoise, Gertrude Camille (sic) Sbribheimer. So my Aunt Gussie (or Mama's aunt, to be just right about it) goes tooting down the halls of history with her name in the Cordon Bleu register.
All of this is old history now. but it wasn't in 1919 when Gramp and Mama and myself were crossing America in a Model T flivver. I remember when we came to Oklahoma. I cried because there were no buffaloes, and the only Indian we saw had become a millionaire from his oil leases and rode, not on a bucking white and black pony, but in the inside of an undertaker's hearse, which he had bought for two reasons: It had big glass walls, and he could recline on a camp cot and take it easy.
Mama was watching the road signs, and she suddenly leaned over from the back seat and said, “Gramp. West Elk is only ten miles away.”
“I don't care. Sari, if the whole elk is two blocks away.”
“Aunt Gussie lives there.”
“Poor West Cow.”
“West Elk,” corrected Mama. “We'll visit her.”
“Why?” asked Gramp. biting the neck off one of his cigars.
“Blood is thicker than water,” Mama spoke properly.
“So is one of her goddamn reeking sauces. Hell! even blood doesn't mix with it, You cat one of her dishes, and the damnlousy thing chases your blood for miles until it screams for mercy.”
Gramp and Mama had the idea that if Gramp ran his swear words together, I wouldn't understand them.
I said, “Where does the damn oldbag live out here? rsquo”
“Baby boy!” said Mama in panic, “Where did you learn such words?”
“— — — — ,” I said (I was saving the real good ones for the lost). “I got ears.”
“And your grammar!” Mania said and began to weep. “ The child is being ruined! And it's all your fault, Gramp. Oh why. why did I come and bring that innocent little mind along?”
Gramp stopped the car, looked at his glowing cigar end. and said softly, a defeated man who knew it, “ Which way is West Elk? We'll go see our dear Aunt Gussie.”
Mama wiped her tears away, sniffed air into her small perfect nose, and purred, “ You're not a had man, Gramp, just careless. Go back a block and turn left.”
“Thank you. Sari,” said Gramp calmly, and we turned for West Elk. Gramp knew all about women, and the thing he knew best was to give in when beaten. He hated tears, and he knew Mama knew it. Mama was a pretty bright character herself, and she never pushed her gains too far. She acted now as if going to West Elk was Gramp's idea and she was only going along for the view—which was mostly oil wells.
West Elk, I hear, no longer exists—which is too bad. since it was something you had to see to admit its being around. It was one main street with another one crossing it, some cement block stores with high false fronts, a lot of stone age cars, some Indians sitting at the curbs, lots of hay and feed and oil-drilling tools, some trees that had died a long time ago—and of course, Aunt Gussie.
She lived in a big frame house on the outskirts of town, a house out of the General Grant period, all gingerbread trimmings, three stories high, low in the porches, narrow in the hips, but with a good slate roof. There was water from deep wells, and Aunt Gussie had raised cattle and had done very well for herself. Her second husband had also died. (“ She never had any luck with the higher emotions,” Gramp said.)
We drove up past a hound dog nursing ten pups and a brood of Chinese ducks testing a drinking pool made of a section of iron, called a stock tank in West Elk. Aunt Gussie was sealed on the steps of the porch, smoking a cornhusk cigarette, wearing levis long before the fad for blue jean pants). a man's shirt, and the remains of a weather-torn Stetson on her head. She didn't look at all like the fancy, flamboyant character from Paris I remembered.
“ Waaahoo!” she said as she saw us. “ Visitors!” She came over to the car. but she didn't say, “Howdy partner.,” or “ Put it there, strangers.” She just kissed Mama. Gramp. and myself and said, “It's good to see you all. It't been a long time.”
Which shows you how movies let a guy down. She didn't even wear a Colt on her hip or spit chewing tobacco. I had to settle for hand-rolled cornhusk cigarettes (remember, in those days no nice woman smoked in public, and the ads never suggested a lady would ever put tobacco to her lips).
