Remembrance of Things Paris Read online

  ALSO FROM THE MODERN LIBRARY FOOD SERIES

  Life à la Henri by Henri Charpentier and Boyden Sparkes

  Clémentine in the Kitchen by Samuel Chamberlain

  Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century by Laura Shapiro

  Cooking with Pomiane by Edouard de Pomiane

  High Bonnet: A Novel of Epicurean Adventures by Idwal Jones

  Katish: Our Russian Cook by Wanda L. Frolov

  The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon

  La Bonne Table by Robert Farrar Capon

  Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet

  The Passionate Epicure by Marcel Rouff

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION• Ruth Reichl

  REMEMBERING PARIS

  PARIS IN THE TWENTIES• Irene Corbally Kuhn

  AFTER THE WAR• Don Dresden

  CHICKEN DEMI-Deuil • George Bijur

  CUISINE PARISIENNE • Louis Diat

  PARIS ONE STEP at a TIME • JJoseph Wechsberg

  CITY OF LIGHT

  THE OLD FLOWER MARKET • Joseph Wechsberg

  ALL that GLITTERS • Joseph Wechsberg

  HAUTE COUTURE • Joseph Wechsberg

  SOLD! • Joseph Wechsberg

  BIBLIOTHèque du GOURMET • Joseph Wechsberg

  FEEDING A CITY

  A NIGHT at LES HALLES • Alaire Johnston

  LES HALLES: A LAST LOOK • Naomi Barry

  LA VIE MODERNE • Joseph Wechsberg

  PURVEYORS

  COLD COMFORT • Joseph Wechsberg

  THE PRESIDENT of PASTRY • Joseph Wechsberg

  PARIS’s HAUTE CHOCOLATERIE •Naomi Barry

  LA VIE en ROSE • Frank J. Prial

  THE BISTRO SCENE

  HOME AWAY from HOME • Joseph Wechsberg

  BISTROS • Naomi Barry

  ALLARD • Naomi Barry

  LE BISTROT de PARIS • Naomi Barry

  CLASSIC TABLES

  LA TOUR d’Argent • Joseph Wechsberg

  PRUNIER • Naomi Barry

  LUCAS-Carton • Naomi Barry

  A SECRET CLUB • Joseph Wechsberg

  MAXIM’s • Naomi Barry

  MAXIM’s • Joseph Wechsberg

  THE CHEFS

  WHEN MICHELIN COMES KNOCKING•Joseph Wechsberg

  LA GRANDE CUISINE FRANçaise • Joseph Wechsberg

  JACQUES MANIère’s HUMAN FACTOR • Joseph Wechsberg

  YOUNG CHEFS of PARIS • Naomi Barry

  WHEN I WAS GREEN • Patric Kuh

  AMERICANS IN PARIS

  A MEMORY of ALICE B. TOKLAS • Naomi Barry

  NOël À PARIS • Judith and Evan Jones

  A LITTLE BLACK MAGIC • Ruth Reichl

  AN INSINCERE CASSOULET • Michael Lewis

  PARISIANS

  SHE DID NOT LOOK LIKE an ACTRESS to ME • Hilaire du Berrier

  THE CHRISTENING • Lillian Langseth-Christensen

  HIGH and DRY • Joseph Wechsberg

  PARISIAN POLICE • Joseph Wechsberg

  A NOSE • Joseph Wechsberg

  THE SEVENTH ART • Joseph Wechsberg

  THE MOST INTIMATE ROOM • Diane Johnson

  PARIS TODAY

  GRAND MASTERS • Jonathan Gold

  THE NEW FACE of PARIS • Paul Goldberger

  THE THREE MUSKETEERS • Patric Kuh

  IT’s WHAT’s for DINNER • François Simon

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  INTRODUCTION

  Ruth Reichl

  For a true gourmet in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Paris was the heart’s home, the place that mattered, a shrine for everyone who believed that eating well was the best revenge. It was where Hemingway’s Moveable Feast took place, where Liebling spent his time Between Meals, where M.F.K. Fisher’s Gastronomical Me was born.

