Richard and I lived in the center of London, above the food photography studio and around the corner from the Time-Life offices on Bond Street. The seven-day schedule was rough but no worse than at a busy restaurant.
At seven every morning we’d review the day’s shooting and the next day’s writing. At nine I would start cooking in front of the camera and do so until 7 P.M., crawl upstairs to nosh on leftovers, drink some Lynch-Bages ’66 until midnight, and plan the next day’s shoot. The late-night Scotches were soon relegated to Saturdays devoted to finding and translating more recipes, outlining and writing the next books, and reviewing what we had done the previous week. Sundays, if not devoted to more of the same, meant lunches at the studio with writers, publicists, journalists, and friends. I made sure to put the sexy food on Friday’s studio shoot. There’s nothing like a little leftover goose or suckling pig with a pumpkin and black truffle gratin for keeping the soul together.
I cooked for all of my London writer heroines, including the very English, large, and wonderful Jane Grigson, whose presence in a room made one feel like taking off for a country cottage and cooking there forever. She was the woman whose book on charcuterie had helped me put Chez Panisse and later Stars on the map. I had been dying to meet her. This lunch as recorded in my notebooks must have come during the making of the “Beef and Veal” volume, since the loin of veal was already roasted. And paid for.
Lunch with Grigsons, Elizabeth David, Sybille Bedford, Richard Olney, Jill Norman (Penguin Books)
Chez Nous, Conduit Street, London
July 9, 1978
Smoked Salmon
Chablis, “Mont de Milieu” Pic 1975
Cold Loin of Veal Stuffed with Montpelier Butter
Château La Pointe 1971
Château Lafite 1962
Cheddar
Château Rieussec 1975
Gooseberry, Red Currant, and Almond Fools
Château Filhot 1969
It must have been the superb Sauternes, because somewhere at the end of lunch it was decided that we would all go to Bordeaux for a weekend. After Richard spent an hour on the phone the arrangements were made and the Comte and Comtesse de Lur-Salaces invited us to lunch at their Château d’Yquem. Within days Richard and I were off to France with Sybille Bedford and the ex-wife of the director John Huston. Elizabeth did not go, thinking that more than two on the road was too much. The Yquem lunch lived in all our memories for all the obvious reasons, but two stood out: the taste of Sauternes with a crayfish sauce and the subsequent story of the Sauternes dinner at Panisse a few years before; and the red wine served in a plain carafe in the middle of the table but never offered. For years afterward we all wondered what one of the greatest men in the white wine business would offer for red wine in Bordeaux. I was restrained from asking by Richard, so we never found out.
We started the meal with Pommery & Greno champagne, a very old-fashioned gesture.
Lunch at Chateau d’Yquem
Filets de Sole au Coulis d’Écrevisse
Château de Fargues 1970
Caneton Farcis
Vin Rouge en Carafe
Jardinière de Legumes
Fromages
Château d’Yquem 1969
Frangipane
Château d’Yquem 1937
The frangipane was a puff pastry stuffed with almond butter cream. Perfect with the 1969 d’Yquem, which, though not as famous as the ’67, had more guts and held up to the cooked flavors of the puff pastry. The 1937 seemed older than expected with a very deep color, but it was still bright. “Polite” and “round” were the words the others used. For me it was almost too polite. But it did have the infinity of a great Yquem.
After a tour of Latour, a tasting at Mouton with every wine from 1971 to 1976, and a lunch with the director of Lafite, it was back to London. I was reminded again how magnificent it is to taste wines that have never left the places they were born. Then my sister, Mary, rang from San Francisco with two pieces of news. One was a devastating closure of the past; the other blew open the future. My mother had just died and Mary had found a site for my new restaurant.
I was devastated that I would never share with my mother a grand hotel suite overlooking the Quirinale Palace, the Mount Lavinia beach in Ceylon, or see her face seized in frozen politesse when a young plover was brought to the table at London’s Connaught hotel smelling more like ripe Pont L’Evêque than perfect game. The huge and great parties in Sydney with people dancing until dawn after staggering buffets, wonderlands of fresh pineapple, shops full of rubies and Egyptian gold necklaces, deep-carpeted Roman couture houses, and sea-urchin-filled seafood restaurants floating on the then clean Bay of Naples. My mother had shown me how to live.