Mary Frances and her first husband, Al Fisher, arrived in Dijon, France in September, 1929. Al was working on his doctorate in English; Mary Frances took art classes, wrote, and wandered. In this excerpt from the book Long Ago in France, Fisher recounts an epic meal made all the more magical by wines from the Burgundy region. The area’s famed vineyards were just beyond Dijon’s city limits.
THE FIRST NIGHT IN THE NEW QUARTERS, AFTER we had moved and arranged about having Al’s trunks of books sent from the station, I looked up the word anniversary in my dictionary and told Madame that it was our first one. “Impossible,” she shouted, glaring at me and then roaring with laughter when I said, “Three weeks, not even a month. We would like to go to a nice restaurant to celebrate,” I said.
She ripped a piece of paper off a package on the wine-stained tablecloth, scrawled on it with a pencil stub she always seemed to have somewhere about her, and said, “Here … you know where the Ducal Palace is? The place d’Armes: You will see a sign there, the Three Pheasants. Give this to Monsieur Racouchot.”
And she laughed again, as if I were amusing in an imbecilic way. I didn’t mind.
We changed our clothes in the unfamiliar rooms. The lights were on wires with weighted pulleys, so that by sliding them up or down you could adjust their distance from the ceiling, and there was a kind of chain running through the socket of each one, which regulated the power of the light. There were fluted glass shades like pie pans, with squares of brown and purple sateen over them, weighted at each corner with a glass bead. The shadows in the unfamiliar corners, and on our faces, were dreadful in those mauve and mustard chambers.
But we felt beautiful. We put on our best clothes, and tiptoed down the wide stone stairs and past the lighted dining room, with a great key in Al’s pocket and our hearts pounding … our first real meal alone together in a restaurant in France.
First we went up the rue Chabot-Charny to the Café de Paris, by the theater. It was Al’s first love, and a faithful one. He worked there almost every day we lived in Dijon, and grew to know its waiters, the prostitutes who had their morning cards-and-coffee there, its regular patrons, and the rolling population of stock-actors and singers, who were playing at the theater across the street. It was warm in winter, and as cool and fresh as any provincial café could be in the summer. I liked it as soon as I walked shyly into it, that first night.
We were very ignorant about French apéritifs, so Al read from a sign above the cash desk when the waiter came, and said, “The Cocktail Montana, please.” The waiter looked delighted, and dashed to the bar. After quite a while he brought a large tumbler, rimmed with white sugar, and filled with a golden-pink liquid. There were two straws stuck artfully on the frosted glass, one on Al’s side and one on mine.
Al was a little embarrassed that he had not ordered clearly for both of us, but as it turned out, anything else would have been a disaster: The Cocktail Montana whipped up by the Café de Paris was one of the biggest, strongest, loudest drinks I ever drank.
We learned later that a traveling cowboy, stranded from a small Yankee circus, offered to teach its priceless secret to the café owner for free beer, promising him that Americans for miles around would flock to buy it … at nine francs a throw, instead of the one franc fifty ordinary drinks cost there. Of course, there were no Americans to flock; the few who stopped in Dijon sipped reverently of rare wines at the Three Pheasants or the Cloche, or good wines in any café, and would have shuddered with aesthetic and academic horror at such a concoction as we took turns drinking that night.
We enjoyed it immensely (we even had it once or twice again in the next three years, in a kind of sentimental loyalty), and walked on toward the Ducal Palace feeling happier than before.
We saw the big gold letters, Aux Trois Faisans, above a dim little café. It looked far from promising, but we went in, and showed Madame Ollangnier’s scribbled note to the man behind the bar. He laughed, looked curiously at us, and took Al by the arm, as if we were deaf and dumb. He led us solicitously out into the great semicircular place, and through an arch next to the café with two bay trees in tubs on either side. We were in a bare beautiful courtyard. A round light burned over a doorway.
The man laughed again, gave us each a silent little push toward the light, and disappeared. We never saw him again, but I remember how pleased he seemed to be, to leave his own café for a few minutes and direct such obviously bemazed innocents upstairs to Racouchot’s. Probably it had never occurred to him, a good Burgundian, that anyone in the world did not know exactly how to come from any part of it straight to the famous door.
The first meal we had was a shy stupid one, but even if we had never gone back and never learned gradually how to order food and wine, it would still be among the important ones in my life.
We were really very timid that first time, but soon it all would become familiar to us. The noisy dark staircase and the big glass case with dead fish and lobsters and mushrooms and grapes piled on the ice no longer seemed strange to us. And after the first summer I never could pass the water closets with their swinging doors without remembering my mother’s consternation when she had first entered them and found them full of men all chatting, easing themselves, and belching appreciatively. Her face puckered in an effort to look broad-minded.
The long hall past the kitchens and small private dining rooms and Racouchot’s office, and the two dining rooms for the pensionnaires, then the dining room.… I grew to know them as well as I know my own house now.
The glass door to Monsieur Racouchot’s small and incredibly disordered office was usually closed, but we knew that it was often filled with the conglomerate cooking odors of a good meal being served to him and one or two of his cooks in their tall white bonnets.
The only regular pensionnaires we knew were Monsieur Venot, the town bookseller, from his shop on the corner two streets down on the place d’Armes, and one of the Lycée teachers, Jean Matrouchot.
