Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [22]
For the next quarter of a century, one of the things he substituted for music was his passion for food. Living in Paris, he nevertheless had Italian specialties sent to him, including favorites like zampone, a sausage of stuffed pigs’ feet, and another sausage called cappelli da prete, named for the priests’ hats it resembled. Once, on receiving a shipment of sardone, large sardines he was especially fond of, Rossini asked an invited dinner guest not to come after all. He liked to enjoy them in solitude and quiet, he explained. Unwilling to share them, he made an exception for his mistress, for whom he saved a single sardine.
He also created his own recipes, relying heavily on two ingredients: foie gras and truffles. Though he called the white truffles of Alba “the Mozart of mushrooms,” he usually made do with the black variety, used, along with goose liver, to garnish his tournedos Rossini and eggs Rossini. The recipe for his macaroni was said to have rivaled his most dazzling music. Dumas asked to include it in his thousand-page work on food, and Rossini invited him to his house to taste it. Dumas accepted, but when he arrived, he explained to his host that he never ate macaroni. Rossini, who had made a great effort over the meal, refused him the recipe. No record of it survives.
LA QUINTINIE · TURGENEV ON LOVE
FIRST TASTES · CHEFS · KING’S GLASS
DIET · BUTTER · CÉZANNE
SYRUP · TOASTS · THEO’S BIRTH · BEES
EGYPTIAN AFTERLIFE · FLATFISH · TAILLEVENT
HONEY · ANNA KARENINA · WATER · AVOCADO
GROVER CLEVELAND · BOILING WATER
PASTA · NIP · LUCULLUS
EGG · HOUSE DRESSING
HUNGER AND APPETITE · WAITERS
PEA SOUP · ARCHESTRATUS
CAFÉ AU LAIT · BREAKFAST
LAMB · KNIVES
CHICKPEA
LA QUINTINIE
Born this day in 1624, Jean-Baptiste de la Quintinie gave up practicing law after discovering the pleasures of gardening. His reputation impressed Louis XIV who brought him to Versailles to oversee the fruit and kitchen gardens that supplied the table at court. La Quin-tinie’s epic book, Instruction pour les jardins fruitiers et potagers, detailed not only the planting and raising of vegetables and fruit but also the aesthetics of creating a beautiful garden.
Nearly every fruit was represented at Versailles, including a grove of five hundred pear trees. La Quintinie wrote rhapsodically about a variety called the Bon Chretien, imported from England and called the Williams there, as being “of a yellow color and with a pink blush on the side which gets the sun, rejoicing the eyes of those who come to look at it as they might a jewel or a treasure.” It was sweet, as all pears are, and like any pear had more fiber than a serving of prunes.
It was renamed for a local nurseryman after it crossed the Atlantic to the United States: the Bartlett.
TURGENEV ON LOVE
At a dinner with Flaubert and others on this date in 1872, Turgenev talked about love. There was not a book nor anything else in the world that could take the place of a woman for him, he said. Love produced a flowering of the personality that could be brought about by nothing else.
He then recalled a story from his own past. When he was young, he said, he had a mistress, a miller’s daughter he used to see when he went hunting. She was delightful, pale, with a cast in one eye, but she would never accept anything from him, money or gifts.
One day she asked for a present. She wanted him to bring her some soap. When he came with it, she took it and disappeared, to return blushing and holding out her now scented hands. She wanted him to kiss them, she said, the way he kissed the hands of the ladies in the drawing rooms in St. Petersburg. He fell to his knees before her. There was not a moment in life to equal that one, he said.
FIRST TASTES
Moderation in all things, the