The Hundred-Foot Journey (24 page)

That night I learned Paul’s father used to read him
The Fencing Master
and
The Count of Monte Cristo,
the reason why Paul had named his most famous dish after Alexandre Dumas. It was also partly why we were there. Château d’If, the island prison fortress that was the setting for
The Count of Monte Cristo,
was that magical night sitting outside our window in the Bay of Marseille, gray rock and fortress walls looking oddly elegant under a string of fairy lights.

The champagne loosened our tongues, and
in vino veritas
I finally glimpsed a few other interior facts behind the famously extroverted Paul Verdun. It was toward the end of our meal, as we ate a light almond tort, alongside sinus-clearing snorts of cognac, that Paul quietly asked me if I had ever eaten at Maison Dada in Aix-en-Provence, the minimalist restaurant of the up-and-coming Chef Mafitte. The insecurity in his voice, even with so much drink sloshing about his insides, was quite distinct.

Charles Mafitte was at the time emerging clearly as the artistic leader of the postmodern movement deconstructing food. He used nitrous oxide cans, an unusual kitchen utensil to say the least, to create his trademark “crystallized foam”—a hard froth he made from sea urchin eggs, kiwi, and fennel—or a bowl of delicious “pasta” made entirely out of Gruyère cheese and
reine des reinettes
apples. Mafitte’s technique involved the total reduction of ingredients, almost to a molecular level, before reassembling an odd mixture of fused foodstuffs into entirely new creations.

I confessed to Paul I had indeed had a memorable meal at Maison Dada, a few years ago, with my then-girlfriend, the thick-thighed Marie, who smelled of mushrooms. Where should I start? Chef Mafitte pulverized Fisherman’s Friend throat lozenges, and used this bizarre ingredient as the basis for his “lobster lollipops,” a stunning dish served with “truffle ice cream.” Even the classic frogs’ legs, really the archetypal dish of French country fare, had been unrecognizably transformed by Chef Mafitte’s artistry: he deboned and “caramelized” the legs in fig juice and dry vermouth, and then served them alongside a polenta “bomb” studded with foie gras and pomegranates. Not even a hint of the classic frogs’ legs ingredients of garlic, butter, or parsley. When I asked Marie what she thought of the dinner, she replied,
“Zinzin”
—Parisian street slang for “Crazy”—and I must confess my inarticulate shopgirl had rather accurately summed up our dining experience
,
even before that notorious womanizer manhandled her under the table.

All this I told Paul, and as I spoke, he became more and more morose, as if he somehow intuited from my animated chatter that this fast-rising chef from the south would one day become his nemesis, relegating Paul’s muscular embrace of classic French cuisine, which he loved with all his being and would defend to his death, as completely and utterly passé.

But he caught himself.

“Enough of this. We are here to celebrate your second star, Hassan. Now drink up. We are off to the discos.”

Paul downed his brandy before saying, “Get up, d’Artagnan. Get up. Time for us to sample the justly famous Marseille tarts.”

I don’t know how much Paul dropped on our celebration that night, but it turned out to be one of the most memorable and enjoyable nights of my life.

A year later, in Normandy to see a supplier, I dropped by Paul’s house in Courgains. His wife, Anna Verdun, greeted me stiffly at the door; she was well known to be rather dismissive of Paul’s common friends, preferring instead to expend her energy on his most famous clients and hangers-on. After her distinctly cool reception, however, Madame Verdun did have a young woman escort me to Paul’s lair in the back of the house.

As I followed the young maid through the halls of their nineteenth-century bourgeois house, the walls all dedicated to framed photos and press clips documenting Paul’s steady rise in the world of haute cuisine, I caught sight of a red-wax scrawl, the slant of the letters instantly striking me as faintly familiar.

The framed property in question was a pamphlet from the late 1970s and the firm handwriting scrawled underneath stated, “For Paul, my dear friend, the great butcher of Courgains, a man who will one day astound the world. Keep up the good fight.
Vive La Charcuterie Française!
”

It was signed, simply, “Gertrude Mallory.”

And so, finally, we come to the key period in question. I was thirty-five years old when Le Chien Méchant earned its second star, and for several years afterward I hit a creative impasse. I worked hard but made no headway, as the freshness and zeal with which I’d started my work at Le Chien Méchant was institutionalized through constant repetition.

