Steal the Menu (6 page)

I am thinking of a canonical sequence: four boned fillets
dredged in seasoned flour, quickly sautéed tableside in browned butter, which, just as the fish is cooked through, sizzles from the addition of the lemon juice. It is this sizzle, at the climax of the waiter’s enactment of the dish, that defines my sense of
sole meunière
. I am also interested in the epithet
meunière
, collapsed from
à la meunière
, in the manner of a miller’s wife. Like many French names for dishes, it is probably entirely fanciful. But the philologist in me can’t help wondering if there once was some kind of connection, in folklore or in a chef’s experience, that honored a miller’s wife’s way with a saltwater fish that was clearly not pulled up from the family millrace. Perhaps it was the flour coating, the miller’s product.

Other people no doubt give their organoleptic memories pride of place. Not me. I am, first and last, attracted by the concept of the dish, its definition, the kinds of information you’d find in Gringoire and Saulnier’s
Répertoire de la cuisine
or, for a more detailed description, in a standard recipe.

I have a philologist’s sensibility. I see an unfamiliar term on a menu and I want to order that dish, add it to my vocabulary. In 2009, at the excellent Chicago restaurant Spiaggia, I spied the unfamiliar word
pagliolaia
on the menu. The waiter said it meant “dewlap.” I thought of the hounds in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
“Their heads are hung / With ears that sweep away the morning dew; / Crook-knee’d, and dew-lapp’d like Thessalian bulls; / Slow in pursuit, but match’d in mouth like bells.”

Spiaggia cooked its dewlaps with diver scallops and wild mushrooms over a wood fire. I ordered the dish, amused that a midwestern chef was one-upping the trend for beef cheeks started by Mario Batali in New York with an even more arcane part of the bovine head. In my review, I hewed to the organoleptic: “The hearty beef fragments and earthy fungus highlight the slippery elegance of the seafood. Having dewlaps myself, I winced for a minute but surrendered
to the brilliance of the conception and the resourcefulness of Spiaggia’s butcher.” I did not disclose my white-magical motivation for ordering
pagliolaia
, which was to learn a new word by consuming the thing itself.

Did I realize back in 1960 or in the next two decades that I was approaching food in this way? Undoubtedly not. I thought I was ingesting cuisines, cultural artifacts frozen like the smiles on archaic Greek statues. And when the smile melted, when those gelid monoliths changed shape before my eyes, I continued to see the change as a systematic mutation, a wholesale revolution, which it was. But the revolution expressed itself through individual dishes, one recipe at a time. And that, of course, was how I experienced the nouvelle cuisine and every one of the later convolutions that have transformed the way we eat, and continue to transform it.

After I passed my PhD orals at Harvard, in the spring of 1965, I got a chance to explore French food in great depth. Instead of supporting myself as a teaching fellow in Cambridge while writing my dissertation, I accepted a job as a correspondent in
Newsweek
’s Paris bureau. In the early mornings before the office opened, I researched the scholarly literature on Theocritus at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Later in the day, I researched the menus of French restaurants.

Newsweek
had hired me because someone at the magazine believed it would locate abler staffers at America’s better college newspapers than it was finding among older journalists at professional papers and magazines. This turned out to be a false theory, in the sense that almost every one of the
Harvard Crimson
–hatched trainees except me left
Newsweek
for law school or other greener pastures after a short stint at the magazine.

Fully expecting that I would return to academia, too, with a completed thesis, I went to work in the
Newsweek
offices off the
Champs-Élysées. I ought to have been very busy, chasing news while simultaneously plowing through the scholarly literature on Hellenistic poetry of the third century b.c. In fact, I had almost no news to chase, and the Theocritus scholarship was almost completely irrelevant to my specific interest in the father of pastoral poetry’s creative reuse of rare Homeric words. Previous researchers had not spent much time on this question, which allowed me to flip through and discard hundreds of articles brought to me by disgruntled stack “boys” of advanced age every weekday morning. Soon there were no more tomes to check out. I had stumbled onto untilled ground, but by then I had lost interest in academic life and tabled the thesis.

