FOOD : A Hunger for Paris : Starved for Experience--and Cash--a Young American Savors Postwar France

THERE IS NO accounting for the fact that I have been a francophile since the cradle and perhaps years before in another incarnation. If I could have named my one major dream in life since I learned to reason, it was to visit and live in France. It is not to exaggerate to say that all my life I had felt an alien in America. I was not comfortable in Mississippi; Chicago seemed spiritually removed to me even as I worked and ate and loved there.

And thus in late fall I boarded an American student vessel, the name of which is lost to me. There was nothing memorable about the voyage to France, certainly not the food. We arrived in Cherbourg and took the boat train to Paris. I felt like a small mouse when I got into the cab at Gare St. Lazare. A small mouse just loosed in a warehouse full of cheese.

It is a bit mawkish, I know, but the moment the taxi turned the corner on the Champs Elysees, driving toward the Place de l’Etoile, I was possessed with the most extraordinary feeling of coming home after years and perhaps centuries of absence, and I started to cry, muffling the sounds so that the driver couldn’t hear.

Alas. I could not have known how brief my honeymoon would be with the City of Light. I was, as it turned out, a damned callow fool, an unmitigated innocent. And I paid dearly for my naivete!

I had planned to remain at least a year in Paris, and in a financial sense this was wholly feasible. The city was--compared to Chicago, my chief frame of reference--a bargain. That is not to say that I was financially equipped to dine in what might even remotely be called style. I had to watch my francs and centimes with unaccus tomed care and, in one sense, this was the greatest blessing of my stay. So necessarily cautious was I in my expenditure, it never occurred to me to take a taxi anywhere. And thus I walked everywhere, morning, noon and night. I rarely rode the Metro or subway. I came to know the plan of Paris by heart. Had I been led blindfold to any section of the city, I could have, blindfold removed, told you precisely the arrondissement I was in.

Tickets to concerts were to be had for centimes, and I listened to marvelous music in the Salle Pleyel, the Salle Wagram, and--the hall that I cherish most to this day--the Salle Gaveau. I heard Andres Segovia, Darius Milhaud, Wilhelm Backhaus, Alexander Brilowsky; saw a performance of “Auberge du Cheval Blanc” (“The White House Inn”) at the Chatelet, and, I hesitate to confess, I saw my first opera, “La Boheme,” one of the most inundating experiences of my life, at the Palais du Chaillot. Totally involved, never before or since have I undergone such strong emotions as I listened to a line that is embedded forever in my brain: An elderly man turned to me and said in English: “ ‘La Boheme’ is all there is or ever will be of youth.”

I was living in a five-story walk-up on the Rue de la Victorie. My chambre was a drafty place, small, with a fireplace which, in the cold winter months of 1949, had to be kept fueled. Else one had to go to bed and sleep under the devil’s own contrivance, that overstuffed comforter called a duvet so much admired in French homes. It is a great puffy coverlet of eiderdown stuffed inside two large pieces of cloth. It is a French government edict that the cloth must be as slick and shiny as possible to ensure that the duvet, which can’t be tucked in, will slide first to the right side, then to the left, always off the bed throughout the course of a cold night. That is one reason that for several weeks I spent so much time at concerts. It was cheaper than wood for the fireplace, and the concert halls were heated.

My landlady was a Mme. Roncaret, an aging woman with a face that was literally a mask of white powder punctuated with red lip rouge and purple eye shadow. Her hair was dyed a peculiar shade of orange and she wore a great deal of perfume. She resembled, in short, a Toulouse-Lautrec creation. She taught piano and all day long I could hear etudes by Czerny and Chopin. She was a dreadful snob and a worse cook.

Once, trying to exercise my French on her, I brought up the subject of music, about which my fund of knowledge was miserable. The only French composer who came to mind was Gounod so I told her, purely in the interest of conversation, that “Guess what music I prefer? Gounod’s ‘Berceuse’ from ‘Jocelyn.’ ” She went into a 15-minute tirade about liking music that the hurdy-gurdy man in the Parc Monceau would hold beneath his contempt.

I dreaded Friday lunch in Mme. Roncaret’s salle a manger . It was invariably grilled sardines which, to my certain knowledge, had been pawned off on her when, at the end of a third or fourth day of unrefrigeration the fishmonger could not otherwise dispose of them. In short, they possessed a most unlikely perfume that deadened the appetite. Other days we dined on white sausages that contained more cereal than meat. These were alternated with viande hache , generally grilled and undercooked and a bit gristly. That is why to this day if someone asks me if I have ever dined on horse meat, I give them a tentative, “I’m not sure.”

