White Truffles in Winter: A Novel Read online

  I would have wanted to say all of that because it was indeed how I felt. And so you should imagine that I did.

  When the crayfish mousse is set, decorate with the cooked tails, shaved truffle, and a perfect sprig of chervil. Cover it with a sheet of translucent amber fish jelly and serve on a silver dish encrusted with ice.

  It is because of this dish, Mousse d’ Ecrevisses, and a rather uneventful strawberry pudding, which I named Fraises Imperator, that the Emperor Wilhelm II had been widely reported in newspapers all over the world to have granted me the title “Le Roi des Cuisiniers et le Cuisinier des Roi,” King of Chefs and Chef of Kings.

  This is not entirely accurate.

  You must understand that this event happened at a time when every chef was called a “king.” Even Ritz had been referred to as “king of hôteliers and hôtelier to kings.” And gout, which seemed to be a plague for many of my clients, was known as “the disease of kings and the king of diseases.” This was, apparently, a turn of phrase that people delighted in.

  And so if the Emperor said it, it would have meant nothing.

  But what he actually said was, “I am the Emperor of Germany, but you are the Emperor of Chefs.” And this is entirely different.

  It is also important to understand exactly how he said it. There was a sense of humility in his voice. He even gave a slight bow. It was remarkable. The year was 1913. Talk of war was everywhere. The Emperor had decided to take a short cruise on the SS Imperator before it was to set sail on its maiden voyage. Named in his honor, the ship was the newest and largest vessel at the time, as the Titanic had sunk just a month before, and unfortunately, horribly, sadly, taking my kitchen crew with it. They were great and glorious men.

  Hearing of my work with the Titanic, The Ritz Hotel Development Company was hired to build and manage the Imperator’s kitchen. It was our charge to painstakingly recreate the dining room of the German ship to be a replica of the Carlton in London. The replica was so exact that it felt to me as if Ritz himself would walk into the room at any moment, looking fit and happy, to greet the diners. Of course, by that time, he had gone quite mad. Still, I imagined him on this beautiful ship.

  When you reach a certain age, all you see are ghosts.

  Because of our great friendship, the Emperor Wilhelm II himself had arranged for me to travel to Germany to design the restaurant for his magnificent ship. And then, later, he requested my return to manage this event. He had no fear of me, although there was talk that I might be the only person who could poison him. And yes, the last time we met I did say, “If, one day, your country once again seeks war with France, and I am still able, I will do my duty,” but when asked to serve His Majesty again I did not hesitate. I went joyfully, proudly.

  He was not our enemy at the time.

  The challenge of feeding the Emperor and his court on such short notice was an enormous task, nearly impossible. I boarded the ship on July 7 to begin preparations. Two days later, 110 guests, many of them the most famous names of German aristocracy, arrived. The next day at 10 a.m., the Emperor and his court boarded and we served 146 guests a formal luncheon, followed that evening by a monumental dinner. The following morning, after an English breakfast of tea with cream, fried eggs, kidney, chops, steak, grilled fish and fruit, His Majesty entered the Palm Room to receive me. He shook my hand warmly, like an old friend, thanked me for coming all the way from London, and then spoke at great length about the strawberry pudding.

  I knew that he had had a nervous breakdown a few years earlier. You could sense the hairline crack. And yet, in his eyes, I could still see the grave young man from his days dining at Le Petit Moulin Rouge and so as a father with two young sons of my own I said, “Your Majesty, I pray that before the end of your reign, we will see the time when the greatest of all humanitarian acts will be accomplished: the reconciliation of Germany and France.”

  This brought tears to his eyes. He assured me that reconciliation was indeed his greatest desire, something he had worked for and had been working for, but that he was misunderstood, misrepresented.

  Indeed. The journalists in newspapers around the world had painted him a villain. And then he said, “I have the greatest hopes of seeing my desires realized, and I pray for it with all my heart, for the greater welfare of mankind. Reconciliation is my greatest desire.”

