La Première Année de Cuisine, Part 13

Beautiful, beautiful soup!

CHAPTER VII

Soups and potages

84. The soups and potages most often prepared at home are:
Panade.
Soupe aux herbes.
Soupe à l’oseille. [Sorrel soup]
Leek and potato soup.
Soupe de ménage
Bean soup.
Lentil or split-pea soup.
Onion soup.
Cabbage soup.
And potage with noodles, vermicelli, tapioca, etc.

A soupe de ménage, American-style

85. A panade is made up of thin slices of bread soaked in a sufficient quantity of water and seasoned with salt and a pat of butter. Let it cook over a very low flame, while stirring the mixture with a wooden spoon. At the time of serving, use an egg yolk to bind the soup and add another small piece of fresh butter.

86. To make soupe aux herbes, take sorrel, spinach, lettuce, chervil, parsley, and purslane.* Wash them, remove the stems with care; chop these herbs and “brown” them in a saucepan with a good-size piece of butter.
Then add water, salt, pepper, and a good handful of rice that has been carefully soaked in advance in lukewarm water.
Mix this up well and let it cook at a very low simmer, for about half an hour.

Who’s sorrel now?

87. Soupe à l’oseille is made with washed and de-stemmed sorrel, which one has “browned” in butter and to which one has added a spoonful of flour, then as much water as is needed, salt, and pepper. One “binds” this with an egg yolk before serving.

88. Leek and potato soup is nourishing and economical. Peel the leeks, cut them in small pieces, cook them in butter over a low flame. Then add potatoes cut into pieces and some water, which is poured in bit by bit as the mixture thickens. Then serve this over slices of bread in the soup plate.

89. A soupe de ménage is made with all sorts of vegetables that have been cut into pieces and boiled in water with salt and pepper. When ready to serve, add a piece of butter in the soup plate, on slices of bread, and pour the soup over it.

90. To make bean, lentil or pea soup use beans, lentils or peas that have been cooked in water, with salt, pepper, and onion. The beans should then be removed from the water and crushed with the help of a presse-purée. Then put them back in the cooking water, and pour the mixture into the soup plate, over some bread to which has been added a bit of butter.

91. Onion soup is made with onion cut in thin slices and that have been browned in butter. Then add a spoonful of flour, making a yellow roux, and pour in the necessary amount of water. Let boil for ten minutes and pour over slices of bread placed in the soup plate with fresh butter.

Most often, onion soup is served gratinée — that is, with a croûton (slice of toasted bread) covered in grated gruyère cheese.
Nowadays, it is eaten primarily by tourists.

92. To make cabbage soup, choose a cabbage as tender and pale as possible. Remove the outer leaves and cut out the core, which is often quite hard. If the cabbage is large, cut in two or in four, rinse several times, then throw into boiling water to blanch it. Remove it to drain. Meanwhile, brown some large chunks or dice of bacon over a high flame. When they are thoroughly browned, add them to the cabbage, fill the saucepan with water, add salt, pepper. Add one onion stuck with a clove, one or two carrots, and a few potatoes. Let boil for three quarter-hours.

93. Potages differ from soups in that one does not use bread.
Potages are most often made with the help of noodles: vermicelli, noodles from Italy, or with tapioca or semolina.
The method of preparation is always the same.
Once the broth is boiling, sprinkle in the broken-up vermicelli or the semolina, or the tapioca, etc., taking care to use one tablespoonful per person. At the end of one quarter-hour of cooking time, the potage is done.

MADELEINE’S JOURNAL

FOURTEENTH ENTRY

The excellence of soup. — Panade. — The use of wooden spoons. — Panade for small children. — It is necessary to want to learn more. — Mutton stew. — Salad.

“What kind of soup shall we make today?” That is the phrase that recurs each morning in our housekeeping conversations, between Maman and me, at the hour when we go to buy the food for the day. This is because, in our home, soup is the basis of ordinary alimentation. In general, we eat some two times per day, and it does us good. Papa says that it is a very healthy dish, Maman (like the good housekeeper she is) adds that it is very economical. Thus there is no reason to hesitate to serve it as often as possible and that is what we do.

However, despite the great variety of soups, we are sometimes thwarted. For example, this morning, we left for the market with the firm resolution to buy a cabbage and to prepare a good cabbage soup, which, augmented with a piece of pickled pork and a few potatoes, would have provided us with a complete meal.

But now there were no cabbages at the market, or rather, none but little cabbages too green, or tough and wilting cabbages.

“What if we bought some sorrel?” I said to Maman.

“The trouble is,” she answered me, “sorrel does not fully accomplish our goal. Sorrel soup is healthy and refreshing but not at all nourishing, like cabbage soup.”

