Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Michael Booth
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright
Michael Booth is a travel writer and journalist who writes regularly for a variety of newspapers and magazines including the Independent on Sunday, Condé Nast Traveller and Monocle. His latest book, Just As Well I’m Leaving: to the Orient with Hans Christian Andersen was published in 2005 and he is currently working on a book about his family’s food adventures in Japan. He lives and cooks in Paris with his wife, Lissen, and two children, Asger and Emil.
Just as Well I’m Leaving: To the Orient with Hans Christian Andersen
To Lissen
What! perhaps someone will say, another work on cooking? For the past few years the public has been deluged with writings of this sort. I agree. But it is precisely all these works that give birth to this one.
from the preface of Menon’s
Le Manuel des Officiers de Bouche (1759)
Delia Smith was on fire. The flames licked her face but she remained passive, gazing into the middle distance. Even as she began to boil and blister, the familiar, wan smile remained stoically fixed. But soon she was aflame: St Joan of Norwich, blazing, burning, burnt and then ashes. Nearby, Nigella was roaring too, her saucy wit no defence against the orange tongues that tickled her décolletage. Within seconds she was charred beyond recognition.
Jamie Oliver had not quite caught fire. I gave him a poke and sprinkled him with lighter fuel. He flambéed like a crêpe Suzette, and I watched the familiar, fleshy grin curl into a manic leer.
Someone threw Sophie Grigson onto the burning pile and I winced. It was all I could do to stop myself jumping into the flames to save her but my wife, Lissen, sensing my resolve was weakening, put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed tightly. She knew what these people had meant to me; she knew how much pleasure they had given me, how they had enriched my life and kept me occupied. These celebrity chefs had inspired my love of cooking for over a decade, but now they were fuelling the evening’s pyrotechnics. Even Sophie must burn.
I lingered for a moment over Rick Stein, recalling some expensive and elaborate seafood experiments as his face bathed in the dancing flames. ‘Michael, what is that?’ asked my sister, pointing at the book in my hands. Lissen followed her gaze: ‘Come on, this was your idea. If we are going to do this, we’re going to do it properly.’ I threw Rick, limply, in the direction of the bonfire: ‘On you go!’ He only made it to the edge. Lissen picked him up and threw him into the heart of the flames where he ignited briefly, then vanished.
It’s true, it had been my idea to end the evening with a cookbook bonfire in the garden. But I had also had two gins and several glasses of wine, so hardly expected anyone to take me seriously. Surely it is at times like this that one’s loved ones are supposed to intervene to protect one, not let one set fire to hundreds of pounds’ worth of cookery books.
It seems some people have an aversion to television chefs. Several of my friends and family assembled for our farewell dinner that night had thrown themselves into the task with a gusto not seen since Goebbels’s book bonfires in Berlin’s Opernplatz. I, on the other hand, do not. In fact, over the last decade I have been in thrall to just about every single one of them, from Ken Hom to Keith Floyd, from Delia’s One is Fun, to the Two Fat Ladies. I have watched their shows, caught the repeats on cable, bought the books that accompanied the series and, slowly, methodically, slavishly attempted to make just about every recipe. I genuinely believe Jamie Oliver to be some kind of autistic savant genius, for instance, while Delia is single-handedly responsible for weaning the British off soggy greens and Bisto. Rick Stein is the Codfather; and Nigel Slater writes like an angel. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nigella really did turn out to be some kind of goddess.
So why the bonfire?
It’s a long story. For a full explanation we need to go back to 1981. No, let’s do this properly and return to 1972, around about the time I began to eat solids . . .
To say that I was a fussy eater as a child is misleading only in the sense that I didn’t actually eat anything much for the first ten or so years of my life, apart from chips and Tunnocks’ tea cakes.
Dinnertimes were traumatic, a dark cloud glowering over every day. The meal would usually begin with my mother presenting some beautifully prepared dish, which she had crafted with great love from the best produce she could afford – pedantic care having been taken to remove anything green, or that had bones, or a texture that might conceivably provoke histrionic, repulsed gurning. The rest of the family would then take pains to express their delight, downing forkfuls with loud praise while I sat there with a gargoyle grimace, claiming either not to be hungry, to feel unwell or, when faced with a dish containing cooked carrots, threatening to hold my breath until I died.
Usually they would go through the ritual of a few well-intentioned attempts to persuade, cajole or, finally, bribe me into eating before we reached the inevitable climax of a full-blown, hair-tearing conniption fit on the floor, followed by the inevitable plate of tea cakes in front of Dallas, and then bed.
Other than that I survived, like some kind of pre-teen air plant, on bread (white, pre-sliced, un-buttered) and orange squash. But I could not avoid food altogether, particularly away from home. Visits to elderly relatives for Sunday lunch were an especially troubling prospect and invitations to friends’ houses for meals took on the air of a royal visit to Tonga as my mother had to pre-approve the menu or forward a long list of ‘Michael doesn’t likes’. I can recall to this day the throat-tightening horror of being presented with a plate of gammon and cabbage at the home of one schoolfriend, and the hot shame of a half-hour spent pushing it around my plate as the rest of the family wolfed theirs down. If only they’d had a dog.
