… not the book returneth, but its ghost!
Andrew Lang, from “Colletet”
WHEN I first went to live in Aix, I felt that I wanted to read everything anyone had written about it and Provence.
I soon knew that this was a greedy impossibility: time was against me, some two thousand years of it, long since caught up with my half-century. In much the same way I came to recognize that every book I must ignore had been written because of many of my own reactions to the compelling town.
“Oh no!” my old friend Georges from Dijon cried out when he saw a writing-look in my eyes as we walked down the Rue Cardinale toward the fountain of the Quatre Dauphins. “Not you too! Not another tiny poetical masterpiece on the trees, the flowing waters, the many-hued effluvia of Aix!”
And thus I closed my reading eyes, so that now I do not know what has been written, really, since the commanders of Caius Sextius Calvinus confirmed his directives to found, in 123 B.C., a military post near the abundant waters, part steaming and part chill, of Aquae Sextiae. Except for guidebooks, to verify some such detail as that one, I am innocent of conscious research, and must follow my inner map to know what street I am on, and even why.
One result of my possible frustration as a writer about the shape and the shadow of this town is that I can think of several books about it that I would like to put into proper form.
The one on Balzac’s view of Aix would, of course, demand a fair amount of research, at least quasi-erudite: even I knew that this fecund and romantic scribe had mentioned our town quite often and lovingly, but where? And why? It was too complicated for my limited patience …
I asked one or two people like Monsieur Colas the antique dealer about it. They got a delighted smile in their eyes, a kind of sly cautious sparkle.
“Have you said anything about this project?” they murmured as if discussing an indiscretion. “Does anyone know of this?”
When I assured them that it was simply a passing wish of mine to see some of Balzac’s impressions of Aix collected in a little book which would interest some of the visitors, they almost pushed me out of their shops, with a last whispered warning never to mention it to anyone. I assumed that later one or another of them would then whisper a few juicy hints to a friend of a friend: the pipeline, it is called there with various significances …
Such a book could be entertaining, I still think … unless it became the sterile thesis of some pedagogic docteur ès lettres.
Another booklet which I approached with a kind of cautious languor, mainly as an excuse to visit the Musée Granet often, would also make a minor “item” for art collectors and gallery hounds. Egocentrically, I felt better qualified to attempt it than the one about the fat novelist, for it would be a kind of gastronomical tour of the fine town museum.
I went so far as to make a tentative list of the canvases that I, self-styled culinary raconteuse, would point out to my occasional reader.
There was the whole history of man’s need for food in that beautiful old priory of the Knights of Malta, waiting for me to unravel a silver thread from one to the next. It would begin with the exquisite little Virgin suckling her child, I thought. It would wind through the simplicity of country feasts to fatuous wanton soupers en ville, and it would pick up the crumbs of poverty and lonely old age. There would be still lifes of many schools, and magnificent flowery “studies” of grapes and dead birds. It would be amusing.
Of course I never wrote it, for want of my own hunger to do anything but look and wonder.
And why was there not a little book, well edited of course, a kind of anthology of everything good that could be gleaned from other writers, poets, essayists, statesmen, diarists, even worldly gossips, about the fountains of Aix? No visitor could be there one hour or a dozen years without knowing their harmony, their undying sound. Why not ease man’s restlessness by letting him read what more vocal men had sung?
Perhaps Monsieur Colas would feel this too was a valuable idea, to be guarded with jealous care from the ambitious, the unscrupulous scholar …
Probably the luckiest creative carelessness on my part, professionally, was my almost compulsive shunning of what could have been a very amusing and lucrative job of gastronomical reportage.
Every year, oddly enough during Lent, there is a series of luxurious dinners given weekly at the Casino, which is a government-subsidied institution throughout France and which in Aix is called the Vendôme. Good and sometimes famous chefs are installed for one week in its kitchens, according to a pattern which changes each year. The last time I was in Aix the specialties were, with not too startling originality, of several great regions of France. Once before the chefs had all brought with them their best menus from well-known station restaurants like Dijon and Toulon.
The year I was asked by a magazine to write a series of “portraits” which probably would have sold at a fairly fat price, the Vendôme had ensnared an impressive list of “mères” to prepare their most famous dishes for their respective seven days behind the pots and pipkins, and then produce one gastronomical blast in culmination.