  But Gourmet came into the world in 1941, just as the United States was going to war and Paris was impossible to visit. Reading through the early issues of the war years you get a certain forlorn sense, a hole in the place where Paris should have been. Is it any wonder that the moment the war ended the magazine’s editor and publisher, Earle MacAusland, immediately dispatched a correspondent to find out what was going on in the City of Light? The story that Don Dresden sent back was slightly dispiriting; rationing was still on, he reported, there was no cream, no butter, and very little meat. All over town he found chefs who were wringing their hands and doing their best.

  But conditions soon improved. Within a few years the magazine was publishing stories about a Paris that had happily returned to its prewar ways. Old men left their mistresses to sit in cafés and watch the world go by, endlessly debating the important question of where dinner should be served. The great parties resumed—set pieces of high fashion and fabulous food. As the good times came back to the metropolis, Gourmet sent off the first of what would be an unbroken line of full-time Paris correspondents to chronicle the life of the city for its eager readers.

  That first resident correspondent was Naomi Barry, who may be the most underappreciated restaurant writer of all time. Reading fifty-year-old restaurant reviews would not normally be much fun; it takes a writer of extraordinary abilities to make you care about meals that you will never be able to eat. But with each review Barry offers up such a rich slice of life that you feel you are sitting at the next table, eavesdropping on your neighbors chatting with the chef. Her reviews are like little time machines that not only allow you to taste the food she is eating, but somehow transport you back to a city that no longer exists.

  For me that is the magic of this collection of essays. Each is a passport to the past, a way to watch Paris grow and change at the very moment it was happening. This is living history, vibrant and unselfconscious, and it offars an amazing opportunity to watch an entire civilization transform itself and move into what will become the present.

  This would not work, of course, had the magazine not been blessed with such extraordinary writers. But after Barry came Joseph Wechsberg, a man who truly belongs in the pantheon of great food writers along with A. J. Liebling and M.F.K. Fisher. He had good taste and great talent, but more than that he had an interesting mind. The subjects that he chose to write about—a bookshop, the opening of a fashion house, the way that Parisians walk down the street—offer you an intimate portrait of a city by an accomplished watcher whose greatest joy was simply to observe the city as it strolled past his table.

  But having its own correspondent in the city was never enough for Gourmet, whose readers had an insatiable appetite for all things Paris. Great writers have always been eager to eat there, and the magazine has always been eager for their thoughts. And so we also have Lillian Langseth-Christensen, Louis Diat, Judith and Evan Jones, Diane Johnson, Michael Lewis, Frank Prial, Paul Goldberger, and Jonathan

  Gold, among others, each devouring Paris in his or her own particular fashion.

  No change went unobserved. The demise of Les Halles was reported by five different people (we have included three). The magazine wrote about the new buildings, the new telephones, the new food. In the early seventies when a generation of young chefs created a whole new style of cooking, Gourmet’s writers were thrilled; something new to write about! We follow the development of nouvelle cuisine, and as the chefs cook and the years pass we see the old city slowly disappear, fade away as if it were being erased to make way for the new. With this new food came a modern and more aggressive metropolis to take the place of Paris past.

  This collection closes with the slightly bemused observation of François Simon, who wrote the finale for Gourmet’s Paris issue at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is not Naomi Barry’s Paris, n
or that of Joseph Wechsberg, but it remains a vibrant and fascinating city. And although M. Simon’s city would have been almost impossible to imagine sixty years earlier, it is a reminder that, in one form or another, we will always have Paris.

  REMEMBERING PARIS

  PARIS IN THE TWENTIES

  Irene Corbally Kuhn

  The year was 1921. The month was May. The city was Paris. And I had just bought a new hat that I remember to this day: an exquisite, wide-brimmed straw hat trimmed with an enormous silk violet. I was about to start work as fashion editor, general reporter, and the only woman on the ten-member staff of the four-year-old Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune.

  The world had passed through the long darkness of the “war to end all wars” and was more than ready for the frenzied gaiety and brief brilliance of the roaring twenties. Paris was packed with Americans—and, for the most part, the French were happy to have us. Artists, writers, composers, dilettantes, bankers, businessmen, army officers, diplomats, and journalists, we had little in common beyond a passion for Paris and tended to travel in separate circles that only occasionally intersected. The journalists were a most clannish group. We did not mix with the literati, which is to say the Americans who came to Paris to write novels. We were, however, most gregarious and mixed with everyone else, because a story could come from anywhere. And frequently it did.

