FIRST INTERLUDE
THE LANGUAGE OF MENUS
To me, menus are a language unto themselves.
I have been collecting and reading them since I was seven, composing and acting them out since I was a teenager. They spoke to me as clearly as any childhood fantasy novel. Reading an old menu slowly forms in my mind’s eye its era, the sensibility of the restaurateur or the chef, even the physical details of the dining room. I can picture the guests even when I don’t know who they were. Sometimes I can conjure up an entire evening, a three-act play orchestrated around the food. And from my own past, it’s the menus and the food that are the fixatives for the memories. When I think again about one of my mother’s summer garden party menus, the whole day is conjured up—my mouth waters as I see, taste, and smell the lovage-mayonnaise covered poached whole salmons laid out in the tents. I can see everyone who was there.
I have used the language of menus as the basis for dialogues with mentors, colleagues, and friends. And I had always assumed that this language was universal. When I began to write this book, I outlined it with menus—some that had aroused my appetites, others that I’d designed and cooked myself—and eagerly passed them on to a few editors and publishers as a way of revealing my mission.
The silence was deafening; broken later by only a single comment posed in a question: What do they mean? After a long pause, that question was followed by two more: What were the stories behind the menus, and were any famous people present at the meals? I couldn’t have been more stunned. I thought the menus told their own stories. And eloquently.
Menus are liberally sprinkled through this book, and so that you do not find them silent, let me tell you how they speak to me.
I transcribed what I had read in the December 1961 Gourmet magazine article on “The Art of Table Decoration” into one of my mid-1960s culinary notebooks: “A treat need not be a luxury; a banquet need not include caviar. Imagination is the most important ingredient.” Then I wrote a menu knowing at that time only that a dinner was given by Cecil Beaton in a private dining room in Paris’s Lapérouse restaurant, for two dozen male friends, and probably in the early 1930s.
Beatonmania
Fat of a Turtle
Château d’Yquem l860
Cold Foie Gras
Truffles Poached in Champagne
Canard Rôti Lucullus
Burgundy (a priceless one)
Doyenne de Comice Pear, Juste à Point
Coffee
Crusted Port
Cognac Napoleon
Romeo and Juliettas
At first glance it seems way over-the-top. But it has a discipline. The kind created by Beaton in the horse-racing scene in My Fair Lady, with its miles and miles of extravagant ruffles and hats, but all in black and white, and the singing in a controlled chant about the perfection of the Ascot afternoon . . . until, of course, Liza screams, “Move your bleedin’ arse,” to her horse lagging in third place. In this menu, that scream is the duck.
The mixed language suggests an Englishman wrote it, since a Frenchman would never use English with food, and with the same taste and delight in the language as in the food. Gras has a onomatopoeic ring to it, but only when pronounced by a lower gratin butcher from Marseilles. Using the English word for it, fat, tells you that in relishing the word, probably pronounced with the very upper-gratin Oxford accent so that it sounded like fiat, the dinner guests were undoubtedly rail-thin young things in perfect Boldini-portrait tailored frock coats and Charvet floppy bow ties, giggling at the irony of slipping so much of that fat between their tightly compressed lips, otherwise opened only for the latest quip, gossip, or fingernails-on-metal analysis of the most recent Brideshead Revisited–type scandal. And I would automatically, without thinking, have used rôti once canard had been used, and slipped into French once the word doyenne had been put on paper. It would just be natural, without affectation, in bilingual company.
Following the turtle fat with foie gras tells me also that whoever ordered the menu was very securely a gourmand with a deep appreciation for the art of dining: knowing how to push one’s guests’ sensibilities to the limit without embarrassing them with a troubling surfeit later in the meal. Obviously they all were aesthetes, and saw themselves that way. They were not unfamiliar with this kind of expensive living, and whoever was paying was wealthy. Maybe a younger Tennant or Devonshire son, if his millionaire father had him on a liberal leash.
