Part 2 (2/2)

Allowing plenty of time before the roasting should begin, pack the stuffing lightly into the bird(s), adding some melted b.u.t.ter or cream if it seems too dry. Correct seasoning to taste, using salt and freshly ground pepper if wished.

Truss with string and skewers, according to custom and 42 42 common sense, and rub all the skin well with soft b.u.t.ter. Then weigh it, and put it in a 300-degree oven, counting between ten and twelve minutes for each pound.

It should be basted every ten or fifteen minutes, with its own juices and a warm mixture of one part b.u.t.ter, one part good olive oil, and one part sherry or vermouth. (Very sweet vermouth adds to the fine glaze....) And that was the basic formula, a kind of distillation of what a dozen cooks had hinted to me in their pages, and what I myself was hoping for. I went on from there, realizing my limitations and accepting my blessings. I found that in my electric oven I did not need to cover the birds with b.u.t.ter-soaked cloths as I would have done in a gas oven, especially if they had been older. I found that my somewhat inexpert trussing presented several little holes where I could squirt the juices from my gla.s.s baster. I found that every time I opened the oven several people wanted to look, so I added fifteen minutes to the cooking time.

I did the two birds separately, because of my small stove and because of the general enjoyment of the slow, demanding ritual. The children would drift in and out, from the vineyards or the redwood trees, to watch the ceremony and to breathe the smells, which grew by the minute into a kind of cloud of herb and orange peel and turkey-ness.

They leaned forward and then away, stunned and tempted, and the dance went on.

We took the birds up to Norah's in the back of the station wagon, past the blazing vines, and there was the long table, three different patchy shapes under the stretch of red and white cloths and three different heights, but with chairs all around it for us the diners, so varied too in shapes and heights and even purposes. One thing we all did know: we wanted to sit down together and eat and drink.

We had sipped Wente Brothers Dry Semillon all morning, slowly and peacefully. Gnats fell into it whenever we stepped outside the two little farmhouses we moved between: the vineyards and indeed the whole valley still gave off a winey, rotting perfume of discarded grapeskins and forgotten raisins.

Inside Norah's place the children prepared and then presented some sort of pageant about Pilgrims and Indians sitting down together to a feast of corn pudding and baked pumpkins and firewater. Anne patted the ten thousand leaves of a series of ”tossed green salads” and stirred a large bowl of dressing made firm but mild for the young palates. On 43 43 the sideboard Norah put the Danish coffee mugs, the dark rum for them as wished it, and the handsome torte dusted with white sugar.

Down the table marched breadbaskets, and ripe grapes on their flat bright leaves, and the wine bottles, a n.o.ble motley for the various tastes, but all from the valley where we stayed so thankfully: Charles Krug and Louis Martini had made the whites, and Inglenook, Beaulieu, and Krug again the reds; and there were pitchers of milk for the children....

The birds were n.o.ble and enough, thus bolstered. Their juices followed the course of the knife, as Mrs. Hibben had said they would, and the meat fell away like waves before a fine s.h.i.+p's bow. All down the table the people held up their plates as fast as the server could carve again, and their eyes shone, and they reached happily for bread, salad, wine, milk, the silver bowl of cranberry sauce in honor of the Pilgrims, and a stone jar of ancient jelly, which one of us three sisters had brought dutifully from our childhood home.

I sat near the carver. I was hot and weary and exalted. I looked down the long gay table, into the living room from the kitchen and past the hearth and out through the big window toward the mountains. The grapes were harvested. The vines were starting, brilliantly, a short be-neficent sleep, and in here in the warm cluttered rich room were my sisters and those they loved and those I did too. It was a good moment in life.

Everything was fine, and so was the dressing. It was light, tantalizing, essentially Oriental. And before we ever tasted it, through the long ex-ercise of our senses while it was prepared and while it fumed slowly in the dainty birds, we all as one (and that is an important fine thing to happen at least a couple of times in anybody's life), we all as one bowed our heads in thanksgiving. It was part of the pageant that none of us had rehea.r.s.ed....

44 BARBARA KAFKA.

Tempest in a Samovar My father loved storms, water pounding into already muddy earth, the rich scent of the wet ground carrying a hint of mold, G.o.d-bearing cracks of lightning and body-shaking thumps of thunder. He would sit on an awninged terrace to be spectator, possessed and possessor of nature's big effect. Frightened, I would join him, trying to live up to his exhilaration. I loved my father, was an acolyte trying to share his vision and not be afraid of his storms. I have never been ill on a boat; he boasted of his years on ocean liners when only he and the captain arrived for dinner. In the wind's shout, I heard his voice and tensed against alarm.