  The Paris Chicago Tribune was one of the two principal English-language daily newspapers published there through the 1920s. The other was the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune. Although their names were similar they had little else in common. The Paris Chicago Tribune, known as “the Trib,” was a grubby gamin compared with that sober, prosperous burgher, the Paris Herald Tribune, known as “the Herald,” and whereas the competition between the two was friendly, it was often fierce. The Herald had been around a long time; the Trib was a brash newcomer, founded to keep the troops of the American Expeditionary Forces stationed in France during World War I in touch with news from home.

  The Herald had editorial offices; the Trib was put out from a single, dingy room on the upper floor of a building on the rue Lamartine—an unremarkable street running off the rue Lafayette on the Right Bank. There were no desks, merely scarred, battered plank tables to support the decrepit typewriters, of which there were never enough to go around. Rickety chairs, a Telex machine, a few telephones, and a half dozen or so naked lightbulbs dangling from a painted-tin ceiling completed the décor. A few of the bulbs were covered with makeshift shades fashioned from newsprint, alarmingly charred. This inelegant space was rented from Le Petit Journal as were the presses and the services of its boisterous Montmartre compositors, who spoke a baffling patois that took months to master. More significant than any of these details, however, was the fact that the building housing the Trib’s editorial room backed onto the same courtyard as a cheerful, rowdy bistro. Arrangements had long since been made for buckets of cool, foaming beer to be conveyed by means of a rope from the courtyard to the editorial room to speed the flow of copy on a hot summer’s night.

  One unique and irreplaceable advantage that the Trib enjoyed over the Herald, though, was the editorial and reportorial talents of Floyd Gibbons, who was the European manager for the Chicago Tribune Company. Gibbons was even then legendary, the quintessential foreign correspondent, a handsome man with a huge sense of adventure, unlimited daring, and great personal courage. He had become a legend for his colorful reporting from the Mexican border war of 1916 and later embellished the legend when he sailed to England in February 1917 aboard the Cunard passenger liner Laconia. The ship was torpedoed off the Irish coast and sank almost immediately. After a night spent in a lifeboat Gibbons and the other survivors were rescued, and half an hour after landing in Liverpool Gibbons was in a telegraph office cabling the dramatic story to his editor in Chicago. It is no wonder he was as much a hero to his fellow correspondents as he was to the public. Later he was to lose an eye while covering the battle of Belleau Wood in World War I, and the white eyepatch he wore from then on became his trademark.

  Although Gibbons was off on assignment in Russia the day I showed up with a letter of introduction from my former editor in New York, we subsequently became lifelong friends. I was hired anyway by his deputy, who took me on to replace the Trib’s fashion editor, Rosemary Carr. She was leaving to return home to marry a promising young poet, Stephen Vincent Benét. My salary was fifteen hundred francs a month, or about ninety dollars at the then prevailing rate of exchange. It was scarcely a fortune, but Paris in those days was accommodating to the impecunious young.

  Even though I had always loved clothes and followed fashion, haute couture was something I had to learn about in a hurry. But, as with many professions, I shortly found that familiarity bred assurance. Most of the great couture houses, eager for publicity among Americans, gave me ready access to their workrooms and showrooms, where, almost by osmosis, I learned the workings of the trade and its terminology. Some even lent me finery to wear on special assignments as when, turned out by Patou, I reported on the activities of the first week of “the season” in Deauville. Others, like Worth and Chanel, habitually gave generous discounts to fashion writers, a practice that worked no hardship on them as there were so few of us then.

  My wardrobe was a matter of some moment in my general reporting as well, because one of my principal tasks was to keep track of arrivals at hotels like the Ritz, the Crillon, the George V, and the Meurice. Never mind that I lived in a garret room in a tiny Left Bank hotel myself; dressed in my designer best, I could command any of those opulent lobbies.

  For sheer elegance and stylishness it’s hard to imagine what could ever equal that small segment of Paris that became my regular beat and daily delight. It included the honey-colored stone colonnades of the marvelously proportioned seventeenth-century Palais-Royal, where I’d sometimes steal a few minutes to wander through the tranquil inner gardens. Next came the imposing classical façade of the Church of the Madeleine, where I one day discovered, in a niche on an outer wall, a beheaded statue of Saint Luc, a victim of the German bombardment a few years earlier. Then there was the gorgeous nineteenth-century exuberance of the Opéra; and finally the peaceful, unpretentious pleasures of the Garden of the Tuileries.

