The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food

A Small Starter: Questions of Food

We have happy days, remember good dinners.

—CHARLES DARWIN

We eat to live? Yes, surely. But why then did the immortal gods also come to the table, and twice a day?

—LÉON ABRIC

IN THE early morning—six-forty, precisely—of May 24, 1942, a young professor of German, a resistant who had taken the underground name of Jacques Decour (his real name was Daniel Decourdemanche) and who taught before the war at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris, wrote a letter to his parents:

You know that for the past two months I have been expecting what is to happen to me this morning; so I have had the time to prepare myself for it; but since I have no religion, I have not given myself up to any meditation on death. Here are a few requests. I was able to send a word to the woman I love. If you see her—soon I hope—give her your affection. This is my dearest wish. I also wish that you could keep an eye on her parents who need help badly. Give them the things that are in my apartment and which belong to their daughter: The volume of the PLEIADE, THE FABLES DE LA FONTAINE, TRISTAN, LES QUATRE SAISONS, two water colors, the menu of the inn LES 4 PAVES DU ROY.

All these last days I have thought a lot about the good meals that we should have together when I was free. You will eat them without me, all the family together—but not sadly, please! I don’t want your thoughts to dwell on the good times that we might have had but on those that we really have shared. During these two months of solitude without even anything to read I have run over in my mind all my travels, all my experiences, all the meals that I have eaten. I even composed the outline of the novel. I had an excellent meal with Sylvain on the 17th. I have often thought of it with pleasure, as well as of the New Year’s supper with Pierre and Renée. Questions of food, you see, have taken on a great importance.

Three hours later, what was going to happen to Decour happened to him. He was shot by the Nazis in the courtyard of the prison. Yet there he was, in the last hours of his life, thinking about sending a menu from a little inn near Versailles to his girlfriend’s parents. (They must have eaten there, once.) His last thoughts turned to his best-loved meals. Of course, he’s nobly trying to ease the horror for his parents, but he’s also trying to find something to hang on to. Questions of food, you see, have taken on a great importance.

Questions of food seem to have taken on a great importance for us now, too. An obsessive interest in food is not a rich man’s indulgence, confined to catering schools and the marginal world of recipe books. Questions of food have become the proper preoccupation of whole classes and cable networks. More people talk about food now—why they eat what they eat and what you ought to eat, too—than have ever done before. Our food has become our medicine, our source of macho adventure, and sometimes, it almost seems, our messianic material. Good food, or watching it get made, anyway, has become, in the age of Rachael Ray and Food Network, a popular sport, and even the many who still prefer fast food to fancy or fresh get to prefer it loudly.

But if our own obsession (and the obesity it fathers) keeps increasing, its spirit seems at odds with that of Jacques Decour’s last thoughts. Not just the gravity, but the pathos of the feeling he evokes, and its humanity, seem very far from the questions we ask about food. We do feel a kinship to him beyond our pity at his end and our wonder at his courage. A kinship because his sense of food—of the rituals of the table, the memories of eating, even as the noise of our cross-talk and cable clatter increases—still shares in our own sense of what makes us human and what forms the core of our memories. For us, as for Jacques Decour, what makes a day into a happy day is often the presence of a good dinner. Though we don’t always acknowledge it enough, we still live the truth Darwin saw: food is the sensual pleasure that passes most readily into a social value.

Yet our questions of food are very different from Decour’s. We tend to argue about matters of taste, about the health of the planet, about the rights and wrongs of vegetarianism—all questions, finally, about what to eat. And we ask these questions expecting material answers: the right way to cook or eat. Decour’s questions are posed in a different key, one we can only call humanist: a view that life is a whole—that we can live fully, and that we ought to, with our pleasures as much as with our principles. He is talking about what goes on around the table as much as what’s on it. We can’t help feeling amazed at the sense of his letter but also a kind of unease, even a certain guilt, in his presence. Our questions of food, even the most high-minded, seem so small compared with his.

