Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [114]
For a long time it was hard to find Gros Plant in the United States. The quantity produced has never been great—most is drunk locally, and Americans tend to favor an easier, softer wine than this flinty white. You can get it now—it has become more accessible as its neighbor, Muscadet, has grown more popular. It is cheap and, if you like this sort of thing, good.
CHURCHILL
1874. At Blenheim, the hereditary home of his father and the only nonroyal palace in England, with 320 rooms, a library more than 180 feet long, and vast surrounding lands, in a small room off the Great Hall, which was as far as his young mother was able to go after leaving the ball, Winston Churchill, who was to become England’s greatest prime minister and, excepting Shakespeare, perhaps her greatest single individual, was born at one-thirty in the morning.
Throughout his long life, he ate well and drank heartily, and once described a meal as follows: “Well, dinner would have been splendid if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess.”
PIZZA · CHILI CON CARNE
PRESENTATION · ROSTI
BREAD AND HISTORY · LA COUPOLE
FOODS OF INDIA · ASPEN WINTERS
CLARENCE BIRDSEYE · MOVIES · KETCHUP
MADAME BOVARY · FIRST MEAL · FRITTATA
CANDLES · DELMONICO’S · BOSTON TEA PARTY
AMPHOUX · DINING ROOMS · ROQUEFORT
CROSS-COUNTRY DINNER · PANETTONE
CANDY CANES · CHAMPAGNE · CHRISTMAS EVE
CHRISTMAS DINNER · BOXING DAY
LOUIS PASTEUR · BURGUNDY-CHAMBERTIN
MME DE POMPADOUR · COULIBIAC
GREAT MEALS
PIZZA
The first pizza ever delivered was ordered by King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Italy in 1889. Visiting the queen’s family near Naples, they heard about a popular handheld meal sold by street vendors and at open-air pizzerias and favored by the poor. They wanted to try it but were unable to mingle with the masses at the local pizzeria. Instead, Rafaele Esposito, the owner of the most famous one, came to them. He brought the ingredients for three different combinations for the royals to try, but it was the one made with tomatoes, mozzarella, and fresh basil—the red, white, and green of the Italian flag—that most pleased the queen. Esposito named it in her honor, and it gave Naples the reputation of having invented pizza.
Its actual origins were far earlier. The Greeks and Etruscans had their versions of rough bread formed with a raised edge to hold bits of other foods on top. In the first century, the Roman statesman Cato wrote about “flat rounds of dough dressed with olive oil, herbs, and honey, baked on stones.” The essential tomato wasn’t added until fifteen hundred years later, imported from the New World, and those now grown in the volcanic soil near Vesuvius are one of the reasons that Neapolitan pizzas are still considered to set the standard.
Italian immigrants brought pizza to America, and the first pizzeria opened in New York City in 1905. It wasn’t until after World War II, however, when soldiers returned from Italy with stories of a wonderful food eaten without utensils, that it took off, and it remains one of the most popular foods worldwide.
CHILI CON CARNE
“Un coup de rouge,” you can say in France, ordering a glass of ordinary red wine. In Texas you can say, “A bowl of red,” meaning chili.
Chili con carne—chili with meat—is a redundant term. All chili, except, of course, vegetarian, has meat, and the authentic Texas variety has little else, no tomatoes and, above all, no beans. Chili seems to have originated in Texas, perhaps in the poor Mexican sections in the days—the early 1800s—when Texas was a possession of Mexico. It is mentioned in print as early as 1857. There were the chili queens of San Antonio a little later, whose carts appeared at dusk with large, brightly colored lamps and a great pot of chili together with tables and stools.
Like Coca-Cola, chili conquered the world, or at least North America. There are countless recipes for it, many of them imaginative, but in spreading north and eastward it underwent changes and