After lunch I would walk back to the Left Bank, always choosing a different route, a different bridge to cross, and generally indulged in my one great extravagance. I would stop at a pastry shop, spending minutes surveying the pastries--great cakes with butter-cream frosting, puff-pastry fantasies like Napoleons with pastry cream fillings, and palmiers , which are given the dreadful name in English, pigs’ ears. I would generally settle for one small fruit tart, a barquette perhaps, the cherries, gooseberries or plums symmetrically posed atop a small cushion of pastry cream flavored with an eau-de-vie . Those were joyous days, many of them spent at Les Invalides, the Louvre, and twice I indulged myself in tours, once to Versailles, another to Malmaison. I was drunk with love for Paris; the smell of Gauloise cigarettes; the taste of cafe noir with croissants each morning, the odor of anisette at nearby tables. In those days I did not care for the taste of Pernod, but it sure smelled like Paris as much as Marseilles, and that smelled good.

Today I look back ruefully and with a certain consternation to think that I did not allow myself to visit more than a meager handful of restaurants. But then I remember that I literally thought twice, and I counted my sous before taking the Metro. On the rare occasions that I did go to restaurants, it was generally a steak-pommes frites establishment. It was in my first fortnight in Paris that I tasted what was, I presume, my first sampling of French cuisine, the food of North Africa notwithstanding. One late afternoon I walked along the banks of the Seine alone, feeling like generations of young Americans before me--like the original flaneur . I crossed Pont Sully and found myself in front of a small restaurant called Le Bossu, which, sadly, no longer exists.

I studied the menu posted in front, and my eyes rested on the least expensive dish, les oeufs brouilles a l’estragon . I entered the restaurant and sat down. I ordered that dish and a glass of white wine. The dish was of course, scrambled eggs with tarragon. I was consummately happy. I had never tasted such heavenly food. Since that couscous in Casablanca, I know full well that it was my first encounter with tarragon. I walked out of the place with a great desire to kiss the good lady who had welcomed me in the first place.

During that stay in Paris I was once taken to Brasserie Lipp, where I ate my first choucroute a l’alsacienne and again ached with the glory of knowing for the first time the grand heights to which sauerkraut could be elevated.

I also dined once at a small Arab restaurant and, for sentiment’s sake, ordered couscous, which wasn’t as good as I had remembered it in Morocco. I nonetheless reveled in it as I always have and always will.

And one Sunday that is indelible in my memory, I took the train to the suburb of St. Germain-en-Laye and dined at the Pavillon Henry IV. On this occasion I really splurged. I ate tournedos Henri IV, the grilled slice of beef filet with its garnish of bearnaise, plus souffle potatoes and a watercress salad. I went into my usual and ecstatic trance-like state at that first sampling of bearnaise sauce (again with tarragon flavor). That plus an initial biting-into of crisp, puffed souffle potatoes were almost more joy than one body could contain.

There soon came, regrettably, an end to these frugal but magnificent pleasures, a far less elevating side to the nights and days as I passed them in Paris.

There is an old canard that if you sit long enough at the Cafe de Paris, Place de l’Opera, sooner or later everyone you have ever known will pass by. The same could be said of the Alliance Francaise on the Boulevard Raspail on the Left Bank. If Paris is where all good Americans go when they die, the Alliance Francaise was, it seemed to me in those days, where they went while they were alive. That is, if they wanted to speak French. And that is where I enrolled on arrival in Paris.

During my years in Chicago, I had been much taken by a tall, well-educated and fascinating brunette who worked in the Midwest bureau of Time-Life. Her name was Zelda, to select a name at random. She was the daughter of a nationally known politician, and my association with her had been polite and purely professional.

Along about the second month of schooling at Alliance Francaise, I wandered in error into a room where a class was in session. I was suddenly startled to see a redhead who, on seeing me, stood up and rushed over to greet me. It was Zelda, who had given herself a cardinal rinse.

That meeting would, as the weeks passed, spell disaster. The total catastrophe. For Zelda and I became chums, a friendship held together by a great bond of drinking. I could not afford to indulge myself in fine or even mediocre restaurants. But the cost of rum and Cognac was suited to my purse, and drink we did, many’s the night, into oblivion.

Because of that void, which lasted several weeks, there isn’t a great deal more to be said about my stay in Paris except how and why it ended.

