Next up on the essays shelf:
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink
Secret Ingredients is a collection of food writing from The New Yorker. I love these collections. So far, we have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories, The Fun of It, and The New Gilded Age. There are a couple more collections out there that I do not own, sports writing, humor writing, fiction.
I’m not a foodie, but I love this collection because 1. it gives snapshots of different eras, 2. the writing is great, of course.
A.J. Liebling was a journalist who wrote for The New Yorker for over 30 years. His pieces are featured in most of these collections. In 1937, he did a small profile/Talk of the Town piece on Orson Welles’ famous direction of Julius Caesar (which, of course, was the subject of the Richard Linklater film). But he also wrote pieces about boxing (boxing references dominate through his essays), food, and France. As a young(ish) man, he went to Europe and studied medieval literature at the Sorbonne. His love affair with France had begun. And it was the 1920s, so one can only imagine the energy of that era in France (although, thankfully, everyone who was there was a writer, so they all wrote books about it). He went back to France throughout his whole life, and wrote about France, thought about France. To fall in love with France in the 1920s was to get your heart broken in the 1930s. Liebling was a war correspondent, and stayed in Europe, filing dispatches from Paris until 1940 when things just got too hot and he came home. Once the Allies got involved, he came back to Europe, England this time. He traveled with the Allies when they liberated Paris. Again, one can only imagine. His writing from this time is powerful and potent. Paris was a city he loved. To see it under occupation was a devastation.
Of course, this makes me think of the mean-est joke I know. I realize it is mean. But that’s why it’s funny. One drunken night in Dublin, sitting with a group of crazy blue-eyed black-haired boys I had just met, the mean and offensive jokes started flying – and of course, I had been made fun of for the entire night for being American. I took it in stride. “Ohh, we’re just teasin’ ya, Sheila. So does everyone, like, play Hank Williams all day long over there, or …” Well, yes, frankly, they do. No one was spared. Every nationality, ethnic origin, race, creed, was decimated in joke after joke. You had to have a thick skin. In general, this is the case in Ireland. The idea that Irish people are gentle lilting sentimental little leprechauns is a myth. You gotta take the teasing. It is essential to get along.
This is really the only mean joke I know so I busted it out. It was my only joke of the night.
“Okay, I’ve got one, I’ve got one …” I blurted out. (Sheila, it’s time you were in bed.)
All the Dublin boys stopped, anticipating, excited. “Ohh, the American has a joke now …” “Ssh, lads, be quiet, Sheila has one.” They all looked at me, drunk and rapt.
I said, “Why are there so many trees in Paris?”
They all thought, they pondered, they agreed they did not know why. “Why, Sheila?”
I said, “So the Germans can march in the shade.”
All hell broke loose. Screams and whoops and hollers, I was toasted, I was hailed, I was celebrated, shots of whiskey were shoved my American way. Phew. Because you never know when someone is going to suddenly pull themselves short and say, “Okay, that stepped over the line.” But on this night, with this group of drunken Irishmen, we were already way over whatever lines might exist.
I’m not saying that mine was the meanest joke of the night. But it got the biggest reaction, a fact of which I am still ridiculously proud. That was a tough crowd.
A.J. Liebling’s war-time pieces are collected in various compilations.
This piece, called “The Afterglow”, was published in 1959, and it spans the decades of French food from the 1920s until then, but this excerpt describes Paris in 1939, a dreadful year for the entire world.
Cafe in Paris, 1939
Liebling wrote a lot about France and French food. He knew it well, he loved it, he understood the history of it, the seriousness of it, the pleasure principle. But in 1939, things had changed. The whole piece is about the decline in French food, and there is a sociological aspect to his observations. The sudden rise in health concerns and nutrition … that certainly impacted French fare, as did the sudden fetishism of being thin, which came “in” with the flapper. Suddenly things like cream and butter, staples of French cooking, were looked on with suspicion. It’s a massive piece, with many different sections.
This excerpt is a bit haunting. It gives quite a picture of what it was like to be in Paris in that annus horribilis.
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink
In 1939, on my first evening in wartime Paris, I headed straight for Maillabuau’s, but it had disappeared; I walked the length of the Rue Sainte-Anne twice to make sure. Yielding to hunger, I entered another restaurant, of the same unpromising aspect – a storefront muffled in curtains against air raids but extruding a finger of light to show that it was open for business. (Everybody in France, at that stage, waged a war of small compromises.) A shabby exterior is no guarantee of good food – perhaps more often it is the contrary – but I was too hungry by then to leave the neighborhood. Nor were the streets hospitable in the dimout. There were no cruising taxis.
Thus it was that I stumbled into the family circle of M. Louis Bouillon, a native of Bourg-en-Bresse, which is the eating-poultry capital of France and in the home province of the great Brillat-Savarin, who was born in Belley. M. Bouillon was a small man with bright, liquid eyes, a long nose, like a woodcock’s, and a limp, drooping mustache that looked as if it had been steamed over cook pots until it was permanently the consistency of spinach. When I entered, he was sitting with his elbows on a table and his head in his hands, contemplating a tumbler of mare de Bourgogne as if trying to read the fate of France in an ink pool. Around the table, with newspapers and coffee, were seated Mme. Bouillon; Marie-Louise, the waitress; the Bouillons’ daughter, Dominique, a handsome girl of eighteen; and their son, not yet called up for service. (I did not know their individual identities yet, but I soon learned them.) Mme. Bouillon brightened, and Marie-Louise rose and came to meet me. “Sit where you wish, Monsieur,” she said. “You have your choice.”
