Insatiable (20 page)

Lunch with Pierre was a postgraduate seminar in New York dining history and the state of the art, larded with the most outrageous gossip. He was so innocent (or so it seemed to me), he didn’t realize he should not be spilling the dirt. I felt I had to protect him by not passing his gossip along (unless it was about someone I disliked, and then how could I help myself?).

One August afternoon just before sunset, when I was summering and writing in a rented A-frame on the beach in Wainscott, I watched a lone fisherman pulling in bluefish. He offered to gut a big one for me if I wanted it, and I called Pierre for grilling advice. He offered to come by and cook it. Setting the two long fillets on a bed of glorious August tomatoes, crushed and cooked down with bits of softened garlic and onion, he brushed the fish with mayonnaise he had just whisked up.

The mayonnaise puffed up and browned under the broiler like crème brûlée—a mini-soufflé—and the fruity acid of the tomatoes cut the natural oiliness of the blue. It was like eating summer. As sensual and remarkable a revelation as the bluefish was, it was not followed by sex. But I always got the feeling that Betty Franey thought we were lovers, the way she hoisted her nose in the air and looked past me whenever we met.

When the world of food exploded and the
Times
single food page became first the “Living” section and then the demanding Wednesday “Dining,” there were many columns to fill. Pierre wrote his weekly thirty-minute dinner, but Craig tangled with his editors. He never seemed happy with their assignments. He would have been content to hold court in his huge new house on Clam Shell Lane in the Springs. It was designed for the big dinner he loved—the vast commercial kitchen, complete with a tandoori oven, and a dining area that took up two-thirds of the entire space. He slept on a Murphy bed that pulled down from the library wall. The great chefs and rising stars of New York and the world drove out to cook with him and Pierre and to see their recipes featured in the
Times
Sunday magazine column.

But the editors had other ideas. They were editing a weekly food “magazine,” after all. Craig was stubborn—baffled and annoyed by their proposals. So he quit. He would live on his royalties. But the newsletter he and Pierre put together failed to make money. He had heart problems and gout. He was knocked down by a taxi. He grew increasingly frail. His great love had promised to buy a house down the street and move to East Hampton, but he never did. Craig was discreet about the details but clearly disappointed. He seemed to be estranged from some of his closest friends—even Pierre. Pierre had his own expanding career in books and television and was happily caught up being the Franey patriarch and grandfather, as well as coach to the new food critic at the
Times,
Brian Miller.

In the late eighties, I left the Hamptons behind and began spending summers in Aspen, so I was shocked to see how frail Craig looked when I picked him up for dinner one night at his small Manhattan flat in the Osborne, on West Fifty-seventh Street. He smiled, suffered a kiss, and berated himself for the long, painful minutes it took to shuffle from the elevator to the front door. The cabbie, nastily chewing me out for making him wait, took one look, shut up, and helped Craig into the taxi.

Eventually, Craig was confined in his cramped pied-à-terre—mostly in bed—with a full-time caretaker, seemingly abandoned by many of the fine-feathered pals who had feasted for years at his table. A few restaurateurs who had witnessed his decline sent food. The premier restaurant critic of New York (perhaps the land, if not the world)—the man whose craving for chili peppers had led a generation of timid eaters to savor the Szechuan pepper, to revel in Tex-Mex and Thai, and to tour the world in his wake—seemed forgotten.

I’m not sure if it was before or after
The New Yorker
referred to him in error as the
late
Craig Claiborne that I proposed to Warner LeRoy and a few food-world cronies that we invite a hundred friends and admirers to “A Hug for Craig” at Warner’s Tavern on the Green. Craig was wheeled in. He grinned like a spoiled child on Christmas morning as he gazed around the room at the familiar faces: his secretary Velma Cannon on his right, Joel Grey, Mayor Ed Koch and Pauline Trigère at one table with his ex-
Times
editor, Joan Whitman. Valerie and Joe Heller. The owners of the
Times,
the Sulzbergers. Ruth and Joe Baum, Sirio Maccioni, Betty Comden, the Batterberrys.
*

Many of us stood in turn and told a Craig Claiborne story. Craig couldn’t stop smiling. It was like being at his own wake . . . only better, because he got to eat the caviar, the white truffles, and the crème brûlée.