I didn’t have any eating disorders; I wasn’t anorexic, I wasn’t bulimic, I was simply an insufferable fusspot. I am sure many children are like this; I just didn’t know any of them. My brother and sister both had healthy, normal appetites and more often than not they would hoover up my leftovers, making me feel even more feeble. I gave up going to birthday parties out of mortal fear of shrivelled sausages on sticks and over-buttered cucumber sandwiches. On more than one occasion my mother received a call to come and retrieve her child who was, at that moment, thrashing around on the floor like a stricken octopus having been offered a well-intentioned plate of baked beans. I rarely made it to Pin the Tail on the Donkey, let alone the party bag.
So how does one go from truculent, pre-teen mealtime refusenik, to a food-obsessed, thirty-something glutton (let’s not tiptoe around this with terms like gourmet and gourmand), who will cross a county after a fresh-caught Dover sole tip-off, and re-mortgage his house for a white truffle?
The year, as I said, was 1981. We were motoring through France on a family holiday with two other families, aiming for a camp site in the Jura. We stopped overnight at a small auberge two hours south of Paris and, once precarious roof racks had been secured for the night, headed for the dining room – in my case, resigned to another night of famine.
My sister had spent the weeks leading up to the holiday – my first trip abroad – goading me about French eating habits. They ate frogs, she claimed, and had slugs for breakfast. There were cooked carrots in everything and horse was a speciality. French children ate yoghurt which, if I understood correctly, was alive – for breakfast, and the more a cheese smelt of pensioner’s feet, the more highly they esteemed it.
Pre-trip research had revealed that they did not sell tea cakes in France and so I had packed as many boxes in my cardboard suitcase as I could, but, on lifting the lid in my room a little earlier, a devastating scene of marshmallowy carnage had been revealed. Starvation, which I had somehow kept at bay for all these years, now seemed a very real possibility. But then, as we entered the auberge’s dining room and were shown to our table, something peculiar began to happen. An alien sensation began in my nostrils, then filtered down to my palate and stomach where it started to stir previously dormant gastric juices. I was actively looking forward to food.
It was unusual enough that our party of six adults and eight children, aged from two to eighteen, was being welcomed so warmly and accommodated by a hurried rearranging of tables and chairs – children were frowned upon in English restaurants in those days, hence, I suppose, the otherwise perplexing rise of the Wimpey Bar but the notion that I was beginning to salivate at the prospect of slugs’ brains and horse doings was perplexing. Had my parents slipped me some new wonder drug as I slept in the car, perhaps the same thing they laced Mr T’s milk with in The A-Team to get him to fly? Or was I simply dreaming?
We sat down. There was no menu, no choice. I was in the hands of fate, but I felt strangely relaxed, as if in the state of pre-slaughter resignation that becalms cattle at the abattoir. There was sorcery in the air, not just the siren smells of sticky reductions and roasting meats from the kitchen, but a bewitching feeling that I had never experienced in the context of a dining room before. For me, the smell of cooking usually invoked dread and nausea but here in France, in the epicurean epicentre of my gustatory nightmares, my nostrils were atwitch in anticipation, my mouth a Niagara of saliva.
The meal passed in a blur of transcendental sensual ecstasy. There were langoustines to start, unbelievably sweet in a white wine broth; then an entire roasted quail, juicy and tender with a creamy potato gratin and crisp mange tout, followed by runny, ripe cheeses and a crème brûlée that was the very essence of eggy excess. All washed down with bottle after bottle of Orangina (with real orange bits floating in the bottom!), and rounded off with a puff on my Uncle Arthur’s cigar and a sip of my dad’s cognac.
Had I looked up from my plate I would have seen those who knew me staring in dumb disbelief. But I did not look up. I simply ploughed through whatever the waiters put in front of me. This was an unremarkable menu, these were – are – all staples of a good provincial French restaurant, but twenty-five years on, I can still remember every bite.
It would be misleading of me to claim that from that day on I became some kind of teenage Master Chef, to be found pressing my nose up against the windows of Michelin-starred restaurants and reading my mother’s Elizabeth David by torchlight under the covers. However, once back home I did at least begin to eat green things. And, as I grew older, more memorable meals out followed, most of them in France, but some in the kind of lacy, provincial French restaurants you used to find in Britain but which are now all estate agents. When I left home and went to university, I had to cook for myself. It dawned on me that, with the help of a cookery book or two, I could do better than the spaghetti and ketchup my friends lived on. I borrowed a Delia from my mother and embarked on a voyage of culinary self-discovery, further encouraged by the revelation that girls liked to eat too.
After university came a couple of abortive careers, until I wound up as a travel writer with a sideline editing guidebooks on foreign cities. My interest in food had by then become an all-consuming passion with hours spent creating the daily evening meal, days spent preparing elaborate dinner parties, and fortunes spent in local butchers and fishmongers, interspersed with occasional rucksack raids on Books for Cooks and bankrupting weekends in the restaurants of Paris. When condensing a city into an ‘Insider’ guide, an ‘Essential’ whatever or ‘48 hours in . . .’, I always made sure I bagged the restaurant section and, so, over six years or so I got to eat in some wonderful restaurants.