“Then let’s buy all sorts of vegetables and we’ll make a good soupe de ménage.”

“No,” said my mother, after having reflected for an instant. “I seem to recall that we have some leftover stale bread that we could use. Now that’s an opportunity, we’ll make a panade.”

“That’s true,” I said. “How is it that we didn’t think of it sooner? But can’t one use fresh bread in making a panade?”

“Yes,” said my mother, “and it will be only finer and more delicate, but in little households like ours, especially in homes with many mouths to feed, there is always, after a meal, a bit of leftover bread that one removes from the table, which are still very good and very clean and of which one should manage to make good use. The best method is to put them into a panade.** As soon as we get home, you will make one for our midday meal.”

We finished our marketing, which, that day, was not extensive: some mutton to put into a stew and a watercress salad.

Back at the house, I busied myself with the panade. I cut into the finest possible slices the leftover bread that we had, and I even added a bit of fresh bread, since I feared that the soup would not be abundant enough.

I put this bread into a pot with enough water to cover, some salt and a good piece of butter. I let it cook over a very low flame and I stirred it often with a spoon.

Maman came near to me while I was turning and turning my spoon in the panade.

It seems I’m not the only one who thinks panade is too bland.
This one has been jazzed up with shrimp, onion, herbs, etc.

“Now there,” she said, “is a good precaution. Without taking this care, your soup would be all lumpy, which is quite disagreeable.

“Moderate your fire a little bit more, since the bread is sticking, and if it does so even a little bit, at the bottom of the pot, and becomes toasted, the soup will be worthless.”

Then, seeing the spoon that I was using to stir the soup: “Scatterbrains!” she said, “have I not repeated to you a hundred times that you must use a wooden spoon? The iron spoon that you are using will remove the coating from the pot by friction, and what’s more, it will give a bad taste to the food. You must not use a silver spoon, either, when cooking, nor tin. The former are quickly altered by acidic substances or blackened by eggs, the latter are softened and soon deteriorate.”

I don’t need to tell you that even before my mother had finished speaking, I had exchanged my iron spoon for a wooden one. I did not feel it was not hard to obey my mother, since I recognized the rightness of her observations, and I reminded myself that she had repeated that one several times.

While my panade was gently cooking, I added a bit of hot water from time to time, which progressively increased the amount of broth and made the soup just as thick as it should be.

“Do you know,” my mother said to me, “what you would do if you were making a panade for a small child?”

“Dear Maman,” I said, “I did not even know that one made panade for small children.”

“You do not remember having seen your cousin Lucie prepare panade for her little Georges during the week she stayed with us a few months ago?”

“My faith, Maman, I did see that Lucie was giving the little one something to eat, but I had no thought of looking or asking what it was. It did not interest me.”

“You were wrong,” said my mother, “and I very much hope that, now that you are so serious, you will show a bit more of that good and healthy curiosity that makes one seek to be taught every time the occasion presents itself. What you did not see, I shall tell you:

“The panade for children is made the same way as this one here, only one uses more of the bread’s crust than of its crumb, because the crust is lighter and more digestible, all the while being just as nourishing as the crumb. A little sugar is added, too, and in this case, hardly any salt. We also make, for very small children, panade with milk, for which we use very little butter.”

A classic mutton stew.
(From ELLE Magazine)

While talking, my mother busied herself with the mutton stew. Docilely following the advice she had just given me, I watched her work.

She “browned” in a stewpot, with butter, the bits of mutton that were to make up the stew. When they had taken on a beautiful golden color, she removed them one by one with a fork and placed them on a plate. Then she threw in the butter and a good spoonful of flour, from which she made a “yellow roux,” which she moistened with water, all the while regretting, she said, that she had no leftover broth from the pot-au-feu to add to it. This being done, she returned the pieces of mutton to the stewpot, added almost as many pieces of potato cut into large chunks. One clove of garlic, two onions, salt and pepper, that was the seasoning.

A rather exotic mutton stew, made with turnips.
(From ELLE Magazine)

”Two hours cooking time over a low flame,” she said, “and our stew will be cooked.”

“But Maman,” I said timidly, “I believe that you have forgotten something.”

“What then?”

“A small branch of thyme and a bit of parsley.”

“You are truly correct,” said my mother with a laugh, “and I see that you seek your revenge for a few minutes ago. I shall add, then, some thyme and some parsley, I could also add a bay leaf, but your father does not like the somewhat bitter flavor that bay gives to sauces. But now that I think of it, who taught you that mutton stew should be seasoned this way?”

“You yourself, Maman. This is the second time that you have prepared it in front of me, and bit by bit as I watched, I remembered what I had already seen you do.”

