White Truffles in Winter (20 page)

And so, if you can take the Philadelphia cream cheese and call it something else, let us say, for example, “
fromage frais
,” “
spécialité fromagère
,” “
fromage à la crème
” and say that it comes from a French patriot on a tiny family farm off the coast of Iceland who sings “La Marseillaise” every morning to his cows as he milks them—“Ye sons of France, awake to glory!”—how can they resist?

Another very good example is “Jésus de Lyon” (or “de Morteau” in Franche-Comté), a sausage cured in a beef bung cap that gives it a pear shape that is alleged to resemble baby Jesus. Out of respect for the name of Christ, Jésus de Morteau is spelled Jésu by Mortuaciens and generally smoked. Jesus is quite a popular fellow with my people and has many small sausages named after him in the Basque and Savoy regions. However, since Christ was born a Jew in a pig-less culinary culture, I doubt very much if he would approve this bounty of saucissons
and yet, it matters not. They fly off the shelves, especially at Easter.

Guilt does wonders for the appetite.

W
HEN THEY WERE FIRST MARRIED, DELPHINE HAD
taken to telling strangers that her sons were actually princes. It was understandable. She, Escoffier, and their boys, Paul and Daniel, traveled to Switzerland in the summer and back to Monte Carlo for winter season. She met the same mothers and their children every year, but they were families of rank and privilege. When they asked, she had to tell them something. “My husband's the cook,” would not do.

In the summer, at the Hôtel National in Lucerne, a castle set against the lush and ancient lake, the young boys and their mother would spend the day swimming or hiking in the wildflower mountains, or shopping in the marketplace alongside movie stars and kings. They were tan and fat.

At night, when the boys were asleep, Escoffier would bring her “gifts,” which they would eat together on the tiny balcony overlooking the moonlit lake. Each plate was an intricate jewel—
Filets de soles cardinal
, sole and whiting mousse stuffed into crayfish shells and sauced with cream, cognac and crayfish tails, or
Noisettes d'Agneau
, tournedos of lamb on artichoke bottoms napped with a Madeira-scented béchamel. They would eat and plan books they never had time to write together and vacations they never seemed to be able to take.

In the winter, back in Monte Carlo, in the early morning, Escoffier would kiss his sleeping family, make a pot of strong coffee, and walk from La Villa Fernand to his offices at the Grand Hôtel
to decide what Queen Victoria would have for dinner, and later, after the boys were in bed and the hotel dining room was closed, he would meet Delphine for drinks in the casino, and sometimes in a private room with Prince Edward himself.

It was not the life of a cook.

And so London was unexpected.

“Why can't you just go for the summer season?”

“Ritz says we shall be ambassadors for France.”

“We shall be miserable.”

“Ritz is brilliant.”

“Ritz is deranged; an obsessive perfectionist. He will be miserable, too. London is filled with the English.”

“But you love the Queen. And the Prince.”

“Those two are the least English of the lot.”

“Echenard has agreed to join us.”

“He's leaving Monte Carlo, and the Grand, with you?”

“He will be maître d'hôtel for us. He knows London.”

“Then he cannot be happy.”

“If you love me, you will come.”

“If you love me, you will not go.”

But Escoffier had no choice. There had never been a hotel like The Savoy before. Owned by producer Richard D'Oyly Carte, and built though the success of the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership, particularly
The Mikado
, it was the most modern building in the world.

The previous top hotel in London was entirely lit by gaslight and offered only four communal bathrooms for five hundred guestrooms and none for their restaurant at all. The Savoy, however, offered electric lights, telephones and private bathrooms lavishly appointed in marble with hot and cold running water.

The food, however, was horrible, and so no one cared. The Savoy was on the brink of bankruptcy when Ritz was given full control. His first act was to fire most of the staff—a detail he forgot to share with Escoffier.

The chef arrived in London on a Sunday. “Drive to the Strand entrance, but do not venture to travel into the courtyard, the hill alongside is very steep,” he told the cabman the directions that Ritz had given him, but unfortunately the man did not speak French and was traveling too fast. His horse slid the last ten yards. Escoffier hit his head. His bags tumbled into the courtyard. The driver demanded a sizeable tip.

