On Friday I had a perfect luncheon at Bellamy’s – smoked eel mousse sealed with a thin layer of aspic and served with melba toast, filets of Dover sole with mashed potato, and île flottante. I still have my teeth but I really enjoy food that doesn’t need mastication – nursery food for grown-ups, a sign of arrested development according to AJ Liebling.
I have just finished Between Meals, An Appetite for Paris, by AJ Liebling.
”AJL (1904-1963) was an American journalist who was closely associated with The New Yorker from 1935 until his death. His New York Times obituary called him “a critic of the daily press, a chronicler of the prize ring, an epicure and a biographer of such diverse personages as Gov. Earl Long of Louisiana and Col. John R. Stingo.” He was known for dubbing Chicago”The Second City” and for the aphorism “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Liebling’s boxing book The Sweet Science was named the greatest sports book of all time by Sports Illustrated. Liebling was a connoisseur of French cuisine, a subject he wrote about in Between Meals: An Appetite For Paris.” (Wikipedia)
“Between Meals is a collection of pieces from the New Yorker that doubles as a memoir of eating. Liebling was passionate about pugilism and horse racing, but his true love was France. In 1926, aged twenty-two, he convinced his father to send him to Paris for a year of study, much of which he spent beyond the confines of the Sorbonne. When he wasn’t familiarising himself with French wines at the Restaurant des Beaux Arts in St Germain he was likely to be lunching at the Rowing Club de la Seine, on hare paté, tins of sardines, muzzles of beef, radishes, rice butter, cheese, fruit, brandy and coffee.
Liebling’s Paris of the 1920s is filled with local bistros, waiters, restaurateurs, landlords and fellow diners. It’s a city of solitary walks, reading and people-watching, all rendered in lively detail: “I was often alone, but seldom lonely. I enjoyed the newspapers and books that were my usual companions at table, the exchanges with waiters, barmen, booksellers, street vendors … the sound of the conversations of others around me”.
“The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite”, he observes, and that appetite is reflected in the many descriptions of menus at places such as Maillabuau, where he made his way through a dozen snails, soup garbure, trout grenobloise and poulet Henri IV, followed by an omelette au kirsch. Still, Liebling is a discerning eater, not a glutton. He enjoys the satisfaction of knowing what goes with what. A truite au bleu (“a live trout simply done to death in hot water, like a Roman emperor in his bath”) needs an Alsatian wine such as Lacrimae Sanctae Odiliae. And such pairings are also subjective: a taste must know its own mind, hence the pleasure Liebling takes in discovery. He is not prescriptive. (I’ve seen it from the other side as a waiter; you respect the diner who is confident enough to stray from the tried and tested.)
None of Liebling’s restaurants have survived, and most of the dishes he describes have gone too. You’d be hard pressed to find somewhere in Paris today serving larks on brochettes, quail potted with fresh grapes or spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce nantua. Have we lost the sense of adventure, connection and experience that should frame eating out? Is this the “gastronomic dark time” Liebling feared was on its way? Comfort eating has its place, of course, but it is also, he suggests, a sign of arrested development, in which we forsake our ability to appreciate other cultures, other ingredients, and turn instead to the “reassuring tastes of infancy”. (TLS, Edward Chisholm)
He describes a spot of lunch he had with his friend Yves Mirande.
“The lunch began with a half-dozen oysters, which Mirande opened himself and served with little rounds of buttered bread. Then there was a pâté de foie gras, which we ate with the same bread, and then a slice of ham from Bayonne, which Mirande had brought back from a trip to the South. After that came a hot sausage in crust, and then a fillet of pike in a rose-coloured sauce Nantua, made with crayfish butter. The pièce de résistance was a saddle of lamb larded with anchovies, accompanied by artichokes on foie gras. We had cheeses after that – Camembert, Pont l’Evêque, and Roquefort – and finally some figs. With the oysters we drank a bottle of white Bordeaux; with the pâté and the ham, a bottle of red; with the sausage and the pike, champagne; and with the lamb, more red Bordeaux.” (Between Meals, An Appetite for Paris, by AJ Liebling)
My mother described my grandmother’s cooking as elemental – they simply couldn’t get the staff so she never really learnt how to cook – boiled beef and sago were emblematic of a no frills lunch with granny – displeasing guests like Leibling. Arrested development on the ingredients front didn’t stop my mother being a pretty good cook but she cooked the best sago ever which we called ‘frogs eyes’ a la creme.
How interesting.We certainly have lost our hunger for such a wide variety of foods.And ironically enough instead of celebrating the wide variety of ingredients readily available from every culinary culture on the planet,the hamburger seems to be winning in popularity, sadly.One fact still remains however; hunger really is The Best sauce! Who knows what will be on the menu even fifty years from now?
Bon appetit Christopher.
Tapioca was ‘frog eyes’ in my school.
In my husband’s business canteen the cook couldn’t spell
Tapioca, so wrote on blackboard menu ‘slippery balls’
Belfast humour.
Great! I too can relate.We called that particularly slimy mess…frog spawn!
Tapioca, in my convent school days, was pink and stuck together in large globules – cooked by the little French girls employed by the terrifying nuns. I still have flashbacks.