  My surveillance of the grand hotels was, more often than not, an unmomentous routine devised principally to fill a column headed “Americans in Paris.” But not infrequently the routine could become exciting, as when I was dispatched to interview Charlie Chaplin. Because the weather was glorious and his morning was free, we strolled the length of the Champs-Élysées together, and I caught glimpses of the shy, gentle spirit of the man who was known as the greatest comedian of his day.

  It was another story when Peggy Hopkins Joyce took up residence at the Ritz while she selected her next season’s wardrobe. A striking, natural blonde, Peggy was famous for being famous. She had shot to celebrity as a show girl and shortly thereafter began to enjoy a long and successful career as a courtesan. Not only diamonds but sapphires, emeralds, and rubies were all her best friends. And furs. And clothes. And a shrewdly chosen investment portfolio. It was the mark of a successful man to be seen in her company, and her salon was the world of the wealthy. Had she lived in Louis XV’s day, she undoubtedly would have given Madame de Pompadour real competition as the royal favorite. Like Pompadour, she was intelligent, capable, discreet, and a wonderfully entertaining companion. Warm, generous, and naturally gracious, she was secure in her chosen calling and counted almost as many women as men among her friends. The French found her enchanting, as I discovered when she invited me to dine with her and her latest conquest—a French industrialist who was a regular patron of the Tour d’Argent. There, at a window table, we drank Champagne and watched the long blue twilight gently mantle the magnificent south front of Notre-Dame just opposite, a sight so achingly lovely I scarcely tasted the food.

  And that was a pity because the likes of the Tour d’Argent, the Grand Véfour, a
nd Lasserre, for example, were seldom accessible to newsmen and newswomen living from one undernourished salary check to the next. We were more likely to seek out the bistros frequented by taxi drivers (an estimably knowledgeable group about food as about much else) or the small, family-run restaurants where provincial food of every variety flourished and where one could often find a delicious locally produced wine available nowhere else. In memory, the food was sublimely and universally good, the coffee unvaryingly poisonous.

  Then, of course, there were the cafés, some of which not only still exist but continue as centers for the same clientele. For Paris is a place where habit dominates perhaps more than in any other major metropolis. Montparnasse has been the haunt of artists forever. Now, as in my day, Le Sélect, La Coupole, and Le Dôme, all arrayed near one another along the boulevard du Montparnasse as it cuts through the short streets and hidden squares of the Left Bank, attract the young and struggling equally with the established and prosperous among artists.

  The literary set favored Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and their cafés, then as now, were Le Flore and Les Deux Magots, with the brasserie Lipp a distant third. Here, if one cared to, one could find from time to time not only Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds but a range of young American literary talent one is less likely to associate with Paris in the twenties: the poets Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and e. e. cummings; the novelists John Dos Passos and Glenway Westcott, to cite just a few. They, as well as the tens of dozens of others who came to Paris then “To Write” but never quite made it, belied the title “the Lost Generation.” They were anything but, if diligence and a zest for life are used as the measures.

  Still, most of us who were engaged in the unceasing demands of meeting deadlines for a daily newspaper saw little of our literary countrymen and regarded them as rare birds given to strange habits and mysterious enthusiasms. Our interests, we believed, were those of the real world and reflected everyday reality. This meant, among other things, that the shadow of the war often filled our consciousness, as on Memorial Day in 1921, when ceremonies were held all over France to honor Americans who had lost their lives on the battlefields. As I traveled by train from Paris to Belleau Wood near Château-Thierry, with the American ambassador and other officials, American as well as French, it was impossible to prepare myself adequately for the sight that greeted our arrival. The day was soft and fine; May was merging into June, and the sky was an infinite blue. But the blackened ruins of abandoned villages, the charred skeletons of ancient trees, and the shell-pocked fields lying fallow stood in terrible contrast to the loveliness of the weather. Dominating everything was the endless expanse of white crosses, each grave marked by a small American flag, made even more moving by the nosegays of wildflowers set out before dawn by local farmers. As the scene impressed itself on my memory forever, I could only think of how many just my age must lie beneath those crosses.