“It's a nice place. West Elk,” said. Mama after we got out of the car and up onto the porch.
Aunt Gussie used some of Gramp's run-together words. “If it weren't that beef took a flop after the war (World War I), I'd be out of here as fast as a sparrow could flick its tail, Paris, that's a nice place, isn't it, Gramp?”
“It's a place,” said Gramp, not wanting to get committed on anything with Aunt Gussie.
“The food,” said Mama, “ the French—they know how to eat.”
“So do I,” I said.
“Come in,” said Aunt Gussie, “ Lsquo and I'll rustle you up some grub.” (That wasn't such bad sounding western talk I figured.)
Inside, the house was cool and neat. On the walls were Aunt Gussie's two pink Matisse nudes and her real good Picassos, purchased years before anybody in this country thought he could paint better than an idiot Chilean. “A lot of meat on those sofas,” Gramp said, but he never really got past Degas and the greener of Lautrec's night scenes.
It would have been a nice lunch, only Aunt Gussie said, “You all coming out here reminds me I'm a cordon blew.”
“Why should it?” said Gramp.
A little boy came in just then, Carrying a big pencil and looking at us. Aunt Gussie patted him on the head. “This is my son, Sandor. The late Mr. Horvath Andrassy was a Hungarian.”
We lowered our eyelids for a moment in memory of Aunt Gussie's late husband. Sandor stuck out his tongue at me and ran his pencil over it. I noticed it left a purple line, and I hoped he would die.
“Shake hands with Cousin Sandor,” Mama said. She was like an Englishman in the jungle, dressing for dinner: you had to make the proper social sounds and gestures with her around. I shook hands, and Sandor tried to throw me with an Indian handlock. I was very polite and only kicked him in the shins,
I must say lunch was a real delight, First a huge tongue came in, smoking hot on a board. Aunt Gussie grew her own tongues, she told us. She had some cattle crossed with buffalo, and their tongues hung and smoked were the best —her private stock. Buffalo tongue Gertrude is something special, and Gramp's journal gives some of its secrets. The tongue is stewed in a deep kettle with onions, cloves, carrots, celery, parsley, bay leaf, peppercorn, and Hungarian paprika. The tongue is removed when tender and skinned; tomato sauce and saffron arc added; and it's baked with truffles and noodles and basted from time to time with a mixture of chicken consomm\eacut\and gelatin. When served, it's sliced thin as paper against the grain.
Aunt Gussie really bad learned something in Paris, besides meeting Hungarians. She had a kind of páté maison, local Oklahoma style; filet of beef-buffalo, pork, and liver; and a soup which she claimed was based on the local pot of the native share croppers, refined by hard work and study—a sort of steaming madrilène, neatly laced with sherry.
Aunt Gussie explained, “I try to keep the American base to my cooking, but I add what it needs from Paris. I must make you my Hunter's Pot. It's Spanish from below the border, but the crop pickers brought it North.”
“Good food,” agreed Gramp, wiping his mouth and reaching for the local wine that Aunt Gussie made from native grapes. (Remember when the law said no drinking?) Gramp and Mama and myself were very happy to tuck in and eat. Crossing America in 1919 (and today, for a matter of fact) is unkind to a stomach. If I write here of all the good food we found, don't think we ate well on the trip. I don't record all the hand-hammered sandwiches, the fried chicken of the deadly South, the iron rolls, the rusty hamburgers, the tired and limping greens, the river-bog soups, the rancid pork sides, the hot dogs stuffed with mystery, the cabbage steamed to death in heat, the plaster of Paris pies, the sand-tasting cakes, the rubber doughnuts, the battery-acid coffee, the blue milk, the fried eggs that were pure little-chick murder, and the scrambled and omeletted horrors—all the things that crossing America brings to our stomachs.
Better forget all this and come back to dinner at Aunt Gussie's that night. The hunter's boiled dinner was something: garbanzo or chick-peas, chunks of real hickory-smoked bacon (not the machine-aged stuff of today), chorizo sausages and garlic sausages, lean beef, sliced cabbage, tomato that had lived delightfully in sin with garlic, and the white meat of chicken.