Why do we care so much about our food? There’s a sociological explanation (it’s a signal of status), a psychological explanation (it takes the place of sex), and a puritanical explanation (it’s the simplest sign of virtue). But all these, while worth pursuing, seem to be at one side of Decour’s questions. Thinking about questions of food an hour before his execution, Decour wasn’t thinking virtuous thoughts about his health, or even the planet’s health. Thinking about meals he was thinking about something else, about that inn near Versailles, about Sylvain and Pierre and Renée and about the parents who had raised and were now to lose him. Food represented for him the continuity of living, and what gave form to life.

Having made food a more fashionable object, we have ended by making eating a smaller subject. When gastronomy was on the margins of attention it seemed big because it was an unexpected way to get at everything—the nature of hunger; the meaning of appetite; the patterns and traces of desire; tradition, in the way that recipes are passed mother to son; and history, in the way that spices mix and, in mixing, mix peoples. You could envision through the modest lens of pleasure, as through a keyhole, a whole world; and the compression and odd shape of the keyhole made the picture more dramatic. Now the door is wide open, but somehow we see less, or notice less, anyway. Betrayed by its enlargement, food becomes less intimate the more intensely it is made to matter.

I love to eat. I love to eat simple food and I love to eat fancy food. I love to eat out and I love to eat at home. I love the Grand Véfour in Paris, where the banquettes are made of velvet and the food is filled with truffles, and I love the coffee shop down the street, where the eggs all come with greasy potatoes. I’ve loved to eat since I was little, when my mother, a terrific cook, would make all the dishes, large and small, near and far. I learned early on the simple path between eating well and feeling happy. And, as all eaters do, I also early on learned the short, sudden path between desire and disappointment: my first strong taste memory is of taking a deep bitter swig of vanilla extract in a dark closet into which I had sneaked the bottle, sure that something that smelled that good had to taste good, too. (It doesn’t.) If all my pleasures are gathered around the table, all my disillusions taste bitter, like that vanilla.

Getting older, with children of my own, I was trained enough to cook for them—my wife’s feminist mother had purposefully neglected her daughter’s kitchen tuition. And, over the years, I wrote a lot about cooking and eating, as a writer is bound to dwell on the things he loves. But though I had written happily about what food tasted like and what it looked like and also about the odd personalities of the people who made the best food, I was left, decades on, wondering: what did it really mean? Why did we care? What was, so to speak, the subject of food? The attempts to make food art I found embarrassing, and the attempts to make it adventure I found absurd. I recognized sexual politics in that effort, the result of traditionally women’s work now being done by men, including me. Men being men, they had to assert themselves by trying not to seem too obviously feminine, pretending that cooking was really just as macho as NASCAR, and so producing the taste for rattlesnake testicle ragout. And with the coming of Mr. Perfect, something more insidious happened: the sheer brunt and dailiness of women’s real lives—the everyday dance women still must do for family life to go on—was subtly undermined by the cooking husband, or host. (Putting on an apron and making a sauce is the easiest of household chores, and a neat way to escape doing the others.)

In place of Decour’s Big Questions, we had many small ones. Should we eat locally? Stop eating meat altogether, and if so, should we do it out of humanity or for our health? All questions worth answering—and yet, weren’t they still to one side of what we really felt when we came home to share dinner and felt happy when we did? Certainly within the new rites there were intimations of a new order, and of a new table, of a larger meaning to our questions of food. I could see, for instance, that in the past twenty-five years, two big things had happened in the world of fancy food. One was the growth of the pure-food movement, best captured in the name slow food, and which encompasses localism, seasonal cooking, farmers’ markets, organic produce—a whole host of interlocked activities and styles that spoke to the old, the past, the lost, the sustainable, the recoverable, heritage breeds, and forgotten peasant wisdoms. The other was the growth of techno-emotional cooking, as its founder, or anyway its first pope, Ferran Adrià, likes to call it, more often referred to as molecular gastronomy. Adrià and his apostles use gels and foams and aerations and freeze-dried powders, outré rearrangements and deconstructed plates: the gleeful appliqué of new technology to cooking. This doubleness suggested a kind of ongoing confrontation between two forces in life, the eternal-natural and the techno-inventive—a confrontation, so to speak, between Hestia, Queen of the Hearth and Home, and Willy Wonka, King of the magic mountain. (Hestia had nymphs and rustics on her side; Willy, an army of Oompa-Loompas.)

