Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [37]
In 1927, barely eking out a living as a young writer in Greenwich Village, he impulsively decided one evening to go to Paris. The following day he boarded a boat. Paris was legendary, and his professor at Tufts had told him of seeing art students returning from a ball at dawn, carrying their naked models on their shoulders. Intending to stay for a few weeks, Root remained, apart from the war years, for the rest of his life. He prided himself on not having known Hemingway.
Among his works are an autobiography and the twin, idiosyncratic volumes The Food of France and The Food of Italy, as well as a large, informative dictionary, Food. The last thing he wrote was a note to his editor regarding the supposed thinning qualities of oysters. He had been off in Brittany feasting on them. “I have gained three kilos,” he reported happily. It was October 31, 1982. He died in his sleep that night.
DOUGHNUT
In 16th-century Holland, where they originated, doughnuts were called olykoeks or “oily cakes,” made of round lumps of dough about the size of a large nut and fried in pork fat. The Pilgrims brought them to America, where they were called, logically enough, dough-nuts.
As to the origin of the hole, one of the most compelling versions has a 19th-century sea captain, Hanson Gregory, of Rockport, Maine, at the helm during a storm at sea. As he was eating a doughnut, the ship pitched wildly and the doughy cake was impaled on a spoke of the wheel, leaving a hole in the center. There is perhaps some question about this since Gregory was only fifteen at the time. On the other hand, his name is closely associated with the doughnut, and he may deserve credit for the hole simply by having asked his mother to remove the center of the deep fried dough, since it had cooked less completely and was soggy.
What is more certain is that by World War I, doughnuts were so popular with American troops in Europe that the soldiers came to be known as doughboys.
BRIE
Charlemagne, the great, energetic ruler who inherited a Frankish kingdom from his father and enlarged it through war into the Holy Roman Empire, died in 814 A.D. after a long reign that is now recognized as marking the end of the Middle Ages. He was a large man in many respects, with five legitimate wives and a number of “supplementary” ones. Dazzled by the monuments and ceremonial grandeur on a trip to Rome in 774, he formed the idea of making his own realm one of comparable beauty and culture. It was also the year he was said to have first tasted Brie and enjoyed it.
The real Bries, Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun, are made from raw milk in the Ile-de-France not far from Paris. Always packed in a flimsy, round wooden box fourteen inches in diameter and an inch and a half high, Brie will carry a label reading “Appelation d’Origine Contrôlée.” At its peak of readiness it is viscous, though not runny, with a slightly bulging, uneven white top mottled with pale brown. It is a cheese that ripens from the outside in and once cut, ceases to ripen. A wedge bought unripe will only age and grow hard.
Genuine raw Bries cannot be imported, but there are some pasteurized French Bries that are reasonably good, as well as a host of poor imitations from Germany, Denmark, and the United States, which sometimes even come in a can. These are usually chalky, firm, and not worth it.
BRIE—POEM
On a piece of paper folded to fit into a small silver pillbox, given as a gift, in the early days, when Jim had just introduced me to Brie:
My darling, you will quickly see
This tiny box contains no Brie
And, if it did, it is so small
It would be hardly any Brie at all.
But thoughts, however small or great,
No shape possess, nor size nor weight,
And thus, this box can well confine
All delicious thoughts of mine,
As, richer far than any Brie,
Are thoughts of crossing Italy,
And finer than the farms of Meaux
Are memories of things we know.
So keep it safe, my wondrous beast—
This box contains a dazzling feast.
K.S.
SPAGHETTI AND MEATBALLS
In addition