Some interviewer had once asked Craig that inevitable question, what he would like to have for his last meal. I remembered he wanted grapefruit sorbet. So the sorbet came before the crème brûlée and “a dessert storm” from Le Cirque, and a brandy Alexander tart after.

The last time I saw Craig, cookbook writer Ruth Spear and I invited him for lunch at Trattoria Dell’Arte, across from Carnegie Hall. He was in his wheelchair. Craig ordered a vodka martini. I didn’t know what to do.

“Are you sure you’re supposed to be drinking, Craig?” I asked. In a flash, I imagined that lunching with me might be the death of Craig Claiborne.

“Of course,” he said. “And who are you?” he asked Ruth.

“You know me, Craig,” said Ruth. “I wrote the last
Ladies Village Improvement Society Cookbook.
You wrote the introduction.”

“I don’t remember,” he said. “But I like your hair. . . . where is the flat bread?” he asked the waiter. “That crisp bread you always have.”

The waiter apologized. The crisps were only served at dinner.

“You always give me those crisps,” said Craig.

“Could you look around and see if they aren’t a few crisps left from last night?” I begged the waiter. He disappeared.

“What are you drinking?” Craig asked.

“It’s a glass of red wine. A California cabernet.”

“I’ll have one, too,” he told the waiter.

“Oh Craig,” I said, remembering now that his doctor had once told him to drink only vodka. “Are you sure it’s good to mix vodka and wine?”

He ignored me. “You have beautiful hair,” he said to Ruth.

I noticed that Craig, normally right-handed, had been using his left hand to drink the martini, so I moved his red wine to the left.

“That’s not right,” he snapped at me, frowning in distaste. “Etiquette says the glass goes on the right.” He moved it. “Where is my martini? Who took my martini?”

“I think the waiter thought you were finished with it when you asked for the wine.”

“I was not.” He pursed his lips.

I called for the waiter. “Is it possible Mr. Claiborne’s martini is sitting on a side table somewhere . . . ? Could you bring it back?” I pleaded.

The waiter apologized profusely.

“It’s proper to ask first before you clear,” Craig scolded him.

Craig ate a chicken liver from his small appetizer portion. A fresh, full-blown martini appeared. A man righteous and vindicated, he sipped it. Now Ruth was looking anxious, too.

At that moment, a man came bustling in the front door with a grease-stained brown paper bag. “Flat-bread crisps just out of the oven,” he announced, asking a waiter to put them in a basket for Mr. Claiborne. “I went up to Fiorello
*
myself to get them.”

Craig was beyond flat bread. Ruth and I broke off several shards, then ate some, crumbled some, and hid a few to make them look sufficiently appreciated.

I realize I’ll never know whether the Trattoria crew was being sweetly indulgent to a fragile ghost in a wheelchair or trying to please me. I like to think it was an homage to the power Craig had been. Because, after all, fame is fleeting, the liver is frail, and one never knows if
The New Yorker
will seal your coffin before the grapefruit sorbet.

Years later, Pierre and I had a last lunch together just weeks before the cruise he didn’t come home from in 1996. He was full of good news—new grandchildren, a new million-dollar two-book contract, an upcoming swing through all the famous kitchens of France that would be the framework of his new television series. “And I have three pensions, too,” he said, “one from the
New York Times,
one from Social Security, and my pension from France.”

Betty was with him on the ship when he was stricken with a heart attack and carried ashore. He died the next day. Friends were shocked, deeply sad to lose him, so young and vital at just seventy-five. It was indeed tragic. He was so full of life. He might have gone on, beloved grandpapa of a growing progeny, racking up sales, hitting his numbers, charming viewers across the land with his easy cooking, gathering his lobsters in Gardiner’s Bay, spilling the juiciest gossip. His memorial dinner at Tavern on the Green was a bacchanal, a lovefest, an outpouring of affection.

