Clementine in the Kitchen

Book by Samuel Chamberlain

Chapter 1

Twelve years of living in France made the transplanted Beck family
blissfully, incurably conscious of good food. When the initial novelty of
representing an American firm in Paris in the Roaring Twenties had begun to
wear off, and as French schools, taxes, politics, red tape, and bicycle
races began to puzzle us less, one towering realization dawned upon us:
These French people know how to LIVE!

With great enthusiasm we had begun serving our apprenticeship at the art of
graceful living in a Paris apartment in the Faubourg-St.-Germain. By the
time we moved to the sleepy country town of Senlis in the Ile-de-France,
where we had bought an eighteenth-century stone house, we were well along
the gourmet's path, from which there is no turning back. And when the final
blessing of a perfect French cook appeared to make our domestic picture
complete, we became utter sybarites, frank worshippers of the splendors of
the French cuisine. Now we would rather talk about a good sauce béarnaise
than football, finance, or infidelity. Our French table has been the scene
of endless gastronomic adventure and gustatory improvisation. Our library
shelf of well-thumbed cookbooks has yielded secrets that have given us
rapturous hours of research into "new taste thrills" altogether unknown to
the advertising men who coined the phrase. Our kitchen is the most
important shrine in the house, and our nostrils are instinctively strained
in that direction any time after ten in the morning.

Much as we appreciate oil heaters, air conditioning, electric
refrigerators, and other creative comforts of the American way of life, we
admit, without shame, that we are hopelessly Francophile on the question of
food. We will run a mile from ham and pineapple, jelly and lamb, sweet
potatoes and marshmallows, but will warm right up to sweetbreads and peas,
snails and Burgundy, radishes and butter. We like wine with our meals and
think that beef steak and ice water is a barbarous combination. We don't
think cranberry sauce helps turkey or that catsup is a necessary companion
of well-cooked meat. We would rather have a few leaves of crisp lettuce,
properly seasoned with olive oil and wine vinegar, salt, pepper, and a
sprinkling of chopped chives, than any of the exotic tea-room salads that
are rightly the targets of wise-cracking columnists. I hope our patriotism
won't be challenged when the truth is told about daughter Diane, for
example, who has all the qualities of a good American girl of sixteen, but
who remains entirely indifferent to fudge cake, baked beans, pancakes,
tomato juice, and corn fritters. But she's a fervent enthusiast of tripe à
la mode de Caen (Hemingway or Faulkner would call it cowbelly, I suppose).
She prefers the grey-green portugaise oysters of France, aromatic with
iodine and sea water, to our placid Cotuits. She adores cervelle de mouton
au beurre noir, those delicate little mounds of sheep's brains swimming in
black butter. At one sitting she has eaten a dozen and a half husky
Burgundian snails before being halted. Sweetbreads, calf's head à la
vinaigrette (including the eye), head cheese, mussels, rabbit stew-all
delight her. She does weaken at eel, almost revolts at squid and octopus,
and puts her foot down when it comes to blood sausage and andouillette, a
Breton sausage the taste and texture of which lead to the blackest of
suspicions.

Well, that's the kind of a family we are. I won't blame you a bit if you
slam this book shut with impatience and dismiss us as a troupe of
gastronomic Fifth Columnists. But if you are still with us, may I take you
back to the month of May 1931 and to our kitchen in France where the
estimable Clémentine, in all her culinary splendor, began her reign of many
years.

We'll never forget when Clémentine came to us, out of the blue, as the
result of a stray telephone number that Mrs. Beck had picked up at a Paris
dinner party. She had just discharged the fifth cook in eight weeks and was
scouting forlornly for a sixth. Clémentine sounded so good over the
telephone that my desperate wife at once sent her fifty francs for
transportation to our little town north of Paris. One look at the smiling,
pink-cheeked Clémentine and we knew that she would be a godsend after the
succession of indifferent cooks who had presided in our venerable cuisine.
Old Amélie had been too cranky. Noëlie could prepare some toothsome
specialties (her cassoulet still haunts us), but she was fantastically
sloppy. Jeanne had made frequent and abnormal inroads into my wine cellar.
But the fair, black-eyed Clémentine seemed to possess all virtues and no
faults. She arrived on the five-o'clock local, a demure and smiling little
person, and was busy preparing dinner within an hour. The Becks heard
snatches of song coming from the kitchen and then sniffed the heavenly
mélange of shallots, butter, and herbs browning in Clémentine's casserole.
Our day of good fortune seemed to be at hand. And when we learned that our
rosy discovery was a genuine Cordon Bleu and a resident of Beaune, the
gastronomic heart of Burgundy, our joy knew no bounds.