  I wrote his words down as soon as he said them and for many years have read and re-read them. In German, the word for reconciliation is Versöhnung. In French, réconciliation. They are completely different words, although I did not recognize it at the time.

  Shortly after our meeting, on August 3, 1914, the Emperor declared war on France.

  On November 1, 1914, my dear son Daniel, a lieutenant in the 363rd Alpine Regiment, was hit by German fire. A single bullet shattered his face, killing him instantly, and leaving his four children for me to bring up.

  Brillat-Savarin once said, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.”

  Thanks to the Germans, I have consumed a great many things that I would like to have forgotten—horses, rats, spaniels—and this has made me hungry in unimaginable ways.

  COVERED IN SOOT AND COBWEBS, SABINE CARRIED TWO cases of the empty champagne bottles up from the basement, her stray foot dragging behind her. The summer heat had bloated and bruised the tomatoes overnight—all of them—filling the house with clouds of fruit flies, which followed her everywhere. She placed the boxes at Escoffier’s feet and swatted at the buzzing mass that encircled her head.

  “The flies have also appeared to have taken a great liking to you,” he said.

  Sabine did not find this amusing. “Can you not select six champagne bottles that you can part with?”

  Escoffier shook his white head. “Each one is important. Each one is history.” Since dawn, the old man had been sitting in the kitchen in his Louis-Philippe dress coat and striped trousers—not cooking, eating or speaking—just polishing his copper pans. He had laid them out on the table according to size. And then, slowly, gently, he dipped a lemon into salt, rubbed the tiny butter warmer, and lovingly polished it with a clean cloth. He then moved on to the next. And the next.

  There were fifty or more. At this rate, it would take him a week.

  Sabine asked him several times to stop but he refused. “Pick more lemons,” he’d say. “Get more salt.” And he just kept cleaning.

  Just before sunrise, the nurses discovered that Delphine’s paralysis was complete. She could no longer use her hands or any other part of her body. Her room was filled with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  But Escoffier sat in the kitchen, amidst the rotting tomatoes, cleaning.

  Sabine sat down in the chair next to him and wiped her hands on her apron, which made him frown. He tapped the side of his nose.

  “Professional standards,” he said. “Use a clean cloth.”

  She ignored him. A dirty apron was the least of her worries. The sticky sweet juice of the fruit stained her skin, and was starting to make the entire house smell of rot.

  “I only need six bottles, not even a case. I have spoken to the butcher and he will trade me two of his own stewing chickens for six bottles of the sauce. These are birds that he has reserved for his own family. Fat. Juicy. But I need the bottles. Do you understand?”

  If he did, he did not seem to care. Escoffier methodically wiped his hands on a clean towel, picked up an empty champagne bottle, sniffed it as if it still held wine.

  “The Red Dinner: a celebration of winning a fortune, playing red at the roulette here in Monte Carlo,” he said. “Everything was to be red and labeled with the number nine—the final winning number. The waiters wore red shirts and gloves. Tables were draped in scarlet linen and red rose petals strewn over it all. Candlelight streaming through the cut crystal of Baccarat glasses revealed the number nine discree
tly etched in gold at the base of each stem.”

  “A fine setting for chicken,” she said. “So, these can be used?”

  “The Red Dinner was very famous.”

  “Most certainly it was, but everyone who attended is probably dead now and we will all die from hunger, too, if you cannot choose just six bottles for me to put sauce in.”

  All this talk of champagne made her thirsty. She fingered the box of cigarettes in her skirt pocket.

  “Six bottles is all I ask.”

  “Are there not new bottles that can be used?”

  “Madame said to use these, said we must use these, but if you need me to, I can empty six bottles of Moët myself.”

  “I am sure you can.”

  The door to the kitchen opened and Escoffier’s son and daughter, Paul and Germaine, peered in.

  “We were wondering where you were,” Paul said.

