White Truffles in Winter (6 page)

And then he told me of the origins of this dish and I began to cook it with him. Two men, two cooks, completely different and yet something at the core of us was completely the same. We were kindred spirits.

That night I served his chicken to Miss Bernhardt for her birthday celebration and she was quite thankful. Although the dish did not contain a puree of either foie gras or truffles, and it was not her traditional birthday meal of scrambled eggs and champagne, she consumed it in its entirety, including a side of what the English call “chips.”

“Magic,” she said. “It is magic.”

And it was. The crust was crispy and light with a floral hint from the spices. The meat of the young chicken was fragrant and juicy. I have never seen an actress, any actress, each so much in one sitting.

Upon my return home, I had written Monsieur Estes to thank him for his time and his exquisite recipe, but my letter was returned a month later unopened. The famed chef had disappeared, never to be heard from again. Some spoke of the Klan.

It pains me to think that this gracious man may have fallen victim to violence at the hands of such ignorant barbarians. How is it possible? How could someone so famous just disappear?

Miss Bernhardt said, “The forgetting killed him.”

I believe she may be right.

As for the recipe for the fried chicken, it is simple. Cut some boiled fowl into slices and marinate them in very good olive oil, the juice of a lemon and a handful of herbs fresh from the garden. I enjoy tarragon, for a hint of licorice; lemon thyme, to bring forward the citrus note; and the slightest bit of lavender. The fowl should marinate for at least three hours. Flour. Fry. Garnish with fried parsley.

It should be noted that this is not Monsieur Estes's recipe. To recreate his exact dish, you will need a quarter of a pound of butter, a spoonful of flour, pepper, salt, a little vinegar, parsley, green onions, carrots, and turnips. Cook in a saucepan. Cool. Place cut chicken in this marinade for at least three hours. Dry the pieces, flour them and fry. Garnish with fried parsley.

While Monsieur Estes's is a memorable recipe, it is not mine. To make southern fried chicken properly, you must add a bit of your true self—the history of the dish demands it. You must bring your heart. Although very few dishes require such bravery, when cooking there is no room for cowardice.

Life, of course, is another matter entirely.

T
HE DIFFICULT THING ABOUT MEMORY IS THAT IT LEAVES
a permanent stain. Even when details fade, there is a darkness that remains. The left foot will always be favored after the right is broken. The heart will always be reluctant once it understands how far it can bend.

It was the sound of Sarah's laughter—all bones and fury—that Escoffier could not forget.

They met in
1874
, Paris, long before Delphine, marriage and children, at a time when the most scandalous city in the world was scandalized by the first exhibition of the
Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes
. “Impressions”—Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas—was a show of outsiders, not sanctioned by jury or state nor salon, only themselves. Renegades.

Everyone had seen it. The critics were inflamed.

“Dirty three-quarters of a canvas with black and white, rub the rest with yellow, dot it with red and blue blobs at random, and you will have an impression of spring before which the initiates will swoon in ecstasy.”

“One wonders whether one is seeing the fruit either of a process of mystification which is highly unsuitable for the public, or the result of mental derangement which one could not but regret.”

“Impression!” the art critic Louis Leroy would later write. “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished!” And so he named the group “Impressionists.” Escoffier was intrigued. He had been studying sculpture with the artist Gustave Doré, who suggested that he attend the exhibit. He went without hesitation.

As a gesture to the working classes, the exhibit was open only in the evenings. Escoffier left the kitchen of Le Petit Moulin Rouge after nine. It had been a long day. The dining room was being renovated and the work was behind schedule. Summer season was just a month away. They had to be ready to open or the fickle fashionable set would find someplace else to behave badly in.

It was raining and unseasonably cool. The gas streetlamps were dim; some were out. The damp air made the city feel quiet. Mud stuck to the bottoms of his shoes, spattered his trouser cuffs. There was just the occasional clop of horse hooves on the cobblestone streets or the whispers of lovers in the darkness of doorways.

The exhibition was being held in Nadar's studio. Escoffier knew the photographer well. When he arrived, there was a great winding line of people—standing, pushing, seeing, being seen. The bourgeoisie,
in their borrowed finery, huddled together and narrated the scene to one another in loud whispers. Some provided the names of the divetta and their cuckolded patrons whose faces they recognized from drawings in the newspapers; some just speculated on whose heart was lost and whose was won.