I wanted to imagine an apocalyptic final battle for the fate of food. But actually, though often opposed to each other in principle, the people who supported one didn’t fight much with the people who practiced the other. What were they really after? What was really going on with these questions? What did it all mean? We shouldn’t intellectualize food, because that makes it too remote from our sensory pleasures; but we ought to talk as intelligently as we can about it, because otherwise it makes our sensory pleasures too remote from our minds. The knowledge that our senses are part of our intelligence is what makes us human. We alone know our fun. The sweetness in our morning coffee is at once a feeling, an idea, and a memory. Eating is an intelligent act, or it’s merely an animal one. And what makes it intelligent is the company of other mouths and minds. All animals eat. An animal that eats and thinks must think big about what it is eating not to be taken for an animal.

And so we turn back to the table. It was the eighth of July, 2004, and I was in the kitchen of the British chef Fergus Henderson at his whole-beast restaurant, St. John. The day before, bombs had exploded throughout London, as I was getting off the train from Paris, and the tragedy had made Henderson think more intently of the purpose of his craft.

I don’t understand how a young couple can begin life by buying a sofa or a television, he said indignantly to me. Don’t they know the table comes first? The table comes first. The table comes first, before the meal and even before the kitchen where it’s made. It precedes everything in remaining the one plausible hearth of family life, the raft to ride down the river of our existence even in the hardest times. The table also comes first in the sense that its drama—the people who gather at it, the conversation that flows across it, and the pain and romance that happen around it—is more essential to our real lives, and also to the real life of food in the world, than any number of arguments about where the zucchini came from, and how far it had to travel before it got here. If our questions of food matter, it is because they imply most of the big fights about who we are—our notions of clan and nation, identity and the individual. Civilization is mostly the story of how seeds, meats, and ways to cook them travel from place to place. The parts of that story are surely things that everyone should know, if only because they lead us to who we are. If our questions of food are to hold out the promise of self-knowledge that gastronomy once offered, we can’t ask them outside of history.

And so, thinking about questions of food turned me back to the subject of France, the old home of the eaters we have become. All the spice routes passed through Paris. And if they no longer do as much as they once did, that is part of the story, too. You don’t have to be too ardent a Francophile to see that thinking about the table and its rituals means thinking about France, about French history and French manners, just as you don’t have to be an Anglophile to know that understanding liberalism and its rhetoric means thinking about England. Even if you eat nothing but Thai noodles and Turkish kebabs, Paris looms somewhere on the horizon of your imaginings, if only in an awareness of where the idea of eclectic eating in big cities began.

For to the other explanations—Freudian and puritanical—of our food mania, we might add a French explanation: it’s a sign of civilization. Jacques Decour ended his letter this way: It is eight o’clock. It is almost time to go. I have eaten and drunk my coffee. I think I have attended to everything. I have attended to everything. In the end, the last ritual Decour performed was to eat his last breakfast and drink his last cup of coffee and think that he had attended to it all.

All the other questions of food condense into a single question, Jacques Decour’s question, the question of pleasure in a tragic world. Come to the table, dinner’s ready! the hostess says, her face alight with nervous promise, and we trot dutifully to our places, expecting little, hoping for a lot—that, sitting there, we may not improve our lives but may achieve at least our ambiguities. The brightness of life, the double nature of desire, the longings of hunger and the likings of appetite, all the table’s troubled truths … In the midst of life we are at dinner. Why? Why do we think of food at times like these? What do we think of food at times like these? How can you think about food at a time like this? It’s an old question. The indignant puritan repeats it today. Reading his last letter, we might even ask it of Jacques Decour. To find out how he once could, why we still do, is the purpose of these pages.

PART I

Coming to the Table

THE TWO pillars of modern eating are the restaurant and the recipe book. The restaurant is the place where all eating out takes place; the recipe is the thing with which all home cooking starts. Both are modern. Until the nineteenth century, big books of recipes did not exist, and there was no place to go and eat in exchange for money that was like the places we go now.