This further fuelled my obsession but it also rendered unavoidably apparent the gulf between the stuff – rough approximations of the photographs in TV chefs’ cookbooks – that emerged from my kitchen and the food that I enjoyed in the restaurants I wrote about. It didn’t take too many Michelin-starred experiences for me to realise that following a Delia recipe and knowing how to cook were two very different things. For starters, I grew to realise that recipes are doomed from the start. Supposedly any fool can follow one (unless it’s one of Heston Blumenthal’s, in which case I need about three days and the patience of a hermit) but the simple, unavoidable truth is recipes don’t work. There. I have said it. Someone had to. I realise this places me at odds with a multi-million-pound branch of the publishing industry, but it’s true. I would say that around three-quarters of all the recipes I have ever followed in my life have had one or more flaws, whether it’s been oven temperatures; missing steps; cooking times; the order in which ingredients are incorporated; quantities; or even the ingredients themselves. Even when I follow Jamie Oliver recipes to the letter I seem to end up with burnt garlic before I have even begun. My mum has condemned Nigel Slater out of hand on the grounds of a chocolate brownie recipe that refused to work twice. Alistair Little’s Keep it Simple should, in my view, be outlawed under the Trade Descriptions Act. I’ve tried Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s recipe for spaetzle twice and both times ended up with something that looked like a by-product from the construction industry. And you don’t need to spend too much time in foodie Internet chat rooms to discover that many find Nigella’s recipes somewhat ‘vague’. I will probably find myself battered to death with a spatula in a dark restaurant back alley for saying this, but have you ever tried to follow an Elizabeth David recipe? I find them infuriating! And all of this goes double for books about baking, which is a discipline notorious for requiring precise measurements and instructions, and is far more susceptible to the environment you are working in. Following a recipe is like building a house without adequate foundations, architectural plans or professional builders. In the dark.
When you think about it, the failings of recipe books are inevitable. It is not the writers’ fault. In fact, I do believe that most cookbooks are written with the best intentions at heart (and in all of the above cases, I am sure they are), usually by highly skilled cooks, and their recipes are properly tested, but how can Delia or Jamie or Heston possibly know the exact condition, size, ripeness, tenderness or colour of the ingredients you will be using? How can they know how efficient your oven is or how cold your fridge is? How can they know how thick your frying pan is, or the quality of meat you are using? How does Delia know that you should leave tomatoes in boiling water for a minute, as she suggests, to shed their skins – what if they are particularly ripe? You’ll be left with a mush. How do they know the temperature of your kitchen, or whether you like to cook with a window open, that your Kenwood has seen better days and doesn’t quite whisk with the gusto it once had, or that your grill is so caked in grime that it can barely muster half the heat it ought to?
And these are merely the issues that plague the well-written, thoroughly tested recipe books. What about all those hastily cobbled together recipes in the back of women’s magazines and the Sunday supplements, or all those dodgy postings on the Internet, on blogs and notice boards that many home cooks have started to use more and more? You really have to have your wits about you if you venture into cyberspace for cooking instructions.
Some times recipes do work, of course, but those occasions are, I suspect, more to do with a blessed alignment of the culinary planets than any rigorous intent on the part of the cookbook writer. But even when recipes do work, cookbooks rarely, if ever, empower you to cook. It took me years of harrowing kitchen failures to realise this, but a proper cook knows techniques rather than formulas; a proper cook can look at a plate of raw ingredients and conjure an infinite repertoire of dishes. A proper cook, I eventually convinced myself, needs just one cookery book: Auguste Escoffier’s Ma Cuisine.
Though he died in 1935, Escoffier is still remembered as the ‘king of chefs and the chef of kings’, and chefs regard him as the culinary oracle. I bought a copy of Ma Cuisine, the bible of classical French cooking, and had a look at some of the recipes. A short while later, disorientated and confused, I carefully placed the book on the shelf in the kitchen, next to my copy of Pukka Tukka. I would return periodically to Ma Cuisine, cautiously, as if it were an unexploded bomb, open it at a random page and within minutes feel a piercing migraine coming on. It was one thing, it seemed, to be able to whip up monkfish wrapped in prosciutto à la Jamie or even one of Delia’s twice-baked soufflés, but quite another to assemble even the simplest of Escoffier’s dishes. Take foie de veau sauté à la bordelaise: for this ‘simple’ calves’ liver with tomato sauce there are no fewer than nine cross references to other recipes that make up its constituent parts, many with their own cross references to other constituent recipes, and all involving roasting bones, reducing stocks, trussing, demi-glace this, timbales of that and quite possibly suédoise of the other. Maddening, daunting and, to my eyes, impossible. They were recipes, but not as I understood the concept.
For a while I simply lived with this new found insight into my culinary ignorance, assimilating it together with all the rest of my limitations, like being rubbish at DIY and anagrams. But food is so much more important than shelving and my amateurishness gnawed away at me every time I reached for Delia. The praise of dinner guests, who genuinely believed I was a decent cook, rang hollow. I wasn’t a decent cook, I was a worthless fraud. A foodie-by-numbers, join-the-dots chef merely able to follow a few simple instructions to produce dishes that were probably being served at middle-class dinner tables from Oslo to Oxford to Ohio, and everywhere else that had fallen under the tyrannical yoke of the TV chef.