In the bureau, I was the fourth of four correspondents, and the youngest by far at twenty-four. In the French idiom, I was the office
benjamin
(after Joseph’s youngest brother in the Old Testament). In practice, this meant that, aside from reading seven daily newspapers and thirty magazines, I had almost nothing to do. The other three correspondents, better connected, more skilled and more aggressive, hogged all the available work. And there wasn’t much of that, considering the very small amount of its precious space that
Newsweek
would allot to a backwater like France in a normal week.

Even French reporters didn’t have much of a story to follow then, because France under President Charles de Gaulle was essentially a benevolent dictatorship. De Gaulle had a chokehold on the news. In this quasi-totalitarian atmosphere, a very junior American correspondent had almost no chance of breaking stories major enough to interest a stateside editor. I had to plead to get the bureau to submit my name for accreditation to the only major event of my two years in France, a De Gaulle press conference, which one of the veteran correspondents would actually cover.

Yet I was a full-fledged foreign correspondent with a very
official-looking clothbound press card and, fatefully, an expense account. So I busied myself with entertaining “sources” (most often just friends with marginally newsworthy job descriptions) at restaurants of high gastronomic quality. No one in the office minded. In fact, the bureau chief seemed glad not to have me nagging him for work, and it amused my colleagues that I was putting so much energy into establishing contacts in corners of French life they had no time to investigate.

When I left for a job in the New York headquarters, in 1967, the bureau gave me a copy of the antiquated but still respected
Larousse gastronomique
as a token of my colleagues’ respect; or perhaps it was their mildly scornful recognition of my being a person for whom food was a passion.

I had eaten at the big-name restaurants, the three-stars, which were venerable exercises in period performance. Chez Maxim was all deco froth. Lapérouse specialized in Gilded Age naughtiness, with dining alcoves that could be closed off from public view by pulling a drape to hide you and your
poule de luxe
. The Tour d’Argent gave you a card inscribed with the number of the
canard à la presse
they had just served you. Mine, I believe, was the 22,987th to be crushed and exsanguinated in that calf-sized silver device that glittered at one edge of the dining room high above the Seine with its famous view of Notre-Dame. On the street level was an actual museum, featuring menus from the Paris Commune of 1871, when the Tour d’Argent had served its besieged patrons with the flesh of animals “liberated” from the zoo of the Jardins des Plantes, a few blocks away.

The closest a
fin bec
could get to a creative sensibility in a high-end Paris restaurant in 1967 was either at glamorous Lasserre, near our office, or at Chez Garin, the remarkable bistro near my Left Bank apartment. Lasserre had a mechanical roof that opened to the sky in warm weather, to provide relief from the heat and to clear
the accumulated Gauloise smoke from the elegant room. Tables sported costly articulated metal birds, which the intoxicated sometimes tried to purloin, under the waiters’ watchful eyes. It was part of the fun to see some pinstriper caught red-handed with a glittery peacock or snipe in his briefcase. The food was first-class and vibrantly
cuisiné
, showing the hand of a chef not yet ready for the mortuary.

Garin wasn’t so flashy, but for a lot of money you got top-flight versions of conventional cooking tuned up and rethought, sometimes with enough complication so that they really edged across the line into haute cuisine, or made the boundary between bistro and haute cuisine seem beside the point. Gael Greene ate there in May 1972 for
New York
magazine, about the last moment when any major French restaurant could still elicit ooh-la-las for trout stuffed with a pike mousse. The influence of the nouvelle cuisine’s great young chef Michel Guérard was already visible, if unavowed, in the two vegetable purees (celeriac and string bean) that Garin served Ms. Greene as a garnish for a split grilled kidney.