There were of course several mères from Lyon, of one- to three-star renown. There was perforce one, the one, from Mont-Saint-Michel. A few other culinary centers produced their motherly quotas, and the redoubtable ladies brought off their Lenten tours de force with skill and poise, as far as anyone could judge by their series of expert menus.
I met a few of them, and found them brisk poised businesswomen, with decidedly less poundage and fewer gray hairs than their titles would lead one to expect. In more than one case I felt that the charming person I talked to could more possibly be a well-tutored granddaughter than the old omelet queen or fish-dumpling dowager whose name she bore. It reminded me a little of the letter of introduction I was asked to present to “one of Cézanne’s most promising pupils,” who turned out to have been a suckling babe when the old master died in 1906 …
The director of the Vendôme invited me to be his guest at any of the weekly orgies he planned for Lent, that year. He asked me to bring an escort. He asked me to write something nice about his ventures, present, past, and proposed.
All this seemed entertaining to me. I tossed a coin for Normandy or Périgord, and the truffles won. I asked Félix, less than half my age but the most available male, to escort me. We discussed clothes seriously: he would wear his new brocade cummerbund to the gala dinner. I outlined on invisible paper a series of interviews with all the famous mères.
Then the director of the Vendôme let it drop, too casually, that as guest of honor I would naturally be mistress of ceremonies and in full charge of the public address system, the giving of prizes and cotillion favors, and the general gay witty ton of the evening. I must, he said in a brotherly way, do everything but sing for my supper.
My throat closed as fast as a clam; my brain washed white.
Of course my psychogenic nose dive was abrupt and complete. Félix put away his cummerbund, I spent the night of Mère Poularde’s dinner in bed with a hot toddy, and the director of the Vendôme never again bowed over my hand when I crept in to his cozy bar to meet visiting firemen.
Most irrevocably of all, the invisible pages I had written about all the non-gray, non-old méres of France turned to ash in my head. It was a beautiful chance, forever gone, to write an unimportant, pleasant, and perhaps profitable little book about a unique gastronomical congress. Ah well and ho hum.
The other important near-miss in my literary approach to Aix was impelled less by my professional curiosity than by an aesthetic one. It itched at me enough to make me scratch my way through two interviews with a formidable tiny woman who ruled one of the great pastry shops of the town.
She was about half my size, which always affects my accent: it becomes lumpish and awkward, much as I myself do when I must be with Oriental women. Great white cow, I am with them; great Saxon oaf I am with some of the birdlike females of Provence.
There were at least three other pastry shops as good as hers, in a town perhaps more noted for them than any other in a country dedicated to the gastric hazards of almond paste, chestnuts soaked in sweet liqueurs, and chocolate in all its richest and most redolent forms. There were, in fact, two other famous stores on the same side of the Cours Mirabeau. Like hers, they served tea in the afternoon, in discreet side rooms where English and Swedish people hummed over the trays of goodies. And like hers, they seemed to follow a rigid pattern of production which from my first months in Aix interested me to the point where I grew brave enough to ask the woman about it.
By the time I did so, she recognized me as an inoffensive and fairly good customer: her cookies and wafers and cakes were plainly made of ingredients I approved of for my children, in spite of my responsibility to their livers, and the shop always smelled right, not confused and stuffy but delicately layered: fresh eggs, fresh sweet butter, grated nutmeg, vanilla beans, old kirsch, newly ground almonds …
Once my older daughter designed and ordered a birthday cake there for her sister. Madame looked openly shocked by the picture, and called the head chef. He came in with his hands rolled in his apron and a cigaret on his lower lip, which he dropped and stamped into the waxed floor when he saw the plan. Finally he looked sadly at us, and shrugged, and made the cake, but Madame told us coldly that it was the first time such a thing had ever been requested.
It was a large cake, big enough for ten people, made like a coiled green snake, to celebrate the birthday of the younger girl’s pet fetish, a slim reptile of green beads brought once from Mexico, which she carried everywhere with her for many years and which her best friend finally stole. Freud rode roughshod through all the motivations of this strange gift of pastry from the older sibling, and it is no wonder that even the pastry chef blanched a little at her plan.