It was not an auspicious start.

The day was dark and very damp. The cold made Escoffier's bones ache. The bump on his head was throbbing. He had brought too many bags with him. There were no doormen waiting as one would expect. The hotel seemed deserted. Ritz knew when he was to arrive, had promised to meet him, but was nowhere to be found. However, Monsieur Echenard was sitting in the lobby looking pale.

“A rather unpleasant situation has unfolded,” he said.

When Escoffier entered his new kitchen, the most modern kitchen in the world—it had electricity, its own ice room, windows to let in fresh air and light and hot and cold running water—it was in ruins. The previous manager and his staff were not pleased with their firing. Every window was shattered; crows picked their way through quail's eggs and duck liver; black starlings hissed and hummed, drunk on rotted cherries and overripe plums. Dogs ran wild as wolves chewing their way through the chicken cages, the long-dead birds uncaring.

Every glass, plate and bowl had been broken. The stoves had been dismantled and piled in a heap. The doors of the ovens were missing. Milk and cream covered the floors. Lobsters and langoustines were left to die in heaps of decaying fish. Sides of beef and racks of veal were charred, left in the ashes of coke fires, but no wood or coal was anywhere to be found. Not even a grain of salt remained.

“It's Sunday,” Echenard said. “All the stores in England are closed. Impossible to buy a thing.”

They were scheduled to open for breakfast the next morning.

“And Ritz?”

“He says he has all the confidence in the world in you. He and his wife are upstairs settling in.”

Escoffier and Echenard and the handful of staff who had remained worked through the night. Louis Peyre, an old friend who ran kitchens for the Charing Cross Hotel, was roused from his sickbed and cheerfully supplied enough basic food and cookware so The Savoy could reopen the next day.

“The English are a very good people,” Escoffier later wrote Delphine. “Welcoming.”

She did not respond.

The next morning, a traditional English breakfast, miraculously, was served. It was the full “fry-up” with poached eggs, crisp browned potatoes, blood pudding, sausage, pink bacon, baked beans, mushrooms and broiled tomatoes. There was fried bread served with lemon curd and blackberry preserves. The juice was freshly squeezed from Spanish blood oranges.

It was lovely, though not exactly the breakfast that Escoffier had in mind. There were no croissants or brioches. No cheese. The only fruit was juice.
Café au lait
was not offered, but tea and milk were served. Still, it was a solid success although he knew that if The Savoy was to win over the elite of English society, he couldn't give them what they could eat in Charing Cross.

That first morning, Escoffier walked through the dining room stopping at the tables that Echenard said he needed to, kissing hands and nodding. He spoke no English, although people often spoke to him, and so he replied in French and even though they did not understand a word he said they found him to be witty.

Prix-fixe,
he thought.

At the Grand Hôtel, he and Echenard had realized that their English clients didn't speak French well enough to order without assistance. Some were even intimidated. But walking through the dining room that first morning, Escoffier knew that if he offered a fixed price menu that contained most of the items
à la carte
, he could feel free to create dining experiences that the English would embrace. And didn't need to pronounce.

“Each menu will be a new adventure,” he told Echenard—and it was.

With wall panels painted by Whistler, rose silk–shaded chandeliers and diners starched and scented, elegant in their formal clothes, Escoffier found himself profoundly inspired. He spent hours crafting dish after dish, polishing them like jewels:
Filets de sole Coquelin, Homard aux feux eternels, Volaille à la Derby, Chaud-Froid Jeannette
, named after the North Pole expedition ship
Jeannette
, and for the Prince of Wales, Dear Bertie,
Cuisses de Nymphe Aurore
, less poetically known as frogs' legs (although
cuisses
is, in fact, the word for thighs. Escoffier was often quick to point out that
Nymphe Aurore
did not mean frog, either).