“Now that is nice,” said Maman, “and I see that my reproach a minute ago was absolutely unfounded. I want to wipe it away with a caress….”

Maman had not finished her sentence when I leapt into her arms. Mon Dieu, how good it is to hug one’s maman!

However, there was something yet to be prepared: it was the watercress salad.

The watercress had to be washed, sorted, prepared. I set to work, arming myself with patience, since the job is long and meticulous, especially when the watercress is short. So I used my fingertips to break the leaves where the stems were yellowed, I removed the white filaments that are the roots. All this was placed in a heap, on a piece of paper, while the good leaves and good stems were thrown together into a terrine, where I rinsed them several times.

I then did for the watercress as for other salads, I placed it in a salad basket where I let it drain. Before placing it in the salad bowl, I briskly shook the basket for a few minutes. Papa, who is clever, took charge of the seasoning. It seems that it’s a whole art to know how to prepare and stir the salad, and I am not yet knowledgeable enough to succeed at it. That’s what Papa said with a laugh, I suppose in order to tease me; I calmly await the day when it will please him to name me the head salad-cook. However, I certainly noticed that Papa always puts one spoonful of vinegar for every two spoonfuls of oil, salt, pepper, and that he whisks all of this together in the base of the salad bowl before putting in the salad. So there’s nothing left but to prepare it myself, and I think that I will succeed at it, the day that Papa lets me take charge.

WHAT I MUST DO

[To copy and to keep]

1. I shall apply myself to the best of my ability to vary the soups that are the basis of family meals.

2. I will not be dissuaded from my choice until I have seen the resources that are available at the market.

3. I shall use, when making panade, leftover bread that is stale.

4. When anyone prepares in front of me a dish that is unknown to me, I shall watch how they make it, in order to be instructed.

5. I shall use wooden spoons above all when cooking food.

6. I shall take special care when making lamb stew, which is a beneficial and economical dish, but which is detestable if it is not cooked and seasoned as it should be.

7. I shall not serve a salad that has not been sorted, cleaned, washed and drained with the greatest care in advance; since salad often contains caterpillars, small slugs, some sand, etc.

8. I shall remember that, in order to prepare salad well, it is necessary to count two spoonfuls of oil for every one of vinegar.***

Next time: Madeleine learns to shop methodically
and to plan her cooking so that dishes are ready on time
and in the correct order,
so she doesn’t have to leave the table 87 times per meal.
And if that weren’t enough ... the value of sincerity!

*TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: I have never seen purslane (French: pourpier) in cookbooks, nor heard it mentioned in conversation. From the context, I deduced that it’s some kind of plant, and from research, I learned that it grows in the southern part of France. After that, you’re on your own.

**Maman is wrong. The best use for stale bread is galettes: tear the bread into small chunks, mix with milk and egg (amounts vary, depending on how much bread you’ve got), then drop spoonfuls into a skillet of hot oil. I got this idea from Jacques Pépin, then experimented with elaborations on the theme. Plain, they taste very much like a cross between pancakes and French toast (quelle surprise), but the beauty is that you can add other leftover bits. I’ve had success with sweet (using fruit, such as sautée of apple or pear, ripe banana, or tinned pineapple; surely jam would work, too) and savory (a tomato, onion, and cheese variation in particular).

***Around my household, the ratio for vinaigrette is three spoonfuls of oil to two spoonfuls of vinegar. Madeleine’s deference to Papa’s salad skills does ring a clear bell with me, since for years preparing the vinaigrette was Bernard’s duty, while I prepared the rest of the meal.

And in parting, we offer this word of wisdom:
NO MORE METAL SPOONS!!

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My 35 Years without Opera

Imagine, if you will, that when my godmother invited me to the opera on 15 May 1975, I said, “No thanks.” What would my life have been like? Here’s a sugestion ... submitted for your approval.

My name is Bill. That’s me, doing a little shopping at the supermarket on the way home from work. Middle-aged, heavy-set. No, not that guy, the other guy. Yeah. I’m the one in the grey overcoat. I know it’s mid-May, but the weather’s been so changeable, and you can’t be too careful. Especially in the frozen-food section.

I’m just picking up a few TV dinners for next week. I’m not surprised you didn’t notice me. Why would you? It’s been a long time since I thought I was anybody special. Not since I was in junior high, if you want to know.

Back then, I wanted to be a writer. But then — what’s the expression? “I put away the things of a child.” The older I got, the more pointless it seemed, really. Like studying French. Mother said why not study accounting, it’s so practical. So I did.

I’ve been with Consolidated Office Supplies for a long time. Hard to count the years: one day is just like any other. Now that so many offices are going “paperless,” though, we’ve had layoffs. I’m probably next. Nothing I can do about it.