I have never been in a private dining room at Lapérouse, but one can count on it having a rectangular table seating two at each end, leaving no room for dropped conversation. And just as the meal was far more than a token, so the table decor would not have been one shrimp-pink geranium in a vase—a degree of sophistication with which Beaton would have been out of sympathy. Rather there would have been an impression of enthusiastic spontaneity. Probably there was a tulipière filled with enough camellias so that after each guest was served one for the buttonhole, enough were left to make an impression on the room of expense but not extravagance.
Very likely there was a small sofa in the corner. Somewhere off the room fur coats, top hats, and silver-tipped Malacca canes were stored, since it was obviously winter. It was the kind of scene Ken Russell portrayed in The Music Lovers, but with more restraint, at least until the port showed up, at which point the sofa was the scene of more intimate conversations, the waiters long since having ceased entering before knocking, after the “my dears” among the young men had become a bit thick.
And the food?
Our minds now might reel at a slab of turtle fat apiece. Even at this dinner the cold-blooded English, who would easily rip out the throat of a partridge with their teeth, might have thought twice to plunder further an endangered species so baldly. So the slab of fat in the Limoges soup plate in front of each of the two dozen guests must have given them a slight frisson. I had fat of a turtle in my youth, but only small cubes in turtle soup. Here it is obviously served hot, perhaps moistened with a little sherry-perfumed consommé (but only a little), since it is followed by a cold foie gras. Well, not exactly cold, more like the temperature of the pantry off the dining room, which in those days clocked in at a bone-chilling (were it not for the cashmere-lined silk waistcoats) sixty degrees. Obviously Beaton knew that to stimulate the senses and keep them going is to sample something hot, then something cold, then something hot again.
To follow turtle fat with foie gras—100 percent more fat—is a heady statement in an already heady room. I remember the turtle fat texture as more foie gras than even meltingly fatty hot foie gras itself, and I love the knowledge here that, as the turtle should be hot, the foie gras should not. Heated until the fats are released, foie gras seems to me too slippery; the flavor is deeper and more satisfying when the fat melts slowly in one’s mouth. A reluctant companion in excess, rather than a dancer in your lap.
Next, a whole truffle per person poached in champagne, served in a starched napkin, says again, “This is a person who knows the best of the best,” and needs no ostentatious show of it. The roasted duck Lucullus, however, gives one pause. What duck dish could be worthy of the name of ancient Rome’s most sumptuous banqueteer? I don’t know what the preparation consists of but need to believe it had no truffles, and ideally no coxcombs, testicles, or sweetbreads either. “Doyenne de Comice pear”—housewife’s pear, a frivolous and funny label that could easily rev up the fragile conversation. The simplicity is pleasantly startling. And then the “crusted” port: nonvintage, but to those in the know, a much more satisfying value for your money, all the while accompanied by Havana’s best and most expensive cigars. The waiter appears again for the last time, to crack open the windows for the fresh air of the Quai des Grands-Augustins to end the evening.
WIMSEY
In college I devoured all the Lord Peter Wimsey books. In my diaries at the time I noted a menu that to me is still perfection in language, balance, and progression of food. In 2014, Chris Kimball of the TV show America’s Test Kitchen told me, “You are the Lord Peter Whimsey of your food generation—flamboyant, sharp-tongued, talented, and in love with the style of the thing as much as the thing itself.” I replied that I loved the comparison and that it was true in “the way in which something is presented, even if hardly presented at all. Keep the beluga in its blue tin. Remember it sitting in the hollowed-out belly of the ice Buddha in the film Auntie Mame. Nothing more is needed.”
Oysters
Chablis Moutonne 1915
Chevalier Montrachet 1911
Consommé Marmite
Sole
“Echter” Schloss Johannisberger
Poulet
Lafite I875
Pré-salé
Clos Vougeot 1911
Dessert
Genuine Imperial Tokay
True “Napoleon” with Seal
I wrote “Short and lovely” in my college culinary notebooks when I first read it.