For a bizarre reason, Zelda, who was Jewish, and I, who do not profess to any form of organized religion, decided to go to Rome in late December. The reason was that 1950 was to be the Holy Year in the Roman Catholic Church. We also thought that a visit to St. Mark’s in Venice on Christmas Eve would be romantic fun, God knows why. Oh, beautiful for pilgrim feet!

To compound this midwinter insanity, I decided on a madder scheme. I must have had about $750 left from my initial $1,000 that I had saved in Chicago and with which I was funding this sojourn in Paris. In addition to that, I had two checks, each totaling $65, issued by the U.S. Government, my monthly stipend for education under the GI Bill of Rights.

I decided that I would play the black market, a quite respectable thing to do in those days. But at that point in time, playing the black market was sheer folly. Immediately after the war, you could make quite a little profit by selling hard currency in the form of U.S. dollars. But at the same time I decided to wheel and deal, the profit to be made by the sale of a few dollars illegally as opposed to what you could get legally from the bank could be counted in pennies. But this was the situation. In 1949 you could not take a $50 bill, to choose an arbitrary amount, or a government-issued check to a bank and receive dollars in change. You would have to accept francs.

The black market was played thusly: You took your hard currency or government check to a bank in Switzerland and they would give you American cash. You returned to France, found someone willing to pay you a higher-than-the-bank price for this hard currency, and the difference in exchange was your profit.

And so Zelda and I boarded the train for Lausanne. We stayed there one night to give me ample time to convert every bit of exchange that I owned into American dollars. The next morning we boarded the train for Milan en route to Venice.

In Milan we took a stroll. We spotted a group of men huddled around a black table on which they were playing a shell game, the sordid mechanics of which are, even at this late date, too painful and embarrassing to recount. Zelda and I were ripped off for $100 each within the space of five minutes.

Next stop, Venice.

In Venice on Christmas Eve, as midnight approached, we walked to the Basilica San Marco only to discover that it was bolted shut.

The next day or the day after, we returned to St. Mark’s, and on the way we met a man, a slender, dapper, handsome type, all grace and charm, who gave the impression of suddenly being much taken with Zelda. I shall call him Carlo. We joined him for coffee on the Piazza San Marco, and within the space of an hour he had given us his curriculum vitae . It would seem indeed that within those 60 minutes there was little about himself that he had not revealed. In perfect English, he stated that he was divorced. His wife had run off with a professor from Princeton. He had a child, he explained, as he extracted a portrait of a young tyke who looked like something by Botticelli. He taught language and he would like on the following day to show us Titian’s workshop, a landmark that very few tourists were fortunate enough to be shown. He lived on the Lido, ventured back and forth across the lagoon by rented boat, and so on.

The three of us took a stroll and met a young lady, a tourist alone from Brooklyn.

The four of us agreed to have dinner. With all those dollar bills from Swiss banks crammed into my vest pocket, I was feeling outrageously flush. I said that I would be the host.

It must be said that in the closing years of the 1940s, Italy had still not recovered economically from the ravages of the last war. The black market still flourished there. La dolce vita was in the distance.

Our Venetian friend noted that Zelda had the makings of a cold coming on, and so he stepped briefly inside a shop where he purchased black market Kleenex for her. And her favorite brand of American cigarettes, which she was wont to chain-smoke. Also black market. A few steps further, our friend stopped and bought a bottle of Italian brandy. It was then proposed that we go back to our albergo to have a drink in my room.

The four of us sat around a small table, a glass at hand. In retrospect, I recall that Carlo was inordinately generous in pouring three of us helpings of brandy. He poured himself small portions, watered down, protesting that his tolerance for alcohol was minuscule.

At 7 o’clock Zelda was beyond maneuvering and was put to bed in her room across the hall. The remaining three of us continued our carousing into the night and into Taverna la Fenice, at the time one of Venice’s most celebrated.

I have no recollection of that dinner. Memory came back to me fleetingly, and I remember removing my wallet from my breast pocket and paying the bill, which seemed staggeringly high.

It was bitter cold when we deposited Miss Brooklyn at her hotel and walked to mine. Carlo protested that it was too late to take the boat back to the Lido and, therefore, he would check into my albergo . He was assigned a room adjoining mine.

I stumbled or otherwise got my body into bed and unconsciousness. There was a knock at my door and I presumed it was Zelda in need of a match or other light for a cigarette.

I yelled, “Come in,” and it was Carlo, who entered quietly and just as quietly shut the door, turning the key in the lock with his left hand behind his back.

“Where’s your money?”

“I don’t have much.”

I was cold and terrified as well.