The second floor of the building where the exhibit was housed was brightly lit; laughter and anger drifted down to the street. Escoffier joined the crowd as they walked up the narrow flight of steep stairs, step by careful step. He was still wearing his platform shoes; slick from the mud, they pitched him forward and made each step tentative, made him feel even smaller. When he reached the landing, people were wildly arguing.

“Imbeciles!”

“Genius!”

A duel was challenged. Someone screamed but many laughed as guns were drawn and the men were escorted out into the night. Two shots. Applause. More laughter. Escoffier did not look.

There was a table with a tired man selling tickets. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and beard unkempt. Admission was a single franc, and the catalogue, edited by the man, Renoir's brother Edmond, fifty centimes. Escoffier could barely afford admission. He studied the catalogue closely, and yet gently, so as not to break the book's spine.

“Would you consider an exchange?” he asked. “This fine book for a fine meal at Le
Petit Moulin Rouge?”

Renoir's brother shook his head. “Fifty
centimes is a small price for what I have gone through. Degas could not see his way to speak to me until the very last moment before we were to go to press. And Monet sent too many paintings and such horrible titles—
Entrance of a Village
,
Leaving the Village
,
Morning in a Village
—the man has no sense.”

The brother opened to a page. The painting was Le Havre as seen from a window: the sun appeared to be damp and the sunrise was merely vapors. It was haunting in a way Escoffier could not explain.

“Thankfully, he let me rename them,” the man said. “
Impression, Sunrise
—is that not the perfect name?”

It was. Escoffier gave the man fifty centimes.

“Merci.”

The brother entered the transaction neatly in a small ledger book. Escoffier could see that there were few entries on the income side. Notoriety had not brought profitability.

If this were a restaurant, the man would be rich.

Even though it was late, inside the studio the exhibit was crowded, although not many appeared to be from the “working class,” as the organizers had hoped. The majority of the crowd was composed of artists, none particularly well known, along with courtesans and actors. They were the type of people Escoffier often allowed to eat as guests at Le Petit Moulin Rouge—the “decorative people,” as he thought of them. Bohemians—gypsies of sorts—witty, attractive, charming and unconventional. They were amusing and essential to setting a tone in any dining room, especially the women. Without these women the restaurant would be filled with unhappy men. Respectable women were not willing to be seen dining publicly. At least, not yet. Escoffier was trying to convince the owners to add rose-colored lighting in the dining rooms. It would be flattering and soon all women would come to Le Petit Moulin Rouge. And come again. He knew that the civilizing presence of women, even Bohemian women, was key to success.

At the exhibit, however, they seemed slightly menacing. Most of them were drinking. All of them were loud and boisterous. The walls of the room were painted deep red, like a pomegranate. People were even arguing over that. “Blood,” a man shouted. “The walls soaked in blood.”

It all seemed rather ridiculous.
They are their own theater,
he thought.

Whatever the shade was called, however, it provided the perfect backdrop for the work. Each painting, and there were many, stood in sharp relief to the color of the walls. Each stroke, each illumination, each intent and every nuance seemed heightened, like the sun rising in an angry sky.

Escoffier, exhausted, made his way tentatively through the jumble of canvases and people. The rooms smelled of wet wool and sweat. The work astonished him. There was a wall of oils and pastels all hung at eye level by Renoir; ten works by Degas; five by Pissarro; three by Cézanne and so many by Monet that he clearly understood Renior's brother's plight.

But he had never seen such beauty. Not even the most elegant woman cast in the rose-hued gaslight of a café could rival it. When he arrived at
Impression: Sunrise
, it was infinitely more breathtaking in real life than it was in the catalogue. He thought for a moment that he had fallen into a dream, a lonely dreamscape in orange and gray. It was everything Doré had told him Impressionist paintings would be. It was not like reality at all but more real somehow. It did not have a distinguishable line or form. And the color was not true to any color in life but its vibrant sun set against the dawn seemed to pulsate like the real sun in a universe yet to be discovered.

The work took Escoffier back to those moments when he first came to Paris as a young man and sat along the river and waited for the morning to come. The painting made him feel as if the world was still filled with promise, as if he was at the exact moment when everything would change.

It was as if Monet had harnessed the power of the sun itself.