The restaurant was once a place for men, a place where men ate, held court, cooked, boasted and swaggered, and wooed women. The recipe book was traditionally feminine: the kitchen was the place where women cooked, supervised, gave orders, made brownies, to steady and domesticate men. In the myth-world of the nineteenth century, the restaurant existed to coax women into having sex; the recipe book to coax men into staying home.

These two poles are, blessedly, switching (moms now eat out as commonly as dads make supper), but the double pillars—less like pillars, perhaps, than like the two steeples of Chartres, parts of the same church but unlike each other—remain. To grasp the play of the table, and its politics, let us begin with those two supporting R’s, before proceeding to treat the rituals of taste, which they both support. Begin, then, at the moment when we go to the fancy place for dinner and sit down, nerves alight, or else the moment when we come home and smell what’s cooking. Both are moments of arrival, of expectation, overseen by history. We have gone out for lunch or come home for dinner, and now we start.…

1

Who Made the Restaurant?

A RESTAURANT is a place where you go to eat. You usually arrive in the early afternoon or the middle of the evening, and are taken to a table of your own in a room, usually on the ground floor of a city building in a space leased by a cook and made to look like a dining room. There are plush chairs and benches, and often mirrors. Someone, a professional go-between, often dressed in a parody of evening wear, whatever the hour, brings you a card that lists the things the cook is ready to cook, and how much it will cost to get him to cook them for you. You study this card—usually a list with decorations, sometimes bound in a leather pseudobook—and say what you’ll have, and then the go-between goes into another room, the kitchen, which you can’t see or hear or probably even smell. After a wait, the go-between brings the food you asked for. Very often, you will start with soup before having some grilled or roasted meat, followed by a sweet, almost always something made with sugar, a pudding or cake, rather than something naturally sweet, such as a plain piece of fruit. You are expected to have tea or coffee afterward, and then a bill is brought to your table. Prices are never mentioned out loud, and you pay whatever the card said you would. The place isn’t a whorehouse or anything like it, but often you take someone there because you would like to have sex with them afterward, and sometimes you do, although, if you do, you go and do it somewhere else.

All the details, from soup to sex, of this setup, which by now seems as normal as eating itself, as obvious as breathing, can be found in more or less the same form from Sydney to San Francisco. And all of them—waiters, menus, tables, mirrors, closed kitchen, seduction, and silences, even the little table in the corner, tout compris—were thought up in Paris during a twenty-five year period right before the French Revolution and in the twenty or so years after. When you consider that eating is one of the few things that humans did even before they were people, it seems strange that restaurants should be so recent, but they are—as though the idea of having sex in beds had been discovered in Berlin during the winter of 1857, and then word got around.

There were places where you could go and pay for a meal before there were restaurants, of course: the tavern, the cook-shop, the inn, the table d’hôte, the traiteur, or cook-caterer. The tavern as it evolved throughout Europe in the later part of the eighteenth century had many of the essential emotional traits of the modern restaurant. But the restaurant, with its special rituals and its particular look, began at one time and in one place.

The restaurant was known at once to be a modern and amazing thing. The great gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin marveled in 1825 that now "any man with three or four pistoles in his purse, can immediately, infallibly, and simply for the asking procure all the pleasures of which taste is susceptible. Yet how resilient, many-sided, adaptable, this new thing turned out to be, defying the rule that a picnic is made for one lawn and no other! If the restaurant is not the most original of modern instances and institutions, it is surely the most tenacious. It is the primal scene of modern life. Most modern urban people mark their lives by their moments in cafés and restaurants, just as ancient people marked their time on earth by visits to the local oracle, or medieval people by pilgrimages: we are courted, spurned, recruited, hired, fired, lured to a new job, or released from an old one at a table while a waiter hovers nearby. There are few marriages that did not begin at dinner at a table leased for the evening, and few divorces that did not first show signs of approaching doom in a sigh of resentment or an eye roll of exasperation in a similar setting. (Can’t you just make up your mind and stick with it?/Why do you always overtip? … The forever sentiments of anniversary dinners out not rarely sugar over the approaching no-mores" of domestic life.)