Auguste Escoffier, the father of modern French cooking (and chef to César Ritz of the famous hotels), considered oysters such a natural way to raise one’s juices and expectations for the food following that he hardly deemed them part of the “opus” or the main part of the written menu, and often left them off. Or merely listed them as “Natives,” deliciously the same word in French and English. Here they are part of the menu, and probably Colchesters or flat oysters like Bélons. A great Colchester is rich enough to need a palate cleanser, but as importantly, a dozen of them would need a mental one so that they didn’t dominate the beginning of the rest of the food. That is up to the sole.
The consommé of a simmered beef broth from a marmite works better here than a lighter chicken, since white poultry broth wouldn’t send the oysters into memory quite completely enough.
A bachelor like Peter is used to simple food. So I guess the sole is simply meunière or grillée, since his mouth will be hungering for a bit of richness after the consommé broth, with or without a splash of sherry, though not enough so Peter would recoil at the fish being covered with lobster sauce. The chicken, however, is obviously à la crème after the austere fullness of the sole, as simply served by Henri Soulé years later in Manhattan’s Le Pavillon. Obviously the pré-salé is that perfect lamb from the salt marshes of Brittany around St.-Michel, or from the coast lands of Suffolk or Cornwall. Simply roasted.
And the dessert? Well, no need to call that out, since it’s chosen from a trolley of them. Peter would have either a little baba au rhum or just a big plate of raspberries covered with Devon or Jersey/Guernsey cream—if the chicken was not.
After reading this I wrote myself a note: “Taste an old Lafite and Tokay.”
Years later in Berkeley I would taste the Tokay, and then in my San Francisco restaurant Stars, at a West Coast tasting of the old Lafites, finally taste the 1875.
COUNTERREVOLUTION
Cecil Beaton was definitely in the air my spring of 1969, when I wrote a self-consciously “decadent” menu for a dinner in my Somerville, Massachusetts, house. This was at the height of the counterculture, when revolution was in the air.
Pirozhki
Vodka Wyborowa
Prosciutto and Figs
Niersteiner Spiegleberg Spätlese Kabinet 1966
Consommé Marijuana
Roast Beef, Sauce Nature/Madère
Château Beychevelle 1962
Spinach Cream Puree
Pommes de Terre Chateau
Watercress Salad Vinaigrette
Fraises, Crème Carême
Korbel, brut, California
Coffee
Meringues
Madeira (Cossart)
Cigars Royal Jamaica, Churchill
It was hot outside and inside, and since nothing gets a party going or the juices flowing faster than a slug of vodka right out of the freezer followed by anything warm and rich, that’s what we did. The vodka was bison-grass-flavored Żubrówka. We immediately popped a little pastry, pirozhki or “little bites,” into our mouths, the bison-grass perfumes playing off against coriander-flavored buttered cabbage-filled pastry, the burn of the alcohol in our throats smoothed over just in time by the butter. Heaven.
Then prosciutto and figs, salty and sweet, dry against moist fig flesh (not dry against wet, like melon), the complex flavors brought together even further by the fruity young Spätlese.
The consommé cleansed the palate, and this one, from marijuana plants, the stems soaked in a rich chicken stock, provided another level of stimulation. But not before its time. The brew takes forty-five minutes to reach the brain, by which time, as planned, we were on to dessert, tasting strawberries and cream as we’d never tasted them before. Meanwhile, the bitterness of the creamed spinach was a perfect foil against the fat of the roast beef, its juices bolstered with sweet Madeira. The second-growth Bordeaux accompanying the meat was from an especially hard year that I adored and defended for its non-easy virtue. The wine did not yield easily, but when its personality finally and stubbornly emerged, it proved a glorious match.