There had been a scare at the beginning of the war, and a great many people had left Paris, expecting it to be bombarded. They had not yet quite decided to come back – it was in the first week of October 1939 – and business was, in consequence, dead. I have seldom been so welcome anywhere, or got so quickly acquainted. And I had fallen luckily. M. Bouillon was a great cook. His son was in apprenticeship at the Cafe de Paris, one of the few remaining big classic restaurants. His daughter, that paragon, could make a souffle Grand Marnier that stood up on a flat plate. M. Bouillon told me that he had only recently taken over the restaurant. The rickety cane chairs and oak sideboard looked bad enough to have come from Maillabuau’s dispersal sale. But there was food. “The markets are full,” M. Bouillon said. “Game, shellfish – everything you can think of. It’s customers that lack.” I forget what I had at that first meal – a steak marchand de vin, or a civet of hare, perhaps, before the souffle, which I ordered to see Dominique do her trick. Then I settled down to drinking with M. Bouillon. He was sombre at first. What kind of a war was this, he wanted to know. When would we go out and give them a crack on the snout? In his war, the horizon-blue war, the Boche had come as far as the Marne and been stopped within six weeks of the beginning. That put people in the proper cadence. This war set one’s nerves on edge. It was the British, he felt sure, who were responsible for the delay; they were perhaps negotiating with Fritz. A war that could not make up its mind had a funereal effect on commerce. The Americans were different from the English, but they weren’t in the war. M. Bouillon and I grew sentimental, optimistic, bellacose, and, finally, maudlin. I had a hard time finding my way home, although my hotel, the Louvois, was only 150 yards away – a straight line with one turn to the right.
After that, M. Bouillon’s restaurant became my advanced field headquarters while I vainly tried to get an ordre de mission to go to the front, where nothing was happening anyway. Conditions rapidly simulated normal. The Parisians came back. An ill-founded feeling of satisfaction succeeded the alarm and puzzlement of the first days; the Allies might not be hurting the Nazis, but at least the Nazis weren’t hurting the Allies. There was a growing public hunch that the “real” war would never begin. Often, M. Bouillon took me with him on his buying trips to Les Halles, so I could see that the Germans weren’t starving Paris. On the trips, we would carry a number of baskets and, as we filled one after another with oysters, artichokes, or pheasants, we would leave them at a series of bars, in each of which we had one or two Calvas. The new Calvados sold at the market bars was like a stab with a penknife, and at some bars we would drink Pouilly-Fume by the glass for a change of pace. The markets were overflowing; I recall that there was fruit from Mussolini’s Italy and fine poultry from Prince Paul’s Yugoslavia. M. Bouillon drew my attention to the chickens, which he said were as handsome as those of Bresse but inferior in flavor. There was transport, apparently, for everything but war materials. (I drew the wrong conclusion, naturally; if there was transport for the superfluous, I inferred, the essential must already have been taken care of.) The Bouillon theory was that when we had completed our round of Les Halles, we would circle back on our course to pick up the baskets, with a courtesy round at each port of call, and thus avoid a lot of useless toting. It worked all right when we could remember the bars where we had left the various things, but sometimes we couldn’t, and on such occasions M. Bouillon would cry that restauration was a cursed metier, and that if the government would permit, he would take up his old Lebel rifle and leave for the front. But they would have to let him wear horizon-blue; he could not stand the sight of khaki, because it reminded him of the English.
Of all the dishes that M. Bouillon made for me, I remember with most affection a salmis of woodcock in Armagnac with which I astounded a French friend – a champagne man – whom I entertained in the little restaurant. I’m sure it was the best I’ve had in my life, and M. Bouillon could do almost as well with a partridge, a beef stew, or a blood pudding with mashed potatoes. My Frenchman, as a partner in a good firm of champagne-makers, had to get around to an enormous number of restaurants in a normal year, so when he acknowledged M. Bouillon’s greatness, I felt the same gratification that I felt much later when Spink’s, of London, authenticated a coin of Hadrian, minted at Gaza, that I had bought from an Arab in Gaza itself. M. Bouillon was my discovery, and the enjoyment of a woodcock signed “Bouillon” was an irreplaceable privilege.
Like most fine cooks, M. Bouillon flew into rages and wept easily; the heat of kitchens perhaps affects cooks’ tear ducts as well as their tempers. Whenever we returned to the restaurant from Les Halles minus some item that M. Bouillon had paid for and that Madame had already inscribed on the menu, there would be a scene, but on the whole the Bouillons were a happy family – Madame and the children respected Monsieur as a great artist, though the son and daughter may have thought that he carried temperament a bit far. It was an ideal family unit to assure the future of a small restaurant; unfortunately, the war wiped it out. When the fighting began in earnest, in May 1940, the customers again left Paris. The son was mobilized, and the rest of the family went away to work in the canteen of a munitions factory. When I reentered Paris at the Liberation, in 1944, I looked them up and found that they had returned to the quarter but that they no longer had the restaurant. To conduct a restaurant successfully under the Occupation had called for a gift of connivance that poor M. Bouillon didn’t have. Since August 1944, I have lost sight of them.
