Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [25]
“Yes?” said Bazin.
“When the baby is born, we’d like to wet its lips with a good French wine.”
Bazin, whose English was all right within normal confines, took a few seconds to comprehend, his glance wandering a little until it fell on the bottle of Latour on the shelf over the sink. He went over and picked it up.
“This is the wine?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not entirely a bad wine,” he commented, and joined me in the delivery room.
Things proceeded pretty much as expected and at one in the morning, Jim, standing outside the delivery room, heard the robust cry of an infant, and soon after, one from Bazin.
“Pull the cork!” he called.
A few drops of the wine were applied to Theo’s lips, and then the rest of us—doctor, nurses, Jim, I, and a friend who had rushed to the hospital when he learned the event was imminent—shared the bottle in celebration. It matched its reputation.
We returned to the States seven weeks later, and when it appeared a couple of years after, bought a case of another Bordeaux, Château Leoville-Barton, 1985, the year of Theo’s birth, which proved to be one of the great vintages of the last quarter-century. When he was old enough to drink some, we asked hopefully,
“Recognize the taste?”
He looked as if he did.
K.S.
BEES
1989. Last dinner party in Aspen before leaving town late in the season. Corned beef with turnips, carrots, and cabbage, horseradish sauce. There were nine at the table. Two of the men were talking about bees, saying they have an ideal society—only the females work. The males, far fewer in number, care for the queen.
If stung, brush, don’t pull, the stinger out of your skin, as the venom sac and a pulsating muscle are still attached to it. Only females sting, they say, and queens only sting queens.
EGYPTIAN AFTERLIFE
Ancient Egyptians believed in sending the dead into the afterworld with everything they needed to mirror their life on earth, especially food and drink.
During the Old Kingdom, some 4,500 years ago, those wealthy enough to have tombs were provided with alabaster replicas of roasted geese and statues of servants making bread. By the time of the New Kingdom, 1,500 years later, internal organs of the dead that might cause hunger were removed from the body and placed in funerary jars guarded by magic animal spirits.
Even the poor, buried in only three feet of desert sand, were given bowls of meat and drink in their graves. But they were not honored by the sacrifice of an ox or bull as the rich were, when the heart and legs, considered the best parts, were offered to the gods, and the rest was cooked to feed the mourners.
FLATFISH
Flounder, sole, turbot, plaice, and halibut are among the fish that lie flat on the sea bottom and have both eyes on the same side of the head. They are not born this way. They begin life swimming vertically with an eye on each side, but one eye gradually migrates to either the right (flounder and sole) or left side (turbot), and the fish begins to swim lopsided and finally flat. It lies camouflaged side up eyes visible above the sand looking for food or, as may happen, danger. The flounder, a continuous fin almost all around it, is described as seeming to ripple through the water and glide to the bottom, where it buries itself.
The largest fish of this type, the halibut, can be as much as eight feet long and weigh more than six hundred pounds.
Flounder, sole, and the others cook easily, being of uniform thickness and readily de-boned. As a matter of interest, it does not take twice as long to cook a two-inch-thick fillet as a one-inch, but four times as long.
One day we watched Pierre Franey and Craig Claiborne, who both wrote on food for The New York Times, testing a recipe, if it can be called that, for cooking flatfish—in this case, flounder. They made Flounder à l’Anglais: dab flounder fillets with bits of butter, sprinkle them lightly with breadcrumbs, and broil them for five minutes, without turning, fairly close to the flame. They will come out beautifully