Eating - Jason Epstein [25]
When we tired of the Grand Véfour, we tried more modest places: Lapérouse, with its cabinets particuliers, and Chez Allard, in the Sixth, with its rustic menu. It was there that I first had braised duck with olives, one of the few Parisian dishes of the expiring Escoffier period not covered with béchamel or espagnole in various forms. For years I served my version of this classic dish at home in New York, and occasionally still do.
From Paris we flew to Berlin, which by then had begun to dig itself out of its wartime rubble. Bricks from ruined buildings were piled neatly along the Kurfürstendamm. The cabarets were open all night. But politically Berlin seemed to be digging itself back in, for the Cold War had begun, and Berlin, deep within the Soviet sector, was its central front. The best bookstore with fine editions of Russian classics was in the Soviet zone, and so was the best restaurant. It served thick soups, black bread, sausages, and fried potatoes in many versions. For years I kept the menu in my desk. In the United States there were no collected editions of our classic writers, an omission which, at the suggestion of Edmund Wilson, I would eventually correct. Some writers whom we met in the American zone who were working for the CIA warned us to avoid the Russian zone. The Cold War ground rules had yet to be clarified, and there was talk of kidnappings. We ignored this advice and returned often for soup and sausages, reluctant to admit that, with the war so recently ended, we were preparing to go at it again. In Berlin, amid our Cold War friends, Korea was no longer an anomaly. War now seemed routine, accompanied by the ideological quarrels in the intellectual journals that I now found it obligatory to read, and which would soon convince me that warfare, both cold and hot, is our normal state, and peace an aberration.
We were happy to leave this bleak city still largely in ruins and drift off to Italy for a few weeks. We had been away too long and were ready to think about going home. I wondered whether I still had a job after my long absence.
We arranged passage on the Andrea Doria from Naples. In the Azores, the cheerful little ship became fogbound. We arrived in port a day late. Our waiter, whose glasses had broken during the crossing and hung lopsided across his Roman nose, explained that because of the delay we had run out of pasta. On deck as we approached our pier, an Italian father was holding his two small sons in his arms, pointing to the Manhattan skyline, and shouting, “Fantastico, bambini, fantastico.” Despite the warlike rumblings in Berlin, this was how it seemed to us, too, in the early spring of 1954. In my absence, the paperback series I had launched had gone from triumph to triumph. I was welcomed back, enthusiastically.
Barbara and I were relieved to be back in our Greenwich Village garret, which after our month in Paris seemed to us more than ever like a set from La Bohème with its skylight and fireplace, its old brick walls, crooked floor, and window boxes filled with geraniums in spring. We had spent the last three months in hotels and restaurants and other people’s dining rooms. I was eager to cook at home, but not like our favorite Grand Véfour with its Escoffier menu. It was obvious to us that the mood had shifted. In the Paris bookshops, stacks of Samuel Beckett’s plays were piled up everywhere, and there was an existentialist on every street corner. In London, still aching from the