Like many foodies weaned on TV chefs, I had grown bored with their insistence that food be fast, easy and cheap to make. I wanted more from my cooking – I didn’t want simple and quick, I wanted complex and slow. I was tired of throwing a tray of hastily tossed fish and herbs in the oven for fifteen minutes; tired of salads that took ten minutes to prepare; tired of couscous and pasta; bored with ‘tear it up and bung it in’ cooking. It seemed to me that all the TV food shows were aimed at people who didn’t like to cook. But what about those of us who were willing to put in the hours?
A couple more years passed with many more epiphanies in great restaurants. What were the secrets of this alchemy that had me happily handing out wads of notes for the briefest of sensations? Why couldn’t I do these things at home? Why did my wine reductions always taste of vinegar no matter how hard I stared at them while they were simmering, and why did my foie gras disintegrate if I so much as let it glimpse a frying pan? How could I possibly pass judgement on the work of top chefs from a position of such indefensible ignorance?
The word ‘indefensible’ is a clue. It’s all very well for Gordon Ramsay to lambast another chef’s cauliflower soup, or for Ian McKellen to pour scorn on someone else’s Iago, but how could I summon the gall to pronounce upon the technique of a professional chef working in a Michelin-starred kitchen?
By learning to become a professional chef myself, and then by going to work in a Michelin-starred kitchen, that’s how.
Over a period of a couple of months a plan began to form. I would quit my non-existent job; we would cash in our savings; sell the car, the house and my set of Jamie Oliver non-stick frying pans (which always seemed to boil rather than fry my food); and move to Paris where I would learn to cook like a professional. As plans go it was reckless, short-sighted, high risk and virtually guaranteed to end in catastrophe. Thinking about it, perhaps ‘plan’ was too strong a word. I did some research, talked to some chefs and food writers I knew, and found out that the best place to do this was the Cordon Bleu cookery school, the world-renowned bastion of classical French cooking. The school had developed from a cookery magazine founded in Paris in 1895 and is named after the blue ribbon from which the sixteenth-century knights of the Order of the Holy Spirit suspended the distinctive cross that symbolised their order. More potent, as far as I was concerned, was the fact that the school has a direct link with Escoffier, via Henri-Paul Pellaprat, the author of L’Art Culinaire Moderne, who taught there for thirty-two years and worked with Escoffier to codify French cuisine in a form that remains relevant to this day. One could even say that Le Cordon Bleu invented the TV cookery format we know and love with chefs demonstrating techniques and dishes to an audience of enthusiasts: the first demo being held in rooms close to the Palais Royal in January 1896. Other claims to fame include teaching American food icons Julia Child and Dione Lucas to cook, not to mention Jacques Chirac and Dustin Hoffman. The school also invented Coronation Chicken for the banquet to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
There are now twenty-five Cordon Bleu schools around the world, but the Culinary Arts Programme at the Paris school on rue Léon Delhomme in the fifteenth arrondissement remains the flagship course. The Cuisine Diplôme Le Cordon Bleu would be my goal. Over nine months, in exchange for a sum of money about which I am still in denial, the school promises to turn students into classical French chefs, fully versed in the various techniques of French cookery and able to create dishes from scratch, and to present them to a professional standard.
This was only the first part of my master plan. Other than being able to prepare impressively complex dinners for friends, there seemed little point in going to all the trouble and expense of learning how to cook to a professional standard without at least a trial run of my skills. My aim, after graduating (should I make it that far), was to go to work in a top Parisian restaurant – ideally one with a Michelin star which, though a flawed way to judge a restaurant, is still a fair indication of a quality kitchen. This, and only this, would offer a true test of my skills, and banish my critic’s guilt for ever. And, of course, there was always the possibility that it might lead me to an entirely new career . . .
Though you wouldn’t guess it from her appearance, my wife Lissen can eat and drink me under the table. I suspect this has something to do with her Viking genes (she is Danish). Her hearty appetite, as well as her love of Paris would, I hoped, persuade her to go along with this reckless plan. And I was right. She said yes in a heartbeat.
I hurled Gary Rhodes into the fire and Lissen threw on the last of the hundreds of recipes I had torn from the pages of the Sunday supplements over the years. Only one book, Ma Cuisine, remained and, back inside the house, as the others began to clean up the mess from the dinner I had made earlier, I placed it in the last of the removal boxes.
Tomorrow we would leave for Paris and a new home, lifestyle and perhaps even career. My plans included not just learning to cook, but also improving my French and exploring the culinary temptations of Paris – finding the best restaurants and markets, the finest bakers, butchers and chocolatiers. It was as noble a way of jeopardising the security and well-being of my family as I could think of.
In Paris one is always reminded of being a foreigner.
Roman Polanski
Having cleared away the last flakes of singed cookery book from the patio, packed the last cuddly toy in the last straining suitcase and bidden an anxious farewell to the final boxes for storage, Lissen, Asger, aged four, and Emil, sixteen months, and I set off for France. Asger would be starting at a new school with a new language; Lissen would be adjusting to a life away from her friends and network; and Emil would have a whole host of new, well-meaning elderly ladies to alarm with his tiger impression while out shopping.