When a white-tied waiter bearing a silver-domed plate presented
Tournedos Rossini
, a perfect filet mignon topped with a slice of
pâté de foie gras
draped with Périgueux sauce made from Maderia and truffles, to Rossini, its namesake, the famed Italian composer, it made every newspaper in the world. Elegant and corpulent, guided by the love of food, not music, Rossini was quoted as saying, “I know of no more admirable occupation than eating. Appetite is for the stomach what love is for the heart,” and then made his way through twenty plates of the dish. Suddenly there were barely enough cattle in Scotland to fill the public's need.

“Fantasy certainly sells,” Escoffier said.

Nothing proved to be impossible at The Savoy. A patron's desire for dinner in a Japanese garden was made possible by completely transplanting the courtyard. For a green and white banquet, fruit trees, still bearing fruit, were trimmed to become tables with glass tops and each chair was a softly sculpted bush. And when a millionaire decided that he wanted to dine in Venice, the gardens were flooded, and diners were set along an improvised canal so that the maestro Caruso could serenade from a gondola.

The kitchen was massive with a brigade of fifty men. Although Escoffier refused to learn English, most spoke no French, and so together they built a language on gesture, intuition and culinary skill with bits of French, English, Polish, Italian and Chinese thrown into the mix.

The Savoy quickly became a rousing success and yet every night Escoffier found himself alone.

“Please,” he wrote Delphine. At first he tried to visit Monte Carlo at least once a month, but it was difficult to get away.

“She will come around,” Ritz told him. But she did not. They began to argue every visit.

“The very thought of London makes me ill,” she said. “Every morning I rise and cannot eat, or drink.”

“How can a city make a person ill?”

“There is no sea. The people are pasty.”

“The people are kind. The city is exciting.”

“There are no taxes in Monte Carlo. You cannot lose your residency.”

“Two houses are too expensive to maintain.”

After a time, Escoffier began to wonder if his wife didn't join him because of Sarah. The actress spent a great deal of time in London. It would be awkward for the two to meet. Delphine knew that he and Sarah had been lovers and did not seem pleased that they had remained close through the years. In fact, when he defended Sarah against accusations of immorality, it truly seemed to annoy his wife.

“She has had a child without a father.”

“She is a devoted mother and cares for her own mother and sister, too.”

“She wears men's clothes.”

“ ‘I am so original,' she once said, ‘that I prefer to be at peace with my conscience and with God.' ”

“If you must tell people you are original, how original can you be?”

Even before he went to The Savoy, Sarah had been a problem between them. When the international press accused Bernhardt of orgies while on tour in America, one of which was at an all-male supper party hosted at Delmonico's by the editor of the
New York Herald
, Delphine called it a “publicity stunt” to sell tickets. Escoffier found this very confusing.

“All the society women returned their theater tickets. She wouldn't jeopardize her art with a ‘stunt,' as you say.”

“Outrage is her art.”

“Is that not also the poet's art form?”

Delphine would not speak to him for a week.

However, when Sarah married Aristide Damala, Delphine seemed to warm to her. Pictures of the couple were everywhere. “They look happy,” she said. “Don't they?”

Escoffier had to agree. Damala was as beautiful as an angel, twelve years younger than Sarah. A diplomat turned actor. “This ancient Greek god is the man of my dreams,” the actress was quoted as saying.

“Perhaps being Madame Damala suits her.”

Unfortunately, Damala was also a morphine addict. Soon the press began to pick away at them; one review featured a cartoon of Bernhardt holding Damala like a puppet, manipulating his limbs.

“I made him a monster,” she later told Escoffier. “He wanted me to take his name, to become Madame Damala. I could not and he could not bear it.”

Three weeks after their wedding, Damala went missing for days and later surfaced with a girl in Brussels. She was the first of the many girls, prostitutes and mistresses that Sarah would be forced to share her husband with—and the press covered every indiscretion. When he had a child with another actress, an extra whose primary job was to shoot him with heroin during intermissions, Sarah threatened to have the infant drowned in the Seine.

With each headline, Delphine grew more and more quiet on the subject of Sarah. It was difficult to criticize the actress as a wife. Time and time again, even after they were legally separated, Sarah took her husband back. She'd had plays commissioned for him, bought him a theater and even canceled her own performances to attempt to nurse him back to health.