Impossible,
he thought, but the more Escoffier looked at the painting, the more it seemed alive. After a time, a voice behind him, a woman's voice, silvered and shining, said, “The secret is that there is no contrast in colors. The sun has nearly the same luminance as the grayish clouds. If Monet had painted the sun brighter than the clouds, as one finds in real life, the painting would bore.”

Escoffier turned around. The milk cream skin, the elegant long neck set in relief against a Belgian lace collar and black velvet waistcoat. Monet's sun paled in comparison to her. Sarah Bernhardt. Her perfume, a musky rose, enveloped him. And yet a moment later, the crowd swelled around her and she was gone as if she never came. Even the scent of her had vanished.

Idiot.

He should have said something, anything. Escoffier had hoped for this moment for such a long time. When Sarah came into Le Petit Moulin Rouge, he stood behind the velvet curtains of the dining room and watched as she ate. Hers was the only ladies' hand in the dining room that he could not bring himself to kiss. Nor could he meet her eye.
One cannot approach a goddess
.

And so he sat in the darkened theater at all her performances, memorized the lines, and relived them in his dreams.

For so very long he wanted to meet her alone and thought of standing outside of the stage door or somehow leading her away from her dinner companions, but all of that seemed offensive, reckless—the type of behavior that lovesick fools engaged in.

And yet the goddess had come and gone and he was silent.
Fool.

Or maybe it was just a dream.

He told no one of this meeting. To a man like Escoffier—a small man who worked in whispers, whose fleeting miracles were made one plate at a time—Bernhardt seemed well beyond his grasp. But there she was, whispering in his ear. He could still feel the warmth of her lips; could still hear her words, and that voice, weeks later. It made him sleepless.

And yet, he was just as famous as she was.

At the time they met, Escoffier was thirty years old and had already revolutionized fine dining in Paris. Not satisfied with the overly rich and elaborate classics Marie-Antoine Carême had set forth,
faites simple
was Escoffier's mantra. He served only the finest of ingredients and only in season. Excessively complicated sauces became elegant reductions. The gesture replaced excessive gilding. Food was pared down to its essence and so became a mystery to be eaten, not just admired.

Before Escoffier, all fine meals served were
à la française
with several dozen dishes served at the same time. Elaborately garnished soups, pâtés, desserts, fish, crèmes, meats, stews, and cheese were stacked high on shelves as a centerpiece to give the impression of great wealth. By the time the guests arrived at the table, most of the dishes were cold and spoiled. Some were several days old and rancid. Food was something to admire, not eat.

But Escoffier's food was served very hot, so that the diner could embrace the aroma, and
à la russe
with dishes being eaten one at a time in a series of courses, fourteen in all.

Elegance and, in turn, eroticism were the underlying principles. “Let the food speak where words cannot.”

He was a quiet storm that swept over the tables of Paris.

She must have known who I was,
he later thought. But the next time Escoffier saw Sarah in the dining room, her eyes seemed to look through him. Sarah was the darling of the Comédie-Française, after all. She was, by her own design, unforgettable. She slept in a silk-lined coffin and once attempted to have a tiger's tail grafted to the base of her spine. She was born “Rosine Bernardt,” and later added the “h.” Her mother was a Jewish courtesan and her father was unknown—at least, that was one story from the press.

It was also reported that Sarah was an American of French-Canadian descent who, as a girl, worked in a hat shop in Muscatine, Iowa. At the age of fifteen, she fell in love with the theater and made her way to Paris by taking on a series of lovers.

There were other stories, of course, most of which she created herself.

When it came to the Divine Miss Sarah, as Oscar Wilde had called her, confusion was understandable. She claimed not to speak any English but her French had an American accent, and so was always suspect. She said her father was “Edouard Bernardt” from the Le Havre
of Monet's painting, a magical place,
and he was a man who, depending on the moment, was a law student, accountant, naval cadet or naval officer. But “Bernardt” was her grandfather's name. He was Moritz Baruch Bernardt, a petty criminal.

When it came to Sarah, the truth was difficult to ascertain. Alexandre Dumas,
fils
, whose
La Dame aux Camélias
Sarah performed thousands of times, called her a notorious liar. She took famous lovers, including Victor Hugo, of both sexes.

She was thunder and lightning. She was Heaven and Hell. She was unforgettable.

After their meeting at the exhibition, Escoffier barely slept. He threw himself into work and his studies with Doré. Busy, always busy.