We received a few mediocre reviews during this period, I admit. But the old fires, they still burned deep somewhere, and it was when I turned forty, that a dangerous restlessness set in, an urge to kick things up a notch.

I wished—even willed—for some dramatic change to happen.

They found Papa dead on the kitchen floor, in his bathrobe, surrounded by shards of broken plates and glass bowls. Auntie and his local doctor had stupidly forced Papa, at the age of seventy-two, to go on a strict diet; he was having none of it. Awakened by his loudly rumbling stomach, Papa descended to the kitchen in the middle of the night for a little sustenance. He threw open the refrigerator door and stuck his head inside; according to the medical examiner, he was gobbling the leftovers so fast that a chunk of chicken leg got lodged in his throat.

Frightened by the clump of cold chicken blocking his air passage, he reeled around the kitchen in a panic, until finally felled by a massive heart attack. Mercifully, Papa was dead even before he hit the floor.

We all thought Papa would live forever, and his funeral in Lumière remains to this day bleak and out of focus. The entire family was mad with grief, but I personally was so brokenhearted, my eyes so blurry from the constant flow of tears, that I never noticed how feeble Madame Mallory was looking, as she leaned heavily on Monsieur Leblanc’s arm and stood unsteadily at the back of the cemetery. All I could see was that the cemetery was filled with local residents, thousands of them from as far away as Clairvaux-les-Lacs, their hats off and heads bent in respectful mourning.

He won them over in the end, my Papa.

Two months later, on her way down from the attic, Madame Mallory tripped and tumbled down the stairs, breaking several ribs and both legs on the descent. She died a few weeks later, from pneumonia, confined to a bed in the same hospital that had treated my burns two decades earlier.

It is my great shame and sadness that I never made it back to the Jura to properly say good-bye to my
maîtresse,
but I couldn’t, for simply too much was happening in Paris. Life always brings unpredictable surprises, and after all my good fortune, it was apparently time again for an Indian-style hullabaloo.

The world we had known for so long, it abruptly ended in some profound way, when the television screens suddenly filled with the shocking news that stock markets around the world were collapsing.

Economists have their own explanation as to what happened during this dark period, but I like to think the universe at large was itself reacting to the news that Abbas Haji and Gertrude Mallory were no more a part of this life, but had finally been summoned to the abattoir.

Depression, on a global scale, it was the only appropriate response.

It was Saturday, twenty years after I came to Paris, when I was at the Place Maubert farmers’ market acquiring a handsome pair of imported mangoes wrapped in purple tissue and carefully packed like rare orchids in a wooden box, that my sister rang my cell phone and informed me that Paul Verdun had died in a car crash.

Mehtab called just as I was handing over my money to the cashier under the stall’s awning, so I was unable to respond to her typically brutal delivery, but my sister chattered on in a voice pitched with excitement.

“They found him at the bottom of a cliff, just outside Courgains. Dead. Just like that. Car, flat as nan. Nah, Hassan? Are you there?”

The
vendeuse
behind the fruit stall handed me my change.

“I cannot talk now,” I said, and disconnected the phone.

For quite some time I stood stupid with shock, wondering what should become of us. The world seemed to be coming to an end, and a meaningless and monotonous phrase—
an era is over
—incessantly went around in my head.

But Paris cannot in fact be stopped and the Place Maubert market continued its brisk trade without pause. It was early May and couples lugging string bags stuffed with leeks and joints of spring lamb banged into me. A Vespa beeped with irritation at my statuary immobility before carefully negotiating around my back.

Odd details still stick in my mind: the policemen on in-line skates eating cheese pastries, flakes of dough falling on their blue shirts; the golden charcuterie chickens turning in the rotisserie with windows yellowed from grease. The very air of the market smelled, I remember, of ripe Comté cheese, and a wicker hamper filled with wine bottles from Argentina’s Mendoza vineyards stood on the sidewalk opposite me. Not even the North Africans hawking cocaine-like vials of Turkish and Iranian saffron, normally a great personal weakness, could budge me from my spot in the center of the street, where I was rooted like thistle to a rock.

