6. CHAPTER DE LA GASTRONOMIE (This title should actually be: "ABOUT GASTRONOMY" but I feel that certain things are best expressed in French) A very elegant gentleman enters in company of a very elegant lady the very elegant restaurant of an elegant hotel. They take place at a table. The maitre d' respectfully distributes the bills of fare and the wine list. The gentleman takes a fleeting look at his bill of fare and asks the maitre d': - Tell me, do you have elephant ears on your list? The maitre d' (baffled): Elephant ears? No, we don't have elephant ears on the bill of fare. Guest (horrified): You don't...(turns to the lady) Ma chĂŠrie, the man doesn't have elephant ears - on his bill of fare. The lady: Oh! mon Dieu. The gentleman (distressed): When did we order elephant ears for the last time? Oh, yes, it was at the George V Hotel in Paris - a very good inn, I should say... The maitre d' asked at once whether we preferred African or Asian ears. For there is a difference: With the African ears the portions are larger, but the flesh is stringier. The Asian elephant's ears are smaller. But what makes the difference is the wax, it all depend upon the quality of the ear wax. We weren't really hungry, so we ordered some Asian ears. The maitre d' asked how we would like to have them prepared: broiled, minced, poached or baked over with a delicate sauce Mornay. We decided for cold Asian elephant ears with a vinaigrette and some potato salad. We are really people with simple taste, aren't we, ma chĂŠrie? ( she nods approvingly). Maitre d': ...and you got them?
Guest (sadly): No...no, they were out of potato salad (shakes his head with melancholy): Ma chĂŠrie, wouldn't it be amusing to feed like the working class, just for once? (turns to the maitre d'). Please, do send on our Presidential suite - a couple of hot dogs - with plenty of mustard. What is there to tell about gastronomy nowadays? Everything has been said and written already. Month after month there land those periodicals in the house. On the front page most of the time the portray of a successful caterer or hotel owner, smiling and self sure. Inside new methods, new products, the description of a wonderful place, readers' letters, an editorial. Everything trimmed on new, as so many capital discoveries of a progressive era. And yet gastronomy is old, Oh! so old... A long, long time ago some humanoid found out that a piece of meat placed too close to the camp fire was actually broiling and tasted better. From then on he stuck a piece of meat on a wooden stick and held it over the fire. That must have been more than 70.000 years ago. The very same gesture is performed nowadays by a boy scout with a sausage. Nothing has changed. Thirty five or forty thousand years ago, in the Cro Magnon era, some individual took a lump of clay and made a pot out of it. Then he - or she - placed it on a fire, filled it with water and threw some herbs into it. Cooking was born. And ever since the world is confronted with millions upon millions of combinations of meat, vegetables, fruits, fish, herbs and spices, of so-called recipes. And it can rightfully be said that everything a cook is producing nowadays has been produced sometime or somewhere earlier. There is nothing new under the sun, in gastronomy even less than anywhere else. This is the reason why a cook who tries to fascinate the world with his "creations" is an ignorant, at best. Or a plagiarist, at worst, if he admit this elementary truth.
The ancient Romans' garum, for instance, is extraordinarily similar to the trassi of the Indonesians or Malays. Garum and trassi are the product of marinated fish which have been let to ferment and are subsequently pressed. The penetrating smell of trassi fills the air in every village of South Eastern Asia, but trassi gives a bahmi goreng its inimitable taste. Cheese has been "invented" in Asia Minor about ten thousand years ago. Gravelachs comes from Scandinavia, but the techniques or marinating or macerating raw fish are also familiar to the Japanese and to the Polynesians. The Malay expression for fish is "Ikan", and is derived from the ancient Greek "Ichtyo". Since the beginnings of time, ever since humans are human - and possibly even earlier - people take their meals in community. Food and drink are needed to sustain life, but the meal taken in common goes with, and puts its stamp on every stage of a human existence: A good meal is there to celebrate the birth of a new citizen, his wedding, his anniversary. A beloved person's demise is marked by a funeral meal. We eat and drink together at a religious festivity, or in order to raise funds for political or cultural purposes or to honor a personality. Always on those occasions there is food and drink. The ancient Greek scientist Strabon relates that the inscription engraved on Assyrian king Sardapanales' tombstone read as follows: "Sardapanales, Son of Anacyndarax, has, in one single day, built the city of Anchiale and the city of Tarsus. Stranger, eat, drink and enjoy life, for nothing else is of importance." A similar saying was making the rounds with the English fliers who went bombing Germany in the course of the Second World War and who were involved in particular in the total destruction of the museum city of Dresden in February 1945: "Friends, let's eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we'll die."