I love restaurants. I love them even though, after many years as a reporter spent being fully disillusioned about their behind-the-scenes—having labored once or twice in their kitchens and befriended their owners—I am aware of how brutal the work is, how long the hours are, and how, aside from the ventures of a handful of those entrepreneurs essentially indifferent to the food they serve, how tiny is the hope of profit. Sale métier, the cooks and waiters alike mutter in Ludwig Bemelmans’s memoirs of restaurant life in prewar Europe—Filthy occupation—and the muttering goes on still. Yet when I think of happy moments, I think of eating out.

Though they sometimes witness the ends of our love lives, restaurants have a ring of hope about them, a note of innocent celebration that makes them the right background for seduction. The man who asks the girl to dinner is not, after all, actually suggesting sex except by the airiest remote inference; he is pretending to be a better man than that: let’s meet, talk, try. The restaurant offers the hope of happiness that gives greedy sex the look of lighthearted love, and, in the erotic sphere as much as the eating sphere, turns raw hunger into formal appetite. The restaurant offers not seduction but what precedes seduction, the false promise of pure motives.

I am, doubtless, prejudiced by particular experience. On my tenth birthday, I took the Moloznik boys from across the street to see a double feature of the first two James Bond films, this at a blissful time when the second run of movies in theaters was still a regular event, so that one had the pleasure of reseeing a good thing in the velvet padding of the cinema—not on the sofa, as we do now—with its thrilling moments in the dark: the trickle of sweet, forbidden Coke through a straw, and the chewy, burnt, semipainful edges of caramels. My parents were blackmailed into taking all three boys out to dinner at a Howard Johnson’s on, as I recall, City Line Avenue in Philadelphia.

Howard Johnson’s is gone now, reduced to a handful of sad motels. But in its day it had something grand about it. There was the electric sign outside, in green and orange, showing, in rapidly animated yet obviously distinct action—you could see the unlit armature of the next moment of movement waiting just beyond the neon figure that was lit, an endlessly repeating flip book of colored light—simple Simon and the Pieman enacting a brief drama of supplication and supply; one took eternally, the other fed over and over again, on the sign above City Line Avenue.

I sensed then that the sign, though meant as a come-on, was one of those strange, dense referents that used to be part of the pool of myths of ordinary people. Simon, as I recall, had the bent-kneed neediness of a Maxfield Parrish illustration, which, combined with the zigzagged lettering, made the sign, in retrospect, a kind of Saturday Evening Post cover come to life, or at least to electricity. (It was similar in spirit to, though far more pop in form than, the mural of Old King Cole in New York’s St. Regis Hotel, a stylized comment on a nursery rhyme assumed to be known to everyone.) The sign’s whimsical high voltage—the elaborate fable electrically enacted simply to signal Eat!—was conducted into the HoJo’s interior as well, where the color scheme of blue and orange seeped even onto the margins of the many-paged menu. Its dishes were familiar from the highway to New York: the rubbery fried clams, the 3-D burger, the mint-chip ice cream, minted with green food coloring. The burger that I had that evening had the delectable aroma, now vanished from the world, of the griddles of my childhood, something buttery, and of the soda fountain. The possibility of choice, the splendor of existence, was all present.

It was not the deliciousness of the food—my mother made better burgers—but the overcharge of optimism that made the meal matter. Its excellence involved the removal of the obvious signs of labor, which even then I took to be a benevolent fiction, for the better food at home was benign good fortune but effortful. You had to have my mom to eat really well, but anyone could come here and share. It was a moment of transformation, liftoff, of anonymity transmuted into intimacy without the obligation of gratitude: you told the menu-bearing woman at the cash register Four for dinner, and suddenly, inexplicably, you were in a booth, and there was dinner for four! This sense of being in the unimaginable right place with exactly the right company in the most welcoming of rooms attended by the most considerate of servers—whistling while they worked and candidly eyeing the reward—was a blessing felt there and sought ever since.