This is how I learned about food, amid the alarms of the dinner table, his pleasure surrounded by the family fights. The food sheltered me; I grew round as I built a wall against their anger, which sought to shred me between the talons of competing ambitions, a.s.sign me roles and set goals that if achieved could only displease one while satisfying the other. The food covertly put me on my father's side. He took the steak bone from the platter and gnawed it, smearing his mouth with fat and flecks of charred bone, his teeth grating into the hard surface, his tongue seeking out bits of marrow and shreds of sweet flesh, to my mother's flesh-fearing disgust. I learned that the sweetest meat lies near the bone.

He drank and his many brothers drank. Together they drank, challenging each other with their ice-cold native vodka. The clear liquid was a b.o.o.by trap, hot with long-soaked small red peppers, but clear as rainwater. Who would gag, who would reel? When he drank with them, the bitter arguments, the arm wrestling were softened by love and shared memories. They listened to news from the Russian front and ate herring in cream with sliced onions, smoked salmon, sturgeon, and a fish they called kipchunkie kipchunkie (which I later learned to call sable) and, finally, smoked black cod. There were bagels too hard for me to bite, black Russian pumpernickel, and what they called cornbread, a throwback to Europe where wheat was ”corn.” The bread was dense and heavy and has disappeared. No one will any longer make the dough, too thick for machines. He ate the heel, the crumb of bread was for the effete, along (which I later learned to call sable) and, finally, smoked black cod. There were bagels too hard for me to bite, black Russian pumpernickel, and what they called cornbread, a throwback to Europe where wheat was ”corn.” The bread was dense and heavy and has disappeared. No one will any longer make the dough, too thick for machines. He ate the heel, the crumb of bread was for the effete, along 45.with white meat of chicken and desserts.

He taught me to eat pickles from the barrel, the juice running down my arm, and took me to restaurants when I was mother-abandoned.

She was out of town, often in Was.h.i.+ngton, doing important work-beyond objection-for the government during the great war.

His was the ultimate revenge and seduction. We had lunch at Luchow's.

His office was nearby, and he was proud of his charge card: number 1.

We ate herring in dill mustard sauce and puffy, plate-sized apple pancakes, boiled beef with lots of horseradish, and I sipped his beer.

At Chambord, we sat outdoors on a spring night, beyond the copper-pot view of the kitchen, a kitchen where they would prepare, if you would wait, any dish from the cla.s.sic French repertoire, and my father ordered-the whole restaurant stopped to stare-a nineteen-dollar bottle of wine in 1945 when I was twelve. I remember the bottle shape, a Bordeaux, the year a '29; but the name is clogged in memory. I fell in love with the idea of France, the country vital to my father's business but whose language remained arcane to him. Later, that was my victory, my French.

My mother did not, does not cook. Like learning to type, it was something for servants. She scrambled to success with education as grappling tool and was moving always upward, bringing sometimes a memory of a tasted recipe for Rachel, a recipe reflecting the ever-increasing image of the better life, first, moules mariniere moules mariniere, then fillet of sole bonne femme bonne femme. She liked chocolate ice cream and tried French with a clumsy accent. I learned that food was part of travel and distant places.

Rachel was not a nice person, and why should she be, a black woman living in a tiny room-a maid's room-in the Fifth Avenue apartment without a view of self-proclaimed liberals? But she was a superb natural cook and always there from the time I was four until the apartment with the view could be bought and she didn't fit. My mother fought her leaving. My father was remorseless and Rachel went to work in his factory. I didn't miss her. By then I was leaving as well, glad to escape the escalating sound of fighting, the several gla.s.ses of Scotch too many, and the disappointment of a woman whom the end of Depression and war left without a clear cause.

I didn't spend time in the kitchen with Rachel. I lived in Ba.r.s.et-s.h.i.+re, Jane Austen's Hamps.h.i.+re, Joyce's Dublin, Swann's attar-of-roses Paris, and Stendhal's provinces. I swallowed the sentimental sour of Edna St.

Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker. I gobbled Yeats, Eliot, and Mallarme and wandered lonely through picture galleries learning 46 46 the strange green faces of gold-framed madonnas, the melodrama of red in El Greco, the tear-provoking repose of Cezanne's solid geometry, and the liquid geometry of Dali. I danced, and a savage in music, I could hear only the insistent beat of ballets, the enticements of my father's gypsy records, and the voice-carried sweetness of opera. And what I wrote I hid.

