Blue Trout and Black Truffles: The Peregrinations of an Epicure
300
Blue Trout and Black Truffles: The Peregrinations of an Epicure
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780897336512 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 05/24/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 300 |
| Sales rank: | 942,068 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Blue Trout and Black Truffles
The Peregrinations of an Epicure
By Joseph Wechsberg
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 1953 Joseph WechsbergAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89733-651-2
CHAPTER 1
"Someday he'll want to eat more than he's going to get."
DR. HIMMELBLAU
MY DELICATE CHILDHOOD, OR: THE EDUCATION OF A GOURMET
Nowadays I travel hundreds of miles and don't mind crossing international boundaries to lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, but I wasn't always like that.
As a child, I used to run away from food. I would chew on a bite of meat and refuse to swallow until my mother promised to let me go to the cinema. When I was a first-grader in Ostrava, my home town in Moravia, I would get sick every morning at the sight of my breakfast.
The grown-ups said I was a delicate, nervous child, oversensitive and afraid of school. They were wrong. I didn't mind school — until the ten o'clock recess. Then the boys and girls would unpack their sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, and I would turn green in the face and get sick again. I couldn't stand the smell of food.
In these years I was kept alive on a diet of frankfurters and cocoa. I had to be tricked into swallowing frankfurters and cocoa in odd moments of mental bemusement. Other foods had to be camouflaged to look and taste like frankfurters or cocoa before I would touch them. It might have been easier to feed me intravenously. I was a spoiled brat, but that's hindsight, of course.
People on the street would stop my mother and inquire about my sallow face. They said I must be quite ill, poor boy. My mother would start to cry. She had the ability to laugh and cry in the same breath, but in those days I rarely made her laugh.
Marie, our old cook, and Fraulein Gertrud, the governess, proffered various suggestions to break the deadlock of my stomach. They thought I should take long walks in the fresh air, or go to the mountains or to the sea. Sometimes they said I needed a good spanking.
Luckily, my father had no confidence in such amateurish suggestions. He knew that there was nothing wrong with me; the women just didn't handle me intelligently. To prove his point, he would take me out on Sunday mornings. We would get on the streetcar for Svinov, a dreary factory suburb, and for two hours we would ride back and forth. My father bribed the motorman to let me push my foot down on the bell; sometimes I was permitted to turn the wheel of the mechanical brake. The streetcar began to jolt and the people inside would berate the motorman; once there was a fight and a policeman had to be summoned. In wintertime it was cold on the motorman's platform, but my father would stand next to me, and he didn't mind the cold. He seemed to enjoy the ride.
Afterward we would walk over to the Konditorei Wollgart, the best confectionery in town. I was still elated from driving the streetcar, and the sight of chocolate-coated Indianer, cakes, patisserie, Sachertorte with whipped cream wasn't repulsive at all. I would eat a couple of Indianer dreaming of a bright future when I was going to drive a streetcar all by myself.
When we came home, the air was filled with the aroma of the Sunday dinner. My face would turn green.
My father told my mother about the Indianer. "The boy would eat everything if you women would only treat him right," he would say.
The soup was served. I got sick. Small wonder, my mother said, acidly. After all that stuff I'd eaten at the Konditorei.
When I had one of my fits of prolonged starvation, refusing even frankfurters and cocoa, my father would call up Dr. Himmelblau, the family physician.
"Anything serious?" Dr. Himmelblau would ask. "I'll be right over."
"We-ll," my father would say, cautiously. He was a man of quiet dignity and he couldn't tell a lie. "He — he doesn't want to eat."
"Oh," Dr. Himmelblau would say. "I — I have to see a few patients. But I'll drop in tonight." He didn't consider me a patient.
Dr. Himmelblau's polished bald head was like a much-used billiard ball from any angle you looked at it. Throughout all the years his appearance never changed. Even in his sixties he had the timeless appearance of a slightly underfed Chinese Buddha.