Yet I kept remembering Craig. Becoming testier and angrier as he grew more frail, lingering in that wheelchair, not always recognizing the few old friends who still came, Craig barely lived at the end till he died in January 2000. His closest intimates (I among them) discouraged admirers from turning a memorial service into a $350-a-plate charity benefit, and no one seemed to have time to organize a more modest memorial, until Dorothy Hamilton opened the French Culinary Institute to a gathering of Craig’s friends.

Pierre died the happiest man I ever met.

Mushroom Strudel

T
his is a recipe from my young bride days, before cholesterol was a health concern. But I believe holidays are the perfect excuse for excess. If you serve sixteen with this recipe, you’ll feel half as guilty. I did four of these for Craig Claiborne’s riotous sixty-seventh birthday party, where so many great chefs cooked that few guests even noticed my effort.

2 lbs. mushrooms

1/4 cup minced shallots or green onions

6 tbsp. butter

2 tbsp. oil

Salt and pepper

2 8-oz. packages cream cheese

8 sheets frozen strudel or filo dough, 16 inches x 22 inches

3/4 cup melted butter

Bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 400° F.

Mince mushrooms and squeeze them dry in the corner of a towel.

Sauté with minced shallots or green onions in butter and oil over moderately high heat, stirring frequently. Cook until pieces separate and the liquid has evaporated. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Blend in cream cheese.

Spread a sheet of strudel or filo dough on a damp towel, narrow end toward you. Brush with melted butter and sprinkle on bread crumbs. Repeat with second and third sheets, stacking them on top of the first sheet, then butter, but do not crumb fourth sheet. Put half the mushroom mixture on narrower edge of the dough, leaving a 2- to 3-inch border at the sides. Fold in the sides, then, using the edge of the towel, roll. Prepare the second strudel.

Put strudels on buttered baking sheet and brush with melted butter. Bake in oven until brown (about 20 minutes). The strudel cuts easily with shears. Strudel can be made and baked ahead, stored in the refrigerator or in the freezer overnight, and then reheated.

Serves 8.

26

I L
OST IT AT THE
B
ATHS

D
ON’S HASTE TO GET THE FINALE IN WRITING WAS RUDE. BUT THERE WAS
no speedy divorce in New York State then. I signed the separation agreement and told him he could take it from there. “Just be sure the judge gives me back my maiden name,” I said.

Don had picked a day in September, just weeks away, to fly to the Dominican Republic—mecca of no-fault divorce at the time, no questions asked, no waiting. I was back from summer in the Wynns’ gray house, triumphantly toting the hundred pages I owed my publisher. Andrew, the accountant, confessed that he was torn between me and the woman he thought he was hopelessly in love with before we met. Where had I heard that before? It was painful at home, wandering the scene of the crime.

A sybaritic and restorative retreat dangled by Yanou seemed divinely timed. I would escape the comforting of well-meaning friends while Don was securing our quickie divorce. The previous winter, just before I locked myself into the MacDowell Colony, my Parisian publicity genie had persuaded me to write about a client’s torturous slimming cure and had joined me in near starvation in the mountain village of Crans-sur-Sierre in Switzerland. Now she called to trumpet that days of spa torture were over. Michel Guérard, definitely her client now, was defatting soufflés and lightening sauce with an amazing new alchemy all his own, having dedicated himself to the creation of a
grande cuisine diététique
.

Michel, the brilliant sorcerer I knew from Le Pot au Feu, had fallen in love with tall, slim, otherworldly Christine Barthélémy, daughter of a thermal-spa dynasty. He’d already lost five kilos from sheer joy, Yanou reported, and the family’s medicinal waters had trimmed even more flab. He had shuttered Le Pot au Feu in the suburbs of Paris forever. The two had been married in vintage dress, then retreated to the countryside to create a stylish inn they were calling Les Prés et Les Sources d’Eugénie, near the Barthélémy family’s spa. I should bring my fragile person to their little nowhere town in the southwest of France at once, she urged.

Given the headlined famine and drought around the globe in 1974, I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable about the excesses that led me periodically to detox for a week or two in some expensive spa. Alas, no matter how genuine one’s social conscience, or how many charities you supported, among grand bouffeists, the search for slimming miracles never ceased, and I felt the obligation to report them. Yanou dangled the exclusive rights to be the first to test the chef’s dramatic breakthrough.