But Rachel did teach me that cooking was an improvisation and a response. My mother's hints of dishes produced, from Rachel's pots, wonderful flavors, and, for the few people Rachel liked, there were mysteriously good chocolate cakes to eat late at night with whole bottles of milk.

Refuge in the mind-world of college brought no relief. I courted favor, writing other people's papers, better than my own. To produce was too frightening, a challenge to my father's fragilely male repudiation of my mother's achievement, a challenge to my mother's expansive compet.i.tion, her flight through six degrees. It was to risk annihilation, and I graduated with a c.u.m, summa generals, and a summa thesis written late at night in the last hurried hours before the deadline in the less frightening, public s.p.a.ce of my dorm's living room.

I worked, I married, and I fled again from my parents' house as I tried to learn, awkwardly, what a home might be, a place that was not perpetually neat and ready to be viewed, one filled with the smell of onions and garlic and welcoming to hoped-for friends. I learned to cook. It was not frightening. It was all there in my friends the books, often wrapped in the festivity of French. I spread six or seven on the floor and learned of food as I had learned to learn. Comparing recipes, I tried to see through them to the times when they were written, the personalities of the cooks, and to an ultimate version of whatever dish I would serve, a try at loving, too late at night. I was still not able to judge the time and s.p.a.ce of recipes, had not yet learned to listen to the changing sound of bubbles in the pot, the varying smells from the oven.

I had found the way to invert and supersede my father's intrusive pleasures, avoid my mother, and reject their worlds. I worked with my hands. I was a cook. I learned a new language, recipes.

In this new language I found work. I had wanted to write great poetry, but my fears of competing in my parents' worlds crippled my ambition.

As if by happenstance, but surely by the intuition of others, I found that people would pay me to write about food, about what I had traveled and tasted, what my hyperacuity-honed in staying short of danger in those nightly dinner-table battles-made me taste and 47 47 replicate and feel. In that work, everything I knew and the ways I had learned to see was of use. If we look, food has the structure of linguistics and religion. It is sociology and economics, politics and cultural definition; it is history, memory, and pa.s.sion interwoven with style as clearly as painting, literature, dance, music, and architecture. Yet it is without the risks of high art.

Food is about loving and giving and performance and applause. It is polymorphous, combining what had been the professional work of men with what had been the largely invisible, perhaps because ubiquitous, labors of women. It is essential and sensuous. I found a home where my father's storm could be tamed to the bubbles and steam of my grandmother's samovar.

48 COLETTE.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY DEREK.

COLTMAN.

Wines I was very well brought up. As a first proof of so categorical a statement, I shall simply say that I was no more than three years old when my father poured out my first full liqueur gla.s.s of an amber-colored wine which was sent up to him from the Midi, where he was born: the muscat of Frontignan. was very well brought up. As a first proof of so categorical a statement, I shall simply say that I was no more than three years old when my father poured out my first full liqueur gla.s.s of an amber-colored wine which was sent up to him from the Midi, where he was born: the muscat of Frontignan.

The sun breaking from behind clouds, a shock of sensuous pleasure, an illumination of my newborn tastebuds! This initiation ceremony rendered me worthy of wine for all time. A little later I learned to empty my goblet of mulled wine, scented with cinnamon and lemon, as I ate a dinner of boiled chestnuts. At an age when I could still scarcely read, I was spelling out, drop by drop, old light clarets and dazzling Yquems.

Champagne appeared in its turn, a murmur of foam, leaping pearls of air providing an accompaniment to birthday and First Communion banquets, complementing the gray truffles from La Puisaye...Good lessons, from which I graduated to a familiar and discreet use of wine, not gulped down greedily but measured out into narrow gla.s.ses, a.s.similated mouthful by s.p.a.ced-out, meditative mouthful.

It was between my eleventh and fifteenth years that this admirable educational program was perfected. My mother was afraid that I was outgrowing my strength and was in danger of a ”decline.” One by one, she unearthed, from their bed of dry sand, certain bottles that had been aging beneath our house in a cellar-which is, thanks be to G.o.d, still intact-hewn out of fine, solid granite. I feel envious, when I think back, of the privileged little urchin I was in those days. As an accompaniment to my modest, fill-in meals-a chop, a leg of cold chicken, or one of those hard cheeses, ”baked” in the embers of a wood fire and so brittle that one blow of the fist would shatter them into pieces like a pane of gla.s.s-I drank Chateau Lafites, Chambertins, and Cortons which had escaped capture by the ”Prussians” in 1870. Certain of these wines were already fading, pale and scented still like a dead rose; they lay on a sediment of 49.tannin that darkened their bottles, but most of them retained their aristocratic ardor and their invigorating powers. The good old days!

