SIMPLICITY

SOME 20TH-CENTURY CULINARY BENCHMARK MOMENTS

Recently I saw, perhaps on the great David Liebowitz’s blog, mention of the venerable restaurant Prunier in Paris. Eons ago the one in Sydney was my first luxe restaurant experience. On the current menu in Paris is “Œuf Christian Dior, l’original.” An egg named after the master of simplicity.

That I had to see.

When I saw the photo, I remembered the famous saying that “Simplicity is the last refuge of the complex.” (Wilde).

A coddled egg, real aspic, and caviar. Simple and direct. Complex because coddled eggs, let alone to be unmolded, are a bitch.

So what else was going on in the 20th century to define simplicity except for his eggs?Perhaps a menu from Mexico in 1904 is a good start.

When while in college I visited my white-haired, white-suited, Stetson-hatted, and ebony-caned great uncle Billy in New Orleans, he told me about the Yucatan in the first part of the 20th-century. When he was fifteen, he said, his mother told him it was time to visit her family in the Yucatan to celebrate his quinceañero (reaching the start of manhood at 15 years). He told me “I had boarding-school classmates from Merida who struck me as being always highly genteel. They had their horses shipped over each year, and their staff would come at the beginning and end of the school year to pack and unpack. I knew my family lived on estates outside of town. Where your grandmother’s cook, Ate, used to bring turtles for turtle soup, serving the meat in the shells.”

When he reached the hacienda in Chunchucmil (south of Merida on the way to Campeche) once the home of the Empress Carlota, the sight of everyone taking tea took his breath away. All the great hacienda owners had gathered to greet Mexican Presidente Porfirio Diaz and hold a banquet in his honor. The host, his cousin, Rafael Peon Loza, was a collector of Limoges, Sevres, Baccarat, and English gilt silver plate as legendary as the house. All that treasure had been brought out. Even though Diaz was perfectly capable of packing all of it into his train at the end of lunch.

Hacienda in Chunchucmil, Yucatán, Mexico 1904

Uncle Billy still had the menu and showed it to me. Senor Peon Loza’s Parisian chef had written the menu in French, and I was astonished when I read it.

Jerez Hors d’oeuvre

Rhin Huîtres fraîches de Chunchucmil

Consommé Printanier Royale

Bouchées d’Oeufs brouillés

Homard à l’Américaine

Bordeaux Fricandeaux Bourgeoise

Tortues en ragoût dans leurs carapaces

Bourgogne Pavos à la Yucateca

Punch Président

Chaud froid de Becassines en belle vue (sic)

Salade Russe

Champagne Abricotines au Madère

Glaces Jane Hading

Liqueurs Desserts

Someone got the spelling right with no ‘s’ on oeuvre. The miracle of fresh oysters from the beach on the west coast of the Yucatan brought in special baskets on horseback without the benefit of refrigeration. Puff pastry (Bouchées) is not easy to make in the tropics, though the French scrambled eggs are and a mastery of simplicity. I would eat an homard a l’americaine any day when it is langouste or spiny lobster instead of americanus. The grand bourgeois dish of fricandeaux from veal of the ranch. How impossibly grand and simply elegant serving the turtle in its shell. The Yucatecan turkey (pavos) was relleno negro, cooked with the black paste from charred chiles. The chaud- froid of woodcock was the breast turned into a forcemeat and put back in the cavity before being covered with a brown sauce made from the bones and fixed with gelatin (calves’ feet from the herd) and chilled in the icehouse. The fresh Salade Russe of peas and carrots and other chopped cooked vegetables in mayonnaise mounted with sturgeon caviar from the Mississippi delta, and the apricots were fire-roasted like chiles and then soaked in 1876 Madeira. Glaces honored Jane Hading (real name Jeanne-Alfrédine Tréfouret) was a glamorous French actress (1859-1941) and remembered from her louche tour of South America in the 1880s.