A few traditions have gone lost with the time. Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, had fallen in love with Antonius, Consul of Rome. Someday she gave for him a truly royal banquet: The whole service was made of pure gold, enriched with precious gems. A fabulous piece of art. The walls of the banquet room were covered with purple and golden silk cloth. She had twelve richly ornamented triple couches installed and invited Antonius and as many persons as he cared to take along. Antonius was deeply impressed by so much magnificence, so she gave him all of it as a present. Well, just try to filch one coffee spoon in a restaurant nowadays... Plenty has been written and said in an ironically about the so-called Nouvelle Cuisine: "Toy food, overbred, artificial..." Baloney! The Roman politician Heliogabale had, in one single banquet, six hundred ostrich brains served, green peas stuffed with gold nuggets, lenses decorated with gems, to other foodstuffs amber and pearls. Nero had in his palace dining room openings in the ceiling through which flowers could be thrown upon the guests. A nice cheese fondue as a meal taken in common? In the Middle Ages the whole family would be eating out of the same dish. Soup was taken from a common tureen, even in well-to-do families. Our modern cookery artists are proud of their fantasy. What is to be said of following menu, dictated by Marshall and Duke of Richelieu to his master-cook? The French were warring in Germany, at the beginning of the 18. century, and had just taken the city of Hannovre. Among the many prisoners there were a number of German noblemen, who were invited by the duke. In the kitchen there was but an ox, and a few roots as well. For Marshall and Duke of Richelieu - Cyrano de Bergerac's commander - actually plenty for the finest meal in the world: First service:
a broth with toasted bread.
Four hors d'oeuvre: the muzzle Ste. Menehould style small patties with the chopped tenderloin the kidneys with frittered onions the tripe with mushroom cream sauce and lime sauce From the broth: the boiled beef with carved beets. (carve the beets in grotesque shapes, on account of the Germans) Six main dishes: oxtail with chestnut mush the tongue marinated (Burgundy style) the round braised in gravy with celery roots. fritters with hazelnut mush roasted bread with marrow (Army bread just as good as other bread) Second service: roasted ribs (you baste them with whatever is left of the marrow) endive salad with ox tongue beef in jelly with pistachios cold meat patties with ox blood and wine from Jurançon (don't mix up) Six sweet dishes: Glazed turnips in beef gravy pies of marrow and candied sugar jellied lemon rinds with chocolate a mush of artichoke hearts and (ox)gravy with almond milk brain fritters marinated in cherry juice beef jelly with wine from Alicante and plums from Verdun and then... all there is left of marmalades. "And should, through an unhappy hazard, this meal not be up to par, so I shall deduct from Maret's and Roquelère's
salary (probably head cook and butler)the sum of one hundred pistols. Go now, and doubt no more" (sig) RICHELIEU Well, how can we put up with such competition? Our gastronomes are really trying, but when we read from the old books we find today's gastronomy so mean, so seedy, so hackneyed. In the course of the 19. century Bordeaux wine would be loaded on board of ship and sent on a world tour. The rolling of the waves did them good, so it was said. What does that have in common with today's mass production? Of course it could be objected that the world in those days was prey to terrible famines. Famines as we presently know them in Africa, or in Europe after the Second World War. Sure, the calorie intake of a common worker in the Middle Ages amounted to about 1.400, as is presently the case with a Haitian peasant or a gulag prisoner, or a Muslim in Bosnia. Of course the Roman Empire broke down in the fifth century in an ocean of misery and despair - as the Third World presently does. Everyone knows that in those days people were suffering from beriberi, on account of one-sided nourishment, just as nowadays children in Egypt or in Vietnam go blind because of lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. This same one-sided nourishment which is the cause of obesity, the poor people's obesity, as it is to found in southern countries, and in North America and Europe as well. Which technical progress has been introduced in our oh! so modern kitchen? The deep freeze? The Samoyeds, the Inuits, the Laps have known about it for many thousands of years. The preheated plates? They were to be found at the banquet offered by Montezuma to the pirate Cortez. The steamer? Arabs cook their couscous in such a contraption, no one could say since when. The low temperature oven? The grandmothers of our grandmothers knew the Roman kettle and the low temperature broiling techniques. In those days there were no restaurant guides either. The poor ate because they were hungry, and the