I play a lot of video games. That’s my idea of excitement, I guess. There’s never anything good on TV. I don’t listen to much music. It’s just something in the background. Somebody else’s background, not mine. I see people getting excited about a song, and I just don’t understand what the big deal is. I don’t read much. Nothing really holds my interest, you know?

Funny to think that I ever wanted to write, or travel, or see a play. What made me want those things? I don’t remember. Maybe it was sex. Everything comes down to that, right? I tried dating a couple of actresses when I was in college. It never worked out. I live alone now.

That’s my story — no story at all, really.

This exercise was so depressing that it requires an antidote.
Fortunately, Marilyn Horne has provided one.

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A Few Minutes with …

I like to think of myself an absolutely dead-center, average, normal American. For example, like most people, I served in the armed forces in wartime. That ought to count for something.

Granted, that war ended 65 years ago, before some of you were born. And I can’t remember which side I fought on. But it ought to count.

Like most average Americans, I’m over the age of 90, and I go to work every day in an office in Manhattan. I prefer to use a manual typewriter. Just like you.

Whenever I make a public appearance, little old ladies throw their panties at me. Just the way they do for any average, normal American. That ought to count, too.

Like you, I’ve worked for the same employer since 1949. Harry Truman was President. You remember him.

And like you, I was born in 1919. Woodrow Wilson was President. Nowadays a lot of political analysts will tell you that Barack Obama is some kind of a latter-day Wilson. Don’t listen to them: I know. I was there. There’s no similarity!

When Wilson was President, I fussed and whined all day long, when I wasn’t napping, and I wore a diaper. Whereas today — d’you ever take a good look at a paper clip? I wonder who makes those things.

At the television news division where I work, like you, hundreds and thousands of skilled and talented people have been laid off or cut back over the past quarter-century. They’re not average, normal Americans, though, like you and me.

Americans like us are paid a few million dollars a year just to ramble on in a vague, irritable way about trivial or mundane topics for three minutes each week, with time off over the summer. So that we can think of new things to get irritated about.

They might not pay me if I couldn’t think of anything to say. Sometimes they do, but I don’t want to push it. I don’t like to use the same piece more than three or four times a year, either. Somebody might notice. But if I doodle around enough and don’t come to the point, they probably won’t.

People will say, “Gee, that reminds me of that piece he did about — what was it about, Martha?” “No, you’re thinking of that other piece.” I can just hear them, even without turning up my battery.

I ought to do what average, normal writers like William S. Burroughs and Larry King would do. I ought to take my old essays and cut ’em up and rearrange ’em in different order. I bet they’d sound different then.

I used to keep a meter running, so I could count how much money I was making. I had it attached to that little stopwatch they use at the beginning and end of the show. That’s American ingenuity for you. Then they shortened my segments, and now the numbers go too fast. They give me a headache.

I’m only guessing, but I’ve probably made about $300 thousand since I started talking.

If I’m so average, why is it that I don’t know any of the popular stars of blue movies today? I don’t mean know them personally. I just mean the names. Somebody sent me a magazine, and I didn’t recognize any of the stars.

Winona Ryde-me. Who’s that? I guess some people like her. To each his own. What ever happened to Wynonna Juggs? She may be getting on in years, by now, but I’ll bet she’s still sexy. There’s nothing an older woman can’t do just as well as a younger woman.

I don’t really believe that. I just have to appeal to my fan-base. Keep those cards and letters and panties coming, ladies.

I still call them “blue movies.” They never were blue, really. They were black-and-white, and usually pretty fuzzy. But it wouldn’t sound like much fun if you called them “black-and-white-and-fuzzy movies.” If you said to your absolutely dead-center, average, normal army buddies, “Hey, let’s take in a black-and-white-and-fuzzy movie,” they’d probably say no. I know I would.

Nowadays the movies do look kind of blue, when I take enough of my little pills. I pop ’em like breath mints.

D’you ever wonder why they don’t make mint-flavored pills? I bet they’d sell more if they tasted better. Somebody told me you’re not supposed to chew them. I don’t know if you’re supposed to, but I know what I like. So I’m going to keep on chewing them.

They don’t make blue movies the way they used to, that’s for sure. Remember On Golden Blonde? Now there was a blue movie the whole family could enjoy. That’s the one where Jane Fondle did that back-flip. That was a classic. I wonder where I put my Super-8 projector.

D’you ever wonder why you can’t find your equipment anymore? Sometimes, I don’t even remember how it works.

It’s probably in the same place where I put my copy of On Golden Blonde, right next to the point of this essay. I guess I mislaid that, too. Too late to go and look for it now. I ran out of time about two minutes ago.

I wonder whether anybody will notice that my essay cut off in the middle, before I’ve come to the point.

Probably not.

