Gourmet Rhapsody Read online

  She had picked it, that particular one among all the others, she had not hesitated for an instant. I have since learned that this is what makes for excellence, this impression of ease and certainty in an instance where we know that it actually takes centuries of experience, a will of iron and the discipline of a monk. Where did Aunt Marthe derive her science from—a science made up of hydrometry, solar radiation, biological maturation, photosynthesis, geodesic orientations and many other factors that my ignorance will not venture to enumerate? For what an ordinary human might know from experience and reflection, she knew instinctively. Her acute discernment swept over the surface of the vegetable garden and measured its climate in a microsecond that no ordinary perception of time could detect—and she knew. She knew as surely and with the same nonchalance as if I had said, The weather is fine, she knew which of these little red globes had to be picked now. In her dirty hand, deformed by work in the fields, there it sat: crimson in its taut silken finery, undulating with the occa­sional more tender hollow, with a communicable cheerfulness about it like a plumpish woman in her party dress hoping to compensate for the inconvenience of her extra pounds by means of a disarming chubbiness evoking an irresistible desire to bite into her flesh. Sprawled on the bench beneath the linden tree, lulled by the low murmuring of the leaves, I woke from a voluptuous nap, and beneath this canopy of sugary honey I bit into the fruit, I bit into the tomato.

  In salads, baked, in ratatouille, in preserves, grilled, stuffed, cherry, candied, big and soft, green and acidic, honored with olive oil or coarse salt or wine or sugar or hot pepper, crushed, peeled, in a sauce, in a stew, in a foam, even in a sorbet: I thought I had thoroughly covered the matter and on more than one occasion I wrote pieces inspired by the greatest chefs’ menus claiming that I had penetrated its secret. What an idiot, what a pity . . . I invented mysteries where there were none, in order to justify my perfectly pathetic métier. What is writing, no matter how lavish the pieces, if it says nothing of the truth, cares little for the heart, and is merely subservient to the pleasure of showing one’s brilliance? And yet I had always been acquainted with the tomato, since the time of Aunt Marthe’s garden, since the summer when an ever more ardent sun kissed the timid little growths, since the moment my teeth tore into the flesh to splatter my tongue with the rich, warm and bountiful juice, whose essential generosity is masked by the chill of a refrigerator, or the affront of vinegar, or the false nobility of oil. Sugar, water, fruit, pulp, liquid or solid? The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one’s mouth that brings with it every pleasure. The resistance of the skin—slightly taut, just enough; the luscious yield of the tissues, their seed-filled liqueur oozing to the corners of one’s lips, and that one wipes away without any fear of staining one’s fingers; this plump little globe unleashing a flood of nature inside us: a tomato, an adventure.

  Beneath the hundred-year-old linden, between perfume and palate, I would bite into the plump purple globes that Aunt Marthe had brought me with the vague sensation that I was in the presence of a capital truth. A capital truth—but one which, still, is not the one I seek now at the gates of death. It has been decreed that on this morning I shall drink my despair to the dregs, for I have strayed from the place to which my heart is calling. The raw tomato, no, that is not yet what I have been searching for . . . and now another raw delight has entered my thoughts.

  (Violette)

  Rue de Grenelle, the Kitchen

  Poor Madame. To see her like this, a real suffering soul, she just doesn’t know what to do anymore. It’s true he’s really in a bad way . . . I didn’t recognize him! How you can change in a day, I’d no idea. Violette, said Madame, some food he’s after, you understand, something he’s after but he doesn’t know what. At first I didn’t understand. Some food he’s after, Madame, well does he want it or not? He’s searching, searching, something that would make him feel good, she answered, but he can’t find it. And she was wringing her hands, what is he thinking, to get all worked up over some dish when you’re about to die; if I were going to die tomorrow, you can be sure I wouldn’t be bothered about eating!

  I do everything here. Well, almost everything. When I first started here thirty years ago, it was as a cleaning lady. Madame and Monsieur had only just gotten married, they had some property, I think, but not a whole lot, all the same. Just enough to hire a cleaning lady three times a week. The money came later, lots of money, I could see it was happening very quickly and that they expected there would be more and more money, because they moved into this big apartment, the same one we’re in today, and Madame started doing a lot of work on the place, she was very cheerful, she was happy, you could tell, and she was so pretty! So once Monsieur was firmly established in his career they hired other servants and Madame kept me on as a “housekeeper,” with better pay, full time, to “supervise” the others: the cleaning woman, the butler, the gardener (there’s only a large terrace, but the gardener always finds things to do, in fact he’s my husband, so there will always be a job for him). Mind now, don’t go thinking this isn’t work, I run around all day, I have my inventories to draw up, lists, orders to give, and while I don’t want to act all important, if I weren’t here, frankly, nothing would run smoothly in this house.

