The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [179]
When Nora began to reminisce guiltily about the fine Hungarian salami stuffed with donkey meat she had enjoyed as a girl, I knew I had her. I administered the coup de grâce by telling her, in complete truthfulness, that an anthropologist has demonstrated that in those countries where horses are used for food, the animals are treated much more humanely after they are no longer fit for work. Within a few minutes she had agreed to bring back six pounds of horse fat—as long as it was legal. President Clinton is fond of her restaurant, and Nora would not risk embarrassing her commander in chief with the scandal of smuggled fat.
I had two weeks to prove that my plan complied with the law of the land. But the problem was this: ruthless radical Republican right-wing religious maniacs had shut down the U.S. government! At the best of times, it is exquisite torture to get a straight answer about food from the Customs Service. Now there was no one even to ask.
And then, as if by divine intervention, the federal government went back to work for a few days. Still, nobody in Washington had the courage to give me the go-ahead. The FDA would take charge only if the horses were wild, and sent me to the USDA, which thought the FDA was wrong. Then I reached one Richard Scott, who supervises the agricultural import inspectors and needs to make these decisions every day. He checked a manual of horse diseases, made sure that Nora’s fat was not from Argentina or Paraguay, performed further occult acts, and announced that if my horse fat had already been rendered and properly packed, she could carry it in without going directly to jail.
Now it was just a matter of time before fries cooked in horse fat would be mine.
My dedication to French fries is so profound that it undoubtedly has intrauterine origins, and for as long as I can remember, friends have telephoned me from the farthest reaches of civilization whenever they stumble across a particularly lofty French-fry achievement. Have I tried the fries at the little restaurant on the northwest corner of the Place des Vosges in Paris or at the new McDonald’s in Pushkin Square in Moscow? The Cafe de Bruxelles in Greenwich Village or Benita’s Frites in Santa Monica? Or the rotisserie near the Antibes market on the French Riviera, where crisp, golden chickens drip and dribble their juices upon the excellent fries piled in the bottom of the rotisserie for the few minutes that pass after they are fried and before they are sold?
Sometimes Fate puts the finest fries right under my nose. One summer we drove an hour into the hills overlooking the medieval walled city of Lucca, in Tuscany, to a tiny village called Pieve Santo Stefano and the restaurant called Vipore, the “Viper,” named two centuries ago for its fearsome owner, who successfully kept local bandits from preying on customers as they stopped at his inn to break the day’s long ride from Florence to Forte di Marmi on the Tyrrhenian Sea. We sat at wooden tables in a garden planted with flowers and herbs and black cabbages, watching the lights come on in Lucca and the stars come out overhead, and enjoyed the wonderful cooking of Cesare Casella, son of the owners, whose inventions include potatoes deep-fried with garlic and branches of fresh rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, and nepitella, and served on paper made from straw. The herbs become crisp and perfume the oil, the garlic grows soft and mellow, the crunchy potatoes take on all their flavors, and they are wonderful. Tuscans are known for frying their potatoes with a little