A couple of months earlier, Lissen and I had spent two days in Paris trying to find a new home and a school for Asger. The former had turned out to be a classic chicken and egg situation in which the chickens were required to offer evidence of nationality, marriage, regular income and grandparents’ debt profiles, while the eggs kept losing all the paperwork. In short, to get an apartment, we needed to have a resident’s bank account and to get a resident’s bank account . . . you’re ahead of me. Other people’s bureaucratic nightmares are never terribly interesting, so I will spare you the details of what became a protracted campaign, except to say that, if my life depended on it, given the chance, I would have chosen to solve the Gordian knot blindfolded, using a barge pole held between my teeth, rather than deal with the demands of the BNP Paribas.
Happily, Lissen has an extraordinary knack of finding choice apartments. Wherever we have moved, within a few days she has been able to source – by sheer willpower, I think – a spacious, quiet, practical place with the view everyone wants, for a peppercorn rent. Despite having seen her do this on four separate occasions during our time together, I still wasn’t taking anything for granted. I’d heard about the virtual impossibility of finding a place to live in Paris, with all those stories of queues of prospective tenants in their best suits with bulging files containing a lifetime’s paperwork beneath their arms, picketing apartments barely fit for cattle. So I had arranged for us to see fifteen apartments in five different arrondissements within forty-eight hours, planning our schedule down to the minute, including lengthy lunch breaks, breaks for snacks and dinner reservations. Lissen, meanwhile, flicked casually through Le Figaro, found an ad that sounded interesting, and left a message on the estate agent’s answerphone.
Fifteen stables later we were heading back to our hotel room prior to flying home early the next morning, when Lissen’s phone rang. It was the agent, a Madame Raffarin, responding to her message. Were we interested in viewing the apartment on Avenue Marceau? The only other remotely habitable apartment we had seen had been one overlooking the railway lines behind Gare Saint-Lazare with an overpowering fragrance of rancid fat, traumatic stains in the bath and a transvestite hooker stationed outside the front door. So, interested we were, particularly when we discovered that Avenue Marceau is one of the spokes that radiate from the Arc de Triomphe – the next one, clockwise, from the Champs-Elysées in fact.
It turned out to be a classic, broad, Hausmannian avenue leading down to the river, the camouflaged trunks of its serried plane trees screening dignified fin de siècle, six-storey apartment blocks. It makes up one side of the so-called ‘golden triangle’ of Paris, which together with the Champs-Elysées and Avenue Montaigne corrals most of France’s top fashion houses. As with much of central Paris, these apartments were built in the late-nineteenth century from that soft, warm, white limestone which ranges in subtle shades from ‘uncooked dough’ to ‘well-cooked biscuit’ – a magical masonry that seems to soak up light during the day, suffusing the city with an bewitching glow at dawn and dusk.
I knew that a handful of the world’s finest restaurants lay within walking distance; restaurants whose kitchens were run, if not under the constant supervision, then at least under the periodic monitoring eye of some of the most accomplished and esteemed chefs of the past half century – such as Alain Ducasse, the first man ever to have three triple Michelin-starred restaurants to his name; Joël Robuchon, one of the pioneers of nouvelle cuisine and widely considered the greatest of all French chefs; and the molecular magician, Pierre Gagnaire. There was the small matter of an average bill of two hundred euro per person for the privilege of eating their food, but I would worry about that another day.
As we strode up the avenue to our appointment I caught tantalising glimpses of chocolatiers, boucheries and boulangers in side streets, as well as another brief, equally auspicious sighting: Roman Polanski’s impressively thick, greying, coiffed hair disappearing into a doorway (he lives on nearby Avenue Montaigne – the street with the highest density of trout-pout plastic surgery victims and perfumed Pekinese in the world).
Excitement turned to embarrassing levels of fawning desperation on my part – Lissen, being more used to this kind of thing, kept relatively cool – as Madame Raffarin, tall, grey-haired and trussed tight in a gold-buttoned Chanel jacket, showed us in through the front door of the apartment block and into a lavish marble entrance hall. Passing a statue of Aphrodite in an alcove just in front of the concierge’s ground-floor residence (a concierge!), we crammed into a three-person lift for a clanking ride to the third floor. There, the lift opened onto a deep, wine-red carpet, before wide, wooden doors (actually metal, painted to look like wood) filleted with metal lattice grills. Madame Raffarin unlocked the doors and stood aside.
It required just a glance at the dark, aged parquet flooring, gilded mirrors, high, stuccoed ceilings, and antique furniture for us to realise that this was the fantasy Parisian apartment we had never dared imagine we might find. Lissen’s shamanistic real-estate mojo had provided for us again.