  I do like Monsieur. I know he’s got his faults, and one of them is that he’s made poor Madame so unhappy, not just today but right from the start, always off somewhere, always coming back and never asking for any news, looking at her as if she were transparent and giving her presents the way you give someone a tip. Not to mention the children. I wonder if Laura will come. I used to think, before, that when he got old everything would work out, that he’d end up being more gentle, and then grandchildren are supposed to reconcile parents with their children, you can’t resist. Of course, Laura doesn’t have any children. But still. You’d think she’d come . . .

  I like Monsieur for two reasons. First, because he has always been polite and kind with me, and with Bernard my husband as well. More polite and kind than with his wife and kids. That’s the way he is, well-mannered enough to say, “Good morning, Violette, how are you today? Is your son feeling better?” but he hasn’t said good morning to his wife for twenty years. The worst of it is that he seems sincere, with his big, loud, kindly voice, he’s not proud, no, not at all, he’s always very courteous with us. And he looks at me, and he pays attention to what I say to him, and he smiles because I’m always in a good mood, always busy doing something, I never rest and I know he’s listening to my answers because he answers me too when I question him in return: “And you, Sir, how are you this morning?” “Fine, fine, Violette, but I’m behind with my work and it’s not getting any better, I’ve got to get going,” and he winks at me before he disappears down the corridor. Now, he wouldn’t be like that with his wife. He likes people like us, Monsieur does, he prefers us, you can tell. I think he feels more at ease with us than with all those upper crust sorts he hangs around with: you can tell he’s glad he can please them and impress them, stuff them full of food and watch them listening to him, but he doesn’t like them; it’s not his world.

  The second reason I like Monsieur, it’s kind of hard to put in words . . . it’s because he farts in bed! The first time I heard it, I couldn’t figure out what it was I’d heard, so to speak . . . And then it happened again, it was seven in the morning, it came from the corridor to the little salon where Monsieur sometimes slept when he came home late at night, a sort of detonation, a false note, but I mean really loud; I’d never heard anything like it! And then I understood, and I couldn’t stop laughing, I laughed till I cried. I was bent over double, I had a bellyache, but at least I had the presence of mind to go to the kitchen, I sat down on a bench, I thought I’d never catch my breath! From that day on I’ve felt particularly well-disposed toward Monsieur, yes, well-disposed, because my husband farts in bed, too (but not as loud, all the sa
me). A man who farts in bed, my grandmother used to say, is a man who loves life. And then, too, I don’t know: it made me feel closer to him . . .

  I know exactly what it is that Monsieur wants. It’s not a dish, it’s not something to eat. It’s the lovely blonde lady who came here twenty years ago with a sad look on her face, a very gentle lady, very elegant, and she asked me, “Is Monsieur at home?” And I answered, “No, but Madame is here.” She raised an eyebrow, I could tell she was surprised, and then she turned on her heel and I never saw her again, but I’m sure there was something between them and that if he didn’t love his wife it was because he was missing the tall blonde lady in the fur coat.

  Raw

  Rue de Grenelle, the Bedroom

  To return is to discover perfection. That is why only decadent civilizations are susceptible to the return: it is in Japan, where refinement has attained un­equalled heights, at the heart of a millennial culture that has given hu­manity its greatest contributions, that the return to raw food, in its latest manifestation, has been possible. It is at the heart of old Europe—like my own self, endlessly dying—that for the first time since prehistory people have been eating raw meat seasoned with a mere sprinkling of spices.

  Raw food. One would be wrong to believe that this involves nothing more than the coarse consumption of unprepared matter! Slicing into raw fish is like cutting into stone. To a novice a block of marble seems monolithic. If you try to place your chisel at random and strike a blow, the tool will jump out of your hands, while the stone will preserve its integrity, unaffected. A good marble worker knows his material. He senses where the cut—which already exists, just waiting to be revealed—will yield to his blow, and he has already divined, to the nearest millimeter, the figure that will be drawn forth, a figure which only the uninformed might impute to the will of the sculptor. No, on the contrary, the sculptor merely unveils the shape—for talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.

  The Japanese chefs of my acquaintance only became masters in the art of raw fish after years of apprenticeship, where the cartography of flesh was gradually brought to light. It is true that some people already have the gift, can feel beneath their fingers the fault lines along which the offered creature shall be transformed into delectable sashimi, of the sort only experts know how to exhume from the tasteless entrails of the fish. But they do not become artists for all that until they have mastered their innate talent, and learned that instinct alone cannot suffice: they will also need agility in slicing, discernment in determining what is best, and strength of character to reject anything that is mediocre. The chef Tsuno, the greatest of them all, was known to take from a gigantic salmon only a single tiny piece that seemed a paltry amount. In this matter, in fact, abundance is meaningless: perfection orders everything. A tiny fragment of fresh flesh, on its own, naked, raw: perfect.

  I knew him when he was already advanced in years, when he had deserted his own kitchen and would observe the customers from behind the bar, without ever touching a plate. Once in a great while, however, in honor of a guest or a particular occasion, he would return to his work—but only for sashimi. In his latter years these already exceptional occasions became increasingly rare, until they came to be considered extraordinary events.