It was really a great thing. The soup was chervil Gertrude, made with Cooked cucumber and chervil run through strainers and boiled with butter, scallions, cream, some sorrel leaves, and just a hint of red pimientos.
Then came American apple pie, baked with a few cloves (not too many), the native jack cheese, made at home and stored in the spring house, and coffee served in man-sized cups that hold a pint (you can still pick them up in old shops). Aunt Gussie said it was cowboy coffee, and that' just about the best coffee in America. I must admit I don't know how cowboys make coffee, but if anyone docs—the old style with a pot in the embers—I' be glad to hear from him.
The next morning we had just a few snacks of bacon and eggs and some croustade de porc Gertrude a wonderful pork pie. Sandor took me out to see the horses and tried to get me in the right position to get my brains kicked out. He was a real delightful child. We played Indians and I tied him to the stake in the barnyard. Is it my fault that he fell into the manure pit?
Lunch was a salad of herbs dressed in lime juice, some good bors-d'oeuvre, and I remember lots of currant jelly over something. All pretty native to the country and built up by Aunt Gussie's Paris days.
After lunch Sandor and I played “ hanging in a mining camp.” I had him two feet off the ground before he screamed. He showed me where the hay was stored, and I almost fell into the teeth of the hayrack. The score stood pretty even at five o'clock. At that hour we went to see the new well they were digging, and my shirt tail got “ caught” in the steam pump, but they stopped it in rime. Ten minutes later Sandor was swimming for his life in the sump hole. The deadly wars of children are never fully written about. Sandor had the real Hungarian touch—he did it all with a charming smile.
I think everything would have been fine if Aunt Gussie had not tried to kind of rub Gramp's nose in it. We were sitting after dinner, relaxing and digesting, when Aunt Gussie said, “And to think I owe it all to being a cordon bleu.”
Gramp did not react. He closed his eyes and put on his rigid smile.
Aunt Gussie said, “There I was, a green young widow, alone in Paris and tired of the art galleries and of visiting Marcel in his cork-lined room (Proust, the great French writer, in case any literary critic reads this), but that ugly little building was there on the dirty street with the magic words, reading…”
“Do not flush while train is in station,” Gramp said.
“Cordon Bleu,” Aunt Gussie went on, as if she hadn' heard Gramp, and Mama put an elbow into Gramp's ribs, as a hint not to get vulgar.
I think that really tore it. Gramp had been willing to forgive and eat, but Aunt Gussie never could let it lay. “There are, of course, gourmets, people who know good food; but only a cordon bleu is the true expert. The rest…” We heard the wind in the cottonwood trees, the horses at the drinking tank, a duck talking love, the late birds under the roof. “The rest,” said Aunt Gussie, “they are, how shall I say it? They are amateurs.”
“— — — —,” said Gramp, forgetting to run his words together. “I think I need some sleep if we're to pull out early tomorrow,”
There were fond good-byes in the morning. Mama and Aunt Gussie weeping, and Sandor and myself kissing goodbye—he got a good grip on my ear with his teeth, but I blacked his eye by butting his cheek with the top of my head.
After that, we waved, the car started, and we went off down the dusty road, Gramp was feeling good and smiling. Mama couldn't figure it out until Gramp said, “We've added something new to our art show.”
Our art show was our windshield. In the habit of those days, we pasted onto it hotel labels, slogans, witty sayings, and trade-marks. Stickers reading “Hi, Chickens,” “Here Comes the Inspector,” “Hotel Tjaden, Running Water in Season.” “Real Steak Dinners—All You Can Eat, Thirty Cents,” “Drink Enduro, Be a Man Again.”
And there in one corner it was—a card: Cordon Bleu Diplôme de Cuisine Bourgeoise, Gertrude Camille Shribheimer,
Mania screamed, and Gramp smiled. “It was her scalp or mine, Sari.”