As for the private dining rooms across the hall from the main room, we seldom saw them except in passing. They were usually occupied by groups of wine men or famous politicians visiting the Mayor, Gaston Gérard. Once or twice we engaged one to entertain some of Al’s friends from Princeton, who had come down from Balliol College in Oxford, people like William Mode Spackman and his wife Maryanne and her sister Dorothea, who had once been engaged to Al. We ordered especially good wines for them and I remember being much impressed when one of their guests grandly reordered a bottle of the best wine we had yet dared offer to anyone, a 1919 Gevrey-Chambertin of formidable reputation and equal price. It seemed almost sacrilegious to me that anyone could be so nonchalant about ordering so expensive a wine. I almost forgot their pitying acceptance of our strange toilette in our apartment on the rue du Petit-Potet, and I was glad to send them off filled with not only Racouchot’s fabulous wines but with his remarkable cuisine.
This long approach to the heart of the restaurant, the main dining room, was unlike any we had ever known. Always before we had stepped almost from the street to a table, and taken it for granted that somewhere, discreetly hidden and silenced, were kitchen and offices and storage rooms. Here it was reversed, so that by the time we came to the little square dining room, the raison d’être of all this light and bustle and steam and planning, its quiet plainness was almost an anticlimax.
There were either nine or eleven tables in it, to hold four people, and one round one in the corner for six or eight. There were a couple of large misty oil paintings, the kind that nobody needs to look at, of autumn or perhaps spring landscapes. And there were three large mirrors.
The one at the end of the room, facing the door, had a couple of little signs on it, one recommending some kind of cocktail which we never ordered and never saw anyone else drink either, and the other giving the price by carafe and half-carafe of the red and white vins de maison. As far as I know, we were the only people who ever ordered that: Racouchot was so famous for his Burgundian cellar that everyone who came there knew just what fabulous wine to command, even if it meant saving for weeks beforehand. We did not yet know enough.
We went into the room shyly, and by luck got the fourth table, in a corner at the far end, and the services of a small bright-eyed man with his thinning hair waxed into a rococo curlicue on his forehead.
His name was Charles, we found out later, and we knew him for a long time and learned a great deal from him. That first night he was more than kind to us, but it was obvious that there was little he could do except see that we were fed without feeling too ignorant. His tact was great, and touching. He put the big menus in our hands and pointed out two plans for us, one at twenty-two francs and the other, the diner de luxe au prix fixe, at twenty-five.
We took the latter, of course, although the other was fantastic enough … a series of blurred legendary words: pâte truffé Charles le Témpéraire, poulet en cocotte aux Trois Faisons, civet à la mode bourguignonne … and in eight or nine courses.…
We were lost, naturally, but not particularly worried. The room was so intimate and yet so reassuringly impersonal, and the people were so delightfully absorbed in themselves and their plates, and the waiter was so nice.
He came back. Now I knew him well enough to be sure that he liked us and did not want to embarrass us, so instead of presenting us with the incredible wine book, he said, “l think that Monsieur will enjoy trying, for tonight, a carafe of our own red. It is simple, but very interesting. And may I suggest a half-carafe of the white for an appetizer? Monsieur will agree with me that it is not bad at all with the first courses. . . .”
That was the only time Charles ever did that, but I have always blessed him for it. One of the great wines, which I have watched other people order there through snobbism or timidity when they knew as little as we did, would have been utterly wasted on us. Charles started us out right, and through the months watched us with his certain deft guidance learn to know what wine we wanted, and why.
That first night, as I think back on it, was amazing. The only reason we survived it was our youth … and perhaps the old saw that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. We drank, besides the astounding Cocktail Montana, almost two liters of wine, and then coffee, and then a little sweet liqueur whose name we had learned, something like Grand Marnier or Cointreau. And we ate the biggest, as well as the most exciting, meal that either of us had ever had.
As I remember, it was not difficult to keep on, to feel a steady avid curiosity. Everything that was brought to the table was so new, so wonderfully cooked, that what might have been with sated palates a gluttonous orgy was, for our ignorance, a constant refreshment. I know that never since have I eaten so much. Even the thought of a prix-fixe meal, in France or anywhere, makes me shudder now. But that night the kind ghosts of Lucullus and Brillat-Savarin as well as Rabelais and a hundred others stepped in to ease our adventurous bellies, and soothe our tongues. We were immune, safe in a charmed gastronomical circle.
We learned fast, and never again risked such surfeit … but that night it was all right.
I don’t know now what we ate, but it was the sort of rich winy spiced cuisine that is typical of Burgundy, with many dark sauces and gamey meats and ending, I can guess, with a soufflé of kirsch and glacé fruits, or some such airy trifle.
We ate slowly and happily, watched over by little Charles, and the wine kept things from being gross and heavy inside us.
When we finally went home, to unlock the little door for the first time and go up the zigzag stairs to our own rooms, we wove a bit perhaps. But we felt as if we had seen the far shores of another world. We were drunk with the land breeze that blew from it, and the sure knowledge that it lay waiting for us.
We went back often to The Three Pheasants during the next three years, and in 1954, when I returned to the city for the Foire Gastronomique, I found that Racouchot had died and that his famous restaurant had been combined with the restaurant below it on the place d’Armes, the Pré aux Clercs. This was a good move, I am sure, but it never had the magic for me of the old restaurant upstairs. I remember dining there more than once with Norah when we went back during the seventies, and she agreed that it was by far the best place in Dijon, but it was never the same for me, and I remembered it as I had last known it.