rich because the knew all about the subject. Good eating was an integral part of their education. What does it mean, "to eat well"? Does the stressed City broker who hastily swallows a certified goose liver medaillon in jelly with port wine between a call to ZĂźrich and another from Sydney, who quickly slurps a portion of lychee and carambole macerated in gin and who rinses with a glass or two of Chevalier-Montrachet 1983 Grand Cru enjoy his food more than the ordinary worker who quietly enjoys a steak and kidney pie with mashed potatoes and a salad, along with a glass of beer? Is "eating well" commensurate with filling one's stomach with expensive - because rare foodstuffs, does it mean sitting for hours at a time and ingurgitating the more or less dubious "creation" of a self satisfied host? I readily admit that having a meal means definitely more than just the intake of calories, vitamins, carbon hydrates or trace elements. A meal is a social function, an act of sociability, with a certain decorum and occasionally even some magnificence. And actually, why not? But where is the fine line between real competence and bluff, between the honest search for healthy, wholesome food and the hysterical shows of fashionable restaurants which are being lionized before they disappear into oblivion? Once the pubs were really in. The honest to goodness English pubs, which are hardly to be found in England any more. A species that subsists on the Continent, after it has been replaced by Mac Donald's in its home country. In Granges we got three of them: One is closed for an indefinite period of time, one is seemingly doing very well and one is underselling everybody and accumulates losses. As we arrived in Granges in 1987 not less than three restaurants were being mentioned in the famous Gault & Millau gastronomic guide. One has gone broke, one has remained closed for more than four hundred days. One is still open. Sic transit gloria mundi: There goes the World's glory.
Our gastro critics, who are monthly watching and commenting the very latest trend in the world's second oldest trade recommend us to find a USP. (The use of American-English expressions gives a smart gloss, for this reason these initials are in use in the original German text) And what is a USP? It is a Unique Selling Proposition: Every joint should also become "Unique". With about 27.000 licensed places in this country this would account for a lot of variety indeed... Our honorable gastro critics celebrate year after year the cult of "fresh, fresher, ever fresh". It should be up to them to break out of the routine, to show the way to new frontiers. And I take it upon myself to suggest a USP for them: There are nowadays no bad wines any more, and no really great cheese. Game, and especially feather game, is getting tamer and tamer. The last buffaloes are being bred industrially. And I - and probably many other cooks by trade - find it increasingly difficult to make the difference between different sorts of meat: I for one have trouble finding the difference between elk and beef tenderloin. Time has come to honor our ancestors' methods again. On my first job as kitchen help in Yverdon VD I have experienced how dead ducks were hung by the head until they became loose and fell to the ground. Only then were they to be picked up and plucked and dressed. They had acquired the gamey taste and flavor and reached ideal maturity. This method was widespread in the former centuries, and has seemingly subsisted until the mid-fifties in Central Europe. Of Grimod de la Reynière, a 19. century gourmet we are told that he appreciated the gamey flavor above all other things, and that he used to carry at all times a couple of dead grouses in his overcoat's pockets in order to control the birds' maturity. And it is precisely this fidelity to an ideal which provokes my respectful admiration: Why should not our Sylvio Rizzi, our chief critic in gastronomy for
instance, give the good example and reintroduce this old fashion ? Our mean, seedy gastronomy needs new impulses, is in need of pure heroes who are able and willing to show the way to a bright future. Klara and I have long and seriously pondered about our own USP. All we found out was cooking produced by a cook who understand his trade and respects his customers. Wines that can be drunk without getting a headache. Patrons from all horizons and all social classes who mingle freely and feel happy with us. A decent priceperformance relationship; also a few more accessory details. All of it awfully old fashioned, but it works. For, really, there nothing new under the Sun. What is that, a delicacy? A delicacy is according to Webster's delicate foodstuff, a refined dish.
