Antoine made the right response. He raised his eyebrows in polite wonder while smiling only on the left side of his face, an expression that means, How greatly I respect the vigor of your opinions, however much they may call to mind the ravings of a lunatic. “What do you mean?” he demanded.
“Well, it is my experience that everyone grows green asparagus now. It’s all you see for decorative plats, that touch of green. In the magazines, for instance, among the fashionable chefs, it’s all you see, green asparagus. It has a much greater decorative effect. It’s obvious.”
“Ah, yes, for decorative effect,” Antoine agreed calmly. Everybody won.
As they were speaking, I was poking a pile of girolles nearby, and wondering if I had made a mistake in not planning to serve some kind of autumnal mushroom plate for dinner the next night. I was in a heightened emotional state because I had offered to cook dinner for Alice Waters, and I had spent most of the summer worrying about what I would cook and how it would taste. I had decided to try and sneak in a little serious shopping while I was observing Alice and Antoine. I had also decided to go out later that day and buy a new set of dinner plates. I had come to both of these decisions more or less in the spirit of a man who, having in an insane moment invited Michael Jordan over to play a little one-on-one, decides that he might as well use the occasion to put down a new coat of asphalt on the driveway.
I had made up my mind to do a lamb braised for seven hours—a gigot de sept heures, as it’s known—which would be cooked in the Provencal style, with eggplant and tomatoes. But to be in Rungis at dawn with two such devoted terroiristes as Alice and Antoine, for whom cooking is meaningful only if it is an expression of the place where the things are being cooked, made me feel a little guilty. I was going to have to get the tomatoes out of a can, and though the canned tomato is absolutely typical of my own terroir, I somehow felt that they would disapprove.
Nearby Alice had found frisee and watercress and was looking at them raptly—not with the greed of a hungry man seeing dinner but with the admiration of William Bennett looking at a long marriage. “There’s nothing so beautiful as French watercress,” she said. “I can recall walking down the rue Mouffetard in 1965, my first year in Paris. I was a girl from New Jersey who’d grown up on frozen food, and to see the baskets and baskets of greens, so many shades of green and red!
“I walked up and down the street, my eyes unbelieving,” she went on. “I had never tasted an oyster. I went through Normandy, eating eighteen at a time, and drinking apple cider, and it was so wonderful that I was just carried away, and I would fall asleep by the roadside. When I got back to Berkeley, I thought of opening a creperie, and I tried to import some of the cider and found out that there was alcohol in it. That was why I kept passing out! I thought it was just the oysters and the apple juice and France.” She was lost for a moment.
“You know,” Antoine said, coming over, “there used to be asparagus grown in Argenteuil, just down the river from Paris—great asparagus. And they used to have figs in Argenteuil too. The white figs of Argenteuil, they were called in the nineteenth century. The trees were bent over with weights, so that the branches could be buried in the ground, to protect them all through the winter. Yet we think of figs as a southern fruit.”
“Oh, we have to have them,” Alice said, her eyes moist with emotion. “The white figs of Argenteuil! We’ll grow them again. It can be done, you know.” We had been wandering through the airplane hangars and were standing among towers of carrots and leeks, mountains of haricots verts. She looked upward and, Pucelle-like, seemed to be seeing before her—in a vision, as though they were already tangible, edible—the white figs of Argenteuiclass="underline" an improbable Berkeley Joan, imagining her France restored to glory.
I had been thinking about various menus ever since I’d had the idea of cooking dinner for Alice, and for a while I’d thought I might do a four-hour braised leg of lamb that I had found the recipe for in the Sunday magazine of the London Independent. Unfortunately I had lost the issue of the magazine. I had the phone number of the editor, but I thought that it was unprofessional journalistic practice, in this day and age, to call up a fellow scandalmongering cynic and ask him if he would mind thumbing through his back issues for a recipe.
Then, this summer, I came upon a copy of a twenty-five-year-old recipe book written by the wonderful (and blind) food writer Roy Andries de Groot. The book was called The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth. Half cookbook, half Lost Horizon remake, it tells about a little inn—the Auberge of the Flowering Hearth—that the author discovered in the French Alps, while he was on an assignment to write something on how the monks down there make Chartreuse. The menu called for mussel soup, poached pears, and a gigot de mouton de sept heures—the same slow-cooked lamb that I had lost the recipe for but, in this case, given the whole, classic nine yards, or seven hours. Sounded great and was in the right spirit for the occasion, part of the history of the American love of French cooking.
Then I had another inspiration. As Alice Waters would have wanted, my childhood had been a series of intense family dinners, evening after evening, with their own set of “social protocols,” and one of the most cherished of these family dinnertime protocols was known as Getting Someone Else to Do the Work. I decided to call Susan Herrmann Loomis, who lives in Normandy, and ask her to come to Paris to help me cook. Susan is the author of books on French and American country cooking and has a ClA-worthy gift for going into deep cover in a strange region and coming out with all its secrets. She cheerfully agreed to help, and after much discussion—she felt that the mussels would be too similar in color to the gigot, a feat of previsualization that increased my respect for the things a professional cook knows that an amateur doesn’t—we decided that we would cook together. We scoured markets and arrived at a menu: steamed autumn vegetables with aioli, or garlic mayonnaise; the seven-hour lamb with eggplant and tomatoes; and an apple tart with rosemary. I went out and got the best bottle of Chartreuse I could find, to keep it honest to de Groot’s memory.
While we prepared, Alice continued her tour of Paris. The idea of a restaurant turned out to have been something of an afterthought at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, which is an annex of the Louvre, out on the rue de Rivoli. For many years, it had been a sleepy, unattended institution, filled with old clocks and settees. Mme. David-Weill’s reign devoted a recent exhibition to the Tati stores, a kind of French Woolworth’s, and has promised in general to be much more swinging. Still, the space that had been put aside for eating, though it looked out from the back of the museum onto the Tuileries gardens, lacked some of the amenities of modern restaurants. “It’s all those kinds of basic things,” Alice explained after she had seen it. “Where do the employees wash their hands? Where are the umbrellas for the rainy days? It’s only ninety covers, which is even fewer than Chez Panisse.” She went on, diplomatically, “It’s really more of a tearoom size than anything else. I worry that the space is too small to express what we’d like to express.”