Why serve roast beef in ninety-five-degree weather? In love with memories of my own and in the spirit of Beaton at Lapérouse, it was the way I knew best to push culinary senses to the limit. The fat of beef I had dry-aged for thirty-four days had all the complexity of the long-cellared wine with which it was paired, with a kind of power that met the intensity of the hot weather. The beef, the heat, the wine said all about what it meant to be at table that night: our manners meeting the challenge of the menu, ingesting forbidden drugs, and talk of my heroes Ho Chi Minh, Che, and Nureyev, whose pictures were on the kitchen wall.
Watercress with vinaigrette was a different kind of bow to the heat, and cleared the palate. The commercial strawberries were tossed in fresh red currant syrup, a trick that always intensifies their strawberryness. Served with a custard containing white Maraschino, this simple cream has so many layers of flavor that you can’t put your finger on what makes it so mysteriously and magically delicious. And of course the drugs would have just been kicking in . . .
Consommé Marijuana
6 cups rich chicken stock
1 packed cup marijuana stems and seeds
½ cup fresh basil leaves
1 loose cup freshly picked nasturtium
flowers (mixed bright colors)
sea salt
pepper mill
Preheat the oven to 275 degrees.
Bring the chicken stock to a boil in a 4-quart saucepan.
Meanwhile, spread the marijuana out on a metal cookie sheet or tray and put in the oven for 10 minutes. After the stems and seeds are “toasted,” put all of them in the chicken stock and turn off the heat. Steep for 1 hour.
Put the stock through a very fine strainer, and return to the cleaned-out saucepan.
Chop the basil leaves coarsely (⅛ inch), and shred the nasturtium flowers. Heat the consommé to boiling. Put the basil and nasturtium in warmed soup plates, and pour the consommé over. Pass the sea salt and pepper mill separately.
RICHARD OLNEY
My early outlaw efforts notwithstanding, it was reading Richard Olney’s French Menu Cookbook in 1970 that firmed up my ideas of what a seriously enjoyable but also controlled menu should be. I wrote to him that in the progression of his dishes I could see the workings of his mind and heart, his discipline, and his sense of play. In his first chapter, he lays out principles of menu creation that I live by to this day, even while tweaking them:
Each course must provide a happy contrast to the one preceding it; at the same time the movement through the various courses should be an ascending one from light, delicate, and more complex flavors through progressively richer, more full-bodied, and simple flavors. Essentially the only thing to remember is that the palate should be kept fresh, teased, surprised, excited throughout a meal. The moment there is danger of fatigue, it must be astonished or soothed into greater anticipation until the moment of release and postprandial pleasures.
Inspired by his philosophy, I created the following menu in 1971 for a late-winter dinner with Annie Meyer and friends at our Prides Crossing farm. We ate to the sounds of our barking dogs, partridge and quail chirping, geese chattering, and guinea fowl screaming.
Winter Dinner with Annie Meyer and Friends
Pâté de Foie (perdrix) Moelle
Frozen Vodka Wyborowa
Garlic Soup
Perdrix à la Souvaroff
Château Léoville 1959
Château Ausone 1937
Soufflé of Hominy
Chateau Cheval-Blanc 1959
Salade Doria
Stilton (aged)
Martinez Port 1927
I made a pâté of beef marrow and the livers of the farm partridge(perdrix), spread it on wonderful country bread, and served it warm with freezing bison-grass vodka. I wanted that satisfying jolt at the beginning of the menu: the rich game flavors, the scent of its juniper berries, the perfumed bites of black pepper and cold vodka. The garlic soup brought us back to earth. Long-simmered and very mild, it was like a consommé with a vegetable pure, rich and austere at the same time. The partridge was stuffed with a truffled foie gras, while the hominy (white cornmeal) soufflé that accompanied it was simple and clean, the perfect foil for the luxurious meat and liver. The Léoville had a slightly truffled aroma and was particularly good with the partridge stuffing. Of course, in those days there was no fresh foie gras and I had to use canned.