dictionary
a
According to my own, possibly deft definition a delicacy is basically an expensive gimmick. Who is right? How many people know that oysters were in Dicken's days food for the poor? And that in the 19. century there was in the Loire Valley in France and in the Rhine Valley in Germany an official rule prohibiting rich people in their mansions to feed salmon more than twice a week to their servants? In 1958 lobster was a festive meal for a common worker in Nova Scotia, but still affordable. In 1964 lobster from the Maine-New Brunswick coast had practically disappeared. Lobster then came from Namibia and was out of price in New York. As a little boy I have experienced how chicken, real chicken, was served. It was a festive meal also, reserved for family gatherings, solemnly enjoyed. The morels came from the nearby woods, the cream for the sauce from the milk pail. Caviar is not my cup of tea. Probably because I got too much of it when I was young and hungry. Caviar is in my eyes an expensive bugaboo.(If I remember well the young snobs in St. Moritz used to eat caviar with unpeeled
boiled potatoes). Asparagus in October, strawberries in January do no make sense. Morels sink to an ordinary product as soon as has been found the method to cultivate them. Is a delicacy a finely prepared foodstuff, a fine foodstuff? Let's see, I think that we are on the right path, but haven't reached our goal yet. Brillat Savarin, French magistrate, politician and gastronome (1755-1826) has left a whole array of aphorisms and axioms for the posterity: "The Universe only makes sense everything that lives needs food."
through
life,
and
"Animals feed; man eats; only an educated person knows how to dine." "The fate of nations depends upon their eating habits." "Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you what you are." "The Creator forces people to eat in order to survive, invites them through the appetite and rewards them with the pleasure". "The discovery of a new foodstuff has more contributed to the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a new star." and many, many more. If however anything that is refined is to be classified as a delicacy, then we only eat delicacies at last: Flour is so refined that it is of absolutely no nutritious value without chemical additives. Wine is standardized to such a point that no one knows anymore where it comes from. A chick from a battery loses its flavor along with its feathers. Today's milk has nothing in common with the wonderful cow juice of my childhood. I think that we have gotten off the right path. A delicacy is surely something fine, but is not necessarily refined.
A long time ago, Klara and I went on a vacation. We have undertaken a real wandering across the Jura hills, between Basel and the lake of Geneva. One stage brought us from Le Locle to the Creux du Van, a decent stretch for young, well trained men, but rather a ordeal for people like us, with so many years on our shoulders and so much bacon around the waist. The jaunt was about 35 kilometers, with a difference in elevation of some 1.100 meters. I made the last climb on all fours. Klara's condition was noticeably better, but we were creeping more than walking as we reached the Soliat refuge. There we ordered some food and drink: Some tommes, those delicious little cheeses made partly of goat milk and partly of cow milk. Local ham, fresh butter and bread, To drink, a bottle of white Neuchâtel wine. I have participated to many banquets before and since, but never have I enjoyed every bite as intensely as on this hot July afternoon of 1987. I felt how life was flowing again through my veins. The sound of cow bells was angels' music, the sheer walls of the Creux du Van and the majesty of the Alps were the decor of a fantastic stage. The air was fragrant, next to me there sat a beloved person and the food and the wine tasted good, deliciously good, just plain good. Of course I have before and since eaten plenty of tommes du Jura, along with ham, have drunk Neuchâtel wine again, admired the Alps over and over again and Klara is still by my side, with plenty of love and sometimes of patience. And more than once I have derived a deep satisfaction from having completed a difficult task. But seldom, so I think, is a person allowed to enjoy such perfect conjuncture, such a blessed moment. And so I ask once more: A delicacy, what is that? And I shall try my own answer: A delicacy is a dish - or a drink prepared with care and competence
served with love and consumed joyously and gratefully And according to this definition I guess aren't too many delicacies in this world.