He professed no concern whatsoever at my lack of appetite. Sometimes he would glance perfunctorily at my outstretched tongue, perhaps to please my anxious parents, but later on he wouldn't even do that. Fortunately, Dr. Himmelblau was thoroughly impervious to the theories of Professor Doctor Sigmund Freud, though Vienna, and Dr. Freud, were only a few hours by train from my home town. I hate to think what some of Dr. Freud's disciples would do to me today if I refused to eat anything but frankfurters and cocoa.
Once Dr. Himmelblau gave me a thoughtful look and said to my parents: "He will be all right. Someday he'll want to eat more than he's going to get." It was a remarkable blend of accurate diagnosis and correct prognosis.
A few months afterward I caught a cold, undernourished and transparent as I was, and came down with pneumonia and pleurisy. "He almost died," my mother later said. She would break into tears at the very memory of my sickness.
When I felt better, Dr. Himmelblau advised my parents to take me to a famous professor in Vienna for a checkup. The professor, an internist, lived in the ninth district, practically within stethoscope range from Dr. Freud. He knocked all over my frail body, listened to the windpipes inside my chest, and pronounced that only the "southern sun" would heal me.
The nearest exposure to southern sun was in the South Tyrolian town of Merano. It then belonged to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; today it is part of Italy. Merano is a lovely oasis of vineyards, orchards, palm trees, and flowers, surrounded by the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Alps. In late summer, at sunset, the peaks reflect the reddish glow of the sun; the natives call it Alpenglühen, Alpine glow. The air tastes of Calville apples, which, like all apples, grow in summertime and are stored in many cellars in winter.
Merano is the home of the Merano Grape Cure, doubtless the most insignificant medical discovery of the century. It consists of walking in the balmy sunshine and eating four pounds of grapes every twenty-four hours, and is said to speed up recovery after any disease. The cure was a great success, particularly with hotel-owners, doctors, and the proprietors of the vineyards, who were the doctors' friends.
My mother and I stayed at a nice villa whose owners, the Lambergs, specialized in the care and upkeep of juvenile hypochondriacs. "Aunt" Lamberg thought I would be no problem. It was just a matter of finding the right diet for me, she said. She hopefully offered me eggs, coffee, butter, gorgonzola, pasta asciutta (spaghetti), white chicken meat, dark chicken meat, veal cutlets, ravioli, goulash, York ham, cooked Prague ham, uncooked Westphalian ham, prosciutto, sweet pickles, oatmeal, Swiss fondue, blinis, Wiener Schnitzel, pizza, chocolate pudding. I turned down everything and asked for grapes.
The local doctor was delighted. He said here was living proof that the Merano Grape Cure was effective not only for diseases of the digestive tract but also as "a palliative for a nervous strain in delicate children." The doctor brought two colleagues along. They examined me and said they were going to write about me in the local Kurblatt. I was still getting sick at the sight of a juicy steak.
The following year — it was 1914, and I was getting to be seven — the First World War broke out. It was late in August, and my parents, my two-year-old brother Max, and I were spending the summer vacation on the Semmering, a beautiful mountain resort near Vienna. There was no radio, but bad news traveled as quickly as today. Long before the Viennese newspapers had arrived, everybody knew that Kaiser Franz Josef I had ordered general mobilization.
My father, a reserve officer in the Austrian Army, said we must take the first train home, where he would report for duty. My mother cried and said the evening train was slow, couldn't we wait until the next morning and take the express? My father said it was his duty to go right away. He'd always been like that.
When we got home, my father settled his personal affairs, put on his uniform, took his saber, kissed us good-by, and left. I shall never forget that moment. I stood by the window of our fifth-floor apartment. Downstairs, in front of the house, waited a horse-drawn landau that was to take my father and my mother to the railroad station.
