The Perfect Meal Read Online Free Page B

then, with surgical skill, dissect a joint to demonstrate the elasticity of the tendons that showed this to be not some pathetic battery bird but an authentic poulet de Bresse that had been allowed to eat and reach maturity in the open air.
    A spoonful of mashed potato sparked a dissertation on the cooking and preparation of the purée that Marcel Proust fed to the musicians of the Poulet String Quartet when he summoned them to his apartment at 2:00 a.m. to play César Franck and stir his memories. It came from the kitchens of the Ritz Hotel, directed by the great Escoffier.
    Boris was so eloquent on the subject that I looked up the recipe, Pommes de Terre à la Crème , in Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire . It specifies Vitelotte or new kidney potatoes. They must be boiled in their skins, peeled immediately—a miserable chore for some sous-chef —then sliced and put into a pan with boiling cream. When the potatoes are soft and the cream reduced, the mixture is whipped with a hand whisk and “finished” with yet more cream. No wonder the musicians wiped their plates.
    Boris could speak of food with the passion of a lover. But like the old man on the back steps in my film, he’d eat no more than a spoonful. Was he like those tasters of wine, tea, or coffee who need only a tiny amount to gauge quality? Or did he rather resemble Casanova in old age, having enjoyed so many beautiful women that perfection bored him, and he could be aroused only by the ugly and grotesque? Either way, Boris lived in the same belief that food wasn’t about appetite but appreciation. In every respect, he qualified for the term used by UNESCO to define a person who maintained the quality of food for its own sake. Fine shades of meaning separate the terms for connoisseurs of food. A gourmet enjoys food and eats well, but not to excess. A gourmand loves food so much that he gorges himself; he’s a glutton. But a gastronome is someone for whom the study of food and the maintenance of its excellence means infinitely more than the satisfaction of mere appetite. He doesn’t so much enjoy or love food as revere it—and one does not eat what one reveres.
    In The Red Shoes , Lermontov declines to watch Vicky Page dance at a musical evening thrown by her mother. Ballet, he tells her, is his religion. “And one doesn’t really care to see one’s religion practiced”—he makes a contemptuous gesture that encompasses the gaudy décor and chattering guests—“in an atmosphere such as this.” Boris the gastronome was no different. To celebrate food in a public restaurant would have been, to him, like munching a hot dog in church. And I mean a hot dog with everything .
    I hesitated for a few weeks before I told Boris about my project. We were in the courtyard of the Grande Mosquée de Paris. He drank mint tea, which I never liked, while I nibbled on one of those nut cookies called ma’amoul . I felt like Burton on his secret pilgrimage to Mecca, an unbeliever enjoying the pleasures of Islam.
    I explained what I had in mind.
    “I don’t like your chances of finding anyone to roast an ox.”
    “I only want to see if these dishes still exist. It isn’t a real dinner. It’s a dinner of the mind. I thought you’d approve.”
    “You’ve had worse ideas,” he conceded.
    “You’ll help me out, then? Advise me?”
    “As long as I don’t have to eat any of these things.”
    “No risk. I promise. So . . . where would you begin?”
    “As it says, a meal begins with an apéritif.”
    “But which one?”
    “What about your friend Karl?” he said. “I’d ask him.”
    Karl was another expatriate writer and a famous drinker. But . . . Boris and Karl acquainted? I didn’t know that. Though now I came to think of it, they’d both been at that dinner where Boris ate his invisible meal. Was there a covert association of such men, meeting in out-of-the-way cafés for the same ambiguous exchanges that passed between Boris and me? Was I just one cog