  In contrast to his father, who always appeared well dressed and elegant at any time of the day, Paul looked like a tourist in a city that did not welcome tourists. Despite Monaco’s tropical disposition, he was pale. He wore a white shirt with short sleeves, white belt and open-toed sandals that accentuated his white feet. He was jowly and round but had his father’s regal eyes and the same drooping mustache.

  “Papa, are you listening?”

  “I am cleaning.”

  Germaine, looking very much like her mother, her willful hair twisted in place, took Sabine by the arm. “Why isn’t the girl cleaning?”

  “The girl, her name is Sabine, is making tomato sauce.”

  The flies seemed to be getting worse. One crawled up Sabine’s nose and triggered a sneezing fit.

  “She’s ill.”

  “She’s fine.”

  “She’s ill. And there are flies everywhere.”

  Sabine couldn’t stop sneezing. She rubbed her face frantically. The small flies were slowly driving her mad.

  Escoffier shooed imaginary flies away from his own face. “She is making tomato sauce.”

  Like a yawn, the shooing became contagious. Paul and Germaine joined in.

  “She appears deranged,” Germaine said.

  “Willful, perhaps. But what chef isn’t?”

  “She is making tomato sauce?” Paul said. “This kitchen is filthy. Why are there so many tomatoes?” The strain in his voice seemed to attract the flies to him. They spun around his head. “This is absurd. And these flies!”

  Sabine finally stopped sneezing, finally caught her breath. “Madame Escoffier ordered them,” she said. “The tomatoes. Not the flies. She asked that we become awash in them. And we are.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Germaine said. “Why would she do that? This is a ridiculous amount of fruit even for a family of our size.”

  “Stories.”

  The children did not know what to make of this. Escoffier, however, seemed to understand.

  “Pommes d’Amour.”

  Sabine stood and wiped her hands on her apron again. Escoffier did not notice. He picked up a tomato and held it gently as if it were a lush red rose.

  “If it was Madame Escoffier’s desire to fill the house with stories and tomatoes,” he said, “we will have tomatoes. Everywhere. Sabine, there were no stories at the market?”

  “But everywhere?” Germaine said. “This is too much.”

  Escoffier offered the tomato to her. The sweet sticky juice ran down her arm. She licked it and took a bite of the fruit.

  “Pommes d’Amour.”

  Paul picked up a champagne bottle. “I must know the story of every one of these.”

  “Please, then,” Escoffier said. “Begin.”

  Paul looked at his father. “But mother?”

  Sabine took six bottles from the box. “I am using these for the sauce. The children cannot eat stories.”

  Paul studied Sabine and then his father. It was quite clear that while Sabine had never really seen the children, they, too, had never looked at her closely before.

  Sarah.

  “I’m sure Mother is wondering where we all are,” Paul said; the coldness in his voice confirmed it. He, too, saw Sarah’s ghost in the girl.

  Escoffier slowly stood. “Come to me.” He opened his arms and Germaine embraced him. He held his daughter closely to his chest and kissed her dearly.

  “But Papa, all these tomatoes,” she said.

  Escoffier nodded and held his arms out to his son. “Paul?”

  The man looked at Sabine and she looked away, out the window into the vast expanse of the Côte d’Azur. The water was so blue, she couldn’t remember ever seeing anything that blue before. Blue as truth, she thought.

  “Paul?”

  The son kissed his father on both cheeks, as was the custom, but nothing more. And left the room.

  “I’m sorry,” Germaine said.

  Escoffier closed his eyes for a moment. “We all are.”

  As soon as Germaine left the kitchen, Sabine picked up the box of bottles again. Escoffier took them out of her hands, placed them on the floor and sat down next to them. “Where were we?” he asked.

  Sabine, resigned, sat next to the old man. Handed him the bottle he had been holding. Escoffier held it to the light as a jeweler holds a perfect stone. “Can you guess what was served at a red dinner?”

  She sighed. “Tomato sauce?”

  He shook his head. “A jam perhaps could have been fitting. Confiture de Tomates. But no. Try again.”

