Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [26]
TAILLEVENT
The most famous cook of the Middle Ages was Taillevent, a name that has gone down in history when even the architects and builders of great cathedrals were anonymous. Born around 1310, his real name was Guillaume Tirel, but he has always been known by his nickname, probably derived from his long nose. He began as a kitchen boy with the hellish task of turning the big roasting spits in the service of Jeanne d’Evereux, who was to become queen of France. He advanced steadily employed in the households of the great, reaching his highest position under Charles VI, who granted him nobility.
His immensely influential cookbook, Le viander, was a collection of recipes and descriptions that remained important for two hundred years and still provides a look at eating habits in the 14th century, when foods were highly spiced and the principal methods of cooking were roasting and boiling. Very few green vegetables were consumed, but fowl included swans, storks, herons, comorants, and turtledoves.
HONEY
Honey, esteemed as a food since deepest antiquity, is mentioned in Egyptian writings from 7,500 years ago. It is thought to be superior to sugar, both because of its mineral and protein content and because the simpler sugars it is composed of—dextrose and fructose—are absorbed more readily into the bloodstream than processed sugar. In The Iliad, the weary heroes revived themselves with honey, and Plutarch remarked that the ancient Britons, great consumers of it, only began to grow old after 120 years.
The flavor and color of honey depend on the flower the nectar comes from. The wax of the comb, sometimes present, is not nutritious.
A single bee may make more than five hundred flights to carry back one ounce of nectar, about a teaspoonful. Though pollen content can make honey cloudy, all honey is pure, but it may darken over time. If it crystallizes, its container should be warmed gently in water to restore it. Honey keeps indefinitely if tightly covered and cool. It need not be refrigerated.
Mme du Barry and others used honey in beauty preparations, and when Sherlock Holmes retired, his creator made him a beekeeper—they are said to be long-lived—on Sussex Downs.
ANNA KARENINA
There are meals that make you forget other meals, restaurants that erase other restaurants, and books that stand above others. Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s great masterwork, written and rewritten as many as six times from April 1873 until 1877, has remained towering for more than a century and even into an age of images, vulgarity, mobs, and noise. Tolstoy was forty-five years old when he started it, having thought of the idea three years before, and by the time he was deeply involved in the writing, he had lost all interest in it. “If only someone would finish Karenina for me,” he wrote to a friend midway.
The novel opens with an infidelity. Oblonsky, who has deceived his wife and doesn’t know how to make things right, has dinner with Levin, his friend, who is hopelessly in love with Oblonsky’s lovely young sister-in-law, Kitty. Oblonsky, a prince, is sleek, handsome, and well cared for. Levin is earnest, intensely idealistic, and unfashionable. Attendants with napkins over their arms welcome them in the restaurant, and a fresh tablecloth is immediately spread over another. A private room (“Prince Golitsyn and a lady”) may shortly be available, if they prefer.
The dinner begins with fresh Flemsburg oysters and champagne, then Parmesan cheese, vegetable soup, turbot (of which Levin is tremendously fond), roast beef, capon, and to finish, stewed fruit. The wine is Chablis. It is a world of aristocracy and wealth, doomed to vanish forever in less than fifty years, though none of them, including Tolstoy, who modeled Levin upon himself, foresaw it.
Anna, the beautiful and heartbreaking heroine—Oblonsky’s sister, as it happens—dies at the end, but it is she, nevertheless, who has survived the Russian revolution, the bloody civil war that followed, and