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sauce—the latter a closely guarded secret—ravioli with wonderfully hot spinach, salad, Bordeaux wine, and bread. We were talking about the city’s great expanse, where wed been that day, places that by contrast made this one seem even warmer and more serene: the bleak square across the street from Humboldt University where Goebbels ordered books heaped and burned in 1933, and later in the afternoon, the chilling remains of Plotzensee Prison, now a memorial, where thousands of political enemies of the Third Reich, in particular Czechs and members of the German Resistance movement, were executed.

The busboy cleared the table. “Did you enjoy your dinner?” he asked. Immensely. The hotel, with its comforts, was just a few long blocks away.

LE PAVILLON

1941. The restaurant that was to become the most exalted in the country for three decades, Le Pavillon, opened this day on 55th Street in New York across from the St. Regis Hotel in a location felt to be unlucky, since two restaurants had previously failed there. The perfectionist owner and maître d’, Henri Soulé, had first come to the United States to work at the French Pavilion restaurant at the 1939 World’s Fair—a bottle of 1929 Château Margaux was on the wine list at four dollars and fifty cents at the time.

Short, “inclined to stoutness,” diplomatic, and unflappable, Soulé was utterly dedicated to his work. He rarely went to the theater or a movie and his hobby, he said, was paying bills. Although the nation found itself at war only seven weeks later and there were many problems, the restaurant was a success from the start.

MARIE ANTOINETTE

Wheeled through the streets of Paris in an open cart, Marie Antoinette, widow of Louis XVI, who had been executed nine months earlier, went to the guillotine on this day in 1793 after having eaten a little bouillon in her prison cell at the urging of her maid. Though hated by the French for her Austrian background and frivolous ways, she nevertheless had never uttered the words blamed for helping to incite the French Revolution when told the starving masses had no bread: “Let them eat cake.”

• Bouillon is French for “stock”: liquid cooked with some combination of meat, fish, poultry, bones, and seasonings, and then strained.

• Broth is the liquid before being strained.

• Consommé is a bouillon from which all the smallest remaining particles have been removed by clarifying it.

CRAIG CLAIBORNE

We wanted to invite Craig Claiborne, to whose house in East Hampton we’d been a number of times, both for black-tie New Year’s Eve dinners and working lunches, at which he and his longtime collaborator, Pierre Franey, tried out various recipes and ways of cooking—with Franey doing the actual work and Claiborne in half-glasses, standing at the typewriter taking down details.

Claiborne was the celebrated New York Times food critic and cookbook writer. He knew the great chefs—some of them cooked at his parties on New Year’s Eve—and had eaten at every great restaurant. What and how to feed him?

We decided on lunch instead of dinner, feeling it would be judged less seriously. The matter of the other guests was easily settled: Random House editor Joe Fox; his wife, Anne Isaak; and their house-guests, British publisher Christopher MacLehose and his girlfriend, Susanna Porter, an editor.

We cooked the entire menu in a trial run: Brussels-sprout-and-carrot soup, flounder à l’Anglaise—broiled with butter and a simple dusting of bread crumbs—a potato gratin, and a lemon tart for dessert.

At the table we pretended not to notice the reaction to the soup. “Delicious,” Craig announced. We felt we were winning. There were requests for seconds on the gratin. Every shred of flounder vanished, as well as the entire lemon tart. Over dessert, Craig, his face cherubic, began to tell a few dirty jokes. Then, among a literary group who ought to know every word in the dictionary he challenged us to come up with the four words in English that have three sets of double letters, proper names like Mississippi or Tennessee not included.

“Committee,” someone