Two years later, in 1961, at Harvard College, the Freshman Union eating hall was worse. Worse even than the food I had at army camp in England with the Royal Fusiliers when I was a fifteen-year-old cadet. Once again I spoke up, this time to the deaf ears of a home economist and the huge women cooks who had been serving that slop for thirty years with firmly muttered Boston Irish oaths. So I backed off, and plotted to get out of Harvard’s “houses” and into a house of my own. Or anyone’s, for that matter. “Anyone” appeared in the form of a teaching fellow from Paris, and soon I was ensconced in a Directoire-decorated apartment on Beacon Hill’s Chestnut Street I called the “Champagne Palace.”
The teaching fellow turned out to have lived in Paris, so we loved the same things. The champagne flowed, the candles stayed lighted, and the Piaf songs played on. There wasn’t much of a kitchen, but I did manage a mean steak au poivre. Since my aunt continued sending recipes, I had to improvise and we enjoyed a chicken in cream, spaghetti in clam sauce, lobsters, and all sorts of risottos and omelets. The apartment was above the English consul general’s house, the site of constant English theater cast parties, so many a bored actor found his way up the stairs at the advice of the consul’s (and our) risqué maid. Here I could practice my own full-blown candlelight Alexandria Quartet hospitality and impromptu cooking for the first time. The guests were whatever actors, hustlers, pill pushers, and Etonian consular sons and cousins appeared in the wee hours of the morning. A college diary entry in 1961:
Freddy and the Champagne Palace
Steak au poivre
Jack Daniel’s
Chambolle-Musigny
Courvoisier
Pills
Substitute Chicken Club, Omelet
After two years of this masked ball, my Champagne Palace friend became unhinged, and the creditors showed up and commandeered my Directoire gilt-bronze swan-neck and dolphin chandelier. So after a few more parties, the palace was disbanded and bare, and I went back to my allotted rooms at Adams House. Deprived of a kitchen, my time was now filled with Baudelaire, Mallarmé, William Burroughs, studies of Egyptian funerary temples, and wishing I didn’t understand why Oscar Wilde would take a cab to cross the street. My great friend and roommate, Michael Palmer, already on his way to becoming a first-rate poet, developed friendships with Louis Zukofsky, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and the Robert Creeleys, who were among those who visited our room. After smoking marijuana for the first time, I said I preferred a good champagne, Lafite-Rothschild, or Otard cognac, and offered some to that evening’s guests. But I still needed to cook for whoever had the munchies.
I set up a kitchen in the closet with the hot plate and blue Le Creuset frying pan sent by my aunt, who was worried that years of bad school food would stunt my mind. Recipes and advice on how to entertain my friends kept coming: one for romaine lettuce dressed with sour cream, mayonnaise, and imported Parmesan cheese; others for her incredible coleslaw; iced coffee with ice cream and vanilla bean; and the names of importers on the East Coast that sold Ratsherrn bock beer and a particular 1957, Rosé d’Anjou (with advice never to spend money on any older ones).
At the end of that letter in 1962 she wrote, “Your uncle’s prediction for the past five years came to pass yesterday—two Soviets in space and he expects them to try for a rendezvous and to train for a rescue in space.” Back on earth, she knew it was time to check out my mental health, so she invited me with several of my friends, including Michael, still uninitiated in the lessons of aristocratic Russia, to come to Washington.
My friends had indulged in my aunt’s chicken liver with hundred-year-old Madeira recipe, which I’d cooked in our college room’s closet. Before we disbanded from Harvard, I wanted them to experience the source and lifestyle of the only perfect harmony I had ever known—a grand world whose real players were about to disappear. I wanted my friends to hear the conversations at the table with my uncle’s circle of aristocratic Russians, their talk ranging from underwater missiles and galactic travel to space stations and the real story of Rasputin’s death. The storyteller was Count Cheremetev, childhood friend of Prince Yusupov, Rasputin’s assassin. My favorite of the group was a discreet crown prince of Poland. When my aunt had offered an aspirin to a guest complaining of a headache, the prince said: “Take the France instead; it sails at eleven.”
So in our junior year we made the trip to Washington, D.C. My friends paled when they saw the silk and malachite apartment, but it was nothing compared with the pallor they’d acquired after three vodka toasts: “To our meeting!” “To the promise of your young minds!” and “May you leave the world a better place than you found it!” Only a Russian could greet you and speak to your death within five minutes. It was normal for me.