Christine Guérard, with her pale, unpainted oval face and straight black schoolgirl hair, was a wraith from another era in turn-of-the-century lace and ruffles. It was she who had created the stage set, the glorious Victorian inn with its Napoléon III touches, ridiculously charming bric-a-brac, fresh flowers everywhere, and thick towels in the wantonly luxurious bathrooms. The dining room was all painted wicker and fringed Victorian silk shades, candelabra—no two alike—velvet walls, and, in an airy alcove looking out to the meadows, tiger-striped velour and a banquette of kelly green hugging a table draped in Indian paisley.

Everything in the room—except for the few subdued cure takers gloomily anticipating painful deprivation—was witty or beautiful, or both. Christine insisted on keeping me company at that first lunch. We sipped the dieters’ aperitif, a tea brewed from the beards of corn husks, pine needles, cherry stems, and heather, served in a tall glass garnished with long curls of orange and lemon peel, a slice of fig, half a strawberry, a half-moon of peach. “It will make you want to sleep,” she said. “And pee pee.”

Lunch was breathtaking to look at and delicious, too: a perfect poached egg crowned with tomato coulis and snippets of chive, and beside it, slivered chicken riding in an artichoke heart on a cool pale green sea of cucumber puree. A concerto of texture, color, and taste. Okay, I thought. Nice lunch. But there was still more. A second plate, a statement in beige: thinnest slices of duck in a rich pepper-studded sauce, with sautéed apples.

“Can it be cream?” I asked. No, Michel insisted, looking wounded that I would suggest such perfidy. What looked suspiciously like a cream sauce was the result of whisking zero-calorie white cheese with duck stock and water in a blender.

“But surely the apples are sautéed in butter?”

“Absolument non,”
Michel cried. “It is my pan of Teflon that does that.” Dessert was yet another still life: a trembling little mold of delicate coffee custard capped with a crunch of espresso ice, beribboned with candied orange peel and a punctuation of ripe currants. I’d eaten a total of precisely 445 calories. Or so the posted menu claimed.

I thought of the desolation of dinner at last year’s Swiss spa, one gassy braised green pepper. Of course there was a downside at Eugénie-les-Bains. I had agreed to submit to the prescribed waterlogging spa rituals every morning, the soakings, the measured sippings of vile sulfuric liquid, the strafings of needle-sharp water spray designed to shock and melt the cellulite.

Spa culture had not yet became the rage nor the routine it is today in America, though we had our Maine Chance and the Golden Door. Sitting in radioactive pools or sipping sulfurous waters was totally bizarre to most Americans. But on the far side of the Atlantic, if Lourdes failed you, the thermal bath was an alternate faith.

Now with Michel Guérard in residence, Les Prés et Les Sources would also become a detour on the serious dining circuit, as well as a mecca for plumpies. Chef pals, Parisian chums, a scattering of gastronomic groupies, and the local bourgeoisie were already showing up for Sunday lunch, primed for that old full-blown gourmand Pot au Feu magic, and the kitchen delivered. Thickening matrons in conspiracies of two and four, a scattering of young beauties with nondieting husbands in tow, one delicious nymphet with a brittle-thin mother overseeing the child’s “cure”—we were the pampered
curistes
exploring the eight-dollar decalorized menu.

In the parlor, friends of the Guérards were toasting one another with champagne. I could hear the crunch of their foie gras-laden toasts across the room. I sipped my virginal tisane. No need to be consumed with envy, I told myself, not when one is eating what tastes like a rich cream of fresh garden vegetables served in tall covered porcelain cups, herb-marinated rabbit with a zesty tomato puree, and mint-splashed melon—only 392 calories.

A few years later, I realized we had been the guinea pigs of early experiments that Michel would refine into the
cuisine minceur
that brought him international fame and spawned an expensive cookbook in countless languages. Did anyone ever cook from this book? Not me. But looking at the photographs was less fattening than eating.