An uncharacteristic thing had happened when I had gone to bed. I am meticulous, fastidious to the point of a slight neurosis. A wayward ash, a dog’s hair, a stray needle or hairpin can disturb and distract and unsettle me until it is removed from sight.

On this evening, I had taken off my jacket and hung it carelessly on the knob of a chair in the room.

Carlo started for it.

I am no hero, but I was petrified at the thought of that money loss. I, naked, tossed the covers off my body and stood, hoping somehow to thwart his advance toward my wallet.

He lunged, pushed me back onto the bed, my back against the wall and a blade of solid steel pointed at my heart.

“Mind yourself,” he said, backing toward the jacket. Out of my breast pocket he withdrew my wallet and passport. He lifted every bill from the wallet, tossed the wallet and passport on the bed. He backed to the door, unlocked and opened it, and stole out into the hallway, closing the door behind him.

I hurriedly dressed, terrified. I had not one cent and only a few lira to my name, in Italy or elsewhere. There was no one in my family, no friend in Chicago to whom I could appeal for aid. In all the world, only Zelda.

I made my way across to her door, passing meanwhile Carlo’s room. His door was fully ajar, the bed lamp was lit, and he was reclining against the pillow, reading. On the night stand was Zelda’s Kleenex.

I awakened Zelda and asked her to keep an eye on Carlo. I would go to the police.

There were no taxis and I walked in the freezing darkness to the police station, only to discover that no one spoke Inglese . I would have to wait for the morning guard.

To make it brief, the police went to the hotel and searched Carlo’s room behind closed doors. An hour later they emerged to tell me that there was no sign of my money.

Over the years, as you may have noted, in times of stress, my memory pulls a disappearing act, and it did here.

I can reconstruct the past in bits and pieces.

But for the record, if you examine the pages of Venice’s leading newspaper of the last week in December, 1949, you will note a black headline buried somewhere within that says, “ Giornalista Americano Rapinato en Albergo.” Rapinato , I hasten to add, is not a cognate meaning what you might be wondering. It means robbed.

I do know that Zelda (she did not then nor did she ever want for money) agreed to loan me the entire sum of money that I had lost. Provided I would continue with her on the Italian viaggio as far as Florence, that splendid town, which had been part of our original itinerary. Indeed, Zelda threatened to turn me loose without a lira if I did not continue to keep her company.

To be truthful, I wanted nothing so much as immediate passage back to America.

We took the train to Bologna for the express purpose of dining at Papagallo, which we understood to be one of the finest restaurants in all of Italy. We dined on tagliatelle , and even in my state of grave and continuing anxiety, it was a transcendental experience. Never had I eaten such noodles, golden, thin to the point of near translucence, and bathed in heavy cream and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. We also had a superb encounter with filetti di tacchino or thinly sliced breast of turkey with prosciutto and Gruyere cheese. I might add that, as of a few months ago, I paid a sentimental visit to Bologna and Papagallo’s, and I think it was one of the worst meals of my life. The food was a disaster and the service was worse. The interior of the restaurant was equally seedy and depressing.

Not to belabor the travesties and trials of that trip with Zelda, the next day we were to take the train for Florence. We arrived at the train station well in advance of our scheduled departure and stopped at a small trattoria for a pre-prandial aperitif (I had only recently been initiated into the joys of Italian vermouths).

There was a single stipulation in my financial arrangement with Zelda: I was not to be trusted with money. She would dispense such funds as were necessary for food, drink and repose. Around her neck and over her shoulders was strapped an uncommonly capacious and heavy leather bag, inside which she carried a small, oily and supple purse, the most interesting aspect of which was that it was stuffed, bulging with international currency. That in itself would not have seemed unusual, but the fact was that an expert in forensic chemistry could easily have traced each piece of currency to which bar Zelda had dined in throughout her stay in Europe.

Zelda adored finger food of any sort. Thus you would find paper drachmas not too daintily stained with olives and lakerda that had given her pleasure in the plaka in Athens; pesetas that smacked of angulas in oil or other tapas that she had tasted at her favorite tascos in Barcelona; francs that had been briefly anointed with the oil of anchovies or other dainty tidbits she’d nibbled while standing at small counter bars in Marseilles.

Shortly before the train pulled into the station. Zelda indicated that she must make a hurried trip to the lavabo, and to hasten things she handed me her purse, so redolent of good times. I took it, walked to the cashier and paid for the aperitifs. Zelda returned and I returned the purse.

We boarded the train, which was crowded with Holy Year pilgrims, I burdened with my small suitcase and several of her numerous pieces of luggage. We took our seats at the only places we could find in separate compartments. Just before the train got underway, she stuck her face in the door of my compartment.

