Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [118]
MOVIES
Food isn’t featured as often in movies as sex, but screen meals leading up to or following it are often more memorable. One unforgettable scene centers on Albert Finney and Joyce Redman gluttonously devouring a chicken and soon each other in Tom Jones. Another is the far more decorous Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, with white gloves and carrying her chicken in a picnic basket. “Breast or leg?” she asks sweetly.
Movies with food as a theme have been made around the globe: The Baker’s Wife from France, Babette’s Feast from Denmark, Tampopo from Japan, Like Water for Chocolate from Mexico, Monsoon Wedding from India, La grande bouffe from France/Italy, Life Is Sweet from Great Britain, and Eat Drink Man Woman from Taiwan. American contributions to the field run the gamut from Diner and Big Night, in which there’s a lot of action, to My Dinner with Andre and The Big Chill in which talk at the table is the main thing going on, or nearly. And who is able to leave The Godfather without the desire to go get some pasta—perhaps because of the length.
KETCHUP
Ketchup evolved over time from far more exotic ingredients than it now contains. Also called catsup, ketchup probably originated in China in the 1600s and was known in the Canton dialect as ketsiap, a sauce made of vinegar, spices, and the innards of fish. When it immigrated to Malaysia, it became ketchap and traveled with English sailors back to Europe, where mushrooms replaced fish innards in the ingredients. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that tomatoes became part of the mix. It was marketed in the United States in 1876, described by a manufacturer as a “blessed relief for Mother and the other women in the household.”
MADAME BOVARY
Gustave Flaubert, whose first published work was the masterpiece Madame Bovary, was born in Rouen, son of a surgeon, on this day in 1821.
In Bovary, there is the great ball of the Marquis of Vaubyessard that Emma Bovary and her colorless doctor-husband attend—the ball she never forgot and which overwhelmed her life with its luxury and great style.
It begins with a dinner at which the many men are at one table and the ladies at another with the host and hostess and one ancient figure, the Marquis’ father-in-law, eating as if alone with a napkin tied around his neck and gravy dripping from his mouth. He was a nobleman, too, and was said to have once been a lover of the queen, Marie Antoinette.
There are bouquets of flowers, crystal, large plates, and fine linen. Fruit in open baskets, lobster, quail, truffles, champagne, pineapple. Then later, after much dancing, a supper of soups, cold meats en gelée, and wines.
The next evening, having returned home, Emma and her husband eat onion soup and a piece of veal. The memory of the ball is fresh; it pierces her heart, and the gown she had worn and the satin slippers, the wax of the dancing floor still on their soles, are carefully, devoutly, put away forever.
The longing for the world of sensuality and wealth she had glimpsed never went away. It determined the rest of her life and her death.
FIRST MEAL
The chef is certainly not the same one who prepared the first meal we ate there together more than thirty years ago. But Tante Louise is still there and thriving, a restaurant modeled after a French country inn, an anomaly on the corner of a commercialized strip in east Denver. Since that visit, it has become much more upscale and won many awards for its menu and extensive wine cellar.
I have no idea what we ate that first night. I wasn’t really thinking about the food. Wed had a drink and later seen a movie, which I also can’t remember. The man across the table from me was everything. I was young and still too inexperienced to be a decent conversationalist. We talked about Europe, which he knew intimately—Rome, Paris, London, Barcelona—a world I had seen bits of on a student tour and longed to know.
It was the first of thousands—at home, abroad, in elegant restaurants and unforgettable dives. A lifetime of meals. He’s always said that conversation