He hadn’t dreamed up the name yet, but every day at Eugénie brought new tastes on the Villeroy & Boch plates: chicken poached in parchment, a leg of milk-fed lamb baked in meadow grass, remarkable soups and vegetable purees peppered with deliberation, like his foam of spinach blended with pear (it would be copied everywhere), an eggplant starter resembling a Cubist still life by Picasso, a
tourte
of cabbage leaves. I remember the first time I saw Michel’s flat apple pizzette, the thinnest-possible pastry, which became the maquette for skinny tarts still seen today in far richer versions everywhere. I thought I detected butter, but very little, and apples so thin and so sparsely sugared that he easily had wrung hundreds of calories from the classic.

Days at Eugénie evolved into a lazy ritual. The French did not believe in exercise for slimming. Indolence was the rule. One hundred grams of springwater upon rising, breakfast in bed, then coffee and a soft-boiled egg with tiny asparagus tips to dip into it, or creamy white cheese or yogurt and fruit were the dieter’s options, but the innocent chambermaids couldn’t stand to see suffering, and they insisted on serving doubles of everything to everyone. Then to the foul-smelling baths.

The scale indicated the drill was working. I was losing a pound a day. After lunch, reading, walking through Eugénie (a small village, barely a seven-minute exercise), and sunning at the pool were de rigueur but rigorless. In the kitchen, Michel demonstrated how to whisk a
diététique
sabayon that would make a meager ration of fish taste wantonly rich later that evening.

“I hate the word
régime,
” he said.
Régime
. French for diet. “It sounds so military.” He cocked his head quizzically, searching for a poetic alternate. Alas for me, the journalist determined to stick to the low-cal plan—the better to embark on my new single life—his fatal flaw was his subversively tender heart. “Give her one sip of this beautiful wine,” he would tell the sommelier. “Give her just a tiny portion of that goat cheese.”

One evening, I was invited with a handful of Guérard pals to dine with the son of the Darroze restaurant family in his living quarters behind the pharmacy nearby. A caravan of cars was commandeered to transport a gang of us. Michel carried a diet dinner in a giant basket for the
curistes
. The Darroze kin and friends oohed and aahed over the exquisite detail of our near-calorie-free watercress timbale filled with snails and ringed with Teflon-sautéed frogs’ legs, and the braised calf’s liver sauced in a clear juice pebbled with minced carrot, onion, celery, and tarragon.

Michel pretended to hide his eyes as our hosts insisted the
curistes
must also taste the foie gras, a few wild cèpes, a morsel of dove, and, of course, that fatty little bird, the
ortolan.
Take two; they’re small, we were told. And yes, we must sip the ’47 Talbot and the ’29 Cos d’Estournel, because who knew how many times again in this life such wines would come our way. And who could deny us a dab of Roquefort and at least one swallow of ancient Armagnac, a smooth, throat-warming relic of 1900. I’d almost forgotten what a thrill it was to eat much too much and sip more than one sip of a magnificent wine.

The scale halted its gentle descent. “This is not going to make a very good article, Michel,” I complained, depressed to see days of prudence destroyed by one night of madness.

Michel got the point at once. He sentenced me to sip bouillon for the next two days and eat salad tossed with mineral oil—that old laxative trick. There was so little time left to hit my goal of five kilos. I had to settle for nine pounds as I departed with a kiss on each cheek from Michel and Christine, bound for a weekend gathering of chefs and food-loving friends to celebrate chef Roger Vergé’s third Michelin star at the Moulin de Mougins. A voyage from cozened deprivation to wholesale abundance. Well, after all, it was my job.

What could Vergé possibly feed the cuisinary all-stars gathered at Mougins? Cleverly, he gave us a
grand aioli
that first afternoon. It required no cooking at all, just garlicky mayonnaise and everything meant to dip in it. But that was just the aperitif. The weekend binge went on and on.

By the time I got to a scale at the Restaurant Bocuse, my next stop the following Monday, I had regained five pounds, although it did seem to me that my cheekbones were nicely chiseled. That would definitely help in my new life as a single woman. Paul Bocuse, who’d driven us both from Mougins, had been dieting, too, and didn’t like the scale’s telltale news. He punished us both by plying me with tempting morsels till I thought I would burst, and then it was time to catch the train to Roanne. I’d promised the Troisgros family I would stop by on my way back to Paris.