The result was a reptilian masterpiece, carefully carved in an artful sponge cake and then covered, coil by coil, in a thick layer of green almond paste. There were skin markings of glaze, I remember. A delicate pink fork of sugar protruded between tiny white teeth. The eyes were fierce. A miasma of Alsatian kirsch hovered over and around it.
We never saw the chef again, but guests at the birthday party screamed and then remained polite in our foreign presence, and the whole delicious monstrosity was eaten, and the next day my little girl succumbed to a semicomatose and vertinginous state called crise d’acétone in French and bilious attack in American. The episode was never mentioned by the wee lady, so smartly dressed and coiffed, who ran the pastry shop.
The first time I asked her about the beautiful rhythm of the cakes and fruits and bonbons that flowed through the one generous window of her store, she seemed remotely interested, but baffled by my own interest.
Why should I bother? What difference did it make? Of course, of course: reputable confectioners and pastry-makers always put candied fruits in their windows on such and such a date, and sugared almonds for the baptismal season and June brides, and strawberries made of fresh almond paste for this date and molded painted snails and shrimps for that. Of course; everyone knew that. If the right things did not appear in the good shopwindows at their proper time, where would Aix be? Where would life be? And as for the dates and seasons, everyone knew them.
I flapped oafishly, my accent in lumps and my spiritual bulk greater than my body’s. I tried to explain that to a visitor the pageantry of the pastry shop windows was mysterious, exciting. It was plainly dictated by the supplies on hand, the new crop of almonds, the freshly preserved fruits like melons and cherries and figs, then the deep mysteries of all the different blends of chocolate at Christmastime, and the purity of Easter with white eggs and mimosa blossoms and sugar daffodils …
She looked firmly at me. “There are always the calissons,” she said. “I see that you are a foreign writer. We shall make an appointment to show you the kitchens where we produce the calissons of Aix. The best calissons of Aix, naturally.”
She offered me one, held in a little silver tong. I waved it respectfully aside, for we both knew that I had sent dozens of them, boxes of them, to unnumbered friends everywhere in the world. We both knew they always arrived. We knew too that they were delicious, and that I never ate them.
I assured her once more that the little pointed ovals of artfully blended almond paste were a superb confection, part pastry, part candy, light but rich, not cloying, haunting and delicate, old as the Romans or perhaps Jeanne the second queen of King René, a regal tidbit …
“Yes yes, and thank you again,” I said in my stolid Saxon way, “but I should so much like to have you tell me about the calendar that you as the leading pastry shop follow here in Aix … the set days for producing all these other specialities for the town …”
She shrugged elegantly. “It is routine,” she said. “We all do it. Everyone knows when it is time to start the chocolate fish for April Fools’ day. But the calissons are a specialty unique to Aix. I shall arrange for an appointment with our kitchens.”
The ugly truth is that I did not keep my date. I sent a note. From then on I sent my children or friends into the shop across from the Deux Garçons … there were two or three things there that I felt it almost to a duty to enjoy while I could, like the little oblong slabs, each made in its own pan, of a kind of thin solid sponge cake called something like “paving blocks.” In the other town, Dijon, they had been round and called Genoa bread. In Aix the taste and smell of them crept into my private map, so that even now I can eat one on the terrace of the shadow-café, while I wait for six o’clock and the end of the children’s schoolday and a drink with them …
Often, after I left Aix the first time, I thought of the book about the brilliant sights and smells of that rhythmic parade through the pastry shop windows. It was exciting. It was based on the main supplies of the strange rich dry land; the almonds, the colors of all the fruits and fishes, the spring floods of eggs and cream and syrups. Religion took it over, with pagan rituals behind the altars: spring, marriage, birth and rebirth, the miracles of Christmas and Easter. And through war and plague and near-starvation the pastry cooks and the candy-makers molded and melted what they had, into the right symbols always.
I decided to try again, and in 1960 I went back to the stylish tiny woman whose stronghold was on the Cours across from the Deux Garçons. She remembered me, with a small unsurprised smile, and offered me a calisson from silver tongs. I thanked her, and because of the passage of time I ate it while she watched.
My accent seemed somewhat less lumpy, thanks also to time and perhaps a vermouth-gin at the café, and I explained once more about my wish to write a kind of calendar, with reasons and dates, of the beautiful procession of sweetmeats in her fabulous windows and in those of all the other good pastry shops in Aix.