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La Première Année de Cuisine, Part 12

MADELEINE’S JOURNAL

THIRTEENTH ENTRY

Soft-boiled eggs. — A veal cutlet cooked on the grill. — Order and cleanliness in the kitchen.

I thought I knew very well how to cook soft-boiled eggs, but now I perceive that I wasn’t at all knowledgeable on this point. Once again, it’s Tante Victoire who, from her armchair, instructed me in the correct manner.

“How are you getting along, little one?” she said to me when she saw me putting a small saucepan of water on the fire.

“Auntie, I’m waiting for the water to boil. When it’s reached a high boil, I’ll put in the eggs, and an instant later, I’ll take them out.”

“’An instant later,’ what does that mean? How long does that last, ‘an instant’?”


“I don’t know, Auntie; it’s about … whenever I think the eggs are cooked.”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” said Tante Victoire, “it’s not by ‘about’ that we practice good cooking. Everything must be regulated. Give me my watch that you see hanging there, by my bed.”

I took the watch and gave it to Tante Victoire.

“Now,” she said, “warn me when the water is really bubbling.”

Precisely when the water began to boil, I warned Tante Victoire.

“Put the eggs in a spoon big enough to contain them both. Gently plunge the spoon into the water; remove it while leaving the eggs behind, cover the saucepan…. Now let’s wait.”

A minute and a half passed, according to Tante Victoire’s watch.

“Remove the saucepan from the fire, place it to one side on the stove, then let’s wait longer….”

A minute and a half passed.

“…Now remove the eggs, both at once if possible, and place them on the plate. You’ll see, when I eat them, how they’ll be.”

I served the eggs to Tante Victoire and, when she had broken the end of one shell, she showed me that the albumen had become milky, such that one could easily mix it with the yolk using the little spoon.

“You see,” she said, “that’s how we can tell the eggs are properly cooked. The albumen should never be transparent, but neither should it be hard or stuck to the eggshell. We get eggs to be milky this way by allowing them to finish cooking off of the fire. Now, my dear, get busy with the cutlet.”*

“Cutlets are my glory,” I said to myself, “and I certainly don’t need Tante Victoire’s advice in order to succeed.” So I took the cutlet, I trimmed it by removing all of the film that covered the strip of fat that surrounded it; with a stroke of a cleaver I shortened the bone, then I flattened the meat by hitting on it with the flat side of a cutting knife. Then I salted the cutlet on both sides with fine salt, then I roled it in breadcrumbs and I placed it delicately on the grill.

All the while chatting with Tante Victoire, who watched me make my little preparations and who sampled her soft-boiled eggs with gusto, I brought to the front of the hearth several bright-red coals that I placed on a bed of cinders.

The coal being nicely arranged and fiery, I placed the grill on top of it, and I watched the cooking of the cutlet, “a dish so delicate when it’s carefully prepared,” Tante Victoire says, “and so awful when it’s badly cooked.”

During this time, Tante Victoire continued to give me advice: “Fan the coal with this newspaper that I put there for this purpose,” she said to me. “You will see that the coal will not blacken under the influence of the grease that’s falling from the meat.”

And since I began to fan very hard: “Now, now, not so hard!” she added. “Don’t you see that you must proceed gently and with care, otherwise you’ll raise a cloud of cinders with your fanning, it will fly everywhere and land on the meat…. Now lift the cutlet with the end of your fork and don’t turn it over unless it’s quite browned on the bottom.”

Perfectly: it would give you pleasure to see how browned the meat was. I turned the cutlet over, all the while following Tante Victoire’s advice and feeling a bit embarrassed to have needed it, I who believed myself to be so capable in the art of grilling meat. And I thought, “How funny! One thinks oneself quite knowledgeable just because one knows how to make one or two or three dishes; one imagines that one has nothing left to learn; one is ready to pride oneself in knowing so much, and then one fine day one realizes that one doesn’t know everything and that persons of age and experience are much more knowledgeable than we. How we ought to consider ourselves lucky to receive their good advice!”

The juice began to bead up on the surface of the cutlet: this was the sign that it was completely cooked. I served the cutlet to Tante Victoire and I began to put away in the kitchen the diverse utensils I’d used.

My mother has taught me that the kitchen must never be cluttered and that objects should be put away as soon as one has used them. The grill was placed on a little table, near the sink, where the breakfast dishes had just taken their place. The forks and spoons that I had used now joined them; with a rag that I have the habit of hanging from my belt, I wiped the knives, then returned them to a drawer of the buffet. I used this same rag to give a lick to the table where I’d placed these diverse objects and prepared the cutlet, and I gave a lick of the broom to the hearth to make the fire look nice again and to sweep up the scattered cinders, and voilà, the kitchen was in order, just as if I hadn’t made lunch.