But there it was, inescapable: an important branch of classic French cuisine had just died alongside Chef Verdun, one of its last true defenders.

It was at that moment a cantankerous old woman with a fig face knocked into me, deliberately I am sure, and, without warning I was furious. I pushed back, hard, and she scuttled away yelling,
“Sale Arabe.”

The woman’s curse—“You dirty Arab”—brought me abruptly back to the Rue des Carmes, and for the first time I really looked around at the Parisian indifference surrounding me in the market, so typically offhand, as if nothing of true significance had actually occurred.

I was deeply offended. Paul was a national treasure and even I, a foreigner, knew the bells of Le Panthéon up the hill should have been ringing out the country’s great sorrow. And yet his departure from this world was greeted by nothing more than a Gallic shrug of the shoulders; but perhaps I should have seen it coming. Just weeks before,
Gault Millau
had demoted Paul from nineteen to fifteen points out of a possible twenty, a brutal reminder that today’s critics and customers were obsessed with the culinary cubism of Chef Charles Mafitte.

It was logical, with my heritage, that I would be drawn to Chef Mafitte’s “world cuisine,” which seemed to revel in combining the most bizarre ingredients from the most exotic corners of the earth, but if I leaned in any direction, it was toward Paul’s French classicism. Charles Mafitte’s “laboratory” creations were highly original, creative, and even at times breathtaking, but I could not help coming to the conclusion his culinary contrivances were, in the end, a triumph of style over substance. And yet it was undeniably his “chemical” cooking that had struck a chord with the critics and public alike these last several years, and, like it or not, Paul’s classically ornate fare was passé and seemed, in comparison, hopelessly outdated. But Paul was all honest blood and bones and meaty substance, and I, for one, was going to miss him deeply.

But it was all over. And thick-headed as I was, I realized, standing in that Saturday morning market, there was nothing left for me to do but to return home and call Paul’s widow to express my condolences. So, mangoes under arm and full of this admittedly abstract sense of loss, I headed back to Le Chien Méchant, up at the top of Rue Valette.

As I trudged up the hill, past the flat-faced apartment buildings on Rue des Carmes, marking the postwar rise of French socialism, I walked under a string of children’s underpants hung from a clothesline stretched across two balconies. Right then a woman in the ground-floor flat of the working-class building threw open a window in her kitchen, and I was instantly engulfed in a steamy cloud of
tripes à la mode de Caen,
billowing out from the cast-iron pot on her stove.

It was this earthy smell of tripe and onions that finally pulled up from my depths a stew of memories, and in that moment my friend Paul—not the three-star Chef Verdun—was restored to me.

For I remembered that time when, a few years ago, eager not to take the trip alone, Paul convinced me to join him for a produce tour of the Alsace, on the border with Germany. Paul drove his silver Mercedes at a reckless tempo through the countryside, and it was too much, the manic way he pushed us through our tasks. Until, that is, the afternoon arrived when—after countless trudgings up and down muddy lanes to remote farmhouses, where we sampled yet another Gewürztraminer or thyme-infused honey or smoked sausage—I had a fit.

“Enough,” I yelled. I would not continue to one more farm, I told Paul in an ice-cold voice, unless he first agreed to stop for a quiet and unhurried meal. Paul, shocked by my uncharacteristic show of steel, quickly agreed to my terms, and we pulled into a sleepy village I can no longer remember the name of.

But I do remember the bistro we ate in was smoke-filled and dark-paneled and along the zinc bar there were a couple of locals huddled morosely over
ballons
of wine. I recall that the place smelled of rotten wood and spilled pastis, and we took the table in the back, under a mottled mirror. A bored young man, a Gitane hanging from his lips, came over and took our order, as an aged woman in a soiled housedress shuffled in and out of the back kitchen.

Paul and I both ordered the day’s special, tripe, which was served in chipped bowls and plonked unceremoniously down in front of us. We ate in silence, dunking crusty cuts of country bread into the stew and washing it all down with a local Pinot Gris, slurped noisily from the glass tumblers standing like squat peasants at our elbows.

Paul pushed back his empty bowl and sighed with contentment. A bit of tripe sauce dotted his chin like a culinary beauty mark, and I noticed immediately the pressures that had been leaving deep creases across his face had miraculously disappeared for the moment.