Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [48]
Boswell reminded him of their early drinking days together, saying that he used to have a headache afterward.
“Nay, Sir,” replied Johnson. “It was not the wine that made your head ache, but the sense I put into it.”
“What, Sir! Will sense make the head ache?”
“Yes, Sir,” answered Johnson with a smile, “when it is not used to it.”
Johnson occasionally gave up liquor altogether, explaining, “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.” At other times he indulged himself, saying, “Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.”
Seven years after Johnson’s death in 1784, Boswell published his Life of Johnson, still considered perhaps the greatest biography ever written, the perfect match of subject and author.
SALAD
Lettuce has been around so long that it is hard to say just when it began to be eaten raw with a dressing. It may have been as early as the 14th century. By the 17th, salads were elaborate and often included fruits, meats, and flowers, along with what wed recognize as something similar to a vinaigrette.
The Chevalier D’Albignac, a French nobleman who had fallen on hard times, made his fortune when, by chance, he exported the salad craze to London in the early 1800s. He was asked one day at a tavern to demonstrate the reputed French skill at making salads. He gave such an impressive performance that he was soon being summoned to fashionable restaurants and private dining rooms to dress the greens. Before long, he was arriving in his own carriage with a servant carrying a special case for his tools and exotic ingredients. He described the performance: “Finally, I put the salad back into the salad bowl and let my servant toss it. And I let fall on it, from a height, a pinch of paprika.”
Should one serve salad before or after the meal? Originally it was served as a first course to encourage the appetite. Today, certain salads always come before, especially those with a variety of ingredients, such as the Caesar or Waldorf. In Europe, a simple green salad is often served after the meal, sometimes with a cheese course.
Peggy O’Shea, a friend who lived in Paris for a number of years and studied the ways of the French, says that it is customary there for the host to toss the salad and take the first portion to spare the other guests the danger of being spattered by dressing from a full serving bowl.
What to drink with green salad is simpler. Neither red nor white wine, but rather a glass of chilled Vichy—sparkling—water.
CIGARS
The aroma of fine cigars at the end of a meal was for a long time not unusual. At a London dinner once we were offered genuine Havanas afterward, and as Jim admired the elegant shape he was holding, he began to recite, “There’s peace in a Larranaga, there’s calm in a Henry Clay …”
It had become quiet. He went on: “But the best cigar in an hour is finished and thrown away, thrown away for another as perfect and ripe and brown …”
There was dead silence. They were staring at him.
“Kipling, right?” he said.
The brilliant woman who was the ballet critic of the London Times had been watching Jim as if transfixed. She breathed a sigh of relief.
“Thank God,” she said. “I was mad with envy. I thought you were making it up.”
NELLIE MELBA
When she performed at London’s Covent Garden as the reigning operatic soprano of her day, the royal laryngologist declared her vocal cords “the most perfect I have ever seen.” But as Nellie Melba said of herself, “It’s no use having a perfect voice unless you have brains, personality, magnetism, great willpower, health, strength, and determination.” She had them all in spades and was so famous that her name became attached to toast, wafers, and a dessert made of peaches and ice cream created by the great 19th-century French chef Escoffier.
She was born near Melbourne, Australia, on this day in 1861. For her operatic debut in Rigoletto, she changed her name from Helen Mitchell to Nellie Melba, in honor of her birthplace. “See to everything