I drained that paternal cellar, goblet by goblet, delicately...My mother would recork the opened bottle and contemplate the glory of the great French vineyards in my cheeks.

Happy those children who are not made to blow out their stomachs with great gla.s.ses of red-tinted water during their meals! Wise those parents who measure out to their progeny a tiny gla.s.s of pure wine-and I mean ”pure” in the n.o.ble sense of the word-and teach them: ”Away from the meal table, you have the pump, the faucet, the spring, and the filter at your disposal. Water is for quenching the thirst.

Wine, according to its quality and the soil where it was grown, is a necessary tonic, a luxury, and a fitting tribute to good food.” And is it not also a source of nourishment in itself? Yes, those were the days, when a few true natives of my Burgundy village, gathered around a flagon swathed in dust and spiders' webs, kissing the tips of their fingers from their lips, exclaimed-already-”a nectar!” Don't you agree that in talking to you about wine I am describing a province I know something about? It is no small thing to conceive a contempt, so early in life, not only for those who drink no wine at all but also for those who drink too much.

The vine and the wine it produces are two great mysteries. Alone in the vegetable kingdom, the vine makes the true savor of the earth intelligible to man. With what fidelity it makes the translation! It senses, then expresses, in its cl.u.s.ters of fruit the secrets of the soil. The flint, through the vine, tells us that it is living, fusible, a giver of nourishment.

Only in wine does the ungrateful chalk pour out its golden tears. A vine, transported across mountains and over seas, will struggle to keep its personality, and sometimes triumphs over the powerful chemistries of the mineral world. Harvested near Algiers, a white wine will still remember without fail, year after year, the n.o.ble Bordeaux graft that gave it exactly the right hint of sweetness, lightened its body, and endowed it with gaiety. And it is far-off Jerez that gives its warmth and color to the dry and cordial wine that ripens at Chateau Chalon, on the summit of a narrow, rocky plateau.

From the ripened cl.u.s.ter brandished by its tormented stem, heavy with transparent but deeply troubled agate, or dusted with silver-blue, the eye moves upward to contemplate the naked wood, the ligneous serpent wedged between two rocks: on what, in heaven's name, does it feed, this young tree growing here in the South, unaware that such a thing as rain exists, clinging to the rock by a single hank of hemplike 50 50 roots? The dews by night and the sun by day suffice for it-the fire of one heavenly body, the essence sweated by another-these miracles...

What cloudless day, what gentle and belated rain decides that a year, one year among all the others, shall be a great year for wine? Human solicitude can do almost nothing, it is a matter in which celestial sorcery is everything, the course the planets take, the spots on the sun.

Simply to recite our provinces and their towns by name is to sing the praises of our venerated vineyards. It is profitable both to the spirit and the body-believe me-to taste a wine in its own home, in the landscape that it enriches. Such a pilgrimage, well understood, has surprises in store for you that you little suspect. A very young wine, tasted in the blue light of its storage shed-a half bottle of Anjou, opened under a barrel vault dusted with pale light by a violent and stormy summer afternoon-moving relics discovered in an old stillroom unaware of the treasures it contains, or else forgetful of them...I once fled from such a stillroom, in the Franche-Comte, as though I had been stealing from a museum...Another time, among the furniture being auctioned off on a tiny village square, between the commode, the iron bedstead, and some empty bottles, there were six full bottles being sold: it was then, as an adolescent, that I had my first encounter with an ardent and imperious prince, and a treacherous one, like all great seducers: the wine of Jurancon. Those six bottles made me more curious about the region that produced them than any geography teacher ever could have done. Though I admit that at such a price geography lessons would not be within the reach of everyone. And that triumphant wine, another day, drunk in an inn so dark that we never knew the color of the liquid they poured into our gla.s.ses...Just so does a woman keep the memory of a journey, of how she was surprised one night, of an unknown man, a man without a face, who made himself known to her only by his kiss...

The present sn.o.bbery about food is producing a crop of hostelries and country inns the like of which has never been seen before. Wine is revered in these places. Can wisdom be born again from a faith so un-enlightened, a faith professed by mouths already, alas, armored with c.o.c.ktails, with venomous aperitifs, with harsh and numbing spirits?

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