WHIMSICAL FOOD

And a Chicken in Champagne Cream Sauce

In 2014, Chris Kimball on the TV show America’s Test Kitchen told me, “You are the Lord Peter Wimsey of your food generation – flamboyant, sharp-tongued, talented, and in love with the style of the thing as much as the thing itself.”

In college I devoured all the Lord Peter Wimsey books. In my diaries at the time, I noted a menu that to me is still perfection in language, balance, and progression of food.

Oysters

Chablis Moutonne 1915

Chevalier Montrachet 1911

Consommé marmite

Sole

“Echter” Schloss Johannisberger

Poulet

Lafite I875

Pré-salé

Clos Vougeot 1911

Dessert

Genuine Imperial Tokay

True “Napoleon” with Seal

I wrote “Short and lovely” in my college culinary notebooks when I first read it.

Auguste Escoffier, the father of modern French cooking (and chef to Ritz), considered oysters such a natural way to raise one’s juices and expectations for the food following that he hardly deemed them part of the “opus” and often left them off the written menu.

Or merely listed them as “natives,” deliciously the same word in French and English.

Here they are part of the menu, and probably Colchesters or flat oysters like Bélons. A great Colchester is rich enough to need a palate cleanser, but as important, a dozen of them would need a mental one so that they did not dominate the beginning of the rest of the food.

That is up to the sole.

So, the consommé of the broth “marmite” is beef rather than the lighter chicken, since white poultry broth wouldn’t send the oysters into memory quite completely enough.

I guess the sole is simply meunière or grilled since everyone’s mouth will be hungering for a bit of richness after the broth, though not enough so Peter would not recoil at the fish being covered with lobster sauce.

The chicken, however, is obviously a la crème after the austere fullness of the sole, as simply served by Henri Soulé years later in Manhattan’s Le Pavilion.

The pré-salé is that perfect lamb from the salt marshes of Brittany around St. Michel, or from the coastlands of Suffolk or Cornwall. Simply roasted.

And the dessert? Well, no need to call that out since it’s chosen from a trolley of them. Peter would have either a little baba au rhum or just a big plate of raspberries covered with Devon or Jersey/Guernsey cream—if the chicken was not.

After reading this I wrote myself a note: “Taste an old Lafite and Tokay.”

Years later in Berkeley I would taste the Tokay, and then in my San Francisco restaurant Stars I would hold the West Coast tasting of the old Lafites, and finally taste the 1875.   

A fictional meal indeed, But the greatest fictional meal of all time was later, in 1936.

One that the famous French writer Colette gave in her apartment off the Palais-Royal.

Cocteau invited me after I had met him at a lunch in Picasso’s studio now famous for Cocteau, seeing there were no decorations on the dining table, went out, bought wooden toys from a quai vendor, and made them the centerpieces.

But to set the scene at Colette’s, the rage at this time were opium, smoothly brown and almond-eyed servants, ocelots, pet sewer rats like Kyrie and Eleison who sat on one of the guest’s shoulders while pretending they weren’t voyeurs or even voyeuses, dressing manly to save money on dresses. “We shall restore our collective masculinity,” one of the rat owners said a bit too loudly over a third glass of champagne blessed with cocaine. 

A comment from the table was that such a proposal was not inverted transvestism, but merely economy.

The dinner started with Prince Yusupov and his banished intimate companion, the Grand Duke Dimitri Romanov, telling of the night they killed Rasputin by feeding him rose cream cakes and Madeira laced with cyanide.

It continued with Missy (Colette’s mistress), while shooting morphine between her thighs, insisting that there was nothing Against Nature in  Huysmans’ alluring liaison with a "cherry-lipped youth.” Dinner was then interrupted by Lady Diana Cooper passing her Poiret compact brimming with cocaine to Cocteau while he, tendril fingers pushing his face upwards for best public effect, told everyone that Yusupov’s version the height of decadence, to eat very rich roast beef with very rich old d’Yquem, was just the lie that tells the truth. 

The dinner finished with WC Fields, disgusted with all the precious talk, declaring that “I cook with wine. Sometimes I even add it to the food.”

At least as fantastical was Vincent Price. A great Hollywood actor who starred as a horror film villain from the 1930’s through 1990.

Photo Courtesy of Series Eats

Here is his recipe from Henri Soule’s Le Pavillon, (“the New York City restaurant that defined French food in the United States from 1941 to 1966.”)  taken from “Silver Screen Supers.”

Photos Courtesy of The New York Post

“Preheat oven to moderate (350 degrees F, 180 degrees C, Gas mark 4).

Season a 3 lb chicken with 1 teaspoon salt. Put in a small casserole with 2 tablespoons butter and 2 cups dry French champagne.

Cook in the moderate oven about 45 minutes. Baste every 8 minutes and turn until the chicken is an even golden brown on all sides.  

Remove the chicken and keep chicken warm on hot platter.

The Sauce

Add to juices in the casserole 4 cups cream, 3 finely chopped shallots, 4 mushrooms crushed by rolling with rolling pin (the chef’s directions said to “roll with a bottle”), 1 sprig parsley, chopped, 2 bay leaves, and a pinch of thyme.

Simmer on top of stove until sauce has reduced to two-thirds of the original amount. Strain through a fine sieve into a clean saucepan.

Place over a medium heat and swirl in 2 tablespoons butter. Add 6 ounces dry champagne.

Spoon some of the sauce over the chicken, serve the rest separately.”

My note: I would add that it is difficult and messy to carve a whole chicken covered in a cream sauce. Better to cut the chicken, when it is still warm but cool enough to handle, into serving pieces. Then put those pieces in a sauté pan or saucepan and then pour the sauce over those. Briefly simmer, but not boil, to heat the chicken pieces. The photo has chopped herbs, but I would leave them out. Not that chicken in tarragon is not delicious.

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