Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [90]
• Attitude can be even more important than money. Customers who are polite and patient, especially when something goes wrong, are held in high regard.
• Owners, chefs, and waiters are devoted to clients who are enthusiasts, who love the food, the service, the ambience—the whole experience—and don’t hesitate to say so.
CHAMBERTIN
Picasso said a picture lives by its legend, and food and drink do also. Caviar has its aristocratic aura. So do certain wines. The English writer Hilaire Belloc wrote, regarding his youth, that he had forgotten the town, forgotten the girl, but the wine was Chambertin.
In Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen serves a bottle of very good wine to Emmanuelson, the disgraced maitre d’hôtel who stops, unshaven and in worn-out shoes, at her farm and is given dinner, very likely his last, since he is intending to walk ninety miles through the Masai country along bad roads with savage animals all around. When Emmanuelson’s glass is filled, he drinks from it and then holds it toward the light for a long while, finally saying, “Fameaux. Fameaux,” and identifying the wine simply by its taste and body, a 1906 Chambertin. That moment fills Dinesen, who had had but slight regard for him, with respect.
Chambertin, however, is not what it once was. The vineyards that had produced extraordinary wine for more than one thousand years were consolidated in 1702 under a single owner named Jobert, who succeeded in giving the name its great cachet and became rich in doing so. The thirty-two acres that comprised his holding have gradually been divided among many owners, now more than two dozen, and not all the wine they produce is great or even good, though it is all Chambertin or Chambertin-Close de Bèze. Today, you need a wine guide or reliable merchant to lead you through the thicket.
BROCCOLI
The origins of broccoli are obscure, although it was known to the ancient Romans—the Emperor Tiberius’s son was said to be inordinately fond of it. It traveled from Italy to France with Catherine de’ Medici in 1533, but then took many years more to make it across the Channel to England. It came to America about the time of the Revolution—John Randolph of Virginia mentions it in his 1775 treatise on gardening.
A member of the cabbage family and extremely rich in vitamins, broccoli should not be overcooked and allowed to become soggy. It is excellent with lemon butter or hollandaise sauce. Its literary fame seems to rest largely on a caption written by E. B. White for a New Yorker cartoon. A despairing mother is trying to make a stubborn child eat dinner.
“It’s broccoli, dear,” she explains.
“I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”
ROMANÉE-CONTI
Sometime around 1960, I read Alexis Lichine’s The Wines of France and soon after, inspired, I bought the first great bottle of my life in a wine shop that was a few doors from the St. Regis. The wine was Romanée-Conti—I’m not sure of the vintage, but I think 1956. I remember the price, however: sixteen dollars. Today a bottle can cost more than a thousand.
Romanée-Conti is probably the greatest of all Burgundies. It comes from a small vineyard of some four and a half acres that was already a jewel when Mme de Pompadour coveted it. It went up for auction after the Revolution and was last sold in 1868. It produces between three hundred and five hundred cases in an abundant year. So limited an output, combined with its legend, makes it expensive.
In comparison, a fine Bordeaux like Lynch-Bages will ship some 35,000 to 45,000 cases.
Burgundies—great ones—are known for their aromatic quality and are generally, unlike Bordeaux, not decanted, since their bouquet is diminished in the open air. I didn’t know that when I drank the only bottles of Romanée-Conti I am likely to have in this life, but luckily both times it was served directly from the bottle. I trust it was, as red Burgundies should be, a few degrees cooler than a comparable Bordeaux.
J.S.
COLONEL JOHNSON
On this day