She bowed, and I bowed.
Then she tapped a bell beside the cash register, and informed the apprentice who popped in from the odorous rear of the shop, breathing with panic under her sugary smock, that I wished to see the calisson factory.
I was a foreign writer, Madame said. I wished to study the art of making the famous calissons of Aix.
An appointment was made for the next week.
As I went out, helplessly, to cross the Cours for another vermouth-gin, I arranged in my head to go to Marseille for three days, and I silently composed a regretful letter to Madame.
From the Deux Garçons I could see the windows of her shop. They were a blaze of brilliant fish shaped in replicas of all the mean, bright, fanged, horny, spikedy things that go into a real bouillabaisse, painted on artful molds of pure almond paste, spilling from nets and from reed baskets onto the wide window shelf. Seaweeds shaped from tinted sugar caught them. Tiny mussels and urchins tangled in the shadows. There was not a calisson in sight.
And back in the depths of the kitchens the next candies were being readied.
Was it for the Rites of Spring, the coming of the first strawberries, gleaming tiny fraises des bois looking more beautiful than possible in their little straw baskets, all made of sugar and vividly painted almond paste? Or was it time already for the cherries? Then there would be candied cherries as deep and translucent as the stained glass of a cathedral window, piled like symmetrical rubies upon silver platters. There would be one or two enormous willow-wand cornucopias, spilling out rich chocolate-covered cherries with their stems still sticking through to prove their race: cherries soaked and floating in the finest marc or kirsch, and then coated delicately with a fondant before the final imprisonment of the chocolate. And in Provençal pots and jugs among the glossy bonbons would be cherries of every possible hue and size, realer than life and artfully painted to out-mimic Bings, Royal Annes, and every other kind that ever grew in orchard. Cherries were ripe …
Or brides were. Or new babies were. Or it was time to be confirmed, and be given a little prayer book made of fine pastry frosted with white and gold. Or it was Carnaval, and hideous masks of frosted sponge cakes were dusted with edible confetti over their leers. Or perhaps it was simply the time when every pastry shop in Aix was filled with round high cakes covered with sugar made to look shockingly like ripe Gorgonzola or Roquefort cheese, with one slice cut out and two or three little sugar mice popping in and up mischievously. The more mice, the higher the cost, and for me there was never the real reason for this annual invasion, for I never got any kind of calendar of these tides and rhythms.
I followed them dumbly, perhaps as a fish follows the currents that push it here and there, and make it hungry one time and amorous the next and never more than protestingly wondering.
I sat in a kind of quiescent pet across from the shop on the Cours, mapping a revenge that always fizzled into another order of calissons to be mailed to Hong Kong or Pacific Palisades when I next went in for some apple tarts or brioches.
“When is Madame going to visit our calisson factory?” the tiny owner would ask me perkily now and then.
“Soon, soon,” I would say with utterly false warmth.
Then she would offer me one of the bland little sweetmeats with her silver tongs. I would bow. She would too.
And here is the recipe, all positive that I have culled, so far, about the mysterious pattern of the pastry shop windows of Aix, which is apparently as irrevocable as the passage of time itself, and which does not deviate one day, one hour, for generations and even centuries, nor for war, pestilence, invasion, nor even peace.
CALISSONS OF AIX
Grind one pint of blanched almonds very fine in a mortar, with one pound of fine white sugar. Pass them through a sieve and put back into the mortar.
Mix into them a few tablespoonfuls of apricot or peach syrup, and then dry out over a slow fire in a heavy casserole. Spread sheets of sacramental paper-bread on a marble candy slab, and then spread the almond paste about one-quarter inch thick over it.
[This paper-bread is the kind that makes communion wafers in church and that is also fed to goldfish. I do not know where it can be bought except perhaps in pastry supply stores. MFKF]
Over the top of the calisson paste spread a Royal Glaze, which is made by mixing two whites of egg with one scant cup of powdered sugar with a wooden spoon until they form a smooth glossy syrup. Cut the whole into pointed ovals about an inch and a half long, and bake them in a moderate oven for a short time. They keep well.
This basic recipe, which is ageless, is varied by the pastry cooks of Aix to have a distinguishing taste of orange in one kitchen (probably the zest added to the almond paste), and hints of anise in another, but the flavor of fine fresh almonds must always predominate.