My mother got in first. She seemed drawn and smaller than usual. She always looked small next to my father; at parties, I remember, she would walk under his outstretched arm without bending her head. Her performance always got a big laugh.
She slumped down in the rear of the coach, her shoulders trembling with sobs. Fräulein Gertrud, the governess, who stood next to me, holding my brother, and Marie, the cook, were crying too. I didn't understand why they were all crying. I was very proud of my father. To me he looked like a Generalfeldmarschall in his Oberleutnant's uniform, with his light-blue blouse, dark-blue pants, high shako, and his saber.
He got up on the step of the landau, and then he turned around and waved up to us. From where I stood I could see the strange, tense expression on his face as if he, too, were crying — crying without tears. Then he quickly turned away, sat down, put his arm around my mother's shoulder, and told the coachman to hurry off.
I never saw him again. Less than three months later my mother was notified by the Austrian War Ministry that my father had been killed in action on the eastern front, after leading his infantry company "in a heroic assault against the overwhelming fire power of ten Russian machine guns." The entire company was wiped out.
My father and hi s men were buried in a mass grave deep inside the Polish woods, right there where they had died. A few months later a general from the War Ministry brought my mother a small velvet case with the Verdienstkreuz, Distinguished Service Cross, one of the highest Austrian Army medals, and a long-winded citation. My mother put the velvet case away and never looked at it.
I didn't understand what was happening. A world had collapsed around me, but I wasn't aware of any change. We were still living in the large, pleasant apartment on the fifth floor of the stately family house. The premises of the family bank were on the second and ground floor. We still had Marie, the cook, and Fräulein Gertrud, the governess. Every summer we went to Tyrol for two months. There was little to eat and everybody complained about the lack of food, but that suited me just fine. The less to eat, the better.
Then the front collapsed and there were rumors in our town that "the Russians were coming." Many people left in a panic, shops closed, and food supplies ran out. The Russians didn't come, but the shops remained closed and there was nothing to eat.
My mother and my father had often spent their Sundays hiking in the near-by Beskid Mountains. Now my mother would take her rucksack and visit the peasants, to trade in some of her beloved Meissen cups and Bohemian crystal vases for half a dozen eggs or a pound of butter.
I wondered what the peasants were doing with the Meissen cups, and once I accompanied my mother on her errand. The houses of the peasants were crammed with objets d'art and bric-a-brac like the back room of an antique shop. In a stable I saw a large Bechstein piano, half buried under straw and manure. When I opened the cover, a pair of dirty shoes were lying inside.
In those months my mother began to suffer from insomnia. The war was lost, and the Kriegsanleihe — war bonds — which we'd been forced to buy had become worthless. Then the family bank folded. My mother said she would have to let Fräulein Gertrud go. We couldn't afford her any more.
Even frozen potatoes were hard to get now, and when there was bread, it looked and tasted like clay bricks. Sometimes we had only polenta with gravy for our noon meal. Polenta is ground maize. Before the war Marie had used it to feed the geese.
It was in these days, I think, that I began to show interest in food. Years afterward my mother would often describe the "wonderful and terrible" day when I first asked for a Wiener Schnitzel. It was wonderful, she would say, because I was hungry, like other people; and terrible because it was as easy to get a slice of veal in Ostrava in May 1919 as it would be today to get a pound of plutonium.
In the early 'twenties food became more plentiful. The more there was, the choosier I got. I would turn down ordinary things — meats, vegetables, soups, and desserts, and exasperated my mother by displaying a craze for hard-to-get delicacies at unexpected moments. Once I woke up in the middle of the night and asked for "blood" oranges. In those days only the children of black-marketeers and the mistresses of cabinet members got oranges. I also asked for smoked eel, Rhein salmon, pain de faisan aux truffés, saddle of venison, and sliced pineapple, though I had never tasted any of these things and knew them only from hearsay. I read surreptitiously the memoirs of Casanova, but I skipped the bedroom scenes, which bored me, and dwelt upon the author's mouth-watering descriptions of the magnificent meals with which he'd regaled his ladies, prior to their seduction.
