The Benedictine abbey of Saint Peter, Hautvillers, Marne. About 1670. Dom Pérignon, the cellarist in charge of making wine from the grapes of the abbey’s vineyards, has been experimenting with a method of producing the naturally sparkling wine that will one day be known as Champagne. According to legend, he announces his breakthrough by calling to his fellow monks, “I am drinking stars!”
IT WAS YEARS SINCE I’D SPENT ANY TIME IN THE UNITED STATES, long enough to think of Manhattan as a foreign country. Mentally converting dollars to Euros became second nature, and the automatic “Have a nice day” of checkout ladies had me responding, to their confusion, “Thanks. You too.”
Some friends had lent me their apartment in Midtown. There’s a special satisfaction in the anonymity of a hotel room or someone else’s home, that sense of a neutral space that you are free to fill with whatever you please. For the period of your sequestration, you are whoever you choose to be. Leonard Cohen wrote about “laying low, and letting the hunt go by.” Something of that sense was the first pleasure of being back in New York.
“We’ve filled the fridge,” said my friends as they left. “No need to buy anything.”
But they were vegetarians (and I was anything but). The grains, greens, and soy products they’d left me were free of salt, preservatives, and, sadly, flavor.
Fortunately one is never more than a few blocks from one of those vast supermarkets that seem to occupy every second corner in American cities. Within thirty minutes I was standing just inside the entrance to such an establishment, speechless with admiration.
European markets have aisles; this one had avenues . . . boulevards . . . freeways of food. Fifty kinds of bread. Twenty kinds of muffins. Ten kinds of butter. Thirty varieties of milk. And the meats! Not just pork and beef but also buffalo and ostrich.
The produce department provided the greatest surprise. Dragon fruit, guavas, and rambutan were almost unknown in France, as were black potatoes, prickly pear, and tomatillos, but even more surprising were the familiar plants and fruits jumbled together with no respect for the seasons.
How could ears of sweet corn, traditionally available for only a few weeks in summer, be on sale next to forest mushrooms that grow only in the fall? Since this was high summer, one expected lettuces, but not white asparagus. And why were beige autumnal pears offered next to fat summery strawberries?
No merchant in Paris would offer this miscellany of produce at the same time of year. Timing was everything. Sicilian clementines arriving in December, each bearing a few green leaves, brought a tart, bright reminder of summer to the darkest of months and added a grace note to the rituals of Christmas. Passe-Crassanes, the juiciest of pears, identified by the blob of red wax on the end of each stem, were in season only for the same few weeks as unctuous Vacherin cheese, the taste of which they so perfectly complemented.
French markets used refrigeration too, but less promiscuously. Just because something could be done didn’t mean it should be done. Melons could be had in December, flown in from Israel or Africa, but the connoisseur saved that experience for the summer, since nothing compared to the taste of a juicy cantaloupe from Cavaillon eaten with paper-thin slices of jambon cru, wind-dried all winter under the rafters of a Provençal farmhouse.
Moreover, to eat summer fruit in the depth of winter was to miss the pleasure of desserts unique to the colder months—a tarte Tatin of caramelized apples, or pears à la Dijonnaise, simmered in spiced and sugared white wine.
Loading up my supermarket cart with some more obscure products of its shelves, I hauled my purchases back to the apartment.
I’d just closed the refrigerator when jet lag struck, and I fell into bed. As it was only about 8 p.m. local time, I woke, refreshed, at 3 a.m. Fighting one’s circadian rhythms is futile, so I brewed a pot of Outer Mongolian coffee, toasted a Transylvanian whole-grain muffin with Circassian date flakes, and settled down in front of the TV. After a few minutes staring in disbelief at evangelists promoting prayer handkerchiefs and cancer cures made from sacred buffalo tallow and consecrated water from the Jordan River, I took refuge in the all-movie channels.
We all enjoy doing something we know is not good for us, but it’s an additional pleasure to have no choice. Watching Down Argentine Way with Betty Grable, Don Ameche, and Carmen Miranda in that vivid 1940s Technicolor gave the same guilty satisfaction as eating peaches out of the can, and not caring that the syrup dripped off your chin.
Browsing the produce aisles of that supermarket had brought home to me how much I’d learned from living in France. It taught me that, in food as in most things, the essence of pleasure resides in timing. To delay satisfaction sharpens the experience. Anticipation stimulates the imagination, enriching both the expectation of gratification and the gratification itself.
To eat summer fruit in midwinter felt as sinful as watching movies at 3 a.m. Much as I admired the miracle of hydroponics that brought strawberries to unnatural ripeness out of season, I wasn’t tempted to try them. Somewhere in Charente or Languedoc, tiny fraises des bois were making their slow way to maturity. Soon they would arrive at the outdoor produce market on rue de Seine. I remembered their scent, almost like perfume, the subtle mixture of tart and sweet, the delicious crunch between tongue and palate.
I could wait.