The Southwestern Hotel, Southampton, UK, November 14th, 1906

In my grandfather’s culinary and travel notebooks I found an entry he had written about his time as a young man in London. He wrote that the most ambitious menu he had made was for his birthday before sailing for New York on the R.M.S. Mauretania. At the time the largest and fastest liner in the world. His guests were his best chums from Harrow. All of them had finished their final year, and this dinner was a farewell to them. The guest of honor was the very beautiful and wealthy Kashmiri Brahmin Jawaharlal Nehru, my grandfather’s best friend who had the same birthday and year as he.

Whitstable Natives

Clear Turtle Soup

Devilled Whitebait

Fricassée of Sweetbreads

Roast Pré-Salé Saddle of Lamb

Champagne Ice

Cold Roast Pheasant

Roast Snipe “aux Nids”

Soufflé Palmyre

Charlotte of Fruits

Bombe Alhambra

Croûte à la Baron

Someone always complains about eating natives, until told they are oysters harvested from no more than 100 miles from the plate of them.

The clear turtle consommé revived the appetite before the deep-fried blanchailles or whitebait à la Diable, made more devilish by dusting them with chile molido from the Yucatan. The fricassee of sweetbreads was creamed because the lamb was roasted, just cooking juices, no sauce. Then the unsweetened Pommery & Greno ice (the same as all were drinking) for the guests to get a second wind. The pheasant that restarted the meal had its head, tail and wings stuck on again with little wooden pins, so it was as much a showpiece to get everyone talking again as another respite in the menu. The snipe that followed were hot and tasty, flamed in fine Champagne Cognac and served with little straw potatoes ‘nests’ or baskets filled with straw potatoes. The Palmyre was vanilla, aniseed and kirsch, the baked charlotte was served with Crème Carême, and the bombe was made of vanilla and strawberry ice creams. The savory at the end of the meal was the pompously named Croûte à la Baron, but merely toasted cheese with an anchovy across it.

All started with an Amontillado, went on to Berncasteler Doctor Gold Label, and then lots of Pommery champagne followed by Cockburn port and then Gautier’s Cognac.

The Carlton Hotel, London, March 14th, 1910

There were several culinary notebook and diary entries from my grandfather, but a favorite is about the great chef August Escoffier: “I had met Escoffier in New York when he was there to open the Ritz and to raise the standard of cooking on board the luxury liners of the Hamburg-Amerika line, so when I saw him in London I asked the chef to make a menu for a dinner with André Simon and his wife at the Carlton a few weeks hence.”

Back in London in time for the dinner, Escoffier appeared in his Louis-Philippe-style frock coat and high heels (he needed to give himself a few inches of breathing space above the hot stoves) appreciating planning in advance and saying that savoir-vivre was of the utmost importance.

My grandfather told Escoffier that he thought that his statement “the art of cuisine is perhaps one of the most useful forms of diplomacy” was the only savoir-vivre he needed at diplomatic functions.

The conversation with André was whether sauces should complement a dish or stand apart from it? They quizzed Escoffier. His answer was that “the art of the saucier consists in bringing about a marriage of the elements at his disposal, to bring them together in a way that creates a whole which harmonizes perfectly with the fundamental ingredients of the dish, to which the sauce must give value, but still be only an accompaniment.”

That settled that.

I, for one, am all for arranged marriages in the kitchen, and know that simplicity is the hardest thing to do. No place to hide, no sauce to hide under.

Rossolnik Soup

Poached Turbot

Breast of Chicken with Artichokes

Baron of Lamb

Rouen Duck à la Rouennaise

Asparagus

Soufflé Surprise

Rossolnik is the classic Russian cucumber soup, the poached turbot had only a parsley mousseline sauce, and the breast of chicken was cooked in brown butter with artichokes. The baron of milk-fed lamb was plain roasted, no sauce, and the duck à la Rouennaise was cooked un-bled and the sauce made from only from the duck-pressed carcass and its juices. The asparagus had butter only. The soufflé surprise was a high-hat hot soufflé with strawberry ice cream in the center. They drank Pommery & Greno 1892 throughout.

A menu of Escoffier’s from the Carlton.

Waleska (mistress of Napolean) was one of his signature dishes, and the dish a model of his ‘keep it simple.’

From Escoffier’s masterpiece cookbook Le Guide Culinaire