I would come home from Gymnasium at one p.m. and go directly into the kitchen without so much as taking off my hat. I lifted the covers from the pots and began to sniff at the contents. Marie would get angry and throw me out. She had the irascible temper that comes from spending the best years of one's life near a hot range. Marie had learned her trade in an era that knew no Mixmaster and refrigerator. I don't think she would use a Mixmaster now if she were still alive. She used to say that to mix a dough well, you have to turn the wooden spoon counterclockwise. She needed no refrigerator; she could make wilted parsley look fresh again by dipping it into warm water, and she would put a drop of peroxide into the milk to keep it from getting sour. On hot days when the Schlagobers — whipped cream — melted, she would add a little fresh, uncooked milk and whip it again. Her kuchen was never dry; she would put a few drops of glycerin into the dough. Her kuchen was excellent.
Sometimes I'm asked where my enthusiasm for good food originates. I don't know. Neither the theory of environment nor that of heredity seems to apply to my particular case. There was always plain, healthy, nutritious food in our home — "nutritious" was one of my mother's favorite expressions — but it would hardly have qualified for the palates of jaded epicures. There were no epicures in our family; there were bankers, engineers, doctors, civil servants, businessmen, scholars — but not one gourmet among the whole lot. They were contemporaries of Carême and Escoffier, but they didn't know it, or didn't care. (I missed Escoffier by a few years and I also missed Gustav Mahler and Caruso. I'll never cease to regret it.)
The food in our home was distinguished only for its monotony. The menu of the noon meal was planned for weeks ahead. Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we had consommé and boiled beef with vegetables (Monday: carrots; Tuesday: spinach; Wednesday: cabbage; Thursday: peas), followed by a dessert. Friday we had fish and on Saturday a roast.
Marie was a competent vegetable and dessert cook. But her delicious gâteaux, soufflés, puddings, and other frivolities were served only for guests. When we were alone, the dessert had to be a nutritious, cooked dish.
Today I know that the cooked Mehlspeisen of my delicate childhood are gastronomic delights. I can think of nothing better than povidla-tascherln, hoop-cheese dumplings, Bohemian Dalken, Palatschinken (pancakes), Kaiserschmarren, Äpfel im Schlafrock ("apples in dressing-gown," fried apple slices), Schusterbuben ("shoemaker's boys," a sort of potato noodles). But at home I hated them. I would have hated Sevluga caviar and Château Margaux 1899 if I'd had them five times a week.
On Fridays we had fish and I was afraid of fish. When I was five, I'd almost choked to death on a carp bone, an episode known in our house as the-day-he-got-blue-in-his-face. On Sundays the main dish was Wiener Schnitzel. The religious split in town ran straight through the populace's Sunday menu: the Jews had Wiener Schnitzel, the Gentiles had roast pork with sauerkraut and dumplings.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blue Trout and Black Truffles by Joseph Wechsberg. Copyright © 1953 Joseph Wechsberg. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
MY DELICATE CHILDHOOD, OR: THE EDUCATION OF A GOURMET,THE FIRST TIME I SAW PARIS,
ENCORE,
ARTIST'S DREAM,
"TAFELSPITZ" FOR THE HOFRAT,
A DISH FOR LUCULLUS,
THE SAUSAGE MILLENNIUM,
A "BALATONI FOGAS" TO START WITH,
CONNOISSEURS AND PATRIOTS,
THE LADIES FROM MAXIM'S,
BLACK TRUFFLES,
ONE MOMENT IN HEAVEN,
AFTERNOON AT CHÂTEAU D'YQUEM,
PROVENCE WITHOUT GARLIC,
THE MYSTERIOUS FISH SOUP,
"WORTH A SPECIAL JOURNEY",
THE FORMIDABLE MONSIEUR POINT,