As were the famous chicken livers as hors d’oeuvre, vodka, and caviar blini for a first course. The first Russian culinary lesson was that blini should be drenched in enough melted butter for it to run down into one’s lace cuffs, if one had them. The second was in the social nerve and dexterity to pick up a vodka in one hand, a beluga-laden, butter-soaked, sour-cream-covered blini in the other, and pop the whole blini in one’s mouth seconds after the burn of the vodka hit one’s throat.
After several more courses and lots of wines, dessert was a quart of ice cream per person. Then my uncle repeated the before-the-war/after-the-war tutorial, giving each of us a taste of his favorite liqueur partnered with its far more magnificent prewar incarnation. The pousse-café to settle our stomachs was what legends are made of: a sixteen-ounce Scotch and soda. Our lessons had begun, and we returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Stories of this Russian meal survived better than we did, and it became a challenge to repeat as much of it as possible back in Cambridge, though now it was at least easier with a kitchen of my own. When we couldn’t stand Adams House any longer (or they us), Michael and I took a little two-story house with a garden on Green Street in Cambridge. I pulled out my Elizabeth David Gourmet articles on the London restaurateur of the thirties X. Marcel Boulestin; put aside Radiguet and Ho Chi Minh, and opened Prosper Montagné’s Larousse Gastronomique.
We never did get around to planting the planned little lettuces and mesclun in the garden, but the kitchen was well enough equipped for serious cooking. Michael loved food as much as I did. He came from an Italian family in Scarsdale, New York, with several maiden aunts who specialized in organizing Old World feasts. His Wellesley College girlfriend, Cathy Simon, loved cooking as well. Her Danish mother in Manhattan was a friend of the legendary cooking teacher Michael Field, and Cathy had learned from the best. Not that she needed much education: she was one of the best natural cooks I had ever seen. And our Texan friend John Sanger, another passionate cook and Michael Field fan, had the allowance to cook all the things like whole Smithfield hams that we others couldn’t afford.
For my junior year birthday, Michael had given me a can of truffles and a book of H.D.’s poems, setting the tone for the coming year, one spent in the college library listening to tapes of Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence read Coward’s play Private Lives, and cooking. Nothing else seemed to make much sense.
Once we had our kitchen, I couldn’t wait to use the truffles and the other gift from Michael, an 1884 Madeira.
First Dinner in Our Own Kitchen
Cambridge 1964
Pâté
Frozen Vodka
Consommé Madrilène
Saumon en Gelée aux Truffes
Pouilly-Fumé 1962
Filet de Boeuf Périgourdine
Chateau-Neuf-du-Pape 1957
Strawberries and French Cream
Asti Spumante
Coffee
“Napoleon” Armagnac
Sercial Madeira 1884
Guests at that dinner included Cathy, John Sanger, and my boyfriend Colin Streeter, the most beautiful young man at Harvard and, it was said, just out of the arms of Leonard Bernstein.
Fired up by this success, I filled my notebook with recipes for salt beef, how to make hams, turbot with Meyer lemon salad, sturgeon with cream and caviar, green bean and nasturtium flower salad, and Soufrières lime punch. I wrote that my goal was to cook the way Balenciaga cut clothes—simple in form, without ornamentation, always in harmony with the lines of the body. For “body” read ingredients.
Everyone who had been on the Washington trip wanted to test what Cheremetev had told us was Prince Yusupov’s definition of decadence: drinking Chateau d’Yquem with roast beef. The Russians considered the point of it to be the richness of the fat (it had to be prime and aged beef) and the age of the wine, which could not be too young or too old. Too young, the wine would lack the complexity to match the richness of the meat, and too old, it would pale under that same richness. A twenty- to thirty-year-old d’Yquem was thought to be just about right.
We served the beef with a 1955 d’Yquem because that was all we could find and afford. But the ten-year-old wine did its job: I remember the moment of silence that fell around the hot, early summer kitchen as I cut salty fat off the roast ribs and everyone (as instructed) sucked on a chunk while washing it down with the cool wine. One felt a stagger in the knees, the body sending a silent but eloquent message to the brain to stop! We had reached the benchmark. Or so we thought.
Our final dinner, a year later, just before we graduated in June 1965, was in a kitchen that had reached one hundred degrees by the time I had roasted the goose. I served it at room temperature with more d’Yquem. The fatty goose and its Peking duck–like skin, paired with the old sweet wine, pushed us momentarily out into a world where eating and tasting were as powerful forces as any we knew.
But enough of all that, I thought. We were leaving the college nest, and so time to find a job. An offer from The New Yorker seemed from the other side of the moon, so I thought of architecture. And Italy and Greece. Would they move me enough to go back to school for more?
I sailed for Europe.