Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [123]
A favorite Christmas carol recalls the pious ruler of what is now the Czech Republic, who was assassinated by his brother in 929 A.D. but became the patron saint of Bohemia, Good King Wenceslas. He looked out one cold night to see a poor man, one of his subjects, gathering winter fuel. It was on the Feast of Saint Stephen. To a page he said,
Bring me flesh and bring me wine,
Bring me pine logs hither:
Thou and I will see him dine
When we bear them thither.
While Christmas Day is traditionally spent at home with immediate family, Boxing Day means visits to grandparents who serve ham or even roast lamb instead of the turkey or roast beef of the day before.
LOUIS PASTEUR
Wine can be considered with good reason as the most healthful and the most hygienic of all beverages.
—LOUIS PASTEUR
In 1822, Louis Pasteur was born this day in Dôle, in the French Jura. Before he turned his attention to making milk safe to drink, Pasteur, at the request of Napoleon III, studied the reasons that wine and beer turned sour, an economic disaster for French producers in the 1850s. Pasteur identified the cause as bacteria and discovered that if the starting sugar solutions could be heated to 55 degrees C (131 degrees F), the bacteria—and the problem—were eliminated. The process, eventually called pasteurization, formed the foundation of microbiology.
Soon after, he also saved the French silk industry by distinguishing healthy from diseased silkworms and in later work developed the theory of germs as the cause of illness, along with methods of inoculating against rabies, tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax. He died in 1895 at the age of seventy-two, a national hero. His funeral was held at Notre Dame, and he was buried in a crypt in the Institute Pasteur, which he founded and ran and which continues to be a world-class center for the study of infectious diseases.
BURGUNDY-CHAMBERTIN
1832. The Canal de Bourgogne opened after more than two hundred years of planning and about sixty of actual construction. For the first time, the wines of Burgundy could be reliably shipped to Paris and beyond.
Some of the greatest red wines in the world are made from pinot noir grapes, grown in the chalky soil of the Côtes de Nuits, a small region just south of Dijon at the northern end of the Cotes d’Or. One of those is Chambertin, named for Bertin, an owner during medieval times who grew vines on his field (champ) and modeled his methods on those of the monks who were his neighbors.
Over hundreds of years, a wine was created on these seventy acres that Napoleon called his favorite. The story is that he issued a standing order: whenever French troops passed this vineyard, they were to present arms. Dumas wrote of the wine, “Nothing inspires such a rosy view of the future.” And Talleyrand, a connoisseur of food and drink, took a more modern approach, saying of Chambertin, “When one is served such a wine, one takes the glass respectfully, looks at it, inhales it, then, having put it down, discusses it.”
MME DE POMPADOUR
An infant, christened Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, was born this day in 1721 to middle-class parents in Paris. In time she was to become the mistress of Louis XV who made her Marquise de Pompadour, and for more than twenty years her influence over the king and the government was unrivaled.
She had been taught early that sex and food were the two means of holding a man, and she made good use of both. Intelligent and stylish, she entertained the king at intimate dinners and surrounded herself with writers and artists of the first rank—Voltaire, Helvetius, Boucher. It was said of her that she had been taught everything except morals, which would have stood in her way. When she became, as was described, “no longer fit for love,” she arranged for younger women to perform this duty and so remained essential to the king and his close confidant. She died at forty-two.
“Born sincere, she loved the king for himself,” Voltaire wrote. “She had justice in her spirit and in her heart; all this is not to be