Tante Victoire paid me a compliment for these good habits and made me promise to uphold them always: “You wouldn’t believe,” she said, “how much all these little precautions, this good order and this habitual cleanliness can save time. There are housewives who waste all their time in sweeping and cleaning. You understand, don’t you, that it’s far preferable not to need so much cleaning, and to do that, the foremost of all methods to employ, is to avoid making a mess, that is, to return each thing to its place when you are done with it. There’s a whole art in not cluttering up the kitchen with dirty dishes and pots and cooking tools. I see that you know this, that makes me happy and permits me to predict very well what you will do later, when you have greater age and experience. Alas, ma petite!” she added with a sigh. “That will come too quickly, too soon. You’ll see.”

These last words of Tante Victoire made me feel suddenly tender toward her. I guessed without much realizing what she meant. Poor Tante Victoire, so alone in life, so kind, so helpful! And here she was feeling unwell now… I hope it’s nothing serious! Oh! How I’m going to continue to take good care of her, so that she’ll get back on her feet as soon as possible, and I’ll help her chase away her sadness.

Tante Victoire having finished her lunch, I relieved her of her plate, her silverware, her napkin; I put away all of this, too, then I took up my needlework and sat beside her to keep her company for several hours.

WHAT I MUST DO

[To copy and keep]

1. When I prepare soft-boiled eggs, I will leave them for one and a half minutes in boiling water on the fire and one and a half minutes in this same water off the fire, the saucepan remaining covered in both cases.

2. I will plunge them carefully into the boiling water to avoid cracking them.

3. I will not forget to salt and to bread a cutlet that I am going to place on the grill.

4. I will fan the coals on which the cutlet will cook, so that the fire will always be quite hot.

5. I will know that a cutlet is cooked when the juice beads up on the surface.

6. I will put away the cooking utensils as soon as they are no longer needed and I will not allow pots and dirty dishes to make a clutter.

7. I will always wear an apron to protect my dress from stains and I will carry a rag hanging from my belt while I am cooking.

8. It’s with this rag, and not with my apron, that I will wipe my knife, the table, and even my hands.

Next time: Soup! Beautiful soup!

*TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Using the word “côtelette,” our dear author, L. Ch.-Desmaisons, doesn’t specify the kind of meat in question. I don’t know how general this tendency is today, though I’ve noticed in the work of other authors, around the time of the publication of La Première Année, that a “côtelette” is always presumed to be veal unless otherwise specified. (This is especially true in Zola’s novels, in which the côtelette is the single-most frequently consumed dish, most especially among members of the Rougon family.) My other reading informs me that, in some parts of the English-speaking world, a “cutlet” is also called a “chop.”

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There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden

Les chatons sauvages
Naturally, the camera’s batteries died before the shyest of the litter emerged from the mirabelle lair.

Apart from the occasional meditation on the subject of Susan Graham’s nose, this blog has been notably lacking in cuteness. I apologize for that. As it happens, destiny has provided me with a remedy: my new neighbors, whose cuteness is indisputable and worthy of greater publicity.

Two of the local alley cats, having responded to their irresistible attraction (perhaps because they look exactly alike*), produced this litter of adorable kittens, a quartet. And they’ve made their home in a quiet corner of the garden here in Beynes, at the foot of a lilac bush.

All Hail Our New Overlords!

I can’t be certain how old the kittens are. One day, their mother wasn’t pregnant anymore. One night, I thought I heard mewing in the garden. Some days later, I saw the little imps frolicking under the mirabelle tree.

They’re timid creatures, where I’m concerned, so there’s been no question of picking them up and cuddling them, or even touching them. However, they are absolutely fearless with each other and the dandelions in the lawn. They practice pouncing, and they chase and wrestle with each other for long hours in the sun. This is especially cute if you don’t recall that they’re really just training to maim, kill, and eat other animals.

I’m not a cat person, but I do find them amusing to watch, and I’m hopeful to ease them soon into some home other than my garden, or the streets of Beynes.


*NOTE: Let’s just say that there appears to be an interesting family dynamic going on. So far, the father has been by to inspect his progeny only once. He didn’t seem impressed. The mother comes and goes, her demonstrations of devotion alternating with long absences and presumed indifference.

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Betty White

America exults now in the full throes of a Betty White Moment, demanding with one voice that the actress host NBC’s Saturday Night Live (tomorrow, in case you haven’t heard) and reveling in a giddy parade of cameos that play ironically off of her sweet, grandmotherly demeanor. United as a people, we love to see her groping Sandra Bullock, cussing at Craig Ferguson, manipulating Wilhelmina Slater, or playing tackle football against a team of taller, younger, heavier, manlier men. It’s great fun.