We were told the apartment belonged to a Madame de Laurent (the ‘de’ prefix being a telltale of the French nobility). Many of her family’s objets and paintings remained. The dining room was lined with shelves of dusty antique books. In the living room hung a vast oil painting of a sun-dappled country estate, with a bay-windowed chateau in the background and, presumably, de Laurent’s ancestors – the women dressed in voluminous crinolines, the men in top hats – frolicking in the foreground. Opposite was a print, dated 1783, of a fruity, bewigged gentleman – the Comte de Saint-Germain, a Célèbre Alchimiste, according to the inscription below. Each room had a marble fireplace. The Persian rugs and velvet curtains were faded and threadbare in parts and the place clearly hadn’t seen a lick of paint since de Gaulle was in office, but this only served to make it less of a museum and more of a potential family home.
Slightly less impressive was the kitchen which, typically of apartments like this, was stark and stuck at the end of a corridor. That said, given the general standard of French domestic kitchens this one was a veritable showroom. Most kitchens I’ve seen in France have been museum pieces, with Formica worktops, Abigail’s Party-era decor and patterned linoleum floors. I’d seen better equipped kitchens in camper vans. Based on this discovery I had developed a theory about the state of a nation’s kitchens being inversely related to the quality of their cuisine. America and Britain have among the least enviable culinary traditions in the world, despite, or perhaps as a result of, lavishing extraordinary amounts of money and attention on their kitchens. Meanwhile, the domestic kitchens I have seen in, say, Thailand, Italy and France, have often been little more than makeshift galleys. Nevertheless, in these unprepossessing environments have flourished three of the world’s greatest cuisines. There are exceptions – Eskimos have both dire cooking facilities and a particularly unappealing cuisine (including, as I understand it, one dish in which they bury a dead seal and leave it to fester before eating it) – but I still hold it to be broadly true that, while we coo over the ice-making function of our Smeg fridges and our matching lipstick-red Kitchenaid mixer, the French just get on with making really good food.
At least this kitchen was reasonably well equipped. The day before, we had seen one with just a two-ring hob, no oven and two heavily tarnished SNCF mugs. Evidence that a previous resident had been a keen cook included a ricer – an implement resembling a makeshift hurdy gurdy – and a mandolin, for the thin slicing of fingertips. A definite sign, I felt, that the apartment should be ours.
But it was not our apartment quite yet.
Lissen and I walked around in silence, passing surreptitious, wide-eyed glances, and trying not to look in any way deviant. To calm down I walked over to the living-room window to check out the view. I could clearly see the top half of the Eiffel Tower to the left; to the right was the Arc de Triomphe; while more significantly, across the street below I spied a grand-looking boulangerie and chocolatier. I squeaked involuntarily and beckoned Lissen over. She followed the direction of my furious nodding, raised her eyebrows slightly, and then turned back to Madame Raffarin who was asking us something about the rent and the terms.
Were we smokers? What? Us? Did we play any musical instruments? Never! We of course had documentary evidence of regular income totalling three times the rent? Um. And references from previous landlords, as well as a letter from our employers and bank verifying we were who we said we were? Erm. And we had no problem blocking out a year’s rent in advance as a caution (a uniquely Draconian form of housing deposit locked into an independent bank account for the duration of the lease)? Ah, that. Well . . .
We, of course, had none of this.
But my mind was already racing ahead to visions of warm croissants for breakfast, fresh cream cakes at teatime and intermittent flans nature (addictive vanilla custard tarts, served in slices so thick and heavy you can literally feel them bringing your metabolism to a grinding halt as you digest them) throughout the day. I saw glamorous, candle-lit soirées where I offered witty bon mots and elaborate canapés to sophisticated Parisian women in slinky cocktail dresses while their husbands scowled jealously. Then I thought a bit more about the cakes.
I wandered out into the hallway connecting to the bedrooms and bathroom where, hanging on the wall, was a series of fourteen sombre prints depicting the death and funeral of Napoleon. As an omen for a prospective English tenant did this cancel out the ricer? In the master bedroom there was a nineteenth-century oil painting of a North African man, replete with fez and gold brocade tunic, fighting to control a rearing, white stallion beneath a stormy sky. The horse’s nostrils were flared in rage as its front legs pawed the air. I imagined a similar reaction from Madame Raffarin once she discovered we were hopelessly out of our depth, but returned to the living room to find Lissen explaining our situation and pledging to have the necessary paperwork on her desk within three days.
The demands, not to mention the rent, were so beyond our means that they entered the realm of the ridiculous (though, the truth was, by Paris standards it was a fair price). Perhaps I could sell some stories while I was in Paris; Lissen, who is a singer, might get some more gigs; or, failing that, we could send Asger and Emil down to the corner of the Champs-Elysées to perform their – actually quite accomplished – rendition of the ‘Me Ol’ Bamboo’ routine, from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The next two weeks were especially tense as we struggled to negotiate our way through a quagmire of paperwork and juggle our finances. But then, suddenly, the lines of communication went dead. Madame Raffarin stopped replying to emails, every time we phoned we got her voicemail; faxes remained unanswered. We feared the worst, discussed those scenarios in detail (maybe the transvestite prostitute would be up for a bit of babysitting?), and did a great deal of deep sighing while gazing into the middle distance. We were due to move to Paris within two weeks.
Then, as if emerging from a long tunnel, Madame Raffarin’s mobile came back into service. She had been on holiday but neglected to tell anyone. Yes, everything with the apartment was fine; she would send the contracts the same day. A week later we were in, our few possessions unpacked and distributed where their presence would cause the least offence to the rest of the furniture.