  The man was exasperating. The tiny flies remained persistent. She tried to ignore them but they kept landing on her face, making it itch. She took a deep breath and, unfortunately, swallowed one. Coughed.

  The old man put the bottle down. Poured her a glass of the lemonade she had made for lunch. She drank, greedily.

  “Merci.”

  “The Red Dinner. Do you give up?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you haven’t even ventured a guess. Here, I will help. Imagine the Savoy.”

  “London?”

  “Don’t think about its being in London. Think of the Savoy as if it were a continent of civility where anything was possible.”

  “But we are speaking of London?”

  “We are speaking of the Savoy. Consider a table set as if there had been a great windstorm of white and pink roses: they were everywhere. Upon the plates, there was a meal of blushing pinks. To begin, a chilled Alsatian borscht. And then I deepened the rouge palette with Poulet au paprika, the paprika and its brick-red foundation made the pink quite vivid. Finally, we ended with the magnificent Agneau de lait des Pyrénées—a beautiful tender softly pink lamb, very little fat, that is born and raised in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques of France. The mother sheep must spend at least eight months a year at pasture. The lamb, only fed by its mother, is slaughtered when it is very young. Not more that a fortnight.”

  “That sounds very sad.”

  “It was a palette for the palate.”

  “The poor lamb.”

  “The happy diner. Now. You see how it is done. And so, for the Red Dinner?”

  She rubbed her face with her hands. The tiny flies were inescapable, as was the question. “Would this have been a meal of lobster, beets and strawberries?”

  Above them, in Madame’s room, there suddenly was the soft sound of crying. For a moment, a cloud passed over Escoffier’s face.

  “Wrong again. Nothing so simple! The real challenge was not merely to replicate color, the mood and texture of it, but the emotion behind the winning. The entire meal must build course upon course to the exact moment when one pushes the winnings back onto the roulette table, being ready to lose it all, and then watches the silver ball land on the Red Nine.

  “So the question became how does one captu
re the moment that changed everything?”

  “By making tomato sauce?”

  “Can you not imagine it? How does one create such a meal?”

  She could imagine it. Quite clearly. Escoffier’s staff in their pressed white uniforms, those witches of nowhere else, correcting sauces, arranging meats, sculpting ice into the forms of swans; their magic lay in the fleeting perfection of the moment. But still, there was sauce to be made.

  “Are you going to do this with every bottle?”

  “Do you not want to know how to capture the moment when wealth overwhelms?”

  “Non.”

  “Well, I will still tell you.”

  He was, indeed, planning to do this with every bottle.

  “The brilliance of the meal lay in the Golden Rain, a gilded whimsy. It was pure fantasy: a dwarf mandarin orange tree gilded in a ‘rain’ of gold leaf and spun sugar. It seemed to be growing from a pile of chocolate francs each with a tiny slice of orange glacée wrapped in a spangle of gold leaf. It was gold upon gold and unbearably sweet—exactly how one would feel after winning three hundred fifty thousand francs.”

  “Thank you. I would not have been able to sleep tonight without knowing that.”

  Sabine took the bottle from his hand and placed it with the rest. “We will use this box,” she said. “After I sauce the tomatoes for the butcher, I will sauce all the rest. And I will use all these bottles. We will have a month of red dinners, so it is a fitting choice.”

  “The children do not like tomato sauce.”

  Sabine sank back down into the kitchen chair. “Fine. You are the great chef. What should I do, then? What do children like to eat?”

  “Chicken,” he said and then began to walk out of the kitchen but stopped at the door. “Seventy-five point six grams of the Demerara, if we have any left. If not, light brown sugar will do. Seventy-eight milliliters of malt vinegar. Boil together. Reduce. Cool.”

  “For the chicken?”

  “Non. The tomato sauce. It’s spicing essence. It heightens deliciousness, the fifth taste. Add a few drops and it will brighten the taste of the sauce. It will brighten any sauce, or mask the flavor of any meat that has gone bad. The tomatoes are past their prime. You can smell the rot. There are flies everywhere.”