Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [55]
Sushi can be eaten with the fingers, but sashimi should not be, and any piece of sushi is meant to be eaten in one bite. Sake is usually not drunk with sushi—rice wine with rice is disfavored.
CARĚME
The founder of French grande cuisine, Marie-Antoine Carěme, is born on this day in Paris in 1783. The sixteenth child of a desperately poor family he was abandoned to the streets at the age of ten and ended up with the owner of a low-class restaurant, where he discovered an interest in cooking.
By the time he was sixteen, he was apprenticed to a famed pastry chef, Sylvain Bailly who permitted him to pursue unusual passions at the National Library—copying architectural drawings and learning to read. The drawings would later form the basis of his own incredible confectionary creations. This was at a time when pastry chefs had tremendous prestige and were responsible for the huge decorative centerpieces, pièces montées, that were the glory of formal dinners.
Carěme attracted the attention of Talleyrand, who conducted diplomacy at his famous table and spent an hour each morning going over the day’s menu. The employment with Talleyrand lasted twelve years and was followed—Carěme was himself now a celebrity—by work in England for the future George IV, in Russia for Czar Alexander I, and back in Paris for the Baron James de Rothschild. He had, in the end, created hundred of menus and dishes in the most exalted houses in Europe.
His definitive cookbook, L’art de la cuisine française aux XIX-e siècle, was published in 1833, two years before his death. He had risen before dawn for years to begin work and choose ingredients in the markets and had labored intensely in hot kitchens where the windows, half an hour before serving, were even shut to keep the dishes warm. He died at fifty, burnt out, it was said, “by the flame of his genius and the charcoal of the roasting spit.” Many of his recipes are still used today, especially those for sauces, of which 289 are described in his five-volume book. To read him is to sit at the tables of emperors and kings. Alexander I said, “What we did not know was that he taught us to eat.”
THARID
On this day in 632 A.D., the prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam, died in the arms of his favorite wife, A’isha. He had once said that as A’isha surpassed other women, so did tharid surpass other dishes. Tharid, an ancient Arabian stew, was made of meat mixed or layered with bread. The Prophet’s praise made it popular throughout the Muslim world, where variations are still eaten from the Middle to the Far East.
AUTOMAT
1902. The first Automat, a marvel of its time, opens its doors on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, an outgrowth of a café started fifteen years earlier by Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart, who divided the duties of cooking and serving. The success of Horn & Hardart was based at first on the quality of the coffee, made every twenty minutes from freshly ground beans using the new drip method, an enormous improvement over boiling coffee grounds for hours with eggshells to make it less muddy.
People came for the coffee and stayed for the food. Horn and Hardart were the precursors of both fast-food restaurants and coffeehouse chains, eventually serving over a quarter of a million customers a day in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Waiters and cashiers were replaced by self-service—a cafeteria with a vast array of small windows, each displaying one dish and its price. Customers dropped in coins and opened the window.
With growing competition, the Automats waned, and the last one, at 42nd Street and Third Avenue in New York City, closed on April 8, 1991. But over its nearly ninety-year history, the Automat became an American institution. A section of the very