Yet my enjoyment has been tempered somewhat, because, you see, I already had my Betty White Moment. And I’m still sorting it out.

The night I quit CBS News was not a good one for me or for my boss. At the tail end of an Affiliates Meeting in Las Vegas, we let our tempers get the better of us, and what’s worse, we did so in public, concluding at the Las Vegas airport. I left him at the gate and stormed off toward the ticket counter to book myself on some other plane.

Here, Betty White looks the way I felt.

That’s when I saw Betty White coming toward me. I resolved to salvage what I could of the evening — by introducing myself to a much-loved actress.

She was wonderfully gracious, as her escorts, an older man and a younger woman, stood by. Surely they’d all heard many times before the sorts of things that I said: how much I admired her vivid characterizations of Sue Ann Nivens and Rose Nylund, and how I wished her well on whatever new sitcom she had come to Las Vegas to promote.

But Betty White wanted to know about my work: “What an interesting job! What’s it like to work with Dan Rather?”

“Well, to put it in WJM terms,” I said, “he’s a lot more like Lou Grant than he is like Ted Baxter.”

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
Neither of these men is Dan Rather.

“Oh, you know, it was just awful, when we were doing The Mary Tyler Moore Show and making station visits,” she said. “No matter where we went, somebody would always pull us aside and say, ‘You know Ted Baxter? We’ve got one of those here!’”

“Really, Dan’s a good guy,” I said, still concerned about his public image even though — as I told her — I’d just fought with my boss and quit my job.

“Well, don’t you worry,” Betty White replied. “I’m sure that in no time, you’ll be throwing your cap up in the air and turning the world on with your smile!”

It was a lovely remark, and it made me feel better. For the first time in what seemed like ten years, I started to laugh. What do you know? Talking to Betty White had salvaged my evening.

So I can absolutely vouch for the witty, sweet, grandmotherly part of her persona.

But if — and I’m just saying — if she proceeded to board the very same plane that my boss was flying to Los Angeles, and if she spent the entire trip pumping him for details of our fight, humiliating the poor guy, who was visibly upset and surely didn’t want to talk about it with her — if she went on in this fashion, such that any chance I might have had of begging to get my job back perished somewhere in midair between Las Vegas and L.A. — and if a certain CBS News executive happened to tell me all of this during my exit interview —

Well then, I might have reason to believe that there’s some basis in truth to the flip side to her persona that we’ve been seeing in all those ironic comedy sketches lately.

Golden: Betty White & Bea Arthur

Over the years, whenever I tell about my meeting Betty White, other people never fail to respond with an account of the celebrated incident, which every single one of them claims to have witnessed personally, when her Golden Girls colleague Beatrice Arthur is reported to have declared, “Betty White is a @%#÷! A funny @%#÷, but a @%#÷.”

I repeat that anecdote now so that you won’t have to. (And so that I won’t have to censor you if you try to use the offending locution in my squeaky-clean comments section.) I doubt that the incident ever took place, least of all in a New York City restaurant where, apparently, 38 thousand people were sitting at the table next to Bea Arthur’s and eavesdropping intently on her conversation.

Moreover, I remind you that, only moments before Betty White allegedly drove the final nail in the coffin I’d constructed for my career, she had done her charitable best to encourage me. (And a similar kindly impulse might have motivated her to speak with my boss.)

However, if you’ve ever seen the little promotional video for the movie The Proposal, in which Betty White surreptitiously terrorizes the actor Ryan Reynolds — yeah, I kinda know how that would feel, if it ever happened to me.

Thank you for being a friend.
For a few minutes, anyway.

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Delpy’s ‘The Countess’

Julie Delpy as Erzebet Bathory

Writer–director Julie Delpy’s third feature, The Countess, is in almost every way more ambitious than her previous film, 2 Days in Paris, which I both admired and enjoyed. 2 Days was intimate in every way, a mostly lighthearted Franco-American culture clash starring Delpy, her ex-boyfriend (Adam Goldberg), and a tight-knit group of her family and friends. You very much got the feeling that what Delpy put on the screen was something she and these same people had enacted in real life, before she and Goldberg broke up. Yet she’s so smart that she maintained a constant balance (or tension) between sympathy and objective distance. She certainly didn’t let the French off the hook for anything, as almost any other filmmaker in this country would have done.

The Countess seems at first like a completely different kind of movie: it’s a period costume drama, and much of the time, it looks like one of the “tradition of quality” movies that the Nouvelle Vague critics railed against. It’s the story of Erzebet Bathory, the most powerful woman in 17th-century Hungary, who was convicted of vampirical serial murders: killing virgins for their blood in an insane attempt to remain young and beautiful. Delpy stars as Bathory, and this time she’s cast actors who (to my knowledge, anyway) weren’t previously part of her real-life inner circle.