  I was a young critic at the time, whose career was still a matter of promising beginnings, and I still concealed the arrogance that only later would be recognized as the mark of my genius, but which, at the time, would have come across as mere pretension. It was therefore with feigned humility that I went to sit at the Kamogawa sushi bar, alone, for a dinner that I expected to be honorable. I had never tasted any raw fish in my life, and hoped to discover a new source of pleasure. Nothing in my budding career in gastronomy had in fact prepared me for such a thing. The only word that mattered to me at the time was terroir—but today I know that a terroir only exists by virtue of one’s childhood mythology , and that if we have invented these worlds of tradition rooted deep in the land and identity of a region, it is because we want to solidify and objectify the magical, bygone years that preceded the horror of becoming an adult. Only a fanatical will to make a vanished world endure despite the passing of time can explain this belief in the existence of a terroir—an entire world that has disappeared, a mixture of flavors, smells, scattered fragrances that has left its sediment in ancestral rites and local dishes, crucibles of illusory memories that seek to make gold from sand, eternity from time. There is no great cuisine, without evolution, without erosion and forgetting. Invention must constantly be invoked upon the countertop, and past and future, here and elsewhere, raw and cooked, savory and sweet shall all be mixed, for it is this inventiveness that has made cuisine into an art that thrives untrammeled by the obsession of those who do not wish to die.

  It is no exaggeration therefore to say that between cassoulets and cabbage stew I arrived at the Kamogawa sushi bar completely innocent of any contact—but not of preconceived ideas—with Japanese cuisine. Hidden by a host of cooks, at the back to the right, was a little man slumped in a chair. The restaurant was bare, the room Spartan, the chairs basic, but a cheerful hubbub reigned, the sort you hear in places where guests are satisfied with the food and with the service. Nothing surprising. Nothing special. Why did he do it? Did he know who I was, had word of my budding reputation in the little gastronomy fraternity spread to the ears of this blasé old man? Was it for his sake? Was it for mine? What causes a mature man, who has outlived all his emotions, to revive a faltering internal flame after all, and for one last show set his vital force ablaze? What is at stake in the confrontation between a man who is abdicating and one who is conquering—is it lineage, is it renunciation? It remains a fathomless mystery: not once did he turn his gaze on me, except at the end—his eyes empty, ravaged, signifying nothing.

  When he got up off of his rickety chair, a stony silence gradually fell over the restaurant. First of all upon the cooks, who were petrified with stupor, and then, it was as if an invisible wave suddenly broke over all those present, upon the customers at the bar, then those in the room, until the silence reached those who had just come in and who stood watching the scene, dumbfounded. He had gotten up without saying a word and walked over to the counter, opposite me. The man whom earlier I had assumed was leading the team bowed briefly, a gesture filled with the absolute respect so characteristic of Asian cultures, and then he slowly stepped back, with all the others, toward the gaping kitchens, although they did not go in, but just stood there, motionless, devout. Chef Tsuno elaborated upon his composition there before me with gentle, sparing gestures, displaying an economy of movement that bordered on indigence, but I could see beneath his palm the birth and blossoming, in mother of pearl and moiré, of slivers of flesh, pink and white and gray; fascinated, I sat watching the miracle.

  It was dazzling. What would then pass through the barrier of my teeth was neither matter nor water, merely an intermediary substance that had retained of the former the texture and consistency that prevent it from evaporating into nothingness, and had borrowed from the latter the miraculous fluidity and smoothness. True sashimi is not so much bitten into as allowed to melt on the tongue. It calls for slow, supple chewing, not to bring about a change in the nature of the food but merely to allow one to savor its airy, satiny texture. Yes, it is like a fabric: sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds. The first pink mouthful to evoke such a thrill was salmon, but I had yet to try plaice, scallops, and octopus. Salmon is oily and sweet, despite its essential leanness; octopus is pure and rigorous, loath to divulge its secret liaisons to one’s bite, and then only after a long resistance. I would stare at the strange, lacy little piece of flesh before siezing upon it, all marbled pink and purple but almost black at the tip of its crenellated excrescences; I would clumsily pick it up with my chopsticks, which o
nly complied with difficulty, and place it upon my tongue—which contracted at such novel density—and I would shiver with pleasure. Between the two, between the salmon and the octopus, came the entire palette of sensations, each characterized by the same compact fluidity which places heaven on one’s tongue and makes any additional liquid, whether it is water, Kirin, or warm sake, utterly superfluous. As for the scallop, it was so light and evanescent that it slipped away the moment it arrived, but long afterward, my cheeks recalled the effects of its profound caress. Last of all came the plaice, which, mistakenly, seemed to be the most rustic of all, for it is a lemony delicacy, and its exceptional constitution is confirmed the moment one bites into it and discovers its stupefying plenitude.