Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [99]
His father had died before his birth in 1667, and his mother soon abandoned him. Raised by an uncle, he was able to read by the time he was three years old. He became a brilliant writer; his best-known work was Gulliver’s Travels, later transposed into a children’s story. His savage A Modest Proposal puts forth a solution to the problem of hunger in Ireland by the sale of the babies of the poor to the rich as food, and is as devastating as on the day it first appeared in 1729.
In Directions to Servants he addressed in a similar vein how servants should properly conduct themselves:
“Whoever comes to visit your master or lady when they are abroad,” he instructed, “never burden your memory with the person’s name, for indeed you have too many other things to remember. Besides, it is a porter’s business, and your master’s fault he does not keep one; and who can remember names?”
CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI
1533. Catherine de’ Medici, a fourteen-year-old princess, appeared at the court of France to marry the future Henry II. She arrived with an escort of cooks, along with bags of white haricot beans, broccoli, and artichokes to be planted in her new country. But she brought far more than vegetables—she brought with her the Italian Renaissance.
Women at the time did not dine with the king or great lords, since the act of chewing was thought to spoil their beauty. Instead, they consumed broths in the privacy of their own rooms. But Catherine and her ladies in waiting were accustomed to sharing the table with men and added their presence to the pleasures of the table. Wife of a king and mother of three kings, she was also a glutton. She loved huge banquets at which she could feast on the many dishes of fowl that were then so popular: heron, swan, stork, guinea hen, and even crow. A woman who knew what she liked, she shocked her more respectable subjects by the number of artichokes—considered an aphrodisiac—she consumed.
BABA AU RHUM
On this day in 1677, Stanislas Leszczy–nski, the nobleman who would twice sit on the throne of Poland and twice be exiled to France, was born in Lwów. He was well liked in France, where he governed Lorraine; beautified its capital, Nancy; and corresponded with intellectuals; and where his daughter, Marie, became the wife of Louis XV and queen of France. He is credited with the idea of improving a small sugar cake by steeping it, still warm, in rum after baking, thus creating baba au rhum. The name, it is said, comes from that of the character he loved best in The Thousand and One Nights, Ali Baba.
APPLE SALES
You cannot sell a blemished apple in the supermarket, but you can sell a tasteless one, provided it is shiny, smooth, even, uniform, and bright.
—ELSPETH HUXLEY
The best-selling apple in the United States is the Delicious, first grown in Iowa in the 1870s, but its taste has deteriorated over the years, and the yellow variety is even worse. The Delicious apple, A. J. Liebling wrote, is “a triumph … because it doesn’t taste like an apple,” and “the Golden Delicious … doesn’t taste like anything.”
CALIFORNIA WINE
Most of the wine consumed in the United States is produced in California. There are fine wineries in the north, around San Francisco, and a huge grape-growing belt in the center of the state. California wines tend to have a high alcoholic content—fifteen percent is not unusual. There is an immense variety, and the choice can be bewildering.
The great California red is Cabernet Sauvignon, along with Merlot and Zinfandel. The best white is Chardonnay. Inexpensive table wine often has a generic name such as Burgundy or Chablis. The better wines usually carry the name of the predominant grape.
The top wines—about thirty or forty producers of red and an equal number of white—are world-class. The price will usually identify this,