Cougar Town: Daniel Brühl and Julie Delpy

The costumes are indeed the first thing you notice, and they’re sumptuous, all brocade and beadwork, with fantastical jewelry: the royal courtiers all look as if they’ve stepped out of portraits by Bronzino or Holbein the Younger. They’re the inspiration for one of the movie’s rare laugh lines: in a dinner-table debate with a Cardinal over the strengths of women, Bathory observes that she does have a weakness for beautiful gowns and jewels, “But that is a weakness that you share, Cardinal.”

Almost immediately, Delpy begins to work against the costumes. The color of the cinematography is muted, with none of the Technicolor richness that other period dramas revel in, and the digital camerawork provides flat, dull images. Since the rest of the photography — composition and movement — is so adept, I presume that the drabness was a conscious choice. You feel as if you’re looking at plates from a very old book, before color printing had advanced to its present-day proficiency. Yet so much of the rest of the movie serves Delpy’s goals so well, that she really could have afforded to give us more lushness, and thereby toyed with our expectations more.

Far from historical pageantry, The Countess is an intimate chamber drama, perhaps even more intimate than 2 Days. And Erzebet is very much a 21st-century woman whose great misfortune is to live in the 17th. She’s richer than the king and more powerful than any other courtier, so that, when her husband dies, the men can’t wait to see her remarried — or brought down.

William Hurt

Rather than marry her cousin, Gyorgy Thurzo (William Hurt), she seduces, sleeps with, and falls passionately in love with his 21-year-old son, Istvan (Daniel Brühl). Dad has other plans for Junior, however, and ships him off to Denmark to marry a wealthy merchant’s daughter; he intercepts all letters between the lovers, and even forges a letter to Erzebet that persuades her she’s too old and ugly to be loved. Over the objections of her confidante and bedmate, Anna Darvulia (the wonderful Anamaria Marinca, of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days), Erzebet determines that bathing in the blood of virgins will keep her eternally young. The body count rises to some 600 victims before she stands trial, losing her wealth, power, and freedom. She’s walled up in a chamber for the rest of her days.

But as Brühl’s character reminds us in the framing sequences, history is written by the victors — and Erzebet was the loser in this story. It’s implied that Thurzo poisoned her husband, and though the gory drama we see enacted later is in almost every detail what Hungary’s Male Power Establishment wanted people to believe, we can easily see that both King Rudolph II and Thurzo had a great deal to gain from Erzebet’s downfall. (Even when Gyorgy proposes to Erzebet, it’s in terms of material advantage, and basically that’s all he has on his mind at any point in the film.)

Let us prey.

As a screenwriter, Delpy is better here at plot and suspense than she is at the actual dialogue, which often sounds like warmed-over Masterpiece Theatre hash. Let’s face it, it’s hard enough for native-English speakers to write this stuff. Delpy makes no mistakes, yet the speech seldom feels idiomatic.

Like Delpy, Daniel Brühl and Anamaria Marinca speak excellent English with a faint accent, and this seems to have authorized William Hurt to put on an accent, too. It doesn’t quite work — for one thing, nobody winds up with the same accents — but apart from this, Hurt is at his crafty best. There’s always been a strong current of malevolence, even violence, in his acting; back in the day, this made him more interesting to watch than the run-of-the-mill blond leading man. Now balding, bearded, and heavy, he’s still keeping the nastiness in check, just as he had to do when he was playing good guys. His Thurzo is precisely the wrong man for Erzebet to cross.

Anamaria Marinca and Julie Delpy

I could have used somebody prettier in the role of Istvan, an essentially passive figure who has little to do in the film. Though he does a perfectly decent job, and he’s credible as a 21-year-old, presumably Brühl’s participation was a requirement of the several German entities that helped to underwrite The Countess. Marinca fares better as the voice of reason, whom all the others presume to be a witch.

As her own leading lady, Delpy is superb, delivering the rangiest, most demanding performance I’ve seen from her. Yet Erzebet’s character is quite a lot like Delpy’s: intelligent, strong-willed, passionate, multilingual. The only differences here are slight, namely those costumes and the fact that Erzebet gives a damn whether she’s beautiful. I couldn’t help reflecting that, in all of her best work, Delpy has pretty much played herself.

Granted, there’s nobody else I’d rather see in the role of Julie Delpy, but she’s so insightful, she might bring something valuable to roles that don’t resemble her. Since her next project appears to be a New York-based sequel to 2 Days in Paris, I’ll have to wait a bit longer to see her branch out — but I’m looking forward to that.

With her father (in the role of her father), in 2 Days in Paris

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