“Do you have my purse?” she demanded eagerly.

“No!” I yelled, and as the wheels of that vehicle started slowly turning, we jumped off the train. I was frightened. My God, I thought. The ultimate dilemma.

“Zelda,” I started, “what’ll we do now? We’re broke.”

“Oh, piddle,” she said. “It’s not the money. My passport was in that purse. And so were some prescriptions for drugs that I can’t live without.”

Back to the Italian police, once more with feeling.

The rest of that trip was mostly anticlimactic.

The next day, with a cable from home in her hand, she was issued another passport by the American consul. And money was not the grave concern I had imagined it would be. When she opened her suitcases at the hotel where we spent the night, I noted that tucked here and there was a comfortable assortment of packages containing traveler’s checks in denominations to nourish the spirit.

After a few days in Florence, I returned to Paris by train, and it was almost a classic finale to that misbegotten expedition. The train was packed, and in my third-class compartment I sat facing a toothless, unshaven old man whose breath reeked of garlic, gorgonzola, and a wine that was referred to in my childhood as dago red.

I waited in Paris for a week to accommodate myself to the French Line’s boat schedule. The francs and centimes that I owned (through Zelda’s generosity) seemed more precious than ever.

As it turned out, I was not to leave Europe that year without fate giving me one final thumbing of the nose.

On the night before I was to catch the boat train, I had rejoined Zelda at our favorite bar that dispensed cheap Cognac and rum. We had called it a night at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning. I had slept through the sound of the alarm clock at 6 a.m. and awakened with an hour to go before the departure of the train for Cherbourg.

I hastily shaved, showered, shoved clothes into a bag and ran into the cold morning streets of Paris to hail a cab. No small feat at that hour and in the section of Paris where I lived. At 8:40 I found a taxi and hurried into the back seat, alarmed.

I realized that seconds were important in making that 9 o’clock departure.

In my very best, lamentable French, I told the driver of my dilemma. I then reckoned how much the fare would be to the station. In my anxiety I decided that I would make ready twice the amount and add a handsome tip as well.

My memory is faulty after all these years as to the exact sum, but I believe that I had agreed to give the driver 600 francs, which would have been exceedingly generous.

I fished in my pockets and discovered that all I had was a thousand-franc note.

“Driver,” I said (or tried to say), “I want to give you 600 francs to get me to the train station as fast as possible. I only have a thousand francs. I will give you that and you give me 400 francs. There will be no time to lose at the Gare St. Lazare.”

He was a charming old man. While driving at utmost speed, he reached into his wallet and handed me 400 francs.

We arrived at the station at two minutes to 9.

I bolted from the cab, coattail flying. And so had the cabdriver, yelling his lungs out.

A second later a group of bystanders grabbed me and held me stock-still.

“Let me go!” I yelled. “You’re crazy.”

“But, monsieur,” one of them who spoke English informed me, “the cabdriver says he gave you 400 francs and you gave him nothing.”

It was true. In my haste, I had not forked over the thousand-franc bill.

When I got to the ticket-taker, I was told that the boat train had departed on time five minutes ago. I wanted to cry. I hadn’t even said goodby to my landlord and landlady. I simply couldn’t go back and say I needed my room back, I missed the train.

And then the ticket-taker said, smiling: “Don’t bother. You missed that tourist-class boat train. The first-class train leaves at 10.”

And in this time of trial and travail there was one factor to give me spiritual uplift.

I had booked passage on that legend known as the Ile de France, and it was sailing from Cherbourg to Manhattan.

Although I had dined on scrambled eggs with tarragon at Le Bossu and choucroute a l’alsacienne at Brasserie Lipp, I was to taste my first sample of classic French cooking aboard that ship.

To be sure, I was traveling tourist class. But on that first night out, what was placed before me was a dish of such stunning magnificence that I felt--without hyperbole--what amounted to a spiritual revelation. It was as though a key had been turned, a door opened, and suddenly I was offered the essence and extract of some sublime, supernal elixir that was all I’d ever hoped for without knowing what I had hoped for.

The dish was listed on the menu as turbotin a l’infante . To this day, I believe that my career in food can be dated from that one meal. It was a heady experience the like of which has never been equaled, although closely approximated on occasions that I can count on the fingers of one hand. Never again has anything tasted so audaciously good as that young turbot with white wine sauce.

From “A Feast Made for Laughter,” by Craig Claiborne. Copyright 1982 by Craig Claiborne. Published by Doubleday. Reprinted by permission.