Perspiration right there at the table; and
as for South African peaches, I carefully walked around them,
getting farther away all the time. A peach was just the same as
a pesthouse to me, in Paris.
Alas though! no one had warned me about French oysters, and
once - just once - I ate some, which made two mistakes on my part,
one financial and the other gustatory. They were not particularly
flavorous oysters as we know oysters on this side of the ocean.
The French oyster is a small, copper-tinted proposition, and he
tastes something like an indisposed mussel and something like a
touch of biliousness; but he is sufficiently costly for all purposes.
The cafe proprietor cherishes him so highly that he refuses to
vulgarize him by printing the asking price on the same menu. A
person in France desirous of making a really ostentatious display
of his affluence, on finding a pearl in an oyster, would swallow
the pearl and wear the oyster on his shirtfront. That would stamp
him as a person of wealth.
However, I am not claiming that all French cookery is ultra-exorbitant
in price or of excessively low grade. We had one of the surprises
of our lives when, by direction of a friend who knew Paris, we
went to a little obscure cafe that was off the tourist route and
therefore - as yet - unspoiled and uncommercialized. This place
was up a back street near one of the markets; a small and smellsome
place it was, decorated most atrociously. In the front window,
in close juxtaposition, were a platter of French snails and a
platter of sticky confections full of dark spots. There was no
mistaking the snails for anything except snails; but the other
articles were either currant buns or plain buns that had been made
in an unscreened kitchen.
Within were marble-topped tables of the Louie-Quince period and
stuffy wall-seats of faded, dusty red velvet; and a waiter in his
shirtsleeves was wandering about with a sheaf of those long French
loaves tucked under his arm like golf sticks, distributing his
loaves among the diners. But somewhere in its mysterious and
odorous depths that little bourgeois cafe harbored an honest-to-goodness
cook. He knew a few things about grilling a pig's knuckle - that
worthy person. He could make the knuckle of a pig taste like the
wing of an angel; and what he could do with a skillet, a pinch of
herbs and a calf's sweetbread passed human understanding.
Certain animals in Europe do have the most delicious diseases
anyway - notably the calf and the goose, particularly the goose of
Strasburg, where the pate de foie gras comes from. The engorged
liver of a Strasburg goose must be a source of joy to all - except
its original owner!
Several times we went back to the little restaurant round the
corner from the market, and each time we had something good. The
food we ate there helped to compensate for the terrific disillusionment
awaiting us when we drove out of Paris to a typical roadside inn,
to get some of that wonderful provincial cookery that through all
our reading days we had been hearing about. You will doubtless
recall the description, as so frequently and graphically dished
up by the inspired writers of travelogue stuff - the picturesque,
tumbledown place, where on a cloth of coarse linen - white like
snow - old Marie, her wrinkled face abeam with hospitality and
kindness, places the delicious omelet she has just made, and brings
also the marvelous salad and the perfect fowl, and the steaming
hot coffee fragrant as breezes from Araby the Blest, and the vin
ordinaire that is even as honey and gold to the thirsty throat.
You must know that passage?
We went to see for ourselves. At a distance of half a day's
automobile run from Paris we found an establishment answering to
the plans and specifications. It was shoved jam-up against the
road, as is the French custom; and it was surrounded by a high,
broken wall, on which all manner of excrescences in the shape of
tiny dormers and misshapen little towers hung, like Texas ticks
on the ears of a quarantined steer. Within the wall the numerous
ruins that made up the inn were thrown together any fashion, some
facing one way, some facing the other way, and some facing all
ways at once; so that, for the housefly, so numerously encountered
on these premises, it was but a short trip and a merry one from
the stable to the dining room and back again.
Sure enough, old Marie was on the job. Not desiring to be unkind
or unduly critical I shall merely state that as a cook old Marie
was what we who have been in France and speak the language fluently
would call la limite! The omelet she turned out for us was a thing
that was very firm and durable, containing, I think, leather
findings, with a sprinkling of chopped henbane on the top. The
coffee was as feeble a counterfeit as chicory usually is when it
is masquerading as coffee, and the vin ordinaire had less of the
vin to it and more of the ordinaire than any we sampled elsewhere.
Right here let me say this for the much-vaunted vin ordinaire of
Europe: In the end it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an
adder - not like the ordinary Egyptian adder, but like a patent
adder in the office of a loan shark, which is the worst stinger
of the whole adder family. If consumed with any degree of freedom
it puts a downy coat on your tongue next morning that causes you
to think you inadvertently swallowed the pillow in your sleep.
Good domestic wine costs as much in Europe as good domestic wine
costs in America - possibly more than as much.