As museums cross, or so Updike tells us, with the mystique of women, restaurants cross in memory with the optimism of childhood, with birthdays, promises, quiet, and the guilty desires of childhood, too: special treatment, special favors. The Cardinal, who never arrives, who sweeps you up into his carriage saying, Child, you please me, becomes the maître d’ who says, Ah, sir, we’re so glad to see you! Some note of gaiety, of excess, of potential, lingers even at the most pedestrian lunch counter. (I have never looked at the Edward Hopper study of loneliness without thinking happily about how cozy the combination of diner chili and lemon meringue pie must be that late at night.)

Years went by—and here one must imagine calendar pages blowing and stock shots of jets crossing the Atlantic—and I found myself in Paris, just at a moment when the Grand Véfour had changed hands from Raymond Olivier’s to the great cook Guy Martin’s. Jet-lagged in the golden light of the Palais Royal, I recognized instantly the same sweet charge, the sibling resemblance to City Line Avenue and the Howard Johnson’s of my tenth birthday. The enameled nymphs and goddesses, the mirrors, the red velvet couches—it was, for all the Palais Royal sophistication, this resemblance that made it moving: the experience of overcharge, of more than was necessary, of décor and joy, and sobriety of eating. Both were places of possibility, the illusion of potentials: we shall be blessed, and know that we are.

Even purely social restaurants, where dramas of snobbery play out, can be turned to such pleasure. In my misspent editorial youth, I used to take two gifted, hard-drinking writers, Mordecai Richler and Wilfrid Sheed, to lunch once a month at the Four Seasons in the Seagram’s building. While Tina Brown and Helen Gurley Brown dined on water and lettuce, my two authors would let themselves go on shrimp with chipotle sausage, linguine alle vongole, crab cakes … and a bottle of red wine and a bottle of white (and too many Cognacs at the end; it was the last decade of hard-drinking writerliness, the last gasps of literary alcoholism that Sheed wrote about movingly and bravely in his In Love with Daylight). While Anna and Helen and the rest sipped and barely munched, the maître d’ would wheel out a kind of chocolate bombe, for the express and sole purpose of having them squeal with indignant denial of interest. But the writers would demand a piece, and then another, with whipped cream (or crème fraîche, as the arc had bent again toward France).

The restaurant, whether in its most abstract, ritzy form or at its most elemental, can always be diverted back toward a primal magic, a mood of mischief, stolen pleasures, a retreat from the world, a boat on the ocean—years later, having ice cream aboard a cruise ship in a storm, I would find that sense of stolen kisses, of clandestine joy, instantaneously renewed. That is what the restaurant promises, and how its prosaic purpose—cooked food exchanged for money—passes into the poetic, which explains why when the young man, from Balzac to Scott Fitzgerald, comes to the city, the first thing he seeks out is the place to eat that he has read about.

Who invented the restaurant? How did it begin? How did it happen that the long history of paying for food in a setting so singular became such a resilient institution—so resilient that a single restaurant, like Gundel in Budapest, could survive wars and revolutions, communists and the new economy, only to end much as it began? How did restaurants happen, and why did they happen first, or best, in Paris?

Until recently, most cooking history was pop history, filled with canned Eureka! moments and arch legend-making. (The great chef Dunand found himself after the battle with nothing but crayfish, chicken, some eggs, and a couple of tomatoes. What, he wondered, could he make from such a motley assortment of ingredients? A moment’s thought, a minute’s chopping, and an hour later, on the Emperor’s table, chicken Marengo was born, etc.) The birth of the restaurant had its myth-made tang, too. The old, potent, and long-standing story was that it was the French Revolution that had made the restaurant: After the revolution, the cooks of the French aristocrats were out of work, since they no longer had any mouths to feed. With nowhere to go but the streets, they opened cafés and started selling in public what before you could get only in private. Willy-nilly, the modern restaurant came into existence. A little later, a few high chefs, the great pastry architect Antonin Carême among them, made up a grammar of French cooking; that is, they wrote down recipes. Together, the dining room on the street and the recipe book in the kitchen made a new