The Becks had been in Beaune only a few weeks before and had reveled in the
luxurious cuisine of that epicurean stronghold. Would our newly found
treasure be able to duplicate the memorable Sunday dinner in Beaune, which
we had enjoyed with the Bellon family, par exemple? We wondered. If she
could, our reputation as Lucullan hosts was everlastingly made. Papa Bellon
had spread himself on that memorable Sunday, and the enraptured Becks
remembered every detail of the feast. A bourgeois dinner in Burgundy lacks
finesse, perhaps, but it is glorious in earthy fundamentals. The menu of
Papa Bellon's dinner was simply worded, but it made a more lasting
impression upon us than many an ornamental menu of la grande cuisine
française that we had sampled. Le voici:

Escargots de Bourgogne

Truite de la Rivière Nageante dans le Beurre

Coq au Chambertin

Petits Pois à la Française

Pâté en Croûte

Salade de Laitue

Fromage

Tarte aux Mirabelles

Café

Papa Bellon had ordered the dinner two days ahead of time at the leading
restaurant in Beaune. From his confident air the Becks knew that auspicious
things were in the offing. Besides the plump Monsieur et Madame Bellon
there were with us two buxom daughters, a solemn son-in-law, and a
strapping son of twelve. We sat down for the obligatory apéritif on the
terrace while our host went inside to talk to the chef.

A clink of glasses, a few appraising glances at the townspeople walking
home from church, and we were ready to go into the restaurant, where our
table, decked with red-and-white checkered cloth, shimmering with
glassware, and heaped high with crusty bread, had been set for ten guests.
The prodigal plenty of that dinner saddens us now, when we think of the
daily fare of the Nazi-held Burgundians. At each place were a dozen
beautiful escargots de Bourgogne in their light ochre shells, very hot and
very fragrant, exuding a heavenly aroma of garlic, parsley, and fresh
butter. This rare comestible calls for specially designed platters,
holders, and forks, but how well worth their acquisition! With the snails
we sipped a full-blooded Nuits-Saint-Georges. Some people have the idea
that snails, because they live in a shell, are closely related to seafood
and therefore must be accompanied by a white wine. Escargots de Bourgogne
are land snails exclusively, growing fat on the leaves of the grape vines.
They never get even close to the sea, and Burgundians prefer them with red
wine.

The ancient waiter shifted plates and appeared with a massive oval, copper
casserole containing ten handsome trout, deep in a prodigal bath of melted
butter. Nageante dans le beurre was indeed the expression to use. The wine
was a lighter gold than the butter, a clean, tempting Meursault Charmes of
1926. Coq au Chambertin, the pièce de résistance, could not have been more
typical of Burgundy. It is doubtful if any Chambertin went into that
delectable dish, which usually is content to be called coq au vin, but the
sauce wasn't made from just any bottle of red wine, either. Then came a
rich and fragrant pâté en croûte. Ham, veal, sausage meat, strips of fat,
spices, pistachio nuts, and a symphony of herbs had been mixed and encased
in a golden crust. This was served hot with a salad of plain green lettuce.
We watched the headwaiter with fascination as he mixed the dressing on a
flat plate-five parts of olive oil to one of strong wine vinegar, salt,
ground pepper, and a generous daub of Dijon mustard. The wine was a lusty
Pommard Rugiens 1926, which held over handsomely for the cheese platter, an
impressive plank of Camembert, Brie, Roquefort, and Port-du-Salut.

Individual tartes aux mirabelles after this, accompanied by a rich Château
Chalon poured from its distinctive bottle, then some very black coffee and
a trio of liqueurs: Vieux Marc for those who could take it (papa and
son-in-law), Armagnac for me, and rich purple Cassis for the ladies.

Well, it was quite a Sunday dinner. Do you wonder that we were enthused
about the splendors of gastronomy in Beaune?

Would Clémentine, the native Burgundian, give us splurges such as this?
Could our figures and my pocketbook take it? The answer, we soon found out,
was magnificently in the affirmative. Clémentine was a Cordon Bleu in the
best tradition. My son Phinney and I began to dream of fabulous banquets,
and I began to recall uneasily that one gets gout in Burgundy. Luckily
there were two deterrents to shield us from mad, headlong