that
there
With today's gastronomy it is one of those things: Let's get it straight: this criticism is not directed against those cooks who are trying with enthusiasm, hard work and plenty of talent to bring variety in their bill of fare. Every cook has his/her way of doing things and a repertoire which he/she endeavors to extend, often with definite success. There can be no objection to a sound variety of dishes, when they are carefully chosen, when the service is not impeded. And here it is not the cooks who get in the way but rather may I write this and still show up in my own restaurant? - the patrons. I still see myself in that good restaurant in Neuchâtel, in the French speaking part of Switzerland, as maitre d'. The boss was dynamic, a pure product of the business world. From him I got the method of running a rather ordinary bill of fare and to complete it seasonally. The bill of fare was in French - so what's new? - and on Sunday there came many people from the neighboring, German speaking canton of Bern. Every time I had to translate the whole shebang into German. And practically every time there came the same plaintive, almost accusing question: "Yeah, but you haven't got any Wienerschnitzel?" Wienerschnitzel is a sacred institution in German Switzerland. It is a breaded veal cutlet, with a slice of lemon decorated with a filet of anchovy and some capers. We had no Wienerschnitzel on the bill of fare, but a breaded veal cutlet with rosemary. It was no use. The former general manager of one of the most dynamic restaurants in Zßrich, owner of the largest restaurant in the canton of Neuchâtel, president of the cantonal
caterers' association had to capitulate concentrated power of the Wienerschnitzel.
before
the
In our own place we have introduced a Sunday brunch, with a decent success, if I may say so. I as a cook am truly interested in bringing a sound variety in the choice of food. Various sorts of roast, of stew, curries and other things, sauerkraut, game, are to be found next to an array of salads, cold cuts and hors d'oeuvre, as well as a large choice of sweets. Sometime I prepare a paella. I have noticed again and again that a nice paella, prepared according to the rules remains untouched throughout the whole service. The reason is simply that it is garnished with some large prawns or Norway lobsters, as it should, and that our patrons, people of a certain age refuse to have anything to do with those horrible grubs. Period. Also I have tried to sell a nice cool vichyssoise heat of the summer. A vain endeavor: First of all do not know what's a vichyssoise, and then they horrified face when they get to know "What? a cold soup? You nuts or something?"
in the people make a potato
And yet a cream of potatoes, with the white of leek and some onion, refined with double cream, delicately flavored with chives and served absolutely chilled is one of the great achievements of modern gastronomy. No one should think for even one second that these consideration are reserved for the German Swiss only. The innumerable Hiltons, Sheratons, Holiday Inns throughout the world are just as much the product of this mentality: After the Second World War American people had in large numbers the means, and felt the need, to explore the world. But it should not be all too foreign and exotic. Every night there had to be the possibility for retreating into the familiar American surroundings. No different is a Spanish migrant worker's reaction to a nice cheese fondue: - Una sopa de quĂŠso! que suerte!" "A cheese soup! disgusting!"
And so we'll leave the gastro critics at their criticisms and the advisers at their advice. They are harmless and sometimes even amusing. Most of them have never been confronted with the daily problems of a catering operation, and they have a definitely fuzzy notion of their chosen audience's real needs. They haven't demonstrated any particular talent as caterers, but they feel able to criticize and advise caterers. And you know, I for one find this just and reasonable: For isn't it so, that with a bad wine it is possible to produce an excellent vinegar!