We hit the streets of Paris early the next bright, hot August day, intent on acquainting ourselves with our neighbourhood and neighbours . . . only to discover that there were no neighbours, and the neighbourhood was closed for business. The only signs of life were the police guards outside the Spanish embassy next door. The whole of Paris, particularly those who live in the eighth and sixteenth arrondissements on whose borders we lived, were on holiday for the entire month, as is the case every August in Paris. It was as if we had turned up early for a party only to find that the hosts hadn’t even returned from shopping for Pringles and plastic beakers.
Our apartment building was empty, too, but for the concierge, Madame Bauvais, a short, smiley, dark haired woman in her early fifties with a penchant for floral print blouses, A-line skirts and with her hair permanently in curlers. She took an instant liking to Asger and Emil’s chubby cheeks and, in a lengthy speech of which we understood but a fraction, welcomed us to Paris.
The gourmand has only a belly, whereas the gastronome has a brain.
Pierre Larousse
In the first couple of weeks we revisited Paris’ greatest hits: the Louvre, the Rodin Museum, the Sacré Coeur, Notre-Dame and so on. Unfortunately these sightseeing trips followed a pattern determined more by child wrangling requirements than gourmet exploration. While Lissen prepared the kids to go out, I would bury myself in guidebooks trying to find a good restaurant for lunch. Once at the museum, or wherever, we would spend about half an hour looking at stuff before I would start to get fidgety, worrying that, as we hadn’t made a reservation, the restaurant would be full. Something else would then catch Lissen’s eye and we would spend another half an hour looking at more stuff before I finally persuaded her to leave. But then, more torment, as the kids would need to run around and let off steam which meant that when we finally arrived at the cosy-looking bistro it would be packed with greedy, smug locals. I would stand grimacing anxiously in the open doorway just long enough to catch a whiff of roasting meats and simmering sauces and glimpse a dessert cabinet resplendent with glossy chocolate tarts and float-away peach soufflés. We would usually end up seated on a torn vinyl banquette, beneath plastic plants, in some smoky, sparsely populated brasserie choosing from a menu that would, over the next couple of weeks, become drearily familiar – salad niçoise, confit de canard or steak au poivre and tarte tatin – while a row of paint-stained workmen stood eyeing us suspiciously from the bar. Worst of all, it usually ended up costing virtually the same as the end-of-the rainbow bistro.
This was not a good start. It was, it seemed, remarkably easy to eat badly in Paris. The first lesson, then, was this: good food required good planning.
At least the markets were open to all. Our local turned out to be the Wednesday and Saturday morning market on Avenue President Wilson at the bottom of Avenue Marceau. Large supermarkets are banned from central Paris, which can be infuriating if you are in a hurry. But for me a good French market is Disneyland, the Louvre, a Caribbean beach and a bungee jump all wrapped up in one: pleasure, art, relaxation and stimulation. From the first stall, Lorenzo’s, the best fish stall in Paris, its icy scree resplendent with writhing crabs, hillocks of crusty oysters and alien sea urchins; on past the bounteous fruit and vegetable stalls; the compelling viscera of the butchers’ glass cabinets; acres of cheeses, flowers and breads; until I eventually emerged back into daylight an hour later, the outside world was banished. I was transported. This, I thought to myself, reflecting on years of shopping in English and Danish supermarkets, must be how early-eighteenth-century explorers felt when they finally arrived at some south Pacific island after months at sea with nothing but maggoty ship’s biscuits and their own urine for sustenance.
But a good French market can be overwhelming the first few times you visit. Why are there crowds by one vegetable stall, yet another is deserted? Which fish stall is the freshest, and can their fish really be this expensive? And what on earth is that grey, spongy stuff in the butcher’s cabinet? Slowly, through experience and, later, the tutoring of experts, I began to learn a few of the tricks of a successful trip. The first rule I figured out for myself early on, which was, to get the best service, to get the personal recommendations about which pâté to taste or what cheese is in season, or the odd bunch of complimentary parsley (or on one occasion a whole, ghostly white calf’s foot), I had to patronise no more than a handful of stallholders – one from each category of fish, fowl, meat, veg, fruit and dairy, plus the Lebanese stall that sold a terrific sharp, fresh white bean salsa. (I soon learned never to buy bread from the market as it was not as fresh as the boulanger’s). It was no good skipping from one stall to another picking up a head of broccoli here, a punnet of strawberries there, as if in the opening titles of a Mary Tyler Moore sitcom. If you want to be treated with any respect you need to demonstrate your loyalty to specific stallholders, dropping ten or twenty euro every week with the same people.
A good place to start was Jöel Thiebault’s vegetable stall, also reputedly the best in Paris, where they sell ancient varieties of carrots in various, non-orange colours; gnarled, chunky tomatoes as big as grapefruit; rainbow-coloured turnips; and purple broccoli. Thiebault’s family has sold vegetables grown on its farm in Carrières-sur-Seine here since 1873 and its staff, each of whom has the looks of a movie star, have perfected the art of ignoring customers, confident that Thiebault’s vegetables are so renowned – he is named on the menus of many of the restaurants he supplies – that they will endure an eternity to buy them.