No dessert—the rest of the menu was so rich—but a flashy salad instead. Potatoes with asparagus tips in white truffle mayonnaise with red and gold chopped baked beets sprinkled on top. Aged Stilton and the 1927 port stopped time. The best part, actually, was the breakfast the next morning, when I made a mousse of all the leftover foie gras stuffing and partridge meat, spread it in a gratin dish, buried coddled eggs in it, and covered it with fresh cream before baking it just until it started to bubble. Served with Black Velvets (half champagne, half Guinness), it blew what was left of our minds.
NEW OLD FOOD
A menu doesn’t always need to be a grand wallow.
In summer, in particular, it is best to be calculatingly offhand as well as to indulge in the occasional roast beef gesture. Begin, for example, with bruschetta because it’s colorful when made with yellow and red tomatoes, light, immediate, and delicious. The acid and sweetness of the fruit and the olive oil, the spice from pepper, the aromas of garlic and fresh herbs make for a perfect palate teaser.
A great summer menu can be as simple as this one, cooked by Cathy Simon to cheer me up following the harrowing experience in June 1969 of my year-end presentation at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design:
Cathy’s Dinner to Cheer
Cambridge, June 1969
Asparagus, sauce alsacienne
Niersteiner Domtal
Tuna, Fresh, over Charcoal
Salad, Lettuce of the Garden
Mushrooms
Pie: Strawberry and Rhubarb
Scotch & Soda
The asparagus was poached and served at room temperature with a thin demi-glace and olive oil; the fresh grilled tuna was showered in basil from the garden, which also supplied the lettuce salad served alongside mushrooms mixed with cream, mustard, and olive oil. Strawberry and rhubarb pie and Scotch and soda were accompanied by the sound of chanting students bent on overthrowing the established social order, but I, for one, was happy to keep the best of the old one (its food and cellars) while investigating, by cooking, a new one.
FOUR MENUS
For these four menus I had no thought in my mind other than the power of simplicity and the ease of cooking it, for creating the most effect for my guests. Foraging on the beaches of islands in Maine, and tasting lobsters and mussels right out of the water, had reminded me of the power also of perfect, and perfectly fresh, ingredients.
Dinner for Two Street-Kid Dancers
My House, Somerville, 1970
Avocado-Lobster Mayonnaise
Chateau d’Yquem 1959
Chicken (cold) in Tarragon Butter
White Asparagus
Cheesecake with Garden Strawberries
Lunch in the Heat, Using Up the Somerville Cellar
June 11, 1970
Poached Red Snapper, cold
Dom Pérignon 1959, 2 bottles
If I had had some caviar, I would have thinned a little cream and mixed them for a light sauce, like that perfect lunch dish from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Filet de Sole à la Ritz, or cold sole with a sauce of whipped cream and fresh horseradish, but the cupboard was bare so I left it just as it was, no mayonnaise since it would have killed the champagne. My last two bottles, one each, and that was the point of the lunch as well as finding that perfect snapper at Legal Sea Foods around the corner from my house.
Lunch by Myself at the Farm Eating the Produce Before Moving to California
May 3, 1971
Hot Pheasant Liver Toasts
Iced Lemon Vodka
Cold Roast Pheasant
Vosne-Romanée 1961 (superb!)
In this case the produce was the last of the birds. I couldn’t catch the guinea fowl, but the pheasant were willing.
Lunch with Annie, for Michael Palmer, in from California
Prides Crossing, Massachusetts. July 1971
Cold Poached Salmon, Garden Mayonnaise
Château d’Yquem 1947
Caesar Salad
Wild Strawberries
Château d’Yquem 1966
The Caesar was a flop since it was impossible to find good lettuce. I wrote in my notes that we must grow our own lettuces again, including mesclun and eight-inch-long romaine. These were not to be seen for another twenty years, though we did raise some as soon as I took on the job of head chef at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse a year later. Michael raved about the wines he was trying out there in California, and we drove down to the local store to look for some. All we found was bulk California “Burgundy.”