Steal the Menu (4 page)

Over the years and through many editions, Mrs. Kander actually increased the Jewish content of the book, perhaps sensing that much of her audience was, like my mother, already significantly assimilated and in need of grounding in the Jewish culinary heritage. Mother’s own repertory far exceeded the limitations set by Mrs. Kander. She would boast that she could cook dinner for a month without ever repeating a dish.

Since we were entirely unobservant at home, dietary rules played no part in what we ate. My father was the only one of us with any trace of the shtetl, and he was an unhesitating adventurer at table. So my mother had a free hand to broaden her horizons as a cook, a project she conducted with help from
Gourmet
magazine.

I never ventured into her kitchen, except after dinner to dry
dishes on the maid’s night out. It was Mother who boiled the artichokes and deep-fried the eggplant slices, trimmed the sweetbreads and whisked together the hollandaise for the asparagus.

Wine did not appear in our house until I was in high school, a bottle of pinkish Almaden, which loitered half-drunk in the refrigerator for many days. You may take this as a vestige of Jewish tradition if you like. I was in college when my father told me he had just seen his first alcoholic Jewish patient.

Mother kept active in the kitchen well into her eighties, always picking up new recipes. (The spicy pecans of her invention coincided with the craze for Asian fusion in the 1980s world-at-large.)

When I left home for two years of boarding at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, a half-hour drive north of our last house inside the city of Detroit proper, I had been exposed, without realizing it, to a fairly broad spectrum of foods and food ideas, and I was inclined by my home training to opt for novel things to eat when they were on offer. Cranbrook, an architecturally magnificent complex built for a Detroit newspaper millionaire by the Finnish genius Eliel Saarinen, taught me many things—Latin poetry, English hymns, French-kissing—but it was an interruption of my alimentary education.

School food is school food is school food. I do, however, remember with affection a dessert we called anti-gravity pudding, because you could invert the dish and its contents would not fall onto the table. Cranbrook also taught me how to clear the entire service for a table of twelve on a single tray without dropping a glass or a saucer on the endless walk to the kitchen, past twenty-four tables of malicious teenage boys hoping you would lose control of your cargo. The trick was to load the tray on a sideboard so that most of the weight was piled on one side. Then you knelt beside it, slid the heavy side over your shoulder and stood up,
very carefully. With practice, the tray could then be held with one hand, on the underweighted outer side, while the free hand swung smugly at one’s waist.

It is also true that I learned to appreciate rum before graduation, but I don’t count that as the beginning of real connoisseurship in the beverage department. Especially since my coindulger and I consumed the stuff with Coke and then got sick in a YMCA room far from school.

I didn’t learn much about food at Harvard, either. My college diet consisted of more school food punctuated with cheap eats at restaurants in Cambridge and Boston. To be fair, you could, and I did, try whale steak at Chez Dreyfus. Chez Jean on Shepard Street introduced me to rillettes and other traditional French bistro food. There was gussied-up New England fare at Locke-Ober. But like a whole generation of future American food lovers, I discovered the gastronomic me on $5 a day (and often less) bumming around Europe after freshman year, in the summer of 1960.

Armed with $1,000 from savings and gifts, I joined an unofficial student invasion of the Old World, which had still not entirely rebounded from two world wars and an intervening economic collapse. This meant that dollar-holding ephebes like me could afford to eat every night in charming Left Bank bistros like Julien et Petit or La Chaumière. And if you were actually me, an inchoate food obsessive smothered by thirteen years of anti-gastronomic formal schooling, you devoured not only the
artichaut à la barigoule
(including the
fonds
, which you saw French diners at nearby tables extracting from the leaves and broth) but the concept of an orderly food heritage—a cuisine. After a summer of assiduously feeding off menus written in a language as traditional as the Homeric Greek I’d just learned to read at Harvard, I had signed on, without consciously knowing it, to a lifetime of passionate interest in filling
my mouth and brain with as much of this previously undreamed of culinary material as my late start and physical distance from the source would allow.

The strong dollar also bought cheap travel, first by air and then by rail, to every other corner of Europe my meager cognitive map of the continent suggested as a destination. The Eurail Pass was my carte blanche to Spain, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy and even Greece. In only thirteen weeks, I chugged through a kaleidoscope of European capitals and second cities, spending the days in museums and the evenings at restaurants that functioned as survey courses in European cooking.

On an early August evening, I boarded not the Orient Express but a by-blow named the Simplon-Orient Express, because it passed through the Simplon Tunnel from Switzerland to Italy and then continued on through Yugoslavia to Athens. After four dismal, sooty, hungry nights on the train, I was back in my element, imbibing the food of Greece—the plethora of mezes, the lamb in all forms and, outstandingly, the supernal melons in the garden at the Byzantine monastery of Hosios Loukas in Boeotia.

Later that summer came the raspberries in Venice and Florence and Rome,
lamponi
, served with cultured, vaguely sour, thick cream or with sugar, but never both, unless you asked nicely.

So by the end of that thirteen-week sojourn in Europe, I had seen the
Mona Lisa
and the caryatids at the Erechtheum, St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Rembrandts in Amsterdam. But what had been planned as a cultural “grand tour” on a student budget had turned into a voyage of gastronomic discovery, a self-taught survey course on the cuisines of Europe, with cultural landmarks crammed in between meals.