Just five years earlier, the nouvelle cuisine revolution had already begun simmering in the provinces. My bureau chief, Joel Blocker, proposed a story about someone named Paul Bocuse who was making news just outside Lyon. Joel struck out with his Bocuse proposal, but he would have been able to win space in the magazine for another modern French chef also trained by Fernand Point, if sudden political news hadn’t sidetracked him and forced him to send me instead to a small town in Alsace for the announcement of a third Michelin star to L’Auberge de l’Ill in tiny Illhaeusern.

Although the article on the restaurant that appeared in
Newsweek
’s April 3, 1967, edition was unsigned, it was nonetheless my debut as a food writer. The food I ate on this fateful assignment included a spit-roasted
poularde de Bresse
with truffles and golden Alsatian noodles. I have no memory of how it tasted or what it looked like, but it was clearly an attempt by the chef, Paul Haeberlin, to combine the very best chicken he could find with a luxury ingredient necessary to legitimize the dish as worthy of three stars, a cooking method that set it apart from everyday oven-roasted chicken. The noodles, a regional specialty, added handmade, local distinction. This, in itself, was a daring modernism, a belated nod to the automobile age. Haeberlin had bet his future that garnishing his signature chicken with humble noodles instead of an array of elaborately turned vegetables out of the
Larousse gastronomique
would appeal to Michelin’s modernizing inspectors.

Restaurant Paul Bocuse at Collonges-au-Montd’Or, which features culinary innovation in a flamboyant atmosphere. (
illustration credit 1.4
)

This discreet nod to the Auberge’s remoteness from Paris, in a village so small it had no hotel, in a province whose identity was not securely French, would have resonated immediately with the Michelin inspectors looking for a rationale to justify adding this modest-looking hostelry to the pantheon of twelve three-star temples it had been enshrining almost without change for years. But, as neither they nor I could have said at the time, this dish, semiotically complex as it was (high/low, rustic/elegant, cosmopolitan/regional, French/German), would not count, when examined by hindsight anytime after 1972, as a forerunner of the radical changes soon to disrupt French kitchens. History was accelerating for chefs.

For me, the Illhaeusern reportage was important and memorable because of two other historically trivial reasons. It gave me a taste of food journalism, and it gave my son Michael, then on the verge of two, a taste of a really good soft-boiled egg.

I was traveling with him and my wife, Margaret, because the assignment had burst upon me on the eve of a skiing vacation. We piled into a rental Peugeot station wagon and drove due east through Nancy to Alsace. I had left Margaret and Michael in the hotel at nearby Ribeauvillé, thinking it would be unprofessional to bring them along for an interview at the restaurant. But when Jean-Pierre Haeberlin, Paul’s brother, who ran the front of the house, learned they were nearby, he insisted that Margaret and Michael be fetched for lunch.

Paul prepared a special meal for our infant, the egg and some remarkable mashed potatoes. When the egg appeared, Michael took a look at the amazingly reddish-orange yolk and exclaimed, “Apricot.” A gourmet had announced himself. When he finished eating, two school-age daughters of Jean-Pierre’s came out in regional costumes and led our boy upstairs for a nap.

Could this kind of unaffected hospitality survive the onslaught
of adult gourmets in diamonds and limos? Jean-Pierre Haeberlin was justifiably worried. He said (and
Newsweek
quoted him):

It was also a moment of challenge and change for me. Despite this minor triumph in Alsace, and a more significant professional success with an interview I extracted from Orson Welles when his Shakespearean film
Chimes at Midnight
opened in America, my career as a Paris correspondent had not flourished. I brooded over that with the typical paranoia of someone working at the periphery of a large organization. Was I being stifled by a hostile bureau chief who felt I had been foisted on him by his bosses in New York? I thought so. And when Jack Kroll, the senior editor in charge of cultural coverage, invited me to return to New York and work for him in the “back of the book,” where I had flourished as a trainee two years earlier, I did not hesitate to accept his offer.