It took time for the stallholders to get to know me. In fact, it was about a month before they acknowledged my existence at all and several times I petulantly walked away from stalls that ignored me (spiting only myself – French stallholders, like the shopkeepers, aren’t overly troubled by mundane rituals of commerce such as the exchange of money). The first few times I attempted to buy something I would stand in line; be ignored as regulars were dealt with before me; until, finally the stallholder allowed me to catch his eye for a moment. I would launch into a carefully rehearsed request, in French, closing my eyes in order to concentrate better, only to open them and find the stallholder had been distracted by a passing acquaintance. When he returned I was forced to repeat my request. This was my first encounter with the red-faced man with the spectacular comb-over and gruesomely stained apron, whom I now like to think of as ‘my chicken man’.
Peeved at not having been taken for a serious shopper, instead of pointing at his cheapest chickens, I pointed to the ones from Bresse. Bresse chickens are generally held to be the finest in France, quite possibly the world. These elegant, white-feathered, blue-legged birds are the only fowl to carry the French food quality mark, the Appellation d’Origine Controlée (AOC). They are raised under strict quality controls – corn fed, and free to roam the lush local grassland in Bourg-en-Bresse close to the Jura Mountains in eastern France. Most supermarket chickens are killed at around six weeks but Bresse chickens are allowed to roam free for sixteen weeks before being dispatched. As a result, their meat, though tougher than a battery chicken’s, is firm and dark and much more tasty. The nineteenth-century French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin called them ‘the queen of poultry and the poultry of kings’. Like Thiebault’s vegetables, Bresse chickens are mentioned by name on some of the finest menus in the world; they are the divas of the chicken world. Needless to say, they cost a packet. Right, I thought, this’ll show him I’m not some fly-by-night tourist (though what a tourist would be doing with a raw chicken is a moot point). Rather satisfyingly Chicken Man actually did a double take, raising his chin slightly in the air and narrowing his eyes doubtfully. Was I sure I wanted this one? Yes, quite sure, thank you.
It was over twenty euro. That’ll teach him! I marched triumphantly up Avenue Marceau with my prize; ruined it in the oven that evening (Bresse chickens are better gently poached, I later discovered); and had to promise never, ever to spend that much money on a chicken again.
Blowing the cost of a decent bistro lunch on a bird is just one of numerous rash purchases I felt compelled to make to gain the respect of the Avenue President Wilson stallholders. Others included an entire, fresh, vacuum-packed duck liver that, at the time, I hadn’t the faintest clue what to do with; a cheese that was borderline toxic and necessitated a full-blown fridge clear-out after it had gone; and a root vegetable that I still have yet to identify. But gradually I perceived a change. At my fruit stall, when I chose a melon and passed it to the stallholder, he asked me when I planned to eat it. ‘The weekend,’ I replied. He sniffed the melon, squeezed it, shook his head and swapped it for another. I knew that, likewise, there were degrees of ripeness for Camembert, but I was still taken aback by the cheese woman’s careful selection of one ‘for next week’. She must have inspected about half a dozen before deciding on the optimum example, not just squeezing them, but kneading them with the serious intent of a reflexologist probing for a wonky metatarsal. The acceptance of the President Wilson stallholders, signalled by a smile, or even a jokey admonishment when I walked past without buying something, felt like a personal endorsement of my shopping discernment.
I appreciate the cheek of adding recipes in something trumpeting itself as an antidote to the tyranny of cookery books but these are all very free-form recipes, more suggestions really – and you are of course free to add or subtract ingredients. In many later instances the recipes in this book are a good way of demonstrating a technique I’ve learned that you might find interesting (though not in this case, as it requires no technique at all).
Between arriving in Paris and the start of my education I had no culinary guidance whatsoever. I grew desperate and invented this vegetable bake after one of my early scattergun market splurges. I think I was in a stage of Jamie Oliver withdrawal or something, so it is a bit of a mess (the chefs at Le Cordon Bleu would be appalled), but it’s a great lunch or weekday supper to have when no one’s looking.
Ingredients (Serves 4)
Some oil – olive, peanut, sunflower, doesn’t really matter
1 aubergine, cut into slices about the same thickness as a paperback of The Old Man and the Sea
1 fennel bulb, sliced about a bit. You’re supposed to peel the stringy bits, but I never do
Some garlic cloves (optional)
1 or 2 onions (or a few shallots), each sliced into bite-sized wedges
Thyme and rosemary (dried is as good, if not better in this instance, than fresh)
About 6 tomatoes. First remove their cores with a paring knife, then remove the skin by scoring a cross on their underside, placing them in boiling water, counting to ten or so (longer if they are less ripe – watch for the skins to start to peel), cooling them immediately in cold – preferably iced – water, and then peeling. You then de-seed them simply by halving the tomatoes horizontally (not to be pedantic, but I later learned that it doesn’t work if you halve them top to bottom as some of the seed cells will remain intact), and then squeeze them as you would lemon halves. Then quarter into ‘petals
Some slices of Bayonne or Parma or any thin-sliced, air-dried ham