The most important research project came almost at the end of the “course.” I went to Maxim’s in Paris. It had three stars in Michelin, but an eighteen-year-old American with $20 could eat
there as if he were King Farouk. I ordered
caneton aux pêches
, duckling with peaches,
not oranges
. The menu said the dish came right out of Escoffier. Now, I thought, I was in touch with the highest and best a person could experience, a variation on a great French dish by the greatest of chefs; classic. And like those other classic monuments of European culture, from Aeschylus to the mansarded roofs of the Louvre, this culinary monument, and all the hundreds of classic dishes I’d met with, were part of a tradition that had gelled for the ages.

And you could eat it. Again and again.

With cuisine, as with classical literature, you had a fixed text, or at least an archetypal recipe to which all those dishes I was eating arguably pointed back, just as the surviving manuscripts of Catullus and Plato, altered by scribal recopying over the centuries, had a common ancestor. From this premise arose the concept of culinary authenticity, of getting things right in the kitchen, reproducing the foods of France or Italy just as innocents abroad like me and thousands of other young American travelers experienced them on their home grounds, guided by experts like Julia Child or Marcella Hazan, meticulously faithful to tradition. But as a firmer sense of the history of cuisines came over me, I slowly came to see that the food I’d eaten in contemporary Europe had evolved throughout the modern period. Certainly the food of Europe before Columbus, tomatoless and potatoless, was nothing like the European food universe we knew, with its
salades de tomates, potages Parmentier
, and on and on and on. You couldn’t even push back the dawn of authenticity as far as 1850, once you began looking at cookbooks and other documentation of food eaten in the nineteenth century and comparing it with the food of our day. This turned out to be true even for societies assumed to be glacially traditional, such as China and India.

But in the summer of 1960, it was bliss to believe that the cuisines
I had been informally studying on a shoestring in restaurants all over western Europe were as immutable as the conjugation of Latin verbs.

I walked back from Maxim’s to my Left Bank fleabag, stopping at a café for a game of pinball (
le flipper
). By then I knew the drill. First you asked the cashier for change
—de la monnaie
, if from a five-franc note; more often, you exchanged a franc coin for five twenty-centime pieces,
cinq pièces de vingt
, worth about four U.S. cents each, enough for five games (
parties
). Then you wormed your way next to the crowd of spectators around the Gottlieb pinball machine and plunked a coin down on the glass, asserting your right to play next.

One night I surpassed myself, flipping and nudging my way to a celestial score worth three free games. A tall North African had been watching me.

“Pas mauvais, monsieur,”
he said. It was late. I had an early train to England and my flight home. I waved off the compliment and walked out, leaving the man to play my
parties gratuites
.

Two years passed. I studied more Greek and Latin. I spent another summer in Europe, three months filled with more classic meals, of which the highlight was a lunch with my parents and sister at France’s most important and historically pivotal restaurant, La Pyramide, in Vienne, on the Rhône south of Lyon. The food world knew this elegant, three-star establishment as Chez Point, or simply Point. Its founder, Fernand Point, had died in 1955, but his wife, Mado, kept the place going without any decline that a naive twenty-year-old could perceive.

I was also unaware, as I suspect were most of the guests filling the sunny
terrasse
of Point in late July 1962, that Chef Point’s legacy of light sauces and uncluttered plates would live on in the kitchens of his former apprentices, Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers and virtually every other future star of the nouvelle cuisine. What struck me was the
foie gras en brioche
. I had eaten
pâté de foie gras
before, usually an inert pink spread scooped out of a can. But inside this flawless brioche, the Point kitchen had inserted fresh unadulterated foie gras. On the plate was a deceptively unimposing round slice of liver surrounded by a golden ring of bread. The taste caught me by surprise. This, I saw, was the real thing, the rich and refined goose liver that all the fuss was about.

Fernand Point, 1947: He purified the language of the French kitchen and passed on his leaner cuisine to the young chefs who then created nouvelle cuisine. (
illustration credit 1.1
)

I can’t recall the rest of the meal, only the very end, when my father discovered that his wallet was missing. He thought he must have left it in the car. I was sent out on a search mission. There it was on the driver’s seat, unmolested.

Pierre (standing) and Jean Troisgros. In the pokey cattle town of Roanne, these former Point acolytes served the most radical and witty menu of the postwar period. (
illustration credit 1.2
)

If I hadn’t been so anxious about the wallet, I might have looked up the street and seen the Gallo-Roman pyramid (really an obelisk) that gave the restaurant its name.

By legend, Point had once tried to resolve an argument between two customers right there where our car was parked. He’d persuaded two men who were fighting over the lunch bill to take their loud dispute outside and decide the matter by racing on foot to the pyramid. The winning runner would pay the bill.

Point was the starter. Off the men ran. And ran and ran and ran, until they disappeared into the afternoon.

Back in Cambridge, I found senior year an abrupt culinary letdown but a big step up in the interpersonal relations department. By Labor Day I was married, and with the marriage came a kitchen. Mostly, my wife did the cooking, without any expectation that I would help out except with the dishes. But I did get my hand in, crucially, in the summer of 1964, in the easy weeks between my Fulbright year of reading classical greats at Wadham College, Oxford, and the onset of classics graduate school back at Harvard.